The Long Mars

27

Everybody on Maggie’s airship thought they’d have to get out of the “Anaerobic Belt” before they came across complex life once more. As it turned out, everybody was wrong, and not for the first time.

Earth West 161,753,428: ten days after they’d entered this thick band of oxygen-free worlds, the twains drifted over a landscape teeming with life, big, complicated, active life. Evidently this was a new complexity band—but, this deep into the stepwise worlds, the life forms they saw below were very different from anything they’d encountered before.

Maggie was standing in the observation gallery with some of her senior crew. These included Mac and Snowy the beagle, at her insistence, in the vague hope that forcing the two of them into the same space might bring to a head whatever issue was bubbling between them. Not yet it hadn’t. And, as it happened, Captain Ed Cutler was here too; he’d come over for his weekly face-to-face with Maggie.

The ships, side by side, were drifting through a yellowish sky laced with very odd-looking clouds, over a greenish sea, that lapped against a shore of pale brown streaked with scarlet, purple. The very colour scheme was distracting, as though it had come out of some doped-up college student’s imagination. On the land were banks of what had to be vegetation, including what looked to Maggie like “trees’, tall structures with trunks and some kind of leaf-like arrangement on the top, evidently a universal formation wherever you needed light from the sky but had to be rooted to the ground for nutrients. But those “leaves” were crimson, not green. Gerry Hemingway had told her they were busily photosynthesizing, leveraging the sun’s energy—but unlike Datum trees, what they seemed to be absorbing from the air was not carbon dioxide but carbon monoxide, and what they were producing was not sweet oxygen but hydrogen sulphide and other unpleasant compounds. Around the clumps of “forest’, meanwhile, stretched swathes of some kind of “prairie” of more diverse vegetation, but nobody knew what the hell grew there yet.

And, among the vegetation, animals moved. Nothing like Datum animals. Maggie made out a disc, translucent, huge, like a cross between a jellyfish and a Hollywood UFO, that slithered and slurped and morphed its way over the land. No, not just one disc: a whole family, a herd maybe, big adults with little ones skittering alongside. Gerry Hemingway wondered if they moved by some kind of ground effect, like an airship.

It didn’t aid comprehension that all this was played out at a manic speed, as if the world outside was stuck on fast-forward. Hemingway’s biologists suggested that was something to do with the higher temperatures of this world, an increase in available energy. Still, whatever the justification, Maggie wished all this shit would just slow down. And—

“Mao’s eyebrows!” That, astonishingly, was Lieutenant Wu Yue-Sai. She turned to Maggie and blushed. “I must apologize, Captain.”

“The hell you must. What do you see?”

Wu pointed. “There. No, there! In the trees—it is long, muscular, like a snake. A huge one. But—”

But this “snake” hurled itself through the air, from tree to tree. No, it did more than that, Maggie saw; it was streamlined, kind of like a flexible helicopter blade, and it was wriggling as it moved through the air. It was purposefully gliding—even flying, if you wanted to stretch a point.

Gerry Hemingway whistled. “A twelve-foot-long flying snake. Now I’ve seen everything. No, wait—not yet I haven’t.”

For the “snake” had hurled itself on one of the disc creatures, a little one, an outlier. There was a hiss of steam, the disc wriggled and thrashed, but Maggie saw the snake sink inside the disc, and once within, it began to twist and tear its way back out again.

“Eating its victim from the inside out,” Mac said. “Having burned its way in with some kind of acidic secretion. Charming. Everywhere you go, herbivores and carnivores, the dance of predator and prey.”

Maggie forced a laugh, to try to lighten the mood. “Maybe, but I bet you never thought you’d see it quite like this, did you?”

Cutler was standing rather stiffly beside Maggie. He never was one for social occasions. He said now, “I suppose we need to find somewhere rather more isolated for a safe landing for our shore parties, Captain? The crews could use some R&R; we’ve been cooped up a long time…”

The group fell silent at this. Maggie felt embarrassed for the man.

Mac had no such compunctions, however. “Captain, are you suggesting we actually send crew down there?”

“I don’t see why not. We’ve landed on exotic Earths before.”

“Sir, do you ever pay attention to the science briefings from your officers?”

Maggie murmured warningly, “Mac…”

“Not if I can help it,” Cutler said defiantly.

Mac looked around. “Gerry, do you have what’s left of that first drone we sent out, so we can show it to the Captain here? The damage to its hull—no?… Never mind, I’ve a better idea.” He made his way to the wall of the observation gallery, where a series of lock-boxes had been fixed to allow the collection of atmospheric samples. He donned a protective glove, reached inside and pulled out a flask of gas, yellowish in the deck’s fluorescent lights. “The air,” he said, “of Earth West 160,000,000 plus change. And do you know what we found in here, Captain?”

“No free oxygen, I know that much. Water vapour?”

“Good guess. But not just water. Highly acidic water. Captain Cutler, that’s the story of this world. The oceans are more like dilute sulphuric acid. So are the rivers. So’s the rain. And so is the blood of these creatures down below, the couple we managed to snag with drones. Why, you just saw it in action, as that snake thing must have concentrated its bodily fluids to burn its way into that protoplasmic beast—”

“Ed,” Maggie said quickly, hoping to defuse the situation, “the science boys think that on this world, in this band of worlds, water, I mean neutrally acidic water, isn’t what life uses as—what’s the term, Gerry?”

“A solvent. Which means, in this context, something to provide a liquid environment within which the chemistry of life can happen. On Datum Earth, we use water. Here—”

Cutler asked, “Acid?”

“That’s the idea,” Mac said. “There’s a whole biosphere based on that simple fact, that difference. But we’ve barely started to scratch the surface.”

Hemingway said, “We have here a suite of life that’s made up of the same basic molecules as us, Captain Cutler, but with an entirely different chemical basis. Perhaps the plants absorb carbon monoxide and secrete hydrogen sulphide. In any event it would be extremely hazardous, to say the least, for a human to venture down there without very heavy protection.”

Maggie said, “But the ships are sound. The hull, the envelopes can withstand the dilute acidity of the rain. Obviously we’re keeping our internal air supply sealed off. I’m sure you’d have been briefed by your XO if she’d perceived any problems, Ed.”

Cutler was quite unperturbed, Maggie saw. He was a man whose mind was thoroughly compartmentalized, and he liked it that way. The nature of these exotic worlds, unless his ship was directly endangered, was something he didn’t need to hear about, and he’d no doubt instructed his crew in that regard. Still, he seemed to show a flicker of curiosity as he asked now, “So what went wrong?”

Hemingway stared at him. “Pardon me, sir?”

“I mean, how did these worlds get this way, instead of producing regular oxygen-breather types like us?”

Hemingway said cautiously, “Well, we can only guess, sir. We’ve only spent a couple of days with a whole new kind of biosphere.”

Maggie smiled. “Guess away, Gerry, you’re all we’ve got.”

“We think that these worlds, for whatever cause, must have gone through a phase of extreme heat when they were younger. Maybe they were like Venus, for a time, with thick atmospheres, ferocious heat at the surface. The thing about Venus, though, is that we’ve always suspected life was possible up in the clouds, where it’s cool enough for life, if you pick the right altitude. There could be some kind of bug tapping solar ultraviolet, and using whatever chemical resources it can find to live on up there. Notably droplets of sulphuric acid—because the acid, you see, has a higher boiling point than water, and is available as a solvent where liquid water isn’t… The point is, maybe this Earth was like Venus, our Venus, when it was young.”

“OK. But this world isn’t like Venus now.”

“No, sir. But maybe it—recovered. Cooled down again, rather than suffer the full catastrophic heating of our Venus. It became more—well, Earthlike. But that acid-based life, once it got a foothold, stayed in control. And the result is the acid biosphere you see below.”

“Hmm. Sounds kind of pat to me. And I— What the— Back!” To Maggie’s blank astonishment, Cutler pulled his handgun, crouched down, and pointed it two-handed at the hull wall.

Then she turned and saw the snake.

It came twisting and turning, riding the yellowish air—yes, it was undoubtedly flying, purposefully. And it was heading straight for the ship, for this observation gallery, and what must look like fresh meat to a flying, acid-blooded, snake-like predator…

“Keep calm,” snapped Nathan Boss. “It can’t do us any harm. The hull, the windows, are resistant to—”

The beast slammed into the hull, its whole body sprawled across the window. Maggie got a nightmarish glimpse of the animal’s underside, an array of suckers and ribbed flesh and things like tiny lips that mouthed the window surface. She even saw some kind of liquid come squirting out, fizzing. She remembered the fate of the jellyfish down on the ground, and her skin crawled at the imagined touch of acid.

And Ed Cutler ran for the wall, towards the snake, gun in hand. “I got this,” he said.

Maggie grabbed for him, missed. “Ed! No! Let that thing off in here and you’ll either crack the hull and kill us all, or the ricochets—”

“I’m not a fool, Captain.” He jammed the weapon into one of the air-sample lock-boxes. “These things will self-seal, right? Same design on the Cernan. Eat this, acid boy.”

And he fired the gun. The noise was enormous in the enclosed space. Maggie saw the projectile pass through the snake’s body and splash away into the air, leaving a ragged hole. The animal thrashed and squalled, and lost its grip and began to fall away.

“Let me finish him off,” Cutler said, changing his stance, repositioning the gun.

“For Christ’s sake stop him!” Maggie yelled.

Mac was the closest, Snowy the fastest. Between them they hauled Cutler away from the window, and Mac forced the weapon out of his hands.

Cutler stopped struggling, and they released him. “All right, show’s over.” He was breathing hard, his face flushed; he glowered a look of pure hatred at the beagle, then turned to Maggie. “Decisiveness, Captain Kauffman. That’s a quality usually attributed to me, in the face of danger—”

“The only danger here came from you and your weapon. Get off my ship, you idiot.” She deliberately turned her back. Then she approached Snowy and Mac, who were standing awkwardly side by side. “Good teamwork, you two.”

The beagle nodded gravely. “Thank you, Captain.”

Mac just shrugged.

Maggie said, “Good work, in spite of the fact that you avoid each other like the plague. So, you going to tell me what’s going on between you two?”

Snowy said reluctantly, “Matter of—honou-hhr…”

“Honour? What about?”

“Murde-hrr my people.”

“Who? Mac? Are you serious?… Ah, look, we need to sort this out. In the meantime—Mac, with me.”

“Yes, Captain.”

She led him to the window and looked down. She could see the snake where it had landed, twisting, struggling. “We’re supposed to be explorers. We only just show up here, we don’t even get out of the ship, and we start shooting. Killing. Except we didn’t kill that thing.”

“No, we didn’t.”

“Badly wounded, though. And it’s in a lot of pain, in my nonmedical opinion.”

“Can’t disagree with that, Captain.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, get down there and fix it, that’s what.”

“How the hell am I supposed to do that? You heard Gerry describe its life system. What do I use for anaesthetic, battery acid?”

“Figure it out. You’re the doctor. Think what you might learn about the anatomy of these creatures.” More softly she said, “And think what an impression you’d make on the crew, after Cutler’s performance.”

He opened his mouth, closed it, and, very visibly, began to think. “Hmm. Well, if Hemingway is right about the ecosystem here, an animal like that must live off some combination of the plants’ products, regardless of what they are. I’d need Harry Ryan to knock me up canisters of hydrogen sulphide, sulphur dioxide.”

“Ask him.”

“And I’ll need thick gloves. Thick, thick gloves…” He walked away. “Hemingway, you’d better come give me a hand down there.”

Maggie looked down once more at the writhing acid snake, then turned away and returned to work.

There were more acid worlds, many more, in a belt that turned out to be millions of steps wide, a good fraction of the width of the great belt of complex water-solvent biology worlds that encompassed the Datum itself, and containing just as much diversity of form. A belt dominated by a form of life whose existence had been entirely unsuspected, before this mission.

And still they sailed on.