The Martian Chronicles Page 10

  Now he looked at the Martian against the sky.

  "The stars!" he said.

  "The stars!" said the Martian, looking, in turn, at Tomas.

  The stars were white and sharp beyond the flesh of the Martian, and they were sewn into his flesh like scintillas swallowed into the thin, phosphorescent membrane of a gelatinous sea fish. You could see stars flickering like violet eyes in the Martian's stomach and chest, and through his wrists, like jewelry.

  "I can see through you!" said Tomas.

  "And I through you!" said the Martian, stepping back.

  Tomas felt of his own body and, feeling the warmth, was reassured. I am real, he thought

  The Martian touched his own nose and lips. "I have flesh," he said, half aloud. "I am alive."

  Tomas stared at the stranger. "And if I am real, then you must be dead."

  "No, you!"

  "A ghost!"

  "A phantom!"

  They pointed at each other, with starlight burning in their limbs like daggers and icicles and fireflies, and then fell to judging their limbs again, each finding himself intact, hot, excited, stunned, awed, and the other, ah yes, that other over there, unreal, a ghostly prism flashing the accumulated light of distant worlds.

  I'm drunk, thought Tomas. I won't tell anyone of this tomorrow, no, no.

  They stood there on the ancient highway, neither of them moving.

  "Where are you from?" asked the Martian at last.

  "Earth."

  "What is that?"

  "There." Tomas nodded to the sky.

  "When?"

  "We landed over a year ago, remember?"

  "No."

  "And all of you were dead, all but a few. You're rare, don't you know that?"

  "That's not true."

  "Yes, dead. I saw the bodies. Black, in the rooms, in the houses, dead. Thousands of them."

  "That's ridiculous. We're alive!"

  "Mister, you're invaded, only you don't know it. You must have escaped."

  "I haven't escaped; there was nothing to escape. What do you mean? I'm on my way to a festival now at the canal, near the Eniall Mountains. I was there last night. Don't you see the city there?" The Martian pointed.

  Tomas looked and saw the ruins. "Why, that city's been dead thousands of years."

  The Martian laughed. "Dead. I slept there yesterday!"

  "And I was in it a week ago and the week before that, and I just drove through it now, and it's a heap. See the broken pillars?"

  "Broken? Why, I see them perfectly. The moonlight helps. And the pillars are upright."

  "There's dust in the streets," said Tomas.

  "The streets are clean!"

  "The canals are empty right there."

  "The canals are full of lavender wine!"

  "It's dead."

  "It's alive!" protested the Martian, laughing more now. "Oh, you're quite wrong. See all the carnival lights? There are beautiful boats as slim as women, beautiful women as slim as boats, women the color of sand, women with fire flowers in their hands. I can see them, small, running in the streets there. That's where I'm going now, to the festival; we'll float on the waters all night long; we'll sing, we'll drink, we'll make love, Can't you see it?"

  "Mister, that city is dead as a dried lizard. Ask any of our party. Me, I'm on my way to Green City tonight; that's the new colony we just raised over near Illinois Highway. You're mixed up. We brought in a million board feet of Oregon lumber and a couple dozen tons of good steel nails and hammered together two of the nicest little villages you ever saw. Tonight we're warming one of them. A couple rockets are coming in from Earth, bringing our wives and girl friends. There'll be barn dances and whisky--"

  The Martian was now disquieted. "You say it is over that way?"

  "There are the rockets." Tomas walked him to the edge of the hill and pointed down. "See?"

  "No."

  "Damn it, there they are! Those long silver things."

  "No."

  Now Tomas laughed. "You're blind!"

  "I see very well. You are the one who does not see."

  "But you see the new town, don't you?"

  "I see nothing but an ocean, and water at low tide."

  "Mister, that water's been evaporated for forty centuries."

  "Ah, now, now, that is enough."

  "It's true, I tell you."

  The Martian grew very serious. "Tell me again. You do not see the city the way I describe it? The pillars very white, the boats very slender, the festival lights--oh, I see them clearly! And listen! I can hear them singing. It's no space away at all."

  Tomas listened and shook his head. "No."

  "And I, on the other hand," said the Martian, "cannot see what you describe. Well."

  Again they were cold. An ice was in their flesh.

  "Can it be ... ?"

  "What?"

  "You say 'from the sky'?"

  "Earth."

  "Earth, a name, nothing," said the Martian. "But ... as I came up the pass an hour ago ... " He touched the back of his neck. "I felt ... "

  "Cold?"

  "Yes."

  "And now?"

  "Cold again. Oddly. There was a thing to the light, to the hills, the road," said the Martian. "I felt the strangeness, the road, the light, and for a moment I felt as if I were the last man alive on this world ..."

  "So did I!" said Tomas, and it was like talking to an old and dear friend, confiding, growing warm with the topic.

  The Martian closed his eyes and opened them again. "This can only mean one thing. It has to do with Time. Yes. You are a figment of the Past!"

  "No, you are from the Past," said the Earth Man, having had time to think of it now.

  "You are so certain. How can you prove who is from the Past, who from the Future? What year is it?"

  "Two thousand and one!"

  "What does that mean to me?"

  Tomas considered and shrugged. "Nothing."

  "It is as if I told you that it is the year 4462853 S.E.C. It is nothing and more than nothing! Where is the clock to show us how the stars stand?"

  "But the ruins prove it! They prove that I am the Future, I am alive, you are dead!"

  "Everything in me denies this. My heart beats, my stomach hungers, my mouth thirsts. No, no, not dead, not alive, either of us. More alive than anything else. Caught between is more like it. Two strangers passing in the night, that is it. Two strangers passing. Ruins, you say?"

  "Yes. You're afraid?"

  "Who wants to see the Future, who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think--the pillars crumbled, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered?" The Martian was silent, but then he looked on ahead. "But there they are. I see them. Isn't that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter what you say."

  And for Tomas the rockets, far away, waiting for him, and the town and the women from Earth. "We can never agree," he said.

  "Let us agree to disagree," said the Martian. "What does it matter who is Past or Future, if we are both alive, for what follows will follow, tomorrow or in ten thousand years. How do you know that those temples are not the temples of your own civilization one hundred centuries from now, tumbled and broken? You do not know. Then don't ask. But the night is very short. There go the festival fires in the sky, and the birds."

  Tomas put out his hand. The Martian did likewise in imitation.

  Their hands did not touch; they melted through each other.

  "Will we meet again?"

  "Who knows? Perhaps some other night."

  "I'd like to go with you to that festival."

  "And I wish I might come to your new town, to see this ship you speak of, to see these men, to hear all that has happened."

  "Good-by," said Tomas.

  "Good night."

  The Martian rode his green metal vehicle quietly away into the hills, The Earth Man turned his truck and drove it silently in the opposite direction.

/>   "Good lord, what a dream that was," sighed Tomas, his hands on the wheel, thinking of the rockets, the women, the raw whisky, the Virginia reels, the party.

  How strange a vision was that, thought the Martian, rushing on, thinking of the festival, the canals, the boats, the women with golden eyes, and the songs.

  The night was dark. The moons had gone down. Starlight twinkled on the empty highway where now there was not a sound, no car, no person, nothing. And it remained that way all the rest of the cool dark night.

  October 2002: THE SHORE

  Mars was a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in waves. Each wave different, and each wave stronger. The first wave carried with it men accustomed to spaces and coldness and being alone, the coyote and cattlemen, with no fat on them, with faces the years had worn the flesh off, with eyes like nailheads, and hands like the material of old gloves, ready to touch anything. Mars could do nothing to them, for they were bred to plains and prairies as open as the Martian fields. They came and made things a little less empty, so that others would find courage to follow. They put panes in hollow windows and lights behind the panes.

  They were the first men.

  Everyone knew who the first women would be.

  The second men should have traveled from other countries with other accents and other ideas. But the rockets were American and the men were American and it stayed that way, while Europe and Asia and South America and Australia and the islands watched the Roman candles leave them behind. The rest of the world was buried in war or the thoughts of war.

  So the second men were Americans also. And they came from the cabbage tenements and subways, and they found much rest and vacation in the company of silent men from the tumbleweed states who knew how to use silences so they filled you up with peace after long years crushed in tubes, tins and boxes in New York.

  And among the second men were men who looked, by their eyes, as if they were on their way to God ...

  February 2003: INTERIM

  They brought in fifteen thousand lumber feet of Oregon pine to build Tenth City, and seventy-nine thousand feet of California redwood and they hammered together a clean, neat little town by the edge of the stone canals. On Sunday nights you could see red, blue, and green stained-glass light in the churches and hear the voices singing the numbered hymns. "We will now sing 79. We will now sing 94." And in certain houses you heard the hard clatter of a typewriter, the novelist at work; or the scratch of a pen, the poet at work; or no sound at all, the former beachcomber at work. It was as if, in many ways, a great earthquake had shaken loose the roots and cellars of an Iowa town, and then, in an instant, a whirlwind twister of Oz-like proportions had carried the entire town off to Mars to set it down without a bump.

  April 2003: THE MUSICIANS

  The boys would hike far out into the Martian country. They carried odorous paper bags into which from time to time upon the long walk they would insert their noses to inhale the rich smell of the ham and mayonnaised pickles, and to listen to the liquid gurgle of the orange soda in the warming bottles. Swinging their grocery bags full of clean watery green onions and odorous liverwurst and red catsup and white bread, they would dare each other on past the limits set by their stem mothers. They would run, yelling: "First one there gets to kick!"

  They biked in summer, autumn, or winter. Autumn was most fun, because then they imagined, like on Earth, they were scuttering through autumn leaves.

  They would come like a scatter of jackstones on the marble flats beside the canals, the candy-cheeked boys with blue-agate eyes, panting onion-tainted commands to each other. For now that they had reached the dead, forbidden town it was no longer a matter of "Last one there's a girl!" or "First one gets to play Musician!" Now the dead town's doors lay wide and they thought they could hear the faintest crackle, like autumn leaves, from inside. They would hush themselves forward, by each other's elbows, carrying sticks, remembering their parents had told them, "Not there! No, to none of the old towns! Watch where you hike. You'll get the beating of your life when you come home. We'll check your shoes!"

  And there they stood in the dead city, a heap of boys, their hiking lunches half devoured, daring each other in shrieky whispers.

  "Here goes nothing!" And suddenly one of them took off, into the nearest stone house, through the door, across the living room, and into the bedroom where, without half looking, he would kick about, thrash his feet, and the black leaves would fly through the air, brittle, thin as tissue cut from midnight sky. Behind him would race six others, and the first boy there would be the Musician, playing the white xylophone bones beneath the outer covering of black flakes. A great skull would roll to view, like a snowball; they shouted! Ribs, like spider legs, plangent as a dull harp, and then the black flakes of mortality blowing all about them in their scuffling dance; the boys pushed and heaved and fell in the leaves, in the death that had turned the dead to flakes and dryness, into a game played by boys whose stomachs gurgled with orange pop.

  And then out of one house into another, into seventeen houses, mindful that each of the towns in its turn was being burned clean of its horrors by the Firemen, antiseptic warriors with shovels and bins, shoveling away at the ebony tatters and peppermint-stick bones, slowly but assuredly separating the terrible from the normal; so they must play very hard, these boys, the Firemen would soon be here!

  Then, luminous with sweat, they gnashed at their last sandwiches. With a final kick, a final marimba concert, a final autumnal lunge through leaf stacks, they went home.

  Their mothers examined their shoes for black flakelets which, when discovered, resulted in scalding baths and fatherly beatings.

  By the year's end the Firemen had raked the autumn leaves and white xylophones away, and it was no more fun.

  June 2003: WAY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AIR

  "Did you hear about it?"

  "About what?"

  "The niggers, the niggers!"

  "What about 'em?"

  "Them leaving, pulling out, going away; did you hear?"

  "What you mean, pulling out? How can they do that?"

  "They can, they will, they are."

  "Just a couple?"

  "Every single one here in the South!"

  "No."

  "Yes!"

  "I got to see that. I don't believe it. Where they going--Africa?"

  A silence.

  "Mars."

  "You mean the planet Mars?"

  "That's right."

  The men stood up in the hot shade of the hardware porch. Someone quit lighting a pipe. Somebody else spat out into the hot dust of noon.

  "They can't leave, they can't do that."

  "They're doing it, anyways."

  "Where'd you hear this?"

  "It's everywhere, on the radio a minute ago, just come through."

  Like a series of dusty statues, the men came to life.

  Samuel Teece, the hardware proprietor, laughed uneasily. "I wondered what happened to Silly. I sent him on my bike an hour ago. He ain't come back from Mrs. Bordman's yet. You think that black fool just pedaled off to Mars?"

  The men snorted.

  "All I say is, he better bring back my bike. I don't take stealing from no one, by God."

  "Listen!"

  The men collided irritably with each other, turning.

  Far up the street the levee seemed to have broken. The black warm waters descended and engulfed the town. Between the blazing white banks of the town stores, among the tree silences, a black tide flowed. Like a kind of summer molasses, it poured turgidly forth upon the cinnamon-dusty road. It surged slow, slow, and it was men and women and horses and barking dogs, and it was little boys and girls. And from the mouths of the people partaking of this tide came the sound of a river. A summer-day river going somewhere, murmuring and irrevocable. And in that slow, steady channel of darkness that cut across the white glare of day were touches of alert white, the eyes, the ivory eyes staring ahead, glancing aside, as the river, the long an
d endless river, took itself from old channels into a new one. From various and uncountable tributaries, in creeks and brooks of color and motion, the parts of this river had joined, become one mother current, and flowed on. And brimming the swell were things carried by the river: grandfather clocks chiming, kitchen clocks ticking, caged hens screaming, babies wailing; and swimming among the thickened eddies were mules and cats, and sudden excursions of burst mattress springs floating by, insane hair stuffing sticking out, and boxes and crates and pictures of dark grandfathers in oak frames--the river flowing it on while the men sat like nervous hounds on the hardware porch, too late to mend the levee, their hands empty.

  Samuel Teece wouldn't believe it. "Why, hell, where'd they get the transportation? How they goin' to get to Mars?"

  "Rockets," said Grandpa Quartermain.

  "All the damn-fool things. Where'd they get rockets?"

  "Saved their money and built them."

  "I never heard about it."

  "Seems these niggers kept it secret, worked on the rockets all themselves, don't know where--in Africa, maybe."

  "Could they do that?" demanded Samuel Teece, pacing about the porch. "Ain't there a law?"

  "It ain't as if they're declarin' war," said Grandpa quietly.

  "Where do they get off, God damn it, workin' in secret, plottin'?" shouted Teece.

  "Schedule is for all this town's niggers to gather out by Loon Lake. Rockets be there at one o'clock, pick 'em up, take 'em to Mars."

  "Telephone the governor, call out the militia," cried Teece. "They should've given notice!"

  "Here comes your woman, Teece."

  The men turned again.

  As they watched, down the hot road in the windless light first one white woman and then another arrived, all of them with stunned faces, all of them rustling like ancient papers. Some of them were crying, some were stern. All came to find their husbands. They pushed through barroom swing doors, vanishing. They entered cool, quiet groceries. They went in at drug shops and garages. And one of them, Mrs. Clara Teece, came to stand in the dust by the hardware porch, blinking up at her stiff and angry husband as the black river flowed full behind her.

  "It's Lucinda, Pa; you got to come home!"

  "I'm not comin' home for no damn darkie!"