Semper Mars(135)
These people could talk. They could dream. They could imagine. They could create.
As with all good science, each new Cydonian discovery only increased the number of questions until it seemed there would never be an end to them. Who were these people? Who or what had brought them to Mars, and why? Had that agency, as some scientists were now suggesting, been responsible for creating Homo sapiens by genetically manipulating populations of Homo erectus…and if so, why? The humans—had they carved their own image into the titanic monument known as the Face? Or was the agency that had brought them to Mars the artist and, again, why?
And the dark question that more and more people on Earth were asking lately—who or what had destroyed the young colony on the Cydonian plain? Everywhere across this part of Mars, now, excavations were turning up more and more artifacts, shattered remnants of a vast city that had covered an ancient, once-subtropical coastline on the Boreal Sea, a city that had flourished for decades at least, and possibly for centuries, until some devastating force had struck from the sky and destroyed it all, probably within the space of hours. The D&M Pyramid was now believed to have been some sort of titanic apparatus for creating a warm and breathable atmosphere over a large portion of the northern hemisphere; its destruction had resulted in the rapid and inevitable bleed-off of the artificial atmosphere into space, the freezing of the ocean, the suffocation, freezing, and mummification of humans suddenly faced with Armageddon.
Who had attacked the Martian colony? Were they still out there, somewhere among the stars…and were they a threat to Earth and Humankind now?
Interesting. During the past weeks, more and more of the net’s resources had been focused here, on Cydonia, instead of on the war. Was that, he wondered, the way to end war? Could it be as simple as that…providing the world with new frontiers, new horizons…and new sources of wonder?
Of course not. It was not, he realized now, the military that divided peoples and created wars, but governments, governments that lived only to serve themselves, no matter how democratic they might seem outwardly, governments that for survival needed to control the populations from which they’d emerged.
For Alexander, that was an astonishing revelation, as significant, perhaps, as the mummified bodies beneath the sands of Cydonia. So much human misery could be laid at the doorstep of human government and greed and monkey-band fear and the appalling ignorance that separated humans into mutually suspicious tribes.
Earth, Alexander suspected, was in the long run a lost cause. If there was a future for humanity, it was out here. Man’s heritage, it seemed, lay somewhere among the stars.
He was going to have to go there to find out who he was, and why he’d come to be that way.
The sun had nearly reached the western horizon, and it grew dark swiftly on Mars. It was time for him to start back. A kind of rock-carved ramp ran down the left side of the Face, providing relatively easy access if you didn’t mind the three-hundred-meter climb. Fortunately, it was all downhill from here. He could see the others waiting for him by the Mars cat below, almost lost in the east-reaching shadow of the Face.
On the way down, some moments later, the ground shifted slightly beneath his feet. Alexander put his gloved hand out to steady himself…and never realized how close he’d come to actually touching the cunningly concealed rock doorway leading to the Face’s interior.
The Cydonian Face had clung to its secrets for half a million years, now. It could wait a little longer…