The Empress of Mars (32 page)

The Heretic looked up at him timidly. He wiped the tear-tracks away, leaving red streaks with the touch of his fingertips, a barred pattern like war paint.

It was the dull hour in the Empress when the lunch crowd had cleared out, leaving the place for once comparatively deserted. Mary had gone down to the transit station with Alice and Mr. De Wit, to arrange about Alice’s passport. It chanced that there was only Manco behind the bar, and Mr. Morton sweeping up around the airlock, when the portal opened and admitted a great deal more sand and a stranger. Mr. Morton looked at him reproachfully, but said nothing as he hurried to sweep away the new drifts, for the stranger had a certain lean and hard-bitten look about him Mr. Morton found intimidating.

The stranger peered around, spotted the bar, and made for it. “You serve beer here?”

“That’s right,” said Manco.

“How much for a pint?”

“What’ve you got?”

The stranger grinned briefly at that. He pulled a wallet from within his jacket and dug out a few coins. “Would you say two euros was fair?”

Manco shrugged. He got down a beer mug and filled it for the stranger, depositing the old coins in the till. The stranger sipped his beer, made a face, and looked suspiciously into the mug. “It’s beer,” Manco assured him. “Things taste different up here.”

“I’d noticed,” said the stranger. He took another sip and rolled it around on his tongue. “Best to get used to it, I reckon. We’re here to stay.”

“Yes?” Manco glanced at the man, without interest, as he wiped down the bar.

“Heard there’s a woman runs this place. She about?”

Manco shook his head. “Down the hill. She’ll be back in an hour, maybe.”

“Right then.” The stranger drank a little more beer. “Not so bad. Never was one for hops, myself. Well. You lot staying on, now that Areco’s taken over?”

Manco nodded.

“They tried to cancel our contract,” said the stranger. “Said they weren’t bound to the terms we’d signed with the BAC. We told ’em they didn’t have any idea who they were dealing with and if they thought they were going to pull that kind of shite with the Martian Agricultural Collective, they’d find out their mistake in short order.”

“Really.”

“Really. We’re not taking any corporate double-dealing from a pack of white-collar plushies. We came up here to make a new and better world and we
will
, see?”

“Will you?” Manco glanced up at the stranger as he wrung out a bar rag. “It’ll take a lot of work, you know.”

“We don’t mind work, mate. Not for the cause. You work here long?”

“Six years.”

“Maybe you’d know, then.” The stranger leaned forward and thrust out his hand, and Manco shook it. “Rich Chesebro, MAC. Got a question for you, mate. We plan on terraforming this place into a better world, but a world’s got to have people living on it. So we plan on raising families. We’ve been asking around about conditions here and that. Talking to the medievalists, the Morrigans they call themselves. They said they’ve been up here eleven years and not one of ’em has had kids.

“They said there’s only two girls have managed to get pregnant the whole time anyone’s lived on Mars. And both the girls live here.”

“That’s right,” said Manco.

“What’s the trick?” Chesebro set down his mug and leaned forward.

Manco studied him. “You’re serious about the terraforming, huh?”

“Wouldn’t have come up here if we weren’t.”

“You understand you’re not just looking at building a few shelters and doming over a few fields. You understand you’ll spend the rest of your lives up here, working yourselves till you drop in your tracks, to make this place live. You understand it’ll take sacrifices, and nobody’s going to see a cent of profit for generations. If then.”

“We know that,” said Chesebro. “We don’t matter. Profit doesn’t matter. Only the cause matters.”

Manco nodded slowly. “I’ll probably regret this some day. Hold on a minute.” He threw down the bar rag and opened a drawer in the back bar. Bringing out his buke, he switched it on. “You got a universal lead?”

“Yeah—” Chesebro fumbled in his jacket and brought out his own buke. He opened a little slot and drew out a plug. Manco took it and connected the two bukes. “You’re downloading the formula for some kind of fertility drug?”

Manco shook his head, tapping in a few codes. “Something I want you to look at first.”

“Don’t fuck around with me, mate.” Chesebro’s eyes glinted.

“Look at the data, okay?”

Exhaling in impatience, Chesebro leaned forward and ordered up the hologram display. Within the bright globe he saw the virtual canals stretching across the plains, the aqueducts that rose across the valleys, the blue-green ponds transforming the red rock world into a garden.

“There’s your better world,” said Manco. “That’s how you build it.”

Chesebro sucked in a harsh breath. He leaned closer, reading avidly. Manco took his mug and refilled it as he read. Twenty minutes later the
beer still sat untouched, as Chesebro had not taken his eyes from the display long enough to notice it was there.

He sat back at last. “Hell,” he said. “It’d work. It would.” He looked up at Manco with quite a different expression. “This your work, is it?”

“The British Arean Company fired me before I could implement it.”

“Bastards.” Chesebro stared at the holo display a moment, lost in thought. “The algae stuff, though, to make the methane . . .”

“The lady of the house was the BAC’s xenobotanist. She made it. It’s growing in the clan’s irrigation ponds. Every so often they dredge it out and dump it outside, because it grows so fast it clogs the pipes, but they can’t eradicate it. Tough stuff.”

“Good.” Chesebro rubbed his chin. “Great. All right; it’ll take generations to build the canals. Where do we get the kids?”

Manco walked to the nearest wall. He tore off a patch of lichen and brought it back, and handed it to Chesebro. Chesebro turned it over in his hands, looking at it uncertainly. “Some kind of drug?”

“No.” Manco made a gesture that took in the brew tanks and the lofts in the arch of the ceiling. “The lichen photosynthesizes, just like plants on Earth. Any light at all does it, combined with all the CO
₂
venting from the brew tanks. It makes oxygen. Plus we run oxygen through the tanks in the fermentation process. All it means is that we get significantly more oxygen in here than the people over at Settlement Base, or the people at Morrigan Hall. Ever read about what happened back on Earth, when the Han Chinese moved up into Nepal?”

“No.”

“I did, when I started wondering about this, after our girls got pregnant. Fertility rate among the Chinese plummeted. They weren’t adapted to the mountains. There was enough high-altitude oxygen to keep them alive, but their bodies were too stressed for ovulation. Same thing with the women from Settlement Base and the clan. The cattle breed fine, because they’re allowed out to graze. If the clan’s women worked out in the fields like the men, or if the clan had slept out in their fields, instead of all together in Morrigan Hall, it might have been enough to make a difference.”

“And . . . if we slap this stuff up and let it grow on our walls . . .”

“And build sleeping shelters in your fields.”

“Right.” Chesebro groped in one of his pockets and found a snack bag. He tucked the lichen into it, sealed it, and put it back in his pocket. “I owe you for this, mate.”

Manco shook his head. “Build the canals,” he said. “That’s all I want.”

It was difficult to organize a baby shower on Mars, but Rowan had managed, on the very day before Mr. De Wit and Alice were scheduled to return to Earth.

Alice’s baby had been determined to be a girl, which was fortunate for the purposes of party décor, as most of the household ware was already pink. The Heretic had been coaxed out from under the refrigeration unit long enough to bake a cake, which rose like a pink cloud and stayed that way, thanks to Martian gravity, and the effect was impressive.

The problem of presents had been overcome as well. Rowan had commandeered Emporium di Vespucci’s catalogue, and simply printed out pictures of what she had ordered. The images were blurry, gray, and took most of a day to print out, but once she had them she painted them with red ochre and pink clay.

“See? Virtual presents,” she said, holding up a depiction of a woolly jumper. “You don’t even have to worry about luggage weight on the shuttle. This set’s from Reno and I. It comes with matching bootees and a cap.”

Alice blotted tears and accepted it gratefully. Beside her, Mona gazed at the heap of pictures—receiving blankets, bassinet, more woolly jumpers—and squeaked, “Oh, I can’t
wait
to have a baby of my own!”

“Yes you can, my girl,” Mary told her, standing to one side with Mr. De Wit, who seemed rather stunned.

“I can’t imagine what my neighbors will think when all this stuff starts arriving,” he said, giggling weakly. “I’ve been a bachelor so many years . . .”

“They’ll get over it,” said Alice, and blew her nose. “Oh, Eli, darling,
look
! An Itsy Witsy Play Set with a slide and a sandbox!”

“That’s from me,” said Mary, somewhat stiffly. “If the little thing has to grow up on Earth, at least she’ll be able to play outdoors.”

There was a sizzling moment wherein Alice glared at her mother, and Mr. Morton broke the silence by clearing his throat.

“I, er, I hope you won’t mind—I prepared something.” He stepped forward and offered Alice a tiny holocabinet. “In honor of your name being Alice, I thought it would be nice—there’s this marvelous old book, proscribed of course, but I recorded as much as I could remember of the poems—perhaps she’ll like them . . .”

Alice thumbed the switch and the little stage lit up, and there was Mr. Morton in miniature, wringing his hands as he said: “Ahem! Jabberwocky. By Lewis Carroll. ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimbal in the wade . . .”

“My, is it in Old English?” Alice inquired politely. “How nice, Mr. Morton!”

“Well, it—”

“This is from me.” Manco stepped forward and drew from his coat a little figurine, cast from the most delicately rose-colored grit he could find. The Virgen de Guadalupe smiled demurely down at her seraph. “The Good Mother will look after her. You’ll see.”

“It’s lovely! Oh, but I hope it doesn’t get confiscated going through Earth customs,” Alice cried.

“Just point to the crescent moon horns and tell ’em it’s Isis,” Mary advised.

Chiring stepped forward and laid a black cube on the table.

“This is a holoalbum,” he said. “Candid shots of the whole family and a visual essay on the Martian landscape, you see? So she’ll know
where she’s from. She’ll also get a lifetime subscription to the
Kathmandu Post
.”

“That’s very thoughtful,” said Alice, not knowing what else to say. “Thank you, Chiring.”

“Ma’am? There’s somebody in the airlock,” said Mr. Morton.

“That’ll be my Reno, I expect,” said Rowan. “He was going to close up early as soon as he’d transmitted the day’s receipts. Mona! That’s
his
slice of cake. You keep your hands off it.”

It wasn’t Ottorino, however.

“Ma’am.” Matelot stood stiffly, twisting his air mask in his hands. Padraig Moylan and Gwil Evans flanked him, staring at the floor.

“What’s this, gentlemen?” said Mary.

Matelot cleared his throat and looked from one to the other of his companions, clearly hoping one of them would speak. When neither showed any evidence of opening their mouths for the rest of eternity, he cleared his throat again and said: “Himself sends word—well, he’s not himself anymore, but we’re delivering his last message as chief out of consideration, see.”

“What?” Mary got to her feet.

“We put it to a vote,” said Gwil Evans. “Clan chieftain has to abide by the vote of the clan. And seeing as it was under his leadership we came up here in the first place—and broke our backs and lived in poverty for ten years now with nothing to show for it—and then he goes and consorts with someone who got herself excommunicated by Holy Mother Church, begging your pardon, Mother, and that’s bad luck surely to fall on him and his as a consequence—and seeing as he lost us the secret of the biis when his boy ran off and died, and then there were all those lawsuits—”

“We fired his arse,” said Padraig Moylan stonily. “He’s got no luck at all.” He looked sidelong at Rowan and Alice. “And the women think
some
people have drained off all the luck that was ours for themselves. Or why wouldn’t our girls have quickened in these ten long years, when yours have caught so easy the minute they had husbands to themselves? It’s a curse, and we’re childless as well as stony broke.”

“But you’re not broke. There’s still Celtic Energy Systems, my dears,” said Mary, into the thunderous silence that had fallen.

“Well, and who’s had any benefit of that but your people, yet?” said Matelot, looking up into Mary’s eyes and looking away quickly.

“You’ll be needing it now,” said Mary. “You’ll be grateful for it when Areco sends you a notice jacking up the cost of your utilities, as I don’t doubt they’ll do.”

“Well, there you’re wrong, ma’am,” said Gwil Evans. “See, that was what brought it to a head. Areco sent us their solicitor, all proper in his little white hat. He tells us, Areco wants the fruit of our labors. The ironworks and the cattle sheds and fields and all, to lease to that Martian Agricultural Collective. Areco’s buying all of it for a princely sum and giving us a golden rocket back to Earth, plus company shares. Every one of us rich enough to retire and live like gentry the rest of our lives.

“Himself calls a council to talk it over amongst ourselves, and he tells us we oughtn’t take Areco’s dirty money. And so we put it to a vote and, in short, Mother, he was voted down, and we’ve elected Ramsay as new clan chief. So himself-that-was sends you four thousand punts Celtic as compensation for Finn’s fields and hopes you will consider emigration as well. And warns you that Areco is planning on shutting off your utilities tomorrow, which warning we wouldn’t carry except for old times’ sake.”