Beckworth was gawking, though with restraint; this was the real thing, not training. Slim tulip-shaped spires reared hundreds of feet into the air between warrens of lower-slung, thick-walled compounds, their time-faded colors still blazing against a sky of faded blue tinged pink with the dust of the Deep Beyond. The towers varied in pointillist shadings like the memory of rainbows seen in dreams. Lacy crystalline bridges joined them, and transparent domes glittered below over lineage apartment houses or the homes of the rich and powerful, full of an astonishing flowering lushness. The narrow serpentine streets below wound among blank-faced buildings of hard, glossy, rose-red stone whose ornamental carvings were often worn to faintest tracery …
Zar-tu-Kan had been an independent city-state and ancient when the Tollamune emperors of Dvor-il-Adazar united Mars. It had outlived the Eternal Peace of a planetary empire that lasted thirty thousand years, and was a city-state again. The elongated forms of its native citizens moved past one another and the draught-beasts and riding-birds in an intricate, nearly silent dance, with the loudest sound the scuff of leather and pads on stone. Occasionally a voice; now and then a tinkle of music, like bells having a mathematical argument.
“Mars isn’t older than Earth. It just feels older,” Tom Beckworth said, as they walked, renewing a discussion they’d been having off and on all the way from Kennedy Base on the icebound shores of the Arctic sea.
Shipping people between planets was expensive, even in this year of grace 1998, and only the very best got to make the trip. Unfortunately, sometimes smart, highly educated people invested a lot of their mental capital in defending preconceptions rather than challenging them.
“Martian civilization is a lot older than ours,” Beckworth went on. “But there have to be commonalities. And frankly, they’ve done less with their time than we have with ours.”
She smiled to herself. This wasn’t Venus and you couldn’t play Mighty Whitey Sahib in a pith helmet here. He would learn. Or not.
She stopped and made a sweeping gesture with her arm. “This is it,” Sally said. “Home sweet residence.”
The building was a smooth three-story octagon, featureless on the outside save for low-relief patterns like feathery reeds, with a glassine dome showing above its central portion, typical of the Orchid Consort style in the Late Imperial period. Maintainer bugs the size of cats and shaped like flattened beetles crawled slowly over the crystal in an eternal circuit.
“Helloooobosssss,” a thin, rasping, hissing voice said, in thickly accented English.
The man started violently as a skeletal shape uncoiled itself from beside the doors. In outline it was more or less like a dog covered in dusty russet fur—a fuzzy greyhound on the verge of starvation, with a long whip tail, teeth like a shark, and lambent green eyes under a disturbingly high forehead and long, prehensile toes.
“Hi, Satemcan,” Sally said. “Anything to report?”
“Quietttt,” the animal said, dropping back into Demotic; the greeting had exhausted its English. “Possibblytoooquiettt.”
It bent forward and sniffed at Beckworth’s feet. “Smelllsss unusual. Like you, but … more.”
She reached into one of the loose sleeves of her robe and tossed a package of rooz meat. The not-quite-animal snapped it out of the air and swallowed flesh and edible preservative packaging and all, licking his chops with satisfaction. Then she stripped the glove from her right hand and slipped it into a groove beside the door. A faint touch, dry and rough, and the portal of time-dulled tkem wood slid aside.
“You’ll need to give the house system a taste,” she said, as they passed into the vestibule and tucked their masks back into pockets in their robes. “There.”
Beckworth put his hand in the slot in a gingerly fashion.
“It bit me!” he exclaimed.
“Needs the DNA sample,” she said.
The inner door with its glossy surface slid aside to reveal an arched passageway in the foamed stone. That gave onto an inner courtyard about a hundred yards across. The air was blissfully damp—about like Palm Springs or Bakersfield—and smelled faintly of rock, growth, and things like marjoram and heather and others that had no names on Earth. The pavement was ornamental, a hard, fossil-rich, pale limestone that was replaced every few centuries. Little of it could be seen beneath the vegetation that covered the planters, rose up the slender fretwork pillars that supported the arcaded balconies that overlooked the court, and hung in colored sheets from the carved-stone screens. It wasn’t quite a closed system like a spaceship, but fairly close.
“I extend formal and impersonally polite greetings to the lineage and residents,” she said quietly in fluent Demotic. “This is my professional associate, denominated Thomas, casual/intimate form Tom, lineage designation Beckworth. He will be residing with me for some time as is contractually permitted by my lease.”
That took all of ten words and a couple of modifiers, in Martian. Half a dozen people looked up from chores or narrow books that hinged at the top or games of atanj, gave a brief inclination of the head, then ignored her, which was reasonably courteous; none of them were wearing their robes, or much of anything else.
“We’re on the second floor,” she said, leading the way.
“Nobody seems particularly interested in us,” Beckworth said.
“They’ve seen Terrans before,” Sally said, with a shrug.
“There are only a couple of hundred of us on Mars. I’d have thought we’d attract more attention. A Martian sure as shit would in Oakland!”
“They’re not like us, Tom. That’s the point.”
The door to her suite opened its eye and looked at her, the S-shaped pupil swelling. She met the gaze, letting it scan her and her companion. It blinked acknowledgment and there was a dull click as the muscle retracted the ceramic dead bolt.
They racked their sword belts and he looked at her pictures with interest. There was one of her parents, one of the winery they ran in Napa, and a couple of her siblings and nieces and nephews and one of a cat she’d owned, or vice versa, in university.
The apartment was large, several thousand square feet, paradisical after you got used to spaceships or space habitats or that habitat-on-Mars called Kennedy Base. The furniture was mostly built into the substance of the walls and floor, with silky or furry native blankets and rugs folded on top, some stirring a little as they sensed the Terrans’ body warmth. The extra two degrees tended to confuse them.
Homelike, in a sort of chilly detached alien way, she thought, and went on aloud:
“There’s a bed niche over there, let’s sling your duffle.”
“Where’s the bathroom?”
“That way. Wait until you make the acquaintance of the Zar-tu-Kan style of bidet,” she added, and grinned at his wince.
“When do we eat?”
“I’ll whip us up a stir-fry,” she said.
“Martians make stir-fries?” Beckworth said, surprised.
“No, I just like stir-fries.”
“Want me to lend a hand?”
“You’re not going anywhere near my cooking gear,” she said. “It took years to get everything just right.”
As they stowed his modest baggage, Beckworth said quietly: “What’s with the canid?”
“Satemcan? He’s … ah, he’s a very helpful gofer. Especially out in the field. His food doesn’t cost much.”