On a well-settled Mars, the five major city Council regimes
struggle to meld into a stable, working government. Embracing an official
Unified Faith In Humanity, the Councils are teetering on the verge of pogrom
directed against Christians, Molesters, Jews, Rapists, Buddhists, Murderers,
Muslims, Thieves, Hindu, Embezzlers and Artificial Humans – anyone who
threatens the official Faith and the consolidating power of the Councils. It
makes good sense, right – get rid of religion and Human divisiveness on a
societal level will disappear? An instrument of such a pogrom might just be a
Roman holiday...To see the rest of the chapters, go to SCIENCE FICTION:
Martian Holiday on the right and scroll to the bottom for the first
story.
Partially
concealed by the base of an upthrust fault and aligned with a crack in a
boulder resting at the base of the cliff, the man in the marsbug had a clear
view of the second largest city on Mars. Burroughs Dome glittered at the center
of the crater it called home. Thirty-five kilometers across, it was still dwarfed
by the crater – as it was dwarfed in reputation by every other Dome on Mars. It
had a bit of the reputation of an ancient Earth city called Calcutta…
It was
home to one of the most notorious Humans ever to live on Mars.
Paolo Marcillon sat watching the empty air over the console. Natan Wallach,
The Hero of the Faith Wars, was a powerful, charismatic man. His speech had
been memorized by thousands of Martians, quoted in uncounted speeches, and made
into hundreds of plaques, drinking vessels, and architectural epigraphs. It was
a mesmerizing speech, powerful, and despite the fact that its spokesperson had
vanished – assumed murdered by some religious zealot – was widely claimed to be
the foundation of Martian civilization.
The truth was that it hadn’t been. Some underground believers – and
antirevisionist historians – whispered that it had been written by Wallach’s
father, a manipulative man whose embezzlement from the database of a small Dome
had caused its financial collapse and eventual abandonment. The Ghost Dome was
rarely visited, though the tale was often told…
Paolo’s pulse pounded in his ears. He had spent months in prayer. He had
spent days in prayer. He had spent every moment he was awake on his way to this
place in prayer. But the answer – the compulsion – had not lessened. He had to
talk to Natan Wallach.
He had to talk to the Hero of the Faith Wars; a man who was a close to him
as a brother. Because they WERE brothers and he hadn’t talked to Natan for
years. Not blood-brothers, they’d been raised together from birth; Paolo’s
parents had died the Blue Fever years. They’d been friends with the Wallach
family and they’d taken the orphan four-year-old in. Their adolescence together
had been very rocky.
Paolo took a deep breath. His brother looked to be barely twenty-five;
though he was forty-six. Paolo was a year younger…and looked like he was in his
late fifties. “Genetics,” he muttered. His parents hadn’t believed in
gene-meddling. The mods were fine, eliminating cystic fibrosis, heart disease,
near-sightedness, and the most common cancers – he’d been modified. But where
that was all he’d had, Natan had had muscular enhancements, perception
enhancements, and had a biological neural connect for digital data downloading,
grown. A source of sore rivalry when they were kids; now a source of sadness.
Paolo pursed his lips. He wasn’t getting any younger; his brother’s life
wasn’t getting any less strange as far as he’d heard. His friends in Burroughs
talked about a man calling himself Stepan…
With a sigh, Paolo suited up. He’d catch the inbound commuter lev-train
from the outposts ranging along the heights of the crater ring, then try and
discreetly snoop around to see what his big brother was really up to. He found
himself hoping that the conversion was true.
He also found himself hoping that Natan – or Stepan, or whomever! – would also
help him avoid their father…
