Old Mars

Matthew Hughes was born in Liverpool, England, but has spent most of his adult life in Canada. He worked as a journalist, as a staff speechwriter for the Canadian Ministers of Justice and Environment, and as a freelance corporate and political speechwriter in British Columbia before settling down to write fiction full-time. Clearly strongly influenced by Jack Vance, as an author Hughes has made his reputation detailing the adventures of rogues like Old Earth’s master criminal Luff Imbry, who lives in the era just before that of The Dying Earth, in a series of novels and novellas that include Fools Errant, Fool Me Twice, Black Brillion, Majestrum, Hespira, The Spiral Labyrinth, Template, Quartet and Triptych, The Yellow Cabochon, The Other, and The Commons, and short-story collections The Gist Hunter and Other Stories, 9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn, and The Meaning of Luff and Other Stories. His most recent books are the novels in his urban fantasy trilogy, To Hell and Back: The Damned Busters, Costume Not Included, and Hell to Pay. He also writes crime fiction as Matt Hughes and media tie-in novels as Hugh Matthews.

In the autumnal story that follows, he shows us that everyone sees the Mars that they want to see—and perhaps gets the Mars that they deserve.

The Ugly Duckling MATTHEW HUGHES

IT TOOK FRED MATHER THE BETTER PART OF AN HOUR TO drive over the blue hills that stood between the base camp and the bone city. At the highest point of the switchbacking ancient road of crushed white stone, the thin Martian air grew even thinner. He had to take long, slow breaths to fill his lungs, while dark spots danced at the edges of his vision and he worried about steering the New Ares Mining Corporation’s jeep over one of the precipices.

He could have gotten there more quickly—and more safely—by paralleling the dried-up canal down to the glass-floored sea. Then he could have plowed fifteen miles through its carpeting dust to the promontory girdled by a seawall that had not felt a wave’s slap in ten thousand years. The towers of the dead Martian town stood like an abandoned, unsolved chess puzzle, white against the faded sky.

The road at the landward end of the town was lined on either side by low, squat structures, windowless but with arched doors of weathered bronze. He was just wondering if they might be tombs—nobody knew yet what the Martians had done with their dead—when the hand radio on the passenger seat squawked and Red Bowman’s voice said, “Base to Mather, over.”

He picked up the set, keyed the mike switch, and said, “Mather, over.”

“How you coming?” said the crew chief. Mather thought he heard a note of suspicion in the man’s voice.

“I’m just pulling into the town now.”

There was a silence, then the radio said, “The hell you been playing at? You should’ve been there an hour already.”

“I took the hill road.”

“What the hell for?”

“I thought it might be quicker. It looked shorter on the map.” Mather was lying. The reason he hadn’t gone by the canal road was that he hadn’t wanted to meet any other traffic. He had wanted, for a little while at least, to be able to pretend that he was the only Earthman on Mars instead of just the only archaeologist.

The radio crackled back at him. “We got a schedule to meet, egghead. Now you get those transponders planted, then you get your heinie back here mucho pronto.”

Bowman hadn’t said “Over,” but Mather was about to confirm and sign off when the crew chief continued with, “And you come home by the seabed. You wreck that jeep, and you’ll be going back Earthside on the next rocket, with a forfeiture of all pay and benefits!”