Strider's Galaxy

Mars: AD2527

Strider was more than a bit depressed by the way the interview had gone—essentially, she'd blown it—so she refused their offer of a courtesy cabble and decided to walk home. The night air was thin and cold—a perfect contrast to the environment-conditioning of the SSIA blister. She breathed it deep into her lungs, feeling its pleasurable pain in her throat. There was little or no traffic on the road this late, so that all she had to guide her was starlight and the faint glow of City 43, sixteen kilometers ahead of her. The walk would take her nearly an hour; in a way she wished it would take longer. She wanted to get the taste of bureaucracy out of her mouth.

A few hundred meters away from the blister—far enough away that she could feel she'd properly left it behind her—she paused and looked up at the sky. Staring at the stars was her customary occupational therapy: the thought of the distances and scale of the Universe was usually enough to calm her wraths and anxieties.

Tonight it didn't work, though. The first thing she saw was Phobos, normally her favorite companion in the heavens.

The uniforms who'd interviewed her had talked a lot about Phobos. People were building a ship on the tiny moon, taking advantage of the low gravity and the abundance of mineral wealth not far below the surface. By the time the ship was finished its mass would be a small but significant percentage of Phobos's own, so that when the vessel was ferried off to Jupiter for fuelling there would be a perceptible shift in Phobos's orbit.

That would happen in about a year's time.

She had hoped for the past decade that she would be aboard that ship.

So much for that.

She started to walk again.

In the year 2489 in the Martin Hunter Ogobe Hospital in Ouagadougou a female child was born to a mother who didn't want her. It wasn't a matter of economics—no one ever starved in Burkina Faso, whose rich plains and extensive, hardly tapped uranium deposits funded the world's most beneficent social security system. No, the reason the mother didn't want even to see her daughter after the birth was that she was only thirteen and the conception had come about as a consequence of a rape. The rapists—there had been three of them—had been tracked down and castrated, but this symbolic vengeance had done nothing to remove from the girl's memory the terror of the experience, or the pain.

Rape was a very rare crime in any part of the developed world. Most people—certainly in a country like Burkina Faso—possessed sexbots; if not, they could be hired on any street corner for the night for the price of a pack of ziprite gum. The three criminals had, rather, been expressing their disapproval of the shortness of her dress. The girl who had just given birth to a child she would never see, would never name, had started experimenting with her own parents' sexbots over a year earlier; she had found the female infinitely the better lover, yet generally she wanted the male to play a part as well, because it was good to feel his rigidity inside her when she came to her final orgasm. She had even tried to reprogram the two sexbots to copulate with each other, so that she could watch, but she'd never been able to.

None of the three men who'd raped her had enjoyed the same exaggerated penile proportions as the male sexbot, yet each of their penetrations had been agonizing. She had been in the family orchard at the time, with the sky mockingly blue above and the birds disinterestedly flitting between the trees. One of the men had held a knife against her throat and put his penis in her mouth. Another had unsuccessfully tried to ram his penis into her rectum. She had thought she was going to die, and she very nearly did. The pain of giving birth to the resulting child was as nothing compared to that earlier event.

As soon as she had discovered her pregnancy she had begged for an abortion, but Burkina Faso was then in the grip of strict Umbellism, and abortions were illegal unless the child would be born handicapped. Her parents devoutly refused to fly her abroad; however the child had been conceived, they said, it had a right to live.

They were beside her as their unwanted grandchild was born. Like the mother, they had no desire to see the baby again, and so it was left to the hospital staff to take the squealing infant away and hook her up to an automated wetnurse, on whose plastic nipple—with its carefully concocted and ever-ready supply of milk-substitute—she thrived. The child was later placed in an institution that catered for unwanted children. And she was given a name: Leonie.

She never really worried about the fact that she hadn't a mother until much later, when she was fifteen. That was when her mother sent her a viddisc showing both the scene of her birth and, afterwards, a tearstained apology for having abandoned her at birth. Would it be possible for the two of them to get together and try to patch up something of a family?

"Fuck off," Leonie said to the screen.

She put the viddisc in the nearest disposal vent, and waited until she heard the grinders boot up, far below, before she went away down the corridor to find something to eat.

"How has your rejection by your mother at birth affected your ability to relate to other people?" said Alphonse Dulac. He was standing by an artificial window looking out on an artificial scene. People had generated lush landscapes within most of the blisters on Mars, in stark contrast to the generally still patchy vegetation of the open terrain, but the SSIA had resisted the trend: if people were indeed to be sent to the stars they should become accustomed to bleakness and alienness. This didn't stop the SSIA's bigwigs from wanting to enjoy a pleasant view from their "windows."

Strider raised an eyebrow. Her other four interviewers—all men, which vaguely annoyed her—were seated facing her around the outer side of a semicircular stone desk. They were all bigger than her, but then most people were. She imagined that the desk was a lens, and that where she sat was a focus for their gazes.

"It affected me for a year or two after I got that viddisc," she admitted. "No longer than that. I had a lot of difficulty trusting people. I mean, it's hard to make friendships when at the back of your mind you're thinking that the person who should have been your best friend of all kicked you out of her life, sight unseen, then fifteen years later tried to pass her guilt right back on to you."

She pushed her fingers back through her hair.

"But then," she continued, "after a while I began to feel sorry for her. I'd been thinking of myself as the failure in the relationship—or lack-of-relationship—but I grew to realize that it wasn't me, it was her. It'd have been tougher to bring myself together if she'd held on to me for a year or two and then rejected me."

She knew she was sweating. Part of the reason was that the blister's environment-conditioning was turned up too high, especially in this office; the other and greater part was because the interview had suddenly homed in on the intimate aspects of herself. She'd known this was coming, but it didn't make it any easier to deal with. Also, she was irritated by the light in here, which was Earth-standard and thus brighter than what she was accustomed to.

Dulac looked over his shoulder at her.

"So you began to be able to relate to other people again?"

"Yeah, you bet," said Strider. She grinned, at last beginning to relax. Think of these pompous bastards as medics, she thought. You've told enough medics about your innermost secrets over the years. "I related with a lot of people during my late teens."

"And those relationships . . . ended," suddenly said Rateen Macphee, opposite her.

"Most of them hardly began," said Strider, startled by his intervention. "I was enjoying myself. Weren't you the same at that age? Weren't we all?"

"What I'm trying to get at," said Macphee, "is that you can hardly class brief sexual affairs as true interpersonal relationships."

Strider reflected for a moment. The point was a fair one.

"Yeah," she said finally, "but what all of them meant was that I'd discovered how to trust people again. Don't get me wrong: I was always genuinely fond of the people I had sex with, and some of them remained good friends for years afterwards—there are a couple working here for the SSIA whom I see regularly."

"For sex?" It was Dulac again.

"No. I hardly ever have sex these days—except with my bot, of course."

"Why not? Are you frightened of sex?" Dulac moved back from the "window" and resumed his seat.

Again Strider paused.

"Can I explain a few things?" she said.

"Go ahead."

"For a while after I saw my mother's viddisc I was terrified of being raped. That was another bit of guilt that she piled on me—as if somehow what had happened to her was my fault. But I got over it. Twenty years ago sex was—for me and for a lot of the other kids around me—a way of telling ourselves that we were fond of each other. We could have bought each other drinks, or something, but we never had any money. So instead we talked a lot, or went out walking if the pollution wasn't too bad—which it often wasn't, because the winds usually blew all Burkina Faso's crap southward and away—and sometimes we had sex. There was no great hassle about it."

"And then?" said Dulac.

"Yeah, then I went through a bad patch." Strider looked around at the five blank faces. In a way, Dulac and Macphee were the easiest to cope with. The other three had said nothing at all to her after the mumbled introductions, an hour ago; besides, their faces were covered with different pieces of interactive technology: for all she knew, they could right now be examining her alveoli in detail or watching a soap opera. At least Dulac and Macphee had each left one eye uncovered. It gave Strider something to look at, some way of communing. "I became infatuated with someone. It lasted just over a year. It took me that long to realize what a complete turd he was. When I left him it hurt a lot—not because the relationship had dissolved but because I realized how stupid I'd been."

"To trust him?" This time it was Macphee. He and Dulac were positioned at opposite ends of the huge, heavy desk. Strider was being interviewed in stereo.

"No. Where I'd been stupid was that I'd let my hormones govern my perceptions. I'd wasted a year of my life. I was like a junkie who'd managed to come off the tabs and then looked back on all the time that had been wasted—all the good days that had been thrown away. Cured junkies have a choice: to go back on the tabs or to build themselves a life. I decided to build myself a life—that I wasn't going to make that kind of mistake again."

"You decided not to fall in love again," said Dulac, clearing his throat.

"I hadn't been in love in the first place." She grinned once more, and for the second time this evening began to relax. "I thought about what I really wanted to do, and discovered that it was to go starside. Part of my task was to re-learn how to make friendships, so I did that; I realized that sex wasn't the best way of establishing trust—that a game of chess was better. Also, I got myself a degree in astrophysics at Ouagadougou Univ and—"

"A first," said Macphee, looking across at Dulac.

"With honors," replied Dulac.

Strider recognized that the little exchange had been designed merely to harass her. They were deliberately putting her under stress. She shrugged. That was part of their job: to find out how she coped with stress.

"I got the degree," she said, "and then I signed up as a trainee with the SSIA. The rest you know about—it's all in the computers."

Dulac looked grumpy. "Of course we've been through your records, Strider, and very impressive they are—you wouldn't have been called here for interview had they not been. But the purpose of our meeting is not to examine your academic credentials or your technical skills or your military expertise but to try to find out what sort of a person you are. We've all looked at your psychological profiles as well, but they can tell us only so much. You're obviously well adapted and stable; you're a strong personality with a high IQ. What we need to establish is whether or not you could endure the strains of being cooped up in a tin can for thirty years with forty other people, some of whom will certainly prove incapable of tolerating that strain."

"Can I get up and walk about?" said Strider.

Dulac nodded.

She moved over to the fake window and looked out at the scene. Someone had spent a lot of computer-time generating the holographic display. The theme was an idyllized version of Classical Greece, with philosophers in long white robes strolling through sylvan greenery and exchanging what were presumably great wisdoms—probably definitive proofs that the Earth was flat. The tranquillity of the scene, however, was infectious; Strider felt as if the room temperature had just dropped by a welcome five degrees.

"You've been asking a lot about my personal life," she said, turning back towards her interrogators, who had swivelled their chairs to face her. She shrugged. "It hasn't been all that pleasant for me, but it hasn't bothered me too much, either. Some things about me I keep very secret, and no one will ever discover them: you could keep me in this room for a month and you'd still never find them out. Most of them are secret because if I talked about them I could hurt other people—which makes me sound more sanctimonious than I intend. Some of them are secret for the most selfish of reasons. Everything else about me, though, is information I'm happy to divulge.

"And one thing that I'm happy to divulge right now," she said, staring Dulac straight in the eyes, "is that I will not allow anyone to call the Santa Maria a 'tin can'. I don't know how much personal work you've put into its creation, buster, but I do know that thousands of other people have labored over it, from the designers and techs through to the person with a wrench who helped install the shower-heads. Some of them have been working for the money, but I reckon most of them have seen that ship as the liferaft she is."

Dulac looked unfazed. Strider had expected an angry reaction from him.

"Carry on," he said.

"The Santa Maria is a triumph of human endeavor in every sense of the term," said Strider. She looked once more through the "window," deliberately controlling herself. "I will not listen to some pampered fat cat in an office calling it a 'can'."

"I think this stage of the interview procedure is over," said Dulac abruptly. He looked at each of his colleagues in turn. They nodded. Then he swivelled back to meet Strider's gaze.

"Thank you for your time. We can call up a cabble to take you back to City 43 . . ."

Once upon a time—centuries before a raped child had brought into existence the infant that became the human being now walking through the darkness towards City 43—much of the Earth had been like the holographic scene Strider had watched in the interview room. Then a soaring population and sheer human greed had killed it—or, at least, had initiated and accelerated the processes that would, a millennium or two ahead, kill it. Maybe not as long as a millennium would be required: the environmental degradation was now moving with almost visible swiftness, and seemed irreversible.

What had really spelled the end was the short three-way nuke war between Indonesia, Japanasia and China in 2047. The war was over in a matter of hours, because that was how long it had taken for the populations of all three nations to be exterminated entirely; it might have gone on a bit longer except that the countries' military leaders had been among the casualties. Aotearoa and Australia chipped in for a final few suicidal minutes. Aside from the millions who died during those few hours, over half the population of the Earth perished over the next couple of decades as a direct consequence of the war, which had been, in essence, about net-usage rights. Kids were born with horrific disabilities; or more often they were not, because people chose to abort them or had pre-empted the moral dilemma by opting for sterilization.

No one had ever tried to calculate how many other human beings had died through the major indirect consequence of the war, which was a radical shift of climate patterns. Various models produced in the twentieth century had suggested that a nuke war would either contribute so much to global warming that life on Earth would bake to death or throw so much crap into the atmosphere that, with the Sun's heat blocked out, life would freeze to death. The nuke war showed the opposing models to be both right and wrong. Most of the northern hemisphere froze, and most of the southern hemisphere baked—which didn't much concern the people of Oceania, who were all dead anyway, but was rough luck for the southern half of South America, which had had nothing to do with the original, now largely forgotten dispute and whose population was largely too poor to emigrate in haste to more temperate climes.

Those temperate climes extended in a band of variable width around the equator. Mexico and United Caribbea and the countries to their south were inundated by North Americans seeking sanctuary from the chill. While parts of Africa became wastelands, others tried to cope with colossal immigration from Europe. In the aftermath of the nuke war, the Arab nations wiped themselves out in the bacteriological War of Hatred, which incidentally destroyed Israel.

When the surviving human population of Earth got down to about four hundred million, of whom ten per cent were in some way handicapped, the world's few remaining political leaders decided that the best option was the urgent terraforming of Mars. It was a task that took several hundred years, and the resultant ecosystem was frail; at most a few hundred million people could survive on the once red but increasingly green planet. They could—with difficulty—live outside if they chose, but most opted to dwell inside the various blisters constructed with an almost obscene haste all over humanity's new world. Water was still a problem: even with cloud-seeding, showers tended to be short-lived and mild. Some people decided instead to remain on Earth; about a hundred million continued to live in the safe zone around the equator, enjoying the fruits of what still seemed a profligate nature while at the same time knowing that the world was dying around them. But anyone with any sense, and who could afford it, went to Mars.

If they were allowed to. The Martian government soon started introducing immigration quotas. There was almost another war—and would have been, except that Earth no longer possessed the technological ability to mount one. This was a good thing: the human species had already had the misfortune to destroy one planet; to have destroyed another would have seemed like carelessness.

She was about half an hour into her walk back to City 43 when the attack came.

The Martian night was almost silent, except for the faint, high-pitched whines of nocturnal insects; the insides of the blisters could be noisy, but the plastite walls stopped most of the sound from leaking into the meager atmosphere. Strider had been listening to nothing but the sound of her own footfalls and her hoarse breathing for several kilometers when a hand from behind her snaked around her mouth.

"Don't make any noise," said a voice.

Instinctively, Strider bit the palm that was gagging her, then grabbed the wrist with both hands, fell half-sideways and, rearing up, threw the mugger out in front of her. Although she had been nearly twenty years on Mars, it still seemed to her that he took an inordinately long time to fall to the ground. By the time he did so, she had one boot ready to clamp down on his throat.

"I have friends," the man croaked.

"So have I," said Strider. She wished her voice sounded stronger. While the Martian atmosphere was sufficient to support human life, any prolonged exercise—like walking—led to breathlessness. "What were you wanting?"

Flat on his back, the mugger tried to produce a shrug. She could see his face only as a blur in the darkness. "Your plastic," he said. "What the fuck else do you think I'd want?"

"To kill me, maybe?"

"Nah. My license doesn't extend to killing people, just to mugging them. If you'll let me get my papers out of my pocket . . ."

"No."

"Oh, it's like that, is it?" The man began to shiver.

"Don't worry. Like yourself, I'm not into killing." She looked up towards Phobos again, wondering if the sight of the tiny moon might give her some inspiration. If she let this turd go then all that would happen would be that he'd mug someone else, less capable than herself. Her civic duty was to take him along with her to City 43 and hand him in to the authorities, where he would be charged with incompetence. But she didn't enjoy the prospect. She was already tireder than she'd expected, so beating him unconscious and then carrying him was out of the question. She could pull her lazgun on him, she supposed, and march him all the way to City 43, but in the darkness he could easily escape from her, and he might attack her again . . .

"I've got an idea," she said, looking down once more at the dim blob of his face. "You and I could be friends."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Friends. It's what people often are to each other."

"I—"

"You're currently in no position to argue. I could break your neck if I wanted to."

"You probably couldn't."

"What do you mean?" She leant forward to stare at him more closely.

"I'm not a human. I'm a bot."

"Oh, for—"

"It's true," he said.

"Bots don't go mugging—they've no need to." Bots of whatever type either had free board and lodging or they weren't manufactured in the first place.

"I do."

She rested her boot on his throat; it wouldn't hurt him much and it was a relief to stop standing on one foot. His head buzzed for a couple of seconds, then stopped.

"I think you need to do some explaining."

"Dr Dulac—"

"What's that asshole got to do with this?"

"There are several stages of the interview. You passed the first one. Now you've just passed the second. I wouldn't have hurt you more than necessary, you know."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Do you think you chose to walk back to your hotel in City 43? Wouldn't that have been just a bit irrational of you? Do you think you could allow me to sit up?"

"No. Squirm a bit."

Again the bot attempted a shrug. "Have it your own way."

Strider pressed her foot down more firmly as she thought. Dulac had looked so firmly out the fake window that it was only natural that she would want to do so as well; perhaps her desire or otherwise to see that vista was a part of the test: people who were not inquisitive were hardly likely to be the best personnel aboard the Santa Maria. She remembered the famous legend about what happened when the first Viking had landed on Mars, way back in whatever it was: about half an hour after the initial pictures had begun to come through to Earth, someone on the project had said, "Yeah, but I want to see what's on the other side of that ridge." Inquiry was what going into space was all about. And, of course, the holo she had seen was of people walking around under the open sky of a paradisiac world. Probably Dulac had also laced the air of the office with nanobots that would increase her suggestibility when she inhaled them. She giggled suddenly: if he'd done that, he and his four colleagues must have been going berserk all through the discussion of her sex life.

She sobered quickly.

"What other mind games was Dulac playing?" she said.

"I don't know, lady. I'm just a bot. Look, are you sure you won't let me sit up? Machines can feel just as much discomfort as human beings when they're pinned down like this."

"Tell me another."

"I possess just enough pain sensors to protect myself from damage, so your boot isn't hurting me. But I've got enough intelligence to realize that I should be vertical, not horizontal, and that this situation is very humiliating. Does that make sense to you, lady?"

"I'll let you sit up—I'll even let you stand up and walk around—if you respond the right way to my earlier idea. You and I could be friends, and walk the rest of the way together to City 43."

"No. I can't do that. I have to get back to the SSIA blister. It's not within my remit to do anything else."

Strider snorted. "Just as a matter of interest, what would you have done if I hadn't overpowered you?"

"Mugged you. But without causing pain, if I could help it."

"Well," she said, "at least you're being franker than you were before." She raised her boot cautiously. "Can you call a cabble for me?"

"It'd be a pleasure, lady," said the bot, slowly raising himself. "Anything to get you as far away from me as possible. There's one on the way already."

When she finally got back to her hotel room she stripped off her clothes and twisted the command switch to fill the room with water. Of course, it wasn't real water—there was no water to waste on Mars—but an illusion, the same way that it was only an illusion that she was breathing through gills as she swam around in the warmth. Further illusions ensured that the room expanded so that she was swimming in an infinitude of sunlit ocean, with bright shoals of fishes flickering towards her and then away again.

She twitched her tail to bring herself down to face the mirror that hung over the bed.

You don't look so bad, young Leonie, she thought, turning from side to side, watching herself move slowly in the water. A small green fish, half-transparent, came up to investigate her elbow; she batted it away gently with the palm of her hand, and it scampered off in panic to rejoin its shoal. If it weren't for the fact that you're not so young any longer.

She thought she was forty, although she hadn't checked up on her exact age recently. The difference between Earth's and Mars's years made calculating birthdays a nightmare, and nobody cared, anyway. She could expect to live another hundred and sixty or seventy years—more, if she were lucky, thanks to the nanobots that inhabited every cubic micrometer of her body, scouring away detritus and collaborating to perform minor surgery on the rare occasions it was necessary. Dulac probably knew to the millisecond exactly how old she was.

She grinned at herself in the mirror. Hey! You're younger than you thought! This is the year 2527, and you were born in 2489, so you're now well under forty. You're a spring chicken, Leonie.

Her face was one of those that didn't appear beautiful at first—for the early years of her life she'd been plain, if that, and then her bone structure had begun to exert itself on the lines of her features. Now she knew that her appearance was what polite people called "distinguished." She reckoned her best features were her eyes, which were deeply brown—almost as brown as her skin—with glimmers of pink flesh visible in their corners. Her nose was snub, which she liked, and her lips were full, which she wasn't so sure about.

She poked her tongue out at her own reflection, positioned herself carefully just above the bed, then twisted the command switch again to make the water disappear.

She landed with a pfflumpph on the bed's forcefield, and felt her tail transmuting back into legs again.

According to the bot—whose name, while they'd been waiting for the cabble to arrive, she had finally established was Pinocchio—most of the other people Dulac and his coterie had interviewed so far had failed. The bot wasn't too clear about the details, but he knew that he'd had to quasi-mug only about ten per cent of the candidates, being successful in almost all cases.

Only an hour or so ago she'd been looking up at Phobos and thinking, Well, that's it, then. Now she was beginning to think there was a chance.

She was also beginning to feel both grimy and hungry. The water, while she'd been in it, had given her a delicious sensation of lightness and cool cleanliness, but that had vanished as soon as she'd switched the illusion off.

She rolled from the bed and walked into the shower-room, where she crapped efficiently before standing a while in the cubicle as the ultrasound rasped her clean. As a treat—remembering that it was the SSIA who were paying the hotel bill, not herself—she pressed the button by the side of the shower-head. A measured one hundred and fifty milliliters of cold real water splashed over her.

That'll be another thing that's different, if I get aboard the Santa Maria, she thought, licking herself dry wherever she could reach. There'll be as much water as I want.

She dialled herself a meal from the wall and ate it at the bedside table, wondering briefly what the food was and then deciding not to wonder: it was Tikka Something, which was near enough for her. When she was full she threw the rest down the disposal vent, watched the sex channel for a little while—the nature of her questioning during the interview had, infuriatingly, made her sexually tense—decided not to masturbate, switched over to one of the news channels which she hit during an ad break, saw a small child doing a tap-dance while masquerading as a soyaburger, then discovered that there had been several more assassinations on Earth ("Though fewer than usual for a Thursday," added the 'caster reassuringly, standing in the middle of the carpet and all of thirty centimeters tall), and at last tapped her fingernail against the wall to switch off both the holo and the lighting.

She spent a moment wishing she could phone a mother, then slept.

"You're wanted for another interview," said Pinocchio, emerging from the wall.

Strider stared at him.

"Where did you learn to do that trick?" she said.

"What made you think these walls were solid?"

"There's a mirror hanging on one of them," Strider snapped. "Oh, yeah, I see what you mean. Everything in here that's hanging off a wall is hanging off the same one. Clever. Good illusion."

"Holographic walls save valuable building materials," said Pinocchio virtuously.

"And are walls that people can look in through from the outside."

"That is true."

"Did anyone? Look in on me, I mean?"

"I don't know, lady."

"There's a lot of things you don't know, Pinocchio."

"And a lot that I do. For example, I know how to clean your clothing while you ablute. This is a useful service which I can perform, and which no human being could do."

Strider found herself smiling at him.

"Next time, knock," she said. "Preferably on the door."

By the time she returned from showering Pinocchio had laundered her clothing, pressed it, and laid it out on the bed. It was a standard SSIA uniform: blue underpants, blue brassiere, blue socks, blue jumpsuit. Strider often wondered if someone in the Agency had a monopoly on the manufacture of blue dye. The garments smelt beautifully clean.

"How did you do that?" she said, looking round the room.

Pinocchio tapped his stomach. "I was originally intended to be a valet, before I was seconded to the SSIA. I have stuff in here you couldn't imagine. I could even brew you some coffee, if you'd like."

"Can you manage a cup of water?"

"Of course."

Strider watched as, after a few preliminary gurgles, a hatch opened in Pinocchio's chest and a plastic cup was extended on a skeletal hand. She took it, and sniffed it. It was superbly cold. She drained the water in a single, long gulp.

"Another?" she asked.

Pinocchio's head buzzed disconcertingly. "I would like to, but it is not permitted for another hour. Please do not ask again, lady. It would put undue stress on my decision hardwiring if I had to reject your request. Since my torso is entirely taken up with gadgetry that enables me to perform as a valet, all my hardwiring has had to be confined to my head and lower legs, and my feet. I am less intelligent, for this reason, than many bots."

"Then why the fuck did the SSIA take you on?"

"I was cheap. Back in 2430, when the SSIA was being set up, they needed several thousand bots in a hurry, and Rwanda was being hawkish about budgets. There were a few hundred of the KR371 line on sale, and I was one of them. I think I may be the only one who has lasted the distance. Besides, the coffee I brew is really very good. Are you sure you wouldn't like a cup?"

"Quite sure. I'm allergic to caffeine."

"There is no caffeine in my coffee."

"I'm still sure."

"Oh." Pinocchio was visibly crestfallen. "Then can I ask you, lady, to pack your things and come with me back to the SSIA blister? Your interview will last the rest of the day, and then you will be podded back to"—again the bot's head buzzed momentarily—"City 78."

"I don't live in City 78."

"From tonight you will. Either you will be in final training for the Santa Maria mission, or you will be working as an ancillary staff member."

Or I'll have resigned, thought Strider. Everything she'd brought with her fitted easily into a shoulderbag. She could have asked Pinocchio to carry it, but she wanted to do so herself. I can take missing out on the mission, but not working alongside the lucky ones: that'd be twisting the knife. Dulac and others like him never seem to realize that the reason people like me joined the SSIA is that we want to go to the stars, not help other people go there. I want Tau Ceti ii; I want it so badly I can almost smell the air of the place.

What she said was: "Take me to your cabble."

The cabble sped along the dusttrack, floating exactly one meter above the surface at all times. Strider was pleased to find that Pinocchio didn't try to cut across the plain, but stuck to the carved-out road: the leaps and jumps cabbles took as they tried to accommodate to irregular surfaces had no effect on a bot but a considerable effect on human beings. Strider had been cabble-sick once, and never wanted to be again.

Cabbles were slow vehicles, rarely exceeding twenty-five kilometers per hour, so Strider had time to talk to the bot.

"What's this second interview about?" she said, watching the red-orange plains, spattered patchily with greens and blues, slowly move past. The hemispherical dome of the cabble oddly distorted the scene.

"They don't tell me things like that."

"But you must have a clue. You told me last night that I was the hundred and fifty-ninth person they'd seen."

"You're only the fourteenth that they've called back again."

This sounds hopeful. She squinted out at the Sun, which was pleasingly small and white. She remembered the bulbous yellow Sun of her early life: now it seemed as though it had been an enemy.

"Hasn't anyone else . . . you know, let something slip out?" she said.

"A couple of them looked really happy afterwards, lady. That's all I can tell you. Their conversations were privileged, as this one is."

A rut made the cabble tilt briefly sideways, and Strider's stomach lurched. The vehicle whined for a moment until it regained an even keel.

A minute passed as Strider stared out at the landscape. She had never regretted leaving Earth—well maybe just for a few weeks, after she'd been accepted by the SSIA and was being shuttled out here to Mars. But as soon as she'd arrived in this fresh world it was as if she'd come home. She liked breathing air that didn't taste of anything; even in Burkina Faso there had always been the sensation that the thick, cloggy air you were inhaling had been breathed by a hundred million other people and farted by most of them. She liked the fact that the sunlight was muted, so that she never had to squint against the day's brilliance. She liked the fact that you could go only a few kilometers and find yourself utterly alone—although this was not something she was going to admit to her interviewers.

"What's it like being a bot?" she asked suddenly. It was something that had never occurred to her before. The only bots she had ever spent much time with were sexbots, and in such circumstances conversation was not generally part of the agenda.

"I don't know what you mean, lady."

"Maybe it's a silly question . . . or maybe it's not. If you asked me what it was like being a human I could give you some kind of an answer."

"I think being a bot is not so much different from being a human," said Pinocchio after a pause. "I have likes and dislikes, just as humans do. I am more likely to malfunction than a human is, because no one has ever thought it necessary to spend much time or money constructing nanobots for bots." He rubbed the heel of his palm against his eye—a curiously human gesture. The cabble hummed softly. "I dislike the prospect of being trashed—just the same way as humans don't want to be killed. That's about it."

"Do you feel emotions? Affection? Hatred? You know what I mean."

Pinocchio's head buzzed for a second or two. Strider no longer found the effect alarming.

"Emotions other than preferences—likes and dislikes, as I said—were not something deliberately built into my software," he said at length, "but I have developed something analogous to them, over the centuries. You could have trashed me last night, but instead you asked if we could be friends. That has imprinted itself in me."

The cabble beeped loudly: they were approaching the locks of the SSIA blister.

"I will be part of the Santa Maria mission," said Pinocchio. "I hope that you will be, too, lady."

The last remark told Strider more than she had expected to know.

Project Eyeball had lasted the best part of a hundred years, and the first—and so far only—results had come back ninety years after that.

Earth was in a mess and, for another few thousand years yet, Mars would be incapable of hosting the several billions of individuals that the human species would multiply itself into. Of course, there were strict laws against over-reproduction, and most of the time they worked, but, if a woman has a second child or even a third, what do you do? Kill the children?

Sometime at the end of the twenty-third century a Mexican governmental advisor suggested sending out bot probes to those nearby stars the astrophysicists knew possessed planets to see if any of those worlds might be suitable for colonization. He was fired for stupidity—the Mexican government had very few funds to draw on—and his idea was immediately taken up by the Nigerghanaians. The only difficulty was, of course, that, if the astrophysicists knew a star had at least one planet, then it was probable that the star's planetary retinue was of a nature unlike the Solar System's. The space telescope Hubble XVII, orbiting Pluto, was able to detect the "wobbles" induced in the paths of a number of stars by attendant planetary objects; it seemed that, at least around singleton stars, planets were the norm rather than a rarity. The trouble was that, even with Hubble XVII's sensitivity, the smallest "wobble" that could be distinguished represented a planet of mass some two times that of Jupiter. A planet twice the mass of Jupiter is well on the way to becoming a star in its own right, and had probably, during the evolution of its parent, swept up most of the detritus floating around during the days, billions of years ago, when smaller, Earth-like planets might have been forming. Some of those "planetary" bodies might even be wasted pulsars, in which case there was no hope at all that any planets would be found.

The Big Idea didn't take very long in coming. It was probably a better plan to send probes to those stars where the astrophysicists hadn't been able to detect the presence of planets.

In 2303 Nigerghana put up the idea to the by now very small United Nations, where it was rejected by all except Mexico, whose government had performed a volte-face. However, the nascent Martian nation declared itself in favor of the Nigerghanaians, pointing out that it could mount the project for a fraction of the cost any terrestrial nation would have incurred: launch prices from Mars were far smaller than those from Earth, and the asteroid belt, with its invaluable raw materials, was several tens of millions of kilometers nearer. When a historian dug out the idea of the Von Neumann probe—which had been popular among theoreticians centuries earlier, long before the human species had had the technological ability to construct any such thing—the Martians told the Earth nations that they could be part of the project, or not.

The idea of the Von Neumann probe is a very simple one. If you can create a bot probe so sophisticated that it will guide itself to the vicinity of another star, it takes very little extra effort to make it capable of finding, in the orbit of that star, a random chunk of rock—an asteroid or a dead moon—on which it can set down and start constructing a replica of itself while at the same time making a survey of the stellar system and reporting home. The replica—or, if there's nothing interesting in this particular stellar system, both the parent and the offspring—can then head off towards different nearby stars. The enthusiasts for the concept had, throughout the period between the late twentieth century and the mid-twenty-first century, regarded this as the paradigmatic fashion in which any technological species would investigate the Universe. The idea fell from fashion when it became apparent that there were almost certainly no Von Neumann probes currently at work in the Solar System: had other civilizations hit on the idea there should, by the mere laws of statistics, have been plenty.

What the Martians did was adapt the notion a little. In the middle of the twenty-fourth century they put a colony on Ceres and built five probes simultaneously; the effort strained Mars's revenues considerably, even though most of the nations of Earth provided contributory funding. Completed, the five probes were launched into the asteroid belt to discover, essentially, what they could eat. When, some years later, Hubble XVII was able to observe the first of the offspring blasting off in the general direction of Epsilon Eridani, there was widespread rejoicing on Mars. There would have been widespread rejoicing on Earth as well, except that it was in the middle of another global war: fortunately no nukes or micro-organisms were used, but it was a pity about the population of Patagonia.

In 2510 Mars picked up the first signals from one of the cloned bot probes: Proxima Centauri was orbited by seven lifeless, atmosphereless lumps of rock, none of them larger than the Solar System's Mercury. No one was startled or disappointed by the news: Proxima, itself orbiting distantly around the binary of Alpha and Beta Centauri, had never been regarded as a hot prospect. Still, it would have been nice had the first probe report been positive.

The second one was. It came in 2512, and it came from the system of Tau Ceti. Here there were only five planets orbiting the little star. The second one out had an atmosphere that was rather richer in oxygen than that of Mars, a gravity zero point eight three that of the Earth, and abundant vegetation. Whether or not humans would find it in fact habitable was something the probe could not determine: only human beings themselves could do that.

By trying it out.

It was a ruthless means of experimentation, but no one could think of a better one.

So, on Phobos, the Martians began the construction of the Santa Maria, which would hold forty-five human beings for a thirty-year trip, and was capable of supporting them for a further eighty years if it proved obvious that Tau Ceti II was a complete non-starter: in that case they would explore the system, learning what they could, and then head straight back home.

It had been projected that the building of the Santa Maria would take thirty years but, as time went by and no further probes reported, some urgency was put into the construction. Unlike most major engineering projects, it was coming in ahead of schedule.

The semicircular desk had been replaced by a much smaller one, seemingly made of wood. Pinocchio ushered Strider into the room, and left. Today only Dulac and Macphee were there, and they were smiling.

She could have done with a few smiles during her interrogation yesterday. In fact, she could have done with any palette of human emotions from her interviewers, whatever those emotions might have been: even outright antagonism would have been better than what she had endured.

The three of them exchanged greetings, and sat. The chairs were placed at precisely one-hundred-and-twenty-degree intervals, Strider observed, and despite herself she began to feel excitement kick in. The arrangement was for a meeting of equals.

"A few final questions, Strider," said Dulac.

"I'm ready."

"Why is it that you lack neural implants, stim sockets, cortical amplification, secondary retinal screens, augmented musculature and a direct commline?" Dulac was still smiling, but she could tell by the way he was leaning across the desk towards her that her he wanted an answer: this wasn't just friendly chitchat.

She decided to be honest.

"Because I've never felt the need of any of them," she said. "Most of them are just toys. I don't need augmented musculature, because I augment my own by working out in the gym. I refuse to have stim sockets or secondary retinal screens because they get in the way of my perceptions: I'm more efficient without them." She put her hands, palms down, flat on the table in front of her. "I've often thought about having a direct commline installed, because it could be useful, but—"

"Would you object to having a commline installed?" Macphee interposed. Even though this was a much lower-key interview than yesterday's, and even though the friendly smiles were still in place, the two still seemed determined to play the good-cop, bad-cop game.

"It would depend on the circumstances. I was fitted with a stim socket for a while a few years ago: after a while I got tired of getting high when I didn't really want to, so I had the thing taken out again. Occasionally I use a commlink to hook myself into the system temporarily. Ideally, I'd rather do without a permanent commline. On the other hand, if it meant I could perform my job better . . ."

"What degree of technological enhancement does your body in fact possess, Strider?" said Dulac.

"Nothing except nanobots—but you must know that from my records."

"How much holo do you watch?" said Macphee.

"Not much. Most of it's garbage."

"So you wouldn't describe yourself as addicted to it?" said Dulac.

Strider laughed. "Of course not."

"Yet you watched some in your hotel room last night."

"So you were observing me. I tuned in to a bit of holo, yes, because I was too tired to start a new bookette and I wanted something to relax with." She drew a finger across the bridge of her nose. "You're putting me on the defensive, and that pisses me off."

Dulac cleared his throat. "Thanks for the frankness, Strider. We wouldn't be doing it unless we had reason."

"We're not fooling around here," added Macphee. "These questions are more important than they might seem. Would you get up and go over to the window?"

"It's a pretty scene," said Strider, pushing back her chair.

"We've changed it today," said Dulac. "Please, go and look at it and tell us what you think."

She stared at him for a moment, then obeyed.

The tranquil groves and the ambling philosophers were gone. Instead there was a scene of such extravagant bleakness that Strider sucked in her breath. There was a prairie of long grey grass that seemed to stretch out towards infinity. Vicious sleet was coming down at an angle, and a gale was blowing across the landscape so violently that many of the ears of the grass were being ripped away, to go tumbling high in the air before being lost in the distance. A pinkish sun lowered not far above the horizon. Strider touched the plastite: it was at approximate skin temperature, but at the same time it made her sense that it was cold. She felt a stinging in her nostrils, as if she had just breathed a whiff of ozone.

"Is this Tau Ceti II?" she said quietly. "It's beautiful."

Dulac chuckled behind her.

"No. It's only a mock-up. We haven't got any pictures of the planet yet—we won't have until next year some time. You should know that."

Strider nodded absently, still absorbed by the scene of wilderness. The Martians' Von Neumann probes were programmed to replicate themselves first, explore the stellar system they had encountered, and then only as a last resort descend to the surface of any major planet. In theory the probe could lift itself off again, but only at the potential cost of destroying every ecosystem for hundreds if not thousands of square kilometers around. In practice, if they decided to investigate a world close up, they would send transmissions home as long as they thought fit, then switch themselves off.

She loved Mars. She thought of herself not as an Earthling but as a Martian. But she would have given virtually anything to be able to strip back the plastite of the fake window and throw herself into the mocked-up alien scene.

"Strider," said Dulac. He had to say it a second time before she heard him, because a heavy creature with two huge horns jutting from each shoulder was strutting through the grass towards her. It seemed to have no head as such; its eyes were just beneath and to the front of the horns.

"Yes," she said, forcing herself away from the view.

"You've got yourself a job."

"On the Santa Maria?" She tried to make it sound as if the question weren't any big deal.

"You could say that."

"Oh, shit, you're not making me part of the back-up team, are you?"

"No." Macphee took over. "We want you to be the Santa Maria's captain."

It took them a while to explain to her what the word "captain" meant—hierarchical structures were of course present on Mars, but everyone tried to ignore the fact. It took them a while longer to tell her why she had been singled out for the role.

In an era when almost everybody was booted up with various bits and pieces of technological augmentation, she was something of a rarity; some people were filled with more extraneous software than the average bot, which was fine when they wanted to play videogames in the middle of the night without having to get out of bed but not so exciting when they had to draw on more basic brain functions, like walking. And the two major troubles with technology were that eventually people came to rely on it and that inevitably, in time, it broke down. Sometimes it could be fixed, sometimes it couldn't.

The SSIA was sending a party of human beings on a journey that might take a hundred and ten years. During this time, some of the potential colonists would certainly suffer mental collapse: the Santa Maria was as large as she could be built, but the confinement and the boredom would surely break a few of the party. What was more worrying, however, was the risk of technowithdrawal: people became addicted to their gadgetry, and were likely to become suicidal—or, worse, murderous—if it broke down and couldn't be replaced.

Strider was a normal human being.

This, they repeated, meant that she was very unusual. It had also made her a prime candidate for—she practiced the new word again that night back in her apt in City 19—captaincy of the Santa Maria. She'd told Dulac and Macphee that she wanted a week to sort things out before the SSIA podded her across to City 78.

She felt like getting laid by way of celebration but she couldn't think of anyone to call whom she much liked and her sexbot was so goddam proficient that she was bored with it ("Couldn't you just sort of be interestingly impotent from time to time?" "It-is-not-in-my-programming."), so instead she spent a week's salary ordering up a real-cheese pizza, a glass of wine and a shot of ziprite.