Year's Best Scifi 8 Part 49

Here's where I was too late. There's her bone and necklace again. That's the burrow into middle chamber. Gas goes low there. All these thoughts pa.s.sed through his head as he retraced steps over razor rocks and unstable shale. He had been paid four times to venture into Thennet territory. Twice he had successfully brought out living victims, both still relatively sane. Once he had brought out a corpse.

Once he had left a corpse where he found it. Seven times before that, curiosity had taken him there. The time they captured him, his chances of escape had been minimal. He was determined not to be captured again.

Now, however, there was something different about the sinister, smoking landscape of craters and spikes. There was a kind of silence Captain John MacShard couldn't explain. A sense of waiting. A sense of watching.

Unable to do anything but ignore the instinct, he dropped down into the fissures and began to feel his way into the first flinty corridors. He had killed five Thennet guards almost without thought by the time he had begun to descend the great main pa.s.sage into the Thennet underworld. He always killed Thennet at a distance, if he could. Their venom could sear into delicate circuitry and destroy his armor and his lifelines.

Three more Thennet fell without knowing they were dead. Captain John MacShard felt no hesitation about killing them wherever he came across one. He killed them on principle, the way they killed by habit. The less of the Thennet there were, the better for everyone. And each corpse offered something useful to him as he crept on downward into the subsidiary tunnels, following still familiar routes.

The walls of the caverns were thick with flaking blood and ordure, which the Thennet used for building materials. Mostly it had hardened, but every so often it became soft and slippery. Captain John MacShard had to adjust his step, glad of his gills as well as his armor, which meant he did not have to smell or touch any of the glistening stuff, though every so often his air system overloaded and he got just a hint of the disgusting stench.

But something was wrong. His armor began to pop and tremble. It was a warning. Captain John MacShard paused in the slippery pa.s.sage and considered withdrawing. There would normally be more Thennet, males and females, shuffling through the pa.s.sages, going about their business, tending their eggs, tormenting their food.

He had a depressing feeling that he couldn't easily get back, that he was already in a trap. Was it a trap which had been set for him specifically? Or could anyone be the prey? This wasn't the Thennet.

Could it be the Thennet had new leaders.h.i.+p and wider goals? Captain John MacShard could smell intelligence. This was intelligence. And it wasn't a kind he'd smelled before. Not in Thennet territory.

Mostly what you smelled was terror and ghastly glee.

There was something else down here. Something which had a personality. Something which had ambitions. Something which was even now gathering power.

Captain John MacShard had learned to trust his instincts, and his instincts told him he would have to fight to return to the surface. What was more, he had an unpleasant feeling about what he might have to fight....

His best chance was to pretend he had noticed nothing, but keep his attention on that intelligence, even as he sought out the merchant's daughter. What was her name? Mercedes?

The narrow, fetid tunnels of the Thennet city were familiar, but now they were opening up, growing wider and taller, as if the Thennet had been working on them. But why?

And then, suddenly, a wave of thought struck against his own mind-a wave which boomed with the force of a tidal wave. It almost stopped him moving forward. It was a moment before the sense of thethoughts began to filter in to him.

No longer. No longer. I am the one. And I am more than one. I am s.h.i.+enna Sha Shanakana of the Yellow Price, and I shall again become the G.o.ddess I once was when Mars was young. I have paid the Yellow Price. I claim this star system as my own. And then I shall claim the universe....

The girl? Captain John MacShard could not stop the question.

All he received was a wave of mockery which again struck, with an almost physical weight.

CHAPTER FIVE.

Ancient and Modern

A voice began to whisper through the serpentine tunnels. It was cold as s.p.a.ce, hard and sharp as Mercurian steel.

The female Mercedes is gone. She is gone, Earther. There is nothing of her, save this flesh, and I am already changing the flesh so that it is more to my taste. She'll produce the egg. First the body, then the entire planet. Then the system. Then the stars. We shall thrive again. We shall feast at will among the Galaxies.

So that was it! Yet another of Mars' ancient ghosts trying to regain its former power. These creatures had been killed, banished, imprisoned long ago, during the last of Mars' terrible wars.

They had reached an enormous level of intellectual power, ruling the planet and influencing the whole system as they became capable of flinging their mental energy through interplanetary s.p.a.ce, to control distant intelligences and rule through them.

They considered themselves to be G.o.ds, though they were mortal enough in many respects. It had been their arrogance which had brought them low.

So abstract and strange had become their ambitions that they had forgotten the ordinary humans, those who had chosen not to follow their bizarre path, whose lives became wretched as the Eldren used all the planet's resources to increase their powers. They had grown obsessed with immortality, recording themselves onto extraordinary pieces of jewelry containing everything needed to reconst.i.tute the entire individual. Everything but ordinary humans to place the jewels in their special settings and begin the process, which required considerable human resources, ultimately taking the lives of all involved. For most of the ordinary humans had died of starvation and dehydration as those powers plundered their planet of all resources, melting the poles so that first there was an abundance of water, the time of the beginnings of the Sea Kings'power, but then, as quickly, the evaporation had begun, dissipating into empty s.p.a.ce, no longer contained by the protective layers of ozone and oxygen. The water could not come back. It was a momentary s.h.i.+mmer in the vastness of s.p.a.ce as it was drawn inevitably toward the sun.

Captain John MacShard knew all this because his mother had known all this. He had not known his mother, had not known he had emerged, a brawling, bawling independent creature from the egg she had saved, even as she and her husband died, victims of the planet's unforgiving climate. He had not known how he had come to live among the aboriginal ape people. The fiercely tribal Mercurians had been fascinated by his tanned, pale hide, so unlike their own dark green skins. They had never thought him anything but one of themselves. They had come to value him. He had been elected a kind of leader. He had taken them to food and guarded them against the giant rock snakes. He had taught them to kill the snakes, to preserve their meat. They named him Tan-Arz or Brown-Skin.

Tan-Arz was his name until the Earthlings found him at last. His father's brother had paid for the search, paid to bring him back to Earth during that brief Golden Age before the planet again descended into civil war. Back to the Old Country. Back to Ireland. Back to Dublin and Trinity College. Then to South London University.

Dublin and London had not civilized Captain John MacShard, but they had taught him the manners and ways of a gentleman. They had not educated Captain John MacShard, but they had informed his.e.xperience. Now he understood his enemies as well as his friends. And he understood that the law of the giant corporations was identical to the law he had learned on Mercury.

Kill or be killed. Trust nothing and no one. Power is survival. He smelled them. He was contemptuous of most of them, though they commanded millions. They were his kind. They were his kind gone soft, obscenely greedy, decadent to the marrow.

His instinct was to wipe them out, but they had trained him to serve them. And he had served them.

At first, when the wars had begun, he had volunteered. He had served well and honorably, but as the wars got dirtier and the issues less clear, he found himself withdrawing.

He realized that he had more sympathy, most of the time, with the desperate men he was fighting than with the great patricians of Republican Earth.

His refusal to take part in a particularly b.l.o.o.d.y operation had caused him to be branded a traitor.

It was as an outlaw he had arrived on Mars. They had hunted him into the red wastelands and known he could not have lived.

But Mars was a rest cure compared to Mercury. Captain John MacShard had survived. And Captain John MacShard had prospered.

Now he captained his own s.h.i.+p, the gloriously alien d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi, murmuring and baroque in her perpetually s.h.i.+fting darkness. Now he could pick and choose whom he killed and whom he didn't kill.

He had no financial need to continue this dangerous life, no particular security to be derived, even the security of familiarity. Nothing to escape from. Nothing within him he could not confront. He did it because he was who he was.

He was Captain John MacShard and Captain John MacShard was a creature of action, a creature which only came fully alive when its own life was in the balance. A wild creature that longed for the harsh, savage places of the universe, their beauties and their dangers.

But Captain John MacShard had no wish to die here in the slimey burrows of the unhuman Thennet.

He had no desire to serve the insane ends of the old Martian G.o.dlings who saw their immortality slowly fading and longed for all their power again.

You, Captain John MacShard, will help me. And I will reward you. Before you die, I will make you the sire of the supernatural. Already the blood of my Martians mingles with your own. It is why you are so perfect for my plans.

John MacShard: You are no longer the Earthboy who grew up wild with the submen of Mercury. You are of our own blood, for your mother drew her descent directly from the greatest of the Sea Kings and the Sea Kings were our own children-so much of our blood has mingled with yours that you are now almost one of us.

Let your blood bring you home, John MacShard.

"My blood is my own! It belongs to n.o.body but me! Every atom has been fought for and won."

It is the blood of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, John MacShard. Of kings and queens.

"Then it's still mine. By right of inheritance!" John MacShard was all aggression now, though the voices speaking to him were patient, reasonable. He had heard similar voices before. As he lay writhing in his own filthy juices on one of the Old Ones' examining slabs.

It is your Earth blood, however, which will give us our glory back. That vital, st.u.r.dy, undiluted stuff will bring us back our power and make Mars know her old fear of the unhumans who ruled her before the Sea Kings ruled.

Welcome home, Captain John MacShard, last of the Sea Kings. Welcome home to the Palace of Queen s.h.i.+enna Sha Shanakana, Seventh of the Seven Sisters who guard the Shrine of the Star Pool, Seventh of the Seven Snakes, Sorceress of the Citadel of Silence where she has slept for too many centuries.

The little mortal did its job well, though unconsciously. I needed its daughter's womb and I needed you, John MacShard. And now I have both. I will reemerge from the great egg fully restored to my power and position.

Behold, Captain John MacShard! The Secrets of the Silent Citadel! CHAPTER SIX Queen of the Crystal Citadel

All at once the half-Martian was surrounded by crystal. Crystal colored like rainbows, flas.h.i.+ng and murmuring in a cold wind that blew from all directions toward the center where a golden woman sat, smiling at him, beckoning to him, and driving all thought momentarily from his mind as he began to stumble forward. He wanted nothing else in the world but to mate with her. He would die, if necessary, to perform that function.

It took Captain John MacShard a few long seconds to bring himself back under control. Faces formed within the crystal towers. Familiar faces. The faces of friends and enemies who welcomed Captain John MacShard and bid him join them, in their good company, for eternity. These were the siren voices which had tempted Ulysses and his men across the void of s.p.a.ce. Powerful intelligences trapped within indestructible crystal. Intelligences which, legend had it, could be freed by the stroke of a sacred sword held in the hand of one man.

Captain John MacShard shuddered. He had no such sword. Only his jittering Banning cannon in its heavy webbing. He laid his hand on the gun and seemed to draw rea.s.surance from it.

His white wolf's teeth were clenched in his lean jaw. "No. I'm not your dupe and I'm not Earth's dupe. I'm my own man. I'm Captain John MacShard. There is no living individual more free than me in the universe and no one more ready to fight to keep that freedom."

Yes, murmured the voice in his head. It was a seductive voice. Think of the power and therefore the freedom you have when we are combined...Power to do whatever you desire, to possess whatever you desire, to achieve whatever you desire. You will be reborn as Master of the Universe. The whole of existence will be yours, to satisfy your rarest appet.i.tes....

The voice was full of everything feminine. He could almost smell it. He could see the figure outlined at the center of the crystal palace. The lithe young body with its waves of golden hair, clad in gold, with golden threads cascading down her perfect thighs, with golden cups supporting her perfect b.r.e.a.s.t.s and golden sandals on her perfect feet. He could see her quite clearly, yet she seemed the length of a football field away. She was beckoning to him.

"All I want is the power to be free," said Captain John MacShard. "And I already have that. I got it long ago. n.o.body gave it to me. I took it. I took it on Mercury. I took it on Earth. I took it on Mars, and I took it on Venus. Not a year goes by when I do not take that freedom again, because that is the only way you preserve the kind of freedom I value. My very marrow is freedom. Everything in me fights to maintain that freedom. It is unconscious and as enduring as the universe itself. I am not the only one to possess it or to know how to fight to keep it. It is the power of all the human heroes who overcame impossible odds that I carry in my blood. You cannot defeat that. Whatever you do, s.h.i.+enna Sha Shanakana, you cannot defeat that."

She was laughing somewhere in his mind. That laughter coursed along his spine, over his b.u.t.tocks, down his legs. It was directed. She was displaying the powers of her own incredible mentality.

Captain John MacShard examined the body of the girl he had come to rescue. Of course the Martian sorceress possessed her, probably totally. But was there anything of the girl left? It was crucial that he know.

He forced himself to push forward and thought he saw something like astonishment in the girl's eyes.

Then another intelligence took control of her face and the eyes blazed with eager fury, as if the G.o.ddess had found a worthy match. There was an ancient knowledge in those eyes which, when they met Captain John MacShard's, saw its equal in experience.

But all Captain John MacShard cared about was that he had glimpsed human eyes, a human face.

Somewhere, Mercedes Morricone still existed. That body which pulsed with strange, stolen life and glaring intelligence, still contained the girl's soul. That was what he had needed to know.

"Give the human its body back," said Captain John MacShard, switching to servos so that his armwhined up, automatically bringing the Banning cannon to bear on the golden G.o.ddess who now smiled at him with impossible promises. "Or I will destroy it and in so doing destroy you. I am Captain John MacShard, and you must know I have never made a threat I was not prepared to follow through."

You cannot destroy me with that, with a mere weapon. I draw my strength from all this-all these-from all my companions still imprisoned in the crystal. Ultimately, of course, I may release them. As they come to acknowledge that I am Mistress of the Silver Machine.

And now Captain John MacShard looked up. It was as if someone had tilted him by the chin. And above him stretched the vibrating wires and twisting ribbons of silver that told him the terrible truth.

Inadvertently he had stepped into the core of one of the ancient Martian machines.

The sorceress had set a trap. And it had been a subtle trap, a trap which showed the mettle of his enemy.

The trap had used his own stupid pride against him.

He cursed himself for an idiot, but already he was inspecting the peculiar twists and loops of the machine, which seemed to come from nowhere and disappear into nothing. A funnel of silver energy was at the apex, high above.

Yet, perhaps most impressively, this silver citadel of science was absolutely silent.

Silent, save for the faintest whisper, like the hiss of a human voice, far away, the sweet, persuasive suggestions of this seductive sorceress slipping into his synapses, soothing his ever-wary soul, preparing him for the big sleep, the long good-bye....

Everything that was savage. Everything that had made him fight to survive in the wastelands of Mercury. Everything that he had learned in the cold depths of s.p.a.ce and the steamy seas of Venus.

Everything he had been taught in the seminaries of Dublin and the academies of London. Everything came to Captain John MacShard's aid then. And there was a possibility that everything would not be enough.

The silent crystals around him began to vibrate, almost in triumph. And there, below the pulsing silver fire, the G.o.ddess danced.

He knew why s.h.i.+enna Sha Shanakana danced and he tried desperately to take his eyes off her. He had never seen anything quite so beautiful. He had never desired a woman more. He felt something close to love.

With a strangled curse which peeled his lips back from his teeth, he took the Banning in both hands, his fingers playing across the weird lines and configurations of the casing as if he drew music from an instrument.

The G.o.ddess smiled but did not stop dancing. Neither did the crystals of her citadel stop dancing.

Everything moved in delicate, subtle silence. Everything seduced him. If there had been music, he might have resisted more easily. But the music was somewhere in his head. There was a tune. It was taking charge of his arms and legs. Taking over his mind. Was he also dancing? Dancing with her in those strange, sinuous movements so reminiscent of the snakes which had pursued them on Mercury until he had become the hunter and turned them into food for himself and his tribe?

Oh, you are strong and resourceful and mighty and everything a hero should be. A true demiG.o.d to mate with a demiG.o.ddess and create a mighty G.o.d, a G.o.d who in turn will create entire new universes, an infinity of power. Look how beautiful you are, Captain John MacShard, what a perfect specimen of your kind.

A silver mirror appeared before him and he saw not what she described but the wild beast which had survived the deadly wastes of Mercury, the demonic creature who had slain the Green Emperor of Venus and wrested a planet from the grip of Grodon Worbn, the pious and vicious Robot Chancellor of Ganymede.

But the sweetness of her perfume, the sound of those golden, silky threads brus.h.i.+ng against her skin, the rise and fall of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the promise in her eyes...

All this Captain John MacShard shook off, and he thought he saw a look of some astonishment, almost of admiration, in those alien orbs. His fingers would scarcely obey him, but they moved without thought, from pure habit, flicking across the Banning, touching it here, adjusting something there. An instrument made for aliens. No human hand had ever been meant to operate the Banning, which was named not for its maker but for the first man who had died trying to find out how it worked. General Banning had prided himself on his expertise with alien artifacts. He had not died immediately, but from the poisons which had eaten into his skin and slowly digested his flesh. Captain John MacShard had never bothered to find out how the Banning worked. He simply knew how to work it. The way so many Spanish boys simply know how to coax the most beautiful music from the guitar.

The same intelligences, who Captain John MacShard believed to have perished out beyond Pluto, had also made his s.h.i.+p. There was a philosophy inherent to his s.h.i.+p, which rejected most who tried to board her vast, echoing interior, whose very emptiness was essential to her function, to her existence, and the weapon, and somehow Captain John MacShard understood the philosophy and loved the purity of the minds which had created it.

His respect was what had almost certainly saved his life more than once as he learned the properties and sublime beauty of the Banning and the s.h.i.+p.

He was panting. What had he been doing? Dancing? Before a mirror? The mirror was gone now.

The G.o.ddess had stopped dancing. Indeed, she was leaning forward, fixing Captain John MacShard with strange eyes in which flecks of rainbow colors flashed and flared. The red lips parted to show white, even teeth. The young flesh glowed with inner desires, impossible promises...

Come, John MacShard. Come to me and fulfill your n.o.ble destiny.

Then Captain John MacShard was sweeping the Banning around him in an arc. He aimed at the crystals while the gun's impossible circuits and surfaces plated and replated in a blur of changes, from gold to copper to jade to silver to gold as the great gun seemed to expand under Captain John MacShard's urgent caresses. Yet nothing dramatic happened to the crystals. They darkened, but they did not break. The light went from glaring day to misty night.

A terrifying silence fell.

He swept the gun again. Still the crystal held. And whatever was within the crystal held, too. It was harder to see movement, perhaps because the inhabitants were protecting themselves. But the gun had done nothing.

The silence continued.

Then the golden girl laughed. Her laughter was the sweetest music in the universe.

Did you think, Captain John MacShard, your famous gun could conquer s.h.i.+enna Sha Shanakana, Priestess of the Silent Citadel, Sorceress of the Seven Dials? The stupid Knights of the Balance who came against us from far Cygnus met their match. They planned to conquer us, but we killed them all, even before they reached the inner planets ....