“It’s fading,” Vijay sighed.
“It only lasts while we’re in darkness and the high atmosphere is still in sunlight,” Jamie said, knowing that the Sky Dancers had other places to go, other eyes to delight, other omens to warn of.
“Look!”
A meteor trail streaked across the deep violet sky like a fiery finger tracing a path through the heavens.
“Wow!” Jamie managed to say before the meteor’s blazing track winked out. “That was a big one.”
“Should we make a wish?”
“Yeah. Wish that we don’t get hit by a meteor shower,” Jamie said, remembering the shower that peppered the dome of the First Expedition. One of the tiny stones had even hit his helmet. Remembering how close he’d come to death, Jamie suddenly felt very vulnerable in the flimsy nanosuit.
“We’d better get inside,” he said to Vijay.
The safety monitor reinforced the notion. “Dr. Waterman, temperature’s dropping rapidly.”
“Right,” he said crisply. “We’re coming in.”
As they trudged back toward the lights of the dome and the airlock hatch, Vijay said, “That was spectacular, Jamie.”
He looked at her, but it was already too dark to make out her beautiful face. Smiling ruefully, Jamie said, “Mars is a beautiful world. But it can be dangerous.”
“You don’t want to leave, do you?”
“Hell no,” said Jamie.
Boston: Video Studio
Monsignor DiNardo sat in the barber’s chair while the makeup specialist smoothed a creamy lotion over his stubborn shadow of a beard.
“Italians,” the young woman muttered, more to herself than the priest. “All that testosterone.”
She was blond and blowsy. It was hard for DiNardo to tell her age, what with the cosmetic and rejuvenation treatments available.
DiNardo looked at the big wall mirror in front of him. His chin and jaw looked baby pink, although his shaved scalp still showed a face of stubble. “All my life my beard has given me difficulty,” he said. “I’m sorry if it’s making you work too hard.”
“Oh, that’s all right, Father,” she said, suddenly embarrassed. “It’s my job, after all.”
“You are Catholic?”
“Born to it,” she said, turning to the rows of bottles and jars on the counter.
“Irish?” he guessed.
“Nope. Italian, just like you.”
“Ah! Que paese?”
“Huh?”
“What part of Italy do you come from?”
“Oh, my family’s been here for a hundred years. More. I went to Italy once, though. To Rome and Florence.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
She broke into a major grin. “I never had it so good. Guys were after me everywhere I went.”
Of course. Blond and buxom, DiNardo thought.
“Boy, did I have impure thoughts on that trip!”
DiNardo laughed. “I could hear your confession, if you wish.”
She laughed, too. “I go every week at my parish church, Father.”
“Good.”
She studied his face for several moments. “I think we’re finished. You look fine.”
Glancing into the mirror again, DiNardo thought he looked much as he always looked. His jaw was smooth and pinkish, but his eyes still drooped and had those bags beneath them.
He started to get out of the chair, but the makeup woman put a hand on his shoulder. “Father, could I ask you something?”
“Certainly,” he said.
Her brows knit slightly. “I been watching them filming you in the studio. What you said about the Martians, is that real?”
“Of course.”
“There really were living people on Mars, just like us?”
DiNardo nodded. “We don’t know what they looked like, as yet. But they left buildings. They had a form of writing. They existed millions of years ago.”
“But I saw this show on TV, the guy there says it’s all a fake. He wrote a book about it and he said that the scientists have faked the whole thing just to get more money out of us.”
“I am a scientist,” he said gently.
The woman looked stricken. “Oh, I didn’t mean you, Father! Those other scientists. The secular ones. The ones who’re atheists and hate religion. They’d do anything to tear down our beliefs.”
“I don’t believe so,” DiNardo said. “I know many of them and they are as honest as you and I.”
“You really think so?”
“They are trying to understand how things work. On Mars, they are trying to puzzle out how the Martians lived. And how they died.”
“But they’re always changing their minds. They’re always putting up some theory about this or that. And their theories always attack religion and God.”
DiNardo forced a smile. “God isn’t worried about what the scientists are doing. In reality, the scientists are trying to learn how God created the world and how He makes it run.”
“You think?”
“They may not know it,” DiNardo said, his smile becoming genuine, “but even the most stubborn atheist among them is working lo uncover God’s ways.”
She looked unconvinced, but she murmured, “I never thought about it that way.”
DiNardo got up from the chair and thanked her. He half expected her to ask him for his blessing, but she simply smiled, her fleshy face dimpling prettily.
DiNardo headed for the studio, where they would be recording the final sequence on the documentary about Mars.
She didn’t ask the difficult question, DiNardo said to himself as he stepped through the doorway into the big, barnlike studio. She didn’t ask how a loving and merciful God could create those intelligent Martians and then callously wipe them out, kill them all, with just a flick of His celestial finger.
That was the question that haunted Monsignor DiNardo: How could God be so cruel?
BOOK III
Exiles
The Old Ones prophesied that The People would live in the blue world and prosper there. Through many trials they endured, and learned the ways of the blue world, and grew in strength and wisdom. But always they turned their eyes to the red world and wondered. Always their dreams were haunted by visions of the red world and what it once was.
Dreams bear their own wisdom, and in time some dreamers strive to bring them into the waking world.
Depew, Florida: Longstreet Middle School
The English class was watching The Return of Zorro on the big flat screen up at the front of the room. Bucky Winters sat toward the rear with his own notebook open on his lap, where the teacher couldn’t spot it. She was half dozing up at her desk anyway, Bucky saw.
If she catches me I’m toast, he told himself. But half the class was either daydreaming or furtively watching their own notebook screens. Only a handful of students were actually following the adventures of the masked swordsman up on the big flat screen. The sound track, in Spanish with English subtitles, was loud enough to rattle the classroom windows.
Bucky was watching a forbidden video on his notebook screen. He had the sound track muted because he dared not risk letting the teacher see him using the earplug. So he followed the documentary about Mars without the sound, using the Spanish subtitles that the program offered.