Shooting back. Even over the machine-gun racket, I could hear bullets hissing by.
I mimicked Namir and lay prone, presenting as small a target as possible.
This had happened often enough that the physical sensation was almost familiar. Time crawled. My face and hands were greasy with cold sweat. All tight inside. Wiping away tears and snot.
“Shoot, goddamn it!” Dustin shouted. I’d fired one burst and still held the trigger down in a spastic clench. I pulled it again and again, firing in the direction of the crowd pushing through the door.
When I was young, I wondered about the expression “shooting fish in a barrel”—the image was so silly. Besides, you could just shoot a hole in the barrel and let the water drain out. That’s what this was, though. Or lemmings, another animal metaphor that had nothing to do with reality. Rushing through the door as if it were the edge of a cliff.
It couldn’t have taken long. Finally, two of them used the pile of bodies as a kind of shield, firing machine guns blindly toward us from behind their dead and dying comrades. The bullets went well over my head as I hugged the ground between Namir and Dustin. In less than a minute, someone shot the two from a rooftop, and all was quiet.
Relatively quiet. Someone was crying, and another groaned over and over. Namir ran to the pile of bodies and tossed away the rifles the two had been shooting. He studied the pile, I guess for signs of life. Then he peered out from behind the door for a few seconds and pulled his head back in.
Don’t do that,
I almost yelled.
Don’t push your luck.
How many had held back from the charge?
A minute went by, then several, without a shot. Some people came out of the main cabin with candles and first-aid kits and began circulating.
One of them, a woman I hadn’t met, came over to us.
“Any wounded?”
My ankle hurt like hell, but it wasn’t broken. I remembered what that felt like, from the night I fell into a lava tube and was discovered by the Martians. When I was a frightened girl, studying to be a terrified woman.
“Check Dustin over there. I think he was knocked out.” I watched her in the candlelight. She felt for a pulse in his neck and wrist.
“He’s alive,” she said, and he reached up weakly and touched her face.
“There it is again,” Namir said. He was looking up.
The bright blue light, unblinking, moving slowly overhead. Some idiot fired a machine gun at it, tracers slowing and falling away. It shrank to a dim point and disappeared.
“Brilliant,” he said. “Let’s see whether they shoot back.”
They didn’t, and the incident was forgotten in the confused aftermath of the attack. Eight people had serious wounds. They rigged a fly for shelter on the side of the infirmary and put the wounded on makeshift pallets there, along with an operating table; there wasn’t enough light inside for surgery.
They were long out of glue, and had to stitch people up. Running out of everything else. Two of the enemy bled to death because the farm was rationing its supply of surrogate.
It would run out sooner or later, of course, along with everything else medical. Those medical books from the 1800s that we brought from Lanny’s would eventually save a lot of lives. But first a few people, a few million, would have to die from lack of everyday miracles, like nanotech and blood surrogate.
They did have a stretchy ankle bandage to keep me upright and working. I slept for a couple of fitful hours and then was up at dawn to work a grave-digging shift. There were individual graves for the dead farmers, but what I and five others were working on was a mass shallow grave for the eighteen enemy dead. It was a pyre as much as a grave, actually. Hip deep, twelve feet by six. We filled it with dry wood and kindling and stacked pine logs on that. And then the bodies.
I was glad to be excused from that part of it. There were plenty of enthusiastic volunteers.
A vocal minority wanted them stripped. Manufactured clothing would be rare soon. Okay, Roz said—you can take it, but you have to wear it yourself. No one did.
It was a horrible sight. Faces blackening and melting in the flames, restless dead limbs moving, insides boiling away and bursting, the fire bright and greasy with rendered human fat. Finally, it was only skeletons and separated bones momentarily glimpsed inside the roaring flames.
Part of me watched the process with numb detachment. I didn’t even notice when Namir left my side and then came back with a cup of wine, which he offered to me.
“No,” I said. “I’m still queasy.”
“Yes,” he said, and stared at the fire as he drank. He smiled, and I wondered what he was thinking. Maybe I didn’t want to know.
“Got some more for you,” Roz said, approaching with Jerry pulling the cart. Seven or eight bodies, all apparently men. “Let’s check all the pockets for ammo before they go into the fire.”
I reached for the top body and jumped back. It was Card.
“Sorry,” Roz said, recognizing him. “I’ll do it.”
His face was unaffected, calm. But the top of his head had been blown out of round by a bullet that hit him in the temple. On the other side, an exit wound the size of my fist.
“He didn’t feel anything,” I said.
“A pity.” She pulled him off the cart by his feet and dragged him partway to the fire. She turned out his pockets, found something, and held it out to me. “Yours if you want it.”
It was a keychain with two old-fashioned metal keys as well as modern stubs. It was attached to a little carving that I immediately recognized: a small sea tortoise carved from a tagera nut in the Galápagos—my parents had bought them as souvenirs for us before we got on the Space Elevator on the way to Mars.
Mine was still on Mars, in a box of personal effects I’d left behind.
“Thanks,” I said, and stared at it as she and two other women carried his body away. I turned my back toward them so as not to watch him consigned to the flames. There was no love between us, but a lot of history.
My last blood connection to the Earth. Parents long gone and both my children Martians. “Back in a minute,” I said to no one in particular, and headed for the latrine. It wasn’t the most pleasant place to sit and think, but if I spent enough time there, the next time I looked into the fire, I wouldn’t recognize anybody. And the heat from the flames suddenly felt monstrous.
18
By the next morning, the fire had burned all the way down, and there was nothing recognizably human on the surface of the ashes. Those of us who had dug the pits were given a morning of rest while different work crews filled them.
I volunteered to take some tea and cookies out to them, mid-morning, which was good fortune for me, if not for them. I dropped the tray. But I got to see the Martians land.
A huge floating disc, maybe half the size of the entire compound, floated swiftly down out of the sky and stopped, hovering a couple of feet off the ground. There was no sound except for the crash of my teapot and cups.
“Please do not shoot,” the disc said with an amplified American accent. “We’re unarmed; we mean no harm. Hello, Carmen.”
“Hello,” I said. “I know you?”
“No. But there are people aboard you do know.” There was a dome-shaped protrusion in the center of the disc. A wedge of door opened, facing us.
A Martian stepped out and rippled toward the edge of the disc, all of its arms out in greeting.
“Snowbird?”
“It’s good to see you, Carmen. Paul is not with you.”
“He died . . . he died a couple of days ago.”
“I am sorry we missed him. We could use another pilot. It’s a long way back home.”
“Siberia?”
“Back to Mars. Home.”
“It came from Russia to pick me up? Us?”
“They picked
me
up in Russia, Carmen. They came from Mars, of course.”
“We are trying to locate every surviving Martian on Earth,” the amplified voice said. “You and Paul appear to be the last.”
Namir had come up beside me. “Leaving . . . for good?” he said.
“We don’t know,” the voice said. “This is all native Martian technology, which is to say, it’s from the Others. It might last forever, it might crash today. All we know for sure is that we can’t touch the surface of the Earth. If we do that, the power dies.”
“We had to jump on board,” Snowbird said, “from a snow-covered roof.”
“I’m afraid there’s not much time,” the voice said. “In the absence of Paul, you could bring another. But you have to decide now.”
I turned to Namir. His eyes were wide. Elza stepped up next to him, without touching, her face a mask. “Go with her,” she said softly. “You have to.”
Dustin limped up and put his hand on her shoulder. “For both of us,” he said. “For all of us. Go.”
Namir embraced them both, and said something I couldn’t hear.
Then he turned his back on everything and held out his hand to me.
His hand was large and strong. The skin was rough. “Shall we?”
We took two steps together and leaped into space.
EPILOGUE
It’s been a long time since dying was simple. When I returned to Mars, almost forty ares ago, two of the first people I met were my dead brother.
Before the Others pulled the plug on the Earth, back in 2138, there had been a constant data exchange between the two planets for most of a century. Absolutely total backup, which included the cybernetic copies of Card’s two reserve bodies, although they were physically destroyed along with Los Angeles.
Of course there are billions of such “people,” sitting around as passive records, whose physical bodies are long gone. Some of them even had citizenship, back on Earth, if they’d filed the right incorporation papers before they died. Card had. I guess he could still vote in California if anyone was running for office.
I talk to one or the other every now and then, but it’s creepy. The calendar peeps me when it would be their birthday on Earth. His birthday.
They’ve never asked me about the day that he died.
If only my parents had lived long enough to be duplicated; I’d love to talk to either of them. They might not have done it anyhow. I haven’t. It takes weeks of immersion, and a desire to outlive your body.
I may do it yet. Both universities are after me, so all this valuable history should not be lost.
But maybe it should be lost. It’s not as if they don’t make new history to take its place.
When my dear Namir died, after we’d been together almost thirty ares, he declined to leave a copy. He quoted Wordsworth to me: “The old order changeth, making place for new / And God fulfils himself in many ways.”
He didn’t believe in gods any more than I do. But it’s a convenient shorthand.
Twice in these forty ares we have seen signs of life, communications, from Earth. There’s a powerful telescope at the observatory that’s dedicated to that task, at least one person watching the Earth whenever it’s up.
During the second-most-recent opposition, a tiny cross burned in Siberia, the place where Martians last lived on Earth. Each arm of the cross was forty miles long, so it was quite an engineering feat with primitive tools. Twenty ares before, a fiery cross—or X—appeared in the desert of White Sands, New Mexico, and was visible as a black mark on Earth’s crescent for months.
They are still there. Still looking up.
Sometimes before dawn or just after sunset, I go up into the old dome and watch the blue spark of Earth rising or setting.
I did that this morning, for no special reason on the Martian calendar, but mine peeped and reminded me that on Earth I would be ninety years old today. Or my bones would be.
So I carried these old bones up and sat there alone, watching the Earth fade as the sky went from indigo to pale orange. Remembering the morning more than seventy years ago, waiting for a cab in the Florida dark. My father pointing out the bright unblinking red dot that we were about to visit. Saying we’d be back home in about five years.
But home was where we were going.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joe Haldeman (1943 –) is a US writer who took a BSc in physics and astronomy before serving as a combat engineer in Vietnam (1968–1969), where he was severely wounded, earning a Purple Heart; later, in 1975, he took an MFA. This range of degrees was an early demonstration of the range of interests that have shaped the Hard SF with which he has sometimes been identified; his experiences in Vietnam have in fact marked everything he has written, including his first book,
War Year
(1972), a non-SF novel set there, and the concurrently drafted (though much delayed)
1968
(1994).
