Old Mars

For a big man, Count James Fitzgerald threw up most discreetly. He leaned out of the sky-chair, one quick convulsion, and it fell in a single sheet between the sculpted pinnacles of Unshaina. He wiped his lips with a large very white handkerchief and that was it, done. He would blame me, blame the sky-chair bearers, blame the entire Twav Civilization, but never the three cups of special tea he had taken while I packed for him, nor the bottle that was his perennial companion in the bedside cabinet.

Checkout had been challenging this time. I would never say so to Count Jack, but it had been a long time since I could parlay the Country Count from Kildare by name recognition alone.

“You are leaving the bags,” the manager said. He was Armenian. He had never heard of Ireland, let alone County Kildare.

“We will be returning, yes,” I said.

“But you are leaving the bags.”

“Christ on crutches,” Count Jack had exclaimed as the two sky-chairs set down onto the Grand Valley’s landing apron. “What are you trying to do, kill me, you poncing infidel? My heart is tender, tender I tell you, bruised by decades of professional envy and poisonous notices.”

“It is the quickest and most direct way.”

“Swung hither and yon in a bloody Bat-cab and no money at the end of it, as like,” Count Jack muttered as he strapped in and the Twavs took the strain and lifted. He gave a faint cry as the sky-chair swung out over the mile-deep drop to the needles of the Lower Rookeries, like an enfilade of pikes driven into the red rock of the Grand Valley. He clung white-knuckled to the guylines, moaning a little, as the Twav carriers swayed him between the scurrying cableway gondolas and around the many-windowed stone towers of the roosts.

I rather enjoyed the ride. My life has been low in excitements—I took the post of accompanist to the Maestro as an escape from filing his recording royalties, which was the highest entry position in the industry I could attain with my level of degree in music. Glamorous it was, exciting, no. Glamour is just another work environment. One recovers from being star-struck rather quickly. My last great excitement had been the night before we left for Mars. Ships! Space travel! Why, I could hardly sleep the night before launch. I soon discovered that space travel is very much like an ocean cruise, without the promenade decks and the excursions, and far, far fewer people. And much, much worse food. However tedious and braying the company for me, I derived some pleasure from the fact that for them it was three months locked in with Count Jack.

I have a personal interest in this war. My grandfather was one of the martyrs who died in the opening minutes of the Horsell Common invasion. He was the first generation of my family to be born in England. He had been at prayer in the Woking Mosque and was consumed by the heat ray from the Uliri War Tripod. Many thousands died that day, and though it has taken us two generations to master the Uliri technology to keep our skies safe, and to prepare a fleet to launch Operation Enduring Justice, the cry is ever fresh: remember Shah Jehan! I stood among the crowds on that same Horsell Common around the crater, as people gathered by the other craters of the invasion, or on hilltops, on beaches, riverbanks, rooftops, holy places, anywhere with a view of open sky, to watch the night light up with the drives of our expeditionary fleet. The words on my lips, and the lips of everyone else on that cold November night, were Justice, Justice, but in my heart, it was Remember Shah Jehan!

Rejoice! Rejoice! our Prime Minister told us when our drop-troopers captured Unshaina, conquered the Twav Civilization, and turned the Grand Valley into our Martian headquarters and munitions factory. It’s harder to maintain your patriotic fervor when those spaceships are months away on the far side of the sun, and no one really believes the propaganda that the Twav were the devious military hive-masterminds of the Uliri war machine. Nor, when that story failed, did we swallow the second serving of propaganda: that the Twav were the enslaved mind-thralls of the Uliri, whom we had liberated for freedom and democracy. A species that achieves a special kind of sentience when it roosts and flocks together seems to me to embody the very nature of the demos. The many-bodied gods atop the flute-thin spires of Unshaina represent the truth that our best, our most creative, our most brilliant, may be all the divinity we need.

It has been a long time since I was at prayer.