Blue Hearts of Mars (36 page)

“Some of them—most of them—have been taken to Space Elevator 11. To the holding warehouse,” Mr. Tanaka said suddenly, his eyes were squeezed shut as though the words left him involuntarily. He buried his face in his hands and groaned. “I’m going to regret this,” he muttered. He looked up. “If you do anything that makes me lose my position—” he began, then finished as though realizing threats wouldn’t work on Mei, “Well, just don’t, Mei. Just don’t.”

“Thanks, daddy,” she said jubilantly and leapt to his seat and threw her arms around his neck. She gave him a big kiss on the cheek. He smiled reluctantly and returned the hug before regaining his stern composure.

“I mean it, Mei. If you two try anything dangerous, I don’t know that I’ll be able to save you,” he admonished her.

“We won’t,” I promised, hoping I could keep it. “But I have one more thing to ask you. To beg of you, really.”

Mei let go of her father and looked at me, her expression serious.

Neither of them said anything, so I went on. “I know you have access to the emergency broadcast channel. There’s something I need you to broadcast.”

The two of them exchanged a glance, then looked back at me expectantly. So I told them. Whether Mr. Tanaka would really do it was the question. I hoped he would. I didn’t know what else to do.

*****

Space Elevator 11 was forty miles west of New Helsinki. It had its own dome and a huge station where a series of railroad tracks intersected. The elevator itself was outside the dome but there were covered transport tracks that led to the platform where the elevator was loaded. Cars left the platform every four hours. The warehouse Mr. Tanaka mentioned was where cargo waited before leaving Mars or where it landed upon import. It bothered me to think of Hemingway waiting in there like a piece of cargo.

The huge people-movers that brought the Mars colonists never really left space. While a few of them were eventually decommissioned for having been too damaged by stray space debris, many of them waited in perpetual orbit out in space, anchored near the space elevators. So the fact that they’d been fired up for this new colonizing effort wouldn’t have made the news, as it was hardly out of the ordinary to see them upon docking at the space-side elevator platforms.

Mei and I left New Helsinki, saying goodbye to her father as soon as we had the chance, after I gave him instructions I hoped he would follow. There was no way to tell for sure. I made my request and left it up to him. If Mr. Tanaka didn’t do it, I knew Hemingway would be truly lost to me. But whatever happened, I needed to get to him before he was sent away.

I woke up as our train slowed into the enormous station near Space Elevator 11. Mei was already standing up. The sun, a molten orb beyond the dome, had sunk to just inches above the horizon as the evening wore on.

“What’s the plan, Retta?” Mei asked as I followed her off the train. Most of the people on the car with us were carrying luggage, on their way to Earth or some other destination—the resorts on the moon, the cruise lines that floated out to the spinning way-stations with all their spas, casinos, and other extravagances. I felt naked without luggage. It was just me and nothing else.

I waited for a small family to exit the train before I got off. “I’m playing it by ear,” I said, finally answering Mei as we strode uncertainly through the station.

“Are we just going to barge in there and demand that they free him?”

I bit my nail. “That wouldn’t work,” I said. “The agents would just wipe our minds and send us away. I want to avoid them at all costs.”

“Wipe our minds?” Mei repeated.

“Yeah, it’s terrible.” I inhaled sharply.

“It sounds like it,” she said.

My Link bleeped suddenly. I looked down at it, turning the wide, colorful screen to my face. “He did it. I can’t believe he did it,” I said, glancing quickly at Mei then back at my Link. Mr. Tanaka had come through—broadcasting the message on the emergency channel.

The program was on auto-play. I stopped to view it, looking around momentarily to see if others were receiving the message. Mei had stopped and was staring at her own Link, as were many of the other wayfarers in the station. They paused in their tracks, staring down at their Links, transfixed. Emergency broadcasts weren’t very common. When one came, you listened. It might be a warning about an abnormally huge dust storm, or a cascade of meteorites that broke through the artificial shields protecting Mars. Your life might depend on paying attention to the messages.

“One of the great and most secretive discoveries on Mars was the casket,” said Hemingway’s voice, coming from the speaker on my Link. “In it was the first perfectly engineered artificial intelligence, or as they are now known, Android.”

A thrill jolted through me. This was the holo-documentary Hemingway made. It was playing for every Martian citizen that had a Link or Gate, if they were logged into their profiles.

I watched as the creation of an android began onscreen. The footage came from Sonja’s personal database. “Prior to this,” Hemingway went on, “we had developed robots that were much more rudimentary. There were elements we had not perfected. Muscles. Skin. The heart. An energy mechanism and waste system. Things on a cellular level. The truly complicated aspects of artificial life.”

The android bones were put together—an intricate, hollow, lightweight-metal skeletal system. “We don’t know where the casket came from. Its inhabitant woke and lived for twenty-seven hours. He assimilated our language quickly and began to speak to us. He told us how to organize intelligence. The following is a transcription of what he said: ‘There is a kind of light that does not burn. The sun in our sky is a poor substitute for this light. All life begins as an intelligence. Another word for this is soul.’”

Hemingway narrated, speaking in an otherworldly type of voice. The voice of the first android.

“‘Light gathers to light. The darkness flees before the light. The opposite of knowledge is ignorance. Darkness is ignorance. Knowledge is light. Intelligence is pure light. In another sphere, beings of light illuminate all things. Knowledge is laid out before these beings—transparent and perfectly understood by the mind of light. Nothing can hide from a mind of light.’”

I didn’t know what it meant. It sounded like gibberish. Crazy gibberish. The rantings of a madman. For some reason, though, it was making me cry. Hemingway’s voice coming through my Link made the ache in my chest sharper.

I stared at the images, transfixed. This was the first time I was seeing them. I’d never gotten the chance before he was taken. Before everything else had happened.

Mei glanced at me, “The document, Retta?” she asked. I nodded. She went on, her questions assertive as though she wasn’t sure what to believe, “The one from Synlife, that you said was just a lot of crap? So what, you think it’s true, then?”

“I think so. Hemingway’s mother didn’t refute it. I mean, it might be—” I hesitated, taking a deep breath, “I think it might be true. That they were here, before us, totally different from the robots humans had created.”

“Wow.” She looked back at her own Link, staring, entranced just like everyone else in the station appeared to be. I heard a mother hushing a young child, saying, “Just a minute, mommy’s watching an important message.” The document came from Synlife. The document I dismissed as pure nonsense in favor of the more concrete facts, like that they were going to send the blue hearts away. It was true, then, and it was only because of Mei’s random decision to send it to me that I even had it. Sonja confirmed that she believed it was true when I came up with the idea for the holo-film—when I really pinned her down, she spelled it out—Synlife hid the casket, eager to keep the secrets to themselves, to develop the technology that made the androids so alive, so real, so capable.

Sinuous, red muscle grew along the limbs of the android in the holo-film. Organs filled the torso cavity—a liver of sorts, something that was maybe a gallbladder or the like, and a red heart. A red, red heart. I hoped everyone paid special attention to that. The process looked painstaking. It was portrayed in time-lapse. Sometimes I caught glimpses of Sonja as she built this android—her hair was shorter, her face brighter and hopeful, more youthful.

“‘A child is born,’” Hemingway went on, still reading the words of the first android. “‘The child is pure and undefiled. Its mind is blank. It begins to assimilate information. It moves out of pure innocence into various states of enlightenment.’”

“‘This is how to organize intelligence. Place a piece of darkness—a particle of dark matter—in a chamber of artificial light. The light rushes to the darkness and adheres to it until it becomes a sphere of light. Place the sphere between the lips of the synthetic life form. Place your own mouth upon the mouth of the synthetic life form and breathe into it. The sphere of light sinks in. The breath and life animate the android.”

Tears streamed down my cheeks. Layers of skin stretched over the android body. I watched as Sonja began to focus on the face. She pulled away, her expression a pleased smile. The face of the android belonged to Hemingway. I gasped.

The narrating voice of Hemingway went on. “‘Soon it will begin breathing. Soon its eyes will close. It will sleep as each bodily system awakens and begins to work together.’”

The android Hemingway blinked, his eyes focusing on Sonja before drifting shut as he fell asleep.

“‘Thus, every intelligence has a piece of darkness within it.’”

The narrative finished. The scene faded. Words flashed across the screen. “Androids, the blue hearts of Mars, lived on Mars before humans. They are the true children of Mars.”

A collective gasp rose in the open area of the train station. I looked up as heads swiveled toward neighbors and a cacophony of voices rose at once in animated conversation.

“What was that?” A woman nearby wearing a Bermuda shirt and white capris demanded of her male companion. “Some kind of joke?” She sounded angry.

Mei and I stared at each other, listening to reactions, waiting—for what we didn’t know.

“I’m not sure,” her companion said calmly. He was slightly shorter than her with a distinctive potbelly while the rest of his body was thin and gaunt. He rubbed his jaw, staring at his Link still. The couple looked like they were set for vacation. He shook his head. “It came through on the emergency band. Someone with authority sent it out.”

“This is impossible!” another man’s voice rose above the couple’s conversation. “There’s no way blue hearts have red hearts. They’re blue hearts!” I strained to see the owner of the voice, rising up on my tiptoes. I could see a head of black, curly hair, bobbing above the bodies between us as he strode toward Mei and me in a heated rage. People parted to let him through. He wore a pair of decorative eyeglasses and a backpack was slung over his shoulder. He came to a halt as he gestured wildly. “Blue hearts, people! Blue! They have blue hearts. No one’s buying this red heart crap. It’s just propaganda!” His cheeks glittered with metallic enhancements. The glasses perched on his nose were gold-framed with tints over the lenses, the kind that changed hues for whatever you were seeing.

“Maybe it’s true,” a younger boy said. He looked to be about Marta’s age. He gripped a jacket tightly in both hands, standing near a couple that I assumed were his parents.

The curly-haired man whirled around to face them. “There’s no way it’s true. You really think all this time that Synlife, and whoever else, has been able to conceal the color of the androids’ hearts? Don’t you think we would have found out?”

The boy’s mother came to his defense, “By doing our own biopsies? Or maybe with our X-ray vision? Or maybe all of us should have just
asked
Synlife. There’s no reason they’d lie to us. Anyway, they were the first people—er, life?—on Mars. That means Mars is theirs. Doesn’t it?”

My feet felt rooted to the floor. Was it working? The holo-documentary had caused conversation, at least. People were talking. Strangers interacting, trying to work out the implications of the film’s revelations. Some were enraged, some seemed to believe it and looked thoughtfully at each other, discussing the possibility that we’d been wrong all along.

But what now? They knew. Yet that didn’t change that Hemingway was about to be lifted into space aboard an elevator, stuffed into a colonizer, and sent away. Far, far away.

Mei was still staring at me, her dark eyes studying my face, waiting for me to tell her our plan.

I had no plan.

I was tired. I’d run and fought, and struggled, and I was completely drained. I looked up, out the skylights of the train station. We were a half-hour closer to twilight. The cords of the space elevator stretched up into the atmosphere outside the dome. Way up in the distance, I could see the container dropping down to the surface, sunlight glaring off the metal. Had they begun moving the androids yet? Was Hemingway even in the warehouse or was he gone? A shock of pain went through my heart. I nearly sobbed. The tears I’d cried from seeing the holo-documentary were dry. My cheeks felt crusted with salt. In the background I heard a voice over a loudspeaker announce the impending departure of a train bound for the city.

I looked back at Mei. She’d been watching the container on the space elevator as well. Her eyes drifted down to me. A gust from the departing train blew her dark hair in waves about her face. A frown touched her lips.