Nobody Gets The Girl (26 page)

"Look," said Richard. "I'm more to blame for
this than she is. And I think I might have a little insight into
this. You have a chance to do something that is forever lost to me.
You can still talk with your mother. This is a second chance for
you."

Sarah toyed with the tiny hearing
blockers.

"You know, it's funny," she said. "But I
don't hate you for this. I don't hate you for killing my father,
for coming here and judging me, for telling me how I should treat
my mother. But..."

"But?"

"But I've hated you for a long time now for
not coming to find me. I haven't exactly been keeping myself
secret. I've been mentioned in news stories as Vincent Kay's
'mistress.' They've run photos of me in tabloids. I always thought
you'd find me. But it took this to make you come here?"

"I've been a little unfocused for the last
year," said Nobody. "Sorry."

"Do you still love me?" asked Sarah.

"No."

"Oh."

"Not romantically," said Richard. "But I hope
we'll be friends. This isn't some kind of bullshit. I really enjoy
your company."

"So what changed?"

"You'll kill me when I tell you."

"How bad can it be compared to your killing
my dad?"

"I might be in love with your sister. I’m
hoping you'll help me find her."

Sarah cut him a glance that twisted his
stomach worse than the space machine. He knew he'd gone too far in
revealing this.

Then Sarah started to laugh.

"Wow," she said. "I mean, wow. You have a lot
of nerve, Nobody."

"What do I have to lose?" he asked.

THEY CONTINUED TO
talk for the next
few hours. Richard was relieved to discover he'd done the right
thing. With everything out in the open, Sarah seemed more curious
than angry about what had happened. He told her about the fight
between Rail Blade and Dr. Know, about the mansion being cut in
half, what had happened in the garden, about his lost year
wandering the country, and everything he knew about Rex Monday up
to and including how he died.

"It makes perfect sense," said Sarah, after
hearing about the time loop that had put the gun back into his
hands.

"See, this is why I like you," said
Richard.

LATER THAT NIGHT
, Richard demonstrated
his space machine. One moment they were standing on the patio
outside the dining room of the mansion, the next they were standing
in Dr. Know's museum and Sarah was throwing up onto the metal toes
of a two-story-tall robotic ostrich.

"Don't... do that again," said Sarah. "Jesus,
that has to be the worst way to travel ever."

"I rode a bus across North Carolina once,"
said Richard. "The space machine just takes getting used to."

Sarah wiped her mouth as she looked around
the museum. "I never thought I'd admit it, but I've missed this
place."

"I guess it's home again for you, if you
want. It's got to be less lonely than that mansion. Use those
earplugs. Talk to your mother."

"OK. Is Paco still here?"

"Paco? The chef?"

"Yeah."

"I think so."

"Good. Irwin could barely make toast."

"I'm glad you can see the upside to this.
Especially so soon after throwing up."

"So what's next for you?" said Sarah.

"I'll keep looking for Amelia. She needs to
know that the war between your father and Rex Monday is over. And,
of course, I want to find out if she ever thinks about me."

"That's it. Rub it in," said Sarah. "I'm
still having a hard time getting my head around this. On my
brother's grave? Ew."

"I didn't pick the spot," Richard said,
apologetically.

"And you have no clue where she is now? It's
not in my father's files?"

"All I have is those weird videos of her in a
desert, and a map with an X on it I can't even begin to figure
out."

"Let me have a look," said Sarah.

As they moved toward the door, Sarah looked
overhead.

Richard looked up to the empty ceiling.

"Huh," she said. "I wonder what Dad did with
the spaceship?"

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

MOONSLIGHT

And so it was that Nobody went to Mars.

It took a little while to piece together.
Sarah's contacts at NASA needed a few weeks to match the map up to
satellite photos. Then a generous grant from Katrina Knowbokov set
the entire Cambridge University math department working on
extrapolating Rex Monday's coordinate system for the space machine
to a number sequence appropriate for another planet. Richard spent
the time testing the spacesuit Dr. Know had whipped together for
Mindo on her trip to the moon. It was comically large on him, but
airtight.

On Christmas morning, when the air was still
and silent, Richard tapped in the coordinates, hit enter, and took
the biggest leap of faith he had ever taken.

On Earth, the transposition of points on the
curvature of space felt close to instantaneous. The swap of
information occurred at the speed of light, and there were no two
points on Earth where this took more than a fraction of a
second.

Given the relative positions of the two
planets on that Christmas morning, it took twenty minutes for the
transit.

Richard went insane. There was no way of
comprehending the realms he passed through. It was a void of
unending darkness where everything glowed with a blinding light. It
was a blast furnace that blistered his skin and left his teeth
chattering beneath a casing of ice. Only he didn't always have
teeth and skin. Sometimes his skin would just vaporize away, at
other times his individual teeth danced before him in a delicate
pearly arc. His mind snapped at this, shattering into a thousand
jagged shards. Part of him stood, dispassionate, distant, watching
his twisting body against the pure white screen of the unspace. He
nodded slowly, coolly, contemplating the painful things happening
before him, but no longer truly aware of the pain of his head being
forced through the loops of his own intestines.

Even without a mouth, Richard said, "Get your
head out of your ass."

The world stopped dancing. His teeth flew
back into his mouth. His eyes tugged back into their sockets with
disgusting wet plops. The blank white screen before him became
blowing red sand as he fell to his knees, which were now,
thankfully, where they should be, and not glued on backwards.

And then he went sane, staring at his gloved
hand in the red sand. At least he thought he was sane. "I am sane,"
he said. It didn't sound crazy to say this.

He had fallen down. Immediately before him
was the glass of his visor, and beyond this were sand and pebbles
and his glove. He had an excellent view of them. His stomach was
oddly quiet. The anti-nausea medicine he’d taken had worked.

He lay there for a moment, fascinated by the
sand six inches from his face. This was Mars. He was laying face
down on Mars. Why had this seemed like a good idea?

Then he remembered why he was here. He grew
vaguely aware of his arms and legs and managed to move them. He
flailed about, unsure which way was up, until finally he realized
he had achieved a sitting position. No longer limited to the view
six inches from his face, Richard looked around the rocky
landscape. He was near a red cliff, with a wall as straight as if
it had been measured off with a chalk line. The seamless barricade
gleamed like red glass in the feeble sunlight. Perhaps a football
field in height, it stretched as far as he could see in both
directions. As he looked around, he could see a second wall
opposite him, perhaps a mile away, a crisp, dark line running
parallel to the wall he was near.

And above that, shimmering in the sun like a
mirage, was a steel dome. He let out a long, slow whistle.

He began to walk. It was oddly difficult,
given how light he felt. The sand beneath him was very fine; it was
like walking on talcum powder. He tried jumping. He could launch
himself twenty feet across the landscape with little effort, but
the many brick-size stones that jutted up from the sand made
landings tricky. Only luck kept him from breaking a leg or an ankle
the few times he tried.

He was worried about what would happen when
he reached the far wall. He had no idea how he would climb such a
smooth, featureless surface. Programming the space machine on an
alien planet to use as a shortcut might be rash. And, low-gravity
or no, he would never be able to jump such heights.

Closer to the wall, a particularly odd-shaped
boulder caught his attention. It was smooth and polished, tall as a
house, and an odd color for the landscape, a brilliant Earth-sky
blue. He was struck by how much it resembled a boat lying on its
side. It even had a rudder, and on what would have been the deck,
there were openings like hatches that revealed a hollow
interior.

Fifty feet away, Richard stopped and blinked.
This wasn't a rock that looked like a boat. This was a boat. He
rushed forward, stumbling over stones, slipping in dust, until he
reached the deck. He ran his hand along the glazed translucent
surface. The boat seemed to have been molded as a single piece; he
couldn't find a seam or a joint anywhere. The deck was tilted too
steeply for him to climb to one of the hatches, but he had no doubt
now that he was looking at an artificial construction.

Had Amelia built this? Why would she have
built a boat on a desert world? He swallowed, trying to make sense
of it.

He stepped back for a better view. His back
ran into something hard. He spun around to find iron bars. In a
whirl, iron bars thrust from the soil around him, in seconds
joining over his head to trap him in a man-sized birdcage. The bars
kicked up dust as they rose, and for a moment the dust cloud
blinded him.

As the dust settled, he could see a shining
steel rail arcing through the air from the top of the cliff down
toward the boat. Sliding toward him along the rail, Amelia drew
nearer. She was encased entirely in a shell of steel that mirrored
perfectly her nude body beneath. She raced toward the cage at a
speed that made Richard flinch, until she halted, instantly, inches
beyond the bars. She reached her hand through the cage and placed
her slender steel fingers upon his visor. Her face gave no clue as
to what she might be thinking.

Then the small speaker near his ear buzzed,
the noise rising and falling until it formed a robotic, mechanical
voice. "Oh," she said. "It's you."

The cage crumbled to rust. She wrapped her
arms around him, not in a hug of greeting, but in the manner one
might embrace a particularly bulky rolled up rug. With a lurch of
motion the dusty red soil was left behind and they rose into the
sky as the rail whipped around, back toward the top of the cliff.
For a moment, he could see the landscape clearly, and it seemed to
him that thin dusty roads radiated out from the steel dome. The
valley he'd landed in was revealed to stretch straight as a
mile-wide highway toward both horizons. Then his focus shifted to
the steel dome, which was several hundred yards around and dotted
with semi-transparent ruby panels. Just before they smacked into
the wall of the dome, the metal split open like a giant mouth, and
swallowed them.

Within the dome, the light was brighter than
Richard would have guessed, and not as red as the outside windows
would have indicated. A fountain bubbled with water in the center,
and grass grew across the floor. Flowering plants bloomed
everywhere in neat rows, next to blue walls crafted from the same
material as the boat. Near the fountain was the husk of the
spaceship Richard had seen in the museum, now disassembled into
several cylinders that looked like little buildings.

Rail Blade sat him down, and his helmet
speaker said, "You can take off your suit. There's air in
here."

Rail Blade moved and the metal flowed away
from her face and hair, until she wore only the metal shell from
the shoulders down. She watched him intently as he unsnapped the
clasps of his helmet and twisted it off with a grunt.

"Jesus Christ," Richard said, lowering the
helmet to the grass. He gulped in a big lungful of musty air with a
scent vaguely reminiscent of a locker room. "I'm on fucking
Mars!"

Amelia grinned. "Welcome to Xanadu."

"Xanadu?"

"You know, like the poem. This is my stately
pleasure dome."

"Ah," said Richard. "Hi."

"Hi," she said.

"Which one of us gets to ask the obvious
question first?"

"I'll go. What on Earth are you doing on
Mars?"

"I like the way you phrased that," said
Richard. "That's my first question also."

"I'm here to terraform Mars as a gift to the
human race," said Amelia. "You?"

"Whoa," said Richard. "My answer isn't nearly
as good as that."

"May I assume Father sent you?" said
Amelia.

"No. He's dead."

"Oh," said Amelia. "Did my mother kill
him?"

"What? Why would you say that?"

"I could see it in her eyes from time to
time. That desperate look. And, no offense, but to my father, she
was even more invisible than you. She was merely a vessel that
Father used to give birth to us. Once we kids started flying
around, Father's attention was entirely on us. Can you blame her
for being resentful?"

"No," said Richard, relieved at her reaction.
"That's why I put the gun in her hand."

"Bastard," said Amelia, her eyes flashing to
anger. Richard cringed, and threw up his hands, expecting her to
hit him.

"What?" he said, relieved that she didn't hit
him, and that metal blades hadn't popped out of nowhere and hacked
him to bits. "Why are you mad? You almost killed him yourself."

"He was still my father," said Amelia,
turning away. "What you said about putting the gun in her hands,
your tone... you were making a joke of it."