Champion of Mars (19 page)

On the ground, long antennae pedalling the air, was a large arthropod. Holland dropped to his knees in excitement, forgetting the hard shell, rocking forward clumsily. The thing whipped round and skittered down the crack.

“Did you see it? Did you see it?” Holland shouted. “We have to go down there now, we have to!”

“What the hell is what?” said Stulynow.

“The creature!” Holland went to the gap, scrabbled at it, shining his torch into it and finding nothing but old rock and stark shadow.

“Holland, get aw... w... ...f it’s sa...”

Stulynow’s voice broke up into static. A loud, sinous pulsing rode the roar of EM white noise, building to an eerie shriek, deafening them. Vance reeled. Stulynow stumbled against the wall, one hand on the smooth lava, the other pawing at his helmet. The ground shook violently. Fragments of rock pattered onto the scientists, and a large chunk smashed into the inert mule, breaking a leg. Holland lurched forward, and the hard shell’s visor cracked into the stone. Gas poured in. Alarms whooped in his helmet, losing out to the screech and rush of the EM racket.

Light flickered, like a bulb coming to life off an unsteady power source. It brightened rapidly to lightning intensity, whiting out the tube.

His senses overloaded, Holland screamed. Something hit his shoulder, and he rolled into a tunnel of hurtful light and noise, where blackness awaited him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Zero Point

Year 12,397 of the Hegemony of Man

T
HEY STRIPPED AND
lay down in the grass together, naked, the moon and mirror suns their blind audience. When they had finished, tingling and happy, they rolled onto their backs and stared into the sky. It was noon, summertime. Crickets sounded their monotonous symphonies out and back across the Tersis plains. Birds wheeled overhead, slow and lazy on the thermals, as if it were too hot to do much of anything other than turn and turn again.

KiGrace Lurenz watched a vulture sweep a long arc round the bowl of the sky. He screwed his eyes closed and smiled at the sun on his skin. He was pleasantly sweaty, his flesh felt snug in his skin, and he was aware of all of himself, at one place, in the moment. The Second World was a universe away. There was just him in his head, in his flesh. Only him in this space in the now and, by his hand, Kybele.

He rolled onto his stomach. Dry grass rustled under the blanket.

“You’re getting yourself all over the blanket,” she said.

“It’ll wash,” he said. He stroked a strand of hair away from her face and sighed in deep contentment. He was always at his happiest when he was with her. “Is this not the perfect summer day?”

Kybele frowned. He did not like it when she frowned. It had been her idea, this incarnation, and it was not the first time, he thought. Although his memories of his previous lives were dim, he knew to his core that she was different as a person when she chose to be human. In some ways it was better, in others more difficult. They were closer when she was as he was, but – divorced from the fabric of the Library – she was prone to dark moods and bizarre worries. He could see them coming; he thought one came now. He fought to stop his good mood evaporating.

“What is wrong, my love?”

“I’m not sure, Ki, I... feel something.” She turned to him. His heart stirred, and his loins too, causing him discomfort so soon after. She was so beautiful, not only in her perfect outer form. From within shone something primordial, a beauty a million poets could go insane trying to describe. “Why are you smiling?” she asked.

“I was thinking that I would never make a good poet,” he replied. His good humour was lost on her.

“Hold me, please?” she said, and she looked small and scared, and he found it hard to believe then that she had seen two hundred and fifty centuries go by. He had, too, of course, but the machine-born experienced it in a rawer manner. He could forget all about his earlier lives, and often did. They were material for his art, they were a comfort against the certainty of death. Nothing more.

Except her. She had always been there. That was anything but small.

He held her, her face against his chest.

“Come now,” he said. “Do not be sad. I need you at your sparkling best for the exhibition.”

“Do we have to go?” she said, her voice muffled against his chest. Her warm breath tickled his skin. It was always the small things that brought him such joy. He felt like crying with gratitude for it, but made himself laugh instead.

“You know the answer to that.”

“Can we not just stay here? I get tired of the questions.”

“Darling, ours is the great romance of the ages. This is a time of romantics, people need a certain melodrama. It helps them fight off accidie.”

“Oh don’t be so arch,” Kybele scolded. “I wish they’d choose someone else,” she said.

“They’ll forget all about Kybele and KiGrace once the exhibition is under way. I promise.”

“Hmph,” she said. She kissed his chest and peeked up at him with big brown eyes, half hidden by her hair. “Please? I’ll make sure you won’t regret it.” A little mischief came into her voice.

KiGrace laughed again. His erection was returning. His balls ached already, but he was sorely tempted by her offer. Far from becoming stale with the ages, their physical relationship, when they shared a life with one, was enriched by their knowledge of each other. She was an accomplished lover. “No! Don’t exert your feminine wiles on me, woman, I’ve got to appear in the Library in ten minutes for my pre-exhibition conference. I can’t keep my public waiting, you know.”

“Are...” – she kissed the top of his stomach – “you sure?” She moved lower, and lower, and he sighed as she took him in her mouth.

“Yes I’m sure!” he said, almost yelping. He twisted his hands in her hair. “Now get off.” He said it with no conviction, and she did not let him be.

KiGrace was late for his pre-exhibition conference.

“K
ANYONSET IS AT
its best during the night, do you not think?” A breathy voice spoke into his ear. Sharp perfume came with it, the scent of flowers, cloves and the actinic aroma of fresh-knapped flint. KiGrace turned in surprise at it, annoying the Centauran diplomat with whom he had been speaking. KiGrace didn’t care overly much. He was famous enough to offend when he chose, and this voice was a far more intriguing prospect. It belonged to a woman of a kind he was unfamiliar with: short, very slender, with wide-spaced eyes and faintly bluish skin. He had no idea who she was, but that was normal for such events as these.

“I can see why you think so,” he said. “The lights, the silhouettes...”

“It is not the sights,” she said. “Come with me.” She caught him by an elbow and pulled him away to the edge of the spire garden. He shot an apologetic smile to the diplomat. Two of the man’s wives stood beside him, crestfallen. KiGrace supposed they were waiting to be introduced to him. He resolved to go back to them later.

“They look disappointed,” said the woman.

“Yes,” he said. “I will say hello, if only for appearance’s sake. It is not good to disappoint one’s public.”

“Perhaps they wish for more than a hello.”

“Oh, I do hope not,” he said. He did not want the Centauran to push his wives onto him.

She raised an eyebrow. “I am sure your artistic genes are much in demand.”

“Then they can visit the genelooms.”

“It’s not the same,” she said. “Now, pay attention.” The woman took his hand and led him right to the edge of the garden, where flowering plants hung in long streamers. Kanyonset lay before him, a mass of lights, silhouette and reflections: tall shapes of the living spires growing from the rock into the sky, flames on water, the navigational beacons of space- and aircraft winking in the sky, the stars...

“I see,” he said. “Away from the lights, you can appreciate it more. A tapestry of light and shadow,” he said. “It brings mystery to the familiar, never sinister, as the body of a lover in a room lit by moonlight.”

She giggled. “You are a marvellous artist, but a terrible poet.”

KiGrace sipped his wine. “It is funny that you say so. I said the same thing to Kybele only this afternoon.”

“Close your eyes.”

“I must...”

“Shh! You’re an immersive artist, abandon just one sense for a few moments. Indulge me.”

She was attractive, and intriguing, so he did. He shut his eyes.

“Now listen!”

He listened. Away from the pavilion, the music and chatter of the party was muted. At night, the air is rarefied, the cluttered voice of the day depleted, and sound is so much clearer. He could hear the rivers and the waterfalls. He could hear laughter. He could hear fragmented conversations, sharp with the promise of gossip, words tantalising but indistinct.

“Now breathe,” she said.

The scent of the dust on the air, the fragrances of flowers. Perfume, people.

“You may open them now,” she said. He did, and examined her more closely. She wore a shift of sheer material, bellybutton exposed, her small breasts visible through the fabric, nipples small and erect in the night’s chill. She was barefoot. Gold wound in her hair and about her throat, ankles, forearms, fingers and toes. “In this city, at night, the splendour of its vistas hidden away, you can find an intimacy lacking in the day. Tell me, KiGrace, what do you remember of your first life?”

He shrugged. It was a common enough question from those wanting to know how far back he and Kybele’s shared history went. He found it rather boring, his rehearsed reply saying as much. “Red sands, brown sky, and a little of Earth in ancient times. Not much else: a sense of loss, a sense of pressure, of great heat. Pain.” He made a gesture.

“‘You do not remember your births, but the deaths; always.’”

“You?” The woman disturbed him. She was out of place, she did not look right. There was something odd about her, twitchy, like an animation with missing frames, like a poor Library interface.

“I quote the spirit Madeno, ten thousand years dead. Kybele was there, wasn’t she?”

“Yes. Yes, she was, she held my hand. She was different, then. I remember that. And I did not love her. That came much later.”

“And she made her promise, the one she has always kept.”

“As is widely known. I am sorry, you are delightful, but I have not the faintest idea of who you are. Let us do this properly. I am KiGrace Lorenz, and you?”

She smiled. Her teeth, too, were bluish, even in the flickering yellow flames of the torches around the garden. The torches. Of course, that and the drink. That explained it. “Who I am is of no consequence. Only know that I have come a very long way to see you.”

And there it was. The woman’s otherworldliness aside, it always came back to that. KiGrace smiled and attempted to look modest. “I am afraid I can take no lover, madam, for my heart and body belong to Kybele.”

“That is not always the case.”

“No, but in this lifetime it is so. I do not regret it; Kybele is everything to me,” he said. Which was half a lie.

“I have heard that is not always so.” She smiled the kind of smile designed to quicken a man’s heart. KiGrace’s duly quickened.

“Rumours,” he said, which was entirely a lie. KiGrace was an accomplished liar, but he was not sure if she believed him.

The woman’s shoulders relaxed, her chest retreated a small but important distance. She turned her shoulder slightly away. If there was a transaction of the physical sort to be made here, its time had come and gone.

“In any case, you are conceited.”

“I am an artist,” he said. “Conceit is allowed me, I am sure.”

“I did not come here to seduce you, only to show you.”

“What?” he said. And thought that maybe she had come to seduce him, and maybe she had not. He would enjoy debating the truth of it with himself later.

“What I have already shown you,” she said. She appeared distracted, casting her glance over to the pavilion once, then twice, as if someone in there waited for her. “Goodbye, KiGrace.” Her smile returned, a different kind of smile, a distant one. “Until we next meet.”

“Goodbye,” he murmured. He was at a loss for what else to say. The woman went toward the bright light streaming from the open doors of the pavilion, and the bustle of the party within. She slipped sideways into the throng. It swallowed her without noticing, and she was lost to sight.

The music stopped; clacks and odd notes took its place as musicians prepared their next piece.

Kybele walked out onto the gardens. She looked around her, lost without him.
Is it healthy
, he wondered,
for two souls to spend so long together?
He supposed not, but he supposed a lot of things. He supposed he sought other lovers for precisely that reason, although he suspected he did it because he was a man, and he could. He was selfish, he knew, but he did not love her any the less for it.

In her brilliant, eternal, powerful mind, she knew this, but for all that, he knew that she did not feel dispassionately about his liaisons; not in the least.

She saw him and came over.

“Who was that?” she asked. To her credit, there was only a hint of jealousy. She slipped her arms about his waist.

KiGrace stared after the woman, disquiet spoiling his mood.

“Ki?”

“Oh, what? Sorry, darling.” He turned and kissed her head, taking the scent of her deep into his nostrils; always different, eternally the same. “No one. She wanted me to smell the air, would you believe?” He meant this to be light-hearted, but a shudder coursed up his back.

“Are you alright?” asked Kybele. “Is it the people? Is it that they are watching us, watching the famed eternal lovers? So many moments pass in this life, and so few of them are solely ours.” She burrowed into KiGrace’s back. She was welcome and warm through his robe.

The music began again, a brisk air. Somewhere inside, someone gave a shriek of pleasure.

“No, no, they don’t bother me. Nothing bothers me when you are here. And you are always here,” he said. “I am cold. Just cold.”

“I hope that is all.”