The Long Mars

26

More lifeless Marses, sheaf after sheaf of them, day after flying day, broken up by landings each night on yet another copy of the Mangala landscape, and occasional pauses for exploration.

On the thirtieth day they landed for the night on a world not far short of Mars East Million—a million steps East of the Gap—and Frank Wood went for a brief walk in the dark, bundled up in his pressure suit. This night the twin stars of Earth and moon were particularly prominent, riding high in the east. This was a typical Mars, like the Mars of the Datum sky, a world about as lethal as it could get and still have any kind of similarity with Earth. But it was a pleasure for Frank to land anyhow and stretch his legs.

These walks had become Frank’s habit, uncomfortable and faintly risky as they were, a way of putting some distance between him and the Linsays. Just a few minutes each day, so Frank’s own personality had room to breathe, and recover something like its proper shape. Walks on worlds that might be forty or fifty thousand worlds apart, so far were they travelling each day, and yet all so alike—so similarly dead. On this night, as on many nights on these desolate Marses, he wondered what the point of it all was: all these empty worlds, an emptiness made worse by the brief and rare windows of habitability they found, almost all slammed shut with the finality of extinction. Was it crueller to have lived and died, or never to have lived at all?

And what was the meaning of it all—was every world inhabited by intelligence going to be Long like this Mars, like Earth? He imagined a sky full of threads of Long worlds, like broken necklaces drifting in some dark ocean. Maybe you could have a Long Venus—a Long Jupiter, even, if mind ever took hold there. But why? Why should it be that way? What was it all for? He suspected he would never find a satisfactory answer to such questions.

Just do your job, airman.

As it happened they came across traces of another near-miss civilization the very next day, only fifty thousand worlds plus change past the meaningless million-step milestone.

The crater was a few tens of miles south of Mangala itself, the glitter of metal easily visible from the air, and spotted by their image-processing software as they stepped through.

This time Frank was piloting Willis as the gliders flew over. The crater was a great bowl in the ground, deep and clear-cut, maybe a half-mile across. But its inner surface gleamed with some kind of metallic coating. From a height, Frank could see that the bowl itself was littered with inert objects, crumpled and fallen: machinery of some kind, perhaps. And some parts of the crater, and the land near by, were blotted black, as if bombed from the air by immense bags of soot. The crater appeared to be joined to a wider landscape by straight-line trails of some kind, but they were old, faint, dust-choked.

Willis growled, “Another close call, dammit. Another still-warm corpse. I see no movement, am picking up no signals. You want to take us down, Frank? Sally, station-keep.”

“Yes, Dad,” came a dry reply. Sally tolerated being ordered around by her father in situations like this, but just barely.

Frank dipped the glider’s nose. As they skated in towards the bowl of the crater, Frank noticed that swathes of the surrounding terrain were glassy, glinting in the weak sunlight as the land flowed by under the glider’s prow. He remarked on this to Willis.

“Yeah,” Willis replied. “And look in the crater.”

As they skimmed over the bowl one more time, Frank saw that the crater’s inner surface appeared to have been coated with sheets of some kind of metal, but the lining was extensively damaged, torn away by explosions—and melted, in part. “Radiation weapons? Lasers?”

“Something like that. I think this may have been some kind of telescope—like Arecibo, rigged up in the natural bowl of the crater. If the surface was mirror-like, maybe it was optical. You’d get a great view of Earth with a thing like that, given its location.”

They flew deeper into the bowl itself now. Frank was wary of any surviving superstructure, but he saw nothing: the destruction had been comprehensive. Piled up in the bowl’s depths was a tangle of smashed equipment, much of it of elaborately sculpted metal. At first he could discern no signs of life, no biology down there. But then he made out shards of chitin that looked vaguely familiar.

“Put us down,” Willis said. “We may as well take a few samples. Sally, stay aloft…”

They came down a short distance from the mirrored pit, and walked over.

When they clambered down into the pit itself, clumsy in their pressure suits, the deep cold seemed to intensify. At the bottom, there was no sign of recent activity; a layer of windblown dust seemed undisturbed. Willis snipped a few samples of metal components, the reflective surface, the chitin-like remains.

Frank said, “This shell stuff looks familiar. Like traces of the crustaceans we’ve been seeing from the beginning.”

“So it does. There is a certain consistency, isn’t there? I’m thinking of what we’ve seen: the crustaceans, the whales. A kind of common palette; maybe we’re going to find distorted versions of those families wherever we go, differently evolved.

“I think I see how it would work… You have a rapid evolution of life forms, species, families, genera, while Mars is young. Pretty much identical on every world of the Long Mars. But then a given Mars shrivels, and whatever survives has to hibernate, aestivate. Mostly Mars stays dead, but on Jokers like this the root stock takes its chances when they come, adapting in different ways depending on the details of the environment. An endless reshaping of the same primordial stock—variations on the theme of whales and crustaceans, and maybe other sorts we’ve yet to identify.” As he spoke Willis kept working, patiently studying the melancholy debris. “I’ll run this through the assay gear on the glider.”

“I take it the tech artefacts you’re looking for aren’t here.”

“No. Disappointingly. Though this is the highest culture technologically we’ve encountered.”

“You’ll know it when you see it, will you, whatever it is?”

“You can bet on it.”

“How do you even know this thing exists?”

Willis didn’t look up from his work. “This is Mars. On such a world it’s a logical necessity.”

Frank knew that they were all getting on each other’s nerves anyhow, but this deliberate obscurity of Willis’s increasingly niggled him. What was he, a chauffeur who couldn’t be trusted with the truth? “Secrecy and certainty, huh? Those traits have helped your career, have they?”

Willis just ignored him, which annoyed him even more.

“Sally compared you to Daedalus. I looked him up. In some versions of the story he invented the labyrinth on Crete, where they kept the Minotaur. Problem was, he didn’t think through the consequences. Made the labyrinth so intricate it was hard to pin down the beast if you needed to slay it. Not only that, it had a design flaw. With a simple ball of thread you could make a trail to find your way out—Daedalus never thought of that.”

“Is this storytelling going anywhere, Wood?”

“Maybe you are more like Daedalus than you think. What will you do with this bit of Martian tech, if you find it? Just unleash it on the world, like the Stepper box? You know, you and Sally, father and daughter, you both treat mankind like it’s some unruly kid. Sally slaps us around the back of the head when she thinks we’re misbehaving. And you, your way of teaching us responsibility is to hand us a loaded gun and let us learn by trial and error.”

Willis thought that over. “You’re just sore because you’re an old space cadet. Right? Step Day stopped you from getting to fly around in the space station measuring the thickness of your piss in zero gravity, or whatever those guys did up there for all those years. Well, bad luck for you. And whatever we do, at least we have mankind’s best interests at heart. Me and Sally, I mean. Now. Does this conversation have any point, Frank?”

Frank sighed. “Just trying to figure you two out.” He looked down at the silent war zone. “God knows there isn’t much else to do on this trip…”

“Ground party, Thor.”

Frank tapped the control panel on his chest to switch over his comms circuit. “Go ahead, Sally.”

“I’m picking up some residual background radiation.”

Now there was movement, out of the corner of Frank’s eye. A vent of some greenish smoke, puffing into the air from a pile of dust-coated debris.

Sally said, “The builders and warriors are long dead, but maybe the junk they left behind isn’t. Suggest you get out of there.”

“Copy that. Come on, Willis.”

Willis followed without arguing as Frank clambered out of the pit. Frank glanced up at Sally, flying high in the air, a Martian Icarus. Then he looked away, concentrating on where he put his booted feet on the uneven slope.