Red Planet Run (30 page)

I found the button on his chest panel for vital signs. His pulse was strong but rapid, his blood pressure low but not dangerously so. “You sure you aren’t a Texas Ranger after all?”

He gave an imitation of a snort. “Not hardly.”

“Art.” I met his eyes. “You saved our lives. I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to thank you.”

He smiled, a pale imitation of the lazy grin. “Do I get to choose?”

I had to laugh. “You might.”

“Hold that thought.”

I looked around. “Where are Sestieri and Sukenik?”

“They found Tom.”

“And?”

“He’s alive, barely.”

I gave a weary nod. “Good.” I tried to think what to do next.

“Mom?” Paddy had come to stand next to us. “Shouldn’t we call Sean?”

“Oh. Right.” I’d set my wrist chronometer with Sean’s mark. Time left before Sean began to lift: 33 seconds. I chinned over to Channel 1.
“Kayak,
this is the Pyramid. Sean, this is Mom. Do you read?”

The headset crackled instantly into life. “I sure do, Mom,” Sean’s relieved voice said. “Are you okay? Is Paddy?”

“Not a scratch on either of us,” Paddy said with a forced cheerfulness. “We’ve taken casualties, though. Evans has a leg wound. And we’ve found the Champollions. They’re both alive, but they’re both hurt.”

“What about Kwan?”

Paddy’s young voice sounded subdued. “He’s dead. And four others.”

Sean’s young voice sounded grimly pleased. That was the difference between doing the shooting yourself and someone else having done it for you. “Good.”

“Is there any sign of that rover?”

“No.”

“Have you run a scan on the infrared?”

“Yes. He hasn’t come into sensor range yet.”

“Okay. Do you think you can bring the
Kayak
up to the top of the Pyramid?”

He was wounded. “Of course.”

“Do it. We’re going to kick a hole through the dome and get out that way. Look for a flare.”

“On my way.”

In the end, we had to burn a hole through the dome with our pistols, using up most of the rest of the charges in two of them. Sean was waiting. I retained just enough energy to follow the three wounded and the four walking up through the hole and the ladder and through the lock. Paddy doffed her suit and helped me with mine. “Sean, call Woolley. Tell him to stay put, that we’ve still got at least one bad guy on the loose, that we’ll call him tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t forget the password. De Caro?”

He looked up from Evans’ leg. “What?”

“They going to make it?”

His lips set in a thin line. “Art’s okay; it was just a flesh wound. Lots of blood and there’ll be a chunk missing from his thigh, but it’ll heal all right.”

“And the others?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. Tom’s in and out, Jeannie’s completely non-responsive. They’ve both been raped and beaten, and they’ve both lost a lot of blood.”

“The twins and I are universal donors.”

His face lightened. “Good. That’ll help.”

We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star.

 

—Emerson

 

WE PICKED UP THE GUY
on the rover first thing the next day. It turned out he’d never seen our first touchdown the evening before, and he was totally unnerved when we dropped out of the sky to land literally on top of the cab of his vehicle, a nice bit of piloting if I says it who shouldn’t. Sean shinnied down the rope ladder, forced an entry, and brandished a laser pistol before the guy’s terrified eyes. He folded without a peep. He wasn’t quite up to the Kwan standard of predator.

I had a difficult time restraining the Fab Four from stuffing him out the airlock sans pressure suit then and there, but I had questions I wanted answered and he bought his life with them. It turned out he was more than willing to talk. Miffed that he’d been landed with sentry duty while the fun and games went on without him, he actually had the temerity to say so. After that, I was ready to stuff him out the airlock myself. When he became aware of that fact, he couldn’t get the words out fast enough.

The Kwans of this world always seem to ferret out the kind of information that will do the most harm to the most people, and this was no exception. Helen must have been planning my trip to Mars well in advance. Like the Big Lie thirty-odd years before, her quote, exaggeration, unquote, about the expedition to Cydonia and its quote, discoveries, unquote, had filtered down to the spacer’s equivalent of the bush telegraph. Down far enough for Kwan to come into possession of it. The entire trail of bloodshed that led from the landing field on Ceres to the destruction of the Tallshippers’ habitat to the attack on Vernadsky to Kwan’s presence at Cydonia—all of it had been predicated on the existence of a possible weapon at Cydonia. Kwan wanted to be Master of the Universe, and he surrounded himself with a group of like-minded mental midgets who agreed that was a nifty idea.

It wasn’t that I minded Helen’s Big Lies so much; it was that they so often led to my escaping death by mere centimeters. I resolved to tell her so the next time I saw her.

I called Woolley in from the cold, and that afternoon the crawler trundled up. I appropriated one of the cube canisters and carried it up to the top of the Pyramid, Kwan’s sole remaining henchman under heavy and unfriendly guard bringing up the rear. At the top floor I popped the canister in a corner. When the cube solidified I stuffed the prisoner inside and welded the door shut behind him. Paddy climbed up on top, and with her pistol cut a small hole in the cube’s roof; that would serve to toss him food and water and bring up a waste bucket now and then. I should have executed him, but truth to tell, I didn’t have the stomach for it. If either of the Champollions died, the feeling of the expedition team was such that the decision would be taken out of my hands, and for the moment I was willing to leave it at that. He wouldn’t suffocate, as the atmosphere inside the Pyramid was so close to being Terran standard as to make no never mind. Over the vociferous objections of the twins, I’d brought the sparrows inside and left them there with no visible means of life support. At the end of a week both were still alive and singing, even with the door open at the bottom of the stairs and the hole burned into the roof. “Some kind of containment field?” Paddy suggested.

“A version of the one that protects the Ghoul,” Sean said, nodding. “Or a scaled-down version of the Ghoul itself.”

Paddy nodded. “Has to be.”

It didn’t have to, but once I was convinced the atmosphere wasn’t going anywhere, I gave the okay to assemble the cell and a camp on the Pyramid’s top floor. There was plenty of room; the prisoner’s cubicle, tucked into one corner, was barely within shouting distance, and the ambient temperature stabilized at 15 degrees Celsius. Someone 500,000 years before had gone to an awful lot of trouble to make things comfortable for us. I kept my eyes peeled for a water faucet.

We began to chip away at the crust on the dome and, as we expected, uncovered panel after panel of solar cells. We started on the south face, hoping for the impossible, and were not disappointed. After millennia of idleness those cells spit on their hands and started in to work with a will. First the dust of the centuries began to disappear from the stairs, then from the Penthouse (Sean’s nickname for the domed room at the top of the Pyramid). An elevator appeared next to the stairwell, thanks a lot, that went straight from the front door to the Penthouse in five seconds flat. I made Sestieri stand by in the Penthouse, while on the ground floor I put a goonsuit on the platform and sent it up and had her send it back before I tried it myself. I survived, and our thigh muscles groaned their relief when we began using the elevator on a regular basis.

We uncovered another bank of solar cells, and the exterior of the dome began to clean itself, literally right out from under our feet. Another bank of cells shed its skin of solar-fired clay and the elevator began making a second stop, at another enormous room about halfway up the Pyramid, this one filled with rows and rows of towering, rectangular boxes that vaguely resembled card frames. Although I’d not seen the inside of the Librarian’s ship, for some reason those stacks made me think of it. Perhaps because everything in the Pyramid seemed to be powered by optics, and perhaps also because the stacks reminded me of the computer banks at O’Neill Central on Terranova, or battery storage on Luna, or both. It drove Sestieri, the epigrapher, mad. She hungered for a hieroglyphic, a rune, a cuneiform, anything to make a start in deciphering the history of Cydonia. But there was nothing, or nothing she recognized, as written language.

It reminded me of Archy patiently explaining to me back on Ellfive seventeen years before that I would have to wait for the information I wanted from what the Librarians had left behind, that they had no written language, and that he was transcribing light waves into System English as fast as he could. I wondered what the fastest and the smartest and the only sentient (so far) computer in the System would make of the Pyramid. I thought we should both have a chance to find out, and I said as much to Simon on the bounce.

Paddy and Sean were prowling through the stack room on their own one evening when they saw some kind of screen flare into life on the side of one of the stacks, and from it a face stare out at them. It seemed to be speaking, but there was no audio. Broken, distorted, it flickered for fifteen or so seconds, and faded. “What did the face look like?” I said. They exchanged a glance. “Well?”

Paddy hesitated. “Young, dark hair and eyes.” She fumbled for words, and looked to Sean for help.

“She looked like that picture of Elizabeth on Auntie Charlie’s desk,” he said bluntly.

I sat up, startled. “Are you sure?”

“No. It was only on for a few seconds. But that’s who it reminded us of.”

I cross-examined them. They stuck to their story.

Well? Why not? At Cydonia I was forced to believe six impossible things before breakfast every day. Why not Elizabeth, too?

The screen had yet to relight, and the stacks resisted every attempt at admission. I didn’t force it. Once we cleared enough solar cells, I might get my “Press this button” sign yet.

A month after we took back the Pyramid, Tom recovered enough to care for Jeannie, who had achieved consciousness of a kind, although that was about all. We buried Kwan and his buddies in a common grave a klick off the Pyramid’s right foot and didn’t bother to mark it. It had been bad timing all around for the Champollions to stumble across the Pyramid’s uncovered door just before Kwan & Company rolled up in Johnny Ozone’s rover. Woolley, his ego subdued when faced with their injuries, took over as team leader with a previously undemonstrated tact and diplomacy, and the work went on. He orchestrated the inventory and the dating of the complex while deferring the running of the expedition to me. No matter what I did, people still kept coming to me for all the answers. You are what you are.

We used the
Kayak
to make a foray north to the City, a quadrangle of four smaller pyramids placed around a central core, another northeast to watch the sun rise over the Face at winter solstice. We were going to have to take a closer look at the Cliff, too, and sooner or later we were going to have to figure out a way to test my theory about the Tholus, although by now even Woolley was convinced I was right. We were going to need ships, and supplies, and about 100,000 pairs of willing and expert hands, and I told Helen so. Her response had been an ominous silence, so I was expecting her arrival any day, trusting her to be first in line on the Red Planet run.

During my leisure time I’d been paging through the works of some of my favorite poets, as fiction now seemed too pedestrian, and history was being rewritten before my eyes. Some of the poems I found were eerie in their prescience, like Frost’s
Star-Splitter,
Paddy’s favorite poem, probably because Frost’s backyard stargazer burned down his house and he used the insurance money to buy his telescope. Paddy could relate. Sean liked Frost, too, especially anything that happened down on the farm—apple-picking, fence-mending, wood-splitting—but his favorite poet was Housman. There was something about rose-lipt maidens and lightfoot lads that never failed to move him. Sean was the unreconstructed romantic of the family. Kipling’s
The Sons of Martha
reminded me of Maggie Lu and of every other engineer I’d ever met—“It is their care that the gear engages; it is their care that the switches lock.” And Eliot’s closing lines from
Little Gidding
were always stirring; hell, as Crip said, they were the oath you had to take before they let you into the Aerospace Pilots Association.

I scrolled down and came to Shelley’s
Ozymandias,
and felt the chill all the way down to my bones.
Sic transit gloria mundi.

I took off the headset and looked out the port. From the
Kayak
’s galley I watched the sun set, turning the western surface of the Pyramid a deep, reddish-gold. If I squinted toward the southeast, I imagined I could see the tip of the Tholus, poking up out of its splosh crater, on eternal guard against the careless whim of the cosmos.

At Cydonia, we had uncovered not the decay of a colossal wreck but the partly working remnants of a cosmological Camp in a Can. I had no difficulty in superimposing Kwan’s maddened, berserker image over the shattered visage of Shelley’s poem, and realized that the poet’s warning might not have been of the indifferent passage of time that cast the statue down, but against the building of the statue in the first place. If Kwan had won, he would have built just such a statue, and in a hundred years or a thousand years it, too, would have been cast down.

We had won. What would we leave? A legacy that was built to last, like Cydonia, or… what? The Prometheans might have provided the human race with one catalyst long ago. Twenty-six hundred years later, Cydonia was giving us another nudge, refocusing our attention. The danger was clear. The last time we let ourselves be suckered and sidetracked away from cold hard truth, 1,600 years were lost to the Great Interruption. This time, did we go the way of Vernadsky and complacency, or Kwan and chaos?