Love and Rockets Part 4

We'd mapped this from orbit. I knew to the meter how wide this plaza was. But seeing it . . .

I stepped lightly down Sixth Virtue's three-rung ladder. Set my foot on time itself. For some reason, I wished for a cutla.s.s like Joan's.

"I can hear you breathing." It was the Captain, her voice nasty in my ears.

So much for comm silence. Lot of nerves up there in orbit. It was nice to know someone cared.

"Yes, ma'am." I smiled inside my helmet. "The Barsoomian banths ain't got me yet."

"Keep to the mission profile, Ari."

"Yes, ma'am."

Mission profile said enter one of the buildings without breaching existing barriers. In other words, an open door or window, nothing that could be shut behind me. Look around for portable artifacts, preferably something representing technology or information storage or, ideally, both. Then capture as many images as I reasonably could in a short amount of time, and back out to the lander.

1.3 bars of O2. I could breathe here.

I pushed the traitor thought aside and concentrated on walking. Malick's World tugged at me with .91 standard gs. It was just enough to give me a sense of floating with each stride and make me have to watch my step. This was a nickel-iron rockball of a planet amazingly like Earth except for the absent hydrosphere. And how long had those oceans been gone, I wondered? After all, this world boasted the intact ruins of a seaport and a still-breathable atmosphere-even without oceans or jungles to maintain the oxygen cycle.

What did one do with a few trillion tons of missing seawater, anyway?

I was a little over two hundred meters from my initial target, the pillared building due north of the lander. As I approached, I looked up at the carvings once more. They were hard to see, dense, complex, fractal even, with enough curves and bends to make my eyes ache, and shadows rendered b.l.o.o.d.y in the orange-maroon light. The carvings showed something a lot like people fighting something a lot like squid. A giant pelagic wrestling match.

No, I corrected myself, death match. There were plenty of dismemberings, spearings-through-the-groin (or cephalopodian mantle), berserk necrophagic frenzies and whatnot portrayed up there.

It seemed a curious choice for public art.

I slowed my pace and panned my helmet cam back and forth across the frieze. Even if these buildings had been formed by some bizarre geological process-one theory which had made the rounds in force back on Correct Thought-geological process didn't spontaneously carve woman-eating squid. Squid-eating women?

Still, astonishing. My heart raced. This was how a species had seen itself, how it had thought about itself. Myth? Legend? History? Oh, Mother Burroughs, if only you were here now to see the Mars of your dreams.

At that thought, a crackle erupted in my helmet: "Why aren't you moving?"

I realized I had stopped. It was the sheer, boggling wonder of it all.

"It's a new world, Captain. These carvings are proof of it."

"What carvings?"

Oops.

"Check my cam feed, ma'am." I couldn't take my eyes off them. She couldn't even see them. Not good, that.

"I see a lot of rock, Ari."

"No . . . ah . . . squid?"

"No. I suggest you return to the lander now."

"Ah . . ." I considered that one, quickly. I didn't feel delusional. But would I if I was? I was still breathing suit air, so there weren't environmental pathogens tweaking me. Could it be a virteo resolution problem or something? "Ma'am, I'm just going up on that porch to look through the doors."

"Get back to the lander."

"In a minute, Captain."

"Petty Officer Russdottir . . . that's an order."

"Detached command, ma'am." I started walking again.

"It is my judgment that you are at risk of becoming unfit for command."

Eyes on the stone squid, I giggled. "Then Doctor Sheldon can examine me to certify that fact at her next convenience." Not that I minded being examined by Doctor Sheldon. As often as possible. I giggled some more. "As per procedures, ma'am."

The silence which followed told me how much trouble I'd be in once I returned to orbit, but . . . would I ever have this kind of opportunity again? Not a chance, not by the Great Mother's shorts. High command would either seal this discovery over or flood it with doctoral nerds from high-credit universities like New Tubingen and Oxford-at-Secundus. Little old industrial-zone girls like me were never coming back here, except maybe as taxi drivers and cooks.

I didn't want to think about that any more, so I turned off my helmet audio. And hey, I was at the steps!

My helmet crackled back to life. Override from orbit. What the h.e.l.l happened to my detached command, anyway?

It was Sheldon. "Ari," she said. "Sweetie. Please. I know you can hear me. Stop walking and think."

Up the steps. Too low, too long, maybe ten cents a riser but two meters on the tread. Somebody had wanted people to enter this building in an unsettled state of mind. Either that or they had really weird feet.

Tentacles.

No . . . I let that thought bleed from my head like oxygen from a jammed valve.

"Ari, dear. Listen. Something's going wrong. I don't want to lose you like this." Her breath caught. "Captain is putting together a rescue team, but you don't want to endanger your friends, do you?"

"Bulls.h.i.t," I sang. Sheldon might be my lover, but she was commissioned and I wasn't. Her lies were always for the good of the ship. The whole reason for sending me in the number two lander was because we were both disposable. Gunny Heloise's expensive string of muscle-girls weren't going to do a combat drop to fish me out of the arms of some f.u.c.king stone squid.

Had I said all that aloud?

"Ari, please, you're leaving camera range . . ."

"Good!" I took a deep breath and popped my helmet free. There was a slight sucking noise as it came loose. I turned and hurled it back out into the plaza, where it bounced a little too slowly, with an odd ringing echo. Air density and composition a little off, I thought. Sound waves didn't propagate quite right.

Time to breathe the air of this world. Joan Carter, I am here. I released my breath, drew in a new one and let the smells and scents of another civilization flood into me on a river of oxygen.

Mostly it tasted like a granite plaza at night, though, oddly, there was an after-rain tang to the air.

Hand on the hilt of my cutla.s.s, I stepped into the shadows looking for traces of the women who ate stone squid.

Inside was tall, horribly tall. The walls and ceiling were proportioned wrong. It was as if the same architect who'd designed those too-shallow steps had been turned on her plans sideways and stretched the building upward. That same damp granite smell tickled my nose, like must newly released from a long-forgotten freight canister.

Age and rot, even in this dry place.

My boots clicked against the worn flagstones as I walked on, accompanied only by echoes.

Pillars rose around me, covered with the same frantic, disturbing carvings that had decorated the portico outside. I walked toward one, touched the pillar with the point of my cutla.s.s. It rang like honest stone, but when I tried to brush that bit of carving with my gloved hand, somehow it wasn't exactly where I had thought it should be.

"Not quite dead, are you?" I shouted.

They . . . whoever they were . . . had looked like me. Human enough for me to care. Like Joan with her Red Woman lovers on old Barsoom. The . . . squid . . . were everywhere. Detailed. Frightening. Real. Had it been the squid that drank the oceans dry?

Had it been the squid who built this city?

That thought scared me into walking again. This place must have been built by humans. Must have.

I bent to adjust my greaves, and my thoat-leather fighting harness. Nothing fit me quite right today. Like the very air itself, everything was subtly wrong. And where the h.e.l.l were the monsters? At least these were squid, not something so seemingly human as the rykorriding kaldanes that had taken Joan's daughter from her.

The injustice of the world boiled within me as I stalked between a pair of the overtall pillars, cutla.s.s trembling in my hand. Something, someone, had consumed the women of this world, sisters to me at least as much as the Red Women had been sisters to Joan Carter. They had been drunk dry, to desiccate along with their oceans.

Then I found one of my world-sisters, of the stone squid-eating women, curled in a corner. She'd died here long ago. Her body was a husk wrapped in robes crumbling from dry rot. I could not tell what race she had been, she was so decayed, but I preferred to believe her a Red Woman rather than one of the degenerate Therns or First Born.

She had died here to warn me of the stone squid.

I heard a squawk: "Ari."

I whirled, cutla.s.s ready, wishing I had my radium pistol. Had I left it behind on my airship? Some enemy must be clouding my mind. I was never this slow of thought.

"Sweetie, can you hear me?" It was a woman's voice, weak and quavering as women will be when confronted with the sharp end. I circled again, but could not find her. Magic, then, or some ancient machine sparked to life in this temple.

She went on: "We've overridden your implant. Sixth Virtue's relay is homed in on your carrier. Ari . . . please . . . I know you're alive. You've got to come out of that building, right now. Please, sweetie."

"No tears, woman," I shouted. Something was wrong with my voice! It was high and thin, with a reedy quaver. I had indeed been somehow ensorcelled. I knelt to search my dead sister for help, parting her robes with a muttered apology.

So much hair on that poor dead one's chest, I thought. She must have struggled with an overactive testosterone level. And her b.r.e.a.s.t.s . . . gone. Cancer?

Her?

What would a woman be doing here? He.

He?

Where had that word come from?

"Ari! Captain Pellas is authorizing a retrieval drop. Listen carefully. Can you get a signal out to us?"

I ignored her.

Then his robes fell completely open. His c.l.i.toris, dry as the rest of him, had grotesquely hypertrophied in life. Inches long, perhaps. And his b.r.e.a.s.t.s . . . the poor dear must have had a radical. Common enough in s.p.a.ce.

s.p.a.ce?

His c.l.i.t?

My free hand strayed to the lower skirt of my fighting harness. Checking.

"Sweetie. They're launching immediately. Be down in twenty-five minutes or so. Please, if you can hear me, sit tight."

I had an awful moment, my chest seizing cold and tight as my hand groped air between my thighs. Where was my . . . my . . .

Him? What the h.e.l.l was a him? What the h.e.l.l was I thinking? Animals were bedeviled with y-chromosome carriers. Humans, blessed by evolution and intelligence, had moved beyond that particular genetic disorder. Everybody knew it. There hadn't been a natural born male human since the days of Herad the Great-she'd put the last of the poor, d.a.m.ned mutants mercifully to death back the first of the Years Before.

"I'm . . . I'm in some kind of trouble," I said aloud.

"We're coming, dear. Fast as we can."

A door opened before me. A four-armed warrior in battle harness loomed, c.o.c.k swinging between his legs like an animal's. Then he was struck down from behind. A beautiful woman, of the Red race-a true princess of Helium, I realized-peered inward, b.l.o.o.d.y sword gripped firm. "Come," she called extending her free hand, "quickly."

"Hold on, sweetheart," the bodiless voice said within my ear.

I looked down at the corpse. Who could bear to live in a world of such horrible defectives, mutant in body, mind, and metabolism?

Throat harnesses jingled behind the princess. A cold wind chattered. All I had to do was step forward, into every world I'd ever dreamed of. Except for the . . . men.

"Come."

"Stay with us."

The voice of dream called me on, the voice of love bade me stay. The voice of reason screamed somewhere deep inside me. Eyes clouding with tears, I hurled my cutla.s.s at the princess. Somehow both startled and sorrowful, she withdrew, leaving me alone with an ancient male corpse. I huddled next to my dead sister-for even with a c.o.c.k and a beard, she was still my sister-and waited for my rescue to arrive.

Far too soon, something slithered wet and huge upon the stone floor behind me, but I had already given away my weapons and returned bare-handed to the world my mothers had made. Instead I took the dead woman's hand and waited to see who would find me first.

WANTED.

Anita Ensal.

Evie hadn't figured on the comets. Until them, her plan had been working perfectly. Well, maybe not perfectly, but certainly she'd made a clean escape and had a chance of success.

But the shuttle wasn't reinforced like a miner's ship, wasn't nimble like a planet-runner, and wasn't equipped with a protective shield like the galaxy-cla.s.s cruiser it had come from. It was supposed to go from the cruiser to a moon or s.p.a.ce station. It hadn't been made for the asteroid belt and it certainly hadn't been made for comet showers.

The proof of this was that the shuttle was now damaged past any sort of repair Evie could hope to make. She was lucky she still had breathable air, but the water reclamation unit was damaged, she had little food, and she'd had to turn the grav-generator off.

She wasn't sure where she was, the shuttle's navigation system, like everything else about it, being rather too simple to tell her. But she was pretty positive she was many days' flight away from Asteroid Station C at full throttle, not to mention the Belt's...o...b..t moved her farther away from Checkpoint Charley every minute. She was weeks away from Pallas Station, and a lifetime away from Ceres.

Not that she wanted to go to any of them. What she wanted to do was get away. Well, she'd done that really well.

She set the distress signal to maximum range and waited, staring at the millions of stars of which she had an unparalleled view. She'd never felt so alone in her life.

Days later, loneliness was the least of her worries. It was going to be a race to see whether she died of thirst or from freezing. The distress signal was still going, but almost nothing else on the shuttle was.

She'd managed to struggle into a s.p.a.cesuit, but she wasn't sure she could attach the helmet properly. Besides, she wasn't sure what good it would do anyway. It wasn't like the oxygen tank in the suit would last her long enough to get anywhere, and there was nowhere to go. Just a lot of empty s.p.a.ce and a million beautiful, cold, unhelpful stars.