Free The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN by Michael Rizzo Page A

with the great Planums on either side
of the Marineris Valley.
    “I’ve been out here every day for three months now
and it doesn’t get old,” he tells me. “Looking at it. Those slopes
that go up and up forever, higher than Everest—not that I’ve ever
seen Everest, of course—then flattening out like that on top, like
the Grand Canyon, if the Grand Canyon was as big as the United
States and five times deeper. And don’t remind me I didn’t look at
it twice all the five-and-a-half-years we were here before
everything blew up… It was different looking at it through eight
inches of plexi, or through the bubble of a stuffy pressure suit.”
He stops for awhile, just drinking it in. And I hate to admit it,
but he does sound old, despite what cutting-edge nano-medicine and
a lifetime of Spec-Ops PT have done for him.
    “This was going to be something our great-great
grandkids were supposed to be able to enjoy: being able to take a
stroll on fucking Mars with only a wimpy little oxygen mask.” He
sounds deeply, profoundly sad—something that’s been getting
steadily worse over the last five months. His pissed-off has long
since mellowed, his outrage at the bombardment and the imagined
criminal atrocity behind it. It no longer drives him, and he’s
begun the slide through the stages of grieving into the
debilitating depression Halley fears will take hold of all of
us.
    His irony when he talks of children’s children’s
children isn’t lost either: Neither of us had the time or security
for having children, not with the life we chose. We were allowed
lovers, bodies to cling to, to soothe one another like real people
do, but families were an unobtainable luxury. Loved ones were just
another way for your enemies to hurt you, and we’d made a world
full of enemies.
    “This isn’t supposed to be for us , Mikey,” I
listen to him wallow in it. “We’ve done some shitty things. Evil
things. In the name of a better world.”
    A world we couldn’t live in.
    “I know…” I try badly. And I tell myself this crisis
is normal, expected. Halley can increase his serotonin levels, and
he’ll push through it.
    “No,” he sounds like he’s almost crying in his mask,
trying not to. “No, you don’t.” He won’t look at me, just keeps his
eyes on the horizon. “You still think I came here for you, for
loyalty and still needing to keep your crazy ass out of bad
trouble, like always, even after I tried to retire and walk away.
And I did come here because of you. But that’s not all of it.”
    He picks up his stick and jabs it at the dirt, poking
holes, stirring up dust.
    “I had this nice little dream: I’d pull one last
tour… And if I didn’t get myself holed by an Eco or a Disc, I’d get
established, make a life here—settle into a cushy corporate
security job at one of the nicer colonies like Tranquility, or
maybe even Pax—the hippies would drive me crazy, but maybe I’d find
myself a nice young tofu-girl to nurse me through old age. Then one
day I could actually die in my sleep, fifty million miles away from
the planet I participated in fucking up, so maybe here they’d make
me a nice little marker that remembered me for being a sweet but
slightly crazy dirty old man. But that’s what it comes down to—I
had it all planned out in my head before I got on the damn shuttle.
One-way ticket. Last frontier. The ultimate get-away-from-it-all.
Last line on the tombstone, if there’s gonna be such a thing.”
    He looks up at the sky. You can see stars even at
midday. And the irregular blobs of the two moons.
    “Maybe we should do up one for them,” he suggests,
pointing up at the bigger blob that is Phobos, thinking of those
who probably died in space, in orbit, half-a-century ago. “A
tombstone. Maybe a monument. Names on a rock, at least. Even if
nobody but us ever gets to see it.”
    “We should,” I agree. I don’t say anything else for
awhile, just stand with him. Then I give him: “I figure I