by George Mann
Zora bit her lip. “Not all of them. That Valkiri woman.”
“She may have done something to the nuke at the Centimes’ pharm, as well, Dr. Smythe. You understand the implications of this.”
Zora squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them and blinked to clear her mind. “Yes, Ombudsman Hesperson. There’s a killer on the loose.”
He grimaced and nodded. “Exactly. And it seems you are not her only victims.”
Marcus said, “Then best shelter us until she’s apprehended.”
Hesperson continued smoothly. “And draw fire here? If this woman follows you into Borealopolis, several thousand lives will be at risk. The entire population of our city would be endangered.” He leaned into the viewscreen. “Let me put a proposition to you, Drs. Smythe. Bring me this woman, give her up to us, and we will allow you shelter. Perhaps I can even persuade the Borealopolis city-corp to reward you somehow.”
Marcus said, “How? How can we stop her?”
Hesperson made a cage of his fingers and looked over it at them “I assume you have the usual homesteader’s aversion to visual monitoring of your hab?”
“We left Earth to avoid that kind of violation,” Zora snapped.
Hesperson’s mouth twitched. “Then let me remind you that you are the only ones who have seen her face.”
ZORA FELT EXHAUSTED. The sols were short this time of year, and the sky had darkened several hours before. Sekou’s whimpers cut her like little blades, and she herself was getting hungry. “My brain is shutting down, Marcus. What can we do? Land Ethic Nomads... many of them are unregistered. We don’t know Valkiri’s last name, or even if she was born in a place where she would be given one. Valkiri is probably an alias. We don’t even know the legal names of the tribe members we’ve sheltered and traded with before.”
“We’ve seen her face.”
“Yes, briefly and in bad light.” In respect for the Land Ethic Nomads’ desire to conserve resources, the lights in the hab had been dimmed. Of course, that served Valkiri’s purposes very well. “But we could download face reconstruction software and create a picture. Or—”
“Mama,” said Sekou quite reasonably, “I really have to go now. Can we go home now?”
“No, honey.”
“You promised we could go visit Mr. and Mrs. Centime and that little girl. Please, Mama. They have a bathroom, don’t they?”
Zora turned to him. “You’ll just have to hold it! This is an emergency, Sekou.”
“Mama, I can’t!”
“Well, then you’ll have to go in your pants. We have more important problems.”
“Mama—”
She turned to Marcus. “We can’t pressurize the rover just to let him urinate. We just can’t.” The rover passenger compartment had no airlock. It took a long time to pressurize and they might have a much greater need later to pressurize, if for example they had to consume water or food. Of course they’d have to find water and food, which they hadn’t had time to pack.
Marcus squatted down in his cumbersome environment suit and looked at Sekou, bent in a cramped ball inside the bubble. “Listen, Sekou. Your daddy and mama understand. We ran into a problem and we’re trying to solve it fast. Now, take a deep breath and tell me if there’s enough air in there.”
Sekou made a great show of inflating his chest as far as was possible while bent double, then blowing out. “I think it’s okay, Daddy.”
“Good. That’s a good boy. Now close your eyes and keep trying the air in there. Breathe big deep breaths, that’s right.”
“But if I—?”
“If you have an accident, we can clean it up soon as we get where we’re going. Okay? Are you a big guy?”
“No, Daddy.”
“Oh yes. Big, brave guy. Breathe again, let’s see you puff out those cheeks.”
Sekou breathed in and out again, eyes closed.
Zora felt again the pang of being not very good with kids. When a girl leaves her family at fifteen and the Earth itself at nineteen, as Zora had, maybe she doesn’t pick up the knack of being good with kids. “He’ll pee himself if he falls asleep,” she sent on a private channel to Marcus.
Marcus said, “Yeah, and what harm is there in that, considering the ice we’re on?”
That crumbled Zora’s sense of reality, and she began laughing, in a kind of relief at having let go some of the pettier fears of their situation. Then something occurred to her. “We could use the photograph that Sekou took.”
Marcus turned his eyes to her. “Use—”
“To find her. If we have an image, we don’t need to try to recognize her face. We can upload it to Marsnet and let their biometrics identify her.”
“Girl, I thought I married you for your pretty face, but I’ll love you forever for your brain. Wait, though. What if she’s not registered?”
“She won’t be, probably. But Earth shares biometric data with Marsnet.”
“Still won’t tell us where she is on Mars. I like the idea—”
“Even Land Ethic Nomads can’t stay out in the sky forever. Send out biometrics, including the photo itself, and tell pharmholders to check when travelers seek shelter.”
“Yes, yes, Daddy, Mama, we can go home then?” Sekou was not asleep, it seemed.
“Yes, little habling, yes, but close your eyes and go to sleep like Daddy said.”
“Okay. But I have to go so bad!”
Marcus patted the top of the bubble with his gloved hand. “Remember what I said, now. Close your eyes. Mama and Daddy have to talk some.”
Zora said, “There’s one problem. I have no idea where that photo plate is.”
“Ask Sekou.”
Sekou heard his name and was instantly awake, sensing somehow that he could be part of the solution to the family crisis. “Mama! Mama! It’s in my bedroom. I tried to show you when you read my story to me, only you made me go to sleep.”
Zora felt a shudder of fear and hope. She knew Marcus would volunteer to go back into the hab and retrieve the camera and the photo plate. She knew it was dangerous, but she made an instant calculation. Life without Marcus would be hell, and life on Mars without Marcus would be worse than hell.
Marcus had already turned the rover around. She bit her lip. She was going to insist on being the one to go into that hot hab. But she wouldn’t make her bid until the last possible minute. She’d surprise him, force him into letting her do it before he could think. The entire ride was silent. Maybe Marcus was making the same calculations.
As THEY NEARED the hab, Sekou’s tired little voice piped up. “Can we go back in now?”
“No! Stop asking! Mama and Daddy are just trying to protect you,” Zora snapped.
Marcus said, “Sekou, my big smart man, you remember about the radiation sensors? You know what bad rays do?”
“Yeah, Daddy. I just hoped maybe they went away.”
“Not yet, son. We may have to move to a new hab.”
“Can I take my toys there?”
“You’ll get new ones.”
“But you’ll get my camera?”
“Yes, but I’ll tell you straight up, we have to give it up.”
Zora had been wondering why Sekou no longer clamored for a bathroom, but a glance at his overalls revealed a dark stain on the front. Sekou, noticing her glance, said. “It kind of smells bad, and it’s all cold and wet.”
Zora murmured, “Sorry, baby.” And then, trying to think what Marcus would say, “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”
Marcus stopped the rover about thirty meters from the hab entrance. He untoggled the rover door and began to open it.
“Marcus,” she said.
“Don’t, Zora. You can’t do this.”
She had thought very carefully about it. “You’re stronger, I know, But that’s exactly why I should go in and find the camera. If something happened to me while I was in there, you would be better able to care for and defend Sekou than I would be.”
“Zora, suppose you�
�re pregnant.”
“I’m not. I’m having a period. It just started.” This was not strictly true, but Zora felt like her period was about to start, and anyway, she used a colored-light cycle regulator that had never failed her, both in conceiving Sekou and in preventing subsequent conceptions.
“Zora,” he said tiredly, “you playing me?”
She felt a flush of outrage. “You want me to take off my environment suit and show you the blood on my underpants?” Even though actually, come to think of it, she was playing him.
What could she do? If Marcus died, if he got sick and died, her life on Mars without a mate was too horrible to envision—she’d be meteor sploosh, she’d be forced to sell herself, she’d be dead. Mother and child, she and Sekou, would be like naked bacteria in the harsh UV sky of Mars. But it was even worse than that. Without Marcus, she wouldn’t want to go on living. Not even for Sekou. It would be better to venture everything, live or die now, than die slowly as the widow of Dr. Marcus Smythe.
“Let me do it, Marcus.” She heard the pleading in her voice, and the sharp knife of desperation under her groveling.
“Zora—”
“Oh, never mind! You always want to charge ahead, the big bull rover, like some stupid big male animal from Earth.”
Even through the helmet she could see him wince.
She realized just then that they hadn’t turned their corns to private channel, and that Sekou was listening intently.
Marcus said, “How you doing, big guy?”
“Okay,” said Sekou very softly. Then, louder, “It’s wet and icky and smelly in here. How long before we go home?”
Zora closed her eyes and thanked whatever gods controlled their fate that Sekou was in a bubble, because she was very close to hitting him. “We aren’t going—”
Marcus swiftly and seamlessly interrupted her. “Sekou, here’s a trick for getting over the bad parts. Make up good thoughts. Like, if you wanted to invent a toy, what would it be?”
“A camera to take three-dees,” said Sekou promptly.
“Those pictures you took, those were good,” Marcus continued. “Maybe help us get a new home. Your daddy’s going to get the camera.”
“Can I take more pictures then?”
Zora focused on the back of Marcus’s suit. “When did you tear your suit?” she asked.
Marcus wheeled around and looked at her. “Playing me, girl? My sensors say the suit’s fine.”
“It’s not torn through,” she said reasonably. “But it has a weak spot. That’s bad, baby.”
“Slap some tape on it.”
She rummaged the storage compartment and got out the tape. “I can’t handle this in my gloves,” she said.
He was quiet. “Have to pressurize the rover cabin then, to mend it. That what you want? Mend it.”
She tried not to smile. The nearly invisible spot she had seen on his suit was not likely to cause problems. “You can’t go out into the hab in a weakened suit.”
Marcus stared at her. “What kind of jive is that, Zora?”
“No, Marcus, no! Sekou, tell Daddy he’s got a little tear in his suit.”
Sekou tried to crane his neck, but of course he couldn’t see anything.
“Girl, I know you’re playing me. I know this.”
She threw the tape at his feet. “Be a fool, then. Get us all killed.”
“You’re counting that I can’t take the chance.” He stooped slowly and picked up the tape.
Zora continued, as if she had just thought of it. “You can pressurize the cabin and fix your suit. But it’ll take a while to pressurize. A half hour at least. I’ll go get the camera with the photo while the atmosphere builds up.”
“When you come back, we’ll lose all that good atmosphere again.”
She looked at him blandly. “It can’t be helped. You can take the opportunity to get Sekou out and cleaned up. We have no clean clothes for him, but ten minutes over the heater will at least dry his britches.”
Marcus stared back unsmiling. “You’re a jive fool, girl. If you get serious radiation sickness, I’ll kill you.”
“You’re saying don’t go?”
He stared longer. Then, “Go.”
ZORA DIDN’T LOOK back at the rover as she loped awkwardly in her environment suit to the front airlock of the hab. Once inside, she felt a sense of unreality, her family home having turned alien. Odd to fumble to open the door to Sekou’s tiny room, not to feel the softness of his blanket through her thick glove. Everything was changed, charmed, deadly.
Her com still connected her to her child and her husband back in the rover. “Sekou,” she asked, matter of fact. “Tell Mama where the camera is.”
Sleepy, Sekou’s voice came back, “Under the bed.”
Environment suits aren’t built for crawling on hands and knees. Under the bed Sekou had stowed all sorts of things, pitiful toys made of household scraps and discards. A whole fleet of rovers made of low quality Mars ceramics with wobbly wheels that only a child would consider round. A doll she had made of scraps of cloth, and upon which he had put a helmet made of a discarded jar.
And way back toward the wall, where her clumsy fat-fingered glove could scarcely reach, the camera.
“The pictures is still in the camera, Sekou?”
“Yes, Mama.”
She felt a flash of fury for not having paid more attention to her own child’s plaything. “How do you get the pictures out?”
“You have to develop them.”
“Say what?”
Marcus broke in. “It’s a chemical process. The film emulsion is sensitive to light, you apply chemicals to fix it. You unload the film into the chemical bath in the dark.”
Sekou had done this by himself? Mars god almighty, her boy was going to be something fine as a grown man. “Why can’t we just give the camera to Hesperson? And why can’t we do the developing in the rover?”
“It needs water, if I understand correctly. And I’m not sure Hesperson has the chemicals.”
Sekou’s voice broke in, excited. “They’re already all mixed up. Look behind the sanitizer. And Mama, it has to be way dark or you’ll spoil them. Take them in the bathroom.”
Marcus added, “It’s Nineteenth-century technology, Zora. Just do as the boy says.”
“Nineteenth century,” she said. “What game are you two running on me?” She felt the fool. She had a Ph.D. in biochemical engineering. How could she not know how to work a Nineteenth-century gadget? But then she couldn’t weave cloth, or knit, or make a fire with flint, either.
“Turn off your helmet light, too,” Sekou added.
THIRTY MINUTES LATER, she was staring at film negatives. “Why is there no color? Insufficient bandwidth? And how could anybody be recognizable?”
“I think any computer could deal with that. Try it on your com.”
She scanned the tiny transparent images into her com and was rewarded with a bright, colorized image of Valkiri. After the com had thought a minute, it added a third dimension to the colorized image, although both color and third dimension looked a little off from the memory she had of Valkiri.
Marcus’s voice in her com startled her. “Bail out of there, woman. You’ve absorbed enough R.E.M.s to light up Valles Marineris.”
MARCUS WAS BACK in his suit, Sekou in his bubble, and the pressure in the rover falling rapidly when she got it.
“My suit doesn’t show a radiation load,” she said.
“Something wrong with it. They probably sabotaged our suits, too. Let’s book for Borealopolis.”
Sekou didn’t even ask to see the picture. “Those guys that stayed in my room,” he said, “they did something bad, didn’t they?” Through the haze of the bubble’s surface, she could see betrayal written on his pinched face.
“I’m sorry, Sekou. I think it was just the new girl, the one with the frizzy blonde hair. But we can’t trust them anymore.”
She had stopped trusting her conviction that she wasn’t pr
egnant, too. She’d have to find a machine and test herself the minute they were safely inside the city.
HESPERSON GREETED THEM inside the city’s outer airlock. His assistant took the image, “We’ll run a biometric search on this, right away.”
“And you’ll take us in?” Marcus asked. “We need consumables. Can’t live like Land Ethic Nomads, running from hab to hab, on charity.”
Hesperson smiled warily, “The city management of Borealopolis can offer you a nice cubicle, plus free air, water, food, and utilities for up to a year.”
“Marcus,” Zora said, “we’ll have to contact Vivocrypt Corp about renegotiating our contracts.”
Marcus looked grim. “They’ll want another ten mears of work, no lie.”
Hesperson took them to a cramped, body-smelling holding area where they could unsuit while he arranged for temporary quarters. Zora wanted some hot tea, but she had to find out something first. She slipped away and found a cheap medical test machine in a dark corridor. It looked battered and she wondered if the lancet that nicked her skin was even sterile. But in two minutes, it told her what she wanted to know—or didn’t want to know. She was pregnant.
She stood in the corridor in the dimness for endless minutes. How long had she been in the radioactive hab? Her suit com would have the information, but she didn’t want to know, really.
What difference would it make now?
She willed herself to walk back to the holding area.
SHOULD SHE TELL Marcus she had lied? Or should she quietly go and abort the fetus? She had lied about the rip in his suit, and he had forgiven her that lie. But could she compound the lie, saying she was sure she wasn’t pregnant, a further betrayal?
Her mind was a welter of horror and confused thinking.
“—and you can run routine quality tests on our water treatment until we find you work more suited to your backgrounds,” the assistant was saying. “Any questions?”
Sekou looked up at her and whispered, “Can I ask how long before we can go back, Mama?”
And all the stars help her, she had all she could do not to slap him.
HESPERSON HUSTLED BACK in, smiling. “Then there’s a break in the search for Valkiri. The image your little boy recorded with the camera matches the face of a Land Ethic radical who had jumped contract from Equatorial City two years ago. Her name was Estelle Query. She was a nuclear engineer in charge of developing ways to maximize heat production in large urban nukes.”