The Empress of Mars (8 page)

And a light, flickering red. Manco thought it was a warning light, perhaps, one of those posted by airlocks to remind the unwise traveler to mask up. Then he saw that it was a candle, a votive offering flaring in a cup of ruby glass.

It was familiar. He had seen it every night of his childhood. It was part of the shrine his mother had kept on the little shelf above the holocabinet, the shrine she had taken with them on all the family holidays, the Virgen de Guadalupe looking down on all the holovised soccer matches his father had watched, all the soap operas and news broadcasts . . . at night it had looked like this, the small circle of ruby light and above it only the downturned serene face, the folded hands, visible.

Manco saw them now. He stood there swaying, blinking at the vision. What was he doing here, back in the house on Avenida Tullu-mayo? His mother had sold the house after his father had died. Just as he wondered this, the roaring night fell abruptly silent. He heard his own breathing and heartbeat, and nothing else.

Nor did he hear the voice, when it came. It spoke inside his skull, piercingly sweet, words that he felt rather than heard. And smelled: there was an overpowering scent of roses. The face and hands were above him now and they were not smoke-darkened wood but alive, the dark skin of the Mother of God, and the eyes opened and regarded him.

Manco stood still, trembling. “What do You want?”

The reply was that She wanted him to plant roses for Her, in this cold and wretched place. Make the mountain bloom. Expend his life and the blood of his heart in this purpose. In return, She would be with him and keep him from all harm. She spoke to him for what seemed like hours.

The vision passed, he never knew how or when. Manco found himself shivering by Airlock Four, staring out at the Martian sunrise, and the sun was like a pale opal. He began to walk up the Tube, with no clear objective.

A little way up the mountain he spotted a domed shelter, looming against the morning sky. Hazily he wondered what it might be, until he remembered hearing that Mary Griffith had bought a building and moved it up here. He walked closer, near enough to spot her in full Outside gear, working at the base of the dome’s wall. It looked as
though she were plastering or tarring, daubing and slapping something on the wind-scoured surface. As he watched, she finished and came back in through the airlock, rubbing together her gauntleted hands.

Her eyes widened as she spotted Manco. He nodded a greeting. “Remember me?”

“Manco Inca, is it? I do indeed. The bright man with the plan. It would have worked, too. Damn Rotherhithe and damn the BAC to black stony flea-bitten hell. Look at you! They cast you off too, did they? You look as though you haven’t eaten in a week.”

“I don’t think I have,” he’d said. “What were you doing there?”

“Ah! Remember all my hard work with the bioengineered lichens? All gone for nothing. Bloody BAC sacked me and locked me out of my own laboratory. All my notes, all my data gone Goddess knows where.”

“They fired you, too? But you have kids!” Manco was horrified. The little girls had amused him, when he had seen them playing in the tubes. He had found the little chattering one particularly funny.

“And I’ve still got ’em, and damned little else. Six Petri dishes I had on a shelf in my kitchen, that’s all I have left of my work, can you believe it? So I’ve just done a bit of gardening, you might say, putting the stuff on my wall here. If it lives, it lives, and I know I have phototropic lichen. If it doesn’t, it wouldn’t have worked anyway.

“Either way, it’s no stinking use now. Come inside, Manco dear. You look like you could use a good cup of tea. I’m setting up a tavern, see.”

“I’d be grateful for something to drink, Ms. Griffith, but I can’t pay you,” Manco had said. She’d waved an impatient hand.

“Nobody has any money. Don’t worry about it, my dear. And call me Mother; everyone else does,” she’d said.

When Mary and Mr. De Wit returned from the ruined allotment, the Brick was still where they had left him, placidly sipping ale. Everyone else in the Empress looked ill at ease, however. Rowan came to meet Mary as she entered. “Mum, Mr. Cochevelou wants a word,” she said in an undertone.

“Cochevelou!” Mary said, turning with a basilisk glare, and spotted him in his customary booth. He smiled at her, rubbing his fingertips together in a nervous kind of way, and seemed to shrink back into the darkness as she advanced on him.

“Eh, I imagine you’ve come from your old allotment,” he said. “That’s just what I wanted to talk to you about, Mary dearest.”

“Don’t you ‘Mary dearest’ me!” she told him. “Chiring! Here’s a conversation you’re going to want to film. It’s going to be quite dramatic.”

“Yes, Mother,” said Chiring, grabbing his handcam and running into range. He focused on Cochevelou, who grimaced and made ineffectual shooing motions at him.

“Mary, darling! Darling. You’ve every right to be killing mad, so you do. I struck the bastards to the floor with these two hands when I found out, so I did. ‘You worthless thieving pigs!’ I said to them. ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?’ I said. ‘Here we are in this cold hard place and do we stick together in adversity, as true Celts ought?
Won’t the English laugh and nod at us when they find out?’ That’s what I said.”

“Words are all you have for me, are they?” said Mary icily.

“No indeed, dear,” said Cochevelou, looking wounded. “Aren’t I talking compensation? But you have to understand that some of the lads come of desperate stock, and there’s some will always envy another’s good fortune bitterly keen.”

“How’d they know about my good fortune?” Mary demanded.

“Well, your Mona might have told our DeWayne about your Dutchman,” said Cochevelou. “Or it might have gone about the Tube some other way, but good news travels fast, eh? And there’s no secrets up here anyway, as we both know. And how nice to know our Finn, now delighting in the Blessed Isles, kept his word and took your diamond to Amsterdam after all, and don’t I feel awful now for all those curses I laid on his dear name? The main thing is, we’re dealing with it. The clan has voted to expel the dirty beggars forthwith—”

“Much good that does me!”

“And to rebate you the cost of Finn’s fields at the original asking price of four thousand, and to award you perpetual use of the biis from henceforth, rent-free as though you were one of our own,” Cochevelou added. “The new improved ones, as our Perrik is so proud of.”

“That’s better.” Mary relaxed slightly. “You got that on record, didn’t you, Chiring?”

“And perhaps we’ll find other little ways to make it up to you,” said Cochevelou, pouring her a cup of her own Black Label. “I can send work parties over to mend the damage. New vizio panels for you, what about it? And free harrowing and manuring that poor tract of worthless ground.”

“I’m sure you’d love to get your boys in there digging again,” Mary grumbled, accepting the cup.

“No, no; they’re out, as I told you,” said Cochevelou. “We’re shipping their raggedy asses back to Earth on the next flight.”

“Are you?” Mary halted in the act of raising the cup to her lips. She set it down. “And where are you getting the money for that, pray?”

Cochevelou winced.

“An unexpected inheritance?” he suggested, and dodged the cup that came flying at him.

“You hound!” Mary cried. “They’ll have an unexpected inheritance sewn into their suits, won’t they? Won’t they, you black beast?”

“If you’d only be mine, all this wouldn’t matter,” said Cochevelou wretchedly, crawling from the booth and making for the airlock with as much dignity as he could muster. Chiring ran after him, keeping the camera focused on his retreat. “We could rule Mars together, you know that, don’t you?”

Cochevelou didn’t wait for an answer, but pulled his mask on and was flying for the airlock when it opened before him and three Haulers stepped through.

They weren’t as massive nor as red as the Brick; two had dreadlocked hair and beards framing their masks, and the woman’s hair was in dreads too. Their psuits seemed sculpted to their bodies, glued on by countless hours and miles on the High Road. They pulled off their masks and stood gulping in air, distance-blind, blinking in the close dim space before they spotted the Brick. One of them staggered forward.

“There’s a navvy lost,” he said. Cochevelou halted in his tracks. Every head turned. Chiring swung his camera around.

“Who’s lost?” demanded the Brick, getting to his feet.

“The boy on the South Pole Line,” said the Hauler. “He was supposed to have been back at Nav Station three days ago. There was this storm out in Amazonia.”

“Crap.” The Brick pulled on his gauntlets.

“We’ve got four Jinmas we can send,” said Cochevelou. “I’ll bring ’em up to Nav Station in an hour.”

“Thanks, mate.”

“Chiring! Mr. Morton!” Mary swung around. “Pack up four tanks of the porter. You!” She stepped to the door of the kitchen and shouted in at the Heretic. “Start a fry-up. Anything we’ve got to spare, so it’s packed up for takeaway. Alice, run down and tell Manco we need the quaddy
now
.”

But Alice had backed into a booth and was staring at them all, green-faced. “Who is it?” she asked. “
Who’s
the boy on the Line?”

One of the Haulers opened his mouth to reply, but the Brick cut in: “Could be one of about six guys out there.” He glanced at Mary and murmured, “Maybe you’d better come.”

“What’s going on?” asked Mr. De Wit.

“People go missing sometimes,” said Mary distractedly. “We have to go out and find them. Will you do me a favor, Mr. De Wit, and sit with Alice a little while? Just sort of keep her chatting while we’re busy?”

“I’ll go for the quaddy,” said Rowan, pulling on her mask as she sprinted past them. Mary turned away from the rage building in Alice’s face, and let the Brick lead her away out through the lock.

It was a long trudge out the Tube to the Ice Hauler depot, and long before they got there the temperature had dropped far enough to make Mary shiver. The vizio here was so old it had opaqued like smoke, blocking what little warmth the sun bestowed. Grit crunched under her boots. Beside her the Brick strode along in grim silence, though if he had wanted to chat she’d have found it hard to hear him except at maximum volume: the Tube was full of the roar and hiss of the wind, and the noise of engines echoing back from the depot as the Haulers scrambled.
No wonder the boys want their comforts when they come in
, thought Mary.

When they finally stepped through into the vast dome, the depot was nearly deserted. The Brick’s rig loomed like a sleeping dinosaur, its ball tires taller than Mary, its tank scoured to a dull and gleaming silver by sand storms. The hatch sprang open as they neared it. The Brick bent and made a stirrup of his hands for Mary, hoisting her up into the cab. She scrambled awkwardly across the seat and fastened herself in. The Brick lurched up beside her and closed the hatch, and toggled the switches that turned on the lights and life support. The warmth and rush of air felt like an embrace.

They demasked but still said nothing to each other, as the Brick started up the drive and maneuvered his rig out through the lock. Mary
watched on the screens: there was the wide pink road before them on the frontal cam, the larboard cam showed four Jinma rigs thundering up the slope from Clan Morrigan’s allotments, and on the starboard cam nothing but the broad empty slope of Mons Olympus. Only when the Jinmas had fallen into a convoy behind them did Mary clear her throat.

“Mr. Brick. Are there really all of six lads working the South Pole Line?”

The Brick grunted a negative. “Only Dun Johnson.”

“Is he a Donald?”

“Dunstan.”

“Oh.” Mary folded her hands in her lap and watched the screens, the endless procession of road markers hurtling toward them from right and left.
Perhaps we won’t need the boy’s name for a gravestone
, she thought.
Perhaps we’ll need it for the marriage certificate. And the birth certificate. A happy ending. Perhaps the silly little bitch will come to her senses and thank the Goddess when she gets him back alive and well
.

She tried to summon the boy’s face from her memory, without success. One bearded countenance was pretty much like another, and on Mars all beards were red or reddish, after a while. He had seemed slight of build, before he psuited up, she remembered that much; but she had no memory of the sound of his voice.

They got out into the open stretches, the tilted miles of rock, and in the rear cam the Jinmas in the convoy moved up closer, to avoid the dust billowing in the Brick’s wake. The forward cam just showed the pale bump of Nav Depot on the horizon, nearly obscured as it was by the dust of other rigs, where the Haulers’ frozen cargo was weighed and processed.

“Had he any family Down Home?” Mary asked.

“I have no clue, m’dear,” said the Brick.

They pulled into the depot and masked up, and climbed from the cab. The wind and cold bit into Mary at once, the driven red sand stinging like pepper. The Brick put his arm around Mary to keep her steady in the throng of Haulers pushing through the lock. Inside, he roared his
identification to someone with a headset, who thumbed it into a buke. Mary looked up in the crowded darkness and saw a vast blurry holo-projection hanging above her.

After a moment’s disorientation she recognized what it was: a topo map of the Southern Hemisphere. An area had been marked off with a blue overlay and divided into a numbered grid, some of which were colored green. As she stared, another square winked green and an amplified voice said:

“Sector 46, Rob Meggs in Sweet Marilyn! Rob Meggs, you listening?”

“Oi!” shouted someone in the crowd, and a man began shouldering his way to the exit lock. Another square went green and:

“Sector 47, Nangsa Nangsa in the Blue Phantom! Nangsa Nangsa, where are you?”