by Greg Bear
“Do you mind my asking, again, maybe—have you been here before?”
“No,” she says.
“How do you know where to go, what to do?”
She answers, “My fat’er told me.”
“Was he ever here?”
“Na more questions.”
“We’re grateful, of course.”
“W’afor t’ey send you?” she asks as we walk. She points behind us to the rest of my squad.
“They’re concerned.”
“T’ey t’ink I like you?”
No words for another ten or twelve paces. Then, Teal says, with a short intake of breath, “Your soldiers han’t riven or forced. T’ey leave us be. I could guess it so. Flammarion lies on sa many t’ings.”
There’s a crater on Mars called Flammarion, also one on the Moon. They used to name craters after dead scientists. Flammarion was an astronomer some time ago, but what his or her namesake is doing here, or has done to Teal, or has told Teal about us, I can’t even guess.
On we move another couple of dozen paces.
“T’was tip time I left Green Camp,” Teal says. “Sa bad came a me. Ally Pecqua stole my widow’s due, and Idol Gargarel… He chose me a make t’ird gen with te Voors.”
“Third gen? Force you to have kids?” I don’t know anything about Voors. Another settlement, I guess. Trading females. Doesn’t sound appealing.
Teal looks sidewise, face cold in the faint blue light of the star bulbs—lost and cold and sad. I want to punch Ally what’s-the-name and Idle Gargle in their throats for making her sad.
Teal continues, “I stole te buggy and just drove away. Stealing transport is killing crime in te basin. You’re not te only ones in trouble on Mars.
“I’m not here a rescue you. You need a rescue me.”
NOT YOUR FATHER’S FUTURE
Sitting in the Eames chair, looking out at the early morning gray, I tap fingers on my knees. Reach into my pocket. Fumble with the platinum coin. Then I get up to pee. Wander into the kitchen. Open the refrigerator. Nothing looks good. Most of it has spoiled. No fresh veggies. Should have picked some up in the market. Not thinking. Not planning ahead.
Walking ghost, out of my box.
I drink a glass of water from the tap. Soon time a break and out, Teal would say.
Walk some more and sync my terrestrial compass. Take advantage of my liberty, with or without company. But I don’t want to. I don’t know what to do with what I know. Could be dangerous to tell anybody. Joe told me to stay away from MHAT. Maybe I shouldn’t even be here.
I can wallow in confusion and self-pity in the blue and steel apartment only so long before ape-shit darkness closes in and worse memories gibber and poke.
On top of the amazing, the good, and the awful that came after I acquired the coin, I have echoing in my head the jagged haunt of Teal’s own story, of high frontier injustice and a young woman’s flight, and how none of us could save her from the value of that primordial, metal-rich Drifter, nor from her betrayal of a hard ethic pushed way beyond the intent of the original Muskies.
Humans can be such shits.
A Skyrine shouldn’t tangle in matters that have nothing to do with why we fight. Shouldn’t invest in an outcome neither his own nor the war’s. Stay in the box. But last night’s fitful sleep, second night back—after a day spent in seclusion, squeezed into the leather chair, wrapped in soaking towels, seeping out through sweaty skin the last of the Cosmoline—staring out the window at the passing ships and ferries and pleasure boats, the pulse of Guru-motivated wealth and commerce, the whole, big, wide fidging world—
I heard echoes of Teal’s voice, her accent, her choice of words. What Teal said before she betrayed her people’s trust and led a wayward bunch of Skyrines to the Martian crown jewels:
You need a rescue me.
Despite everything, despite the Battle of Mars and our very real chances of losing the entire war, I can still hear her voice and believe, insist, that Teal is alive, can still be found, though I have no more power to return to Mars right now than one of those wheeling gulls.
Not unless I take another tour. Something I have vowed not to do. Something Joe would definitely discourage.
But there’s one thing I did vow. I promised Teal that I will deliver the platinum token.
I just don’t know to whom.
HOBOS AND DRIFTERS
The answer to where all the air comes from is a few hundred meters ahead, down a tunnel with many branches, most of them dark—no star lights. We don’t go there.
Teal breaks into a lope. I have difficulty keeping up. She knows how to push and kick away from both floor and ceiling in the lesser gravity, not so Mars-bound as to have lost her terrestrial strength. I have no idea how Muskies raise their daughters; maybe there’s universal Spartan discipline. The Green Camp big shots might insist their children train to become accomplished gymnasts. She sure moves like one.
Is her story, barely begun, a tale of patriarchal tragedy, rigorous discipline—or hypocrisy and cant, all Scarlet Letter and shit? I am truly both sympathetic and intrigued—but then I come up abruptly to where she stands on the edge of another shaft, actually a very large pit. I nearly bump into her. She blocks me with her outstretched arm, glaring at me yet again. Am I really that clumsy?
Beyond the rocky edge, a wide, echoing gloom fills with rising plumes of hot mist, fresh and moist and somehow electric. Slurps and the wet claps of bursting bubbles echo through the steam. Nothing like it in my experience on Mars. For the first time, I feel that I am actually smelling a living planet, not just the dusty shell around a fossil egg.
Teal backs us away a couple of steps. “Onced t’ey called t’is Devil’s Hole,” she says. “I didna know t’was so close.”
“Hot pools,” I say. “Not sulfurous. Clean, sweet.”
“T’ey wor sulfurous. Fat’er said you could not breat’ here a-t’out a special mask. And still, t’ere’s niter.” She leans and points to a patina of white crystals flecking the black stone arch. “First team here suffocated. Bad air seeped inna t’eir suits. Second team took better suits and dosed te deep pools wit’ oxyphores. Buggied in borax and potash from te farm flats, dropped oxidized dust and mine tailings inna pools. Oxyphores converted all into life, food—air.”
Oxyphores—the green dust?
“T’ird team dug more garages, brought depositors and printers, made machines, explosives—carved and blasted deep. Too deep, as ’Turn out. Cut a stony barrier right inna hobo. Flow fast, alive. Deep flood. You know a hobo, what t’at is, Master Sergeant Venn?”
“Not in your sense, I suspect.”
“Hesperian history. You learn geology in school?”
No need to tell all. “Fighting means knowing your ground.”
“Hobo should be spelled with double aitch, H2-obo. Means anTient underground lake or river flowing, sloshing, around volcanic chimneys and hard, rocky roots, seek an old familiar bed a run free, flood or carve more, t’en, as always, up t’ere, freeze, dry up—blow away. But keep a flow deep down, down here. No matter how t’ey dam and block, hobo kept breaking t’rough, flood entire. No need for sa much water, we already had enough from te soft lands. Te miners struggled a pump and get back a work. T’ey failed.
“My fat’er was a tail end of fift’ team. When t’ey pulled out, he set te sensors a let towns know when te hobo played down, sloshed ot’er way. T’ey planned a come back and resume mining. Ore a big lodes of iron, nickel, platinum, iridium, aluminum. Of course too much water, even for Martians. All could a let us build more towns. Many more. If we wor making more babies or bringing in more settlers. Neit’er which we do, now.”
“Because of the fighting.”
“Afore t’en. Te first troubles started afore I wor born.”
“Troubles?”
“Come wit’ me.”
She takes me through a narrower tunnel. Here, the star lights seem brighter—the walls reflect their feeble glow. Beneath the gre
en dust, my fingers feel the neutral warmth of pure metal in large patterns, irregular and beautiful crystalline shapes.
Then it hits me. During daylight, Mars dirt is warmer than the thin air for the first couple of centimeters, but gets colder the deeper you dig. Down here, something is keeping the Drifter’s thick walls pleasant to the touch. The Drifter may be sitting above an old magma chamber, one of the last signs of Mars’s youth.
This place is fabulous. I doubt it would be possible to overrate its strategic importance. How could it have been kept secret from Earth? Or from the Antags, for that matter?
But if Gamecock heard the general right, maybe it isn’t secret—not to Command. Someone could have spilled the beans and told Earth, and Earth could have finally decided to look up satellite gravimetry from decades past.
Confirm an anomaly.
Maybe command decided this is something worth finding and fighting for. Enough water and materials to support a couple of divisions, thousands of drops and ascents, for decades to come. No need for fountains.
Yet the Antags are still dropping comets.
And nobody told us.
My head reels trying to figure the ins and outs.
Teal comes to a ladder, metal rungs hammered into one side of a square, vertical shaft about three meters wide, rising into darkness. I can just make out a platform ten or fifteen meters above.
“Climb wit’ me?” she asks. “I doan wanT go it alone.”
“What’s up there?”
“My father said a watchtower, dug inna rock near te top, face west.”
“There’s air?”
She gives me a tart look and takes to the rungs. There is indeed a platform about halfway up the shaft. I’m not at all good at orienting underground, not sure which way I’m pointed, but guess we’re well up in the hill that rises over and beyond the sunken entrance—the “head” of the Drifter. The pure metal gives way to dark reddish stone streaked with black. The platform is rusty, coated in greenish powder, and creaks under our weight. Rust-colored water streaks and shimmers down the stone.
How long since the flood subsided? Days? Weeks? And who would be alerted that the Drifter was again open to mining and manufacture? How long until they all decide to return, in force, and find us?
Niter. Sulfur. Depositors and printers. They could easily make weapons, explosives.
Another ladder climb and we pass through a metal hatchway into a cubicle, bare rock on three sides, metal shutters on the fourth—and cold. Deep cold. Electric heaters have been mounted low in the stone walls, but not turned on. The chill sucks the heat from our bodies. We obviously won’t be staying long.
“ ’Tis as I heard,” Teal says, shivering, stooping—too tall for the cubicle. “T’is was built a guard over ot’er camps shoving in.”
Where there are people, there will be competition. Conflict. It’s what humans do best.
“Maybe we shoulda worn skintights,” Teal mutters as she twists the plastic knurl. “Doan know if…”
With a ratcheting creak, the shutters pull up and aside. There’s thick, dusty plex beyond, lightly fogged by decades of blowing sand—despite another set of shutters on the opposite side. Teal keeps turning the knurl and the outer shutters lift as well. The wide port provides a view of the sloping entrance to the northern garage and the rocky plain beyond. That damned brown blur still rises in the northwest. Odd. The comets should have wiped away any weather pattern.
I point it out to Teal. “That’s been there since we arrived. Any idea what it might be?”
She shakes her head.
Because the plex sits under a meter of rock overhang, there’s no view of the sky much above the horizon. And we can’t look straight east or south.
Teal reaches up and unscrews a cover in the cubicle’s roof. My fingers are numb. I can barely feel my face.
“T’ree-sixty,” she says, swinging aside the cover and pulling down a shining steel periscope. She plucks at its metal bars, not to freeze her fingers. “As told.”
“Who told?” I ask.
“Fat’er. Look quick,” she says. “Canna stay long unless we find te control booth and gin te power.”
I keep my eyes a couple of centimeters from the nearly solid rubber eyecups, but manage a circling, fish-eye view of the land around the promontory and the cubicle. Like a submarine under the sand!
Nothing… nothing…
Around once more, and then, to the southeast, I see a dusty plume, much closer, and beneath that, approaching the Drifter: three vehicles, neither Antag nor Skyrine.
More buggies.
“Muskies coming,” I say.
She gives me attitude about that name, but takes the view. She rotates the periscope several times, always pausing in the direction of the buggies’ approach.
“From te Voor camp,” she announces.
“Voor? Who are they?”
“Voors, Voortrekkers,” she says. “You know not’ing of us!” She stows the scope, closes the shutters, and returns to the ladder, muttering, “Got a way gin main power.”
Right. She descends from the lookout and I follow, fingers so numb I can barely hold on to the rungs. If we find a control room and power switches and equipment, maybe we’ll also find the miners’ stock of reserves: medical supplies, skintight repair kits, food. Enough to give us time to wait for reinforcements. Which have got to be on their way. This was supposed to be a big shove, right?
Maybe we’ve found what command was looking for all along.
PATRIOTS AND PIONEERS ALL
Teal is in the tunnel, running east. I reach the bottom of the shaft barely in time to see her disappear into darkness. Training tells me to get back to my squad—Voortrekker sounds suspiciously old-school—but I’m conflicted. I don’t know what sort of trouble we could face, what exactly to tell Gamecock or Tak or the general, if he’s still with us. Would the buggies carry miners returning to their digs—happy to see us, happy to have our help? Somehow, I don’t think so. But can I trust Teal to tell the whole truth?
I doubt our angels will answer any of these local questions. They’re rarely conversant on matters not immediately important to our operations, and settlers have never been an issue.
And why not?
How stupid is that?
The star lights here still glow, but dimmer, doubtless on fading battery power. I cross through many gaps filled with shadows. I’m feeling my way and my pace is slower than Teal’s. The tunnel weaves for fifty or sixty meters through raw metal and then basalt and outcrops of what looks like pyrites—fool’s gold, crystals of iron sulfide. Lots going on in the eastern Drifter.
The tunnel opens into what could be another buggy barn—but empty. The green dust here is thick and pools of moisture stain the floor’s compacted sand. Teal stands on the far side, beside another lock hatch, feeling the seals with her long fingers, then pushes her face close to detect loss of air.
The temperature is cooler but not frigid.
“Western gate still tight,” she says, glancing back at me. “And welded shut. My fat’er told me t’ere now only two gates, two ways in, sout’ern and nort’ern. When te Voors took te Drifter, t’ey wanted exclusive, madeT defensible wit’ small force.”
“Do the Voors know we’re here?”
“T’ey know I’m a-here,” she says.
“How?”
She shakes her head and walks to our right, toward a glassed-in booth mounted high in the empty chamber, where a dispatcher or controller might sit, looking down upon the garage floor. She climbs the ladder and pushes on a door in the booth’s side.
I stand below and look up. “Tell me what happens if they get in,” I say.
“If t’ey find me, t’ey take me back. If t’ey find you, t’ey kill all.”
“They can fucking try,” I say.
“T’ey have guns,” she announces, working to pry open the booth door. No go. It looks welded shut as well. She descends, eyes darting like a deer seeking a canebrake.
>
“We need to know the truth,” I say. “Why did you come here? What if those buggies are just bringing back miners?”
“T’ey wouldna come back just now,” she says.
“Why not? The hobo’s down—”
“Because t’ey’re afraid!” she cries. “You think t’is just a mine? You donna know a t’ing!”
“Afraid of what? Us?”
“Na!”
“What the fuck is going on?” I ask, voice a little too high. I try to stay in front of her and intercept one of her looks, but as she sets foot on the floor, and I push in, she grimaces, reaches out with a long, agile arm—and slaps me. I don’t know a single Skyrine who reacts well to being slapped by anyone bigger than a child. My hand is up and about to return the favor when the look on her face collapses into anguish, and she lets out a piercing scream.
That stops us both cold. We face off in the middle of the chamber, breathing heavily. She twists about, hands out and clenched, stretched to the limit.
“We have a find it!” she cries. Her voice echoes—broken, lost, hollow. Then she falls to one knee, as if about to pray, and hangs her head. “It warna just the hobo drove out fift’ team. My fat’er wouldna say all. Even so, he told me come here when if t’ere is na ot’er place a go. Drifter safer t’an Green Camp, if I wor put a te dust. But he said I must go alone.”
This floors me. “Even so, you rescued us,” I say, trying to reestablish common ground, common sympathies. “Maybe you thought, like you said, we might be able to help. You don’t think anyone else can or will help… right?”
She shakes her head. “I doan know why I pick you. You’re na our people. You’re na even friends.”
“We’re human, goddammit!” I say. “We’re fighting for everyone.”
“Na for us,” she says softly. “We doan want you here. Likely t’ey doan want you here.”
“The Voors?”
Teal forces her calm, fixed face, stands, and wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand. Then, looking down and blinking, she reaches a decision. “Sorry. Na call for sa much at onceT.”
“Yeah,” I say.