The Mating of the Moons

by Bryce Walton

  Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  The Mating of the Moons

  _by Kenneth O'Hara_

  [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Orbit volume 1number 2, 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence thatthe U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

  [Sidenote: _SHE CAME TO MARS IN SEARCH OF SOMETHING, SHE KNEW NOT WHAT,TO GIVE HER LIFE MEANING. SHE FOUND IT ... IN A WAY...._]

  The sun glared, fiercely detached. The thin air suddenly seemedfriendless, empty, a vast lake of poison and glassy water. All at once,the stretching plains of sand began to waver with a terribleinsubstantiality before Madeleine's eyes.

  Even the Ruins of Taovahr were false. And for Madeleine, even if theywere not false, there was no sign of the outer garments of dream withwhich, on a thousand lonely nights back home on the Earth, she hadclothed those dusty scattered skeletons of crumbled stone.

  Don, one of the brightest and most handsomely uniformed of all thebright young guide-hosts at Martian Haven, droned on to the finish ofhis machine-tooled lecture about the Ruins of Taovahr. He, of course,was the biggest chunk of falseness on Mars.

  "And so folks, this is all that's left of a once great civilization. Afew columns and worn pieces of stone. And we can never know now how theylived and loved and died--for no trace whatsoever of an ancient peopleremain. The dim, dark seas of time have swept their age-old secrets intothe backwash of eternity--"

  "Oh God," whispered Madeleine.

  "Shhhh!" said her father. And her mother blinked at her with a resignedtolerance.

  "But he's a living cliche," she said, trying to control the faintness,the dizziness, the dullness coming back as the last illusion drainedaway. "Even if the ruins were real, he'd make them seem trite."

  "Madeleine!" her mother gasped, but in a subdued way.

  "But there ought to be something special about a Martian ruin, Mother."

  Don had heard her. His smile was uneasy, though politely tolerant, asall good hosts were to rich tourists. "You're hard to please, MissEricson. Maybe too hard." His lingering glance stopped just short ofcrudity. But the look made it clear that if she wanted the romance allwomen were assumed to expect at Martian Haven, he could provide it, ashe did everything else--discreetly, efficiently and most memorably.

  Mrs. Ericson giggled. She had long since abandoned any hope of Madeleinebeing, even by stretching the norm, a well-adjusted girl. But much faithhad been placed in a Martian vacation, and hope that it would provideMadeleine with some sort of emotional preoccupation, even an affair, ifneed be--something, anything, that would at least make her seem faintlycapable of a normal relationship with a male. Even this fellow Don. ForMadeleine was past thirty-five--how far past no one discussed anymore--and was becoming more tightly withdrawn every day.

  Don shouted. "All right, folks! Now we wend our way back to MartianHaven, over a trail that's the oldest in the Solar System, a trail thatwas once a mighty highway stretching from the inland city to the greatocean that once rolled where now there is only thousands of miles ofwind-blown sands!"

  The long line of exclaiming and sickeningly gullible tourists, eithertoo young and wide-eyed to know better, or too old and desperate toadmit the phoniness, ooohhhed and ahhhhed, and the rickshaws and camels,plus a few hardy adventurers on foot, turned with him as Don twisted hisown beast toward Martian Haven.

  Even the Ruins, she thought--they were like imported props lying in thesand, like old abandoned bits of a set for a TV production.

  "Madeleine," her father said, still trying to be a big brother afteryears of failure. "I really don't understand this at all. Coming all theway to Mars, and you act like--well--like we'd just stepped around thecorner in Chicago to some ridiculous carnival!"

  "I am cursed," she whispered. "I'm tortured."

  "What?" her mother said, and stared, with that child-like curiosity withwhich she had greeted Madeleine's advent into the world, and which shehad never lost.

  "Tortured by the insight that both enables and compels me to see throughthe sham and pretense."

  Her father grunted and blinked twice. He almost always blinked twicewhen she began sounding pedantic like that. He suspected that she did itdeliberately to show off his ignorance.

  "Funny," she said, mostly to herself, "that I allowed myself to be soldthis--Mars--the biggest piece of ersatz junk of all!"

  "Madeleine!" her mother exclaimed.

  "The advertisers got here first," Madeleine said, glancing at Don. "Thehucksters." She stopped talking. Mars offered none of itself, but theothers didn't understand. Mars was only what the hucksters wanted it tobe.

  She wondered how she could hang on to the end of the season--even thoughit was only three more days. They had committed themselves to arigidly-planned schedule, a clockwork program that had them and theother "vacationing" tourists jumping and squeaking like automatons:Exotic Martian sports. Martian tennis played on a hundred-yard courtwith the players hopping through the rarified air and lower gravity withan almost obscene abandon. Swimming in a strangely buoyant water,called, of course, Martian water. Sandsled racing. Air-hopping with thede-gravity balloons. Spectator sports, including gladiators who leapedinto the phony canals and fought to the death against thehideous-looking Martian rat-fish. There were many other "activities", innone of which Madeleine had been able to interest herself.

  This last three days promised something called the "Martian Love Ritualunder the Double Moons." And a climactic treasure hunt among thesubterranean Martian labyrinths. They too, Madeleine was sure, wereartificial.

  Mrs. Ericson adjusted her polaroid glasses and waved her rickshaw boyinto his harness, where his thighs tensed for the long haul. He was anincredibly huge man, taller even than those specially-bred movie stars,who averaged eight feet tall. Madeleine felt faint and clung to hercamel. The Martian camels were coughing and wheezing and the sun glaredhorribly in the early afternoon.

  Mr. Ericson looked with guarded apprehension at the six-legged camel.Don pulled him aboard. "What a helluva beast!" laughed Ericson. Earthcamels specially bred by the big travel agencies to have a so-called"unearthly" appearance. Sad creatures with two extra, dangling limbs anda single, half-blind, blood-shot eye, watery and humbly resentful.

  Pathetic mutation, Madeleine thought. Like those horrid rat-fish, likethe canals and the games and the ruins and those silly rituals. Allersatz.

  The caravan moved along the high ridge, a narrow trail that wound backtoward Martian Haven along the edge of the eroded cliffs.

  "Maybe the only thing that would satisfy Madeleine," her father said,"would be a real Martian."

  "But that's not in the brochure," Don said.

  "What's Mars without a Martian?" giggled Mrs. Ericson.

  In her own insular little world, which had been the only one Madeleinehad ever been able to tolerate at all, she swayed and bumped to thecamel's movements. "One thing sure, Don," she said softly. "There were_real_ Martians once. So why all the phony props? You can't tell me thisnonsense is better than the facts about the real Martians."

  "Ask the boys who built this place. They hired me, they make the rules,"Don said. He did not look at her.

  "How did you ever end up with a job like this, Don?"

  "The outfit that built the Haven hired all the old Martian colonists andtheir descendants, any who wanted to work for them. So I took a job.Pay's good. It's seasonal. Anyway, I like Mars."

  "Sure," she said. "You must love it--to corrupt it like this."

  "Mars was here, it'll still be here after the last tourist goes."

  She laughed thinly. Don, with her, was trying to
play another role, onehe hoped she might find interesting. "You're a symbol of the phoniness,Don. Trained in the special host schools. Selected for your beautifulresemblance to a statue of Adonis. Artificially created to be anever-smiling host of good-will, just like these pathetic camels havebeen bred for an exotic touch. No real intelligence, Don, nororiginality. And everything you do or say is right out of the text bookon how to make friends and influence tourists."

  Don didn't look at her. His fingers trembled on the camel's reins.

  "What is this fascinating-sounding 'Ritual of Love' going to be like?"giggled Mrs. Ericson.

  "It's an authentic exploitation of actual rituals once held by