Old Mars

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 mug shot 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 “blowholes,” 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 that 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 twenty-first centuries.

All Mac wanted was the reality. To see the canals running again while sun and moons illuminated blue forests and small fields of brass-colored crops. To settle down on a few acres of land, growing enough to sell and sustain himself. Then maybe a family. To make a new Mars, a peaceful Mars where kids could grow. That’s what he’d dreamed. That’s what had kept him alive all these years. He let out a brief, not particularly bitter, laugh. Now the best he could hope for was a quick death.

He wondered if he could gain any time by giving himself up in the hope that he’d find another chance of escape. It would avoid what was probably an inevitable death out here. He had to take control of his own determined soul, which would rather fight and die than wait for another chance. But that was all he could do. He got hold of himself and, disgusted by his chosen action, he snarled and pulled a big white silk scarf out of a leg pouch in his leathers.