Tuesday, July 29, 2155
Sol 25 of Martian Month of Leo
THE THING GANNET BROOKS LIKED BEST about Mars was the lightness of the place, a feeling she could only describe as a kind of buoyancy.
That sensation of lightness returned to her gradually today as the transport vessel’s gravity plating finished making its slow adjustment from an Earth-normal one g to the thirty-eight percent that prevailed on the Red Planet’s surface, which still lay thousands of kilometers away. In the meantime Mars loomed ever larger, having grown before Brooks’s eyes from a ruddy, coin-sized disk until it had become the pockmarked sphere that now dominated the broad transparent aluminum ports of the transport’s “walking lounge.”
The haze of atmosphere was clearly visible now along the periphery of the daylight crescent that Brooks could see from the vessel’s present angle of approach, apparently thickened somewhat since she had last visited this place three years earlier. Either the Martian terraforming project was making far faster progress than anyone had anticipated, or else she was letting her imagination run away with her again. That same imagination led her to almost feel an enormous rush of wind parting her shoulder-length brown hair as the transport skimmed uncomfortably close to the gray, rocky bulk of Phobos, which reminded Brooks of nothing so much as a gigantic, acne-scarred potato. The Stickney crater yawned wide across the body’s lumpen surface, like a hungry maw nearly nine klicks wide and capable of making a quick meal of the transport on its way into the sixty-seven-hundred-odd kilometer-deep gulf of cisphobian space that separated the larger and innermost of Mars’s two moons from the planet itself.
Makes sense that something named after an ancient legend about fear would put images like that in my head, she thought as the planet transformed yet again before her eyes, this time changing from a globe suspended against an infinitely large velvet blanket of emptiness to a very real place that a human being could relate to, a place that was familiar despite its obvious alienness.
Less than four hours later, Brooks made her second Martian landing approach of the day, this time on a local private skimmercraft she had boarded a little more than an hour after disembarking from the interplanetary transport at Bradbury. Because it was designed to fly only in the rarefied Martian atmosphere, the skimmer was configured quite differently than the vessel that had brought her here from Earth. It resembled one of the old-style airplanes that had ruled Earth’s skies for much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, although this craft’s wings possessed far more lift-generating surface area than those of any terrestrial plane or glider, a feature made necessary by the relative insubstantiality of the atmosphere. The thinness of the Martian air also placed a fairly low ceiling on the skimmer’s maximum altitude, which Brooks estimated to be perhaps two-thirds that of a twentieth-century commercial jet. But even though the skimmer had to stay well inside the bounds of suborbital flight, and was presently descending at a far shallower angle than the interplanetary transport had, the aerial view it presented of this cold, rusty desolationscape of a world looked even more spectacular to Brooks than the view she had had from space.
“Glorious, isn’t it?” Representative Qaletaqu said from a seat on the opposite side of the skimmer’s modest passenger compartment, which was empty except for the two of them.
“Now I think I understand why you went into politics,” Brooks said, unable to tear her gaze away from the exterior view. “You’re telepathic.”
She heard him chuckle gently in response as she watched the rough southern highlands of Margaritifer Terra rolling away behind the skimmer’s belly as the craft headed nearly due west into the rising sun. The oddly diminished orb’s yellow rays scattered across the boulder-strewn eastern edge of Ophir Planum and glinted against the large pressure-dome habitats to the south. Her eyes moved north to follow the long, sinuous gouge of the Valles Marineris as it snaked its way back into the night that still enveloped the rugged highlands of Sinai Planum, Syria Planum, and the mighty space-scraping peak of Olympus Mons, all of which still lay below the approaching western horizon. As still more of the ancient Martian terrain rolled toward the skimmer, the horizon formed an ever-retreating line that appeared weirdly foreshortened because of the planet’s relatively small size, the relentlessly unfolding red-and-ocher landscape taking on the aspect of a forced-perspective painting.
“Thank you again for agreeing to show me your hometown,” Brooks said as she turned to face the Martian Colonies’ official representative to the Coalition Council. “It’s really very gracious of you—particularly after I ambushed you right before we left Earth.”
He smiled beneficently. “I’m more than happy to help a journalist who doesn’t seem hell-bent on making us all look like a bunch of ignorant hicks,” he said.
And it probably doesn’t hurt that he knows that Mars will be my last stop in the Sol system for the foreseeable future, she thought as she paused to contemplate the next leg of her outbound “frontier tour” with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension. He had to know as well as she did that the war correspondent beat she was heading out to cover could well take her on a one-way journey.
“I just want to write an honest account of how people are dealing with this Romulan conflict,” she said as she looked back toward the hazy sunrise, which now illuminated the upper reaches of the approaching Mariner Valley’s eastern extremity with a clarity she had never seen before, even in the high-definition holopics taken by aerial drones. “I intend to report from the home front all the way to the farthest-flung human settlements I can reach.”
And that’s because people need to know everything they can about whatever threat these Romulans really pose, she thought. Not to scare them away from deep space the way Naquase would, or send them packing back to Earth to hide under the bed. But to show them there’s nothing out there that we can’t find a way to deal with.
Or maybe even come to terms with.
“I’m curious,” he said. “Why did you pick Mars instead of the Luna colonies?”
The question surprised her. “Mars always seemed like the best offEarth starting place I could ask for to kick off a frontier tour like this one.”
“But why? I mean, Luna seems like a much rougher place than Mars, at least as frontiers go. At least Mars has an atmosphere, even if you can’t quite breathe it yet.”
Brooks reluctantly turned away from the vast, rapidly approaching canyon, facing him again. “I’ll grant you that your chances of surviving a rip in your suit are marginally better any place where there’s no hard vacuum waiting to boil your blood in your veins. On the other hand, Luna can never lull you into a false sense of security because it looks so much like Wyoming or New Mexico.”
“True enough,” he said. “But you go outside the Moon habs with a bad suit, it’ll all be over pretty darned fast.”
She nodded. “Also true. But on Luna you’re never more than a few hours away from the best medical care Earth has to offer, assuming that whatever mishap you’ve had doesn’t kill you outright. Besides, an airless place like Luna can’t whip up a funnel cloud that picks up enough iron-oxide dust to generate a high-voltage static charge. I saw one of those things discharge directly into a man once during a sudden windstorm near Sagan Station. It hit him like a Jovian lightning bolt. His suit’s electronics failed on the spot, and his helmet blew out like it was made of papier mâché. The only difference between dying that way and ripping your suit open in the Tycho crater is how long it takes you to die.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, his dusky features taking on a pensive cast.
Not eager to absorb anybody’s unsolicited sympathy, she continued with her original point. “Besides, I’ve visited the New Berlin colony a few times, as well as a couple of the other Lunar habs. I know that Luna used to be a legit frontier, at least once upon a time. But it’s turning into a posh low-g retirement resort. It’s a place where old folks who can never re-acclimate to Earth-normal gravity get to play golf all day under the Alan B. Shepard Dome without worrying about breaking a hip if they happen to take a fall. And their great-grandchildren on Earth are still close enough for regular visits.”
“Shows how long it’s been since I’ve been to Luna,” Qaletaqu said. “Here on Mars, we’ve come to think that Earth regards us as another Canada. Looks like the Moon has become another Florida.”
Brooks allowed a wry snicker to escape her lips. “It’s also a tourist trap. Did you know there’s a hotel and casino right smack in the Sea of Tranquillity now?”
He scowled. “No. But I hope they haven’t messed up the old Apollo landing sites. We learned our lesson about that sort of thing here when the workers at the Utopia Planitia settlement nearly backed over the Viking 2 lander with one of the mohole borers.”
“It looks like the Lunar Schooners had a similar experience,” she said. “At least all the artifacts and bootprints that Armstrong and Aldrin left behind are right there in the hotel lobby, on display in a vacuum chamber surrounded by a bunch of red velvet ropes. Uggh.” She shuddered theatrically.
She turned back toward the window as the skimmer plunged over the lip of the immensely broad, four-thousand-kilometer-long canyon, whose eastern side, now probably more than one hundred fifty klicks distant, had already retreated over the horizon. The skimmer then dived into the valley’s frost-and-fog-shrouded vertical expanse, spaces some seven kilometers deep that the approaching dawn had yet to penetrate. A pattern of approaching lights quickly emerged from the mist as the skimmer descended into the disconcerting darkness that obscured the canyon floor despite the persistent presence of a brightening purple-and-salmon sky directly overhead.
It took nearly a minute for Brooks to realize that the lights she saw weren’t intended to guide the skimmer to a landing strip on the ground. She grasped this fact at the same instant she realized that the lights weren’t even on the ground; rather, they were nestled all along the expanse of the vertical face of the rough southern wall of the Valles Marineris, like the windows of a steel-and-glass high-rise building melded seamlessly with the natural contours of Mars.
“Welcome to Popé Pueblo, Miz Brooks,” Qaletaqu said, speaking a place name that evoked images of the cliffside cavern dwellings in which his Anasazi, Hopi, and Pueblo ancestors had dwelled during pre-Columbian times in the deserts of North America’s southwest. “You’re about to visit the jewel of the Mariner Valley, and the home of my people—for now, at least.”
Brooks paused for a moment to wonder just what he meant by that. But before she could ask, the skimmer’s wheels made percussive but not violent contact with the kilometers-long ribbon of pressed regolith tarmac on the canyon floor. Her weight shifted forward distractingly against her seat restraints as the pilot began the final deceleration that would bring the vehicle to a slow, rolling stop.
Gannet Brooks’s first impression of the vast subterranean complex built by the citizens of Popé Pueblo—known as “Canyontown” to the locals—was that they had done an incredible job of living off the land.
According to the background Qaletaqu’s office had provided, this was no mere metaphor. The interiors of the Canyontowners’ pressurized, cliffside cavern dwellings had been hewn directly out of the red-brown Martian rock, thick stone walls being a survival necessity because the planet’s relatively insubstantial atmosphere provided essentially no protection against incoming radiation. The radiation-resistant windows through which the Canyontowners looked upon the still mostly untamed Martian surface were synthesized from the local minerals as well. The very air they breathed and the water they drank were likewise reconstituted, both from the Martian environment and the inhabitants’ own waste, abetted by the huge, industrial-scale atmosphere-processing units they had mounted along the canyon floor, the first place on the planet expected to provide a breathable-air, shirtsleeve environment, assuming that the Martian terraforming project continued at its present pace for at least the next few centuries.
The Canyontowners’ basic “build it here out of whatever’s handy” ethos allowed them to elevate their self-sufficiency to a fine art, with the vast majority of their food coming from the ranks of ultravioletshielded greenhouses they had arranged along the canyon lip, as well as from underground nurseries whose full-spectrum lights drew their power from the areothermal heat released through the mining moholes that the Dytallix-Barsoom Resource Extraction Corporation had sunk deep into the Red Planet’s thick mantle.
Brooks’s second impression of the Canyontowners was gained as Qaletaqu conducted her on a tour of the underground city’s brightly lit main street. Its charmingly anachronistic-looking array of apparently mom-and-pop, proprietor-run businesses were interspersed with a number of recognizable corporate franchises—starting with a tavern and hotel whose retro architecture and dungaree-clad habitués could have been taken directly from an old vid about North America’s Wild West. The Canyontowners themselves seemed paradoxically wild in their habits and culture, despite the obvious discipline the construction and maintenance of a safe, livable, and prosperous habitat such as Popé Pueblo in an environment as unforgiving as Mars required.
The first solid evidence of this dichotomy that she witnessed directly was the bar fight that broke out right before her eyes as she and Qaletaqu walked along the concrete walkway between the tavern and the storefront office of the Dytallix-Barsoom Resource Extraction Corporation. The tavern’s swinging doors had flown open just ahead of a pair of scuffling workmen, whose movements followed a weirdly elastic trajectory dictated by the low Martian gravity. Qaletaqu wasted no time plunging into their midst in order to separate the men, sending them on their respective ways once he’d determined that neither man had sustained any serious injuries and had extracted their mumbled pledges to cause no further trouble, at least for the rest of the day.
Brooks had expected Qaletaqu to offer a bouquet-and-fruit-basket-full of embarrassed apologies immediately after the fracas was done and the instigators had moved on. Instead he surprised her by commenting that since neither man had any critical duties to perform before sobriety returned, no harm had been done. Then he simply resumed the tour of central Canyontown to which he had been treating her, as though a bar fight that spilled into the street was the most ordinary occurrence imaginable. He must be messing with my head on purpose, she thought as she walked mutely beside him along Popé Boulevard. She decided right then and there not to let herself appear to be surprised in the least by any other strangeness she might see here. Grateful at least for this little bit of local color for her next news feature, she followed him across the empty, bare-rock street beneath the simulated sun that hung suspended from the high, cathedral-like ceiling.
They came to a stop on the concrete walkway that fronted what appeared to be a cluster of public buildings. Qaletaqu gestured toward an A-frame building that was unlike all the flatter, squatter structures that dominated central Canyontown. Standing directly between the office of the local sheriff and the town hall, both fashioned from stone slabs anchored in place jointly by gravity and Martian adobe, the peak-roofed building in the middle resembled a log house of the sort built by a number of ancient North American native tribes. Upon closer examination, however, it turned out to be composed of a local pressed-regolith concrete that had been formed, textured, and painted to resemble genuine wood, which was doubtless an exceedingly rare commodity on the treeless and still all-but-lifeless Red Planet.
In a voice filled with reverence, Qaletaqu explained that this place was the consecrated site of the local habak, or religious shrine, a sacred place where the Canyontowners came to seek guidance in the form of visions from their animal spirit guides and the shades of their dead ancestors.
When they aren’t brawling in the tavern, she thought, but refrained from saying aloud.
An hour or so later, after she had booked herself a room over Ahota’s Public House, Canyontown’s sole tavern, Brooks quietly took a seat in the back of the establishment’s smoky but surprisingly spacious game room. From the careworn condition of some of the furniture and fixtures, she concluded that the place must have been experiencing something of a slump recently, perhaps because the specter of war was never particularly friendly to the tourist trade of any nation or world.
Brooks watched as about two dozen of the locals, whose ages ranged from teen to elderly, slowly filled the room’s obviously temporary complement of plastiform folding chairs, which someone had arranged in three rough concentric circles around a forlorn-looking pool table. Quietly studying the primarily Native American but nevertheless highly variegated faces arrayed about her, she wondered whether the anarchic behavior she had seen so far today had been merely a fluke. She already strongly suspected it wasn’t, however, as she watched the grizzled old man who had taken the seat beside her busily typing on a square padd that had a larger than usual display, probably to accommodate his failing eyesight. The old man told her, without being asked, that he was working on a political manifesto. The elderly but strong-looking woman seated at his other side interrupted him long enough to explain that he’d been working diligently on this very same manifesto every day of the past twenty-two years. The old man then interrupted the interruption to describe his work as a reimagining of the Fundamental Declarations of the Martian Colonies, using a political vocabulary that made it sound like a weird and probably explosive mix of classical Marxism, post–World War III Meltdown Nihilism, Grange Populism, and grab-up-the-guns Ayn Rand Objectivist-Libertarianism. He finished his rhapsodic description by saying that his document, while still a work in progress, promised to deliver the long-sought-after goal of proving the ultimate perfectibility of human nature.
Good luck with that, she thought from behind her politest smile. She refrained from pointing out that a perfected human nature wasn’t likely to be of much more help against the Romulans than would the Canyontowners’ streak of eccentric, colorful independence.
As the old man returned to his work, Brooks continued to study the rest of the faces in the crowd. They displayed a panoply of diverse emotions ranging all the way from eager anticipation to stuporous boredom, but all of them living, breathing manifestations of that independent streak. Brooks considered using that singular characteristic as the primary angle for the profile she was going to write about these people. Based both on what she’d observed so far and the backgrounders she had read, she assumed that the Canyontowners’ ornery self-reliance shared an origin with the formal name the place had received from its Hopi-Pueblo expat founders—Popé Pueblo—when they had established it in 2109. A quick search of the local infonets right after she’d checked into her room revealed that Popé was the name of the Native American tribal leader who’d led the 1680 revolt against the Spanish conquerors who had dragged his people into forced labor in Mexican mines.
Brooks wondered if she was already becoming used to the weirdness of this place, so far from the mainstream of ordinary Earthbound human experience, yet so much closer to humanity’s cradle than Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, Altair, or any of the human species’ other long-term habitations. If human weirdness turns out to correlate positively with distance from Earth, she thought, then I’d better learn to anticipate strangeness and adapt to it a lot faster than I’ve been doing.
Of course, Brooks had already half expected something strange to come out of today’s public political meeting—a gathering that Qaletaqu himself had called in order to brief the people of his tribe on the report he was to deliver tomorrow morning under the Ares City Dome before the full Governing Council of the Confederated Martian Colonies—which wasn’t being held in the nominally official town hall across the street. And she received further confirmation of the weirdness of today’s meeting even before Mars’s official Coalition representative formally called the oddly informal proceedings to order.
This occurred when the local mining and areothermal power magnate who ran the Dytallix-Barsoom Resource Extraction Corporation, a grizzled, overall-clad man whom the two dozen or so people present called Kolichiyaw, abruptly rose from the folding chair between the two occupied, respectively, by Kwahu, Canyontown’s sheriff, and Cheveyo, the shaman in charge of Popé Pueblo’s communal habak.
“Where you off to, Kolichiyaw?” the sheriff said, polishing the star-shaped badge pinned to his black lapel with a soiled white sleeve. “The town meeting’s about to start.”
“I need a drink,” Kolichiyaw said, thrusting out his jaw belligerently. To Brooks’s eye, the BREMCO executive had already had more than enough to drink. “I’ll be right back.”
Still seated near the sheriff, Cheveyo the shaman shook her head. “You know the rules, Koli. There’s no drinkin’ at the town meetings.”
“The holy lady’s got it right, Kolichiyaw,” Sheriff Kwahu said. “Booze and politics don’t mix.”
Kolichiyaw stopped, turned around, and shook his head truculently. “No. Sobriety and politics don’t mix. Especially now that we’ve gotta worry about these Romans sneaking up on us on their way to Earth.”
“Romulans, Koli,” Kwahu said as he rose slowly from his seat. “They’re called Romulans.”
“Whatever. I’m goin’ to get a drink now. Be right back.” With that, the mining chief resumed his course for the bar.
“No,” Kwahu said, loudly enough to bring nearly all the ambient chatter in the room to a halt. “You’re not. If you have anything more to drink, you’d best head straight home instead of back here.”
Brooks watched as Kolichiyaw stopped in his tracks and faced the sheriff yet again. “Look, Kwahu, I really don’t see the problem with me grabbing a little drink, and then coming right back here with it ’fore the meetin’ starts.”
Kwahu shook his head and sighed sadly, then opened his coat momentarily, just long enough to reveal the presence of a rather nasty-looking pistol. The weapon still seemed disconcertingly handy despite the sheriff’s having allowed the flap of his coat to fall and conceal it again.
“Here’s the problem, Koli, at least as I see it,” Kwahu said languidly. “You break the no-drinking-at-public-meetings rule, and I’m going to shoot you. Okay?”
Brooks studied Kolichiyaw’s face very closely. The mining magnate stared back at the sheriff defiantly, his jaw muscles looking as taut as suspension bridge cables bearing far too much weight.
Though Brooks had sought a little local color to illustrate her journalistic portrait of Mars, she hoped not to find blood red on her painter’s palette. A frisson of real fear began surging through her, making her hyperalert to every motion, every facial tic, every nuance of behavior from the men who stood on either side of the standoff.
A tall, rail-thin woman dressed entirely in black rose from the chair positioned almost directly beneath the dart board and approached Kolichiyaw, coming to a stop directly at his side. Apparently unconcerned by the escalating tension between Kolichiyaw and the sheriff, she drew a small object from her pocket from which she extended a long metal strip, perhaps as wide as a human thumb. With the fluid motions of an expert, she anchored one end of the metal strip to the polished stone floor with her foot while extending the strip vertically by hand until its end came to a stop just about parallel to the crown of Kolichiyaw’s tousled head.
“Powaqa, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Kolichiyaw said, now looking profoundly irritated. “This is a damned inconvenient time to measure a man for a new suit.”
The woman reeled the metal strip most of the way in, then took a quick horizontal measurement of Kolichiyaw’s shoulders.
“Not if it’s the suit he’s likely to be buried in,” she said.
“Goddamned corporate royalty,” the old man beside Brooks said as he cast a scowl in Kolichiyaw’s direction. “Think they own the whole damned planet, while we just live on it like the fleas on a big, red, dusty dog.”
“What’s it gonna be, Koli?” Sheriff Kwahu said, tempered steel behind his voice now, his gaze as hard as the local granite.
Despite the obviously sincere warning, neither Kolichiyaw nor the tall, slender woman he had called Powaqa made any move to remove themselves from harm’s way.
Brooks leaned toward the old man who sat beside her, still— amazingly—typing his manifesto. Hiking a thumb toward Powaqa, she said, “Who is she, the town tailor?”
“Yup,” the old man said without looking up from his padd.
Plagued by stereotypical images of the black-clad frontier town morticians for whom pistol-wielding gunfighters created so much business in those ancient Wild West films, Brooks was relieved to hear that Powaqa was merely a clothier.
“She’s the undertaker, too,” the old man continued, grinning as he typed. “Saves a lot of time.”
Qaletaqu entered the room at that moment, rapidly approaching the pool table at the room’s center.
His shoulders suddenly slumping, Kolichiyaw’s defiant manner collapsed into a heterogeneous mixture of resignation and the grumblings of a little kid caught misbehaving. After spending another heartbeat or two in sullen silence looking at the sheriff, he spared a glance at Qaletaqu before meekly taking his seat. The undertaker-cum-tailor did likewise, but not before casting a brief glance at Brooks—a conspicuous stranger in Canyontown, after all—which warned her that Powaqa probably saw her as a potential customer, visitors to Mars sometimes being insufficiently detail-oriented to survive that first (and potentially last) hike outside the safety of the pressurized habitats.
“All right,” Kolichiyaw muttered as the sheriff sat beside him. “Let’s get this damned thing over with before those last three whiskeys start to wear off.”
Okay, so these people do have a few rules, Brooks thought as the air filled with convivial greetings for Qaletaqu, who wasted no time hopping up onto the pool table, an astonishingly graceful-looking move in the weak Martian gravity. They just don’t believe in standing on ceremony over the really trivial ones.
It was now becoming crystal clear to her that the truly important rules—such as the ones that required people to stay sober in extremely unforgiving environments such as airlocks, the Martian surface, and local political conclaves—had to be enforced to a fault in order to ensure the long-term survival and continued smooth functioning of the entire settlement. It makes sense, she thought. Especially considering that these people have managed to survive for nearly half a century out here on the ragged edge of human existence.
That thought reminded Brooks that Canyontown’s almost entirely Hopi/Pueblo population, around twenty-thousand strong at present, had descended from North American desert cliff dwellers, people who had also “lived on the edge,” quite literally, for millennia. Some of these same people had adapted that heritage to the clusters of high-rise towers that had arisen all over the Earth during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; they had become the iron workers who fearlessly walked the narrow paths of steel beams and girders that crisscrossed the skylines they’d helped to fill with iconic monuments of steel and glass.
It was no wonder that these people could eke out a living in a precarious place like Mars, whatever changes the act of adapting to such environments might wreak upon them. Brooks wondered if living on the edge might not be in their very blood, just as their fierce streak of independence, a trait they had first demonstrated to the ancient Spaniards, seemed to be.
Mars doesn’t hold any terror for them, she thought. It’s only encouraged a healthy respect for a world that could kill them all in a heartbeat if they were to allow themselves to get careless or cocky.
Could part of that respect have arisen from the recognition that Mars was one of the few places left in the solar system where such an independent people could truly be themselves? She couldn’t help but wonder when the Canyontowners’ notions of personal and political sovereignty would force them to move on yet again in search of another new home, perhaps orbiting a star that no other human had ever approached.
Using the pool table as a platform, Qaletaqu raised his hands to call for silence. It was clear from the generally warm reaction across the room that the planetary representative to the Coalition Council was one of Canyontown’s favorite sons.
“Before we get sidetracked into discussions of potholes and the new pooper-scooper law,” he said once the room had fallen more or less silent, “let me start with the one topic I know is on everybody’s minds—the Romulans.”
He paused to allow good-natured laughter and murmurs of assent to cross the room back and forth in a series of waves before he continued.
“Unless you’ve been stuck at the bottom of a deep hole on Deimos for the past two Sols, you already know that the Vulcans have decided to leave this entire system essentially undefended except for some sort of detection grid that they assure us will give us advance warning when unauthorized warp-driven ships approach. Vulcan’s Coalition delegation gave every assurance that the thing will work as advertised.”
“Ha!” the old man with the manifesto in his lap called out.
“I share your skepticism, Ahota,” Qaletaqu said, taking the interruption completely in stride and prompting Brook’s belated recognition that the crazy old-timer was the tavern/hotel’s owner. “But we really don’t have a lot of choice other than to take the Vulcans’ assurances at face value.”
“The problem with doing that,” Sheriff Kwahu said, turning his chair around backward so he could drape himself over the back as he sat, “is that we’re liable to get considerably less advance warning than Earth does.”
“It’s nobody’s fault that Mars is a few million klicks closer to the system’s edge than Earth is,” Kolichiyaw said with a theatrical shrug. “Hell, I always thought that was a big part of this godforsaken dust-ball’s charm.”
A low chuckle passed through the gathering.
“That’s true enough,” Qaletaqu said, slowly walking along the pool table’s length as though it were a stage. “But we’re still stuck with the fact that we have a lot less leverage over Vulcan than either Earth or the Centauri do. And they couldn’t persuade Vulcan to reconsider its decision, even working together.”
A brown-skinned, deeply wrinkled man with flashing eyes and iron-colored, shoulder-length hair rose from a seat in the back of the room.
“We do have at least one other option,” the older man said. Brooks noticed that every head in the room turned attentively toward him, a courtesy that not even the town sheriff received without displaying his shooting iron.
“And what option is that, Katowa my father?” Qaletaqu said. His tone sounded outwardly respectful, though Brooks sensed that the representative was waging a mighty internal struggle to maintain it.
Katowa.
Brooks recognized the name from her background research. This regal-looking man was Qaletaqu’s father, the ceremonial chief of the Martian Hopi-Pueblo nation, a man who had served for many years as the Martian Colonies’ official representative to the United Earth government, prior to its having become one of the founding members of the Coalition of Planets. According to his official bio, Katowa had restricted his activities to Mars during recent years as his advancing age had made him increasingly intolerant of Earth’s much higher gravity. Brooks knew that although Katowa was not the designated head of Canyontown’s government—and therefore could not make any decisions for Canyontown by fiat—she also knew that he was regarded across Mars as one of the planet’s wisest heads, and certainly commanded the respect of everyone in the room.
Katowa walked slowly toward the pool table as he responded to his son’s question. “It is the only option that does not require our meek acceptance of whatever mere scraps others deign to hand to us, Qaletaqu my son.”
“Right on!” Ahota called out. “We’ve been on Mars long enough! Time to pull up stakes and move on!”
Ahota’s wife shushed him with a swift elbow to the ribs.
“With respect, Ahota,” Qaletaqu said, “we still have much work ahead of us here in remaking this world into something the spirits of our ancestors would recognize.”
Katowa came to a stop at the pool table’s edge, his hands clasped before him as he gazed up at Qaletaqu, dark eyes as patient as the ages, and yet filled with an awful urgency.
“The Romulans may not allow that, my son,” the chief said as he carefully stepped up onto the pool table’s surface via a chair placed beside him by the sheriff. “The conflict that is coming is a sign from the spirit world that the time has come once again for the tribe to seek a new home.”
Qaletaqu spread his hands before him in a placating gesture. “We already have a home, father. It is the Valles Marineris.”
“Mars has never been more than a temporary camp site,” Katowa said with a slow shake of his gray-maned head. “The galaxy abounds with new worlds that the spirits of our ancestors would recognize far more readily than they would this one, Qaletaqu. Worlds that need not be remade from scratch. Worlds upon which our tribe might at long last establish a permanent home among rivers and trees and living things, where the very skies do not conspire to kill us.”
Well, running away is certainly one way of dealing with the Romulans, Brooks thought. But out in the wide wicked galaxy, that tactic will work about as well as it would on the local playground bully.
Unfortunately, a whole lot more people, both on Earth and off, were all but certain to embrace this wrong-headed idea, so long as opinion makers like Keisha Naquase—not to mention Chief Katowa—insisted on promoting it.
But Qaletaqu appeared to see this issue the same way Brooks did.
“The tribe has lived here for less than half a century, as measured in the years of our ancestors,” he said. “Frankly, that’s little more than a rounding error compared to the way they reckoned time. They used to consider the future ramifications of their every decision out to seven generations.”
“Had the Romulans menaced our ancestors,” the old man said, “their progeny might never have made it all the way to the present generation.”
“The Great Spirit has never granted us guarantees, Father, only opportunities.”
“Agreed. We should seize the best possible opportunity for the tribe’s continued survival.”
Qaletaqu looked disappointed, but not deterred. “Wouldn’t a decision to leave now, rather than to stay and help all the other tribes of humanity to fight the war that’s coming, merely be capitulation to yet another conqueror? I think the spirit of Popé would not be pleased.”
Katowa stood in silence, facing his son, apparently absorbing and considering his sharp words. Brooks thought those words had cut him deeply, judging from the moisture she saw gleaming in the old man’s eyes.
“I stand by my recommendation,” the old chief said at length. “But I will defer to the wisdom of the vote of the Canyontown Commission.”
Which meant, so far as Brooks understood it, the adult population of this tavern’s game room. She already knew that Katowa’s opinion carried tremendous weight with Canyontown’s rank-and-file citizenry.
What she didn’t know and wouldn’t discover, at least not before what looked to be a very close vote was counted and counted again, was whether or not Katowa could sway a prosperous, settled people into becoming a band of nomads with a future at least as uncertain as the one that included joining the war against the Romulans.
Brooks was relieved to see that Qaletaqu’s view held the day, if only by a whisker. It was only after the second count had been completed— the first count had resulted in a tie—that she realized she had been holding her breath.
Katowa and approximately half the room took in the news of their defeat stoically. The last thing these people were, after all, was a collection of whiners.
“So we Canyontowners will stay right where we are,” Qaletaqu said afterward, in a tone of peroration that clearly signaled that the day’s business was very nearly done. “We’ve invested far too much sweat and blood in this valley, and in this planet, to simply abandon it. We’ll make the most of every last split-second of advance warning the Vulcans can give us before the Romulans come. After all, they’ll have to get past the patrol zones of both the Titan outpost and Jupiter Station before they reach the cold far shore of the inner solar system.
“And once they get here,” Qaletaqu said with a fire behind his eyes that Brooks found both inspiring and frightening, “we’ll give ’em a fight that’ll make our forefather Popé proud.”
The next day, as another interplanetary transport carried her on toward the next stop on her outbound tour, Gannet Brooks reviewed the audio recording she had made of Qaletaqu’s words as she looked out one of the aft observation ports. The cold, rocky world in whose deepest places the determined people of Canyontown had built a home was a rapidly retreating red-and-brown crescent.
Popé, she recalled, had prevailed against the invading Spaniards, overcoming long odds with moxie, determination, and careful planning. But the people who had followed him into battle had eventually succumbed to infighting and disunity. She breathed a silent prayer of hope that the Martians, particularly the Canyontowners, would do better.
Just as she fervently hoped that they wouldn’t inadvertently vindicate Keisha Naquase’s peace-at-any-cost philosophy by getting themselves wiped out in the conflagration that was coming.