Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [6]
Where did her Nanny come from? No trace of her was present in the earlier, much less coherent dreams. Nathi ran again through the background data. Nothing to explain a Captain of the Dragon Guard as the girl’s personal attendant.
The Dragon Guard? Wait. Nathi linked into his order’s library. Of course. The Dragon Guard, the Order of Flamethrowers’ famed warrior elite. Parahuman. Trained in their so-called “families” from early childhood. Their High Captain led a special, secretive commando force in the Wyrm Fleet.
That was some food for thought. A damn big heapful.
Following the Singularity, the old-style polities like monarchy, democracy, plutocracy—the rule of kings, of people, of the rich—had given way to caste technocracy. With one’s immortality increasingly depending on technology and scientific knowledge, it came as no surprise. A parahuman’s caste determined the nature of one’s mind enhancements—wizards, warriors, and workers of all kinds, with normal humans bringing up the rear.
In the previous two Wizard Wars, as in the current one, the Order of Flamethrowers had always been the enemy of Nathi’s order. Where could the girl have seen a Dragon Captain in such astonishingly true detail?
It was only when he started digging into data on the Dragon Guard that he discovered a curious coincidence. The girl was now being treated in the Crown of the South, a strategically important castle in the south polar region. For a long time, it belonged to the Flamethrowers—until three years ago, when they had been driven off from Mars.
Three years ago—when the girl had suffered brain damage.
But the castle had another name back then.
The Dragon Nest.
2
HE DREAMED OF HELLAS, AS THE POSTHUMANS DREAM—THE input redirected to stream out from the depths of their digital subconscious.
Nathi dreamed of Hellas where he was born, a second generation Zulu Martian. His parents, devout Zulu Zionists, had named him Nkosinathi, “Lord is with us.” But somewhere in Nathi’s many wanderings, he must have lost the godly part.
Hellas was the deepest and by far the widest hole on Mars, the only place where the atmospheric pressure was enough for water to stay liquid, just above the water’s triple point. The amaZiyoni, the Zionist Christians from South Africa, were big on baptism by immersion—outdoors.
He had good reasons to be proud of his people. Although Americans had been the first to step on Mars, they’d settled for a quick walk—in and out. It was Zulu, Xhosa, other South Africans that were the first to come to Mars to live.
Having failed to find the much-anticipated water in the Dao and Harmakhis Valles, they trekked westward, deeper into Hellas, until they reached the honeycomb terrain, a mess of oval and hexagonal depressions. It was only by careful, painstaking shepherding of water ice clouds forming just below the Hellas rim, and by selective damming of wind currents with osmotic nets, that finally the pilgrims learned to fill the honeycomb with water in late spring, the warmest season in the southern hemisphere.
He well remembered the day he was baptized, already a teenager—it had taken quite a while to set the cloud pastures up. Imagine wading quietly into the water, until it closes over your head. The awe mixed with a touch of fear, as you lift the helmet off to let the Martian water in—like coming out of your second skin. The air whistling out under pressure—and the sweetness of the oxygen that flows through your breathing mask. The kiss of water on your bare skin, immediately sublimating from your body’s heat at this low pressure—a new birth out of a cold embrace, invigorating, sweetly painful. The thin layer of cold steam enveloping you like placenta. And the red sand swirling by your feet.
It was too long since he’d been home.
He flew—imagined wings and soared above the angular