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DOC HOLLIDAY 2.0


Wil McCarthy


John Henry Holliday walks up to the guards as bold as you please, smoking his favorite cigarillo and tipping his hat against the cold glare of the sun. He takes the cigarillo out of his mouth and, with a twinge of regret, drops it into the dirt, not bothering to grind it out with his boot, because there’s not enough damned oxygen here to keep it burning unattended.

“Afternoon, gentlemen.”

“What’s this? What are you doing?” one of the guards asks him. It’s a man—a beefy one—dressed in the kind of brightly spangled coverall some people wear here on Mars. He doesn’t look worried or even particularly suspicious. He looks like a man who feels he’s got everything under control, and doesn’t need to do much to keep it that way.

“Yeah,” says the other guard. “Whadya want?” He’s smaller, and wearing a similar but blander coverall that, although it’s all one piece, somehow suggests a puffy white shirt atop puffy black trousers. He’s like an actor in some hastily thrown-together play, wearing a third-rate pirate costume.

“The conversation will be brief,” he tells them both. “I’m about to draw my weapon and fire, so I advise you both to kill me before you’re hit.”

“Excuse me?” the larger man says, not afraid but simply confused.

“Who the hell are you?” asks the other.

Patiently, Holliday pulls his coat aside to reveal his iron. “I prefer not to gun a man down in cold blood, but I warn you I’m not above it. Defend yourselves or not, as you please.”

One of the guards needs no further urging. He’s cradling a rifle of some sort, and he swings it around and raises it just in time to receive a round through the center of his heart from Holliday’s pistol, which is not difficult to draw and cock and fire in time. The man pauses for a moment, a look of confusion spreading across his face, and then drops into the dust.

The other guard looks suddenly afraid, as well he ought to, and asks, “What…what do you want?”

It’s a natural enough question, particularly as Holliday has already holstered his pistol out of sheer polite sportsmanship.

“What do I want?” Holliday muses. “Sorry, I don’t want anything, or not from you at any rate. Your people have made my people very angry, and I’m the consequence. You might say I exist because of you, though I’m unlikely to appear grateful about it.”

An explosion sounds somewhere nearby.

“Why, there’s my friend Wyatt, right on time with some dynamite. Are you cut from marble, sir? Perhaps you’re a good man who deserves better than your friend here, but it hardly matters. I’ll have satisfaction. Now raise your weapon.”

The man does so, far too slowly, and Holliday answers: drawing and firing and re-holstering. It’s an ugly business, but it’s over in just a moment, and Holliday is moving past the two twitching corpses, into the warehouse they were supposedly guarding. Inside are “trucks”—vehicles like coaches or small locomotives—and stacks of crates, and smaller stacks of metal ingots. And three men caught in the act of loading a crate into the back of a truck. The look on their faces is a mix of confusion and alarm, but the box is heavy, and they cannot simply drop it.

Holliday surprises himself by simply gunning all three of them down. Not very sporting, but these men are thieves and killers, and there are limits to even a gentleman’s patience. They fall with the box on top of them, and it isn’t a proud moment, but Holliday is moving past them toward a glassed-in office at the rear. Two more men inside, fumbling for weapons as Holliday approaches. If there’d been a door they would have locked it, but there wasn’t, and although these men were willing enough to cut down miners and truck drivers to steal their hard-won metal, they seem rather less eager to take on an armed opponent.

“I aim to tangle with you boys!” Holliday calls out as he moves around to where he can shoot through the doorway. They’re already firing by the time he gets there; quiet sounds, more like the bark of a hare than the report of a firearm, and Holliday feels a disturbance in the air as the shots move past him. A bit too close, actually, so he dispenses with manners once again and simply shoots them both as soon as he has the angle, grateful that they are in fact mere criminals and not true gunfighters. One he shoots through the heart and, for good measure, through the head as well. For the other, he aims more carefully and blasts the rifle out of his hands. It’s a tricky shot, but he’s done it a time or two when there was no need for a duel to turn fatal. The man screams and flails his arms, fountaining blood from one of his hands, and then drops to his bottom, howling and moaning and clutching his wounded appendage.

And then, just like that, the confrontation is over.

Holliday takes a moment to collect himself, finds a match and a cigarillo in his breast pocket, lights up, and vomits on the concrete floor of the warehouse.

“Doc?” a voice calls out to him. “Are you all right?”

Holliday takes a quick puff on the cigarillo before answering, “Over here, Wyatt. In one piece and, I believe, free of holes. And how are you?”

“The same,” Wyatt says. “They never knew what hit ’em.”

“This one might,” Holliday says, inclining his head toward the wounded man as Wyatt approaches.

“You left one alive?”

“I did. I thought perhaps he could carry a warning to others who may be running this operation from afar.”

“Ah. Good thinking.”

And it is good thinking, because men like these will not complain to the authorities, and yet, if they wonder, without knowing, what happened to their warehouse, they might get uppity ideas of trying to steal from Wyatt’s employers once again. The Dawes Crater Mining Company is a no-nonsense operation, and Wyatt is, for the most part, a no-nonsense kind of man.

“Get up,” Wyatt says to the injured man. “Come on, I said get up. You’ve riled the wrong dogs, but we’re done here. For now.”

“Let me see your hand,” Holliday says to the man. “Come on, I’ll not harm you.”

Nearly weeping now, the man gets unsteadily to his feet and walks toward Holliday, his wounded hand outstretched.

Holliday draws a cotton handkerchief out of his pocket and gently binds the wound. He might be a dentist by trade, but that was always just a matter of family honor. With licensing requirements in Georgia so lax, any quack could claim to be a medical doctor, whereas only a schooled and certified man could be a dentist. And yet, Holliday had come from a long line of surgeons, and knew his business well enough.

“You’ll have it seen to proper,” Wyatt says. “Keep it balled in a fist until then, and you’ll be all right.”

“Who’s the doctor here?” Holliday chides.

“Not you,” Wyatt says. “He’s bleedin’ fine there. Make a fist, I tell you.”

“Who are you?” the man wants to know.

“We’re retribution,” Holliday tells him, with a sudden stab of anger. “Or I am, at any rate—created for that one purpose. Wyatt here was created to make peace among brawlers, but I’ve no such talent. Now come with me. Come with us.” He leads the man past his murdered comrades and out into the daylight. “You’re going to have a long walk. Wyatt here has dismantled your fax machine—that was the boom you heard—and it means your friends here aren’t getting refreshed from any local backups. By the time they’re dusted out of archive and back on their feet again, they won’t know what happened here, or why they died. But you will. The nearest settlement is Silver Canal, ten klicks that-a-way, and I suggest you get about it before you bleed to death.”

“Or die of thirst,” Wyatt offers. And it’s no empty threat, for the noontime sun of Mars, while no match for that of Earth, can dry a man out in a day and a half if he’s not careful.

“Please,” the man says, like he’s been ordered up a gallows, and it occurs to Holliday that this fellow may never have walked ten kilometers in his life. He seems fit enough, but of course he’s printed that way. Printed fresh every time he steps through a fax from one place to another, and why walk when you can do that instead? Why bother getting any exercise at all?

“If you don’t like the walk, you should contemplate the alternative,” Holliday tells him, and gives him a shove. “Things could have gone worse for you, make no mistake. Perhaps some day you’ll appreciate what a fine shot it was that saved your life today.”

“Next time will be worse,” Wyatt says darkly. “You tell your people to stay the hell away from Dawes Crater, and the Dawes Crater Mining Company, and from the two of us.”

“Who are you?” he asks.

“I’m Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp 2.0 Faxborn. That right there is Doc Holliday. Look it up before you even think about crossing our paths again. I’ve got an eye for faces; I surely won’t forget yours.”

* * *

Once the shooting stops, the place is overrun by Wyatt’s ragtag posse of blacks and Chinamen and whatever else he’d found here on Mars. And Holliday is of two minds about that, because the faxborn part of him knows a man’s skin means less than nothing. In this day and age, anyone can be black or white or red or yellow any time they feel like it. Or polka-dot blue! And it says nothing about the person inside, all right. But Holliday came up in Georgia during Reconstruction, and that left little burrs in his heart. Burrs that don’t seem to mind he isn’t real, and never lived in Georgia at all, and never drew a breath until a week ago Sunday when Wyatt Earp printed him out of a fax machine. He has no reason to feel any way about anything, but he does. Yep, he does.

The trucks are loaded up with stolen metal—all the wealth hijacked away from Dawes—and soon the trucks are on their way back there to repatriate the loot. Holliday doesn’t quite understand why these ingots have to travel overland—can’t they just be shoved through a fax machine like everything else? But apparently not, so away they roll, bouncing over the ruts and rocks of a landscape very much like Utah. Holliday and Wyatt are alone in a truck of their own, with Wyatt driving and Holliday riding beside him with a shotgun across his knees.

Holliday’s been born with a detailed knowledge of Martian geography (“areography,” they call it), and this road goes only back to Dawes. So he knows well enough where he is in the world. But what a world! The sky is purple-gray, like a hemisphere of slate, the light of the sun punching through. An alien sun; it seems bright enough but too small by half, and too cold, and somehow too blue. The same sun that shines down on Earth, he supposes, though it doesn’t look it. Thin clouds streak the sky here and there, moving faster than it seems they ought to, and on the other side of this celestial dome, opposite the sun, hangs the pearly orb of Phobos, the nearer moon.

The most unsettling thing about all this is how normal it feels. How proper, as though John Henry Holliday were born in this place, born for this place, and all his other memories no more than daydreams. Which is exactly true.

“That was awful,” he tells Wyatt.

“It’s always awful.”

“Indeed, yes, but this time feels different. A greater sin than I’ve previously committed. Which can’t be right, can it?”

“No,” Wyatt tells him. “I’ve seen you do worse.”

And that’s true. The two of them had been mixed up in some bad business in their day. Some of that had been Wyatt’s fault, or at least Wyatt was the reason Holliday became involved. But not too much. Wyatt was a lawman, and a law-abiding one, for the most part. If anything, he’d been a brake on the worst impulses of the man he called “Doc” Holliday. Things could, perhaps, have gone worse if the two had not become friends—the lawman and the gambler.

“Is it always this way?” Holliday wonders aloud. “Sickening? Churning in the belly like a bad meal? I wouldn’t know. This was only my second gunfight, wasn’t it? My second.”

Wyatt only grunts to that, and so the two ride in silence for a while, with only the whistle of the wind and the squeaking of the truck to acknowledge their existence.

But there are thoughts in John Holliday’s head that want to get out, that want to be spoken aloud and acknowledged by his fellow man. In a very real sense, he has never unburdened himself, never had a real conversation at all. A construct, like Wyatt, printed by machines for a world that had no real men of its own, no one capable of chasing down and murdering a few miscreants. Because that was illegal, yes, but also because it was difficult, because it required a hard and violent heart that even the roughest miners and teamsters of this age seemed to lack.

“I never asked to be a gunfighter, you know.”

“None of us did,” says Wyatt.

“Oh, I beg to differ, Wyatt. You pinned any number of badges on your chest, carried all manner of firearms all your life. What did you think would happen when you moved to Kansas, eh? You’d be arranging flowers? Take up blacksmithing? No, you were born to this life of turmoil in a way I never was. I was a good dentist, Wyatt, I really was. I won awards for my dentures and bridgework, and I’d’ve been quite content to live out my days that way, with a wife at my side and children underfoot. It was all I wanted, all I needed out of life. It was just bad luck I caught my mother’s illness.”

John Holliday had moved west for the clean, dry air, but found it difficult to practice his trade. People in Texas had better uses for their money than to give it to a dentist who coughed, so he’d fallen back to his other great skill: reading a deck of cards. And, when necessary, manipulating one.

Wyatt just snorts at that. “Way I hear it, Doc, you had your share of scrapes back in Georgia, as well. You’re as fine a gentleman as I’ve met, but you’re a born fighter, and there’s no shame in it. Where would the world be without gentlemen who know how and when and why to be angry?”

“I believe we’re in that world now, Wyatt.” He thinks about that for a moment and then laughs. “Some god of war Mars turned out to be. When men finally reached up to settle this world, I guess the fight had gone right out of them.”

“Exactly. There’s men here know how to steal, men who know how to throw a punch, maybe. Nobody who can take a real beating and keep coming. But you, you’re a mean cuss when crossed, Doc. It’s what I always liked about you.”

There is some truth to that, but Wyatt had never known the younger Holliday. Gambling was a respectable enough profession for a gentleman—it brought no shame to him or to his fine Georgian family—but it surely did rub him up against some unsavory characters, often drunk and even more often angry about losing. He didn’t seek out conflict, he truly didn’t. But it seemed to dog him wherever he went, and he just seemed better at it than most. He didn’t want to cough himself to death from tuberculosis, so there were definitely days he’d’ve been just as happy to lose a duel as win one. But no, he was too fast. He was the fastest man he’d ever met, and the corpses piled up until it was his very reputation for violence that seemed, at times, the only thing that earned him any peace.

Holliday thought again for another while, and finally said, “If you and I are reborn, Wyatt—reborn into a more peaceful world—then perhaps it’s a greater sin to continue in our old ways. To look a man in the eye and pull a trigger on him when he has no quarrel with you. Shouldn’t that sicken us? Is that any way for the resurrected to behave?”

“If that’s why they were resurrected,” Wyatt says. But he doesn’t sound convinced.

“Most men aren’t six days old, Wyatt. Most men aren’t created for a purpose. Have I just fulfilled mine? Should I now vanish?”

“Aw, hell, Doc, you haven’t even been paid yet. And no, you haven’t outlived your usefulness. Not by a long shot. There’s a whole world here, and nothing eating you from inside. Resurrected, like you said. You can be anything. I mean, to the extent that people can.”

“Well. Well. That begs the question, then, doesn’t it? What’s a man to do with his second life?”

After a pregnant pause, Wyatt admits, “I’m still figuring that out myself.”

“I see.”

They finish the rest of their long drive in silence.

* * *

In the dormitory room assigned to him by the mining company, Holliday sleeps roughly that night, haunted by dreams of violence. How many men has he sent to Valhalla? A dozen and a half, all told? Do past sins still burden his reborn soul? Has he been snatched from divine retribution, and if so, do the cheated gods await his second death? They might have a long wait, for all persons are “immorbid” in the Queendom of Sol, where a freshly printed body awaits anyone careless enough to momentarily expire.

It’s only strong drink that allows him any rest, and when he awakes it’s only strong drink that controls his hangover. Like a man still consumed from within, Holliday lies abed until his pocketwatch calls it well past noon. Then, like a half-animated corpse, he finds his way to the mining company’s cafeteria, where he fills his belly with starchy biscuits drowned in a kind of sawmill gravy, and chases them with iced tea and then, again in his room, another nip from the whiskey bottle Wyatt bought for him as a resurrection gift.

“Wouldn’t be right, you starting altogether fresh,” Wyatt had told him. “I’ve also put a thousand dollars to your credit account, which is all I can free up from my own this morning. Be warned, it’s not as much as it sounds like.”

“You always were cash poor,” Holliday had said back. “Paid in promises on a good day, and daydreams on all the rest.”

These were very nearly their first words to each other here on Mars, which John Henry “Doc” Holliday 2.0 Faxborn later came to realize were part of the first conversation he’d ever had.

Afternoon finds him walking down Main Street, between the rows of brightly colored buildings. He turns on Third Avenue (aware somehow that these street names were chosen ironically and anachronistically by the town’s founders), and realizes then that what seemed an aimless stroll was in fact a beeline for The Metal Bar. In his week among the living, he’s found this ironically named drinking establishment suits him better than either of the town’s other two choices.

Soon enough, he’s sat down, shuffling a deck of cards and offering to teach a table of strangers the basics of Five-Card Draw. The cards are a thing Holliday had to order by providing a detailed description to the fax machine, for while a few card games are known in the Queendom, they’re played on touchscreens or else entirely in the mind. A physical deck of celluloid-coated paper, inked in bright colors and static as a painting, is something else entirely.

“It’s like something out of a storybook,” says a miner named Glenn Abbott. He doesn’t say it kindly, nor does he look that way on Holliday’s person.

“Well, then, perhaps Go Fish will be more your speed,” Holliday tells him.

“You weren’t invited to sit down,” Abbot says, in what he seems to imagine is a warning tone. Then he adds, in a tone of clear insult, “Faxborn. Take it somewheres else, or find out why.”

Holliday laughs at that, in genuine amusement. Out of respect for Wyatt’s town, he carries no gun or knife, nor even a nonlethal “tazzer,” but there’s loose cutlery on the table, along with drink glasses and a China plate Holliday could use to bash in a man’s nose or skull without breaking a sweat.

“I came to play,” Holliday tells him, “and there’s no other occupied table.”

“Come on, Glenn,” says another man, who introduced himself simply as “Fuzzy” before Holliday sat down beside him. “Hain’t you seen trouble enough this month?”

“Not looking for trouble,” Abbott replies. “He’s the one who sat down here.”

“Just looking for a friendly wager,” Holliday says, not moving.

“I’ll play you,” says a thick-boned woman, whose name Holliday doesn’t know, but whose face he remembers from his last time in here.

“Hell you will,” says Glenn Abbott, getting up from his chair. “He looks like a cheater to me. Why’s the deck physical like that, if he doesn’t mean to use it crooked?”

For a moment, no one says anything.

“Hain’t that my business if I want to play?” the woman finally asks.

“It’s mine,” Holliday tells them all, “if my honor is so impugned.”

And he’s ready, quite ready, to take the matter as far as it will go, but then he reminds himself that he’s not in fact dying of tuberculosis. He doesn’t need to get himself killed over a petty insult. Also, nobody here knows anything about him. He might be a cheat for all they know, and he has, in fact, from time to time, cheated at cards. He remains seated.

To Abbott, he says, “What do you have against the faxborn, exactly? Has one of them hurt you? Has Wyatt? He’s a hard man, I know, and harder when crossed.”

“What business is it of yours?”

“None, sir, and I apologize if I’ve aggrieved you in some way. I’m just here to play cards.” Holliday says this as soothingly as his nature allows, which isn’t very. In truth, even his kindest words have a way of coming out as though spoken to an inferior, and for a moment he’s afraid he’s going to have to fight it out after all. But Abbott sits back down, grumbling vaguely.

A few pleasantries are exchanged, and drinks are ordered, and his charm seems to have done the trick, because in another minute he’s dealing out four hands, as if among friends.

* * *

Although civility got the card game started, in the end, he needn’t have bothered with it, for Glenn Abbott accuses him thrice more of cheating. He surely isn’t, but he does have the advantage, teaching them a game he knows well.

“Come now,” Holliday says, that first time. He’s just won his third pot, and while there are no bills or chips or coins on the table to mark the transfer, a thing called a “living contract” has allegedly transferred the funds into his account. “You earn that much in an hour, I expect. You think I’d risk hellfire over such a small sum?”

The second time is worse. Abbott says, “No one’s that lucky, faxborn.”

And Holliday warns him, “Sir, I’ve told you I turn these cards honestly. Poker’s a game of skill, as well as luck. If you call me a liar, as well as a cheat, then I hope your hands are quick.”

“Steady, boys,” says Fuzzy.

That cools Abbott off for no more than a minute before he’s on his feet again, saying to Holliday, “A goddamn thief is what you are.”

And with that, Holliday’s had enough of this man. He was a fool to ever sit down with him, but a gambler can’t always be a chooser, and anyhow he held a hope that this new world was somehow better than the old one. Alas, no, so he stands up, grabbing the China plate as he rises and cracking it on the edge of the table to get a point on the end of it. And he’s ready, quite ready, to drive that point into Glenn Abbott’s heart and send him back to his maker. But no, that’s not right. Killing Abbott would merely get the man refreshed from backups, missing at most a few weeks of memory. Solving nothing.

Holliday pauses for a moment, knowing even while he does it that hesitation is death in a confrontation like this one. But Abbott is wide-eyed with surprise at finding a weapon by his belly, so much so that Holliday thinks he was perhaps not expecting a fight at all. Simply expecting Holliday to back down to his repeated insults? The thought is so strange, he hardly knows what to make of it.

“Drop the plate, Doc,” says a familiar voice behind him.

Without turning, Holliday says, “Hello, Wyatt. Have you come to play cards with us? We’re having a wonderful time.”

“So I hear.”

Holliday keeps his eyes on Abbott’s hands, not trusting to luck or to Wyatt’s intervention. But he sets down the broken China and waits.

“Gambling is legal here,” he says mildly.

To which Wyatt replies, “Not in public, it isn’t. In a bar, you can play for points, but not cash. That leads to fighting, which leads to broader trouble.”

“Does it?”

Holliday is simply being difficult; his whole life has been about that broader trouble, and he knows it very well indeed. He isn’t surprised that Wyatt, late in life, has decided it’s too much to put up with on his watch.

“Everyone, look at me,” Wyatt says in measured tones, then repeats it less evenly when Abbott and Holliday fail to comply. “Look. At. Me. Doc!”

Holliday finally turns to face his friend.

“This game is over. You boys and girls stay here and talk about your feelings. Doc, you’re with me.”

* * *

“Have I caused you some embarrassment?” Holliday asks, when the two of them are out on the street together.

Instead of answering directly, Wyatt asks him, “Do you remember what Charlie Bassett said to Katie that night in Dodge? About drinking when you gamble, and gambling when you drink?”

“Who’s Katie?” Holliday asks.

“Very funny,” says Wyatt.

“I’m serious, Wyatt. I don’t recollect anyone by that name.”

“She was your wife, Doc.”

“Are you referencing Big Nose Kate? She and I were never married, as you know, and she’d’ve shot any man with the temerity to call her Katie.”

“I used to call her that all the time,” Wyatt says.

“You did not. Your memory betrays you. And if you’re speaking of that conversation in the Long Branch Saloon, it was Bat Masterson who thought to school me on temperance. Charlie Bassett and I were drinking companions, before you ever set foot in Dodge.”

Wyatt, who’s been walking down the edge of the street, where the wellstone-paved road seemed to kick most of its dust, now stops. “That’s not how I remember it. Are you sure, Doc? You’re not just gabbing?”

“I’m not,” Holliday assures him.

“Well, damn. Damn it all. The surgeon who helped birth you said our memories would be synchronized.”

“Eh?”

“It’s all bullshit, you know. All the memories, all the moments of your life, just made up. How could anyone know all the actual moments of Doc Holliday’s life? But damn it, yours were supposed to crystallize from mine. That quack.”

“Wyatt, what are you talking about? I know you and I are not authentically resurrected, but are you saying we’re not even authentic simulacra?”

“No. I mean, we’re well crafted.”

“We’re what?”

Wyatt harrumphs at that. “Study of history is serious business here, and it doesn’t miss much. The accents, the sceneries, the turns of phrase we grew up with…those are all real. And everything you ever said or did that got written down and remembered. Or photographed. They can reconstruct an awful lot from one photograph, Doc. It’s the little details that’ll trip you.”

“Like the name of the woman who loved me best?”

“Yeah,” Wyatt says, with a tinge of sadness in his voice. “Like that. Now I’ve got boxing practice in half an hour, which you’re welcome to attend. Or not, but I’ll ask you to stay out of trouble, please. You’re my responsibility, and I’d rather this time we not drag each other into something we’ll have to run away from.”

“You appear to be the one getting me into it, Wyatt. I didn’t ask for this. Am I half imaginary, now, and half ghost? I certainly didn’t ask for that. Maybe I will run away.”

Wyatt seems to think on that a moment, before saying, “You’re a free man, Doc. Free as anyone. But take warning: it’s hard to run in the Queendom of Sol, and near impossible to hide.”

“It was just a card game, you know.”

“It wasn’t. It never is.”

“Well, then, I believe I’ll take a walk. Assuming my legs are real enough to carry me around.”

“Cute. It does get easier, you know. Being alive again.”

“Does it? Well, then. Good day, sir.”

* * *

“Thank you for coming, John,” says Jonathan Adisa, the “site manager” of Dawes Crater. Rising partway from his chair, he reaches out to shake Holliday’s hand.

“A gentleman,” Holliday says, mildly surprised. He accepts the handshake—the first he’s been offered here on Mars—by anyone other than Wyatt, that is.

“I’m old,” Adisa says, with a slightly fake-looking smile. “And my parents were strict.”

“As were mine,” Holliday allows.

Adisa seems to be waiting for something, then finally says, “Ah. You’re waiting for an invitation! Please, sit.”

“Thank you.”

Holliday sinks into one of the two chairs positioned in front of Adisa’s desk. The chair looks like wood, but yields under his weight like a feather mattress, conforming to his shape while still managing somehow to feel both rigid and light. It’s a sort of magic Holliday is slowly becoming used to, here in the world of six hundred years in his future.

“Your friend Wyatt wanted to be here with you,” Adisa says, “but I thought for our first meeting it might be more productive if we spoke alone.”

“Wyatt does drive a hard bargain,” Holliday says, with unfeigned sympathy. “To his detriment at times. I suspect his preference would be to negotiate this matter with me out of the room entirely.”

“Oh, he has. He did. The price for your services was set before you were born.”

“Oh? I see. Come to think on it, I’d expect no less from him. What, then, is the purpose of our meeting?”

“To discuss your future.”

“Ah.”

Holliday understands immediately. Though Adisa has the powers of a mayor, the “site manager” is a company man, not an elected official. This puts Dawes Crater City in a category of company towns with which Holliday had some familiarity. In his old life, he’d tended not to spend too much time in places like this, because mining companies discouraged gambling. It was anyhow practiced mainly by the lowest-paid workers, so the big-money games from which Holliday made his living were rare. Complaints of cheating were taken seriously, too, which made it hard sometimes to hang onto a worthy score.

Even worse were the towns where there’d been some sort of a scrape—someone shot, someone stabbed, something burned down to create a diversion. Regardless of the underlying events and reasons, Holliday was generally put to blame, and had more than once fled with nothing but the coat on his back and the contents of his pockets. If the life of a gambler was hard, the life of a gunfighter was harder still. Even if that man had a sense of honor that his opponents lacked.

And here he is, post-scrape in another goddamned mining town.

“At the age of one week,” he muses, “I’m already being asked to move on.” By a black man, no less. The burrs in Holliday’s heart snag on that fact, though the faxborn part of him knows they shouldn’t. “Racism” is a word people never used in Holliday’s time, as it was so prevalent as to be unremarkable, and people do not use it in the Queendom, either, because no one living has ever seen it practiced. But Holliday is aware of it as part of an ugly history, in which he himself played some part. He’s not so much resentful of Adisa’s dark skin as he is surprised, but he knows that’s also a thing he shouldn’t feel. So perhaps he’s simply confused, and uncomfortable at his confusion. He’s used to moving on, though; that much doesn’t surprise him.

“I’m not necessarily asking you to leave,” Adisa tells him.

“Oh, come now. There’s work to be done here, by serious men. And serious women, too, and not by persons such as myself. If Wyatt does his job correctly, there’ll never be another gunfight in Dawes.”

“I certainly hope that’s true. But I’m told you have other skills.”

“Cardplaying and dentistry. One of which is not wanted here, and the other not needed. Every man, woman, child, and dog here has the most perfect teeth I’ve ever seen.”

Adisa sighs. “Look, the hijackers could come back at any time. I’d like you to stay on here for at least another few months, as a deterrent. You don’t have to do anything. During that time, I can offer you training toward new employment.”

Holliday pauses, taking that in. He has come to learn that as a faxborn construct, he is basically the stories and reflexes of a long-deceased gunfighter, grafted onto a generic fax template of a male human being from the Queendom of Sol. That template is equipped with a sort of generic recognition of things and a generic knowledge of how things work, and this part of him recognizes Adisa’s offer as a serious and valuable one. Most men of the Queendom are idle in the lowest sense of the word, without any sort of meaningful work to do. This is true even here in Dawes Crater, where a small but growing share of the population simply eat and drink and take up space, perhaps dedicating themselves to art appreciation clubs, which seem quite a popular affair. In Holliday’s week among them, he’s been tempted to lead them all into mischief. Tempted, hell—he’s gone and done it, or tried at any rate.

“What sort of employment? A formal joinder to the Security force?”

“Better,” Adisa says. “I’ve heard the Provincial Authority might be interested in a man of your background. And, uh, manners.”

Holliday snorts. “They haven’t met me. Those manners, alas, lie thin upon the surface.”

He almost adds, “Scratch ’em, and you may find nothing but rage underneath.” But why talk himself out of an opportunity? A man needs something that needs him back. And anyhow, that rage came partly from the hand he’d been dealt back on Earth: the consumption, and the ghastly death it promised if no one came along and shot him first. But he met that ghastly death honorably enough, and is now every bit as resurrected and immortal as his mama could have hoped. Perhaps the time for rage has passed.

Holliday’s never met an officer of the Provincial Authority, or anyone else from outside Dawes Crater, except of course the hijackers he was brought here to kill. But he knows them by reputation. They’re the despised “whitecaps,” who come to town only to haul people out of it, for trial in distant lands. No one but Wyatt seems to think kindly of them, and it’s telling that Holliday knows this after only a week in town.

“This is Mars,” Adisa tells him, after musing a long time. “A lot of us would welcome any manners at all. Especially from a man as…dangerous as yourself.”

In moments of doubt, it’s Holliday’s practice to say nothing, so another long pause stretches out before Adisa speaks again: “The training I’m talking about would be partly neural stim and partly memory surgery. Quite expensive, but the company’s willing to pick up the cost.”

“And why is that?”

Adisa spreads his hands. “Are three reasons enough? As your creators, we’re legally responsible for your introduction into society. Some…mistakes were made with your friend Wyatt, and I’d rather not see those repeated. That’s the first thing. Second, you’re correct that we don’t really want you staying here indefinitely, in anything like your original capacity. It doesn’t send the right message.”

“Towns like yours welcome a gunfighter,” Holliday agrees darkly, “until they don’t.”

“It’s a big world,” Adisa counters. “Full of better places than this. You could always return, once you’ve acclimated and things have settled down, but I doubt you’ll want to.”

Annoyed now, Holliday asks, “What’s the third reason?”

At this, Adisa looks slightly embarrassed. “We’d, uh, like some friendly faces in the Provincial Authority. You were born here, and you’re familiar with our problems.”

“I’m only a week old, sir.”

“Still.”

Holliday says nothing, until Adisa finally fills the silence again. “Look, you’re our creation. A history program told us what kind of champion we needed, and we made it happen. You’re Wyatt’s creation, really, and he’s Tom Clady’s. Both of you, made right here. That means something.”

“I see. And in my filial gratitude for the privilege of existing, I’ll gallantly keep the feds off your back?”

Adisa sighs unhappily. “That’s not how I’d put it. But yes, basically.”

He doesn’t say anything else. Eventually, Holliday realizes it’s his own turn to fill the silence. “I hope you’ll forgive my cynical nature. What child was ever grateful for the hand his parents dealt him? Satan himself was a child of God, which I suppose makes him a brother of Jesus. Now there’s a sibling rivalry for you. All right, then, Wyatt gets Dawes Crater, and like any second son I get to move along, free of inheritance. Your offer is a fair one, and I shall think on it some, ere I give you my answer.”

* * *

The walls of the buildings on Mars can both display text and speak in human voices, and by a sort of wireless telegraph system, invisible messages can be sent through the air. Holliday for some reason finds none of this remarkable, so he is not particularly surprised when, while he’s sulking in his room, “avoiding trouble,” such a message announces itself with a little chirp. A string of glowing letters announces AN INVITATION FROM ELIZABETH M. GONZALES, EPAULET CAPTAIN OF THE MARTIAN PROVINCIAL AUTHORITY, LANDOWNER, REGISTERED PRE-PARENT, AND BACHELORETTE OF SCIENCE IN CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS AND ENFORCEMENTS.

“Receive and display,” he tells the wall, as though he’s been doing such things all his life.

“Mr. Holliday,” the message says, both in printed text and in the pleasant speaking voice of a human female, “it pleases me to extend an invitation to speak on a matter of possible mutual interest. If interested, please make my acquaintanceship at the Provincial Emulative Firing Range, today at one P.M. your time. If not interested, please accept my heartfelt apology for any intrusion. RSVP requested. Thank you.”

There’s something oddly stilted about the words, as though their speaker is reading from a carefully prepared script in a not-quite-native dialect.

“Reply yes,” Holliday says. Then, thinking better of it, he adds, “Reply yes, thank you. Any meeting outside this damned crater would delight me, Madam.”

It’s already past noon, so he climbs up off his bed, combs his hair and moustache with a quite magical little styling comb, and puts on a tie and hat. Wyatt seems to have gone native in the clothing department, or at least to have met the natives halfway, but Holliday finds the local fashions clownish, and will not stoop to them. He looks much as he did toward the end of his life, when he lived in Leadville, high in the mountains of Colorado, and was never warm even in July. Shirt and trousers, vest, cravat, jacket, riding boots with woolen socks underneath, and over it all a broad-brimmed hat, to keep the bright sun from burning his skin. Leadville hadn’t been good to him, but by the time he realized it was worse for his lungs, rather than better, the damage was done. After that, there was nothing for it but to ride the stage down to Glenwood and hope its vaporous, sulfur-dripping caves and pools might heal him. They didn’t, and so he died, but he was well dressed until he actually took to bed for that final time.

Of course, his present outfit must seem quite outlandish by the standards of Mars and the Queendom of Sol, so he supposes he’ll have to adapt at some point. But damn it, he’s a week-old faxborn historical construct, and anyone who doesn’t like that can bugger right off.

He’s never traveled by fax before, but he understands the process, so he slips downstairs to use the dormitory’s own fax gate. It’s a metallic-looking slab mounted up against a wall of the building’s atrium, and apparently surrounded by a whisker-thin layer of unmoving fog or smoke or fine gauze. It’s the same machine from which he obtained his deck of cards.

“Outbound travel, Provincial Firing Range,” he says to it.

“Deconflict,” it says back to him in a gentle, sexless voice that might almost belong to a child. “Provincial Live Firing Range, or Provincial Emulative Firing Range?”

“Emulative, I think. Which one was I just invited to?”

“Emulative,” says the fax. “Destination established.”

Holliday simply assumed the thing knew his business, and indeed it does, and the Queendom part of him thinks, well, why wouldn’t it? The Old American part of him finds this all a bit unsettling, but he goes ahead and steps through the plate, spreading his hands before him as though he’s walking through a curtain.

On the other side, he’s outdoors. It’s dawn or dusk or something, and a chilly wind carries fine, stinging, alkaline grit. Grateful for his coat and boots, he unties the cravat from his neck and wraps it over his nose and mouth, tightening the bead of his hat’s chin strap underneath it to keep it from slipping. He wishes, suddenly, that he had a pair of those damnfool Martian goggles.

Malo e lelei,” says a woman’s voice. “Thank you for coming.”

He turns, and sees a woman wearing exactly the aforementioned goggles, above a sky-blue uniform and below a distinctive white cap, which Holliday recognizes at once as the finery of the Martian Provincial Authority. Her mouth and nose are fully exposed to the grit, although a white mask dangles around her neck, unused.

“Captain Gonzales?” he asks. He’s never met a female with any sort of rank at all, much less a captain. She’s brown-haired, of medium build, and looks like she means business.

“The same. Doctor Holliday?”

“You know I am.” That seems a bit terse, so he follows it with, “Thank you for your kind invitation.”

Her smile and nod are professional, as well as warm, and Holliday can see she’s sizing him up, as if for a fight. “I’m sorry for the short notice. It’s time for my monthly shooting drills,” she says, “and my scheduled partner had a last-minute conflict. It occurred to me this might be an opportunity for us to meet.”

“I see.”

Holliday doesn’t know what “emulative” shooting is, or why it needs to be out in conditions such as these, but he’s bored and (he realizes suddenly) lonely, so he’s going along with it.

“Do you consent to being shot at?” she asks, with the seriousness of a Texas Ranger.

“Do I what?” The question rocks him back. He realizes he’s both immorbid and archived. In fact, the fax machine he’s just stepped through retains a seconds-old image of him that would be automatically reinstantiated if this current body were, for some reason, to stop functioning. But it’s a strange question, isn’t it? Like asking a man if he’d like to be beaten unconscious with sticks. Flummoxed, he says, “I think you’d better unpack that question a bit.”

“Ah. Yes. Sorry,” she says. “It’s actually easier if I show you.”

She walks away from him, and although there’s nothing lurid about her uniform, he’d be a fool not to notice she’s got a fine derriere. Everyone seems to, here in the Queendom.

He follows her to a broad wellwood table. They’re in the middle of what looks like a stage set of some kind of ancient Greek village. The walls and columns are thin and fake-looking, and not attached to anything, and it’s open on every side to what looks like many kilometers of hardpan desert, broken here and there by low hills covered in scrub oak.

The table is covered in neatly arranged weapons: pistols and rifles, tazzers and wireguns, and even the sort of long knives David Bowie made famous in the Republic of Texas. Every weapon matched with a single duplicate. It is a table full of weapons in pairs.

“Are we dueling?” he asks.

“We are,” she confirms. “These are nonlethal dummy armaments. They’ll sting, but won’t leave a mark. Do you consent?”

Holliday studies the weapons, then Gonzales’s face. It’s not that female leaders were completely unknown in his time. Why, Queen Victoria of England had ruled over hundreds of millions of people, and he did not doubt she’d been loved and respected by a great many of them. But a police captain was another matter. He supposed she was something between a federal marshal and an army captain, and her bearing is consistent with this. Authoritative, but not overbearing.

Her face, though, seems both serious and friendly, a bit like other people he’s met who are aware of him by reputation. She seems to think she knows something about him, and perhaps she does. If she’s thinking about offering him a job, she will certainly have done some research, and found something agreeable about him.

“I’ve never worn a badge,” he cautions her. “I’ve been sworn into a posse here and there, on a mostly informal basis, and that’s the sum of my experience. And I’ve more than once killed men dead who were not directly about to kill me. I’d be a strange choice for any agency of the law.”

“Maybe,” she says, picking up a gun belt and buckling it around her waist. “You want to fight about it?” She seems genuinely eager to try her luck against him, and this too is something familiar. Back in Kansas and Texas and Colorado, and especially in Arizona, men would hear about him, how fast he was, how deadly, and would take it as a personal challenge, though he’d never met them. Many bad men, and a few good ones, had gone to their graves that way.

“Madam,” he says, then falters. He doesn’t know what to say to her. It would be ungentlemanly in the extreme to duel a woman. And yet, if these things are no more lethal than a hot cup of tea, and the duel no more meaningful than a game of hearts in a hotel parlor, then refusing it would also be rude. “You have me at a disadvantage.”

“I’m sorry,” she says sincerely. “Have I presumed too much?”

“Or I too little,” he says, flummoxed. But he is bored and lonely. And he’s deadly fast with a weapon, and he’s in a new country where the customs are different. This isn’t an invitation he ought to refuse. “When in Rome, I suppose, one must do as the Romans, or be marked forever a barbarian.”

Now her voice is playful: “Would it help if I insulted your honor?”

“It would not,” he tells her, strapping on a gun belt. And then says, with a tentative humor of his own, “For then I should have to kill you in earnest.”

She laughs at that, then marches ten paces away and turns to face him. “Try it.”

She seems to know the forms, better than most men in the West ever did. Very well, then. He paces off ten yards of his own, then turns to face her, his arms and hands relaxed at his sides.

“Draw,” he says mildly. Then waits for her hand to move toward the hilt of her pistol. When it does, he waits some more, and finally, lackadaisically draws his weapon and shoots her once in the forehead. BANG! Calmly, patiently, he fans the hammer back with his other hand, and puts two more rounds into the middle of her chest. BANG! BANG!

She falls backward, a familiar look of surprise and pain and fear on her face. Her hand never did touch that gun, and he fears for a moment that he’s actually killed her. But she steps back and catches herself before actually toppling over. Then she drops her iron and leans forward, grabbing at her face with one hand and her chest with the other. She cries out in pain, then melts into laughter and shoots upright again, a broad smile splitting her face.

“I knew it!” she barks. “Oh, I knew it! Look at you! Fastest gun in the Old America. My God.”

“Are you all right?” he asks, with both friendly and gentlemanly concern. He thinks to lower his weapon.

“I’m excellent,” she chortles. “My God. I’m excellent. When you crank the reflexes that high, you normally get tic disorders and a bad case of Tourette’s Syndrome. But if you interconnect the cerebellum directly with the motor cortex, bypassing the sensory cortex entirely…The surgeon who created you wasn’t sure it would work, but I knew it had to. It had to, because you were a real person. Oh, my God, it’s such a pleasure to meet you, Doctor.”

Holliday, who understands about half of what she just said, puts his pistol back in the holster. “So you’ve spoken with my surgeon. You knew me even before I was born? Faxborn?”

“I did,” she says, retrieving her weapon from the dirt where she’s dropped it, brushing it off and then gently holstering it. “I’m sorry if that feels like an invasion of privacy, but Dr. M’chunu consulted with me before performing the birth, as he was concerned you might be used for…extralegal purposes.”

“He was right about that. I’ve killed six men since I’ve been here.”

She looks hard at him now, then raises her goggles up to her forehead and looks at him some more. Her irises are difficult to discern at this distance, particularly since she’s squinting against the blowing dust, but he thinks they might be the color of worn-out pennies.

“No one has complained,” she says, finally.

He snorts at that. “No witness, no crime?”

She nods slowly, the tip of her tongue peeking out at an angle at one corner of her mouth. “And an inadmissible confession, yes. But I don’t want to hear anything about it. I don’t want to know anything about it.”

That seems rather a lax attitude for a police captain to take, and, for a moment, he’s not sure what to say or do. Walking back to the table, he unbuckles the gun belt and lays it back down where he got it.

“I’ve never worn a badge,” he tells her again. “I don’t understand why someone like you would want anything at all from someone like me.”

“A fair question,” she says, walking up a laying her own gun belt down. She lowers her goggles back down over those worn-penny eyes. “Shall we get out of this wind?”

“And go where?”

“For a drink? I’m off duty for another twelve hours.”

“I think you shall tire of my company long before that,” he says, then wonders if he’s joking or serious, and whether it even matters. Since his birth, he’s had zero romantic interest in any goggled Martian lady, and her own interest in him seems more scientific than personal. This is an audition, and he seems to be doing his best to fail it.

“Clear the range!” she calls out in a strong voice. Whereupon a trio of mirror-bright, willow-thin mechanical men come whirling out of the fax machine, clearing the table with astonishing speed and efficiency, then picking up the table itself. In another moment, they’re gone, vanished back into that vertical slab.

“Come on,” she says, neither commanding nor wheedling, but just simply issuing the invitation.

“I have nothing else on my calendar,” he confesses.

* * *

She takes him not to Dawes Crater, but to a nearby city called Sabeeta, which Holliday knows is a regional capital of the Sinus Sabaeus Quadrangle. The drinking establishment is no saloon or music hall, but something more like a vision of heaven. They’re outdoors, but sheltered from the wind and dust by a mazey arrangement towering triangular sails, white against the toffee-colored sky. It’s early afternoon here, and the sails are brightly lit by the sun’s warm rays, but he imagines they would look even grander and more imaginary if they were lit up at night. He resolves to find that out sometime.

The liquor is something called “hard tea,” which is served in a clear mug and is roughly the same color as the sky. It isn’t strong or sweet or bitter or sour, but it has a mild, cool bite to it, like mint.

“…the Provincial Authority has developed a rather prissy reputation,” Gonzales is saying. “We’re better educated than the people we police, and that doesn’t go over well.”

She’s packed away her goggles and mask in a sort of belt pouch, and she looks at him now over the tea mugs they’re both holding.

Holliday’s hat and jacket hang over the back of the chair he’s sitting in. His cravat is draped loosely around his neck, and the top button of his shirt is undone. It’s finally warm here on Mars, and he welcomes it.

“I’m an educated man myself,” he tells her.

She waves that off. “Not the same thing. You were a dentist, which is a hands-on profession. And you were mostly a gunfighter.”

“I was mostly a cardplayer,” he says, feeling a need to be understood more precisely. “Though I’d’ve remained a dentist had the opportunity remained open. Tuberculosis had other ideas. As did certain rough characters, without whom I would never have fired a weapon in anger. You seem to have some odd ideas about me.”

She sips from her mug and says, “I know you fought beside law enforcement several times in your life. You may not have worn a badge, but you had the respect and gratitude of men who did.”

He snorts. “A badge did not guarantee a man was on the side of the angels. I gather it does now, which makes your interest all the stranger.”

“You’re not making this easy,” she says. “Look, when we arrest a suspect, we show up in overwhelming numbers to forestall resistance, but this winds up making us look weak. I’ve seen how your friend Wyatt handles things, and I think that’s exactly what we’re missing. He makes people afraid of crossing him, without actually doing all that much. It’s quite something to see.”

“He’s a man, yes, in a world of sheep. Pardon me if it’s rude to say so. I wonder, then, why don’t you extend this invitation to him?”

“And poach him away from the mining company? I’d never hear the end of it. Interfering with commerce is the last thing we want to be known for.”

“He is a shareholder,” Holliday admits, “of a profitable enterprise. That’s something he never quite managed back on Earth, so if I think a moment, I don’t suppose you could pry him away. But Miss Gonzales, surely you know I’m nothing like him. Except insofar as neither one of us has ever worn a uniform, or ever would.”

She frowns. “So it’s ‘no,’ then? You haven’t even heard the offer.”

“Haven’t I? All right, then, out with it.”

He sounds ruder and less patient than he would like. Gonzales seems like a perfectly fine peace officer and human being, and Holliday is at loose ends. But he fears she’s barking down the wrong hole, here, and doesn’t like the idea he would let her believe otherwise.

She sips from her mug again, then sets it down and wipes her mouth with a knuckle. “Doctor, I know it’s hard for faxborn people. You were literally created for one purpose, and when you’re new there’s nothing else about you. Nothing that’s your own. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. You’re not limited by your memories, or how things were done in the Old America.”

“No? Captain, we’re all limited by who we are. By who we’ve been, and what we remember doing and feeling. You don’t just brush that off like dust. Now, do you have an offer for me or not?”

“The rank of sergeant,” she says, and from her tone he can tell she no longer thinks this will impress him. “In charge of a special liaison unit, five men.”

“Men? Not ‘men and women’?”

“Not for this.”

He presses: “Not ternary? Not transdeterminate or agendered or celibound?” These are just words to him. He’s aware there’s nothing wrong with any of them, but he’s never met such a person, so the concepts are quite alien. He presses further: “No robots? I’ve seen your robots; they’re faster than I am. And slower to anger, I would think. Better at following orders.”

“Our problems are mostly with men,” she says. “Rough men, with no use for people like me. That’s where we need the most outreach. Not enforcement; we need persuasion. A touch of fear, or at least respect. You think the people of Dawes Crater don’t respect you? I know about that little hijacking problem, and I know it ended the day you were born. What do you think would happen if we put you on the road, town to town?”

“I think I would get in a lot of fights,” he says. “Truly.”

“And you’d have your men behind you to break it up. That could be their main job. Look, I’ll even make it a plainclothes unit, so you don’t have to wear the blue. You like your hat? We can make that the uniform. Not whitecaps at all; The Holliday Black Hats, if that’s what you want. And if things go well, there’d be a path upward, to detective sergeant or even detective inspector. You could hunt for fugitives, like an old-time Texas Ranger.”

He blinks three times, slowly, before he speaks again, because in his old life he’d done exactly this a time or two, hunting fugitives with his friend Wyatt Earp. It wasn’t comfortable work, but he was suited to it. And having a posse of hard men at his back, keeping his trouble from getting out of hand, or standing with him when it did…Why, that was exactly why he’d had Wyatt for a companion all those years. He did not want to be a peace officer, and he did not want to be an instrument of unchecked violence, and the world had never really wanted him to be a dentist or any sort of quiet citizen. But Captain Gonzales seemed to be offering a fourth option: to be an agent of mild intimidation. Why, that was practically his natural state.

“Perhaps you know me better than I’d surmised,” he says. Slowly and thoughtfully, he tells her, “I know there are places in the Queendom—even right here on Mars—where people live in the traditional manner, without fax machines. Living and dying and suffering ailments of the body. I’d had some thought of settling in one of these colonies, and resuming the dental trade.”

“Sadly,” she says, “they’d have the right to refuse you. As a faxborn person, I mean. Some of them might not mind, but some of them very definitely would.”

“Convenient,” he says, “that my hopes should be unattainable.”

“I can help you find out,” she says.

“Really? Can’t I just ask any wall?”

“Not necessarily. I mean, you can try it, but walls don’t know everything. Particularly about what happens in the unlivened regions, right?” An unhappy expression passes over her features, as though she’s just realized she might be on the wrong side of this issue. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m not here to squash your dreams. It’s just that your actual needs may be aligned with those of the Provincial Authority. And the mining company, who’ve agreed to pick up the cost of your training.” She pauses, then adds, “You don’t have to answer right away, but you should know, the pay is also generous.”

She names a figure, and he recognizes it to be more than he could plausibly need to make a life for himself here. More than a dentist made in the Old America, and steadier than what a card player could bring in.

It’s quite an offer, really. Quite a surprisingly attractive offer.

“Would I be free to quit if it doesn’t suit me?” he asks.

“You would,” she agrees. “And I’ll personally help you craft a backup plan, which you can revert to anytime you like.”

“Well,” he says.

There’s silence, which she declines to fill.

“Well,” he says again.

“Take your time,” she tells him.

“No,” he says. With one long swallow he drains his mug, then sets it upside down on the table’s wellcloth covering. “No, I think I’ve taken enough time already. The answer, Madam, is yes.”

And that, quite frankly, is how the Martian Civility Wars began.


The End



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