And then he realized that his mind was already made up.
As the mem sank toward the giant, striated flanks of Arsia Mons, he was a bullet that had been fired, mindless, unable to change his course. He watched the slow-falling dust as the lander bumped to a stop, his helmet seeming to find its own way into its socket, his legs taking him down the ladder after Takahashi. One of the colonists held out an arm to support him, and he took it, watching the figure by the airlock door that held her hand to her throat in an achingly familiar gesture.
“Reese?” she said, and he nodded, let her help him inside and into a cot in sickbay.“Sleep,” she said, and he felt the needle go into his arm, the warmth of Butorphenol spreading through his jaw and the underside of his tongue, taking the gravity away again.
Kane looked into the greasy water and saw himself reflected, from his worn boots and woolen trousers to the crude leather helmet on his head.A cold wind blew off the ocean, its breath whistling past him with a faint, chilling melody. He shivered and stepped carefully around the tidal pool, the rocks painful to his feet. Through the fog a ship landed, its motion unaffected by the sea, drifting exactly to the shore and then pausing.Words were carved into the prow, and he could barely make them out: Thou man which shalt entir into thys shippe, beware that thou be in stedefaste beleve, for I am Faythe.And therefore beware how thou entirst but if thou be stedefaste, for and thou fayle therof I shall nat helpe the. Caxton’s Mallory, a distant part of his brain told him, but the words had no relevance to what he was seeing. The ship rode low in the water, low enough that a dozen steps across the rotted pier took him onto its deck. He breathed the salt, stinking air and then climbed down creaking steps into the hold. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he made out a crude bed in one corner. On it lay a silver serving tray that held a silver goblet, a half-drawn broadsword etched with runes, and a long-bladed pike. The sight of the objects filled him with terror. He woke with a scream gurgling in his throat and his hands clutching at his face for a beard that wasn’t there. Even when his conscious brain recognized the glazed walls of the Martian sickbay, his body, down to the cellular level, felt displaced, disoriented.
He had never dreamed so intensely before, felt so clearly that he had been transported through time, or into some parallel universe.
A sharp spasm of hunger brought him to a sitting position. Gravity clung to him like mud and the effort of fighting it made him dizzy, nauseated.The pain in his ribs awoke with a dull throbbing, and he touched his chest, finding a tight lattice of surgical tape.
He didn’t hurt as badly as he thought he would, but then again, when he’d felt that second rib crack he’d thought he was going to die. He sat with his feet off the edge of the cot and drank a little water. Compared with the brownish, alkaline water of the ship it tasted impossibly sweet and pure.
As long as he kept still, both his stomach and ribs were all right. Turning his head slightly, he could count twenty beds in the sickbay, all of them in use.Takahashi slept peacefully across the room; next to him Lena kicked and moaned softly. Reese was off to Kane’s left, pale but breathing.
A row of windows above Lena and Takahashi’s cots showed a twilit garden and squat, distant houses.The dazzling reddish light from overhead faded as Kane watched, giving way to the sudden Martian night and the colorless glow of fluorescents.
Almost immediately he felt a slow, distant rumbling in the walls. He gripped the sides of the cot, afraid of a tremor, and then saw a silvery line rising slowly across the open section of the dome.
“They’re just raising the mirror,” a voice said, and Kane recognized it as the one that had come over his headphones. He turned slowly and saw a very tall, intense-looking woman standing behind him. She had tangled, dark blonde hair to her shoulders and the beginnings of intriguing lines around her eyes and mouth. Her scent, compounded of strong soap and mild exertion, alerted Kane on a primitive level. He felt a surge of almost impersonal longing, an upwelling of his imbalanced hormones.
“They close both sides at night. During the day one side is always open to the sun.Are you all right?”
“Okay, I guess,” Kane said.As she moved, her breasts turned under her T-shirt in a way that wouldn’t have been possible in Earth’s gravity.
“Do you want to try and stand up?”
“Sure,” he said.“Why not?” She helped him to his feet, carefully avoiding his ribs. She was an inch or so taller than Kane, and she had to bend her knees in order to slide one of his arms around her shoulders. The pleasure of touching her was muddled for him by vertigo and a sensation that his intestines were going to spill out of his body.
“My name is Molly,” the woman said.
“Kane,” he said.
“I know.”
“The others...are they okay? How’s Reese?”
“He’s the worst off, but he’ll get over it. He’s been through this before.”
They made it twice around the room. Only once, when he stumbled,did Kane have a serious vestibular problem.The worst part was seeing the faces of the other patients, most of them in their fifties and sixties, their sunken eyes, gray skin, hollow necks ringed with bowstring muscles.
He lay back down on his cot, exhausted, his shrunken heart hammering and his ribs aching dully.“These others,” he said, with a limp gesture,“what’s wrong with them?”
Molly’s mouth stretched out into a hard line.“Cancer, most of them,” she said.“We’re what you call a high risk up here.The dome cuts out most of the hard radiation, but enough still gets through...” She trailed off, started again.“Get some rest. I’ll come back with some broth or something in a little bit.”
“Molly?”
“Yes?”
“You knew we were coming.We signaled you all the way here.There must have been broadcasts from Earth at least every couple of months for the last nine years.Why didn’t you ever answer?”
She sat on the edge of the cot, one hip a distracting pressure against his leg.“Do you really need an answer to that? We didn’t want you to come.You people, you and the Russians both, you pulled out and left us here and that was the end of it.You’ve been through your problems, apparently, or you wouldn’t be here.Well, we’ve been through our problems too, only they’re not the same.We don’t want your help, and we don’t want to belong to anybody anymore.”
“Well,” Kane said.“At least I know where we stand.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have anything against you personally, and I don’t even care if you stay here for a week or two or whatever. But there are people here who are going to care. Curtis, for one, and he’s the governor.Then there’s about thirty people who survived the Marsgrad disaster.They wouldn’t want to see anybody waving an American flag around here.”
“Nobody’s going to wave any flags, if that matters.There isn’t even a US anymore.”
“We kind of figured that out.We got your broadcasts, saying you were a Pulsystems expedition. I’ve got nothing against corporatocracy myself, but nationalism doesn’t die out overnight.We’ve seen that here, and we don’t want it starting again.”
Kane raised his hands,palm out.“Truce,”he said.“As far as I knew,we were only coming here to sift through the ruins. Nobody’s told Morgan that there’s anybody alive up here yet.” He gave in to a yawn.“Besides, we’re not really in any condition to overthrow your way of life.”
“Granted,” she said, and stood up.“I’ll get you some soup.”
After she left, he sat propped up in bed, reluctant to let himself sleep again.What, he asked himself, could have been so frightening about the dream? As far as he could tell it was no more than a scene from Mallory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, left over from his college mythology courses. Nothing particularly sinister in that.Yet he knew it wasn’t the events, but the consciousness in the dream that had frozen him, a medieval terror of the gods and their instruments.