Patron of the Arts

by William Rotsler

  There’s something amusing about Marsport, or the idea of Marsport. It’s not much of a place, only four middle-sized domes and a few connecting zome structures. It sits midway between the old ruins and the open pit Princess Aura mines. The citizens of Marsport take the inevitable kidding in good grace and then turn the tables on you by inventing “local customs” that are strictly adhered to (for example, the first three rounds are on the visitors—and the last three). There’s the Raygun Ranch Saloon, the Flash Gorden Hotel, Ming the Merciless Cafe and Dale Arden’s, which is a sort of general store. Next to the Planet-wreckers Bar & Grill is the Mongo Assay Office. They called the local beer “xeno” and drank a lot of it. I asked them what they made it from and was told I shouldn’t ask; then they told me sunbuds, which sounds fine but turns out to be a sort of sickly gray-green lichen, only fatter.

  Marsport was the halfway point on our grand tour, and Wootten let me off for a couple of hours while he did some servicing and checking. I borrowed a sandcat from a prospector in from Tracus Albus with a busted wrist and drove north a couple of kilometers to The Tomb. Archaeologists have carefully opened the crypts and found nothing of value, not even bones, only a little calcium dust. Apparently the Martians did not, like so many Earth cultures, bury their dead with everything they might need in the afterlife. Either they didn’t believe in one, or they didn’t think you could take it with you.

  The Tomb is only partially excavated on the exterior, but the inside is estimated to be forty percent cleared. It was found by a wildcat prospector intrigued by the unusual vibrations he read on his sonar. Carnegie institute and Interplanetary Projects both were involved in the dig and the only visually significant find, the Starstone, is on exhibition at the Modern.

  But it was not treasure or even archaeological knowledge that brought me, in the chilly Martian morning, to stand within the great vault. I wanted

  to

  experience

  everything I could

  about

  Mars.

  Here—perhaps—the ancient kings had been laid to rest. But the place could easily have been the equivalent of a monastery or a Hall of Fame or a prison cemetery. Perhaps we would never know.

  But ancient hands, inhuman hands, had built this vault. A groined roof, one of the few left—or discovered—arched overhead. Every footstep was echoed; even my breathing seemed loud. Instinctively I tried to make no noise, although I would have been delighted to raise the dead.

  Most of the crypts that were visible were opened, their sealing slabs labeled and set aside. I peered into one of the arched vaults, my torch quickly scanning it. I don’t know what I expected. Rats. Moldering bones. Staring eyes. A shrouded figure rising. But there was nothing. Literally and actually nothing but dust. Not much of that. The next one was the same, and the five after that. Not even bones. The cold dry air must have kept them mummified for centuries upon centuries, but if only a small percentage dried up and disappeared each century there had been so many centuries that nothing was left. Were the experts right? Had Mars once been a garden? Waters flowing

  from

  the

  polar

  caps,

  watering

  verdant

  forests

  of—what?—red-leaved trees? Were there any experts on Mars?

  I walked to the center of the vast vault. Arches were everywhere, branching into more and more passages, more vaults, a giant cemetery of alien dreams.

  “Hello!”

  My shout echoed and echoed, but did not even raise dust. I ran my light over the ceiling. Unadorned, except for its structural beauty. No Michaelangelo here. No six-fingered hand holding brushes with paint dripping into its tentacles. No royal commissions, no patron, not even a WPA assignment. A place to house the beloved dead, not a pleasure palace.

  I went back out and climbed on the cat. I could be back in time for the noon meal and then—on to Bradbury!

  We went straight up the Ceraunius, cut west a bit at Lacus Ascraeus then back to north, across the Tracus Albus, through Lux, detoured into Thaumasia to drop off some supplies to a lone miner there, then into the highlands of Lacus Silis and Bradbury.

  That’s what it said on the log and on the latest Martian Commission Official Map, Sector 5-100. The way Wootten told it was,

  “We roll up the Cerry until we hit Sandcat Tower, ding a dot westerly over the Crashstrip, through Luxy, then drop off some bits with Old Ed Amendola. We’ll break a beaker of top-pop, then tear-ass up the high country and snap it off at Bradbury.”

  There is a lot that never appears on any “official” map, whether it be Mars or Michigan.

  I was very excited now. Not only was I approaching Nova; I was also going through some of the prettiest country on Mars. I remembered my father telling me how desolate and phony the moon had seemed to him when man first took the giant step. He said it was much the same with the first Martian flybys, and even after the first landing at Touchdown, which is a pretty dreary spot. Not until man came down out of the sky and walked around on Mars did he find out how pretty it was. It takes getting used to, there’s no doubt of that. It’s featureless most of the time, but there are unexpected marvels in the rills, and where the rocks are still showing through the battered, cratered, weathered surface, you can see extraordinary beauty. I’m not the first Mars enthusiast who’s been told that the “great marvels” of Mars could easily go unnoticed in the American Southwest. I won’t even deny it. But these were Martian rocks, Martian plains, Martian desolation. I loved it. I was still feeling the effects of Amendola’s private-label top-pop when we sighted the first of the farms around Bradbury. Few of the towns had extensive farming areas. Burroughs, Wells, Bradbury, Grandcanal City, a scattering between Grabrock and Northaxe, but for the most part these few thousand acres supplied the bulk of food for the whole population.

  The Alfonso VI Hacienda was on our right, and someone waved from the bubble of a tractor ripping a virgin field. We turned at the stone pylon marking the corner of a green field of potatoes, and I felt cramped. We could no longer just go where we pleased. I came down out of the observation dome and helped the others tidy up the interior. Bradbury is the most prosperous “city” on Mars, mainly because of the water, which makes the farmland possible. There are mines eastward, along the long track to Burroughs, but they are not so important here. The magnificent Star Palace is way out beyond the perimeter, but it contributes little to the economy, except for the money and supplies brought by the archaeologists.

  We rolled to a stop at the main warehouse, a series of zomes nesting against the westernmost dome. I helped store my seedlings and other cargo in a rented space, then went on with Wootten into his Guild’s wayhouse to wash up.

  I stepped out of the sonics feeling refreshed and dug into my pack.

  “By the ten thousand tortures of Ares” (Wootten liked synthetic curses), “What kind of outfit is that?”

  I looked at the snowsilk blouse, the grained black tights, and the neoteric leather boots and saw them as Wootten did. I grinned and said,

  “My cleanboot fancy adventurer’s outfit. I left the cape with the blazen symbol back on Earth.”

  Wootten plumped down on the bed and fingered the snowsilk.

  “Hot flaming damn.” He paused, then said carefully, “Look, do you mind if I give you a few pointers?”

  “Go ahead.” I hadn’t felt like a neo at anything since I tried to ski fifteen years before.

  “Uno, this stuff is mighty fine and fancy, but it marks you not only as a cleanboot but as a rich cleanboot.” He squinted thoughtfully at me for a moment, then shrugged almost imperceptibly and said, “You have enough troubles with Nova. Dos, you’ll stand out like a vapor trail at a time I think you might like to be inconspicuous. Tres, you’ll look like one of them honorary degrees.”

  I grinned ruefully and nodded my head. I knew that an “honorary degree” was used as an insult, for these nuvomartians were eminently pragmatic an
d while most of them had degrees it was because they really needed them to do the job they had.

  “What do you suggest?” I asked.

  “What else you got?”

  We went through my limited wardrobe and selected a similar outfit, in black, but in the plainer, tougher coriace tissu material that seemed to be standard wear.

  “Dressup is generally just a clean set of whatever you wear regularly,” Wootten told me. “Damned few governor’s balls here.” Then he cackled lewdly and grinned. “Get that stuff on and let’s get ourselves wrapped around some of the local pop-top.”

  I groaned at the thought, but dressed quickly enough and followed Wootten out and down the street that wandered through the town. I caught a glimpse of the big cylindrical structure that housed the GE fusion torch and the long zome with the buildings of varying size and form that suckled on the torch, each for the various major elements it needed.

  Wootten saw me looking and said, “It goes night and day, y’know. Heavy metals, garbage, everything. Rips the raw material down to the atomic level, or would, if you put it through enough times. We do that for anything we ship back to Earth. It’s cheaper. That torch is why we can go without masks around here and how they can have all the farms, y’know.”

  I nodded. “The air-maker.” Garbage, dirt, tons of rock, dead bodies, trash were all stripped down to the basic elements, the nitrogen and oxygen recombined for atmosphere, with dashes of other gases, with pinches of trace elements, and a glug or two of whatever might have slipped through, and the planet Mars was getting itself another blanket of air—breathable, this time, by Homo sapiens. Terraforming. Adaptation. The fusion torch had just barely saved Earth from strangling in its own wastes. Hundred-, two-hundred-year-old trash dumps were mined for material. Some of these sites were the richest sources of heavy metals left on our ruined Mother Planet. My own Ecolocorp had bought options on hundreds of municipal dumps just as soon as I knew a practical and portable fusion torch and mass accelerator was feasible. It was cheaper to bring the torch to the trash than the trash to the torch. Great scoops dumped gobs of the planet’s plundered resources on conveyor belts that fed into the hoppers.

  Earth was still far from cleaned up. Piles of pure elements did not feed the billions, but they helped, mainly by sustaining the technology. Oil and the heavy metals were recycled. The technology that was needed to recombine the raw elements was even more complex than the technology that produced the raw material.

  But atomically pure was even better than chemically pure and many of the delicate sciences, such as body and brain chemistry were aided by these pure elements, which reduced the X factor. Today, everyone gets at least an annual readout and delicate chemical adjustments are made where the nutritional balance has been disrupted. The fusion torch and attendant technology have saved man’s ass, but man’s soul is still in danger.

  Maybe that was why I was on Mars.

  Kochima’s Star Palace was our destination. First a dram of pop-top served in a rosy glass made from local silica, then a thick, tasty slab of algae steak, ragged cubes of soyasen, a few rounds of carrot as thick as my wrist, and some sort of blue-green lettuce. Between the drink and the food were introductions to a score or more of miners, torch technicians, farmers, and biologists. I noticed that whether hard-rock miner or test-tube biologist they all had a common factor of self-reliance, of independence and reliability. I was pleased to note that these traits were not the creation of the vidtab writers and that, as far as I could see,

  “My word is my bond” was a truism.

  Oh, not that everyone loved everyone else, and certainly not that they were all saints. You can be a self-reliant, independent, and reliable assassin or jewel thief or computer criminal. It was simply that these seemed common traits, and I found it comforting. I had been too long in the world of pragmatic business, where truth was a commodity and friendship a matter of whom you were dealing with. Nuvomartians wanted each individual to be what he seemed. They lived close to nature, but it was an alien nature that man was only beginning to understand. The need to trust one’s own kind was strong.

  Maybe it was a little early, but I felt at home.

  I found there were surprising aspects to some of these men. Easton had been in Leavenworth for six years for “adjusting” Union Oil’s computers to pay large sums into a dummy account. Now he ran the complex mass accelerator’s computers. “Long Jim” Trotter had been James Trotter IV, scion of a New England financial megafamily. Wayland and Migliardi had fought at New Orleans, in the Riots, one on each side. Drayeen had been a space salesman for a vidtab readout magazine. Puma had been Reymundo Santiago, a painter of note, and now a partner in Rojorock, Inc., a small mining company. They wanted to know all the latest news and gossip about Earth, and I wanted to know about Mars. But there were more of them so I ended up answering the questions.

  Yes, Rosita Chavez and Olga Norse, Jr., were lovers but they had recently formed a notorious triad with Ed Avery, the director of City on Top of Itself, the muckraking exposé of the predominantly homosexual archotolog called Heaven. No, it would be at least two years before the new Mark IX torch would be ready. Yes, the food riots in India had resulted in the deaths of millions. Peru and parts of the PanArab Republic had also suffered riots. No, there were no plans for saving Kennedy Space Center even as a historical monument. Yes, the White House wanted to chop off aid to Mars.

  No, China Corlon was not a transsexual. Yes, President DeVore had called President Goldstein a mastoc cornard, and the insult was still shaking the beds of Washington. No, the Femmikin robots were no substitute for real women, no matter how well programmed to your tastes. Your own suspension of disbelief was their best asset. Yes, the FSA had picked John Grennell and Terry Ballard for the Callisto mission. No, Margarita Silva did not have implants, as far as I knew, just a bounty from nature.

  Yes, Utah had gotten an injunction against Femmikin, Inc. after the Secretary of Robotics had fallen in love with one. No, Lila Fellini had not had any special geriatric treatments, nothing that wasn’t standard for all of us. Yes, the antipollution vigilantes had been disbanded. No, the Curtain of the Unknown cult had not quite won their election in England. Yes, some of the plastic surgeons considered certain of their patients to be living works of art, and it was true that Dolores Salazar, Helen Troy, and Illusiane had appeared nude, or in scanty power jewel costumes, on pedestals, at a gallery opening. No, they had not quite perfected the DNA regrowth techniques at Johns Hopkins West, but the RNA research was progressing well. Yes, the subcerebral learning techniques were much improved. No, the bordello bill had been defeated in Australia. Yes, Ron Manuel and Neola Digarth would be doing their next sensafilm on Mars. No, you didn’t go insane living in an archo tower complex, it only seemed that way.

  I finally begged off by saying that all my talking was preventing me from drinking. They laughed and filled my glass with bubbling purple. When I was sufficiently drunk I was helped to bed, then got up to help Tanaka and Migliardi to their bunks.

  Morning came early, as mornings all too often do. Wootten and I had forgotten to opaque the port and even at 141 million miles the sun was still bright enough to hurt my pop-topped eyes. Luckily, Wootten had some “Cork,” and soon we were eating breakfast and looking for a way to get me to the Sunstrum mine. Wootten asked around and found out that Puma was taking a sandcat out past there to Burroughs, and I asked myself along.

  It was two hundred kilometers of beauty, for water from the torch was flowing down an ancient watercourse and we paralleled it for half the distance. Transplanted pines and other trees grew thickly, not in tree farms, but in realistic clusters and strings and solitary giants. With water a tiny native plant called Sprinkle blossomed into a lush dark green bush with hundreds of tiny flowers. The fabricated water looked very natural, and very welcome, winding its way through rock and pothole. It was not much more than a creek, but already it was called “the Mississippi of Mars,” and was officially labeled Athena
River. Puma filled me in on Nova’s parents; his account was less formal than one of Huo’s dossiers, but just as accurate and complete.

  “Sven Sunstrum came out here with the first shipload of colonists. Those were tough days. He punched holes all over the plate this side of the John Carters. Hit some iridium nodes and got himself a Chinese wife through the People’s Republic nobs. It’s been what, twelve years? That’s Martian years, of course. Nearly twenty-two Terran years. Goddamn, that Nova is growin’, isn’t she?

  “Well, Li Wing turned out to be a beauty. Sven, he fought a few who wanted to buy her contract, and he lasered a couple who didn’t take no for an answer. They had Nova and they struck a goddamn manganese mountain the same year. He’s on the Council and he’s past president of the Guild. As tough an old sander as you’ll find still turning wheels.

  “And don’t bypass Li Wing. That is still some woman, y’know?

  Not many with that kind of class get this far out. One time, back when Nova was just a baby, there were some zongo cleanboots out here that thought this was wide-open country, that they could do as they damn pleased. This was before they had any more than a squad of Marines at Ares.

  “They came up on Sunstrum’s digs when he was off in Burroughs with a load. They cut down a couple of diggers and cut power on the lift so the rest were trapped. They figured to steal Sunstrum’s fabled riches and rape his Chinese wife. But Li Wing gave them a fight and cut one of them zongos right from balls to gullet. She was about ready to whack off any protruberance that came near her when one of those burnouts grabbed the baby. Said he’d slice Nova’s throat if the woman didn’t behave. Li Wing never hesitated a second. She flipped that sticker around and threw it right through that bastard’s throat. Kid dropped into the bunk and Li Wing snatched a laser and cut the legs off all three that were left.”