Beyond the door was a tunnel, hewn, like the air lock, from the solid rock, lit every ten paces by a small lamp inset in the ceiling. Fifty paces brought them to a second door, studded like the outer doors, a wheel lock obtruding from its center. Directly overhead a vent went up into the dark. Ebert looked up, hearing movement. A guard, he thought. It was where he himself would have put a guard, anyway. Beyond the door was a big, low-ceilinged room, broad pillars giving it the appearance of an ancient crypt. Four steps led down. To the right were full-length lockers, to the left, long trestle tables and benches. Surprisingly, the room was empty.
Ebert stepped down, then looked across at his companion, watching, as he undipped the latches on his helmet, then twisted it and lifted it up over his head.
“Welcome to Hellespont, Shih Ebert,” the man said, turning to face Ebert. “My name is Echewa, Chief Aluko Echewa, of the Osu.” He smiled, his teeth like polished stones in the blackness of his face. “And, yes, I’m real, if that’s what you’re thinking. But come, we’ve an hour or more before your prisoner gets here. Let me get you something to eat. I’m sure you’re hungry after your flight.”
Ebert stared, unable to believe what he was seeing. The black man’s nose was broad, almost flat, his mouth large, the lips well formed. As for his skull, that was shaved and polished, like a piece of carved ivory. Ebert let out his breath. There had been rumors, of course. And there were those lines in Kan Jiang’s poem “Into the Dark” that had always haunted him. But to see it...
Echewa laughed. “Well? Are you hungry, man, or not?” “I’m hungry,” Ebert said, removing his helmet and setting it under his arm. “But tell me, Aluko Echewa, just what in the gods’ names is this place?”
Echewa had begun to turn away, but at Ebert’s words he turned back, then came across, facing Ebert, his shockingly white eyes suddenly intent. “The gods? No. Let me make it clear, Shih Ebert. We have only one god here, and that is Mother Sky. Whatever else you say, we’ll let it pass, but do not offend our god. You understand me?”
“I understand.”
Echewa relaxed, smiled. “Good. Then come. Let us eat. And maybe I’ll tell you of the osu and of how we came to live here under Mother Sky.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Punishment of Heaven
The storm had abated shortly after nightfall. An hour back a second craft had come from out of the darkness to the north, a big security cruiser, its hold crammed with supplies for the settlement. Supplies and a single prisoner.
Ebert had stood on the rocks overlooking the entrance to the settlement, Echewa crouched beside him, watching as two guards dragged her from the interior of the craft. He had known it was a she only because Echewa had said it was. But that was all Echewa had known. All he’d wanted to know. “Why do you work for him?” Ebert had asked.
Echewa had turned and looked up at him, the tinted visor hiding his face. “We don’t work for him. But he did us a favor once, long ago. This is in settlement of that. A debt of honor.”
“But the supplies . . . ?”
Echewa had turned back, watching them unload. “The supplies are not what you think, Hans Ebert. They are paid for fully. It is as I said. A debt of honor. Once paid, we will no longer be beholden to your friend. We shall be free men again.”
Free men—those words returned to him now as he squatted, alone on the rocks, looking out across the desert to the north. It was like an ocean, a great, dark ocean, its edges scattered with the jagged teeth of rocks, thrusting up above the wavelike dunes. The sight of it reminded him of a time when, as a child, he had stood beside his father, back on Chung Kuo, watching the waves of the great Atlantic break against a rock-strewn beach. At the time it had terrified him and he had clung, screaming, to his father’s leg, while his father had roared with laughter and thrown a stone far out into the incoming tide. Free men . . . Yes, yet when had he ever been free? When—in all the twenty-nine years of his life—had he not been beholden to someone? His father. Li Yuan. DeVore. Each one had taken him and used him. And all the while he’d thought his life his own. But it had never been his own. Life had been a great tide, rushing in and overpowering him. All his life he had been too weak, too governed by his own desires, to stand against that tide and shape his own destiny. But finally he understood. Finally he could make that choice: to continue as he was, or to become a new man, free of the old patterns of his being.
For some men it was easier. Echewa, for instance. For him the choice had been made at birth, for he was osu, an outcast—a black man in a world that did not permit the existence of black men. When the Han had come to Mars, his father’s fathers had fled into the desert, knowing there was no place for them in the Cities of the Han. They had become Osu, the lost tribe of Mars, the dwellers in the quiet places. Mother Sky had become their god. That last he had not understood, for like the poet Kan Jiang, he found no call within himself for gods. No. If the world made any sense at all, it was not because some godlike being directed it, even a god as amorphous and all encompassing as Echewa’s, but because it had beauty and order and laws unrelated to men and their notion of gods. Men . . . Some days he felt that Mankind was merely a distraction from the real business of the universe, a petty sideshow.
It was like what was happening just now to Mars. What was that but a brief convulsion, a sickening in the body politic? Let the Cities burn, he thought. Let it all pass. It made no difference. Here, amid this bitter cold, was true reality. Here, unexpectedly, was a beauty that took his breath. He leaned back, looking up at the star-dusted darkness. Earlier, through Echewa’s glasses, he had focused on the distant horizon, watching as Phobos sped from west to east while, several degrees higher in the sky, tiny Deimos slowly drifted east. Beyond both, its sunlit face like a bright hole burning in the darkness of the sky, sat the planet of his birth, Chung Kuo.
Chung Kuo. That, too, would pass. And still the stars would blaze in the darkness.
He breathed shallowly, conscious suddenly of the hum of the heater in his pressure suit as it struggled to combat the cold. It was minus one hundred and eighteen degrees and falling. In two hours it would be dawn, the coldest time of day on Mars.
“Shih Ebert...”
He turned, looking up at the figure that had appeared, as if from the air, on the rocks behind him. It was Echewa.
“You must come in now. It is dangerous to be out here so long. Besides, you have come a long way. You must rest.” Ebert stood, feeling a tiredness, a stiffness in his limbs. “The night is beautiful, neh?” he said, turning slowly, taking in the vast panorama of the stars.
Echewa looked up, nodding. “The night is our mother. She comforts us. She tells us who we are.”
“And the day?” he asked, curious. “Is the day your father, Aluko Echewa?” Echewa shook his head. “I thought you understood, Hans Ebert. We have no father. Mother sky is all. We live, we die, beneath her. She sees all. Even the darkness deep within us.”
Ebert stood there a moment, considering, then shook himself. “There’s one thing I don’t understand, Aluko, and that’s why I’m here at all. The prisoner—she’s perfectly safe here. If she ran, where would she run to? So why am I needed?”
Echewa shrugged. “Perhaps it is your fate.” “My fate?” Ebert laughed. “What has fate to do with the schemes of our friend DeVore? No, there’s a reason for this, don’t you think? Some dirty work involved that he doesn’t want his own hands stained with.” He stared at the Osu, expecting an answer, but Echewa was silent. “Well, whatever. . . But I tell you this, Aluko Echewa: I am no friend to Howard DeVore. Unlike you I owe the man no debt of honor.” “And yet you serve him. I find that strange.”