Old Mars Read online

  It was a tall and narrow cave mouth, where the ground had parted a million years ago. But such was the lay of the land that the crevice was almost invisible unless viewed from a precise angle. The four men knew that angle, knew the chamber that widened behind the slit of the opening. In there, the birds would be sleeping, huddled together on the ground like a pool of banked embers, rustling and breathing together.

  The four hunters crept to the mouth of the cleft, wire nets ready. Still in single file, they scraped backs and chests against the rough rock—it had been easier when they were boys—and eased into the cavern. Silently, breath abated, they ranged themselves around the sleeping quarry. Then, at a signal from the eldest, they cast their nets in a prearranged sequence.

  The birds awoke as the first net fell, and rose up as one, swiftly bearing the wire mesh aloft. But the second net fell, its edges weighted, and the birds’ upward motion slowed. Then came the third net, and the fourth. Weighed down, the overlapping meshes too dense to escape through, the creatures settled back to the floor with a mournful sound.

  Elated, the hunters carefully brought the borders of the nets together, made a bundle whose gathered mouth they briskly tied with metal cords.

  The birds, pressed into a sphere, flowed rustling over one another, like a boiling sun of gold and red. The men used their weapons to widen the crevice, then gently bore the captive birds out into the sunlight. The creatures voiced their displeasure, but the hunters struck up the traditional hymn of consolation with its promises of respect and good treatment.

  The birds quieted, whether soothed by the blandishments or lulled by the sonorous rhythm of the song. Where the white road left the hills and ran down to the town, the men stopped to order their garments and brush off any dust or detritus. Then they hoisted the netted birds over their heads like a collective halo, and, at a measured pace, made their triumphant return.

  Before they were halfway to the spiral-pillared gate, the people were coming out to sing them home.

  The song was still echoing in Mather’s mind when he came back to the here and now. He was not surprised to find himself outside the gate at the landward end of town. The shrunken sun was graying the Martian sky from somewhere behind the rumpled silhouette of the hills, making the road of crushed stone to shine ghostly at his feet.

  This time, he did not even think to write any notes. He turned and walked slowly—he was unaccountably tired—through the dead town, back to the harbor plaza. Although he had not eaten or drunk in quite some time, he passed by the sandwiches and water can in the jeep without noticing them.

  “He’s mostly just dehydrated,” said the roughneck who’d had first-aid training. “The air’s so dry here, if you forget to keep drinking, you can start to get woozy pretty fast.”

  “Pour another cup into him,” said Bowman, “then put him in the shade.”

  They’d found Mather facedown on the tiles of the harbor plaza when the truck carrying the mining machine arrived in the late afternoon of the second day. Now, as Bowman leafed through the notebook he’d found not far from the collapsed man, he knew why Mather hadn’t been answering his radio calls since the day before.

  Most of it was illegible scribbles, but a few words stood out—communal, ritual, bonding—enough to confirm the crew chief’s long-held suspicion that Mather was another one of those longhaired intellectuals who got all Mars-struck and came out here thinking they’d find … What? Bowman had no idea what kind of foolishness filled a mind like Mather’s. And he didn’t want to.

  He went to the top of the harbor steps and threw the notebook down toward where the mechanical behemoth’s front tracks were already finding purchase on the bottom riser. Black smoke belched from the machine’s exhaust as the operator goosed the throttle, and it began to climb, the bone steps cracking and powdering beneath grinding metal. The right-side track reached Mather’s book and shredded it.

  Bowman watched to make sure the miner was coming on in the way it was designed to. When it reached the top, and its front end crashed down onto the tiles, shattering them, he ordered the operator out and climbed into the control compartment. The machine’s screen lit up, green on black, showing a gridwork based on bright points: the transponders Mather had placed, thankfully before he went outbacky-wacky, as Bowman had once heard an Australian desert prospector describe it.

  The radio signals were all five-by-five. Bowman set the controls, stepped down from the cab, and watched as the great machine oriented itself and set to work. It labored over to the building nearest the harbor steps, deployed its heavy chain-link thrashers, and began to demolish the front wall in a spray of bone dust and chips.

  “Looks good,” the crew chief said, shouting to his men over the noise of the automated miner. “Let’s get the jeep down here. I want to get back to base before it’s too dark. First drink’s on me.”

  When they were all loaded and ready to go, he sent a man to fetch Fred Mather. But Mather was gone.

  The silvery-paged books were not really books, Mather now knew. The raised hieroglyphic squiggles weren’t meant for the Martian eye but for Martian fingers. You ran the pads of the fingertips over the sinuous forms and out came, not text, but music. The songs formed in your head and played themselves out as you stroked the pages: all kinds of songs—from dancing tunes to soft ballads, from hymns to anthems, but each one tinged with a melancholic sweetness that he had come to associate with Martianness.

  In his lucid moments, he contemplated the balance and the contrast that were inherent in the meeting of Martians and Earthmen: One race was fading into its purple twilight just as the other was setting out to see what the bright day would bring.

  Over the music, he could hear Bowman and some other men calling his name. He was disappointed. He’d thought that when they set off back to camp, they’d report him as missing and forget about him. People did wander off on Mars, never to be seen again. And he had not made any friends among the miners. They’d all seen him for the ugly duckling he was.

  But, as he sat in the birds’ cave and thought about it, he recognized that they’d have had to come back to restart the machine. The morning after they’d left, he’d climbed aboard and thrown the big main switch that stopped it. The machine paused in its digestion of a house that stood halfway between the harbor and the gate. The land leviathan had been making substantial progress. Earthmen knew how to build reliable machinery.

  But there were books to be gathered, and a few other objects that the Martians had left behind: masks, some children’s toys, items of clothing, a cup that might have been carved from alabaster. He’d wanted to bring them to the cave. But when he’d gathered all that he could find and returned to restart the miner, he found that he did not know how to set its controls to follow the transponder grid. So he had left it with its engine idling in neutral, knowing that Red Bowman would come out in the jeep to get it running again.

  He had hoped that they’d think the miner had malfunctioned on its own, but the calling voices from outside the cave told him that the crew chief was not given to innocent explanations. Mather crept to the narrow mouth, which he’d made even harder to see by dragging prickle bushes into the cleft. Through the thin branches, he could see Bowman and the others. They were standing on a ridgeline, cupping their callused hands around their mouths to call his name. They had binoculars. They also had guns.

  The men looked for him all day, but Mather remembered the Martian hunting skills he’d acquired from the memory-visions—that’s what he had taken to calling the phenomena—and he had no trouble avoiding capture. In the evening, the searchers climbed into the jeep and drove off across the empty sea. From the hills, he watched their dust plume hang in the air almost motionless, so slowly did the fine particles sift down in the lesser gravity and the windless Martian air.

  When full darkness fell, he went down to the town. He had discovered that the lines incised into the walls of the houses performed a similar function to those graven into the sides of
the cube. But, whereas the latter were memory-visions of public events, the ones in the houses were of private occasions. They were the Martians’ family photo albums.

  At first, he had thought he should disable the machine completely, to save these intimate records. But after sampling several, he realized that they were all much the same: memories of births and deaths and unions, naming-day ceremonies, and other mundane rites of passage. But each was imbued with the same soft sadness that permeated the communal gatherings. These were not records taken from the middle of a community’s life but from its end. They were memorials, left by the long-ago Martians when they packed up their possessions, and, leaving the doors of their houses open, went away forever.

  Red Bowman was not happy. He had a production schedule to fulfill. Having the automated miner standing idle because crazy Mather had interfered with its controls threatened the crew chief’s chances of winning the substantial bonus that would be due him if he delivered truckloads of bone fertilizer before the specified date. So when the jeep had gone far enough out across the seabed, he stopped it and got off, sending it on to base with the other men while he walked back along its vague track, trudging through the fine dust to the bone town.

  Night fell before he got there, but he could see the white towers glimmering before him, occasionally lit by sparks and flashes as the tireless machine that was grinding its way through the walls encountered metal. But even if he’d been blind, Bowman could have found his way just by going toward the sound of the diesel engines. Or by the stench of its exhaust.

  He came up the harbor steps and crossed the plaza. The sea beast’s image was almost completely defaced by the miner’s tracks. The behemoth’s mechanical growls faded as it turned a far-off corner in its programmed course, putting walls between it and the Earthman. Bowman used the lull to listen for sounds of Mather’s moving about the town. In a few moments, he heard something.

  At first, he thought it was a wind wuthering beneath a building’s eaves. But there was no wind, and the Martians’ roofs were flat and no wider than the walls that supported them. He moved in the direction of the sound. It was coming from across the plaza, from one of the larger buildings that the behemoth would not reach for a couple of days.

  The place had a bronze door, figured in the flowing script that Bowman did not like to look at; it reminded him of snakes, and snakes reminded him of the Devil. He sometimes wondered if there had been a deal between God and Lucifer: God would rule on Earth and the Devil would have Mars.

  He eased through the door, a flashlight ready for use in his left hand, a pistol in his right. He didn’t want to have to shoot Mather, but everybody knew the story of the man on the early expedition who’d gone mad and murdered his crewmates. He thought the fellow might have been an archaeologist—some kind of ologist, for sure—and he’d gone kill-crazy after rubbing up against too much Martian evil.

  The sound came again, a keening, crooning note without words. It was like something a cat would sing, Bowman thought, maybe to a mouse it had caught. He didn’t like cats either. Killing was all right when you had to, really had to, but you ought to do it clean.

  He could dimly see the general layout inside the building: an open space, seats or steps in descending circles, a great white shape at the bottom. The sound came from the opposite side, louder now that Bowman was inside the place and the hoo-hooing was echoing so softly around the bone walls. The hairs on his neck and forearms rose of their own accord. He slid his thumb over his weapon’s safety catch, making sure it was off.

  He edged around the upper deck of the amphitheater. Against the white vagueness, he saw a dark shape, seated halfway down the tiers. He readied the pistol, then thumbed the flashlight’s switch.

  A Martian sat in the middle of the terraced seats, clad in a robe of metallic cloth that dully reflected the beam. His whole head was enclosed in a cloche-mask of silver, the facial features chased in gold, the thin eyebrows elevated, and the mouth pursed in an expression of permanent surprise. Bowman could not see the color of the eyes through the mask’s slits, but the figure’s gaze did not turn to him. Instead, it remained fixed on the side of the cube down in front.

  The Earthman played the flashlight’s beam over the man. He could see the hands, five-fingered instead of six. From beneath the robe came the cuffs of the blue jeans they all wore, and the scuffed boots were also New Ares company issue.

  “Mather!” Bowman called. The man in Martian garb gave no sign of having heard. The crew chief moved in on the runaway, keeping the beam on him, with the pistol lined up just beside and behind the flashlight. “Mather!”

  The masked head did not turn, the limbs did not move. Bowman stood beside him, poked his shoulder with the muzzle of the gun. “Snap out of it!”

  Still no response. Bowman set the flashlight down on one of the tiered seats so that it illuminated the still figure. Then he hooked his fingers below the rim of the head-enclosing mask and yanked upward.

  The Martian warriors marched to battle in gleaming companies of 144. Six companies made a battalion of 864. They carried shields of hammered bronze that matched their burnished armor and guns capable of spitting streams of metal insects that, finding flesh, would sting and burrow. On their flanks and scouting ahead raced knee-high electric spiders, their joints clicking with a rhythm that combined into a continuous whir.

  Six battalions had gone out through the bone gate of Ipsli, almost the town’s entire male complement. They took the coastal road toward Huq, and, by midday, they arrived at the chosen field, a place where the hills fell back to widen the coastal plain. They formed up, four battalions in front, two in reserve, and sat down to await the enemy.

  The Huq army came late, earning themselves some justified mocking from Ipsli. Questions were shouted across the open ground as to whether they’d had something better to do today, whether their beds had been too comfortable to leave. Or their wives.

  The Huq replied with taunts of their own, recalling past encounters when Ipsli’s war aims had not been realized. Then the heralds went to meet in the space between the two hosts, to decide on the order of battle. As usual, it would be individual combats first, then small groups. Ipsli’s first battalion was anxious for a rematch with their Huq counterparts; it was felt that last year’s engagement was decided more by the state of the ground—it had rained the night before—than by the relative skills of the combatants.

  Youths fought first, with minimized weapons. Then came the midranked warriors, in pairs and quatrains. Ipsli was doing well, only two deaths and one maiming, while several Huqs had had to be carried from the field. Sentiment within the ranks was leaning toward ending the day with a general melee.

  There came a break for lunch while the spiders fought their bouts. Huqs and Ipslis wagered against each other on the outcomes, the heralds holding the takes and disbursing the winnings. Then it was time for individual champions to take the field.

  Fred Mather was in the form of Ipsli’s paramount, wearing his great-great-grandsire’s armor of laminated strips of bronze overlaid with polished electrum. When, late in the afternoon, the trumpets called his sign, he took up the long spear, its black shaft bound with strengthening wire. He disdained to fight with a shield.

  As he stepped out in front of Ipsli, the spear over his shoulder, a shout went up from the battalions behind him. He strode toward the center of the field, watching as the Huq champion came to meet him. Unlike last year, his opponent had chosen only the long, two-handed electric sword. It would be a memorable contest, Mather thought. Next year, they might well be singing songs about today.

  He had gotten used to the strangeness of being two persons in one mind. The Martian memory-visions were like the documentary dramas he had seen on television at home, where actors took the parts of historical figures—except that here the spectator took the actor’s place. He had wondered at first if the experience was similar to what fiction books had done to readers, before the cleansing of the world.
/>   Now Mather-as-warrior strode calmly to where the heralds waited on the fighting ground. He grounded the butt of his spear, then tipped back his helmet to rest it on the crown of his long, narrow head. The man who had come out to face him set his sword’s point against the turf and tilted back his own headgear. His golden eyes gazed at Mather with no sign of fear.

  The first herald sang the traditional song. As he heard the last line begin, Mather gripped the shaft of the spear, took a slow and steady breath, and pulled his helmet down. He assumed the ready stance. The swordsman also covered his face and raised his blade.

  Bowman yanked the cloche-mask clear of the lunatic’s face, but it fit too tightly to come all the way off. Mather’s eyes, in the flashlight beam, were wide and opaque. For a moment, they looked almost golden, but the crew chief put that down to a reflection of the pale bone walls in the man’s grossly dilated pupils.

  Mather blinked, once, then after a moment, twice more.

  “Snap out of it!” Bowman said. He poked him again with the pistol’s muzzle.

  The archaeologist came up off the bench, turning toward the crew chief in one fluid motion. With the back of his left hand, he brushed the pistol away, while his right struck out at Bowman’s belly. But the blow did not connect, and not just because the other man stumbled back.

  Mather looked down at his right hand, as if puzzled. From the way he held it, Bowman first had the impression that there was something in the madman’s grasp—did the Martians have invisible knives?—and that he had tried to stick him with it. But then, as he saw Mather blink, Bowman realized that the crackpot must be seeing things.

  Somehow, that made him more angry than anything yet. It wasn’t right that this soft-handed college boy’s insanity was threatening Red Bowman’s bonus and the life it would buy for him here on Mars: a place of his own and a solid business to run. He was willing to work hard for what he wanted, and no dreamy-eyed book-fiend was going to rob him of his earned reward.