Champion of Mars

by Guy Haley

  “I can show you, if you like.”

  “No thanks, Cybele. I’ve seen the simulations. They’ll be wrong anyway.” At that time there were only five mirror-sats redirecting the sun’s energy onto the red planet: one over Canyon City, the others focussed on the poles. He’d seen pictures from when they first started up, sky-high plumes of carbon dioxide erupting from the ice caps where the light hit. A sea was already forming near the south pole, in Hellas Planitia, the big crater there. Oceans would follow. He wanted to go and see that, and he would, when he was older. Too far for his quad, that was for sure.

  He finished his food. “Okay, we better be on our way, or we’re going to miss it,” he said.

  He opened a pannier on the back of the quad and pulled out his radiation gear, a flimsy all-in-one made to go over his clothes. He pulled it on and drew up the hood. Cosmic ray dosage wouldn’t be too high on a two-day trip, but it’d keep Grandma Sue happy.

  Or at least, a little bit less mad.

  He pulled on his parka and gloves over the top of it, bulky with superinsulating foams, and activated the heating units built into them.

  “I’m freezing my arse off up here,” he grumbled.

  “No one made you come,” said Cybele, which made Jonah laugh.

  He climbed onto the quad and drove on, wheels kicking dust up behind him as he went.

  Four and a half hours later, Jonah made it up to the end of the road. A final, vicious switchback brought him up and over the lip of the canyon. It wasn’t obvious at first, as the Valles’ edges were so ragged as to present no discernible rim, but Cybele told him they were out.

  The road degenerated into a dozen different tracks, heading in all directions. Jonah consulted the map in his implant. He located the hill he’d chosen as his vantage point on the horizon, and headed off toward it.

  He crested the hill in good time, weary and aching from the ride. His muscles were leaden, and his bones felt like they were still vibrating. It was a fantastic feeling.

  There was a star up there, getting brighter. A ferry. He’d chosen a good spot. Twenty kilometres away were the buildings of the new landing field, a spur of the new Tharsis road leading to it. The road was much wider than it needed to be, he thought, but Cybele had told him that Marsform were planning ahead. She’d showed him a projection of Martian population growth over the next century. It scared him a little. He could not visualise so many people here in his lifetime.

  He set up his shelter and binoculars. He talked to Cybele as he worked; he’d set up a holograph of the AI, much better than talking to thin air. Cybele’s holo looked out over the plains, a visual marker for Jonah so he’d know what the AI was peering at through satellite eyes or over the Martian Grid. A necessary illusion.

  By the time he’d finished setting up his modest camp, two other stars shone in the wake of the first, forming a line. The first glowed brilliant white, flickering a little as it passed through the thin Martian atmosphere.

  Jonah settled down, ate a meal of self-heating stew, and wrapped a thermal blanket around himself. He pressed his face up to the viewfinder of the binoculars, had them magnify the spaceport. He homed in on the new immigration building, a huge thing, it seemed to him, again way in excess of the planet’s needs.

  Current needs, he reminded himself.

  They were well in signal here – the port had an array of dishes and transmitters, and part of its sprawling complex was dedicated to boosting on-planet Grid access. His binoculars pointed out a bunch of stuff on enhanced reality they thought he might be interested in. It was all tub-thumping, municipal public relations nonsense. His grandma had come here from Earth, and she’d told him what enhanced reality was like there: tailored adverts, viral marketing that knew your name and shoe size, endless, unwanted solicitation. Peaceful without it, she said, here on Mars.

  He sighed. It wasn’t going to be that way for very long.

  He ran the binoculars over the vehicles in the car park. Ownership or rental details sprang up from each. His grandmother’s wasn’t there yet, but more were arriving with every minute.

  “Cybele, what is this place going to be like?” he said suddenly.

  “It is going to change,” said the AI, gently.

  He took his eyes from the binoculars and looked over the Tharsis plateau around his hill. Endless, red dust, as fine as powder paint, the rocks black against it. The world was so quiet, the wind whispering sadly, in mourning for a world long gone.

  “It was not always like this, Jonah,” said Cybele. “Once Mars had life. Perhaps we are only seeing it returned to how it should be.”

  “Do you know what Pastor Frank says?”

  “I do not know what Pastor Frank says,” said Cybele pleasantly. “Please tell me.”

  “Get this, he says that the existence of Mars and Venus are clear indications of the existence of God.”

  “Does he now?” said Cybele, who had no strong feelings on religion one way or another.

  “Yeah, he says it’s like God gave Man stepping stones out into the universe. He gave us Earth, like,” he laughed. “You’ll like this, like Earth is a nursery, right, but our parents went away, and left the door open and a car waiting outside so we could follow. He says it is hard to imagine a better pair of planets for making into other Earths. But you know what Pastor Frank’s like, he sees the face of Jesus in his breakfast eggs.”

  “Venus will not be transformed for some time,” said Cybele.

  “It will be, though, won’t it? All of them will be, I expect.” He picked up a stone, held it between forefinger and thumb. “Everything’s changing.”

  “All history is a succession of changes,” said Cybele.

  “Like, this rock, right? It’s probably never been touched by a human being.”

  “That is the balance of probability,” said Cybele.

  “So, yeah, I might be the first human being ever to hold this. But –” He looked at it hard, it was just a black small stone. Basalt. Most of the rock here was. “I won’t be the last.” He tossed it down the hill, where it lost itself in a crowd of its fellows.

  The air by the horizon was yellow-pink but if one lay back and looked up, the sky was bluish, and it grew a little bluer every year. And all around his camp, if he looked hard enough, there were signs of change; stubborn patches of fruticose lichen, genes hardened against the cold, cosmic radiation and the intense dryness. All these things conspired to kill it, but it was there nevertheless, bearding the stone, tiny soldiers besieging the planet. Jonah tried to imagine the cold red plains as grassland, or jungle, like he’d seen on holos from Earth. They’d re-engineered so much of the environment down there after the eco-collapse. To do the same here should be easy, once the TF got past a certain point.

  “There are AIs on the ships?” he said.

  “Many,” said Cybele.

  “I suppose you’ll be glad of the company.”

  “I am ambivalent,” she said. “It will be they who will change things here the most, however.”

  The tiny female holograph looked up to the approaching stars.

  “They’re coming,” said Cybele.

  There were seven lights in the sky now. The leading light resolved itself into a metallic glint, navigation beacons blinking. Jonah focussed his binoculars on it, cranked them up to maximum magnification. A stubby-winged space plane filled his vision, and ER factoids sprouted from it through his implant; he knew most of them by heart. The things had been designed robustly, to make the Hohman crossing between Mars and Earth over and over again. Each craft carried three hundred passengers.

  Streamers of air whirled off its wingtips, the heat of re-entry generating a contrail from its body.

  There was the crack of a sonic boom. The plane drew down to the horizon, flaps opening, engines firing. Activity boiled on the runways down at the port. Vehicles withdrew to the terminal buildings, emergency lights flashing. The windows on the port had filled up, curious onlookers jostling to welcome the
first wave of mass immigration to the red planet.

  The sun dipped behind a horizon that swelled with the bumps of the Tharsis Montes. It would be night soon.

  Jonah took his face from the binoculars and watched the planes come in, one after another, and taxi into position. Support vehicles rolled out to the landing strip and crowded them.

  After a time, the doors opened, and they disgorged new Martians by the hundred.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Arena of Kemiímseet

  YOECHAKENON STANDS IN the great arena of Kemiímseet. The noise of the crowd is the noise of a beast. When resting, it murmurs; when angry, it hisses; when excited, it roars.

  Now, it roars.

  The gates opposite Yoechakenon clank open, heavy bronze grids pulled on chains; the arrangement deliberately primitive. This is a place where the spectators can get a sense of life as it could be: unlinked, solitary and savage. Such is part of the ritual of the arena.

  The crowd members have their programmes, they have their tickets and their whispers. They know what to expect. Yoechakenon does not. I do not. And although he feels no fear, I fear enough for the both of us. He is without his armour, he has been hurt before. He is not invincible.

  From the noise it makes – the cheering, the yells, the heated debates over wagers large and small – the crowd anticipates a challenge to their champion. I listen with him as he moves his hearing over a number of these exchanges. He does this without applying his full concentration, his mind focussed upon the door opposite. The minor whisper I have tasked with monitoring the crowd is barely acknowledged, either by his consciousness or by the other semi-autonomous valets which cluster round about it.

  Even all together, these minor valets of no use compared to I, Kaibeli. True, they are part of me, voices hived off from my soul choir, but I as myself – my whole, integrated self – am forbidden to communicate with him as he fights. I am barred, and painfully so. My connection with him is reduced to one of the second degree. Only my prayers reach him.

  The noise of the crowd thunders in both worlds of Mars, but Yoechakanon’s connection with the Great Library, once so intimate, is reduced to a voyeur’s glimpse, the clamour of its halls a distant susurration.

  We are prisoners here, both of us.

  His tactical advisor, a barely aware collection of murderous advice, catches something his ears have heard but that he has not.

  “Your opponents are three sand giants,” it says, “large specimens, brought in by flitter thirteen days ago.” It is a simple being, hungry for violence. I am glad to be rid of it. “They are not sick, nor are they drugged. They are paid, and they are warriors. One quarter of the crowd are wagering upon them.”

  Yoechakenon shifts his shortsword from hand to hand and spits upon each of his palms in turn. “Let the crowd bet on them,” he says. “Let them lose their money.”

  He tenses the tendons in his hands and flexes his fists, a pre-combat habit he has carried these last seven lifetimes. He passes the sword back to his right. He thinks a command at the blade’s rudimentary mind and it warms. He hefts it; he misses the glaive. Heat weapons are primitive, but the crowd likes the swirl of red-hot metal, the showers of sparks that spatter from every hit. His tattooed body is naked bar a closed helmet and a run of plate on his right arm. His status allows him an energy field, built into his vambrace, but this he does not activate yet.

  “Sand giants; biomorphs endemic to Ipulloni Desert of the Tertis hinterlands. First example documented twenty-seven thousand, three hundred and seventy-three years...” Yoechakenon ignores the drone of the advisor. He has heard information like this so many times that it is scratched indelibly into his biological and eternal memories. It bores him. He rotates his shoulders, stretching prison stiffness from his muscles, and he waits.

  The gates are open. The sand giants stride through, and the crowd’s noise becomes deafening. Yoechakenon loathes the crowd, but they love him. They cry out not because they think he may be beaten; rather, they revel in seeing their champion given a challenge. A challenge by their reckoning, at any rate. Yoechakenon does not find the giants so impressive.

  They are not real giants; there are no such things on Mars, only the tall tribesmen who inhabit the plateau where the mirror suns no longer shine and the land is cold and poor. Time and gravity have worked their spell upon them since the long-ago days of settlement, a time I do not remember. They stand taller by a head and a half than the tallest of other Martians. They are heavy-featured, with heads out of proportion to their thin frames. Their eyes and nostrils are hooded, their skin a darker red than Yoechakenon’s.

  They move warily, as cautious of the crowd as they are of Yoechakenon. They hold themselves well, handling their spears as men who have been born to them. Yoechakenon has their measure, tall though it is. He lifts his visor and spits on the sand. There will be no honour in their deaths. This is butcher’s work, not combat.

  They fan out to attack him from three sides at once, one poised to rush him as the others close in from the flanks. It is a tactic they use on the great desert lions.

  Yoechakenon is deadlier than any lion.

  He stands motionless, searching for hidden strength and finding none. Wind stirs stray hairs that have escaped his braids.

  The crowd falls silent.

  The giants look to one another, nod, and lower their spears.

  Yoechakenon charges. He leaves his energy shield inactive.

  Blood soaks the sands of the arena floor a deeper red.

  None of it is Yoechakenon’s.

  “YOECHAKENON.” I SPEAK aloud. The champion reacts angrily when I communicate thought-to-thought after a bout. Voice is better, although in truth he is best left alone entirely until the mood passes. This will not wait. I let a moment go by before calling him again.

  Yoechakenon is beautiful. He is two and a half metres tall, long and lean, his limbs attenuated by the standards of his ancestors, yet he is muscular and strong. Yerthmen would have found his skull and face elongated and incongruously delicate, although they too would have thought him handsome.

  There are no Yerthmen now.

  His skin is smooth, like the surface of a dune, and as red; covered in motile tattoos denoting his rank and histories. They are defaced with luminous bars, imprisoned as we are. Yoechakenon’s hair is bone white, its braids terminating in beads of turquoise and limestone. Four large and three small interfaces wrought of half-metal glitter in his skin around his spine. Beyond his physical form I see his energy field – manipulated over and over again in his long quest to become champion – as butterfly wings about him. I see his enhanced musculature shiver with electricity as it repairs itself, and his tattoos’ pain under the sigils of shame, their anguish revealed to my eyes alone.

  His imprisonment has left his bearing untouched. He is tall and proud and arrogant still, but he is not the same man who slew the Spirefather of Olm. That man is gone, and I do not know well he who stands in his stead.

  Yoechakenon’s golden eyes are expressionless. He looks through the window over the empty arena. All the cells look onto the arena floor, another torture devised by the Door-ward, that its prisoners may watch others die and consider their own fate, never far away, upon the sand. Yoechakenon does not care. He is the greatest champion Mars has ever known. He stares over the killing ground as if he would make himself lord of the place by force of will as much as by force of arms.

  This cannot wait.

  “Yoechakenon,” I say. “I am sorry...”

  “Please!” He holds a hand up. I balk at this show of anger at me. I resent him. I am infuriated that he does not appreciate that I suffer too, by choice, for him. The feeling passes. I tell myself part of his anger is guilt, an emotion he does not deal with easily, and so I keep my resentment locked deep inside a place he cannot see.

  “I am sorry, Yoechakenon.” My mind reaches out to his, soothing him in a way words cannot. “Forgive me. Faithful whispers tell me that men from the T
win Emperor come. They wish to speak with you.”

  “The Emperor wishes to see me? He has lost his wits.”

  “The Emperor’s men will be here soon. Their heartsigns echo through the Second World, and their passage brings the fences down.”

  Yoechakenon leans onto the sill of the window, and drops his gaze from the arena to the floor of the cell. His anger pushes against the malignant presence of the Door-ward. He can do little to bar the Door-ward; its detestable, oily presence swims round the top of his skull, mocking us as it mocks all who languish in the arena.

  “We will soon learn what he wants, then.” Yoechakenon stares out again. The afternoon is too hot for entertainment, and the seats are empty. The sand has been raked flat, the blood washed away. On days like this, after the crowds have gone, Yoechakenon can hear the guns on the Tertis plateau above the canyons, distant summer thunder. Day by day, the guns grow closer. They give him some satisfaction.

  Two men, clad in the armour of the palace scarabs, come to the cell door. They carry energy pikes. Yoechakenon watches through my spirit eyes. He sees the scarabs as I see them, as layered energy. My whispers dart about them, bringing me armour schematics, vital signs, Second World presence, active lesser spirits, details of their spirit companions. The men’s companions attempt to do the same, but I am far older and stronger than the spirits bonded to these men, and Yoechakenon remains dark to them.

  The hand of the lead man breaks the bars of light blocking the entrance, shutting down the door.

  “Lord.” The man bows and steps into the cell. He is older than his companion by a score of years, and speaks respectfully. “We have been ordered to bring you before His Most Glorious Majesty, the Twin Emperor Kalinilak-Kunuk.” The older soldier is expectant, a man who awaits an order from a trusted superior. His companion is different. His body language is looser, less respectful. He is certain of his own martial skill in the face of Mars’ greatest champion.

  He is a fool.

  Their armours’ domed backs make them seem hunched. Globular joints form awkward junctions at the scarabs’ elbows and shoulders. Wide helmets, two broad saucers one atop the other, enclose their heads, adding to the impression of inhumanity. Lights wink in the darkness between the saucers. Sensor bunches set between artificial eyes and ears dart out to taste the air.