Mars Life (14 page)

He remembered the First Expedition, their third morning on Mars, the jolt of sheer exhilaration he’d gotten when he’d spotted a rock that bore a streak of green. He’d been certain, rationally, that the green was an inclusion of copper. But still, green in the middle of the planetwide desert of rusty red! It turned out to be copper, as Jamie had suspected, but the excitement that it might have been life—that was a moment he’d never forget.

And then he’d discovered the cliff dwellings. At first no one believed him. He had seen the niche from a distance; even the camera imagery he had brought back to their base was hazy, indistinct. A Navaho imagining things that remind him of home, they all said. It wasn’t until the Second Expedition when he and Dex had driven purposefully out to the edge of the canyon and rappelled nearly a full kilometer down to the cleft in the worn old cliffs that they saw beyond a doubt that the buildings actually were there.

That was more than a thrill. Even inside the cumbersome old hard-shell suit he wore his knees had gone weak on him.

Chang had recited safety protocols at him when Jamie told the mission director he wanted to go to the cliff buildings. Jamie had quietly insisted on going alone.

“I don’t want to take anyone from their work,” he’d said.

Scowling, Chang said, “Take your fellow Navaho.”

“Graycloud? He’s got his own tasks to do, doesn’t he?”

It took some discussion, but Chang had finally agreed to allow Jamie to ride up to the buildings alone. Jamie got the impression that the mission director was just as glad that he didn’t have to take anyone away from their assigned jobs to escort him.

Now he pressed the control stud on the front of his climbing harness and the cable drive decelerated. Jamie rose slowly past the lip of the cleft and stopped the cable altogether, his feet dangling in midair, his body twisting slightly in the harness. His throat went dry. There they were, six buildings made of sun-dried brick, bleached white with age, silent, empty, waiting for him.

It’s better to do this alone, he told himself. Just these ancient buildings and me. No one else. No distractions.

He swung his legs and planted his booted feet on the edge of the cleft, unhooked the harness, then walked a dozen steps toward the buildings. The solid rock overhead formed a shield against the elements, not that it had rained or snowed on Mars for eons. There was frost from time to time, Jamie knew, pitifully thin coatings of rime that condensed on the rocks overnight and evaporated with the morning sun. The endolithic lichen living inside the rocks on the valley floor depended on that meager source of moisture.

Stepping to the face of the nearest building, Jamie wondered why the seasonal frosts hadn’t eroded the brickwork more. It’s had sixty-some million seasons to do its damage, he told himself. Yet, as he touched the bleached white wall with his nanogloved fingers, he saw that its surface was scarcely pitted. Archeologists had studied these buildings, he knew. He’d read their reports. No one could explain how the structures had remained relatively undamaged over all those millions of years. These bricks must be more than adobe, he reasoned. Maybe the Martians could teach us something about construction materials.

Another one of Mars’s mysteries, Jamie said to himself. And he smiled. Someday we’ll figure out the answers to all the mysteries. And Mars will be a lot less interesting.

Or will it? The answer to one mystery usually leads to still more unknowns.

Morning sunlight was slanting into the cleft as Jamie ducked through the low doorway of the building and stepped inside. Whoever built these structures wasn’t very tall. He remembered how he and Dex Trumball had to get down on all fours, inside their bulky hard-shell suits, and crawl through the entrance. In the flexible nanosuit he could walk through if he hunched over.

Twenty years worth of curious, two-legged explorers from Earth had swept away all the dust that had accumulated in the buildings. The rooms inside were bare, their stone-covered floors cleared and somehow sterile looking. Archeologists had come and gone, cleaning, searching, sifting the dust, seeking artifacts, fossils, some hint of who built these cliff structures, some clue about their purpose in the lives of their vanished builders.

Over the span of more than twenty years they had found precious little. Practically nothing, Jamie knew. The rooms had been empty. No furniture, no altars, not a scrap or a shard to indicate why the structures had been built up here in this inaccessible site, or what they had been used for. The Martians had taken their secrets with them.

Except for the drawings.

Jamie clambered up the aluminum ladder that had been placed for access to the next floor. The drawings were on a wall on the uppermost floor. One wall out of the entire complex of buildings. Was this your shrine? Jamie asked the vanished Martians. Your school?

A battery of full-spectrum lamps faced the wall, connected to a thermionic nuclear power pack, pointing at the drawings like an execution squad. The lamps were off, but there was enough sunlight coming in through the light well in the ceiling that Jamie could make out the etched figures clearly.

Archeologists had sprayed the wall with a monomolecular coating of clear hard plastic, so that no one could damage the lines of finely etched figures. Jamie shook his head at their precaution. Sixty million years of time hadn’t erased the drawings. But maybe a handful of thoughtless assholes could mess them up, he admitted to himself.

At first the scientists thought the figures had been writing: line after line of delicate curves and swirls etched into the rock facing of the wall. Gradually the teams of archeologists and philologists who had come to Mars to study the figures came to the conclusion that they were pictographs: a form of writing, to be sure, but one that used pictorial symbols rather than arbitrary shapes to form words.

Jamie reached out with a gloved hand, barely able to suppress the very human urge to touch the symbols. He saw a circle with rays coming out of its perimeter, so much like the sun symbols of the southwest Native Americans that his breath still caught in his throat whenever he looked at it. Other symbols vaguely reminded him of snakes, triangles, even a few that sort of looked like trees.

Line after line of carefully wrought pictographs. They had eyes like ours, Jamie told himself. And hands, fingers. They had minds like ours.

The lines of precise, regularly spaced figures ended about a meter above the cleanly swept floor. Then came ragged, lopsided symbols, obviously scrawled in desperate haste compared to the orderly pictographs above them. The methodical lines of symbols had been inscribed deeply into the stone by chisels or similar instruments. The childlike scribbles had been scratched out quickly, roughly, as if the person who scraped them onto the rock had been looking over his shoulder, staring death in the face.

It’s their history, Jamie was certain. They were telling the story of their people, their way of life, their beliefs, their dreams. And then it happened. That giant meteor hit like the fist of devastation. The skies went dark. Their crops died. It became winter forever.

Jamie stared at the symbols as if he could make them speak to him by sheer willpower. But they remained mute, lifeless.

Are they prayers? Jamie asked himself. Was this collection of buildings placed up here in this inaccessible cleft in the rocks as some sort of temple? Will we ever know?

Jamie stood there, as silent and unmoving as the stones themselves, until the sunlight began to fade.

“Dr. Waterman.” The excursion monitor’s voice in his earplug sounded foreign, alien. “You’re at the limit. Temperature’s starting to go down.”

It took him two tries to make his voice work. “Right. I’m starting hack.”

With enormous reluctance he turned away from the carvings and made his way back down to the lowest level of the building. It was late afternoon. He’d been in the building almost the whole day.

Time to get back to the base, he told himself. Before it starts to get really cold.

As he slipped his arms into the climbing harness and clicked its lock on his chest, Jamie took one more look at the bleached white buildings. And he realized what he had to do.