Greg Bear - A Martian Ricorso

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2024-11-19 0 0 63.78KB 18 页 5.9玖币

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A Martian Ricorso

a short story by Greg Bear

Martian night. The cold and the dark and the stars

are so intense they make music, like a faint tinkle of

ice xylophones. Maybe it's my air tank hose scraping;

maybe it's my imagination. Maybe it's real.

Standing on the edge of Swift Plateau, I'm afraid to

move or breathe deeply, as I whisper into the helmet

recorder, lest I disturb something holy: God's sharp

scrutiny of Edom Crater. I've gone outside, away

from the lander and my crewmates, to order my

thoughts about what has happened.

The Martians came just twelve hours ago, like a tide

of five-foot-high laboratory rats running and leaping

on their hind legs. To us, it seemed as if they were

storming the lander, intent on knocking it over. But it

seems now we were merely in their way.

We didn't just sit here and let them swamp us. We

didn't hurt or kill any of them--Cobb beat at them

with a roll of foil and I used the parasol of the

damaged directenna to shoo them off. First contact,

and we must have looked like clowns in an old silent

comedy. The glider wings came perilously close to

being severely damaged. We foiled and doped what

few tears had been made before nightfall. They

should suffice, if the polymer sylar adhesive is as

good as advertised.

But our luck this expedition held true to form. The

stretching frame's pliers broke during the repairs. We

can't afford another swarm, even if they're just

curious.

Cobb and Link have had bitter arguments about

self-defense. I've managed to stay out of them so far,

but my sympathies at the moment lie with Cobb. Still,

my instinctual desire to stay alive won't stop me from

feeling horribly guilty if we do have to kill a few

Martians.

We've had quite a series of revelation the last few

days. Schiaparelli was right. And Percival Lowell,

the eccentric genius of my own home state. He was

not as errant an observer as we've all thought this

past century.

I have an hour before I have to return to the lander

and join my mates in sleep. I can last here in the cold

that long. Loneliness may weigh on me sooner,

however. I don't know why I came out here; perhaps

just to clear my head, we've all been in such a

constrained, tightly controlled, oh-so-disguised

panic. I need to know what I think of the whole

situation, without benefit of comrades.

The plateau wall and the floor of Edom are so

barren. With the exception, all around me, of the

prints of thousands of feet... Empty and lifeless.

Tomorrow morning we'll brace the crumpled

starboard sled pads and rig an emergency automatic

release for the RATO units on the glider. Her wings

are already partially spread for a fabric inspection --

accomplished just before the Winter Troops

attacked--and we've finished transferring fuel from

the lander to the orbit booster. When the glider gets

us up above the third jet stream, by careful tacking

we hope to be in just the right position to launch our

little capsule up and out. A few minutes burn and we

can dock with the orbiter if Willy is willing to pick

us up.

If we don't make it, these records will be all there is

to explain, on some future date, why we never made

it back. I'll feed the helmet memory into the lander

telterm, stacked with flight telemetry and other data

in computer-annotated garble, and instruct the

computer to store it all on hard-copy glass disks.

The dust storm that sand-scrubbed our directenna and

forced me to this expedient subsided two days ago.

We have not reported our most recent discovery to

mission control; we are still organizing our thoughts.

After all, it's a momentous occasion. We don't want

to make any slips and upset the folks back on Earth.

Here's the situation on communications. We can no

longer communicate directly with Earth. We are left

with the capsule radio, which Willy can pick up and

boost for re-broadcast whenever the conditions are

good enough. At the moment, conditions are terrible.

The solar storm that dogged our Icarus heels on the

way out, forcing us deep inside Willy's capacious

hull, is still active. The effect on the Martian

atmosphere has been most surprising.

There's a communicator on the glider body as well,

but that's strictly short-range and good for little more

than telemetry. So we have very garbled

transmissions going out, reasonably clear coming

back, and about twenty minutes of complete blackout

when Willy is out of line of sight, behind or below

Mars.

We may be able to hit Willy with the surveyor's

laser, adapted for signal transmission. For the

moment we're going to save that for the truly

important communications, like time of launch and

approximate altitude, calculated from the fuel we

have left after the transfer piping exploded.... was it

three days ago? When the night got colder than the

engineers thought possible and exceeded the specs

on the insulation.

I'm going back in now. It's too much out here. Too

dark. No moons visible.

Now at the telterm keyboard. Down to meaningful

monologue.

Mission Commander Linker, First Pilot Cobb, and

myself, Mission Specialist Mercer, have finished

ninety percent of the local survey work and

compared it with Willy's detailed mapping. What

we've found is fascinating.

At one time there were lines on Mars, stripes like

canals. Until a century ago, any good telescope on

Earth, on a good night, could have revealed them for

a sharp-eyed observer. As the decades went by, it

was not the increased skill of astronomers and the

quality of instruments that erased these lines, but the

end of the final century of the Anno Fecundis. Is my

Latin proper? I have no dictionary to consult.

With the end of the Fertile Year, a thousand centuries

long, came the first bleak sandy winds and the

lowering of the Martian jet streams. They picked up

sand and scoured.

The structures must have been like fairy palaces

before they were swept down. I once saw a

marketplace full of empty vinegar jugs in the

Philippines, made from melted Coca Cola bottles.

They used glass so thin you could break them with a

thumbnail tap in the right place--but they easily held

twenty or thirty gallons of liquid. These colonies

must have looked like grape-clusters of thousands of

thin glass vinegar bottles, dark as emeralds, mounted

on spider-web stilts and fed with water pumped

through veins as big as Roman aqueducts. We

surveyed one field and found the fragments buried in

red sand across a strip thirty miles wide. From a

mile or so up, the edge of the structure can still be

seen, if you know where to look.

Neither of the two previous expeditions found them.

They're ours.

Linker believes these ribbons once stretched clear

around the planet. Before the sand storm, Willy's

infrared mapping proved him correct. We could

trace belts of ruins in almost all the places Lowell

had mapped--even the civic centers some of his

followers said he saw. Aqueducts laced the planet

like the ribs on a basketball, meeting at ocean-sized

black pools covered with glassy membranes. The

pools were filled by a thin purple liquid, a kind of

resin, warming in the sun, undergoing photosynthesis.

The resin was pumped at high pressure through tissue

and glass tubes, nourishing the plantlike colonies

inhabiting the bottles. They probably lacked any sort

of intelligence. But their architectural feats put all of

ours to shame, nonetheless.

Sandstorms and the rapidly drying weather of the last

century are still bringing down the delicate

structures. Ninety-five percent or more have fallen

already, and the rest are too rickety to safely

investigate. They are still magnificent. Standing on

the edge of a plain of broken bottles and shattered

pylons stretching to the horizon, we can't help but

feel very young and very small.

A week ago, we discovered they've left spores

buried deep in the red-orange sand, tougher than

coconuts and about the size of medicine balls.

Six days ago, we learned that Mars provides

children for all his seasons. Digging for ice lenses

that Willy had located, we came across a cache of

leathery eggshells in a cavern shored up with a

translucent organic cement. We didn't have time to

investigate thoroughly. We managed to take a few

samples of the cement--scrupulously avoiding

disturbing the eggs--and vacated before our tanks ran

out. While cutting out the samples, we noticed that

the walls had been patterned with hexagonal

carvings, whether as a structural aid or decoration

we couldn't tell.

Yesterday, that is, about twenty-six hours ago, we

saw what we believe must be the hatchlings: the

Winter Troops, five or six of them, walking along the

edge of the plateau, not much more than white specks

from where we sat in the lander.

We took the sand sled five kilometers from the

landing to investigate the cache again, and to see

what Willy's mapping revealed as the last standing

fragments of an aqueduct bridge in our vicinity. We

didn't locate our original cache. Collapsed caverns

filled with leathery egg skins pocked the landscape.

More than sandstorms had been at the ruins. The

bridges rested on the seeds of their own destruction--

packs of kangaroo-rat Winter Troops crawled over

the structure like ants on a carcass, breaking off bits,

eating or just cavorting like sand fleas.

Linker named them. He snapped pictures

enthusiastically. As a trained exobiologist, he was in

a heat of excitement and speculation. His current

theory is that the Winter Troops are on a binge of

destruction, programmed into their genes and

irrevocable. We retreated on the sled, unsure

whether we might be swamped as well.

Linker babbled--pardon me, expounded--all the way

back to the lander. "It's like Giambattista Vico

resurrected from the historian's boneyard!" We

barely listened; Linker was way over our heads.

"Out with the old, in with the new! Vico's historical

ricorso exemplified."

Cobb and I were much less enthusiastic.

"Indiscriminate buggers," he grumbled. "How long

before they find us?"

I had no immediate reaction. As in every situation in

my life, I decided to sit on my emotions and wait

things out.

Cobb was prescient. Unluckily for us, our lander and

glider rise above the ground like a stray shard of an

aqueduct-bridge. At that stage of their young lives,

the Winter Troops couldn't help but swarm over

everything. An hour ago, I braved the hash and our

own confusion and sent out descriptions of our find.

So far, we've received no reply to our requests for

First Contact instructions. The likelihood was so

small nobody planned for it. The message was

probably garbled.

But enough pessimism. Where does this leave us, so

far, in our speculations?

Gentlemen, we sit on the cusp between cycles. We

witness the end of the green and russet Mars of

Earth's youth, ribbed with fairy bridges and

restrained seas, and come upon a grimmer, more

practical world, buttoning down for the long winter.

We haven't studied the white Martians in any detail,

so there's no way of knowing whether or not they're

intelligent. They may be the new masters of Mars.

How do we meet them--passively, as Linker seems

to think we should, or as Cobb believes: defending

ourselves against creatures who may or may not

belong to our fraternal order of Thinkers?

What can we expect if we don't defend ourselves?

Let your theologians and exobiologists speculate on

that. Are we to be the first to commit the sin of an

interplanetary Cain? Or are the Martians?

It will take us nine or ten hours tomorrow to brace

the lander pads. Our glider sits with sylar wings

half-flexed, crinkling and snapping in the rising

wind, silver against the low sienna hills of the Swift

Plateau.

Sunlight strikes the top of the plateau. Pink sky to the

East; fairy bridges, fairy landscape! Pink and

dreamlike. Ice-crystal clouds obscure a faded curtain

of aurora. The sky overhead is black as obsidian.

Between the pink sunrise and the obsidian is a band

of hematite, a dark rainbow like carnival glass,

possibly caused by crystalline powder from the

aqueduct bridges elevated into the jetstreams. From

our vantage on the plateau, we can see dust devils

crossing Edom's eastern rim and the tortured mounds

and chasms of the Moab-Marduk range, rising like

the pillars of some ancient temple. Boaz and Jachin,

perhaps.

Since writing the above, I've napped for an hour or

so. Willy relayed a new chart. He's found

construction near the western rim of Edom

Crater--recent construction, not there a few days ago

when the area was last surveyed. Hexagonal

formations--walls and what could be roads. From his

altitude, they must rival the Great Wall of China.

How could such monumental works be erected in

just days? Were they missed on the previous passes?

Not likely.

So there we have it. The colonies that erected the

aqueduct-bridges were not the only architects on

Mars. The Winter Troops are demonstrating their

skills. But are they intelligent, or just following some

instinctual imperative? Or both?

Both men are sleeping again now. They've been

working hard, as have I, and their sleep is sound.

The telterm clicking doesn't wake them. I can't sleep

much--no more than a hour at a stretch before I

awake in a sweat. My body is running on

supercharge and I'm not ready to resort to

tranquilizers. So here I sit, endlessly observing.

Linker is the largest of us. Though I worked with him

for three years before this mission, and we have

spent over eight months in close quarters, I hardly

know the man. He's not a quiet man, and he's always

willing to express his opinions, but he still surprises

me. He has a way of raising his eyebrows when he

listens, opening his dark eyes wide and wrinkling his

forehead, that reminds me of a dog cocking its ears.

But it would have to be a devilishly bright dog.

Perhaps I haven't plumbed Linker's depths because

I'd go in over my head if I tried. He's certainly more

dedicated than either Cobb or I. He's been in the

USN for twenty-one years, fifteen of them in space,

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Greg Bear - A Martian Ricorso

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