John leaned over his metal stand and jotted down his last notes for the homestead survey. The map for the little offshoot of Acidalia Colles Gully that stretched out below him was filling out nicely, too. It had taken more than a year to get around to properly surveying his land, but there was nothing to be done about that: more than three hundred other homesteaders all needed their land surveyed as well. As they say, a cobbler’s child wears worn shoes.
He looked down from the dry hilltop into the Acidalia Colles Gully. A dense carpet of red creeper marked where the channel stayed damp through the Martian spring and was only now drying in the late northern summer. Plump succulents dotted the hillsides like spiky orange pots, and dry red scrub bush clung to the rocky soil above the valley. For the two months of spring flood season, the desert of Mars blossomed like nothing on Earth, a riot of colors unseen when the plants lay dormant during the other twenty-one Mars months. Like other Mars pioneers whose homesteads included areas where water flows, John’s homestead claim was a quarter-section, 160 acres; if a claim was completely arid, a half-section, 320 acres. All along the center of the homestead, many-legged native cattle—More like big-eyed elephant-octopus things, his brother had once remarked—munched the plants that most folks found distasteful, stripping leaves from stems with their half-dozen snout-tentacles. Good thing people found the cattle and their little Mars-chicken relatives more to their liking, or the pioneers would have expired from starvation long ago.
John stepped back from his equipment and stood straight. The land was bathed in pink afternoon light shed by a tiny sun set in a sky so blue it was almost purple. Just out of sight, a mile beyond Jacob’s Mesa (so named in remembrance of his father), lay the ruins of an abandoned Martian trading-post: his town, John’s Town, well within the boundaries of his quarter-section claim. Burrowed into the side of the mesa huddled the little Martian cottage John called home during the brutal Martian winter and spring, and where he would remain through the summer and hereafter. He felt like smiling.
Son, said his father, you’ve finally found your place. It’s good.
Yes, sir, he replied. I love this land. Reminds me of home, only more remote from troubles.
Nothing like home, then, said his father.
I guess not, except for how you can be alone.
“John Mulberry,” called the intruder, whose face was still half-covered with the bandana most folks wore to block the dust from nose and mouth, and whose head bore a heavy wool hat. John could tell that it was Lucius McCrady by the heavy denim coveralls the man’s wife had mended a dozen times with green thread. Lucius wore a gun-belt. From the shape of the hammer and cylinder, John figured the holster held an old Remington percussion revolver. That was different.
John frowned and crossed his arms. It wasn’t like Lucius to bear a weapon, even out here in the wilds where one might encounter a pack of little land-squid. Their sting wasn’t much of a threat to a man wearing boots and warm clothing. John wore his father’s Indian War guns since last winter, when the Company’s enforcers had started getting rough. Each night, he cleaned and oiled the pair of Colt Army Model 1873 .45-caliber revolvers against the omnipresent red and black dusts of Mars.
Lucius was clearly spooked—probably got himself in trouble with the subversive talk he was spreading among the homesteaders, miners, and port-workers. He and Martina were decent people; they had braved the rimey sandstorms of January to bring John warm beans and Mars-chicken after John’s brother Billy died. Lucius would never draw arms against another man, or so John would have thought. He decided it was time to have a word with Martina; she was smart and level-headed and would put Lucius off the road to getting himself killed.
Lucius stopped beside him on the hilltop overlooking the gully. He watched the grazing cattle for a moment. John waited patiently. On Mars, where the air was as thin as on an Earthly mountain-top, it was only polite to let a man catch his breath after a long walk.
“You heard the Company’s looters annexed the Perry claim?” asked Lucius.
“I did,” said John. He had surveyed the Perry homestead during last year’s spring, and the Perrys had been overjoyed to learn that their dusty half-section encompassed the ruins of an ancient Martian city. Such a claim could be worth more even than a Mars-stone mine, what with the technology one could sell to enterprising folks back on Earth. Ben Perry had uncovered intact Martian water-pumping equipment in one of the cellars.
Lucius was clearly waiting for more; when he didn’t get it, he began to fidget.
Careful, said his father. John sometimes wondered if he was crazy, talking with the dead as he was wont to do out here alone with the beautiful desolation of the wilderness.
“John,” said Lucius, pulling down his bandana, “you know what I’m asking.”
John remained silent.
“Dammit, John, we need your help. You know we’ve been organizing for a while now. The port-workers are with us; they took the Company men’s spare guns and ammunition last night, and we been sharing those out among the homesteaders and miners. Even a few of the Chinese are with us, with the promise that they won’t be treated like slaves anymore.”
John squinted into the distance from whence Lucius had come, tracing the snake of dust back to Acidalia Town. He couldn’t quite make out the buildings from this distance, but he could see that people were kicking up a lot of dust back there.
“I’ve heard talk about this,” John said. “I expect Boss Cooper has heard, too. I don’t imagine those gunfighters in his employ will take kindly to your preaching war against the Company.”
“It’s ain’t war,” the other man said. “It’s revolution. It’s freedom! The Company ain’t never done nothing for us but eat our lunch. Imagine what we can do without them. We’re running the Company’s looters and enforcers out of Acidalium for good. Tonight. We got to hit them before the cargo-ship leaves, before the new Company men get dug in. We’re planning to ship all the Company men back to Earth where they belong, at least the rotten ones. But we need more men to make that happen.” He looked intently at John.
Keep out of this, John. A little breeze gave John the excuse to look away from the man’s piercing green eyes and set his solar compass onto his papers to keep them from blowing away.
“We need men with guns,” Lucius said. “I know you’re no fan of the Company since what they did to Billy.”
John remained quiet. He peered through his scope alidade to pick out the red-iron balls he had discovered atop the mesa. His mouth tasted of rust.
“I respect you wanting your solitude. I’ve respected how you stay out of things. But you know we need boys like you. Boys who harbor in their hearts hate for the Company. And more than that...” He gestured at John’s gun-belt. “I heard tell that you know how to use those Peacemakers. I heard—”
John abruptly turned to face the man. He savagely pulled down his own bandana so he could speak more clearly. His face felt on fire.
“What did you hear, Lucius?”
Lucius was about to speak, then looked down.
“I don’t know, John,” he finally said, quietly. His face was shadowed beneath his hat. “None of us really know what to do with these.” He fondled his pistol’s old hardwood grip.
Stolen by Chinamen to start a war, said John’s father.
“But those enforcer boys,” Lucius said, “they know what to do with theirs.”
“That’s right, Lucius, they do. You’ve gotten a bunch of ranchers and miners and Chinese box-haulers all riled up so they’re willing to make a stand against the Company’s gunfighters. What do you expect will happen? Even if you kill them all, then what? The Company will just send a new crew when the cargo-ship comes back again in a couple of months. Are you going to kill every new enforcer who comes to Mars?”
“There’s no other way!” Lucius’s eyes were bright with angry tears. “Sure, you know what it’s like to lose a father and a brother, but you don’t know what it’s like to lose your ba
by girl. Martina and I do! Martina’s one dream in life was to raise a family. The Company stole her dream. Ben Perry knows what it’s like to possess a whole city and watch it taken away, the only thing of any worth on his homestead, and now he’ll watch his pretty wife starve to death and his little boy starve to death unless the rest of us do something about it.
“Well, we’re going to do something about it.” Lucius’s cheeks glowed red.
“I implore you,” John said, “don’t do this. Shooting someone never solved anything. It festers like a disease that produces more spite that someone else needs to let out by the blood of another. If you know I can shoot these,” he patted his Colts “you know that I know they don’t solve anything.”
“But your brother! He—”
“He stuck his nose in somebody else’s business.” John felt so angry now he shook. It had been all he could do to heed his father’s words and not go looking for the man who had murdered his brother in the cold. He wanted to repeat his father’s words: You can’t see a man for what he is when you’re pointing a gun at him. But he becomes a man again right quick when you see the pain in his eyes. After he dies, you never stop seeing him that way for the rest of your days.
But all John could manage was, “Guns didn’t do Billy much good.”
“Sometimes you got no choice but to fight,” Lucius said as he began to turn away. “If you’re a man, you’ll lend us your guns tonight. Right after sunset, outside the Company office in Acidalium Town.”
He walked away, retracing his path in the dust.
You’re right to stay out of this, son, said John’s father. It’s not your business. Killing someone doesn’t make you a man.
A breeze began to hiss across the brim of John’s hat. It was a cold summer.
~ * ~
John did not go to town. He sat atop the butte, near a fire made from bundles of dry stalks. Sunset lasted for an hour or more. Rainless storms coming in from the north cast up dust, pink and luminous in the twilight. When the wind settled down, the stars blazed overhead the way they do in fever-dreams, millions of them like milk spilled across a glass sky, white and blue and red like Mars in the daylight. Somewhere up there, one of those blue stars was Earth, source of all that ailed them, where the body of his father lay dead and rotting in the ground, and no amount of killing could ever bring the man back to life.
Daddy, what am I supposed to do? He got no answer.
Later, when his fire had died to cinders and the bitter cold began to claw at his toes and fingers, John heard the unmistakable thunder of a gunfight in the distance. He wondered if it was his imagination getting the better of him, the way he could see Captain Grunwold sitting across the fire, two scabbed-over bullet-holes in his blue Army uniform. The dead man stared at John with unreadable brown eyes, those eyes he could never stop seeing even when he looked away.
John’s father joined them, wispy white hair tousled in the breeze, surrender in eyes sunken from seeing the horrors of too many years in the Army during the Indian Wars. He used to talk about the weight he carried on his conscience. The last thing John’s father had told him, lying on a cot that stank of dried blood, was The West is built on taking away from someone else. I’ve surveyed it all, and it’s nothing but men here now, men so full of greed they’ll climb over anyone who was here first, over women and children even, men so bad their hearts depart their bodies for fear of turning to stone in such hard chests. Ride that Martian ship to the only free place left, where no one has to die or kill to build a home.
Little flashes of light in Acidalium Town told John the thunderstorm existed not just in his mind.
John was glad at that moment for his father’s death prior to seeing even this distant land spoiled by the stony hearts of men.
~ * ~
The next morning, John awoke to the sound of hammering at his cottage door.
“John Mulberry!” shouted a man on the other side of the concrete slab. “You come out here!”
John didn’t recognize the voice, but he could tell there were two other men outside with him. They spoke to one another in hushed tones. John pulled on his coveralls over the liner-underwear he slept in, stepped into the boots that he kept beside the cot, fitted the knitted-wool cap that he kept on the night-stand, strapped on his gun-belt that hung on an iron hook near the bed, and then fitted his deerskin gloves. The man pounded on the door again.
“We know you’re in there. Come out!”
The Martian who’d lived here before John sat pressed into the far corner beneath the one round window, its tentacles quivering, its intelligent black eyes fixed on John’s as he crossed the blue-and-green checkerboard floor to the door. When John first found this cottage, he’d discovered the Martian’s body, dry skin stretched across the globe of its ribs. It had left the heater on and door open when it perished, dumping warmth into the icy fall air. John had buried it at the base of the mesa. A framed photographic print on the front wall portrayed the creature standing upright with its cluster of tentacles supporting it, and beside the thing stood another Martian, half-turned toward the first who looked out at the viewer. It was taken outdoors on the plains. In the distance, a third Martian squatted among blocks in the sand, looking like a fat octopus rather than jellyfish balanced on spidery limbs. The Martian ghost never spoke, but neither did it seem to disapprove of John sharing its cottage. John had left the photograph where he found it out of respect for the dead.
He swung the door open on creaky hinges. He stood on the stoop and evaluated the three men standing in the pale sunshine. Company enforcers, two newly arrived a week ago that he recognized, and the gunfighter Gerry Ake, former bounty hunter out of Oklahoma.
The bastard who shot me dead, said Billy. John’s heart raced.
Their mounts chewed dry creeper leaves down near the Martian’s grave; these long-legged variants of Martian cattle refused to climb slopes such as the staircase carved into the stone of Jacob’s Mesa, though they seemed not averse to bearing men upon their long, narrow backs. John noticed that there were four mounts, though only three men stood before him. John felt a relief, for if they intended to kill him here, they would not have brought him a mount. He reached for the dial beside the door frame, the one that controlled the Martian heaters that kept the place comfortable through the bitter winters. He turned off the heaters.
“John Mulberry, Martian Public Land Surveyor?” said the young blue-eyed enforcer.
“I’m he.”
“You’re a known associate of one Lucius McCrady, settler four miles east of town, and his wife Martina McCrady, former sporting woman from the saloon. They are fugitives from justice, having led a gang what murdered four employees of the Cydonia Company and injured six others.”
“He’s not here, nor is Martina. You’re welcome to look around inside.”
“We ain’t here for them,” said Gerry Ake, stepping forward a bit between the two younger men.
At Ake’s instigation, the blue-eyed enforcer fumblingly drew a battered .44-40 Winchester pistol from its dry leather holster and pointed it at John.
“Put your hands up and get out here!” the boy shouted.
“You aim to shoot me?” The barrel wobbled just a foot from John’s face. “Because it’s a hell of a thing to kill a man and have to live for the rest of your life with the emptiness you manufactured in that act.”
John, look at his hands shake! said John’s brother. You can take him. He ain’t never killed a man.
That’s just it, Billy, John replied. He ain’t never killed a man.
The enforcer boy glanced down at John’s guns, then back into John’s eyes. His rapid breathing made clouds of steam that whipped away in the morning breeze. The cold, dry air of Mars was greedy for the moisture harbored in a man’s lungs.
“You prepared for that?” John asked.
The boy blinked, his Winchester lowering a bit.
“I got no problem killin’ outlaws,” said Gerry Ake. He smiled, baring tobac
co-stained teeth, and rested his gloved left hand on the hilt of his Colt .44-40 Bisley target revolver, pristine with mother-of-pearl grips.
“I know you don’t,” said John, raising his hands to chest-level. He didn’t look at the gunfighter. “I wasn’t involved in the shootout you mention.”
“Don’t care,” said Gerry Ake. “Boss wants to talk to you. Now keep your hands away from those Army cannons you like to wear.”
The quiet third enforcer unbuckled John’s gun belt and slung it over a shoulder. John pulled the door to his cottage closed and led the way down his gritty stone steps to the Martian mounts waiting in the gulley below.
Westward Weird Page 10
