No one was left alive inside the dome. He saw a flash of heat and fired at it, then saw that it was only a jet of warm air escaping from a sealed room.
His knees shook from the vibration underfoot.A high-tensile aluminum strut tumbled gently to the ground just in front of him, shattering frozen stalks of corn as if they were stained glass sculptures.
He had to get out. He ran for the nearest break in the wall and saw a pane of plastic explode a few inches away from his head. Curtis, he thought, aiming at the noise Kane had made. He threw himself forward and rolled, bringing the gun up as he fell.
Nothing moved.
I can’t stand this, Kane thought.The roaring was in his ears now, coming up through the soil and vibrating the air in his suit. He pushed himself up on his elbows and saw Curtis running for the ship.
The survivors, a few dozen of them at most, were bright dots on the slope leading up to the cave. No bystanders, Kane thought, no more mistakes.
The shockwave came up out of the southeast at the speed of sound, a white-hot tidal wave of dust and ash and volatile gasses ten miles high. It picked Kane up and flung him against the wall of the broken dome so hard that he blacked out for an instant, and when he came around he was stunned, overwhelmed by the deafening chorus of voices in his brain, hurting in at least a dozen parts of his body.
He saw the lander still, somehow, standing upright on the plain.
He saw Curtis get to his feet and run for the hatch of the lander, the panel still hanging from one arm.
He raised the gun and fired, saw Curtis clutch his leg and go down.
He pulled the hammer back, watching globular patterns of reflected heat crawl across the visor of Curtis’s helmet.
He fired again, saw the visor split and the face behind it explode, spraying steam and tiny droplets of blood into the churning air.
The gun tumbled out of Kane’s limp fingers. He pushed himself away from the wall, took one step, then another. He stumbled, went to his knees, got up and walked some more.
The first time he tried to pull the panel from Curtis’s fingers he lost his balance and went down again, his knees hitting Curtis’s chest in an accidental echo of his own broken ribs, his helmet thumping into the ruin of Curtis’s face as his momentum carried him forward. He tugged again and the panel came free.
It’s over, he thought. He stood on the threshold of the Return, the conceptual rebirth. He put one hand on the ladder, pulled one leg onto the bottom rung. Back to Earth with the panel. Kill the king, marry the princess.
He shook his head.There was no princess.What was he thinking of ?
“Takahashi?” he said. His radio was off.
He pulled himself another step up the ladder. He thought of the curvature of the ship’s orbit, a Hohmann ellipse that would match the one that had brought him here and complete the circle, perfect the symmetry.
Curtis lay in the dust beneath him like the monk he’d seen in his dreams, desiccated, shattered, the promise of his Pattern betrayed.
The body in the wake of the ship, Medea’s brother Aegialeus, butchered to delay Aeetes’ vengeance; the embolized victims inside the ruptured dome. Morgan owns you, Lena said. Symmetry breaking, the beginning of life.When I am grown to a man’s estate.
He slammed his helmet into the side of the ship, waking himself up. Somewhere in the back of his skull the biological circuit whispered to him in neural languages that his conscious mind could not hear; sweet, irresistible voices that told him to take the panel, to lift the ship.
Yamato-Takeru knew, Kane thought; he’d felt his spirit stolen away from him, just like this.
Every separate human life, the boy had said.A moment of the life of some great being which lives in us.
The membrane parted again, and Kane saw them all, Jason and Percival and the hundreds of other human lives and the single Pattern they formed, the single act they performed again and again, outside time, each of them with a unique moment, a contribution.
Kane knew what his had to be.
Molly was still sitting on the cliffside when Kane found her. He had remembered to turn his radio on again, but he couldn’t find the words that he needed.
Takahashi stood next to her, with three or four others. In the aftermath of the shockwave, the dust had settled and the night was turning clear.
“It was the Russian ship,” Takahashi said. Kane looked at him with incomprehension.“Mayakenska. She crashed the Salyut in the Solis Planum.That was the explosion.”
“The oasis,” Kane said.
“The beginning of one, anyway. If the crater’s not deep enough, some of Verb’s antimatter can finish it up. I guess it was her way of trying to settle up.”
“Not much...not much of a trade,” Kane said, looking back at the ruins of Frontera, cooled now to within a few degrees of the plain around it.
“No,”Takahashi said.“But it’s a start.”
Kane knelt in the dirt in front of Molly.“Take this,” he said, and he put the panel in her hands.“Build ships.”
“Kane...”
“Shut up,Takahashi,” he said.There was more, but this was not the time for it. Later he would tell her about the rest of his plans, a fullfledged relief mission with food and medicine and whatever else they needed.A treaty with Aeroflot to keep them safe. But he would tell her later, by radio, once he was on his way back to Earth.
“Where’s Lena?” he asked.
“Inside,” Takahashi said.“She’s staying.There’s a lot of work for her here.They’re all staying,even Hanai.That doesn’t matter—the two of us can run the ship.But we have to have that panel.That’s what we came for.”
“Is it?” Kane said.“I don’t think so.”
“Kane...”
“We’ve got time,” Kane said.“We need these people, they need ss. We’ll work it out.” Even without eye contact Kane could feel Takahashi’s will bending to the new order.“Go on ahead,”he said.“Get the ship ready. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Takahashi turned and walked away.
“Curtis?” Molly said.
Kane leaned toward her, put both his hands on her helmet and held it facing his own.
“He’s dead,” Kane said.
Her hands closed around the panel, and she seemed to nod; she got up and carried it toward the airlock.
Kane had a vision of her, standing under the Martian sky, hair blowing in the wind, dressed in a heavy jacket and mask, but in the open air, thick, green shrubbery at her feet.
The vision was his own, not a product of the implant; his voices were silent. He wondered if Molly would hear them when her time came, if she would see the ghost of Odysseus in the video screens of the ships that would take her to Io and Titan and on to the stars.
The colors of the night began to shimmer and bleed until the Martian landscape glowed like Reese’s gateway. Only a force of will held Kane’s perceptions together as he walked down the hillside that would lead him back to his ship, back to the Earth, back to his kingdom.
a u t h o r ’ s n o t e
Kane’s Pattern is the Pattern of the Hero, detailed in Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces (Bollingen, 1968). Quotations from the I Ching are from the Wilhelm/Baynes version (Bollingen, 1967); quotations from Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum are from the Bessaraboffl/Bragdon translation (Vintage, 1970).
I would like to particularly acknowledge the superb nonfiction books of James E. Oberg, which were indispensible in the writing of this noveclass="underline" Red Star in Orbit (Random House, 1981), New Earths (Stackpole, 1981), and Mission to Mars (Stackpole, 1982). I also made extensive use of Hedrick Smith’s The Russians (Ballantine, 1978).
I am deeply grateful to William Gibson, Edith Shiner, and Bruce Sterling for making me see what it was I really wanted to do.Thanks also to my editor, Betsy Mitchell, and to the many other friends who contributed time and suggestions, including Ellen Datlow and the Turkey Citizens.