The Empress of Mars (Company) Read online

  “Sorry,” said the Heretic, ducking her head in awkward acknowledgment of tardiness and hurrying off to the kitchen, where she set about denting pans with more than usual effort to make up for being late. Mary followed after, for the Heretic was another problem case requiring patience.

  The Heretic had been an Ephesian sister until she had had some kind of accident, about which few details were known, but which had left her blind in one eye and somehow gotten her excommunicated. She had been obliged to leave her convent under something of a cloud; and how she had wound up here on Mars was anybody’s guess. She stammered, jittered, and dropped things, but she was at least not the proselytizing kind of heretic, keeping her blasphemous opinions to herself. She was also a passable cook, so Mary had agreed to take her on at the Empress.

  “Are you all right?” asked Mary, peering into the darkness of the kitchen, where the Heretic seemed to be chopping freeze-dried soy protein at great speed.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you want the lights on? You’ll cut off a finger,” said Mary, turning the lights on, and the Heretic yelped and covered her human eye, swiveling the ocular replacement on Mary in a reproachful kind of way.

  “Ow,” she said.

  “Are you hung over?”

  “No,” said the Heretic, cautiously uncovering her eye, and Mary saw that it was red as fire.

  “Oh, dear. Did you have the dreams again?”

  The Heretic stared through her for a moment before saying, in a strange and breathless voice, “Out of the ground came scarlet flares, each one bursting, a heart’s beacon, and He stood above the night and the red swirling cold sand and in His hand held up the Ace of Diamonds. It burned like the flares. He offered it forth, laughing and said: Can you dig it?”

  “Okay,” said Mary, after a moment’s silence.

  “Sorry,” said the Heretic, turning back to her cutting board.

  “That’s all right,” said Mary. “Can you get luncheon on by eleven?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, good,” said Mary, and exited the kitchen.

  Lady, grant me an ordinary day, she begged silently, for the last time the Heretic had said something bizarre like that, all manner of strange things had happened.

  Yet the day rolled on in its accustomed groove as ordinary as you please. At noon the luncheon crowd came in, the agricultural workers from the Clan and contract laborers from the Settlement, who were either Sherpas like Chiring or Incas like Manco; few English other than the Haulers frequented the Empress of Mars, for all their queen might smile from its sign.

  After noon, when the laboring men and women went trooping back to their shifts through the brown whirling day, and the wind had reached its accustomed hissing howl, there was too much to do to worry. There were plates and bowls to be scoured, there was beer to brew, and there was the constant tinkering necessary to keep all the machines running, lest the window’s force field fail against the eternal sandblast, among other things.

  So Mary had forgotten all about any dire forebodings by the time the blessed afternoon interval of peace came round, and she retired to the best of her tables and put her feet up.

  “Mum.”

  So much for peace. She opened one eye and looked at Rowan, who was standing there gesturing urgently at the communications console.

  “Mr. Cochevelou sends his compliments, and would like to know if he might come up the Tube to talk about something,” she said.

  “Hell,” said Mary, leaping to her feet. It was not that she did not like Mr. Cochevelou, clan chieftain (indeed, he was more than a customer and patron); but she had a pretty good idea what it was he wanted to discuss.

  “Tell him Of Course, and then go down and bring up a bottle of the Black Label,” she said. She went to fetch a cushion for Mr. Cochevelou’s favorite seat.

  Cochevelou must have been waiting with his fist on the receiver, for it seemed no more than a minute later he came shouldering his way through the Tube, emerging from the airlock beard first, and behind him three of his household too, lifting their masks and blinking.

  “Luck on this house,” said Cochevelou hoarsely, shaking the sand from his psuit, and his followers mumbled an echo. Mary noted philosophically the dunelets piling up around their boots.

  “Welcome to the Empress, Mr. Cochevelou. Your usual?”

  “Bless you, ma’am, yes,” said Cochevelou, and she took his arm and led him away, jerking a thumb at Mona to indicate she should take a broom to the new sand. Mona sighed and obeyed without good grace, but her mother was far too busy trying to read Cochevelou’s expression to notice.

  Between the beard and the forge soot, there wasn’t much of Cochevelou’s face to see; but his light eyes had a shifting look to them today, at once hopeful and uneasy. He watched Mary pour him a shot of Black Label, rubbing his thick fingers across the bridge of his nose and leaving pale streaks there.

  “It’s like this, ma’am,” he said abruptly. “We’re sending Finn home.”

  “Oh,” said Mary, filling another glass. “Congratulations, Mr. Finn.”

  “It’s on account of I’m dying without the sea,” said Finn, a smudgy creature in a suit that had been buckled tight and was still too big.

  “And with the silicosis,” added Cochevelou.

  “That’s beside the point,” said Finn querulously. “I dream at night of the flat wet beach and the salt mist hanging low, and the white terns wheeling above the white wave. Picking dulse from the tidepools where the water lies clear as glass—”

  There were involuntary groans from the others, and one of them booted Finn pretty hard in the ankle to make him stop.

  “And, see, he goes on like that and drives the rest of us mad with his glass-clear water and all,” said Cochevelou, raising his voice slightly as he lifted his cup and saluted Mary. “So what it comes down to is, we’ve finally saved enough to send one of us home and it’s got to be him, you see? Your health, ma’am.”

  He drank, and Mary drank, and when they had both drawn breath, she said: “What’s to happen to his allotment?”

  She had cut straight to the heart of the matter, and Cochevelou smiled in a grimacing kind of way.

  Under the terms of the Edinburgh Treaty, which had been hammered out during that momentary thaw in relations between England and the Celtic Federation by the Tri-Worlds Settlement Bureau, every settler on Mars had received a leased allotment of acreage for private terraforming. With the lease went the commitment to keep the land under cultivation, at the risk of its reverting to the British Arean Company.

  The British Arean Company, having long since repented its rash decision to invite so many undesirables to settle on Mars, had gotten into the habit of grabbing back land it did not feel was being sufficiently utilized.

  “Well, that’s the question,” said Cochevelou. “It’s twenty long acres of fine land, ma’am.”

  “Five in sugar beets, five in hay, and ten in the best barley,” said Finn.

  “With the soundest roof ever built and its own well, and the sweetest irrigation pipes ever laid,” said Cochevelou. “You wouldn’t mind drinking out of them, I can tell you. And how the biis zoom amongst its rows by night!”

  Mary became aware that dead silence had fallen in her house, that all her family were poised motionless with brooms or trays of castware to hear what would be said next. Barley was the life of the house. It was grown on cold and bitter Mars because it would grow anywhere, for a given value of anywhere, but it didn’t grow well on the wretched bit of high-oxidant rock clay Mary had been allotted.

  “What a pity if it was to revert to the BAC,” she said noncommittally.

  “We thought so, too,” said Cochevelou, turning the cup in his fingers. “Because of course they’d plow that good stuff under and put it in soy, and wouldn’t that be a shame? So of course we thought of offering it to you, first, ma’am.”

  “How much?” said Mary at once.

  “Four thousand punts Celtic,” Cochevel
ou replied. “And you’d get the services of the biis complimentary, of course, you being nearly family.”

  Mary narrowed her eyes. “How much of that would you take in trade?”

  There was a slight pause.

  “The British Arean Company has offered us four grand in cash,” said Cochevelou in a somewhat apologetic tone. “You see. But we’d much rather have you as a neighbor, wouldn’t we? So if there’s any way you could possibly come up with the money . . .”

  “I haven’t got it,” said Mary bluntly, and she meant it, too. Her small economy ran almost entirely on barter and goodwill.

  “Aw, now, surely you’re mistaken about that,” said Cochevelou. “You could take up a collection, maybe. All the good workers love your place, and wouldn’t they reach into their hearts and their pockets for a timely contribution? And some of your ex-BACs, haven’t they got a little redundancy pay socked away in the bottom of the duffel? If you could even scrape together two-thirds for a down, we’d work out the most reasonable terms for you!”

  Mary hesitated. She knew pretty well how much her people had, and it didn’t amount to a thousand punts even if they presold their bodies to the xenoforensic studies lab. But the Lady might somehow provide, might She not?

  “Perhaps I ought to view the property,” she said.

  “It would be our pleasure,” said Cochevelou, grinning white in his sooty beard, and his people exchanged smiles, and Mary thought to herself: Careful.

  But she rose and psuited up, and fitted her mask on tight, and went for a stroll through the airlock with Cochevelou and his people.

  The Settlement was quite a bit more now than the single modest dome that had sheltered the first colonists, though that still rose higher than any other structure, and it did have that lovely vizio top so its inhabitants could see the stars, and which gave it a rather Space-Age Moderne look. It wasted heat, though, and who the hell cared enough about two tiny spitspeck moons to venture out in the freezing night and peer upward at them?

  The Tubes had a nice modern look, too, where the English maintained them, with lots of transparencies that gave onto stunning views of the Red Planet.

  To be strictly accurate, it was only a red planet in places. When Mary had come to live there, her first impression had been of an endless cinnamon-colored waste. Now she saw every color but blue, from primrose-curry-tomcat-ochre to flaming persimmon-vermilion through bloodred and so into ever more livery shades of garnet and rust. There were even greens, both the subdued yellowy olive khaki in the rock and the exuberant rich green of the covered acreage.

  And Finn’s twenty long acres were green indeed, rich as emerald with a barley crop that had not yet come into its silver beard. Mary clanked through the airlock after Cochevelou and stopped, staring.

  “The Crystal Palace itself,” said Finn proudly, with a wave of his hand.

  She pulled off her mask and inhaled. The air stank, of course, from the methane; but it was rich and wet too, and with a certain sweetness. All down the long tunnel roofed with industrial-grade vizio, the barley grew tall, out to that distant point of shade change that must be sugar beet. Beyond that were hayfields where cattle grazed peaceful and pastoral as in an Earth meadow. Pollinator microbots, tiny points of golden light, hummed and dove, floated and circled out there.

  “Oh, my,” Mary said, giddy already with the oxygen.

  “You see?” said Cochevelou. “Worth every penny of the asking price.”

  “If I had it,” she retorted, making an effort at shrewdness. It was a beautiful holding, one that would give her all the malted barley she could use and plenty to trade on the side or even to sell . . .

  “No wonder the English want this,” she said, and her own words echoed in her ears as she regarded the landscape beyond the vizio, the long green stripes of the other allotments, the low-domed methane hell of the Clan’s cattle pens, the towering pipe-maze of Cochevelou’s ironworks.

  “No wonder the English want this,” she repeated, turning to look Cochevelou in the eye. “If they own this land, it divides Clan Morrigan’s holdings smack in two, doesn’t it?”

  “Too right,” agreed Finn. “And then they’ll file actions to have the cowshed and the ironworks moved as nuisances, see and—ow,” he concluded, as he was kicked again.

  “And it’s all a part of their secret plot to drive us out,” said Cochevelou rather hastily. “You see? They’ve gone and made us an offer we can’t refuse. Now we’ve broke the ground and manured it for them, they’ve been just waiting and waiting for us to give up and go home, so they can grab it all. The day after we filed the papers to send Finn back, bastardly Inspector Baldwin shows up on our property.”

  “Didn’t his face fall when he saw what a nice healthy crop we had growing here!” said Finn, rubbing his ankle.

  “So he couldn’t condemn it and get the lease revoked, you see?” Cochevelou continued, giving Finn a black look. “Because obviously it ain’t abandoned, it’s gone into our collective’s common ownership. But it wasn’t eight hours later he came around with that offer of four thousand for the land. And if we take it, yes, it’s a safe bet they’ll start bitching and moaning about our cattle and all.”

  “Don’t sell,” said Mary. “Or sell to one of your own.”

  “Sweetheart, you know we’ve always thought of you as one of our own,” said Cochevelou soupily. “Haven’t we? But who in our poor clan would ever be able to come up with that kind of money? And as for not selling, why, you and I can see that having the British Arean Company in here would be doom and destruction and (which is worse) lawsuits inevitable somewhere down the road. But it isn’t up to me. Most of our folk will only be able to see that big heap of shining BAC brass they’re being offered. And they’ll vote to take it, see?”

  “We could do a lot with such money,” said Matelot, he who had been most active kicking Finn, with a sigh. “Buy new generators, which we sorely need. More vizio, which as you know is worth its weight in transparent gold. Much as we’d hate to sell to strangers . . .”

  “But if you were to buy the land, we’d have our cake and be able to eat it too, you see?” Cochevelou explained.

  Mary eyed him resentfully. She saw, well enough: whichever way the dice fell, she was going to lose. If the Clan Morrigan acreage shrank, her little economy would go out of balance. No barley, no beer.

  “You’ve got me in a cleft stick, Cochevelou,” she told him, and he looked sad.

  “Aren’t we both in a cleft stick, and you’re just in the tightest part?” he replied. “But all you have to do is come up with the money, and we’re both riding in high cotton, and the British Arean Company can go off and fume. Come on now, darling, you don’t have to make up your mind right away! We’ve got until the Queen’s Birthday to finalize things. Go on home and talk it over with your people, why don’t you?”

  Mary clapped her mask on and stamped out through the airlock, muttering.

  CHAPTER 3

  Extraordinary Day

  Mary had been accustomed, all her life, to dealing with emergencies. When the British Arean Company’s headhunters had approached her with a job offer, it had seemed as though it must be the Lady’s reward for all her years of coping.

  A glorious adventure on another world! The chance to explore, to classify, and to enshrine her name forever in the nomenclature of Martian algae! The little girls had listened with round eyes, and only Alice had sulked and wept about leaving her friends, and only for a little while. So they’d all set off together bravely and become Martians, and the girls had adapted in no time, spoiled rotten as the only children on Mars.

  And Mary had five years of happiness as a valued member of a scientific team, respected for her expertise, finding more industrial applications for Cryptogametes gryffyuddi than George Washington Carver had found for the peanut.

  But when she had discovered all there was to discover about useful lichens on Mars (and in five years she had pretty much exhausted the subject), the Briti
sh Arean Company had had no more use for her.

  The nasty interview with General Director Rotherhithe had been both unexpected and brief. Her morals were in question, it had seemed. She had all those resource-consuming children, and while that sort of thing might be acceptable in a Celtic Federation country, Mars belonged to England. She was known to indulge in controlled substances, also no crime in the Federation, but certainly morally wrong. And the British Arean Company had been prepared to tolerate her, ah, religion in the hope that it would keep her from perpetuating certain other kinds of immorality, which had unfortunately not been the case—

  “What, because I have men to my bed?” Mary had demanded, unfortunately not losing her grasp of English. “You dried-up dirty-minded old stick, I’ll bet you’d wink at it if I had other women, wouldn’t you? Bloody hypocrite! I’ve heard you keep a lesbian holopeep in your office cabinet—”

  Academic communities are small and full of gossip, and even smaller and more full of gossip under a biodome, and secrets cannot be kept at all. So Julie and Sylvia Take Deportment Lessons from Ms. Lash had been giggled at, but never mentioned out loud. Until now.

  General Director Rotherhithe had had a choking fit and gone a nice shade of lilac, and Sub-Director Thorpe had taken over to say that It was therefore with infinite regret, et cetera . . .

  And Mary had had to cope again.

  She hadn’t cared that she couldn’t afford the fare home; she loved Mars. She had decided she was damned if she was going to be thrown off. So, with her redundancy pay, she’d gone into business for herself.

  She’d purchased a dome from the Federation colonists, a surplus shelter originally used for livestock; and though the smell took some weeks to go away even in the dry thin air, the walls were sound and warm, and easily remodeled with berths for lodgers.

  Chiring Skousen, who had had his contract canceled with the British Arean Company for writing highly critical articles about the redundancies and sending the features home to the Kathmandu Post, might have gone home free and clear with the other journalists who had been embedded to cover the Big Red Balloon. Instead he remained, because he wasn’t about to leave a good story. Now he boarded at the Empress, filming an ongoing documentary on the Big Red Balloon’s aftermath.