The Long Mars

‘Something like that. I think this may have been some kind of telescope – like Arecibo, rigged up in the natural bowl of the crater. If the surface was mirror-like, maybe it was optical. You’d get a great view of Earth with a thing like that, given its location.’

They flew deeper into the bowl itself now. Frank was wary of any surviving superstructure, but he saw nothing: the destruction had been comprehensive. Piled up in the bowl’s depths was a tangle of smashed equipment, much of it of elaborately sculpted metal. At first he could discern no signs of life, no biology down there. But then he made out shards of chitin that looked vaguely familiar.

‘Put us down,’ Willis said. ‘We may as well take a few samples. Sally, stay aloft . . .’

They came down a short distance from the mirrored pit, and walked over.

When they clambered down into the pit itself, clumsy in their pressure suits, the deep cold seemed to intensify. At the bottom, there was no sign of recent activity; a layer of windblown dust seemed undisturbed. Willis snipped a few samples of metal components, the reflective surface, the chitin-like remains.

Frank said, ‘This shell stuff looks familiar. Like traces of the crustaceans we’ve been seeing from the begi

‘So it does. There is a certain consistency, isn’t there? I’m thinking of what we’ve seen: the crustaceans, the whales. A kind of common palette; maybe we’re going to find distorted versions of those families wherever we go, differently evolved.

‘I think I see how it would work . . . You have a rapid evolution of life forms, species, families, genera, while Mars is young. Pretty much identical on every world of the Long Mars. But then a given Mars shrivels, and whatever survives has to hibernate, aestivate. Mostly Mars stays dead, but on Jokers like this the root stock takes its chances when they come, adapting in different ways depending on the details of the environment. An endless reshaping of the same primordial stock – variations on the theme of whales and crustaceans, and maybe other sorts we’ve yet to identify.’ As he spoke Willis kept working, patiently studying the melancholy debris. ‘I’ll run this through the assay gear on the glider.’

‘I take it the tech artefacts you’re looking for aren’t here.’

‘No. Disappointingly. Though this is the highest culture technologically we’ve encountered.’

‘You’ll know it when you see it, will you, whatever it is?’

‘You can bet on it.’

‘How do you even know this thing exists?’

Willis didn’t look up from his work. ‘This is Mars. On such a world it’s a logical necessity.’

Frank knew that they were all getting on each other’s nerves anyhow, but this deliberate obscurity of Willis’s increasingly niggled him. What was he, a chauffeur who couldn’t be trusted with the truth? ‘Secrecy and certainty, huh? Those traits have helped your career, have they?’

Willis just ignored him, which a

‘Sally compared you to Daedalus. I looked him up. In some versions of the story he invented the labyrinth on Crete, where they kept the Minotaur. Problem was, he didn’t think through the consequences. Made the labyrinth so intricate it was hard to pin down the beast if you needed to slay it. Not only that, it had a design flaw. With a simple ball of thread you could make a trail to find your way out – Daedalus never thought of that.’

‘Is this storytelling going anywhere, Wood?’

‘Maybe you are more like Daedalus than you think. What will you do with this bit of Martian tech, if you find it? Just unleash it on the world, like the Stepper box? You know, you and Sally, father and daughter, you both treat mankind like it’s some unruly kid. Sally slaps us around the back of the head when she thinks we’re misbehaving. And you, your way of teaching us responsibility is to hand us a loaded gun and let us learn by trial and error.’

Willis thought that over. ‘You’re just sore because you’re an old space cadet. Right? Step Day stopped you from getting to fly around in the space station measuring the thickness of your piss in zero gravity, or whatever those guys did up there for all those years. Well, bad luck for you. And whatever we do, at least we have mankind’s best interests at heart. Me and Sally, I mean. Now. Does this conversation have any point, Frank?’

Frank sighed. ‘Just trying to figure you two out.’ He looked down at the silent war zone. ‘God knows there isn’t much else to do on this trip . . .’

‘Ground party, Thor.’

Frank tapped the control panel on his chest to switch over his comms circuit. ‘Go ahead, Sally.’

‘I’m picking up some residual background radiation.’

Now there was movement, out of the corner of Frank’s eye. A vent of some greenish smoke, puffing into the air from a pile of dust-coated debris.

Sally said, ‘The builders and warriors are long dead, but maybe the junk they left behind isn’t. Suggest you get out of there.’

‘Copy that. Come on, Willis.’

Willis followed without arguing as Frank clambered out of the pit. Frank glanced up at Sally, flying high in the air, a Martian Icarus. Then he looked away, concentrating on where he put his booted feet on the uneven slope.

27

EVERYBODY ON MAGGIE’S airship thought they’d have to get out of the ‘Anaerobic Belt’ before they came across complex life once more. As it turned out, everybody was wrong, and not for the first time.

Earth West 161,753,428: ten days after they’d entered this thick band of oxygen-free worlds, the twains drifted over a landscape teeming with life, big, complicated, active life. Evidently this was a new complexity band – but, this deep into the stepwise worlds, the life forms they saw below were very different from anything they’d encountered before.

Maggie was standing in the observation gallery with some of her senior crew. These included Mac and Snowy the beagle, at her insistence, in the vague hope that forcing the two of them into the same space might bring to a head whatever issue was bubbling between them. Not yet it hadn’t. And, as it happened, Captain Ed Cutler was here too; he’d come over for his weekly face-to-face with Maggie.

The ships, side by side, were drifting through a yellowish sky laced with very odd-looking clouds, over a greenish sea, that lapped against a shore of pale brown streaked with scarlet, purple. The very colour scheme was distracting, as though it had come out of some doped-up college student’s imagination. On the land were banks of what had to be vegetation, including what looked to Maggie like ‘trees’, tall structures with trunks and some kind of leaf-like arrangement on the top, evidently a universal formation wherever you needed light from the sky but had to be rooted to the ground for nutrients. But those ‘leaves’ were crimson, not green. Gerry Hemingway had told her they were busily photosynthesizing, leveraging the sun’s energy – but unlike Datum trees, what they seemed to be absorbing from the air was not carbon dioxide but carbon monoxide, and what they were producing was not sweet oxygen but hydrogen sulphide and other unpleasant compounds. Around the clumps of ‘forest’, meanwhile, stretched swathes of some kind of ‘prairie’ of more diverse vegetation, but nobody knew what the hell grew there yet.

And, among the vegetation, animals moved. Nothing like Datum animals. Maggie made out a disc, translucent, huge, like a cross between a jellyfish and a Hollywood UFO, that slithered and slurped and morphed its way over the land. No, not just one disc: a whole family, a herd maybe, big adults with little ones skittering alongside. Gerry Hemingway wondered if they moved by some kind of ground effect, like an airship.

It didn’t aid comprehension that all this was played out at a manic speed, as if the world outside was stuck on fast-forward. Hemingway’s biologists suggested that was something to do with the higher temperatures of this world, an increase in available energy. Still, whatever the justification, Maggie wished all this shit would just slow down. And—