Titans of Chaos

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?" Colinsuggested.

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 thesoil and return to him, so he could at least boast later his bootprint had been left in the rust-redsoil of this dead, outer world. I looked something more like a winged centaur made of solidifiedenergy than I did a girl, and an aura of blue light surrounded my head and shoulders as I kept aone-molecule-thin layer of hyperspatial substance between me and the Martian air. In my humanarms I carried the Union Jack, furled on a spearshaft.

Victor looked like a faceless gold statue, with arms and legs little more than streamlined tubesmarring the symmetry of his bulletlike space-body. He did not walk. His legs were one solid fusedmass, their internal consistency hardened into a many-textured bonelike growth. But he couldmove himself by balancing positive and negative energy flows, and manipulated the environmentwith particles finer and surer than hands.

The waters of the canal were already turning the color of old blood and forming lumpy rose-grayice. (Yes, I know it was a dry riverbed, filled via magic, but no girl explorer worth her salt is goingto call a streambed on Mars anything but a canal.) Vapor was also pouring up from the orangewaters, which might have been sublimation because the air temperature was so low. Red frost hadcollected at the waterline of our ship.