The Aethers of Mars Read online

  (Apparently, the proper Martian pronunciation would have been something like Oo’h!dha?kgit. The “!” indicated a Martian guttural inhalation that Mrs. Shankar said was roughly equivalent to the clicks used by Hottentots and some of the Bantu tribes of southern Africa. The “?” indicated a glottal stop not too dissimilar to those used in Arabic and a number of other tongues. It was all quite interesting but Charlotte was perfectly happy to use the practical “Uddakit.”)

  Uddakit served the Protei Locus region as something in the way of a capital city, although Mr. Shankar said the term “capital city” didn’t really capture the heart of the matter. To humans, that term signified a town or city that served as the seat of government for a distinct geographic realm, be that realm a fully sovereign state or a region within it such as a province, district or prefecture. But Martian political relationships were more fluid. Nations in the sense that humans used the term didn’t really exist on Mars. Instead, the planet’s population was organized politically in a multitude of what humans would consider city-states, all which had the most complex—it might be better to say convoluted, sometimes even tortuous—relations with each other.

  So, according to Mr. Shankar, Uddakit could more accurately be depicted thusly:

  The dominant metropolis of the Protei Locus region, understanding that “dominance” in this context is a complex phenomenon which can be better measured as the sum of mutual debts and obligations in which Uddakit is what you might call the principal creditor, rather than a simple matter of command and obeisance.

  To get from Uddakit to any of the subordinate cities of Protei Locus one could no longer travel by dirigible unless one was prepared to risk life and limb in the bizarre Martian airships which looked more like inflated canoes than anything else Charlotte could think of. Naturally, her brother Adrian was keen to do so, but fortunately their father put his foot down.

  “I don’t think so, son,” he said genially. “Mind you, I wouldn’t mind trying it myself”—he was ever the diplomat dealing with Adrian—“but don’t forget we have all of the Shankars to deal with. They’d hardly agree to risk it, especially the elderly ladies.”

  So, they travelled by barge—understanding by the term “barge” the Martian rivercraft that were much narrower in their beam than any human vessel of that name. They reminded Charlotte of the wherries you saw on English rivers and canals, except the bows were squared off like punts. They were propelled by two Martians standing in the stern of the boat using oars, much like pictures she’d seen of Venetian gondolas, except the gondolas only had one oarsman.

  That was not surprising, though, given how small Martians were compared to humans. They weren’t all that much shorter than humans, but they were built along more slender lines, to the point of seeming gaunt. She didn’t think any of them weighed more than seven stone.

  She found them to be a bit horrid, actually. The problem was that they looked so human, allowing for a few notable differences. The most outstanding of those were their ears, which were foxlike: very tall—the tips often rose above the crest of the skull—and very thin, although they were as hairless as a human’s. The eyes were set wide apart and were also quite thin. They brought to mind the eyes of Japanese or Chinese, except there was no epicanthic fold.

  It was the Martians’ close resemblance to humans that bothered Charlotte. She thought she’d have been less unsettled if they’d been distinctly alien in their appearance.

  She made a comment to that effect to her father and he said: “Well, they are related to us, you know. Much more closely than any of the great apes, in fact.”

  They were standing in a group on a pier along one of the many small rivers that passed through Uddakit. Mr. Shankar was standing next to them, and he overheard her father’s remark.

  “Be careful, Edward!” he said, smiling slyly. “If the august professors at Oxford learn of your heresy, you’ll never hear the end of it. Wouldn’t surprise me if you were denounced by name at the next meeting of the Royal Society.”

  “What’s the Royal Society?” demanded Adrian. Snoopy as ever, her brother had overheard the exchange.

  “It’s short for ‘The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge,’” said Mr. Shankar, smiling more widely still. “Founded in 1660. It’s considered the most prestigious learned society in the entire world—”

  “Not by me,” grunted her father.

  “—by all save hopeless cranks who advocate such preposterous theories as continental drift and the common ancestry of humans and Martians.”

  “Blithering idiots,” said her father. “It’s blindingly obvious we’re of the same evolutionary lineage as Martians. The number of morphological features we have in common number literally in the hundreds. How else—”

  “Convergent evolution, convergent evolution,” said Mr. Shankar, intoning the phrase as he might a religious incantation.

  “Blithering idiots, I say it again.” Her father was frowning rather fiercely. “The odds that convergent evolution would produce such a huge number of common traits is literally astronomical. There’s as much chance that two people born next door to each other of completely different parents were as close as identical twins.”

  Mr. Shankar shrugged. “I don’t disagree with you, Edward. But it will take a great deal of work to overturn the existing biases—all the more so, given that the political authorities and economic powers have a vested interest in maintaining the notion that humans and Martians are species as separate and distinct as oysters and buffalos.”

  “Why is that?” asked Adrian.

  Her father and Mr. Shankar looked at each other. Then her father shook his head. “I’ll explain some other time, son. It’s a somewhat delicate matter, and”—he pointed his finger—“I do believe our boats have arrived.”

  * * *

  To Vera Duchesne’s relief—mild relief, since she’d been expecting it; but relief nonetheless—the two Okhrana agents were left behind as she and her large party departed from Uddakit on the three boats that Luff and Shankar had hired to take them to Ghlaktora. Apparently they’d persuaded themselves that other people were more likely candidates for being Savinkov, or harboring Savinkov. That was true enough, to be sure, but there was always a certain element of chance in these things.

  And they might still change their minds, however unlikely that might seem at the moment. She’d need to remain vigilant once they arrived at their destination. But, for the moment—really, for the first time since she’d boarded the Agincourt—she could relax.

  “Look, Madame Duchesne!” exclaimed Adrian. The boy was pointing toward something in the distance. “I think it’s a real Martian!”

  His sister frowned, glancing at the two Martians in the stern of the boat, rowing them forward. “Be polite,” she hissed at her brother.

  Adrian responded with a magnificent sneer—or what he imagined to be one, rather. It was really not possible for someone his age to produce the sort of lip-curling expression that caused foes to reel in dismay and subordinates to cringe and abase themselves.

  “Those aren’t real Martians,” he stated firmly. “Didn’t you listen to Papa? They’re just funny-looking almost-people.”

  Again he pointed into the distance. Far away, across the bleak landscape they were now passing through, Vera could barely discern some sort of creature moving slowly along the skyline.

  It looked … odd. Very odd. The creature—was it intelligent? should she rather think of it as a “being” than a creature?—seemed to be stumping along on four equidistantly positioned lower limbs. The movement reminded her more of the way a sensate derrick might locomote than anything she’d ever seen an animal on Earth do.

  “Be quiet, Adrian,” Charlotte hissed again. “You’re being rude.”

  Vera had grown quite fond of the Luff children. Charlotte more than Adrian, but that was probably just a passing thing. She remembered her own two brothers at the age of eleven. Vexatious creatures, they’d bee
n—and in their case, “creatures” was indeed the right term to use.

  But she forced those memories away. Along with them came too many other, more painful ones. Valentin had died in the Tsar’s prisons when he was only eighteen. Of disease, the police said, but the bruises and abrasions on his corpse suggested otherwise. Her older brother Dmitri had survived the three years he spent in Siberia, but he’d never been the same afterward.

  He’d been badly beaten also, on several occasions. The Russian police and prison officers were brutes, always quick to use the knout. He’d survived reasonably intact—measured in physical terms, at least. But mentally …

  He seemed to have aged a decade for every year he’d lived in exile. It was seeing him return home when she was nineteen that had crystallized her own attitude toward the Romanov dynasty and the brutal regime it oversaw. She’d hated them since she was a girl. Now, she resolved to work toward their overthrow. She’d joined the SR Party less than a month later.

  “What are you thinking, Vera?” asked Edward Luff, his voice tinged with concern. “You seem very sad all of a sudden.”

  She shook her head, more to remind herself of the need to remain vigilant than anything else. The company of friends carried its own perils.

  “It’s nothing, Edward. I was just remembering my brothers. One of them died very young and the other … well, he’s been sickly since he suffered some mishaps.”

  On impulse, she took Luff’s hand in her own and gave it a little squeeze. He returned the grip and leaned a little closer.

  She still hadn’t made a decision regarding that issue. The problem wasn’t an emotional one. Not any longer. Luff was a fine man whom it would be easy to come to love as time passed, and she was already attached to his children.

  The problem was Savinkov, as always for her these past few years. What was she to do with the man? Her obligation toward him and everything he represented outweighed everything else.

  Still, she did not relinquish her grip on the hand of the man standing beside her. Not even she, after all that had transpired, was immune to sentiment and feeling.

  * * *

  They arrived in Ghlaktora on the morning of the third day after they disembarked from the Agincourt. It had been a slow voyage—the Martian canal boats were no faster than their earthly counterparts. But Charlotte had found it to be a pleasant one nonetheless.

  The ever-growing closeness between her father and Madame Duchesne was now so obvious that even her obtuse little brother had noticed. And, for once, had not been a nuisance.

  “I like her a lot,” he’d declared. So he’d not be an antagonist, after all, as she schemed and maneuvered to bring about the logical and beneficial end result.

  No one would ever really be able to replace her own mother. But Vera Duchesne would serve splendidly as a stepmother—she’d be a vast improvement on Mrs. Smith!—and what was more important was that her father’s loneliness needed to be brought to an end. He was not by nature well-suited to being a widower.

  Charlotte came to that final conclusion before they reached Ghlaktora. Quite a bit before, in fact. She spent the last day and a half of their journey basking in the glow of her own maturity. Already rather wise, she was—though still two months shy of fifteen.

  Earth months, that was. Did they have months on Mars? She’d have to find out.

  * * *

  Chapter 12

  The five days Alexander spent chasing after Jelinek managed to be simultaneously nerve-wracking and tedious. Nerve-wracking, because following the art dealer as he worked his way through several small Martian cities was hard to do without being spotted. Tedious, because all of that tense work produced absolutely nothing in the way of results.

  By the third day, Alexander had stopped placing quotation marks in his own mind around the phrase “art dealer.” He no longer had any real doubt that Jelinek’s profession was exactly what he claimed it to be. The man not only stopped the places an art dealer would frequent, but he also made the sort of purchases you’d expect him to make.

  By the fourth day, Alexander’s suspicions that Jelinek might be Savinkov had faded almost entirely away. The only logic behind those suspicions had been the possibility that Jelinek/Savinkov might use whatever art objects he acquired to smuggle weapons into Tryddoc Aru.

  A nice theory, in the abstract—and brought down, as theories so often were, by a crude fact. In this case, by the fact that Jelinek turned out to be a very specialized sort of art dealer. He didn’t seem to be the slightest bit interested in Martian sculpture or the peculiar carvings they made from the knobby outer bark—if such it was; Alexander was not a botanist—of the gnarled and stunted trees—if such they were; the same caveat applied—that grew on the planet’s arid tablelands.

  Either of those could have served as hiding places for weapons and explosives, especially the carvings. But the only objets d’art that Jelinek seemed interested in were the small tapestries that Martians used for curtains in their homes. The tapestries might have served to disguise weapons or munitions, if they were accumulated in sufficient number. But as soon as Jelinek bought one, he immediately had it mounted in a thin frame made of some Martian substance that seemed like a cross between heavy cardboard and thick leather. Protection for the long voyage home, presumably.

  Nothing much deadlier than a large knife could have been hidden in those flat parcels, and no one armed only with a blade was going to pose any threat to Russian officials on Mars. Not important ones as closely guarded as Prince Vorontsov, at any rate, and an assassin like Savinkov wouldn’t have come all the way to Mars simply to murder a minor consulate officer. Cossacks had limits, but dealing with men wielding blades was not one of them.

  So, by the fifth day, Alexander was more than ready to relinquish the chase—if the term could be used at all. Happily, Jelinek ended his travels by returning to Mooktar and Alexander was able to reach the Russian consulate before noon. From there, he’d be able to check on Drezhner’s progress and, more importantly, re-open communication with Rachkovsky. The Paris bureau of the Okhrana had a very powerful radio at its disposal; powerful enough to reach Mars with Morse code.

  As it happened, when he arrived at the consulate there was already a message waiting for him from Rachkovsky, along with another from Drezhner.

  He read the one from Rachkovsky first.

  SAVINKOV DISCOVERED TO HAVE DIED TWO YEARS AGO. IDENTITY AND MISSION OF SRP AGENT ON MARS UNKNOWN, IF HE EXISTS AT ALL. MAY BE A RUSE. TAKE WHATEVER MEASURES SEEM NECESSARY.

  Alexander stared at the slip of paper. Savinkov … dead? So for the past two years …

  Who had been taking his place? Who had been responsible for the reports—not many, but some—that had trickled in to the Okhrana placing Savinkov in various places?

  He shook his head. This would take some contemplation. In the meantime, he might as well see what Drezhner had been up to. Nothing very useful, most likely.

  Drezhner’s message was also in Morse. It didn’t take Alexander more than a few seconds to read it.

  “That cretin!” he exclaimed.

  YOU WILL HAVE SEEN MESSAGE FROM RACHKOVSKY. NOW OBVIOUS EDWARD LUFF IS SAVINKOV. I AM IN PURSUIT.

  Alexander felt like tearing out his hair. It should have been obvious to Drezhner that the most likely situation was that they had been chasing a phantom all along. Didn’t the message itself caution if he exists at all? But even if one assumed that there was an unknown SRP agent on Mars—Savinkov or someone else, it mattered not—the notion that the English scholar was the agent was …

  He groped for a suitable term. “Moronic” came to mind immediately. The more long-winded “fevered fantasies of an imbecile” came right on its heels, followed by “monumentally stupid.”

  Drezhner was likely to cause an international incident. Alexander turned to the embassy clerk who had handed him the message. The consul himself, Evgeny Kireyev, was standing right next to the clerk, but Alexander had already taken his measure. K
ireyev was the sort of minor nobleman who filled such unimportant posts for the Russian empire. By mid-day, they were usually drunk.

  By now, it was afternoon and Kireyev was sodden. The clerk was likely to be more useful.

  “What’s the fastest way to get to Ghlaktora?” he asked.

  “Where’s Ghlaktora?” The clerk was not inebriated. But obviously not an intellectual titan, either.

  “It’s one of the smaller cities in Protei Locus,” Alexander explained impatiently. “It’s famous as a repository of ancient Martian texts.”

  “What’s Protei Locus?”

  Fortunately, the consul had something in the way of a functioning brain, awash as it might be in vodka.

  “Part of the Aromatus,” he said. Then, belched. Then: “Were me, I’d hire a—belch—gondola thing.” He waved his hand vaguely. “You know. One of those funny-looking airships with the gasbags on the bottom instead of the top where—belch—they should be.”

  “What do they cost?”

  Bleary-eyed, the consul looked at the clerk. That worthy now demonstrated that his brain, minuscule thought it might be, did hold at least a few facts.

  “About eight ootyuk a day. Twelve, if you hire a crew as well, which I’d recommend.”

  “And an ootyuk is … what, in Russian currency?”

  When told the sum, Alexander decided he could manage the business—with the assistance of Kireyev. Consulates always had a certain amount of discretionary funds at their disposal.

  Kireyev put up a protest, but between his drunkenness and Alexander’s insistence, he capitulated soon enough.

  Not soon enough, though, for Alexander to hire a “gondola thing”—which was called a fluybakh in the local tongue, as it turned out—and set off for Ghlaktora the same day. By the time he finished haggling with the fluybakh’s owner and captain the sun was setting. And as it turned out, Martians were unwilling to fly by night. Not, at least, in a fluybakh.