Obelisk

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘And not enough oxygen in the air to enable motility anyhow,’ Verity put in.

  ‘Yet there are sites in the valley where I believe I have seen tracks. Channels dug deep into the strata. Even,’ Alexei said dramatically, ‘a kind of footprint. Very small, bird-like or lizard-like, and embedded in mud and mudstone. Not new – but not more than a few thousand years old, I would guess. Why do we not see these forms being created now?’

  In terms of observations of Mars he had come a long way since first staring at those grainy Voyager orbiter pictures in JPL, I thought.

  Nevertheless I shook my head. ‘We don’t yet know enough about Mars to eliminate non-biological causes, Alexei.’

  ‘Of course not. But there could be something we are not expecting – for example, some equivalent of slime moulds, which alternate between static and mobile forms. I have a feeling that there is more to this biosphere than we have yet discovered, aspects we do not comprehend …’

  There was a hiss of static.

  We turned. The TV image had fritzed out, the hockey game lost. Some of our colleagues dug comms links out of their coverall pockets.

  And Verity, touching her earpiece, got up and went straight to the galley’s small window, looking east.

  Alexei and I glanced at each other, and followed. Through the window we looked out over our base, a collection of domes and shacks, and the greenhouse bubbles where we grew our potatoes and beans. A child ran by, with her mask off, just five years old and breathing the air of Mars.

  ‘They went to Defcon One,’ Verity said, listening to her earpiece. ‘The USAF Skylab didn’t make its correct orbit after launch. Looked like it was descending over Soviet territory. Like a bombing run. It was just a malfunction – but the Russians responded—’ I could hear the squeal of static. She pulled the little gadget out of her ear.

  And an evening star flared, low in the Martian sky. It was as sudden, as brutal, as that. Verity had known where to look, to see Earth in the sky.

  I didn’t know what to feel. I retreated to my default mode, the science dweeb. ‘Quite a stunt, to make bangs bright enough to be visible across interplanetary space.’

  Verity glanced at me. ‘I guess you have a choice to make about going home when the cycler comes, Puddephat.’

  The star had seemed to be dimming. But then, only moments after the peak, there was another surge of light.

  ‘The second strikes,’ murmured Alexei. He put his arm around Verity’s shoulders. ‘This is home. Earth is gone. Mars is our mother now. And the future is our responsibility, those of us here.’

  Standing alone, I comforted myself with the thought that the conflict was already minutes in the past, even as its light seared into my eyes.

  Hell City, Mars. 28 October 2010.

  Alexei Petrov died. He was seventy years old.

  The skin cancer took him, as it’s taken too many of us, that remote sun spitefully pouring its ultra-violet through the thin air here on this mountaintop we call Mars.

  When he knew the game was up, he wrote out a kind of will. Naturally he left all his meagre material possessions to Verity and their kids and grandchildren. But he also willed a gift to me, a box of notes, a lifetime’s research on the Mars ground, beginning with records from the fancy instruments our mission designers gave us and finishing with eyewitness observations written out in his own cramped handwriting, like a Victorian naturalist’s journal.

  The point was, Alexei had come to certain conclusions about Mars, mankind’s second home, which he hadn’t shared with anybody – not even Verity. But when I’d gone through it all, and checked his results, and reworked his findings – and found they tallied with some tentative conclusions of my own – I called on Verity Whittaker Petrova, and asked her to take a walk with me around our little township.

  We lived in a huddle of yellowing plastic domes. Some of the youngsters – we already had second-generation Martians sixteen or seventeen years old – were building houses of the native ‘wood’, hacked out with stone axes and draped over with alpaca skin, houses that looked like tepees, or Iron Age roundhouses from Europe. But the houses had to be sealed up with ageing polythene sheets, and connected by piping to our elderly air circulation and scrubbing plants, driven by the big Soviet solar cell arrays now that our small NASA nuke plant had failed. Verity had led the effort to build a pretty little chapel, using materials scavenged from the MEM.

  All this was set down on the floor of Hellas basin, a feature so vast that from anywhere near its centre you can’t see the walls. After the One-Day War we had all come here to live together, Soviets and Americans together, including the crew of the abandoned interplanetary cycler. The logic was that we needed as large a gene pool as possible. Besides, once the last signals from the moon bases went silent, we huddled for companionship and warmth.

  Well, we got along in reasonable harmony, save for the occasional fist fight, despite the fact that our two nations had wiped each other out. We avoided political talk, or any discussion of constitutions or voting rights or common ownership of means of production. We were too few to need grand political theories; we would let future generations figure it out. We thought we would have time, you see.

  We walked on towards the farm domes, with their laboriously tilled fields of potatoes and yams and green beans. The work we’d put in was heartbreakingly clear from the quality of the soil we’d managed to create from Martian dirt. We’d even imported earthworms. But a spindly, yellowed crop was our only reward.

  The native Mars life seemed to be struggling too. Between the domes was a small botanical garden I’d established myself, open to the Martian elements. The native stock looked different from my first impression, on that wonderful Independence Day of discovery. The cacti were shrivelled and tougher-looking, and the trees I’d planted had hardly grown. Adult specimens, which had littered the north-facing slopes of Hellas in tremendous forests, were dying back too.

  A gaggle of kids ran by, coming from the alpaca pens, yelling to each other. They were bundled up in shabby coats and alpaca-wool hats, and they all wore face masks. The kids had always loved the alpacas. Verity and I, two fragile old folk, had to pause to let them by.

  ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I didn’t understand a single word any of them said.’ After her decades with Alexei she had a faint Slavic accent. ‘The kids seem to be making up their own language, a kind of pidgin. Maybe we should call it Russ-lish. Rung-lish.’

  ‘How about Wronglish?’

  That made her laugh, just for a second, this dust-ridden, careworn, sanctimonious matriarch at my side.

  We paused by the alpaca domes ourselves, where those spindly beasts, imported as embryos from the mountains of South America, peered out at us, or scraped apathetically at the scrubby grass that grew at their feet.

  ‘I think it was the alpacas I noticed first,’ Verity said slowly. ‘How reluctant they became to leave their domes.’

  I took a deep breath, sucking in the stale odours of my own mask. ‘Did Alexei ever talk to you about his conclusions?’

  ‘No, he didn’t. But I was married to the man for twenty-five years, Puddephat, and I was never completely dumb, even though I was no double-dome like you two. I learned to read his moods. And I knew that the air pressure is dropping. That’s obvious. A high-school barometer would show it. The partial pressure of oxygen is falling even faster. There’s something’s wrong with Mars.’

  I shook my head. ‘Actually, I think Mars is just fine. It just isn’t fine for us, that’s all.’

  She stood, silent, grave.

  I sighed. ‘I’ll tell you what Alexei concluded, and I agree with him. Look.’ I scratched axes for a graph in the crimson dirt with my toe. ‘Here’s a conventional view of Mars – what we believed must be true before we landed here. When it was young, Mars was warm and wet, with a thick blanket of air, and deep oceans. Like Ea
rth, in many ways. That phase might have lasted a couple of billion years. But Mars is smaller than the Earth, and further from the sun. As the geology seized up and the volcanoes died back, and the sunlight got to work breaking up the upper atmosphere, Mars lost a lot of its air. Here’s the air pressure declining over time …’ I sketched a graph falling sharply at first, but then bottoming out before hitting zero. ‘Much of the water seeped away into deep underground aquifers and froze down there, or at the poles. But still you finished up with conditions that were only a little more extreme than in places on Earth. Mars was like high country, we thought. Scattered lakes, vegetation. Verity, this decline took billions of years – plenty of time for life to adapt.’

  She nodded. ‘Hence the cacti and the trees. Now you’re telling me this is all wrong.’

  ‘We, and Alexei especially, have had decades now to take a good close look at Mars. And what we find doesn’t tally with this simple picture of a one-off decline.

  ‘We found extensive lava fields much younger than we’d expected – a whole series of them, one on top of the other. Sandwiched in between the lava strata we found traces of savage glaciation, and periods of water flows – river valleys, traces of outflow events, even shorelines. And we found thin bands of fossils, evidence of life growing actively for brief periods, overlaid by featureless sandstone – the relics of dead ages of windblown dust storms. You can date all this with crater counts. Cycles, over and over.

  ‘Here’s what Alexei came to believe.’ I scuffed out the graph with my toe, and sketched another. ‘Mars did start out warm and wet. It had to be so; we see the trace of huge oceans. The biosphere itself is the legacy of that age. But that warm phase was short-lived. Mars lost almost all its air, catastrophically.’ I drew a new line that cut right down to the zero line.

  ‘How low?’

  ‘Hard to say. To no more than one per cent of Earth’s sea-level pressure. You can tell that from the evidence of the dust transport, the rock-shattering extremes of temperature, the solar weathering …’

  I sketched it for her, speaking, drawing. Mars’s natural condition is dry and all but airless. All the water is either locked up in polar ice caps or is sunk deep in a network of subterranean aquifers. The air is so thin there’s virtually no shielding from the sun, and no heat capacity to keep in the warmth at night; you swing daily from heat to a withering cold. The only thing that moves is the dust, swirling around in a trace of air.

  ‘And life, Verity, life huddles underground, living off the planet’s inner warmth, and seeps of liquid water in the cracks in the rocks. Spores and seeds and microbes, hiding from the raw sunlight.’

  She pulled off her mask and breathed in, a deep gulping, rasping breath. ‘It ain’t that way now, Puddephat.’

  ‘No. But the way it is now, as it happens, is unusual for Mars. We’re coming to the end of a volcano summer.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Which is when things change.’ I drew a series of spikes reaching up from the flatlined graph. ‘Mars is still warm inside. Every so often the big Tharsis volcanoes blow their tops. They pump out a whole atmosphere, of carbon dioxide and methane and other stuff, and a blanket of dust and ash that warms the world up enough for the permafrost to melt …’

  ‘And life takes its brief chance.’

  ‘You’ve got it. Mars turns green in a flash, maybe just a few thousand years. The native life spreads seeds and spores far and wide. At the peak of each summer there probably is some motility – Martian moulds squirming in the dirt, Alexei was right about that – but we came too late to see them directly.

  ‘But, just as quickly, the heat leaks away, and the air starts to thin. The end, when it comes, is probably rapid – a catastrophic decline – lots of feedback loops working together to destroy the life-bearing conditions.’

  Her face was hard. ‘And then it’s back to the dustbowl.’

  ‘Yes. Alexei thought he mapped six such episodes, six summers. The first was about a billion years after the planet formed. The second a one-and-a-half billion years ago, and then eight hundred million years ago, two hundred million, one hundred million—’

  ‘And now.’

  ‘Yeah. We were lucky, Verity, we humans, to come along just now, to see Mars bloom, for it’s a rare event.’

  ‘Or unlucky,’ she said acidly.

  ‘I suppose so. In normal times, we couldn’t even have landed the way we did, in a big glider of a MEM. Air too thin. You’d need heat shields, parachutes, rockets …’

  ‘We maybe wouldn’t have come here. And maybe we wouldn’t have had all this extra tension over Mars, over the future in space. Maybe we wouldn’t have gone to war at all. And now …’ She looked around at the shabby huddle of our settlement, the yellowing plastic, the broken-down machines, the dying crops, the bundled-up, wheezing children. ‘We thought we were safe, here on Mars. Or at least that we had a chance. A new world, a new roll of the dice for humanity. But if the atmosphere collapses we won’t be able to live here.’

  ‘No. In, say, a century, tepees and bonfires won’t cut it. You might as well be living on the moon. If we’d had more time, more resupply from home—’

  ‘We were lured here by a lie. A transient phenomenon.’

  I reached out and took her hand. ‘Verity – all these years. When I close my eyes I can still see you sitting in the chair in Mount Wilson, smiling as I showed you Mars … It seems like yesterday. I don’t begrudge you Alexei. You had a good life, I can see that. But now he’s gone, and maybe—’

  She snatched her hand away. ‘What are you talking about, Puddephat? My children are going to die here, and their children, without meaning, without hope. What do you think we’re going to do, in your head – sit together on a porch, holding hands and smiling as we give out the suicide pills?’

  ‘Verity …’

  She stalked off.

  And I was left alone with the alpacas, and my graph in the dirt.

  Hell City, Mars. 4 July 2026.

  Even now I’m not alone, probably. Some other group may be huddled up against another air machine, bleeding power off peeling Soviet solar cells. We could never reach each other. Doubt if my old pressure suit would fit me any more – but it’s a moon suit you need on Mars now.

  Anyhow, that’s it for me. At eighty-three, I’m probably the oldest man left alive on any of the worlds. I’ll raise Old Glory one more time over the sands of Mars, and toast her with the very last drop of my Soviet potato vodka, and bury this tin chest, and wait for the dust storms to bury me …

  I guess I should finish the story.

  We didn’t need suicide pills in the end. When the youngsters figured out that my generation had blown up one world and dumped them into lethal conditions on another, they went crazy. A war of the age cadres, you could call it. Verity died in the chapel, praying to God for succour, telling the young ones they would be damned for their sins; her own grandchildren blew the chapel up. I daresay we could have lasted longer, if we’d eked everything out as carefully as we could. But to what end? So we could live to see the last molecule of oxygen rust out of the air?

  Mars abides. Yes, it’s a consolation that in the far future, in fifty or a hundred million years, when my bones are dust, and Earth has healed over and is a mindless green point in the sky, the great volcanoes will shout again and bring Mars to life once more, though we will be gone. There’s always that, and – whoever you are, whoever reads this – I hope you won’t think too badly of us.

  It was one heck of a ride, though, wasn’t it?

  JONAS JAMES PUDDEPHAT.

  EAGLE SONG

  7510 BC

  Wolf Cry led Spring Snow out of the camp and up the track to the ridge and the Giant’s Stone. It was deep in the night, but this was midsummer, and the huge sky was a deep blue speckled with stars. The way was easy to find.

  They were b
oth breathing hard by the time they reached the Stone. But Wolf was just fifteen years old, Spring sixteen, both lean and fit, and they recovered quickly. ‘There.’ Wolf pointed high in the sky. ‘See that? The new star.’

  Spring looked up. Her eyes were wide, her small mouth open, and a pretty pin of carved antler held her skin cloak fixed at her throat. Wolf felt something churn deep inside him, churn with longing. She said, ‘Well, I can hardly miss it.’ She looked away uneasily, and glanced back the way they had come, to the camp by the lake.

  From here they could see the sweep of the landscape, the lake flat and still, the huts hunched by the shore, cages of bent-over poles draped with skin and reed thatch. Thin threads of smoke rose up from the ruddy glow of the hearths. Wolf could hear a dog growl in its sleep, and somebody snoring – old Speaker, probably – small sounds that rose up into the still air. Around the camp the wildwood was black in this light and foreboding, but it was broken by the smouldering scars of fire. The people burnt the reeds; the new growth that followed attracted the deer to the water.

  Spring said, ‘I could have seen your star from down there, at my mother’s side. Why did you need to bring me up here?’

  But there was something about this particular star that Wolf Cry longed to share with her. ‘Spring – it changes. The star.’

  She frowned. ‘What do you mean? Does it wander? Will it fall? Do you think it will sprout hair? I’ve seen that before.’

  ‘No. I never heard anybody talking about any other star like this. Sometimes it’s there. And sometimes it’s not.’ He opened and closed his fist, trying to make her understand. ‘I saw it. A few nights ago it was fast, like this,’ and he flapped his fingers quickly. ‘But it slowed down. I counted it with my breath. One breath. Another. Then two, then three, then five.’ Fingers flapped, flapped.

  ‘You’re talking nonsense,’ she said. She was shivering despite the warmth of the night. ‘Stars don’t blink like, like an eye. It’s not blinking now, is it?’