‘Sun,’ the Mandrake exec’s voice came out even enough. ‘Check the upper openings.’
The systems specialist nodded and powered up her grav harness. The whine of the drivers cut in and then deepened as her bootsoles unstuck from the floor and she drifted upwards. Jiang and Deprez circled out, Sunjets raised to cover her.
‘No way through here,’ she called back down from the first opening.
I heard the change, and my eyes slanted back to the songspires. Wardani was the only one watching me and she saw my face. Behind Hand’s back, her mouth opened in a silent question. I nodded at the spires and cupped my ear.
Listen.
Wardani moved closer, then shook her head.
Hissing. ‘That’s not poss—’
But it was.
The faint, violin-scraped sound of the song was modulating. Reacting to the constant underpinning drone of the grav drivers. That, or maybe the grav field itself. Modulating and, very faintly, strengthening.
Waking up.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
We found Hand’s safe transmission base four songspire clusters and about another hour later. By then we’d started to hook back towards the docking bay, following a tentative map that Sun’s Nuhanovic scanners were building on her arm. The mapping software didn’t like Martian architecture any more than I did, that much was apparent from the long pauses every time Sun loaded in a new set of data. But with a couple of hours’ wandering behind us, and some inspired interfacing from the systems specialist, the programme was able to start making some educated guesses of its own about where we should be looking. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was dead right.
Climbing out of a massive spiralling tube whose gradient was too steep for human comfort, Sun and I staggered to a halt at the edge of a fifty-metre broad platform that was seemingly exposed to raw space on all sides. A crystal-clear open starfield curved overhead and down around us, interrupted only by the bones of a gaunt central structure reminiscent of a Millsport dockyard crane. The sense of exposure to the outside was so complete I felt my throat lock up momentarily in vacuum combat reflex at the sight. My lungs, still straining from the climb, flapped weakly in my chest.
I broke the reflex.
‘Is that a forcefield?’ I asked Sun, panting.
‘No, it’s solid.’ She frowned over the forearm display. ‘Transparent alloy, about a metre thick. That’s very impressive. No distortion. Total direct visual control. Look, there’s your gate.’
It stood in the starscape over our heads, a curiously oblong satellite of greyish-blue light creeping across the darkness.
‘This has got to be the docking control turret,’ Sun decided, patting her arm and turning slowly. ‘What did I tell you. Nuhanovic smart mapping. They don’t make it any bet—’
Her voice dried up. I looked sideways and saw how her eyes had widened, focused on something further ahead. Following her gaze to the skeletal structure at the centre of the platform, I saw the Martians.
‘You’d better call the others up,’ I said distantly.
They were hung over the platform like the ghosts of eagles tortured to death, wings spread wide, caught up in some kind of webbing that swung eerily in stray air currents. There were only two, one hoisted close to the highest extent of the central structure, the other not much above human head height. Moving warily closer, I saw that the webbing was metallic, strung with instrumentation whose purposes made no more overt sense than the machines we’d passed in the bubble chambers.
I passed another outcrop of songspires, most of them not much over knee height. They barely got a second glance. Behind me, I heard Sun yelling down the spiral to the rest of the party. Her raised voice seemed to violate something in the air. Echoes chased each other around the dome. I reached the lower of the two Martians, and stood beneath the body.
Of course, I’d seen them before. Who hasn’t. You get input with this stuff from kindergarten upwards. The Martians. They’ve replaced the mythological creatures of our own picket-fenced earthbound heritage, the gods and demons we once used for the foundations of our legends. Impossible to overestimate, wrote Gretzky, back when he apparently still had some balls, the sideswiping blow that this discovery dealt our sense of belonging in the universe, and our sense that the universe in some way belonged to us.
The way Wardani laid it out for me, one desert evening on the balcony at Roespinoedji’s warehouse:
Bradbury, 2089 pre-colonial reckoning. The founder-heroes of human antiquity are exposed for the pig-ignorant mall bullies they probably always were, as decoding of the first Martian data systems brings in evidence of a starfaring culture at least as old as the whole human race. The millennial knowledge out of Egypt and China starts to look like a ten-year-old child’s bedroom datastack. The wisdom of the ages shredded at a stroke into the pipe-cooked musings of a bunch of canal-dive barflies. Lao Tzu, Confucius, Jesus Christ, Muhammed – what did these guys know? Parochial locals, never even been off the planet. Where were they when the Martians were crossing interstellar space.
Of course – a sour grin out of one corner of Wardani’s mouth – established religion lashed back. The usual strategies. Incorporate the Martians into the scheme of things, scour the scriptures or make up some new ones, reinterpret. Failing that, lacking the grey matter for that much effort, just deny the whole thing as the work of evil forces and firebomb anyone who says otherwise. That ought to work.
But it didn’t work.
For a while it looked as if it might. Upwelling hysteria brought sectarian violence and the recently established university departments of xenology frequently up in flames. Armed escorts for noted archaeologues and a fair few campus firefights between fundamentalists and the public order police. Interesting times for the student body…
Out of it all, the new faiths arose. Most of them not that much different to the old faiths by all accounts, and just as dogmatic. But underlying, or maybe floating uneasily atop, came a groundswell of secular belief in something that was a little harder to define than God.
Maybe it was the wings. A cultural archetype so deep – angels, demons, Icarus and countless idiots like him off towers and cliffs until we finally got it right – that humanity clung to it.
Maybe there was just too much at stake. The astrogation charts with their promise of new worlds we could just go to, assured of a terrestroid destination because, well, it says so here.
Whatever it was, you had to call it faith. It wasn’t knowledge; the Guild wasn’t that confident of its translation back then, and you don’t launch hundreds of thousands of stored minds and clone embryos into the depths of interstellar space without something a lot stronger than a theory.
It was faith in the essential workability of the New Knowledge. In place of the terracentric confidence of human science and its ability to Work It All Out someday, a softer trust in the overarching edifice of Martian Knowledge that would, like an indulgent father, let us get out into the ocean and drive the boat for real. We were heading out the door, not as children grown and leaving home for the first time, but as toddlers gripping trustingly with one chubby fist at the talon of Martian civilisation. There was a totally irrational sense of safety and wrapped-up warmth to the whole process. That, as much as Hand’s much vaunted economic liberalisation, was what drove the diaspora.