“Are you sad, Father?” asked Bud.
“Sadness is for those who have personally lost something,” said Oud. “How can I be sad? I have made a fine journey in a good slimshang, in the low season. I have arrived at the place of our First-Birth. And I have a new bud-son who will live to see other wonders on this elder twilight world. How could I be sad?”
“Thank you for bringing me here,” said Bud.
“No,” said Oud, “thank you.”
Weeton here again. We leave Bud and Oud in a sort of valetudinarian idyll (I like to think), staring into the setting sun with Solis Lacus around them, and Thyle I and II far away.
Meanwhile, I’m out here on this empty rise where the edge of a sea once rolled, trying to find what is dragging on my retro-slimshang. The sun is setting here, probably adding to my anthropomorphization of those two Martians now dead four hundred thousand years.
After exploring the Life-Rock for a day (“If you’ve seen one rock, you’ve seen them all”—Oud), his narrative ends two days into the return journey back to Tharsis.
Oud, as far as we can find so far, never wrote another word.
Bud, except for his appearance in Oud’s narrative, is unknown to history or Martian literature.
I hope, so far as I’m able, that they lived satisfying, productive Martian lives.
We’ll never know. While Mars and the Martians were dying, we were still looking up, grunting, out of the caves, at the pretty red dot in the sky.
1 Well put. Weeton’s guess was fairly accurate, one of the few times early colonists and philologists were. Other places, he’s less reliable.
2 Elenkua N’Kuba, ed. Weeton’s Oud Narrative: A facsimile reproduction. Elsevier, the Hague: 2231.
JAMES S. A. COREY
James S. A. Corey is the pseudonym of two young writers working together, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Their first novel as Corey, the wide-screen space opera Leviathan Wakes, the first in the Expanse series, was released in 2010 to wide acclaim, and was followed in 2012 with a new Expanse novel, Caliban’s War. Coming up is another Expanse novel, Abaddon’s Gate.
Daniel Abraham lives with his wife in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he is director of technical support at a local Internet service provider. Starting off his career in short fiction, he made sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, The Infinite Matrix, Vanishing Acts, The Silver Web, Bones of the World, The Dark, Wild Cards, and elsewhere, some of which appeared in his first collection, Leviathan Wept and Other Stories. Turning to novels, he made several sales in rapid succession, including the books of The Long Price Quartet, which consist of A Shadow in Summer, A Betrayal in Winter, An Autumn War, and The Price of Spring. At the moment, he’s published the first two volumes in his new series, The Dagger and the Coin, which consists of The Dragon’s Path and The King’s Blood. He also wrote Hunter’s Run, a collaborative novel with George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, and, as M. L. N. Hanover, the four-volume paranormal romance series Black Sun’s Daughter.
Ty Franck was born in Portland, Oregon, and has had nearly every job known to man, including a variety of fast-food jobs, rock-quarry grunt, newspaper reporter, radio advertising salesman, composite-materials fabricator, director of operations for a computer manufacturing firm, and part owner of an accounting-software consulting firm. He is currently the personal assistant to fellow writer George R. R. Martin, where he makes coffee, runs to the post office, and argues about what constitutes good writing. He mostly loses.
In the tense story that follows, they show us that “honor” can mean many different things to many different people—and to nonpeople too.
A Man Without Honor
JAMES S. A. COREY
For the exclusive eyes of George Louis, by the Grace of God King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland30 September 172–Your Majesty, I was once an honorable man.
I do not wish at this late date to recount the circumstances under which Governor Smith revoked my Letter of Marque, nor the deceptions by which I was then forced to choose between my loyalty to the crown or my honor as a gentleman. I made my choices then, and I have accepted the consequences of them. For the greater part of a decade, I have led my crew through Caribbean waters, the forces of personal loyalty, despair, and rude vengeance changing me as a caterpillar in its chrysalis into the debased, cruel, and black-hearted man that I was accused of being long before it was true. I have sunk a dozen ships. I have ransomed members of your own family. I have taken what was not mine by right but by necessity. I have no doubt that you have heard my name spoken in tones of condemnation, and rightly so, for I have made that original calumny true a hundred times over. Nor shall I pretend any deep regret for this. My loyalty and care were rewarded with betrayal, and though it be a defect of my soul, such a trust once broken with me can never be mended.
I have likewise no doubt that on this, the occasion of Governor Smith’s death, some part of the credit or blame for his demise might be attributed to me. I write to you now not to ask pardon for that which I have done or defend myself against accusations of which I am innocent. It is my sole hope that you shall read my words and through them understand better the circumstances of the governor’s death and my own role in it. I only ask that as you read this you bear in mind these two things: I swear before God that, though he had earned my vengeance a thousand times over, it was not my hand that slew the governor, and that I was once an honorable man.
Picture, then, my ship, the Dominic of Osma, as she rode upon the August waves. A hurricane had assaulted the coast three days earlier, and water and air held the serenity that only comes after such a storm or before it. The sun shone with a debilitating heat, looking down upon our poor sinners’ heads like the eye of an unforgiving God or else His counterpart, and we rode upon a sea whose blue echoed the sky. I recall feeling a profound peace as we moved between these two matchless vastnesses. I had a hold stocked with salt pork, freshwater, limes, and rum. I had a crew of men whose loyalty and ability I had reason to trust. We might have spent weeks upon the sea without sighting land or fellow vessel before I felt the first pang of anxiety.
But that was not to be.
Quohog was the first man to sight the doomed ship, and his barbaric yawp sounded down from the crow’s nest. In his accent, one of the oddest I have heard in the widely traveled Carib, the call of Ship ahoy! sounded more Zeeah loy and his further report of smoke as Awch. For those of us who had shipped with him, there could be no doubt as to the meaning of his garble, but as to the intent of it, I believe we all hesitated. Quohog had a well-earned reputation as a man who enjoyed a good joke, and none of us, myself included, would have been surprised if he had invented the sighting for the sheer joy of looking down at the deck and watching us scatter. So it was that I made no order to change our sail until I could, with spyglass in hand, climb aloft and confirm the existence of this improbable ship.
She was a merchant fluyt, that was clear, and she rode low in the water. Sails once proud hung ragged from her arms, and smoke rose from her. The gunports were open, and her half dozen cannon stood openmouthed and unmanned. She flew the tattered flag of Denmark, and her rail and sides were splintered and burned. In retrospect, I believe it was the burning that led me astray, for I had seen the leavings of many battles at sea, and I had never seen scorching of that kind from a weapon of man. I assumed instead that I was looking upon a lightning-struck ship that had through ill chance or malice been caught in the open sea during the tempest just passed. Such easy prizes were rare but not unheard of, and with pleasure at our good fortune, I called the man at the wheel to turn us in pursuit.