Red Planet Run (31 page)

Kwan was the barbarian at the gate, the berserker in all of us, and make no mistake, he was there, waiting, hoping, ready to spring out at the first opportunity. He was with de Gama at Bombay, with Cortez at Tenochtitlan, in Spain during the Inquisition, with Soloviev in Unalaska, with the Japanese in China, with the S.S. at Auschwitz, with the Serbs in Bosnia, with the Chinese in Korea twice. He was energetic, amoral, and ruthless. He stopped at nothing, not even death.

Vernadsky was the other side of the coin. The beast of complacency lurked within each of us, side by side with the berserker, like him just waiting to be let off the chain. He abided with the Indians of Bombay, who gave in to de Gama; he was boon companion to Montezuma, who knelt to Cortez as God; he lived next door to every German who ever said, “We did not know.” He was the ultimate cosmopolitan, tolerant, smug, and self-satisfied. He was the end product of two thousand years of civilization. The berserker would kill us quick. The beast would kill us slow, and make us enjoy it.

Throughout the history of mankind, one of the preeminent questions of our condition has been: Are we alone? We created a pantheon of gods to prove that we were not, and spilled enough blood to float an armada convincing others to believe it, too. Then the age of mysticism gave way to the age of reason; the world became less mysterious and more predictable and the physical sciences rushed in where angels feared to tread, proving with biological calculation, astronomical observation, and mathematical probability that life in the universe is as infinite as the universe itself, that it would be the height of conceit for us to imagine we were the only living creatures in it. Berserker and beast, Librarian and Cydonian, we coexisted on the cosmic ocean of which my father had once taught me from the bridge of his boat. But who were the Cydonians? Were they gods or men? Were we nothing more than peas in some far off Mendel’s garden, marks on a social scientist’s bell curve a thousand thousand light-years distant? And when would the experiment end, and who got to say it was over?

For myself, if I was nothing more than the rat in someone’s maze, I was going to be the smartest, quickest, strongest rat there was. Our end might be our beginning, but we now had the advantage of knowing it for the first time, and with knowledge comes wisdom, and the shedding of fantasies and myths of the past, all the baggage that drags you down and holds you back.

I wandered into Atlas and Igneous and found Paddy in her usual position, genuflecting before her telescope, eye glued to the ocular, attention fixed fifty light-years in the past. She turned at my entry. “Hi, Mom.”

“Hi. Good seeing this evening?”

“And how; the Red Spot’s hot enough to warm my hands by. Want to take a look? There’s a storm brewing down around the Tropic of Capricorn; it’s real pretty.”

“Sure.”

Sean joined us, and so we whiled away the night, watching Io and Ganymede and Europa transit Jupiter’s broad face, admiring the hazy glory of the Orion Nebula, calling down the stars in the Big Dipper one at a time—Alkaid, Alcor and its binary sibling Mizar, Alioth, Megrez, Phecda, and Pointer Sisters Merak and Dubhe—in a naming ceremony worthy of the storyknife, still snugged safely into the small of my back. I reached around to touch it, just to be sure. If I knew Mother, she’d be riding shotgun on the same ship that brought Helen, and I would be able to return the storyknife to her, with my love and my thanks.

The lucent spark of Deimos paced slowly across the sky. The pale, misshapen orb of Phobos faded into the first blush of dawn. Slowly, obstinately, Sol heaved up over the horizon, the quintessential cockeyed optimist, hoping against hope that this time, at long last, we might get it right.

We just might.

Like the man said, the best thing we’re put here for’s to see.

Dana Stabenow was born in Anchorage and raised on 75-foot fish tender in the Gulf of Alaska. She knew there was a warmer, drier job out there somewhere and after having a grand old time working in the Prudhoe Bay oilfields on the North Slope of Alaska, making an obscene amount of money and going to Hawaii a lot, found it in writing.

Her first science fiction novel,
Second Star
, sank without a trace, her first crime fiction novel,
A Cold Day for Murder
, won an Edgar award, her first thriller,
Blindfold Game
, hit the
New York Times
bestseller list, and her twenty-eighth novel and nineteenth Kate Shugak novel,
Restless in the Grave
, will be released in February 2012. 

Find her on the web at
stabenow.com
.

Second Star
A Handful of Stars
Red Planet Run

Fire and Ice
So Sure of Death
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Better to Rest

A Cold Day for Murder
A Fatal Thaw
Dead in the Water
A Cold-Blooded Business
Play with Fire
Blood Will Tell
Breakup
Killing Grounds
Hunter’s Moon
Midnight Come Again
The Singing of the Dead
A Fine and Bitter Snow
A Grave Denied
A Taint in the Blood
A Deeper Sleep
Whisper to the Blood
A Night Too Dark
Though Not Dead

Blindfold Game
Prepared for Rage

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Red Planet Run
 was first published by Ace in 1995. This digital edition (v1.0) was published by 
Gere Donovan Press
 in 2011.

Copyright © 1995 by Dana Stabenow.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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