The Long Mars

Maggie noticed that Rosalind and A

Yue-Sai said, ‘Captain, if I may, I would like to go inspect more of this little colony for myself.’

‘You do that.’

As Yue-Sai stood up, David smiled and held out a hand to her. ‘Please, don’t leave us.’

It was a request, not a command. Yet it seemed to have a peculiar effect on Yue-Sai. She stood frozen, as if unwilling to disobey him. But then she shook her head, turned away, and left the tepee.

‘And you say there were no survivors,’ Mac pressed now. ‘From the crew, I mean. None but the five of you.’

David spread his hands. ‘What can I say? They kept us safe – in an i

‘I’m sure you can.’

David described how over the following days, weeks, they had taken the bodies, bagged up, to a burial site some distance away. ‘We needed to stay here, by the wreck. We needed its raw materials for our survival, and we knew any rescue attempt would be drawn here. We buried the bodies decently.’

Mac pressed him on exactly where. David was vague, as if distressed to be pushed to recall such a difficult time.

‘All the questions you ask, Doctor Mackenzie – look, the Armstrong crew saved us. They gave their lives to do so. This is the noblest sacrifice imaginable. Really, is there anything else to be said?’

Even Maggie felt there wasn’t. ‘Let’s take a break.’

Quietly, however, she detailed Nathan to keep David and the others as busy as possible. ‘The rest of you, spread out. There are only five of them, they can’t tag us all.’ Then she turned to Mac, who remained expressionless. ‘I don’t know if anything’s wrong here. But—’

Mac said, ‘These kids are just too damn likeable. Right?’

‘Something like that. I’d prefer to take a look around myself . . .’

32

MAGGIE FOUND THAT the reactions of the crew to these Happy Landers was extreme – mixed, but extreme. ‘Like they all love them or hate them,’ Mac growled. ‘Mostly they love ’em,’ he admitted.

In those terms, Gerry Hemingway was a lover.

‘You should see what they’ve done with the native ecosystem, Captain. Those experimental fields out front? You understand we have a mix of life origins here on this world, with Datum types – our DNA type – mixed in with at least one other kind. Well, they’ve been experimenting, through domestication, even a little genetic tinkering using equipment scavenged from the Armstrong’s lab. They’re developing useful crops, for food, fabrics, drugs, from the DNA stock. And they’re using the partner life forms to support that – as nitrogen fixers, for instance, pest control, even using them as natural, self-repairing supports for the crops.’

‘And that affair with the wires and the batteries and the jars?’

‘Power production. Milking the photosynthesizing plants for energy to be stored in the batteries, or to crack water for hydrogen. They’ve made incredible progress, though it’s hard to judge the details – hard to judge exactly what it is they’ve done, they don’t seem to write stuff down. And when they try to explain it – Rachel spent fifteen minutes with me, she was open enough, but—’ He shook his head. ‘I was a slow starter at grade school, you know, Captain. Made up for it later. Speaking to her, to this kid from the boonies, from some place where they don’t even have proper schools – this kid who must have been self-taught in every discipline we discussed – Captain, she made my head spin. I felt like I was back at grade school again, and she got kind of impatient when I couldn’t keep up, like she wasn’t used to being asked to clarify her statements.’

Mac gri

Maggie said, ‘Shut up, Mac. So they’re – well, they’re smarter than us. More inventive, faster learning.’

‘I’d say by a significant degree,’ Hemingway said seriously.

‘I’d agree with that,’ Mac said. ‘And not just smarter academically. Smarter with people too. You can see it by the way they’re dazzling everybody. It’s all subtle signals, subtexts, body language. All working just under the radar of the conscious mind.’

‘But they ain’t foolin’ you, huh, Mac?’

‘Maybe I’m better at recognizing this stuff than most. I did some psychology options before they let me out into the wild, you know. Once did a term paper on Hitler. How he got so many people to do what he wanted. You can analyse it quite specifically.’

Hemingway scoffed. ‘You’re not seriously comparing David, say, to Hitler.’

‘These guys are worse, potentially. Hitler had the charisma but he wasn’t all that smart – probably wouldn’t have lost his war otherwise. These characters are smarter than us – Maggie, I’d like to try IQ tests and such on them, I predict they’d break the scale. Definitively smarter. And smart people can fascinate, baffle, like a magician bamboozling a five-year-old kid.’

If Hemingway was a fan and Mac an immediate sceptic, Wu Yue-Sai, despite seeming briefly dazzled herself, was definitely growing suspicious. She showed Maggie around the rest of the settlement. Most of the fields were scratches, the structures half-finished. And, in a roughly dug pit, there were heaps of ration packs from the downed Armstrong, all scraped clean, even MREs, military-class meals ready to eat, usually a last resort when it came to cuisine choices.

‘Captain, one must have sympathy for their plight. Whatever happened to bring them here, we have five Crusoes, pitched into an alien wilderness with a challenge to survive. Yet they are five young people, strong, healthy and very smart, who have spent years here. And, aside from their remarkable experimental set-up which Lieutenant Hemingway has shown you, they have made remarkably little progress. It’s as if what they have achieved, save for the basic provision for shelter and so on, has been – well, for show. Half-finished, abandoned.’

Mac grunted. ‘Eating off ship’s rations while meddling with the plants’ genetic make-up. Five Doctor Frankensteins.’

‘But no Igor,’ Maggie said with a grin.

Wu Yue-Sai said slyly, ‘Actually I understand that reference. It is odd you should say that, Captain. I think they do have an Igor.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look here.’

She showed them one of the secondary structures, a rough tepee that contained nothing but a heap of fire-damaged clothing, presumably hauled from the crash. Yue-Sai had examined the structure closely, even pulling the supporting struts out of the ground. And she had found, roughly scratched into one strut – far enough down that it would have been buried, out of sight – a pair of initials.

‘SA,’ Mac read. ‘There’s no “S” among the group we met.’

Yue-Sai said, ‘Indeed not. Then who is SA? Was it SA, in fact, who built this structure?’

At that moment Snowy came ru

When he reached Maggie he stopped, straightened up, as if morphing back to human form, and saluted her. ‘Captain. I have ff-found . . . You ss-see.’

Making his own investigation, he’d followed scents. That was very wolf-like, Maggie thought. Covering a lot of ground quickly, he’d followed one trail to a clump of forest, of comparatively tall trees in this bonsai world. In the heart of the wood he’d found a cage, swathed in silver survival blankets under a covering of leaves – those blankets would have rendered the set-up invisible to infrared sensors, Maggie realized.