An Exaltation of Stars (1973) Anthology

by Terry Carr (Ed. )

  Oxenshuer monitored his departing companions from his safe niche in the control cabin. The small video screen showed him the path of their crawler as it diminished into the somber red plain. You’re well named, rusty old Mars. The blood of fallen soldiers stains your soil. Your hills are the color of the flames that lick conquered cities. Jouncing westward across Solis Lacus, Vogel kept up a running commentary. “Lots of dead nothing out here, Johnny. It’s as bad as the Moon. A prettier color, though. Are you reading me?”

  “I’m reading you,” Oxenshuer said. The crawler was like a submarine mounted on giant preposterous wheels. Joggle, joggle, joggle, skirting craters and ravines, ridges and scarps. Pausing now and then so Richardson could pop a geological specimen or two into the gunny sack. Then onward, westward, westward. Heading bumpily toward the site where the unmanned Ares IV Mars Lander, almost a decade earlier, had scraped some Martian microorganisms out of the ground with the Gulliver sampling device.

  “Gulliver” is a culture chamber that inoculates itself with a sample of soil. The sample is obtained by two 7½-meter lengths of kite line wound on small projectiles. When the projectiles are fired, the lines unwind and fall to the ground. A small motor inside the chamber then reels them in, together with adhering soil particles. The chamber contains a growth medium whose organic nutrients are labeled with radioactive carbon. When the medium is inoculated with soil, the accompanying microorganisms metabolize the organic compounds and release radioactive carbon dioxide. This diffuses to the window of a Geiger counter, where the radioactivity is measured. Growth of the microbes causes the rate of carbon dioxide production to increase exponentially with time—an indication that the gas is being formed biologically. Provision is also made for the injection, during the run, of a solution containing a metabolic poison which can be used to confirm the biological origin of the carbon dioxide and to analyze the nature of the metabolic reactions.

  All afternoon the crawler traversed the plain, and the sky deepened from dark purple to utter black, and the untwinkling stars, which on Mars are visible even by day, became more brilliant with the passing hours, and Phobos came streaking by, and then came little hovering Deimos. Oxenshuer, wandering around the ship, took readings on this and that and watched his screen and listened to Dave Vogel’s chatter, and Mission Control offered a comment every little while. And during these hours the Martian temperature began its nightly slide down the Centigrade ladder. A thousand kilometers away an inversion of thermal gradients unexpectedly developed, creating fierce currents in the tenuous Martian atmosphere, ripping gouts of red sand loose from the hills, driving wild scarlet clouds eastward toward the Gulliver site. As the sandstorm increased in intensity, the scanner satellites in orbit around Mars detected it and relayed pictures of it to Earth, and after the normal transmission lag it was duly noted at Mission Control as a potential hazard to the men in the crawler; but somehow—the NASA hearings did not succeed in fixing blame for this inexplicable communications failure—no one passed the necessary warning along to the three astronauts on Mars. Two hours after he had finished his solitary dinner aboard the ship, Oxenshuer heard Vogel say,

  “Okay, Johnny, we’ve finally reached the Gulliver site, and as soon as we have our lighting system set up we’ll get out and see what the hell we have here.” Then the sandstorm struck in full fury. Oxenshuer heard nothing more from either of his companions.

  Making camp for the night, he took first from his pack his operations beacon, one of his NASA souvenirs. By the sleek instrument’s cool, inexhaustible green light he laid out his bedroll in the flattest, least pebbly place he could find; then, discovering himself far from sleepy, Oxenshuer set about assembling his solar still. Although he had no idea how long he would stay in the desert—a week, a month, a year, forever—he had brought perhaps a month’s supply of food concentrates with him, but no water other than a single canteen’s worth, to tide him through thirst on this first night. He could not count on finding wells or streams here, any more than he had on Mars, and, unlike the kangaroo rats, capable of living indefinitely on nothing but dried seeds, producing water metabolically by the oxidation of carbohydrates, he would not be able to dispense entirely with fresh water. But the solar still would see him through.

  He began to dig.

  Methodically he shaped a conical hole a meter in diameter, half a meter deep, and put a wide-mouthed two-liter jug at its deepest point. He collected pieces of cactus, breaking off slabs of prickly pear but ignoring the stiletto-spined chollas, and placed these along the slopes of the hole. Then he lined the hole with a sheet of clear plastic film, weighting it by rocks in such a way that the plastic came in contact with the soil only at the hole’s rim and hung suspended a few centimeters above the cactus pieces and the jug. The job took him twenty minutes. Solar energy would do the rest: as sunlight passed through the plastic into the soil and the plant material, water would evaporate, condense in droplets on the underside of the plastic, and trickle into the jug. With cactus as juicy as this, he might be able to count on a liter a day of sweet water out of each hole he dug. The still was emergency gear developed for use on Mars; it hadn’t done anyone any good there, but Oxenshuer had no fears of running dry in this far more hospitable desert.

  Enough. He shucked his pants and crawled into his sleeping bag. At last he was where he wanted to be: enclosed, protected, yet at the same time alone, unsurrounded, cut off from his past in a world of dryness.

  He could not yet sleep; his mind ticked too actively. Images out of the last few years floated insistently through it and had to be purged, one by one. To begin with, his wife’s face. (Wife? I have no wife. Not now.) He was having difficulty remembering Lenore’s features, the shape of her nose, the turn of her lips, but a general sense of her existence still burdened him. How long had they been married? Eleven years, was it? Twelve? The anniversary? March 30, 31? He was sure he had loved her once. What had happened? Why had he recoiled from her touch?

  —No, please, don’t do that. I don’t want to yet.

  —You’ve been home three months, John.

  Her sad green eyes. Her tender smile. A stranger, now. His ex-wife’s face turned to mist and the mist congealed into the face of Claire Vogel. A sharper image: dark glittering eyes, the narrow mouth, thin cheeks framed by loose streamers of unbound black hair. The widow Vogel, dignified in her grief, trying to console him.

  —I’m sorry, Claire. They just disappeared, is all. There wasn’t anything I could do.

  —John, John, it wasn’t your fault. Don’t let it get you like this.

  —I couldn’t even find the bodies. I wanted to look for them, but it was all sand everywhere—sand, dust, the craters, confusion; no signal, no landmarks—no way, Claire, no way.

  —It’s all right, John. What do the bodies matter? You did your best. I know you did.

  Her words offered comfort but no absolution from guilt. Her embrace—light, chaste—merely troubled him. The pressure of her heavy breasts against him made him tremble. He remembered Dave Vogel, halfway to Mars, speaking lovingly of Claire’s breasts. Her jugs, he called them. “Boy, I’d like to have my hands on my lady’s jugs right this minute!” And Bud Richardson, more annoyed than amused, telling him to cut it out, to stop stirring up fantasies that couldn’t be satisfied for another year or more.

  Claire vanished from his mind, driven out by a blaze of flashbulbs. The hovercameras, hanging in midair, scanning him from every angle. The taut, earnest faces of the newsmen, digging deep for human interest. See the lone survivor of the Mars expedition! See his tortured eyes! See his gaunt cheeks! “There’s the President himself, folks, giving John Oxenshuer a great big welcome back to Earth! What thoughts must be going through this man’s mind, the only human being to walk the sands of an alien world and return to our old down-to—Earth planet! How keenly he must feel the tragedy of the two lost astronauts he left behind up there! There he goes now, there goes John Oxenshuer, disappearing into the debriefing chamber—�
�

  Yes, the debriefings. Colonel Schmidt, Dr. Harkness, Commander Thompson, Dr. Burdette, Dr. Horowitz, milking him for data. Their voices carefully gentle, their manner informal, their eyes all the same betraying their singlemindedness.

  —Once again, please, Captain Oxenshuer. You lost the signal, right, and then the backup line refused to check out, you couldn’t get any telemetry at all. And then?

  —And then I took a directional fix, I did a thermal scan and tripled the infrared, I rigged an extension lifeline to the sample-collector and went outside looking for them. But the collector’s range was only ten kilometers. And the dust storm was too much. The dust storm, l oo damned much. I went five hundred meters and you ordered me back into the ship. Didn’t want to go back, but you ordered me.

  —We didn’t want to lose you too, John.

  —But maybe it wasn’t too late, even then. Maybe.

  —There was no way you could have reached them in a short-range vehicle.

  -I would have figured some way of recharging it. If only you had let me. If only the sand hadn’t been flying around like that. If. Only.

  —Ithink we’ve covered the point fully.

  —Yes. May we go over some of the topographical data now,

  Captain Oxenshuer?

  —Please. Please. Some other time.

  It was three days before they realized what sort of shape he was in. They still thought he was the old John Oxenshuer, the one who had amused himself during the training period by reversing the inputs on his landing simulator, just for the hell of it, the one who had surreptitiously turned on the unsuspecting Secretary of Defense just before a Houston press conference, the one who had sung bawdy carols at a pious Christmas party for the families of the astronauts in ’86. Now, seeing him darkened and turned in on himself, they concluded eventually that lie had been transformed by Mars, and they sent him, finally, the chief psychiatric team, Mendelson and McChesney.

  —How long have you felt this way, Captain?

  —I don’t know. Since they died. Since I took off for Earth.

  Since I entered Earth’s atmosphere. I don’t know. Maybe it started earlier. Maybe it was always like this.

  —What are the usual symptoms of the disturbance?

  —Not wanting to see anybody. Not wanting to talk to anybody. Not wanting to be with anybody. Especially myself. I’m so goddamned sick of my own company.

  —And what are your plans now?

  —Just to live quietly and grope my way back to normal.

  —Would you say it was the length of the voyage that upset you most, or the amount of time you had to spend in solitude on the homeward leg, or your distress over the deaths of—

  —Look, how would I know?

  —Who’d know better?

  —Hey, I don’t believe in either of you, you know? You’re figments. Go away. Vanish.

  —We understand you’re putting in for retirement and a maximum-disability pension, Captain.

  —Where’d you hear that? It’s a stinking lie. I’m going to be okay before long. I’ll be back on active duty before Christmas, you got that?

  —Of course, Captain.

  —Go. Disappear. Who needs you?

  —John, John, it wasn’t your fault. Don’t let it get you like this.

  —I couldn’t even find the bodies. I wanted to look for them, but it was all sand everywhere—sand, dust, the craters, confusion; no signal, no landmarks—no way, Claire, no way.

  The images were breaking up, dwindling, going. He saw scattered glints of light slowly whirling overhead, the kaleidoscope of the heavens, the whole astronomical psychedelia swaying and cavorting, and then the sky calmed, and then only Claire’s face remained, Claire and the minute red disk of Mars. The events of the nineteen months contracted to a single star-bright point of time, and became as nothing, and were gone. Silence and darkness enveloped him. Lying tense and rigid on the desert floor, he stared up defiantly at Mars, and closed his eyes, and wiped the red disk from the screen of his mind, and slowly, gradually, reluctantly, he surrendered himself to sleep.

  Voices woke him. Male voices, quiet and deep, discussing him in an indistinct buzz. He hovered a moment on the border between dream and reality, uncertain of his perceptions and unsure of his proper response; then his military reflexes took over and he snapped into instant wakefulness, blinking his eyes open, sitting up in one quick move, rising to a standing position in the next, poising his body to defend itself.

  He took stock. Sunrise was maybe half an hour away; the tips of the mountains to the west were stained with early pinkness. Thin mist shrouded the lowlying land. Three men stood just beyond the place where he had mounted his beacon. The shortest one was as tall as he, and they were desert-tanned, heavyset, strong and capable-looking. They wore their hair long and their beards full; they were oddly dressed, shepherd-style, in loose belted robes of light green muslin or linen. Although their expressions were open and friendly and they did not seem to be armed, Oxenshuer was troubled by awareness of his vulnerability in this emptiness, and he found menace in their presence. Their intrusion on his isolation angered him. He stared at them warily, rocking on the balls of his feet.

  One, bigger than the others, a massive, thick-cheeked, blueeyed man, said, “Easy. Easy, now. You look all ready to fight.”

  “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “Just came to find out if you were okay. You lost?”

  Oxenshuer indicated his neat camp, his backpack, his bedroll. “Do I seem lost?”

  “You’re a long way from anywhere,” said the man closest to Oxenshuer, one with shaggy yellow hair and a cast in one eye. “Am I? I thought it was just a short hike from the road.”

  The three men began to laugh. “You don’t know where the hell you are, do you?” said the squint-eyed one. And the third one, dark-bearded, hawk-featured, said, “Look over thataway.” He pointed behind Oxenshuer, to the north. Slowly, half anticipating trickery, Oxenshuer turned. Last night, in the moonlit darkness, the land had seemed level and empty in that direction, but now he beheld two steeply rising mesas a few hundred meters apart, and in the opening between them he saw a low wooden palisade, and behind the palisade the flat-roofed tops of buildings were visible, tinted orange-pink by the spreading touch of dawn. A settlement out here? But the map showed nothing, and, from the looks of it, that was a town of some two or three thousand people. He wondered if he had somehow been transported by magic during the night to some deeper part of the desert. But no: there was his solar still, there was the mesquite patch, there were last night’s prickly pears. Frowning, Oxenshuer said, “What is that place in there?”

  “The City of the Word of God,” said the hawk-faced one calmly.

  “You’re lucky,” said the squint-eyed one. “You’ve been brought to us almost in time for the Feast of Saint Dionysus. When all men are made one. When every ill is healed.”

  Oxenshuer understood. Religious fanatics. A secret retreat in the desert. The state was full of apocalyptic cults, more and more of them now that the end of the century was only about ten years away and millenary fears were mounting. He scowled. He had a native Easterner’s innate distaste for Californian irrationality. Reaching into the reservoir of his own decaying Catholicism, he said thinly, “Don’t you mean Saint Dionysius? With an i? Dionysus was the Greek god of wine.”

  “Dionysus,” said the big blueeyed man. “Dionysius is somebody else, some Frenchman. We’ve heard of him. Dionysus is who we mean.” He put forth his hand. “My name’s Matt, Mr. Oxenshuer. If you stay for the Feast, I’ll stand brother to you. How’s that?”

  The sound of his name jolted him. “You’ve heard of me?”

  “Heard of you? Well, not exactly. We looked in your wallet.” “We ought to go now,” said the squint-eyed one. “Don’t want to miss breakfast.”

  “Thanks,” Oxenshuer said, “but I think I’ll pass up the invitation. I came out here to get away from people for a little while.”

&
nbsp; “So did we,” Matt said.

  “You’ve been called,” said Squint-eye hoarsely. “Don’t you realize that, man? You’ve been called to our city. It wasn’t any accident you came here.”

  “No?”

  “There aren’t any accidents,” said Hawk-face. “Not ever. Not in the breast of Jesus, not ever a one. What’s written is written. You were called, Mr. Oxenshuer. Can you say no?” He put his hand lightly on Oxenshuer’s arm. “Come to our city. Come to the Feast. Look, why do you want to be afraid?”