City of Mists: Tales from the Age of Aether, #1

PROLOGUE

Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, Volume 9 No. 3, January 31, 1887

Report on Martian Explorations

Mrs. Margaret Wylie has resided for sixteen years on Mars, and has taken part in numerous expeditions on behalf of both the Society and the Colonial Office. Her long studies of Martian artefacts and languages, as well as her unique relationship with the Martian High Emperor, have given her a tremendous insight into the history of the Red Planet. On her most recent visit to London, Mr. Francis Galton, F.R.S., invited her to address the Society, and she graciously accepted. The transcript of her remarks is provided in full below.

Gentlemen,

Approximately ten thousand years ago, while our Earth was emerging from the perpetual winter of the last glacial period, civilization on Mars was reaching its zenith. A temperate climate combined with advances in science and medicine gave rise to a long period of peace in which the Martians attained heights of culture and technology we can still scarcely comprehend. The dozen or so nations of Mars maintained this peace for hundreds of years, until a scientist of the nation that occupied the Tharsis region discovered the properties of Cavorite. As you all know, when properly refined and applied Cavorite completely blocks the force of gravitational attraction, and thus this substance allows our aetherships to travel to our sister worlds. This Martian scientist immediately understood the possibilities of his discovery and presented his findings to his government, which swiftly built a small fleet of aetherships and launched them to explore the worlds that most resembled their own—Earth and Venus.

On Venus they found a thriving civilization, similar in advancement to our own European civilization on Earth today save that the Venerians had no knowledge of Cavorite. Venus was lush, rich in all forms of life as well as precious metals and jewels. The world was matched by her people, who were passionate and proud and quite conversant in the pursuits of war.

Earth, on the other hand, was thinly peopled by barbarian tribes possessing only the faintest knowledge of agriculture or the other arts of civilization. While the planet was not as rich as Venus, there was always the possibility that greater mineral wealth lay buried beneath the slowly receding ice sheets.

With the riches of two new worlds to exploit, the Tharsis nation turned to building fleets of aetherships. For the first time in centuries Mars knew strife, as the other nations of Mars insisted that they, too, be allowed to share in this newfound knowledge and wealth. Tharsis resisted their entreaties, however, knowing that sole possession would make them the foremost power on Mars. At this refusal the other nations began to re-arm, and there were great battles fought all over Mars until the Tharsians were able to use their new aethership fleet to crush their enemies. Within another ten years they had conquered all of Mars, and the first High Emperor was enthroned at Nix Olympica.

These wars led to a fundamental shift in the nature of the civilization of Mars. Their culture became more pragmatic and more cruel, consumed with desire for wealth and advancement, willing to let mere strength substitute for reason and morality. The Venerians were the first to suffer the consequences of this when the Martians decided that there was no need to trade for what could be taken by force. The Martians established bases on Venus and raped the territories around them of anything that caught their fancy. When the Venerians attempted to fight back they were annihilated, their cities bombed, their civilization crushed by the Martians’ superior technology.

Earth was not spared. Tharsis aetherships carried off massive quantities of her raw materials. Furs were especially prized, and the great beasts of the period—mammoth, mastodon, gigantopithecus, cave bears, saber-tooth tigers—were hunted to extinction to decorate the homes of Mars. Massive machines harvested the exotic Terrestrial forests and turned vast regions into deserts. Most importantly for us, humans captured and displayed in Martian zoos thrived as stolen Venerians did not. They were sold as pets and used as experimental animals until their full intelligence was realized, at which time they came into high demand as slaves and servants to provide services that the Martians no longer wished to perform themselves. Soon the Martians were kidnapping human barbarians en masse, mainly from the high northern latitudes since they seemed to acclimatize better to Mars’s cooler conditions.

This situation lasted for somewhere around three thousand years, with the Martian society becoming ever more ossified. Scientific advances stopped. Production of art and literature declined, the Martians becoming content to merely review the creations of the past. They ceased exploration of the solar system, abandoning their outposts on Mercury and Ceres completely, and closed down many of their bases on Venus and Earth.

Then came The Collapse.

About six thousand years ago there was an accident at the main facility in Syrtis where the Martians refined the Cavorite for their aetherships. Apparently a large sheet of Cavorite was improperly shielded and it created a mighty vortex over the facility. This vortex blew a significant part of the Martian atmosphere into space before the Martians were able to destroy the Cavorite slab. While not immediately fatal, the atmospheric loss proved disastrous to their planet as the reduced atmospheric pressure and oxygen content slowly killed off large sections of the Martian fauna. The temperature dropped and the polar ice caps spread, but far more devastating was the increased aridity. Open bodies of water disappeared at an alarming rate, first the lakes and seas, then the oceans themselves. As the seas shrank their salinity increased, so that even those bodies of water which persisted like the Acidalian Sea could no longer support much life. The bases on Earth and Venus were abandoned and the vast fleets of aetherships destroyed, the Martians being terrified of another catastrophe.

Martian agriculture and industry ground to a halt without plentiful water supplies. Millions of Martians in the cities suddenly had no drinking water. During the first year after the accident Mars’s population dropped from four billion to a few million. Cities emptied as the inhabitants starved, killed each other for the meager resources remaining, or fled into the countryside in search of sustenance. Human slaves were slaughtered, or abandoned and left behind to starve. Every atrocity—murder, theft, rape, torture, cannibalism—was practiced on a scale that is quite unimaginable to us here today.

In a few areas the Martians were able to secure their water supplies and maintain their civilization to some degree—the megalopolis of Nix Olympica where the High Emperor still reigns is the primary example. Elsewhere the die-off continued. The Martian survivors struggling to exist blamed their downfall on the failure of science and developed a virulent hatred and fear of advanced technology. They shunned the old cities, abandoning them to their former slaves, and cast off all but the most basic knowledge. Inside the cities the human slaves systematically looted the buildings then slowly learned to survive on the meager sustenance they could draw from the city environs, occasionally augmented by raids on the Martian tribes outside. This situation has remained fairly stable for thousands of years.

But while the desertification of Mars has slowed, it has not stopped. Every year the deserts spread a little more, and today all but a handful of the cities in the high latitudes are now completely dead and abandoned. Six thousand years ago the Martians built a number of great pumping facilities at the edge of their ice caps to deliver water to their cities. Most of these are now buried under hundreds of yards of ice, and as they fail so do the cities that depend on them. Those who speak of colonizing Mars do not understand that Mars is a dying planet, the Martians a dying race. There will be no recovery, no Martian Renaissance—only a long, slow slide into eventual oblivion.

CHAPTER I

A NIGHT IN HONG KONG

IT WAS HOT FOR JUNE in Hong Kong, and humid enough to leave you drenched in sweat just from thinking about walking anywhere. I tossed and turned for a while, but even with all the windows open it was too miserable to sleep. I was having a really bad night, anyway. You know those nights—where memories rush in and pound at you like surf against the rocks and there’s no way to block them out because your brain just will not shut down. And you know that if you don’t do something to make it stop you’re going to end up in one of those sleazy opium joints down by the docks sucking on a pipe until you no longer care about anyone or anything but the smoke. At the end the smoke is all that is left of you, then it blows away and you’re gone.

I wasn’t quite that far gone yet, though. I dressed as quietly as I could in the dark and tiptoed out so I wouldn’t wake up Min on her pallet by the door. The poor kid had been wearing herself ragged studying English ten and twelve hours a day. I tried to get her to slow down, but she had it in her head that she was doing it to please me and she is even more stubborn than I am. Five minutes later I was in a rickshaw headed for the west side of Victoria City. The coolie took the scenic route along the strand, probably hoping for a breeze off the bay to make the trip a little less miserable. He was destined for disappointment; there wasn’t a breath of air blowing that night. I leaned back, closed my eyes, and let myself doze to the drone of cicadas and crickets until the noise of the waterfront drowned them out.

Sampans and junks stretched off into the darkness, thousands of them rocking gently in the waves, oil lights and paper lanterns dancing like fireflies over the black water. The smell of cooking fish and rice drifted up the streets, and somewhere far ahead a group of fishermen belted out a sailing ditty in sing-song Cantonese. The boats made a little community all their own, attached to the city but not of it, something I understood quite well. We both bobbed on the edge of an ocean with no place we could honestly call home. Not anymore.

A wave of homesickness crashed over me, crushing my heart beneath it, and I looked up towards Victoria Peak, hoping to catch some glimpse of the light of my old home. I could not find it; it was still too early. Or too late, depending on your point of view. It was just as well, I suppose. Seeing it only hammered home how impossibly far off and completely unreachable it had become. I had angered too many powerful people there, and they had made certain I could never go back.

I realized that we had gone far enough and called out an address to the coolie pulling the rickshaw. He nodded and turned left down Belcher’s Street into the maze of dingy shanties, markets, and teahouses of Sai Wan, the Chinese quarter. We jolted down side streets and through narrow little alleys that I would never have dreamed trying to navigate on my own, but the bearer knew right where to go and pulled up at a decrepit old warehouse building next to an abandoned marketplace choked with tall weeds and garbage. Two fairly new gas lamps burned on either side of a door that looked as though it had not been painted in decades. I fumbled in my pocket for a coin and handed it to the coolie, who bobbed his head with a gap-toothed grin and raced away into the gloom, and then I turned back to the building and knocked loudly on the door.

Gambling houses are illegal in Hong Kong. Probably because the East India Company has not figured out a way to make enough money from them to be worthwhile like the opium business and coolie trafficking. Payoffs to the Hong Kong Police lead to the sudden onset of blindness where they are concerned, but eventually some East India official with a puritanical bent catches wind of it and leans on the Captain Superintendant until he shuts it down. This place did not have a name—everyone just called it ‘Tang’s Place’ after the owner—but after surviving for six months it had developed a certain notoriety. One of the most popular bets carried on its books was how much longer it would go without being shut down, which indicated a perverse sense of humor on the part of the proprietor and a distinct lack of foresight on the part of the gamblers who would have no way to collect their winnings.

The lock rattled and the door creaked open. A cold-eyed Chinese man wearing a tailored dark grey suit looked me over from top to bottom and waved me in when he recognized me.

Evening, Ming-kwai. Busy tonight?

Busy every night, Mister Branham. But we save room for you.

He ushered me through the interior door and left me blinking in the sudden brightness of hundreds of lights. An older Chinese man approached me with a beatific smile.

Mister Branham, it’s good to see you, he said, bowing. He did not have so much as a trace of accent to his English. Would you like your usual table?

I shook my head. Thank you, but not tonight, Mister Tang. I think I’d rather wander about for a while.

Of course. If you change your mind, please let me know.

I wandered over to the bar and ordered a double whiskey. I gulped that one and ordered another, which I carried to a spot at the end of the bar where the dim light would let me be inconspicuous. The place was crammed with military officers, East India functionaries, and businessmen from all over the world. Half a dozen Chinese constables in the navy blue of the Police Force hovered around one table with some gentlemen I recognized from past visits to the Supreme Court House. Old Tang was obviously staying current with the bribe money. I decided the gentlemanly thing to do was to pitch in to his payoff fund by ordering another double whiskey.

A hand landed heavily on my shoulder. Jack!

Hello, Eric. Captain Eric Sutherland, Hong Kong Regiment, was the only real friend I had on the island. He was grinning like a lunatic. Been into the gin, I see.

You’re a fine one to talk, Jack. The gleam in your eye and the wobble in your step tells me you’ve already had more than you ought. He looked pointedly at my surroundings, then back at me. What are you doing hiding in the dark back here?

Trying to be inconspicuous.

Eric guffawed. You really think anyone is going to notice you in this crowd? Look. He pointed to where four Chinese in gaudy green and red uniforms had just walked in. Their leader was draped in enough gold braid to outfit the entire Grenadier Guards.

Who is that?

General Fong Yu. Comes over from Canton once a month or so to bet on the horses, and hangs around here or at that place over on Hollywood Street afterwards. Word is that he has horrible luck and gambles away a fortune every time, but he doesn’t care because he’s in deep with the triads’ smuggling and extortion operations.

He’ll find lots of kindred souls here: police, bankers, company officials.

Undoubtedly. Come on, let’s go lose some money. Today was payday.

I tried, but I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for the idea. You go on, Eric. I’m just here to watch tonight.

He shook his head. Suit yourself, Jack. I’ll come back and spot you a drink when I break the bank.

I lifted my glass to him in a mock toast, and he disappeared into the morass. I worked my way through a couple more drinks, watching the crowd but not really seeing them. My mind was far away, in a time when I was not an exile in an East India Company cesspit. Someone tugged at my arm. I turned, thinking Eric had come back, and instead found myself facing Min, her thin, pretty face drawn up with worry.

Min, what are you doing here? What’s the matter?

Policemen break in the door. Inspector Quincy. He say they looking for you, come to take you away, she gasped out. I run quick to find you, warn you.

That didn’t make any sense. I hadn’t done anything to get myself in trouble, and I didn’t owe anyone any money. Min, are you sure they were looking for me?

That what Inspector Quincey say, she insisted.

Quincey was a self-important ass of the type that tends to congregate in police forces where corruption is endemic. He was also an enforcer for the East India Company management. If the local directors wanted to put someone in the hospital they sent Quincey, and I was pretty sure he made people that East India considered undesirable disappear, too. Since he had all the conscience of a shark I figured he and the company were made for each other. We had exchanged words a couple of times and he made sure that I knew that my continued existence was purely due to company sufferance. It sounded as though that sufferance had just come to an end.

What else did he say?

He say you go away, I must go to work for him.

I frowned. No wonder she was upset. I had rescued her from a group of slavers with the same sort of thing in mind a few months ago. I’m not going anywhere, Min, I said