In the Courts of the Crimson Kings

by Stirling, S. M.

  Stupid me, Jeremy thought, forcing his teeth not to chatter. I asked the same question in that tunnel back in Rema-Dza.

  The tunnel they were in was quite different from those on the higher levels, save for the roughly twenty-foot diameter that it shared with most of them. It was crooked, for one thing, wandering along like a natural fumarole, which it probably was. The walls were roughly shaped, either by chisel-like tools or chisel-like teeth. And for almost the first time since he’d left the shores of the Great Northern Sea where Kennedy Base sat, the air felt damp.

  They’d gotten down to the edge of the great, lens-shaped aquifer that underlay Olympus Mons, or at least to one of the fracture zones that wicked down moisture from the upper slopes to feed it. This might have been a collection channel when the water table was higher.

  The floor and walls glistened in spots with moisture or slush-crystals, and it was blotched by some pale, lichenous growth. Doctor Daiyar carefully avoided brushing against those, and so did he after her sharp warning, “Infective!”

  The air had a dank, moldy smell as well. Doctor Daiyar seemed apprehensive.

  No, she looks scared shitless, Jeremy thought. In an undemonstrative Martian way. I’m beginning to think Teyud is this planet’s equivalent of a passionate, emotional Sicilian.

  They both had sword and pistol in hand. Daiyar stopped and cocked one large, mobile ear. It was as silent as a tomb—Jeremy pushed away the image with an effort—or at least very quiet, except for the novelty of the sound of water dripping somewhere.

  Daiyar stopped short. Jeremy felt a waft of warm—or warmer, at least—air on his face. It felt good, after having been cold for days. The last time he’d actually felt warm, he’d been in bed with Teyud, on board the Intrepid Traveler. And even she had cold feet. He remembered the way she’d twine them with his and compare him to a heating element with a longing that made his eyes prickle for a second.

  When Daiyar resumed her steady pacing, he asked, “I take it that warmer air isn’t a good sign?”

  “Geothermal heat,” she said. “It and the associated chemicals sustain fungi and algae which are at the base of subterranean food chains. Exercise extreme caution. Predatory fungi will be present, and perhaps rodents of unusual size. Use this on exposed flesh, and wear your mask.”

  Errrkkk! he thought. Those rodents back in the cell were bad enough; I really don’t want to meet any that are bigger.

  He smeared on the ointment she offered; it was thin and had an astringent smell, and made his skin feel leathery somehow, as if all his pores had been filled with wax. The mask was a triangle of ceramic, like the bottom half of a hockey goalie’s. You breathed through its pores, and it made each breath a little harder—you had to suck—which he found made his heart pound harder, until he ran through a few Zen exercises. He’d never been zazen, exactly, but his home state was lousy with them, or at least the northern part was, and the techniques were helpful. The beating of blood in his temples receded.

  Then her ears swiveled again; she turned and they pointed forward at full extension. “We are pursued,” she said. “That was the chase-call of a sniffer. We must move faster—yet still cautiously. They are moving very rapidly indeed.”

  Between the devil and the deep blue sea, he thought.

  He remembered the thought an hour later, when they came into the chamber. It was huge; just how big he couldn’t tell, because the view through his goggles faded off into hints of twisting heat. Where the geology was suitable, Mars’ lower gravity meant it could have cavern complexes bigger than anything on Earth. The part nearest him had puddles. Shimmering mist covered them, turning into patches of low fog here and there; spires and stalagmites rose out of it in brutal inverted exclamation points.

  “No, not puddles,” he said to himself, watching one patch of water a hundred feet or more across; there was a distinct smooth ripple for a moment, as if something long and sinuous was gliding beneath the surface. “It has pools. Deep, interconnected pools. Linked to very large underground lakes or rivers.”

  Irregular pathways of comparatively dry ground twisted off into the same indistinct distance, ridged and rough with irregularities and boulders. Luckily the surface was gritty beneath his boot-soles, a bit like strong pumice.

  He thought that the goggles must be failing him and put up a hand to remove them until he realized what the headache-inducing shimmer was; many of the pools were hot, hot enough to send tendrils of mist up into the air. It had gotten much warmer, but this area was uncomfortably hot, especially as it was downright humid as well. Smooth, glittering discolorations near the water hinted at mineral rime, and shapes stood all about. Some looked like elongated versions of Terran mushrooms; others, growing on spires and outcroppings of rock, looked like shelf fungi. One type looked remarkably like a heap of cow intestines, which he recognized because he’d visited his mother’s brother’s ranch fairly often as a kid.

  The goggles conveyed only hints of color; most appeared gray-white, but some had what he thought must be savage bands and whorls and spots of pink and dark purple. And some of them were—very slowly—turning in his direction. He heard the drip of water loudly now, and ripples and gurgles, and a dry, feathery, creaking sound. And, yes, very faintly a musical belling, echoing through endless spaces in the huge sponge of stone.

  It sounded like a group of very hungry silver trumpets.

  The horns of Elfland, he thought, picturing again the starved, skeletal elegance of the Sniffer in Zar-tu-Kan. But the Dogs of Fangs-In-Your-Ass, if they catch up to us.

  “Most of the fungi are not very motile,” Daiyar said tightly; he suspected that the words were as much for herself as for him. “Follow me closely. Do not stop if at all possible. A collective frenzy will result if we are immobile for any length of time. This is—metaphorical mode—very much like a game of atanj with time-limited moves.”

  She started off at a brisk walk, turning and twisting to keep the two of them as far as possible from either the thicker growths or the edge of the pools. Jeremy followed precisely in her footsteps. A tall, bulbous, spotted thing about fifty yards away creaked alarmingly, then burst with a loud dry pop. A cloud of white mist drifted in his direction.

  Daiyar whirled and took an aerosol-like container from her harness and twisted it. Another mist poured out from it, and intercepted the cloud of spores—or at least all the ones he could see. Jeremy fought not to hold his breath as they walked on; more and more of the pods back there were bursting.

  “You are perspiring. Cease at once,” Daiyar said, her voice muffled by the mask that covered nose and mouth. “The wild spores are most dangerous in mucus membranes but they can sometimes germinate on any damp surface and sweat tends to remove the protective ointment. Then the filaments of their roots can dig deeper into the pores and spread with explosive speed as they consume tissue.”

  “Oh, I’ll do my level best not to perspire, despite the clammy heat and the terror,” Jeremy said hollowly, with a brief, horrific flash of the way Sally Yamashita had died. He fought down an insane urge to giggle—the doctor probably believed he could stop sweating on command. “You bet, no sweat.”

  The Deep Beyond was looking more and more attractive. At least lethal fungi came there only if someone brought them in.

  They walked on toward a clearer patch of flattish rock with only a single massive triangular piece of lava sticking out of it, like a deformed, acne-ridden troll’s nose twenty feet high that trickled smoke from cracks around its base. A shimmering greenish light seemed to hang over it, and Daiyar stopped, looking backward and forward. Her ears twitched.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “The heat indicates high-metabolism life forms,” she said.

  It did. The first few skittered out of the fissures in the base of the rock as he watched. One made a beeline for his boot, and he stamped in reflex. What he could see when he raised his foot was just like the zombie-rats that had plagued him in the prison cell, the ones he was
beginning to remember with nostalgia.

  Except that this one was about the size of his thumb, or a large cockroach.

  “Rodents of unusual size!” Daiyar said, a frantic overtone in her voice. “Quickly! There will be thousands in a few moments!”

  Unusual size? Jeremy thought—or some part of his mind gibbered. I thought that meant unusually large size! Damn Demotic and damn its precision!

  They began to spring forward to get around the nose-shaped protuberance. Jeremy caught a flash of motion out of the corner of his eye and threw himself down with a yell; Daiyar did the same an instant later. Something flashed by over his head, a creature like a huge manta ray, right down to the lashing tail that sang through the air where his head had been like a steel whip. When he jumped back up—soaring five feet into the air as he did—the base of the triangular rock was already black and heaving with a mat of the rodents; the whole thing started to boil toward him.

  “Surrender!” a voice boomed, as if magnified by a megaphone, echoing off the walls and roof and stony spires of the great chamber.

  He turned. A dozen Sniffers were at the entrance to the cavern, gabbling and rising on their hind legs to point in his direction, then dropping back to stand with long red tongues lolling over thin jaws lined with gripping teeth designed to catch and immobilize. Their baying and babbling subsided at a harsh command from one of the ten guards behind; all of them were mounted on fat-tired, self-propelled unicycles, the only things with the speed and capacity to handle rough footing to catch them so fast. The riders had dart rifles and the round helmets with pivoting eyestalks he’d first seen in Zar-tu-Kan, the kind that plugged into your optic nerve.

  You needed eyes in the back of your head in a place like this.

  “Drop your weapons and surrender!” the voice boomed again.

  Jeremy had gotten much better at interpreting the musical but low-affect Martian voices. This one sounded distinctly frazzled.

  Daiyar had frozen, except for her head, which whipped back and forth between the approaching horde of miniature zombie-rats, the darkness above where mantas made ready to stoop, and the fields of sporulating fungi they’d passed though. Jeremy made the same calculation, and acted: He scooped up the doctor’s elongated form, slight and with a hollow-boned lightness. Then he ran at the troll’s nose, and leapt.

  One of the manta-things passed him on the way up, the long, barbed whip of its tail barely missing him. He landed halfway up the rocky height, scrabbled for footing, crouched, and leapt again. This time he came down on a small, four-foot-square, patch at the top. He was close enough to the far edge that he had to squat frantically and push himself backward to avoid toppling down the far side. It was reassuringly solid, though, so they needn’t fear anything crawling out of the rock to get at them.

  One of the manta-things dove at them. As it did, Jeremy saw bones and the half-dissolved bodies of zombie-rats and dozen other things stuck to the glutinous surface of its underside. It passed inches over their heads, and he managed to shoot it with the dart pistol he still gripped in one hand. It jerked in midair and circled downward, still with trembling waves moving across a surface that looked like custard or jelly close to. It settled on the rock floor, with hundreds of the rodents underneath it; they all gave a galvanic jerk that heaved the manta up like a blanket with a bunch of puppies underneath.

  Then it grew still, although the edges rippled as if it was trying to throw itself back into the air or crawl away. More of the zombie-rats rushed in and began nibbling at its fringes; those that skittered out on top of it stopped and began to sink into it . . . or at least the first wave of them did. Jeremy restrained an impulse to shoot at it again as his pistol gave a pip of readiness.

  “They are not wholly animal tissue,” Daiyar wheezed as she stood up. “Most of its mass is a symbiotic motile fungus. Hence, the neurotoxin is less effective.”

  “Oh, great—shit!” Jeremy yelled, throwing himself down again and slashing with his sword as he fell backward.

  That met a lashing tail as another flying thing whipped by; the blow to his wrist was like striking a moving baulk of teak, but the severed tip fell to the rock beside him. Daiyar scraped it off the edge to the surface below with her sword, and the rodents scattered back, leaving a clear space about it. They covered the fallen manta in a heaving mantle three or four deep by now, but enough were left over to send columns climbing up the rock face. They came on like ants.

  The pursuing Coercives came on, too, leaning forward and racing their unicycles along the path the fugitives had followed, tilting and banking with crazed skill. One failed and crashed sideways into a pile of the cow-gut-looking fungus; it closed over him like a spring-loaded trap, with a wet plop sound. Another shot as something started to haul itself out of a pool, and whatever-it-was collapsed back into it with a froth of limbs or tentacles that churned the water to foam. More of the mantas sailed down from the roof; looking up, he saw one detach itself from where it hung by something that looked like a snail’s foot. The organ sank back into its body as it uncurled its wings and swooped.

  “Go!” Jeremy said to Daiyar. “They won’t kill me! Get me help from the Emperor!”

  He picked the doctor up by the back of her harness and tossed her down, on the far side of the prominence, the one that faced the round black mouths of tunnels leading out of here. He didn’t have time to see how she was doing; he had to spend a few moments stamping and kicking as the miniature zombie-rats tried to swarm over the edge. Once or twice he crushed them with the flat of his sword or the barrel of his pistol as they climbed up the fabric of his trousers, hitting himself hard enough to give his bones bruises

  “I should have brought a fucking bullwhip and called myself Oklahoma Jones!” he screamed as he danced and slapped, on the edge of hysteria. “Goddamn the Lost City and all its fucking secrets! I should have stayed home and watched the video feed!”

  A dart rifle round whistled past his ear. A manta dived again, missing him, banking and landing on one of the Coercives and encasing him like hot shrink-wrap.

  “Mother!”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Encyclopedia Britannica, 20th edition

  University of Chicago Press, 1998

  MARS: Family Structures and Gender Roles

  The differences between Terran and Martian family structures are profound, and derive from both Martian history and the differences in the biology of reproduction in the two species.

  Although like Terrans, Martians remain sexually active year-round from puberty on, Martian females do not share our continuous fertility. Research indicates that the ancestral stock from which modern h. sapiens martensis descends had an estrus cycle like most mammals, whether preserved from previous periods or re-evolved in the Martian environment. The bioengineered subsapients known as De’ming maintain such a cycle, becoming fertile twice in the Martian year, or approximately once per Earth year.

  The standard variety of Martian humanoid, however, has a reproductive pattern unique among primates: females must consciously activate the reproductive organs. This ability appears at puberty, and doing so produces a period of heightened libido. It requires some training, but the ability itself is genetically programmed; learning it is analogous to an infant learning to walk or talk. Speculations on the origins of this phenomenon have tended to attribute it either to early biological engineering, or to evolutionary pressure in an environment where an unplanned pregnancy would often be disastrously risky to both mother and child.

  Another relevant biological trait is the longer Martian life span, approximately twice the human norm, with lives of one hundred fifty to two hundred years not uncommon, and several decades more far from unknown; anti-agathic drugs may double this, if taken consistently from adulthood. (These life span figures do not take into account possible periods of hibernation; see hibernation, Martian.) Since Martians achieve sexual maturity only slightly more slowly than Terrans, and since they experience no equivalent of menopause
—as with the male, fertility among Martian females simply declines gradually after middle age—the potential breeding span of a Martian female typically exceeds a century and may extend over two or three hundred years, particularly among high-status individuals with access to anti-agathic treatment.

  Combined with low levels of mortality from infectious disease from very early times, and the fact that total fertility rates have rarely exceeded two or three per female, this drastically reduces the proportion of her life span a Martian female need spend either pregnant, lactating, or caring for infants. In most preindustrial societies on Earth this period exceeds seventy-five percent of a statistically typical woman’s adult life; on Mars it has rarely exceeded ten percent, and is often less. Furthermore, all pregnancies are conscious choices, not unscheduled accidents.

  Hence for Martian females reproduction is an episode in their lives, rather than the major part of it; it is an important episode, to be sure, and parental feelings of obligation are very strong. Most Martians also grow up without nonadult brothers or sisters; and the proportion of children in a Martian population is radically lower than in a Terran one, even at comparable levels of lifetime fertility. Effectively, for psychological purposes, every child is an only child and children grow up in an overwhelmingly adult world.

  It is probably these factors that make Martian “marriage”—to the extent the term is applicable at all—more explicitly contractual than that in most Terran societies, and universally term-limited rather than indefinite. Reproduction is seen as a means of perpetuating lineages, or making alliances between them; usually the considerations are partly based on the economic resources each party will devote to the child, partly on eugenic concerns, and partly on the pledge of continued cooperation between the “merged” bloodlines. Typically, reproductive partnership agreements are drawn up to specify the number of offspring, and the length of time and precise nature of the resources each party will devote to it.