Old Poison (31 page)

The unpleasant sound of ridicule flavored my
next question. “So you think the Martians made these spheres?”

He studied me for a moment then answered
quite seriously. “These stones are not all our science ignores.
Man’s history is far older than our current beliefs allow for. You
ask for evidence? The world is littered with marvelous mysteries
and empirical evidence of a great, seafaring, scientifically
advanced society, composed of many peoples and many races, a
society that was wiped out about twelve to fifteen thousand years
ago. There are megaliths and structures, each demonstrating a
knowledge of global geography and heavenly astronomy that has not
been duplicated by modern man until the last one hundred years.
Ignorant Europeans inaccurately attributed these works to primitive
civilizations that could not possibly have constructed them. Then
these barbarian conquerors burned ancient Mayan libraries,
thousands of books, that might have educated mankind not only in
the sciences, but in their own prehistory.

“Do I believe this ancient society, now lost
and forgotten, owed some of its knowledge to Martian
colonizers?”

He smiled and paused for effect. “It doesn’t
matter because that is not really what you are asking. What you are
asking is, can the
Martian Diary
provide you with
justification for sending the data that rests at your fingertip?
The answer is
no.
You do not need the
Martian Diary
for that purpose. Just look around at what you know is happening to
Earth’s environment, every day. That is all the justification you
need. Do it.”

I clicked Send, and in the twinkling of an
eye, the world was given new scientific knowledge. The question
was, what would they do with it?

* * * * *

Gill and I had talked all the way back to
San Jose, much of our conversation being about those stone
mysteries that dot our globe. He refused to speak about the
Martian Diary
. When he dropped me off at the Gran Hotel, he
reached back and grabbed my laptop.

“You have been quite true to Evelyn in the
face of many dangers and have been of great assistance to the
Caretakers. I want to leave you with a small gift of thanks. It is
our way of showing our appreciation. In the coming years of doubt,
it may help you to feel justified in what you have done.”

He then put the
Martian Diary
CD in
my computer, pulled up a single file, copied it to my hard drive,
and retrieved the CD.

I held my curiosity in check until I was
back home and safely out on Sam’s boat in the harbor. Then I opened
it and read the final chapter of the
Martian Diary
.

Paus Tak, Southern Laboratory

For a moment the sound that drew me from
slumber had made my heart leap for joy, but once fully awake I knew
it to be just the wind. Then the stabbing sadness of loneliness
overwhelmed me. I wished I could sleep or could die. Perhaps today
I would have the courage to do it, to bring a final end.

Then I heard it again, sounding so like a
human voice. She often fools me like that, the wind. Sometimes she
whistles from the sky and makes me believe that by some miracle a
great Taner still lives and flies the skies. Sometimes I even look
up, not because I really believe any of the great birds escaped
extinction, but because, for a brief moment, I can pretend I will
see one.

Sometimes she scuttles along the ground
sounding like a Mitmox following at my heels, waiting to be fed. On
those occasions I do talk to her like she was a small pet. Of
course, I am going mad. I actually did see a live Mitmox once when
I was a child. One of the geneticists bred it, quite against the
rules of course, but he was lonely for some companion critter. He
made me promise never to tell.

Then I heard the sound again, and this time
I also heard footsteps in the outer cave. I began to hope that
there really could be another human being alive and here at Paus
Tak.

It’s been two and a half years since I heard
the last human voice. I preserved Klal Matak’s remains in the old
science way, placing his stem cells, tissue, and all organs cells
in the frozen zoology calesets along with the rest of the extinct
flora and fauna of our sad, dead planet. This I had promised him,
though for what purpose I cannot foresee, for I, Klal Tslak, am the
last of the preservers at Paus Tak. When I die, there will be no
one to perform this task for me; in fact, there will be no one at
all, for I am the only living creature here. I could, of course,
clone a new companion, but even if it were not forbidden by my
vows, I would never be so cruel as to create another to sit in our
solar-powered island and await the last morsel of food and final
silence of our world.

But the voice. Somehow there was a voice. At
last I knew it was real. I tried to answer but it had been so long
since I had spoken aloud my voice failed me. I ran toward the
caller trying to yell out. When I met him I threw my arms about him
and cried until the poor man passed out in my arms, for he had
arrived more dead than alive.

He is a Nomad called Choam who now eats and
rests in my solar chamber after a harrowing journey from burrocity
Zed. His mission was to bring news of the final rebellions and to
request a written history and detailed scientific data regarding
the purpose and product of the Preservers. He says the Hidden Ones
wish to take this information with them on the last ship across the
skies to Atland.

I do not believe there is any purpose to
this because to my knowledge there is no one capable of biological
preservation, much less capable of the biological restoration of
all the species we have preserved at the cellular level. It took
only two generations of withholding biology from the burro
curriculum to turn science into superstition. The only remnant left
is some sort of religious ceremony in which the organs are removed
from the body and the whole saved in impure mummification. Deprived
of true knowledge, they believe this ritual will bring life after
death somewhere out in the heavens. Men descend to barbarity far
faster than they ascend to science.

As to the rebellions, it is no more than I
expected. The tunnels of the burrocities ran ankle deep in human
blood, and all cities are by now airless, frigid, and lifeless.
That leaves myself, Choam, perhaps a few isolated Nomads, and a
small handful of scientists at the tiny outpost burrocity of Zed.We
are the only living organisms on this planet that was once a lush
garden of life.

The only news that surprised me was the
cause of the outbreak. It wasn’t the tragic, inhuman condition of
life in the burrocities. It wasn’t even the knowledge that only a
privileged few would secure transportation to the new planet. It
was the dissemination of an old environmental visual recording of
the once living planet, its lush flora and fauna, its oceans and
free-running rivers of water. It was the knowledge of what had been
lost.

The extinction records Choam needs are
ready; in fact, a list of extinct species was begun ages ago, even
before the genetic preservation program was begun. The scientific
methods of preservation are also well documented and detailed and
have only awaited the call to be carried to the new world. It is
the final thing he requested that I am helpless to supply. The
Hidden Ones want a brief history of extinction. A brief history.
How does one briefly recite the history of the destruction of an
entire planetary ecosystem? If I could find the words, they would
break my heart.

Choam returns in the morning to Zed, where
the final ship waits to carry the Hidden Ones, the Caretakers of
our people’s history. He takes this note from Klal Tslak, the last
of the Preservers, who lived a life of hope for a hopeless cause. I
pray someone comes back to the ice caves of Paus Tak and restores
these bits of genetic patterns of the living flora and fauna that
once graced this land.

If Choam can survive another round trip to
Zed and back, he will join me here to await the final silence of
all save the wind.

* * * * *

Joan Francis is a licensed private
investigator and owner of Francis Pacific Investigations. She has
also worked as a newspaper reporter and is the author of a new
Diana Hunter thriller, Silent Coup. She spent her childhood in
small mining towns and camps in the western United States and in
South America with her family and mining engineer father. Moving
from place to place as her father opened up new mine sites, she
attended fifteen schools before graduating with a B.A. in history
from the University of Washington in Seattle. Married with three
grown children, she and her husband now live in a secluded valley
of the Tehachapi Mountains. Her website is
www.joanfrancis.net
and her email is
[email protected]
.

* * * * *

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