Jay Lake - Last Plane to Heaven

1.3 bars of O 2. I could breathe here.

I pushed the traitor thought aside and concentrated on walking. Malick’s World tugged at me with .91 standard gs. It was just enough to give me a sense of floating with each stride and make me have to watch my step. This was a nickel-iron rockball of a planet amazingly like Earth except for the absent hydrosphere. And how long had those oceans been gone, I wondered? After all, this world boasted the intact ruins of a seaport and a still-breathable atmosphere—even without oceans or jungles to maintain the oxygen cycle.

What did one do with a few trillion tons of missing seawater, anyway?

I was a little over two hundred meters from my initial target, the pillared building due north of the lander. As I approached, I looked up at the carvings once more. They were hard to see, dense, complex, fractal even, with enough curves and bends to make my eyes ache, and shadows rendered bloody in the orange-maroon light. The carvings showed something a lot like people fighting something a lot like squid. A giant pelagic wrestling match.

No, I corrected myself, death match. There were plenty of dismemberings, spearings-through-the-groin (or cephalopodian mantle), berserk necrophagic frenzies and whatnot portrayed up there.

It seemed a curious choice for public art.

I slowed my pace and panned my helmet cam back and forth across the frieze. Even if these buildings had been formed by some bizarre geological process—one theory that had made the rounds in force back on Correct Thought —geological process didn’t spontaneously carve woman-eating squid. Squid-eating women?

Still, astonishing. My heart raced. This was how a species had seen itself, how it had thought about itself. Myth? Legend? History? Oh, Mother Burroughs, if only you were here now to see the Mars of your dreams.

At that thought, a crackle erupted in my helmet: “Why aren’t you moving?”

I realized I had stopped. It was the sheer, boggling wonder of it all.

“It’s a new world, Captain. These carvings are proof of it.”

“What carvings?”

Oops.

“Check my cam feed, ma’am.” I couldn’t take my eyes off them. She couldn’t even see them. Not good, that.

“I see a lot of rock, Ari.”

“No… ah… squid?”

“No. I suggest you return to the lander now.”

“Ah…” I considered that one, quickly. I didn’t feel delusional. But would I if I was? I was still breathing suit air, so there weren’t environmental pathogens tweaking me. Could it be a virteo resolution problem or something? “Ma’am, I’m just going up on that porch to look through the doors.”

“Get back to the lander.”

“In a minute, Captain.”

“Petty Officer Russdottir… that’s an order.”

“Detached command, ma’am.” I started walking again.

“It is my judgment that you are at risk of becoming unfit for command.”

Eyes on the stone squid, I giggled. “Then Dr. Sheldon can examine me to certify that fact at her next convenience.” Not that I minded being examined by Dr. Sheldon. As often as possible. I giggled some more. “As per procedures, ma’am.”

The silence that followed told me how much trouble I’d be in once I returned to orbit, but… would I ever have this kind of opportunity again? Not a chance, not by the Great Mother’s shorts. High command would either seal this discovery over or flood it with doctoral nerds from high-credit universities like New Tübingen and Oxford-at-Secundus. Little old industrial-zone girls like me weren’t never coming back here, except maybe as taxi drivers and cooks.

I didn’t want to think about that anymore, so I turned off my helmet audio. And hey, I was at the steps!

My helmet crackled back to life. Override from orbit. What the hell happened to my detached command, anyway?

It was Sheldon. “Ari,” she said. “Sweetie. Please. I know you can hear me. Stop walking and think.”

Up the steps. Too low, too long, maybe ten cents a riser but two meters on the tread. Somebody had wanted people to enter this building in an unsettled state of mind. Either that or they had really weird feet.

Tentacles.

No… I let that thought bleed from my head like oxygen from a jammed valve.

“Ari, dear. Listen. Something’s going wrong. I don’t want to lose you like this.” Her breath caught. “Captain is putting together a rescue team, but you don’t want to endanger your friends, do you?”

“Bullshit,” I sang. Sheldon might be my lover, but she was commissioned and I wasn’t. Her lies were always for the good of the ship. The whole reason for sending me in the number- two lander was because we were both disposable. Gunny Heloise’s expensive string of musclegirls weren’t going to do a combat drop to fish me out of the arms of some fucking stone squid.

Had I said all that aloud?

“Ari, please, you’re leaving camera range…”

“Good!” I took a deep breath and popped my helmet free. There was a slight sucking noise as it came loose. I turned and hurled it back out into the plaza, where it bounced a little too slowly, with an odd ringing echo. Air density and composition a little off, I thought. Sound waves didn’t propagate quite right.

Time to breathe the air of this world. Joan Carter, I am here. I released my breath, drew in a new one, and let the smells and scents of another civilization flood into me on a river of oxygen.

Mostly it tasted like a granite plaza at night, though, oddly, there was an after-rain tang to the air.

Hand on the hilt of my cutlass, I stepped into the shadows looking for traces of the women who ate stone squid.

Inside was tall, horribly tall. The walls and ceiling were proportioned wrong. It was as if the same architect who’d designed those too-shallow steps had turned her plans sideways and stretched the building upward. That same damp granite smell tickled my nose, like must newly released from a long-forgotten freight canister.

Age and rot, even in this dry place.

My boots clicked against the worn flagstones as I walked on, accompanied only by echoes.

Pillars rose around me, covered with the same frantic, disturbing carvings that had decorated the portico outside. I walked toward one, touched the pillar with the point of my cutlass. It rang like honest stone, but when I tried to brush that bit of carving with my gloved hand, somehow it wasn’t exactly where I had thought it should be.

“Not quite dead, are you?” I shouted.

They… whoever they were… had looked like me. Human enough for me to care. Like Joan with her Red Woman lovers on old Barsoom. The… squid… were everywhere. Detailed. Frightening. Real. Had it been the squid that drank the oceans dry?

Had it been the squid who built this city?

That thought scared me into walking again. This place must have been built by humans. Must have.

I bent to adjust my greaves, and my thoat-leather fighting harness. Nothing fit me quite right today. Like the very air itself, everything was subtly wrong. And where the hell were the monsters? At least these were squid, not something so seemingly human as the rykor-riding kaldanes that had taken Joan’s daughter from her.

The injustice of the world boiled within me as I stalked between a pair of the overtall pillars, cutlass trembling in my hand. Something, someone, had consumed the women of this world, sisters to me at least as much as the Red Women had been sisters to Joan Carter. They had been drunk dry, to desiccate along with their oceans.

Then I found one of my world-sisters, of the stone squid-eating women, curled in a corner. She’d died here long ago. Her body was a husk wrapped in robes crumbling from dry rot. I could not tell what race she had been, she was so decayed, but I preferred to believe her a Red Woman rather than one of the degenerate Therns or First Born.