Page 30 of River Dragon’s Song

She reached out and traced one of the lines with her fingertip. It was cut as crisply as the notches in the spillway wall. It ran for a meter or so and then split into three. Each of those branches split again, and where they ended there were small carved symbols, set into the stone like seals.

She followed the line back the other way, and it joined a thicker one, and that one joined another. She stepped back to see more of the wall, and then further back. Then she turned in a slow circle in the middle of the chamber and looked at all of it at once, and suddenly, she understood.

“It’s a map,” she whispered.

The lines were rivers. They were underground rivers, hundreds of them, running beneath the surface in a vast connected network. And the pattern they made was familiar, although it took her a moment to see why. There was the long, deep scar of the great canyon, carved in a heavy band across the middle of the dome. There were the broad highlands to the south and the smooth low plains to the north. And there, right at the top of the dome, where the lines all converged, was a wide pale region where the carving had been done differently. The stone was smoothed and polished there, and the lines ran underneath it, fainter and finer, as if they were flowing under ice.

The polar ice cap, she realized.

“These lines go all the way to the pole,” she said slowly. Her voice sounded strange to her. “Korrak, this is a map of the entire planet.”

He was watching her, his head tilted. She pointed to one of the carved symbols, and then another, and another. There were dozens of them, scattered all across the web of lines, each one sitting at the end of a river like a city on a coast. “What are these?”

He was quiet for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was low and slow, and she had the feeling that he was remembering the words as he said them.

“Every river,” he said. “Every garden. We carried water to all of them.”

She stared at him speechlessly. Then she looked back at the map, at the endless branching lines, and the hair rose on her arms. It had never been only this river. His people had built channels and spillways and overflows beneath the entire planet. They had carried water from the poles to the equator and back again. They had tended it and kept it moving, the way a heart kept blood moving through a body.

“You were the caretakers,” she said. “Your people. You didn’t just look after one river. You looked after all of Mars.”

He reached up and touched a thick, glowing line near the center of the wall. Beside it, carved into the stone, was a symbol she didn’t recognize, a flowing curve like a wave caught in the middle of breaking.

“Nai’thara,” he said softly. “We carry the water.”

He said it with such pride and such sorrow that her throat closed up. She thought of him waking up alone in the dark, with his memories scattered and his people gone. She thought of him going out night after night to clear the silt from the channels without even knowing why. Because it was what he was. Because some part of him had remembered, even when the rest of him had forgotten.

She reached for his hand and held it tightly. They stood there together, looking at the map. After a while she let go and walked around the chamber, studying the lines more closely. Her engineer’s brain was already racing ahead. If even a fraction of these channels still existed, if even a few of them still carried water, it would change everything anyone knew about Mars.

It would also make this place worth more than anything GenCon had ever found. She thought of their survey teams and their drills and their quarterly targets, and her stomach tightened.

She was halfway around the chamber when she found the scar. It was on the far side of the dome, low down, near the curve of the floor. A large section of the map had been destroyed there. The stone had been gouged and scraped away in deep, violent strokes, until nothing was left but rough, pitted rock. The glowing lines ran right up to the edge of it and simply stopped, cut off like severed threads. The lichen didn’t grow there at all.

“Korrak,” she said. “What happened here?”

He came over to look. For the first time since she had known him, he looked uneasy. The scales along his neck lifted slightly. He reached out as if to touch the scarred stone, and then drew his hand back.

“I do not know,” he said slowly. “Always like this. Since I woke.”

“Someone did this deliberately,” she said. “Look at the tool marks. Somebody scratched it out.”

He shook his head helplessly, and the look on his face made her decide not to ask any more questions, not yet. She put her hand on his arm, and after a moment he covered it with his. They turned away from the scar and he gestured at the pool.

“Hot.”

He was right. The pool was blissfully hot. She tested it with her fingers first, and then with her hand. Then she sat down on the smooth stone edge and pulled off her boots and socks and put her feet in, and she groaned out loud. It was like sinking into a bath. She hadn’t had a real bath since she left Iron Ridge.

“Oh my God,” she moaned. “Oh, that’s incredible.”

He crouched beside her, watching her with that slow, intent look she was beginning to know well. She looked up at him, and at the steaming water, and at the glowing map curving over their heads. And she made a decision very quickly.

She stood up and unzipped her suit. She did it slowly, without looking away from him, and his eyes followed the zipper all the way down. She peeled the grey fabric off her shoulders and pushed it down over her hips and stepped out of it. Then she stripped off her thermal underlayer, and her underwear, until there was nothing left. She stood there naked in front of him in the soft glow of the lichen.

She had expected to feel shy, but the way he was looking at her didn’t leave any room for it. His pupils had gone wide and dark. The scales along his jaw and throat had flushed that deep, rich blue, and the low rumble started in his chest, rough and hungry. He didn’t move. He simply looked at her as if he had never seen anything like her in his life and never wanted to see anything else.

She walked down the smooth stone steps into the pool. The hot water rose over her ankles and her knees and her thighs, and she sighed with pleasure as it closed around her waist. Then she turned and held out her hand to him.

“Come here,” she said.