The State of The Art

damaged.'

'You’ll get a new one?'

'Yes, of course.'

'A better one?'

'I expect so.'

'What will they keep? Just the brain?'

'Plus about a metre of secondary column and a few subunits.'

I want us to get there. I want us to be found. I want to live.

We come to the edge of the escarpment about mid-morning. Even though I am not walking I feel very tired and sleepy, and my appetite has disappeared. The view ought to be impressive, but I’m only aware that it’s a long, difficult way down. The escarpment lip is crumbly and dangerous, cut with many runnels and channels, which lower down become steep, shadowy ravines separating sharp-edged ridges and jagged spires. Scree spreads out beyond, far below, in the landscape at the cliff’s foot; it is the colour of old, dried blood.

I am suitably depressed.

We sit on a rock and rest before making our way down. The horizon is very clear and sharp. There are mountains in the far distance, and many broad, shallow channels on the wide plain that lies between the mountains and us.

I don’t feel well. My guts ache continually and breathing deeply hurts too, as though I’ve broken a rib. I think it is just the taste of the recycler’s soup that is putting me off eating, but I’m not certain. There are a few stars in the sky.

'We couldn’t glide down, could we?' I ask the suit. That’s how we got through the atmosphere, after all. The suit used the minuscule amount of AG it had left, and somehow got the tattered photopanel sheet to function as a parachute.

'No. The AG is almost certain to fail completely next time we try it, and the parachute trick… we’d need too much space, too much drop to ensure deployment.'

'We have to climb?'

'We have to climb.'

'All right, we’ll climb.' We get up, approach the edge.

Night again. I am exhausted. So tired, but I cannot sleep. My side is tender to the touch and my head throbs unbearably. It took us the whole afternoon and evening to get down here to the plains, and we both had to work at it. We nearly fell, once. A good hundred-metre drop with just some flakes of slatey stone to hold on to until the suit kicked a foothold. Somehow we made it down without snagging and tearing further the photopanels. More good luck than skill, probably. Every muscle seems to hurt. I’m finding it hard to think straight. All I want to do is twist and turn and try to find a comfortable way to lie.

I don’t know how much of this I can take. This is going to go on for a hundred days or more, and even if the still undiscovered leak doesn’t kill me I feel like I’m going to die of exhaustion. If only they were looking for us. Somebody walking in a suit on a planet sounds hard to find, but shouldn’t be really. The place is barren, homogeneous, dead and motionless. We must be the only movement, the only life, for hundreds of kilometres at least. To our level of technology we ought to stand out like a boulder in the dust, but either they aren’t looking or there’s nobody left to look.

But if the base still exists, they must see us eventually, mustn’t they? The sats can’t spend all their time looking outwards, can they? They must have some provision for spotting enemy landings. Could we have just slipped through? It doesn’t seem possible.

I look at my photographs again. They appear a hundred at a time on the viewer. I press one and it blooms to fill the little screen with its memories.

I rub my head and wonder how long my hair will grow. I have a silly but oddly frightening vision of my hair growing so long it chokes me, filling the helmet and the suit and cutting out the light, finally asphyxiating me. I’ve heard that your hair goes on growing after you die, and your nails too. I wonder that — despite one or two of the photographs, and their associated memories — I haven’t felt sexually aroused yet.

I curl up, foetal. I am a little naked planet of my own, reduced to the primitive within my own stale envelope of gas. A tiny moonlet of this place, on a very low, slow, erratic orbit.

What am I doing here?

It’s as if I drifted into this situation. I didn’t ever think about fighting or doing anything risky at all, not until the war came along. I agreed it was necessary, but that seemed obvious; everybody thought so, everybody I knew, anyway. And volunteering, agreeing to take part; that too seemed… natural. I knew I might die, but I was prepared to risk that; it was almost romantic. Somehow it never occurred to me it might entail privation and suffering. Am I as stupid as those throughout history — those I’ve always despised and pitied — who’ve marched off to war, heads full of noble notions and expectations of easy glory, only to die screaming and torn in the mud?

I thought I was different. I thought I knew what I was doing.

'What are you thinking about?' the suit asks.

'Nothing.'

'Oh.'

'Why are you here?' I ask it. 'Why did you agree to come with me?'

The suit — officially as smart as me, and with similar rights — could have gone its own way if it wanted. It didn’t have to come to war.

'Why shouldn’t I come with you?'

'But what’s in it for you?'

'What’s in it for you?'

'But I’m human; I can’t help feeling like this. I want to know what you think the machines' excuse is.'

'Oh, come on; you’re a machine too. We’re both systems, we’re both matter with sentience. What makes you think we have more choice than you in the way we think? Or that you have so little? We’re all programmed. We all have our inheritance. You have rather more than us, and it’s more chaotic, that’s all.'

There is a saying that we provide the machines with an end, and they provide us with the means. I have a fleeting impression the suit is about to trot out this hoary adage.

'Do you really care what happens in the war?' I ask it.

'Of course,' it says, with what could almost be a laugh in its voice. I lie back and scratch. I look at the camera.

'I’ve got an idea,' I tell it. 'How about I find a very bright picture and wave it about now, in the dark?'

'You can try it, if you want.' The suit doesn’t sound very encouraging. I try it anyway, then my arm gets tired waving the camera around. I leave it propped up against a rock, shining into space. It looks very lonely and strange, that picture of a sunny orbital day, sky and clouds and glittering water, bright hulls and tall sails, fluttering pennants and dashing spray, in this dead and dusty darkness. It isn’t all that bright though; I suspect reflected starlight isn’t much weaker. It would be easy to miss, and they don’t seem to be looking anyway.

'I wonder what happens to us all in the end,' I yawn, sleepy at last.

'I don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see.'

'Won’t that be fun,' I murmur, and say no more.

The suit says this is day twenty.

We are in the foothills on the far side of the mountains we saw in the distance from the escarpment. I am still alive. The pressure in the suit is reduced to slow down the loss rate from the leak, which the suit has decided is not a hole as such, but increased osmosis from several areas where too much of the outer layers ablated when we were falling. I am breathing pure oxygen now, which lets us bring down the pressure significantly. It might be coincidence, but the food from the recycler tube tastes better since we switched to pure gas.

There is a dull ache all the time from my belly, but I am learning to live with it. I’ve stopped caring, I think. I’ll live or I’ll die, but worrying and complaining won’t improve my chances. The suit isn’t sure what to make of this. It doesn’t know whether I have given up hope or just become blase about the whole thing. I feel no guilt at keeping it