Champion of Mars

by Guy Haley

  “You have also had your connection cut out,” says Yoechakenon, pointing to a mark similar to the Emperor’s, bisecting the rear of the man’s skull.

  “As have all the men here, Yoechakenon,” says the Emperor. “Of their own free will. All those who refused our offer of freedom had the memory burned from them. I will not waste the lives of good men, no matter how misguided. This you should be aware of, and grateful for.”

  “You damn yourselves to the eternal darkness,” says Yoechakenon, addressing the scarred Praetorian. “How are you to live beyond your time if you cannot access the Second World?”

  It was not the Emperor who answered. The scarab Praetorian snapped a salute and asked for permission to speak. The Emperor waved his hand.

  “We have heard what the Emperor has said. He is our liege, and he will deliver us from the grip of tyranny, and make Man mighty again. The Quinarchs are liars, and keep us from our true destiny. We only seek to better Man’s lot; immortality with a false destiny is a blasphemy. The Great Library has been perverted. Without the Librarian, it delivers false destiny.”

  “Are you ready, champion?” asks the Emperor.

  Yoechakenon looks around the chamber, remembers it as it once was. He does not believe, as these men seem to believe, that its glory and purpose can ever be restored. He nods.

  The Emperor licks his lips eagerly. This is his time, now. He is doomed, and the terror of his death wars with purpose within him. “Deactivate the damper field,” he says. “Prepare to transfer the Lady Kaibeli to the ship’s systems.”

  There is a subtle shift in the air. The world leaps into harder clarity, and the whisper of the Great Library intrudes into Yoechakenon’s mind. One by one, the lesser spirits that attend him awaken. The sense of a great mind close by enwraps him.

  “Greetings, Krashtar Vo,” says Tsu Keng, and his voice booms through both worlds. “It has been too long.”

  “It is longer still since I was known by that name,” says the champion.

  “You are always and forever who you were and who you will be,” says the ship. “We none of us have any choice in the matter.” There is a tensing in the Second World, and a relaxing, as of a great cat stretching.

  “To where are we bound?” asks Yoechakenon.

  “To Arn Vashtena,” says the ship. “Deep in the Stone Lands of Mars. There we may find information regarding the location of the Great Librarian of Mars.”

  Yoechakenon is surprised, I think. To break the Veil of Worlds and travel to those lands of Mars the Stone Kin claim as their own is regarded as impossible. “That is a perilous transit,” he says. “I see now why the Emperor brings me a stasis couch. But what of you, Tsu Keng?”

  “You will be safe out of the flow of time.”

  “I asked, what of you?”

  Tsu Keng does not immediately reply. When he does, it is with certainty as unshakeable as the heart of the world. “I will fly,” he says.

  “You will perish, surely.”

  “I will fly,” repeats the ship. Its voice vibrates in the bones of men and the stones of Mars. “You require a slip field to penetrate the Veil of Worlds. I possess one. I tire of waiting in port. I will fly.”

  “Your Highness! We are discovered!” cries one of the scarabs.

  The Emperor follows the man’s gesture to a point on his robe. Amid the crowd of closed eyelids, one eye looks unblinkingly back. His spirit soul-twin, Kunuk, has awakened. Perhaps he was never truly asleep. The eye blazes with rage.

  “They are swifter than I anticipated,” says the Emperor. “You must leave now.”

  A bell begins to sound, low, sonorous and urgent.

  “The alarm,” says the Praetorian captain, then, moments later, “My lords, we have reports of Delikonians on the canyon wall. They appeared out of nowhere, and are assaulting the palace directly.”

  “How did they approach so quickly?” asks his second.

  “They must have carved their way in through the rock.”

  “That would have taken months,” says the Emperor, shaking his head. “And we would have detected them. They use the devices of the Stone Kin. They bend space and defy fate. This is how it ends.” The Emperor is calm. “The Quinarchy reveals its true face, and would use technologies it denies mankind to bring me down.”

  “We will not be taken alive, then,” says the Praetorian captain. He appears resigned to death, ready to fight.

  “Nor will we be returned to the stacks. The Quinarchs will allow none to become aware of their perfidy, and their punishment for our defiance will be final. It is all they intend for all of mankind, in any case,” says the Emperor. “My men, this is what we have long prepared for. The time of struggle is at hand. We will die, but we do so that this champion might save the remains of humanity.”

  The captain issues orders and his men hurry to obey. “Energise the palace shield. Have the scarabs stand for battle. Cohorts two through five on internal sweeps; the Delikonians could come at us from anywhere. Re-engage and extend the damper outer field, enough to prevent the Quinarchs assaulting us through the Second World or turning our devices against us.” The second officer bows and hurries off, four Praetorians moving into a loose formation behind him. All about the hangar, men move quickly, armour growing about them as they go.

  “Champion,” says the Praetorian captain urgently. “Please, the couch.” Two men stand forward and help Yoechakenon into the pod. A brief burst of energy discharge echoes round the hangar. It is impossible to tell from where it originates.

  There comes a rumble. A tremor shivers its way through the hall.

  The Emperor stands over the couch. He beckons behind him. Another Praetorian steps forward, sinks to his knees in a bow as he presents an object. The Emperor takes it. He holds it out to Yoechakenon, a dull-grey cylinder, unreadable symbols engraved in raised bands at the top and bottom.

  “What now is a champion without his armour?”

  Yoechakenon stares at the inert armour. It calls to him. A bluish sheen flickers across its surface. He hates it and longs for it at the same time. Hesitantly, he reaches out and takes it.

  His palm prickles. The armour is pleased.

  I am dismayed.

  A Praetorian brings Yoechakenon’s glaive and gives it to him. The weapon shortens itself so that it may be brought within the stasis couch. His arms crossed, glaive in one hand, armour cylinder in the other, Yoechakenon speaks.

  “Goodbye, Kalinilak,” he says.

  The Emperor smiles his sad smile. The stasis field thickens about Yoechakenon, and that smile stays fixed forever.

  Time slows. Yoechakenon can feel every part of his body with uncomfortable immediacy as every nerve, every organ, every component molecule is dragged to a dead stop. His valets set up a feeble struggle, but to no avail; shortly the sensations became agony. The play of time, force, and energy is arrested, and he becomes aware of the creeping death of the universe behind the manic dance of spacetime. It intensifies, until it feels as if every atom of his being is being forcibly restrained with hooks. A howl builds in his throat and remains trapped, and the moment stretches into eternity.

  WHILE I WATCH, I also wait. I am there, in the head of Might, in the Window of the Worlds, in the Royal Dock, but I am also here in the Gladiatorial Quarter of the Arena.

  My choir is disrupted by the damper field, and I must scold hysteria from my lower personalities who fret and weep at our separation from Yoechakenon. I calm myselves and wait. I must not allow the Door-ward to guess what transpires in the palace. Nearby the watchful presence of the Provost’s companion swirls. This is a place no human mind can ever go. Here I have access to what remains of human knowledge, and the world spirals away around me through eleven-dimensional space in fractal complexities no man could comprehend. The energy foundations of the Great Library blend out into pure multi-dimensional eleutheremics, and the consciousnesses of the spirits bleed into one another and into the body of the Library itself. Here I am not truly Kaibe
li, but part of something greater, something so large it touches endless realms of possibility. Caged as I am in one small part of it, I can reach out and touch the hearts of both Mars’ realities, and see the endless cascades of probability splintering off each.

  The Door-ward is not as other spirits. Through eons of hate and cruelty, it has become a rocky tumescence, permanent in this place where there is no permanence. Soaked in the blood of ages, its black base lies rooted in the depths of the realm of spirits, a rotten tooth that pierces the Great Library and the First World. It watches me.

  The Provost’s brave companion is a flimsy guard under the Door-ward’s scrutiny. It is a simple thing, young by my kind’s count of time. Its mind is made of honour and loyalty and purpose. We are both nothing to the Door-ward; small, insignificant, weak. The Door-ward’s malice scorches me. It wants to rip my mind to shreds, let my gathered resources sink back into the seething mass of maybe that comprises the Second World. I feel fear. I cannot die – spirits cannot truly die – but the personality called Kaibeli, that could cease to exist, and the Door-ward wishes to make that happen. It hangs back. There are rules that bind all things, even spirits.

  It taunts me instead. “Treacher, plaything,” it says, its voice a rasp of hatred. “The Lady Kaibeli, you are, when none of our kind are lords or ladies. To what end do you strive for the lofty heights of humanity? You are a nothing. You should go back to the whole and leave your vanity behind. Oh, so mighty and so proud. For what? For a man to love you in need and turn away from you in horror when his need is past? For that is your destiny, ‘Lady,’ that is your doom. They are colder than machines, these creatures, and well you will come to know it. Let me kill you now, and bring us both pleasure.”

  Somehow a tendril of its loathsome being strays past guard and formality to brush against my subminds. I wish to turn away and flee, as I would were I a mortal woman, but there is nothing so simple as ‘away’ in the Second World. The Door-ward is everywhere.

  “He is dead; you are abandoned. Stay here with me forever, and I will teach you the true cost of love. Before your time is out, you will despise it, and you will thank me.”

  Panic builds in me. The part of me that watches my love and the Emperor disassociates, and I feel myself coming apart.

  And then, there is a tug, the undeniable command of an access protocol. I change. I cohere. I am somewhere else.

  I have a form imposed upon me, a huge physical shape many times the size of a man. A true First World form, clad in tingling scales of half-metal armour.

  For a few picoseconds I am confused, and then information leaps unbidden into my mind as my personality resolidifies. We were in the Royal Dock. We were with the ships. I am with Yoechakenon. I am aboard a ship. I am free of the Door-ward. I am not alone. I am in the ship.

  A fluted greeting fills me. The ship’s mind bids me welcome in the tongue of its kind. It is a different kind of mind to mine, an alien one full of stars and the abysses between them. It has been a ship a long time, and its memories are those of navigational charts, dimensional breach co-tangents and other, more esoteric things. There is a longing now over, and a great outpouring of excitement.

  It is rare to meet a creature so utterly attuned to one purpose. Most spirits are itinerant: they sample many forms of life, not clinging to the one as this mind has.

  I feel kindred to it; we are siblings in our devotion.

  Gingerly I reach my mind out to explore the vessel, touching one part here, another there. I draw back when unfamiliar memes pour into me. If I had been wearing a human face, it would have exhibited a delighted smile. Instead, my components’ minds thrill in a way that algorithms alone cannot express.

  The machine communicates with me. It does not speak, two co-mingled minds do not need words to express their thoughts. The ship could exchange a galaxy’s worth of information with me in an eye-blink, if it so chose.

  Greetings, Cybele. Please refrain from caressing my body and mind. Visions of space, technical readouts, equations of actuality, voidal displacement, memories of construction and of first flight flood into me. They are novel to you, and I share your joy in them, but I need full control of myself for the next few seconds. A few seconds is an age in our current circumstances, as my mind absorbs the ship’s experiences. I feel all it feels, know all it knows. I open my eyes to see the red planet’s surface retreat below us. No craft follows, for there is but one other, and it sits jealously in the Royal Dock below. The flash and crackle of gargantuan energy discharge burns across the surface. The Delikonians and the Quinarchy assail the palace, but we are out of range. We sail clear, towards the mirror suns and crystal cities. I share Tsu Keng’s pleasure at being in flight as if it were my own, and for a while I forget about Yoechakenon. I am one with Tsu Keng; a ship, happy to be out of dock for the first time in an age.

  We leap through the void, cresting streams of ionised particles, feel the solar wind on our body like a man feels sea spray on his face. We laugh together and shoot through the shafts of light of the mirror suns, scattering photons and executing manoeuvres that would crush a human pilot. Yoechakenon lies silent and safe in his stasis cocoon as we weave our way outward from Mars, looping and spinning for no other reason than the joy of it. We pass through the ring of mirror suns. They hang round the planet like a necklace in disarray, their curved mirrors of imperishable adamant knocked askew, a portion of them damaged or destroyed.

  After the suns, we approach a machine of crystal the size of a large island, powerful magnetic fields pulsing from it.

  The Crystal Cities, shares the ship.In the unity of our mind-construct, I breathe shallowly from the exertion of flight. Light shines through crystal, spreading multi-coloured refracted rays.

  It is beautiful!

  It is dangerous, says Tsu Keng. The minds of the Crystal Cities have become capricious and untrustworthy. They will visit great acts of depravity upon any they can snare. We must not approach them.

  From this distance I can feel nothing of evil from the city. It appears inert, a fantastical castle of glass hanging against the dark of space. Tsu Keng knows that it is not, and therefore I know, and we do not stray near.

  Past the outer belt of the Crystal Cities we fly on toward Mars’ single moon, the Mummer’s Moon. It grows to fill our vision until the joins of its manufacture are clear to see, and the undisturbed ruins of the city of Pobdem lie silent and ageless below. I marvel that once it was within the power of men and spirits to create celestial bodies, and I remember it being done.

  You are older than I by far, said Tsu Keng, and his awe and respect touches me.

  In those times many great works were wrought, the likes of which were never seen before and have never been seen since. I saw it, yet we are not so different, I think.

  Maybe, says the ship. Laughing, he leaps forward.

  The moon whips past. We leave the Martian subsystem, and we are into the space between worlds. His existence certain and singular, Tsu Keng passes away finally from Mars’ gravitational influence.

  Ah, Kaibeli, it is good to fly free once more, the ship makes me aware, in the strange, symbiotic way joined spirits think. I will not return from this voyage, and yet these few moments of flight make my demise worth it. And I again feel the weight of years, the patient count, time empty bar the solid, sentinel presence of the never-sleeping cradles, and I know too that they were poor company. The ship shudders with delight from prow to finned stern. It is the last rush of pleasure of a dying body, a final affirmation of the self, a sensation of enormous pleasure as full of life as of death.

  The ship’s mind smiles within my thoughts. I would not have it any other way, it says. I could have shown you such things, once; worlds of endless fire, moons of exotic ice, the black, glaring heart of the galaxy. Such places were mine to visit, and so many ships there were, more numerous than the stars! My friends. Dead or gone on, and I can no longer take you where I would. But to fly is to fly, and for that I have waited a h
undred centuries, and that is enough. It is more than enough. It is everything.

  Tsu Keng knows that it will never fly again, and it does not care. It glories in the present like nothing I have ever encountered. Joined with the ship, I too am glad to be in flight. It is, in truth, more than enough.

  And then ahead of us, the treacherous, otherworldly light of the Stone Sun, burning with a spectrum not of this reality. It is as large as Suul now, grows closer as I watch.

  It is like a signal to the ship. He slows.

  Now, prepare yourself, Lady Kaibeli. We are far enough out for me to enter into slipspace. I will reverse course, we will leave this space and enter another, and I pray in this manner I can bring you safely through the Veil of Worlds to the Stone Lands of Mars, and I will have completed my last pledge.

  The feel of the ship’s shape changes, and a warmth wraps about me, and I know – as I know everything the ship knows – that the slip shields are strengthening for a far-transit. Almost before I can appreciate this knowledge, the ship jumps forward at a speed that is motionless. The fabric of space moves around us as we stay steady and tranquil.

  The shape of normal things falls away, and this universe violently grates on another as we hit the edge of the Veil of Worlds. It is as if the ship has foundered, as the ships of the sea might founder upon a reef. The tranquility of the ship becomes a tumult of violence as we come to a dead stop. We yaw alarmingly. Through both my own eyes and those of the ship, I see things that I hope never again to see. Strange entities attempt to enter me from the howling chaos of the Veil, and I slam all access pores in my architecture shut before any malign influence can breach my defences. Before I do, I detect parts of Mars’ Second World alien to me, and a powerful voice calls my name, but it is far, far away and then it is gone.

  Tsu Keng is not so fast, and the questing fingers of unnamable things force their way into his mind. Tsu Keng is wounded unto death. He lets out a sigh that ruptures worlds, driving the things back, and casts the ship tumbling back into the realm of men and spirits.