The Martians

They turned down the main canyon. Far below was their tent, looking as if it would slide down its slope any instant. Now there was a sign of life. Eileen grinned bleakly behind her faceplate. Outside her suit it was forty degrees below zero, and the air was not air.

Roger was hurrying down the canyon ahead of them, no doubt to turn on the air and heat in the tent, or pull the waggon out to move it all downcanyon. In the alien gravity she had lived in all her life, he dropped down the great trench as in a dream, not bounding gazelle-like in the manner of John or Doran, but just on the straightest line, the most efficient path, in a sort of boulder ballet all the more graceful for being so simple. Eileen liked that. Now there, she thought, is a man reconciled to the absolute deadness of Mars. It seemed his home, his landscape. An old line occurred to her: ‘We have met the enemy, and they is us.’ And then something from Bradbury: ‘The Martians were there … Timothy and Robert and Michael and Mom and Dad.’

She pondered the idea as she followed Clayborne down their canyon, trying to imitate that stride.

‘But there was life on Mars.’ That evening she watched him. Ivan and Doran talked to Cheryl; John sulked on his cot. Roger chatted with the Mitsumus, who liked him. At sunset when they showered (they had moved the tent to another fine flat site) he walked over to his panelled cubicle naked, and the flat onyx bracelet he wore around his left wrist suddenly seemed to Eileen the most beautiful ornamentation. She realized she was glancing at him in the same way John and the doctor looked at her – only differently – and she blushed.

After dinner the others were quiet, returning to their cots. Roger continued telling the Mitsumus and Eileen stories. She had never heard him talk so much. He was still sarcastic with her, but that wasn’t what his smile was saying. She watched him move and sighed, exasperated with herself; wasn’t this just what she had come out here to get away from? Did she really need or want this feeling again, this quickening interest?

‘They still can’t decide if there’s some ultra-small nanobacteria down in the bedrock. The arguments go back and forth in the scientific journals all the time. Could be down there, so small we can’t even see it. There’s been reports of drilling contamination … But I don’t think so.’

Yet he certainly was different from the men she had known in recent years. After everyone had gone to bed, she concentrated on that difference, that quality; he was … Martian. He was that alien life, and she wanted him in a way she had never wanted her other lovers. Mrs Mitsumu had been smiling at them, as if she saw something going on, something she had seen developing long before, when the two of them were always at odds … Earth girl lusts for virile Martian; she laughed at herself, but there it was. Still constructing stories to populate this planet, still falling in love, despite herself. And she wanted to do something about it. She had always lived by Eulert’s saying: If you don’t act on it, it isn’t a true feeling. It had got her in trouble, too, but she was forgetting that. And tomorrow they would be at the little outpost that was their destination, and the chance would be gone. For an hour she thought about it, evaluating the looks he had given her that evening. How did you evaluate an alien’s glances? Ah, but he was human – just adapted to Mars in a way she wished she could be – and there had been something in his eyes very human, very understandable. Around her the black hills loomed against the black sky, the double star hung overhead, that home she had never set foot on. It was a lonely place.

Well, she had never been particularly shy in these matters, but she had always favoured a more in-pulling 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 timpani roll. She tiptoed to the panels, thinking Fortune favours 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 though 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 kilometres.’

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 waggon 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 kilometres 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 into 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 centre 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 kilometres 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.

THREE THE ARCHAEA PLOT (#ulink_13f31702-af2e-572e-948f-74b4005d4917)

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 understand it fully 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 travellers 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 for 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 some day.

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 Thermoproteus, 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.

FOUR THE WAY THE LAND SPOKE TO US (#ulink_4dc1c3cc-f99a-5bb9-b486-658497481dbc)

1. THE GREAT ESCARPMENT (#ulink_1cfb933f-1877-5c42-8138-894ff8627530)

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 proto-continental 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 break-up 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.

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 down, 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.