MARS UNDERGROUND

by William K. Hartmann

  Roaring London, raving Paris,

  In that point of peaceful light?

  Tennyson, he was ahead of his time."

  The two figures were surrounded by a ghostly ring of man-sized, russet stones that stood erect and caught the morning sun like sentinels who had been standing guard all night. The ring of stones was surrounded by a broad circular ditch and adjacent bank of brown soil a hundred meters in diameter. Two broad flat avenues, like wide paths cleared of stones, broke through the circle, one running northeast and the other southeast. Centered in each avenue in the distance was a huge, solitary boulder standing as erect and quiet as a Buckingham Palace guard.

  The shorter figure turned toward the taller. "You built this all yourself?"

  "Of course."

  "It doesn't look right."

  The tall figure began moving in long, low-gravity hops around the circle, from stone to stone, patting each one in turn. "You see, Stonehenge marks the sunrise at summer solstice in England. But since my Stonehenge is exactly on the equator, I decided to give my Stonehenge two avenues: one for summer solstice in the northern hemisphere and one for summer solstice in the southern hemisphere."

  The two friends moved to the center of the circle. The radio voices cut back and forth invisibly and inaudibly in the thin air, sounding only inside the helmets. "I studied it, the original Stonehenge." The taller figure continued, sweeping a puffy and awkward arm toward the northeast avenue, "The builders, they were very sophisticated about astronomy." He had a European accent, French but with a touch of British, like a French speaker who had learned English in London. "Of course," he added parenthetically, "we Europeans always were more sophisticated than you Americans. You did not even have pottery by that time, if I recall...."

  "Mornings are damn cold out here, Philippe, and I've got to be getting back. So just cut the BS."

  The tall figure ignored him and pointed directly toward the outlying stone, partway down the northeastern avenue. "You stand in the center of Stonehenge on the day when summer begins, and you look down the avenue, and the sun will rise over that outlying stone. In England it was called the Heel Stone. No one knew why before they discovered it was a calendar observatory. Finally, people realized the word came from 'Helios.' Greek for sun. Somehow that name had carried down through the ages."

  "So you..."

  "I always liked the design of Stonehenge. I saw it first in winter. It was covered with snow. So simple and quiet, as if it had its own secret purpose. I liked it so much. That is why I copied it here. We will come back in June. You'll see...."

  "Where are the big stone gates in the middle? I thought you were going to build the whole thing."

  "I re-created the original design, which they started in 2500 B.C. The big stones that impress everybody, with cross pieces on top, they were added later, perhaps for some ceremonial function. Trilithons. They had nothing to do with the original astronomical purpose." He emphasized the last words, as if they were part of a sacred formula. "By 1800 B.C., the people had forgotten the original purpose. They took a beautiful observatory and converted it to a temple of superstition. It's always that way, I think. Knowledge gets discovered, then degraded. The original design was just this simple ring, with the solstice avenue. Very elegant, yes?"

  "How could you build this by yourself?" The smaller figure had a broad, Midwest American accent, with a hint of something else.

  "It was easy. I came out with the seismic crew every morning. I told them I just wanted to observe what they were doing. We got friendly. Soon they let me start driving the equipment. It was a game, you know? The French artist, driving a tractor. They were waiting for me to have some disaster so that they could have a laugh. You Americans are transparent, you know, even when you think you are being devious. Finally I convinced them to let me take the caterpillar out here on my own. It was just a few kilometers from their base camp."

  The shorter figure sat down on one of the smallest stones, as if pondering the whole enterprise. "Damn irregular, Philippe. First it's Old Man Stafford soloing in his dune buggy, now it's you driving a caterpillar like some cowboy construction worker. The rules are going to hell."

  "Stafford would like this place. He is interested in everything."

  "Yeah. His strength and his weakness."

  "He is—how do you say it—an okay guy."

  "Of course. I love the guy. There's no one like Stafford. Somehow, he's taken a shine to me. Tells me about the old days, his adventures... Still..."

  "What?"

  "It's dangerous for him to go out alone. It's a goddamn bad precedent is what it is."

  "They say he goes everywhere, Hellas, the desert. They say he knows of secret treasures...."

  "It's just talk, because Stafford has been out alone, and other people haven't." He picked up a pebble and threw it in a very long arc. "Anyway, it's all Braddock's fault, down at Hellas. Lets Stafford do whatever he wants. He shouldn't let him go out alone like that. Something goes wrong, there'll be hell to pay."

  "It must be incredible to be out there alone in a vehicle. Did you never want to feel what it is like to drive one of the vehicles alone? In my caterpillar, it was fantastic. The power! You know what you can do with it? How it feels? A flick of the wrist and you are moving one-tonne boulders around like the building blocks of children. Fantastic. I dug the ditch and bank in three days. I can imagine how Stafford must feel, master of the desert. You know what I think, Carter? I think it is valuable for all of us to let an older, proven person like him have free rein, to be free of the procedures and the committees. It is a good idea of our Mars society. We ought to export this idea back to Earth. It is like the Aztecs. The young warriors were not supposed to drink, but old people could drink as much as they liked. It was their reward."

  In the hazy light, Philippe stood by the door of the dune buggy, waiting for Carter to take one last walk around the New Stonehenge circle.

  The wind was beginning to come up. He could hear the rustle of sand grains hitting his suit. Carter should hurry up. Carter always spent too much time poking around, thinking about things, instead of absorbing ... what? Philippe could not find a word for it. He gazed to the north, across the unexplored desert.

  A memory came to him. Once his parents had taken him to Algeria. They showed him an estate and told him that his great-grandfather had once owned it. The estate bordered on kilometers of trackless desert. It had been abandoned years before, and the desert was reclaiming it. Philippe could still see the dead trees like black sticks, with sand lapping at their roots. Peculiar lineations in the sand had once been irrigation canals, sparkling in the Saharan sun. On that day, the concept of "owning" land became very strange to him. The estate in the boundless desert was not like a farm that had been tended for generations. It was just a vast, empty space, a piece of weathering landscape that had been there for eons before his great-grandfather or any of the French had come from Europe, and would be there for eons to come. How could anyone say such a thing was owned? It would be like saying you owned the bubble of air that surrounds you.

  As a youth, then, he began to think of himself as a visitor everywhere he went. He would pass through, and perhaps leave something that some child of the future would enjoy. But he was not an owner or a competitor for things that other men seemed driven to seek....

  The empty Martian desert stretched like a dream beyond the circle he had built: more land than all the continents of Earth. Unknown. Unused. Winds blew dust to lord knew where, piling it in little dunes and sweeping them away ten years later. And to what purpose, if there was no one out there to see it? It was hard to imagine a universe full of events, which no one witnessed.... A planet on which no one had lived. Till now. Purpose? Through what perverse history had Western culture transmitted this fixation with "purpose," down through the centuries? Well, the Martian desert, it was just there. Empty.

  He had built something in it. He had been seized by the vision of building this structure, here,
in this four-thousand-million-year-old desert. Well, so, it was something he had to do.

  He hoped Carter would not ask him why. He could not explain why.

  High above the equator of Mars, as Carter Jahns and Philippe Brach departed the New Stonehenge, Annie Pohaku sat under the glass-roofed promenade of Phobos University. She watched the red globe sliding overhead, moving ponderously beyond the branches of the potted Xylosma trees. They were passing over the night side of the planet, black against the stars. It was very different from the night side of Earth, which she had seen from the shuttle as she left home. Earth's night side twinkled like a jewel box with the lights of a thousand cities. Here, no lights at all. Just a black bulk blocking the stars, vaguely menacing.

  Now Phobos crossed the terminator and came into sunlight. There, on Mars, was the Lake of the Sun, Solis Lacus, a fractured dry plain, emerging into dawn to meet its namesake. During the last months, on the long voyage to Mars, she had been studying her maps and holeos.

  The amber light of Mars revealed hidden warm highlights in her long, glistening black hair as Mars passed overhead, languorously, once every ninety seconds, in response to the rotation of the Phobos wheel-shaped colony itself. The warm light caressed the planes of her face, her high brown cheekbones, her wide jaw. Her smooth Eurasian features betrayed fascination as she watched the red, broken landscapes swing by, one famous landmark after another.

  Mars overhead and no one else along the promenade paying any attention. She ought to write something about that.

  There were lots of journalistic opportunities here and not many journalists to cover them. A few stringers were in place here and there, she knew, but she felt like the only journalist here who was alive. She looked forward to an interesting assignment. Phobos University was an amazing place, but she couldn't wait to get back to Mars City and out on the surface. In the few weeks since her arrival, she had been to Mars City once, to claim the room the net had provided, and to establish a beachhead. She had returned on the shuttle to Phobos, exploring the University. She had made videos, interviewed researchers, run hours of satellite imagery from the archives in the big library. Now she looked forward to exploring the planet itself, and its people.

  Chance of a lifetime, she thought. Coming to Mars, not having to live here, but just to drop in for a matter of weeks and skim the cream off a world the other nets were ignoring. Being here long enough to experience the place, without getting out of touch with the real news back on Earth. Almost anything she chose to do could contribute to her assignment as the one-woman advance team to scout out an IPN special: "Mars—The Next World." The network did something like that every year or so. While she was here she should get some imagery and write a few pieces for the network's E-mags.

  "Mars—The Next World." There were people back in the network offices in New York and Tokyo who laughed cynically about the corny title. It was easy for them to laugh at people who departed Earth full of enthusiasm and came back with wide tourist eyes and earnest tales of amazing sights. Journalistic dogma said that any assignment off Earth was a career dead end. Mars, some of her friends had told her, was the farthest outback in the solar system. Big mistake, they said. Maybe so. To network execs, who thought an office was a natural habitat for humans, anyone who would begin to like provincial Mars seemed naive, out of touch with The Latest.

  In the beginning, when she was a kid, Mars had been news. Scientists and engineers, carving out a human presence. But what did they have to show for it now? Two decades of dead, dry rocks and a struggle to keep things going.... The viewers had lost interest pretty fast. Tokyo had lost interest. Maybe her career was on the line, but try as she might, she didn't really worry much about it. Being here was too much fun. Anyway, here she was. Chance of a lifetime. She'd show them.

  Once you were here, the phrases began to take on real meaning: new world; frontier. To her surprise, a story was starting to come together. With luck, the net might extend it into a series. Four, maybe five parts. Takemitsu had said he would consider it if she could come up with enough interesting stuff.

  Two students from the University walked by her bench, arm in arm, not much younger than herself. They were speaking Russian. Interesting place, Phobos. Strange in its own way. It was true what returning off-worlders said. Phobos was like nothing in the Earth-moon system. The difference was not so much the physical place, but something about people's attitude toward what they were doing....

  She shifted her weight on the cast glass bench, leaning back to watch Mars slide by overhead.

  Maybe it would turn out to be a dead end.... Sometimes she thought about chucking her whole hectic career and returning to her native Hawaii, where the tempo was still slow and she knew she could be happy. Back to Tomas, who would always be waiting....

  She closed her eyes.

  Memories. Scenes, like invisible perfumes, wafting into the windows of her mind like a sea breeze. The sun bright as a bomb shining in the window of that other shuttle, taking her away from Earth for the first time, lifting off from South Point.. . Looking down; looking back. The planet curving away blue and white; and on the planet an ocean blue and green; and on the ocean as far from anyplace as someplace could be, an archipelago; and on the island curling ferns and streets with pink flowers and trees with broad green leaves; and on the leaves drops of fresh rain, beaded like little spherical lenses, waiting for something; and in each lens a sparkle of the sun, and a dozen motes circling like planets...

  The eyes of Tomas saying good-bye...

  Memories popped into mindspace like subatomic particles popping into existence after the big bang, and what if whole planets, including dusty red ones, could spring into being as easily as that?

  She opened her eyes and looked through the graceful arch of glass. Sun, Mars, Sun, Mars, swinging by. There were still adventures to be had in her life, before going home.

  Suddenly she caught sight of the shuttle drifting against the curved hazy horizon of Mars. It was getting bigger. The shuttle from Mars City. She could see the antennae, and the protruding landing legs, as useless here as legs on a fish. It was majestic. She ought to get a shot of that with Mars in the background. Viewers were used to seeing the slow-motion dance of spacecraft, but not with a red backdrop. With a little image processing, they could create a 3-D effect. Shuttle hanging in front of Mars, like a model. Fakey as hell, but Takemitsu and the viewers loved it. It looked more like what they saw in the action-sensies.

  The same shuttle would take her down to Mars.

  The most interesting part of the planet was coming into view. The gashlike rift, Valles Marineris, was carpeted with a deposit of gray-brown dust, forming a dark streak visible from Earth and mapped in the 1800s as the thickest of the mythical "canals." It was given the name Coprates, curiously derived from the Greek root for dung. Shit canyon. An ironic name for the biggest canyon in the solar system.

  She ought to write something about that, too, a little piece with photos of the canyon as seen overhead through the roof of Phobos's famous promenade. She pondered a title, smiling mischievously.

  The empty hills and river channels, passing below, made her think of Earth. She remembered a flight down the California coast, not long before she left. Masses of houses, the ragged coast with its decaying luxury hotels, the ribbon roads with their scattered crawling ants. That green and tan land was pressed down by an enormous accumulated mass of history, the people who had lived there and disappeared. The first unknown hunters pouring onto the continent through Alaska; Ulloa and Sir Francis Drake probing the coast, Junipero Serra and his missions, young Richard Dana on his whaling ship visiting an empty peninsula, and old Richard Dana coming back twenty-five years later to find the massive city of San Francisco with its bustling American enthusiasm. And the masses of faceless construction workers, businessmen, farmers, and dream merchants who had built the land—all lost in history. The tangled invisible mass of events and personages, piling up year after year, seemed to weigh d
own that land, becoming denser and heavier each year.

  Now, as she looked down on this empty red land of Mars, where no history had accumulated, it seemed light and airy by comparison, an empty slate.

  A thought flashed in her mind: She'd be writing this history. She'd be adding density to the landscape below.

  Yes, she could get a story out of Shit Canyon if she wanted to. A California geologist she had flirted with a few days before arrival at Phobos said that the canyon was long enough to stretch across the U.S. Said it formed because of uplifting just before the big volcanoes erupted in Tharsis. Or some such. He seemed to think this was exciting, and quoted some meaninglessly long time ago in the past—she couldn't remember. Two billion years? Why did they even bother to talk about time periods so long?

  Still, he might make a good interview. When he described his esoteric knowledge, he radiated pure joy, the way scientists do. How the canyon's formation had exposed underground ice deposits that turned to water. Cascades of water, gushing out of the faults, rushing down the valley to the east, carving out the river channels around Mars City. She gazed up at Mars, where she could see them now, ancient dusty traceries of the twin dusty riverbeds, Eos Chasma and Capri Chasma. The Californian had loved trying to impress her with this story of diluvian drama. His big hands moved a lot and his eyebrows went up and down when he talked about what they were learning from ancient strata. He had been kind of cute, in a boyishly confident haole way. Yes, Takemitsu would love him, describing giant floods and waving his hands in a low-gravity dance, superimposed on some huge holeo of the canyon.

  She ought to find him. He said he had to go directly on to Mars—no time for an interview. He hinted at dark, important, masculine projects, but she forgave him. When she got back to Mars City, she should find him again. What was his... She leaned over the 'corder strapped to her wrist and spoke slowly.

  "What is the name of the California geologist we met on the flight from Earth?"