Labyrinth of Night (6 page)

In ideal circumstances, this would have been a testament to international space cooperation. Indeed, the members of the Mars settlement had long since learned to disregard the matter of who contributed what. Boggs and Shimoda, in fact, refused to take official credit for ‘their’ discovery, pointing out that it was the
Viking
Imaging Team which had first located the Face in 1976 (a self-effacing statement which would later have dire repercussions). But on Earth, the sponsoring governments did not view matters in the same light. When Mars had been a way-station for further planetary exploration and its resources were considered nearly limitless, the US and the CIS, Japan and the Europeans were completely willing to share the wealth. But the City, the unexplored culture and technological artifacts of the aliens (nicknamed the ‘Cooties’ by Boggs, an appellation which was made to stick by the news media) was not seen to be part of the bargain.

Unfortunately, international space law had yet to evolve to cover exploration or salvage of extraterrestrial artifacts. The closest applicable document, ‘The Protocol for the Sending of Communications to Extraterrestrial Intelligence’, which had been drafted by SETI scientists in the late 1980s and proposed to the Outer Space Affairs Division of the United Nations, did not cover the remote contingency of someone actually
finding
alien artifacts, and most legal scholars agreed that terrestrial maritime law did not apply to the salvage of non-terrestrial objects. Thus, there was no practicable legal recourse: the City seemed to be up for grabs, but by whose hands?

To make matters more complicated, American Politics had taken one of its periodic swings to the right, particularly in regard to American-Russian relations. Having dragged itself from the verge of complete social and economic collapse during the early 1990s, the Commonwealth of Independent States had entered the free-market system with a vengeance in the early 21st century. Now strongly allied to the European Common Market countries, the CIS had become a strong world competitor in export machinery, agriculture, and cybernetics. As well, the newly-privatized Glavkosmos had become particularly innovative in space industry, with many of its spin-offs directly affecting the CIS’s revitalized industrial base. Although the United States had long since ceased to be the Commonwealth’s military and political rival, America found herself rivaled in the global marketplace by the CIS, in everything from wheat exports and popular films (the remake of
Battleship Potemkin
had taken the Oscar in 2028 and the action film
Six from Siberia
was breaking worldwide box-office records) to consumer cybernetics and automobiles, as demonstrated by the success of the new Zil 3000 solarcar.

Many pundits were already pronouncing the 21st century as the Russian Century, a slogan which didn’t sit well with those who had assumed that the new millennium would be a continuation of the American Century. The discovery of the City threatened to upset the pre-existent balance even further; if the alien necropolis yielded any important technological discoveries, then the unspoken conventional wisdom was that the nation which made those discoveries would be the primary beneficiary. The CIS was desperate to solidify its new foothold in the world marketplace and saw the City as a possible means to a greater end…and the United States, its principal economic rival, was equally desperate to make sure that the CIS didn’t grab that leading edge.

It now seemed to many Americans still suspicious of Russian motives as if the CIS was about to swipe a major scientific discovery from the hands of the United States. The Cooties and the City became a sore point for the man in the street. A national boycott of Russian products was begun by the Republican Party, and the archaic-sounding ‘Mars Is Not Red’ bumper-sticker began appearing on cars across the country.

The nationalistic backlash reached its peak in November, 2028, when the ultra-conservative George White was elected President. During his first State of the Union address to Congress, White alluded directly to the emerging American-Russian disagreement over the salvage rights to Cydonia artifacts (even though, as his critics pointed out, none had yet been discovered within the City). Referring to an ‘American manifest destiny in space,’ President White also made the highly dubious claim that the City belonged to the United States because it had first been spotted by an American space probe in 1976.

The Russian leadership in Minsk was furious with White’s rhetoric. President Andrei Nasanov, a Labor Party protectionist who took the traditional view that Russian space efforts constituted manifest destiny for his own country, struck back with an even more ludicrous claim that, because the old USSR had accomplished the first landing of a space probe on Mars in 1971, the red planet was rightfully Russian territory. All mention of the United Nations Space Treaty, which forbade national claims to heavenly bodies, was lost in the subsequent squabble.

If the City had been found to be merely a cluster of abandoned, empty dwellings, the feud might have eventually collapsed in the usual sullen name-calling between the economic superpowers. But then, for better or for worse, the Labyrinth was discovered…

A
N ABRUPT JAR
woke Cassidy from his doze. For a moment, he wondered if the lander had turned around and redocked with the
Shinseiki.
When the spearhead-shaped spacecraft had departed from the cycleship and commenced its final approach, Jessup had told him that it would take fifteen or twenty minutes until aerobraking and atmospheric entry.

Cassidy had taken the opportunity to close his eyes; the less he had to deal with zero-gee, the better he liked it. There was another hard bump and a slight fishtailing of the stern, like an airliner hitting turbulence at high altitude. No, he had not landed, and this was not something through which he could sleep.

He opened his eyes as he instinctively gripped the arms of his couch. In the forward cockpit, he saw first officer Massey’s head above the back of his acceleration couch. The varicolored lights of the instrument panels were overwhelmed by hot-pink light which surged through the narrow slit windows of the flight deck. ‘Are we there yet?’ he murmured.

‘Just hitting the upper atmosphere,’ Jessup said from the couch next to him. Cassidy glanced over at him; the NASA man looked as confident as a frequent-flyer businessman riding out a thunderstorm on a Chicago-to-New York shuttle. He peered at Cassidy. ‘How’re you doing there?’

‘Superb.’ Another swerving jar as if the lander had been drop-kicked. Cassidy felt his stomach curdle. ‘How much longer till we’re on the ground?’

‘Ten, maybe fifteen minutes,’ Massey said. The
Shinseiki’s
first officer didn’t look away from his controls; his hands gripped the yoke, his dark skin hued red by the light through the cockpit windows. ‘Altitude two-hundred-forty-four kilometers, entry angle fourteen-point one degrees, velocity about sixteen klicks per hour. Things will get bumpy for a few minutes when we hit Mach Two. Just relax and enjoy the ride.’

The lander skewed left-right-left-right again. ‘Bumpy?’ Cassidy asked. ‘Things will
get
bumpy?’ He let his head sag against the padded backrest of his couch, then decided that such indirect contact with the fuselage of the lander wasn’t so comforting after all. Atmospheric friction must be causing the outer hull to blister like Texas asphalt…but you don’t cruise down Route 82 at twice the speed of sound, nearly 800,000 feet above the ground.

Just considering it made his guts lurch. So don’t think about it, he told himself. Pretend it’s a roller coaster at Six Flags. Cassidy shut his eyes again and clutched the armrests, feeling a momentary respite, a little bit of calm. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out, as the fuselage shuddered and the deck jumped beneath his feet. It felt as if the lander were plummeting down an abyss a million miles deep.

Presently the violence subsided; for a few serene moments it seemed as if the tiny vessel were floating on an air-cushion, suspended in time and space. ‘L-minus six minutes,’ Massey reported. ‘UAMS off, coming up on main chute deployment in four minutes, twenty-two seconds…’

Much better now. There were still small tremors running through the hull, but nothing serious. He could hear Massey murmuring radio instructions into his headset mike. No sweat, dude. You can make it…

‘You still have that relief bag I gave you?’ Jessup asked abruptly.

Ben opened his eyes. Now there was a weak purple light suffusing the cockpit; everything in the spacecraft seemed to have been tinted with its lovely glow. The airline-style vomit bag was still beneath Cassidy’s right thigh; he had been sitting on it since the lander had undocked from the
Shinseiki.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think I…’

‘Velocity six hundred-fifty meters per second, altitude five kilometers,’ Massey said. ‘Chute deployment countdown. Five…four…three…’

He felt Jessup pull the folded bag out from under his ass and shove it into his right hand. ‘Get ready,’ Jessup said. ‘Drogue chutes first…’

Then the lander was grabbed by God’s own fist, wrenched into a vertical position and shaken angrily; the three drogue chutes had fired to brake the biconic spacecraft. A second later there was another hard yank as the main chutes opened, but by then Cassidy’s guts had given their final revolt.

He belched agonizingly and clawed at the bag. He barely managed to rip open its adhesive seal and plunge his face against the paper maw before he vomited like never before.

‘L-minus fifty seconds,’ Massey reported. ‘Velocity two-hundred-seven klicks, altitude one-point-five klicks. Main engine ignition in ten seconds. Coming up on touchdown at Cydonia Base. Welcome to Mars, gentlemen…’

Terrific. Cassidy hated the joint already.

Suspended beneath the giant main chutes, guided by short thrusts from the RCRs, the lander floated like a silver dandelion seed the last mile to Cydonia Base. At fifteen hundred feet, the chutes were jettisoned and the descent engines ignited to slow the craft for touchdown on the base’s landing pad, which was little more than a circle of sand near the habitat which had been cleared of boulders and large rocks.

Richard Jessup couldn’t see the base because the cockpit windows now faced skyward, but he could imagine what lay below: eleven modules arranged in a row and buried under the red topsoil, the vehicles parked nearby and, not far away, the quadrangle of ancient pyramids which was the Lost City of Mars…

The lost city of Mars.
He wondered how such a romantic term crept into his mind, and then remembered. The day the City had been found by the
Burroughs
survey team, a few of the boys from NASA headquarters had gone over to the Hawk and Dove, a favorite watering hole on nearby Capitol Hill for government pen-pushers. They had spent the better part of the night celebrating the discovery of ETI so close to Earth; in fact, Jessup had surrendered his car keys to the bartender and had taken a cab back to his place in Georgetown. It had been one of those evenings.

At one point during the festivities, someone who had read a lot of science fiction—it must have been old Joe Quinlan since he was the only one among them who touched the stuff—had mentioned an old pulp-era story written by Ray Bradbury and Leigh Brackett. ‘“
The Lost City of Mars
,”’ Joe had cackled as he reached for the third or fourth or fifth pitcher of beer which the bar girl had brought to their table.
‘Man oh man. If they were still around, we oughtta send ’em tickets to Mars just
b
ecause they outguessed us. Can you friggin’ believe it? A lost city on Mars…
’

Jessup smiled at the memory, then quickly shook his head. No. Cut it out. There was no time for science fiction dreams. He had to think of Steeple Chase first.

Mars would have to wait. He had a more important job in front of him.

Within a few minutes of touchdown on the landing pad, Jessup walked away from the spacecraft and headed for the half-buried cluster of modules. White mists of fuel were steaming from the lander’s vents; the ground crew was already moving in with fuel lines to drain the rest of the propellant from the tanks.

Behind him, Ben Cassidy was being helped down the ladder by Massey. Jessup told the musician to remain by the lander until someone came for him, and for once Cassidy appeared to be in no mood to argue; in fact, he seemed to be having trouble simply walking, taking tentative baby-steps in the lesser gravity. It was just as well, as far as Jessup was concerned; he was getting tired of Cassidy’s lip. He left the musician in Massey’s care and strode off, glad to be rid of his burden for a few minutes.

Two of the base’s co-supervisors, Miho Sasaki and Arthur Johnson, had been at the landing pad as a sort of informal reception committee. They now followed Jessup, all three clad in the lightweight Mylar skinsuits which had recently replaced the more cumbersome hardsuits of the first expeditions. The white fabric overgarments of their skinsuits were soiled with red dust, and every few seconds, short steamy-cold plumes of vapor vented from their backpacks: waste carbon-monoxide, expelled from the open-loop life-support systems which extracted oxygen from the native carbon-dioxide and fed into the skinsuits’ zero-prebreath environment. It rendered obsolete the frequent oxygen-tank rechargings of the older hardsuits, but it made everyone give off fumes as if they were old-style automobiles.

Sasaki and Johnson had been effusive in their greetings—quite understandably, as it had been almost ten months since the last cycleship lander had touched down at Cydonia Base—but Jessup had brusquely demanded that they accompany him to the habitat. He shut out the expressions of astonishment glimpsed through their helmet faceplates, just as he consciously excluded all other sensory input: the strange pull of lesser gravity, the crimson boulder-strewn landscape with its short horizon, the weird pink sky and the odd feeling that, if it wasn’t for the colors and the data on his heads-up display, this could all be a hot desert somewhere on Earth.

As they marched towards the habitat, Jessup paused to look at the City: four enormous, eroded stone pyramids, eerily reminiscent of the Egyptian pyramids at Giza, towering above the flat red landscape. The necropolis cast long late-afternoon shadows across the ground, their tips almost touching the habitat itself; even from here, he could see the cracks and fissures which ran across their flanks, the ravages time itself had made upon these living-rock hills which the aliens, through some undetermined means, had managed to carve into pyramids. Their sheer size was overwhelming; it almost caused the eye to play tricks upon itself, making it seem as if they were somehow miniaturized instead of hundreds of feet in height.