Old Mars

They seemed startled, and Dave guessed they hadn’t had much contact with Marsmen who spoke their language. One of them gestured the Martian imperative at him, a sign normally used by parents toward young children, mildly discourteous to an adult, and he accompanied it with English words. “You wear a sunstone that does not belong to you.”

Dave laid a hand over the sunstone that was hidden beneath his shirt. “It belonged to my father,” he said. “He gave it to me.”

“It belonged to our cousin,” said the Martian. “We are his nearest relations, and it should come to us.”

Rekari stepped forward. “Venori continued his family through this one’s father. I was witness to it.”

The men in the boat all signed the negative. “It is not proper that a man of Earth should wear the stone,” said the one who had spoken, and the others made multiple gestures of agreement.

“His elders judged it proper,” said Rekari.

The strangers put their heads together and whispered among themselves. They seemed to be having a very quiet argument. Finally, one of them hoisted in the anchor, but instead of turning around and starting south, the three pulled short paddles from the bottom of the boat and sculled closer to Rekari’s craft, so close that their spokesman could leap the gap between the two.

“It is ours,” he said, and before Dave could do more than take a single step back, the Martian’s long-fingered hand had darted out and caught at the sunstone’s chain where it showed at the collar of his shirt.

Dave felt the chain bite at his neck, and he grabbed the Martian’s wrist to keep him from pulling harder. “Letann!” he shouted.

The Martian froze for a moment, and then his fingers opened and the chain dropped free. Wrenching his wrist out of Dave’s grip, he lurched backward, and his right leg slammed the gunwale, knocking him off balance. Before he could stop himself, he was falling over the side and into the canal.

Letann? As soon as the word left his mouth, Dave knew it was an ancient one, a command subsuming “No” and “Stop” and “How dare you?”—the deepest possible level of indignation. Where had he learned that word? In his childhood? He couldn’t remember. He knew he had never used it before.

The wet Martian’s companions helped him back into their boat, and the three had another whispered conversation, accompanied by quite a few glances in Dave’s direction. Finally, without any word or gesture, they hoisted in their anchor and started south.

Dave rubbed his neck where the chain had scraped the skin and watched the other boat pull away. When it was well beyond shouting distance, he said, “Do they really have a claim to it?”

Rekari made the negative sign. “Their family and Venori’s have been separated for more than forty generations. They have their own stone. One of them may inherit it, in time.”

“But if they’re his closest relatives …”

“You are his closest relative, David. Of that, I am certain.”

Dave signaled a child’s acknowledgment of his elder, but Rekari gestured a negative, though a mild one.

“You are not a child, David. Not with a sunstone on your neck.” His hand hovered over the part of Dave’s shirt that covered the stone. “This is a responsibility. Your father knew that when he told me to give it to you.”

“I understand,” said Dave. He didn’t have much of his father beyond it, just a shabby house and a few pieces of furniture. Some copies of the papers his father had written on Martian antiquities. And his father’s reputation, of course, intangible as that was. The sunstone represented all of that.

Dave sat at the tiller, and Rekari handed him a piece of flatbread and a container of peanut butter. Then he pulled up the anchor, and they began moving again, and the other boat quickly dwindled behind them.

After a time, Dave asked, “Why did they give up?”

Rekari chewed on his own meal of dried lizard meat. “Because they knew,” he said, and he would not say more.

On the fourteenth day, Dave stood in the prow of the boat. “We’re almost there.” He looked at the mapper. “Not more than another kilometer.” The banks of the canal had risen steadily over the last couple of days, and now, every few hundred meters, there were rough steps cut into them, unmistakably artificial. Above the banks, low hills were visible, silhouetted against the eastern sky.

Rekari sat by the mast. He made no attempt to look ahead. Instead, he looked back at the way they had come. “Your father was right. There was a city here once,” he said. “Long ago, when there was less ice all through the year. It was a beautiful city, with graceful spires where flying creatures sometimes made their nests and theaters open to the sky for actors in masks with fanciful fronds sprouting from the living wood. Gorgeous masks. And the alaria trees lined every avenue and perfumed the air and shed their white blossoms on the water like so many miniature boats.” He made that sign of sorrow again. “It has all been gone so long. How do they bear it?”

“How does who bear it?” Dave asked.