The Sunstone

The Sunstone

by Phyllis Eisentstein

The scooter had a mapper, but he didn’t need it; he had a good sense of direction, it wasn’t all that far, and you couldn’t get los following the Hiddekel canal. The sky was dark when he started out, but the scooter’s headlight was bright and the road was in good shape, well cleared of the water-seeking nettles that perpetually encroached on the canal. He made it to Charlestown by dawn.

Charlestown had never been much of a town, even though it was on the route to the confluence of two canals, but then, even the major cities on Mars were nothing compared to the ones on Earth. But Dave had had enough of the crowds and bustle of Earth, and Charlestown looked very good to him, its single main street lined on both sides with ramshackle houses that doubled as stores and bars, with lanes of smaller homes spreading outward on the side away from the canal. North of the town was the boat dock, with half a dozen barges and there small sailboats moored there, and beyond that, the arc or Martian cottages where Rekari and his extended family lived. As Dave expected, only a few people were on the main street that early, and he recognized them all. One even called his name as he passed, and he raised an arm in greeting though he didn’t stop.

His father’s place, close to the north end of town, was both office and home, with a sign above the door that announced, in faded lettering, “Ben Miller and Sons, Tourism. See the Ancient Ruins”.

Guy’s out in the desert. He beds down for the nigh. Wakes up suddenly. He hears water. He listens more carefully. Running water. It’s the ghost canal. A kind of mirage, leading travelers astray so they die of thirst convinced there’s water all around them.

They told him about a cave system. Legend said it was a way into another world. Some argued it came out on Terra, in Arizona somewhere. Some thought ancient Mars. Others linked it to the discoveries of the so-called hidden universe obscured from our astronomers by drifting clouds of cosmic fog. (The Lost Canal by Michael Moorcock)

Some were Marsmen like him, some were new settlers, still filled with enthusiasm for the open land that had been so effectively advertised to them, and a few were wealthy tourists. Dave had made sure the latter had his contact information: “Tour the ruins of the lost Martian civilization with the men who discovered them,” said his card. It was not quite a lie in his own case because, as a teenager, he had found a cluster of foundations and a few lengths of sand-scoured wall no higher than his knee near on of the lesser canals that splayed out from Nilicaus Lacus, and Rekari, his father’s Martian business partner, had pronounced them seven or eight thousand Martian years abandoned…

 Sunstone. … as a teen, he had found a cluster of foundations and a few lengths of sand-scoured broken walls… Photo by Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

…

The arc of cottages there, with its open side to Hiddekel, which the Martians called Moreyah, had stood, Rekari once said, for a thousand years, which wasn’t all that long by Martian standards. The cottages themselves were made of a local soft red stone. The Martians grew the plant for their seeds, which humans considered inedible, and fed the seeds not just to themselves but to small lizards living in burrows in the canal walls. The lizards were their primary source of protein, and humans also considered them inedible. Dave had tried lizard stew once, and on courtesy kept him from spitting out his first and only mouthful. He had always thought it was a good thing that Rekari’s people felt much the same about human food – that meant there was little competition for those kinds of resources between Martians and Marsmen.

Mariner

Mariner

By Chris Roberson

The week after he had graduated from high school, and after tearful farewells with his friends and family, Jason set off from Galveston, Texas, in a twenty-four-foot cutter, intending to continue sailing until he came back to port from the other direction.

But he hadn’t even managed to complete the first leg of his journey. He was still in the Caribbean when, under the light of a fool moon, he came upon a strange vortex in the dark waters. A swirling whirlpool, it grew from nothing in a matter of moments, to quickly for Jason to change course to avoid it. One instant Jason was sailing along under a starry sky, and the next his boat hit the vortex and everything changed.

Jason had squinted his eyes, bracing for impact, and when he opened them again, he looked out onto another world.

He was on Mars, he would later learn. Not the Mars he’d seen in pictures sent back by NASA probes though. Had he been transported to the distant past of the Red planet, or its future? Or perhaps on the some analogue of the fourth planet that existed in another dimension? Jason had never learned for certain. He tried to see what the Earth looked like, to give him some sense of context, but the best telescopes he had managed to construct showed him only a blurry image of a blue-green planet in the sky, and his knowledge of constellations did not extend to calculating how those same stars would appear on another world and at another time.

But those were facts that Jason would only discover later. On that first day, at that first instant he knew only that he was somewhere he’d never seen before.

Mariner. The Suffocated God, forgive my blasphemy (Chris Roberson). Photo by Elena

The cutter lay half-buried in fine sands, under a brilliant blue sky, across which two moons sailed in their stately orbits toward each other. Jason had stepped off the deck of his boat onto the sands, in a daze, and immediately sunk up to his waist. The grains of sand were so small, so fine, that the ground behaved more like a liquid than a solid, almost like quicksand. And as he floundered in the sands, barely able to keep afloat, he noticed the menacing silhouette of a bony ridge knifing through the red sands toward him.

Jason’s first day on his new world would be his last, his journeys ended in the belly of a sand-shark, had a passing Praxian naval ship not hauled him on board. The crew had never seen a human before and returned to the Praxis canals in the south with Jason as much as object of curiosity as he was their captive. Despite the language barrier that separated them when they reached port, Jason managed to communicate to his captors that he needed air to breathe. Had he taken much longer to get his message across, he would have drowned, as they began to force him down into their underwater community with them.

In the days that followed, Jason learned just enough of the common tongue in Praxis to offend the sensibilities of the Praxian Hegemony, who refused to entertain the notion that life might exist anywhere in the universe but the red planet, despite any and all evidence to the contrary. He was convicted of heresy and confined to a cell where he would await execution. It was there that Jason met the first Martian whom he would call “friend”, and the course of his life was forever changed.

But through it all, Jason cursed the editors of National Geographic. Had it not been for them, he might just have gone to college or gotten a job like any other regular person.

A Martian Bat

A Martian Bat

(from King of the Cheap Romance by Joe R. Lansdale)

What happened was this.

The fever hit the Far Side, as we called the city long beyond the mountains. The Martian fever is a nasty beast. It comes on sudden and hot and burns the mind right out of a person, turns them red, mounds up pus-filled lesions quick-time, makes a person quiver, scream and rave, go completely off their nut.

No one really knew how it gets started, but it happened now and then, comes out of nowhere like rain from a clear, sunny sky. It was thought to have something to do with certain kinds of Martian water, melted snow that flowed down out of the mountains and joined up in streams and creeks that got into the water supply. Mars was mostly hot, dry desert, but up around the ice caps it was rich in water, cold and savage.

Though the fever was brutal, there was a cure, and it was mighty effective, if not readily available. That’s what my father and I were trying to do, make it available…

…

What I think about is how if we’d have left a few second earlier, or a few seconds later, none of it might have happened.

A Martian Bat. Illustration : Elena

But there we were with first light on the windshield, then the shield turned dark, and there was a whomp, a sound like some kind of machine tearing metal. It wasn’t metal though. It wasn’t the ship. It was the scream of the Martian Bat. The damn things are huge, and, unlike Earth bats, which Dad says travel by night, Martian Bats travel day and night but are blind, their eyes huge and white as snow.

They are guided by some kind of in-built radar.  That radar helps them find prey, and I guess the bat thought we were one of the great blue birds that fly over the ice, for it came at us and let out with its horrid scream that sounded like metal ripping. The craft twisted and swirled, but held to the sky all right, at least until the bat bit us and clawed us and we started to come apart.

The craft killed the bat due to the collision of its wings or part of the beast’s being sucked into a turbine. Whatever did it, we both went down. I remember seeing out the windshield a glimpse of bat’s wings, a near subliminal glimpse of those white eyes and that toothy mouth. The front end of the ship bent up, and down we went. Had the bat not had hold of us, had what was left of its massive wings not held and glided, we would have dropped faster than a stone and with the sudden impact of ripe fruit being slammed on rocks…

An Ice Shark

An Ice Shark

(from King of the Cheap Romance by Joe R. Lansdale)

At first, I thought it was an illusion, mirage. But no, it was real, a black fin had broken the ice, and it had broken it violently enough that I heard it crack, though I figure I was a quarter mile from that fin. I didn’t know what it was from experience, but I had read about it and recognized it that way.

It was an ice shark, big as killer whales on Earth, but sleeker, with a black fin and tentacles that exploded from its head like confetti strands but were considerably more dangerous. It could travel on the surface or underneath, and could even crawl on land for a long time. Its fin was harder than any known metal and could crack the ice without effort. The ice shark had a tremendous sense of smell, a bit or radar, not as highly developed as the bat, but effective enough. It could squeeze into tight places, like oatmeal sliding through a colander. It had most likely smelled my urine and had come for lunch.

That shark couldn’t have known I would be more vulnerable come night, but it sure seemed to. It came fast behind me but was never able to catch me, even though I had only pushed the throttle a little more than before. Yet, it was like it knew I had limitations. That if all it did was wait, I would have to slow down and it would have me.

It was growing dark, but I could still see the line of mountains and the vast expanse of nothing around me, then all of a sudden the light washed out and the moons rose up. I turned on the lights.

And then it happened.

An Ice Shark. Illustration by Elena.

Even inside the sled, I could hear the ice crack, and then I could see them. I had never actually seen them for realm just vids, but there they were, cracking up through the ice and rising up and sliding along – the Climbing Bergs. They were rises of solid ice that came down from the depths where it was cold and wet and where the old, old Mars was. They would break open the surface and slide along and suck in the air. They were mound of ice full of living organisms that owned them. Living organisms that came up for air and pulled it in and renewed themselves like Sothern Earth ladies with handshaking fans on a hot day in church. Sometimes they were empty ice – clear ice you could see all the way through. And sometimes the ice held the ancient Mars inside of it. I had heard of that, extinct animals, and even Martians themselves, though there had only been fragments of that discovered, and most stories about them were legends, as the ice soon sank back down into the depths, taking their ancient treasures and information with them.

The ice cracked loud as doom and rose up and the moons flashed on the clean, clear ice moonlight shone through it. In covered my entire path, and inside of the ice I could see something: a dark shadow. The shadow was in the center of the ice, and it was a shadow that covered acres and rose up high. Then I was close enough that I could see better what the shadow was. It almost took my breath away, almost made me forget about what was behind me. It was a slanting slide of ice that went directly up against the icy wall of the berg, and inside the berg was a huge set of stone stairs that rose up to a stone pyramid, and the stairs went inside and dipped into the dark. The ice between the outside and the pyramid looked thin, as if it might be hollow inside the berg.

I knew this much. I couldn’t keep outrunning the shark…

I glanced in the mirror and saw the shark’s fin, poking high, and I could see its shape shimmering beneath the ice. A huge shape, and I could see that it was, as I said, a monster that in spite of its name was really nothing like a shark. It was a dark form that was formless; it moved like gelatin, except for the fin, which stayed steady, sawing through the ice effortlessly…

I looked back. The shark tore its whole body through the ice. It shifted and twisted and wadded and finally it roared. It was a roar so loud I felt the ice beneath me shake. The rear and the wind carried its horrid breath to me. It was so foul I thought I might throw up. Its shape changed, became less flat and more solid, tentacles flashed out from its head, and I could see flippers on its belly, between those dipped little legs with bony hooks for feet. It was slithering and clawing its way across the cold space between me and it.

Wool

Wool

By Hugh Howey

The helmet came last handled with obvious care. The tech had her hold it while he adjusted the metal ring collar around her neck. She looked down at her reflection in the visor, her eyes hollow and so much older than she remembered yet so much younger than she felt. Finally, the helmet went on, the room dimmer through the dark glass. The tech reminded her of the argon blast, of the fires that would follow. She would have to get out quickly or die a far worse death inside.

He left her to consider this. The yellow door behind her clanged shut; its wheel spun on the inside as if by a ghost.

Juliette wondered if she should simply stay and succumb to the flames, not give this spiritual awakening a chance to persuade her. What would they say in Mechanical when that tale spiraled its way through the silo? Some would be proud of her obstinacy, she knew. Some would be horrified at her having gone out that way, in a bone-charring inferno. A few might even think she’d not been brave enough to take the first step out the door, that she’d wasted the chance to see the outside with her own eyes.

The helmet came last… Illustration by Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Her suit crinkled as the argon was pumped into the room, creating enough pressure to temporarily hold the outside toxins at bay. She found herself shuffling toward the door, almost against her will. When it cracked, the plastic sheeting in the room flattened itself against every pipe, against the low-jutting bench, and she knew the end had come. The doors before her parted, the silo splitting like the skin of a pea, giving her a view of the outside through a haze of condensing steam.

One boot slid through that crack, followed by another. And Juliette moved out into the world, dead set on leaving it on her own terms, seeing it for the first time with her own eyes even through this limited portal, this roughly eight-inch-by-two-inch sheet of glass, she suddenly realized.