The Lost City of Mars, Ray Bradbury

The Lost City of Mars

The great eye floated in space. And behind the great eye somewhere hidden away within metal and machinery was a small eye that belonged to a man who looked and could not stop looking at all the multitudes of stars and the diminishings and growings of lightabillion billion miles away.

The small eye closed with tiredness. Captain John Wilder stood holding to the telescopic devices which probed the universe and at last murmured, “Which one?”

The astronomer with him said, “Take your pick.”
“I wish it were that easy.” Wilder opened his eyes. “What’s the data on this star?”

“Alpha-Cygne II. Same size and reading as our sun. Planetary system, possible.”

“Possible. Not certain. If we pick the wrong star, God help the people we send on a two-hundred-year journey to find a planet that may not be there. No, God help me, for the final selection is mine, and I may well send myself on that journey. So, how can we be sure?”

“We can’t. We just make the best guess, send our starship out, and pray.”
“You are not very encouraging. That’s it. I’m tired.”

Wilder touched a switch that shut up tight the greater eye, this rocket-powered space lens that stared cold upon the abyss, saw far too much and knew little, and now knew nothing. The rocket laboratory drifted sightless on an endless night.

“Home,” said the captain. “Let’s go home.”
And the blind beggar-after-stars wheeled on a spread of fire and ran away.

The frontier cities on Mars looked very fine from above. Coming down for a landing, Wilder saw the neons among the blue hills and thought, We’ll light those worlds a billion miles off, and the children of the people living under those lights this instant, we’ll make them immortal. Very simply, if we succeed, they will live forever.

Live forever. The rocket landed. Live forever.

The wind that blew from the frontier town smelled of grease. An aluminum-toothed jukebox banged somewhere. A junkyard rusted beside the rocket port. Old newspapers danced alone on the windy tarmac.

Wilder, motionless at the top of the gantry elevator, suddenly wished not to move down. The lights suddenly had become people and not words that, huge in the mind, could be handled with elaborate ease.

He sighed. The freight of people was too heavy. The stars were too far away.
“Captain?” said someone behind him.

He stepped forward. The elevator gave way. They sank with a silent screaming toward a very real land with real people in it, who were waiting for him to choose.

At midnight the telegram-bin hissed and exploded out a message projectile. Wilder, at his desk, surrounded by tapes and computation cards, did not touch it for a long while. When at last he pulled the message out, he scanned it, rolled it in a tight ball, then uncrumpled the message and read again:
FINAL CANAL BEING FILLED TOMORROW WEEK. YOU ARE INVITED CANAL YACHT PARTY. DISTINGUISHED GUESTS. FOUR-DAY JOURNEY TO SEARCH FOR LOST CITY. KINDLY ACKNOWLEDGE.

—I. V. AARONSON

Wilder blinked, and laughed quietly. He crumpled the paper again, but stopped, lifted the telephone and said:
“Telegram to I. V. Aaronson, Mars City I. Answer affirmative. No sane reason why, but still—affirmative.”

And hung up the phone. To sit for a long while watching this night which shadowed all the whispering, ticking, and motioning machines.
The dry canal waited.

It had been waiting twenty thousand years for nothing but dust to filter through in ghost tides.
Now, quite suddenly, it whispered.
And the whisper became a rush and wall-caroming glide of waters.

As if a vast machined fist had struck the rocks somewhere, clapped the air and cried “Miracle!,” a wall of water came proud and high along the channels, and lay down in all the dry places of the canal and moved on toward ancient deserts of dry-bone, surprising old wharves and lifting up the skeletons of boats abandoned thirty centuries before when the water burnt away to nothing.

The tide turned a corner and lifted up—a boat as fresh as the morning itself, with new-minted silver screws and brass pipings, and bright new Earth-sewn flags. The boat, suspended from the side of the canal, bore the nameAaronson I.

Inside the boat, a man with the same name smiled. Mr. Aaronson sat listening to the waters live under the boat.

And the sound of the water was cut across by the sound of a hovercraft, arriving, and a motorbike, arriving, and in the air, as if summoned with magical timing, drawn by the glimmer of tides in the old canal, a number of gadfly people flew over the hills on jet-pack machines, and hung suspended as if doubting this collision of lives caused by one rich man.

Scowling up with a smile, the rich man called to his children, cried them in from the heat with offers of food and drink.
“Captain Wilder! Mr. Parkhill! Mr. Beaumont!”

Wilder set his hovercraft down.
Sam Parkhill discarded his motorbike, for he had seen the yacht and it was a new love.

“My God,” cried Beaumont, the actor, part of the frieze of people in the sky dancing like bright bees on the wind. “I’ve timed my entrance wrong. I’m early. There’s no audience!”
“I’ll applaud you down!” shouted the old man, and did so, then added, “Mr. Aikens!”

“Aikens?” said Parkhill. “The big-game hunter?”
“None other!”

And Aikens dived down as if to seize them in his harrying claws. He fancied his resemblance to the hawk. He was finished and stropped like a razor by the swift life he had lived. Not an edge of him but cut the air as he fell, a strange plummeting vengeance upon people who had done nothing to him.

In the moment before destruction, he pulled up) on his jets and, gently screaming, simmered himself to touch the marble jetty. About his lean middle hung a rifle belt. His pockets bulged like those of a boy from the candy store.

One guessed he was stashed with sweet bullets and rare bombs. In his hands, like an evil child, he held a weapon that looked like a bolt of lightning fallen straight from the clutch of Zeus, stamped nevertheless:Made in U.S.A.His face was sunblasted dark. His eyes were cool surprises in the sunwrinkled flesh, all mint-blue-green crystal. He wore a white porcelain smile set in African sinews. The earth did not quite tremble as he landed.

“The lion prowls the land of Judah!” cried a voice from the heavens. “Now do behold the lambs driven forth to slaughter!”
“Oh for God’s sake, Harry, shut up!” said a woman’s voice.

And two more kites fluttered their souls, their dread humanity on the wind.
The rich man jubilated.
“Harry Harpwell!”

“Behold the angel of the Lord who comes with Annunciations!” the man in the sky said, hovering. “And the Annunciation is—”
“He’s drunk again,” his wife supplied, flying ahead of him, not looking back.

“Megan Harpwell,” said the rich man, like an entrepreneur introducing his troupe.
“The poet,” said Wilder.

“And the poet’s barracuda wife,” muttered Park-hill.
“I am not drunk,” the poet shouted down the wind. “I am simplyhigh.”

And here he let loose such a deluge of laughter that those below almost raised their hands to ward off the avalanche.

Lowering himself, like a fat dragon kite, the poet, whose wife’s mouth was now clamped shut, bumbled over the yacht. He made the motions of blessing same, and winked at Wilder and Parkhill.

“Harpwell,” he called. “Isn’t that a name to go with being a great modern poet who suffers in the present, lives in the past, steals bones from old dramatists’ tombs, and flies on this new egg-beater wind-suck device, to call down sonnets on your head?

I pity the old euphoric saints and angels who had no invisible wings like this so as to dart in oriole convolutions and ecstatic convulsions on the air as they sang their lines or damned souls to Hell. Poor earth-bound sparrows, wings clipped. Only their genius flew. Only their Muse knew air-sickness—”
“Harry,” said his wife, her feet on the ground, eyes shut.

“Hunter!” called the poet. “Aikens! Here’s the greatest game in all the world, a poet on the wing. I bare my breast. Let fly your honeyed bee sting! Bring me, Icarus, down, if your gun be sunbeams kindled in one tube and let free in a single forest fire that escalates the sky and turns tallow, mush, candlewick and lyre to mere tarbaby. Ready, aim, fire!”

The hunter, in good humor, raised his gun.
The poet, at this, laughed a mightier laugh and, literally, exposed his chest by tearing aside his shirt.
At which moment a quietness came along the canal rim.

A woman appeared walking. Her maid walked behind her. There was no vehicle in sight, and it seemed almost as if they had wandered a long way out of the Martian hills and now stopped.
The very quietness of her entrance gave dignity and attention to Cara Corelli.

The poet shut up his lyric in the sky and landed.

The company all looked together at this actress who gazed back without seeing them. She was dressed in a black jumpsuit which was the same color as her dark hair. She walked like a woman who has spoken little in her life and now stood facing them with the same quietness, as if waiting for someone to move without being ordered. The wind blew her hair out and down over her shoulders. The paleness of her face was shocking. Her paleness, rather than her eyes, stared at them.

Then, without a word, she stepped down into the: yacht and sat in the front of the craft, like a figurehead that knows its place and goes there.

The moment of silence was over.
Aaronson ran his finger