Free In the Courts of the Crimson Kings by S.M. Stirling Page A

who was also his assistant and a biologist of note, gave a dinner for the explorers on a balcony of clear crystal supported by two curving braces of the same material shaped like slender snakes, a structure that seemed nerve-wrackingly fragile if you didn’t know the strength of the stuff.
    To the stomach it was still nerve-wracking, particularly as it was sixty feet to the tough reddish-green sward that made up the roadway below. Even in one-third gravity that was a long way.
    “God, it’s good to see some Terran faces,” Holmgard said.
    “Yeah,” Dolores said. “I knew I’d been here too long when I read the latest Newsweek and wondered which candidate for president was going to establish the most Sh’u Maz .”
    Her husband chuckled and shuddered at the same time. “It’s been months! I know there were storms, but . . .”
    Jeremy shuddered a little in turn. “Storms” didn’t begin to describe what the Martian polar winter was like—and seasons lasted twice as long on this planet. Sometimes more, if you were unlucky enough to be in the hemisphere that got the downside of the eccentric orbit that time around. It gave you a lot of time to brush up on your research and perfect your game of atanj , though no Terran had yet become more than mediocre at it.
    “Bob, we came as soon as we could,” Sally said soothingly. “And we’ve got that disk from Susie and Joyce.”
    The Holmgards brightened and stuck the disk into the reader on the table; it was a bit of incongruously homey Texas Instruments bluntness amid the stretched elegance of Martian glassware. The screen came alive and showed two children of twelve and ten, their looks halfway between Robert’s hulking Minnesota-Swede blondness and his wife’s dark Peruvian-Spanish delicacy.
    Jeremy paid attention to the entertainment while they listened to the message: Not far away a bird the size of a six-year-old sat on a perch and sang a song with a haunting minor-key melody, now and then making sounds like wind chimes to accompany itself, and moving wings like living Tiffany glass in time to the music it made.
    “Dammit, we should have a fiber-optic cable between here and the base by now,” Holmgard said, turning off the message and sighing. “Given what the weather does to radio.”
    Jeremy nodded. That had been tried once, and had failed at hideous expense—there were limits to what the USASF budget could bear, especially now that the first flush of wonder had worn off and the voters weren’t quite so enchanted with pouring tens of billions yearly into space. And the peculiarities of the Martian atmosphere limited wireless bandwidth.
    The Holmgards tore themselves away from their children’s disk with commendable speed and devoted themselves to their hostly duties. Jeremy speared a strip of grilled rooz and nibbled it; despite the fact that it came from a bird—more or less—it didn’t taste at alllike chicken. A bit like beef, a bit like pork with a soupçon of shrimp, meltingly tender and spiced with something that tasted like a cross between garlic and chili with a hint of flowers. There was a heat to it that hit you after a moment of hesitation, like slow-motion napalm.
    Although it’s better not to remember it’s cooked over dung fires , he thought, taking a drink of water that had a slightly metallic taste.
    Granted, the animal in question essentially shat thumb-sized pieces of pure charcoal, but the thought was still a bit off-putting if you dwelt on it.
    “Okay, let’s go over your mission,” Bob said.
    He touched the screen with fingers that were thick, muscular, and nimble. A map of Mars sprang up, then narrowed down to the section around Zar-tu-Kan; it was the product of satellite photography combined with local knowledge.
    “If your interpretation of the chronicles is right, there’s not much doubt that the lost city of Rema-Dza is around here ,” he said. “Out where the dead canal runs. But that’s bad country—dust storms,