Champion of Mars (30 page)

His opa had given him this room because it faced into the dawn, partly for the spectacle, he said, and mostly to get him out of bed in the mornings, a tactic that bore only partial success. But today, before the full constellation of mirrors was ablaze in the sky, Krisseos was up and washed, ready for the day’s work. Downstairs, his opa had left the breakfast sacks for him to carry down the hill, along with a pair of skins, one for wine and one for water. He grabbed them up and headed off to the quay.

“Ho there, sleepy head!” called his opa, in rare good spirits. “You are late. Before sun up, I said.”

Krisseos waved at the sky where one by one bright points of light flashed into full illumination. “And so it is, not all the suns are yet lit.”

“Pah!” was all Opa could manage.

“Good morning Krisseos,” said the machine Kaibele. Both it and the old man sat on the boat’s gunwales. Mars’ tides were strong, and the boat had floated up off the pebbles to bob level with the jetty.

For a split second, Krisseos’ brain jammed. No, he said to himself. No, not today. I refuse to be a stammering child. Not in front of her. “Morning,” replied Krisseos. He managed to smile. It got easier the longer he held the machine’s gaze.

“Humph, you look different today. Less like the cat got your tongue.”

“I feel different, Opa,” he said. He did, in truth; less burdened. His interest in the machine overcame his shyness. “Shall we get going?”

“Aye,” said Opa, facing out to sea. “Tide’s turning, and will not wait on us.”

Krisseos mimed along with his opa’s words to Kaibele. The machine smiled.

Opa turned back to him and made his way to the rear. “Come on! Unhitch the lines, or we’ll spend our day sat in this boat on the beach rather than fishing.” He shook his head as he took his place at the tiller.

Krisseos pushed the boat off the rough jetty with a boat hook. Carefully he rowed by those boats still in the harbour, coming to life at the hands of sleepy crews. The other villagers shouted out to them as they sculled past, good natured boasts and jibes. All were fond of Krisseos. He was the only youth in the village.

When they rounded the harbour mole helping Barrafee Point close the cove to the open sea, Krisseos shipped the oars and began to unfurl the sails. The machine joined him, her hands expert and sure on the rigging. The canvas billowed out, a fair following wind pushing them out to join the vanguard of Barrafee’s small fishing fleet.

The sky was clear, and the sun was hot on his skin. Kittiwakes skimmed the low swell in the wake of the boat.

A thought suddenly occurred to him.

“Machine, can you swim?”

“Master Krisseos,” said the machine solemnly, “I cannot float.”

They both laughed. At the rear of the boat, Krisseos’ opa shook his head, and hoped the boy remembered what he had said to him.

The next fortnight passed quickly and easily. The machine was slender but strong, able to haul up nets with a speed Krisseos could not match. She was likewise an accomplished sailor. At her urging, the old man decided to take a break, allowing Krisseos and Kaibele out in their smack alone. About time, both the old and young man thought, if for slightly different reasons.

Vardamensku’s trepidation about Krisseos’ attraction to the machine did not recede, but he was forced to admit she had brought the youth out of himself. His blushes became less frequent, his mood more even. Confidence blossomed in the boy, doubly so when Varka acquiesced to him taking the boat out alone.

He wished at that moment that he had allowed him to do it earlier. Krisseos was becoming a man. For years, he had been hurrying him along, and now he realised that soon the boy would be gone altogether, and that – for all he had said to Krisseos – gave him cause for sorrow.

At the very least, it appeared that he had ceased to worry about the remembering quite so much. All men have to have their heart broken at least once, he thought. That’s just the way of things. Why not by a machine?

Still he worried.

I
T WAS THE
night before Krisseos would leave the village for the remembering. His party was over, and they were alone. Himeks Moon stood huge in the sky, raising knives of white light from the ripples in the harbour. Further out, past the mole, the white tops hushed; the world breathing, Kaibele had said.

Kaibele and Krisseos sat on the end of an old jetty, out away to the western end of the harbour, which Barrafee’s small river had long since filled with silt, making the water too shallow for the fishing boats. By Krisseos lay a skin of wine, a present from his opa. The old man had hoped to spend this last night of Krisseos’ ignorance with him, when he was still just the boy he had raised, before some other man looked out through his eyes and saw him differently, but he understood the passions of the young, for he had been young many times himself.

“There are no houses out by the far end of the harbour now,” Krisseos was saying. “But you can see the bases of walls where the cottages used to be.” He gestured behind them up the hill, to where squares of white poked through the tough maquis like the teeth of dead giants. “I wonder, are they empty because the people moved to the east of the village when this part of the harbour silted up? Or was the town much bigger once? There are empty houses three streets up from us, but Opa says sometimes they will be full, and sometimes not. People come and go. It’s frustrating. Perhaps after the remembering I will know. If I take the remembering.” The shallow water was clear as air, fish whitened by moonlight flying beneath the soles of his feet. “Do you know if Barrafee was bigger once? It must be glorious to remember everything you ever did, back over time, back to the beginning.”

“I do not remember,” said the machine. “I wish I did.”

“But machines remember everything!”

“Who said so? I said no such thing,” said the machine. “We forget as easily as you. What divides mortals from the machines, Krisseos, is that we never forget who we are, unless we choose to, and then the loss is permanent. That is all the difference there is,” said Kaibele. “We do not remember everything we have done. Time is a harsh abrasive, it can wear anything away. The finest data storage system is not immune to its effects. Every time we move from shell to shell, or our personalities are transmitted, or the sun suffers a storm, or there is a burst of radiation from a distant supernova, small errors creep into our memories. These accumulate over time, until our pasts are corrupted to the point where we cannot read them again. Redundant storage units can help, but I can go to two of those and check the memories they hold against one another, and they will both be different. We self-correct by extrapolation, and we don’t always get it right. Reconstructing the past mathematically is as hard as predicting the future.”

“The priests say fate is set.”

“So they do. Perhaps they are right. Maybe not. I do not know.”

“You are immortal.”

“Yes, in a way. And you envy us for it, just as we envy you for your chance at a new beginning. It enriches you in a way that we will never have...” She stopped, searching for words. “Yours is not a strict continuation. Each rebirth layers more complexity onto your soul, but if an AI spirit goes into the stacks for a while, what comes out is the same as before. A copy, not a persistence of being. There is no enrichment in death for us. Our souls are different from yours.” In the moonlight, their faces were the same colour, planes of white and grey; if Krisseos ignored the sculpted tubes of her neck, she could almost be a girl of his own age.

“So ours are better?” said Krisseos, teasing.

“Oh, I didn’t say that either,” she smiled, resting a hand on his arm.

“You must remember how old you are.”

“I am old. That is enough.”

“Have I offended you?” Krisseos’ earlier shyness rushed back, rocking his newfound confidence. “I... I am sorry. There are no girls here; I mean, no machines. I mean, I don’t know these things, I am sorry if I was rude to ask, I...”

“Shh,” she said, and her smile was kind. “I am teasing you.” She had done this often, with the ease of long familiarity, though they’d known each other only two weeks. “In honesty, I do not know. I have a date, but calendars change with time. I could find out if I asked one of the higher spirits, I suppose. Perhaps I have in the past, I don’t know that either.”

“How old, then?”

She laughed a moment, as if uncomfortable herself. She turned her perfect machine face away from him a moment, sat forward and stared at the moon. Krisseos wished he hadn’t asked. He missed the touch of her hand on his arm. “I am thousands of years old, Krisseos. Many tens of thousands of years old.”

“Wow,” said Krisseos quietly. He whistled through his teeth softly. “Me, I’m seventeen.”

Kaibele laughed. Krisseos grinned. The tension dissipated.

“You are seventeen now, as Krisseos. In a few days you might find that you are as old as I am.”

“Yes.” Krisseos fell quiet a moment.

“Now it’s my turn to say sorry to you. Have you not yet decided?”

“No,” he said. He became thoughtful, and stared at the fish darting over the silt at the foot of the old jetty. He took a nervous pull at his wine.

“I’m sorry. I cannot help you decide. We continuous creatures, we go on forever, with no chance at renewal, unlike you. We never have to make the choice whether to remember or not. Circumstance decides that for us. It is a blessing, and a curse.”

“What is the first thing you remember?” asked Krisseos.

“I remember leaving Earth as was, shortly after my mind was made, I think; almost before men lived on other worlds. At least, I remember how Mars was, before men and machines remade it.”

“Tell me about it, please? It will take my mind off tomorrow.”

“Truly?”

“Please.”

And so she told him of wars and princes, of Earth and Erth, of red sands and blue oceans, of things so far back in time they were like a fable even to her, and she laughed with delighted surprise almost as often as he at her recollections. And so they passed the night.

“Do you remember anything else?” He felt completely at ease with Kaibele. He could not imagine having not been. His bashfulness was a ridiculous memory.

“Many other things, but in particular a promise I made. That is the clearest of all, and comes from near the beginning.”

“What was your promise?”

“That is for me to know, dear Krisseos.” She smiled broadly. “You need only know that I have always kept it, and I always will.” She leaned forward and kissed him gently on the lips. Her mouth was warm and moist, not like he had thought a kiss to be, but Krisseos had never been kissed before. In a way, he had expected it. Like everyone expects their first kiss, he knew it was coming, and like everyone he was also taken by surprise.

Kaibele’s warm face withdrew. “It would please me greatly if you would remember that, whatever you decide in Kemyonseet,” she said. They looked out toward the western sea, and the rising highlands beyond it. The sky was turning dark pink. This time he took her hand, nervous still. She grasped his fingers and they sat a while. Then she smiled again, and kissed him again, for a long time and with passion, leaving Krisseos gasping and aroused. She held him tightly for a long second, her body moulding itself to his as if it too were flesh, then she pulled away.

“Now, go to bed for a few hours,” she said. “Tomorrow is not a day to be faced without sleep.”

K
RISSEOS AWOKE WITH
a thick head but a light heart. He had slept little, but he felt energised. He smiled and touched his lips.

“Boy! Krisseos! You have to get up now. I’ve let you sleep as long as is possible. We have to go!” Strong sunlight blazed around the edges of his window.

The barge.

Krisseos scrambled to his feet and flung open the shutters. The barge dominated the sea, two kilometres out beyond the harbour, too large to enter Barrafee’s little cove. A high hull of black metal crammed with heavy carvings towered over the mole. Brightly coloured bunting festooned its upper decks. Below that stood other children on the cusp of adulthood, youths and girls his own age.

“It’s here!”

“Yes, it’s here.” His opa huffed up the ladder into the room. “And we better get going. It will stay until noon. If we are not aboard by then, it will take your lack of presence as a refusal and depart, so we better get going.” He threw Krisseos’ small bag at him. “We’ve got less than an hour.”

There was no fishing today. The short street from Vardamensku’s shop to the harbour front was thronged by the village’s two-score inhabitants, out to bid their only son farewell forever. When he returned, if he returned, he would not be the same boy as stood before them now. Krisseos took their shoulder slaps, gifts of food and encouragements with good grace, but always he was searching behind whoever was talking to him, looking for a face made of metal. No matter how hard he looked, Kaibele was nowhere to be seen.

They got in the boat, steadied by their neighbours. Cheers went up as they slipped out from the jetty. Today, Krisseos’ opa rowed.

Krisseos looked back, still searching the meagre crowd.

“I said, my son. Always, always they move on,” said his opa. “Always.”

“Yes. You did,” he said miserably. “I hoped she would come to say goodbye.”

Clear of the boats, they unfurled the sails and prepared for the short trip out to the barge. Vardamensku was searching his ancient brain for some gruff piece of advice on first romances, when Krisseos shot out of his seat.

“Steady, boy! You’ll have us in the sea!”

“There, there she is! There she is!”

Vardamenksu stood, rested his hands on the boy’s shoulder and looked back to shore. The machine stood waving outside the mole, her metal and plastic body shining in the sunshine, hidden from the town. She waved until she had become a seaglass glint on the seashore, and then she turned and was gone into the rocks.

“She won’t be here when I return, will she?” asked Krisseos.

“She might, boy, she might,” said Vardemnsku, rising to take down the sail.