In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (11 page)

He stripped off a glove and felt it. Cold and very, very slightly granular.

“I’ve never seen glassine do that,” Sally said when she’d joined him. “Show abrasion like this. What could have done it?”

“Time,” Teyud said.

This time they both looked up, startled. They’d been speaking English.

I suspected she understood more of it than she let on
, Jeremy thought.
Very bright lady
.

“Enough time,” she amplified. “A very, very long time. The—”

She used a couple of Martian words he didn’t know. Sally whispered: “That means ‘molecular bonds,’ I think.”

“They cannot resist the entropy embodied in sand and wind forever if they are not renewed. When this happens, be cautious. Loss of structural strength follows, to degrees unpredictable and which can be ascertained only by experiment.”

She drew her pistol and fired northward; the sound was a sharp
fffftht
as methane mixed with air and exploded. Fifty yards in that direction, a spot of canal covering gave a musical
ting
with a shattering undertone, and then a ragged section fell into the emptiness below. Sand poured downward for a while.

“I express enthusiastic appreciation,” Sally said. “The information is of substantial use.”

She was making notes with a little pod recorder hitched to her belt. Then she bent and flipped up a big hemispherical shell, like a
perfectly symmetrical turtle the size of a small car. The underside was empty, save for parts of a skeleton attached to the inside; the foot that had secreted fresh glassine was long gone.

“Canal roof repair bug,” she said to Jeremy. “It’s a variant of the standard construction type. Must have died when this section was abandoned.”

He nodded. The bottom of the canal lay about twenty feet below his perch. This section had only a foot or so of sand on the floor, and he could see the skeletons of endless rows of canal shrimp—the human-sized adult phase, when they attached themselves to the bottom like barnacles and waved their tails in unison to create a current and drive the water where the builders wanted it. The canals had their own ecology, and he was looking at the ruins of it.

There was something scratched on the opposite wall of the canal, on the inside just above where the old water level would have been. He knelt, feeling the gritty sand moving beneath his knees through the robe and pants, and aimed the minicam, his thumb dialing up more magnification. The glyphs were a bit irregular, as if someone had scratched them into the hard quasiorganic concrete in a hurry. Jeremy spoke into the microphone as he read:

“I
told
the fools this section couldn’t maintain flow if they didn’t extend the catchments!” He almost laughed. But the laughter died. That was a cry of despair across millennia, and one that presaged the death of cities, migration and flight and death.

He seemed to hear the keening. Then he
did
hear something, and whirled awkwardly at Teyud’s shout of warning.

That saved his life. His feet shot out from beneath him as the sand moved on the glassine, and talons flashed through the space he’d toppled through rather than into his throat. A fluting scream followed, bloodlust and frustration set to music but loud enough to nearly deafen him, and there was a dry carrion stink.

The hilt of the still unfamiliar sword thumped him under the ribs as he fell, leaving him wheezing with pain. A snake-slim figure poised over him; he had a confused impression of gaping jaws edged with sawlike points, a long, whipping tail, and a flaring mane of red-bronze feathers—and long arms tipped with claws reaching for him.

Then there was a sharp wet smack and one of the slit-pupil eyes
gushed out in a miniature volcano of matter and blood. The creature pitched backward, convulsing as the neurotoxin in the needle sent every muscle into spasm, head arching back to its heels with a crackle of snapping spine.

Jeremy forced himself to breathe, and his mind to function. Back on his feet, he saw a wave of the
things
swarming around the
Traveler
’s crew in a maelstrom of flashing blades, warbling jaws where purple tongues showed, and snapping dart pistols. One Martian had gone down and three of the things savaged the body. Some of the attackers had sticks or crudely formed stone hand axes in their clawed hands. Their motions had the darting quickness of snakes, or great predatory birds, which they resembled even more.

Teyud tossed her dart pistol to her left hand to let it recover and drew her sword, lunging with blurring swiftness; a narrow body tried to dance aside and instead took the point through its torso, collapsing limply as she withdrew the blade. Without pause, she reversed her grip and thrust backward into another that was raising a rock over her head. Then the pistol gave the
pip
sound that meant there was enough methane for another shot.

Baid tu-Or was holding off a pair, their heads lunging out in snaps that ended in
clomp
sounds as she swept her sword back and forth; Teyud shot one of them in the base of the skull, and the engineer cut the other’s legs out from under it as it turned. Sally was backed up against the canal’s wall, her Terran automatic pistol in her hand, trying to get a clear sight at one of the darting, quicksilver shapes without shooting a Martian by mistake.

Time to get involved
, Jeremy thought.

He jumped. A dozen saw-beaked faces and twelve pairs of crimson eyes pivoted upward as he soared and then fell, his robe billowing against the restraint of his harness. His pistol was in his hand as he touched down on the sparsely vegetated surface—and his was no Martian dart gun, but a good alloy-steel .40 Colt Magnum shipped from Earth by solar-sail cargo pod.

One of the things had a fire-hardened spear, and it ran past him at Teyud’s flank. He fired at point-blank range and the thing’s head broke apart in a spray of bone fragments, feathers, and blood. Sally shot a moment later. The bullet punched into a snaky torso and knocked the beast down; it beat its head and tail on the ground in
blind agony, screaming like a laserdisc of a Wagnerian soprano turned to maximum volume, then went limp.

Then Teyud’s pistol was pointing straight at
him
. He threw himself down and rolled as it snapped, just in time to see an attacker behind him spasm backward with a dart in the paler short fuzz of its throat. He shot the one following it from the ground, holding the pistol two-handed.

The smashing roars of the Terran weapons broke the attack where more familiar dangers hadn’t. Suddenly all the creatures were fleeing in a mob, scattering northeastward, crying out in oddly melodious fluting voices that sounded like short, sad tunes played on a saxophone. Teyud called sharply to one of her subordinates, and the man tossed her a dart rifle. She went down on one knee, brought the long slim barrel up and aimed carefully, firing as quickly as the chamber could regenerate and the beasts were in range.

Phhttt. Phhttt. Phhttt. Phhttt
.

Four of the . . . mob or pack or flock . . . went down. Then she handed the weapon back to the crewman.

“Everyone feed your guns!” she called. “
Dharz
are prone to unanticipated actions and they may return.”

Feeding the gun meant pushing a syringe of sludge into a port on the weapon’s top, as well as reloading the ammunition.

At least my Colt doesn’t wheeze or smack its lips
, Jeremy thought as he snapped in a new magazine.

And it didn’t depend on igniting organic methane to push its projectiles out. The sharp scent of nitro powder mingled with the faint sulfurous burnt swamp-gas reek of the Martian weapons in the thin, cold dry air; beneath it ran the smell of Martian blood, saltier and more metallic than that of the creatures Earth bred. Teyud watched Jeremy’s hands as he reloaded and holstered the automatic.

“Interesting,” she said. “How does it operate?”

“Explosive combustion of nitrogenous compounds driving a heavy metal slug through spiral stabilizing grooves on the inside of the barrel,” he said, which took five words in Demotic.

Her brows went up. “Extravagant, but effective. Could I use one?”

He shook his head. “The recoil would break your wrists, I’m afraid,” he said.

Which was true enough, at least for standard-breed Martians, although he didn’t know about Thoughtful Grace, who were a lot stronger. But it was also policy not to let the locals have Terran weapons.

Though theirs are nearly as effective
, he thought.
Unless the gas generator part dies of old age or gets indigestion. And they’re difficult to replace
.

“What
are
these creatures?” he asked, turning one over with his toe.

It still looked like an eight-foot feathered snake with long legs and arms. The head had a scaly flesh-covered beak that came to a point, but formed interlocking saw-edged blades behind. The skulls were narrow too, but long, and must hold a fair-sized brain. His toe moved on and forced a hand axe out of a grip that clenched in death.

“Dharz,”
Teyud said. “In origin, small, social carnivores of the Deep Beyond,
tembst
-modified for the hunt in ancient times.”

“Modified for the hunt? It was far too much as if they were hunting
us
.”

“Feral now.” Her mouth quirked very slightly. “Perhaps my . . . our ancestors should not have made them so clever, or so large, or so indiscriminate in their search for edible protein.”

A slight inclination of the head and a spare gesture of one blood-spattered hand; it meant, more or less,
insincere apologies are tendered for the sake of form
, and in this context it was an ironic joke.

Another Martian came up, the ship’s engineer; she had a bleeding wound down one cheek, clotting with an alien swiftness as he watched.

“They were not so many, or so bold, in the Conqueror’s day,” she said. “Nor did they come so far out of the Deep Beyond. We have one dead, Expeditionary Supervisor Teyud; and three wounded, one seriously. All will recover but the worst will not be fit for duty for a twentieth of a year.”

“The Beyond is dangerous,” Teyud said, as she carefully wiped her sword clean and sheathed it. “And the casualty was a
tokmar
sniffer. That is a seriously self-destructive habit.”

As she spoke, the crew bandaged injuries, carried the wounded—which by local notions included only those too badly hurt to walk or work—back to the
Traveler
. Several returned with a
rack of poles that they erected, snapping the members together; the rest had gathered the bodies of the
dharz
and were preparing what looked unpleasantly like butchering tools. Sally Yamashita had gathered the crudely shaped weapons the beasts had used and was examining them thoughtfully.

“Ah . . . those things are a bit too intelligent for me to feel comfortable eating them,” Jeremy said, as the crew drained the beasts’ blood into containers.

Teyud and the engineer looked at him in puzzlement; their nicating membranes swept over their eyes and they blinked, a disconcerting double sideways-and-vertical gesture.

“
Dharz
are not humans,” said the engineer. He remembered her name was Baid tu-Or.

The phrase she used meant specifically “not of the lineages of those present” and implied the capacity to interbreed.

As far as he knew, Terrans and Martians couldn’t interbreed, being nearly as different from each other genetically as humans and chimps, but evidently Baid was being generous.

“And we are preparing them to feed to the engine,” Teyud reassured him. “Higher-quality feed will increase its range and intensity of effort. Our own supplies are ample at present and
dharz
are reputed to be very rank in taste. Note that we intend to dedicate the remains of our dead fellow employee to the same function.”

“Oh,” he said. Then, “Thank you for saving my life.”

She quirked a small smile and said gravely, “It would be detrimental to my reputation if my employers were eaten by wild
dharz
only ten days out from Zar-tu-Kan. In any case, you have performed the same with respect to me, so the balance of debit and credit is neutral.”

“Well . . . let’s get going, then,” he said. “The Lost City awaits!”

That made him feel better for a moment, until Teyud gave one of her disturbing not-quite-smiles.

“The
dharz
are heading in the same direction,” she pointed out. “They evidently feel it will be safe for them. This is not a favorable indicator.”

Encyclopedia Britannica, 20th Edition
University of Chicago Press, 1998

MARS
: Biology

Martian biology at first glimpse appears much more distinctive than that of Venus; hominids apart, there are few or no species with a close resemblance to extant or extinct Terran forms. And although
homo sapiens Martensis
is unquestionably a close relation of
homo sapiens sapiens
, it is not a type historically attested on Earth. It is therefore not surprising that the “alien transplantation of earthly forms” theory of the origins of life on Venus and Mars was first definitively proven on Venus.

Close examination of modern and fossil records and recent genetic analysis shows two reasons for the distinct developmental paths of Martian and Terran life since their point of divergence some two hundred million years ago. The first is that the Martian environment is less Earthlike, and much harsher, than that of Venus. It is, on average, far harsher than that of Earth itself, with the
most favored zones corresponding to Earth’s high, dry deserts and much land comparable to the fringes of Antarctica or the Tibetan plateau. Other observers have called it “Australia in an icebox.”

To simplify, one may say that the ecology of Venus is higher-energy than that of Earth and contains a greater scope for diversity. The ratio of ocean to land on Venus further amplifies the number of separate niches and species. Mars has less solar energy to drive the food chain, and a single world-girdling equatorial continent that has endured in roughly its present form from earliest times; hence the Martian land ecologies are more uniform, with a smaller number of more universally distributed species. The large number of migratory species and the high significance of fliers exaggerate this tendency.