Bouncing along the canyon floor on my way back to the dig site I wondered if I’d done the right thing. This was my first trip to Mars, and none of it matched the fiction I’d read in my teens. I hadn’t yet seen any canals, visited any ancient cities, or saved any alien princesses. Was that my motivation? Had I substituted Dr. Sands for my alien princess? Maybe her artifact contained some piece of an ancient city. I shook my head and tried to clear away the allegories, but I kept my eyes peeled for signs of canals, just in case.
The rest of the day went smoothly. Amidst much oxygenated flatulence, the four buffalo dogs working on the dig ate their way down two meters all the way around the eight meter cylinder that lay under the alien capstone. If there was part of an ancient city in there, its inhabitants had been mighty tiny.
Ahonen showed up in the middle of supper time in the dig site’s little mess hut. I’d brought some special supplies in my shuttle, and we were enjoying a delicate mushroom soup with parsnip and macklebee when the big Finn stormed in. He removed the helmet of his environment suit and began shouting.
“What did you do, Conroy? What did you do to my buffalo dogs?”
The archaeologists, Faith Sands included, looked up in confusion. The buffalito handlers kept eating their soup.
“Mr. Ahonen, how nice to see you again,” I said. “Can I offer you some soup? I promise you, it’ll be the best thing you’ve had for weeks. The foie gras that’s coming next is exquisite, lightly seared amidst a vanilla bean bing cherry sauce. And the main course to follow is a salmon bergeron with fingerling nickels and a caper and lime emulsion that survives interplanetary travel incredibly well. It will make you think you’ve never eaten fish before in your life.”
“I won’t ask you again, Conroy. What did you do to my buffalo dogs?”
“Absolutely nothing. I came to see you this morning. We talked. I left. I’m sure you have it all on security vids from several angles.”
“I do. But that’s not all that happened. You must have done something else.”
“Why do you say that?”
“My buffalo dogs have all lined up outside my office, and they just sit there. They refuse to go into the tunnels. They won’t dig. They won’t eat. Hell, they won’t even fart. They’re worthless. What did you do?”
“Nothing more than you’ve already seen,” I said. “Reggie and I came straight back here.” At the mention of his name, my buffalo dog lifted his shaggy head from the tureen of on the ground near my chair and barked twice.
“That’s it! You brought that animal into my camp!”
“It only seemed fair,” I said. “Yours kept coming here. Curiosity, you said. Reggie was curious too. He wanted to meet them. It’s no one’s fault that he’s a more compelling trainer than you are.”
Ahonen stomped closer, hovering over me but glaring at Reggie. “You bastard. I don’t know how you’ve done it, but you’ve incapacitated eight buffalo dogs. They’re worth more than ten million each. That’s over a quarter billion Marsbucks to the Wada Consortium that I’m responsible for, not to mention the fines we’ll incur for delaying the Seroni construction project. You’ve ruined me!”
I felt Dr. Sands’s eyes on me, an Aruban princess, if not an alien one. I’d saved her, and I knew she knew it. “Maybe you should have thought of that, before you let your charges damage an archaeological site of untold potential.”
Ahonen spat at me, he actually spat! “This isn’t over. You’ll pay for this, Conroy. You and your precious archaeologist.” He looked like he wanted to kick something, probably me, possibly Reggie. Instead he shoved his helmet back into place and stormed out of the mess hut. Reggie returned his attention to his tureen. The four handlers all smiled at one another. The archaeological crew sat looking at the airlock, all except for Dr. Sands who stared at me.
I wiped off Ahonen’s spittle. “I guess he doesn’t like soup.”
It wasn’t over. The next morning, when the archaeologists and the handlers and the buffalitos all converged on the site to resume their work, they found an empty hole, eight meters across and six meters deep. The alien cylinder with its partially erased capstone had vanished.
I found Dr. Sands staring into the gaping opening, only the rigidity of her environment suit keeping her on her feet. The other members of her crew weren’t faring much better.
“How did he... Why would he... Conroy?”
“The why is easy,” I said. “Revenge. As to the how, I’d guess some kind of portable pressor/tractor field projector. He probably has several of them on his construction site.”
She shook her head, still staring at the spot where her artifact should have been. “No, that wouldn’t work. It was too deeply embedded in the rock. He’d have damaged the cylinder.”
“I doubt he was worried about damaging it.”
She lifted her head and her eyes met mine. “What can we do?”
“Get me the chips,” I said.
“What?”
“The chips and flakes that the Wada buffalitos scuffed off, get them. Please.”
She turned away, hopeless but at least with something to do. When she came back moments later, I had gathered the buffalo dog handlers around me and sat in a huddle with Reggie and the other buffalitos. I took the packet from Dr. Sands, unsealed it, and poured the contents into my gloved hand. The pieces gleamed like the polished and shattered bones of tiny creatures. I pushed them under Reggie’s nose.
“Don’t eat,” I said. “Taste, but don’t eat.”
Reggie lowered his muzzle and the chips vanished from my hand. A moment later he spit them back. The other four buffalitos pressed forward, eager to do the same. When they finished I returned the fragments to Dr. Sands and got to my feet.
“What was all that?” she said.
“We’re going to get your artifact back,” I said. “Or, at the very least, your capstone.”
“How?”
I nodded at my buffalo dog. “Reggie, find!”
He surged into action, racing off like a furry, four-legged cannonball. The other buffalitos followed at top speed, part miniature stampede, part search party. They spread out, bounding across the canyon in the opposite direction from the construction site. I waved the handlers over. “Follow them as best as you can. Reggie will keep them from getting lost, but they’ll welcome the sight of you on their way back.”
“Are you going with them?” asked Dr. Sands.
“No,” I said. “I’m going to find Mr. Ahonen.”
I found him in his bungalow. That was my first clue. When I removed my helmet and he saw it was me, his face reddened with renewed anger. That was my second clue. He stood up from behind his desk.
“I didn’t think you’d be stupid enough to set foot in my camp,” he said. “This is a construction site. Accidents can happen here.”
“Why’d you do it? Is your pride so big that it’s worth more than an alien artifact millions of years old?”
“What are you going on about? “
“Cut the crap,” I said. “The cylinder. Where is it?”
He laughed. I expected him to laugh, but it was the wrong kind of laughter. It wasn’t the resonating maniacal laughter of a criminal mastermind as he reveals his diabolical plan. Ahonen laughed the self-satisfied sound a man makes when he’s beaten, but it turns out the other guy hasn’t won either. Third clue.
“How did you misplace a multi-ton artifact half buried in ancient rock?” And he kept laughing.
Three clues is enough, even for me. I thought about punching him, but I didn’t deserve the satisfaction, not until I found the artifact. I slammed my helmet into place and pushed back into the airlock. Ahonen’s laughter echoed in my head all the way back to the dig site.
The buffalo dogs hadn’t returned. Their handlers were still out there too, checking in via radio with the archaeological crew who had gathered in the mess hut. The buffalitos had left the canyon and were moving away from Seroni.
“It wasn’t Ahonen,” I sa
id.
“Then... who?” said Dr. Sands.
I could only shrug. “We’ll know that when we find your artifact. I’m going to climb up to my shuttle. I’ll be able to do a wide area search from the air.”
“I’m coming with you,” said Dr. Sands, which I guess is the kind of thing a Martian princess is supposed to say. I nodded to her, and together we began the ascent to my waiting shuttle.
A buffalito following an olfactory trace at full speed in light gravity can cover a lot of ground. Reggie and the others had been out there for several hours, and I didn’t expect to find them right away. I implemented a simple search pattern, extending outward from beyond the canyon. An hour into the search we sighted several of the handlers, adjusted our course, and flew on.
We found the buffalitos half an hour later, more than twenty kilometers from the canyon edge. They’d climbed the slope of an ancient ridge and sat at the opening of a cave, yapping in the thin atmosphere at whatever was inside. I brought the shuttle down as close as I could, and Dr. Sands and I hurried out in our environment suits. We climbed down to the cave mouth and found the four buffalo dogs.
“Where’s Reggie?” said Dr. Sands.
I gestured at the cave. “Inside. Why don’t you wait here while I go see what he’s found.”
For the second time in just a few hours someone laughed at me. “I don’t think so.” She didn’t wait for an argument, striding right into the cave. I followed; what else could I do?
What had looked like a shallow dimple of a cave from outside took a turn into greater depth which the outside light couldn’t reach. It didn’t matter. A soft glow illuminated the arc of the cave wall. We followed that light another quarter turn and found two buffalo dogs sitting at the back of the cave. One of them was Reggie. At our arrival he yipped and jumped into my arms. The other buffalo dog could have been his exact twin, except that he was pure white and pulsing with light.
“Greetings, Dr. Sands. Greetings, Mr. Conroy.”
The white buffalito had spoken, and called us by name, and it hadn’t used any sound. Its voice had originated inside my head.
Dr. Sands stared at it, speechless. I managed a droll reply. “You have the advantage of us,” I said. “Who might you be?”
“I don’t have a name,” said the white buffalito telepathically. “But for the purpose of conversation, call me Archive.”
“Archive?” Dr. Sands had found her voice. “Archive of what?”
“A distant civilization. Hundreds of billions of beings.”
“They must be pretty damn tiny,” I said.
The white buffalito barked. “Not the people, Mr. Conroy. I am the archive of their thoughts, their knowledge. I am their art, their literature, their history, and their plans for the future.”
“All that in something your size?”
“My creators possessed the knowledge of encoding information within patterns of the subatomic particles of ordinary matter. I contain multitudes of data.”
“You’re an emergency back-up,” said Dr. Sands.
“Yes, Doctor. The galaxy is an unpredictable place; my creators knew that. Stars go nova, planets collide, well-intentioned experiments go awry. So periodically they compiled the content of their civilization and put it some place far away for safe keeping. Just in case. The Seroni expansion project woke me up.”
“But why do you look like my buffalito? And where’s the cylinder and capstone from the site?”
“My storage vessel. I collapsed and absorbed it to achieve full activation. I removed myself to this cave for just that purpose. That, and to process the information I’d been absorbing from your people on this planet. That’s what I was doing when your creature found me. I needed a shape appropriate to this environment. His skill in tracking me made him a viable template.”
“Now what will you do?” asked Dr. Sands.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I’ve failed in my purpose,” it said. “The beings who created me misjudged their own longevity. My scans reveal they no longer exist. They cannot reclaim their knowledge. And I cannot sustain transport off this planet to find others who might be able to. I am done, and wasted.”
“But we can,” said Dr. Sands, her eyes wide with an excitement beyond anything I’d seen in them. “You can tell us, all about your people, everything. You can share their civilization, keep them alive by passing on their art and history and philosophy to us.”
“That would be ideal, Doctor, but I cannot.”
“Why not?” I said.
“I mean no disrespect, Mr. Conroy, but your species can’t contain it.”
“Well, no, of course not,” I said. “Not all of it, not all at once, but you can dole it out in manageable bits, right?”
“I cannot. I’m an archive of subatomically encoded engrams, but I store them randomly and without any organization.”
“But could we copy and absorb them?” I said.
“Yes, much like the buffalo dogs copy the behavior of your Reggie,” said the white buffalito. “I could easily expose you to an atom bearing an engram, and an atom in your own body that has not experienced subatomic repatterning would automatically make a copy. If you had copies of all the right engrams that combined into a coherent thought, you would suddenly know a piece of knowledge from my creators’ civilization.”
“Then do that. Pop your engrams onto something we can absorb and we’ll grab onto them one by one.”
“It would take too long. Any of my creators could have absorbed all of the patterns at once. But a single engram at a time would take millennia, and your people don’t live that long.”
Dr. Sands nodded. “Because they’re not organized relative to one another. Each engram would be like a pixel from a photograph. And even if you had enough pixels to assemble the full photo, you’d have to have all the right pixels from the same photo, and there are billions of photos.”
“An apt analogy, though the order of magnitude is severely lacking,” said the white buffalito.
I laughed and shook my head. “You’re going about this from the wrong direction. Reverse your perspective.”
Dr. Sands looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “What are you saying?”
“Think Shakespeare. Monkeys and typewriters. Or in this case, buffalo dogs and typewriters.”
“Excuse me?” said the voice in my head.
“When you encode the engram onto an atom, is that atom used up when it’s absorbed and its pattern copied?”
“Of course not. There is no ‘using up’ of matter. If the atom does not combine with other atoms of the body, it can be absorbed by another being.”
“Then encode your engrams onto oxygen atoms.”
Dr. Sands gasped, and in the next instant was throwing her arms around me and all but kissing me through our respective helmets. “Yes!”
“Clarify.”
“You said it yourself,” she said, letting go of me far too soon. “There’s no using up of matter. The same oxygen that I breathe today will be inhaled by someone else, again and again. Encode your civilization’s legacy onto oxygen and release it into the new atmosphere that’s being built here on Mars. Given enough time and people, related engrams will combine in the same person, people will get the full picture, one at a time.”
The white buffalito sat silent. Minutes passed. And then, “That might work,” it said, its voice in my head sounding hopeful. “But it will take a long long time.”
“It’s going to take a long time to build an breathable atmosphere on Mars,” I said. “Not to mention build up the population here that’s going to breathe it. But it’s nothing compared to how long you’ve already been waiting.”
“I agree. And while I lack the typewriters you spoke of, I have apparently chosen an excellent shape. I shall begin at once.”
The white buffalito farted. Reggie barked with approval. The atmosphere of Mars grew by a tiny percentage, and the release of an alien archive into
the human realm had begun.
Requiem
Every character needs an origin story, and one day I decided to write Conroy's. To make it more interesting, and to stretch myself as a writer, I wanted to try a technique known as “bookending” in which the author actually tells two stories, a main, standalone story that, in this case, was actually all flashback, surrounded front and back by another story. Basically, a story in which someone tells someone else a second story.
Early drafts of this went through a grueling critique process by the small group of fellow writers who vet all my stuff and make me look good. My main problem with this was in the beginning of the flashback: in order to tell the story I had to first maroon a young Conroy on a planet. In the initial version I did this by blowing up a spaceship carrying Conroy, his fiancée, and a hundred or so other college students all off on a semester-in-space. The explosion kills everyone onboard (except for Conroy). Problem solved, right? My critique group shouted me down for this, reminding me that all the Conroy stories were light and happy, and that off-handedly killing the love of his life and lots of innocents was not something the story could recover from (this was 2001, two years before the film Finding Nemo would insist that you can kill off nearly an entire family of fish, sparing only one parent and one child, and still tell a funny, heart-warming story, but I digress). So I rewrote it. Characters changed and expanded. I ditched the fiancée and added Conroy's already-dead, great aunt. Then I blew up a much smaller ship, killing off only a dozen or so passengers to maroon Conroy. Again my helpful colleagues shouted me down.
In the end, Conroy's ship still blew up, but it’s the act of a not-really-alive vat-grown husk who would rather destroy itself than be used as a vessel for another persona, and Conroy ends up marooned as a result and we finally get to move on into the main story. Some of the later events of this story figure prominently in my first novel, Buffalito Destiny, and damned if that vat-grown husk—or its ideological cousin—doesn't come back to be a main character in the second novel, Buffalito Contingency. I had no idea either of these things would happen at the time I wrote this story. You just never know.
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