Four days of playing with numbers, and you can get pretty quick with an abacus.
I also staggered the watches, so that not everyone was awake at the same time. It was the only privacy we had, to have some time when the guy who is getting on your nerves is asleep. And yes, Colin did talk after lights out, and Victor did tell him to shut up. Just like in school.
We celebrated at the skew-turn point. One minute of zero gravity, while we howled like monkeys and bounced off the walls, doing fast somersaults and slow cartwheels. Vanity's hair was like a puffball surrounding her head; I was blinded by a blond cloud. Note to female cosmonauts: Short hair is in fashion.
Then the Nautilus was running prow-backwards, and decelerating toward Mars.
The ship did seem to have some arbitrary limitations. She could drive through space, but not fly through the air.
Propelled how, by the way? I could see lines of energy reaching from the vessel into the complexities of higher dimensions, and see the rippling activity in the strange dreamlands surrounding Mars, but I could not figure out how the ship moved. But I saw the utility dimming dangerously toward uselessness, and I knew she could not land under her own power.
So we cheated on the landing again. I simply bent the world-lines radiating from the center of Mars away from the vessel. The ship, aerodynamic as a falling log, was lapsed into a feather-slow fall by me, while we were still high enough in the thin Martian atmosphere that four-space was pliant; then she was magnetically levitated down by Victor the rest of the way.
Victor, with his brain, had read the location of the most-recent lander from various computer sites before we left Earth. He was confident that he could restore power to the cameras, and the antennae, and send a signal back to Earth. He was not confident that any receiving stations were operating on Earth, space-exploration budgets being what they were, but I wanted to have a go nonetheless. So we fell through the sky in that direction.
Where to set down? Quentin had prepared one of our three chambers with his hexagons and pentagrams, and he burned a candle and summoned up one of his allies. Our procedure was the same as before: I used the ring of Gyges to hide us from the entity, and Victor did not. This one looked like a lion carrying a viper in its paw, and riding the back of a coal-black steed, but Quentin tricked it into assuming human form, and then it was dressed like a Dominican friar.
The black friar gestured with his viper. "Mine office is to make waters rough with stones. As Moses with his rod, so I. Soil of sullen red, yield up thy ancient waters!"
Through the uncovered portholes, we saw, two hundred yards below our hull, one of the dry riverbeds of Mars, which had not known water for three billion years, now bubbled white and crimson with muddy and torrential floods.
The ship that landed on the single living waterway of Mars was shaped like a trireme again, not a torpedo, when Victor and I emerged onto the upper deck. We did not have pressure suits with us, and our attempts to construct them from materials aboard, or from materials taken from the dreamlands, did not thrill and amaze the others to the point of trusting their lives to them.
Colin was particularly peeved at this, and he begged Quentin to summon up some spirit from the vasty deep that could inspire him to survive the subartic, low-pressure, high-ultraviolet conditions. Quentin leafed through his translated notes of his grimoire, and said he had barons who could command ninety-nine legions, and discover the virtues of birds and precious stones, but there was nothing about radiation poisoning.
I said, "Sorry, Colin, you are just going to have to play Collins."
"Who is Collins?"
"The first man not on the moon," I said.
"Maybe I could just step outside for a minute and take the damage, and heal myself?" Colin suggested.
I said, "The air is thinner than the top of Mount Everest, there is no free oxygen in it to breathe, and the temperature is between minus eighty and minus one hundred and ten!"
"Fahrenheit or Celsius?"
"I am English!" I said. "Do you think I would use the continental system invented by Jacobins?"
Quentin inquired in a soft voice, "Wasn't Fahrenheit a German?"
Vanity said, "We did our estimates of the Mars positions in kilometers."
"Well, I may be English, but I am also an astronaut! So there!" I retorted triumphantly.
Colin said, "Leader, that does not make any sense."
So they were left belowdecks. I was carrying Colin's boot, which I had promised to push into the soil and return to him, so he could at least boast later his bootprint had been left in the rust-red soil of this dead, outer world. I looked something more like a winged centaur made of solidified energy than I did a girl, and an aura of blue light surrounded my head and shoulders as I kept a one-molecule-thin layer of hyperspatial substance between me and the Martian air. In my human arms I carried the Union Jack, furled on a spearshaft.
Victor looked like a faceless gold statue, with arms and legs little more than streamlined tubes marring the symmetry of his bulletlike space-body. He did not walk. His legs were one solid fused mass, their internal consistency hardened into a many-textured bonelike growth. But he could move himself by balancing positive and negative energy flows, and manipulated the environment with particles finer and surer than hands.
The waters of the canal were already turning the color of old blood and forming lumpy rose-gray ice. (Yes, I know it was a dry riverbed, filled via magic, but no girl explorer worth her salt is going to call a streambed on Mars anything but a canal.) Vapor was also pouring up from the orange waters, which might have been sublimation because the air temperature was so low. Red frost had collected at the waterline of our ship.
The windy shoreline, and the dead rocks and fine sands of the cracked surface, gave off a high-pitched wail. This shrilling wavered and rose and fell, like a woman of Arabia lamenting at a funeraclass="underline" a nerve-racking noise. There was no smell I could smell. The horizon seemed strangely close. The sun was a dim smudge, smaller than seen from Earth, but the sky was rose, crimson, and pale orange in concentric bands centered on the sun, like a dust storm seen in the distance.
The zenith was a chilly deep indigo, strange to see.
I spent some minutes looking for Phobos and Deimos, but they were not the luminous hurling moons of Barsoom that John Carter had promised me. Perhaps that dim spot there, like a Sputnik? The senses of my race are just not that good for picking out astronomical objects, which have no moral entanglements or immediate utility.