Robert Silverberg - The Feast of St. Dionysus

In the dining hall one night Oxenshuer drinks much too much wine. The thirst comes upon him gradually and unexpectedly; at the beginning of the meal he simply sips as he eats, in his usual way, but the more he drinks, the more dry his throat becomes, until by the time the meat course is on the table he is reaching compulsively for the carafe every few minutes, filling his cup, draining it, filling, draining. He becomes giddy and boisterous; someone at the table begins a hymn, and Oxenshuer joins in, though he is unsure of the words and keeps losing the melody. Those about him laugh, clap him on the back, sing even louder, beckoning to him, encouraging him to sing with them. Ernie and Matt match him drink for drink, and now whenever his cup is empty they fill it before he has a chance. A serving girl brings a full carafe. He feels a prickling in his earlobes and at the tip of his nose, feels a band of warmth across his chest and shoulders, and realizes he is getting drunk, but he allows it to happen. Dionysus reigns here. He has been sober long enough. And it has occurred to him that his drunkenness perhaps will inspire them to admit him to the night’s revels. But that does not happen. Dinner ends. The Speaker and the other old men who sit at his table file from the hall; it is the signal for the rest to leave. Oxenshuer stands. Falters. Reels. Recovers. Laughs. Links arms with Matt and Ernie. “Brothers,” he says. “Brothers!” They go from the hall together, but outside, in the great cobbled plaza, Matt says to him, “You better not go wandering in the desert tonight, man, or you’ll break your neck for sure.” So he is still excluded. He goes back through the labyrinth with Matt and Jean to their house, and they help him into his room and give him a jug of wine in case he still feels the thirst, and then they leave him. Oxenshuer sprawls on his bed. His head is spinning. Matt’s boy looks in and asks if everything’s all right. “Yes,” Oxenshuer tells him. “I just need to lie down some.” He feels embarrassed over being so helplessly intoxicated, but he reminds himself that in this city of Dionysus no one need apologize for taking too much wine. He closes his eyes and waits for a little stability to return. In the darkness a vision comes to him: the death of Dave Vogel. With strange brilliant clarity Oxenshuer sees the landscape of Mars spread out on the screen of his mind, low snubby hills sloping down to broad crater-pocked plains, gnarled desolate boulders, purple sky, red gritty particles blowing about. The extravehicular crawler well along on its journey westward toward the Gulliver site, Richardson driving, Vogel busy taking pictures, operating the myriad sensors, leaning into the microphone to describe everything he sees. They are at the Gulliver site now, preparing to leave the crawler, when they are surprised by the sudden onset of the sandstorm. Without warning the sky is red with billowing capes of sand, driving down on them like snowflakes in a blizzard. In the first furious moment of the storm the vehicle is engulfed; within minutes sand is piled a meter high on the crawler’s domed transparent roof; they can see nothing, and the sandfall steadily deepens as the storm gains in intensity. Richardson grabs the controls, but the wheels of the crawler will not grip. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Vogel mutters. The vehicle has extendible perceptors on stalks, but when Vogel pushes them out to their full reach he finds that they are even then hidden by the sand. The crawler’s eyes are blinded; its antennae are buried. They are drowning in sand. Whole dunes are descending on them. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Vogel says again. “You can’t imagine it, Johnny. It hasn’t been going on five minutes and we must be under three or four meters of sand already.” The crawler’s engine strains to free them. “Johnny? I can’t hear you, Johnny. Come in, Johnny.” All is silent on the ship-to-crawler transmission belt. “Hey, Houston,” Vogel says, “we’ve got this goddamned sandstorm going, and I seem to have lost contact with the ship. Can you raise him for us?” Houston does not reply. “Mission Control, are you reading me?” Vogel asks. He still has some idea of setting up a crawler-to-Earth-to-ship relay, but slowly it occurs to him that he has lost contact with Earth as well. All transmissions have ceased. Sweating suddenly in his spacesuit, Vogel shouts into the microphone, jiggles controls, plugs in the fail-safe communications banks only to find that everything has failed; sand has invaded the crawler and holds them in a deadly blanket. “Impossible,” Richardson says. “Since when is sand an insulator for radio waves?” Vogel shrugs. “It isn’t a matter of insulation, dummy. It’s a matter of total systems breakdown. I don’t know why.” They must be ten meters underneath the sand now. Entombed. Vogel pounds the hatch, thinking that if they can get out of the crawler somehow they can dig their way to the surface through the loose sand, and then—and then what? Walk back ninety kilometers to the ship? Their suits carry thirty-six-hour breathing supplies. They would have to average two and a half kilometers an hour, over ragged cratered country, in order to get there in time; and with this storm raging their chances of surviving long enough to hike a single kilometer are dismal. Nor does Oxenshuer have a backup crawler in which he could come out to rescue them, even if he knew their plight; there is only the flimsy little one-man vehicle that they use for short-range geological field trips in the vicinity of the ship. “You know what?” Vogel says. “We’re dead men, Bud.” Richardson shakes his head vehemently. “Don’t talk garbage. We’ll wait out the storm, and then we’ll get the hell out of here. Meanwhile we better just pray.” There is no conviction in his voice, however. How will they know when the storm is over? Already they lie deep below the new surface of the Martian plain, and everything is snug and tranquil where they are. Tons of sand hold the crawler’s hatch shut. There is no escape. Vogel is right: they are dead men. The only remaining question is one of time. Shall they wait for the crawler’s air supply to exhaust itself, or shall they take some more immediate step to hasten the inevitable end, going out honorably and quickly and without pain? Here Oxenshuer’s vision falters. He does not know how the trapped men chose to handle the choreography of their deaths. He knows only that whatever their decision was, it must have been reached without bitterness or panic, and that the manner of their departure was calm. The vision fades. He lies alone in the dark. The last of the drunkenness has burned itself from his mind.

“Come on,” Matt said. “Let’s do some wrestling.”

It was a crisp winter morning, not cold, a day of clear, hard light. Matt took him downtown, and for the first time Oxenshuer entered one of the tall brick-faced buildings of the labyrinth streets. Inside was a large, bare gymnasium, unheated, with bleak yellow walls and threadbare purple mats on the floor. Will and Nick were already there. Their voices echoed in the cavernous room. Quickly Matt stripped down to his undershorts. He looked even bigger naked than clothed; his muscles were thick and rounded, his chest was formidably deep, his thighs were pillars. A dense covering of fair curly hair sprouted everywhere on him, even his back and shoulders. He stood at least two meters tall and must have weighed close to 110 kilos. Oxenshuer, tall but not nearly so tall as Matt, well built but at least twenty kilos lighter, felt himself badly outmatched. He was quick and agile, at any rate: perhaps those qualities would serve him. He tossed his clothing aside.

Matt looked him over closely. “Not bad,” he said. “Could use a little more meat on the bones.”