Gene Wolfe (tribute site: http://www.op.net/~pduggan/ wolfe.html and www.ultan.co.uk/) lives in Barrington, Illinois, and is widely considered the most accomplished writer in the fantasy and science fiction genres. His four-volume The Book of the New Sun is an acknowledged masterpiece. Some people consider him among the greatest living American writers. His most recent book is Return to the Whorl, the third volume of The Book of the Short Sun (really a single huge novel), which many of his most attentive readers feel is his best book yet. He has published many fantasy, science fiction, and horror stories over the last thirty-six years, and has been given the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. Collections of his short fiction include The Island of Dr Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, Storeys from the Old Hotel, Endangered Species, and Strange Travelers.
“Shields of Mars” is from Mars Probes, along with the DAW 30th Anniversary SF Anthology , and somewhat by default the most significant SF anthology of the year. The story is an homage to the planetary romance tradition, to space opera, to the value system of honor and loyalty in a racially mixed culture. But in contrast to the Moorcock story later in this book, it is not space opera but ironic science fiction. It transcends the disappointments of Mars as it turned out to be without denying scientific reality, and reinvigorates the SF tropes Mars.
Once they had dueled beneath the russet Martian sky for the hand of a princess—had dueled with swords that, not long before, had been the plastic handles of a rake and a spade.
Jeff Shonto had driven the final nail into the first Realwood plank when he realized that Zaa was standing six-legged, ankle-deep in red dust, watching him. He turned a little in case Zaa wanted to say something; Zaa did not, but he four- legged, rearing his thorax so that his arms hung like arms (perhaps in order to look more human) before he became a glaucous statue once again, a statue with formidable muscles in unexpected locations.
Zaa’s face was skull-like, as were the faces of all the people from his star, with double canines jutting from its massive jaw and eyes at its temples. It was a good face, Jeff thought, a kind and an honest face.
He picked up the second Realwood plank, laid it against the window so it rested on the first, and plucked a nail from his mouth.
Zaa’s gray Department shirt (“Zaa Leem, Director of Maintenance”) had been dirty. No doubt Zaa had put it on clean that morning, but there was a black smear under the left pocket now. What if they wanted to talk to Zaa, too?
Jeff’s power-hammer said bang, and the nail sank to the head. Faint echoes from inside the store that had been his father’s might almost have been the sound of funeral drums. Shrugging, he took another nail from his mouth.
A good and a kind face, and he and Zaa had been friends since Mom and Dad were young, and what did a little grease matter? Didn’t they want Zaa to work? When you worked, you got dirty.
Another nail, in the diagonal corner. Bang. Mind pictures, daydream pictures showed him the masked dancers who ought to have been there when they buried Dad in the desert. And were not.
Again he turned to look at Zaa, expecting Zaa to say something, to make some comment. Zaa did not. Beyond Zaa were thirty bungalows, twenty-nine white and one a flaking blue that had once been bright. Twenty-eight bungalows that were boarded up, two that were still in use.
Beyond the last, the one that had been Diane’s family’s, empty miles of barren desert, then the aching void of the immense chasm that had been renamed the Grand Canal. Beyond it, a range of rust-red cliff that was in reality the far side of the Grand Canal, a glowing escarpment lit at its summit by declining Sol.
Jeff shrugged and turned back to his plank. A third nail. Bang . The dancers were sharp-edged this time, the drums louder. “You’re closing your store.”
He fished more nails from his pocket. “Not to you. If you want something I’ll sell it to you.”
“Thanks.” Zaa picked up a plank and stood ready to pass it to Jeff.
Bang. Echoes of thousands of years just beginning.
“I’ve got one in the shop that feeds the nails. Want me to get it?”
Jeff shook his head. “For a little job like this, what I’ve got is fine.”
Bang.
“Back at the plant in a couple hours?”
“At twenty-four ten they’re supposed to call me.” Jeff had said this before, and he knew Zaa knew it as well as he did. “You don’t have to be there…”
“But maybe they’ll close it.”
And I won’t have to be the one who tells you.
Jeff turned away, staring at the plank. He wanted to drive more nails into it, but there was one at each corner already. He could not remember driving that many.
“Here.” Zaa was putting up another plank. “I would have done this whole job for you. You know?”
“It was my store.” Jeff squared the new plank on the second and reached to his mouth for a nail, but there were no nails there. He positioned his little ladder, leaning it on the newly nailed one, got up on the lowest step, and fished a fresh nail from his pocket.
Bang.
“Those paintings of mine? Give them back and I’ll give you what you paid.”
“No.” Jeff did not look around.
“You’ll never sell them now.”
“They’re mine,” Jeff said. “I paid you for them, and I’m keeping them.”
“There won’t ever be any more tourists, Jeff.”
“Things will get better.”
“Where would they stay?”
“Camp in the desert. Rough it.” Bang.
There was a silence, during which Jeff drove more nails.
“If they close the plant, I guess they’ll send a crawler to take us to some other town.”
Jeff shrugged. “Or an orthopter, like Channel Two has. You saw Scenic Mars. They might even do that.”
Impelled by an instinct he could not have described but could not counter, he stepped down—short, dark, and stocky—to face Zaa. “Listen here. In the first place, they can’t close the plant. What’d they breathe?”
Even four-legging, Zaa was taller by more than a full head; he shrugged, massive shoulders lifting and falling. “The others could take up the slack, maybe.”
“Maybe they could. What if something went wrong at one of them?”
“There’d be plenty of time to fix it. Air doesn’t go that fast.”
“You come here.”
He took Zaa by the arm, and Zaa paced beside him, intermediate armlike legs helping support his thorax and abdomen.
“I want to show you the plant.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Come on. I want to see it myself.” Together, the last two inhabitants of the settlement called Grand Canal went around the wind-worn store and climbed a low hill. The chain-link fence enclosing the plant was tall and still strong, but the main gate stood open, and there was no one in the guard shack. A half mile more of dusty road, then the towers and the glassy prisms, and the great pale domes, overshadowed by the awe-inspiring cooling stack of the nuclear reactor. On the left, the spherical hydrogen tanks and thousands upon thousands of canisters of hydrogen awaiting the crawler. Beyond those, nearly lost in the twilight, Number One Crusher. It would have been a very big plant anywhere on Earth; here, beneath the vastness of the russet sky, standing alone in the endless red-and-black desert, it was tiny and vulnerable, something any wandering meteor might crush like a toy.
“Take a good look,” Jeff said, wishing Zaa could see it through his eyes.
“I just did. We might as well go now. They’ll be wanting to call you pretty soon.”
“In a minute. What do you suppose all that stuff’s worth? All the equipment?”
Zaa picked his teeth with a sharp claw. “I don’t know. I guess I never thought about it. A couple hundred million?”
“More than a billion. Listen up.” Jeff felt his own conviction growing as he spoke. “I can lock the door on my store and board up the windows and walk away. I can do that because I’m still here. Suppose you and I just locked the gate and got on that crawler and went off. How long before somebody was out here with ten more crawlers, loading up stainless pipe, and motors, and all that stuff? You could make a better stab at this than I could, but I say give me three big crawlers and three men who knew what they were doing and I’d have ten million on those crawlers in a week.”
Zaa shook his head. “Twelve hours. Eight, if they never took a break and really knew their business.”
“Fine. So is the Department going to lock the door and walk away? Either they gut it themselves—not ten million, over a billion—or they’ll keep somebody here to keep an eye on things. They’ll have to.”
“I guess.”
“Suppose they’ve decided to stop production altogether. How long to shut down the pile and mothball everything? With two men?”
“To do it right?” Zaa fingered the point of one canine. “A year.”
Jeff nodded. “A year. And they’d have to do it right, because someday they might have to start up again. We’re pretty well terraformed these days. This out here isn’t much worse than the Gobi Desert on Earth. A hundred years ago you couldn’t breathe right where we’re standing.”
He studied Zaa’s face, trying to see if his words were sinking in, if they were making an impression. Zaa said, “Sure.”
“And everybody knows that. Okay, suppose one of the other plants went down. Totally. Suppose they lost the pile or something. Meltdown.”
“I got it.”
“Like you say, the air goes slow now. We’ve added to the planetary mass—covered the whole thing with an ocean of air and water vapor three miles thick, so there’s more gravity.” Jeff paused for emphasis. “But it goes, and as it goes, we lose gravity. The more air we lose, the faster we lose more.”
“I know that.”
“Sure. I know you do. I’m just reminding you. All right, they lose one whole plant, like I said.”
“You never lose the pile if you do it right.”
“Sure. But not everybody’s as smart as you are, okay? They get some clown in there and he screws up. Let’s take the Schiaparelli plant, just to talk about. How much fossil water have they got?”
Zaa shrugged.
“I don’t know either, and neither do they. They could give you some number, but it’s just a guess. Suppose they run out of water.”
Zaa nodded and turned away, four-legging toward the main gate.
Jeff hurried after him. “How long before people panic? A week? A month?”
“You never finished boarding up.”
“I’ll get it later. I have to be there when they call.”
“Sure,” Zaa said.
Together, as they had been together since Jeff was born, they strode through the plant gate upon two legs and four, leaving it open behind them. “They’re going to have to give us power wagons,” Jeff said. “Suppose we’re at home and we have to get here fast.”
“Bikes.” Zaa looked at him, then looked away. “In here you’re the boss. All right, you had your say. I listened to everything.”
It was Jeff’s turn to nod. He said, “Uh-huh.”
“So do I get to talk now?”
Jeff nodded again. “Shoot.”
“You said it was going to get better, people were going to come out here from Elysium again. But you were boarding up your store. So you know, only you’re scared I’ll leave.”
Jeff did not speak.
“We’re not like you.” To illustrate what he meant, Zaa began six-legging. “I been raised with you—with you Sol people is what I mean. I feel like I’m one of you, and maybe once a week I’ll see myself in a mirror or someplace and I think, my gosh, I’m an alien.”
“You’re a Martian,” Jeff told him firmly. “I am, too. You call us Sols or Earthmen or something, and most of my folks were Navajo. But I’m Martian, just like you.”
“Thanks. Only we get attached to places, you know? We’re like cats. I hatched in this town. I grew up here. As long as I can stay, I’m not going.”
“There’s food in the store. Canned and dried stuff, a lot of it. I’ll leave you the key. You can look after it for me.”
Zaa took a deep breath, filling a chest thicker even than Jeff’s with thin Martian air that they had made. “You said we’d added to the mass with our air. Made more gravity. Only we didn’t. The nitrogen’s from the rock we dig and crush. You know that. The oxygen’s from splitting water. Fossil water from underground. Sure, we bring stuff from Earth, but it doesn’t amount to shit. We’ve still got the same gravity we always did.”
“I guess I wasn’t thinking,” Jeff conceded.
“You were thinking. You were scraping up any kind of an argument you could to make yourself think they weren’t going to shut us down. To make me think that, too.”
Jeff looked at his watch.
“It’s a long time yet.”
“Sure.”
He pressed the combination on the keypad—nine, nine, two, five, seven, seven. You could not leave the door of the Administration Building open; an alarm would sound.
“What’s that?” Zaa caught his arm.
It was a voice from deep inside the building. Zaa leaped away with Jeff after him, long bounds carrying them the length of the corridor and up the stair.
“Mister Shonto? Administrator Shonto?”
“Here I am!” Panting, Jeff spoke as loudly as he could. “I’m coming!”
Undersecretary R. Lowell Bensen, almost in person, was seated in the holoconference theater; in that dim light, he looked fully as real as Zaa.
“Ah, there you are.” He smiled; and Jeff, who was superstitious about smiles, winced inwardly.
“Leem, too. Good. Good! I realized you two might be busy elsewhere, but good God, twenty-four fifteen. A time convenient for us, a convenient time to get you two out of bed. Believe me, the Department treats me like that, too. Fourteen hours on a good day, twice around the clock on the bad ones. How are things in Grand Canal?”
“Quiet,” Jeff said. “The plant’s running at fifteen percent, per instructions. We’ve got a weak hydraulic pump on Number One Crusher, so we’re running Number Two.” All this would have been on the printout Bensen had undoubtedly read before making his call, but it would be impolite to mention it. “Zaa Leem here is making oversized rings and a new piston for that pump while we wait for a new one.” Not in the least intending to do it, Jeff gulped. “We’re afraid we may not get a new pump, sir, and we want to be capable of one hundred percent whenever you need us.”
Bensen nodded, and Jeff turned to Zaa. “How are those new parts coming, Leem?”
“Just have to be installed, sir.”
“You two are the entire staff of the Grand Canal Plant now? You don’t even have a secretary? That came up during our meeting.”
Jeff said, “That’s right, sir.”
“But there’s a town there, isn’t there? Grand Canal City or some such? A place where you can hire more staff when you need them?”
Here it came. Jeff’s mouth felt so dry that he could scarcely speak. “There is a town, Mr. Bensen. You’re right about that, sir. But I couldn’t hire more personnel there. Nobody’s left besides—besides ourselves, sir. Leem and me.”
Bensen looked troubled. “A ghost town, is it?”
Zaa spoke up, surprising Jeff. “It was a tourist town, Mr. Bensen. That’s why my family moved here. People wanted to see aliens back then, and talk to some, and they’d buy our art to do it. Now—well, sir, when my folks came to the Sol system, it took them two sidereal years just to get here. You know how it is these days, sir. Where’d you take your last vacation?”
“Isis, a lovely world. I see what you mean.”
“The Department pays me pretty well, sir, and I save my money, most of it. My boss here wants me to go off to our home planet, where there are a lot more people like me. He says I ought to buy a ticket, whenever I’ve got the money, just to have a look at it.”
Bensen frowned. “We’d hate to lose you, Leem.”
“You’re not going to, Mr. Bensen. I’ve got the money now, and more besides. But I don’t speak the language or know the customs, and if I did, I wouldn’t like them. Do you like aliens, sir?”
“I don’t dislike them.”
“That’s exactly how I feel, sir. Nobody comes to Grand Canal anymore, sir. Why should they? It’s just more Mars, and they live here already. Me and Mr. Shonto, we work here, and we think our work’s important. So we stay. Only there’s nobody else.”
For a moment no one spoke.
“This came up in our meeting, too.” Bensen cleared his throat, and suddenly Jeff understood that Bensen felt almost as embarrassed and self-conscious as he had. “Betty Collins told us Grand Canal had become a ghost town, but I wanted to make sure.”
“It is,” Jeff muttered. “If you’re going to shut down our plant, sir, I can draw up a plan—”
Bensen was shaking his head. “How many security bots have you got, Shonto?”
“None, sir.”
“None?”
“No, sir. We had human guards, sir. The Plant Police. They were only police in Grand Canal, actually. They were laid off one by one. I reported it—or my predecessor and I did, sir, I ought to say.”
Bensen sighed. “I didn’t see your reports. I wish I had. You’re in some danger, I’m afraid, you and Leem.”
“Really, sir?”
“Yes. Terrorists have been threatening to wreck the plants. Give in to their demands, or everyone suffocates. You know the kind of thing. Did you see it on vid?”
Jeff shook his head. “I don’t watch much, sir. Maybe not as much as I should.”
Bensen sighed again. “One of the news shows got hold of it and ran it. Just one show. After that, we persuaded them to keep a lid on it. That kind of publicity just plays into the terrorists’ hands.”
For a moment he was silent again, seeming to collect his thoughts; Zaa squirmed uncomfortably. “Out there where you are, you’re safer than any of the others. Still, you ought to have security. You get supplies each thirty-day?”
Jeff shook his head again. “Every other thirty-day, sir.”
“I see. I’m going to change that. A supply crawler will come around every thirty-day from now on. I’ll see to it that the next one carries that new pump.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“But you’ll be getting a special resupply as quickly as I can arrange it. Security bots. Twenty, if I can scrape that many together. Whatever I can send.”
Jeff began to thank him again, but Bensen cut him off. “It may take a while. Weeks. Until you get them, you’ll have to be on guard every moment. You’re running at fifteen percent, you said. Could you up that to twenty-five?”
“Yes, sir. To one hundred within a few days.”
“Good. Good! Make it twenty-five now, and let us know if you run into any problems.”
Abruptly, Bensen was gone. Jeff looked at Zaa, and Zaa looked at Jeff. Both grinned.
At last Jeff managed to say, “They’re not shutting us down. Not yet anyhow.”
Zaa rose, two-legging and seeming as tall as the main cooling stack. “These terrorist have them pissing in their pants, Jeff. Pissing in their pants! We’re their ace in the hole. There’s nobody out here but us.”
“It’ll blow over,” Jeff found he was still grinning. “It’s bound to, in a year or two. Meanwhile we better get Number One back on line.”
They did, and when they had finished, Zaa snatched up a push broom, holding it with his right hand and his right intermediate foot as if it were a two-handed sword. “Defend yourself, Earther!”
Jeff backed away hurriedly until Zaa tossed him a mop, shouting, “They can mark your lonely grave with this!”
“Die, alien scum!” Jeff made a long thrust that Zaa parried just in time. “I rid the spaceways of their filth today!” Insulting the opponent had always been one of the best parts of their battles.
This one was furious. Jeff was smaller and not quite so strong. Zaa was slower; and though his visual field was larger, he lacked the binocular vision that let Jeff judge distances.
Even so, he prevailed in the end, driving Jeff through an open door and into the outdoor storage park, where after more furious fighting he slipped on the coarse red gravel and fell laughing and panting with the handle of Zaa’s push broom at his throat.
“Man, that was fun!” He dropped his mop and held up his hands to indicate surrender. “How long since we did this?”
Zaa considered as he helped him up. “Ten years, maybe.”
“Way too long!”
“Sure.” Sharp claws scratched Zaa’s scaly chin. “Hey, I’ve got an idea. We always wanted real swords, remember?”
As a boy, Jeff would have traded everything he owned for a real sword; the spot had been touched, and he found that there was still—still—a little, wailing ghost of his old desire.
“We could make swords,” Zaa said. “Real swords. I could and you could help.” Abruptly, he seemed to overflow with enthusiasm. “This rock’s got a lot of iron in it. We could smelt it, make a crucible somehow. Make steel. I’d hammer it out—”
He dissolved in laughter beneath Jeff’s stare. “Just kidding. But, hey, I got some high-carbon steel strip that would do for blades. I could grind one in an hour or so, and I could make hilts out of brass bar stock, spruce them up with file work, and fasten them on with epoxy.”
Though mightily tempted, Jeff muttered, “It’s Department property, Zaa.”
Zaa laid a large, clawed hand upon his shoulder. “Boss boy, you fail to understand. We’re arming ourselves. What if the terrorists get here before the security bots do?”
The idea swept over Jeff like the west wind in the Mare Erythraeum, carrying him along like so much dust. “How come I’m the administrator and you’re the maintenance guy?”
“Simple. You’re not smart enough for maintenance. Tomorrow?”
“Sure. And we’ll have to practice with them a little before we get them sharp, right? It won’t be enough to have them, we have to know how to use them, and that would be too dangerous if they had sharp edges and points.”
“It’s going to be dangerous anyhow,” Zaa told him thoughtfully, “but we can wear safety helmets with face shields, and I’ll make us some real shields, too.”
The shields required more work than the swords, because Zaa covered their welded aluminum frames with densely woven plastic-coated wire, and wove a flattering portrait of Diane Seyn (whom he had won in battle long ago) into his, and an imagined picture of such a woman as he thought Jeff might like into Jeff’s.
Although the shields had taken a full day each, both swords and shields were ready in under a week, and the fight that followed—the most epic of all their epic battles—ranged from the boarded up bungalows of Grand Canal to the lip of the Grand Canal itself, a setting so dramatic that each was nearly persuaded to kill the other, driving him over the edge to fall—a living meteor—to his death tens of thousands of feet below. The pure poetry of the thing seemed almost worth a life, as long as it was not one’s own.
Neither did, of course. But an orthopter taped them as it shot footage for a special called Haunted Mars. And among the tens of billions on Earth who watched a few seconds of their duel were women who took note of their shields and understood.