The Warlord of Saturn's Moons - Eleanor Arnason, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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THE WARLORD OF
SATURN’S MOONS
ELEANOR ARNASON
Here I am, a silver-haired maiden lady of thirty-five, a feeder of stray
cats, a window-ledge gardener, well on my way to the African violet and
antimacassar stage. I can see myself at fifty, fat and a little crazy, making
cucumber sandwiches for tea, and I view my future with mixed feelings.
Whatever became of my childhood ambitions: joining the space patrol;
winning a gold medal at the Olympics; climbing Mount Everest alone in
my bathing suit, sustained only by my indomitable will and strange
psychic arts learned from Hindu mystics? The saddest words of tongue or
pen are something-or-other what might have been, I think. I light up a
cigar and settle down to write another chapter of
The Warlord of Saturn’s
Moons.
A filthy habit you say, though I’m not sure if you’re referring to
smoking cigars or writing science fiction. True, I reply, but both activities
are pleasurable, and we maiden ladies lead lives that are notoriously short
on pleasure.
So back I go to the domes of Titan and my redheaded heroine
deathraying down the warlord’s minions. Ah, the smell of burning flesh,
the spectacle of blackened bodies collapsing. Even on paper it gets a lot of
hostility out of you, so that your nights aren’t troubled by dreams of
murder. Terribly unrestful, those midnight slaughters and waking shaking
in the darkness, your hands still feeling pressure from grabbing the victim
or fighting off the murderer.
Another escape! In a power-sledge, my heroine races across Titan’s
methane snow, and I go and make myself tea. There’s a paper on the
kitchen table, waiting to tell me all about yesterday’s arsons, rapes and
bloody murders. Quickly I stuff it into the garbage pail. Outside, the sky is
hazy. Another high-pollution day, I think. I can see incinerator smoke
rising from the apartment building across the street, which means there’s
no air alert yet. Unless, of course, they’re breaking the law over there. I
fling open a cabinet and survey the array of teas. Earl Grey? I ponder, or
Assam? Gunpowder? Jasmine? Gen Mai Cha? Or possibly an herb tea:
sassafras, mint, Irish moss or mu. Deciding on Assam, I put water on,
 then go back to write an exciting chase through the icy Titanian
mountains. A pursuer’s sledge goes over a precipice and, as my heroine
hears his long shriek on her radio, my tea kettle starts shrieking. I hurry
into the kitchen. Now I go through the tea-making ceremony: pouring
boiling water into the pot, sloshing the water around and pouring it out,
measuring the tea in, pouring more boiling water on top of the tea. All the
while my mind is with my heroine, smiling grimly as she pilots the
power-sledge between bare cliffs. Above her in the dark sky is the huge
crescent of Saturn, a shining white line slashing across it—the famous
Rings. While the tea steeps, I wipe off a counter and wash a couple of
mugs. I resist a sudden impulse to pull the newspaper out from among the
used tea leaves and orange peelings. I already know what’s in it. The
Detroit murder count will exceed 1,000 again this year; the war in
Thailand is going strong; most of Europe is out on strike. I’m far better off
on Titan with my heroine, who is better able to deal with her problems
than I am to deal with mine. A deadly shot, she has also learned strange
psychic arts from Hindu mystics, which give her great strength,
endurance, mental alertness and a naturally pleasant body odor. I wipe my
hands and look at them, noticing the bitten fingernails, the torn cuticles.
My heroine’s long, slender, strong hands have two-inch nails filed to a
point and covered with a plastic paint that makes them virtually
unbreakable. When necessary, she uses them as claws. Her cuticles, of
course, are in perfect condition.
I pour myself a cup of tea and return to the story.
Now my heroine is heading for the mountain hideout where her partner
waits: a tall, thin, dour fellow with one shining steel prosthetic hand. She
doesn’t know his name and she suspects he himself may have forgotten it.
He insists on being called 409, his number on the prison asteroid from
which he has escaped. She drives as quickly as she dares, thinking of his
long face, burned almost black by years of strong radiation on Mars and in
space, so the white webbing of scars on its right side shows up clearly. His
eyes are grey, so pale they seem almost colorless. As I write about 409, I
find myself stirred by the same passion that stirs my heroine. I begin to
feel uneasy, so I stop and drink some tea. I can see I’m going to have
trouble with 409. It’s never wise to get too involved with one’s characters.
Besides, I’m not his type. I imagine the way he’d look at me, indifference
evident on his dark, scarred face. I could, of course, kill him off. My
heroine would then spend the rest of the story avenging him, though she’d
never get to the real murderer—me. But this solution, while popular
among writers, is unfair.
 I go into the kitchen, extract a carrot from a bunch in the icebox, clean
it and eat it. After that, I write the heroine’s reunion with 409. Neither of
them is demonstrative. They greet each other with apparent indifference
and retire to bed. I skip the next scene. How can I watch that red-headed
hussy in bed with the man I’m beginning to love? I continue the story at
the moment when their alarm bell rings, and they awake to find the
warlord’s rocket planes have landed all around their hideout. A desperate
situation! 409 suggests that he make a run for it in their rocket plane.
While the warlord’s minions pursue him, my heroine can sneak away in
the power-sledge. The plan has little chance of success, but they can think
of none better. They bid farewell to one another, and my heroine goes to
wait in the sledge for the signal telling her 409 has taken off. As she waits,
smoking a cigar, she thinks of what little she knows about 409. He was a
fighter pilot in the war against the Martian colony and was shot down and
captured. While in prison something happened to him that he either can’t
remember or refuses to talk about, and, when the war ended and he was
released, he became a criminal. As for herself, she had been an ordinary
sharpshooter and student of Hindu mysticism, a follower of Swami
Bluestone of the Brooklyn Vedic Temple and Rifle Range. Then she
discovered by accident the warlord’s plot to overthrow the government of
Titan, the only one of Saturn’s satellites not under his control. With her
information about the plot, the government may still be saved. She has to
get to Titan City with the microfilm dot!
The alarm bell rings, and she feels the ground shake as 409’s plane
takes off. Unfortunately I’m writing the story from my heroine’s point of
view. I want to describe 409 blasting off, the warlord’s rocket planes
taking off after him, chasing him as he flies through the narrow, twisting
valleys, the planes’ rockets flaring red in the valley shadows and missiles
exploding into yellow fireballs. All through this, of course, 409’s scarred
face remains tranquil and his hands move quickly and surely over the
plane’s controls. His steel prosthetic hand gleams in the dim light from the
dials. But I can’t put this in the story, since my heroine sees none of it as
she slides off in the opposite direction, down a narrow trail hidden by
overhanging cliffs.
I am beginning to feel tense, I don’t know why. Possibly 409’s dilemma
is disturbing me. He’s certainly in danger. In any case, my tea is cold. I
turn on the radio, hoping for some relaxing rock music and go to get more
tea. But it’s twenty to the hour, time for the news, and I get the weekend
body count: two men found dead in suspected westside dope house, naked
body of woman dragged out of Detroit River. I hurry back and switch to a
country music station. On it, someone’s singing about how he intends to
 leave the big city and go back down south. As I go back into the kitchen, I
think:
Carry me back to Titan.
That’s where I want to be.
I want to repose
On the methane snows
At the edge of a frozen sea.
I pour out the old tea and refill the cup with tea that’s hot.
The radio begins to make that awful beepity-beep-beepity sound that
warns you the news is coming up. I switch back to the rock station, where
the news is now over. I’m safe for another fifty-five minutes, unless there’s
a special news flash to announce a five-car pile-up or an especially ghastly
murder.
The plan works! For my heroine, at least. She doesn’t know yet if 409
got away. She speeds off un-pursued. The power-sledge’s heating system
doesn’t quite keep her warm, and the landscape around her is forbidding:
bare cliffs and narrow valleys full of methane snow, overhead the dark blue
sky. Saturn has set, and the tiny sun is rising, though she can’t see it yet.
On the high mountains the ice fields begin to glitter with its light. On she
races, remembering how she met 409 in the slums of The Cup on
Ganymede, as she fled the warlord’s assassins. She remembers being
cornered with no hope of escape. Then behind the two assassins a tall
figure appeared and the shining steel hand smashed down on the back of
one assassin’s head. As the other assassin turned, he got the hand across
his face. A moment or two more, and both the assassins were on the
ground, unconscious. Then she saw 409’s twisted grin for the first time
and his colorless eyes appraising her.
There I go, I think, getting all heated up over 409. The radio is
beginning to bother me, so I shut it off and re-light my cigar. I find myself
wishing that men like 409 really existed. Increasingly in recent years, I’ve
found real men boring. Is it possible, as some scientists argue, that the Y
chromosome produces an inferior human being? There certainly seem to
be far fewer interesting men than interesting women. But theories arguing
that one kind of human being is naturally inferior make me anxious. I feel
my throat muscles tightening and the familiar tense, numb feeling
spreading across my face and my upper back. Quickly I return to my story.
 Now out on the snowy plain, my heroine can see the transparent domes
of Titan City ahead of her, shining in the pale sunlight. Inside the domes
the famous pastel towers rise, their windows reflecting the sun. Her
power-sledge speeds down the road, through the drifts that half cover it.
Snow sprays up on either side of the sledge, so my heroine has trouble
seeing to the left and right. As a result, it’s some time before she sees the
power-sledges coming up behind her on the right. At the same moment
that she looks over and sees them, their sleek silver bodies shining in the
sunlight and snow-sprays shooting up around them, her radio begins to go
beep-beep-beep. She flicks it on. The voice of Janos Black, the warlord’s
chief agent on Titan, harsh and slurred by a thick Martian accent, tells her
the bad news: 409’s plane has been shot down. He ejected before it
crashed. Even now the warlord’s men are going after the ejection capsule,
which is high on a cliff, wedged between a rock spire and the cliff wall.
Janos offers her a trade: 409 for the microdot. But Janos may well be
lying; 409 may have gotten away or else been blown up: She feels a sudden
constriction of her throat at the thought of 409 dead. She flicks off the
radio and pushes the power-sledge up to top speed. She realizes as she
does so that 409 is unlikely to fare well if Janos gets ahold of him. Janos’
wife and children died of thirst after the great Martian network of
pipelines was blown apart by Earther bombs, and Janos knows that 409
was a pilot in the Earther expeditionary force.
I write another exciting chase, this one across the snowy plain toward
the pink, green, blue and yellow towers of Titan City. The warlord’s
power-sledges are gaining. Their rockets hit all around my heroine’s
sledge, and fire and black smoke erupt out of the snow. Swearing in a low
monotone, she swings the sledge back and forth in a zig-zag evasive
pattern.
I stop to puff on my cigar and discover it’s gone out again. My tea is
cold. But the story’s beginning at last to interest me. I keep on writing.
As my heroine approaches the entrance to Titan City, she’s still a short
distance ahead of her pursuers. Her radio beeps. It’s Janos Black again.
He tells her his men have gotten to the ejection capsule and are lowering it
down the cliff. Any minute now, they’ll have it down where they can open
it and get 409 out.
Ignoring Janos, she concentrates on slowing her sledge and bringing it
through the city’s outer gate into the airlock. A moment or two later, she’s
safe. But what about 409?
Frankly, I don’t know. I stand and stretch, decide to take a bath, and go
to turn the water on. The air pollution must be worse than I originally
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