Old Mars Read online

  But Sexton did not reply, and was nowhere to be seen.

  Sighing with exasperation at the easily distracted philosopher, Kidd rose and stalked into the next room, where he found Sexton standing by the coal pile with the half-filled basket at his feet, staring with great intensity at a lump of coal. “Surely,” Kidd snapped, “you can leave off your studies for five minutes for the sake of our supper?”

  In reply, Sexton thrust the filthy thing into Kidd’s hands. “What think you of this?”

  The black lump was not coal at all but wood covered in coal dust. The Martians used small fragments of wood as kindling; this lump was much bigger than those, nearly as large as a fist, but apart from that it was not unusual. “It’s wood,” Kidd said with a shrug. “What of it?”

  “The rings, man! Look at the rings!”

  Kidd rolled his eyes, then peered closer … and his heart began to race. “From the curvature … this must have come from a tree at least three feet in diameter.”

  “Exactly!” Sexton pointed to several similar lumps in the cloth basket. “And these are the same. Yet there’s not a tree to be seen anywhere near here.” He picked up a chunk of wood and held it up between them. “We must discover their source!”

  Kidd slogged to the top of a dune, surveying the horizon ahead through his telescope. “Nothing!” he called to Sexton. “Not a damned thing.”

  Not awaiting a response, he headed back down the dune, his feet sending cascades of the fine, cold sand sliding toward where Sexton sat rubbing his feet.

  The natural philosopher’s face showed vexation and exhaustion both. “I would have sworn that adjective he used indicated a distance of between two and ten miles.” He took a drink from his waterskin. “My water’s over half-gone. Perhaps we should turn back.”

  Kidd looked back along the well-trodden track they’d followed for the past four hours, then forward to where it vanished around a curve. “You’re certain he indicated this path? And that he understood what you were looking for?”

  Sexton shrugged. “It’s a pox’d difficult language.”

  Kidd took a sip of water, shielding his eyes against the sun, and considered their situation. It was nearly noon, and all they’d seen in four hours of walking was endless sand and mineral formations that had once seemed exotic. Though his own waterskin was not as depleted as Sexton’s, he too was tempted to abandon this snipe hunt. Yet it was the only hope they had.

  He stared out across the desert. So much like an ocean, yet red and dry and motionless. And, unlike the sea, with its constant rush of wind and wave, oppressively silent.

  No … not quite silent. Could that be …?

  “My feet are—” Sexton began.

  “Hush!” Kidd snapped, and cut him off with a gesture.

  Kidd listened hard. And heard a sound he’d not heard in many months.

  Axes. Axes chopping wood. The sound had been hidden from them before by the noise of their own feet on the sand.

  They hurried forward, around the curve, and soon found themselves on the edge of a canyon perhaps two hundred feet deep. They’d been only a few hundred yards from it and had not even suspected its existence. A sandy track, apparently carved from the canyon wall by Martians, switchbacked down from the desert’s surface. And at the bottom …

  “My God,” Kidd said.

  The bottom of the canyon was thick with trees. Enormous trees, a hundred or even a hundred and fifty feet tall, each honey-blonde trunk rose straight and smooth from the dark loamy floor to a single great tuft of foliage just below the canyon’s lip. Groups of Martians moved among them, tiny at the feet of these towering giants.

  As they watched, one of the trees fell gently, slowly, to the canyon floor. The Martians leapt upon the fallen giant and began hacking it into tiny pieces with their axes.

  “What in God’s name are they doing?” Kidd cried.

  “The growing conditions at the bottom of this canyon must be nearly unique,” Sexton mused. “But, as we’ve seen, coal is plentiful here. Perhaps they are so accustomed to burning coal that they must cut their wood into coal-sized chunks.”

  Kidd shook his head. “Prisoners of habit.”

  While Kidd stared down into the canyon, Sexton paced excitedly. “I must determine how these trees survive in the midst of a desert!” he muttered. “This could be my life’s work!”

  At that statement, Kidd’s eyes went wide, and his already-dry mouth grew drier still. These trees were the final piece in the puzzle of how to return to Earth, but if he returned without Sexton, he’d face the noose anew.

  Furthermore, he realized, he’d grown rather fond of the silly goose.

  “But Sexton,” Kidd said, placing an arm around the philosopher’s shoulders, “if you make of these trees your life’s work, who will help us to rebuild the ship? Surely there are improvements to be made in the design.”

  “Surely …” Sexton said, his eyes unfocusing as he considered the question.

  “And once we are airborne, we must find a new prevailing wind to bear us homeward. For this, we may require new theories of the motions of air.”

  “A difficult problem indeed.” Sexton patted his pockets for his notebook.

  “Consider, too, the problem of bringing the trees, whole, out from this canyon, transporting them to the ship, and raising them up as masts.”

  Sexton’s head came up suddenly. “Masts?”

  “Masts,” Kidd acknowledged.

  “But that’s exactly what we need!” said Sexton, and laughed.

  “Masts!”

  “Masts!” Kidd cried, and he too burst out laughing.

  The two men held hands and danced around and around, bouncing with glee high into the thin Martian air.

  Mars Adventure floated fifty feet above the sand, straining against her mooring cables. Above her loomed eight vast balloons, each slightly larger than before—an enormous crazy patchwork of bright Martian colors. They had taken up nearly every yard of fabric in the city, purchased with many weeks of backbreaking labor, but both Martians and Englishmen seemed pleased with the exchange.

  The new masts were astounding—straight and smooth and so very light that they’d taken only half the crew to hoist out of the canyon and fit into place. And this was not merely the lighter weight of everything on Mars … these trees, products of a tiny, dry, and alien planet, bore a wood lighter and stronger than any on Earth. They’d packed the hold with as many logs as they could cram in. “We’ll build a whole fleet of airships!” Sexton swore, “and come back for more! We’ll make our fortune with these logs!”

  “Not I,” Kidd told him.

  Sexton blinked in astonishment, then grinned. “Surely the famous Captain Kidd does not lack in avarice?”

  Kidd returned Sexton’s grin. “Have no fears on that score. Upon my return, I expect the gratitude of a king! And with those proceeds, I intend to settle down in Scotland, my ancestral home, with all the Ferintosh I can drink.” He leaned over the taffrail, looking down upon a city full of Martians, all a-chitter with excitement to see the great ship fly. “Fare thee well, ye great crabs!” he cried, then turned to the bosun. “Cast off!”

  The men leapt into action, and, a moment later, with a great soaring bound, Mars Adventure sprang away into the blue Martian sky.

  S. M. STIRLING

  Considered by many to be the natural heir to Harry Turtledove’s title of King of the Alternate History novel, fast-rising science fiction star S. M. Stirling is author of the Island in the Sea of Time series (Island in the Sea of Time, Against the Tide of Years, On the Ocean of Eternity), in which Nantucket is cast back to the year 1250. He’s also produced the New York Times bestselling Change series: a first trilogy (Dies the Fire, The Protector’s War, A Meeting at Corvallis), followed by The Sunrise Lands, The Scourge of God, The Sword of the Lady, The High King of Montival, The Tears of the Sun, and Lord of Mountains, and his most recent book, The Given Sacrifice. Another alternate history series, The Lords of Creation
, has two volumes: The Sky People and In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, set in a universe in which Mars and Venus were terraformed by mysterious aliens in the remote past. Most recently, he started a new series, Shadow-spawn, which consists of A Taint in the Blood, The Council of Shadows, and Shadows of Falling Night. He has also written stand-alone novels such as Conquistador and The Peshawar Lancers, and collaborated with Raymond F. Feist, Jerry Pournelle, Holly Lisle, and Star Trek actor James Doohan, as well as contributing to the Babylon 5, T2, Brainship, War World, and Man-Kzin War series. His short fiction has been collected in Ice, Iron and Gold. Born in France and raised in Europe, Africa, and Canada, he now lives with his family in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  If something important is stolen from you, sometimes you have to go to extreme lengths to get it back, no matter how dangerous the quest—or how many corpses you have to pile up along the way …

  Swords of Zar-tu-Kan

  BY S. M. STIRLING

  Encyclopaedia Britannica, 20th edition

  University of Chicago Press, 1998

  Mars—Parameters:

  Orbit: 1.5237 AU

  Orbital period: 668.6 Martian solar days

  Rotation: 24 hrs. 34 min.

  Mass: 0.1075 x Earth

  Average density: 3.93 g/cc

  Surface gravity: 0.377 x Earth

  Diameter: 4,217 miles (equatorial; 53.3% x Earth)

  Surface: 75% land, 25% water (incl. pack ice)

  Atmospheric composition:

  Nitrogen 76.51%

  Oxygen 20.23%

  Carbon dioxide 0.11%

  Trace elements: Argon, Neon, Krypton.

  Atmospheric pressure: 10.7 psi average at

  northern sea level

  The third life-bearing world of the solar system, Mars is less Earth-like than Venus …

  Zar-tu-Kan: Avenue of Deceptive Formalities

  “WELCOME TO ZHO’DA,” SALLY YAMASHITA SAID.

  “I’ve been on Mars over a month now!”

  “Kennedy Base is on Mars, but it isn’t really on Zho’da,” she said.

  The Demotic word meant something like The Real World.

  She swept her mask over her face with a practiced gesture as she walked out of the street-level stage of the airship landing tower, against air as dry and acrid as the Taklamakan Desert and nearly as thin as Tibet’s.

  A second later, Tom Beckworth followed suit. The living, quasi fabric writhed, then settled down, turning her face into a smooth black oval below the tilted brown eyes. You didn’t absolutely have to think about the fact that you were plastering a synthetic amoeboid parasite over your mouth and nose. His matched his medium ebony skin much more closely.

  Sally always enjoyed getting back to Zar-tu-Kan, the main contact-city for the US-Commonwealth Alliance of explorers and scientists on Mars. It was honestly alien. While Kennedy Base was … sort of like a major airport that had somehow landed in Antarctica with everyone stuck in a second-rate hotel by bad weather. She was probably going to live out the rest of her life on Mars, and with antiagathics cheap at the source, that could be a long time.

  Beckworth was gawking, though with restraint; this was the real thing, not training. Slim tulip-shaped spires reared hundreds of feet into the air between warrens of lower-slung, thick-walled compounds, their time-faded colors still blazing against a sky of faded blue tinged pink with the dust of the Deep Beyond. The towers varied in pointillist shadings like the memory of rainbows seen in dreams. Lacy crystalline bridges joined them, and transparent domes glittered below over lineage apartment houses or the homes of the rich and powerful, full of an astonishing flowering lushness. The narrow serpentine streets below wound among blank-faced buildings of hard, glossy, rose-red stone whose ornamental carvings were often worn to faintest tracery …

  Zar-tu-Kan had been an independent city-state and ancient when the Tollamune emperors of Dvor-il-Adazar united Mars. It had outlived the Eternal Peace of a planetary empire that lasted thirty thousand years, and was a city-state again. The elongated forms of its native citizens moved past one another and the draught-beasts and riding-birds in an intricate, nearly silent dance, with the loudest sound the scuff of leather and pads on stone. Occasionally a voice; now and then a tinkle of music, like bells having a mathematical argument.

  “Mars isn’t older than Earth. It just feels older,” Tom Beckworth said, as they walked, renewing a discussion they’d been having off and on all the way from Kennedy Base on the icebound shores of the Arctic sea.

  Shipping people between planets was expensive, even in this year of grace 1998, and only the very best got to make the trip. Unfortunately, sometimes smart, highly educated people invested a lot of their mental capital in defending preconceptions rather than challenging them.

  “Martian civilization is a lot older than ours,” Beckworth went on. “But there have to be commonalities. And frankly, they’ve done less with their time than we have with ours.”

  She smiled to herself. This wasn’t Venus and you couldn’t play Mighty Whitey Sahib in a pith helmet here. He would learn. Or not.

  She stopped and made a sweeping gesture with her arm. “This is it,” Sally said. “Home sweet residence.”

  The building was a smooth three-story octagon, featureless on the outside save for low-relief patterns like feathery reeds, with a glassine dome showing above its central portion, typical of the Orchid Consort style in the Late Imperial period. Maintainer bugs the size of cats and shaped like flattened beetles crawled slowly over the crystal in an eternal circuit.

  “Helloooobosssss,” a thin, rasping, hissing voice said, in thickly accented English.

  The man started violently as a skeletal shape uncoiled itself from beside the doors. In outline it was more or less like a dog covered in dusty russet fur—a fuzzy greyhound on the verge of starvation, with a long whip tail, teeth like a shark, and lambent green eyes under a disturbingly high forehead and long, prehensile toes.

  “Hi, Satemcan,” Sally said. “Anything to report?”

  “Quietttt,” the animal said, dropping back into Demotic; the greeting had exhausted its English. “Possibblytoooquiettt.”

  It bent forward and sniffed at Beckworth’s feet. “Smelllsss unusual. Like you, but … more.”

  She reached into one of the loose sleeves of her robe and tossed a package of rooz meat. The not-quite-animal snapped it out of the air and swallowed flesh and edible preservative packaging and all, licking his chops with satisfaction. Then she stripped the glove from her right hand and slipped it into a groove beside the door. A faint touch, dry and rough, and the portal of time-dulled tkem wood slid aside.

  “You’ll need to give the house system a taste,” she said, as they passed into the vestibule and tucked their masks back into pockets in their robes. “There.”

  Beckworth put his hand in the slot in a gingerly fashion.

  “It bit me!” he exclaimed.

  “Needs the DNA sample,” she said.

  The inner door with its glossy surface slid aside to reveal an arched passageway in the foamed stone. That gave onto an inner courtyard about a hundred yards across. The air was blissfully damp—about like Palm Springs or Bakersfield—and smelled faintly of rock, growth, and things like marjoram and heather and others that had no names on Earth. The pavement was ornamental, a hard, fossil-rich, pale limestone that was replaced every few centuries. Little of it could be seen beneath the vegetation that covered the planters, rose up the slender fretwork pillars that supported the arcaded balconies that overlooked the court, and hung in colored sheets from the carved-stone screens. It wasn’t quite a closed system like a spaceship, but fairly close.

  “I extend formal and impersonally polite greetings to the lineage and residents,” she said quietly in fluent Demotic. “This is my professional associate, denominated Thomas, casual/intimate form Tom, lineage designation Beckworth. He will be residing with me for some time as is contractually permitted by my lease.”

  That took all of
ten words and a couple of modifiers, in Martian. Half a dozen people looked up from chores or narrow books that hinged at the top or games of atanj, gave a brief inclination of the head, then ignored her, which was reasonably courteous; none of them were wearing their robes, or much of anything else.

  “We’re on the second floor,” she said, leading the way.

  “Nobody seems particularly interested in us,” Beckworth said.

  “They’ve seen Terrans before,” Sally said, with a shrug.

  “There are only a couple of hundred of us on Mars. I’d have thought we’d attract more attention. A Martian sure as shit would in Oakland!”

  “They’re not like us, Tom. That’s the point.”

  The door to her suite opened its eye and looked at her, the S-shaped pupil swelling. She met the gaze, letting it scan her and her companion. It blinked acknowledgment and there was a dull click as the muscle retracted the ceramic dead bolt.

  They racked their sword belts and he looked at her pictures with interest. There was one of her parents, one of the winery they ran in Napa, and a couple of her siblings and nieces and nephews and one of a cat she’d owned, or vice versa, in university.

  The apartment was large, several thousand square feet, paradisical after you got used to spaceships or space habitats or that habitat-on-Mars called Kennedy Base. The furniture was mostly built into the substance of the walls and floor, with silky or furry native blankets and rugs folded on top, some stirring a little as they sensed the Terrans’ body warmth. The extra two degrees tended to confuse them.

  Homelike, in a sort of chilly detached alien way, she thought, and went on aloud:

  “There’s a bed niche over there, let’s sling your duffle.”

  “Where’s the bathroom?”

  “That way. Wait until you make the acquaintance of the Zar-tu-Kan style of bidet,” she added, and grinned at his wince.