Champion of Mars

by Guy Haley

  Tertiz. Tharsis, he remembered. Tharsis. Thersis, Tersis, Taertiz. That was a name that had changed. He saw it happen in his memories. The sweep of time made him dizzy.

  He remembered so much. Remembering pretty much all of his lengthy and varied past meant that in this life, he hadn’t got a fucking clue who he was. Yesterday had as much weight as a breakfast he’d had fourteen lifetimes since, and he could rarely tell which came first.

  Hence the drink. At night, not during in the day. In the day he needed to stay sharp. He was terrified – he wasn’t ashamed to admit it – that he’d walk right by her.

  He wiped his forehead. Shattered machines and the bones of men littered the sand. The last battle against the Stone Kin, at the end of the Third Stone War, had been fought here, when the fuckers had come boiling out of the Stone Sun. The new sun had done its job all right, it had kept the Stone Kin locked into the Suul (Sol, he remembered) system, but they’d found some way to use it to their advantage, to root themselves on Mars. Man had won, but the lands around Olympus were lost to fuck knew what, the Veil of Worlds, billowing white up ahead of him, their boundary.

  He was sure it was here, round here somewhere, where it had happened, where he had lost her.

  He never made a promise to her, not like she’d made to him. She wouldn’t expect him to come back to find her, but a promise like that, it cuts deep, and it goes both ways, right? And how many years had it been? He thought back to that moment of hot pain, the hand holding his hand, hard metal so soft through his glove. Pain is all he remembers of that life, no matter how comprehensive his recollections of others. It could have been his first, he might have come out of a womb rather than a machine. Maybe he’d even had his genes shuffled the animal way.

  It seemed outlandish, even faintly disgusting.

  That hand, and that promise – he had no idea how long ago that was. But it was thousands and thousands and thousand of years. Thousands. Of. Years. Obligation like that. It is... He struggled for the word. Mutual.

  He didn’t know why, maybe because his head was full of too many memories of other men’s lives, but he wasn’t so clever this time around. Maybe the Librarian didn’t think its grunts needed much thinking power, just experience. He wasn’t stupid, not by a long way, but he had been cleverer.

  Maybe that’s why he wouldn’t give up, why he camped out in that shithole of a town that all the refugees from Olympus had finally left when they’d realised the Veil was there forever and their cities were lost to them. Maybe that’s why he sat there in the searing heat and dry wind, drinking himself stupid every night with a bunch of toothless madmen, coming up here every damn day. Looking. For. Her.

  Finding a particular pebble on a beach would have been easier. Half a million men had died up here, and one hundred and fifty six thousand spirits were killed – their shattered sheaths, and those of a million more whose minds escaped, were tangled with the skeletons of the men. The bodies lay four deep in places. You could walk over them in a straight line and your feet wouldn’t touch dirt for a week.

  Still he looked. Every day, from dawn until sunset.

  He knew why.

  His fork sang in his belt and he stopped. He poked about in the dirt for a while, until he unearthed a shattered robot carriage. He dug it out with his folding spade, and he pulled it onto its back. All its limbs were gone, half its head was missing. It was a similar model to one of those she wore in the fight (one; there were half a dozen types, at least, she’d ridden during the course of the war). He pulled the fork from his belt: grey, dull metal, two tines as wide apart as an outstretched hand. It hummed affirmatively.

  He cracked the sheath’s buckled carapace with some difficulty, sitting with his legs spread straight out either side of it so he could work at it properly. He swore and coaxed it and hit it with a rock. After a time, the core reluctantly rose from the chest port. A glass bulb filled with blue luminescence. He fitted it into the fork. The note was encouraging. The spirit within was alive, and it was sane. The note changed, a name. His face fell, dropping from joy to resignation without stopping by to visit hope. It wasn’t her.

  He had the urge to smash the core with a thigh bone and leave the place forever.

  He didn’t.

  He put the core in the bag with the four others he’d found that day – a big haul, sometimes he didn’t find anything for weeks. Some of the spirits couldn’t get out when their bodies were fragged. Not all of them died. Some of them were still trapped up here, unable to get into the Second World so close to the new Stone Lands and the Veil. The ones he took back paid with cash or favours. Their gratitude kept him in lodgings and drink.

  He pushed the wrecked sheath away from him and stood. His knees hurt. He was not young any more, and was not as well made as he should have been in the first place. Fast-growth made for fast lives. Heat haze shimmered off the bones. He squinted, thought he recognised an outcrop. There were so many memories of so many lives ended rapidly, one after another, that it was hard to tell which belonged to which. The bluff, however, he was certain he knew, and that it had been important.

  Impossible to find her, others might say. But the way he looked at it, when he died, he’d go into the stacks and come out again (or he might not, but the end result would be the same for Kaibeli). If he didn’t look for her now, his memories would only fade each time he went into the stacks and was reborn. He could afford to waste a lifetime looking for her. It was that, or lose her forever.

  He shouldered his threadbare pack and walked up the bluff, duster flapping about his calves in the breeze. Yeah, he was sure he remembered it. He stood at its top, looked down. He’d died here. Skulls and crushed machine bodies, still garbed in dusty armour, were half-buried in the hot sand. One of them was him. He remembered gunfire rattling off the skins of horrifying Stone Kin war constructs. He remembered it had had no effect, and he remembered what had happened to him and his men when they’d crested the hill.

  He rubbed at his stomach, the place where they’d pulled his guts out.

  When had it happened? Who the fuck knew?

  Behind him, the Veil of Worlds rippled like a curtain of white gauze across the sky. He had been up to it, once or twice, looked into the place beyond that was no longer a part of the same reality. The Veil would kill you if you so much as brushed against it, but it was safe to stand within touching distance.

  You could not see through it.

  He held up the fork. It warbled unsteadily. No spirits alive around the bluff.

  He moved on.

  “SAY, YO MODEN Pic?” a man sitting on a pile of wrecked robot chassis asked him. He was ratty about the face, a dirty round hat crammed onto his head. His skin was filthy, hair greasy, but the armour he wore was expensive, and he leaned on a long energy gun that gleamed with oil and active maintenance gels. The man looked like scum, but he knew his type – the dangerous type.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Ah, does it matter?” said the man. He jumped up off the wrecked war droids. “I know it be yo, spirits tell me.” His hands were crossed over the trigger assembly of his gun, like he was shooting the breeze outside a bar.

  Moden turned his head. Everywhere was the dead landscape of war. “There are no spirits here,” he said.

  “There weren’t no spirits here,” corrected the man. He was an islander, judging by his uncouth speech; way off his home patch. You saw an islander without his fishing skiff it was nearly sure he was a sell-sword, or a pirate, or both. “But they’s coming back. Second World’s growing agin. I work for a man, big man out of Kemyonset. He wants to talk to yo.” Somehow, the man’s gun had contrived to point itself at Moden. Casually, like, but it was pointed at him nonetheless. “Ain’t nothing bad, don’t you worry yoself ’bout that. Fact, might be to yo advantage. He got sometin’ yo might be interessed in.”

  Moden looked at the gun muzzle. His gaze slid slowly up the man’s dirty wargear to settle on his face. “I got a choice?”

>   The man spat and gave an unpleasant smile. “Now I think about it, I don’t suppose yo do.”

  The man – Moden never did learn his name – took him down the side of the mountain. The volcanoes of Mars did not feel like mountains, despite their immense size. From a distance they dominated the landscape, but their slopes were so shallow that it was hard to accept you were standing on something that forced itself into the marches of space. After an hour they came to an area alive with activity – men, sheathed spirits and lesser machines working the land, collecting the dead. Piles of stacked bones and armour, heaps of broken sheaths made macabre sculptures on the red mountain. They were being catalogued. Men worked, genotyping the bones, or held forks similar to his own, testing the ruined sheaths for stranded spirit life.

  “This way,” said the rat-faced islander. His gun had never left Moden’s back, no matter how diffidently he held it. It was like they were gentlemen wandering the desert for a morning’s shooting. It was like nothing of the sort. Ratface jutted his chin toward a cluster of tents.

  “Which one?” said Moden. At the centre of the tents was one that was much richer than the others, embroidered with a living tapestry that occasionally took flight from the fabric, swooping around the worksite and singing sad songs of the dead Erth.

  “Which do yo think?” said Ratface.

  Moden paused. His eyes narrowed.

  “Git goin’,” said Ratface. The gun wandered closer to Moden’s back.

  They walked to the tent.

  GUARDS STOOD AT the end of a covered walkway leading to the tent’s entrance, stiff-necked city sorts, all shiny armour and ego. They stood stock still, eyes locked forward, as Ratface herded Moden between them toward the colourful tent flap. Ratface gave them his nasty smile, and tipped his dirty hat.

  “In there,” said Ratface. “Yo go in now.”

  Moden faced him. “Not going to guard me?”

  Ratface spat into the sand. “No need. Be seein’ yo, wastelander.”

  He sauntered off, leaving Moden by the tent entrance. He let off a long fart as he walked out past the guards, shouldered his rifle, and whistled his way out of Moden’s life.

  Moden looked around the camp. Wind cracked at the canvas. The tapestries murmured sad tales. The guards paid him no attention whatsoever.

  He’d be dead within seconds if he turned and walked away. There was something on the air here, intangible eyes watching.

  He lifted the heavy flap, and went into the tent.

  It was heavily decorated inside. The fabric of the tent was thick, blocking out the sun, and the inside was lit by a variety of oil lamps. Carpets covered the dirt. The poles were decorated after the school of Menlo Kar. At a desk of alpine mertzwood sat a man writing by candlelight. He scratched a pen across paper. A spirit-inhabited putto at the corner of the desk, half a Marspan tall, whispered the words he wrote into the records of the Second World.

  The candles flickered as Moden entered. The man stopped writing. His hair was dressed in the latest fashion, his robes stiffened into elaborate folds as was the custom of the fourteen houses of the Man-dar-see. This was a rich man, a powerful man. “Ah,” he said. “Moden Pic.” He spoke as if they had an appointment, and Moden had arrived in good time. Perhaps he believed that; most of the aristocracy were full believers in eleutheremic fate. Moden was not. He had seen too much in this life and his others to buy into that. For starters, if everything was fated, how come the spirits were absolutely shitting their ephemeral selves during the war? Ask them and you got the usual evasive horseshit.

  The man held an open hand out to a stool in front of his desk. He went back to his writing. Moden supposed he was supposed to sit down.

  The man could suppose the fuck off. Moden remained where he was.

  The man looked up and sighed. He laid aside his pen, scattered red sand across what he had written and blew gently upon the paper, then tipped the sand away, put the paper into a tray and dusted his hands off . The putto fell silent. “I understood it would be like this, but I am still irked by it.” The man tried an honest expression. He had a merchant’s face, generously blanketed in fat, lips creased by the constant pursing that seemed to accompany bazaar dickering. The expression did not suit him; there was a ruthlessness underlying his skin. “I am fool to myself.” A chuckle followed to the same effect, a plaster mask of a laugh, fragile and fake. “Please sit down. I have a proposal I wish to discuss with you. I have gone to a great deal of time and trouble to find you.” His tongue periodically strayed from his lips, fat and pink as the rest of him, to touch the corners of his mouth or the base of his philtrum.

  Moden peered out of the tentflap. “I am flattered,” he murmured. The light was harsh after the dim tent interior. Still the same sense of peril. “If I run, I die, right? That’s the way these things usually work.”

  The man tilted his hands and put out a fleshy lip. “I have to have some leverage.”

  “No Second World up here any more, so no assassin spirits. And those brassnecks you got there won’t stop me.”

  “Oh, I very much doubt they would. You’re what, a five-times-reinvested veteran of the last war? And how many times have you lived in total, Moden Pic? Hundreds? You’re quite the legend back in Kemyonset, I have no doubt you could take my men apart like soft cheese. But you are wrong about the Second World, as wrong about that as you are about the lack of assassin spirits.” He wagged a pudgy finger. “I have a variety of exceptionally final means at my disposal here. But, assuming I did not, and assuming you considered declining my invitation on the mountain, it begs the question, if your martial prowess is so great, then why did you come here at all? And to that I know the answer...” He smiled. His teeth were small. “I think you know what I have.” The man pulled open a drawer, the wood creaking. “Or should I say, who.”

  From within the drawer he produced a spirit core, which he held up between his fat forefinger and thumb. The light it cast – pale violet with threads of silver, Kaibeli’s colour – made of his face a demoniacal leer. “I am sure you know who this is. We’re here on a reclamation mission, you see. The Second World is growing again. The Grand Court and Conclave of Spirits has been re-established, the Great Library functions again, although alas without the Great Librarian. Five of the greatest spirits have come to the fore and are rebuilding Mars. True, we may still be isolated from the rest of the galaxy, but there’s no reason we have to go the same way as Erth. It’s a new world out there!” He snatched the spirit core into his palm, enfolding it within flesh and hiding its glow. His face returned to that of the avuncular cheat. “Of course, you wouldn’t know that, hiding yourself up here and drinking yourself stupid. It was a coincidence, really, that we came across her so soon. And that, my friend, gave me an idea. I wonder, would you care to do me a small service in return for your lover?”

  Moden’s throat was suddenly dry. “Prove it is her, and maybe we can talk.”

  Again that smile, again the tongue following to taste it. The man tossed the core across the tent. “Prove it yourself. You have the equipment.” He heaved himself out from behind his desk with not a little difficulty, for he was grossly fat, as many men of the aristocracy tended to be.

  Moden caught it and withdrew the fork from his belt. As he brought the core close, the fork sang the song he had wanted to hear these last twenty years, humming the notes that made up her name. “Kaibeli, Kaibeli, Kaibeli.” He fitted the core into the fork’s tines, and it sang the louder.

  Moden removed it and gave a noncommittal grunt. “You can fool the forks.”

  The fat man rolled his eyes. “Yes, you can, but I have not. It takes time, effort and a lot of lies in very particular places. Dangerous places. Do you see me doing that up here?” He held up his arms and looked about him, as if appealing to a court of law.

  “Let me fit her to a sheath, and then we’ll see.”

  “Let you fit her to a sheath and then I’ll die. No thank you. I’m afraid you’ll have to take
this on faith, but I will point out that your fork was most insistent.”

  Moden weighed the dull grey instrument in his hand. Wasn’t it just?

  He looked up from under his hat brim, eyes dark spaces where candle-flame stars danced. “What do you want me to do?”

  The man rubbed his hands together. “First, let us deal on level terms. You are Moden Pic, but you do not know who I am. I will tell you, so we may deal fairly. I am Sulman Mahoo, of the third house of Man-dar-see, and I would have you do a simple task.” He chuckled apologetically, acknowledging the lie. “I want you to catch me a Stone Kin.”

  IT APPEARED THAT Moden was to be the bait.

  A party of men, armed with weapons that caused the Kin certain excruciation, walked in wide perimeter around Moden. He, stripped of his weapons, was left at the centre of a large depression in the side of the volcano, close by the Veil of Worlds.

  There was a reek to the place, redolent of slaughter, cloves and chipped flint, a chemical tang on the air that scalded the throat and forced Moden to wear a scarf wrapped about his face. The scent was one he knew well, the scent of the Stone Kin.

  There were a few places like this left, portals half-open, slowly closing, where phantoms and images from the higher dimensions might intrude. Moden avoided them.

  Here, Mahoo had told him, was one of the last places the smaller forms might fully make their way into mundane reality, if only for a short while.

  Moden had faced the Stone Kin innumerable times, and he was frightened, because rather than in spite of that. The Stone Kin were hard to comprehend, eleven-dimensional beings extruded into base four-dimensional reality. They were not of stone; Moden had no idea why they were called so, but he suspected it was because of their manner of movement. They were fast and uniformly deadly, and yet sometimes one would stop dead, like a picture, as if they were excluded from the normal flow of time. They might remain that way for microseconds or millennia. As a habit, it would have added to their otherworldly menace, if they were not easily slain while in this state.