On a well-settled Mars, the five major city Council regimes
struggle to meld into a stable, working government. Embracing an official
Unified Faith In Humanity, the Councils are teetering on the verge of pogrom
directed against Christians, Molesters, Jews, Rapists, Buddhists, Murderers,
Muslims, Thieves, Hindu, Embezzlers and Artificial Humans – anyone who
threatens the official Faith and the consolidating power of the Councils. It
makes good sense, right – get rid of religion and Human divisiveness on a
societal level will disappear? An instrument of such a pogrom might just be a
Roman holiday...To see the rest of the chapters, go to SCIENCE FICTION: Martian Holiday on
the right and scroll to the bottom for the first story. If you’d like to read
it from beginning to end (60,000+ words as of now), drop me a line and I’ll
send you the unedited version.
Paolo Marcillon pursed his lips. He wasn’t getting any
younger; his brother’s life wasn’t getting any less strange as far as he’d
heard. His friends in Burroughs talked about a man calling himself Stepan who
had once been Natan Wallach. It seemed insane on the face of it. His brother
had been violently anti-faith; a penultimate materialist, unable to grant
credence to anything he could not touch, taste, hear, see, or smell.
To believe the rumor mill, his brother had made a three
hundred and sixty-degree reversal away from lifelong, rigidly held beliefs. With
a sigh, Paolo suited up. There was only one way to find out the truth and it
was impossible to deny the compulsion he was under. While he was certain God
had a hand in this crazy scheme, he was also terrified.
He sealed his helmet, stored the air in the marsbug, and
let himself out through the airlock.
He’d catch the inbound commuter lev-train from the
outposts ranging along the heights of the crater ring, then try and discreetly
snoop around to see what his big brother was really up to. He found himself
hoping that the conversion was true.
He also found himself hoping that Natan…Stepan…his
adoptive brother…could help him avoid their father and help him search the Dome
archives for information on the strange probe. He’d discovered it just outside
of the crater. It had already been excavated – or it had done a soft landing.
By the surface pitting, it was clearly old and it wasn’t anything made by any
Human government.
On the other hand, it might have been a secret project,
but the level of technology apparent in it wasn’t within the reach of any
current Martian government. Unless there were players he’d never heard of.
Shaking his head, he made the short walk up to the crater
lip to get his bearings. Just to the east was Outpost 14. The silver thread of
the maglev track running along the rim then spiraling down to the floor and into
Burroughs. Setting off for the ‘post, he started out by worrying and gradually
slipped into prayer.
An hour later, he was on the platform, waiting for the
next train. His helmet’s faceplate display showed him he had only a few minutes
to wait. Even so, he found himself nervously checking the suit’s condition,
reviewing his direction, and wondering what his brother was doing living so
close to their father. Though the rumors from the Hidden Church said his
brother was somewhere on the Rim doing something like mission work, none of
them were specific enough for him to have a clear target.
He snorted as the train pulled in. It was a simple flat
car with one rail around the edge, steel toeholds set in rows and vertical
T-shaped poles to hang on to. It was mostly empty, though five figures stood at
the far, rear corner. They didn’t even sway as it stopped. They were locked in
place, probably conferencing. Or they were robots. Unlikely. Mars had never
gone in for the robotic revolution like Earth had. Genetically modified
artificial Humans had taken the place of mechanicals because they weren’t
bothered by the fine Martian dust that pervaded life on Mars.
It took the better part of an hour to loop around the
crater wall; another half an hour to descend to the floor. It was only minutes
non-stop then to Burroughs itself. The car stopped, the other five passengers
they’d picked up on the way down, himself, and the first five got off, heading
for the decontamination and entry gate.
By the time he was out of his suit and standing on the
main concourse of the Dome, it was nearly noon. The city kept its ambient
temperature a little high and he wiped his forehead on his sleeve. Standing
with his back to a column near a city map, he scratched his chin. The rumors
said that Stepan was working somewhere on the Rim, which was the immensely thick
permanent “wall” on which the dome rested. Even though the dome itself wasn’t
made of real glass, but was a forcefield sandwiched between mobile nanomachines
in constant motion, it was still a technology that could break down.
Theoretically no dome could actually “crack” as there wasn’t any physical
structure involved. But the complex interaction between the field and the two
layers of microscopic robots could be disrupted by a large enough force.
Designed to deflect micrometeorite impacts, a strike from something larger than
a fist could conceivably disrupt enough of the sandwich to set up a vortex that
would gradually spread; rather like a skin disease.
The Rim held temporary material that would explosively
bubble a neighborhood if there was ever a catastrophic failure of the
nanomachine-forcefield-nanomachine sandwich. It had only ever been tested in an
actual disaster once. FirstDome, since abandoned along with Paolo’s father’s
Ghost Dome, had blamed not the bubble technology to save everyone in the
neighborhood, but religion. A Pogrom had followed and not long after, the Dome
government fractured and the Councils had seized power, sometimes allowing a
Mayor to rule, sometimes doing the job themselves as democratically as
possible.
He sighed. Life on Mars was complicated. He wondered if
life on Earth, where you could walk around on the surface had been any easier.
Shaking his head, he located the nearest library and set off for it.
No comments:
Post a Comment