In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (2 page)

The audio pickups were transmitting a soft whistling of wind, accompanied by a murmur of commentary from the technicians at Cape Canaveral. There was something in the sky, distant and moving slowly—but too quick for the pickup to track it, given the time-lag factor, so they didn’t try. They waited, and not much happened. A shout went up as a small and fuzzy animal hopped by, but it was gone too quickly to see details except that it precisely matched the color of the leafy ground cover and jumped on its hind legs.

“Camouflage,” Beam noted; he’d come into the field in the ’50s, but looked older than he must be. “When you’re small and at the bottom of the food chain, you want to be invisible.”

More of the whatevers hopped around, and turned out to look like desert rats with tufted tails and squashed-in faces; some of them had miniature versions of themselves clinging to their backs. A reading of temperature and atmospheric density came up in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

“So at Martian sea level the air’s a little thinner than Denver,” Poul commented, taking a pull on his beer. “The interior highlands must be like Tibet or the Bolivian Altiplano.”

“Yeah, but with lower gravity—”

“The dropoff will be slower, yes. Where Viking came down it’s chilly and very dry, but you or I could be comfortable there with a good warm coat.”

“So much for wearing oxygen masks and skating on the canals,” Bob said, and chuckled ruefully.

That was probably because of the Mars book he
had
written back in the early ’50s.

“It’s northern-hemisphere summer there now, though. Betcha
winter is a sockeldanger,” Ray put in. “And twice as long as ours, don’t forget.”

“Wait, what’s that?”

People jostled toward the screen, then sat back with self-conscious control. A dot was coming up the long stretch beside the canal, growing until details could be seen . . .

A landyacht
, he thought as a wordless cheer rang out, then corrected himself when the scale snapped into his perception.
No, a landship
.

Six long outriggers with giant wheels supported it; they dipped and returned as they rode over irregularities in the terrain, keeping the boxy hull nearly level.

“Good suspension system,” Sprague said. “Pneumatic? Or efficient springs. Even in one-third gravity. The sails look transparent. I’d love to know what they’re made of; it doesn’t really look like cloth.”

Two masts and yards supported huge gossamer sails that looked like lanteens but weren’t. Galleries and windows ran around the hull; if the builders were sized anything like human beings, that meant the landship was at least a hundred and fifty feet long. As it grew closer they saw a figurehead at the front below the bowsprit, some sort of gruesomely fanged beast . . .

“Now we know something about the local wildlife. Something bad,” Jack quipped.

“Either that, or they’ve been reading Clark Ashton Smith, Jack.”

It might be mythological
, Fred thought, over the hammering of his heart.
Don’t jump to conclusions
.

Closer still, and there was writing behind the figurehead—symbols at least, with a generic family resemblance to the ones on the canal banks. Figures moved on the decks, bending to incomprehensible tasks.

“It’s heading toward the lander!”

It did, the front pair of outriggers turning, then the hull fore-shortening as the prow swung toward the camera. The sails twisted and did something; Poul liked messing about in boats, and he murmured about pointing into the wind.

“Beat-up old . . . whatever-it-is,” Fred heard himself say.

Closer to, they could see that most of the structure was made out of some dense close-grained reddish wood, intricately carved but worn and patched and replaced in places. But other sections like the outriggers were strange, glossy and looking like metal or crystal or some unearthly—
Watch it!
he told himself—alloy.

The sails came down neatly as the craft coasted to a halt. They couldn’t see all of it, for it was too close now; they could observe how the big wheel at the end of one of the outriggers effortlessly climbed over a boulder, the tire deforming and springing back as it did so.

“That wheel looks as if it were
spun
somehow, out of resilient crystalline wire,” Bob commented. “Nice engineering. It must grip like fingers. Do we have anything that could do that? They may be ahead of us in some fields.”

“But they’re using
sails
for propulsion,” the editor of
Astounding
said.

His head pushed forward pugnaciously, and he crushed out a cigarette. “I refuse to believe we’re not the most advanced species in the solar system. We’re going to them, after all, not them to us.”

“Mars is smaller than Earth,” Bob replied. “There may not be any fossil fuels or fissionables. Our rockets burn hydrogen cracked with power from burning coal, or oil, or more and more from nuclear power. We’re testing atomic-powered rockets for deep-space work, for the manned missions, to get us out there in person—” he nodded at the screen—“but lack of power sources would push Martian development into other paths.”

Beam drew thoughtfully on his pipe, a minor affectation. “Or they may have come to us first . . . but a very long time ago, and then they had a Dark Age or two. And to Venus. That would account for—”

“Lookatthat!” Larry cried joyfully.

A ramp dropped from under the snarling figurehead, and a dozen figures descended.

“Martians,” someone said reverently. “Men from Mars.”

“Humanoids from Mars, at least,” someone else murmured with the abstracted air of a man taking mental notes. “Bilaterally symmetrical bipeds . . . hard to tell more with the way they’re muffled up. There might be tails under those robes . . . their joints bend the same
way as ours . . . look, four fingers and a thumb on the inside!
Definitely
hominid, like the ones on Venus!”

“And those are weapons,” Beam said. “Rifles, pistols . . .”

“And they’re all wearing swords,” Sprague commented. “And one of them has a bow. Unless they’re very primitive firearms, muzzle-loaders, you’d expect edged weapons to go out of use fairly quickly.”

“Could be some sort of honor code. Maybe Burroughs got that right, too! Gentlemen don’t use a gun if the other guy draws a sword.”

“Nobody’s
that
honorable,” Sprague said. “Not in the real world . . . worlds. Not for long; the cheaters win too often. This place the probe’s in could be the equivalent of, oh, nineteenth-century India or Africa, and the weapons are imported from elsewhere—a transitional phase.”

“Hey, look, the one with the bow doesn’t have a nose—or at least it’s a real stub under that headdress. Look, he’s turning his head again—you can see it when he’s in profile.”

“They’re not primitive guns,” Beam said flatly; he was an expert, and a crack shot himself. “I can’t make out the mechanisms but the barrels are too slender and too precisely formed for that.”

Fred peered more closely. The figures cautiously approaching the lander were swathed in clothing. The basic garment seemed to be a loose wide-sleeved and calf-length robe a bit like an Arab burnoose with an attached headdress that hid everything but a slit over the eyes . . . or what were presumably eyes. Beneath that he could see baggy pants and boots, and gloves that covered quite humanlike hands. Broad belts and body harnesses of worked leather carried tools and weapons—long curved knives with carved hilts, swords whose guards were intricately worked cages of some glossy stuff, holsters with slender-barreled pistols and fanciful grips.

One had a bandolier of rope and a grappling tool looped over one shoulder. All of them had something like a cargo hook clipped to their body harness. Another bore something that looked roughly like a rifle as well, with a long thin barrel, a short bulbous body, and a skeletal stock. The archer had a quiver over the shoulder and a strung bow, a complex-looking recurved thing that reminded him a little of pictures he’d seen of Chinese archery.

The robe of the figure in the lead was a dusty rose color edged with black, and there were jewels and goldwork on the harness. The ones behind ranged from someone nearly as gorgeous to plain brown patched cloth.

“The captain and officers and crew,” someone murmured. “Or something like that.”

They came closer and closer, until eyes showed through the slits in their headdresses—humanlike, but detail was frustratingly absent. All were tall and slim despite the muffling cloth; Fred estimated the leader as most of the way to seven feet. The leader . . .
might as well call him the captain
. . . drew his sword. Light shimmered off the metal; it was double-edged and looked disconcertingly sharp, but not exactly like steel.

“Cut-and-thrust blade,” Sprague said. “More thrust than cut. A good deal like some seventeenth-century European types.”

Everyone caught their breath as the captain turned and spoke to his . . . men? The voice sounded human, perhaps a little high-pitched, but the language was wholly unfamiliar. It sounded ripplingly musical with an occasional staccato burst.

“Tonal and monosyllabic, I think, like Chinese,” Sprague went on, as two of the robed humanoids turned and trotted back toward the ship. “Maybe. Difficult to learn, if it is. I’ll bet the grammar is analytic, too.”

The captain turned back and prodded the lander, reaching up; they could all hear the
tunk . . . tunk
. . . as the point of the blade prodded the light metal hull.

The television spoke: “We are attempting to communicate. The message shall be,
We come in peace for all mankind
.”

“Some advertising man thought
that
up,” Fred said, and there was a nervous chuckle; everyone knew how he felt about
them
.

Minutes passed, and the English words sounded tinny and strange through the pickup in the thin Martian atmosphere. The Martians jumped back; the one with the bow turned and ran. A rifle came up and fired—there was no bang, no flash or smoke, just a slight
hsssst
sound, but the lander rang under an impact.

The captain didn’t run. Instead he shouted something in his musical language and waved the long blade at his followers. One hurried back up the ramp and returned with a folded tarpaulin; the
Martians threw it over the lander, and then the screen went dark. Creaking noises followed.

Poul broke the long silence with a guffaw. “They’re putting it on board, by God! They swung a yard over and tied it up in a sack and they’re hoisting it on deck!”

Walter and Werner came back on, both looking sandbagged and starting to stammer explanations that couldn’t possibly have anything behind them.

“I knew it!” Leigh shouted, punching her fist into the air. “I told you sons of . . . sons what it would be like years ago!”

A rebel yell cut loose, and suddenly the room was a babble of voices.

Several years later, the captain’s words were determined to be in the Tradeship dialect of Demotic Modern, and were tentatively translated:

“It’s alive! Those fools at the Scholarium will pay a fortune for this!”

Encyclopedia 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 × Earth
AVERAGE DENSITY
: 3.93 g/cc
SURFACE GRAVITY
: 0.377 × Earth
DIAMETER
: 4,217 miles (equatorial; 53.3% that of 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
P
RESSURE
: 10.7 psi average at northern sea level

The third life-bearing world of the solar system, Mars is less Earthlike than Venus, although like Earth and unlike Venus its rotation is counterclockwise, and the length of the Martian day is nearly identical to that of Earth’s. The atmosphere is thinner than Earth’s, and is apparently growing thinner still; though it remains easily breathable for Terran humanity at the lower levels, uplands tolerable for Martians require oxygen masks of the type used by mountaineers on Earth. More significant is the fact that Mars has a thick, rigid crust that prevents the plate tectonics characteristic of the other two worlds.

Average temperatures on Mars are roughly 10 degrees Celsius lower than those on Earth, due to the lower solar energy input. This effect is moderated by the higher percentage of carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere, a phenomenon puzzling to scientists because the planet lacks the plate tectonics needed to recirculate carbon compounds and, presumably, has less vulcanism. The year, twice the Terrestrial, and the greater eccentricity of the Martian orbit render seasonal contrasts greater than the Terran norm even at the equator.

Temperatures on Earth may have been in a similar range, however, at some periods of geologic time (see “Snowball Earth”). It is believed that the gradual thinning of the Martian atmosphere and hence its reduced ability to hold heat has been offset to some degree by the gradual increase in the Sun’s energy output over time.

The proportions of land and water on Mars are almost a precise reversal of those on Earth. Mars has seas surrounded by land, rather than land surrounded by oceans, and so the total land area is not dissimilar to that of Earth. The bulk of the water area is concentrated in the Great Northern Sea in the northern polar zone, with a smaller equivalent in the Antarctic Sea. Smaller bodies of water are present in parts of the main equator-girdling land mass . . .

Mars, City of Zar-tu-Kan
Tau-il-Zhi (Tower of Truth)
May 1, 2000 AD