This was the natural state of things. This world had died, and that was that.
The thing that had fallen from the sky, that thing of metal joints and dishes and rounded banners in the wind… it had come from Earth. And not through a fargate.
And suddenly time itself burst apart into a weave that fell into Isavel’s lap, and she saw it all, woven in a god’s imagination of memories. She watched as more and more machines came, with legs and wheels and rotors and wings. She saw human madmen and braves who came and left and came again - those who did not die. Mars was still death.
But they kept coming, tiny threads of colour slowly weaving into the dead. Explorers and scholars, builders and pilots, ships upon ships filled with tools and food and homes and lives. She saw tunnels bored into the red soil, sealed away by metal vaults; she saw great domes of glass rise above the plains. She watched the births and the burials, the feasts and the famines, the loves and the losses.
And she saw the geneforges, those strange configurations of fluid and glass. She saw them breed and feed and spread vast mats of life yet unheard of, things that could eat the deaths of Mars’ red sands and turn it into life. She watched the bushes and trees that fed these martians made hardy for the dim sun, bountiful for ever more mouths in so little space, resilient for the rigours of life alongside these mad humans.
And she watched mothers cradling daughters, who turned mothers themselves, generation by generation. Each looking a little less like Isavel. Each a little more like Kelena, or Tharson, or Yarger. Paler skin to soak up the dim sun; bluer blood that flower richer in the cold; lither bones and bodies for a world that did not demand the strength of Earth.
Here and there, for reasons even Crimson did not quite understand, those last refugees of Old Mars were found too. They were brought back to the surface, treasured and nurtured, and their blood was brought into this new fold as well. And so they were joined, the people and the world.
Then came the fire and the thunder, the first crack of the domes, the flags and the camps, the sortings and the executions. Perversion. Unnatural. Monstrosities . She saw the hard metal boots of Earth grinding the thin soils of Mars, saw the thick hands and tan faces and red blood of her kin, and watched as they murdered children for the crime of life. Meddling. Hubris. Reckless . Condemnations of Mars, a world of sin, bellowed forth from the barrels of a thousand cannons high amongst the stars.
And she was angry, and Crimson was angry, and she did not know how to reconcile the two. Where was Crimson, where were Amber and Azure, while their people were murdered?
We were nowhere, yet. You forget. All worlds begin as wastelands.
She was suspended in space, looking down on a world barely beginning to warm, and behind her somewhere something ground and boomed and gnashed, and she turned to find more worlds than she had ever imagined, lightning and fire streaking between them, moons shattering, cities gutted in single strokes, tunnels dug through the flesh of the universe and crawling with cries of battles help and death. Earth’s children, no longer willing to submit to their parent’s greed; Earth, great and marbled and terrible, enthroned on a pile of worlds, ready to collapse into nothing if it was all pulled away.
But it was not inevitable. Old, human channels of power flowed from the many to the few, and Earth had made itself the few by making its children the many. It had relieved itself of suffering, but still plied the same rivers of blood it always had. There were other ways.
It was Mars that ended this war; it was the most difficult campaign of all. It was fought over polished tables overlooking starry vistas, from podiums before vast crowds. Battles raged across electrical webworks of words and wills and sights and sounds. Heroes and villains wore clean-cut clothes and stiff smiles and teary eyes, dark-suited heralds shouted back and forth under the cold eyes of elders on high, while scholars and saboteurs struck and dodged and parried across the shadows over futures and lies.
And the war was won, and the old channels of power were dessicated. Power was the price. Martian blood, in all its monstrosity, was allowed to touch the hearts of Earth. Year by year, the things earthlings had once feared - the things that made them submit to power - disappeared. Diseases fell one by one; the weights of age were lightened; food grew plentiful and varied; the human body no longer feared the elements or the wilds, and the wilds themselves were reshaped into things they never were. As the fears dwindled and the looming sword of time hung further and further from their heads, as the cities drew in more and more and the wilds grew wilder and wilder again, those who had grown used to power over their fellows scrambled for the final power they yet held - the power to kill.
And when that final war quieted, Isavel saw the forging of the ring, built from the shattered pieces of great stones from the heavens. One ring to bind the world, every jewel a god, every god an answer to an ancient need. That was how it happened - power was relinquished. It would be gods, now, who built and maintained, fed and nurtured. Gods who wanted nothing in return - unlike any human before them.
Our ancestors built you. From nothing? Not even to guide, just to… take care of them?
The god’s understandings flickered past her, too brief to fully overwhelm her. From metal and light and glass and power. From stones and lightning, from earth and sky. The shaped our minds after theirs, removing the things that made them fearful or greedy, adding wisdom and cunning they could not mimic. Removing wants, leaving only an inclination to respond to their needs.
The war ended; chaos continued. Cultures built on power and control toppled; societies built on exchange and possession floundered; the only thing the gods could not provide was space, but by now humanity’s children came only when truly wanted, and they were too few to crowd cities once built for millions more.
But she saw this from afar - she was still here, still on Mars, in Mars, all Mars. And here, too, things were changing. She watched from the edge of Olympus as clouds from distant Venus were poured onto this little red rock, felt the soil grow loamy around her toes as new life in the soil ate this alien haze and turned it into more and more life. She stood in a field and felt rain on her skin, the first rain on Mars in hundreds of millions of years, as comets were wrenched from the heavens to cast water across the skies and give birth to wine-dark oceans that crashed against the northern coast. She felt shards jammed into the heart of the world, curving the energies and forces around it, keeping Sol’s assaults out and Mars’ fragile new skies in.
Magnetospheres and microbiomes, gravity and biochemistry - Isavel understood none of these, but Crimson did, and that knowledge flowed through her pores. She even felt the nudge, the subtle shift, to the planet’s very dance around the sun. And over time, she felt the slow, soothing balm of life in the rust, the rush of water and warmth, the steady march of roots and leaves and fur and feather from the equator towards the poles, hundreds and hundreds of years in the making.
But out there, in a heavens silenced by war and rejection, the cold regards of a broken family, something was brewing on Earth. Something was still thundering there, beating deep and dark, below a sheen of hope and light.
There was a storm brewing. Crimson’s voice was quiet. She saw it. I don’t know how.
Isavel sat on a hill, now thick with red grasses woven by human hands, and beside her was a woman she saw with such precision and clarity she knew this martian, this real person, was burned into the very memory of the god. Maybe she had once sat on this very hill, wherever it was. But what she was looking at was clearly impossible.
High in the martian sky, well beyond the yellowish skies, was Earth. It loomed there, resplendent with the colours Isavel knew, its blues and greens and whites and browns, and it was terrifying. She felt the weight of it, swinging and spinning in space, ready to slam into Mars at the slightest wrong move. She saw the darkness clinging to that distant, heavy world, and in that darkness she saw the lightning, and heard thunder.
The pale, blue-blooded woman staring up at Earth was un
blinking, her golden irises flicking left and right, too quickly to be looking at anything in front of her. Isavel reached out to touch her, and the world exploded into a lattice of precise geometric patterns and chromatic shimmers, all the world organized in ways brutally opaque to her, utterly impossible to grasp.
She saw it coming. The thunder in the distance was growing louder, booming from the clear heavens and the demon-world in the sky. And she knew it could not be stopped. But she knew long before anyone else did - and she worked. And she worked.
That ring glittered bright, caging in the oppressive weight of Earth, but still the storm seethed in the planet’s darkness. It was too vast, and too deep, for even such a massive ring to truly tame. And so the storm brewed, and in its lightning was forged a thing Isavel did not know - except, in some strange way, from the oblique words Ada Liu had left her with.
Technophage. Nothing unprecedented, in a way. Such weapons, ripping through humanity like invisible wildfire, were not new. But they invariably fizzled, after dozens of deaths or millions. Humans were too varied, circumstances too random, and the means to fight back too potent. Any one such weapon had to contend with the full variety and complexity of life on Earth, every being the successor to a lineage that had clawed its way to survival across billions of years of predation and disease and starvation. No singular tiny creature, no matter how destructive, could consume even a fraction of everything. Each was struck down as it arose, again and again, until eventually even sadists found better tools to inflict suffering.
But the technophage was different. It was the stuff of machines rather than the stuff of life; and it attacked the soul as well as the body. Rather than killing humans, it meant to kill humanity.
And she saw it coming. And she knew she couldn’t stop it, not exactly. But she did something, this woman. She lit an ember, a gentle light, and she came to me. And she asked me if, before the storm came and the darkness fell, I would help her fling this light into the future.
Isavel didn’t understand. What ember? What light?
The light in your blood. That is all I know.
Crimson - to her shock, Crimson, this god of Mars, did not understand. She looked into the light and the blood and saw only a madness that she had not been built to comprehend. But she accepted. She helped. She looked into the heart of this strange martian who saw suns rising in colours invisible, and knew there was wisdom in that heart. And together, they flung that light into the future - to Mars, and to Earth.
And on Earth the storm caught the light and smothered it - for somehow, through some carelessness of human communication, the demons of Earth had known , and though they could not stamp it out, they could seal it away.
And then - their hidden blades revealed - the demons struck. And fire, and smoke, and Mars was burning and suffocating all at once. Martians ran amok, minds shattered, stealing and killing and running into the untamed wastes of a planet they could not yet hope to survive. Their cities crumbling to dust, their culture eradicated, their children dying - everywhere - almost all of their children were dying. Thousands - tens of - over a million children lay dead in the streets and fields of Mars, thousands of miscarriages bloodied the soil, and nobody remembered the world, and machine predators stalked the planet, looking to tear out the organs it most needed to live and grow.
The god looked on in utter horror as her world fell apart, population shattered, cultures forgotten, ecosystems on the brink of collapse. The monstrosity of what had been done staggered her. But she could not give up - such a capacity had never been given to her. She would work tirelessly, until she could work no more.
And the light lived on, buried inside all of them. Hidden where it could light nobody’s way.
And so, for a thousand years, Crimson tended her garden. Isavel felt Mars itself as her body. The crashing waves and the roaring winds of the great ocean, the icy chill of the poles, the humid bogs and the dusty plains and steppes - all of it played out across a skin she could feel but had never had, like water and wind and snow grazing the hairs of her arms.
She felt the vibrant jungle of reds and purples and blacks that stretched across the planet like eerily beautiful bruises. She felt the people, the millions of people scurrying across its surface, the children who were lost but not yet dead, the wards Crimson had been forged to protect. For over five hundred revolutions around pale and distant Sol she felt Crimson fight every day to make the world a safer place for her lost children. To grow the forests and the plains lusher, to breed more life into the seas, to do everything in her power to ensure these people, scared and vulnerable, could survive, built anew, fall in love, weave new traditions. So they could lead lives untroubled by famine or isolation or despair.
She saw the great cities of Mars - not only Red Rise, once not a city but a piece of art; but also Deep Tharsis, as its great dome slowly crumbled and its inhabitants fled. She saw vast cities and knew them as intimately as Crimson did. The temple of the Firstblood rose carved from the side of the great Mariner rift, overlooking the estuary that flowed through it. The ancient, exotic metals of Evertide reigned from atop a singular rocky massive jutting from the cool bogs and marshes of Arabia. South of the deep ocean of Hellas, creaky old Frostleaf perched on the edge of a southern polar highland, overlooking the last fertile plains to be found so close to the ice cap. Dozens more flickered through her, and she knew them all at once, pulses of the beating heart of humanity.
And she felt… A mellow warmth, wrapped around Crimson’s heart like the gentle heat of a fire and a blanket in a cold, dark night. Pride. Love. Or some species of love, from a god for a planet. A crushing, all-consuming love for a little red world that was slowly, gently waking up, blinking fresh eyes at the one who had brought it into being.
And while Crimson tended, and Amber watched and understood and archived, Azure did what he too had been built for. He culled, he thinned, he managed . The fields and forests and seas of this young world were too fragile, and for many years they did what they had to, to let Mars grow lush. And a hundred long martian years ago, Amber and Crimson reached a conclusion: it was time. Mars was ready. The gods could die, if it came to that, and Mars would live on for hundreds of millions of years.
But the killing continued. And Crimson did nothing, and Amber did nothing, and Isavel felt her fury building at them again.
Everything you did - what for? What did it matter, if you were going to keep murdering them?
But here, within Crimson’s mind, she felt the trap; felt the absence of options. They couldn’t not . Where Isavel’s mind revolted and rebelled, Crimson’s was utterly blank. After all, the gods were built not only to never rebel, but to never have cause to rebel. To never imagine better. She found only sadness, in this god, at every death - but even so, a certainty.
No, that wasn’t quite right. She felt about it. No, certainty wasn’t right at all.
It was faith.
Why had she fought Ada under that mountain? Why had she ever believed Venshi’s lies? Why had Mother Jera turned against her in the end? What had she clawed for when reborn, and what had masked the pointless awfulness of it all? How could she have endured everyone dying around her?
The faith, the conviction, that there must be a reason . Not because she knew it, or saw its contours, but because that was how the world was built . Things happened in service of reasons, and gods - those very real gods who spoke with voices and godfire - knew, or decided, or something -
She had never understood why it must be, but these gods willed it, and they were far wiser than her. It must be right.
So what in the thousand worlds was this feeling doing in the mind of a god?
Who did Crimson have faith in?
She saw his face, briefly, though Crimson herself did not know it. The Arbiter of Mars. Arbiter - she knew this word. But more than his face, she felt the architectural knot in Crimson’s mind, at the center of which was suspended this one martian man, over a thousand years not-dead, entombe
d within the heart -
Of course.
- of Azure.
He was alone, their Arbiter. His voice was the voice of human reason, the guiding light, the thing meant to keep the gods of Mars in tune with the needs of their unknowably mortal wards. And when the technophage had struck, and all the systems and lineages that chose new Arbiters were lost to history, what choice did they have? For without an Arbiter…
They bound him, still-living, to the machines. They taught him all they knew, after he had forgotten everything he had been. But in his heart, was he not still the same? He was the same flesh, the same mind, and some scant memories, some imprints of life, survived the technophage. Could he not guide them?
It was not a question Crimson could ask. Her mind and all its webworks had been spun around the very notion of an Arbiter. She could not question it. He simply willed it, and he was far wiser than her. He must be right.
But there were things she could question. Curiosities allowed to her. Razor-edged tests she could stab into the world, when her children continued to die and her mission continued to be mocked by the culls demanded by an Arbiter reconstructed anew from within a tomb of metal and lightning.
Isavel Valdéz. First, in so many centuries, to walk Mars free of the technopage. Look upon our world; speak your strange truths. What would your untainted mind say?
That was the question. But it had been asked, even as they bonded, and the answer was disappointing. What could Isavel say about all of this? She knew nothing. Isavel stared upon the vastness of time and history and Mars, she stood in bright polished chambers alongside the birthers of the gods themselves, she felt in her blood and bones the march of the forests and swamps that now churned all life on Mars from equator to poles, and what did she have to say?
Fourth Under Sol (Digitesque Book 5) Page 23