Old Mars

From Oud: “A sudden plume of dust and steam on the horizon that rose a cretop (five miles) high. Much scattering of debris. Had to trim the slimshang close-to to avoid falling boulders and navigate carefully around many more. The cloud hung in the air till sundown, and probably after.”

My present course shows some remnants of Oud’s event and later ones, including a string of frosted craters off to my right. There are also a couple of shield craters or later volcanic (still active) cones that followed on that cataclysm.

The navigating was even dicier than Oud’s had been.

Some idea of the upheavals of Oud’s time may be gained by his referral (in an earlier narrative) to what is now Olympia Mons as “the new hill.”

So on went Oud on his winter journey, unconcerned by small things like the sky falling and mountains building on the horizon line.

It’s only an accident of sound that Oud’s name is the same as the English one for a Turkish mandolin. (I believe there is an album called The Kings of the Oud on Oud, put out by Picwick Records, supposedly music inspired by Oud’s journey, done by a bunch of studio musicians, rumored to have included Lou Reed and Glen Campbell, among others. I have never heard it: People who have said that it was “pretty uninspired by anything.”)

The third day of both our journeys was fairly downhill, uneventful, and of no great consequence. Night was the same. Oud did not even mention it.

The fourth day, I had some trouble with the rigging of the slimshang. Oud had troubles of a differing kind.

His narrative is deceptive. After complaining about the low quality of the foodstuffs he could find for his breakfast (he had noticed the decline in traditional plant life from his ancestors’ time earlier in the narrative), and speculating about his probably paltry lunch (“slim mossings” is the phrase he used), a few hours into the day comes the line, “If I didn’t know better, and this wasn’t winter season, I would think I was undergoing grexagging.”

Well. I wasn’t undergoing grexagging (no human ever had), but I was having the devil’s own time getting over a series of long gullies without my sail luffing. I resorted to the last ignominy of slimshanging: I got out and pushed.

Eventually, I gained height and wind simultaneously and made off at a fast clip, Solis Lacusward.

I had left Oud in his travels sure that he was not undergoing grexagging. After some more navigational and observational entries, his next sentence may take the reader by surprise.

“Bud has the tiller now. Since he knows almost everything I know, but is only just learning to use his pseudopodia, I let him learn by experience what a glorious thing a slimshang is, but also how ungainly it can become in seconds.”

Bud? asks the reader. Bud? Who is this? Where did he come from?

Oud cannot resist his little joke:

“I watch him clumsily take us around boulders and over dunes. I see how his movements and coordination become smoother and more assured as time—and miles—pass. He reminds me of myself when younger.”

Of course he did. Oud had undergone grexagging (meiosis). Bud was a younger Oud.

This is the only time in Martian literature that a narrator has grexagged in the course of an ongoing narrative. Grexagging usually took place in one’s domicile, attended by nest-brothers, and was celebrated with ritual exchanges of foodstuffs, chattel, and good wishes. Grexagging usually occurred in the spring or summer season, foretold by mood swings, dietary changes, and agrophobia.

It had happened to Oud in the winter, with no presaging except the slimshang wanderlust. He must have attributed his body’s stirrings to that, sublimating the others.

Scientist to the end, he described his changes: “I have less weight than in 393^rd year. To think I grexagged at such an advanced age, with no forewarnings, and in the winter season, is as surprising to me as anyone.

“It is said that Flimo of the (Syrtis Major) nest had an off-bud at 419 years, but that it was unviable and was ritually eaten at the Festival of Foregiving, and the nest stayed away for the customary year before being allowed to attend the next All-Nest Convention.

“Bud looks viable to me—in the last few hours, his handling of the slimshang has grown as assured as that of someone who’d been doing it for a century or so.

“We run now at full jangle across the flat of the former sea-bottom that stretches toward (Solis Lacus). It does a Being good to watch his bud-descendant proud and confident at the tiller of his slimshang.”

It’s still debated (especially by us first wave of humans on Mars) what event it was that took place at the cultural shrine toward which Oud and Bud made their way.