3
The Laurel
We walk hand in hand with the others from our township through
the tunnelroads to the Common. Lune drones on above us on the
HC, high above, as the Goldbrows (Aureate to be technic) ought to
be. They show the horrors of a terrorist bomb killing a Red mining
crew and an Orange technician group. The Sons of Ares are blamed.
Their strange glyph of Ares, a cruel helmet with spiked sunbursts
exploding from the crown, burns across the screen; blood drips from
the spikes. Children are shown mangled. The Sons of Ares are called
tribal murderers, called bringers of chaos. They are condemned. The
Society’s Gray police and soldiers move rubble. Two soldiers of the
Obsidian Color, colossal men and women nearly twice my size, are
shown along with nimble Yellow doctors carrying several victims
from the blast.
There are no Sons of Ares in Lykos. Their futile war does not
touch us; yet again a reward is oered for information on Ares, the
terrorist king. We have heard the broadcast a thousand times, and
still it feels like ction. The Sons think we are mistreated, so they
blow things up. It is a pointless tantrum. Any damage they do delays
the progress of making Mars ready for the other Colors. It hurts
humanity.
34
In the tunnelroad, where boys compete to touch the ceiling, the
people of the townships ow in merriment toward the Laureltide
dance. We sing the Laureltide song as we go—a swooping melody of
a man nding his bride in a eld of gold. There’s laughter as the
young boys try running along the walls or doing rows of ips, only
to fall on their faces or be bested by a girl.
Lights are strung along the lengthy corridor. In the distance,
drunk Uncle Narol, old now at thirty-ve, plays his zither for the
children who dance about our legs; even he cannot scowl forever.
He wears the instrument suspended on shoulder straps so that it
rests at his hips, with its plastic soundboard and its many taut metal
strings facing up toward the ceiling. The right thumb strums the
strings, except when the index nger drops down or when the
thumb picks single strings, all while the left hand picks out the bass
line string by string. It is maddeningly dicult to make the zither
sound anything but mournful. Uncle Narol’s are equal to the task,
though mine only make tragic music.
He used to play to me, teaching me to move to the dances my
father never had the chance to teach me. He even taught me the
forbidden dance, the one they’ll kill you for. We’d do it in the old
mines. He would hit my ankles with a switch till I pirouetted
seamlessly through the swooping movements, a length of metal in
my hand like a sword. And when I got it right, he would kiss my
brow and tell me I was my father’s son. It was his lessons that
taught me to move, that let me best the other kids as we played
games of tag and ghosts in the old tunnels.
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“The Golds dance in pairs, Obsidians in threes, Grays in dozens,”
he told me. “We dance alone, because only alone do Helldivers drill.
Only alone can a boy become a man.”
I miss those days, days when I was young enough that I didn’t
judge him for the stink of swill on his breath. I was eleven then.
Only ve years ago. Yet it feels a lifetime.
I get pats on the back from those of Lambda and even Varlo the
baker tilts me his brow and tosses Eo a st of bread. They’ve heard
about the Laurel, no doubt. Eo tucks the bread into her skirts for
later and gives me a curious look.
“You’re grinning like a fool,” she says to me, pinching my side.
“What did you do?”
I shrug and try to wipe the grin from my face. It is impossible.
“Well, you’re very proud of something,” she says suspiciously.
Reagan and Iro, Kieran’s son and daughter, my niece and nephew,
patter by. Three and three, the twins are just fast enough to outrace
both Diona, Kieran’s wife, and my mother.
My mother’s smile is one of a woman who has seen what life has
to oer and is, at best, bemused. “It seems you’ve burned yourself,
my heart,” she says when she sees my gloved hands. Her voice is
slow, ironic.
“A blister,” Eo says for me. “Nasty one.”
Mother shrugs. “His father came home with worse.”
I put my arm around her shoulders. They are thinner than they
used to be when she taught me, as all women teach their sons, the
songs of our people.
36
“Was that a hint of worry I heard, Ma?” I ask.
“Worry? Me? Oh, silly child,” Ma sighs with a slow smile. I kiss
her on the cheek.
Half the clans are already drunk when we arrive in the Common.
In addition to a dancing people, we’re a drunken people. The
Tinpots let us alone in that. Hang a man for no real reason and you
might get some grumblings from the townships. But force sobriety
upon us, and you’ll be picking up the pieces for a bloodydamn
month. Eo is of the mind that the fungus, grendel, which we distill,
isn’t native to Mars and was instead planted here to enslave us to
the swill. She brings this up whenever my mother makes a new
batch, and my mother usually replies by taking a swig and saying,
“Rather a drink be my master than a man. These chains taste
sweet.”
They’ll taste even sweeter with the syrups we’ll get from the
Laurel boxes. They have avors for alcohol, like berry and
something called cinnamon. Perhaps I’ll even get a new zither made
of wood instead of metal. Sometimes they give those out. Mine is an
old, frayed thing. I’ve played it too long. But it was my father’s.
The music swells ahead of us in the Common—bawdy tunes of
improvised percussion and wailing zithers. We’re joined by Omegas
and Upsilons, jostling about merrily toward the taverns. All the
tavern doors have been thrown open so their smoke and sound
billow into the Common’s plaza. Tables ring the plaza and a space is
left clear surrounding the central gallows so that there is room to
dance.
37
The Common is a tiered circular spiral. Taverns and repair depots
ring the lowest level; Gamma homes ll the next several levels,
followed by supply depots, a sheer wall, and then, high above in the
ceiling, a sunken metal dome with nanoGlass viewports. We call
that place the Pot. It is the fortress where our keepers live and sleep.
Beyond that is the uninhabitable surface of our planet—a barren
wasteland that I’ve only seen on the HC. The helium-3 we mine is
supposed to change that.
The dancers and jugglers and singers of the Laureltide have
already begun. Eo catches sight of Loran and Kieran and gives them
a holler. They’re at a long, packed table near the Soggy Drop, a
tavern where the oldest of our clan, Ol’ Ripper, holds court and tells
tales to drunken folks. He’s passed out on the table tonight. It’s a
shame. I would have liked for him to see me nally get us the
Laurel.
At our feasts, where there’s hardly food enough for each soul to
hold a bit in their gob, the drink and dance take center. Loran pours
me a mug of swill before I even sit down. He’s always trying to get
others to drink so he can put ridiculous ribbons in their hair. He
clears way for Eo to sit beside his own wife, Dio, her sister, twin in
looks if not birth.
Loran has a love for Eo like her brother Liam would, but I know
he was once as taken with her as he ever was with Dio. In fact, he
bent a knee to my wife when she turned fourteen. But then again,
half the lads joined him in that. No sweating it. She made her choice
right and clear.
38
Kieran’s children swarm him. His wife kisses his lips; mine kisses
his brow and tousles his red hair. After a day in the Webbery
harvesting spiderworm silk, I don’t know how the wives manage to
look so lovely. I was born handsome, face angular and slim, but the
mines have done their part to change me. I’m tall, still growing.
Hair still like old blood, irises still as rust-red as Octavia au Lune’s
are golden. My skin is tight and pale, but I’m pocked with scars—
burns, cuts. Won’t be long till I look hard as Dago or tired as Uncle
Narol.
But the women, they’re beyond us, beyond me. Lovely and spry
despite the Webbery, despite the children they bear. They wear
layered skirts down past their knees and blouses of half a dozen
reds. Never anything else. Always red. They’re the heart of the
clans. And how much more beautiful they will look wrapped in the
imported bows and ribbons and laces contained in the Laurel boxes.
I touch the Sigils on my hands, a bonelike texture. It’s a crude Red
circle with an arrow and cross-hatching. It feels right. Eo’s doesn’t.
Her hair and eyes may be ours, but she could be one of the
Goldbrows we see on the holoCan. She deserves it. Then I see her
smack Loran hard on the head as he throws back a mug of Ma’s rice-
swill. God, if he’s placing about the pieces, placed her well. I smile.
But as I look behind her, my smile fades. Above the leaping dancers,
amid the hundred swirling skirts and thumping boots and clapping
hands, sways a single skeleton upon the cold, tall gallows. Others do
not notice it. To me, it is a shadow, a reminder of my father’s fate.
39
Though we are diggers, we are not permitted to bury our dead. It
is another of the Society’s laws. My father swayed for two months
till they cut his skeleton down and ground his bones to dust. I was
six but I tried to pull him down the rst day. My uncle stopped me. I
hated him because he kept me from my father’s body. Later, I came
to hate him again because I discovered he was weak: my father died
for something, while Uncle Narol lived and drank and squandered
his life.
“He’s a mad one, you’ll see someday. Mad and brilliant and noble,
Narol’s the best of my brothers,” my father once said.
Now he’s just the last.
I never thought my father would do the Devil’s Dance, what the
oldfolk call death by hanging. He was a man of words and peace.
But his notion was freedom, laws of our own. His dreams were his
weapons. His legacy is the Dancer’s Rebellion. It died with him on
the scaold. Nine men at once doing the Devil’s Dance, kicking and
ailing, till only he was left.
It wasn’t much of a rebellion; they thought peaceful protest would
convince the Society to increase the food rations. So they performed
the Reaping Dance in front of the gravLifts and removed bits of
machinery from the drills so that they wouldn’t work. The gambit
failed. Only winning the Laurel can get you more food.
It’s on eleven when my uncle sits down with his zither. He eyes
me something nasty, drunk as a fool on Yuletide. We don’t share
words, though he has a kind one for Eo and she for him. Everyone
loves Eo.
40
It’s when Eo’s mother come over and kisses me on the back of my
head and says very loudly, “We heard the news, you golden boy.
The Laurel! You are your father’s son,” that my uncle stirs.
“What’s the matter, Uncle?” I ask. “Have gas?”
His nostils are wide. “You little shiteater!”
He launches himself across the table and soon we’re a muddle of
sts and elbows on the ground. He’s big, but I ip him down and
pound his nose with my bad hand till Eo’s father and Kieran pull me
o. Uncle Narol spits at me. It’s more blood and swill than anything
else. Then we’re drinking again at opposite ends of the table. My
mother rolls her eyes.
“He’s just bitter he didn’t do a bloodydamn thing to get the
Laurel. Shown up is all,” Loran says of his father.
“Bloodydamn coward wouldn’t know how to win the Laurel if it
landed in his lap,” I say, scowling.
Eo’s father pats me on the head and sees his daughter xing my
burned hand under the table. I slip my gloves back on. He winks at
me.
Eo’s gured out the fuss about the Laurel by the time the Tinpots
arrive, but she’s not excited as I’d hoped she’d be. She twists her
skirts in her hands and smiles at me. But her smiles are more like
grimaces. I don’t understand why she’s so apprehensive. None of the
other clans are. Many come to pay their respects; all of the
Helldivers do, except Dago. He’s sitting at a group of shiny Gamma
tables—the only ones with more food than swill—smoking down a
burner.
41
“Can’t wait for the sod to be eating regular rations,” Loran
chuckles. “Dago’s never tasted peasant fare before.”
“Yet somehow he’s thinner than a woman,” Kieran adds.
I laugh along with Loran and push a meager piece of bread to Eo.
“Cheer up,” I tell her. “This is a night for celebrating.”
“I’m not hungry,” she replies.
“Not even if the bread has cinnamon on it?” Soon it will.
She gives me that half smile, as if she knows something I do not.
At twelve, a coterie of Tinpots descend in gravBoots from the Pot.
Their armor is shoddy and stained. Most are boys or old men retired
from Earth’s wars. But that’s not what matters. They carry their
thumpers and scorchers in buckled holsters. I’ve never seen either
weapon used. There’s no need. They’ve got the air, the food, the
port. We haven’t a scorcher to shoot. Not that Eo wouldn’t like to
steal one.
The muscle in her jaw is exing as she watches the Tinpots oat
in their gravBoots, now joined by MineMagistrate, Timony cu
Podginus, a minute copper-haired man of the Pennies (Copper to be
technic).
“Notice, notice. Grubby Rusters!” Ugly Dan calls. Silence falls
over the festivities as they oat above us. Magistrate Podginus’s
gravBoots are substandard things, so he wobbles in the air like a
geriatric. More Tinpots descend on a gravLift as Podginus splays
open his small, manicured hands.
“Fellow pioneers, how wonderful it is to see your celebrations. I
must confess,” he titters, “I have a fondness for the rustic nature of
42
your happiness. Simple drink. Simple fare. Simple dance. Oh, what
ne souls you have to be so entertained. Why, I wish I were so
entertained. I cannot even nd pleasure o-planet in a Pink brothel
after a meal of ne ham and pineapple tart these days! How sad for
me! How your souls are spoiled. If only I could be like you. But my
Color is my Color, and I am cursed as a Copper to live a tedius life
of data, bureaucracy, and managment.” He clucks his tongue and his
copper curls bounce as his gravBoots shift.
“But to the matter: All Quotas have been met, save by Mu and
Chi. As such, they will receive no beefs, milks, spices, hygenics,
comforts, or dental aid this month. Oats and substantials only. You
understand that the ships from Earth orbit can only bring so many
supplies to the colonies. Valuable resources! And we must give them
to those who perform. Perhaps next quarter, Mu and Chi, you will
dally less!”
Mu and Chi lost a dozen men in a gas explosion like the one Uncle
Narol feared. They did not dally. They died.
He prattles on awhile before coming to the real matter. He
produces the Laurel and holds it in the air, pinched between his
ngers. It’s painted in fake gold, but the small branch sparkles
nonetheless. Loran nudges me. Uncle Narol scowls. I lean back,
conscious of the eyes. The young take their cues from me. The
children adore all Helldivers. But the older eyes watch me too, just
as Eo always says. I’m their pride, their golden son. Now I’ll show
them how a real man acts. I won’t jump up and down in victory. I’ll
just smile and nod.
43
“And it becomes my distinct honor to, on behalf of the
ArchGovernor of Mars, Nero au Augustus, to award the Laurel of
productivity and monthly excellence and triumphant fortitude and
obedience, sacrice, and …”
Gamma gets the Laurel.
And we don’t.
44
