In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (35 page)

They began to spring forward to get around the nose-shaped protuberance. Jeremy caught a flash of motion out of the corner of
his eye and threw himself down with a yell; Daiyar did the same an instant later. Something flashed by over his head, a creature like a huge manta ray, right down to the lashing tail that sang through the air where his head had been like a steel whip. When he jumped back up—soaring five feet into the air as he did—the base of the triangular rock was already black and heaving with a mat of the rodents; the whole thing started to boil toward him.

“Surrender!” a voice boomed, as if magnified by a megaphone, echoing off the walls and roof and stony spires of the great chamber.

He turned. A dozen Sniffers were at the entrance to the cavern, gabbling and rising on their hind legs to point in his direction, then dropping back to stand with long red tongues lolling over thin jaws lined with gripping teeth designed to catch and immobilize. Their baying and babbling subsided at a harsh command from one of the ten guards behind; all of them were mounted on fat-tired, self-propelled unicycles, the only things with the speed and capacity to handle rough footing to catch them so fast. The riders had dart rifles and the round helmets with pivoting eyestalks he’d first seen in Zar-tu-Kan, the kind that plugged into your optic nerve.

You
needed
eyes in the back of your head in a place like this.

“Drop your weapons and surrender!” the voice boomed again.

Jeremy had gotten much better at interpreting the musical but low-affect Martian voices. This one sounded distinctly frazzled.

Daiyar had frozen, except for her head, which whipped back and forth between the approaching horde of miniature zombie-rats, the darkness above where mantas made ready to stoop, and the fields of sporulating fungi they’d passed though. Jeremy made the same calculation, and acted: He scooped up the doctor’s elongated form, slight and with a hollow-boned lightness. Then he ran at the troll’s nose, and
leapt
.

One of the manta-things passed him on the way up, the long, barbed whip of its tail barely missing him. He landed halfway up the rocky height, scrabbled for footing, crouched, and leapt again. This time he came down on a small, four-foot-square, patch at the top. He was close enough to the far edge that he had to squat frantically and push himself backward to avoid toppling down the far side. It was reassuringly solid, though, so they needn’t fear anything crawling out of the rock to get at them.

One of the manta-things dove at them. As it did, Jeremy saw bones and the half-dissolved bodies of zombie-rats and dozen other things stuck to the glutinous surface of its underside. It passed inches over their heads, and he managed to shoot it with the dart pistol he still gripped in one hand. It jerked in midair and circled downward, still with trembling waves moving across a surface that looked like custard or jelly close to. It settled on the rock floor, with hundreds of the rodents underneath it; they all gave a galvanic jerk that heaved the manta up like a blanket with a bunch of puppies underneath.

Then it grew still, although the edges rippled as if it was trying to throw itself back into the air or crawl away. More of the zombie-rats rushed in and began nibbling at its fringes; those that skittered out on top of it stopped and began to sink into it . . . or at least the first wave of them did. Jeremy restrained an impulse to shoot at it again as his pistol gave a pip of readiness.

“They are not wholly animal tissue,” Daiyar wheezed as she stood up. “Most of its mass is a symbiotic motile fungus. Hence, the neurotoxin is less effective.”

“Oh, great—
shit!
” Jeremy yelled, throwing himself down again and slashing with his sword as he fell backward.

That met a lashing tail as another flying thing whipped by; the blow to his wrist was like striking a moving baulk of teak, but the severed tip fell to the rock beside him. Daiyar scraped it off the edge to the surface below with her sword, and the rodents scattered back, leaving a clear space about it. They covered the fallen manta in a heaving mantle three or four deep by now, but enough were left over to send columns climbing up the rock face. They came on like ants.

The pursuing Coercives came on, too, leaning forward and racing their unicycles along the path the fugitives had followed, tilting and banking with crazed skill. One failed and crashed sideways into a pile of the cow-gut-looking fungus; it closed over him like a spring-loaded trap, with a wet plop sound. Another shot as something started to haul itself out of a pool, and whatever-it-was collapsed back into it with a froth of limbs or tentacles that churned the water to foam. More of the mantas sailed down from the roof; looking up, he saw one detach itself from where it hung by something that
looked like a snail’s foot. The organ sank back into its body as it uncurled its wings and swooped.

“Go!” Jeremy said to Daiyar. “They won’t kill me!
Get me help from the Emperor!
”

He picked the doctor up by the back of her harness and tossed her down, on the far side of the prominence, the one that faced the round black mouths of tunnels leading out of here. He didn’t have time to see how she was doing; he had to spend a few moments stamping and kicking as the miniature zombie-rats tried to swarm over the edge. Once or twice he crushed them with the flat of his sword or the barrel of his pistol as they climbed up the fabric of his trousers, hitting himself hard enough to give his bones bruises

“
I should have brought a fucking bullwhip and called myself Oklahoma Jones!
” he screamed as he danced and slapped, on the edge of hysteria.
“Goddamn the Lost City and all its fucking secrets! I should have stayed home and watched the video feed!
”

A dart rifle round whistled past his ear. A manta dived again, missing him, banking and landing on one of the Coercives and encasing him like hot shrink-wrap.

“Mother!”

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

MARS
:
Family Structures and Gender Roles

The differences between Terran and Martian family structures are profound, and derive from both Martian history and the differences in the biology of reproduction in the two species.

Although like Terrans, Martians remain sexually active year-round from puberty on, Martian females do not share our continuous fertility. Research indicates that the ancestral stock from which modern
h. sapiens martensis
descends had an estrus cycle like most mammals, whether preserved from previous periods or re-evolved in the Martian environment. The bioengineered subsapients known as
De’ming
maintain such a cycle, becoming fertile twice in the Martian year, or approximately once per Earth year.

The standard variety of Martian humanoid, however, has a reproductive pattern unique among primates: females must consciously activate the reproductive organs. This ability appears at
puberty, and doing so produces a period of heightened libido. It requires some training, but the ability itself is genetically programmed; learning it is analogous to an infant learning to walk or talk. Speculations on the origins of this phenomenon have tended to attribute it either to early biological engineering, or to evolutionary pressure in an environment where an unplanned pregnancy would often be disastrously risky to both mother and child.

Another relevant biological trait is the longer Martian life span, approximately twice the human norm, with lives of one hundred fifty to two hundred years not uncommon, and several decades more far from unknown; anti-agathic drugs may double this, if taken consistently from adulthood. (These life span figures do not take into account possible periods of hibernation; see
hibernation, Martian
.) Since Martians achieve sexual maturity only slightly more slowly than Terrans, and since they experience no equivalent of menopause—as with the male, fertility among Martian females simply declines gradually after middle age—the potential breeding span of a Martian female typically exceeds a century and may extend over two or three hundred years, particularly among high-status individuals with access to anti-agathic treatment.

Combined with low levels of mortality from infectious disease from very early times, and the fact that total fertility rates have rarely exceeded two or three per female, this drastically reduces the proportion of her life span a Martian female need spend either pregnant, lactating, or caring for infants. In most preindustrial societies on Earth this period exceeds seventy-five percent of a statistically typical woman’s adult life; on Mars it has rarely exceeded ten percent, and is often less. Furthermore, all pregnancies are conscious choices, not unscheduled accidents.

Hence for Martian females reproduction is an episode in their lives, rather than the major part of it; it is an important episode, to be sure, and parental feelings of obligation are very strong. Most Martians also grow up without nonadult brothers or sisters; and the proportion of children in a Martian population is radically lower than in a Terran one, even at comparable levels of lifetime fertility. Effectively, for psychological purposes, every child is an only child and children grow up in an overwhelmingly adult world.

It is probably these factors that make Martian “marriage”—to
the extent the term is applicable at all—more explicitly contractual than that in most Terran societies, and universally term-limited rather than indefinite. Reproduction is seen as a means of perpetuating lineages, or making alliances between them; usually the considerations are partly based on the economic resources each party will devote to the child, partly on eugenic concerns, and partly on the pledge of continued cooperation between the “merged” bloodlines. Typically, reproductive partnership agreements are drawn up to specify the number of offspring, and the length of time and precise nature of the resources each party will devote to it.

While the present-day Martian culture, as did its Imperial-era predecessor, possesses a concept of romantic love, this notion is much more detached from reproduction than in any Terran society. Long-term personal relationships and partnerships and erotic bonds may involve reproduction, but more often do not.

This pattern, and its biological underpinnings, together with the lower level of sexual dimorphism among Martians, probably account for the fact that no known Martian society has ever segregated the genders or emphasized divergent gender roles to the extent common on Earth. Total or near-total equality of the sexes is the rule; even in folklore, there is no memory of a time when this was not so.

Mars, Dvor Il-Adazar
Abandoned sections and pits, Northwest Quadrant
May 27, 2000 AD

Cell division is occurring very rapidly
, Teyud thought.
Full function should be restored soon
.

The dream was an unusual one. She could see the cells splitting and the fluids of her body streaming around them, carrying away waste; vivid colors of red and white and brownish green, and somehow the senses of feel and taste were involved as well—salty and acrid. Stem cells of various sorts rushing to spawn and repair damaged and crushed tissue, white blood cells efficiently combating infectious agents from the soil, antibodies wrapping around them and transporting them away to the lymphatic disposal system, new red
blood cells engorged with oxygen and nutrients arriving and being supplemented from the stores in her marrow.

All of it was as plain as looking through a magnifying device during her childhood, with one of her tutors sharing the neural link to the instrument and giving her a running commentary. Yet the whole was immensely amplified, and as she had the thought, her disembodied point of view stepped back, until she had a momentary sense of her whole body—not as an object, but as an infinitely complex
process
, a series of interactions and feedback cycles that made of it a complete universe moving on its own world-track through time, yet intimately linked with the world outside. And the rapid on-off-on flashing of her nervous system, the delicate holographic structures of memory . . .

Teyud blinked her eyes and knew that she was awake, smelling the scents of dry earth and warm stone and blood. She felt wonderful—something that was in itself surprising; it wasn’t the first time she’d awoken after being knocked unconscious, when it was normal to have severe headaches and nausea and general pain for some time. Now the only unusual thing was her lack of motivation to rise. She brought her hand to her face and found that the binoculars had crawled away; something told her that they were neatly contained in their canister.

Could this be the euphoria and sense of patterned delusions said to precede death?
she thought curiously.
Of course, such reports are necessarily from those who do
not
die. And I have not seen a narrow tunnel of light leading to the proverbial concourse of those to whom I owe money or other favors
.

Something like a tent arched over her head; she could see bits of sunlight through its golden mass. It stank, as well, a smell she remembered . . .

That is the wing of the
Paiteng
that I killed . . . compelled to die, rather, with the Invisible Crown. I wonder if I can do that again? If so, I truly have the powers of a Despot on the board of the Game of Life!

She probed at her own mind with her will, as if it were her tongue touching a newly sprouting tooth, trying to find the points where the ancient device melded with her own self. There was a slight soreness there, like an abstract abrasion, an ideational wound on the surface of her inner being.

Do not do it often
, she thought.
There is a potentially lethal strain involved; to strike so is to weaken oneself. Like the Game of Life indeed! Yet the Invisible Crown definitely seems stronger and more active here in the Mountain
.

The feeling of lassitude diminished, and she turned and crawled out from under the beast’s wing. That led her past its head; the fierce raptor beak was open, with the purple tongue lying in the dust, and the bright green of the eye faded and glazed. She nodded soberly to it. A thousand feet or so overhead, a score of its nestmates still circled; as she watched, a harsh cry drifted down the air and they formed into a circle, cruising lower in a descending spiral.