Old Mars

“You’re doing the right thing, Jack,” Ferid Bey said. “One, and another thing; Faisal, you couldn’t pick up for the coffee, could you?” I suspected there was a reason Ferid Bey had brought us out to this tatty bargee hostel. “And while you’re at it, could you take care of my hotel?”

Already, Count Jack was hearing the distant applause of the audience, scenting like a rare moth the faint but unmistakable pheromone of celebrity.

“And am I … top of the bill?”

“Always, Jack,” said Ferid Bey. “Always.”

From our table on the promenade deck of the Empress of Mars, we watched the skymasters pass overhead. They were high and their hulls caught the evening light that had faded from the canal. I lost count after thirty; the sound of their many engines merged into a high thunder. The vibration sent ripples across the wine in our glasses on the little railed-off table at the stern of the barge. One glass for me, always untouched—I did not drink, but I liked to keep Count Jack company. He was a man who craved the attention of others—without it, he grew translucent and insubstantial. His hopes for another involuntary audience of passengers to charm and intimidate and cow with his relentless showbiz tales were disappointed. The Empress of Mars was a cargo tug pushing a twelve-barge tow with space for eight passengers, of which we were the sole two. I was his company. I had been so enough times to know his anecdotes as thoroughly as I knew the music for his set. But I listened, and I laughed, because it is not the story that matters but the telling.

“Headed east,” Count Jack said. I did not correct him—he had never understood that on Mars, west was east and east was west. Sunrise, east; sunset, west, dear boy, he declared. We watched the fleet, a vast, sky-filling arrowhead, drive toward the sunset hills on the close horizon. The Grand Valley had opened out into a trench so wide we could see the canyon walls, a terrain with its own inner terrain. “Godspeed that fleet.” He had been uncharacteristically quiet and ruminative this trip. It was not the absence of a captive audience. The fleet, the heavy canal traffic—I had counted eight tows headed up-channel from the front to Unshaina since we began this first bottle of what Count Jack called his “Evening Restorational”—had brought home to him that he was headed to war. Not pictures of war, news reports of war, rumors of war, but war itself. For the first time, he might be questioning the tour.

“Does it make your joints ache, Faisal?”

“Maestro?”

“The gravity. Or rather, the want of gravity. Wrists, ankles, fingers, all the flexing joints. Hurt like buggery. Thumbs are the worst. I’d have thought it would have been the opposite, with its being so light here. Not a bit of it. It’s all I can do to lift this glass to my lips.”

To my eyes, he navigated the glass from table to lips quite successfully. Count Jack poured another Evening Restorational and sank deep in his chair. The dark green waters of the canal slipped beneath our hull. Martian twilights were swift and deep. War had devastated this once populous and fertile land, left scars of black glass across the bottomlands, where heat rays had scored the regolith. The rising evening wind, the Tharseen, which reversed direction depending on which end of the Grand Valley was in night, called melancholy flute sonatas from the shattered roost pillars.

“It’s a ghastly world,” Count Jack said after a second glass.

“I find it rather peaceful. It has a particular beauty. Melancholic.”

“No, not Mars. Everywhere. Everywhere’s bloody ghastly and getting ghastlier. Ever since the war. War makes everything brutal. Brutal and ugly. War wants everything to be like it. It’s horrible, Faisal.”

“Yes. I think we’ve gone too far. We’re laying waste to entire civilizations. Unshaina, it’s older than any city on Earth. This has gone beyond righteous justice. We’re fighting because we love it.”

“Not the war, Faisal. I’ve moved on from the bloody war. Do keep up. Getting old. That’s what’s truly horrible. Old old old and I can’t do a thing about it. I feel it in my joints, Faisal. This bloody planet makes me feel old. A long, slow decline into incompetence, imbecility, and incontinence. What have I got? A decent set of pipes. That’s all. And they won’t last forever. No investments, no property, and bugger-all recording royalties. Bloody Revenue cleaned me out. Rat up a drainpipe. Gone. And the bastards still have their hands out. They’ve threatened me, you know. Arrest. What is this, the bloody Marshalsea Gaol? I’m a Papal Knight, you know. I wield the sword of the Holy Father himself.”