by Tuğrul Sultanzade
When he received a call from the settlement in Crater Ansu, Yakut Hanub was on the open plains. In a velvet infinity … He felt that such places gave him a spiritual strength. Here there were only ghosts chasing each other and the puny atmosphere of Mars. Hanub had only been waiting for death lately. He had been meditating in the nothingness that stretched as far as the eye could see, but the call he received drew him to life. He had to see Joker Chief Kenimb urgently. He began a relentless march northward.
Ansu was an artificial crater. Many craters like Ansu had appeared in an age when nuclear fairies had flickered and faded on the red planet. Back then, humanity was younger and dreams were sweeter.
My only dream now is a quick death, Hanub said.
His life had been slow and painful. The gift Mars had given him was a tough, radiation-resistant skin. It trapped water, kept him warm and protected his body against gene destruction. But it made it harder and harder for Hanub to move every day, because his skin was constantly hardening. One day it would harden completely and Yakut Hanub would become a statue, unable to move, waiting to die. Knowing this did not frighten him; on the contrary, the certainty of his end gave him peace. He only needed to find a safe hollow and retreat into it. There he would meditate until his heart, too, was petrified.
As he walked north, his stiff legs reminded him that the end was drawing ever closer. The southerly wind brought spindly clouds of carbon, dropping snow on the velvet desert like a lament. Then the day closed and opened again. This cycle repeated itself three times. Near the end of the fourth cycle, Crater Ansu appeared in the distance. A broken dome of a lantern, skeletons of buttresses and snowdrifts.
A pair of Jokers standing guard at the mouth of the crater pointed their digital bows at Hanub.
“Take off your mask!” they said, “and identify yourself.”
Hanub removed the mask he had made from his own skin, revealing a face with a large eye and a mouth like a notch in the center. The guards recognized this face. “Come on. Our chief is waiting for you. He’s in the North West Compound. Don’t linger too long. We’ll keep an eye on you.”
Outsiders were not welcome in Crater Ansu. Yakut Hanub was no exception. Even as a Joker, he was shadowy and sinister; an outsider. The Jokers of the Northern Plains had fled the massacres in the south. Now they had become isolated, scattered tribes. Hanub was not angry with them. Living in this crater would make one an enemy even to oneself. The sky was a web of shattered glass, the pale night indifferent. The North West Compound consisted of a few containers and a cucumber-shaped tower rising above them.
Except for the light of the Totemvision emanating from the tower, the compound was shrouded in darkness. Hanub passed through the entrance of the tower and climbed the stairs built with flimsy synthetic material. Three flights later he reached the Observation Room. Chief Kenimb sat cross-legged in front of the Totemvision. His balding head was full of wrinkles. Hidden among these wrinkles was an eye. Without turning his head back, the chief greeted Hanub with his third eye.
“Come on,” he invited. “Sit down.”
Hanub did as he was told, almost without making a sound. Like placing a dead man in his grave.
On the Totemvision screen were images of the Martian surface taken from space. But the images tingled. It was as if something had attacked the screen, half liquid, half gas, contaminating the images.
“Get some rest. You’ve taken long roads to come here.”
“My whole life is a long road,” Hanub said slowly, reverently. “My skin is getting harder and harder by the day.”
“My daughter has the gift you were given. She is like you, but I made her sleep so she would not die …”
“You have the means,” Hanub said. “You can give her gene therapy.”
“No,” said the chief. “My daughter is like a flower growing in a container between life and death. I am here, no different from her. This is our destiny. The gifts of Mars are the seal of our destiny. I will not change it.”
“I hate Mars and its gifts as much as I hate everything else.”
The chief laughed at these words. “I felt the same way when I saw the gift Mars gave my daughter when she was born, but I am an old man now, and my daughter is as peaceful as any living being can be … Hate will get you nowhere.”
“Humility, too …”
Meanwhile, the tingles on the Totemvision screen began to multiply. Velvet-colored deserts, ponds and plains that looked as if they were covered in blood dust, all of them collapsed under the tingling waves.
“What is it, chief?” Hanub asked.
“The storm is approaching. The images the Totem sends are melting away in the storm.”
“My faith in the Totem is shaken at times like this.”
“Alas. You have not understood the real issue. Even if terrible storms are raging here, the Totem is in orbit now, intact, and its size would frighten the Naked God. Here, on the surface of Mars, even if the gates of hell open and all the demons come storming in and attack us, the Totem will remain in orbit, scattering the memory of us into space with its sweet, mesmerizing light.”
“Forgive me, chief. The Totem is of no use to us after we are dead or while we are alive. Even the most miserable followers of the Naked God are superior to us.”
“They are not,” said the chief. There was irony and humility in his words. “They may hunt the Jokers in the south, but the Northern Plains are now in our hands.”
“And how long can the Jokers hold them?”
“As long as there is trade and perseverance. There’s a scavenger market about twenty days from here. They sell high quality parts they bring from all over Mars and even from the Belt. From there we buy the necessary materials and make weapons. Soon we’ll fix the ceiling of the lantern… but we won’t cover it with glass, we’ll cover it with durable steel … It will become a fortress and we’ll tunnel deeper … but there’s a problem: that’s why we called you. Someone is kidnapping Jokers. Especially young Jokers, by that unknown enemy. The only thing we know about him is that he is not one of the Naked God’s followers …”
“How do you know that?”
“They don’t kidnap Jokers because they loathe us. But there are others who are interested in the gifts Mars has given us. They are more dangerous than the disciples. They want to scrape the gifts of Mars from our souls and bodies and steal them. This is one of the two things we know about the nameless enemy. He wants to take the gifts of Mars from us. And he keeps heading north. He’s probably going to the Arctic. Maybe he’s already there. With all the Jokers he’s kidnapped … We’re pretty sure he’s one person. Probably not a man. He must be a fleeing shadow emerging from the abyss. He wants to crossbreed the shadow of darkness with the shadow of the planet. He will create a mighty body for himself …”
“You want me to make him disappear?”
“No,” said the chief. “I can’t ask the impossible. I just want you to find out what happened to the kidnapped Jokers … and, if possible, let the demon know we’re ready to cooperate. If you come back with convincing evidence that the job is done, you will be rewarded according to the effect that evidence has on us. Maybe we’ll give you a gear, for example. Who knows how tiring it must be for you to walk, whereas if you had a gear, you would be able to move about as you wish, and more easily choose the best place for your final meditation.”
Hanub savored this exquisite vision. A suicide kiss on the lips of Mars and the red earth trampled by the gear.
“I’ll do it, you’ve given me a reason to live the rest of my life…”
Meanwhile, the screen of the Totemvision went black. It looked like a heart pumping blood into itself. The storm was now wrapped around the tower. Mars was groaning. Everything was merging into the night and the night was roaring like a demon from eternity.
“Wait,” said the chief. “This storm will last a long time.”
***
Yakut Hanub left Ansu Crater the next day. The storm had subsided, the blue evening had lowered its cold veils. The night was growing silent. It was like the ghost of an ancient tsunami. Spectrums of light and clusters of dust migrated from place to place like living beings, creating bright visions. A dozen four-pointed stars. Then a headache. The endless song of darkness. Open like a roaring mouth, shining stars and the pale blue Earth like an ode in honor of them all. I would like to wake up there when I die, Hanub said to himself, but not in this body. Maybe in the body I had on the First Day.
The First Day was a hypothetical pre-birth purgatory invented by believers in the Naked God. There, souls awaiting life wandered in bodies that took their image from the reflection of the Naked God. Mars was like a mirror distorting the image. When some souls came to life on Mars, they broke away from the image of the Naked God and became contaminated with the vile “gifts” of Mars. This is what happened to the Jokers. They were unfortunate beings whose image and existence were raped by Mars. They were a blasphemy against the Naked God from the moment they were born, and they were all doomed to Mars, along with the gifts they carried in their distorted bodies. Their bodies were their coffins. They could only get off this planet when they died. And death was a mystery? For a Joker, it was both salvation and an enemy. Because life, even poisoned by Mars, struggled to continue to exist in every body. Hanub was aware of the lamp of life burning within him. He waited quietly for death without frightening it or provoking its flames.
But how far?
The mask he had created from his own skin was hurting him. His legs insisted on not moving. The shadows were pale and indistinct. The blue evening of Mars was as weary as a dying angel. The Pole would perhaps be Hanub’s grave. But he wanted to die meditating, not fighting.
The further north you went, the more mournful, yet hostile, things became. The plains near the Pole were not velvet, they resembled ragged entrails. Was Mars a murdered god, bleeding incessantly, struggling to wake up …
The walk, full of thoughts, nightmares and pain, went on and on through the myriad color changes of the sky. Finally, when the hills began, Yakut Hanub stopped and looked back one last time. There, against the red backdrop of nothingness, was his life stretching as far as the eye could see. It was as if she was crying for him, like a lover in love and heartbroken.
It took him two days to cross the hills that formed the last frontier. His legs ached with a pain that tried to take over his entire being. At the beginning of the third day, the sky, woven with fibers of light of various hues, gifted him his purgatory. Under the pale morning of Mars, a desert of white ice appeared. The glaciers were like the hair of a cursed goddess banished here millions of years ago. They reached in spirals to the foot of the hills, wanting to grab them and pull them into the goddess’ doom. It was pleasant to walk on the ice because the ground was neither hard nor rough. It was unlike any texture on the surface of Mars. In this white inferno, Hanub could feel the breaths of time. The snow falling from the puny carbon clouds burned the suit he had created from his own skin. Life stretched on one side and shrank on the other, and Hanub drifted towards his truth.
He didn’t even know what day of the walk it was anymore. He hadn’t counted how many times the light disappeared and came back. He hadn’t counted the darkness, because he couldn’t see the light.
If he met the demon the chief had talked about here, he probably wouldn’t be able to fight. He was too tired. And he wasn’t going to rest. It would be useless. The savages were armed with the mightiest gifts of Mars. They were the misty devils of the red planet. The Jokers, leper angels.
One night, the haze dissipated completely. Space was naked. Rising from the horizon, Totem appeared in the sky. It was like a tear flowing against gravity. Totem’s light was brighter than the stars. It was sending its powerful magnetic waves right here, right now, above Hanub. It was as if it was blessing Hanub himself, not the planet. First came colors, then sounds; the sound of an angel crying. Hanub knelt down and thanked . One eye closed in pain. He lost consciousness.
It was daytime when he woke up. The wind was whistling, blowing dust and ice particles. But there was something else, an incomprehensible sensation emitted by an invisible alien being. The wind was not enough to disperse this eerie feeling that made the hairs stand on end. It was as if the invisible being was standing there somewhere, rigid, watching Hanub with judgement.
This cannot be death, Hanub thought, for the lamp of life burning within him smoked softly, with greater calm than ever. So what was this? Was it the demon that Chief Kenimb had spoken of?
“I am aware of what you are thinking,” the alien being spoke in a voice that vibrated the radiant airwaves, not leaving Hanub in suspense any longer. The voice was strong enough to bend the membrane of the sky.
Hanub looked around in horror, but he could see nothing. There was only a white void and spirals of sensation travelling through it.
“Come and see the truth,” the strange being spoke in a voice that echoed throughout the Pole.
“I have come to make a deal,” Hanub shouted, suppressing his fear and accepting the end. “I have no other intention.”
“I don’t deal with the living!” the voice replied. “The chief already knows that!”
Hanub shuddered. “I’m willing to die,” he said desperately. “I live for the day I die, as long as it happens soon!”
“Are you willing to see the truth? The truth is more terrible than death…”
Before Hanub could fully digest either fear or astonishment, he saw an object buried under the snow shining with a sweet glow. It was a glass-covered capsule. It was a mirror that turned Mars upside down. Inside it was Hanub the Yakut himself.
He recognised his reflection as soon as he saw it. This is my true body … bereft of the gift of Mars, as naked as on the First Day.
Tuğrul Sultanzade is from Famagusta, Cyprus, and is a science fiction writer and English teacher. He has published works in numerous anthologies. Sultanzade primarily writes in Turkish, but his stories have also appeared in international anthologies such as Captain’s Log, Über den Wolken und andere Geschichten, Radioactive Dreams and the latest Uncharted Worlds. He graduated from the Eastern Mediterranean University with a degree in English Language Teaching and currently works in the field of ELT. He is fluent in Turkish, English, and Azerbaijani, and has some proficiency in Russian and German.