Chapter 4

Ken woke up the following morning feeling ill-rested and fatigued. The depression and grief of Annie's loss was still going full force within him. Accompanying these emotions were a cornucopia of others, guilt at what had happened between he and his nurse the night before the primary one. He had, in a certain sense of the word, had sex with Zeal. He had touched her body in intimacy, and she had touched his. Though she had claimed it was a standard massage technique he knew that had to be a bunch of bullshit. She had molested him in his bed and he had allowed it to happen. His first day awake after 188 years and he ends up being a victim of a sex crime. And a willing victim - he couldn't help but admit - at that. He knew if Zeal offered him another of her so-called massages, he would be hard pressed to resist her.

It was just after 8:00 AM, or 0800 hours in the Martian way of time telling, when Loretta, the day nurse, brought him a tray of breakfast and set it before him. It was sausage, eggs, a small stack of pancakes with maple syrup, a plastic cup full of orange juice and another plastic cup full of steaming black coffee. Though the food smelled wonderful and tasted even better, he only picked at it, unable to muster the strength to chew and swallow more than a few bites.

The wonders of his new reality however, served to drive back the feelings of loss and grief to a certain degree. It made him feel strangely guilty whenever some new aspect of technology or medicine that had hardly been conceived of in his time riveted his attention, drawing it away from the grief he was feeling. It was almost like Annie was being cheated out of some of the mourning that she was due. But guilt or not, depression or not, he could not help but be fascinated by the sight of his nurse ordering breakfast by speaking into the ceiling or checking his vital signs by looking at the screen behind him. He simply could not help it.

One such wonder occurred after Dr. Mendez gave him his final physical exam before discharge.

"You are just the same as yesterday," Mendez told him when the last test was complete. "Which is to say you're perfect, if I do say so myself."

"Thanks," Ken muttered a little sourly as he pulled his shorts and half-shirt back on. He still did not know what to think of Mendez. His instincts were telling him that he was a man not to be trusted but he was smart enough to realize that this feeling might be a result of prejudices he had picked up as a police officer. After all, the man looked just like a dangerous Latino gangbanger. There was also the fact that he seemed to be romantically involved with his granddaughter. Paternal instincts apparently did not stop after the first or even the fifth generation.

"I just have a few more cosmetic type questions for you if you feel up to them," Mendez said as he packed up his instruments.

"Cosmetic?"

"Fuckin' aye," he said with a nod. "Now, as I told you yesterday, I took the liberty of turning off the genes responsible for hypertension, nearsightedness, and rheumatoid arthritis because I figured you wouldn't really want those problems. But there are a few other things that I can help you with that are a matter of personal choice."

"Oh?" Ken said, not quite sure what the doctor was driving at.

"For instance," Mendez said, "I noticed from photographs of you that were taken... uh... before, that you prefer to be clean shaven. No mustache, no beard. Is that correct?"

"Yes," he replied slowly. "I used to grow a mustache every now and then - it was kind of a cop thing - but I hated taking care of it. Most of the time I kept my face smooth."

"Most Martian men who do not wish to have facial hair have that gene dampened, as it were, so that they don't have to shave every day. Would you like me to do that for you?"

Ken looked at him for a moment, trying to digest what he was being offered. "Dampened?" he finally asked. "Do you mean that you can fix it so my beard doesn't grow at all?"

"You're down with it," he replied. "It's just a simple matter of telling your genes to halt hair growth on your facial area. Women have us do the same thing to their legs and their armpits, their pubic region, also to their face if they're prone to that sort of thing. We can also shut off hair growth to your head if you wish but that doesn't work very well unless you want to be completely bald. The hair that protrudes turns gray really quickly if its not constantly growing."

After being assured that this procedure would be in no way painful, dangerous, or irreversible, Ken consented to it. Who wouldn't embrace the oppurtunity to give up the time-consuming and inconvenient habit of shaving every day? The task was completed not with the use of hypodermic needles or drugs but with a small headset device Mendez clipped on the back of his head for about five minutes. It emitted no sound, no vibration, no sensation of any kind except for a single beep when it was done. Mendez then removed it and stashed it back in his plastic case.

"If you ever decide to grow a mustache just let me know," he told Ken. "I can hook you up to the computer in my office and undampen just the follicles on the upper lip."

"Thanks, Doc," he said, running his hand over his scruffy face, marveling that his next shave would be his last.

This last shave was accomplished with the assistance of Loretta a few minutes later with a rather scary looking, though painless device called a "laserator" which she ran all over his face making it as smooth as the proverbial baby's butt.

Another wonder that was unheard of back in his time was the lack of discharge paperwork. Karen and Jerico gave him another complete neurological exam shortly after his post-laserator shower. When it was done Karen simply said, "That's it."

"That's it?" he asked. "What do you mean?"

"I mean you're in perfect physical and neurological health. Your body and your brain are functioning perfectly. You're officially free of the Whiting Medical Center."

"Don't I have to sign anything or... well... you know, anything like that?"

She shook her head. "The computer has already noted that you've been medically cleared and has moved your file into the inactive database. You are no longer registered as a patient here."

"Wow," he said, impressed. He wondered how many bureaucratic types had lost their jobs when these Martians had their revolution. Probably quite a few if this was any example of how things worked.

Mendez and Jerico, after offering congratulations to Karen and Ken both, made a discrete departure from the room, leaving them alone.

"So what now?" he asked. "Do we go over to your place or what?"

"We can go there now if you wish," she told him. "That might be a good idea if you want to settle in a little. But if you're up to it we do need to make a trip down to the capital building downtown."

"What for?" he asked.

"We need to get you registered as a citizen of Mars. That way you can receive all of the things you're entitled to, like grocery allotments and clothing allowances and a personal computer. It shouldn't take very long."

"You mean, just like that I can become a citizen? I don't have to be a resident for any length of time?"

"Nope," she said. "Anyone who applies for Martian citizenship is immediately accepted as long as they don't have a history of non-political criminal behavior. We get about twenty thousand or so immigrants a year from WestHem and EastHem. A lot of them are defectors from the cargo ships that go back and forth. Some are people who have applied for visas and came over legally. Every once in a while we get naval or marine personnel who defect and fly to us in spacecraft. Once the entire crew of a stealth attack ship surrendered to our navy and asked for asylum. I can tell you that WestHem was pretty pissed off about that, even though we did return the ship to them." She snorted a little in disgust. "Like we would want one of their little toy ships anyway. They're still trying to get us to return the officers of that ship so they can try them for treason."

"And that would be bad, right?" he asked.

"They would execute them," she replied. "The death penalty is very much in favor for certain types of criminal activity in WestHem. But anyway, we can make the trip tomorrow if you like. If you want to just spend your first day getting used to things and adjusting to your new environment, that's perfectly static."

"No," he said after a moment's thought. "Let's go downtown. I'm dying to see this place. Uh... so to speak."

She gave him a pleased look. "I was hoping you'd say that," she said. "Let's get it on."

They rode the elevator down to the lobby level of the building and stepped out into a spacious entryway lined with plush carpet. An information desk manned by a friendly looking young man stood just inside of a set of sliding doors leading out to the street. WHITING AVENUE EXIT read a sign just above the doors. Ken experienced another moment of self-consciousness at walking around in public dressed in little better than underwear but it quickly dissipated when he saw that all of the people milling about in the lobby were wearing the same thing.

Karen led him to the doors and they opened silently as they approached, sliding along tracks in the ground. Beyond was a tile entryway that stretched for about twenty feet and then the street. Directly across the street, which was enclosed from thirty feet above by glass, was the entrance to another building that could be seen rising into the air above them. The sign over the main doors to the structure identified it as the UNIVERSITY PROXIMAL HOUSING COMPLEX #2. Other buildings and other building entrances were spaced evenly along the length of the street with a few intersections with other streets visible in the distance. Only by looking directly upward through the glass could the pink Martian sky be seen. The rest of it was blocked out by the bulk of the buildings.

The street itself ran as far as could be seen in both directions. It was divided into three distinct sections. A central tiled area about fifteen feet wide ran down the middle. A steady stream of people were walking in both directions down this stretch, most ambling gently along in pairs or in groups of three or four, and most seemed to stick to the right side of the strip relative to the direction they were moving. On either side of this central strip were sections about ten feet wide that were paved in some sort of metal alloy that was flat gray in color. The occasional scuff of black rubber on this surface told Ken that wheeled vehicles utilized these sections of the road although none were visible at the moment. The sound on the street was of a busy city sidewalk - absent of the accompaniment of car horns and engines - with a thousand conversations babbling among the throngs of Martians.

"The tram station is this way," Karen said, turning to the right and cutting diagonally across the paved portion of the street. "It's about a two block walk from this portion of the facility."

"How far is downtown?" Ken asked, nervous at the thought of riding a Martian public transport train.

Karen, like on several occasions before, seemed to be acutely attuned to what he was thinking. "It's walkable," she said, "but it would take a while. We're talking about eight kilometers, maybe a little more."

"Let's take the tram," he said, thinking that her definition of what was walkable and his were two different things.

They walked away from the Whiting University and Medical Center building and past two other housing complexes before turning right on a street called 22nd Expressway. Once they made the turn Ken was able to see two sets of the black single track of the train system above them. They were located near the right side of the glass roof and attached by a series of steel mounting braces that were spaced every fifty feet or so. No trains were currently visible. Ken could see signs on the street before them directing traffic to WUMC STATION 2. Many of the pedestrians around them were heading that way.

The entrance to the station was a set of sliding glass doors that were locked in a state of perpetual openness as people walked in and out of them. Ken and Karen waited patiently in the line that had formed and eventually were able to push through to a wide staircase that climbed steeply upward, doubling back twice. At the top of the stairs was a broad, flat platform that looked out over the track and the roof of the street. Large groups of people were waiting next to a long row of heavy looking glass doors that opened directly to the outside. Karen explained that the train would mate with the doors when it stopped, opening the train door and the platform door at the same time, therefore keeping intact the integrity of the seal. Mounted above each of the doors was a computer-generated display that showed a map of the tram system and labeled the trains and the tracks with numbers and letters. To Ken's eyes the map looked remarkably like a schematic of a large metropolitan freeway system. There was a belt-line that circled the entire city perimeter and multiple spoke lines that led inward, towards a central hub. Above the map was the current time: 1132 hours, and the next two scheduled train times: 1138 hours and 1150 hours.

"Do you have to pay anything to ride this thing?" Ken asked as they took their place among the waiting crowd.

"No," she said. "The intra-city public transportation system is free in all of the cities. Before the revolution it used to be run by MarsTrans, which was one of the big WestHem based corporations. They used to charge us to ride and it wasn't cheap either. That profit margin thing, you know."

Ken shook his head. "I still don't understand how a system like this can work. How can your government just pay for all of this stuff without having any money coming back to them? From what you've told me, they're paying out billions of these credits you have to all kinds of workers but they don't seem to have any sort of income. Do you pay really high taxes or what?"

"We don't pay any taxes," she said.

"Then where does the money come from?" he wanted to know. "How can your economy keep going if there is a constant drain on the government bank without anything going back in?"

"Well, in the first place, a lot of credits do go back in," she said. "After all, it's the government that sells us or provides us with most of the things that we spend our credits on. The government owns all housing and everything above the minimal public housing level costs credits to get into. And then there are certain luxury food items, intoxicants, coffee, inter-city or extraterrestrial travel. Those are all things that are provided by the government at a cost. So there is an inflow of credits to the government you see, but you have to understand that this inflow doesn't really matter to our economy, nor does the outflow because the credits we are paid in and we use to buy things with don't actually represent anything concrete."

"I'm sorry," he said, looking at her as if she was speaking gibberish, "but I'm not tracking with you here. How can they not represent anything?"

"They don't represent anything because our economy, our very existence is not based upon the acquisition of wealth. The credits only exist to provide motivation for working, to reimburse those who are functioning members of society and contribute something to it. They have value because they are the only means by which to buy things and there is no way to get them except to receive a pay allotment for a job or to have someone give them to you for some service you have provided. There is no finite amount of credits because they are nothing more than notations in the Internet."

"Doesn't that cause inflation though?" he asked, remembering his college economics electives. He had been specifically told that a system such as she was describing could not work.

"We have no inflation here," she answered. "All prices and all salaries are permanently fixed at pre-determined rates. There are of course step raises for experience and promotions, but a beginning garbage collector is always going to make four thousand credits a year and his living quarters are always going to cost whatever it is he is paying for it. A one liter bottle of cola syrup is always going to cost a half a credit. A slab of filet mignon is always going to cost a credit per kilo. A two-week cruise to Saturn is always going to cost two hundred credits for economy class and four hundred for luxury class. These prices and salaries never change, it is forbidden for them to change by our constitution. When some new luxury item or service enters the marketplace, the proprietor is required to go before a common sense committee that is run by the government to have the price fixed. He or she is then bound to honor this price forever."

"Price fixing," he said, scowling a little. "I was taught that was a false solution, that it would eventually cause economic collapse as faith in the currency was lost."

"And that would be true," Karen told him, "if we were economically tied in any way to any other entity such as EastHem or WestHem. But we are not. Mars is completely self-contained and able to exist without Earth at all. True, we get some luxury items from them but we do not give them our money nor accept theirs. We have made it so their currency is worthless here and ours is worthless there. It is a strict trade of goods for goods and nothing they provide for us are goods we couldn't live without. A lot of people would be pissed off if we suddenly couldn't drink WestHem coffee or sip a nice bottle of California or French wine or fire up a good smoke after dinner, but the loss of those things would not be detrimental. Our system works because we are unified here and because we do not focus obsessively on the acquisition of our currency. Like I told you before, there is no elite class and no super corporations to pervert us. A credit is just that, it is credit that is given for your contribution to society, whatever that contribution might be. Those who do not contribute, get no credits."

"So you took the power out of having money?" Ken observed, starting to find a bizarre kind of sense in what she was saying.

"Exactly," she said. "Money is nice and can buy you things but that is about all that it can do for you. It is not the focus of our existence anymore; it is instead just a motivating factor to our lives. If you want to have nice things, things that are not a part of your constitutional rights, then you have to work. The more highly skilled or dangerous your job is, the nicer of things and living quarters you can have. We have no millionaires here. We have no one willing to sell his or her soul in order to become a millionaire. It really wouldn't do you any good to have that many credits anyway. There is only so much that you can spend them on."

"And this has worked for forty years?"

"Twenty-one by our calendar, but yes, it has. There were a few glitches and loopholes in the early years. That is to be expected in any system as complex as what we have come up with, but our constitution allows us to easily change any portions of it that are being exploited for self-interest. The first line of the document reads that common sense and fairness for all will always triumph in any constitutional question."

"I'd like to read this constitution of yours," he said. "It sounds like a rather intriguing piece of work."

"As soon as we get you your personal computer," she said, "you can look at it any time you want. It's programmed as part of the hard drive system on every computer. We revere it the way other countries or political divisions revere their flag and their national anthem."

While Ken was sorting through the Martian economic system in his head, picking at it and trying to come up with some kind of loophole that would prove that it couldn't work (and having no success) the station began to rumble slightly. It was not quite on the level of an earthquake, not even a mild one such as he used to regularly feel in San Jose, but it still made a little burst of adrenaline go flowing through his body. After all, he was standing less than twenty feet from a pane of glass that was the only thing separating the platform he was on from the lethal Martian atmosphere. What was causing it? What would happen because of it? His sudden fear was calmed somewhat by the obvious lack of concern on every face around him. Most of them in fact looked somewhat eager, even as the rumbling and vibration grew marginally worse.

The cause of the vibration became clear when the tram that they were waiting for came rushing into view from their right. It consisted of eight cars all attached together with flexible airlocks of some sort, presumably to allow people to walk from one car to the next. Each of the cars was about eight feet high and about twenty-five feet in length. There were no wheels in evidence, only a large groove on the bottom that was an inverted version of the track that it rode upon. Ken was amazed, and more than a little frightened to see that the tram did not actually touch the track at all, instead, it hovered impossibly about eight inches above it. It came into the area of the station at such a speed that he at first thought it was simply going to whiz right on by. It did not seem possible for the thing to stop quickly enough to load and unload passengers at this particular destination. He was opening his mouth to ask Karen if this was an express train when it did exactly what he thought it couldn't do. It ground almost instantly to a full and complete halt, so quickly he almost missed it. One moment the train was moving at full speed and the next it was standing still. The doors along the length of the platform all opened at once with a clank and a slight hissing of air pressure.

Jesus, Ken thought, feeling the adrenaline course through him again. True, he had seen the rapid starts and stops from the serenity level atop the hospital but it been different from a thousand feet up. How could the people inside possibly put up with such a deceleration? Wouldn't they all be smashed up against the seat in front of them? And what about those who were standing? But even as these questions formed in his mind, he remembered the elevator in the hospital; the one that had seemed to be standing still even as it shot upward and downward at five floors per second. The inertial dampening device the Martians used was in action here. Karen had mentioned that all public transportation had it. Knowing this however, did not make him feel a whole lot better about climbing aboard the thing. He almost suggested to Karen that they walk the eight kilometers downtown after all but when the crowd around him began to surge forward he had little choice but to surge with them. Mars or not, he still didn't like to make a scene. And besides, he had to get used to riding these contraptions eventually, didn't he?

They were virtually forced through the doors by the stream of scantily clad, trashy-talking Martians and then the crowd thinned out as people headed off to different parts of the car. There was a center aisle that was about four feet wide that ran the length of the car and rows of double seats on both sides, everywhere except where the doors were. Each set of seats had a window next to it that consisted of glass that looked entirely too thin to Ken. There were no advertisements or graffiti of any kind, anywhere in the car but there was a computer display both at the front and the rear that showed the current location of this tram in the system and the current time. Below this the next stop - something called INDUSTRIAL 43 STATION - was listed along with the estimated time of arrival.

"Let's get a seat," Karen said, leading him along the aisle towards the rear of the car. About half of the seats were empty despite the fact that many of the occupants were standing in groups near the doors. They talked to each other in low voices or perused the screens of their personal computers, which Karen informed him were called "PC's" for short. Some of them, Ken saw, were actually talking to their PCs, although whether these were modern cell phone conversations or they were just bullshitting with their computers he could not tell.

Before they found a place to plant themselves, the doors suddenly slid shut with another clank. A second later the tram was in motion and moving at full speed. Through the windows on his right Ken saw the station he had just been standing at rapidly recede and disappear behind them. The scenery directly outside became a blur of buildings shooting by. These were the only indicators he had that they were not still standing still. Though he braced himself and though it seemed like he should have been thrown to the floor by the rapid acceleration, there was no sensation of movement at all; not even when they went around the bend of a rather sharp turn in the tracks. It was very disconcerting to see that you were moving but not to feel it. Faint nausea began to worm in his stomach.

"Are you okay?" Karen asked, propelling him into one of the plastic chairs. Though it looked like it was made of a firm, hardened material of the sort that used to be found in fast food restaurants it was actually quite soft and comfortable.

"I think I'm getting that reverse motion sickness that you were talking about," he said.

"Just look down at the floor," she told him sympathetically. "If that doesn't help, then close your eyes. The sensation will go away if you can't see outside."

He tried looking at the floor, as suggested, and it did help ease the sensation as long as his peripheral vision remained blind to the movement out the windows. He probably could have passed the entire trip in this matter but he found his eyes constantly drawn back to the view outside in this strange, alien city. He was like a teenager who happened across a beautiful woman carelessly seated while wearing a short skirt. He could not help but continually take glimpses despite the knowledge that adverse consequences might result. He would take ten to twenty second glances as the train wound and twisted its way along its route before the resulting nausea and vertigo forced him to look back down at the floor for a few seconds. Fortunately the consequences in this case were benevolent. After about ten minutes his brain began to get used to the conflict in sensory input allowing his glances to become longer and more detailed. He saw high-rise after high-rise stretching into the pink sky above and throngs of Martians walking to and fro on the streets below them. Occasionally he would catch a brief view of the red landscape when they passed close to the edge of the inhabited area. The train that carried them would dash forward at high speed, sometimes cutting from one side of the roof to the other, sometimes traveling in a straight line, sometimes taking sharp turns. Every twenty to thirty seconds they would come to a sudden, though unfelt, halt and the doors would clang open allowing a stream of fresh passengers to embark or old passengers to disembark.

"The system is set up," Karen explained to him once she saw that he was taking an interest, "so no point in the city is more than twelve blocks from a tram station. Of course some places, like the universities and the capital, have several different stops near them due to the large numbers of workers and students."

"Doesn't anyone drive to work?" he asked, remembering the tire marks on the road.

"No," she said. "There are no private motor vehicles of any kind on Mars. This is something that goes back all the way to initial colonization. It is generally agreed, even on Earth, that the mass transit system in use during your time - that in which every person drove his or her own vehicle - was a terrible, wasteful mistake. The fuel consumption and the traffic congestion that resulted were insurmountable problems. When World War III started and the Asian powers cut off the supply of Middle East and Alaskan oil to the United States, the Western economy was almost destroyed. Nobody could get to work, supplies could not get from one place to another, and vital chemicals could not be manufactured."

"I just remember the traffic jams," Ken said, thinking back on them with absurd nostalgia. He would never see a traffic jam again! "But what about the part of the street alongside the area where everyone walks? It's obvious that vehicles of some sort drive on them. Whose vehicles are they?"

"Delivery trucks mostly," she answered. "Groceries and consumer items are delivered to your housing area by truck. They mostly do their work at night though, when there isn't as much pedestrian traffic to interfere with them. Also, the police department uses electric carts as part of their patrol services. They drive on the streets too. So do the dip-hoes."

"Dip-hoes?"

"Department of Public Health and Safety," she clarified for him. "DPHS is the official designation although over the years that abbreviation has evolved into dip-hoes. They're the ones who handle the emergency medical and trauma problems that occur on the streets or anywhere away from the hospital. They do a lot of other things as well. They do emergency repairs on airlocks. They rescue people if they get stuck in or on something. They take charge of damage control if such a thing ever becomes necessary. If there's a fire burning somewhere in the city, they put it out."