Return - Book III of the Five Worlds Trilogy

by Al Sarrantonio

  But still his views had not changed; had, indeed, hardened to the point where he had divorced his wife, severed his relationship with his business partner, “a treasonous Martian if there ever was one,” in Ankus-Pel’s own accusatory words—though in this case the old man’s indictment turned out to have little effect, since Ankus-Pel’s partner proved to be more adept at politics (in the form of bribery) than Ankus-Pel himself, who relied on patriotism. Bribery will always win out in that contest, and Ankus-Pel found himself, at the age of seventy, with only a lot of credits and a burning nationalism to sustain him.

  And so he had moved to the famous Syrtis Retreat, with others of like mind, mostly old men with memories of long-past glory and dreams of future glory to come. Their retreat, a club of men and fewer women, was at least a magnificent place to reminisce. A former private reserve of two thousand hectares owned by the late Senator Own-Yei and appropriated by Prime Cornelian, it had subsequently been turned over to Ankus-Pel and his Fellows in return for services rendered during the High Leader’s consolidation. Also, in the High Leader’s estimation, it had been a way to consolidate these powerful, rich, and rabid followers into one place where they could be monitored. The two thousand hectares, besides containing the High Leader’s monitoring equipment (unknown to the members of the Elect, of course), also housed a magnificent mansion of sandstone containing some forty bedrooms (fifteen utilized), a game room containing a billiard table with brilliant red top, a bar (much utilized), a Screen room with seating for a hundred, a solarium, bathhouse, secret room containing pornographia (frequented by most if not all of the fifteen), as well as planetarium, pool house, indoor tennis facilities, indoor barqui facilities (a game for younger Martians, which left this particular facility to the dust and sand bugs), as well as outdoor tennis courts, outdoor barqui facilities, and, for a reason no one associated with the retreat since the demise of the senator could explain, an outdoor baseball diamond: baseball being a sport that had never been played on Mars since its independence.

  But by far the most utilized facility in the Syrtis Retreat was a room that had been added since the Elect’s establishment on the premises: the Historical Room, which contained all of the artifacts of Mars’s current ascendancy and its bloodthirsty past.

  There were relics in this museum room of the torturer Ran-Kel, whose ruthless tactics at the right hand of Corvus-Mei, the Martian ruler during the early years of the planet’s war of independence with Earth, had, until the rise of the High Leader, been long suppressed. Here were his most prized instruments: golden rods spiked with razor points, used for beatings; a whip made of sewn Earth-human skin; a ring of human eyeballs in the shape of a crown, interlaced with electronics to make the wearer think he was wearing the crown within his own skull. There were lesser exhibits of Martian cruelty, cruder instruments of torture and mayhem fashioned by lesser artists than Ran-Kel, as well as racks of weapons dating back to the earliest made on Mars itself.

  But the most evident of exhibits, and those taking the most room (three of four walls) belonged to the special atrocities of the High Leader himself.

  Here, then, were all of Prime Cornelian’s special moments: the individual dismemberments, caught forever as Screen images; the fits of pique ending in loss of life; and, most prominently, the mass carnages resulting from the High Leader’s profound application of the theories and weapons of the Machine Master of Mars, Sam-Sei.

  Here were diagrams of the workings of the plasma soldiers: their initial and subsequent campaigns; full-length holographic renderings, a rare (and covertly shot) Screen video of the Machine Master at work, complete with all the genius tinkerer’s mumblings and profound silences.

  It was all here, all the glories of Mars past and present—and it was in this room, before dawn on this day, that the Elect chose to have this most important of meetings, to talk of the Machine Master’s latest invention, a gift from the High Leader himself.

  Ankus-Pel, resplendent in crimson robes of the finest satin (sold to the Elect as Martian but, in fact, of Plutonian origin, by way of Titan, where the silkworms were bred), his thin, somber face topped by a miter of equally red hue, called the meeting to order.

  His colleagues, less elegantly garbed according to their own taste and frugality (Ankus-Pel’s miter was the only one in evidence, skullcaps and bareheadedness predominating), were arranged around this historic room in their usual chairs, mostly of red leather; beside each was a cherrywood side table bearing a glass of the finest Martian red wine, for the requisite toast, given tonight by Ankus-Pel in lugubrious sobriety:

  “My Fellow Elect, it is a sad occasion we mark, when we are the only Martians of good faith—indeed, as far as I know, the only of our great race—left on all of Mars! I nevertheless give you,” the old man intoned, raising his glass before him in benediction, “Mars—in all of its defiant glory!”

  There were no other words from the Elect; only a nodding of heads and a silent drinking of wine. A robot attendant, whisper-quiet, rolled from side table to side table, refilling glasses, which were repeatedly and quickly emptied during the ensuing discussion of the Machine Master’s Irregulator.

  “Here, then, we, the Elect, make our stand,” Ankus-Pel said, and now there were choruses of “Here, here,” though not rousing ones.

  Bal-Mei, oldest and perhaps most devoted of all the Elect, a former military woman whose career had been stained long ago with her involvement in a massacre of Titanian immigrants who had sought to establish Moral Guidance on Phobos (a stain that had been removed from her career by the High Leader), rose unsteadily to her feet; years, with the addition of wine, made her unsteady.

  “I affirm this stand with every fiber of my being!” she shouted hoarsely. “I affirm all things Martian that make this so!”

  A few more proclamations of “Here, here” followed, more robust.

  “We all do, Fellow Bal-Mei,” Ankus-Pel said. He waited politely for the older woman to be seated so that the meeting might commence (after all, time was short), but Bal-Mei seemed intent on continuing to stand; suddenly the old woman shot a leathery hand, finger pointed, at the ceiling of the room.

  “And it shall work! The High Leader will not allow it to end otherwise!”

  Now another, and then another, of the wine-besotted Fellows rose from their chairs, pointing also at the ceiling.

  “It will work!”

  “I affirm this stand!”

  “It is time to make use of the Machine Master’s Irregulator!”

  “Yes! It is time!”

  Ankus-Pel, draining his own wine once more, found his own voice suddenly added to the others, fear and age making a wonderful partnership for action.

  “Yes! It is time!” he said.

  “Then let’s be about it!” Bal-Mei said.

  And so this meeting of the Elect broke up not in sober Martian rectitude, but in, perhaps, a more fitting manner: in a wild scramble for the door of the museum room, which led amid rose light to the broad stairway, which in turn led eventually to the conservatory, a somber glass enclosure bathed in rose-colored glass illumination, whose own, narrower stairway, stepped in thin slats of pink quartz, led upward, and upward still, to the platform where once a telescope had eyed the heavens—but where now sat the Machine Master’s Irregulator, a squat and wide tube of polished black, topped with an elegant bowl … as if waiting to catch something from the heavens.

  The thing that filled the sky.

  “No!” Ankus-Pel gasped, on seeing the horrid comet that subsumed the delicate pink atmosphere and burned white even now at dawn. At its flanks its twin brethren, sporting lurid tails, streaked the horizon at west and east.

  Ankus-Pel’s colleagues, the Martian Fellow Elect, cowered beside him. Three were still on the stairs, one below having already succumbed to heart failure; another staggered back, failed to find footing, and tumbled down the quartz stairway to lie broken below.

  “We … cannot stop it!” croaked Bal-Mei, whose own streng
th now failed her, after pushing past her younger Fellows with relish to reach the roof.

  “The Machine Master will not fail us!” Ankus-Pel cried, thrusting himself forward to lay his hands upon the sleek Irregulator. “The High Leader himself, who is Mars, will not fail us!” On the platform they noticed the wind now: a howl that seemed to contain within it the wailing of the planet Mars. At all the horizons dust storms were swirling. To the North a huge, intensely red tornado furiously beat its funnel at the ground, while the sky, even in this early morning, began to darken as the comet above them brightened.

  “Activate the machine!” Bal-Mei sobbed. For a moment she found her strength and thrust herself forward to stand at Ankus-Pel’s side, her own wild face mirroring the younger man’s. “Activate it now!”

  Ankus-Pel, half mad with terror, nodded and turned to fumble blindly at the controls set into the side of the Irregulator; as he did so, his eyes wandered upward and then locked on the fiery rock that bore down on them all.

  The Irregulator hummed; its ebony surface vibrated.

  “It’s working! It’s working!” someone cried hopefully.

  To the west and east there was a flash as the sky turned to fire.

  The Irregulator shuddered, then split open, revealing … nothing within.

  “No … !” Bal-Mei shrieked.

  Ankus-Pel looked up to see the Irregulator’s bowl reach to catch and cradle the monstrous thing above—which crushed and drove through it and filled everywhere at once.

  Chapter 24

  This, then, was the fate of Mars:

  The first comet struck the Syrtis Major region, in the vicinity of the Syrtis Retreat, wiping that facility from existence.

  The second comet, slightly larger in diameter at thirty-one kilometers, struck twenty-two minutes later, in the Noachis Terra region, precisely in the central impact bulge of the crater Le Verrier—in effect making a new crater out of an old one. The new one was much larger than the original Le Verrier and threw a monstrous plume (as had the first comet, and as would the third) of dust and rock into the atmosphere; the force of the impact was measurable at five hundred megatons, as if every concussion bomb in Prime Cornelian’s arsenal had gone off at once in the same spot. This explosion was nearly duplicated fourteen minutes later, when the third comet struck west of Olympus Moos, in the dusty plains of Amazonis Planitia. The modest agricultural plantations that had been established in the area ten years before, in an experiment (of modest success) to grow the prized textile cotton, vanished in an instant, as did the historic home of Pastor Jeim, the early Mars settler who became its first poet of note; Jeim had built the house with his own hands (in kit form, from timbers imported from Earth); this curiosity, which had earned its trustees a modest profit each year, was dashed to timber atoms and shot into the atmosphere along with cotton molecules and the aforementioned ton upon ton of rock and dust.

  The rocks, following the law of gravity, went up, and came down, raining destruction on a roughly circular area radiating from the impact point of each comet; this phenomenon contributed to the immediate kill total of each blast by roughly doubling it, since plants can’t run and animals can run but are still subject to fate.

  The dust from the three explosions immediately began to spread into the upper atmosphere, which had been heated by the three blasts; it began to form a thick blanket that would cover Mars for thirty years. This would deprive the surface of the planet sunlight for more than enough time to kill ninety-five percent of the species living on Mars. The surviving five percent would be anything but sentient, mainly underground microbials and a few hearty strains of deepwater fish not in need of light in Mars’s single sea of any depth, Terra Tyrhenna.

  The atmosphere briefly caught fire; but there were worse fires below, and the winds whipped up by this instant global dust storm caused firestorms in the famed old cities of Xanthe Terra (Mutch, Da Vinci, and New Haven, on the shores of the shallow summer community lake Ister Chaos). This was on the second day, when hot winds from the third impact roared past Olympus Mons; by this time it was not the heat but broken electrical lines that sparked the infernos, burning all three cities to ashes and boiling most of the lake at Ister Chaos away. Similar scenarios played themselves out around the planet; much of the Northern Ice Cap melted to steam from these blazes, and the Southern Cap, of mostly carbon dioxide, rose into cauldrons of dry ice fog.

  From space, the three wounds, which could be seen before thickening dust covered the planet in a woolly red cover, were impressive and frightening to behold: dragged black gaping holes, craters from hell. Those who saw them were not altogether loath to the inevitability of their concealment. They were obscene.

  This was only the beginning, of course. Mars, for all intents and purposes, was dead to the Solar System; when its skies finally cleared in thirty years, the atmosphere would be a mess, and the dust that had killed the planet by hanging in the air would continue to do so by falling to the ground. The planet’s atmosphere, climate, weather, and surface would be utterly alien to what it had been before.

  Without technology, it would take thousands of years for Mars to restore itself. Even with technology, it would take a hundred.

  Pynthas Rei, within the caldera of Olympus Mons when the third comet burned the sky overhead, felt its impact when it struck in Amazonia Planitia. The caldera floor beneath him rumbled, and when he made the climb up the caldera’s west wall, he beheld Comet Three’s mushroom cloud still rising. It boiled up and into itself, climbing impossibly high, right into the day’s low clouds that had settled on the region. The clouds themselves seemed to shake a moment later, and then the top of the mushroom spread out even as it continued to ascend.

  The ground to the west below the huge volcano was black and jumbled at the impact site; to either side of it, incongruously, the fields of Amazonia Planitia looked as yet untouched and faintly fertile as always.

  And then there was another rumble beneath Pynthas Rei.

  Whimpering in terror, Pynthas scrambled down the caldera wall to the pitted floor even as a third tremble rolled through Olympus Mons. Eyes goggling, he looked back at where he had just been: the walls were crumbling, falling outward, and disappearing.

  A large convulsion seized the volcano’s cap, and a sound like thunder roared beneath Pynthas Rei.

  Overcome with terror, Pynthas retreated to his small camp on the caldera’s floor. Within the tent were provisions and the single other item he had brought: the last surviving keepsake from his mother, a delicate ceramic bear from earth. Its cheap brown paint had long since flaked away, as had the black spots that had served as eyes; there was a bit of the red color that had adorned the bear’s lips still remaining, making the toy appear clown-like.

  Pynthas clutched the bear to himself and rushed out of the tent as yet another tremor went through the caldera; this rolled into a continuing quake accompanied by an ear-splitting roar.

  Pynthas fell; shouting with fear, he witnessed the ground to his right splitting, heaving up and away as a growing crack appeared.

  The bear was crushed under him as Pynthas was thrown down again; he scrambled away from the widening breach, his attention momentarily drawn to the pieces of the toy; but his sob was choked off by another, greater upheaval and worsening roar. The center of the caldera burst wide open, letting a jet of steam out which shot into the sky; it was followed, moments later, by a blurt of lava from its lip—

  After thousands of years of dormancy, Olympus Mons was erupting! His toy bear forgotten, back pressed against the rock wall of the caldera, Pynthas Rei stared in wonder even as the deafening rumble that signaled his imminent destruction built and built beneath him, as the long-dead giant prepared to burst brightly into life, even as its planet died.

  The roar built and built, the tremble beneath his feet shaking his body even as it drove him deaf, and yet Pynthas Rei’s eyes were filled with joyful tears as he looked into the hiss of steam that precluded the coming explosion.
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  For he was a little boy again, not more than three, and in his mother’s arms for the last time. They had traveled all day on a cheap transport pass (children under six free); it was the first time she had ever taken him anywhere, the first time she had ever taken a day off from her job in the Lowell City factory she worked in. He was with other children who didn’t like him all day, and at night, when she came for him, she was already falling asleep on her feet. She sometimes brought him presents, the little ceramic bears she painted, but there was never time for trips and games.

  But today they were together! And on a trip! And what a trip—for as the transport stopped and the bored driver opened the doors, his mother stepped off and pointed, and Pynthas had his first view of the massive cone of Olympus Mons, its head wreathed in a cloud like a crown that day, its wonderful monstrous form like nothing else he had ever seen.

  “Do you see, Pynthas? Do you see?” she had said, cradling him. “It’s the biggest volcano in the whole Solar System! There isn’t a bigger one on any of the worlds!”

  And he had watched with fascination, and they had had Earth-style ice cream at a stand near the transport, and when they were on the bus going home, he fell asleep on her lap, his head nuzzled into her breast, smelling her perfume and scent …

  “Mother!” Pynthas Rei sobbed, holding his hands out as Olympus Mons below him gave up its secret, and vaporized the caldera and everything on it in a titanic explosion rivaling, for a moment, the strike of the comet to the west.

  Searching, as per his orders, in low-flying shuttle transports north of Noachis Terra, General Ramsden decided to set his lead craft and the two others under his command down when the second comet struck.

  Twenty minutes later the folly of this strategy was elucidated when falling boulders began to rain down on the area; even though they had found a small shuttle airport hangar in the city of Denning to hide in, one of the craft was crushed when a rock the size of the shuttle itself found its way through the roof of the hangar and into the craft.