| Nightfall. The rocky galleries flooded with shadow. Hurriedly David threw his samples into the back of the rover and set it to the laborious climb out of the Noctis Labyrinthus. The engine protested, groaning, crawling up the heavily eroded escarpment, pushed to the limit. There. He achieved the last sheen of sunlight and was saved from creeping darkness. He sighed, relieved, and his visor fogged briefly with his breath. Before him, across the smoother ground, the trail was muted with the fine red dust that eddied like liquid cinnamon into the ruts. But it was a trail; it led to shelter. A human voice, and, of course, her. The rover bounced on, hugging the rim of the light, gaining on the darkness. A cloud of crimson particles billowed from the oversized wheels, veiling the horizon and the face of a small, raw sun. David glanced to his left, to where the world came to an abrupt edge. He hesitated, gauged the remaining light, turned aside from the path. A low rise, a jumbled set of ruts, and a chasm yawned before him. Pinnacles of layered rock, ravines flowing with rivers of dust, colors rippling and heaving as if the torn crust of Mars quivered like a wounded animal. Night pooled in the depths, drawing the wind from the light, voices wailing about the ocher spires. Vertigo welled from the abyss, plucking at him. He shuddered in sudden fear. He inhaled deeply of his personal bubble of atmosphere, tilted his helmeted face to the lowering pink sky, raised his gloved hands and declaimed in a desperate defiance, "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" His voice emerged from the speaker, a feeble mutter that was whipped away and dissipated into darkness. The wind sang, echoing in his audio receivers. He turned, crushed. The rosy haze of dusk was almost upon him. "Nothing beside remains," he whispered. "Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away." Shadows crept out of the Labyrinth of Night, pursuing the tiny rover like grasping fingers. David set his mouth; it would be foolish to look behind him, he was one of the only two living creatures in this entire sector of Mars. Still his neck prickled. Brought too much emotional baggage, he told himself. Think too much. Fear from within, not without. There was the camp, the life unit like a giant clamshell half-buried in the sand. His first days there David had built a low rock wall around it, as carefully as a New England farmer clearing a field; now only a few boulders showed above the red dust. Mars was not quite ready to accept human artifacts. He slowed, edged the rover in close to the shelter, stopped. Clumsily he scrambled out and turned to retrieve the samples. In this batch, perhaps, the evidence of extraterrestrial life. But he doubted that man would ever find new life; we're alone, folks, stuck with our terrors. Behind him the door of the shelter opened. "Were you delayed?" The voice was soft, carefully modulated, with a rote of music in it. Someone had taken great care with that synthesizer. And another voice, harsh and masculine, "What kept you, David? I was about to eat your rations!" With an effort David hoisted the containers. Irene stepped out of the airlock and lifted them effortlessly from his gloves with her slender pale hands. "Yeah, thanks," he began. She turned back into the shelter. David secured the rover and cast one last suspicious glance around the misty horizon. Nothing. A crimson blotch, the oversized star that was the sun, and the eternal pink sky. He craved green the way a starving man craves food. He turned his back on Mars and ducked inside the shelter, pausing in the suiting chamber to divest himself of helmet and suit and boots and power packs. Irene was already returning from the lab to the main room, a slender coveralled figure winking from light to puddle of fluorescent light. Andrei sat at the table, a tray of root vegetables before him. "What kept you?" he asked again. "Woolgathering, as usual," David replied. He sat down. Irene produced another food tray from the warmer and set it before him. "Do you need anything else?" she asked. "Water ration?" "Yes. Dust in my throat." "Something wrong with your suit?" Andrei asked. His eyes were blue, their gaze sharp as a surgeon's dissecting scalpel. David avoided them, seizing the cup and pouring the liquid into his mouth. Tasteless, distilled from subsurface ice, molecules of an alien world flowing into his body. He wondered if they would make of him some alien life form. "No, nothing's wrong with my suit. Just that staring at the dust all day makes me feel as if I'm choking on it." Andrel's keen glance shifted, granting reprieve. "When I was a kid," he said, "we'd go on hiking trips through Bryce Canyon, clambering up and down the bluffs like monkeys. Not so different from here, really, except for the suits. And the cold." "No snakes," David said. Andrei was trying to cheer him up; he should cooperate. He dived with a show of enthusiasm into the vegetable stew. Not bad. Not good either. Earth roots, processed in Martian soil -- a different tang to the ordinary potatoes and carrots. "Irene," Andrei called, and she turned from her task. "Go ahead and check yourself out. We have a chess game later on." "Why do you keep on playing?" David asked. "She always beats you." "Mind over matter. Some day I'm going to win." "It's her mind..." David began, and cut himself off. Irene seated herself and plugged the electrodes into her fingertips. The meters flickered, testing the circuits of her artificial nerves. She was still, clear chiseled profile set, fiber-optic eyes closed. The faintest blush of color touched her polymer cheeks, an indication of energy level, not emotion. "She looks real," David hissed, as if it mattered if she heard him. "A human form is the most efficient for the multiple tasks she's required to do. So the lab decided to give her eyelashes and teeth and hair, and decided to wire her computer brain like a woman's." "Engrams complementary to ours -- that's what they told us, isn't it? But I don't think they provided us grizzled prospectors with a female companion just out of the goodness of their hearts." The blue gaze fixed him once gain, peeling away layer after layer of pretense. "Of course not. It's an experiment in cultural evolution, and we're part of it. That's why we're here, scientific curiosity." That's why you're here, David thought, avoiding the older man's eyes. "I don't know. I just have a -- a feeling. One of the puny intuitions left to us human types." Iren -- One Robot something something Experimental -- was a great scientific breakthrough for his ex-wife's biotechnical research and development team. His own nerves twinged whenever she plugged herself in like that. A technological stigmata. | |