The Empress of Mars Read Online Free PDF

doing whatever it is he does, we’re all going straight out and filing a marriage declaration, my girl, do you hear me?”
    “Mum!” Alice recoiled. “Like I’d ever marry Dunny! And he doesn’t work a shift, anyway. He’s only a freelancer. He works for the
Haulers
, of all people.”
    Mary glared at her. The Haulers were fairly far down the social scale on Mars. “What’s he do then?”
    “He works on the High Road project,” said Alice. “All he has to his name is his clothes and a Mahindra. Which he lives in. And you want me to raise a baby in a Mahindra cab, I suppose—”
    “Don’t be stupid! You’ll all live here. Dunny, is that his name? I thought it was Wilson.”
    “It’s Johnson. And anyway we’re not going to get married today, because he’s off to the Pole for weeks and weeks working on the High Road,” said Alice.
    “And what a sweet good-bye you bid him, too. You have a heart of stone,” said Mary, pacing the kitchen in despair. Alice clenched her fists.
    She muttered: “It’s not as though it’d last, anyway. Men always leave, Mum.
Your
dad left.”
    Mary rounded on her. It was true enough: Mary had been at university when her father had announced he was fed up with her mother and was walking out, and that her mother was now her responsibility. Mary had found a job, and a smaller apartment, where she and her mother had lived in an uneasy state of truce until her mother had taken all those sleeping pills. Mary had buried her mother, found a still smaller apartment, and taken night courses until she’d got her doctorate in xenobotany.
    “And what if he did walk out on us?” Mary retorted. “
Your
dad
didn’t
.”
    Alice flushed and stared at the floor, just as she had done when Mary had come back from the hospice and tried to explain about the Blessed Isles.
    “. . . And he’ll never hurt from the cancer anymore, you see? And we’ll miss him terribly, but he’ll be happy, and we should be glad for Daddy
,” Mary had told the little girl. Alice hadn’t said anything, but Mary had seen the rage building and building in her downcast eyes. She’d gone to her room and next day acted as though nothing had happened, chattering and playing. It wasn’t until a week later Mary had found Alice’s doll, Ian’s last present to his daughter, head down in the compost bin.
    “Well, all the other men left,” said Alice now. “And anyway,
this
is all a lot of fuss about nothing. Deadly rays from space or something will do for it, you wait and see.”
    Mary slapped her then.

 
     
     
     

CHAPTER 4
Sweet Honey in the Rock
     
     
    So in all the excitement the crystal was stuck on the back bar and forgotten until that evening, when the Brick came in from his polar run.
    The Brick was so named because he resembled one. Not only was he vast and tall and wide in his quilted Hauler’s psuit, he was the color of a brick as well, though what shade he might be under years of high-impact red dust was anybody’s guess. There was red grit between his teeth when he grinned, as he did now on emerging from the airlock, and his bloodshot red eyes widened in the pleasant evening darkness of the Empress.
    He lifted his head and sucked in air through a red nose flattened as a gorilla’s from years of collisions with fists, boots, steering wheels, and (it was rumored) Hospital orderlies’ foreheads. He had been on Mars a long, long time.
    “Damn, I love that smell,” he howled in English, striding to the bar and slapping down his gauntlets. “Beer, onions and Proteus nuggets frying, eh? Give me a Party Platter with Bisto and a pitcher of Foster’s.”
    “I’m afraid we don’t have Foster’s, sir,” dithered Mr. Morton. Mary elbowed him.
    “It’s what we call the Ares Lager when he’s in here,” she murmured, and Mr. Morton ran off at once to fill a pitcher.
    “How’s it going, beautiful?”
    “Tolerably, Mr. Brick,” said Mary, sighing.
    He looked at her keenly and his voice