High

This next bit sounds kind of freaky, I admit. The trouble is that something must have happened, but thanks to the hydrogen poisoning I have no real idea what. All I can do is go on the images I have stored in my mind, even though I know they can't be true.

So here goes. After I'd told them some more about my trip through the tunnels with John Carter and his buddy Tars Tarkas, they cut me down from that gallows thing. Just as well, too - my wrists were almost dislocated already , and those two other girls didn't look exactly healthy (I found out afterwards that they use the bodies of spies to feed those eight-legged things they ride. I don't know if they were already dead. For their sake, I hope so).

One of the mounted warriors caught me up. With a start I saw it was Dejah Thoris herself. As we galloped along she pointed out the sights: the great canals stretching right and left all around us, the pyramids looming in the far distance, and – coming ever closer – the great stone face.

It was a little like Giza, really. Or the pictures that you see of it. The great pyramid, the sphinx, and all that sand.

But it wasn’t the pyramids we were aiming for. An immense semi-circular flying machine was hovering ahead of us, and that was what Dejah Thoris and her troop of soldiers were riding towards.

It landed in a cloud of dust in front of us, the rear doors opened, and a tongue of steel shot out. Without even dismounting we pounded straight into the interior of the machine. After that all I remember is a mass of steel corridors and staircases until we finally reached her state rooms at the top of the ... flying saucer, I guess you’d have to call it.

The room was huge, and hung with billowy draperies. The couches were soft; servants fussed around us. After a while, when everything was disposed to her satisfaction, the Queen simply clapped her hands, once, and everyone disappeared.

She clapped them again and the shutters rolled up. And there before us was the whole expanse of Mars.

We must have already taken off (though I hadn’t heard anything – no screaming engines, no whirr of flying dust), because the view was breathtaking. I know we were at least as high as Olympus Mons, because the curve of the planet was already visible, with the blue-black hardness of space encroaching on every side.

It took my breath away. I mean that literally. I just sat there, almost forgetting to breathe, in awe, unable to speak, let alone think what to do next.

A voice came from the back of the room.

“You see the realm of Helium, girl. Now it is time for you to speak in full. The hangmen are still finishing with your friends.”

I hadn’t noticed that the white-bearded man had stayed when everyone else left. He was sitting at a little shaded desk at the back of the room. As he spoke, he gestured to the wall behind him, and lo and behold, I saw the platform again. And the two poor girls being cut down from their bonds.

“Wha ... What do you want to know?”

I knew it might be fatal to show weakness, but fuck, I am only a kid – and not that brave at the best of times, for all I can talk the talk. I started to cry.

At this Dejah Thoris came over and started to cluck over me. In a strangely clumsy, unpractised way, as if she wasn’t used to such emotional displays. At least she was trying, though, and so, at last, with a lot of sobbing and sniffing, I told her my story. I mean the whole thing, from beginning to end. Dad and Mum’s divorce, and moving to the outer rings, and our next-door neighbour and his schemes, and all the ups and downs and ins and outs and plots and counterplots and lies and carefully calculated truths ... I just can’t go through all that again.

They listened solemnly to all of it. It must have been incomprehensible to them, in their medieval world of jousts and horse-back fighting, but they gave no sign of that.

What interested them most, apparently, because they questioned me most closely about it, was the story of the lost explorers. They wanted all the detail I could dredge up on that.

At length, when I was done – it seemed to take hours, but maybe it was only a few minutes, really: who can say? –the flying machine didn’t seem to have moved at all. With a shock, I realised that the view out of the window was fixed and static, as if it had been painted. Looking round, I saw how threadbare the carpets and couches actually were. And Dejah Thoris and her counsellor. How shabby they looked! More like refugees from a costume party than Martian gods ... like Pat and the private eye in crude Barsoomian disguises.

Something of my feelings must have shown in my face, because she spoke to me:

“You’ve spotted us, I see. I’m afraid we had to trick you to find out all you knew (which isn’t all that much, luckily for you. Your mother’s still missing, I’m afraid. That’s where we will still need your help. Her life’s in terrible danger right now. She’s in the hands of a madman, though she may not know it. She wouldn’t be the first he’s tried to kill, but we’re damned determined she’ll be the last.”

Marriage

Detail from "Madonna and Child"

The wind proposed to the snow. The snow and the wind plighted their troth, and a frost-fingered ship probed the pack-ice of their love. A bowsprit probed their season of intimacy.

Happiness is frozen in the froth of a cloud; it’s a light which freezes, then cracks. It’s a thicket of lilies infested with violet snakes, gliding between twilight and the sea, gliding across the blood-red lawns of twilight.

The whip cracks, streaking the snow of your first love. The wild beast falls asleep in a blood-streaked orchid.


– Maurice Blanchard


•

He said: my hoarse lips pant spotted
panthers who sing
sweeter than bellbirds in the bush
or the blood-streaked bulls of storm cumulus
He said:
Inside me I’ve got
steep salt waves
breaking over (so dainty) feast-day flowers
He called Our Lady
a little girl with a basket of vegetables
He said: Then he said:
I’m a poppy
clashing at dawn with pale blue animals


– Jacques Baron

Confessions

She was aware of its lulling music before anything else, the sound of water flowing over stone. Then she realised that her eyes were already open, that the pearly opalescent sheen over to one side was light flooding into a cave, that she was lying in it, with a blanket or some light bedspread over her, that she was - ouch! - one fiery mass of aches and pains.

She groaned, tried to roll over and saw - him.

He was an elderly man, wrapped in an offcolour robe. He looked a little like her image of Socrates or Plato or one of those Greek philosophers of the past: the robe, the bare shoulders, the comforting white beard.

"Where am I?" she managed, after a while.

He smiled. "I'm sure you know that the answer to that question would mean little to you right now. Suffice it to say that you're right here. That you're alive (just barely). Do you require anything further?"

"Just - water."

He gestured towards the cup beside her elbow. "Water's there. I suggest you get some rest. I'll be back to check on you in a while. For the moment, though, I have some things to do."

Phil tried to ease herself up and off the - surprisingly comfortable - pallet she was lying on. Then gave it up as a bad job, and fell back into sleep: a fitful sleep this time, broken by nightmares of long corridors in the dark, and grinning bloody men with cruel spikes.

*

"You say you were once one of them."

"Not really. I've always been aware that others could find their way down here. So many have tried! But these men were different. They had no interest in exploring the farthest caverns: torture and sex-magic were the whole of their world, and heaven help the poor innocents who fell into their hands!"

"Like me and Pat."

"Like you and your friend Pat. She's over there, by the way. I buried her by the landslip over there, where the permasol is softest."

He gestured across the expanse of the huge cavern. He and Phil were sitting by the banks of a broad sea, streaks and filaments of orange vegetation radiating out from their faint human warmth.

"So how do you live down here?"

"All that can be explained another day. For now, I need to know just how you found your way in here."

"That's just it. I don't know. I must have been half mad, because I was talking to her head, and she answered me back! I swear she did! She started the conversation, in fact."

"The radiation."

"I'm sorry?"

"You think you were imagining it, but you weren't. The radiation down here can have strange effects. It's why I'm still alive, essentially unaged, in this hollow world of rock and water. It's why your wounds are healing up so fast."

"Oh."

"I know it's a lot to grasp, all at one time. And I'd better tell you now - there's no way out of here."

"But the men, the torturers ..."

"Yes, I told you I tried to infiltrate them - for a time. At first I thought they'd grasped the central fact of this place, understood the effects it could have on human beings. I thought they were killing people to bring them back ..."

"And were they?"

"No. But I had to walk among them, talk to them, to work that out. They torture to kill, and to indulge themselves. There's nothing deeper in what they do. No end to the itch they're scratching."

"And did you ..."

"Yes, I had to. Or else they would have captured me, and my head would have been grinning from a pole. Bu tafter that I realised I had to shut myself off from them ... If they found this place not even they could ignore its potentialities."

"Bringing things back to life?"

"A kind of life, yes - life insofar as pain can be suffered by such a being. Certainly it would have skin to scorch and orifices to penetrate."

"Then how did I ..."

"That's what I'd like to know. I found you inside my perimeter. That means there's some way in. I've been closing off all the paths for years, blocking them with landfalls, cave-ins - everything designed to look natural."

"So ... this isn't Paradise."

"No, no paradise, no Shangri-La. I'm not a wise philosopher - just a man, a very old man, kept in a kind of artificial stasis by the lifecycles of this planet. And - I'm very much afraid - so, now, are you."

"And we're alone here?"

"After a fashion. In my early days I adopted a few children."

"Children! Boys and girls?"

"Not as you know them. That's how I know the half-life this place gives. We could dig up your friend's head, for instance - could question it like an oracle. But it wouldn't be her, nor could it tell us anything new."

"Are they flesh and blood? Animals? Machines?"

"Some specimens of each kind. They won't bother us unless we provoke them. They mostly live on the far side of the lake. You'll get to know them all -- if you wish to, that is."

"What's your name?"

"My children call me Philemon. But in the outside world I used to be called Petrie."

"Like the explorer?"

"Like the scientist, I like to think."

"Are we safe here? Can they get at us?"

"I'd have said we were safe, three days ago. That's when I found you, over by the rockfall. But now that I know there's at least one way in left open, I have to find it, close it off."

"But ... we could find it ourselves, escape from here, go back to the city, to the domes."

"Is that what you want?"

"I want to see my daughter, find out if she's okay. I want to get back to my life."

"I'm sorry. I understand what you're saying, but you have to remember my life-force depends on this place. I can't ever leave. There's nothing for me outside."

"But there is for me!"

"Perhaps there still is. Perhaps the process hasn't gone too far in your case. It soon will, though. I had a companion when I first came here, all those years ago. But we spent too long exploring our new world. When he tried to leave he shrivelled into dust. I found his body and buried him. Flint, he was called."

"But ... why didn't you shrivel into dust? If you followed him out."

"He never drank the water or ate the weeds."

"But ..."

Suddenly something clicked into place. She saw the milky mildness of his deep-set eyes as they actually were: a mask for thick, impenetrable cataracts of scar-tissue.

“Yes, I fed you on them. I’m sorry. I want you to stay with me and be my wife."

Helium

"The Three Graces" (Greek: Antique)

"My name is Dejah Thoris, Queen of Helium! And who are you?"

Well, wherever I was, it wasn't Kansas. Or anywhere in the domes (or under them, for that matter).

I was standing on a platform, arms hoisted in the air, with two other girls beside me. Our hands were bound to rings on some kind of scaffolding, our feet spreadeagled and tied. We were completely naked.

But somehow that didn't seem to matter much. The commanding figure addressing us was naked, too. Or as good as. She had a kind of leather harness tied around her, and there was a big jewel on her throat, but otherwise her athletic figure stood completely nude and untrammelled.

"I'm Luce - Lucy," I tried to mutter, after a while.

My two companions glared at me, and I saw with a start that each was gagged. Their mouths were filled with a kind of bit, like a horse's bridle. Looking around, I saw a weaselly kind of a guy standing to one side of the platform with a similar leather and metal harness in his hands. Could that be meant for me?

The queen was frowning.

"Loose Lucy?"

"No, your Supreme Majesty ..."

It always pays to butter up the local dignitaries: especially those who've got you trussed up on what looks distressingly like a gallows. I learnt that much from school ...

"My name is Lucy, if it please you. My friends call me Luce, for short."

"Well, Loose-for-short, what are you doing in my kingdom? We have a short way with spies, as you will presently learn. I take it you're reporting to the Kaldanes?"

"No, your Majesty. I don't even know who they are. All I know is that I set out on a journey to find my mother and her friend, and then I ... fell asleep and woke up here."

Even to my ears it sounded a bit thin. Something impelled me to add a little to the story. I could see the weaselly man beginning to stroke his harness impatiently. Was that a whip hanging down from his belt? My companions seemed to think so; they were now eyeing him nervously as well.

"I met two companions on my journey, who helped me along my way. One said his name was Tars Tarkas, the other called himself John Carter of Nevada."

"John Carter! You have met John Carter. You are lying, slave. You know what that name means to me."

"No, your Majesty! I never heard the name before he told it to me. But he told me many stories of his past, and your name was in almost all of them. He said that you were beautiful, and the love of his life."

"He said that, did he? I still think you are lying, but the whip will tell us for sure."

"Hold, lady!" A talll, white-bearded figure intervened. "Let us hear the girl unprompted, at least at first. Once the cutting starts she'll tell us anything. Let her observe the fate of her ompanions first, then command her to speak again."

A sudden pain seized hold of me, and a taste of rust and sweat filled my mouth. I realised the man with the bridle had crept up behind and gagged me without warning.

The whipping of the two girls was brutal beyond anything I could have imagined. Their backs were soon striped with blood, puddling under their feet.

They bore it like stoics at first, but it went on and on beyond any possible endurance. Finaly, when both of them were hanging like ragdolls from their limp wrists, the Queen gave the signal to stop, and the bodies were cut down.

My gag was taken off.

"Now, child, speak," said the old man.

Free Love

Alessandro Allori, "Venus and Cupid" (c.1600)

Girl of the wood-ember hair
flash-photo wit
hourglass waist
otter-cub in the tiger’s jaws
bouquet of sunflowers in your mouth
teeth white mice tracks in the snow
teased-amber tongue
tongue stained blood-red by the Host
tongue of a Barbie batting her eyelids
alchemist’s tongue
lashes crayon slashes
swallowtail eyebrows
forehead fogged-up
greenhouse panes
champagne-flute shoulders
– dolphins butting through sea-ice –
matchstick wrists
card-sharp fingers / my Ace of Hearts
harvest-shock fingers
marten-fur armpits
(Midsummer bonfires
of blackbirds’ nests)
spindrift arms
ground fine as grain
skyrocket legs
sparking like clockwork / or despair
calves shoots from the Rata tree
feet like initials
feet like keyrings / feet like bung-taps
pearl-barley neck
whitewater throat / (my love-nest
in the torrent’s bed)
night-walking breasts
sea-otter breasts
crucified breasts
rosebud nipples spiked with dew
belly like a folded fan
a giant claw
your back / a jump-jet hovering
quicksilver back
beacon back
nuque of the neck / a rolling stone
a glass that shatters in your hand
coracle hips
flared hips
pale as a peacock
tipped head-over-heels
asbestos bum
swansdown behind
Spring booty
leaf-dagger sex
sex panning for gold / platypus pussy
sex soft as anemone/ jujube sweet
mirror sex
eyes pricked with tears
violet eyes / my magnetic north
nomad eyes
eyes water to a dying man
eyes one second from the chop
eyes deep as a well / eyes free as air / eyes dry earth and eyes
cool fire

– André Breton

King Candaules

Jean Leon Gerome, "King Candaules" (1859)

- It wasn't your fault.
- I'm sorry?
- I just said it wasn't your fault, what happened to me.
- I never thought it was! If anything, it was your ...

With a start, Phil realised she was speaking out loud. The voices in her head were at last starting to spill out into the world. At least, that seemed the most plausible explanation. Wasn't it?

But the head in her hands continued to talk:

- This isn't the end of it, Phil. You have to listen to me. There's some stuff I have to tell you ...

It all seemed amazingly real. The muscles in her jaw clenching and declenching as the words came out, each one wrung out of the inertia of rigor mortis - the pale light coming on and off at the back of her eyes.

The blood had long since ceased to drip from that clean, transverse cut, but now a little colour had come back to her cheeks.

- Pat, is ... is that you?

She couldn't stop herself from addressing the thing that used to be her best friend's head, that mouth she'd kissed, those eyes she'd stared into so many times. For all she knew, it mightn't be Pat at all. She'd read of demons, souls of the dead, who possessed the bodies of the departed before the life force left for good ...

What if it was one of those? And yet, she felt so forlorn, so lonely, naked and cold here in the dark.

- Of course it's me, who did you think?

The speech came easier now, as if the head was recovering old motor skills, learning how to lubricate its sound-box past a croak.

- I know I'm hallucinating, I know it can't be you, but ... Oh, Pat, I'm lost, I don't know what to do ...
- Stop blubbering and feeling sorry for yourself, that's the first thing.

But it was quite some time before she could control the racking sobs enough to speak again to the blood-stiffened thing in her hands.

- Why have you ... come back? Aren't you dead now?
- My God, I don't know how I ever put up with ... Of course I'm dead you stupid cow. Can't you see I've had my head cut off? D'you think I'm trying to get you to give me the kiss of life? I'm here for you, you numb cunt.

Somehow being sworn at by a severed head brought Phil back to herself. The circumstances might be insane, trading insults with the (slightly-deflated) severed head of her ex-friend and lover in the dark, but then ... the situation definitely was insane, had been for longer than she cared to think - since she'd taken that pie round to the hunky new guy next door.

Perhaps even before that ... since she'd caught her husband screwing round on her, had found out that he'd stationed one of his buddies behind the curtain to watch her undress, had fucked her in full sight of that same friend (she'd wondered at the time at his unaccustomed vigour) ... then, the meeting with Pat, the naughty talk, the pussy-licking parties ... all insane. A trajectory that led here, to the dark.

- There's no need to be like that. I'm not completely stupid. Which one of us is still alive, I'd like to know?

It was kind of a relief to surrender to it, to talk to the head as if the whole thing made sense. Perhaps that's all she'd needed from the start, in fact: a friend to talk to.

Stripped of all else, she still had that, at least.

- Fair enough. Point taken. That was pretty smart of you, I must admit, slipping that sticker between his ribs. Crawling out of that hell-pit was good, too. You've done well so far, girlfriend. Mind you, I played my part -- distracting them till you could get the jump on them.
- Distracting them! You mean screaming and moaning and trying to give them information as they tortured you ... you would have sold out everyone you knew for another five seconds of life ...
- Okay, okay. Maybe I would have. Things were different, then. I still had stuff to lose. You're still alive. You don't know ... how it feels.
- Oh, Pat, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scream at you. It's just ... I'm so alone. Can't you tell me what to do?
- That's just what I can't do, I'm afraid, cutie-pie. I can talk to you like this. That is, if I am talking to you - you're halfway to going insane, you know, girlfriend. This could all be in your head, in which case ... I'm afraid you really are talking to yourself ...
- Don't say that! I can see you. That's what I thought at first, too, but now I'm sure it's you. I'm sure I'd never think to say the things you're saying to me now.
- Really? Well, anyway, whether it's me or not, it's time to get to the point. You've got to get up and keep going.
- Why? I'm going to die here, aren't I?
- I'm not going to lie to you. There's a very good chance of that, I've gotta admit. But you don't want to just sit here and wait for it.
- Why not?
- Because those guys are still behind you, and they're pissed.
- Oh, Pat! No!
- Yes, I'm afraid so. One thing to sit here and die of cold and hunger in the dark, but it's quite another to get spitted by those creeps ... I should know. That's what they're doing to me right now.
- But where should I go? The tunnels all look the same ...
- Yes, and that's how we've stayed ahead so far. It was hours before they discovered the body, and then they set out to hunt you down. No girl has ever gotten away before, but they've had a lot of manhunts in the tunnels. At first it was easy, all they had to do was follow the gouts of blood. Sorry about that.
- You mean, while you were still bleeding from the neck?
- Yeah. But I dried up pretty fast, I have to say, so that didn't give them much of a clue. And then you have been wandering around here for quite some time - I don't think you realise just how long. And there is the whole underworld of a planet to hide in here ...
- Are they going to catch me, then?
- Eventually, I'm afraid, they will. They're not all that far off. You can't hear them, but I can -- I can somehow sense them coming. That's why I had to ... come through, come back to you.
- Thanks, Pat. I loved you, you know.
- I know, I know. Jeez, kid, I love you too. I wouldn't be doing this otherwise, I can tell you. I can't feel pain anymore, but there's no way you can know just how tiring it is to keep this up.
- So should I just get up and keep running? Try out tunnels at random until I reach the surface? Before I sat down to rest I was wondering where the light was coming from. I even thought it might be coming from you, at first ... Is there a way up from here?
- No! You mustn't go up. Don't you get it? The surface is not your friend. The cold and lack of air would kill you in a second. That's just for a last resort if they get too close. You've got to go down, go deeper into the crust.
- Why? What's down there?
- I don't really know, to be quite honest - just that there's something down there. I'm being blocked from knowing, if you really want to know. Something's telling me that it's not a place for the dead. You've still got a chance, just the slimmest of chances, of reaching there, though.
- And if I don't?
- Well, you'll die. Of cold and exposure here, if you don't move and they don't find you in time. Of torture and abuse, if they catch up with you (and that's looking pretty probable right now, I have to say). Of asphyxiation if you follow the light back to the surface. None of them especially attractive ways to go.
- So you're saying I've got no choice?
- You've always got a choice. You can take up any of the three I've mentioned - or else you can try to live.
- Fuck, I feel so tired. Is it so bad, being dead?
- Well, Phil, I just can't recommend it. The tiredness doesn't go away, that's the first thing. It's just that you can't refresh yourself by resting. And there's no pleasure left in things: in eating, drinking, sex ... all that's gone for good. There may be more to it than that, mind you. I'm a pretty new corpse. But I can't see things changing much. Time ... doesn't mean the same thing over here.
- You're scaring me a bit.
- Good! At last! I must say, you're taking this whole dialogue-with-a-skull thing a bit too easily, I think. You should be scared. You should be putting those gorgeous little buns of yours into action, and trying to find your way down to ... the place you've got to go.
- It won't be worse than here?
- Well, that I can't say. I don't see how it could be, but I don't know for sure. I don't know much of anything at this point, actually; I'm really pretty fucking tired, Phil.
- I'm sorry, Pat. ... Pat?
- Hmmm? I was nodding off there, kid. If there's anything else you want to know, you'd better make it fast. I don't know how long I can keep this up.
- Do I really have gorgeous buns?

It seems as though they've been walking for hours. Every time they reach a junction in the tunnels, Phil chooses the one heading down. As a result, the faint phosphorescence she could rely on further up has faded out almost to nothing. If it weren't for the pale light in the eyes of her friend, she'd be completely in the dark. Not that that matters so much down here. What is there to see but rock and tunnel entrances and more rock?

- You're fleeing for your life and you're still worried if your arse looks fat?
- Not worried, exactly. It's just ... You were the one who mentioned it!
- It's a great arse, believe me, honey.
- Yours was great, too.
- Yeah, tell me about it. You know, in retrospect I feel I spent a bit too time sculpting those buns of steel. I mean, where has all that expenditure of energy got me now? All that's left is a head. And I'm not even going to start on all the jokes you could concoct on that subject ...
- It's just ... you know my husband.
- Oh yeah, I know your husband. Fucked him a couple of times, I guess you knew that.
- I guessed.
- Sorry.
- That's okay. It doesn't matter now. It's just that ... you know he showed me off. When I wasn't looking.
- He was proud of you.
- Is that what it was? Pride? Having his friend hide behind a curtain while I got undressed, fucking me in front of him ...
- Well, no, not pride exactly, I guess. It just turned him on, I suppose. Showing off his very best toy to make his friend envious. Like that Greek story, I suppose.
- Greek story?
- Yeah, I read it once, or heard about it, maybe. This King invites the commander of his palace guards to watch the Queen undress. He reckons she’s the most beautiful woman in the world, but he had to show her off to someone to prove it to himself. He chooses an underling because he thinks that way he’ll run less risk of the story getting out.
– What happened?
– Well, the story does get out, somehow. And the Queen is royally pissed! She summons the captain of the guard and tells him he has to kill her husband or else she’ll have him killed. So he does, he kills the king and marries the queen. So he ends up sleeping with the woman he was invited in to perve at. And he sires a line of kings.
– And the moral is?
– I don’t know. Beauty is dangerous, perhaps. Or it’s easy to lose the thing you value most if you take it too much for granted. That’d be your husband, certainly. He wasn’t even that good of a screw.
– And me?
– You what?
– Am I that good of a screw?
– To me you are, baby. You’re the best. But don’t forget that I’m never going to have you again ... or anything else for that matter. Just dust to drink and dust to eat and dust to lie in and dust to fuck and dust to talk to and dust to ...

The voice drones on and on, like an old-fashioned tape recorder running low on batteries, but Phil is paying little attention. She can see again, just faintly, and hear – hear something, something like the gurgle of a stream, of running water, the splashing sound of a stream encountering bare rock.

Hydrogen

I might have known that's what they'd do. Of course I'd heard about it, even laughed when it was some other kid who'd slipped up and fallen asleep at the switch. Literally, in this case.

The trouble is, it's one thing to play pranks when the only thing at stake is wounded vanity and hurt feelings (though come to think of it, the chances of someone getting hurt were still not that inconsiderable). It's quite another when it's already a matter of life and death.

I had no idea that's what it was, at first. How could I? That's the whole point of the joke, really. What you do is a bit like a card trick, really. You know, the ones where you ask someone to pick a card, any card -- only there's something in the way you're holding them that makes your victim choose the one you had in mind for them all along.

In this case it was suits and oxygen tanks. You leave them all higgledy-piggledy, so that everybody chooses seemingly at random, but actually you've already monkeyed with the breathable air gauges on one of them so that the mixture's all messed up.

Result: a kind of stange euphoria, shading off into hallucination and (I guess, eventually) unconsciousness and death. Unless someone finds you first, that is.

When I set off I was alone, but by the time I'd gone a mile or two I had at least two companions with me (I say at least, because I was pretty sure there were more creeping along just out of eyeshot, visible only through their movements in the shadows).

It was therefore kind of a comfort that they were warriors. One was a muscular, practically naked human about my height and weight. He told me he was looking for his girlfriend. Dejah Thoris, I think he said her name was.

The other was even stranger. Roughly four metres tall, with four arms and a green skin (I guess I must have seen something like him in a picture once -- I'm not really one for bug-eyed monsters as a general rule).

They were good to talk to, to tell you the truth. I mean, it wasn't all that easy to say just what I was looking for, but they seemed to understand that. The concept of a quest against overwhelming odds made perfect sense to them.

They told me stories about their past exploits (I wish I could remember half of them), and so we covered miles like that, just strolling along, listening companionably to whoever was discoursing at the time.

Which is not to say that there weren't intervals of silence. They pricked up their ears at every strange sound. On Mars, you see, little ever moves - there's none of that perpetual susurration of dust and subsiding rock you get on earth (or so I'm told).

So sound means danger, especially in the tunnels below the city. They knew that, and I knew that, and so did the strange dog-thing they had with them.

I don't know when I noticed how hard it was getting to keep on walking. I must have been staggering like a drunk, to tell the truth. They were far too polite to comment, but after a while they had to start helping me along.

I'm sure they could have carried me themselves, if they'd been real. They still seem quite real to me, looking back, but I didn't know then that my air had been tampered with.

So it's like a long dream, the whole memory of that walk, and I really have no way of knowing just when and where I finally collapsed. I couldn't take you there, if that's what you're wondering.

All I can see is water and green grass. Unlikely on Mars, I know, but that's what I'm seeing now.

Life on Mars

There’s a persistent tendency in humans to try to make sense out of everything they see. When Perceval Lowell turned his telescope on Mars, he saw canals. Saw them, mapped them, wrote about them. Others saw them too. The question is, would he ever have seen them at all if he hadn’t already read Schiaparelli’s claim to have observed canali – which translates as “channels” rather than “canals” – crisscrossing the red planet’s surface?

The Rorschach blot test demonstrates our ability to construct a meaning – a story even – out of random shapes and lines. How many of us have seen a figure waving at us beside a road at night, only to have it transform into a fencepost as we pass? Or else some long-lost loved one, turning a busy street-corner in front of us?

The so-called pyramid and face on Mars are surely little more than this. Coincidental shade effects recorded on a sole exposure, copied, talked about, enhanced until they’ve taken on the accoutrements of fact?

And yet. Is that all they are? Can there really have been life on Mars in some far distant epoch? Is there life there now? And, if life, has there ever been intelligence, civilisation, history? I guess the more relevant question is what we hope to achieve by asking?

The only hopeful thing about us, it sometimes seems, is our curiosity. We fondly imagine that the more that we find out, the happier we will become – the wiser, rather. This time we won’t go wrong because we’ve finally seen something amazing enough to matter. …

Submitted for your approval:

• In December 1984 the meteorite ALH84001 was found in Allan Hills, Antarctica. At c. 4.5 billion years old, this is one of the oldest pieces of the solar system still in existence, and it is thought to have originated on Mars. On closer examination, it revealed structures which may be the fossils of microscopic organisms, nanobacteria. At any rate, no completely convincing non-biological explanation has yet been submitted for these traces. Nor have experts ruled out the possibility that, in a far-distant past, such meteorites were instrumental in transferring life from a wet, fecund Mars to Earth.

• In March 2004, NASA announced that its remote-controlled robotic rover Opportunity had discovered evidence that Mars was, in the past, a wet planet. This evidence is mainly in the form of sedimentary bedrock deposits and erosion features difficult to account for under any other hypothesis.

• In December 2006, NASA presented images from its Mars Global Surveyor satellite which suggest that water still occasionally flows on the surface of Mars. While there were no actual pictures of flowing water, changes over time in the appearance of craters and dark spots in the landscape do strongly suggest that something has been flowing there. Dust, possibly, but then again, maybe the Red Planet's lifeblood, liquid water.

Rumble Edge Line

Part Two:
Labyrinths

La vie – labyrinth
La mort – labyrinth
Says the Master of Ho
– Jules Superveille, “Le maitre d’Ho”

How had she got here? It was so hard to remember. These tunnels, underground chambers stretching around her in the dark ...

Dark, yes. How could she see at all? There was no perceptible source of light. Had she somehow developed new senses, grown new night-adapted eyes? So much else had changed, so little was left of who - or what - she had been.

Looking down, she saw the lantern in her hand. So that was it!

But ... a strange lantern it was. The handle like a rope of hair wrapped round her wrist, the swing of it somehow heavy, unresponsive.

She lifted it up to examine it more closely.

And saw Pat's eyes.

*

Those eyes were still open, glaring at her. That much she was certain of. She'd walked a fair way since then, since realising just what it was she was holding in her hand.

And, when you thought about it, that went some way towards explaining the length of steel in the other hand. The crusted hot sharp cruel knife she couldn't bring herself to let go of for a moment.

Pat's glazed, accusatory eyes, by contrast, she would have dumped miles ago, heaved into one of the pits and adits besieging her path. But by now the long hair was so caked and tangled around her wrist that there was no breaking free of it. Short of hacking through it with the knife, and that she balked at still. Not good old Pat -- false friend though she might have been.

She'd been the one shouting near the end: "Take her, take her - not me. I'll do anything you like ..." But it hadn't saved her. Nothing could have saved her then. Saved any of them.

So what or who had intervened on her behalf, spared Phil from her friend's fate? Had one of those thugs had a change of heart, looked beyond their game of jutting cocks and cruel instruments of pain to see a person, see a woman stretched on the rack of torment?

And yet, it wasn't her blood on the knife, she realised. Nor was it Pat's (thick and copious though that had been when the narrow blade descended). They'd left her alone after that, she realised now -- left her alone in the dark.

Had one of them come in for a quiet ... ?
Had he bent over just a bit too low?
Had she ... somehow?
(Where had she learned to be so quick and sly?
With her ex?
Her mischievous little daughter?)
Had she slipped it in between his ribs?
Cut her own cords with it?
The slashes around her wrists were smarting still, come to think of it ...
Rolled his obese corpse from her?
Eased herself up on hands and knees, with infinite precautions, crept through the dark until she bumped up against a wall?
Followed it around until she felt free air, crept on, and only realised when she got outside in the corridor that that thing rolling ahead of her was Pat?
One part of Pat, that is - Not the naked, jointed haunch still jutting from the guillotine.
And the light?
Where was that coming from?
Could it be?
Somewhere outside?