Champion of Mars (2 page)

I make further notes and upgrade my recommendation for his commendation to a personal insistence. His comrades regain the gates. The portal irises shut. Within, they prepare themselves for a final stand.

The battlefield is clear. The sortie has not succeeded.

The walls of Olm are already pitted. Their flesh smokes as the sun cannon of Kemiímseet redouble their bombardment. The spirits of the city scream as stray shots find their way through the energy shield to strike the spires beyond. Breaches will open soon in the walls, the shield will fail, and the warriors of Kemiímseet will pour through and do what warriors have done to cities throughout all of human history.

This fratricidal war has run on for a decade and a half. Man versus man, spirit versus spirit. The rebellious Quinarchs assault the authority of their Emperor. The Great Librarian has been missing for millennia, and there is no one to mediate.

There will be victory for the Twin Emperor today, but it will not last. Soon the war will be over, and with its end, so too will the time of Man come to a close.

There is nothing I can do to stop it. It is fated, and fate can be resisted only rarely. The death of Olm will be the act of a monster. It may seem the champion has no decision in the matter. Nevertheless, it remains the act of Yoechakenon. The coexistence of freedom and hard determinism is the dilemma at the heart of eleutheremics.

Yoechakenon, who is revered and feared in all the lands of Mars.

Yoechakenon, whom I love and have loved forever.

I note the current tally. Disgust overwhelms my detachment.

Sometimes, more often of late, I think that Mars should have stayed dead.

CHAPTER TWO

Holland

2107 AD, Ascraeus Mons

T
HE ANDROID STARED
through Holland as if he weren’t there. He couldn’t stand it any longer. He turned to his guide, Dr Stulynow, sitting across the narrow gangway of the rover’s passenger cabin.

“Can you stop that thing from staring at me?” he shouted. The rumble of the rover’s fat tyres was deafening, the vibrations of the passenger cab setting Holland’s nerves on edge. Evidently Marsform’s budget didn’t stretch as far as soundproofing. The vehicle jounced madly as it took a boulder field at a brisk pace. Stulynow shrugged and tapped his ears.

“Use your mike!” Holland gesticulated at his own ears, then thrust his chin up over the rim of his environment suit’s gorget and jabbed at the microphone wrapped around his throat.

Stulynow slowly pulled his own microphone into place, geckroing the strap about his throat, annoyed at the interruption. His eyes never left Holland’s as he did so. His face was heavy, Sibero-Asiatic, marked by hard years, the creases in his face picked out in red by Martian dust. The stuff got everywhere. Small dunes of it covered the floor of the passenger cabin, drifted up round the walls and bases of the long benches. Black grit danced on the vibrating floor. Stulynow’s suit was stained pink-brown, with a few darker patches of brown or dark red where the dust had adhered to traces of oil. After only a week, Holland’s own suit was beginning to colour; it wouldn’t be long before he was indistinguishable from the rest of the colonists. Not that it would matter. Whether his suit was brilliant white or not, they’d still know he was new here, an outsider, and treat him accordingly. It was stamped across everything about him, from the way he walked to the things he said. It’d take more than a dirty suit to fit in.

He felt uneasy. He hadn’t expected the android, and this big Slavic scientist with the attitude problem wasn’t helping. It was not an auspicious start to his time at Ascraeus Base.

Holland stared defiantly back while Stulynow pressed at his phone, keying off whatever it was he’d been listening to.

“Yes?” he said, his voice phlegmy and too intimate on Holland’s suit speakers. The dust clogged the human respiratory system as efficiently as it jammed air filters.

“Could you stop that thing from looking at me?” said Holland. “It won’t quit staring at me.”

Stulynow turned his head unhurriedly. All his movements were slow, like he was trapped in treacle. Holland had noticed that to be a peculiarity of the new Martians. Perhaps it was the low gravity, or the cold, or the boredom. He idly thought about testing his reaction times daily to see how long it would take for him to become the same.

Stulynow considered the android for long seconds. The rover hit something big, leapt into the air and came down with a jerk that made Holland’s teeth clack.

“Why?” said Stulynow eventually. “She is doing no harm. She doesn’t mean anything by it.”

“She?”

Stulynow shrugged as if he really did not give a damn what Holland thought about the android, mostly because he didn’t. “That’s the basic personality pattern it has; female. By default.”

“
It
is freaking me out.” The thing’s plastic eyes bored into Holland. They were hideous in their verisimilitude. Realistic blue irises stared unblinkingly from a softgel face, like the eyes of a burns victim peeking out from dressings that could not quite hide the horrors beneath. The features were inert, smooth and still as if carved from wax. He dreaded the moment when they’d twitch back into life.

Stulynow said something. The rumble of the engine and the grind of tyres on rocky ground was all Holland heard, despite the suit speakers being six centimetres from his ears.

“What?” said Holland, too sharply. He became angrier, mostly at himself. He was making a poor impression.

“I said, what’s your problem?” repeated Stulynow loudly.

“I don’t like AI.”

Stulynow pulled a face and adjusted his earbuds. They were on wires, of all things, but they liked that up here. It was easier to fix a broken wire than a miniature transmitter. The Martians had limited access to fabrication units; only those run for company purposes had a full range of patterns. Raw materials, drawn from the planet’s mining operations, were scarce. This was strictly a frontier environment, geared to transforming the world, as it had been since the first settlement in ’93 and would remain for a long time. A goodly proportion of the colonists held double or triple doctorates – Stulynow was a cryovulcanist and a noted speleologist – but here men were expected to work with their hands too, to be as happy with a shovel as with a minilab. That required a certain kind of individual. The distance from home and its comforts further narrowed down the psychological types recruited by the company. The first wave of the new Martians were real pioneers, capable, but misanthropic. Who else but the emotionally damaged would want to come all the way out here? Holland had his reasons for getting off Earth, like all of them, but these new Martians disdained the problems of others even while struggling with their own. They looked down on Holland. He was still only a scientist, and not yet a pioneer.

Holland stared at the earbuds. He appreciated their simplicity. He supposed they also cut out the noise of the rover, which the suit speakers, his helmet off, did not. Common sense, and he’d expected that, anticipated it. He’d come here because it was a place where men relied on men. The machines on Mars were set only to the task of making a second Earth.

Except the android. That could never be a slave, not a thinking machine of that level. He knew they had one out there, he just hadn’t expected to be sharing his ride with one. He couldn’t escape them, no matter what he did, and that angered him.

The machine continued to stare at him.

Perhaps it wasn’t enough to get away. Perhaps he’d made a mistake. Perhaps Dr Ravi had been right and he shouldn’t have come. He should have stayed on Earth and tried to work through his phobia, just like everyone else who’d suffered in the Five Crisis. Time hadn’t lessened its immediacy, and distance was doing as poorly.

“Can’t you turn it off, or at least make it close its eyes?” he said.

“She
is
off,” said Stulynow, shrugging again. “As off as she gets, anyhow. This sheath is in its inactive state, asleep. More or less, she’s not really here at all. This is just a shell; she’ll be doing something back at base. We only take the remote carriage in case something goes wrong. The sheath’s eyelids get stuck on open whenever she’s asleep. I haven’t been able to get it fixed. Sorry.”

Holland snorted derisively.

Stulynow frowned. “Do not do that. She always has a line into the sheath. She can still hear you. You will hurt her feelings.”

Holland looked away. “It’s a machine. They don’t have feelings.”

Stulynow looked at the android, strapped tightly into its seat on the long couch next to him. “Maybe not, but she does a good job emulating them. Her mind has full adaptive heuristics. She’s a top range Class Three self-evolving AI; not many of those anywhere in the Solar System.”

The Fives have that capability,
thought Holland bitterly.

“Reliable model. I have worked with her for several months. She might not be human, but you can’t tell, much better than other Threes. And if she doesn’t feel, only appears to, what’s the difference? My experience of what goes on in your head is as deep as my experience of hers. It’s all the same. There is no difference, not subjectively.”

“You’re wrong,” said Holland.

Stulynow politely waited for him to say something more, but Holland fixed his eyes on the door leading to the driver’s cabin. The Siberian shrugged again. His shoulders were in perpetual motion with weary indifference. He keyed his music back on.

They spent the rest of the journey to Ascraeus Base in silence.

“H
OLLAND.
D
R
H
OLLAND
?” Someone was shaking him awake. Holland blinked his eyes and looked around him in confusion. The rover had stopped. The silence was disconcerting. The cabin rocked gently, buffeted by the spring winds.

“You were sleeping,” said Stulynow.

“I was dreaming,” said Holland. He grasped his suit gauntlet and twisted it off so he could rub his eyes. “Of the ocean.”

Stulynow smiled. “We all do that; or of the forest. It’s this place. Dr Miyazaki says it’s the planet, reaching out to us to tell us to make it live again.”

“What do you say?”

“Bullshit,” said Stulynow with a broad grin. “It’s seeing red and brown all the time, makes you want to look at some other colour. Come on, we’re here. Suit up.” He pulled Holland’s helmet from an overhead bin and handed it to him. “It’s a short walk over to the main entrance. The ground’s too unstable to take the weight of the rover, and the drones will be busy.”

“Do I get to see the tube today?”

“You are one eager son of a bitch! No. Well...” – the Russian scratched his head – “the entrance, maybe. Tomorrow. Ask Maguire when we get in; he wrote your itinerary.” He turned to the android, flipped down a panel, and depressed a large button designed to accommodate gloved fingers. “You too. Wake up, lady, we are needing you now. Beauty sleep is over.”

The machine’s face quivered as it came online, a rapid succession of expressions flickering over the softgel.

“See?” said Stulynow. “She dreams too.”

“I do not dream,” said the machine. “I was assisting Dr Vance in the medical laboratory. She is annoyed at the interruption.”

“Then tell her she can carry your sheath back up to the base herself, if you’re too precious to spare for five minutes so you can walk.”

“I will walk.” The android stood. She gave Holland a long look.

“Watch out for him, he’s a Frankenphobe,” Stulynow said to the machine. The android appraised Holland a moment longer and stalked off down the long passenger cabin, feet clicking like those of a beetle expanded to nightmare proportions. The machine took up station beside the door.

“I am sorry for being rude before. It is the Russian in me,” said Stulynow. “We are an emotional people, always up and down. Riding the rover makes me down. At least today, it was only we three. You should try it with twenty dirty construction grunts; then you will know discomfort.”

“I think I preferred you dour.”

“Wait a while, and you will get your wish.”

“Are you ready, Dr Stulynow?” asked the android.

Stulynow helped Holland put his helmet on and checked the seals on the gorget, then donned his own and gave a thumbs up. Fans roared to life, sucking the air from the cabin; the rover lacked a discrete airlock. The fans ceased, the air pressure brought close to Martian norms, less than one per cent of that at sea level on Earth. That was at Mars’ mean planetary elevation, and they were much higher here. The android reached out a slender carbon plastic finger and touched a wall panel, which flashed from red to amber to green. The door popped out and slid away along the exterior of the vehicle. A faint outrush of air carried a cloud of flash-frozen water vapour with it.

They stepped out onto a hard standing. A thirty-metre comms mast towered over one corner, by a couple of equipment bunkers built of sintered soil bricks, uplinking them to the Red Planet’s nascent ring of commsats.

Outside, it was bitterly cold, so cold Holland wished he had a full vacuum suit on rather than the lighter Martian environmental gear. They were only halfway up the northern flank of Ascraeus Mons, nine kilometres above the mean. Up here the temperature hovered around minus forty degrees celsius, even as the plains below warmed to near freezing in the spring sunlight. The sky was caramel with dust blown up on spring winds, visibility was middling. The shallow slopes of the volcano marched relentlessly upwards, making a vast bulge in the crust that distorted the horizon, its curve blending with the dusty sky.

“Impressive, isn’t it? As monstrous and beautiful as Aphrodite’s left tit,” said Stulynow. “Even though it is ball-breakingly cold,” he sniffed. “That will be a problem for you, I think. For it me, it is only as cold as home in winter, nothing more.”

Holland searched the deceptively level mountainside. Black holes gaped where lava tubes and chambers had collapsed into themselves.

“Where’s the base?”

Stulynow pointed to a place half a kilometre or so uphill, where a cluster of a dozen bubble tents blistered the mountainside. The largest of the domes was a good forty metres across. A short-range relay array stood in the middle, communicating with the radio mast at the buggy park, and through that, with the rest of the planet. More brick buildings surrounded it. Had Stulynow not pointed the camp out, Holland doubted he would have found it; the domes carried a thick coat of dust, turning the NASA, ESA and Marsform badges into colourless blotches. The parts of the base made of brick were practically invisible.