The Long Mars

38

In the morning the three of them resolved to hike to the pit, leaving the gliders behind. That was basically Frank and Willis’s plan. A plan that entailed leaving the gliders unguarded…

Sally didn’t contribute much to the discussion. She was doubtful about the plan, however. This was Mars, a typical Mars—a dead Mars, aside from whatever they were likely to encounter in the pit. There were no real hazards here. Even a dust storm, pushed by Mars’s feeble air, would barely leave a mark of its passing. The only real danger was an unlucky meteor strike, and no sentry could ward off that. To post a guard, thus splitting their tiny team, would have been absurd.

Wouldn’t it?

Sally was cautious by nature; living alone in the wild worlds of the Long Earth had made her so, long ago. But her caution was of a different degree to Frank’s. He thought in terms of physical effects, equipment failures—a meteor strike, a solar flare, a leaky pressure hull. While Sally had learned to think in terms of malevolent life—creatures out to kill her, one way or another. Maybe she was importing an over-caution bred on a too-alive Earth to a too-dead Mars where it wasn’t appropriate. Maybe this was just a distraction.

Wasn’t it?

She went along with the guys’ plan. But in her head a small alarm sounded softly, continually.

And she remembered that light she’d thought she’d seen, glowing in the Martian night.

So the three of them walked to the pit. In the bright daylight the thread of the cable was even more striking than in the twilight, a brilliant eggshell blue like no natural colour Sally had seen on any of the millions of Marses they had visited.

As they walked, Willis held up a small sensor pod to study their target. “That cable is about a half-inch thick,” he said. “A finger’s width. You know, I’m betting it doesn’t need to be that thick.”

“A safety factor,” Frank suggested. “Maybe the apparent thickness is mostly dummy, a lightweight safety coating. You don’t want to be slicing off the wing of your flying machine—”

“Or your limbs—”

“On a super-strong thread that’s too fine to even see.”

As they talked Sally was studying the ground, the lip of the approaching pit. “No raying.”

“What?” Frank asked.

“No splash debris, like from any other crater on Mars, or the moon.”

“Umm,” Frank said. “But there is a crater wall, of sorts…”

The ground rose up as they neared the lip, hard-packed under the dust, to become a circular barrier maybe fifty feet tall, Sally saw as she crested it, a wall that ran right around the rim of the hole in the ground. This was a big feature, it was obvious now they were standing on top of it, a hole a full half-mile across encircled by this smooth wall. Away from this highest point, which was a broad ridge so Sally had no fear of falling, the lip fell away smoothly, funnelling into the ground. From here she could only see the upper sections of the interior walls of the pit itself, which looked like compacted Martian rock.

Willis cautiously knelt down, tied a fine rope to a handheld sensor pod, and lowered it into the pit, paying out the rope, clumsy with his gloved hands. “Yeah, this pit is indeed just about twenty miles deep; the radar confirms it. And pretty much the same radius all the way to the bottom. It’s a cylinder.”

Frank said, “Surely no meteor could create a pit as deep and orderly as this. A bigger impactor doesn’t drill a deeper hole, it just melts more rock, and you get a wider, shallower crater.”

“Hmm,” Willis said. “I can imagine how it could be done. A string of small impactors coming down one after the other. Deepening the hole before it had a chance to infill.”

Frank pulled a face, looking dubious. “Maybe. If this is artificial I can think of easier ways to build it. Like with a massive heat weapon. Like we saw used in war, back on world—what was it?”

“About a million,” Willis said. “The Martian Arecibo.”

“But,” Sally said, “that’s a long way from here, stepwise. We’ve seen no evidence of cross-stepwise transfer of technologies, or even life forms, here on Mars.”

“True. But convergence of technology types isn’t impossible,” Willis said. “We have directed-energy weapons, and we’re not even from Mars.”

Sally shook her head. “We’ve got nothing but guesses. Why would anybody build this, though?”

Willis was monitoring the results coming back from his sensor pod. “I can make a guess at that. This pit is deep. The Martian atmosphere’s scale height is only around five miles. At twenty miles deep, you’d expect the air pressure to be around fifty times its value on the surface. Up here you have a typical Martian-surface atmosphere, a scrape of carbon dioxide at about one per cent Earth’s sea-level pressure. At the bottom of this pit, and my instruments are confirming it, that’s up to about fifty per cent.”

Frank whistled. “That’s better than on the Gap Mars.”

“Right. Which is about as hospitable as we’ve found it, anywhere across three million stepwise copies. That’s why they built this pit, Sally. As a refuge.”

“From what?”

Willis said, “From the collapse of the air. Maybe there was something like a volcano summer here—a deep one, a long one—”

Frank said, “Long enough for some breed of Martians to come up with a space programme.”

“Right. But, like all summers, eventually it came to an end. The heat leaked out, the snow started falling at the poles, the oceans froze over and receded. The usual story.”

Sally thought she saw it now. “This pit is a refuge.”

“Yeah. And it couldn’t be simpler. The pit would keep its air, water, even if civilization fell.”

Frank said, “And the elevator?”

“Maybe they moved the root station here, before the end, from Pavonis or wherever else. Kind of romantic, but very long-term thinking. They lived in a hole in the ground to make sure they saved their air and water, but they kept their ladder to the planets.”

Sally peered into the pit. “So what’s down there now?”

“Life,” said Willis. “I can tell that much. There’s oxygen, methane—the atmosphere is unstable, chemically. So something must be photosynthesizing away, pumping all that oxygen into the air.” He glanced around, at the way the slanting morning sunlight caught only the upper surface of the pit walls. “No, not photosynthesis. Not primarily anyhow—not enough direct light, in the depths. Maybe it’s like the deep-sea organisms on Earth, out of sight of sunlight, feeding on seeps of minerals and energy from underground. We’re close enough to the Tharsis volcanoes for that to work; the big magma pockets under those babies must leak a lot of heat.”

Sally asked, “So this is the last refuge of their civilization. Where’s the city lights, car exhausts, radio chatter?”

“None of that, I’m afraid. There is one splash of metal.”

Frank looked startled. “Metal?”

“An irregular form. Down on the floor of the pit.”

Sally said wistfully, “All this makes me think of Rectangles.”

Willis wasn’t interested, but Frank glanced at her. “Where?”

“A Long Earth world I discovered with Lobsang and Joshua. We called it Rectangles, for the traces of foundation ruins we found on the ground. Another site with relics of a vanished civilization.”

“Right. And a cache of high-tech weapons.”

She looked at Frank in surprise. “How did you know that? Oh. Jansson told you.”

“We spoke a lot. Especially when she was in her last days, during Yellowstone. Told me a lot about her life. Her time with you—”

“We’ll have to go down,” Willis said, cutting across their talk. “Into the hole.”

Sally took a breath. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

“In the spirit of noble exploration, I suppose,” Frank said.

“No. So that I can get up close and personal with that cable. And get a look at the root station.”

“OK,” Sally said dubiously. “Suppose, hypothetically, we agree we’re going to do this. How? We don’t have twenty miles of rope—do we, Frank?”

“No. Anyhow we’d need a lot more, for doubling up, fail-safes.”

“We don’t have winches, or jet packs—”

“We fly down,” Willis said. “We take one of the gliders, and fly down.” He looked at them both. “You’re going to say no, aren’t you? Look. You can see how wide this pit is. A half-mile across—plenty of room for a spiral flight, down and back up.”

“The air at the base is a hell of a lot thicker than the design optimum, Willis,” Frank protested.

“You know as well as I do that fifty per cent bar is still within the performance envelope. And besides, there’s a lot of heat seeping out of this hole in the ground. We can ride back up using the thermals; that will help.

“Here’s the plan. Two of us will ride one glider down, leaving the other glider on the surface as backup, together with one pilot. We can offload stores before the flight. There are obvious fallback strategies, if anything goes wrong. Maybe we could even climb back up, out of this pit. The gravity is a baby.”

Frank said, “Why not send down a drone plane?”

“Not equipped to take samples.”

“But—”

“End of discussion,” Willis said. “We came here for that damn space elevator. We ain’t going home without a piece of it. Got that? OK. Let’s get down to specifics.”

They argued about how to split the crew. They agreed that one should stay on the surface, two descend. Which one, which two?

In fact the logic was clear. Willis was always going to go into the pit. Sally was the least good pilot, but as the youngest and fittest she had the best chance of climbing out of that hole in the ground if things got bad enough. Frank, meanwhile, the best pilot, was the obvious choice for the reserve on the surface.

Willis and Sally it would be, then.

Willis fretted through the day that Frank insisted they took in offloading Thor, the glider to be used for the descent, testing through its systems one more time, checking over their pressure suits and other gear, working out communications protocols and the like. And if Willis was restless, Frank was visibly unhappy, whether because the stunt was so obviously dangerous or because he was the guy left behind to mind the store, Sally wasn’t sure.

Come the evening they had a hot meal in one of the bubble tents, washed up, and took to their sleeping bags early. The plan was to rise at dawn and use the full day to descend, do whatever had to be done at the base of the pit, and climb back out again before the sun fell.

That night Sally slept no better and no worse than she had during the whole trip. Another legacy of her solitary, nomadic life: she had adapted to getting by on whatever sleep she could snatch, as and when she got the chance. She was always aware, though, oddly, of the thread to the sky just a couple of miles away, silent, ancient, with space at its tip and some kind of fallen culture at its feet. Her life had always been odd, even before Step Day. Just when she’d thought it couldn’t get any odder…

Thor lifted, propelled by the methane rockets, as obedient and responsive as ever. Willis was piloting.

Once they were into their glide Willis made one circle over the landing site. Sally looked down at the ground, at Woden gleaming bone white in the morning sun, and their bubble tents like blisters on the scuffed Martian dust. Frank Wood stood alone, staring up. He waved, and Willis waggled the wings in response.

Sally still had that faint alarm bell ringing in the back of her head. There was something about this situation that wasn’t right, that they hadn’t thought through or prepared for. Well, Frank Wood was more experienced than Sally in this kind of situation, less intelligent than Willis maybe but calmer, more capable in many ways. If something did blow up, she’d have to rely on Frank’s instincts to save the day.

Thor turned away from the landing site and towards the pit, and Sally turned her attention to the challenge facing her.

They were over the pit in only a couple of minutes. Willis, getting the feel of the craft, took Thor banking in tight circles over the opening, keeping one eye on the elevator cable. “I can see the cable easily,” he said with some relief. “Also I rigged up a proximity sensor that will ping if we get too close. Short of flying straight at the damn thread, we should be OK.”

“Don’t tempt fate, Dad.”

“Now you sound like your maternal grandfather, Patrick. Remember him? The gloomy Irishman. OK, let’s take her down.”

He began a lazy spiral around the axial cable, cutting the speed, Sally guessed, as low as he dared without risking a stall. Soon they were descending towards the mouth of the pit, the low sunlight wheeling through the glider cabin—and then, with a smooth wash of rising shadow, they fell beneath the lip of the hole, with its artfully consolidated ridge. The sun caught only the uppermost stretch of the wall of crimson rock, and soon they were falling into the darkness.

Sally felt an odd sense of claustrophobia. But that was logical, for her, with the instincts of a natural stepper. Sally had grown up knowing in her bones that as a last resort, whatever difficulty she got into, she could always just step away, even without a Stepper box. Even on the Long Mars that was true, though she would generally just be swapping one lethal landscape for another. But you couldn’t step out of a pit, a hole dug into the ground, because there would be earth and bedrock in the worlds to either side stepwise. A pit, a basement, a cellar, even a mine, was therefore a simple defence against stepping aggressors, as had been figured out very early after Step Day, even by neighbourhood cops like Monica Jansson.

On the Long Mars as on the Long Earth.

She was trapped in a cage one world thin.

As she descended twenty miles.

Into the dark.

Towards the unknown.

It came as a relief when Willis switched on lights, shining front and back of the glider and to either side, picking out the wall on the one hand and the cable on the other. The floor was still too far below to be visible. The wall of the pit was layered, with a spray of sun-blasted dust on the surface, then a mass of rubble and gravel and ice—and then the bedrock, itself deeply cracked, a record of the huge primordial impacts that had shaped this world. She wondered if these walls had needed some kind of consolidation, to keep this tremendous shaft from collapsing. Maybe Mars’s lower gravity, and its cooler interior, helped with that.

“Piece of cake,” Willis said as he piloted the glider. “Just got to hold her steady. And get used to the thickening air. Worst danger is I’ll fall asleep at the wheel.”

“Don’t even joke about it, Dad.”

“You keep watching, the walls, the ground. I have cameras working and other sensors, but anything else you spot—”

“I can see something.” The wall, in the plane’s spotlight, was no longer featureless, she saw. The rock face, as rough as ever, was etched with a kind of zigzag spiral. “Stairs,” she said. “I see stairs. Big ones, four or six feet deep, it’s hard to tell from this vantage. But they’re stairs, all right.”

“Ha! And we’re not a mile deep yet. Should have anticipated stairs. A culture careful enough to build this hole in the ground in anticipation of its entire civilization collapsing was always going to install something as simple as stairs.”

“Why don’t they reach all the way to the surface?”

“Maybe they just eroded away. I have the feeling this pit has been here a long time, Sally.”

After that, for a time they descended in silence. The circle of Martian sky above them receded, a coppery disc, like a coin. From above, the ship must look like a firefly spiralling down the barrel of a cannon. Still the base of the pit was invisible.

At about twelve miles deep Sally thought she saw more detail on the wall, and she had her father level out for a closer look.

“Vegetation,” she said, watching carefully as the glider slid past the walls. “Stumpy trees. Things like cacti. Dad, this is like what we saw on Gap Mars.”

He checked the air pressure. “Yeah, we’re up to about ten per cent of a bar already. I guess this is the lower limit of tolerance for that vegetation suite. And there must be just enough sunlight down here to support their kind of photosynthesis. Remarkable, isn’t it, Sally? We keep seeing the same biospheric suite, essentially, taking its chance wherever it can, wherever the environment lets up its stranglehold, even just a little. I can feel the air thickening, getting kind of bumpy. . .”

So it was. Sally guessed that the pool of air trapped in the pit was turbulent, stirred up by the heat from below and falling back when it cooled. She tried to watch for more evidence of life on the walls, but mostly she monitored the glider’s increasingly ragged descent.

“OK,” Willis said at last. “Less than a mile to go. Pitch black down there. Radar’s showing ground. I’m going to put her down on as smooth a patch as I can find—and not far from that anomalous metal heap I detected from the surface.”

She stayed silent; she could only distract him. She checked the seals of her own pressure suit, and telltale sensors monitoring Willis’s suit.

Only in the last few seconds did she see details of the pit bottom, which looked as if it was encrusted with life, a multitude of shapes and colours gaudy in their panning lights, quickly glimpsed. It was like a seabed, like looking down into a fish tank.

“Here we go…”

The landing was bumpy. Through the fabric of the craft Sally heard scrapes, crackles, liquid noises, before they came to rest.

Willis glanced back over his shoulder at her, and grinned. “Once again, a piece of cake. Come on, let’s see what’s out there.”

Sally clambered cautiously out of the glider.

The only light came from splashes from the glider’s floods. The disc of sky, far above at the top of this rock chimney, was too remote even to see—although, glancing up, following the blue thread of the beanstalk cable, Sally thought she saw something moving, falling, occluding what light there was.

The ground, as she’d glimpsed just before the landing, was coated with life, most of it static: purple-green bacterial slime, and things like sponges, things like sprawled trees, things like banks of coral. The glider, on landing, had cut parallel tracks through all this, tracks that glistened, moist. The air was comparatively thick, the place was comparatively warm—this was indeed as welcoming an environment as she’d found on any Mars so far. And it surely had to be fed by energy supplied by mineral seeps from the deeper ground, moisture perhaps leaking from some aquifer; there could be no meaningful input of sunlight down here—and no rain, on a typically arid Mars. Unless the pit had some kind of microclimate of its own, she thought, with captive clouds and rainstorms all contained within its walls.

Walking away from the glider towards the elevator cable, she turned her head from side to side, sweeping her helmet flashlight. Aside from the cable itself, and the basic architecture of the pit, there was no sign of structure, of sentience—

Something moved, cutting across her beam from one pool of shadow to another. She whirled, alarmed.

It was a crustacean, she saw, flat to the ground like those she’d seen at some of their early stops, its chitinous armour gleaming with colours that must be, normally, entirely invisible. Indeed it had no eyes, she saw, none of the eye stalks she’d noticed on those surface creatures.

“You poor thing,” she said. “You really have been down here a long time, haven’t you? Long enough not just for your culture to have fallen apart, but for you to have evolved out your sight…”

The creature seemed to listen. Then it scuttled back into the dark.

Keeping a wider lookout Sally walked on, heading for the cable. Even from here she could see that there was no obvious root station, no structure; the cable just seemed to sink into the deep rock, which was covered by a tide of dark-adapted life… But, she saw, the cable itself was scuffed, frayed, only a few yards above the ground level.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hmm?” As ever, Willis sounded distracted, not quite paying attention to her.

“Bad news is the root node is buried somehow. I suppose if the builders had the power to melt out this pit, they could have just sunk the node in molten rock… Good news is the cable is frayed here. Like something clipped it. We might be able to get your samples after all.”

“Uh huh. And I think I’ve found what did the clipping. Come see.”

She turned, sweeping the glow of her helmet light. She saw Willis in his suit, standing straight, his back to her. He was holding something, in the shadows. And beyond him, nearer the pit wall, she saw a gleam of metal.

It was a spacecraft. A stubby nose and part of a wing poked out of the heavy clay, badly damaged. And she saw scrapings, where Willis had cleared dirt from around a hatchway.

“What the hell?”

“Recent,” he said. “Comparatively. Given that the ship hasn’t yet eroded to dust. Maybe they came from some other world—the Earth of this universe, even. Whatever, they must have tried to land down here—”

“They were even worse pilots than you.”

“They actually clipped the cable. What if they’d cut it entirely? We could have lost everything.”

She walked forward for a closer look. The ship had obviously come down hard, and was ripped open, but it must have looked weird enough beforehand. There were padded things with grooves in them that could have been seats. She glimpsed what looked like bones, gleaming beneath rotted fabric.

And Willis was holding a skull; it was crested, arrow-shaped and two or three times bigger than a human head.

Again something moving overhead caught Sally’s eye. She tipped her head, angling her flashlight, trying to find it again. Something pale, flapping.

“The ship doesn’t concern us,” Willis said. “Leave it for the expeditions from the universities. We’ll take images, a few samples. Bits of bone. Maybe this skull. Then we’ll get our chunk of cable material and get out of here…”

The thing that was falling from above came closer now, drifting slowly in the thickening air, the low gravity, flapping gently, like a damaged bird. As it settled to the life-crowded ground, not far from Sally, she saw that it was a ceramic panel fixed to aluminium struts, painted with the corner of a Stars and Stripes, clearly visible.

It was a piece of Woden.