Three-quarters of a million deaths on Adoracion changed things. That, and a few other geopolitical shortcomings that cropped up with the rise of the Protectorate. Back on Earth, the old faiths slammed down, political and spiritual alike, iron-bound tomes of authority to live by. We have lived loosely, and a price must be paid. In the name of stability and security, things must be run with a firm hand now.
Of that brief flourishing of enthusiasm for all things Martian, very little remains. Wycinski and his pioneering team are centuries gone, hounded out of university posts and funding and in some cases actually murdered. The Guild has drawn into itself, jealously guarding what little intellectual freedom the Protectorate allows it. The Martians are reduced from anything approaching a full understanding to two virtually unrelated precipitates. On the one hand a textbook-dry series of images and notes, as much data as the Protectorate deems socially appropriate. Every child dutifully learns what they looked like, the splayed anatomy of their wings and skeleton, the flight dynamics, the tedious minutiae of mating and young-rearing, the reconstructions in virtual of their plumage and colouring, drawn from the few visual records we’ve managed to access or filled in with Guild guesses. Roost emblems, probable clothing. Colourful, easily digestible stuff. Not much sociology. Too poorly understood, too undefined, too volatile, and besides do people really want to bother themselves with all that…
‘Knowledge tossed away,’ she said, shivering a little in the desert chill. ‘Wilful ignorance in the face of something we might have to work to understand.’
At the other end of the fractionating column the more esoteric elements gather. Weird religious offshoots, whispered legend and word of mouth from the digs. Here, something of what the Martians were to us once has remained – here, their impact can be described in murmured tones. Here they can be named as Wycinski once named them; the New Ancients, teaching us the real meaning of that word. Our mysteriously absent winged benefactors, swooping low to brush the nape of our civilisation’s neck with one cold wingtip, to remind us that six or seven thousand years of patchily recorded history isn’t what they call ancient around here.
This Martian was dead.
A long time dead, that much was apparent. The body had mummified in the webbing, wings turned parchment thin, head dried out to a long narrow skull whose beak gaped half open. The eyes were blackened in their backward-slashed sockets, half hidden by the draped membrane of the eyelids. Below the beak, the thing’s skin bulged out in what I guessed must have been the throat gland. Like the wings, it looked paper-thin and translucent.
Under the wings, angular limbs reached across the webbing and delicate-looking talons grasped at instrumentation. I felt a tiny surge of admiration. Whatever this thing had been, it had died at the controls.
‘Don’t touch it,’ snapped Wardani from behind me, and I became aware that I was reaching upward to the lower edge of the webbing frame.
‘Sorry.’
‘You will be, if the skin crumbles. There’s an alkaline secretion in their subcutaneous fat layers that runs out of control when they die. Kept in balance by food oxidation during life, we think, but it’s strong enough to dissolve most of a corpse, given a decent supply of water vapour.’ As she spoke, she was moving around the webbing frame with the automatic caution of what must have been Guild training. Her face was utterly intent, eyes never shifting from the winged mummy above us. ‘When they die like this, it just eats through the fat and dries out to a powder. Very corrosive if you breathe it in, or get it in your eyes.’
‘Right.’ I moved back a couple of steps. ‘Thanks for the advance warning.’
She shrugged. ‘I didn’t expect to find them here.’
‘Ships have crews.’
‘Yeah, Kovacs, and cities have populations. We’ve still only ever found a couple of hundred intact Martian corpses in over four centuries of archaeology on three dozen worlds.’
‘Shit like that in their systems, I’m not surprised.’ Schneider had wandered over and was rubbernecking on the other side of the space below the webbing frame. ‘So what happened to this stuff if they just didn’t eat for a while?’
Wardani shot him an irritated glance. ‘We don’t know. Presumably the process would start up.’
‘That must have hurt,’ I said.
‘Yes, I imagine it would.’ She didn’t really want to talk to either of us. She was entranced.
Schneider failed to take the hint. Or maybe he just needed the babble of voices to cover the huge stillness in the air around us and the gaze of the winged thing above us. ‘How come they’d end up with something like that? I mean,’ he guffawed, ‘it’s not exactly evolutionarily selective, is it? Kills you if you’re hungry.’
I looked up at the desiccated, spreadeagled corpse again, feeling a fresh surge of the respect I’d first felt when I realised the Martians had died at their posts. Something indefinable happened in my head, something that my Envoy senses recognised as the intuitive shimmer at the edge of understanding.
‘No, it’s selective,’ I realised as I spoke. ‘It would have driven them. It would have made them the toughest motherfuckers in the sky.’
I thought I spotted a faint smile crossing Tanya Wardani’s face. ‘You should publish, Kovacs. That kind of intellectual insight.’
Schneider smirked.
‘In fact,’ the archaeologue said, falling into gentle lecture mode while she stared at the mummified Martian, ‘the current evolutionary argument for this trait is that it helped keep crowded roosts hygienic. Vasvik and Lai, couple of years ago. Before that, most of the Guild agreed it would deter skin-feeding parasites and infection. Vasvik and Lai wouldn’t actually dispute that, they’re just jockeying for pole position. And, of course, there is the overarching toughest motherfuckers in the sky hypothesis, which a number of Guild Masters have elaborated, though none quite as elegantly as you, Kovacs.’
I tipped her a bow.
‘Do you think we can get her down?’ Wardani wondered aloud, standing back to get a better look at the cables the webbing frame depended from.
‘Her?’
‘Yeah. It’s a roost guardian. See the spur on the wing. That bone ridge on back of the the skull. Warrior caste. They were all female as far as we know.’ The archaeologue looked up at the cabling again. ‘Think we can get this thing working?’
‘Don’t see why not.’ I raised my voice to carry across the platform ‘Jiang. You see anything like a winch on that side?’
Jiang looked upward, then shook his head.
‘What about you, Luc?’
‘Mistress Wardani!’
‘Speaking of motherfuckers,’ muttered Schneider. Matthias Hand was striding across to join the congregation beneath the spreadeagled corpse.
‘Mistress Wardani, I hope you weren’t thinking of doing anything other than look at this specimen.’
‘Actually,’ the archaeologue told him, ‘we’re looking for a way to winch it down. Got a problem with that?’
‘Yes, Mistress Wardani, I have. This ship, and everything it contains, is the property of the Mandrake Corporation.’
‘Not until the buoy sings, it isn’t. That’s what you told us to get us in here, anyway.’
Hand smiled thinly. ‘Don’t make an issue of this, Mistress Wardani. You’ve been well enough paid.’
‘Oh, paid. I’ve been paid.’ Wardani stared at him. ‘Fuck you, Hand.’
She stormed away across the platform and stood at its edge, looking out.