The day came when I woke up and realized I’d seen the medic before. Not long after that I stayed awake long enough to say “hello.” Eventually I learned that a survey satellite had picked up the exploding gig, and shot pictures because that bright light was unusual. An AI identified a shape in the dust as a human body lying outside, and dispatched an autorescue—a rocket with a people-grabbing arm. The autorescue flew out of Olympic City’s launch pad on a ballistic trajectory, landed not far from me, crept over to my not-yet-out-of-air, not-yet-frozen body, grabbed me with a mechanical arm, and stuffed me into its hold. It took off again, flew to the hospital, and handed me over to the doctor.
Total cost of one autorescue mission, and two weeks in a human-contact hospital—which the insurance company refused to cover because I’d deliberately blown up the gig—was maybe twenty successful prospecting runs’ worth. So as soon as I could move, they indentured me and, since I was in no shape to do grunt-and-strain stuff for a while, they found a little prospector’s supply company that wanted a human manager for an office at the Hellas depot. I learned the job—it wasn’t hard—and grew with the company, eventually as Mars’s first indentured CEO.
I took other jobs, bookkeeping, supervising, cartography, anything where I could earn wages with which to pay off the indenture faster, especially jobs I could do online in my nominal hours off. At every job, because I’d promised Sam, I learned as much as I could. Eventually, a few days before my forty-third birthday, I paid off the indenture, quit all those jobs, and went into business for myself.
By that time I knew how the money moved, and for what, in practically every significant business on Mars. I’d had a lot of time to plan and think, too.
So that was it. I kept my word—oh, all right, botterogator, let’s check that box too. Keeping promises is important to success. After all, here I am.
Sixty-two earthyears later, I know, because everyone does, that a drug that costs almost nothing, which everyone takes now, could have kept Sam alive. A little money a year, if anyone’d known, and Sam and me could’ve been celebrating anniversaries for decades, and we’d’ve been richer, with Sam’s brains on the job too. And botterogator, you’d be talking to her, and probably learning more, too.
Or is that what I think now?
Remembering Sam, over the years, I’ve thought of five hundred things I could have done instead of what I did, and maybe I’d have succeeded as much with those too.
But the main question I think about is only—did she
Every so often I regret that I didn’t really fulfill that second promise, an irony I can appreciate now: she feared the icy grave, but since she burned to mostly water and carbon dioxide, on Mars she became mostly snow. And molecules are so small, and distribute so evenly, that whenever the snow falls, I know there’s a little of her in it, sticking to my suit, piling on my helmet, coating me as I stand in the quiet and watch it come down.
Did she dream me into existence? I kept my promises, and they made me who I am… and was that what she wanted? If I am only the accidental whim of a smart teenage girl with romantic notions, what would I have been without the whim, the notions, or Sam?
Tell you what, botterogator, and you pass this on to the new generation of Martians: it’s funny how one little promise, to someone or something a bit better than yourself, can turn into something as real as Samantha City, whose lights at night fill the crater that spreads out before me from my balcony all the way to the horizon.
Nowadays I have to walk for an hour, in the other direction out beyond the crater wall, till the false dawn of the city lights is gone, and I can walk till dawn or hunger turns me homeward again.
Botterogator, you can turn off the damn stupid flashing lights. That’s all you’re getting out of me. I’m going for a walk; it’s snowing.
PUG
Theodora Goss
“Pug is flat, like most animals in fiction. He is once represented as straying into a rosebed in a cardboard kind of way, but that is all…”
You don’t know how lonely I was, until I met Pug.
In summer, tourists come to Rosings. The coaches are filled with them. They want to see where Roger de Bourgh murdered Lady Alice, or where Lady Alice’s grand-niece Matilda de Bourgh hid King Charles, in the cellar behind a cask of port, from the Roundheads. There has always been a rumor that her son, from her hasty marriage to Walter d’Arcy, resembled the king more than his father. The de Bourghs have never been known for acting with sober propriety. Miss Jenkinson relishes the details. “And here,” she says, “you will see the bloodstains where Lady Alice fell. This floor has been polished every day for a hundred years, but those stains have never come out!” And indeed there are, just there, discolorations in the wood. Whether they are the bloodstains of Lady Alice, I can’t tell you.
When the tourists come, I go to my room, in the modern wing of the house where even Miss Jenkinson’s ingenuity will find no bloodstains, or out into the garden. If, by chance, they happen upon me, I admire the roses, or the fountain with its spitting triton, and they assume I am one of them. Of course, if Miss Jenkinson sees me, she scolds me. “Miss Anne, what will your mother think! Outside on a day like this, and without a shawl.” With the fog rolling over the garden. We are in a valley, at Rosings. We are almost always in a sea of fog.
I could hear them that day, the tourists. In the fog, their voices seemed to come from far away, and then suddenly from just beside me, so I ducked into the maze. It is not a real maze: for that, the tourists must go to Allingham or Trenton. It is only a series of paths between the courtyard, with its triton perpetually spitting water, while stone fish leap around him in rococo profusion, and the rose garden. But the paths are edged with privet that has grown higher than I, at any rate, can see. I have called that place the maze since I was a child. When I am in the maze, I can pretend, for a moment, that I am somewhere else.
So there I was, among the privets, and there he was, sitting on his haunches, panting with his pink tongue hanging out. Pug.
Of course I did not learn his name until later, when he showed me the door. The door: inconsistent, irritating, never there when you want it. And at the best of times, difficult to summon, like a recalcitrant housemaid.
But there was Pug. I assumed he had come from Huntsford, from the parsonage or one of the tradesmen’s houses. He was so obviously cared for, so confident as he sat there, so complacent, even fat. And he had a quality that made him particularly attractive. When he looked at you with his brown eyes, and panted with his pink tongue hanging out, he looked as though he were smiling.
“Here, doggie,” I said. He came to me and licked my hand. I knew, of course, that Mother would never allow it. Not for me, not in, as she called it, my “condition.” But as I said, I was lonely. “Come on, then.” And he followed me, through the courtyard, into the kitchen garden with its cabbages and turnips, and through the kitchen door.
I had no friends at Rosings, but Cook disliked Miss Jenkinson, and the enemy of my enemy was at least my provisional ally. I knew she would give me a scrap of something for Pug. He gobbled a bowl of bread and milk, and looked up at me again with that smile of his.
“If Lady Catherine finds him in your room, there will be I don’t know what to pay,” Cook said, wiping her hands on her apron.
“Mother never comes into my room,” I said.
“Well, I’ll tell Susan to hold her tongue. Only yesterday I said to her, you’re here to clean the bedrooms, not to talk. Someday that tongue of yours is going to fall off from all the talking you do. And won’t your husband be grateful!”
“All right, Cook,” I said. “I’ll take him up, and could you have Susan bring me a box with wood shavings, just
