Down to a Sunless Sea

23 The City on the Sea

The next “day” the ship arrived at its destination, and Mars had yet another marvel to reveal.

It was a town of huts large enough to be called a city, and the buildings, which were mostly one-story structures, with a few that reached to two or three stories, were woven, like the ship, out of stiff fibers like wicker or rattan fastened to frames of thicker girth.

But that was not what made the place a marvel.

It was floating on the surface of the luminous sea!

The structures of the city were built on rafts, some of these being so small as only to be able to accommodate one hut, while others seemed nearly as big as city blocks back Earthside.

The rafts of all sizes were linked together by rope-bridges suspended from posts, or by ladders and catwalks, and the rafts were held together in the floating colony by thick braided cables and lines.

On Earth such a maritime metropolis could hardly have held together for long, but would have been broken up by the action of wind and wave, storm and tide. Here in this weird world of eternal morning, of course, there were no waves to speak of and the weather seemed perpetually calm, for the travelers had as yet seen no storms. Later they would discover that a gentle rain did fall from time to time, and that the Sea People—as they came to think of the golden subterraneans —collected this precipitation in rooftop troughs to serve as water for drinking, bathing and cooking. Will Harbin could understand the rains easily enough: humidity from the atmosphere collected like dew on the cavern roof and eventually the drops were large enough to make a decent, if mild, little shower.

The floating city was a gorgeous vision as they approached it across the luminous sea. Some of the wicker structures were painted in gay and gaudy profusion of colors that ranged from rose-pink to carnation and vermilion, pale blue, rich greens, indigo, lavender, tangerine—a dazzling variety of colors that made the incredible place look like an elfin city in a fairy tale.

Flags and banners and pennons fluttered from rooftops and gateposts and masts. Gorgeous silken carpets or tapestries hung from every aperture. None of the buildings seemed to have anything like windows, but it seemed that the rattan wall-screens could be fastened and rolled up by an arrangement of ropes and pulleys at wish.

An insubstantial town of Faerie, floating like a mirage on an unknown sea beneath the world… .

Their ship moored at the end of a long quay and the travelers and their captors trooped ashore. Here in a sort of harbor, many similar vessels were tethered. Some of these were ships as large as the one that had captured the travelers, while others ranged from the size of canoes and gondolas, down to little dinghys and miniature rafts.

A laughing, cheerful crowd gathered on the dock to greet their returning friends. And here, for the first time, Brant and the others saw the adults of the golden race, discovering the fully-grown of the Sea People to be as naked and hairless as the children had been. The men looked rather soft and languid and effeminate to Brant’s way of thinking, and the women tended to be placid and timid, much like Suoli.

It was obvious that the lack of enemies or hostile weather had made the Sea People degenerate over the hundreds of generations since their forefathers had come to the underground world.

The youths were unlading their ship, bringing “ashore” the food they had caught in ceramic jugs. Everyone milled about in happy confusion, staring curiously at Brant and his companions, laughing gaily and chattering among themselves. Many embraced and kissed the mariners as they came ashore, and Brant could not help noticing that, as often as not, youths were kissed by men or other youths, and girls by girls or women. He doubted, from the lascivious nature of this embracing and caressing, that many of these couples were family.

The travelers did not seem to be under any sort of constraint, although bright-eyed young Kirin stuck close to Brant’s side throughout the unloading of the ship, and Will Harbin’s demure little tutor, Aulli, clung close to the scientist. Brant noticed that she was holding the older man by the hand, and he grinned. A time or two during the voyage he had teased Harbin about his “little girl-friend,” at which the old man had sniffed contemptuously, not deigning to honor the remark with reply or denial.

Soon they were led across catwalks and rope-bridges, walking casually right through houses where whole families were busied at domestic tasks. These merely smiled or waved, seemingly undisturbed by their intrusion. Guess you get used to having no privacy, where anybody can see through the very walls and nobody wears any clothes, Brant thought.

“What is this place?” he asked young Kirin, who clung gamely to his side through the crush and press of naked bodies.

“It is Zhah,” Kirin answered simply. He looked faintly surprised that Brant did not know; but, then, the very concept of strangers was a complete novelty to the boy.

“Who is your ruler?”

“Prince Azuri, of the High-Born,” said the boy. “And before him it was Princess Suah, also of the High-Born.”

“And who are the High-Born, exactly?” he asked curiously. The boy explained, although he had to fumble a bit to find the proper words, that the High-Born were the noblest of the Seven Clans into which the Sea People were divided. When Brant inquired how many rulers the present dynasty had given to Zhah, Kirin looked baffled, as if the question had no meaning to him.

Later on, they deduced that family relationships were so casual among the Sea People as to be irrelevant. The golden people simply took lovers for a time, before drifting away into another love relationship, and if children were begotten, it was hard to tell to which father. It was difficult for Brant and Harbin to see how any sort of distinct clan-grouping could exist here, where the people seldom if ever knew for certain who their fathers were.

“Maybe they count descent through their mothers, and their mothers’ mothers, and so on back,” suggested Brant to his companion. Harbin shrugged.

“Hard to imagine a matriarchal society such as the one you suggest being ruled over by a prince,” the older man said. “I’ll ask Aulli how they work it, when I get a chance.”

When they were led before him, Prince Azuri proved to be a slender, girlishly pretty youth of sixteen or so. He wore nothing in the way of regalia that would denote his rank, except that, instead of the partly utilitarian and partly ornamental harness worn by everybody else except for very young children, he wore only gems. These were in the form of necklaces, pectorals, rings on both fingers and toes, anklets, armlets, girdles and bracelets. Among the gems were some with which Brant was already familiar from his years of exploration on the surface, including the ho-katha, or fire-stones, and the rare ziriol, the priceless Martian purple rubies.

Cupidity gleamed in the eyes of Tuan and his outlaws. They had also recognized the gems, and wore greedy expressions.

As, by the way, did Agila… .

Rather than being presented to the ruler of the Sea People in some ceremonial manner, it was more like being casually introduced to somebody who might be interested in meeting you.

And the Prince was very interested, indeed. He crowed with delight over the strangeness of the visitors, and touched them here and there with lively curiosity, running his fingertips over the bristling mat of black hair on Brant’s burly chest, and fingering the furcaps of the outlaws as if he had never seen such before, which he probably hadn’t. He gave Tuan’s stiff tuft of beard a little tug, giggling delightedly. Tuan glowered, but said nothing.

Then the jeweled boy sat down tailor-fashion on a, plump peach-colored cushion and clapped his hands. Servants came in from the other partitions of the palace, if that is really what it was, bearing cushions for the newcomers, and they all sat down in a ring and were served candies, jellies, mints and sauces in little ceramic pots, while Azuri chattered with Kirin and Aulli, wanting to hear all about how they had discovered these strange and interesting people.

The palace was a three-story edifice, erected near the center of the raft-city, and seemed to be inhabited by very many people who drifted in and out casually, staring with polite curiosity at the strangers. The walls were hung with sumptuous woven stuffs, littered with gaudy cushions, carpeted luxuriously, and furnished rather skimpily with a few wicker tabourets and stools and little else. Festoons of gauzy, lovely things, resembling silk or paper flowers, hung from the rafters. Since flowers were unknown on the Desert World, Brant decided to himself that they were simply fanciful constructions, wrought from pure imagination. But remembering the tiny white flowers that had starred the indigo moss, he couldn’t be sure of this.

Later on, and without even the slightest formality or even bidding Prince Azuri farewell, Aulli and Kirin tugged Brant and Harbin to their feet and led them away to small partitions where they could rest. The boy and girl curled up next to the two men and fell asleep. Brant, who wanted to be alone with his woman, had to comply with the local custom, so he shrugged and stretched out.

“They seem a happy, healthy sort of folk, without sexual inhibitions, like the Polynesians “were when the first white explorers found them,” Harbin remarked drowsily.

“Yeah,” said Brant. “And the explorers taught them to be ashamed of their bodies, to drink whisky, and what syphillis was. I wonder what we’re going to teach the Sea People?”

The old scientist grimaced at the notion, but made no reply.

They were simply guests, it turned out, neither captives nor slaves. None of them could have quite expected this, but it was a relief to Brant and an even greater one to that suspicious ruffian, Tuan.

The two found an opportunity to converse privately the next “day,” when they met by chance on a gallery-like long balcony on the third floor of the palace. Brant was resting his arms on the rail, looking down to watch nude children of both sexes scrambling about gleefully in tiny boats, pelting each other with handfuls of glowing seawater in some sort of childish game.

“The wise man who walks with Brant, the Dok-i-tor, does he know aught of the crystal weapons?” inquired Tuan. Brant confessed lazily that he had not yet had a chance to discuss the matter with Will Harbin. And he countered with a question of his own.

“Is our truce still in force, Tuan?”

“As far as Tuan is concerned, it is. They number a hundred to our one, and armed with those weird weapons, they become formidable as adversaries.”

Something else had been on Brant’s mind.

“These people are playful, happy, peaceful children,” he said. “But we would be very wise to avoid offending them in any way. So, can you keep your men under tight control, Tuan? I mean, keeping their hands off the women and away from the jewels?”

“The band of Tuan will obey to the letter the commands of Tuan,” the chieftain said with a vicious gleam in his eye, “or Tuan will—” and here he uttered a gruesome Martian saying that is virtually untranslatable, but had much the same meaning as: “I’ll drink their blood with my breakfast cereal.”

The two tall men grinned at each other. They were not friends, but were beginning to understand and appreciate the qualities each other possessed, and that is one way of beginning a friendship.

Presently, Tuan drifted away, leaving Brant with his lazy thoughts.