Lin Carter - The Man Who Loved Mars

by Lin Carter

  “A Mars shuffle,” I supplied the term. I felt a little numb. The Doc had, in fact, thought of everything. There was no real excuse I could find for backing out of this … not that I wanted to, I told myself fiercely … or did I? I wanted to be alone, to examine my feelings, but there was no time for that, no leisure to contemplate the alternatives or count the chances against failure. The Doctor wanted to leave within the hour: it was now or never. And I knew this was my last chance. My only chance. That one-in-a-billion chance I had dreamed about all these past two years.

  Perhaps the old man took my lapse into brooding silence for suspicion. Anyway, he spoke up in that soothing voice of his that could have made his fortune in the diplomatic corps.

  “You needn’t be afraid that I have brought any unseen partners in to finance this expedition, my friend. My retirement pension is very adequate to one of my spartan requirements. And I have recorded a few textbooks in my time that bring in a surprising royalty twice each year. We coached the actor all week long in your habits and drinking tastes; he was eager to get work, and he was not expensive. After a week or ten days he will pack up and go to Milan, and there he will drop out of sight and resume his own identity. There is a registered package for him at the express office in Milan, but he can not pick it up until the seventeenth of the month. Oh, they will know you have eluded them but not right away. We will have vanished into the hinterlands of Mars long before the police realize you cannot be found: trust me, my friend. I have as much to lose, should we fail in this endeavor, as do you.”

  I chewed it over, and it tasted good. But still…

  “Your actor looks good, damn good, I’ll admit. He would fool the average storekeeper or gondola jockey, who knows me enough to say buon giorno. But he isn’t good enough to fool someone who sees and talks to me every day, and he’ll run a gauntlet of plenty of those: the kid that bring me my New York Times-Post-News every morning, the old woman in the market who sells me rolls and sausage, my landlady���or the waiter who serves me my brandy every afternoon���”

  “Probably not; but he won’t have to. This evening you are going to develop a terrible toothache. You will bandage your jaw and growl curtly to your landlady and keep to your bed very much of the time: the street boy that brings you your newsfax will run your errands for you and will innocently spread the word of your discomforture. Really, Cn. Tengren, you must trust me. I have anticipated everything.”

  “Not quite. There are a few mementos I would rather not be parted from and at least one item which I will need on Mars���”

  I broke off as he smiled again that saintly, beaming smile and dipped into the attache case to bring out precisely those of my few belongings I would not want to have left behind. They were nothing much, a battered Everyman copy of Dowson, an old pre-Troubles Loeb edition of Quintus Smyrnaeus, and the antique Tauchnitz Shakespeare 1 had carried everywhere since school. I fingered the things absently, the depth photo of my mother and father and brother, and the little portrait-bust of Yakla that the old sorcerer had delicately carved out of slidar ivory for me that tenday we hid from the CA skimmers in the ruins of Ygnarh.

  And the crown itself, of course.

  I did not unwrap it from its place in the folds of the million-year-old yonka. A Jamad Tengru does not lay bare the Sacred Things before the eyes of Outworlders. But my fingertips knew the curves of the old, worn iron hoops and the settings of the nine-sided thought crystals.

  To think that I might wear it once again in the presence of the People … to hear the hill-shaking shout of the hai-yaa … to lead again the war horde against the Hated Ones … and perhaps this time, to lead it to victory! If I said yes.

  So I said yes.

  While the Doctor settled his bill and checked out and Bolgov collected their luggage and got it into the freight shaft, the girl and I took the lift to the roof. Thank God for the age of automation: the lift was self-operationed and the only attendant on the parking roof was a camera eye. The girl blocked its view of me as we emerged into the open.

  The sky was plum-purple by this time: dull, opaque, and dusty, like the bloom of a grape. We walked swiftly down the ranks of parked cars, not speaking to each other. The air was thick with the smell of sunbaked tar and lubricating oil, hot metal and rubber. Over all was the stink of Venice itself, a vast cacophony of stenches, wherein the odors of rotting garbage, stagnant water, and floating sewage dominated.

  The first stars were out. They shone dully and looked neither convincing nor real. They were more like tarnished asterisks of foil pinned to the purple curtains of the creche play or the dusty decorations on the domed ceiling of a run-down dance hall. Under this imitation sky we crossed the rooftop and found the Doctor’s Lanzetti. Within a minute or two I was safely tucked away in the back seat, out of range of observation, with the rear windows opaqued. The luggage went thumping into the rear, and in a bit my companions climbed in, sealing the doors. The Doctor tuned in on Traffic Central, climbed steeply, and merged with the pattern. He chose a sideline which meandered across the country at five thousand feet in the general direction of Naples, but once the traffic had thinned out, he edged into a local level and unobtrusively followed a northerly route for a while, until he hit the turnoff for Strato 104. From then on we could relax, but he was careful to keep the car well within the speed and altitude limit. It would not have been wise to attract any attention from the traffic monitors, who spot-checked their radar from time to time.

  We climbed at a leisurely rate until we were well over Europe. I switched on my seat scope and watched Switzerland go past beneath us and then Germany. You could see the lights of Munich and Frankfurt even from this height, but New Berlin was lost in a haze of pollution. Something very much like tears stung my eyes, and 1 glared them back stubbornly. This would probably be the last time in my life I would see the country of my birth. I had not gone home even in my years of wandering, for after my trial it had been subtly conveyed to me that Germany would not welcome me even as a tourist. I grinned wryly, remembering: a Berliner had held the coordinator’s chair of the Associated Nations the year of my Martian crusade or rebellion or whatever it was. The fact that I, the archtraitor, shared the same homeland had been the ruin of his political ambitions���had, in fact, set his own party back to a very secondary place in the elections. My homeland nursed old grudges for a long time; if I had gone home, there would have been an unfortunate “accident.”

  The Doc chose the most commonly traveled tourist lane to the Moon but turned off into a side route a couple of hours later, as we neared our goal. I was dozing and missed it, but he followed the route around to the dark side, and very near the far terminator we decelerated with a bumb-bump that woke me. I shifted the seat scope to see the old Icarus, a black mass blotting out the stars, invisible except for its orbit lights. There was no mistaking the lumpy profile of an Icarus, with its control blister just forward of the center line, lending it a resemblance to a hunchbacked dolphin. We matched orbits; the cargo hold opened, and we berthed in the nearest of the twin cradles, broke seal when the doors were tight again, and climbed stiffly out.

  The Doc was affability itself, now that a lot of the danger was over.

  “Now, my young friend, we all have our several duties except for yourself, so permit me to escort you to your cabin and forgive me if I leave you there to your own devices. Have you dined?” I told him that I had not; I had not been aware of my emptiness until his remark reminded me. “Very well! You will find an autochef in your room and please make yourself at home. It will be some time before we break orbit���about an hour before Earthrise���so if you retire before then, please remember to strap yourself in your bunk. We will all have breakfast together in the morning, so until then …”

  The cabin was smaller than was comfortable, but at least it had its own fresher cubicle, and the autochef produced a pretty good steak and surprised me with its Argentine coffee. I packed away my few effects in the wall ca
binet, wondering what I was going to do for a change of clothes. But my host had anticipated this, and I found clean linen in my size and a couple of pairs of the zippered one-piece overalls spacemen call airsuit liners. I bathed, dined, and turned in, strapping the safety harness down, and turned off the lights. An hour before we edged around the Moon beyond the daylight terminator, I would be on my way to Mars.

  It was hard for me to believe it was all coming true. I drifted into sleep, thinking about it, and my last coherent thought was a nagging twinge of guilt. For I knew that, despite what the Doctor thought, Ilionis was only a fairy tale. There was no lost Treasure City, and there was no lost treasure. This I knew beyond all doubt or question … I, who knew more of Mars and of its people than any other man of my world could ever know. This truth I could keep to myself for a while, but eventually it would come out, when we reached the site and found nothing there but eroded gullies full of gritty sand.

  And when we got that far, I would be in very serious trouble.

  3. Planetfall

  There is no experience in life duller and more tedious than a space trip, particularly one of any real duration. By comparison, a strato flight from anywhere to anywhere is diverting, because at least you have clouds and a landscape below to look at; and an old-fashioned ocean voyage must have been heavenly, back in the days when they still used surface vessels.

  But in space there simply is nothing at all to look at, which is why spacecraft are made without portholes or windows. Nothing lies beyond the hull fabric save dead black vacuum. There are lots of stars, but they all look alike and after your first glimpse of the “star-gemmed immensitudes” (as the poet calls them), you have seen everything there is. There is no variety in duplicating the experience.

  The only parts of a space trip that afford the traveler anything at all in the way of scenic effects are departure and arrival. Generally, both are conducted in the vicinity of one moon or another, so you have the moonscape to look at and the more interesting planetscape beyond. But between the beginning and the end of your trip, there is nothing at all but dreary shipboard routine and absolute tedium. The drone and vibration of the drive itself are pleasurable in a way, but you only have them during acceleration and deceleration, and in between there is empty silence, punctuated by the whishing of the air ducts and the intermittent chime of the Meteor Proximity Alarm. God, you even begin to hunger for the minor excitement of the MPA after a while!

  A Luna-Mars flight is tedium carried to the nth. degree, especially when you make crossover in anything less luxurious than a Prometheus-class liner. The spacelines know how to cope with the boredom and provide everything from stereo views of Aristarchus at Earthrise, the Rings during a four-moon crossing, and other scenic spectaculars, to indoor sports, organized games, amateur theatricals, and a library of taped drama and variety shows.

  Our four-man expedition, of course, had none of these diversions. We didn’t even talk much among ourselves, although the Doctor made a heroic try at maintaining Old World geniality during dinner and strove to win a reputation as a brilliant conversationalist. The girl, Ilsa, had nothing to say to me, and as for my friend Konstantin, he had nothing to say to anybody.

  But all spacecraft keep a library by Mandate law, if only to prevent people from going crazy during a long crossover. The Antoine d’Eauville had one that was quite decent, considering its quite natural preponderance of scholarly journals and texts (it was, after all, a museum boat). I got the impression that the craft was named after either the museum’s founder or one of its more generous patrons, but no one ever enlightened me on the subject, so I never learned which.

  I found enough to read to occupy most of my time, although outside of the voluminous scientific literature the general run of reading material was limited to turn-of-the-century European novelists and playwrights, with an unexpected sprinkling of midcentury writers from the South American states, mostly new to me. I had read no Borges at all since school and happening upon his inimitable genius was most enthralling. But the poets were almost entire* ly new discoveries. I had read, or looked into, a few of the Argentines���Ascasubi, Lugones, Almafuerte���but the others���such as a now-forgotten poet, once enormously popular, named Carriego���were all unknowns. Among them was Vazquez, the Nobel-prize winner, who became the most exciting of my new finds.

  With nothing else to do in the endless monotony, I read virtually all day long. From time to time I would have to switch the machine off for no other reason than that it was overheating. Luckily, no one else aboard had my leisure, so I had the book tapes all to myself. The girl, I think, had a portable reader in her cabin; the Doctor was busy with a detailed redaction of the thought record; I don’t know what Bolgov did���perhaps just sprawled on his bunk all day, glaring at the ceiling and sweating greasily���and the ship, of course, navigated itself.

  In this strange way we traversed the distance between Luna and Mars, hardly seeing or speaking to each other except at meals. And I passed the monotony of transit gaining a modest education in obsolete European novelists and obscure South American poets. And without the least trouble or contact with a Mandate scout.

  Mars became a big, mottled orange with spots of permafrost marking its poles. The Doctor expanded on his plans. It would have been begging for trouble, had he done the usual thing and moored the d’Eauville in a parking orbit and taken either the gig or the Lanzetti down. For surely the Earthside cops would have reconstructed what had happened and beamed an alert to their CA colleagues at Deimos Terminal. A quick scout would have spotted the d’Eauville without trouble and cut off the Doctor’s escape route by simply sitting him out.

  So he planned on something a trifle more risky, and that was to set the spacecraft down on the surface. Now an Icarus is about as small and light a craft as can safely be used for a crossover, but it’s still cumbersome and tricky and fragile enough to make planetfall dangerous. The safety margin, however, got a boost from the fact that the gravity field of Mars is skimpy at best and the museum had already modified the d’Eauville’s design to take an outsized and high-powered drive engine for just such a purpose. Anyway, the Doctor was certain the computer could set her down on her tail in the flats west of the Drylands without blowing a venturi or springing a seam. I hoped he was right.

  Once a safe planetfall was accomplished, the CA cops simply had no way of finding us, unless they had thirty times the manpower and flying strength they had had when I was last here. Because they could only locate the d’Eauville if they made an aerial search of the entire planetary surface, acre by acre. Which was a logistic impossibility.

  Ibe trouble with making planetfall in the westernmost Drylands was that we would have to do an awful lot of surface travel after landing. But that could not be helped: it would be like waving red flags and yelling “Look at me!” to go any closer to a major colony like Laestrygonum. And we needed a flat space with solid bedrock to set down on.

  We didn’t dare risk running so much as a single orbit, since we wanted to come down with the least possible chance of being sighted en route. In mid-crossover Bolgov had carefully programed the d’Eauville’s piloting and navigational computer to match intrinsics with the planet upon approach, so that the craft could segue smoothly from its original flightpath directly into a landing pattern without a break. It was a masterly job, and it went off without a hitch.

  We came down in a slow glide, at an elongated angle to make maximum use of the thin atmosphere as a cushion to slow us down, since we didn’t wish to run the risk of using the ordinary spiral braking orbit. A fast planetfall was of the essence, since every single second of time between the moment we broke out of deep space and the moment we hit topsoil we were in constant danger of being noticed on somebody’s radar.

  So we came in high up in the northern hemisphere over Arcadia and rode her down across Orcus at a shallow angle that tightened into a fish-hook arc. The glide path took us curving across the midregions of the
Mare Sirenum in the direction of Aonius Sinus, with our terminus calculated just west of central Phaethontis.

  The fabric began heating up till the hull would soon be a dull cherry-red. The Sirenum went hissing by beneath us in a rusty-purplish blur, much too hazy for us to make out anything but the largest craters. It was a shame we were going too fast to see the landscape, because this was very historic country. The area we were passing over had been the first chunk of local real estate that we Earthmen had ever gotten a close-up look at, even if it had only been a passing glance. I refer to the history-making Mariner IV fly-by, way back in 1965. The tiny, unmanned craft had skimmed across this same part of the Sirenum with all cameras whirring.

  The only major canal that traverses the western half of Phaethontis is called the Thermodon. The Doc had hoped to be able to set the d’Eauville down near the west bank of the Thermodon, because the craft had been spray-enameled a dark mottled pattern and would blend with the colors of the canal, reducing the risk of a visual sighting. Coming out of our glide path for a taildown was a tricky bit of maneuvering, but the gyros were up to it, and we sat down, shaken by racking shudders that made the fabric screech and the structure groan. But we made it. The jets died with a cough, the craft trembled, then sat still. And then we all began to breathe again …

  We had made it and in one piece.

  “My compliments to the museum staff, Doc,” I said in the unexpected silence. “Not many ships could live through a planetfall that tough.”

  “Thank you, my boy, but I believe the credit belongs to the Rolls-Royce people. They built good craft in those days …”

  We unstrapped, levered ourselves out of the pressure chairs, which deflated with a piercing whistle, and began taking off our emergency suits and putting on the lightweight thermal suits we would need for Mars itself.