Old Mars Page 39

  “Many years ago,” said Rekari, “before you were born, before I became your father’s associate, a child was lost from a Martian town some forty kilometers to the south. Your father had already explored considerably in the area, looking for ruins, and so, knowing the landscape, he volunteered to help in the search. He was, in fact, the only man of Earth who did. And he found the child. But the season was winter, and he was too late. The child had died of the cold. Still, the family was grateful, and the child’s grandfather, who was head of the family, never forgot. For the sake of that child, who had been their only hope of a future, he helped your father over the years, translating inscriptions, telling stories passed down from ancient times, even drawing maps of places that once were but are no more. And some months ago, in the last days of his life, when his family was coming to an end, he called your father to his side and, for the sake of that child, gave him this sunstone so that the family might be carried on, even if by a man of Earth. And it was he who told your father of the place that might have been a city in the old times, because he knew how much your father wanted to find such a city. One more story, of many that your father heard in his years on Mars.

  “We went,” said Rekari. “How could we not go? We always went. But this time, all we found was your father’s death. And now you are the head of your family.”

  Dave let the stone rest in his cupped palm, thinking about how his father must have worn it, about the old Martian whom he had never met, and about that lost child. He was feeling a bit lost himself. Ben Miller and Sons. He wished he could have shaken his father’s hand one last time, embraced him one last time. He didn’t feel like the head of anything. “Well, there’s Bev,” he said.

  “She has joined herself to another family,” said Rekari. “And your father did not mean for her to have the stone. I know you understand that.”

  Dave made the sign for agreement. He slipped the chain over his head, then, because it seemed so strange to be a human and wearing a sunstone, and because Rekari wore it that way, he tucked it inside his shirt where no one would see it. “I assume his grave is near the site,” he said. “I wish to visit both.” Cool at first, the stone warmed quickly against his chest, and he could not help feeling oddly comforted by it, as if some tiny part of his father were with him.

  Rekari made the sign for sorrow one more time. Then he murmured, “When the new boat is finished, I will take you there. It is a long journey.”

  Dave thought about the boat, fresh and sleek-looking, a beautiful pleasure craft, but not for the impatient, and he found that he was very impatient. He calculated how many Earth creds he had left.

  More than enough. “I’ll buy a motor for the boat,” he said finally. “Not so long a journey as with a sail.”

  Rekari gave him a surprised look. “Have you come home rich?”

  “There was money to be earned on Earth, and I spent less than I was paid. I have enough to use for important things.”

  Rekari stood. “Then the decision is made. We will go north, you and I. Buy the motor, and I will ready the boat to receive it.” He went to the door, where he turned back for just a moment to make the sign of temporary farewell before walking out into the midday light.

  Dave slumped in his father’s chair. He felt drained by their conversation and suddenly overwhelmed by the day’s events. He slid the sunstone from beneath his shirt and curled his hand around it. “You should have told me, Dad,” he whispered, and he shut his eyes hard against the tears that he had not allowed Rekari to see. Going on without his father was something he could barely imagine. They were going to be a team. For two Martian years he had thought about how he would change that sign. “Ben Miller and Son, Archaeology. Tour the Ancient Ruins.” The bold truth. He had planned on painting the new one himself. Ben and Dave Miller were going to find one of those lost cities and revolutionize the human view of the ancient Martian civilization. Oh, he had such plans, with his new-minted Ph.D. He shook the sunstone, as if through it he could shake his father. “Why didn’t you tell me?” And then the real question, “Why did you have to die?”

  When the tears finally eased, he wiped his eyes on the shoulder of his shirt. Dragging himself out of the chair, he pushed the front door shut. Rekari had left the lamp, and somehow its greenish glow was comforting, reminding him of his childhood and evenings spent in Rekari’s own home. But he didn’t need its light to find his way around. He left it where it was and staggered into the living quarters and his own bedroom, where he eased himself onto the bed. He turned the thin pillow over and put his head down.

  The next thing he knew, someone was ringing the office doorbell, which was hand-operated by twisting a knob and did not rely on the nonexistent utility power. He blinked the sleep from his eyes and sat up. The windows were even darker than before—night had fallen. He lurched off the bed and stumbled to the office, where the lamp had faded almost to nothing. Pulling the flash out of his pocket, he went to the door and pulled it open.

  It was Jacky, with her own flash held beside her hip. Behind her, a few soft lights in the buildings across the street were the only other illumination. “Still interested in chicken?” she said.

  He blinked a few more times and realized he was very hungry. He nodded.

  “Come on over,” she said. “I’ve got beans and tomatoes, too.”

  It sounded great. “I’ll be there right away.”

  Three other people were gathered for the meal. Dave knew them all—old-timers, friends of his father. He didn’t know if he should tell them his father was dead. He decided he couldn’t face that conversation yet, so instead, they traded some small talk, including some about Earth, then Dave excused himself and paid his bill.

  “Going out to help your dad, are you?” Jacky said as she took his creds.

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Rekari’s boy stepped the mast today. That means a launch. Pretty convenient.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll go for a sail,” said Dave. “Just to see how things have changed in two years.”

  Jacky laughed. “Nothing ever changes here.”

  Dave pointed over his shoulder in the general direction of the canal. “There’s the wheat.”

  “It’s like the cycle of the seasons,” said Jacky. “It gets a little warmer, the water rises, it gets a little colder and it falls back. There won’t be any wheat.”

  Dave shrugged. “Wheat means new settlers, new homes. There’ll be things to see.”

  “And lost cities to hunt.” She winked at him and turned to another customer.

  He was still tired after eating, so he decided to go back to bed, and when he finally woke, just before dawn, he felt better. The shower was unusable due to the lack of power, but there was a bucket in the side shed, and he was able to scoop up water from the canal, dissolve a disinfecting tablet in it, and sluice himself off. He changed to some reasonably fresh clothes from the duffel and tucked the sunstone under his shirt. By then, Jacky’s place was open for breakfast, and her flatbread and peanut butter tasted very good. Dave went out feeling ready for just about anything.

  About a hundred meters down the street was Mike’s Power Shop. He had a few motors in stock, adaptable to boats for people who thought sails were too slow—there were always a few, especially newcomers. Newcomers were more likely to have money, of course, while those who had been on Mars awhile had a tendency either to tap their relatives for help or to offer barter. Mike was more than happy to sell his best for Earth creds and to throw in a full charge. He loaned Dave a cart to take it down to the Martian quarter.

  Burmari was waiting for him. The boat was already on the slide that would carry it into the canal, the sail was mounted but still tightly furled, and the brackets for the motor had been installed.

  “It will tolerate a motor,” said Burmari, “but it will not move as beautifully with one.” Martians did not care for motors; they weren’t using any when the first Earthman arrived, though most archaeologists believed that
their ancient ancestors must have had them. How could they have achieved such a high civilization, they argued, without that kind of power? But Dave always remembered that the ancient civilizations of Earth had used the power of human and animal labor and nothing else. And the pyramids still stood—he had seen them with his own eyes.

  “It won’t move as beautifully,” he agreed, slipping the motor into the brackets and closing the latches. The screw rested just below the surface of the water. “But sometimes it’s all right to sacrifice beauty for speed.”

  Burmari’s polite expression did not betray how little a Martian would believe that.

  Rekari emerged from the house at the far end of the arc. “Did you sleep well, David?”

  “Very well,” said Dave.

  “And when do you wish to begin the journey? As you see, the boat is quite ready.”

  “We have to lay in supplies.”

  “The work of a morning for me,” said Rekari. “Is that possible for you as well?”

  “I’ll find out.”

  “If so, we can leave after the midday meal.”

  It didn’t take Dave long to gather supplies from a local shop—mainly peanut butter, barley flatbread, and dried beans that could be reconstituted with boiled canal water. He stowed it all under the gunwale on one side of the boat while Rekari put his own supplies under the other. They checked the motor’s mapper, and it seemed accurate, showing their destination on a standard grid-style projection of the planet. His father’s excavator, a lightweight miniature bulldozer whose larger cousins Dave had used on Earth and which Rekari had stored for him, fit snugly in the stern beside Dave’s personal bundle of tools. Rekari’s wife and Jacky collaborated on a sendoff lunch of grilled lizard, goat cheese, and potatoes—something for everyone—and just before noon, Dave and Rekari pulled away from the dock to the sound of the softly churning screw. Rekari estimated the trip at two weeks.

  For the first few days, they followed Hiddekel north through an area Dave had visited with his father, where there were human settlements and Martian ones, ruins that Earth tourists had paid well to view and others that were barely visible to an untrained eye. But eventually they shifted into an eastward-tending canal and entered territory unknown to him. By day, Dave and Rekari alternated at the tiller. At night, they dropped anchor, heated their meals in a unit that plugged into the motor, and slept in the boat on inflatable pads. And Dave thought, not for the first time, how much more beautiful the stars were without that big, bright Earth satellite to spoil them; the Martian moons were far more modest, with Phobos a fraction of the size and brightness of Earth’s moon and Deimos just another pinpoint in the great darkness.

  Beginning on the second night, after their meal, with Rekari’s lamp glowing at the boat’s prow, the Martian talked about his travels with Dave’s father, about their discoveries in the Syrtis, Sabaeus, and Tharsis areas. They had not been familiar with the farther north. No ruins had been found there—too much ice during the winter and too much flooding during the melt, Rekari said; the old Martians had probably chosen not to establish any major population centers in such a volatile area.

  “Of course, your father did not believe that. He had perhaps an exaggerated idea of the ancients. As most of you do. They weren’t very different from us. They loved their boats, as we do. The old stories say they had great fleets of boats, with sails patterned like the leaves of the alaria tree.” He leaned back against the mast, the bottom of its furled sail brushing his shoulder. “There aren’t many alarias left. Like so many other things. There were shallow seas in those days, and there would be boats sailing on them on summer afternoons, as far as the eye could see. It was very beautiful.”

  “I wish I could have seen that,” Dave said.

  Rekari looked out into the darkness. “Yes, it must have been a great sight.” He was silent for a moment, then he said, “There were more of them, back then, than we are now. We don’t have very many children now.” He glanced at Dave. “I am more fortunate than most in that.”

  On the sixth day, just after they had shifted into an easterly-tending canal that would link to one that continued north toward their coordinates, Dave noticed that they were being followed. He hadn’t thought so when he saw the boat for the first time, its mast and furled sail faintly visible against the sky. He had assumed it was a Martian trader, though when it kept up with them, he knew it had to be motorized, which was unusual for a Martian boat. Perhaps it was some Marsman’s pleasure craft. Or it could have been two or three different boats that he was conflating. When it made the turn into the new canal, though, he knew—Martian or Marsman—it was following them.

  When he woke at dawn on the eighth day, it was only a dozen meters away. Sometime during the night, its crew had taken the sail down completely to make better speed, and the cloth was rolled up and tied along one gunwale, the mast standing oddly naked in the center of the boat. In the bow, three Martians, strangers to Dave, were lowering the anchor over the side, and he waited till they were finished to signal a greeting. They returned the greeting, but there was something hesitant about their gestures, as if they were not comfortable using their signs with Marsmen. When they shifted their gazes to his left, he realized that Rekari had risen from his sleeping pad and was standing beside him.

  Dave murmured, “Do you know these men?”

  “It is possible,” said Rekari.

  Dave called out to the men in the Martian language. “Is there some way in which we can help you?”

  They seemed startled, and Dave guessed they hadn’t had much contact with Marsmen who spoke their language. One of them gestured the Martian imperative at him, a sign normally used by parents toward young children, mildly discourteous to an adult, and he accompanied it with English words. “You wear a sunstone that does not belong to you.”

  Dave laid a hand over the sunstone that was hidden beneath his shirt. “It belonged to my father,” he said. “He gave it to me.”

  “It belonged to our cousin,” said the Martian. “We are his nearest relations, and it should come to us.”

  Rekari stepped forward. “Venori continued his family through this one’s father. I was witness to it.”

  The men in the boat all signed the negative. “It is not proper that a man of Earth should wear the stone,” said the one who had spoken, and the others made multiple gestures of agreement.

  “His elders judged it proper,” said Rekari.

  The strangers put their heads together and whispered among themselves. They seemed to be having a very quiet argument. Finally, one of them hoisted in the anchor, but instead of turning around and starting south, the three pulled short paddles from the bottom of the boat and sculled closer to Rekari’s craft, so close that their spokesman could leap the gap between the two.

  “It is ours,” he said, and before Dave could do more than take a single step back, the Martian’s long-fingered hand had darted out and caught at the sunstone’s chain where it showed at the collar of his shirt.

  Dave felt the chain bite at his neck, and he grabbed the Martian’s wrist to keep him from pulling harder. “Letann!” he shouted.

  The Martian froze for a moment, and then his fingers opened and the chain dropped free. Wrenching his wrist out of Dave’s grip, he lurched backward, and his right leg slammed the gunwale, knocking him off balance. Before he could stop himself, he was falling over the side and into the canal.

  Letann? As soon as the word left his mouth, Dave knew it was an ancient one, a command subsuming “No” and “Stop” and “How dare you?”—the deepest possible level of indignation. Where had he learned that word? In his childhood? He couldn’t remember. He knew he had never used it before.

  The wet Martian’s companions helped him back into their boat, and the three had another whispered conversation, accompanied by quite a few glances in Dave’s direction. Finally, without any word or gesture, they hoisted in their anchor and started south.

  Dave rubbed his neck where the chai
n had scraped the skin and watched the other boat pull away. When it was well beyond shouting distance, he said, “Do they really have a claim to it?”

  Rekari made the negative sign. “Their family and Venori’s have been separated for more than forty generations. They have their own stone. One of them may inherit it, in time.”

  “But if they’re his closest relatives …”

  “You are his closest relative, David. Of that, I am certain.”

  Dave signaled a child’s acknowledgment of his elder, but Rekari gestured a negative, though a mild one.

  “You are not a child, David. Not with a sunstone on your neck.” His hand hovered over the part of Dave’s shirt that covered the stone. “This is a responsibility. Your father knew that when he told me to give it to you.”

  “I understand,” said Dave. He didn’t have much of his father beyond it, just a shabby house and a few pieces of furniture. Some copies of the papers his father had written on Martian antiquities. And his father’s reputation, of course, intangible as that was. The sunstone represented all of that.

  Dave sat at the tiller, and Rekari handed him a piece of flatbread and a container of peanut butter. Then he pulled up the anchor, and they began moving again, and the other boat quickly dwindled behind them.

  After a time, Dave asked, “Why did they give up?”

  Rekari chewed on his own meal of dried lizard meat. “Because they knew,” he said, and he would not say more.

  On the fourteenth day, Dave stood in the prow of the boat. “We’re almost there.” He looked at the mapper. “Not more than another kilometer.” The banks of the canal had risen steadily over the last couple of days, and now, every few hundred meters, there were rough steps cut into them, unmistakably artificial. Above the banks, low hills were visible, silhouetted against the eastern sky.

  Rekari sat by the mast. He made no attempt to look ahead. Instead, he looked back at the way they had come. “Your father was right. There was a city here once,” he said. “Long ago, when there was less ice all through the year. It was a beautiful city, with graceful spires where flying creatures sometimes made their nests and theaters open to the sky for actors in masks with fanciful fronds sprouting from the living wood. Gorgeous masks. And the alaria trees lined every avenue and perfumed the air and shed their white blossoms on the water like so many miniature boats.” He made that sign of sorrow again. “It has all been gone so long. How do they bear it?”