Mars Plus

Prologue Among the Ochre Dunes

The ochre-colored grains of fine sand ground under Roger Torraway s feet. He heard the sound of crunching like a cricket song in the thin Martian air rather than felt the grinding through his ankles. Not many human nerves connected to the steel shanks and hard plastic wedges that comprised his feet.

He glanced down at the tracks that he and his companion, Fetva Mikhailovna Shtev, were leaving on the windward face of this dune. A newcomer to Mars might worry that they were scarring the landscape for a millennium, so feeble must be the winds under an atmospheric pressure of something less than one percent of Earth average.

But what the air lacked in pressure it made up in mass, being ninety-five percent heavy molecules of carbon dioxide. Also, because this feeble atmosphere could not effectively spread the heat load that solar radiation pounded into the Martian landscape, weather systems tended to be global in scale: single wind cells circulated across the equator from the summer hemisphere to the winter latitudes, and thermal tides flowed from the warm dayside to the chilly night. Those winds racked up huge speeds as they went. A long-time resident like Roger had personally seen how, when the surface velocity exceeded 100 meters per second, large sand grains and small stones literally skipped over the face of the dunes, scattering tinier grains and sending up clouds of dust that would hang in the atmosphere for months, like smoke.

His and Fetvas tracks would vanish with the next storm—which was about thirty-six hours away now, according to Torraway s weather sense. That prediction was based partly on his own on-site observations of temperature and pressure, partly on his latest download from the planetwide cyber grid which reported satellite data and issued hourly forecasts for the major human colonies at Schiaparelli, Solis Planum, and Tharsis Montes. These were places he rarely visited anymore, but from their weather reports he could easily triangulate and interpolate the conditions he was likely to meet anywhere in a wide band across Mars s surface.

Roger Torraway, U.S. Air Force colonel (retired— but then so was his branch of the service, along with most of the country it had belonged to), had seen a lot of Mars in his forty-odd years of exploration. He had traveled around his adopted planet at least six times, from Olympus Mons to Hellas Planitia, and skirted the edges of the dry-ice fields at both north and south poles. He had even visited the infamous Face of Mars in the Elysium region. As his worlds number-one citizen, Roger felt he should investigate for himself this phenomenon, which had so fascinated and inspired the masses of humans left behind on Earth.

Feature writers in the Sunday supplements had debated the Face's probable origins ever since the Viking 1 orbiter had relayed the first photographs of the enigmatic, faintly smiling formation in 1976. Many people wistfully believed it was a purpose-built artifact aimed at the sky, like the Nazca pictographs in the Permian desert. But Torraway had established with digital scans returned from his own faceted eyes that the staring Face was indeed just an illusion of the camera. It was totally invisible at ground level. Roger had found none of the distinctive planes and shadows that had aroused such intense simian curiosity, nothing but a small saddleback hill littered with boulders. He was not even sure he had identified both of the ashpits that, from far overhead, had resolved so clearly into eye sockets.

In his life on Mars, Roger Torraway was often alone but never lonely From time to time he met up with one of the thirty or so true Cyborgs who lived a free and natural existence under the Martian sky. Since each of them was designed to be a self-contained unit, independent of the dug-in human colonies as far as rations and energy supplies, routine repairs, tools, weapons, and grid links went, the members of the Cyborg population had nothing to share with each other except personal histories and observations in rare, fleeting companionships.

Some of these human-machine constructs were more self-contained than others. For example, the Cyborg Fetva Mikhailovna Shtev. She had to be the second oldest Earth-born creature on Mars. Fetva had much larger solar arrays than the ones in Roger's design. On Torraways shoulders, those elegantly structured webs of photovoltaic film folded or extended themselves as neatly as a bat s wings. Shtev's panels, on the other hand, formed a broad standing canopy above her head like a potentates parasol—ugly, but it meant she could rely entirely on Mars's relatively feeble ration of solar energy. So, unlike Roger, Fetva did not have to return at regular intervals to the path of the microwave footprint laid down by the orbiting fusion generator lodged in a crater on Deimos. Roger did. He needed that extra boost to charge the batteries powering his backpack computer, which monitored his auxiliary sensory systems.

Still, whenever Shtev met him under the tingling energy shower, he noticed that she tended to walk-more slowly and seemed to glow with relaxed health. She even smiled a bit.

The differences between the two of them went deeper than their energy capacity. For example, Fetya was the product of the late Russian Republics Cyborg program, also aimed at Mars, which had operated in parallel with, but secret from, the program at the U.S. National Laboratory at Tonka, Oklahoma—now the sovereign state of Texahoma in the North American Free Trade Partners—which had created Roger. With their typically Slavic approach to problem solving, Fetya's doctors had surgically removed all physical traces of her femininity, sparing only whatever kernel of identity lived in the cybernetic convolutions of what remained of her mind. (But why then, Roger wondered, had she retained the female-gendered names, the imya and otchestvo of a Great Russian, instead of adopting a serial number as the other Cyborgs of her line had done?)

Maybe that had been innate survival instinct, Fetya sensing it was necessary to keep alive something from her human past. Maybe it had worked, too. She still functioned, while the rest of her compatriots were long dead, having given out well before any unrecoverable systems failure or metals fatigue should have claimed them.

Another difference in the Russian Cyborgs was their skin. Roger's glistening, midnight black covering—his "bat suit" somebody had called it once, back on Earth—had been turning a deep, bruised purple over the years of exposure to Mars s high levels of ultraviolet radiation, unblocked by any ozone layer because the planet's atmosphere had never had enough free oxygen to create one. Fetya's skin was a dull green. With her overall heavier build and tentlike solar array, she resembled a cross between one of Rodin's larger bronzes left to tarnish in the rain and an old U.S. Army truck with a layer of grime on its olive-drab paint job.

As the two of them walked west, Fetya pointed her light index finger at a spire of rock that stood out from the gray cliffs that obscured the horizon. When her forearm reached full extension, her hand dropped at the wrist, reflexing in an impossible 110-degree angle. The movement opened a dark cavity through her metacarpals, exposing the blunt end of a blackened 9 mm barrel.

"Bang!" her voice said in Roger's head.

"Do you still have ammunition for that thing?" He had not heard its discharge in the thin air. He had seen no muzzle flash, nor any wisp of expanding gas. And, even at extreme long-range viewing, he could detect no flying chips or spray of stone dust on or about the spire.

"Yup." Her hand snapped back, becoming just a hand again.

^"With you?"

"Not anymore—too heavy. Nothing to shoot here, anyway. But I got it cached where I can reach it real quick—both nine-mil, and double-aught for the scatter tube in my left arm."

"But then... why bother going through the motions?'

"Practice. Keeps the circuits limber," Shtev explained. "Target acquisition and ranging, parallax correction, muscle alignment and tensing. .. these subroutines can get stale. Bit tables pick up holes. Have to keep them combed out."

"Did you hit anything?" he pressed, trying to see the outcrop through her very different senses.

"Yup."

"How would you know?" Roger was curious about all his friends whose systems were differently wired than his own.

"Retinal imaging says so." Shtev shrugged. "Point-nine-nine probability, anyway"

"Does that account for windage and parabolic dropoff?"

"Yup. Calibrated for Mars light gravity, even. ... Or used to be, before that module decayed to fifty-percent reliability and terminated ..."

Torraway knew about deteriorating datastreams from first-hand experience. Despite the triple redundancy built into his cyber systems and the constant checksums they took with backup units orbiting overhead, Roger's computer-controlled senses had become subject to intermittent failures. "Microseizures" he called them, when his world went black for two or three whole seconds while the backpack computer reset itself and then rebuilt his mechanical sensorium from the raw signals.

Roger understood that he was just getting old. But what the actual design-life expectancy on his mechanical and cybernetic systems was, not even the humans who had built them could say. Alexander Bradley and the rest of the interface team back in Tonka had been shooting for a uniform fifty-year mean time between failures. That would have allowed Roger to live out at least the normal human span of three score and ten.

As if he were normal anymore. Or, for that matter, human.

Still, the discoloration of his skin and the increasing frequency of those microseizures gave him cause to worry. Was it possible that Brad and the other designers had slipped up? Were there other miscalculations buried in his near-perfect Mars-adapted body, ticking away like some kind of viral logic bomb?

Torraway looked down at his own legs. Even apart from the discolorations, he was beginning to worry about his skin's surface integrity. Over the years, despite his preternaturallv accurate sense of balance and Mars's helpfully low gravity, Torraway had taken his share of tumbles and scrapes. He still had a supply of patches and quicksealer, of course, but there comes a time in the life of any garment, skin included, when the mass of patches will no longer hold together; it lacks the tensile strength of the whole cloth. The covering on Roger's lower body was approaching that moment. Worse yet, he feared the incessant radiation was doing more than changing his color: that his glossy, impervious hide might suddenly become ... brittle.

Roger's biggest concern of all, however, lived outside his body.

The fusion generator on Deimos was subject to implicit design limitations—namely, its fifty-year fuel supply. Once, back when Roger had first walked on Mars, that span had seemed like a lifetime. But now those years had almost all ticked away Torraway still felt no older, or not in the human terms of aches and pains, aside from the random glitches associated with his computer-aided senses. In fact, the excruciating surgeries that had made him Cyborg seemed to have gifted him with eternal vigor and stamina. But someday, soon, someone had better do something about the old magnetohydrodynamic reaction horn up in orbit.

He must have mentioned this worry to Fetya—or had she been listening in to the echo of his thoughts as they cycled through his backpack cyber and leached out to the computer grid?

"You know," she said, "colonials are all time building more orbital power stations. Maybe they spare you some juice?"

"Wouldn't work," Torraway replied. Each of those stations was up in geosynchronous orbit, locked in over one point on the surface and beaming its power down to a single colony complex. "If I depended on their generosity," he said aloud, "I'd be trapped within a hundred-kilometer radius of one tunnel city or another— like an Indian at a U.S. Cavalry fort."

"Which means what?"

"Uhh ... You'd say I was like a Jew in the Czar's shtetl." "Ah!"

"I don't want to be tied down."

"So, is simple. You must go back among humans. See to the refueling. Demand your rights as Mars first citizen."

"It's not that simple, Fetya. . . . That's an old-style fusion device up there, running on deuterium and tritium. The builders extracted its original fuel from Earth s oceans, but there's no setup on Mars to reprocess our limited water supplies like that. So the replacement fuel would have to come up from Earth. And that means one of the colonies would have to trade for it. In turn, they'd have to give up something the human colonists wanted more. My status as 'first citizen' just doesn't swing that much weight. Besides, I don't know the situation on Earth anymore. Nor, to be truthful, much about current Martian politics. I suspect the tension over Earths claims to Martian territory would make peaceful trading rather difficult, especially in a contraband item like fusion fuel."

"Don't know until you ask."

"But that's the humiliating part—asking."

"Humiliation? So you feel human emotions still? After so much time away?" Shtev grunted in his head. "How long since you went under pressure and talked to human people with air-driven voice?"

"Not since Sulie died. . . . Oh, and I did go back for Don Kayman's funeral, but I just stayed behind a rock and watched the burial."

"Otherwise, just monitor computer grid when suits you"

"Yeah, I listen in, sometimes."

"So? Listen in harder. Find out what colonials need. Help them get it. Humans suck up for gratitude."

"I don't know...."

"She's right, Roger!"

The voice came from his left. He turned around to see the outline of his first wife, Dorrie. She was walking lightly along beside him on the crest of a dune. Instead of a pressure suit, she wore a tiny pair of shorts and a halter, with her dark hair flying free on the feeble Martian wind. It was a bit-image that Torraway sometimes wished would decay faster than the other random dropouts in his backpack computer.

"You really should go back and talk to the administrators about your fusion generator," Dorries silvery voice warned. "Time on fuel supply is growing short ... Only eight hundred and thirty-two Martian days left! Do something about it!"

"All right, Dorrie, I'll talk to them," he agreed—if only to turn the warning image off.

"What?" Shtev asked, from his right side.

"I said I'll see to it."

"Good. Preserve us all."

Roger nodded. After a few more paces, he glanced over to his left again but Dorrie was gone. She had not even left phantom footprints in the ochre sands.