Old Mars

She swept her mask over her face with a practiced gesture as she walked out of the street-level stage of the airship landing tower, against air as dry and acrid as the Taklamakan Desert and nearly as thin as Tibet’s.

A second later, Tom Beckworth followed suit. The living, quasi fabric writhed, then settled down, turning her face into a smooth black oval below the tilted brown eyes. You didn’t absolutely have to think about the fact that you were plastering a synthetic amoeboid parasite over your mouth and nose. His matched his medium ebony skin much more closely.

Sally always enjoyed getting back to Zar-tu-Kan, the main contact-city for the US-Commonwealth Alliance of explorers and scientists on Mars. It was honestly alien. While Kennedy Base was … sort of like a major airport that had somehow landed in Antarctica with everyone stuck in a second-rate hotel by bad weather. She was probably going to live out the rest of her life on Mars, and with antiagathics cheap at the source, that could be a long time.

Beckworth was gawking, though with restraint; this was the real thing, not training. Slim tulip-shaped spires reared hundreds of feet into the air between warrens of lower-slung, thick-walled compounds, their time-faded colors still blazing against a sky of faded blue tinged pink with the dust of the Deep Beyond. The towers varied in pointillist shadings like the memory of rainbows seen in dreams. Lacy crystalline bridges joined them, and transparent domes glittered below over lineage apartment houses or the homes of the rich and powerful, full of an astonishing flowering lushness. The narrow serpentine streets below wound among blank-faced buildings of hard, glossy, rose-red stone whose ornamental carvings were often worn to faintest tracery …

Zar-tu-Kan had been an independent city-state and ancient when the Tollamune emperors of Dvor-il-Adazar united Mars. It had outlived the Eternal Peace of a planetary empire that lasted thirty thousand years, and was a city-state again. The elongated forms of its native citizens moved past one another and the draught-beasts and riding-birds in an intricate, nearly silent dance, with the loudest sound the scuff of leather and pads on stone. Occasionally a voice; now and then a tinkle of music, like bells having a mathematical argument.

“Mars isn’t older than Earth. It just feels older,” Tom Beckworth said, as they walked, renewing a discussion they’d been having off and on all the way from Kennedy Base on the icebound shores of the Arctic sea.

Shipping people between planets was expensive, even in this year of grace 1998, and only the very best got to make the trip. Unfortunately, sometimes smart, highly educated people invested a lot of their mental capital in defending preconceptions rather than challenging them.

“Martian civilization is a lot older than ours,” Beckworth went on. “But there have to be commonalities. And frankly, they’ve done less with their time than we have with ours.”

She smiled to herself. This wasn’t Venus and you couldn’t play Mighty Whitey Sahib in a pith helmet here. He would learn. Or not.

She stopped and made a sweeping gesture with her arm. “This is it,” Sally said. “Home sweet residence.”

The building was a smooth three-story octagon, featureless on the outside save for low-relief patterns like feathery reeds, with a glassine dome showing above its central portion, typical of the Orchid Consort style in the Late Imperial period. Maintainer bugs the size of cats and shaped like flattened beetles crawled slowly over the crystal in an eternal circuit.

“Helloooobosssss,” a thin, rasping, hissing voice said, in thickly accented English.

The man started violently as a skeletal shape uncoiled itself from beside the doors. In outline it was more or less like a dog covered in dusty russet fur—a fuzzy greyhound on the verge of starvation, with a long whip tail, teeth like a shark, and lambent green eyes under a disturbingly high forehead and long, prehensile toes.

“Hi, Satemcan,” Sally said. “Anything to report?”

“Quietttt,” the animal said, dropping back into Demotic; the greeting had exhausted its English. “Possibblytoooquiettt.”

It bent forward and sniffed at Beckworth’s feet. “Smelllsss unusual. Like you, but … more.”

She reached into one of the loose sleeves of her robe and tossed a package of rooz meat. The not-quite-animal snapped it out of the air and swallowed flesh and edible preservative packaging and all, licking his chops with satisfaction. Then she stripped the glove from her right hand and slipped it into a groove beside the door. A faint touch, dry and rough, and the portal of time-dulled tkem wood slid aside.

“You’ll need to give the house system a taste,” she said, as they passed into the vestibule and tucked their masks back into pockets in their robes. “There.”

Beckworth put his hand in the slot in a gingerly fashion.

“It bit me!” he exclaimed.

“Needs the DNA sample,” she said.