The Martian Chronicles

“Ah, now, now, that is enough.”

“It’s true, I tell you.”

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

Tomas listened and shook his head. “No.”

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

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

“Can it be… ?”

“What?”

“You say «from the sky»?”

“Earth.”

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

“Cold?”

“Yes.”

“And now?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Two thousand and one!”

“What does that mean to me?”

Tomas considered and shrugged. “Nothing.”

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

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

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

“Yes. You’re afraid?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Will we meet again?”

“Who knows? Perhaps some other night.”

“I’d like to go with you to that festival.”

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

“Good-by,” said Tomas.

“Good night.”

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

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

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

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

October 2002: THE SHORE

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

They were the first men.

Everyone knew who the first women would be.

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

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

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

February 2003: INTERIM

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