Old Mars

Before Oud, the literature was conflicting and rather noninformative. (On Earth, when anthropologists can’t find instant meaning in any cultural artifact, they say, “This obviously had deep religious significance.”)

What had happened in the dim Martian past? we asked, before Oud’s manuscript was unearthed. Was there some Fatima- or Lourdes-type event? Was it a recurring event and ritual, a Martian Eleusinian Mystery? Rather than either, it appeared to have been a singular event, so important that its effects lasted for several million years. Whatever it was, it must have been a doozy. No Being ever really talked about it before Oud. It seemed to be part of them, a piece of general knowledge, perhaps as known to Bud a few hours after his off-budding as to Oud after his 394 years.

So onward they went toward Solis Lacus; so onward I followed them (some three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand years later), me happy in the long-gone companions of the journey; Oud proud of his new offspring; Bud probably hooting from the sheer joy of being alive and at the tiller of a fine slimshang, on a dying planet that was losing its oxygen, its water, and its heat.

“As with all nest-fathers,” says Oud, “I instructed Bud on how to more efficiently rid himself of his waste products on waking in the morning and how to use his haze-eyes to better see distant objects. He only took a few minutes to learn those skills that would last him a lifetime.”

Now Oud the scientist takes over the narrative:

“I notice that for the past two days we have had only dry snow (carbon dioxide frost), with only a few patches of real snow here and there. Not like in our ancestors’ time, when dry snow was the rarity.”

His (and their, and my) next day of the trip would bring us to our goal—changed though it was since their time.

On old maps of Mars, Solis Lacus (The Lake of the Sun) was a bright circular feature in the midst of a darker area, thought at the time to be an irrigated, heavily vegetated patch, with the stark circularity of Solis Lacus in its midst.

We now know that the dark part was heavy volcanic dust and ash and the bright roundness a raised area swept by winds and kept clear.

In Oud’s time, it was a long fold of the edge of the old bottom of a remnant sea, like prehistoric Lake Bonneville on Earth. As they rolled toward it, Oud said, “Ancestors described the wonder and majesty of (Old Bitter Sea) with its rolled margin of amaranth and turquoise gleaming in the sunset after a long day’s slimshanging. Now it’s an almost featureless rise of the landscape, hardly worth a second two-looks.”

Oud reefed his sail as they slid out onto the brightness of the middle of Solis Lacus.

Bud said, “It is quiet here, Father.”

“Indeed,” said Oud, “for here is where it started.”

“Were you born here, Father?”

Oud looked around.

“We were all born here,” said Oud. He pointed to the raised lump in the cold distance. “That is where the Life-Rock fell from the sky. From where we, and all living things, come. In the ancestors’ days, we returned each year for the Festival of Wow, to appreciate that, and to think and wonder on its happening. It must have been something, then, all the nests gathered, all hooting and racket, such music as they had.”

“Are you sad, Father?” asked Bud.

“Sadness is for those who have personally lost something,” said Oud. “How can I be sad? I have made a fine journey in a good slimshang, in the low season. I have arrived at the place of our First-Birth. And I have a new bud-son who will live to see other wonders on this elder twilight world. How could I be sad?”

“Thank you for bringing me here,” said Bud.

“No,” said Oud, “thank you.”

Weeton here again. We leave Bud and Oud in a sort of valetudinarian idyll (I like to think), staring into the setting sun with Solis Lacus around them, and Thyle I and II far away.

Meanwhile, I’m out here on this empty rise where the edge of a sea once rolled, trying to find what is dragging on my retro-slimshang. The sun is setting here, probably adding to my anthropomorphization of those two Martians now dead four hundred thousand years.

After exploring the Life-Rock for a day (“If you’ve seen one rock, you’ve seen them all”—Oud), his narrative ends two days into the return journey back to Tharsis.

Oud, as far as we can find so far, never wrote another word.

Bud, except for his appearance in Oud’s narrative, is unknown to history or Martian literature.

I hope, so far as I’m able, that they lived satisfying, productive Martian lives.

We’ll never know. While Mars and the Martians were dying, we were still looking up, grunting, out of the caves, at the pretty red dot in the sky.

1 Well put. Weeton’s guess was fairly accurate, one of the few times early colonists and philologists were. Other places, he’s less reliable.

2 Elenkua N’Kuba, ed. Weeton’s Oud Narrative: A facsimile reproduction. Elsevier, the Hague: 2231.

JAMES S. A. COREY