Peculiar Tales (7 page)

THE FUNERAL

I
still think they’re Russian,” said Brother Aloysius. “After all, they occupied this base until the Reformation—at least twenty years.”

“You might be right,” I said, “but it really doesn’t seem to make much sense.”

“Brother Raoul is right,” said Brother Bernard. “Why would they have hidden the bodies this way? If you want to call it hidden, that is.”

“That’s exactly my point,” I said. “They
weren’t
hidden. I mean, yes, they were in that cave, but they weren’t buried in any real sense. You’d think if the Russians were trying to cover something up, they’d have buried them out in the desert. No one would have ever found them there.”

“There’s that,” said Bernard, “and the fact that they were buried—
entombed
might be a better word, I think—with some ceremony. These bodies weren’t simply dumped into the cave willy-nilly.”

“True,” said Aloysius, “but...”

“But what?” I said. “There’s really nothing at all to suggest that they were Russians.”

“Well, who else could they have been? It’s obvious they’re not Chinese.”

He was right about that. The two bodies we’d found in the cave were not Chinese, though they had occupied the base for nearly ten years prior to the Russians. It hardly required a forensic specialist to determine that. The Martian atmosphere had freeze-dried the corpses as throughly and efficiently as any museum might have done a prized specimen. Mars provided nothing to corrupt the bodies, other than what they themselves contained: their own chemistry and the action of the bacteria in their guts as, starving, unrestrained and driven by a need for their own survival, they turned on their erstwhile hosts. But even these processes were hobbled by the lack of moisture in the Martian atmosphere and the utter lack of oxygen. To say nothing of an atmospheric pressure that was only kept from being called a vacuum by a technicality. The bodies surely had been thoroughly desiccated within minutes of being exposed to the environment—certainly within less than an hour.

In any event, the process preserved the bodies meticulously. Except for the parchment-like quality of the skin and the expected results of almost instant dehydration, there was little to complain of cosmetically...though the corpses’ substantiality was more illusion than fact. One could have effortlessly punched a pencil entirely through one of them. In fact, something very like that happened only moments after their discovery when Brother Julius, misled by their appearance, had tried to lift the arm of the woman...and was dismayed beyond all measure when his fingers sank into the massless, unresisting flesh like a pitchfork through a puffball mushroom. I understand he still has disturbing dreams about it, eight decades later.

In any event, the point was that it was clear that the bodies were not Chinese. The man could easily have been Russian. Nearly two meters tall and muscled like a stevedore, he must have been a formidable specimen in life. The woman, though...She possessed an exotic beauty that was profoundly puzzling. I might even say disturbing. It’s hardly necessary for me to say that most of our attention had been focused on the woman—since she was obviously the strangest of the two. We had no explanation for her physical anomalies. She seemed to be raceless—or it might be better to say that she seemed to be a blend of the best of all the human races—a quality many Polynesians had when there were still such a people. The skin of both the man and woman had been altered by their exposure to the Martian climate. The male was as brown as leather. So was the female, though she seemed to all of us to possess a reddish cast that made her resemble a statue cast in purest copper.

“Besides,” Bernard had been saying, “they had obviously been laid out with some ceremony. This was surely not the result of some clandestine disposal.”

“And we have, after all,” I added, “all of the records of the Russian occupation. Everyone’s accounted for.”

“
If
you trust the Russians,” Aloyisius said uncharitably.

“Perhaps they were members of some cult, operating within the Russian camp. That’d explain why there aren’t any Russian artefacts.”

Everyone agreed that this seemed a likely hypothesis. In the years immediately preceding the Reformation, Eastern Europe had been rife with heathenish cults and sects of all sorts.

The bodies were still in the cave at that time...though it is a little inaccurate of me to keep calling it that. There are no caves on Mars...at least not that anyone has become aware of. What I’m talking about here was a deep excavation between two parallel layers of hard rock where, untold millenia ago, a bed of ice had once been. In one of those eras of warming that Mars periodically undergoes, the ice had melted, adding its part to the flood that had gouged out the canyon below and creating, in the process, the deep, low-ceilinged chamber in which we had found the two bodies a fortnight ago.

Bernard had been correct in saying that the bodies had been buried with some ceremony—though according to what heathen rite was anyone’s guess. This had certainly not been any Christian burial. The corpses laid side-by-side on flat stones. About a foot separated them at their elbows. Both had been completely nude...which may better explain young Julius’ disturbing dreams than the horror of the disintegrating flesh. Naturally, all but the most senior scientists had been banned from cave. Even then we had taken the necessary precaution of placing opaque cloths over the offending regions, for the sake of decency and our
own
dreams.

And a good thing, too. Both bodies had been handsome specimens. The male was well over six feet tall, as I’ve mentioned. The woman was nearly as tall as the man, though built on much more slender—I may even say streamlined—lines. Her slenderness was not entirely due to her sex...her bones themselves were unnaturally thin in cross-section. The fact—one that was immediately obvious to all of us—was that she could hardly have stood comfortably erect on Earth—and even if so would have been in constant danger of fracturing a bone. Her lungs and heart were also unusually large and well-developed. Of course, I must explain immediately that neither would have suited her in any way to live unprotected on the surface of Mars. Even her enlarged organs would not have sufficed to keep her alive any longer than I would survive without my environmental suit.

Still...if she clearly could not have survived on Earth, what did that make her?

That was the point that most concerned the Patriarch.

“We must deal with this carefully, Brother Raoul,” he told me as he combed his beard with his long fingers. “This discovery presents difficulties of which even you may not be yet aware.”

“I can suspect what some of them may be. I’ve heard that it is being whispered about among the junior acolytes that these, um, beings may be, ah, of non-terrestrial origin.”

“Yes...and this is talk that will be stopped at once! It is the basest heresy and won’t be tolerated for an instant. These bodies are of those of human beings and, therefore, must have Earth as their origin. There is no other possibility.”

“I understand, your Holiness. It is a dangerous thing to think otherwise. A danger to one’s immortal soul, I mean.”

“Have you learned anything new since we last spoke?”

“No, your Holiness. The mystery only grows deeper the further we look into it. We’re all pretty convinced now that the bodies are not Russian; no one ever seriously believed they were Chinese. Still, we could devise any number of plausible explanations for the presence of the male—humans have, after all, had a presence on Mars for nearly a century. It’s the female who is presenting the greatest difficulty.”

“Her physical anomalies, you mean? As you say, humans have been on Mars for more than three generations. I’ve seen children with my own eyes who have adapted to the low gravity of the planet and the reduced air pressure of the habitats.”

“That is true, your Holiness, and it was one of the first things that occurred to us. But...the physical changes you mention are only just now beginning to show up in third and fourth generation children. The problem lies in the fact that the woman obviously died a very long time ago. I don’t think there’s any question that her burial dates at least from the earliest Russian occupation. Humans hadn’t been on Mars long enough at that time to allow for the sort of physiological changes we see in her to take place.”

“You think she may in fact predate the Russian colony?”

“That is, as you said yourself, your Holiness, getting into the realm of dangerous speculation. But the fact of the matter is that we really have no way of determining just how long those bodies have been in the cave. Going just by the physical evidence alone, they could have been hidden a few months ago...or thousands of years.”

“But of course we know there were no humans on Mars before the first ones arrived from Earth.”

“Of course.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, as you know, when the bodies were found they were completely nude. This isn’t entirely true, however. There were scraps of what appear to be small pieces of leather that may have once been clothing of some sort. It’s difficult to tell. In my opinion, no. There simply isn’t enough. Even if there were originally ten times as much as we found, it would hardly have sufficed even for modesty’s sake.”

“You’ve had the jewels and jewelry analyzed?”

“Yes. Most were scattered around the female body. I think they may have been placed there as part of some sort of ceremony. Others, Brother Thomas, for instance, thinks they may have once been part of some sort of costume the woman had been wearing. In any event, there is nothing unusual about them. Ordinary rubies, sapphires and the like. The jewelry itself is much more peculiar. The fact that it consists almost entirely of gold is puzzling enough since, as you know, that element is vanishingly rare on this planet. But more puzzling is the design. It must be the work of a highly original, idiosyncratic artist since we can relate it to nothing found in any Earthly record. That is, the patterns resemble no historical styles or known goldsmiths of either the past or present. It is completely unique.”

“Hmmm,” said the Patriarch, still stroking his long beard as he stared through the window at the pink hills beyond. “Keep me informed. There is no question that the bodies are of terrestrial origin, so we must quell any discussion—no matter how lightly made—that suggests otherwise.”

“I understand, your Holiness.”

Work continued. To keep rumors to a minimum, I reduced the on-site team to its five most essential—and most trusted—members. Men who were both good scientists and good, solid theologians. We discovered little to report to the Patriarch. The cave had been bare of anything other than the bodies, the platforms they lay upon and the few scraps we’d found near them.

Then we made the discovery.

“I’ve closed the cave,” I reported to the Patriarch.

“So I understand. You’ve also scattered the men after making them take oaths of secrecy.”

“I felt it was necessary, your Holiness.”

“You’ll explain why?”

“Yes, your Holiness, and I think you’ll agree that my actions were prudent. Brother Audrey was our physiologist, as you know, and had been performing most of the anatomical studies. Yesterday morning he discovered that the female was oviparous.”

“She was an egg-layer?”

“Yes, your Holiness. There’s no question about it. Her, ah, reproductive, um, equipment was not unlike that of the terrestrial platypus. She had no womb in the normal, human sense of the word.”

“A mutation? A freak of some kind?”

“No, your Holiness, I am sure she wasn’t. You, of course, immediately see what this means. The woman is, in fact, not of the Earth. If not of the Earth, than of somewhere Else. And if somewhere Else, then somewhere where Man may not have fallen, may never have known sin nor salvation. You can readily see all that is implied.”

“Yes, yes...of course. You did the right thing, naturally. You will have the cave sealed immediately and permanently. Do this thoroughly, you understand? I want no possibility of these bodies ever again being found.”

“Rumors of their existence have already spread through the monastery, your Holiness. That bodies have been found, at any rate. It occurs to me that we can claim they were Russians—no one will seriously doubt that: even the Russians’ records are spotty regarding the earliest years they occupied this spot. But if we simply seal the bodies in the cave, we’ll be raising more questions than ever. I’d suggest a mock burial. That will satisfy most.”

“Good. I want all the records destroyed as well. I know you and your team put a great deal of time and effort into your researches, but you understand the greater necessity?”

“Of course, your Holiness.”

And it was done.

And that was many decades ago now. Two aluminum coffins filled with sand and covered by the holy flag of the United North American Theocracy were ceremoniously interred into the rim of the crater. There would be no reason for anyone to ever disturb them. The five brothers who worked in the cave with me so many years ago were eventually scattered across Mars, Earth and the solar system. Most are now dead. The Patriarch is long gone, God rest his soul, and the Patriarchs who succeeded him were simply never made privy to the Great Discovery. If they every heard of the burial, it was only as an uninteresting footnote in a particular uninteresting period of the order’s history. I think it can now be safely assumed to be forgotten...or at least as good as forgotten.

By everyone but myself.

After I finish writing these words, I’ll follow the regular routine that has closed every one of my days for the past eighty-odd years. I’ll put my journal back into hiding, clean my pen, extinguish my candle and prepare myself for bed. Once safely under my comforter and in the deep silence of the darkness of my cell I will slip my hand into the secret recess in the wall and withdraw the object hidden there and, for a moment or two, feel its hard outlines in the darkness. I dare not look at it in the light.

It is a gun. Specifically, it is a 0.36-inch five-shot 1862 Colt single-action percussion revolver. I found it under the male body. In the wooden grip someone had carved the name “John Carter”.