Patron of the Arts

man came down out of the sky and walked around on Mars did he find out how pretty it was. It takes getting used to, there’s no doubt of that. It’s featureless most of the time, but there are unexpected marvels in the rills, and where the rocks are still showing through the battered, cratered, weathered surface, you can see extraordinary beauty. I’m not the first Mars enthusiast who’s been told that the “great marvels” of Mars could easily go unnoticed in the American Southwest. I won’t even deny it. But these were Martian rocks, Martian plains, Martian desolation. I loved it. I was still feeling the effects of Amendola’s private-label top-pop when we sighted the first of the farms around Bradbury. Few of the towns had extensive farming areas. Burroughs, Wells, Bradbury, Grandcanal City, a scattering between Grabrock and Northaxe, but for the most part these few thousand acres supplied the bulk of food for the whole population.

The Alfonso VI Hacienda was on our right, and someone waved from the bubble of a tractor ripping a virgin field. We turned at the stone pylon marking the corner of a green field of potatoes, and I felt cramped. We could no longer just go where we pleased. I came down out of the observation dome and helped the others tidy up the interior. Bradbury is the most prosperous “city” on Mars, mainly because of the water, which makes the farmland possible. There are mines eastward, along the long track to Burroughs, but they are not so important here. The magnificent Star Palace is way out beyond the perimeter, but it contributes little to the economy, except for the money and supplies brought by the archaeologists.

We rolled to a stop at the main warehouse, a series of zomes nesting against the westernmost dome. I helped store my seedlings and other cargo in a rented space, then went on with Wootten into his Guild’s wayhouse to wash up.

I stepped out of the sonics feeling refreshed and dug into my pack.

“By the ten thousand tortures of Ares” (Wootten liked synthetic curses), “What kind of outfit is that?”

I looked at the snowsilk blouse, the grained black tights, and the neoteric leather boots and saw them as Wootten did. I grinned and said,

“My cleanboot fancy adventurer’s outfit. I left the cape with the blazen symbol back on Earth.”

Wootten plumped down on the bed and fingered the snowsilk.

“Hot flaming damn.” He paused, then said carefully, “Look, do you mind if I give you a few pointers?”

“Go ahead.” I hadn’t felt like a neo at anything since I tried to ski fifteen years before.

“Uno, this stuff is mighty fine and fancy, but it marks you not only as a cleanboot but as a rich cleanboot.” He squinted thoughtfully at me for a moment, then shrugged almost imperceptibly and said, “You have enough troubles with Nova. Dos, you’ll stand out like a vapor trail at a time I think you might like to be inconspicuous. Tres, you’ll look like one of them honorary degrees.”

I grinned ruefully and nodded my head. I knew that an “honorary degree” was used as an insult, for these nuvomartians were eminently pragmatic and while most of them had degrees it was because they really needed them to do the job they had.

“What do you suggest?” I asked.

“What else you got?”

We went through my limited wardrobe and selected a similar outfit, in black, but in the plainer, tougher coriace tissu material that seemed to be standard wear.

“Dressup is generally just a clean set of whatever you wear regularly,” Wootten told me. “Damned few governor’s balls here.” Then he cackled lewdly and grinned. “Get that stuff on and let’s get ourselves wrapped around some of the local pop-top.”

I groaned at the thought, but dressed quickly enough and followed Wootten out and down the street that wandered through the town. I caught a glimpse of the big cylindrical structure that housed the GE fusion torch and the long zome with the buildings of varying size and form that suckled on the torch, each for the various major elements it needed.

Wootten saw me looking and said, “It goes night and day, y’know. Heavy metals, garbage, everything. Rips the raw material down to the atomic level, or would, if you put it through enough times. We do that for anything we ship back to Earth. It’s cheaper. That torch is why we can go without masks around here and how they can have all the farms, y’know.”

I nodded. “The air-maker.” Garbage, dirt, tons of rock, dead bodies, trash were all stripped down to the basic elements, the nitrogen and oxygen recombined for atmosphere, with dashes of other gases, with pinches of trace elements, and a glug or two of whatever might have slipped through, and the planet Mars was getting itself another blanket of air—breathable, this time, by Homo sapiens. Terraforming. Adaptation. The fusion torch had just barely saved Earth from strangling in its own wastes. Hundred-, two-hundred-year-old trash dumps were mined for material. Some of these sites were the richest sources of heavy metals left on our ruined Mother Planet. My own Ecolocorp had bought options on hundreds of municipal dumps just as soon as I knew a practical and portable fusion torch and mass accelerator was feasible. It was cheaper to bring the torch to the trash than the trash to the torch. Great scoops dumped gobs of the planet’s plundered resources on conveyor belts that fed into the hoppers.