Complete Short Fiction, page 73
He had a stone head plunked massively down on his shoulders without the feeble intervention of a neck. His large nose had once been broken and healed crookedly and scars lined his jaws, traces of old violence, though Hektor had heard the rumors that they were all the result of surgery deliberately intended to roughen his appearance.
He stood and, deliberately ignoring Breyten, bowed slowly to Hektor. “We have lost a Martian,” he said. His voice was unremarkable.
Silently, Hektor bowed back. Hounslow’s unsubtle refusal to acknowledge Breyten’s existence was confirmation, if any was needed, that they already knew each other.
Everyone sat down and told stories about Lon Passman, as was the ancient, immemorial custom. Hektor, oversensitized by his contact with Breyten and his newly coined histories, wondered how old a ceremony it really was.
After a series of more-or-less enlightening personal reminiscences by Fatima Weissman, Miriam Kostal, Colonel Trep, and Theodore Ah, Rudolf Hounslow finally spoke.
“I only met Lon Passman once, but I will always remember it.” He paused. For all his lack of expression, he knew how to start a story, Hektor reflected. “It was more than twenty years ago. I had camped out in the Noctis Labyrinthus. I was there to think. That was where some of my thoughts crystallized. It was very near where the unfortunate Bertilla Li Prakrit met her death.”
Hektor looked around, startled, but everyone else seemed to accept the name as normal.
“She was betrayed. I was betrayed. My air gave out. I was out on the sands of Mars, meditating on Mars, when Mars came in to me in a most unwelcome way.” He bared his teeth in recognition of the irony, making it obvious that irony was not a skill of his. “Something in the carbon dioxide filter had malfunctioned, and my blood alarm went off.” A wrathful expression crossed his face. “Those responsible have slept quietly for twenty years, but now—” He stopped himself with a visible effort.
“I stumbled outside when I realized what my fate was, to die cleanly on the surface, rather than suffocate in my tent. I stood outside and felt the cold of Mars on me. I looked around at the cliffs. A figure stood on a far outcrop. I wondered if it was the ghost of Bertilla, come to free me.”
Since Hounslow had clearly adopted the Bertilla Li Prakrit story from Breyten recently, Hektor doubted that very much.
“It was Lon Passman. I turned from him. I was no longer interested. I was ready. But he came. He recognized my situation and he came down. I was barely conscious by the time he did. He shared his air, though he had only enough for himself. He was willing to sacrifice himself for me, for Mars. With the new oxygen, I could think again, and I supervised the reconstruction of the carbon dioxide filter. That gave us enough usable air to get us to an emergency station.”
Hounslow barely moved, but gave the impression of settling back in his seat, piece spoken.
There was a moment of stunned silence at this revelation, then Nyasa Tso smoothly described an incident in which she had been involved in the Legislative where Lon Passman had shown his parliamentary skills. The mourning broke up soon afterward.
Hektor and Nyasa walked a passage in the wall of Ius Chasma. Sun slanted in between the heavy rock bastions. The mood in the streets was dark. Most of the storefronts along the passage were half-shuttered, ready to be slammed closed in case of riot, their proprietors, mostly Malay and Lebanese in this part of Ius, peering suspiciously out from behind their desks.
Hektor stopped at a window. In the middle of the display of small devotional figurines, popular saints and the like, was the massive figure of a woman wearing an old-time air tank. Bertilla Li Prakrit. It was the fourth or fifth one he’d seen in the course of their walk.
“This is intolerable!” he said. “She’s everywhere. And she’s not real, dammit, she’s not real. Does everyone believe in her now?”
Nyasa was amused. “I suspect they do. There are even songs about her. You’ve heard them. Does it drive you crazy?”
“Damn right it does. It means that Hounslow has half-won already. He’s her spiritual heir, haven’t you heard? Come to pick up her mantle, so long buried in the sand.”
Casually, as if she did it all the time, Nyasa took his arm. “Hounslow’s perfectly capable of making up his own stories. That mourning tale, now. . . .”
“Bad luck, to tell lies at a mourning.” Hektor knew he sounded stiff, like a censorious old priest, but despite himself, he felt that his father had been somehow compromised by it, as if Hounslow’s lies and misinterpretations were yet one more burden Lon would have to bear in the land of the dead. “Are you telling me that Hounslow made the whole thing up?”
“Oh, not at all.”
“And how do you know?” The challenging tone in his voice should have been used for Hounslow.
“Trep told me. And he heard the story from Lon when it happened, before Hounslow was anyone at all. He thought it was just irritating that Hounslow had done that, but I suspected it would mean something more to you.”
“You were right.”
“According to Lon,” Nyasa said, “Hounslow was lying unconscious when Lon found him. A quick check of his gear showed he’d screwed up a valve installation.”
“Hounslow said it was sabotage.”
Nyasa shook her head. “Maybe Hounslow did mutter some conspiracy theory while regaining consciousness. I think that’s the way his brain works. But the damage to his valve was clearly visible to eyeball inspection. No one traveling on the surface would have allowed that to get away, and what kind of sabotage is so easily detected? The problem, according to Lon, was that Hounslow insisted on using antique equipment.”
Hektor felt a thrill. “Antique?”
“Well, yes. He must have bought his skintite valve in an antique store. Feeble little thing, Earth design probably. Lon had to cut it off and replace it from his kit. And the rest of the story—Hounslow’s supervising the rebuilding of the filter, all that—completely made up. Lon did that. Hounslow lay on the ground, barely conscious, drooling. Not a great image for the Olympus Clubs.”
Hektor thought of the valve that Breyten had somewhere, carefully wrapped up. Bertilla’s valve, it had become now. Where had it really come from? Their father had taken them on many trips to the western reaches of the Labyrinth. It had been one of his favorite places, perhaps because he had met their mother there, when they were both working rescue for the region.
“My father might have died by accident,” Hektor said. “Just like that, just the way Hounslow almost did. I’ll never be sure. All that time he tried to get in contact with Hounslow, using the power of that old bond. And Hounslow always refused. Refused, until he could accept the last invitation, and come to look at my father’s dead body. Maybe to imagine Lon Passman looking down into Rudolf Hounslow’s own dead face, suffocated in the Labyrinth, in some other place in history.”
“Maybe,” Nyasa said dubiously, not as carried away by the image as Hektor was.
Hektor looked at her. She was serene and carefully polished, as if disaster didn’t taint the air. In the future, he wondered, would they rewrite their own history? Demote Breyten and Laia to supporting roles, whose job was bringing the principals together? In the open, in their words, perhaps they would, the way people edited unfavored relatives from family pictures. But somewhere in their hearts, they would always know the truth of it. And the less they spoke it, the sharper and more alive that truth would be.
“I want to find her,” he heard himself say.
She stopped. “Why?” She didn’t have to ask who.
“She can’t throw herself in with Hounslow. She can’t. What does she think she’s doing? It’s doomed, it’s all doomed, and we can’t just let it happen, not that way . . . He trailed off, appalled at the spilling idiocy of his own words.
“You can’t save either of them from the consequences of their own decisions,” Nyasa said coolly. “Not Laia. Not Breyten.”
“I can try,” Hektor said stubbornly. “We both should.”
Nyasa was silent for a long time. Did he really think that it was just a sense of responsibility that drove him? He had to see Laia again, if only for one last time. Did Nyasa feel that need too?
“I can’t tell you,” Nyasa said, after a long pause.
“Nyasa—”
“I can’t.” Listening more carefully, he finally heard the desperation in her voice. “I don’t know myself where she is. It was part of the agreement we reached . . . I pushed myself away, distanced myself. So I am not permitted to know. But I still can get in touch with her and let her know. What she does after that is strictly up to her.”
Hektor knew the pressures on Nyasa. She was an officer of the Vigil. For her to have a conduit to a member of Hounslow’s organization, and to conceal it from her superiors, was a serious breach indeed. But in the midst of so many conflicting loyalties, it was impossible to be completely serene with one’s own.
And if Nyasa was telling him this, it meant she trusted him. He hoped.
“Will you do it?” Hektor asked.
“Yes,” she said softly. Then: “Tell me how she is, will you?”
“I will.”
Two days after Lon Passman’s funeral a well-armed group attacked the military stores at Krishetra’s Camp, in Argyre. To the misfortune of Hounslow’s movement, the attack was successful. The weapons stored there had been rotated out of service and were of second-echelon quality. Thus the guard put on them was inadequate. Nevertheless, the students assaulting the place lost five of their number. The survivors got away with a varied collection of security-bonded personal arms, three field-focused fission devices, one enhanced-radiation fission-fusion device, network comm equipment, and even several dozen canisters of aerosol nerve toxin, which should never have been stored in that facility. Heads would roll on Earth for that one.
It was just as Hektor and Nyasa had hoped. A group of hothead students, pressed beyond endurance and influenced by Hektor’s information to Breyten, had acted without orders. Instead of a coordinated planetwide operation, this, for many hours, was the only attack. An open, unquestionable act of rebellion had occurred without being truly decisive.
Hektor watched the news with one eye as he maneuvered his crawler. Rudolf Hounslow, under observation since he had resurfaced for Lon Passman’s mourning, had been liberated by an Olympus Club attack, ill-coordinated but of overwhelming strength. He had fled west of Tharsis and vanished.
Now that revolt had actually broken out, Hektor should have turned back. He knew that. But he didn’t. Laia had communicated through Nyasa and agreed to meet him. He was almost at the coordinates.
He pulled his crawler in under an overhanging wall when the road finally vanished, replaced by chaotic terrain too rough for the crawler’s spring wheels. The meteoric ejecta here at the edge of the Isidis Planitia were exceptionally large in size, giant bubbly boulders. The cliffs sharp shadow cut the crawler in two. Hektor could see stairs carved into the cliffs side.
The cliff marked the edge of the overlapping meteor craters south of Isidis, an area never melted flat like the plains to its north. It was a randomly torn area, a place of steep walls, dark declivities, shattered rock. Ahead was the jutting wall of a collapsed meteor impact crater. A light glowed there. Hektor forged toward it, climbing gingerly over the crumbling rock. He hoped that this was not a trap. But, whatever happened, Laia was there. Of that he was sure.
He finally made it to the light. A door had been carved in a rock outcrop and an airlock installed. Hektor raised his gauntlet and knocked. After a moment the access light came on and he entered.
“I never expected victory.” Laia looked surprisingly fresh in the coldrock-wall environment beyond the airlock. “At least not the way you understand it, your definition, your world.” Her hair gleamed in the overhead lights, and her skin seemed taut and soft and aromatic.
“Maybe you didn’t, but Rudolf Hounslow certainly did.” Hektor kept his voice soft. “Isn’t that right?”
“It is.” Laia did not dodge or evade. “He may still get it.”
“He won’t. You know he won’t. Come with me, Laia. My crawler’s at the bottom of the cliff. We can be out of here and back to the Utopia magtrack in four or five hours.”
“We could,” she said dreamily. “And what then, Hektor? Where are we then?” She leaned against the wall, slinging her hip out.
“We’re home, Laia. Home and safe.”
“And whose home is that?” She shook her head. “I don’t want to fight with you, Hektor. You’re going to marry Nyasa. Oh, don’t pout, it makes sense for both of you. Just wait and see. But I’m not sliding back into that dust pit!” She was suddenly fierce. “Never again. It doesn’t matter what else I do.”
He looked at her. She was ablaze, and it didn’t matter what practical things he had to say to her. The more sense they made, the less interested she was in hearing them. She was helping tip the planet over and never wanted to see it set up in its safe place again.
“All right,” Hektor said. “Take me to see Hounslow, then.”
She looked at him, then reached out a hand. He took it. It was cool and soft and he wanted to pull her to him and put his arms around her. “You want to see it.”
He nodded. “If I can do anything to stop it, I will. If I can’t, I can witness it.”
“I have a gun, you know,” she said distantly. “It comes from that raid on Krishetra’s Camp. I could make you do anything I want.”
“Why don’t you just ask me? What do you want?”
“I want you to come with me. To see Rudolf Hounslow.”
Hektor was sealed in a bubble like a ghost. He had given everything up: his equipment, his mobility, his freedom. It had made sense to do it, while watched by Laia’s eyes. Now that he had more time to think, he wasn’t so sure. He was attached to the side of a large crawler. It bounced slowly across the chaotic terrain, sun blasting down on it.
It was part of a convoy. Hektor could see dozens of crawlers from his vantage point, and had no doubt that others moved at angles he could not see. It was a mysterious, detached image. Hektor didn’t understand it. He was a witness, he could see it, but his testimony after would be uninformed, ridiculous. Nevertheless, he pressed his face to the flexible plastic of his bubble and stared.
Hounslow had managed it so well up to now. The surface organization of the Olympus Clubs had been disbanded in the wake of DeCoven’s assassination. But they had remained, concealed under the calculated debauchery of the Friends of St. Rabelais. All of their reputations had been destroyed. Wasn’t that the bravest act of all, on Mars?
But here they sat out in the open, visible to orbital satellites. Surely Hounslow didn’t think he could fight an actual battle with the Vigil. Did he believe that organization was riddled with enough of his sympathizers that it would refuse to act? It seemed a hell of a gamble. The convoy continued moving westward across Isidis Planitia and into the great expanse of Syrtis Major as night fell and screened the scene from his eyes.
Silence, darkness, and a cold that he could feel sucking at the outside of his bubble. Frost began to form around him and even he, a Martian, started to shiver.
He peered outside again. He could now see moving lights and activity. It was all vague. Then the vagrant sweep of a shoulder lamp revealed a growing shape. A surface dome. A large one. Now that he had that bit of evidence, the rest of the motions made more sense. They were setting up camp, out here in the open, in the center of the expanse of Syrtis Major. What the hell was going on?
A click, and the door behind him opened. He turned, expecting Laia, but found, instead, a grim-faced man unfamiliar to him, dressed in a skintite.
“What’s going on?” Hektor demanded. “Where’s—”
Without speaking, the man slapped an air mask over Hektor’s face and blew the bubble. Mars sucked at Hektor’s skin with an infinity of flaring, stabbing teeth. He was able to suck frigid air through the mask, but everything else was a haze of meaningless agony. Was he flying? Had he been flung into orbit by the eruption of a volcano?
Suddenly there was air and warmth around him again. Propelled by a shove from behind, he slammed to the ground, but the pain of the impact was like a mother’s loving pat compared to what he had just been through. He ripped the mask from his face and sucked in warm soothing air.
He blinked tearing eyes in the bright light and was finally able to see Rudolf Hounslow seated in front of him.
“You like that?” Hounslow said. “You like how that feels? Imagine last exhale, Hektor. Imagine what Bertilla Li Prakrit felt as she died. A little more and you wouldn’t have had to imagine it.”
Hektor’s skin burned and itched. He wondered how many cells and blood vessels had ruptured through his exposure to the thin, cold air.
“There’s a lot of imagination going on here,” Hektor managed. “Are you really that hooked on Breyten’s fairy stories?”
“It’s time that everything was clean!” Hounslow shouted. “The muck’s all over all of us, you worst of all, my friend. Bertilla was clean, she could have made sure that blood and sweat washed over all of us, but she died, she died, and she never made it. We will!”
Hektor looked into his eyes and saw a Mars suffused with blood. He felt the clean, hot, red glory. His life was a mess, everyone’s life was a mess, compromised, petty, intricate, demanding. It would be such a relief to scream your throat out and let the blood flow out over the skin, to feel your blade slicing cleanly through flesh. Hektor felt it. He was Martian. He felt it as he’d seen it in Laia’s eyes.
“Are you with us?” Hounslow demanded. “Your father would have been.”
That broke the spell instantly.
