George Martin - Old Mars

Rekari stepped forward. “Venori continued his family through this one’s father. I was witness to it.”

The men in the boat all signed the negative. “It is not proper that a man of Earth should wear the stone,” said the one who had spoken, and the others made multiple gestures of agreement.

“His elders judged it proper,” said Rekari.

The strangers put their heads together and whispered among themselves. They seemed to be having a very quiet argument. Finally, one of them hoisted in the anchor, but instead of turning around and starting south, the three pulled short paddles from the bottom of the boat and sculled closer to Rekari’s craft, so close that their spokesman could leap the gap between the two.

“It is ours,” he said, and before Dave could do more than take a single step back, the Martian’s long-fingered hand had darted out and caught at the sunstone’s chain where it showed at the collar of his shirt.

Dave felt the chain bite at his neck, and he grabbed the Martian’s wrist to keep him from pulling harder. “Letann!” he shouted.

The Martian froze for a moment, and then his fingers opened and the chain dropped free. Wrenching his wrist out of Dave’s grip, he lurched backward, and his right leg slammed the gunwale, knocking him off balance. Before he could stop himself, he was falling over the side and into the canal.

Letann? As soon as the word left his mouth, Dave knew it was an ancient one, a command subsuming “No” and “Stop” and “How dare you?”—the deepest possible level of indignation. Where had he learned that word? In his childhood? He couldn’t remember. He knew he had never used it before.

The wet Martian’s companions helped him back into their boat, and the three had another whispered conversation, accompanied by quite a few glances in Dave’s direction. Finally, without any word or gesture, they hoisted in their anchor and started south.

Dave rubbed his neck where the chain had scraped the skin and watched the other boat pull away. When it was well beyond shouting distance, he said, “Do they really have a claim to it?”

Rekari made the negative sign. “Their family and Venori’s have been separated for more than forty generations. They have their own stone. One of them may inherit it, in time.”

“But if they’re his closest relatives …”

“You are his closest relative, David. Of that, I am certain.”

Dave signaled a child’s acknowledgment of his elder, but Rekari gestured a negative, though a mild one.

“You are not a child, David. Not with a sunstone on your neck.” His hand hovered over the part of Dave’s shirt that covered the stone. “This is a responsibility. Your father knew that when he told me to give it to you.”

“I understand,” said Dave. He didn’t have much of his father beyond it, just a shabby house and a few pieces of furniture. Some copies of the papers his father had written on Martian antiquities. And his father’s reputation, of course, intangible as that was. The sunstone represented all of that.

Dave sat at the tiller, and Rekari handed him a piece of flatbread and a container of peanut butter. Then he pulled up the anchor, and they began moving again, and the other boat quickly dwindled behind them.

After a time, Dave asked, “Why did they give up?”

Rekari chewed on his own meal of dried lizard meat. “Because they knew,” he said, and he would not say more.

On the fourteenth day, Dave stood in the prow of the boat. “We’re almost there.” He looked at the mapper. “Not more than another kilometer.” The banks of the canal had risen steadily over the last couple of days, and now, every few hundred meters, there were rough steps cut into them, unmistakably artificial. Above the banks, low hills were visible, silhouetted against the eastern sky.

Rekari sat by the mast. He made no attempt to look ahead. Instead, he looked back at the way they had come. “Your father was right. There was a city here once,” he said. “Long ago, when there was less ice all through the year. It was a beautiful city, with graceful spires where flying creatures sometimes made their nests and theaters open to the sky for actors in masks with fanciful fronds sprouting from the living wood. Gorgeous masks. And the alaria trees lined every avenue and perfumed the air and shed their white blossoms on the water like so many miniature boats.” He made that sign of sorrow again. “It has all been gone so long. How do they bear it?”

“How does who bear it?” Dave asked.

Rekari laid his hand on his chest. Then he slid his fingers into the opening of his shirt and pulled out his own sunstone and held it for a moment, looking at it, and it glimmered in the afternoon light. Then he tucked it away again. “The elders,” he said, and he reached back with one hand and cut the motor. “I believe we have arrived.” He swung the tiller over.

The boat bumped the canal bank at a set of steps, and while Rekari saw to the anchor, Dave climbed them. At the top, he was surprised to see a broad, open space. So far from the settled areas of Mars, and so close to a canal, it should have been covered by nettles, but a half circle some fifty meters in diameter was bare of them, though beyond it, starting just past a clump of huge boulders, they grew thickly in every direction, all the way to the distant low hills. His father had always said that big nettle fields implied underground water and marked the oases in the vast deserts of Mars—good places to hunt for lost cities. They had certainly helped him find some of the ruins now on the tourist round. He must have cleared these away himself, probably with the traditional herbicide the Martians used. Which meant he really thought something significant was here.

Rekari came up the steps to join him. “I buried your father over there,” he said, pointing to the north.

Martians marked their gravesites with an outline of rocks pressed hard into the soil—whatever rocks happened to be around—and if there were no rocks nearby, they just used a raised rim of soil, which meant that their graves tended to disappear over time, rocks scattered or covered by windblown dust, shallow earthworks worn away. It didn’t seem to bother them; they weren’t in the habit of visiting their dead later on. His father’s grave was still visible, not far from the canal, its rocks lined up neatly, though some dust had gathered on them. Dave knelt and brushed them clean with his hands. He wished he could have been there to help dig the grave and to stand with Rekari in the brief Martian ritual that marked the end of life. He had witnessed the ritual once, with his father. Now he could only kneel beside the grave and remember the last time he saw the famous Dr. Benjamin Miller, at the Meridiani spaceport, waving and shouting good-bye. He could almost hear his father’s voice now, calling his name. And then, for a moment, he thought he really could hear that voice, and he looked up automatically, but of course no one was there but Rekari. He shook his head and got to his feet and looked out over the nettle-free space that stretched north and east from the grave. A city, Rekari had said. Was that reality or just myth? It was hard to tell with Martians, with a civilization so much older than any on Earth.

He began to walk, charting a mental grid over the barren ground. It didn’t take him long to find the area his father had stripped of its surface soil and, within it, a smaller space where he had focused his efforts—the trowel marks were unmistakable. What had he seen here? Dave wasn’t sure he could make out anything that hinted at ancient structures. He went back to the boat for a large flask, which he filled with canal water, and for the spray nozzle that fit it, and he used them to begin dampening the area, a standard archaeological technique to bring out markings that had faded away due to the dryness of the soil. Rekari helped him, making a dozen trips for more water and even scattering some of it by hand, and between the two of them, they left the ground moist but not muddy. The sky was beginning to darken when they spread the sail over their efforts, weighting its edges with rocks, to let the dampness work overnight. Then they ate their evening meals and slept on land for the first time in two weeks.