Blue Hearts of Mars (22 page)

“We leave, calmly. Find a place to stay.”

As we walked back toward the elevators, a door opened behind us, cutting Hemingway’s planning short. We both turned.

Two men wearing dark goggles, black slacks, and black shirts with a fist-sized red emblem over the left breast were coming out of another apartment. They looked up at us, pausing, each carrying a small white object. I don’t know what they saw when their eyes fell on us, but they immediately began to chase after us.

“Run!” Hemingway hissed at my side.

I broke into a run, my heart screaming in my chest. Our pursuers had been about forty feet away. I feared that they would close such a distance quickly. As we reached the elevator and Hemingway slammed his fist into the call button, they’d narrowed it by twenty feet.

“Get in! Get in!” he shouted as I glanced behind me to see how close they were after waiting what felt like an eternity for the elevator. Before I could turn back around, I was yanked by the arm into the elevator car by Hemingway. As the doors snapped shut, a hand slipped between them. I screamed in shock and Hemingway slapped the “close” button over and over again, each time the doors tried to open. Soon the hand had grown into an arm that waved back and forth, grasping at the air. I dodged it, jumping back against the far wall of the elevator car, watching it searching blindly until finally, the hand jerked away and the doors sealed with a soft hiss.

I gasped, shaking, falling against the wall of the car as the elevator shot downward.

“Who are they?”

“The IRS. At least, they wore IRS uniforms,” he said. “They must have been here wiping the Voice from people’s memories.”

“Why?” I asked, choking on my breath.

“Who knows? Control? Maybe something significant happened while we were on the train, and they want to stop it before it spreads further,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know. Their motives are beyond my understanding.”

“They were chasing us. Why? It makes no sense.”

“Maybe they think we live here,” he shrugged. “Maybe they think we’re trying to escape their treatment or something. No idea.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have run,” I said, wiping beads of sweat from my forehead.

“Retta, running was the only
right
thing we did. Unless you want to have your memory indiscriminately toyed with. You saw how confused that Masumi guy was. Do you want that to happen to us?”

I shook my head. “Now they think we’re criminals.”

“That’s part of their game. Authority, even elected authority, loves to make innocent people feel like submitting is the right thing to do. It’s not,” he paused, looking at me, his eyes full of concern. “Listen, when the doors open, don’t stop and look around, just run straight for the doors to the street. We’ll keep running until we’ve lost them,” he said.

I began to tell him that I’m not an android, that I can’t run like him, but the doors opened and he was pulling me along. The only breath I had was used to follow him. I heard the noise of feet scrambling after us, and it was all I could do to keep my chest from exploding in fear and to keep breathing as I ran.

Down the hall to the doors, out onto the street, between the foot traffic rushing along the sidewalks, across the street, weaving around scooters, bike taxis, small cars, and up the street. It was nice how, in spite of running my legs to death, there were so many distractions to put between us and our pursuers. I don’t know how I did it, but I somehow managed to keep up with Hemingway. I kept waiting for my heart to burst or my limbs to give out.

Everything was going fine—as fine as it can go when you’re being chased by a faceless law enforcement agency that has some arbitrary permission granted to it by someone other than you to wipe your mind—when I tripped on my own feet. I went flying, my hand jerking from Hemingway’s grip, and the pavement came up to meet my knees and the palms of my hands. I rolled and rolled and the world turned, spinning around me, until without warning, I was being scooped up.

That was familiar. Sort of. Hemingway was carrying me slung over his shoulder, like a sack of trash. It could have been romantic if not for the circumstances and the terrible way he was lugging me. In short, it was really uncomfortable, especially on top of the bruises on my knees and the scrapes on my hands. From my vantage point I could see the muscles in his behind flexing and rippling as he ran. I focused on that, trying to ignore the discomfort of being carried.

Crowds parted for Hemingway, and filled in behind him, pointing at us and talking, rather loudly, in Japanese or English, switching back and forth. Occasionally I arched my back to look up and search the crowd for the IRS men. It was always hard to see them, since the streets were so full of bodies and vehicles, but sometimes I caught a glimpse of them, shoving pedestrians aside, pointing, and darting toward us.

After what felt like an entire lifetime of bouncing up and down on Hemingway’s jagged shoulder, I shouted to him that they were gone. Thankfully it had been about ten city-blocks since I’d spotted their red-emblemed shirts and dark-goggled eyes. Hemingway slowed to a trot, then bent to put me down beneath an awning, near the entrance to a sushi shop, away from the throngs on the street.

“Thanks,” I said, rubbing my sore hands gingerly across my thighs. I looked around. “Sushi?” I asked, noticing the crowd within, taking small plates off a conveyer belt, all seated around an exposed kitchen full of chefs.

“The Japanese didn’t want to part with their culture as much as the Fins,” he smiled. “They have artificial lakes on the other side of the settlement, I think.”

“Fins like fish too. But not
that
drastically.”

I glanced up and down the street. We’d come to a spot that looked surprisingly the same as every other street we’d been down. Tall buildings soared around us, the roads were as full as they’d always been, and signs flashed along the street, announcing the names of shops, the goods within, or other services. Need your skin rejuvenated? Pop in for an elastin replacement. Things like that. “Hungry?” I asked, peering back into the sushi place. It looked like a fun concept and I was famished.

He nodded, “But first, let’s find somewhere to hide.”

I studied the signs up and down the street. “That looks like it might be a hotel.”

“Let’s go,” he said. “You can walk alright?”

“Yes. Please, no more carrying.”

“I thought you liked it,” he said, sounding slightly hurt.

“Sometimes, but not when you do it like I’m a bag of rubbish,” I said, smiling. “Thanks, by the way.”

He nodded. I offered my hand and we wove back into the stream of pedestrians and headed for the hotel.

It turned out that Hemingway had enough to pay for a hotel room.

For
five
years.

His mother began a savings account for him before he was born. Or made. Whatever. And she’d been squirreling away hundreds of markkas every month on his behalf. It was fully vested, or something, when he “turned eighteen,” which happened already. I guess his birthday was in January. I didn’t ask if they called it birthdays for androids. They must. I would ask later, when we weren’t anxious and scared.

We got one room and headed up to it. It was a suite. Apparently New Tokyo was a big tourist destination. The room had a bathtub. Something I’d never seen before. I stared at it for a long time, thinking of all that water, just poured into a basin for one person to sit in. Soaking.

“Want to take a bath?” Hemingway asked from where he reclined on the bed. It was big and lavish, with a white and gold colored comforter and loads of fluffy pillows.

“No,” I said, turning. “The most water I’ve seen in one place, not counting the lake in Neuholland and those rice paddies, is the fountains back home. I just can’t believe people would waste water like that.”

“It’s recycled,” he said, rolling onto his side.

“Still seems wrong,” I said. I approached the bed, hesitated, then sat down in an armchair near it. I sank back into the cushions, sighing. I almost didn’t feel worthy of its too-grand comfort and the gold and white colored fabric. It matched the bed like God had designed beds and armchairs in the beginning, in Eden. The thought of sleeping in that beautiful bed with Hemingway scared me, to be honest. I mean, I wanted him. I had for a long time. But I’d never felt like there would ever come the choice between saying yes to myself. Or saying no.

Because, how could I say no? He was what I’d wanted. Ever since that first day when I noticed the galaxies in his eyes.

He watched me, his eyes glowing, his smile becoming devilish. “You OK?”

“Sure. So, are you going to sleep on the floor?”

He laughed. “Hardly.”

“Well, I snore,” I said. “Or so I’ve been told.”

“By who? Other boyfriends?”

“Marta,” I said with a shrug.

“What’s wrong? I promise to be honorable. We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, Retta,” he said, giving me a look like he was so much older and mature than me. Maybe he was. It was hard to understand the difference of relative age between a human and an android.

“It’s not you,” I said with a sigh. “It’s me.”

“You can’t be trusted?”

I shook my head. “Not with you, anyway.” I flashed a wry, embarrassed grin and glanced down at my fingernails.

He sat up on the bed and crossed his legs in front of himself. “I’m that irresistible? Come over here.”

I cocked my head at him.

“It’s safe, I promise.”

I joined him on the bed, sitting in front of him, imitating his position.

“Take my hand,” he said, offering me his right hand. When I put my hand in his, he slid his fingers up my wrist, to touch my forearm with his index finger and middle finger.

“What are we doing?”

“Hold my hand and wrist the way I’m holding yours.” He adjusted my index and middle finger with his other hand. “Retta, this is a ceremony. Blue hearts perform it between each other when they want to marry. Because our marriages aren’t recognized by law.”

“They’re not?” I asked, surprised.

He shook his head. “Most people don’t know, since most people don’t know who’s an android and who’s not. It’s just not talked about. But if you go to apply for a marriage license, they check to see if you’re an android. If you are, you can’t get the license.”

I took a deep breath. “How do you know about it, the ceremony?”

“My mom.”

“You’re not already married, are you?” I squinted at him suspiciously, hiding a smile. After everything, well, it wouldn’t have surprised me.

“You wish. Then you could say no based on those grounds. Anyway, it’s just kind of one of those things you find out, and never forget. You don’t have to do it,” he said, his eyes becoming soft but penetrating.

“No, I think I want to. I do. I want to. It’s what I’ve wanted from the beginning,” I answered, feeling a bit like I was floating. Marriage. I mean, marrying Hemingway? Did I want to do it? Was I making a hasty decision just because I wanted to be able to sleep with him and then go home and be able to face my dad? My mom had died, but I thought about her enough that I sometimes felt like she was watching my life over my shoulder. What about her?

If I married Hemingway, I wouldn’t be able to marry anyone else. I’d be stuck with him forever, or for as long as we both lived, or I guess we could always get divorced. But that’s not how I did things. I didn’t back out of deals.

Like every girl, I’d spent an obscenely huge amount of time thinking about marriage: who I’d end up with, how he’d propose, what the wedding would be like, where we’d honeymoon, where we’d live, what he’d do to make money, what I’d do to make money. Some of the answers I came up with were boring and realistic, and some were farfetched and impossible, like we’d honeymoon on Earth at a beach resort (right, well, only if I was marrying a tycoon), or we’d live on a luxury space-yacht smuggling illegal goods between Earth and Mars (another tycoon, this one the dangerous, handsome, smuggling type).

Did I really want to throw away these fanciful ideas to tie the knot with Hemingway, sitting on a bed in a hotel room? It was a very nice bed. But still. Just a hotel room. With my family far away. And did I want to marry with no government of any sort stamping the ceremony with its all-powerful seal of approval?

Well. Yes.

The question wasn’t even if I loved Hemingway. I did. I’d decided that a long time ago. Before I broke into the Synlife building.

And I didn’t care about the government deciding it was OK for me to marry someone. That was my choice.

But in all my daydreaming, I had come to the conclusion that a marriage was a promise between two people. Not between two people and the government. Hemingway already had my heart. And I felt pretty certain I had his—even after everything. After all, I trusted him, and maybe that was stupid, but it wouldn’t have been the first stupid thing I’d done. Not that that was a great reason to do something. But . . . despite everything, you had to trust. Despite what my dad had told me about the truth and the media. Despite watching androids being used like they were property. Despite the history of Mars and Earth and the wars and everything ugly in the universe.