by K. T. Hunter
"Oh, now, let me guess. The Nemo paradox? That old chestnut? How did it go, again?" He hunched over, elbow on knee, chin on fist, in a parody of Rodin's famous statue. "On the one hand, old Aronnax, your father, writes in a journal that he met Captain Nobody -- one of my fathers, as rumour has it -- back in 1867. They parted ways in 1868 when the Nautilus went down in a maelstrom off the coast of Norway. Am I right so far?" He switched elbows and knees to his other side. "On the other hand, we have Cyrus Smith, the engineer who claims to have landed on Lincoln Island in l865 after escaping from the Confederates in a balloon in the middle of a hurricane. And it's a mysterious place, this Lincoln Island, as it is home to the now-retired Captain Nobody. He is their enigmatic benefactor for four years, until they meet him in 1869, just before he shuffles off this mortal coil, along with the Nautilus. Do I have it right?"
"Yes! Have you read both journals?"
He chuckled. "More often than I've read Twain. Like you, I've wanted to know more about my other progenitor. Quite a mystery, isn't it, that he had a seven-month adventure with Aronnax whilst he was nursemaiding Smith?"
She shot him a sly smile and continued for him. "And that Smith claims to have read Aronnax's account before it even happened? I'm inclined to chalk it all up to errors in translation at this point, unless someone actually traveled in time like that fellow." She wiped a joyous tear from the corner of her eye as she pointed at the book she had returned. "But that's not the biggest mystery of all. I don't think Pugh is interested in dates."
"Oh, really?" he asked with an arched eyebrow. "What, pray tell, do you think the good professor really wants to know?"
She narrowed her eyes at him, and he could feel her gaze examining his face -- not an altogether unpleasant experience. Hope rose in his chest.
"Aronnax seemed to have no inkling of Nemo's origins. However, Smith says that Nemo revealed that his real name was Dakkar, a Prince of India." She pointed at him. "You, my good Captain, are quite the handsome fellow, but you look nothing like a Prince of India."
He nodded. "I have thought that, too. But Maggie states that she made no mistake, that she used his Code--"
"That is where things get dicey," she replied. "This whole paradox revolves around assumptions, evidence, and assumptions about evidence. I believe Maggie when she says she used the Code she was given. But how can we be sure it was his? Perhaps she was given someone else's by mistake? Nemo supposedly died -- twice -- decades ago! With no body to be found. No Code to compare against. Just some hair sample out of nowhere." She wrinkled her nose in thought. "By the way, no one has stated how that sample was acquired. Did someone from either encounter nip a lock of hair from him?"
"I believe Smith did, just before they scuttled the Nautilus. At least, that's what I am told."
"That particular tidbit wasn't in the journal. And how did we -- meaning Pugh and Maggie -- get hold of that sample from Smith?"
"I don't know. A family secret, perhaps."
"Perhaps," she replied with a smile. "Or perhaps they are not entirely sure themselves. It could be Smith himself! Very well, then, at this point we will merely have to think of your 'other' father as Mr. Mystery. Perhaps we will have a better shot at determining his identity that way."
"Then, perhaps," he said quietly, "you can figure out what went wrong with me."
"Wrong?" She leaned back as she pronounced the word, as if she had tasted something foul. "Wrong? I would not say that. I would not say that at all." She crossed her arms and harrumphed, then spoke again. "Don't worry for a moment about what Code you may or may not have. It's your actions that count. That is why this is just a pet project, I'm sure. Besides, Pugh and Maggie are your family. You led us through the power outage safely. You're about to get us to Mars! You are the first spacefaring captain in history! You did that with your head, your heart, and your backbone, not your Code."
Chastised, he grinned at her sheepishly. "Well, I didn't do it alone."
"No one does." She cleared her throat and studied her hands. "At least, no one should."
"May I remind you, you're not alone, either? Maggie has pretty well adopted you for her own, and I think Yeoman McLure would punch anyone in the face who said you were any less than family. Elias adores you, and you have given him some peace where his missing daughter is concerned." It was his turn to look away. "And my sister. The one I never knew I had." He looked back at her. "You never really were alone, as long as you had her friendship. She was to you what Miguel was to me."
They finally looked up at each other again, and he felt a tug inside of him at the pained expression on her face.
"I'm glad she had you," he continued, "just as I am glad that she had Mr. Davies. I wish I had known her. I would have liked to have had a sister." With a shyness he had not felt in many years, he took one of Gemma's hands in his own larger one and held it lightly. "Would you tell me about her? Tell me about my sister?"
They talked until the darkness in the Gardens faded into the ship's artificial dawn. When they heard Herr Knopf muttering his way through the cabbage patch, they winked at each other like conspirators and slipped onto their separate paths to the day that awaited them.
~~~~
Gemma
"I just don't think I was meant for this, that's all," Gemma said as the crochet hook glared at her in the flickering firelight.
She tossed it onto the low table in the middle of their circle. She tugged at her brown lab jacket, feeling grateful that her ribs had healed enough to wear her own clothing again. The pirate blouse -- freshly laundered by Frau Knopf -- had long since found its way into the depths of Old Dependable.
Gemma glanced across the table at Maggie, the seventh member of the circle seated at last, who was working her way through a massive pile of wool. With one pair of tentacles, she stitched the last few rows of the scarf that Gemma had seen back in the nest, its calligraphic "M" fluttering as she moved. Yet another pair of limbs had started a completely separate piece in the same colour, with the roots of a "G" scrolling out of her needles. Every so often, yet another tentacle would slip in a third needle to twist the yarn and form the letters.
"Space is cold," was the only explanation Maggie would give for it as she worked and swayed to the velvet sound pouring out of the gramophone. In Wallace's absence, the unlabeled albums had slipped out of their hiding place and onto the shelves, resting in the light. They had enjoyed more than one airing during tea time.
"Nothing against Vivaldi," Frau Knopf had said as she had lowered the needle onto the record just after Gemma had arrived, "but a little bit goes a long way. But the blues? The blues sings about life, what goes wrong, what we do to each other. You cannot fix what you do not know is broken, Ja? I think any Volk that can sing the blues about itself, that Volk is going to be all right, in the end. This music will be out in the open back home, and soon. You'll see."
Caroline chirped at Maggie. "So you were the ghost, all along!" The Boolean sat next to Knopf, who was winding a skein of yarn about the young lady's outstretched hands. "You were the one always skittering about."
"I'm afraid so."
Gemma was pleased that Caroline had taken to Maggie's means of communication so quickly. All those scientific romances the girl was fond of reading must have prepared her for it.
The Boolean frowned. "What shall I report back to the Psychical Society, then? I surely can't tell them about Maggie. Do I tell them there weren't any ghosts, after all? Or that it was bugs from the Garden creeping about in the air ducts?"
Frau Knopf stopped winding for a moment and fingered the cameo at her throat. Her gaze was focused somewhere in the distance. "There are always ghosts, Fraulein. Even on Mars."
"That would really be something to report! Ghosts on Mars. But whose ghosts, I wonder?"
"You could have your own lecture tour with that," Gemma replied. "Like Nellie Bly after her trip round the world."
Caroline gasped with excitement. "And you could do it with me! Wouldn't it
be grand?"
"Oh, it would," said Maggie. "'To Mars and Back'. But from a woman's point of view!"
"Ja," said Frau Knopf. "Ja, we can't rely on the men to say anything important."
Gemma rubbed her chin. It would certainly get Brightman's attention, which might or might not be deliciously wicked. A lecture by Gemma Aronnax, doubly so.
Gemma said, "Perhaps we should start with a journal. Let's be proper scientists about this."
"And proper journalists!" Caroline replied.
The pipephone speaker crackled to life, and a tinny version of Christophe's voice emerged.
"Attention all hands. We have a visual on Mars. We should enter orbit within forty-eight hours."
Maggie reached for Gemma's hand with one snaky limb and held it tightly.
"Planet, ho!" she sang.
~~~~
Christophe
The last of the debris had been cleared, and the floor of Gun Control shone as brightly as it had the day they had launched. Only a few stubborn patches of char remained here and there, and they would soon be gone. The controls of Hui's new weapon occupied the space that once housed the now-ravaged heat ray.
Christophe rested his palm against the new steel panel on the wall and tried to sense what lay underneath; he tried to detect where the ship had absorbed Cervantes into its very bones. Miguel had seeped into the ship that he had cared for and shepherded since before her maiden voyage. It had been as dear to him as the Kiwi Clipper was to Christophe. He understood that now. The Thunder Child's Fury no longer felt like a stranger.
"All is quiet here," he whispered. "We have heard neither hails nor calls from the Red Planet." Christophe stroked the wall with the tips of his long fingers. "You've done well, old sport. You've gotten us this far. Just hold us together a little while longer. Just a little while. We'll do what we need to do, and then we'll go home."
He leaned his forehead against the steel's welcoming but unyielding coolness. With closed eyes, he listened to the hum of the Oberths and let the sound wash over him like the tide flowing its way towards shore. Until Maggie came to fetch him, Christophe strained his ears to hear an answer in the Fury's enduring song.
~~~~
Gemma
"It certainly looks peaceful," remarked Bidarhalli.
"Where are they?" asked Hui.
Along with the rest of the Cohort, Gemma gazed down at their destination from the orrery observation window. After forty long days and forty even longer nights, the Thunder Child's Fury had reached her goal at last, on the second day of October. With all that had happened on the way, they had almost forgotten where they were going. But now it was here, in front of them and undeniable. The ship had sidled up to the planet like a child ready to nurse from its many-times-greater mother.
The rest of the crew were at battle stations. The tension was so thick that Frau Knopf could have sliced it, toasted it, and served it for tea. Captain Moreau had drilled them over and over again in preparation for any number of conceivable scenarios. They had prepared, in fact, for anything but this.
They had prepared for anything and everything except for... nothing.
From the soft semi-darkness of the orrery, the Cohort watched the polar caps glisten as the ship slipped by through the quiet sky in a near-polar orbit. Craters and canyons pocked the face of the planet, and vast dry plains of soil and rock stretched out beneath them like an Arean Danae. As they passed over the North Pole and sailed towards the South Pole over the Martian equator, they saw no oceans. There were no rivers, no Martian version of the Nile. Lowell's famous canals were nowhere to be seen, and the red circles on the conference room maps were reduced to so much wasted ink. Taking photograph after photograph with Alfieri's telescope, for once pointed down at the ground instead of at the sky, they had found neither roads nor cities. Nothing moved. There was more life in the Fury's Garden than on the Red Planet entire.
Nothing.
As they orbited the planet, they chased day into night, looking for any lights that might pierce the darkness. They crossed into day again, still alone, and saw fresh landscape that had rotated into the sunlight. Dust storms larger than Great Britain scoured the surface. A deep scar cut across Mars' face, a deep wound that, if it had been any deeper, would have cleaved that world in two. Even practical Gemma felt that some great hand had reached out from the stars and clawed the very heart out of the rusted rock.
There was no sense of menace. There were no angry nests of Invaders threatening to break loose upon them. There was simply a scarred pearl hanging in the heart of the night. The only people that Gemma could see were the reflections of her fellows in the observation window, peering round each other like a clutch of nervous hens straining to see a fox in the bushes.
But the hens saw no foxes. There was nothing but dust and rust.
"So beautiful!" Gemma said.
Once the shock of not being attacked had worn off, she had opened a blank journal and started scribbling about in it. She was lost in a fever of sketching each view of the planet as they plowed across the Martian sky.
"I agree," said Shaw as he mopped the sweat from his forehead with his kerchief. "Unfortunately, we are not here for the Cook's Tour. Where could they be? Maggie, have you any theories?"
"No," Maggie mumbled into their heads. She chewed on the end of a trembling tentacle with the side of her beak. "I haven't the foggiest."
The pipephone on the wall squawked, and Gemma picked up the handset. "Llewellyn."
Dr. Pugh's voice crackled over the line. "Seeing anything from down there yet, lass?"
"All's quiet here, Dr. Pugh."
"How's Maggie?"
Gemma cast a sidelong glance at her new friend. "All right, aside from a touch of the jitters. How is everyone on the bridge?"
"Feeling like Maggie. We haven't seen a thing, either. Any thoughts from our resident geologist?" There was no mistaking the teasing edge in his voice.
"Pffft," she sputtered back. "Perhaps underground? The surface seems rather bleak. I don't even see ruins of where things used to be."
"I agree with you. But what about launch facilities for the cylinders? Or factories to produce the Black Smoke? Where do they cultivate the Red Weed? Where did they manufacture the weapons they used against us? Could all that be underground?"
"What about that great scar of a canyon? Could they have facilities built into its walls?"
"It's a possibility." The rest of what he said was muffled, as if he were addressing someone on the bridge. "The captain has requested that you and Maggie join us in his ready room."
"But--"
"I have a feeling that Mars will still be down there when we're finished."
She replaced the handset. Maggie must have overheard the conversation, for she stood up on two of her tentacles and waited. Gemma managed one last glimpse at the waiting planet below them. She could almost hear the stars whispering to her again, now that they were here.
"It's just begging to be explored, isn't it?" Gemma asked.
"It's certainly begging for something," Maggie replied.
Christophe and Dr. Pugh joined Gemma and Maggie in the ready room, where they clustered around one end of the table.
"Did they leave?" Pugh mused aloud. "Did they know we were coming? Could our one ship have frightened them away?"
"I highly doubt that," said Christophe. "I do remember that not too long after the Invasion, we saw some of them head towards Venus. Is it possible that they all left?"
"Oh, heavens, I'm not ready to turn around and hoof it all the way to Venus," Pugh moaned. "I'm out of steam as it is."
Gemma said, "Even if they did journey to Venus, wouldn't some infrastructure be left behind? We're not seeing any ruins or remains. It's like they were never here."
"Frankly," Maggie chimed in, "I am relieved."
Gemma asked, "What if we did meet some other Martians like you, Maggie? Ones that would talk to you?"
"Oh, my!" she exclaimed, one tentacl
e waggling nervously in the air. "I don't know what I would say. What would we have to talk about?"
Pugh pushed away from the table and rested his long legs on a neighboring chair. Folding his arms across his middle, he rolled his neck back onto the top of the chair and studied the ceiling. He chuckled, almost giddy in his relief. "You could always teach them how to knit."
Maggie's laugh felt pleasant in Gemma's brain. "I do not think we brought that much yarn."
"Knitting," Gemma mused. Her eyes widened as realizations dovetailed into place. She stood with the force of her next word. "Knitting!"
"What are you going on about?" asked Pugh as he rolled a weary face towards her.
"The Invaders. They don't knit."
"I certainly wouldn't expect them to."
"I think the Martians are remarkable for what they didn't bring," Gemma said with a shiver. "The cylinders in which they traveled were unadorned. In all the information we've managed to uncover in their memory Code, we haven't found one ounce of culture. No art, no music." She picked up a CDV that someone had left on the table. Christophe's face beamed at them in sepia tones as she waved it about. "No cards to trade. No tales of great Martian heroes to inspire them as they went forth. They didn't bring anything to read or do as we did. No recreational materials at all! Certainly no Cultural Officers. They didn't need them. They don't get bored." She slapped the CDV down upon the table. "In our heady rush to tear apart their technology, we overlooked the most powerful bit of all: the Martians themselves. They are not aliens."
When the others merely stared at her in a confused, blank silence, she continued. "At least not in the way we think of them. Caroline stated it best: they are like analytical engines. I'd wager my entire CDV collection that that's exactly what they are."
"You mean, living analytical engines?" asked Christophe.