Champion of Mars

by Guy Haley

  “Look,” says Yoechakenon. On the floor before him, face down and caked in dust and mould, are the remains of a diminutive creature.

  “Human derivative,” I say. “Devolved.”

  Reaching out with his glaive, Yoechakenon turns the skeleton’s head over. It has a small skull with over-large eye sockets and a feeble jaw, like that of a child. “This is like no man I have ever seen.”

  “You are correct. Breathe deep.”

  Yoechakenon does as he is instructed. The mask of the armour melts away, and he inhales the must of the place into his lungs. There is a pause of some seconds as I examine trace DNA on the air. I furnish him with a reconstruction of the creature – short and vicious. I lack a full sample, so employ my imagination. I make it as ugly as possible, to goad Yoechakenon to greater caution. He is too confident, and it could cost us.

  The image I assemble is high-foreheaded and hairless. Bulging eyes top a tight, spiteful mouth lined with serrated teeth. Long arms depend from broad shoulders, framing a round belly.

  “A degenerate, a neotenous mutant of some kind,” I say. “Perhaps specifically crafted; a construct. Who knows to what depths the inhabitants of the Stone Lands have sunk, or been forced. We are the first here for millennia.”

  Yoechakenon searches the shadows, tightening his grip upon the glaive. “It is long dead, and has the seeming of a child, albeit a wicked one.”

  “It is and it does,” I say.

  He looks about the silent spire. “No wonder they have not shown themselves. A creature like this poses no threat.”

  He walks around the spine. The door to the antechamber is a little way around from us, a pointed arch of great size embedded in the rippled dendrites of the core.

  The doorway is obstructed with rotten skin, bone struts and other detritus. Yoechakenon finds another skeleton. The face of this one’s skull is split, a crude machete still grasped in its out-flung hand.

  It takes Yoechakenon half an hour to shift enough detritus to make a space to crawl through. All the while I keep up my scans of the place, using his supernormal senses and the abilities of the armour. He may be ambivalent about the threat these child-men pose, but I am not.

  And still there is no sign of them.

  Yoechakenon forces his way through at the apex of the arch. On the other side, the debris shelves off, spilling out in a steep fan around the door, into a tunnel the width of a triumphal avenue. Yoechakenon rolls down the debris and lands with a faint clatter on the floor, glaive up. Beyond, the ground is clear.

  “Lighting,” says Yoechakenon. He gestures at flickering lamps set into the wall at head height, casting a feeble glow. “The stacks live.”

  “Yes,” I reply, “I can feel their pull.” I draw his attention to a set of doors at the end of the corridor, seventy or so spans away. “Beyond those doors is the antechamber.”

  Other doors gape hungrily at intervals down the road, and Yoechakenon advances slowly, glaive at the ready. Some say the Stone Kin feed off the pure energies of our world, and that emanated by the spirits is an especial delicacy to them. As we progress, the decay lessens, and the lights grow steady. We reach the doors, baroque things decorated with images of blind, silent faces. They slide open soundlessly.

  “The Spirefather knows we are here. It calls to me ever louder,” I say. Be on your guard, another of my voices adds, full of warning. It is not as it seems.

  “What was that?” asks Yoechakenon.

  “My choir seeks to warn me of possible danger, but I calculate it as minimal.” I still do not tell him of the warning song. Now it has returned, it sounds in my head like distant drums.

  The antechamber is lavishly appointed with things made by the most ancient crafts; simple things of natural substances, yet here, at the still-living heart of the spire, they are free of tarnish and decay.

  A massive bronze face hangs from the ceiling, its eyes closed, a replica of those on the door, mouth eternally open. Rows of chairs are tiered round the room, turned to the face. Withered screens and broken projector banks are arrayed beneath it. Yoechakenon tries a few passes over control arrays, his feet crunching on shattered crystals, glass and brittle plastics. Nothing happens, and the material face of the Spirefather remains silent.

  “I was hoping that maybe you would not have to directly interface with the machine. But that looks a forlorn hope now,” he says. “What if the Spirefather here is insane, or corrupt?”

  “There is nothing to indicate that is so,” I lie. “I will be fine.”

  The shaft to the Heart Chamber of the spire opens before us, in the centre of the antechamber’s bright floor.

  “We must go down, I take it?”

  He is correct. I must interface directly, in the armour; I lack the ability to link remotely. “Yes. I must go direct to the Heart Chamber. The gravity slide in the shaft still functions.”

  “‘A wise man walks when confronted with an unknown mount,’” quotes Yoechakenon. He sits, and sets his feet under the smooth rim of the shaft, pushing hard to get them through the gravity slide’s resistance bubble. He searches for the hidden service ladder below the ornate lip.

  “I would find something to occupy yourself with, Kaibeli,” says Yoechakenon. “It is going to be a long climb.”

  We descend against the gravity slide’s resistance for five hundred spans. The field cuts off one hundred spans above the slide’s base. The shaft’s lowest ten spans are choked with the bones of the child creatures, and Yoechakenon is obliged to activate the glaive to cut a way through. The bones burn as the blades touch them.

  “Defence mechanism,” says Yoechakenon, once we have made it to the lower floor.

  “The Spirefather is using them as fuel,” I say. A thick, irregular root has grown through the wall, of the same material as the ganglionic bundles that once spread throughout the spire. Thin, dry fibres stretch from it, wrapped about the dry bones of the creatures. They are brittle and break as Yoechakenon prods at the skeletons, but the main root pulses with unlovely life, and the wall puckers round it where its thickness disappears into the next chamber. It is an obscenity for a machine to feast on flesh.

  “It has kept itself alive. We may be lucky, and its mind will not have deteriorated too much,” he says.

  “I do not think it has,” I say. I can feel it now, stronger than ever. It appears sound, but there is a rage to it, and its song is all the louder. “It is a strong mind, an ancient one. I can feel it now, it touches me.” Its presence is heavy and thick, its weight bowing the boundary between First and Second Worlds. “It lies in the centre of the Heart Chamber. Let us go to it.”

  Be wary, says one of my underminds. It is far more than you know.

  Danger, says another. Danger.

  My primary consciousness suppresses them, and Yoechakenon does not hear. A spirit that eats flesh is an abomination, and whatever lies before us will be dangerous, but I must venture inside. I think, could this mind be the Great Librarian?

  Aside from these bones and the root that has sucked them dry, the circular corridor around the Heart Chamber is as pristine as it would have been when the last of the city’s inhabitants died. The passage is egg-shaped in cross-section, bowing out at the base, rising to a domed point several spans above Yoechakenon’s head. The walls are of burnished titanium. Psycho-active reliefs and motile hieroglyphs decorate the walls in a wide band. I reach several strands of my consciousness out to them; they come alive, and I ingest their stories.

  “Yoechakenon, the hieroglyphs speak to me. The Spiremother’s mind is here also, in the walls. It is wayward, but it lives here still. I can feel her moving behind the glyphs’ message, slow and old.”

  “I thought this was so,” he says. “It is beneath a Spirefather to occupy itself with such things as lighting and maintaining a dead building.”

  We move on, to where the spire’s Heart Chamber is situated. Laments pour from the glyphs and the Spiremother, a song of loss.

  “It persist
ed for many thousands of years, this place.” My voices falter and fragment. Too much data is coming in. It is not overly complex, merely projected very loudly, and therefore hard to parse. Such is the volume of it I cannot share it directly with Yoechakenon, for fear it would kill him. The emotional content, raw and powerful, threatens to drown my attempts to vocalise its message. “This place, Yoechakenon, this place was one of the last. There is so much sadness, Yoechakenon! The Spiremother weeps for her lost people. Such great sadness.” I can say no more.

  Greenish light fills the corridor as more of the symbols on the wall react to my touch.

  “The Spiremother’s mind, is it still sound?”

  “Barely. She can do little but feel. And endlessly repeat the same thing... Listen, I will screen it for you.”

  I fill Yoechakenon’s mind with the Spiremother’s sorrowful medley of emotion. If he is moved, he does not show it.

  “Does it know anything?”

  “No. It lost contact with the external world a very long time ago. It is an old woman, weeping for her dead children. Robust interrogation, I think, would destroy it.”

  “Then we must ask the Spirefather.”

  The door to the Heart Chamber gapes by Yoechakenon’s left hand. We step through, and we find ourselves in the presence of a demigod from elder times.

  Stood in the middle of the floor is a baroquely carven pillar twice the height of Yoechakenon. Atop it sits the heart of the spire – its Library node. In form it is a large sphere, devoid of the ornamentation that crawls across every other surface in the Heart Chamber. It is featureless, excepting a deep groove that bisects its circumference. Below that, a green eye a half-span across is set into a recess. Cables twist down from the heights of the roof, connecting in a cluster atop the sphere. In itself it is not remarkable: the node points of later spires are different, fully organic boluses like that occupied by the Spirefather of Olm, yet many like this half-metal sphere exist still in spires all across Mars. The knowledge inside, the age of the Spirefather, that is another matter.

  Dim lamps in sconces upon the chamber’s walls add to the glow of the Library’s eye. There are no other signs of life in the chamber.

  The armour’s spirit shifts and growls, aroused by the power in the sphere. Yoechakenon twists its brutal mind and bids it be quiet. It whimpers and slinks back into the depths of the armour’s neurology.

  “I must go in,” I say.

  “You are certain?”

  A clamour of concerned voices springs up from all parts of my mind, shouting down the mournful chant of the spire’s heart and threatening to break the bars I have placed between myself and the armour. Only just, I keep Yoechakenon unaware of my doubts. I see no other way.

  “Very well,” he says. The armour slides from his skin, his pack falling to the floor as the viscous metal retreats from his body. He gasps as it disengages from his mind, and again as its tendrils pull, one by one, from six of the seven plugs lining his spine. He falls to his knees. The armour pools upon the floor, then flows away and up, making itself into a sphere. It is black and matte, like the materials that make the spires, reflecting nothing from its surface. He pants. “I am going to send in the armour’s spirit with you.”

  “Yoechakenon...”

  “The armour’s mind is useless to me while you are using the armour’s body as an interface; you know this. I would rather its spirit protected you than did nothing.”

  Silence falls between us. “You will be entirely alone.”

  “Do not let it concern you,” he says. “I have become used to sharing my thoughts with no one. I have been in the arena with only the tactical advisor many times before. This will be little different.”

  I hated those times, trapped in a featureless prison until the bout was over, forcing myself to watch through the eyes of the crowd and the Great Library, not knowing if he would live or die.

  “Only for minutes, Yoechakenon.”

  “We are born alone with our thoughts,” he counters. “If a newborn can cope, so can I. I spoke with the Emperor disconnected from the Second World without harm. There is no other way.”

  “I will be quick, then,” I say. “There is a chance that the creatures here are alert to our presence, and it may be that the Spirefather will be gentler with them should it want you removed.”

  “I will be able to deal with them, if need be. I may lack the armour, but the glaive remains.”

  “Very well. I will be able to communicate with you, but the effort will be great. Do not expect a full description of the Second World within the Library casing.”

  “I will not,” says Yoechakenon.

  There is nothing more to be said. There are things I wish I can say, but I cannot.

  Yoechakenon’s mind slips out from my own, as I move through the armour’s last connecting tendril into the sphere it has become. He speaks hurriedly, as he feels the last of me depart. “Kaibeli?”

  “Yes, Yoechakenon?” I say. I am faint to him. I stand before the doors of this lost world.

  “Come back unharmed.”

  “I will, my love,” I say.

  I do not tell him of the song I can hear, loud and foul, from deep within the sphere.

  The last tendril withdraws as the armour gives its matrix to me. The trinity between man, armour and companion mind is severed, and for the first time in his life, Yoechakenon is left entirely alone with his own thoughts. Our connection is now one of the third degree – I can feel his strongest emotions, and see him from the perspective of the armour’s sphere, but he is unaware of me. It must be utterly strange to him, to be thinking with the knowledge that no others are listening. Even when he fought in the arena, his head was full of the monotone chatter of the tactical advisor, and before, when the Emperor hid them both from the Second World, they were together in the flesh. Here there is nothing at all.

  Certain scholars hold that all men had once been this way, alone, although I find it hardly credible. I pray that insanity is not the immediate wage of retreating from communion with all minds but one’s own, as other scholars believe.

  He is naked, but the heat put out by the Library nexus is enough to keep him warm. He stretches. His body has been kept physically clean by the armour, but its touch makes him feel dirty and in need of scouring nonetheless. He stops thinking for a moment, to steer away from the unpleasant thought of the armour’s intimate embrace, and blankness rushes in. His mind is totally silent. It is unnerving, and yet at the same time peaceful.

  I watch him squat and reach for the discarded pack. He pulls out a survival wafer, takes a slug of hi-water from the small canteen, and chews.

  I turn my attention away. I flow through the martial halls of the armour, and along a conduit into the glowering casing of the ancient machine. Light ceases, sensation changes.

  There is blackness.

  There is a terrible, raucous noise. The song. A corrupt and corrupting choir, barely coherent, its message nevertheless clear:

  Stay away.

  NINETEEN

  Relief

  THE DAMAGE DONE to Deep Two and the cave entrance was not severe. The outer office was wrecked, the suiting room had been damaged and much of the caving equipment destroyed, but Stulynow had been no demolition expert and the structure was mostly sound. Jensen was able to clear most of it in two days, with Kick and Cybele’s help.

  No one spoke when they brought Stulynow’s broken body back to base. The medical bay’s tiny mortuary had never been used before, and they had to peel the protective films from the body locker’s surfaces before they could place Stulynow and Vance within. It was apparent from their faces that they had thought it never would be used.

  Holland was kept under a close watch. He was allowed to continue with his work in the lab, provided someone was with him at all times. This was no great inconvenience, as he would rarely have been working alone in any case, as Miyazaki and Kick’s main work stations were also there. At night, Cybele kept watch over him, her
sheath stationed outside his door. He experienced no more episodes of sleepwalking, and there were no further energy spikes from the artefact underground. Gradually the mood in the base relaxed. The artefact ceased being an impending threat, and became a fact of life. The scientists remained subdued, and work became the cure to their anxiety and grief.

  A week passed, and Holand had either completed all his tests or had set experiments in process that would not be completed for weeks. His most ambitious project was populating a number of vivariums mimicking the cave environment. Holland was always a one for observational biology, and spent a deal of his time altering one aspect or the other of the miniature environments he constructed. Cybele, who was becoming something of a constant companion to him, was a great help in formulating the chemistry of these exotic habitats, and he grew less antagonistic toward her.

  Once he’d constructed his wall of glass cases, however, he grew frustrated. There was little to do other than monitor them, and as each came equipped with a miniature sensor package, that took all of ten minutes of each day. There were no further expeditions from the base. The storm’s winds continued unabated outside, and naturally trips into the cave were out of the question. In any case, Holland was confined inside by Orson’s orders, and so could not even take part in the repair of Deep Two, with which the rest of the team busied themselves.

  When Maguire came to see him, he was sitting in silence, slumped on a stool, staring at the caged Martian life. He’d been holding his tablet and repeatedly refreshing the results until he became hypnotised by the percentage creep of chemical compounds. He tested himself, to see how long he could wait before tapping the icon. For a while he lost himself in this pointless endeavour, until eventually he’d become bored with this too. By the time Maguire came in, he was staring at the glass cases until his eyes went out of focus, blinking, and starting the process again. He didn’t stop when the door hissed open.