The Empress of Mars (Company)

by Kage Baker

  “Ms. Griffith,” he had said, “I was reading about your work with Martian algae and lichens. You were experimenting with gene splicing, trying to develop varieties that might help out terraforming.”

  Mary had nodded. “Martian lichens are photophobic. I’ve got one now that’s phototropic, look you, and I’m trying to make the little bastard produce oxygen like an Earth plant.”

  “What about an algae that produces methane? I read you’d produced a strain of algae that did that.”

  “I have.”

  “That’s why we need the ponds and canals,” Manco had said, turning back to Sub-Director Thorpe. “We stock them with methane-producing algae. The methane outgasses into the atmosphere through vents in the vizio domes. Install the ponds planetwide and we have a greenhouse effect. The planet gets warmer, the water thaws, storms occur, and electrical currents in the air build up an ozone layer.”

  “Just a moment,” General Director Rotherhithe had said. “I thought a greenhouse effect was a bad thing.”

  Someone had stifled a giggle. Sub-Director Thorpe had rolled his eyes and, turning to the general director, said “On Earth, sir, yes, sir. But we want a greenhouse effect here on Mars.”

  “Oh.”

  “More to the point,” Financial Officer Goodwin had said, “how much would all this cost the Company?”

  “It won’t be cheap,” Manco had admitted. “On the other hand, we won’t need to import any building materials from Earth. Martian grit makes good cement. Martian stone is good for cutting and shaping.”

  “But you’d need hundreds and thousands of miles of high-grade vizio, wouldn’t you? To say nothing of all the casting units and work crews to build this thing.”

  “It’s the terraforming system, sir. It has to be built planetwide for there to be enough methane generated for the job, but it’ll require very little maintenance once it’s built and have virtually no moving parts.” Manco had sensed the tide was turning against him, then, but he’d kept on. “Furthermore, once the system is up and running, colonies can be seeded along the canals. The water will be their lifeline. They’ll be able to farm the land between the canals, with a little more expenditure on vizio. The day will come when it’s warm enough to grow crops without vizio domes over them!

  “And from Earth, people will look up and see Mars the way Lowell thought he saw it, crossed with water-bearing canals, seasonally green with crops.”

  It had been a nice image, but the wrong one to throw out before bureaucrats. Too fanciful, too much like science fiction. Most of them had filed out of the room in silence afterward, though Mary had stayed to shake his hand and tell him she thought he was a genius. At the end only Sub-Director Thorpe and General Director Rotherhithe had remained, staring at him as he shut down his buke.

  “Well, it’s an interesting proposal,” Sub-Director Thorpe had conceded. “We’ll have to take it up with the board of directors, of course. Really quite an innovative plan, however.”

  General Director Rotherhithe had stepped close and peered at the tiny gold crucifix Manco wore around his neck. He poked at it. “What’s this, then? You’re not a Christian, are you?”

  “I am, sir,” Manco had replied. General Director Rotherhithe had pursed his lips and walked from the conference room without another word.

  A month later Manco had received a memo from Sub-Director Thorpe telling him that Manco’s proposal had interested the board of directors, but would of course involve far more outlay of capital than the British Arean Company was willing to spend at this time. They wished to see a scaled-down version. Could Manco prepare a new proposal in time for the next quarterly meeting, with a two-thirds reduction in projected costs?

  A month after that, as Manco had been revising his canal network, the Big Red Balloon had burst. Two days later Manco had been fired. The termination notice cited Article 3-17D in his contract, the one stating that British Arean reserved the right to terminate without redundancy pay any employee determined to have joined any cult or engaged in any manner of cultist activity.

  Manco had hurried to Sub-Director Thorpe’s office, begging to speak to him, but been refused. Thorpe was gone anyway, in another two weeks, as the British Arean Company reduced its staff on the planet. Only the bureaucrats received enough redundancy pay to get them home.

  And Manco had gone a little mad, perhaps, for a while. He stashed his belongings at the transit station, bought whiskey from the clan and spent a lot of time drunk, wandering the Tubes, muttering to himself in Quechuan and glaring out at the red world that might have become green. He had slept in the Tubes by night, like a lot of other former British Arean Company employees, and if it had been cold enough for a couple of the jobless to get frostbite, there was at least air to breathe.

  Chiring had sought them out, thrusting his handcam into the faces of ragged unshaven men and a few women, inviting them to speak out about their abandonment by the British Arean Company. Some had ranted and raved; Manco had simply stared into the lenses, too full of bitter words that choked him to be able to get any of them out. Where would he even begin, if he could speak?

  A few shamefaced Incan laborers, still on the payroll, hunted him up now and again to press handouts on him. He took to cutting himself. The sight of his welling blood was strangely consoling, though it tended to crust over black at once, never ran enough for cutting his wrists to kill him.

  One night he woke abruptly, as he sometimes did in the Tubes, gasping in the thin scant air, his heart pounding. A storm was raging outside, in the black night, with sand hissing as it whirled against the vizio walls. It made opaque boiling patterns there, visible only faintly where a distant light from Settlement Base showed them up. The drone of the wind filled the Tube, hypnotic, ominous, like the voices of alien gods singing.

  How long until dawn? Manco wrapped his coat around himself and wept for everything that might have been, for the pure malevolent strangeness of this depth to which he had fallen. He put his hands over his ears to shut out the sound of the wind, rocking himself to and fro.

  He heard his mother calling his name. He lifted his head and stared, with his tears evaporating to salt tracks on his face. Her voice echoed down the gray ghostly tunnel. His mother had been a Mexican emigrant to Peru, never very comfortable speaking Quechuan, but she was calling to him without accent now, her grammar perfect. Manco, my son! Manco, come up the mountain to me.

  Manco got to his feet and stumbled along the Tube, peering through the impenetrable gloom. He had a vague idea that it was bad to respond to a ghost who called your name. He walked on, though, wondering what sort of hallucination he was having. The darkness swarmed with barely perceptible movement, sand and shadows, nothing but void ahead of him . . .

  And a light, flickering red. Manco thought it was a warning light, perhaps, one of those posted by airlocks to remind the unwise traveler to mask up. Then he saw that it was a candle, a votive offering flaring in a cup of ruby glass.

  It was familiar. He had seen it every night of his childhood. It was part of the shrine his mother had kept on the little shelf above the holocabinet, the shrine she had taken with them on all the family holidays, the Virgen de Guadalupe looking down on all the holovised soccer matches his father had watched, all the soap operas and news broadcasts . . . at night it had looked like this, the small circle of ruby light and above it only the downturned serene face, the folded hands, visible.

  Manco saw them now. He stood there swaying, blinking at the vision. What was he doing here, back in the house on Avenida Tullu-mayo? His mother had sold the house after his father had died. Just as he wondered this, the roaring night fell abruptly silent. He heard his own breathing and heartbeat, and nothing else.

  Nor did he hear the voice, when it came. It spoke inside his skull, piercingly sweet, words that he felt rather than heard. And smelled: there was an overpowering scent of roses. The face and hands were above him now and they were not smoke-darkened wood but alive, the dark skin of the M
other of God, and the eyes opened and regarded him.

  Manco stood still, trembling. “What do You want?”

  The reply was that She wanted him to plant roses for Her, in this cold and wretched place. Make the mountain bloom. Expend his life and the blood of his heart in this purpose. In return, She would be with him and keep him from all harm. She spoke to him for what seemed like hours.

  The vision passed, he never knew how or when. Manco found himself shivering by Airlock Four, staring out at the Martian sunrise, and the sun was like a pale opal. He began to walk up the Tube, with no clear objective.

  A little way up the mountain he spotted a domed shelter, looming against the morning sky. Hazily he wondered what it might be, until he remembered hearing that Mary Griffith had bought a building and moved it up here. He walked closer, near enough to spot her in full Outside gear, working at the base of the dome’s wall. It looked as though she were plastering or tarring, daubing and slapping something on the wind-scoured surface. As he watched, she finished and came back in through the airlock, rubbing together her gauntleted hands.

  Her eyes widened as she spotted Manco. He nodded a greeting. “Remember me?”

  “Manco Inca, is it? I do indeed. The bright man with the plan. It would have worked, too. Damn Rotherhithe and damn the BAC to black stony flea-bitten hell. Look at you! They cast you off too, did they? You look as though you haven’t eaten in a week.”

  “I don’t think I have,” he’d said. “What were you doing there?”

  “Ah! Remember all my hard work with the bioengineered lichens? All gone for nothing. Bloody BAC sacked me and locked me out of my own laboratory. All my notes, all my data gone Goddess knows where.”

  “They fired you, too? But you have kids!” Manco was horrified. The little girls had amused him, when he had seen them playing in the tubes. He had found the little chattering one particularly funny.

  “And I’ve still got ’em, and damned little else. Six Petri dishes I had on a shelf in my kitchen, that’s all I have left of my work, can you believe it? So I’ve just done a bit of gardening, you might say, putting the stuff on my wall here. If it lives, it lives, and I know I have phototropic lichen. If it doesn’t, it wouldn’t have worked anyway.

  “Either way, it’s no stinking use now. Come inside, Manco dear. You look like you could use a good cup of tea. I’m setting up a tavern, see.”

  “I’d be grateful for something to drink, Ms. Griffith, but I can’t pay you,” Manco had said. She’d waved an impatient hand.

  “Nobody has any money. Don’t worry about it, my dear. And call me Mother; everyone else does,” she’d said.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Lost Boy

  When Mary and Mr. De Wit returned from the ruined allotment, the Brick was still where they had left him, placidly sipping ale. Everyone else in the Empress looked ill at ease, however. Rowan came to meet Mary as she entered. “Mum, Mr. Cochevelou wants a word,” she said in an undertone.

  “Cochevelou!” Mary said, turning with a basilisk glare, and spotted him in his customary booth. He smiled at her, rubbing his fingertips together in a nervous kind of way, and seemed to shrink back into the darkness as she advanced on him.

  “Eh, I imagine you’ve come from your old allotment,” he said. “That’s just what I wanted to talk to you about, Mary dearest.”

  “Don’t you ‘Mary dearest’ me!” she told him. “Chiring! Here’s a conversation you’re going to want to film. It’s going to be quite dramatic.”

  “Yes, Mother,” said Chiring, grabbing his handcam and running into range. He focused on Cochevelou, who grimaced and made ineffectual shooing motions at him.

  “Mary, darling! Darling. You’ve every right to be killing mad, so you do. I struck the bastards to the floor with these two hands when I found out, so I did. ‘You worthless thieving pigs!’ I said to them. ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?’ I said. ‘Here we are in this cold hard place and do we stick together in adversity, as true Celts ought? Won’t the English laugh and nod at us when they find out?’ That’s what I said.”

  “Words are all you have for me, are they?” said Mary icily.

  “No indeed, dear,” said Cochevelou, looking wounded. “Aren’t I talking compensation? But you have to understand that some of the lads come of desperate stock, and there’s some will always envy another’s good fortune bitterly keen.”

  “How’d they know about my good fortune?” Mary demanded.

  “Well, your Mona might have told our DeWayne about your Dutchman,” said Cochevelou. “Or it might have gone about the Tube some other way, but good news travels fast, eh? And there’s no secrets up here anyway, as we both know. And how nice to know our Finn, now delighting in the Blessed Isles, kept his word and took your diamond to Amsterdam after all, and don’t I feel awful now for all those curses I laid on his dear name? The main thing is, we’re dealing with it. The clan has voted to expel the dirty beggars forthwith—”

  “Much good that does me!”

  “And to rebate you the cost of Finn’s fields at the original asking price of four thousand, and to award you perpetual use of the biis from henceforth, rent-free as though you were one of our own,” Cochevelou added. “The new improved ones, as our Perrik is so proud of.”

  “That’s better.” Mary relaxed slightly. “You got that on record, didn’t you, Chiring?”

  “And perhaps we’ll find other little ways to make it up to you,” said Cochevelou, pouring her a cup of her own Black Label. “I can send work parties over to mend the damage. New vizio panels for you, what about it? And free harrowing and manuring that poor tract of worthless ground.”

  “I’m sure you’d love to get your boys in there digging again,” Mary grumbled, accepting the cup.

  “No, no; they’re out, as I told you,” said Cochevelou. “We’re shipping their raggedy asses back to Earth on the next flight.”

  “Are you?” Mary halted in the act of raising the cup to her lips. She set it down. “And where are you getting the money for that, pray?”

  Cochevelou winced.

  “An unexpected inheritance?” he suggested, and dodged the cup that came flying at him.

  “You hound!” Mary cried. “They’ll have an unexpected inheritance sewn into their suits, won’t they? Won’t they, you black beast?”

  “If you’d only be mine, all this wouldn’t matter,” said Cochevelou wretchedly, crawling from the booth and making for the airlock with as much dignity as he could muster. Chiring ran after him, keeping the camera focused on his retreat. “We could rule Mars together, you know that, don’t you?”

  Cochevelou didn’t wait for an answer, but pulled his mask on and was flying for the airlock when it opened before him and three Haulers stepped through.

  They weren’t as massive nor as red as the Brick; two had dreadlocked hair and beards framing their masks, and the woman’s hair was in dreads too. Their psuits seemed sculpted to their bodies, glued on by countless hours and miles on the High Road. They pulled off their masks and stood gulping in air, distance-blind, blinking in the close dim space before they spotted the Brick. One of them staggered forward.

  “There’s a navvy lost,” he said. Cochevelou halted in his tracks. Every head turned. Chiring swung his camera around.

  “Who’s lost?” demanded the Brick, getting to his feet.

  “The boy on the South Pole Line,” said the Hauler. “He was supposed to have been back at Nav Station three days ago. There was this storm out in Amazonia.”

  “Crap.” The Brick pulled on his gauntlets.

  “We’ve got four Jinmas we can send,” said Cochevelou. “I’ll bring ’em up to Nav Station in an hour.”

  “Thanks, mate.”

  “Chiring! Mr. Morton!” Mary swung around. “Pack up four tanks of the porter. You!” She stepped to the door of the kitchen and shouted in at the Heretic. “Start a fry-up. Anything we’ve got to spare, so it’s packed up for takeaway. Alice, run down and tell Manc
o we need the quaddy now.”

  But Alice had backed into a booth and was staring at them all, green-faced. “Who is it?” she asked. “Who’s the boy on the Line?”

  One of the Haulers opened his mouth to reply, but the Brick cut in: “Could be one of about six guys out there.” He glanced at Mary and murmured, “Maybe you’d better come.”

  “What’s going on?” asked Mr. De Wit.

  “People go missing sometimes,” said Mary distractedly. “We have to go out and find them. Will you do me a favor, Mr. De Wit, and sit with Alice a little while? Just sort of keep her chatting while we’re busy?”

  “I’ll go for the quaddy,” said Rowan, pulling on her mask as she sprinted past them. Mary turned away from the rage building in Alice’s face, and let the Brick lead her away out through the lock.

  CHAPTER 8

  Men

  It was a long trudge out the Tube to the Ice Hauler depot, and long before they got there the temperature had dropped far enough to make Mary shiver. The vizio here was so old it had opaqued like smoke, blocking what little warmth the sun bestowed. Grit crunched under her boots. Beside her the Brick strode along in grim silence, though if he had wanted to chat she’d have found it hard to hear him except at maximum volume: the Tube was full of the roar and hiss of the wind, and the noise of engines echoing back from the depot as the Haulers scrambled. No wonder the boys want their comforts when they come in, thought Mary.

  When they finally stepped through into the vast dome, the depot was nearly deserted. The Brick’s rig loomed like a sleeping dinosaur, its ball tires taller than Mary, its tank scoured to a dull and gleaming silver by sand storms. The hatch sprang open as they neared it. The Brick bent and made a stirrup of his hands for Mary, hoisting her up into the cab. She scrambled awkwardly across the seat and fastened herself in. The Brick lurched up beside her and closed the hatch, and toggled the switches that turned on the lights and life support. The warmth and rush of air felt like an embrace.