The Long Mars

29

Long Mars, one point five million steps East, as near as dammit. More than forty days into this stepwise trek.

And suddenly the crimson plain below the gliders was full of action.

Frank was at the controls of Thor, with Sally sitting behind him. Frank’s first glimpse was of dust rising from charging vehicles, a herd of some tremendous beasts racing, a glint of metal—and fire, fire shooting out like flame-throwers in the Vietnam jungle.

Frank’s first reaction was to pull on his joystick, lifting the nose of the glider up and away. He yelled to Willis in Woden, “Climb! Climb! We don’t want that flame weapon to reach us!”

“Roger that,” Willis replied more calmly. “But I don’t think that’s a weapon, Frank. Take a closer look.”

When he had the glider climbing smoothly, Frank did take another look, through a panel on his console with an image he could zoom in with a touch. He saw again those big animals (how big?—his mind recoiled from making an estimate) fleeing over the plain, some kind of herd of them—maybe a dozen, big and small, adults and children. From above they looked like storybook dinosaurs, massive bodies with long necks, long tails balanced front and back, and galloping legs. “They’re like sauropods, maybe,” he suggested.

“Maybe. But those ‘sauropods’ are bigger than anything we ever had on Earth,” Willis said. “I’m recording a total length of two hundred and fifty feet, from nose to tail. Like eight blue whales laid end to end. Total height about fifty feet. A lot bigger than even Amphicoelias, which, I’m reading now, was the largest sauropod on Earth. That’s Martian gravity for you. And they’ve got a dozen pairs of legs each. No wonder they’re so fast. Also armoured, with bands of shell on their backs.”

Sally said, “Those sand whales had a dozen pairs of flippers. Same anatomy.”

“I think they’re this world’s versions of the sand whales. Descendants from some common root. Look at the necks, like tubes, and those wide mouths. And—oh, my word—”

One of the big beasts stopped and turned, skidding in the dust of what looked like another dried-up lake. It rose up, uncurling its body so two, three, four sets of limbs were off the ground, and lifted its mighty neck to grow tall, and it loomed over the vehicles following it—Frank hadn’t got a good look at them yet—and it opened that big sand-whale mouth and belched a gout of flame. The fire licked down at the hunters, whose vehicles turned and scattered.

“There’s your napalm thrower, Frank,” Willis said.

“A fire breather,” Sally said. “What a sight.”

“Just as well it can’t fly,” Frank said practically.

Willis, in Woden, snorted. “Probably just igniting methane from its digestive system.”

Frank forced a laugh. “In the service, I knew a guy who lit his farts with a cigarette lighter.”

“Don’t spoil the magic,” Sally said. “That’s the nearest thing to a dragon I’m ever likely to see.”

“And think about it,” Willis said. “For some reason this Mars is evidently full of life, and vigorous life. Why would a beast that size need armour plating, and a flame-thrower? Imagine its true predators.”

“True predators?”

“As opposed to those hunters down below, Frank. And by the way—too late about avoiding being seen.”

Frank, with an effort, looked away from the big beast at bay.

The little flotilla of vehicles behind the flame-breathing dragon scattered and slowed, and as the dust settled around them Frank made out details. The vehicles weren’t carts, they had no wheels; they were more like sand-yachts, sail-driven, riding on some kind of skid system. The dust-coated structures looked so primitive technologically he guessed they were made of wood, or some local equivalent. Their occupants, two or three to a yacht, were nothing remotely like humans. They were crustaceans, a form familiar from other encounters, but in this particular evolutionary arena they had developed supple armoured bodies, long manipulating limbs that held weapons: spears, bows perhaps.

And, yes, the gliders had been seen. Frank saw what looked like raised chitinous fists waving, even a spear thrown in futile threat into the air.

He said, “I’m guessing we don’t go down there.”

“I wouldn’t,” said Sally. “And look over there.” She pointed over Frank’s shoulder.

There were more hunters chasing more land-dragons, further away across the plain, oblivious, it seemed, to the presence of the gliders in the sky. As one party caught up with a fleeing beast, Frank saw spears protrude from its hide, and ropes fixed to the spears hauled a handful of yachts along in its wake. It must take some skill to plant a thing like a harpoon between those armour plates. One boat turned over, scattering its occupants, and Frank got a glimpse of the skids, which were white as ivory.

He said to Sally, “Those skids look like bone. Maybe these guys are like the old nineteenth-century whalers who used to build bits of the beasts they brought down into their boats… Sally, what’s that you’re singing?”

“It’s called ‘Harpoon of Love’. Just a stray memory—never mind.”

Willis growled, “And look ahead, to the north.”

Frank levelled the glider and looked that way, away from the bloody commotion below him. And he saw, standing up from the smooth flatness of the seabed, a series of dark bands, slender, vertical, black against the purplish sky of this world.

Monoliths. Five of them.

All this was too much for Frank to take in. “I don’t believe it. Land-dragons? Crustacean whalers in sand-yachts? And now this?”

Sally said, “What, would you prefer another dead Mars?”

“I’m at the limit of my scope’s resolution,” Willis called back. “And this damn air is full of dust, and moisture. But I think those slabs bear some kind of inscription.”

Frank said wildly, “What inscription? Prime number sequences? A build-your-own-wormhole instruction manual?”

“Something like that, possibly,” Willis said, reasonably patiently in the circumstances. “The legacy of the Ancients.”

Sally snapped. “What are you talking about? What Ancients?”

“Oh, come on,” Frank said with a smile. “This is Mars. This is the story of Mars, which is always an old world, old and worn down. There are always monuments left behind by the Ancients, the vanished ones, enigmatic inscriptions…”

Willis growled, “Let’s stick to reality. We’re not going to know any more until we take a copy of those inscriptions back home for a proper analysis.” His glider tipped towards the monoliths. “We have to get in there and record it all, maybe take a sample of the monolith material itself. Then we’ll go on—”

“After finding this you want to go on?”

“Sure. This is wonderful. But it’s not what I came looking for. And—”

Behind him, Sally cried out. “Ow, Jeez, my head…”

An instant later, Frank felt it too.

For the rest of that day, they tried every way they could think of to get close enough to the monoliths to record their surface images. But something was blocking their approach.

If they flew in, or even if they landed and tried to walk in, they all suffered blinding, agonizing headaches. Sally was reminded of the pressure Joshua Valienté claimed he had felt in the presence of the huge entity they knew as First Person Singular. Or the way the trolls were repelled by the density of human consciousness on Datum Earth. Evidently humanoids shared some kind of faculty, a sensitivity to mind—a faculty that these hypothetical “Ancients” were able to manipulate.

Willis tried to trick the mechanism by moving to a stepwise world, moving in closer to the monolith site, and stepping in—but the pain nearly disabled him, even stepwise where there was no direct trace of the monoliths.

They tried sending in their drone aircraft, but another defence strategy came into play. The little planes were just pushed away, physically, as if by an invisible hand in the air, until they reached some limit beyond which their automatic guidance cut back in, and they would turn and try again. Willis wanted to try sending in one of the gliders under remote control, but the others vetoed that.

“Whatever is written on there,” Frank sadly concluded, “it’s not meant for us. Those Ancients of yours are keeping us out, Willis.”

“Oh, we’re not beaten yet. We’ll find a way.”

They landed a safe distance away from the sand-whalers.

Later, as the light was fading, as they were setting up a bubble tent for the night, Sally pointed to the north. “Look. At the feet of the monoliths. My eye was caught by something… I see a dust trail. And are those sand-yachts?”

They were, Frank confirmed, by looking through binoculars held up to his pressure-suit faceplate. Three, four, five of the whalers were rushing past the base of the monoliths as if they didn’t exist. “They aren’t even slowing down.”

Willis said, “Infuriating. Those sand-whalers have absolutely no idea what they’re dealing with here. The monoliths are just a feature of the landscape to them.”

“Which,” Sally said, “might be why they can get so close.”

Frank said, “Maybe the monoliths are meant for them, some day—not us. Listen, I’m satisfied we’re far enough from those whalers that they won’t bother us tonight. But you don’t take chances. I think we should keep some kind of watch in case those guys come visiting.”

“Agreed,” Sally said.

Willis stood there, still in his pressure suit, thinking. “We ought to send up one of the gliders. Just to make sure they don’t sneak up on us.”

Frank considered. “That seems excessive, Willis. A drone will do just as well.”

“No, no.” He strode off. “I’ll take Woden. Better to be sure…”

Of course there was no stopping him. And of course he’d lied. He’d had no intention of serving as some aerial sentry.

Once he had Woden in the air, there was absolutely nothing Frank and Sally could do to stop him turning the glider’s nose south, towards the main party of whalers.

“He hasn’t even got the comms system on, damn him,” Frank growled, frustrated, twisted up with anxiety. “What the hell’s he doing?”

Sally seemed calm. “Gone to find a way to get those images he wants,” she said. “What else? That’s what my father does. He goes and gets what he wants.”

“He’ll get himself killed, that’s what he’ll go and get. He’s your father. You seem cool about it.”

She shrugged. “What can I do?”

Frank shook his head. “If you fix up the tent, I’ll go check over Thor. Make sure we’re ready to go get him out of there fast if we need to.”

“Fair enough.”

In the end Willis didn’t make his approach to the whalers until first light.

Frank, who had spent a fretful, sleepless night swathed in his half-closed pressure suit, was wakened by a soft beep from the comms system. “Sally. He’s online.”

She sat up immediately; she always slept very lightly.

“Go ahead, Willis—”

Frank found himself staring at a screen image of the upraised carcass of a giant insect-like creature, taller than a man when it stood upright. Over a tough-looking exoskeleton it wore belts and bandoliers containing tools, loops of rope, and it held a spear in three, four of its multiple limbs, a spear with a rope attached: a harpoon. All this was seen through a greyish mist. And the creature was pointing the spear straight into the camera.

“Convergent evolution,” Willis’s voice murmured.

“Willis?”

“You’re seeing what I’m seeing, through my helmet cam. Convergent evolution. That harpoon might have come from a Nantucket whaling ship. Similar problems demand similar solutions.”

Sally asked, “What’s that grey mist? The vision’s blurred—”

“I’m in a survival bag.” A gloved hand appeared, pushing at a translucent wall. “In my pressure suit, in a bag.”

The bags were simple zip-up plastic sacks with small compressed-air units. They were meant for decompression emergencies when you couldn’t reach a pressure suit; you just jumped in a bag, zipped it up, and the released air would keep you alive for a while. You had very limited mobility, with tube-like sleeves for arms and legs to allow some capability; essentially you were supposed to wait for rescue from somebody better equipped.

“I rigged out a few bags to provide the local air, so these whaler guys can use them.”

Sally frowned. “Air bags? Why do these guys need air bags? They live here.”

“I’m recording this encounter in case it doesn’t work out. You might learn from my mistakes next time.”

Frank snapped, “Next time what?”

“Next time you approach these guys to go in and record the monolith inscriptions for you.” He held up his other gloved hand; it held, awkwardly, a small handheld cam, and a stack of Stepper boxes.

Sally said, “I understand the cam. You need to photograph the monoliths—or get the whalers to do that for you. But why the Steppers?”

“I told you, right at the beginning of all this. Trade goods. Steppers—something that was going to be valuable to whatever kind of sapient we encountered. Even though you need a spacesuit to survive a single step, on these Joker Marses. Hence I’m giving them survival bubbles too…”

It took some pantomiming for Willis, surrounded by spear-wielding, expert-hunter, six-foot-tall crustaceans, to get over what he wanted. First he showed the whalers what a Stepper could do for them. He finished its assembly, a question of pushing a few plugs into sockets, and then turned the switch, stepped away to the hunters’ bafflement—and popped back into the world behind the lead guy, to their obvious consternation. “That’s it, fella. You get the idea. Imagine creeping up on Puff the Magic Dragon using one of these. Now you try. But you need to finish it for yourself, if it’s to work for you. And you’re going to need to use the survival bubbles, otherwise the Mars to either side will kill you in a breath…”

Only an hour later he had the crustaceans’ apparent leader in a comically incongruous plastic bubble, stepping back and forth at will, and jumping out of nowhere to alarm his buddies. Or possibly her buddies, Frank corrected himself. He couldn’t help noticing that one of those companions came in for particular humiliation with the new tool: some kind of rival to the leader? A father, brother, son, mother, sister? Whatever, he was jumped on, tripped, shoved, pushed over.

Sally said, “If these beasts bear any kind of similarity to human personalities, that guy is going to be seriously pissed at Dad for this.”

“Yeah,” Frank murmured. “That’s one angry young prince. Or whatever.”

As the morning wore on, Frank watched with increasing impatience. And at one point he thought he heard a sound like distant thunder. The sky was cloudless. Were storms even possible on this version of Mars?

The crustaceans were fast learners. They quickly grasped the potential of the technology, and soon picked up the idea that in exchange for the magic Stepper box, all Willis wanted was for them to take his handheld cam as close to the monoliths as they could get.

“If this doesn’t work, nothing will. I also gave them seeds for the Martian cactus that powers the box. That comes from the Gap Mars, and there’s a good chance it will grow here too…”

“My God,” Frank said. “You just encountered these creatures. And yet within a few hours you’ve given them their own Step Day.”

“It’s not like that,” Willis said sternly. “Remember, the Stepper is only an aid to releasing an ability to step that’s innate in the first place. There had to be some sapient Martians who could step, or, surely, there’d be no Long Mars at all. But stepping is a lot less useful here, because the worlds neighbouring a habitable island like this are almost always going to be lethal. I’m only giving them what they have already, Frank. And besides, it’s going to take a Renaissance and an Industrial Revolution for these guys to be able to figure out the meaning of the Long Mars, let alone how to make decent pressure suits.”

“But they are clearly inventive, technologically,” Sally said.

“And brave,” Frank said. “They learn fast too—”

“Oh well, Pandora’s box is open now. Or would you and that ass Mellanier say that’s the wrong myth, Frank? Look, we need to stay in this world long enough to get the monolith data. Then we can move on. But I suggest we get the gliders in the air soon.”

“Why?”

“I think I’m learning to read these guys’ body language. They seem a little anxious. Remember how I speculated about what kind of predator could make a two-hundred-and-fifty-foot-long animal grow armour plate? That thunder you thought you heard a while ago—I heard it too—that ain’t thunder…”