The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  Then I went back to Eugene to get to work on the novel.

  The following story is one I wrote not long after that. It is not part of the Eight World series, or any series at all, though I have had some notion of using all or part of it as a segment of a novel. We’ll see what develops from that.

  “In the Hall of the Martian Kings” was given an award for best story of the year by an organization of teachers of science fiction. This delighted me more than I can say. Not just the award itself, but the very idea that there could be such an organization. These days, when 80 percent of the giant movie blockbusters have an SF or fantasy element, when the novels of Philip K. Dick are being butchered and making billions, it’s hard to remember just how disreputable all that “spaceship stuff ” used to be, right into the 1970s. Mr. Green, my librarian/pusher, had to have some real nerve to order hundreds of SF paperbacks, boxes and boxes of them, simply because I and a few of my friends couldn’t get enough of them. These days, no big deal. Back then, back in that stronghold of Southern Baptists, he might have been brought up before the school board and burned alive on a pile of degenerate rock ’n’ roll 45s.

  IN THE HALL OF THE MARTIAN KINGS

  IT TOOK PERSEVERANCE, alertness, and a willingness to break the rules to watch the sunrise in Tharsis Canyon. Matthew Crawford shivered in the dark, his suit heater turned to emergency setting, his eyes trained toward the east. He knew he had to be watchful. Yesterday he had missed it entirely, snatched away from it by a long, unavoidable yawn. His jaw muscles stretched, but he controlled this yawn and kept his eyes firmly open.

  And there it was. Like the lights in a theater after the show is over: just a quick brightening, a splash of localized bluish-purple over the canyon rim, and he was surrounded by footlights. Day had come, the truncated Martian day that would never touch the blackness over his head.

  This day, like the nine before it, illuminated a Tharsis radically changed from what it had been over the last sleepy ten thousand years. Wind erosion of rocks can create an infinity of shapes, but it never gets around to carving out a straight line or a perfect arc. The human encampment below him broke up the jagged lines of the rocks with regular angles and curves.

  The camp was anything but orderly. No one would get the impression that any care had been taken in the haphazard arrangement of dome, lander, crawlers, crawler tracks, and scattered equipment. It had grown, as all human base camps seem to grow, without pattern. He was reminded of the footprints around Tranquillity Base, though on a much larger scale.

  Tharsis Base sat on a wide ledge about halfway up from the uneven bottom of the Tharsis arm of the Great Rift Valley. The site had been chosen because it was a smooth area, allowing easy access up a gentle slope to the flat plains of the Tharsis Plateau, while at the same time only a kilometer from the valley floor. No one could agree which area was most worthy of study: plains or canyon. So this site had been chosen as a compromise. What it meant was that the exploring parties had to either climb up or go down, because there wasn’t a damn thing worth seeing near the camp. Even the exposed layering and its archeological records could not be seen without a half-kilometer crawler ride up to the point where Crawford had climbed to watch the sunrise.

  He examined the dome as he walked back to camp. There was a figure hazily visible through the plastic. At this distance he would have been unable to tell who it was if it weren’t for the black face. He saw her step up to the dome wall and wipe a clear circle to look through. She spotted his bright red suit and pointed at him. She was suited except for her helmet, which contained her radio. He knew he was in trouble. He saw her turn away and bend to the ground to pick up her helmet, so she could tell him what she thought of people who disobeyed her orders, when the dome shuddered like a jellyfish.

  An alarm started in his helmet, flat and strangely soothing coming from the tiny speaker. He stood there for a moment as a perfect smoke ring of dust billowed up around the rim of the dome. Then he was running.

  He watched the disaster unfold before his eyes, silent except for the rhythmic beat of the alarm bell in his ears. The dome was dancing and straining, trying to fly. The floor heaved up in the center, throwing the black woman to her knees. In another second the interior was a whirling snowstorm. He skidded on the sand and fell forward, got up in time to see the fiberglass ropes on the side nearest him snap free from the steel spikes anchoring the dome to the rock.

  The dome now looked like some fantastic Christmas ornament, filled with snowflakes and the flashing red and blue lights of the emergency alarms. The top of the dome heaved over away from him, and the floor raised itself high in the air, held down only by the unbroken anchors on the side farthest from him. There was a gush of snow and dust; then the floor settled slowly back to the ground. There was no motion now but the leisurely folding of the depressurized dome roof as it settled over the structures inside.

  The crawler skidded to a stop, nearly rolling over, beside the deflated dome. Two pressure-suited figures got out. They started for the dome, hesitantly, in fits and starts. One grabbed the other’s arm and pointed to the lander. The two of them changed course and scrambled up the rope ladder hanging over the side.

  Crawford was the only one to look up when the lock started cycling. The two people almost tumbled over each other coming out of the lock. They wanted to do something, and quickly, but didn’t know what. In the end, they just stood there, silently twisting their hands and looking at the floor. One of them took off her helmet. She was a large woman, in her thirties, with red hair shorn off close to the scalp.

  “Matt, we got here as—” She stopped, realizing how obvious it was. “How’s Lou?”

  “Lou’s not going to make it.” He gestured to the bunk where a heavyset man lay breathing raggedly into a clear plastic mask. He was on pure oxygen. There was blood seeping from his ears and nose.

  “Brain damage?”

  Crawford nodded. He looked around at the other occupants of the room. There was the Surface Mission Commander, Mary Lang, the black woman he had seen inside the dome just before the blowout. She was sitting on the edge of Lou Prager’s cot, her head cradled in her hands. In a way, she was a more shocking sight than Lou. No one who knew her would have thought she could be brought to this limp state of apathy. She had not moved for the last hour.

  Sitting on the floor huddled in a blanket was Martin Ralston, the chemist. His shirt was bloody, and there was dried blood all over his face and hands from the nosebleed he’d only recently gotten under control, but his eyes were alert. He shivered, looking from Lang, his titular leader, to Crawford, the only one who seemed calm enough to deal with anything. He was a follower, reliable but unimaginative.

  Crawford looked back to the newest arrivals. They were Lucy Stone McKillian, the redheaded ecologist, and Song Sue Lee, the exobiologist. They still stood numbly by the air lock, unable as yet to come to grips with the fact of fifteen dead men and women beneath the dome outside.

  “What do they say on the Burroughs?” McKillian asked, tossing her helmet on the floor and squatting tiredly against the wall. The lander was not the most comfortable place to hold a meeting; all the couches were mounted horizontally since their purpose was cushioning the acceleration of landing and takeoff. With the ship sitting on its tail, this made ninety percent of the space in the lander useless. They were all gathered on the circular bulkhead at the rear of the life system, just forward of the fuel tank.

  “We’re waiting for a reply,” Crawford said. “But I can sum up what they’re going to say: not good. Unless one of you two has some experience in Mars-lander handling that you’ve been concealing from us.”

  Neither of them bothered to answer that. The radio in the nose sputtered, then clanged for their attention. Crawford looked over at Lang, who made no move to go answer it. He stood and swarmed up the ladder to sit in the copilot’s chair. He switched on the receiver.

  “Commander Lang?”

  “No, this is Crawford again. Com
mander Lang is . . . indisposed. She’s busy with Lou, trying to do something.”

  “That’s no use. The doctor says it’s a miracle he’s still breathing. If he wakes up at all, he won’t be anything like you knew him. The telemetry shows nothing like the normal brain wave. Now I’ve got to talk to Commander Lang. Have her come up.” The voice of Mission Commander Weinstein was accustomed to command, and about as emotional as a weather report.

  “Sir, I’ll ask her, but I don’t think she’ll come. This is still her operation, you know.” He didn’t give Weinstein time to reply to that. Weinstein had been trapped by his own seniority into commanding the Edgar Rice Burroughs, the orbital ship that got them to Mars and had been intended to get them back. Command of the Podkayne, the disposable lander that would make the lion’s share of the headlines, had gone to Lang. There was little friendship between the two, especially when Weinstein fell to brooding about the very real financial benefits Lang stood to reap by being the first woman on Mars, rather than the lowly mission commander. He saw himself as another Michael Collins.

  Crawford called down to Lang, who raised her head enough to mumble something.

  “What’d she say?”

  “She said take a message.” McKillian had been crawling up the ladder as she said this. Now she reached him and said in a lower voice, “Matt, she’s pretty broken up. You’d better take over for now.”

  “Right, I know.” He turned back to the radio, and McKillian listened over his shoulder as Weinstein briefed them on the situation as he saw it. It pretty much jibed with Crawford’s estimation, except at one crucial point. He signed off and they joined the other survivors.

  He looked around at the faces of the others and decided it wasn’t the time to speak of rescue possibilities. He didn’t relish being a leader. He was hoping Lang would recover soon and take the burden from him. In the meantime he had to get them started on something. He touched McKillian gently on the shoulder and motioned her to the lock.

  “Let’s go get them buried,” he said. She squeezed her eyes shut, forcing out tears, then nodded.

  It wasn’t a pretty job. Halfway through it, Song came down the ladder with the body of Lou Prager.

  “Let’s go over what we’ve learned. First, now that Lou’s dead there’s very little chance of ever lifting off. That is, unless Mary thinks she can absorb everything she needs to know about piloting the Podkayne from those printouts Weinstein sent down. How about it, Mary?”

  Mary Lang was lying sideways across the improvised cot that had recently held the Podkayne pilot, Lou Prager. Her head was nodding listlessly against the aluminum hull plate behind her; her chin was on her chest. Her eyes were half-open.

  Song had given her a sedative from the dead doctor’s supplies on the advice of the medic aboard the E.R.B. It had enabled her to stop fighting so hard against the screaming panic she wanted to unleash. It hadn’t improved her disposition. She had quit, she wasn’t going to do anything for anybody.

  When the blowout started, Lang had snapped on her helmet quickly. Then she had struggled against the blizzard and the undulating dome bottom, heading for the roofless framework where the other members of the expedition were sleeping. The blowout was over in ten seconds, and she then had the problem of coping with the collapsing roof, which promptly buried her in folds of clear plastic. It was far too much like one of those nightmares of running knee-deep in quicksand. She had to fight for every meter, but she made it.

  She made it in time to see her shipmates of the last six months gasping soundlessly and spouting blood from all over their faces as they fought to get into their pressure suits. It was a hopeless task to choose which two or three to save in the time she had. She might have done better but for the freakish nature of her struggle to reach them; she was in shock and half believed it was only a nightmare. So she grabbed the nearest, who happened to be Dr. Ralston. He had nearly finished donning his suit, so she slapped his helmet on him and moved to the next one. It was Luther Nakamura, and he was not moving. Worse, he was only half-suited. Pragmatically she should have left him and moved on to save the ones who still had a chance. She knew it now, but didn’t like it any better than she had liked it then.

  While she was stuffing Nakamura into his suit, Crawford arrived. He had walked over the folds of plastic until he reached the dormitory, then sliced through it with the laser he normally used to vaporize rock samples.

  And he had had time to think about the problem of whom to save. He went straight to Lou Prager and finished suiting him up. But it was already too late. He didn’t know if it would have made any difference if Mary Lang had tried to save him first.

  Now she lay on the bunk, her feet sprawled carelessly in front of her. She slowly shook her head back and forth.

  “You sure?” Crawford prodded her, hoping to get a rise, a show of temper, anything.

  “I’m sure,” she mumbled. “You people know how long they trained Lou to fly this thing? And he almost cracked it up as it was. I . . . ah, nuts. It isn’t possible.”

  “I refuse to accept that as a final answer,” he said. “But in the meantime we should explore the possibilities if what Mary says is true.”

  Ralston laughed. It wasn’t a bitter laugh; he sounded genuinely amused. Crawford plowed on.

  “Here’s what we know for sure. The E.R.B. is useless to us. Oh, they’ll help us out with plenty of advice, maybe more than we want, but any rescue is out of the question.”

  “We know that,” McKillian said. She was tired and sick from the sight of the faces of her dead friends. “What’s the use of all this talk?”

  “Wait a moment,” Song broke in. “Why can’t they . . . I mean they have plenty of time, don’t they? They have to leave in six months, as I understand it, because of the orbital elements, but in that time—”

  “Don’t you know anything about spaceships?” McKillian shouted. Song went on, unperturbed.

  “I do know enough to know the Edgar is not equipped for an atmosphere entry. My idea was not to bring down the whole ship, but only what’s aboard the ship that we need. Which is a pilot. Might that be possible?”

  Crawford ran his hands through his hair, wondering what to say. That possibility had been discussed, and was being studied. But it had to be classed as extremely remote.

  “You’re right,” he said. “What we need is a pilot, and that pilot is Commander Weinstein. Which presents problems legally, if nothing else. He’s the captain of a ship and should not leave it. That’s what kept him on the Edgar in the first place. But he did have a lot of training on the lander simulator back when he was so sure he’d be picked for the ground team. You know Winey, always the instinct to be the one-man show. So if he thought he could do it, he’d be down here in a minute to bail us out and grab the publicity. I understand they’re trying to work out a heat-shield parachute system from one of the drop capsules that were supposed to ferry down supplies to us during the stay here. But it’s very risky. You don’t modify an aerodynamic design lightly, not one that’s supposed to hit the atmosphere at ten-thousand-plus kilometers. So I think we can rule that out. They’ll keep working on it, but when it’s done, Winey won’t step into the damn thing. He wants to be a hero, but he wants to live to enjoy it, too.”

  There had been a brief lifting of spirits among Song, Ralston, and McKillian at the thought of a possible rescue. The more they thought about it, the less happy they looked. They all seemed to agree with Crawford’s assessment.

  “So we’ll put that one in the Fairy Godmother file and forget about it. If it happens, fine. But we’d better assume that it won’t. As you may know, the E.R.B.-Podkayne are the only ships in existence that can reach Mars and land on it. One other pair is in the congressional funding stage. Winey talked to Earth and thinks there’ll be a speedup in the preliminary paperwork and the thing’ll start building in a year. The launch was scheduled for five years from now, but it might get as much as a year’s boost. It’s a rescue mission now, easier
to sell. But the design will need modification, if only to include five more seats to bring us all back. You can bet on there being more modifications when we send in our report on the blowout. So we’d better add another six months to the schedule.”

  McKillian had had enough. “Matt, what the hell are you talking about? Rescue mission? Damn it, you know as well as I that if they find us here, we’ll be long dead. We’ll probably be dead in another year.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. We’ll survive.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t have the faintest idea.” He looked her straight in the eye as he said this. She almost didn’t bother to answer, but curiosity got the best of her.

  “Is this just a morale session? Thanks, but I don’t need it. I’d rather face the situation as it is. Or do you really have something?”

  “Both. I don’t have anything concrete except to say that we’ll survive the same way humans have always survived: by staying warm, by eating, by drinking. To that list we have to add ‘by breathing.’ That’s a hard one, but other than that we’re no different than any other group of survivors in a tough spot. I don’t know what we’ll have to do, specifically, but I know we’ll find the answers.”

  “Or die trying,” Song said.

  “Or die trying.” He grinned at her. She at least had grasped the essence of the situation. Whether survival was possible or not, it was necessary to maintain the illusion that it was. Otherwise, you might as well cut your throat. You might as well not even be born, because life is an inevitably fatal struggle to survive.

  “What about air?” McKillian asked, still unconvinced.

  “I don’t know,” he told her cheerfully. “It’s a tough problem, isn’t it?”

  “What about water?”

  “Well, in that valley there’s a layer of permafrost about twenty meters down.”

  She laughed. “Wonderful. So that’s what you want us to do? Dig down there and warm the ice with our pink little hands? It won’t work, I tell you.”