The Martians Read online

  Well, she had never been particularly shy in these matters, but she had always favored a more inpulling approach, encouraging advances rather than making them (usually) so that when she quietly got off her cot and slipped into shorts and a shirt, her heart was knocking like a tympani roll. She tiptoed to the panels, thinking Fortune favors the bold, and slipped between them, went to his side.

  He sat up; she put her hand to his mouth. She didn't know what to do next. Her heart was knocking harder than ever. That gave her an idea, and she leaned over and pulled his head around and placed it against her ribs, so he could hear her pulse. He looked up at her, pulled her down to the cot. They kissed. Some whispers. The cot was too narrow and creaky, and they moved to the floor, lay next to each other kissing. She could feel him, hard against her thigh; some sort of Martian stone, she reckoned, like that flesh jade. . . . They whispered to each other, lips to each other's ears like headpiece intercoms. She found it difficult to stay so quiet making love, exploring that Martian rock, being explored by it. . . . She lost her mind for a while then, and when she came to she was quivering now and again; an occasional aftershock, she thought to herself. A seismology of sex. He appeared to read her mind, for he whispered happily in her ear, “Your seismographs are probably picking us up right now.”

  She laughed softly, then made the joke current among literature majors at the university: “Yes, very nice . . . the Earth moved.”

  After a second he got it and stifled a laugh. “Several thousand kilometers.”

  Laughter is harder to suppress than the sounds of love.

  Of course it is impossible to conceal such activity in a group—not to mention a tent—of such small size, and the next morning Eileen got some pointed looks from John, some smiles from Mrs. M. It was a clear morning, and after they got the tent packed into the wagon and were on their way, Eileen hiked off whistling to herself. As they descended toward the broad plain at the bottom of the canyon mouth, she and Roger tuned in to their band 33 and talked.

  “You really don't think this wash would look better with some cactus and sage in it, say? Or grasses?”

  “Nope. I like it the way it is. See that pentagon of shards there?” He pointed. “How nice.”

  With the intercom they could wander far apart from each other and still converse, and no one could know they were talking, while each voice hung in the other's ear. So they talked and talked. Everyone has had conversations that have been crucial in their lives: clarity of expression, quickness of feeling, attentiveness to the other's words, a belief in the reality of the other's world—of these and other elements are such conversations made, and at the same time the words themselves can be concerned with the simplest, most ordinary things:

  “Look at that rock.”

  “How nice that ridge is against the sky—it must be a hundred kilometers away, and it looks like you could touch it.”

  “Everything's so red.”

  “Yeah. Red Mars, I love it. I'm for red Mars.”

  She considered it. They hiked down the widening canyon ahead of the others, on opposite slopes. Soon they would be back in the world of cities, the big wide world. There were lots and lots of people out there, and anyone you met you might never see again. On the other hand . . . she looked across at the tall awkwardly proportioned man, striding with feline Martian grace over the dunes, in the dream gravity. Like a dancer.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Twenty-six.”

  “My God!” He was already quite wrinkled. More sun than most.

  “What?”

  “I thought you were older.”

  “No.”

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “Hiking canyons?”

  “Yes.”

  “Since I was six.”

  “Oh.” That explained how he knew all this world so well.

  She crossed the canyon to walk by his side; seeing her doing it, he descended his slope and they walked down the center of the wash.

  “Can I come on another trip with you?”

  He looked at her: behind the faceplate, a grin. “Oh yes. There are a lot of canyons to see.”

  The canyon opened up, then flattened out, and its walls melted into the broad boulder-studded plain on which the little outpost was set, some kilometers away. Eileen could just see it in the distance, like a castle made of glass: a tent like theirs, really, only much bigger. Behind it Olympus Mons rose straight up out of the sky.

  Archaea Plot

  The little red people did not like terraforming. As far as they were concerned it wrecked everything, the way global warming wrecked things on Earth, only two magnitudes worse, as usual. Everything on Mars is two magnitudes more than it is on Earth—two magnitudes more or less.

  Of course the relationship between the little red people and the introduced Terran organisms was already complex. To fully understand it you have to remember the little red people's even smaller cousins, the old ones. These were the Archaea, that third order of life along with bacteria and eucarya—and in this case, also citizens of the panspermic cloud which four billion years before fell on Mars from space, having flown many light-years from their point of spontaneous generation around an early second-generation star. Mostly Thermoproteus and Methanospirillum, it seems, with a few Haloferax thrown in as well. They were hyperthermophiles, so the early Mars of the heavy bombardment suited them just fine. But then some few of these travelers were blasted off the surface of Mars by a meteor strike, and crash-landed later on Earth, fructifying the third planet and sparking the long wild course of Terran evolution. Thus all Earthly life is Martian, in this limited sense, though in truth it is also far more ancient than that.

  Then later Paul Bunyan, the distant descendant of these panspermic Archaea, came back to Mars to find it cold and ostensibly empty, though some of the old ones still persisted, golluming around in various submartian volcanic percolations. Paul and his big blue ox Babe were bested by Big Man, as you know, and inserted by him through the planetary interior, crust mantle, and core. From there Paul's inner bacterial family spread through all the regolith on the planet, and began the so-called cryptoendolithic great leap forward, that first submartian terraforming, which produced at the end of its evolution the little red people as we know them.

  So the Martians had come home again, almost as small as the first time around—about two magnitudes bigger than the old ones left behind, that's right. But the relationship between the little red people and the Archaea was clearly not a simple one. Second cousins thrice removed? Something like that.

  Despite this blood tie, the little red people discovered early on in their civilization that their ancestors the Archaea could be grown and harvested for food, also building material, cloth, and the like. Inventing this form of agriculture, or husbandry, or industry, allowed for a tremendous population explosion, as the little red people had just taken a step up the food chain, by exploiting the level of life just below theirs. Fine for them, and because they have helped us so much in their subtle way, fine for the humans on Mars as well; but the Archaea considered it barbarous. The little red people interpreted their sullen bovine glares as subservience only, but all the while the Archaea were looking at them thinking, You cannibals, we are going to get you someday.

  And so they hatched a plot. They could see that the terraforming was just more of the aerobic same old same old; that the little red people would adapt to it, and become part of the new larger system, and move up onto the surface and take their little red place in the growing biosphere; and meanwhile the old ones would remain trapped in pitch-darkness, living off heat and water and the chemical reactions between hydrogen and carbon dioxide. It isn't fair, the Archaea said to each other. It won't do. It was our planet to begin with. We should take it back.

  But how, some said. There's oxygen everywhere you go now, except down here. And they're making it worse every day.

  We'll find a way, some of the others replied. We are Therm
oproteus, we'll think of something. We'll infiltrate somehow. They've poisoned us; we'll poison them back. Just bide your time and keep in touch. The anaerobic revolt will have its day.

  The Way the Land Spoke to Us

  1. The Great Escarpment

  You know that the origin of the big dichotomy between the northern lowlands and the southern cratered highlands is still a matter of dispute among areologists. It might be the result of the biggest impact of the early heavy bombardment, and the north therefore the biggest impact basin. Or it may be that tectonic forces were still roiling the early crust, and an early protocontinental craton, like Pangaea on Earth, had risen in the southern hemisphere and then hardened into place, as the smaller planet cooled faster than Earth, without any subsequent tectonic-plate breakup and drift. You would think these would be interpretations so diverse that areology would quickly devise questions that would make one or the other explanation either certain or impossible, but so far this is not the case; both explanations have attracted advocates making fully elaborated cases backing their views, and so the matter has shaped itself into one of the primary debates in areology. I myself have no opinion.

  The question has ramifications for many other issues in areology, but it's worth remembering just what the big dichotomy means for people walking across the face of Mars. Hiking across Echus Chasma to its eastern cliffs gives one perhaps the most dramatic approach to the so-called Great Escarpment dividing the two.

  The floor of Echus Chasma is chaos at its most chaotic, and for someone on foot, this means endless divagations and extravagances to make one's way forward. Nowadays one can follow the trail, and minimize the ups and downs, end runs, dead ends, and backtracking necessary to make one's way in any direction; and the Maze Trail is the very model of route-finding efficiency through such torn terrain; nevertheless, if one wanted to get a sense of what it was like in the early days, it is perhaps better to leave the trail, and strike out to forge a new and unrepeatable cross-country ramble through the waste.

  If you do that, you will quickly find that your view of your surroundings is inadequate to plan a forward course very far. Often you can see across the land only a kilometer or less. Big blocks of chunky eroded basalt and andesite are the entirety of the landscape; it's as if one were crossing a talus whose particulates were two or three magnitudes larger than the talus one usually crushes underfoot. So that one threads through the terrain as an ant must make its way through talus. Small but unclimbable cliffs confront one everywhere one looks. The only way to make progress is to keep to ridgelines, skirting great hole after great hole, while hoping the ridgelines will connect to each other in ways that can be clambered over. It's like negotiating a hedge maze by staying on the hedge tops.

  Chaotic terrain: The name is quite accurate. Here the surface of the world once lost its support, when the aquifer below it drained rapidly away, downhill and over the horizon in a great outflow flood—in this case, down Echus Chasma, round the big bend of Kasei Vallis, down Kasei's gorge canyon and out onto Chryse Planitia, some two thousand kilometers away. And when that happened the land came crashing down.

  So you walk, or climb, or crawl, for day after day, across the tilted surfaces and broken edges of the great blocks of the fallen crust. You can see just what happened: The land dropped; it shattered; there was more of it than there was room for, and so it came to rest all atilt and acrackle. The violence of this ancient collapse has been scarcely masked by the three billion subsequent years of wind erosion and dustfall. It is an irony that such an unstable-looking landscape should actually be so ancient and unchanged.

  So it is a matter of broken rock for as far as the eye can see. Which is not far, admittedly; even on the highest points along the way (the Maze Trail takes a line that runs from one of these to the next), the horizon is only three or four kilometers away. A very tight and jumbled wasteland of rust-tinted rock.

  Then at the peak of one long roof beam of a ridge, you find yourself high enough that off to the east, a great distance away, just poking over the crackle, lie the tops of a mountain range, pale orange in the late-afternoon light. If you camp on this prominence, in the alpenglow the distant range looks like the side of a different world, rolling slowly up into the sky.

  But the next morning you descend back into the maze of potholes and passlets, ridgelines and occasional flat block plateaus, like low rooftops in Manhattan. Crossing these terrains commands all your attention, and so you almost forget the sight of the distant mountain range, the problems are so great (it was in this region we found a providential crack in a thirty-meter cliff, which allowed us to climb down safely, lowering our packs on ropes)—until at the next prominence in your path through the chaos, it heaves back into view, closer now and seemingly taller, as one can see farther down its side. Not a mountain range, one now sees, but a cliff, extending north and south from horizon to horizon, etched in the usual spur-and-gully formation of cliffs everywhere, and somewhat saw-toothed at its top, but massively solid for all that—the etchings without any depth, like the brushing you see on certain metal surfaces.

  And each day, when it stands over your horizon at all, it's closer. It tends to stay over the horizon longer; but never all the time, as very often you drop into the depths of the next sink in this sunken land. But eventually, continuing roughly eastward, every time you are not actually in the depths of a pothole, the cliff positively looms over the world to the east, towering over the horizon, which stubbornly remains no more than five kilometers away. So at that point you have two horizons, in effect; one near and low, the other far and high.

  And eventually you get so close to it that the cliff simply fills the eastern sky. It rises astonishingly near the zenith; it's like running into the side of a bigger world. Like crawling over a dry cracked seabed to the side of a continental shelf. The gulleys and embayments in the cliff are whole landscapes in themselves now, canyon worlds of great depth and even greater steepness. Every spur between them is now seen to be a huge buttress, ribbing the side of a higher world. The occasional horizontal ledges marking the buttresses appear big enough to support complete island estates. But it's hard to tell from below.

  And indeed, by the time you reach the point called Cliff Bottom View, where you stand on one of the last high points of the chaos, nearly as high as the narrow strip of hilly plateau between the chaos and the escarpment, and you can finally see all the land between where you are and the foot of the great cliff, you can no longer see the cliff's top. The mass of it blocks your view, and what you see rimming the sky, so far up toward the zenith, is not the true top, though it can seem so if you have not been paying attention, but is rather some prominence partway down its side.

  Only by getting into a small blimp and taking off into the air, and flying up and away from the cliff, back out over the eastern part of the chaos, can you see the whole extent of it. If you keep sight of a reference mark, you can see that what down in the last camp you took for the top of the cliff was only about two-thirds of the way up it; the rest was blocked from view; and in any case the very strong optical effect of foreshortening had deceived you as to the true height of the thing. You keep floating up into the air, up and up and up, like a bird gyring on an updraft, and finally seeing all the cliff at once from this perspective, we just started to laugh, we couldn't help it—we were laughing or crying, or both at once, our mouths were hanging open to our chests, we positively goggled at it, and there was nothing really we could say, it was so big.

  2. Flatness

  There are places out in Argyre that are nothing but flat sand to the horizon in every direction.

  Usually the sand is blown into dunes. Any kind of dune, from very fine ripples underfoot to truly gargantuan barchan dunes. But in some areas even that is missing, and it is simply a flat plane of sand or bedrock, with the sky arching over it.

  They say that if you look at it closely, the sky forms the visual equivalent of a dome overhead. Not a true hemisphere, but fl
attened somewhat. This is a virtually universal human perception, the result of consistent overestimation of horizontal distance compared with vertical distance. On Earth the horizon seems to be two to four times farther off than the zenith overhead, and if you ask someone to divide the arc between the zenith and the horizon evenly, the point chosen averages well less than forty-five degrees; about twenty-two degrees by day, I have found, and thirty by night. Redness increases this effect. If you look at the sky through red glass it appears flatter; if through blue glass, taller.

  On Mars the unobstructed horizon is only about half as far away as it is on Earth—about five kilometers—and sometimes this simply makes the zenith seem even lower—perhaps two kilometers high. It depends on the clarity of the air, which of course varies a great deal: Sometimes I have seen the dome of the sky appear ten kilometers high, or even transparent to infinity. Mostly lower than that. In fact the vault of the sky is a different shape every day, if you will take the time to look at it carefully.

  But no matter the transparency of the sky, or the shape of the dome it makes overhead: The sand is always the same. Flat; reddish brown; redder out toward the horizon. The characteristic redness occurs if even one percent of the bedrock or the dust on the ground is made up of iron oxides such as magnetite. This condition obtains everywhere on Mars, except for the lava plains of Syrtis, which when blown free of dust are nearly black—one of my favorite places (also the first feature to be seen from Earth through telescopes, by Christiaan Huygens in 1654).