The Aethers of Mars

by Eric Flint

  Conrad smiled. “Is that what happened? Really?”

  Szurthål folded his arms. “Apparently not. Educate me.”

  Conrad leaned against a clay-brick and mortar wall, let the wrapped Enfield slip into his shadow. “I was not arrested. They never read charges, and at any rate, it would not have been a Company matter—not with a blackcoat present. And did you see the black armbands on the Company soldiers?”

  “Yes.”

  “That signifies that they are nominally under government authority; they are ‘deputized,’ you might say, but only the blackcoat can give official orders, make arrests, act in the name of the Quee—well, the King, now.”

  “I see. But it was he who apprehended you.”

  “He did not apprehend me. He simply dragged me away after beating me senseless. And that was after Stans—the human with the light blue eyes—pointed out that there might be further ‘objects of interest’ in my luggage.”

  Szurthål’s ears rotated forward. “Ah. Now I see. This Stans was implying that the sergeant might find more goods of value in your luggage—goods that would not need to be accounted for, if they were not reported. And which Stans implied he could not report, since he ‘had not had enough time’ to conduct a complete survey of the contents.”

  “Exactly. And Stans—whoever he may really be—is not, at least, part of the official chain of command here on Mars. So the sergeant knew he could pilfer my goods without fear of report or reprisal.”

  Szurthål smiled. “So, to the Black Market district, then.”

  “Yes, I think so. Tell me, do you have much experience with, er—such establishments?”

  Szurthål sneered; the narrow face and long features that were characteristic of his race made his expression seem even more disdainful than the equivalent human reaction. “Well enough to run one myself.”

  Conrad smiled. “What an oddly appropriate turn of phrase.”

  * * *

  Lying prone on the ledge of the defunct secondary aqueduct that had once supplied the Old Market District with its fresh water, Conrad peered over the sights of the Spanish guard’s Lee-Enfield. He watched as the sergeant and the other Company trooper entered the street through a crumbling portcullised arch. The guard carried his rifle at the ready; the sergeant carried the luggage. They looked up the street expectantly.

  After a moment, a dusty, cloaked figure stepped from a shadowed doorway and made a gesture that, to a casual observer would have looked as though he was batting at an insect. Three times. And then, after a precise four-count, he batted twice more.

  The two humans began walking forward; a moment later, the cloaked figure did the same. In perhaps half a minute, they would meet in the middle of the street, near the shin-high rim of a half-collapsed cistern.

  Conrad estimated the range, slapped the tangent sight of the Lee-Enfield flat. He had not fired a weapon yet in the Martian air, but it was notably thin—like the air at the highest alpine reaches—and extremely dry. Bullets would have less atmosphere and humidity to fight through and should have flatter trajectories over the course of their marginally longer ranges.

  The Enfield was in reasonable shape. Its action wanted a full field strip and wipe with an oil-cloth in order to remove the finer dust, but the barrel’s rifling had no visible defects or erosion, and the action still cycled smoothly. Optimally, he would have liked to have had the opportunity to put a few rounds through the gun on a range, get a feeling for the idiosyncrasies that it—like any firearm—possessed. But this was not an optimal situation and this was no time to reflect upon things one did not have.

  The two humans and the dusty Martian had almost reached each other when the latter held up a hand. Both sides stopped; unheard words were exchanged.

  Conrad snugged the weapon’s stock into his shoulder, snapped the safety off, leaned his eye down to sight along the barrel.

  Down in the street, the unheard words were apparently not congenial ones; fierce gestures were being exchanged by the sergeant and the Martian. The latter seemed to want to see the contents of one of the valises; the sergeant evidently wanted to see something the Martian possessed. Money, Conrad imagined. He let the tip of the front sight drift up into the v-notch of the back sight—

  The Martian shook his head sharply and turned to go. The sergeant stepped forward, angry, voice loud enough to be heard as a dull, indistinct roar all the way up on Conrad’s perch, almost fifty yards away and twenty yards up in the air.

  Conrad brought the sights into alignment on the chest of the Company soldier, was mildly surprised to feel no anticipation of remorse: nothing. The Cleaner was doing its chilling work upon his conscience once again. He curled his finger lightly, moving the trigger through its first step, exhaled lightly, squeezed it home.

  The Enfield barked. The Company soldier went down, the bullet just to the right of the sternum. He was kicking weakly as the sergeant spun around to check the status of his sole back-watcher—and then began reversing that turn quickly, experience evidently reminding him that he had been a fool to take his eyes off the most proximal threat—

  Before he came all the way back around, the long-caped Martian closed the distance to the blackcoat in a fluid, leaping step and ran a long, thin dagger into his back three times, the interval between the strikes so swift that Conrad could not follow the motions.

  The sergeant fell, clutching his diaphragm with one hand and the valise with the other.

  Staying low, Conrad shouldered the rifle, rose into a crouch, and prepared to scoot back to the point where the aqueduct emerged from the roof of an abandoned tower. But not before he looked down in the street and saw the Martian’s face—Szurthål’s face—smiling up from beneath the cape’s hood. He snatched up the valises and ran away into the tangled labyrinth that was the southwestern slum of Coprates’ Old Market District, which, it just so happened, petered out at the foot of the same tower to which Conrad himself was headed.

  * * *

  Once at the tower, the two split Conrad’s luggage between them. They made quickly for what Szurthål called a vashatum or “narroway”: one of the thin, shallow canals that were the tangled capillaries in the aquatic circulatory system handling Coprates’ non-pedestrian traffic. After securing the services of what looked like a hybrid between a sampan and an elongated punt, they hunkered in its hide-covered midsection and pulled its front and rear blinds: if the human authorities somehow managed to mount a quick search, they were notoriously amateurish at capturing criminals who remained on the move within the labyrinthine narroways.

  Szurthål watched, arms folded, while Conrad checked the valises. His last few dinars and lira were gone—no surprises there—but everything else seemed to be in order. Conrad resisted the urge to grasp the Mauser to him jealously. “Strange that the sergeant hadn’t sold the weapons—or anything—yet.”

  Szurthål grunted. “It would have been strange if he had sold anything yet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that, here on Mars, a blackcoat is always protected by his official position and by his uniform. So he had no need to sell these goods at the first reasonable offer. That is why he was still moving between the dealers, allowing them to make competing bids, driving up the price. But where is the book? I do not see it.” Szurthål frowned. “Of course, I did not see it last time, either.”

  Conrad smiled, swayed slightly as the punt bumped against the smooth-worn sidings of the narroway, reached into the shorter valise. He pulled away a length of amateurish stitching with which he had repaired a split seam, separated the canvas folds, slipped two fingers inside. He drew out a small piece of paper.

  Szurthål frowned. “I hope that is not all that is left of the book.”

  “No; it is the book. In a manner of speaking.”

  “Speak in a more plain manner, then.”

  “This is a postal receipt. I did not carry my most valuable currency—my British pounds—or the book onto the ship with me. When I boug
ht my ticket, I sent these items to myself—under an alias—to the postal depot here in Coprates.”

  “Not Coprates: Q’oodpryxos,” corrected Szurthål. “So you are telling me that the book was never lost?”

  “Not to me. But if you had not rescued me when you did, you would not know where it was. And even if you had, you would not have known the name under which it was sent, or to which it was to be delivered, or the location of this receipt—without which the postal clerk will not release the parcel.”

  Szurthål folded his arms, leaned back. “You are a most annoying Pink, Conrad von Harrer. Let us go to this postal depot and then deliver this book to its rightful owner.”

  Conrad nodded. “Is he—the owner—here in the city, or farther away?”

  “Farther away.” Szurthål smiled. “In a manner of speaking.”

  * * *

  Eight days and 1500 miles later, Conrad was unable to restrain his curiosity any longer. Folding his arms and leaning against the wind-swept bow-rail of the dirigible’s double-decker gondola, he finally succumbed to same question he had heard children ask parents in trains, trams, coaches, and ferries his whole life: “When are we going to get there?”

  Szurthål smiled, glanced sideways. “You are to be congratulated on your patience, Pink. It is uncommon in your species. So is your tolerance of high altitudes—relatively speaking.”

  “What do you mean, ‘relatively speaking’?”

  Szurthål gestured out at the uplands they were approaching, the dirigible rising slowly along with the ground. “I mean that most humans find it difficult to travel in our cloud galleys at all, even when we follow the canals and stay well under the crests of the tablelands.”

  Conrad looked out across the forbidding expanses to which Szurthål had referred. From this altitude, the tablelands of Mars—its “sea-level” surface, as some early areologist had oxymoronically defined it—were smooth expanses of tan and rust, perturbed here and there by a ripple of darker rock. If he looked closely, von Harrer could make out the patchy scrub growth that speckled it, punctuated by occasional stands of mauve, waist-high brambles. Farther off, he spied what might have been mile-wide puddles of standing water. “Hard to believe anything can live up there,” murmured Conrad into the wind.

  Szurthål, who enjoyed the phenomenal hearing common to all his people, shrugged. “Hzzhh. There are worse places. The Dust Seas, for instance. But we will not see those. Happily.”

  “Tell me that means we are almost at our destination.”

  Another shrug. “Three days, maybe four. It depends upon whether we find ourselves moving into a headwind or a tailwind when we top the Hydraxes Maximus—the Great Spillway—and glide down over its city, Looghpur, and thence down into what you call the Margaritus Sinus.”

  “And which you call?”

  “We call it the Chabråni Oopreth, the Wide-Gather of the Great-Melt’s Flow. From there we head due east across those lowlands to reach the Oxus canal, which we will follow northeast to our final destination.”

  “The Dirce Fons?”

  Szurthål waved a corrective hand. “That is the region, only. We travel to Thrynoo’ul, furthest of the Bowl Cities, forgotten home of forgotten gods.”

  “And why are they called ‘Bowl Cities’?”

  “Do you always have another question? Because the cities are in bowls, of course.”

  “Of course. Cities in bowls. But seriously, why—?”

  “I am being serious, human.” Szurthål called him “human” much more than “Pink,” now. But only rarely did he use “Conrad.” Still, it was progress—of a sort. “The Bowl Cities are in what our scholars suspect are ancient craters—deep enough to provide air that is more thick and comfortable, and in which we may grow our crops. The benchlands—those that line and fan out from the canals in the valleys and rifts—are the wellsprings of our life—our ‘oases,’ you would call them. Even when such fertile lands are distant and isolated, like the scattered craters of the Bowl Cities, they are too precious to be wasted.”

  Conrad squinted forward toward the wide mountain pass that Szurthål had called the Great Spillway and suddenly realized that what he had thought was a purely natural terrain feature had, in fact, been partially converted into a gargantuan array of reservoirs and sluiceways. Collectively, it dwarfed any engineering project ever attempted, or even imagined, by humanity. Von Harrer pointed at what appeared to be stairs built into the side of the northernmost mountain, each one several miles wide and at least half a mile high. “Are those all—locks?”

  Szurthål looked, nodded. “Yes. They are the Kunamzhai Jopurti, the Little Downward Stairs.”

  “‘Little’?”

  Szurthål smiled: the arrestingly sharp features of the Martian face seemed to resist the requisite curve of lips and brow, Conrad had noticed. “Yes, ‘Little.’ You should see the Uthramshup Jopur—the Big Upward Stairs, the locks that carry the waters of each year’s Great Polar Melt up into the highland reservoirs that we shall soon be flying over. But it will be night-time when we pass over the ‘Uthrams.’ Perhaps some other time.”

  Conrad was almost glad he would not get to see the Big Upward Stairs; the Little Downward ones left him nearly breathless. The sluices were the size of rivers; the machine towers for the lock gates were at least 500 feet on each side, and 700 feet high; and there was a spider web of what from the distance looked like gossamer filigree—until closer approach revealed it to be a bewildering maze of aqueducts and secondary runoffs and catch tanks. The sheer size of the construction—which had converted a mountain pass into one vast water-management system—defied ready comprehension because, even from this altitude, Conrad could not take it all in at once; it was simply too large to be seen in one glance.

  “Do you find it more difficult to breathe?” Szurthål asked with the faintest hint of solicitousness.

  “No, why?”

  “Because your mouth has remained open for an unusually long time.”

  Conrad snapped his jaw back up into place, sought for something to provide a new topic of conversation. Anything would do—anything that prevented Szurthål from making another respiratory inquiry that would ultimately reveal that Conrad had simply been gaping at the Martian feats of engineering like a simpleton. He pointed at brown and green strips that followed up along the skirts of the Kunamzhai Jopurti. “What are those?”

  Szurthål looked at the strips, then back at Conrad in surprise. “Perhaps the distance—or the scale—has tricked you. Those are what you call paddies—seeded with your planet’s ‘rice.’”

  Conrad nodded. “Yes. The scale—disoriented—me.” He reflected on the numerous other paddies—albeit far smaller in scope—they had passed during their flight over what areologists called the “breadbasket of Mars”: the lowlands that writhed from west to east, just south of the equator. Beginning with the deep, rich Vallis Agathodaemonis, it rose and broadened into the Sinus Aurorae and finally tapered out into the paired channels that comprised the Canali Aromatum, at whose ends the green reached up toward the skirts of the Great Spillway itself. “It has only been a few years since Rhodes brought rice to Mars. How could it be so widespread, so quickly?”

  Szurthål shrugged. “Because Rhodes sends his agents out to the potentates and satraps of the greater cities. And as they decide and act, so do their vassals, who have always spent more effort imitating their betters than thinking for themselves.” He frowned. “But that is the lesser part of why the lords and landowners of Mars have so rapidly converted to rice. The primary reason is the rice itself: it is vastly superior to the canal millet that we have relied upon until now.”

  “Superior? In what way?”

  “In every way, human. It furnishes twice the sustenance of the millet, and is far more digestible. So there is less famine, and since infants eating rice have less colic, they gain weight and are stronger sooner—and so, fewer of them succumb to diseases.”

  “What you describe is a godsend, but fro
m your tone, it sounds like you are describing a curse.”

  Szurthål nodded. “Because you are right: it is both a god gift and a curse. In exchange for his rice—and the men who know how to grow it—Rhodes has done more than take possession of our satraps’ vast treasuries of opals and peridots and spinels; he has taken possession of our souls. Of all of us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Szurthål looked off into the distance. “Your Mr. Rhodes—the so-called Overlord of Mars—discovered we would pay anything for his rice. And why not? What price would you not pay to give your newborn babes a threefold increase in the chance that they would live to have babes of their own?”

  Conrad simply nodded: Szurthål’s question was so obviously rhetorical that any response would be either idiotic, insulting, or both.

  “And so, when your Overlord of Mars finished taking our gems, he took our backs and our arms: he purchased the Guild of Thrall-Reckoners.”

  “The what?”

  “The Guild of Thrall-Reckoners. Ah, I forget: you would not be familiar with this concept. Conrad, until Rhodes came, we had never had the kind of slavery you have had. Perhaps because our forms of servitude were individual and were less brutish, we have never attempted to do away with them. Many of our workers are still what you might label thralls, or bondsmen, if I understand those words correctly. And among our people, the accounts of these thralls—the tracking of the kind and duration of servitude they owe—has been overseen by a Guild.”

  “A guild? Managing slaves? How can the Guild’s overseers be trusted to be fair?”

  “Hzzhh! Do you consider the alternative better? Is it more likely that a master can be trusted to keep fair accounts of his thralls? The Guilds of Thrall-Reckoners—for at one time, there were many—have been a part of our world for as long as we have record of its affairs. Scholars say that, in earlier days, Thrall-Reckoners were called into being by potentates who wished to reduce the possibility of revolts by bondsmen whose masters falsified their accounts, wishing to retain their services perpetually.”