There were dozens, if not hundreds, of cameras. Together, they’d watched Julie hire a dozen men and women from the loading floor. What a pity, they all thought, that there was no sound. They’d watched Llyra and Wilson’s tearful reunion with their parents while Julie was still downstairs. They’d watched the tender—but silly—way she and her companion, Saladin and Ali’s niece, Jasmeen, had chosen to greet her grandmother.
They were two families of jokers, the Ngus and the Khalidovs. The universe would probably implode, Lafcadio thought, if they should ever interbreed.
The scientists and the used spaceship salesman were also watching—on another cluster of 3DTV screens—the development of certain events occurring in orbit around Ceres, and from somewhere beyond the orbit of the Pluto-Charon System. That was the real reason—both Lafcadio and Ali suspected it—that Saladin wanted to stay put for a while longer.
According to Sheridan Sinclair, aboard the Curringer Corporation’s far-ranging yacht, the William Wilde Curringer, the unexplained energies were coming from a Drake-Tealy Object 500 miles in diameter, nearly the size of the third largest asteroid, Vesta. The pulse rates were definitely converging and should be synchronized in another day. Sinclair was keeping Billie at least a thousand miles away from the Object.
“Sinclair,” Ali observed, “looks like little man in Monopoly.”
Saladin chuckled. “Yes, he does.”
“Dr. Ngu’s watching the same thing you guys are!” said Lafcadio.
Cameras on the opposite side of the mezzanine-like structure had caught it. Ardith’s virtual screen was displaying the same images, from Ceres and the Cometary Halo, that were on the screens here in the ship: a string of colorful bar graphs, indicating frequencies all the way across the electromagnetic spectrum, displaying strange pulses of energy. Saladin had determined there were gravity pulses happening, as well.
“Should we communicate with her?” Ali asked his partner. “Should be unobtrusive enough. We know things she does not know. Perhaps she knows—”
“All right, all right, I get it!” Saladin was occupied with what was on the screen before him—pulses in energies he hadn’t known existed.
“Touchy, today?” asked Ali. “Did we get up on wrong side bed?”
Saladin gave a great sigh of exasperation. “Go ahead and contact her, then—only leave lag time, as if we were still back home, in Moon.”
Lafcadio asked, “But why?”, then ducked the man’s powerful glare.
“Who knows?” said Saladin. “In addition to touchy, I am also today sneaky.”
“Hungry, too” Ali suggested. “Here comes caterer’s shuttle.”
***
“I’d rather have stayed in town,” Adam told Ardith as she unpacked their luggage and put their clothes away in closets and drawers. He’d have helped, but they were both in wheelchairs, and the clash of wheels would have been awkward. The house seemed to be built of closets. Julie had designed it.
It had been a good many years since Adam had visited his mother on Mars. The woman might have told him, he thought, when he’d mentioned hiring a sandskipper, that there was no further need for sandskippers, at least not here. A straight, beautiful, six-lane highway, paved with tough, black plastic, stretched past her house between Coprates City and Bradbury, entirely paid for by the trucking companies whose giant freighters blasted along its length, bringing food and other things from the spaceport in the city to the towns far out on the macaroni prairie.
The paving plastic, derived from macaroni plant, had many other uses, and was just one of many things that the big freighters were reloaded with—the System’s highest-tech industrial and consumer goods were another—when they roared back to the city and its tiny spaceport.
“You don’t want to stay here,” Ardith observed, not looking up from the bed where she was refolding what she took from their luggage, “because you’re embarrassed to make love to me in your mother’s house.”
“That’s not it at all,” he replied. Actually it was, at least in part, but he didn’t want to admit it. It might not even be possible for them in this planet’s gravity field. “I just don’t know if the place is defensible.”
Ardith chuckled. “Oh, it’s defensible, all right, my darling, if Julie designed it. Are you kidding? A Marine who fought a revolution and then managed to survive all the looting and murdering that followed?”
“I concede your point. We had our troubles with Earth, too, but nothing like that. The house I was raised in, the house my grandfather built, was a lot of wonderful things, but it was not defensible. It did have lots of nice little nooks and crannies to hide and play in, though.”
“I remember that,” she said. “And a boathouse.”
“Ah, yes. And a boathouse.” Suddenly he realized, if everything went the way he hoped it would, he’d never live in the house on Pallas again. Neither would Ardith. Some other Ngus would. Ardith had brought up the subject of moving her lab to Ceres once the terraformation process was complete. That was for the future. They had other problems now.
There was a gentle knock on the door. “Come,” they both said. The door slid into the casement. Llyra stood outside—impossibly tall and grown-up looking—on the hall carpet of a balcony looking out over the great room. Mounted on the ceiling-high stonework above what Adam had always thought of as his mother’s “walk-in fireplace” (it burned macaroni plant, compressed into logs) was the head of a southern greater kudu his father had killed on Pallas. Through the balcony railing, Adam could see the tips of its corkscrew horns from where he sat.
He still remembered how that animal had tasted.
“Grandma says to tell you she’s ready to go,” Llyra informed them. Adam could see that she wasn’t comfortable in this amount of gravity, but she was handling it without any artificial support. Of course she and Jasmeen had had the voyage here, at one-third gee. She came into the room and sat on the bed so she could be at the same level they were.
Ardith took her hand. Llyra looked startled for an instant. Her mother had never been very physical with her, but Llyra understood that things were starting to change—that her mother was struggling to change them. It was the very kind of struggle Llyra had been brought up to admire.
“I still don’t know,” Ardith said, “about taking you and Jasmeen with us. It could be very dangerous.” She looked over, appealing to Adam.
Llyra protested, “But that’s the point, Mom, isn’t it? We’re the tastiest bait. Wilson stopped them from hurting the factory ship. I shot that man in the knee. They might not bite, if we aren’t there. Especially the woman that Jasmeen shot. I’d be pretty pissed off, myself.”
“Please don’t say ‘pissed’, dear.” It was a reflex. Llyra giggled.
Risking what might once have touched off an explosion, Adam agreed with his daughter. “I don’t like it much, either, but I’m afraid she’s right.”
Ardith sighed—things were different, both her husband and her daughter realized—and nodded reluctant agreement. “Make sure you have—”
“My gun? It’s right here, Mom. Jasmeen is armed, and I imagine you two—”
Ardith laughed. “Your father is better-armed than I’ve ever seen him!” He grinned and showed her the ten millimeter magnum he wore cross-draw at his waist, along with a pair of forty-five caliber weapons that had belonged to his father. Julie had insisted on his having them. He had tucked them away in the arm compartments of his wheelchair.
“Will not help much with thrown bomb.” The door was still open. Jasmeen stepped into the room. “I come to help with chair if you permit.” It was oddly humiliating to think of this tiny, slender young woman helping him with his wheelchair, but that was what his daughter was here for, too, he realized. When it was over, this afternoon, he’d get himself a walker.
“That’s what Wilson and some of his friends will be watching for. Yes, you may help us, Jasmeen, thank you. You remember what this was like.”
On Moon, yes. Was embar
rassment—but not so much as Gurney!”
With Jasmeen pushing Adam, and Llyra pushing her mother—who said she hated leaving such a mess behind: clothing folded neatly on a bed—they went to an elevator that took them to the ground floor. Llyra and Jasmeen were delighted to be staying on the third or fourth floor (there was any number of half-levels, and Adam could never keep track) in what Julie called “the cupola”, the highest room of the house.
Wilson was standing beside his grandmother in the entrance to the great room, near the front door. The house was an amazing construction of red-gray field stone—one could tell it was native Martian, because there was no lichen on it and never had been—and what appeared to be wood. Adam suspected it came from the same place as the fireplace logs.
The front door itself boasted an enormous, colorful window made of stained glass, depicting her two literary protagonists Conchita and Desmondo, and their pet arachnicat, Ploogle, slaying a gigantic gray dragon. Adam loved that picture. It was the cover—stained glass and all—of an infamous book in which his mother had taken on organized religion.
His son looked even more grown up than his daughter, Adam thought. It wasn’t a matter of size—Wilson had been full grown three years ago, back on Ceres—so much as the set of his face and the way he carried himself. He’d been through a lot in those three years, Adam realized.
Wilson was dressed well, for a hunter, in a dark, collarless shirt, trousers tightened in the Martian way at the ankles, and a sportcoat that came halfway to his knees. It was thrown back on the right to expose the big, low-slung .45 Magnum that had belonged to his great grandfather. On the other side, high on the waist, he wore his twelve-shot revolver.
From the front hallway, Adam could see into his mother’s front parlor, where the 3DTV had been left on, and where the bait was being cast.
” … Old Survivor Stadium where later today, as special guests of a local semi-professional team, the Coprates City Warlords, many of the survivors of the recent, horrifying takeover of the East American Spacelines’ City of Newark will relax and enjoy a day of sunshine, hotdogs, local beer, and exciting baseball as only Martians can play it.”
The camera zoomed past the correspondent to a section of the bleachers that had been cheerfully decked out in bunting of Martian orange—the original color of the planet before the macaroni plant arrived. Banners waved, and signs proclaimed it “Survival Day At Old Survivor.”
“We’ll stay with the story and have some interviews later this afternoon. Honey Graham, Interplanetary Interactive Information Service.”
***
“It’s a trap, of course,” said Crenicichla.
He was looking out the window, down into Old Survivor Stadium. A moment before, he’d been watching Honey Graham on 3DTV. He could see her still, if he peered hard enough—or used the field glasses from their survival kits—standing on the pitcher’s mound, facing right field.
“Of course it’s a trap,” Krystal answered him calmly. At the moment, she was cleaning their weapons as well as she could, given that she had no specialized supplies or tools. “She used to be on our team like all of the media, but she’s becoming a tad unreliable, isn’t she?”
“A tad and a half,” Crenicichla answered her. “It’s what comes of spending too much time with the Ngu family. You know we could still just disappear, Krystal. They’re starting to stock some of the local running water with trout. I have enough money to last us a long, long time.”
She nodded. “I know. I used to go fishing for bass in a lake where I lived. It sounds tempting. You go fishing. I’m going down there.” She nodded at the window and the stadium. “I won’t blame you, honest, honey.”
Crenicichla turned, quickly strode across the little room, and took the woman—his woman, he realized—by both shoulders where she sat working at the little correspondence table. He bent so that his face was beside hers. “Don’t you dare say anything like that to me, ever again! Wherever you go, Krystal Sweet, I go! No matter where it happens to be, or what happens as a consequence!”
She grinned. “I was kind of hoping you’d say that, darling.” She ran a hand through his hair, then placed the slide of a disassembled autopistol back on the frame, slid it all the way to the rear, let it lock, then released it into battery. She loaded the gun. “You know the same goes for me, Johnnie, though I never thought I’d hear myself say it.”
He nodded, stepped back, and took a deep breath. He was a man capable of intense loyalty, he knew, but for the first time in his life, he found himself transferring it. “The ballgame doesn’t start for a couple of hours. Let’s get something to eat—and then go get married.”
Holstering her weapon, she giggled. “How romantic! I’ll wear my formal sunglasses.”
***
In the plaza, the statue of the Old Survivor stood four times larger than life. It was made of coarsely-brushed stainless steel. If someday it rained a hundred inches a year in Coprates, it would never tarnish. Pigeons stayed off—years of research had been dedicated to that—because they didn’t like the texture of the metal under their feet.
From a cobbled sidewalk across a downtown street, Julie looked up at the faceplate where his eyes should have been visible. She had known this man as well as anyone had. He had saved her life on several occasions, as well as those of countless other people in a colony struggling to stay alive.
She could see him now, in her mind’s eye, sitting with them around the electric furnace in the dimly-lit common hut, his pale blue eyes twinkling in the glow of the heating elements. His seamed face was framed in an untidy mass of gray and yellow hair and a prickly-looking beard.
Nobody knew who the Old Survivor was, not even the Old Survivor, himself. He’d come to Mars with one of six expeditions preceding the one that Julie had followed as part of a military contingent sometimes called the seventh and a half. He couldn’t recall which had brought him. His envirosuit was a patchwork of suits from all six. If the seventh hadn’t made it, his suit would have wound up with salvaged pieces of theirs.
She could hear him, even now, telling stories in a raspy brogue that made it seem as if he’d been with every one of the expeditions, in turn. He’d spoken of individual acts of heroism and sacrifice that had raised the hair on the back of her neck, and of cruelties and stupidities that defied reason.
Nobody knew his name. At the base of the statue. a plaque read, “THE OLD SURVIVOR” and under that, “John Carter, Jeddak of Jeddaks”. Sometimes that was who he thought he was. He’d worn nothing under his suit and carried the enormous, curved-tipped sword she saw replicated here today.
She could see him now, sitting with them around the furnace in borrowed clothing the others had insisted that he wear. When he left, they found it neatly folded in the airlock, where his sword stood when he visited.
Nobody knew where he came from or where he went. It was believed he’d found a cave somewhere in Candor Chasma. He must have somehow sealed it, warmed it, filled it with oxygen. One day he’d simply shown up at the seventh’s landing site bearing a few items of technology as gifts. Later he’d disappeared, to reappear whenever he thought he might be needed.
She could see him now, trying the same kindness on the military encampment, several miles away. The civilians called it “Derbyville” for the color and shape of its inflated domes. The sentries had nearly killed him before she stopped them. He had never come back to Derbyville.
Nobody had ever found the Old Survivor’s cave. At first, there was no time or energy to spare shadowing him to it, even if it could have been done, during the early days of Martian settlement. Today it was the Holy Grail of Martian archaeology and history. One day he’d simply disappeared, never to return. Sooner or later, it was assumed that he was dead.
Julie remembered it all. She shut the limousine door, instructed the car to return in two and a half hours, turned, and followed the rest of her family into Maxwell’s, the best restaurant in the Solar System.
Looki
ng more like a hockey player than a System-famous chef, Maxwell himself greeted her at the door with a glass of high desert wine. He’d promised her family the best duck they’d ever eaten—and to initiate them into the mysteries of salad dressing made with truffle oil, worth more on Mars, ounce-for-ounce, than the purest palladium.
***
“Okay,” said Honey. “Let’s have one with everybody waving at the camera!” It was a sunny day in Coprates City. Orange banners and bunting flew in the soft, warm breeze of a typical Valles Marineris summer.
She didn’t have to shout to be heard. Except for those she was photographing, and attendants preparing the grass, the stadium was empty. The members of the Ngu family sat together in the three middle levels of the first tier. Llyra and Wilson sat together, roughly in the center, flanked by Adam and Ardith on Llyra’s side, and Jasmeen on Wilson’s. Above them sat Julie, the Khalidovs, and Jasmeen’s scientist uncles, Mohammed and Ali. All of them were wearing Warlord baseball caps emblazoned with the Old Survivor’s sword.
Never had there been a greater assemblage of rented wheelchairs, walkers, and canes among a group of essentially healthy individuals, most of whom, coming from the Moon or the asteroids, were simply not accustomed to the one-third gravity of Mars. Whoever had said it was right: more than any other force, gravity would shape the future social history of the species Homo sapiens.
On two rows of seats beneath them, sat Wilson’s hunting friends, Scotty, Marko, Mikey, Shorty, Casey, and Merton with their own walking aids. All had declined to give Honey their last names. Shorty didn’t want to be photographed at all. One of them, she understood, was missing because Wilson had killed him in a duel aboard the passenger liner. What she wouldn’t have given to see—and air!—that video. But the Captain had forbidden it. Busy boy, Wilson. He was soon to become a full-time single father.