Old Mars Page 33

  “Oh Jesus,” Tilda breathed. “Okay, thanks … I’ll … I’ll think of something.” She cut the connection and looked toward her fathers.

  Kane was huddled over his husband, talking intently. “I’m sorry, Noel. I lost my way for a while. I wasn’t sure where my first loyalty lay. I know now. I love you. Come home.”

  There could be no help there. The connection between Kane and Noel was still too fragile, too tenuous. She couldn’t pull Kane away at this critical juncture. Tilda slipped out of the temple, down the long stairs, and into the street. In the distance, she could hear the dragon’s growl of heavy machinery, followed by a crash as a wall came down.

  She broke into a run. She rounded a corner, and there was Stephen in the high glassed-in cab. Even through the layers of glass and his helmet, she could see how his face twisted in fury. He drove the giant earthmover into a building, battering at it with the front bucket.

  Tilda ran forward, waving her arms over her head and shouting, “Stop!” She got in front of the dozer. Her grandfather jammed to a stop only inches from her.

  “Get out of my way!”

  “No! You can’t do this! You’ll kill Noel-Pa. His soul is in the city.”

  “He’s already dead. He gave in to these creatures. This place. I have to save Kane and you.”

  “You do this, and you’ll lose us both,” she screamed back.

  He threw the massive machine into reverse, spun it around, and headed for another building. Desperation like bile filled her mouth. Tilda had no idea how to assault the behemoth and the man inside.

  Miyako walked slowly and calmly out of the door of the building Stephen was approaching. The dozer ground to a stop, and Tilda realized that the torrent of memory had penetrated even Stephen’s closed mind. Wind-driven sand swirled about her feet, and, suddenly, Tilda knew what to do. She ran forward, ripped off the fuel cap.

  Miyako was talking. “You didn’t love me. I was a means to an end. You never forgave me for being in Catherine’s place.” Tilda was frantically shoveling handfuls of sand into the gas tank. “All you talked about was the baby and how he would be better than Kane ever was. Even the baby was just a way to hurt Kane. It didn’t matter. I didn’t matter.”

  All through Miyako’s speech, Stephen was muttering, “You’re not real. You’re a monster.”

  Oh God, she was pregnant, Tilda thought. And it broke Granddad. Broke us all. She shook her head, driving away the hopeless thought. But not yet, damn it!

  Stephen threw the earthmover into gear and roared forward, trying to crush Miyako. Then the engine coughed and died. Screaming curses, the old man threw open the door of the cab and leaped to the ground. He was carrying a long, heavy spanner.

  Tilda rushed up and paced at his side as he pursued Miyako, who drifted always just out of reach. “You can’t kill her. You already did that. And you can’t wipe out the memory of what you did to her. And if Noel-Pa dies, the memory of your cruelty to him will remain too. And I promise you I’ll come here to die, so what you did to me won’t ever be forgotten.”

  He stumbled over a curb, and his strides seemed less certain. Tilda pushed on, knowing that her words were cutting wounds in the old man’s soul and not really caring.

  “If you had let Catherine die in the city like she wanted to, her memories would be here. You wouldn’t have lost her completely. Don’t you understand? The more you grab at us, the more we fight to get free. And if your actions cause Noel-Pa to die, you’ll lose your son too.”

  Stephen stumbled to a stop and leaned on the spanner like a cane. His shoulders were shaking. “God forgive me!” The words were broken, whispered, and Tilda barely caught them. “I’m so alone.” He sank down to the ground.

  Miyako’s memory ghost walked up to him. Laid a hand on his shoulder. “We have a lot to talk about,” she said simply.

  Tilda left them there and ran back to the temple. To find Noel-Pa leaning against Kane, his helmeted head on his husband’s shoulder. They opened their arms to her and she ran into their embrace.

  A few weeks later, she and Ali walked together in the Martian city. It was a scene of frenzied activity as crews worked to clear away the sand and rubble, scientists pondered how the city recorded the life memories of the dying, and religious leaders prayed. The McKenzie farm had opened its doors to house the army of experts who had arrived.

  “So, you don’t regret staying?” Ali asked her.

  “No. There’s so much to do here. Noel-Pa and Stephen have the easiest access to Miyako, and I can talk to Ozymandias. I’m needed.”

  “Who was he?” Ali asked.

  “The Martian who figured out how to keep memory alive.”

  “No wonder they built a monument to him.” Ali paused and surveyed the slender spires, now cleaned of the occluding dust. “It’s sort of ironic the way your dad and granddad are working together now.”

  “Yeah, also kind of appropriate. And I’m still going to Cambridge. They’re just letting me do it as a correspondence course.” She smiled at him. “I’ll miss you.”

  “It won’t be forever.”

  “I thought you were staying on Earth.”

  Ali looked around. “I’ve got a lot of memories here. I’d hate to abandon them.”

  He gave her a hug, and she watched him walk back to his ultralight. She then headed home. Daddy-Kane and Noel-Pa were making breakfast, and, with so many people to feed, they could probably use some help.

  MICHAEL MOORCOCK

  One of the most prolific, popular, and controversial figures in modern letters, Michael Moorcock has been a major shaping force in the development of science fiction and fantasy, as both author and editor, for more than thirty years. As editor, Moorcock helped to usher in the “New Wave” revolution in SF in the middle 1960s by taking over the genteel but elderly and somewhat tired British SF magazine New Worlds and coaxing it into a bizarre new life. Moorcock transformed New Worlds into a fierce and daring outlaw publication that was at the very heart of the British New Wave movement, and Moorcock himself—for his role as chief creator of the either much admired or much loathed “Jerry Cornelius” stories, in addition to his roles as editor, polemicist, literary theorist, and mentor to most of the period’s most prominent writers—became one of the most controversial figures of that turbulent era. New Worlds died in the early seventies, after having been ringingly denounced in the Houses of Parliament and banned from distribution by the huge British bookstore and newsstand chain W H Smith, but Moorcock himself has never been out of public view for long. His series of “Elric” novels—elegant and elegantly perverse “Sword & Sorcery” at its most distinctive, and far too numerous to individually list here—are wildly popular, and bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic. At the same time, Moorcock’s other work, both in and out of the genre, such as Gloriana, Behold the Man, An Alien Heat, The End of All Songs, and Mother London, have established him as one of the most respected and critically acclaimed writers of our day. He has won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Guardian Fiction Award. His other books include (among many others), the novels The War Hound and the World’s Pain, Byzantium Endures, The Laughter of Carthage, Jerusalem Commands, The Land Leviathan, and The Warlord of the Air, as well as the collection Lunching with the Antichrist, an autobiographical study, Letters from Hollywood, and a critical study of fantasy literature, Wizardry and Wild Romance. His most recent books include London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction and The Whispering Swarm, the first volume in the new Sanctuary of the White Friars series. After spending most of his life in London, Moorcock moved to a small town in Texas several years back, where he now lives and works.

  Moorcock is no stranger to Mars, having visited there with a series of novels, written under the name of Edward P. Bradbury, that sent a swashbuckling Earthman to an ancient, habitable Mars: Warriors of Mars, Blades of Mars, and Barbarians of Mars. Now he takes us back to Mars in the company of a notorious outlaw on the run
for his life, deadly pursuit hot on his heels, who blunders into a situation where he’s forced to race against time to save the entire planet from being destroyed, with only a few short hours left on the clock …

  The Lost Canal

  MICHAEL MOORCOCK

  1

  Martian Manhunt

  MAC STONE WAS IN TROUBLE. HE HEARD THE STEADY SLAP-slap-slap of the P140 auto-Bannings and knew they’d licked the atmosphere problem. That gadget could now find a man, stun him, or kill him according to whatever orders had come from Terra. If necessary, the bionic “wombots” it carried could follow him into space. The things worked by popping in and out of regular space the way you bunch up a piece of cloth and stick a needle through it to save time and energy. Human physiology couldn’t stand those instant translations—in and out, in and out through the cosmic “folds”—but the wombot wasn’t human; it moved swiftly and easily in that environment. Flying at cruising speed for regular space-time, the wombot could cross a million miles as if they were a hundred. The thing was a terrible weapon, outlawed on every solar colony, packing several features into one—surveillance, manhunter, ordnance. If Mac were unlucky, they’d just use it to stun him. So they could take their time with him back at RamRam City.

  Why do they want me this bad? He was baffled.

  They had him pinned down. In all directions lay the low, lichen-covered Martian hills: ochre, brown, and a thousand shades of yellow-grey almost as far as he could see. You couldn’t hide in lichen. Not unless you could afford a mirror suit. Beyond the hills were the mountains, each taller than Everest, almost entirely unexplored. That was where he was heading before a wombot scented heat from his monoflier and took it out in a second. Four days after that, they hit his camp with a hard flitterbug and almost finished him off. Nights got colder as the east wind blew. Rust-red dust swept in from the desert, threatening his lungs. It whispered against his day suit like the voices of the dead.

  If they didn’t kill him, autumn would.

  Mac plucked his last thin jane from his lips and pinched off the lit end. He’d smoke it later. If there was any “later.” The IMF had evidently gotten themselves some of the new bloodhound wombots, so compact and powerful they could carry a body to Phobos and back. Creepy little things, not much bigger than an adult salmon. They made him feel sick. He still hoped he might pick the site of his last fight. He had only had two full charges left in his reliable old Banning-6 pistol. After that, he had a knife in his boot and some knucks in his pocket. And then his bare hands and his teeth.

  They had called Stone a wild animal back on Mercury, and they were right. The Callisto slave-masters had made him into one after they pulled him from a sinking lavasub. He’d been searching for the fabled energy crowns of the J’ja. The rebel royal priests had been planning to blast Spank City to fragments before the IMF found the secret of their fire-boats and quite literally stopped them cold, freezing them in their tracks, sending the survivors out to Panic, the asteroid that liked to call herself a ship. But the J’ja had hidden their crowns first.

  So long ago. He’d been in some tough spots and survived, but this time it seemed like he’d run out of lives and luck.

  You didn’t get much cover in one of the old flume holes. They’d been dug when some crazy twenty-second-century Terran wildcat miners thought they could cut into the crust and tap the planet’s plasma. They believed there were rivers of molten gold down there. They claimed that they heard them at night when they slept curled within the cones. Someone had fallen into a particularly deep one and sworn he had seen molten platinum running under his feet. Poor devils. They’d spent too long trying to make sense of the star-crowded sky. Recently, he’d heard that the inverted cones were used by hibernating ock-crocs. Mac hoped he wasn’t waking anything up down there. He doubted the theory and did his best not to think about it, to keep out of sight and to drop his body temperature as much as he dared, release a few dead fuel pods and hope that the big Banning bloodbees would mistake him for an old wreck and its dead pilot and pass him by.

  “You only need fear the bees if you’ve broken the law.” That familiar phrase was used to justify every encroachment on citizens’ liberty. Almost all activities were semicriminal these days. Mars needed cheap human workers. Keep education as close as possible to zero. The prisons were their best resource. Industrial ecology created its own inevitable logic.

  Sometimes you escaped the prisons and slipped back into RamRam City, where you could live relatively well if you knew how to look after yourself. Sometimes they just let you stay there until they had a reason to bring you in or get rid of you.

  And that’s what they appeared to be doing now.

  Slap-slap-slap.

  Why were they spending so much money to catch him? He knew what those machines cost. Even captured, he wasn’t worth a single wombot.

  Wings fluttering, big teeth grinding, the flier was coming over the horizon, and, by the way it hovered and turned in the thin air, Mac’s trick hadn’t fooled it at all. Good handling. He admired the skill. Private. Not IMF at all. One guy piloting. One handling the ordnance. Or maybe one really good hunter doing both. He reached to slide off the pistol’s safety. Looked like he was going down fighting. He wondered if he could hit the pilot first.

  Stone was a Martian born in the shadow of Low-Canal’s massive water tanks. The district had never really been a canal. It had been named by early explorers trying to make sense of the long, straight indentations, now believed to be the foundations of a Martian city. But it was where most of AquaCorps’s water was kept. Water was expensive and had to be shipped in from Venus. Sometimes there would be a leakage, and, with kids like him, he could collect almost a cup before the alarms went. His mother lived however she could in the district. His father had been a space ape on the wild Jupiter runs, carbon rods rotting and twisting as they pulled pure uranium from the Ki Sea. He’d probably died when the red spot erupted, taking twenty u-tankers with it.

  When he was seven, his ma sold Mac to a mining company looking for kids small enough to fit into the midget tunnelers working larger asteroids and moons that were able to support a human being for a year or so before they died. His mother had known that “indentured” was another word for death sentence. She knew that he was doomed to breathe modified methane until his lungs and all his other organs and functions gave out.

  Only Mac hadn’t died. He’d stolen air and survived and risen, by virtue of his uninhibited savagery, in what passed for Ganymedan society. Kru miners made him a heroic legend. They betrothed him to their daughters.

  Stone was back on Mars and planning to ship out for Terra when his mother sent word that she wanted to tell him something. He’d gone to Tank Town with the intention of killing her. When he saw her, the anger went out of him. She was a lonely old woman lacking status or family. He’d only be doing her a favor if he finished her off. So he let it go. And realized that she’d been holding her breath as he held his, and he turned and laughed that deep slow purr she knew from his father. This made her note his tobacco-colored skin, now seamed like well-used leather, and she wept to read in his face all the torments he had endured since she’d sold him. So he had let her die believing a lie, that they enjoyed a reconciliation. What he said or thought didn’t mean much to the Lord she believed in.

  After that, he’d started stealing jewels with a vengeance. Good ones. Big ones. He’d done very well. Hitting the mining trains. Fencing them back through Earth. Generous, like most thieves of his kind, and therefore much liked by the Low-Canal folk who protected him, he’d done well. He was one of their own, accepted as a Martian hero with stories told about him as V-dramas. Only two people had made it out of the Tanks to become famous on the V. Mac Stone was one, and Yily Chen, the little Martian girl he’d played hide-and-go-seek with as a kid, was the other. Yily now operated from Earth, mostly doing jobs the corps didn’t want anyone to associate directly with them. Her likeness had never been published. He remembered her for he
r lithe brown body, her golden eyes. He’d loved her then. He couldn’t really imagine what she looked like now. No doubt she’d become some hard-faced mother superior, pious and judgmental, like most tankers who grew up staying within the law, such as it was. She had put Tank Town behind her. He’d elected to stay. But he’d been sold out once again, this time to the Brothers of the Fiery Mount, whoever they were. They put him back to work on Ganymede with no idea he had family there.

  Then some war broke out on Terra for a while. It couldn’t have come at a better time. It destroyed the old cartels and opened the planet up to real trade. And everyone wanted to rearm, of course.

  By the third month of Stone’s return, his clan, riding a wave of similar revolutions through the colonies, had conquered a significant number of exec towers and looted a museum for a heliograph system they’d been able to copy. Communications. Codes. Bribes. Clever strategy. Guerrilla tactics. By the sixth month, as they prepared for the long tomorrow, they had won the moon and were doing business with four of the richest nations of Terra and New Japan.

  Meanwhile, over at the freshly built Martian Scaling Station, the “black jump” was opening up the larger universe hidden in the folds of space-time through which the wombots traveled. They’d begun to realize that they were part of a denser, mostly invisible cosmos. Until recently, the “cosmic fog” had obscured so much from the astronomers. The discovery brought about new power shifts and unexpected alliances. With the right start, they said, some of those worlds could be reached in days! Now it didn’t matter if Terra was dying. Was that really the prevailing logic?

  Mac knew that he and the human race were at some sort of crossroads, poised at last on their way to the stars. They might find an unbeatable enemy out there. Or beatable enemies. Or they could learn to negotiate. The game Mac knew best wasn’t necessarily the best game. For now, however, he needed capital to play with the big guys, and he was never going to get that kind of money in one piece. Not while he remained an outworld Martian wolfshead. He knew enough about those odds. He knew who the men were who owned the worlds. All of which was to his advantage. His equal share of the Ganymede profits wasn’t large enough, and he didn’t like his public profile getting bigger. He’d made his ex-brother-in-law boss and quietly returned to Mars and his old trade. He—or really the pseudonym he’d chosen—developed a serious reputation. He was credited with any number of unsolved cases. No one knew what to expect from him. Few knew his face or his real name. A fist diamond had paid to have every mug shot and most records wiped. He began to build his pile. The first thing he needed was a good ship of his own. He went into water brokerage. He had a half share in an atmosphere factory. He was earning that ship when he’d been, he assumed, betrayed. He wondered if that had anything to do with the sneaky little Venusian lep who had come to see him with a suspicious offer a week or two before his arrest.