Out of Scarlight

Out of Scarlight

By Liz Williams

Scarlight sits in a narrow valley, at a point where the Yss river is channeled between steps of stone, and cascades down to the canals of the plains in a series of dramatic chasms. At the top of Scarlight itself, an ancient arched bridge sits over one of these waterfalls, which then plummets several hundred feet to a dark pool, and on down through the town. Scarlight is one of those nexus places, where many roads meet, and they say that the pool is filled with the bones of those who have upset the lords of Scarlight.

…

The pursuer rode a green beast, one of the burrow-dwelling things that live in the hills of Ithness, and it was therefore a long way from home. Part reptile, part cat, it leaped along sinuously, and I could see its rider casting the malefic incantations that the sorcerers of Ithness are wont to employ, hurling poisons like bolts.

An extraterrestrial dream. Painting by Elena

…

The Shan-hai called on the carrion spirits of the wind. They use an older tongue for these ceremonies, a language that has been dead for thousands of years and has nothing to do with the builders of the canals or the cities of the plain. It is wilder, stranger, not at all human. It made my skin crawl to hear it, and yet it filled me with a strange ascetic sense of longing : the reverse of the sex-songs that they sing in the palaces to inflame all those who hear them. This spoke of purity and deliberate isolation. Perhaps it was what I needed. I became lost in the thin harmonies, as the priestess berated or cajoled or implored the carrion gods; I did not know which. But then I became aware that someone was close to my shoulder. Casually, I turned.

A Man Without Honor

A Man Without Honor

by James S.A. Corey

As we passed through the vast interior of the Serkeriah, Carina Meer – for this proved to be the captain’s name – did her best to apprise me of our situation, and I will do my best to summarize here what she said to me. That body that we call Mars was once home to a vast and flourishing civilization. Great cities of living crystal filled with sweet water. The seven races lived together there in harmony and conflict, peace and war, much in the fashion of the nations of our own world. She told me of being a child and looking up at the vast night sky to see the brightness that that, to her, was our own world, and I found myself powerfully moved by the image.

Those cities now lie in shards, the canals empty and dry. The Ikkean race, for reasons known only in their own insectile councils, turned en masse upon the other six races. The soft-shelled Manae, wise and gentle Sord (of whom La’an was the first of my acquaintance), radian Imesqu, vast and slow Norian, mechanical Achreon, and our own cousin Humanity were driven under the surface of the planet, to live in the great caverns where the Ikkeans feared to follow.

The six conquered races lived in darkness and despair until Carina’s borther, Hermeton, happened in his alchemical investigations upon a rare alloy capable of bringing enormous power. His new solar engines, it was hoped, might tame the Ikkean threat, should the alloy be found in sufficient quantity.

An Old Martian Castle Landscape. Image : © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

To this end, the conquered races had sent their agent to the rich profundity that is Earth, to gather from the violence of our planet’s core the means of their liberty. Great was their feat of discovery, for while their power is vast, their position with the Ikkean threat is tenuous. An alliance between the Ikkean race and the humans of Earth would certainly have spelled doom to the six races. And their fears, as you will see, were not unjustified.

…

The Palace of the Underworld had grown to almost twice its height when the enemy’s flying scouts appeared.

Imagine if you will, Your Grace, the wast Martian sky, as purple as a lilac, with the same sun that shines on Westminster and London here taking on a wholly foreign aspect, with wide tendrils of rainbow snaking from its centrally glowing orb. See, if you will, the vast ruins that had once been the pride of seven races with their crystal hearts laid bare by storms and war; the massive, dying river, slow as an old man’s blood ; the bleeding and desperate crew hauling the hope of survival on a half-shattered cart that struggled and failed to rise from the ground like a wounded moth.

The air was thin and held the scent of metal and spent gunpowder. The heat of the sun oppressed as powerfully as a tropical noontime.

Now hear the familiar cry of Quohog – awch loy – smoke ahoy. Picture a storm of dragonflies, each as large as a man’s arm. They rose in the east, thick as the billows of a vast conflagration, and spread out across the sky. I heard Carina Meer’s cry when she caught sitght of them and saw the blood drain from her tawny face.

Written in Dust

Written in Dust

by Melinda M. Snodgrass

She banked to come in next to him, and they flew wingtip to wingtip as they passed over the Martian city. She wondered what her dream Martians would make of it now. The jewel-tone towers were still the same, but now the avenues were washed with red dust and filled with the whine and moan of the incessant Martian wind instead of with songs.

The shadow of the ultralights’ wings swept across the red sand and rock of the planet, and played tag with the swirling whirlwinds dancing across the craters and plateaus. The fragile light of the distant sun sparkled on the domes covering the farm fields of the settlers.

Through the front windshield, she watched the looming mass of Mons Olympus, the solar system’s largest volcano, draw closer. The peak scraped at the red sky of Mars, and a few tattered clouds coiled about the shoulders of the mountain as if the massif were trying to wrap itself in a thin shawl.

Written in Martian Dust. Painting by Elena

… They found a level area not far from the sharp cut of the canal and landed. In Mars’s low gravity they were able to take long, flauting strides that quickly carried them to the edge of the canal. It was obvious that it wasn’t natural. The edges were clean, as if cut by a laser, and the walls were impossibly straight. Tilde knew that early explorers had lowered probes into the canals but nothing had been found. Just sheer walls of fused glass. Why had the Martians made them? What purpose had they served?

Initially, the fear that something lived in those deep cuts had discourages colonization, but years passed and nothing ever emerged from the canals, and necessity replaced fear. The home world, gripped in climate change and lacking enough cropland for her teeming billions, needed a new breadbasket. So the doomsayers had been overridden, and the settlers had arrived.

Mechanical Flower

Mechanical Flower

As I spoke, I craned my neck to look up at the night sky. The major constellations gleamed brightly: Ursa Major, Draco, Cygnus, with Denes as the north star. You can’t see the Milky Way very well in the city; you have to go out into the desert to get a decent view of the Martian night sky. (Martian Blood, by Allen M. Steele)

The sea beast’s image was almost completely defaced by the miner’s tracks. The behemoth’s mechanical growls fades as it turned a far-off corner in its programmed course, putting walls between it and the Earthman. (The ugly Duckling, by Matthew Hughes)

Mars now loomed above the bow, glowing red and huge as the dome of St. Peter’s at sunset. The great north polar cap gleamed white and pristine atop the ruddy globe, but Sexton had rejected Edmond’s idea of landing there to melt water from snow, fearing that the air of the polar regions might be so cold that their limited supply of coal could not heat it sufficiently to raise the ship again. (The Wreck of the Mars Adventure, by David D. Levine)

“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 Artic Sea. (S.M. Stirling, Swords of Zar-tu-Kan).

Colors of Mars. The light of Martian Sun. Painting: Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

“My race is not the first to inhabit this world”, answered Qudipai. “Before us, there was a race that strode across Mars like the giants they were. A tall man like you would not come up to the waist of even the smallest of them. Nothing could stand in there way, but soon their triumphs made them arrogant. It was when they decided that they themselves must be gods that the true God brought His fist down and flattened their kingdom with a single blow”. (In the Tombs of the Martian Kings, by Mike Resnick)

I slept, but with the strange dreams that I remembered from earlier times here, tormenting images of leatherblack wings and a girl’s face, seen through fire. (Liz Williams, Out of Scarlight)

Oud lived, we think, at the start of the Great Bombardment (see later), before the largest of the geologic upheavals, the rise of the shield volcanoes and the great asteroid impacts that released untold amounts of suddenly boiling permafrost and loosed water vapor and pyroclastic flows that changed the even-then-ever changing face of Mars. (The Dead Sea-Bottom Scrolls – A Re-creation of Oud’s Journey by Slimshang from Tharsis to Solis Locus by George Weeton, Fourth Mars Settlement Wave, 1981, Howard Waldrop).

Shall I recount to you the battle at the edge of the Palace of the Underworld, and how young Carter saved us all by scaling the massive spider-ship as though it were rigging, his dagger in his teeth? Or the fateful meeting with Hermeton, brother to Carina Meer, and the fearful duplicity of his plan to defeat the Ikkeans? Shall I describe to you the great caverns below the martian surface and detail the mystery and madness of the Elanin Chorus? The death dwarves of Inren-Kah? The hawk-men of Nis? The Plant-Queen of Venus? Like Scheherazade to her Caliph, Il believe I could beguile you with these tales for countless nights. But to what end? (A Man without Honor by James S.A. Corey).

Tilda pushed back the canopy and climbed into her garishly painted ultralight plane. Was it the unremitting red of Mars that made settlers so crazy for color? she wondered. Hers was painted silver, with blue stars and moons and streaks and swirls across the overly long wings and fuselage. (Written in Dust by Melinda M. Snodgrass).

Colors of Mars. The light of Martian Sun. Image : Megan Jorgensen.

The Lost Canal

The Lost Canal

by Michael Moorcock

The canals were deep and wide once, designed to get the most from dwindling water supplies. The meteors leveled them. But this Ia canal? It was underground?

« My clan’s ancestors planned to build this great underground canal, protected from all foreseeable danger, completely encircling the planet, with branches serving other local systems. The canal was named for an ancient water goddess, Ia. Ia would connect to a series of hubs serving other canal systems. Its creators thought that it would, through the trade it would stimulate, bring peace to the entire planet. Ia would circle Mars from pole to pole, where the melting ice caps would continuously refill it. The project was abandoned long before my time.”

« Abandoned? What happened? » In spite of his circumstances, Stone found the story engaging. « It sounds a grea idea ».

« During construction at the Pataphal cross-waterway intersection, after hundreds of miles of the Ia system had already been built, a terrible disaster struck. A whole section of the great Nokedu Cavern floor, which had been tested and found solid, fell away. Hundreds were killed. More of the cavern kept falling, until it formed a massive chasm, miles deep and far too wide to bridge. Black, unfathomable, the Nokedu Falls dropped deep into the planet’s heart.

The Lost Canal. Painting by Elena

The entire project was abandonded. No more would have been said had not an extraordinary phenomenon occurred maybe a month after the project was closed for good. A guard reported seeing the canal slowly filling with water.

Some freak of natural condensation created a system that had the effect of filling the Ia canal with enough water to float a good-size barge. But of course, at Nokedu the water again rushed into the great chasm. Damming didn’t work. It became pretty clear that the water had to circulate. Several expeditions had been made into the Nokedu Deep to find the cause of the phenomenon. The expeditions were lost or returned without success. The water supply remained continuous…

…

He moved his head to his right. In the helmet’s crisp illumination, he saw black water rippling, making its rapid way toward the falls, which had to be miles away and yet were already distinct. A distant roar. At a discreet sound from the helmet, Stone turned right, keeping the water on his left as the walkway widened, revealing the dark bulk of buildings, low houses, all abandoned.

This had been a busy, thriving port.

People had traded down here and been entertained, had families and lived complex lives. Mac wished that he had time to explore the town. Unlike the canal itself, the settlements along the bank were on a human scale and in different styles. This was where the last humanoid Martians had lived. The place had a bleak atmosphere. Mac saw no evidence for the legends he’d grown up hearing in the Low-Canal of enduring pockets of Martians still living down here.

They were not the last native Martians. Those were the raïfs. Never wholly visible, the flitted around the Low-Canal settlements – the so-called mourning Martians, whose songs sometimes drifted in from the depths of the dead sea-bottoms and whose pink-veined outlines were almost invisible by noon. They drifted like translucent rays, feeding on light. Their songs could be heartbreaking. Storytellers insisted that they were not a new race at all but the spirits of the last humanoid Martians forever doomed to haunt the Low-Canal.

Stone had never felt quite so alone. The buildings were thinning out as he walked, and his helmet showed him an increasing number of great natural arches, of stalagmites and stalactites forming a massive stone forest beside the whispering water of the Ia canal. Some had been carved by ancient artists into representations of long-since-extinct creatures. Every so often, he was startled by a triangular face with eldritch, almost Terran, features. Mac, used to so much strangeness, felt almost in awe of those petrified faces, which stared back at him with sardonic intelligence.

Nothing lived here, not even the savage crocs. Nothing flew or scampered or wriggled over the smooth marble, among the stone trunks of stone trees whose stone boughs bent back to the ground. The only noise came from the rushing water, and even that was muted.

Destroying the Future. Painting by Megan Jorgensen.