The Martian in the Wood

by Stephen Baxter

  “I think we are observing generations of technology at play here, Zena. Spanning millennia – or millions of years, perhaps. The wider valley is surely too straight to be natural. I think these basaltic cliffs once contained a much wider waterway – perhaps it was more like a sea way, connecting vanished oceans. But as the great aridity tightened its hold, the way was largely abandoned – except for that canal, whose straightness, you see, follows the rectilinearity of its vanished forebear.”

  She pointed to the building. “That looks like South Kensington.”

  Walter laughed, surprised. “So it does.”

  The single building, not far from the canal’s flow, was big, on a rectangular base, with a roof that glittered, metallic – Zena thought it might be aluminium, and if so fabulously expensive – and before its portico was a broad terrace of some pale pink stone. Masts stood on this terrace, topped with artefacts that glinted in the sun; they were like raindrops, but must be much bigger, she thought: lenses, perhaps.

  This was the only building in sight.

  “It is like a museum, yes,” Walter said. “Interesting perception. Previous generations would have thought of a church, or temple, or some grand classical building. Perhaps a taste for the grandiose spans the ages. Even spans the worlds.” He eyed her.

  She smiled grimly. “That’s another pretty broad hint about where you think we are, Mr Jenkins.”

  “Or where we seem to be, at least.”

  She looked further, seeking more detail. Beyond the building’s broad terrace was a roadway, itself roughly following the line of the valley, floored by broken stone.

  And on this roadway, she saw now, sat a man, alone, cross-legged.

  Her heart thumped.

  He sat still, apparently at peace. A small pile of belongings was heaped up next to him, and behind him was a kind of frame from which another figure dangled, inert. Zena could not make this out clearly. She later told Walter it reminded her of the articulated human skeletons hanging from a frame that you might see in a teaching hospital – but inverted, with the skull at the bottom, the feet at the top. Understandably, given what she had seen before, she felt unwilling to look more closely for now.

  Again that shadow flickered across the sun. She looked up, shading her eyes.

  She made out the occluding object now. At first she thought it was a monstrous bird. Around a central, spherical mass, bat-like wings spread wide, flapping and folding; where the sunlight caught them she could see the wings were translucent, and were supported by ribs, like huge, splayed fingers. No, it was too big to be a bird, she realised now, but surely smaller and more graceful than the flying machines in America and elsewhere of which she had read.

  And as she watched this object seemed to be circling closer, and lower.

  “Whether or not that flyer has seen us, I believe it is descending, towards him.” She pointed to the man sitting patiently on the ground.

  Walter studied her. “You know where we are, don’t you?”

  “I believe so. And I know who he must be. I think we should get down to him before the flyer reaches him.”

  “Agreed.” Walter picked up his pack, handed Zena her shotgun, and looked around for an easy way down to the valley floor.

  Where they found that the man, sitting alone, was of course Nathan Gardner.

  * * *

  Zena and Walter approached cautiously, Zena for one keeping an eye out for the flyer.

  But she faced her brother.

  Sitting cross-legged, his hands open and resting on his knees, he seemed serene, at ease. Yet he was in rags, his hair and beard unkempt, and he was gaunt, as if he hadn’t been eating. She could see the shape of his skull under the skin of his face, the eyes bright, his teeth stained from bleeding from the gums when he smiled.

  The wretched creature beside him, dangling from its frame, was long dead: human or at least humanlike, male, naked, and inverted. A kind of cannula, like a tap, was fixed to its neck.

  Walter, briefly and with reluctance, examined the corpse; he took care not to touch it. “This is the creature you saw in the cave of the Neanderthals.”

  Zena confirmed it.

  “Yes, that looks like the Heidelberg jaw, though the body would have to be dissected by a competent anatomist to be sure … Tall as he is, I think this fellow was young when he died. A boy.”

  Nathan spoke for the first time. “He was an animal, without mind. He could not understand. His suffering was brief.” His voice was scratchy, hoarse.

  Zena knelt before him. “And what about yourself? What about your suffering, Nathan? You look scarcely better than he does.”

  He shook his head, his smile ghastly. “I have all I need.”

  Zena looked around, at the single building, the empty valley. The solitary figure of the flyer, still slowly descending – cautious in the thin air, perhaps. “What is it you have? There is nothing here.”

  “Nothing material. But they live like this, or underground. Many of them live alone, physically – there are few of them, scattered over this world – though they like to congregate. For the benefit of their young, especially.”

  “They,” Walter said analytically. “You mean the Martians.”

  Nathan only smiled.

  “Well, it makes a certain sense.”

  And Zena, apparently stranded on a slab of Mars – Mars! – stuck in the middle of the family estate, had to suppress a laugh that would have come out sounding deranged, she was sure. “Sense, Mr Jenkins? How can any of this make sense?”

  Now the flying thing grounded, with surprising grace. Zena saw how the central mass, evidently a passenger, shrugged off the frame of wings, as a walker might shrug off an overcoat. The wings neatly folded themselves up, to a compact packet.

  And the thing moved forward.

  Zena had never seen a Martian close up, during their time on the Earth in ’07 (and nor had I). Few photographic records were made of them while alive; artists’ impressions were, according to eye witnesses, notoriously unreliable, giving no real sense of, for example, the graceful motion of their machines. Even the nearly intact specimen which would one day be pickled and put on display in the Natural History Museum had not yet been released from academic scrutiny. And besides, all the time the Martians had been on the Earth they had been oppressed by our planet’s heavy gravity, which distorted their very bodily form.

  So, now, Zena had few preconceptions. She and Walter held their places as the thing scuttled closer.

  It was big. Massive. The bulk of a Martian has been compared to a bear, and Zena could see that now. But it looked swollen, it was all but spherical and nearly featureless, with little of the articulation and detail of terrestrial animals. Its hairless hide was like glistening leather. It moved with surprising speed and grace, raised up on its limbs, which, sprouting from beneath the body, were more like extended hands, she thought: two clusters of long, powerful fingers, on which it scuttled like a crab. It had a mouth with a V-shaped upper lip, and large, apparently lidless eyes, almost luminous. There was no distinct face; it was as if these features were painted on a balloon. Zena – as I would, when I too came face to face with such creatures – had an odd, disorienting sense of infancy: this was like a baby’s face, hugely swollen and those lidless eyes wide with surprise.

  And Zena saw now that it had a kind of plug in the side of its body, another cannula. This was its only equipment – save, Zena saw now, for a glassy object, egg-shaped, that it carried in two of its long fingers. It came to rest alongside the dangling corpse, and with a graceful flick, took the tube which hung from the body, and fixed it to its own cannula. When this arrangement was in place it gave a soft hoot, like a steam whistle, almost of satisfaction, Zena thought.

  Nathan laughed.

  It was an unexpected, jarring sound in a world that was still and silent. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that I’m so happy. Happy to be here. Happy you’ve joined me at last, Zee-zee. It’s all so perfect. Can’
t you see?”

  Walter stood close to Zena. “How’s your shooting?”

  “My father took me hunting. I didn’t like it, but –”

  “Remember I told you what they found when they cleared out one of the cylinders? A crystalline artefact…” He pointed to the crystal egg that nestled under the Martian.

  She saw it quickly. “That is how they communicate. That is how they project their dreams.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And if it is destroyed, this ends. I know what to do.” She brought her gun around from its strap, cocked it, aimed.

  “No!”

  She jerked back, shocked. She lifted the gun away. “Mr Jenkins? What is it? This was surely what you were suggesting…”

  “Of course, of course.” He ran a gloved hand through hair that had greyed during the summer of the Martians. “But it’s just that it’s such an – amputation. Think of it! The Martians seem materially poor to us; they have no art, no luxury – none that they brought to the Earth, at least. But what need of art or sticks of furniture when you live your life in the realm of the joined mind? And imagine that deep, intimate contact suddenly curtailed. You yourself so recently lost your parents, Miss Gardner. How can we inflict such a severing?” He sighed, almost wretchedly. “I once dreamed of the perfectibility of species. But even the Martians remain an incomplete form with this terrible flaw, the ghastly business of the blood. And yet, and yet! The magnificence of the vision!”

  If you have read his memoir you’ll know this was typical of Walter Jenkins. Such hesitation, such contradiction, at a moment of existential crisis – the anguish of doubt!

  But Zena was made of sterner stuff. “Magnificent?” She gestured at the dangling corpse. “This? May I finish it, Mr Jenkins?”

  “Do it –”

  She raised the gun and fired, in a single movement, before he could object again. She saw the egg shatter.

  And the world shattered in turn.

  * * *

  Holmburgh Wood closed around her like a clenching fist, darker than ever and still more threatening, as if in sullen reaction to her act of vandalism.

  They were in a clearing in the Wood, but it was only a few yards across – not miles. The canal was gone, the valley, the great house. And Zena could see the evidence of burning: huge tree trunks lay around like tremendous matchsticks, evidently smashed by a preliminary explosion then charred by a flash fire.

  The only structure here was a kind of shack, as Zena thought at first, a rough cylinder perhaps five yards across and not much taller, made of plates of some silvery, battered metal.

  “It’s like a broch,” she said, wondering. “Like the monuments in Scotland.”

  Walter grunted. “A broch of aluminium, it seems. Evidently laboriously constructed by the Martian, from the wreck of its fighting-machine, after the lightning strike that had smashed it…”

  And the Martian itself was still here. Its flying wing was vanished. Compared to what she had seen before, the Martian looked to Zena as if it had been deflated, squashed, and its leathery hide was scarred and blistered from burns; it breathed heavily, making that hooting sound with its beaked mouth. It was bleeding itself, from small wounds inflicted by shards of the smashed egg. Yet still those babyish eyes were wide as if in perpetual surprise.

  Similarly, the Heidelberg-jaw boy suspended from the frame was not as he had been earlier. Hanging now from a branch, not a stand, this was just a boy, lanky, clothed in rough farm gear, drained, inverted, his face looking bruised by the blood flow. Zena knew who this was: the wretched Mervyn Chapman, gone missing weeks before. She hoped that his suffering had been brief.

  But she saw – a ghastly detail – that he was suspended from the tree by bootlaces, knotted around his ankles. She remembered noticing that Nathan had lost his own laces.

  “None of it was real, was it? The animals. The Neanderthals.”

  “None of it. Only the Martian –”

  “And the blood.” She turned at last to Nathan.

  He no longer sat cross-legged and in repose. He was sprawled on the cold ground, filthy, gaunt. And a cannula in his arm steadily transferred his blood through a transparent tube to the wheezing Martian. “It’s perfect, Zee-zee,” he whispered. “Perfect and eternal. Bliss, for ever. Can you not see it?”

  She still had her shotgun. She cocked it and raised it at the Martian.

  With a speed that belied its bulk and apparent distress, it scuttled away, diving inside its broch. The feed line snapped, and Nathan’s blood dribbled out onto the ground.

  Zena would have gone after it, but Walter grabbed her arm. “No. The fighting-machine is wrecked, but see how it has welded the panels of its shelter … It still has the resources to harm us, and Nathan. Come. You must take your brother out of here.”

  “Yes.” She focussed on Nathan, who still smiled as if in a dream. She tied off the dripping feed from his vein, swathed his arm in a bandage to protect the cannula until it could be properly removed, and tried to get him to his feet.

  Walter called, “I can help if you wish. But –”

  “You should bring Mervyn, if you can. The Chapmans need their son back.”

  She had Nathan now, his arm draped over her shoulder. He smiled still, as he had at the side of his Martian canal. She looked around for the paint trail she had made.

  Then, one step at a time, calm, determined, purposeful, she brought them all out of Holmburgh Wood.

  VI

  As is the way with all things Martian, it seems to me, the story was never wrapped up to everybody’s satisfaction.

  Save, possibly, for the Martian in the Wood itself, as I shall relate.

  Nathan Gardner’s return from the Wood, along with the corpse of the Chapman boy, caused something of a sensation. Nathan was whisked away to hospital, with the police in hot pursuit as they began their efforts to unravel the presumed murder of Mervyn Chapman. Nathan was of course a suspect, as the only human being known to have been venturing in the Woods about the time of Chapman’s death. Indeed, as I recorded, the wretched boy had been strung up by Nathan’s own bootlaces. The fragmentary but honest accounts of Zena and Walter were taken with a copper’s healthy pinch of salt: it is ironic that Walter once again found himself classed as an unreliable narrator when it came to the goings-on of a Martian.

  There was an investigation, but it was not thorough. The police and other agencies were at the time horribly stretched by the ongoing effort to recover from the Martian assault, and poor Mervyn’s was just one more ghastly death among many, if a late and unusual one. The police did strive to find evidence for themselves, by venturing once more into the Wood. The locals laughed at hearing the whistles of “another lost bobby”.

  In the end it was impossible for the most ingenious prosecutor to prove that Nathan had murdered Mervyn; there was no physical evidence, no signs of a struggle or blood on Nathan’s clothes – only that ghastly detail of the bootlaces. The fact that Zena was able to send the family lawyers into battle for her brother was a big help. As for murder by a Martian, I had a sense in those days that people didn’t want to think about such scenarios; the Martians and their incursion were something to be sorted out and tidied away.

  By the midsummer of ’08 the police had given up, and the case was dropped. Suicide was implied. Of course Rab Chapman was unhappy with the outcome. In the summer Zena had to move Nathan to relatives in London, for his own safety – Walter helped with that.

  And life went on.

  * * *

  As autumn drew in, the harvest from the tenant farms was poor once again, the wheat and other produce swollen but dry and without texture, the meat of the animals stringy and flavourless, the cows’ milk sour. The year ended in another still, cold, snowless winter.

  Around the solstice Zena thought she heard activity coming from the Wood, its very heart. Heard a kind of hammering. Saw a green glow, eerie and unearthly.

  The spring produce grew bad once again, and it w
as another poor year for the lambing.

  In April Rab Chapman led a number of the farmers into the Wood, in force this time. It turned out they had got hold of grenades, from some cache abandoned in Surrey during the military’s retreat from the Martians and purloined through the black market. One man came out with his hand blown off, the stump tied off with a leather belt. The Wood was unharmed.

  The second anniversary of the Martian landings in Surrey came and went without incident. The farmers grumbled their way through another bad year; some drifted away for good.

  That autumn brought a revived national awareness of the Martian threat. Close oppositions of Mars come in clusters and with varying distances, for obscure astronomical reasons to do with the fact that the orbits of the planets are not perfect circles – but clearly the closer the approach of the planets the easier it is to cross the gulf between them. The closest encounter of the current cluster, called a “perihelic” opposition, was not in fact ’07 when the invasion of Surrey came, but in 1909 – on September 24, in fact. As that date approached there was much speculation, irresponsible and otherwise, about whether the Martians would use the encounter to come over and have another go.

  Like every other sensible person in Britain, when the day came Zena found herself watching the sky.

  But her gaze was drawn to the Wood, that black mass on her horizon, and she thought of the Martian in there watching the sky as she was. Two species joined in astronomy. And joined in another way: the Martian, isolated from its fellows by the destruction of the crystal egg, was as alone as she was, in this house without a family.

  She was rewarded in this vigil, but not as she had expected.

  Later, Walter Jenkins explained it all to me. He is one for being wise after the event.

  To cross space, a Martian, we know, needs protection and a means of propulsion. The invaders in ’07 came in cylindrical hulls, powered by expulsion from a vast cannon on the surface of Mars. Well, then, imagine constructing a smaller cylinder from the shell of a wrecked fighting-machine. Make it big enough for a single passenger, just one Martian, together with whatever supplies it needs to survive the journey. Give it a Heat-Ray engine as the basis of some propulsion system – and in the War Walter himself had seen how much energy such engines contain, when one of them, downed, had flash-boiled a long stretch of the River Thames at Shepperton, an incident that left Walter himself parboiled and scarred for life.