The First Poet Laureate of Mars

by T E Olivant

  “How did you get it through the scanners?” The Augments took the security of Alcedine very seriously, which wasn’t surprising considering how many attempts had been made to kill them. There were advanced scans for any person or thing entering or leaving the Tower.

  “Not a problem when the package is on the system already, and I took care of it before I left. It went through the fast track channel, only minimal scanning. I just had to show them the code. That’s the hacker’s trick: use their own system and people will believe anything you tell them.”

  “How exactly does a kid from Sat Three work out how to hack the Augment’s own software.”

  “Well, for one thing there’s not much else to do on that floating cesspit. Oh, and I’m twenty-five so not exactly a kid. We haven’t all lived for nearly four hundred years.”

  Tolly’s shoulders twitched. “I can’t believe I told you that.”

  “You didn’t have a choice. Now I think we should get out of here. I’m going to keep hold of the package, but there’s no way I’m just going to sit about in my room with it.”

  “Why not?” Was that a tremor starting in his left leg? Tolly hoped he would still be able to walk when he brought the Council to its knees.

  “Because there’s a chance that this might be a set-up. I have no idea what’s in this thing, and its sealed shut. If it’s something highly illegal and they tip off the Augments…”

  “They will kick you off the planet.”

  “A hundred years ago maybe. Now the penalty would probably be five years labor in the mines. Times have changed.”

  “Not that much.”

  “I guess you better come with me, just in case.”

  Tolly managed to nod. He stood up and was glad to see that his legs were still working.

  “Alright,” Hester moved towards the door. “I know somewhere we can keep out of sight for a while. I just hope he’s ok with me bringing a friend.”

  “I don’t think we should involve anyone else in this.”

  “I’m afraid we don’t have a choice.”

  Tolly hesitated.

  “You still don’t trust me? After everything I told you?”

  “My brain is a hundred years in the past. Is it surprising I am finding this hard to process? And besides, your actions are not consistent. You told me that I knocked you out, kidnapped you and then you decided to help me?”

  “What can I say?” Hester shrugged. “I’m impulsive and I make poor decisions.”

  “That certainly seems to be true.”

  “Hey, if it wasn’t for my bad decision making you would still be thinking you wanted to erase yourself.” Hester poked him in the chest. “You know the Old Tolly thought I was great. And he said I was an excellent poet.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Chapter 30

  “Wow. Your apartment is huge.”

  “Yes, it is,” Derek said as he showed them into a long low living room dominated by an enormous sofa. “I must admit when I invited you, I imagined you’d be coming alone. Now, who is your friend.”

  “Tolly. He’s an Augment.”

  “Hello Tolly. Yes, I can see that. Can I ask what he is doing here?”

  Hester sighed. She was kind of on edge. She was still carrying a package that was probably full of something very illegal, and she was worried about Tolly. He had started limping and his left arm was hanging down by his side. But what worried her the most was that he was trying to pretend he was fine.

  And now she had to explain things to Derek and she was just too tired.

  “Please, I’m not very good at asking for help. And I know you’ve already gone out of your way to help me today. But I need just a little more. Let us stay with you for a few hours until I find out where I have to send this package. Then you’ll never see me again. Promise.”

  “You do realize that I actually enjoy spending time with you, don’t you?”

  Hester filed that away under the category of ‘interesting, will think about later’.

  Derek shrugged in resignation. “Maybe I should get your friend a glass of water.” He disappeared off through a door to what must have been a separate kitchen. He really was rich.

  Tolly stood in the middle of the room staring into space. Hester touched his arm.

  “You don’t look too good.”

  “Side effects of the treatment. It’s not as bad as it looks.” Tolly managed to look her in the eye but she could see his muscles were still rigid with tension. “Who is your friend anyway?”

  “He’s an actor. You know, from the movies. A kind of lousy one to be honest.”

  “Does he spend his life in the symgym.”

  “Oh, I see. The muscles. They are pretty impressive. Do you like him?” Hester gave Tolly a wink.

  “You mean a sexual attraction? I’m an Augment.”

  “So?”

  “Augments are sexless. It’s part of the process.”

  Hester laughed softly. “Not all of them. Come on, let’s check out this viewscreen. It’s bigger than my entire apartment on Sat Three.”

  Derek handed them each a glass of water.

  “Can we watch something?”

  “As long as it’s not one of mine,” he said with a grin.

  “Actually,” Hester said, “have you got a copy of the one about the miners.”

  “It’s not finished yet. But I’ve got some footage of the interviews I did.”

  Hester turned to Tolly. “It might be a good thing, jog some of your memories of the early days of the Mars colony.”

  “Why not,” the Augment replied, but Hester wondered if he had even heard her. Still, he took a seat on the sofa and slumped down until his head was on his chest.

  “What’s in the package?” Derek asked.

  “No idea. Probably best if you forget you’ve ever seen it.”

  “Just like you asked me to forget about everything that dead woman said?”

  “Yes.”

  As Derek loaded up the video files Hester turned around to check on Tolly.

  “I’m fine,” he said when he caught her staring. If looking like he was going to pass out at any second was fine, they she guessed he was.

  “I never got a chance to ask you,” Hester said. “Why did you suddenly come and find me. I mean, when I first tried to tell you about the memory erasure you thought I was lying. What changed your mind?”

  “I got sent some pictures. They were from my… lost years. The last one was of you and I just before I had the procedure.”

  Hester’s eyes widened. “Someone took a picture of us? Who? No one knew that I was helping you. Damn it Tolly, you could have mentioned this earlier.”

  “I’m sorry. I am… functioning at a sub-optimum level.”

  “No shit,” she groaned. “Someone knows that we are working together. Just who the hell could that be? I never even met you before yesterday. Can I see the pictures?”

  “Sure. They’re on this.” He handed over a datastick.

  “That’s the one I gave you.”

  “No, it’s not. I’ve got that one in my other pocket.” He placed the second datastick beside the other one on the table. And stared.

  “They’re the same.”

  Hester frowned. “I guess they might be a common type. Although I’ve never seen a green one before.”

  Derek picked up the two devices, then he stood up and walked out of the room.

  Hester and Tolly shared a confused glance, but the actor returned immediately. He was holding a third identical datastick.

  “Now wait just a minute,” Hester said. “You have nothing to do with all this, how come you’ve got one of them?”

  “It was sitting right on that table five days ago. No idea how they got in. And it seems like I received mine before either of you, so you don’t need to pretend like I’m an outsider.”

  “All right, what was on your stick?”

  Derek grinned. “You’ll like this. Min
utes of the Augment Council.”

  “That’s impossible,” Tolly said.

  “Want to bet? Why don’t we watch it?”

  Chapter 31

  The first clue that the recording of the Augment Council was illegal was the camera angle. It had clearly been filmed from just under the table. Mainly the footage was of people from the neck down, although they did sometimes come into view. The audio, however, was perfectly clear.

  Tolly sat forward until he was just inches away from the viewscreen. It had been well over a hundred years since he’d entered the Council chamber, but it still looked exactly the same. It was situated at the top of the Alcedine Tower with the most spectacular view of Mars from its plexiglass dome ceiling.

  I remember it being built, he thought. I remember when we first walked into the dome, we cowered in case we had got the engineering wrong and the whole thing shattered leaving us to shrivel and die in the Mars atmosphere. It was better when we had feared our limitations.

  Along with the Augments that were physically present, those in the Council chamber had been joined by holographic projections of Augments from other colonies. One of them was familiar.

  “Tolly, that’s you!”

  “I know.” The sight of his own projected figure had caused him less pain than he might have imagined. It was merely like being punched in the jaw. So far, after the stabbing pains of the day before, his mind had seemed to settle into a dull throb. But Tolly knew the damage was still being done. Sometimes he had to drag his leg along behind him now when he walked, and for a brief ten-minute period earlier one side of his face had gone numb. If they didn’t do something soon he would be totally incapable of stopping whatever the Augments and the Merchants were up to.

  The people in the chamber began to speak.

  “We are here to vote on the motion before the Chamber.” Tolly did not recognize this voice, it must be a new Augment, as in someone younger than one hundred. “Should the life of an Augment be limited or should we retain the status quo. You have already had adequate time to consider the proposals. Today we will take the vote.”

  Tolly felt a rush of familiarity even though the specific scene was new to him. How many votes had he participated in over the years? The Augments still prided themselves on their democracy, and it was part of the reason they had survived for so long. In the last hundred years – the century that he could remember, that is – he had stopped turning up for many of them. He had let himself become too isolated, that was the problem. But with this topic, there was no chance he would ever have missed the vote.

  “Let us go around each Augment in turn. For or against. Then an iris scan. Proceed. Those who originated the two sides are exempt.”

  The ‘yes’s and ‘no’s were almost equal when Tolly’s flickering hologram came into view. To his annoyance, the camera skipped past him before he said a word. That could only mean he responsible for making the case for one side or the other. Well, at least he knew which side that was: he hadn’t changed completely in a hundred years, he was sure of it.

  “I wonder when this was,” Tolly said, half to himself. “If only I could remember.”

  Tolly had lost track of the count by the time the vote went around the room, but those present on the video clearly hadn’t. There were murmurs of discontent before they even got to the last speakers.

  “The vote is in. In favor of the motion: twenty-eight. Against: twenty-three. Motion passed.”

  The murmur grew louder and one Augment stood up. Somehow Tolly was not surprised to see it was Rowhan.

  “I object to the validity of the vote. In a case such as this every Augment has a say. The Council should wait until we have heard from each one of us in turn.”

  A second voice spoke, and the bolt of pain that assaulted his spinal column told him that it was his earlier self.

  “We have the personal votes of two-thirds of all the Augments. The Council’s responsibility is to speak for all of us. Procedure has been followed.”

  “I agree,” the first speaker said. “The vote stands.”

  The camera cut off and the screen went black.

  The actor spoke up. “I had no idea why someone sent it to me, but I wondered if it might have something to do with the miners. They are always in conflict with the Augments. Of course, this was before I met Hester.” He turned to Tolly, “I guess you might be upset to learn they were going to let you die.”

  Tolly turned to him in surprise. “Of course not. I have been campaigning for two centuries to remove the life augmentation part of our biological reprogramming. I’m certain that I was the one that put the case in favor of limiting our lives.”

  “But… Hester told me you were really old.”

  The girl fidgeted. “Not exactly how old, I didn’t tell him that.”

  “I am old. That means I am ideally placed to know how dangerous a long life is. Augments should not live for three centuries. We are, at bottom, human beings and a human was never meant to live long enough to see tens of generations of friends live and die. It… does something to the brain.”

  “So you wanted the vote to go through?”

  “Yes. Even though I can’t remember it I can say that for certain.”

  The actor stroked his chin in thought. “Isn’t this all a bit of a coincidence? We all received these datasticks before we even met.”

  Tolly massaged his neck to try to ease the knots out of it. “It does seem incredible. I would very much like to know who sent us the information.”

  “And why,” Hester added. “What does the Augment’s decision on prolonging life have to do with the Merchant’s building a base on Mars?”

  She looked at him for an answer, but his brain was too foggy to find one. “I don’t know. But we need to find out soon.”

  “Before the Augments catch us?”

  “Yes, that. But also because I am dying.”

  Chapter 32

  “You’re dying?” Hester stared at Tolly who gave her the unreadable expression that only an Augment could manage.

  “Judging by my vital signs I may not manage another twenty-four hours.”

  “But… there must be a way we can help you?”

  Tolly shrugged. “The only way to stop the neurological damage is to stop investigating what I lost when they took my memory. The bigger the brain wipe, the bigger the risk to life. And a hundred years is a pretty big wipe. I won’t stop searching for the memories and that means that at the current rate of decay I have around a day left.”

  Hester bit her lip. She couldn’t consider the Augment a friend, but he had been… what? A fellow outcast? At least her life seemed to make a little more sense when he was there. It seemed inconceivable that he was just going to let himself die.

  “What can we do?” She asked.

  “We need to move quickly. The Augment in the video who argued against the life limit is called Rowhan. He’s the head of the Council and he is the one who sent me for the brain wipe. He is the connection we’ve been looking for.”

  Hester shook her head. “We’re still missing too much information. What has this video got to do with the Merchant base? It must all come back to that somehow.”

  There was a beeping sound from her datapad.

  “Crap. I have to deliver this parcel. And it’s got to go to… hang on, where is Hangar Five? It’s not showing up on the colony locator.”

  “It’s not part of the colony. It’s in between here and the old mines. You can get a shuttle but there’s hardly anything there. It’s a refueling point.”

  “Well that’s great. Why would someone want something delivered there?”

  “It’s out of the way. And the shielding is poor so the Augment’s spy satellites can’t see in. The signal is terrible so communications don’t work either.”

  “Perfect. Look, I better get going.”

  Both men stood up.

  “Not alone,” Tolly said, just as Derek said:

  “I’m coming with you.”
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  She gritted her teeth. “Listen guys, I spent ten years as a smuggler on Sat Three. I played the Merchant gangs off one another and survived a hell of a lot of trouble. I’m not scared of delivering a package.”

  Tolly ignored her and turned to Derek. “You will go with her?”

  “Of course.”

  “What the hell?” Hester yelled, but the Augment simply held up one finger.

  “I will not have time to explain everything we have been through to someone else if you do not come back. You are necessary and you must be protected. This is no reflection on your abilities. I am sure you will adequately take care of yourself, but you should take back up. Just in case.”

  “But then you will be on your own. What if you –”

  “Die? Then at least you will be able to carry on without me. And if you can’t do that then you should both get on the next shuttle out of orbit. This is not the time to be a hero.”

  “Heroes always say that,” said Derek with his best actor’s grin.

  “Just try not to slow me down,” Hester said, still not happy that she was being babysat.

  “Heroes always say that too.”

  “Will you try and get some rest?” Hester asked Tolly. His skin was so pale he could see the threads of blue veins creeping up his neck.

  “Do I look like I can do anything else?”

  The shuttle ride to Hangar Five was just long enough for Hester to fall asleep so that when they arrived she felt groggy and sulky.

  “You’re cute when you snore,” Derek said as they walked into the Hangar but she pretended she didn’t hear him. Despite what Tolly had said she wished the actor hadn’t come. She had been a smuggler long enough to know that it was easier to escape from a bad situation when you only had yourself to worry about.

  Anxiety pushed her forward. This wasn’t how she liked to operate. Back on Sat Three the reason she had been so successful had been her preparation. She knew every system in and out so that when the time came to hack into them she had mitigated every possible risk. Now she was going in blind. And if she screwed up it wouldn’t just be her that was in danger.