In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (14 page)

Her fingers touched the controls. Teyud watched in fascination; she found Terran technology as outré as Earthlings found the Martian variety.

Most are not interested in Terran
tembst
if it is not immediately profitable. This is a failure of imagination. For a beginning, they can consistently make more of their devices whenever they please. For another,
some of it has capacities we lack. They are chaotic, yet perhaps they may be the means of restoring true
Sh’u Maz.

Sally repeated the sequence, then went through it again.

“Nothing,” she said quietly. “The pickup is fully functional as far as I can tell, but we’re being jammed.”

Jeremy sucked in his breath. Teyud looked keenly from one Terran to the other.

“Significance?” she said sharply, after a silence that stretched.

“That means that other Terrans are interfering,” Jeremy explained.

“Ah, the Eastbloc,” the Martian said.

Now both of them stared at
her
. Martians who had any grasp of Earth’s internal divisions were few and far between. Most were utterly uninterested.

“I have had some contact with them,” Teyud explained, then turned away. “It was not of an amiable nature.”

I hope that this interference is aimed at you, my employers. Otherwise half a world was not far enough to run . . . and if I run farther, I approach the source of peril once again
.

Mars, Near The Lost City of Rema-Dza
May 10, 2000 AD

The dead plantations began to line the canal a day’s sail out of the lost city of Rema-Dza. Crystal stumps showed through the red sands, some still jagged where they were recently uncovered, most worn to smooth nubs. Pieces of glassine pipe showed where distribution systems had curled around the low hillsides along the contour lines to fruit trees in their individual pits. Eroded shards of wall stood out of the sand now and then, with thin scatterings of atmosphere plant on their leeward sides, protected for a while by their stabilizing effect on the moving dust. When the city itself came into sight, there was more of the green-red vegetation clustering around the bases of the towers still intact.

The pitiful hint of life was doubly welcome as the dryness of the cool air clawed at their mouths and sinuses. Both the Terrans had special masks with water-soaked linings that they used every so often to stave off nosebleeds, and they were also using double portions of
lotion on their hands and faces to minimize chapping and cracking. Even the Martians found it uncomfortable here, except for the weird one with the odd tint to his skin who didn’t seem to
have
a nose.

“Why’s the growth concentrated around the towers?” Jeremy asked Sally. “Though that’s pretty sparse to call
concentrated
. More of a ‘very thin’ as opposed to ‘nothing’.”

“The towers have—evidently did have even back when this place was built—systems that suck what water there is out of the air. It’s a supplement to canals and reservoirs. That would keep some life going.”

Winds cracked the sail taut and wailed mournfully through the thin lines of the rigging; beneath that was the hiss of sand like abrasive talc, and beneath that, the deeper, irregular sounds the air made as it wove through the ruins and hooted through their twisted passages. The quiet hum of the wheels faded as they slowed and the buildings loomed larger, turning from a model in the distance to immensities like a long-lost New York.

Teyud slid down from her perch high on the mast. Jeremy hid a slight shudder as she peeled the vision device from her face; it looked like she was being hugged at eye level by a semitransparent octopus with waxy skin and an unpleasant pinkish tinge spreading through its veins and capillaries.

The thing scuttled into its container at her belt, filling it like a viscous fluid, then darted a tentacle back out, grabbed a handle on the underside of the lid and slapped it shut with a sharp
click
.

Damned if I’ll ever like equipment that drinks your blood
, he thought.
Even if that does make it . . . loyal. Give me plain old electronics and optics any day
.

He was getting better at reading Martian expressions, though, or at least those of Teyud za-Zhalt. He’d spent thousands of hours looking at video, but there was a gestalt you could only pick up at first-hand.

She’s not just a collection of traits
, he told himself.
I think I’m actually getting to know her a little as a human . . . that is, a sentient being
.

She was looking worried but not alarmed; evidently there was still no immediate sign of the possible pirates. Which he heartily approved of—pirates sounded much more romantic in a book about the Spanish Main than they did out here in the thoroughly modern
Deep Beyond, and when Martians decided to be nasty, they could be
very
nasty indeed. This culture wasn’t long on empathy at the best of times; he suspected that the emphasis on genetics tended to make them indifferent to individuals. Perhaps the fact that, as far as anyone could tell, they’d never had anything resembling a religion or a belief in an afterlife had something to do with it as well.

“There is no sign of pursuit,” she said. “The weather will probably turn bad now. Possibly very bad; seasonal wind and sandstorms are common now in this location. However, this has positive features in our situation. We will have shelter and pursuers will not.”

The dunes that surrounded and half buried the lost city were higher than any which could stand under Earth’s gravity even in the Erg, the sand seas of the Sahara; so were the structures that towered out of them. Rema-Dza’s buildings didn’t have the candy-striped colors of Zar-tu-Kan as they jutted from the red-pink dunes. The towers still standing were reddish brown from base to tip, and they looked more like tall spindly mushrooms with buttressed bases than asparagus stalks. Some were stumps; a few had been ground open to show the honeycomb of passages and halls within but hadn’t fallen yet. Life showed there, wheeling dots that coasted between the great ruins. It wasn’t until you realized how far away they were that they stopped looking small . . .

“Wild
dhwar
and
paiteng
,” Teyud said.

Those were the Martian birds that held the top predator niches wolves and tigers did on Earth. Dhwar had thirty-five-foot wingspans, paiteng more like fifty or fifty-five; and their claws and beaks were of uncomfortable size. Dhwar hunted in packs or flocks and had a nasty habit of squabbling over their prey in midair, letting bits and pieces drop as they did. Paiteng had smaller groups, usually parents and subadult offspring. Around here it helped to be able to patrol a hunting territory of a couple of thousand square miles.

She went on, “This would be a good nesting site and they do not need to feed locally; nor do they need liquid water. We must be cautious.”

The buildings and broken domes that clustered around the feet of the towers were a little different too, structured as if they’d been put together from LEGO blocks and blunt wedges, staring out with more windows than the exterior of a Martian building would have
these days. Even the Deep Beyond hadn’t been quite so hostile, when this place was built.

“A very long time since it was inhabited,” Teyud said. “Since the days when it seemed
Sh’u Maz
would indeed endure.”

“One of the last cities to be built in the Imperial era, but also one of the first to be abandoned,” Jeremy said cheerfully.

He’d studied the chronicles from Earthside long enough to be sure of that, and he was feeling more than a little smug at having his—not guess, estimate . . . confirmed. There had been quite a few skeptics. Martians usually had a pretty blasé attitude toward history, as they had so much of it, and it was refreshing to have Teyud showing curiosity; most of the crew had given the place one glance and then gone back to work, except the lookouts who kept watch for anything dangerous.

“Well, lookitthat,” Sally murmured as they coasted closer.

The winds were backing and filling; the sail boomed and thuttered above them. Teyud made a gesture and it was brought down; at another, the engine gave a grunt and began working its cranks to turn the wheels of the stern axle. The motion of the
Traveler
became steadier as she swayed upright, more like the powered vehicles the Terrans were used to at home. A circular domed building at least as large as the central part of Zar-tu-Kan slid by, and half draped across the other side of it was the ruin of an airship. Teyud’s brows went up slightly, the equivalent of whistling, swearing, and slapping her knee.

“That is very large,” she said. “And from its lines, a warcraft.”

“Thousand feet, easy,” Sally said. “Maybe fifteen hundred. They don’t build them that large anymore.”

The skeleton reared four hundred feet into the air, the thin flexible covering gone except for scraps. That showed the geodesic mesh of the structure below, except for large patches that had fallen in, either burned when the craft fell or simply eroded away since. If it was similar to what the Martians used now, it was made of a composite, long fibers of single-molecule chains in a resin matrix. On Earth they’d call the material synthetic, though here it was secreted by animals rather than made in a high-pressure vat.

“To a high probability, this city was evacuated in haste,” Teyud said, looking at it. “With some fighting.”

Jeremy nodded. “The redaction I saw was a commentary on a list
of abandonments, done rather later—more than two thousand years later for the list, and another two thousand for the commentary. Two thousand of our years, one thousand of yours. The implication was that the canal was cut off upstream in some sort of disturbance—a violent agitation of resistant elements, the commentary said—and everyone had to get out fast when the water stopped flowing, and go somewhere where the resistants weren’t waiting for them.”

“Ah,” Teyud said—that was a conversational placeholder in Demotic, rather like “well” or “so” or “um.” “You hope that the ruins were not thoroughly stripped of Imperial
tembst
?”

Teyud went on, “The nomads will have been visiting for some time. Possibly beginning not long after the city fell. There were always some of them in the Beyond, if not so many or so dangerous as now. In any case, only the shells of the
tembst
would remain.”

Jeremy looked at her and nodded. There were drawbacks to using organics, one of the most obvious being that they died if you didn’t feed and water them.

“Yeah, it wouldn’t be useable, but the remains will tell us things. We’re hoping that the nomads won’t have taken everything that civilized people would, if they’d had time to strip it during a gradual decline or a planned evacuation. Of course, that was a long time ago. There might have been an expedition afterward that never got recorded. But we can hope, and even if there was, we’ll learn.”

The desire of it overwhelmed him. To
know
. . .

Teyud gave him an odd look, shrugged, and turned to the helm. Sally smiled at him.

“Abstract curiosity isn’t something this culture encourages,” she said.

He was getting good at interpreting
her
expressions, too—being cooped up with someone did that. There was a hint of something she wasn’t saying in the narrow dark eyes.

“They must have had it once, or they’d never have developed the . . . hey, let’s call it
tembst
in the first place.”

That look was there again. “The usual explanation is that modern Martian culture is decadent,” she pointed out.

He snorted. “Yeah, but that’s insufficient even if ‘decadent’ means anything besides ‘I don’t like your sex life.’ You’re a biologist, Sally. Hasn’t it occurred to you that these people are awfully backward
in things like physics to have gotten so far with the biological sciences? How did they get the equivalent of electron microscopes?”

“They’ve got things that will do the equivalent. Those tailored enzymes they still use to splice genes, for example. And they used to have more in the Imperial era,” she said neutrally.

“But they’re biological, too. How did they get from here to there? Their physics is pre-Einsteinian, barely Newtonian, and their mathematics are early-twentieth-century equivalents, and largely an intellectual game to them anyway. They’d never thought about atomic structures or quantum mechanics before we arrived, so how the hell did they get molecular biology? And don’t tell me they knew more once and forgot it all later. It’s a long time since the Early Imperial era, yes, and their technology literally manufactures itself, but they never lost literacy and there are
some
documents that old. They’ve never had better physics than they do now and they should have had something much better to develop the
tembst
they’ve got.”

She hesitated. He saw it and went on, “Come clean. Does this have anything to do with my project getting approved?”

Another hesitation, and then a shrug before she spoke. “Okay, there’s need-to-know now. We . . . the big brains back home, actually—think that there may have been an Ancient intervention here, way back when.”

“Of course there was. Mars was a dead rock before the Lords of Creation—”

She winced slightly at the lurid name science fiction writers had placed on the aliens who’d terraformed Mars and Venus two hundred million years ago. Half the thud-and-blunder fiction on the market today involved them.

“—stuck their oar in.”

“Not just the initial terraforming or the transplanting of Terran life-forms,” she said. “We know they were active on Venus fairly recently, historically speaking.”

Jeremy nodded. Some languages on Venus were related to ones on Earth, to Proto-Indo-European specifically. That had been demonstrated back in the late ’80s. Humans had been taken from Earth and dropped there recently . . . relatively recently. Plus, there was the Diadem of the Eye . . .

“But all we’ve got on Venus is one enigmatic artifact and a native
legend about what it did before it became totally inactive,” he said. “Yes, there’s been a theory around ever since then that the Lords gave the early Martians a kick-start in biotech as part of their big experiment. But what’s changed?”