The Long Mars (23 page)

It was the issue of oxygen, in fact, that caused her to have her first long conversation with Douglas Black since her most distinguished passenger had come on board the
Armstrong
.

Maggie made her way to Black’s suite of rooms. She had Mac at her side; she was here to back up the doctor’s complaints.

She’d asked for this meeting, but even on her own ship Douglas Black wasn’t a man who would come calling. And it didn’t surprise her that Black kept them waiting on his doorstep. His man Philip told them he had just woken up from a nap.

Mac muttered, ‘Damn arrogance.’

‘Let’s just play it low key for now, Mac, and see what he has to say for himself . . .’ And then the door opened.

Black had a team of aides, but only one servant on hand today, Philip the overbearing bodyguard, who gave the two officers a quick guided tour of Black’s suite, glaring at them throughout.

The suite, a grand name for a set of cabins which Black had fitted out at his own expense, was less luxuriously appointed than Maggie had expected. There was a small galley, for Black insisted on having his food prepared for him exclusively, from fresh ingredients where possible – evidently Philip was also the chef. The lounge area was equipped with deep, adjustable chairs and couches, and a bank of information-processing gear, screens, tablets, storage units.

At first glance Black’s bedroom looked to Maggie like a compact intensive care unit, with one big gadget-laden bed draped in a transparent curtain – it was effectively an oxygen tent, Mac murmured – and surrounded by monitors and drip-feeds, even what looked like a telesurgery robot arm. One small cot in the corner, behind a light partition, must be where Philip slept, on guard twenty-four seven.

It was the oxygen tent, Maggie knew, that Mac had an issue with.

Black, at ease in his lounge, sitting in a massively engineered wheelchair, wore a loose, comfortable-looking kimono jacket, silk trousers, slippers. Even in the enclosed submarine-hull artificiality of the gondola he wore his sunglasses. He smiled, his wizened face creasing, as he himself poured them rather good coffee. ‘So – welcome to my lair, Captain Kauffman. That’s the sort of thing people expect me to say, isn’t it? Shall we get down to business? I’m aware that your doctor here has been taking an interest in my welfare, but I have brought my own medical establishment, as you can see.’

‘But,’ Mac growled, ‘on this ship, where I’m chief surgeon, you do fall under my purview nonetheless.’

‘Of course. I bow to your authority; it can be no other way.’

Maggie said, ‘I’m afraid that’s where the friction is coming from, sir. Specifically your use of oxygen.’

‘Captain, I have assured Doctor Mackenzie that I have brought my own supply, my own replenishment and recycling equipment – it’s like a regular little spaceship in here.’

‘You nevertheless are plugged into the ship’s supply,’ Mac said. ‘It’s inevitable, an engineering constraint. And you, sir, are using up a hell of a lot. Captain, I wouldn’t have raised it, but since right now there’s no spare oh-two outside the hull, we need to discuss this.’

‘I don’t understand, Mr Black,’ Maggie said. ‘
Why
are you using all this oxygen?’

Mac broke in, ‘To fill his hyperbaric chamber all day and all night. You saw the tent over his bed, Captain. He lives in the damn thing, breathing air with an oxygen content whole percentage points above the Datum Earth level.’

‘OK.’ This sounded nothing but kooky to Maggie. She’d had a long day before this meeting, but she wished now she’d got herself better briefed. ‘I’m no medic. Why would you want that, Mr Black?’

‘For the most profound of reasons. To regain the one thing that all my money can’t buy me – not yet, anyhow. You joked about my searching for the fountain of youth, Captain. Well, in a sense –
so I am
.’

For the next few minutes he ran her through a discourse, complete with a picture show on one of his big tablets, of the treatments he was taking, not just to slow down the ageing of his body but actually to reverse it. Hormones that declined with age were replenished, including growth hormones, testosterone, insulin, melatonin, others, to let them repair and restore body functions, as they would in a youthful body. There had been attempts at genetic repair using retroviruses to make and break DNA strings, removing damaged or undesired sequences. Back in the Low Earths Black was promoting experimental methods involving stem cells to regenerate tissues, even whole organs.

He spread liver-spotted hands. ‘Look at me, Captain. I have always exercised, eaten well, avoided most vices. I have been fortunate in being spared many common illnesses. And of course my decades-long precautions against the ambitions of assassins have borne fruit, so far.’ He tapped his skull. ‘Mentally I seem as sharp as ever, my memory is good . . . But I am eighty years old; my time is running out. There is so much more to see, so much to do. Consider the mission we are undertaking right now! Can you see that I would do all I can not to leave just yet? Can you blame me?’

‘All right. But what’s that got to do with oxygen?’

‘It’s one of the therapies,’ Mac said. ‘And one of the flakier ones.’

Black inclined his head. ‘I won’t argue with a medical man. But you won’t condemn me for exploring all the options, will you? Yes, the use of excess oxygen is controversial. But – look where we are. Look out the window! There is no oxygen here, and these worlds are all but dead. It is oxygen that promotes the life force. Why, you yourself use it in extremis for a patient, do you not, Doctor? The word is “oxyology”, Captain. The use of a high oxygen partial pressure to promote healing, the rejuvenation of the body. It is cheap, it is easy, and some claim to have proof that it works, on ants and mice and so forth. Why not try it?’

Mac would have argued some more, but Maggie raised a hand. ‘I think I get the picture. But I don’t yet see what kind of “fountain of youth” you’re seeking aboard this Navy ship, Mr Black.’

He would only smile. ‘All I can say is that I will know it when I find it – if it exists.’

Maggie stood. ‘I think we’re done here. Look, Mac, we’re watching our oxygen usage closely, but we’ve a complement of ninety, and Mr Black’s consumption, given his private supply and even with his tent, is going to be only a fraction of that. We can cope, for now. But,’ she said to Black, ‘I’ll put my chief engineer on alert. And if we need to impose any kind of emergency measures I’ll have to restrict you to a regular crew allocation, sir.’

‘Of course.’ He looked faintly offended. ‘I would never let my own interests put at risk a single one of your young charges.’ He looked from one to the other. ‘Is our business done? Am I allowed down from the naughty step?’

Maggie laughed gracefully, and nudged Mac until he forced a smile.

‘Then, if you’ve time, let’s have fun. Please, do sit again. Perhaps you’d like to look over the latest package of science updates prepared for me by your kind Lieutenant Hemingway. I’m sure you know it all already, but the images can be startling.’ He nodded to Philip, who got up to make preparations; soon the room’s screens filled up with curtains of purple and crimson. ‘Who would ever have imagined that life even without the power of oxygen was capable of such beauty, such inventiveness of design? Can I offer you more coffee? Or perhaps something stronger . . .’

24

A
ND SO, OVER THE YEARS
, Joshua had kept in sporadic touch with Paul Spencer Wagoner, as the strange little boy grew up into a somewhat stranger young man. He’d felt it was a kind of duty. Joshua was probably the boy’s only contact, save for his immediate family, from his childhood in Happy Landings. Joshua Valienté was always big on duty.

But he was also curious. And in Paul Spencer Wagoner there seemed to be a lot to be curious about.

As far as Joshua could tell, Tom and Carla Wagoner had always tried their best with Paul, and his little sister Judy; certainly they had never hurt the kids. But when their marriage broke up, cracking under the stress caused by the kids, Joshua guessed, Tom was left to deal with Paul alone. And what Tom couldn’t cope with was when his son, growing in knowledge if not in wisdom, and acquiring a certain power mentally if not physically, turned on his father.

Paul was just ten when he was taken away from his father.

‘Paul knows me too well,’ Tom said to Joshua, when they met at the Madison Home in the spring of 2036. Joshua was back to see how the Sisters were coping in the aftermath of the death of Sister Agnes, the previous year. ‘How I broke up with his mother,’ Tom said, ‘and she took little Judy away. By the way, Carla’s coping no better than me, I can tell you – she has just the same issues with Judy as we had when Paul grew up. And he knows how I screwed up at work. Paul
saw
all that, he understood far more about it than any damn kid ought to. About what’s going on inside my skull, I mean.’ He shook his greying head regretfully. ‘When he takes me apart over some flaw or foul-up, it’s – crushing. I don’t feel like a father with an uppity kid. I feel like a pet dog being punished. Totally subordinate.

‘But it’s worse when he’s deliberately cruel. Oh, I don’t mean physically, I guess I could handle that. He can slice you to pieces with words. Damn kid. And you know what the worst of it is? He does it just because he can. For fun – no, not even that. For curiosity. To see what happens when he opens you up, like cutting open a frog. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he is just a kid, but . . .’

A little digging revealed that Paul’s sister Judy had by now also been taken away from her mother. And, such was the whim of the care system, the siblings were kept apart.

Paul, meanwhile, it was clear, was not happy, not settling anywhere, and in danger of spiralling out of control. After a couple more disastrous attempts at foster care, Joshua pulled a few strings. Paul was taken into the Home in Madison, and placed under the stern but perceptive care of the Sisters.

After that, Joshua saw him more regularly. The boy remained a mystery, though, to Joshua and the Sisters, as he grew into a strange maturity.

25

W
ILLIS
L
INSAY APPEARED
to be right about the stepwise geography of the Long Mars, Frank Wood observed.

Most of the stepwise Marses, at a first glance, as seen from the gliders riding in the high, thin air, were all but exactly the same. The pilots kept their dust-streaked birds hovering over their landing-site area of the Mangala Vallis, a huge arid landscape, and generally little changed from world to world, as it had been from the beginning. As Willis had predicted the only relief for Mars came from the occasional Jokers, worlds where, for some reason, there was warmth, moisture, a brief chance for any surviving life to express itself.

But all of these beneficent accidents seemed limited in
time
. It might take years, centuries, millennia, maybe even tens of millennia, but at last the eruptions would cease, the volcanic gases would clear, or the crater-lakes freeze over, as Mars returned to its regular state of lethal stasis. In fact, more often than they found functioning biospheres – like the world of the sand whales they’d encountered fortuitously early in their voyage – the travellers came upon traces of recently extinguished life. Aside from dust storms, not much happened on Mars; erosion was slow, and such traces could linger.

For example, about two hundred thousand steps East of the Gap, the gliders had swept over what looked like the remains of a mighty ocean that must have covered, if briefly, the plains of the northern hemisphere. Sites like Mangala showed signs of having become sea coasts, and Willis pointed out stranded beaches, what looked like a petrified forest a short distance inland, and salt plains on the dried-out ocean floor.

When they swept down for a closer look, they saw conical casts on the seabed, casts as tall as pyramids created by some immense snake – maybe a relative, in a common-origin sense, of the sand whales they’d seen before – and scattered plates like abandoned armour that might have come from something like the crustacean predators. Even bones, resembling a huge ribcage as if of a whale, sitting on a dry ocean floor.

At last, on the twelfth day, some half a million steps East of their starting point, they came upon traces of sapience. They found a city.

Set upon the high land to the south of Mangala, straight-line avenues still showed under the dust, and towers loomed, tall and bone-white. But there was no sign of extant life.

They had got in the habit of swapping over crew and rotating piloting responsibilities, to keep everybody fresh and experienced, and so that the pilots got used to the quirks of both machines. The day they found the city, Frank was riding shotgun as Sally piloted
Thor
, while Willis flew
Woden
solo. And so Frank was able to take in the scenery as Sally took the bird down close to the ground, and swept towards the city.

One peculiarity of their flight was that, such was the thinness of the air, the gliders needed high speed to keep aloft; that wasn’t so noticeable at high altitude, but close to ground level you whipped along like a swallow chasing a fly. So the city loomed out of nowhere, and suddenly Frank found himself racing over avenues of broken flags between towers of ivory, impossibly tall, cracked and shattered. Frank couldn’t resist it; he let out a rebel yell.

Sally grunted. ‘I’m trying to concentrate here.’

‘Sorry.’

‘How’s the data capture?’

Frank glanced at a tablet beside his seat, which showed megabytes of data from imaging systems, sonar, radar, an atmospheric sample suite, pouring into the glider’s compact memory. They even had radio receivers listening out for any evidence of transmitters; Mars’s ionosphere was feeble and would be a poor reflector of radio waves, but you never knew, and it seemed remiss not to listen. ‘All in hand,’ he said. ‘Quite a place, isn’t it? From the air the city looked like – I don’t know – a chess set. From here, down and dirty, those towers look like cracked teeth. But taller than anything you could build on Earth.’