Selected Stories: Volume 1

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Rachel made a noncommittal response. No more dva would be created, and both of them knew it. Though conditions on Mars remained worse than a bad day in Antarctica, tough unmodified humans would soon be making an earnest attempt at colonization, more than just the token UN base Rachel Dycek had overseen. Politics had changed, and the days of augmented humans—and their creator—were over.

  “You will need to make your repairs with haste,” Rachel said. “A Class-Four dust storm is on its way from the north and should arrive late today.”

  The dva women looked at her with sharp, deep-set eyes. The man nodded again and took a step backward. “Thank you, Commissioner. We already know about the storm. We can smell it in the air.”

  The response took her aback. Of course the dva would know such things just by living closer to the Martian environment.

  Rachel herself had been concerned only with how the storm would obliterate her own tracks, allowing her to disappear forever.…

  The breached water pipeline had been a mere pretext for her to take one of the crawlers from the inflatable base. Everyone else had duties, and no one had complained when she volunteered to make the long trip. Now the dva would perform their repair tasks, and Commissioner Keefer would think Rachel had taken care of everything. She would be long gone before anybody suspected something might be wrong.

  After cycling back through the crawler’s airlock, she drove off toward the volcanic highlands and the mighty rise of Olympus Mons, leaving the dva behind with their spilled ice and their dead. She had no intention of ever returning to them, or to her base.

  Even on the highest slopes, the Martian air tasted spoiled to Boris Tiban. His first inclination would have been to mutter a curse and spit at the ground, but he had learned decades ago never to waste valuable moisture in pointless gestures. All the adin had learned that in their first days on Mars.

  Boris reached the opening of the cave and turned to survey the endless slope that stretched down to the horizon. The climb from the plains to the highlands had not even left him out of breath. With only a third of the gravity that his body had been born to, Mars made him feel like a superman. He belonged here at high altitudes, where he could still breathe.

  Two of the other adin came out to greet him as he stood in the cave entrance. They appeared unkempt, inhuman—as they had been designed to look. When they saw him alone, they hesitated. Stroganov asked, “Where is Nicholas?”

  “Dead. The dva killed him.” But the cause of death had been more than the dva. He and Nicholas had descended too rapidly, and the atmospheric pressure had maddened him with pain. Nicholas had begun to hemorrhage before the dva struck their first blow.

  “Oh, Boris!” Bebez said. Her words sounded too human coming from the tight, insulated lips, the flattened face.

  Boris leaned against his pointed metal staff, torn from the center of a transmitting dish, and closed his eyes. Boris Tiban. That was what they had called him in the camps in Siberia, decades ago on Earth before his surgical transformation into adin. Prior to that he had worked in the Baku oil fields near the Caspian Sea; his superiors had showed no mercy when a fire in his area caused a major explosion that destroyed a week’s production of petroleum. Sentenced to Siberia, Boris Tiban had grown strong in the hellish winter wasteland, the harsh labor. And then they had snatched him away again, put him through rigorous selection procedures, made him sign forms written in English, a language he could not read, and then worked their black cyborg magic on him.

  “Is Boris all right? Why doesn’t he come inside?”

  Boris had never heard Cora Marisov’s voice in the rich atmosphere of Earth, but he imagined it had been deep and musical, not the shrill tones caused by the thin air. Cora herself must have been beautiful. She refused to leave the shadows now, especially now.

  He stepped into the cave. “We destroyed one of the water pumping stations. It will do no good. Nicholas died.”

  Inside, the caves were comfortable, the air breathable. The dim light hid the traces of green lichen crawling over the rocks. Boris remembered how excited he had been, all the adin had been, when their terraforming efforts began to show results: the lichens, the algae, the changing hue of the sky. They had worked together in selfless exertion, tearing themselves apart to terraform the planet, to make it a better place for themselves.

  The adin had been the first true Martians, feeling the soil with their bare feet, breathing the razor-thin air directly into their enhanced lungs. They had set out to conquer a world, and they had succeeded—too well. Now none of them could breathe the dense air below.

  Cora came out, swaying as she walked. She went to him, and he embraced her. “I am glad you came back. I was worried.”

  Boris could not feel the details of her body against him. The long-chain polymers lacing his skin insulated against heat loss but also deadened the nerve endings. He felt like a man in a rubber monster suit from a ridiculous twentieth century film about Martians. But like those costumed actors, Boris Tiban was human inside. Human!

  With the death of Nicholas, only five of the adin remained of the initial 100. He, and Cora, and three others.

  And Cora frightened him most of all.

  Through the trapezoidal windowports of the crawler, Rachel Dycek could look out at the Martian sky and see bright stars even during the daytime. Twice a day the burning dot of Phobos swam from horizon to horizon, running through its phases—full, to quarter, to crescent, to new—though they were visible only in telescopes. The other moon, Deimos, seemed nailed to the sky, hanging in nearly the same place day after day, as it slowly lost pace with the planet’s rotation.

  The uphill slope of Olympus Mons was shallow, taking forever to rise up from the Tharsis Plain until it pushed itself clear of the lower atmosphere. The crawler vehicle made steady progress, kilometer after kilometer.

  The monotonous landscape sprawled out on all sides. Rachel felt small and insignificant, unable to believe the arrogance with which she had tried to change all this. She had been successful against a world; because of her work, adapted humans could live in the open air of Mars—but now her successors were tossing her aside as casually as if she had been the most miserable failure. That phase of the project was over, they said.

  The terraforming of Mars had begun with atmospheric seeding of algae many decades before the first permanent human presence on the planet. The algae latched onto the reddish dust continually whipped into the air, gobbled the abundant carbon dioxide, photosynthesized the weak sunshine, and laid the groundwork of terrestrial ecology.

  Encke Basin, in the Southern Highlands, showed the great recent scar where the united space program had diverted a near-Earth comet into Mars. The comet brought with it a huge load of water, and the heat of impact measurably (though only temporarily) raised the planet’s temperature. Encke Sea had volatilized entirely within seven years, further raising the atmospheric pressure.

  But the terraforming had been an enormous and unending drain on Earth’s coffers, siphoning off funds and resources that—some said—might better be spent at home. Fifty years had passed, and still no humans smiled under the olive sky or romped through the rust-colored sands as the propaganda posters had promised. Popular interest in the project had dropped to its lowest point. The beginning of a worldwide recession nearly spelled the end of a resurrected fourth planet.

  No wonder the Sovereign Republics looked on Rachel Dycek as a national hero. With her secret work, she had succeeded in creating a new type of human that could survive in the harsh environment. Double lungs, altered metabolism, insulated skin like a living protective suit.

  In a surprise move, suddenly there were people living on Mars—and they were Russians, Siberians, Ukrainians! The news shocked the world and catapulted Mars back into the headlines again.

  Rachel Dycek and her team came out of hiding with their rogue experiments and raised their hands to accolades. A hundred human test subjects began eking out a living on the surface of Mars, breath
ing the air, setting up terraforming industries, ingesting the algae and lichens and recovered water. They transmitted progress reports that the whole world watched. They were called the adin, the first.

  After months of interrogation by outraged—or perhaps envious, Rachel thought—investigative commissions from the world scientific community, she and her team had developed a second generation of Mars-adapted humans, the dva, who needed less drastic changes to survive on a world growing less hostile year by year.

  All the enhanced males were given vasectomies before they were shipped to Mars; since they were not genetically altered, any children conceived by adin would have been normal human babies who would die instantly upon taking their first freezing, oxygen-starved breaths.

  And finally, just five years ago, a “natural” human presence had been established on the surface, living in thin-walled inflatable colonies set up in canyons protected from the harsh weather. Rachel had been given the title of commissioner of the first Mars base as a reward for her accomplishments. She had watched as her dva workers paved the way on the highlands, remaking the world for humans to live on unhindered.

  The dva project no longer needed her supervision, though; and most of the adin had abandoned their work and died out before Rachel ever set foot on the planet. Adapted humans were a short-term phase in the terraforming scheme.

  Jesús Keefer, the UN Mars Project advisor, had come to replace her. Rachel’s work on Mars was finished, and she had been ordered to go home. Keefer would not want her around, and Rachel’s superiors had left her no choice. They would return her to Earth a well-respected scientist and administrator. She would fill her days with celebrity banquets, lecture tours, memoirs, interviews. Charities would want her to endorse causes; corporations would want her to endorse products. Her face would appear on posters. Children would write letters to her.

  It would be pathetic. Everything would remind her of how she had been retired. Obsolete. Tossed aside now that she had completed her task. But Mars was her home, her child.

  The crawler toiled up the lava slope of Olympus Mons. Black lumps of ejecta thrust out like monoliths from the dust, scoured and polished into contorted shapes by the furious wind. On the sunward side of some of the rocks she could see gray-green smears of lichen, a tendril of frost. It made her heart ache.

  Even in the one-third gravity her body felt old and weak. Returning to Earth—and the extra weight it would make her carry—would be hell for her.

  Instead she had made up her mind to go to the highest point in the solar system, fourteen miles above the volcanic plain. Make sure you finish up at the top, she had always said. Olympus Mons stood proudly above most of the atmosphere, two and a half times the height of Mount Everest on Earth.

  On the edge of the eighty-kilometer-wide caldera, Rachel Dycek would stand in her laboring environmental suit and look across her new world.

  Already she could see the bruised color of the northern sky as the murky wall of dust stampeded toward the southern hemisphere.

  The crawler itself might survive—the vehicles had been designed to be tough—but the sandstorm would obliterate all traces of her.

  Cora Marisov remained in the shadows of the lava tubes where the adin lived, partly out of shyness, partly out of the revulsion she felt toward her changing body.

  Fifteen years ago her eyes had been modified for the wan Martian sunlight. They had been dark eyes, beautiful, like polished ebony disks, slanted with the trace of Mongol features retained by many Siberians. Her Martian eyes, though, were set deep within sheltering cheekbones and brow ridges, covered with a thick mesh of lashes. She remembered her grandmother braiding her hair and singing to her, marveling at what a beautiful girl she was. Her grandmother would no doubt run away shrieking now, making the three-fingered sign of the Orthodox cross.

  Cora made her way up the sloping passageway to where sunlight warmed the rocks. The wind picked up as she stepped outside. The cramps in her abdomen struck again, making her wince, but she forced herself to keep moving. She used her fingers to collect strands of algae that had clung to the flapping skimmer-screens that captured airborne tendrils. The adin would cook the algae down, leach out the dusts, and bake it into dense, edible wafers.

  After greeting her upon returning from his raid, Boris Tiban sat brooding in silence below, basking near the volcanic vent. She thought of him as a rogue, one of the legendary Siberian bandits, or perhaps one of the exiled revolutionaries. It had taken her a long time to grow accustomed to the abomination of his body, the lumpy alien appearance, the functional adaptations tacked onto his form.

  She recalled her emotions the first time they had made love, more than the usual turmoil she felt when lying with a man for the first time. This was no longer a man, but a freak, with whom she grappled in a charade of love.

  He had taken her under the dim sun, inside a sheltering ring of lava rock that reminded her of a primitive temple. She lay back in the cold, red dust but could not feel the sharp rocks against her padded back. When Boris held her and caressed her and lay his body on top of her, she could enjoy little of his touch. Too much of her skin’s sensitivity had been surgically blocked.

  Thin wind had whistled around the rocks, but she could hear Boris’s breathing, faster and faster, as he pushed into her. Her external skin may have been deadened, but she squirmed and made a small noise deep in her throat; the nerves inside had not been changed at all. They moved and grabbed at each other, making an indentation in the dust that looked afterwards as if a great struggle had occurred there.

  They had nothing to worry about. The Earther doctors had made sure they were all sterile before dumping them on this planet. Sex was one of the few pleasures they could still enjoy. Cora and Boris had made love often. What did they have to lose? she thought bitterly.

  A hundred of the adin had set out to establish new lives on Mars. Eight had died within the first week when their adaptations did not function as expected; more than half succumbed within the first year, unable to adapt to the harsh new environment.

  As good workers, they had transmitted regular reports back to Earth, at first every day, then every week, then intermittently. With a forty-minute round-trip transmission lag, they could transmit their report and be gone again from the station before the Earth monitors could respond. Boris had liked using the delayed messages to taunt and frustrate. The Earthers couldn’t do a damned thing about it.

  After three years, cocky with invulnerability, Boris had spoken to the remaining adin. The Earthers had abandoned them on Mars, he said, to sink or swim depending on their own resourcefulness. Earth wanted to watch a soap opera, the quaint outcasts’ struggle for survival. Finally, Boris transmitted an arrogant refusal to do terraforming work anymore, and then destroyed the station. He had taken the metal spire from the tip of the dish and kept it as his royal staff.

  By that time, only thirty adin remained. They moved to higher altitudes where the climate was more comfortable, the air thinner and easier to breathe.

  Within a Martian year, the first dva arrived. They had been planned to replace the adin all along.…

  Now, her arms laden with wind-borne algae strands, Cora turned and listened to an approaching mechanical noise, tinny in the thin air. She looked down the slope and saw the human crawler in the distance, raising an orangish-red cloud behind it.

  Cora stumbled back down into the cave, but already the other adin had heard it. Boris leaped to his feet from where he had been brooding; his body glistened with diamonds of frozen vapor. He held the pointed staff in his hand and peered out the window opening. The other three adin hurried to him.

  No one paid attention to her. She couldn’t be much help to them right now anyway.

  Cora slumped down against the rough rock wall, breathing heavily and sorting out the algae strands. She felt tears spring to the corners of her eyes as she patted her swollen belly—the last great practical joke of all.

  The crawler helped Rachel choose the
best course. She opted to follow a gaping chasm that spilled down the slope of Olympus Mons, possibly extending to the base of the towering cliff that lifted the volcano from the Tharsis bulge. The chasm was one of the only landmarks she found on the vast uphill plain. It suggested days long past when liquid water had spilled downhill from melting ice. Or perhaps the enormous shield volcano had simply split its seams. She knew little about geology; it was not her area of expertise. If she had been a geologist on Mars, her specialty would never have become obsolete.

  Gauges showed the outside air pressure dropping as she ascended. The wind speed picked up, bringing gusts that carried enough muscle to rattle the crawler. She had been climbing for half a day. The distant sun had passed overhead and dropped to the northwestern horizon. Behind her reeled two parallel treads, marking the path of the crawler. They would be erased when the storm hit, certainly before anyone thought to come looking for her.

  With a momentary twinge of guilt, Rachel hoped the dva at the pumping station would be all right, but she knew they had been trained—and made—to survive the weather conditions of this new transitional Mars.

  Ahead Rachel saw areas that looked like ancient volcanic steam vents, lava tubes, and towering jagged teeth of black rock rotten with cavities formed by blowing dust. It looked like an extraterrestrial Stonehenge guarding a gateway to a wonderland under Mars. Long sunset shadows stretched like dark oil spilling down the slope.

  And then figures stepped away from the rocks, emerging from the lava tubes. Human figures—no, not quite human. In the fading light she recognized them.

  Adin.

  She saw three at first, and then a fourth stepped out. This one carried a long metal staff. Her heart leaped with amazement, awe, and a little fear. Rachel’s first impulse was to turn the crawler around and flee back downslope to report the presence of this encampment of rogue “Martians.” What would they do to her if they caught her?