Old Mars

The Sunstone PHYLLIS EISENSTEIN

HE HAD EXPECTED HIS FATHER TO MEET HIM AT THE MERIDIani spaceport. But when he disembarked after the monthlong flight from Earth, duffel bag over his shoulder, the only people waiting for the passengers were strangers. After two Martian years away, with a brand-new Ph.D. in archaeology under his belt, Dave Miller had thought that the man who had scrimped and saved to ensure that his son got the best graduate-school education in the solar system would be there to welcome him home.

The other passengers, whom he had gotten to know on the journey, collected their luggage and their local contacts—family, friends, hosts—and dispersed. 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 one of the lesser canals that splayed out from Niliacus Lacus, and Rekari, his father’s Martian business partner, had pronounced them seven or eight thousand Martian years abandoned. His father, the famous Dr. Benjamin Miller, to whom the card really referred, had decided they were not worth adding to the tourist round. But that hadn’t made them any less a discovery.

When there seemed no point in waiting any longer, Dave went into the terminal and found a phone. He’d bought a personal communicator back on Earth, but on Mars, where dust storms so often interfered with wireless communications, landlines were more reliable. The terminal clerk told him the local phone would probably work—it had yesterday—but when he tried his father’s number, there was no answer, not even with a recording.

He chewed on his lip for a few seconds, then gave in and tapped his sister’s number. He hoped her husband didn’t answer; his sister had always been hard enough to deal with.

The child’s voice on the other end did not know who Uncle Dave was, but was finally persuaded to pass the call to his or her mother.

“David.” It wasn’t a friendly voice, but it was his sister’s. In two years, she had not answered one of his letters.

“Yes, I’m back,” he said. “How have you been? How’s the family?” He didn’t even know how many kids she had now.

“Don’t pretend you care, David,” she said. “What do you want?”

“It’s been two years, Bev. That’s not much of a welcome.”

He could hear the snort at her end. “I honestly didn’t think you’d come back. Was Earth that big a disappointment?”

“Earth was fine,” he said, “but staying there was never the plan.”

“Oh yes,” said his sister. “You were always going to come back here and help Dad dig more things up. Maybe find one of those lost cities he was always looking for. He hasn’t come home in months, you know.”

“Months?” said Dave. “How many months?” His father had always spent long stretches of time in the field, but … months?

“I don’t know. Four? Five? It’s not like I see him very often when he’s not out there.”

“Have you talked to Rekari?”

There was a pause at her end. “I never understood what Dad saw in that piece of Martian scum.”

“But have you …?”

“No, I haven’t talked to him. And he hasn’t talked to me, either.”

“Beverly—”

“Dad always liked him better than his own family. And you did, too. Don’t try to tell me anything different.”

Dave didn’t answer that. Rekari had always been a good companion for a growing boy. “Did he go out with Dad?”

“How should I know?”

“He didn’t answer the phone.”

“Does he even know how to use a phone?”

Dave took a deep breath. On Earth, he had learned not to respond to people who said nasty things about Martians and the humans who lived on Mars, though it had taken more than a few fistfights to make those lessons stick. “I’ll be at Dad’s if you want me,” he said.

“Fine,” she said, and she broke the connection.

It was the longest conversation they’d had in a decade, and it made Dave worry. Months? He let the phone go and walked back to the clerk to arrange for transport to Charlestown. There was none, of course, but the clerk was willing to sell his own scooter to a fellow Marsman. And he was happy enough to take Earth creds, which usually came from tourists and the people who dealt with them; Dave had acquired a pretty decent supply from part-time jobs during school. He slung his duffel on the back, checked the charge gauge, and closed the canopy to head north. 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 lost 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 three small sailboats moored there, and beyond that, the arc of 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.” His father had been optimistic while his mother was alive, but there had never been more than one son; and the son-in-law who might have worked with him but worked for the regional utility instead was unimpressed by the grants his father-in-law had gotten from Syrtis University and the remains of the six ancient villages he had discovered over the last thirty years; archaeology on Mars, Bev’s husband said, wasn’t worth much beyond entertaining a few tourists.

Dave closed the scooter into the side shed and tried the office door. It wasn’t locked. Nothing in Charlestown was ever locked, although a key hung from the handle in case anyone wanted to use it. Inside, he found the tiny front room that served as an office dark, its windows too grimy to admit more than a hint of morning sunlight, and the light switch dead under his hand. He left the door open, and the splash of light showed undisturbed dust everywhere. He flicked on the battery-powered flash every Marsman carried and went to the door separating the business from the living quarters. In his father’s bedroom, the bed was rumpled, but the bureau drawers were closed, the clothing in them neatly folded, and the jacket he always wore in the field was missing from its hook. Farther on, Dave’s own bedroom was just as he had left it, with a couple of school trophies on the bureau and a pair of old shoes under the bed.

“You don’t have to come back,” his father had said. But Dave had always known he would. Ben Miller and Sons. Home.

The first few months away had been hard. There had been homesickness, of course, but he had pushed that aside with exercise, first on the ship and even more on Earth itself, until the feeling of wearing a backpack that weighed twice as much as he did eased. By then, graduate school and all the sights and experiences of the exotic mother planet had absorbed him, and thinking about home no longer bothered him. Except perhaps when he woke up on a clear morning and saw that piercingly bright sunlight—the light that was never so strong on Mars—between the curtains.

He dropped the duffel on the bed and opened his own bureau drawers one by one, trying to remember what else he had left behind. Not much. There were a couple of T-shirts in the bottom drawer. And underneath them was a small notebook.

He’d always carried a notebook when he went out exploring, but his had gone with him to Earth and were in his duffel now. This was one of his father’s. Only the first page had anything written on it. There was a date at the top, nearly five Martian months ago, and below that were a few lines in his father’s familiar hand, about likely ruins where the Alcronius canal emerged from the northern ice cap. It was a good lead, his father’s notes said, because it came from the oldest Martian he had ever met, who had once helped him by translating some barely legible inscriptions. A good lead, but a long trip, and he was sure he and Rekari would be gone for quite a while, checking it out. At the bottom were the coordinates of the place.

As of the date of the entry, the northern ice cap had been as melted as it ever would be, and the canal current had ebbed. You could easily take a boat north then. Rekari had a boat. Dave had seen it at the dock.

He was tired after the long ride, but he was even more hungry. The cabinets in the tiny kitchen were empty; his father had probably taken their contents on the trip north. So Dave went out to see if one of the local restaurants had anything interesting, which on Mars meant anything at all. Jacky’s, just down the street, had peanut butter and flatbread for breakfast, and Dave was glad enough for that. As a student on Earth, he hadn’t eaten much better.

“I don’t know that your dad thought you’d come back,” said Jacky. She was tall and thin, with cheeks weathered by the Martian winds, but she had a smile for him, and a treat of homemade blackberry jam. Jacky had always been a better big sister than Bev, and Dave had often wondered why his father hadn’t married her and made her a real part of the family.

“He’s been gone quite a while, hasn’t he? My sister said months.”

Jacky looked at her watch. “One hundred and thirty-three days.”

Dave leaned an elbow on the table, gathered up a few crumbs of the flatbread, and tossed them into his mouth. “I saw Rekari’s boat at the dock. Did he go along?”

Jacky nodded. “But he came back, a month or so ago. He said somebody had to look after the business. Not that there’s been any lately. I haven’t seen a tourist since last year.”

Dave paid the check in Earth creds, and Jacky tucked them into her shirt. “It’s good to see you back, kid. Maybe there’ll be something better for dinner. I hear the Warners have an extra chicken. I might be able to talk them out of it.”

“I’d like that,” said Dave.

“Check back at five.”

He went outside and headed for the Martian quarter.

The main street was busier now, with people doing their morning shopping before heading out to the scrubby fields of genetically modified peanuts, potatoes, and barley that stretched eastward from Hiddekel. On the west side of the canal, someone seemed to be trying to raise wheat again—that happened every decade or so, according to his father, when new settlers arrived from Earth. It never worked very well, but it usually produced enough spindly stalks to feed a few goats. Dave had eaten plenty of wheat bread on Earth, and he didn’t think it was anything special. Chicken, though, was something else.

Several people stopped to say hello to him, to ask about his experience on Earth, to tell him how good he looked, and it was much more than a ten-minute walk before he finally reached Rekari’s compound. 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, with roofs of woven plant fiber coated with hardened clay. The Martians grew the plants 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 only 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. Although his father had insisted that in an emergency, Martian food would not kill him. Fortunately, Dave had never needed to test that claim.

Rekari’s son Burmari was in the center of the arc, working on a boat that was obviously new and nearly finished, only the mast and sail missing. When he saw Dave, he made the Martian sign for welcome, then walked over to clap him on the shoulder in a human greeting. Like all Martians, Burmari was thin and wiry, with ruddy skin and large, pale eyes, and he was more than a head taller than any Marsman. Dave smiled and reached up to return his greeting. They had known each other all of Dave’s life.

“School treated you well,” said Burmari. “You look healthy and strong.”

He spoke in the local Martian language, but Dave had no trouble understanding him; since childhood, he had been as fluent in it as in English.

“Extra gravity will do that,” said Dave. “But I’m happy to be back where there is less of it. Where is your father?”

But before his son could respond, Rekari came out of the cottage at the far end of the arc, and he made the sign of greeting, then held his arms out for a very human-style embrace.

After that, there was a gathering of the rest of Rekari’s family from every point on the arc, his wife, his younger brother and his wife, and their two children. A table and stools were brought out, and cups of an herbal drink that both humans and Martians liked, mint-flavored and faintly alcoholic. Dave could see the curiosity on the faces that surrounded him, but only the nephew, who had been little more than a knee-high nuisance when Dave left, was impolite enough to ask about Earth. Settling himself with a cup, Dave talked about the cities, the crowds, the school, and his teachers, trying to give an overview of the experience, and they seemed willing to listen as long as he wanted to go on. Eventually, though, Rekari called a halt, saying that Dave was too tired to keep talking. Adult Martians were generally good at reading humans—much better than humans were at reading them—but Dave actually felt less tired than before his meal. But he knew that if anyone had answers to his own questions, it was his father’s Martian business partner.

“I think we should speak in the office,” Rekari said, raising a hand in a gesture that meant to wait a moment. He ducked inside one of the cottages and came back with a green Martian lamp. There wasn’t much left of the old civilization, but the sun-loving lichen that the ancients had either discovered or created were still around, and they could be persuaded to give a little light back for a few hours every day if you knew exactly how to treat them. Rekari had tried to teach Dave the trick, but he had always ended up overfeeding them, which stifled their light.

“I have a flash,” Dave said, patting one of his jacket pockets.

“I’m sure you do,” said Rekari, but he took the lamp anyway.

In the office, Rekari closed the front door and set the light on the long table that served as a desk and a display surface for maps. He brushed the dust from his usual chair and sat down. Dave took his father’s chair and waited. He knew that Rekari would eventually get around to telling him what he wanted to know, and there was no use trying to rush him. Martians always took their time.

Rekari folded his long fingers on his knee. “Did you find school on Earth to be useful?” he asked.

Dave had spent his undergraduate years at Syrtis University, where his teachers were all his father’s former students, and he had been satisfied at the prospect of earning his doctorate there. But his father had insisted that the Earth experience would make him a better archaeologist, even though on Earth he would be working at digs that had already been thoroughly explored by several generations of Ph.D. candidates. In the end, he realized that his father had been right. The range of knowledge of his teachers on Earth was astonishing, and they were more than willing to mentor the son of Dr. Benjamin Miller.

“Yes,” Dave said. “Extremely useful.”

Rekari’s hands moved in the Martian sign of approval. “Your father was pleased that you went. One of his old friends there wrote to him and said you were doing well.”

Dave waited.

Rekari seemed to be studying him. At last, he said, “Your father was ill.”

Dave felt a chill run up his back. It was bad news, then. “What do you mean?”

“His heart was not functioning properly.”

“He seemed fine when I left.”

Rekari made the Martian negative sign. “There were pills to help, even before you left.”

Dave frowned at him. “You should have told me.”

“The doctor said there was nothing to be done beyond the medication. A procedure on Earth might have helped, but the doctor was not certain your father would survive the journey. And your father did not wish to waste the ticket on himself.”

“I would have given it to him, gladly.”

“He knew that.”

Dave sighed heavily. His father had always been so stubborn. “You really should have told me.”

Rekari’s voice was low. “That may be, but he did not wish it.”

Dave understood, but it was so frustratingly Martian. They had immense respect for their own elders, and that spilled over to the humans they knew best. You just didn’t cross an elder if you were a Martian. That was why Rekari had gone along on so many expeditions even when he didn’t believe they would result in anything.

Rekari had been his father’s business partner for more years than Dave had been alive, helping his father guide rich Earth tourists through the best-preserved Martian ruins, offering lore that was traditional if not always accurate—as he admitted privately—and translating ancient inscriptions in colorful ways. In the long periods between tourist visits, the two of them searched for more ruins as well as for any interesting minerals that the long-depleted Martian landscape had to offer. The ancient civilization had used up most of the planet’s easily accessible resources, leaving a legacy of rust thinly scattered over the surface, but his father had once found a narrow vein of opal in a cliff exposed by the melting of the northern ice cap. Now there were rings and pendants of that opal among the more affluent residents of Syrtis City, although the gold for the settings had been brought from Earth in the luggage of the city’s only jeweler. The opal money had helped to finance several expeditions to sites that seemed to have exceptional archaeological potential. Nothing significant came of any of them, though. The old Martian cities had been lost for a very long time. But his father had never given up.

“I found his notebook,” said Dave. “It says he had some promising coordinates.”

The Martian lifted one hand in his version of a shrug. “Your father heard a story. You know, he was always hearing stories.”

Dave nodded.

“He thought he had some coordinates. So we took the boat and went, and we spent weeks searching at the edge of the northern ice. To my eyes, there was nothing, but in one area, your father saw … perhaps … some traces of what once might have been. We had brought the excavator along, of course, and he used it to strip off the top layer of soil, as always. Then he went down on his hands and knees with a trowel and began to scrape at some markings he said appeared to be the remains of wooden footings. He had done the same so often before, I did not think it would harm him. I knelt beside him and tried to help, but he pushed me away. It was delicate work, he said. Leave it to the expert, he said. I had used my trowel before, many times, but your father did have a surer hand.”

Dave wasn’t certain that was true, but he didn’t say so. Elders—and they were both his elders, after all—were not to be contradicted.

“I could see he was in great pain,” said Rekari. “His hands were shaking so much that he could not open the pill bottle. I took it from him and opened it and gave him a pill, but it was no help. The doctor had said a second pill, if necessary, but that, too …” He made a sign that Dave had never seen before, and his thin shoulders sagged as if he was immensely tired. “I buried him in the north and came back here. When anyone asked, I said that he and I had decided that one of us had to return to the business, and he preferred to stay in the field.” He made the new sign again, an emphasis by repetition that Martians rarely resorted to. At Dave’s inquiring gesture, he said, “It is sorrow, David. It is not a sign that the young should use.”

Dave took a deep breath and made it anyway. “I would like to visit his grave.”

“He would not wish it,” said Rekari.

“That doesn’t matter. I wish it.”

Rekari reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a wad of cloth the size of his fist. “This is what he wished, David. To give this to you.” He unrolled the cloth to expose a pale, teardrop-shaped pebble, smoothly polished, pierced at one end and threaded with a silver chain. Its surface glimmered faintly, like the ghost of an opal, and Dave knew immediately what it was. Its Martian name translated as “sunstone,” and it was traditionally worn by the heads of Martian families and passed down from parent to child, generation after generation. Rekari, who had been head of his family since the death of his father nine years before, wore one, usually tucked inside his shirt. The humans on Mars did not consider sunstones especially attractive, though Dave had always thought Rekari’s was pleasant-looking.

He hadn’t known his father owned one.

Rekari held the stone out to Dave, the chain dangling from his long fingers.

Dave took it and held it close to the lamp. “Where did this come from?”

“Many years ago,” said Rekari, “before you were born, before I became your father’s associate, a child was lost from a Martian town some forty kilometers to the south. Your father had already explored considerably in the area, looking for ruins, and so, knowing the landscape, he volunteered to help in the search. He was, in fact, the only man of Earth who did. And he found the child. But the season was winter, and he was too late. The child had died of the cold. Still, the family was grateful, and the child’s grandfather, who was head of the family, never forgot. For the sake of that child, who had been their only hope of a future, he helped your father over the years, translating inscriptions, telling stories passed down from ancient times, even drawing maps of places that once were but are no more. And some months ago, in the last days of his life, when his family was coming to an end, he called your father to his side and, for the sake of that child, gave him this sunstone so that the family might be carried on, even if by a man of Earth. And it was he who told your father of the place that might have been a city in the old times, because he knew how much your father wanted to find such a city. One more story, of many that your father heard in his years on Mars.

“We went,” said Rekari. “How could we not go? We always went. But this time, all we found was your father’s death. And now you are the head of your family.”

Dave let the stone rest in his cupped palm, thinking about how his father must have worn it, about the old Martian whom he had never met, and about that lost child. He was feeling a bit lost himself. Ben Miller and Sons. He wished he could have shaken his father’s hand one last time, embraced him one last time. He didn’t feel like the head of anything. “Well, there’s Bev,” he said.

“She has joined herself to another family,” said Rekari. “And your father did not mean for her to have the stone. I know you understand that.”

Dave made the sign for agreement. He slipped the chain over his head, then, because it seemed so strange to be a human and wearing a sunstone, and because Rekari wore it that way, he tucked it inside his shirt where no one would see it. “I assume his grave is near the site,” he said. “I wish to visit both.” Cool at first, the stone warmed quickly against his chest, and he could not help feeling oddly comforted by it, as if some tiny part of his father were with him.

Rekari made the sign for sorrow one more time. Then he murmured, “When the new boat is finished, I will take you there. It is a long journey.”

Dave thought about the boat, fresh and sleek-looking, a beautiful pleasure craft, but not for the impatient, and he found that he was very impatient. He calculated how many Earth creds he had left.

More than enough. “I’ll buy a motor for the boat,” he said finally. “Not so long a journey as with a sail.”

Rekari gave him a surprised look. “Have you come home rich?”

“There was money to be earned on Earth, and I spent less than I was paid. I have enough to use for important things.”

Rekari stood. “Then the decision is made. We will go north, you and I. Buy the motor, and I will ready the boat to receive it.” He went to the door, where he turned back for just a moment to make the sign of temporary farewell before walking out into the midday light.

Dave slumped in his father’s chair. He felt drained by their conversation and suddenly overwhelmed by the day’s events. He slid the sunstone from beneath his shirt and curled his hand around it. “You should have told me, Dad,” he whispered, and he shut his eyes hard against the tears that he had not allowed Rekari to see. Going on without his father was something he could barely imagine. They were going to be a team. For two Martian years he had thought about how he would change that sign. “Ben Miller and Son, Archaeology. Tour the Ancient Ruins.” The bold truth. He had planned on painting the new one himself. Ben and Dave Miller were going to find one of those lost cities and revolutionize the human view of the ancient Martian civilization. Oh, he had such plans, with his new-minted Ph.D. He shook the sunstone, as if through it he could shake his father. “Why didn’t you tell me?” And then the real question, “Why did you have to die?”

When the tears finally eased, he wiped his eyes on the shoulder of his shirt. Dragging himself out of the chair, he pushed the front door shut. Rekari had left the lamp, and somehow its greenish glow was comforting, reminding him of his childhood and evenings spent in Rekari’s own home. But he didn’t need its light to find his way around. He left it where it was and staggered into the living quarters and his own bedroom, where he eased himself onto the bed. He turned the thin pillow over and put his head down.

The next thing he knew, someone was ringing the office doorbell, which was hand-operated by twisting a knob and did not rely on the nonexistent utility power. He blinked the sleep from his eyes and sat up. The windows were even darker than before—night had fallen. He lurched off the bed and stumbled to the office, where the lamp had faded almost to nothing. Pulling the flash out of his pocket, he went to the door and pulled it open.

It was Jacky, with her own flash held beside her hip. Behind her, a few soft lights in the buildings across the street were the only other illumination. “Still interested in chicken?” she said.

He blinked a few more times and realized he was very hungry. He nodded.

“Come on over,” she said. “I’ve got beans and tomatoes, too.”

It sounded great. “I’ll be there right away.”

Three other people were gathered for the meal. Dave knew them all—old-timers, friends of his father. He didn’t know if he should tell them his father was dead. He decided he couldn’t face that conversation yet, so instead, they traded some small talk, including some about Earth, then Dave excused himself and paid his bill.

“Going out to help your dad, are you?” Jacky said as she took his creds.

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Rekari’s boy stepped the mast today. That means a launch. Pretty convenient.”

“Well, maybe I’ll go for a sail,” said Dave. “Just to see how things have changed in two years.”

Jacky laughed. “Nothing ever changes here.”

Dave pointed over his shoulder in the general direction of the canal. “There’s the wheat.”

“It’s like the cycle of the seasons,” said Jacky. “It gets a little warmer, the water rises, it gets a little colder and it falls back. There won’t be any wheat.”

Dave shrugged. “Wheat means new settlers, new homes. There’ll be things to see.”

“And lost cities to hunt.” She winked at him and turned to another customer.

He was still tired after eating, so he decided to go back to bed, and when he finally woke, just before dawn, he felt better. The shower was unusable due to the lack of power, but there was a bucket in the side shed, and he was able to scoop up water from the canal, dissolve a disinfecting tablet in it, and sluice himself off. He changed to some reasonably fresh clothes from the duffel and tucked the sunstone under his shirt. By then, Jacky’s place was open for breakfast, and her flatbread and peanut butter tasted very good. Dave went out feeling ready for just about anything.

About a hundred meters down the street was Mike’s Power Shop. He had a few motors in stock, adaptable to boats for people who thought sails were too slow—there were always a few, especially newcomers. Newcomers were more likely to have money, of course, while those who had been on Mars awhile had a tendency either to tap their relatives for help or to offer barter. Mike was more than happy to sell his best for Earth creds and to throw in a full charge. He loaned Dave a cart to take it down to the Martian quarter.

Burmari was waiting for him. The boat was already on the slide that would carry it into the canal, the sail was mounted but still tightly furled, and the brackets for the motor had been installed.

“It will tolerate a motor,” said Burmari, “but it will not move as beautifully with one.” Martians did not care for motors; they weren’t using any when the first Earthman arrived, though most archaeologists believed that their ancient ancestors must have had them. How could they have achieved such a high civilization, they argued, without that kind of power? But Dave always remembered that the ancient civilizations of Earth had used the power of human and animal labor and nothing else. And the pyramids still stood—he had seen them with his own eyes.

“It won’t move as beautifully,” he agreed, slipping the motor into the brackets and closing the latches. The screw rested just below the surface of the water. “But sometimes it’s all right to sacrifice beauty for speed.”

Burmari’s polite expression did not betray how little a Martian would believe that.

Rekari emerged from the house at the far end of the arc. “Did you sleep well, David?”

“Very well,” said Dave.

“And when do you wish to begin the journey? As you see, the boat is quite ready.”

“We have to lay in supplies.”

“The work of a morning for me,” said Rekari. “Is that possible for you as well?”

“I’ll find out.”

“If so, we can leave after the midday meal.”

It didn’t take Dave long to gather supplies from a local shop—mainly peanut butter, barley flatbread, and dried beans that could be reconstituted with boiled canal water. He stowed it all under the gunwale on one side of the boat while Rekari put his own supplies under the other. They checked the motor’s mapper, and it seemed accurate, showing their destination on a standard grid-style projection of the planet. His father’s excavator, a lightweight miniature bulldozer whose larger cousins Dave had used on Earth and which Rekari had stored for him, fit snugly in the stern beside Dave’s personal bundle of tools. Rekari’s wife and Jacky collaborated on a sendoff lunch of grilled lizard, goat cheese, and potatoes—something for everyone—and just before noon, Dave and Rekari pulled away from the dock to the sound of the softly churning screw. Rekari estimated the trip at two weeks.

For the first few days, they followed Hiddekel north through an area Dave had visited with his father, where there were human settlements and Martian ones, ruins that Earth tourists had paid well to view and others that were barely visible to an untrained eye. But eventually they shifted into an eastward-tending canal and entered territory unknown to him. By day, Dave and Rekari alternated at the tiller. At night, they dropped anchor, heated their meals in a unit that plugged into the motor, and slept in the boat on inflatable pads. And Dave thought, not for the first time, how much more beautiful the stars were without that big, bright Earth satellite to spoil them; the Martian moons were far more modest, with Phobos a fraction of the size and brightness of Earth’s moon and Deimos just another pinpoint in the great darkness.

Beginning on the second night, after their meal, with Rekari’s lamp glowing at the boat’s prow, the Martian talked about his travels with Dave’s father, about their discoveries in the Syrtis, Sabaeus, and Tharsis areas. They had not been familiar with the farther north. No ruins had been found there—too much ice during the winter and too much flooding during the melt, Rekari said; the old Martians had probably chosen not to establish any major population centers in such a volatile area.

“Of course, your father did not believe that. He had perhaps an exaggerated idea of the ancients. As most of you do. They weren’t very different from us. They loved their boats, as we do. The old stories say they had great fleets of boats, with sails patterned like the leaves of the alaria tree.” He leaned back against the mast, the bottom of its furled sail brushing his shoulder. “There aren’t many alarias left. Like so many other things. There were shallow seas in those days, and there would be boats sailing on them on summer afternoons, as far as the eye could see. It was very beautiful.”

“I wish I could have seen that,” Dave said.

Rekari looked out into the darkness. “Yes, it must have been a great sight.” He was silent for a moment, then he said, “There were more of them, back then, than we are now. We don’t have very many children now.” He glanced at Dave. “I am more fortunate than most in that.”

On the sixth day, just after they had shifted into an easterly-tending canal that would link to one that continued north toward their coordinates, Dave noticed that they were being followed. He hadn’t thought so when he saw the boat for the first time, its mast and furled sail faintly visible against the sky. He had assumed it was a Martian trader, though when it kept up with them, he knew it had to be motorized, which was unusual for a Martian boat. Perhaps it was some Marsman’s pleasure craft. Or it could have been two or three different boats that he was conflating. When it made the turn into the new canal, though, he knew—Martian or Marsman—it was following them.

When he woke at dawn on the eighth day, it was only a dozen meters away. Sometime during the night, its crew had taken the sail down completely to make better speed, and the cloth was rolled up and tied along one gunwale, the mast standing oddly naked in the center of the boat. In the bow, three Martians, strangers to Dave, were lowering the anchor over the side, and he waited till they were finished to signal a greeting. They returned the greeting, but there was something hesitant about their gestures, as if they were not comfortable using their signs with Marsmen. When they shifted their gazes to his left, he realized that Rekari had risen from his sleeping pad and was standing beside him.

Dave murmured, “Do you know these men?”

“It is possible,” said Rekari.

Dave called out to the men in the Martian language. “Is there some way in which we can help you?”

They seemed startled, and Dave guessed they hadn’t had much contact with Marsmen who spoke their language. One of them gestured the Martian imperative at him, a sign normally used by parents toward young children, mildly discourteous to an adult, and he accompanied it with English words. “You wear a sunstone that does not belong to you.”

Dave laid a hand over the sunstone that was hidden beneath his shirt. “It belonged to my father,” he said. “He gave it to me.”

“It belonged to our cousin,” said the Martian. “We are his nearest relations, and it should come to us.”

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.

The next morning, after a quick breakfast, Dave gathered up his other tools—the folding shovel, the stiff-bristled brush, and the sharp trowel he had brought from Earth that fit into a scabbard at his belt. Then he went to the sail, took a deep breath, and pulled the fabric aside. As expected, the dampness had spread under the protective cloth, and after some minutes on his hands and knees, Dave thought he could see variations in its absorption—the faint shadows of wooden footings, long since rotted away, forming a vanished entrance that framed a rectangular space of long-ago disturbed soil. The differences were subtle, but something in him said yes, they really were there. The idea that the entrance had been made of alaria wood popped into his mind, though he assumed that was because Rekari had mentioned alarias.

He pulled out the trowel and scraped at the damp soil with its finely honed edge. When the top layer came up fairly easily, he decided to use the excavator, and Rekari helped him maneuver it out of the boat and roll it into place. He flipped the switch, and the small machine came to life and began to scuff at the surface and toss the soil aside. He ran it over the suspicious area, and at each pass, it dug deeper, a centimeter at a time.

Fifty centimeters below the surface, it exposed a polished stone surface. He jumped down into the shallow pit and went to work with trowel and brush to clean it off and find its edges.

Fully exposed, the smooth stone measured a little less than one meter by two, oriented with the longer side running almost precisely north and south. The western edge merged with rougher stone that extended toward the canal. The eastern edge ended sharply, and when he dug a narrow trench downward there, he found a smooth vertical face about fifteen centimeters in depth, with another horizontal surface at the bottom. He lengthened his trench eastward, found another edge after about forty centimeters, another vertical face, and another horizontal surface below that. It looked like the beginning of a stairway. He started the excavator again, set the depth control to maximum, and spent the rest of the afternoon clearing the three steps. Not long before sunset he had a hole two meters by three, almost a meter deep, and three steps that led … to what?

Rekari had been sitting at the edge of the hole for most of the excavation. Now Dave climbed up and sat beside him in the waning sunlight. “There has to be something down there,” he said. “Nobody builds stairs to nowhere.”

Rekari signed his agreement.

“If this were Earth, I’d say maybe a sunken amphitheater. There’s room for a pretty broad arc before you reach those boulders.” He gestured toward them.

“An interesting thought,” said Rekari.

“Maybe there’s a polygon of steps.” He looked left and right, measuring the area with his eyes. “That would be a major excavation. I’d have to ask for a grant from Syrtis University and a crew of grad students to help. It could be very exciting.”

“It’s only three steps,” said Rekari.

Dave signed agreement. “I’ll need more evidence before I can write that grant proposal.” He swiveled his legs out of the hole and stood up. “Well, more digging tomorrow.” He smiled at Rekari. “It begins to seem like Dad had a really good lead.”

Rekari looked down at the steps, now in deep shadow. “Your father taught me a great deal in the years of our partnership,” he said. “He might have wondered if the ground level was lower thousands of years ago, and if these steps might not have led upward from there to something that no longer exists.”

Dave crossed his arms over his chest and looked into the hole, too. “Well, that’s possible,” he said. “And a lot less exciting. But I have to find out. I could use some peanut butter now, and a good night’s sleep.”

The next day, he found more steps leading downward. And more. Periodically, he pulled the excavator back to the surface and lengthened the opening, two meters at a time, so that the forward wall would not collapse from being undercut. In the pit, the excavator was soon beyond its ability to loft soil the entire distance to the surface, and so he and Rekari alternated using the shovel to finish clearing away what the machine tossed to the higher steps. By midafternoon, the hole was more than five meters long, and there were ten steps leading down. By midafternoon two days later, it was ten meters long, with twenty steps.

That was when they hit the door.

It was an elliptical panel, vertical, about two meters tall and a meter and a third wide. As he brushed the packed soil away and examined it with his flash, Dave saw that it was set flush into a smooth stone wall, but the panel itself was made of metal, and he was amazed at its condition—the corrosion was minimal, as if the door had been left there a hundred years ago instead of thousands.

“Look at this,” he whispered, as if Rekari, standing behind him, needed to be told that something was there.

Rekari stretched out a hand and touched the door almost reverently.

There was no handle, no lock that might admit a key or a tool, no obvious way to open it. But it was wider than the step in front of it was deep, which meant it had to open away from the stairway. Dave set both of his hands against its right side and pushed tentatively, then with increasing effort. The door did not move. He tried the other side, with the same results. “I didn’t think I’d need to bring a crowbar,” he muttered. Holding the flash close, he peered at the metal, going over it centimeter by centimeter, but all he could find were two hairline joins, one the length of the vertical axis, the other at the horizontal, both too tight to admit even the sharp edge of his trowel.

He leaned his forehead against the cold metal. Most archaeologists considered chisels too destructive, but he was beginning to wish he had brought one along. He took a deep breath. Patience, he reminded himself, was the essence of archaeology. Dad, he thought, I know this is what you were looking for. He leaned his whole body against the door from his cheek to his knees and pushed with every muscle he had. He could feel the sunstone under his shirt biting into his chest from the pressure.

The panel shivered.

He kept pushing.

Suddenly the door parted along those hairline joins, each quarter drawing back into the stone frame, leaving the ellipse open.

Beyond, illuminated by a dozen green lamps set on as many tripods, stood two Martian men. They stared at Dave.

He stared back. What the hell …?

Rekari had caught his arms to keep him from falling through the opening. Now he let go slowly, and in Martian, he said, “This is the son of my friend.”

The two men did not sign a greeting in response to the introduction. They just kept staring.

Dave stepped over the curving threshold and looked around. The room inside the door was perhaps five meters square, and its walls were as smoothly polished as the steps had been, and empty of any decoration. At the far end of the room was another downward stairway, this one lit by green lamps hanging on its walls; he could see them descending. He signed a greeting to the two men, and when they did not answer it, he went to the stairway and started down. They did not try to stop him, but he could hear them following and speaking to Rekari in Martian.

“He cannot wear the stone,” one of them said. “He is a stranger.”

Dave guessed that Rekari signed the negative, because he said, “I cradled this child in my arms the day he was born. He is not a stranger.”

“He is of Earth,” said one of the men.

“He went to Earth for his education,” said Rekari. “He did not stay.”

Dave didn’t look back to see what else they might have been signing at each other. He was more interested in finding out what lay at the bottom of the steps. The door alone was an archaeological treasure; what else could be hidden below, where rain and wind and dust couldn’t touch it? He could feel so many things drawing him downward—curiosity, fascination, regret that his father couldn’t be here with him. Especially regret. And yet, he felt he was fulfilling his father’s goals by descending those stairs.

It was a long, long way down, but finally the steps opened up into a huge room that seemed originally to have been a natural cavern, with walls rippled by deposits left behind by water. Green lamps lit the space, standing on tripods ranged in concentric arcs all around. In the center of the room was a pair of large tables shaped like two half circles with an arm’s-length gap between them. There were no chairs.

The two men moved to either side of him then. “We are the caretakers,” they said in English. “Now you will give us the sunstone.”

Dave looked at Rekari. “You said it was mine.”

“They cannot take it from you,” said Rekari, and he seemed to be speaking to them as much as to him. “The elders won’t allow it. We saw that with Venori’s cousins.”

“You must leave it here,” said one of the men.

Dave signed the negative. “My father gave it to me,” he said in Martian. “I will not give it up.”

“You will,” said the man. Gesturing for Dave to follow him, he walked over to the tables and stood at one end of the gap between them. There, he traced a symbol on one table with his left hand and on the other with his right, and a panel of dark wood rose up between them, almost filling the space.

It was crowded with sunstones, row upon row of them, hanging on hooks shaped like miniature fingers.

“You will leave the sunstone here,” said the Martian, “with all of the others whose families have ended.”

Dave stared at the stones. There were so many of them. So very many families gone. He could almost feel them calling to him from the dust of ages, and without thinking, he eased past the caretaker and slid two steps into the gap. He reached out with both hands and spread his fingers, so much shorter than Martian fingers, across as many stones as he could.

A sudden kaleidoscope of images sprang up around him, blotting out the array of stones, the table, the cavern. He found himself surrounded by strange tall trees with multicolored leaves, by boats with sails as colorful as the leaves, gliding across a glassy sea, by sprawling buildings topped with spires like blades pointing to the pale sky, by crowds of Martian men, women, and children, walking, running, gesticulating, all of those myriad images overlaid upon each other in a riot of color and motion. It was day, it was night, it was rain, snow, and sunshine. And the noise was deafening, a thousand thousand voices laughing, weeping, calling out, a chattering cacophony, with snatches of music rising above it all, like the singing of birds and the creaking of hinges in need of oil. The stones were speaking to him, speaking through his own stone, and inundating him with Mars as it was and would never be again.

And then, in his vision, someone reached out to him, took his shoulders with immaterial hands, and steadied the dizzying rush. All motion halted, all sound receded, and in front of everything a form coalesced.

Dr. Benjamin Miller.

“Hello, son,” he said.

Dave felt his mouth open, but no words came out. He didn’t know what to say or do first. He wanted to throw his arms around his father, but when he reached out to him, there was nothing to touch but air. Finally, hoarsely, he said, “Dad!”

His father smiled. “It’s good to see you, son. I’m sorry I couldn’t be at Meridiani to meet you.”

“Dad …”

“I wanted us to go out into the field together one more time. But the old pump didn’t make it.” He shook his head and sighed. “I remember lying on the ground and hearing Rekari call my name, then the pain was just too much. The next thing I knew, I was here.”

“Here in the cavern?” said Dave.

His father made the Martian sign of negation. “In the sunstone I’d been wearing, that you’re wearing now.”

Dave’s fingers went to the stone. “In it?”

“In it,” said his father, “with Venori and all of his elders. Sun-stones turn out to be much more than symbols, son. Everyone who wears a stone carries his elders in it—every elder who ever wore it, their memories, their knowledge, their personalities. I still haven’t finished sorting it all out, even with Venori’s help. I think it must be easier for the Martians since they expect it. He and I will both help you.”

Dave swallowed hard. “So I’m dead, too?”

His father made the negative sign again. “You’ve just had the full experience for the first time. Venori says it was triggered by all these stones being so close to you. But it’s been growing. I know you noticed it.”

Dave thought back to all the feelings he’d had, all the intuitions, all the impulses. “I guess I have.”

“And now that you’ve seen this place, you have to decide whether you want to make your reputation from it, or whether you want to search for something else. It’s a great find, son. The kind an archaeologist spends a lifetime hoping for.”

Dave looked past his father to the frozen multitudes, and he thought again about all those sunstones and the lives they represented—the parents, the children, the long history that archaeologists only guessed at. And he said, “What do they think?”

His father shook his head. “They’re in the past, son. As I’m in the past. The future has to make that decision. But first, you have to get out of here. And to do that, you have to open your eyes.”

“What?”

“Open your eyes. Open your eyes now.”

His father’s voice faded away, and his form wavered, became translucent, and beyond him all the frozen figures began to move and talk, faster and faster, until they closed in on him and he couldn’t be told apart from the multilayered blur of the rest. Dave felt surrounded by that dizzying motion again, and he pressed his hands to his eyes and took deep breaths and tried to push it all away. He felt himself crumple, felt the pain of hip and knee and elbow slamming against an unyielding surface, felt himself curl into fetal position, then black silence overwhelmed him.

Some time later—he didn’t know how long—he opened his eyes behind his hands, and when he pulled his hands away from his face, it didn’t make any difference. He was lying on a cold stone floor in darkness. He rolled to his knees, wincing at the pain of his bruises. He pushed up to his feet. “Rekari?” he said. There was no answer. In the Martian language, he called out, “Is anyone nearby?” Again, there was no answer.

He patted his pockets, found the flash, and snapped it on. They hadn’t taken it. Of course, they couldn’t. He wore a sunstone, and they didn’t dare touch him without his permission. He understood that now. It had taken every iota of courage Venori’s forty-generations-removed cousin had been able to summon simply to touch the chain, and Dave shouting in ancient Martian had been too much for him. Patting his chest, Dave verified that his sunstone was there.

He played the flash around. He was still in the cavern, though the panel of sunstones had slid back down between the tables. The green lamps had all been covered; he pulled the shields off several to make a softly lit path to the stairway. He ran up the steps, exposing lights as he went. At the top, the elliptical door was closed, and it would not open for him, even when he touched it with the sunstone. Someone had locked it.

The caretakers, of course. They couldn’t take his stone, but they could lock the stranger into the cavern and let him die there. He wondered what they had said to Rekari to make him cooperate.

He went back down to the cavern.

He stalked through the room, taking the shields off all the lights. Then he hitched himself up on one of the tables and looked around. The elliptical door had been buried. It was obviously an ancient entrance to this cavern, no longer used. But the caretakers had to get in and out somehow, if only to replenish the lamps. He made a circuit of the room, but it seemed to be completely sealed. He licked a finger and held it up, searching for a breeze, but there was nothing noticeable.

All right, he thought. It was time to stop being stupid.

He curled his hand around the sunstone and spoke in his most formal and respectful Martian. “Venori,” he said, “my elder who chose my father to be his son, tell his son how to leave this place.”

He thought he could hear a faint whisper, like a broom sweeping a wooden floor. And then his own vision turned dark again, except for one small spot on his right, and when he turned toward it, he felt as if he was looking down a long, narrow tunnel that ended at a circle low on the cavern wall. He slid off the table and walked toward the circle, stumbling once because he couldn’t see the floor beneath his feet, and though the spot remained as bright as Phobos, it shrank before him until, at the wall, it was no larger than the sunstone that hung about his neck. It stood at knee height, and when he bent close to it, he saw nothing special to mark it. He touched it with one finger, and when nothing happened, he pressed the sunstone to it.

The darkness in his vision cleared away as the wall opened into an ellipse, its stone quarters withdrawing into the walls just as the metal segments of the ellipse at the top of the stairs had done. Beyond was a stairway upward, lit by more green lamps. Dave climbed. At the top was another stone wall, and his vision shrank again, for just a moment, to show him where to press the sunstone to it. When that wall opened, late-afternoon daylight invaded the stairwell.

Dave stepped out. He found himself in the clump of boulders that stood at the far end of the nettle-free area; two of them had slid aside to allow him to pass, and as he emerged, they closed up behind him.

Outside, Rekari and the two caretakers sat atop one of the other boulders. Rekari jumped down to embrace Dave. “I knew you could do it.”

“So it was a test,” said Dave.

Rekari made the sign of agreement, twice.

“And what if I had failed?”

Rekari held him at arm’s length and looked into his face. “If two days had passed and you had not found the way, I would have gone back and brought you out. But I knew you would not fail. I knew when you opened the first door that the elders had accepted you.”

Dave turned back to the place where the boulders had parted to let him out. There was no way to tell that anything had happened there, but he knew he could open it again at any time. “My father has suggested that I could become famous by revealing the cavern to the people of Earth. On Earth, many such places have been visited by scholars and tourists. Caves at Altamira and Lascaux. Graves in Greece. The pyramids of Egypt. Sacred places. I visited a few of them myself when I was in school there.”

The caretakers glanced at each other. “And will you do this?” said one of them.

Dave fingered the sunstone at his neck. He looked at Rekari. “The people who made those places on Earth are long gone. The people who made this place on Mars are still here. What would the elders say if I stole it from them?” He made the sign of the negative. “The elders will help me find the ruins of cities where no one has lived for twenty thousand years. That is the proper work of archaeologists, not helping to despoil what has not been abandoned. There will be enough other places to make my reputation.”

Rekari gripped Dave’s arm. “Your father will be pleased. I know it.”

He thought about his father then—he could feel his presence in the stone. They would go out in the field again together after all, just not quite in the way either of them had hoped. And Dave would break the news of his death to Jacky, who would care, and to Beverly, who would perhaps realize that she also cared, because that was what one did for one’s elders. He knew that neither of them would believe that his father lived on in the stone. He didn’t think he would even try to tell them. It was, after all, a private thing between him and his elders.

“Will you work with me?” he said to Rekari.

“That would please me greatly,” said Rekari.

They walked back toward the hole they had dug.

“We should fill that in,” said Dave. “We don’t need it anymore.”

They had left the excavator on the third step from the bottom. Now they dragged it up to the surface, and Dave leaned against it for a moment, looking down the stairway. “You could have shown him lost cities, couldn’t you?” he said. “You and your elders know where they are. Why didn’t you?”

“That was his desire,” said Rekari. “Not mine.”

“But it didn’t matter in the long run. I’m going to do what he would have done.”

“It matters a great deal,” said Rekari, “because as much as I liked and respected your father, he was not a Martian. And you are.”

“Am I?” said Dave. But he didn’t need Rekari to answer that. He already knew, and so did all of the elders in his sunstone.

“Perhaps we can paint a new sign,” said Rekari. “For the new proprietor of the Miller family business.”

Yes, thought Dave. We’ll do that.

Dave Miller, Archaeology. Tour the Ancient Ruins.

Home.