The Martian in the Wood

by Stephen Baxter

  “You’re laughing at me.”

  “No! Wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “But I thought I saw a unicorn!”

  “You reported your impressions honestly. I think it may have been – if it was anything at all – an elasmotherium. Another beast of the Ice Age. Actually a relative of the rhino, but tall, horse-like, and with a single horn. First identified in Russia. Some archaeologists believe that historical sightings of survivors might actually have given rise to the legend of the unicorn.

  “But I’ll tell you the one detail I find most authentic about your account, Miss Gardner. It’s the numbers in your herds: eight, ten, twelve beasts, you said. You see, those cold centuries favoured the growth of big animals, the megafauna, because the bigger the body the more inner heat it can retain. Less surface area per pound of flesh; an elephant can withstand a chill where a mouse will shiver to death. But their fodder is poor quality and sparse, and the land can afford to support only a few such big beasts. And so, small herds. It’s demonstrated in the modern Arctic, and in the fossil record. So what you say is very convincing. Why, the Neanderthals too lived in small, isolated groups, as you witnessed. Made them resilient in the short term, but prone to extinction when a smarter, more flexible competitor came along.”

  But she seemed not to believe it herself. She shook her head. “Even now, as I sit here drinking Pierce’s weak tea, I can scarcely credit it all.”

  “I believe you saw something.” I imagine him sitting forward, his gloved hands clasped – gloved to protect the scarring from his burns. If Zena had shown any reaction to his poor physical condition, his notes don’t report it. “I don’t necessarily believe that what you found was some Ice Age refugium, a domain of the Neanderthals and the giant elk – it does seem incredible that so much could have survived for so long. But then, something unusual happened to that Wood of yours before any of this started, didn’t it? Which was the reason you contacted me.”

  “You mean, the coming of the Martian. If it was –”

  “Well, the timing is right, if what your brother saw was a rogue fighting-machine, separated from the pack, its pilot cut off from fellows who were already dying. And as everyone remembers, the summer was plagued by thunderstorms. I sometimes wonder if the earth itself, outraged, was fighting back against the alien infection!

  “Now, if the lightning did strike a fighting-machine in the Wood, then the machine could have been crippled, for its ‘musculature’ is a matter of metallic discs and sheaths controlled by electromagnetism. Crippled, and stranded there ever since. Oh, it seems quite plausible to me that a Martian might have got stuck in your Wood, like Br’er Rabbit, Miss Gardner!” He smiled now. “And as for the dioramas you saw, I fancy a Martian would have liked our Ice Age. Perhaps it dreams of the glaciers …

  “It is the cold, after all, that drove the Martians to our Earth in the first place. Their world is doomed by the gradual cooling of the sun, just as much as ours. Lord Kelvin has proved it; our sun’s fuel is finite, and it will dim like an exhausted hearth – Flammarion says in only thirty million years. We are already in the autumn of the solar system. Now, the Martians have performed planet-scale miracles of hydrology, to bring water from the polar regions to the relative warmth of the lower latitudes – we can see their canals through the telescopes. But the secular cooling of our star has continued relentlessly, and the most ingenious of technological minds must, at last, admit defeat – on that world, at least. And, when they looked sunward, they saw our Earth, green and moist and vibrant…”

  “But it’s too hot for them,” Zena hazarded. “Now that they are here.”

  “Yes! Because they are habituated to the cold, you see. Just as to their world’s lower gravity.”

  She seemed to be trying to imagine it. “So there you have this Martian, stranded, alone, uncomfortable, dreaming of cool Mars, of what he’s used to … But what has that to do with us, and Neanderthals?”

  “Or rather visions of Neanderthals,” Walter said. “Miss Gardner, as I will describe in my forthcoming memoir, during the Martian War I observed the Martians in life as closely as anyone – yes, I still maintain it is so, despite certain critics. And I argue that the evidence I saw with my own eyes of their ability to carry through complex communal tasks, all without a word being spoken, is evidence of some kind of telepathy. A direct link, mind to mind. Why, isn’t it logical? The Martians have stripped away their bodies until they are nothing but mind. And as to how a Martian mind may contact, even influence others …

  “Everybody knows that the Martians came to the Earth in cylinders, ten shots from the cannon on Mars. And the cylinders were cluttered with junk which they removed from the interiors after landing, to assemble into their various machines, and so forth. But, we have discovered since their demise, there are a few components that were not used for such a purpose – indeed, for which a purpose has yet to be identified.

  “From the Wimbledon cylinder we retrieved a crystalline ovoid – it looks like an egg, like some eccentric antiquarian ornament – that was taken to the Royal College of Science for analysis. Crystalline and clear, and filled with elusive patterns of light, that you can see, just, if you turn it this way and that. Glimpses, of somewhere else … What’s it for? I’m better placed to guess than most.

  “We know that the Martians use machines to replace many of the functions of their bodies: locomotion, manipulation, even feeding, it seems. Perhaps the Martians similarly have devices that can think for them – or at least that aid their own thinking, and its broadcast.

  “Why not? If a Martian can speak to another Martian across a few feet, perhaps with some amplification it can reach to its fellow in a fighting-machine closing on London, or even shout back home to its companions on Mars! For the invaders must have had some way of reporting back what they found on the Earth, and we saw no sign of heliographs, or even of the remote-signalling electric devices of the kind Marconi has demonstrated. Why not mind to mind, with a little help, eh?”

  Zena thought that over. “So you have a Martian alone in Holmburgh Wood –”

  “Alone and desperately lonely,” Walter said. “For we have clear evidence that Martians are social beasts. I and many others saw the Martians come back for a fallen comrade, in the heat of battle. It is logical that it should be so. There can only be few of them, as individuals, and they must be loyal to each other – for they have no family. Freud, you know, speculates about the effect of their peculiar reproductive method on their psychology –”

  “They bud, like polyps.”

  “That’s it. No sex! No wonder old Sigmund is so intrigued.” He leaned forward. “Now, consider the picture. Of a Martian, isolated, perhaps consumed by a superhuman loneliness of an intensity we cannot imagine – and it is communicating those emotions, or trying to, by the power of the mind, with some technological enhancement. And a communication that perhaps can be picked up, if dimly, even by minds so coarse as ours. Think of it! It is as if it has built a signalling tower in that Wood of yours. Is it any wonder that humans, common beasts that we are, are dazzled by the light? Perhaps even a leakage of that intensity has blighted the feebler living things of the Earth around – the farmers’ wretched crops, their animals. And if you were wandering through a Martian’s dreams, perhaps it is no wonder you report distortions of space and time.”

  She pondered this hypothesis. “And the Neanderthals and the unicorns, the Ice Age images?”

  Walter shrugged. “It dreams of its own cold world. Perhaps that is stirring deep old memories of our own. Of the ice, of the lost beasts alongside which we ourselves evolved: these dreams are your brother’s, and yours, not the Martian’s. Or perhaps there are greater minds at play. Consider the Wood itself: the ancient trees never cut nor coppiced, their raddled trunks caked with moss and parasitic plants, and with that gnarling and twisting that comes only with great age. The whole somehow integrated, as if the trees were nerve cells in some hideous brain of wood and moss and v
egetation. A mind, restless, oppressive, resentful! Or perhaps the truth is stranger still.

  “Look – I believe that our analysis of the Martians is sometimes distracted by the obvious, by technology we can recognise if not resist. The Martians are not of this world, you know. They come from a place where things are not as they are here. And perhaps their consciousness, muddled with ours, is having effects that are stranger, and stronger, than we think.”

  “Well, if it is so, what must we do?”

  He smiled, a distorted expression on that heat-damaged face. “Good question, and to the point. There are times when life reduces to its essentials. I spent much of the Martian War trying to find my wife – or that’s what I thought I was doing. I got rather muddled on the way…”

  Zena thought that over. “We must go back to the Wood and save my brother.”

  “Exactly! I suggest we start first thing in the morning.”

  V

  Zena offered Walter the use of her parents’ bedroom, by far the most comfortable in the Lodge, but not yet cleared. Considerately he turned down the offer, and settled for a much smaller room, once a servant’s, but warm enough.

  In the morning Pierce prepared an extensive breakfast of porridge, toast, eggs, bacon, cold meat, fruit juices, coffee. Walter tucked in with a vigour that surprised Zena. But only months before he had spent many days on the run from the Martians, and he would never forget the experience of raw hunger; he always filled his belly when he got the chance.

  And they spoke of forests.

  “Our fascination with the woods runs deep,” he said. “And our fear. Odd when you think that our most distant forebears may have emerged from the forests of Africa, and our closest extant cousins – according to Darwin, I mean the African apes – still live there. Gilgamesh, you know, faced the challenge of the Cedar Forest. The Caesars’ legions came to grief in the German forest, and always feared it. Julius claimed unicorns lived there! Perhaps he saw a hold-out of your elasmotheriums, do you think? And folk tales abound with forests; they are places of ogres and witches and transformations and a slipperiness about time and space.”

  “But no Martians.”

  He smiled. “Not until now. Perhaps we are witnessing the birth of a new mythos. Are you going to have any more of that ham?”

  They prepared for the hike. Walter accepted Zena’s pressing to take heavy boots, a waterproof coat, hat and walking stick that had belonged to her father. Pierce made up light packs of food, water, bits of medicinal kit, and such practicalities as a torch and even an old flare gun.

  Walter had no weapon. I don’t believe he ever used a gun in his life. When Zena took one of her father’s hunting rifles from the cupboard, and a packet of shells, Walter made no comment.

  Thus they set off.

  * * *

  Compared to her previous hike, they made slow progress, even along the trail to Holmburgh Wood. From the beginning Walter, bearing his war injuries, leaned heavily on his stick, and soon grew short of breath. Zena was already mildly anxious about the shortness of the late winter day. But she told herself to be patient; perhaps, in the heart of the Wood, it wasn’t winter at all.

  Walter remarked on the miserable condition of the vegetation, even given that it was midwinter: the dead grass, the spavined bushes, the absence of birds and other creatures. He speculated on nitrogen deficiency. “Harbinger of the Pasteur Institute has studied atmospheric changes associated with the Martians and their rampantly colonising red weed. Another mystery that will take years to resolve!”

  The boundary of the Wood itself, the black-trunked trees thrusting out of the ground like the bars of a cage, seemed still more daunting, more excluding even than before. Walter poked at the trunks with his stick, and made no comment as Zena led him around the boundary to the place where she had entered before. Her paint splashes were still visible, though overgrown with moss and even flaps of new bark.

  They pushed into the Wood. The daylight, for what it was worth, was shut out. Walter tripped on roots, and lost his footing when his boots sank into deep banks of moss and rot. But he used a battery torch to light his way, and learned to poke with his stick at uncertain ground before risking it. Their conversation, subdued, was limited to the practical, as they helped each other find a way through, and they made slow but steady progress.

  At first, at least, nothing seemed to have changed. Zena saw no sign that her brother had been this way recently, or anybody else for that matter. But she found her markers of yellow paint, even if some of them had weathered more than she would have expected – almost as if the Wood were resisting her attempt to blaze a trail through it. She had brought the paint pot; she renewed the marks with defiant splashes of her brush.

  Walter watched her. “I envy your determination, and clarity of thought. I myself feel – disoriented. It is as if the very light shifts around us, the shadows, turning me about. And the smells, of rot and blood, even of burning…”

  “The Wood doesn’t want us here.”

  “No, indeed! But it is going to have to put up with us. Lead on, Miss Gardner.”

  At last they came to a place she thought she recognised. She held up her hand to halt Walter, and peered ahead, the shotgun heavy on her back. “Something is different.”

  “How?”

  “This is where I came upon snow, last time.”

  Walter grunted, and pushed forward beside her, inspecting the ground. “You’re sure?”

  “I’ve been following my paint marks. I remember ducking under this branch, I remember it being like an archway, and struggling with the sudden drifts.”

  “No sign of snow now. Or slush, or any sign it was here recently.” With his stick, he probed at the ground. “But plenty of this stuff.” He lifted fronds of wilted vegetable matter, raised on the end of his stick. The fronds were blood dark and swollen with vesicles, like blisters. “Have you seen it before? The red weed, we called it. It was all over the countryside in Surrey and London, especially the water courses.”

  “Where the Martians went.”

  “That’s it. And died out as they did, presumably from earthly infections.”

  “It’s not long since I was here. Even if the snow cleared, could it have spread so quickly, grown so thick?”

  “It’s possible. It grew mighty fast in the few days it had last year, before the blight got it. But it’s also possible that what you saw before, the snow banks, was just as valid a perception as this, the red weed. Even if the two are entirely different phenomena.” He smiled, rueful. “In my attempts to chronicle the Martian incursion, in the fragments I have published so far – articles mostly for the American journals – I have been described as an ‘unreliable narrator’. Call me an honest one, at least, even if I have had difficulty in digesting my experiences. But in here, you see, I think it’s reality that may be unreliable. Not your memory.” He shook the fronds off his stick, and pointed ahead. “We should go on. I think I see light ahead. As if the forest is ending. Do you remember –”

  “There was the clearing with the animals. The megafauna. And then, the Neanderthals’ hearth. It’s not as before.”

  “Something different, then. Good! Come on.”

  He led the way.

  It was only a little further before they came upon the valley.

  * * *

  That, at least, was how Zena labelled it in her head, on first glance. She and Walter, as if by instinct, quickly dropped down behind the shelter of a low bluff, and out of sight.

  The dense forest had given way, quite abruptly, to a wide landscape – as expansive as the clearing where she had spotted the elasmotheriums and the giant elks – but there were no megafauna here, she saw immediately. And the ground itself, the very geology, was changed too. She and Walter were at the top of a kind of cliff, perhaps fifty feet high, overlooking a broad, straight valley. The hard, rocky ground under her feet, and the outcrops by the edge, were rust red.

  Walter picked at the rock with a fingerna
il. “No grains,” he murmured. “Not any kind of sandstone. It could be basalt, if heavily weathered. Rusted. Are there basaltic outcrops in Sussex?”

  Zena had no idea. She stared at him, and the bit of rock he studied, and back at the wall of forest from which they emerged. It looked a hundred yards away, at least, though she thought they had come only a few paces to this bluff. She was cold, too, but it was a dry, sharp cold, oddly less uncomfortable than the damp murk of an English winter.

  She looked up. The sky was clear, where it had been overcast, and the sun was low. Still the morning, then. But the sun looked pale, oddly shrunken. The sky was a deep, deep blue.

  And before her was this valley, where no valley had existed before.

  Cautiously she leaned forward, and peered out over the bluff. A valley, yes, wide and with a flat floor, and walled by this low cliff, and by a matching parallel line on the horizon. But where the cliffs were rust red, the valley floor was mostly green or grey, for it was covered with a greyish sort of vegetation. It was difficult to see the detail at this remove, but she thought she saw low trees, and grass, or perhaps moss.

  And the valley was evidently inhabited.

  The main features were a single great building – like a museum, was her first thought – and a canal. It could only be that, a waterway that was much narrower than the valley that enclosed it, that ran dead straight between the rocky cliffs. The land along its banks, perhaps irrigated, was thick with the grey-green vegetation. But the water itself, flowing only sluggishly, was stained blood red.

  “Just as the astronomers see,” Walter murmured. “The red waters, red oceans, and grey-green land.”

  Astronomers? She tucked that word away for now.

  “It looks like blood,” she said. “The water in the canal. But –”

  “The red weed,” Walter said. “Or some cladistic relative. Without a doubt.”

  As he spoke a shadow passed over them, crossing the sun; Zena looked up, blinking – her eyes were still adapted to the dark of the forest – but she saw nothing.