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9: Exile
A year later, I had tracked down the woman I had seen in my dreams. I had become a bedraggled-looking wildman in rags, like any other Triber. I carried a knife, a gun, and a staff. I carried a rucksack with my earthly possessions, which weren't much, and whatever dried food and canned water I could scrounge. No longer a monk, I left the holy books where I'd lived, because they were useless down here. Better to carry spare ammo and an attitude.
You learn a lot when you're totally screwed. Like the Tribers aren't all that stupid. They don't stay down low because that's as far as you roll. This is where the water is—duh. If you don't live in a fancy dome, and you don't have complicated machinery to pull moisture out of rocks and air, it's so much simpler just to go where all the runoff from the hills and mounains goes. So I learned this and a world of other new information I'd never known about the planet I called home.
I took up for a while with a band of escaped criminals called the Blood Rabbits, who kicked me all over the valley while teaching me to fight. I caught on fast, because I was tired of trying to sleep on a rack of aching bones and throbbing muscles. They made me fetch their water in two leather buckets, which seemed unpleasant for the first few months. Then one day I returned to find my dozen or so companions all dead and skewered, their stuff taken, and our tents burned to the ground. I also saw the perpetrators coming back for more after I stood there, dropped the buckets, and let out a yell of outrage at all the exposed body cavities and severed parts lying around. I ran almost nonstop for about three days, except time I spent sleeping exhaustedly in hidden rock cairns. Speaking of which, there is O2 hidden in them thar caverns. While our human numbers are shrinking—partly due to stupidity and violence—the fact is that Mars is getting greener. It's happening at a slow rate and will probably reverse itself again in about 10,000 years—okay, I'll let on that I have since learned about terraforming, but I don't want to get ahead of myself here. So another thing the Tribers have learned over time is that sometimes, if you find just the right cave that nobody has found before you, it might just be filled with straight breathable air, unlike the weak mix that fills the thin atmosphere outside. When I say ran, I mean with four oxygen tubes running into each nostril. There are also the so-called god rocks stationed all around the deserts and lower elevations—you stick your bottle in one of the holes, and in a few minutes pull it out fully recharged. Nobody understands the mechanism. The assumption is that they date to the creation and the Godpods. The god rocks are starting to fail.
I finally found Sudie Eastgate on a farm outside a small Triber dome in the Maid in China foothills. A lot of the Tribers have settled down and built fortresses from which to defend against their own kind.
The woman I found was not the same one as in my erotic dreams. I could still recognize the little girl I'd played with, who had shown promise of becoming an attractive woman. Sudie, nearing 30, had lost most of her teeth. She was overly thin from a hard life, and had a scar across one cheek where someone had knifed her. That wasn't the worst of it, but I'll get to that in a moment. She had angry, scared blue eyes and thick, frizzy brown hair tied under a dirty kerchief. She wore a colorless gray dress that came down to her ankles, with soiled underwear visible around the edges of her neck and feet. Her skin was purpled by wind, sun, and drink. Despite all that, I recognized her.
As I came up the dirt path to the farm, I waved. "Sudie! Sudie Eastgarden!"
She dropped the bucket of water she was carrying and produced an antique handgun that looked as if it might explode if she fired.
I waved some more. "Sudie, it's okay, I'm your childhood playmate, Rob Earl Farr." It sounded strange to my own ears to say that name, which I had not used in years. Unlike Timony, who had taken the ecclesiastical name Gaunt, I'd kept the family name but dropped the rest. "Remember?" I said as I drew near, "we used to play house in your backyard in the Punician Neighborhood, back in the Granistons. Do you recall?" I could still see in my mind's eye the cute little copper-redhead with her blue eyes, smooth round cheeks, and serious expression.
The wreck of a woman before me kept her gun aimed at me and shook her head. She looked upset, so maybe I thought that meant she knew what I was talking about. Behind her I saw a nice spread—a couple of small domes for holding the O2; hillsides covered with tight greens designed to survive this Martian hell; and cattle standing under a catch dome—that's where their methane farts get captured to burn as lamp fuel during the Storm Season.
As I drew near, I heard a man's voice: "Yo, mister, drop your shit and raise your hands slowly and carefully if you don't want to have a few extra holes real soon."
I did as I was told. The man was her husband, a bear of a guy named Sam Gorepoint. He advanced on me, holding up a shotgun that looked like a toy in his brawny brown arms. He had black woolly hair, a flat nose, and skin the color of coffee. Some of the royals up on Olympus have these features, but I knew I shouldn't be surprised to see more of them among the Tribers. His dark eyes looked cautious rather than violent, and I took heart. "Sir," I said, "I am an old friend of Timony Eastgarden. That name ring a bell?"
It was Sudie who reacted. She couldn't speak, for reasons I shall mention momentarily. She lowered the gun and stood with it dangling senselessly between her knees while she staggered toward me overcome with emotion. After all, he'd been her brother.
"Honey, I am afraid I have very sad news for you." I let her come near, gently pried the gun from her hands, and tossed it aside while Mr. Gorepoint kept me in his sights. When I told her, she made the most god-awful wailing and screeching noises. She staggered to one side, then the other, and finally fell to her knees and tore her hair.
Gorepoint put his gun aside and knelt down to comfort her. I joined them. So there we were, the three of us on our knees. Gorepoint, a big gentle guy, held her to him and hugged and rocked her back and forth while she kept uttering these animal-like wails and screeches. She sounded hoarse. She honked.
"Man cut her tongue out," Gorepoint said while defensively holding her to him.
"My Gods, no," I said, "why?"
Gorepoint shook his head. "The day before Shan left here, or Timony as you may know him, a Triber came from the south with news that got Timony all wound up. Man named Hang Me Now. He came up from the south with news of a conspiracy to kill the Holy Mother and take over the Confederation. Plot to rule the world, and I can only imagine that would be a terrible thing."
"But what happened to her?" I wailed. I stroked her hair while tears ran down her cheeks and over his arm as she regarded me with recognition in her eyes. I had hoped to exchange stories with her and hear her voice again, and I felt robbed, not to mention terrible for her.
"This guy Hang Me Now, he had some powerful news for Timony Shan. This is about a year ago, and I was just arriving here from my own bullshit going on back in Lantern City. Hang Me Now told Shan some secrets he knew, and she overheard. Now she can't write, so with her tongue cut out she can't speak, so I don't know how she could tell the secret. She draws things in the dust, but I have no idea what they mean. Timony never knew what happened to his sister. She almost bled to death, but I found her and healed her up, and she's carrying my child now."
She hugged her thin belly and I could see now, for the first time, that it was growing taut.
"You feed her and take good care of her," I said.
"Oh I will," he said. She sobbed against his powerful chest while he hugged her to him. He got a glint in his eyes. "This Hang Me Now, you can find his skin nailed to the back shed here. I fixed him good. I didn't care what kind of secrets he had, or how important he thought they were. I fixed his ass. Wild animals ate his ass, but I skinned him first and hung him up for a warning to any other assholes want to come down and make trouble here."
I stayed with them three days, helping with their work in return for food and a place to stay. During breaks, Sudie sat happily by my side as I told her stories of how we played together in the good old days. Sam Gorepoint fetched wood and milked cows and did all the stuff a good man would do for his wife. Sudie couldn't talk or write, but she found ways to communicate. She drew pictures in the dust with a twig. She made signs in the air.
Truly unforgettable for me, however, are the evenings we spent sitting together around the hearth. What a place this was! Sam had erected a shelter of concrete and glass-blocks that would take bombs to penetrate once he shut the steel door at night. He was in the process of paneling the inside with wood, which is scarce up in the heights but fairly abundant in the lowest valleys. I had never imagined that this material, when shaped into bare planks and laid side to side, could make such a warm effect. And it smelled good, like spices. Sudie had covered the rest of the still-bare concrete walls with hanging cloths scavenged here and there. The cattle were down in a cave for which their one-room dwelling made a natural entryway. There were some serious marauders about at night, and we and the animals were all about as safe as could be. It was a marvelous experience to sit around the hearth like this—something I had never experienced in my life, not even when my parents were still alive. Sam, and Timony before him, had tapped into an underground methane chamber. Every once in a while on Mars you hear of a home built like this suddenly exploding in a fireball, but Timony had brought a shutoff flap from the crash site of a royal air liner up the valley. I saw the place: fine bone and aluminum girders from the huge airship strewn far and wide, shreds of skinplast still glued to the bones, and holes everywhere dug by Tribers looting what had fallen miles and buried itself six feet or deeper. With the deflector in place, we were safe from a sudden spark that ruin a less intelligently built shelter. So there we sat—Sam with broad back against the fur-draped wall next to the glowing glass cube, Sudie leaning her head dreamily against his chest, and I sitting wrapped in a blanket, cross-legged, before the glowing 4 x 4 x 4 cube in which a faint light glowed, mostly wan yellow that barely illumined Sudie's grotesque but happy smile, but flickering often down to the red wavelengths or higher into a grayish-blue. It was something to stare at, this fire, while it radiated warmth throughout the room. It was Clear Season then, but nights are cold on Mars, very cold, and anyone who isn't sheltered will be found in the morning, dead and covered with frost, or weeks later as a husk of a mummy emptied of organics by the fungi and bacteria that thrive all over the planet.
"I came down from Argo," Sam said in his powerful voice. "I was wanted by the Roy Ollies. Know who they are?" He was older than I, and took a paternal attitude. It was meant kindly, unlike the Abbot's coldness, and I accepted it.
I shook my head.
"You're a Free Domer. You wouldn't know. That's the Royal Police on Olympus Mons. They wear these olive-drab jump suits, black helmets, black boots, black everything. The Roy Ollies. Oh yes, I was wanted for killing a man who tried to roll me on a back street when I was headed home from a week in the mines up there. I worked in the special mines under the Temple complex. Turned out he was a crooked cop, and I couldn't get justice. I had a wife up there too, but she left me for a younger man and took my kids with her."
He left the rest unsaid, but I understood that it would be harmful or fatal for his children if he ever showed his face there again. Sudie understood best, because her life had been ruined when her family were exiled from the Granistons over Timony's unorthodox ideas. In the religious tyrannies, thinking is a crime. I don't mean thinking you're thinking, which is blindly agreeing with the regime. I mean actually using your brain to form dangerously free thoughts. I was smart enough to understand Timony's point of view, though I might not initially have had the courage or recklessness to endanger my family if I had one. I might have just kept my thoughts to myself, as is my tendency. Events, as you see, left me no choice however, and here I was sitting around a warm fire with Tribers. And for just those few days, I was happier than ever before or ever since.
There was a holiness about those evenings. The faint blue glow that filled the room, and the black light outside filled with stars twinkling in the thick, cold atmosphere of Low Mars, reminded me more than once of the formation of Her Holiness' geodesic dome with its sixty flickering torches and the High Mars wind ruffling the Swat guards' ornate cloaks and plumes.
"So I came down from Argo," Sam said, "wandering much like you've done. You either die or become a Triber. There's no inbetween. The three of us each know it well, don't we, my love?" He gave Sudie a squeeze, and she responded by closing her eyes, smiling in weary contentment, and resting her hand on his forearm. "I found my way here, and this woman and her brother took me in. First I was just a helping hand. Then Timony would take off and come back at odd times. He was looking for something, that boy." Sudie tugged at his tunic, and he looked down at her. "Want me to show him?" she nodded, and he rose. Stiffly, he hobbled over to the shelf above the free-standing fire cube. He took down an object wrapped in cloth. It was about the size of a large coin. "See that? I think it's an ancient coin."
I held the heavy metal object in my hand. I turned it this way and that. I rubbed it clean with its cloth, and then leaned very close to the bluish cube so that an almost natural daylight illumined it. He was right. It did look like a coin, and a hefty one that filled my palm. Its edges were irregular with wear, and its surfaces shiny. "It's an image of Mars!"
Then I remembered: "The Holy Mother was holding something like this in her hand the night she was murdered."
"They are very sacred and important," Sam agreed with conviction but a look that told me he knew no more about it.
"I see Olympus Mons, and the Syrtis, and the deserts... What are these six points?" I turned the coin over, and saw the remnants of indecipherable writing. In the middle was the faint image of a man wearing an odd helmet.
"Don't know what the six points are," Sam said. "I found that in the mines one day. I was drilling for explosives, because that was my craft, and saw this thing just happened to be lying next to my boot. So I picked it up, put it in my pocket, and kept on working because we were busy and you gotta work smart around explosives. No time to be distracted. Forgot all about it until a few weeks later when they tossed me out of the city and I had to grab what old dirty clothing I could. Not even a chance to say goodbye to the kids. About a year later, down in a Triber market, I had a man look at it. He was a doctorologist who'd been tossed from his university for questioning the literal Godpods. He looked it over in his tent near the used parts bazaar, where on a good day it smells like onions and on a bad day you don't want to know. He told me he had an idea about the six points, but he wouldn't tell me. He did say the man on the back is Gore Washing Town. That's an ancient founding father, he said."
The face was oddly pitted, but I didn't think to ask about that. "What's that thing on his head?"
"A wig."
"No."
"I'm serious, that's what he said. He said he saw some ancient coins in a museum, and some of the people on them wore wigs."
"He wouldn't tell you about the six points?"
"No. He handed it back to me quickly, almost as if he were scared. He said if They, meaning I guess the Temple cops, found me with this I'd be in serious trouble."
I could tell that Sudie was suddenly getting very nervous. She stirred in her blanket, half rose, half sat, leaned against the wall, squirmed as if she couldn't get comfortable. Her eyes were distant, and her lips roiled over the dark cavern of her mouth. When you don't have a tongue, it takes work to keep your mouth moist inside, particularly when you occasionally flip out and relive terrible events. Sam rushed over to hug and comfort her. "Careful now," he told me. "She's having a flashback."
"I'm sorry."
"Hold on." He led her to their sleep alcove in a far corner, spoke comfortingly, offered her a drink of super-shnapps that I could smell from here. Rocket fuel. Wow. I wanted some of that, but she needed it far more just then.
Minutes later, Sam returned. He looked thoughtful. "I got to turn in," he said.
"The six points," I pressed.
He said dubiously, avoiding my gaze. "I don't know if I should even have showed you." He held out his hand. I placed the rag and the coin in his palm. He rose and carefully restored it to its shelf above the heating cube before sitting on a step near me. Finally, having deliberated, he said: "I showed it to you because you were close to Sudie and Shan at one time.
I said: "I was educated in the Temple, you know."
He nodded, still looking down. "I know."
"These six dots can only be one thing." He continued to nod, and I said: "They are the six stations of the Holy Mother."
He looked up and met my gaze squarely. There was fire in his eyes. "That's what got Timony killed. Do you want to go that way too?"
"Timony came to warn me about an assassination. The Holy Mother was poisoned I was expelled from the city."
"There's more," he said. "Timony—Shan—he was looking for the seventh point."
I shook my head. "I can't think of anything in the literature or the scriptures that talks about a seventh point. What does it mean?"
"It's about a journey," he said. He came back from one of his trips all fired up. He'd been shot by a Triber, and needed time to recover. Sudie begged him not to go out, but he was like a crazy man about finding that seventh point. He kept saying 'It's geometry, Sam, it's all about geometry.' I had no idea what he was talking about, still don't. That was the last time I ever saw him."
"There is something more you haven't told me."
He seemed reluctant. "Think about this carefully, Farr. Sudie has already lost her brother, and she is happy that you've come. I need help with the farm, especially because she is getting frail and I'm scared of losing her."
I nodded. Inwardly, I knew I could not stay. I was restless, and it hurt me to see her as she had become. I really needed a place of my own, with a woman of my own, and I couldn't spend my life as a Triber farmer. I think he understood that as he read my eyes.
"Very well," he said. "What has to be has to be. That's what your scripture says about Fate."
I was well-versed, so to speak, and always ready with a rejoinder. "Scripture also says that Fate is like a stream that can be channeled."
He seemed to accept that. "When I came down here, I saw that Sudie had taken up with this Triber, and both Timony and I saw he was no good. His real name was Gufin or Goofin, but I thought he was worthless and called him Hang Me Now. He wouldn't hold his own on the work, you see, and he ate and drank more than his share. He liked bedding Sudie but he was mean to her. Timony was gone a lot, and didn't always see what went on. Then Timony came back that last time and started talking about this coin and what it meant. Hang Me Now only understood one thing: that Timony was after treasure. When Timony left here, it was to warn you and also to look for the seventh point. Hang Me Now made up his mind to follow secretly and ambush Timony after he found what he thought was treasure. Before he left, he cut Sudie up so she couldn't tell anyone else about the supposed treasure. He came looking for me to kill me, but I was in the wrong place that day, so he gave up and took off. When I came home and saw what he did to her, I got my gun and tracked him. He's the second man I killed. I made him get on his knees before me and beg. I wanted him to beg for forgiveness but that never occurred to the selfish bastard. He only begged for his life and offered to share the treasure with me if I let him life. I told him there was no treasure, not of gold or silver anyway, that it was a treasure of knowledge. I also told him what he did to Sudie couldn't be forgiven. I thought about making him die a slow and painful death, but that would have cheapened me, so I walked up behind him and put the gun to his head. I said, "Enjoy life one more minute because that's all you got." He chose to spend his last minute crying and sniveling instead of taking a deep breath and looking around in wonder. Then I pulled the trigger. I came home and took Sudie for my own, and for all I know his carcass is a rotten apple on the dusty slopes."
"You rid the world of him," I said. The finer points of criminal law are often lost amid the harsh facts of life down here in the Triber badlands.
"I think he figured out where the seventh point was," Sam said.
"Do you know?"
He shook his head. "He took that to his grave with him."
"I'd like to stay another day or two."
"I'd like that."
"I'll help you with the work."
"Thank you."
"I won't promise to stay, but I can promise to come back."
"She'll like that," he said.
I didn't say goodbye to Sudie when I left. I prepared her for my departure, so that it should come as no surprise. I told her stories about our childhood, and told her I would always come back to sit with them by the hearth. I told her it was the happiest time of my life, and she held my hands between hers with a light in her eyes that said she felt the same. Whether I would ever see them again was a matter for the Gods, but Fate can be channeled like a stream, so I would return one day or die trying.
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