Empire Dreams

by Ian McDonald

  So before Patrick wakes I shower. I wash my hair, I trim my nails, I depilate, I deodorize, I even repaint the tekmark on my forehead and dress in the most nearly fashionable outfit I own. On the train downtown I just sit and watch the people. They do not know that I was the girl with the sunken eyes and the stinking hair they were so careful not to be seen staring at. Now I am just another face on a train. By denying the body I only drew more attention to it. The only way to achieve purity is to escape totally from the body. But that is impossible while we are on this earth. Not so on Mars.

  Tapheading, for me, is like waking from a dream into a new morning. Eyes click open to the vast redscapes of Mars. You can hear it shouting, Real, real! with the voice of the polar wind. Let me tell you about the polar wind. For a hundred thousand years it blew cold and dry from the ice itself, but we have moved our orbital mirrors in over the pole and are thawing the cap. So now the winds have reversed direction and great thunderheads of cloud are piling up, layer upon layer, in the north. Someday it will rain, the first rain on Mars for fifty thousand years. I will rejoice at the feel of it on my plastic skin, I will laugh as it fills the ditches and dikes of our irrigation systems and I shall doubtless cry on the day when it touches the seeds of the Black Tulips I have planted and quickens them to life. But that is in the future. Maybe this year, maybe next year, maybe five years from now.

  For the present I take joy in lifting my head from the planting and seeing the rows of Johnny Appleseeds digging and dropping and filling and moving on. They are mine. No. They are me. I can be any one of them I choose to be, from Number Eleven busily spraying organic mulch over the seedbeds to Number Thirty-five trundling back to base with a damaged tread.

  But I can be much more than that. If I blink back through the ROTECH computer network I can be a dronelighter blowing tailored bacteria into the air, or a flock of orbital mirrors bending light from round the far side of the sky, or an automated hatchery growing millions of heat-producing oxygen-generating Black Tulip seeds for the Johnny Appleseeds, or a channel cutter building the fabulous Martian canals after all these millennia, or a Seeker searching deep beneath the volcanic shield of Tharsis for a magma core to tap for geothermal energy, or an aviopter flying condor patrol high over the Mare Boreum, which will one day indeed be a Sea of Trees …

  I can be whatever I want to be. I am free. I am pure spirit, unbound to any body. And this is my vision of purity, of spirituality: to be forever free from this body, from earth and its decadence, to fly on into a pure future and build a new world as it ought to be built; as a thing of spirit, pure and untainted by human lusts and ambitions. This is a future that stretches far beyond my human lifespan. They say it will be eight hundred years before a man can walk naked in the forests we are growing in Chryse. Two hundred years will pass after that before the first settlers arrive on the plains of Deuteronomy. A thousand years, then, to build a whole world in. That will give me enough time to make it a proper world.

  This is my vision, this is my dream. I am only now beginning to realize how I may achieve it …

  But first I must dream again….

  * * * *

  It is not the rattle of the rain that has woken you, nor the slam of a passing ore train on the slow up-line; it is something far less tangible than that, it is something you feel like the crick in your neck and the dryness in your mouth and the gumminess around your eyes that you get from having fallen asleep against the side window. So knuckle your eyes open, sniff the air. You can smell the rain, but you can smell something else too, like electricity, like excitement, like something waiting to happen.

  Look at the screen, what do you see? Wind blowing billows across endless kilometers of wet yellow grass that roll away to the horizon. Low rings of hills like the ancient burial mounds of Deuteronomy lie across the plain: eroded impact craters, Taam Engineer tells you. This is Xanthe, a land as different as different can be to the forests of Chryse or the paddies of the Great Oxus. A high, dry plainland where the Grand Valley begins to slope up to the high country of Tharsis. But today the rains have come out of season to the stony plain, carried on an unnatural wind, for the ROTECH engineers and their sky-mirrors are driving the storm away from the peopled lowlands to the Sinn Highlands where it can blow and rain and rage and trouble no one. The sky is hidden by a layer of low, black, curdled cloud and the wind from the Sea of Trees blows curtains of rain across the grassland. Miserable.

  You ask your grandfather how much longer and he says not long, the storm will blow out within the hour and Xanthe’s a poor land anyway, fit only for grazers and goatherds and getting through as quickly as possible. Grandfather Taam smiles his special secret smile and then you realize that, according to the story, this is where it all happened, where Taam Engineer—your own grandfather!—met the saint and so averted a dreadful accident. Now you know where the feeling of excitement has come from. Now you know why Grandfather Taam has brought you on the great Lady’s last haul.

  So you ask the old man, this is where it all happened? And he smiles that secret smile again and says yes, that this is where it all happened all those years ago, long before you were even thought of; it was here the Lady worked a miracle and saved five hundred lives, yes, we’ll be there soon, and look, even the weather is deciding to improve, look.

  Out across the hills the sky is clearing from the northwest. Light is pouring through the dirty clouds and the rain has blown away leaving the air jewel-bright and clear. Catharine of Tharsis explodes out into the sunlight, a shout of black and gold, and the plains about her steam gently in the afternoon sun.

  Lights flash on the control desk. Even though you do not understand what they mean, they look important. You direct Taam Engineer’s attention to them, but he just nods and then ignores them. He even sits back and lights a cheroot. You thought he had given up those dirty things years ago, but when you ask him if there is anything wrong, he says, “Nothing, boy, nothing,” and tells you she’s only doing what her high station expects of her, but you haven’t time to think about that because the train is slowing down. Definitely, unmistakably. Her speed is now well under 100. You look to Taam Engineer, but he grins roguishly and does not even touch the keypad to demand more speed. He just sits there, arms folded, puffing on his cheroot as the speed drops and drops and it becomes obvious that the train is not just slowing, but stopping.

  The nonstop Rejoice-to-Llangonnedd Ares Express grinds past a stationary chemical train down-bound from the sulfur beds of Pavo. The engines whine as they deliver power to the squealing brakes, and the seven-hundred-ton train comes to a stand right out there in the middle of the pampas with not a station or even a signal pylon to mark it as special and worthy of the attention of Catharine of Tharsis.

  A hiss of steam startles you, it is that quiet. Cooling metal clicks. Even the hum of the engines is gone, the fusion generators are shut right down. The rust-red chemical train looks almost sinister in its stillness.

  “What now?” you whisper, painfully aware of how loud your voice sounds. Grandfather Taam nods at the door.

  “We get out.”

  The door hisses open and he jumps out, then lifts you down to the ground. You can see the staring faces pressed to the windows all the way down the train.

  “Come on,” says Grandfather Taam and he takes you by the hand and leads over the slow down-line (you glance nervously at the waiting chemical train, half-expecting the automated locomotive to suddenly blare into life), down the low embankment, and into the tall grass. He grinds his filthy cheroot out on the ground, says “It should be around here somewhere,” and starts thrashing about, whish whish swush, in the wet grass. You can hear him muttering.

  “Aha! Got it! A bit overgrown, but that just goes to show how long it is since a human engineer ran this line. I tell you, in my day we kept the weeds down and polished the silverwork so bright you could see it shining from ten kilometers down the track. Come and look at this, son …”

  He has cleared the
grass away from a small stone pedestal. Inlaid in tarnished metal is the nine-spiked wheel symbol of Saint Catharine. You can feel the devotion as your grandfather bends to rub the dirt of the years from the small memorial. When it is clean and silver-bright again he bids you sit with him on the damp crushed grass and listen as he tells you his tale.

  * * * *

  I have told Patrick what I am going to do. I used the simplest words, the most restrained gestures, the shortest sentences, for I know how incoherent I become when I am excited. I did my best to explain, but all I did was scare him. Seeing me transformed, my body clean, my face pretty, again the Kathy Haan he had once loved, and then to hear me tell him of how I am going to cast this world away and live forever on Mars is too great a shock for him. He does not have to tell me. I know he thinks I am mad. More than just “mad.” Insane. My explanations will do no good, he can’t understand and I’m not going to force him to.

  One favor, Patrick. You know people who can get these things, could you get me two lengths of twistlock monofiber?

  What for?

  I need it.

  For your mad “escape”—don’t tell me. Forget it. No, Kathy.

  But listen, Patrick—

  No no no, I’ve listened enough to you already, you’re a persistent bitch, if I listen to your voice long enough I’ll find myself agreeing with whatever insane notion you suggest.

  But it’s not insanity. It’s survival, it’s the only way for me to go.

  Yes yes yes, the only way you can be pure, the only way you can achieve spirituality … What is it that’s driven you to this, Kathy? It’s suicide, that’s exactly what it is!

  The Crazy Angel, Patrick. At some time or another the Crazy Angel touches us all and we just have to go with the flow.

  But he doesn’t see the joke: if there is no God, how can there be any angel at all, crazy or otherwise, unless it is me?

  Are we not enough? There was a time when it was enough for us to have each other. What more do you want, what more is there?

  Do you really want me to answer that, Patrick? I give him one of my fascinating half-smiles that used to excite him so much. Now it only angers him.

  Then, what does Mars offer that I don’t?

  Same question. This time I choose to answer it.

  Sanity.

  Sanity! Hah! You talk to me about sanity? That’s rich, Kathy Haan, that is rich.

  I remain patient. I will not allow Patrick to disturb me. I will not lose my head or shout at him. To do so would only be to play the game according to his rules, and his sick society’s rules.

  Sanity, I say, in a world where words like hunger and fear and disease and war and decadence and degeneration don’t have any meaning, in a world that one day will be so much more than your earth could ever be. Freedom from a world that registers its terrorists, Patrick Byrne, and lets them kill who they will for their high and lofty registered ideals!

  That stings him, but I am relentless, I am the voice of final authority: the angel is speaking through me and won’t be silent.

  And you will let me go, Patrick, you will get me those lengths of monofiber from your Corps friends, because either I go or your sick, sick society will have me off the top of a building in a week, and that is a promise, Patrick Byrne, a Kathy Haan promise: either way I go, either way you lose.

  Bitch! he roars and spins round, hand raised to strike, but no one may lay hands on the Crazy Angel and live and the look in my eyes stops him cold. Serenity.

  Bitch. God; maybe you are an angel after all, maybe you are a saint.

  Not a saint, Patrick, never a saint. Sure, don’t I not believe in God? Not Saint Kathy, just a woman out of time who wanted something more than her world had to offer. Now, will you get me those bits of twistlock fiber?

  All right. I can’t fight the Crazy Angel. How long? I hold my hands about half a meter apart.

  Two of them, with grips at both ends and a trigger-release twistlock set to fifth-second decay so they won’t ever find out how I did it.

  I’ll get them. It’ll take some time.

  I can wait.

  Words flow as expressions across his face. Then he turns away from me.

  Kathy, this is suicide!

  So what? It’s legal, like everything else from political murder to public buggery.

  It’s suicide.

  No. Not this. To stay behind, to try and live one more year on this rotting world, that’s suicide. More than that, it’s the end of everything, because then I’ll have even thrown all my hope away.

  * * * *

  It is a story old and stale with telling and retelling, but here, sitting on the damp grass under the enormous sky, it feels as if it is happening to you for the first time. Taam Engineer’s eyes are vacant, gazing into years ago; he does not even notice how his stained fingers trace the starburst shape of the Catharine Wheel on the pedestal.

  “I tell you, I thought we were done then. I’d given up all hope when that pump blew, with us so far out into the wilderness (and it was wilderness then, this was years back before ROTECH had completed terraforming the Grand Valley). We were so far out that no help could ever reach us in time, not even if they sent the fastest flyer down from their skystations, and there were five hundred souls aboard, man, woman, and child …

  “So I ordered them to evacuate the train, even though I knew right well that they could never get far enough away to outrun the blast when the fusion engines exploded … But I had them run all the same, run to those hills over there—you know, to this day I don’t know if they have a name, those hills—but I thought that if they could reach the far side then they might be safe, knowing full well that they never would …

  “All the time I was counting off the seconds until the pressure vessel would crack and all that superheated steam would blow my beauty to glory and us with her. I can remember that I had one thought in my head that kept running round and round and round: ‘God, save the train, please, save the train, God …’ That was when the miracle happened.”

  An afterbreath of wind stirs the grass around you. It feels deliciously creepy.

  “I don’t know if it was my calling or the train’s agony that brought her, and I don’t think it matters much; but on the horizon I saw a black dot, way out there …” He points out across the waving grass and if you squint along the line of his finger into the sun you too can see that black dot rushing towards you. “An aviopter, black as sin and big as a barn, bigger even, circling over the line, and I tell you, it was looking for me, for the one who called it …” Taam Engineer’s hands fly like aviopters, but he is too busy watching the great black metal hawk coming lower and lower and lower to notice them. “And I swear she took the loco in her claws, boy, in her metal claws, and every bit of brightwork on her ran with blue fire. Then I heard it. The most terrible sound in the world, the scream of the steam-release valve overloading, and I knew that was it and I scrambled down this bank as fast as I could and threw myself onto the ground because death was only a second behind me, and do you know what I saw?”

  Though you have heard the story a hundred tellings before, this time it takes your breath away. So you shake your head, because for once you do not know.

  “I tell you, every one of those five hundred souls, just standing there in the long grass and staring for all they were worth. Not one of them trying to run, I say, so I turned myself belly-up and stared too, and I tell you, it was a thing so worth the staring that I couldn’t have run, though my life depended on it.

  “They’d stripped her down and laid her bare and unplugged the fusion generators and, by the Mother-of-Us-All, they were fusing up the cracks in the containment vessel and running the pumps from zero up to red and down again, and those pumps, those God-blind-’em pumps, they were singing so sweetly that day it was like the Larks of the Argyres themselves.”

  “Who, Grandfather?” you say, swept away by the story, “who were they?”

  “The Angels of Saint Catharine
herself, I tell you. They had the look of great metal insects, like the crickets you keep in a cage at home, but as big as lurchers and silver all over. They came out of the belly of the aviopter and a-swarmed all over my locomotive.”

  He slaps his thighs.

  “Well, I knew she was saved then and I was whooping and cheering for all I was worth and so was every man-jack of those five hundred souls by the time those silver crickets had finished their work and put her back together again. Then they all just packed back into the belly of that big black aviopter and she flew off over the horizon and we never saw her again, none of us.

  “So, I got up into the cab and everything was all quiet and everything smelt right and every readout was normal and every light green, and I put the power on as gentle as gentle and those engines just roared up and sang, and those pumps, those pumps that so near killed us all, they were humming and trilling like they were fresh from the shop. Then I knew I’d seen a miracle happen, that the Blessed Lady, Saint Catharine herself, had intervened and saved us all. And I tell you this, I would still never have believed it had it not been for those five hundred souls who witnessed every little thing she did and some of them even had it recorded and you can see those pictures to this day.”

  Up on the track the chemical train fires up. The shocking explosion of sound makes you both jump. Then you laugh and up on the embankment the robot train moves off: cunk cunk, cunk cunk. Taam Engineer rises to watch it. When it is gone he pats the small stone pedestal.

  “So of course we named the engine after her and put this here to commemorate the miracle. I tell you, all the engineers (in the days when we used to have human engineers) on the Grand Valley run would sound their horns when they went by as a mark of respect, and also in the hope that if they gave the Lady her due, one day she might pull them out of trouble. You see, we know that the Lady’s on our side.”

  He offers you a hand and drags you up damp-assed from the ground. As you climb the embankment you see all the faces at the windows and the hands waving icons and charms and medallions and holy things. It makes you look at Catharine of Tharsis again, as something not quite believable, half locomotive and half miracle.