Equilateral (7 page)

Mars! The mythmakers have associated it with armed conflict, poets have sung of it, and, finally, in this century, astronomers have identified the sphere as home to living organisms, the solar system’s only other world known to be inhabited, a world with bodies of water and an atmosphere. Astronomers have recognized seasonal variations in its flora. They’ve observed the artifacts under construction by Martian intelligence. Now, as it crosses Capricornus night by night toward Aquarius, the planet fairly pulses, fairly breathes, fairly glowers with life. Yet it presents a featureless, dimensionless crimson disk when Thayer first slides it into the view of the eyepiece, which projects from the bottom of the tube. Patience is required. The eye must accustom itself. Light pools on the retina, building an image in the brain. The disk is still tiny, a single carat on a bed of velvet even when enlarged 450 times, as high a magnification as the Clark’s objective lens makes practical.

And still Mars withholds its charms. The disk remains empty of meaning. At the time of the solar system’s murky origins and
in accordance with the unforgiving equations of celestial mechanics, the planet was inserted into an orbit just a few million miles beyond the range of man’s best, most confident scrutiny. It will always beckon him, tantalize him, seduce him, and then remain chaste to his advances, before dancing out of sight into the void.

“The wind’s picked up,” Miss Keaton remarks.

Thayer adjusts his chair to bring it closer to the eyepiece. The seeing has been degraded. There’s an extra twinkle in the stars.

Hoping to find at least one familiar Martian feature, Thayer fixes his study on the southernmost edge of the planet, at the upper part of the inverted image. It’s early spring in the southern hemisphere. Very gradually over several silent, motionless minutes, the glare subsides. First the polar cap becomes visible, pale against the disk, extending to about sixty-five degrees south latitude.

Then, before he’s fully conscious of it, he discerns something stirring on the surface of the planet; no, it’s beneath the surface, bubbling up. Vague ripples. Shadows. Shadows of shadows. They’re there and then they’re gone and then they’re back, more emphatically. The lines shudder before they take the positions where he knows they will be, according to the maps he has drawn himself. The canals. Deeper he looks into the disk and he’s rewarded, for a moment, by a glimpse of the thin gray lines horizontally traversing the circular, elevated Hellas region. This is Peneus, the waterway named after the great river whose waters were employed by Hercules to flush the Augean stables. The vernal melting of the southern ice cap has likely filled the
south-central canals, irrigating the adjacent land. This area at the edge of Mare Australe pullulates with the spring crops, whatever strange vegetable matter they may be.

Thayer teases out the outline of Mare Australe. It’s just more than a month since France-Lanord reported developments in the southern hemisphere.

“Shadowing? Possibly, I’m not sure they’re new,” Thayer murmurs after several minutes, his face still at the eyepiece. For years Thayer and Miss Keaton have spoken to each other in these postures, one stooped at the instrument, the other a few steps back, watching, never looking face-to-face, while they shared their most important observations. “He believes it’s around Peneus.”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” he echoes. After a long while he says, “Damn. Damn the air.”

“Pho.”

“Ah, hold on,” he says. Below the sea, broken in places, lies some kind of new strip or stripe. “Something’s there, I think.” A thready line appears to emanate from Agyre, at the edge of the dead sea—perhaps the vanguard of a waterway project, now that he considers it in the light of France-Lanord’s sketches. Other astronomers who have received the French sketches are also looking hard at the region tonight, seeking to detect a shadow, a discoloration, a figment at the limit of perception on the surface of an object that remains 130 million miles from Earth. Astronomers will study their drawings from previous oppositions. Photographs were taken at the 1892 approach, but their large-grained emulsions, the only ones available, were in-sufficiently
sensitive to reveal what may be apprehended by the human eye. Not a single canal has ever been distinguished in a photograph.

Thayer looks for several minutes and makes a careful sketch in his notebook before he pulls away. “Have a look yourself.”

“Let the poor girl look. She’s shivering.”

Thayer has already forgotten Bint, who’s standing apart from the astronomer and his secretary. She’s wrapped her robe tight against her frame, but it’s hardly enough to keep out the sands’ early morning chill.

Thayer raises his hand and shows Bint the eyepiece.

“Merrikh,” he says.

She takes small steps as she approaches the instrument. Thayer wonders whether she comprehends the telescope’s purpose; whether she will make the connection between the image in the eyepiece and the steady red beacon low above the horizon. She’s small enough to stand erect at the eyepiece. She does as Thayer did, opening her right eye wide to the lens, a few sixteenths of an inch above it. She’s motionless as she demonstrates the native patience that has been won from the desert’s silence.

“Look well, Bint,” Thayer instructs her. “Look hard. Everything worth seeing lies at the edge of visibility.”

Miss Keaton murmurs her assent. This was one of the first lessons Thayer gave her, years ago, when she first came into his employ.

He adds, “Every discovery lies within the standard error of measurement. The most important truths about the cosmos can hardly be separated from illusion.”

“She can’t understand you, Sanford.”

Offered a view through a telescope, most lay observers look briefly, presuming they have seen what they were supposed to. But Bint remains at the eyepiece for minutes, as if in fact she’s directly executing his command. Waiting her turn, Miss Keaton believes she can pick out the reflection of the planet’s image on the surface of the girl’s eye. She thinks she may even see in this mirroring the creamy tip of the ice cap. Thayer also watches Bint attentively, expectantly. He too perceives the sanguine glint. Bint’s moist, budlike lips are parted as she gazes into the eyepiece. Miss Keaton reconsiders. The girl is slender and submissive, her skin is clear, and the very crudeness of her features impart an almost classical sensuality. Thayer could conceivably consider her attractive.

“Merrikh,” the girl repeats, murmuring.

She continues to ignore Thayer and Miss Keaton. Her only motion is a small, peculiar one: the light, absentminded passage of a finger from her right hand across the palm of her left.

When she finally draws away from the telescope she turns to Thayer, smiling openly, in a womanly way, without the deference that he should expect. He doesn’t mind. She holds out her palm and traces a circle on it with a fingernail. Once that’s complete she draws another line across her hand, where the memory of the circle is imprinted. If the circle represents Mars, then the line’s termini may very possibly approximate the positions of Peneus and the arid patch of Martian ground known as Agyre.

“You’ve seen something?” Thayer’s eyes light. “You’ve seen definite features!”

Miss Keaton knows that Bint’s recognition of the new artifact is extraordinary. The first time laypeople observe the planet through a telescope they rarely see any landforms at all, not even the ice caps. Their impatience makes it difficult to convince skeptics of the canals’ reality: “
I didn’t see them, so they can’t be there!
” One would not then expect the ready detection of surface features by an unlettered Bedouin serving girl. Her confirmation of the shadowing gives substantial credence to the French astronomer’s claim. France-Lanord will have to be cabled in the morning, which is almost upon them.

Bint gives up her place to the secretary, who’s at first presented with the usual blank crimson disk. Regardless of her long experience with the instrument, she too is obliged to wait for her eyes to adapt. Miss Keaton’s aware that in these several minutes, Thayer and Bint are in the position of having seen something that she has not. They stand behind her, waiting. Soon, though, the image appears, starting at the ice cap, an even gray line, something that wasn’t there during the 1892 approach. The new canal can only confirm that the inhabitants of Mars remain capable of grand construction. Their race is still a worthy audience for the spectacle of the Equilateral. But a disquiet tugs at her. Something she can’t quite make out.

Eleven

The secretary requires the remaining hours before dawn to complete the report, which she signs with Thayer’s name, adding that the observation was joined by Miss A. Keaton. The second witness provides superfluous confirmation, for Thayer’s visual powers are unrivaled among his peers—he’s identified incipient squalls in the atmosphere of the sun before they became raging cyclones the size of the Earth; he’s mapped Himalayan peaks on the surface of Jupiter’s Ganymede—but the astronomer routinely asks her to share priority.

The morning has not yet warmed when she steps from her tent on the way to the telegraphic bureau, the carefully typed paper in hand. The camp is still waking, and there’s still no bird-song. The embers of last night’s cooking fires are being stirred and reanimated. Men make their stiff-legged way toward the latrines. A fellahin work gang lingers in the distance, before departing for labors to be performed on Side AC. An unseen muezzin clears his throat, about to launch into the day’s first devotions.

Miss Keaton’s strides across the packed sands are long and confident, whatever uncertainty from the night having dissipated
with the night itself. She sees men falling to the ground. The repeated cries in the muezzin’s first line reach her now:
Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!
They’re a kind of comfort and a kind of thrill. She reflects on how awful the song would seem to the women who were her school friends a decade earlier, girls who were bright, sophisticated, and daring—every one of them now married into anonymity. None would care to imagine herself under this sun, treading these wastes, and sharing this remote camp with thousands of men, or that Adele would possibly consider herself anything but unfortunate.

The night telegraph man is still on duty, another Turk with a tarbush, or perhaps it’s the same Turk from the water bureau. He rises from his prayer rug. When she hands him the report, he bows with possibly exaggerated courtesy. She stands away, looking out on the sands while he tap-tap-taps the message to Europe. The mechanism produces another repetitive sound, no less all-encompassing than the muezzin’s prayers. The transmission concludes with her name reduced to a series of dots and dashes and reassembled thousands of miles away, with harm neither to her person nor to her reputation. At this moment, she herself takes in the distance between Point A and London, over desert and sea. By some similar magic or technology, she may yet someday span the vacancy between Point A and the planet Mars.

Twelve

Thayer, Ballard, and several junior engineers ride out to mile 50 on Side AB, where there’s a segment of the triangle that hasn’t been reached by the work crews. The astronomer is perplexed. They were scheduled to complete it months before. This is some of the easiest territory they will have to cut through, the ground soft and unobstructed, almost begging to be excavated.

Having dismounted, Thayer steps away from his party, engineers who can enumerate unequivocally the reasons this section has yet to see a spade or hand-barrow. He feels a rising disgust for the men’s company. Once he turns, he’s the last person on Earth, the last of everything. No living creature respires within his field of view, which extends hundreds of miles. His boots kick through some chalky sand that embed a reflection of the geometric design in their soles, a series of equilateral triangles. Thayer squats to run a hand through the loose dirt.

He picks up several small flat round stones about an inch wide, each stamped with the fanlike image of a brachiopod that is no longer represented among the Earth’s extant species. A
dozen such stones lie in the immediate area a few yards between him and the engineers, rebuking the numbskulls and scoundrels who deny the evidence for evolution by natural selection.

Thayer stands on land that was once the bottom of a shallow Saharan sea, in an epoch long before the supposed flood of Noah, but one that was just as wet, when the Earth was primarily an aqueous planet. Whales, dolphins, and fish plied the waters, nesting in future wadis and savoring the fresh, cooling streams that rose from the future oases. They were content in their dominions, unaware that evolution conspired against them. Then the waters receded, leaving sand and their fossilized remains, and providing for the emergence of another species, one that would establish his home on land and from that redoubt rule the planet.

The closing century has succeeded in proving what previous times have only fitfully suggested: that history moves in a single direction and that the direction is forward. Since 1800, railroads have replaced horse-drawn conveyances, photography has replaced the inexact daubings of painters, and representative legislatures have replaced despots. These innovations have dramatically enlarged man’s imagination. Charles Darwin’s theories have won acceptance precisely because the evolution of living species echoes the progress of our age.

Thayer has offered his own contributions to the idea, advanced most prominently by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, that evolution is a universal process that governs the development of inanimate matter as well as it does Earth’s species of life and the progress of human societies. We may confirm this
principle by simply lifting our heads to the sky, where gas and dust are constantly evolving into more complex celestial objects. In his pioneering 1890 expedition to Chile, Thayer observed diffuse entities visible from the Southern Hemisphere, particularly the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. According to settled nineteenth century opinion, these nebulae are relatively close by, located within a Milky Way that comprises the entire universe. Thayer’s observations have shown that they’re individual stars precipitating from incandescent gas before our very eyes, dust and gas evolving into stars and planets, a process that eventually casts our individual human destinies—a process that at this moment in our planetary history
demands
the Equilateral.