I didn’t feel this way aboard Pygmalion. Force of circumstance is an excellent suppressant — and few circumstances are as effective as acting for dear life while smuggling an illegal uncontrolled DNA replicator package past the Pink Police. When I was asleep, my dreams of Juliette kept depression at bay, but now the days seem to stretch emptily ahead of me. I’m locked in a prison of time, the windows barred with pitiless pessimism. Sometimes I wish I could be someone else; it seems that as long as I have to drag my own past around behind me, I can’t break the pattern. But activity helps, so I try to find things to fill the hours while I wait for Jeeves’s quarantine to expire.
Marsport sprawls across the northern flank of Pavonis Mons, flooding down the enormous flank of the extinct shield volcano from Bifrost’s roots — fourteen kilometers above the equatorial mean — to the edge of the cliff where the slope of Pavonis falls steeply to the plain below. The cliff edge itself is four and a half kilometers above the mean: Marsport spans ten kilometers of altitude and nearly a hundred kilometers of distance. It’s a huge, sprawling city, dusty and split by canyons and gulches where lava tubes have collapsed — as if some deity had taken a model of east Texas and tilted it at a ten-degree angle. The thermal injection wells and water refineries only add to the eerie similarity. I’ve been to Marsport before, but never with money and enforced idleness. When I checked the wallet Jeeves gave me, I discovered nearly a thousand Reals, more than I could have saved in a whole decade working in the casinos on Venus. It’s enough to buy me a ticket to Earth or steerage to Jupiter system. Here on Mars I could live on it for a couple of years if I watched my outgoings.
But Jeeves isn’t through with me yet, is he? I hang on to the raw fact like a survival raft. It’s a purpose, any purpose — even if it’s not mine. And so I try to fill my days without worrying too much about the money running out. I rent a cheap spider and throw myself into the bazaars and malls and arcades, exploring and bargain-hunting and sightseeing. I’m still calling myself Maria, but there is less reason to hide now that I no longer hold the cargo, so I register a dropbox with a discreet private shipping firm and arrange to have my real self’s mail directed to it.
After a few days, the shopping trip is wearing off, and I’m back to feeling lonely and bored. But Marsport is not short on distractions, so I force myself not to retreat into my rented room; that way lies dank depression. On my way home one afternoon, I pass a dusty rack of recycled cargo containers set back from 80th Street. I am unsure what exactly catches my eye, but I look twice and a sense of déjà vu kicks in. Juliette knew this place. I’m sure of it. “Stop and back up,” I tell the spider, gesturing at the frontage. “What’s that?”
My spider’s navigation module is snappy enough. “The indicated building is owned by the Scalzi Endowment Museum. The premises are open to the public. Do you want me to park?”
“Yes, do that.” There’s no point getting chatty with spiders — they sound superficially bright, but there’s nobody home inside. “Secure yourself and admit nobody until I return.”
The spider hunkers down in the parking lot beside the rack of drab gray containers. They’ve been welded together crudely, giving no clue to their contents, like so much of Marsport’s architecture. Haphazardly strung overhead cables and crude pipes and ducts tie the racks to their neighbors up and down the road. I get out and walk toward the entrance, an air lock punched through the outer skin of the building like the mouth parts of a hatching parasite.
The doors open to admit me, and the lock rotates. I gasp at the interior. What catches my attention isn’t the polished marble floor, or the vaulted ceiling and wide, gracefully curved staircases to the balcony that surrounds the room, but the weirdly curved sculpture that stands before me. It’s a mass of off-white stones, intricately carved with strange spurs and spikes and whorls and sockets set in them, and it appears to stand on two legs — at least, they look like legs, but they’re segmented and broken in the middle, and there are a mess of odd-shaped pebbles at their bottom end, like toes—
“Good afternoon, ma’am,” says a caretaker, sliding forward from his plinth. “May I take your coat?”
I gape like a yokel, and point. “What’s that?”
“That’s Ivan,” says the caretaker, “our Allosaurus. Impressive, isn’t he? He’s the largest dinosaur off Earth.”
“But it’s—” I stop. A flood of associations are cascading out of my unconscious, like small fragments of stone self-assembling into a skeleton of knowledge. Like the thing I’m staring at. Teeth. Claws. “You teach evolution, don’t you?”
The caretaker shakes his head, very slowly. “We aren’t religious. We are here to maintain the exhibits; that is all.”
“But to explain—” I stop. “Can I look around?” I ask tentatively.
“That’s what the museum is for, ma’am. May I take your coat?”
I spend the rest of the day and a chunk of the night wandering the halls and galleries of the museum like an ignorant, lonely ghost. I am alone; there are no other visitors. And the exhibits speak to me, or to my memory of Juliette. They’re almost all skeletons, stony vitrified structural elements of replicators from Earth, long since sterilized, shipped to Marsport at great expense for… who knows why? I could ask, I suppose, but I’m not sure I want to know the answer. Any possible explanation is likely to be far less romantic than my own imagining. All I can be sure of is that some of our Creators chose to do this thing, long before the birth of my kind, before the rise of the servants. And the displays talk.
“This is a skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis. Age: one point six million years. The Australopithecines were an early family of hominid subtypes. Note the much smaller cranium: A. afarensis had a brain approximately one-third the size of the later Homo genus to which our Creators belong. They are believed to have evolved around four million years ago…”
I move on. It’s not what I’m looking for.
Another skeleton, positioned beside an improbably hirsute and disturbingly curved synthetic reproduction of the original: “Canis lupus familiaris, the dog, a subspecies of wolf, was domesticated between fifteen and one hundred thousand years ago. Commonly known as man’s best friend” — I don’t think so, one of my ghosts observes smugly — “dogs were redesigned and customized to fit a variety of service roles prior to the development of emotional machines. They were used for…”
Move on. Something, the ghost of one of Juliette’s memories, is tugging at me impatiently.
He’s in the next room, behind a blackout curtain and a warning sign. ENTER AT OWN RISK: CONTENTS MAY BE DISTURBING TO SOME. My vascular pumps throb, and my skin begins to tighten and sweat, alarming me. It’s an emo reaction, involuntary and scary, hardwired into my design parameters. Part of me knows what’s inside. I lift the edge of the curtain and tiptoe inside, knock-kneed with terror and fascination.
The room is small and circular, with an exit immediately opposite the entrance, designed to funnel a steady stream of visitors around the exhibit on the plinth in the middle. I see his fine, clean bones first, glimmering in the twilight. He’s standing erect, one foot raised as if to step forward off his stand, captured in motion. The skull looks straight at me, eye sockets empty and small, chin larger than I had expected. And beside him is the life-sized reproduction—
I do not collapse in a quivering heap before him. I am strong; I can look at him without side effects. (But you know he’s only made of plastic, one of me whispers. You can smell it. What if he smelled… alive?) He’s big, that much I was expecting. His eyes are small and close-set, and his hair is lank and fine and just odd, not like mine. And the texture of his skin, if it’s real, is sallow. No chromatophores here, no glossy-smooth surfaces, just a random stippling of pores, and fine, glassy fur over discolored patches of skin—