Red Planet Run (23 page)

“Sean, the Prometheans’ existence is still only a theoretical possibility backed by a few alleged artifacts and a lot of guesswork.”

“I bet the Librarians could tell us.”

“They could if they were still speaking to us,” I agreed, and sighed.

For a moment we sat, not speaking, staring out the port over the vast flat slope littered with boulders and pocked with craters. Busy old fool, unruly Sol was well up over the horizon, outlining the summit of Olympus Mons as we crouched adoringly at its feet. “What did happen here?” I wondered aloud. “From all indications, once there was several hundred feet of water on the surface of Mars. That volcano was active. At one time, planetary evolution was proceeding here much as it was on Terra. For its first billion years, the climate on Mars was nothing short of balmy. What made life begin on Terra, and a three-billion-year winter begin here?”

“Is winter the right word?”

I looked at my son. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know exactly,” he said. “Winter implies spring will follow, I guess.”

“Mars, planet-in-waiting?” Paddy suggested.

“Always the bridesmaid, never the bride,” Sean said, nodding agreement. “Don’t you get the feeling—”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” he said again. “Look at the planets in this system, the inner ones, anyway. Mercury and Venus too hot, Mars too cold, Terra just right.”

“Kind of like someone groping for the right formula?” I suggested, interested in spite of myself.

“Exactly,” Sean said, pleased with me, and I was proud I’d said a smart thing. “Like someone was running a test to define the limits of the proper thermal band around a star to develop and sustain life.”

“I suppose, assuming life is as prolific and promiscuous in other star systems, the configuration of the Solar System at the very least gives us a rule of thumb.”

“A guideline,” Paddy said, nodding. “We know where to look.”

Sean, very sober, said, “I wonder if Prometheus was too cold or too hot?”

“Or if it was too cold and they blew it up trying to warm it.” Paddy said.

“Or tried to cool it down too quickly.”

That hint of white shadow the previous evening had dissipated by the following morning and not replaced itself. I was disappointed, and it showed. “What did you want, Mom?” Paddy said, grinning.

“An eruption?” Sean suggested. “Steam? Ash? Lava?”

“Don’t be silly,” I said, without conviction. Our seismometer had not picked up any significant tremors during our stay, but that didn’t mean anything. Earthquakes come when they will and if they will. I’d been born during the Great Alaskan Earthquake, 8.5 on the Richter scale. It was fifty years before another that size hit again, and by that time me and my family were well and truly off-planet for good. I’ve never considered earthquakes necessary. Made for a very unstable habitat. “Don’t be silly,” I repeated, with more conviction this time.

We spent the next two months mapping Tharsis, and could quite happily have spent much longer, if some of us had not been in the regrettable habit of responsibility and reminded the rest of us that we were there not to map Tharsis but to explore Cydonia. By then, Helen was bombarding us with bi-monthly bulletins, all of which began with the latitude and longitude of the Cydonia complex. I decided we’d better head in that direction before she hopped a ship for Mars and dragged us there by our short hairs.

· · ·

Between World War III and the Great Galactic Ghoul there wasn’t much record left of the Cydonia studies on Terra. Maria Mitchell had been preoccupied with charting the Asteroid Belt for commercial exploitation, so for the most part Mars had been only an afterthought, especially after the United Eurasian Republic beat the American Alliance in establishing the first colony there. The feeling was something like, okay fine—disdainful sniff—you’ve got Mars, we’ll take Luna and the Belt.

In the nearly forty years since its discovery, until Helen coerced Terranova into an expedition, no one had bothered to take a closer look, much less actually send someone out to poke around. Nowadays, backers of space projects never did anything without expecting a return, and the quicker and cheaper the better. I was pretty sure the only way Helen had managed financing for the Cydonia Archaeological Expedition was to make extravagant and wholly spurious promises about what would be found in the way of essential elements. I wouldn’t have put it past her to convince them that the entire Iron Planet was really made of titanium.

Helen had always been interested in Cydonia. The first time I’d ever heard of the place was in our room at Stanford, more years ago now than I cared to remember. She’d had Hoagland’s book, the JPL study, the NASA study, and blown-up reproductions of the Viking photos tacked up on the wall, all of them underlined and highlighted and annotated and circled in her neat handwriting. She held forth at length on the purposes of the various structures. At first I merely endured it. After a while I got interested and began to listen.

What first attracted Terran attention was the Face, a mound found in the northern desert of Mars in the shape of a head 1.6 kilometers in length. The Face looked vaguely like Tutankhamen’s death mask crossed with a rhesus monkey, and alone, it could have been an anomaly, explained away as one of those natural erosional phenomena like Cochise’s profile in the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona and the Sleeping Lady in Alaska and a hundred other such formations on Terra.

What made people begin to take the Face seriously was its geographical context. To the right of the Face was a cliff on the edge of a splosh crater. To the left of the Face was the so-called City, four pyramidal structures with walls pretty straight for having been carved by wind and sand. The City, the Face, and the Cliff were arranged so that at summer solstice 500,000 years ago you could have stood in the center of the City and watched the sun rise over the exact center of the Cliff and Face. This jolted observers into taking a closer look, whereupon they discovered a pyramid with a ridgepole forked on both ends with the dimensions of da Vinci’s
Man.

The observers began to add things up, literally, and found some queer mathematical relationships, not only between the various structures at Cydonia but between Cydonia and the rest of Mars. For example, if one arbitrarily placed the Tharsis bulge at zero degrees longitude, Cydonia lined up on 120 degrees longitude. The vertices of tetrahedral geometry, the basis of vorticular fluid dynamics and the first step in Einstein’s Unified Field Theory, occur precisely 120 degrees apart. The distance between the Pyramid and the Face was precisely 1/360th of the diameter of Mars. The Pyramid, in its mathematical proportions, repeated a set of fundamental constants, including pi. All the structures were located within 100 square kilometers, a parallelogram which formed other mathematical relationships with the enclosed structures and with the planet of Mars itself.

Somewhere along in here, someone pointed out that the Face bore a definite resemblance to Homo erectus, a Terran ancestor of the human race who was inventing fire at about the same time the summer solstice sun was rising over the Face, and the rest was madness. “Monkeys on Mars!” screamed the tabloids, but enough serious people were interested to equip the next probe to take a closer look. A month before Pyongyang, the Eurospace Probe Endeavor IV received a few fuzzy pictures that seemed to confirm the existence of artificial structures at Cydonia. World War III put further inquiry on hold.

Helen didn’t talk much about Cydonia after that. It was a tactical decision, first things first. Her immediate goal had been to secure and consolidate our foothold in space, and to do that the venture had to be proven profitable to investors. The biggest investors were nations, and nations were notoriously citizen-driven, and citizens were notorious for demanding the biggest bang for the buck. Following the war, every buck not spent toward Never Again was fiercely challenged, which led a frustrated Helen and Frank to devise the Big Lie, which got Terrans back into space and, eventually, on the road once again to Cydonia.

For the first time, I wondered why Helen wasn’t aboard the
Kayak.
I had been so absorbed in myself that I hadn’t even thought to ask. I wondered, shamefully, if she had sacrificed the dream of a lifetime to give me a purpose, a direction, a time to heal.

We still hadn’t been able to raise the Cydonia expedition on the commnet, and the longer we went without communication the more nervous I got. The landscape didn’t help. When we left the Tharsis uplift behind us, the terrain changed dramatically. Most of the northern hemisphere of Mars was composed of vast quantities of flat. It made it a safe site for the Viking landers but there wasn’t much to see once they set down, other than the ubiquitous splosh crater, formed by meteorites striking the surface millions of years before when the planet’s crust was still liquid. Mars was just lousy with splosh craters.

The up side was that we made good time because there wasn’t much to stop and look at and whatever there was we could see coming from a long way off, but we fought mental mañana every klick of the way. The features on the PlanetView crept by, the spectrometer seemed incapable of recognizing anything but iron, and the pixels came out flat and uninspiring. I was beginning to think we weren’t going to see anything worth looking at until we got to the ice steppes of the North Polar Cap.

Which is why, when we saw it, we thought it was the rim of yet another splosh crater.

It wasn’t.

· · ·

It looked like a splosh crater, much the same as the one the New Martians had used to build Vernadsky, a round hole in the ground surrounded by a rim of debris thrown out on impact. Red sand had piled up around the rim, presenting a smooth front on all sides. Inside was a bowl-shaped depression, filled with more of the ubiquitous red sand.

Only not quite. I was sitting in CommNav, my feet crossed on the board, practicing the chord changes for “Early Morning Rain” (B seven’s a bitch) when Sean called downship. “Mom?”

A minor was a snap by comparison, and I preferred the way it sounded, too. “What?”

“Could you come here a minute?”

Although E minor was my favorite, and no wonder, since it was what I sang in most of the time, whether the song called for it or not. “Why?”

“Mom!”

Muttering beneath my breath, I put aside the guitar. Paddy was in the galley, inventing an origami otter. She rolled her eyes as I passed. Sean was in Sciences, or Atlas and Igneous, as he had recently dubbed it. We were all pretty bored.

I stopped behind him. “What?”

“Look,” he said, one finger pointing through the bubble port. By a miracle, Paddy had stowed her telescope the night before and the view was unobscured.

I looked in the direction of his finger. “So what? Another splosh crater? Big deal.”

Wordlessly, he handed me the glasses. “Do I have to?” He frowned at me, and with a sigh I focused the lenses.

He waited.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What’s that?”

“What’s what?” Paddy said from behind me.

“In the bowl of that splosh crater ahead.”

She squinted at the horizon. “I don’t—Oh.” She snatched the glasses from me. “Looks like a spire, or some kind of pedestal rock.” She lowered the glasses. “But inside a crater?”

I didn’t think so, either. Even from this distance the slim pillar was too smooth, too regular. We were cruising at a thousand meters, in front of a breeze making about eight kph. “How tall is it?”

It was before ten in the morning, so Paddy measured the pillar’s shadow and added a few numbers. “About one hundred seventy meters.”

It looked taller. As we came closer it looked as if it had barely survived a bad case of smallpox.

“Mom.” Sean was leaning over the control board, his nose flattened against the graphplex of the port. “There’s people down there.”

There were people down there, half a dozen p-suited figures, standing in a half-circle, looking up. I popped both jibs and trimmed them to put us in irons, but made no move to descend. Their goonsuits looked Terranova SI, same as ours, but I kept the
Kayak
where she was, at a thousand feet, with one hand clenched on the He-maker switch. If there were anything other than mad scientist types down there, I was prepared to climb high and fast and rig for running back to Vernadsky, where the odds would be more in my favor.

“Mom, it’s okay,” Paddy said. “It’s the gravediggers.”

“Gravediggers” was the accurate though less than felicitous nickname Sean had given the Cydonia expedition. “How do you know?”

“Look.”

I leaned forward, my forehead against the cool surface of the port, and stared down. The six figures had been joined by two more, evidently from the inside of the pillar. Five of the figures had extended their arms and formed themselves into a five-pointed star. The other three, also with extended arms, were arranged in something that looked like a dipper standing on its handle.

“It’s a question mark, Mom,” Sean said. “A star, followed by a question mark.” He looked at me and grinned. “ ‘Is that you, Star?’ ”

I refused to relax my guard. “Kwan recognized me at Vernadsky. This could be a ruse to get us down on the ground.” I went into CommNav and punched up Channel 9. “Cydonia Base, this is the
Kayak,
Star Svensdotter, commanding. You folks got your ears on?” I leaned my forehead against the port, looking down.

The star and the question mark melted into an agitated mass of waving arms. At the same time several excited voices erupted over the speaker. “Hello,
Kayak
!” “Is this really Star Svensdotter?” “About time you got here!” “Where have you been, we—”

“Cydonia Base!” Silence. “Could I talk to just one person at a time, please?”

There was a pause. As we watched, one of the figures below detached itself from the group and stood a little apart. “Of course, Ms. Svensdotter. I beg your pardon, but when the first new person we see in over a year is Star Svensdotter, one can hardly blame us for a little natural excitement.” He gave a rich chuckle. I loathed people who chuckled richly.