The Long Mars

He said to Sally, ‘Those skids look like bone. Maybe these guys are like the old nineteenth-century whalers who used to build bits of the beasts they brought down into their boats . . . Sally, what’s that you’re singing?’

‘It’s called “Harpoon of Love”. Just a stray memory – never mind.’

Willis growled, ‘And look ahead, to the north.’

Frank levelled the glider and looked that way, away from the bloody commotion below him. And he saw, standing up from the smooth flatness of the seabed, a series of dark bands, slender, vertical, black against the purplish sky of this world.

Monoliths. Five of them.

All this was too much for Frank to take in. ‘I don’t believe it. Land-dragons? Crustacean whalers in sand-yachts? And now this?’

Sally said, ‘What, would you prefer another dead Mars?’

‘I’m at the limit of my scope’s resolution,’ Willis called back. ‘And this damn air is full of dust, and moisture. But I think those slabs bear some kind of inscription.’

Frank said wildly, ‘What inscription? Prime number sequences? A build-your-own-wormhole instruction manual?’

‘Something like that, possibly,’ Willis said, reasonably patiently in the circumstances. ‘The legacy of the Ancients.’

Sally snapped. ‘What are you talking about? What Ancients?’

‘Oh, come on,’ Frank said with a smile. ‘This is Mars. This is the story of Mars, which is always an old world, old and worn down. There are always monuments left behind by the Ancients, the vanished ones, enigmatic inscriptions . . .’

Willis growled, ‘Let’s stick to reality. We’re not going to know any more until we take a copy of those inscriptions back home for a proper analysis.’ His glider tipped towards the monoliths. ‘We have to get in there and record it all, maybe take a sample of the monolith material itself. Then we’ll go on—’

‘After finding this you want to go on?’

‘Sure. This is wonderful. But it’s not what I came looking for. And—’

Behind him, Sally cried out. ‘Ow, Jeez, my head . . .’

An instant later, Frank felt it too.

For the rest of that day, they tried every way they could think of to get close enough to the monoliths to record their surface images. But something was blocking their approach.

If they flew in, or even if they landed and tried to walk in, they all suffered blinding, agonizing headaches. Sally was reminded of the pressure Joshua Valienté claimed he had felt in the presence of the huge entity they knew as First Person Singular. Or the way the trolls were repelled by the density of human consciousness on Datum Earth. Evidently humanoids shared some kind of faculty, a sensitivity to mind – a faculty that these hypothetical ‘Ancients’ were able to manipulate.

Willis tried to trick the mechanism by moving to a stepwise world, moving in closer to the monolith site, and stepping in – but the pain nearly disabled him, even stepwise where there was no direct trace of the monoliths.

They tried sending in their drone aircraft, but another defence strategy came into play. The little planes were just pushed away, physically, as if by an invisible hand in the air, until they reached some limit beyond which their automatic guidance cut back in, and they would turn and try again. Willis wanted to try sending in one of the gliders under remote control, but the others vetoed that.

‘Whatever is written on there,’ Frank sadly concluded, ‘it’s not meant for us. Those Ancients of yours are keeping us out, Willis.’

‘Oh, we’re not beaten yet. We’ll find a way.’

They landed a safe distance away from the sand-whalers.

Later, as the light was fading, as they were setting up a bubble tent for the night, Sally pointed to the north. ‘Look. At the feet of the monoliths. My eye was caught by something . . . I see a dust trail. And are those sand-yachts?’

They were, Frank confirmed, by looking through binoculars held up to his pressure-suit faceplate. Three, four, five of the whalers were rushing past the base of the monoliths as if they didn’t exist. ‘They aren’t even slowing down.’

Willis said, ‘Infuriating. Those sand-whalers have absolutely no idea what they’re dealing with here. The monoliths are just a feature of the landscape to them.’

‘Which,’ Sally said, ‘might be why they can get so close.’

Frank said, ‘Maybe the monoliths are meant for them, some day – not us. Listen, I’m satisfied we’re far enough from those whalers that they won’t bother us tonight. But you don’t take chances. I think we should keep some kind of watch in case those guys come visiting.’

‘Agreed,’ Sally said.

Willis stood there, still in his pressure suit, thinking. ‘We ought to send up one of the gliders. Just to make sure they don’t sneak up on us.’

Frank considered. ‘That seems excessive, Willis. A drone will do just as well.’

‘No, no.’ He strode off. ‘I’ll take Woden. Better to be sure . . .’

Of course there was no stopping him. And of course he’d lied. He’d had no intention of serving as some aerial sentry.

Once he had Woden in the air, there was absolutely nothing Frank and Sally could do to stop him turning the glider’s nose south, towards the main party of whalers.

‘He hasn’t even got the comms system on, damn him,’ Frank growled, frustrated, twisted up with anxiety. ‘What the hell’s he doing?’

Sally seemed calm. ‘Gone to find a way to get those images he wants,’ she said. ‘What else? That’s what my father does. He goes and gets what he wants.’

‘He’ll get himself killed, that’s what he’ll go and get. He’s your father. You seem cool about it.’

She shrugged. ‘What can I do?’

Frank shook his head. ‘If you fix up the tent, I’ll go check over Thor. Make sure we’re ready to go get him out of there fast if we need to.’

‘Fair enough.’

In the end Willis didn’t make his approach to the whalers until first light.

Frank, who had spent a fretful, sleepless night swathed in his half-closed pressure suit, was wakened by a soft beep from the comms system. ‘Sally. He’s online.’

She sat up immediately; she always slept very lightly.

‘Go ahead, Willis—’

Frank found himself staring at a screen image of the upraised carcass of a giant insect-like creature, taller than a man when it stood upright. Over a tough-looking exoskeleton it wore belts and bandoliers containing tools, loops of rope, and it held a spear in three, four of its multiple limbs, a spear with a rope attached: a harpoon. All this was seen through a greyish mist. And the creature was pointing the spear straight into the camera.

‘Convergent evolution,’ Willis’s voice murmured.

‘Willis?’

‘You’re seeing what I’m seeing, through my helmet cam. Convergent evolution. That harpoon might have come from a Nantucket whaling ship. Similar problems demand similar solutions.’

Sally asked, ‘What’s that grey mist? The vision’s blurred—’

‘I’m in a survival bag.’ A gloved hand appeared, pushing at a translucent wall. ‘In my pressure suit, in a bag.’

The bags were simple zip-up plastic sacks with small compressed-air units. They were meant for decompression emergencies when you couldn’t reach a pressure suit; you just jumped in a bag, zipped it up, and the released air would keep you alive for a while. You had very limited mobility, with tube-like sleeves for arms and legs to allow some capability; essentially you were supposed to wait for rescue from somebody better equipped.

‘I rigged out a few bags to provide the local air, so these whaler guys can use them.’

Sally frowned. ‘Air bags? Why do these guys need air bags? They live here.’

‘I’m recording this encounter in case it doesn’t work out. You might learn from my mistakes next time.’

Frank snapped, ‘Next time what?’

‘Next time you approach these guys to go in and record the monolith inscriptions for you.’ He held up his other gloved hand; it held, awkwardly, a small handheld cam, and a stack of Stepper boxes.