by Greg Bear
Steam rises from the hoarfrost accumulated during the night. It vanishes like a tramp after dinner.
Should we wish to send a message to Willy now, we shall have to unship the laser and remount it. The hash has increased and Willy says his pickup is deteriorating.
More ice falls during the night. Linker kept track of them. My insomnia has communicated itself to him--ideal for standing long watches. Ice falls are more frequent here than on Earth--the leavings of comets and the asteroids come through this thin atmosphere more easily. A small chunk came to within a sixty meters of our site, leaving an impressive crater.
Another break. Willy has relayed a message from Control. They managed to pick up and reconstruct our request for instructions on first contact. They must have thought we were joking. Here's part of the transmission:
"We think you're not content with finding giant vegetables on Mars. Dr. Wender advised on Martians...(hash)...some clear indications of their ability to fire large cylindrical bodies into space. Beware tripod machines. Second opinion from Frank: Not all green Martians are Tharks. He wants sample from Dejah Thoris--can you arrange for egg?"
I put on a pressure suit and went for a walk after the disappointment of the transmission. Linker suited up after me and followed for a while. I armed myself with a piece of aluminum from the salvaged pad. He carried nothing.
Swift Plateau is about four hundred kilometers across. At its northern perimeter, an aqueduct had once hoisted itself a kilometer or so and vaulted across the flats, covering fifteen kilometers of upland before dropping over the south rim into the Moab-Marduk Range. Our landing site is a kilometer from the closest stretch of fragments. Linker followed me to the edge of the field of green and blue grass, keeping quiet, looking behind apprehensively as if he expected something to pop up between us and the lander.
I had a notebook in my satchel and paused to sketch some of the piers the Winter Troops hadn't yet brought down. None of them were over four meters tall.
"I'm afraid of them," Linker said over the suit radio. I stopped my sketching to look at him.
"So?" I inquired with a touch of irritation. "We're all afraid of them."
"I'm not afraid because they'll hurt me. It's because of what they might bring out in me, if I give them half a chance. I don't want to hate them."
"Not even Cobb hates them," I said.
"Oh, yes he does," Linker said, nodding his head within the bulky helmet. "But he's afraid for his life. I fear for my self-respect."
I shook my helmet to show I didn't understand.
"Because I can't understand them. They're irrational. They don't seem to see us. They run around us, fulfilling some mission.... they don't care whether we live or die. Yet I have to respect them--they're alien. The first intelligent creatures we've ever met."
"If they're intelligent," I reminded him.
"Come on, Mercer, they must be. They build."
"So did these," I said, waving a gloved hand at the field of shattered green bottles.
"I'm trying to make myself clear," he said, exasperated. "When I was in Eritrea, I didn't understand the nationalists. Or the communists. Both sides were willing to kill their own people or allow them to starve if it won some small objective. It was sick. I even hated the ones we were supporting."
"The Martians aren't Africans," I said. "We can't expect to understand their motives."
"Comes back double, then, don't you see? I want to understand, to know why--"
He suddenly switched his radio off, raised his hands in frustration and turned to walk back to the lander.
Our automatic interrupts clicked on and Cobb spoke to us. "That's it, friends. We're blanketed by hash. I can't get through to Willy. We'll have to punch through with the laser."
"I'm on my way back," Linker said. "I'll help you set it up."
In a few minutes, I was alone on the field of ruins. I sat on a weather-pocked boulder and took out my sketchbook again. I mapped the directions from which we had been approached and attacked and compared them with the site of the eggs we had found. What I was looking for, with such ridiculously slim evidence, was a clear pattern of migration--say, from the hatcheries in a line with the sunrise. Nothing came of it.
Disgusted at my desperation, I was lost in a fog of something approaching misery when I glanced up... And jumped to my feet so fast I leaped a good three feet into the air, twisting my ankle as I came down. Two white Martians stared at me with their wide, blank gray eyes, eyelashes as long and expressive as a camel's. The fingers on their hands--each had three arms, but only two legs--shivered like mouse-whiskers, not nervous but seeking information. We had been too involved fending them off before to take note of their features. Now, at a loss what to do, I had all the time in the world.
Three long webbed toes, leathery and dead-looking like sticks, met an odd two-jointed ankle which even now I can't reproduce on paper. Their thighs were knotted with muscles and covered with red and white stippled fur. They could hop or run like frightened deer--that much I knew from experience. Their hips were thickly furred. They defied my few semesters of training in biology by having trilateral symmetry between hips and neck, and bilateral below the hips. Three arms met at ingenious triangular shoulders, rising to short necks and mouselike faces. Their ears were mounted atop their heads and could fan out like unfolded directennas, or hide away if rough activity threatened them.
The Martians were fast when they wanted to be, and I had no idea what else they could eat besides the ruins, so I made no false moves.
One whickered like a horse, its voice reedy and distant in the thin atmosphere. The noise must have been impressively loud to reach my small, helmeted ears. It looked behind itself, twisting its head one-eighty to look as its behind-arm scratched a tuft of hair on its right shoulder. The back fur rippled appreciatively. Parrot-like, the head returned to calmly stare at me.
After half an hour, I sat down again on the boulder. I could still see the lander and the linear glint of the glider wings, but there was no sign of Cobb or Linker. Nobody was searching for me.
My suit was getting cold. Slowly, I checked my battery pack gauge and saw it was showing a low charge. Cautiously, in distinct stages, I stood and brushed my pressure suit. The Martian to my right jerked, fingers trembling, and I held my pose, apprehensive. With a swift motion, it pulled a green, fibrous piece of aqueduct-bridge girder from its stiff rump fur with its behind-arm and held it out to me. The piece was about thirty centimeters long, chewed all around. I straightened, extended one hand and accepted the gift.
Without further ado, the Martians twisted around and leaped across the plateau, running and leaping simultaneously.
Clutching my gift, I returned to the lander. My feet and fingers were numb when I arrived.
The tripod lay on the ground, legs spraddled. The laser was nowhere to be seen. I had a moment's panic, thinking the lander had been attacked--but since I had kept it in sight, that didn't seem likely. I climbed into the lander's primary lock.
Inside, Linker clutched the laser in both hands, one finger resting lightly, nervously, on the unsheathed and delicate scandium-garnet rod. Cobb sat on the opposite side of the cabin, barely two meters from Linker, fuming.
"What in hell is going on?" I asked, puffing on my fingers and stamping my feet.
"Listen, Thoreau," Cobb said bitterly, "while you were out communing with nature, Mr. Gandhi here decided to make sure we can't harm any of the sweet little creatures."
I turned to Linker, focusing on his uncertain finger and the garnet. "What are you doing?"
"I'm not sure, Dan," he answered calmly, face blank. "I have a firm conviction, that's all I know. I have to be firm. Otherwise I'll be just like you and Cobb."
"I have a conviction, too," Cobb said. "I'm convinced you're nuts."
"You're seriously thinking about breaking that garnet?" I asked.
"Damned serious."
"We can fight them off with other things if we have to," I re
asoned. "The assay charges, the core sample gun--"
"Don't give Cobb any more ideas," Linker said.
"But we can't talk to Willy if you break that garnet."
"Cobb saw two of the Winter Troops. He was going to take a pot-shot at them with this." Linker lifted the laser, face still blank.
I blinked for a few seconds, feeling myself flush with anger. "Jesus. Cobb, is that true?"
"I was sighting on them, in case there were more--"
"Were you going to shoot?"
"It was convenient. They might have been a vanguard."
"That's not very rational," I observed.
"I'm not sure I'm being rational, either," Linker said, fully aware how fragmented we were now, the sadness we all felt coming to the surface. His eyes were doglike, searching my face for understanding, or at least a way to understand himself.
"I'll do anything necessary to make sure we all survive," Cobb said. "If that means killing a few Martians, then I'll do it. If it means overruling the mission commander, then I'll do that, too."
"He refused to put the laser down, even when I gave him a direct order. That's mutiny."
"This isn't getting us anywhere," Cobb said.
"I won't vouch for your sanity," I said to Linker. "Not if you break that garnet. And I won't vouch for Cobb's, either. Taking pot-shots at possibly intelligent aliens." I remembered the stick. Damn it, they were intelligent! They had to be, advancing on a stranger and giving him a gift.... "I don't know what sort of speculative first-contact training we should have had, but in spirit if not in letter, Linker has to be closer to the ideal than you."
"We should be testing the brace on the pad and leveling the field in front of the glider. When we get out of here, we can argue philosophy all the way home. And to get home, we need the laser."
Linker nodded. "We'll just agree not to use it for anything but communication."
I looked at Cobb, finally making my decision, and wondering whether I was crazy, too. "I think Linker's right."
"OK," Cobb said softly. "But there's going to be a hell of a row after we debrief."
"That's an understatement," I said.
This record, even if it survives, will probably be kept in the administration files for fifty or sixty years--or longer--to "protect the feelings of the families." But who can gainsay the judgment of the folks who put us here? Not I, humble Thoreau on Mars, as Cobb described me.
I did not reveal the gift to my crewmates until the laser had been remounted in the lander. I simply lay it on the table, wrapped in an airtight transparent sylar specimen bag, while we rested and sipped hot chocolate. Linker was the first to pick it up, glancing at me, puzzled.
"We have enough of these, don't we?" he asked.
"It's been chewed on," I pointed out, reaching to run my finger along the stick's surface. I told them about the two Martians. Cobb looked decidedly uncomfortable then.
"Did they chew on it in your presence?" Linker asked.
"No."
"Maybe they were offering food," Cobb said. "A peace offering?" His expression was sad, as if all the energy and anger had been drained and nothing much was left but regret.
"It's more than food," Linker said. "It's like stick-writing.... Ogham. The Irish and Britons used something similar centuries ago. Notches on the side of a stone or stick--a kind of alphabet. But this is much more complex. Here--there's an oval--"
"Unless it's a tooth-mark," I said.
"Whether it's a tooth-mark or not, it isn't random. There are five long marks beside it, and one mark about half the length of the others. That's about equal to one Deimotic month--five and a half days." My respect for Linker increased. He raised his eyebrows, looking for confirmation, and started to hand the stick to me, then stopped and swung it around to Cobb. Mission commander, re-integrating a disgruntled crewmember. A mist of tears came to my eyes.
"I don't think they've reached a high level of technology yet," Linker said.
Cobb looked up from the gift and grinned. "Technology?"
"They built the walls and structures Willy saw. I don't think any of us can argue that they're not intent on changing their environment. Unless we make asses out of ourselves and say their work is no more significant than a beaver dam, it's obvious they're advancing rapidly. They might use notched sticks for relaying information."
"So what's this?" I asked, pointing to the gift.
"Maybe it's a subpoena," Linker said.
While I've been recording the above, Cobb has gone outside to see how long it will take to clear the glider path. The field was chosen to be free of boulders--but anything bigger than a fist could skew us around dangerously. The sleds have been deployed. I've finished tamping the braces on the pad.
The glider and capsule check out. In an hour we'll lase a message to Willy and give our estimate on launch and rendezvous.
Willy tells us that most of Mesogaea and Memnonia are covered with walls. Meridiani Sinus, according to his telescope observations, has been criss-crossed with roads or trails. The white Martians are using the sand-filled black old resin reservoirs for some purpose unknown.
Edom Crater is as densely packed as a city. All this in less than two days. There must be millions of hatchlings at work.
I'll break again and supervise the glider power-up.
Linker and Cobb are dead.
Jesus, that hurts to write.
We had just tested the RATO automatic timers when a horde of Winter Troops marched across the plateau, about ninety deep and a good four kilometers abreast. I'm certain they weren't out to get us. It was one of those migrational sweeps, a screwball mass survey of geography, and incidentally a leveling of all the aqueduct-bridges from the last cycle.
They gave us our chance. We didn't reply.
Linker had finished clearing the path. They caught him a half-kilometer from the lander. I think they just trampled him to death. They were moving much faster than a man can run. I imagine his face, eyebrows rising in query, maybe he even tried to smile or greet them, lifting a hand....
I can't get that out of my head. I have to concentrate.
Cobb knew exactly what to do. I think he didn't mount the laser solidly, leaving a few brackets loose enough so he could unship it and bring it down, ready for hand use at a minute's notice. He took it outside the ship with just helmet and oxygen on--it's about five or six degrees outside, daylight--and fired on the Winter Troops just before they reached the glider. There are dead and dying or blinded Martians all along the edge of the path.
They paid their casualties no heed. They did not bother with us, just pushed around and through, touching nothing, staying away from the area he was sweeping--the edge of the path.
They can climb like monkeys. They dropped over the rim of the plateau.
They didn't touch Cobb. The frayed cord on the laser killed him when he stepped on it coming back in.
Where was I? Inside the glider, monitoring the power-up. I couldn't hear a thing. It was all over by the time I got outside.
The laser is gone, but we've already sent our data to Willy. I have the return message. That's all I need for the moment. The glider and capsule are powered and ready.
I'll launch it by myself. I can do that.
When Willy's position is right. The timer is going. Everything will be automatic.
I'll make it to orbit.
Two hours. Less. I can't bring them in. I could, but what use? There are no facilities for dead astronauts aboard the orbiter. What hurts is I'll have a better margin with them gone, more fuel. I did not want it that way, I never thought of that, I swear to God.
The glider wings are crackling in the wind. The wind is coming at a perfect angle, thin but fast, about two hundred kilometers an hour. Enough to feel if I were outside.
I trust in an awful lot now that Linker and Cobb are gone. Maybe it'll be over soon and I can stop this writing and stop feeling this pain.
Waiting. Just the right instant for launch. Timers, e
verything on auto. I sit helpless and wait. My last instructions: three buttons and an instruction to the remotes to expand the wings to take-off width and increase tension. Like a square-rigger. They check okay, flat now, waiting for the best gust and RATO fire. Then they'll drop into the proper configuration, dragonfly wings, for high atmosphere.
I spent some time learning Martian anatomy as I cleared the path of the few Cobb had let through. There are still a couple out there. I don't think I'll hit them.
