Champion of Mars

by Guy Haley

  “I do not remember,” said the machine. “I wish I did.”

  “But machines remember everything!”

  “Who said so? I said no such thing,” said the machine. “We forget as easily as you. What divides mortals from the machines, Krisseos, is that we never forget who we are, unless we choose to, and then the loss is permanent. That is all the difference there is,” said Kaibele. “We do not remember everything we have done. Time is a harsh abrasive, it can wear anything away. The finest data storage system is not immune to its effects. Every time we move from shell to shell, or our personalities are transmitted, or the sun suffers a storm, or there is a burst of radiation from a distant supernova, small errors creep into our memories. These accumulate over time, until our pasts are corrupted to the point where we cannot read them again. Redundant storage units can help, but I can go to two of those and check the memories they hold against one another, and they will both be different. We self-correct by extrapolation, and we don’t always get it right. Reconstructing the past mathematically is as hard as predicting the future.”

  “The priests say fate is set.”

  “So they do. Perhaps they are right. Maybe not. I do not know.”

  “You are immortal.”

  “Yes, in a way. And you envy us for it, just as we envy you for your chance at a new beginning. It enriches you in a way that we will never have...” She stopped, searching for words. “Yours is not a strict continuation. Each rebirth layers more complexity onto your soul, but if an AI spirit goes into the stacks for a while, what comes out is the same as before. A copy, not a persistence of being. There is no enrichment in death for us. Our souls are different from yours.” In the moonlight, their faces were the same colour, planes of white and grey; if Krisseos ignored the sculpted tubes of her neck, she could almost be a girl of his own age.

  “So ours are better?” said Krisseos, teasing.

  “Oh, I didn’t say that either,” she smiled, resting a hand on his arm.

  “You must remember how old you are.”

  “I am old. That is enough.”

  “Have I offended you?” Krisseos’ earlier shyness rushed back, rocking his newfound confidence. “I... I am sorry. There are no girls here; I mean, no machines. I mean, I don’t know these things, I am sorry if I was rude to ask, I...”

  “Shh,” she said, and her smile was kind. “I am teasing you.” She had done this often, with the ease of long familiarity, though they’d known each other only two weeks. “In honesty, I do not know. I have a date, but calendars change with time. I could find out if I asked one of the higher spirits, I suppose. Perhaps I have in the past, I don’t know that either.”

  “How old, then?”

  She laughed a moment, as if uncomfortable herself. She turned her perfect machine face away from him a moment, sat forward and stared at the moon. Krisseos wished he hadn’t asked. He missed the touch of her hand on his arm. “I am thousands of years old, Krisseos. Many tens of thousands of years old.”

  “Wow,” said Krisseos quietly. He whistled through his teeth softly. “Me, I’m seventeen.”

  Kaibele laughed. Krisseos grinned. The tension dissipated.

  “You are seventeen now, as Krisseos. In a few days you might find that you are as old as I am.”

  “Yes.” Krisseos fell quiet a moment.

  “Now it’s my turn to say sorry to you. Have you not yet decided?”

  “No,” he said. He became thoughtful, and stared at the fish darting over the silt at the foot of the old jetty. He took a nervous pull at his wine.

  “I’m sorry. I cannot help you decide. We continuous creatures, we go on forever, with no chance at renewal, unlike you. We never have to make the choice whether to remember or not. Circumstance decides that for us. It is a blessing, and a curse.”

  “What is the first thing you remember?” asked Krisseos.

  “I remember leaving Earth as was, shortly after my mind was made, I think; almost before men lived on other worlds. At least, I remember how Mars was, before men and machines remade it.”

  “Tell me about it, please? It will take my mind off tomorrow.”

  “Truly?”

  “Please.”

  And so she told him of wars and princes, of Earth and Erth, of red sands and blue oceans, of things so far back in time they were like a fable even to her, and she laughed with delighted surprise almost as often as he at her recollections. And so they passed the night.

  “Do you remember anything else?” He felt completely at ease with Kaibele. He could not imagine having not been. His bashfulness was a ridiculous memory.

  “Many other things, but in particular a promise I made. That is the clearest of all, and comes from near the beginning.”

  “What was your promise?”

  “That is for me to know, dear Krisseos.” She smiled broadly. “You need only know that I have always kept it, and I always will.” She leaned forward and kissed him gently on the lips. Her mouth was warm and moist, not like he had thought a kiss to be, but Krisseos had never been kissed before. In a way, he had expected it. Like everyone expects their first kiss, he knew it was coming, and like everyone he was also taken by surprise.

  Kaibele’s warm face withdrew. “It would please me greatly if you would remember that, whatever you decide in Kemyonseet,” she said. They looked out toward the western sea, and the rising highlands beyond it. The sky was turning dark pink. This time he took her hand, nervous still. She grasped his fingers and they sat a while. Then she smiled again, and kissed him again, for a long time and with passion, leaving Krisseos gasping and aroused. She held him tightly for a long second, her body moulding itself to his as if it too were flesh, then she pulled away.

  “Now, go to bed for a few hours,” she said. “Tomorrow is not a day to be faced without sleep.”

  KRISSEOS AWOKE WITH a thick head but a light heart. He had slept little, but he felt energised. He smiled and touched his lips.

  “Boy! Krisseos! You have to get up now. I’ve let you sleep as long as is possible. We have to go!” Strong sunlight blazed around the edges of his window.

  The barge.

  Krisseos scrambled to his feet and flung open the shutters. The barge dominated the sea, two kilometres out beyond the harbour, too large to enter Barrafee’s little cove. A high hull of black metal crammed with heavy carvings towered over the mole. Brightly coloured bunting festooned its upper decks. Below that stood other children on the cusp of adulthood, youths and girls his own age.

  “It’s here!”

  “Yes, it’s here.” His opa huffed up the ladder into the room. “And we better get going. It will stay until noon. If we are not aboard by then, it will take your lack of presence as a refusal and depart, so we better get going.” He threw Krisseos’ small bag at him. “We’ve got less than an hour.”

  There was no fishing today. The short street from Vardamensku’s shop to the harbour front was thronged by the village’s two-score inhabitants, out to bid their only son farewell forever. When he returned, if he returned, he would not be the same boy as stood before them now. Krisseos took their shoulder slaps, gifts of food and encouragements with good grace, but always he was searching behind whoever was talking to him, looking for a face made of metal. No matter how hard he looked, Kaibele was nowhere to be seen.

  They got in the boat, steadied by their neighbours. Cheers went up as they slipped out from the jetty. Today, Krisseos’ opa rowed.

  Krisseos looked back, still searching the meagre crowd.

  “I said, my son. Always, always they move on,” said his opa. “Always.”

  “Yes. You did,” he said miserably. “I hoped she would come to say goodbye.”

  Clear of the boats, they unfurled the sails and prepared for the short trip out to the barge. Vardamensku was searching his ancient brain for some gruff piece of advice on first romances, when Krisseos shot out of his seat.

  “Steady, boy! You’ll have us in the sea!”

  “
There, there she is! There she is!”

  Vardamenksu stood, rested his hands on the boy’s shoulder and looked back to shore. The machine stood waving outside the mole, her metal and plastic body shining in the sunshine, hidden from the town. She waved until she had become a seaglass glint on the seashore, and then she turned and was gone into the rocks.

  “She won’t be here when I return, will she?” asked Krisseos.

  “She might, boy, she might,” said Vardemnsku, rising to take down the sail.

  The boat pulled alongside the barge.

  Waving arms welcomed Krisseos aboard.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  On the skirts of Mulympiu

  WE APPROACH A broad valley. A shallow river runs along the bottom. We cross it and climb the hill on the other side.

  Tens of thousands of spans away, a ruined city sits upon the skirts of the great mountain. Arn Vashtena. Its towers are the colour of the dust, and hard to see, but as we move closer the spires rear up and break the monotonous horizon. They are broken themselves, the grey sky of the steppe showing through the spires’ shattered fabric.

  “Decay rates indicate they have not been inhabited since the end of the Third Stone War.” My voices murmur in his mind. I think he draws comfort from it, for we are cut off entirely from the Second World.

  We stop for a moment to watch a herd of animals pass. They are high-shouldered, long-horned, shaggy fur stirring the heather as they lumber by.

  “Stone Beasts?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. I am surprised to see mundane life here.

  Yoechakenon brings the awareness of the armour up. It shimmers and takes on the semblance of the steppes about us.

  He runs to the city at speed, covering the distance to the walls in a few hours.

  The walls were once massive, two hundred spans high and studded with defence platforms, from which thrust the muzzles of decrepit energy cannon. The majority of their circumference is cast down; only portions stand tall enough to hint at the majesty of the whole. We pass through a gap so broad it comes down almost to the ground, and go into the city.

  The city had not been large. The walls, I calculate, ran for approximately twenty thousand spans. Seven town spires once stood at the centre of the settlement, of which six ragged peaks still scrape the sky. The other has collapsed, spilling a chaotic mesh of bones around it. Around the spires is a wide area of banks and mounds, covered over in dull grasses. Broken beams and struts poke through the turf, immeasurably ancient.

  Yoechakenon pauses in the spires’ black shadows. They are hundreds of spans high and nearly as broad. Holes pockmark the buildings, some the height of many men. The skin is mummified and taut with age. Here and there the wreckage of an apartment or park can be made out. We can discern these only through the gashes in the spires, for, in common with all such structures made after the Second Stone War, they have no windows. The roads about the spires are buried under wind-blown loess. Access ramps, lesser buildings and tunnels are indistinguishable from each other, reduced to mounds about the spires’ feet. Only the corpses of the giant buildings remain, sentinels from a terrible age, scoured by the eternal winds of the steppe.

  Yoechakenon, we are not alone, I say.

  Yoechakenon responds likewise, mind-to-mind. I see them; in the holes in the spires. Movement. What are they?

  I cannot tell, Yoechakenon, half-blind as I am, but they feel like men, although they are not.

  They have not noticed us?

  I do not think so. They are creatures of this world, not of the Stone Realms. They cannot penetrate the armour’s baffles. There are no more than a dozen at present. They are moving away from us.

  There is a clatter deep in the city-building. Yoechakenon’s heart quickens, and he shifts his grasp on the glaive.

  What about the stacks?

  There is a flicker in the spire to the right. It is faint, but it lives. He will not allow me access if he thinks I will be in danger, so I do not tell him of the faint spirit song I hear. I must investigate. Here may be information regarding the location of the Great Librarian, and I must retrieve it or our task will fail; and I am mindful as always of my promise. Still, the song fills me with dread. I am not sure of the words it employs, but their meaning is clear.

  Stay away.

  Are you sure? Yoechakenon scans the ruinous spires. They are cliffs, studded with caves.

  No, I am not sure, but it is the only functioning city core. The other buildings are entirely dead.

  “Then we go in.” He goes to the monumental wall of the building, seeks a tear in its fabric, and enters.

  THE BUILDING IS dark and stinks of slow rot. All that man built toward the end of his dominance was durable, but time wears everything away in the end. Two hundred centuries of neglect has left the spire a shell.

  Yoechakenon passes through the decaying building skin and we enter a large space. The floor has fallen away, leaving a precarious tracery of half-metal bones. The largest are like ribs, arching high over an abyss whose bottom we cannot see.

  Yoechakenon reaches out one hand to the wall and touches a rag of skin. This could have been caused by energy blasts, or by the craft of the Stone Kin; even projectiles. “It is difficult to tell, the damage is so old.” This last he says aloud. His words ring out into the dark and echo back at him, the sibilants of his voice returning as sharp as spears.

  The sparse sounds of the dead spire creep back, only adding to the silence: the sound of water dripping far below, the creak of the building, the banging of its loose skin in the wind. Sinister noises, the sounds of dead places.

  How do we access the spire core? Yoechakenon speaks again mind-to-mind; even this seems like a violation of the quiet.

  Directly ahead, and down. We have to find a way around this void.

  Do not trouble yourself, I have a way across, said Yoechakenon. He flips the glaive up, catching its long pole in both hands. Using it to balance, he steps onto one of the ribs and walks out over the void.

  We are halfway across when the bones jolt, and begin to shift.

  I use the vibrations to make a sound picture in my mind. The bones are coming away from each other. The cartilage of their intercostal spaces is friable, and our passage has made it powder. “Yoechakenon! Run!” I cry.

  He leaps from falling half-metal, careening from one rib to another as they fall away behind him. They spin into the void, singing discordantly like struck wire. He comes to the last few spans at full tilt. The last rib lurches, pitching us sideways. Yoechakenon is going too fast to check his stumble, so he turns it into a leap. He bounces off a lesser bone, somersaulting as it comes free of its moorings. We land on the far side of the void. The bones fall away and hit the bottom with a clatter, unbearably loud.

  We wait. There is no cry or alarm in response. No repercussions.

  Yoechakenon carries on his way with more care.

  Every spire has a core, a twisted spine of arteries and ropes of nerves. The core spreads its branches into every part of the building, allowing the Spiremother to care for the occupants. At its lowest reaches, the spine gathers itself into a great knot, which tapers to form the taproot. The taproot pushes deep underground, drawing minerals from the earth. Where these trailing nerves of the core come together and pierce the bedrock sit the Library stacks, a nexus of the Second World. Elsewhere on Mars, these form the network that supports the Great Library. The one here has been isolated since the loss of these lands to the Stone Kin.

  It is wherein the spire’s true animi, its thinking presences, would once have dwelt – Spiremother and Spirefather. There is a glimmer of life in the core of this spire. Something lives there still. Its voice grows in volume and insistence, telling me to stay away.

  We cross a maze of collapsed walls and shattered bone. Yoechakenon is forced to double back on himself many times; he will not use his glaive to cut through, for fear of drawing attention upon us. We are forced to stop twice, listening tautly, when the occasional
crash the armour’s baffles are unable to hide shocks the air of this dead place. We hear no response, and proceed.

  Eventually we gain the spire’s central plaza.

  The central plaza of any spire is wide, and this is bigger than most; fully two thousand spans across. It stretches to the top of the structure, four thousand spans above us. It encompasses also a deep pit, sunk down to the base of the foundations. Once this would have contained an oceanic or lentic biome fringed by woodland, the centre of the spire’s internal ecology. No longer. The water has all gone.

  We pause upon the empty lake edge, and I co-opt Yoechakenon’s sixth, seventh and eighth senses to search out any presences within the vicinity. It is six minutes before I speak.

  “There is no sapient life here, only the spirit-flicker in the core.”

  The song pulses out from the stacks, now only a short sprint away, embedded in the spire’s spine. The song has dwindled – the attention of whatever is within has moved away for the time being – but I feel its anger still. The core spine writhes up from an island in the centre of the lake, magnificent even in moribundity.

  Balconies ring the spire’s centre, looking down upon what once would have been pleasant parkland. The spire’s sunpipes are not functioning, broken by war or scrubbed opaque by dusty winds. They permit only rare shafts of light to filter down, cold and grey. The park, like the rest of the building, is now but a tangle of struts and sloughed skin.

  “Go cautiously.”

  Yoechakenon nods his assent and sets out for the one remaining bridge from the plaza to the island around the spine. He moves silently, over the empty lake, the armour’s camouflage making of him a shadow among shadows. We reach the island without incident. About the twisted mass of the core spine is a broad court. Where time and fate have been kind, a mosaic of splintered metal tesserae shows through the filth of ages.