“Yeah,” I murmur. “And us.”
Just below the overlook, pipes spray shimmering liquid over the digs, uniting in a cascade that plunges three hundred meters to fill sparkling pools on the lowest level. Rainbows gather around the inset floodlights. This could be another hobo, an underground channel diverted with the specific purpose of giving the crystals all they require, encouraging the kobold caretakers to finish their work, whatever that might be.
Only two people I can see walk the ramparts below, checking and measuring columns and brackets, flashing their torches up faces of crystal. They wear black hoods and shoulder capes made of the same material as the plastic on the walls, like raincoats. They don’t seem concerned about getting wet. One flashes a light up, then nods to the other. They link arms and vanish beneath a rampart.
“Got the layout?” Borden asks me.
“The water is pumped from below,” I say. “It recirculates.”
Kumar says, “Maximized production. I’m not sure this was ever authorized.”
“Nothing in half measures,” Mushran says. “Such was implied from the beginning, as soon as we parted from the other divisions. We go for broke, no?”
“Why are the Muskies helping?” Jacobi asks. “What’s their take?”
“Division Four promised them relocation, supply, and defense,” Kumar says. He doesn’t seem all that enthusiastic now, seeing what’s been accomplished. Jealousy—or too much of a good thing?
“This fragment sat here, inactive, nothing more than a mass anomaly, for over a billion years,” Mushran says. “Until we were sent to work with the miners.”
From an access hatch a few meters behind us, two men emerge, removing their hoods and capes. My spine tingles seeing them.
“Fucking Vinnie!” Tak says, coming forward and patting my skintight. “Why all the armor?”
Behind him, Joe steps forward, face wreathed in a huge grin. “Master Sergeant,” he says. He wraps his arms around me.
“We’re old friends,” Tak explains. “Vinnie, introductions?”
I hesitantly make the rounds, naming names and ranks, introducing Kumar as former Wait Staff. “Met him at Madigan,” I say.
Joe looks abashed. “Sorry about that,” he says. “Alice told me you didn’t make it across the border.”
“I got you the fucking coin,” I say behind the faceplate.
“And now we’re here.” He wipes his face with a green-speckled towel.
Mushran suggests that the tour continue, there is not much time. “Joe, would you carry on?” They seem on good terms. Kumar notes this with precise calm.
“Yeah, well, this big dig looks like we’ve been here forever, but it’s only been a few months,” Joe says. “We drilled from the galleries around the upper levels, down to where we hit crystal—then blasted fractured basalt and sandstone a few kilometers east of here, diverting an ancient aquifer until it found its way to Fiddler’s Green.”
“Deliberate,” Borden says.
“Absolutely,” Joe says. “When the water began to intersect the rocky layers containing nodules of crystal, it triggered the assembly of kobolds, which began to carve outward through the matrix. Reproducing what happened in the Drifter, but this time… quicker and, as you say, deliberate.”
“Water was enough?”
“The comets might have helped speed things up,” Joe says. “Lots more nitrogen in the atmosphere.”
“The Antags seeded nitrogen… on purpose?” Borden asks. “How does that fit in?”
“There is some thinking that the Antags are also divided and in turmoil over these artifacts,” Mushran says. “But any theory of such planned action is not yet widely accepted.”
“Weren’t you afraid it would make you different—less than human?” Jacobi asks.
“Some of us are affected,” Joe says. “Kazak was. Others, like me, like Tak, don’t seem to feel it. For us, it’s just dust. Nobody actually gets sick because of it.”
“Why doesn’t all this shoot out spikes and turn you to glass?” Ishida asks.
“We’re not trying to hurt it,” Joe says, his eyes crinkling with amusement, or anticipating Jacobi’s next question.
“So if it’s not going to kill us, why would the Gurus want it destroyed?”
“It’s older than the Gurus by a few billion years,” Joe says. “Older tech. Maybe they feel outclassed.”
“But it’s not technology,” Ishida says. “It’s more like rocks.”
“That’s how the ancient civilization kept records,” Tak says. “The one that lived in the old moon before it fell. We still don’t understand the process.”
I want to throw up, I’m so torn inside. Seeing DJ, Joe, Tak, waiting to see Teal—and everyone here is talking like this is a ride at Disneyland. “What happened to Kazak?” I ask.
“Killed when they attacked Fiddler’s Green,” Joe says.
“Who attacked?” I ask.
“Antags,” Tak says. “We got most of them.”
Kazak didn’t make it. That fucking hurts. I was sure he’d survive everything and see us all home. My heart sinks. Everything’s falling away beneath my feet. I absolutely need to see Teal. I feel dizzy.
“Those crystals aren’t, like, a diamond as big as the Ritz, or quartz—or anything like that,” Jacobi says. “They’re some sort of server—data storage made of rock?” She’s working this over. The literary reference is nice—I did not anticipate that. Maybe I tend to think grunts are ignorant, too. “So the dust, the tea, is…” She looks intense and lets it trail off.
“Why not just let it sit here?” Ishida asks. “Why did the settlers dig it up?”
“Tell us, Vinnie,” Joe says, with that provocative grin I know so well. The grin that got me into the Skyrines. The grin that ultimately brought me to Mars. “Why do the Voors think it’s important—why are we here?”
“The green powder hooks us into something I don’t understand,” I murmur. “Something really old. Maybe more important than anything the Gurus have offered.”
“Speak up, please,” Mushran says.
“Origins,” I say, louder, to get through the faceplate. “Access to the deep past.”
“The wisdom of an ancient civilization,” Mushran adds, with an upward look, as if about to pray.
“Is that what you feel, Vinnie?” Joe asks.
“Yeah. I guess.”
Jacobi is taking this in with that same fixed intensity, and now she’s watching me the way I watch Ishida. They’re all watching me.
Three more men, two young, one old, all wearing capes and hoods, all tall and skinny, walk past with barely a glance at us and enter the hatch, which turns out to be the door to an elevator. I walk to the rim to watch the men emerge below. They go on about their business, surrounded by a flow of kobolds getting on with their own billion-year jobs.
“Where’s Teal?” I ask.
“We’re heading to the annex now,” Joe says. “That’s where you’ll have to decide whether to strip and join us, or break it off and go home.”
Which is why this charade is so ridiculous.
FAMILY UNIT
He leads us around the rim of the dig, through a low, flat cavern shored up with natural columns of rock and metal and braces of load-bearing concrete. The ceiling is a meter over my head. As I’ve said, I don’t like deep mines and the suggestion of overburden. I can almost see the openness of the Red, the surface, and wonder what the weather’s like. Probably weird. Safer down here. But I don’t feel that way.
We walk through a shadowy, unlit zone toward three bright spotlights. As we close on the lights, I make out a steel hatch, like the lock hatches but thicker. There’s a box with attached pad on the right side, at chest level. Tak takes out a platinum coin and places it in the panel. “We don’t get many visitors,” he says. “We’re just being extra cautious.”
“You don’t want shit getting out,” Jacobi says. Her eyes shift and her plate fogs. She’s not handling this part of the
tour well. Maybe she shares my dislike for low, flat places covered with billions of tons of rock. Or maybe she’s been more thoroughly briefed than me. Maybe there are real dangers, and all these good folks are crazy, and we don’t want to join them.
The hatch opens. I’ve been through so many goddamn hatches, if I never see another I’ll be a happy man. But this is the sticking point, whatever the fuck that means. This is why we’re here.
Coyle’s gone back into hiding; maybe she doesn’t like caverns, either—with better reason than most, right? Bug is silent as well. It’s just me in my cranium, and to be alone is to be in bad company. Some Frenchman said that. Maybe Jacobi can tell me. Alice would know. Where the fuck is Alice? Right. She can’t go transvac anymore. Bad solar storm, no more Cosmoline. I remember. I remember the apartment in Seattle, Joe’s and Tak’s apartment where I was invited to stay when we were all on Earth, nice place, with a view of the Cascades and Puget Sound and all the ferries coming and going. Why we fight. What the Gurus told us, gave to us—all that tech.
But the Gurus lied. Everything’s a lie. And now, we’re about to be led into… what, the truth? Or another kind of lie, even older, even more devious and dangerous? Maybe the Gurus know more than we do about what the tea does. Maybe they really are looking out for our best interests, and we’re acting like upstart children. Moses after all goes up the mountain to see the burning bush and receive the Utterances, and down in the lowlands, his people get restless and start worshipping idols. Dathan, right? Edward G. Robinson orders the casting of the golden calf. Maybe we’ve just looked on the golden calf and now Moses is about to conjure the lightning to righteously teach a great big lesson. My chin cup fills with sweat. I want to open the faceplate. It’s too late for me, why not just open the plate and take in more dust, finish the job?
I reach for my plate.
Borden grips my elbow. “Not yet, Venn,” she says. I shake her loose, then turn and try to back away from the hatch. My step is spasmodic. I’m shaking all over. Tak has come up behind me, Joe is on my left.
“Let me go!” I plead. Tak and Joe move in close and put their heads—their naked heads—against my helm. They talk in low voices, tell me I have to maintain, it’s important we all stick together and see this through, this is why we came to Mars. Joe’s wearing his patent-pending skull grin, part determination, part sympathy, part bloody-minded stubbornness. I remember that grin and the first time I saw it. I remember that day back in the lagoon near Carlsbad. The day he and I scared the living shit out of each other, on a stupid dare, when we were snot-nosed kids.
“Relax,” Joe says to me. “There’s good stuff to come. Maybe good answers. God knows we’ve earned them.”
“I w-w-won’t be me,” I say, maybe I whimper. Yeah, that was a fucking whimper. “I’ll get sucked down!”
“I don’t think so. You look muy frio, Vinnie. We’ll get through this together, right?”
I feel my head shaking back and forth, then cycloiding to up and down, like I’m agreeing. That’s the effect Joe has on me, but Tak as well; I don’t want to play the coward or the fool in front of Tak Fujimori.
“DJ’s waiting,” Tak says. “I think he has something to show you.”
“Yeah, but DJ’s crazy,” I say. They ignore that. DJ’s always been crazy.
The hatch opens. A short, dark-haired woman pokes her head through, not as plump or as pretty as the last time we met—haggard and worn down, pale, but recognizable.
“You remember Alice,” Joe says. He likes surprises.
“You can open your plates,” Alice tells us, no prelims, no intros. She walks between us, fluttering her hands and looking a little disgusted. “Everybody peel and get cleaned up, replace those filters. Doc says it’s okay.”
“Who’s the doc?” Borden asks.
“Me,” Alice says. “Former first lieutenant Alice Harper, U.S. Marine Medical Services.”
“You can’t go transvac,” I murmur. “You’d die, right? That’s what you told me.”
“I was wrong,” she says. “After what we did to you. You getting picked up… The trip wasn’t easy, but I made it. What’s behind the big door is worth the risk. You know that—don’t you?”
“Can you ever go back?” I ask.
“Maybe not,” Alice says. “Can you?” She taps her cheek. “Go for it.”
I reach for my plate. Borden shoves out her gloved hand as if to stop me, but Kumar says it will be fine, this is expected. Despite that, Borden signals us to wait. She opens her own plate first. When she still lives, we all break seal and breathe the air of Fiddler’s Green, which is pure and sweet and alive.
Alice crinkles her nose at our waft. “Jesus,” she says. Our skintights have been stressed to their limits. We smell of shit and piss and combat flop sweat. “We got soup and tea inside. Real tea. Mushran, is this fine Indian gent another master of the universe?”
“Yes, Alice,” Mushran says, and introduces Kumar in a tone that indicates here, in the annex, Alice Harper is running things, not Mushran, and certainly not Kumar or any other part of Division Four. No surprise, once they got her here—however they got her here—Alice put herself in charge.
Four tall young men and women wait in an alcove beyond the hatch and receive our shed skintights. The suits are racked and the men begin to replace the filters with fresh ones taken from a box. They must be in their teens—Martian years. Second gen? The women break away and hand us plastic scrub pads, then point us toward a wide, shallow tub, where we step under U-shaped pipes rigged to deliver spray mildly scented of soap. The women make scrubbing motions. Naked, we turn about, enjoying the warm shower. Ishida’s skin and metal drips. Ishikawa has a broad grin.
“Scrub!” Alice shouts.
We scrub.
“Don’t forget butts and privates. And chew this.”
As we emerge, she hands us little lozenges. The lozenges taste of cinnamon. My mouth begins to effervesce. We’ve got foam on our lips.
“Lick it down and swallow. New bacteria, better than your own, believe me. And fresh breath. Your tummies will ache for a couple of hours, but after that, you’ve never felt better.”
“Alice,” one of the men says, shaking his head in disgust, “te suits want disinfect and patch.”
“Do it,” Alice says.
They haul away the skintights. Tak has a stack of white tunics over his arm and starts handing them out. Children’s sizes, considering how tall the Muskies are. Mine drops just below my ass, like a hospital gown, but feels clean and cool against my drying skin.
Still no Teal. I made sure of that before I entered the showers. And no DJ this time. What’s he up to? Is it possible that here, inside Fiddler’s Green, DJ has found a place where he can avoid being the total goofball? Astonishing. I’m starting to feel better about this. Clean makes a difference.
“I got to go topside,” Alice says. “Joe will take you from here. Congratulations, Venn. See you in a few.” She touches fingertips with me and smiles, then moves off. “Say hello to Tealullah,” she adds over her shoulder. “I don’t think she likes me much.”
I watch her fade into the tunnels. “Why’s that?” I ask Joe.
“Because Alice took her kid away,” Joe says.
Joe and Tak stick by me. Borden sticks by me. Kumar has conceded his flanking position to Joe and Tak. I got a posse. “All right,” I say. “We’re here. Where’s Teal?”
“In the annex,” Joe says. “Let’s go.”
CHOSEN BY THE TEA
We look like patients in a mental ward, walking away from the shower room, chewing our gum, foaming and licking, but everyone is dressed the same so we fit right in.
“What was it like at Madigan?” Joe asks.
“Great,” I say. “Docs took good care of me.”
“I’ll bet,” Joe says.
“Sorry we couldn’t get to you in time,” Tak says.
“Hey, no problem. I screwed up,” I say. “Talked to a secretary. Used my finger to
pay for a cab. Nice apartment, though. Alice…”
“She’s our Dorothy,” Joe says. “Keeps all the Tin Men and Scarecrows organized.”
I think of all the twisters outside. “Wasn’t sure I could trust her… Still not sure,” I say, time and imagination skewing in my head. Someone’s rummaging in my memories again. And to confuse me more, I’m remembering stuff that never happened. Or looking at things from points of view not my own. Like the bar fight at Hawthorne.
“She’s tough,” Tak says. “Maybe a little too tough.”
“Teal had a baby,” I say. “And they took it away from her?”
“Him, actually,” Tak says.
Kumar and Borden and Mushran are a couple of steps behind, listening.
“Let’s go grab a beer and talk about it,” I say, in my best “where the fuck am I” tone.
“Beer on Mars is crap,” Tak says. “They tried brewing it from sawdust and yeast, so Rafe says.”
“What the hell is he doing here?” I ask. “The Voors would have shot Teal.”
“Voors live here, remember?” Tak says.
“The elder de Groot was a piece of work,” Joe says. “He’s dead. There’s only eight Voors left. About a hundred died when Ants hit their caches two months ago. Rafe saved Teal, but he couldn’t save her husband.”
“Husband?” I’m used to bad news, but this mix of good and bad leaves me hollow. My stomach starts to ache. “I thought…”
“Do we ever get what we want, Vinnie?” Joe asks.
“You seem happy,” I say.
“Weirdest thing is how happy Joe is,” Tak says.
“I’m a happy guy,” Joe says. “You met Kumar at Madigan, right?”
“Yeah.” We look back at Kumar, walking between Borden and Mushran. Behind them I see our Skyrines, Jacobi and Ishida leading the way. “Real head-fucker. What the hell is this place?”
Joe ignores that for now. “Back at Madigan, they tested your blood and shit. You came up triple cherry. The tea had done a real number on you, strongest they’d seen off Mars. So Kumar decided you had to be brought here, or the Wait Staff—the other divisions, still mostly in control—would kill you for sure.”