The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (27 page)

Roz’s house let her in with her key, and the smell of roasted sausage and baking potatoes wafted past.

“Sven?” she called, locking herself inside.

His even voice responded. “I’m in the kitchen.”

She left her shoes in the hall and followed her nose through the cheaply furnished living room, as different from Steele’s white wasteland as anything bounded by four walls could be. Her feet did not sink deeply into this carpet, but skipped along atop it like stones.

It was clean, though, and that was Sven’s doing. And she was not coming home to an empty house, and that was his doing too.

He was cooking shirtless. He turned and greeted her with a smile. “Bad day?”

“Nobody died,” she said. “Yet.”

He put the wooden spoon down on the rest. “How does that make you feel, that nobody has died yet?”

“Hopeful,” she said.

“It’s good that you’re hopeful,” he said. “Would you like your dinner?”

“Do you like music, Sven?”

“I could put on some music, if you like. What do you want to hear?”

“Anything.” It would be something off her favorites playlist, chosen by random numbers. As it swelled in the background, Sven picked up the spoon. “Sven?”

“Yes, Rosamund?”

“Put the spoon down, please, and come and dance with me?”

“I do not know how to dance.”

“I’ll buy you a program,” she said. “If you’d like that. But right now just come put your arms around me and pretend.”

“Whatever you want,” he said.

MARTIAN HEART

John Barnes is one of the most prolific and popular of all the writers who entered SF in the 1980s. His many books include the novels
A Million Open Doors, The Mother of Storms, Orbital Resonance, Kaleidoscope Century, Candle, Earth Made of Glass, The Merchant of Souls, Sin of Origin, One for the Morning Glory, The Sky So Big and Black, The Duke of Uranium, A Princess of the Aerie, In the Hall of the Martian King, Gaudeamus, Finity, Patton’s Spaceship, Washington’s Dirigible, Caesar’s Bicycle, The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky, The Armies of Memory, Tales of the Madman Underground, Directive 51,
and others, as well as two novels written with astronaut Buzz Aldrin,
The Return
and
Encounter with Tiber.
His short work has been collected in
. . . And Orion
and
Apostrophes and Apocalypses.
His most recent books are the novels
Daybreak Zero
and
Losers in Space,
and the forthcoming audiobook
The Last President.
Barnes lives in Colorado and works in the field of semiotics.

Here he weaves an affecting story of a love that’s both young – and doomed.

O
KAY, BOTTEROGATOR, I
agreed to this. Now you’re supposed to guide me to tell my story to
inspire a new generation of Martians.
It is so weird that there
is
a new generation of Martians. So hit me with the questions, or whatever it is you do.

Do I want to be
consistent with previous public statements?

Well, every time they ask me where I got all the money and got to be such a big turd in the toilet that is Mars, I always say Samantha was my inspiration. So let’s check that box for tentatively consistent.

Thinking about Sam always gives me weird thoughts. And here are two: one, before her, I would not have known what either
tentatively
or
consistent
even meant. Two, in these pictures, Samantha looks younger than my granddaughter is now.

So weird. She
was.

We were in bed in our place under an old underpass in LA when the sweeps busted in, grabbed us up, and dragged us to the processing station. No good lying about whether we had family – they had our retinas and knew we were strays. Since I was seventeen and Sam was fifteen, they couldn’t make any of our family pay for re-edj.

So they gave us fifteen minutes on the bench there to decide between twenty years in the forces, ten years in the glowies, or going out to Mars on this opposition and coming back on the third one after, in six and a half years.

They didn’t tell you, and it wasn’t well known, that even people without the genetic defect suffered too much cardiac atrophy in that time to safely come back to Earth. The people that went to Mars didn’t have family or friends to write back to, and the settlement program was so new it didn’t seem strange that nobody knew a returned Martian.

“Crap,” I said.

“Well, at least it’s a future.” Sam worried about the future a lot more than me. “If we enlist, there’s no guarantee we’ll be assigned together, unless we’re married, and they don’t let you get married till you’ve been in for three. We’d have to write each other letters—”

“Sam,” I said, “I can’t write to you or read your letters if you send me any. You know that.”

“They’d make you learn.”

I tried not to shudder visibly; she’d get mad if I let her see that I didn’t really want to learn. “Also, that thing you always say about out of sight, that’d happen. I’d have another girlfriend in like, not long. I just would. I know we’re all true love and everything but I would.”

“The spirit is willing but the flesh is
more
willing.” She always made those little jokes that only she got. “Okay, then, no forces for us.”

“Screw glowies,” I said. Back in those days right after the baby nukes had landed all over the place, the Decon Admin needed people to operate shovels, hoes, and detectors. I quoted this one hook from our favorite music.
“Sterile or dead or kids with three heads.”

“And we
can
get married going to Mars,” Sam said, “and then they
can’t
separate us. True love forever, baby.” Sam always had all the ideas.

So, botterogator, check that box for
putting a priority on family/love.
I guess since that new box popped up as soon as I said,
Sam always had all the ideas,
that means you want more about that? Yeah, now it’s bright and bouncing. Okay, more about how she had all the ideas.

Really all the ideas I ever had were about eating, getting high, and scoring ass. Hunh. Red light. Guess that wasn’t what you wanted for the new generation of Martians.

Sam was different. Everybody I knew was thinking about the next party or at most the next week or the next boy or girl, but Sam thought about
everything.
I know it’s a stupid example, but once back in LA, she came into our squat and found me fucking with the fusion box, just to mess with it. “That supplies all our power for music, light, heat, net, and everything, and you can’t fix it if you break it, and it’s not broke, so, Cap, what the fuck are you doing?”

See, I didn’t even have ideas
that
good.

So a year later, there on the bench, our getting married was her having another idea and me going along with it, which was always how things worked, when they worked. Ten minutes later we registered as married.

Orientation for Mars was ten days. The first day they gave us shots, bleached our tats into white blotches on our skin, and shaved our heads. They stuck us in ugly dumb coveralls and didn’t let us have real clothes that said anything, which they said was so we wouldn’t know who’d been what on Earth. I think it was more so we all looked like transportees.

The second day, and every day after, they tried to pound some knowledge into us. It was almost interesting. Sam was in with the people that could read, and she seemed to know more than I did afterward. Maybe there was something to that reading stuff, or it might also have been that freaky, powerful memory of hers.

Once we were erased and oriented, they loaded Sam and me into a two-person cube on a dumpround to Mars. Minutes after the booster released us and we were ballistic, an older guy, some asshole, tried to come into our cube and tell us this was going to be his space all to himself, and I punched him hard enough to take him out; I don’t think he had his balance for centrifigrav yet.

Two of his buds jumped in. I got into it with them too – I was hot, they were pissing me off, I wasn’t figuring odds. Then some guys from the cubes around me came in with me, and together we beat the other side’s ass bloody.

In the middle of the victory whooping, Sam shouted for quiet. She announced, “Everyone stays in their same quarters. Everyone draws their own rations. Everyone takes your turn, and
just
your turn, at the info screens. And nobody doesn’t pay for protection or nothing.”

One of the assholes, harmless now because I had at least ten good guys at my back, sneered, “Hey, little bitch. You running for Transportee Council?”

“Sure, why not?”

She won, too.

The Transportee Council stayed in charge for the whole trip. People ate and slept in peace, and no crazy-asses broke into the server array, which is what caused most lost dumprounds. They told us in orientation, but a lot of transportees didn’t listen, or didn’t understand, or just didn’t believe that a dumpround didn’t have any fuel to go back to Earth; a dumpround flew like a cannonball, with just a few little jets to guide it in and out of the aero-brakes and steer it to the parachute field.

The same people who thought there was a steering wheel in the server array compartment, or maybe a reverse gear or just a big button that said
TAKE US BACK TO EARTH
, didn’t know that the server array also ran the air-making machinery and the food dispensary and everything that kept people alive.

I’m sure we had as many idiots as any other dumpround, but we made it just fine; that was all Sam, who ran the TC and kept the TC running the dumpround. The eighty-eight people on International Mars Transport 2082/4/288 (which is what they called our dumpround; it was the 288th one fired off that April) all walked out of the dumpround on Mars carrying our complete, unlooted kits, and the militia that always stood by in case a dumpround landing involved hostages, arrests, or serious injuries didn’t have a thing to do about us.

The five months in the dumpround were when I learned to read, and that has helped me so much – oh, hey, another box bumping up and down! Okay, botterogator, literacy as a positive value coming right up, all hot and ready for the new generation of Martians to suck inspiration from.

Hey, if you don’t like irony, don’t flash red lights at me, just edit it out. Yeah, authorize editing.

Anyway, with my info screen time, Sam made me do an hour of reading lessons for every two hours of games. Plus she coached me a lot. After a while the reading was more interesting than the games, and she was doing TC business so much of the time, and I didn’t really have any other friends, so I just sat and worked on the reading. By the time we landed, I’d read four actual books, not just kid books I mean.

We came down on the parachute field at Olympic City, an overdignified name for what, in those long-ago days, was just two office buildings, a general store, and a nine-room hotel connected by pressurized tubes. The tiny pressurized facility was surrounded by a few thousand coffinsquats hooked into its pay air and power, and many thousand more running on their own fusion boxes. Olympica, to the south, was just a line of bluffs under a slope reaching way up into the sky.

It was the beginning of northern summer prospecting season. Sam towed me from lender to lender, coaching me on looking like a good bet to someone that would trust us with a share-deal on a prospecting gig. At the time I just thought rocks were, you know, rocks. No idea that some of them were ores, or that Mars was so poor in so many ores because it was dead tectonically.

So while she talked to bankers, private lenders, brokers, and plain old loan sharks, I dummied up and did my best to look like what she told them I was, a hard worker who would do what Sam told me. “Cap is quiet but he thinks, and we’re a team.”

She said that so often that after a while I believed it myself. Back at our coffinsquat every night, she’d make me do all the tutorials and read like crazy about rocks and ores. Now I can’t remember how it was to not know something, like not being able to read, or recognize ore, or go through a balance sheet, or anything else I learned later.

Two days till we’d’ve gone into the labor pool and been shipped south to build roads and impoundments, and this CitiWells franchise broker, Hsieh Chi, called us back, and said we just felt lucky to him, and he had a quota to make, so what the hell.