The Mating of the Moons.

by Kenneth O'Hara.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Orbit volume 1 number 2, 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

[Sidenote: _SHE CAME TO MARS IN SEARCH OF SOMETHING, SHE KNEW NOT WHAT, TO GIVE HER LIFE MEANING. SHE FOUND IT ... IN A WAY...._]

The sun glared, fiercely detached. The thin air suddenly seemed friendless, empty, a vast lake of poison and gla.s.sy water. All at once, the stretching plains of sand began to waver with a terrible insubstantiality before Madeleine's eyes.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Even the Ruins of Taovahr were false. And for Madeleine, even if they were not false, there was no sign of the outer garments of dream with which, on a thousand lonely nights back home on the Earth, she had clothed those dusty scattered skeletons of crumbled stone.

Don, one of the brightest and most handsomely uniformed of all the bright young guide-hosts at Martian Haven, droned on to the finish of his machine-tooled lecture about the Ruins of Taovahr. He, of course, was the biggest chunk of falseness on Mars.

"And so folks, this is all that's left of a once great civilization. A few columns and worn pieces of stone. And we can never know now how they lived and loved and died--for no trace whatsoever of an ancient people remain. The dim, dark seas of time have swept their age-old secrets into the backwash of eternity--"

"Oh G.o.d," whispered Madeleine.

"Shhhh!" said her father. And her mother blinked at her with a resigned tolerance.

"But he's a living cliche," she said, trying to control the faintness, the dizziness, the dullness coming back as the last illusion drained away. "Even if the ruins were real, he'd make them seem trite."

"Madeleine!" her mother gasped, but in a subdued way.

"But there ought to be something special about a Martian ruin, Mother."

Don had heard her. His smile was uneasy, though politely tolerant, as all good hosts were to rich tourists. "You're hard to please, Miss Ericson. Maybe too hard." His lingering glance stopped just short of crudity. But the look made it clear that if she wanted the romance all women were a.s.sumed to expect at Martian Haven, he could provide it, as he did everything else--discreetly, efficiently and most memorably.

Mrs. Ericson giggled. She had long since abandoned any hope of Madeleine being, even by stretching the norm, a well-adjusted girl. But much faith had been placed in a Martian vacation, and hope that it would provide Madeleine with some sort of emotional preoccupation, even an affair, if need be--something, anything, that would at least make her seem faintly capable of a normal relationship with a male. Even this fellow Don. For Madeleine was past thirty-five--how far past no one discussed any more--and was becoming more tightly withdrawn every day.

Don shouted. "All right, folks! Now we wend our way back to Martian Haven, over a trail that's the oldest in the Solar System, a trail that was once a mighty highway stretching from the inland city to the great ocean that once rolled where now there is only thousands of miles of wind-blown sands!"

The long line of exclaiming and sickeningly gullible tourists, either too young and wide-eyed to know better, or too old and desperate to admit the phoniness, ooohhhed and ahhhhed, and the rickshaws and camels, plus a few hardy adventurers on foot, turned with him as Don twisted his own beast toward Martian Haven.

Even the Ruins, she thought--they were like imported props lying in the sand, like old abandoned bits of a set for a TV production.

"Madeleine," her father said, still trying to be a big brother after years of failure. "I really don't understand this at all. Coming all the way to Mars, and you act like--well--like we'd just stepped around the corner in Chicago to some ridiculous carnival!"

"I am cursed," she whispered. "I'm tortured."

"What?" her mother said, and stared, with that child-like curiosity with which she had greeted Madeleine's advent into the world, and which she had never lost.

"Tortured by the insight that both enables and compels me to see through the sham and pretense."

Her father grunted and blinked twice. He almost always blinked twice when she began sounding pedantic like that. He suspected that she did it deliberately to show off his ignorance.

"Funny," she said, mostly to herself, "that I allowed myself to be sold this--Mars--the biggest piece of ersatz junk of all!"

"Madeleine!" her mother exclaimed.

"The advertisers got here first," Madeleine said, glancing at Don. "The hucksters." She stopped talking. Mars offered none of itself, but the others didn't understand. Mars was only what the hucksters wanted it to be.

She wondered how she could hang on to the end of the season--even though it was only three more days. They had committed themselves to a rigidly-planned schedule, a clockwork program that had them and the other "vacationing" tourists jumping and squeaking like automatons: Exotic Martian sports. Martian tennis played on a hundred-yard court with the players hopping through the rarified air and lower gravity with an almost obscene abandon. Swimming in a strangely buoyant water, called, of course, Martian water. Sandsled racing. Air-hopping with the de-gravity balloons. Spectator sports, including gladiators who leaped into the phony ca.n.a.ls and fought to the death against the hideous-looking Martian rat-fish. There were many other "activities", in none of which Madeleine had been able to interest herself.

This last three days promised something called the "Martian Love Ritual under the Double Moons." And a climactic treasure hunt among the subterranean Martian labyrinths. They too, Madeleine was sure, were artificial.

Mrs. Ericson adjusted her polaroid gla.s.ses and waved her rickshaw boy into his harness, where his thighs tensed for the long haul. He was an incredibly huge man, taller even than those specially-bred movie stars, who averaged eight feet tall. Madeleine felt faint and clung to her camel. The Martian camels were coughing and wheezing and the sun glared horribly in the early afternoon.

Mr. Ericson looked with guarded apprehension at the six-legged camel.

Don pulled him aboard. "What a h.e.l.luva beast!" laughed Ericson. Earth camels specially bred by the big travel agencies to have a so-called "unearthly" appearance. Sad creatures with two extra, dangling limbs and a single, half-blind, blood-shot eye, watery and humbly resentful.

Pathetic mutation, Madeleine thought. Like those horrid rat-fish, like the ca.n.a.ls and the games and the ruins and those silly rituals. All ersatz.

The caravan moved along the high ridge, a narrow trail that wound back toward Martian Haven along the edge of the eroded cliffs.

"Maybe the only thing that would satisfy Madeleine," her father said, "would be a real Martian."

"But that's not in the brochure," Don said.

"What's Mars without a Martian?" giggled Mrs. Ericson.

In her own insular little world, which had been the only one Madeleine had ever been able to tolerate at all, she swayed and b.u.mped to the camel's movements. "One thing sure, Don," she said softly. "There were _real_ Martians once. So why all the phony props? You can't tell me this nonsense is better than the facts about the real Martians."

"Ask the boys who built this place. They hired me, they make the rules,"

Don said. He did not look at her.

"How did you ever end up with a job like this, Don?"

"The outfit that built the Haven hired all the old Martian colonists and their descendants, any who wanted to work for them. So I took a job.

Pay's good. It's seasonal. Anyway, I like Mars."

"Sure," she said. "You must love it--to corrupt it like this."

"Mars was here, it'll still be here after the last tourist goes."

She laughed thinly. Don, with her, was trying to play another role, one he hoped she might find interesting. "You're a symbol of the phoniness, Don. Trained in the special host schools. Selected for your beautiful resemblance to a statue of Adonis. Artificially created to be an ever-smiling host of good-will, just like these pathetic camels have been bred for an exotic touch. No real intelligence, Don, nor originality. And everything you do or say is right out of the text book on how to make friends and influence tourists."

Don didn't look at her. His fingers trembled on the camel's reins.

"What is this fascinating-sounding 'Ritual of Love' going to be like?"

giggled Mrs. Ericson.

"It's an authentic exploitation of actual rituals once held by the Martians," Don said. "It has a pagan religious significance. The moons were male and female, and when they--ah--united their light, the Martians held feasts, fertility rituals--highly symbolic rites."

"Only symbolic?" said Mrs. Ericson, pretending blase disappointment.