It can’t be old, Artie grumbled. Japan hasn’t been invented yet. It’s just a bunch of starving people huddled in skin tents. And Honda’s not going to be born for another eleven thousand years!
Martin ignored him.
“‘Raise the sail with your stronger hand.’ Means you need to go after the opportunities where you can help the most.”
Martin started to walk down the hill, away from Gobekli Tepe.
“Now, Artie,” he said, and his voice faded away as he walked, “I see a whole world of opportunity out here for us. Yes, sir, a whole big world…”
Death on Mars
MADELINE ASHBY
Sometimes you have to keep secrets, but there’s always a price to pay for keeping them.
Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer and futurist living in Toronto. She is the author of the Machine Dynasty novels and was the coeditor of Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond. Her most recent book, Company Town, was the winner of the Copper Cylinder Award and a finalist in CBC Books’ Canada Reads competition. She has written science fiction prototypes for Intel Labs, the Institute for the Future, SciFutures, the Atlantic Council, and others. She also teaches strategic foresight at Dubai Future Academy and elsewhere as part of the foresight consultancy Changeist. You can find her at www.madelineashby.com.
“Is he still on schedule?”
Donna’s hand spidered across the tactical array. She pinched and threw a map into Khalidah’s lenses. Marshall’s tug glowed there, spiralling ever closer to its target. Khalidah caught herself missing baseball. She squashed the sentiment immediately. It wasn’t really the sport she missed, she reminded herself. She just missed her fantasy league. Phobos was much too far away to get a real game going; the lag was simply too long for her bets to cover any meaningful spread. She could run a model, of course, and had even filled one halfway during the trip out. It wasn’t the same.
Besides, it was more helpful to participate in hobbies she could share with the others. The counsellors had been very clear on that subject. She was better off participating in Game Night, and the monthly book club they maintained with the Girl Scouts and Guides of North America.
“He’s on time,” Donna said. “Stop worrying.”
“I’m not worried,” Khalidah said. And she wasn’t. Not really. Not about when he would arrive.
Donna pushed away from the terminal. She looked older than she had when they’d landed. They’d all aged, of course—the trip out and the lack of real produce hadn’t exactly done any of them any favours—but Donna seemed to have changed more dramatically than Khalidah or Brooklyn or Song. She’d cut most of her hair off, and now the silver that once sparkled along her roots was the only colour left. The exo-suit hung loose on her. She hadn’t been eating. Everyone hated the latest rotation of rations. Who on Earth—literally, who?—thought that testing the nutritional merits of a traditional Buddhist macrobiotic diet in space was a good idea? What sadistic special-interest group had funded that particular line of research?
“It will be fine,” Donna said. “We will be fine.”
“I just don’t want things to change.”
“Things always change,” Donna said. “God is change. Right, Octavia?”
The station spoke: “Right, Donna.”
Khalidah folded her arms. “So do we have to add an Arthur, just for him? Or a Robert? Or an Isaac? Or a Philip?”
The station switched its persona to Alice B. Sheldon. Its icon spun like a coin in the upper right of Khalidah’s vision. “We already have a James,” the station said. The icon winked.
“Khalidah, look at me,” Donna said. Khalidah de-focused from the In-Vision array and met the gaze of her communications officer. “It won’t be easy,” the older woman said. “But nothing out here is. We already have plenty of data about our particular group. You think there won’t be sudden changes to group dynamics, down there?”
She pointed. And there it was: red and rusty, the colour of old blood. Mars.
His name was Cody Marshall. He was Florida born and bred, white, with white-blond hair and a tendency toward rosacea. He held a Ph.D. in computer science from Mudd. He’d done one internship in Syria, building drone-supported mesh-nets, and another in Alert, Nunavut. He’d coordinated the emergency repair of an oil pipeline there using a combination of de-classified Russian submersibles and American cable-monitoring drones. He’d managed the project almost single-handedly after the team lead at Alert killed himself.
Now here he was on Phobos, sent to de-bug the bore-hole drillers on Mars. A recent solar storm had completely fried the drill’s comms systems; Donna insisted it needed a complete overhaul, and two heads were better than one. Marshall couldn’t do the job from home—they’d lose days re-programming the things on the fly, and the drill-bits were in sensitive places. One false move and months of work might collapse all around billions of dollars of research, crushing it deep into the red dirt. He needed to be close. After all, he’d written much of the code himself.
This was his first flight.
“I didn’t want to be an astronaut,” he’d told them over the lag, when they first met. “I got into this because I loved robots. That’s all. I had no idea this is where I would wind up. But I’m really grateful to be here. I know it’s a change.”
“If you make a toilet seat joke, we’ll delete your porn,” Song said, now. When they all laughed, she looked around at the crowd. “What’s funny? I’m serious. I didn’t come all the way out here to play out a sitcom.”
Marshall snapped his fingers. “That reminds me.” He rifled through one of the many pouches he’d lugged on board. “Your mom sent this along with me.” He coasted a vial through the air at her. Inside, a small crystal glinted. “That’s your brother’s wedding. And your new nephew’s baptism. Speaking of sitcoms. She told me some stories to tell you. She didn’t want to record them—”
“She’s very nervous about recording anything—”
“—so she told me to tell them to you.”
Song rolled her eyes. “Are they about Uncle Chan-wook?”
Marshall’s pale eyebrows lifted high on his pink forehead. “How’d you guess?”
Again, the room erupted in laughter. Brooklyn laughed the loudest. She was a natural flirt. Her parents had named her after a borough they’d visited only once. In high school, she had self-published a series of homoerotic detective novels set in ancient Greece. The profits financed med school. After that, she hit Parsons, for an unconventional residency. She’d worked on the team that designed the exo-suits they now wore. She had already coordinated Marshall’s fitting over the lag. It fit him well. At least, Brooklyn seemed pleased. She was smiling so wide that Khalidah could see the single cavity she’d sustained in all her years of eschewing most refined sugars.
Khalidah rather suspected that Brooklyn had secretly advocated for the macrobiotic study. Chugging a blue algae smoothie every morning seemed like her kind of thing. Khalidah had never asked about it. It was better not to know.
But wasn’t that the larger point of this particular experiment? To see if they could all get along? To see if women—with their lower caloric needs, their lesser weight, their quite literally cheaper labour, in more ways than one—could get the job done, on Phobos? Sure, they were there on a planetary protection mission to gather the last remaining soil samples before the first human-oriented missions showed up, thereby ensuring the “chain of evidence” for future DNA experimentation. But they all knew—didn’t they—what this was really about. How the media talked about them. How the Internet talked about them. Early on, before departure, Khalidah had seen the memes.