Mars Life (24 page)

“You got to know when to hold ‘em, and know when to fold em.” Andersen struggled to his feet. “Sorry you had to come down horn Boston just to hear bad news, Mr. Trumball. But, believe me, I’ve looked at all the angles. Your documentary is a dead issue. Maybe some private schools will look at it, but don’t expect a big audience.”

Dex muttered a heartfelt, “Damn.”

As he watched Andersen waddle off through the hotel lobby, Dex knew that his worst fears had been realized. The New Morality and their fellow fundamentalists were working hard to strangle the exploration of Mars.

He had only one card left to play. With a sigh, he pulled out his pocket phone and called for his limo. He wasn’t looking forward to riding through the choking traffic all the way out to JFK airport. But Kinnear was in Hawaii, and if Dex was going to close a deal for bringing tourists to Mars he had to go to Kinnear.

I’ll get it all signed and sealed, he told himself as he impatiently waited for the limo to show up. I won’t breathe a word of this to Jamie until the money’s on the table.

Fulvio, are you all right?” Jamie asked, alarmed. He could hear the priest’s labored breathing in the headphone clipped to his ear.

“Yes,” DiNardo answered, puffing. “I’m just... a little . . . out of breath.”

They had ridden side by side up the cable lifts from the valley floor to the cleft where the ancient buildings stood. It had taken DiNardo three floundering tries to get his boots on the floor of the cleft. In the end, Jamie had to throw him a tether and reel him in.

Through the inflated helmet of DiNardo’s nanofabric suit Jamie could see the priest’s face was flushed, whether from exertion or embarrassment he couldn’t tell.

“I have never been a mountaineer,” DiNardo said, with an apologetic smile, as he unclipped the climbing harness.

“It’s my fault,” Jamie said. “We pushed you through without all the necessary training.”

“I’m all right now. I simply needed to catch my breath.” Jamie nodded and held out one hand, as if to steady his companion.

DiNardo looked past him, and his mouth sagged open. “This is it,” he whispered, eyes widening.

Jamie felt himself break into a broad smile. “This is it. The cliff dwellings.”

The structures stood ghostly pale against the ruddy tones of the overhanging rock, but straight and clean-lined, created by an intelligence that knew how to build for the ages.

As they began to walk toward the buildings, Jamie went on, “Carleton says they weren’t dwellings. The Martians lived down on the valley floor. These buildings were some sort of temple, he believes, used for ceremonial purposes.”

“They came here to worship?”

“Maybe.”

They ducked through a low doorway and straightened up again inside the building. Sunlight filtered down from the light well that ran through the core of the structure.

“Do you think this was truly a place of worship?” DiNardo asked, his voice hardly above a whisper.

Heading for the ladder that led to the upper floors, Jamie said, “The Anasazi back in Arizona built storehouses for grain high up in rock clefts. They used the sites for protection against their enemies.”

“Did these Martians have enemies among them?”

“Damned if I know.”

DiNardo chuckled softly. “Be careful of the words you speak. I had a teacher, a stern old Irish Jesuit, who always warned us that we should not use such language. ‘God might grant your wish and damn you for all eternity,’ he would tell us.”

“I can’t believe that God would be so spiteful,” said Jamie.

“Neither could I,” said Monsignor DiNardo. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, “Yet he did away with the Martians, did He not?”

Jamie looked at the priest. His face was etched with something beyond the kind of burning desire to know that drove Jamie. His eyes looked infinitely sad.

Vijay, meanwhile, was in the midst of a tutorial by Carter Carleton.

She had deliberately sought him out at lunch, and found him at a table with eight others. They made room for Vijay to sit across the table from Carleton, between a professor of geophysics and a postdoc cellular biologist. Carleton spent the mealtime discussing the work at the dig, although he did almost all the talking while the others listened and nodded.

He’s handsome, Vijay thought. Handsome and basking in the attention everyone’s giving him. Four of the eight others were women, three of them quite young. Vijay memorized their names from the tags on the coveralls and made a mental note to check their dossiers.

It’s all part of my psych profiling, she told herself. I’ve got to know everyone’s background as thoroughly as I can.

But it was Carleton who fascinated her. She had looked up his file as soon as she had gotten Nari Quintana’s agreement for the psychology study. Carleton was by far the most interesting personality among the scientists and technicians. He had been chairman of the University of Pennsylvania’s anthropology department, but had resigned under a cloud of accusations and recrimination. Vijay had pulled up news media reports of the scandal: a female student had accused him of sexual assault. The university’s official records never mentioned the word 
rape, 
but the tabloids did, plentifully.

Fascinating, thought Vijay. Carleton came to Mars as a virtual refugee from the affair, claiming he’d been set up by religious fundamentalists because of his teaching about evolution. Now he was leading the effort to excavate the long-buried Martian village. And reveling in the attention it brought him.

He’d been shacked up with one of the younger women, Doreen McManus, Vijay had learned. But she’d gone back to Selene. If Carleton misses her, he certainly doesn’t show it, she thought.

On the other hand, she mused, there’s definitely tension between Carleton and Chang. Negative tension. Chang doesn’t like the anthropologist, he sees Carleton as a challenge to his authority.

“Come on over to the stereo table,” Carleton said to the group, “and I’ll show you what I mean.”

They dutifully left their half-finished lunches on the table and trooped across the dome. Halfway there Vijay realized that Carleton had come up alongside her.

“Are you really interested in this?” he asked, smiling at her. He was slightly taller than Jamie, she realized, and several centimeters taller than she. Slim, with a tight gut. On Earth he’d be deeply tanned from all his outdoors work. Here on Mars no one got sunburned, not inside the suits they had to wear.

“It’s fascinating,” Vijay replied. Carleton beamed, thinking that she referred to his work.

Carleton called up the three-dimensional display of the dig, then spent the rest of the lunch hour showing what they were uncovering.

“These along here are the foundations of what might most likely be living quarters.”

“Houses?” asked one of the women students.

“Houses,” Carleton said.

“Or not,” said one of the older men. “Mustn’t jump to conclusions.”

Carleton nodded perfunctorily. “Yes, but look at the way they’re grouped around what can only be a central plaza.”

“Kind of small for a plaza.”

“A miniplaza, then.” Carleton’s tone went harder. “I’m willing to bet that’s where they had a communal fireplace. We’ve found traces of ash in a central stone-lined pit. That’s where they cooked their food.”

Another of the students, male, said, “They must have had fairly extensive fields of crops nearby.”

Brightening, Carleton agreed. “We’ll look for those once we’ve excavated the entire village. Croplands don’t leave all that much for us to find, though. Seeds, maybe petrified parts of plants. Not like the foundations of these structures.”

A tone chimed, echoing through the dome.

“Lunch hour’s over,” said Carleton. “Time to suit up and get back to work.”

The group began to head for the main airlock, where their nanofabric suits hung waiting for them.

“Would you like to join us, Mrs. Waterman?”

Vijay was only half surprised by his question. “Me? I don’t know anything about digging up old ruins.”

“That’s all right. I can show you what to do.”

“Really?”

“If it interests you.”

Thinking it over swiftly, Vijay said, “I have to check in at the infirmary. Would it be okay if I came out a little later?”

“Certainly. I’ll look forward to it.”

He gave her a brilliant smile, then turned and headed toward the airlock.

Vijay stood at the stereo table, thinking, A narcissist. He’s definitely a narcissist. But is he also a rapist?                   

She thought not.

It was midafternoon by the time Vijay finished her notes, suited up, and walked out to the dig. She recognized Carleton, standing in a bulky, grimy old hard suit by the big sifter on the edge of the pit with a pair of others in nanosuits flanking him on either side.

He recognized her, too.

“Mrs. Waterman!” she heard in her earphone. “Welcome!”

Vijay walked up to the anthropologist and they shook gloved hands. “Please call me Vijay,” she said.

“Sure. Great. And you can call me Carter.”

She peered over the edge of the excavation. “Those actually do look like the foundations of buildings.”

“That’s exactly what they are, Vijay.”

For the next ten minutes Carleton pointed out to her the houses, the plaza, the street that ran straight toward the old riverbank, just as he had outlined them »on the stereo display. Seeing the ancient remains in actuality, though, was different. Vijay felt an excitement that stirred her. Jamie was right. Real, actual people lived here, worked here, raised families here.

And died here, she realized. More than sixty million years ago.

“They were a lot shorter than we,” Carleton was saying. “Built close to the ground.”

“How can you tell?” she asked.

“We’ve made some measurements of the door frames. Reconstructions, actually, since the frames are all collapsed. But we have intact doorways up in the cliff structures.”

“I see.”

The setting sun was casting long shadows across the valley floor before Vijay realized that she had spent almost the entire afternoon with Carleton at the dig. The excavation was completely shaded now. The workers were climbing up out of the pit on the ramp that had been cut into one side of it.

“Another day older and deeper in debt,” one of the postdocs wisecracked as he shut down the sifter’s motor.

Carleton waggled a finger at him. “Wrong attitude, Lonzo. Another day finished and we’re closer to having the whole village excavated.”

“And what then?” Vijay asked.

He put a hand on her shoulder and turned her toward the dome. “By then we should know a lot more about the Martians than we do now. What they ate, how they lived — “

“What they looked like?”

He nodded inside the inflated bubble of his helmet. “Yes, I think we should even get a fairly good idea of what they looked like.” Then, grinning, he added, “It would help if they left a few pictures around. Decorated their homes. Put up a sign or two.”

“Do you think you’ll find something like that?”

He shrugged inside the nanosuit. “Maybe they were iconoclasts. Maybe making images of themselves was forbidden.”

“Like Muslims,” Vijay murmured.

“Burial sites,” Carleton said. “That’s where we’ll find out the most about them. We haven’t found their cemetery, not yet.”

Vijay wondered if the Martians buried their dead. Some cultures on Earth preferred cremation, she knew. Primitive peoples often left dead bodies out in the open to be consumed by scavengers.

“Can you have dinner with me?” Carleton asked.

Surprised, Vijay blurted, “I have meals with my husband.”

“Bring him along. I’m broad-minded.”

Once she had finished vacuuming her nanosuit and hanging it on the rack by the main airlock, Vijay hurried across the dome to her quarters. Jamie wasn’t there, so she walked to his office. He wasn’t there, either.

Puzzled, almost worried, she stood outside the entrance of his cubicle and wondered if she should ask the excursion controller where her husband was. Then she saw him and Monsignor DiNardo walking slowly from the airlock, deep in conversation.

Feeling relieved, Vijay headed back toward their quarters. He’ll come there before dinner, she told herself.

But Jamie spotted her from halfway across the dome and beckoned to her. She hurried to him.

“I didn’t realize how late it was getting,” Jamie said. “We spent lire whole day up in the cliff structures.”

“It is my fault,” the priest said, with an apologetic smile. “I’m afraid I have taken your husband away from his duties.”

Before Jamie could reply, Vijay said, “I went out to the dig. With Carter.”

“Oh? I thought you were working with the medical staff.”

“I played hooky this afternoon. Just like you.”

DiNardo’s brows knit. “Hooky?”

“Carter’s asked us to have dinner with him,” Vijay said to Jamie.

He turned to the priest. “I thought we’d eat with Monsignor DiNardo tonight. We have a lot to talk over, about the documentary that Dex made. We’re going to add a segment from up in the cliff dwellings.”

Vijay started to bite her lip, caught herself, then said, “Well, whyn’t you two do what you need to, and I’ll eat with Carter. Okay?”

Jamie glanced at DiNardo, then nodded. “Okay.”

Vijay felt strangely disappointed.

You’re husband’s a busy man,” said Carleton, smiling across the small table at Vijay.

She made herself smile back as she glanced past Carleton’s shoulder at Jamie and DiNardo sitting at the next table, huddled over their untouched dinners, talking intently. Jamie’s back was to her.