Identity Theft and Other Stories Page 10

  My footprints stretched out behind me. There were no others. I was hardly the first to visit Cydonia, but, unlike on the Moon, dust storms on Mars made such marks transitory.

  I then looked up at the night sky. Earth was easy enough to spot—it was always on the ecliptic, of course, and right now was in…my goodness, isn’t that a coincidence!

  It was in Virgo, the constellation of the Virgin, a dazzling blue point, a sapphire outshining even mighty Spica.

  Of course, Virgo doesn’t depict the Mother of Our Lord; the constellation dates back to ancient times. Most likely, it represents the Assyrian fertility goddess, Ishtar, or the Greek harvest maiden, Persephone.

  I found myself smiling. Actually, it doesn’t depict anything at all. It’s just a random smattering of stars. To see a virgin in it was as much a folly as seeing the ruins of an ancient Martian city in the rocks rising up around me. But I knew the…well, not the heavens, but the night sky…like the back of my hand. Once you’d learned to see the patterns, it was almost impossible not to see them.

  And, say, there was Cygnus, and—whaddaya know!—Phobos, and, yes, if I squinted, Deimos too, just beneath it.

  But no. Surely the Holy Virgin had not revealed herself to Jurgen Emat. Peasant children, yes; the poor and sick, yes. But a televangelist? A rich broadcast preacher? No, that was ridiculous.

  It wasn’t explicitly in Cardinal Pirandello’s message, but I knew enough of Vatican politics to understand what was going on. As he’d said, Jurgen Emat had been at seminary with Viktorio Lazzari—the man who was now known as Leo XIV. Although both were Catholics, they’d ended up going down widely different paths—and they were anything but friends.

  I’d only met the Pontiff once, and then late in his life. It was almost impossible to imagine the poised, wise Bishop of Rome as a young man. But Jurgen had known him as such, and—my thoughts were my own; as long as I never gave them voice, I was entitled to think whatever I wished—and to know a person in his youth is to know him before he has developed the mask of guile. Jurgen Emat perhaps felt that Viktorio Lazzari had not deserved to ascend to the Holy See. And now, with this silly announcement of a Martian Marian vision, he was stealing Leo’s thunder as the Pope prepared to visit Fatima.

  Martian. Marian. Funny I’d never noticed how similar those words were before. The only difference…

  My God.

  The only difference is the lowercase t—the cross—in the middle of the word pertaining to Mars.

  No. No. I shook my head inside the suit’s helmet. Ridiculous. A crazy notion. What had I been thinking about? Oh, yes: Emat trying to undermine the Pope. By the time I got back to Utopia Planitia, it would be late Saturday evening. I hadn’t thought of a sermon yet, but perhaps that could be the topic. In matters of faith, by definition, the Holy Father was infallible, and those who called themselves Catholics—even celebrities like Jurgen Emat—had to accept that, or leave the faith.

  It wouldn’t mean much to the…yes, I thought of them as my congregation, even sometimes my flock…but of course the group that only half-filled the pews at Saint Teresa’s each Sunday morn were hardly that. Just the bored, the lonely, those with nothing better to do. Ah, well. At least I wouldn’t be preaching to the converted…

  I looked around at the barren landscape, and took a drink of pure water through the tube in my helmet. The wind howled, plaintive, attenuated, barely audible inside the suit.

  Of course, I knew I was being unfairly cynical. I did believe with all my heart in Our Lady of the Rosary. I knew—knew, as I know my own soul!—that she has in the past shown herself to the faithful, and…

  And I was one of the faithful. Yes, pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall—but I was more faithful than Jurgen Emat. It was true that Buzz Aldrin had taken Holy Communion upon landing on the moon, but I was bringing Jesus’ teachings farther than anyone else had, here, in humanity’s first baby step out toward the stars…

  So, Mary, where are you? If you’re here—if you’re with us here on Mars, then show yourself! My heart is pure, and I’d love to see you.

  Show yourself, Mother of Jesus! Show yourself, Blessed Virgin! Show yourself!

  Elizabeth Chen’s tone had the same mocking undercurrent as before. “Have a nice walk, Father?”

  I nodded.

  “See anything?”

  I handed her my helmet. “Mars is an interesting place,” I said. “There are always things to see.”

  She smiled, a self-satisfied smirk. “Don’t worry, Father,” she said, as she put the helmet away in the suit locker. “We’ll have you back to Bradbury in plenty of time for Sunday morning.”

  I sat in my office, behind my desk, dressed in cassock and clerical collar, facing the camera eye. I took a deep breath, crossed myself, and told the camera to start recording.

  “Cardinal Pirandello,” I said, trying to keep my voice from quavering, “as requested, I visited Cydonia. The sands of Mars drifted about me, the invisible hand of the thin wind moving them. I looked and looked and looked. And then, blessed Cardinal, it happened.”

  I took another deep breath. “I saw her, Eminence. I saw the Holy Virgin. She appeared to float in front of me, a meter or more off the ground. And she was surrounded by spectral light, as if a rainbow had been bent to the contours of her venerable form. And she spoke to me, and I heard her voice three times over, and yet with each layer nonetheless clear and easily discernible: one in Aramaic, the language Our Lady spoke in life; a second in Latin, the tongue of our Church; and again in beautiful, cultured English. Her voice was like song, like liquid gold, like pure love, and she said unto me…”

  Simply sending a message to Cardinal Pirandello wouldn’t be enough. It might conveniently get lost. Even with the reforms of Vatican III, the Church of Rome was still a bureaucracy, and still protected itself.

  I took the recording wafer to the Communications Center myself, handing it to Loni Sinclair, the woman who had brought Pirandello’s original message to me.

  “How would you like this sent, Father?”

  “It is of some import,” I said. “What are my options?”

  “Well, I can send it now, although I’ll have to bill the…um, the…”

  “The parish, my child.”

  She nodded, then looked at the wafer. “And you want it to go to both of these addresses? The Vatican, and CNN?”

  “Yes.”

  She pointed to an illuminated globe of the Earth, half embedded in the wall. “CNN headquarters is in Atlanta. I can send it to the Vatican right now, but the United States is currently on the far side of Earth. It’ll be hours before I can transmit it there.”

  Of course. “No,” I said. “No, then wait. There are times when both Italy and the U.S. simultaneously face Mars, right?”

  “Not all of the U.S.—but Georgia, yes. A brief period.”

  “Wait till then, and send the message to both places at the same time.”

  “Whatever you say, Father.”

  “God bless you, child.”

  Loni Sinclair couldn’t quite mask her amusement at my words. “You’re welcome,” she replied.

  Four years have passed. Leo XIV has passed on, and John Paul III is now pontiff. I have no idea if Jurgen Emat approves of him or not—nor do I care. Dwelling on Earthly matters is frowned upon here, after all.

  Five million people a year still come to Fatima. Millions visit Lourdes and Guadalupe and La’Vang.

  And then they go home—some feeling they’ve been touched by the Holy Spirit, some saying they’ve been healed.

  Millions of faithful haven’t made it to Mars. Not yet; that will take time. But tens of thousands have come, and, unlike those who visited the other shrines, most of them stay. After traveling for years, the last thing they want to do is turn around and go home, especially since, by the time they’d arrived here, the propitious alignment of Earth and Mars that made their journey out take only two years has changed; it would take much
longer to get home if they left shortly after arriving.

  And so, they stay, and make their home here, and contribute to our community.

  And come to my masses. Not out of boredom. Not out of loneliness. But out of belief. Belief that miracles do still occur, and can happen as easily off-Earth as on it.

  I am fulfilled, and Mars, I honestly believe, is now a better place. This is a congregation, a flock. I beam out at its members from the pulpit, feeling their warmth, their love.

  Now I only have one problem left. To lie to Cardinal Pirandello had been a violation of my oath, of the teachings of my faith. But given that I’m the only priest on all of Mars, to whom will I confess my sin?

  Immortality

  Janis Ian is a wonderfully popular folk singer, best known for “Society’s Child” and “At Seventeen.” Turns out, though, that she’s also a big science fiction fan, and she began attending World Science Fiction Conventions in 2001. Soon, she and Mike Resnick hatched the idea of having all of Janis’s favorite SF authors write stories inspired by her song lyrics. The resulting anthology, Stars, turned out to be one of the major SF books of 2003, and I was very honored, and very proud, to be asked to contribute to it.

  Still, I found this a difficult story to write, since my point-of-view character was obviously, and presumptuously, based at least in part on Janis. Although I had finished a draft of this story on the day I left Toronto for the 2002 World Science Fiction Convention in San José, I’d actually planned to tell Janis that I hadn’t been able to come up with anything—I just wasn’t comfortable with the story. But Janis greeted me with a big hug and told me how much she was looking forward to my submission. With great trepidation, I polished it up and sent it in after the Worldcon, and, to my infinite relief, Janis loved it. Whew!

  Baby, I’m only society’s child

  When we’re older, things may change

  But for now this is the way they must remain

  —Janis Ian

  Sixty years.

  Sweet Jesus, had it been that long?

  But of course it had. The year was now 2023, and then—

  Then it had been 1963.

  The year of the march on Washington.

  The year JFK had been assassinated.

  The year I—

  No, no, I didn’t want to think about that. After all, I’m sure he never thinks about it…or about me.

  I’d been seventeen in 1963. And I’d thought of myself as ugly, an unpardonable sin for a young woman.

  Now, though…

  Now, I was seventy-seven. And I was no longer homely. Not that I’d had any work done, but there was no such thing as a homely—or a beautiful—woman of seventy-seven, at least not one who had never had treatments. The only adjective people applied to an unmodified woman of seventy-seven was old.

  My sixtieth high-school reunion.

  For some, there would be a seventieth, and an eightieth, a ninetieth, and doubtless a mega-bash for the hundredth. For those who had money—real money, the kind of money I’d once had at the height of my career—there were pharmaceuticals and gene therapies and cloned organs and bodily implants, all granting the gift of synthetic youth, the gift of time.

  I’d skipped the previous reunions, and I wasn’t fool enough to think I’d be alive for the next one. This would be it, my one, my only, my last. Although I’d once, briefly, been rich, I didn’t have the kind of money anymore that could buy literal immortality. I would have to be content knowing that my songs would exist after I was gone.

  And yet, today’s young people, children of the third millennium, couldn’t relate to socially conscious lyrics written so long ago. Still, the recordings would exist, although…

  Although if a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If a recording—digitized, copied from medium to medium as technologies and standards endlessly change—isn’t listened to, does the song still exist? Does the pain it chronicled still continue?

  I sighed.

  Sixty years since high-school graduation.

  Sixty years since all those swirling hormones and clashing emotions.

  Sixty years since Devon.

  It wasn’t the high school I remembered. My Cedar Valley High had been a brown-and-red brick structure, two stories tall, with large fields to the east and north, and a tiny staff parking lot.

  That building had long since been torn down—asbestos in its walls, poor insulation, no fiber-optic infrastructure. The replacement, larger, beige, thermally efficient, bore the same name but that was its only resemblance. And the field to the east had become a parking lot, since every seventeen-year-old had his or her own car these days.

  Things change.

  Walls come down.

  Time passes.

  I went inside.

  “Hello,” I said. “My name is…” and I spoke it, then spelled the last name—the one I’d had back when I’d been a student here, the one that had been my stage name, the one that pre-dated my ex-husbands.

  The man sitting behind the desk was in his late forties; other classes were celebrating their whole-decade anniversaries as well. I suspected he had no trouble guessing to which year each arrival belonged, but I supplied it anyway: “Class of Sixty-Three.”

  The man consulted a tablet computer. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Come a long way, have we? Well, it’s good to see you.” A badge appeared, printed instantly and silently, bearing my name. He handed it to me, along with two drink tickets. “Your class is meeting in Gymnasium Four. It’s down that corridor. Just follow everyone else.”

  They’d done their best to capture the spirit of the era. There was a US flag with just fifty stars—easy to recognize because of the staggered rows. And there were photos on the walls of Jack and Jackie Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, and a Mercury space capsule bobbing in the Pacific, and Sandy Koufax with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Someone had even dug up movie posters for the hits of that year, Dr. No and Cleopatra. Two video monitors were silently playing The Beverly Hillbillies and Bonanza. And “Easier Said Than Done” was coming softly out of the detachable speakers belonging to a portable stereo.

  I looked around the large room at the dozens of people. I had no idea who most of them were—not at a glance. They were just old folks, like me: wrinkled, with gray or white hair, some noticeably stooped, one using a walker.

  But that man, over there…

  There had only been one black person in my class. I hadn’t seen Devon Smith in the sixty years since, but this had to be him. Back then, he’d had a full head of curly hair, buzzed short. Now, most of it was gone, and his face was deeply lined.

  My heart was pounding harder than it had in years; indeed, I hadn’t thought the old thing had that much life left in it.

  Devon Smith.

  We hadn’t talked, not since that hot June evening in ’63 when I’d told him I couldn’t see him anymore. Our senior prom had only been a week away, but my parents had demanded I break up with him. They’d seen governor George Wallace on the news, personally blocking black students—“coloreds,” we called them back then—from enrolling at the University of Alabama. Mom and Dad said their edict was for my own safety, and I went along with it, doing what society wanted.

  Truth be told, part of me was relieved. I’d grown tired of the stares, the whispered comments. I’d even overheard two of our teachers making jokes about us, despite all their posturing about the changing times during class.

  Of course, those teachers must long since be dead. And as Devon looked my way, for a moment I envied them.

  He had a glass of red wine in his hand, and he was wearing a dark gray suit. There was no sign of recognition on his face. Still, he came over. “Hello,” he said. “I’m Devon Smith.”

  I was too flustered to speak, and, after a moment, he went on. “You’re not wearing your nametag.”

  He was right; it was still in my hand, along with the drink chits. I thought about just turning and walking away. But
no, no—I couldn’t do that. Not to him. Not again.

  “Sorry,” I said, and that one word embarrassed me further. I lifted my hand, opened my palm, showing the nametag held within.

  He stared at it as though I’d shown him a crucifixion wound.

  “It’s you,” he said, and his gaze came up to my face, his brown eyes wide.

  “Hello, Devon,” I said. I’d been a singer; I still had good breath control. My voice did not crack.

  He was silent for a time, and then he lifted his shoulders, a small shrug, as if he’d decided not to make a big thing of it. “Hello,” he replied. And then he added, presumably because politeness demanded it, “It’s good to see you.” But his words were flat.

  “How have you been?” I asked.

  He shrugged again, this time as if acknowledging the impossibility of my question. How has anyone been for six decades? How does one sum up the bulk of a lifetime in a few words?

  “Fine,” he said at last. “I’ve had…” But whatever it was he’d had remained unsaid. He looked away and took a sip of his wine. Finally, he spoke again. “I used to follow your career.”

  “It had its ups and downs,” I said, trying to keep my tone light.

  “That song…” he began, but didn’t finish.

  There was no need to specify which song. The one I’d written about him. The one I’d written about what I did to him. It was one of my few really big hits, but I’d never intended to grow rich off my—off our—pain.

  “They still play it from time to time,” I said.

  Devon nodded. “I heard it on an oldies station last month.”

  Oldies. I shuddered.

  “So, tell me,” I said, “do you have kids?”

  “Three,” said Devon. “Two boys and a girl.”

  “And grandkids?”

  “Eight,” said Devon. “Ages two through ten.”

  “Immortality.” I hadn’t intended to say it out loud, but there it was, the word floating between us. Devon had his immortality through his genes. And, I suppose, he had a piece of mine, too, for every time someone listened to that song, he or she would wonder if it was autobiographical, and, if so, who the beautiful young black man in my past had been.