Kage Baker - Empress of Mars

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Science Fiction

By Kage Bake

Empress o

Mars

Empress of Mars

by Kage Baker

Fictionwise

www.Fictionwise.com

First published in Asimov's, July 2003

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Empress of Mars

by Kage Baker

There were three Empresses of Mars.

The first one was a bar at the Settlement. The second was

the lady who ran the bar; though her title was strictly

informal, having been bestowed on her by the regular

customers, and her domain extended no further than the

pleasantly gloomy walls of the only place you could get beer

on the Tharsis Bulge.

The third one was the Queen of England.

Empress of Mars

by Kage Baker

ONE: THE BIG RED BALLOON

What were the British doing on Mars?

For one thing, they had no difficulty calculating with metric

figures. For another, their space exploration effort had not

been fueled primarily by a military industrial complex. This

meant that it had never received infusions of taxpayers’

money on the huge scale of certain other nations, but also

meant that its continued existence had been unaffected by

the inconvenient disappearance of enemies. Without the

necessity of offworld missile bases, the major powers’ interest

in colonizing space had quite melted away. This left plenty of

room for the private sector.

There was only one question, then: was there money on

Mars?

There had definitely been money on Luna. The British

Lunar Company had done quite well by its stockholders, with

the proceeds from its mining and tourism divisions. Luna had

been a great place to channel societal malcontents as well,

guaranteeing a work force of rugged individualists and others

who couldn't fit in Down Home without medication.

But Luna was pretty thoroughly old news now and no

longer anywhere near as profitable as it had been, thanks to

the miners’ strikes and the litigation with the Ephesian Church

over the Diana of Luna incident. Nor was it romantic

anymore: its sterile silver valleys were becoming

domesticated, domed over with tract housing for all the clerks

Empress of Mars

by Kage Baker

the BLC needed. Bureaucrats and missionaries had done for

Luna as a frontier.

The psychiatric Hospitals were filling up with unemployed

rugged individualists again. Profit margins were down. The

BLC turned its thoughtful eyes to Mars.

Harder to get to than Luna, but nominally easier to

colonize. Bigger, but on the other hand no easy gravity well

with which to ship ore down to Earth. This ruled out mining

for export as a means of profit. And as for low-gravity

experiments, they were cheaper and easier to do on Luna.

What, really, had Mars to offer to the hopeful capitalist?

Only the prospect of terraforming. And terraforming would

cost a lot of money and a lot of effort, with the successful

result being a place slightly less hospitable than Outer

Mongolia in the dead of winter.

But what are spin doctors for?

So the British Arean Company had been formed, with

suitably orchestrated media fanfare. Historical cliches were

dusted off and repackaged to look shiny-new. Games and

films were produced to create a public appetite for adventure

in rocky red landscapes. Clever advertising did its best to

convince people they'd missed a golden opportunity by not

buying lots on Luna when the land up there was dirt cheap,

but intimated that they needn't kick themselves any longer: a

second chance was coming for an even better deal!

And so forth and so on.

It all had the desired effect. A lot of people gave the British

Arean Company a great deal of money in return for shares of

stock that, technically speaking, weren't worth the pixels with

Empress of Mars

by Kage Baker

which they were impressively depicted in old-engraving style.

The big red balloon was launched. Missions to Mars were

launched, a domed base was built, and actual scientists were

sent out to the new colony along with the better-socially-

adapted inhabitants of two or three Hospitals. So were the

members of an incorporated clan, as a goodwill gesture in

honor of the most recent treaty with the Celtic Federation.

They brought certain institutions the BAC officially forbade,

like polluting industries and beast slavery, but conceded were

necessary to survival on a frontier.

So all began together the vast and difficult work of setting

up the infrastructure for terraforming, preparing the way for

wholesale human colonization.

Then there was a change of government, which coincided

with the BAC discovering that the fusion generators they had

shipped to Mars wouldn't work unless they were in a very

strong electromagnetic field, and Mars, it seemed, didn't have

much of one. This meant that powering life support alone

would cost very much more than anyone had thought it

would.

Not only that, the lowland canyons where principal

settlement had been planned turned out to channel winds

with devastating velocity. Only in the Tharsis highlands,

where the air was thinner and colder, was it possible to erect

a structure that wouldn't be scoured away by sandstorms

within a week. The BAC discovered this after several

extremely costly mistakes.

The balloon burst.

Empress of Mars

by Kage Baker

Not with a bang and shreds flying everywhere, exactly;

more like a very fast leak, so it sort of dwindled down to an

ignominious little lopsided thing without much air in it. Just

like the dome of the Settlement Base.

So a lot of people were stuck up there without the money

to come home, and they had to make the best of things.

Under the circumstances, it seemed best to continue on with

the job.

* * * *

Mary Griffith woke alone that morning, though she did not

always do so. She lay for a while in the dark, listening to the

quiet, which was not the same thing as silence: low hum of

the jenny and a few snores drifting from the other lofts

tucked in under the curve of the dome like so many swallows’

nests. No coughing. No quarreling. No fretful clunking to tell

her that Three Tank needed its valves unblocked yet again.

Smiling to herself, she rolled out of her bedclothes and

tossed the ladder over the side, so descending nimbly to meet

the day. She was a compactly built and muscular little woman

of a certain age. Her ancestors, most of them coal miners,

had passed along with other hardy genetic characteristics a

barrel chest, which gave her considerable bosom a certain

massive foundation, and Martian gravity contributed in its

own way to make Mother Griffith's Knockers famous

throughout the Settlement.

Having sent the ladder back up on its reel and tied off the

line neat as any sailor, she set the stove to heating and

pumped a kettle of water. The water came up reluctantly, as

it always did, rust-colored, strangling and spitting slush from

Empress of Mars

by Kage Baker

the pipe, but it boiled clear; and as she sat and sipped her tea

Mary watched the steam rise like a ghost in the dry cold air.

The visible phantom ascended and dissipated, reaching the

lofts and sending its message to the other sleepers, who were

pulled awake by its moistness as irresistibly as though it was

the smell of eggs and bacon, were they back on Earth. Soon

she heard them tossing in their blankets, heard a racking

cough or a whispered exchange. She sighed, bidding goodbye

to the last bit of early-morning calm. Another day begun.

She got up and rolled back the shade on the big window,

and the sullen purple dawn flared in and lit her house.

“Oh, my, that's bright,” said someone plaintively, high up

in the shadows, and a moment later Mr. Morton came down

on his line, in his long black thermals looking uncommonly

like a hesitant spider.

“Good morning, Mr. Morton,” said Mary, in English because

his panCelt was still halting, and “Good morning, Ma'am,” said

he, and winced as his bare feet hit the cold sanded floor. Half-

hopping he picked his way to the stove and poured his tea,

inhaling the steam gratefully; brought it back to the long

stone table and seated himself, wincing again as his knees

knocked into the table supports. He stirred a good lump of

butter into the tea and regarded Mary through the steam,

looking anxious.

“Er ... what would you like me to do today?” he inquired.

Mary sighed and summoned patience.

He was nominally her employee, and had been so since

that fateful afternoon when he, like so many others, had

Empress of Mars

by Kage Baker

realized that his redundancy pay did not amount to half the

fare back to Earth.

“Well, you didn't finish the scouring on Five Tank

yesterday, did you?” she said.

“No,” he agreed sadly.

“Then I think perhaps you had better do that, Mr. Morton.”

“Okay,” he said.

It was not his fault that he had to be told what to do. He

had spent most of his adult life in Hospital and a good bit of

his childhood too, ever since (having at the age of ten been

caught reading a story by Edgar Allan Poe) he had been

diagnosed as Eccentric.

Mind you, it wasn't all jam and tea in Hospital. Even the

incurably twisted had to be of some use to society, and Mr.

Morton had been brilliant at the chemistry, design and

fabrication of cast-stone structures for industrial use. That

was why he had been recruited by the BAC, arriving on Mars

with a single black duffel containing all he owned and a heart

full of dreams of romantic adventure.

Having designed and fabricated all the structures the BAC

needed, however, he had been summarily fired. He had gone

wandering away through the Tubes and wound up at the

Empress, his white thin face whiter still for shock, and sat at a

dark table drinking batch for eight hours before Mary had

asked him if he was ever going home, and then he had burst

into tears.

So she had given him a job. Mary had been fired, herself.

Not for redundancy, though, really; for being too Ethnic.

Empress of Mars

by Kage Baker

“Five Tank, yes, and in the afternoon we can get brew

another pale ale,” she decided, “Or maybe a good oatmeal

stout, what do you think?” and Mr. Morton brightened at that.

“Have we got any oats?” he inquired.

“If She provides them,” Mary said, and he nodded sagely.

Mr. Morton wasn't an Ephesian himself, but he was willing to

concede that there was Somebody out there responsive to

human prayer, and She certainly seemed to hear Mary's.

“Something will turn up,” he said, and Mary nodded.

And when the day had well and truly begun—when the

lodgers had all descended from their alcoves and gone

trudging away down the Tubes to their varied employments,

when Mary's daughters and their respective gentlemen callers

had been roused and set smiling or sullen about the day's

tasks, when the long stone counter had been polished to a

dull shine and the heating unit under One Tank was filling the

air with a grateful warmth, and Mary herself stood behind the

bar drawing the first ale of the day, to be poured into the

offering basin in the little shrine with its lumpy image of the

Good Mother herself, dim-lit by her little flickering votive

wire—even in that moment when the rich hoppy stuff hit the

parched stone and foamed extravagantly, for Co2 is never

lacking on Mars—even just then the Lock doors swung open

and in came the answer to prayer, being Padraig Moylan with

a hundredweight sack of Clan Morrigan oats and two tubs of

butter in trade.

Mr. Moylan was thanked with grace and sincerity, the

clan's bar tab recalculated accordingly. Soon he was settled in

a cozy alcove with a shot of red single malt and Mona, the

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ScienceFictionByKageBakerEmpressofMarsEmpressofMarsbyKageBaker2Fictionwisewww.Fictionwise.comCopyright©2003byKageBakerFirstpublishedinAsimov's,July2003NOTICE:Thisebookislicensedtotheoriginalpurchaseronly.Duplicationordistributiontoanypersonviaemail,floppydisk,network,printout,oranyothermeansisaviola...

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