Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (15 page)

Go upstairs, pack our travel-worn suitcases one last time, check out, and wheel our stuff on a luggage cart the short distance across the street to the main terminal. I’m carrying my Hugo in one hand by this point, out in the open, in plain sight—this is something I learned to do a few Worldcons ago, in Holland, when, during the midst of the build-up for the Gulf War and the terrorism scare that was generated by it, I walked into the airport carrying my Hugo and instantly had at least two automatic rifles trained on my chest by flak-jacketed security troops, who were no doubt considering the possibility that it was some kind of pipe bomb or hand-held rocket; I remember thinking, as the security people at the gate examined the Hugo
very
carefully, Thank God I didn’t put it in my suitcase, where it would have shown up on an X-ray and gotten the whole flight cancelled, or pull it out of a bag, so that they think I’m drawing some kind of weapon and shoot me. Since then, whenever I’ve had the occasion to go through an airport with a Hugo, I’ve been careful to carry it in plain sight, and am prepared to spend at least a few minutes at the security gate explaining what it is. This time, however, it quickly becomes apparent that the security people in Glasgow Airport have seen a Hugo go through here before—“Ah, that’s that award for science fiction, isn’t it?” one guard says jovially, and I wonder, Just how many Hugos have come through this very gate in the last week? Two couples in the waiting area at the gate also recognize the Hugo, as does someone on the plane, and another couple later at Heathrow, so obviously fans are still dribbling home from Glasgow, four full days after the convention ended. I wonder how long it will take before everybody is home again, and you’d no longer run into anyone who was also returning from the Worldcon?

We have an hour-long flight to Heathrow. At Heathrow, getting a brief glimpse of the outskirts of London as we break from the clouds that have enveloped us since leaving Glasgow, we make our way to the International Transfers area, where the customs official who checks our passports nods at the Hugo and says, “I thought that Arthur C. Clarke had all of those!” This is probably not a fan on the way home from Glasgow, but he not only knows what a Hugo is, but, from his remark, understands something of the history of it! I must admit that this boggles me, as, outside of this trip, I’ve never met any airport official who had the slightest idea what a Hugo was; I usually tell most of them that it is a bowling trophy that I’ve won while on vacation, and they nod and accept this at face value.

We climb on board the shuttle bus for the short ride to Terminal 4. There’s a little girl aboard with her parents, and she’s just delighted with the whole experience of being on this bus, squealing with happiness when the bus starts to move, laughing and clapping her hands, shouting joyously and pointing when she sees airplanes on the runway. I watch her thoughtfully. For most of us on the bus, this bus ride is just something that we endure, an uncomfortable inconvenience that we put up with because we want to get to someplace else where we’ll do something we really want to do—to her, the bus ride itself is a joy, a pleasure to be savored, a source of inexhaustible wonders. If we could only recapture that innocent, open-hearted experience of life, living with all pores open and savoring each moment for itself, experiencing each moment as it happens without anticipation or retrospect, drinking in the wonder of things we instead choose to consider trivial or boring or mundane, relishing just that moment, just that one moment, for its own sake, like a little child, how much better off we’d be, how much more enjoyable and tranquil our lives would be, no matter how long or how short they were.

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 intellectually 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.

But the real enemy was time. Thomas was acutely aware that the inexorable clock of celestial mechanics was ticking relentlessly away . . . that soon the optimal launch window for the return journey to Earth would open and that they
must
shape for Earth then or never get home at all. Whether the storm had lifted yet or not, whether they had landed on Mars or not, whether Thomas had finally gotten a chance to show off his own particular righteous stuff or
not,
when the launch window opened, they had to go.

They had less than a week left in Mars orbit now, and still the sandstorm raged.

The waiting got on everyone’s nerves. Thomas found Johnboy’s manic energy particularly hard to take. Increasingly, he found himself snapping at Johnboy during meals and “happy hour,” until eventually the commander had to take him aside and tell him to loosen up. Thomas muttered something apologetic, and the commander studied him shrewdly and said, “Plenty of time left, old buddy. Don’t worry. We’ll get you down there yet!” The two men found themselves grinning at each other. Commander Redenbaugh was a good officer, a quiet, pragmatic New Englander who seemed to become ever more phlegmatic and unflappable as the tension mounted and everyone else’s nerves frayed. Johnboy habitually called him Captain Ahab. The commander seemed rather to enjoy the nickname, which was one of the few things that suggested that there might actually be a sense of humor lurking somewhere behind his deadpan facade.

The commander gave Thomas’s arm an encouraging squeeze, then launched himself toward the communications console. Thomas watched him go, biting back a sudden bitter surge of words that he knew he’d never say . . . not up here, anyway, where the walls literally had ears. Ever since
Skylab,
astronauts had flown with the tacit knowledge that everything they said in the ship was being eavesdropped on and evaluated by NASA. Probably before the day was out somebody back in Houston would be making a black mark next to his name in a psychological-fitness dossier, just because he’d let the waiting get on his nerves to the point where the commander had had to speak to him about it. But damn it, it was
easier
for the rest—they didn’t have the responsibility of being NASA’s token Nigger in the Sky, with all the white folks back home waiting and watching to see how you were going to fuck up. He’d felt like a third wheel on the way out here—Woody and the commander could easily fly the ship themselves and even take care of most of the routine schedule of experiments—but the landing party was supposed to be
his
command, his chance to finally do something other than be the obligatory black face in the NASA photos of Our Brave Astronauts. He remembered his demanding, domineering, hard-driving father saying to him, hundreds of times in his adolescent years, “It’s a white man’s world out there. If you’re going to make it, you got to show that you’re
better
than any of them. You got to force yourself down their throats,
make
them need you. You got to be twice as good as any of them . . .”
Yeah, Pop,
Thomas thought,
you bet, Pop . . .
thinking, as he always did, of the one and only time he’d ever seen his father stinking, slobbering, falling-down drunk, the night the old man had been passed over for promotion to brigadier general for the third time, forcing him into mandatory retirement.
First they got to give you the chance, Pop,
he thought, remembering, again as he always did, a cartoon by Ron Cobb that he had seen when he was a kid and that had haunted him ever since: a cartoon showing black men in space suits on the moon—sweeping up around the Apollo 58 campsite.

“We’re losing Houston again,” Woody said. “I jes cain’t keep the signal.” He turned a dial, and the voice of Mission Control came into the cabin, chopped up and nearly obliterated by a hissing static that sounded like dozens of eggs frying in a huge iron skillet. “. . . read? . . . not read you . .
. Plowshare . . .
losing . . .” Sunspot activity had been unusually high for weeks, and just a few hours before, NASA had warned them about an enormous solar flare that was about to flood half the solar system with radio noise. Even as they listened, the voice was completely drowned out by static; the hissing noise kept getting louder and louder. “Weh-ayl,” Woody said glumly, “that does it. That solar flare’s screwing everything up. If we still had the laser link”—here he flashed a sour look at Johnboy, who had the grace to look embarrassed—“we’d be okay, I guess, but without it . . . weh-ayl, shit, it could be days before reception clears up.
Weeks,
maybe.”

Irritably, Woody flipped a switch, and the hissing static noise stopped. All four men were silent for a moment, feeling their suddenly increased isolation. For months, their only remaining contact with Earth had been a faint voice on the radio, and now, abruptly, even that link was severed. It made them feel lonelier than ever and somehow farther away from home.