“The universe is more pitiless than you know.
“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
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. “
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.
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,
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.
The fallen jaw. Too many teeth. Had it devoured her, was it sated now? And the others, its victims from
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.
THE SMELL OF ORANGE GROVES
by Lavie Tidhar
On the roof the solar panels were folded in on themselves, still asleep, yet uneasily stirring, as though they could sense the imminent coming of the sun. Boris stood on the edge of the roof. The roof was flat and the building’s residents, his father’s neighbours, had, over the years, planted and expanded an assortment of plants, in pots of clay and aluminium and wood, across the roof, turning it into a high-rise tropical garden.
It was quiet up there and, for the moment, still cool. He loved the smell of late-blooming jasmine, it crept
