Champion of Mars

by Guy Haley

  “Is someone following you, Jord?”

  “Yes! Curse you, KiGrace,” he hissed. KiGrace habitually referred to Jord as ‘he,’ it made things simpler that way. Jord’s gender was, in truth, far more complicated than that. His polyphonic voice, blending female softness and pitch with male vibrato, was the most evident signifier of his uncertain status. KiGrace was curious as to what Jord kept under his robes, had outright propositioned him on more than one occasion; when he was sure Kybele was not to know. Jord had declined every offer.

  “No one can hear us; I have invoked full privacy. The people beyond these curtains will not even see us.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Everything is about to change.” He hunched over the table. It was too low for him. He was tall by Martian standards, and towered over native Earthmen. He picked up his glass, quick skeletal fingers rolling it back and forth. He nearly dropped it. A scarlet drop slopped from its rim. A blotch spread out on the cloth. He stared at it, transfixed. “That is how it will start,” he said. He pointed at the stain. “Spreading slow. But unlike the wine, it will not stop. It will never stop.”

  “What are you babbling about, Jord?”

  Jord licked his lips, his tongue the colour of liver. He drained his goblet. “You asked me to investigate the Technophi, their eleven-dimensional eleutheremics?”

  “Yes. Yes, I did. I am interested in applying higher geometries to my art, but they would not aid me. A simple task for you, surely? What of it?”

  “Listen to me, you arrogant whoreson!” His voice dropped lower, and he hunched further. “There’s a faction, right? The Arcomanni?”

  KiGrace raised his eyebrows. He was getting bored with this. “I know nothing about the intrigues of the Technophi, who does? Who cares?”

  “Never mind. They’ve codified all this into some new kind of discipline.”

  “And? There is no practical application for eleutheremics, it is mathematics as art, that is all.”

  Jord smiled a humourless smile. “Now that’s where you are wrong. They’re attempting to actually use this stuff, practically” – he snarled the word –“to unravel the higher-dimensional matrices. The Technophi are tearing themselves up over it. There’s some serious in-fighting going on at the Temples of Reason, and I mean actual fighting. Half a habitat laid waste, last I heard. Many dead.”

  “Won’t the Federals step in?”

  Jord shook his head. “Too risky, the Solists need the Technophi votes. They’ll lose them altogether if they back the wrong side, so the fucking government is hanging back, waiting to see what happens. By which time of course it will be too fucking late. Last I heard, the Arcomanni had the upper hand; they’ve built something, some kind of machine, and they’re going to turn it on.”

  “What does it do?”

  “Do? Do? I don’t fucking know! But the plant I have... had... he thinks it will do nothing good, oh, something to do with spatial collapse, temporal fuck ups. I think it’s something to do with how the slipships work... Oh, I don’t know! I don’t know! I only know that it’d be a good idea to be on a slipship and on your way out of the system.”

  KiGrace sighed. “Jord, old friend. We live in an age of doom-mongering. Every week I hear the Technophi will blow the sun up or that we risk thinking reality out of existence by over-examining it. Why get so upset by this? It will pass. Come, stay and watch my exhibition, calm down, drink, find a lover for the evening. The morning will seem the brighter for it.”

  “Shit, KiGrace, I’m seriously in peril coming here to tell you this at all. They’ve agents all over the place.”

  “The spirits of Mars will protect you.”

  “Yeah, and who runs the Library? It’s not the damn spirits, is it? Half of them are Technophi anyway.”

  “Then why are you here at all?” said KiGrace crossly.

  Jord filled his glass from a ewer on the table, a fine piece that decorated its environs with a shifting play of holographic light. He stared at the drink hard, then swallowed it all back in three long gulps. “Because you’re the only friend I have, right?” He stood. “I have passage booked to the Piscean colonies. It leaves in half an hour. I have tickets for you and for Kybele. If you won’t come, watch the sky. There should be... something.”

  “I cannot possibly go with you. Later, maybe; tomorrow, definitely. Now? Impossible.”

  “It’ll be too late by then. Ask the machines. They know something is up.”

  KiGrace winced. “Those of Mars prefer not to be so called.”

  “Fuck them and fuck their fucking pretensions! Ask them. Ask the spirits directly. Have you not noticed anything weird recently? Anything with their prognostications? Ask them. Something is going to happen. They know. Something tonight. For all I know, it might have already happened.” Jord stood to his full, soaring height. He swayed as he stood, from the wine, or his fear. His robe shifted with the movement like a sail. “KiGrace, they say they tried it before. And when they did, something got out.”

  KiGrace snorted, then, and instantly regretted it. Jord’s face turned hostile.

  “Fuck you, KiGrace, I don’t know why I care.” He turned away, flapping at the curtains around their couch, seeking a way out.

  “Jord?” called KiGrace.

  “Yeah?” said Jord. He did not turn back, but he did stop.

  “Thank you. I appreciate your concern for me.”

  Jord turned back and pulled his sleeve across his face. He was sweating despite the cold. “Right. Good luck, KiGrace.”

  Jord staggered away, shoving people out of his path with his spidery fingers.

  KiGrace could not get the look on his face from his mind. It lurked there, joining the memory of Kybele’s frown in an unsettling alliance.

  KIGRACE STEPPED INTO the cavity at the heart of the pavilion, a circle of black in the floor, the entrance to a deep well.

  The music came to a carefully timed stop. KiGrace floated a little higher in the air, so he was looking out over the assembly. He clapped his hands. Conversation stilled and all eyes turned to him.

  “Ladies, gentlemen, it is time. I present to you... my exhibition.”

  The pavilion’s dome turned black and curled backwards, opening the room to the sky. The musicians left. The contents of the pavilion were whisked away by servants, the permanent fittings dissolving into the floor. Then the floor, too, faded into nothing, leaving KiGrace’s delighted audience floating in the air. Together they descended into a spherical chamber of seemingly infinite size. At a thought from KiGrace, the audience floated into a sphere. This was his artistry, the blend of the Second and First Worlds. His audience could not tell what was real, and what was not. All mediated by the spirits in the Library, but it was his work. He felt a swell of pride as he set to work. He had designed this exhibition over long months, and now he wanted to share it.

  Music, low and slow, started up. He grew in stature, his face becoming a silver mask, his body a sculpture of quicksilver.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned, and a chorus sang his words back at him. “You are Mars.”

  The sphere of bodies glowed, an orb of dazzling light that pushed back the dark. The light dimmed. A planet hung there, new and hot. The beginning of the world they called home. Time accelerated, hundreds of thousands of years passing every second. The heavens cleared. Bombardments of meteors rained on the world. The world cooled, the oceans grew. The atmosphere thickened.

  Life came.

  For each participant, the exhibition was different. KiGrace believed that a guided experience was the highest form of art. Prescriptive art limited the participation of the observer, while free scenarios sidelined the creator. Only together could art, artist and audience achieve a unity. Each audience member found his own way to experience the exhibition. Some became fish in ancient seas, others meteors that met fiery ends in the sky. Some hopped from viewpoint to viewpoint, others watched from on high like gods.

  At crucial moments, KiGrace had his temporal dila
tion effect slow, sometimes almost to real time. He did so when the world was hit by the asteroid that formed the vast basin the Southern Sea now occupied; again when the unnamed planetoid that formed the old moons of Phobos and Deimos broke apart in orbit. For the arrival of life, ten minutes, and for the final eruption of Olympus, twenty. He played the formation of the Marrin at a hundred thousand times normal speed, allowing his audience to see it gape open before their eyes, or experience their bodies being torn apart as the rocks they inhabited split.

  Together they watched the planet’s first youth end. They felt it cool. They saw the last of the higher animals die in the last warm pool. Saw the planet’s core cool and still, saw the electromagnetic field flicker and go out.

  A billion years of frigidity and dust followed; brief warm spells interrupted it, but the planet remained dead. KiGrace swept through this at speed, and yet still it lasted an age, purposefully so. He hounded his audience with despair, his score dolorous.

  Light faded.

  The sun returned, bursting around another world, a blue world. A candle flame flickered up toward them. The first rocket. It was barbarically decorated and terrifyingly primitive. More followed. The perspective swam back to Mars. They watched in awe as the first men landed upon the dead world.

  Time sped again. Kanyonset was founded and grew. Mirror suns scurried into orbit one after the other, as if in a hurry to be the first to their stations. Plumes of gas gouted from the poles. Ice melted. Time slowed to show the period of comets, and the aftermath of their impacts.

  Oceans grew again. Dust storms gave way to the swirling of soft white cloud. Fleets of hurrying spacecraft and asteroids fitted with engines formed a line in the sky, and a new moon grew.

  Twenty-five thousand years went by. Mars flourished and softened, but always, the dead world was visible under the new, a skull under transparent flesh. KiGrace made sure of that.

  They achieved the present. KiGrace had everyone’s viewpoint converge naturally. Bringing them back from their personal experiences to one shared arena was one of the hardest parts of his work, and he prided himself on his skill in it. Together, they wheeled around the planet as it was that very night, zooming over savannah, city, and ocean, up the Marrin, to the heart of Kanyonset. Along streets, jinking past unknowing passersby. Then to the spire they stood upon, up its rippled sides, and high into the sky. KiGrace let the night turn over them a moment, then had them dive quickly to the pavilion at the centre of the garden at the top.

  They passed through the roof and centred on the figure of KiGrace, floating over his black circle of nothing. He allowed them to look out of his eyes, just for an instant, as he regarded them. They felt what he felt: pride, an eagerness to show and share, lust, boredom, and even his contempt, small and itself contemptible, toward the people who worshipped him.

  He had the gravity field lower them to the floor gently, to cushions placed there for the purpose.

  They sat up one by one, blinking and smiling.

  KiGrace sank to the ground.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said softly. “You are Mars.”

  He bowed to rapturous applause.

  The musicians returned, as did servants, bringing with them tables and food. People clustered about him, flattering him and praising him, although all were dazed. He caught Kybele’s eye across the crowd.

  She smiled at him, and mouthed. “It was wonderful.”

  He smiled back, suddenly bashful, and dipped his head in a formal bow to hide the blush on his cheeks. She deserved better than him. He decided to be better.

  Outside, the stars twinkled; never judging, always there.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Royal Dock

  THE EXIT FROM the Window of the Worlds, like the entrance, leads to a place far from the door’s physical position. Yoechakenon blinks as he emerges into bright light. The door closes behind him and disappears as if it had never been. We are in a large cavern. It is dark. Light orbs move in the air, the halo of brightness surrounding them projecting only for a few score spans, but he recognises the space he stands in, and so do I.

  “The Royal Dock,” he says.

  “Yes,” says the Emperor. “You remember?”

  Yoechakenon nods. For many lifetimes, he was of the pilot clans. Extinct now, along with their calling. No spacecraft have flown from here for thousands of years, since the end of the Third Stone War, and the Quinarchy’s prohibition of space travel.

  Sadness squeezes me in tight coils. Once a marvel of engineering, the Docks of Mars were renowned across the domains of Man, a huge dome fourteen thousandspan in diameter. Their heyday is long past, the time when ships from hundreds of worlds came and went from here dim even to the spirits of the Second World, and our memories are long.

  The mirrors and glass are broken, the metalwork crumbled. Artistry is hidden behind veils of dust and sand. In many places the Dock’s richly decorated roof has caved in, leaving gashes of natural rock showing; damp, angular wounds that will never heal or be mended. The portals to the deeper harbours yawn black and foreboding where once all was light and glitter. The lesser hangars are for the main part gone, their arches broken by the oppressive weight of time, their burdens spilled across the floor in fans of scree.

  Saddest of all are the heaps of twisted half-metal skeletons, dotting the floor or hanging wretched from the walls. These are the bones of ships and their cradles. Most of the ships passed centuries ago, their spirits gone on to be other things and become forgetful of the joys of the endless night between the stars, their gargantuan mortal forms decaying into unrecognisable heaps of dust and filth.

  Amidst the crumbling remnants, a score of the thousands of docking cradles are still recognisable as such. Their spirits are strong, and they have clung to life. The shreds of the ships they held are still evident as rotting swags of tissue hanging from the cradles’ proud structures. The cradles’ arms are held high, the surety of the spirits within – that they will one day again embrace a living craft – keeping them whole. I can feel their minds watching us incuriously. They are so single-minded in their vigil that their presence can be felt through the damper field, boring through it as the awl of a carver bores through soapstone. These survivors are uninterested in the affairs of men and other spirits. They crave only to hold the space-chilled skin of a ship once more, and are willing to wait until the end of time to do so.

  They are jealous of the three that still hold ships.

  The ships are massive, grown over decades generations ago from half-metals and genomancy. One has given up recently, some time over the last few hundred years I estimate, the animating spirit departed or dead, and now the ship lies slack, its hull gaping open. Ribs poke through necrotic skin, and the air is heavy with the must of its decay.

  But the other two, these are whole, and I am amazed. Their hulls shine still with reflected starlight. They are proud. They have not succumbed to ennui. They wait, tirelessly numbering the years until they can voyage the interstellar seas again. They are the last of their kind, the remainder of a fleet that could once block out the sun with their number, crafted with technologies long gone from Martian ken. They are beautiful, and their presence fills Yoechakenon with melancholy for what they are, and what he once was.

  He knows one as Nikambziok, the other as Tsu Keng. His heart swells with sorrow and happiness in equal measure at the sight of the second.

  Around the two whole ships are signs of intense activity, of which the light orbs are but a part. Piles of debris have been cleared away. Machines stand idle by the dome walls: half-metal joiners, genomancy knitting rigs, branching pipes like arterial webs, nutrient pods, cutting lances – all the things needful to large-scale construction and starship replenishment. I wonder where the Emperor got them from, these arcane machines. I wonder who demonstrated their function. Hundreds of imprints of booted feet track through the dust and roof-fall.

  The Emperor gestures towards Tsu Keng.

  “The slips
hip Tsu Keng. He is to be your transport. If the damper field were not so strong, he would doubtless tell you how much he wishes to fly once again, despite the risks. You can probably feel his eagerness anyway. I cannot.”

  “Yes,” says the champion, quietly. “Once, he was my ship, and I his pilot.”

  “This I did not know. Fate works with us,” says the Emperor. He is gladdened by this, vindication strengthening his papery voice. He turns to a console, recently installed by the look of it, and Yoechakenon sees that the Emperor sports a long, crescent shaped scar on the back of his head. It is thin, only now revealed in the brightly lit hangar space.

  He has cut out his connection, he thinks to himself. This is insanity. And he wonders if he has been cast down the wrong track of fate.

  “You will depart immediately, before the Quinarchy becomes any more suspicious.” The Emperor presses several of the console’s inlaid stone buttons and speaks into an ornately carved orchid. “Prepare for the champion’s departure.” He turns to Yoechakenon. “We must break free from the tyranny of the spirits. I know that you will do what is necessary.”

  A twin line of scarabs march toward the two men, their suit lights and faceplates glimmering in the darkness. They push a couch-like object with high sides – a stasis pod. One approaches. He bears the pips of a Praetorian captain upon the left pauldron of his armour. His helmet comes apart to reveal a broad, mistreated face, his honour tattoos obscured by a web of scar tissue. “The dampers are in place all the way down to the east hangar, Your Majesty; the Quinarchy has no idea of what is transpiring here.”

  “What of Kaibeli? We are reduced to a connection of the second degree. I need her back with me,” says Yoechakenon.

  “The Lady Kaibeli will be transferred when my liege gives the command.”

  “She must remain in the arena until you are ready to depart,” says the Emperor. “As soon as she is withdrawn, the Quinarchy will know that I have defied them.”