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Page 15.
 "But what happened to her?" I wailed. I stroked her hair while tears ran down her cheeks and over his arm as she regarded me with recognition in her eyes. I had hoped to exchange stories with her and hear her voice again, and I felt robbed, not to mention terrible for her.
"This guy Hang Me Now, he had some powerful news for Timony Shan. This is about a year ago, and I was just arriving here from my own bullshit going on back in Lantern City. Hang Me Now told Shan some secrets he knew, and she overheard. Now she can't write, so with her tongue cut out she can't speak, so I don't know how she could tell the secret. She draws things in the dust, but I have no idea what they mean. Timony never knew what happened to his sister. She almost bled to death, but I found her and healed her up, and she's carrying my child now."
She hugged her thin belly and I could see now, for the first time, that it was growing taut.
"You feed her and take good care of her," I said.
"Oh I will," he said. She sobbed against his powerful chest while he hugged her to him. He got a glint in his eyes. "This Hang Me Now, you can find his skin nailed to the back shed here. I fixed him good. I didn't care what kind of secrets he had, or how important he thought they were. I fixed his ass. Wild animals ate his ass, but I skinned him first and hung him up for a warning to any other assholes want to come down and make trouble here."
I stayed with them three days, helping with their work in return for food and a place to stay. During breaks, Sudie sat happily by my side as I told her stories of how we played together in the good old days. Sam Gorepoint fetched wood and milked cows and did all the stuff a good man would do for his wife. Sudie couldn't talk or write, but she found ways to communicate. She drew pictures in the dust with a twig. She made signs in the air.
Truly unforgettable for me, however, are the evenings we spent sitting together around the hearth. What a place this was! Sam had erected a shelter of concrete and glass-blocks that would take bombs to penetrate once he shut the steel door at night. He was in the process of paneling the inside with wood, which is scarce up in the heights but fairly abundant in the lowest valleys. I had never imagined that this material, when shaped into bare planks and laid side to side, could make such a warm effect. And it smelled good, like spices. Sudie had covered the rest of the still-bare concrete walls with hanging cloths scavenged here and there. The cattle were down in a cave for which their one-room dwelling made a natural entryway. There were some serious marauders about at night, and we and the animals were all about as safe as could be. It was a marvelous experience to sit around the hearth like this—something I had never experienced in my life, not even when my parents were still alive. Sam, and Timony before him, had tapped into an underground methane chamber. Every once in a while on Mars you hear of a home built like this suddenly exploding in a fireball, but Timony had brought a shutoff flap from the crash site of a royal air liner up the valley. I saw the place: fine bone and aluminum girders from the huge airship strewn far and wide, shreds of skinplast still glued to the bones, and holes everywhere dug by Tribers looting what had fallen miles and buried itself six feet or deeper. With the deflector in place, we were safe from a sudden spark that ruin a less intelligently built shelter. So there we sat—Sam with broad back against the fur-draped wall next to the glowing glass cube, Sudie leaning her head dreamily against his chest, and I sitting wrapped in a blanket, cross-legged, before the glowing 4 x 4 x 4 cube in which a faint light glowed, mostly wan yellow that barely illumined Sudie's grotesque but happy smile, but flickering often down to the red wavelengths or higher into a grayish-blue. It was something to stare at, this fire, while it radiated warmth throughout the room. It was Clear Season then, but nights are cold on Mars, very cold, and anyone who isn't sheltered will be found in the morning, dead and covered with frost, or weeks later as a husk of a mummy emptied of organics by the fungi and bacteria that thrive all over the planet.
"I came down from Argo," Sam said in his powerful voice. "I was wanted by the Roy Ollies. Know who they are?" He was older than I, and took a paternal attitude. It was meant kindly, unlike the Abbot's coldness, and I accepted it.
I shook my head.
"You're a Free Domer. You wouldn't know. That's the Royal Police on Olympus Mons. They wear these olive-drab jump suits, black helmets, black boots, black everything. The Roy Ollies. Oh yes, I was wanted for killing a man who tried to roll me on a back street when I was headed home from a week in the mines up there. I worked in the special mines under the Temple complex. Turned out he was a crooked cop, and I couldn't get justice. I had a wife up there too, but she left me for a younger man and took my kids with her."
He left the rest unsaid, but I understood that it would be harmful or fatal for his children if he ever showed his face there again. Sudie understood best, because her life had been ruined when her family were exiled from the Granistons over Timony's unorthodox ideas. In the religious tyrannies, thinking is a crime. I don't mean thinking you're thinking, which is blindly agreeing with the regime. I mean actually using your brain to form dangerously free thoughts. I was smart enough to understand Timony's point of view, though I might not initially have had the courage or recklessness to endanger my family if I had one. I might have just kept my thoughts to myself, as is my tendency. Events, as you see, left me no choice however, and here I was sitting around a warm fire with Tribers. And for just those few days, I was happier than ever before or ever since.
There was a holiness about those evenings. The faint blue glow that filled the room, and the black light outside filled with stars twinkling in the thick, cold atmosphere of Low Mars, reminded me more than once of the formation of Her Holiness' geodesic dome with its sixty flickering torches and the High Mars wind ruffling the Swat guards' ornate cloaks and plumes.
"So I came down from Argo," Sam said, "wandering much like you've done. You either die or become a Triber. There's no in-between. The three of us each know it well, don't we, my love?" He gave Sudie a squeeze, and she responded by closing her eyes, smiling in weary contentment, and resting her hand on his forearm. "I found my way here, and this woman and her brother took me in. First I was just a helping hand. Then Timony would take off and come back at odd times. He was looking for something, that boy." Sudie tugged at his tunic, and he looked down at her. "Want me to show him?" she nodded, and he rose. Stiffly, he hobbled over to the shelf above the free-standing fire cube. He took down an object wrapped in cloth. It was about the size of a large coin. "See that? I think it's an ancient coin."
I held the heavy metal object in my hand. I turned it this way and that. I rubbed it clean with its cloth, and then leaned very close to the bluish cube so that an almost natural daylight illumined it. He was right. It did look like a coin, and a hefty one that filled my palm. Its edges were irregular with wear, and its surfaces shiny. "It's an image of Mars!"
Then I remembered: "The Holy Mother was holding something like this in her hand the night she was murdered."
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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