She glances, sees the coiling string of numbers, gives a little shudder. “Caretaker,” she says. “Must be his jumper.”
“They left caretakers behind?”
“Maybe. Hang onna’t.” She moves on. I follow. She’s slowed down a bit, as if she can’t find what she’s looking for.
“Do you mind my asking, again, maybe—have you been here before?”
“No,” she says.
“How do you know where to go, what to do?”
She answers, “My fat’er told me.”
“Was he ever here?”
“Na more questions.”
“We’re grateful, of course.”
“W’afor t’ey send you?” she asks as we walk. She points behind us to the rest of my squad.
“They’re concerned.”
“T’ey t’ink I like you?”
No words for another ten or twelve paces. Then, Teal says, with a short intake of breath, “Your soldiers han’t riven or forced. T’ey leave us be. I could guess it so. Flammarion lies on sa many t’ings.”
There’s a crater on Mars called Flammarion, also one on the Moon. They used to name craters after dead scientists. Flammarion was an astronomer some time ago, but what his or her namesake is doing here, or has done to Teal, or has told Teal about us, I can’t even guess.
On we move another couple of dozen paces.
“T’was tip time I left Green Camp,” Teal says. “Sa bad came a me. Ally Pecqua stole my widow’s due, and Idol Gargarel… He chose me a make t’ird gen with te Voors.”
“Third gen? Force you to have kids?” I don’t know anything about Voors. Another settlement, I guess. Trading females. Doesn’t sound appealing.
Teal looks sidewise, face cold in the faint blue light of the star bulbs—lost and cold and sad. I want to punch Ally what’s-the-name and Idle Gargle in their throats for making her sad.
Teal continues, “I stole te buggy and just drove away. Stealing transport is killing crime in te basin. You’re not te only ones in trouble on Mars.
“I’m not here a rescue you. You need a rescue me.”
NOT YOUR FATHER’S FUTURE
Sitting in the Eames chair, looking out at the early morning gray, I tap fingers on my knees. Reach into my pocket. Fumble with the platinum coin. Then I get up to pee. Wander into the kitchen. Open the refrigerator. Nothing looks good. Most of it has spoiled. No fresh veggies. Should have picked some up in the market. Not thinking. Not planning ahead.
Walking ghost, out of my box.
I drink a glass of water from the tap. Soon time a break and out, Teal would say.
Walk some more and sync my terrestrial compass. Take advantage of my liberty, with or without company. But I don’t want to. I don’t know what to do with what I know. Could be dangerous to tell anybody. Joe told me to stay away from MHAT. Maybe I shouldn’t even be here.
I can wallow in confusion and self-pity in the blue and steel apartment only so long before ape-shit darkness closes in and worse memories gibber and poke.
On top of the amazing, the good, and the awful that came after I acquired the coin, I have echoing in my head the jagged haunt of Teal’s own story, of high frontier injustice and a young woman’s flight, and how none of us could save her from the value of that primordial, metal-rich Drifter, nor from her betrayal of a hard ethic pushed way beyond the intent of the original Muskies.
Humans can be such shits.
A Skyrine shouldn’t tangle in matters that have nothing to do with why we fight. Shouldn’t invest in an outcome neither his own nor the war’s. Stay in the box. But last night’s fitful sleep, second night back—after a day spent in seclusion, squeezed into the leather chair, wrapped in soaking towels, seeping out through sweaty skin the last of the Cosmoline—staring out the window at the passing ships and ferries and pleasure boats, the pulse of Guru-motivated wealth and commerce, the whole, big, wide fidging world—
I heard echoes of Teal’s voice, her accent, her choice of words. What Teal said before she betrayed her people’s trust and led a wayward bunch of Skyrines to the Martian crown jewels:
You need a rescue me.
Despite everything, despite the Battle of Mars and our very real chances of losing the entire war, I can still hear her voice and believe, insist, that Teal is alive, can still be found, though I have no more power to return to Mars right now than one of those wheeling gulls.
Not unless I take another tour. Something I have vowed not to do. Something Joe would definitely discourage.
But there’s one thing I did vow. I promised Teal that I will deliver the platinum token.
I just don’t know to whom.
HOBOS AND DRIFTERS
The answer to where all the air comes from is a few hundred meters ahead, down a tunnel with many branches, most of them dark—no star lights. We don’t go there.
Teal breaks into a lope. I have difficulty keeping up. She knows how to push and kick away from both floor and ceiling in the lesser gravity, not so Mars-bound as to have lost her terrestrial strength. I have no idea how Muskies raise their daughters; maybe there’s universal Spartan discipline. The Green Camp big shots might insist their children train to become accomplished gymnasts. She sure moves like one.
Is her story, barely begun, a tale of patriarchal tragedy, rigorous discipline—or hypocrisy and cant, all Scarlet Letter and shit? I am truly both sympathetic and intrigued—but then I come up abruptly to where she stands on the edge of another shaft, actually a very large pit. I nearly bump into her. She blocks me with her outstretched arm, glaring at me yet again. Am I really that clumsy?
Beyond the rocky edge, a wide, echoing gloom fills with rising plumes of hot mist, fresh and moist and somehow electric. Slurps and the wet claps of bursting bubbles echo through the steam. Nothing like it in my experience on Mars. For the first time, I feel that I am actually smelling a living planet, not just the dusty shell around a fossil egg.
Teal backs us away a couple of steps. “Onced t’ey called t’is Devil’s Hole,” she says. “I didna know t’was so close.”
“Hot pools,” I say. “Not sulfurous. Clean, sweet.”
“T’ey wor sulfurous. Fat’er said you could not breat’ here a-t’out a special mask. And still, t’ere’s niter.” She leans and points to a patina of white crystals flecking the black stone arch. “First team here suffocated. Bad air seeped inna t’eir suits. Second team took better suits and dosed te deep pools wit’ oxyphores. Buggied in borax and potash from te farm flats, dropped oxidized dust and mine tailings inna pools. Oxyphores converted all into life, food—air.”
Oxyphores—the green dust?
“T’ird team dug more garages, brought depositors and printers, made machines, explosives—carved and blasted deep. Too deep, as ’Turn out. Cut a stony barrier right inna hobo. Flow fast, alive. Deep flood. You know a hobo, what t’at is, Master Sergeant Venn?”
“Not in your sense, I suspect.”
“Hesperian history. You learn geology in school?”
No need to tell all. “Fighting means knowing your ground.”
“Hobo should be spelled with double aitch, H2-obo. Means anTient underground lake or river flowing, sloshing, around volcanic chimneys and hard, rocky roots, seek an old familiar bed a run free, flood or carve more, t’en, as always, up t’ere, freeze, dry up—blow away. But keep a flow deep down, down here. No matter how t’ey dam and block, hobo kept breaking t’rough, flood entire. No need for sa much water, we already had enough from te soft lands. Te miners struggled a pump and get back a work. T’ey failed.