Semper Mars(134)

He was standing atop the Face, symbol of all that was still unknown about Mars, about the beings who’d lived here half a million years ago, about Man himself, and how he’d come to be….

It seemed odd, but the features of the Face, so obviously artificial, so obviously artistic, so obviously the product of conscious and intelligent design when seen from high overhead, flattened into an expanse of ordinary sand-smoothed rock from this vantage point, from the surface of the Face itself. After an hour’s climb, he’d reached this highest part of the mesa, the center of the chin just south of the enormous crevasse that formed the image’s mouth.

Below, at his feet, were the quadrangular plates that so resembled teeth; farther off, just visible half a mile to the north, were the vast, bare, flattened mounds of windswept rock that, from the sky, at any rate, looked like eyes.

From where he stood now, it didn’t look as though the landform could possibly be artificial. Only from the air did the overall cumulative effect of thousands of separate aspects, the convex smoothness of the eyeballs, the planes of cheeks and jaw and ridged brow, even the striations in the carving’s headdress or helmet that gave it such an eerie resemblance to the nemes of some pharaoh out of ancient Egypt, all come together, directly challenging any assertion that this was the mindless accidental product of eons of wind, ice, and water.

Fifty-one sols on Mars, and he still felt no closer to the answers he was looking for than he’d been back on Earth. It was going to take years…no, decades, just to learn where to begin. The archeological teams continued to uncover mountains of weather-eroded equipment, enigmatic artifacts, and the ungraspable products of alien design philosophies. It was already clear that human manufacturing and materials-processing techniques were about to be revolutionized, and the teams hadn’t yet gotten properly started. No one was willing to even guess what new surprises might still be in store.

And with all of this, the biggest questions were still stark and unyielding mysteries. Who’d built the Cydonian monuments, and why? Who were the humans whose remains were now being found everywhere throughout the region? What was their relationship with their cousins left back on Earth at the very dawn of the human spirit?

He sat down on a smooth-sculpted ridge, feeling the thin wind rattle against his lightweight EVA suit.

He liked it here on Mars, liked the freedom to pursue his studies without hindrance, liked the fact that the government, even though it was sponsoring his work, was far, far away. He’d come to terms with the Marine presence here; Garroway and his MMEF were what was making all of this possible, and he was grateful for that, as well.

Alexander was being hailed as a hero of the scientific community, the scientist who’d refused to acquiesce to the UN World Cultural Bureau’s attempts at censorship. Well, he couldn’t have managed that without the Marines. This war, he thought, more and more, was a struggle between those who would disseminate the truth, and those who would try to control it.

Control was the key, so far as the governments of Earth were concerned. No wonder, he thought, the UN had been so desperate to hide the secrets uncovered beneath the Cydonian plain. In the past weeks, according to the Net News vidcasts, dozens of new religions, new alien cults, new cosmic awareness groups had blossomed around the news that mummified humans half a million years old had been discovered on Mars. There were rumors that widespread riots in France, Germany, and Mexico were threatening to undermine those nations’ war efforts. If their governments fell in the chaos of religious rioting and fanaticism, the war might well sputter to an end.

Alexander’s published papers, both on the net and in Archeology International, were being hailed in the States as one man’s bid for academic freedom, an end to scientific censorship, and a victory for truth.

Maybe. He’d gotten credit for the discovery, at any rate. And most of Mireille Joubert’s team was working for him now, part of a genuinely international research project that had as its goal the discovery of the truth about the Martian ruins. Joubert herself was still sulking, but he thought she would come around.

He looked around at the bleak and rocky landscape of the Face and laughed. This Martian Sphinx was good at keeping its secrets…better, perhaps, than its far smaller cousin on Earth. The ancient humans discovered here remained the biggest mystery of all.

His original guess that the bodies he’d found were representatives of Homo erectus had been mistaken, it turned out. Several papers had already emerged in various journals and net professional posts discussing the images of the bodies uncovered so far, pointing out that their facial features almost certainly placed them in the group generally referred to as “archaic Homo sapiens.” These were essentially modern humans with hang-on traits of their Homo erectus ancestors, like brow ridges and heavy musculature. Their brains were as large and as complex as those of fully modern humans; perhaps even more telling, the structure and placement of their larynxes were the same as modern humans, riding lower in their throats, and with larger pharyngeal cavities than the earlier erectus.