by Jack Dann
“You really have no idea, do you? A great culture, possibly the greatest the world has known, reaches a point where it dismantles itself, gives way to a simpler, let’s say impoverished, less sophisticated successor. Why would they do it?”
“I can only think of two answers,” he said quickly, honestly. “There was some enemy…”
“You could say that.” The intercept’s eyes flashed with interest. “Or?”
“You gained by it. It had to be progress. Something you saw as better.” And he remembered what she’d said-impoverished-and barely dared utter the words. “You became us!” Remembered what else she’d said: less sophisticated. “You simplified your culture, someone did, something, some ruling elite maybe, and became us-”
“Yes.” There was something like madness in the phantom’s darkling bits of eyes, something reckless and fervent, but Beni dared not suggest the tombs housed what remained of the Tastan’s dead insane. It was more. It had to be more. But he did not have to stumble over words to form a question. Arasty continued speaking.
“Some ruling elite, yes. An enemy, true, that culled our millions and our cultural heritage. Downgraded us all. To simple, immortal, happy folk like you-”
“Then-”
“Immortal. Happy ichneumon. But able to be maimed, killed by violence. With time to be curious, to ponder, to forget, to indulge. Happy, happy, happy ichneumon!”
“Then you’re here-”
“Go on!” Madness spun in the darkness of the eyes.
“To cull us! Prey on us! To give purpose to immortal lives! They planned ahead. Saw we would need-”
“No!” The intercept had halted in blazing fury, actually flickered, flashed off and back again. The face was rigid with a rage and suffering held in such perfect suspension that Beni was faint with the involuntary numbing terror he felt welling up. The eyes, the black false eyes, held him.
“No, little hunter. No. See it our way. To give purpose to our thwarted lives. Some kind of revenge for those few among the elite, eighty-five out of all those many, to whom the genetic treatments did not bestow immortality. Who had helped cull and simplify, then found themselves without the intended blessing, left to die in the agony of exclusion from that. From you.”
Beni saw the extent of the resolve, the old fierce hatred, that she would never let him go. He would never get to tell this story. Never even reach the central chamber. Or know he had.
“These aren’t tombs. They’re traps,” he said, understanding, remembering the other meaning to her name for him, the insect leaving behind its offspring to feed.
“Yes, Beni. Traps to lure immortals curious in their long lives. A way of striking back at time.”
And Beni felt the deep-down dread that Ramirez, some kind of Ramirez, tampered with, changed, or no-just allowed to go back unharmed-was acting as a lure out there in the bright summer days, giving hope, keeping the dream alive in others, but part of the trap, knowing or unknowing. Pray Destiny it was unknowing. Such a small shrewd price to pay, letting one or two go free, letting others go back maimed. Let the tombs have a bad day and so keep them coming.
“Be merciful, Dormeuse. Arasty.”
“I am, little hunter. With you I truly am. Normally I grant the beautiful lie, tell those I am about to rob of life, light and limb, beauty, eons of youth, of how normally death is what makes lives, cultures, ultimately defines civilization. I remind them that it’s right that immortals should reach a point of idle curiosity and need to be challenged, extended, tested. I tell them that whatever their fates individually, those I kill or hurt are helping maintain the tenor of life for all.”
“But you’re actually culling.”
“Avenging. It’s simpler.”
“Out of envy.”
“Bad enough in life. But when it’s all there is, all that’s left, it fills the largest cup, becomes a vast power. I phrase it so they think they will be spared somehow. That they are different and special. To some I even suggest that their personalities will join mine in the tomb matrix. Then, when there is hope, when vanity and optimism is there in hints and the absolute conviction of ego, then I cripple and kill, then I bring them to the worst of hells, to such terrible insurmountable despair. You I have spared this anguish, Beni.”
“Spared me! By telling me the truth?”
“Yes.”
“But I can’t believe you, can I? Not after what you’ve just said.”
“You really should. Look at your display.”
Beni did, saw how simply, elegantly, the tomb’s long-dead owner, this printing of her anyway, had expressed his dilemma.
A maze. He was in a maze. He did not know what to say.
Arasty, the ghost of her, smiled. “Well?”
“Never be importunate, I was always told. Never beg.”
“I’ve told you I’m being merciful. I might listen.”
“All right. Don’t kill me.”
“I won’t.”
“Don’t maim me.”
“I won’t.”
“Let me return.” As part of the trap, he didn’t say, refusing to go so far.
“Earn it.”
“I need to think. Concentrate.”
“Shall I leave?”
“You’d still be here. You’re in the walls.”
“True. The tomb.”
“The trap.”
“The trap, yes. My personality is coded through all this. But it would be easier for you to concentrate.”
And the intercept vanished, took away her glow, left only dim yellow lamplight, tunnelling, vitreous, intimate darkness without her darkling eyes.
Beni stopped, pretended to think, triggered his implant, saw again the plan of her tomb picked out in light, saw that he was at the central chamber, the structural heart of what this thwarted, predatory, former woman had become. Out of despair.
“Oh, Dormeuse, Dormeuse,” he murmured. “I am so sorry.” Imagining how it had to be, the eighty-five labouring over the final secret plan, the hate and loss in their hearts as all the others sailed blissfully on, away, abandoning.
What choice then. What choice now. For them both.
“We can change this,” he said, resolved, striding on to his goal, though he did believe he was already there. “We can make a start here. Try to be friends. Let me try to be that, Arasty. At least try to be that.”
“Yes,” the tomb said, the walls, the night, as he strode on in his cone of yellow light into the endlessness of the hill. “And that is why.”
OUTSIDE the Nothing Stones pull and pull and will forever pull, drawing in the emptiness of infinity, the blackness of eyes made hard, so unforgivingly hard. She is punitive and spiteful and so so determined. It is all she will ever have.
Beni strides on with his young man’s dreams-of success, of being different, better than the best, with his wonderful new dream of achieving something more, something new. He walks into night and does not see the final reading, does not know just how merciful she has been, that this time there is mercy, as much of it as there can ever be. He believes he can still be the greatest of them all. He still believes Ramirez is someone else.
WINNING MARS by Jason Stoddard
New writer Jason Stoddard has made sales to Interzone, Sci Fiction, Strange Horizons, Futurismic, Fortean Bureau, and Talebones, and is at work on his first novel. He works in the advertising industry, lives in Valencia, California, and maintains a website at www.jasonstoddard.net.
In the exciting but slyly satirical story that follows, he postulates that the Reality TV/Adventure Gaming craze will take us all the way to Mars-but that wherever we go, we’ll bring our human baggage with us.
DEATH
Death came as nothing more than a thin white line in the light blue Martian sky. Like a single strand of spider-silk, gossamer and insubstantial. There was no sound.
Nandir’s team, Glenn Rothman thought, stopping for a moment to watch. Chatter from the Can above: Unstable. Tumbled. Nobody knew why.
<
br /> Glenn shivered. He’d almost picked Nandir’s route, which seemed easier on the rolling and flying legs but more difficult on the Overland Challenge to the travel pod. Perfect for him and-
“Come on!” Alena said, over the local comm. She was standing thirty feet in front of him, looking back, her face twisted into an angry mask.
“We just lost Nandir.”
“I’m going to lose you if you don’t get moving!”
“Don’t you care?”
An inarticulate growl. Then a sigh. They were, after all, all camera, all the time. “Of course I care. But I want to win.”
Glenn shook his head. He bounced over to her and tried to take her hand, but she pulled away. “Not now!” she said. Her normally full lips were compressed into a thin line, the soft arcs of her face pulled into something harder and more brutal. The face he used to love. The face he still loved.
She bounded away and he hurried to catch up. She’d made it clear that they were only back together for this one ultimate challenge, bigger than Everest, bigger than freeclimbing Half-Dome, bigger than marathoning the Utah desert, bigger than swimming the English Channel, bigger than their four-year marriage, bigger than anything he could give.
He caught up and tried to give her a smile. She looked ahead grimly. The terrain was getting more rugged. Ahead of them rose part of Ius Chasma, a two-thousand-foot near-vertical wall they would have to freeclimb to reach their transpo pod.
The low gravity was both a blessing and a curse. Glenn was still getting used to what he could do. The squeezesuit and header made him top-heavy, throwing off his balance, but his total weight here was still less than half of what he was used to.
“More human interest, Glenn,” the Can blatted at him from his private channel.
He shook his head. They’d been ordering them around since before they left Earth.
“Glenn, we need to see Alena.”
He plodded ahead.
“Glenn, we’re close to contract breach.”
He turned to focus on Alena. The squeezesuit clung to her curves, and the transparent header was designed to show as much of her pretty face as possible. Less attractive now, perhaps, with her hair hanging damp and her mouth set in a hard line.
“More,” they said.
Glenn tried running in front of her and feeding the view from one of his rear cameras, but it was too hard to concentrate on the terrain ahead and keep her in frame. Eventually he dropped back to focus on the exaggerated hourglass shape of her suit.
“Good,” they said. “Stay there for a while.”
“Okay,” he said. Idiots.
PITCH
“Of course someone is going to die. Probably lots of some-ones.”
Jere Gutierrez nodded solemnly. So maybe the old fuck wasn’t just another crank with a stupid dream trying to suck his nuts.
“Death is a legal problem,” he said.
“For Neteno?”
Jere didn’t answer. He pressed a discreet button and the datanet whispered in his ear. His guest was Evan McMaster, producer of Endurance, one of the last reality shows.
So he was real. He was part of the Golden Age.
Jere never prescreened CVs because everyone claimed some kind of connection, whether it was the last great years of Reality, or the almost-mythical Hegemony of the 70s and 80s, when the world was run by television, when audiences sat rapt on their cheap cloth sofas and scarfed microwave dinners in front of the tube, long before the coming of the internet and the rise of Interactives, long before television had been cast into the “Linear, Free-Access” ghetto. Every diapered octogenarian who tottered into his office smelling of piss and death claimed to be part of that great time. They all claimed to know that one compelling idea that would trounce all and return Neteno to some crowning glory, like television of old.
So maybe taking this meeting was not just a complete padre-suckup. Maybe Dad was right, just this once.
“Neteno doesn’t do snuff,” Jere said.
“What about the new Afghanistan thing? Or the Philippines?”
“That was news.”
“What about the Twelve Days in May?”
Jere just looked at him. He waited for the old guy to drop his eyes. And kept waiting.
“Make your pitch,” Jere said. “And make it good.”
Evan stood up and paced in front of Jere’s obsidian desk, backlit by the dim light coming in from the tinted window that overlooked Los Angeles.
“First, let’s dispense with the death thing,” he said.
“Sponsors don’t like it.”
“Don’t lie. Sponsors love it. They just look properly horrified and give some insignificant percentage of their profits to the survivors and everyone’s happy. Your big problem is legal.”
“Tell me why we should take the chance.”
Evan went back to his pocket projector and remapped the far wall with demographics, charts, multicolored peaks spiking like some impossible landscape. Stuff he had seen before, but this was far out of proportion. And yet it still bore the stamp of 411, Inc. It was good data.
“Three reasons. First, the Chinese.”
“The Chinese stopped at the moon.”
“Yeah. They said they’d go to Mars, but they’re bogged down at the Moon.”
“Cost.”
“Yeah. Another is NASA. They’re dead. Gutted. After the Twelve Days in May, all the money is going to Homeland Security. Everything’s being folded into the new Oversight thing. And the polls show people being OK with the Kevorking of the Mars flights. But underneath it all is a pent-up need to see some great endeavor. It’s the Frontier Factor.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Henry Kase. New pundit. Blames the lack of a Frontier Factor for most of the world’s problems. Complete crap, maybe, but it maps well on the audience we’re looking at.”
“Go on.”
“Third, the Rabid Fan. That’s real. You know it.”
Jere nodded. Everyone dreamed of creating a new Star Trek, still in syndication after all these years, or a new Simpsons. A show that made people dress up, go to conventions, meet in real life, found languages, change dictionaries.
“They’ll think this is too game-show,” Jere said.
“Yeah. But they’ll watch. All the trekkies and scifi nuts and people who dream about getting out, getting away, people who hate their lives for whatever reason, they’ll all watch. Look at the numbers.”
Jere looked at the projection, peaky and perfect and tantalizing. If they could create something like that… he sat silent for a long time, imagining himself at the forefront of a movement.
“There are problems,” Jere said finally.
“Of course.”
“Death is still one. I can borrow a platoon of lawyers to armor-plate our ass, but the shitstorm that follows may still take us down. Especially if they all kick it. As in Neteno is a goner. Done. Stick a fork in it.”
Evan nodded. “I know.”
“You’re asking me to risk my network? While you sit there, almighty, living off interest from a previous life?”
“I’m prepared to throw in,” Evan said.
“How much?”
“Everything.”
“It’s never everything.”
Evan sighed. “I’ll sign a personal guarantee.”
Jere had the bottom line whispered back to him and whistled. “You need funding like a first-run ‘Active for a Free-Access ’Near.’ ”
“The sponsors will line up.”
“Why?”
“Their logo. On Mars. Maybe a featurette. Come on!”
“Sponsors don’t like one-shots.”
“So tell them this is a series. Tell them we’re going to storm the Chinese on the moon!”
It was crazy. It was stupid. And it was, more than likely, impossible. But it was an idea. It was a big idea. And it just might be enough.
“Reality shows are dead,” Jere said.
“It’s coal. Time t
o mine it.”
Jere nodded. The way things retroed round and round so fast, it was probably comfortably new again. And there were probably millions of people like himself who had caught a glimpse of the last reality shows and remembered them in a fond way.
You’ve taken big chances, he thought. Which is why Neteno is a rising star amongst dying losers.
“We may be able to get some money from NASA,” Jere said, finally. And some money from Dad, since he recommended Evan.
“You’re in?” Evan said.
“How long’s the flight?”
“To Mars? Three months. We’re going to do it?”
“Then we can definitely get food and bev sponsors. Perfect, too, start on the holidays when everyone’s home and be ready for sweeps in Feb.”
“We’re doing it?”
Jere nodded.
Evan did a little jump and victory dance.
Jere cleared his calendar with a few quick touches and stood up. “Let’s go to lunch. I need to know how you intend to pull off this stunt.”
Evan’s eyes sparkled. “It’s Russian tech. You know, the stuff they do, the $250k packages to orbit for a week.”
Jere paused at the door. “That’s why I know people will die.”
CRASH
“Pull it out! Come on! Pull!” Sam Ruiz shouted through their local comm. Mike Kinsson and Juelie Peters tugged at the shattered plastic shell. Suddenly the whole side twisted off, and all three ended up in a tangled heap on the dusty ground. Mike Kinsson noticed absently that the Disney and Red Bull and Wal-Mart logos on Juelie’s suit were covered in dust, and reached out to brush them off.
“What are you doing?” Sam said, yanking Juelie to her feet.
“Dust…” Mike said, and trailed off. It was stupid anyway. Why should he worry about their sponsors? Why should he worry about anything? They were dead.
Sam’s team had been given the easiest Overland Challenge, nothing more than a fast run over rocky ground, because they had been assigned the toughest rolling and flying part. Soaring over a tiny edge of Valles Marineris was part of their air journey, partly to make it more dramatic and partly to bring back some great images.