Читать книгу Seven Against Mars - Martin Berman-Gorvine - Страница 7

Chapter 3

Aphrodite Port was a bedlam through which Jack led his companions confidently.

Karolla had bid them goodbye at the edge of the city. “Afro-Port is a human town, I fear that Venusians they would hunt down,” he explained. Overhead, dark clouds billowed and grumbled.

“Aw, c’mon, ya big furry lump, you know that the Treaty gives Venusians full guest status in town.”

“Treaties humans make, treaties humans can break,” Karolla replied, blinking innocently.

“Next thing you know, you’ll be asking how come you need ‘guest status’ on your own planet,” Jack sighed. “All right, friend, go in peace.” He spun around three times, ending with his back turned to Karolla, put his right hand against the small of his back and wiggled his fingers. The Venusian gravely bowed until his head was on a level with Jack’s hand, where a small fleshy comb atop his head, like a scaled-up version of a cock’s comb, wiggled in sync with Jack’s fingers. For a moment the hand and the comb touched, then the Venusian disappeared into the jungle with a single mighty bound.

Katie and Rachel stared at Jack.

“What? Haven’t you ever seen a Venusian handshake before?” Without waiting for an answer, Jack took Anya’s hand and strolled up to a white, human-size metal gate.

“Who desires entry?” a mechanical voice demanded. Rachel and Katie jumped.

“It is I, Zap-Gun Jack,” Jack proclaimed with a grand flourish of his weapon.

“Negative. Not recognized. Admission denied,” said a red-eyed metal spider crouching atop the lintel.

“Aw, come off it, you mechanical arthropod. You know very well who I am.”

“You must identify yourself properly and surrender your weapon,” the robot insisted. Jack opened his mouth to argue.

Searing heat struck Rachel from behind. She opened her mouth to scream, but the planet was apparently splitting open, leaving her deaf and blind. When she came to she was lying on her back in a patch of neatly trimmed grass, lights flickering overhead. Jack, Katie, Anya and a number of other strangers looked down at her with concerned expressions. Seeing that Rachel’s eyes were open, Jack grinned and reached down to help her up. “Attagirl, you’re a real Venusian now!” he cried, clapping her on the back.

“Ow! That hurt!” Rachel gasped and tears came to her eyes. “What—what—”

“What was that? You, my girl, were grazed by the first lightning strike of this monsoon season and lived to tell the tale! Which is good luck! Take a look up there.” Jack took her arm and pointed to the sky.

Rachel looked up and gasped. She had thought the flickering light was from a concussion. But it was real, the result of continual lightning strikes on the surface of an invisible dome that stretched far above the town. The effect was mesmerizing, a writhing of white-hot branches against a velvety background, like a photographic negative of trees lashed by hurricane winds. “Why don’t I go blind?” Rachel whispered.

“Ah,” Jack smiled, “thank our afro-bucky for that! It’s polarized, keeps out the harmful radiation as well as the rain. If you were standing outside right now, well, let’s just say you couldn’t be standing outside right now. People who’ve been exposed in the open say it’s like having a nice hot shower from a fire hose. Those who survive, that is.”

“And you were going to leave me to fend for myself in that?” Katie gave Jack a shove that sent him staggering.

“He was only kidding, he already told you that,” Anya caught Jack smoothly. “Come on, let’s go inside somewhere. This lightning could set off my epilepsy, and you wouldn’t want me frothing at your feet, would you, Jack darling?”

“No, quite right, uh, Annie my love,” he said, catching her eye. “Let’s go back to my digs, girls! I’m almost caught up on my rent for once!” When they were clear of the crowd, Jack said out of the side of his mouth, “She doesn’t really have epilepsy. It’s just that you never know when one of Ares’ agents might be hiding in the crowd.”

Katie gave him a withering look. “We’re from Earth, you pistol-waving goon, not the planet Dumbass.”

“Yeah, okay, gotcha there,” Jack mumbled, leading them into a seedy alley.

Rachel half-listened to the chatter as she glanced around. Things were much messier than she would have imagined. From all those pulps Abe had sent her, she had expected the future to be bright and gleaming, with hard, clean steel and plastic surfaces. Steel and plastic there were in plenty, but everything looked scratched or rusty or both, as if from long use. The poorer parts of Warsaw might look like this in two or three hundred years. Wait. Has everyone I know been dead for two hundred years? Abe, a skinny kid with an annoying grin, grown up and married with children and grandchildren and maybe even great-grandchildren, dead longer than Thaddeus Kosciusko? What if she never lived to see the end of the war? So maybe she was dying and only dreaming all this. Or had she been right before, that all that was taking place in another universe? There was one way to find out.

“Ow! What was that for?” Katie yelped.

Rachel shook her aching hand. “Hit me back. Please! Like you did to Anya?”

“Rachel, what the hell is the matter with you?”

“Do you have to talk like that? That stupid Texas accent? I’ve studied English since I was six and I can’t understand half of what you’re saying! You sound like Huckleberry Fi—” Lying on her back in the street watching stars sparkle among the dancing lightning flashes in the sky-dome, Rachel croaked, “Thank you, Katie. Now I know I’m alive.”

“You won’t be if you make fun of me again!” Katie growled as Anya and Jack helped Rachel to her feet.

Jack shot her a warning look. “Miss Katie, don’t take this wrong, I’ve known a lot of hot-tempered space jockeys, and I’ve been known to throw a punch or two myself, but you’d better get a hold of yourself or you won’t last till we get out of Afro-Port, much less on Mars.”

“Thanks for the advice, Mr. Zap-Gun,” Katie snapped.

“Look, let’s all cool out here,” Jack said. “We’re all tired out from the danger and the long walk. I’ll just drop our gear off at my place and we’ll go around the corner for some grub and a cold drink at Adrian’s.”

Anya’s lips tightened at the suggestion, but she didn’t say anything. Jack ran into a darkened entrance, emerging barehanded less than a minute later. “All done, ladies. Let’s go refresh ourselves!”

Adrian’s was located in a dark, dank room that stank of beer over a slight savor of vomit and disinfectant. Loud music blared from unseen speakers. The bar supported a solitary semiconscious drinker, a middle-aged man. The bartender was nowhere to be seen.

“Charming,” Katie said. “Are all the bars in Afro-Port like this?”

“Afraid not. This is one of the better ones,” Jack said cheerfully. “Yo! Adrian! Get your lazy butt out here, you have customers!”

There was an unfriendly rumble from the shadows, and a hulking figure appeared out of the darkness fast enough to make Rachel jump. “Why, if it ain’t Deadbeat Jack,” it said, with a voice like Karolla would have had in a sensible world.

“Deadbeat? Me? Come off it, Adrian. You know I’m good for it. I know things have been rocky for me lately, but I’ve got money coming in next week from the city for that surveying work I did out in the canyons.”

The man-mountain snorted like a baby tornado. “The city, huh? I got news for you, Jack: They’re broker than you are. Any graft that comes in, da Mayor keeps for himself. If you’re waitin’ on them for your pay, you’ll soon find your sorry butt in the Corrector, courtesy of a debt collector.” The walls trembled as he laughed.

Jack snickered dutifully. “So what do you say then, old friend? For the sake of old times?”

“You were broke then too.”

“For the sake of friendship between worlds?” He gestured at his guests, who cringed. “Here I have two lovely ladies from Earth as well as my best Martian girl!”

“So now I’m financin’ you getting’ laid?”

Katie raised her fists. “Shut your trap, you big mmmmf!” Rachel clapped her hand over Katie’s mouth.

“Not only pretty, but spunky, too! I like spunk. All right, Jack, I’ll feed you and your girlfriends this once, even if they do have highly questionable taste in men. But this is the last time, clear?” Adrian shook a finger as thick as a klemeth vine under Jack’s nose.

“Perfectly, my good man. But I really think this is an awful lot of fuss to make over a 200 zloty debt.”

“Two hundred eighty six zlotys and 35 groszys, and that’s before I feed you and your hungry pieces, Jack.”

Katie asked, “What’s he talking about?”

“Polish money,” Rachel mumbled.

Anya responded, “Solar System currency.”

Katie rolled her eyes. “Oh, brother, Rachel. What’s the Solar capital called? New Warsaw?”

“No, that’s the Lunar capital. I’m surprised an Earth native wouldn’t know that,” Anya said.

“Not half as surprised as I am,” Katie said. “And here I thought you had so much imagination, Rachel!”

By this time they were all seated around a grimy table on which Adrian sullenly deposited a steaming tray of some type of meat, a plate of buns, and a pitcher of beer.

“I don’t really want to know what animal that meat came from, do I?” Rachel said in Polish to Anya.

“Probably not. It’s best to close your eyes and hold your nose while eating here. Though it does make you look kind of funny,” Anya demonstrated. Rachel put her hand over her mouth and giggled.

“All right, all right, quit jabbering away in Marpolski and leaving us monolingual types out of the conversation,” Jack said.

“Jabbering away in what?” Rachel asked.

“Marpolski. It’s what we call our language,” Anya eyed Rachel.

The food was surprisingly good, however. The meat reminded Rachel of her mother’s brisket, and she made sandwiches of it with the buns. The beer was strong, and she sampled it cautiously; her parents didn’t let her drink, not that there was any alcohol to be had in the ghetto, unless you were some black-market bigwig.

“We need to start planning how we will get to Mars to end the dreadful tyranny of Ares and rescue my long-lost brother.” Jack sounded as if he were going to the store to buy a quart of milk.

“Do y’all actually talk like that?” Katie asked.

“Talk like what?”

“Like that. Like something out of a book.”

Rachel sighed. He is something out of a book, and not a very good one.

Jack merely blinked at them. “How should I talk then, ladies? Is it not true that Ares is a dreadful tyrant?”

“Well—yes, from everything you and the princess say,” Katie said.

“And is it not true that Jim is lost, lo these many years?”

“You’re doing it again!”

“Doing what again?”

“Talking like a character in an old book! Who says ‘lo these many years’ in real life?”

“I do,” Jack said, puzzled.

Rachel sighed again. But this isn’t real life. Though it sure felt like it. She wasn’t about to repeat her experiment with Katie. People in her grandfather’s village might have a lot of silly superstitions about dreams, but in Rachel’s experience if somebody hit you in a dream it didn’t physically hurt and you didn’t wake up with a lump like the one that was forming on her forehead.

“Katie, could I talk to you for a second?” Rachel stood abruptly.

“Huh? Sure, I guess so.” She followed Rachel to the far corner.

Jack and Anya stared after them for a moment but then started making out. Rachel frowned. Is that proper royal protocol? She turned to Katie.

“Look, I can’t explain what’s going on any more than you can, but I think we’d better just play along for now,” Rachel said. Katie stared at her. “What? Don’t tell me the expression ‘play along with’ is obsolete in the twenty-second century.”

“It’s not that,” Katie said. “But what’s the point of getting caught up in this world if it all melts around me in the end? How do I know I’m not just lying out on the prairie dreaming?” The shadows in the room grew darker as she spoke.

Rachel shivered. “That’s why I provoked you into hitting me. It hurt enough to break me out of my solipsism. Uh, solipsism means—”

“You don’t have to tell me what it means. I ain’t stupid just because I grew up on a dusty old farm in the middle of nowhere and sometimes say ‘ain’t.’”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Never mind. Y’all are right, I’d better learn to be a little less prickly, before I get into a fight with somebody bigger than me.” Katie paused. The silence and the shadows thickened still further. When she spoke again it was in such a low whisper than Rachel had to lean forward until their faces were practically touching. “What do you think, Rachel? If we wanted to go back home, could we?”

“I haven’t got any ruby slippers, if that’s what you mean.” Rachel remembered wistfully seeing “The Wizard of Oz” that final summer before the war broke out. “And I know this seems hard to believe, but I don’t understand what’s going on any more than you do. I didn’t make up this bar, and if I had, I wouldn’t have made it a filthy, disgusting hole like this.”

A faraway look came into Katie’s eyes. “Maybe I did.”

“Maybe you did what?”

“Maybe I’m responsible for this bar. It looks a lot like the place in Abilene my daddy took me to for my first drink, on my fourteenth birthday. Even smells like it.”

Rachel stared. Her breath caught in her throat. “But it’s my story!”

Katie shook her head. “Huh-uh. It’s just as much my story, ain’t it? I mean, once you write it, the reader’s got to imagine it in her own mind. It ain’t as if I had a TV I could watch it on, like in the old days.”

“What’s a TV?” Rachel frowned. “So everything in this world is made up by either you or me?”

“Could be,” Katie said. “And then that means, if we ever want to go back home, we’ve both got to click our heels three times. So to speak.”

Rachel looked across the room. Jack, Anya, the bartender, and the semi-conscious drinker were still visible, but their outlines wavered like trees seen through a heat haze. “Do you want to go home so we can help our parents?” she whispered.

Katie hesitated. “Not yet. Not till we know more. Otherwise we’re both liable to get into the same pickle our folks are in. But I miss my parents so much. I don’t know what the Dixies did to them. I wish I could bring them here.”

“And my parents,” Rachel whispered. “The Germans.…” Katie’s gaze fell to the floor. “What? What is it?”

“I—I don’t know if I should tell you,” Katie whispered.

“What is it? Why not?”

At that moment, the outside door burst open.