Exile (4 page)

"Tell me something. In your research, what is it you know of the senator's daughter, Tabrel Kris?"

"I know that she grew up on Mars and attended a private school in Wells until a year ago. Her mother died when she was very young."

"Is that all?"

Prime Minister Faulkner stood in the doorway for a moment, regarding the young man. "There is one other thing I am aware of about her, Sire."

"Well?"

"I . . . hesitate to tell you, Sire."

"Must I order you? Out with it!"

"It seems," Prime Minister Faulkner said uncomfortably, "that she is betrothed to a diplomat's son on Titan."

Dalin Shar stood motionless.

"I believe," Prime Minister Faulkner said gently, before closing the door, "that the marriage is to be within the Martian year."

A
mere hundred thousand miles from Mars, Senator Kris called his daughter to his side.

The home planet was framed in the shuttle's window. It hung in space like a claret ball, its shroud of atmosphere greatly softening its surface, still rusty even three hundred years after terraforming. Only the fragile, wide patches of green, the sustaining, oxygen-giving plains, fed by the aquifers which led down from the highlands, where it occasionally rained, and from the polar caps, where frozen water now ruled, made it appear any different than before man had tinkered with it. Indeed, it now looked much as Percival Lowell had described and drawn it in the late 1800s, after carrying Giovanni Schiaparelli's vague description of "canali" to preposterous lengths of scientific delusion, turning channels into man-made canals.

Now there were man-made canals, and the green of seasons that Lowell had also, in his tame dementia, so assiduously described.

Even so, it hung before Senator Kris a planet changed, overnight.

"Tabrel," the old man said, drawing his daughter near, "I'm afraid it's time for us to go separate ways."

"What do you mean?" Tabrel said with alarm.

Nodding toward Mars, the senator drew a deep breath and said, "I must return home and attempt to stop Cornelian."

"But how—"

The old man's lined face now turned to his child. "There is a chance that the people, if they are not too lost in Cornelian's delusions of war-glory by now, will side with me. If I can get that to happen, the army may follow. It is a slim chance, but one I must take."

Tabrel clung to the old man.

"If I fail," Senator Kris continued, "it means war throughout the Four Planets, and on Venus also. It means a return to dark times for Mars."

"I'll go with you, then," Tabrel said.

"You must not be allowed anywhere near Come

han. You know that, Tabrel."
  
-

"But he'll kill you!"

The senator paused before saying, "I've never lied to you, daughter. We both know how probable that is. You will be safe on Titan, at least for the time being. The outpost there is secure. Jamal Clan is waiting for you."

"Jamal Clan . . ."

The senator paused before saying, "There is ... another matter I wish to discuss with you. I have become aware of your. . . attachment to King Dalin Shar. I am also quite aware of your betrothal to Jamal Clan."

"Whom I have never seen."

"True. This marriage was arranged long ago, in the best interests of both Mars and Titan. Since at the moment it would mean little to Mars, I would feel secure in releasing you from the vow, if you so wish."

"Are you sure, Father?" Tabrel said.

"There ... would be certain diplomatic hurdles should this happen, of course. The Titanians might not be as sanguine as I about dissolving this arrangement." He smiled wanly. "But I have no doubt my daughter could jump those hurdles."

"Thank you, Father."

"And who knows? You may find Jamal Clan's charm overwhelming nevertheless!"

Tabrel smiled.

"I've ... not often spoken of such things," the senator continued, "but I want you to know it has not been easy for me raising you alone. Since your mother's early death I've often felt . . . inadequate to the task. But looking at you today, I feel as if this, at least, was a victory in my life."

Senator Kris gently cupped his daughter's chin with his hand and looked into her eyes.

"I want you to be strong, daughter. With the strength I know is in you."

He waited until she nodded.

"I'll be strong, Father."

"No matter what happens?"

Again she nodded. "No matter what happens."

"I must go back," he said, his voice low and gentle. "Greater evil will come to Mars if I don't." Tabrel clung to her father.

Senator Kris, standing stiffly, looked with tired eyes to his attendant standing a respectful distance away. He made a motion and the robot deftly approached. Gently it tried to pry the clinging Tabrel from her father.

Senator Kris said, "I've arranged for you to leave immediately, Tabrel. I felt it was best."

The firm hands of the attendant pulled Tabrel away from her father. Suddenly she stepped back on her own and said, "I understand."

Her father looked down at her and smiled sadly. "Good-by, dear daughter," he said.

"Good-bye ..

Before long, the senator, still standing at the window, hands clasped behind his back, watched as the coffinlike pod of the lifeboat was jettisoned. It moved serenely away from the shuttle until reaching a distance of two kilometers. Then its rocket ignited, throwing it sideways in the senator's vision away from the shuttle, on its way to rendezvous with the Titanian craft waiting another hundred thousand miles distant from Mars.

Taking in a deep breath, the senator let it out slowly.

"Good-bye, dear daughter," he said. "Forever."

Five hours later Senator Kris's shuttle was in Mars orbit. An hour after that it had been given clearance to land.

Prime Cornelian himself patched into the communications line and came on screen.

"Senator!" Prime Cornelian crowed. "How nice of you to return!"

"I feel no joy about it, myself," Senator Kris said, refusing to look through the front portal at the red planet rushing up at them. He knew how safe shuttles were but declined to put himself through the roller-coaster plunge of their landings.

"Nonsense!" Prime Cornelian said. "You and your lovely daughter will be my guests of honor on your landing!"

The senator smiled inwardly at the inclusion of Tabrel in the statement.

"After all," Prime Cornelian continued, "you are the only specimen of the Martian Senate left in existence! Perhaps we'll put you in a zoo!"

Senator Kris said, "I demand an immediate plebiscite on your usurpation of power. If you refuse, you'll be challenging the most ancient tenet of Martian government. I don't think even you could get away with that."

"You wish to have the people choose between you and I?"

Kris nodded solemnly.

"A parliamentarian till the end, eh, Kris? Very well. You shall have your plebiscite."

Trying not to show his surprise at Cornelian's answer, the senator said, "And I demand safe passage at landing, and immunity from harm until the vote. Agreed?"

Cornelian's metallic visage was unreadable.

"Agreed," the insect man said finally, cutting off communication before the senator could say anything else, leaving Kris wary, but vaguely hopeful.

They were on the ground soon enough, on the farthest pad of Lowell Port. Immediately the shuttle was surrounded by Martian Marines, as was the senator when he alighted the ship.

"Prime Cornelian cannot wait to see you," Pynthas Rei said, pushing his way through the soldiers to stand before Kris. He moved his hands one over the other in a constant, annoying motion. He looked up at the senator from his hunched-over position with his bulbous eyes. He smiled lopsidedly and reached out a thin finger to stab at the senator.

"Cannot wait!"

"Remove your hand from me, Pynthas," the senator said. "I'm not a fowl ready for plucking."

"We'll see about
that!"
Pynthas hooted, poking at the senator's tunic again.

Senator Iris's attendant immediately pushed its way between Pynthas and the senator.

Pynthas stumbled back, then fell down on the tarmac.

"Destroy that machine!" Pynthas screeched.

The order was ludicrous, because attendants were inanimate objects incapable of real harm to humans, and also because the command had come from Pynthas Rei—a life-form not much higher on the evolutionary scale than an attendant.

Nevertheless, to Senator Kris's surprise, a Marine immediately raised his weapon and fired a line of destroying fire at the attendant.

With a final, calm "Sir—" the attendant froze where it stood. Then its limbs collapsed and it fell to one side, smoking from a hole in its innards.

"Was that necessary, Pynthas?" Senator Kris said, trying to keep both anger and fear—fear that a man such as Pynthas should have the power to do such a thing, or to do anything at all, for that matter—out of his voice.

"Yes!" the toady said, rising from the ground to look with lopsided satisfaction at the ruin of the attendant.

"Prime Cornelian awaits," the red-suited Marine who had shot the attendant said dispassionately.

"I wish to be brought to a neutral location," Senator Kris said. "Until the plebiscite is held."

Pynthas's attention immediately returned to Senator Kris.

"Of course!" he said. "My orders are to take you to a neutral location—as soon as you see Prime Cornelian!"

"I do not—" Kris began, but the Marine turned his weapon on the Senator, indicating the first in a line of waiting transports, whose door stood open.

"Shall we?" Pynthas smiled unctuously, leading the way. He stopped only to kick ineffectually at the now inanimate robot.

A broken length of metal shot out of the machine, hitting Pynthas, nearly knocking him down again. He whimpered, scuttling sideways, before scrambling into the transport ahead of everyone else.

Staring out through raser-proof glass, Senator Kris tried to keep his mind blank.

When that didn't work, he watched the landscape scrolling by outside.

This was a beautiful, if bleak, world. Those who were born on Mars loved it because they were of it; those who had settled here from other places—as Farman Ens had done as a boy, when his parents left a sick Earth to start a new life on a new planet—came to cherish it with an even deeper love.

It was not a perfect place. It never would be. In many respects the Terraformers, as the pioneers who had settled and then set about to change Mars in the 2200s were known, had failed in their experiments. There was an oxygen atmosphere that constantly needed replenishment, because the few plants successfully engineered to thrive on the planets meager resources were not numerous or fertile enough to do the job by themselves. The problem was water. Though surface water had once existed on Mars, billions of years ago, it stubbornly refused to exist now. Even with all that the Terraformers had been able to accomplish—the thickening and oxygenating of the atmosphere, the subsequent increase in surface pressure to the point where human blood did not boil, the formation of a pencil-thin ozone layer to deflect the Sun's lethal UV rays, the cultivation of scant crops and hybrid mammals—even with all this, they had not succeeded in making water flow on the surface. And though Mars' polar caps and fairly abundant underground aquifers had proved relatively rich in water, the size of the caps and the depth of the aquifers (which ranged from fifty to two thousand feet below the Martian surface soil) were just not sufficient to nourish an entire planet. When it rained—and it did rain, infrequently—what scant moisture reached the parched ground was soaked downward by thirsty soil, or upward by instant evaporation. There was an occasional dusting of snow to play in, but for Martian children, there were no lakes to swim in, no streams to sail paper boats in, no puddles to jump in.

So a sort of hybrid had eventually emerged, half original Mars, half new Mars.

For those who loved it, there was no other place to live.

Like their planet, Martians were not perfect. Their cities were permanent, beautiful, and culturally resplendent, with abundant water for their regulated populations. Martians were a hard people, capable of sealing themselves in their habitats for
months at a time when a global dust storm raged, capable of living like camels when an aquifer dried up or collapsed and water rations went into severe effect. Over the centuries, genetics had turned the original Earth settlers into a wiry, tall, and for the most part lean people; their eyes were large in their gaunt faces, their fingers long and delicate, their skin shades of brown ranging from a deep mahogany to a light pinkish tone.

Their imperfection evidenced itself in their history of self-government. Their War for Independence with Earth had been savage, and some of this savagery had persevered in the Martian character. It had been said that no Martian was more than one insult away from a fight. That a form of democracy had persevered for the last hundred years, in the form of a High Prefect presiding over a Senate elected by the people, was, to Kris, next to remarkable. He had often argued with his colleagues, to little result, about the fragility of their own freedom; sometimes he had felt that he was the only man on the planet who understood that they were only one madman away from barbarity.