“Hmm?” I said.
“We’re approaching Cydonia. Rise and shine.”
And give God the glory, glory… “All right,” I said. I always slept well on Mars—better than I ever did on Earth. Something to do with the 37 percent gravity, I suppose.
She went back into the cabin. I looked out the window. There, off in the distance, was a side view of the famous Face. From this angle, I never would have given it a second glance if I hadn’t known its history among crackpots.
Well, if we were passing the Face, that meant the so-called cityscape was just twenty kilometers southwest of here. We’d already discussed our travel plans: she’d take us in between the “pyramid” and the “fortress,” setting down just outside the “city square.”
I started suiting up.
The original names had stuck: the pyramid, the fortress, the city square. Of course, up close, they seemed not in the least artificial. I was bent over now, looking out a window.
“Kind of sad, isn’t it?” said Liz, standing behind me, still in her coveralls. “People are willing to believe the most outlandish things on the scantest of evidence.”
There was just a hint of condescension in her tone. Like almost everyone else on Mars, she thought me a fool—and not just for coming out here to Cydonia, but for the things I’d built my whole life around.
I straightened up, faced her. “You’re not coming out?”
She shook her head. “You had your nap on the way here. Now it’s my turn. Holler if you need anything.” She touched a control, and the inner door of the cylindrical air lock chamber rolled aside, like the stone covering Jesus’ sepulchre.
What, I wondered, would the Mother of our Lord be doing here, on this ancient, desolate world? Of course, apparitions of her were famous for occurring in out-of-the-way places: Lourdes, France; La’Vang, Vietnam; Fatima, Portugal; Guadalupe, Mexico. All of them were off the beaten track.
And yet, people did come to these obscure places in their millions after the fact. It had been a century and a half since the apparitions at Fatima, and that village still attracted five million pilgrims annually.
Annually. I mean Earth annually, of course. Only the anal retentive worry about the piddling difference between a terrestrial day and a Martian sol, but the Martian year was twice as long as Earth’s. So, Fatima, I guess gets ten million visitors per Martian year…
I felt cold as I looked at the landscape of rusty sand and towering rock faces. It was psychosomatic, I knew: my surface suit—indeed white, as Jurgen Emat had noted—provided perfect temperature control.
The city square was really just an open area, defined by wind-sculpted sandstone mounds. Although in the earliest photos it had perhaps resembled a piazza, it didn’t look special from within. I walked a few dozen meters, then turned around, the lamp from my helmet piercing the darkness.
My footprints stretched out behind me. There were no others. I was hardly the first to visit Cydonia, but, unlike on the Moon, dust storms on Mars made such marks transitory.
I then looked up at the night sky. Earth was easy enough to spot—it was always on the ecliptic, of course, and right now was in… my goodness, isn’t that a coincidence!
It was in Virgo, the constellation of the Virgin, a dazzling blue point, a sapphire outshining even mighty Spica.
Of course, Virgo doesn’t depict the Mother of Our Lord; the constellation dates back to ancient times. Most likely, it represents the Assyrian fertility goddess, Ishtar, or the Greek harvest maiden, Persephone.
I found myself smiling. Actually, it doesn’t depict anything at all. It’s just a random smattering of stars. To see a virgin in it was as much a folly as seeing the ruins of an ancient Martian city in the rocks rising up around me. But I knew the… well, not the heavens, but the night sky… like the back of my hand. Once you’d learned to see the patterns, it was almost impossible not to see them.
And, say, there was Cygnus, and—whaddaya know!—Phobos, and, yes, if I squinted, Deimos, too, just beneath it.
But no. Surely the Holy Virgin had not revealed herself to Jurgen Emat. Peasant children, yes; the poor and sick, yes. But a televangelist? A rich broadcast preacher? No, that was ridiculous.
It wasn’t explicitly in Cardinal Pirandello’s message, but I knew enough of Vatican politics to understand what was going on. As he’d said, Jurgen Emat had been at seminary with Viktorio Lazzari—the man who was now known as Leo XIV. Although both were Catholics, they’d ended up going down widely different paths—and they were anything but friends.
I’d only met the Pontiff once, and then late in his life. It was almost impossible to imagine the poised, wise Bishop of Rome as a young man. But Jurgen had known him as such, and—my thoughts were my own; as long as I never gave them voice, I was entitled to think whatever I wished—and to know a person in his youth is to know him before he has developed the mask of guile. Jurgen Emat perhaps felt that Viktorio Lazzari had not deserved to ascend to the Holy See. And now, with this silly announcement of a Martian Marian vision, he was stealing Leo’s thunder as the Pope prepared to visit Fatima.
Martian. Marian. Funny I’d never noticed how similar those words were before. The only difference…
My God.
The only difference is the lowercase t—the cross—in the middle of the word pertaining to Mars.
No. No. I shook my head inside the suit’s helmet. Ridiculous. A crazy notion. What had I been thinking about? Oh, yes: Emat trying to undermine the Pope. By the time I got back to Utopia Planitia, it would be late Saturday evening. I hadn’t thought of a sermon yet, but perhaps that could be the topic. In matters of faith, by definition, the Holy Father was infallible, and those who called themselves Catholics—even celebrities like Jurgen Emat—had to accept that, or leave the faith.
It wouldn’t mean much to the… yes, I thought of them as my congregation, even sometimes my flock… but of course the group that only half-filled the pews at Saint Teresa’s each Sunday morn were hardly that. Just the bored, the lonely, those with nothing better to do. Ah, well. At least I wouldn’t be preaching to the converted…
I looked around at the barren landscape, and took a drink of pure water through the tube in my helmet. The wind howled, plaintive, attenuated, barely audible inside the suit.
Of course, I knew I was being unfairly cynical. I did believe with all my heart in Our Lady of the Rosary. I knew—knew, as I know my own soul!—that she had in the past shown herself to the faithful, and…
And I was one of the faithful. Yes, pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall—but I was more faithful than Jurgen Emat. It was true that Buzz Aldrin had taken Holy Communion upon landing on the Moon, but I was bringing Jesus’ teachings farther than anyone else had, here, in humanity’s first baby step out toward the stars…
So, Mary, where are you? If you’re here—if you’re with us here on Mars, then show yourself! My heart is pure, and I’d love to see you.
Show yourself, Mother of Jesus! Show yourself, Blessed Virgin! Show yourself!
Elizabeth Chen’s tone had the same mocking undercurrent as before. “Have a nice walk, Father?”
I nodded.
“See anything?”
I handed her my helmet. “Mars is an interesting place,” I said. “There are always things to see.”
She smiled, a self-satisfied smirk. “Don’t worry, Father,” she said, as she put the helmet away in the suit locker. “We’ll have you back to Bradbury in plenty of time for Sunday morning.”