The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

THE VICAR OF MARS by Gwyneth Jones

The Reverend Boaaz Hanaahaahn, High Priest of the Mighty Void, and a young Aleutian adventurer going by the name of “Conrad,” were the only resident guests at the Old Station, Butterscotch. They’d met on the way from Opportunity, and had taken to spending their evenings together, enjoying a snifter or two of Boaaz’s excellent Twin Planets blend in a cosy private lounge. They were an odd couple: the massive Shet, his grey hide forming ponderous, dignified folds across his skull and over his brow, and the stripling immortal, slick strands of head-hair to his shoulders, black eyes dancing with mischief on either side of the dark space of his nasal. But the Aleutian, though he had never lived to be old—he wasn’t the type—had amassed a fund of fascinating knowledge in his many lives, and Boaaz was an elderly priest with varied interests and a youthful outlook.

Butterscotch’s hundred or so actual citizens didn’t frequent the Old Station. The usual customers were mining lookerers, who drove in from the desert in the trucks that were their homes, and could be heard carousing, mildly, in the public bar. Boaaz and Conrad shared a glance, agreeing not to join the fun tonight. The natives were friendly enough—but Martian settlers were, almost exclusively, humans who had never left conventional space. The miners had met few “aliens,” and believed the Buonarotti Interstellar Transit was a dangerous novelty that would never catch on. One got tired of the barrage of uneasy fascination.

“I’m afraid I scare the children,” rumbled Boaaz.

The Aleutian could have passed for a noseless, slope-shouldered human. The Shet was hairless and impressively bulky, but what really made him different was his delicates. To Boaaz it was natural that he possessed two sets of fingers: one set thick and horny, for pounding and mashing, the other slender and supple, for fine manipulation. Normally protected by his wrist folds, his delicates would shoot out to grasp a stylus for instance, or handle eating implements. He had seen the young folk startle at this, and recoil with bulging eyes—

“Stop calling them children,” suggested Conrad. “They don’t like it.”

“I don’t think that can be it. The young always take the physical labour and service jobs, it’s a fact of nature. I’m only speaking English.”

Conrad shrugged. For a while each of them studied his own screen, as the saying goes. A comfortable silence prevailed. Boaaz reviewed a list of deserving “cases” sent to him by the Colonial Social Services in Opportunity. He was not impressed. They’d simply compiled a list of odds and ends: random persons who didn’t fit in, and were vaguely thought to have problems.

To his annoyance, one of the needy appeared to live in Butterscotch.

“Here’s a woman who has been suspected of being insane,” he grumbled aloud. “Has she been treated? Apparently not. How barbaric. Has visited Speranza… No known religion… What’s the use in telling me that?”

“Maybe they think you’d like to convert her,” suggested Conrad.

“I do not convert people!” exclaimed Boaaz, shocked. “Should an unbelieving parishoner wish my guidance towards the Abyss, they’ll let me know. It’s not my business to persuade them! I have entered my name alongside other Ministers of Religion on Mars. If my services as a priest should be required at a Birth, Adulthood, Conjunction, or Death, I shall be happy to oblige, and that’s enough.”

Conrad laughed soundlessly, the way Aleutians do. “You don’t bother your ‘flock,’ and they don’t bother you! That sounds like a nice easy berth.”

Not always, thought the old priest, ruefully. Sometimes not easy at all!

“I wouldn’t worry about it, Boaaz. Mars is a colony. It’s run by the planetary government of Earth, and they’re obssessed with gathering information about innocent strangers. When they can’t find anything interesting, they make it up. The file they keep on me is vast, I’ve seen it.”

“Earth,” powerful neighbour to the Red Planet, was the local name for the world everyone else in the Diaspora knew as the Blue.

Boaaz was here to minister to souls. Conrad was here—he claimed—purely a tourist. The fat file the humans kept might suggest a different story, but Boaaz had no intention of prying. Aleutians, the Elder Race, had their own religion; or lack of one. As long as he showed no sign of suffering, Conrad’s sins were his own business. The old Shet cracked a snifter vial, tucked it in his holder, inhaled deeply, and returned to the eyeball-screen that was visible to his eyes alone. The curious Social Services file on Jewel, Isabel reappeared. All very odd. Careful of misunderstandings, he opened his dictionary, and checked in detail the meanings of English words he knew perfectly well.

wicked…

old woman…

insane…

Later, on his way to bed, he examined one of the fine rock formations that decorated the station’s courtyards. They promised good hunting. The mining around here was of no great worth, ferrous ores for the domestic market, but Boaaz was not interested in commercial value: he collected mineral curiosities. It was his passion, and one very good reason for visiting Butterscotch, right on the edge of the most ancient and interesting Martian terrain. If truth be known, Boaaz looked on this far-flung Vicarate as an interesting prelude to his well-earned retirement. He did not expect his duties to be burdensome. But he was a conscientious person, and Conrad’s teasing had stung.

“I shall visit her,” he announced, to the sharp-shadowed rocks.

The High Priest had travelled from his home world to Speranza, capital city of the Diaspora, and onward to the Blue Planet Torus Port, in no time at all (allowing for a few hours of waiting around, and two “false duration” interludes of virtual entertainment). The months he’d spent aboard the conventional space liner Burroughs, completing his interplanetary journey, had been slow but agreeable. He’d arrived to find that his Residence, despatched by licensed courier, had been delayed—and decided that until his home was decoded into material form, he might as well carry on travelling. His tour of this backward but extensive new parish happened to concentrate on prime mineral-hunting sites: but he would not neglect his obligations.

He took a robotic jitney as far as the network extended, and proceeded on foot. Jewel, Isabel lived out of town, up against the Enclosure that kept tolerable climate and air quality captive. As yet unscrubbed emissions lingered here in drifts of vapour; the thin air had a lifeless, paradoxical warmth. Spindly towers of mine tailings, known as “Martian Stromatolites,” stood in groups, heads together like ugly sentinels. Small mining machines crept about, munching mineral-rich dirt. There was no other movement, no sound but the crepitation of a million tiny ceramic teeth.

Nothing lived.

The “Martians” were very proud of their Quarantine. They farmed their food in strict confinement, they tortured off-world travellers with lengthy decontamination. Even the gastropod machines were not allowed to reproduce: they were turned out in batches by the mine factories, and recycled in the refineries when they were full. What were the humans trying to preserve? The racial purity of rocks and sand?

Absurd superstition, muttered the old priest, into his breather. Life is life!

Jewel, Isabel clearly valued her privacy. He hadn’t messaged her in advance. His visit would be off the record, and if she turned him away from her door, so be it. He could see the isolated module now, at the end of a chance “avenue” of teetering stromatolites. He reviewed the file’s main points as he stumped along. Old. Well travelled, for a human of her caste. Reputed to be rich. No social contacts in Butterscotch, no data traffic with any other location. Supplied by special delivery at her own expense. Came to Mars, around a local year ago, on a settler’s one-way ticket. Boaaz thought that must be very unusual. Martian settlers sometimes retired to their home planet; if they could afford the medical bills. Why would a fragile elderly person make the opposite trip, apparently not planning to return?

The dwelling loomed up, suddenly right in front of him. He had a moment of selfish doubt. Was he committing himself to an endless round of visiting random misfits? Maybe he should quietly go away again… But his approach had been observed, a transparent pane had opened. A face glimmered, looking out through the inner and the outer skin; as if from deep, starless space.

“Who are you?” demanded a harsh voice, cracked with disuse. “Are you real? Can you hear me? You’re not human.”

“I hear you, I’m, aah, ‘wired for sound.’ I am not a human, I am a Shet, a priest of the Void, newly arrived, just making myself known. May I come in?”

He half-hoped that she would say no. Go away, I don’t like priests, can’t you see I want to be left alone? But the lock opened. He passed through, divested himself of the breather and his outer garments, and entered the pressurised chamber.

The room was large, by Martian living standards. Bulkheads must have been removed, probably this had once been a three or four person unit: but it felt crowded. He recognised the furniture of Earth. Not extruded, like the similar fittings in the Old Station, but free-standing: many of the pieces carved from precious woods. Chairs were ranged in a row, along one curved, red wall. Against another stood a tall armoire, a desk with many drawers, and several canvas pictures in frames; stacked facing the dark. In the midst of the room two more chairs were drawn up beside a plain ceramic stove, which provided the only lighting. A richly patterned rug lay on the floor. He couldn’t imagine what it had cost to ship all this, through conventional space in material form. She must indeed be wealthy!

The light was low, the shadows numerous.

“I see you are a Shet,” said Jewel, Isabel. “I won’t offer you a chair, I have none that would take your weight, but please be seated.”

She indicated the rug, and Boaaz reclined with care. The number of valuable, alien objects made him feel he was sure to break something. The human woman resumed (presumably) her habitual seat. She was tall, for a human: and very thin. A black gown with loose skirts covered her whole body, closely fastened and decorated with flourishes of creamy stuff, like textile foam, at the neck and wrists.

The marks of human aging were visible in her wrinkled face, her white head-hair and the sunken, over-large sockets of her pale eyes. But signs of age can be deceptive. Boaaz also saw something universal—something any priest often has to deal with, yet familiarity never breeds contempt.

Jewel, Isabel inclined her head. She had read his silent judgement. “You seem to be a doctor as well as a priest,” she said, in a tone that rejected sympathy. “My health is as you have guessed. Let’s change the subject.”

She asked him how he liked Butterscotch, and how Mars compared with Shet: bland questions separated by little unexplained pauses. Boaaz spoke of his mineral-hunting plans, and the pleasures of travel. He was oddly disturbed by his sense that the room was crowded: he wanted to look behind him, to be sure there were no occupants in that row of splendid chairs. But he was too old to turn without a visible effort, and he didn’t wish to be rude. When he remarked that Isabel’s home (she had put him right on the order of her name) was rather isolated she smiled—a weary stretching of the lips.

“Oh, you’d be surprised. I’m not short of company.”

“You have your memories.”

Isabel stared over his shoulder. “Or they have me.”

He did not feel that he’d gained her confidence, but before he left they’d agreed he would visit again: she was most particular about the appointment. “In ten days time,” she said. “In the evening, at the full moon. Be sure you remember.” As he returned to the waiting jitney, the vaporous outskirts of Butterscotch seemed less forbidding. He had done right to come, and thank goodness Conrad had teased him, or the poor woman might have been left without the comfort of the Void. Undoubtedly he was needed, and he would do his best.

His satisfaction was still with him when the jitney delivered him inside the Old Station compound. He even tried a joke on one of the human children, about those decorative rock formations. Did they walk in from the desert, one fine night, in search of alcoholic beverages? The youngster took offence.

“They were here when the station was installed. It was all desert then. If there was walking rocks on Mars, messir—” The child drew herself up to her frail, puny height, and glared at him. “We wouldn’t any of us be here. We’d go home straight away, and leave Mars to the creatures that belongs to this planet.”

Boaaz strode off, a chuckle rumbling in his throat. Kids! But when he had eaten, in decent privacy (as a respectable Shet, he would never get used to eating in public), he decided to forgo Conrad’s company. The “old mad woman” was too much on his mind, and he found that he shuddered away from the idea of that second visit—yet he’d met Isabel’s trouble many times, and never been frightened before.

I am getting old, thought the High Priest.

He turned in early, but he couldn’t sleep: plagued by the formless feeling that he had done something foolish, and he would have to pay for it. There were wild, dangerous creatures trying to get into his room, groping at the mellow, pockmarked outer skin of the Old Station; searching for a weak place… Rousing from an uneasy doze, he was compelled to get up and make a transparency, although (as he knew perfectly well) his room faced an inner courtyard, and there are no wild creatures on Mars. Nothing stirred. Several rugged, decorative rocks were grouped right in front of him, oddly menacing under the security lights. Had they always stood there? He thought not, but he couldn’t be sure.

The brutes crouched, blind and secretive, waiting for him to lie down again.

“I really am getting old,” muttered Boaaz. “I must take something for it.”

He slept, and found himself once more in the human woman’s module. Isabel seemed younger, and far more animated. Confusion fogged his mind, embarrassing him. He didn’t know how he’d arrived here, or what they’d been talking about. He was advising her to move into town. It wasn’t safe to live so close to the ancient desert: she was not welcome here. She laughed and bared her arm, crying I am welcome nowhere! He saw a mutilation, a string of marks etched into her thin human skin. She thrust the symbols at him: he protested that he had no idea what they meant, but she hardly seemed to care. She was waiting for another visitor, the visitor she had been expecting when he arrived the first time. She had let him in by mistake, he must leave. They are from another dimension, she cried, in that hoarse, hopeless voice. They wait at the gate, meaning to devour. They lived with me once, they may return, with a tiny shift of the Many Dimensions of the Void.

It gave him a shock when she used the terms of his religion. Was she drawn to the Abyss? Had he begun to give her instruction? The fog in his mind was very distressing, how could he have forgotten something like that? Then he recalled, with intense relief, that she had been to Speranza. She was no stranger to the interstellar world, she must have learnt something of Shet belief… But relief was swamped in a wave of dread: Isabel was looking over his shoulder. He turned, awkward and stiff with age. A presence was taking shape in one of the chairs. It was big as a bear, bigger than Boaaz himself. Squirming tentacles of glistening flesh reached out, becoming every instant more solid and defined—

If it became fully real, if it touched him, he would die of horror—

Boaaz woke, thunder in his skull, his whole body pulsing, the blood thickened and backing-up in all his veins. Dizzy and sick, on the edge of total panic, he groped for his First Aid kit. He fumbled the mask over his mouth and nostril-slits, with trembling delicates that would hardly obey him, and drew in great gulps of oxygen.

Unthinkable horrors flowed away, the pressure in his skull diminished. He dropped onto his side, making the sturdy extruded couch groan; clutching the mask. It was a dream, he told himself. Just a dream.

Rationally, he knew that he had simply done too much. Overexertion in the thin air of the outskirts had given him nightmares: he must give his acclimatisation treatment more time to become established. He took things easy for the next few days, pottering around in the mining fields just outside the Enclosure—in full Martian EVA gear, with a young staff member for a guide. Pickings were slim (Butterscotch was in the Guidebook); but he made a few pleasing finds.

But the nightmare stayed with him, and at intervals he had to fight the rooted conviction that it had been real. He had already made a second visit, there had been something terrible, unspeakable… His nights continued to be disturbed. He had unpleasant dreams (never the same as the first), from which he woke in panic, groping for the oxygen that no longer gave much relief.

He was also troubled by a change in the behaviour of the hotel staff. They had been friendly, and unlike the miners they never whispered or stared. Now the children avoided him, and he was no genius at reading human moods, but he was sure there was something wrong. Anu, the lad who took Boaaz out to the desert, kept his distance as far as possible; and barely spoke. Perhaps the child was disturbed by the habit of looking behind him that Boaaz had developed. It must look strange, since he was old and it was difficult. But he couldn’t help himself.

One morning, when he went to make his usual guilty inspection of that inner courtyard, the station’s manager was there: staring at a section of wall where strange marks had appeared, blistered weals like raw flesh wounds in the ceramic skin.

“Do you know what’s causing that effect?” asked Boaaz.

“Can’t be weathering, not in here. Bugs in the ceramic, we’ll have to get it reconfigured. Can’t understand it. It’s supposed to last forever, that stuff.”

“But the station is very old, isn’t it? Older than Butterscotch itself. You don’t think the pretty rocks in here had anything to do with the damage?” Boaaz tried a rumble of laughter. “You know, child, sometimes I think they move around at night!”

The rock group was nowhere near the walls. It never was, by daylight.

“I am twenty years old,” said the Martian, with an odd look. “Old enough to know when to stay away from bad luck, messir. Excuse me.”

He hurried away, leaving Boaaz very puzzled and uneasy.

He had come here to collect minerals, therefore he would collect minerals. What he needed was an adventure, to clear his head. It would be foolhardy to brave the Empty Quarter of Mars in the company of a frightened child: perhaps equally foolhardy to set out alone. He decided he would offer to go exploring with the Aleutian, who took a well-equiped station buggy out into the wild red yonder almost every day.

Conrad would surely welcome this suggestion.

Conrad was reluctant. He spoke so warmly of the dangers, and with such concern for the Shet’s age and unsuitable metabolism, that Boaaz’s pride was touched. He was old, but he was strong. The nerve of this stripling, suggesting there were phenomena on Mars that an adult male Shet couldn’t handle! Even if the stripling was a highly experienced young immortal—

“I see you prefer to ‘go solo.’ I would hate to disturb your privacy. We must compare routes, so that our paths do not cross.”

“The virtual tour is very, very good,” said the Aleutian. “You can easily and safely explore the ancient ‘Arabia Terra’ with a fully customised avatar, from the comfort of your hotel room.”

“Stop talking like a guidebook,” rumbled Boaaz. “I’ve survived in tougher spots than this. I shall make my arrangements with the station today.”

“You won’t mind me mentioning that all the sentient biped peoples of Shet are basically aquatic—”

“Not since our oceans shrank, about two million standard years ago. I am not an Aleutian, I have no memory of those days. And if I were ‘basically aquatic,’ that would mean I am already an expert at living outside my natural element.”

“Oh well,” said Conrad at last, ungraciously. “If you’re determined, I suppose it’s safer if I keep you where I can see you.”

The notable features of the ancient uplands were to the north: luckily the opposite direction from Isabel’s dour location. The two buggies set out at sunrise, locked in tandem; Conrad in the lead. As they passed through the particulate barrier of the Enclosure, Boaaz felt a welcome stirring of excitement. His outside cams still showed quiet mining fields, ever-present stromatolites: but already the landscape was becoming more rugged. He felt released from bondage. A few refreshing trips like this, and he would no longer be haunted. He would no longer be compelled to turn, feeling those ornate chairs lined up behind him, knowing that the repulsive creature of his dream was taking shape—

“It’s a dusty one,” remarked Conrad, over the intercom. “Often is, around here, in the northern ‘summer.’ And there’s a storm warning. We shouldn’t go far, just a loop around the first buttes, a short EVA, and home again.…”

Boaaz recovered himself with a chuckle. His cams showed a calm sky, healthily tinged with blue; his exterior monitors were recording the friendliest conditions known to Mars. “I’m getting ‘hazardous storm probability’ at near zero,” he rumbled in reply. “Uncouple and return if you wish. I shall make a day of it.”

Silence. Boaaz felt that he’d won the battle.

Conrad had let slip a few too many knowledgeable comments about Martian mineralogy, in their friendly chats. Of course he wasn’t “purely a tourist”: he was a rock hound himself. He’d been scouring the wilds for sites the Guidebook and the Colonial Government Mineral Survey had missed, or undervalued. Obviously he’d found something good, and he didn’t want to share.

Boaaz sympathised wholeheartedly. But a little teasing wouldn’t come amiss, as a reward for being so untrusting and secretive!

The locked buggys dropped into layered craters, climbed gritty steppes. Boaaz buried himself in strange-sounding English-language wish lists; compiled long ago, in preparation for this trip. Hematite nodules, volcanic olivines, exotic basalts, Mössbauer patterns, tektites, barite roses. But whatever he carried back from the Red Planet, across such a staggering distance, would be treasure—bound to fill his fellow hounds at home with delight and envy.

Behind him the empty chairs were ranged in judgement. That which waits at the gates was taking form. Boaaz needed to look over his shoulder but he did not turn. He knew he couldn’t move quickly enough, and only the sleek desert-survival fittings of the buggy would mock him—

Escaping from ugly reverie, he noticed that Conrad was deviating freely from their pre-logged route. Most unsafe! But Boaaz didn’t protest. There was no need for concern. They had life support, and Desert Rescue Service beacons that couldn’t be disabled. He examined his CGMS maps instead. There was nothing marked that would explain Conrad’s diversion: how interesting! What if the Aleutian’s find was “significantly anomalous,” or commercially valuable? If so, they were legally bound to leave it untouched, beacon it, and report it—

But I shan’t pry, thought Boaaz. He maintained intercom silence, as did Conrad, until at last the locked buggys halted. The drivers disembarked. The Aleutian, with typical bravado, was dressed as if he’d been optimised before birth for life on Mars: the most lightweight air supply; a minimal squeeze-suit under his Aleutian-style desert thermals. Boaaz removed his helmet.

“I hope you enjoyed the scenic route,” said Conrad, with a strange glint in his eye. “I hate to be nannied, don’t you? We are not children.”

“Hmm. I found your navigation, ahaam, enlightening.”

The Aleutian seemed to be thinking hard about his next move.

“So you want to stop here, my friend?” asked Boaaz, airily. “Good! I suggest we go our separate ways, rendezvous later for the return journey?”

“That would be fine,” said Conrad. “I’ll call you.”

Boaaz rode his buggy around an exquisite tholeiitic basalt group—a little too big to pack. He disembarked, took a chipping, and analysed it. The spectrometer results were unremarkable: the sum is greater than the parts. Often the elemental makeup, the age, and even the extreme conditions of its creation, can give no hint as to why a rock is beautiful. His customised suit was supple. He felt easier in it than he did in his own, ageing hide: and youthfully weightless—without the discomfiting loss of control of weightlessness itself. Not far away he could see a glittering pool, like a mirage of surface water that might mark a field of broken geodes. Or a surface deposit of rare spherulites. But he wanted to know what the Aleutian had found. He wanted to know so badly that in the end he succumbed to temptation, got back in the buggy and returned to the rendezvous: feeling like a naughty child.

Conrad’s buggy stood alone. Conrad was nowhere in sight, and no footprints lead away from a nondescript gritstone outcrop. For a moment Boaaz feared something uncanny, then he realised the obvious solution. Still consumed by naughty curiosity, he pulled the emergency release on Conrad’s outer hatch. The buggy’s life-support generator shifted into higher gear with a whine, but the Aleutian was too occupied to notice. He sat in the body-clasping driver’s seat, eyes closed, head immobilised, his skull in the quivering grip of a cognitive scanner field. A compact flatbed scanner nestled in the passenger seat. Under its shimmering virtual dome lay some gritstone fragments. They didn’t look anything special, but something about them roused memories. Ancient images, a historical controversy, from before Mars was first settled—

Boaaz quietly maneuvered his bulk over to Conrad’s impromptu virtual-lab, and studied the fragments carefully, under magnification.

He was profoundly shocked.

“What are you doing, Conrad?”

The Aleutian opened his eyes, and took in the situation.

The wise immortals stay at home. Immortals who mix with lesser beings are dangerous characters, because they just don’t care. Conrad was completely brazen.

“What does it look like? I’m digitising pretty Martians for my scrapbook.”

“You aren’t digitising anything. You have taken biotic traces from an unmapped site. You are translating them into information-space code, with the intent of removing them from Mars, hidden in your consciousness. That is absolutely illegal!”

“Oh, grow up. It’s a scam. I’m not kidnapping Martian babies. I’m not even kidnapping ancient fossilised bacteria, just scraps of plain old rock. But fools will pay wonderfully high prices for them. Where’s the harm?”

“You have no shame, but this time you’ve gone too far. You are not a collector, you’re a common thief, and I shall turn you in.”

“I don’t think so, Reverend. We logged out as partners today, didn’t we? And you are known as an avid collector. Give me credit, I tried to get you to leave me alone, but you wouldn’t. Now it’s just too bad.”

Boaaz’s nostril slits flared wide, his gullet opened in a blueish gape of rage. He controlled himself, struggling to maintain dignity. “I’ll make my own way back.”

He resumed his helmet.

Before long his anger cooled. He recognised his own ignoble impulse to spy on a fellow collector. He recognised that perhaps Conrad’s crime was not truly wicked, just very, very naughty. Nevertheless, those controversial “biotic traces” were sacred. The nerve of that young Aleutian! Assuming that Boaaz would be so afraid of being smeared in an unholy scandal, he would make no report—

When this got out! What would the Archbishop think!

Yet what if he did keep quiet? Conrad had come to Butterscotch with a plan, no doubt he had ways of fooling the neurological scanners at the spaceport. If Conrad wasn’t going to get caught, and nobody was going to be injured—

What should he do?

That which waits at the gates was taking shape in an empty chair. It waits for those who deny good and evil, and separates them from the Void, forever—

He could not think clearly. Conrad’s shameless behaviour became confused with the nightmares, the disturbed sleep and uneasy wakening. Those marks on the wall of the inner courtyard… He must have room, he could not bear this crowded confinement. He stopped the buggy, checked his gear, and disembarked.

The sky of Mars arced above him, the slightly fish-eyed horizon giving it a bulging look, like the whitish cornea of a great, blind eye. Dust suffused the view through his visor with streaks of blood. He was in an eroded crater, which could be a dangerous feature. But no warnings had flashed up, and the buggy wasn’t settling. He stepped down: his boots found crust in a few centimeters. Gastropods crept about, in the distance he could see a convocation of trucks: he was back in the mining fields. He watched a small machine as it climbed a stromatolite spire, and “defecated” on the summit.

Inside that spoil-tower, in the moisture and chemical warmth of the chewed waste, the real precursors were at work. All over the mining regions, “stromatolites” were spilling out oxygen. Some day there would be complex life here, in unknown forms. The Martians were bringing a new biosphere to birth, from native organic chemistry alone. Absurd superstition, absurd patience. It made one wonder if the settlers really wanted to change their cold, unforgiving desert world—

A shadow flicked across his view. Alarmed, he checked the sky: fast moving cloud meant a storm. But the sky was cloudless; the declining sun cast a rosy, tourist-brochure glow over the landscape. Movement again, in the corner of his eye. Boaaz spun around, a maneuver that almost felled him, and saw a naked, biped figure, with a smooth head and disturbingly spindly limbs, standing a few metres away: almost invisible against the tawny ground. It seemed to look straight at him, but the “face” was featureless—

The eyeless gaze was not hostile. The impossible creature seemed to Boaaz like a shadow cast by the future. A folktale, waiting for the babies who would run around the Martian countryside; and believe in it a little, and be happily frightened. Perhaps I’ve been afraid of nothing, thought Boaaz, hopefully. After all, what did it do, the horrid thing I almost saw in that chair? It reached out to me, perhaps quite harmlessly… But there was something wrong. The eyeless figure trembled, folded down, and vanished like spilled water. Now he saw that the whole crater was stirring. Under the surface shadow creatures were fleeing, limbs flashing in the dust that was their habitat. Something had terrified them. Not Boaaz, the thing behind him. It had hunted him down and found him here, far from all help.

Slowly, dreadfully slowly, he turned. He saw what was there.

He tried to speak, he tried to pray. But the holy words were meaningless, and horror seized his mind. His buggy had vanished, the beacon on his chest refused to respond to his hammering. He ran in circles, tawny devils rising in coils from around his feet. He was lost, he would die, and then it would devour him—

Hours later, young Conrad (struck by an uncharacteristic fit of responsibility) came searching for the old fellow, tracking his suit beacon. Night had fallen, deathly cold. The High Priest crouched in a shallow gully, close to the crater where Conrad had spotted his deserted buggy; his suit scratched and scarred as if something had been trying to tear it off him, his parched, gaping screams locked inside his helmet—

The High Priest struggled free from troubling dreams, and was bewildered to find his friend the Aleutian curled informally on the floor beside his bed. “Hallo,” said Conrad, sitting up. “I detect the light of reason. Are you with us again, Reverend?”

“What are you doing in my room—?”

“Do you remember anything? How we brought you in?”

“Ahm, haham. Overdid it a little, didn’t I? Oxygen starvation panic attack, thanks for that, Conrad, most grateful. Must get some breakfast. Excuse me.”

“We need to talk.”

Boaaz drew his massive head down into his neck-folds, the Shet gesture that stood for refusal, but also submission. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”

“I knew you’d see sense. No, this is about something serious. We’ll talk this evening. You must be starving, and you need to rest.”

Boaaz checked his eyeball screen, and found that he had lost a day and a night. He ate, rehydrated his hide, and retired to bed again: to reflect. The Mighty Void had a place for certain psychic phenomena, but he had no explanation for a “ghost” with teeth and claws, a bodiless thing that could rend carbon fibre… In a state between dream and waking, he trudged again the chance avenue of stromatolites. Vapour hung in the thin air, the spindly towers bent their heads in menace. Isabel Jewel’s module waited for him, so charged with fear and dread it was like a ripe fruit, about to burst.

The miners and their families were subdued tonight. The sound of their merrymaking was a dull murmur in the private lounge, where Boaaz and the Aleutian met. The residents’ bar steward arranged a nested “trolley” of drinks and snacks, and left them alone. Boaaz offered his snifter case, but the Aleutian declined.

“We need to talk,” he reminded the old priest. “About Isabel Jewel.”

“I thought we were going to discuss my scare in the desert.”

“We are.”

Strengthened by his reflections, Boaaz summoned up an indignant growl. “I can’t discuss my parishioner with you. Absolutely not!”

“Before we managed to drug you to sleep,” said Conrad, firmly, “you were babbling, telling us a horrible, uncanny story… You went into detail. You weren’t speaking English, but I’m afraid Yarol understood you pretty well. Don’t worry, he’ll be discreet. The locals don’t meddle with Isabel Jewel.”

“Yarol?”

“The station manager. Sensible type for a human. You met him the other day in your courtyard, I believe. Looking at some nasty marks on the wall?”

The Shet’s mighty head sank between his shoulders. “Ahaam, in my delirium, what sort of thing did I say?”

“Plenty.”

Conrad leaned close, and spoke in “Silence”—a form of telepathy the immortals only practiced among themselves; or with the rare mortals who could defend themselves against its power.

The old priest shuddered, and surrendered.

“You underestimate me, and my calling. I am not in danger!”

“We’ll see about that… Tell me, Boaaz, what is a ‘bear’?”

“I have no idea,” said the old priest, mystified.

“I thought not. A bear is a wild creature native to Earth, big, shaggy, fierce. Rather frightening. Here, catch—”

Inexplicably, the Aleutian tossed a drinking beaker straight at Boaaz: who had to react swiftly, to avoid being smacked in the face—

“Tentacles,” said Conrad. “I don’t think you find them disgusting, do you? It’s an evolutionary quirk. Your people absorbed some wiggly-armed ocean creatures into your body-plan, aeons ago, and they became your ‘delicates.’ Yet what you saw in Isabel Jewel’s module was ‘a bear with tentacles,’ and it filled you with horror. Just as if you were a human, with an innate terror of snakey-looking things.”

Boaaz set the beaker down. “What of it? I don’t know what you’re getting at. That vision, however I came by it, was merely a nightmare. In the material world I have visited her once, and saw nothing at all strange.”

“A nightmare, hm? And what if we are dealing with someone whose nightmares can roam around, hunt you down and tear you apart?”

Boaaz noticed that his pressure suit was hanging on the wall. The slashes and gouges were healing over (a little late for the occupant, had the attacker persisted!). He vaguely remembered them taking it off him, exclaiming in horrified amazement.

“Tear me apart? Nonsense. I was hysterical, I freely admit. I suppose I must have rolled about, over some sharp rocks.”

The Aleutian’s black eyes were implacable. “I suppose I’d better start at the beginning… I was intrigued by the scraps you read out from ‘Isabel Jewel’s’ file. Somebody suspected of insanity. That’s a very grim suspicion, in a certain context. When I saw how changed and disturbed you were, after your parish visit, I instructed my Speranza agent to see what it could dig up about an ‘Isabel Jewel,’ lately settled on Mars.”

“You had no authority to do that!”

“Why not? Everything I’m going to tell you is in the public domain, all my agent had to do was to make the connection—which is buried, but easy to exhume—between ‘Isabel Jewel,’ and a human called ‘Ilia Markham’ who was involved in a transit disaster, some thirty or so standard years ago. A starship called The Golden Bough, belonging to a company called the World State Line, left Speranza on a scheduled transit to the Blue Torus Port. Her passengers arrived safely. The eight members of the Active Complement, I mean the crew, did not. Five of them had vanished, two were hideously dead. The Navigator survived, despite horrific injuries, long enough to claim they’d been murdered. Someone had smuggled an appalling monster on board, and turned it loose in the Active Complement’s quarters—”

There were chairs, meant for humans, around the walls of the lounge. The Aleutian and the Shet preferred a cushioned recess in the floor. Boaaz noticed that he no longer needed to look behind him. That phase was over.

“There are no ‘black box’ records to consult, after a transit disaster,” the Aleutian went on. “Nothing can be known about the false duration period. The crew construct a pseudo-reality for themselves, as they guide the ship through that ‘interval’ when time does not pass: which vanishes like a dream. But the Navigator’s accusation was taken seriously. There was an inquiry, and suspicion fell on Ilia Markham, a dealer in antiques. Her trip out to Speranza had been her first transit. On the return ‘journey’ she insisted on staying awake, citing a mental allergy to the virtual entertainment. A phobia, I think humans call it. As you probably know, this meant that she joined the Active Complement, in their pseudo-reality ‘quarters.’ Yet she was unharmed. She remembered nothing, but she was charged with involuntary criminal insanity, on neurological evidence.”

Transit disasters were infrequent, since the new Aleutian ships had come into service; but Boaaz knew of them. And he had heard that casualties whose injuries were not physical were very cruelly treated on Earth.

“What a terrible story. Was there a… Did the inquiry suggest any reason why the poor woman’s mind might have generated something so monstrous?”

“I see you do know what I’m getting at,” remarked Conrad, with a sharp look. The old priest’s head sank obstinately further, and he made no comment. “Yes, there was something. In her youth Markham had been an indentured servant, the concubine of a rich collector with a nasty reputation. When he died she inherited his treasures, and there were strong rumours she’d helped him on his way. The prosecution didn’t accuse her of murder, they just held that she’d been carrying a burden of unresolved trauma—and the Active Complement had paid the price.”

“Eight of them,” muttered Boaaz. “And one more. Yes, yes, I see.”

“The World State Line was the real guilty party, they’d allowed her to travel awake. But it was Ilia Markham who was consigned for life—on suspicion, she was never charged—to a Secure Hospital. Just in case she still possessed the powers that had been thrust on her by the terrible energies of the Buonarotti Torus.”

“Was there a…? Was there, ahaam, any identifying mark of her status?”

“There would be a tattoo, a string of symbols, on her forearm, Reverend. You told us, in your ‘delirium,’ that you’d seen similar marks.”

“Go on,” rumbled Boaaz. “Get to the end of it.”

“Many years later there was a review of doubtful ‘criminal insanity’ cases. Ilia Markham was one of those released. She was given a new name and shipped off to Mars, with all her assets. They were still a little afraid of her, it seems, although her cognitive scans were normal. They didn’t want her or anything she possessed. There’s no Buonarotti Torus in Mars orbit: I suppose that was the reasoning.”

The old priest was silent, the folds of hide over his eyes furrowed deep. Then his brow relaxed, and he seemed to give himself a shake. “This has been most enlightening, Conrad. I am, in a sense, much relieved.”

“You no longer believe you’re being pursued by aggressive rocks? Harassed by imaginary Ancient Martians? You understand that, barbaric though it seems, your old mad woman probably should have stayed in that Secure Hospital?”

“I don’t admit that at all! In my long experience, this is not the first time I’ve met what are known as ‘psychic phenomena.’ I have known effective premonitions, warning dreams; instances of telepathy. This ‘haunting’ I’ve suffered, this vivid way I’ve shared ‘Isabel Jewel’s’ mental distress, will be very helpful when I talk to her again… I do not believe in the horrible idea of criminal insanity. The unfortunate few who have been ‘driven insane’ by a transit disaster are a danger only to themselves.”

“I felt the same, but your recent experiences have shaken my common sense.” The Aleutian reached to take a snifter, and paused in the act, his nasal flaring in alarm. “Boaaz, dear fellow, stay away from her. You’ll be safe, and the effects will fade, if you stay away.”

Boaaz looked at the ruined pressure suit. “Yet I was not injured,” he murmured. “I was only frightened… Now for my side of the story. I am a priest, and the woman is dying. It’s her heart, I think, and I don’t think she has long. She is in mental agony—as people sometimes are, quite without need, if they believe they have lived an evil life—not in fear of death but of what may come after. I can help her, and it is my duty. After all, we are nowhere near a Torus.”

The Aleutian stared at him, no longer seeming at all a mischievous adolescent. The old priest felt buffeted by the immortal’s stronger will: but he stood firm. “There are wrongs nobody can put right,” said Conrad, urgently. “The universe is more pitiless than you know. Don’t go back.”

“I must.” Boaaz rose, ponderously. He patted the Aleutian’s sloping shoulder, with the sensitive tips of his right-hand delicates. “I think I’ll turn in. Goodnight.”

Boaaz had been puzzled by the human woman’s insistence that he should return “in ten days, in the evening, at the full moon.” The little moons of Mars zipped around too fast for their cycles to be significant. He had looked up the Concordance (Earth’s calendar was still important to the colony), and wondered if the related date on Earth had been important to her, in the past.

By the time he left his jitney, in the lonely outskirts of Butterscotch, he’d thought of another explanation. People who know they are dying, closely attuned to their failing bodies, may know better than any doctor when the end will come. She believes she will die tonight, he thought. And she doesn’t want to die alone. He quickened his pace, and then turned to look back—not impelled by menace, but simply to reassure himself that the jitney hadn’t taken itself off.

He could not see the tiny lights of Butterscotch. The vapours and the swift twilight had caused a strange effect: a mirage of great black hills, or mountains, spread along the horizon. Purple woods like storm clouds crowded at their base, and down from the hills came a pale, winding road. There appeared to be a group of figures moving on it, descending swiftly. The mirage shifted, the perspective changed, and Boaaz was now among the hills. Black walls stood on either side of the grey road, the figures rushed towards him from a vanishing point; from an infinite distance at impossible speed. He tried to count them, but they were moving too fast. He realised, astonished, that he was going to be trampled, and even as he formulated that thought they were upon him. They rushed over him, and were swallowed in a greater darkness that swallowed Boaaz too. He was buried, engulfed, overwhelmed by a foul stench and a frightful, suffocating pressure—

He struggled, as if trying to rise from very deep water: and then the pressure was gone. He had fallen on his face. He picked himself up with difficulty, and checked himself and his gear for damage. “The dead do not walk,” he muttered. “Absurd superstition!” But the grumbling tone became a prayer, and he could hear his own voice shake as he recited the Consolation. “There is no punishment, there is only the Void, embracing all, accepting all. The monsters at the gates are illusion. There are no realms beyond death, we shall not be devoured, the Void is gentle…”

The mirage had dissipated, but the vapours had not. He was positively walking through a fog, and each step was a mysterious struggle, as if he were wading through a fierce running tide. Here I am for the third time, he told himself, encouragingly, and then remembered that the second visit had been in a nightmare. A horror went through him: was he dreaming now? Perhaps the thought should have been comforting, but it was very frightening indeed: and then someone coughed, or choked: not behind him, but close beside him, invisible in the fog.

Startled, he upped his head and shoulder lights. “Is anybody there?”

The lights only increased his confusion, making a kind of glory on the mist around him. His own shadow was very close, oversized, and optical illusion gave it strange proportions: a distinct neck, a narrow waist, a skeletal thinness. It turned. He saw the thing he had seen in the desert. A human male, with small eyes close-set, a jutting nose, lined cheeks, and a look of such utter malevolence it stopped Boaaz’s blood. Its lower jaw dropped. It had far too many teeth, and a terrible, appallingly wide gape. It raised its jagged claws and reared towards him. Boaaz screamed into his breather. The monster rushed over him, swamped him, and was gone.

It was over. He was alone, shaken in body and soul. The pinprick lights of the town had reappeared behind him: ahead was that avenue of teetering stromatolites. “Horrible mirage!” he announced, trying to convince himself. He was breathing in gasps. The outer lock of the old woman’s module stood open, as if she had seen him coming. The inner lock was shut. He opened it, praying that he would find her still alive. Alive, and sharing with him, by some mystery, the nightmare visions of her needless distress; that he knew he could conquer—

The chairs had moved. They were grouped in a circle around the stove in the centre of the room. He counted: yes, he had remembered rightly, there were eight. The “old, mad” human woman sat in her own chair, withered like a crumpled shell, her features still contorted in pain and terror. He could see that she had been dead for some time. The ninth chair was drawn up close to hers. Boaaz saw the impression of a human body, printed in the dented cushions of the back and seat. It had been here.

The fallen jaw. Too many teeth. Had it devoured her, was it sated now? And the others, its victims from The Golden Bough, what was their fate? To dwell within that horror, forever? He would never know what was real, and what was not. He only knew that he had come too late for Isabel Jewel (he could not think of her as “Ilia Markham”). She had gone to join her company: or they had come to fetch her.

Conrad and the manager of the Old Station arrived about an hour later, summoned by the priest’s alarm call. Yarol, who doubled as the town’s Community Police Officer, called the ambulance team to take away the woman’s remains, and began to make the forensic record—a formality required after any sudden death. Conrad tried to get Boaaz to tell him what had happened.

“I have had a fall,” was all the old priest would say. “I have had a bad fall.”

Boaaz returned to Opportunity, where his Residence had been successfully decoded. He was in poor health for a while. By the time he’d recovered, Conrad the Aleutian had long moved on to other schemes. But Boaaz stayed on Mars, his pleasant retirement on Shet indefinitely postponed—although he had tendered his resignation to the Archbishop as soon as he could rise from his bed. Later, he would tell people that the death of an unfortunate woman, once involved in a transit disaster, had convinced him that there is an afterlife. The Martians, being human, were puzzled that the good-hearted old “alien” seemed to find this so distressing.