Titans of Chaos

So we cheated on the landing again. I simply bent the world-lines radiating from the center ofMars away from the vessel. The ship, aerodynamic as a falling log, was lapsed into a feather-slowfall by me, while we were still high enough in the thin Martian atmosphere that four-space waspliant; 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 sitesbefore we left Earth. He was confident that he could restore power to the cameras, and theantennae, and send a signal back to Earth. He was not confident that any receiving stations wereoperating on Earth, space-exploration budgets being what they were, but I wanted to have a gononetheless. So we fell through the sky in that direction.

Where to set down? Quentin had prepared one of our three chambers with his hexagons andpentagrams, and he burned a candle and summoned up one of his allies. Our procedure was thesame as before: I used the ring of Gyges to hide us from the entity, and Victor did not. This onelooked like a lion carrying a viper in its paw, and riding the back of a coal-black steed, butQuentin 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. AsMoses 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 dryriverbeds of Mars, which had not known water for three billion years, now bubbled white andcrimson with muddy and torrential floods.

The ship that landed on the single living waterway of Mars was shaped like a trireme again, not atorpedo, 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 thedreamlands, 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 thevasty deep that could inspire him to survive the subartic, low-pressure, high-ultravioletconditions. Quentin leafed through his translated notes of his grimoire, and said he had baronswho could command ninety-nine legions, and discover the virtues of birds and precious stones, butthere was nothing about radiation poisoning.