Strider's Galaxy

by John Grant

  Those temperate climes extended in a band of variable width around the equator. Mexico and United Caribbea and the countries to their south were inundated by North Americans seeking sanctuary from the chill. While parts of Africa became wastelands, others tried to cope with colossal immigration from Europe. In the aftermath of the nuke war, the Arab nations wiped themselves out in the bacteriological War of Hatred, which incidentally destroyed Israel.

  When the surviving human population of Earth got down to about four hundred million, of whom ten per cent were in some way handicapped, the world's few remaining political leaders decided that the best option was the urgent terraforming of Mars. It was a task that took several hundred years, and the resultant ecosystem was frail; at most a few hundred million people could survive on the once red but increasingly green planet. They could—with difficulty—live outside if they chose, but most opted to dwell inside the various blisters constructed with an almost obscene haste all over humanity's new world. Water was still a problem: even with cloud-seeding, showers tended to be short-lived and mild. Some people decided instead to remain on Earth; about a hundred million continued to live in the safe zone around the equator, enjoying the fruits of what still seemed a profligate nature while at the same time knowing that the world was dying around them. But anyone with any sense, and who could afford it, went to Mars.

  If they were allowed to. The Martian government soon started introducing immigration quotas. There was almost another war—and would have been, except that Earth no longer possessed the technological ability to mount one. This was a good thing: the human species had already had the misfortune to destroy one planet; to have destroyed another would have seemed like carelessness.

  #

  She was about half an hour into her walk back to City 43 when the attack came.

  The Martian night was almost silent, except for the faint, high-pitched whines of nocturnal insects; the insides of the blisters could be noisy, but the plastite walls stopped most of the sound from leaking into the meager atmosphere. Strider had been listening to nothing but the sound of her own footfalls and her hoarse breathing for several kilometers when a hand from behind her snaked around her mouth.

  "Don't make any noise," said a voice.

  Instinctively, Strider bit the palm that was gagging her, then grabbed the wrist with both hands, fell half-sideways and, rearing up, threw the mugger out in front of her. Although she had been nearly twenty years on Mars, it still seemed to her that he took an inordinately long time to fall to the ground. By the time he did so, she had one boot ready to clamp down on his throat.

  "I have friends," the man croaked.

  "So have I," said Strider. She wished her voice sounded stronger. While the Martian atmosphere was sufficient to support human life, any prolonged exercise—like walking—led to breathlessness. "What were you wanting?"

  Flat on his back, the mugger tried to produce a shrug. She could see his face only as a blur in the darkness. "Your plastic," he said. "What the fuck else do you think I'd want?"

  "To kill me, maybe?"

  "Nah. My license doesn't extend to killing people, just to mugging them. If you'll let me get my papers out of my pocket . . ."

  "No."

  "Oh, it's like that, is it?" The man began to shiver.

  "Don't worry. Like yourself, I'm not into killing." She looked up towards Phobos again, wondering if the sight of the tiny moon might give her some inspiration. If she let this turd go then all that would happen would be that he'd mug someone else, less capable than herself. Her civic duty was to take him along with her to City 43 and hand him in to the authorities, where he would be charged with incompetence. But she didn't enjoy the prospect. She was already tireder than she'd expected, so beating him unconscious and then carrying him was out of the question. She could pull her lazgun on him, she supposed, and march him all the way to City 43, but in the darkness he could easily escape from her, and he might attack her again . . .

  "I've got an idea," she said, looking down once more at the dim blob of his face. "You and I could be friends."

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "Friends. It's what people often are to each other."

  "I—"

  "You're currently in no position to argue. I could break your neck if I wanted to."

  "You probably couldn't."

  "What do you mean?" She leant forward to stare at him more closely.

  "I'm not a human. I'm a bot."

  "Oh, for—"

  "It's true," he said.

  "Bots don't go mugging—they've no need to." Bots of whatever type either had free board and lodging or they weren't manufactured in the first place.

  "I do."

  She rested her boot on his throat; it wouldn't hurt him much and it was a relief to stop standing on one foot. His head buzzed for a couple of seconds, then stopped.

  "I think you need to do some explaining."

  "Dr Dulac—"

  "What's that asshole got to do with this?"

  "There are several stages of the interview. You passed the first one. Now you've just passed the second. I wouldn't have hurt you more than necessary, you know."

  "Oh, yeah?"

  "Do you think you chose to walk back to your hotel in City 43? Wouldn't that have been just a bit irrational of you? Do you think you could allow me to sit up?"

  "No. Squirm a bit."

  Again the bot attempted a shrug. "Have it your own way."

  Strider pressed her foot down more firmly as she thought. Dulac had looked so firmly out the fake window that it was only natural that she would want to do so as well; perhaps her desire or otherwise to see that vista was a part of the test: people who were not inquisitive were hardly likely to be the best personnel aboard the Santa Maria. She remembered the famous legend about what happened when the first Viking had landed on Mars, way back in whatever it was: about half an hour after the initial pictures had begun to come through to Earth, someone on the project had said, "Yeah, but I want to see what's on the other side of that ridge." Inquiry was what going into space was all about. And, of course, the holo she had seen was of people walking around under the open sky of a paradisiac world. Probably Dulac had also laced the air of the office with nanobots that would increase her suggestibility when she inhaled them. She giggled suddenly: if he'd done that, he and his four colleagues must have been going berserk all through the discussion of her sex life.

  She sobered quickly.

  "What other mind games was Dulac playing?" she said.

  "I don't know, lady. I'm just a bot. Look, are you sure you won't let me sit up? Machines can feel just as much discomfort as human beings when they're pinned down like this."

  "Tell me another."

  "I possess just enough pain sensors to protect myself from damage, so your boot isn't hurting me. But I've got enough intelligence to realize that I should be vertical, not horizontal, and that this situation is very humiliating. Does that make sense to you, lady?"

  "I'll let you sit up—I'll even let you stand up and walk around—if you respond the right way to my earlier idea. You and I could be friends, and walk the rest of the way together to City 43."

  "No. I can't do that. I have to get back to the SSIA blister. It's not within my remit to do anything else."

  Strider snorted. "Just as a matter of interest, what would you have done if I hadn't overpowered you?"

  "Mugged you. But without causing pain, if I could help it."

  "Well," she said, "at least you're being franker than you were before." She raised her boot cautiously. "Can you call a cabble for me?"

  "It'd be a pleasure, lady," said the bot, slowly raising himself. "Anything to get you as far away from me as possible. There's one on the way already."

  #

  When she finally got back to her hotel room she stripped off her clothes and twisted the command switch to fill the room with water. Of course, it wasn't real water—there was no water to waste on Mars—but an illu
sion, the same way that it was only an illusion that she was breathing through gills as she swam around in the warmth. Further illusions ensured that the room expanded so that she was swimming in an infinitude of sunlit ocean, with bright shoals of fishes flickering towards her and then away again.

  She twitched her tail to bring herself down to face the mirror that hung over the bed.

  You don't look so bad, young Leonie, she thought, turning from side to side, watching herself move slowly in the water. A small green fish, half-transparent, came up to investigate her elbow; she batted it away gently with the palm of her hand, and it scampered off in panic to rejoin its shoal. If it weren't for the fact that you're not so young any longer.

  She thought she was forty, although she hadn't checked up on her exact age recently. The difference between Earth's and Mars's years made calculating birthdays a nightmare, and nobody cared, anyway. She could expect to live another hundred and sixty or seventy years—more, if she were lucky, thanks to the nanobots that inhabited every cubic micrometer of her body, scouring away detritus and collaborating to perform minor surgery on the rare occasions it was necessary. Dulac probably knew to the millisecond exactly how old she was.

  She grinned at herself in the mirror. Hey! You're younger than you thought! This is the year 2527, and you were born in 2489, so you're now well under forty. You're a spring chicken, Leonie.

  Her face was one of those that didn't appear beautiful at first—for the early years of her life she'd been plain, if that, and then her bone structure had begun to exert itself on the lines of her features. Now she knew that her appearance was what polite people called "distinguished." She reckoned her best features were her eyes, which were deeply brown—almost as brown as her skin—with glimmers of pink flesh visible in their corners. Her nose was snub, which she liked, and her lips were full, which she wasn't so sure about.

  She poked her tongue out at her own reflection, positioned herself carefully just above the bed, then twisted the command switch again to make the water disappear.

  She landed with a pfflumpph on the bed's forcefield, and felt her tail transmuting back into legs again.

  According to the bot—whose name, while they'd been waiting for the cabble to arrive, she had finally established was Pinocchio—most of the other people Dulac and his coterie had interviewed so far had failed. The bot wasn't too clear about the details, but he knew that he'd had to quasi-mug only about ten per cent of the candidates, being successful in almost all cases.

  Only an hour or so ago she'd been looking up at Phobos and thinking, Well, that's it, then. Now she was beginning to think there was a chance.

  She was also beginning to feel both grimy and hungry. The water, while she'd been in it, had given her a delicious sensation of lightness and cool cleanliness, but that had vanished as soon as she'd switched the illusion off.

  She rolled from the bed and walked into the shower-room, where she crapped efficiently before standing a while in the cubicle as the ultrasound rasped her clean. As a treat—remembering that it was the SSIA who were paying the hotel bill, not herself—she pressed the button by the side of the shower-head. A measured one hundred and fifty milliliters of cold real water splashed over her.

  That'll be another thing that's different, if I get aboard the Santa Maria, she thought, licking herself dry wherever she could reach. There'll be as much water as I want.

  She dialled herself a meal from the wall and ate it at the bedside table, wondering briefly what the food was and then deciding not to wonder: it was Tikka Something, which was near enough for her. When she was full she threw the rest down the disposal vent, watched the sex channel for a little while—the nature of her questioning during the interview had, infuriatingly, made her sexually tense—decided not to masturbate, switched over to one of the news channels which she hit during an ad break, saw a small child doing a tap-dance while masquerading as a soyaburger, then discovered that there had been several more assassinations on Earth ("Though fewer than usual for a Thursday," added the 'caster reassuringly, standing in the middle of the carpet and all of thirty centimeters tall), and at last tapped her fingernail against the wall to switch off both the holo and the lighting.

  She spent a moment wishing she could phone a mother, then slept.

  #

  "You're wanted for another interview," said Pinocchio, emerging from the wall.

  Strider stared at him.

  "Where did you learn to do that trick?" she said.

  "What made you think these walls were solid?"

  "There's a mirror hanging on one of them," Strider snapped. "Oh, yeah, I see what you mean. Everything in here that's hanging off a wall is hanging off the same one. Clever. Good illusion."

  "Holographic walls save valuable building materials," said Pinocchio virtuously.

  "And are walls that people can look in through from the outside."

  "That is true."

  "Did anyone? Look in on me, I mean?"

  "I don't know, lady."

  "There's a lot of things you don't know, Pinocchio."

  "And a lot that I do. For example, I know how to clean your clothing while you ablute. This is a useful service which I can perform, and which no human being could do."

  Strider found herself smiling at him.

  "Next time, knock," she said. "Preferably on the door."

  By the time she returned from showering Pinocchio had laundered her clothing, pressed it, and laid it out on the bed. It was a standard SSIA uniform: blue underpants, blue brassiere, blue socks, blue jumpsuit. Strider often wondered if someone in the Agency had a monopoly on the manufacture of blue dye. The garments smelt beautifully clean.

  "How did you do that?" she said, looking round the room.

  Pinocchio tapped his stomach. "I was originally intended to be a valet, before I was seconded to the SSIA. I have stuff in here you couldn't imagine. I could even brew you some coffee, if you'd like."

  "Can you manage a cup of water?"

  "Of course."

  Strider watched as, after a few preliminary gurgles, a hatch opened in Pinocchio's chest and a plastic cup was extended on a skeletal hand. She took it, and sniffed it. It was superbly cold. She drained the water in a single, long gulp.

  "Another?" she asked.

  Pinocchio's head buzzed disconcertingly. "I would like to, but it is not permitted for another hour. Please do not ask again, lady. It would put undue stress on my decision hardwiring if I had to reject your request. Since my torso is entirely taken up with gadgetry that enables me to perform as a valet, all my hardwiring has had to be confined to my head and lower legs, and my feet. I am less intelligent, for this reason, than many bots."

  "Then why the fuck did the SSIA take you on?"

  "I was cheap. Back in 2430, when the SSIA was being set up, they needed several thousand bots in a hurry, and Rwanda was being hawkish about budgets. There were a few hundred of the KR371 line on sale, and I was one of them. I think I may be the only one who has lasted the distance. Besides, the coffee I brew is really very good. Are you sure you wouldn't like a cup?"

  "Quite sure. I'm allergic to caffeine."

  "There is no caffeine in my coffee."

  "I'm still sure."

  "Oh." Pinocchio was visibly crestfallen. "Then can I ask you, lady, to pack your things and come with me back to the SSIA blister? Your interview will last the rest of the day, and then you will be podded back to"—again the bot's head buzzed momentarily—"City 78."

  "I don't live in City 78."

  "From tonight you will. Either you will be in final training for the Santa Maria mission, or you will be working as an ancillary staff member."

  Or I'll have resigned, thought Strider. Everything she'd brought with her fitted easily into a shoulderbag. She could have asked Pinocchio to carry it, but she wanted to do so herself. I can take missing out on the mission, but not working alongside the lucky ones: that'd be twisting the knife. Dulac and others like him never seem to realize
that the reason people like me joined the SSIA is that we want to go to the stars, not help other people go there. I want Tau Ceti ii; I want it so badly I can almost smell the air of the place.

  What she said was: "Take me to your cabble."

  #

  The cabble sped along the dusttrack, floating exactly one meter above the surface at all times. Strider was pleased to find that Pinocchio didn't try to cut across the plain, but stuck to the carved-out road: the leaps and jumps cabbles took as they tried to accommodate to irregular surfaces had no effect on a bot but a considerable effect on human beings. Strider had been cabble-sick once, and never wanted to be again.

  Cabbles were slow vehicles, rarely exceeding twenty-five kilometers per hour, so Strider had time to talk to the bot.

  "What's this second interview about?" she said, watching the red-orange plains, spattered patchily with greens and blues, slowly move past. The hemispherical dome of the cabble oddly distorted the scene.

  "They don't tell me things like that."

  "But you must have a clue. You told me last night that I was the hundred and fifty-ninth person they'd seen."

  "You're only the fourteenth that they've called back again."

  This sounds hopeful. She squinted out at the Sun, which was pleasingly small and white. She remembered the bulbous yellow Sun of her early life: now it seemed as though it had been an enemy.

  "Hasn't anyone else . . . you know, let something slip out?" she said.

  "A couple of them looked really happy afterwards, lady. That's all I can tell you. Their conversations were privileged, as this one is."

  A rut made the cabble tilt briefly sideways, and Strider's stomach lurched. The vehicle whined for a moment until it regained an even keel.

  A minute passed as Strider stared out at the landscape. She had never regretted leaving Earth—well maybe just for a few weeks, after she'd been accepted by the SSIA and was being shuttled out here to Mars. But as soon as she'd arrived in this fresh world it was as if she'd come home. She liked breathing air that didn't taste of anything; even in Burkina Faso there had always been the sensation that the thick, cloggy air you were inhaling had been breathed by a hundred million other people and farted by most of them. She liked the fact that the sunlight was muted, so that she never had to squint against the day's brilliance. She liked the fact that you could go only a few kilometers and find yourself utterly alone—although this was not something she was going to admit to her interviewers.