Mars Life (12 page)
MANHATTAN: WORLDWIDE NEWS NETWORK
Orlando Ventura sat at the foot of the small conference table, but he knew all the others depended on him for the crucial decisions. Well, almost all the others: the “consultant” from the New Morality depended on no one except his own inner certainties—reinforced by orders from Atlanta.
Ventura was a compact type, prone to paunchiness, but he kept his figure reasonably trim with daily workout sessions and ruthless, no-mercy games of tennis on the rooftop courts of the Worldwide News building. He had touched up his long, wavy hair with subtle dabs of gray at his temples; it made him look more mature, he thought, more serious and reliable.
“So what’s our approach on this Martian fossil?” asked the bureau chief, sitting at the head of the table. The chief was rake thin, all nerves and twitches, totally bald except for a ridiculous fringe of darkish hair that he kept long enough to tickle his collar.
Everyone turned to Ventura, but before he could reply the New Morality consultant said softly, “Alleged fossil. No one has proved its age or even proved that it came from a Martian creature. It might be simply a strangely shaped piece of rock.”
“It makes for more audience interest if we call it a fossil,” said Ventura, strongly enough to be firm, not so intense as to sound confrontive.
Ventura thought of the consultant, who sat at the bureau chief’s right hand, as a censor. No one in the network hierarchy would admit it, but they didn’t want the New Morality causing trouble for them. The rival network Global News had nearly gone bankrupt when the New Morality arranged an international boycott of their broadcasts—and the products that they advertised.
The consultant’s name was Shelby Ivers. He was a minister from the New Morality’s headquarters in Atlanta. He looked like a chubby, pink-faced, well-scrubbed young man with short dark hair combed forward to hide a receding hairline. Instead of the usual ministerial garb of funereal black he wore a cheerful checkered sports jacket and a tie of royal blue. Beneath his white shirt, Ventura was certain, a silver crucifix hung around his neck, its size determined by the man’s estimation of the cleanliness of his soul.
“The scientists themselves haven’t agreed that it’s a fossil,” sniffed the consultant, frowning down the table toward Ventura.
Lena Pickering, a sharp-eyed blond producer, said with her usual annoying nasality, “The scientists never really agree on anything, do they?”
Score one for Lena, Ventura thought, knowing that she was ambitious and wanted a spot on his staff.
“Look,” said the bureau chief, squirming in his chair, “everybody’s calling it a fossil. We’d look pretty dumb if we just called it a rock, wouldn’t we?”
“Call it an alleged fossil, then,” insisted the consultant.
“A probable fossil?” suggested Ventura’s director, sitting halfway down the table.
“A possible fossil,” said the woman across the table from him.
“A fossil,” Ventura insisted.
“But-”
“We can put in a disclaimer at the beginning of the show,” Ventura said, raising his voice enough to cut off all the others. “Say that the scientists believe it’s a fossil and until proven otherwise that’s what we’re going to call it.”
Everyone fell silent as the consultant drummed his fingers on the conference tabletop for a few moments. At last he shrugged. “I’ll write the disclaimer for you,” he said.
“Fine,” said Ventura.
“All right,” the bureau chief said, trying to smile, “that’s settled. Now, I’ve got an idea for you to consider. How about having a cohost on this show with you, Lannie?”
Ventura winced at the nickname, but shuddered inwardly at the thought of sharing the spotlight. “A cohost?” he asked, in a deathly sort voice. “On
my
show?”
my
show?”
“Edie Elgin. She was a media star back during the First Mars Expedition,” the bureau chief said.
“She’s retired. Lives on the Moon now,” said Ventura’s top researcher, a meek-looking younger guy whose bland exterior hid a Invent ambition.
“She was shacked up with one of the scientists who went to Mars,” Ventura said thinly.
“Right. James Waterman. He’s chief scientist of the whole Mars program now.”
The consultant spoke up. “She’d be prejudiced in his favor then, wouldn’t she?”
Nodding in the consultant’s direction, Ventura said, “There is that.”
“Or maybe she’s pissed at him for dumping her,” said one of the women.
“She dumped him, more likely. She’s married to Douglas Stavenger now.”
“The man whose body is filled with nanomachines?” the consultant blurted, frowning with distaste. “She’ll be even more biased. We can’t have that kind of imbalance.”
The bureau chief steepled his fingers in front of his chin. “Maybe not, then,” he muttered. “It was just a suggestion.”
Ventura shot a silent glance of thanks toward the consultant, thinking that he owed the guy one. He also realized for the first time that the bureau chief was out to get him.
“So who’s going to be on your panel, Lannie?” the chief asked, as if he’d never suggested a cohost.
“We’ll need a scientist, of course.”
“More than one,” said Ventura’s own producer, sitting on his left.
Lena Pickering said with a grin, “You put on two scientists, they’ll start arguing with one another.”
“You put on three and you’ll get six different opinions,” muttered one of the men halfway down the table.
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” said the bureau chief. “Controversy builds audience interest.”
Ventura shook his head. “When scientists start arguing they go into their own specialized language. It’s all incomprehensible gobbledygook. The audience can’t follow them.”
“It’s a real turnoff, chief.”
The bureau chief scratched at his bald pate. “Okay, okay. One scientist, then. Who else?”
“A Believer,” said the consultant. “We’ve got to have a Believer on the panel.”
“You volunteering?” Ventura asked. He meant it to sound like an invitation, but despite his intentions it came out more like a challenge.
The consultant stared at him for a moment. “Me? Heavens, no! I’m not a public persona.”
No, Ventura replied silently. You never show your face to the public. You do your work behind their backs.
“How about Penny Quinn?” one of the women suggested. “She’s always interesting.”
“She’s off the wall.”
“Is she a Believer?”
“I’m pretty sure she is. And she’s a woman. You don’t want this panel to be all male.”
“Why not?”
“Neanderthal!”
The consultant folded his hands on the tabletop and said earnestly, “We must have a Believer. If we have a scientist, then we must have a Believer, in the interests of fairness and balance.”
Where do you get this “we” stuff, Ventura asked silently. But he owed the guy a favor, so he said nothing.
Half a dozen names were suggested, all of them shot down by one or another of the people around the table.
“Why not get the Pope?” someone grumbled.
Ventura brightened. “That’s not a bad idea.”
The bureau chief scowled down the table at him.
“No, I don’t mean the Pope himself,” Ventura explained. “But there’s that priest at the Vatican, the one that was supposed to go on the First Expedition but got sick and had to be replaced.”
“Yeah, I remember. He got appendicitis, didn’t he?”
“Gall bladder.”
“Anyway, why not him?” Ventura asked. “He’s a scientist
and
a priest, for god’s sake. He advises the Pope about scientific matters, if I remember right.”
and
a priest, for god’s sake. He advises the Pope about scientific matters, if I remember right.”
“What’s his name?”
“Di something-or-other.”
“DiNardo,” said Ventura.
The consultant looked less than pleased. “He’s a geologist, isn’t he? A scientist.”
“But he’s a priest, as well.”
“But he’s a scientist.”
The argument went around the table for more than half an hour. In the end, while the bureau chief swallowed a handful of pills without water, they decided that the panel would consist of a British paleontologist who was spending a year at Yale; an evangelist minister whose TV shows always pulled in a huge audience; an actress who was starring in a docudrama series about the Salem witch trials; an author who’d written several books debunking the notion that intelligent life had ever existed on Mars; and two university students, one majoring in planetary sciences and the other in theology. Plus the Rev. Dr. Fulvio A. DiNardo, S.J.
Ventura nodded, satisfied that he had gotten what he needed for an exciting, informative show. And no goddamned cohost.
TITHONIUM BASE: THE DIG
Jamie and Vijay were finishing their breakfasts in the nearly empty cafeteria.
“They start early here,” Vijay said, between sips of tea.
Jamie started to reply, but saw a lanky young man walking slowly toward their table. Like almost everyone else at the base, he wore plain grayish blue coveralls, unadorned except for the nametag pinned above the left breast pocket.
“Dr. Waterman?” the youngster asked, in a voice so soft Jamie had to strain to hear it. “I’m supposed to guide you around the dig this morning.”
The young man stopped a respectful two meters from Jamie’s chair. As he got to his feet, Jamie saw that he was quite tall, well over six feet, but youthfully slim, not yet grown into his adult weight. He wore his jet black hair in a long ponytail, and his face was lean, with high cheekbones and the coppery skin of a fellow Native American.
“You’re Billy Graycloud?” Jamie asked, putting out his hand.
“Yessir. The resident Navaho. Until you arrived, of course.” He smiled shyly.
“Have a seat. We were just finishing. This is my wife, Vijay.”
The kid dipped his chin. “Billy Graycloud,” he said to Vijay as he sat down.
“I’m pleased to meet you, Billy,” she said, with a smile.
Jamie said, “Dr. Chang tells me you’re a computer analyst.”
Graycloud looked down at his boots. “I will be, I guess, once I get my doctorate.”
“From UNM?”
“Uh, nosir. Arizona. In Tucson.”
Jamie knew that Graycloud had been picked to maintain the Navaho presence on Mars. No nation was allowed to claim Mars or any other body in the solar system as its sovereign territory. But corporations or other legally recognized “entities” could claim exclusive use of an asteroid or part of a planet, as long as they maintained a physical presence on-site. By international agreement, the Navaho Nation had been granted control of the utilization of the red planet—as long as at least one Navaho actually resided on Mars. The Navaho Council regarded this grant as a sacred trust and, under Jamie Waterman’s direction, kept Mars off limits to everyone except the scientists who were exploring Mars and their support staff.
As Vijay gently teased out Graycloud’s life history from the awkward, insecure student, Jamie realized with a jolt of surprise that if they had to abandon their work on Mars and return everyone home, the planet would be wide open to any other group that wanted to exploit it. Just like the whites did to the red men in America, he thought. The fact that his mother was a descendant of the
Mayflower
pilgrims didn’t alleviate Jamie’s fears one whit.
Mayflower
pilgrims didn’t alleviate Jamie’s fears one whit.
“Well, anyway,” Graycloud was saying to Vijay, “Dr. Chang told me to escort you out to the dig. . . . Not that you need escorting, I know. You’ve been on Mars a lot more’n I have.”
Jamie smiled at him. “I’m glad of your help, Mr. Graycloud.”
“Uh, Billy. Call me Billy, sir.”
“Okay, Billy. And you’ll have to call me Jamie.”
Graycloud blinked at Jamie. “I... I don’t know if I can do that, sir.
“You’ll have to. When you call me sir it makes me feel a thousand years old.”
Graycloud smiled uneasily.
The three of them got up from the table and left the cafeteria. Vijay gave Jamie a peck on the cheek and headed off for the infirmary. Graycloud led Jamie to the main airlock area.
“You ever use a nanosuit before, si. . . uh, Dr. Waterman?”
Jamie shook his head. He saw a row of transparent suits hanging limply along a partition. They looked like plastic raincoats, almost.
“They’re a lot better than the old hard-shells,” Graycloud said. “Easier to put on. Quicker, too.”
Picking up the drooping arm of the nearest suit, Jamie asked, “Do they give you as much protection against radiation?”
“Supposed to. We’ve got a nanotech expert from Selene here at the base and she checks radiation dosages all the time. No problems so far.”
“So far,” Jamie echoed.
Graycloud’s brows knit. “If you’d feel more comfortable in a hard-shell — “
“No,” Jamie said gently. “I’ll go with your recommendation, Billy.”
Graycloud swallowed visibly, then nodded. “Okay, let’s find you a size medium.”
* * * *
Jamie felt slightly nervous as he and Graycloud stepped through the main airlock’s outer hatch and onto the ruddy sand of Mars. The nanosuit seemed terribly flimsy; it was like wearing nothing more than a plastic slicker.
Then it struck him. I’m on the surface of Mars! Not inside one of those stiff old hard suits, clomping around like a two-legged turtle. I’m practically in my shirtsleeves!
The reddish ground was littered with rocks, some as small as pebbles, many as large as a man’s head. Jamie looked up, and through the transparent bubble that enclosed his head he saw the cables running up the seamed, rugged cliff face to the niche in the rocks where the Martian buildings were.
‘You okay, Dr. W?” Graycloud’s voice sounded concerned in the headphone Jamie had clipped to his ear.
“I’m fine, Billy.”
“No problems with the suit?”
“None.” Jamie almost laughed. “I was thinking about the first time Dex Trumball and I rappelled down the cliff face from up top on the plateau. The first time we walked into the buildings and actually touched them.”
“Must’ve been a helluva moment,” Graycloud said.
“It sure was.”
“Uh, if you want to see the dig, it’s over this way.”
Jamie followed the student across the rock-strewn floor of the canyon. He noticed several areas along the cliffs base that were taped off, like a crime scene. The endolithic lichen, he realized. The biologists don’t want anybody near them.
They walked toward a small group of people who were clustered around a hole in the ground. Most of them wore nanosuits, although a couple were in the bulkier hard-shells.
“Which one is Dr. Carleton?” he asked Graycloud.
The younger man pointed. “Over there, in the hard suit with the orange sleeve stripes, by the sifter. That’s Doreen McManus with him. She’s the nanotech specialist I told you about.”
The figure in the hard-shell suit turned slowly, awkwardly, like a medieval knight in a rusted suit of armor.
“Waterman!” Carleton called. “Over here.”
Jamie stepped carefully around the scattered rocks toward Carleton, Graycloud beside him. The anthropologist’s face was hidden behind the reflecting coating of his helmet visor but his voice in Jamie’s headphone was brimming with enthusiasm.
“Take a look at these.” He gestured with a gloved hand to a half dozen plastic containers arranged in a neat row along the table by the sifter. Each one had an odd-shaped rock in it. “We just pulled them up this morning.”
None of the rocks was larger than palm-sized. They all looked gray and undistinguished to Jamie. His geologist’s eye noticed that one of them had a darker band in its middle.
Reaching for it, Jamie asked, “May I?”
Carleton said, “Gently. Be careful with it. I think that darker streak might be pigment.”
“Pigment?”
“Might be a shard from pottery.”
Using two hands, Jamie picked up the irregularly shaped piece out of its plastic container. The gloves of his nanosuit were so delicate that he could feel the rough edges of the shard. It was thinner than his little finger, slightly curved. By god, Jamie thought, this really could have been part of a bowl once.
He looked up at Carleton. “You’ll have to have this analyzed.”
“Damned right.”
Jamie handed the piece back to the anthropologist. “Do you have the equipment you need?”
“Some. I can do a spectral analysis of the pigment.”
“If that’s what it is.”
Carleton’s voice dropped a tone, went darker. “Yes, if that’s what it is.”
“The geology team can do a thorium/lead dating measurement,” Jamie mused, “to tell how old it is.”
“Not potassium/argon?”
Remembering earlier attempts at fixing the dates of Martian rocks, Jamie replied, “The argon tends to outgas over time; throws the measurement off.”
“I’ll want a carbon-14 run, too. Then we can see if the pigment’s a different age from the rest of the shard,” Carleton said as he carefully deposited the piece back in its container.
Jamie shook his head. “This stuff probably dates back sixty million years. C-14 won’t be any good for that kind of time.”
Carleton chuckled. “You’re right. I was thinking of human artifacts, on Earth. We’re a lot younger, aren’t we?”
‘Yes, we are,” said Jamie. Silently he added, And we’re still here. Not extinct.
Jamie looked again at the other rocks in their little boxes. “And what about these?”
“Don’t know yet. I’m collecting anything that looks even faintly interesting. For example, this one,” he pointed to a slim fragment, “just might be a piece of bone.”
Jamie saw that it had a slight indentation running its length, but otherwise there was nothing that looked bonelike to his eyes.
“You’ll have to do an MNA test on it.”
“Martian nucleic acids, right.” Carleton hesitated, then said, “The bio people tell me they need more sensitive equipment. The stuff they have here is pretty primitive compared to what’s available back on Earth.”
Jamie remembered that biologists on Earth had teased molecules of DNA from sixty-million-year-old fossils of dinosaurs. There was even talk of recreating a
Tyrannosaurus rex
a few years ago, before the fundamentalists took control of the Congress. What would the New Morality think about us recreating a Martian? Jamie wondered. They’d blow up this base and everybody in it, he thought.
Tyrannosaurus rex
a few years ago, before the fundamentalists took control of the Congress. What would the New Morality think about us recreating a Martian? Jamie wondered. They’d blow up this base and everybody in it, he thought.
He asked Carleton, “You’ve already talked to the biologists here at the base?”
“About my vertebra. I asked them to do an MNA run on it.”
“I see.”
“Their equipment isn’t sensitive enough. If there’s any organic material left on the vertebra it’s so minuscule that their reading is down in the noise.”
“We’ll need better equipment, then,” Jamie muttered. Then he added, “Or we’ll have to send the fossil back to a lab on Earth.”
“Oh no!” Carleton said sharply. “That’s
my
discovery. That fossil doesn’t leave my sight.”
my
discovery. That fossil doesn’t leave my sight.”
“We could ship you back home with it.”
“I’m staying here. And so are whatever finds we make. I’m not letting any Earthside lab steal my credit.”
Jamie started to reply, but pulled in a deep breath instead. No sense starting a fight here, he told himself. The man’s had his troubles with university bureaucracies in the past. I can’t blame him for being possessive. He wants the mountain to come to Mohammed. Trouble is, resupply missions cost money. Money that we haven’t got.
Then he thought, But on the other hand, if the biologists want so badly to test his fossil for nucleic acids, maybe they’ll have enough clout to fund a mission here. That would be helpful.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Jamie said.
“Good,” said Carleton. “And while you’re at it, I could use a few trained paleontologists, too.”
Jamie smiled at him and suppressed an urge to ask if he wanted anything else.
Other books
White Girl Bleed a Lot by Colin Flaherty
Playing with Fire by Tamara Morgan
The Winter Children by Lulu Taylor
Always Look Twice by Geralyn Dawson
Framed and Hung by Alexis Fleming
The Discarded by Brett Battles
Dark Energy by Robison Wells
Lisa Shearin - Raine Benares 02 by Armed, Magical
Benjamin Ashwood by AC Cobble