The Martian Viking

by Tim Sullivan

  Through the transparency, the passengers watched in horror as the woman took off her helmet and pointed the gun at the pilot. She was a pretty, thin woman with short, dark hair—and she was hijacking the carrier.

  "Oh, my God," his mother and the Connie said in unison.

  The other passengers were babbling away, too. They were all scared shitless. Smitty felt a little scared, but he thought this was kind of neat at the same time.

  The cockpit was pressurized again, and the transparent seal was lifted. The alien odor of Mars wafted in as one of the hijackers entered the cabin. He reached up to remove his helmet.

  "Please keep calm," he said.

  It was only then that Smitty realized what he was seeing.

  His Dad saw him at the same time.

  "Dad!" Smitty cried.

  "Smitty!"

  "Johnny!" Ronindella screamed.

  "Ronnie!" Johnsmith exclaimed.

  The Connie rep glared at Ronindella. "So I'm the criminal, am I?"

  Smitty was in the aisle, running to his father. Johnsmith stooped to embrace him.

  "Son!" Johnsmith said with tears in his eyes. "I can't believe it!"

  "What I can't believe, sir," said an indignant Representative Silver, "is that you have hijacked this vehicle, violating the laws of the Conglomerated United Nations of Earth."

  "Another few hours, and we would have died out there," Johnsmith said. "And we're not going back to Elysium, now that we're considered criminals."

  "Perhaps you should consider giving yourselves up," the Connie said. "It will probably be a lot easier on you in the long run."

  "We've been on Mars for years," Johnsmith said, "and none of us have found anything easy here."

  Two of the other hijackers were coming into the cabin now, a man and a woman.

  "But how do you know?" the woman was saying. "How can you possibly know it's going to happen, that it isn't just an illusion?"

  "I know," the man said simply.

  The woman had a funny expression on her face, as though she had never run into anybody like this before. Smitty thought that was odd, because the man was very ordinary looking, short with a shaved head.

  "Where are you taking us?" a woman in the back of the cab asked.

  "To Olympus Mons," the man with the shaved head told her.

  "Oh, I was hoping we'd get to see that," the woman said drily.

  The engines whined again, and the carrier began to lift off the dry seabed. As soon as it was through the pass, Frankie instructed the pilot to fly to the northwest at top speed. The carrier accelerated, and soon the orange desert was an indistinct blur beneath them.

  Ronindella would not speak to Johnsmith. She hadn't forgiven him for becoming an Arkie, and she wanted him to know it. It was amazing to Smitty that they could have been apart all these months and start fighting as soon as they saw each other. His Dad didn't seem to care, though. He seemed happy just to be sitting here talking to Smitty, and that was great. Let her sit there sulking; that would give Smitty all the more time with his Dad.

  "How did you get to Mars?" Johnsmith asked, grinning at Smitty.

  "I won a contest."

  "What? That's incredible!"

  "Yeah, it was a Kwikkee-Kwizeen contest, and I—"

  Smitty was cut short by one of the Arkies, a sweaty, fat black man, coming down the aisle.

  "Johnsmith," the man said. "Something has happened."

  "What?" Johnsmith leaned forward in his seat. "What is it, Alderdice?"

  "Frankie's punched in a code to talk to Olympus . . . ." Alderdice seemed very worried.

  "Yes, and what happened?" Johnsmith said.

  "There's no answer."

  Johnsmith didn't wait to hear more. He got up and went through the cab, ducking his head to get into the cockpit.

  "Alderdice says you can't get through to Olympus," Johnsmith said. "Are you sure you've got the correct code?"

  "We're getting through now," Frankie said.

  "Well, that's good news." Johnsmith saw that Frankie did not look relieved. "Isn't it?"

  "Well, it would be, except that there's nobody home."

  "Nobody home? I don't understand."

  "We're getting a recorded message." She lifted a tiny earpiece to his face. "Listen."

  Johnsmith held it to his ear. He heard a man's ecstatic voice saying, " . . .the Viking Monument." A pause followed. "The signs have been observed . . .the Ship is on its way . . .gather at the Viking Monument . . ."

  "It's on a continuous loop," Johnsmith said, after listening to the message twice more. "It says the Ship is on its way to the Viking Monument."

  "Yes." Jethro Pease's eyes were glazed with delight and wonder.

  "What is the Viking Monument?" Prudy asked.

  Johnsmith stared at her blankly, trying to remember if she had ever spoken to him before, except to order him around. "I think it must mean the monument where the first Viking lander set down almost a hundred years ago."

  Nobody spoke for a few seconds, giving Johnsmith time to consider the implications of the message. The Viking Lander Monument as the site of a Viking ship's arrival—a ship that existed only as a fantasy on an archecoded oneiric sphere the size of a ball bearing? Insane.

  "Why don't we go see for ourselves?" Frankie said. "It should be easy enough to do."

  "Yeah," the pilot said. "There's an automatic guidance program that hits all the touristy spots. The Viking Monument is definitely on the agenda, almost due west in Chryse."

  "Then punch it in," Johnsmith said.

  Alderdice, Pease, Felicia, and Frankie all looked at him curiously. He assumed that they were responding to his commanding tone, which surprised him, too. Johnsmith had never been a believer in destiny or fate, and yet it now seemed that just such an entity was beckoning.

  "Do as he says," said Frankie.

  "But how do we know . . .?" Felicia trailed off.

  "We don't know anything," Johnsmith said. "But we don't have anyplace else to go."

  Felicia looked frightened and confused, like a little girl who had just walked in on her parents having sex.

  "The Ship, the Ship," Jethro Pease chanted. "We're going to see the Ship."

  The pilot had finished punching in the coordinates. The whine of the engines changed pitch, and the hijackers were thrown against one another as the carrier pointed to the west.

  Johnsmith went back and sat down with his son.

  "Where are we going, Dad?" Smitty asked eagerly.

  "We're going to see something nobody's ever seen before, Smitty."

  "Yeah, what is it?"

  "I don't know exactly. Let's just call it the Ship, for now."

  "The Ship!" Smitty remembered the onee he had touched in his Dad's effapt, on that sad day when they had come to clean the place out. He didn't know if he should tell his Dad about it, though. After all, he wasn't supposed to use onees, not even by accident. Not even one he found among his Dad's belongings . . . .

  "Smitty, there's something happening on Mars. I first got a glimpse of it through an onee, the night before I was drafted."

  Smitty couldn't believe it. Here was his Dad, confessing that he had used onees, too. In fact, they might even have used the same one.

  "It was a ship," Johnsmith said. "A Viking, or Geatish, ship. I saw it, not knowing that the onee had originated in an illegal plant on Mars. I thought it was just a hallucination, but now I'm beginning to think there's more to it."

  "Dad," Smitty whispered, not wanting his mother to hear.

  Johnsmith leaned closer to his son.

  "Dad, I touched one of those onees, too."

  A strange look came over Johnsmith Biberkopf's face. His brow furrowed, and he frowned. But his expression gradually changed. He smiled at Smitty. "Then you know all about it, don't you, son?"

  Smitty grinned. It was okay, after all. All the bullshit about onees didn't matter. He and his Dad had both taken them, and they were together now, and it was going to br
ing them even closer together. Smitty felt like yelling at the top of his lungs, telling everybody in the carrier, everybody on Mars, everybody in the whole frigging solar system.

  "This is great, Dad," he said.

  "Yeah, it sure is."

  They both threw back their heads and laughed, two guys who loved each other, and who shared a very special secret.

  Ronindella turned and glared at her husband. "Oh, I hope you're having fun, Johnny," she said. "I just hope you're having a wonderful time subverting your own son, because when they catch up with you, they'll lock you up and throw away the key."

  "Maybe so, heart of my heart," Johnsmith said, his voice dripping with sarcasm, "but I will at least have known something you'll never know."

  Ronindella sneered, clearly not interested in what he had to say. "Asshole," she said.

  "You think I'm a fool," Johnsmith said. "But the truth is, I've loved someone besides myself, and you never have."

  Ronindella turned on him in a rage. "I love God," she snarled.

  "That's a convenient excuse for acting with almost complete selfishness," he said calmly. "As long as you can convince yourself that you're closer to God than the rest of us, then you can treat us like shit. Well, I'm not buying that anymore."

  "Look who's talking about selfishness," Ronindella screamed. "You lost your job and got drafted, leaving your wife and child to shift for themselves."

  "You got almost all the money I've earned on Mars," he said. "And as for losing my job . . .well, at least I had one once."

  Ronindella pursed her trembling lips. He had never talked to her like this. What had happened to him? Had he gone totally mad here on Mars? "How dare you speak to me like that?" she said, but the fire was no longer in her.

  "I dare to talk like that, because it's the truth. You live here as a Conglom slave for a while, honey, and it makes you see a lot of things clearly that you never saw on Earth."

  Smitty was looking up at his Dad admiringly. He had dreamed of a moment like this a thousand times, but he had given up on ever actually seeing it. It was so neat to see his Dad fighting back, telling his Mom off, just as she deserved.

  "Please," Representative Silver said. "You really ought to try to be a little more amicable, the both of you."

  "Shut up!" Ronindella shrieked at the old man.

  "I beg your pardon," Silver said with great dignity.

  Ronindella didn't answer. Instead, she turned toward the transparency, and watched Chryse Planitia fly by.

  Johnsmith was relieved to see her breast rising and falling in sleep a few minutes later. Ronindella always slept soundly, looking angelic, after battling with him. Well, he was glad to see that she could rest. He certainly couldn't. He should have been enervated and exhausted after the past few days, but he wasn't. He was as fresh as a kid on a summer morning.

  The day that Jethro Pease had spoken of was almost here.

  TWENTY

  THEY SAW THE signs of the Ship long before they reached the Viking Monument. The sky over the desert had darkened and taken on a strange, aqueous quality that Johnsmith had never seen on Mars before. It almost looked as if a thunderstorm were brewing; but that, of course, was downright impossible.

  Still, something was happening, and whatever it was, it was something new.

  "It's a disjunctive node," Jethro Pease said.

  Everyone in the carrier turned to look at him. He sat in a window seat near the front, gazing out at the forbidding, dark sky.

  "What did you say, sir?" Representative Silver asked.

  "I said it's a disjunctive node," Jethro repeated.

  "Might I ask what that means?"

  "Sure, you can ask all you want, but I can't really explain it to you."

  The Connie Representative shook his head.

  "I've heard of it," Frankie Lee Wisbar said. "It's kind of like a bubble in the continuum. If you should wander into one, and the bubble bursts, you'll end up in some other time and place."

  "And where did you hear about this wonder of nature?" Representative Silver asked, trying to sound sarcastic, but looking just a trifle nervous.

  "In Arkie training sessions. They taught us that the Conglom wants to harness this thing, but it's bigger than any government. It's kind of a . . .philosophical or . . ."

  " . . .or religious thing," Silver said, glancing sternly at the daydreaming Jethro Pease. "But that's all misguided twaddle. If it exists at all, it's nothing more than a natural phenomenon. The human race needs it for the virtually unlimited energy it might provide."

  So that was it, Johnsmith realized. A wonder of nature was to be exploited by the Conglom as a kind of interdimensional, extratemporal power plant.

  "We've arrived," Frankie Lee Wisbar announced.

  The carrier settled down onto the surface, as everyone grabbed a pressure suit and got into it as quickly as possible. Two minutes later, the last of them had climbed out onto the surface and was staring at the Viking Monument, no more than fifty meters to the south. Hundreds of Arkies were clustered a little farther to the west. Their voices created a constant roar in Johnsmith's helmet, as if they were an ocean.

  Decades earlier, a transparent cube had been erected around the lander, which stood just a few feet from a big boulder on the rock-strewn plain. It looked like a big tin can on struts, parts wrapped in aluminum foil, with a primitive robot arm protruding from it. On it was fastened a plaque, describing the descent of this first Viking lander way back in 1976.

  To the west, the disjunctive node boiled. It wasn't getting larger, but it seemed to be taking on definition, becoming more focused. The longer Johnsmith gazed into its watery depths, the more he thought he understood it . . .though of course he did not understand it at all. He was simply awe stricken. And yet there was a feeling of familiarity stirring in him, a feeling that would not go away. Never a believer in fate, he nevertheless thought that perhaps he had been born to witness what was about to happen.

  "Look!" Smitty cried.

  Something was taking shape inside the disjunctive node. It was not clear just what it was, but it was big.

  "I'm scared," Felicia said.

  In spite of everything, Johnsmith put his arm around her shoulder for a moment. They watched the node come closer, changing as it moved eastward. The crowd of Arkies moved on the ground below, following it in a ragged procession through the Martian desert. Some of them were chanting. Jethro Pease ran to meet them, to stand under this miracle . . .or phenomenon, depending on one's point of view.

  The rest of the carrier's passengers, the pilot, and the hijackers, stood by, gazing up in wonder. The disjunctive node was slowly moving toward the Viking Monument with the stateliness of a papal procession.

  Now Johnsmith understood why there had been so much violence, both to the body and spirit. He saw Representative Silver trembling under the shadow of the disjunctive node, and knew that nobody in the solar system had quite been prepared for this.

  Except for the Arkies. They had figured it out, where all the technology of Earth had failed. They had accepted it as a religious experience, and their instincts had led them here, to bear witness to this sight for the ages.

  "It's just a rain cloud," Ronindella said. "You've come all this way just to see a rain cloud."

  As if rain on Mars would not be any big deal, Johnsmith thought.

  "That's no thunderstorm," Felicia argued. "It's the beginning of a revolution that will sweep through the entire solar system."

  Both of them were wrong, Johnsmith realized. Ronindella, with all her talk of miracles, did not recognize a genuine miracle when she saw one, and Felicia did not understand that there was not a political solution for everything. He was saddened by the incompleteness of their respective visions, these two women whom he had loved at different times of his life.

  Three carriers appeared, coming from the east. They must have been sent from Elysium, Johnsmith thought. The Conglom had figured it out, and they had doubtless sent Angel Torquema
da to save the day.

  But this was too big for Angel Torquemada, or anybody else.

  More carriers arrived from the north, south, and west. Dozens of them whined, sending up swirls of dust as they descended on Chryse Planitia. The carriers landed, almost simultaneously, all around the monument. Ramps shot out and shock troops sprinted down them and out across the desert.

  Particle beam fire outlined the disjunctive node's underside in red; it was so close now. The beam seared the procession of Arkie pilgrims, and four figures dropped to the sand, kicking and twitching in their death throes. Gunfire popped in the thin atmosphere like a string of firecrackers.

  The Arkies did not try to defend themselves. They were dying by the dozens, as the Conglom prisoners, driven mad by isolation and trained to kill, ran through them like heated knives through oleomargarine.

  It was a slaughter, the Conglom's revenge for the disastrous raid on Olympus. And there was Angel Torquemada, standing outside the nearest carrier, officiating over the massacre like some evil god.

  Johnsmith wondered why the troopers hadn't attacked him and his friends first. Perhaps Torquemada feared harming Representative Silver and the other tourists. More likely, he was saving the escapees from Elysium for last.

  "That son of a bitch," Felicia said.

  Johnsmith turned to see her determined face, just as she wrenched the pistol out of Frankie's hand and squeezed off three shots.

  Angel Torquemada tumbled end over end, finally colliding with the landing strut of one of the carriers. Blood soaked his pressure suit, and he did not move again.

  "Good lord," Representative Silver said.

  Felicia tossed the gun away. Its arc seemed slightly slower than natural, because of the low gravity, and it clanked dully against a rock when it finally came down.

  Angel Torquemada was dead, but it didn't seem to matter to the troops. They were consumed by bloodlust, murdering the Arkies at will. Their war cries mingled with the screams of the wounded and the dying, creating a cacophony of fearsome magnitude.

  Johnsmith's helmet radio crackled as the disjunctive node came closer. It was no more than thirty meters away, just over the heads of the Arkies.