Old Mars

Again there was no answer. Bowman had reached the rocks. He could see glimpses of Mather through the gaps. The man was wearing the Martian robe and another mask, this one with an expression of serene amusement. “Come out and we’ll talk,” he said.

“About what?”

The crew chief shrugged. “About what you’re going to do, how you’re going to live.”

“Does that matter to you?” said the musical voice.

“A little. Listen, at first, I was angry at having you on my crew because I didn’t think you’d pull your weight. Then I got scared that you’d screw up the operation and wreck everything.”

Bowman waited a moment to see if the other man would respond, then said, “But once you left us alone to get on with it, you were not my problem anymore. And now that we’re pulling out, I can afford to wonder about what you think you’re achieving up here.”

He waited again, this time letting the silence extend. It made him uncomfortable. He was thinking that it wasn’t just a silence between him and Mather; it was a silence between him and the hills, between him and Mars.

Finally, the man behind the rocks spoke. “There’s nothing to achieve.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“There’s nothing to do. Nothing to be done.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s all been done,” said Mather. “That’s the point. That’s what Mars is.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“I know.” There was another silence, then, although Bowman had heard no footsteps, Mather’s musical voice came as if from farther away. “Good-bye.”

The Earthman skirted the standing rocks and climbed above them. There was no sign of the other man. He called his name, twice, but heard only the eloquent silence of the Martian hills.

Bowman went back to the jeep, back to the base camp, then on to the next job. In later years, he would sometimes tell people, “Just because you can come up with a question, that doesn’t mean there’s an answer.”

Some years later, a prospector came by, his picks and shovels and magnetometer clattering with each step of his walking machine. He spotted the cube of white stone that the automated miner had left as valueless and went to take a look. To one side, he found a mummified corpse clothed in Martian cloth, seated on a chair carved from Martian ironwood. A silver mask rested on the desiccated lap.

At first, the prospector thought that he’d discovered a genuine Martian, though people said they were all gone now. It was the eyes that fooled him: wide and dried, and turned toward the cube, they had looked from a distance like golden coins.

But the mask was a good one. The prospector’s day had not been wasted.

DAVID D. LEVINE

David D. Levine is a lifelong SF reader whose midlife crisis was to take a sabbatical from his high-tech job to attend Clarion West in 2000. It seems to have worked. He made his first professional sale in 2001, won the Writers of the Future Contest in 2002, was nominated for the John W. Campbell award in 2003, was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Campbell again in 2004, and won a Hugo in 2006 for his story “Tk’Tk’Tk.” A collection of his stories, Space Magic, won the Endeavour Award in 2009. In January of 2010 he spent two weeks at a simulated Mars base in the Utah desert, which led to a highly regarded slide show and The Mars Diaries, a self-published hardcopy collection of his and his crewmates’ blogs. His story “Citizen-Astronaut,” a science-fiction novelette partially based on his “Mars” experience, won second prize in the Baen Memorial Contest, was published in Analog, and came in second in the 2011 AnLab Readers’ Poll. David lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Kate Yule, with whom he edits the fanzine Bento. His website is www.daviddlevine.com.

Here he takes us to Mars in a way that NASA probably never thought of …

The Wreck of the Mars Adventure DAVID D. LEVINE