Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  We shop briefly at Terminal 4, Susan at last finding a charm for her bracelet, and then have to scamper to make our flight when they announce over the PA that the flight to Philadelphia is boarded except for the last five passengers—two of whom are us. Long, grueling, uncomfortable flight back, almost eight hours long, crammed in three-abreast this time, during which I try to apply the lesson I’ve learned from watching the little girl on the bus, with only partial success.

  We finally touch down in Philadelphia, only to discover, on disembarking, that we have somehow lost the expensive blanket we’d bought for our son Christopher in Scotland, probably left behind on the luggage cart in Heathrow during our scramble to catch our flight. Wait in a long, slowly-inching line to get through Customs, watching another little kid who is dodging merrily around the line-dividers, as if he is skiing the giant slalom, having a wonderful time while his parents fret and grind their teeth impatiently and snarl at each other in frustration. The little boy clearly knows the lesson of the little girl on the bus, while the parents have clearly forgotten it. I think we all know it at one time; I wonder when we forget?

  Pick up our suitcases, take a cab back to our apartment, where we are greeted at the door by a pair of hysterical cats, who are, at first, frantically glad to see us—later, they will remember that they’re supposed to be mad at us for leaving them, and become sulky and aloof, slowly thawing over the course of the next couple of days when they forget that they’re mad and are not supposed to want to get patted.

  It’s four P.M. in Philadelphia, but by our body clocks, it’s nine o’ clock at night. It’ll take weeks for us to readjust.

  There’s an immense pile of mail, and the answering machine is winking steadily, like an ominous red eye. Sighing, I reluctantly plunge into the shitstorm of bills and problems and emergencies that must be dealt with, including the news that, while we were gone, my mother has fallen and broken her hip, had surgery to have a bolt and plate put in, and is now in a rehab hospital.

  The vacation is over.

  The Gods of Mars

  Introduction to The Gods of Mars

  I suppose I could begin by telling you that the authors of this story have been friends of mine for almost twenty years. I could go on to say that I like their work. A lot. I’ve read them closely and am not ashamed to admit that I’ve stolen learned from each of them.

  But we’re here to discuss “The Gods of Mars.” Before we begin, I should warn you that this is a story that has bothered me since I first read it in Omni magazine in 1985. This is, I will argue, one measure of the authors’ success. Because I can’t explain exactly how this story got under my skin without interrogating its central mystery, I urge you to read it now, if you have not already done so, before we continue.

  All right? Cool story, no?

  It is the nature of our genre that stories often engage in dialog with other stories—sometimes as homage, sometimes as critique. This story chats up the work of the first “Killer B’s:” Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury. The allusions to Burroughs are explicit and begin with the title. Burroughs published a novel called The Gods Of Mars in 1913; it was his second in the Barsoom sequence. Gardner has revealed that neither of his collaborators had read Burroughs’s Martian novels at the time they wrote this story and that all of the Barsoomian references are his alone. Like Michael and Jack, I have never visited Burroughs’s Mars (although I spent a lot of my childhood in the jungle with Tarzan) and while I recognize these grace notes, they strike no deep resonance with my inner twelve-year-old. But while the physical landscape our astronauts discover is all Burroughs, the psychic landscape is clearly Bradbury-esque. Ray Bradbury created a thoroughly romanticized Mars, the dream-like home of a ghost civilization that haunts its human explorers—and this reader. It is a world where the improbable is commonplace.

  What is significant about these literary influences is that both of them inhabit the edges of science fiction. For instance, John Carter needed magic to get to Barsoom. Although Burroughs’ imaginary world is certainly resplendent, one may question its consistency. And while Bradbury launches his expeditions to Mars in rockets, he is interested not at all in space technology or planetary science. In fact, the Mariner 9 mission to Mars stripped The Martian Chronicles of all claims to be taken seriously as science fiction; since 1971 the only way to read Bradbury’s wonderful tales is as fantasy.

  And how are we to read “The Gods of Mars”? In the mystery genre, there is a kind of story referred to as the “police procedural.” The “Gods of Mars” begins as “space procedural.” Four astronauts in orbit around Red Planet prepare to launch the lender, which will carry three of them to the surface. Humans are about to step onto Mars for the first time when a storm whips up, obscuring the entire planet. As they wait it out, they become increasingly apprehensive. “. . . the inexorable clock of celestial mechanics was ticking relentlessly away . . . soon the optimal launch window for the return journey to Earth would open . . .” The first third of the story displays a robust scientific rigor that would not have been out of place in the pages of Analog.

  When the storm clears, however, the astronauts gaze down upon a strange new planet. Gone are the craters, Olympus Mons, the Valles Marineris; in their place are Percival Lowell’s canals. The crew is unnerved; one of them offers the panicky speculation that the Martians must have changed everything. “They’re out there right now, the flying saucer people!” But level-headed Commander Redenbaugh has checked the ships instrumentation and discovered that the Mars they expected is indeed still there; they must be suffering from some kind of mass hallucination. Although this is not a particularly satisfactory explanation, the crew accepts it as a working hypothesis and votes to continue with the landing. At this point, the story is still within the precincts of science fiction. The plot turns on the problem of the dual perceptions of Mars, but still seems to anticipate a rational solution. Perhaps there is “. . . some kind of intense electromagnetic field out there that we haven’t detected that’s disrupting the electrical pathways of our nervous systems . . .”

  Except the story bifurcates here. Up until they make the decision to land, we have seen the action through the point of view of Thomas, who is to command the landing party. Thomas is a well-crafted character, which leads us to assume that he inhabits more or less the same reality as we do, albeit sometime in the future. But immediately after Thomas casts the deciding vote to go for the landing, we are thrust briefly into the point of view of Commander Redenbaugh, who will stay behind in the ship where reason holds its tenuous sway. He is the keeper of our reality, while Thomas and the landing crew step into a fantasy of passing strangeness.

  And this is what still bothers me after all these years. I can’t wrap my mind around the notion that even though Commander Redenbaugh sees the fantasy which is Lowell’s Mars, he chooses to believe the instruments, which keep him safe inside the science fiction story. Meanwhile, Thomas can hear Commander Redenbaugh and watch the ship leave orbit, even after he has stepped out of the science fiction story into the fantasy. It’s maddening! The door between these mutually exclusive realities never shuts all the way. I’ve run thought experiments on “The Gods of Mars.” For example, what if there were a way for Commander Redenbaugh to land? Would he see three bodies or his crew skinning the hyena-leopard? What if he chose not to look but merely dispatched a robot to fetch the corpses? Would it be able to retrieve them? If it did, and they were, in fact, as lifeless as the instruments reported, what would happen to the crew paddling down the river? And what will happen to the lost crew and the canals and the lights of the distant city when the next expedition arrives on Mars?

  The narrative is silent on these questions. The authors obviously saw no profit in over-defining a choose-your-own-reality story. Reluctantly, I have come to agree with this artistic decision. The unresolved puzzles continue to surprise and intrigue me to this day.

  For this reader, however, the phenomenological paradox, while inte
llectually engaging, isn’t necessarily the deepest aspect of “The Gods of Mars.” I believe that the story poses a more personal question of each of us:

  If you could choose, which way would you go? With Redenbaugh or with Thomas?

  Me, I honestly don’t know.

  James Patrick Kelly

  The Gods of Mars

  by Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann,

  and Michael Swanwick

  They were outside, unlashing the Mars lander, when the storm blew up.

  With Johnboy and Woody crowded against his shoulders, Thomas snipped the last lashing. In careful cadence, the others straightened, lifting the ends free of the lander. At Thomas’s command, they let go. The metal lashing soared away, flashing in the harsh sunlight, twisting like a wounded snake, dwindling as it fell below and behind their orbit. The lander floated free, tied to the Plowshare by a single, slim umbilicus. Johnboy wrapped a spanner around a hex-bolt over the top strut of a landing leg and gave it a spin. Like a slow, graceful spider leg, it unfolded away from the lander’s body. He slapped his spanner down on the next bolt and yanked. But he hadn’t braced himself properly, and his feet went out from under him in a slow somersault. He spun away, laughing, to the end of his umbilicus. The spanner went skimming back toward the Plowshare, struck its metal skin, and sailed off into space.

  “You meatballs!” Thomas shouted over the open intercom. The radio was sharp and peppery with sun static, but he could hear Woody and Johnboy laughing. “Cut it out! No skylarking! Let’s get this done!”

  “Everything okay out there?” asked Commander Redenbaugh, from inside the Plowshare. The commander’s voice had a slight edge to it, and Thomas grimaced. The last time the three of them had gone out on EVA, practicing this very maneuver Johnboy had started to horse around and had accidentally sent a dropped lugnut smashing through the source-crystal housing, destroying the laser link to Earth. And hadn’t the commander gotten on their asses about that; NASA had been really pissed, too—with the laser link gone, they would have to depend solely on the radio, which was vulnerable to static in an active sun year like this.

  It was hard to blame the others too much for cutting up a little on EVA, after long, claustrophobic months of being jammed together in the Plowshare, but the responsibility for things going smoothly was his. Out here, he was supposed to be in command. That made him feel lonely and isolated, but after all, it was what he had sweated and strived for since the earliest days of flight training. The landing party was his command, his chance for glory, and he wasn’t going to let anybody or anything ruin it.

  “Everything’s okay, Commander,” Thomas said. “We’ve got the lander unshipped, and we’re almost ready to go. I estimate about twenty minutes to separation.” He spoke in the calm, matter-of-fact voice that tradition demanded, but inside he felt the excitement building again and hoped his pulse rate wasn’t climbing too noticeably on the readouts. In only a few minutes, they were going to be making the first manned landing on Mars! Within the hour, he’d be down there, where he’d dreamed of being ever since he was a boy. On Mars.

  And he would be in command. How about that, Pop, Thomas thought, with a flash of irony. That good enough for you? Finally?

  Johnboy had pulled himself back to the Plowshare.

  “Okay, then,” Thomas said dryly. “If you’re ready, let’s get back to work. You and Woody get that junk out of the lander. I’ll stay out here and mind the store.”

  “Yes, sir, sir,” Johnboy said with amiable irony, and Thomas sighed. Johnboy was okay but a bit of a flake—you had to sit on him a little from time to time. Woody and Johnboy began pulling boxes out of the lander; it had been used as storage space for supplies they’d need on the return voyage, to save room in Plowshare. There were jokes cracked about how they ought to let some of the crates of flash-frozen glop that NASA straight-facedly called food escape into space, but at last, burdened with boxes, the two space-suited figures lumbered to the air lock and disappeared inside.

  Thomas was alone, floating in space.

  You really were alone out here, too, with nothing but the gaping immensity of the universe surrounding you on all sides. It was a little scary but at the same time something to savor after long months of being packed into the Plowshare with three other men. There was precious little privacy aboard ship—out here, alone, there was nothing but privacy. Just you, the stars, the void . . . and, of course, Mars.

  Thomas relaxed at the end of his tether, floating comfortably, and watched as Mars, immense and ruddy, turned below him like some huge, slow-spinning, rusty-red top. Mars! Lazily, he let his eyes trace the familiar landmarks. The ancient dead-river valley of Kasei Vallis, impact craters puckering its floor . . . the reddish brown and grey of haze and frost in Noctis Labyrinthus, the Labyrinth of Night . . . the immense scar of the Vallis Marineris, greatest of canyons, stretching two thirds of the way around the equator . . . the great volcanic constructs in Tharsis . . . and there, the Chryse Basin, where soon they would be walking.

  Mars was as familiar to him as the streets of his hometown—more so, since his family had spent so much time moving from place to place when he was a kid. Mars had stayed a constant, though. Throughout his boyhood, he had been obsessed with space and with Mars in particular . . . as if he’d somehow always known that one day he’d be here, hanging disembodied like some ancient god over the slowly spinning red planet below. In high school he had done a paper on Martian plate tectonics. When he was only a gangly gradeschool kid, ten or eleven, maybe, he had memorized every available map of Mars, learned every crater and valley and mountain range.

  Drowsily, his thoughts drifted even further back, to that day in the attic of the old house in Wrightstown, near McGuire Air Force Base—the sound of jets taking off mingling with the lazy Saturday afternoon sounds of kids playing baseball and yelling, dogs barking, lawn mowers whirring, the rusty smell of pollen coming in the window on the mild, spring air—when he’d discovered an old, dog-eared copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars.

  He’d stayed up there for hours reading it, while the day passed unnoticed around him, until the light got so bad that he couldn’t see the type anymore. And that night he’d surreptitiously read it in bed, under the covers with a pencil flashlight, until he’d finally fallen asleep, his dreams reeling with giant, four-armed green men, thoats, zitidars, long-sword-swinging heroes, and beautiful princesses . . . the Twin Cities of Helium . . . the dead sea bottoms lit by the opalescent light of the two hurtling moons . . . the nomad caverns of the Tharks, the barbaric riders draped with glittering jewels and rich riding silks. For an instant, staring down at Mars, he felt a childish disappointment that all of that really wasn’t waiting down there for him after all, and then he smiled wryly at himself. Never doubt that those childhood dreams had power—after all, one way or another, they’d gotten him here, hadn’t they?

  Right at that moment the sandstorm began to blow up.

  It blew up from the hard-pan deserts and plains and as Thomas watched in dismay, began to creep slowly across the planet like a tarp being pulled over a work site. Down there, winds moving at hundreds of kilometers per hour were racing across the Martian surface, filling the sky with churning, yellow-white clouds of sand. A curtain storm.

  “You see that, Thomas?” the commander’s voice asked in Thomas’s ears.

  “Yeah,” Thomas said glumly. “I see it.”

  “Looks like a bad one.”

  Even as they watched, the storm slowly and relentlessly blotted out the entire visible surface of the planet. The lesser features went first, the scarps and rills and stone fields, then the greater ones. The polar caps went. Finally even the top of Olympus Mons—the tallest mountain in the solar system—disappeared.

  “Well, that’s it,” the commander said sadly. “Socked in. No landing today.”

  “Son of a bitch!” Thomas exploded, feeling his stomach twist with disappointment and sudden rage. He’d been so close.

  �
�Watch your language, Thomas,” the commander warned. “This is an open channel.” Meaning that we mustn’t shock the Vast Listening Audience Back Home. Oh, horrors, certainly not.

  “If it’d just waited a couple more hours, we would have been able to get down there—”

  “You ought to be glad it didn’t,” the commander said mildly. “Then you’d have been sitting on your hands down there with all that sand piling up around your ears. The wind can hit one hundred forty miles an hour during one of those storms. I’d hate to have to try to sit one out on the ground. Relax, Thomas. We’ve got plenty of time. As soon as the weather clears, you’ll go down. It can’t last forever.”

  Five weeks later, the storm finally died.

  Those were hard weeks for Thomas, who was as full of useless energy as a caged tiger. He had become overaware of his surroundings, of the pervasive, sour human smell, of the faintly metallic taste of the air. It was like living in a jungle-gym factory, all twisting pipes and narrow, cluttered passages, enclosed by metal walls that were never out of sight. For the first time during the long months of the mission, he began to feel seriously claustrophobic.