Old Mars Read online

  He stepped forward and smacked Mather across the side of the head with the pistol barrel. But the steel did not hit flesh. Instead, it struck the dull gleam of the Martian head covering. The sound of the impact was a musical note, but the helmet seemed to absorb the shock. Mather barely registered the blow.

  Yet something had gotten through. The archaeologist blinked again, and now it seemed for the first time that he was actually focusing on the crew chief. He looked down again at his right hand, curled around empty air. Then he shook his head as if coming out of a daze.

  “You’re coming with me,” Bowman said. He raised the gun, and so that the madman would have no doubt as to the consequences of disobedience, he thumbed back the hammer.

  Mather’s shoulders slumped. He reached up with both hands and wriggled the silver cloche-mask free of his head. He lowered it and gazed sadly at its polished, figured surface, the perpetual surprise that looked back at him. Then, when Bowman said, “Move it,” he flung the metal object up and into the crew chief’s face.

  Bowman fell back, blood spurting from his nose. He lost his footing and toppled over the bench seat beside him, banging the elbow of his gun arm. The pistol fell, clattering on the bone floor right beside his foot, and he was glad it did not go off. But by the time he had recovered the weapon and swung the flashlight around, he had only enough time to catch Mather disappearing through the door to the plaza, the Martian robe flying like a flag from his shoulders.

  He hunted for the madman all night, light and gun at the ready. He steeled himself to shoot on sight, but when the thin Martian dawn came he was still alone.

  The mechanical behemoth ground on, house by house, street by street, filling its hoppers with the dust of millennia-dead sea beasts, excreting its cubes of gold and silver, copper and bronze, still warm from the atomic smelter. Bowman fretted that Mather would return from his hiding place in the blue hills and try to stop the work. He took men from other projects, gave them guns, and put them on guard.

  The sentries reported seeing occasional flashes of sunlight on metal up in the blue hills, but the madman made no more attempts to interfere with the reduction of the bone city. Finally, the day came when they reloaded the automated miner onto its multiwheeled transporter and prepared to move it across the dusty, glass-bottomed sea to the next deposit. The operation proceeded without incident.

  Red Bowman’s bonus was safe again. He had been a man short for a while, but had managed to make up a full crew’s complement by hiring an experienced hard-rock mining man who had come to Mars hoping to get rich prospecting in the barrens but had found nothing.

  The crew chief watched the transporter slowly carry the leviathan away, followed by its floating contrail of pale dust. Then he started up his jeep and drove through the scar where the town had been. The houses were gone, as well as the pavement of the streets on which they had stood for thousands of years. The miner had scraped right down to the packed earth beneath, and in places to the rufous Martian bedrock. After it had uncovered the first urn buried beneath a courtyard, Bowman had called in the technician to reset the automatic controls. The machine had then proceeded to find scores of the gold, silver, and electrum containers, increasing the operation’s precious-metals yield by a solid percentage. New Ares had awarded Bowman an “attaboy” bonus for showing initiative.

  He came to where the gate had stood and put the jeep onto the ribbon of crushed white rock. He drove slowly toward the hills, then up into them as the road began to climb. He moved his gaze from side to side, watching for flashes of light.

  The hills always gave him the creeps. They were as silent as the ancient towns, but somehow the silence was different here. The towns were not human-made, but they had been manufactured by beings who, for all their peculiarities, shared some commonalities with Earthmen. The land itself, though, that was pure Mars. It had never had any connection to humankind, not all the way back to the gelling of the planets. Men might come and build on it, but they would never be of it. And those who tried to be of it, like Mather, would always be driven mad.

  That was Bowman’s way of thinking, and before he moved off to the next demolition, he wanted to talk about it with the one man he knew who might understand. So he drove higher into the hills, stopping every now and then, his head turning from side to side, waiting for the bright wink.

  Late in the afternoon, he saw it from the corner of an eye and turned toward the long, boulder-strewn slope from which it had come. There was a group of tall rocks halfway up the hill. They might have been a natural occurrence, or they might have been placed there for some obscure Martian purpose. But when he trained his binoculars on the formation, he saw motion through a gap between two of the stones.

  He got out of the jeep and walked toward the place, his hands held out to show that they were empty. “Mather!” he called. “We’re leaving! Nobody’s going to come after you!”

  A voice came from the rocks, thin on the less substantial Martian air. It had a flutey quality, as if a musical instrument were speaking. “What do you want?”

  “I just wanted to say good-bye,” Bowman said. He was closer now, close enough to see between the gaps in the rocks. He saw silver and touches of gold. “You know,” he said, “that mask rightly belongs to New Ares Mining.”

  “No,” said the thin voice, “I don’t know that.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Bowman said. “We’ll get it later, I suppose. After you die.”

  There was no response to that.

  “You are going to die, you know,” said the Earthman, trudging up the slope. “Fact is, I don’t know how you’ve managed to survive this long without water. Were you sneaking in at night to steal it?”

  “No.”

  “Then how?”

  Again there was no answer. Bowman had reached the rocks. He could see glimpses of Mather through the gaps. The man was wearing the Martian robe and another mask, this one with an expression of serene amusement. “Come out and we’ll talk,” he said.

  “About what?”

  The crew chief shrugged. “About what you’re going to do, how you’re going to live.”

  “Does that matter to you?” said the musical voice.

  “A little. Listen, at first, I was angry at having you on my crew because I didn’t think you’d pull your weight. Then I got scared that you’d screw up the operation and wreck everything.”

  Bowman waited a moment to see if the other man would respond, then said, “But once you left us alone to get on with it, you were not my problem anymore. And now that we’re pulling out, I can afford to wonder about what you think you’re achieving up here.”

  He waited again, this time letting the silence extend. It made him uncomfortable. He was thinking that it wasn’t just a silence between him and Mather; it was a silence between him and the hills, between him and Mars.

  Finally, the man behind the rocks spoke. “There’s nothing to achieve.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “There’s nothing to do. Nothing to be done.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s all been done,” said Mather. “That’s the point. That’s what Mars is.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “I know.” There was another silence, then, although Bowman had heard no footsteps, Mather’s musical voice came as if from farther away. “Good-bye.”

  The Earthman skirted the standing rocks and climbed above them. There was no sign of the other man. He called his name, twice, but heard only the eloquent silence of the Martian hills.

  Bowman went back to the jeep, back to the base camp, then on to the next job. In later years, he would sometimes tell people, “Just because you can come up with a question, that doesn’t mean there’s an answer.”

  Some years later, a prospector came by, his picks and shovels and magnetometer clattering with each step of his walking machine. He spotted the cube of white stone that the automated miner had left as valueless and went to
take a look. To one side, he found a mummified corpse clothed in Martian cloth, seated on a chair carved from Martian ironwood. A silver mask rested on the desiccated lap.

  At first, the prospector thought that he’d discovered a genuine Martian, though people said they were all gone now. It was the eyes that fooled him: wide and dried, and turned toward the cube, they had looked from a distance like golden coins.

  But the mask was a good one. The prospector’s day had not been wasted.

  DAVID D. LEVINE

  David D. Levine is a lifelong SF reader whose midlife crisis was to take a sabbatical from his high-tech job to attend Clarion West in 2000. It seems to have worked. He made his first professional sale in 2001, won the Writers of the Future Contest in 2002, was nominated for the John W. Campbell award in 2003, was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Campbell again in 2004, and won a Hugo in 2006 for his story “Tk’Tk’Tk.” A collection of his stories, Space Magic, won the Endeavour Award in 2009. In January of 2010 he spent two weeks at a simulated Mars base in the Utah desert, which led to a highly regarded slide show and The Mars Diaries, a self-published hardcopy collection of his and his crewmates’ blogs. His story “Citizen-Astronaut,” a science-fiction novelette partially based on his “Mars” experience, won second prize in the Baen Memorial Contest, was published in Analog, and came in second in the 2011 AnLab Readers’ Poll. David lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Kate Yule, with whom he edits the fanzine Bento. His website is www.daviddlevine.com.

  Here he takes us to Mars in a way that NASA probably never thought of …

  The Wreck of the Mars Adventure

  DAVID D. LEVINE

  WILLIAM KIDD KNELT UPON THE COLD STONE FLOOR IN THE complete blackness of the Condemned Hold in Newgate Prison. Heavy iron shackles lay loose upon wrists and ankles grown far thinner than when they’d first been fitted, the skin torn and scabrous from too-long acquaintance with the cold, rough metal. Chains rattled as he shifted into a somewhat less uncomfortable position.

  All of these were familiar, and could be ignored. But the commotion in the hall beyond his locked door was new, and a terrible distraction. No doubt some of the other prisoners were celebrating the imminent demise of their most famous neighbor.

  “Keep quiet out there!” he cried, or tried to. “Leave a condemned man to make peace with his Lord!”

  There was no possibility that the revelers could have heard Kidd. His Dundee brogue, once powerful enough to carry across a hundred yards of open ocean in the midst of a gale, was now reduced to little more than a whisper. Yet, almost at once, the babble of voices dropped away to nothing.

  A moment later came the rattle of keys in the lock.

  This too was unexpected. For anyone at all to enter Kidd’s cell was a rarity, by order of the Admiralty Board and the House of Commons. A visit in the middle of the night was unprecedented. And on the very eve of his execution …

  Kidd levered himself up into a sitting posture, chains clanking as he settled back on his haunches. Weary from months of imprisonment, despondent from years of rejection, disappointment, and defeat, he could think of no reason for such an untimely visit other than more bad news. Perhaps the House had decided to advance his execution to the small hours of the morning for some political reason. Or perhaps they intended to shave his head, or perform some other indignity, before marching him to the gibbet. He’d long given up any thought of comprehending the constant fickle changes of Parliamentary whim.

  Whatever the news, Kidd meant to take it as a man should. Exerting himself to his utmost, he strained to rise to his feet. But he had barely struggled up to one knee when the door clashed open.

  The dim, flickering light of torches blinded him. He tried and failed to raise an arm to shield his eyes. But before he could do so, two burly keepers entered and pinned his arms behind him. New irons clasped him at elbow and wrist, tight and hard and cold, and new chains ran clattering down to the ringbolts fixed in the stone floor. The guards forced Kidd to his knees, and in a moment he was trussed immovably in place. A hand gripped the back of his head, forcing his gaze to the floor. Was he to be beheaded here in his cell?

  “P-prisoner secured, m’lord.” The voice belonged to one of the prison’s harshest and most brutal wardens. What could reduce this man to stammering servility?

  “Leave us.” A cold, brusque voice, one used to immediate compliance. It had an accent Kidd couldn’t place. Dutch?

  “M’lord?”

  “Leave us. Alone.”

  The warden gulped audibly. “Yes, m’lord,” he whispered.

  The hand released Kidd’s head and two sets of feet shuffled out of the cell. A moment later, the door creaked closed, shutting more quietly than Kidd would have thought possible.

  A single torch remained, and the sound of one man breathing.

  Kidd raised his head.

  The stranger was tall, over six feet, and the dark cloak that covered him from head to toe could not disguise his imperious bearing. He held an embroidered handkerchief to his nose, no doubt soaked in vinegar to combat the prison’s stench.

  “To what do I owe the privilege, m’lord?” Kidd rasped, masking his terror with ironic courtesy.

  The man pushed back his hood. “Surely an investor can pay a visit to his client?”

  For a moment, Kidd failed to recognize the face, with its proud black eyes and its hard, humped beak of a nose. Then he gasped and ducked his head. Though they’d never before met in person, he’d seen that face in profile on a thousand coins. “Your Majesty,” he whispered, though cold anger burned beneath his ribs.

  William III, King of England and Ireland, also William II of Scotland, placed the vinegar-soaked cloth again beneath his nose. “My time here is short,” he said, his voice muffled. “Even men as deeply stupid as my beloved advisers cannot be counted upon to miss my absence for long. So I must come directly to the point.” He drew the cloth aside, his dark eyes fixing Kidd’s. “I am here to offer you a pardon.”

  At first, Kidd could form no reply. Surely this was only a dream? Or a cruel jape, intended only to deepen his suffering? Hope warred with anger and disbelief in his breast. “Your Majesty?” he managed.

  “You heard me,” the king snapped. “I will spare your filthy, piratical neck from the noose my Parliament has woven for you from your own ill-considered words.”

  Kidd matched the king’s level stare. “I but spoke the truth.”

  “The truth is nothing against politics! And were it not for politics, I’d never find myself here in this stinking rathole with you.” The king sighed. “You are troublesome, Kidd. You and I both know you are no pirate, but my advisers would see you swing for the damage you’ve done your backers’ reputation. And with your impetuous bravado and your damned honesty, you’ve made so many enemies I could never defend you in public without losing the whole Whig party. But for all your faults, and for all the stories your enemies have spread about you, you’re too good a captain to waste on the gibbet. So, again, I have come to offer a pardon.” A small strange smile played upon his lips. “But if you accept this pardon, you will be required to undertake a certain charge for me. When you hear the charge, and the conditions, you may wish to decline this offer of clemency.”

  “What charge and conditions,” Kidd snarled through gritted teeth, “could make a man esteem the hangman’s noose above a king’s pardon?”

  Infuriatingly, the smile broadened. “I desire that you plan, outfit, equip, crew, and carry out an expedition to the planet Mars.”

  Rage flared in Kidd at the king’s callous jest, but he held his tongue; he did not even allow the contempt he felt to show on his face.

  This prudence was a new thing for Kidd. Even one year ago, freshly detained on false and libelous charges, he would have railed and spat and fought at such a ridiculous slight. But capricious imprisonment had taught him caution.

  He paused and gave due consideration to the words of a king—a king not known for levity or insani
ty. This was a new century, a time of exploration and discovery and wonders. With the New World now nearly as well mapped as the Old, men were setting out in search of even newer worlds. Balloons were rising from all the capitals of Europe, and after Dampier’s successful circumnavigation of the Moon, a journey to Mars, though outlandish, was not entirely inconceivable.

  “I’ve heard the charge,” Kidd said, swallowing his anger. “And the conditions?”

  “Primus,” the king said, holding up one finger, “you may not disclose the terms of the pardon to any man, upon penalty of death. Secundus, you will be placed under the command of the physiologer John Sexton. You will obey his orders, serve him faithfully, and remain within one hundred feet of him at all times until the successful completion of the expedition, under pain of death. Tertius, you will be held personally responsible for the safety of the said Sexton. Should any harm whatsoever befall him, you will suffer death.” He put down the hand with its three extended fingers and crossed his arms on his chest. “On the other hand, if you should somehow manage to return to London with your own head and Sexton’s intact, you’d have the gratitude of a king. Perhaps even a baronetcy.”

  Kidd considered the king’s words, considered them most seriously. He knelt in chains, in the darkest cell of the worst prison in England, faced with a choice between an impossible task—an insane expedition, from the attempt of which neither he nor any man he might recruit would be likely to return—and certain death upon the morrow.

  And he began to laugh.

  Rough, hacking chuckles burst from a throat left parched and ruined by a year of prison food, prison water, prison air. The king took a step back, the white cloth held tight against his nose, as though he feared Kidd might somehow burst his manacles and attack the royal person.

  “I accept your pardon, Your Majesty,” Kidd gasped when the fit had passed. “I never could pass up a challenge.”