Prolouge
Your optimism really sucks,
you know it won't turn out
that way—intellectually you
must. But you find a way
around the doubt. Your
city isn't my city; mine's
layered with dust. And
you'll have to redouble your
holding to trust, which at
present condition's insoluble
rushing past massive flood-
gates, machining was terrible
with rust. As passive as a
once teeming broken world
is.
Just us, and ours.
the Lay of Mars
Mars thereabout was mostly
flat, and sometimes besmirched
by fields of red and rough-hewn
rock. Except where we set out,
or the ancient place our our arrival,
or theirs,
was on the side of Mount Rainier,
or where it's foothills fell away to
flat ground, where the domes could
give themselves fair structure for
their internal suppoprt. And where
wind was low.
the Middle Road
Sidelong encampment—
now a nation, bathed in
cobalt blue. And whose
excursions henceward
were espied by nearer
men who there would
play upon the line.
And guard was set there
by our side. And I walked
it, not alone by night but
flanked on both sides by
our men. Cloaked in rubber-
ized canvas suits. Creaky
metal joints, glass faceplate.
And I have watched them
die, whether shot through,
or grazing tore the suit's seal
would let the vacuum in. No
breath, eyes turning pearly
white. Maybe a smatter of
blood on the glass or frozen
in the bullet hole. And it was
cold, under the chill red sun
in morning, or setting blue-white.
Even being alive, and having
a suit heater. Cold and
wet, taught dimpled skin
all on the rubber suit.
Patrolling the Escarpment
And taking our task to heart
we traipsed around an old tin
shed and over the stone plaited
raiment of a rise. Gravel and
dust raising up on a slow wind
lower gravity, by the dim halo
of the fluorescent lights on
distant tower we'd look out back
on our side of the line. Cold
metal of the gun through rubber
suit was radiating. And the fan
inside the suit kick'd on, bullets
on the air race from the dark side
of a crater's dust hill. Running fast.
Huff of own breath off glass echo
around in helmet.
Running fast, breath fog glass,
hard to see, as darkening from
distant light. New bullets stream-
ing past my back. Running fast
shoot back. Hide.
War on Mars
The vac-suit's untoward and heavily
impedes your arms, legs, their moving.
The grit thrown up by any of a number
of explosions, or bullets thudded in,
is dust in all the crevices of the helmet,
and in the hinges of the joints. You've
seen it all to much. And so have I. What
happens if we just decide to leave it all
behind, and steal a ship, or stowaway
in a leaving skiff in the cargo bay. What
does it say about us that we let it?
