Selected Stories: Volume 1

by Kevin J. Anderson

  But instead she stopped and parked the vehicle, locking its treads. So what might they do, and what did it matter? She sealed the protective plates over the windowports, then stood up. The recompressed air in her suit tasted cold and metallic.

  Rachel had nothing to lose, and she wanted to know how the adin had fared, what they had done, why they had broken off contact with Earth. At least she would know that much before she died, and it would bring closure to her work. She had to find out for herself, even if no one else would know. She was probably the only one who cared anyway.

  She cycled through the door of the crawler and turned back to key the locking combination. Rachel stepped forward to meet the adin survivors as they bounded toward her.

  The Earther inside the suit looked fragile, like eggshells strung together with spiderwebs. She would never survive ten seconds unprotected outside.

  Assisted by Stroganov, Boris took the captive woman’s arm and lifted her off the ground. Her reflective suit, bloated from internal pressure, felt slick and unnatural in his grip. He noticed that the suit design had changed somewhat since he had last dealt with Earthers, when they had first deposited the adin on the Martian surface.

  He and Stroganov carried their captive easily in the low gravity; oddly, she did not struggle. Boris set the woman down in the dimness of the lava tube and scrutinized her small body. Apparently nonplussed, she straightened herself and looked around the grotto. Through the faceplate of her helmet, Boris saw dark eyes and an angular face, salt-and-pepper hair. He discerned no expression of helplessness and fear. He found it disconcerting.

  “I recognize you,” the Earther woman said. Her words filtered through the speaker patch below the faceplate in crisp textbook Russian straight from Moscow schooling. “You are Boris Petrovich Tiban.”

  Pleased that she knew him but also angry at where she must have seen him, Boris said, “You must have been entertained by our struggle for survival on this world, while you sat warm and cozy on yours? How often do they replay my last transmission to Earth, just before I dismantled the dish?” He rang his staff on the porous lava floor for emphasis.

  “No, Boris Tiban, I remember you from my selection procedures.” She paused. “Let me see, Siberian labor camp, correct? You had been a worker at the Baku oil fields in Azerbaijan. Your record showed that you got into many brawls, you came to work drunk more often than not. During one shift you had an accident that started a fire in one of the refinery complexes. The resulting explosion killed two people and ruined a week’s oil production.”

  The other three adin stepped away, looking at her in amazement. Bebez grabbed onto Elia’s arm. Boris felt a cold shiver crawl up his spine that had nothing to do with the temperature of Mars. Flickers of memory brought him fuzzy glimpses of this woman, dressed in a white uniform, bustling down cold tile halls. “How do you know all this?”

  The woman’s response was a short laugh. She seemed genuinely amused. “I selected the final adin candidates myself. I performed some of the surgery. I made you, Boris Tiban. You have survived here because of the augmentations I added to your body. You should be grateful to me with every breath you take of Martian air.” She turned around, flexing her arm. The suit made crinkling noises.

  “I do not remember these others as well,” she continued. “There were so many candidates in the first phase.”

  Boris felt the fury boil within him. It all came back to him now. “Doctor … Dycek—is that your name, or have I remembered it wrong?” She was provoking him, taunting him—perhaps she did not know him as well as she thought. Stroganov gawked at her, then at him; yes, he remembered her, too, the smell of chemicals, the slice of pain, the promises of freedom, the exile on this planet.

  Boris brought the metal staff up. “Maybe I should just smash open your helmet.”

  “Do what you will. I never intended to return anyway.”

  Boris stared into her dark eyes distorted by the transparent polymer. He could not say anything. She had made him helpless.

  “Tell me why you are so angry,” she continued. “We set you free of your labor camp. You signed all the papers. We gave you a world to tame and all the freedom to do it. Better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven, is that not correct?”

  All the clever words tumbled in his throat, clambering over each other to come out. Where was the tough, charismatic leader who had conquered Mars? He had made his speeches over and over to the surviving adin; but now he had the proper target in front of him. He clenched his hand so tightly that he actually felt the nails against his thick, numb palm.

  The anger finally burst out, and Boris shouted in a way that overrode all his training for shallow breaths and conservation of exhaled moisture. “You created us for Mars—and then you took Mars away!”

  He gestured out beyond the cave walls. In his mind he held a picture of the growing lichen, the tracings of frost on the lava rock, the thickening air. Dr. Dycek looked at him through the faceplate. He saw a weary patience in her eyes, which made him even angrier. She did not understand.

  “Why is she here?” Elia asked him. “Find out why she is here.”

  Boris looked down at Dr. Dycek. “Yes, why?”

  “I am being replaced. I have no more work on Mars, and I am to be shuttled back to Earth.”

  Boris tightened his grip on her thin metallic suit. “So now you know what it feels to be obsolete yourself. We watch our world slipping away with each new dva establishment, with each water-recovery station, with every normal human setting foot on our planet! The time has come to send them a message they cannot ignore.”

  Dr. Dycek put her gloved hands on her hips. “I came up here to be swept away in the dust storm. They will never find my body. If you kill me it makes no difference.”

  “We could dump your body just outside of the flimsy inflatable base. They would find you then.”

  “Then someone would have to hunt you down,” Dr. Dycek said. “Why bloody your hands? No need to add murder to your conscience.”

  Boris laughed at that. He felt easier now, more in control. “Murder? It is murder only when a human kills another human. Mars will be killing you, Dr. Dycek. Not me.” He hefted the metal staff over his head, ready to swing it down upon the curved faceplate. She tilted her head up. “It is the way with all creatures: those who cannot adapt to their environment must die. So here, breathe the clear, cold air of Mars. It will be a grand gesture for the adin!”

  “Oh Boris, stop!” It was Cora’s voice, sounding annoyed. She made her way out of the shadows from the back of the cave. “I once admired your ways, but now I am tired of how you must make a grand gesture of everything. Tearing up our transmitter, sabotaging the dva pumping station, even blowing up the Baku oil refinery.”

  “That was all justified!” Boris snapped. But he watched Dr. Dycek’s attention flick away from him as soon as Cora stepped into the light. Cora panted, then winced at internal pain.

  “She’s pregnant!” Dr. Dycek said. “How? That’s impossible!”

  For a moment, Boris thought her comment so ludicrous that he stifled a chuckle. How? Does a doctor not know how a woman gets pregnant?

  “Even the best Russian sterilization procedures must not be one hundred percent effective,” Cora answered.

  Dr. Dycek’s entire attitude altered. “Your baby will die if it is born up here! It will have none of your adaptations. Just a normal, human child.”

  “We know that!” Boris shouted.

  “This changes everything. An adin having a child! The first human born on Mars!” Her voice rose with command as if they were her slaves—just as she had sounded in the adin training and therapy sessions back on Earth. “We will have to take you in the crawler vehicle back down,” she said to Cora. “I can pressurize the cabin slowly so you will acclimate and tolerate the atmosphere below for a short time.”

  Boris felt his control of the other adin slipping like red dust through his fingertips. Stroganov and Bebez nodded, looking at t
he suited figure and ignoring him. Cora stepped forward, so intent with new hope and excitement that she did not try to hide her swollen appearance. “You can save my baby?”

  “Perhaps. If we get you back to the base.”

  “This is good news, Boris!” Elia said. “We thought the baby would die for certain.”

  Boris released his hold on Dr. Dycek’s arm and turned to face his four companions in the cave. “Yes, save the child! And then what? Then everything will be perfect? Then all our problems will be solved? No! Then the Earthers will know where we are. They will come here and watch us die off, one by one. They will make a documentary program about us, the failed experiment. Maybe it will be on worldwide National Geographic?”

  He moved toward the cave opening to the deepening dusk outside. It was difficult for him to stomp in anger in the low gravity. “You are all fools! I can have more intelligent conversations with the rocks.”

  Boris Tiban stalked out into the air to stare at the brightening stars, at Phobos rising again in the east and the pinprick of Deimos suspended partway up the sky. He felt like the king of all Mars, a king who had just been overthrown.

  Not even Boris’s tantrum could disturb Rachel’s concentration as she stared at the rounded abdomen of the adin woman. The survival of these augmented humans impressed her, but the simple miracle of this pregnancy that should never have happened amazed her much more. A pregnancy, the type of thing men and women had been doing for millions of years—but never before on this planet.

  She and her medical team had seen no need to sterilize the female adin, a much more difficult operation than a vasectomy. Though Rachel had heard of men siring children years after they had had vasectomies, she and her team considered that possibility to be an acceptable risk. Russian medicine had somewhat low standards for “acceptable risks.” Rachel could hardly believe it herself.

  But the tight skin stretched over Cora’s belly spoke otherwise. The thick adin fur wisped up and curled over, showing white patches where toughened skin had been stretched to its limits. Rachel reached out with a gloved hand to touch the bulge, but she could feel little through the protective material.

  Cora seemed more preoccupied with excusing Boris’s temper. “He is not always like this. He is strong and has kept us alive by our own wits for ten years now, but everything is running through his fingers. He lost our companion Nicholas two nights ago in a raid.” She drew a deep breath. Her words carried a rich Siberian accent that evoked thoughts of wild lands and simple people. “These grand gestures of his always backfire.”

  Suddenly Cora’s mouth clamped shut and she let out a hiss. She squeezed her eyelids together. The skin on her abdomen tightened until it had a waxy texture and was as hard as the rind of a melon. Her hands groped for something to grab onto, finally seizing a lump of lava. She squeezed the sharp edges until blood oozed from shallow cuts in her palms, freezing into a sparkling smear on the rock.

  Rachel knelt beside Cora while the other adin came closer, showing their concern. Rachel had never had children of her own; she had been too preoccupied with her work, too driven, too dedicated. She had never regretted it, though—had she not done something far more important by preparing the first human to set foot on Mars?

  Cora gasped out her next words after the spasm passed. “It’s all right. For now. That has been happening for days. I can bear the pain, but I can concentrate on little else.”

  “You must not have the child here,” Rachel repeated. She didn’t know if the baby would be getting enough oxygen through the mother’s bloodstream even now, but it certainly could not survive in the open air. “How frequent are the contractions?”

  “I have no idea,” Cora snapped in a voice filled more with pain and weariness than anger. “I don’t exactly have a chronometer! Boris left all that behind when we came to the highlands.”

  “They are about every fifteen minutes,” said one of the adin, Bebez. “You must get her away from here. Give her whatever help you can offer. The baby will surely die up here.”

  Rachel would have to give up her own pointless gesture of defiance, standing on the volcano top while the dust storm swept her away. But it seemed a ridiculous thing to do now, like something Boris Tiban would attempt. A grand gesture that would impress no one. Instead, she would accomplish something to hold up in front of Jesús Keefer’s face.

  Cora’s infant would focus Earth’s attention once again on the adin and the dva, and on Rachel’s own efforts. She might even get a reprieve, be allowed to stay on Mars to study the remaining altered humans and how they adapted to their changing planet. But she felt she was doing this for something else as well. Better to save a life than to take her own.

  “Let us go and save your child, Cora. My crawler is not far.”

  Cora stood up and Rachel touched her shoulder. The other three adin nodded their agreement but made no move to help as the two women went to the door opening into the Martian dusk.

  Outside, Boris Tiban was nowhere to be seen. The sky’s green had turned a muddy ochre. The upthrust rocks were stark against the smooth slope of Olympus Mons.

  The crawler was gone.

  Leaving Cora to stand against a rock, Rachel ran over to where she had stopped the vehicle. The low gravity made her feel light on her feet. The wind ran groping fingers over her suit.

  She found the crawler’s tracks, already beginning to blur in the wind, then she came to a sloughed-off portion of the chasm wall where a large object had been toppled over the edge. Pry marks in the lava soil showed how Boris had used his metal staff.

  As dread surged inside her, Rachel went to the brink of the gorge. More lava rock lay strewn a hundred meters below. In the gathering shadows of night, she could make out the squared-off form of her vehicle, out of reach far below.

  In darkness, they used tough cables and harsh white spotlights to reach the bottom of the chasm. The adin had taken the equipment from the remaining cache of supplies they had brought with them when they had abandoned the Martian lowlands. Low gravity made the climb easier.

  Cora allowed Stroganov and Dr. Dycek to help her over the roughest patches. She had to stop four times during the descent while cramps seized her body, demanding all her attention.

  Over the past two days the cramps had clenched her stomach muscles, squeezing and pushing, then gradually loosening again. At first they had been intermittent, several an hour and then giving her a few hours’ rest before they started again. But the pain grew worse, more regular, more intense, as her muscles lowered the baby, helped position it, started to open Cora up inside. Cora knew the baby could come within hours, or she could have to endure this for several more days.

  She watched Stroganov jerk the thin cable as his spotlight shone down on the crawler vehicle surrounded by broken scree. He had never told anyone his first name, but clung to his family identity; he traced his lineage back to the first nobles sent by Peter the Great to conquer the wilds of Siberia.

  The crawler had plowed a clean path down the cliff as it fell, and its low center of mass had brought it to a rest upright, though canted against a mound of rubble. As Stroganov played the light over the scratched and dust-smeared hull, Cora looked for the disastrous damage she expected to see.

  “It appears to be intact,” Dr. Dycek said. She squeezed Cora’s shoulder and jumped the last few meters to the bottom of the chasm, landing with deeply bent knees. Her voice sounded thin and far away as she shouted through her faceplate. “This vehicle is tough, built to withstand Mars—as you were.”

  Dr. Dycek held out her hands for Elia to toss down one of the spotlights. From above, Cora tried to pay attention to the operation. Using the spotlight beam, Dr. Dycek climbed around the vehicle, inspecting the metal plates protecting the trapezoidal windowports. She rapped on one with her gloved fist, then held her fist high in satisfaction.

  On her own initiative, Cora began the last part of the descent. Stroganov and Elia helped her until they all stood on the jumbled f
loor of the chasm. Loose boulders the size of houses lay strewn about. Cora looked up to the top of the cliff wall, a black razor-edge that blocked all view of the stars. Bebez had remained in the caves, and Cora saw no figure looking down at them.

  They had called into the darkness for Boris to come and help them, but he had remained silent and hidden.

  Dr. Dycek trudged up to them. “The door-lock mechanism is still functioning. The antenna is smashed, though, so we will not be able to let anyone on the base know we are coming.” She paused. “From the dents around the antenna base, it looks to me as if Boris knocked it off himself.”

  The other adin said nothing. Cora nodded to herself. Yes, that was the way Boris would do it. He was so predictable.

  Then her knees buckled as a new labor spasm squeezed her like a fist and sucked away thoughts of the outside world. Stroganov caught her and held her upright.

  Dr. Dycek grabbed one of Cora’s arms and began to stumble-walk her toward the crawler. “Come on. We have at least a day’s journey before we get back to the base. Even at that, I cannot be certain this chasm will lead us anywhere but a blind end. But there is no other way. The crawler is down here, and we have no choice of roads. You have no time to waste.”

  Dr. Dycek hauled her into the tilted opening of the crawler’s small airlock. Stroganov and Elia helped, each of the adin men squeezing Cora’s numb skin in a silent gesture of farewell.

  “The storm is coming,” Stroganov said, sniffing the air.

  “I know,” Dr. Dycek answered. She made no other comment about it, but faced Cora instead. “We will get you inside and begin the slow pressurization of the interior. We have to make the atmosphere thick enough so the baby can breathe, in case it is born along the way.”

  Cora dreaded the thought of air as thick as soup and heavy as bricks on her chest, making an ordeal out of every breath—especially during the most exhausting hours of her life.