Broken Angels (32 page)

What happened next was hard to explain.

I heard the sound coming.

I knew with utter certainty that I was going to hear it fractions of a second before the low chime floated down out of the bubble Sun was exploring. The knowledge was a solid sensation, heard like an echo cast backward against the slow decay of passing time. If it was the Envoy intuition, it was working at a level of efficiency I'd only previously run into in dreams.

“Songspire,” said Wardani.

I listened to the echoes fade, inverting the shiver of premonition I'd just felt, and suddenly wanted very much to be back on the other side of the gate, facing the mundane dangers of the nanobe systems and the fallout from murdered Sauberville.

Cherries and mustard. An inexplicable tangle of scents spilling down in the wake of the sound. Jiang raised his Sunjet.

Sutjiadi's normally immobile features creased.

“What
is
that?”

“Songspire,” I said, spinning matter-of-factness around my own creeping unease. “Kind of Martian houseplant.”

I'd seen one once, for real, on Earth. Dug out of the Martian bedrock it had grown from over the previous several thousand years and plinthed as a rich man's objet d'art. Still singing when anything touched it, even the breeze, still giving out the cherry-and-mustard aroma. Not dead, not alive, not anything that could be categorized into a box by human science.

“How is it attached?” Wardani wanted to know.

“Growing out of the wall.” Sun's voice came back dented with a by-now-familiar wonder. “Like some kind of coral . . .”

Wardani stepped back to give herself launch space and reached for the drives on her own grav harness. The quick whine of power-up stung the air.

“I'm coming up.”

“Just a moment, Mistress Wardani.” Hand glided in to crowd her. “Sun, is there a way through up there?”

“No. Whole bubble's closed.”

“Then come back down.” He raised a hand to forestall Wardani. “We do not have
time
for this. Later, if you wish, you may come back while Sun is repairing the buoy. For now, we must find a safe transmission base before anything else.”

A vaguely mutinous expression broke across the archaeologue's face, but she was too tired to sustain it. She knocked out the grav drivers again—downwhining machine disappointment—and turned away, something muttered and bitten off drifting back over her shoulder, almost as faint as the cherries and mustard from above. She stalked a line away from the Mandrake exec toward the exit. Jiang hesitated a moment in her path, then let her by.

I sighed.

“Nice going, Hand. She's the closest thing we've got to a native guide in this”—I gestured around—“place, and you want to piss her off. They teach you that while you were getting your conflict investment doctorate? Upset the experts if you possibly can?”

“No,” he said evenly. “But they taught me not to waste time.”

“Right.” I went after Wardani and caught up just inside the corridor leading out of the chamber. “Hey, hold up. Wardani. Wardani, just chill out, will you. Man's an asshole, what are you going to do?”

“Fucking
merchant
.”

“Well, yeah. That, too. But he is the reason we're here in the first place. Should never underestimate that mercantile drive.”

“What are you, a fucking economics philosopher now?”

“I'm—” I stopped. “Listen.”

“No, I'm through with—”

“No,
listen.
” I held up a hand and pointed down the corridor. “There. Hear that?”

“I don't hear . . .” Her voice trailed off as she caught it. By then, the Carrera's Wedge neurachem had reeled in the sound for me, so clear there could be no question.

Somewhere down the corridor, something was singing.

•         •         •

Two chambers farther on, we found them. A whole bonsai songspire forest, sprouting across the floor and up the lower curve of a corridor neck where it joined the main bubble. The spires seemed to have broken through the primary structure of the vessel from the floor around the join, although there was no sign of damage at their roots. It was as if the hull material had closed around them like healing tissue. The nearest machine was a respectful ten meters off, huddled down the corridor.

The song the spires emitted was closest to the sound of a violin, but played with the infinitely slow drag of individual monofilaments across the bridge and to no melody that I could discern. It was a sound down at the lowest levels of hearing, but each time it swelled, I felt something tugging at the pit of my stomach.

“The air,” Wardani said quietly. She had raced me along the bulbous corridors and through the bubble chambers, and now she crouched in front of the spires, out of breath but shiny-eyed. “There must be convection through here from another level. They only sing on surface contact.”

I shook off an unlooked-for shiver.

“How old do you reckon they are?”

“Who knows?” She got to her feet again. “If this were a planetary grav field, I'd say a couple of thousand years at most. But it isn't.” She took a step back and shook her head, hand cupping her chin, fingers pressed over her mouth as if to keep in a too-hasty comment. I waited. Finally the hand came away from her face and gestured, hesitant. “Look at the branching pattern. They don't. They don't usually grow like this. Not this twisted.”

I followed her pointing finger. The tallest of the spires stood about chest high, spindly reddish black stone limbs snaking out of the central trunk in a profusion that did seem more exuberant and intricate than the growth I'd seen on the plinthed specimen back on Earth. Surrounding it, other, smaller spires emulated the pattern, except that—

The rest of the party caught up, Deprez and Hand in the van.

“Where the hell have you . . . Oh.”

The faint singing from the spires crept up an almost imperceptible increment. Air currents stirred by the movement of bodies across the chamber. I felt a slight dryness in my throat at the sound they made.

“I'm just looking at these, if that's okay, Hand.”

“Mistress Wardani—”

I shot the exec a warning glance.

Deprez came up beside the archaeologue. “Are they dangerous?”

“I don't know. Ordinarily, no, but—”

The thing that had been scratching for attention at the threshold of my consciousness suddenly emerged.

“They're growing toward each other. Look at the branches on the smaller ones. They all reach up and out. The taller ones branch in all directions.”

“That suggests communication of some sort. An integrated, self-relating system.” Sun walked around the cluster of spires, scanning with the emissions tracer on her arm. “Though, hmm.”

“You won't find any radiation,” said Wardani, almost dreamily. “They suck it in like sponges. Total absorption of everything except red wave light. According to mineral composition, the surface of these things shouldn't be red at all. They ought to reflect right across the spectrum.”

“But they don't.” Hand made it sound as if he were thinking of having the spires detained for the transgression. “Why is that, Mistress Wardani?”

“If I knew that, I'd be a Guild President by now. We know less about songspires than practically any other aspect of the Martian biosphere. In fact, we don't even know if you can rank them in the biosphere.”

“They grow, don't they?”

I saw Wardani sneer. “So do crystals. That doesn't make them alive.”

“I don't know about the rest of you,” said Ameli Vongsavath, skirting the songspires with her Sunjet cocked at a semi-aggressive angle. “But this looks to me like an infestation.”

“Or art,” murmured Deprez. “How would we know?”

Vongsavath shook her head. “This is a ship, Luc. You don't put your corridor art where you'll trip over it every time you walk through. Look at these things. They're all over the place.”

“And if you can fly through?”

“They'd still get in the way.”

“Collision art,” suggested Schneider with a smirk.

“All right, that's enough.” Hand waved himself some space between the spires and their new audience. Faint notes awoke as the motion brushed air currents against the red stone branches. The musk in the air thickened. “We do not have—”

“—time for this,” droned Wardani. “We must find a safe transmission base.”

Schneider guffawed. I bit back a grin and avoided looking in Deprez's direction. I suspected that Hand's control was crumbling and I wasn't keen to push him over the edge at this point. I still wasn't sure what he'd do when he snapped.

“Sun.” The Mandrake exec's voice came out even enough. “Check the upper openings.”

The systems specialist nodded and powered up her grav harness. The whine of the drivers cut in and then deepened as her boot soles unstuck from the floor and she drifted upward. Jiang and Deprez circled out, Sunjets raised to cover her.

“No way through here,” she called back down from the first opening.

I heard the change, and my eyes slanted back to the songspires. Wardani was the only one watching me and she saw my face. Behind Hand's back, her mouth opened in a silent question. I nodded at the spires and cupped my ear.

Listen.

Wardani move closer, then shook her head.

Hissing. “That's not poss—”

But it was.

The faint, violin-scraped sound of the song was modulating. Reacting to the constant underpinning drone of the grav drivers. That, or maybe the grav field itself. Modulating and, very faintly, strengthening.

Waking up.

CHAPTER THIRTY–TWO

We found Hand's safe transmission base four songspire clusters and about another hour later. By then we'd started to hook back toward the docking bay, following a tentative map that Sun's Nuhanovic scanners were building on her arm. The mapping software didn't like Martian architecture any more than I did, that much was apparent from the long pauses every time Sun loaded in a new set of data. But with a couple of hours' wandering behind us, and some inspired interfacing from the systems specialist, the program was able to start making some educated guesses of its own about where we should be looking. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was dead right.

Climbing out of a massive spiraling tube whose gradient was too steep for human comfort, Sun and I staggered to a halt at the edge of a fifty-meter-broad platform that was seemingly exposed to raw space on all sides. A crystal-clear open starfield curved overhead and down around us, interrupted only by the bones of a gaunt central structure reminiscent of a Millsport dockyard crane. The sense of exposure to the outside was so complete I felt my throat lock up momentarily in vacuum combat reflex at the sight. My lungs, still straining from the climb, flapped weakly in my chest.

I broke the reflex.

“Is that a force field?” I asked Sun, panting.

“No, it's solid.” She frowned over the forearm display. “Transparent alloy, about a meter thick. That's very impressive. No distortion. Total direct visual control. Look, there's your gate.”

It stood in the starscape over our heads, a curiously oblong satellite of grayish blue light creeping across the darkness.

“This has got to be the docking control turret,” Sun decided, patting her arm and turning slowly. “What did I tell you. Nuhanovic smart mapping. They don't make it any bet—”

Her voice dried up. I looked sideways and saw how her eyes had widened, focused on something farther ahead. Following her gaze to the skeletal structure at the center of the platform, I saw the Martians.

“You'd better call the others up,” I said distantly.

They were hung over the platform like the ghosts of eagles tortured to death, wings spread wide, caught up in some kind of webbing that swung eerily in stray air currents. There were only two, one hoisted close to the highest extent of the central structure, the other not much above human head height. Moving warily closer, I saw that the webbing was metallic, strung with instrumentation whose purposes made no more overt sense than the machines we'd passed in the bubble chambers.

I passed another outcrop of songspires, most of them not much over knee height. They barely got a second glance. Behind me, I heard Sun yelling down the spiral to the rest of the party. Her raised voice seemed to violate something in the air. Echoes chased each other around the dome. I reached the lower of the two Martians, and stood beneath the body.

Of course, I'd seen them before. Who hasn't? You get input with this stuff from kindergarten upward. The Martians. They've replaced the mythological creatures of our own picket-fenced Earth-bound heritage, the gods and demons we once used for the foundations of our legends.
Impossible to overestimate,
wrote Gretzky, back when he apparently still had some balls,
the sideswiping blow that this discovery dealt our sense of belonging in the universe, and our sense that the universe in some way belonged to us.

•         •         •

The way Wardani laid it out for me, one desert evening on the balcony at Roespinoedji's warehouse:

Bradbury, 2089 precolonial reckoning. The founder-heroes of human antiquity are exposed for the pig-ignorant mall bullies they probably always were, as decoding of the first Martian datasystems brings in evidence of a starfaring culture at least as old as the whole human race. The millennial knowledge out of Egypt and China starts to look like a ten-year-old child's bedroom datastack. The wisdom of the ages shredded at a stroke into the pipe-cooked musings of a bunch of canal-dive barflies. Lao-tzu, Confucius, Jesus Christ, Muhammad—what did these guys know? Parochial locals, never even been off the planet. Where were
they
when the Martians were crossing interstellar space?

Of course—
a sour grin out of one corner of Wardani's mouth
—established religion lashed back. The usual strategies. Incorporate the Martians into the scheme of things, scour the scriptures or make up some new ones, reinterpret. Failing that, lacking the gray matter for that much effort, just deny the whole thing as the work of evil forces and firebomb anyone who says otherwise. That ought to work.

But it didn't work.

For a while it looked as if it might. Upwelling hysteria brought sectarian violence, and the recently established university departments of xenology were frequently up in flames. Armed escorts for noted archaeologues and a fair few campus firefights between fundamentalists and the public order police. Interesting times for the student body. . . .

Out of it all, the new faiths arose. Most of them not that much different from the old faiths by all accounts, and just as dogmatic. But underlying, or maybe floating uneasily atop, came a groundswell of secular belief in something that was a little harder to define than God.

Maybe it was the wings. A cultural archetype so deep—
angels, demons, Icarus, and countless idiots like him off towers and cliffs until we finally got it right
—that humanity clung to it.

Maybe there was just too much at stake. The astrogation charts with their promise of new worlds we could just
go to
, assured of a terrestroid destination because, well,
it says so here.

Whatever it was, you had to call it faith. It wasn't knowledge; the Guild wasn't that confident of its translation back then, and you don't launch hundreds of thousands of stored minds and clone embryos into the depths of interstellar space without something a lot stronger than a theory.

It was faith in the essential workability of the New Knowledge. In place of the terracentric confidence of human science and its ability to Work It All Out someday, a softer trust in the overarching edifice of Martian Knowledge that would, like an indulgent father, let us get out into the ocean and drive the boat for real. We were heading out the door, not as children grown and leaving home for the first time, but as toddlers gripping trustingly with one chubby fist at the talon of Martian civilization. There was a totally irrational sense of safety and wrapped-up warmth to the whole process. That, as much as Hand's much-vaunted economic liberalization, was what drove the diaspora.

Three-quarters of a million deaths on Adoracion changed things. That, and a few other geopolitical shortcomings that cropped up with the rise of the Protectorate. Back on Earth, the old faiths slammed down, political and spiritual alike, iron-bound tomes of authority to live by.
We have lived loosely, and a price must be paid. In the name of stability and security, things must be run with a firm hand now.

Of that brief flourishing of enthusiasm for all things Martian, very little remains. Wycinski and his pioneering team are centuries gone, hounded out of university posts and funding and in some cases actually murdered. The Guild has drawn into itself, jealously guarding what little intellectual freedom the Protectorate allows it. The Martians are reduced from anything approaching a full understanding to two virtually unrelated precipitates. On the one hand a textbook-dry series of images and notes, as much data as the Protectorate deems socially appropriate. Every child dutifully learns what they looked like, the splayed anatomy of their wings and skeleton, the flight dynamics, the tedious minutiae of mating and young-rearing, the reconstructions in virtual of their plumage and coloring, drawn from the few visual records we've managed to access or filled in with Guild guesses. Roost emblems, probable clothing. Colorful, easily digestible stuff. Not much sociology. Too poorly understood, too undefined, too volatile—and besides, do people really want to bother themselves with all that . . . ?

“Knowledge tossed away,” she said, shivering a little in the desert chill. “Willful ignorance in the face of something we might have to work to understand.”

At the other end of the fractionating column the more esoteric elements gather. Weird religious offshoots, whispered legend, and word of mouth from the digs. Here, something of what the Martians were to us once has remained—here, their impact can be described in murmured tones. Here they can be named as Wycinski once named them:
the New Ancients, teaching us the real meaning of that word. Our mysteriously absent winged benefactors, swooping low to brush the nape of our civilization's neck with one cold wingtip, to remind us that six or seven thousand years of patchily recorded history isn't what they call ancient around
here.

•         •         •

This Martian was dead.

A long time dead, that much was apparent. The body had mummified in the webbing, wings turned parchment-thin, head dried out to a long narrow skull whose beak gaped half open. The eyes were blackened in their backward-slashed sockets, half hidden by the draped membrane of the eyelids. Below the beak, the thing's skin bulged out in what I guessed must have been the throat gland. Like the wings, it looked paper-thin and translucent.

Under the wings, angular limbs reached across the webbing and delicate-looking talons grasped at instrumentation. I felt a tiny surge of admiration. Whatever this thing had been, it had died at the controls.

“Don't touch it,” snapped Wardani from behind me, and I became aware that I was reaching upward to the lower edge of the webbing frame.

“Sorry.”

“You will be, if the skin crumbles. There's an alkaline secretion in their subcutaneous fat layers that runs out of control when they die. Kept in balance by food oxidation during life, we think, but it's strong enough to dissolve most of a corpse, given a decent supply of water vapor.” As she spoke, she was moving around the webbing frame with the automatic caution of what must have been Guild training. Her face was utterly intent, eyes never shifting from the winged mummy above us. “When they die like this, it just eats through the fat and dries out to a powder. Very corrosive if you breathe it in, or get it in your eyes.”

“Right.” I moved back a couple of steps. “Thanks for the advance warning.”

She shrugged. “I didn't expect to find them here.”

“Ships have crews.”

“Yeah, Kovacs, and cities have populations. We've still only ever found a couple of hundred intact Martian corpses in over four centuries of archaeology on three dozen worlds.”

“Shit like that in their systems, I'm not surprised.” Schneider had wandered over and was rubbernecking on the other side of the space below the webbing frame. “So what happened to this stuff if they just didn't eat for a while?”

Wardani shot him an irritated glance. “We don't know. Presumably the process would start up.”

“That must have hurt,” I said.

“Yes, I imagine it would.” She didn't really want to talk to either of us. She was entranced.

Schneider failed to take the hint. Or maybe he just needed the babble of voices to cover the huge stillness in the air around us and the gaze of the winged thing above us. “How come they'd end up with something like that? I mean”—he guffawed—“it's not exactly evolutionarily selective, is it? Kills you if you're hungry.”

I looked up at the desiccated, spread-eagled corpse again, feeling a fresh surge of the respect I'd first felt when I realized the Martians had died at their posts. Something indefinable happened in my head, something that my Envoy senses recognized as the intuitive shimmer at the edge of understanding.

“No, it's selective,” I realized as I spoke. “It would have driven them. It would have made them the toughest motherfuckers in the sky.”

I thought I spotted a faint smile crossing Tanya Wardani's face. “You should publish, Kovacs. That kind of intellectual insight.”

Schneider smirked.

“In fact,” the archaeologue said, falling into gentle lecture mode while she stared at the mummified Martian, “the current evolutionary argument for this trait is that it helped keep crowded roosts hygienic. Vasvik and Lai, couple of years ago. Before that, most of the Guild agreed it would deter skin-feeding parasites and infection. Vasvik and Lai wouldn't actually dispute that, they're just jockeying for pole position. And of course there is the overarching toughest-motherfuckers-in-the-sky hypothesis, which a number of Guild Masters have elaborated, though none quite as elegantly as you, Kovacs.”

I tipped her a bow.

“Do you think we can get her down?” Wardani wondered aloud, standing back to get a better look at the cables the webbing frame depended from.

“Her?”

“Yeah. It's a roost guardian. See the spur on the wing? That bone ridge on the back of the skull? Warrior caste. They were all female as far as we know.” The archaeologue looked up at the cabling again. “Think we can get this thing working?”

“Don't see why not.” I raised my voice to carry across the platform. “Jiang. You see anything like a winch on that side?”

Jiang looked upward, then shook his head.

“What about you, Luc?”

“Mistress Wardani!”

“Speaking of motherfuckers,” muttered Schneider. Matthias Hand was striding across to join the congregation beneath the spread-eagled corpse.

“Mistress Wardani, I hope you weren't thinking of doing anything other than look at this specimen.”

“Actually,” the archaeologue told him, “we're looking for a way to winch it down. Got a problem with that?”

“Yes, Mistress Wardani, I do. This ship, and everything it contains, is the property of the Mandrake Corporation.”

“Not until the buoy sings, it isn't. That's what you told us to get us in here, anyway.”