Read Online WHITE MARS by Roger Penrose, Brian Aldiss - Free Book Online

wonderful Tom Jefferies apart. He could always hear two opposed tunes playing and make harmony from them, possibly because he had trained himself to think of unimaginably distant futures.
     
    Of course I attended Antonia's memorial service. I was full of grief - hers was the first death on Mars, and a man wrote an elegy on it.
    At the time of the EUPACUS collapse, when we found we were stuck on the Red Planet, all hell broke loose. There was rioting, and I was witness to one incident that Tom quelled with a quick answer.
    An idiot was trying to incite violence, shouting out that they must destroy the domes. 'We've been lied to. Our lives have been stolen. What they call civilisation is just a sham, a stinking sham. There's no truth - it's all a lie. Burn the place down and have done, it's all a big lie. Everything's a lie!'
    Tom stood up, saying loudly, 'But if that were true, then it would be a lie.'
    Silence. Then strained laughter. The crowd stood about uneasily. The orator disappeared. The domes were not destroyed.
     
    It must be admitted, I was in despair; I was really scared of being stuck on Mars for any length of time. I took a buggy from the buggy rank without authorisation and made off into the steeps of Tharsis to hide myself away, to commune with myself, to adjust. Although I spoke with my Other, she was a nothing, a green weed floating under water. When night was coming on, I parked myself on the edge of a gully and watched darkness gather, comforted in a way by its remorseless advance, as death had advanced on Antonia.
    Whatever you do, I thought to myself, the darkness is always encroaching.
    A wind rose. A dust storm brewed up from nowhere. Sudden gusts slammed against my vehicle. It seemed to stagger. Then it was falling over and over, down the gully. I struck my head on a support and became unconscious, although curiously aware all the while.
    In that trance-like state, the person with whom I was closest came to stand by me. She sat in a room with a wide window overlooking the Pearl River and unbound her piled dark hair. This she shook out in a dark shower, to show that she knew of my ill fortune and grieved for me.
    In her hands she held a silver carp, the meaning of which I did not understand. The carp swam from her grasp, through the pure air.
    When my senses returned I was confusedly aware of a pain and a light. The pain came from my right leg - or was it coming from the pinpoint of light glaring at me over a shoulder of Tharsis? Waves of pain prevented me from thinking coherently.
    Eventually I managed to drag myself up. Then I realised that the light I had seen was Saturn, shining low over the rock. The buggy lay on its side against a cliff. By good fortune, it had not cracked open during the drop, or I would have died from lack of oxygen while senseless.
    Yet I might as well have been dead. My trip having been unauthorised, I had no radio with which to summon help. Nor had I a suit in which to attempt to extricate myself. Could I have climbed into a suit? That was doubtful with my ruined leg. I could do nothing but crouch there, waiting to die.
    But the Martians look after their own. They had instituted a search once the buggy had been reported missing. When the dust storm died, they were out in strength.
    I became hazily aware of a noise overhead. A man was scraping the dust away from a side window and looking down at me. I could not recognise his face, and fainted away.
    When I roused, I was in a hospital bed, in the Reception House, coming round from anesthesia. A handsome but stern woman bent over me. Gently brushing my forehead with her hand, she said, 'You see, it was irrational to take out an unauthorised buggy, wasn't it?' Those were the first words Mary Fangold ever said to me.
    Only later did I find that my shattered right leg had been removed and a synthetic limb grown in its place.
    Now I understood the meaning of the silver carp that my dear friend had shown me in a dream. It swam away