Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  The proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere has increased faster than anyone could have predicted. The manic growth of plant life, feeding on carbon dioxide, excreting oxygen, accounts for only a small part of the oxygen increase; those white factories are everywhere on Mars, all over the globe—immensely scaled-up versions of our artificial-enzyme breathers. I have found what becomes of the carbon. Conveyor lines of flying medusas feed the carbon into the throats of massive volcanoes—directly into the ground, through great shafts the Amaltheans have sunk to magma chambers deep below the surface, there to be stored up for eventual recycling by geologic processes. What is the logic of this? It is manifold, I think, and will be revealed in time.

  With the heady rush of oxygen has come a swarm of animal species. Insects enliven the meadows: stick-like dragonflies, as blue as neon with black button eyes; clouds of gnats and mosquitos; ants and spiders teeming among the roots. And at night, locusts singing to the bright stars.

  Beetles everywhere! According to Angus McNeil, there was a noted 20th-century biologist named Haldane who, having been questioned what inference about God one might draw from a study of His works, replied, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.” On Mars we glimpse a foreshadowing of that fondness, if not its rationale.

  The Martian seas teem as thickly. Following the infusion of oxygen into the waters, the portals of the world-ship have opened and emptied their living reservoirs of plankton and coral and worms and jellyfish and crustaceans and cephalopods. Captain Walsh and I have been down in the Manta to see for ourselves; the sunlit blue-water scenery is reminiscent of the Red Sea, the richest sea on Earth. We could not move the submarine without encountering life in myriad shapes and colors—and frantic, fantastic behaviors.

  Today, for the first time since we landed on Mars, I walked on the surface with the mask of my breather dangling unused in front of me. With every step, succulent ice plant squashed under my boots. Today for the first time I saw a flock of birds, or something like birds, moving against the horizon.

  The Amaltheans are masters at this; surely they are the gardeners of the universe. And Mars is the Garden of Eden.

  00.21.13.19

  My friend Angus tells me that Paradise cannot last.

  The problem is heat, he says. Not heat at the surface, which has been maintained at the present comfortable temperature by the greenhouse effect of a carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere, but heat in the interior, which comes from only two sources: heat remaining from the planet’s formation out of the solar nebula, and heat generated by the decay of radioactive isotopes.

  We know from the Mars of our own era, says McNeil, that the planet—while volcanically more active than anyone had suspected before the first human explorers set foot on the place—is not specially endowed with radioactives. As for the heat of formation, which was less than Earth’s to begin with, that must inevitably be lost. For Mars has only half the diameter of Earth; consequently it has a higher surface-to-volume ratio and radiates at a proportionally higher rate.

  And when the interior heat drops too low, Mars will lose its atmosphere.

  I balked at that. “I have trouble seeing the connection between atmospheric temperature and the planet’s inner temperature. Didn’t you just now say that the greenhouse effect is not linked to interior processes?”

  Patiently my studious friend explained that the greenhouse effect depends upon carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. “Not only are the Amaltheans deliberately removing it, the planetary system itself is constantly removing carbon dioxide from the air, through active chemical weathering.”

  At the time Angus was telling me this we were walking along the edge of an eroded butte, as red as the Morrison sandstones of Earth. Far below us a narrow blue sea shone like lapis, hemmed in by red walls. A hundred threads of white water, waterfalls carried to their outfalls through saturated strata, burst from the rock as if it had been repeatedly struck by the rod of Moses, to fall into pools and rush over cascades of broken boulders, to flow through groves of willow and palm that had not existed a Martian year ago. The ultimate source of these waterfalls was visible on the purple edge of the desert a hundred kilometers away, in a line of rainstorms rolling sublimely across the sands.

  “Rain constantly dissolves atmospheric carbon dioxide to form carbonic acid,” Angus explained, “and the acid eats at the rocks where the rain falls and the water runs, and the carbon is locked into them,” He bent down and picked up a shard of sandstone, prying at its water-blackened surface with his thumbnail. “If the carbon in this rock should fail to return to the atmosphere—if the carbon in enough weathered rocks like this does not return to the atmosphere, and if the carbon the Amaltheans are shoveling into the volcanoes never returns to the atmosphere—Mars will freeze.

  “Carbon is released when the rocks are heated. But Mars has no plate tectonics to carry slabs of surface rock deep into the interior,” he went on. “For now, and for the last billion years or so, the planet is recycling such rocks by burying them under immense layers of lava and volcanic ash. Granted, Mars has, or anyway will have in our era, the biggest volcanoes in the solar system. But as they cool—and they must—carbon will be removed from the atmosphere and locked in the rocks, water will freeze, the animals will die, and the plants will dry up and roll away on a cold, cold wind.”

  Although Angus painted this disastrous picture perhaps too graphically, I saw his point. Yet I cannot believe the Amaltheans have not anticipated these events and planned some means of forestalling the inevitable.

  14

  00.22.06.13

  What is Troy up to? What has become of that once-genial fellow Redfield? Their communications with us are infrequent and brief. Of course they never expected us to be here with them. Their alien friend tried to leave us in our own era, among our own kind. But did they expect to come here? What role do they have to play in all this?

  And I wonder about that cult of theirs, of which the late—and, I confess, little missed—Sir Randolph Mays was apparently some sort of figurehead. Nemo now, wherever he’s gone to, and well named.

  As for Troy and Redfield, they claim never to have been believers in the Free Spirit—unlike Troy’s parents. But I wonder. Perhaps I will never know. We on the Ventris are not privy to their councils. We know what they tell us, and that only, and we do our best—like obedience-trained media-hounds—to cover the pre-announced news.

  There has been much of it.

  After that long ago and thrilling first landing on Mars we kept ourselves busy to the point of exhaustion merely by attempting to keep up with the swift work of the Amaltheans. We could not hope to document everything they did—there were too many of them for that, and they were too widely dispersed over the surface of the planet. But Troy’s infrequent bulletins notified us of the more spectacular events—the melting of the southern ice cap and the flooding of the Hellas depression, the sowing of the waters with a thousand species of fish numbered in the billions, the planting of the Scandia highlands with conifers (a million trees in a week, with wildflowers and mosses and all the rest to sustain the ecosystem, an instant taiga!)—and we moved the Michael Ventris as necessary in order to capture them with our cameras as they unfolded.

  We dropped the tug’s clip-on holds, of course, and the equipment bay too, except when we needed it to transport the Manta. The little submarine was an invaluable tool; so much of what we wanted to see happened underwater. Other than the Manta, the hold had carried only the battered Moon Cruiser in which Mays and Marianne had arrived on Amalthea, and for which we had made room by abandoning our ice mole. We’d dragged the cruiser with us as evidence of Mays’s misdeeds, evidence intended to be used in some eventual Space Board inquiry—which seemed, as the months passed, increasingly unlikely ever to convene (at least with any of us present to testify). So the cruiser’s gone now, tom apart, recycled, serving useful purposes.

  Even stripped, the Ventris is an awkward craft for flying in the thick atmosphere: it is wholly
dependent upon its rocket engines for lift; its flight paths are suborbital parabolas. It needs too-frequent refuelings from the world-ship’s immense reservoirs of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Therefore Tony and Angus are planning a sailplane to carry on our explorations, one modeled on the graceful marsplanes of our own era. At the moment it’s a spare-time labor of love for them; all of us are busy with full-time work. We have been building a home on Mars.

  We walk freely in the warm, oxygen-rich air, having discarded our breathers long ago. What was our basecamp has become our settlement, our village. We have a nearby fresh-water spring in the shelter of a high sandstone bluff to the west, to windward. Less than half a kilometer to the north is the sea, which (on another Mars?) will someday drain into the vastness of the Valles Marineris.

  The old Ventris is parked half a kilometer in the opposite direction, a skeletal vehicle perched in the dunes, surrounded by cast-off holds like rusting boilers that make it look like a gutted steamship, although in this case our ship, however rarely called upon to demonstrate its spaceworthiness, is in fact still capable of getting up steam.

  Rocket engines make a fine foundry fire, and the rocks of Mars are rich in iron ore. Rockets are also quite capable of melting sand to pure silica, although we have lately fashioned solar mirrors that do the job almost as well. We have made a variety of implements of glass and iron and crude steel, but the principal product of our steel mill is reinforcing bar. Here and there, at the margins of our narrow sea, the crumbling red bluffs are seamed with gypsum and limestone (the presence of limestone was a surprise to me, for I had thought it a product solely of life)—all the makings of a cement industry.

  Our houses are made from reinforced concrete and glass. We shape them as if we were happily patting sandcastles on a beach, scooping out the sand and mounding it, pouring water on the mounds to hold, temporarily, whatever whimsical shapes we might wish to carve in them, then emplacing our glass slabs and securing the mounds in a net of iron bars.

  The right recipe for concrete was not easy to find. In our first attempts the sandy mixture never set but merely crumbled to powder. We recalibrated, our chemical programs—not without some grumbling from a ship’s computer program that thinks itself above such mundane business. Now the smooth, heavy mud sets quickly and, over the course of a week or so, cures nicely, whereupon we dig the sandy mold from beneath it. Voila, a graceful domed structure, much higher and more boldly vaulted in this planet’s low gravity than any corresponding structure could be on Earth, the intricacy of its intaglio limited only by the imagination and patience of its builders (and of course by the speed of evaporation). Even the first crude results gave us pleasure more intense than I could have foreseen.

  Because we seek protection from the wind—our mound-building is easier if we dig holes in the sand rather than make exposed piles of it, which the wind too rapidly dries and resculpts—our settlement is more than half buried; only the very tops of the domes show above ground level. Shrubs and trees and ground-hugging flowers borrowed from Amalthean plantations grow in the cool and sheltered pathways among our houses and workrooms. Angus tells us they are remarkably like the desert plants of some parts of our Earth—the man’s fund of odd knowledge is a continual delight and surprise, the more so because he never thrusts it upon us—and he has taught us their names: pepper trees, oleanders, ocotillos, chollas, barrel cactuses, palos verdes, sago palms, desert primroses, shooting stars, a hundred other species of tiny bright flowers whose names I quickly forget (all of them carefully recorded, of course). Angus knows them as well as the names of his friends.

  Some of the fruit trees are also familiar; the original apple of Eden is here. But many are unlike anything on Earth. We named the “whiteglobe” for the fruit it bears copiously, for several months at a time—fruit as spherical as oranges, as smooth as melons, as pale as eggs. Yesterday I came upon Marianne as she was pruning the too-vigorous growth from the whiteglobe trees, lopping off shiny wands of wood that were erupting with pink and purple blossoms from what had been hard green fuses only a week ago, and carefully setting the more perfect cuttings aside to use in the floral arrangements with which she often graces our rooms.

  Although the days and nights here are only a few minutes longer than Earthly days and nights, the year and the seasons are twice as long. Just now the cool Martian spring is slowly lengthening into the long Martian summer. Marianne was dressed only in a tapa chiton, enjoying the sun on her bare limbs. Like all of us, her skin was deeply tanned and there were lines around her still-young eyes from staring into bright distances.

  She was crying—she cries easily—but not from sadness. She told me, after we had talked about this and that while the small sun set in a moonless sky, that she is pregnant.

  So the last roles are filled; we truly have our Adam and Eve.

  00.22.29.19

  In a little more than a month we will have been a year here—a Martian year, which is a little less than two Earthly years. (The Martian days, on the other hand, are not much more than twenty-four hours long.) We have devised a twenty-four-month calendar, alternating twenty-nine-day months with twenty-eight-day months and tacking on a couple of extra days at year’s end. It is not the system they use on Mars in the era we came from, when dates throughout the solar system refer to standard dates on Earth, but ours works better for us. It reminds us that we really are on Mars—that that other Earth, and the times of our origin, are inaccessible.

  The names of our months will come later—we’ve decided not to hurry tradition, or impose artificial order on what should be a spontaneous process. It makes little difference that New Year’s Day does not happen to fall in midwinter in the north of Mars (in fact it falls in the northern summer), for our base camp is not far from the equator.

  Troy occasionally favors us with one of her comm-link bulletins, but otherwise we see little of her or Redfield. She keeps us in mind—we never seem to need to remind her when goods and supplies that only the aliens can provide are low; we have been able to contact her as we wish, even to have occasional access to Amalthean vessels and facilities; but she does not seem to concern herself much with the minutiae of our welfare.

  We have, I think, accepted what we had earlier wished to avoid, what some might call our fate. Although I think it decidedly unclassical that the Fates, those stern goddesses, would have entangled themselves in so antisymmetric a state of affairs. We ill-matched, ill-chosen representatives of the human race are hardly suited to play primogenitors, any pair of us. All Africa is carried in Jo’s well-stirred Caribbean ancestry, all Asia in Redfield’s genes from his Chinese mother (and for that matter, Redfield is seen among us less often than Troy).

  If fate has not brought us here, what has? Chaos? The second law of thermodynamics? These go equally against the grain. A man of my age (however one counts the years) should be prepared to accept the meaninglessness of the universe, I suppose. And be happy merely to comprehend some small part of it.

  In the quotidian, acceptance means only that we do not look forward to another miraculous change of affairs. Weird and unlikely as it seems, we are here upon the surface of the planet Mars some billions of years before the era in which we were born. We watch the planet being transformed before our eyes. We record the transformation, laboring to produce documents we hope will be uncovered by some distant generation of our descendants or other relatives, or even by some version of ourselves.

  Of course, in history as I have lived it so far, I did not find the record we are making—nor did anyone I know of. Why not? It has often been suggested that this is an alternate history.

  As for our present selves, or “real” selves, it seems very likely that we Martian pioneers will die here. But no time soon, I hope.

  15

  00.23.03.19

  Tony and Angus have finished their airplane at last.

  Test flights in the neighborhood have been wildly successful. Oh it is a lovely sight, this ruddy, long-winged craft—to m
y eye, much more graceful than the Martian sailplanes of our era which inspired it. Its stringers are bamboo, its ribs a kind of willow or poplar, its fabric covering our finest tapa, which is really more like a thin paper made from the fibrous stems of reeds and painted (“doped” Jo says) with a strong-smelling red vegetable lacquer cooked up by Angus.

  The plane carries two people, one behind the other; both have controls. Its main instruments are a portable altimeter and an inertial compass, adapted from a now-useless deep-space suit system.

  Tomorrow, Jo, our best pilot, and Tony—not only our navigator, but the lightest of us—are to set out on the first long-range flight.

  Where to, no one can say for sure. The motive power of this airplane is wind, nothing more; the pilot flies it where the wind carries it. Whoever is not driving has even less to say about the itinerary. Perhaps all this is less tricky than it seems; I am no aeronautical engineer. It has been pointed out to me that in our low gravity, only a third of Earth’s, it is not only easier to get an airplane into the air, it is certainly much easier on the flyers if it fails to stay there.

  But what makes the whole project practical is that this Mars, not unlike the Earth of our own era, has thick ionized layers of atmosphere which serve to reflect radio signals over the steep curve of the planet. So if there is a crash landing—even thousands of kilometers away—we can come to the rescue in the Ventris.

  00.23.06.12

  Jo radioed us at the scheduled time:

  “Wind’s still carrying us northeast. In three days we’ve covered seven thousand kilometers on the ground, practically in a great circle. Crossed over Eden, west of Arabia. It’s beginning to look like we’re being sucked into a huge weather vortex over the north pole.”