Old Mars Read online

  Once or twice, Stone looked back toward the bank, now invisible to him. Was all their effort worthless? Wouldn’t it be better to accept the impossibility of their mission? He began to think Krane was mad. If there was a threat, then inevitably they would die. Death was the future of all people, all planets, all universes. Their struggle was symbolic of the futility of living creatures who fought against their own inevitable extinction. What were a few more years of existence compared to the longevity of a cosmos? In those terms, the whole history of their species lasted for less than a fraction of a second. And then, sheltering beside him under the protection of the energy equalizer, she looked up for a second, and, obscurely, he understood that the effort always would be worth it. Always had been worth it.

  They emerged eventually from the overhang. They saw the gaudy lime-green box glittering on the far side of a rocky cleft. Stone could see no obvious way down to it. For a moment, it seemed that they had come this far only to fail. Then Yily nodded and signaled that if he held on to the spidercord, she might be able to swing down and snag the box. But it would mean switching over to her own untested equalizers. Whether her suit had enough capacity was uncertain. She shrugged and began tying herself on.

  The falls coughed and grumbled, always treacherous.

  Stone grew concerned that there wouldn’t be enough spiderwire. He had trouble gauging the distance properly. He braced himself. He would have to switch off as soon as he could after she switched on, conserving power and maintaining stability for split seconds. He raised his hand and gave the signal. They knew a sickening few moments while the switch took place, then she was dropping out of sight before coming back into view, a far smaller figure than he had expected.

  The blue and red of her suit was just visible, flashing on and off as she fell through a sickening weight of water. Her relative gravity, thanks to the converter, gave her extra resistance, and she stretched out her arms and clasped the n-bomb to her, swinging free over the rosy abyss. She cried out her triumph in a wild yell, her body curving back into the trajectory. He thumped the control and brought her up to where he perched, hanging on with everything but his nails and teeth. He was laughing like a fool as she swung to stand beside him, counting out with elated blows on his arm the measure to activate his helmet’s converter so both were again protected. He could feel her elation as he hugged her tight.

  They had the star bomb!

  Now, somehow, they had to follow the steps back to the sheltering rock. Inch by inch, they crossed the exposed falls, feet feeling for holds as the minutes slipped by, and they dared not waste a moment trying to see how much time they had before the bomb did what it had been designed to do. The climb back to the walkway seemed to take longer than the whole rest of the mission. Increasingly, the strain on the equalizer became greater. Little bubbles of energy flinched and disappeared into the wavering field.

  Stone was almost convinced that they had run out of time and strength. He gasped his surprise when, suddenly, his boots stood on the smooth granite and the bomb was on the ground before them. Manhandling it to the relative quiet of the stone arches, they were at last able to turn off the equalizers. The suit crackled and zipped, revealing flaws that moments later would have meant sudden death.

  Stone triumphantly announced their success to Krane over the radio. The Earthman seemed less than overjoyed.

  “You have twenty-seven minutes left,” he said. “Do you think you can do it, Stone?”

  Yily grinned and began to whistle.

  “What’s that?” Krane asked.

  “It’s not doing anything,” she said. “ ‘Yankee Doodle,’ right?”

  But, even when the tune had been relayed back to them by Krane, only four of the eleven locks protecting the n-bomb snapped open. They needed seven in sequence. “The Yellow Rose of Texas” snapped open two more. “Moonlight on the Wabash” made two snap back. She tried different keys and speeds, new sequences. Two more. One more. But after that it was no good. She was embarrassed. “My grandma came to Mars in the Revival Follies. We used to sing them all before the dope took her.”

  “This is getting dangerous,” Krane told them. “Something has jammed. Stop!” Oblivious of his growing concern, they kept trying and kept failing as the minutes and the seconds died. “You’ve got to stop!” Krane told them. “Unless every lock is undone in order, the bomb can’t be neutralized. It took us years to work out those codes. We encrypted everything in easily remembered traditional tunes. We—we haven’t time to work out the codes again! If anything, we’ve complicated the situation. We have eight minutes left.”

  Mac hovered over the bomb, trying different force-tools on the remaining locks. “This is hopeless. We could explode the thing at any moment.” He watched the most recently tried force-tool fade from his glove.

  “I guess neither of us is musical enough. Time for plan B.” She reached with both hands into her pack and pulled out a large square metal container. Quickly, she dragged off the box’s covering, revealing a compacted canister covered with government warnings, which, as she stroked it with her gloved fingers, began to expand, flopping and twitching like a living thing until it lay in her lap like a long khaki-colored barracuda. “I’d better set this now.”

  Stone recognized the unactivated B-9 wombot. He guessed her plan, but he said, “What are you going to do with that?” It was his idea too.

  But she wouldn’t stop. “I’m a lot lighter than you. Give me your big scarf,” she said. “Hurry! And some of those tools might prove useful here. I’ll tell you what to do. We need that spiderwire. Can you disconnect it from your suit?”

  “I can try.”

  So he dragged out his long white scarf. She began to wind the thing around her waist. No clocks or numbers on the bomb told them how much time they had left. They had only their own chronometers. “Seven minutes.”

  He was still planning to do the thing himself. “Now,” he said, “get those magnets situated. The scarf will be useful. It won’t bear any serious strain, but it’ll keep the bomb in position while we spiderwire it to the wombot. Leave those ends free. Screw drill might help.”

  The thing grew firm in her hands as she helped give the cables a few more turns. “OK,” he said. “More magnetic clamps. As many as we have between us.” The bomb was settled on the ground, the wombot beside it. At his count, they seized the bomb, rolled it, and bound it with the wire while they fixed the eight magnetic manacles she normally used for heavy-gravity truants. They held the wombot squarely on the bomb. Six minutes. He took a deep breath.

  Then, while he was still thinking about it, she had straddled the whole contraption, binding herself to it with the scarf and the remaining spiderwire, leaving her limbs free. There wasn’t time to argue. Stone grew more and more unhappy. He realized that he couldn’t take over. Too late to start arguing.

  Soon she had the whole contraption firmly beneath her, the wombot now fighting like a fish to be free. He gripped it as hard as he could with his numbed hands. Then she began powering up her suit.

  He couldn’t find any more words. He felt sick. He had an unusual set to his jaw as he watched her first switch her own equalizer to run, then eased the bomb but not the wombot outside her suit’s circle of power. She tapped in codes on her arm. Wouldn’t she need a helmet? There was a faint flash and she winced. Not a suicide mission! Don’t say it was that! The sound of the falls still drowned any noise they made without using the radio. The powerful bionic drone jumped in her hands and lifted over Stone’s head with Yily still clinging to it. It bucked and pirouetted and bucked again. He yelled for her to let go, that he would catch her.

  “I have to test it first,” she said. “There isn’t much time.”

  “Maybe we should say good-bye.” Suddenly calm, though scarcely reconciled, he stepped back.

  “Maybe.” And then she released the wombot.

  It leapt into the air, looped once, with her hanging on for dear life, her e-suit flickering and flashing.
The wire secured the bomb. She was held only by a few magnetic clamps, spiderwire, and her own strength. But Stone could have sworn he saw her grinning.

  The contraption began to move in a straight line. Out over the Nokedu Falls—out through the distant spray, gold and silver in the pink light—and, to Stone’s utter horror, down!

  Down flew Yily Chen. Down she flew! Out of sight as she was dragged by the wombot into that vast rosy chasm and those wild, dancing, deadly waters. Stone had never known so much fear before. Never so much fear than when he saw her vanish. “Oh, God!” He tried to get his radio back on, but there was no reception. “Oh, Yily!” He felt ill. He scanned the gold-flecked air with his enhanced eyes. Nothing.

  The Nokedu Falls shouted its beautiful, monstrous laughter.

  Then, triumphantly, the wombot leapt like a salmon up the falls, into the air above the canal, and seemed to hover for a moment with Yily flying behind it, going through some weird contortions, maybe to gain altitude. Up she came, then back, hurtling almost directly toward him. He dove clear of the thing as it seemed to home in on him. Was he the nearest heat? Had he really been the target all along? Then here she came, just in time, jumping clear of the flying bomb, down onto the walkway as the wombot performed a perfect turn and flew like a radium ray straight and true back along the way they had first come—then vanished from normal space-time. Now it would push through the folds of unseen space, seeking maximum heat, blinking up to the surface through the rock until it hit thin air, still skewering through the folds of space-time, on its way to Sol.

  He rolled over as she switched off her suit and fell, laughing, into his arms.

  Then Stone did what unconsciously he had wanted to do since he’d first chased the tousled, brown-skinned Martian girl playing hide-and-go-seek in and out of the deep shadows of the tanks. He took her in his arms, tossed away his helmet, and kissed her full on her blood-red lips. She kissed him back with a passion, biting his tongue and grinning as he responded.

  Up in RamRam City, a scummer lying on his back, high on jojo juice, saw a quick blossom of brightness appear in Sol’s NW quadrant, a crimson flower against dull orange, and had no notion how lucky he was to be alive or what that brief moment had earned.

  Soon Stone and Yily followed the long walkway of polished black granite beside the wide canal and up the great staircase to the chamber where he had first met Krane. The Earthman was gone, but on a hook extending from the deactivated noman’s right arm was a soft grey ratskin bag, and when Stone poured the contents into her open palm Yily gasped.

  Stone lit the last three inches of his jane, drew deep, smiled, contentedly watching her as she laid them out, side by side on the bag: seven perfect flame sapphires, pulsing with constantly shifting shades of indigo. Each was a different world. Each was utterly fascinating, ready to reflect and amplify your secret dreams. Should you wish, you could live in one forever.

  “Yeah,” said Stone happily. “Quite a sight.”

  EPILOG

  THEY KNEW WHAT WOULD HAPPEN, OF COURSE, WHEN THE mining companies and the archaeologists discovered a plentiful supply of water. That water would still be contaminated by centuries of leakage from an alien superbomb and would have to be filtered, probably not very thoroughly. That wouldn’t be much of a problem, especially with expendable prison labor working down there. Stone guessed what the exploiters would do with the great calm waterway perpetually pouring into a bottomless canyon to be captured and recycled, by some mysterious process, back into the canal again. Power.

  “It’ll all go,” said Yily Chen. “It’ll be sensationalized and sanitized. People will run boat tours to the safe parts. There’ll be elevators directly down to the falls. Tourist money will bring a demand for comfortable fiction. Guides will play up invented legends and histories. Art critics will explain the grandeur of her design, the beauty of her reliefs, the ingenuity of her architects and engineers. She’ll give birth to a thousand academic theories. Crazy theories. Cults. Religions. And that won’t be the worst of it when people like Delph start tearing out the metals and the precious jewels …”

  “No,” he said. “It doesn’t have to happen. We can keep it to ourselves. Just for a while.”

  It was what Yily wanted too. She smiled that sweet, sardonic Martian smile. “I guess I was planning to retire,” she said.

  So they bought Mars. She only cost them two indigo flame sapphires, sold to a consortium of Terran plutocrats. For the pair, Stone and Chen got the mining companies, a couple of ships, RamRam City and other settlements, the various rights of exploration and exploitation, and the private prisons Stone had known so well and subsequently liberated so promptly.

  Later, it might be possible to create on Mars a paradise of justice and reason, a golden age to last a thousand years where their Martian descendants could grow up and flourish. But meanwhile, for a few good months, maybe more, they had the lost canal to themselves.

  PHYLLIS EISENSTEIN

  Phyllis Eisenstein’s short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Amazing, and elsewhere. She’s probably best-known for her series of fantasy stories about the adventures of Alaric the Minstrel, born with the strange ability to teleport, which were later melded into two novels, Born to Exile and In the Red Lord’s Reach. Her other books include the two novels in the Book of Elementals series, Sorcerer’s Son and The Crystal Palace, as well as stand-alone novels Shadow of Earth and In the Hands of Glory. Some of her short fiction, including stories written with husband Alex Eisenstein, has been collected in Nightlives: Nine Stories of the Dark Fantastic. Holding a degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago, for twenty years she was a member of the faculty of Columbia College, where she taught creative writing, also editing two volumes of Spec-Lit, a softcover anthology showcasing SF by her students. She now works as a copy editor in a major ad agency, and still lives, with her husband, in her birthplace, Chicago.

  Here she spins a tale that denies the truth of the old saying that you can’t go home again. You can go home again, but you may have to look for it in the strangest places, and go a very long way to reach it.

  The Sunstone

  PHYLLIS EISENSTEIN

  HE HAD EXPECTED HIS FATHER TO MEET HIM AT THE MERIDIani spaceport. But when he disembarked after the monthlong flight from Earth, duffel bag over his shoulder, the only people waiting for the passengers were strangers. After two Martian years away, with a brand-new Ph.D. in archaeology under his belt, Dave Miller had thought that the man who had scrimped and saved to ensure that his son got the best graduate-school education in the solar system would be there to welcome him home.

  The other passengers, whom he had gotten to know on the journey, collected their luggage and their local contacts—family, friends, hosts—and dispersed. Some were Marsmen like him, some were new settlers, still filled with enthusiasm for the open land that had been so effectively advertised to them, and a few were wealthy tourists. Dave had made sure the latter had his contact information: “Tour the ruins of the lost Martian civilization with the men who discovered them,” said his card. It was not quite a lie in his own case because, as a teenager, he had found a cluster of foundations and a few lengths of sand-scoured wall no higher than his knee near one of the lesser canals that splayed out from Niliacus Lacus, and Rekari, his father’s Martian business partner, had pronounced them seven or eight thousand Martian years abandoned. His father, the famous Dr. Benjamin Miller, to whom the card really referred, had decided they were not worth adding to the tourist round. But that hadn’t made them any less a discovery.

  When there seemed no point in waiting any longer, Dave went into the terminal and found a phone. He’d bought a personal communicator back on Earth, but on Mars, where dust storms so often interfered with wireless communications, landlines were more reliable. The terminal clerk told him the local phone would probably work—it had yesterday—but when he tried his father’s number, there was no answer, not even with a
recording.

  He chewed on his lip for a few seconds, then gave in and tapped his sister’s number. He hoped her husband didn’t answer; his sister had always been hard enough to deal with.

  The child’s voice on the other end did not know who Uncle Dave was, but was finally persuaded to pass the call to his or her mother.

  “David.” It wasn’t a friendly voice, but it was his sister’s. In two years, she had not answered one of his letters.

  “Yes, I’m back,” he said. “How have you been? How’s the family?” He didn’t even know how many kids she had now.

  “Don’t pretend you care, David,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “It’s been two years, Bev. That’s not much of a welcome.”

  He could hear the snort at her end. “I honestly didn’t think you’d come back. Was Earth that big a disappointment?”

  “Earth was fine,” he said, “but staying there was never the plan.”

  “Oh yes,” said his sister. “You were always going to come back here and help Dad dig more things up. Maybe find one of those lost cities he was always looking for. He hasn’t come home in months, you know.”

  “Months?” said Dave. “How many months?” His father had always spent long stretches of time in the field, but … months?

  “I don’t know. Four? Five? It’s not like I see him very often when he’s not out there.”

  “Have you talked to Rekari?”

  There was a pause at her end. “I never understood what Dad saw in that piece of Martian scum.”

  “But have you …?”

  “No, I haven’t talked to him. And he hasn’t talked to me, either.”

  “Beverly—”

  “Dad always liked him better than his own family. And you did, too. Don’t try to tell me anything different.”

  Dave didn’t answer that. Rekari had always been a good companion for a growing boy. “Did he go out with Dad?”