Patron of the Arts

Throne.

It could only be that. If it wasn’t, it should have been. Only the rounded stubs of something remained in the center of the dais that rose up slightly before the last terrace. No great lord here to stand high above his groveling subjects, but a servant of the people, a listener, a being who was the focus of his subjects.

The sunlight made long dark shadows across the broken floor, accenting the aged rock. Everything stood out in textural relief, reddened by the setting sun. Courtiers and peasants had stood here, judgments had been made, boons awarded, decisions handed down. Perhaps here the last Martian had died, his alien bones long ground into the sand that drifted around the floor, filling the cracks in the stones. The King is dead, long live the King!

But the Queen is alive.

I turned and went out under the carvings of leaping alien beasts and dim views of what might be seas filled with what might be ships. I turned at the Athena Stone and my boots kicked up plumes of red-brown sand as I went through the Sungate and climbed up into the sandcat. I started the engine, spun the wheel, and raced through the failing light toward the Center.

I had things to do.

7

There was a big sandstorm the next day, out on the Ausonia Borealis between Ares Center and Grandcanal City. Nova had already taken the only fast direct transport to Bradbury, so I had two choices. The short loop up to Grandcanal City and down to Bradbury, which wouldn’t start for almost a week, or until the sandstorm eased up. Or the long loop southwest to Redrock, then southeast to Nabokov, east to Marsport, and north to Bradbury. Because the transporter was leaving the next day and I wanted to move, as well as to see Mars, I chose the longer way, which actually would be quicker.

The big GM Transporter, with the roller capsules behind, stood ready outside the main dome in the dawn light of the following day. I shook hands with Johann and told him to give what was left of the shimmercloth bolt to What’s-her-name. He gave me a maiming blow on the shoulder and shoved me on up into the cabin, slamming the hatch behind me.

Everyone works on Mars. There are no passengers as such. As neophyte cleanboot I was given the simple job of watching the cabin pressure and fuel telltales and punching frozen meals out of the dispenser. By the time we got to Redrock four days later I had been promoted to topwatch, up there in my own little blister- bubble and as important as hell. When I wasn’t defrosting yeast pies and algae bricks in the zap ovens, that is.

It’s pretty drab country going down to Redrock. Just sand and craters and all that weathered worn look we’re familiar with. The country rises in the Isidis Regio area and becomes more rocky than sandy, then nothing much but rock until the mesa rises at Redrock.

Of course it was Martian drabness we were crossing and that alone made it fascinating. Although the trails were clearly marked by previous tracks and by bleepers every few kilometers it was common practice to wander off and parallel the route, taking meandering side trips and detours from the meanderings. One literally never knew what might be found this way. The ruins at Burroughs were discovered by a curious tracker named Solari who was taking a big arc from Touchdown to the Grabrock mines, and that find led to the development of the bubble-cluster “city” itself.

Redrock was nothing more than a pair of dusty domes looking much like the castoff brassiere of some giant Amazon. The converging tracks turned the area into patterned facepowder. We made our cargo drop and picked up other material for transport around our route. The ore itself would be run through the fusion torches, fired along the mass accelerator where the disintegrated molecules would be dropped out automatically at their atomic weight. Thus only very pure elements were transported, for things were costly enough as they were. How “pure” the material in the hoppers was depended on how critical the process was or how often the same material was processed. For Earthside shipping it was the purest possible, but less than perfect samples were used at the site.

We didn’t even sleep in the domes that night but stayed in our cramped but “homey” transporter. Those big fusion-powered GMs are beauties, with multiple wheels that can roll up over most anything on Mars. The control cabin is self-contained, with an airlock to the personnel capsule behind. Bunks, toilet, Varifreezer with IR oven, and oxy bottles took up almost all the space. Some cargo was carried on top, in racks, but most was in the trainlike capsule rolling along behind. We had two on this trip, but I was told in the flatter area between Ares Center and Bradbury and between Touchdown and Wells they could pull as many as six.

The ore carriers were basically the same, but with bigger control cabins and no personnel carriers at all, just the huge tank cars lumbering behind.

We headed toward the Russian base at Nabokov before dawn the next morning. We were soon into Ice Cream Park, where multicolored layers of bright rock ripple and roll, appearing and disappearing beneath the sand and rusty rock. It was a kind of brittle cold fairyland, with frosty confections of a fantastic nature popping up, writhing along the ground, then disappearing again, all as if in frantic motion but frozen solid for millions of years.

The last of the tutti-frutti goodies dipped under the surface, and we rolled on out onto the bleak Dioscuria Cydonia, as desolate a spot as exists this side of the northern Gobi. Not many transporters cared enough to meander on this morose landscape, and we drove resolutely ahead. Wootten, our driver, grinned thinly and called it Hawaiian Estates and kept his foot down on the accelerator.