The Empress of Mars (3 page)

“I haven’t got it,” said Mary bluntly, and she meant it, too. Her small economy ran almost entirely on barter and goodwill.

“Aw, now, surely you’re mistaken about that,” said Cochevelou. “You could take up a collection, maybe. All the good workers love your place, and wouldn’t they reach into their hearts and their pockets for a timely contribution? And some of your ex-BACs, haven’t they got a little redundancy pay socked away in the bottom of the duffel? If you could even scrape together two-thirds for a down, we’d work out the most reasonable terms for you!”

Mary hesitated. She knew pretty well how much her people had, and it didn’t amount to a thousand punts even if they presold their bodies to the xenoforensic studies lab. But the Lady might somehow provide, might She not?

“Perhaps I ought to view the property,” she said.

“It would be our pleasure,” said Cochevelou, grinning white in his sooty beard, and his people exchanged smiles, and Mary thought to herself:
Careful
.

But she rose and psuited up, and fitted her mask on tight, and went for a stroll through the airlock with Cochevelou and his people.

The Settlement was quite a bit more now than the single modest dome that had sheltered the first colonists, though that still rose higher than any other structure, and it did have that lovely vizio top so its inhabitants
could see the stars, and which gave it a rather Space-Age Moderne look. It wasted heat, though, and who the hell cared enough about two tiny spitspeck moons to venture out in the freezing night and peer upward at them?

The Tubes had a nice modern look, too, where the English maintained them, with lots of transparencies that gave onto stunning views of the Red Planet.

To be strictly accurate, it was only a red planet in places. When Mary had come to live there, her first impression had been of an endless cinnamon-colored waste. Now she saw every color but blue, from primrose-curry-tomcat-ochre to flaming persimmon-vermilion through bloodred and so into ever more livery shades of garnet and rust. There were even greens, both the subdued yellowy olive khaki in the rock and the exuberant rich green of the covered acreage.

And Finn’s twenty long acres were green indeed, rich as emerald with a barley crop that had not yet come into its silver beard. Mary clanked through the airlock after Cochevelou and stopped, staring.

“The Crystal Palace itself,” said Finn proudly, with a wave of his hand.

She pulled off her mask and inhaled. The air stank, of course, from the methane; but it was rich and wet too, and with a certain sweetness. All down the long tunnel roofed with industrial-grade vizio, the barley grew tall, out to that distant point of shade change that must be sugar beet. Beyond that were hayfields where cattle grazed peaceful and pastoral as in an Earth meadow. Pollinator microbots, tiny points of golden light, hummed and dove, floated and circled out there.

“Oh, my,” Mary said, giddy already with the oxygen.

“You see?” said Cochevelou. “Worth every penny of the asking price.”

“If I had it,” she retorted, making an effort at shrewdness. It was a beautiful holding, one that would give her all the malted barley she could use and plenty to trade on the side or even to sell . . .

“No wonder the English want this,” she said, and her own words echoed in her ears as she regarded the landscape beyond the vizio, the
long green stripes of the other allotments, the low-domed methane hell of the Clan’s cattle pens, the towering pipe-maze of Cochevelou’s ironworks.

“No wonder the English want this,” she repeated, turning to look Cochevelou in the eye. “If they own this land, it divides Clan Morrigan’s holdings smack in two, doesn’t it?”

“Too right,” agreed Finn. “And then they’ll file actions to have the cowshed and the ironworks moved as nuisances, see and—ow,” he concluded, as he was kicked again.

“And it’s all a part of their secret plot to drive us out,” said Cochevelou rather hastily. “You see? They’ve gone and made us an offer we can’t refuse. Now we’ve broke the ground and manured it for them, they’ve been just waiting and waiting for us to give up and go home, so they can grab it all. The day after we filed the papers to send Finn back, bastardly Inspector Baldwin shows up on our property.”

“Didn’t his face fall when he saw what a nice healthy crop we had growing here!” said Finn, rubbing his ankle.

“So he couldn’t condemn it and get the lease revoked, you see?” Cochevelou continued, giving Finn a black look. “Because obviously it ain’t abandoned, it’s gone into our collective’s common ownership. But it wasn’t eight hours later he came around with that offer of four thousand for the land. And if we take it, yes, it’s a safe bet they’ll start bitching and moaning about our cattle and all.”

“Don’t sell,” said Mary. “Or sell to one of your own.”

“Sweetheart, you know we’ve always thought of you as one of our own,” said Cochevelou soupily. “Haven’t we? But who in our poor clan would ever be able to come up with that kind of money? And as for not selling, why, you and I can see that having the British Arean Company in here would be doom and destruction and (which is worse) lawsuits inevitable somewhere down the road. But it isn’t up to me. Most of our folk will only be able to see that big heap of shining BAC brass they’re being offered. And they’ll vote to take it, see?”

“We could do a lot with such money,” said Matelot, he who had been most active kicking Finn, with a sigh. “Buy new generators, which we
sorely need. More vizio, which as you know is worth its weight in transparent gold. Much as we’d hate to sell to strangers . . .”

“But if
you
were to buy the land, we’d have our cake and be able to eat it too, you see?” Cochevelou explained.

Mary eyed him resentfully. She saw, well enough: whichever way the dice fell, she was going to lose. If the Clan Morrigan acreage shrank, her little economy would go out of balance. No barley, no beer.

“You’ve got me in a cleft stick, Cochevelou,” she told him, and he looked sad.

“Aren’t we both in a cleft stick, and you’re just in the tightest part?” he replied. “But all you have to do is come up with the money, and we’re both riding in high cotton, and the British Arean Company can go off and fume. Come on now, darling, you don’t have to make up your mind right away! We’ve got until the Queen’s Birthday to finalize things. Go on home and talk it over with your people, why don’t you?”

Mary clapped her mask on and stamped out through the airlock, muttering.

Mary had been accustomed, all her life, to dealing with emergencies. When the British Arean Company’s headhunters had approached her with a job offer, it had seemed as though it must be the Lady’s reward for all her years of coping.

A glorious adventure on another world! The chance to explore, to classify, and to enshrine her name forever in the nomenclature of Martian algae! The little girls had listened with round eyes, and only Alice had sulked and wept about leaving her friends, and only for a little while. So they’d all set off together bravely and become Martians, and the girls had adapted in no time, spoiled rotten as the only children on Mars.

And Mary had five years of happiness as a valued member of a scientific team, respected for her expertise, finding more industrial applications for
Cryptogametes gryffyuddi
than George Washington Carver had found for the peanut.

But when she had discovered all there was to discover about useful lichens on Mars (and in five years she had pretty much exhausted the subject), the British Arean Company had had no more use for her.

The nasty interview with General Director Rotherhithe had been both unexpected and brief. Her morals were in question, it had seemed. She had all those resource-consuming children, and while that sort
of thing might be acceptable in a Celtic Federation country, Mars belonged to England. She was known to indulge in controlled substances, also no crime in the Federation, but certainly morally wrong. And the British Arean Company had been prepared to tolerate her, ah,
religion
in the hope that it would keep her from perpetuating certain other kinds of immorality, which had unfortunately not been the case—

“What, because I have men to my bed?” Mary had demanded, unfortunately not losing her grasp of English. “You dried-up dirty-minded old stick, I’ll bet you’d wink at it if I had other women, wouldn’t you? Bloody hypocrite! I’ve heard you keep a lesbian holopeep in your office cabinet—”

Academic communities are small and full of gossip, and even smaller and more full of gossip under a biodome, and secrets cannot be kept at all. So
Julie and Sylvia Take Deportment Lessons from Ms. Lash
had been giggled at, but never mentioned out loud. Until now.

General Director Rotherhithe had had a choking fit and gone a nice shade of lilac, and Sub-Director Thorpe had taken over to say that It was therefore with infinite regret, et cetera . . .

And Mary had had to cope again.

She hadn’t cared that she couldn’t afford the fare home; she loved Mars. She had decided she was damned if she was going to be thrown off. So, with her redundancy pay, she’d gone into business for herself.

She’d purchased a dome from the Federation colonists, a surplus shelter originally used for livestock; and though the smell took some weeks to go away even in the dry thin air, the walls were sound and warm, and easily remodeled with berths for lodgers.

Chiring Skousen, who had had his contract canceled with the British Arean Company for writing highly critical articles about the redundancies and sending the features home to the
Kathmandu Post
, might have gone home free and clear with the other journalists who had been embedded to cover the Big Red Balloon. Instead he remained, because he wasn’t about to leave a good story. Now he boarded at the Empress, filming an ongoing documentary on the Big Red Balloon’s aftermath.

Manco Inca, who had been a terraforming specialist and who had
asked to leave the British Arean Company because he was discovered to be a (sort of) practicing Christian, brought her a stone-casting unit in exchange for rent, and soon he’d been able to cast her five fine brewing tanks and ever so many cups, bowls, and dishes. He was also a decent mechanic, and had helped Mary repair the broken well pump and set up the generators.

Cochevelou himself, in a gesture of Celtic solidarity, had stood Mary the first load of barley for malting, and even given her a secondhand still that admittedly had needed repair, though Manco had been equal to the task.

And once it was generally known that Mary had both beer and pretty daughters, the Empress of Mars was in business.

For five years now it had stood defiantly on its rocky bit of upland slope, the very picture of what a cozy country tavern on Mars ought to be: squat low dome grown all over with lichen patches most picturesque, except on the weather-wall where the prevailing winds blasted it bald with an unceasing torrent of sand, so it had to be puttied constantly with red stonecast leavings to keep it whole there. Mary swapped resources with the clan, with the laborers, with even a few stealthy British Arean Company personnel for fuel and food, and an economy had been born.

And now it was threatened, and Mary was going to have to cope again.

“Holy Mother, why is it always
something
?” she growled into her mask, kicking through drifts as she stormed back along the Tube. “Could I count on You for even one year where nothing went wrong for once? I could not, indeed.

“And now I’m expected to pull Cochevelou’s smoky black chestnuts out of the fire for him, the brute, and where am I to come up with the money? Could You even grant me one little miracle? Oh, no, I’m strong enough to cope on my own, aren’t I? I’ll solve everyone’s problems so they needn’t develop the spine to do it themselves, won’t I? Bloody hell!”

She came to a transparency and glared out.

Before her was Dead Snake Field, a stretch of rock distinguished by a
cairn marking the last resting place of Cochevelou’s pet ball python, which had survived the trip to Mars only to escape from its terrarium and freeze to death Outside. Initial hopes that it might be thawed and revived had been dashed when Finn, in an attempt at wit, had set the coiled icicle on his head like a hat and it had slipped off and fallen to the floor, shattering.

There in the pink distance, just under the melted slope of Mons Olympus, was the sad-looking semicollapsed vizio wall of Mary’s own few long acres, the nasty little allotment she’d been granted almost as a nose-thumbing with her redundancy pay. Its spidery old Areomotors gave it a deceptively rural look. With all the abundant freaky Martian geology to choose from, the British Arean Company had managed to find Mary a strip of the most sterile clay imaginable; and though she was unable to farm it very effectively, they had never shown any inclination to snatch it back.

“There’s another joke,” she snarled. “Fine fertile fields, is it? Oh,
damn
Rotherhithe, the old purse-mouth pervert!”

Mary stalked on and shortly came to the Tube branch leading to her allotment. There was really little point, but she went down to see how her own crops were doing.

Plumes of mist were leaking from the airlock seal; now that needed replacing, too, something
else
broken she couldn’t afford to fix. There were tears in her eyes as she stepped through and lowered her mask, to survey that low yellow wretched barley, fluttering feebly in the oxygen waves. No biis circled here, at the moment; she couldn’t afford continuous pollination service. The contrast with Finn’s lush fields was too much. Mary sat down on an overturned bucket and wept, and her tears amounted to one scant drop of water spattering on the sere red clay, fizzing with peroxide.

When her anger and despair were wept out, she remained staring numbly at the fast-drying spot. The clay was the exact color of terracotta.

“I wonder,” she said, “whether we could make pots out of the damned stuff.”