Champion of Mars Read Free

transmitter. The Martians had limited access to fabrication units; only those run for company purposes had a full range of patterns. Raw materials, drawn from the planet’s mining operations, were scarce. This was strictly a frontier environment, geared to transforming the world, as it had been since the first settlement in ’93 and would remain for a long time. A goodly proportion of the colonists held double or triple doctorates – Stulynow was a cryovulcanist and a noted speleologist – but here men were expected to work with their hands too, to be as happy with a shovel as with a minilab. That required a certain kind of individual. The distance from home and its comforts further narrowed down the psychological types recruited by the company. The first wave of the new Martians were real pioneers, capable, but misanthropic. Who else but the emotionally damaged would want to come all the way out here? Holland had his reasons for getting off Earth, like all of them, but these new Martians disdained the problems of others even while struggling with their own. They looked down on Holland. He was still only a scientist, and not yet a pioneer.
    Holland stared at the earbuds. He appreciated their simplicity. He supposed they also cut out the noise of the rover, which the suit speakers, his helmet off, did not. Common sense, and he’d expected that, anticipated it. He’d come here because it was a place where men relied on men. The machines on Mars were set only to the task of making a second Earth.
    Except the android. That could never be a slave, not a thinking machine of that level. He knew they had one out there, he just hadn’t expected to be sharing his ride with one. He couldn’t escape them, no matter what he did, and that angered him.
    The machine continued to stare at him.
    Perhaps it wasn’t enough to get away. Perhaps he’d made a mistake. Perhaps Dr Ravi had been right and he shouldn’t have come. He should have stayed on Earth and tried to work through his phobia, just like everyone else who’d suffered in the Five Crisis. Time hadn’t lessened its immediacy, and distance was doing as poorly.
    “Can’t you turn it off, or at least make it close its eyes?” he said.
    “She is off,” said Stulynow, shrugging again. “As off as she gets, anyhow. This sheath is in its inactive state, asleep. More or less, she’s not really here at all. This is just a shell; she’ll be doing something back at base. We only take the remote carriage in case something goes wrong. The sheath’s eyelids get stuck on open whenever she’s asleep. I haven’t been able to get it fixed. Sorry.”
    Holland snorted derisively.
    Stulynow frowned. “Do not do that. She always has a line into the sheath. She can still hear you. You will hurt her feelings.”
    Holland looked away. “It’s a machine. They don’t have feelings.”
    Stulynow looked at the android, strapped tightly into its seat on the long couch next to him. “Maybe not, but she does a good job emulating them. Her mind has full adaptive heuristics. She’s a top range Class Three self-evolving AI; not many of those anywhere in the Solar System.”
    The Fives have that capability, thought Holland bitterly.
    “Reliable model. I have worked with her for several months. She might not be human, but you can’t tell, much better than other Threes. And if she doesn’t feel, only appears to, what’s the difference? My experience of what goes on in your head is as deep as my experience of hers. It’s all the same. There is no difference, not subjectively.”
    “You’re wrong,” said Holland.
    Stulynow politely waited for him to say something more, but Holland fixed his eyes on the door leading to the driver’s cabin. The Siberian shrugged again. His shoulders were in perpetual motion with weary indifference. He keyed his music back on.
    They spent the rest of the journey to Ascraeus Base in silence.
     
     
    “H OLLAND. D R H OLLAND ?” Someone was shaking him