The Long Mars

Paul was just ten when he was taken away from his father.

‘Paul knows me too well,’ Tom said to Joshua, when they met at the Madison Home in the spring of 2036. Joshua was back to see how the Sisters were coping in the aftermath of the death of Sister Agnes, the previous year. ‘How I broke up with his mother,’ Tom said, ‘and she took little Judy away. By the way, Carla’s coping no better than me, I can tell you – she has just the same issues with Judy as we had when Paul grew up. And he knows how I screwed up at work. Paul saw all that, he understood far more about it than any damn kid ought to. About what’s going on inside my skull, I mean.’ He shook his greying head regretfully. ‘When he takes me apart over some flaw or foul-up, it’s – crushing. I don’t feel like a father with an uppity kid. I feel like a pet dog being punished. Totally subordinate.

‘But it’s worse when he’s deliberately cruel. Oh, I don’t mean physically, I guess I could handle that. He can slice you to pieces with words. Damn kid. And you know what the worst of it is? He does it just because he can. For fun – no, not even that. For curiosity. To see what happens when he opens you up, like cutting open a frog. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he is just a kid, but . . .’

A little digging revealed that Paul’s sister Judy had by now also been taken away from her mother. And, such was the whim of the care system, the siblings were kept apart.

Paul, meanwhile, it was clear, was not happy, not settling anywhere, and in danger of spiralling out of control. After a couple more disastrous attempts at foster care, Joshua pulled a few strings. Paul was taken into the Home in Madison, and placed under the stern but perceptive care of the Sisters.

After that, Joshua saw him more regularly. The boy remained a mystery, though, to Joshua and the Sisters, as he grew into a strange maturity.

25

WILLIS LINSAY APPEARED to be right about the stepwise geography of the Long Mars, Frank Wood observed.

Most of the stepwise Marses, at a first glance, as seen from the gliders riding in the high, thin air, were all but exactly the same. The pilots kept their dust-streaked birds hovering over their landing-site area of the Mangala Vallis, a huge arid landscape, and generally little changed from world to world, as it had been from the begi

But all of these beneficent accidents seemed limited in time. It might take years, centuries, mille

For example, about two hundred thousand steps East of the Gap, the gliders had swept over what looked like the remains of a mighty ocean that must have covered, if briefly, the plains of the northern hemisphere. Sites like Mangala showed signs of having become sea coasts, and Willis pointed out stranded beaches, what looked like a petrified forest a short distance inland, and salt plains on the dried-out ocean floor.

When they swept down for a closer look, they saw conical casts on the seabed, casts as tall as pyramids created by some immense snake – maybe a relative, in a common-origin sense, of the sand whales they’d seen before – and scattered plates like abandoned armour that might have come from something like the crustacean predators. Even bones, resembling a huge ribcage as if of a whale, sitting on a dry ocean floor.

At last, on the twelfth day, some half a million steps East of their starting point, they came upon traces of sapience. They found a city.

Set upon the high land to the south of Mangala, straight-line avenues still showed under the dust, and towers loomed, tall and bone-white. But there was no sign of extant life.

They had got in the habit of swapping over crew and rotating piloting responsibilities, to keep everybody fresh and experienced, and so that the pilots got used to the quirks of both machines. The day they found the city, Frank was riding shotgun as Sally piloted Thor, while Willis flew Woden solo. And so Frank was able to take in the scenery as Sally took the bird down close to the ground, and swept towards the city.

One peculiarity of their flight was that, such was the thi

Sally grunted. ‘I’m trying to concentrate here.’

‘Sorry.’

‘How’s the data capture?’

Frank glanced at a tablet beside his seat, which showed megabytes of data from imaging systems, sonar, radar, an atmospheric sample suite, pouring into the glider’s compact memory. They even had radio receivers listening out for any evidence of transmitters; Mars’s ionosphere was feeble and would be a poor reflector of radio waves, but you never knew, and it seemed remiss not to listen. ‘All in hand,’ he said. ‘Quite a place, isn’t it? From the air the city looked like – I don’t know – a chess set. From here, down and dirty, those towers look like cracked teeth. But taller than anything you could build on Earth.’

Willis called over, ‘That’s the low gravity for you.’

Sally said, ‘But the towers didn’t save them when the final wars came. Look down.’

Now, in the rubble-littered roadways and even inside some of the smashed buildings, Frank saw wreckage: segments of casing, articulated limbs, as if torn from some immense spider. They were made of some kind of metal, perhaps, or ceramic. These fragments were broken, crushed, blown open, and the road surfaces and walls were pitted with bomb craters. All of this was covered with a fine sheen of rust-red dust, wind-blown.

Frank asked, ‘Why do you say “final wars”?’

Sally said, ‘Because evidently there was nobody left to clean up when it was done. Many of these Joker islands-in-time must have ended in wars, mustn’t they? When the climate collapsed, the survivors would have fought over the last of the water – the last trees to burn – maybe they made sacrifices to appease their gods. All patterns familiar from Datum Earth’s history; that’s what we’d do. Stupidity is a universal, it seems.’

In this city like a vast cemetery, that cold remark made Frank wince.

Willis said, ‘I doubt if there’s anything more for us here. I’ll go down to take a few samples. Follow me if you like.’

Frank saw Woden dip towards a broad flat area outside the city. He asked Sally, ‘How about it? Need to stretch your legs?’

‘I’ll be fine. You?’

‘Skip it. I’m doing my couch yoga as we speak.’ To conserve the methane fuel they needed to launch from the ground, they were trying to minimize landings.

Sally tugged on her joystick. Thor’s nose lifted, and the glider spiralled into the high air. Once again the city was reduced to a toy-like diorama, with no visible trace of bomb blasts or insectile war machines.

Frank switched to the internal intercom, so Willis couldn’t listen in. ‘So, Sally.’

‘What?’

‘“Stupidity is a universal.” I’ve heard you say that kind of thing before. Are you serious?’