Mars Needs Rich Wednesday, August 27, 2003

What an exchange, from "The End of the Battle." Angela's father has just died. Three whole human lives in these lines.


Angela Box-Bender was on the platform to meet the train. She had an air of gravity and sorrow.

"I say, Angie," her husband asked, "how long is this business going to take?"

"Not more than an hour. Father Geoghegan wanted to preach a panegyric but Uncle Peregrine stopped him."

"Any chance of anything to eat? I left the flat at six this morning."

"You're expected at the presbytery. I think you'll find something there."

"They don't expect me to take any part, do they? I mean carry anything? I don't know the drill."

"No," said Angela. "This is one of the times when no one expects anything of you."

Overwhelmed by things like that, I asked a good buddy what I should be writing. My science fiction isn't selling, and every time I plunge into the mainstream, I wake up an hour later with a medic forcing the water out of my lungs. My friend's take:

We each are CURSED by our own perspective and voice. Escape it to your detriment; you must obey it.

Here's the next question, then: What is my perspective and voice?

I'll leave you with a page, probably one of the best I ever wrote. It's a book about Mars, so I figure it's timely.


I’d gotten halfway across the field when he came out the front door. He had a week’s worth of beard on his chin and he was wearing the same pants he’d ruined at the beach.

I called to him without thinking it over. He ran.

The whole battleship sky fell on me. Even worse when he threw his arms around me and clapped me close. Everything inside me got squeezed together—all the sins I’d clawed out of the world and the last big evil I’d have to push through to finish the job.

“I been praying for you,” Fatso said.

“Somebody has.”

He felt my bandages bunching under my shirt and leaned back for a look. “You been hurt?”

I shrugged. “I been worse.”

He chewed that over. “Jack’s dead, ain’t he?”

“For good.”

Fatso looked in my eyes, squinting against the snowflakes. “I’m sorry, Tillie.”

I squeezed his arm and backed off a couple steps. I couldn’t have him watching me while I did it.

“Listen to me, buddy,” I said. My hands were shaking worse than my voice. “I need you to go across the road and get in the car that’s parked there. Tonight I’ll buy you a dinner on somebody else’s dime and lay it all out for you. But right now I need you walking away from here.”

Fatso breathed in a lungful of cold and let it out slow. “Why do you want my back to you, Tillie?”

“You gotta trust me on this one,” I said. “It’s the right thing.”

He sussed it at once. “Don’t kill him,” he said.

“I can’t promise that.”

At that he gave me his eyes. They were full of tears but full of business. “That ain’t good enough anymore,” he said. “If you’re gonna go in there and do him you gotta tell me why and you gotta tell me now.”

I gritted my teeth. “There are a lot of lives riding on this one getting done now.”

Fatso set his legs apart and folded his arms across his chest. Snow settled on him like he was a statue.

“You can either tell me,” he said, “or you can try and get past me.”

The old anger rose. He had to have his nose in everything. He had to make everything tough. He had to make me stand in the cold and go over all of it so that what? So that he could agree to do what he should’ve done from the start. Fifteen years he’d been doing this to me.

You had to hand it to Jack. Alone was better than this.

Remember this.

“Well?” Fatso’s bare arms trembled against the November chill. “What’s it gonna be?”

I took a step toward him. He dropped into a fighting crouch.

“Oh for Chrissakes,” I said. I rolled my eyes and threw open my arms.

He gave me a smile, a real twelve-year-old number. The whole gray sky rushed out of me.

“Of course I’ll tell you,” I said, clapping his back. “I’ll tell you everything.”

“Thanks, buddy.” He gave me a thump in return. Something inside me got knocked out of place, but Mary could fix it later. “You don’t know what it means to me.”

I dunno why. The snow and his smile and a bullet in my heart. I loaded up my lungs and said, “You know something, Fatso? You and Mary. I love you two more than anything in this world.”

Fatso laughed right in my ear. “I bet you been saving that one up for a while.”

“Half my life,” I said.

@ 8:55:00 PM,

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