Champion of Mars (20 page)

They stood a moment, wrapped in each others’ warmth.

“Come on back inside,” she said. “There is someone you will be pleased to see.”

“Oh, really? Who?”

“Jord is here, and he wants to speak to you right away.”

“There are only ten minutes before the performance.”

“Then we had better go now.” She took his hand, and drew him back inside, where the crowd reverently parted. Eyes glowed with pleasure at seeing them together. They were the living proof that immortality need not be desperate; that love could bridge the gulf between humanity and the machine world of the spirits.

He was unmoved by their attention either way – he was an artist and used to life in the public eye – but he was mindful Kybele did not care for it, and so did not tarry to answer any of their polite questions. For every query he had one answer: “All will become clear,” he told them, “when the exhibition begins!”

“Y
OU REALISE THAT
I have eight minutes until I am due on stage for the exhibition?”

Jord was nervous, not his usual mood. Ordinarily he had a certain air of smugness about him, for he knew things others did not, and quite frequently more about the doings of others than they did themselves. More than one reputation had been brought low by Jord. He was a spy of the worst kind: a gossip, a scold. Nothing in the worlds of science, art and society was safe from his prying. People were afraid of him.

Today he was the one who was afraid.

“You’re hard to pin down, Ki. I went to the Library conference, but you’d already gone.”

“I have had a tiring day.”

“You mean you spoke with those interested in your work who were not invited to this exhibiton, and got it out of the way as quickly and politely as possible?”

“You know me too well, Jord. What is it you want? This is not a convenient time.”

“Listen to me, KiGrace. You pay me well for information. You have to leave Mars. Right now. How much more baldly can I put it?” His head bobbed back and forth. He was thin and immensely tall, and the effect was almost comical, like a puppet.

“Is someone following you, Jord?”

“Yes! Curse you, KiGrace,” he hissed. KiGrace habitually referred to Jord as ‘he,’ it made things simpler that way. Jord’s gender was, in truth, far more complicated than that. His polyphonic voice, blending female softness and pitch with male vibrato, was the most evident signifier of his uncertain status. KiGrace was curious as to what Jord kept under his robes, had outright propositioned him on more than one occasion; when he was sure Kybele was not to know. Jord had declined every offer.

“No one can hear us; I have invoked full privacy. The people beyond these curtains will not even see us.”

“It doesn’t matter. Everything is about to change.” He hunched over the table. It was too low for him. He was tall by Martian standards, and towered over native Earthmen. He picked up his glass, quick skeletal fingers rolling it back and forth. He nearly dropped it. A scarlet drop slopped from its rim. A blotch spread out on the cloth. He stared at it, transfixed. “That is how it will start,” he said. He pointed at the stain. “Spreading slow. But unlike the wine, it will not stop. It will never stop.”

“What are you babbling about, Jord?”

Jord licked his lips, his tongue the colour of liver. He drained his goblet. “You asked me to investigate the Technophi, their eleven-dimensional eleutheremics?”

“Yes. Yes, I did. I am interested in applying higher geometries to my art, but they would not aid me. A simple task for you, surely? What of it?”

“Listen to me, you arrogant whoreson!” His voice dropped lower, and he hunched further. “There’s a faction, right? The Arcomanni?”

KiGrace raised his eyebrows. He was getting bored with this. “I know nothing about the intrigues of the Technophi, who does? Who cares?”

“Never mind. They’ve codified all this into some new kind of discipline.”

“And? There is no practical application for eleutheremics, it is mathematics as art, that is all.”

Jord smiled a humourless smile. “Now that’s where you are wrong. They’re attempting to actually use this stuff,
practically
” – he snarled the word –“to unravel the higher-dimensional matrices. The Technophi are tearing themselves up over it. There’s some serious in-fighting going on at the Temples of Reason, and I mean actual fighting. Half a habitat laid waste, last I heard. Many dead.”

“Won’t the Federals step in?”

Jord shook his head. “Too risky, the Solists need the Technophi votes. They’ll lose them altogether if they back the wrong side, so the fucking government is hanging back, waiting to see what happens. By which time of course it will be too fucking late. Last I heard, the Arcomanni had the upper hand; they’ve built something, some kind of machine, and they’re going to turn it on.”

“What does it do?”

“Do? Do? I don’t fucking know! But the plant I have... had... he thinks it will do nothing good, oh, something to do with spatial collapse, temporal fuck ups. I think it’s something to do with how the slipships work... Oh, I don’t know! I don’t know! I only know that it’d be a good idea to be on a slipship and on your way out of the system.”

KiGrace sighed. “Jord, old friend. We live in an age of doom-mongering. Every week I hear the Technophi will blow the sun up or that we risk thinking reality out of existence by over-examining it. Why get so upset by this? It will pass. Come, stay and watch my exhibition, calm down, drink, find a lover for the evening. The morning will seem the brighter for it.”

“Shit, KiGrace, I’m seriously in peril coming here to tell you this at all. They’ve agents all over the place.”

“The spirits of Mars will protect you.”

“Yeah, and who runs the Library? It’s not the damn spirits, is it? Half of them are Technophi anyway.”

“Then why are you here at all?” said KiGrace crossly.

Jord filled his glass from a ewer on the table, a fine piece that decorated its environs with a shifting play of holographic light. He stared at the drink hard, then swallowed it all back in three long gulps. “Because you’re the only friend I have, right?” He stood. “I have passage booked to the Piscean colonies. It leaves in half an hour. I have tickets for you and for Kybele. If you won’t come, watch the sky. There should be... something.”

“I cannot possibly go with you. Later, maybe; tomorrow, definitely. Now? Impossible.”

“It’ll be too late by then. Ask the machines. They know something is up.”

KiGrace winced. “Those of Mars prefer not to be so called.”

“Fuck them and fuck their fucking pretensions! Ask them. Ask the
spirits
directly. Have you not noticed anything weird recently? Anything with their prognostications? Ask them. Something is going to happen. They
know.
Something tonight. For all I know, it might have already happened.” Jord stood to his full, soaring height. He swayed as he stood, from the wine, or his fear. His robe shifted with the movement like a sail. “KiGrace, they say they tried it before. And when they did,
something got out
.”

KiGrace snorted, then, and instantly regretted it. Jord’s face turned hostile.

“Fuck you, KiGrace, I don’t know why I care.” He turned away, flapping at the curtains around their couch, seeking a way out.

“Jord?” called KiGrace.

“Yeah?” said Jord. He did not turn back, but he did stop.

“Thank you. I appreciate your concern for me.”

Jord turned back and pulled his sleeve across his face. He was sweating despite the cold. “Right. Good luck, KiGrace.”

Jord staggered away, shoving people out of his path with his spidery fingers.

KiGrace could not get the look on his face from his mind. It lurked there, joining the memory of Kybele’s frown in an unsettling alliance.

K
I
G
RACE STEPPED INTO
the cavity at the heart of the pavilion, a circle of black in the floor, the entrance to a deep well.

The music came to a carefully timed stop. KiGrace floated a little higher in the air, so he was looking out over the assembly. He clapped his hands. Conversation stilled and all eyes turned to him.

“Ladies, gentlemen, it is time. I present to you... my exhibition.”

The pavilion’s dome turned black and curled backwards, opening the room to the sky. The musicians left. The contents of the pavilion were whisked away by servants, the permanent fittings dissolving into the floor. Then the floor, too, faded into nothing, leaving KiGrace’s delighted audience floating in the air. Together they descended into a spherical chamber of seemingly infinite size. At a thought from KiGrace, the audience floated into a sphere. This was his artistry, the blend of the Second and First Worlds. His audience could not tell what was real, and what was not. All mediated by the spirits in the Library, but it was his work. He felt a swell of pride as he set to work. He had designed this exhibition over long months, and now he wanted to share it.

Music, low and slow, started up. He grew in stature, his face becoming a silver mask, his body a sculpture of quicksilver.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned, and a chorus sang his words back at him. “You are Mars.”

The sphere of bodies glowed, an orb of dazzling light that pushed back the dark. The light dimmed. A planet hung there, new and hot. The beginning of the world they called home. Time accelerated, hundreds of thousands of years passing every second. The heavens cleared. Bombardments of meteors rained on the world. The world cooled, the oceans grew. The atmosphere thickened.

Life came.

For each participant, the exhibition was different. KiGrace believed that a guided experience was the highest form of art. Prescriptive art limited the participation of the observer, while free scenarios sidelined the creator. Only together could art, artist and audience achieve a unity. Each audience member found his own way to experience the exhibition. Some became fish in ancient seas, others meteors that met fiery ends in the sky. Some hopped from viewpoint to viewpoint, others watched from on high like gods.

At crucial moments, KiGrace had his temporal dilation effect slow, sometimes almost to real time. He did so when the world was hit by the asteroid that formed the vast basin the Southern Sea now occupied; again when the unnamed planetoid that formed the old moons of Phobos and Deimos broke apart in orbit. For the arrival of life, ten minutes, and for the final eruption of Olympus, twenty. He played the formation of the Marrin at a hundred thousand times normal speed, allowing his audience to see it gape open before their eyes, or experience their bodies being torn apart as the rocks they inhabited split.

Together they watched the planet’s first youth end. They felt it cool. They saw the last of the higher animals die in the last warm pool. Saw the planet’s core cool and still, saw the electromagnetic field flicker and go out.

A billion years of frigidity and dust followed; brief warm spells interrupted it, but the planet remained dead. KiGrace swept through this at speed, and yet still it lasted an age, purposefully so. He hounded his audience with despair, his score dolorous.

Light faded.

The sun returned, bursting around another world, a blue world. A candle flame flickered up toward them. The first rocket. It was barbarically decorated and terrifyingly primitive. More followed. The perspective swam back to Mars. They watched in awe as the first men landed upon the dead world.

Time sped again. Kanyonset was founded and grew. Mirror suns scurried into orbit one after the other, as if in a hurry to be the first to their stations. Plumes of gas gouted from the poles. Ice melted. Time slowed to show the period of comets, and the aftermath of their impacts.

Oceans grew again. Dust storms gave way to the swirling of soft white cloud. Fleets of hurrying spacecraft and asteroids fitted with engines formed a line in the sky, and a new moon grew.

Twenty-five thousand years went by. Mars flourished and softened, but always, the dead world was visible under the new, a skull under transparent flesh. KiGrace made sure of that.

They achieved the present. KiGrace had everyone’s viewpoint converge naturally. Bringing them back from their personal experiences to one shared arena was one of the hardest parts of his work, and he prided himself on his skill in it. Together, they wheeled around the planet as it was that very night, zooming over savannah, city, and ocean, up the Marrin, to the heart of Kanyonset. Along streets, jinking past unknowing passersby. Then to the spire they stood upon, up its rippled sides, and high into the sky. KiGrace let the night turn over them a moment, then had them dive quickly to the pavilion at the centre of the garden at the top.

They passed through the roof and centred on the figure of KiGrace, floating over his black circle of nothing. He allowed them to look out of his eyes, just for an instant, as he regarded them. They felt what he felt: pride, an eagerness to show and share, lust, boredom, and even his contempt, small and itself contemptible, toward the people who worshipped him.

He had the gravity field lower them to the floor gently, to cushions placed there for the purpose.

They sat up one by one, blinking and smiling.

KiGrace sank to the ground.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said softly. “You are Mars.”

He bowed to rapturous applause.

The musicians returned, as did servants, bringing with them tables and food. People clustered about him, flattering him and praising him, although all were dazed. He caught Kybele’s eye across the crowd.

She smiled at him, and mouthed. “It was wonderful.”

He smiled back, suddenly bashful, and dipped his head in a formal bow to hide the blush on his cheeks. She deserved better than him. He decided to be better.

Outside, the stars twinkled; never judging, always there.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Royal Dock

T
HE EXIT FROM
the Window of the Worlds, like the entrance, leads to a place far from the door’s physical position. Yoechakenon blinks as he emerges into bright light. The door closes behind him and disappears as if it had never been. We are in a large cavern. It is dark. Light orbs move in the air, the halo of brightness surrounding them projecting only for a few score spans, but he recognises the space he stands in, and so do I.