Titans of Chaos

And it was not a barren waste: Mavors had a camp there. A camp? A city. I saw endless arsenalsand munitions factories half-buried beneath the rock and crag of the mountain, manned byshark-toothed snake-skinned Laestrygonians. Poking up through the bedrock and casting longshadows across the landscape of snow and rust loomed launching towers, magnetic rails, andmissile emplacements large enough to shoot down the tiny moons, cyclopean, huge and dark,beneath the dusty pink sky. The Laestrygonians manning these skyscraper-size guns wore nopressure suits on the surface: Perhaps they were the original inhabitants of Mars.

Out from this fortress-city ran corridors into the fourth dimension, shortcuts through spaceexactly the type Vanity had been unable to make.

I could see the distant points to where these corridors led: I saw strange cathedrals made of glassbeneath black skies that rained sulfuric acid; I saw a soaring fortress, slim as an upraised sword,towering over a cratered gray land where stars burned to either side of a pitiless sun. At the endof one corridor made of darkened air, I saw a space station made of carven wood, its hullovergrown with metal trees and leaves of purest silver, hanging above cold, swirledmethane-snowstorms of a gas giant surrounded by broken and scattered rings.

Venus, Luna, Neptune. Of course, I knew these places at a glance. Had I not seen a hundredartists' renditions, had I not pored over Voyager photographs, hadn't I dreamt of nothing else mywhole life? These were the unclaimed worlds into whose alien soils I had meant one day to plantthe Union Jack.

Someone had beaten me to it. All these planets were explored.

I saw ships plying these space routes. I saw the gilled men of Atlantis, brothers to Mestor, inshining black scale-mail, wearing neither helmets nor gauntlets, hanging weightlessly by tethersfrom long cylindrical vehicles of open grillework, vessels poised in the airless, interplanetary void.

Atlanteans were amphibious, not just to water, but to outer space as well. A pang of envy wentthrough me. No need to carry heavy life support if you were a race born for space.

Some of the vessels were heavily armed, and crewed by Laestrygonians. These had thecircle-and-arrow emblem of Mars painted on their hulls. The Atlantean ships were bronze orcerulean blue, and bore the emblem of the trident.

The trip back across the cold red landscape of Mars at dusk was bleak and melancholy.