Born Under Mars

by John Brunner

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

When mankind colonized the stars, they travelled out from Earth in two directions - to Centaurus and its Southern Hemisphere neighbours and to Ursa Major and the constellations around Polaris. And strange to say the humans who settled on those various worlds began to develop into two differing antagonistic types. For Ray Mallin, born under the surface of Mars in the sparse colony of Earth's inhospitable old neighbour, neither the anarchic 'bears' nor the autocratic 'Centaurs' commanded his loyalty. So when secret agents of both galactic groupings suddenly focus their unwelcome attention on his most recent star-piloting mission, he knew only that something of vast significance was up - and that he unknowingly was the key to it.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 123

Sample

I WOULD TELL it as it happened to me. But I am no longer as I was when it happened. At least, though, I can remember when the change began—to the hour, almost to the minute.

There was the bare room lit by a single high fluorescent yellowed with age. It held some chairs. One of them was of stone, hand-carved, weighing about a quarter of a ton. They had lashed me to it because even in Martian gravity no one could have moved dragging such a load. To me, as a Martian, it was the weight of death itself.

I was thinking a lot of death because of what Thoder had taught me—what I was learning after so many years was of importance. I was afraid of the last thing he said, in his rusty hollow voice: “There is always an escape, Ray, even if it is only through the wall at the end of life.”

But this escape I did not wish to take. Had there been a reason, had I known why these men were doing to me—what they were doing—I might have put his lesson into effect.

The lack of a reason brought to mind an earlier teaching of Thoder’s, when he said, “Consolation is armour.” I had such consolation; I knew that whatever my interrogators wanted from me they weren’t getting it. But it was a fragile shield against a nerve-whip. I could claim small credit for not giving information I didn’t possess.

Still, I leaned on that support for all I was worth. I wanted to recall this time. The four who were torturing me were wearing privacy screens and their voices were filtered. If I sought clues to their identity—and I did, with all the blazing raw agony of my nerves—I must miss nothing.

I had weakened at the beginning and thought of another teaching Thoder showed me, not understood till now, with his little bead-on-a-string: how to let time go lax and speed the ball of consciousness towards the future. This was easy—after all, it was the process of sleep. Enduring, I had come on the frail staff of my sole consolation to considering the reverse: the tautening of time so that the bead stopped, the now froze. Yet I burned so, I burned so under my skin!

If I live, I will find Thoder and beg forgiveness …

No, I could not summon the mental resources to slow time; accordingly I could seize only the intervals between blasts of agony to look, listen, smell, feel and remember these men.

At first I had thought “slavers!” In spite of every official denial, rumours about kidnapping for slavery went on spreading. Most of the accusations were against the Tyranny of Centaurus, of course. Officially, only Earthmen had views, individually, while Earth was nonpartisan, but most Earthmen’s sympathies lay with the Bears.

Ironical! Me, Ray Mallin, brought to a typical Earthman’s attitude!

My mind was wandering. I had wasted irreplaceable seconds. I snatched it back to the knowledge that the interval since the last nerve-whipping was exceptionally long, and I had a chance to concentrate again.

Accents? They speak Anglic fluently. But I speak the lingua spatia of both Centaurs and Bears with equally good accent and vocabulary, so these people could be …

Pointless. Listen instead to what is said, I told myself as though I were Thoder.

The man in the middle chair of the group of three facing me snapped, “One more time, I said!”

The man apart from the others, holding the nerve-whip, raised his instrument. I tensed, but the leader shook his head. “Try it without the whip,” he directed. “The pain may be keying in a hypnotic cover-story.”

I tried not to show relief, as the last of the men turned to face me—at least, the shapeless mass of his privacy screen hunched to suggest the action—and said in his cajoling voice, “Ray Mallin! Your last voyage! Think back and tell us how it began!”

Should I tell it this time more fully, supplying extra details—? I rejected the temptation. I was near to convincing these people I was speaking truth, near to victory, near to escape and to revenge. To waste the advantage was futile. Anyhow, what difference did elaboration make? The substance was still the unvarnished truth.

My last voyage but one had taken me as far as Durrith. I had never travelled much in Centaur space before, but I’d seen most of the interesting worlds in the Bear sphere of influence, and I’d finally grown sick of the discrepancy between Earth’s official neutrality propaganda and what everyone knew to be the preference underlying it. I was afraid to fall into the stereotyped assumptions that would make people think I was what my papers called me: an Earth citizen.

Not that I thought of it in terms of “being afraid” until later, when I’d grown more honest.

I learned the very hard way that I’d swallowed much of that propaganda, despite my resentment of it. It implied things were much the same whether you went north or south of the Old System. They weren’t. The third time I was cocky with the Chief Officer of the tub I was aboard—he was an aristocrat claiming family connections with the Tyrant himself—I was dumped. On Durrith. If a Centaur crewman had done the same thing he would probably have been dumped without the courtesy of having a planet put under his feet first, but for the only time in my life that I could recall I was grateful for my official nationality. An advantage of being an Earthman was that in whichever sphere of influence you were you knew that the other side was temporarily supporting you. Not that I could thank Earth’s scheming politicians for this incidental benefit—it resulted merely from the strategic location of the Old System between two great power-blocs.

However, for whatever reason, the Centaur officer had been constrained to show me the lock on a habitable planet. I was on Durrith, with half a trip’s pay and no prospects.

At first I wasn’t particularly alarmed. I headed for Traffic Control at Durrith Main Port, and invested part of my ready cash in getting drinking-acquainted with the port controllers. This technique had worked for me before, on Goldstar; that time, I was unofficially notified of an engineer’s post on a freighter, and the only drawback was that if I showed my nose on Goldstar again the local crewmen’s fraternity would chop it off. Not that I cared. The fraternity hadn’t copied the progressive unions closer to the Old System and recognised Martian nationality. Until they did …

Anyhow, this was irrelevant. On Durrith, as on other worlds south of Sol in Centaur space, they didn’t have fraternities. But they did have patronage.

Three weeks on Durrith, no sign of a berth, I was debating whether to buy passage home—which smacked of defeat—or take the cheaper course, against all my principles, and have the local Earth consul ship me home DTS (Distressed Terrestrial Subject), with the injury-worsening insult of having to spend a year in government service on my return to work off the dead horse. To work, without pay, for Earth! The idea revolted me.

I’d spun out my cash as far as I could by helping in a bar on the port—discovering that what went over with the Bears failed miserably here—when Lugath turned up.

Lugath was so unlike the Centaur officers I’d met until then that, had he not been commanding a ship under Centaur registry, I’d hardly have credited his claim to citizenship in this sector. For one thing, he showed harrassment, which Centaurs regarded as undignified. For another, he addressed me as a fellow man. And he came rapidly to the point.

“They tell me you can handle four-space drivers.”

I produced my certificates. Of course, the fact that they were heavily overstamped with Bear merit endorsements had weighed against me in Centaur space. Still, they were what I had—and they were good.

I half-expected Lugath to curl his lip and walk away on seeing so many Bear stamps. Instead, he merely commented, “You’ve served mostly in Bear space, I see.”

I shrugged and nodded—as Thoder would have said, to no point.

“What brings you this side?”

“A four-space freezer!” I snapped, and immediately regretted it. That was the kind of answer I’d given the Chief Officer of that same freezer once too often, and if I didn’t watch my tongue I’d lose another job the same way before it was offered.

Lugath frowned impatiently. “What was that?”

“A Spica-class refrigeration ship—sir.” The last word followed late. “They dumped me because I was too ready to talk back to the Chief. But I can handle any four-space drivers you care to show me.”

Lugath hesitated, but not for the reason I was anticipating. He said at length, “In that case you may not wish to return so quickly to the Old System—”

I leaned forward. This was miraculous! Right now I wanted out of Centaur space, and I didn’t care if I never came back. “Earth?” I demanded. “Or Mars?”

He gave me a strange look, at the back of which was something I only identified a long time later as alarm. He said, “Mars, naturally!”

And “naturally” was right. Earth was far too wary to allow foreign vessels to broach the air of the home planet. I was afraid my spur-of-the-moment error would put him off, but he gave me the job.

His ship was as far out of the ordinary as her master. She was a conversion job. The hull was that of a Deneb-class ladyboat, half freighter and half liner, but the engines were cruiser-type, stripped to essentials to cram them into the available space. With a hull of such low mass to shift, they gave a velocity equal to a crack luxury liner’s. To forestall my inevitable curiosity Lugath made an offhand reference to picking them up cheap out of a wreck. That yarn rang hollow, but I was too afraid for my job to pester him with questions.

Most of the time the engines threatened to leave the hull behind. I spent the voyage literally sleeping with them, a stress-alarm rigged by my hammock to wake me if anything went wrong. It did, frequently, and I came to wonder whether Lugath’s regular engineer had suffered a breakdown from the strain, but I didn’t ask after him, either. We made Mars without disaster, and Lugath paid me off with a bonus, something else I’d not have expected from a Centaur.

Aside from the anomalous drivers and Lugath’s cordiality—for a Centaur; if he’d been Bear or even Earthborn I’d have classed him as pompous and haughty—the trip was unremarkable.

And that was what was troubling my interrogators.

My words died in silence. I waited. Finally the leader of the four gave a veiled shrug and gestured to the whipper. As the control of the weapon was thumbed to maximum, I strove to do as Thoder had shown me and make time accelerate, make my private “now” outrun the onset of the agony.

I was too slow, but in any case I hardly felt the pain. It was so violent I blacked out. My last conscious thought was a memory of Thoder’s gentle tsk-tsk over a disappointing pupil.

SUFFOCATING …

I struggled against the reflex of fright, attempting to look back on this moment of waking from a calmer period ahead, explaining to myself what was terrifying me. It is the effect experienced in dreams when one thinks, “I drown, swimming with my face below water,” and knows simultaneously that the flow of air is stopped by a soft pillow, so that the head rolls and the dream passes.

Not that I, a Martian, had ever actually swum in water.

I thought at first it was dust choking me—my mouth and throat were harsh-dry with soreness like sand-strangulation. But this was wrong. What lay weighty and oppressive on me, smothering my face and crowding my lungs, was thick damp air. I was giddy from hyperoxia. The remedy was to cease breathing for a while. Why had I been breathing so deeply? I looked to the soreness of my throat and found the dying tensions of strained muscles. I had been shouting, perhaps screaming, from remembered terror.

Thoder would say: “A man binds time over millions of years—are you then to be frightened of Timurlane, Tibbetts and Tovarenko?”

Not breathing, I felt, measured, analysed. The air, first. Wherever I was, it was a rich and foreign place. The measure of air on Mars is by altitude-feet of Earth-normal, taking units of a thousand from sea-level to one hundred, or Martian ground-normal. Arbitrary, but close enough. I was used to breathing at ten, like all Martians. Here, the pressure and humidity combined to make an estimate difficult, but I reckoned two, or three at the most. No wonder I had thought of suffocation; no wonder I felt oxygen-nausea as well as the fading agony of the nerve-whippings I’d endured.

Also the place I lay. A bed. I moved, testing my assumptions, and found answer yes. A bed with nulgee flotation instead of springs. I had been in one once, at an expensive house of ill fame on Charigol. I lay on it naked, on my back, one arm on my belly, one outflung at right angles to my shoulder and still not reaching the edge. Wide, this bed. Like all Martians . . .