gentleman looks after his clothes. A nod, a word to the number up and the number down and the number across as he changes into the simple white coverall. Sometimes, in the transfer, the body forgets itself; a soiling, a leaking, at least, a drooling. As ever, the papery thing catches at the crotch. Ready. Fifteen hundred locker doors clatter shut, ranked and filed. People moving; always moving, along streets, down platform, onto trains, into rooms, down plastic clad corridors, moving together, a herd of bodies under the utilitarian strip light.
He nods to his fellow on-shifters. He does not confuse them with workmates anymore. Once you get in that chair, they can send you anywhere. The thin Sikh man next him could work an entire quartersphere away. His own closest workmate is a black man from Senegal. Ashwin carries, he bolts.
But the room catches him, every time. He flies heavy-lift rosettes through the staggering canyon lands of Valles Marineris, but a thousand black-chairs, row upon row, all facing in the same direction, is awe-full.
As ever, the air hums to barely audible mantras to relax the on-workers and set the brain-wave patterns ready for the transfer. The scent is mood blue. Ashwin has come to hate that stink up his nose. He finds his seat, twenty along by thirty-five deep. Still warm. He knows its every creak as he lowers himself onto the skin. A nod to the Sikh, mumbling a prayer to himself. Ashwin lies back, stretches. The sensory array arms unfold over his face like a mantis over her husband.
A start, something, down at the foot of the room. A noise raised over the mantra-wash; wailing, animal noise. Ashwin props himself up, the machine arms with their eyecups and earplugs and skull taps scurry away. Thrashing: something is spasming its couch. Attendants come running through the rows of transfer couches, screening the sight with their bodies, but the fear has rippled out to every corner of the huge room.
The technology is safe, they said. Tested, tried, true, safe. You need have no fear. We are paying for your soul, but nothing will go wrong.
But things go wrong. Things have always gone wrong. The ones who settled under the skull-tap probes and went into seizures. The ones who built up an allergic response to the nanoprocessors. The ones who, like this one, come out in pieces, broken in the head. The ones, they rumor, who never come out at all. Who go somewhere else.
Ashwin watches the electric gurney weave its load back between the couches. Nothing to see here, nothing’s happened, everything will be fine, go about your work, you have great work to do today, great work. And Ashwin feels part of him saying, yes, yes to the blandishments of the company medics and he knows that part is the pretransfer drugs suffusing up through the skin of the seat, through his own skin, into his blood. Let go. All is illusion: mind, body… illusion. Free your mind. Let us park your body. Go. Commute.
Soft bioplastic fingers unfold over Ashwin. Eyecups press over his sockets: A moment’s panic as the plugs seek out the contours of his inner ears and fill them. The breathing tubes worm down his nostrils, into his lungs. The drip-feed needles and blood scrubbers are busy at his wrists. Last of all, the taps caress his skull as the nanoprocessors swarm through the cranium into his selfhood and wrench it away from him.
But another Ashwin, one the drugs and tiny skull machines cannot touch, shouts through the drugs and the seethe of nanomachines, the sweat-reek of the workroom, the corporada mantra-blur. What kind of world? What kind of Mars you asked yourself, up on the roof, riding with the poor men like the poor man you are? That kind of Mars, where poor men are taken away quietly on a cart, where there is no fuss, no mess, nothing to spoil the corporada image. You think your people will ever ride on the roof of those great fusion-power expresses? There will never be enough cars on the space-elevator, there will never be enough berths in the transplanetary ships, enough lovely, habitable cities for all the poor of Chandigarh and the Punjab and all of Bharat, let alone the children they squeeze into being every second of every day. Rich men build a rich world. You go to construct a golf course in the sky. A country club for the datarajahs.
Then that Ashwin is snuffed out, and there is the black of light-speed for a time the mind cannot clock. And after that instant: light, mass, sensation, existence. A world. His world. Ashwin Mehta has arrived on Mars.
The old man came down the stairs sniffing. No salty tang of mongrel urine in the porch. He threw back the heavy night curtains. The outer windows were leafy with frost. No taint in the hall. In the study the splendid erection of ATOM 12 was undefiled; a natural challenge to a dog. Why did he always forget to close the door when that thing came to call? Nothing and no one to close them on, most of the time. The living room smelled of vodka and gentle sweat, but no taint of piss. The fire had burned down to gray charcoals. New morning now. Antti wrenched open the curtains, admitting watery, destroying light into every part of the room. He waved clear a circle in the frosted mist inside the window. Real mist beyond, moving slowly across the frozen bay. The sun was high and wan, seeming to dash and veer through the upper streamers of the fog. If it were a morning hoar, it would boil off, but the speed with which the trees on Kuresaari Island were fading hinted at an inversion layer forming out at the limit of the pack ice. They could lie out there for days. Weeks, in a stable winter anticyclone. Breath steaming, Antti watched the ice crystals reform and close as cold coils of fog hastened across the ice to swaddle the wooden house.
In the unsympathetic morning light, the oracle-machine was just a wafer of translucent aquamarine plastic. No more wisdom than a credit card. Wincing at the foolishness of old men and firelight and vodka, Antti slipped open the lid. Still there from the night before. He had forgotten to shut the program down. So clever, and yet too stupid to think of doing it itself.
Dining room unsullied. Dining table polished and perfect. Table linen pure and unpolluted. Kitchen. And there it was, one paw in a shallow lagoon of cold, orange piss, proudly wagging its tail.
“Hiii! Hutt! Hutt! Hutt! Out with you, pissing beast! Go on, out, out, away with you.”
The thing had a terrible temper, but the wrath of old men is swift and fearless. The vile thing was bundled out the back door before it could open its jaw. It stood there, grubby white on the white, stunned by the suddenness of the cold. Antti bent to the undersink cupboard to fetch cleaner and cloths and disinfectant before young feet in search of cereals came skidding through the amber slick. It was crying now, a kind of sobbing keen that made Antti despise it all the more. Learn Darwin, he thought as he went down on his knees to the crusted piss.
Only when he heard Yuri’s voice from outside did Antti realize he had not heard the dog’s yip for some minutes now. He ran to the door to scold Yuri about silly boys who went rushing out into the cold not properly dressed. He listened. Yuri’s voice was getting farther away. He was out on the ice.
“Bloody cur!” Antti cursed. He dashed down the back path as fast as his years and the winter would let him.
“Yuri!”
The boy was farther even than he had feared, calling into the white fog that came weaving thicker every moment through the trees across the inlet.
“Yuri!”
Come back, oh, come back now, don’t let this be the moment when you decide that everything old men say is stupid and you can safely disregard them.
“Yuri!”
The boy stopped, on the edge of melting into the white and white.
“Come back, come on back. It’s not safe; you can’t see a foot in front of you in this fog, and the ice can still be rotten.”
“But my dog…”
“Come back to the house.” He saw the boy look back to the dimensionless white of the closing fog and knew what he must offer to buy his safety. “I’ll go look for him. You go on back. It’ll be all right.”
Hunting through the drawer of the study desk, Antti looked at his private space fleet and shivered. Venture into the unknown. The alien on your doorstep. He found his mission training compass. It saw me through Kamchatka, it won’t let me down within sight of my own back door. Outside, the cold was paralyzing. Antti took a bearing on the house and went down to the edge of the ice. Pebbles grated beneath his booted feet. And he was there. The door opening, everyone waiting for that first crack of light, that pale slit widening into a wedge, a rectangle of illumination, beyond which lay a new world. Cranking down the ladder, everyone getting into proper order in the lock as narrow as a birth canal; bulking in their excursion suits, rehearsing their lines. Rozdevshensky first, then him, last Nitin. The top of Rozdevshensky’s helmet vanishing over the platform. Rozdevshensky down, a breath-more a sigh-on the helmet intercoms. Then him, lumbering out backward, clumsy as a spring-woken bear. Looking at the
