Chapter THIRTY-TWO
We found Hand’s safe transmission base four songspire clusters about another hour later. By then we’d started to hook back towards the docking bay, following a tentative map that Sun’s Nuhanovic scanners were building on her arm. The mapping software didn’t like Martian architecture any more than I did, that much was apparent from the long pauses every time Sun loaded in a new set of data. But with a couple of hours’ wandering behind us, and some inspired interfacing from the systems specialist, the programme was able to start making some educated guesses of its own about where we should be looking. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was dead right.
Climbing out of a massive spiralling tube whose gradient was too steep for human comfort, Sun and I staggered to a halt at the edge of a fifty-metre broad platform that was seemingly exposed to raw space on all sides. A crystal-clear open starfield curved overhead and down around us, interrupted only by the bones of a gaunt central structure reminiscent of a Millsport dockyard crane. The sense of exposure to the outside was so complete I felt my throat lock up momentarily in vacuum combat reflex at the sight. My lungs, still straining from the climb, flapped weakly in my chest.
I broke the reflex.
“Is that a forcefield?” I asked Sun, panting.
“No, it’s solid.” She frowned over the forearm display. “Transparent alloy, about a metre thick. That’s very impressive. No distortion. Total direct visual control. Look, there’s your gate.”
It stood in the starscape over our heads, a curiously oblong satellite of greyish-blue light creeping across the darkness.
“This has got to be the docking control turret,” Sun decided, patting her arm and turning slowly. “What did I tell you. Nuhanovic smart mapping. They don’t make it any bet—”
Her voice dried up. I looked sideways and saw how her eyes had widened, focused on something further ahead. Following her gaze to the skeletal structure at the centre of the platform, I saw the Martians.
“You’d better call the others up,” I said distantly.
They were hung over the platform like the ghosts of eagles tortured to death, wings spread wide, caught up in some kind of webbing that swung eerily in stray air currents. There were only two, one hoisted close to the highest extent of the central structure, the other not much above human head height. Moving warily closer, I saw that the webbing was metallic, strung with instrumentation whose purposes made no more overt sense than the machines we’d passed in the bubble chambers.
I passed another outcrop of songspires, most of them not much over knee height. They barely got a second glance. Behind me, I heard Sun yelling down the spiral to the rest of the party. Her raised voice seemed to violate something in the air. Echoes chased each other around the dome. I reached the lower of the two Martians, and stood beneath the body.
Of course, I’d seen them before. Who hasn’t. You get input with this stuff from kindergarten upwards. The Martians. They’ve replaced the mythological creatures of our own picket-fenced earthbound heritage, the gods and demons we once used for the foundations of our legends. Impossible to overestimate, wrote Gretzky, back when he apparently still had some balls, the sideswiping blow that this discovery dealt our sense of belonging in the universe, and our sense that the universe in some way belonged to us.
The way Wardani laid it out for me, one desert evening on the balcony at Roespinoedji’s warehouse:
Bradbury, 2089 pre-colonial reckoning. The founder-heroes of human antiquity are exposed for the pig-ignorant mall bullies they probably always were, as decoding of the first Martian data systems brings in evidence of a starfaring culture at least as old as the whole human race. The millennial knowledge out of Egypt and China starts to look like a ten-year-old child’s bedroom datastack. The wisdom of the ages shredded at a stroke into the pipe-cooked musings of a bunch of canal-dive barflies. Lao Tzu, Confucius, Jesus Christ, Muhammed—what did these guys know? Parochial locals, never even been off the planet. Where were they when the Martians were crossing interstellar space.
Of course—a sour grin out of one corner of Wardani’s mouth—established religion lashed back. The usual strategies. Incorporate the Martians into the scheme of things, scour the scriptures or make up some new ones, reinterpret. Failing that, lacking the grey matter for that much effort, just deny the whole thing as the work of evil forces and firebomb anyone who says otherwise. That ought to work.
But it didn’t work.
For a while it looked as if it might. Upwelling hysteria brought sectarian violence and the recently established university departments of xenology frequently up in flames. Armed escorts for noted archaeologues and a fair few campus firefights between fundamentalists and the public order police. Interesting times for the student body…
Out of it all, the new faiths arose. Most of them not that much different to the old faiths by all accounts, and just as dogmatic. But underlying, or maybe floating uneasily atop, came a groundswell of secular belief in something that was a little harder to define than God.
Maybe it was the wings. A cultural archetype so deep—angels, demons, Icarus and countless idiots like him off towers and cliffs until we finally got it right—that humanity clung to it.
Maybe there was just too much at stake. The astrogation charts with their promise of new worlds we could just go to, assured of a terrestroid destination because, well, it says so here.
Whatever it was, you had to call it faith. It wasn’t knowledge; the Guild wasn’t that confident of its translation back then, and you don’t launch hundreds of thousands of stored minds and clone embryos into the depths of interstellar space without something a lot stronger than a theory.
It was faith in the essential workability of the New Knowledge. In place of the terracentric confidence of human science and its ability to Work It All Out someday, a softer trust in the overarching edifice of Martian Knowledge that would, like an indulgent father, let us get out into the ocean and drive the boat for real. We were heading out the door, not as children grown and leaving home for the first time, but as toddlers gripping trustingly with one chubby fist at the talon of Martian civilisation. There was a totally irrational sense of safety and wrapped-up warmth to the whole process. That, as much as Hand’s much vaunted economic liberalisation, was what drove the diaspora.
Three-quarters of a million deaths on Adoracion changed things. That, and a few other geopolitical shortcomings that cropped up with the rise of the Protectorate. Back on Earth, the old faiths slammed down, political and spiritual alike, iron-bound tomes of authority to live by. We have lived loosely, and a price must be paid. In the name of stability and security, things must be run with a firm hand now.
Of that brief flourishing of enthusiasm for all things Martian, very little remains. Wycinski and his pioneering team are centuries gone, hounded out of university posts and funding and in some cases actually murdered. The Guild has drawn into itself, jealously guarding what little intellectual freedom the Protectorate allows it. The Martians are reduced from anything approaching a full understanding to two virtually unrelated precipitates. On the one hand a textbook-dry series of images and notes, as much data as the Protectorate deems socially appropriate. Every child dutifully learns what they looked like, the splayed anatomy of their wings and skeleton, the flight dynamics, the tedious minutiae of mating and young-rearing, the reconstructions in virtual of their plumage and colouring, drawn from the few visual records we’ve managed to access or filled in with Guild guesses. Roost emblems, probable clothing. Colourful, easily digestible stuff. Not much sociology. Too poorly understood, too undefined, too volatile, and besides do people really want to bother themselves with all that…
“Knowledge tossed away,” she said, shivering a little in the desert chill. “Wilful ignorance in the face of something we might have to work to understand.”
At the other end of the fractionating column the more esoteric elements gather. Weird religious offshoots, whispered legend and word of mouth from the digs. Here, something of what the Martians were to us once has remained—here, their impact can be described in murmured tones. Here they can be named as Wycinski once named them; the New Ancients, teaching us the real meaning of that word. Our mysteriously absent winged benefactors, swooping low to brush the nape of our civilisation’s neck with one cold wingtip, to remind us that six or seven thousand years of patchily recorded history isn’t what they call ancient around here.
This Martian was dead.
A long time dead, that much was apparent. The body had mummified in the webbing, wings turned parchment thin, head dried out to a long narrow skull whose beak gaped half open. The eyes were blackened in their backward-slashed sockets, half hidden by the draped membrane of the eyelids. Below the beak, the thing’s skin bulged out in what I guessed must have been the throat gland. Like the wings, it looked paper-thin and translucent.
Under the wings, angular limbs reached across the webbing and delicate-looking talons grasped at instrumentation. I felt a tiny surge of admiration. Whatever this thing had been, it had died at the controls.
“Don’t touch it,” snapped Wardani from behind me, and I became aware that I was reaching upward to the lower edge of the webbing frame.
“Sorry.”
“You will be, if the skin crumbles. There’s an alkaline secretion in their subcutaneous fat layers that runs out of control when they die. Kept in balance by food oxidation during life, we think, but it’s strong enough to dissolve most of a corpse, given a decent supply of water vapour.” As she spoke, she was moving around the webbing frame with the automatic caution of what must have been Guild training. Her face was utterly intent, eyes never shifting from the winged mummy above us. “When they die like this, it just eats through the fat and dries out to a powder. Very corrosive if you breathe it in, or get it in your eyes.”
“Right.” I moved back a couple of steps. “Thanks for the advance warning.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t expect to find them here.”
“Ships have crews.”
“Yeah, Kovacs, and cities have populations. We’ve still only ever found a couple of hundred intact Martian corpses in over four centuries of archaeology on three dozen worlds.”
“Shit like that in their systems, I’m not surprised.” Schneider had wandered over and was rubbernecking on the other side of the space below the webbing frame. “So what happened to this stuff if they just didn’t eat for a while?”
Wardani shot him an irritated glance. “We don’t know. Presumably the process would start up.”
“That must have hurt,” I said.
“Yes, I imagine it would.” She didn’t really want to talk to either of us. She was entranced.
Schneider failed to take the hint. Or maybe he just needed the babble of voices to cover the huge stillness in the air around us and the gaze of the winged thing above us. “How come they’d end up with something like that? I mean,” he guffawed, “it’s not exactly evolutionarily selective, is it? Kills you if you’re hungry.”
I looked up at the desiccated, spreadeagled corpse again, feeling a fresh surge of the respect I’d first felt when I realised the Martians had died at their posts. Something indefinable happened in my head, something that my Envoy senses recognised as the intuitive shimmer at the edge of understanding.
“No, it’s selective,” I realised as I spoke. “It would have driven them. It would have made them the toughest motherf*ckers in the sky.”
I thought I spotted a faint smile crossing Tanya Wardani’s face. “You should publish, Kovacs. That kind of intellectual insight.”
Schneider smirked.
“In fact,” the archaeologue said, falling into gentle lecture mode while she stared at the mummified Martian. “The current evolutionary argument for this trait is that it helped keep crowded roosts hygienic. Vasvik and Lai, couple of years ago. Before that, most of the Guild agreed it would deter skin-feeding parasites and infection. Vasvik and Lai wouldn’t actually dispute that, they’re just jockeying for pole position. And, of course, there is the overarching toughest motherf*ckers in the sky hypothesis, which a number of Guild Masters have elaborated, though none quite as elegantly as you, Kovacs.”
I tipped her a bow.
“Do you think we can get her down?” Wardani wondered aloud, standing back to get a better look at the cables the webbing frame depended from.
“Her?”
“Yeah. It’s a roost guardian. See the spur on the wing. That bone ridge on back of the skull. Warrior caste. They were all female as far as we know.” The archaeologue looked up at the cabling again. “Think we can get this thing working?”
“Don’t see why not.” I raised my voice to carry across the platform “Jiang. You see anything like a winch on that side?”
Jiang looked upward, then shook his head.
“What about you, Luc?”
“Mistress Wardani!”
“Speaking of motherf*ckers,” muttered Schneider. Matthias Hand was striding across to join the congregation beneath the spreadeagled corpse.
“Mistress Wardani, I hope you weren’t thinking of doing anything other than look at this specimen.”
“Actually,” the archaeologue told him, “We’re looking for a way to winch it down. Got a problem with that?”
“Yes, Mistress Wardani, I have. This ship, and everything it contains, is the property of the Mandrake Corporation.”
“Not until the buoy sings, it isn’t. That’s what you told us to get us in here, anyway.”
Hand smiled thinly. “Don’t make an issue of this, Mistress Wardani. You’ve been well enough paid.”
“Oh, paid. I’ve been paid.” Wardani stared at him. “F*ck you, Hand.”
She stormed away across the platform and stood at its edge, looking out.
I stared at the Mandrake exec. “Hand, what’s the matter with you? I thought I told you to ease up on her. The architecture getting to you or something?”
I left him with the corpse and walked across to where Wardani stood with her arms wrapped tightly around her body and her head lowered.
“Not planning to jump, are you?”
She snorted. “That piece of shit. He’d have a f*cking corporate holofront on the gates of paradise if he ever found them.”
“Don’t know about that. He’s a pretty serious believer.”
“Yeah? Funny how it doesn’t get in the way of his commercial life.”
“Yeah, well. Organised religion, you know.”
She snorted again, but there was a laugh in it this time and her posture unlocked a little.
“I don’t know why I got so bent out of shape. I don’t have the tools here to deal with organic remnants anyway. Let it stay up there. Who gives a shit?”
I smiled and placed a hand on her shoulder.
“You do,” I said gently.
The dome over our heads was as transparent to radio signals as it was to the visual spectrum. Sun ran a series of basic checks with the equipment she had, then we all trooped back to the Nagini and brought the damaged buoy up to the platform, together with three cases of tools Sun deemed likely to be useful. We stopped in every chamber, flagging the route with amber limpet cherries along the way, and painting the floor with illuminum paint, much to Tanya Wardani’s chagrin.
“It’ll wash off,” Sun Liping told her in a tone that suggested she didn’t much care one way or the other.
Even with a couple of grav harnesses to ease the lifting, getting the buoy to its designated resting place was a long, hard job, made infuriating by the bubbling chaos of the ship’s architecture. By the time we’d assembled everything on the platform—off to one side, at a discreet distance from the mummified original occupants—I was shattered. The radiation damage raging through my cells was getting beyond the power of the drugs to do anything about it.
I found a section of the central structure that wasn’t directly below a corpse and propped myself against it, looking out at the starscape while my abused body did its best to stabilise my pulse and damp down the sickness in the pit of my guts. Out among the stars, the open gate winked at me as it rose over the platform’s horizon. Further right, the nearest Martian tugged at an upper corner of my vision. I looked up and across to where the corpse peered down at me through shrouded eyes. I raised one finger to my temple in salute.
“Yeah. Be with you shortly.”
“I’m sorry?”
I rolled my head sideways and saw Luc Deprez standing a couple of metres away. In his rad-resistant Maori sleeve, he looked almost comfortable.
“Nothing. Communing.”
“I see.” From the expression on his face, it was pretty clear he didn’t. “I was wondering. Want to go for a look around?”
I shook my head.
“Maybe later. Don’t let me stop you, though.”
He frowned, but he left me alone. I saw him leaving with Ameli Vongsavath in tow. Elsewhere on the platform, the rest of the party were gathered in small knots, talking in voices that didn’t carry much. I thought I could hear the songspire cluster making faint counterpoint, but I wasn’t up to focusing the neurachem. I felt an immense weariness come sliding down out of the starfield and the platform seemed to tilt away beneath me. I closed my eyes and drifted off into something that wasn’t exactly sleep, but came equipped with all the disadvantages.
Kovacs…
F*cking Semetaire.
Do you miss your fragmented Limon Highlander?
Don’t—
Do you wish she were here in one piece, eh? Or would you like the pieces of her squirming over you unattached?
My face twitched where her foot had smashed my lip as the nanobe cable hurled it past me.
Is there an appeal, hmmm? A segmented houri at your command. A hand here, a hand there. Curved handfuls of flesh. Consumer cut, so to speak. Soft, graspable flesh, Kovacs. Malleable. You could fill your hands with it. Mould it to you.
Semetaire, you’re pushing me—
And unattached to any inconvenient independent will. Throw away the parts you have no use for. The parts that excrete, the parts that think beyond sensual use. The afterlife has many pleasures—
Leave me the f*ck alone, Semetaire.
Why should I do that? Alone is cold, a gulf of coldness deeper than you looked upon from the hull of the Mivtsemdi. Why should I abandon you to that when you have been such a friend to me. Sent me so many souls.
Alright. That’s it, motherf*cker—
I snapped awake, sweating. Tanya Wardani was crouched a metre away, peering at me. Behind her, the Martian hung in mid-glide, staring blindly down like one of the angels in the Andric cathedral at Newpest.
“You OK, Kovacs?”
I pressed fingers against my eyes and winced at the ache the pressure caused.
“Not bad for a dead man, I suppose. You’re not off exploring?”
“I feel like shit. Maybe later.”
I propped myself up a little straighter. Across the platform, Sun worked steadily on the buoy’s exposed circuit plates. Jiang and Sutjiadi stood nearby, talking in low tones. I coughed. “Limited amount of later round here. I doubt it’ll take Sun the whole ten hours. Where’s Schneider?”
“Went off with Hand. How come you’re not doing the Coral Castle tour yourself?”
I smiled. “You’ve never seen the Coral Castle in your life, Tanya. What are you talking about?”
She seated herself beside me, facing the starscape.
“Trying out my Harlan’s World argot. Got a problem with that?”
“F*cking tourists.”
She laughed. I sat and enjoyed the sound until it died, and then we sat for a while in a companionable quiet broken only by the sound of Sun’s circuit soldering.
“Nice sky,” she said finally.
“Yeah. Answer me an archaeological question?”
“If you like.”
“Where did they go?”
“The Martians?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it’s a big cosmos. Who—”
“No, these Martians. The crew of this thing. Why leave something this big floating out here abandoned? It must have cost a planetary budget to build, even for them. It’s functional, as near as we can tell. Heated, maintained atmosphere, working docking system. Why didn’t they take it with them?”
“Who knows? Maybe they left in a hurry.”
“Oh, come—”
“No, I mean it. They pulled out of this whole region of space, or were wiped out or wiped each other out. They left a lot of stuff. Whole cities of it.”
“Yeah. Tanya, you can’t take a city away with you. Obviously you leave it. But this is a f*cking starship. What could make them leave something like that behind?”
“They left the orbitals around Harlan’s World.”
“Those are automated.”
“Well? So is this, to the extent of the maintenance systems.”
“Yes, but it was built for use by a crew. You don’t have to be an archaeologue to see that.”
“Kovacs, why don’t you go down to the Nagini and get some rest. Neither of us is up to exploring this place, and you’re giving me a headache.”
“I think you’ll find that’s the radiation.”
“No, I—”
Against my chest, my discarded induction mike burred. I blinked down at it for a moment, then picked it up and fitted it.
“…just ly—…—ere,” said Vongsavath’s voice, excited and laced heavily with static breakup. “What-ver… was… don’t thin—… died of starv…”
“Vongsavath, this is Kovacs. Back up a minute. Slow down and start again.”
“I said,” the pilot enunciated with heavy emphasis. “Th—…’ve found… ther body. A hu… body. Part… gang…—eked up at the dock…—ation. An—… looks li—… thing kill—… him.”
“Alright, we’re on our way.” I struggled to my feet, forcing myself to speak at a pace Vongsavath might have a chance of understanding through the interference. “Repeat. We are on our way. Stay put, back to back and don’t move. And shoot any f*cking thing you see.”
“What is it?” asked Wardani.
“Trouble.”
I looked around the platform and suddenly Sutjiadi’s words came rolling back over me.
We shouldn’t be out here at all.
Over my head, the Martian gazed blankly down at us. As far removed as any angel, and as much help.