Year's Best Scifi 8 Part 48

The hophead began to giggle in a way that at once identified him as a cruffer, addicted to the fine, white powdered bark of the Venusian high tree cultures, who used the stuff to train their giant birds but had the sense not to use it themselves.

Captain John MacShard turned away. He wasn't going to waste his time on a druggy, no matter how expensive his tastes.

Morricone lost his terror of Captain John MacShard then. He needed help more than he needed dope. Captain John MacShard was faintly impressed. He knew the kind of hold cruff had on its victims.

But he kept on walking.

Until Morricone scuttled in front of him and almost fell to his knees, his hands reaching out toward Captain John MacShard, too afraid to touch him.

His voice was small, desperate, and it held some kind of pain Captain John MacShard recognized.

"Please..."

Captain John MacShard made to move past, back into the glaring street.

"Please, Captain MacShard. Please help me..." His shoulders slumped, and he said dully: "They've taken my daughter. The Thennet have taken my daughter."

Captain John MacShard hesitated, still looking into the street. From the corner of his mouth he gave the name of one of the cheapest hotels in the quarter. n.o.body in their right mind would stay there if they valued life or limb. Only the crazy or desperate would even enter the street it was in.

"I'm there in an hour." Captain John MacShard went out of the bar. The boy he'd given the silver coin to was still standing in the swirling Martian dust, the ever-moving red tide which ran like a bizarre river down the time-destroyed street. The boy grinned up at him. Old eyes, young skin. A slender snizzer lizard crawled on his shoulder and curled its strange, prehensile tail around his left ear. The boy touched the creature tenderly, automatically.

"You good man, Mister Captain John MacShard."

For the first time in months, Captain John MacShard allowed himself a thin, self-mocking grin.

CHAPTER TWO.

Taken by the Thennet!

Captain John MacShard left the main drag almost at once. He needed some advice and knew where he was most likely to find it. There was an old man he had to visit. Though not of their race, Fra Energen had authority over the last of the Memiget Priests whose Order had discovered how rich the planet was in man-made treasure. They had also been experts on the Thennet as well as the ancient Martian pantheon.

His business over with, Captain John MacShard walked back to his hotel. His route took him through the filthiest, most wretched slums ever seen across all the ports of the s.p.a.ceways. He displayed neither weakness nor desire. His pace was the steady, relentless lope of the wolf. His eyes seemed unmoving, yet took in everything.

All around him the high tottering tenement towers of the Low City swayed gently in the glittering light, their rusted metal and red terra cotta merging into the landscape as if they were natural. As if they had always been there.

Not quite as old as Time, some of the buildings were older than the human race. They had beenadded to and stripped and added to again, but once those towers had sheltered and proclaimed the power of Mars' mightiest sea lords.

Now they were slums, a rat warren for the sc.u.m of the s.p.a.ceways, for half-Martians like Captain John MacShard, for stranger genetic mixes than even Brueghel imagined.

In that thin atmosphere you could smell the Low City for miles and beyond that, in the series of small craters known as Diana's Field, was Old Mars Station, the first s.p.a.ceport the Earthlings had ever built, long before they had begun to discover the strange, retiring races which had remained near their cities, haunting them like barely living ghosts, more creatures of their own mental powers than of any natural creation-ancient memories made physical by act of will alone.

Millennia before, the sea lords and their ladies and children died in those towers, sensing the end of their race as the last of the waters evaporated and red winds scoured the streets of all ornament and grace. Some chose to kill themselves as their fine ships became so many useless monuments. Some had marshaled their families and set off across the new-formed deserts in search of a mythical ocean which welled up from the planet's core.

It had taken less than a generation, Captain John MacShard knew, for a small but navigable ocean to evaporate rapidly until it was no more than a haze in the morning sunlight. Where it had been were slowly collapsing hulls, the remains of wharfs and jetties, endless dunes and rippling deserts, abandoned cities of poignant dignity and unbelievable beauty. The great dust tides rose and fell across the dead sea bottoms of a planet which had run out of resources. Even its water had come from Venus, until the Venusians had raised the price so only Earth could afford it.

Earth was scarcely any better now, with water wars turning the Blue Planet into a background of endless skirmishes between nations and tribes for the precious streams, rivers, and lakes they had used so dissolutely and let dissipate into s.p.a.ce, turning G.o.d's paradise into Satan's wasteland.

And now Earth couldn't afford Venusian water either. So Venus fought a b.l.o.o.d.y civil war for control of what was left of her trade. For a while MacShard had run bootleg water out of New Malvern. The kind of money the rich were prepared to pay for a tiny bottle was phenomenal. But he'd become sickened with it when he'd walked through London's notorious Westminster district and seen degenerates spending an artisan's wages on jars of gray reconst.i.tute while mothers held the corpses of dehydrated babies in their arms and begged for the money to bury them.

"Mr. Captain John MacShard."

Captain John MacShard knew the boy had followed him all the way to the hotel. Without turning, he said: "You'd better introduce yourself, sonny."

The boy seemed ashamed, as if he had never been detected before. He hung his head. "My dad called me Milton," he said.

Captain John MacShard smiled then. Once. He stopped when he saw the boy's face. The child had been laughed at too often and to him it meant danger, distrust, pain. "So your dad was Mr. Eliot, right?"

The boy forgot any imagined insult. "You knew him?"

"How long did your mother know him?"

"Well, he was on one of those long-haul ion sailors. He was a great guitarist. Singer. Wrote all his own material. He was going to see a producer when he came back from Earth with enough money to marry. Well, you know that story." The boy lowered his eyes. "Never came back."

"I'm not your pa," said Captain John MacShard and went inside. He closed his door. He marveled at the tricks the street kids used these days. But that stuff couldn't work on him. He'd seen six-year-old masters pulling the last Uranian bakh from a tight-fisted New Nantucket blubber-chaser who had just finished a speech about a need for more workhouses.

A few moments later, Morricone arrived. Captain John MacShard knew it was him by the quick, almost hesitant rap.

"It's open," he said. There was never any point in locking doors in this place. It advertised you had something worth stealing. Maybe just your body.

Morricone was terrified. He was terrified of the neighborhood and he was terrified of Captain John MacShard. But he was even more terrified of something else. Of whatever the Thennet might have doneto his daughter.

Captain John MacShard had no love for the Thennet, and he didn't need a big excuse to put a few more of their number in h.e.l.l.

The gaudily dressed old man shuffled into the room, and his terror didn't go away. Captain John MacShard closed the door behind him. "Don't tell me about the Thennet," he said. "I know about them and what they do. Tell me when they took your daughter and whatever else you know about where they took her."

"Out past the old tombs. A good fifty or sixty versts from here. Beyond the Yellow Ca.n.a.l. I paid a breed to follow them. That's as far as he got. He said the trail went on, but he wasn't going any farther. I got the same from all of them. They won't follow the Thennet into the Aghroniagh Hills. Then I heard you had just come down from Earth." He made some effort at ordinary social conversation. His eyes remained crazed. "What's it like back there now?"

"This is better," said Captain John MacShard. "So they went into the Aghroniagh Hills? When?"

"Some two days ago..."

Captain John MacShard turned away with a shrug.

"I know," said the merchant. "But this was different. They weren't going to eat her or-or-play with her..." His skin crawled visibly. "They were careful not to mark her. It was as if she was for someone else. Maybe a big slaver? They wouldn't let any of their saliva drip on her. They got me, though." He extended the twisted branch of burned flesh that had been his forearm.

Captain John MacShard drew a deep breath and began to take off his boots. "How much?"

"Everything. Anything."

"You'll owe me a million hard deens if I bring her back alive. I won't guarantee her sanity."

"You'll have the money. I promise. Her name's Mercedes. She's sweet and decent-the only good thing I ever helped create. She was staying with me...the vacation...her mother and I..."

Captain John MacShard moved toward his board bed. "Half in the morning. Give me a little time to put the money in a safe place. Then I'll leave. But not before."

After Morricone had shuffled away, his footsteps growing softer and softer until they faded into the general music of the rowdy street outside, Captain John MacShard began to laugh.

It wasn't a laugh you ever wanted to hear again.

CHAPTER THREE.

The Unpromised Land

The Aghroniagh Hills had been formed by a huge asteroid crashing into the area a few million years earlier, but the wide sweep of meadowland and streams surrounding them had never been successfully settled by Captain John MacShard's people. They were far from what they seemed.

Many settlers had come in the early days, attracted by the water and the gra.s.s. Few lasted a month, let alone a season. That water and gra.s.s existed on Mars because of Blake, the terraplaner. He had made it his life's work, crossing and recrossing one set of disparate genes with another until he had something which was like gra.s.s and like water and which could survive, maybe even thrive and proliferate, in Mars' barren climate. A sort of liquid algae and a kind of lichen, at root, but with so many genetic modifications that its mathematical pedigree filled a book.

Blake's great atmosphere pumping stations had transformed the Martian air and made it rich enough for Earthlings to breathe. He had meant to turn the whole of Mars into the same lush farmland he had seen turn to dust on Earth. Some believed he had grown too ambitious, that instead of doing G.o.d's work, he was beginning to believe he, himself, was G.o.d. He had planned a city called New Jerusalem and had designed its buildings, its parks, streams, and ornamental lakes. He had planted his experimental fields and brought his first pioneer volunteers and given them seed he had made and fertilizer he had designed, and something had happened under the unshielded Martian sunlight which had not happened in his laboratories. Blake's Eden became worse than Purgatory.

His green shoots and laughing fountains developed a kind of intelligence, a taste for specific nutrients, a means of finding them and processing them to make them edible. Those nutrients were most commonly found in Earthlings. The food could be enticed the way an anemone entices an insect. The prey saw sweet water, green gra.s.s and it was only too glad to fling itself deep into the greedy shoots, the thirsty liquid, which was only too glad to digest it.

And so fathers had watched their children die before their eyes, killed and absorbed in moments.

Women had seen hard-working husbands die before becoming food themselves.

Blake's seven pioneer families lasted a year and there had been others since who brought certain means of defeating the so-called Paradise virus, who challenged the hungry gra.s.s and liquid, who planned to tame it. One by one, they went to feed what had been intended to feed them.

There were ways of surviving the Paradise. Captain John MacShard had tried them and tested them.

For a while he had specialized in finding artifacts which the settlers had left behind, letters, deeds, cherished jewelry.

He had learned how to live, for short periods at least, in the Paradise. He had kept raising his price until it got too high for anybody.

Then he quit. It was the way he put an end to his own boredom. What he did with all his money n.o.body knew, but he didn't spend it on himself.

The only money Captain John MacShard was known to exchange in large quant.i.ties was for modifications and repairs to that ship of his, as alien as his sidearm, which he'd picked up in the Rings and claimed by right of salvage. Even the sc.r.a.p merchants hadn't wanted the ship. The metal it was made of could become poisonous to the touch. Like the weapon, the ship didn't allow everyone to handle her.

Captain John MacShard paid a halfling phunt-renter to drive him to the edge of the Paradise, and he promised the sweating driver the price of his phunt if he'd wait for news of his reappearance and come take him back to the city. "And any other pa.s.senger I might have with me," he had added.

The phunter was almost beside himself with anxiety. He knew exactly what that green sentient weed could do, and he had heard tales of how the streams had chased a man halfway back to the Low City and consumed him on the spot. Drank him, they said. No sane creature, Earthling or Martian, would risk the dangers of the Paradise.

Not only was the very landscape dangerous, there were also the Thennet.

The Thennet, whose life-stuff was unpalatable to the Paradise, came and went comfortably all year round, emerging only occasionally to make raids on the human settlements, certain that no posse would ever dare follow them back to their city of tunnels, Kong Gresh, deep at the center of the Aghroniagh Crater, which lay at the center of the Aghroniagh Hills, where the weed did not grow and the streams did not flow.

They raided for pleasure, the Thennet. Mostly, when they craved a delicacy. Human flesh was almost an addiction to them, they desired it so much. They were a cruel people and took pleasure in their captives, keeping them alive for many weeks sometimes, especially if they were young women. But they savored this killing. Schomberg had put it graphically enough once: The longer the torment, the sweeter the meat. His customers wondered how he understood such minds.

Captain John MacShard knew Mercedes Morricone had a chance at life. He hoped, when he found her, that she would still want that chance.

What had Morricone said about the Thennet not wishing to mark her? That they were capturing her for someone else?

Who?

Captain John MacShard wanted to find out for himself. No one had needed to pay the Thennet for young girls in years. The wars among the planets had given the streets plenty of good-looking women to choose from. n.o.body ever noticed a few missing from time to time.

If the Thennet were planning to sell her for the food they would need for the coming Long Winter, they would be careful to keep their goods in top quality, and Mercedes could well be a specific target.The odds were she was still alive and safe. That was why Captain John MacShard did not think he was wasting his time.

And it was the only reason he would go this far into the Aghroniaghs, where the Thennet weren't the greatest danger.

CHAPTER FOUR.

h.e.l.l Under The Hill

It was hard to believe the Thennet had ever been human, but there was no doubt they spoke a crude form of English. They were said to be degenerated descendants of a crashed Earth ship which had left Houston a couple of centuries before, carrying a political investigative committee looking into reports that Earth mining interests were using local labor as slaves. The reports had been right. The mining interests had made sure the distinguished senators never got to see the evidence.

Captain John MacShard was wearing his own power armor. It buzzed on his body from soles to crown. The silky energy, soft as a child's hand, rippled around him like an atmosphere. He flickered and buzzed with complex circuitry outlining his veins and arteries, following the course of his blood. This medley of soft sounds was given a crazy rhythm by the ticking of his antigrav's notoriously dangerous regulators as he flew an inch above the hungry, whispering gra.s.s, the lush and luring streams of Paradise.

Only once did he come down, in the ruins of what was to have been the city of New Jerusalem and where the gra.s.s did not grow.

Here he ran at a loping pace which moved him faster over the landscape and at the same time recharged the antigrav's short-lived power units.

He was totally enclosed in the battlesuit of his own design, his visible skin a strange a.r.s.enical green behind the overlapping energy shields, his artificial gills processing the atmosphere to purify maximum oxygen. Around him as he moved was an unstable aura buzzing with gold and misty greens, skipping and sizzling as elements in his armor mixed and reacted with particles of semi-artificial Martian air, fusing them into toxic fumes which would kill a man if taken straight. Which is why Captain John MacShard wore his helmet. It most closely resembled the head of an ornamental dolphin, all sweeping flukes and baroque symmetry, the complicated, delicate wiring visible through the thin plasdex skin, while the macro-engineered plant curving from between his shoulder blades looked almost like wings. He could have been one of the forgotten beasts of the Eldren which they had ridden against Bast-Na-Gir when the first mythologies of Mars were being made. The transparent steel visor plate added to this alien appearance, enlarging and giving exaggerated curve to his eyes. He had become an unlikely creature whose outline would momentarily baffle any casual observer. There were things out here which fed off Thennet and human alike. Captain John MacShard only needed a second's edge to survive. But that second was crucial.

He was in the air again, his batteries at maximum charge. He was now a shimmering copper angel speeding over the thirsty gra.s.s and the hungry rivers of Paradise until he was at last standing on the shale slopes of the Aghroniagh Mountains.

The range was essentially the rim of a huge steep-sided crater. At the crater's center were peculiar pockets of gases which were the by-product of certain rock dust interacting with sunlight. These gases formed a breeding and sleeping environment for the Thennet, who could only survive so long away from what the first Earth explorers had called their "clouds." Most of the gas, which had a narcotic effect on humans, was drawn down into their burrows by an ingenious system of vents and manually operated fans. It was the only machinery they used. Otherwise they were primitive enough, though inventive murderers who delighted in the slow, perverse death of anything that lived, including their own sick and wounded. Suicide was the commonest cause of death.

As Captain John MacShard raced through the crags and eventually came to the crater walls, he knew he might have a few hours left in which to save the girl. The Thennet had a way of letting the gaseswork on their human victims so that they became light-headed and cheerful. The Thennet knew how to amuse humans.

Sometimes they would let the human feel this way for days, until they began to get too sluggish.

Then they would do something which produced a sudden rush of adrenaline in their victim. And thereafter it was unimaginable nightmare. Unimaginable because no human mind could conceive of such tortures and hold the memory or its sanity. No mind, that is, except Captain John MacShard's. And it was questionable now that Captain John MacShard's mind was still in most senses human.