Mars Life (34 page)

It was the same dream.

Jamie walked through the village, an unseen ghost among the Martians. They were going about their various businesses as the warm sun baked their adobe structures. Try as he might, Jamie could not get a clear vision of them. He knew they were all around him, moving through the narrow packed-dirt streets, but he couldn’t quite make out what they looked like.

Up on the cliff face far above him the temple buildings stood white and clear in the sunshine. Jamie stood for a long time in the village’s central square and stared up at the temple complex.

Maybe I can go up there and ask them what their writing means, he said to himself. He saw that there were steps carved into the nearly vertical cliff wall. A rugged climb, he thought. They must be terrific climbers. “Ya’aa’tey!”

Whirling around, Jamie saw his grandfather Al, once again in his best black leather vest and the hat with the big drooping brim and silver band circling its crown.

“Ya’aa’tey,” Jamie replied happily, reaching both hands toward his grandfather.

“How’s it goin’, Jamie?” Al asked. “Makin’ any progress?”

“The whites want to bring tourists here,” Jamie said. In his own ears his voice sounded as if he were nine years old.

“Naw, they can’t get here. Not here.”

“That’s right,” Jamie said, feeling relieved. “This village doesn’t exist anymore, does it?”

Al grinned at him, dentures white and even in his weathered, seamed face.

“You don’t get it, do you, grandson? They can’t come here because this village don’t exist yet.”

Fifteen people, Jamie thought as he stared at his computer display. Fifteen men and women. Who’s going to stay? Who’d want to stay, under these conditions?

I can’t ask Vijay to risk it, he told himself. She’d want to stay with me, but it’s not fair for me to keep her here. But I can’t send her away, either. I promised her we’d be together, whatever happened. If I stay, she stays. She won’t want to leave, not without me. And I’ve got to stay here. I’ve got to.

His pocket phone buzzed. Flicking it open, he saw Billy Graycloud’s face in the tiny screen. The kid was outside at the dig, clear nanofabric bubble over his head.

“Dr. W, we’ve cleared one grave. You oughtta see it before they start takin’ the bones out.”

“Right,” said Jamie. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

He jumped up from his chair so fast he banged a knee against the wobbly folding table and nearly knocked his laptop to the floor. Stuffing the phone back into his shirt pocket, Jamie rushed to the suit lockers by the main airlock hatch and hurriedly pulled on a nanosuit.

“Not so fast, please.”

Jamie looked up and saw the diminutive Kristin Dvorak, one of the astronauts.

“I am the safety officer today,” she said, in her Middle European accent. “You rush too much, you kill yourself.”

Jamie smiled sheepishly. “I know. It’s just—”

Kristin held up a finger. “I’ll check you out. Make sure you’re sealed up good.”

He stood there like a suspect in a police shakedown while she walked all around him, checking his suit seals, his life-support backpack and their connections to the suit’s metal collar.

“Hokay,” she said, her ballerina-slim face utterly serious. “Now pull up the hood and inflate it.”

Jamie did as he was told. Then she checked the transmission from the radio clipped to his ear. At last Kristin smiled and said, “You are clear for excursion. Have a pleasant day.”

Jamie grinned at her and ducked through the airlock hatch.

Once outside he loped across the stony ground to the edge of the excavation and down the ramp to its bottom. A small crowd was standing off at the far side of the pit, where the cemetery lay. Jamie couldn’t see Carleton among them.

“Dr. W!” Graycloud’s voice. “Come and see this!”

Jamie made his way along the central street of the long-buried village, ancient building foundations dark and low against the reddish ground on either side of him. Nobody was working among them, he saw. They’re all at the graveyard.

“We waited for you, Jamie,” said Carter Carleton. Jamie was surprised to see him in a nanosuit instead of his usual hard-shell.

“I’m sorry if I held you up,” he said, panting a little from his trotting.

Carleton seemed strangely subdued. “He’s waited sixty-five million years. A few more minutes won’t bother him.”

There were eight men and women standing at the edge of the grave, Billy Graycloud among them. Jamie was surprised to see Mo Zeroual, too. What’s a number cruncher from Selene doing out here? he asked himself. He must have volunteered.

Jamie looked down into the uncovered grave. It was filled with odd-looking bones, crushed by the weight of eons, flattened, distorted. But he thought he could make out what looked like a spine, and maybe those were limbs. Six of them?

“That’s a Martian?” he whispered.

“That’s a Martian,” Carleton replied, his voice also hushed, choked. “And more.”

Jamie glanced at the anthropologist, then looked back into the grave.

Pointing, Carleton said, “Those look like beads, don’t you think? And that little object there might have been a small vase or a cup of some sort.”

“It’s hard to tell,” said Jamie.

“It’s all been flattened by the overburden,” Carleton said, still half-whispering. “It’s going to take some time to put it all together and find out how they were actually built.”

“Six legs?” Jamie asked.

Carleton nodded inside his bubble helmet. “At least. Two of them end in grasping appendages. Hands. See?”

“Hard to tell,” Jamie repeated.

Graycloud spoke up. “They must’ve been built close to the ground. Like turtles.”

“Not necessarily,” said Carleton. “The skeleton’s been flattened by the weight of thirty meters of soil pressing down on it.”

Someone else made a comment, and Carleton answered. But Jamie stared into the grave and saw at last the Martians that he had dreamed about. They didn’t look human at all, but they had legs and arms and hands, eyes and ears, they spoke a language and wrote pictographs and built this village and the shrine high up on the canyon wall. They had minds. We could have communicated with them, if only . . .

Carleton sank to his knees and bent to reach into the grave.

“Careful!” one of the group gasped.

“I know,” said Carleton, leaning over. His gloved fingers reached for the flattened, odd-shaped bone at one end of the skeleton. It was only slightly larger than his hand, mottled rusty gray, hard looking.

Holding it up in his hands like a kneeling worshiper raising a holy grail, Carleton said, “This is a cranium. Got to be.”

“The brain case isn’t all that big.”

“Are those eye sockets?”

“They look straight ahead. Binocular vision.”

“They saw things in depth: three-dimensional vision, just like us.”

Resting back on his haunches, Carleton turned the fossil around in his hands. “Ha. See this?” He pointed with his free hand.

Jamie saw a hole in the back of the skull.

“Foramen magnum, I’ll bet my last breath on it,” Carleton said in a strangely hushed, almost worshipful voice. “This is where the spinal cord went through the cranium to connect with the brain.”

“If its brain was in its cranium,” one of the biologists said.

Ignoring the remark, Carleton went on, “It must have been four-legged.”

“Or six?”

“It held its body horizontal to the ground. It didn’t stand upright, the way we do.”

Jamie thought that was a lot to assume in the first five minutes of examination, but he said nothing. This was Carleton’s moment and he was entitled to his surmises. Who knows? Jamie asked himself. He might even be right.

Carleton slapped his gloved hands together, startling Jamie out of his musings. “All right,” he said, his voice loud and commanding now. “We start removing the bones, one piece at a time. I want a complete photographic record. Every clod, every molecule we remove has got to be recorded down to the nanometer. This is history, people! Let’s get to work!”

And Jamie heard his grandfather’s enigmatic words: 
This village don’t exist yet.

Jamie helped Carleton and his team to tenderly lift the fossilized bones out of the grave, together with the beads and shards of pottery that lay with the body, and carry them inside the dome. Under Carleton’s exacting direction, they laid everything on the big stereo table in exactly the same positions as they had been in the grave.

Two technicians spent the next hour taking stereo photographs of the remains, while Carleton’s people gathered in the cafeteria to relax after a long, exciting, tension-filled day. Jamie went with them.

“Well, they buried their dead, all right,” said Alonzo Jenkins as he lounged back in a cafeteria chair, legs stretched out and a plastic glass of fruit juice in his hand.

“With trinkets,” added Shirley Macintyre, one of the medical technicians who had volunteered to help at the dig. She was in her midtwenties, and had dropped out of astronaut training in Britain to join the medical team on Mars. Tall, lean and muscular, she had been pursued by several of the men but stayed aloof from them all.

“They must have believed in an afterlife,” Billy Graycloud said softly. Eyebrows went up; people looked surprised that Graycloud would speak up.

Jamie smiled at the young man and said, “So they must have had some form of religion.” Everyone nodded.

“I wonder how much they were like us,” murmured one of the men.

“Or we’re like them.”

“Not physically,” said Jamie. “We don’t look anything alike.”

“But mentally?”

“Spiritually?”

“They lived in villages,” Jamie said, ticking off points on his fingers. “They had a rudimentary form of writing. They buried their dead — “

“With beads and pottery,” Macintyre interjected.

“Like Billy said, they believed in an afterlife,” said Jenkins. “So they must have had some kind of religion.”

“That’s the basis for religion, sure enough.”

They looked up to see Carter Carleton walking toward them from the juice dispensers, a glass in his hand, a happy smile on his handsome face.

“The promise of life beyond death,” Jenkins said. “That’s what religion’s all about.”

“It’s a powerful lure,” Carleton said, joining the conversation as he sat himself next to Macintyre. “It’s pure nonsense, of course, but it’s certainly suckered people into accepting religion everywhere, even on Mars.”

“What do you mean, it’s nonsense?” Macintyre asked. “How can you be sure?”

“Catholic, aren’t you?” said Carleton, frowning slightly. “You’ve had it pounded into your skull since before you could walk.”

Jenkins objected, “That’s not fair, Dr. Carleton. Everyone’s entitled to their beliefs.”

“Besides,” Macintyre said, “there’s a lot more to religion than the promise of an afterlife. There’s the whole ethical basis. Society would be impossible without religion’s ethical teachings.”

Carleton smirked. “Like ‘Thou shalt not kill’? Except when your church says it’s okay. Like the Crusades: kill the Saracens! Or the suicide bombers: kill the unbelievers!”

“They were extremists.”

“Were they? How about the good Christians back in the USA who’ve made homosexuality a crime in their states? Outlawed abortion. Hell, they’re even trying to make all forms of family planning illegal.”

“They’re acting on their beliefs,” Macintyre insisted.

Jamie got to his feet and left them arguing. To himself he thought, How about the religious believers who don’t want us here on Mars? How about the terrorists who set off those bombs back at the university? How about—

“Dr. W?”

Jamie broke out of his thoughts and saw Billy Graycloud walking beside him.

“Had enough of the debate?” he asked.

Graycloud smiled shyly. “I figure they’ll start asking me about my religious beliefs pretty soon. I don’t want to get involved in it.”

“Smart lad,” Jamie said. “We’ve got enough to do without getting into arguments over religion. They’ll start yelling at each other pretty soon.”

“I guess. Nothing like religion to start people fightin’.”

Jamie smiled bitterly. “When you’re sure you’re right, when you’ve been told all your life that these beliefs are the absolute truth . ..” He shook his head. “People have done horrible things in the name of religion.”

They walked side by side toward Jamie’s quarters.

“I guess that’s why they’re scared of science,” Graycloud muttered, as much to himself as to Jamie. “Scientists don’t talk about truth. They look for facts.”

“And we change our minds, too, when new facts contradict what we believed.”

Graycloud nodded. He looked to Jamie as if he was about to say something, but he stopped himself and remained silent.

“Is there something else?”

Graycloud pursed his lips, as if searching his memory. “Well, yeah, there is.”

Jamie waited for the youngster to go on. After several silent steps he prodded, “What is it, Billy?”

Frowning slightly, Graycloud said, “The translation.”

“Getting anywhere?”

“Kinda. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Could you come over to the comm center? I can show you what I’ve done so far.”

Nodding, Jamie changed course and walked with Graycloud to the communications center. The place was silent except for the hum of the consoles. Two women were on duty, chatting quietly together, headphones clipped to their ears while their display screens flickered with routine messages. Graycloud sat at an unused console and booted up the computer. Jamie pulled one of the little wheeled chairs over beside him and sat on it.

The screen showed the inscriptions carved into the wall of the cliff structure. Graycloud scrolled the screen’s cursor to the image of a circle with short lines emanating from it, north, south, east and west.

“Okay,” Graycloud said, licking his lips. “That one I call the sun.

“Father Sun,” Jamie murmured. “Like the Navaho sun symbol.”

“Right. Okay. That one’s easy. Now this one . . .” The cursor drifted to a wriggly pair of lines and stopped. “This one might mean ‘water.’ Or ‘river.’”

“That’s reasonable,” said Jamie.

“And this one . . .” The cursor swung to a bulbous symbol that reminded Jamie of a head of broccoli. “Might be ‘tree’ or ‘plant.’”

“Or ‘crops,’” Jamie suggested.

Graycloud’s brows hiked up. “Yeah. Crops. Could be.”

Jamie patted the younger man’s shoulder. “You’re making progress, Billy.”

“Am I?” Graycloud turned toward him and Jamie could see the doubt and worry in his eyes. “Or am I just screwin’ around?”

“Progress,” Jamie said firmly.

Graycloud shook his head warily. “I don’t know, Dr. W. All I’m really doing is assigning our words to their symbols. Arbitrarily. How do we know the circle means the sun? It might mean ‘crater’ or ‘beach ball,’ for all we know.”

Jamie almost laughed. “Probably not ‘beach ball.’”

“But you see the problem?” Graycloud said, almost pleading. “I’m just assigning 
our 
meanings to 
their 
symbols. It’s GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.”

For a moment Jamie said nothing, thinking hard as he looked at this earnest young man and considered his problem. At last he said, “The proof will be in the message you get out of the symbols, Billy. When you run these meanings through the computer, will a meaningful message come out of them or will it be meaningless nonsense?”

“But we could be fooling ourselves.”

“How?”

“I mean, even if we get a message that seems to have some meaning to it, it could be just the meaning we put into it. It could have nothing to do with what the Martians wanted to say.”

“I see.”

“I could be wasting my time here.”

Jamie smiled. “Billy, you’ve got thesis blues.”

“Huh?”

“Every graduate student goes through this when they have to write their thesis. At some point in the project it all starts to look like nonsense, garbage, junk. You feel certain that you’re wasting your time, that what you’re doing is all gibberish and it’s never going to go anywhere. You start to wonder if you shouldn’t just toss it all down the chute and go out and sell used cars or paint houses or do something, 
anything, 
that’s more useful than the crap you’re working on.”

Graycloud stared at him for a long silent moment. Then, “Did you ever feel that way?”

Jamie nodded, remembering. “With my master’s thesis. And especially with the doctorate. 
Stratigraphy of the Potential Oil-Bearing Deposits of Northern New Mexico. 
I almost quit school altogether when I was working on that one.”

Blinking, Graycloud said, “But there aren’t any oil-bearing deposits in northern New Mexico. Are there?”

“Not much. Plenty of dinosaur fossils, though. I damned near changed my major to paleontology.”

“Really?”

“I thought about it. But I stayed with geology and that thesis earned me my Ph.D.”

Graycloud looked uncertain, troubled.

“Keep plugging at it, Billy. I know it looks like a mess now, but you’ll get there. It’ll be worth it in the end.”

“I sure hope so.”

Silently, Jamie replied, So do I, kid. So do I.