Red Planet Run (26 page)

I shifted uneasily. “I have a hard time buying into a theory that requires a full-scale planetary invasion. It just isn’t, I don’t know, economical I guess is the right word. Think of the distances involved, the materiel required. My God, the
time”

“Could have been an internal dispute,” Sukenik said. “Wouldn’t be the first time that happened on a dig.”

Sestieri gave her a skeptical look. “We archaeologists don’t generally blow up the structures we discover.”

“Speaking of blowing things up, where is it?” I asked.

“Where’s what?”

“The device.” I looked around the galley. “Whatever it was you found that you told Helen Ricadonna about, the thing you thought might be a weapon and might be pointed at Prometheus.”

All eyes turned to me in blank astonishment. After a brief silence, Art said carefully, “Star, the Tholus is the first structure we been inside since we got here. Basically, for the past year we just been mapping the area, getting a feel for the relationships of the structures. They’re too big and most of them too crusted over to start excavation. The scale we’re talking about here—we’re too small a crew even to think of that. The only reason we started digging at the Tholus was because it had the base with the smallest circumference, so our chances of finding something were good relative to the time we’d spend. We just purely lucked out.”

“There isn’t any weapon?”

He shook his head.

“You haven’t found anything that indicates whoever was here was taking an interest in Prometheus?”

He shook his head again, “In Terra, maybe, if Amedeo is right about the Face.”

Paddy and Sean were sitting on grins, and I leaned back with a sigh. “Do you know Helen Ricadonna, Art?”

“Can’t say I’ve had the pleasure.”

“You don’t know how lucky you are.”

There was silence for a moment as we all became busy with our own thoughts. Sean broke it eventually, a frown creasing his forehead. “Mom?”

“What, Sean?”

“Remember all those evenings on Outpost when we used to sit around the galley and talk about Prometheus and if it really ever did exist and if so, what happened to it?”

“Yes,” I said, and explained for the gravediggers’ benefit, “Our favorite topic of after-dinner conversation on Outpost. Did the Belt grow or was it made? Was it once a planet or always just a loose collection of cosmic dust flying in formation?”

“It was my understanding that some proof had been found of previous planetary presence,” Woolley said.

“So far, it’s pretty inconclusive.” I told them of the few artifacts we’d found, and he stroked his mustache and nodded wisely.

“So who won the nightly arguments?” Evans said with a grin.

“Nobody. There were almost as many theories as there were asteroids, and the theoreticians outnumbered both.” I turned to Sean, who sat waiting with an impatient expression, “So you were saying?”

“So, as I was about to say before I was so rudely interrupted, when a scientist starts a new culture in a lab, he doesn’t start just one sample.” Bright blue eyes met mine. “He starts a bunch, and tests them with different stimuli, and then he watches what happens, and takes notes on how each reacts to that stimuli.”

“Here we go,” Paddy said, rolling her eyes.

Sean looked at her, his jaw pushed out. He looked positively australopithecus. “Paddy, maybe Emaa and Maggie Lu are right. Maybe Terrans were planted. Like cultures. Maybe, just maybe”—he raised his voice when Paddy groaned—“the Prometheans were, too.”

“ ‘Too hot, too cold, just right?’ ” I quoted his own words back at him.

Evans regarded Sean with a crooked smile. “Y’all reckon we’ve come home to Eden?”

Sean looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe the scientist lived here, at Cydonia. When something went wrong on Prometheus—it doesn’t matter what—the survivors fled to Terra. Maybe they were farther along than Terra, and maybe they brought their knowledge with them but they didn’t have room for anything else. Like—like maybe Democritus; we were just studying him in our history of science class, remember? Democritus’ speculation on the existence of the atom was strictly philosophical, not practical. He couldn’t physically prove the atom’s existence. But he could plant the seed of its probability.”

“And the seed sprouted twenty-three hundred years later with Dalton,” Evelyn Carter said, looking at Sean with a dawning respect.

“Democritus was born a hundred and fifty years after Prometheus allegedly exploded,” Paddy pointed out.

Sean shook his head. “Stop being so dogmatic, Paddy. What is it with you, you’re so in love with Darwin you can’t admit another possibility? I’m not pissing in the face of the theory of evolution, I’m just saying we may have stumbled over a corollary. It’s one hypothesis that fits the facts available to us thus far.” He paused, pleased with the way he’d put that, and added shrewdly, “You can’t ignore facts just because you don’t like them, Paddy. You have to recognize them, make them fit into some kind of framework.”

“You still haven’t told us what all this has to do with the Face,” she said obstinately. She got her stubbornness from her father.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he said impatiently. So did Sean. “If we were planted, cultured, whatever, maybe the scientist had an idea that sooner or later we’d start exploring.” At her look of blatant disbelief he said hotly, “Who says we’re the only Petri dish in his lab? I’ve got one pot for strawberries and another for tomatoes.”

Paddy rolled her eyes again. “Great, so now we’re tomatoes.”

There was a titter of laughter and Sean flushed. “Compared to the scientist, maybe we are. Anyway, about the Face. If the scientist had a reasonable expectation—a close-up and personal look at Homo erectus, say?—that we would evolve to the point where we could build telescopes to look through and spaceships to travel in, maybe he’d put something here to draw our attention. Maybe it would be a face, shaped in the likeness of what we looked like back then. There’s nothing like looking in a telescope and seeing yourself look back to pique the curiosity.” He looked at me. “Maybe we’re meant to be here, poking around. Maybe that’s why the door to the Ghoul opened when Mom knocked on it, and maybe
that’s
why the steps up fit our stride.”

“But why the Ghoul?” Paddy said.

“Meteors!” he yelled. “If the scientist thought we were going to get smart enough to come look, he probably figured
we’d
figure out a way to get around the Ghoul. And Paddy”— he pointed a finger at her—“we
did
.” He sat back, very erect, and dared her to contradict him. When she opened her mouth he beat her to it. “Okay, smarty, if Cydonia is none of these things, then
what is it?”

She had no answer for him. Nor had I.

Into the silence Sestieri said, “Curiouser and curiouser.” She ticked them off on her fingers: “Terra, Prometheus, now Mars. Has anybody else noticed how much weirder things get the farther out we move from the sun?”

We relaxed into a laugh, and Sukenik gave her an affectionate hug. “There’s a lesson to be learned in that profound observation, I’m sure, but I’m damned if I know what it is.”

Me, either.

· · ·

That night I forswore sleep for staring at the ceiling.

Sean was right about one thing: Prometheus had nothing on Cydonia. The stairwell in the pillar had been too small for me, but I was 193 centimeters tall and weighed over 70 kays. I remembered the suits of armor in the Tower of London, the reconstruction of Homo erectus skeletons in the American Museum of Natural History. What if that stairwell had been constructed for the human race as it had been and not as it would be?

Had the pillar in the Tholus been built with the long-term goal of admitting us one day?

Had the Face been constructed solely for our benefit, to intrigue us enough to take a closer look?

If so, what else waited for us on this spot in the northern hemisphere of the Red Planet?

It took a while to resolve the various relationships of the Cydonia Expedition, and when I did I was more confused than before.

Thomas and Jeanne Champollion were the absent team leaders, physicist and astronomer respectively, unusual occupations for archaeologists, but then this wasn’t your usual archaeological expedition and it was far from being the usual archaeological dig. Jeanne was also ship’s captain. We had yet to meet them, as they called the Tholus base camp the evening we arrived and said they were staying on at the Pyramid for a few more days. They didn’t say much more, according to Evans, who seemed a little aggrieved at their lack of excitement over the team’s excavation and entry into the Ghoul. I didn’t have the heart to suggest that they may have uncovered something even more exciting.

Maximilian and Agatha Woolley were the team leaders-in-waiting, and with every sideways glance, every hint of a sneer, every disdainful sniff, indicated that they should have been in charge. A tubby, fussy little man, Dr. Woolley was an archaeologist’s archaeologist, son and grandson of archaeologists before him, and so steeped in the lore of his craft that with little encouragement, and frequently no encouragement at all, he held forth for hours on the philosophical raison d'être of excavation. He was determined to be the definitive voice on Cydonia (he had taken furious notes throughout the discussion following our entrance into the Ghoul), and was equally determined to fit the complex into historical perspective, complete with beginning, middle, and end. He thought in layers, or strata as archaeologists called them, one stratum at a time, and fussed over details. It had taken the team three days to get him to agree to removing the sand around the base of the pillar. His rationale? Excavation by its very nature was destructive. If the Cydonia Expedition was ever to be able to render with honesty an account of the lives of the creators of the Cydonia complex, it was required of the team not to be rash or foolhardy in their haste to strip bare the bones of this archaeological skeleton. He really talked like that.

Action was not Dr. Woolley’s forte, which might have been the Champollions’ reason for leaving him in charge. For nothing to happen until they returned might have been their primary goal; if so, the Woolleys fulfilled that goal admirably. But I might have been attributing Machiavellian purposes to an entirely innocent couple. Any scientific expedition financed by a multinational coalition was always an acutely political animal. I remembered some of the incompetents wished on me by Colony Control in the early days at Copernicus Base, and reserved judgment.

Dr. Woolley was short, so naturally Mrs. Woolley was shorter, and thin, and sour in expression and disposition. Agatha was a Cordon Bleu chef, as she reminded everyone at least once a day. So far as I could tell, that was the only skill she contributed to the expedition. It was quite enough. When she discovered Sean’s herb garden, she geared down like International Harvester in Iowa in August. Sean caught up with her between the parsley and the basil, both hands full of incriminating sprigs, and for a moment I was afraid he would do her bodily harm. Roger Lindbergh would have been proud of him.

Howard and Evelyn Carter were the third couple. Howard was the team’s artist, specializing in exact, delicate water-color illustrations of his immediate surroundings. From what I observed, the only time he looked at anything other than his wife was when he was drawing it to scale. Evelyn Carter was the team’s conservation expert, and the one most responsible for soothing Dr. Woolley down to the point where he could bear to see a shovel bite into the soil surrounding the entrance to the pillar in the Tholus. She was everything her husband wasn’t; bubbly, outgoing, even a little rambunctious from time to time. She made people laugh. She could also make them angry; her pugnacity in insisting on what should be done to preserve an artifact was as irritating as it was inflexible. Evans, who had advocated immediate excavation upon discovery of the pillar, and Woolley, who had held out staunchly against it, were neither of them speaking to her when we arrived.

For the rest of them… I’ve had people call me prudish because I don’t see sex as a team sport. I don’t mind; monogamy is a matter of personal preference and a lot of people find it limiting. The gravediggers at Cydonia certainly did. Sestieri, the epigrapher, and Sukenik, the surveyor, were gay and the fourth couple in the group; but de Caro, the dating expert, and Evans, the photographer, weren’t and weren’t the fifth. Twelve months’ enforced celibacy could have led to some sexual tension (back on Luna and Ellfive I’d seen just twelve weeks of it result in unique, I might even say bizarre, mating dances between couples old enough to know better), and I admit I was curious to find out why there was none in the Tholus camp. From what I gathered in general conversation, the Champollions were an efficient and self-sufficient team. Bed-hopping would lead to the deterioration of their authority and the team’s effectiveness, in that order, so they didn’t. Max and Agatha considered the whole subject beneath their dignity.

That left Howard and Evelyn. Their attraction to and attachment for each other was evident in every look and gesture, but Tuesdays Evelyn slept in Art’s room, Thursdays in Amedeo’s, saving weekends for her husband. The first Tuesday evening I spent in their camp and saw this happen I was hard put to it to get my jaw up off the floor, but mine was not to reason why, and it worked, as witness the affection and esteem the four of them showed each other, and that was all that mattered.

Until Paddy and I showed up.

Under the pretext of reviewing the Martian data the
Kayak
had collected to date, both Art Evans and Amedeo de Caro spent a lot of time on board. We’d have had to have been blind and deaf not to notice they were as interested in Paddy and me as they were in the data, but they behaved themselves, so I let it slide. They looked a lot, yearningly, but they didn’t touch. I maintained an air of cheerful friendliness and waited for our newness to wear off.

Then one day I walked in on Paddy and Amedeo in Atlas and Igneous. They were kissing, if you can call an activity that involved that much tongue and both sets of teeth and all four hands and an intense, steamy kind of concentration mere kissing. The temperature in the room went up five degrees in the four seconds I stood there, petrified. I had to clear my throat twice before I was heard. They pulled apart. Amedeo’s face was flushed and he wouldn’t meet my eyes, which was okay since I couldn’t meet his. Paddy was pink-cheeked but perfectly composed.