Old Mars

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-grey 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. If 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-crocs. 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 semicriminal 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.