By the time they got back home, it was already a big deal. In the end, they didn’t even have to write their extra-credit report on surface geology, but got full marks just for telling the class about their experience in the cave. (Luckily, Penn had thought to take a few pics of the body and the machinery, which saved them a lot of description.)
The governor of Mars came down from the capital for the dedication ceremony of the new historical landmark, and the three were made to pose with him in front of the remains of the longlost explorer. When the pics and video of the ceremony were posted online, along with a heavily edited version of their school report, the three became celebrities, for a few hours at least, mentioned in posts from as far away as Earth and even Titan.
By the following week, though, things went back to normal, and everyone seemed mostly to have forgotten the whole thing. But the three friends hadn’t.
“So what do you guys want to do?” Ravi asked, putting his palmtop down on the table. He’d just finished Jeremy Stone’s Termination Shock, about interstellar explorers of the far future, and had to admit grudgingly that he might like it better than Bonaventure’s fantasy epics.
“We could watch another episode of Space Man,” Penn suggested from the other side of the clubhouse. He’d become obsessed with the Australian adventure anime The Adventures of Space Man in the last few days and couldn’t shut up about it.
“Yeah, maybe,” Jace said, looking up from his palmtop. He’d been spending all of his free time on extra-credit assignments for their science class, and when the instructor ran out of work for him to do Jace had started reading his way through the library. For days, he’d been boring everyone with the latest tidbit about quantum computing that he’d just read. “It’s kind of repetitive, though. Maybe some gaming?”
The other two brightened at the suggestion, but their enthusiasm dimmed when the debate about just what game to play dragged out into interminable indecision. None of the old games really interested anyone. They all just seemed so . . . boring.
“Oh, hey!” Jace said, after another lingering silence. “I got a mail from this kid online about a new role-playing game we could check out. Earth Force Z?”
“Based on the manga?” Ravi asked.
“Yeah,” Jace answered. The long-running manga series was all about the space forces of a future Earth defending the solar system against the predations of an invading alien armada. “The science in the manga isn’t as good as it could be, but the ship designs are pretty cool.”
Ravi shrugged. “Sure, why not?”
Penn sat up, looking interested. “Let’s give it a shot.”
The three friends dragged their chairs over to the table while Jace called up the rules and game stats on his palmtop. There were complications involved in computing orbital trajectories in the game mechanics, it seemed, but they’d get the hang of it soon enough. It was only science, after all.
For the moment, at least, fantasy was just not going to be enough.
CHRIS ROBERSON has worked as a baker, taught middle school history, been a product support engineer, and given change at an arcade. His work is heavily influenced by the pulp adventure classics of the 1940s and 1950s. He has published a number of books, including Here, There & Everywhere; Set the Seas on Fire; The Dragon’s Nine Sons; End of the Century; Iron Jaw and Hummingbird; Three Unbroken ; and the comic book series Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love and I, Zombie.
He has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award four times—once each for writing and editing, and twice for publishing—twice a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and four times for the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History (winning the Short Form in 2004 with his story “O One” and the Long Form in 2008 with his novel The Dragon’s Nine Sons). Chris and his wife, Allison Baker, live in Austin, Texas, with their daughter, Georgia.
His Web site is www.chrisroberson.net.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I grew up in Texas, in a landscape dotted with relics and reminders of the days when the area had been a frontier. But my friends and I didn’t have any real interest in pioneer days, or “cowboys and Indians,” or anything to do with the history that surrounded us. We were more interested in superhero comics and Japanese anime and role-playing games. Thinking about the kids who might one day grow up on a colonized Mars, I realized that they probably wouldn’t be any more interested in their pioneering ancestors than my friends and I had been about the Europeans who had settled our state (or the Native Americans they displaced). But they should be interested, just like we should have been.
MARTIAN HEART
John Barnes
Okay, botterogator, I agreed to this. Now you’re supposed to guide me to tell my story to inspire a new generation of Martians . It is so weird that there is a new generation of Martians. So hit me with the questions, or whatever it is you do.
Do I want to be consistent with previous public statements?
Well, every time they ask me where I got all the money and got to be such a big turd in the toilet that is Mars, I always say Samantha was my inspiration. So let’s check that box for tentatively consistent.
Thinking about Sam always gives me weird thoughts. And here are two: one, before her, I would not have known what either tentatively or consistent even meant. Two, in these pictures, Samantha looks younger than my granddaughter is now.
So weird. She was.
We were in bed in our place under an old underpass in LA when the sweeps busted in, grabbed us up, and dragged us to the processing station. No good lying about whether we had family—they had our retinas and knew we were strays. Since I was seventeen and Sam was fifteen, they couldn’t make any of our family pay for re-edj.
So they gave us fifteen minutes on the bench there to decide between twenty years in the forces, ten years in the glowies, or going out to Mars on this opposition and coming back on the third one after, in six and a half years.
They didn’t tell you, and it wasn’t well-known, that even people without the genetic defect suffered too much cardiac atrophy in that time to safely come back to Earth. The people that went to Mars didn’t have family or friends to write back to, and the settlement program was so new it didn’t seem strange that nobody knew a returned Martian.
“Crap,” I said.
“Well, at least it’s a future.” Sam worried about the future a lot more than me. “If we enlist, there’s no guarantee we’ll be assigned together, unless we’re married, and they don’t let you get married till you’ve been in for three. We’d have to write each other letters—”
“Sam,” I said, “I can’t write to you or read your letters if you send me any. You know that.”
“They’d make you learn.”
I tried not to shudder visibly; she’d get mad if I let her see that I didn’t really want to learn. “Also, that thing you always say about out of sight, that’d happen. I’d have another girlfriend in like, not long. I just would. I know we’re all true love and everything but I would.”
“The spirit is willing but the flesh is more willing.” She always made those little jokes that only she got. “Okay, then, no forces for us.”
“Screw glowies,” I said. Back in those days right after the baby nukes had landed all over the place, the Decon Admin needed people to operate shovels, hoes, and detectors. I quoted this one hook from our favorite music. “Sterile or dead or kids with three heads.”
“And we can get married going to Mars,” Sam said, “and then they can’t separate us. True love forever, baby.” Sam always had all the ideas.
So, botterogator, check that box for putting a priority on family/ love. I guess since that new box popped up as soon as I said, Sam always had all the ideas, that means you want more about that? Yeah, now it’s bright and bouncing. Okay, more about how she had all the ideas.
Really all the ideas I ever had were about eating, getting high, and scoring ass. Hunh. Red light. Guess that wasn’t what you wanted for the n
ew generation of Martians.
Sam was different. Everybody I knew was thinking about the next party or at most the next week or the next boy or girl, but Sam thought about everything. I know it’s a stupid example, but once back in LA, she came into our squat and found me fucking with the fusion box, just to mess with it. “That supplies all our power for music, light, heat, net, and everything, and you can’t fix it if you break it, and it’s not broke, so, Cap, what the fuck are you doing?”
See, I didn’t even have ideas that good.
So a year later, there on the bench, our getting married was her having another idea and me going along with it, which was always how things worked, when they worked. Ten minutes later we registered as married.
Orientation for Mars was ten days. The first day they gave us shots, bleached our tats into white blotches on our skin, and shaved our heads. They stuck us in ugly dumb coveralls and didn’t let us have real clothes that said anything, which they said was so we wouldn’t know who’d been what on Earth. I think it was more so we all looked like transportees.
The second day, and every day after, they tried to pound some knowledge into us. It was almost interesting. Sam was in with the people that could read, and she seemed to know more than I did afterward. Maybe there was something to that reading stuff, or it might also have been that freaky, powerful memory of hers.
Once we were erased and oriented, they loaded Sam and me into a two-person cube on a dumpround to Mars. Minutes after the booster released us and we were ballistic, an older guy, some asshole, tried to come into our cube and tell us this was going to be his space all to himself, and I punched him hard enough to take him out; I don’t think he had his balance for centrifigrav yet.
Two of his buds jumped in. I got into it with them too—I was hot, they were pissing me off, I wasn’t figuring odds. Then some guys from the cubes around me came in with me, and together we beat the other side’s ass bloody.
In the middle of the victory whooping, Sam shouted for quiet. She announced, “Everyone stays in their same quarters. Everyone draws their own rations. Everyone takes your turn, and just your turn, at the info screens. And nobody doesn’t pay for protection or nothing.”
One of the assholes, harmless now because I had at least ten good guys at my back, sneered, “Hey, little bitch. You running for Transportee Council?”
“Sure, why not?”
She won too.
The Transportee Council stayed in charge for the whole trip. People ate and slept in peace, and no crazy-asses broke into the server array, which is what caused most lost dumprounds. They told us in orientation, but a lot of transportees didn’t listen, or didn’t understand, or just didn’t believe that a dumpround didn’t have any fuel to go back to Earth; a dumpround flew like a cannon ball, with just a few little jets to guide it in and out of the aerobrakes and steer it to the parachute field.
The same people who thought there was a steering wheel in the server array compartment, or maybe a reverse gear or just a big button that said TAKE US BACK TO EARTH, didn’t know that the server array also ran the air-making machinery and the food dispensary and everything that kept people alive.
I’m sure we had as many idiots as any other dumpround, but we made it just fine; that was all Sam, who ran the TC and kept the TC running the dumpround. The eighty-eight people on International Mars Transport 2082/4/288 (which is what they called our dumpround; it was the 288th one fired off that April) all walked out of the dumpround on Mars carrying our complete, unlooted kits, and the militia that always stood by in case a dumpround landing involved hostages, arrests, or serious injuries didn’t have a thing to do about us.
The five months in the dumpround were when I learned to read, and that has helped me so much—oh, hey, another box bumping up and down! Okay, botterogator, literacy as a positive value coming right up, all hot and ready for the new generation of Martians to suck inspiration from.
Hey, if you don’t like irony, don’t flash red lights at me, just edit it out. Yeah, authorize editing.
Anyway, with my info screen time, Sam made me do an hour of reading lessons for every two hours of games. Plus she coached me a lot. After a while the reading was more interesting than the games, and she was doing TC business so much of the time, and I didn’t really have any other friends, so I just sat and worked on the reading. By the time we landed, I’d read four actual books, not just kid books I mean.
We came down on the parachute field at Olympic City, an over-dignified name for what, in those long-ago days, was just two office buildings, a general store, and a nine-room hotel connected by pressurized tubes. The tiny pressurized facility was surrounded by a few thousand coffinsquats hooked into its pay air and power, and many thousand more running on their own fusion boxes. Olympica, to the south, was just a line of bluffs under a slope reaching way up into the sky.
It was the beginning of northern summer prospecting season. Sam towed me from lender to lender, coaching me on looking like a good bet to someone that would trust us with a share-deal on a prospecting gig. At the time I just thought rocks were, you know, rocks. No idea that some of them were ores, or that Mars was so poor in so many ores because it was dead tectonically.
So while she talked to bankers, private lenders, brokers, and plain old loan sharks, I dummied up and did my best to look like what she told them I was, a hard worker who would do what Sam told me. “Cap is quiet but he thinks, and we’re a team.”
She said that so often that after a while I believed it myself. Back at our coffinsquat every night, she’d make me do all the tutorials and read like crazy about rocks and ores. Now I can’t remember how it was to not know something, like not being able to read, or recognize ore, or go through a balance sheet, or anything else I learned later.
Two days till we’d’ve gone into the labor pool and been shipped south to build roads and impoundments, and this CitiWells franchise broker, Hsieh Chi, called us back, and said we just felt lucky to him, and he had a quota to make, so what the hell.
Sam named our prospector gig the Goodspeed after something she’d read in a poem someplace, and we loaded up, got going, did what the software told us, and did okay that first summer around the North Pole, mostly.
Goodspeed was old and broke down continually, but Sam was a good directions-reader, and no matter how frustrating it got, I’d keep trying to do what she was reading to me—sometimes we both had to go to the dictionary, I mean who knew what a flange, a fairing, or a flashing was?—and sooner or later we’d get it figured out and roll again.
Yeah, botterogator, you can check that box for persistence in the face of adversity. Back then I’d’ve said I was just too dumb to quit if Sam didn’t, and Sam was too stubborn.
Up there in the months and months of midnight sun, we found ore, and learned more and more about telling ore from not-ore. The gig’s hopper filled up, gradually, from surface rock finds. Toward the end of that summer—it seemed so weird that Martian summers were twice as long as on Earth even after we read up about why—we even found an old volcanic vent and turned up some peridot, agate, amethyst, jasper, and garnet, along with three real honest-togod impact diamonds that made us feel brilliant. By the time we got back from the summer prospecting, we were able to pay off Hsieh Chi’s shares, with enough left over to buy the gig and put new treads on it. We could spare a little to rehab the cabin too; Goodspeed went from our dumpy old gig to our home, I guess. At least in Sam’s mind. I wasn’t so sure that home meant a lot to me.
Botterogator if you want me to inspire the new generation of Martians, you have to let me tell the truth. Sam cared about having a home, I didn’t. You can flash your damn red light. It’s true.
Anyway, while the fitters rebuilt Goodspeed, we stayed in a rented cabinsquat, sleeping in, reading, and eating food we didn’t cook. We soaked in the hot tub at the Riebecker Olympic every single day—the only way Sam got warm. Up north, she had thought she was cold all the time because we were always working, she
was small, and she just couldn’t keep weight on no matter how much she ate, but even loafing around Olympic City, where the most vigorous thing we did was nap in the artificial sun room, or maybe lift a heavy spoon, she still didn’t warm up.
We worried that she might have pneumonia or TB or something she’d brought from Earth, but the diagnostic machines found nothing unusual except being out of shape. But Sam had been doing so much hard physical work, her biceps and abs were like rocks, she was strong. So we gave up on the diagnosis machines, because that made no sense.
Nowadays everyone knows about “Martian heart,” but back then nobody knew that hearts atrophy and deposit more plaque in lower gravity as the circulation slows down and the calcium that should be depositing into bones accumulates in the blood. Let alone that maybe a third of the human race have genes that make it happen so fast.
At the time, with no cases identified, it wasn’t even a research subject; so many people got sick and died in the first couple decades of settlement, often in their first Martian year, and to the diagnostic machines it was all a job, ho hum, another day, another skinny nineteen-year-old dead of a heart attack. Besides, all the transportees, not just the ones that died, ate so much carb-and-fat food, because it was cheap. Why wouldn’t there be more heart attacks? There were always more transportees coming, so put up another site about healthful eating for Mars, and find something else to worry about.
Checking the diagnosis machine was everything we could afford to do, anyway, but it seemed like only a small, annoying worry. After all, we’d done well, bought our own gig, were better geared up, knew more what we were doing. We set out with pretty high hopes.
Goodspeed was kind of a dumb name for a prospector’s gig. At best it could make maybe 40 km/hr, which is not what you call roaring fast. Antarctic summer prospecting started with a long, dull drive down to Promethei Lingula, driving south out of northern autumn and into southern spring. The Interpolar Highway in those days was a gig track weaving southward across the shield from Olympic City to the Great Marineris Bridge. There was about 100 km of pavement, sort of, before and after the bridge, and then another gig track angling southeast to wrap around Hellas, where a lot of surface prospectors liked to work, and there was a fair bit of seasonal construction to be done on the city they were building in the western wall.
Life on Mars Page 27