Ten Directions

by Samuel Winburn

  So, this is the beginning and there are two dreams you see. One for the brothers and one for the sisters. They both ended up different places before going back up to the sky there.

  Back in the Dreamtime there were two worlds, this one here Yulbrada, she's the Earth we live on and another Waijungari, the planet Mars, who had a bad habit of sleeping around with other fellahs’ wives so he's painted up in red ochre, so people would know it.

  Well the brothers and sisters, the Sun gave them different jobs. The brothers, they're good at lifting things and moving stuff. That's why we keep them around, you know? Don't laugh - it's true. Okay, maybe there are some other things.

  So, the brothers, they came to Yulbrada and dug out the ocean, and stacked up all that rock to make the land, and they drew in the rivers with their fingers but that was as far as it goes. And then they left it only half done so it was up to the sisters to finish it off. You know how it goes. So, then our sisters, they made the Earth a good place to live in, brought in all the trees and plants to eat and flowers to look pretty and all that. And then they invited the animals in to come share everything with us.

  So that's the one beginning of the Earth, the world we come from. The other beginning you can't see. That's Waijungari, the planet Mars, the dirty old man. The brothers, they went to his camp and they did all the same as here, mountains and oceans and valleys and such. And they liked Waijungari because he filled their heads with all sorts of nonsense. They sat around the fire waiting for the sisters to show up. You think they ever did? No, they weren't that stupid. So Waijungari, he got older and dried up into stone and you can still see him up there waiting, and the brothers went to chase the sisters in the sky where they'd had a good head start.

  And that's where things stood until another one of our sisters went back up to Mars to try to join the Dreaming there. That's another story.

  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

  Aurora Davidson, Wheatbelt Wallaby, sprang softly from the rock where she had been perched while listening as Auntie Munya told her the story of this place and how a wayward star-girl might fit into the landscape. It was all in Aurora’s head of course. One of the star sisters coming down to sing the first songs here - that much was true.

  The long shadows of midsummer’s evening were darkening the yellow sky and airbrushed blue clouds gathered around the summit of Elysium Mons on the horizon. As she wandered towards the drilling rig Aurora stooped to examine an interesting specimen. A round, crusty rock lay on the shores of an ancient, sublimated sea.

  Cracking it open with a hammer she noted the distinctive layering of the yellow crystals and rust in the rock. Sulfides, she guessed, from the primordial Martian thermal vent she had been tracking. The rock spoke from an age unreachable on the Earth, where flowing rain and ice and tectonic plates had worn the deep past to dust. On Mars the Dreamtime lay naked to the fingertips. Aurora shivered, merging respectful awe with biting cold.

  To warm up, Wheatbelt Wallaby plunged into the boiling mineral waters for a well-deserved soak.

  Singing the songs of rocks, one of the few things Dad had left to her from his long ramblings out on the songlines, in his intermittent and only long-term job as a bioflora prospector. According to her father, Aurora's Wallaby song began with her first kick. He marked the spot with a stick. A visiting Law Man, an old mate, scanned the horizon and then walked out to a nearby rocky outcrop.

  “A Wallaby. Said that’s who you are Ror. What d’ya think of that?”

  Dad would play this story up wherever he had a few drinks in him, which wasn’t as infrequent as the family would have liked. Of course, Dad, with his sandy hair and freckled, sunburnt skin, was as Aboriginal as the next Highlands Scot. It was Mum’s side that was indigenous, the source of Aurora’s copper skin, which protected her to a degree from the unfiltered Martian sun. Of course, Dad had claimed Mum’s portion of Aboriginality for himself, to his wife’s discomfort, but with enough good nature and genuine respect thrown in to be acceptable to a few Uncles and Aunties.

  Dad was always a helpless bullshitter, even after Mum sent him packing and he might have learnt better. Poor Dad. Aurora continued on Mars the stories he and his Wheatbelt Wallaby girl had started whenever she’d accompanied him out Bush. Every large rock, every dry riverbed became an actor in the new songline of Wheatbelt Wallaby on a new world. Those stories helped her see the life latent in Mars, helped her find her place here, even more so than her career spent scrutinizing geochemistry, morphology and maps.

  Rinsing the stain of red fines from her pelt, Wheatbelt Wallaby splashed the tranquil, pregnant sea covering the new land in all directions. Keeping her head above water by balancing on her thrashing tail, she cracked the thin crust of sediments further increasing the luxuriously hot upwelling of mineral waters. Steam from her breath condensed as fog and hung within the walls of the half-inundated gorge of Elysium Chasma, whose striated far walls peaked up over the rise behind her. Tracks of her tail dragging along as she came and left had become the rocky folds leading out from the fossilized springs. Following her own footprints, she’d come to this spot.

  Noticing the angle of the sun, Aurora returned to her tasks with renewed urgency. With numb fingers she unfolded a neurocam, placed the sample within where its structure was recorded in a flash of laser light.

  Focusing her thoughts through her neurovisor, Aurora flew over the projected surface of the rock. In and out of hairline cracks that spread open before her like wide valleys, down the thermal gradients revealed by the changing crystal sizes of the sulfites and other salts. Aurora was familiar with the terrain. She knew where to look. Not too hot where the heat would scramble the proteins. Nor too cold where easy energy sources would not be found. Just right, at that thin edge between hot and cold, between order and disorder, where life could begin. Something caught her attention and she swooped in to investigate.

  Little friends, bulbous bodies standing out against the sharp edges of the crystalline landscape. Ticks left by Wheatbelt Wallaby, guarding the site, awaiting her return for their next blood meal.

  Aurora examined the bacterial ancestors respectfully. Good specimens these. Colony formers gathered together in a ring configuration, whip-like cilia tails waving in the ancient percolations of the vent just like their cousins back on Earth continued doing to the present day. Therein lay her problem. Were these fellows indigenous or merely emigrants, like her? Pieces of Earth, jettisoned into space by asteroid collisions, had been making the journey between worlds for eons and there was no way of knowing, from looking at their fossils, where the life on early Mars had come from.

  Aurora switched off her neuroview and spent a few minutes relaxing her eyes on the endless vista around her. She was disappointed, but no more so than she had expected. Thermal vents were the principal suspects in the search for the origin of life. Tiny vortices of heat in the surrounding mud and mineral gases given off by the hot rocks gave birth to exotic chemistries and cell-like structures that, in the laboratory at least, they’d managed to turn into life. But, of course, the simple bacteria in Aurora’s sample had evolved far beyond that point leaving no indications of a possible spontaneous generation from the stuff of Mars. Life evolved fast. No one had yet found any traces of the initial spark of life, even given the absence of tectonic turnover on Mars.

  Placing the sample in a collection bag, Aurora rechecked her position and pencilled some notes in her field book.

  The drilling rig robot fed another stem into the ground. The friction thawed water, which had existed as a frozen solid for nearly as long as the rock surrounding it, came out in puffs of sublimated steam, leaving a ring of frost on the rig outlet. Besides small aliquots taken as samples, the bulk of the ancient water evaporated without trace into the desiccated Martian air.

  Cupping her hands in the upwelling spring, Wheatbelt Wallaby brought the water to her lips and sucked it down. The cool water flowed down her throat, slaking the terrible thirst of a drought lasting bil
lions of years. Her eyes grew bright as liquid life leaked past her stomach lining to flush the dust from her veins. Long withered muscles miraculously filled with hydraulic power. Wheatbelt Wallaby stood up on creaking knees and shook the sediments off her back.

  Aurora unlocked a side panel on the rig and pulled out a tray of square plastic containers filled with bronze ice. After loading them into an esky, she downloaded the sample manifest from the rig into her neurovisor. She rested a moment as the nanoprocessors in her neurovisor charged up from standby using her body’s chemical energy. Then she dragged the esky over to her sled and winched it aboard.

  Aurora examined her day’s catch with mixed feelings. The Holy Grail of Martian micropaleontology that she had come to Mars searching for were bacterial spores, living ancestral organisms that might one day be resuscitated. Only by decoding the DNA, or whatever had developed here in its place, for these resurrected survivors would they be able to determine whether Mars had ever given birth. But Aurora understood the chances of that happening, with these samples, was two-fifths of bugger all.

  She looked around her, and then back in the direction of her base camp. The rusty plain of Daedalia sloped down West from her position on the beach of the ancient ocean that circled the wide base of the Elysium volcanic highlands. Yardangs and other wind sculpted depressions and scalds created a menagerie of Dreamtime characters out of the broken crater rims down below. Their long shadows began to walk in the twilight. North and South were covered in endless undulating dunes with sunlight slithering up and down them like a thousand snakes.

  The steep cliffs of the Elysium and Hybleaus Chasma canyons bordered her position to the East. The rock layers along their walls provided an invaluable peek into the brief history of life on the planet since Elysium had risen in the middle of what was then a Martian ocean. Aurora had spent many happy days rappelling down their sides with rock hammer and pick. To top it off, a fortuitous concentration of permafrost ice provided a source of drinking water. There was no doubt this was the best place to locate the only research station on Mars.

  But Aurora looked longingly eastward across the great gulf of the Chasma, a minor canyon on Mars but still as large as the greatest in Europe, towards a minute knob on the horizon. Elysium Mons, the fifth largest volcano on Mars, and still twice the height of Everest. It was a month’s sled journey too far.

  Satellite imagery and robotic explorers suggested that the embers of the volcano still glowed near the surface. Even now faint rumblings tickled the seismometers. Perhaps geo-thermally heated liquid ground waters there may have kept Mars' children alive much longer. Perhaps long enough. And it was there that the greatest unexplained mystery of Mars was found, an emission of methane that could possibly have a biological source. It was so tantalisingly close, her dream mission, to spelunk down into a cavern in the Fossae, rifts along the walls of the volcano, and discover that life in the solar system had two homes instead of just one.

  Then again, she would not be the one to find them, and all evidence pointed to the possibility that no one would. Planetary missions, especially basic science, were of declining interest to the public. Now that E.T. had come calling from myriad rich and exotic worlds, who would still be interested in such lesser sparks of Life as her bacterial Martians?

  A persistent red flashing drew Aurora’s attention to her wrist. Drawn out of her reverie she suddenly realized that her neurolink back to Base had been switched off. How long ago had that happened? She switched it on.

  Her neuroview crackled to life. A wiry woman with a crooked grease streaked nose, tightly cropped hair and an anxious expression abruptly appeared.

  “You right darl?”

  “Yeah, sorry for that Terry. Must have been lost in my thoughts.” Aurora looked back over her shoulder towards the encroaching sunset. “You weren't worried?”

  “Too right we were. Lost in your thoughts? Where d’you think you are, Byron bloody Bay? It’s only been half a day. We were just about to come looking. Thought you’d gone Outers on us.” Terry’s voice cracked revealing honest concern.

  Aurora flushed with embarrassment. “Look, I’m sorry about that. I didn’t realize the neurolink was stuffed until just now.”

  “No shit?”

  “True. What did you think, I’d go Out without taking you with me?”

  Terry smiled, an indulgence Aurora was sure she didn’t deserve right now. “Maybe . . . One less mouth around here to feed I was thinking. D’you reckon you’ll still be in for a share of the pudding?”

  “Nah, I’ll load mine on the compost heap when I get back.”

  “Shit mate, that’s a sin.”

  Aurora laughed. Terry was the archetypal Queenslander, irreverent as a rule but pious about the important things. “Just processed the last batch of samples. Should be back by 20 hundred. Bit worried about the power levels in the rig.”

  “Ah she’ll be right. Get in before your tits freeze. Take too long and I mightn’t be able to restrain myself when it comes to dessert.”

  “I’m sure you’ll do your best. See you soon Terry.”

  The conversation closed to static. Aurora tapped the neurolink panel woven into the cloth on her wrist a few times, but it refused to come back to life. Best hurry home now. She walked back to the rig and initiated the fail-safe mode and sent out a few radio whistles to Denali.

  Aurora grinned as the tail of her sidekick came weaving in and out of the ejecta field of a nearby crater. A moment later his familiar white flash came bounding across the fines, weaving contrails of red dust in his wake.

  Denali was the newest, you beaut artificial intelligence unit around. By the late 21st Century scientists had finally been able to translate the real-world intelligence of a dog into a computer or, more correctly, into an organic quantum molecular matrix. He was quite remarkable. Denali didn’t just act like a dog. He was a dog. Maybe he heard radio signals through his fur and maybe his nose was a sophisticated ion spectrometer, but his eyes looked adoringly into Aurora’s as she stroked his fur.

  The secret, she had been told, was in his development. Denali’s brain and body had grown together through some miracle of nano-molecular engineering. He had been raised among other dogs where he had been accepted by the pack. His human masters had painstakingly trained his neural net as they would train an ordinary dog. He even seemed to dream and have nightmares. Aurora was certain that Denali thought he was a dog, or rather a person lodged in the body of a dog that was a robot under the hood. Scientists could debate self-awareness in robots all they liked - Aurora reckoned Denali didn’t mind.

  Denali had been scouting the area, marking rocks with artificial pheromones, and making millions of observations that would later be downloaded from his head for inspection back at the station. His white, solar cell fur was rusty with fines. Aurora scratched behind his ears as she attached the sled harness to him. She gave the sled one more once over and then stood on the back skids signalling Denali to mush them back home. No wind blew against her face, safely enclosed in a pressurized buckeyball helmet, and the wind at fifteen millibars would have been a scarcely perceptible breeze - the one missing element to an otherwise exhilarating journey home.

  Wheatbelt Wallaby ran alongside, her toes thumping into the sand alongside Denali’s paws. The sands of today and the waters of Dreamtime crested and sank into lengthening shadows as she bounded across them. Each step covered a million years. Memories of past atmospheres billeted her face. Old mates, twin moons Diemos and Phobos, tracked her progress as they chased one another through the twilight. She waved goodnight to her old friend Elysium Mons as the great Goanna man ducked into his hole down under the horizon. Behind her, crimson dust bled into clear air from the scratches her paws cut in the skin of the land. Far to the North beyond the range of her eyes though not of her Dreams, the orange and white inter-bedded ice and dust terraces of the Great Termite Mound covering the Northern Pole pulsated in the setting sun. The Termites there held greedily to the wat
er they had stolen from the rest of Mars and Wheatbelt Wallaby still bore a grudge. When she raised her paw to cut the glare, it was not a salutation.

  The slapping of a loose harness caught Aurora’s attention as she leaned wide to balance the sled behind Denali’s undomesticated dance down a scree slope. She nearly slipped from the sled as she bent over to catch it, a dangerous moment as the slightest rip in her squeeze suit would leave her exposed to bone gripping frostbite and depressurization. The shock tightened her senses. She was not as invulnerable as the beings in her Dreaming, and she would never be part of this place. The ever-present radiation alone would limit her stay to a mere four years. It was an impossible love affair. After so many years of bloody-minded pursuit, Mars the seducer would abandon her. What she’d do after she returned to the life she’d always run from, she had no idea.

  Perhaps she could freeze into the landscape, together with other explorers of Mars who had lost their lives here. Her training activated like a slap in the face, and Aurora shivered as she discarded the thought. Romantic and suicidal notions of dying unprotected in Space were a classic early symptom of Outlanders.

  Outlanders, going Out, over the limit, heading home in your bones, returned to sender, eyes on the skies, Blue Heels (there’s no place like home), Fixed on the Far Side, toxic prox, under the ox, not to mention the obvious acronym. All were names for Proximity Malaise Syndrome, an unexplained malady afflicting space explorers. The effect seemed to increase with one's distance from Earth. The first signs were unpredictable. People could wig out in all sorts of creative ways. Then they would freeze up until finally their hearts stopped beating if they hadn’t managed a more effective way to achieve the same. Entire expeditions thus stricken had either perished in psychotic fits or simply withered away. Humans, it turned out, were congenitally bound to their home world.

  No one really knew why. Numerous medical Orgs had grown up around the subject to no avail. Some people seemed to be resistant, a handful of women, far fewer men, and intriguingly, a small number of Tibetan monks from some high-altitude areas and a few other odds and sods who were apparently almost immune. All their genetic profiles were under intense scrutiny back home - huge rewards awaited discovery of a treatment derived from their genes.