“And I thought you were . . . ohhh!” She turned and pushed her way through the mob, slapping at outstretched hands with very unladylike karate chops.
“Boy loses girl,” I said. “But don’t you worry,” I said into What’s-her-name’s breasts, “everything will come out all right.”
About the only thing that came out that night was my dinner and parts of lunch.
When I woke up the next day I found out why they called it top-pop. I hurt, I limped, and I was sore all over. And I must have done something with What’s-her-name. Getting dressed it seemed faintly astonishing I was alive. When I got downstairs I found Nova had gone off to Bradbury, a thousand kilometers away, with the cargo train of goods from the Balboa.
Johann found me leaning against the front of the Inn, wondering if I should die there or in the street. He laughed and took me back inside to stuff me full of vitamins, and something they jokingly called “Cork.”
“This’ll keep your brain inside your skull,” he said.
About an hour later I decided to go on living and rejoin the human race, providing it wanted me. By lunchtime I was well enough to rent a small sandcat and unpack my warmsuit and breather. I intended to see the Ruins.
I took no one with me. This was something I wanted to see alone. A beeper would guide me back, and it wasn’t all that far anyway. I headed west, feeling quite good, considering. I passed the cannibalized wreck of a sandcat, but that was the only sign humans had ever been there, except for the tracks.
Fifty kilometers out I came up over a rise and there it was. I saw that the rise was the softened edge of a vast crater, but out in the center was the Grand Hall. It looked like a tumbled mass of half-buried rocks, but it was the accepted center of the ancient Martian race. The Ruins were bigger and more complex than any yet found, but even so they did not cover much more than a few city blocks. Either there had not been so many Martians or the rest of their structures were considerably less durable.
I put the cat in gear and went down the slope, my eyes on the ancient rubble, three kilometers away. There were a few sandcat tracks, but they were all old and windblown. Mars did not have much of a tourist trade as yet, and for that I was grateful. I wanted to be alone. Like much of Mars and all of Luna the feeling of déjà vu comes often to the visitor. In “God of Mars” there had been the eerie Wargod Symphony in the air. In fanciful fiction there were always “strange vibrations” or “the call of the ancient dead” or some such rot. All I heard was the purr of the motor and the hiss and rush of sand falling off the treads.
All I admit hearing, that is.
The great blocks of pink and rose and rust formed themselves into complex structures, open-topped, ruined, melted away in the icy winds and carried off by the abrasive sandstorms of the millenia. Most of one dome had fallen, but the arch next to it stood. I parked the sandcat outside and walked in through the Sungate.
Maybe I could hear the whispers of the ancients or the first bars of Wargod.
As I walked into the first vast courtyard the sound of the slight wind behind me was cut off and it was very quiet. I heard my boots crunch in the sand drifts and I stopped.
Silence.
Twenty-five millennia of silence. Covered and uncovered a hundred times by the sand. A dead city. A dead world. But it had lived once and it would live again.
I knew which way the Great Hall lay but took the other direction. I walked down wide streets and cut through fallen walls. I found where Evans had excavated to the point where the stones were relatively unweathered and proved that they had once been so finely honed together they shamed the magnificent Inca walls of Machu Picchu. But the centuries had eaten at the joins, deepening them, digging at their perfection until the individual stones stood out boldly, each carved away from its neighbors.
I stepped around a fallen column and suddenly there was the Little Palace, a near-perfect structure buried completely except for the minaretlike towers. I circled to where the Evans-Baker team had dug an opening, extracting the sand drifts from within and shoring up the roofs. The plastex sheets across the arch at the bottom of the slope were alien, intrusive, but quickly behind me as I went through the unlocked gate. My torch threw its beam into the blackness and I saw the foyer and halls and small rooms, each with its mosaics and carved designs. Here the weathering had been considerably less, but still only an instrument could have told whether that smooth-faced wall once held a painted mural. Anything less permanent than rock itself was smoothed away into oblivion.
I stood for a very long time looking at the hunting scene on the wall of the main room. What were those blurred beasts? Did they really have six legs, like John Carter’s thoats? I had to smile, but the smile faded when I saw a crisp yellow Kodak Sunpan box lying nearby. I picked it up and put the anachronism in my pocket. Sorry, I said to the ghosts.
I sat on a block for an even longer time scanning the delicate bas-relief in the room that has come to be called the Bedroom of the Little Prince. Was it a child’s room, with a fantasy mural of elves and winged mice and fairy queens? It could almost as easily have been a mural depicting some kind of Waterloo, with attacking armies and flying bat raiders. Almost. It did have a kind of delicacy, but what psychology might these aliens have had? We would never know. We don’t even know where the Maya went, or why, and that had been only a little before Columbus landed.
Gone, but not forgotten, I said to the ghosts. I went back out into the weak sunlight and along the Street of Heroes with its sculptured columns blurred into tall rosy lumps protruding from the sand. To my left was the Shell Dome, with the remnants of fossilized crustaceans embedded in the broken shards of dome. Further on to the right was the Treasury, where they had found so many beautiful pieces of what could only be jewelry. Nothing so extravagant as the so-called Royal Jewels of Ares from the Bradbury ruins, but wonderful to look upon and ponder.
I was tempted to enter, but a quick look at the sky showed me I did not have that much time. I hurried on toward the Great Hall. The Circle of Juno, with its judgment seats. The Romulus and Remus Blocks. Further on, the Athena Stone, definitely graceful, quite feminine, yet regal, and quite, quite beyond recognition. Then the entrance to the Great Hall. I turned and looked back, wondering at the Grecian and Roman mythology that had been force-fit onto what man had found here. “We have to call it something,” Evans had said, “and Athena Stone is better than Item XV-4, 3 meters high, at coordinates M-12, subsector A-7.” I had to admit he was right, but I wondered how this nomenclature might blind someone to the discovery of something else. Simpson, in the twentieth century said, “It’s good that things can be found by accident—otherwise you’d never find anything you weren’t looking for.”
So far, everything is “yet.” So far we haven’t met an intelligent race. Yet. Men are not gods. Yet.
I turned and went in.
There is something about proportions that makes a structure greater than the sum of the parts. The Parthenon, that Doric temple to Athena on the Acropolis, is often cited as the perfect building because of its proportions. The Great Temple of Amon at Luxor, the Aztec Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, the Shinto Shrine at Nikko, the Temple of Heaven at Peking, Persepolis, Angkor Wat, Versailles, and of course the Taj Mahal, have all been lauded as “perfect buildings,” and rightly so. But they were all made by humans. As diverse as their builders were they were all Homo sapiens. The Xeno ares or, hopefully, the Homo ares, were simply alien. Their idea of proportions was different, and possibly everything else about them was different, too. The Great Hall was unlike Terran structures that were rigid, rectangular or circular or even trisoctahedral. It flowed, an enormous enclosed space of great majesty. It was more like visual music than walls, a floor, and (once) a ceiling. From no one spot could you see all of it, so it was always exciting. The walls tilted and curved and flowed and changed texture and color. The floor rose and fell, becoming a cozy swirl of stone where you might sit with a small group, then rising and becoming a pul
pit-like protuberance. It swept away and flowed upwards to become a wall, then down again to become what might have been a pool. Walls thinned and melted away to become windows, then thickened and drew close to form side passages to other, lost, rooms. I wandered past the spot where the Colossus had once stood and into a large cul-de-sac of once-bright blood-rock, a cylinder open to the sky. The floor flattened and dipped down in a gentle series of wide terraces toward the Throne.
It could only be that. If it wasn’t, it should have been. Only the rounded stubs of something remained in the center of the dais that rose up slightly before the last terrace. No great lord here to stand high above his groveling subjects, but a servant of the people, a listener, a being who was the focus of his subjects.
The sunlight made long dark shadows across the broken floor, accenting the aged rock. Everything stood out in textural relief, reddened by the setting sun. Courtiers and peasants had stood here, judgments had been made, boons awarded, decisions handed down. Perhaps here the last Martian had died, his alien bones long ground into the sand that drifted around the floor, filling the cracks in the stones. The King is dead, long live the King!
But the Queen is alive.
I turned and went out under the carvings of leaping alien beasts and dim views of what might be seas filled with what might be ships. I turned at the Athena Stone and my boots kicked up plumes of red-brown sand as I went through the Sungate and climbed up into the sandcat. I started the engine, spun the wheel, and raced through the failing light toward the Center.
I had things to do.
7
There was a big sandstorm the next day, out on the Ausonia Borealis between Ares Center and Grandcanal City. Nova had already taken the only fast direct transport to Bradbury, so I had two choices. The short loop up to Grandcanal City and down to Bradbury, which wouldn’t start for almost a week, or until the sandstorm eased up. Or the long loop southwest to Redrock, then southeast to Nabokov, east to Marsport, and north to Bradbury. Because the transporter was leaving the next day and I wanted to move, as well as to see Mars, I chose the longer way, which actually would be quicker.
The big GM Transporter, with the roller capsules behind, stood ready outside the main dome in the dawn light of the following day. I shook hands with Johann and told him to give what was left of the shimmercloth bolt to What’s-her-name. He gave me a maiming blow on the shoulder and shoved me on up into the cabin, slamming the hatch behind me.
Everyone works on Mars. There are no passengers as such. As neophyte cleanboot I was given the simple job of watching the cabin pressure and fuel telltales and punching frozen meals out of the dispenser. By the time we got to Redrock four days later I had been promoted to topwatch, up there in my own little blister-bubble and as important as hell. When I wasn’t defrosting yeast pies and algae bricks in the zap ovens, that is.
It’s pretty drab country going down to Redrock. Just sand and craters and all that weathered worn look we’re familiar with. The country rises in the Isidis Regio area and becomes more rocky than sandy, then nothing much but rock until the mesa rises at Redrock.
Of course it was Martian drabness we were crossing and that alone made it fascinating. Although the trails were clearly marked by previous tracks and by bleepers every few kilometers it was common practice to wander off and parallel the route, taking meandering side trips and detours from the meanderings. One literally never knew what might be found this way. The ruins at Burroughs were discovered by a curious tracker named Solari who was taking a big arc from Touchdown to the Grabrock mines, and that find led to the development of the bubble-cluster “city” itself.
Redrock was nothing more than a pair of dusty domes looking much like the castoff brassiere of some giant Amazon. The converging tracks turned the area into patterned facepowder. We made our cargo drop and picked up other material for transport around our route. The ore itself would be run through the fusion torches, fired along the mass accelerator where the disintegrated molecules would be dropped out automatically at their atomic weight. Thus only very pure elements were transported, for things were costly enough as they were. How “pure” the material in the hoppers was depended on how critical the process was or how often the same material was processed. For Earthside shipping it was the purest possible, but less than perfect samples were used at the site.
We didn’t even sleep in the domes that night but stayed in our cramped but “homey” transporter. Those big fusion-powered GMs are beauties, with multiple wheels that can roll up over most anything on Mars. The control cabin is self-contained, with an airlock to the personnel capsule behind. Bunks, toilet, Varifreezer with IR oven, and oxy bottles took up almost all the space. Some cargo was carried on top, in racks, but most was in the trainlike capsule rolling along behind. We had two on this trip, but I was told in the flatter area between Ares Center and Bradbury and between Touchdown and Wells they could pull as many as six.
The ore carriers were basically the same, but with bigger control cabins and no personnel carriers at all, just the huge tank cars lumbering behind.
We headed toward the Russian base at Nabokov before dawn the next morning. We were soon into Ice Cream Park, where multicolored layers of bright rock ripple and roll, appearing and disappearing beneath the sand and rusty rock. It was a kind of brittle cold fairyland, with frosty confections of a fantastic nature popping up, writhing along the ground, then disappearing again, all as if in frantic motion but frozen solid for millions of years.
The last of the tutti-frutti goodies dipped under the surface, and we rolled on out onto the bleak Dioscuria Cydonia, as desolate a spot as exists this side of the northern Gobi. Not many transporters cared enough to meander on this morose landscape, and we drove resolutely ahead. Wootten, our driver, grinned thinly and called it Hawaiian Estates and kept his foot down on the accelerator.
It was a long way and I had plenty of time to think, either rolling in my bunk or staring at the barren land from my transparent topside dome. What I thought about was mostly Nova.
We had managed to be in our own private observation blister at changeover, when the ship turned around and began its long “backdown”
to Mars. It was weightless then and we tried out sex in a weightless condition, banging our knees and elbows and my head, until the warning light and communicator told us the torch was going to be lit. We disconnected and made it to the couches just before gravity returned again. About all either of us could say for weightless sex is that we did it, after a fashion, which is somewhat like saying, “We’ve been through the whole Kama Sutra!”
But for a month we had been lovers, and in a few minutes she had ripped it apart. It made me wonder just how much she did love me, if she made so little attempt to understand or could not take me on faith. Staring out at the drab plains and near-black sky I asked myself over and over, coming at it from different points, “Do you really want her?” The very things that made her attractive to me also irritated me; her unpredictability, her sudden shifts of mood, her perceptions kept me from being bored with her . . . and drove me crazy at times. An incident, years old, popped into my head. Barlow’s party atop the new floating airport on Lake Michigan. My companion that evening was Wyoming Magnum, the stunningly beautiful new Universal-Metro star of Frankenstein on the Moon. Sleepy-eyed, incredibly voluptuous, satin-smooth, gowned by Lafayette, jeweled by Cartier, the much publicized Borgia ring on her finger, her makeup perfect, her red hair a castle studded with pearls, the rise and fall of her almost completely revealed bosom the focus of every male eye. Warner joined me, talking to me, but his eyes on the almost-inhuman beauty nearby. “You lucky bastard,” he said with feeling. But I had been bored with her for close to fifteen hours. I had been on time, but it was two hours before she emerged, perfect and untouchable. I, too, had been stunned, and had spent the next two hours ruining her perfection in bed, arising at last feeling as if I had somehow managed a glorious masturbation. Then I waited another two hours while she put everythin
g together again.
“I’ll trade her for an option on that Western Algae property,” I said. He looked at me, then laughed. “I mean it, Gordon,” I said. He jumped at the chance. She went home with him as easily as she had gone with me at the studio’s request.
I believe Gordon ended up marrying Wyoming and hating me. But I made close to a million on the West-Algae land, and while money is only money, it’s better than Wyoming Magnum, the jolly inflatable toy. She bored me, not because she was beautiful, or because she kept me waiting, but because that was all she was, just beautiful. I wanted another Madelon, another . . . no, not another Nova . . . I wanted Nova because she was . . . Nova. She was not something made by the quad in vats, not something sleek and vinyl, differing only by a serial number. Nabokov lies in the curve of a big crater in the Mare Acidalium, or Sea of Lenin as they have come to call it. The area was rich in tungsten, titanium and other valuable elements, but very short on natural beauty. The mines dominated the area, with the excavated soil heaped into hillocks. We trundled in past the accelerators and to the bubble complex.
There is something eternally schizoid about the Russian. Meet him man-to-man and he’s friendly, gregarious, outgoing. Give him a uniform or mention politics and he’s Gregor Glum, officious and fussy. He goes all suspicious and starts imagining nefarious plots at the drop of a rubber stamp or the least word of criticism.
I never liked drinking with Russians because I usually lost. I didn’t like doing business with them because it was never just business, it was always bartering and politics and abrupt changes of direction. Here at Nabokov they were on their best behavior in the
“official” ranks, although Wootten went off and got blasted with some of his buddies from the Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev Number Two and said he had a fine time and tumbled a buxom daughter of the steppes. It appeared that “the word” had gone ahead, bounced off the satellite, that one of the ace reporters of Publitex was on his way; I got an A-One reception, packed full of speeches and Instant Boredom. I excused myself as soon as seemed possible, but two hours short of the goal they had set for me, I’m sure. I went off to bed and thought about cool mountain springs and skies that were blue at noon instead of near-black. What I dreamed about was Nova, golden and naked, long black hair spreading in the waters of a brilliantly aqua lagoon . . . Marsport was almost directly east, just above the edge of Mare Boreum. It was wide and wild across here, with a few rills, but previous transporters had blasted down a few ridges and filled in some of the deeper gulleys and we rolled on very quickly.
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