Essentially the canal was a vast trench that ran in a gentle curve to the orange horizon and beyond. It was maybe a half mile across, and lined with gargantuan slabs of raw, red and blue veined marble, each one flawlessly fitted to the others that surrounded it, without the use of cement of filler. No wonder that, millions of years in the future, the Grand Canal would still be visible from space when it was nothing more than a dry and eroded, ruined legacy. Its construction was the kind of public works project that usually followed long and monumentally epic wars. He could personally recall how many a mogul, and all descriptions of despots had redeployed their no longer required soldiers to labor dawn to dusk on some backbreaking wonder of the world in question. Sometimes it would be grandiose calendars or implausible tombs, but the first favorite was always a colossal irrigation project. And thus it had been with Ras Thavas and the Jeddaks of Thark after the Wars on Consolidation and the Time of the Flying Death. The newly arrived visitor might have anticipated bright flowing water in the canal, but that was not the case. Slide already knew the Martian canals held the water they moved from the poles to the equator enclosed in pipes, but no second hand weird tales of the Red Planet had prepared him for what he saw. Each pipe was maybe ten feet across, dark blue, and there were countless thousands of them.
He also would have expected that such a massed multitude of pipework to have been laid according to an orderly and geometric design, but these pipes undulated and intertwined, in and out, and over and under, and each individual one seemed to conform to what would have been the natural flow of the water in motion.
"I looks like the intestinal track of some gargantuan planet sized creature."
Mahdjfb fluttered his antennae. "In some respects it is, but we still drink the water."
Slide could only repeat himself. "Holy shit." He really was on Mars, sometime in the Golden Age, and no matter how jaded he might have become, that was something that could not be easily taken as routine.
Mahdjfb, however, was becoming snippy and impatient. "I know you're impressed with your first sight of the Grand canal, but you really do have to start for the city."
"Could you show me the way?"
"Yes, yes, I'm going that way, but we must hurry."
"The banths and corphals will be out?"
"At least you remember what you're told."
Slide got slowly his feet. "Okay, Mahdjfb. Lead the fucking way.
He reflected, however, as he started following the crustacean that a naked man walking into a Victorian city might receive a very mixed reception.
Story so far: Pursued by bounty hunters after his desertion from the Battle of the Fifteen Armies, and with the backstory already starting to distort around him, Yancey Slide, Idimmu Demon of the Tenth Continuum, escapes in Doc Zen's Carter Machine and arrives on ancient Mars some eight million years in the past. Unfortunately, Slide find himself unceremoniously dumped by the Gridley Wave on the sands of the Red Planet, devoid of clothing and personal effects.
Episode Five
The Establishment of Mrs. Rosa Coote
The Establishment of Mrs. Rosa Coote turned out to be a pillared edifice at the end of a long drive, through wrought iron gates that stood wide open and were studded with electric sparkles. The house itself was lit by gas jets and radium bulbs, and glowed like some garish Las Vegas counterfeit of Victorian England. Patrons arrived by steam cab, Martian ornithopter, and ornamental flying belts that Yancey Slide would later learn were manufactured under Royal patent and went by the brand-name Equilibrimotors. As Slide walked up the driveway, he saw that, in front of the main entrance, a line of paired Pony girls waited with their Amazon drivers, secure in the traces of lightweight, skeletally A-frame chariots, ready to carry passengers on exotic excursions through the fabricated arbors of the wholly fabricated parkland. The girls were skittish and pouting, long legged in absurdly platformed and beribboned in their Dadaist sandals, and they turned high-held heads to stare at potential fares with ball-gag muted resentment, each pair knowing that as soon as a passenger climbed aboard, or a couple, or even threesome in the low Martian gravity, the stern-driving Amazon would mercilessly crack the whip, and, smarting and stinging, they would set off at a run, pulling the chariot, forced to prance, knees impossibly high, by the heels of their surreal shoes. In due course, when drinking in the back bar of the Ferret and Spectacles with some off-duty Pony girls, talkative before turning fighting drunk, he would learn that most of those who served under the lash and between the shafts were indentured servants, in the sex business rather than the diamond mines of Gathol, good-looking, but foul-mouthed, convicted dollymops loose without papers, but a few were incognito ladies of class who actually paid, or had their husbands pay, for the chastening servility of the harness.
As it had turned out, Slide had not been required to enter the city Extrosylvania, of which the Establishment of Mrs. Rosa Coote was a well known attraction, as buck naked as he had arrived on Mars. Once the decision had been made to head for the city, he and the crustacean Mahdjfb had walked in silence for a long time, following the slowly curving line of the Grand Canal, while the small tripod nervously scanned the horizon for the rising of the moons and the coming of the predator banths and the even more hideous corphals. As the wonder of the Grand Canal wore off, Slide found there was very little to look at until, way in the distance, he had spotted three objects on the other side of the canal where the peak of the huge volcano Olympus Mons rose from beyond the horizon. As best he could judge distance on this new planet, Slide figured the things had to be well over thirty feet high, and looked like giant three-legged relatives of Mahdjfb, clad in complex steel armor. Slide had glanced at the little crustacean. "What the hell are those things?"
Mahdjfb swivelled the stalks of his eyes, and his antennae vibrated with what Slide read as disgust. "They are a Trinity of Slimy Things fighting machines. Normally they don't come all the way to this side of Olympus Mons, but they must be feeling bold. Mercifully they never cross the Grand Canal. They have that problem with water."
"I thought the Slimy Things were the enemy."
"They are the enemy."
"But those things look exactly like you."
Mahdjfb's antennae shook angrily. "They do not!"
Slide, having no clothes was completely insensitive to Mahdjfb's feeling and laughed. "They do, man. They look just like you, only much bigger and metallic."
"No they don't."
"Sure they do."
"Don't say that."
"I'm offending you?"
"Of course you're bloody offending me. As if it wasn't bad enough to have had the Slimy Things steal your basic natural design for their damned machines, there are species who like to accuse us of collaboration in the theft. Goddamn it, man, my kind, the Fygglhgis, were here before any of them. There are some bastards, usually human, who try to blame the worst of the Slimy Things outrages on us just because we look like their walking weapons. Can you imagine how it feels to be held responsible by a gang of drunks for the heat-ray destruction of New Jersey?"
Slide now knew that he had touched a nerve in his new-found guide, and he
resolved to say nothing until Mahdjfb had cooled down, which was just as well because, a short time later, the answer to his clothing problem materialized in the form of a thoat and rider drinking at one of the crystal fountains that were provided at regular intervals along the banks of the Grand Canal for exactly that purpose. The meeting could only have been a happy paradigm of Idimmu Blind Luck; happy for Slide, at least, while somewhat disastrous for the mounted traveler. Slide obviously had nothing against this total stranger, but he still, and with hesitation, employed a high-test demon mindfuck to batter the unfortunate into unconscious helplessness. While ignoring Mahdjfb's indignant protests that what Slide was doing could not be considered anything but out-and-out daylight robbery, and a felony as well, Slide had stripped off the man's clothing, which, by another stroke of demon good fortune fitted him exactly. Except for the boots, that is, and the feet of his borrowed body had to be contracted somewhat to squeeze into them. In addition to the long duster coat, embroidered vest, riding breeches, and a very serviceable cotton shirt, the robbery yielded a fat purse of gold jimmy o'goblins, straight out of the 19th century British Empire, and a long barreled and very Martian radium revolver. Slide noticed the Victorian presence on Mars was already starting to get to him. He was already using phrases like "happy paradigm".