Old Mars Read online

  Plunging down the slope, away I went, driving fast. It all seemed to be coming together, working out. I was going to make it just fine. And then in the head beams, a rock jumped up. I hit the throttle in such a way that the sled rose as high as it could go. For a moment, I thought I was going to clear the rock, but it caught the bottom of the sled and tore it, and the sled went crashing, spinning, the see-through cover breaking around me, throwing me out where the valley sloped off on a hill of wet winter grass. I went sliding, then something bumped up against me.

  It was my father’s body. I grabbed at it, and the two of us were going down that hill, me clinging to him, climbing on him, riding his torso down at rocket speed.

  Down.

  Down.

  Down we went, Dad and I, making really good time.

  Until we hit the outside wall of a house. Hit it hard.

  There’s not much to tell after that. Making it to my feet, I staggered along the side of the house and beat on a door. I was taken inside by an old couple, then the whole town was awake. People were sent up the hill to find the sled, to look for the vaccine, and my father’s body next to the wall. The sled was ruined, the vaccine was found, and my dad was still dead. People came in and looked at me as if I was a rare animal freshly brought into captivity. I don’t remember who was who or what anyone looked like, just that they came and stared and went away and new people took their place.

  After the curious had gone, I sat in a chair in the old couple’s house, and they fed me soup. The doctor came in and fixed my wound as best he could, said it was infected, that I had a concussion, maybe several, and I shouldn’t sleep, that it was best not to lie down.

  So, I didn’t.

  I took some kind of medicine from him, sat in that chair till morning climbed up over the mountain as if it was fatigued and would rather have stayed down in the dark; and then I couldn’t sit anymore. I slid out of the chair and sat on my butt a long while, then lay on the floor and didn’t care if I died because I had no idea if I was dying or getting well; I just plain had no idea about anything at all.

  Someone got me in a bed, because when I awoke that’s where I was. I was bandaged up tight and was wearing a nightgown, the old woman’s I figured. The bed felt good. I didn’t want to get out of it. I was surprised when the old woman told me that I had been there three days.

  I guess what happens in those cheap romances Dad talked about is that they end in a hot moment of glory, with all guns blazing and fists flying, but my romance, if you can truly call it that, ended with a funeral.

  They kept Dad’s body in an open barn, so the cold air would keep him chilled, protect him from growing too ripe. But in time, even that couldn’t hold him, and down he had to go, so they came and got me ready in some clothes that almost fit, and helped me along. The entire town showed up for the burying. Me and Dad were considered heroes for bringing the vaccine. Good words were said about us, and I appreciated them. Pretty much overnight, the whole place was cured because of that vaccine.

  Hours after Dad was buried, I got the goddamn Martian fever and had to have the vaccine myself and stay in bed for another two or three days, having been already weak and made even more poorly by it. It was ironic when you think about it. I had brought the vaccine but had never thought to immunize myself, and neither had Dad, and he was a doctor.

  I won’t lie. I cried a lot. Then I tucked Dad’s memory in the back of my mind in a place where I could get to it when I wanted, crawled out of bed, and got over it.

  That’s what we Kings do.

  CHRIS ROBERSON

  Chris Roberson has appeared in Asimov’s, Interzone, Postscripts, Subterranean, and elsewhere. He’s probably best known for his alternate history Celestial Empire series, which, in addition to a large number of short pieces, consists of the novels The Dragon’s Nine Sons, Iron Jaw and Hummingbird, The Voyage of Night Shining White, and Three Unbroken. His other novels include Here, There & Everywhere; Paragaea: A Planetary Romance; Set the Seas on Fire; Book of Secrets; and End of the Century. Recently, he’s been writing graphic novels, including Elric: The Balance Lost featuring Michael Moorcock’s characters, and two New York Times best-selling Cinderella miniseries spinning off Bill Willingham’s Fables. His most recent book is a new novel, Further: Beyond the Threshold. In addition to his writing, Roberson was one of the publishers of the small press MonkeyBrain Books, which has recently launched a digital comics imprint, Monkeybrain Comics. He lives with his family in Portland, Oregon.

  Here’s a robust and exciting sea story, complete with pirates and swordfights, except that the seas our swashbuckling adventurers are sailing are not the seas of Earth but the endless sand seas of Mars …

  Mariner

  CHRIS ROBERSON

  THE SHIP SPED ALONG AT FULL SAIL, WITH NOTHING BUT RED sands as far as the eye could see in all directions. It had been days since they last caught sight of water.

  Jason Carmody stood in the prow of the Argo, scanning the horizon with his handmade telescope, searching for easy prey. From time to time, the leatherwing that perched on the railing beside him would flap its wings and squawk petulantly, and Jason would quiet it with a strip of dried meat from the pouch that hung at his belt. If he waited too long to satiate his pet’s appetite, the leatherwing would nip at Jason’s hands with its jagged snout, to motivate him.

  “ ’Ware, captain, lest the beast take a digit away in its maw,” a voice from behind Jason said.

  Without turning around, Jason dropped another morsel into his pet’s waiting mouth. “Bandit prefers the dried meat, actually. But I’m sure he’d settle for one of my fingers in a pinch.”

  He turned, smiling at the approach of his first officer.

  “Perhaps if the beast were to eat enough of them,” the first officer said, “you’d finally have the proper number.” He waggled the three digits at the end of one arm in Jason’s face.

  “Where I come from, Tyr,” Jason said, “it’s considered the height of pirate fashion to lose whole body parts. The best pirate captains have a wooden leg, or a hook for a hand, or a patch over a missing eye.”

  The first officer grew serious and tapped the small stone pendant that hung from the breather that encircled his neck, covering his gills. “I am sure that, when they go to their final reward, their missing appendages are there waiting for them. As scripture tells us, the Suffocated God makes all things whole in the seas of the dead.”

  Jason took in the first officer’s weathered flesh, the green of his skin marred everywhere by old wounds and scars that mapped the long years of duels, battles, and beatings Tyr had survived.

  “It’s nice to think so,” Jason said thoughtfully, then grinned. “To be honest, though, I’d settle for a decent burger.”

  Tyr clacked his mandibles, the Martian equivalent of laughter. “With our luck, we’d likely find nothing but the thin gruel our former jailers fed us instead.” Remembering himself, he stilled his mandibles, his forehead flushing yellow with shame, and fondled the stone pendant in repentance. “The Suffocated God forgive my blasphemy.”

  When Jason had first met him, in a Praxian jail half a lifetime before, Tyr had been a priest of the Suffocated God, imprisoned for speaking out against the Hegemony that had risen to power in the southern network of Praxis. Jason had only recently arrived on the red planet when he was captured by the Praxians himself, and he and the priest had shared a cell while they waited for their turn on the executioner’s stone. They had been wary of each other at first, but gallows humor and close quarters bred first familiarity, then friendship. When, weeks later, the two had escaped imprisonment together and fled out onto the sand seas in a makeshift raft, they had become as close as brothers.

  “Tyr, did you ever think that we’d one day have a command of our own, and sail—”

  “Captain!” a shout from above interrupted. “Ship ahead, due east!”

  Jason raised the makeshift telescope to his eye and trained it in the direction the lookout in
dicated. There, just cresting the horizon, was a mercantile galleon, riding fat and low on the sands.

  “Breaktime is over, folks,” Jason called out to the rest of the crew. “We have work to do!”

  Jason Carmody had grown up dreaming about sailing around one world but ended up sailing around another instead.

  In his more sardonic moments, he blamed National Geographic. When Jason was still in grade school, he read a series of articles about a teenager who had set out to sail around the globe by himself, and done so. All through middle school, Jason studied globes and maps of the Earth, devoured books on navigation and seamanship, watched any movie or television show he could find that had anything to do with the oceans, or sailing, or exploration. In high school, while his classmates fretted about their SAT scores and agonized over which colleges to attend, Jason spent every available moment of his free time sailing small one-man boats on nearby lakes and rivers, and spent his holidays out on the Gulf of Mexico, daring himself to sail beyond sight of land and navigate back using only a compass and his wits.

  The week after he graduated from high school, and after tearful farewells with his friends and family, Jason set off from Galveston, Texas, in a twenty-four-foot cutter, intending to continue sailing until he came back to port from the other direction.

  But he’d not even managed to complete the first leg of his journey. He was still in the Caribbean when, under the light of a full moon, he came upon a strange vortex in the dark waters. A swirling whirlpool, it grew from nothing in a matter of moments, too quickly for Jason to change course to avoid it. One instant Jason was sailing along under a starry sky, and the next his boat hit the vortex and everything changed.

  Jason had squinted his eyes, bracing for impact, and when he opened them again, he looked out onto another world.

  He was on Mars, he would later learn. Not the Mars he’d seen in pictures sent back by NASA probes, though. Had he been transported to the distant past of the red planet, or its future? Or perhaps into some analogue of the fourth planet that existed in another dimension? Jason had never learned for certain. He tried to see what the Earth looked like, to give him some sense of context, but the best telescopes he had managed to construct showed him only a blurry image of a blue-green planet in the sky, and his knowledge of constellations did not extend to calculating how those same stars would appear on another world and at another time.

  But those were facts that Jason would only discover later. On that first day, at that first instant, he knew only that he was somewhere he’d never seen before.

  The cutter lay half-buried in fine sands, under a brilliant blue sky, across which two moons sailed in their stately orbits toward each other. Jason had stepped off the deck of his boat onto the sands, in a daze, and immediately sunk up to his waist. The grains of sand were so small, so fine, that the ground behaved more like a liquid than a solid, almost like quicksand. And as he floundered in the sands, barely able to keep afloat, he noticed the menacing silhouette of a bony ridge knifing through the red sands toward him.

  Jason’s first day on his new world would have been his last, his journeys ended in the belly of a sand-shark, had a passing Praxian naval ship not hauled him on board. The crew had never seen a human before and returned to the Praxis canals in the south with Jason as much an object of curiosity as he was their captive. Despite the language barrier that separated them, when they reached port, Jason managed to communicate to his captors that he needed air to breathe. Had he taken much longer to get his message across, he would have drowned, as they began to force him down into their underwater community with them.

  In the days that followed, Jason learned just enough of the common tongue in Praxis to offend the sensibilities of the Praxian Hegemony, who refused to entertain the notion that life might exist anywhere else in the universe but the red planet, despite any and all evidence to the contrary. He was convicted of heresy and confined to a cell, where he would await execution. It was there that Jason met the first Martian whom he would call “friend,” and the course of his life was forever changed.

  But through it all, Jason cursed the editors of National Geographic. Had it not been for them, he might just have gone to college or gotten a job like any other regular person.

  It was near midday by the time the Argo closed the distance to the galleon. A vicious sandstorm had kicked up, limiting visibility severely, but through squinting eyes they were able to make out the colors of the Vendish mercantile fleet flying from the galleon’s masts.

  But while Jason Carmody and his crew had been approaching from the west, another vessel had evidently been approaching from the south. And though the Argo still had ground to cover before they could even parley with the crew of the galleon, much less begin an attack, the other vessel was already alongside her.

  “It’s a Praxian naval corvette,” Jason said, lowering his telescope and squinting against the bright midday glare.

  “Does Praxis war with Vend?” a crewman wondered aloud.

  “If so, this will be the first we hear of it,” Tyr answered.

  “Well, they’re certainly not friends.” Jason pointed to the galleon, whose three masts had already been splintered and split. As if to underscore his point, at that moment a sound like thunder rolled across the sands as the Praxian corvette fired from its forward launchers upon the merchant vessel.

  A sudden shower of rocks rained down upon the galleon, further damaging her masts and hull, and making bloody green messes of several of the crewmen who could be seen on her deck.

  “They look to make short work of her.” Tyr scratched a spot on his shoulder where his skin had grown rough and scaly in the dry air. “Your orders, captain?”

  Under normal circumstances, the Argo would steer clear of any confrontation with a naval vessel if at all possible, either the Praxians in the south or the ships of the Vendish fleet in the north. But these were clearly not normal circumstances.

  Jason scowled. “If we return to Freehaven without a hold full of plunder, we’ll catch hell from Rac and the other captains. We’ve been sailing light for a little too long, I think.” He looked from the naval vessel to the galleon and back again. “And that galleon must be hauling something of value if the Praxians want her so badly.”

  “So the Hegemony turns to piracy, then?” Tyr mused.

  “Or the crew of this corvette has, maybe.” Jason rubbed his lower lip. The naval vessel had launched grappling hooks over the deck of the galleon, and was pulling the two ships closer together, preparing to board. “They don’t appear to have noticed us.”

  “With the wind at our backs,” Tyr answered, “we have the sandstorm blowing before us. And their attention is on their present prey, in any event.”

  A slow smile tugged the corners of Jason’s mouth. “Once the Praxians board the galleon, their corvette won’t have much more than a skeleton crew left on board.”

  “And if we hang back and let the sandstorm shield us from their notice …” Tyr clacked his mandibles together softly, chuckling.

  Jason turned to the rest of the crew who were gathered on the deck of the Argo, awaiting orders. They huddled against the drying sands that buffeted them in the high winds, little puffs of steam erupting here and there from the breathers that kept their gills wet and supplied with oxygenated water.

  “To your stations!” Jason drew the curved sword that hung at his waist, raising it high overhead. “Run out the catapults! Prepare to engage!”

  The first inkling that the sailors aboard the Praxian corvette had of the approaching Argo was the fusillade of rocks and debris that pelted down upon them, fired from the pirates’ catapults. So intent had the Praxian sailors been on taking the galleon, though, that their first instinct was that the mercantile vessel had somehow managed to return fire. It was only when Jason Carmody and the other pirates of the Argo swung onto the corvette’s deck, the captain shouting a war cry and the others hissing menacingly through their mandibles, that the sailors realized t
hat they were under attack by a third party.

  “Pirates!” one of the sailors shouted, fumbling for the long knife sheathed at his waist. “Warn the—”

  Jason silenced the rest of the sailor’s call for alarm, driving the point of his sword through the breather around the sailor’s neck and into the fleshy throat beneath. There had been a time when Jason had balked at the use of lethal force, back when he and Tyr had first been taken on board by a pirate ship and invited to join the crew. Jason had tried to carry out his duties with a minimal use of force, incapacitating if possible, killing and maiming only if absolutely necessary. But that had been half a lifetime ago, and in the years since, he had seen firsthand what the Praxian Hegemony and its faithful servants did to any who defied their laws. Jason had seen too many broken and mutilated victims of Praxian “justice” to spare any mercy now for those Praxians who meted it out.

  Jason yanked his sword free of the sailor’s neck, and before the body had hit the deck, Tyr was at his side, an electrified whip coiled in one hand.

  “The Suffocated God guide your passage,” the first officer muttered over the fallen sailor. Though technically he hadn’t been a priest since before Jason knew him, and there was little chance that the sailor had shared his faith, old habits died hard.

  “On your right!” Jason barked, stepping alongside Tyr. A trio of sailors charged toward them, clubs and knives in hand.

  Jason skewered through the belly the first sailor to reach him, halting his advance, and lashed out with a high kick that knocked loose a second sailor’s breather. As the first dropped to his knees, trying unsuccessfully to keep his black innards from spooling out through the wound, the second gasped in the dry, dusty air for breath, his eyes wide with panic.

  Tyr lashed out with his whip, catching the third sailor around the neck. As the sailor grabbed hold of the whip and yanked back, clearly hoping to pull Tyr off his balance, Tyr simply thumbed a stud on the whip’s handle, and sent a bristling charge of electricity coursing down the length of the whip. The sailor jerked and thrashed, eyes rolling back in his head, and Jason caught a scent that reminded him of seafood grilling over an open flame back home.