Moving Mars (10 page)

The Glass Sea, I said. Every Martian was given a Glass Sea fossil at some point in their childhood.

Charles steered us around a basalt-capped turban of limestone. Basalt fragments from an ancient meteor impact lay scattered over the area. I tried to imagine the meteor striking the middle of the shallow ocean, spraying debris for hundreds of kilometers and throwing up a cloud of muddy rain and steam Devastation for an already fragile ecology. Makes me twitchy, I said.

What does?

Time. Age. Makes our lives look so trivial.

We are trivial, Charles said.

I set my face firmly and shook my head. I dont think so. Empty time isnt very I searched for the right word. What came to mind were warm, alive, interesting, but these words all seemed to reveal my feminine perspective, and Charless knee-jerk response had been decidedly masculine and above-it-all intellectual. Active. No observers, I concluded lamely.

Given that, were still here for just an instant, and the changes we make on the landscape will be wiped out in a few thousand years.

I disagree, I continued. I think were going to make a real mark on things. We observe, we plan ahead, were organized

Some of us are, Charles said, laughing.

No, I mean it. We can make a big difference. All the flora and fauna on Mars were wiped out because they I still couldnt clearly express what I wanted to say.

They werent organized, Charles offered.

Right

Wait until you see, Charles said.

I shivered. I dont want to be convinced of my triviality.

Let the land speak, Charles said.

I had never been very comfortable with large ideas astrophysics, areology, all seemed cavernous and dismal compared to the bright briefness of human history. In my studies I focused on the intricacies of politics and culture, human interaction; Charles I think preferred the wide-open territories of nature without humanity.

We interpret what we see to suit our own mindset, I said pompously.

For a moment, his expressiondownturned corners of his mouth, narrowed eyes, a little shake of his headmade me regret those words. If I was playing him like a fish on a line, I might have just snapped the line, and I suddenly felt terribly insecure. The touch of my glove on his thick sleeve did not seem adequate. I still want to go and see, I said.

Charles let go of the guide stick. The tractor smoothed to a stop and jerked. He half-turned in his seat. Do I irritate you? he asked.

No, why?

I feel like youre testing me. Asking me key questions to see if Im suitable.

I bit my lip and looked into my lap, trying for some contrition. Im nervous, I said.

Well, so am I. Maybe we should just let up a bit and relax.

I was just expressing an opinion, I said, my own temper flaring. I apologize for being clumsy. I havent been here before, I dont know you very well, I dont know what

Charles held up his hands. Lets forget all of it. I mean, lets forget everything that stands between us, and just try to be two friends out on a trip. Ill relax if you will. Okay?

I came dangerously close to tears at the anger in his tone. I looked out the window but did not see the ancient carved grotesques outside.

Okay? he asked.

I dont know how to be different, I said. Im not good at masks.

Im not either, and I dont like trying. If Im not the right person for you, lets put it all aside and just enjoy the trip.

I dont know whats making you so angry.

I dont know, either. Im sorry.

He pulled the stick forward and we drove in silence for several minutes. Sometimes I dream about this, he said. I dream Im some sort of native Martian, able to stand naked in the Up and feel everything. Able to travel back in time to when Mars was alive.

Coin-eyed, slender, nut-brown or bronze. Dark they were, and golden-eyed.

Exactly, Charles said. We live on three Marses, dont we? The Mars they made up back on Earth centuries ago. LitVid Mars. And this.

The tension seemed to have cleared. My mood shifted wildly. I felt like crying again, but this time with relief. Youre very tolerant, I said.

Were both difficult, Charles said. He leaned to one side and bumped helmets with me. Our lips could get no closer, so we settled for that.

Show me your Mars, I told him.

The melt river canyon stretched for thirty kilometers, carving a wavering line across the flats. A service path had been carved into the cliffs on both sides, cheaper than a bridge, marring the natural beauty but making the canyon bottom accessible to tractors.

The areology here is really obvious, Charles said. First comes the Glass Sea, then Tharsis One with deep ocean deposits, building up over a billion years, limestone Then ice sheets and eskers Then the really big winds at the end of the last glaciation.

We rolled down the gentle packed tumble slope into the canyon. The walls on each side were layered with iron-rich hematite sands and darker strata of clumped till. Wind and ice, I said.

You got it. Flopsand and jetsand, smear, cling and grind Theres a pretty thick layer of northern chrome clay. Charles pointed to a gray-green band on our right, at least a meter deep. He swerved the tractor around a recent boulder fall, squeezed through a space barely large enough to admit us, and we came out twenty meters below the flats. Our treads pushed aside flopsand to reveal paler grades of grind and heavy till.

We have as many words for sand and dust as the Inuit have for snow, Charles said.

Used to be a school quiz, I said. Remember all the grades of dust and sand and name them in alphabetical order. I only remember twenty.

Here we are, Charles said, letting the stick go. The tractor slowed and stopped with a soft whine. Outside the cabin, silence. The high wind of the night before had settled and the air was still. A dust-free sky stretched wall-to-wall pitch-black. We might have been on Earths moon but for the color of the canyon and the rippled red and yellow bed of the ancient melt river.

Charles enjoyed the silence. His face had a look of relaxed concentration. Theres a rock kit in the boot. Well dig for an hour and return to the tractor. He hesitated, thinking something over. Then well head home. I mean, back to the station.

We checked our gear thoroughly, topped up our air supply from the tractors tanks, pumped the cabin pressure into storage, and stepped through the curtain lock with a small puff of ice crystals. The crystals fell like stones to the canyon floor.

I remember this, Charles said over the suit radio. It hasnt changed. The sand patterns are different, of course, and there have been a few slumps but it looks real familiar. I had a favorite fossil bed about a hundred meters from here. My father showed it to me.

Charles portioned out my share of tools to carry, took my gloved hand, and we walked away from the tractor. I saw two deposition layers clearly outlined in a stretch of canyon wall that had not slumped: a meter of brown and gray atop several meters of pale yellow limestone, and below that, half a meter of grays and blacks.

We walked across shaved flats now, covered with sand; the oldest limestones, and beneath, the Glass Sea bottom. I drew in my breath sharply, a kind of hiccup, startled at how this realization affected me. Old Mars, back when it had been a living planet Alive for a mere billion and a half years.

Where life arose first was still at issue; Martians claimed primacy, and Terrestrials disputed them. But Earth had been a more violent and energetic world, closer to the sun, bombarded by more destructive radiation Mars, farther away from its youthful star, cooling more rapidly, had condensed its vapor clouds into seas a quarter of a billion years earlier.

I believedlike most loyal Martiansthat this was where life had first appeared in the Solar System. My feet pressed thin flopsand five or six centimeters above the graveyard of those early living things.

Here, Charles said, taking us into the inky shadow of a precarious overhang. I looked up, worried by the prominence. Charles saw my expression as he stooped and brought out his pick hammer. Its okay, he said. It was here when I was a kid. Can you shine a light?

We worked by torch. Charles pried up a slab of dense crumbling limestone. I helped lift the slab away, twenty or thirty kilos of rock, piling it to one side. Charles handed me the pick.

Your turn, he said. Under this layer. About a centimeter down.

I swung the pick gently, then harder, until the layer cracked and I was able to finger and brush away the fragments, clearing a space a couple of hands wide. Charles held the torch.

I peered back through two billion Martian years and saw the jewel box of the past, pressed thin as a coat of paint, opalescent against the dark strata of those siliceous oceans.

Round, cubic, pyramidal, elongated, every shape imaginable, surrounded by glorious feathery filters, long stalks terminating in slender, gnarled roots: the ancient Glass Sea creatures appeared like illustrations in an old book, glittering rainbows of diffraction as the torch moved. I specked them waving in the soup-thick seas, sieving and eating their smaller cousins.

Sometimes theyd lift from their stalks and float free, Charles said. I knew that, but I didnt mind him telling me. The biggest colonies were maybe a klick wide, clustered floats, raising purple fans out of the water to soak up sunlight

I reached down with my gloved hand to touch them. They had been glued firmly against their deathbed; they were tough, even across the eons.

Theyre gorgeous, I said.

The first examples of a Foster co-genotypic bauplan, Charles said. These are pretty common specimens. No speciation, all working from one genetic blueprint, making a few hundred different forms. All one creature, really. Some folks think Mars never had more than nine or ten species living at a time. Couldnt call them species, actuallyco-genotypic phyla is more like it. No surprise this kind of biology would give rise to the mother cysts.

He took a deep breath and stood. Im going to make a pretty important decision here. Im trusting you.

I looked up from the Glass Sea, puzzled. What?

Id like to show you something, if youre interested. A short walk, another couple of hundred meters. A billion and a half years up. Earth years. First and last.

Sounds mysterious, I said. You hiding a mother deposit here?

He shook his head. Its on a secure registry, and we license it to scholars only. Father took me there. Made me swear to keep it secret.

Maybe we should skip it, I said, afraid of leading Charles into violating family confidences.

Its okay, he said. Father would have approved.

Would have?

He died on the Jefferson.

Oh. The interplanetary passenger ship Jefferson had suffered engine failure boosting from around the Moon five Martian years before. Seventy people had died.

Charles had made a judgment on behalf of his dead father. I could not refuse. I stood and hefted my bag of tools.

The canyon snaked south for almost a hundred meters before veering west. At the bend, we took a rest and Charles chipped idly at a sheet of hard clay. Weve got about an hour more, he said. We need fifteen minutes to get to where were going, and that means we can only spend about ten minutes there.

Should be enough, I said, and immediately felt like kicking myself.

I could spend a year there and it wouldnt be enough, Charles said.

We climbed a gentle slope forty or fifty meters and abruptly came upon a deep fissure. The fissure cut across the canyon diagonally, its edges windworn smooth with age.

The whole flatland is fragile, Charles said. Quake, meteor strike Something shook it, and it cracked. This is about six hundred million years old.

Its magnificent.

He lifted his glove and pointed to a narrow path from the canyon floor, across the near wall of the fissure. Its stable, he said. Just dont slip on the gravel.

I hesitated before following Charles. The ledge was irregular, uneven, no wider than half a meter. I pictured a slip, a fall, a rip or prick in my suit.

Charles looked at me over his shoulder, already well down the ledge. Come on, he said. Its not dangerous if youre careful.

Im not a rock climber, I said. Im a rabbit, remember?

This is easy. Its worth it, believe me.

I chose each step with nervous deliberation, mumbling to myself below the microphone pickup. We descended into the crevice. Suddenly, I couldnt see Charles. I couldnt hear him on radio, either. We were out of line of sight and he was not getting through to a satcom transponder. I called his name several times, clinging to the wall, each moment closer to panic and fury.

I was looking back over my left shoulder, creeping to my right, when my hand fell into emptiness. I stopped with a low moan, trying to keep my balance on the ledge, waving for a grip, and felt a gloved hand take hold of my arm.

I turned and saw Charles right beside me. Sorry, he said. I forgot we wouldnt be able to talk through the rock. Youre fine. Just step in

We stood in the entrance to a cave. I hugged Charles tightly, saying nothing until my hammering heart had settled.

The cavern stabbed deep into the fissure wall, ending in black obscurity. Its ceiling rose five or six meters above our heads. The fissures opposite wall reflected enough afternoon sunlight into the cavern that we could see each other clearly. Charles lifted the torch and handed it to me. Its the last gasp, he said.

What? I still hadnt recovered my wits.

Weve gone from alpha to omega.

I scowled at him for his deliberate mystery, but he wasnt looking at me.

Gradually, I realized the cavern was not areological. The glass-smooth walls reflected the backwash of light with an oily green sheen. Gossamer, web-like filaments hard as rock stretched across the interior and flashed in my wavering torch beam. Shards of filament littered the floor like lost fairy knives. I stood in the silence, absorbing the obvious: the tunnel had once been part of something alive.

Its an aqueduct bridge, Charles said. Omega and Mother Ecos.

This wasnt a cavern at all, but part of a colossal pipeline, a fossil fragment of Marss largest and last living things. I had never heard of an aqueduct bridge surviving intact.