In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (29 page)

I can’t even get the gumption up to close my eyes!
his mind gibbered at him.

The whole formation turned downward like a giant spiraling corkscrew, or a tornado’s cone-shape—but one made of golden feathers. Acceleration pinned him back against the high cantle of the saddle, and the darkness of the tunnel went by with a rushing impetus that made his eyes water even behind the goggles. He screamed into the living oxygen mask, regardless of its fretful tightening.

Light grew in a circle below him, growing with speed that was even more terrifying than the original plunge, until he saw it was the end of the shaft and an exit into some vast, dimly lit space. A
boom . . . boom . . . boom
sounded, over and over again.

Then his own
Paiteng
was through, and its wings flashed open like lightning; and like lightning it was followed by the sound of a thundercrack
BOOM!
as air compressed and exploded beneath them. The saddle punished him again as the great bird killed its speed like an osprey ending its stoop, and then they were gliding along above the stone surface of a great cavern. It towered away on either side, a huge bubble in the fabric of the volcano; the birds flared their wings forward and landed, hopping to shed the last of their momentum. Jeremy waited, humiliatingly conscious that his full bladder had gotten the best of him.

Two of the black-clad Martians came and unstrapped him, pulling him out of the saddle; on Earth the drop from the shoulders of the bird would have been a bit of a challenge, since its head rested ten feet above the ground, but even in his weakened state it wasn’t too bad here. Attendants led the bird off with the others; they flapped up onto giant perches that ran around the interior of the chamber, over sand trays that caught their droppings . . . and evidently recycled them, from the disturbing ripples that went through the fine dust.
De’ming
pushed a cart around, throwing the
Paiteng
gobbets of unidentifiable meat; they grabbed them out of the air, caroling pleasure. A few simply stuck their heads beneath a wing and slept.

One of the Martians peeled the oxygen mask off Jeremy’s face and threw it into a bin, where it crawled into a cell-like container and stuck its mouth into the feed line.

“Water,” he croaked, after several tries. Then as the Martian simply looked at him: “Water. I’m of the
vaz-Terranan
. We come from the Wet World. We need more than you do. Water, or I’ll die.”

The other nodded. “We went to all the trouble of getting him; best not to let him die, yet.”

Jesus, I wish he hadn’t added that. “Yet” is an ugly word
.

The other wrinkled her nose. “He is already very wet; why does he waste liquid so?” she said, but grudgingly held her flask to his lips.

He sucked at it—it was faintly salty, the way Martians preferred water, and there was a rank undertaste, and it was the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted in his life. Some of it went up his nose, but he didn’t even pause to cough; he could feel his abused tissues soaking it up and coming back to life, like wilted buffalo grass in a dry year back home. When the hand tried to withdraw it, he bit down with savage strength to suck the last drops out.

The impact of the water on his empty stomach almost made him throw up, but he mastered the impulse, and after a few seconds it gave him the strength to stumble along rather than be dragged as his blinding headache receded a bit. The two who frog-marched him along were standard Martians; they were about his height, but normally he could have picked them both up and cracked them together like eggs. Teyud was the only Martian he’d ever touched who didn’t convey that feeling of fragility. But right now, a squad of medium-sized kittens could have handled him easily; not to mention the other rider following along behind with a dart pistol aimed at his buttocks. It
probably
had nonlethals in its magazine.

So an attempt to escape wouldn’t be really practical right now even if he was in tip-top shape. He concentrated on getting his wits back instead.

The huge chamber might have started as a natural bubble in the rock; hands had shaped it into a perfect hemisphere of marooncolored
stone polished to a high gloss that reflected rows of glow-globes, until it was like a great aquarium filled with diluted blood. There were about a hundred of the
Paiteng
there, including some so small that they must be juveniles; others were being flown in circuits around the perimeter of the chamber, or put through maneuvers—probably some sort of training or drill. There was room for many more of the riding birds, hundreds, possibly a thousand, but most of the perches were bare, and the sand pits beneath them swept and empty. The place had a faint ammonia stink, but much less than he would have expected.

One large tunnel with fretwork gates led out of the chamber; it was big enough for the birds to fly in, single file, and he suspected it cut through to the surface of the mountain city. Other exits were smaller, though still usually with generously high ceilings; Martian buildings were the first ones he’d ever been in that didn’t make him feel that six foot six was somehow too tall.

The escort party took him down one of those exits, then into a room with something like an adjustable recliner in it, and enough glow-globes to make its smooth white ceramic surfaces shine brightly. A Martian woman in a white robe and headdress waited there; shelves and cabinets held instruments of ceramic and steel and living tissue that squirmed or just lay twitching slightly; there were colored anatomical diagrams hung from the walls, and several of the bound-at-the-top Martian books as well as the inevitable
atanj
set on a desk that was made from a single block of polished hematite.

It might have been a dentist’s office, or a doctor’s . . . or a torture chamber. He dug in his heels a bit, but the three
Paiteng
fliers lifted him into the chair, stripped off his clothes, and strapped him down, with his head in a clamp. The white-robed Martian came and looked at him; she had a reflector attached to her forehead with a headband and a thin furry-feathery thing coiled around her neck.

That was a
little
reassuring; the creature was the Martian equivalent of a stethoscope. But not very reassuring, since nobody here had ever come up with an equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath. If you wanted to torture someone here, you just hired a neurologist, or commissioned your own G.P. if you were feeling cheap.

“You are agitated, in anticipation of pain, damage, or death.
This worry is premature as yet. I am to examine and, if necessary, treat you. There will be little pain.”

“May I have some more water?” he asked.

She ran a tube into his mouth. “Do not attempt to rehydrate with excessive speed,” she said. “As so often happens, desire may outrun capacity.”

Then she began
doing
things. Even the normal doctor-style prodding and poking was harder to take when he couldn’t move his head; the rest of the examination involved things that wiggled and felt slimy and waxy, and they were applied in ways that were . . .

Intrusive
, he thought, gritting his teeth.
That’s really sort of intrusive
.

Occasionally the Martian doctor muttered something under her breath; he caught technicalities about temperature and blood pressure, and an occasional exclamation of “interesting!”

Another presence came into the room. A face leaned over him briefly; a Martian man—or so he thought, it was hard to be certain sometimes if you didn’t have time to look for telltale signs like the Adam’s apple. The face was not quite the standard form; the eyes were even larger, the chin more pointed, and the bone structure a little less frail. This one’s silken, raven black hair was held by a set of jade-and-gold pins tipped with tourmalines, and his fingers were each capped with metal fretwork cups like elongated thimbles. Jeremy had never seen a Martian quite so pale, though. It was impossible to estimate the other’s age, except that he wasn’t extremely ancient.

The gaze was wholly impersonal, the face immobile even by Martian standards. After a second, it withdrew; he felt a few contacts, as if those thimble-finger-covers had been gently prodded into him here and there. The doctor and the newcomer spoke, but he had trouble following it. Besides their voices being soft and low-pitched by his standards, they spoke an archaic dialect of Demotic; he supposed it was the same one that colored Teyud’s voice, but much stronger. If he hadn’t had some acquaintance with the High Speech, he wouldn’t have been able to follow it at all.

“With a
Terran
?” the aristocratic face grimaced. “Why not intercourse with something more comely, such as a nomad from the Deep Beyond? Or one of their
rakza
.”

Another of those metallic pokes, and he went on, “It has hair over huge sections of its body, like a
vash
.”

A
vash
was the little kangaroo-ratlike jumper, one of the few mammals to be very successful on Mars, if you didn’t count the hominids. And if you considered being a fast-breeding snack at the bottom of the carnivorous food-chain to be success.

The doctor replied, “I am not qualified to speak to that person’s tastes in erotic entertainment, but the evidence of parareproductive intromission in the recent past is plain. There are traces—secretions, hairs and skin flakes—on the Terran’s reproductive organ and adjacent areas, traces specifically of an individual who evidences Thoughtful Grace ancestry mixed with the Imperial strain. The traces are from a female. I have never seen a sample of the Tollamune genome even approximately as pure, but the gene markers are very clear even to a cursory examination.”

The disdainful face leaned over him. “It is highly probable you speak the Real World’s language, Terran subsapient?”

“My sentiments of affectionate respect for you are also unbounded,” Jeremy replied.

“Do not express insolence. Fear me instead,” the man said.

He flicked a wrist, and something long and thin uncoiled from it. The animal looked like a snake covered in very fine feathers with a spikelike beak, and it buried that in his chest with one quick vicious stab.

Fire ran out from it. Jeremy could feel the flame following the tracery of his veins, until it seemed to be penetrating down to his capillaries, hair-thin traceries of intolerable heat. His body convulsed against the bonds, hard enough to draw blood from the padded straps. The pain was too great for a scream; he could only grunt. A few seconds later, and an eternity, he blacked out.

When he came to, the pain was gone; nothing lingered but an itching around the little wound. The blackness must have been over quickly, because the doctor was still speaking with an aggrieved note in her voice.

“I cannot be responsible if the subject dies,” she warned. “It has already been stressed and dehydrated and, as far as I can tell, is somewhat debilitated. Also, its metabolism is not identical to that of our species, and there may be atypical and unpredictable reactions to even such moderate excruciation.”

Moderate! Jesus!

“I note your concerns and will take them into consideration,” the man said. He leaned over Jeremy again. “Do you fear me, Terran?”

“Yes,” he replied shortly.

It was the truth, anyway. He
never
wanted to feel that again!

“You were in the company of one calling herself Teyud za-Zhalt during the past month, commencing in Zar-tu-Kan?”

“Yes.”

“You apparently sprang into the path of a capture net aimed at her. Why was this?”

“To save her.”

The Martian flicked his wrist again; the pain-thing reared upright and hissed.

“It is obvious that I seek your motivations. Do not try my patience with evasive verbalisms again. I have expended much patience over the last few decades and my supply grows thin. I desire to know—metaphorical mode—if you are a Consort, an Initiator, a Boycott, or simply a first-line Brute in this game.”

“I . . .” He paused, feeling his way through the nuances of the language as if it were scattered with pits full of vipers; and he’d never spent much time on
atanj
, either. “I feel a considerable emotional commitment to Teyud za-Zhalt; a pair-bonding.”

“Is this sentiment reciprocated? Will she alter her aims and behavior to prevent your death or excruciation?”

Oh, I really don’t like the sound of
excruciation.
It sounds almost as bad as
yet.

“I am not sure,” he said at last. “She has explicitly confirmed it, and I strongly suspect that she is sincere, but I am uncertain as to the extent and degree of her commitment. I cannot accurately predict her behavior in the hypothetical case you postulate.”

“Still, this promises some profit from an otherwise futile expedition,” the man said. His head turned to the doctor. “I feel less revengeful spite toward my operatives than I at first anticipated. What is the likelihood of a successful infestation?”

“With the control parasite?” the doctor said.

She frowned absently as Jeremy jerked involuntarily against his bonds. Something sharp touched him on one arm, and he relaxed—felt all conscious control of his muscles vanish, in fact.

“Yes. Infestation for excruciation and death would be counterproductive
at this point, although I admit it would to a high degree of probability be amusing and novel.”

Errkkk!
he thought.

“Subtle differences in neurochemistry and immune-system response make the probability of complete success no better than one in three,” the doctor said. “Such is the record of the Imperial physician’s work with the
vaz-Terranan
of the base here—failures being defined as ranging from severe loss of neurological function to death, continuing with new subjects even with extensive experimental adjustment. I have less experience and my probability of success would be lower, particularly on a first attempt. Still, it would be an interesting exercise.”