LITMIR.BIZ

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century,” she said. “What game are you two running on me?” She felt the fool. She had a Ph.D. in biochemical engineering. How could she not know how to work a nineteenth century gadget? But then she couldn’t weave cloth, or knit, or make a fire with flint, either.

      “Turn off your helmet light, too,” Sekou added.

      * * * *

      Thirty minutes later, she was staring at film negatives. “Why is there no color? Insufficient band width? And how could anybody be recognizable?”

      “I think any computer could deal with that. Try it on your com.”

      She scanned the tiny transparent images into her com and was rewarded with a bright, colorized image of Valkiri. After the com had thought a minute, it added a third dimension to the colorized image, although both color and third dimension looked a little off from the memory she had of Valkiri.

      Marcus’s voice in her com startled her. “Bail out of there, woman. You’ve absorbed enough REMs to light up Valles Marineris.”

      * * * *

      Marcus was back in his suit, Sekou in his bubble, and the pressure in the rover falling rapidly when she got it.

      “My suit doesn’t show a radiation load,” she said.

      “Something wrong with it. They probably sabotaged our suits, too. Let’s book for Borealopolis.”

      Sekou didn’t even ask to see the picture. “Those guys that stayed in my room,” he said, “they did something bad, didn’t they?” Through the haze of the bubble’s surface, she could see betrayal written on his pinched face.

      “I’m sorry, Sekou. I think it was just the new girl, the one with the frizzy blonde hair. But we can’t trust them any more.”

      She had stopped trusting her conviction that she wasn’t pregnant, too. She’d have to find a machine and test herself the minute they were safely inside the city.

      * * * *

      Hesperson greeted them inside the city’s outer airlock. His assistant took the image “We’ll run a biometric search on this, right away.”

      “And you’ll take us in,” Marcus asked. “We need consumables. Can’t live like Land Ethic Nomads, running from hab to hab, on charity.”

      Hesperson smiled warily, “The city management of Boreaolopolis can offer you a nice cubicle, plus free air, water, food, and utilities for up to a year.

      “Marcus,” Zora said, “We’ll have to contact Vivocrypt corp about renegotiating our contracts.”

      Marcus looked grim. “They’ll want another ten mears of work, no lie.”

      Hesperson took them to a cramped, body-smelling holding area where they could unsuit while he arranged for temporary quarters. Zora wanted some hot tea, but she had to find out something first. She slipped away and found a cheap medical test machine in a dark corridor. It looked battered and she wondered if the lancet that nicked her skin was even sterile. But in two minutes, it told her what she wanted to know—or didn’t want to know. She was pregnant.

      She stood in the corridor in the dimness for endless minutes. How long had she been in the radioactive hab? Her suit com would have the information, but she didn’t want to know, really.

      What difference would it make now?

      She willed herself to walk back to the holding area.

      * * * *

      Should she tell Marcus she had lied? Or should she quietly go and abort the fetus? She had lied about the rip in his suit, he had forgiven her that lie. But could she compound the lie, saying she was sure she wasn’t pregnant, a further betrayal?

      Her mind was a welter of horror and confused thinking.

      “—and you can run routine quality tests on our water treatment until we find you work more suited to your backgrounds,” the assistant was saying. “Any questions?”

      Sekou looked up at her and whispered “Can I ask how long before we can go back, Mama?”

      And all the stars help her, she had all she could do not to slap him.

      * * * *

      Hesperson hustled back in, smiling. “Then there’s a break in the search for Valkiri. The image your little boy recorded with matches the face of a Land Ethic radical who had jumped contract from Equatorial City two years ago. Her name was Estelle Query. She was a nuclear engineer in charge of developing ways to maximize heat production in large urban nukes.”

      “Figures,” said Marcus.

      “What a smart little boy you have here,” said Hesperson. “Somebody will pay big franks for his contract someday.”

      Zora was already feeling horrible guilt over nearly losing her temper with Sekou. This just made her want to cry.

      “Would you like a nice clean pair of pants?” the assistant asked Sekou. He nodded eagerly and cast an only slightly worried look at Zora and Marcus as she led him out to get cleaned up. Zora buried her face in her hands.

      Marcus pulled her hands away and searched her face, perplexed. “Girl, we’re vindicated. They can’t say it was our fault any more. This Valkiri-Estelle bee has as much as admitted she did it.”

      “But we can’t go home, Marcus. And Sekou deserves better than a cubicle two meters square with only minimal utilities.”

      “Would be good if we could sue her, or her former corp. But there’s no hope there.” He pulled her to him and stroked her shoulders. “Girl, there’s something worse wrong than that. Call it my hoodoo sense, but you’re grieving a bigger grief than our happy ex-home.”

      She sobbed for several minutes into his shirt, then pulled away and said, “I lied, Marcus. I am pregnant, and I’ve stupidly murdered our baby. It can’t live after the dose of radiation I took. It might spontaneously abort, but we can’t take the chance. A damaged infant on Mars—the corp will take it away and kill it.”

      He grabbed her shoulders and looked hard in her face. Then he shook his head sadly and hugged her close. “Zora, girl, don’t blame yourself. I should have known. Truth be told, I did know there was no rip in my suit. I just thought you wanted to be the big woman. I thought I’d let you have your pride, be the heroine. But you were storying—I knew that.”

      She tried to pull away, but he held her tight. She sobbed some more, then said, “You’re so damned intuitive. Did you know I was pregnant, too?”

      His embrace loosened, and she saw his sadness. “Truth be told, I think I did. Something in your eyes. Your skin glowed like it did before, when you were big with Sekou. But I told myself, you’re tripping, Marcus man. Didn’t want to think it, straight up.” His voice sank to almost inaudible. “Didn’t want to think you’d lie to me about that.”

      After awhile, she said, “And can you forgive me?”

      He let go of her and leaned against the cold marscrete wall “Forgive you, forgive myself for not being the man and telling you right out not to play me.”

      She could scarcely make her voice loud enough to hear. “Where do we go from here?”

      He shrugged. “The medical for the abortion is cheap. Medbots are clean and fast. And as far as surviving here, what we’ve got in our brains is enough to sell to some corp.”

      “Sekou,” she said. “They’ll put him in a group school her. But he needs to go back to the on-line school. More than that, he needs a real home.”

      “Sekou needs to hear the truth, which is that he’s a smart kid, and strong, despite his minor ills, and he’ll sell high to some corp that likes his brain as much as Vivocrypt liked yours and mine. Now I’m going to find that sorry assistant and ask what we have to do to get a meal around here.”

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