The Empress of Mars (2 page)

Having designed and fabricated all the structures the British Arean Company needed, however, he had been summarily fired. He had gone wandering away through the Tubes and wound up at the Empress, his white thin face whiter still for shock, and sat at a dark table drinking batch for eight hours before Mary had asked him if he was ever going home, and then he had burst into tears.

So she had given him a job. Mary had been fired herself. Not for redundancy, though, really; for being too Ethnic.

“Five Tank, yes, and in the afternoon we can brew another pale ale,” she decided, “or maybe a good oatmeal stout, what do you think?” and Mr. Morton brightened at that.

“Tch! In your dreams,” said someone in a voice dripping with contempt, high up near the ceiling. Both Mary and Mr. Morton craned their heads back to look, but the remark had not been addressed to them. “I must be out of my mind, wasting time on a loser like you!”

The speaker was Mary’s firstborn, Alice, long-necked and irritable as a swan, who now poised on the edge of her loft and fastened the descent line. Leaning out, she flew down, and let the line go with a snap as soon as her feet hit the floor. It went writhing back up as she flounced away to the stove.

Mary sighed and Mr. Morton, for whom relationships were things that happened to other people, looked fixedly at his feet.

“Have we got any oats?” he inquired, in as bright and normal a voice as he could manage. Before Mary could reply, a second person leaned out of the love nest Alice had made up above One Tank and, groping for the line, came down. It was Alice’s current young man, who grinned sheepishly at Mary. He was carrying his psuit over one arm, with his boots and mask. She nodded at him, trying to remember his name.

“Good morning, Mr. Wilson,” she said. “Please help yourself to the water.”

“Thank you, ma’am. Only it’s Johnson.”

“To be sure, Johnson.” Mary watched as he hurried over to the stove, where Alice stood waiting for him to fix her a cup of tea. Young Johnson obliged. She accepted it with frigid condescension and sat facing away from him as he pulled on his psuit. He fixed himself tea, gulped it down, and hurried off to work after an unsuccessful attempt to kiss her. Mary cleared her throat.

“Have we got any oats with which to brew, Mr. Morton? No, but perhaps She will provide them,” Mary said, and he nodded sagely. Mr. Morton wasn’t an Ephesian himself, but he was willing to concede that there was Somebody out there responsive to human prayer, and She certainly seemed to hear Mary’s.

“Something will turn up,” he said, and Mary nodded.

And when the day had well and truly begun—when the staff had all descended from their alcoves to their varied employments, when Mary’s other two daughters had been roused and set smiling or sullen about the day’s tasks, when the long stone counter had been polished to a dull shine and the heating unit under One Tank was filling the air with a grateful warmth, and Mary herself stood behind the bar drawing the first ale of the day, to be poured into the offering basin in the little shrine with its lumpy image of the Good Mother Herself, dim-lit by Her little flickering votive wire—even in that moment when the rich malty stuff hit the parched stone and foamed extravagantly, for CO
₂
is never lacking on Mars—even just then the Lock doors swung open and in came the answer to prayer, being Padraig Moylan with a hundred-weight sack of Clan Morrigan oats and two tubs of butter in trade.

Mr. Moylan was thanked with grace and sincerity, the clan’s bar tab recalculated accordingly. Soon he was settled in a cozy alcove with a shot of red single malt and Mona, the best listener amongst Mary’s children. Mary, having stashed the welcome barter in a locker, set about her slow eternal task of sweeping the red sand from her tables. She could hear Mr. Morton singing as he worked with his scouring pads, his dreamy lyric baritone echoing inside Five Tank, reverberating “Some Enchanted Evening.”

Mary ticked him off her mental list of Things to Be Seen To, and surveyed the rest of her house as she moved down the length of the table.

There was Alice, still miffed about something, loading yesterday’s beer mugs into the scouring unit. Rowan, brown and practical, was arranging today’s mugs in neat ranks behind the bar. Worn by scouring, the mugs had a lovely silkiness on them now, shiny as pink marble, dwindling to a thinness and translucency that meant that soon they’d be too delicate for bar use and more would have to be cast. (Though when that happened, the old ones could be boxed up and sent out to the British Arean Company PX in the landing port, to be sold as “Finest Arean Porcelain” to such guests as came to inspect the BAC public facilities.)

Over behind Four Tank, the shadows had retreated before a little mine lamp, and by its light Chiring and Manco had a disassembled filtering unit spread out, cleaning away the gudge with careful paddles. The gudge too was a commodity, to be traded as fertilizer, which was a blessing because it accumulated with dreadful speed in the bottom of the fermentation tanks. It was a combination of blown sand, yeast slurry, and the crawly stuff that grew on the ceiling, and it had a haunting and deathless smell, but mixed with manure and liberally spread over thin poor Martian soil, it defied superoxidants and made the barley grow.

And everyone agreed that getting the barley to grow was of vital importance. It fed people, it was a nitrogen fixer, it expired oxygen, and it made soil out of Martian loess and sand.

Now Chiring and Manco sang too, somewhat muffled behind kerchiefs tied over their mouths and noses, joining the last bit of “Some Enchanted Evening” in their respective gruff bass and eerie tenor. A tiny handcam whirred away at them from its place on the table, adding footage to Chiring’s ongoing documentary series for the
Kathmandu Post
. Mary nodded with satisfaction that all was well and glanced ceilingward at the last member of her household, who was only now rappelling down from the lowest of the lofts.

“Sorry,” said the Heretic, ducking her head in awkward acknowledgment of tardiness and hurrying off to the kitchen, where she set
about denting pans with more than usual effort to make up for being late. Mary followed after, for the Heretic was another problem case requiring patience.

The Heretic had been an Ephesian sister until she had had some kind of accident, about which few details were known, but which had left her blind in one eye and somehow gotten her excommunicated. She had been obliged to leave her convent under something of a cloud; and how she had wound up here on Mars was anybody’s guess. She stammered, jittered, and dropped things, but she was at least not the proselytizing kind of heretic, keeping her blasphemous opinions to herself. She was also a passable cook, so Mary had agreed to take her on at the Empress.

“Are you all right?” asked Mary, peering into the darkness of the kitchen, where the Heretic seemed to be chopping freeze-dried soy protein at great speed.

“Yes.”

“Don’t you want the lights on? You’ll cut off a finger,” said Mary, turning the lights on, and the Heretic yelped and covered her human eye, swiveling the ocular replacement on Mary in a reproachful kind of way.

“Ow,” she said.

“Are you hung over?”

“No,” said the Heretic, cautiously uncovering her eye, and Mary saw that it was red as fire.

“Oh, dear. Did you have the dreams again?”

The Heretic stared through her for a moment before saying, in a strange and breathless voice,
“Out of the ground came scarlet flares, each one bursting, a heart’s beacon, and He stood above the night and the red swirling cold sand and in His hand held up the Ace of Diamonds. It burned like the flares. He offered it forth, laughing and said: Can you dig it?”

“Okay,” said Mary, after a moment’s silence.

“Sorry,” said the Heretic, turning back to her cutting board.

“That’s all right,” said Mary. “Can you get luncheon on by eleven?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, good,” said Mary, and exited the kitchen.

Lady, grant me an ordinary day
, she begged silently, for the last time the Heretic had said something bizarre like that, all manner of strange things had happened.

Yet the day rolled on in its accustomed groove as ordinary as you please. At noon the luncheon crowd came in, the agricultural workers from the Clan and contract laborers from the Settlement, who were either Sherpas like Chiring or Incas like Manco; few English other than the Haulers frequented the Empress of Mars, for all their queen might smile from its sign.

After noon, when the laboring men and women went trooping back to their shifts through the brown whirling day, and the wind had reached its accustomed hissing howl, there was too much to do to worry. There were plates and bowls to be scoured, there was beer to brew, and there was the constant tinkering necessary to keep all the machines running, lest the window’s force field fail against the eternal sandblast, among other things.

So Mary had forgotten all about any dire forebodings by the time the blessed afternoon interval of peace came round, and she retired to the best of her tables and put her feet up.

“Mum.”

So much for peace. She opened one eye and looked at Rowan, who was standing there gesturing urgently at the communications console.

“Mr. Cochevelou sends his compliments, and would like to know if he might come up the Tube to talk about something,” she said.

“Hell,” said Mary, leaping to her feet. It was not that she did not like Mr. Cochevelou, clan chieftain (indeed, he was more than a customer and patron); but she had a pretty good idea what it was he wanted to discuss.

“Tell him Of Course, and then go down and bring up a bottle of the Black Label,” she said. She went to fetch a cushion for Mr. Cochevelou’s favorite seat.

Cochevelou must have been waiting with his fist on the receiver, for it seemed no more than a minute later he came shouldering his way
through the Tube, emerging from the airlock beard first, and behind him three of his household too, lifting their masks and blinking.

“Luck on this house,” said Cochevelou hoarsely, shaking the sand from his psuit, and his followers mumbled an echo. Mary noted philosophically the dunelets piling up around their boots.

“Welcome to the Empress, Mr. Cochevelou. Your usual?”

“Bless you, ma’am, yes,” said Cochevelou, and she took his arm and led him away, jerking a thumb at Mona to indicate she should take a broom to the new sand. Mona sighed and obeyed without good grace, but her mother was far too busy trying to read Cochevelou’s expression to notice.

Between the beard and the forge soot, there wasn’t much of Cochevelou’s face to see; but his light eyes had a shifting look to them today, at once hopeful and uneasy. He watched Mary pour him a shot of Black Label, rubbing his thick fingers across the bridge of his nose and leaving pale streaks there.

“It’s like this, ma’am,” he said abruptly. “We’re sending Finn home.”

“Oh,” said Mary, filling another glass. “Congratulations, Mr. Finn.”

“It’s on account of I’m dying without the sea,” said Finn, a smudgy creature in a suit that had been buckled tight and was still too big.

“And with the silicosis,” added Cochevelou.

“That’s beside the point,” said Finn querulously. “I dream at night of the flat wet beach and the salt mist hanging low, and the white terns wheeling above the white wave. Picking dulse from the tidepools where the water lies clear as glass—”

There were involuntary groans from the others, and one of them booted Finn pretty hard in the ankle to make him stop.

“And, see, he goes on like that and drives the rest of us mad with his glass-clear water and all,” said Cochevelou, raising his voice slightly as he lifted his cup and saluted Mary. “So what it comes down to is, we’ve finally saved enough to send one of us home and it’s got to be him, you see? Your health, ma’am.”

He drank, and Mary drank, and when they had both drawn breath, she said: “What’s to happen to his allotment?”

She had cut straight to the heart of the matter, and Cochevelou smiled in a grimacing kind of way.

Under the terms of the Edinburgh Treaty, which had been hammered out during that momentary thaw in relations between England and the Celtic Federation by the Tri-Worlds Settlement Bureau, every settler on Mars had received a leased allotment of acreage for private terraforming. With the lease went the commitment to keep the land under cultivation, at the risk of its reverting to the British Arean Company.

The British Arean Company, having long since repented its rash decision to invite so many undesirables to settle on Mars, had gotten into the habit of grabbing back land it did not feel was being sufficiently utilized.

“Well, that’s the question,” said Cochevelou. “It’s twenty long acres of fine land, ma’am.”

“Five in sugar beets, five in hay, and ten in the best barley,” said Finn.

“With the soundest roof ever built and its own well, and the sweetest irrigation pipes ever laid,” said Cochevelou. “You wouldn’t mind drinking out of them, I can tell you. And how the biis zoom amongst its rows by night!”

Mary became aware that dead silence had fallen in her house, that all her family were poised motionless with brooms or trays of castware to hear what would be said next. Barley was the life of the house. It was grown on cold and bitter Mars because it would grow anywhere, for a given value of
anywhere
, but it didn’t grow well on the wretched bit of high-oxidant rock clay Mary had been allotted.

“What a pity if it was to revert to the BAC,” she said noncommittally.

“We thought so, too,” said Cochevelou, turning the cup in his fingers. “Because of course they’d plow that good stuff under and put it in soy, and wouldn’t that be a shame? So of course we thought of offering it to you, first, ma’am.”

“How much?” said Mary at once.

“Four thousand punts Celtic,” Cochevelou replied. “And you’d get the services of the biis complimentary, of course, you being nearly family.”

Mary narrowed her eyes. “How much of that would you take in trade?”

There was a slight pause.

“The British Arean Company has offered us four grand in
cash
,” said Cochevelou in a somewhat apologetic tone. “You see. But we’d much rather have you as a neighbor, wouldn’t we? So if there’s any way you could possibly come up with the money . . .”