Arabella of Mars

by David D. Levine

  Arabella lay awake for quite some time, staring up at the bright unwinking stars and worrying about what the morrow might bring. Tiny creatures chittered in the darkness; the fire crackled as it burned down; their escort, those who were not on watch, shifted and clattered in their sleep.

  But the captain, she noted, was not snoring. She turned her head to where he lay nearby … and saw him sitting up on one elbow, looking at her, his dark eyes reflecting the fire’s embers.

  “I have not slept,” he confessed.

  “Nor I. I am too concerned about my brother.”

  “All will be well, I am sure.”

  “I wish I shared your confidence.”

  He blinked, the two stars of his eyes vanishing for a moment, then said, “May I entrust you with a secret, regarding confidence?”

  “Of course.”

  “Bravery, as I am sure you are well aware, consists not of the absence of fear but in the taking of action as though the fear were not felt. Confidence, likewise, consists of the presentation of assurance as though there were no doubt as to a successful outcome. Such presentation, however false its origin, is remarkably efficacious in its effect both on others and on oneself.”

  She smiled in the darkness. “Is this, then, the secret to a successful captaincy? Pretense?”

  “It is perhaps the only such secret.” He sighed. “Far too much of my captaincy, I fear, has been rooted in deception.”

  “How can you say that, sir? You are one of the most honest men I have ever met!”

  “I do strive to be, when I can.”

  The silence stretched out, then, punctuated by the cry of a night-hunting shoshok. Arabella waited, feeling that if the captain were to speak about whatever might be troubling him, he should be allowed to do so in his own time.

  “I am not,” he said at last, “the man I present myself to be. My full name and title is Farzand-i-Khas-i-Daulat-i-Inglishia Mansur-i-Zaman Amir-ul-Umra Maharaja Dhiraj Rajeshwar Sir Sri Maharaja-i-Rajgan Bhupendra Prakash Singh Mahendra Bahadur. Or was. Or would have been.”

  Arabella blinked. Somewhere in that stream of syllables she thought she had heard a word from her childhood storybooks. “Did you say … Maharaja?”

  “Yes. I was born to be a prince of India.”

  This, Arabella thought, explained his regal bearing and almost inhuman poise, yet it raised far more questions than it answered. “So … so what occurred to change your estate?”

  He sighed deeply. “When I was a young man, I had every advantage. Fine clothes, expansive hunting grounds, beautiful women … all were mine for the taking. Yet the one thing I desired more than any thing else was to waste my time tinkering with automata.”

  “You should not disparage automata so, sir. They may be, I believe, instrumental to the future perfection of humanity.”

  “My opinion today is much the same as yours, yet in my youth I was even more certain of it, to such a degree that I neglected my other duties. I avoided meals with my family, went days without sleep … all in pursuit of my notion that an automaton navigator could be built that would reduce the lengthy and hazardous voyage to Mars to something as simple as a stroll in the park.”

  “And from this ‘notion,’ as you put it, Aadim was born.”

  “Aadim, in his current form, was yet many years in the future. Yet so dedicated was I to his conception that, when presented with my bride-to-be, I callously dismissed her.” The twin stars of the captain’s eyes shimmered, then vanished. “I called her stupid and dull, only because she did not share my passion for automata. She went away in tears.”

  Arabella listened in silence, wanting to reach out to this intelligent, gentle man whose memories brought him such pain.

  “This insult,” he continued, “to the girl, to her family, and to my own father’s judgement in selecting her, was too great to be tolerated. He disinherited me immediately, and cast me out of the palace with only the clothes on my back.”

  “How horrible that must have been,” Arabella breathed.

  “I was unthinking and cruel, and received no worse in return.”

  “But how could you be expected to survive under such circumstances?”

  “I had friends, other enthusiasts of automata, who provided me with room and board for a time. But their lodgings were not large, and this arrangement soon made all of us uncomfortable, so I sought gainful employment. A learned man of my acquaintance, familiar with my theories regarding the potential of an automaton navigator, encouraged me to offer my services to the Honorable Mars Company. But upon my approach to the company’s grand and palatial offices, I suffered a crisis of confidence and decided, unwisely, to present my understanding of aerial navigation—which was, in truth, entirely abstract—as actual airship experience.” Again he sighed heavily. “I will never know how I was able to talk my way into that, my first commission as navigator. I certainly hope that, as captain, I would be able to take the true measure of such a charlatan as my own younger self. Perhaps my father, regretting his decision to disinherit me but unable to take me back without losing face, exerted some influence on my behalf. In any case, I was taken aboard—under the name Prakash Singh, the very simplest form of my own name, which is as common among my people as John Smith is with yours—and somehow managed to bring the ship to Fort Augusta without disaster.”

  Though the captain had obtained his first posting by deceit, Arabella could not help but sympathize with his predicament, and even admired his pluck and determination in doing so.

  He continued his tale. “Using the funds obtained from that successful voyage, I began to rebuild my prototype navigator. Then, after several more such journeys, I was able to put him into practice—in parallel with traditional navigation, at first. But as his theoretical advantages rapidly proved themselves practical, and in fact highly efficacious, he and I rapidly rose in prominence. After only eight years I found myself captain of my own ship. With the considerable wealth that attends that position I have continued Aadim’s development, extending his instruments throughout Diana so that he and the ship are, in effect, a single highly efficient mechanism of commerce. Yet my tinkering continues, for I am still not satisfied.”

  “But he is already so successful, sir! I have never even heard of any automaton of any variety that is capable of such complexity of calculation, such subtlety of action … dare I say, sir, such a close approximation to human thought and feeling. Sometimes I would swear he seems nearly alive.”

  He tutted. “You are too kind.”

  “Sir, I do not exaggerate.” She hesitated, for what she was about to admit seemed highly implausible even to her. Yet the intimacy of this moment, and her uncertainty of what the morrow might bring, brought the words to her lips almost involuntarily. “From time to time, sir, Aadim seems to … to offer suggestions. Sometimes he seems to resist certain settings of his controls; at other times he encourages them.”

  The captain shifted suddenly on his blanket, causing the sands beneath to respond with a hissing crunch. “You have experienced this phenomenon yourself?”

  “I have, sir. It does not happen frequently, but when it does, the impression is quite distinct. I would swear that it was he, not I, who calculated the successful approach to my family plantation.”

  He turned away from her then, his broad back in its buff uniform coat a slightly paler smudge against the black of the sky.

  For a long time he did not utter a word. Then he took in a breath, as though about to speak, but still made no sound. Then he drew in another sharp breath, and let it out with a long, shuddering sigh.

  The captain was … crying.

  She longed to take him in her arms—to offer comfort to this brave, distant, complex man—but propriety restrained her.

  “I…,” he began, but choked off with a liquid sob. He composed himself, then began again. “I had thought that I was only deluding myself. That my desire for Aadim’s perfection was causing me to imagine his actions as more intelligent, more
conscious, than they could possibly be in reality. You are the first to offer any confirmation of this impression.”

  “I do not pretend to understand how gears and levers can bring forth consciousness, sir, but it certainly appears that somehow they have.”

  He turned back to her then, the blanket rustling beneath him, and moved toward her until they were nearly touching. “If any other person had offered me this assurance,” he whispered, “I would think that they were indulging me, or mocking me, or perhaps that they were merely as self-deceiving as I. But you, my dear, I know to be too intelligent to be mistaken, too forthright for flattery, and too kind for mockery. With your knowledge of automata in general, and of Aadim’s inner workings in particular, I am sure that you would not make such a statement in any thing other than dead earnest.”

  “Indeed, sir, I would not.” Her voice came out as a whisper.

  He swallowed, and the two shining stars of the reflected fire in his eyes shimmered. “Thank you, my dear Miss Ashby,” he said, “from the bottom of my heart.”

  For a long moment they remained thus, their faces mere inches apart, and Arabella’s heart raced as she reflected that their only chaperones were three Martian warriors, who cared nothing for human proprieties, and in any case two of them were asleep.

  But then the captain cleared his throat and sat up straight on his blanket, taking himself away from her. “We should take our rest while we can,” he said, his voice slightly hoarse. “Tomorrow may be a very busy day.”

  “Indeed,” she sighed, as the reality of the situation came crashing down upon her mind. “Still, though, I am glad to have had this conversation, and honored that you have shared your story with me. I assure you most sincerely that you may depend on me to keep your secrets safe within my breast.”

  “From you, I would expect nothing less. Good night, Miss Ashby.”

  Good night, my maharaja, she thought, but what she said aloud was, “Good night, Captain Singh.”

  21

  COREY HOUSE

  Dawn revealed Corey House in all its dour magnificence. It had been built in the earliest days of Martian colonization by a Scottish family—many of the first settlers had been Scots—and it bore the heavy, martial mien characteristic of that people’s architecture: all thick walls, square towers, and fortified parapets. But unlike the gray castles of Scotland, which she had seen in colored plates, this one was built of native Martian stone, and the light of the rising sun brought out the warmth in the rock’s butterscotch-orange and rust-red tones. The house was set firmly into the slope of a small mountain, and the crags all around it displayed similar colors.

  But despite the warmth of the scene’s color scheme, the overall sight that greeted Arabella’s eyes brought a chill to her bones. For the daylight also revealed the full extent of the army of angry Martians that surrounded the house. Rank on rank of tents and huts stretched for what seemed like miles across the plain below the house, lapping like a wave on the lower reaches of the prominence upon which the house was constructed, and reaching right up to the bases of the nearest towers. The encampment seethed with Martians in their bright clan colors, their swords and forked spears glittering in the sunlight.

  Most disturbing of all, several enormous catapults were under construction in the midst of the encampment. Two of them looked to be nearly complete, and large pyramids of jagged hogshead-sized red stones waited near each of them.

  * * *

  After performing her morning necessities, Arabella joined the captain and their escort for the short ride to the near edge of the encampment. A large troop of mounted Martians rode out to meet them, hostility clearly visible in their attitudes, but as soon as they scented the storek on Arabella’s forehead they relaxed. After a brief but thorough inspection of Arabella’s and the captain’s few possessions, they allowed them to enter the camp.

  Their escort did not accompany them further. “We have delivered you to Corey House, as requested,” said the escort leader, “and now we return to our akhmok.”

  “Thank you for accompanying us this far,” Arabella said, “and please convey my thanks and appreciation to Khema as well.”

  The escort leader merely tossed her head in acknowledgement and rode off toward the rising sun, accompanied by her fellows and leading the two huresh that Arabella and the captain had ridden.

  Arabella looked upon their retreating backs with considerable trepidation. Though she had finally returned to the planet of her birth, it now seemed foreign and dangerous. Even Khema, who was more dear to her than any one save her own family, had become barely recognizable. And now even that tiny particle of familiarity was gone, leaving Arabella alone and defenseless among angry, armed Martians who wanted her brother dead.

  No … not alone. She had the captain by her side, for which she was more grateful than she could comfortably express.

  “Come,” she said to him. “Let us present ourselves at the gate. The sooner my brother can explain himself, the better.”

  * * *

  They made their way through the surging crowd, Martian warriors hurrying this way and that with weapons, supplies, and construction materials for the gigantic catapults. Most of the warriors simply glared at them, but on many occasions they were approached by angry Martians with swords or spears raised, who backed down as soon as they scented the storek. By the twentieth or thirtieth such occasion Arabella had learned to stand her ground as though unafraid, though her heart still raced every time.

  “How long does this … charm last?” the captain murmured to her as yet another armed Martian angrily swished her sword at them and stalked away.

  “Khema said it would get us as far as the gate,” she replied. It was all she knew.

  The crowd grew thicker and angrier as they approached the house, until by the time they reached the gate itself they found themselves pushing through a packed mob, many of who were hurling rocks or shooting arrows at the house’s thickly shuttered windows. If not for the storek’s influence they might not even have been able to progress on foot.

  The gate itself, a heavy double door of khoresh-wood some ten feet wide, was deeply set into the red stone of the wall. Both door and wall were exceedingly scarred. Arabella banged the knocker, politely at first and then vigorously, but received no response.

  They stepped back a bit. “Ahoy the house!” the captain called in a carrying voice that even stilled for a moment the furious activity of the Martians packed shoulder to shoulder around them. “Ahoooy!” he called again.

  For some minutes nothing more happened. Then a clattering and a rattling sounded from the other side of the gate’s thick wood. “How the d—l did you get here?” came a muffled voice.

  “We have a safe-conduct from … from a Martian general,” Arabella called back. There was a tiny peep-hole in the door, she noticed, and she directed her voice to it. “We are here to negotiate an end to this siege.”

  Voices sounded from inside, at least two different ones, but between the thickness of the door and the clattering of the Martians she was unable to make out the words. “There seems to be some disagreement within,” the captain said, and Arabella could only nod in unhappy agreement.

  “Please let us in,” Arabella called again. “I am Arabella Ashby, Michael’s sister. And this is Captain Prakash Singh of the Honorable Mars Company.”

  “Miss Ashby?” came a voice from within, a different one. “I had thought you were on Earth!”

  “I took passage on Diana, a fine and very rapid ship,” she said. “Oh, do let us in. I promise we mean you no harm.”

  The argument within resumed, even more vehemently, until finally the first voice cursed and called out, “I shan’t open the door unless you can get those d____d savages to back away at least five yards. And if they charge when I open it, I shall shoot the lot of them, and you too if I must!”

  Even with the storek, it was not easy for Arabella to convince the Martians to clear the area near the door as the unpleasant v
oice demanded. The task was finally accomplished through a combination of gentle persuasion on Arabella’s part, using every bit of Martian politeness she’d learned from Khema, and a display of self-assurance from the captain, who simply spread his arms and walked slowly forward, pressing the crowd back by sheer force of personality.

  Rattles, thuds, and dragging sounds came from the door’s other side as whatever barricade had been erected within was laboriously disassembled. “Get in close!” the unpleasant voice called. “I’ll give you a count of three to get inside.”

  Arabella and the captain moved in close to the gate. The crowd of Martians began to edge forward, diminishing the open space.

  Suddenly, with a grinding scrape of wood on stone, the door was pulled open. It stopped when the opening was less than one foot wide. “Inside!” the voice demanded, accompanied by a pair of wild red-rimmed eyes, a rifle barrel, and a pale beckoning hand. “Hurry!”

  Arabella squeezed herself through as quickly as she could, followed immediately by the captain. A moment later the door was pushed shut behind her, and she was roughly shoved aside as the door was barred and casks, crates, and heavy furniture were piled up against it. The grunts of men and the thump of wood on stone as the barricade was restored were matched by the cries and clatters of the Martians outside trying to get in.

  “Come away from the door, child,” came the first voice. “It’s not safe here.”

  She turned away from the door and the three burly young men still barricading it. A lean old man, with wild white hair and an old-fashioned hunting jacket, stood beckoning with his left hand, a rifle clutched in his right. The butts of two pistols protruded from his pockets.

  It was, she realized belatedly, Lord Corey, the owner of the house … though a much aged and diminished version of the jolly neighbor she’d left behind when her mother had taken her to Earth.

  * * *

  “Thank you for your hospitality, Lord Corey,” Arabella said, and dropped a curtsey. They had retreated from the door, with its continued thuds and clatters, to the drawing-room, a high and echoing chamber nearly unchanged from Arabella’s memories except that it was now crowded with people and stacked high with crates and boxes. Apart from Lord and Lady Corey, their servants, and her family solicitor Mr. Trombley, she recognized none of the company. Where was her brother?