The Martians(23)

She laughed softly, then made the joke current among literature majors at the university: “Yes, very nice . . . the Earth moved.”

After a second he got it and stifled a laugh. “Several thousand kilometers.”

Laughter is harder to suppress than the sounds of love.


Of course it is impossible to conceal such activity in a group—not to mention a tent—of such small size, and the next morning Eileen got some pointed looks from John, some smiles from Mrs. M. It was a clear morning, and after they got the tent packed into the wagon and were on their way, Eileen hiked off whistling to herself. As they descended toward the broad plain at the bottom of the canyon mouth, she and Roger tuned in to their band 33 and talked.

“You really don't think this wash would look better with some cactus and sage in it, say? Or grasses?”

“Nope. I like it the way it is. See that pentagon of shards there?” He pointed. “How nice.”

With the intercom they could wander far apart from each other and still converse, and no one could know they were talking, while each voice hung in the other's ear. So they talked and talked. Everyone has had conversations that have been crucial in their lives: clarity of expression, quickness of feeling, attentiveness to the other's words, a belief in the reality of the other's world—of these and other elements are such conversations made, and at the same time the words themselves can be concerned with the simplest, most ordinary things:

“Look at that rock.”

“How nice that ridge is against the sky—it must be a hundred kilometers away, and it looks like you could touch it.”

“Everything's so red.”

“Yeah. Red Mars, I love it. I'm for red Mars.”

She considered it. They hiked down the widening canyon ahead of the others, on opposite slopes. Soon they would be back in the world of cities, the big wide world. There were lots and lots of people out there, and anyone you met you might never see again. On the other hand . . . she looked across at the tall awkwardly proportioned man, striding with feline Martian grace over the dunes, in the dream gravity. Like a dancer.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Twenty-six.”

“My God!” He was already quite wrinkled. More sun than most.

“What?”

“I thought you were older.”

“No.”

“How long have you been doing this?”

“Hiking canyons?”

“Yes.”

“Since I was six.”

“Oh.” That explained how he knew all this world so well.

She crossed the canyon to walk by his side; seeing her doing it, he descended his slope and they walked down the center of the wash.

“Can I come on another trip with you?”

He looked at her: behind the faceplate, a grin. “Oh yes. There are a lot of canyons to see.”

The canyon opened up, then flattened out, and its walls melted into the broad boulder-studded plain on which the little outpost was set, some kilometers away. Eileen could just see it in the distance, like a castle made of glass: a tent like theirs, really, only much bigger. Behind it Olympus Mons rose straight up out of the sky.





Archaea Plot

The little red people did not like terraforming. As far as they were concerned it wrecked everything, the way global warming wrecked things on Earth, only two magnitudes worse, as usual. Everything on Mars is two magnitudes more than it is on Earth—two magnitudes more or less.

Of course the relationship between the little red people and the introduced Terran organisms was already complex. To fully understand it you have to remember the little red people's even smaller cousins, the old ones. These were the Archaea, that third order of life along with bacteria and eucarya—and in this case, also citizens of the panspermic cloud which four billion years before fell on Mars from space, having flown many light-years from their point of spontaneous generation around an early second-generation star. Mostly Thermoproteus and Methanospirillum, it seems, with a few Haloferax thrown in as well. They were hyperthermophiles, so the early Mars of the heavy bombardment suited them just fine. But then some few of these travelers were blasted off the surface of Mars by a meteor strike, and crash-landed later on Earth, fructifying the third planet and sparking the long wild course of Terran evolution. Thus all Earthly life is Martian, in this limited sense, though in truth it is also far more ancient than that.

Then later Paul Bunyan, the distant descendant of these panspermic Archaea, came back to Mars to find it cold and ostensibly empty, though some of the old ones still persisted, golluming around in various submartian volcanic percolations. Paul and his big blue ox Babe were bested by Big Man, as you know, and inserted by him through the planetary interior, crust mantle, and core. From there Paul's inner bacterial family spread through all the regolith on the planet, and began the so-called cryptoendolithic great leap forward, that first submartian terraforming, which produced at the end of its evolution the little red people as we know them.