* * *
Ryder waved at her. Tall and handsome and always in his prime. His jewel glittered prettily, acknowledging her. You just want to oblige him in all he asks for, Chen decided. Charisma had been his tool and his signature, a manner that eased his dealings with all who met him. He seemed at first to be standing on the six-wheeler, but no part of him actually touched the machine. He looked like a statue fashioned in first-generation materials, a rider upon a giant insect having silicon wings.
“Opportunity!” he said, laughing at her doubtfully raised eye-brows. “That was the name they chose for it.”
“That is a most apt name to associate with this moment.”
“Indeed!” He held a hand out towards the six-wheeler. “It was a technical triumph in its day. It ran and ran, and nothing could stop it. Not even when these silicon panes fogged up with dust and almost starved it to death.”
“Ah, yes ... electricity. This machine made electricity from light to sustain itself.”
Chen’s eyes watched as a small whirlwind tracked toward a line of broken hills then dissolved on the rim of a crater. This was a hazy sort of place right now. But the brown equatorial plain was growing brighter as the sun lifted higher. On Earth there was a day of similar length, but the year would be only half as long, her brain reminded her.
“In retrospect,” Ryder said, “solar power was probably a mistake out here, but you know -politics. In the later missions they went back to using plutonium. You’ll find that of all the natural phenomena, radioactivity is the one that still scares them the most.”
“I think I know why.”
“Do you? Perhaps you do.” There was something of the priest about Ryder. He pointed past her and subtly changed the subject. “Did you notice the marks where it bounced as it came down?”
“Yes. I purposely took a long look at the remains.” Chen looked back along the track. “May I ask you: what does the inscription 7dr signify?”
He puzzled at that. “7dr? Where did you see such a thing?”
“Marked on the empty lander.”
“Oh ... oh, I see!” Amusement, and more of that charming energy. “You have it up-side-down. It’s JPL.”
“Which stands for ... “ The information came immediately from the jewel to re-stock her mind so that the information seemed like a recalled memory. “Jet Propulsion Laboratory?”
“Indeed. An essential project of mine. In the beginning I asked Dan Guggenheim to come in with me. Of course, he agreed. After all, it had been one of my recommendations that had led his father into mining and smelting. It was all a question of money, you see.”
She shook her head, also amused. “Was there ever a great family fortune that you weren’t behind?”
Ryder laughed. “Very few. In my era, I tried to make money the mechanism. It’s a more predictable ruler than gods -- so much easier that way.”
“Their name for one such god was ‘Mars,’ a god of war, I believe,” she said, knowing the coming subject had to be breached.
“You are correct, of course.”
“I wondered ... if you would tell me about the war?”
His spirit seemed to collapse inside him somewhat, and he floated lower. “I count the catastrophe that played out from 1914 to 1989 as my worst failure. There was no avoiding it. And whatever you may hope or choose to think now, you will find that there are times when war is the quickest and cleanest way.”
That was shocking to hear, for the idea made her heart weep, and she wondered if perhaps he was not making excuses for himself.
“I see.”
He saw her disappointed reaction and said, “Well, think of the bombs, Chen. If not for Hiroshima and Nagasaki how many more would have died?”
“It is, I suppose, possible to think of it that way.”
She said nothing more, and so he said, “Yes, I know it sounds cruel and stands against all that we believe in, but it was the shortest way out. Humankind is not easily controlled, and some individuals are affected by an insanity that is terrifying to behold. A greed for absolute power, you might call it. And once such people grasp it, they never willingly let go.”
Was it possible, after all, that Ryder had - what was that obscure expression for individuals too long severed from their own culture?
Gone native ...
Had the constant drudgery and the wasting of all his best efforts sapped away his ideals? Five centuries of riding the human storm alone had reduced him, she had no doubt, from the bright spirit that must once have burned.
“Has not the spreading of democracy helped to make despots a rarer breed?”
“I guess so ... on the whole, yes. Some clever wit among them once remarked that democracy was the least worst system they had yet come up with.”
“How ironic. They could not know that idea was one of our gifts to them.”
“Quite so. However, both Marxism and National Socialism were their own ideas, which shows what a mess they tend to make of their Eden when they are left unattended. But, dear Chen, I am reluctant to dwell too much upon their defects. They do have many redeeming features, and you will find yourself falling in love with them, despite their faults. Come along with me. It’s time I showed you what I asked you here to see.”
They drifted together through the dawn, drifting through the dusty carbon dioxide air, sporting with the meagre gravity of this world, and ultimately following the footprints, as Ryder talked of this and that. He had lived a dozen incarnations since his first landing at Edgehill. He spoke fondly of young Isaac and his later friendships with the other geniuses whom he had fostered, but his fondness for Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin and James Maxwell stood out.
They came at last to the remains of another lander, the one with the corpses inside.
“They landed here to visit their previous handiwork. Pictures were broadcast all over the world. I can see it now: three men clunking around in their cumbersome pressure suits, staring out from their golden face-plates. No membrane to preserve them. A single unforeseen critical malfunction -” Ryder clicked his fingers “- and they all died together.”
He showed his compassion by producing a single salt tear that glistened on a smooth five hundred year-old cheek. “They lay down in their seats to die together and the people back home saw them holding hands an hour or so later. Ghastly. The stuff of nightmare.”
“Yes.”
He looked to her with guilty eyes. “You realize, of course, that I could have undone it all with the smallest touch of this ...”
He lifted up his jewel, and smiled the saddest of smiles.
“Such is the nature of responsibility,” Chen said, understanding his heartache. “Who was it who said that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic?”
Ryder’s eyes scanned the russet horizon. “Ah, now that was another of my English friends. And his words were - and are - most definitely true. If human beings saw us doing any of the things of which we are capable, most of them would run to the very ends of their Earth.”
“All except the very stupid and the very smart.”
“Ha, Chen. Quite so.” After a pause he said: “Where will you choose to live at first?”
She looked at him, a modest side-long glance. “I was hoping you might advise me on that.”
“A permanent base is impossible, of course - you must literally move with the times. Nanjing might be a good starting point for the time being. I have a villa there. It’s yours now. As is my old London property, and the modest penthouse that I frequented for many years atop the Corcoran art gallery in D.C. Very few people ever knew about that. The private elevator was most useful, but Google Earth eventually put paid to it. There’s still the townhouse in Kalorama Heights though.”
There had been several times during their last illuminating talk, the one they had enjoyed on the dry, mouse-grey shore of the Eastern Sea, that Ryder had mentioned he had taken a number of human lovers throughout his
tenure. Dangerous? Perhaps. Tragic? Invariably. How could it be otherwise? She did not yet know if she could bear to do the same. Only time would tell.
Now Chen looked down at the tragic footprints. Man tracks in the brown powder left by unwieldy space boots, a little eroded over the decades but still sharp enough.
At last, Ryder shook off his memories. “So ... that’s why I asked that we meet here. Human beings are so apt to lose heart. They get wrapped up in their own little problematic world and lose the long view. Do encourage them, if you can, to think bigger thoughts. In the century since the fatal landing they never again ventured here. It has been a long time since anything has moved on Mars ... except the dust.”
The End
BITTER PROPHECY
Susan Hawthorne
I. Pentra
As the first pink light of dawn softened the edges of the starless night, the village of Pentra began to stir.
Gef shuddered awake at the sound of banging at the door. He rose with a groan holding his aching head. A long night at the Ale House made being roused at such an hour an unhappy occurrence.
The banging became more insistent.
“Hold yer rapping,” he shouted, “I’m coming.” He heaved himself out of bed, rubbing his ever aching hip.
Gef whipped the door open and found two acolytes from the House of Priests before him. “Go away and come back at a decent hour, the sun’s barely up!” he snarled.
He would have slammed the door but one of them moved forward, preventing him that satisfaction.
“Sir, we ask you to accompany us to the Hall of the Brotherhood. Father Auras has a matter of some urgency to discuss with you.”
Gef leaned on the door and sighed. “I have to wash up and get dressed. It’ll take awhile.”
“Very well, sir, we’ll wait.”
As they stepped back, Gef slammed the door with a curse. He rubbed his eyes in a vain attempt to clear his vision. Squinting, he found his clothing on the floor by the bed. Ripping his sleeping gown over his head, he began to dress, complaining about the Priests as he did.
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