Life on Mars

by Jonathan Strahan (Ed)

  “You don’t even know how ugly it is, do you? You’ve never seen the ocean, or a beach, or mist at morning. . . .” He stopped, bent over the board, and coughed. My anger morphed into pity. Despite being so big—he must top 170 centimeters!—he looked frail. I was never sick.

  I said, “Did you live near an ocean? With mists at morning? I’ve seen recos.”

  “You’ve seen nothing. A reco can’t capture it.”

  “Maybe not. But I know that—”

  “You know nothing.”

  I stood up. “Finish the game by yourself.”

  “Leaving because you’re losing?” he taunted.

  I glared at him. But I sat down again.

  The First Principle governs Mars. It’s a spiritual principle, not a legal one, and absolutely necessary for survival in any closed environment with limited resources: Put yourself in the other person’s place. David was sick, uprooted, longing for the pestilence that was Earth, despite how hard that was for me to imagine. I advanced my bishop.

  We finished the game in silence. He won. I left without looking at him. But as the bot let me out, I heard him breathe behind me, so soft that maybe he didn’t mean for me to hear. But I think he did mean it.

  “Bug.”

  I didn’t turn around. Neanderthal, I wanted to say, but didn’t.

  Don’t be so good all the time, Gina. It’s wearying.

  We don’t look like bugs. He does look like a Neanderthal. Too big, too hairy, too few arms.

  My great-great-great-grandfather was on the initial genemod team. I’m proud of that, and why wouldn’t I be? On Mars there is no room for waste or excess or stupid ostentation. Form follows function. The beauty which that creates is so much better than any Earth beauty; it’s filled with unity and grace. We have softer colors—through a telescope Earth always looks to me too gaudy, all that bright blue and white. On Mars variations are fashioned with subtlety and for the beauty of perfect fit with the environment. My genes are exactly what they need to be for this gravity, this level of radiation, this type of light. And I am a pretty girl. I see it in the eyes of my friends, my mother, other people. The thick, short bones of my legs don’t lose calcium and strength in this gravity, as David Hansen’s will. My big arms, engineered for strength, could break his too-long neck. The flexible tentacles of my small arms can manipulate objects that his clumsy fingers would crush. The light green of my epidermal photosynthetic cells uses the weak Martian sunlight to augment the energy from my food intake. I can see farther than David Hansen, hear better, use fuel more efficiently. Who the hell is he to presume to condescend?

  “I’m not going to play any more chess with David,” I said to my mother. We were on our way to the women’s baths, walking along a corridor deep inside the Level 3 rock. I had my coming-of-age ceremony several weeks ago, and most of my friends have already moved into their adult quarters, but I’m in no hurry. I like my mother. It’s pleasant to have someone to come home to, and there’s no one yet that I’d like to set up a partnership with.

  “I wish you would continue the chess, Gina.”

  “No. He’s awful.”

  “He’s dying.”

  I stopped cold. She said it quietly, factually, the way she recites genetic data. I blurted, “Why would anybody bring a dying man all the way to Mars? Especially one who doesn’t even want to be here?”

  “David isn’t yet a man.”

  “He’s the same age I am!”

  “But it’s different there, you know that. David can’t make any decisions on his own and his parents wanted to be here. Earth is dying. You know that, too.”

  Of course I knew that. We all knew that. It was the reason immigration had resumed at all. Three generations of arrivals at Mars, five generations when Earth was in too much crisis to fund expeditions and we were left to become ourselves in peace. And now another desperate influx by people frantic to get away while they still could. A phrase from literature came to mind: rats leaving a sinking ship. But I had never seen a rat nor a water ship, and Earth literature mostly bored me.

  I said, “Mom—”

  “Put yourself in David’s place, Gina.”

  David’s place was watching bug recos. Vile, stomach-turning things. And the computer games were worse. Win points by pulling tentacles off the “bugs.” Crush them under big robotic feet. Hit them with “pesticides” that make that tough green skin blister and molt. Tie the girl bugs down and rape them. Pack them naked into a “bug jar” and see how many you can fit. But Mom didn’t know my friends and I had seen bug recos and bug games, and I couldn’t tell her. We had them off an illegal feed that Ezra, who was some sort of electronic genius, had cobbled together during a mapping expo in a surface rover and then narrow-beamed to his receiver.

  In my opinion, Earth should die.

  “I think,” Mom said carefully, “that maybe there’s a little xenophobia going both ways here. Will you promise me to think about that, Gina?”

  “All right,” I said, without enthusiasm. “I’ll think about it. What’s David Hansen dying of?”

  “Brain blight.”

  She had me, and she knew it. We’d all learned about brain blight. Earthers caught it from one of the microbes that had been engineered in the Second Bio Wars; it created neurotoxins that ate away at the cerebral areas that controlled basic bodily functions. You got weaker and weaker, until your heart or lungs just gave out for good. It was not contagious and not curable, not even by us. Mars has been far more daring in its genetic engineering than has Earth. We had to be, in order to survive, once the reinforcement ships stopped coming. And we’ve been incredibly lucky, with only minor failures or side effects. But much as we’d modified the human body, we still didn’t know enough to do much with the brain. David Hansen’s brain was essentially the same as mine, and it was killing him. He’d been in cold sleep for the voyage out and that had halted the blight, but now he couldn’t have much time left.

  Put yourself in his place. Eight years old—sixteen in E-years—and exiled, dying.

  I shuddered.

  “Don’t do it,” Barbara said. “You’re an adult, your mom can’t make you.”

  “My mom doesn’t make me do anything,” I said, which was true. “She only reminds me about the First Principle. Gently.”

  “That’s worse.”

  “Much worse.”

  “How many times did you play him?”

  “Six.”

  “How many did you lose?”

  “Six.”

  Barb grimaced. “Did he ever mention . . . you know. . . .”

  “The bug recos? No. He doesn’t mention anything, not directly. He just hints at nasty stuff. His parents are never around because they leave him alone all the time.”

  “I’d leave him alone, too. He’s shit.”

  “While we play he has the link screen on an Earther news feed. It shows disaster after disaster. Yesterday it was all these children dying in some settlement called Africa and the bodies just stacked in a huge pit—you can’t imagine how big—and set on fire to—”

  “Don’t tell me. The Earthers are all rotten, we already knew that. Gina, you should—oh, number three bot’s hit something!”

  We were on excavation duty. First-year workers always do jobs in pairs, even when the job mostly consists of watching screens and adjusting bot performance. Barb and I sat in the dusty little Level 6 control room, deep underground, near the end of our shift. She had her boots up on the back of my chair. Two chairs and the control console nearly filled the space, but Barb had jammed in Jiji’s bed as well. The mebio lay asleep, his tail curled around him. I’d left FuzzBall at home. This was a work shift, after all; sometimes Barb can seem a little immature.

  The excavation bots were a mile away, at the end of the new tunnels. Excavation goes on all the time on Mars. We dig out new rooms shielded by tons of rock from the planet’s yearly ten rems of radiation. We dig wells to the underground aquifers. But this particular project was a fi
rst: a ten-mile tunnel from Mangala to the nearest town, Kasei. Eventually the tunnel would have a little train running along it. Someday underground trains would connect all the settlements in the Valles Marineris.

  I studied the data from the bot. “Whatever it hit is harder than the surrounding rock. An igneous form we haven’t cataloged yet? Look at this Cixin-scale reading, it—”

  Barb’s boots left the back of my chair and hit the floor with a resounding thump! “Let’s go see!”

  “You know we’re not supposed to do that. For any anomaly we’re supposed to call Dr. Alvero and—”

  “Oh, for once don’t be such a good girl, Gina!”

  Barb’s eyes sparkled. Her comment rankled. And somewhere deep inside, I felt—even while knowing it made no sense—that I had already paid out enough goodness by playing chess with David Hansen. Besides, I was curious to go into the tunnel, too. I’d never seen it live. And it wasn’t as if we didn’t know everything about proper suiting up for unpressurized areas. We’d had that drill since we were five.

  “Okay,” I said, “but let me run the diagnostics first to make sure it’s not just a bot malfunction.”

  It wasn’t. The bot had hit something too hard even to dent, although it kept on trying, its diamond-fiber arm scrabbling against the whatever-it-was. Excavation bots are pretty stupid. I turned it off and we took the suits from their closet. Behind the closet was a small air lock, and behind that the start of the tunnel.

  The ceiling was higher than it looked on the control screen, and a lot dustier. Minuscule particles of rock choked the air. Fines, we called them on the surface, but I couldn’t remember if it was the same for underground particulates. All at once this didn’t seem like such a good idea.

  “Barb—”

  “Come on!” she said over her suit radio. She bolted forward, and I followed.

  The tunnel was about three meters wide. The first part had been reinforced by a construction bot, which we passed, busily working, about two-thirds of the way along. After that the walls were rough rock, sometimes with different colored strata briefly lit by my headlamp before we moved on. My uneasiness grew, although I couldn’t have said why.

  A mile underground seems a lot longer than a mile on the surface.

  When we reached the end, we both stood silent until Barb breathed, “Look at that.”

  “It’s got to be a . . .” A what? Inspiration came to me. “A piece of exploratory junk from a few centuries ago. You know, Precollapse, when Earth was sending those piddly little bots to Mars and maybe one of them fell into a hole and then the tectonic plates shifted and it got squashed—”

  “Into a perfectly flat impenetrable wall?” Barb said scornfully. She uses scorn as a shield. She always has.

  The excavation bot stood frozen in the position I’d turned it off, which somehow made it look as dumbstruck as we were. It had uncovered a square meter of metal. The metal, which should have been scarred by tectonic shifts and rusted by aquifer drips and canted by erosion, gleamed a smooth dull gold. Without thinking I put my glove on it. The gloves are heated, of course, but not as well as the suits, or they’d be too inflexible. Crisscrosses of heating element lace the supple metallic fabric. Through my glove I could feel the metal’s piercing cold.

  Of course it was cold. This was deep underground in the Martian autumn. Everything was cold.

  This was colder.

  That made no sense.

  “This makes no sense,” Barb said scornfully. “Is there some part of the tunnel project we weren’t told about?”

  The tunnel project was open knowledge, like nearly every other project on Mars. You can’t build trust any other way among scientific groups, among settlements, among variations in Martian culture. That’s why we have the First Principle. Put yourself in their place.

  “I think,” I said, “we better go back and call Dr. Alvero.”

  For once, Barb didn’t argue.

  Mom wasn’t home when I got off shift, which is rare. She generally wants to hear about my day. Well, she would hear soon enough. Dr. Alvero had called half the xenologists on Mars and they were all rushing to the excavation tunnel by elevator or rover or dirigible. Those that were too far away were glued to the link.

  “Is it—what is it?” Barb had asked, and I was glad because I couldn’t speak myself.

  “How could we know yet?” Dr. Alvero said sternly. I could read that sternness; he was a friend of Mom’s, and I’d sat with him at dinner in the mess hall lots of times. He was excited and hiding it; he was insisting on proper scientific skepticism; he was aware that Barb and I had seriously violated regs during his shift as captain.

  Barb didn’t believe in proper scientific skepticism. She blurted, “Is it ancient Martians? Or aliens?”

  Irritation replaced sternness. “Don’t be premature, young woman. And don’t finish your shift; that’s not necessary now. Sign out and, please, don’t say anything to anyone about this, at least for now.”

  “But will you tell us if it turns out to be—”

  “Come on, Barb!” I said, tugging on her arm before Dr. Alvero could lose his temper. And if the smooth gold wall did mean aliens, everybody would know soon enough—

  Aliens.

  Halfway back to our rooms, I stopped dead. The terraces around me seemed to waver. Aliens. Was that possible? Microbial fossils had been found on Mars, but only microbial fossils. Somewhere in the long distant past, life had started here, and then had shivered to a halt. Climate change or radiation or something—my mind had gone numb. The life on Mars was us. This was our planet, my home. Arrivals from Earth were bad enough. But aliens—

  It was one of those ideas too big and all-encompassing for the mind to hold onto. Like one’s own death.

  I had stumbled the rest of the way back to our rooms, as if I were as clumsy in Martian gravity as David Hansen. Now I didn’t want to be alone. I scooped FuzzBall from her basket and squeezed her tight. But she didn’t like that and yelped. And anyway, a mebio wasn’t what I wanted. What did I want?

  I wanted my life to stay the same.

  Maybe it would. Maybe the smooth gold wall wasn’t anything that would change anything. After all, it had probably been there already for a long, long time, doing nothing. Maybe our life on Mars could just go on the way it always had, unlike life on Earth that just got worse and worse, rising oceans and dying oceans and too much CO2 and stupid ugly biowars and—

  Put yourself in their place. And I want things to stay the same.

  I went to play chess with David Hansen.

  The first thing he said was, “What’s that?” Until he did, I hadn’t realized I was still holding FuzzBall.

  “Oh, hell, you might be allergic, I shouldn’t bring her in here, sorry. . . .”

  “No, let me see it. Bring it here.”

  I didn’t like his commanding tone but I brought FuzzBall to him anyway. David was out of bed, sitting in a chair with the chess set on a little table beside him. He’d been waiting for me. He looked stronger than last time. When he held out his arms for FuzzBall, I gave her to him.

  “What is it?”

  “A mebio. Part mechanical, part genetically engineered biological. Not a ‘bug.’ ” I thought he might react to that, but he was too busy petting FuzzBall, who purred in his arms, little traitor. Well, she was pretty cute, even to an Earther.

  “It looks sort of like a cat. Is it a cat?”

  “I don’t know what genes they started with, but DNA is amazingly adaptable. She eats fines.”

  He looked up. I’d never seen that expression on his face before: open and gentle. He looked almost like a Martian. He said, “What are fines?”

  “The bits of dust that get into everything, no matter how hard you try to make a tight seal. Mebios keep it under control.”

  “You force her to eat dust?”

  “Nobody forces her to do anything. She’s engineered to lick them up, and the saliva-fines mass is shunted to the mechanical part of h
er crop, where it can easily be removed. Here, I’ll show you.”

  “No! Don’t!” Abruptly he dropped FuzzBall to the floor. She yelped in protest, then began licking the polished stone. “Get it out of here. It’s just another freak. Like you.”

  The gentle look was gone. David stared at me like he hated me. I knew he was going to say it a full three seconds before he did.

  “Bug.”

  Something inside me snapped. The find in the tunnel, the repulsive recos, even the chess games I’d lost, one after another. The big and the small all mixed up, and all sauced with David’s contempt and my fear. My vision went red. I picked up the chessboard and threw it at him.

  The board struck the side of his head in a rain of pawns and rooks and bishops. FuzzBall ran for the door, snarling. But David smiled. Blood streamed down his neck and soaked into his shirt. He said quietly, “Too bad you couldn’t throw it harder.”

  I stared at him, stomped out, and burst into tears.

  When Mom finally arrived home from her lab, she rushed straight into my alcove. “Gina! Are you all right?”

  I hadn’t been able to sleep, but the sudden light disoriented me. Blinking, I tried to see if she knew about Barb and me breaking regs. Of course she knew. Her face wrinkled into dozens of concerned little crevasses.

  “I’m fine, Mom. And I know we shouldn’t have—”

  “But are you all right? I couldn’t leave earlier, the oocytes—”

  I held out my arms, like I was three years old again. She sat on the edge of my bed and held me. That was what I needed, what David Hansen didn’t have; someone who cared more about him than about work, or even about Mars. My voice came out thick. “Is it . . . aliens, Mom?”

  She laughed, a strangled sort of laugh, but I understood it. The situation was too weird to be quite real—even though it was real. She said, “They don’t know. And I don’t think we’ll know for a long time. Maybe not ever.”

  That hadn’t occurred to me. “Why not?” Mom was calmer now, and that made me calmer. I let go of her, a little ashamed of my lapse back into childhood.