by Fonda Lee
Carr’s cuff vibrated and played its usual chime in his ear. He cursed and looked down at his arm, intending to decline it, then saw who it was from. His rising passion died like a flame doused with ice water. “It’s my mother,” he said.
Why was Sally calling him now, of all times? He’d messaged her dutifully to let her know he was leaving Valtego. He’d sent her more than enough money to move out of her shitty apartment and find herself a nicer place. He had even asked Enzo to check up on her and make sure she did so. He wanted to ignore the call, but Risha had already pulled away to let him take it, her warmth now frustratingly absent as she drifted, topless, to the stocked mini-bar.
Carr jabbed his cuff. “Mom,” he said, “I’m on a flight right now.”
Her voice was so distant and tinny, time-delayed by the growing distance to Earth, that he scrolled up the receiver volume on his cuff display as high as he could just to hear her. “I don’t want to bother you,” she said. “I know you’re busy. But Carr … ”
She sounded so worried, he pulled himself back down to the ground just to have a surface under his feet. “What’s wrong?”
“A man came around asking questions about you. A detective. He wanted to know who your donor was, and which geneticist I used, and how you got into zeroboxing, and all sorts of things.” Sally’s voice was speeding up, climbing. “I didn’t tell him anything. Well … maybe a little, but I don’t think I said anything wrong. Oh, I hope not. I said that if he was going to keep questioning me, then I wanted a lawyer, but he just waved it off and left.”
Carr felt as though the whoosh of blood in his head was drowning out the faint sound of his mother’s voice in his receiver. “You did the right thing,” he said in a monotone whisper, pulling further away from Risha’s earshot. “All he has are suspicions. That’s all.”
“I looked him up afterward and found this news story from last week. Wait, I’m sending it to you right now. I don’t know what it means, but maybe … ” (crackle of static) “ … prepared … ” (more static) “ … a lawyer … ”
A crazy, desperate thought flashed through Carr’s mind. He was speeding away from Earth, putting vast amounts of space between himself and Detective Van, and Rhystok, and Terran law. What if he didn’t go back? What if he just kept going?
“I can not deal with this right now, Mom. I’m fighting in the biggest-ever zeroboxing tournament next week. We’ll talk when I get back, okay?” He let out a tense breath. “I just need to get through this. We’ll figure it out later. Soon. Okay?”
For a long second, he wondered if he’d lost the connection. The background interference, like a crackly wind inside his ear, made him want to claw his own receiver out of his skull. He realized he was literally bouncing off the wall in agitation, the hand wrapped around the wall grip pushing him off the surface, pulling him back, off, and back, off, and back.
Finally, Sally’s voice, sounding small and vulnerable, said, “Okay. Later, then. Good luck with your fight, Carr.”
“Mom … ” he started, but this time the connection really was gone.
He closed his eyes and dropped his forehead against the wall just as his cuff received the news item Sally had sent. He pulled it up.
Famed Musician Sues Parents,
Reveals Enhancements.
World renowned composer-performer and musical child prodigy Jaymes Wang, 16, who was admitted to the hospital last week after a botched suicide attempt, has filed a civil suit against his parents, Marissa and Austyn Wang, for intentional genetic harm. Wang claims that his parents illegally enhanced him as an embryo and squandered most of his money, which they had claimed to be saving in a trust. Wang has composed for orchestra, film, and the Olympics, and his performances regularly sell out concert halls. Wang also accuses his parents of being connected to a wider scheme of criminal enhancement, although Detective Ruart Van of Genepol declined to give further details, stating that an investigation was in progress.
“What’s wrong?” Risha asked, coming up beside him. “Is your mother all right?”
Carr swiped the text off his cuff display. “It’s nothing,” he said. “She’s just having a hard time adjusting … to the new house … and reporters asking her questions.” He shrugged. “Nothing my brandhelm needs to worry about.”
Risha regarded him silently, the space between her eyebrows wrinkling. “I know Terrans still hold the antiquated idea that their relatives might reflect badly on them. As if genes are unchangeable.” She laid a hand on his chest. “I hope you know you can tell me anything.”
“I know.” Lying to Risha, to her open, concerned face … A sour wave of shame hit Carr in the back of the throat. It was the worst part of all this, of what he was and what he’d done. Just a few minutes ago he’d been imagining marrying her. Suddenly, the idea seemed light years away. How could he possibly marry Risha without telling her? He would have to tell her. Soon. Tell her everything.
The thought made his stomach fold in on itself. But even if he told her, he couldn’t ask her for that kind of commitment, knowing what he did: that one day, maybe soon, he might break her heart, force her to watch the police lead him away or read about him as an item in the news-feeds, just like Jaymes Wang.
He didn’t know how he could cope with that. But he couldn’t lose her. Until then, he couldn’t lose her.
“Let’s go and check this place out. I’ve never been on a jumbo-cruiser before,” he said.
With thirty-two zeroboxers, their coaches and cornermen, Gant and several other ZGFA corporate types, Risha and the rest of the Merkel marketing team, and the invited media, the privately chartered flight was comfortably full. The small on-board gym was always busy, and two sizable rooms had been converted into training spaces, surfaced with magnetic sheeting to create jerry-rigged Cubes. The walls and dimensions felt all wrong, but it was better than having nothing and wasting the three-day journey while their Martian opponents trained.
In the close quarters, Carr felt like just one of the guys again, for the first time in a long while. He’d gotten used to other zeroboxers going a little quiet when he entered a room, even older, bigger ones, even ones he trained with. They treated him either with a kind of wary awe or with too much cheerful backslapping and loud talk, as if to prove his stardom didn’t mean anything to them. Knowing they were now all fellow Terrans competing on the same side instead of against each other changed things. He could hang out with them almost the way he used to. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it.
“I’ve been wearing a cooling top all day for weeks,” Adri “the Assassin” Sansky commented over a training break that had begun with a comparison of their respective supplement formulations. Carr hadn’t seen Adri in months, and he was pleased to learn she was now the top-ranked Terran female midmass fighter. “That’s what I’ve heard is the hardest thing to get used to in the domie system. The cold, and the thin air.”
“It won’t be that bad,” Carr said. “They’re bringing the oxygen in the Cube up to Terran levels, and they negotiated the temperature halfway—a little too cool for us, a little too warm for them, so they figure it’s fair.”
“They have home advantage,” she said, picking compulsively at the edge of her glove. “Every little bit helps.”
Carr couldn’t blame her for being worried. The WCC had a larger and stronger pool of female zeroboxers than the ZGFA, and no one really expected the eight Terran women to win; just to not lose too spectacularly.
“I’m betting you girls will deliver an upset for the highlight reels,” DK said encouragingly. “Save some glory for the guys, yeah?”
“Sure, just for you. I’ll try not to steal all the thunder.” Adri rolled her eyes but smiled at DK’s pep talk. “Back to practicing those damn corner reversals.” She grabbed her squeeze bottle of supplement shake and floated off, leaving Carr and DK alone.
An awkward moment of silenc
e descended. DK cleared his throat. “Blake says his arm is doing okay. He might be back in the Cube in a few months.”
“That’s good to hear.”
“Just thought you might want to know.”
“Yeah. I did. Thanks.” Carr searched for something else to say. A part of him wanted to extend the olive branch to his old friend; the rest of him was too proud to hear anything of it. DK looked good; he’d put on mass to compete with bigger fighters and he was carrying it well. For the first time, he and Carr would be in the same division. When the media had brought this up with him one-too-many times, DK’s response had been more sarcastic than typical: “Yeah, I’ll finally be in the same division as the guy you all won’t stop asking me about.”
Carr glanced over briefly. “So … ”
They were rescued from further conversation when everyone’s cuff flashed the new audio message alert at the same time. Carr picked it up and the ship’s captain, sounding a shade agitated, advised them all that there would be a five Martian-hour delay in their arrival at Surya station, due to “border issues.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” DK wondered aloud.
“It means,” Gant said, pulling himself into the room with a scowl on his face, “that politics are getting in the way. Listen up everyone!” He waited for the zeroboxers in the room to give him their attention. “Last night, the Martian Council of Settlements declared it would be suspending Terran mining and export licenses in retaliation for Earth withholding terraforming technology. After the news reached Earth, protests in front of Martian embassies turned violent, and now Mars is considering moving its diplomats to Luna.” He made a pah noise of frustration and disgust. “So, in short, we’re showing up at a bad time and are being held up for no good reason.”
“The WCC won’t cancel the tournament, will they?” someone asked.
“Are you kidding? If anything, they’ll promote it even more heavily. Martian Airspace and Customs is denying us surface rights, though. We’ll be allowed to land on Surya, but that’s it. Anyone hoping to go to the planet to visit Olympus Mons, or the Valles—sorry, you’re out of luck.”
When they finally docked, half a day late, they were met by a welcoming committee that included the mayor of Surya, the city-station tourism director, the president of the WCC, a contingent of Martian zeroboxers, and a handful of reporters. Gant and the rest of the big shots greeted each other with Martian x-shaped handshakes: right hand to right hand over top, left to left underneath. Carr looked out across the rest of the docking hub’s plaza in amazement. He had never seen so many Martians before: men, women, and children, dressed in such different clothes, many of them pausing to watch the arriving Terrans with curiosity and wariness.
Carr took a step forward and nearly lost his footing from putting too much force into it. Of course—Surya’s lower artificial gravity was designed for Martians. The air was cold and dry, like the inside of Gant’s office. The decorative plants adorning the public plaza were nothing like the lush, broad-leafed, bright green ones he’d grown up around, but hardy-looking things with thin needles or bulbous bodies, descendants of species from the far northern deserts of Earth. Only now did it strike him that he’d really left home altogether, traveled beyond Greater Earth orbit for the first time in his life.
In the midst of much chatter and introductions, Carr found himself shaking hands with the line of Martian zeroboxers and matching them to the video footage he’d studied for the last few months. Suddenly he was looking into the face of Kye Soard, with his fight-flattened nose and shaved, lumpy head.
For half a second, neither of them spoke. A feeling passed through the air between them—the animal recognition one good fighter has upon meeting another. It had already begun: the measuring, the flickering gaze taking note of size and stance and the way the other man moved.
“So you are Luka,” Soard said. “The best of these earthworms, yes?” He had a Southern Highlands accent that Carr couldn’t place. Argyre? Hellas? His Martian geography was sketchy at best. Soard clapped a hand on Carr’s shoulder with a force that straddled the line between friendly and aggressive. Carr forced himself not to tense, not to yield the mental edge. They were within a couple of kilograms of each other, Carr knew, but Soard was more stretched out. He probably had at least a fist’s length advantage in reach. He looked … Carr searched for the right description. Efficient. His body looked efficient. “Welcome,” Soard said. “We will show you a good time! Then send you back home in pieces, my friend.” He grinned with a condescending, cheerful menace that suggested he was joking, and not joking.
Carr was surprised to discover that he liked and disliked the man in equal measure at once. “Or maybe I’ll be taking a bit of domie hide back as a souvenir,” he said with an equally threatening smile, then moved on to shake the next man’s hands.
A chartered bus ferried them to the hotel where they would be staying. Even the vehicles looked different here, like the bullet-shaped skimmers capable of navigating terrain on the Red Planet. As they drove through Surya, Carr squeezed Risha’s hand. “Does it feel like home at all?” he asked.
“A little,” she replied, staring pensively out the windows at the rounded architecture, the people on the streets, the shops and restaurants advertising different regional specialties: tzuka from West Marineris, Northern Lowlands curry, Tharsian imported ale. “It’s a strange feeling.”
It was strange. Surya Station wasn’t like Valtego at all. It was a real space settlement, a place where people lived. Valtego was Earth’s playground, vibrant with energy and bright lights, but not the sort of place most Terrans imagined staying for more than a week unless you had reason to work there. Most Terrans did not imagine anywhere in the universe to be habitable except Earth. Why would they?
“Damn domie cold,” Uncle Polly muttered, pulling on a sweater. “This place sure has gotten bigger.”
“When were you last on Surya?” Carr asked.
“A long time ago. I was maybe a little older than you. Stopped over on leave for a month after two years on my first mining vessel, the Breaker. Even back then it was a mecca for zeroboxing. For anything zero gravity.”
Risha nodded. “The Martian Space Dance Academy is headquartered here. The WCC, of course. Plenty of weightless spas in the central concourse. Recreational and competitive spacewalking is big here too—I think they have three or four major races a year.”
The hotel was new and luxurious, though the rooms were small by Terran standards. Martians were used to having far less space. Carr stood beside the curved, wraparound window of his room, admiring the view. Phobos, the larger of Mars’ moons and one of the busiest shipping hubs in the solar system, loomed large to one side. On the other, the Red Planet hung like a copper disk against a black canvas. He squinted hard, and his optics focused in as far as they could go until he could make out some of the features of the surface: the enormous craters and basins, the flat plains and deep canyons, the soaring mountain ranges. The great domed cities were mere dots.
Thin wisps of white, like shredded gauze, swirled over the surface of the planet. A nascent atmosphere, nothing like the dense cotton cloud cover of Earth. He couldn’t see them, but he’d been told that thousands of enormous solar reflectors orbited Mars, slowly heating it. Whole tracts of the planet were already murky green with algae and plant cover, fed by the water mines that ran day and night.
“Will Mars really be like Earth someday?” he wondered. “With oceans and forests, and people walking outside?”
Risha came up beside him. Her voice held nostalgia and melancholy. “Who knows? Terraforming is enshrined in the Constitution of the Martian Settlements. Pro- and anti-terraformist politicians are constantly arguing about it. It’s been going on since before my grandparents were born, and it’ll probably still be going on after we’re dead. But whatever Mars becomes, it won’t be like Earth. It’ll be its own thing.”
“I think,” Carr said, “I can see why Mars gives Terrans the heebie-jeebies.”
“Come on,” Risha said, turning away from the view, “Your first press conference is in an hour.”
Even though Martian days were thirty-seven minutes longer than Terran ones, the week before the start of War of the Worlds went fast. Uncle Polly was unrelenting, as strict about every detail as he’d been before Carr’s earliest amateur tournaments. He kept Carr in thermal clothes and on a strict hydration schedule to manage the dry cold, sent him to get a radiation cleanse, kept track of what he ate and how much he slept. “Can’t risk getting sick or injured now, can you?” he warned at least twice a day.
The Dr. Drew Ming Athletic Mall on Surya was even larger than Valtego’s Virgin Galactic Center. Risha told him it was named after one of Mars’ visionary geneticists. Martians, she said, named things after scientists the way Terrans used war heroes and politicians. Carr and the other zeroboxers spent every available minute getting acclimated to the new stadium. The Martians were there too, and the Cube was constantly occupied in hour-long practice shifts.
Adri gave voice to the generally shared sentiment: “The domies creep the hell out of me.”
“Don’t let them,” Carr said. He looked over at the two Martian women emerging from the Cube, unfastening their gloves and toweling the sweat from their faces. The WCC fighters looked good, all of them fit and preternaturally graceful in null gravity, their otherness highlighted by the sight of so many of them. Most of them treated the Terran visitors coolly, though they complained loudly about the extra heat.