Her tawny limbs had been rubbed with scented oil until they glowed like amber silks. Then a sparkling dust, like that of crushed mirrors, had been sprinkled across her body. Firelight glittered like powdered gems from every sinuous twist and undulation.
Reluctantly lifting his eyes from the allure of her breasts, Ryker saw that her face was catlike, wide cheeked, elfin, with a small chin and a full-lipped mouth. Her nose was pert, a mere nubbin. Her eyes—
He frowned, then. For she went masked and he could not see her eyes. The visor was of black satin, molded to fit the contours of her face, and it had no eyeholes. Which was strange, he thought, but not very important. With all that sleek, glowing flesh to drink in, he did not have to see her eyes.
And that was his last mistake.
She danced to the pittering of drums and the wail of a small pipe. An old, bony man clenched the drums between gaunt knees, where he squatted to one side of the dragon’s-mouth fireplace. His gnarled, knobbed hands made dry, erratic music.
The pipe was held by a naked boy of perhaps twelve, who leaned with gamine grace against a pillar. The thin, wailing cry of his pipe was like a lost soul in torment, sobbing from the throat of hell. The shrill, raw pain of the sound, and the sadness in it, raised the nape hairs on Ryker’s neck and made the skin on his bare arms creep.
And then, suddenly—quite suddenly—the dance was done.
The girl froze in her last position, then turned and glided away, shrugging through bead curtains that tinkled across a narrow stone doorway. The old man ceased his pattering and climbed stiffly to his feet and hobbled out after the girl. The naked boy took the pipe away from his mouth, grinned impishly, and picked up a copper bowl from a low table and went around the room from man to man.
The men stood or sat, breathing heavily, still staring with hot eyes at the empty space where the girl had writhed. They barely noticed the boy, merely plucking a coin from their belt pouch as he paused in front of each, clinking his bowl remindingly.
When the boy stopped in front of Ryker, the Earthman looked him over slowly, with bemused eyes, coming out of his trance painfully. As he dropped a coin in the bowl his eyes caught sight of something on the boy’s naked chest. Just above the heart and just below the nipple an emblem had once been tattooed. Efforts had been made to erase that which had been needled there, but the smooth, sleek flesh caught the gleam of the firelight in such a way that Ryker could see marks of the needles, even though the pigment had been erased.
It was an odd sign, vaguely familiar: a crouching, many-legged creature, vaguely like an insect. And winged, the many wings folded against its slope of thorax and pod. Weird and strange, and curious.
Mischief gleamed in the boy’s eyes, and a trace of contempt, as he looked at the Earthman and knew him for what he was, a hated F’yagha, an Outworlder. But he did not reject the coin. Turning on his heels, his round little bottom cocked impudently, he swaggered from the room. Shouldering through the tinkling bead curtains, he vanished after the old man and the naked dancer, and was gone.
Now the serving boys came out from wherever they had been hiding, with ceramic pitchers full of wine. Gradually, the numb trance faded and men began to shuffle, grunt, move again.
Ryker accepted a bowl of sharp red wine and drank it thirstily.
His mind was busy with something that bothered him.
It was the girl, or, rather, her eyes.
As she had glided past him through the bead curtains, one strand had caught upon the corner of her visor and stripped it from her face. And he had gotten one swift, transient glimpse of her eyes.
They were huge and thick lashed, those eyes, tip-tilted and inexpressibly lovely.
And they were golden. Golden as puddles of hot metal poured by the jeweler for the making of a precious brooch.
And that was strange. For the People (as the Martian natives call their race) have, most commonly, eyes of amber, sometimes of liquid brown, and even occasionally of emerald. But never of gold. Or never that Ryker knew or had ever seen.
She could not have been an Earthsider, not with that tawny skin and blacksilk hair and snub-nosed cat’s face. Nor a Martian, not with those eyes of molten gold.
Which meant she was of an unknown race… .
Or from an unknown world!
2. Whispering Shadows
He had been on Mars a dozen years, had Ryker, but he was no Colonist.
In the early days, Earthside governments had found few of their people willing to emigrate to the distant, dry, hostile planet. So they had forced emigration by making it legal punishment for certain crimes. In the same manner, and for much the same reason, Britain had once dumped it’s unwanted and condemned on the shores of Australia, dooming these unfortunates to a lifetime of penal servitude in a prison the size of a continent, whose walls were oceans, with storms for guards.
What Ryker had done back on Earth to merit deportation does not concern us here. But he had not been a criminal, exactly, unless adherence to unpopular political philosophies be deemed a crime. Once he had been, in his way, something of a patriot. Once he had placed the common good above his own comfort and security. But no longer.
Here, on this ancient desert world, merely to survive is difficult enough. To live is something else again. And Ryker had lived, which is to say, he had been made to do things he would not have chosen to do, had conditions been otherwise.
But here, at least, he was free. If Mars, in the beginning, had been a prison, it was a prison without walls, where the condemned could freely come and go as they willed. The only thing they could not do was return to
Earth again. Only the most serious crimes merited real imprisonment. Those who, back on Earth, had been judged homicidal murderers, political assassins, terrorists, or dedicated revolutionaries, were sent here to sweat and scrabble in the barium mines until death released them from their chains.
Men such as Ryker were not thought dangerous enough to be locked away in that living hell. There was no need for Earthmen to toil like animals in the black, bottomless mines. For that, the Colonial Administration had the natives. True, they were human enough, the People— although, perhaps, their remotest racial ancestor, in the dim beginnings of time, had been feline whereas ours was simian. Once they had been a mighty race, the builders of a high civilization, the proud inheritors of a noble tradition of art, literature and philosophy. But that great heritage had dwindled and perished during the early Pleistocene.
Mars was old—old. As her green oceans dried and shrank, as her rich atmosphere thinned, as her internal fires cooled, that which had been lush meadow and forest-land once, became dry, powdery desert. No longer could the red world support her teeming life, so that life … died.
What was left was in time reduced to savagery, to barbarism. The few remnants of her proud empires inexorably dwindled to ragged, starveling outlaw bands, who huddled for warmth in the ruined shells of what once had been brilliant and populous cities, and thus Mars broke and humbled the last of her children. The People had lost the dice-roll of destiny; and Earthlings had never liked losers. So, while a few scientists studied their dying traditions and strove to rescue from oblivion their half-forgotten sciences, the more brutal—or more practical— of the uninvited visitors from the green world nearer to the sun regarded them as ignorant savages to be ruthlessly exterminated, cruelly exploited, casually enslaved.