I was also alone.
Ironically, the people who rescued me were another guide and the family from Minneapolis whom he’d escorted into the desert just outside Rio Zephyria. I remember little of what happened after I collapsed at their feet and had to be carried to the guide’s Land Rover. The only things I clearly recall were the sweet taste of water within my parched mouth, a teenage girl gazing down at me with angelic blue eyes as she cradled my head in her lap, and the long, bouncing ride back into the city.
I was still in my hospital bed when the police came to see me. By then, I’d recovered enough to give them a clear and reasonably plausible account of what had happened. Like any successful lie, this one was firmly grounded in truth. The violent haboob that suddenly came upon us in the desert hills. The crash that happened when, blinded by wind-driven sand, I’d collided with a boulder, causing my jeep to topple over. How Dr. al-Baz and I had escaped from the wreckage, only to lose track of each other. How only I had managed to find shelter in the leeside of a pinnacle. The professor’s becoming lost in the storm, never to be seen again.
All true, every word of it. All I had to do was leave out a few facts, such as how I’d deliberately driven into the desert even though I knew that a haboob was on its way, or that even after we saw the scarlet haze rising above the western horizon, I’d insisted upon continuing to drive south, telling Dr. al-Baz that we’d be able to outrun the storm. The cops never learned that I’d been careful to carry with me a pair of sand goggles and a scarf, but refrained from making sure that the professor took the same precautions. Nor did they need to know that I’d deliberately aimed for that boulder even though I could have easily avoided it.
I broke down when I spoke about how I’d heard Omar al-Baz calling my name, desperately trying to find me even as the air was filled with stinging red sand and visibility was reduced to only arm’s length. That much, too, was true. What I didn’t say was that Dr. al-Baz had come within three meters of where I was huddled, my eyes covered by goggles and a scarf wrapped around the lower part of my face. And yet I remained silent as I watched his indistinct form lurch past me, arms blindly thrust out before him, slowly suffocating as sand filled his nose and throat.
My tears were honest. I liked the professor. But his knowledge made him too dangerous to live.
As an alibi, my story worked. When a search party went out into the desert, they located my overturned jeep. Omar al-Baz’s body was found about fifteen meters away, facedown and covered by several centimeters of sand. Our footprints had been erased by the wind, of course, so there was no way of telling how close the professor had been to me.
That settled any doubts the cops might have had. Dr. al-Baz’s death was an accident. I had no motive for killing him, nor was there any evidence of foul play. If I was guilty of anything, it was only reckless and foolish behavior. My professional reputation was tarnished, but that was about it. The investigation was officially concluded the day I was released from the hospital. By then, I’d realized two things. The first was that I would get away with murder. The second was that my crime was far from perfect.
Dr. al-Baz hadn’t taken the chieftain’s blood specimen with him when he’d left the hotel. It was still in his room, along with all his equipment. This included the computers he’d used to analyze the sample; the results were saved in their memories, along with any notes he might have written. In fact, the only thing the professor had brought with him was his room key … which I’d neglected to retrieve from his body.
I couldn’t return to his hotel room; any effort to get in would have aroused suspicion. All I could do was watch from the hotel lobby as, a couple of days later, the bellhops wheeled out a cart carrying the repacked equipment cases, bound for the spaceport and the shuttle, which would ferry them to a marsliner docked at Deimos Station. In a few months, the professor’s stuff would be back in the hands of his fellow faculty members. They would open the digital files and inspect what their late colleague had learned, and examine the blood specimen he’d collected. And then …
Well. We’ll just have to see, won’t we?
So now I sit alone in my neighborhood bar, where I drink and wait for the storm to come. And I never go into the desert anymore.
MATTHEW HUGHES
Matthew Hughes was born in Liverpool, England, but has spent most of his adult life in Canada. He worked as a journalist, as a staff speechwriter for the Canadian Ministers of Justice and Environment, and as a freelance corporate and political speechwriter in British Columbia before settling down to write fiction full-time. Clearly strongly influenced by Jack Vance, as an author Hughes has made his reputation detailing the adventures of rogues like Old Earth’s master criminal Luff Imbry, who lives in the era just before that of The Dying Earth, in a series of novels and novellas that include Fools Errant, Fool Me Twice, Black Brillion, Majestrum, Hespira, The Spiral Labyrinth, Template, Quartet and Triptych, The Yellow Cabochon, The Other, and The Commons, and short-story collections The Gist Hunter and Other Stories, 9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn, and The Meaning of Luff and Other Stories. His most recent books are the novels in his urban fantasy trilogy, To Hell and Back: The Damned Busters, Costume Not Included, and Hell to Pay. He also writes crime fiction as Matt Hughes and media tie-in novels as Hugh Matthews.
In the autumnal story that follows, he shows us that everyone sees the Mars that they want to see—and perhaps gets the Mars that they deserve.
The Ugly Duckling
MATTHEW HUGHES
IT TOOK FRED MATHER THE BETTER PART OF AN HOUR TO drive over the blue hills that stood between the base camp and the bone city. At the highest point of the switchbacking ancient road of crushed white stone, the thin Martian air grew even thinner. He had to take long, slow breaths to fill his lungs, while dark spots danced at the edges of his vision and he worried about steering the New Ares Mining Corporation’s jeep over one of the precipices.
He could have gotten there more quickly—and more safely—by paralleling the dried-up canal down to the glass-floored sea. Then he could have plowed fifteen miles through its carpeting dust to the promontory girdled by a seawall that had not felt a wave’s slap in ten thousand years. The towers of the dead Martian town stood like an abandoned, unsolved chess puzzle, white against the faded sky.
The road at the landward end of the town was lined on either side by low, squat structures, windowless but with arched doors of weathered bronze. He was just wondering if they might be tombs—nobody knew yet what the Martians had done with their dead—when the hand radio on the passenger seat squawked and Red Bowman’s voice said, “Base to Mather, over.”
He picked up the set, keyed the mike switch, and said, “Mather, over.”
“How you coming?” said the crew chief. Mather thought he heard a note of suspicion in the man’s voice.
“I’m just pulling into the town now.”
There was a silence, then the radio said, “The hell you been playing at? You should’ve been there an hour already.”
“I took the hill road.”
“What the hell for?”
“I thought it might be quicker. It looked shorter on the map.” Mather was lying. The reason he hadn’t gone by the canal road was that he hadn’t wanted to meet any other traffic. He had wanted, for a little while at least, to be able to pretend that he was the only Earthman on Mars instead of just the only archaeologist.