by Kage Baker
“Bugger,” she said.
“And, see, it doesn’t matter a tinker’s shite to me, my dear, but you know how people can get once they’ve put their heads together and begun talking and all—” Cochevelou babbled.
“Er—do you want me to take down the Goddess shrine, now?” Mr. Morton inquired.
“No!” Mary got to her feet, clutching the excommunication notice. “But you can go down the hill to the Emporium and buy a picture frame, and nail this damn thing up next to it as a badge of honor!” She flung it down on the counter. The Brick picked it up and, looking it over, chuckled.
“Not to worry, babe,” he said. “The Haulers are behind you. You have us on your side, you don’t need to worry about the Church.”
“How dare they,” said Mary, the rage beginning to work. “Those old bitches!” She strode for the lock, grabbing for her mask and Outside gear. “Mothers, my arse!”
She stormed out through the lock.
“It’s best we don’t try to go after her,” said Cochevelou, though no one was making any move to do so. “Best to let her have her space at this difficult time, right?”
“If you say so,” said the Brick.
The plan of storming into the Ephesian Mission and giving them a good piece of her mind faded rapidly, as Mary walked through the Tubes by herself. A few tears, of embarrassment and anger, trickled down inside her mask, but they soon dried. She thought to go down to her fine fields and walk among them, to comfort herself; but the thought that she might encounter any of the women of Clan Morrigan infuriated her, and so she found herself going in the other direction.
The Tube led here to a barren rocky area, quarried for gravel in the early days of Settlement Base’s construction. Wheeled tracks led in and out through the lock at its end; someone was still driving a quaddy through here on a regular basis. Manco, of course. He came down here to get materials for casting, and wasn’t his sacred grotto, or whatever it was, hereabouts?
She went outside and, yes, there was the quaddy, parked a little distance across the mountainside. Mary walked along the well-beaten trail, and coming around a curve found Manco.
He was standing at a work table he’d jackhammered from a boulder, placidly sculpting a rose on its work surface. Sitting by his tools was a small squeeze bottle of something blackish-red, from which he added a few drops to his bowl of clay. He glanced up through his mask and nodded as she approached.
She nodded back, but walked forward staring past him at the grotto beyond. There she was, the life-sized Virgen de Guadalupe, looking down serenely. Manco had done a great deal since Mary had seen the first holoimages he had taken. The Lady’s robe had been rendered blue-green with paint from the Emporium, and gold spangles were painted here and there. The crescent moon on which the Lady stood was now being supported by a little stevedore of an angel, whose features bore a certain resemblance to Manco’s own. Cast cement spines radiated out from the Lady, painted in alternating yellow and orange to resemble rays of sunlight or divine grace. Around them, spreading out from every crevice and extending up across the grotto walls, were extravagant hallucinogenic waves of roses cast of stone. Some had been daubed with color, yellows and oranges and creamy whites; some had been left unpainted, in shades of pink and bloodred. The Lady’s face and hands had been left unpainted, too. There was an unsettling glint to the eyes, however. Walking close, Mary peered up and saw the pair of rough diamonds Manco had set there.
Blood and diamonds and stone. Was it Mary’s imagination, or was there a certain ferocity in the image’s face, a uniquely Martian look to the Lady?
Belief adapted, it flowed and morphed itself to fit any place in which it fetched up. An ancient goddess of flowers, She Who Swallows the Stone Knife, She Who Crushes the Serpent, finding new work as the Mother of God . . . and, now that the wrecking ball of time had leveled that former neighborhood, so to speak, She was changing Herself to suit yet another new world.
She had nothing to do with Sisterhoods, with churches and rules and sins and pieties, spiritual or temporal. She had everything to do with blood and birth, with fighting to bring children into the world, with struggling to feed them all and keep them alive. She crushed serpents, all right, she pierced with those spines. She did whatever she had to do to keep life going, ruthlessly. She knew what it cost. And here, on Mars, the price was high.
They don’t know You like I know You, thought Mary. We’ll see who lasts, on Mars.
CHAPTER 28
The Unseen Hand
“Here’s something to make you smile, Ms. Griffith,” said Mr. De Wit, leaning back from his buke. “Jovian Integrated Systems has money for Perrik Cochevelou, which is to say his estate. They want to know if you have an automatic deposit arrangement with your Earth bank, or need one set up.”
Mary, sweeping the floor in a high bad temper, looked up glaring. “My Earth bank? All I’ve got’s an old inactive account with First Celtic Federal down there. Not so much as a punt in the damned thing these six years. I went with the British Arean Company’s credit union, or I suppose it’s the Areco Credit Union now, when I emigrated up here. Your people want Cochevelou’s bank data, and I’ve no idea where himself banks.”
“In fact, they want your information,” Mr. De Wit explained. “Perrik’s father hasn’t got power of attorney for him and his estate. You have.”
“What?”
“Cochevelou’s money is all held in the common account of Clan Morrigan. Perrik gave you power of attorney.”
“What? When?”
Mr. De Wit looked a little shamefaced. “We’ve been in communication. He has a buke up there with him, you know. Very clever young man. He was extremely specific about what he wanted, which was that any profit from the bii patents should remain out of reach of Clan Morrigan. He asked if it was possible to create a document authorized by both of you before his disappearance, and, er, I told him it was. So we did.”
“But . . . but . . .” Mary gripped the broom handle. “Oh, no. His father’ll be devastated it wasn’t him.”
“The next step is setting up a trust fund for his father,” said Mr. De Wit. “Perrik really does want to make certain he’s well provided for. I thought you could find a tactful way to put it.”
Mary grimaced. “Why is it always up to me to soothe people’s feelings? And how much money from this Jovian company are we talking about, by the way?”
Mr. De Wit named a sum. Mary reeled where she was standing. “What!”
“In quarterly installments over the next five Earth years,” said Mr. De Wit. “And he has stock shares.”
Giggling breathlessly, Mary sank down on the bench beside Mr. De Wit. “Well! How very nice. Great Goddess Below, Perrik will be able to afford a private compound with security guards and a bloody swimming pool, if he’s so minded.”
“He could,” said Mr. De Wit. “Shall I see if your account at First Celtic Federal can be reactivated?”
“Would you, please?” said Mary, with a wave of her hand, just as Alice leaned out of her loft.
“Eli, sweetie? I have the most awful headache. Will you bring me a cup of tea?”
“Of course,” said Mr. De Wit, and got up to go pump a kettleful of water. Smiling, Mary leaned over to peer at the screen of his buke. She read through the inquiry from Jovian Integrated Systems, with the slightly guilty thrill that came from looking at someone else’s buke screen. Only on the third reading did she notice the name of the sender.
By the time Mr. De Wit came back to the table, Mary had drawn away from the buke and was watching him with slightly hostile eyes.
“Would this Mr. Nennius from Jovian Integrated Systems be the same as Mr. Bill Nennius who worked for the BAC?” she demanded.
Mr. De Wit made a face and sank into his seat. “He would. He wasn’t really working for the British Arean Company, however.”
“Oh, no?”
“No. Ms. Griffith . . . you know that I am, unequivocally, on your side. So are a great many
other people you have never even met. The British Arean Company was being fatally short-sighted when it shelved its settlement operation here. Its own board of directors may have been blind to that fact, but a number of other corporations on Earth saw the mistake. The . . . larger company of which Polieos and Jovian are subsidiaries has been waiting for its chance to take advantage of the British Arean Company’s error. So . . . Nennius was sent up here to encourage Mr. Rotherhithe to make certain blunders that would make the situation worse.”
“But he was a right bastard!”
Mr. De Wit nodded. “I don’t like him. I don’t like his methods. Call him a corporate saboteur, if you like.”
“He was the one filed all those lawsuits against the clan! It was his fault Perrik went into hiding in the first place!”
“And now Jovian Integrated Systems has the bii technology, instead of British Arean. And the British Arean Company is out of the way. It’s felt Areco will get the terraforming efforts started again. Which is to everyone’s advantage, in the larger scheme of things.”
“But . . . bloody hell! Then he was the one hired those two assassins our Reno caught! We might have all been killed!”
“I’m sure that was Mr. Rotherhithe’s doing,” said Mr. De Wit. “He overreached himself, and see what the result has been? The British Arean Company has gone down in flames, but you’re still here. You’re a rich woman, Ms. Griffith. History is about to move forward on this planet. Do you understand that there are two conflicting economic models here? Think of it as a chess game.”
“And we’re a lot of bleeding pawns, I suppose?”
“No indeed, Mother-in-Law,” said Mr. De Wit, with a little of his smile coming back. “You’re most definitely a queen. The queen.”
Mary stared at him, still deeply suspicious. “What about Alice? You marrying her, was that a chess move too?”
Mr. De Wit glanced up at Alice’s loft. “Not at all. That was a happy accident,” he said softly. “Poor Alice. Someday you’ll have to let me take her back to Earth, you know. We can afford it now.”
Mary considered that he had said we, and that he was the only man who had ever seemed to make Alice happy. She considered all he had done on her behalf so far. She remembered the look of thorough detestation with which he had regarded Mr. Nennius. Shrugging, she decided she may as well go on trusting him.
“We can think about it, I suppose,” she said.
Two nights later they were, again, all wakened in their beds by the emergency alarm.
Mary heard the shrilling siren in her sleep, and woke to find she had clapped her mask on. She lay there, muscles rigid, waiting for freezing vacuum and oblivion. The siren went on and on, and still Mary was warm and alive and able to breathe. At last she dressed herself, crawled from her loft, and went down to the floor on her line.
She flicked on the lights. Yes, they still had power. She bent over the communications console, aware that behind her Mr. De Wit was coming down, Ottorino coming down, Manco coming down. There was Chiring, too, coming down on his line, dazed and half-dressed but clutching his handcam.
“What is it?” Rowan shouted down from her loft.
“It’s another breach,” said Mary, reading the message on the screen. “We’ll be all right. They’re saying it’s in the Tube. Suspected micrometeorite, puncture at . . . Section Thirty-seven. That’s right down the hill. They have a crew on the way to seal it off now. Easier than patching up where a cow went through! Everyone’s warned to stay inside until they sound the all-clear.”
Chiring suited up and went out anyway, with his handcam. By the time he returned, all the others had gone back to bed but Mary. She was waiting up for him with a mug of tea. “The Kathmandu Post isn’t worth risking your life over, you know, Mr. Skousen,” she said sternly.
“I was all right,” he said, though he looked pale and scared. “First on the scene. The emergency crew hadn’t even arrived yet. Got some good footage of the breach, before they got the vizio replaced. Oh, it was cold down there!” He took the mug gratefully and drank.
“You should have come back sooner,” said Mary.
“I couldn’t,” said Chiring. “I had to make a report. I was the one who found the . . . well, not the bodies, there weren’t any bodies. Except . . .”
“Someone was in the Tubes and got killed?” said Mary, horrified. “Who would have been prowling around in the Tubes in the middle of the night?”
“Two people,” said Chiring. “At least, two pairs of boots. And some socks and some really ugly sandals inside them. And . . . bits of feet.”
“What?”
“It was like a couple of cases of spontaneous combustion,” said Chiring, guiltily fighting the urge to giggle. “As far as we could make out, a micrometeorite came shooting down, punctured the Tube and . . . apparently selectively incinerated these two women, instead of blowing a crater in the mountainside.”
“Women?”
“Or it could have been a couple of men wearing toenail polish,” said Chiring, losing the fight. He had to put down his tea mug to keep from choking as he snickered. “We found one toe wearing Candy Pink, and another one wearing Tangerine Frost.”
Next day the unfortunate demises of Sister Morgan-le-Fay and Sister Lilith were announced. The Heretic vanished for a long while behind the storage crates in the kitchen. Finally Mary went in, pinpointing her location by the sound of the ocular implant.
“It’s come down to killing now,” she said. Out in the common room she heard the lock hiss; someone had come in.
“I didn’t kill anybody!” said the Heretic, from the shadows.
“You didn’t, but your . . . whatever he is, he doesn’t care what he does, does he? And the Church isn’t going to stop coming after you, are they? Next time something worse will happen. Isn’t there anywhere left for you to hide, besides my house?”
“No,” said the Heretic sadly. “Nowhere left to run now.”
Mr. De Wit came to the kitchen door. “Ms. Griffith, there’s a representative from Areco here to speak with you.”
“A who?” Mary turned around, startled. Mr. De Wit licked his dry lips.
“A lawyer,” he said.
And this time it wasn’t Hodges from the British Arean Company. No, this lawyer was a solicitor from London, no less, immaculate in a psuit from Bond Street and his white skullcap of office. He sat poised on the very edge of one of Mary’s settles, listening diffidently as Mr. De Wit (who had gone quite native by now, stooped, wheezing, powdered with red dust, his beard lank with face grease and sand) explained the situation, which was, to wit:
Whereas, the British Arean Company had been liquidated, having operated at an average annual loss to its shareholders of thirteen percent of the original estimated minimum annual profit for a period of five (Earth) calendar years, and
Whereas, the corporate entity hereafter referred to as Areco having been granted transference of all the British Arean Company’s assets, leases and contracts, with the option but not the obligation to honor and/or renew any and all of same, and
Whereas, having reviewed the original Terms of Settlement and Allotment as stated in the Contract for the Settlement and Terraforming of Ares, and having determined that the contractment of any and all allotted agricultural zones was contingent upon said zones contributing to the common wealth of Mars and the continued profit of its shareholders, and
Whereas, the aforesaid Contract specified that in the event that revocation of a Lease or Allotment was determined to be in the best interests of the shareholders, the Board of Directors retained the right to the exercise of Eminent Domain,
Therefore, Areco respectfully informed Mary Griffith that her lease was revoked and due notice of eviction from all areas of Settlement would follow within thirty (Earth) calendar days. She was, of course, at full liberty to file an appeal with the proper authorities.
“Which you are in the process of doing,” said Mr. De Wit, and picked up a text plaquette from the tab
le. “Here it is. Sign at the bottom.”
“Why should I care?’ said Mary. “Let them take my wretched little allotment. It was never worth spit. If they think they can strip-mine it for diamonds, they’re welcome to try. I’m subleasing a much better one from Clan Morrigan.”
“Can she read?” the solicitor inquired, stifling a yawn. Mary’s lip curled.
“Ten years at Mount Snowdon University says I can, little man,” she informed him.
“Then perhaps you had better read the notice, in fact. The parcels referred to include both your allotment and the land on which this building stands,” he said. “Which is, in fact, part of the original Settlement Base claim as registered with the Tri-Worlds Settlement Bureau on 6 June 2304 (Earth Calendar). Your area of claim begins one and three-quarters of a kilometer due west of this parcel.”
“Is he correct?” she asked Mr. De Wit, who nodded.
“What about the Emporium? I know that’s on my land!”
“That is correct,” the solicitor admitted. “Areco has no interest in the shop.”
“It had better not. As for this spot, why, I’ll appeal,” said Mary, and thumbprinted the document firmly. “So take that and stick it where appeals are filed, if you please.” She handed the plaquette to the solicitor, who accepted it without comment and put it in his briefcase.
“You will be kept notified of all phases of the appeals process,” he intoned. “Good morning, Ms. Griffith.”
When the lock had closed behind him, Mary said, “So much for Uncle Tars Areco bringing us presents! New flies, same filthy stinking old dog! They can’t do this, can they?”
“Unfortunately, they can,” said Mr. De Wit, slumping onto a bench. “They’re not bound to honor any agreements made with the British Arean Company.”
“Teach me to laugh at somebody else’s funeral. What’s the point of appealing, then?” Mary demanded.