Johann stood nearby, thumbs stuck in his harness belt, admiring Nova as she laughed and kissed the welcoming throng. From time to time I felt him eyeing me and at last our eyes met.
He nodded his head toward Nova. “She certainly grew up fast and fine.” I agreed, waiting impatiently for her to return to me. Johann dug into one of his zippered pockets and pulled out a pouch, offering me a pinch of what I recognized as Cannabis sativa Ares III, which was fantastically expensive on Earth. I shook my head and thanked him. I intended to keep all my original impressions clear. Time enough to stretch my senses when I wished to explore other aspects of this world. Two slightly drunken men in pale blue warmsuits were carrying Nova around on their shoulders and she was yelling at them happily. On the backs of their warmsuits there was stitched a large red sunburst with a golden apple in the center.
I ignored Johann’s continued inspection of me, and I don’t think even Raeburn’s computers ever dissected me more deeply. I simply waited until Nova would be “mine” again, though I may not have waited with very good grace. Jealousy was a surprising emotion and I resented being surprised.
Finally Nova writhed back down to the ground and broke free, running to me, flushed and happy. She pulled me forward to introduce me to a group of what the vidtabs are fond of calling Nuvomartians. They were none too enthusiastic, especially with Nova hanging on my arm, but they restricted their reaction to glances among themselves. I shook hands with Iceberg Eddie, D’Mico, Endrace, Big Ivan, and Little Ivan. I had my hand mauled by Kum Ling, Jalisco, and a hulking solemn brute named—or perhaps engraved—Aleksandrovich. There were others, and latecomers, the names all in a muddle, some happy, some resentful, some undecided, some sour, but most of them civil enough in welcoming me.
As everyone was going back through the lock in bunches I lost Nova to the newest group and found myself flanked by Johann and Endrace.
“What do you think of Mars so far?” Endrace asked me.
“I’m not certain I’m welcome,” I said.
“Oh, hell, don’t you worry too much,” Endrace said. “If Nova decided on one of us there would be fifteen sanders who might figure he wasn’t good enough for her and sandplug him some dark night. But an outsider, well, you’re not one of us so we don’t have to fight each other.”
“Just me, huh?” He grinned at me and we passed into the lock, which was needed only to hold the slightly higher Earth-norm pressure inside. “But you might lose Nova to an outsider.”
“Hell, amigo, she’s the Princess of Mars, didn’t you know that?
No sandblasted rock grubber is good enough for her, anyway. Just got to be some visiting prince or other, in the end.”
“Has she been hearing that Princess of Mars stuff since she was a child, from all of you?”
“It seems that way. Her daddy started calling her Princess, the way fathers do, I guess, and it sort of spread, her being so damned pretty and all. She was always really bright and everyone was only too happy to show her stuff, take her places. It just sort of became her way, you know? It keeps most of these hardrock diggers from getting out of line. But if one of them ever did act a bit zongo toward her, there would always be four or five of us willing to converse with him about the error of his ways.”
I stepped out of the lock and felt the higher pressure. I looked at Johann and asked, “Will there be four or five of you coming to have a talk with me some moonless night?”
He grinned and Endrace grinned. “Hardly without a moon up there, compadre, but not much moonlight.” He scratched his jawline and he and Endrace exchanged looks. Johann looked back at me and his grin sort of melted away, into another sort of smile. “I don’t just know yet what we might have to talk to you about.”
The others were already ahead of us, strung out through the streets that curved around the inner domes and other structures. Overhead was the big geodesic main dome, and through the milky, sandblasted triangles I could see the adjoining domes. Already we were being joined by more of the citizens of the Martian capital city, some sober, some not. They surrounded the new nurses and other ladies and some even talked to a few of the men. The Marines were collected by an officer and reluctantly left us.
Johann pointed out some of the local sights—Fosatti’s Emporium, the Sword and Shield Pub, the Grand Martian Hotel, the Royal Bar, and Cluster’s. I kept trying to catch up with Nova, or at least keep her in sight.
But the sights of Mars kept getting my attention, little things as well as big. There were sandslab walls, rough and uneven, slightly shiny from the plastic that had been pressure-impregnated into them, and the fine mica flakes. These formed many of the topless, flatsided structures within the dome. The inner domes, most with airlocks for safety, were the standard rockfoam construction.
Some of the walls were laser-cut from harder rock, and here and there, imbedded in the sandstone, were museum-quality artifacts, fossils, and sliced rosestones. I saw several weathered carvings in deeper pink and dusty red, as blurred as old coins, alien and indecipherable. But, of course, everything Martian was of museum quality simply because of its novelty and rarity. We stopped momentarily at the Royal Bar; the backwall was a single massive slab of petrified fiber, carved with a convoluted design that could have been purely decorative, the Martians’ Eleven Commandments, a political ad, or a shopping list. It was beautiful, but unreadable.
I kept falling further behind diverted by these distractions. By the time I got to middome there was no one close to me, so I stopped to stare, the complete tourist. At the intersection of three narrow streets curving in around the oldest inner domes stood a pylon of ancient rock too big to transport back to Earth, even if the nuvomartians would allow it. It was an object familiar to almost every Earthling. I stopped in amazement, startled and delighted, although I had known it was here someplace.
I let the last of the celebrating miners and others go on down the street, their arms around the laughing nurses. Temporarily, I forgot Nova, for I had found the Colossus of Mars.
That’s what it is called, although it isn’t that big. Only five meters high, it gives the effect of something huge. It’s deep rust-red, its original form melted by time and weather. It stands like a huge shrouded figure, vaguely humanoid, vaguely alien, vaguely anything you care to read into it.
It just had to be a representation of an intelligent being, not an abstract carving or a natural formation. There was too much authority, too much “presence” for it to be anything but a portrait or an inspired representation of an ideal.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Nova was leaning against the light brown wall of a warmsuit factory, her hands behind her, watching me look at it.
“I thought you went with the others.” She shook her head and smiled. I looked up at the graceful spire of rock that had been carved, experts told us, twenty thousand years before the Egyptians raised Khufu’s pyramid. It graced the cover of half the books about Mars, in situ usually, with the thick walls of the Grand Hall behind it, half buried in drifting sand.