“But that’s illegal! It’s against the First Amendment.”
Andersen pulled out a huge white handkerchief and ran it under his collar as he explained, “The First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting freedom of expression. It doesn’t say diddley-squat about faithful God-fearing citizens doing it on their own volition.”
“Their own volition,” Dex snapped. “They’re a bunch of brainless automatons. That mannequin in the store window has more intelligence than they do.”
“The mannequin’s not watching your show, either.”
Feeling desperate, Dex urged, “That’s why we need you! We need to create some buzz about the documentary, make noise about it, get people curious enough to look at it.”
But Andersen shook his head, a slow ponderous back-and-forth wobbling of all that flesh. “You’re flogging a dead horse, Mr. Trumball. The churches are against you. Even the Catholic parishes have told their people not to watch it. I’m not going to go against that kind of tide. It’d be suicide. I’d just be taking your money under false pretenses.”
“You’re just going to let the New Morality push our documentary into oblivion?”
“You got to know when to hold ’em, and know when to fold em.” Andersen struggled to his feet. “Sorry you had to come down horn Boston just to hear bad news, Mr. Trumball. But, believe me, I’ve looked at all the angles. Your documentary is a dead issue. Maybe some private schools will look at it, but don’t expect a big audience.”
Dex muttered a heartfelt, “Damn.”
As he watched Andersen waddle off through the hotel lobby, Dex knew that his worst fears had been realized. The New Morality and their fellow fundamentalists were working hard to strangle the exploration of Mars.
He had only one card left to play. With a sigh, he pulled out his pocket phone and called for his limo. He wasn’t looking forward to riding through the choking traffic all the way out to JFK airport. But Kinnear was in Hawaii, and if Dex was going to close a deal for bringing tourists to Mars he had to go to Kinnear.
I’ll get it all signed and sealed, he told himself as he impatiently waited for the limo to show up. I won’t breathe a word of this to Jamie until the money’s on the table.
Tithonium Chasma: The Cliff Dwellings
“Fulvio, are you all right?” Jamie asked, alarmed. He could hear the priest’s labored breathing in the headphone clipped to his ear.
“Yes,” DiNardo answered, puffing. “I’m just… a little… out of breath.”
They had ridden side by side up the cable lifts from the valley floor to the cleft where the ancient buildings stood. It had taken DiNardo three floundering tries to get his boots on the floor of the cleft. In the end, Jamie had to throw him a tether and reel him in.
Through the inflated helmet of DiNardo’s nanofabric suit Jamie could see the priest’s face was flushed, whether from exertion or embarrassment he couldn’t tell.
“I have never been a mountaineer,” DiNardo said, with an apologetic smile, as he unclipped the climbing harness.
“It’s my fault,” Jamie said. “We pushed you through without all the necessary training.”
“I’m all right now. I simply needed to catch my breath.” Jamie nodded and held out one hand, as if to steady his companion.
DiNardo looked past him, and his mouth sagged open. “This is it,” he whispered, eyes widening.
Jamie felt himself break into a broad smile. “This is it. The cliff dwellings.”
The structures stood ghostly pale against the ruddy tones of the overhanging rock, but straight and clean-lined, created by an intelligence that knew how to build for the ages.
As they began to walk toward the buildings, Jamie went on, “Carleton says they weren’t dwellings. The Martians lived down on the valley floor. These buildings were some sort of temple, he believes, used for ceremonial purposes.”
“They came here to worship?”
“Maybe.”
They ducked through a low doorway and straightened up again inside the building. Sunlight filtered down from the light well that ran through the core of the structure.
“Do you think this was truly a place of worship?” DiNardo asked, his voice hardly above a whisper.
Heading for the ladder that led to the upper floors, Jamie said, “The Anasazi back in Arizona built storehouses for grain high up in rock clefts. They used the sites for protection against their enemies.”
“Did these Martians have enemies among them?”
“Damned if I know.”
DiNardo chuckled softly. “Be careful of the words you speak. I had a teacher, a stern old Irish Jesuit, who always warned us that we should not use such language. ‘God might grant your wish and damn you for all eternity,’ he would tell us.”
“I can’t believe that God would be so spiteful,” said Jamie.
“Neither could I,” said Monsignor DiNardo. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, “Yet he did away with the Martians, did He not?”
Jamie looked at the priest. His face was etched with something beyond the kind of burning desire to know that drove Jamie. His eyes looked infinitely sad.
Vijay, meanwhile, was in the midst of a tutorial by Carter Carleton.
She had deliberately sought him out at lunch, and found him at a table with eight others. They made room for Vijay to sit across the table from Carleton, between a professor of geophysics and a postdoc cellular biologist. Carleton spent the mealtime discussing the work at the dig, although he did almost all the talking while the others listened and nodded.
He’s handsome, Vijay thought. Handsome and basking in the attention everyone’s giving him. Four of the eight others were women, three of them quite young. Vijay memorized their names from the tags on the coveralls and made a mental note to check their dossiers.
It’s all part of my psych profiling, she told herself. I’ve got to know everyone’s background as thoroughly as I can.
But it was Carleton who fascinated her. She had looked up his file as soon as she had gotten Nari Quintana’s agreement for the psychology study. Carleton was by far the most interesting personality among the scientists and technicians. He had been chairman of the University of Pennsylvania’s anthropology department, but had resigned under a cloud of accusations and recrimination. Vijay had pulled up news media reports of the scandaclass="underline" a female student had accused him of sexual assault. The university’s official records never mentioned the word rape, but the tabloids did, plentifully.
Fascinating, thought Vijay. Carleton came to Mars as a virtual refugee from the affair, claiming he’d been set up by religious fundamentalists because of his teaching about evolution. Now he was leading the effort to excavate the long-buried Martian village. And reveling in the attention it brought him.
He’d been shacked up with one of the younger women, Doreen McManus, Vijay had learned. But she’d gone back to Selene. If Carleton misses her, he certainly doesn’t show it, she thought.
On the other hand, she mused, there’s definitely tension between Carleton and Chang. Negative tension. Chang doesn’t like the anthropologist, he sees Carleton as a challenge to his authority.
“Come on over to the stereo table,” Carleton said to the group, “and I’ll show you what I mean.”
They dutifully left their half-finished lunches on the table and trooped across the dome. Halfway there Vijay realized that Carleton had come up alongside her.
“Are you really interested in this?” he asked, smiling at her. He was slightly taller than Jamie, she realized, and several centimeters taller than she. Slim, with a tight gut. On Earth he’d be deeply tanned from all his outdoors work. Here on Mars no one got sunburned, not inside the suits they had to wear.