The ore carriers were basically the same, but with bigger control cabins and no personnel carriers at all, just the huge tank cars lumbering behind.
We headed toward the Russian base at Nabokov before dawn the next morning. We were soon into Ice Cream Park, where multicolored layers of bright rock ripple and roll, appearing and disappearing beneath the sand and rusty rock. It was a kind of brittle cold fairyland, with frosty confections of a fantastic nature popping up, writhing along the ground, then disappearing again, all as if in frantic motion but frozen solid for millions of years.
The last of the tutti-frutti goodies dipped under the surface, and we rolled on out onto the bleak Dioscuria Cydonia, as desolate a spot as exists this side of the northern Gobi. Not many transporters cared enough to meander on this morose landscape, and we drove resolutely ahead. Wootten, our driver, grinned thinly and called it Hawaiian Estates and kept his foot down on the accelerator.
It was a long way and I had plenty of time to think, either rolling in my bunk or staring at the barren land from my transparent topside dome. What I thought about was mostly Nova.
We had managed to be in our own private observation blister at changeover, when the ship turned around and began its long “backdown”
to Mars. It was weightless then and we tried out sex in a weightless condition, banging our knees and elbows and my head, until the warning light and communicator told us the torch was going to be lit. We disconnected and made it to the couches just before gravity returned again. About all either of us could say for weightless sex is that we did it, after a fashion, which is somewhat like saying, “We’ve been through the whole Kama Sutra!”
But for a month we had been lovers, and in a few minutes she had ripped it apart. It made me wonder just how much she did love me, if she made so little attempt to understand or could not take me on faith. Staring out at the drab plains and near-black sky I asked myself over and over, coming at it from different points, “Do you really want her?” The very things that made her attractive to me also irritated me; her unpredictability, her sudden shifts of mood, her perceptions kept me from being bored with her . . . and drove me crazy at times. An incident, years old, popped into my head. Barlow’s party atop the new floating airport on Lake Michigan. My companion that evening was Wyoming Magnum, the stunningly beautiful new Universal-Metro star of Frankenstein on the Moon. Sleepy-eyed, incredibly voluptuous, satin-smooth, gowned by Lafayette, jeweled by Cartier, the much publicized Borgia ring on her finger, her makeup perfect, her red hair a castle studded with pearls, the rise and fall of her almost completely revealed bosom the focus of every male eye. Warner joined me, talking to me, but his eyes on the almost-inhuman beauty nearby. “You lucky bastard,” he said with feeling. But I had been bored with her for close to fifteen hours. I had been on time, but it was two hours before she emerged, perfect and untouchable. I, too, had been stunned, and had spent the next two hours ruining her perfection in bed, arising at last feeling as if I had somehow managed a glorious masturbation. Then I waited another two hours while she put everything together again.
“I’ll trade her for an option on that Western Algae property,” I said. He looked at me, then laughed. “I mean it, Gordon,” I said. He jumped at the chance. She went home with him as easily as she had gone with me at the studio’s request.
I believe Gordon ended up marrying Wyoming and hating me. But I made close to a million on the West-Algae land, and while money is only money, it’s better than Wyoming Magnum, the jolly inflatable toy. She bored me, not because she was beautiful, or because she kept me waiting, but because that was all she was, just beautiful. I wanted another Madelon, another . . . no, not another Nova . . . I wanted Nova because she was . . . Nova. She was not something made by the quad in vats, not something sleek and vinyl, differing only by a serial number. Nabokov lies in the curve of a big crater in the Mare Acidalium, or Sea of Lenin as they have come to call it. The area was rich in tungsten, titanium and other valuable elements, but very short on natural beauty. The mines dominated the area, with the excavated soil heaped into hillocks. We trundled in past the accelerators and to the bubble complex.
There is something eternally schizoid about the Russian. Meet him man-to-man and he’s friendly, gregarious, outgoing. Give him a uniform or mention politics and he’s Gregor Glum, officious and fussy. He goes all suspicious and starts imagining nefarious plots at the drop of a rubber stamp or the least word of criticism.
I never liked drinking with Russians because I usually lost. I didn’t like doing business with them because it was never just business, it was always bartering and politics and abrupt changes of direction. Here at Nabokov they were on their best behavior in the
“official” ranks, although Wootten went off and got blasted with some of his buddies from the Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev Number Two and said he had a fine time and tumbled a buxom daughter of the steppes. It appeared that “the word” had gone ahead, bounced off the satellite, that one of the ace reporters of Publitex was on his way; I got an A-One reception, packed full of speeches and Instant Boredom. I excused myself as soon as seemed possible, but two hours short of the goal they had set for me, I’m sure. I went off to bed and thought about cool mountain springs and skies that were blue at noon instead of near-black. What I dreamed about was Nova, golden and naked, long black hair spreading in the waters of a brilliantly aqua lagoon . . . Marsport was almost directly east, just above the edge of Mare Boreum. It was wide and wild across here, with a few rills, but previous transporters had blasted down a few ridges and filled in some of the deeper gulleys and we rolled on very quickly.
There’s something amusing about Marsport, or the idea of Marsport. It’s not much of a place, only four middle-sized domes and a few connecting zome structures. It sits midway between the old ruins and the open pit Princess Aura mines. The citizens of Marsport take the inevitable kidding in good grace and then turn the tables on you by inventing “local customs” that are strictly adhered to (for example, the first three rounds are on the visitors—and the last three). There’s the Raygun Ranch Saloon, the Flash Gorden Hotel, Ming the Merciless Cafe and Dale Arden’s, which is a sort of general store. Next to the Planet-wreckers Bar & Grill is the Mongo Assay Office. They called the local beer “xeno” and drank a lot of it. I asked them what they made it from and was told I shouldn’t ask; then they told me sunbuds, which sounds fine but turns out to be a sort of sickly gray-green lichen, only fatter.
Marsport was the halfway point on our grand tour, and Wootten let me off for a couple of hours while he did some servicing and checking. I borrowed a sandcat from a prospector in from Tracus Albus with a busted wrist and drove north a couple of kilometers to The Tomb. Archaeologists have carefully opened the crypts and found nothing of value, not even bones, only a little calcium dust. Apparently the Martians did not, like so many Earth cultures, bury their dead with everything they might need in the afterlife. Either they didn’t believe in one, or they didn’t think you could take it with you.