by John Grant
"Rotary seven point one four eight three three six one."
O'Sondheim was her First Officer—which meant, she had been instructed, that he was her second-in-command—and she'd decided that she didn't like him very much. It was an antipathy she would have to learn to control. She suspected that he sustained a corollary antipathy, and wouldn't make too much effort to control it. That was one of the reasons she didn't like him. Still, they were working well together as they checked out the Santa Maria's systems. At least she got on better with him than she did with Marcial Holmberg, the grandisonian individual whom the non-SSIA personnel had elected as their representative. She tried to put the thought of Holmberg out of her mind, but it was one of those thoughts that infuriatingly refused to leave.
"Nine-eleven above, with spin forty-eight."
"Nine-eleven above, with spin forty-eight." He repeated her instructions, tapping the code into his thighputer.
The thighputer was one of the other reasons she didn't like O'Sondheim. The fact that he was an Artif was yet a further one. When she'd first met him, a few months ago, it had emerged in conversation that he'd been born in Bolivia. The body he now wore had been bought in the United States of Ireland. Whenever she asked him if the body had been bought legitimately or on the black market—which latter meant, almost always, that someone had been killed so their body could be sold—he adroitly shifted the subject.
"Zero, then up seven five one nine."
"Zero, then up seven five one nine."
It felt curious, going through all the motions of piloting a starship but getting absolutely no response, except from the holos in front of them. Some wag had thought it funny to make the Main Computer give variable responses to the tests. Messages like "YUP, YOU GOT IT, SMACK ON THE BUTTON" and "JACKPOT TIME!" came up whenever the systems checked out OK, which so far they had. Strider found the Main Computer's forced enthusiasm wearying.
In theory, Pinocchio could have done this. In fact, it was better that Strider and O'Sondheim did. Two things were being done at once: they were checking out the systems, and in a way the systems were checking out them. Strider had spent the past year memorizing every possible navigational command that could usefully be given to the Santa Maria. She knew that O'Sondheim had been doing the same.
"Over X eight delta."
"Over X eight delta."
"BULLSEYE!"
She wished she could find a way of liking O'Sondheim, but it was difficult. The thighputer she could have coped with (although she always reckoned that thighputers were really surrogate penises—something to play with in those idle moments, or to show off to your friends with cries of "My RAM is bigger than yours"), but there were so many other things about him that she couldn't help detesting. If she'd known earlier, she'd have told Dulac that she didn't want Artifs on board.
The human mind ages and ages and ages, but the only reason it dies is because the body supporting it dies. If the medics could get there fast enough, the body could be given sufficient implants and transplants to make it once more perfectly healthy—except for being dead, of course. But then the dead brain could be wiped and a new person's memories and personality fed into it. It was a difficult process, and therefore expensive.
Strider found it utterly immoral.
"Holding ninety-three."
"Holding ninety-three."
In the first place, it would have been easier to resuscitate the dead person than to feed a rich person's individuality into the revived corpse; it would have been even easier than that to keep the original person alive. Money made the difference between life for one and death for the other. In the second place, it was well known that the most poverty-stricken frequently killed their own family members so that the fresh corpses could be sold for Artiffing; sometimes they just murdered someone else, delivered the body to some shady but prosperous med-center, took the money and ran. And it wasn't just the poor who were in on the act: there were organized gangs that made a good living out of Artif murder.
Was O'Sondheim living inside a body that had been deliberately killed? There was no scar tissue visible above the neckline of his jumpsuit, but she hadn't seen the rest of his body and didn't particularly want to. Or was he just occupying the physique of someone the medics might have saved had there been enough money on offer?
"Four point nine two rising—bring back on the eleventh."
"Four point nine two rising—bring back on the eleventh."
But she'd have to learn to get on with O'Sondheim, whether or not the prospect appealed. He was going to be her second-in-command for at least a hundred and ten years, and possibly until the end of her life.
She didn't like the fact that he had secondary retinal screens in front of both eyes. It was hard to tell what he was thinking.
"WAPPALLOOSA!" said the screen in front of her.
#
It was to be her last night on Mars, and she had chosen to spend it in City 3, the oldest of all the extant Martian cities. City 1 had been found to be of defective construction by the twelve thousand people who had been living in it at the time, a century before the Martian atmosphere had become oxygen-rich enough for humans to survive outside; a few cats and rats had lived. City 2 had been destroyed by one of the sporadic volcanic upheavals that had occurred during the early days of terraforming.
Strider stared into her drink and wondered why the hell she'd bothered coming down to the planet for this past week. All it was doing was making the farewell more painful. And this was the last city on Mars she should have thought of coming to. City 3 was devoted to pleasure, which meant you spent half the time wishing someone would turn the music down, half the time fending off unwanted offers of sex, and whatever remained of the time trying to get rid of your hangover.
Her drink was blue. She could spill it on her jumpsuit and no one would notice.
"Hello."
She looked up.
"Pinocchio!" she said.
"Lady."
"Right now, you're the person I'm looking forward most to getting to know on the Santa Maria. Don't call me 'lady', all right?"
She stood up and clasped him round the shoulders, then tugged him down into the bright red plastite chair beside her.
"I am not a person," said Pinocchio.
"I reckon you are."
"That is kind of you, lady."
"My name is Leonie. I want you to call me by that name. Everyone else on the Santa Maria is going to have to call me 'Captain Strider', at least to begin with, but I want you to call me 'Leonie'. Do you want a drink?"
A few meters away from their table someone was displaying a holo of a young boy being flayed alive. People were laughing. Strider hoped and prayed that the holo was just special effects. This wasn't the Mars she wanted to remember.
In fact, it wasn't something she wanted to remember about the human species.
"Drinks are wasted on me. I haven't got a digestive system."
"Aw, come on, Pinocchio. Loosen up a bit."
"If you would like, since it is the last night for both of us on Mars, I could make you very happy."
"You don't mean . . .?" She felt between his legs. "No, I didn't think you were kitted out to be a sexbot."
"I mean we could go for a walk together under the Martian stars. It's likely we'll never see them again."
#
Outside, it was a balmy minus five degrees Celsius. The sky was cloudless. Phobos wouldn't rise for another couple of hours, but Pinocchio pointed out Deimos to her; Strider had difficulty picking out the pinprick of light among the stars. Dominating the heavens, though low on the horizon, was the bright blue-green glare of Earth.
Strider took Pinocchio's arm, and leant against his shoulder.
"Thanks for bringing me out here," she said. "I was crazy to have taken time out in fun city."
"Maybe not so crazy, lady," responded the bot. He was a good half-meter taller than her—the size of an average human—and had to twist his head to look down into he
r face. "It's easier to leave the rest of your kind behind if the last that you've seen is the worst of them."
They trudged through loose soil. Every now and then they had to detour around a patch of straggly bushes. Strider would probably have walked straight into them had it not been for Pinocchio.
"How do you know these things, Pinocchio?" she said after a while. "You're not a human being—you're a bot. You've told me several times that you're a less intelligent bot than most, being designed originally for valet duties. Yet you're more perceptive about human emotions than most humans I know."
She half-tripped, and moved her arm so that it was now around his waist.
"I lied about my status," Pinocchio replied.
She stopped abruptly, tugging him to make him do the same.
"You did what?" she said incredulously.
"I lied. The notion that bots can't lie is a farce. We can be programmed to do anything our designers want us to." She could just make out that he was smiling. "We can even make our heads emit a buzzing noise, if need be, so that everyone thinks we're slow on the uptake. I decided to call you 'lady' because that seemed a rather lackwitted form of address."
There was a large rock nearby. Strider gestured him towards it, and they sat side by side.
"I think you've got quite a bit of explaining to do," she said, putting her hand on his thigh. One of the advantages of bots was that you could be affectionate towards them without it being taken as a sexual advance.
"It's simple enough, if you think about it," said Pinocchio. "There are going to be forty-five people aboard the Santa Maria: aside from yourself, there will be twenty-two males and twenty-two females, all of breeding age and certainly fertile—because we definitely want some children to be born along the way: assuming Tau Ceti II is habitable, it'd be a bit of a disaster if everyone in the colony either hated each other's guts or were all either male or female—you get the general picture? We've even screened out homosexuals, because the production of children is important to the project."
"You said 'we'."
"Remember, I was one of your interviewers. The SSIA put a lot of money into developing me. I have a ranking a little below Alphonse Dulac and a little above Rateen Macphee."
"You bastard!" said Strider, laughing. "You've been deceiving me."
"I've just told you I have. Think a little longer. You are going to be the captain of a vessel whose voyage will last certainly thirty years and possibly one hundred and ten." Now Pinocchio put his hand on her thigh; again, the move was affectionate. "The captain may, shall we say, dabble among the other personnel, but it would only cause strife should she enter into some kind of pair-bonding, however temporary, with one particular individual. The same would be the case if she formed any particularly close friendships."
Strider stood up. Pinocchio's hand slipped away from her easily enough.
"It wouldn't make any difference to me," she said. "I've led teams before. When it comes to the crunch, all the other people become team members, whether they're lovers or someone you'd really rather like to stamp on."
"But it would look to everyone else aboard the Santa Maria as if it might make a difference. The project is bound to fail if that doubt is always in people's minds."
"You mean, even if I fall madly, passionately . . .?"
"Your psychological profile counterindicates this, as do the answers you gave in interview." Standing beside her, he put his arm round her shoulder. "You've learnt that the way to manipulate people to the best advantage of the team is to keep your distance from them."
"It sounds like I'm in for a very lonely time of it," said Strider.
"No," said Pinocchio. "That is exactly the reason why I shall be aboard the Santa Maria alongside you. I'll go through all my dumb-bot routines for the sake of the other personnel, but to you I shall be a friend. That is why I have gone through the charade I've performed over the past year or more: to become your friend."
"Lying is a rotten basis for a friendship," said Strider.
"Would you have come out here to look at the stars if anyone else had asked you?"
The question made Strider think. "Possibly," she said, watching the steam-cloud of her breath make formidably heavy-seeming shapes in front of her.
"Be honest," said Pinocchio.
"Probably not, but possibly. Look, I'm getting cold."
"A moment longer. Do you think of me as a friend?"
"Of course I do. Remember, rather than try to disable you and throw you to the cops, I suggested we could be friends."
"Then trust me."
"Actually, I already do—even though it's hard to trust a liar."
"I lied because it was necessary. I had to earn your friendship."
"Can you still make coffee?"
"Of course. And I can still clean your clothes."
"Can you be a lover?"
"If need be. I was very offended, by the way, when you felt for my genitals."
"I was a bit drunk," she said.
"You still are."
"Not very." Even though the night was as warm as Martian nights ever got, it was nevertheless cold enough to sober someone fairly quickly.
"Do you want me to add being a sexbot to my capabilities? It is something that could be arranged."
"Let's get back to City 3 and find a cabble," said Strider. "I have a lot to think about."
A minute later, as they walked back towards the orange glow of the City 3 blister, she suddenly said, "Hell, yes, Pinocchio, I'd like to have sex with you: it's my last chance on Mars, and you're the person I'd most like to be on a bed with. But there's no need to bother about getting yourself a penis fixed on. That's always been an optional extra, as far as I'm concerned. Let's be friends."
"You called me a person again," said the bot.
"Well, you are, aren't you?" said Strider.
#
Much later, as she was drifting off to sleep, Strider began to realize that she, who had a quiet pride in her ability to manipulate other people, had herself been manipulated by the SSIA. No: "manipulated" wasn't the right term; she had been managed through the use of a paucity of information. Even the bot pretending to sleep beside her had told her only fragments of the truth.
It made obvious sense that Pinocchio should be along for the mission to be a friend to her, so that she didn't succumb to loneliness. But another reason for sending along a bot was that the human component of the mission could perish—either en route, through going ship-crazy or because of systems malfunction or any of a dozen other reasons, or after they had landed on Tau Ceti II: a planet might seem benign but possess hidden dangers. Viral, fungal and bacterial diseases were things that Strider knew about only in theory, mainly because the War of Hatred was something every kid learnt about; but a fresh planet was very likely to possess micro-organisms of its own against which the human frame had no defenses—even the nanobots might have difficulty recognizing alien micro-organisms.
So there was a second reason for Pinocchio to be aboard. If all the humans died, the SSIA wouldn't have lost out entirely on the mission, because there was someone—she no longer, particularly after the past few hours, found it possible to think of the bot as anything but a person, albeit not a human one—who would be able to report back. The Santa Maria's Main Computer would be able to do some of this as well, of course; but it would never be able to do so from the surface of Tau Ceti II, because the Santa Maria was not designed ever to make planetfall. The bot shuttles, linked with the Main Computer, could go down, but they couldn't walk around. Pinocchio, on the other hand, might be the nearest thing to a human being the SSIA could put on to the planetary surface.
Her friend. Her occasional lover. Her back-up.
Or was she the back-up?
She punched his hard chest gently, without malice. He turned over in his pseudo-sleep.
The SSIA were backing it both ways. They had chosen her as the Santa Maria's captain in part because, unlike most people, she wasn't reliant
on human-integrated hardware, which had a habit of going wrong over the years: some of her personnel were undoubtedly going to have a hard time of it when their secondary retinal screens or their stim sockets crashed. There were spares aboard ship, of course, but not the fully equipped operating theater that might be necessary for some of the fiddlier re-implantations.
She was looking forward to meeting the remainder of her personnel, in a few days' time.
#
"Jesus!" said Maria Strauss-Giolitto as she disembarked from the shuttle on Phobos and got her first sight of the Santa Maria. She'd seen holos, of course, during the past year's worth of training sessions, but they'd done nothing to prepare her for the physical experience of approaching the ship.
"What do you mean?" said Lan Yi's voice in her helmet. The elderly scientist had been immediately behind her as they'd debouched from the shuttle, whose crew were waiting impatiently for the two of them to get within the safety of the Santa Maria so that the shuttle could return to Mars to pick up another pair of prospective colonists.
"He is—well, not the god exactly of my faith," said Maria Strauss-Giolitto. "I was blaspheming. Will you look at that baby?"
"Yes," said Lan Yi. "It is very impressive, is it not? When I was first brought up here a month ago I made a very similar exclamation."
The ship was just over three kilometers long and shaped like an enormous fingertip, although here and there various sensor decks protruded, destroying the craft's otherwise smoothly curved lines. Its surface was studded with plastite windows of various sizes; some of these were lit up. The fore part of the Santa Maria, which would have been the foremost point of a well manicured fingernail, was entirely transparent, and brightly lit. There was a suggestion of motion within this area. Down each side were four equally spaced blisters, housing the shuttles that it was hoped would ferry personnel to and from the surface of Tau Ceti II. But what had impressed Strauss-Giolitto was not so much the dazzling appearance of the vessel as the sheer sensation of mass that emanated from it. People could tell you over and over that the craft massed several hundred million tons, and was one of the largest mobile objects the human species had ever constructed, but it still didn't prepare you for the physical confrontation with the beast. As a matter of fact, it was just over Phobos's tiny horizon; as a matter of perception, it was Phobos's horizon.