Perfect choice for an isolated spot to bury two bodies.
Chapter Twenty-five
I left the diskette with my report on Sherry’s desk, and told her to transmit my report to Space Admin in DC. “No reason to encrypt it,” I wrote, adding that I would be gone for the day, but I would be available by radio.
While the folks back home were pondering the report, I was going to fulfill the promise I made to Mark Davis-Seale.
It was illegal to bury anyone on Mars, and androids were supposed to be recycled, but at this point, I didn’t care about niceties and I was more interested in honoring a dying man’s last request than saving my career.
Even if everything I had done had proven to be for the best, I had stepped on too many toes doing it. I knew I would be leaving soon.
I gave the morgue attendant a look that stopped him from questioning what I wanted with the corpse and broken android. We loaded the bodies into two plastic crates, and I pushed them on a cart to the airlock where I had a tractor waiting.
I pulled on the pressurized suit and tossed a shovel and pick in the bed of the tractor trailer alongside the crates. I left, and headed south.
I was looking for a place I’d seen on the map, ten kilometers from the colony. A depression behind a graben that shielded it from the desert. The gentle slope of the southern wall of the canyon began to rise up behind it less than a kilometer away.
I wanted a spot hidden but easily accessible, and when I saw on the ground what I had seen on the map, I realized I’d found the spot. A crack in the rise of the graben made an excellent gateway, and when I drove through, I saw the sand inside was perfectly flat and open with only one small cluster of rocks. I tugged the crates onto a motorized platform truck and led them over to the center of the intended burial ground.” I took the pick and shovel and started to dig.
The first foot was easy to clear, but under that there was a layer of saltpan, indicating where an ancient sea had dried up. I needed the pick to break that up, but afterwards the dirt came out easily in large clumps. I dug down four feet; that’s all I had the strength for, and that took me three hours. I had to put in a new oxygen bottle halfway through.
Also, sweating in a pressurized suit was very unpleasant.
I’d finally shoved the boxes into the hole and started covering them, when I caught a glimpse of some motion out of the corner of my eye. I jumped.
You don’t expect to see any motion of any kind out here on the surface of Mars, and my brain detecting any kind of movement sent all kinds of alarm bells off. I turned to where there were a few rocks sitting on the sand—they had probably rolled away from the canyon wall millennia ago—and waved my shovel.
No one could hear me, but I still shouted. “Who’s there?”
It occurred to me that going out alone onto the surface was very foolish, and I was perhaps about to learn exactly how foolish.
There was something behind a rock. It stood upright.
It was “Desiree.”
She walked toward me. Her dress was torn and her hair askew. Her face and body had been scoured and damaged by the sandstorm. The silicone “skin” around one eye had been torn away, leaving the whole eyeball visible.
She came up and spoke to me on the helmet-to-helmet frequency.
“I know you,” she said softly. “I know you.”
“You shoved me and ran out of the mine tunnel,” I said.
“No. I know you. I knew you when I saw you.” Then her eyes narrowed as she screamed, “I hate you! You made me sad!”
I grew dizzy and lost my balance, staggering backward into the grave. I propped myself up on my hands.
“You’re an android. You have no past,” I gasped.
I was panicked and didn’t know what to say. “Your body was copied from a human, but you were made by the Tesla Corporation.”
I avoided eye contact. What she said next chilled me like nothing in my life.
“Look at me! Look me in the eyes! Tell me the truth!”
That’s what Desiree had demanded the night we broke up. She had learned what I’d said about her. I had been with some friends, and we were drinking and acting all macho. We’d started talking trash about girls. I was loaded. One guy commented on how good-looking my girlfriend was.
And I said, “She lets me fuck her whenever I want. And I do. But tonight I’m gonna grab me a big blonde cheerleader instead.”
This was exactly the wrong thing to say.
I had been too loaded to realize there were some girls in a corner of the Lion’s Den pub who knew Desiree, and they’d overheard what I’d said. They told her later.
You see, just the week before Desiree had caught me flirting with a blonde. I was being a pig; being with a beautiful woman like Desiree gave me a sense of power. I suppose my male brain made the logical leap that since I had beautiful Desiree, I could attract another of equal beauty, of my choosing, if I wanted.
When Desiree confronted me about my boast in the bar, I was too ashamed and too much of a coward to look her in the eyes. She slapped me so hard my glasses flew off.
You don’t know what you had until it’s gone. Ever since then, I had regretted taking her for granted, losing someone who had cared for me. I realized after a few years that what I had taken to be a creeping aloofness near the end of our romance had really been disappointment. Her disappointment in me. Because I had been stupid and immature.
Now, after so many years I knew it, too.
As I stood there staring at the android in shock, I realized her bad memories of me ran so deep they were copied into the android’s positronic brain.
My god, have I been such a bad person to go through this confrontation a second time? I thought.
“Look me in the eyes and tell me you didn’t say that!”
Tied to the mast, as it were, I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. I looked “Desiree” in the eyes. “Yes, it’s true, I said it. I’m ashamed and I’m sorry. I’m a bastard.”
The android raised her hand. If she struck me in the faceplate and broke it, I was dead.
I closed my eyes and waited.
She stopped. “Dave?”
“Yes?”
“How do I know who you are? This is not right. I am an android. Why do I have these memories?”
“I don’t know. Somehow they were copied. Maybe there is some kind of electromagnetic imprint that was transferred.”
Her eyes grew wide. “I can’t breathe. My face is pressed down on the mat. I can’t breathe! Help!”
She lunged forward, and I grabbed her and held her. She looked terrified.
“I’m dead. I suffocated! I remember it!”
I held her in case it comforted her in any way.
She looked up at me. “They brought me back to life!”
“No, those body snatchers copied your body. They’ve been trying to make better and more sophisticated androids, and now they’ve gone too far.”
Her body shook. She wiped her face with the back of her hand. “I want to cry. Why can’t I cry?”
I was crying myself inside the helmet. Then I looked at her face, and saw a drop of lubricating oil underneath the exposed electronic eyeball.
I carefully and gently touched it with a finger of my glove. I held my finger up.
“See, you are crying,” I said.
She looked at my finger and then stood on tip-toe to look at her reflection in my visor. Another small drop of oil was coming out from under her eye.
“What a sad little girl,” she said, looking at herself.
“You were the best thing that happened to me. I ruined my life when I disrespected you, and I’ve been trying to get it back ever since.”
She held me, and then looked down into the grave. “What’s in the containers?”
“A man and a woman who loved each other very much,” I said. “One is human, the other android. I am burying them side by side.”
“What happened to my human body?”
<
br /> “We have it. We will bury it back on Earth, I promise.” I stopped. “Did you recognize me when I first saw you on the transport platform?” I asked.
“Yes, and the memory confused me. I was being used by a maid service. When I told them what happened, they said something to somebody, and I was recalled to Tesla.”
“Then why did I see you a second time in the restaurant?”
“The plant manager took a bribe to send me out to a man who wanted me. His name was Michael Cardinale. We were in the restaurant, and when he saw you, he told me to go one way and he went the other. But I stopped to look at you on the way out, and you saw me. After that, I was hidden in the mine.”
She stood back. “This whole thing is wrong. I don’t want this false life. Deactivate me.”
“I don’t know how.”
She gestured to a spot below her right collarbone. “There is a sliding panel here. Push it aside, and you will see a tab.”
“I don’t … I can’t …”
“I can’t do it myself. A human must.”
“It’s like murder.”
“I’m already dead. I don’t want to live as a machine. Stop this from ever happening to anyone else again. And let me go now.”
Her words, despite their synthetic emotions, touched me, and reluctantly, I reached toward her.
“Tell Gene I loved him.”
“I’m sure he knows that,” I said. “But I will.”
“Wait!” She looked at the grave. “Let us say a prayer, for the three of us.” She looked at me. “It will help me be at peace.”
“What can I say?”
“I’m not afraid of this death right now, but the longer I stay active, the longer of what remains of Desiree within me grows frightened.” She took my hand. “I was in sleep mode when you opened the crate. When I saw you, an awful rush of emotions opened up. That’s why I panicked and fled.”
“I suppose emotions and the inherent logic of a positronic brain must create a terrible conflict,” I said.
“I am dead as a human and unviable as an android,” she said. “I must be deactivated.”
I pointed to the grave and decided to stall. “Let’s put these two to rest first. It’s fitting that a human and a robot should do this together.” I took the shovel, and handed her the pick. “Let’s cover them up.”
Together, it only took a few minutes. When we stopped, she asked, “Shouldn’t we say something?”
“Yes, we owe it to them to have some kind of service.” I looked at Desiree. “Captains can conduct funerals on ships. I suppose I can conduct a funeral here.”
I started: “Lord, we lay to rest the remains of Mark and Elena, who loved each other very much. Only you know where that immortal part of them has gone, but I’m sure they still are together. Theirs was a true love that defied society and prejudice. In years past, there were similar marriages that traversed the bonds of race and religion. Today we celebrate … yes, celebrate a marriage that spanned the distance between man and machine. Now they are together. Now they are like every other couple. No more hiding, no more fear. And for Mark, no more pain. For Elena, no loneliness. They are forever together.”
I stopped.
“Forever together,” said Desiree softly. “You always made good off-the-cuff speeches. Let’s say a prayer together ourselves.”
She started, “Our Father, Who art in heaven …”
We continued together.
… Hallowed be Thy Name
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On Earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us;
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
I stopped, and she continued with her eyes closed, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of my death.”
“I can’t do this!” I cried.
“If the living Desiree ever meant anything to you, do this now,” she said, still looking down with her eyes closed.
Then she opened her eyes and looked up at me. “Do it for me, Boss. Or, do it for the girl you knew. Because I’m really not her.”
Boss. That had been Desiree’s nickname for me, because I sometimes made statements she said sounded “bossy.”
“Would you ever have ever forgiven me?”
“I already had. I had by the time we met at Tom’s. Yes, I was still mad, but not a fraction as much as I pretended. I wanted to make sure you learned your lesson, for the sake of the right girl when you found her.”
She grabbed my wrist. “Do it quickly, do it before I change my mind.”
My hand shook, but I could feel the silicone skin under her right collarbone, and sure enough, there was a line around a small rectangle panel. I pulled the panel back and there was a switch there.
Taking one last look at her, I sighed and I pushed it.
She collapsed downward like an imploding building, like a marionette whose strings were cut all at once. My hand now rested in empty space as the android crumpled into the Martian dust, which slowly settled across her.
I looked down. The dust gave her pale cheeks a false rosy glow. I took the shovel and turned my back on her. I walked 15 feet away and stopped. Without looking back, I began digging another grave.
Chapter Twenty-six
Iglytzin was waiting for me when I got back to the office. “We found Jackson. He was hiding in the old spaceport control building that Davis-Seale had used,” he said. “When we told him Kurland had someone murdered here in the colony, he rolled on him.”
“Have we heard from Space Admin?”
“Just now,” said Sherry as she walked in with a handful of papers from the teletype.
I took it from her and began to read. “It’s from Commander Carter.”
“I sent them a list of names I got from Jackson,” said Iglytzin.
“Yes, and Commander Carter says they are being rounded up,” I said.
Lielischkies walked in to join us.
“My high school principal used to say ‘It’s amazing what you can get done if you don’t care who gets credit,’” I said.
“Yes, and like you said, it is the point man who gets filled with holes,” he said. “But you did it.”
“What exactly did I do?”
“Kurland was an international incident waiting to happen,” said Sherry. “You challenged him and stopped whatever he was planning to do with the androids.”
“I can tell you, from my sources, he was planning a revolt in the Caribbean,” said Lielischkies. “We have found where the missing androids are stockpiled, although we will let the West seize them.”
“Holy shit. He wasn’t crazy enough to go back to Cuba, was he?”
“No, Grenada. He made an alliance with the dictator Eric Gairy, who hid the androids in a secret warehouse. Kurland was going to let Gairy clean house, and then the androids would fan out and take over neighboring islands such as Dominica, Barbados, and such. He planned to establish an impregnable base in the Caribbean, which was apparently the long-range plan of Castro and Guevara, and fight the war of attrition against the West that the Soviet Union no longer has the stomach for.”
He reached into a pocket. “I know it’s completely against regs, but I’m very stressed. I need a cigarette. Can I smoke?”
“Go right ahead, I wish I did, now,” I said.
“The U.S. has already blockaded the island, and will be invading very soon,” said Lielischkies.
“Yes, it says in so many words in this cable I have from Commander Carter,” I said. “Although the island is not specified.”
“Speaking about breaking rules,” said Lielischkies, “when are we having a memorial service for Davis-Seale?”
“You know the answer to that,” I said. “We’re not, and the less said about his death the better.”
Sherry looked a
t me and nodded.
“Well, it looks like we have a lot of loose ends to tie up, but the crisis has passed,” said Iglytzin.
“If you don’t mind, I need to sit down in my office and rest a little while,” I said. “I’ve had a busy day.”
Iglytzin and Lielischkies left, and Sherry went back to her desk. I closed the door to my office and sat down. I laid my hands on the desk and realized I was still in shock as a result of my encounter with “Desiree.” My hands trembled. My mind had been churning, but at some level it had blocked out my grief so I could function. I had been completely numb as I lay the disabled android in the grave, filled it in, and drove the tractor back to the colony.
A knock startled me.
I stared at the door. Sherry opened it and stuck her head in. “Hey, boss …?”
I threw my hands in front of my face and burst out sobbing. Sherry disappeared and the door quickly closed.
* * *
An hour later, Sherry tentatively opened the door of my office. “Are you going to be okay?”
My face was dry by then. “Yes, it’s just so hard. It’s been so hard.” I looked up. “You can come in.”
She did. “I wouldn’t think taking care of Mark and Elena would hit you so hard. You really didn’t know them that well.”
“It wasn’t that. The android Desiree was out there and asked to be deactivated. I buried her, too.”
She put her hand to her mouth. “Oh, my God!”
“Somehow, with those custom circuits he’s developed, Kurland was able to duplicate her memories, too. Perhaps seeing me activated them.” My voice quavered. “It’s like I killed her; a mercy killing. She didn’t want to live as an android. It’s like she died a second time.
“It’s so lonely out there. Thinking of her, even if it really wasn’t her, under the sand,” I continued.
“Graveyards are lonely places,” she said. “My grandmother was Filipino. She said she always thought Westerners put flowers on graves so they would look more home-like.”
That gave me a thought. “There needs to be something marking those graves.”
“What will you do?”
Another Girl, Another Planet Page 32
