The Princess's Footprint (An Erik Midgard Case Files Short Story)

The Princess's Footprint

An Erik Midgard Case Files tribute to

L. Sprague de Camp

By

Kit Downes

First English Language Rights © 18.05.2023

Cover image by R.L. Sather

Also in this series:

The Erik Midgard Case Files (Novels)

1. The Time Traveller's Ball

2. The Lost Libraries Archive

3. The Prince's Wedding

4. The Cultist's Retreat

Open-and-Shut-Cases (Short Stories)

1. The Physicist's Party

2. The Princess's Footprint

Author's note: This story takes place approximately one month after the events of The Cultist's Retreat

Unusually for ancient Earth, the desert reminded me a lot of Mars.

Technically, it was similar to Mars the way Martians dreamed of making it. Most city domes on the planet – JI, Corporate and Free – included terraform parks, sometimes complete resorts, where the native red sand and soil was watered and planted with palms, cactuses, acacia and other genetically-engineered Earth desert plants, giving the city's inhabitants a glimpse of what Mars might be like one day, if it was ever possible to create a breathable atmosphere and have more liquid water on the surface.

Most of them were built at the edge of the city domes. Usually, the sand was brought inside and laid on top of the city's foundations several feet deep, but Martian garden designers were good at making the parks look plausible, as if the dome had been lowered into the landscape from above, right down to having robots to hoe the sand into wind patterns that matched the real ones visible outside the dome each morning before the visitors arrived, helping you to imagine that one day you would be able to walk straight through a door onto the surface, without an airlock or a spacesuit.

The Botucatu Desert, 145 million years ago in the Earth's early cretaceous period, in what would one day be southern Brazil, was very close to this. The sand here was a deep orange-ochre. The wide shallow river, rippling in the afternoon sun, was lined on both low-sloped banks with vegetation, growing thick close to the water, then thinning out into smaller and sparser patches further away from it, like a mosaic made from a range of differently shaded tiles. The trees here were the ancestors of palms, pines, araucarias and sequoias, growing together before they had evolved enough to specialise in different environments. There were patches of grass seven or eight feet tall, and thick, tangled clumps of bushes.

Max Ishtar and I were crouching inside one of these. It was a laser hot summer afternoon in Gondwana. There was no wind and the sand and plants were motionless. Apart from the hum of a few dragonflies, everything was quiet.

Beside me, Ishtar – very slowly and carefully – raised one hand to scratch an ear, keeping his arm as close to his chest as he could and making no unnecessary movements. He succeeded and exhaled with relief, and then flinched as that movement got him spiked, and then again as the flinch repeated the experience.

I would have shown some sympathy, but I was focusing too much on not moving myself. Out of all the bushes we could have chosen, we had managed to pick the one that was the ancestor of a thorn bush in the same way a dinosaur was the ancestor of a bird. The thorns were about nine centimetres long and sharper than any syringe I had ever been on the receiving end of, which the plant had no doubt evolved to keep the larger local fauna, with their tough prehistoric hides and scales, from tearing it up for food or water. I was crouching with my elbows squeezed to my sides, trying very hard not to rock. My light Chronological Operations Agency desert uniform was supposed to be blade-proof, so I had broken off several of the thorns – and had the bloodspots on both hands to prove it – to show to the equipment department when we got home to Luna HQ, who were otherwise never going to believe that their work had not been better than perfect.