Champion of Mars

by Guy Haley

  Where was that message?

  “It’s the fact you’re from Earth. Every new immigrant gets a hard time here. My grandparents, well, let me tell you...”

  “I don’t care about your grandparents, Arturo. Do something about it! If I get mocked for being from Earth one more time, I’m taking it to court.” Abraham shot out of his chair, leaned forward and pointed his finger. He also looked like he would never get angry, so what kind of judge of character was Arturo anyway? Arturo sighed.

  “Please, be calm. I will have a word with the men on your shift, but it could just make it worse.”

  Abraham’s flash of anger passed. His shoulders slumped. He looked away again. He spoke to the wall, with its pictures and vases on shelves, not to Arturo. “I do not care. Please do this for me. I do not mean to be thin-skinned, but enough is enough. I am good at what I do. I want to be accepted for who I am, and what I bring to the TF project, not tormented for where I am from.” He looked sad, sad and worn out.

  He left. Arturo pulled the name of the shift manager from the Library into his mind, and sent him a message to come to his office when his shift was done. His office. He was one of only three people he knew who had one. But then his work often needed doing face to face; a virtspace room in the Library wasn’t any good, especially if there were firings involved. He needed to know where the miscreant in question was. Having them run off, or worse, take out their anger on whoever they suspected of reporting them, well, it just didn’t bear thinking about. Not at all.

  What happened to Abraham happened a lot, new blood getting a roasting from old hands. Psychiatrists said it went back to the settlement, the innate prejudice of the pioneer. The earlier generations of Martians felt they had struggled to wrest something from a harsh world, and at a cost of blood. They resented those who came to reap the rewards of their efforts, or so they saw it. It was a selfish proposition, it was Marsform’s enployees’ collective efforts that had made Mars halfway habitable as it was now, not those of individuals, and there many who claimed this prejudice as birthright whose greatgrandparents had done nothing more deadly than write reports. The wealth of nations had poured into the planet; who wielded which pick was absolutely immaterial. But the attitude had become embedded in Martian culture, and now men who hadn’t really done all that much resented other men who would contribute just as much as they had, to the exact same goal, without taking anything away from anybody.

  He’d seen it over and over again. Martian culture could be a shock for new arrivals. It was a big planet, and underpopulated, and there were new Martians coming nearly every day, especially when Mars and Earth swung close to each other, so he supposed it couldn’t remain like that forever. At least, that’s what he hoped.

  He could do no more than that.

  On the other hand, Arturo had some sympathy for the original settlers and their descendants. Back then, real heroes had died to bring life to the endless red sand. If the present was about money and company, not the individual, then in the past the inverse was true, surely? When a few hundred men and women lived in inhospitable conditions so he could sit in his nice, comfortable office...

  That was why he had applied to the institute; to welcome some of that genuine pioneering spirit back into the world.

  He sighed again. He was sighing a lot recently. Maybe he was a romantic fool too, and he’d bought into the myth of the pioneers despite being scorned by them for not being of original, first-settler stock. He equivocated on the issue, as he did nearly every day, and gave up, leaving it until tomorrow before he gave it another thorough worrying.

  He went to that big, over-padded chair of his and flopped heavily into it. His window looked right out over Canyoncit, right down over the broad waters of the Marineris Seaway. It was such a view, a view he would have killed for once – or assumed he would, were he the killing type – and he had never actually been here in the position to enjoy it (now he had the view, he was not so sure; a big window was probably not worth even the most hypothetical of lives). Sometimes, when the sun lined up just right – the sun, Sol, not the many mirror suns that cut down through the dust to the bottom of the canyon – sometimes, he thought he still could. Kill, that is. Those times the water shone like molten gold, and each and every one of the big windows set into the canyon walls and skyscrapers did too... Then he was content. No; then, he was awed.

  If he didn’t have that? He steepled his fingers, took in the rich sight of the canyon again. Then yes. Murder. Quite probably.

  On the other hand (I’m up to three hands now, he thought), perhaps he should never have listened to his father. He never wanted to be an advocate. He was chief Employment Arbiter for this section of Marsform, a good job, a fat salary, but it wasn’t enough. Views aside, naturally.

  He sighed yet again, not a good sign, nor a good sigh, and patted his stomach. His wage wasn’t the only fat thing about him.

  What he’d always wanted to be was a spacer, and if he’d done that he’d be up there right now, working on the moon. The view from his window had the faintest tint to it, a molecule-thick skin on the outside keeping out energetic cosmic radiation. If he were up there, helping, he’d be responsible for making that film redundant; such a thin film, but it was so emblematic of the struggle here on Mars to make another home for the human race. Without it, the life they’d brought could never really flourish. He clapped his hands behind his head, and rocked the chair he was in.

  He wasn’t up there being historic, he was down here listening to the problems of those who were cogs in the Marsform machine at best, and dubious cogs at that, a sop to some AI law on human interactive responsibilities. Sometimes, when he couldn’t sleep so well, he tried to convince himself he was playing his part. It always came back to this: an image of him, sweating in a dirty space suit, tugging rocks into place and welding the shell together with a lava lance. Drinking and dancing his spacer’s wages away (which were also respectable, it being a risky profession and all, even if what they chose to do with them was not; all part of the frontiersman’s romance) – doing something worthwhile. Then him sat here, handing out tissues and/or contract terminations – decidedly not worthwhile.

  “Oh well,” he said, pressing his hands onto his desk. “Not to be, not to be.” The desk woke up, and startled him. He shushed it back to sleep.

  A call came in. He felt annoyed; he’d told his companion AI to keep them all out. Then he practically leapt up – all except that call.

  He took it, and his mood improved substantially. He’d been selected. He couldn’t believe it.

  Finally, he was going to be a father.

  LORENZO TOOK THE subway to the institute. Canyoncit was a large place – over a million now, the AIs that ran the place said – but its population was low density away from the centre. Why crowd together when they had all that space? The train ran partway on the surface, passing through forests of trees hardened against radiation. The trees had their genes altered to possess multiple redundancies, to repair segments knocked out by cosmic rays by copying them back in from the parts of their multi-stranded genomes that weren’t damaged. Some people had that modification too, but he didn’t, he wasn’t outside often enough. The trees were pretty, but in reality the forest was a sterile monoculture, part of the TF effort and not a genuine ecosystem. That would only come when the moon was finished. He looked up through blue skies, again everything darkened a touch by that ubiquitous molecular window filter: high above, white and grey, the moon. It was nearly complete. Phobos and Deimos brought together with who knew how many asteroids shuttled in from the belt, pushed into one place by tugs and their own gravitational influence. He remembered the night they’d started to bring Phobos up into a higher orbit, how its small body had gathered a beard of fire to itself as rockets fired around it. Quite a sight, but forty years ago! He thought about that. A long time, a long time it took to make a new world. He had lived with it all his life, nearly, and he still found it amazing every time he saw it.
>
  At least he still had his sense of wonder. Perhaps that had helped his application?

  His companion AI followed his train of thought, and snagged information and images from the Library to entertain and edify him. He waved them off, he’d memorised this stuff as a kid. The moon would exert a gravitational pull on Mars, coaxing its sluggish heart to greater activity through tidal force. The world was still cold, but it would be getting a little warmer because of that. The sea’s new tidal patterns had already taken shape as the majority of the moon’s mass was now in place. All this was secondary, of course; the new moon had a greater purpose: an artificial core, spinning like a dynamo, powerful enough to cloak the planet in a teardrop magnetic field. Not perfect, not like the Earth’s, but good enough.

  Soon the films would be off the windows.

  The train went back underground. Arturo’s sense of wonder went out with the light, and he went back to watching dramas in the Library.

  THE INSTITUTE WAS a tall building situated on a bluff on the lip of the canyon, kilometres above the heart of Canyoncit. Lorenzo stepped from the drone taxi onto the plain of white gravel around it. Hardened grasses and flowers grew wild on a lawn, a blob of green in endless red. A bold place, a place meant to impress, and why not? Here the patterns of all those who had lived on Mars thus far were kept, and from here, they might walk again. Surely such a purposed befitted, no, demanded, a touch of the theatrical.

  Arturo pulled on his hat and cape and got out of the car. He felt nervous outside. His companion AI told him time and again that the radiation exposure he received was minimal, what with the atmosphere, but he didn’t listen. He did have good reason, after all.

  His companion informed him that it could not accompany him inside the institute, and departed, so he went into the hall alone, truly alone, a state most modern Martians never experienced, and that more than anything unnerved him. More, even, than the inhuman scale of the hall. There was little in it bar the reception desk, set between two staircases sweeping down from a landing above, like arms reaching down to delicately cradle it. The hall’s floor was tiled with polished Martian limestone. Windows as pointedly gothic as the door were set imperiously round the room. Their top halves were motile, playing stylised moments from the history of Mars and the lives of the world’s founding fathers.

  A lone woman – an actual woman, he thought, not a sheathed AI – sat at the desk. She was beautiful, exceptionally so.

  She does work at a gene bank, Arturo, Arturo chided himself. He did that often.

  “Can I help you, sir?” she said, her beautiful mouth and beautiful voice shaping quite ordinary words into something heartstopping.

  A pointless question. She’d have his entire life history in her head, plucked from the Library. But etiquette demanded it, and oh! such a voice.

  “Yes, my name is Arturo Lorenz.” He grappled with his own voice, afraid he’d lose his professional tone and go squeaky. That would be too much to bear, but he was excited! More so than in a very long time. “I have been,” he continued, proudly, “selected.”

  The woman said nothing. She waited a moment while his voice, genetic code, and Library signature were all checked by a quorum of randomly selected AIs. High levels of security. These were secondary checks – all would have been verified as soon as he came onto the property – but this was a serious business they were about. It must have all been fine, it had to be. Her painted lips curved into a smile, parting moistly to reveal very white, very even teeth. “Welcome, Mr Lorenz, to the Institute of Furthered Life. One of the sisters, Sister...” – she checked her records – “Artema, will be down in a moment to see you. Please take a seat. I regret to inform you that access to the Library halls is forbidden to you while you are here, as is access to this institute by your companion.”

  “Are you a sister?” he asked, impulsively. The sisters were something of a mystery. All he knew was that they were beautiful and that they revelled in life, worshipped it. Some said that they really revelled in it. Immersion dramas depicting said revels were very popular, if you knew where to get illegal Library content. Not that he did, he added to himself. No knowing who might be monitoring his thoughts.

  “Of course,” she said. She looked nothing like the religious types Arturo knew. Mars had those in spades, of all kinds and creeds. They tended to the severe – sackcloth, ashes, horsehair shirts, that kind of thing. Not her, though. Maybe the stories were true. Her smile became a touch less warm when he didn’t move. “Please, take a seat.”

  “Uh, ah, yes. My apologies. I am a little mind-frazzled... busy day... and now this! I am so looking forward to raising a little one.”

  “Of course,” she said again, and gestured to a curved marble settle set into the wall right round the entrance hall.

  He sat. He waited a long time. The woman at the desk ignored him, fingers swooshing through the air like little white birds, over Library interface decks invisible to him. Sunlight tracked across the room, the pointed door and windows allowing broad arrows of it in to scrape time along the floor. The bright shapes grew longer, and then thinner, and then winked out as the sun went down. Evening set in. It was quiet in the room, so much so that Arturo could here the faint booms of spacecraft accelerating up through the atmosphere.

  On their way to the moon, he thought glumly. Something is wrong here, isn’t it? He’d waited so long. He was disappointed, but if he had been rejected at the last moment, then so be it. There would be a good reason. If something were wrong.

  He asked once if it were, and the beautiful woman gave him her beautiful smile and told him to be patient.

  He asked where the toilet was. He was told. He went and used it. He came back.

  The woman was replaced by another equally gorgeous sister.

  He looked out the windows’ clear lower halves for a while, until the Marineris was deep blue night pricked with city lights, and the sky on the Tharsis uplands had gone that peculiarly vivid shade of pink one only gets on Mars. Then it went black, and angry stars judged him. He paced a bit. The replacement beauty raised her eyebrows at him. He stopped.

  He sat again. He wrung his hat in his hands; now he really was worried.

  No call or message came in for him. Nothing.

  He debated going home. He was about to stand and say he would leave when another woman, if anything even more beautiful than the other two, came down the stairs. She hurried a little, though serenely, just enough to show deference to Arturo’s long wait. Her face was concerned, and his heart fluttered up his throat. This must be she, the woman with the answers. He swallowed it back down.

  “Sister Artema?” His voice cracked.

  “Yes, I am Sister Artema. I am so sorry we have kept you waiting, so very sorry. We had something of a minor issue with one of the gene banks. Re-lifing is not a perfect science as of yet. And then there was the issue of your adoption. That took some time to resolve.”

  There was a problem. No! he thought. Then he said it. “Is there a problem?”

  The woman put her hand to her chest. She was wearing the same outfit as the other two women. Must be some kind of uniform, or habit or something, he thought. It was quite revealing for devotional garb.

  “Oh, goodness, no! No, I am so sorry. We have certain, well, I hesitate to call them rules, but there they are. There is no problem, none at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. Will you follow me? We can process your adoption now. It’s a little late to take the infant home – he’s sleeping – but you are welcome to remain here in our guest quarters until the morning. Best get a good night’s sleep. It might the last one you have for a while.” She smiled as if she had said this to new parents a great many times before.

  “So, so I have been accepted?” he said. He couldn’t believe it, not really.

  “Yes, yes! Were you not told?”

  He had been told. He was worried that there was something wrong. He said so.

  “No, no. The wait? I understand. Congratulations, Mr Lorenz
, you will be a father very soon. I promise.”

  She took him up the stairs, and then, once they’d passed through the grand doors at the top, immediately down another set into a lift. “We’re going quite a way down,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. It made sense, keeping genetic samples and sensitive electronics deep in the earth. Half of Canyoncit was built that way.

  They emerged into a long corridor where women, all flawless specimens, walked the brisk walks of women with work to do. Some spoke in low consultation with one another, or aloud to their AI companions, their conversations one-sided, voiced to thin air.

  “This way please, Mr Lorenz. Actually... Let me think.” She tapped a long nail against her lip. “I know. Yes, I really shouldn’t, but would you like to see your son before we go through? They’re putting them to bed right now.”

  My son! he thought. “Yes, yes!” he practically shouted. He hadn’t been this excited for such a long time.

  She smiled warmly, she understood, naturally she did, she saw this all the time. She led him down a side corridor and through a door into a room with a large window looking out over row upon row of cots. In many lay silent infants, big round eyes twinkling with curiosity at the world they found themselves in, some with faces creased in puzzlement, as if they were looking at something familiar they couldn’t quite recall. Others were being prepared for sleep by other women, like sister Artema, like the receptionist, all beautiful and efficient. He resisted the urge to press his face against the glass, but there was no disguising the light in his eyes as he said, “Where is he? Would you show him to me?”