by Paula Guran
Mary glanced across at Charlie, who shrugged his shoulders. "You introduced yourself, held out your hand and when I shook it, the stillness filled me up entirely and we shone then, Mary, you and I, like a shooting star. 'Here she is,' you called quietly downstairs. And then you leaped up, Charlie, nimble as you please, to say hello."
"And the watch hand?" he asked.
"My grandfather's watch was there on the bureau. You fiddled about with it for a bit, then asked me to hold out my arm. You told me not to look and that it would feel a bit like a bee sting. When it was done, you said that it would remind me to wait for you. To wait for my new life. And I've been waiting ever since."
Charlie began polishing the cocktail shakers, even though they were already clean. "And now that we're back, what is it you want?"
Freya looked surprised. "To come with you, of course."
The shaker clattered to the floor. "We're not taking applications, here! This is a two-man gig."
"But I've been waiting my whole life. It's already happened, don't you see? My past, your future, it must all lead to now. You talk about taking people's time, but I've given all my time just waiting, knowing you'd come back."
Mary turned toward the window, unable to look at Freya's hopeful face. Geraldine's guests were scattered across the lawn in little groups; some dancing, others with their arms, or fins or wings, wrapped around one another singing. They were all having the night of their lives, in exchange for just a little of their time.
"You know, Charlie and I have traveled an awful lot and seen some amazing things. This is a magical decade to be living through. You should be out there enjoying it, not wanting to come along with the two of us." She turned to face Freya, who was twisting her hands anxiously. "Listen to that wonderful jazz. Doesn't that make you want to forget everything and just be?"
In a shadowy corner of the garden, the band played, their instruments now part of them. The fat bellied bassist was the double bass, the trumpeter's trumpet sprouted from his lips. Sharkey Malone, of course, was still Sharkey Malone, but with every gravelly note he sang, a bronze honey-bee flew from his lips and there was just a glimpse of the piano keys that had taken the place of his teeth. "When I hear it, it makes me think of timeless things, like I can see into forever. I'm not like them." She looked mischievously at Charlie. "And I'll prove it. I'll have one of your special drinks, please. Gin," she stated, before Charlie could ask.
Mary sighed, relieved, then smiled at Charlie, who was making a double for Freya. This would fix the whole issue once and for all. A drink, a transformation, a blissful forgetting would leave them in the clear. No matter what Freya said, she didn't belong with them.
"One more question. What do you do with the time that you take back?"
"When we know that," said Charlie "it'll be time to go home."
Freya lifted the tiny glass, the violet liquid shining. "To tomorrow," she said, then downed it in one shot. She glided outside, where she was joined by a swarm of dragonflies, their wings shimmering Lalique-green and plum, which had previously been a rather prim man in a pinstripe suit.
"So that's that, then," said Charlie. "I think we better—"
"Go while we have the chance?"
"Couldn't have said it better, old girl."
Mary and Charlie whisked around the room, collecting bottles and glasses and packing them into the black bag. She snapped the case shut and picked it up as Charlie climbed up onto her shoulder.
They went out onto the lawn, for their traditional last walk-through of a party. To their left the plump woman who had become a chrome goddess lay sleeping, like a fallen statue. The dragonflies buzzed about in a man-shape, hovering around the amber lights. And the band played on, a sad, sweet dirge.
Ain't no sun, my autumn girl
Ain't no moon or rain
Got an empty home, an empty heart
Since the sunrise stole you away . . .
"Well, bugger me . . . "
"Charlie! Language."
On their right was a giant willow tree; at its base stood Freya, her eyes dark and sparkling.
Mary stared, her eyes wide. "You've not changed one bit. And that was a double dose. How?"
"I told you, I'm not like them. I'm all still inside. Only after I had that drink, this happened."
Mary and Charlie looked down at Freya's wrist. The watch hand was moving, now, ticking away second by second. They reached out and rested their forefingers gently over it. Freya's time pulsed through them and it felt like exaltation.
Mary clasped her hand. "Time is indeed the fabulous monster in us all. The difference is in what you do with it. Best you do come along with us, after all."
They set out for the jetty, stretching out across the darkened river that held the night reflected.
On the shore sat Geraldine, propped against a fig tree and snoring softly. Her dark locks lifted gently in the breeze, rippling and shaking as they parted to reveal glossy black feathers. With a fierce beating of wings, the sky was filled with ravens from her hair.
Freya bent to kiss her sleeping sister, then followed her new companions waiting on the jetty. Mary sat on the edge, Charlie still on her shoulder.
"What time does the clock have, Charlie?"
He swung from her shoulder and began to climb down her back, deftly unclasping the square silver buttons that ran the length of her spine. As he undid the last one, the doors of her back opened wide. She heard Freya gasp as she looked inside and wondered what it must be like to see it for the first time; a giant hourglass in the center, surrounded by carefully hung fob watches, alarm clocks, chronographs, and wristwatches, with a stone sundial sitting at her left hip. They softly ticked and swung, the silvery river of time swirling and twisting around them and shivering the sand in the hourglass.
"Twenty-one July 1969, 2:56 a.m." He shut the doors, then gave Mary a wink before hopping into the bag.
"Now that does feel like a celebration," Freya said.
"You just wait," replied Mary.
The air around them quivered and flowed as they walked toward the end of the jetty . . .
THE LOST CANAL
Michael Moorcock
1
Martian Manhunt
Mac Stone was in trouble. He heard the steady slap-slap-slap of the P140 auto-Bannings and knew they'd licked the atmosphere problem. That gadget could now find a man, stun him, or kill him according to whatever orders had come from Terra. If necessary, the bionic "wombots" it carried could follow him into space. The things worked by popping in and out of regular space the way you bunch up a piece of cloth and stick a needle through it to save time and energy. Human physiology couldn't stand those instant translations—in and out, in and out through the cosmic "folds"—but the wombot wasn't human; it moved swiftly and easily in that environment. Flying at cruising speed for regular space-time, the wombot could cross a million miles as if they were a hundred. The thing was a terrible weapon, outlawed on every solar colony, packing several features into one— surveillance, manhunter, ordnance. If Mac were unlucky, they'd just use it to stun him. So they could take their time with him back at RamRam City.
Why do they want me this bad? He was baffled.
They had him pinned down. In all directions lay the low lichen-covered Martian hills: ochre, brown, and a thousand shades of yellow-gray almost as far as he could see. You couldn't hide in lichen. Not unless you could afford a mirror suit. Beyond the hills were the mountains, each taller than Everest, almost entirely unexplored. That was where he was heading before a wombot scented heat from his monoflier and took it out in a second. Four days after that, they hit his camp with a hard flitterbug and almost finished him off. Nights got colder as the East wind blew. Rust-red dust swept in from the desert, threatening his lungs. It whispered against his day-suit like the voices of the dead.
If they didn't kill him, autumn would.
Mac plucked his last thin jane from his lips and pinched off the lit end. He'd smoke it later. I
f there was any "later." The IMF had evidently gotten themselves some of the new bloodhound wombots, so compact and powerful they could carry a body to Phobos and back. Creepy little things, not much bigger than an adult salmon. They made him feel sick. He still hoped he might pick the site of his last fight. He had only had two full charges left in his reliable old Banning-6 pistol. After that, he had a knife in his boot and some knucks in his pocket. And then his bare hands and his teeth.
They had called Stone a wild animal back on Mercury and they were right. The Callisto slave-masters had made him into one after they pulled him from a sinking lavasub. He'd been searching for the fabled energy crowns of the J'ja. The rebel royal priests had been planning to blast Spank City to fragments before the IMF found the secret of their fire boats and quite literally stopped them cold, freezing them in their tracks, sending the survivors out to Panic, the asteroid that liked to call herself a ship. But the J'ja had hidden their crowns first.
So long ago. He'd been in some tough spots and survived, but this time it seemed like he'd run out of lives and luck.
You didn't get much cover in one of the old flume holes. They'd been dug when some crazy twenty-second century Terran wildcat miners thought they could cut into the crust and tap the planet's plasma. They believed there were rivers of molten gold down there. They claimed that they heard them at night when they slept curled within the cones. Someone had fallen into a particularly deep one and sworn he had seen molten platinum running under his feet. Poor devils. They'd spent too long trying to make sense of the star-crowded sky. Recently, he'd heard that the inverted cones were used by hibernating ock-crocks. Mac hoped he wasn't waking anything up down there. He doubted the theory and did his best not to think about it, to keep out of sight and to drop his body temperature as much as he dared, release a few dead fuel pods and hope that the big Banning bloodbees would mistake him for an old wreck and its dead pilot and pass him by.
"You only need fear the bees if you've broken the law." That familiar phrase was used to justify every encroachment on citizens' liberty. Almost all activities were semi-criminal these days. Mars needed cheap human workers. Keep education as close as possible to zero. The prisons were their best resource. Industrial ecology created its own inevitable logic.
Sometimes you escaped the prisons and slipped back into RamRam City, where you could live relatively well if you knew how to look after yourself. Sometimes they just let you stay there until they had a reason to bring you in or get rid of you.
And that's what they appeared to be doing now.
Slap-slap-slap.
Why were they spending so much money to catch him? He knew what those machines cost. Even captured, he wasn't worth a single wombot.
Wings fluttering, big teeth grinding, the flier was coming over the horizon, and, by the way it hovered and turned in the thin air, Mac's trick hadn't fooled it at all. Good handling. He admired the skill. Private. Not IMF at all. One guy piloting. One handling the ordnance. Or maybe one really good hunter doing both. He reached to slide off the pistol's safety. Looked like he was going down fighting. He wondered if he could hit the pilot first.
Stone was a Martian born in the shadow of Low-Canal's massive watertanks. The district had never really been a canal. It had been named by early explorers trying to make sense of the long, straight indentations, now believed to be the foundations of a Martian city. But it was where most of AquaCorps's water was kept. Water was expensive and had to be shipped in from Venus. Sometimes there would be a leakage, and, with kids like him, he could collect almost a cup before the alarms went. His mother lived however she could in the district. His father had been a space ape on the wild Jupiter runs, carbon rods rotting and twisting as they pulled pure uranium from the Ki Sea. He'd probably died when the red spot erupted, taking twenty u-tankers with it.
When he was seven, his ma sold Mac to a mining company looking for kids small enough to fit into the midget tunnelers working larger asteroids and moons able to support a human being for a year or so before they died. His mother had known that "indentured" was another word for death sentence. She knew that he was doomed to breathe modified methane until his lungs and all his other organs and functions gave out.
Only Mac hadn't died. He'd stolen air and survived and risen, by virtue of his uninhibited savagery, in what passed for Ganymedan society. Kru miners made him a heroic legend. They betrothed him to their daughters.
Stone was back on Mars and planning to ship out for Terra when his mother sent word that she wanted to tell him something. He'd gone to Tank Town with the intention of killing her. When he saw her, the anger went out of him. She was a lonely old woman lacking status or family. He'd only be doing her a favor if he finished her off. So he let it go. And realized that she'd been holding her breath as he held his, and he turned and laughed that deep slow purr she knew from his father. This made her note his tobacco-colored skin, now seamed like well-used leather, and she wept to read in his face all the torments he had endured since she'd sold him. So he had let her die believing a lie, that they enjoyed a reconciliation What he said or thought didn't mean much to the Lord she believed in.
After that, he'd started stealing jewels with a vengeance. Good ones. Big ones. He'd done very well. Hitting the mining trains. Fencing them back through Earth. Generous, like most thieves of his kind, and therefore much liked by the Low-Canal folk who protected him, he'd done well. He was one of their own, accepted as a Martian hero with stories told about him as V-dramas. Only two people had made it out of the Tanks to become famous on the V. Mac Stone was one, and Yily Chen, the little Martian girl he'd played hide-and-go-seek with as a kid, was the other. Yily now operated from Earth, mostly doing jobs the corps didn't want anyone to associate directly with them. Her likeness had never been published. He remembered her for her lithe, brown body, her golden eyes. He'd loved her then. He couldn't really imagine what she looked like now. No doubt she'd become some hard-faced mother superior, pious and judgmental, like most tankers who grew up staying within the law, such as it was. She had put Tank Town behind her. He'd elected to stay. But he'd been sold out once again, this time to the Brothers of the Fiery Mount, whoever they were. They put him back to work on Ganymede with no idea he had family there.
Then some war broke out on Terra for a while. It couldn't have come at a better time. It destroyed the old cartels and opened the planet up to real trade. And everyone wanted to rearm of course.
By the third month of Stone's return, his clan, riding a wave of similar revolutions through the colonies, had conquered a significant number of exec towers and looted a museum for a heliograph system they'd been able to copy. Communications. Codes. Bribes. Clever strategy. Guerilla tactics. By the sixth month, as they prepared for the long tomorrow, they had won the moon and were doing business with four of the richest nations of Terra and New Japan.
Meanwhile, over at the freshly built Martian Scaling Station, the "black jump" was opening up the larger universe hidden in the folds of space-time through which the wombots traveled. They'd begun to realize that they were part of a denser, mostly invisible cosmos. Until recently, the "cosmic fog" had obscured so much from the astronomers. The discovery brought about new power shifts and unexpected alliances. With the right start, they said, some of those worlds could be reached in days! Now it didn't matter if Terra was dying. Was that really the prevailing logic?
Mac knew that he and the human race were at some sort of crossroads, poised at last on their way to the stars. They might find an unbeatable enemy out there. Or beatable enemies. Or they could learn to negotiate. The game Mac knew best wasn't necessarily the best game. For now, however, he needed capital to play with the big guys, and he was never going to get that kind of money in one piece. Not while he remained an outworld Martian wolfshead. He knew enough about those odds. He knew who the men were who owned the worlds. All of which was to his advantage. His equal share of the Ganymede profits wasn't large enough and he didn't like his public profile
getting bigger. He'd made his ex-brother-in-law boss and quietly returned to Mars and his old trade. He—or really the pseudonym he'd chosen—developed a serious reputation. He was credited with any number of unsolved cases. No one knew what to expect from him. Few knew his face or his real name. A fist diamond had paid to have every mugshot and most records wiped. He began to build his pile. The first thing he needed was a good ship of his own. He went into water brokerage. He had a half share in an atmosphere factory. He was earning that ship when he'd been, he assumed, betrayed. He wondered if that had anything to do with the sneaky little Venusian lep who had come to see him with a suspicious offer a week or two before his arrest.
To his surprise, because it was a special private prison, they took him straight to Tarpauling Hill. Or meant to. Escaping his escort had not been difficult. Escaping a planet was going to be harder.
This was his eighth Martian day on the run. There were no real maps of the hinterland. He knew the Interplanetary Military Force. They let their big robot Bannings loose if they thought that someone was hiding in an area. He could have stayed in RamRam City, hidden in the tanks, but it would get expensive in terms of human lives. He'd had to lead them into wild, unpopulated country or they might have killed half Low-Canal's population. Out to the wide valleys and high mountains of the Monogreanimi, where, it was said, the old high queens of Mars still dreamed in the deep ice.
Mac was trying to find one of the legendary "blow holes," sunk by Mars's last race, who had been seeking air for the shelters in which they'd taken refuge from the Long Rain, the incessant meteor storms pulverizing the planet. The falling meteors had destroyed almost every sign of the dozen or so major civilizations who had once ruled a Mars almost as lush as Venus.
Mac hated Venus. He hated her fecundity as well as her unpredictable gas storms, which regularly wiped out hundreds. Terran Venusians went crazy just to survive the extremes. He hated native Venusians, the smelly little green people nicknamed leprechauns by Terrans. He hated Terrans, too. And he really hated Mercury. Mars, he could not help loving. He loved her vast, tranquil deserts, her hills and high wild mountains where nothing breathed. Once he'd longed to make her self-sustaining again. He'd dreamed of bringing in enough water to make her bloom as she had in the days when the few surviving pictograms and engravings had been created. When she still had seas. There were other legends of how she had been, but these could all be traced back to myths created in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries.
