Mars Needs Books!

by Gary Lovisi

  Ryan shook the thoughts around in his head. Was he being played? Acting out parts and plans that he thought were his own, but were in fact orders he had no knowledge of from secret masters? Who was pulling his strings? It had happened before. With him and with Macky. It happened with many millions more down on Earth every single day.

  If so, then why not here on Mars?

  Memory can always play you.

  And so can the DOC.

  Memory can always be played with also.

  And the DOC loves to play with your memories.

  And so can Arabella Rashid.

  Maybe Ryan should have killed her.

  Then again, he loved her and perhaps, just perhaps, she was the one real hope of his world.

  The world of Mars.

  Unless she was its doom.

  Then she would be James Ryan’s doom as well!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE DOC WILL SEE YOU NOW

  He was in a waiting room. It was a doctor’s waiting room. It was big and white, stocked with a dozen chairs, a dozen people sitting on the chairs. People of all kinds. Citizens. Gloriously ignorant and confused representatives of the proletarian masses. No one said a word or even looked at anyone else.

  There was a table piled high with magazines. They were actual hard-copy magazines from LastCen. No one was paying attention to them at all. That was because all the good little Citizens, the sheep-like proles seated quietly, were each engrossed in reading books.

  Books!

  They were actually reading!

  They were all reading the same book!

  It was a paperback!

  He saw what the title was.

  Mars Needs Books!

  * * * *

  When he woke up, he was not in the secret library of Mars. He was not even sure he was on Mars at all. In fact, he was not even sure he had ever been on Mars in the first place. To be truthful, he didn’t know where the hell he was. Or where the hell he had been.

  Things can sure get strange sometimes. So damn science-fictional....

  Ryan opened his eyes and saw....

  Nothing.

  There was blackness all around him.

  No sound.

  No smell.

  No nothing.

  Ryan began to get that feeling in his gut when it tightens up like a brick and begins a spiral descent at warp speed through his bowels all the way down past his knees. He began to feel he was back in solitary confinement. Even worse than that, he began to feel that maybe, really, he had never actually left at all!

  Then he saw her. Her face slowly came into focus before him. Then it came into view, clear now. He couldn’t move. He thought he must be strapped down, or drugged, or held in a stasis field. More than likely he was brain-linked to whatever software she had him hooked into. Some damn diabolical DOC machine!

  Arabella Rashid, she was playing him like an old style player piano!

  She looked so beautiful.

  She was so deadly.

  And he’d been so damn stupid.

  She said, “I know you, Ryan. Better than you know yourself. Don’t. Don’t feel so bad about it all. About being tricked. There really was no way you could know. Nothing you could do about it. The programming had been set a long time ago....”

  He could not speak but his lips silently mouthed the words, “...since I was in the womb?”

  She smiled. She knew. He knew. The Earth demons had everything under such tight control. The DOC was always in control. Of everything. Of everyone. The master of control-freak obsessive totalitarianism.

  Ryan whispered, “Like in Orwell. Like in Nineteen Eighty-Four, a boot on the face of humanity....”

  “Forever,” Arabella Rashid said, completing the quote. Then she took out a book. It was an old Lion paperback. From the middle of LastCen. Ryan had never seen a copy of it before. It was rarer than rare today. It was Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. But not the Quill reprint or any of the others at all! It was the true original Lion edition from the 1950s. Thompson’s first book for Lion Books and the beginnings of his career—and a noir legend. It was an ass-kicker of a nasty crime novel. There was certainly no copy of that particular edition of that book here on Mars. Ryan had heard tell of the book, of that particular rare edition, he had even looked for it, but he had never seen an actual copy. Even old Baxter Moneybags didn’t have a copy of this particular edition. Nor the Secret Library. Ryan had never even heard of a copy available. In any collection. Where had she obtained it? How had she obtained it?

  Arabella Rashid showed him the book, smiled. Then she put it away in her back pocket. She came closer, whispered in his ear, “The boot on the face of humanity, forever, Ryan. Forever! That was the...original plan.”

  He looked at her carefully. He didn’t understand this at all. Then she seemed to have more to say.

  He wasn’t going anywhere so he decided to listen.

  She was having some trouble saying it.

  Her eyes drifted away from his, said, “We’ve all turned into such monsters. We have all become the thing we hate the most, Ryan.”

  He could not reply.

  “The Killer Inside Me, The DOC, The Authority, all the sickness and deadness on Earth. It all has to change.”

  Ryan looked at Arabella Rashid astonished.

  “I planned the revolution, Ryan. Years ago. I was the one who began the program. It was DOC sponsored. Do you understand? But I changed it. Simon wanted to revitalize the species. He chose Mars for the laboratory. I chose you as the guinea pig. I programmed you. Used you. Made you what you are. The DOC hurt you and filled you with hate and anger—and the lowest guilt and shame. Then we set you loose on Mars, and sent you all the worst incorrigibles from Earth; misfits, troublemakers, and crazy wise-guys who think too much and can’t keep their big mouths shut. Fools and crackpots all. We programmed them, each and every one of them. We programmed you all to love to read, to need to collect the old hard-boiled paperbacks of LastCen. And we thought that if you all didn’t kill each other, then some day you’d revolt against Earth and then we’d come and make war upon you. Kill you all and revitalize the species. A holy war, Ryan. Kill off all the Marsmen! Kill off all your people. Even though they were our people too. Originally. In doing so the big brains like Simon thought the Earth would be saved. The species revitalized. A good little war can sometimes do that, clean out the gene pool, survival of the fittest and all that crap. I didn’t think so. However it seems to have been a staple of human history since before history was even being written.”

  He still couldn’t talk, he could barely think straight anymore. He’d been so ill used he could not comprehend it all yet.

  Arabella Rashid smiled softly at him, she patted his arm. He felt like some kind of pet. “The thing is, Ryan, you came out here to Mars, and on the way here you discovered something. You changed. Not a lot at first, just a little, but that little was enough. You put down your rage and hate, you read your books and you learned from them. You taught the others. They learned. And you had a plan.”

  “I was a man with a plan,” he whispered. “Once.”

  “It was a plan The DOC gave you, Ryan. And don’t you ever forget it!”

  * * * *

  He closed his eyes. Wishing he was any place in the world but where he was now. When he opened his eyes there he was, and there was Arabella Rashid, standing in front of him, waiting for him to come back to her.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “That’s not the question, Ryan. What I want to know now is, what do you want?” she countered.

  He looked at her carefully. More confused than ever now. Grasping. Wondering. Wired. In more ways than one.

  “What do you want, Ryan?” she said almost angrily now. He didn’t like her to be angry with him. “Tell me. We don’t have much time.”

  He looked at her, “I don’t understand.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “No. No, I don’t!”

&nb
sp; “Yes. You. DO!”

  “What do I want? What do I want!”

  “Yes, Ryan. What the hell do you want?” She took out another book, a copy of Little Caesar the gangster classic by W. R. Burnett. An old 1950s Avon edition. Ryan remembered he had a copy in the Rare Book Room of the secret library. “You remember this one? Rico? Remember Rico? What did Rico want, Ryan?”

  He remembered now. He said, “Rico wanted...more. He wanted more! He wanted it all!”

  “Yes, Ryan.”

  He said, “Like the DOC?”

  Arabella Rashid smiled, “Yes, Ryan, like The DOC.”

  “I don’t want that,” he said softly.

  “Is that so, Ryan?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “So, Ryan, just what the hell do you want?”

  He shook his head trying to clear it.

  “Wealth?” she asked.

  He said nothing.

  “Power?”

  He shook his head.

  “Fame?”

  Ryan laughed at that one.

  “Me?” she said.

  Ryan smiled.

  “You’re not answering me, Ryan.”

  He said, “Not under these circumstances.”

  Now it was her turn to smile, “I quite agree.”

  “I just want...,” he said.

  “I believe you now. You just want what you’ve always wanted, Ryan. You just want to be left alone. And not be hurt and used any more.”

  “Yes,” he said, and began to cry.

  And then he heard her say, “Go back to sleep now, Ryan. When you wake up you’ll forget all about this. You’ll forget all about the fact that there is a war on, all about the fact that I am your commanding officer...and the woman who loves you. I’m sorry I had to do this but I had to look inside your mind, to be sure that you had not been tampered with by Simon, or by his evil son—and your supposed brother, Michael, or another DOC officer. I had to erase some of your programming. Now it will be all right, better. I promise you.”

  He shook his head.

  “Ryan, how old do you think I am? How old, Ryan?”

  He tried to focus his eyes with all the effort he had left. He looked deeply into her perfect face. Perfect form. Watching it all slip away from him as the trance took hold and he drifted off. He said, “Thirty, maybe thirty-five?”

  The last thing he remembered before he went under was her perfect smile as her lips silently formed the words, “I am a clone, much as you are. I am one hundred and forty-seven years old, James.”

  Then he was asleep and all those bad memories were erased and gone forever and he was whole within himself again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  LEAVE NO ONE BEHIND

  Next morning Ryan said, “You know, I had the weirdest dream I ever had in my life last night.”

  “Really?” She asked showing mild curiosity.

  He looked at Arabella. Careful. She was so cool. Perhaps he should have killed her when he had the chance. He felt so sad, so betrayed, so played, he felt like crying, or killing her, or making love to her. He loved her so much. So he just took a deep breath and did nothing. That was always the safest course when dealing with someone like her.

  He said, “the dream....”

  “What was the dream like, James?”

  He shuddered, “I don’t think I can talk about it.”

  “It was so bad, that you can’t talk about it?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She said, “Was I in it?”

  He shook his head, “Were you ever!”

  She smiled, “Do you know what I really like about you James? You’re an agent, a killer, but you’re smart. Even better, you learn from your actions. You also learn from the actions and mistakes of others. You learn from your mistakes, you learn from the books, you learn from life, from me. You learn, James, and that’s...priceless today.”

  He shrugged, not knowing where the hell she was going with this. He allowed a playful grin, “I always figured I was a priceless kind of guy.”

  “And you have a good sense of humor, usually. Though that last remark.... And one more thing, James, when presented with a problem you restrain yourself from acting stupidly. You know? You don’t do stupid things, like days ago when you had that stupid gun. What were you going to do with that gun? Shoot me? Kill me?”

  “I thought about it,” he told her, taking a slow, deep breath, “I love you, you know that, but I couldn’t let you destroy everything, everybody here on Mars.”

  “But you restrained yourself.”

  He nodded.

  “And in doing so put yourself and everything here at risk.” she said thoughtfully, waiting for his answer.

  “Yes,” he replied finally. “It was stupid.”

  “But you restrained yourself, James.”

  He did not reply.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  She shook her head. “James, you damn-well know. You’re the best killer the DOC has ever produced. Our most special agent. You could never, ever restrain yourself because your programming is too powerful. Your natural order of action on Earth would preclude such individual independent behavior. Why did you restrain yourself out here on Mars?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know.”

  “You were ready for me?” he asked.

  She smiled, “Of course, but you did not know that.”

  “You know so much why don’t you figure it out for yourself and then tell me!”

  “James, you’re being a real hardhead!”

  He said, “Maybe I know something that you don’t?”

  She looked at him carefully, softened her gaze, said, “James, I love you. These last few days here with you have been.... But you just don’t understand what’s going on. The secret war. It’s in DOC itself. It’s deep. It’s serious now. That’s why I am here.”

  “I had a bad dream last night, Arabella.”

  “James, it wasn’t a dream.”

  He looked over at her, chilled now to the bone. He mumbled, “It wasn’t a dream?”

  “No, James.”

  He shuddered, shaking now like some wirehead junkie. She came over to him and held him in her arms, stroking his forehead softly, “Baby, baby, I’ve been so rough on you. I’m so sorry. I never thought it would come to this. Simon did things to me too. After I killed him, I thought...I thought it was all over. I thought that I had won and things would be better. When I took over DOC I didn’t realize it was just the beginning of Simon’s revenge. His real power over me was inside me. I never knew that. Last night you insisted on helping, you even insisted on the brain-wipe and the reprogramming. We can still get your old self back if you want it and get rid of this new self—this new Mars-created James Ryan....”

  He stopped shivering. The cold left him almost as quickly as it had entered him.

  “You want to know what made me change?” he asked.

  “I know what it is, now, James. It’s the long trip out here. It’s the seclusion, the loneliness, the amount of time. One year to be able to slow down, rest, think, reflect, reevaluate.”

  He nodded, “It has a certain mind-opening effect.”

  She held him and kissed him, and he kissed her back.

  “I love you, James Ryan. The new you. The better Mars you. The new man—not the old DOC killer agent. And you’ve changed me too. At first I couldn’t believe it. I thought Simon’s vile spirit had been locked inside me forever, making me do terrible things I can not even talk about, but his programming has been breached, or corrupted. Or it somehow deteriorated. I began to realize that there was something else involved here. Something none of us had ever anticipated. It was Mars. The trip out here. And what’s written in all those old paperbacks. A change came upon me. It wrought freedom. Life. Love.

  “Freedom from Earth.”

  “And the Department of Control.”

  He smiled at her. “That’s a very subversive
statement.”

  She said, “It sure damn-well is, James.”

  “So what’s your game?” he asked. “Why did you come out here? What do you want?”

  Arabella Rashid smiled, brushing the long hair from her eyes. She said, “It’s the secret war. The DOC. Mars. You. You didn’t start the revolution out here like you were supposed to do. You changed. You got smart. Started a resistance instead. A damn smart and strong one too. A real brotherhood. And it worked. And it screwed up the DOC’s plans for Mars.”

  “The DOC?” he said. “Not you?”

  “No, not me, James. Not anymore.”

  He kissed her. “We can do it.”

  “Fight them? It won’t be easy,” she told him.

  “Freedom, liberty, life, love, the real big, important things are never easy,” he said.

  “Listen, James,” she went on. “I have something here I want to show you. It’s a paperback. An old paperback. From LastCen.”

  She placed the book on the table in front of him, face up. He looked at it. He thought he was back in the dream. It was that same rare Lion paperback of The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson.

  “Nice book,” he said nervously, remembering it from the dream—that had not been a dream. It was incredibly old. From 1952. Way back LastCen.

  She looked at him closely, said for the first time, “You don’t remember, do you, James?”

  He said, “Remember what? I remember the dream, I think, but....”

  “Not the dream, James! Before. Don’t you remember anything from before? I mean from before your previous personality and memory, before we did the brain-wipes and all the reprogramming. Before you came out here to Mars. You don’t remember anything else about this book, The Killer Inside Me?”

  He shook his head. It was all a blank.

  He said, “Actually, I never read the book.”