George Martin - Old Mars

We couldn’t afford the Grand Valley either, but such truths are best entrusted to the discretion of an accompanist. I have talked our way out of hotel bills before.

“I’ll book transport.”

“If you must.” His attention was once again turned to the canyonscape of the great city of the Twav. The sun had risen over the canyon edge and sent the shadows of Unshaina’s spires and stacks and towers carved from raw rock chasing down the Great Valley. Summoned by the light, flocks of Twav poured from the slots of their roost-cotes. “Any chance of another wee drop of your particular tea?”

I took the cup and saucer from his outstretched hand.

“Of course, Maestro.”

“Thank you, dear boy. I would, of course, be lost without you. Quite quite lost.”

A hand waved me away from his presence.

“Thank you. And Maestro?”

He turned from the window.

“Trousers.”

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.

Count Jack gave a small moan as his sky-chair dipped down abruptly between the close-packed stone quills of Alabaster Needles. The chair-boss whistled instructions to her crew—the lowest register of their language lay at the upper edge of our hearing—and they skillfully brought us spirally down past hives and through arches and under buttresses to the terraces of the Great Western Dock on the Grand Canal. Here humans had built cheap spray-stone lading houses and transit lodges among the sinuously carved stone. The Canal Court Hotel was cheap, but that was not its main allure; Ferid Bey had appetites best served by low rents and proximity to docks.

While Count Jack swooned and whimpered and swore that he would never regain his land legs, never, I tipped the chair-boss a generous handful of saucers and she clasped her lower hands in a gesture of respect.

“We’re broke,” Ferid Bey said. We sat drinking coffee on the terrace of the Canal Court watching Twav stevedores lift and lade pallets from the open hatches of cargo barges. I say coffee; it was Expeditionary Force ersatz, vile and weak and with a disturbing spritz of excremental. Ferid Bey, who as a citizen of the great Ottoman Empire, appreciated coffee, grimaced at every sip. I say terrace; spaced beside the garbage bins, it was a cranny for two tables, which caught the wind and lifted the dust in a perpetual eddy. Ferid Bey wore his dust goggles, kept his scarf wrapped around his head, and sipped his execrable coffee.

“What do you mean, broke?” Count Jack thundered in his loudest Sopratutto voice. Startled Twavs flew up from their cargoes, twittering on the edge of audibility. “You’ve been at the bum-boys again, haven’t you?” Ferid Bey’s weakness for the rough was well-known, particularly the kind who would go through his wallet the next morning. He sniffed loudly.

“Actually, Jack, this time it’s you.”

I often wondered if the slow decline of Count Jack’s career was partly attributable to the fact that, after years of daily contact, agent had started to sound like client. The Count’s eyes bulged. His blood pressure was bad. I’d seen the report from the prelaunch medical.

“It’s bums on seats, Jack, bums on seats, and we’re not getting them.”

“I strew my pearls before buffoons in braid and their braying brides, and they throw them back in my face!” Count Jack bellowed. “I played La Scala, you know. La Scala! And the Pope. I’d be better off playing to the space-bats. At least they appreciate a high C. No Ferid, no no: you get me better audiences.”