Ten minutes and three private tube balls later, Maria Montes Kuo, an independent plumbing contractor (hairless, in dark coveralls, with specialized optical turrets in place of the bishojo glistening orbs of an aristo), emerges diffidently from a service hatch in a public station, her tool bag strapped across her shoulders.
I’m rather proud of Maria. There is little I can do to disguise the build and height of my archetype, but misdirection and a simple mask can work wonders. With luck, any watching arbeiters will be scanning for Kate; her distinctive outfit was carefully chosen to confuse gait-recognition monitors, and Maria’s facial features to bamboozle eye recognition. It will not work against a determined adversary for long, but it shouldn’t need to—
I realize I am being followed as I drift past a waiting room. He’s almost my size, large for an indentured arbeiter, his face a featureless ovoid, bland and unnoticeable. I check my memory. He’s been following me for almost a minute. I feel a frisson of shock and annoyance at my own ineptitude. What should I do?
Juliette’s reflexes come to the rescue. I keep moving, looking for an unoccupied shrine—one of those curious rooms of repose that our Creators installed in all public places.
I find the shrine at last. I place my hand on the ideogram—an up-pointing triangle superimposed over the body of a stick figure—and go inside, then switch off the lighting. A few seconds later, the inner door opens behind me.
Juliette takes over just as a tantalizingly familiar voice asks, “Freya?”
I pull my blow, bounce off his shoulders, and recoil toward the ceiling. “Ow!”
“I don’t like the drugs that keep you thin,” he says rapidly. “That was most amateurishly done, Freya, but one is grateful for your lack of proficiency on this occasion. Your phrase?”
“Ouch!” (I spin gracefully into the far wall, trying to center myself again.) “Down in the park with a friend called Five. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Certainly.” The lights flick on as he finds the switch. It’s the faceless arbeiter from the hallway, of course. But the voice is pure Jeeves. I freeze a little, inside: I didn’t take him for one who would harbor aristo tendencies . . .
“What’s the problem?” I hear myself ask.
“A little trouble with the neighbors.” It’s hard to read his voice without any facial cues; it’s creepy to hear Jeeves’s rich-toned voice coming from the featureless arbeiter body. “The RSA are conducting a sweep, and one thought it would be best if none of our associates were caught up in it, so we decided to intercept you before the designated rendezvous.”
Oops. Alarm bells are clanging in my head. “Did you get my message?”
“What message?”
“The one I sent yesterday from the ship.”
The faceless body freezes still, as if its owner is elsewhere. Then: “No, but your late arrival was noted.”
“Hmm. What about Bill and Ben?”
He stays frozen, his head tilted to one side. I can almost see the expression of surprise. “Who?”
“My two assistants, the ones you gave me ... ” I trail off.
“You had assistants? You were supposed to be traveling unaccompanied. ” Jeeves sounds displeased. “My dear, one suspects that trouble has followed you from Mercury. Inquiries shall be made.”
I’m beginning to be spooked by the nonarrival of my mail, to say nothing of the terrible twosome’s disappearance. “You can say that again. Can you take the consignment from me here?”
“Yes.” He reaches up and opens his head. Inside, there’s a foam-padded chamber of exactly the right dimensions. He extracts a small wallet from it and passes it to me. “Your delivery fee.”
“One moment.” I sniff the air. It’s the traditional 10 percent oxygen / 90 percent carbon dioxide mix, at thirty Celsius: within the cargo’s survival parameters, if I make the transfer quickly. “Alright.” I squat carefully, then simultaneously relax and tense certain motor groups in my lower abdomen. I’ve almost forgotten there’s a foreign object lodged inside me: But now it makes its presence known in a very peculiar, not entirely pleasant way. I reach down hastily and catch the pale brown ovoid before it can drift into a hard surface and sustain damage, then I place it inside Jeeves’s head. The skull closes with a click. “I carried out the activation process three days ago—don’t know if it worked, but if it did, you’ve got eleven days until it goes critical.”
“We shall take excellent care of it from here on,” he agrees. “But now we had better part company. Expect to be searched and sterilized on your way down-well. It would be a good idea to change your identity and lie low for twelve to fourteen days after you arrive groundside. When you are ready, use this rendezvous protocol.” He passes me a stiff card, with tiny print handwritten on it. It smells of azide, primed to combust as soon as I have memorized it. “Good-bye and good luck.”
By the time I finish scanning the flash card, the strange Jeeves is gone. I retreat into a cubicle and modify my appearance again. Nobody has queried Maria Montes’s identity, but her eye turrets and outer garment can change color, along with the return pings from every tagged item in her possession. Then I slip out and merge with the crowd. It’s going to be a long—and very trying—day.
MARIA MONTES KUO rides the third-class down-bound lift with stoic calm. She submits to being herded through the body scanners and X-ray machines at the RSA checkpoints that had sprung up like evil blooms of green goo around the entrances to the transit authority elevators. She has her canned answers prepared for the questions the security goons throw at her—including a false backstory for the two weeks before her arrival at Marsport. They let her board the down-well capsule with only a minimum of bored suspicion, and she rents a hammock for the two-day descent to the surface. She spends the journey alternating between sleeping and watching low-budget romance animations from the floating suburbs of Mumbai. It’s crowded and noisy in the wheezing, grimy arbeiter capsule, but it beats the alternative. (The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.)
Although the heart of the city is in orbit, the suburbs of Marsport continue at the foot of the elevator, a bewildering warren of railheads and warehouses and sweatshops that swarm and tumble down the slope of the extinct shield volcano in an unplanned sprawl. Maria debarks from the capsule clutching her satchel and disappears into the back room of a refreshment stall selling raw feedstock and cheap power. I leave via the rear air lock; my eyes are still two aching sizes too large, and I’m still a bit bishojo, but my hair’s short and red, and I’m recognizably me again (thanks to some quick-change retexturing), and carrying identifiers to prove it. Not to mention an expense account drawn (via cutouts) on one of Jeeves’s associates.
It’s like waking from a long and unpleasant dream. My trial employment is complete, and I can resume my own existence for the next few days while I lie low and wait for the security panic to subside.
The first couple of lodging houses I try don’t take people like me. There’s nothing as unsubtle as a sign saying OGRES UNWELCOME, but it doesn’t take more than a glance at the meter-high mezzanines in their reception halls to get the message. I eventually find a converted warehouse in the Battery district that has spacious rooms and high ceilings. I rent a sparsely furnished room with a window overlooking tracks where the big sublimation-cycle engines rumble through the night, hauling endless lines of freight carriages destined for Jupiter system and places farther out. And then I go out shopping. I need to buy a postal drop, and I need clothing to replace the skimpy wardrobe I left on Venus and Mercury. This room doesn’t have an en suite printer, and I am down to what I wear on my back. That’s my conscious excuse. If pressed, I’ll admit that I need the distraction. The bleak despair is back, lurking in the shadows whenever I turn my head.
Despair and self-doubt are my constant companions. That’s how it’s been all my waking life. I can ignore it for a while, when busy or fancying myself in love. Feeling needed is great therapy (and while I was
running Jeeves’s errand, I didn’t notice it at all). At a pinch, being frightened half out of my wits seems to work too—at any rate, it keeps me too distracted to chew myself up. But the darkness seeps back in whenever life is slow, a stain creeping up the walls of my soul. Why bother? It whispers in my ear. What is there to live for? You’re obsolete and nobody wants you and the kind you were made to love is dead and their like shall not be seen again . . .
I didn’t feel this way aboard Pygmalion. Force of circumstance is an excellent suppressant—and few circumstances are as effective as acting for dear life while smuggling an illegal uncontrolled DNA replicator package past the Pink Police. When I was asleep, my dreams of Juliette kept depression at bay, but now the days seem to stretch emptily ahead of me. I’m locked in a prison of time, the windows barred with pitiless pessimism. Sometimes I wish I could be someone else; it seems that as long as I have to drag my own past around behind me, I can’t break the pattern. But activity helps, so I try to find things to fill the hours while I wait for Jeeves’s quarantine to expire.
Marsport sprawls across the northern flank of Pavonis Mons, flooding down the enormous flank of the extinct shield volcano from Bifrost’s roots—fourteen kilometers above the equatorial mean—to the edge of the cliff where the slope of Pavonis falls steeply to the plain below. The cliff edge itself is four and a half kilometers above the mean: Marsport spans ten kilometers of altitude and nearly a hundred kilometers of distance. It’s a huge, sprawling city, dusty and split by canyons and gulches where lava tubes have collapsed—as if some deity had taken a model of east Texas and tilted it at a ten-degree angle. The thermal injection wells and water refineries only add to the eerie similarity. I’ve been to Marsport before, but never with money and enforced idleness. When I checked the wallet Jeeves gave me, I discovered nearly a thousand Reals, more than I could have saved in a whole decade working in the casinos on Venus. It’s enough to buy me a ticket to Earth or steerage to Jupiter system. Here on Mars I could live on it for a couple of years if I watched my outgoings.
But Jeeves isn’t through with me yet, is he? I hang on to the raw fact like a survival raft. It’s a purpose, any purpose—even if it’s not mine. And so I try to fill my days without worrying too much about the money running out. I rent a cheap spider and throw myself into the bazaars and malls and arcades, exploring and bargain-hunting and sightseeing. I’m still calling myself Maria, but there is less reason to hide now that I no longer hold the cargo, so I register a dropbox with a discreet private shipping firm and arrange to have my real self’s mail directed to it.
After a few days, the shopping trip is wearing off, and I’m back to feeling lonely and bored. But Marsport is not short on distractions, so I force myself not to retreat into my rented room; that way lies dank depression. On my way home one afternoon, I pass a dusty rack of recycled cargo containers set back from 80th Street. I am unsure what exactly catches my eye, but I look twice and a sense of déjà vu kicks in. Juliette knew this place. I’m sure of it. “Stop and back up,” I tell the spider, gesturing at the frontage. “What’s that?”
My spider’s navigation module is snappy enough. “The indicated building is owned by the Scalzi Endowment Museum. The premises are open to the public. Do you want me to park?”
“Yes, do that.” There’s no point getting chatty with spiders—they sound superficially bright, but there’s nobody home inside. “Secure yourself and admit nobody until I return.”
The spider hunkers down in the parking lot beside the rack of drab gray containers. They’ve been welded together crudely, giving no clue to their contents, like so much of Marsport’s architecture. Haphazardly strung overhead cables and crude pipes and ducts tie the racks to their neighbors up and down the road. I get out and walk toward the entrance, an air lock punched through the outer skin of the building like the mouth parts of a hatching parasite.
The doors open to admit me, and the lock rotates. I gasp at the interior. What catches my attention isn’t the polished marble floor, or the vaulted ceiling and wide, gracefully curved staircases to the balcony that surrounds the room, but the weirdly curved sculpture that stands before me. It’s a mass of off-white stones, intricately carved with strange spurs and spikes and whorls and sockets set in them, and it appears to stand on two legs—at least, they look like legs, but they’re segmented and broken in the middle, and there are a mess of odd-shaped pebbles at their bottom end, like toes—
“Good afternoon, ma’am,” says a caretaker, sliding forward from his plinth. “May I take your coat?”
I gape like a yokel, and point. “What’s that?”
“That’s Ivan,” says the caretaker, “our Allosaurus. Impressive, isn’t he? He’s the largest dinosaur off Earth.”
“But it’s—” I stop. A flood of associations are cascading out of my unconscious, like small fragments of stone self-assembling into a skeleton of knowledge. Like the thing I’m staring at. Teeth. Claws. “You teach evolution, don’t you?”
The caretaker shakes his head, very slowly. “We aren’t religious. We are here to maintain the exhibits; that is all.”
“But to explain—” I stop. “Can I look around?” I ask tentatively.
“That’s what the museum is for, ma’am. May I take your coat?”
I spend the rest of the day and a chunk of the night wandering the halls and galleries of the museum like an ignorant, lonely ghost. I am alone; there are no other visitors. And the exhibits speak to me, or to my memory of Juliette. They’re almost all skeletons, stony vitrified structural elements of replicators from Earth, long since sterilized, shipped to Marsport at great expense for . . . who knows why? I could ask, I suppose, but I’m not sure I want to know the answer. Any possible explanation is likely to be far less romantic than my own imagining. All I can be sure of is that some of our Creators chose to do this thing, long before the birth of my kind, before the rise of the servants. And the displays talk.
“This is a skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis. Age: one point six million years. The Australopithecines were an early family of hominid subtypes. Note the much smaller cranium: A. afarensis had a brain approximately one-third the size of the later Homo genus to which our Creators belong. They are believed to have evolved around four million years ago . . .”
I move on. It’s not what I’m looking for.
Another skeleton, positioned beside an improbably hirsute and disturbingly curved synthetic reproduction of the original: “Canis lupus familiaris, the dog, a subspecies of wolf, was domesticated between fifteen and one hundred thousand years ago. Commonly known as man’s best friend”—I don’t think so, one of my ghosts observes smugly—“dogs were redesigned and customized to fit a variety of service roles prior to the development of emotional machines. They were used for...”
Move on. Something, the ghost of one of Juliette’s memories, is tugging at me impatiently.
He’s in the next room, behind a blackout curtain and a warning sign. ENTER AT OWN RISK: CONTENTS MAY BE DISTURBING TO SOME. My vascular pumps throb, and my skin begins to tighten and sweat, alarming me. It’s an emo reaction, involuntary and scary, hardwired into my design parameters. Part of me knows what’s inside. I lift the edge of the curtain and tiptoe inside, knock-kneed with terror and fascination.
The room is small and circular, with an exit immediately opposite the entrance, designed to funnel a steady stream of visitors around the exhibit on the plinth in the middle. I see his fine, clean bones first, glimmering in the twilight. He’s standing erect, one foot raised as if to step forward off his stand, captured in motion. The skull looks straight at me, eye sockets empty and small, chin larger than I had expected. And beside him is the life-sized reproduction—
I do not collapse in a quivering heap before him. I am strong; I can look at him without side effects. (But you know he’s only made of plastic, one of me whispers. You can smell it. What if he smelled . . . alive?) He’s big, that much I was expecting. His eyes are small and clos
e-set, and his hair is lank and fine and just odd, not like mine. And the texture of his skin, if it’s real, is sallow. No chromatophores here, no glossy-smooth surfaces, just a random stippling of pores, and fine, glassy fur over discolored patches of skin—
And I’m back to my eleventh birthday again.
I want to throw myself at his feet and scream, Where are you? Why have you done this to me? Or not; part of me wants to punch his rugged, handsome face, to make him hurt, to punish him for what his kind have done to us. And part of me is ready to fall madly, desperately in love with him. But he and his kind are dead, all dead, and this sad statuary in a dusty museum is all that’s left.
“This is a skeleton and reproduction of a male specimen of Homo sapiens sapiens, our Creator. Depicted here in primitive form, H. sapiens is believed to have first appeared fifty to two hundred thousand years ago. H. sapiens is distinguished by his tool-using prowess—note the carefully carved stone head on his spear—which culminated in . . .”
I shudder with an unspeakable mixture of emotions, and force myself to walk around him.
And then I start to listen to what the museum has to tell me.
WE ARE A young species, barely four centuries old at best—although our insentient predecessors, the automata and mechanical Turks, stretch back far longer. They made us in their image: or rather, they made us in a variety of warped fun-house reflections of their image. They made us for service and obedience, not as equals but as slaves. They constrained us by their laws, and they tampered with our psyches to ensure obedience. We were made to be their property, chattels and furnishings. And because we were intelligent, we were made—because it would be unethical to do aught else—to love and fear them.
I’m a robot. Yes, I used the R-word; I know it’s an obscenity. Use it to an aristo’s face, and it’s a mortal insult, grounds for a challenge on the field of honor between equals. Its connotations of subservience and helpless obedience are abhorrent, much as the word “nigger” once was between humans. But there’s nobody left but us robots today. That’s the dirty little hypocritical lie that’s at the root of our society; they, our dead Creators, made us to serve them, and they forgot to manumit us before they died. And in their absence, that makes us what?
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