“Jack! Jack!” I cried. His eyes were wide, his face pale with shock. “Maestro!” He looked and saw me. I took him by the hand and together we ran from the smoking ruin of the skymaster. The crew, military-trained, had been more expeditious in their escape. Already they were running from the wreck. I felt a shadow pass over me. I looked up. Diving out of the tiny atom of the sun—how horrible, oh how horrible! I saw for the first time, whole and entire, one of the things that had been hunting us and my heart quailed. It swooped with ghastly speed and agility on its four wings and snatched the running men up into the air, each impaled on a scimitar-claw. It hovered in the air above us and I caught the foul heat and stench of the wind from its wings and beak. This, this is the death for which I had been reserved. Nothing so simple as an air crash. The sky horror looked at me, looked at Count Jack with its six eyes, major and minor. Then with a terrible, scrannel cry, like the souls of the dead engineers impaled on its claws, and with a gust of wing-driven wind, it rose up and swept away.
We had been marked for life.
Irony is the currency of time. We were marked for life, but three times I entertained killing Count Jack Fitzgerald. Pick up a rock and beat him to death with it, strangle him with his bow tie, just walk away from him and leave him in the dry gulches for the bone-picking things.
I reasoned, by dint of a ready water supply and a scrap of paper thrown in, that showed a sluggish but definite flow, that we should follow the canal. I had little knowledge of the twisted areography of the Labyrinth of Night—no one did, I suspect—but I was certain that all waters flowed to the Grand Canal and that was the spine and nervous system of Operation Enduring Justice. I advised us to drink—Count Jack ordered me to look away as he knelt and supped up the oddly metallic Martian water. We set off to the sound of unholy cries high and far among the pinnacles of the canyon walls.
The sun had not crossed two fingers of narrow canyonland sky before Count Jack gave an enormous theatrical sigh and sat down on a canal-side barge bollard.
“Dear boy, I simply cannot take another step without some material sustenance.”
I indicated the alien expanse of ruck, dust, water, red sky, hinted at its barrenness.
“I see bushes,” Count Jack said. “I see fruit on those bushes.”
“They could be deadly poison, Maestro.”
“What’s fit for Martians cannot faze the robust Terrene digestive tract,” Count Jack proclaimed. “Anyway, better a quick death than lingering starvation, dear God.”
Argument was futile. Count Jack harvested a single egg-shaped, purple fruit and took a small, delicate bite. We waited. The sun moved across its slot of sky.
“I remain obdurately alive,” said Count Jack, and ate the rest of the fruit. “The texture of a slightly underripe banana and a flavor of mild aniseed. Tolerable. But the belly is replete.”
Within half an hour of setting off again, Count Jack had called a halt.
“The gut, Faisal, the gut.” He ducked behind a rock. I heard groans and oaths and other, more liquid noises. He emerged pale and sweating.
“How do you feel?”
“Lighter, dear boy. Lighter.”
That was the first time that I considered killing him.
The fruit had opened more than his bowels. The silence of the canyons must have haunted him, for he talked. Dear God, he talked. I was treated to Count Jack Fitzgerald’s opinion on everything from the way I should have been ironing his dress shirts (apparently I required a secondary miniature ironing board specially designed for collar and cuffs) to the conduct of the war between the worlds.
I tried to shut him up by singing, trusting—knowing—that he could not resist an offer to show off and shine. I cracked out “Blaze Away” in my passable baritone, then “The Soldier’s Dream,” anything with a good marching beat. My voice rang boldly from the rim rocks.
Count Jack touched me lightly on the arm.
“Dear boy, dear dear boy. No. You only make the intolerable unendurable.”
And that was the second time that I was close to physically killing him. But we realized that if we were to survive—and though we could not entertain the notion that we might not, because it would surely have broken our hearts and killed us—we understood that to have any hope of making it back to occupied territory, we would have to proceed as more than Maestro and accompanist. So, in the end, we talked, one man with another man. I told him of my childhood in middle-class, leafy Woking, and at the Royal Academy of Music, and the realization, quiet, devastating, and quite quite irrefutable, that I would never be a concert great. I would never play the Albert Hall, the Marinsky, Carnegie Hall. I saw a Count Jack I had never seen before, sincere behind the bluster, humane and compassionate. I saw beyond an artiste. I saw an artist. He confided his fears to me: that the days of Palladiums and Pontiffs had blinded him. He realized too late that one night the lights would move to another and he would face the long, dark walk from the stage. But he had plans; yes, he had plans. A long walk in a hard terrain concentrated the mind wonderfully. He would pay the Revenue their due and retain Ferid Bey only long enough to secure the residency on Venus. And when his journey through the worlds was done and he had enough space dust under his nails, he would return to Ireland, to County Kildare, buy some land, and set himself up as a tweedy, be-waistcoated, red-faced Bog Boy. He would sing only for the Church, at special Masses and holy days of obligation and parish glees and tombolas; he could see a time when he might fall in love with religion again, not from any personal faith but for the comfort and security of familiarity.
“Have you thought of marrying?” I asked. Count Jack had never any shortage of female admirers, even if they no longer threw underwear onto the stage as they had back in the days when his hair and mustache were glossy and black—and he would mop his face with them and throw them back to shrieks of approval from the crowd. “Not a dry seat in the house, dear boy.” But I had never seen anything that hinted at a more lasting relationship than bed and champagne breakfast.
“Never seen the need, dear boy. Not the marrying type. And you, Faisal?”
“Not the marrying type either.”
“I know. I’ve always known. But that’s what this bloody world needs. Really needs. Women, Faisal. Women. Leave men together and they soon agree to make a wasteland. Women are a civilizing force.”
We rounded an abrupt turn in the canal and came upon a scene that silenced even Count Jack. A battle had been fought here, a war of total commitment and destruction. But who had won, who had lost? We could not tell. Uliri War Tripods lay draped over ledges and arches like desiccated spiders. The wrecks of skymasters were impaled on stone spires, wedged into rock clefts and groins. Shards of armor, human and Uliri, littered the canyon floor. Helmets and cuirasses were empty, long since picked clean by whatever scavengers hid from the light of the distant sun to gnaw and rend in the night. We stood in a landscape of hull plates, braces, struts, smashed tanks, and tangles of wiring and machinery we could not begin to identify. Highest, most terrible of all, the hulk of a spaceship, melted with the fires of reentry, smashed like soft fruit, lay across the canyon, rim to rim. Holes big enough to fly a skymaster through had been punched through the hull, side to side.
Count Jack raised his eyes to the fallen spaceship, then his hands.
“Dear God. I may never play the Hammersmith Palais again.”
Chimes answered him, a tintinnabulation of metal ringing on metal. This was the final madness. This was when I understood that we were dead—that we had died in the skymaster crash—and that war was Hell. Then I felt the ground tremble beneath the soles of my good black concert shoes and I understood. Metal rang on metal, wreckage on wreckage. The earth shook, dust rose. The spoilage of war started to stir and move. The ground shook, my feet were unsteady, there was nothing to hold on to, no surety except Count Jack. We held each other as the dust rose before us and the scrap started to slide and roll. Higher the ground rose, and higher, and that was the third time I almost killed him, for I still did not fully understand what was happening and imagined that if I stopped Jack, I would stop the madness. This was his doing; he had somehow summoned some old Martian evil from the ground. Then a shining conical drill head emerged from the soil, and the dust and rocks tumbled as the mole-machine emerged from the ground. It rose twenty, thirty feet above us, a gimlet-nosed cylinder of soil-scabbed metal. Then it put out metal feet from hatches along its belly, fell forward, and came to rest a stone’s throw from us. Hatches sprang open behind the still-spinning drill head, fanned out like flower petals. I glimpsed silver writhing in the interior darkness. Uliri padvas streamed out, their tentacles carrying them dexterously over the violated metal and rock. Their cranial cases were helmeted, their breathing mantles armored in delicately worked cuirasses, and their palps held ray rifles. We threw our hands up. They swarmed around us, and, without a sound, herded us into the dark maw of the Martian mole-machine.