Lightspeed Magazine Issue 3
Page 2
In the end, you must choose a universe that contains yourself and Mars, together and perfect. Helix Fo chose a world built by viruses as tame as songbirds. Oorm Nineteen chose a world gone soft and violet with unrhyming songs. Make no mistake: every moment is a choice, a choice between this world and that one, between heavens teeming with life and a lonely machine grinding across red stone, between staying at home with tea and raspberry cookies and ruling Mars with a hand like grace.
Maximillian Bauxbaum chose to keep his promise. Who is to say it is not that promise, instead of microbial soup, which determined that Mars would be teeming with blue inhuman cities, with seventeen native faiths, by the time his child opened her veins to those terrible champagne-elixirs, and turned her eyes to the night?
Step 2: Become an Overlord
Now we come to the central question at the core of planetary domination: just how is it done? The answer is a riddle. Of course, it would be.
You must already be an overlord in order to become one.
Ask yourself: What is an overlord? Is he a villain? Is she a hero? A cowboy, a priestess, an industrialist? Is he cruel, is he kind, does she rule like air, invisible, indispensable? Is she the first human on Mars, walking on a plain so incomprehensible and barren that she feels her heart empty? Does she scratch away the thin red dust and see the black rock beneath? Does he land in his sleek piscine capsule on Uppskil, so crammed with libraries and granaries that he lives each night in an orgy of books and bread? What does she lord over? The land alone, the people, the belligerent patron gods with their null-bronze greaves ablaze?
Is it true, as Oorm Nineteen wrote, that the core of each red world is a gem of blood compressed like carbon, a hideous war-diamond that yearns toward the strength of a king or a queen as a compass yearns toward north? Or is this only a metaphor, a way in which you can anthropomorphize something so vast as a planet, think of it as something capable of loving you back?
It would seem that the very state of the overlord is one of violence, of domination. Uncomfortable colonial memories arise in the heart like acid—everyone wants to be righteous. Everyone wishes to be loved. What is any pharaonic statue, staring out at a sea of malachite foam, but a plea of the pharaoh to be loved, forever, unassailably, without argument? Ask yourself: Will Mars be big enough to fill the hole in you, the one that howls with such winds, which says the only love sufficient to quiet those winds is the love of a planet, red in tooth, claw, orbit, mass?
We spoke before of how to get to Mars if your lonely planet offers no speedy highway through the skies. Truthfully—and now we feel we can be truthful, here, in the long night of our seminar, when the clicking and clopping of the staff has dimmed and the last of the cane-cream has been sopped up, when the stars have all come out and through the crystal ceiling we can all see one (oh, so red, so red!) just there, just out of reach—truthfully, getting to Mars is icing. It is parsley. To be an overlord is to engage in mastery of a bright, red thing. Reach out your hand—what in your life, confined to this poor grit, this lone blue world, could not also be called Mars? Rage, cruelty, the god of your passions, the terrible skills you possess, that forced obedience from a fiery engine, bellicose children, lines of perfect, gleaming code? These things, too, are Mars. They are named for fell gods, they spit on civilized governance—and they might, if whipped or begged, fill some nameless void that hamstrings your soul. Mars is everywhere; every world is Mars. You cannot get there if you are not the lord and leader of your own awful chariot, if you are not the crowned paladin in the car, instead of the animal roped to it, frothing, mad, driven, but never understanding. We have said you must choose, as Bauxbaum and Oorm and Fo chose—to choose is to understand your own highest excellence, even if that is only to bake bread and keep promises. You must become great enough here that Mars will accept you.
Some are chosen to this life. Mars itself is chosen to it, never once in all its iterations having been ruled by democracy. You may love Mars, but Mars loves a crown, a sceptre, a horn-mooned diadem spangled in ice opals. This is how the bride of Mars must be dressed. Make no mistake—no matter your gender, you are the blushing innocent brought to the bed of a mate as ancient and inscrutable as any deathshead bridegroom out of myth. Did you think that the planet would bend to your will? That you would control it? Oh, it is a lovely word: Overlord. Emperor. Pharaoh. Princeps. But you will be changed by it as by a virus. Mars will fill your empty, abandoned places. But the greatest of them understood their place. The overlord embraces the red planet, but in the end, Mars always triumphs. You will wake in your thousand year reign to discover your hair gone red, your translucent skin covered in dust, your three hearts suddenly fused into a molten, stony core. You will cease to want food, and seek out only cold, black air to drink. You will face the sun and turn, slowly, in circles, for days on end. Your thoughts will slow and become grand; you will see as a planet sees, speak as it speaks, which is to say: the long view, the perfected sentence.
And one morning you will wake up and your mouth will be covered over in stone, but the land beneath you, crimson as a promise, as a ruby, as an unrhymed couplet, as a virus—the land, or the machine, or the child, or the book, will speak with your voice, and you will be an overlord, and how proud we shall be of you, here, by the sea, listening to the dawn break over a new shore.
Born in the Pacific Northwest in 1979, Catherynne M. Valente is the author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making. She is the winner of the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009, and the Lambda, Andre Norton, and Hugo Awards in 2010. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and an enormous cat.
Author Spotlight: Catherynne Valente
Christie Yant
We’ve learned so much about Mars, with so many successful exploration missions in recent years. How do you think our new knowledge will change the way we write about Mars? Do you see Mars becoming more of a fantasy setting than a science fictional one?
I think Mars is just one of the dominant images and metaphors of SF. So the question is, if you write about a Mars that is different from the one we know from probes and images sent back to earth, is that still SF, or does it become a willful kind of fantasy, creating a world that never did and never will exist? After all, much of fantasy consists of alternate Earths. I don’t know. I’d like Mars to be an interstitial space, one which is still the focus of so many longings and dreams, and yet is unavoidably a real place, and one which is not perhaps as writers 70 years ago hoped it would be.
Much of your recent work has been in the realm of fairy tales and folklore; “How to Become a Mars Overlord” reads almost like the future folklore of Mars. Was that your approach to writing it? Do you think there are larger stories to tell about any of the characters and events on your alternate versions of Mars?
Are you trying to lure me into writing my own Martian Chronicles? Temptress! I love the characters I created for this story and could write more about any of them. With, really, the slightest provocation. I especially became enamored of Oorm Nineteen, the revolutionary poet. But to be honest, it was a delight to spin all of their micro-histories into this macro-tale. I approached it more as a combination of historiography and ad-copy, suggesting this massive history and the possibilities of Mars in a small space, almost a brochure.
Does the “seminar” frame have a back story? Where did that idea come from?
So, the Mars Overlord thing is actually a joke between my husband and myself, one of those metaphors married couples develop, only he had this one before he married me and I sort of picked it up—the idea that of course Mars is the ultimate SF object of affection, and so for my husband, an avowed SF fan, to be a Mars Overlord is this tremendous metaphor for being in control of your life, an
d aiming it toward a more perfect future. One day I asked him if I could write a story about it, and he said I could if I promised to do it right. Hopefully I have. The seminar frame seemed natural to me—every day I see self-help gurus online promising not much less than the rule of Mars.
Which version of Mars would you want to be overlord of, and what kind of overlord would you be?
Oh, I would be a gentle dictator. All of you would love me and despair. In all seriousness I would probably be some kind of Mons Olympus zen hermit, sending poems down with blue-skinned sherpas. The sherpas would trade them for champagne and earth-mangos, and we’d all be happy. But secretly I would be building an army of poetry-loving champagne-addicts.
Is there anything else you would like our readers to know about your story?
It is a strange little beast, but I hope it will be loved. It is a very large metaphor, but also a future history of Mars. It is science fiction, but it is also a wistful kind of fantasy. Mars is contradictory—any story about it must also be.
For those readers who loved “How to Become a Martian Overlord” what other stories—of your own or others—would you recommend?
Definitely “Golubash, or Wine-War-Blood-Elegy,” in the Federations anthology, and “The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew” at Clarkesworld. Those are my big SF stories to date, and they have a bit of the same historian-tone of Mars Overlord.
Christie Yant is a software tester, SF/F writer, podtern for Tor.com’s Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, and editorial minion. Her fiction is forthcoming in the anthology The Way of the Wizard. She lives on the central coast of California with her two amazing daughters and assorted four-legged nuisances. Her website is http://inkhaven.net.
Dead Mars
Pamela L. Gay
Once upon a time—four point six billion years ago—a thick atmosphere surrounded Mars, perhaps even coloring its sky blue. Once upon a time—three to four billion years ago—an ocean covered thirty percent of the Red Planet’s surface, and deltas formed as water rushed from the land to the sea. Once upon a time—as recently as 2 million years ago—Mars’ volcanoes, the largest in our Solar System, erupted, spilling lava down one hundred kilometer long slopes.
Once upon a time, Mars was lush and vibrant and geologically alive. But no more. Today, it hangs above us, red and dead in our dark, winter sky.
Time has been cruel to the Red Planet. Like Earth, Mars formed in the blast furnace of a much hotter, younger Sun, scorched dry by violent solar storms and radiation. It formed without water, but comets bombarded the young world, bringing rain pelting down from space. Images from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show that the water carved out more than forty thousand riverbeds all across the Martian surface, and work lead by University of Colorado Boulder researcher Gaetano Di Achille indicates that it may have pooled into an ocean approximately one tenth the size of those on Earth.
But the ocean didn’t last. Mars, only about half the size of Earth, was born too small to stay wet or to hold onto its atmosphere. The angry, young Sun, raging against its planets, blasted them with cosmic rays and solar winds. Like the shields in a science fiction spacecraft, planets are protected from their suns by magnetic fields bending away the winds and rays. Mars’ magnetic field, however—generated by its molten core—was weak, as was its gravitational pull, which couldn’t stop the lightest atmospheric particles from leaving. One good collision—hydrogen on carbon dioxide—and these low-mass elements accelerated to escape velocities. Whoosh! Away they flew, depriving Mars of what little atmosphere it had. And the problem only escalated as the small planet quickly cooled, freezing out the molten core and further diminishing its already-anemic magnetic field.
The vicious cycle continued. Liquid water requires air. Without the pressure of air, water can boil away at room temperature, so as its atmospheric conditions shifted, Mars’ ocean soon began to disappear. Some of the water was locked up as ice underground. Some became part of the Martian atmosphere, freezing out each year to build the Red Planet’s distinctive icy poles. The water is still there, yes, but the seas are empty, now, and the riverbeds are nothing more than dry and desolate canyons.
But as we look at this desiccated world from our safe, verdant perch here on Earth, the question has to be asked: can Mars be revived? Can we bring back its youthful splendor through application of the proper, planetary treatments for aging? Can we make it habitable for humans?
Books like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars imagine the necessary steps: first, we’d need to create plants capable of surviving Mars’ horrible cold, horrible radiation, and its horribly thin atmosphere. Once that’s achieved, these plants would have to be cultivated across the planet’s surface so they could convert carbon dioxide to oxygen and carbon-sequestering plant matter. Also, we’d somehow need to melt the pole ice so that its carbon dioxide and water could supplement the still too-thin atmosphere.
But despite all this, despite whatever biological or botanical or chemical lengths we go to, the sad fact is that these measures can only do so much. Even if we could make Mars livable, we can never change its size. Mars, unfortunately, will always be too small to gravitationally keep an atmosphere and too cold internally to generate enough of a magnetic field to help it defend what little gas it has.
While some lichens might survive this re-loss of atmosphere, any plants adapted to the Martian geology would likely wilt away. Any newly planted greenery would die as the lack of atmospheric pressure allowed unconstrained water molecules to boil out. Over time, Mars would become an abandoned garden, withered gray and filled with desiccated crops.
So there it is: Mars is and will remain dead, geologically speaking, and any attempts to revive it would result only in a temporary resurrection.
However…
That’s not the whole story, because despite all the evidence to the contrary, this dead world may still be able to support life, though perhaps not the kind we’re used to.
In an exciting development, scientists working with data from Mars Express reported in August 2009 the presence of methane (a gas most commonly equated with cow flatulence) in the atmosphere of Mars. One particularly interesting property of methane is that it breaks down in sunlight, meaning that in order for it to be detected in the present, something must be generating it in the present. And the only two known possible sources for methane? Volcanism and life.
As mentioned earlier, Mars’ volcanoes are epic. They make Iceland look like a slightly smoky lump of rock. The largest mountain on Mars is Olympic Mons, a volcano that stands twenty-seven kilometers above the Martian surface. That’s sixteen miles high, three times the height of Everest. This geologic behemoth, the largest in our Solar System, offers us tantalizing hints at the possibility of both lava and life.
This shield volcano is geologically identical to the volcanoes of Hawaii, only, like Alice in Wonderland, it ate the cake and grew and grew and grew to gigantic proportions. Its caldera stretches across fifty-four lava-filled miles and shows evidence of eruptions as recently as two million years ago. In geologic terms, that’s recent history and means that it’s conceivable that present day volcanic activity, such as the venting of gases like methane, could be going on.
But let’s face it, as exciting as volcanoes are, alien life is a much more interesting possible explanation for the methane.
Here on our world, small bacteria called methanogens once ruled the surface of early Earth. These microorganisms rabidly metabolized carbon dioxide with molecular hydrogen to produce energy and methane waste. While not particularly cute or cuddly, these rod and ball shaped early life forms started off the long process of filling our world with life. Today on Earth, they are extinct, but maybe, just maybe, their cousins continue to live, output methane (without so much as an “excuse me”) and die on Mars.
However, like us humans, whatever form of alien life exists would probably need protection from radiation as well. But on
atmospherically-challenged, magnetically-weak Mars, where could that shelter be found?
In those volcanoes, of course. Specifically, the lava tubes—long, hollow, underground stretches that once carried molten rock hundreds of kilometers down the mountains’ gently sloped flanks. Dirt and rock provide a remarkably good shield against radiation, and as the Martian surface became progressively more inhospitable, some scientists theorize that life could have retreated to the lava tubes, and other underground recesses, to survive.
So as far as any colonization plans go, those lava tubes could be the key to our future on Mars. The Red Planet’s surface is harsh and its atmosphere wispy, but underground, humans may find the safety we need to finally make our home on a planet other than Earth—provided, of course, that we’re willing to share the space with flatulent microbes.
While this isn’t quite the glorious, terraforming future dreamed of by generations of science fiction writers and readers, it is an achievable goal. And with a little luck, and a whole lot of hard work, it is, in fact, a dream we could conceivably make a reality within our lifetimes.
So…Mars-ward ho!
When Dr. Pamela L. Gay isn’t busy as a professor at SIUE (Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville), she blogs & twitters as StarStryder, and co-hosts Astronomy Cast. She is also chair of the International Year of Astronomy New Media Taskgroup.
Patient Zero
Tananarive Due
September 19
The picture came! Veronica tapped on my glass and woke me up, and she held it up for me to see. It’s autographed and everything! For you, Veronica mouthed at me, and she smiled a really big smile. The autograph says, TO JAY—I’LL THROW A TOUCHDOWN FOR YOU. I couldn’t believe it. Everybody is laughing at me because of the way I yelled and ran in circles around my room until I fell on the floor and scraped my elbow. The janitor, Lou, turned on the intercom box outside my door and said, “Kid, you gone crazier than usual? What you care about that picture for?”