Kieran was astounded. "And that's it? It became an article of faith? Nobody's questioned it since?"
"Not in the official halls of academia . . . And never mind when it was later shown that several of the hieroglyphics had been painted upside down, and others used ungrammatically. It didn't matter. The theory had been proved."
"So you're saying they go back much further, to the Technolithic culture," Kieran concluded.
"Yes—way, way back."
"And in America," Juanita said. "Peoples like the Inca and the Maya, they didn't build the huge megaliths there. They told the Spaniards that they found them, sometimes buried in jungle. They're all from the same lost race."
Kieran wondered if they were getting back to the thread they had started with. "So what does that have to do with your being here on Mars?" he asked them. "What have they found out at Tharsis? Are you saying there are signs of the same race here too?"
"We're not sure," Trevany said. "Whatever it is, Hamil out at Troy is excited." Hamil Hashikar was the archeologist in charge of the expedition. "But let's not make the same mistake of jumping to what fits our expectations, and wait and see." His eyes were gleaming, all the same. Kieran had the feeling Trevany knew more than he was letting on. But he would just have to be patient, he supposed.
Just then, his phone beeped. He took it out and answered. The caller was Mahom Alazahad. "I'll be a minute," Kieran told the other two.
Juanita moved forward to show Trevany the list she was holding. "Some of the attachments are missing from the kit for the small drill. I think we should turn them in and get another set. I'll do it this afternoon. . . ."
"What is it, Mahom?" Kieran asked into the phone.
"I just wanted to let you know. Three guys were here asking about you. Showed up in a big Metrosine—suits and rings, cool daddy-os, heavy with the juice. They knew about your dog, described you as a lawyer type. Sounded to me like it could have been from when we snatched that guy at the Wuhan terminal. Just so's you know, Knight. You take it easy wherever you're at. And watch out. Okay?"
5
Fractal patterns. Structures similar to themselves over a wide range of scales, making it impossible to tell if a coastline is that of a driveway puddle or a continent; a forking discharge that of a laboratory spark or a lightning bolt.
Kieran stared out from the bench seat to the right of the Juggernaut's driver's station at the chutes of red-brown sand and scree funneling down between crumbling buttresses of scarp to the right, and then spreading out like river deltas to invade the edge of the plain that they were following. From the correct angle, with nothing familiar to set the scale, the formation would have looked just like a child's sandcastle yielding to the first brushes of the incoming tide, or the side of a storm gully in southern California. So were these the scars and deposits of water action, too—immense, surging, scouring bodies of water in the process of being torn or boiled off the planet? Mars had possessed oceans once, and a different atmosphere, Walter said. Theories and arguments abounded as to where they had gone and why, but the truth was that nobody knew. If conditions had once been so very different, what else might have been very different?
Harry Quong was sprawled in the c-com station behind the two front seats, staring at an infinity somewhere ahead and lost in thoughts of his own. It was Rudi Magelsberg's turn to take a spell at driving. Kieran had guessed initially that he was of German origin somewhere along the line, but Rudi said it was Austrian—not that things like that meant very much in the fluctuating patchwork of Martian society. All the same, he looked the Nordic part, with short-cropped blond hair, almost white, a lofty brow, lean, high-boned features, and a pointy chin and mouth. Right now, he was wearing white shorts that revealed tanned legs generously endowed with blond hair, a bright red shirt, a floppy bush hat, and gold-rimmed sunglasses. Kieran could see why his drive for getting things done and obsession with doing them right could make him a valuable asset on a scientific expedition. But at the same time, the "right" way in Rudi's vocabulary tended to mean his way. Kieran had seen from times spent in spacecraft how inability to yield on the small things could prove the detonator in a confined community. So far, however, apart from his initial coolness toward Kieran's credentials, there had been nothing to suggest a future problem in the bud. Kieran could only hope things stayed that way. He had weathered worse if they didn't.
"So, is this your first time on Mars, Mr. Thane?" Rudi asked, keeping his eyes ahead as the Juggernaut lurched and swayed over sand and rubble. The thought flitted through Kieran's mind that maybe he should have his answers printed as a handout for every new person he met.
"No." (So what brings you here this time?) "I'm visiting an old friend. But also thinking it's maybe time to get myself a place here, too." (Any particular area in mind?) "Probably somewhere in Lowell center."
"It looks quite acceptable from what I have seen. But I don't pretend to have seen that much. Did you know that Lowell has become famous in the last several days—at least within a certain specialized scientific circle? Or maybe I should say, notorious."
"Has it?" Kieran feigned surprise. "Why? What's happened?"
"Apparently, one of the sunsider research operations thought they'd solved the teleportation problem that's been talked about for years. They actually put a human through the process—one of the scientists. At first everybody thought it had worked. He was supposedly acting normally and everything. Then, suddenly, half his memories disappeared, and he went crazy. I never thought it could work, anyway."
"I wouldn't walk into a thing like that, even if they said it did," Harry Quong drawled from behind.
"How did you hear about it?" Kieran asked Rudi curiously.
"I have a brother who's a financial exec with one of the big trans-system carriers. He says there's panic in all their boardrooms right now. Me? I'll stay with archeology."
"Interesting," Kieran commented.
The smell of cooking had begun wafting through the open bulkhead door from the galley, at the forward end of the center compartment immediately behind the cab. "Ah, suddenly I'm hungry," Rudi declared. "Do you need to eat now, Harry? Or can you take over while I go back and get something?"
"I can wait," Harry said. "It's about time you took a break, anyhow."
"I'll get out of your way," Kieran told them. He rose, squeezed himself through the gap between the armrest at the end of the bench seat and the hull, and moved to the door while Harry waited before going forward to change places with Rudi. On the far side of the bulkhead, Katrina Ersohn, the sixth member of the expedition, was pouring batter to prepare another pancake to go on the stack she had started. There was already a steel dish with strips of grilled bacon—large slices; Martian pigs grew bigger in the lower gravity. Katrina glanced up with a quick smile as Kieran came through.
"Boy, that didn't need any announcing!"
"A hungry hoard is about to descend," Kieran pronounced. "Can't say I blame 'em. That looks good."
"I wonder if I get credits for this, too."
Slightly pudgy, pale-skinned with faint freckles across her nose, and with mousy hair that defied her efforts to comb it straight, curling instead into waves that would have delighted Juanita, Katrina was a graduate student from a private European college that had put up a significant part of Trevany's funding to have her included in the expedition. Like Trevany and Rudi, she was a recent arrival from Earth.
"How are you finding things here so far?" Kieran asked her.
She answered while carrying on with what she was doing. "I didn't really get a chance to see too much. Everything seems so unruly and chaotic. . . ."
"Unruled might be a better word."
"But also, it's so . . . alive." Katrina nodded as she flipped the pancake with a spatula—the size of the galley didn't go with aerial dynamic stunts. "If I had to, I think I could get used to it."
"Be careful. You might end up finding you don't want to go back."
"I've heard of that hap
pening. Is it really true? Don't people miss things like the oceans, forests, walking in cities under an open sky? They never feel the need for those things again?"
"Lots of people have never known them," Kieran pointed out. "But of those that have, yes, most of them probably do. But on the other hand, they get intoxicated by the freedom, the ruggedness, the vastness out here. Some say they find it's like going back into a pressure cooker." He watched her for a moment, and then came back suddenly from one of his inexplicable tangents. "Do you dance?"
She laughed. "What, in here? You're crazy."
"On Mars it's a new experience. A fast Viennese waltz makes you feel like an ethereal being whirling among clouds. . . ." Rudi appeared in the doorway from the driver's cab. "I bet a month of it would even make a romantic out of Rudi," Kieran said.
"What's this?" Rudi asked.
"Viennese waltzes," Katrina said. "Shouldn't you be an expert?"
"Actually, I consider myself quite proficient," Rudi agreed.
Kieran decided not to risk provoking him with a response. "Want me to tell Walter and Juanita that grub's nearly ready?" he asked Katrina as she began cracking eggs into a jug for scrambling.
"Sure."
Kieran went back through the living and bunking area, and past the rear bulkhead into the lab section, which took up at least a third of the vehicle's length. The rear window was unshuttered, providing a view of the supplies and equipment trailer rocking and bumping at the end of its tow bar, with the Martian wilderness creeping by behind. An arrangement of glass tubes and vessels connected to a piece of apparatus on one of the side benches, where Trevany and Juanita had been carrying out some kind of chemical test or calibration. Just at the moment, however, they were engrossed with an image on one of the screens at the c-com terminal in the far corner. It showed part of a surface of irregularly shaped blocks interlocked together in an unusual pattern. A figure in a light-duty Martian EV suit stood at lower left, its hand resting on one of the larger blocks at the base.
"I hope you're near a good stopping place," Kieran told them. "Katrina's just about to dish out food. Pancakes, eggs, and bacon. It looks good."
Trevany looked over and made a gesture at the screen. "Not quite. We're through to Hamil, waiting for him to come back with something. . . . That's him there, in the suit. You asked the other day what this is all about. I didn't want to go on then about things that might not be what they seemed. But this is from this morning at Troy. Does it say anything to you?"
Kieran studied the curious mixture of shapes and sizes more closely. The lines defining them couldn't be natural, he realized. This wasn't some kind of formation. It had been built. No two of the stones were the same, some having maybe a dozen or more faces, angles, and notches making up their complex polygonal outlines, yet all dovetailing together to form a peculiarly striking jigsaw effect. And they were immense. The stone that Hamil's hand was resting on stood more than twice his height.
"It's got Murphy Construction Company written all over it," Kieran said. "Jeez, they get everywhere."
"Just north of Cuzco in Peru, there is an ancient citadel called Sacsayhuaman," Juanita said. "Conventionally, it's supposed to have been built by the Incas, but a lot of us have never believed that. Some of the blocks weigh hundreds of tons, yet they're fitted like machine parts. And you see the same thing at another place not far away called Machu Picchu, somehow built at the top of an impossibly inaccessible mountain. Both places use a highly distinctive system of blocks with irregular angles interlocking three-dimensionally; also, a form of reentrant-cut, right-angle block for internal corners. Uncannily similar designs turn up in other places far across the world. A coincidence? Then you find they use the same unusual way of cutting huge gateways out of a single block of rock." Juanita made a deprecating face. "Maybe the Incas were spread out farther than everyone thought, eh?" She turned to follow Kieran's gaze, still taking in the screen. "And now, here we have it again. Or something that looks so extraordinarily close, that from an image, at least, I can't tell the difference."
It was one of the rare times in his life when Kieran felt truly overwhelmed. If his emotions were a fraction of what this must be producing in the scientists, their powers of self-control were astounding. "What are you saying?" he asked them. His flippancy had vanished. "Does it mean that the Technolithic Culture was alien after all—the way some people have always thought?"
"I'm not saying anything at this point," Trevany said. "As I told you the other day, I'm not jumping to anything. Premature commitment causes more problems in science than anything I know. But at least, now you have a better idea of what we're doing."
At that moment, a window showing Hamil's face opened on the screen. He was brown-skinned with saggy chins and a wisp of gray beard, but with an easygoing, jovial disposition—at least, from the few times that Kieran had talked to him—that was conveyed principally by large, animated eyes. "No, we don't have those counts yet," he said. "I'll send them through later. . . . Oh, hello, Knight. So what do you think of this? I assume Walter and Juanita have given you the news."
"Just this moment," Kieran said. "I don't think I've really had a chance to digest it."
"It's big. I promise you, it's big," Hamil said. "What do Rudi and the others think?"
"We're just about to go forward and join them to eat," Trevany answered. "I was meaning to tell them then. My God, one thing at a time, Hamil! Don't you ever let up? Is it going to be like this all the time when we get there?"
Hamil grinned unapologetically. "What else is life good for if not to get things done? Don't you think so, Knight?"
Kieran pursed his lips. "It's probably the best chance you're going to get," he agreed.
"Aha! A natural philosopher too. He'll fit in well, Walter."
"Yes, well, before you start getting philosophical, our lunch is waiting," Trevany said. "I'm sure it's going to be a lively one."
"Enjoy your meal. I'll probably have the figures to you before you're finished." Hamil vanished, leaving his other image, dwarfed by the mysterious orchestration in stone.
6
A major construction and mining concern called Zorken Consolidated, which had hollowed asteroids, dug tunnels, bridged chasms, and made domed cities out of craters across the central parts of the Solar System, had conducted a pilot survey and made test borings for a possible new space complex in the Tharsis region. The engineers and crew had then pulled out pending a decision on whether to take the project further. While the data were being evaluated, Hamil and Juanita had arrived with a small archeological and geological field team and set up camp to investigate the workings that Zorken's survey team had left.
The Troy camp consisted of two trailers accommodating the scientists and a five-man work force, a three-compartment inflatable-frame cabin affording a messroom and work space, and a couple of shacks left by the Zorken workers. One of the latter was pressurized; the other was not, but provided a convenient shelter for power generators and an air recirculation plant. Now, in addition, there was the Juggernaut. The structures and vehicles were clustered at one end of a clear area amid boulders and rubble on an irregular shelf a hundred or so yards wide, halfway down the broken side of a mesa formation upon which the space complex would stand—like Cherbourg, at Lowell. The mesa side overlooked a crumpled valley floor rising to orange bluffs on the far side, which one day, perhaps, would hold a new metropolis. A road bulldozed out of the shallower lower slopes reached the shelf via four steeply-angled segments connected by reversing strips—the side was too steep to construct hairpins. From the ends of the shelf, narrower trails explored the shattered mesa sides, while in the center, a slanting cut carrying an open-cage elevator, again left by Zorken Consolidated, gave access to the mesa top. Above the far end of the shelf from the camp, an improbable rock formation the size of a small house, actually wider at the top than its base, propped by several lesser rocks wedged beneath, balanced on the very edge of the precipice. Dubbed the "Citadel," it
was, according to Hamil, another example of the work of one-time water, not an effect of wind erosion as the conventional explanation maintained.
Looking round and diminutive even in a Martian surface suit, Hamil led the way with Jean Graas, one of the geologists from the original group, along a trail that led on from where the left end of the shelf petered out among rockfalls and vertical blocks separated from the main face. Rising and falling around mounds of debris, skirting drops into gulleys forty or fifty feet below, it must have been treacherous initially, but had since been widened and cut for regular use, with rope handrails installed at the worst spots. Kieran and Katrina followed next, Trevany and Rudi behind them, and Dennis Curry, also from the original team, bringing up the rear. Dennis and Jean had met through their shared professional interests, and Kieran could see them ending up as a husband-wife team one day. Juanita and Harry had remained at camp to finish some chores. They already knew the layout and would see the newer finds later.
Hamil waved an arm to indicate the mass of the plateau looming above them. His voice came through the speaker in Kieran's helmet. "The overburden above the site is over five hundred feet deep. Below the first couple of feet of surface, the layerings and grain alignments are characteristic of cementing by finer binding particles under the action of fluids, not wind deposition." So they were looking at the aftermath of immense flooding, Kieran thought to himself, translating into everyday language. And comparatively recent at that, if the archeological finds were below.
"Where are the oceans that did it, eh?" Trevany said, puffing audibly on the circuit despite the low Martian gravity.
"Exactly, Walter."
"How long will it be before the establishment back on Earth accepts it?" Jean Graas's voice asked.
Rudi chimed in, sounding derisive. "What makes you think they ever will? They've got enough evidence staring them in the face of the same thing happening there, but they refuse to see it. Why should this be any different?"
Martian Knightlife Page 16
