Piers Anthony - Total Recall

The clerk checked the monitor. “Hmm. Seems you left something behind on your last visit.”

Quaid tensed. He had left a slew of murderous goons behind! But also his memories, and his woman.

The clerk walked to the mailboxes and returned with a sealed manila envelope. He handed this to Quaid. “There you go.” He studied the monitor. “Now, that’ll be suite two-eighty in the blue wing. The key-card will be ready in just a minute.”

The clerk turned away to encode the key-card.

Quaid tore open the envelope and pulled out a sheet of red paper folded into a small square. He unfolded the paper and found an advertising flyer for a bar: The Last Resort, in Venusville.

Oh, yes, the notorious sleaze den, a magnet for tourists. There was a Marsville on the planet Venus too, with a similar reputation.

He focused on the flyer. It contained a drawing of a naked girl. On the back was a handwritten message. “For a good time, ask for Melina.”

Surreptitiously, Quaid took a hotel pen and scribbled “Melina” under the written message. The hair on the back of his neck prickled as he saw the handwriting matched.

This was a message intended only for him. He thought of the woman of his dreams. Was it possible? No, of course not. Yet—

Before he knew it, he was on his way out. As he opened the door, he glanced back. The desk clerk was turning back. “Here’s your key, Mr. Bru—”

Then the man realized that he was speaking to emptiness. He looked surprised.

The door closed behind Quaid. He emerged at the front of the hotel and stepped toward the cabstand.

A black man in an outfit reminiscent of the ancient jive era approached him. The man looked to be about forty. “Need a cab, man? I’m Benny, and I’m what you want.”

Quaid nodded toward the first cab in line. “What’s wrong with that one?”

“He ain’t got six kids to feed.”

Quaid saw that the driver of that cab was a punk in his twenties. That wasn’t any more appealing than Benny. He nodded.

“It’s right around the corner,” Benny said eagerly.

As Quaid followed to the bootleg cab, the punk cabbie saw his fare being stolen. “Hey!” he protested. Then he realized that it was no use. “Asshole!”

Mars wasn’t much different from Earth, after all! But for the kind of business Quaid might have here, with agents on his trail, a scoundrel cabbie might be better than a legitimate one. Benny wouldn’t be eager to turn him in to anyone, and probably knew the back alleys of Mars as well as anyone did.

As he approached the dilapidated cab, a huge explosion ripped through the upper level of the Pyramid Mine. Windows shattered and Benny was thrown to the ground as alarms began to sound. Quaid managed to keep his footing, barely.

Benny staggered to his feet, slightly dazed.

“Welcome to Mars,” he said wryly. Suddenly soldiers were everywhere, shooting at unseen rebel forces who returned fire. Benny lifted the gullwing door of the cab hastily. “Let’s get out of here, man.” Quaid climbed in.

Benny quickly pulled into traffic and then seemed to relax.

“What’s all the trouble about?” Quaid asked, craning his neck to watch the smoke rising from the mine.

“Oh, the usual,” Benny said nonchalantly. “Money, freedom… air.” He changed lanes. “So, where to?”

“Venusville.”

Benny gazed at him. “How’s that again, man?”

Quaid pulled out the flyer. “Venusville.”

Benny shook his head. “Man, this is Venusville! The upside part of it, anyway.”

“Then make it the downside part of it.”

“Oho! You know what you want!” He put the car in motion. “Any special—?”

“The Last Resort.”

“Mister, you can do better than that!”

“That’s the address I have.”

“Right, man!” Benny agreed dubiously. He guided the car toward the edge of town.

Quaid took this opportunity to shuck the clumsy galoshes. He wore his own shoes underneath. Two segments of the plastic gun were nestled in the toes of the galoshes; he stuffed these in his pockets, then added two more segments from his purse. He didn’t want to carry that purse around anymore; he would ditch it somewhere along the way. He was just glad that he had been able to hang on to everything that counted when the window blew out at the spaceport.

Soon they entered one of several big tubeways that crossed the chasm separating the two sides of town. Ah—now it was coming clear! The slum section was on the other side of the tracks, as it were.

“First trip to Mars?” Benny inquired conversationally, in much the way an updated JohnnyCab mannequin might. If he had noticed Quaid’s business with the galoshes and purse, he was too discreet to mention it. Tourists could have peculiar ways.

Quaid was staring out the window, still distracted by the view. Such colossal mountains, rifts, rubble-strewn plains; the perfect desolation, yet enthralling too. He could look at this stuff for hours, for days! Yet that wasn’t the half of it. He had dreamed of Mars, longing to travel there. Now he was here, and he was fascinated by it, but the longing remained. For his real identity, and for the woman, and for something else. But try as he might, he never quite got the whole picture. It was as if under all his superficial concerns lay a deeper one, like basalt under topsoil, signifying some horrendously significant past event that he ignored at his peril. As if the matter of whether he survived were inconsequential, compared to what that buried layer meant.

He came out of it, realizing that the cabbie had spoken to him. “Mm-hmm. Well, no… Sort of.”

Benny absorbed that. “Man don’t know if he’s been to Mars or not,” he muttered.

Quaid realized that it did sound confused. But it was true. Someone in his body had been to Mars before, but Quaid himself had not. When he recovered his memory, then he could claim to have been—

He shook his head. The more he learned, the less he seemed to know for sure.

The tubeway emptied into a plaza in the poor section of town. The contrast with the affluent neighborhood was shocking. The upside had broad, clear streets and lovely views; this downside had grim, claustrophobic streets tunneled into the mountainside. It was in perpetual night. There were dim street lamps, but the only natural light flowed through a distant archway. This was not because of a change in the hour; the Mars day, coincidentally, was about half an hour longer than Earth’s, and so easy to adapt to that most people hardly noticed the difference. It was because of the subterranean nature of the city. This was like living in a mine. It was no pun to call this the shady neighborhood.

People moved listlessly under low ceilings. A significant proportion of the population, if what was visible was typical, was deformed in some way. Quaid shuddered.

All the buildings were dilapidated and covered with signs and graffiti. Psychic parlors seemed to be quite popular. Numerous wanted posters advertised a reward for Kuato, and like the ones on the train, they had no pictures. Kuato, the fabled leader of the Mars Liberation Front. Quaid could see how the denizens of a place like this could long for liberation! If they put their hope into a nonexistent figure—well, maybe that was better than having no hope at all.

Something almost floated to the surface of his mind, but it slipped away before he could catch it. Did he know something about a way to liberate Mars? Liberate it from what? The fact was, poverty was endemic; there was plenty of it on Earth too. There was no magic wand to wave to free the downtrodden masses of Mars.

Or was there? He saw soldiers patrolling the streets in pairs. The hostility between them and the people was palpable. Could there be a way to get these poor folk out of the dark ghetto and into the sunside? To provide enough daylight land for all of them?