The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight (80 page)

"I know. I've always known. But that's what this bloody world needs. Really needs. Women, Faisal. Women. Leave men together and they soon agree to make a wasteland. Women are a civilising force."

We rounded an abrupt turn in the canal and came upon a scene that silenced even Count Jack. A battle had been fought here, a war of total commitment and destruction. But who had won, who had lost; we could not tell. Uliri War Tripods lay draped like over ledges and arches like desiccated spiders. The wrecks of skymasters were impaled on stone spires, wedged into rock clefts and groins. Shards of armour, human and Uliri, littered the canyon floor. Helmets and cuirasses were empty, long since picked clean by whatever scavengers hid from the light of the distant sun to gnaw and rend in the night. We stood in a landscape of hull plates, braces, struts, smashed tanks and tangles of wiring and machinery we could not begin to identify. Highest, most terrible of all, the hulk of a space ship, melted with the fires of re-entry, smashed like soft fruit, lay across the canyon, rim to rim. Holes big enough to fly a skymaster through had been punched through the hull, side to side.

Count Jack raised his eyes to the fallen space ship, then his hands.

"Dear God. I may never play the Hammersmith Palais again."

Chimes answered him, a tintinnabulation of metal ringing on metal. This was the final madness. This was when I understood that we were dead – that we had died in the skymaster crash – and that war was Hell. Then I felt the ground tremble beneath the soles of my good black concert shoes and I understood. Metal rang on metal, wreckage on wreckage. The earth shook, dust rose. The spoilage of war started to stir, and move. The ground shook, my feet were unsteady, there was nothing to hold on to, no surety except Count Jack. We held each other as the dust rose before us and the scrap started to slide and roll. Higher the ground rose, and higher and that was the third time I almost killed him for I still did not fully understand what was happening and imagined that if I stopped Jack, I would stop the madness. This was his doing; he had somehow summoned some old Martian evil from the ground. Then a shining conical drill-head emerged from the soil and the dust and rocks tumbled as the molemachine emerged from the ground. It rose twenty, thirty feet above us, a gimlet-nosed cylinder of soil-scabbed metal. Then it put out metal feet from hatches along its belly, fell forward and came to rest a stone's throw from us. Hatches sprang open behind the still-spinning drill head, fanned out like flower petals. I glimpsed silver writhing in the interior darkness. Uliri padvas streamed out, their tentacles carrying them dexterously over the violated metal and rock. Their cranial cases were helmeted, their breathing mantles armoured in delicately worked cuirasses and their palps held ray-rifles. We threw our hands up. They swarmed around us and, without a sound, herded us into the dark maw of the Martian mole-machine.

T
he spidercar deposited us at a platform of heat-ray polished sandstone before the onyx gates. The steel tentacle-tips of our guards clacked on the mirror rock. The gates stood five times human height – they must have been overpowering to the shorter Uliri, and were divided in three according to Uliri architecture and decorated with beautiful patterns of woven tentacles in high relief, as complex as Celtic knot-work. A dot of light appeared at the centre of the gates and split into three lines, a bright 'Y'. They swung slowly outward and upwards. There was no other possibility than to enter.

How blind we humans had been, how sure that our mastery of sky and space gave us mastery of this world. The Uliri had not been driven back by our space bombardments and massed skymaster strikes, they had been driven
deep
. Even as the great Hives of Syrtia and Tempe stood shattered and burning, Uliri proles had been delving deeper even than the roots of their areo-thermal cores, down toward the still warm lifeblood of their world, tapping into its mineral and energy resources. Downward and outward; hive to nest to manufactory, underground redoubt to subterranean fortress, a network of tunnels and delvings and underground vacuum-tubes that reached so far, so wide, so deep that Tharsia was like sponge. Down there, in the magma-warmed dark, they built a society far beyond the reach of our space-bombs. Biding their time, drawing their plans together, sending their tendrils under our camps and command centres and bases; gathering their volcano-forged forces against us.

I remembered little of the journey in the mole-machine except that it was generally downward, interminable long and smelled strongly of acetic acid. Count Jack, with his sensitivities, discreetly covered his nose and mouth with his handkerchief. I could not understand his reticence: the Uliri had thousands of better reasons to have turned us to ash than affront at their personal perfume.

Our captors were neither harsh nor kind. Those are both human emotions. The lesson that we were slow to learn after the Horsell Common attack was that Martian emotions are Martian. They do not have love, anger, despair, the desire for revenge, jealousy. They did not attack us from hate, or defend themselves from love. They have their own needs and motivations and emotions. So they only seemed to gently usher us from the open hatches of the mole-machine (one among hundreds, lined up in silos, aimed at the upper world) into a vast underground dock warm with heart-rock, and along a pier to a station, where a spider-shaped glass car hung by many arms from a monorail. The spider-car accelerated with jolting force. We plunged into a lightless tunnel, then we were in the middle of an underground city, tier upon tier of lighted windows and roadways tumbling down to a red-lit mist. Through underwater waterfalls, through vast cylindrical farms bright with the light of the lost sun. Over marshalling yards and parade grounds as dense with padvas as the shore is with sand grains. Factories, breeding vats, engineering plants sparkling with welding arcs and molten steel. I saw pits miles deep, braced with buttresses and arches and spires, down and down and down, like a cathedral turned inside out. Those slender stone vaults and spires were festooned with winged horrors – those same four-winged monsters that had plucked us out the sky and so casually, so easily dismembered our crew. And allowed us to live.

I had no doubt that we had been chosen. And I had no doubt why we were chosen.

Over another jarring switch-over, through another terrifying, roaring tunnel, and then out into a behemoth gallery of launch silos: hundreds of them, side by side, each loaded with fat rocket-ships stiff with gun turrets and missile racks. I feared for our vaunted Spacefleet, and realising that, feared more for myself. Not even the alien values of the Uliri would show us so much if there were even the remotest possibility we could return the information to the Commanderie.

Count Jack realised it in the same instant.

"Christ on crutches, Faisal," he whispered.

On and on, through the riddled, maggoty, mined and tunnelled and bored and reamed under-Mars. And now the onyx gates stood wide and the padvas fell into a guard around us and prodded us through them. The polished sandstone now formed a long catwalk. On each side rose seats, tier upon tier of obsidian egg-cups. Each held an Uliri; proles, gestates, padvas, panjas; arranged by mantle colour and rank. From the detail of the etchings on their helmets and carapace covers, I guessed them to be of the greatest importance. A parliament, a conclave, a cabinet. But the true power was at the end of the long walk: the Queen of Noctis herself. No image had ever been captured, no corpse or prisoner recovered, of an Uliri Queen. They were creatures of legend. The reality in every way transcended our myth-making imaginations. She was immense. She filled the chamber like a sunrise. Her skin was golden; her mantle patterned with soft diamond-shaped scales like fairy armour. Relays of inseminators carried eggs from her tattooed multiple ovipositors, slathering them in luminous milt. Rings of rank and honour had been pierced through her eyelids and at the base of her tentacles. Her cuirass and helmet glowed with jewels and finest filigree. She was a thing of might, majesty and incontestable beauty. Our dress heels click-clacked on the gleaming stone.

"With me, Faisal," whispered Count Jack. "Quick smart." The guard stopped but Count Jack strode forward. He snapped to attention. Every royal eye fixed on him. He clicked his heels and gave a small, formal bow. I was a heartbeat behind him. "It's all small beer after the Pope."

A tentacle snaked toward us. I resisted the urge to step back, even when the skin of the palp retraced and there, there was a human head. And not any human head: the head of Yuzbashi Osman, the music lover of Camp Oudeman, whom we had last seen leading the bold and stirring – and ultimately futile – charge against the padva hordes. Now the horror was complete. The Yuzbashi opened his eyes and let out a gasping sigh. The head looked me up and down, then gave Count Jack a deeper scrutiny.

"Count Jack Fitzgerald of Kildare-upon-Ireland. Welcome. I am Nehenner Repooltu Sevenniggog Dethprip; by right, battle and acclaim the uncontested Queen of Noctis. And I am your number one fan."

* * *

O
ne finger of rum in Count Jack's particular tea. And then, for luck, for war, for insanity, I slipped in another one. I knocked, waited for his call and entered his dressing room. We might be somewhere in the warren of chambers beneath the Hall of the Martian Queen, miles beneath the sands of Mars, but the forms must be observed. The forms were all we had.

"Dear boy!" Uliri architecture did not accommodate human proportions. Proles had been at work – the prickly tang of scorched stone was strong – but I still had to duck to get through the door. Count Jack sat before a mirror of heat-ray polished obsidian. He adjusted the sit of his white bow tie. He filled the tiny cubby-hole but he still took the tea with an operatic flourish and took a long, County Kildare slurp.

"Ah! Grand! Grand. My resolve is stiffened to the sticking point. By God, I shall have need of it today. Did you slip a little extra in, you sly boy?"

"I did Maestro."

"Surprisingly good rum. And the tea is acceptable. I wonder where they got it from?"

"Ignorance is bliss, Maestro."

"You're right there." He drained the cup. "And how is the piano?"

"Like the rum. Only I think they made it themselves."

"They're good at delicate work, the worker-drone thingies. Those tentacle-tips are fine and dexterous. Natural master craftsmen. I wonder if they would make good pianists? Faisal? Dear God, listen to me, listen to me! Here we are, like a wind-up musical box, set up to amuse and titivate. A song, a tune, a dance or two. Us, the last vestige of beauty on this benighted planet, dead and buried in some vile subterranean cephalopod vice-pit. Does anyone even know we're alive? Help us for God's sake, help us! Ferid Bey, he'll do something. He must. At the very least, he'll start looking for us when the money doesn't materialise."

"I expect Ferid Bey has already collected the insurance." I took the cup and saucer. Our predicament was so desperate, so monstrous that we dared not look it full in the face. The Queen of Noctis had left us in no doubt that we were to entertain her indefinitely; singing birds in a cage. Never meet the fans. That was one of Count Jack's first homilies to me. Fans think they own you.

"Bastard!" Count Jack thundered. "Bastarding bastard! He shall die, he shall die. When I get back..." Then he realised that we would never get back, that we might never feel the wan warmth of the small, distant sun; that these low tunnels might be our home for the rest of our lives – and each other the only human face we would ever see. He wept, bellowing like a bullock. "Can this be the swan-song of Count Jack Fitzgerald? Prostituting myself for some super-ovulating Martian squid queen? Oh the horror the horror! Leave me, Faisal. Leave me. I must prepare."

The vinegar smell of the Uliri almost made me gag as I stepped on to the stage. I have always had a peculiar horror of vinegar. Lights dazzled me but my nose told me there must be thousands of Uliri on the concert hall's many tiers. Uliri language is as much touch and mantle-colour as it is spoken sounds and the auditorium fistled with the dry-leaf rustling of tentacle on tentacle. I flipped out my tails, seated myself at the piano, ran a few practice scales. It was a very fine piano indeed. The tuning was perfect, the weight and responsiveness of the keys extraordinary. I saw a huge golden glow suffuse the rear of the vast hall. The Queen had arrived on her floating grav-throne. My hands shook with futile rage. Who had given her the right to be Count Jack's Number One fan? She had explained, in her private chamber, a pit filled with sweet and fragrant oil in which she basked, her monstrous weight supported, how she had first heard the music of Count Jack Fitzgerald. Rather, the head of poor Osman explained. When she had been a tiny fry in the Royal Hatchery – before the terrible internecine wars of the queens, in which only one could survive – she had become intrigued by Earth after the defeat of the Third Uliri Host at the Battle of Orbital Fort Tokugawa. She had listened to Terrene radio, and become entranced by light opera –- the thrill of the coloraturas, the sensuous power of the tenor, the stirring gravitas of the basso profondo. In particular she fell in love – or the Uliri equivalent of love – with the charm and blarney of one Count Jack Fitzgerald. She became fascinated with Ireland – an Emerald Isle, made of a single vast gemstone, a green land of green people – how extraordinary, how marvellous, how magical. She had even had her proles build a life-size model Athy in one of the unused undercrofts of the Royal Nest. Opera and the stirring voice of the operatic tenor became her passion and she vowed, if she survived the Sororicide, that she would build an incomparable opera house on Mars, in the heart of the Labyrinth of Night, and attract the greatest singers and musicians of Earth to show the Uliri what she considered was the highest human art. She survived, and had consumed all her sisters and taken their experiences and memories, and built her opera house, the grandest in the solar system, but war had intervened. Earth had attacked, and the ancient and beautiful Uliri Hives of Enetria and Issidy were shattered like infertile eggs. She had fled underground, to her empty, virginal concert hall, but in the midst of the delvings and the buildings and forgings, she had heard that Count Jack Fitzgerald had come to Mars to entertain the troops at the same time that the United Queens were mounting a sustained offensive, and she seized her opportunity.