Old Mars Page 41

  He patted his pockets, found the flash, and snapped it on. They hadn’t taken it. Of course, they couldn’t. He wore a sunstone, and they didn’t dare touch him without his permission. He understood that now. It had taken every iota of courage Venori’s forty-generations-removed cousin had been able to summon simply to touch the chain, and Dave shouting in ancient Martian had been too much for him. Patting his chest, Dave verified that his sunstone was there.

  He played the flash around. He was still in the cavern, though the panel of sunstones had slid back down between the tables. The green lamps had all been covered; he pulled the shields off several to make a softly lit path to the stairway. He ran up the steps, exposing lights as he went. At the top, the elliptical door was closed, and it would not open for him, even when he touched it with the sunstone. Someone had locked it.

  The caretakers, of course. They couldn’t take his stone, but they could lock the stranger into the cavern and let him die there. He wondered what they had said to Rekari to make him cooperate.

  He went back down to the cavern.

  He stalked through the room, taking the shields off all the lights. Then he hitched himself up on one of the tables and looked around. The elliptical door had been buried. It was obviously an ancient entrance to this cavern, no longer used. But the caretakers had to get in and out somehow, if only to replenish the lamps. He made a circuit of the room, but it seemed to be completely sealed. He licked a finger and held it up, searching for a breeze, but there was nothing noticeable.

  All right, he thought. It was time to stop being stupid.

  He curled his hand around the sunstone and spoke in his most formal and respectful Martian. “Venori,” he said, “my elder who chose my father to be his son, tell his son how to leave this place.”

  He thought he could hear a faint whisper, like a broom sweeping a wooden floor. And then his own vision turned dark again, except for one small spot on his right, and when he turned toward it, he felt as if he was looking down a long, narrow tunnel that ended at a circle low on the cavern wall. He slid off the table and walked toward the circle, stumbling once because he couldn’t see the floor beneath his feet, and though the spot remained as bright as Phobos, it shrank before him until, at the wall, it was no larger than the sunstone that hung about his neck. It stood at knee height, and when he bent close to it, he saw nothing special to mark it. He touched it with one finger, and when nothing happened, he pressed the sunstone to it.

  The darkness in his vision cleared away as the wall opened into an ellipse, its stone quarters withdrawing into the walls just as the metal segments of the ellipse at the top of the stairs had done. Beyond was a stairway upward, lit by more green lamps. Dave climbed. At the top was another stone wall, and his vision shrank again, for just a moment, to show him where to press the sunstone to it. When that wall opened, late-afternoon daylight invaded the stairwell.

  Dave stepped out. He found himself in the clump of boulders that stood at the far end of the nettle-free area; two of them had slid aside to allow him to pass, and as he emerged, they closed up behind him.

  Outside, Rekari and the two caretakers sat atop one of the other boulders. Rekari jumped down to embrace Dave. “I knew you could do it.”

  “So it was a test,” said Dave.

  Rekari made the sign of agreement, twice.

  “And what if I had failed?”

  Rekari held him at arm’s length and looked into his face. “If two days had passed and you had not found the way, I would have gone back and brought you out. But I knew you would not fail. I knew when you opened the first door that the elders had accepted you.”

  Dave turned back to the place where the boulders had parted to let him out. There was no way to tell that anything had happened there, but he knew he could open it again at any time. “My father has suggested that I could become famous by revealing the cavern to the people of Earth. On Earth, many such places have been visited by scholars and tourists. Caves at Altamira and Lascaux. Graves in Greece. The pyramids of Egypt. Sacred places. I visited a few of them myself when I was in school there.”

  The caretakers glanced at each other. “And will you do this?” said one of them.

  Dave fingered the sunstone at his neck. He looked at Rekari. “The people who made those places on Earth are long gone. The people who made this place on Mars are still here. What would the elders say if I stole it from them?” He made the sign of the negative. “The elders will help me find the ruins of cities where no one has lived for twenty thousand years. That is the proper work of archaeologists, not helping to despoil what has not been abandoned. There will be enough other places to make my reputation.”

  Rekari gripped Dave’s arm. “Your father will be pleased. I know it.”

  He thought about his father then—he could feel his presence in the stone. They would go out in the field again together after all, just not quite in the way either of them had hoped. And Dave would break the news of his death to Jacky, who would care, and to Beverly, who would perhaps realize that she also cared, because that was what one did for one’s elders. He knew that neither of them would believe that his father lived on in the stone. He didn’t think he would even try to tell them. It was, after all, a private thing between him and his elders.

  “Will you work with me?” he said to Rekari.

  “That would please me greatly,” said Rekari.

  They walked back toward the hole they had dug.

  “We should fill that in,” said Dave. “We don’t need it anymore.”

  They had left the excavator on the third step from the bottom. Now they dragged it up to the surface, and Dave leaned against it for a moment, looking down the stairway. “You could have shown him lost cities, couldn’t you?” he said. “You and your elders know where they are. Why didn’t you?”

  “That was his desire,” said Rekari. “Not mine.”

  “But it didn’t matter in the long run. I’m going to do what he would have done.”

  “It matters a great deal,” said Rekari, “because as much as I liked and respected your father, he was not a Martian. And you are.”

  “Am I?” said Dave. But he didn’t need Rekari to answer that. He already knew, and so did all of the elders in his sunstone.

  “Perhaps we can paint a new sign,” said Rekari. “For the new proprietor of the Miller family business.”

  Yes, thought Dave. We’ll do that.

  Dave Miller, Archaeology. Tour the Ancient Ruins.

  Home.

  JOE R. LANSDALE

  Prolific Texas writer Joe R. Lansdale has won the Edgar Award, the British Fantasy Award, the American Horror Award, the American Mystery Award, the International Crime Writer’s Award, and nine Bram Stoker Awards. Although perhaps best known for horror/thrillers such as The Nightrunners, Bubba Ho-Tep, The Bottoms, The God of the Razor, and The Drive-In, he also writes the popular Hap Collins and Leonard Pine mystery series—Savage Season, Mucho Mojo, The Two-Bear Mambo, Bad Chili, Rumble Tumble, Captains Outrageous—as well as Western novels such as The Magic Wagon, and totally unclassifiable cross-genre novels such as Zeppelins West, The Drive-In, and The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels. His other novels include Dead in the West, The Big Blow, Sunset and Sawdust, Acts of Love, Freezer Burn, Waltz of Shadows, and Leather Maiden. He has also contributed novels to series such as Batman and Tarzan. His many short stories have been collected in By Bizarre Hands; Sanctified and Chicken Fried; The Best of Joe R. Lansdale; The Shadows Kith and Kin; The Long Ones; Stories by Mama Lansdale’s Youngest Boy; Bestsellers Guaranteed; On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with the Dead Folks; Electric Gumbo; Writer of the Purple Rage; Fist Full of Stories; Bumper Crop; The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent; Selected Stories by Joe R. Lansdale; For a Few Stories More; Mad Dog Summer: And Other Stories; The King and Other Stories; Deadman’s Road; High Cotton: The Collected Stories of Joe R. Lansdale; and an omnibus, Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal. As editor, he has produc
ed the anthologies The Best of the West, Retro Pulp Tales, Son of Retro Pulp Tales (with Keith Lansdale), Razored Saddles (with Pat LoBrutto), Dark at Heart: All New Tales of Dark Suspense (with wife Karen Lansdale), The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners, and the Robert E. Howard tribute anthology, Cross Plains Universe (with Scott A. Cupp). An anthology in tribute to Lansdale’s work is Lords of the Razor. His most recent books are two new Hap and Leonard novels, Vanilla Ride and Devil Red, as well as the short novels Hyenas and Dead Aim, the novels Edge of Dark Water and The Thicket, two new anthologies—The Urban Fantasy Anthology (edited with Peter S. Beagle), and Crucified Dreams—and three new collections, Shadows West (with John L. Lansdale), Trapped in the Sunday Matinee, and Bleeding Shadows. He lives with his family in Nacogdoches, Texas.

  Here he tells the suspenseful story of a young girl who sets off on a rescue mission with many lives at stake, realizing quite well that it’s dangerous—but perhaps not realizing quite how dangerous it’s going to become.

  King of the Cheap Romance

  JOE R. LANSDALE

  (In memory of Ardath Mayhar)

  I GLANCED AT THE BODY AND TREMBLED. I LOOKED AT THE blue ice directly in front of me, and beyond that at the vast polar regions of Mars, stretched out flat, and way beyond that was a mountain rise. Past that rise was where I needed to go. I felt cold and miserable and sad, and for one long moment I wanted to quit. Then I told myself, that’s not what Dad would have wanted. That’s not what he would have wanted his daughter to do.

  We Kings, we weren’t quitters. It had been drummed into my head since birth. I looked down at Dad’s corpse, all that was left of my family, wrapped in silver bedding, lying on the sled, and it was as if I could hear him now. “Angela, put your ears back and your nose forward, and keep going. That’s how we do. Just like an old mule. That’s how we Kings are. We keep on going when everyone else has already quit.”

  That made me feel strong for a moment or two, then I was thinking back on how I had ended up where I was, and that took the zip out of me again. I couldn’t get hold of being here on the ice, after only moments before being high in the air. It felt as if it was all some kind of dream, some astral visitation of someone else’s life who looked like me and had a dead dad. But the real me was somewhere else, and at any moment I’d snap awake and find myself back in the silver airship, cruising high above the Martian ice.

  I didn’t, though.

  It was really me. Angela King. Out on the ice, breathing out air puffy and white as clouds, the body of my father lying on a sled at my feet.

  I took a deep breath of chilly air and determined then that I had to get over my feelings of defeat. I was a King. I couldn’t quit. Something might quit me, but I wouldn’t quit. Not until I was as dead as Dad.

  What happened was this.

  The fever hit the Far Side, as we called the city long beyond the mountains. The Martian fever is a nasty beast. It comes on sudden and hot and burns the mind right out of a person, turns them red, mounds up pus-filled lesions quick-time, makes a person quiver, scream and rave, go completely off their nut. No one really knew how it gets started, but it happened now and then, comes out of nowhere like rain from a clear, sunny sky. It was thought to have something to do with certain kinds of Martian water, melted snow that flowed down out of the mountains and joined up in streams and creeks that got into the water supply. Mars was mostly hot, dry desert, but up around the ice caps it was rich in water, cold and savage.

  Though the fever was brutal, there was a cure, and it was mighty effective, if not readily available. That’s what my father and I were trying to do, make it available. It was considered a routine trip, though any trip on Mars can blow out and go bad in quick-time. Just when you thought things were good and the land was tamed, Mars would throw a trick at you.

  The ship we had was quick and light. It held us and a couple of sleds, which we didn’t think we’d need, an emergency stash of supplies, and a small, padded leather bag of vaccine. That’s all it took, a small bag containing a few vials. A bit of it went a long way. In fact, Dad said a drop would fix the fever and keep you from having it again, which meant it didn’t take much at all to cure an entire Martian city, and on Mars a city was about two to three thousand. Dad said on Earth you’d call that kind of gathering a town, maybe even a community. But on Mars it was a city. I didn’t remember Earth too well, and had yet to go back, the return trip being so expensive and me not really wanting to go. I liked it on the Red Planet, out in the area where it wasn’t red at all, but blue and white with freezing ice.

  Anyway, Dad said a drop of vaccine would do, and he ought to know. He was a doctor before he died out there on the ice.

  Dad had not wanted me to come. He always said, “On Mars, things can and do go wrong, regular as clockwork, and irregularly too.”

  But since my mom was dead and I would have had to stay with people I didn’t know well, I whined my way into the glider, and up we went, powered by sunlight, carried by whining turbines, darting fast through the thin-aired Martian sky. When we started out, both moons were up and shiny as silver. Dad said he could never quite get used to two moons. I didn’t remember much about Earth, but I did remember it had one moon in the sky. That seemed pretty deficient after living on Mars with one moon fast and one moon slow, both bright in the sky and looking not so far, as if you could stand on a ladder and touch them.

  We sailed along under the moonlight. The night air sucked into the turbines and fed them and charged them along with solar and whatever those pellets were that Dad put in the sliding tray that slid in and out of the instrument panel.

  I sat in the copilot chair, having learned a thing or two about navigation, and we cruised through the last of the dying night; and then the light rose up and the world below went from shiny black to blue-and-white ice. What I think about is how if we’d have left a few seconds earlier, or a few seconds later, none of it might have happened. But there we were with first light on the windshield, then the shield turned dark, and there was a whomp, a sound like some kind of machine tearing metal. It wasn’t metal though, It wasn’t the ship. It was the scream of the Martian Bat. The damn things are huge, and, unlike Earth bats, which Dad says travel by night, Martian Bats travel day and night but are blind, their eyes huge and white as snow. They are guided by some kind of in-built radar. That radar helps them find prey, and I guess the bat thought we were one of the great blue birds that fly over the ice, for it came at us and let out with its horrid scream that sounded like metal ripping. The craft twisted and swirled, but held to the sky all right, at least until the Bat bit us and clawed us and we started to come apart.

  The craft killed the bat due to the collision of its wings or part of the beast’s being sucked into a turbine. Whatever did it, we both went down. I remember seeing out the windshield a glimpse of bat’s wings, a near subliminal glimpse of those white eyes and that toothy mouth. The front end of the ship bent up, and down we went. Had the bat not had hold of us, had what was left of its massive wings not held and glided, we would have dropped faster than a stone and with the sudden impact of ripe fruit being slammed on rocks.

  Still, when we hit, I was knocked unconscious.

  Coming to, I discovered I was lying on the ice. I had on my insulated suit. Dad had insisted I wear it, even in the craft, and I was glad then I had. I didn’t have the hood pulled up, though, and when I sat up on the ice, stiff and sore, I pulled it over my head and lifted up the goggles and the chin cover that had been lying on my chest, suspended there by a dangling strap.

  I tried to get up, but it was like I was wrestling someone invisible. I just couldn’t do it, at least not at first. It was as if whatever kept me balanced had been knocked off its gyro. I finally got my feet under me, which took me so long I thought maybe a Martian year had passed. When I did get to my feet, I looked around for Dad but couldn’t find him. Over the hill, I saw the Martian buzzards gathering, their red-tipped wings catching the rays of the sun. I stumble
d over a little mound of snow, and there was the ship. Or what was left of it. It was so wadded up with the bat, which was about the same size, that it looked as if a great leathery black animal had mated with a silver bird and fallen to earth in blind passion.

  Moving that way, I soon saw Dad, lying out on the ice. When I trudged to where he lay, I saw the snow around him had blossomed red and frozen, like a strawberry ice drink. I got down on my knees and tried to help him. He put out a hand.

  “Don’t touch me,” he said. “It hurts too much.”

  “Oh, Dad,” I said.

  “There’s nothing for it,” he said. “Not a thing. I’m bleeding out.”

  “I know how to sew you up,” I said. “You taught me.”

  He shook his head. “Won’t do any good. I’m all torn up inside. I can feel how stuff has moved around, and I’m not getting any stronger here. Prop me up.”

  There was a seat cushion, and I got that. I took it back to Dad, gently lifted him up, and rested his head on it.

  He said, “When the sun gets to the middle there, I won’t be with you.”

  “Don’t say that,” I said.

  “I’m not trying to scare you,” he said. “I’m telling you how things are, and I’m about to tell you how things have to be, before I’m too weak to do it. I’m going to die, and you should leave me here and take the medicine, if it survived, if you can find it, and you got to take one of the sleds and go across the ice, into the mountains, and make your way over to Far Side.”

  “That’s miles and miles,” I said.

  “It is, but you can do it. I have faith. Those people have to have the cure.”

  “What about you?” I said.

  “I told you how that’s going to turn out. I love you. I did my best. You have to do the same.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “He didn’t have anything to do with it. Alive or dead, he never shows up. You got to do it on your own, and the thing that’s got to carry you is knowing that you’re a King. Think of it like an adventure, like those cheap romance novels I used to read to you.”