by Nancy Kress
The chalice was the gold cup kept behind the altar, which Brother Meissel used when he “said Mass.” It was very pretty, Amanda thought. It was also supposed to be very holy. She said uncertainly, “But … won’t the soldiers see that it’s missing? And know you must have a hiding place somewhere?”
“Soldiers? Recognize the absence of a chalice? You must be joking,” Brother Meissel said. “Just remember, please.”
“I will,” Amanda said. She would like to have said more—to tell him how scared she was, to ask him what the soldiers would do to the abbey—but she knew better. Instead she returned to the TV, leaving the brothers to sing Vespers with no audience whatsoever.
ELEVEN
LOWELL CITY
Brother Meissel was wrong; no soldiers came to search the abbey. Amanda could see why. They were too busy fighting to take over essential city services.
The holo station was first. Privately run, its employees filmed their own shock as Admiral Pierce’s soldiers entered the station that broadcast to all of Mars and most of the Belt, as well as sending data packets to Earth, Titan, and the Space Tunnel. The soldiers were polite. They ordered the employees to leave, and they did. Then uniformed, armed soldiers began operating the equipment.
“Now we see only what they want us to see,” Brother Wu said. But he, too, was wrong. The next morning Amanda crept out of her cell at 0500 hundred, only to find all the brothers already clustered around the TV. It displayed a single static message, without audio:
THIS STATION HAS BEEN RETURNED TO THE PEOPLE, UNDER THE PROTECTORSHIP OF THE NEW MARS PROVISIONAL DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT. BROADCASTING WILL RESUME SHORTLY.
“Our Father, who art in heaven…” Brother Meissel prayed aloud.
Amanda, astonished, looked from Brother Meissel to the screen. “What does it mean?” she asked, but no one answered her until the prayer, in which all had joined, was complete.
“It means that Admiral Pierce’s faction has taken the station,” Brother Meissel finally said. “They claim that General Stefanak can’t win the war with the Fallers. That’s their justification for the insurrection. There must be fighting all over the city.”
“Fighting? But we’re at war with the Fallers, not with Admiral Pierce!”
“Out of the mouths of babes,” someone said.
“But Daddy … my father always says you can’t fight in a Martian dome! You might breach the dome!”
“Depends on what weapons you use. Brother Wu, where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m going outside to see what is happening.”
“You are not. The affairs of Caesar are not our affairs. We must perform the Holy Office. Lauds begins in ten minutes.”
Brother Wu pointed soundlessly at Amanda.
“All right, then,” Brother Meissel said. “Be careful, Shing.”
“I will.”
While the other brothers sang Lauds, Amanda stayed with the TV, waiting for it to do something. Before it could, Brother Wu returned. His full round face was rigid. “I only went as far as the end of Sigma Street,” he told Amanda, the only one in the refectory.
“They’re fighting over the life-support facility. I saw Pierce’s soldiers use laser guns on Stefanak’s troops that—there!” He pointed to the TV.
“… intensely to keep the oppressing forces from cutting off water or air to the city. Victory resulted at oh six hundred hours, and this station is thankful to report that the life-support facility is safe in the hands of the rescuing forces. Our commander, Admiral Pierce—”
Amanda didn’t listen anymore. She stared at the screen, which showed a young SADC soldier being sliced in half by a laser gun. The picture immediately and ineptly swung to a different shot, but Amanda had seen it.
Her mother, bending over the fish pool, and the Faller ship suddenly swooping down from the sky … screaming and screaming but not from her mother who already lay sliced shoulder to hip, a surprised expression on her beautiful face and her father running and shouting, her mother’s blood on the stone by the pool dripping into the pool and the fish—
Salah, falling back from her bunk, his head toppling off his shoulders within a fountain of spurting blood—
Father Emil, lying in the street—
“Amanda,” a voice said calmly, “go into the priest hole.”
The blood dripping into—
“Amanda. Go now to the hole.” It was Brother Meissel, returned without her hearing him.
“Yes,” she gasped. “All right. But you—”
“There are no but’s. Go to the hole and put on the s-suit.” That brought her fully back, “The s-suit? Why?”
“Because I told you to.” Then he relented. “In case the fighting breaches the dome.”
“They’d have to be crazy to do that!” Amanda said, and realized immediately that the sentence was her father’s.
“I believe they are. But if General Stefanak is killed—”
“They’re trying to kill General Stefanak?” Amanda said. It was like trying to kill the sun. General Stefanak had been the center of the Solar System for her whole life. He was as much a fact as light, or air.
The TV picture, still ineptly jumping around and changing focus, showed soldiers guarding the Summit. Amanda recognized the building immediately; the entire Solar System recognized the building. General Stefanak’s headquarters, built under the highest part of Lowell City’s central dome, the towering central support for the dome struts rising hundreds of feet from inside the building itself. As she watched, soldiers outside the Summit began to crumple. No one was firing at them, no one was using tanglefoam, the soldiers were in full battle armor. And they crumpled.
“What … what…” Brother Kawambe. When had the brothers finished Lauds and crowded into the room? Amanda hadn’t even noticed.
Brother Meissel said, “They’re using genemod viruses to stop breathing.”
Amanda gasped; she couldn’t help it. Genemod viruses were completely illegal. They could wipe out everybody. Daddy said you could engineer them to stop replicating after a set number of generations and then die, but were these viruses made like that? And even if they were, who would breathe them before the terminator gene kicked in? Who already had? Brother Meissel? Brother Wu? Herself?
The soldiers at the Summit had breathed them in.
“Amanda, go,” Brother Meissel said.
She hugged each of them first, wasting precious time, not caring. Outside the abbey a huge noise started, people running and screaming. Panic.
Amanda ran to the priest hole, pressed the catches with trembling fingers, and pulled out the s-suit. Easier to put it on outside the hole. She could still hear the panic outside in the streets. And then, over it, another sound, inside: singing. The brothers were singing the Holy Office.
But it’s not one of the times! Amanda thought, crazily. No matter. They were singing anyway. And then she realized it wasn’t the Holy Office but some other chant, one she’d never heard before. “Dies irae, Dies ilia…”
She snapped on her helmet and the chanting, along with all other noises, ceased.
Amanda started to crawl into the hole. But then she realized that once in there, with the helmet on to protect against viruses, she wouldn’t be able to hear or see anything at all. She’d have no idea what was happening. If soldiers searched the abbey, she wouldn’t even hear them coming.
They wouldn’t care if they found her. General Stefanak and Admiral, Pierce were fighting a war inside Lowell City, They were not going to be looking for Amanda Capelo.
She clumped in her heavy boots back into the heart of the abbey. In the choir stalls the brothers all knelt and sang. Amanda had a sudden flash of how it would look on TV—a short adult or tall child in an s-suit complete with helmet, thumping along between rows of singing priests. Crazy.
At Brother Meissel, she stopped, wondering how to say it without removing her helmet. She didn’t have to say it. He made his way to the altar, came back with the chalice,
and handed it to her. Amanda clumped back to the hole.
Inside, she opened the second door and emerged at the rubbish pile, beside the concrete wall that anchored the dome struts. Nearly every building used this space, where the dome slanted down too close to even stand erect, for discards or storage. Awkwardly pushing the chalice ahead of her, Amanda crawled behind building after building, circling the dome by staying beside the concrete wall. When she finally reached a building suspicious enough to wall off its rubbish area, she had also reached a narrow service alley between buildings. She walked along it to the street, less than a block from one of the dome’s eight airlocked gates.
She was just in time to see the dome come down.
A military flyer passed high overhead. Had it fired a proton beam, the entire city would have been vaporized. But it merely fired a focused laser, sweeping the beam across the piezoelectric dome. It sliced a half-kilometer-long surgical cut through plastic, through metal struts, through the buildings and objects and people below.
The struts buckled and began to fall.
Amanda raced toward the gate. She couldn’t hear the falling dome, nor the sirens that must be screeching as the atmosphere escaped. Everything happened silently. Windows blew outward from buildings. People opened their mouths and screamed silently. Those who, like Amanda, wore s-suits struggled toward the gate, crowded through, and began to run. Amanda pushed herself until her lungs throbbed with pain and her legs gave way. Then she dropped to the red ground and twisted to look back at Lowell City.
It looked like half a clear beach ball stoved in on one side. She was too far away now to see details. Only the sagging plastic and the sharp edges of broken struts poking the morning sky. All the people she knew must be dead or dying inside.
Could Brother Meissel and the others have made it to one of the two smaller domes? Those looked intact. No, the brothers wouldn’t have even tried. They’d have stayed in their choir stalls, behind the grille that was supposed to keep out the world, singing. Dies irae, Dies illa …
Amanda choked back sobs. She would not cry—she would not. Instead she began again to walk, staring straight ahead, her panting loud inside her helmet. It was ten minutes more before she realized she still carried the golden chalice, relict from the Ares Abbey of the Benedictine Brothers on Mars.
* * *
The Martian plain, which looked so even from inside the dome, was covered with regolith, large rocks, and enormous boulders. Between them hurried figures in s-suits, shuttle buses, private land cars, skimmers. They all moved in the same direction. Amanda did, too, because everybody else was. The vehicles raced past her. Eventually she saw the ships on the horizon and realized everybody was heading toward the spaceport. As she walked, she saw a ship lift off from the ground.
Although she didn’t know it, Amanda had fled Lowell City from the gate closest to the spaceport. She had a head start on the hundreds trying to reach the port. Forty thousand people had lived in the central dome of Lowell City. Most of them were now dead, suffocated by lack of air and frozen by the intense cold. Some had been able to reach the gateways to the other two smaller domes. Everyone who could get their hands on an s-suit had left the city by vehicle or foot for the spaceport, before their air tanks gave out.
Amanda walked, numb, because she couldn’t think what else to do. She was young and fit. She reached the spaceport before all the civilian ships had gone, the ships in turn fleeing the desperate people who scrambled and fought to get aboard one of them, any of them.
The scene was so eerie that her numb mind shivered. In complete silence, suited figures with bubble heads jumped out of vehicles and ran toward shuttles and hoppers and flyers. The military ships, in a separate part of the field, were surrounded by armed ‘bots who killed anyone without the proper codes. Those civilians with legitimate codes unlocked their private ships. Others swarmed over to them, pushing and shoving to get aboard. Some owners were armed; people went down in tanglefoam or with their suits pierced. Other people stood quietly apart from the fighting, apparently knowing they had no hope, waiting for the inevitable. Amanda saw two figures carrying an s-cot between them. A baby.
She gasped and turned away. But there was nowhere to go. She didn’t have a ship. She couldn’t fight to get on one, and she wouldn’t have fought if she could. She was going to die. So many other people had died … Father Emil and Brother Meissel and Brother Wu and excitable, dim Brother Kawambe … and Amanda’s father. He was probably dead, too.
She sat down. Even through her suit the rocky ground felt cold. She sat on it and waited to die, and her only thought was that she hoped it wouldn’t hurt.
Later, she never knew how long she’d sat there. Maybe just a few minutes; the scene at the ships had not changed. Her backside felt frozen. Someone loomed into her field of vision. Amanda looked up, but she could see nothing behind the tinted face plate of the other person’s helmet.
The suited figure touched the chalice in her arms.
Then it peered closely at Amanda. Her own face plate was clear. The other person started, grabbed Amanda’s hand, and pulled her upward. She stumbled, and all at once she was running, towed along by whoever this was toward a far section of the field. As they approached the land hopper standing there, another figure gestured wildly. The crowd around the craft was small, maybe because it was only a land hopper, incapable of leaving Mars. But it was a crowd, and as Amanda ran, gasping, she saw the second figure stop gesturing and fire a laser pistol at someone trying to charge up the hopper’s ramp. The interloper crumpled to the ground.
Amanda was pulled past the guard, who aimed its pistol at her. But the person towing her kept on pulling, and the other figure didn’t fire, and then she was up the ramp and the door closed and Amanda collapsed onto the deck, gasping, yanking off the helmet that she suddenly felt was suffocating her, just before she felt the hopper lift off the surface of Mars.
She looked up. Two teenagers stood looking down at her, a small swarthy girl and a taller boy. A second boy, in an s-suit but without a helmet, piloted the hopper. The first boy panted as badly as Amanda; he was the one who had been towing her. He didn’t seem able to catch his breath. But even bent double and wheezing, he was beautiful.
The girl said something in a language Amanda didn’t know. The girl’s tone, however, was all too clear: She was furious. The pilot laughed and said something. He made a quick chopping motion with his arm.
The first boy, panting less now, straightened. This made the girl start an even more furious tirade. The boy ignored her. He stared at Amanda.
“Christos … is you! Ah-man-dah Capelo!”
The girl stopped scolding and looked dumbfounded. The pilot turned to stare. Amanda didn’t know what to do. Fear turned her cold body colder.
Then the tall boy said in heavily accented English, “Welcome aboard, Ah-man-dah Capelo. Glad are I you are not dead!”
She shook her head helplessly.
“I by Mars to look at your father! Welcome aboard!”
* * *
They were Greek, Konstantin told her. Greek Orthodox, which meant nothing to Amanda. Konstantin Ouranis was the tall boy who had saved her life, stopping at first for no other reason than she had been carrying a chalice for a religion she neither shared nor understood. When he’d seen her face, he recognized her from the newscasts. He was eighteen years old, had been born in Thessalonika, and knew her father’s work. He wanted to be a physicist. He had come to Mars to ask Martin and Kristen Blumberg if they had any more of Dr. Capelo’s work that hadn’t yet been published.
All this came out slowly, painfully, as Amanda and Konstantin wrestled with language. The pilot had set the hopper down on a smooth stretch of plain in sight of absolutely nothing but red regolith. He and the girl listened intently, as if listening hard could somehow make Amanda’s words intelligible to them. “They have not English,” Konstantin explained. “I have English one year on school.”
“You still do better than I do
in Greek,” Amanda said shyly. Konstantin beamed.
The girl was his sister Demetria. The older boy, twenty, was Nikos Papandrea, Demetria’s boyfriend. Both sat hunched intently forward, eyes flicking back and forth on the speakers’ faces.
Konstantin said, “You to come by where?” His face looked concerned, interested. He had dark brown eyes and curly black hair: gorgeous eyes, gorgeous hair. His skin was a golden brown, the color of honey.
“I was in Lowell City,” she said shyly. “At an abbey.”
“Pardon me?” Konstantin said.
Amanda searched for simple words. “I was with priests. Mass. The Holy Office.” Inspiration seized her. “At a house of God.”
“Splendid!” Konstantin said. Maybe his English software had been British. “You are at house of God, you are…” he searched for a word “… to hide?”
“Yes, I was hiding. From the men who kidnapped … who took away my father.”
“Yes, yes,” Konstantin said and translated for Demetria and Nikos, who made the sign of the cross just as Brother Meissel had done. Brother Meissel …
“They’re dead, aren’t they? All the priests in the house of God?”
“Dead. Yes,” Konstantin said, and took her hand. At his touch Amanda felt a strange sharp shock travel up her spine. “Sorry, I are.”
“Thank you. They were good to me.”
“Splendid,” Konstantin said softly. “Good peoples. You to hide at house of God. And your father, Dr. Thomas Capelo, he to hide at house of God also?”
“No. I don’t know where he is. We weren’t kidnapped … weren’t taken together. I saw him taken.”
“You see your father take? Who?”
“I don’t know!”
Nikos said something sharply and Konstantin stopped to translate. Nikos made a long voluble reply.
“Nikos say bad people to take your father. Dead now, maybe. Maybe no.”
“He’s not dead,” Amanda said stoutly. “I know he’s not dead. They probably need him. He’s the galaxy’s best physicist! There’s no other reason to kidnap him!”