Old Mars

We did not die. We bounced. We hit harder. The skymaster’s skeleton groaned and snapped. Sparking wires fell around us. Still we did not stop, or die. I remember thinking, don’t tumble, if we tumble, we are dead, all of us, and so I knew we would survive. Shaken, smashed, stunned, but surviving. The corpse of the skymaster slid to a crunching stop hard against the house-sized boulders at the foot of the canyon wall. I could see daylight in five places through the skymaster’s violated hull. It was beautiful beyond words. The sky horrors might still be circling, but I had to get out of the airship.

“Jack! Jack!” I cried. His eyes were wide, his face pale with shock. “Maestro!” He looked and saw me. I took him by the hand and together we ran from the smoking ruin of the skymaster. The crew, military-trained, had been more expeditious in their escape. Already they were running from the wreck. I felt a shadow pass over me. I looked up. Diving out of the tiny atom of the sun—how horrible, oh how horrible! I saw for the first time, whole and entire, one of the things that had been hunting us and my heart quailed. It swooped with ghastly speed and agility on its four wings and snatched the running men up into the air, each impaled on a scimitar-claw. It hovered in the air above us and I caught the foul heat and stench of the wind from its wings and beak. This, this is the death for which I had been reserved. Nothing so simple as an air crash. The sky horror looked at me, looked at Count Jack with its six eyes, major and minor. Then with a terrible, scrannel cry, like the souls of the dead engineers impaled on its claws, and with a gust of wing-driven wind, it rose up and swept away.

We had been marked for life.

Irony is the currency of time. We were marked for life, but three times I entertained killing Count Jack Fitzgerald. Pick up a rock and beat him to death with it, strangle him with his bow tie, just walk away from him and leave him in the dry gulches for the bone-picking things.

I reasoned, by dint of a ready water supply and a scrap of paper thrown in, that showed a sluggish but definite flow, that we should follow the canal. I had little knowledge of the twisted areography of the Labyrinth of Night—no one did, I suspect—but I was certain that all waters flowed to the Grand Canal and that was the spine and nervous system of Operation Enduring Justice. I advised us to drink—Count Jack ordered me to look away as he knelt and supped up the oddly metallic Martian water. We set off to the sound of unholy cries high and far among the pinnacles of the canyon walls.

The sun had not crossed two fingers of narrow canyonland sky before Count Jack gave an enormous theatrical sigh and sat down on a canal-side barge bollard.

“Dear boy, I simply cannot take another step without some material sustenance.”

I indicated the alien expanse of ruck, dust, water, red sky, hinted at its barrenness.

“I see bushes,” Count Jack said. “I see fruit on those bushes.”

“They could be deadly poison, Maestro.”

“What’s fit for Martians cannot faze the robust Terrene digestive tract,” Count Jack proclaimed. “Anyway, better a quick death than lingering starvation, dear God.”

Argument was futile. Count Jack harvested a single egg-shaped, purple fruit and took a small, delicate bite. We waited. The sun moved across its slot of sky.

“I remain obdurately alive,” said Count Jack, and ate the rest of the fruit. “The texture of a slightly underripe banana and a flavor of mild aniseed. Tolerable. But the belly is replete.”

Within half an hour of setting off again, Count Jack had called a halt.

“The gut, Faisal, the gut.” He ducked behind a rock. I heard groans and oaths and other, more liquid noises. He emerged pale and sweating.

“How do you feel?”

“Lighter, dear boy. Lighter.”

That was the first time that I considered killing him.

The fruit had opened more than his bowels. The silence of the canyons must have haunted him, for he talked. Dear God, he talked. I was treated to Count Jack Fitzgerald’s opinion on everything from the way I should have been ironing his dress shirts (apparently I required a secondary miniature ironing board specially designed for collar and cuffs) to the conduct of the war between the worlds.

I tried to shut him up by singing, trusting—knowing—that he could not resist an offer to show off and shine. I cracked out “Blaze Away” in my passable baritone, then “The Soldier’s Dream,” anything with a good marching beat. My voice rang boldly from the rim rocks.

Count Jack touched me lightly on the arm.

“Dear boy, dear dear boy. No. You only make the intolerable unendurable.”