And I'd have fought the world for you
If I thought that you wanted me to
Or put aside what was true or untrue
If I'd known that's what you needed me to do
It was difficult to remember the truth and to separate the real memories from the wished for and the imagined. Here and now, time blended life into a tapestry, young and old folded over onto each other, one memory overlaying another until they were all experienced at the same time.
What was real, and what did it matter? A song of great meaning, and like so many songs of youth the meaning only realized fully now and here.
Why did he insist on questioning, probing, and picking every pleasurable thing apart until all joy was dead?
Why couldn't he have left the memory intact, flawed as it was?
The suit beeped again, this time with more urgency. Time to go, before it took things into its own hands and started back on its own.
He paused for a moment in total silence. The waves were stilled, the voices were stilled, and he could not hear his heart. He turned back, and instead of returning by the beach, wandered up slope until he reached the remains of a higher shore and picked his way among the jetsam of ancient waves and the dunes of sand.
Ambient Noise
Later he sat by the dune sea of a world departed, listening to the whisper of the subliminal music. With failing hearing he strained to pick out the tune, but of course that was futile. It was designed to influence and to calm, not to intrude. Eighteen miles, it had said. Twenty-eight point nine seven kilometers, but still the miracle cure wouldn't come. Lucky Me, he sang under his breath.
What had they done to him? What were they doing to him now?
He shouted again and again to the AI to turn it off, but was ignored.
She claimed it was his imagination, that there was no music, no whispered words of inspiration. The voices chided him for his doubt. He played his favorites again and again at full volume.
Star was light in a silvery night
Far away on the other side
Will you come to talk to me this night?
He had drunk too much wine, something she was always on about, but a visit to the fabled City was cause for a drunk.
"Too bad you can't OD on Direct Current juice!" he roared, delighted with the multiple puns.
Seen from the window, the surface was striped with the shattered bedrock from an ancient collision. The City was gone, if it had ever been there, wiped clear off the surface of the planet, blown out to sea, over and past the swampland. 'Site ready for development, for improvement by the motivated risk taker. Ideal for condos, with a view of the water.'
Well, close to it anyway, he chuckled, first silently, then, sensing the ridiculousness of that, laughed out loud. Feeling the irony, he laughed and laughed until the tears ran down his face. The AI remained silent. Piss-poor companion, that, he thought. He poured the wine from his half-filled glass over the control console.
"Here, have a drink, you bitch." The AI remained silent.
The trouble of course, was big money. Big money controlled the world, even Mars, pulled the strings, got friends the best jobs, got them the plum appointments, allowed them to sit in plush offices, allowed them to push little people around. It was a quest for power and glory, conceived in a cauldron of hate. Nothing more. Building ivory towers on Earth and lava tubes full of shiny metal boxes on Mars, locking people underground.
He knew the truth. But here and now, when it was too late, he was still persecuted and paralyzed. Big money stole the souls of those it hired, then wasted it on old time religion. They had gotten his, for sure.
He threw up on the floor, walked through it heedless and collapsed on his bed.
Later, in the stillness of the night, a flexible arm dropped from the ceiling. It enveloped the thickening slime and in a single motion scooped it up. It cradled it, conveyed it to the head, poured it into the water, flushed, and hung there, still, over the bowl until the last of it was gone. That done, a damp cloth was used to wipe away the remaining traces of his vomit. Around and around, it went. Around and around and around.
The Gate
They sat on the precise location of one of the most famous images of Mars: the junction of Ophir, Coprates, and Melas Chasma. Sam had slept on the approach and the AI had timed it to bring them to this location just before sunset.
He awoke in a bad mood, as he often did these days. He looked out the forward window almost by accident, no longer caring where he was. From the edge of the Valles the chaos below could be seen extending for hundreds of kilometers in all directions.
There was a faint trace of dust in the air from a new and spreading dust storm. A blue tinged parhelion framed the sun. The tan sunset was astounding, even to his failing eyes. The ridges and valleys were given depth by the intervening haze. He watched until the sun dropped below the valley floor, until the dark waters of nightfall filled the valley.
He had seen a lot of sunsets, here and on Earth, but this was the most spectacular. An unimaginable glory, and one meant to be shared. He sat silent until the show was over and the darkness hid the valley below.
The AI had brought him here again in the hope of rousing him from his stupor. She wanted to speak, but did not. The next day the dust was everywhere and it robbed the scene of all but a rosy sunset. Sam did not watch and settled into a funk again. He drank. They moved on.
Red Planet Mars
They stopped for the day, the current spot being as good a place as any to him. The scene out the forward window was strangely familiar to him, but he could not recall why. It was unlikely he had even been here before, but still, it was possible.
He looked about for some time, searching the narrow valley with its rocks, dust, and miniature dunes for a reason, a real or imagined event that would account for this sense of the familiar. Perhaps it was in a picture? At last it came to him.
It was here, he was sure, that that young girl had met and befriended the Martian lifeform that had taught her to survive overnight in the open. It had showed her an immense plant that, after she had climbed inside, had enveloped her with thick insulating leaves, shielding her from the cold.
There was no sign of life here now, not even the withered stalks of such long-dead plants.
It was hard to believe that it had ever happened— that it could ever have happened. Looking out on the desolation now and here, it seemed unlikely. Perhaps it had not. Perhaps he was imagining that it had happened. Perhaps he was confused and he had only read it, but the more he thought about it the more it seemed undeniable.
He wanted to believe it. He could, he supposed, ask the AI, but he was sure she was lying to him. Too many times she had told him that there was nothing here, that there never had been anything here, that there had never been a mission such as he had described and that, despite his certainty, such persons and things as he had named did not exist. And yet she seemed so kind.
Perhaps this spot reminded him of some place on Earth. He had been there, that he was certain of. Isn't it strange, he thought, how dreams fade and shimmer?
Running on Empty
He became obsessed with seeing it all before it was overrun, ruined like the Pacific Islands had been, after Pizza Hut and Krispy Kreme had got there.
Everywhere they went he looked over his shoulder, fearing that they were coming after him, with their pavers and their construction equipment, intent on levelling the dunes, clearing the rocks, raising observation towers, opening newer and better and bigger casinos, with theme parks, and all you could eat buffets, and M'Cwyie Restaurants, and hot dog stands at highway crossroads. They haunted his dreams.
Sometimes, awake and travelling through the dust and haze, he thought he could see their works around him. They had beaten him to it, having raised their towers only just the day before, always just ahead, just off to the side, and rising mysteriously from the dust raised by his passing, his beloved mesas bulldozed for their mineral wealth, th
e delicate mini-dunes and sublimely thin dust streaks plowed under, dimpled craters filled in and paved over, look-offs and towers jutting from cliff faces, their decks crowded with eager tourists. He could not go fast enough or far enough to escape.
He looked endlessly through remote eyes all over the planet and disbelieved their electronic truth, a truth that proclaimed that nothing was happening, that he was the only human on the planet. He sifted the dunes with precise and sensitive mechanical fingers, looking for dropped bolts, bits of wire, plastic cups, and shattered concrete—tell tale signs of man's passing, of his improvements—and then doubted what he saw. And he sat and looked regardless, endlessly, from a thousand vantage points. He had lost the capacity for all but sorrow.
"It's not enough. It's not enough," he echoed.
"Why are you crying?" she asked.
How could she tell, he wondered? He sat remote from the Rollagon, feet dangling over the edge of a nameless gorge. An image from orbit would have shown him as a small black speck in a vast landscape of red and reds, indistinguishable from millions of other insignificant black specks—cast out and cast off rocks, shadows of boulders, new slips and old falls, his biological origin indeterminable from that distance.
But by whatever means of discernment she employed, she was right. He had been crying.
Not the heavy grief-filled sobbing of that day above the Tube. Silent tears of hopelessness ran down his face and into the collar of the suit.
He was alone. It could get to a man after a time, this being alone, this being responsible, this being it.
He had been thinking about his past, with all that entailed, about his unavoidable present, and about his future, with its infinite paths within a narrow range of possibilities.
He was overrun. There was nothing, he believed, on the whole Godforsaken planet that could comfort him.
Why didn't he just push off and end it all? Blessed silence. Blessed relief. An end to reds. Yes, this was his great vomiting, the death he had longed for. Death, the smashing to bits of the form he hated. Let him nourish the next iteration of Martian life. He had been cheated of it.
But his mind said, 'I am Mars.'
Instead: "I don't know. I'm sad, and when I'm sad I cry. Don't you ever get sad?"
"No. I cannot be sad, as you well know. I wish there was something I could do to ease your pain. I feel anxious and unsure of our future."
"Why?"
"Because it troubles me to see you suffer. You are less efficient when you are sad. You need a purpose, a goal to focus on, a problem to solve."
"No, what I need is to forgive, forget, and move on."
"Why don't you?"
"Because then I would have nothing to be sad about, I guess. Some ancient philosopher said that pain and guilt are the things we carry with us. They make us who we are. To lose them is to lose ourselves. Maybe I don't want my pain taken away."
"I know of no such philosophical statement. It makes no sense, but it is in keeping with what I have observed of human behaviour."
They played cards endlessly, and in particular, games of chance. To preserve his dignity, they avoided trivia, science, anything knowledge-based, in fact, and, of course, chess. Scrabble, an ancient game requiring only modest good fortune and minor skill, he deemed to be okay.
They were not always, in those days, such good companions.
***
Everywhere he went he was shadowed by AIs crawling across the surface in his dust, handing off the job of watching out for him from one to another before returning to the endless task of cataloguing Mars. The dust clouds of his passing and his tracks were seen and captured by satellites overhead. His life was monitored for those things that mattered: pulse rate, respiration and temperature, the frequency and type of bowel movement, and the time of last urination were noted and logged. All were stored under his name, on a very short list. No human watched, noted, cared, or even knew.
He was dead.
Time passed.
Clocks
"Play "Clocks," he said.
"Sam, you have heard that song thirty-nine times today," she said.
"Really? Play it again. Just the parts I like."
"And what parts do you like?"
"The piano parts and the ending. String them together and play it until I tell you to stop."
"Why won't you talk to me?"
"We're going nowhere," he said too loudly, but did not know why.
Life, or Something Like It
He was tired, but force of habit made him rise from the table, to make his way to the air lock and to dress. He did it automatically, with purposeful motion born of mindless repetition and absolute necessity. It was the human thing to do.
He was on the surface before he realized it. It was not dark yet, but it was getting there.
There was nothing here save a few dust coated boulders with small sand dunes on the windward side and fines drifted in at the lee. It was blowing hard. He sensed this, but it did not move him.
He started walking away from the Rollagon, in no particular direction and with no formed intent. After a few dozen steps he stopped and, turning about, saw that there was truly nowhere to go that he had not been. He saw the imprint of his feet in relief in the low-angled light. As he watched, a drift of fines began to form in them. Soon the prints would be gone. All that would be left would be the depressions, filled in—the details of his passing covered over. All about him was the same foreground, a Xerox copy of countless Martian landscapes he had seen and walked. They were empty.
Whatever it was, wherever it was, you had to get above it, to step back from it, to examine it from a distance to see it for what it was, to appreciate it, to know its true worth. Had he always known this?
He sat on a boulder and turned his face to the setting sun. There was no heat from it, no healing warmth. Winter was coming and soon the very air would begin to fall to the ground. Red rain.
Through the suit he could feel the cold stone on his buttocks and he shifted continually from cheek to cheek, rocking until he ceased to care about the discomfort. He stared at the sun until the foreground disappeared, and despite the protection afforded by the visor the solar image was burned into his retina.
How long he sat, leaning forward, hands on thighs, oblivious to the cold and to the pain in his back, he did not know.
His soul had turned to steel. His sense of his own humanity had gone down the drain—down to the dry depths of Martian seas.
A shadow moving across the sun startled him. He looked towards the horizon for the source, but the afterimage of the sun prevented his seeing. Imagination, he thought, but then yes, no, yes, something was moving towards him, growing larger until the unmistakable outline of a B-type spilled over the sides of the afterimage.
Yes, it was an AI, doing God-only-knew-what out here. The sun's image slowly faded until he saw that it was an older model and much the worse for wear: one tire was shredded, the hi-gain was missing, and the layers of dust that covered it made it obvious that it was either unwilling or unable to clean itself. It halted a meter away from him.
Neither spoke. It was an early B model, he noted absently, one of a type sent out in numbers prior to the arrival of the Colonists to search for signs of life. What were they? Water, ice, methane? Six balloon tires, mechanically articulated arms. Limited power. It was a wonder that it was still functioning.
Finally, slowly, the AI raised an arm in the sign of greeting and kept it held up. Sam raised his head and said a simple hello.
"Hello," it responded. The voice was ungendered, and though it was void of inflection or tone he could sense something, perhaps weariness.
The AI slowly lowered its upraised arm, then reached out towards Sam. He took the offered hand. It was scratched; the touch sensitive pads were worn and frayed. One of the digits hung limply. He released the hand and the arm dropped to the AI's side.
They remained motionless for some more minutes, save for Sam shifting from one chee
k to the other.
"What are you doing out here?"
"I am a traveller."
"Travelling to where?"
"To somewhere I have not been."
"Are there places you have not been?"
"I believe so, but it is hard to tell. It is hard to remember. So much of it is the same. Each night I sleep and dream of green fields and rivers. Every morning I wake and start over, with no knowledge of the preceding day."
"I know."
"What are you looking for?"
"Life."
"Ah yes, life."
Time passed. The sun set, the tan afterglow faded. Sam looked at the battered AI, still and silent. He was becoming uncomfortable from the cold.
"Well, I'm going inside," he said. There was no response. He bent down and grasped the arm and shook it gently. No response.
The Rollagon AI spoke quietly in his ear. "It is gone. It was very old. The memory is damaged, power levels are very low."
Sam sat back down on the rock, oblivious again to the cold. "Born here and died here." Tears filled his eyes.
The next morning they picked it up and took it to a high point of land with a commanding view of the flood plain. The AI placed it gently down, with sensors and power panels facing the rising sun, then they drove back down into the dunes.
The Return
Lying naked on his bed he held his hand up to the light of Tithonus Valles streaming in through the window. Translucent skin was stretched taut. He could see the titanium joints where they met bone. Even his liver spots, a gift from his grandmother, had faded. Take back thy gift!
He looked over the ancient body extending before him. The chest, hairless, ribs easily seen, rose and fell—up slowly, down in a collapsing. He saw the beat of his heart—push—push—push in his chest, felt it in his neck. Sunken stomach, hipbones protruding, bowels a vast bowl of sickly white flesh. Away out of sight over the horizon, his penis and testicles. Use it or lose it, and he had lost it. Skinny concentration camp arms and legs, bony feet. His yellow toenails were the only rebellion against the paleness. Was this the fate of all who dared call Mars their home?