Bear, Greg Read online

  Greg Bear - A Martian Ricorso

  a short story by Greg Bear

  Martian night. The cold and the dark and the stars are so intense they make music, like a faint tinkle of ice xylophones. Maybe it's my air tank hose scraping; maybe it's my imagination. Maybe it's real.

  Standing on the edge of Swift Plateau, I'm afraid to move or breathe deeply, as I whisper into the helmet recorder, lest I disturb something holy: God's sharp scrutiny of Edom Crater. I've gone outside, away from the lander and my crewmates, to order my thoughts about what has happened.

  The Martians came just twelve hours ago, like a tide of five-foot-high laboratory rats running and leaping on their hind legs. To us, it seemed as if they were storming the lander, intent on knocking it over. But it seems now we were merely in their way.

  We didn't just sit here and let them swamp us. We didn't hurt or kill any of them--Cobb beat at them with a roll of foil and I used the parasol of the damaged directenna to shoo them off. First contact, and we must have looked like clowns in an old silent comedy. The glider wings came perilously close to being severely damaged. We foiled and doped what few tears had been made before nightfall. They should suffice, if the polymer sylar adhesive is as good as advertised.

  But our luck this expedition held true to form. The stretching frame's pliers broke during the repairs. We can't afford another swarm, even if they're just curious.

  Cobb and Link have had bitter arguments about self-defense. I've managed to stay out of them so far, but my sympathies at the moment lie with Cobb. Still, my instinctual desire to stay alive won't stop me from feeling horribly guilty if we do have to kill a few Martians.

  We've had quite a series of revelation the last few days. Schiaparelli was right. And Percival Lowell, the eccentric genius of my own home state. He was not as errant an observer as we've all thought this past century.

  I have an hour before I have to return to the lander and join my mates in sleep. I can last here in the cold that long. Loneliness may weigh on me sooner, however. I don't know why I came out here; perhaps just to clear my head, we've all been in such a constrained, tightly controlled, oh-so-disguised panic. I need to know what I think of the whole situation, without benefit of comrades.

  The plateau wall and the floor of Edom are so barren. With the exception, all around me, of the prints of thousands of feet... Empty and lifeless.

  Tomorrow morning we'll brace the crumpled starboard sled pads and rig an emergency automatic release for the RATO units on the glider. Her wings are already partially spread for a fabric inspection -- accomplished just before the Winter Troops attacked--and we've finished transferring fuel from the lander to the orbit booster. When the glider gets us up above the third jet stream, by careful tacking we hope to be in just the right position to launch our little capsule up and out. A few minutes burn and we can dock with the orbiter if Willy is willing to pick us up.

  If we don't make it, these records will be all there is to explain, on some future date, why we never made it back. I'll feed the helmet memory into the lander telterm, stacked with flight telemetry and other data in computer-annotated garble, and instruct the computer to store it all on hard-copy glass disks.

  The dust storm that sand-scrubbed our directenna and forced me to this expedient subsided two days ago. We have not reported our most recent discovery to mission control; we are still organizing our thoughts. After all, it's a momentous occasion. We don't want to make any slips and upset the folks back on Earth.

  Here's the situation on communications. We can no longer communicate directly with Earth. We are left with the capsule radio, which Willy can pick up and boost for re-broadcast whenever the conditions are good enough. At the moment, conditions are terrible. The solar storm that dogged our Icarus heels on the way out, forcing us deep inside Willy's capacious hull, is still active. The effect on the Martian atmosphere has been most surprising.

  There's a communicator on the glider body as well, but that's strictly short-range and good for little more than telemetry. So we have very garbled transmissions going out, reasonably clear coming back, and about twenty minutes of complete blackout when Willy is out of line of sight, behind or below Mars.

  We may be able to hit Willy with the surveyor's laser, adapted for signal transmission. For the moment we're going to save that for the truly important communications, like time of launch and approximate altitude, calculated from the fuel we have left after the transfer piping exploded.... was it three days ago? When the night got colder than the engineers thought possible and exceeded the specs on the insulation.

  I'm going back in now. It's too much out here. Too dark. No moons visible.

  Now at the telterm keyboard. Down to meaningful monologue.

  Mission Commander Linker, First Pilot Cobb, and myself, Mission Specialist Mercer, have finished ninety percent of the local survey work and compared it with Willy's detailed mapping. What we've found is fascinating.

  At one time there were lines on Mars, stripes like canals. Until a century ago, any good telescope on Earth, on a good night, could have revealed them for a sharp-eyed observer. As the decades went by, it was not the increased skill of astronomers and the quality of instruments that erased these lines, but the end of the final century of the Anno Fecundis. Is my Latin proper? I have no dictionary to consult.

  With the end of the Fertile Year, a thousand centuries long, came the first bleak sandy winds and the lowering of the Martian jet streams. They picked up sand and scoured.

  The structures must have been like fairy palaces before they were swept down. I once saw a marketplace full of empty vinegar jugs in the Philippines, made from melted Coca Cola bottles. They used glass so thin you could break them with a thumbnail tap in the right place--but they easily held twenty or thirty gallons of liquid. These colonies must have looked like grape-clusters of thousands of thin glass vinegar bottles, dark as emeralds, mounted on spider-web stilts and fed with water pumped through veins as big as Roman aqueducts. We surveyed one field and found the fragments buried in red sand across a strip thirty miles wide. From a mile or so up, the edge of the structure can still be seen, if you know where to look.

  Neither of the two previous expeditions found them.

  They're ours.

  Linker believes these ribbons once stretched clear around the planet. Before the sand storm, Willy's infrared mapping proved him correct. We could trace belts of ruins in almost all the places Lowell had mapped--even the civic centers some of his followers said he saw. Aqueducts laced the planet like the ribs on a basketball, meeting at ocean-sized black pools covered with glassy membranes. The pools were filled by a thin purple liquid, a kind of resin, warming in the sun, undergoing photosynthesis. The resin was pumped at high pressure through tissue and glass tubes, nourishing the plantlike colonies inhabiting the bottles. They probably lacked any sort of intelligence. But their architectural feats put all of ours to shame, nonetheless.

  Sandstorms and the rapidly drying weather of the last century are still bringing down the delicate structures. Ninety-five percent or more have fallen already, and the rest are too rickety to safely investigate. They are still magnificent. Standing on the edge of a plain of broken bottles and shattered pylons stretching to the horizon, we can't help but feel very young and very small.

  A week ago, we discovered they've left spores buried deep in the red-orange sand, tougher than coconuts and about the size of medicine balls.

  Six days ago, we learned that Mars provides children for all his seasons. Digging for ice lenses that Willy had located, we came across a cache of leathery eggshells in a cavern shored up with a translucent organic cement. We didn't have time to investigate thoroughly. We managed to take a few samples of the cement--scrupulously avoidi
ng disturbing the eggs--and vacated before our tanks ran out. While cutting out the samples, we noticed that the walls had been patterned with hexagonal carvings, whether as a structural aid or decoration we couldn't tell.

  Yesterday, that is, about twenty-six hours ago, we saw what we believe must be the hatchlings: the Winter Troops, five or six of them, walking along the edge of the plateau, not much more than white specks from where we sat in the lander.

  We took the sand sled five kilometers from the landing to investigate the cache again, and to see what Willy's mapping revealed as the last standing fragments of an aqueduct bridge in our vicinity. We didn't locate our original cache. Collapsed caverns filled with leathery egg skins pocked the landscape. More than sandstorms had been at the ruins. The bridges rested on the seeds of their own destruction-- packs of kangaroo-rat Winter Troops crawled over the structure like ants on a carcass, breaking off bits, eating or just cavorting like sand fleas.

  Linker named them. He snapped pictures enthusiastically. As a trained exobiologist, he was in a heat of excitement and speculation. His current theory is that the Winter Troops are on a binge of destruction, programmed into their genes and irrevocable. We retreated on the sled, unsure whether we might be swamped as well.

  Linker babbled--pardon me, expounded--all the way back to the lander. "It's like Giambattista Vico resurrected from the historian's boneyard!" We barely listened; Linker was way over our heads. "Out with the old, in with the new! Vico's historical ricorso exemplified."

  Cobb and I were much less enthusiastic. "Indiscriminate buggers," he grumbled. "How long before they find us?"

  I had no immediate reaction. As in every situation in my life, I decided to sit on my emotions and wait things out.

  Cobb was prescient. Unluckily for us, our lander and glider rise above the ground like a stray shard of an aqueduct-bridge. At that stage of their young lives, the Winter Troops couldn't help but swarm over everything. An hour ago, I braved the hash and our own confusion and sent out descriptions of our find. So far, we've received no reply to our requests for First Contact instructions. The likelihood was so small nobody planned for it. The message was probably garbled.

  But enough pessimism. Where does this leave us, so far, in our speculations?

  Gentlemen, we sit on the cusp between cycles. We witness the end of the green and russet Mars of Earth's youth, ribbed with fairy bridges and restrained seas, and come upon a grimmer, more practical world, buttoning down for the long winter.

  We haven't studied the white Martians in any detail, so there's no way of knowing whether or not they're intelligent. They may be the new masters of Mars. How do we meet them--passively, as Linker seems to think we should, or as Cobb believes: defending ourselves against creatures who may or may not belong to our fraternal order of Thinkers?

  What can we expect if we don't defend ourselves?

  Let your theologians and exobiologists speculate on that. Are we to be the first to commit the sin of an interplanetary Cain? Or are the Martians?

  It will take us nine or ten hours tomorrow to brace the lander pads. Our glider sits with sylar wings half-flexed, crinkling and snapping in the rising wind, silver against the low sienna hills of the Swift Plateau.

  Sunlight strikes the top of the plateau. Pink sky to the East; fairy bridges, fairy landscape! Pink and dreamlike. Ice-crystal clouds obscure a faded curtain of aurora. The sky overhead is black as obsidian. Between the pink sunrise and the obsidian is a band of hematite, a dark rainbow like carnival glass, possibly caused by crystalline powder from the aqueduct bridges elevated into the jetstreams. From our vantage on the plateau, we can see dust devils crossing Edom's eastern rim and the tortured mounds and chasms of the Moab-Marduk range, rising like the pillars of some ancient temple. Boaz and Jachin, perhaps.

  Since writing the above, I've napped for an hour or so. Willy relayed a new chart. He's found construction near the western rim of Edom Crater--recent construction, not there a few days ago when the area was last surveyed. Hexagonal formations--walls and what could be roads. From his altitude, they must rival the Great Wall of China. How could such monumental works be erected in just days? Were they missed on the previous passes? Not likely.

  So there we have it. The colonies that erected the aqueduct-bridges were not the only architects on Mars. The Winter Troops are demonstrating their skills. But are they intelligent, or just following some instinctual imperative? Or both?

  Both men are sleeping again now. They've been working hard, as have I, and their sleep is sound. The telterm clicking doesn't wake them. I can't sleep much--no more than a hour at a stretch before I awake in a sweat. My body is running on supercharge and I'm not ready to resort to tranquilizers. So here I sit, endlessly observing. Linker is the largest of us. Though I worked with him for three years before this mission, and we have spent over eight months in close quarters, I hardly know the man. He's not a quiet man, and he's always willing to express his opinions, but he still surprises me. He has a way of raising his eyebrows when he listens, opening his dark eyes wide and wrinkling his forehead, that reminds me of a dog cocking its ears. But it would have to be a devilishly bright dog. Perhaps I haven't plumbed Linker's depths because I'd go in over my head if I tried. He's certainly more dedicated than either Cobb or I. He's been in the USN for twenty-one years, fifteen of them in space, specializing in planetary geology and half a dozen other disciplines.

  Cobb, on the other hand, can be read like a book. He tends toward bulk, more in appearance than mass; he weighs only a little more than I do. He's shorter and works with a frown; it seems to take twice his normal concentration to finish some tasks. I do him no injustice by saying that; he gets the work done, and well, but it costs him more than it would Linker. The extra effort sometimes takes the edge off his nonessential reasoning. He's not light on his mental feet, particularly in a situation like this. Doggedness and quick reflexes brought him to his prominence in the Mars lander program; I respect him none the less for that, but.... He tends to the technical, loving machines more than men, I've often thought, and from my more liberal arts background, I've resented that.

  Linker and I once had him close to tears on the outward voyage. We conversed on five or six subjects at once, switching topics every three or four minutes. It was a cruel game and neither of us are proud of it, but I for one can peg part of the blame on the mission designers. Three is too small a community for a three year mission in space. Hell. Space has been billed as making children out of us all, eh? A two-edged sword.

  I have (as certain passages above might indicate) been thinking about the Bible lately. My old childhood background has been stimulated by the danger and moral dilemmas--hair of the dog that bit me. The maps of Mars, with their Biblical names, have contributed to my thoughts. We're not far from Eden as gliders go. We sit in fabled Moab, above the Moab-Marduk range, Marduk being one of the chief "baals" in the Old Testament. Edom Crater--Edom means red, an appropriate name for a Martian crater. I have red hair. Call me Esau!

  Mesogaea--Middle Earth. Other hair, other dogs.

  Back on the recorder again. Time weighs heavily on me. I've retreated to the equipment bay to weather a bit of grumpiness between Linker and Cobb. Actually, it was an out and out argument. Linker, still the pacifist, expressed his horror of committing murder against another species. His scruples are oddly selective--he fought in Eritrea in the nineties. Neither has been restrained by rank; this could lead to really ugly confrontations, unless danger straightens us all out and makes brothers of us.

  Three comrades, good and true, tolerant of different opinions.

  Oh, God, here they come again! I'm looking out the equipment bay port, looking East. They must number five or six thousand, lining a distant hill like Indians. That many attacking.... Cobb can have his way, and it won't matter, we'll still have had the course. If they rip a section of wing sylar larger than we can stretch by hand, we're stuck.

  That was close. Cobb fired bursts of the survey
or's laser over their heads. Enough dust had been raised by their movement and by the wind to make a fine display. They moved back slowly and then vanished behind the hill. The laser is powerful enough to burn them should the necessity arise.

  Linker has as much as said he'd rather die than extend the sin of Cain. I'm less worried about that sin than I am about lifting off. We have yet to brace the sled pad. Linker's out below the starboard hatch now, rigging the sling that will keep one section of the glider body level when the RATOs fire.

  More dust to the East now. Night is coming slowly. After the sun sets, it'll be too cold to work outside for long. If the Winter Troops are water-based, how do they survive the night? Anti-freeze in their blood, like Arctic fish? Can they keep up their activity in temperatures between fifty and one hundred below? Or will we be out of danger until sunrise, with the Martians warm in their blankets, and we in our trundle-bed, nightmaring?

  I've helped Linker rig the sling. We've all worked on the sled pad. Cobb has mounted the laser on a television tripod--clever warrior. Linker advised him to beware the fraying power cable. Cobb looked at him with a sad sort of resentment and went about his work. Other than the few bickerings and personality games of the trip out, we managed to keep respect for one another until the last few days. Now we're slipping. At one time, I had the fantasy we'd all finish the mission lifetime friends, visiting each other years after, comparing pictures of our grandchildren and complaining about the quality of young officers after our retirement. What a dream.