Cyberpunk

solid rock. No handle or indentation marred its surface. Kane pressed his hand to it. He sensed its importance, connected it instinctively to the disappearance of the Martians, but could not guess its function. It did not respond to his touch. He turned to look at Reese. “What does it mean?”
    Reese put his helmet back on & started for the door.
    • • •

    Like a fragment of melody on a tape loop: clear, high voices in a minor key, without a message, offering only coloration, a distortion in his ability to see the world. Or like a flickering at the edges of his vision that seemed to be the curves & angles of fourth-dimensional space. Behind it a sense of alien personality, lurking. The ghosts of the Martian builders?
    Kane wandered barefoot through the city under the dome. It was a quiet suburb painted by Magritte, too uniform, too clearly defined, too obviously existing in a vacuum. The grass under his feet was a rich green, round-bladed & moist. The houses were like those in the poverty-level neighborhoods where Kane had grown up, after his father died—vinyl siding, short porches, bushes & trees growing unhindered against the walls.
    At the edge of the dome he watched distorted images of dust storms blow past the double wall of yellowing plastic. High C02 levels & the peak heat of afternoon made him drowsy & short of breath. Reese & Curtis would be at the ruins all day; he had time for an hour or two of sleep.
    Retracing his steps, he saw Curtis’s wife, Molly, on the porch of their bungalow.
    A chill of prescience went through him. The Presence in his mind sang to him as he climbed the single step & stood in front of her. She was solid, indifferent, languidly sensual. Kane’s hands were clenched again.
    “Sit down,” she said, making it a polite question. Kane sat facing her. He searched her face for information, admiring its clean, symmetrical weight. They had reached the neutrality of afternoon. He could not avoid looking at her breasts, at the wide brown nipples visible through her T-shirt.
    “You’d like a drink,” she said, standing. Kane heard the power of command she chose not to use. He felt her matriarchal strength, her link with the rich, darkly scented vegetation that surrounded them. He followed her into the gloom of a curtained kitchen, hearing birds cry outside in an eternal, abstracted spring. He stopped Molly at the refrigerator with a light touch on the arm. As she turned to him her eyes lost their focus & became distant, passive. His hands went to her breasts, thumbs touching her nipples as she gripped his elbows. She led him into her bedroom, a dim, fragrant place more personal, more private than her body. Standing across the bed from him she pulled her clothes off as he watched. The aroma of her body drifted to him, heavy, sweet, blatantly sexual. Kane shut his eyes, unwilling for a moment to continue with it: his internal struggles, his helplessness before his own sexual urgings, the climax inevitably empty compared to the ritual preceding it. As their bodies merged, Molly astride him, her hands on his wrists, Kane felt the violence rise within him. With effort he delayed his ejaculation until Molly had satisfied herself; by that time he had become detached from his own passion. He spasmed quickly & they lay together in the heat of the drowning afternoon.
    Kane had been amazed by Reese’s easy acceptance of his uncle’s offer. Clearly Reese had ulterior motives; Kane had no desire to learn them. From this understanding came a kind of mutual respect, or at least silence. Reese did not ask Kane to justify his part in the scenario, a scenario that seemed to point to both their deaths.
    Reese claimed to have translated the Martian engravings during the ten years he’d spent on Earth, an involuntary furlough caused by the failure of the space program. Kane eventually began to believe the translations were genuine, but knew Reese was holding something back.
    Reese assembled the entire population of the colony in their conference room. Kane sat on the back row with a piece of string, idly weaving cat’s cradles.
    “Today,” Reese said, “I took the preliminary dictionary to the ruins, with Curtis’s help. We were able to piece together a long section from one of the engravings.”
    Kane wondered if Curtis should have been involved. Curtis was clever & authoritarian & the less he knew the better. Kane sensed a primal conflict between himself & Curtis, building toward a violent