“Naw, some dinky sheepskin factory in the Urals. Sverdiosk, I think.”
“Isn’t that where Menshikov came from?”
“Now there was a Russian what am a Russian! Do you remember the time he—”
And they were off in Memory Lane. I rubbed my leg. It hurt like hell, and I was having a hard time slowing my heart down. I took two mugs of almajara and soon was feeling no pain.
That’s the way Nova found me, sprawled in a chair with a bare-breasted wench of uncertain name on my lap and a tableful of equally drunk men around me. The pile of credits I had put on the table had dwindled considerably in the last hour.
I looked up and there she was. I focused on her, then refocused, and kept trying. “Nova!” I said. The others echoed me and Banning, my big scarred buddy Banning, swept her into his lap, but she struggled free.
“Wheaten dead, Antonio with a smashed knee, and now Nikolai with a broken jaw!”
I waved my hand. Somehow it ended up on What’s-her-name’s breast. “Yup. That’s about it. Kuh, oops, ku-clean sweep, honey. Yessir. Best damn fight I ever had.” We all laughed at that, except Nova.
“And I thought you were . . . ohhh!” She turned and pushed her way through the mob, slapping at outstretched hands with very unladylike karate chops.
“Boy loses girl,” I said. “But don’t you worry,” I said into What’s-her-name’s breasts, “everything will come out all right.”
About the only thing that came out that night was my dinner and parts of lunch.
When I woke up the next day I found out why they called it top-pop. I hurt, I limped, and I was sore all over. And I must have done something with What’s-her-name. Getting dressed it seemed faintly astonishing I was alive. When I got downstairs I found Nova had gone off to Bradbury, a thousand kilometers away, with the cargo train of goods from the Balboa.
Johann found me leaning against the front of the Inn, wondering if I should die there or in the street. He laughed and took me back inside to stuff me full of vitamins, and something they jokingly called “Cork.”
“This’ll keep your brain inside your skull,” he said.
About an hour later I decided to go on living and rejoin the human race, providing it wanted me. By lunchtime I was well enough to rent a small sandcat and unpack my warmsuit and breather. I intended to see the Ruins.
I took no one with me. This was something I wanted to see alone. A beeper would guide me back, and it wasn’t all that far anyway. I headed west, feeling quite good, considering. I passed the cannibalized wreck of a sandcat, but that was the only sign humans had ever been there, except for the tracks.
Fifty kilometers out I came up over a rise and there it was. I saw that the rise was the softened edge of a vast crater, but out in the center was the Grand Hall. It looked like a tumbled mass of half-buried rocks, but it was the accepted center of the ancient Martian race. The Ruins were bigger and more complex than any yet found, but even so they did not cover much more than a few city blocks. Either there had not been so many Martians or the rest of their structures were considerably less durable.
I put the cat in gear and went down the slope, my eyes on the ancient rubble, three kilometers away. There were a few sandcat tracks, but they were all old and windblown. Mars did not have much of a tourist trade as yet, and for that I was grateful. I wanted to be alone. Like much of Mars and all of Luna the feeling of déjà vu comes often to the visitor. In “God of Mars” there had been the eerie Wargod Symphony in the air. In fanciful fiction there were always “strange vibrations” or “the call of the ancient dead” or some such rot. All I heard was the purr of the motor and the hiss and rush of sand falling off the treads.
All I admit hearing, that is.
The great blocks of pink and rose and rust formed themselves into complex structures, open-topped, ruined, melted away in the icy winds and carried off by the abrasive sandstorms of the millenia. Most of one dome had fallen, but the arch next to it stood. I parked the sandcat outside and walked in through the Sungate.
Maybe I could hear the whispers of the ancients or the first bars of Wargod.
As I walked into the first vast courtyard the sound of the slight wind behind me was cut off and it was very quiet. I heard my boots crunch in the sand drifts and I stopped.
Silence.
Twenty-five millennia of silence. Covered and uncovered a hundred times by the sand. A dead city. A dead world. But it had lived once and it would live again.
I knew which way the Great Hall lay but took the other direction. I walked down wide streets and cut through fallen walls. I found where Evans had excavated to the point where the stones were relatively unweathered and proved that they had once been so finely honed together they shamed the magnificent Inca walls of Machu Picchu. But the centuries had eaten at the joins, deepening them, digging at their perfection until the individual stones stood out boldly, each carved away from its neighbors.
I stepped around a fallen column and suddenly there was the Little Palace, a near-perfect structure buried completely except for the minaretlike towers. I circled to where the Evans-Baker team had dug an opening, extracting the sand drifts from within and shoring up the roofs. The plastex sheets across the arch at the bottom of the slope were alien, intrusive, but quickly behind me as I went through the unlocked gate. My torch threw its beam into the blackness and I saw the foyer and halls and small rooms, each with its mosaics and carved designs. Here the weathering had been considerably less, but still only an instrument could have told whether that smooth-faced wall once held a painted mural. Anything less permanent than rock itself was smoothed away into oblivion.
I stood for a very long time looking at the hunting scene on the wall of the main room. What were those blurred beasts? Did they really have six legs, like John Carter’s thoats? I had to smile, but the smile faded when I saw a crisp yellow Kodak Sunpan box lying nearby. I picked it up and put the anachronism in my pocket. Sorry, I said to the ghosts.
I sat on a block for an even longer time scanning the delicate bas-relief in the room that has come to be called the Bedroom of the Little Prince. Was it a child’s room, with a fantasy mural of elves and winged mice and fairy queens? It could almost as easily have been a mural depicting some kind of Waterloo, with attacking armies and flying bat raiders. Almost. It did have a kind of delicacy, but what psychology might these aliens have had? We would never know. We don’t even know where the Maya went, or why, and that had been only a little before Columbus landed.
Gone, but not forgotten, I said to the ghosts. I went back out into the weak sunlight and along the Street of Heroes with its sculptured columns blurred into tall rosy lumps protruding from the sand. To my left was the Shell Dome, with the remnants of fossilized crustaceans embedded in the broken shards of dome. Further on to the right was the Treasury, where they had found so many beautiful pieces of what could only be jewelry. Nothing so extravagant as the so-called Royal Jewels of Ares from the Bradbury ruins, but wonderful to look upon and ponder.