Slow Dancing Through Time

by Gardner R. Dozois

  It can’t possibly be real, Thomas thought dazedly.

  Johnboy and Woody were clambering down the ladder, clumsy and troll-like in their hulking suits, and Thomas moved over to make room for them.

  “Mother dog!” Woody breathed, looking around him, the wonder clear in his voice. “This is really something, ain’t it?” He laid a gloved hand on Thomas’s shoulder. “This is what we saw from up there.”

  “But it’s impossible,” Thomas said.

  Woody shrugged. “If it’s a hallucination, then it’s sure as hell a beautiful one.”

  Johnboy had walked on ahead without a word, until he was several yards away from the ship; now he came to a stop and stood staring out across the moss-covered plain to the distant hills. “It’s like being born again,” he whispered.

  The commander cut in again, his voice popping and crackling with static. “Report in! What’s going on down there?”

  Thomas shook his head. “Commander, I wish I knew.”

  He unlashed the exterior camera from the lander, set it up on its tripod, removed the lens cover. “Tell me what you see.”

  “I see sand, dust, rocks . . . what else do you expect me to see?”

  “No canals?” Thomas asked sadly. “No trees? No moss?”

  “Christ, you’re hallucinating again, aren’t you?” the commander said. “This is what I was afraid of. All of you, listen to me! Listen good! There aren’t any goddamn canals down there. Maybe there’s water down a few dozen meters as permafrost. But the surface is as dry as the moon.”

  “But there’s some sort of moss growing all over the place,” Thomas said. “Kind of grayish-ocher color, about a foot and a half high. There’s clumps of bushes. There’s even trees of some kind. Can’t you see any of that?”

  “You’re hallucinating,” the commander said. “Believe me, the camera shows nothing but sand and rock down there. You’re standing in a goddamn lunar desert and babbling to me about trees, for Christ’s sake! That’s enough for me. I want everybody back up here, right now. I shouldn’t have let you talk me into this in the first place. We’ll let Houston unravel all this. It’s no longer our problem. Woody, come back here! Stick together, dammit!”

  Johnboy was still standing where he had stopped, as if entranced, but Woody was wandering toward the canal, poking around, exploring.

  “Listen up!” the commander said. “I want everybody back in the lander, right now. I’m going to get you out of there before somebody gets hurt. Everybody back now. That’s an order! That’s a direct order!”

  Woody turned reluctantly and began bounding slowly toward the lander, pausing every few yards to look back over his shoulder at the canal.

  Thomas sighed, not sure whether he was relieved to be getting out of here or heartbroken to be going so soon.

  “Okay, Commander,” Thomas said. “We read you. We’re coming up. Right away.” He took a few light, buoyant steps forward—fighting a tendency to bounce kangaroolike off the ground—and tapped Johnboy gently on the arm. “Come on. We’ve got to go back up.”

  Johnboy turned slowly around. “Do we?” he said. “Do we really?”

  “Orders,” Thomas said uneasily, feeling something begin to stir and turn over ponderously in the deep backwaters of his own soul. “I don’t want to go yet, either, but the commander’s right. If we’re hallucinating . . .”

  “Don’t give me that shit!” Johnboy said passionately. “Hallucinating, my ass! You touched the moss, didn’t you? You felt it. This isn’t a hallucination, or mass hypnosis, or any of that other crap. This is a world, a new world, and it’s ours!”

  “Johnboy, get in the lander right now!” the commander broke in. “That’s an order!”

  “Fuck you, Ahab!” Johnboy said. “And fuck your orders, too!”

  Thomas was shocked—and at the same time felt a stab of glee at the insubordination, an emotion that surprised him and that he hurried uneasily to deny, saying, “You’re out of line, Johnboy. I want you to listen to me, now—”

  “No, you listen to me,” Johnboy said fiercely. “Look around you! I know you’ve read Burroughs. You know where you are! A dead sea bottom, covered with ocher-colored moss. Rolling hills. A canal.”

  “Those are the very reasons why it can’t be real,” Thomas said uneasily.

  “It’s real if we want it to be real,” Johnboy said. “It’s here because of us. It’s made for us. It’s made out of us.”

  “Stop gabbing and get in the lander!” the commander shouted. “Move! Get you asses in gear!”

  Woody had come up to join them. “Maybe we’d better—” he started to say, but Johnboy cut in with:

  “Listen to me! I knew what was happening the moment I looked out and saw the Mars of Schiaparelli and Lowell, the old Mars. Woody, you said that Lowell saw what he wanted to see. That’s right, but in a different way than you meant it. You know, other contemporary astronomers looked at Mars at the same time as Lowell, with the same kind of instruments, and saw no canals at all. You ever hear of consensual reality? Because Lowell wanted to see it, it existed for him! Just as it exists for us—because we want it to exist! We don’t have to accept the gray reality of Ahab here and all the other gray little men back at NASA. They want it to be rocks and dust and dead, drab desert; they like it that way—”

  “For God’s sake!” the commander said. “Somebody get that nut in the lander!”

  “—but we don’t like it! Deep down inside of us—Thomas. Woody—we don’t believe in that Mars. We believe in this one—the real one. That’s why it’s here for us! That’s why it’s the way it is—it’s made of our dreams. Who know what’s over those hills: bone-white faërie cities? four-armed green men? beautiful princesses? the Twin Cities of Helium? There could be anything out there!”

  “Thomas!” the commander snapped. “Get Johnboy in the lander now. Use force if necessary, but get him in there. Johnboy! You’re emotionally unstable. I want you to consider yourself under house arrest!”

  “I’ve been under house arrest all my life,” Johnboy said. “Now I’m free.”

  Moving deliberately, he reached up and unsnapped his helmet.

  Thomas started forward with an inarticulate cry of horror, trying to stop him, but it was too late. Johnboy had his helmet completely off now and was shaking his head to free his shaggy, blond hair, which rippled slightly in the breeze. He took a deep breath, another, and then grinned at Thomas. “The air smells great,” he said. “And, my God, is it clean!”

  “Johnboy?” Thomas said hesitantly. “Are you okay?”

  “Christ!” the commander was muttering. “Christ! Oh my God! Oh my sweet God!”

  “I’m fine,” Johnboy said. “In fact, I’m terrific.” He smiled brilliantly at them, then sniffed at the inside of his helmet and made a face. “Phew! Smells like an armpit in there!” He started to strip off his suit.

  “Thomas, Woody,” the commander said leadenly. “Put Johnboy’s body into the lander, and then get in there yourselves, fast, before we lose somebody else.”

  “But . . .” Thomas said, “there’s nothing wrong with Johnboy. We’re talking to him.”

  “Goddamn it, look at your med readouts.”

  Thomas glanced at the chinstrap readout board, which was reflected into a tiny square on the right side of his faceplate. There was a tiny red light flashing on Johnboy’s readout. “Christ!” Thomas whispered.

  “He’s dead, Thomas, he’s dead. I can see his body. He fell over like he’d been poleaxed right after he opened his helmet and hemorrhaged his lungs out into the sand. Listen to me! Johnboy’s dead—anything else is a hallucination!”

  Johnboy grinned at them, kicking free of his suit. “I may be dead, kids,” he told them quizzically, “but let me tell you, dead or not, I feel one-hundred-percent better now that I’m out of that crummy suit, believe it. The air’s a little bit cool, but it feels wonderful.” He raised his arms and stretched lazily, like a cat.

  “Johnboy—?
” Woody said, tentatively.

  “Listen,” the commander raged. “You’re hallucinating! You’re talking to yourselves! Get in the lander! That’s an order.”

  “Yes, sir, sir.” Johnboy said mockingly, sketching a salute at the sky. “Are you actually going to listen to that asshole?” He stepped forward and took each of them by the arm and shook them angrily. “Do I feel dead to you, schmucks?”

  Thomas felt the fingers close over his arm, and an odd, deep thrill shot through him—part incredulity; part supernatural dread; part a sudden, strange exhilaration. “I can feel him,” Woody was saying wonderingly, patting Johnboy with his gloved hands. “He’s solid. He’s there. I’ll be a son of a bitch—”

  “Be one?” Johnboy said, grinning. “Ol’ buddy, you already are one.”

  Woody laughed. “No hallucination’s that corny,” Woody said to Thomas. “He’s real, all right.”

  “But the readout—” Thomas began.

  “Obviously wrong. There’s got to be some kind of mistake—”

  Woody started to unfasten his helmet.

  “No!” the commander screamed, and at the same time Thomas darted forward shouting, “Woody! Stop!” and tried to grab him, but Woody twisted aside and bounded limberly away, out of reach.

  Cautiously, Woody took his helmet off. He sniffed suspiciously, his lean, leathery face stiff with tension, then he relaxed, and then he began to smile. “Hooie,” he said in awe.

  “Get his helmet back on, quick!” the commander was shouting. But Woody’s medical readout was already flashing orange, and even as the commander spoke, it turned red.

  “Too late!” the commander moaned. “Oh God, too late . . .”

  Woody looked into his helmet at his own flashing readout. His face registered surprise for an instant, and then he began to laugh. “Weh-ayl,” he drawled, “now that I’m officially a corpse, I guess I don’t need this anymore.” He threw his helmet aside; it bounced and rolled over the spongy mass. “Thomas,” Woody said, “you do what you want, but I’ve been locked up in a smelly ol’ tin can for months, and what I’m going to do is wash my face in some honest-to-God, unrecycled water!” He grinned at Thomas and began walking away toward the canal. “I might even take me a swim.”

  “Thomas . . .” the commander said brokenly. “Don’t worry about the bodies. Don’t worry about anything else. Just get in the lander. As soon as you’re inside, I’m going to trigger the launch sequence.”

  Johnboy was staring at him quizzically, compassionately—waiting.

  “Johnboy . . .” Thomas said, “Johnboy, how can I tell which is real?”

  “You choose what’s real,” Johnboy said quietly. “We all do.”

  “Listen to me, Thomas,” the commander pleaded; there was an edge of panic in his voice. “You’re talking to yourself again. Whatever you think you’re seeing, or hearing, or even touching, it just isn’t real. There can be tactile hallucinations, too, you know. It’s not real.”

  “Old Ahab up there has made his choice, too,” Johnboy said. “For him, in his own conceptual universe, Woody and I are dead. And that’s real, too—for him. But you don’t have to choose that reality. You can choose this one.”

  “I don’t know,” Thomas mumbled, “I just don’t know . . .”

  Woody hit the water in an explosion of foam. He swam a few strokes, whooping, then turned to float on his back. “C’mon in, you guys!” he shouted.

  Johnboy smiled, then turned to bring his face close to Thomas’s helmet, peering in through the faceplate. Johnboy was still wearing that strange, dreamy look, so unlike his usual animated expression, and his eyes were clear and compassionate and calm. “It calls for an act of faith, Thomas. Maybe that’s how every world begins.” He grinned at Thomas. “Meanwhile, I think I’m going to take a swim, too.” He strolled off toward the canal, bouncing a little at each step.

  Thomas stood unmoving, the two red lights flashing on his chin-strap readout.

  “They’re both going swimming now,” Thomas said dully.

  “Thomas! Can you hear me, Thomas?”

  “I hear you,” Thomas mumbled.

  They were having fun in their new world—he could see that. The kind of fun that kids had . . . that every child took for granted. The joy of discovery, of everything being new . . . the joy that seemed to get lost in the gray shuffle to adulthood, given up bit by incremental bit.

  “You’re just going to have to trust me, Thomas. Trust me. Take my word for it that I know what I’m talking about. You’re going to have to take that on faith. Now listen to me: No matter what you think is going on down there, don’t take your helmet off.”

  His father used to lecture him in that same tone of voice, demanding, domineering . . . and at the same time condescending. Scornful. Daddy knows best. Listen to me, boy, I know what I’m talking about! Do what I tell you to do!

  “Do you hear me? Do not take your helmet off! Under any circumstances at all. That’s an order.”

  Thomas nodded before he could stop himself. Here he was, good boy little Tommy, standing on the fringes again, taking orders, doing what he was told. Getting passed over again. And for what?

  Something flew by in the distance, headed toward the hills.

  It looked to be about the size of a large bird, but like a dragonfly, it had six long, filmy gossamer wings, which it swirled around in a complexly interweaving pattern, as if it were rowing itself through the air.

  “Get to the lander, Thomas, and close the hatch.”

  Never did have any fun. Have to be twice as good as any of them, have to bust your goddamn ass—

  “That’s a direct order, Thomas!”

  You’ve got to make the bastards respect you, you’ve got to earn their respect. His father had said that a million times. And how little time it had taken him to waste away and die, once he’d stopped trying, once he realized that you can’t earn what people aren’t willing to sell.

  A red and yellow lizard ran over his boot, as quick and silent as a tickle. It had six legs.

  One by one, he began to undo the latches of his helmet.

  “No! Listen to me! If you take off your helmet, you’ll die. Don’t do it! For God’s sake, don’t do it!”

  The last latch. It was sticky, but he tugged at it purposefully.

  “You’re killing yourself! Stop it! Please. Stop! You goddamn stupid nigger! Stop—”

  Thomas smiled, oddly enough feeling closer to the commander in that moment than he ever had before. “Too late,” he said cheerfully.

  Thomas twisted his helmet a quarter turn and lifted it off his head.

  ###

  When the third red light winked on, Commander Redenbaugh slumped against the board and started to cry. He wept openly and loudly, for they had been good men, and he had failed all of them, even Thomas, the best and steadiest of the lot. He hadn’t been able to save a goddamned one of them!

  At last he was able to pull himself together. He forced himself to look again at the monitor, which showed three space-suited bodies sprawled out lifelessly on the rusty-red sand.

  He folded his hands, bent his head, and prayed for the souls of his dead companions. Then he switched the monitor off.

  It was time to make plans. Since the Plowshare would be carrying a much lighter-than-anticipated return cargo, he had enough excess fuel to allow him to leave a bit early, if he wanted to, and he did want to. He began to punch figures into the computer, smiling bitterly at the irony. Yesterday he had been regretting that they had so little time left in Mars orbit. Now, suddenly, he was in a hurry to get home . . . but no matter how many corners he shaved, he’d still be several long, grueling months in transit—with quite probably a court-martial waiting for him when he got back.

  For an instant, even the commander’s spirit quailed at the thought of that dreadful return journey. But he soon got himself under control again. It would be a difficult and unpleasant trip, right enough, but a determined man could always manage to do
what needed to be done.

  Even if he had to do it alone.

  ###

  When the Plowshare’s plasma drive was switched on, it created a daytime star in the Martian sky. It was like a shooting star in reverse, starting out at its brightest and dimming rapidly as it moved up and away.

  Thomas saw it leave. He was leaning against his makeshift spear—flametree wood, with a fire-hardened tip—and watching Johnboy preparing to skin the dead hyena-leopard, when he chanced to glance up. “Look,” he said.

  Johnboy followed Thomas’s eyes and saw it, too. He smiled sardonically and lifted the animal’s limp paw, making it wave bye-bye. “So long, Ahab,” Johnboy said. “Good luck.” He went back to skinning the beast. The hyena-leopard—a little bit larger than a wildcat, six-legged, saber-tusked, its fur a muddy purple with rusty-orange spots—had attacked without warning and fought savagely; it had taken all three of them to kill it.

  Woody looked up from where he was lashing a makeshift flametree-wood raft together with lengths of wiring from the lander, “I’m sure he’ll make it okay,” Woody said quietly.

  Thomas sighed. “Yeah,” he said, and then, more briskly, “Let me give you a hand with that raft. If we snap it up, we ought to be ready to leave by morning.”

  Last night, climbing the highest of the rolling hills to the north, they had seen the lights of a distant city, glinting silver and yellow and orange on the far horizon, gleaming far away across the black midnight expanse of the dead sea bottom like an ornate and intricate piece of jewelry set against ink-black velvet.

  Thomas was still not sure if he hoped there would be aristocratic red men there, and giant four-armed green Tharks, and beautiful Martian princesses . . .

  AFTERWORD TO THE GODS OF MARS

  This story started, as many of these stories did, during an informal workshopping/brainstorming session at my apartment. As I recall, Jack was down on a visit, Michael had come over, and we were sitting around in my “backyard,” which was a rectangular slab of concrete surrounded by a head-high wooden fence, because it was too hot in my apartment to use it for anything other than perhaps drying meat into beef jerky. It was dusk, and this was July of 1982—July 20th, I think. We’d been trying to come up with new ideas for collaborative stories, and this was one of the plot ideas I threw out to them from my story-idea notebook, where it had been sleeping since 1971, when I’d read an account of the Mariner 9 mission. As Woody says in the story, a dust storm had hidden the entire planet just before Mariner 9 could begin taking the first close-up photos of Mars; when the storm lifted, and the photos were taken, the Mars that they showed was totally unlike the Mars that everyone had expected to see—no canals, none of the classic Lowellian features at all. And so, I immediately thought, what if the Lowellian features had really been there after all, but, under cover of the sandstorm, somebody had changed it all before we could get photos of it, changed it to the now-familiar Mars of the Mariner and Viking photos? And then suppose, just before the first manned expedition gets there, it gets changed back, so that the Mars the astronauts land on is the Mars of Burroughs and Lowell, not the Mars of Mariner 9?