by John Varley
At the edge of the garden he stopped, remembering the order from Lang to stay out unless collecting samples. He watched the thing—bug? turtle?—for a moment, satisfied himself that it wouldn’t get too far away at its creeping pace, and hurried off to find Song.
“You’ve got to name it after me,” he said as they hurried back to the garden. “That’s my right, isn’t it, as the discoverer?”
“Sure,” Song said, peering along his pointed finger. “Just show me the damn thing and I’ll immortalize you.”
The thing was twenty centimeters long, almost round, dome-shaped. It had a hard shell on top.
“I don’t know quite what to do with it,” Song admitted. “If it’s the only one, I don’t dare dissect it, and maybe I shouldn’t even touch it.”
“Don’t worry, there’s another over behind you.” Now that they were looking for them, they quickly spied four of the creatures. Song took a sample bag from her pouch and held it open in front of the beast. It crawled halfway into the bag, then seemed to think something was wrong. It stopped, but Song nudged it in and picked it up. She peered at the underside and laughed in wonder.
“Wheels,” she said. “The thing runs on wheels.”
“I don’t know where it came from,” Song told the group that night. “I don’t even quite believe in it. It’d make a nice educational toy for a child, though. I took it apart into twenty or thirty pieces, put it back together, and it still runs. It has a high-impact polystyrene carapace, non-toxic paint on the outside—”
“Not really polystyrene,” Ralston interjected.
“. . . and I guess if you kept changing the batteries it would run forever. And it’s nearly polystyrene, that’s what you said.”
“Were you serious about the batteries?” Lang asked.
“I’m not sure. Marty thinks there’s a chemical metabolism in the upper part of the shell, which I haven’t explored yet. But I can’t really say if it’s alive in the sense we use. I mean, it runs on wheels! It has three wheels, suited for sand, and something that’s a cross between a rubber-band drive and a mainspring. Energy is stored in a coiled muscle and released slowly. I don’t think it could travel more than a hundred meters. Unless it can re-coil the muscle, and I can’t tell how that might be done.”
“It sounds very specialized,” McKillian said thoughtfully. “Maybe we should be looking for the niche it occupies. The way you describe it, it couldn’t function without help from a symbiote. Maybe it fertilizes the plants, like bees, and the plants either donate or are robbed of the power to wind the spring. Did you look for some mechanism the bug could use to steal energy from the rotating gears in the whirligigs?”
“That’s what I want to do in the morning,” Song said. “Unless Mary will let us take a look tonight?” She said it hopefully, but without real expectation. Mary Lang shook her head decisively.
“It’ll keep. It’s cold out there, baby.”
A new exploration of the whirligig garden the next day revealed several new species, including one more thing that might be an animal. It was a flying creature, the size of a fruit fly, that managed to glide from plant to plant when the wind was down by means of a freely rotating set of blades, like an autogiro.
Crawford and Lang hung around as the scientists looked things over. They were not anxious to get back to the task that had occupied them for the last two weeks: bringing the Podkayne to a horizontal position without wrecking her. The ship had been rigged with stabilizing cables soon after landing, and provision had been made in the plans to lay the ship on its side in the event of a really big windstorm. But the plans had envisioned a work force of twenty, working all day with a maze of pulleys and gears. It was slow work and could not be rushed. If the ship were to tumble and lose pressure, they didn’t have a prayer.
So they welcomed an opportunity to tour fairyland. The place was even more bountiful than the last time Crawford had taken a look. There were thick vines that Song assured him were running with water, hot and cold, and various other fluids. There were more of the tall variety of derrick, making the place look like a pastel oil field.
They had little trouble finding where the matthews came from. They found dozens of twenty-centimeter lumps on the sides of the large derricks. They evidently grew from them like tumors and were released when they were ripe. What they were for was another matter. As well as they could discover, the matthews simply crawled in a straight line until their power ran out. If they were wound up again, they would crawl further. There were dozens of them lying motionless in the sand within a hundred-meter radius of the garden.
Two weeks of research left them knowing no more. They had to abandon the matthews for the time, as another enigma had cropped up which demanded their attention.
This time Crawford was the last to know. He was called on the radio and found the group all squatting in a circle around a growth in the graveyard.
The graveyard, where they had buried their fifteen dead crewmates on the first day of the disaster, had sprouted with life during the week after the departure of the Burroughs. It was separated from the original site of the dome by three hundred meters of blowing sand. So McKillian assumed this second bloom was caused by the water in the bodies of the dead. What they couldn’t figure out was why this patch should differ so radically from the first one.
There were whirligigs in the second patch, but they lacked the variety and disorder of the originals. They were of nearly uniform size, about four meters tall, and all the same color, dark purple. They had pumped water for two weeks, then stopped. When Song examined them, she reported the bearings were frozen, dried out. They seemed to have lost the plasticizer that kept the structures fluid and living. The water in the pipes was frozen. Though she would not commit herself in the matter, she felt they were dead. In their place was a second network of pipes which wound around the derricks and spread transparent sheets of film to the sunlight, heating the water which circulated through them. The water was being pumped, but not by the now-familiar system of windmills. Spaced along each of the pipes were expansion-contraction pumps with valves very like those in a human heart.
The new marvel was a simple affair in the middle of that living petrochemical complex. It was a short plant that sprouted up half a meter, then extruded two stalks parallel to the ground. At the end of each stalk was a perfect globe, one gray, one blue. The blue one was much larger than the gray one.
Crawford looked at it briefly, then squatted down beside the rest, wondering what all the fuss was about. Everyone looked very solemn, almost scared.
“You called me over to see this?”
Lang looked at him, and something in her face made him nervous.
“Look at it, Matt. Really look at it.” So he did, feeling foolish, wondering what the joke was. He noticed a white patch near the top of the largest globe. It was streaked, like a glass marble with swirls of opaque material in it. It looked very familiar, he realized, with the hair on the back of his neck starting to stand up.
“It turns,” Lang said quietly. “That’s why Song noticed it. She came by here one day and it was in a different position than it had been.”
“Let me guess,” he said, much more calmly than he felt. “The little one goes around the big one, right?”
“Right. And the little one keeps one face turned to the big one. The big one rotates once in twenty-four hours. It has an axial tilt of twenty-three degrees.”
“It’s a . . . what’s the word? Orrery. It’s an orrery.” Crawford had to stand up and shake his head to clear it.
“It’s funny,” Lang said, quietly. “I always thought it would be something flashy, or at least obvious. An alien artifact mixed in with caveman bones, or a spaceship entering the system. I guess I was thinking in terms of pottery shards and atom bombs.”
“Well, that all sounds pretty ho-hum to me up against this,” Song said. “Do you . . . do you realize . . . what are we talking about here? Evolution, or . . . or engineering? Is it the plants themselves
that did this, or were they made to do it by whatever built them? Do you see what I’m talking about? I’ve felt funny about those wheels for a long time. I just won’t believe they’d evolve naturally.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I think these plants we’ve been seeing were designed to be the way they are. They’re too perfectly adapted, too ingenious to have just sprung up in response to the environment.” Her eyes seemed to wander, and she stood up and gazed into the valley below them. It was as barren as anything that could be imagined: red and yellow and brown rock outcroppings and tumbled boulders. And in the foreground, the twirling colors of the whirligigs.
“But why this thing?” Crawford asked, pointing to the impossible artifact-plant. “Why a model of the Earth and Moon? And why right here, in the graveyard?”
“Because we were expected,” Song said, still looking away from them. “They must have watched Earth, during the last summer season. I don’t know; maybe they even went there. If they did, they would have found men and women like us, hunting and living in caves. Building fires, using clubs, chipping arrowheads. You know more about it than I do, Matt.”
“Who are they?” Ralston asked. “You think we’re going to be meeting some Martians? People? I don’t see how. I don’t believe it.”
“I’m afraid I’m skeptical, too,” Lang said. “Surely there must be some other way to explain it.”
“No! There’s no other way. Oh, not people like us, maybe. Maybe we’re seeing them right now, spinning like crazy.” They all looked uneasily at the whirligigs. “But I think they’re not here yet. I think we’re going to see, over the next few years, increasing complexity in these plants and animals as they build up a biome here and get ready for the builders. Think about it. When summer comes, the conditions will be very different. The atmosphere will be almost as dense as ours, with about the same partial pressure of oxygen. By then, thousands of years from now, these early forms will have vanished. These things are adapted for low pressure, no oxygen, scarce water. The later ones will be adapted to an environment much like ours. And that’s when we’ll see the makers, when the stage is properly set.” She sounded almost religious when she said it.
Lang stood up and shook Song’s shoulder. Song came slowly back to them and sat down, still blinded by a private vision. Crawford had a glimpse of it himself, and it scared him. And a glimpse of something else, something that could be important but kept eluding him.
“Don’t you see?” she went on, calmer, now. “It’s too pat, too much of a coincidence. This thing is like a . . . a headstone, a monument. It’s growing right here in the graveyard, from the bodies of our friends. Can you believe in that as just a coincidence?”
Evidently no one could. But at the same time Crawford could see no reason why it should have happened the way it did.
It was painful to leave the mystery for later, but there was nothing to be done about it. They could not bring themselves to uproot the thing, even when five more like it sprouted in the graveyard. There was a new consensus among them to leave the Martian plants and animals alone. Like nervous atheists, most of them didn’t believe Song’s theories but had an uneasy feeling of trespassing when they went through the gardens. They felt subconsciously that it might be better to leave them alone in case they turned out to be private property.
And for six months, nothing really new cropped up among the whirligigs. Song was not surprised. She said it supported her theory that these plants were there only as caretakers to prepare the way for the less hardy, air-breathing varieties to come. They would warm the soil and bring the water closer to the surface, then disappear when their function was over.
The three scientists allowed their studies to slide as it became more important to provide for the needs of the moment. The dome material was weakening as the temporary patches lost strength, so a new home was badly needed. They were dealing daily with slow leaks, any of which could become a major blowout.
The Podkayne was lowered to the ground, and sadly decommissioned. It was a bad day for Mary Lang, the worst since the day of the blowout. She saw it as a necessary but infamous thing to do to a proud flying machine. She brooded about it for a week, becoming short-tempered and almost unapproachable. Then she asked Crawford to join her in the private shelter. It was the first time she had asked any of the other four. They lay in each other’s arms for an hour, and Lang quietly sobbed on his chest. Crawford was proud that she had chosen him for her companion when she could no longer maintain her tough, competent show of strength. In a way, it was a strong thing to do, to expose weakness to the one person among the four who might possibly be her rival for leadership. He did not betray the trust. In the end, she was comforting him.
After that day Lang was ruthless in gutting the old Podkayne. She supervised the ripping out of the motors to provide more living space, and only Crawford saw what it was costing her. They drained the fuel tanks and stored the fuel in every available container they could scrounge. It would be useful later for heating and for recharging batteries. They managed to convert plastic packing crates into fuel containers by lining them with sheets of the double-walled material the whirligigs used to heat water. They were nervous at this vandalism, but had no other choice. They kept looking nervously at the graveyard as they ripped up meter-square sheets of it.
They ended up with a long cylindrical home, divided into two small sleeping rooms, a community room, and a laboratory-storehouse-workshop in the old fuel tank. Crawford and Lang spent the first night together in the “penthouse,” the former cockpit, the only room with windows.
Lying there wide awake on the rough mattress, side by side in the warm air with Mary Lang, whose black leg was a crooked line of shadow lying across his body; looking up through the port at the sharp, unwinking stars—with nothing done yet about the problems of oxygen, food, and water for the years ahead and no assurance he would live out the night on a planet determined to kill him—Crawford realized he had never been happier in his life.
On a day exactly eight months after the disaster, two discoveries were made. One was in the whirligig garden and concerned a new plant that was bearing what might be fruit. They were clusters of grape-sized white balls, very hard and fairly heavy. The second discovery was made by Lucy McKillian and concerned the absence of an event that up to that time had been as regular as the full moon.
“I’m pregnant,” she announced to them that night, causing Song to delay her examination of the white fruit.
It was not unexpected; Lang had been waiting for it to happen since the night the Burroughs left. But she had not worried about it. Now she must decide what to do.
“I was afraid that might happen,” Crawford said. “What do we do, Mary?”
“Why don’t you tell me what you think? You’re the survival expert. Are babies a plus or a minus in our situation?”
“I’m afraid I have to say they’re a liability. Lucy will be needing extra food during her pregnancy, and afterward, and it will be an extra mouth to feed. We can’t afford the strain on our resources.” Lang said nothing, waiting to hear from McKillian.
“Now wait a minute. What about all this line about ‘colonists’ you’ve been feeding us ever since we got stranded here? Who ever heard of a colony without babies? If we don’t grow, we stagnate, right? We have to have children.” She looked back and forth from Lang to Crawford, her face expressing formless doubts.
“We’re in special circumstances, Lucy,” Crawford explained. “Sure, I’d be all for it if we were better off. But we can’t be sure we can even provide for ourselves, much less a child. I say we can’t afford children until we’re established.”
“Do you want the child, Lucy?” Lang asked quietly.
McKillian didn’t seem to know what she wanted. “No. I . . . but, yes. Yes, I guess I do.” She looked at them, pleading for them to understand.
“Look, I’ve never had one, and never planned to. I’m thirty-four years old and never, never
felt the lack. I’ve always wanted to go places, and you can’t with a baby. But I never planned to become a colonist on Mars, either. I . . . Things have changed, don’t you see? I’ve been depressed. She looked around, and Song and Ralston were nodding sympathetically. Relieved to see that she was not the only one feeling the oppression, she went on, more strongly. “I think if I go another day like yesterday and the day before—and today—I’ll end up screaming. It seems so pointless, collecting all that information, for what?”
“I agree with Lucy,” Ralston said, surprisingly. Crawford had thought he would be the only one immune to the inevitable despair of the castaway. Ralston in his laboratory was the picture of carefree detachment, existing only to observe.
“So do I,” Lang said, ending the discussion. But she explained her reasons to them.
“Look at it this way, Matt. No matter how we stretch our supplies, they won’t take us through the next four years. We either find a way of getting what we need from what’s around us, or we all die. And if we find a way to do it, then what does it matter how many of us there are? At the most this will push our deadline a few weeks or a month closer, the day we have to be self-supporting.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Crawford admitted.
“But that’s not important. The important thing is what you said from the first, and I’m surprised you didn’t see it. If we’re a colony, we expand. By definition. Historian, what happened to colonies that failed to expand?”
“Don’t rub it in.”
“They died out. I know that much. People, we’re not intrepid space explorers anymore. We’re not the career men and women we set out to be. Like it or not, and I suggest we start liking it, we’re pioneers trying to live in a hostile environment. The odds are very much against us, and we’re not going to be here forever, but like Matt said, we’d better plan as if we were. Comment?”
There was none, until Song spoke up, thoughtfully.
