Blue Hearts of Mars (9 page)

“Who do you think did it?” I whispered.

Hemingway put his arm around me and hurried us on. “Who cares. Let’s get out of here.” We cut through a narrow alley that led to the street that would connect us to where my apartment was, about fifteen blocks down.

“But what does it mean? You know, beyond the obvious,” I said, shrugging away from his arm and stopping in the alley, near a stack of crates. A rat squeaked and dodged out of the meager light into a space between the stacks. Hemingway stopped, turning.

“What rights are androids denied?” I asked.

He scoffed and laughed mirthlessly. “Come on, Retta.”

“Come on,
Hemingway
. What kind of answer is that? Most of the androids live without anyone ever knowing they’re an android,” I said.

“And when someone deciphers their
tell
? Then what? What is life like for that android?”

I paused. “Explain it to me,” I said. “Because I don’t know. I can only imagine and that’s probably not enough.”

He turned in place, a complete revolution, threw his head back, staring up at the indecipherable night sky, and rubbed his hands across his face. “I don’t want to talk about this, Retta. I want to ignore it.” Stopping, he looked me over and shoved his hands into his pockets. “You don’t want to know this stuff. I promise.” He sighed heavily. There was about three feet of space between us. He met my gaze levelly and I could see the little neurons behind his eyes flashing—tiny red and blue lights flickering back and forth as though to reflect his mood.

When I didn’t say anything, he finally spoke.

“Total outsider status, for starters. There are impolite terms for androids that I’m sure you’ve heard. It starts with that, usually. Sometimes it’s painted on your door. Sometimes it’s scratched into your skin while you’re held down by ten men. We feel that. We have sensation in our skin. We bleed. Not just from the wound, but in our hearts. Our
blue
hearts.” He sighed again, then continued. “Occasionally I’ll be asked to leave a store, a restaurant, a classroom, if my presence offends or upsets anyone. ‘Why do you even need to go to school? You don’t need to
learn
.’ I’ve heard that one often, as though every bit of information was simply loaded into my brain at birth. I can’t blame them. It’s not like androids come with a manual, right?” He smiled weakly at me. “You know, well, you need to know that if the types who hold us down and brand us find out about you and me, they’ll accuse me of rape. They’ll taunt you for being with an android. They’ll ask you crude questions about my size. And I don’t mean how tall I am. Do you want that? Because I don’t. I don’t want that for you.” His voice had risen and his breathing had become erratic. He lowered his eyes. “I can’t believe I would let you go through that. I know it will happen.” He shook his head, a crazed look crossed his face and he began to say something.

I cut him off before he could go on. “I didn’t know, Hemingway. I had no idea those kinds of things happened, at least not to this extent.”

“That’s only the beginning. But I deal with it.
We
deal with it.” I took a step toward him, reaching for his hand.

Suddenly there was a commotion coming from behind us—voices shouting, the sound of sirens, and rapidly approaching footsteps.

Hemingway looked over my shoulder, his eyes narrowed and then, without warning, he scooped me up like a baby.

“What the—?” My protest was cut off as he pressed his hand over my mouth. What was he doing? I wondered if I should push him away and, well, try to be put down or something—however one accomplishes
that
. But I could feel his body against mine. He lifted me like I weighed nothing and beneath his clothes, I could feel his muscles working. He broke into a run.

“Hold on,” he breathed in my ear. I was carried along as he bolted. You would think it’d be a jostling and bumpy affair, but it was a surprisingly smooth ride. The city flashed by. I mean, we were going surprisingly fast considering he was carrying me. The dry wind whipped across my face as he rounded the corner and zipped down the street toward my building.

The thing is, you hear stories about what an android can do. But it’s not like they go around showing off their abilities. They want to blend in. So when you see it, it’s a unique experience, to say the least. I don’t even know all the things they’re capable of. It’s not like I’ve got a list. And I think it varies from android to android, but I don’t know, for sure. Hemingway was right—androids don’t come with a manual.

I’ve never been carried like that. It was strange to say the least. We outran whatever happened back there, thanks to Hemingway’s unusual ability to carry me and run at the same time. The colony is generally safe, but there are over seven hundred thousand people living in it—and that’s just New Helsinki. People from the other settlements arrive on train all the time. With numbers like that, not to mention strangers coming from elsewhere continually, there’s bound to be dangerous and bad situations cropping up.

I mean, you’d think with the inspiration of such an impossible civilization, the city would be this pristine, exquisite place devoid of crime, litter, and riffraff. Parts of it are completely amazing—beneath the city, there are pipes pumping heat from the geothermal vents, water from the underground aquifers, and electricity from the solar fields outside the dome, in the valleys—but in so many other ways, it’s not. There are weirdoes hanging around and I’ve started to see homeless people in the plazas and stuff. And there are rats and other rodents creeping about that somehow came along with the people who emigrated (honestly, how did that happen? Stowaways? Did people bring them secretly somehow? Like, were they smuggled?). People don’t take care of their property, they leave litter in the streets, and businesses sometimes leave their trash in the alleys before it’s picked up and sent to the sorting facility where it’s recycled or composted for soil replenishment.

Two hundred fifty years and New Helsinki is just like cities back on Earth. I’ve only been to one other settlement, Neuholland, up north by the ice-cap, where they’ve melted a portion of the glacier to create a more fertile farming region. It’s weird and amazing all at once.

My heart was racing as Hemingway put me down outside my building. I looked around. Everything felt strange after seeing that side of him, like when you wake up from a dream where you can fly and everything seems more possible upon waking.

“Why’d you do that?” I asked.

He laughed. He wasn’t even sweating. “If you’d seen what I saw, you’d be thanking me.”

“Fine,” I said, grudgingly. I loved being that close to him. But it was also disconcerting, similar to how it feels when you’re at a party and a guy wants you to sit on his knee and you do, but you tower like ten feet over everyone else. You stick out. And feel like a total idiot. “Thanks. So what’d you see?”

He shook his head. “Stuff.”

Honestly. It was infuriating. “What? What stuff?”

“Let’s go up to your apartment before your dad freaks out.” He offered me his hand.

“Oh, so now you give me a choice about how to proceed?” I teased.

He let his hand fall to his side. “Cool.”

I took his hand and gently interlaced his smooth fingers with mine. “I didn’t say I don’t want to hold your hand.”

“Funny. I thought that was exactly what you were saying.”

Inside my apartment, my dad was still awake, in the kitchen, reading something on a personal size Gate. “Five more minutes and I would have gone looking for you.”

“I don’t doubt that,” I said.

“Sorry,” Hemingway said. “I tried to get her back right at eleven but we hit some bumps on the way back.”

Was he trying to get on my dad’s good side or what?

“What happened?” my dad asked, his forehead wrinkling in concern. He folded his arms and sat back against the countertop.

“Someone vandalized the capitol building. And I think they were hanging around the area still, because the police came and we almost got caught up in a chase or maybe a fight. But we got out of there before that happened,” Hemingway explained.

So that’s what it was! Why didn’t he just tell me?

“I was just reading the news about a glut of defaced buildings—it’s been happening in all the colonies. Stuff about equal rights for androids and demands to be recognized as alive or some nonsense like that.”

Hemingway’s grip tightened on my hand when Dad said that. Did it take a genius? Why would my dad say something so stupid to Hemingway, an android? He might as well just call him a machine and really make his position clear. I thought again of Sonja, Hemingway’s mother and how she must view him, creating him, imbuing him with life, with spirit or something else so fine that we couldn’t see it.

“Well then, great. Glad to hear how you view it, Dad,” I said and coughed a little.

“What do you think about it, Hemingway?” he asked, now that he’d made clear what he thought about it, giving Hemingway little room to have an opinion without getting on Dad’s bad side.

“He doesn’t—” I began, then caught the expression on Hemingway’s face. He looked a stricken, like he was outraged that someone would say something so unfeeling to him, at least someone who knew him. I said, quietly to Hemingway, “You don’t have to talk to him. Don’t worry about it.”

“No, it’s OK,” Hemingway said to me. “I’ll tell him, if he wants to hear me.”

“Come in, come in,” Dad said, urging us to get out of the entryway and sit on the couch.

I moved, reluctantly, into the room and sat down on the edge of the couch, not really settling in, and Hemingway did the same. We never let our hands separate as we walked. Dad took a seat across from us. I was having flashbacks of the first time we’d been in this position. This wasn’t going much better, I could tell.

“So, go on,” Dad said. I wondered if he sincerely thought that Hemingway was going to side with him or with anyone else who saw androids as second class citizens or as less than what we are: human. It hardly made sense to me to view them as something other than alive. I barely understood the full concept of the android: how they were put together so well, how their minds worked so perfectly, how they could be so completely beautiful, how they were conscious and aware. But even I felt that they were just like me. How could my dad pretend they weren’t?

“I agree with them,” Hemingway said without pausing. “Maybe whoever is doing this isn’t going about making their point clear in the best way possible. But I don’t know another way that would work.”

“You can’t possibly think that you’re not regarded as alive. Can you? You live among humans. You eat with us. You talk with us. You do everything with us.” Dad blinked a few times in surprise and sat perfectly straight in response to this shocker.

I put my hand on Hemingway’s back. His skin was hot beneath his shirt. Every muscle in his back was taut with anxiety.

“You speak as though this is an us/them situation. That’s the point. As soon as an android’s
tell
is deciphered, he or she is no longer seen as
us
. That android is seen as a
them
. And there are plenty of people willing to point that out to him or her in a variety of cruel and sometimes painfully creative ways. Would I ask you to condone anyone treating you or Retta badly? That’s what you’re asking me to do about what androids want: to say it’s OK that some faction of humans want to keep androids in their place. What does that even mean?”

“But you are androids. You’re not human. There’s no changing that,” Dad said, hitting one hand into the other to emphasize.

“‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’” Hemingway asked.

“What—what is that? A quote? Or are you really asking me, because yes, you bleed. I get that.”

“It’s a quote. From
The Merchant of Venice
. Shakespeare. It’s about how Jews were treated as something less than human.”

“That old windbag,” Dad laughed, raising an eyebrow to emphasize his disdain for the ancient playwright. “But you
are
—less than human. You’re androids,” Dad repeated.

I sighed and shook my head. This was just pissing me off. Here was this guy that I was maybe growing to love—I mean, I wanted to wrap myself up in him and breathe him, so is that love? I don’t know, but I felt so much for him. And here was my Dad, being a total jerk to him. Making him feel like a non-entity. And it was making me feel terrible.

“We bleed. We love. We remember our pasts.” Hemingway took a deep breath. “And we can procreate.”

“You replicate,” Dad returned. “That’s different.”

“Different from what your DNA does?”

“Splitting hairs,” Dad said.

Hemingway stood up, shaking his head, “Thanks for the conversation, but I better be going.”

“Giving up so easily?” Dad grinned triumphantly.

“For you it’s an argument. An idea. A philosophy. For me it’s a question of my life. My existence. My future.”

“Thanks Dad! I love bringing my friends back to the house. You make everyone feel so welcome.” I stood and walked with Hemingway to the door.

“I’ll see you later. At school,” Hemingway said, somewhat coolly.