The Empress of Mars (34 page)

She closed her eyes, burying her face in Eliphal’s shoulder. His beard smelled of cinnamon and myrrh.

“Don’t look anymore,” he said quietly. “They’re going to be all right. Trust me, Alice. Can you learn to trust someone?”

“Looks like a huge mobile tit!” whooped the Brick peering into his rear monitor as he yanked back on the throttle.

“But it’s leaking, Mum,” fretted Mona, watching the vapor plumes emerge and dissipate instantly wherever they appeared, over every un-plastered crack and vent. “Are we going to have any air at all once we get it up there?”

“We can wear our masks indoors the first few days, until it’s all patched,” Mary told her, not taking her eyes off the monitor. “Wear extra thermals. Whatever we have to do. Hush, girl.”

In Alf’s cab, Chiring was muttering into a mike, aiming his cam at the monitor for lack of a window.

“Chiring Skousen, your News Martian, here! What you’re seeing
is an epic journey, ladies and gentlemen, a heroic gesture in defiance of oppression.” He paused, reflected on the number of seats the Neo-Maoists had won in the last Nepali parliamentary election, and went on: “The valiant working classes have risen in aid of one woman’s brave stand against injustice, while the technocrats cower in their opulent shelters! Yes, the underpaid laborers of Mars still believe in such seemingly outmoded concepts as gallantry, chivalry and courage.”

“And beer,” said Alf. “Whoo-hoo!”

“The new battle cry of Mars, ladies and gentlemen!” Chiring ranted. “The ancient demand of
Beer for the Workers!
Now, if you’re still getting the picture from the monitor clearly, you can see the slope of Mons Olympus rising before us. Our road is that paler area between the two rows of boulders. We, er, we’re fighting quite a headwind, but our progress has been quite good so far, due to the several ice freighters kindly donated by the Haulers Union, which are really doing a tremendous job of moving Ms. Griffith’s structure.”

“Yeh, fanks,” said Alf.

“And the, er, the chains used for this amazing feat are the same gauge used for tackling and hauling polar ice, so as you can imagine, they’re quite strong—” Chiring babbled, keeping his camera on the forward monitor because he had spotted something he did not understand in the rear monitor. He paused again and squinted at it.

“What the hell’s that?” he whispered to Alf. Alf looked up at the monitor.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “That’s a Strawberry.”

“And, and, er, ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll follow now as I turn my cam on the rear monitor, you can see one of the unique phenomena of the Martian weather. That sort of lumpy pink thing that appears to be advancing on the Settlement Base at high speed is what the locals call a Strawberry. Let’s ask local weather expert Mr. Alfred Chipping to explain just exactly what a Strawberry is. Mr. Chipping?”

Alf stared into the cam, blinking. “Well, it’s—it’s like a storm kind of a fing. See, you got yer sandstorms, wot is bad news eh? And you got yer funny jogeraphy up here and jolligy and, er, now and again you get yer Strawberry, wot is like all free of ’em coming together to make this really fick sandstorm wot pingpongs off the hills and rocks and changes direction wifout warning.”

“And—why’s it that funny spotty color, Mr. Chipping?”

“Cos it’s got rocks in,” grunted Alf, slapping all three accelerator levers up with one blow of his hamhand.

Chiring began to pray to Vishnu, but he did it silently, and turned his camera back to the forward monitor.

“Well, isn’t that interesting!” he cried brightly. “More details on the fascinating Martian weather coming up soon, ladies and gentlemen!”

“I’ll be damned,” said the Brick, in a voice that meant he had abruptly sobered. “There’s a Strawberry down there.”

“Where?” Mary craned her head, instinctively looking for a window, but he pointed at the rear monitor. “What’s a Strawberry?”

“Trouble for somebody,” the Brick replied, accelerating. “Settlement Base, looks like.”

“What?”

“Oh!” said Mona. “You mean one of those cyclone things like Tiny Reg was in?”

“What?”

“Yeah,” grunted the Brick, accelerating more.

“Tiny Reg said he was hit by one down by Syria Planum and it just took his freighter and picked it up with him in it and he went round and round so fast it broke all his gyros and his compass as well,” Mona explained.

“Bloody Hell!” Mary began to undo her seat harness, but the Brick put out an arm to restrain her.

“You don’t want to do that, babe,” he said quietly.

“What do we care if it hits Settlement Base, anyroad?” Mona asked.

“Girl, your sister’s down there!”

“Oh!” Mona looked up at the monitor in horror, just as the Strawberry collided with the new Temple of Diana, which imploded in a puff of crimson sand.

“Alice!” Mary screamed, searching across the monitors for a glimpse of the transport station. There was the shuttle, safe on its pad, lights still blinking in loading patterns. There it stayed safe, too, for the Strawberry turned now and shot away from the base, tearing through Tubes as it went, and the lockout Klaxons sounded as oxygen blew away white like seafoam in the burning-cold day.

“Oh! Goddess! It got some of those shelters the new people were staying in!”

“Never saw a Strawberry come up on Tharsis before,” was all the Brick said, steering carefully. A new cloud of dust was rising from the Martian Motel, as its inhabitants frantically tried to start up any rigs that could be made to start. They scrambled in all directions, fleeing the cyclone. Mary caught a glimpse of fairground-gaudy lights streaking for the horizon: the Excelsior Mobile Card Room, Painless Dentistry Parlor and Investment Brokerage, never more mobile than now.

“But the transport station’s safe!” Mona said. “And Alice and Eliphal are making it off the planet! Look!” The shuttle was indeed rising, leaping clear, well away from the surface weather.

“Goddess thank You, Goddess thank You, Goddess . . . Is the cloud getting bigger?” Mary stared fixedly at the monitor bank.

“No,” said the Brick. “It’s just getting closer.”

Ottorino was singing as he sped along, aware the brand new Rover was ridiculously tiny beside the freighters and rather enjoying the absurdity of it all. He broke off, however, as Rowan clutched his arm.

“What is it, my dearest?”

Mute with terror, she pointed at the rearview mirror. He looked up
into it and for a long moment could not fathom what he was seeing. Then: “Cyclone!” he shouted. “Okay.
Carissima
, we will outrun the twister. Hold on, here we go!”

Within the Empress, Mr. Morton fastened on his guy rope. He scrambled spiderlike along the network of crossing stabilizer struts, which had telescoped out to prop the Empress’s walls like glass threads in a witchball. He peered down worriedly at the floor. It was heaving and flexing rather more than he had thought it would. He looked over at the telltale he had mounted on the wall to monitor stress changes, but it was too far away to read easily.

“Are we going to be okay?” inquired Manco, remarkably stoic for a man dangling in a harness ten meters above uncertain eternity. The Heretic swung counterclockwise beside him, her red eye shut, listening to the clatter of her saucepans within their wired-up cupboards.

“Masks on, I think,” said Mr. Morton.

“Gotcha,” said Manco, and he slipped his on as Mr. Morton did the same, and gulped oxygen, and after a moment he nudged the Heretic as she orbited past. “Come on, honey, mask up. Leaks, you know?”

“Yeah,” said the Heretic, not opening her eye, but she slipped on her mask and adjusted the fit.

“So what do we do?” Manco asked.

“Hang in there,” said Mr. Morton, with a pitch in his giggle suggesting the long sharp teeth of impending catastrophe.

“Ha bloody ha,” said Manco, watching the walls. “We’re shaking more. Are they speeding up out there?”

“Oh, no, certainly not,” Mr. Morton said. “They know better than to do that. No more than two kilometers an hour, I told them, or the stresses will exceed acceptable limits.”

“Really?” Manco squinted through his mask at a bit of rushing-by ground glimpsed through a crack on the floor that opened and shut like a mouth.

“All right, here’s something we can do—” Mr. Morton edged his way along a strut to the bundle of extras. “Let’s reinforce! Never hurts to be sure, does it?” He pulled out a telescoping unit and passed it hand over hand to Manco. “Just pop that open and wedge it into any of the cantilevers I haven’t already braced.”

Manco grabbed the strut and twisted it. It unlocked and shot out in two directions, and he swung himself up to the nearest joist to ram it into place.

“Splendid,” said Mr. Morton, unlocking another strut and wedging it athwart two others.

“Should I be doing that, too?” asked the Heretic, opening her good eye.

“Well, er—” Mr. Morton thought of her inability to hold on to a pan, let alone a structural element requiring strength and exactitude in placement, and kindly as possible he said: “Here’s a thought: why don’t you rappel down to that big box there on the wall, you see? And just, er, watch the little numbers on the screen and let us know if they exceed 5008. Can you do that?”

“Okay,” said the Heretic, and went down to the telltale in a sort of controlled plummet. Below her, the floor winked open and gave another glimpse of Mars, which seemed to be going by faster than it had a moment earlier.

“This box says 5024,” the Heretic announced.

Mr. Morton said a word he had never used before. Manco, hanging by one hand, turned to stare, and the Heretic’s ocular implant began to whirr in and out, gravely disturbing the fit of her mask.

“So, Mr. Brick,” said Mary in a voice calm as iron, “am I to understand that the storm is bearing down upon us now?”

“Bearing
up
, babe, but that’s it, essentially,” said the Brick, not taking his eyes off the monitor.

“Can we outrun it, Mr. Brick?”

“We might,” he said, “if we weren’t towing a house behind us.”

“I see,” said Mary.

There followed what would have been a silence, were it not for the roar of the motors and the rotors and the rising percussive howl of the wind.

“How does one release the tow lines, Mr. Brick?” Mary inquired.

“That lever right there, babe,” said the Brick.

“Mum, that’s our house!” said Mona.

“A house is only a thing, girl,” said Mary.

“And there’s still people in it! Mr. Morton stayed inside, didn’t he? And Manco stayed with him! They’re holding it together!”

Mary did not answer, staring at the monitor. The Strawberry loomed now like a mountain behind them, and under it the Empress seemed tiny as a horseshoe crab scuttling for cover.

“And there’s always the chance the Strawberry’ll hit something and go poinging off in another direction,” said the Brick in a carefully neutral voice.

“Mr. Brick,” said Mary, “basing your judgment on your years of experience hauling carbon dioxide from the icy and intolerant polar regions, could you please think carefully now and tell me exactly what chance there is that the Strawberry will, in fact, change direction and leave us alone? In your opinion, see?”

“I absolutely do not know,” the Brick replied.

“Right,” said Mary. She reached out and pulled down the lever to release the tow line.

A nasty twanging mess was avoided by the fact that Alf, in his freighter, had made the same decision to cast loose at nearly the same second, as had Tiny Reg (who had actually lived through a Strawberry after all and who would have cast loose even earlier, had his reflexes not been somewhat impaired by seventeen imperial pints of Red Crater Ale).

They all three sheared away in different directions, as though released from slings, speeding madly over the red stony desolation and slaloming through piles of rock the color of traffic cones. Behind them the Empress of Mars drifted to a halt, all its tow lines but one fluttering
like streamers. The Strawberry kept coming, churning with a hissing scream of sand punctuated by the occasional noise like gunshot as boulders within it collided with each other and shattered into stone shrapnel.

“What’s happened?” Rowan demanded, white-faced. “Why are we slowing down?”

“It’s strange,” said Ottorino. “All the other chains but ours have broken. I guess it’s up to us to pull the house the rest of the way.”

“But the Strawberry’s almost here!”

“I’m sorry, the what?”

“The cyclone!”

“Oh. Not to worry, darling,” said Ottorino, and threw the Rover into overdrive.

“Five-oh-two-oh,” the Heretic announced in a trembling voice. “5010. 5000. 4050.”

“
Much
better,” said Mr. Morton, gasping in relief. “Good sensible fellows. Perhaps they were only giving in to the temptation to race, or something manly like that. Now, I’ll just get out my flexospanner and we’ll—”

“Four-oh-five-
one
,” said the Heretic.

“What the hell’s that noi—” said Manco, just before the ordered world ended.

On thirty-seven monitors, which was exactly how many there were on the planet, horrified spectators saw the Strawberry bend over as though it were having a good look at the Empress of Mars; then they saw the Empress jolt and leap away, only getting a swat from the Strawberry’s tail end as it bounced off to play with the quailing sand dunes of
Eunostos. The Empress, for its part, shot away up the swell of Mons Olympus, rotating end over end as it went.

“Now the
house
is chasing us!” cried Rowan. Ottorino gaped at the vision in his rearview mirror.

“We will outrun her!” he shouted, and drove like a madman.

Mr. Morton found himself swung about on his tether in ever-decreasing circles, ever closer to the lethal-looking tangle of snapping struts to which he was unfortunately still moored. The Heretic caromed past him, clinging with both arms to the stress telltale, which had torn free of the wall. Something hit him from behind like a sack of sand, and then was in front of him, and he clutched at it and looked into Manco’s eyes. Manco seized hold of the nearest strut with bleeding hands, but his grasp was slick, and it took both of them scrabbling with hands and feet to fend off the broken struts and find a comparatively still bit of chaos where they clung, as the floor and ceiling revolved, revolved, slower now revolving—