Robert Sawyer - Red Planet Blues

Cassandra slapped him again, and again he screamed. Now, I’ve been slapped by lots of women over the years: it stings, but I’ve never screamed. And surely an artificial body was made of sterner stuff than me.

Cassandra went for a third slap. Pickover’s screams echoed in the dead hulk of the ship.

“Tell me!” she demanded.

I couldn’t see his face; her body was obscuring it. Maybe he shook his head. Maybe he just glared defiantly. But he said nothing.

She shrugged again; they’d obviously been down this road before. She moved to one side of the bed and stood by his right arm, which was pinned to his body by the nylon strap. “You really don’t want me to do this,” she said. “And I don’t have to, if…” She let the uncompleted offer hang there for a few seconds, then: “Ah, well.” She reached down with her beige, realistic-looking hand and wrapped three of her fingers around his right index finger. And then she started bending it backward.

I could see Pickover’s face now. Pulleys along his jawline were working; he was struggling to keep his mouth shut. His glass eyes were rolling up, back into his head, and his left leg was shaking in spasms. It was a bizarre display, and I alternated moment by moment between feeling sympathy for the being lying there and feeling cool detachment because of the clearly artificial nature of the body.

Cassandra let go of Pickover’s index finger, and for a second I thought she was showing some mercy. But then she grabbed it as well as the adjacent finger and began bending them both back. This time, despite his best efforts, guttural robotic sounds did escape from Pickover.

“Talk!” Cassandra said. “Talk!”

I’d recently learned—from Cassandra herself—that artificial bodies had to have pain sensors; otherwise, a robotic hand might end up resting on a heating element, or too much pressure might be put on a joint. But I hadn’t expected such sensors to be so sensitive, and—

And then it hit me, just as another of Pickover’s warbling screams was torn from him. Cassandra knew all about artificial bodies; she sold them, after all. If she wanted to adjust the mind-body interface of one so that pain would register particularly acutely, doubtless she could. I’d seen a lot of evil things in my time, but this was the worst. Scan a mind, put it in a body wired for hypersensitivity to pain, and torture it until it gave up its secrets. Then, of course, you just wipe the mind, and—

“You will crack eventually, you know,” she said, almost conversationally, as she looked at Pickover’s fleshless face. “Given that it’s inevitable, you might as well just tell me what I want to know.”

The elastic bands that served as some of Pickover’s facial muscles contracted, his teeth parted, and his head moved forward slightly but rapidly. I thought for half a second that he was incongruously blowing her a kiss, but then I realized what he was really trying to do: spit at her. Of course, his dry mouth and plastic throat were incapable of generating moisture, but his mind—a human mind, a mind accustomed to a biological body—had summoned and focused all its hate into that most primal of gestures.

“Very well,” said Cassandra. She gave his fingers one more nasty yank backward, holding them at an excruciating angle. Pickover alternated screams and whimpers. Finally, she let his fingers go. “Let’s try something different,” she said. She leaned over him. With her left hand, she pried his right eyelid open, and then she jabbed her right thumb into that eye. The glass sphere depressed into the metal skull, and Pickover screamed again. The artificial eye was presumably much tougher than a natural one, but, then again, the thumb pressing into it was also tougher. I felt my own eyes watering in a sympathetic response.

Pickover’s artificial spine arched up slightly as he convulsed against the two restraining bands. From time to time, I got clear glimpses of Cassandra’s face, and the perfectly symmetrical synthetic smile of glee on it was sickening.

At last, she stopped grinding her thumb into his eye. “Had enough?” she asked. “Because if you haven’t…”

As I’d said, Pickover was still wearing clothing; it was equally gauche to walk the streets nude whether you were biological or artificial. But now Cassandra’s hands moved to his waist. I watched as she undid his belt, unsnapped and unzipped his jeans, and then pulled the pants as far down his metallic thighs as they would go before she reached the restraining strap that held his legs to the table. Transfers had no need for underwear, and Pickover wasn’t wearing any. His artificial penis and testicles now lay exposed. I felt my own scrotum tightening in dread.

And then Cassandra did the most astonishing thing. She’d had no compunctions about bending back his fingers with her bare hands. And she hadn’t hesitated when it came to plunging her naked thumb into his eye. But now that she was going to hurt him down there, she seemed to want no direct contact. She started scanning around the room. For a second, she was looking directly at the closet door; I scrunched back against the far wall, hoping she wouldn’t see me. My heart was pounding.

Finally, she found what she was searching for: a wrench, sitting on the floor. She picked it up, raised it above her head, and looked directly into Pickover’s one good eye—the other had closed as soon as she’d removed her thumb and had never reopened as far as I could tell. “I’m going to smash your ball bearings into iron filings, unless…”

He closed his other eye now, the plastic lid scrunching.

“Count of three,” she said. “One.”

“I can’t,” he said in that low volume that served as his whisper. “You’d ruin the fossils, sell them off—”

“Two.”

“Please! They belong to science! To all humanity!”

“Three!”

Her arm slammed down, a great arc slicing through the air, the silver wrench smashing into the plastic pouch that was Pickover’s scrotum. He let out a scream greater than any I’d yet heard, so loud, indeed, that it hurt my ears despite the muffling of the partially closed closet door.

She hauled her arm up again, but waited for the scream to devolve into a series of whimpers. “One more chance,” she said. “Count of three.” His whole body was shaking. I felt nauseous.

“One.”

He turned his head to the side, as if by looking away he could make the torture stop.

“Two.”

A whimper escaped his artificial throat.

“Three!”

I found myself looking away, too, unable to watch as—

“All right!”

It was Pickover’s voice, shrill and mechanical.

“All right!” he shouted again. I turned back to face the tableau: the human-looking woman with a wrench held up above her head and the terrified, mechanical-looking man strapped to the table. “All right,” he repeated once more, softly now. “I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

You’ll tell me where the Alpha Deposit is?” asked Cassandra, lowering her arm.

“Yes,” Pickover said. “Yes.”

“Where?”

Pickover was quiet.

“Where?”

“God forgive me…” he said softly.

She began to raise her arm again. “Where?”

“Head 16.4 kilometers south-southwest of the Nili Patera caldera. There are three craters there, each just under a hundred meters wide, forming a perfect equilateral triangle; the Alpha starts just past the twin fossae about five hundred meters east of them.”

Cassandra’s phone was doubtless recording all this—as was my own. “I thought it was here in Isidis Planitia.”