In the distance loomed jagged heights that had been the edge of a continent when the site of this city was below the waves of a vanished sea . . .
Sally snorted; he had a sudden uncomfortable feeling she knew just what sort of greenhorn romantic twaddle he was thinking. Her words confirmed it.
“Even the experienced are just scratching the surface here. Venus may be full of hunter-gatherers or Bronze Age types like the Kartahownians, but this isn’t Venus—the Martians were doing calligraphy and building cities forty thousand years ago. The Crimson Dynasty ruled before the Cro-Magnons painted mammoths on those caves in France, and it fell about the time we invented writing.”
“We came to them, not vice versa,” Jeremy pointed out. And I’m teasing you. Do you have to be so solemn about everything?
Apparently she did. Even her nod was grave as she went on.
“We have a technological edge. Sort of, or so we like to think. But Earth’s a long way away and there aren’t many of us here. We can’t push these people around and we don’t impress them much, either. I repeat: This isn’t Venus. We can’t play Gods-from-the-sky here. We’re on sufferance. And never forget we don’t know dick about this place, really.”
“Yes, teacher,” he said good-humoredly. “I’ll try to make us a little less abysmally ignorant, hmm? We do need to start learning more about Martian history. Besides what their chronicles tell us. They don’t always ask the same questions we want answered and it’s always a good idea to check words against the stones and bones anyway.”
“Yeah, so you talked them into sending us to do a dig at Rema-Dza. Which may or may not actually exist.”
“The satellite photos show something large is there. And according to the chronicles, it could only be the city of Rema-Dza.”
“Now who’s relying on words? Those are chronicles after fifteen thousand years of recopying, sometimes by people who thought it was a good idea to goof on their descendants, as interpreted by contemporary Martians who sometimes like to play see-what-the-Terran-barbarians-will-swallow. I’m still not sure it was a cost-effective decision.”
It was hard not to be good-humored. He’d finally made it here. He’d dreamed about it since he was old enough to distinguish the stuff on the news from the fairy tales his mother had read him. He’d worked and planned and sweated and competed, but tens or hundreds of millions had shared that dream. Now he’d done it, while they went on dreaming and reading bad novels about people like him, and watching even worse movies and video shows and breathless documentaries on the National Geographic channel.
“Why are you along, then?” he asked. “We’re all supposed to be able to handle stuff on our own. We have to, with only a hundred-odd people to study an entire world.”
Three years of lobbying, and suddenly they found the funds for me and for a survey of the lost cities of the Imperial era. God, I thought it would stay tied up in the USASF bureaucracy forever.
She snorted again. “We’re not supposed to be self-sufficient on our first time out! And you’re a civilian.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said tolerantly, with a good-natured mock salute.
If it weren’t for the planetary exploration program, the Pentagon would be an afterthought these days—there hadn’t been a significant international conflict since the Laotian incident in the ’60s, unless you counted occasional scuffles in backwaters like the Near East and Africa, which nobody in the real centers of civilization had spare time or energy to get involved with. The competition with the Eastbloc and Eurobloc was real enough, but on a more rarefied level—civilization seemed to have outgrown direct confrontations. Most people of his university-and-sciences background thought that was an inevitable product of technological and economic progress.
“Mars and Venus are probably the reasons things are peaceful back home,” Sally pointed out dryly. “But out here, things get a bit more hairy.”
He nodded, not exactly in agreement but unwillingness to argue with someone senior over a minor point. He was the one in a traveling robe woven from the exudation of jeweled moths—cloth that was Kevlar-like armor as well as clothing—with a sword by his side and a minicam and blank data chips in the haversack slung over his back. When he got back to base, the chips would have enough on them to keep Earth’s scholars working for a generation. Plus, there was the sense of bouncy, dreamlike enjoyment that you felt under one-third gravity; he still had to remind himself now and then not to go bounding everywhere like a slow-mo grasshopper.
The Tower of Truth rose eight hundred feet above the glassine roof of the Canal Named Liquid Abundance, growing from a tiny, asparagus-stalk shape to its full immensity as the airship approached. Most of that height was a fluted smoothness of stone striated in dusky green and dark rose, broken only by tall narrow windows. The top flared out into a shape like an elongated teardrop set on its base, ringed about with circular doors large enough to take the pointed nose of an airship; the wall between each door was transparent.
One of the doors irised open as the Zhoming Dael drifted to a near stop three thousand yards away, hanging as weightless as did the dandelionlike seeds for which it was named. From above the passenger deck one of the crew sent an orok out a hatchway, a sort of domesticated eagle with a body the size of a big dog, a crest of bronze-gold feathers on its cruel raptor head and a twenty-foot wingspan. It beat its great pinions twice and then glided to the open portal with a cable in its claws, folding its wings as it stooped through the entranceway and hopped toward the ground crew.
“You might say birds do well on Mars,” Sally said.
That surprised him into a chuckle at the understatement. The lower gravity more than made up for the thinner air, and being able to migrate was a big plus here.
The long fabric of the Drifting Frozen-white Thistle Seeds jerked as hands within took the line and reeved it through geared windlasses. The ship’s engines stopped; Jeremy could hear them panting for breath in the propeller pods above and behind him as the whirring hum died away. In utter silence, the huge craft slid forward until the smooth hull mated with the collar of the portal. Before him, the front of the gondola folded down to make a ramp, and the yellow-red light of Martian glow-globes shone brightly through.
The passengers stood, slung their bundles over their backs, and walked forward to pay the entry toll. Zar-tu-Kan’s officialdom was represented by a robed figure standing by the exit next to a pillar with a slot in the top. He had a small animal-like dark furry cylinder clutched in his right hand; there was a little red rosebud mouth—or anus or, possibly, both—at one end, but no eyes or limbs. The customs agent held it out from his side so that the six feet of thin, pink, slowly curling naked tail was well away from his body.
You didn’t want to make accidental contact with a shockwhip, even if the wielder wasn’t squeezing it to turn on the current. Everyone was allergic to the proteins on its surface.
Each passenger reached into the slot and dropped something as they went by; Sally Yamashita added two inch-long pieces of silver wire.
“One tenth shem,” a voice in accented Martian said, through a grill on the side of the stone post.
“Correct weight for two foreigners and up to fifteen zka-kem of noncommercial baggage,” the functionary added. “You may pass.”
“Doesn’t anyone ever try to stiff the tax man?” he murmured to her. “Slipping in copper for silver?”
“There’s a mouth with teeth below that slot,” she said. “It can taste the purity of metals with its tongue. And if the weight or composition’s wrong, it bites down and holds you for Mr. Revenue Service to beat on with his Amazingly Itchy Electro-Rat.”
Ouch, Jeremy thought. There are times when Martian technology is just plain . . . icky. And they could use a Martian Civil Liberties Union. Admittedly they don’t have really bad tyrants, but they have far too many fair-to-middling ones.
A crowd was waiting to greet the airship. Quietly animated bargaining started as soon as the passengers d
isembarked, with raised eyebrows and the occasional spare gesture doing service for shouts, insults, and windmilling arms. Ground crew brought hoses forward to clip to sockets in the Floating Thistle’s nose and pump sludge aboard to feed the engines and the bacterial solution that produced hydrogen for the lifting cells. Fine sand ballast vented from the keel to compensate.
The interior of the tower here was a huge circular room with a groin-vaulted ceiling; bales and sacks and containers of cargo stood about in it, but not enough of them to prevent a feeling of dusty emptiness. The faded, half abstract, half pictorial frescos above the entry portals showed a traffic far thicker and more bustling . . . but they might be older than Western civilization, beneath their coating of impenetrable glassine. There was a faint smell in the air of things like burnt cinnamon and something halfway between hibiscus and clove, of acrid smoke, of sweat that was harsher and more concentrated than that of his breed because it wasted less water.
And somehow the scent of time, like faded memories piled in an infinite attic, layer upon layer until the present seemed no more than an image seen in a dream.
“Our contact?” he said.
“Jelzhau Zhau-nor. He’s a big wheel in the Zhau-na, the spice merchants’ guild.”
“It’s not really a—” Jeremy began automatically.
“Guild. Or clan. Kin group, corporation, thingie, whatever—”
“ ‘Thingie’ won’t do for the Journal of Martian Cultural Studies.”
“Don’t the younger generation have any respect for their elders these days?”
“Did you, mother dear?”
“No, but I had an excuse—I was rebelling against my Japanese heritage. Anyway, we buy from him.”
Jeremy nodded. Martian spices and drugs—they didn’t distinguish the concepts in Demotic—did things to the taste buds, metabolism, and nerves that Terrestrial science was having problems understanding. They were the only things besides information that could really show a profit after interplanetary shipping costs; gold and gems didn’t even come close.
One of them was a genuine anti-agathic, slowing down aging for Martians and probably for Terrans too, though that would take time to prove. Particularly since Martians had about twice the Terran life span anyway, and the metabolisms of the two species were similar but not identical.
“And he’s got contacts everywhere. He’s the one who hires our guides for us.”
Two Martians came forward and took greeting stances ten yards away—which meant, between those of roughly equal status, something that looked like shaking hands with yourself. Martians certainly didn’t shake hands with each other; this culture put a premium on social distance.
And the gesture was the local equivalent of waving, whistling between your teeth, and shouting, Hey, Mac!
He and Sally returned the signal. One of the Martians was a man who looked middle-aged—which probably meant he was pushing a hundred, in Earth years—and whose height equaled Jeremy’s own six-six. That was average for standard Martians, though they varied less than humans in that way. His smooth, beardless skin was pale olive, and the oiled hair dressed in elaborate curls was raven black, also common. His robe was striped white and dark green, and the leather of his belt and curl-toed boots nearly shimmered with enameled inlay work.
The woman beside him made Jeremy’s eyes go a little wider. She was over seven feet tall, with even more of the big-eyed aquiline delicacy of features than most Martians, but looking more solid, somehow.
Less as if she’d blow away in a stiff wind, he thought.
The color of those huge eyes was distinctly odd, yellow as fire, and so was the almost bronze sheen of hair caught back in a fine metallic net. There was an eerie loveliness to the alien face . . .
“Hey,” he whispered in English. “You didn’t tell me our guide was—”
“Of the old Thoughtful Grace caste. They were—”
“The Crimson Dynasty’s military elite, yes,” Jeremy said. “The caste just below the top.”
For God’s sake! he thought. I’m not an ignoramus because I arrived on the Brackett six months ago and this is my first off-base field trip. I’ve been studying Mars since I was twelve!
But he didn’t say it. There were too few Terrans on Mars to start quarrels, even with the selection for stable types. And you were stuck with the same people for the rest of your life; only two people had returned to Earth from Mars in nearly twenty years. Tiny Kennedy Base, off on the shores of the Bitter Sea, wasn’t a real frontier settlement like growing Jamestown on Venus, but it would be his home for a very long time to come. He’d made that decision when he’d walked through the suddenly open door.
Sally shrugged apologetically for the same reasons. “I didn’t know it would be her this time; there are a couple who we use regularly. Mostly hunters and caravan guards.”
“I didn’t know there were any purebred Thoughtful Grace left, at least not outside the Wai Zang towns,” he said, professional interest growing in his face. “And that’s a long way away.”
“Hell, my specialty is Martian technology.”
“Just that,” Jeremy said dryly.
Biotech from this planet was revolutionizing a dozen industries on Earth, from waste disposal to fuel production. The powers-that-were viewed archaeology and cultural studies mainly as a means to get the Martians to cough up their knowledge, and to figure out ways of keeping them from lynching or poisoning or infecting the irritatingly inquisitive Wet Worlders.
“I know just enough of the cultural ins and outs not to get killed—yet,” Sally said with a wry twist to her mouth. “At least they’re more likely to listen to you on short acquaintance, you Goddamned beanpole.”
The labor gang squatting on the many-footed cargo pallets trotting forward to the flier’s freight ramp were the reason for her complaint. They were De’ming, bred for menial labor by the geneticists—or possibly wizards—of the Crimson Dynasty era. They didn’t exactly look like Earth-humans—they were thick-bodied and short by this planet’s standards—but enough so that they were well within the Terran bell-curve. That was enough to get anyone below six feet perceived as inherently stupid and servile here.
And I don’t like their eyes. There’s nobody “at home” there.
Their kind had been working with that same placid, witless docility for the last thirty thousand Earth-years or so, just smart enough to take simple directions . . .
Icky. Really, really icky.
Jelzhau Zhau-nor tucked his hands into the sleeves of his robe and came to about twice the conversational distance a North American considered comfortable, and cocked his ears forward; they were a bit larger and a bit more elongated than a Terran’s, and a whole lot more mobile. That was a let’s-get-down-to-business signal.
“I profess amiable greetings, Respectably Wealthy Jelzhau Zhau-nor,” Sally said politely in Demotic. “Intent and event produced timely arrival. Mutual delight and profit will probably follow.”
“Hello, my friend Jawen Yama-shita!” he replied, in English.
With only a few hundred personnel on the planet, the U.S.–Commonwealth Organization of American States base could afford to be very selective, but it was still difficult to find people who met all the other qualifications and were that tall. Not only was Jeremy Wainman six-six, he had a fencer’s physique, long limbed and with a wiry muscularity; his face was handsome in a beak-nosed fashion that would last well after he passed his thirtieth year next April. His blue eyes and close-cropped dark brown hair would be accepted as merely exotic.
Make that sort of in English, Jeremy thought.
The sounds were difficult for Martians. At least for speakers of Modern Demotic—the only spoken language on the planet, as far as they’d been able to discover, though there were different dialects. Which simplified things considerably, as learning it made Japanese look easy and Chinese a walk in the park.
Christ, it’s fun to get out and really use all that language training.
&nb
sp; Then the factor went on in his own tongue: “You have met the highly bred Professional Practitioner of Coercive Violence, Teyud za-Zhalt.”
And “highly bred” means exactly the same thing as describing highly bred about a racehorse, and it’s a compliment in this language. The title Professional Practitioner of Coercive Violence covers cops, soldiers and bandits.
Minds with a profound understanding of linguistics had been at work shaping Martian for a very long time.
All that in a hand gesture and three words, one of them a proper name. It’s a bitch to learn, but I love this language! It’s so . . . smooth.
The woman inclined her head slightly and laid her ears back, a gesture of respect to an employer or patron from someone equal in eugenic rank, which was a courteous assumption. Her breed had been lords once.
“My blades are ready, my guns are fully fed and loaded, other necessary equipment and personnel have been procured, and I command the directional template for our journey of exploration, employer,” Teyud said to Sally, adding the last in Deferential Mode.
Her voice was beautifully modulated, a little deeper than the normal Martian soprano; if a bronze bell had been precisely machined by computer-directed lasers, it would sound like that. And her accent was noticeably different from that of the spice merchant.
Perhaps her diction is a bit . . . crisper? And there’s something about the way she handles sibilants, too. Wait a minute—it’s like the way the pillar-with-teeth spoke . . . archaic, maybe? A dialect from some out of the way place that hasn’t changed much? I’ve got to get to know her well enough to ask questions!
Then she turned to him. “Identity? Skill? Status?”
“Jeremy Wainman,” he said. “Scholar, of variation in custom through time; a partner to Sally, of lesser seniority.”
In the Courts of the Crimson Kings Page 3
