The Empress of Mars (4 page)

Mary didn’t need pots, of course; she could stonecast all the household vessels she needed out of Martian dust. What else was clay good for?

Sculpting things
, she thought to herself. Works of art? Useful bric-a-brac? Little tiles with “SOUVENIR OF MARS” stamped into them? Though Mary had no artistic talent herself, Manco had, and maybe one or two others of her people might, and then what if they could get the British Arean Company PX to take pieces on consignment? The Arean porcelain sold pretty well.

“What the hell,” Mary said, wiping her eyes, and standing up she righted the bucket and fetched a spade from the tool rack. She dug down a meter or so through the hardpan, gasping with effort even in the (comparatively) rich air, and filled the bucket with stiff chunks of clay. Then she put on her mask again and trudged home, lugging the latest hope for a few punts.

On Mary’s entry her shamefaced family resumed their various household chores as though they’d been hard at work ever since she’d left, and not standing around discussing the clan’s offer.

Mr. Morton came stalking up to her, knotting his fingers together.

“Er—ma’am, we’ve been talking, and—”

“Here, Mama, that’s too heavy for you,” said Manco, scuttling close and relieving her of the bucket. “You sit down, huh?”

“Very kind, I’m sure,” Mary said sourly, looking around. “I’ll bet not one of you started the oatmeal stout brewing like I asked, have you? Take that out to the ball mill,” she added to Manco, pointing at the bucket. “As long as we’ve got all this damned clay, let’s put it to good use and make something out of it.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Here, you sit down—” Mr. Morton gestured her toward a chair with flapping motions of his long arms.

“I can’t sit down! I have too much to do. Holy Mother, Alice, that heating unit should have been turned on an hour ago! Do I have to see to everything around here? And I want a word with you about that Wilson boy!”

“Water’s heating now, Mum,” Alice cried, running back from Tank Three.

“Well, but I wanted to tell you about our ideas—if it would be all right—” said Mr. Morton.

“I’m sure it will be when I’m not so busy, Mr. Morton,” said Mary, grabbing a pushbroom and going after the sand again. “Rowan, did you and Manco reinstall the filter the new way we discussed?”

“Yes, Mum, and—”

“See, I thought we might raise four thousand pounds easily if we put on a sort of cabaret in here,” Mr. Morton continued earnestly. “Like a dinner show? I could sing and do dramatic recitals, and—”

“What a very nice idea, Mr. Morton, and I’m sure I’ll think about it, but in the meanwhile I need you to get that sack of oats out of the storage locker.”

“And I thought I could do a striptease,” said Mona.

Three broom-pushes before the meaning sank in, and then:

“Striptease?” Mary shouted. “Are you mad? When the BAC already sees us as a cesspit of immorality and substance abuse? That’d really frost the cake!”

Mona pouted. “But you said when you were at university—”

“That was a long time ago, girl, and I needed the money, and—Mr. Skousen, put the damned holocam down! This is a private conversation!”

“And we need the money now! We
never
have any money!”

“Ladies, please—” said poor Mr. Morton, his face pink for once.

“The oats, Mr. Morton. Mona, you will keep your clothes on until you come of age and that’s all that will be said on the subject, do you understand?”

“What’s this?” said Manco, emerging from the utility area and holding out something in his hand. He had an odd look on his face. “This was in the bottom of the bucket. The clay cracked apart and—”

“It’s a rock,” said Mary, glancing at it. “Pitch it out.”

“I don’t think it’s a rock, Mama.”

“He’s right,” said Chiring, squinting at it. “It looks more like a crystal.”

“Then put it on the back bar with the fossils and we’ll ask one of the geologists about it. What was that?” Mary looked up suspiciously. “Who’s that? Who just threw up?”

“It was me,” said Alice miserably, emerging from behind the bar, and Rowan ran to her with a bar towel. Chiring swung the holocam her way.

Mary ground her teeth. “Food poisoning. Just what we all needed. That devil-worshipping looney—”

She started for the kitchen with blood in her eye, but was stopped in her tracks as Rowan said quietly: “It’s not food poisoning, Mum.”

Mary did an about-face, staring at her daughters. There was a profound moment of silence in which she continued staring, and the three men present wondered what was going on, until Alice wailed: “Well, I didn’t think you could
get
pregnant on Mars!”

“Was that what you were fighting about this morning, then?” Mary demanded, having marched Alice into the kitchen and ordered the Heretic out.

“We weren’t fighting,” said Alice. Mary ground her teeth. The girl was probably telling the truth; Alice spoke to most of her suitors as though they were idiots. Curiously enough, they always seemed to adore her for it; for a while at least.

“Is he the father, then?”

Alice shrugged. In the gloom of the kitchen her face bore an unsettling resemblance to her grandmother’s, perpetually offended. “I suppose. Who cares? It’s not like I’m having it anyway.”

“Yes, you bloody well are!” Mary fought back an urge to slap her. “Don’t you dare to stand there before the Goddess and tell me such a thing! You could have used a Happihealthy if you didn’t plan on catching, and why didn’t you, may I ask?”

“I only meant I’ll probably lose it,” said Alice hastily. “And as to why we didn’t use anything—we’re on
Mars
, remember? None of the women in Clan have ever been able to have babies up here. This place kills everything.”

“Well, it hasn’t killed
you
. As soon as the boy gets off his shift doing whatever it is he does, we’re all going straight out and filing a marriage declaration, my girl, do you hear me?”

“Mum!” Alice recoiled. “Like I’d ever marry Dunny! And he doesn’t work a shift, anyway. He’s only a freelancer. He works for the
Haulers
, of all people.”

Mary glared at her. The Haulers were fairly far down the social scale on Mars. “What’s he do then?”

“He works on the High Road project,” said Alice. “All he has to his name is his clothes and a Mahindra. Which he lives in. And you want me to raise a baby in a Mahindra cab, I suppose—”

“Don’t be stupid! You’ll all live here. Dunny, is that his name? I thought it was Wilson.”

“It’s Johnson. And anyway we’re not going to get married today, because he’s off to the Pole for weeks and weeks working on the High Road,” said Alice.

“And what a sweet good-bye you bid him, too. You have a heart of stone,” said Mary, pacing the kitchen in despair. Alice clenched her fists.

She muttered: “It’s not as though it’d last, anyway. Men always leave, Mum.
Your
dad left.”

Mary rounded on her. It was true enough: Mary had been at university when her father had announced he was fed up with her mother and was walking out, and that her mother was now her responsibility. Mary had found a job, and a smaller apartment, where she and her mother had lived in an uneasy state of truce until her mother had taken all those sleeping pills. Mary had buried her mother, found a still smaller apartment, and taken night courses until she’d got her doctorate in xenobotany.

“And what if he did walk out on us?” Mary retorted. “
Your
dad
didn’t
.”

Alice flushed and stared at the floor, just as she had done when Mary had come back from the hospice and tried to explain about the Blessed Isles.

“. . . And he’ll never hurt from the cancer anymore, you see? And we’ll miss him terribly, but he’ll be happy, and we should be glad for Daddy
,” Mary had told the little girl. Alice hadn’t said anything, but Mary had seen the rage building and building in her downcast eyes. She’d gone to her room and next day acted as though nothing had happened, chattering and playing. It wasn’t until a week later Mary had found Alice’s doll, Ian’s last present to his daughter, head down in the compost bin.

“Well, all the other men left,” said Alice now. “And anyway,
this
is all a lot of fuss about nothing. Deadly rays from space or something will do for it, you wait and see.”

Mary slapped her then.

So in all the excitement the crystal was stuck on the back bar and forgotten until that evening, when the Brick came in from his polar run.

The Brick was so named because he resembled one. Not only was he vast and tall and wide in his quilted Hauler’s psuit, he was the color of a brick as well, though what shade he might be under years of high-impact red dust was anybody’s guess. There was red grit between his teeth when he grinned, as he did now on emerging from the airlock, and his bloodshot red eyes widened in the pleasant evening darkness of the Empress.

He lifted his head and sucked in air through a red nose flattened as a gorilla’s from years of collisions with fists, boots, steering wheels, and (it was rumored) Hospital orderlies’ foreheads. He had been on Mars a long, long time.

“Damn, I love that smell,” he howled in English, striding to the bar and slapping down his gauntlets. “Beer, onions and Proteus nuggets frying, eh? Give me a Party Platter with Bisto and a pitcher of Foster’s.”

“I’m afraid we don’t have Foster’s, sir,” dithered Mr. Morton. Mary elbowed him.

“It’s what we call the Ares Lager when he’s in here,” she murmured, and Mr. Morton ran off at once to fill a pitcher.

“How’s it going, beautiful?”

“Tolerably, Mr. Brick,” said Mary, sighing.

He looked at her keenly and his voice dropped a couple of decibels when he said, “Trouble over something? Did the BAC finally get that warrant?”

“What warrant?”

“Oh, nothing you need to know about right now,” he said casually, accepting his pitcher of beer and drinking from it. “Not to worry, doll. Uncle Brick hears rumors all the time, and half of ’em never pan out. As long as the Ice Haulers want you here, you’ll stay here.”

He was probably correct. The Ice Haulers might be held in low esteem by the British Arean Company, but they performed a necessary service, trundling back and forth between the poles as they did. They mined the polar ice caps for water ice, but more importantly for frozen CO
₂
, vital for the manufacture of oxygen. There were even rare veins of frozen oxygen itself, at the South Pole. The mortality rate was fairly high, out there in the frigid red wastes, but most of the Haulers preferred it to life in a padded cell.

“I suppose the BAC is trying to get me closed down again,” said Mary. “Bad cess to them, and what else is new? But I have other problems today.”

She told the Brick about the day’s occurrences and he listened, sipping and nodding meanwhile, grunting occasionally in agreement or surprise.

“Congratulations, m’dear,” he said. “This’ll be the first human child born on Mars, you know that?”

“If she’ll carry the little thing to term,” said Mary. “It’s only a baby, after all. But where am I going to get four thousand punts for the allotment, I’d like to know?”

The Brick rumbled meditatively, shaking his head. “ ‘Only a baby,’ she says. You know they’re not having ’em Down Home anymore, don’t you?”

“Oh, that’s certainly not true. I had three myself,” said Mary.

“The birth rate’s dropping, all the same,” said the Brick, having another
sip of his beer. “That’s what I hear. Funny thing for a species to do when it’s colonizing other planets, isn’t it? And the clan isn’t having kids, and they’ve been trying for ten years.”

Mary shrugged. “I’m sure it isn’t as bad as all that,” she said. “Their cattle have bred, at least. Life will go on somehow. It always does. The Goddess provides.”

“I’ll tell you what I think it is,” said the Brick. He jerked a thumb at the brew tanks. “I think it’s sleeping in the lofts above all that beer being brewed. Just creates a certain ambience, know what I mean?” His voice rose to a genial roar as he hailed the Heretic, shuffling out from the kitchen with his Party Platter. “Hey, sweetheart! You’re looking gorgeous this evening.”

The Heretic blinked at him and shuffled closer. “Hi,” she said, offering him the food. He took it in one hand and swept her close for a kiss on the forehead.

“How’ve you been?”

“I saw the living glory burning. A bright tower in the icy waste,”
she said.

“That’s nice. Can I get just a little more Bisto on these fries?”

“Okay.” The Heretic went back to the kitchen and fetched out a little saucepan of gravylike substance, and as she larded Brick’s dinner, Mary went on.

“If you could see that twenty acres! It was as rich as pudding, probably from our very own sewage we sold them, and green as anything on Earth. Where I’m going to get the cash for it I simply do not know. Chiring makes forty punts a week from his feature in the
Kathmandu Post
, of which he has kindly offered me ten per week toward the land, but I’ve only got a limited time to come up with the brass. If one of my people was a brilliant artist we might sell some Martian high art made out of clay from my nasty little claypit of an allotment, but all of them protested they’re quite talentless, except for Manco who only does Christian subjects, and who wants those? So bang goes another good idea, and I’m running out of good ideas. Just when I thought everything had settled down to some kind of equilibrium—”

“What’s that new thing on the back bar?” inquired the Brick, slightly muffled because his mouth was full.

“Oh. That? Wait, you were a mineralogist, weren’t you?” Mary paused, looking over her shoulder at him as she fetched the crystal down.

“I have been many things, m’dear,” he informed her, washing down his mouthful with more beer. “And I did take a degree in mineralogy at the University of Queensland once.”

“Then you have a look at it. It was in some clay I dug up this afternoon. Maybe quartz with some cinnabar stain? Or more of the ever-present rust? It’s a funny old thing.” She tossed it over and the Brick caught it in his massive hand, peered at it for a long moment.