Old Mars

The Queen of the Night’s Aria IAN MCDONALD

“GOD. STILL ON BLOODY MARS.”

Count Jack Fitzgerald, Virtuoso, Maestro, Sopratutto, stood at the window of the Grand Valley Hotel’s Heaven’s Tower Suite in just his shirt. Before his feet, the Sculpted City of Unshaina tumbled away in shelves and tiers, towers and tenements. Cable cars skirled along swooping lines between the carved pinnacles of the Royal Rookeries. Many-bodied stone gods roosted atop mile-high pillars; above them, the skymasters of the Ninth Fleet hung in the red sky. Higher still were the rim rocks of the Grand Valley, carved into fretwork battlements and machicolations, and highest of all, on the edge of the atmosphere, twilight shadows festooned with riding lights, were the ships of Spacefleet. A lift-chair borne by a squadron of Twav bobbed past the picture window, dipping to the wing beats of the carriers. The chair bore a human in the long duster coat of a civil servant of the Expeditionary Force. One hand clutched a diplomatic valise, the other the guylines of the lift-harness. The mouth beneath the dust goggles was open in fear.

“Oh God, look at that! I feel nauseous. You hideous government drone, how dare you make me feel nauseous first thing in the morning! You’ll never get me in one of those things, Faisal, never. They shit on you; it’s true. I’ve seen it. Bottom of the valley’s five hundred feet deep in Mars-bat guano.”

I come from a light-footed, subtle family, but for all my discretion, I could never catch Count Jack unawares. Tenors have good ears.

“Maestro, the Commanderie has issued guidelines. Mars-bats is not acceptable. The official expression is the Twav Civilization.”

“What nonsense. Mars-bats is what they look like, Mars-bats is what they are. No civilization was ever built on the basis of aerial defecation. Where’s my tea? I require tea.”

I handed the Maestro his morning cup. He took a long, slurping sip—want of etiquette was part of his professional persona. The Country Count from Kildare: he insisted it appear on all his billings. Despite the titles and honorifics, Count Jack Fitzgerald had passed the summit of his career, if not his self-mythologizing. The aristocratic title was a Papal honor bestowed upon his grandfather, a dully devout shopkeeper who nonetheless was regarded as little less than a saint in Athy. The pious greengrocer’s apples would have browned at his grandson’s flagrant disregard for religion and its moralizing. The Heaven’s Tower Suite’s Emperor-sized bed was mercifully undisturbed by another body. Count James Fitzgerald drained his cup, drew himself to his full six and a half feet, sucked in his generous belly, clicked out cricks and stiffnesses in his joints.

“Oh bless you, dear boy. None of the others can make tea worth a tinker’s piss.”

For the past six months, long before this tour of Mars, I had been slipping a little stiffener into the morning tea.

“And did they love us? Did strong men weep like infants and women ovulate?”

“The Joint Chiefs were enchanted.”

“Well, the enchantment didn’t reach as far as their bloody pockets. A little consideration wouldn’t have gone amiss. Philistines.”

A gratis performance at the Commanderie for the Generals and Admirals and Sky-marshals was more or less mandatory for all Earth entertainers playing the Martian front. The Army and Navy shows usually featured exotic dancers and strippers. From the piano, you notice many things, like the well-decorated Sky-lord nodding off during the Maestro’s Medley of Ould Irish Songs, but the news had reported that he had just returned from a hard-fought campaign against the Syrtian Hives.

“Ferid Bey wishes to see you.”

“That odious little Ottoman. What does he want? More money, I’ll warrant. I shan’t see him. He spoils my day. I abjure him.”

“Eleven o’clock, Maestro. At the Canal Court.”

Count Jack puffed out his cheeks in resignation.

“What, he can’t afford the Grand Valley? With the percentage he skims? Not that they’d let him in; they should have a sign: no dogs, uniforms, or agents.”

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.”

“Any audiences would be good,” Ferid Bey muttered, then said aloud, “I’ve got you a tour.”

Count Jack grew inches taller.

“How many nights?”

“Five.”

“There are that many concert halls on this arse-wipe of a world?”

“Not so much concert halls.” Ferid Bey tried to hide as much of his face as possible behind scarf, goggles, and coffee cup. “More concert parties.”

“The Army?” Count Jack’s face was pale now, his voice quiet. I had heard this precursor to a rage the size of Olympus Mons many times. Thankfully, I had never been its target. “Bloody shit-stupid squaddies who have to be told which end of a blaster to point at the enemy?”

“Yes, Jack.”

“Would this be … upcountry?”

“It would.”

“Would this be … close to the front?”

“I’ve extended your cover.”

“Well, it’s nice to know my ex-wives and agent are well provided for.”

“I’ve negotiated a fee commensurate with the risk.”

“What is the risk?”

“It’s a war zone, Jack.”

“What is the fee?”

“One thousand five hundred saucers. Per show.”

“Tell me we don’t need to do this, dear boy,” Count Jack said to me.

“The manager of the Grand Valley is holding your luggage to ransom,” I said. “We need to do it.”

“You’re coming with me.” Count Jack’s accusing finger hovered one inch from the bridge of his agent’s nose. Ferid Bey spread his hands in resignation.

“I would if I could, Jack. Truly. Honestly. Deeply. But I’ve got a lead on a possible concert recording here in Unshaina, and there are talent bookers from the big Venus casinos in town, so I’m told.”

“Venus?” The Cloud Cities, forever drifting in the Storm Zone, were the glittering jewels on the interplanetary circuit. The legendary residences were a long, comfortable, well-paid descent from the pinnacle of career.

“Five nights?”

“Five nights only. Then out.”

“Usual contract riders?”

“Of course.”

Count Jack laughed his great, canyon-deep laugh. “We’ll do it. Our brave legionnaires need steel in their steps and spunk in their spines. When do we leave?”

“I’ve booked you on the Empress of Mars from the Round ‘O’ Dock. Eight o’clock. Sharp.”

Count Jack pouted.

“I am prone to seasickness.”

“This is a canal. Anyway, the Commanderie has requisitioned all the air transport. It seems there’s a big push on.”

“I shall endure it.”

“You’re doing the right thing, Jack,” Ferid Bey said. “One, and another thing; Faisal, you couldn’t pick up for the coffee, could you?” I suspected there was a reason Ferid Bey had brought us out to this tatty bargee hostel. “And while you’re at it, could you take care of my hotel?”

Already, Count Jack was hearing the distant applause of the audience, scenting like a rare moth the faint but unmistakable pheromone of celebrity.

“And am I … top of the bill?”

“Always, Jack,” said Ferid Bey. “Always.”

From our table on the promenade deck of the Empress of Mars, we watched the skymasters pass overhead. They were high and their hulls caught the evening light that had faded from the canal. I lost count after thirty; the sound of their many engines merged into a high thunder. The vibration sent ripples across the wine in our glasses on the little railed-off table at the stern of the barge. One glass for me, always untouched—I did not drink, but I liked to keep Count Jack company. He was a man who craved the attention of others—without it, he grew translucent and insubstantial. His hopes for another involuntary audience of passengers to charm and intimidate and cow with his relentless showbiz tales were disappointed. The Empress of Mars was a cargo tug pushing a twelve-barge tow with space for eight passengers, of which we were the sole two. I was his company. I had been so enough times to know his anecdotes as thoroughly as I knew the music for his set. But I listened, and I laughed, because it is not the story that matters but the telling.

“Headed east,” Count Jack said. I did not correct him—he had never understood that on Mars, west was east and east was west. Sunrise, east; sunset, west, dear boy, he declared. We watched the fleet, a vast, sky-filling arrowhead, drive toward the sunset hills on the close horizon. The Grand Valley had opened out into a trench so wide we could see the canyon walls, a terrain with its own inner terrain. “Godspeed that fleet.” He had been uncharacteristically quiet and ruminative this trip. It was not the absence of a captive audience. The fleet, the heavy canal traffic—I had counted eight tows headed up-channel from the front to Unshaina since we began this first bottle of what Count Jack called his “Evening Restorational”—had brought home to him that he was headed to war. Not pictures of war, news reports of war, rumors of war, but war itself. For the first time, he might be questioning the tour.

“Does it make your joints ache, Faisal?”

“Maestro?”

“The gravity. Or rather, the want of gravity. Wrists, ankles, fingers, all the flexing joints. Hurt like buggery. Thumbs are the worst. I’d have thought it would have been the opposite, with its being so light here. Not a bit of it. It’s all I can do to lift this glass to my lips.”

To my eyes, he navigated the glass from table to lips quite successfully. Count Jack poured another Evening Restorational and sank deep in his chair. The dark green waters of the canal slipped beneath our hull. Martian twilights were swift and deep. War had devastated this once populous and fertile land, left scars of black glass across the bottomlands, where heat rays had scored the regolith. The rising evening wind, the Tharseen, which reversed direction depending on which end of the Grand Valley was in night, called melancholy flute sonatas from the shattered roost pillars.

“It’s a ghastly world,” Count Jack said after a second glass.

“I find it rather peaceful. It has a particular beauty. Melancholic.”

“No, not Mars. Everywhere. Everywhere’s bloody ghastly and getting ghastlier. Ever since the war. War makes everything brutal. Brutal and ugly. War wants everything to be like it. It’s horrible, Faisal.”

“Yes. I think we’ve gone too far. We’re laying waste to entire civilizations. Unshaina, it’s older than any city on Earth. This has gone beyond righteous justice. We’re fighting because we love it.”

“Not the war, Faisal. I’ve moved on from the bloody war. Do keep up. Getting old. That’s what’s truly horrible. Old old old and I can’t do a thing about it. I feel it in my joints, Faisal. This bloody planet makes me feel old. A long, slow decline into incompetence, imbecility, and incontinence. What have I got? A decent set of pipes. That’s all. And they won’t last forever. No investments, no property, and bugger-all recording royalties. Bloody Revenue cleaned me out. Rat up a drainpipe. Gone. And the bastards still have their hands out. They’ve threatened me, you know. Arrest. What is this, the bloody Marshalsea Gaol? I’m a Papal Knight, you know. I wield the sword of the Holy Father himself.”

“All they want is their money,” I said. Count Jack had always resented paying lawyers and accountants, with the result that he had signed disastrous recording contracts and only filed tax returns when the bailiffs were at the door. This entire Martian tour would barely meet his years of outstanding tax, plus interest. “Then they’ll leave you alone.”

“No, they won’t. They won’t ever let me alone. They know Count Jack is a soft touch. They’ll be back, the damnable dunners. Once they’ve got the taste of your blood, they won’t ever let their hooks out of you. Parasites. I am infested with fiscal parasites. Tax, war, and old age. They make everything gross and coarse and pointless.”

Beams of white light flickered along the twilight horizon. I could not tell whether they were from sky to ground or ground to sky. The fleet had gone. The heat rays danced along the edge of the world, flickered out. New beams took their place. Flashes beyond the close horizon threw the hills into momentary relief. I cried out as the edge of the world became a flickering palisade of heat rays. Count Jack was on his feet. The flashes lit his face. Seconds later, the first soft rumble of distant explosions reached us. The Twav deckhands fluttered on their perches. I could make out the lower register of their consternation as a treble shrill. The edge of the world was a carnival of beams and flashes. I saw an arc of fire descend from the sky to terminate in a white flash beneath the horizon. I did not doubt that I had seen a skymaster and all her crew perish, but it was beautiful. The sky blazed with the most glorious fireworks. Count Jack’s eyes were wide with wonder. He threw his hand up to shield his eyes as a huge midair explosion turned the night white. Stark shadows lunged across the deck; the Twav rose up in a clatter of wings.

“Oh, the dear boys, the dear boys,” Count Jack whispered. The sound of the explosion hit us. It rattled the windows on the pilot deck, rattled the bottle and glasses on the table. I felt it shake the core of my being, shake me belly and bowel deep. The beams winked out. The horizon went dark.

We had seen a great and terrible battle, but who had fought, who had won, who had lost, whether there had been winners or losers, what its goals had been—we knew none of these. We had witnessed something terrible and beautiful and incomprehensible. I lifted the untouched glass of wine and took a sip.

“Good God,” Count Jack said, still standing. “I always thought you didn’t drink. Religious reasons and all that.”

“No, I don’t drink for musical reasons. It makes my joints hurt.”

I drank the wine. It might have been vinegar, it might have been the finest wine available to humanity, I did not know. I drained the glass.

“Dear boy.” Count Jack poured me another, one for himself, and together we watched the edge of the world glow with distant fires.

We played Camp Avenger on a stage rigged on empty beer barrels to a half-full audience that dwindled over the course of the concert to just six rows. A Brigadier who had been drinking steadily all through the concert tried to get his troopers up on stage to dance to the Medley of Ould Irish Songs. They sensibly declined. He tripped over his own feet trying to inveigle Count Jack to dance to “Walls of Limerick” with him and went straight off the stage. He split his head open on the rim of a beer keg.

At Syrtia Regional Command, the audience was less ambiguous. We were bottled off. The first one came looping in even as Count Jack came on, arms spread wide, to his theme song, “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.” He stuck it through “Blaze Away,” “Nessun dorma,” and “Il mio tesoro” before an accurately hurled Mars Export Pale Ale bottle deposited its load of warm urine down the front of his dickey. He finished “The Garden Where the Praties Grow,” bowed, and went straight off. I followed him as the first of the barrage of folding army chairs hit the stage. Without a word or a look, he went straight to his tent and stripped naked.

“I’ve had worse in Glasgow Empire,” he said. His voice was stiff with pride. I never admired him as much. “Can you do something with these, dear boy?” He held out the wet, reeking dress suit. “And run me a bath.”

We took the money, in full and in cash, and went on, ever up the ever-branching labyrinth of canals, ever closer to the battlefront.

The boat was an Expeditionary Force fast-patrol craft, one heat ray turret fore, one mounted in a blister next to the captain’s position. It was barely big enough for the piano, let alone us and the sullen four-man crew. They smoked constantly and tried to outrage Count Jack with their vile space trooper’s language. He could out-swear any of them. But he kept silence and dignity and our little boat threaded through the incomprehensible maze of Nyx’s canals; soft green waters of Mars overhung by the purple fronds of crosier trees, dropping the golden coins of their seed cases into the water, where they sprouted corkscrew propellers and swam away. This was the land of the Oont, and their tall, heronlike figures, perched in the rear of their living punts, were our constant companions. On occasion, down the wider channels and basins, we glimpsed their legendary organic paddle wheelers, or their pale blue ceramic stilt towns. The crew treated the Oont with undisguised contempt and idly trained the boat’s weapons on them. The Oont had accepted the mandate of the Commanderie without a fight, and their cities and ships and secretive, solitary way of life went unchanged. Our captain thought them a species of innate cowards and traitors. Only a species tamed by the touch of the heat ray could be trusted.

For five hundred miles, up the Grand Canal and through the maze of Nyx, Twav stevedores had lifted and laid my piano with precision and delicacy. It took the Terrene army to drop it. From the foot of the gangplank, I heard the jangling crash, and turned to see the cargo net on the jetty and troopers grinning. At once, I wanted to strip away the packing and see if anything remained. It was not my piano—I would never have risked my Bosendorfer on the vagaries of space travel—but it was a passable upright from a company that specialized in interplanetary hire. I had grown fond of it. One does with pianos. They are like dogs. I walked on. That much I had learned from Count Jack. Dignity, always dignity.

Oudeman was a repair base for Third Skyfleet. We walked in the shadow of hovering skymasters. Engineers in repair rigs swarmed over hulls, lowered engines on hoists, opened hull sections, deflated gas cells. It was clear to me that the fleet had suffered grievously in recent and grim battle. Skins were gashed open to the very bones; holes stabbed through the rounded hulls from side to side. Engine pylons terminated in melted drips. Entire crew gondolas and gun turrets had been torn away. Some had been so terribly mauled they were air-going skeletons, a few lift cells wrapped around naked ship spine.

Of the crews who had fought through such ruin, there was no sign.

The base commander, Yuzbashi Osman, greeted us personally. He was a great fan, a great fan. A dedicated lifelong fan. He had seen the Maestro in his every Istanbul concert. He always sat in the same seat. He had all the Maestro’s recordings. He played them daily and had tried to educate his junior officers over mess dinners, but the rising generation were ignorant, low men—technically competent but little better than the Devshirmey conscripts. A clap of his hands summoned batmen to carry our luggage. I did not speak his language, but from the reactions of the engineers who had dropped my piano, I understood that further disrespect would not be tolerated. He cleared the camp steam bath for our exclusive use. Sweated, steamed, and scraped clean, a glowing Count Jack bowled into the mess tent as if he were striding onto the stage of La Scala. He was funny, he was witty, he was charming, he was glorious. Most of the junior Onbashis and Mulazims at the dinner in his honor could not speak English, but his charisma transcended all language. They smiled and laughed readily.

“Would you look at that?” Count Jack said in the backstage tent that was our dressing room. He held up a bottle of champagne, dripping from the ice bucket. “Krug. They got me my Krug. Oh the dear, lovely boys.”

At the dinner, I had noted the paucity of some of the offerings and marveled at the effort it must have taken, what personal dedication by the Yuzbashi, to fulfill a rider that was only there to check the contract had been read. Count Jack slid the bottle back into the melting ice. “I shall return to you later, beautiful thing, with my heart full of song and my feet light on the applause of my audience. I am a star, Faisal. I am a true star. Leave me, dear boy.”

Count Jack required time and space alone to prepare his entrance. This was the time he changed from Count James Fitzgerald to the Country Count from Kildare. It was a deeply private transformation and one I knew I would never be permitted to watch. The stage was a temporary rig bolted together from skymaster spares. The hovering ships lit the stage with their searchlights. A follow spot tracked me to the piano. I bowed, acknowledged the applause of the audience, flicked out the tails of my evening coat, and sat down. That is all an accompanist need do.

I played a few glissandi to check that the piano was still functioning after its disrespectful handling by the dock crew. Passable, to the tin ears of Skyfleet engineers. Then I played the short overture to create that all-important sense of expectation in the audience and went straight into the music for Count Jack’s entrance. The spotlight picked him up as he swept onto the stage, “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” bursting from his broad chest. He was radiant. He commanded every eye. The silence in the deep Martian night was the most profound I think I have ever heard. He strode to the front of the stage. The spotlight adored him. He luxuriated in the applause as if it were the end of the concert, not the first number. He was a shameless showman. I lifted my hands to the keyboard to introduce “Torna a Surriento.”

And the night exploded into towering blossoms of flame. For an instant, the audience sat transfixed, as if Count Jack had somehow summoned the most astonishing of operatic effects. Then the alarms blared out all across the camp. Count Jack and I both saw clearly the spider-shapes of War Tripods, tall as trees, wading through the flames. Heat rays flashed out, white swords, as the audience scattered to take up posts and weapons. Still, Count Jack held the spotlight, until an Onbashi leaped up, tackled him, and knocked him out of the line of fire just as a heat ray cut a ten-thousand-degree arc across the stage. He had no English, he needed no English. We ran. I glanced back once. I knew what I would see, but I had to see it: my piano, that same cheap, sturdy hire upright piano that I had shipped across 100 million miles of space, through the concert halls and grand opera houses, on dusty roads and railways, down calm green canals, my piano, exploding in a fountain of blazing hammers and whipping, melting wires. A War Tripod strode over us, its heat-ray arms swiveling, seeking new targets. I looked up into the weaving thicket of tentacles beneath the hull, then the raised steel hoof passed over me and came down squarely and finally on our dressing-room tent.

“My Krug!” Count Jack cried out.

A heat ray cut a glowing arc of lava across the ground before me. I was lucky—you cannot dodge these things or see them coming, or hear their ricochets. They are light itself. All you can be is moving in the right direction, have the right momentum: be lucky. Our Onbashi was not lucky. He ran into the heat ray and vanished into a puff of ash. A death so fast, so total that it became something more than death. It was annihilation.

“Maestro! With me!”

Count Jack had been standing, staring, transfixed. I took his hand, his palm still damp with concert sweat, and skirted around the end of the still-smoking scar. We ducked, we ran at a crouch, we zigzagged in our tails and dickey bows. There was no good reason for it. We had seen it in war movies. The Uliri war machines strode across the camp, slashing glowing lava tracks across it with their heat rays, their weapon-arms seeking out fresh targets. But our soldiers had reached their defensive positions and were fighting back, turning the Uliri’s own weapon against them and bolstering it with a veritable hail of ordnance. The troopers who had manned our spotlights now turned to the heat rays. Skymasters were casting off, their turret gunners seeking out the many-eyed heads of the Uliri Tripods. The war machine that had so hideously killed the brave Onbashi stood in the river, eye blisters turning this way, that way, seeking targets. A weapon-arm fixed on us. The aperture of the heat ray opened. Hesitated. Pulled away. Grasping cables uncoiled from between the legs. We scuttled for cover behind a stack of barrels—not that they would have saved us. Then a missile cut a streak of red across the night. The war machine’s front left knee joint exploded. The machine wavered for balance on two, then a skymaster cut low across the canal bank and severed the front right off at the thigh with a searing slash of a heat ray. The monster wavered, toppled, came down in a blast and crash and wave of spray, right on top of the boat that would have carried us to safety. Smashed to flinders. Escape hatches opened; pale shapes wriggled free, squirmed down the hull toward land. I pushed Count Jack to the ground as the skymaster opened up. Bullets screamed around us. Count Jack’s eyes were wide with fear, and something else, something I had not imagined in the man: excitement. War might be brutal and ghastly and ugly, as he had declaimed on the Empress of Mars, but there was a terrible, primal power in it. I saw the same thrill, the same joy, the same power that had commanded audiences from Tipperary to Timbuktu. I saw it and I knew that, if we ever returned to Earth and England, I would ever be the accompanist, the amanuensis, the dear boy; and that even if he sang to an empty hall, Count John Fitzgerald would always be the Maestro, Sopratutto. All there was in me was fear, solid fear. Perhaps that is why I was brave. The guns fell silent. I looked over the top of the barrels. Silvery Uliri bodies were strewn across the dock. I saw the canal run with purple blood like paint in water.

The skymaster turned and came in over the canal to a low hover. A boarding ramp lowered and touched the ground. A skyman crouched at the top of the ramp, beckoning urgently.

“Run, Maestro, run!” I shouted, and dragged Count Jack to his feet. We ran. Around us heat rays danced and stabbed like some dark tango. A blazing war machine stumbled blindly past, crushing tents, bivouacs, repair sheds beneath its feet, shedding sheets of flame. Ten steps from the foot of the ramp, I heard a noise that turned me to ice: a great ululating cry from the hills behind the camp, ringing from horizon to horizon, back and forth, wash and backwash, a breaking wave of sound. I had never heard it, but I had heard of it, the war song of the Uliri padva infantry. A hand seized mine: the skyman dragged me and Count Jack like a human chain into the troop hold. As the ramp closed, I saw the skyline bubble and flow, like a silver sheen of oil, down the hillside toward us. Padvas. Thousands of them. As the skymaster lifted and the hull sealed, the last, the very last sight I had was of Yuzbashi Osman looking up at us. He raised a hand in salute. Then he turned, drew his sword, and, with a cry that pierced even the engine drone of the skymaster, every janissary of Oudeman Camp drew his blade. Sword points glittered, then they charged. The skymaster spun in the air, I saw no more.

“Did you see that?” Count Jack said to me. He gripped my shoulders. His face was pale with shock, but there was a mad strength in his fingers. “Did you? How horrible, how horrible horrible. And yet, how wonderful! Oh, the mystery, Faisal, the mystery!” Tears ran down his ash-smudged face.

We fled through the labyrinth of the night. We had no doubt that we were being pursued through those narrow, twining canyons. The skycaptain’s pinger picked up fleeting, suggestive contacts, of what we had all heard: terrible cries, echoes of echoes in the stone redoubts of Noctis, far away but always, always, always keeping pace with us. The main hold of the skymaster was windowless, and though the skycaptain spoke no English, he had made it most clear to us that we were to keep away from his crew, whether they were in engineering, the gun blisters, or the bridge and navigation pods. So we sat on the hard steel mesh of the dimly lit cargo hold, ostensibly telling old musician stories we had told many times before, pausing every time our indiscriminate ears brought us some report of the war outside. Hearing is a much more primal sense than vision. To see is to understand. To hear is to apprehend. Eyes can be closed. Ears are ever open. Maestro broke off the oft-told story of singing for the Pope, and how thin the towels were, and what cheap bastards the Holy See had turned out to be. His ears, as I have said, were almost supernaturally keen. His eyes went wide. The Twav battledores on their perches in the skymarine roosts riffled their scales, shining like oil on water, and shifted their grips on their weaponry. A split second later, I heard the cries. Stuttering and rhythmic, they rose over three octaves from a bass drone to a soprano, nerve-shredding yammer. Two behind us, striking chords and harmonics from each other like some experimental piece of serialist music. Another answered, ahead of us. And another, far away, muted by the wind-sculpted rock labyrinth. A fifth, close, to our right. Back and forth, call and response. I clapped my hands over my ears, not from the pain of the shrill upper registers, but at the hideous musicality of these unseen voices. They sang scales and harmonies alien to me, but their music called the musician in me.

And they were gone. Every nerve on the skymaster, human and Twav, was afire. The silence was immense. My Turkic is functional but necessary—enough to know what Ferid Bey is actually saying—and I recalled the few words of the skycaptain I had overheard as he relayed communications to the crew. The assault on Camp Oudeman had been part of a surprise offensive by the Tharsian Warqueens. Massive assaults had broken out along a five-hundred-mile front from Arsai to Urania. War machines, shock troops—there had even been an assault on Spacefleet: squadron after squadron of rockets launched to draw the staggering firepower of our orbital battleships from the assault below. And up from out of the soil, things like nothing that anyone had ever seen before. Things that put whole battalions to flight, that smashed apart trench lines and crumbled redoubts to sand. As I tried to imagine the red earth parting and something from beyond nightmares rising up, I could not elude the dark thought: might there not be similar terrible novelties in the sky? This part of my eavesdropping I kept to myself. It was most simple: I had been routinely lying to Count Jack since the first day I set up my music on the piano.

“I could murder a drink,” Count Jack said. “If there were such a thing on this barquadero. Even a waft of a Jameson cork under my nose.”

The champagne on the deck of the Empress of Mars must have corrupted me, because at that moment I would gladly have joined the Maestro. More than joined, I would have beaten him by a furlong to the bottom of the bottle of Jameson.

Up on the bridge, a glass finger projecting from the skymaster’s lifting body, the skycaptain called orders from his post at the steering yoke. Crew moved around us. The battledores shifted the hue of their plumage from blue to violent yellow. I felt the decking shift beneath me—how disorienting, how unpleasant, this sense of everything sound and trustworthy moving, nothing to hold on to. The engines were loud; the captain must be putting on speed, navigating between the wind-polished stone. We were flying through a monstrous stone pipe organ. I glanced up along the companionway to the bridge. Pink suffused the world beyond the glass. We had run all night through the Labyrinth of Night, that chartless maze of canyons and ravines and rock arches that humans suspected was not entirely natural. I saw rock walls above me. We were low, hugging the silty channels and canals. The rising sun sent planes of light down the sheer, fluted, stone walls. There is nothing on Earth to compare with the loveliness of dawn on Mars, but how I wish I were there and not in this dreadful place.

“Faisal.”

“Maestro.”

“When we get back, remind me to fire that greased turd, Ferid.”

I smiled, and Count Jack Fitzgerald began to sing. “Galway Bay,” the most hackneyed and sentimental of faux-Irish paddywhackery (“Have you ever been to Galway Bay? Incest and Gaelic games. All they know, all they like”), but I had never heard him sing it like this. Had he not been seated on the deck before me, leaning up against a bulkhead, I would have doubted that it was his voice. It was small but resonant, perfect like porcelain, sweet as a rose and filled with a high, light innocence. This was the voice of childhood, the boy singing back the tunes his grandmother taught him. This was the Country Count from Kildare. Every soul on the skymaster, Terrene and Martian, listened, but he did not sing for them. He needed no audience, no accompanist: this was a command performance for one.

The skymaster shook to a sustained impact. The spell was broken. Voices called out in Turkic and Twav flute-speech. The skymaster rocked, as if shaken in a God-like grip. Then, with a shriek of rending metal and ship skin, the gun-blister directly above us was torn away—gunner, gun, and a two-meter shard of hull. A face looked in at us. A face that more than filled the gash in the hull, a nightmare of six eyes arranged around a trifurcate beak. The beak opened. Rows of grinding teeth moved within. A cry blasted us with alien stench: ululating over three octaves, ending in a shriek. It drove the breath from our lungs and the will from our hearts. Another answered it, from all around us. Then the face was gone. A moment of shock—a moment, that was all—and the skycaptain shouted orders. The Twav rose from their perches, wings clattering, and streamed through the hole in the hull. I heard the whine of ray rifles warming up, then the louder crackle and sizzle of our own defensive heat rays.

I thought that I would never hear a worse thing than the cry through the violated hull. The shriek, out there, unseen, was like the cry I might make if my spine were torn from my living body. I could only guess: one of those things had met a heat ray.

We never saw any of the battledores again.

Again, the skymaster shook to an impact. Count Jack lunged forward as claws stabbed through the hull and tore three rips the entire length of the bulkhead. The skymaster lurched to one side; we slid across the decking in our tailcoats and smoke-smudged dickey shirts. An impact jolted the rear of the airship, I glimpsed blackness, then the entire tail turret was gone and the rear of the Skymaster was open to the air. Through the open space I saw a four-winged flying thing stroke away from us, up through the pink stone arches of this endless labyrinth. It was enormous. I am no judge of comparative dimensions—I am an auditory man, not a visual one—but it was on a par with our own limping skymaster. The creature part furled its wings to clear the arch, then turned high against the red sky, and I saw glitters of silver at the nape of its neck and between its legs. Mechanisms, devices, Uliri crew.

While I gaped at the sheer impossible horror of what I beheld, the skymaster was struck again, an impact so hard it flung us from one side of the hold to the other. I saw steel-shod claws the size of scimitars pierce the glass finger of the bridge like the skin of a ripe orange. The winged Martian horror ripped bridge from hull, and, with a flick of its foot—it held the bridge as lightly and easily as a pencil—hurled it spinning through the air. I saw one figure fall from it and closed my eyes. I did hear Count Jack mumble the incantations of his faith.

Robbed of control, the skymaster yawed wildly. Engineering crew rushed around us, shouting tersely to one another, fighting to regain control, to bring us down in some survivable landing. There was no hope of escape now. What were those things? Those nightmare hunters of the Labyrinth of Night? Skin shredded, struts shrieked and buckled as the skymaster grazed a rock chimney. We listed and started to spin.

“We’ve lost port-side engines!” I shouted, translating the engineers’ increasingly cold and desperate exchanges. We were going down, but it was too fast … too fast. The chief engineer yelled an order that translated as “Brace for impact” in any language. I wrapped cargo strapping around my arms and gripped for all my worth. Pianists have strong fingers.

“Patrick and Mary!” Count Jack cried, and we hit. The impact was so huge, so hard, that it drove all breath and intelligence and thought from me, everything except that death was certain and that the last, the very last, thing I would ever see would be a drop of fear drool on the plump bottom lip of Count Jack Fitzgerald, and that I had never noticed how full, how kissable, those lips were. Death is such a sweet surrender.

We did not die. We bounced. We hit harder. The skymaster’s skeleton groaned and snapped. Sparking wires fell around us. Still we did not stop, or die. I remember thinking, don’t tumble, if we tumble, we are dead, all of us, and so I knew we would survive. Shaken, smashed, stunned, but surviving. The corpse of the skymaster slid to a crunching stop hard against the house-sized boulders at the foot of the canyon wall. I could see daylight in five places through the skymaster’s violated hull. It was beautiful beyond words. The sky horrors might still be circling, but I had to get out of the airship.

“Jack! Jack!” I cried. His eyes were wide, his face pale with shock. “Maestro!” He looked and saw me. I took him by the hand and together we ran from the smoking ruin of the skymaster. The crew, military-trained, had been more expeditious in their escape. Already they were running from the wreck. I felt a shadow pass over me. I looked up. Diving out of the tiny atom of the sun—how horrible, oh how horrible! I saw for the first time, whole and entire, one of the things that had been hunting us and my heart quailed. It swooped with ghastly speed and agility on its four wings and snatched the running men up into the air, each impaled on a scimitar-claw. It hovered in the air above us and I caught the foul heat and stench of the wind from its wings and beak. This, this is the death for which I had been reserved. Nothing so simple as an air crash. The sky horror looked at me, looked at Count Jack with its six eyes, major and minor. Then with a terrible, scrannel cry, like the souls of the dead engineers impaled on its claws, and with a gust of wing-driven wind, it rose up and swept away.

We had been marked for life.

Irony is the currency of time. We were marked for life, but three times I entertained killing Count Jack Fitzgerald. Pick up a rock and beat him to death with it, strangle him with his bow tie, just walk away from him and leave him in the dry gulches for the bone-picking things.

I reasoned, by dint of a ready water supply and a scrap of paper thrown in, that showed a sluggish but definite flow, that we should follow the canal. I had little knowledge of the twisted areography of the Labyrinth of Night—no one did, I suspect—but I was certain that all waters flowed to the Grand Canal and that was the spine and nervous system of Operation Enduring Justice. I advised us to drink—Count Jack ordered me to look away as he knelt and supped up the oddly metallic Martian water. We set off to the sound of unholy cries high and far among the pinnacles of the canyon walls.

The sun had not crossed two fingers of narrow canyonland sky before Count Jack gave an enormous theatrical sigh and sat down on a canal-side barge bollard.

“Dear boy, I simply cannot take another step without some material sustenance.”

I indicated the alien expanse of ruck, dust, water, red sky, hinted at its barrenness.

“I see bushes,” Count Jack said. “I see fruit on those bushes.”

“They could be deadly poison, Maestro.”

“What’s fit for Martians cannot faze the robust Terrene digestive tract,” Count Jack proclaimed. “Anyway, better a quick death than lingering starvation, dear God.”

Argument was futile. Count Jack harvested a single egg-shaped, purple fruit and took a small, delicate bite. We waited. The sun moved across its slot of sky.

“I remain obdurately alive,” said Count Jack, and ate the rest of the fruit. “The texture of a slightly underripe banana and a flavor of mild aniseed. Tolerable. But the belly is replete.”

Within half an hour of setting off again, Count Jack had called a halt.

“The gut, Faisal, the gut.” He ducked behind a rock. I heard groans and oaths and other, more liquid noises. He emerged pale and sweating.

“How do you feel?”

“Lighter, dear boy. Lighter.”

That was the first time that I considered killing him.

The fruit had opened more than his bowels. The silence of the canyons must have haunted him, for he talked. Dear God, he talked. I was treated to Count Jack Fitzgerald’s opinion on everything from the way I should have been ironing his dress shirts (apparently I required a secondary miniature ironing board specially designed for collar and cuffs) to the conduct of the war between the worlds.

I tried to shut him up by singing, trusting—knowing—that he could not resist an offer to show off and shine. I cracked out “Blaze Away” in my passable baritone, then “The Soldier’s Dream,” anything with a good marching beat. My voice rang boldly from the rim rocks.

Count Jack touched me lightly on the arm.

“Dear boy, dear dear boy. No. You only make the intolerable unendurable.”

And that was the second time that I was close to physically killing him. But we realized that if we were to survive—and though we could not entertain the notion that we might not, because it would surely have broken our hearts and killed us—we understood that to have any hope of making it back to occupied territory, we would have to proceed as more than Maestro and accompanist. So, in the end, we talked, one man with another man. I told him of my childhood in middle-class, leafy Woking, and at the Royal Academy of Music, and the realization, quiet, devastating, and quite quite irrefutable, that I would never be a concert great. I would never play the Albert Hall, the Marinsky, Carnegie Hall. I saw a Count Jack I had never seen before, sincere behind the bluster, humane and compassionate. I saw beyond an artiste. I saw an artist. He confided his fears to me: that the days of Palladiums and Pontiffs had blinded him. He realized too late that one night the lights would move to another and he would face the long, dark walk from the stage. But he had plans; yes, he had plans. A long walk in a hard terrain concentrated the mind wonderfully. He would pay the Revenue their due and retain Ferid Bey only long enough to secure the residency on Venus. And when his journey through the worlds was done and he had enough space dust under his nails, he would return to Ireland, to County Kildare, buy some land, and set himself up as a tweedy, be-waistcoated, red-faced Bog Boy. He would sing only for the Church, at special Masses and holy days of obligation and parish glees and tombolas; he could see a time when he might fall in love with religion again, not from any personal faith but for the comfort and security of familiarity.

“Have you thought of marrying?” I asked. Count Jack had never any shortage of female admirers, even if they no longer threw underwear onto the stage as they had back in the days when his hair and mustache were glossy and black—and he would mop his face with them and throw them back to shrieks of approval from the crowd. “Not a dry seat in the house, dear boy.” But I had never seen anything that hinted at a more lasting relationship than bed and champagne breakfast.

“Never seen the need, dear boy. Not the marrying type. And you, Faisal?”

“Not the marrying type either.”

“I know. I’ve always known. But that’s what this bloody world needs. Really needs. Women, Faisal. Women. Leave men together and they soon agree to make a wasteland. Women are a civilizing force.”

We rounded an abrupt turn in the canal and came upon a scene that silenced even Count Jack. A battle had been fought here, a war of total commitment and destruction. But who had won, who had lost? We could not tell. Uliri War Tripods lay draped over ledges and arches like desiccated spiders. The wrecks of skymasters were impaled on stone spires, wedged into rock clefts and groins. Shards of armor, human and Uliri, littered the canyon floor. Helmets and cuirasses were empty, long since picked clean by whatever scavengers hid from the light of the distant sun to gnaw and rend in the night. We stood in a landscape of hull plates, braces, struts, smashed tanks, and tangles of wiring and machinery we could not begin to identify. Highest, most terrible of all, the hulk of a spaceship, melted with the fires of reentry, smashed like soft fruit, lay across the canyon, rim to rim. Holes big enough to fly a skymaster through had been punched through the hull, side to side.

Count Jack raised his eyes to the fallen spaceship, then his hands.

“Dear God. I may never play the Hammersmith Palais again.”

Chimes answered him, a tintinnabulation of metal ringing on metal. This was the final madness. This was when I understood that we were dead—that we had died in the skymaster crash—and that war was Hell. Then I felt the ground tremble beneath the soles of my good black concert shoes and I understood. Metal rang on metal, wreckage on wreckage. The earth shook, dust rose. The spoilage of war started to stir and move. The ground shook, my feet were unsteady, there was nothing to hold on to, no surety except Count Jack. We held each other as the dust rose before us and the scrap started to slide and roll. Higher the ground rose, and higher, and that was the third time I almost killed him, for I still did not fully understand what was happening and imagined that if I stopped Jack, I would stop the madness. This was his doing; he had somehow summoned some old Martian evil from the ground. Then a shining conical drill head emerged from the soil, and the dust and rocks tumbled as the mole-machine emerged from the ground. It rose twenty, thirty feet above us, a gimlet-nosed cylinder of soil-scabbed metal. Then it put out metal feet from hatches along its belly, fell forward, and came to rest a stone’s throw from us. Hatches sprang open behind the still-spinning drill head, fanned out like flower petals. I glimpsed silver writhing in the interior darkness. Uliri padvas streamed out, their tentacles carrying them dexterously over the violated metal and rock. Their cranial cases were helmeted, their breathing mantles armored in delicately worked cuirasses, and their palps held ray rifles. We threw our hands up. They swarmed around us, and, without a sound, herded us into the dark maw of the Martian mole-machine.

The spider-car deposited us at a platform of heat-ray-polished sandstone before the onyx gates. The steel tentacle tips of our guards clacked on the mirror rock. The gates stood five times human height—they must have been overpowering to the shorter Uliri—and were divided in three according to Uliri architecture, and decorated with beautiful patterns of woven tentacles in high relief, as complex as Celtic knotwork. A dot of light appeared at the center of the gates and split into three lines, a bright Y. They swung slowly outward and upward. There was no other possibility than to enter.

How blind we humans had been, how sure that our mastery of sky and space gave us mastery of this world. The Uliri had not been driven back by our space bombardments and massed skymaster strikes, they had been driven deep. Even as the great Hives of Syrtia and Tempe stood shattered and burning, Uliri proles had been delving deeper even than the roots of their geothermal cores, down toward the still-warm lifeblood of their world, tapping into its mineral and energy resources. Downward and outward; hive to nest to manufactory, underground redoubt to subterranean fortress, a network of tunnels and delvings and underground vacuum tubes that reached so far, so wide, so deep, that Tharsia was like a sponge. Down there, in the magma-warmed dark, they built a society far beyond the reach of our space bombs. Biding their time, drawing their plans together, sending their tendrils under our camps and command centers and bases, gathering their volcano-forged forces against us.

I remembered little of the journey in the mole-machine except that it was generally downward, interminably long, and smelled strongly of acetic acid. Count Jack, with his sensitivities, discreetly covered his nose and mouth with his handkerchief. I could not understand his reticence: the Uliri had thousands better reasons to have turned us to ash than affront at their personal perfume.

Our captors were neither harsh nor kind. Those are both human emotions. The lesson that we were slow to learn after the Horsell Common attack was that Martian emotions are Martian. They do not have love, anger, despair, the desire for revenge, jealousy. They did not attack us from hate, or defend themselves from love. They have their own needs and motivations and emotions. So they only seemed to gently usher us from the open hatches of the mole-machine (one among hundreds, lined up in silos, aimed at the upper world) into a vast underground dock warm with heart-rock, and along a pier to a station, where a spider-shaped glass car hung by many arms from a monorail. The spider-car accelerated with jolting force. We plunged into a lightless tunnel, then we were in the middle of an underground city, tier upon tier of lighted windows and roadways tumbling down to a red-lit mist. Through underwater waterfalls, through vast cylindrical farms bright with the light of the lost sun. Over marshaling yards and parade grounds as dense with padvas as the shore is with sand grains. Factories, breeding vats, engineering plants sparkling with welding arcs and molten steel. I saw pits miles deep, braced with buttresses and arches and spires, down and down and down, like a cathedral turned inside out. Those slender stone vaults and spires were festooned with winged horrors—those same four-winged monsters that had plucked us out of the sky and so casually, so easily, dismembered our crew. And allowed us to live.

I had no doubt that we had been chosen. And I had no doubt why we were chosen.

Over another jarring switchover, through another terrifying, roaring tunnel, then out into a behemoth gallery of launch silos: hundreds of them, side by side, each loaded with fat rocket ships stiff with gun turrets and missile racks. I feared for our vaunted Spacefleet, and, realizing that, feared more for myself. Not even the alien values of the Uliri would show us so much if there were even the remotest possibility we could return the information to the Commanderie.

Count Jack realized it in the same instant.

“Christ on crutches, Faisal,” he whispered.

On and on, through the riddled, maggoty, mined and tunneled and bored and reamed Under-Mars. And now the onyx gates stood wide and the padvas fell into a guard around us and prodded us through them. The polished sandstone now formed a long catwalk. On each side rose seats, tier upon tier of obsidian egg cups. Each held an Uliri—proles, gestates, padvas, panjas—arranged by mantle color and rank. From the detail of the etchings on their helmets and carapace covers, I guessed them to be of the greatest importance. A parliament, a conclave, a cabinet. But the true power was at the end of the long walk: the Queen of Noctis herself. No image had even been captured, no corpse or prisoner recovered, of an Uliri Queen. They were creatures of legend. The reality in every way transcended our mythmaking imaginations. She was immense. She filled the chamber like a sunrise. Her skin was golden; her mantle patterned with soft diamond-shaped scales like fairy armor. Relays of inseminators carried eggs from her tattooed multiple ovipositors, slathering them in luminous milt. Rings of rank and honor had been pierced through her eyelids and at the base of her tentacles. Her cuirass and helmet glowed with jewels and finest filigree. She was a thing of might, majesty, and incontestable beauty. Our dress heels click-clacked on the gleaming stone.

“With me, Faisal,” whispered Count Jack. “Quick smart.” The guard stopped, but Count Jack strode forward. He snapped to attention. Every royal eye fixed on him. He clicked his heels and gave a small, formal bow. I was a heartbeat behind him. “It’s all small beer after the Pope.”

A tentacle snaked toward us. I resisted the urge to step back, even when the skin of the palp retraced and there, there was a human head. And not any human head: the head of Yuzbashi Osman, the music lover of Camp Oudeman, whom we had last seen leading a bold and stirring—and ultimately futile—charge against the padva hordes. Now the horror was complete. The Yuzbashi opened his eyes and let out a gasping sigh. The head looked me up and down, then gave Count Jack a deeper scrutiny.

“Count Jack Fitzgerald of Kildare-upon-Ireland. Welcome. I am Nehenner Repooltu Sevenniggog Dethprip; by right, battle, and acclaim the uncontested Queen of Noctis. And I am your number one fan.”

One finger of rum in Count Jack’s particular tea. And then, for luck, for war, for insanity, I slipped in another one. I knocked, waited for his call, and entered his dressing room. We might be somewhere in the warren of chambers beneath the Hall of the Martian Queen, miles beneath the sands of Mars, but the forms must be observed. The forms were all we had.

“Dear boy!” Uliri architecture did not accommodate human proportions. Proles had been at work—the prickly tang of scorched stone was strong—but I still had to duck to get through the door. Count Jack sat before a mirror of heat-ray-polished obsidian. He adjusted the sit of his white bow tie. He filled the tiny cubbyhole, but he still took the tea with an operatic flourish and took a long, County Kildare slurp.

“Ah! Grand! Grand. My resolve is stiffened to the sticking point. By God, I shall have need of it today. Did you slip a little extra in, you sly boy?”

“I did, Maestro.”

“Surprisingly good rum. And the tea is acceptable. I wonder where they got it from?”

“Ignorance is bliss, Maestro.”

“You’re right there.” He drained the cup. “And how is the piano?”

“Like the rum. Only I think they made it themselves.”

“They’re good at delicate work, the worker-drone thingies. Those tentacle tips are fine and dexterous. Natural master craftsmen. I wonder if they would make good pianists? Faisal? Dear God, listen to me listen to me! Here we are, like a windup musical box, set up to amuse and titivate. A song, a tune, dance or two. Us, the last vestige of beauty on this benighted planet, dead and buried in some vile subterranean cephalopod vice pit. Does anyone even know we’re alive? Help us for God’s sake help us! Ferid Bey, he’ll do something. He must. At the very least, he’ll start looking for us when the money doesn’t materialize.”

“I expect Ferid Bey has already collected the insurance.” I took the cup and saucer. Our predicament was so desperate, so monstrous that we dared not look it full in the face. The Queen of Noctis had left us in no doubt that we were to entertain her indefinitely, singing birds in a cage. Never meet the fans. That was one of Count Jack’s first homilies to me. Fans think they own you.

“Bastard!” Count Jack thundered. “Bastarding bastard! He shall die, he shall die. When I get back …” Then he realized that we would never get back, that we might never feel the wan warmth of the small, distant sun, that these low tunnels might be our home for the rest of our lives—and each other the only human face we would ever see. He wept, bellowing like a bullock. “Can this be the swan song of Count Jack Fitzgerald? Prostituting myself for some superovulating Martian squid queen? Oh the horror, the horror! Leave me, Faisal. Leave me. I must prepare.”

The vinegar smell of the Uliri almost made me gag as I stepped onto the stage. I have always had a peculiar horror of vinegar. Lights dazzled me, but my nose told me that there must be thousands of Uliri on the concert hall’s many tiers. Uliri language is as much touch and mantle color as it is spoken sounds, and the auditorium fistled with the dry-leaf rustling of tentacle on tentacle. I flipped out my tails, seated myself at the piano, ran a few practice scales. It was a very fine piano indeed. The tuning was perfect, the weight and responsiveness of the keys extraordinary. I saw a huge golden glow suffuse the rear of the vast hall. The Queen had arrived on her floating grav-throne. My hands shook with futile rage. Who had given her the right to be Count Jack’s number one fan? She had explained, in her private chamber—a pit filled with sweet and fragrant oil in which she basked, her monstrous weight supported—how she had first heard the music of Count Jack Fitzgerald. Rather, the head of poor Osman explained. When she had been a tiny fry in the Royal Hatchery—before the terrible internecine wars of the queens, in which only one could survive—she had become intrigued with Earth after the defeat of the Third Uliri Host at the Battle of Orbital Fort Tokugawa. She had listened to Terrene radio and become entranced by light opera—the thrill of the coloraturas, the sensuous power of the tenor, the stirring gravitas of the basso profundo. In particular, she fell in love—or the Uliri equivalent of love—with the charm and blarney of one Count Jack Fitzgerald. She became fascinated with Ireland—an Emerald Isle, made of a single vast gemstone, a green land of green people—how extraordinary, how marvelous, how magical! She had even had her proles build a life-size model Athy in one of the unused undercrofts of the Royal Nest. Opera and the stirring voice of the operatic tenor became her passion, and she vowed, if she survived the Sororicide, that she would build an incomparable opera house on Mars, in the heart of the Labyrinth of Night, and attract the greatest singers and musicians of Earth to show the Uliri what she considered the highest human art. She survived, and had consumed all her sisters and taken their experiences and memories, and built her opera house, the grandest in the solar system, but war had intervened. Earth had attacked, and the ancient and beautiful Uliri Hives of Enetria and Issidy were shattered like infertile eggs. She had fled underground, to her empty, virginal concert hall, but in the midst of the delvings and the buildings and forgings, she had heard that Count Jack Fitzgerald had come to Mars to entertain the troops at the same time that the United Queens were mounting a sustained offensive, and she seized her opportunity.

The thought of that little replica Athy, far from the sun, greener than green, waiting, gave me screaming nightmares.

Warm-up complete. I straightened myself at the piano. A flex of the fingers, and into the opening of “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.” And on strode Count Jack Fitzgerald, arms wide, handkerchief in one hand, beaming, the words pealing from his lips. Professional, consummate, marvelous. I never loved him more dearly than striding into the spotlights. The auditorium lit up with soft flashes of color: Uliri lighting up their bioluminescent mantles, their equivalent of applause.

Count Jack stopped in midline. I lifted my hands from the keys as if the ivory were poisoned. The silence was sudden and immense. Every light froze on, then softly faded to black.

“No,” he said softly. “This will not do.”

He held up his hands, showed each of them in turn to the audience. Then he brought them together in a single clap that rang out into the black vastness. Clap one, two, three. He waited. Then I heard the sound of a single pair of tentacles slapping together. It was not a clap, never a clap, but it was applause. Another joined it, another and another, until waves of slow tentacle claps washed around the auditorium. Count Jack raised his hands: enough. The silence was instant. Then he gave himself a round of applause, and me a round of applause, and I him. The Uliri caught the idea at once. Applause rang from every tier and level and joist of the Martian Queen’s concert hall.

“Now, let’s try that again,” Count Jack said, and without warning, strode off the stage. I saw him in the wings, indicating for me to milk it. I counted a good minute before I struck up the introduction to “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.” On he strode, arms wide, handkerchief in hand, beaming. And the concert hall erupted. Applause: wholehearted, loud-ringing, mighty applause, breaking like an ocean from one side of the concert hall to the other, wave upon wave upon wave, on and on and on.

Count Jack winked to me as he swept past into the brilliance of the lights to take the greatest applause of his life.

“What a house, Faisal! What a house!”

For Edgar Rice Burroughs,Leigh Brackett, Catherine Moore,Ray Bradbury, and Roger Zelazny,who inspired this book,and Robert Silverberg,who should have been in it.