It was a relief, for Poole at least, when Jack Grantt called on the third day, and said he was ready to discuss their jaunt to the Cache.
25
There was no easy way to get by scheduled transport from Hellas to Cydonia, in the northern hemisphere, where Grantt had his base. So Poole used family money to hire another airship, big enough for a dozen passengers, inside which the two of them rattled around for the three days’ journey.
From the air the giant Cydonia dome, largest on Mars, was a splash of Earth green-blue in the red desert – but it would have been dwarfed by Hellas. ‘If the arcology ever gets finished they’re going to lose the tourist market here,’ he said glumly as they descended.
‘You say that,’ Nicola replied, at the controls. ‘Look over there.’
To the north-east, Poole saw, checking a smart map, was a plain called Acidalia Planitia, one of Mars’s classic desert locations – and the place where, so he claimed, Jack Grantt had discovered a unique form of native life. Craters and dunes and sandy waste, like much of Mars.
But right now it looked like a small war was going on.
Through a magnifying window Poole made out camps of stout-looking domes, walls and fortifications, and pressurised vehicles and warriors in mechanised suits tearing at each other across the dunes. Aeroplanes shot through the thin air, wispy Martian craft that looked like they were made of bamboo and paper. All of this was obscured by billowing dust.
‘Looks like fun,’ Poole said doubtfully.
Nicola snorted. ‘None of it is real. Or hardly any of it.’ She pointed to a softscreen display which showed local energy usage. The Cydonia dome glowed bright in false colours; on the ‘battlefield’ there were only a few scattered lights. The ‘war’ was Virtual, a brilliant sham.
They descended on a private airfield a few kilometres out from the dome, alongside a cluster of more basic, older buildings, made of Martian brick and grounded-spaceship hull sections, which Poole surmised was Grantt’s biology lab. Jack Grantt himself came out to greet them: ‘Welcome to Cydonia!’ Grantt, a burly Earthborn, looked clumsy and a little impatient in Mars’s slow-motion gravity, as if he’d never properly adapted. And his skinsuit was extensively patched: a much-loved relic of a lifetime of fieldwork, Poole guessed.
Nicola asked about the war next door.
‘Of course it’s not real. Virtual tourists . . .’
He led them indoors to show them. The living area was cluttered, the walls covered by softscreens, the tables and chairs heaped with grimy clothes or bits of equipment – though big windows offered glimpses of a sealed-off lab area that looked sterilised and pristine.
Grantt swept a surface clear of junk, found a particular screen, and poked around until he got an aerial image. ‘We run drones to keep an eye on things.’ He showed them a diorama of the battle they’d glimpsed from the airship. ‘I guess that’s what you saw. This is the reality.’ He tapped an icon, and most of the battle scene evaporated – the vehicles, the warriors, even most of the thrown-up dust. Only a handful of scattered figures were left behind, running or crawling in the dirt. ‘Gaming, see? Mars has a lot of desert, and sadly there are only so many earthworms who want to spend their money on exploring rock and dust and sunsets. They go shopping in the arcologies, and gawp at the Age-of-Heroes space probes, but as for the landscape . . . Well, some bright spark saw its potential as an empty canvas. So we mount fantasy games and historical re-enactments.
‘You can see we get a few players who want to come out in person, although that limits the experience: in a skinsuit we can’t yet simulate Earth gravity. But most are projections, from Cydonia, or Kahra, or Hellas – even from orbit, though the time lag gets tricky.
‘So there you have it: humans battling space aliens on Mars, most of them entirely unaware that under their feet, a few hundred metres down, you’ve got the real thing. Alien life. Actually I’m happy for this crap to be going on, so long as the visitors stick to the rules. If those grockles did any real damage, Lethe, I’d be on Earth slapping samples of my Lattice down on the desks of the UN Oversight committees so hard—’
‘Lattice?’ Nicola asked. ‘Oh. Mars life.’
‘I mean, you wouldn’t believe the proposals I’ve had to fend off, particularly hydrological, for aquifer mining, and running canals from the polar cap—’
‘And now,’ Poole said quickly, sensing Grantt, always a garrulous man, was these days spending too much time alone, ‘you’ve made a proposal of your own. For a mission to the Cache.’
‘Yes! Look, you’re in good time. I’m just waiting for final confirmation that the Cache is indeed heading for the Lagrange point – L5, to be precise. I’ve had a lot of support from the government, actually – I mean the Martian regional council – they’re always keen to back projects that add prestige to the planet.’
‘You mean,’ Nicola said, and Poole knew her well enough now to see she was being mischievous, ‘projects like your investigation of the Lattice.’
‘Yes! You want to go see? Don’t take off your skinsuits . . .’
After that he couldn’t be stopped. He sealed up his own suit and led them back out into the desert, ignoring the space-opera battle flaring in the distance.
Still, it was a wonderful story he had to tell.
It had begun with life, not unlike terrestrial life – probably it was related, connected by migrant bugs spread between the worlds by meteorite impacts – life which had flourished in the briny seas of young Mars.
Not unlike Earth life, but differing in crucial details, specifically in its biochemistry.
On Earth as on Mars, primitive life had once used variants of the giant molecule RNA both to transmit its genetic information and to build the structural components of living things. That starting point was thought to be commonplace, Grantt said; a warm soup of RNA was a product of relatively simple chemistry, and likely to show up on any world stocked with carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen. On Earth that primitive system had evolved, eventually, to use proteins as the building blocks, and DNA for genetic transfer, with RNA only peripherally involved. Mars life – under pressure almost immediately from a collapsing climate, as the planet, too small, too remote from the Sun, began to freeze over – had been forced to adapt more quickly, and instead had evolved a highly efficient variant of the primal RNA system.
‘Then, physically, as Mars cooled and dried and the surface became uninhabitable, life followed the water as it receded to the aquifers underground, or froze at the polar caps. Oh, some traces of it live as life on Earth does – clinging to salt deposits, or scraps of liquid water under the ice crust, and that is what the Age-of-Heroes explorers concentrated on looking for. And they found it: like vast stromatolites, bug colonies the size of small nations, just under the surface dust. But to focus on that alone – treating Mars as if it was another Antarctica, a marginal environment on Earth, while missing the bigger picture entirely – talk about a category error!
‘Look – on Mars there are huge seasonal transports of mass and energy, as all the dust in the world gets blown around every year, and, more significantly, the very air snows out at the winter pole. Well, life follows the energy flows, on Mars as on Earth – the great snows, even the tides in the deep aquifers – life, microbial life, on a grand scale, powered by planetary cycles. And organised on a planetary scale too.’
‘Which,’ Poole prompted, ‘is where your Lattice comes in.’
‘Exactly.’ He led them to a kind of terrarium, a deep ditch under a porous dome. He clambered clumsily down into the ditch, cleared away maybe half a metre of loose dirt with his gloved hands, and showed them what looked like cables, embedded in the ground, worm-pale, heavily interconnected.
‘I brought this sample up for test purposes. And for funding reviews. Go down a hundred metres or more, anywhere on the planet away from the poles, and you’ll find this. A network
, a kind of natural planetary network, that I call the Lattice. Biological, of course, self-repairing, unimaginably ancient – and connected through the wider microbial ecology to the planetary energy flows.
‘This is life on Mars. Maybe even intelligence; it’s complex enough. Or so I argue. But I’m horribly under-funded. I can’t yet be sure.
‘Look, all the way up to World Senate level we have a commitment to preserve all the life we encounter, in all its forms, wherever we go. But, naturally, familiar forms attract the most attention, and the money. I mean, if there were silicon-based kangaroos bounding around out there I could open a theme park. The Lattice is too . . . strange.
‘It doesn’t fit any of our earthly categories of life. It’s most like a biofilm, perhaps, but not. And its actions are widespread, but they’re subtle – even as it participates in the great cycles of air and dust and water, it manipulates its environment on microscales, trapping vented gases here, releasing water there. I’m pretty sure there’s a global communication network working down here, and not restricted to chemical signals either. It may even be electromagnetic, borne through strata of iron-bearing minerals. Of which, as you can tell from the global rust, there are a lot on Mars.
‘But it’s all too strange for people to perceive, to accept.’ He looked restless, agitated. ‘You see, if I had one other example of extraterrestrial life in such straitened circumstances, surviving and co-operating on a global scale to deliver a sustainable environment, it would help my case regarding the Lattice. A lot.
‘And it’s possible we already lost another example of this kind of life strategy, in the Solar System. Venus. Life kicked off there when the Solar System was young, but Venus got too hot, rather than cold like Mars. A remnant biosphere survived, bugs floating in the acid clouds fifty kilometres up, where the conditions were temperate, almost Earthlike. And they participated in more planetary cycles. They somehow created storm systems, for instance, that threw up mineral-rich dust from the ground. Or so it’s thought. Then, back in the twenty-seventh century, along came one of your ancestors, Michael.’
Poole frowned. ‘I know there’s a statue of Jocelyn Lang Poole—’
‘On Maat Mons, yes. A highland. Except it’s not strictly a statue . . . You should go see it some time. Jocelyn promoted the great atmospheric freeze-out, built a sunshield to achieve it. A kind of clumsy terraforming. Well, her “Sunset Day” in 2657 turned Venus into a huge carbon mine, but—’
‘But it killed off your acid-eating bugs,’ Poole said.
‘And the planetary cycles were destroyed before they were properly understood.’
Nicola asked, ‘And you really think it’s smart? Your Lattice? Like a planetary mind?’
Grantt winked at her. ‘A single great neural network? Each day like a single thought, a cycle of summer and winter like a heartbeat? Communicating with other living worlds, maybe, with radio waves – even gravity waves? Every non-scientist I bring here asks that. Every scientist I bring is sceptical. I have to keep an open mind; I’m a scientist myself. I hope someday to prove it. Or even disprove it.’
If you have time, Poole thought sadly. Because now, strangeness is on the way.
A comms patch on Grantt’s suit lit up. A message from Kahra. They had confirmation: permission to fly to the Cache.
They got drunk. They slept it off.
Then they got down to planning the mission.
FOUR
‘Look at it this way. I still cut my lawn. Now, my evolutionary divergence from the grass is, what, half a billion years deep, more? And yet we communicate . . . It asks me if I want it to grow over five centimetres, or start colonising the verges. It tells me this by actually doing it, you see. I say no, with my mower and my strimmer. So we communicate – not in symbols, but with the primal elements of all life forms, space to grow, food, life, death.’
‘And you think it might be that way with intelligent aliens?’
‘If there is no possibility of symbolic communication, maybe. But if they have the capability to reach us then they will be the ones with the lawnmower.’
George Poole and Michael Poole Bazalget, ad 2047
26
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The ship Jack Grantt acquired to take his small exploration party to the Cache – himself, Michael Poole, Nicola Emry – was called the Bellona.
It was a Poole Industries design, a matchstick with GUTdrive and asteroid-ice reaction mass at the business end, a compact lifedome at the other. But Bellona was wholly owned by the Martian regional government, and had been heavily modified from the standard commercial configuration. Poole promised himself a look around when he got the chance.
Still, it was a GUTship, with the usual performance capabilities – and that dictated the mission profile.
The Cache had finally settled into place at Mars’s L5 Lagrange point, a location in Mars’s orbit that trailed the planet itself by sixty degrees, so that Sun, Mars and Cache were the corners of a neat equilateral triangle. Unlike the position of Larunda at Mercury’s L2 point, the Sun and Mars created a kind of minimum here in their combined gravitational field, so that an object sited here tended to stick around, as if resting at the bottom of a shallow well. Indeed the L5 point, like its twin ahead of Mars, L4, was already cluttered with natural debris that had gathered since the formation of the Solar System. Well, Poole thought, now that junk had been enhanced by something that was not natural, and certainly, it seemed, not mere debris.
Given the geometry, the distance from Mars to L5 was the same as Mars’s orbital distance from the Sun – about half as much again as Earth’s – a distance that any GUTship could travel, under full one-gravity thrust, in less than four days. Once they left Phobos, however, acting under strict orders from the Martian authorities, the Bellona proceeded cautiously, taking more than twice that long. The point was to avoid looking like a missile aimed at the Cache. In addition, as they approached, the ship bathed the Cache in friendly messages, using every medium anyone could think of from visible light through to neutrino beams and gravity-wave pulses.
Meanwhile, during this slow cruise. they were accompanied by a small armada: more Martian ships, a few UN vessels flown out from Earth, a swarm of uncrewed monitor probes, all operating under similar restrictions.
Nicola the pilot chafed at the pace of the operation, and Poole felt uncomfortable under the scrutiny of their escort. But at least the low thrust, only a little in excess of one-fifth gravity, didn’t put any pressure on Grantt’s Mars-adapted physiology.
And, while Grantt was distracted by preparing for what might turn out to be the scientific mission of his life, the slow pace gave Poole a chance to snoop around the Martian craft.
Poole scoured the lifedome, noting an unusual clutter of internal partitions. He descended along the ship’s spine, which was the usual skeletal assemblage of struts, cabling and antennae. He even put on a radiation-hardened skinsuit to go take a look around the GUTdrive compartment. He found an emblem affixed to the GUTengine hull itself, a female warrior on a chariot dragged behind four snorting horses.
‘That’s Bellona,’ Nicola told him when she and Poole compared notes. ‘Sister of Mars, and a warrior herself.’
‘Hmm. The ship’s pretty much a standard design,’ Poole said.
‘With extras,’ Nicola said pointedly.
‘With extras. Such as a lot of compartmentalisation of the lifedome. You could shoot a lot of holes in that bubble and still have the crew survive decompression. I haven’t noticed anything that looks like a dedicated weapon . . . However,’ he said heavily, ‘the GUTdrive thrust nozzles seem unusually manoeuvrable. I mean it’s a standard-capability engine, even though we’re throttled down to this walking pace. But if you can direct the exhaust out of those nozzles—’
‘You have a flamethrower to take out any moths that fly too close.’ She was whispering, though Pool
e had a feeling that anything they said aboard this ship could be heard by Grantt, if he paid attention, if not by other agencies. ‘So here we are, approaching an alien visitor with polite caution, firing off friendly messages, in a covertly weaponised ship. Some would say it’s a sensible precaution . . .’
‘And some,’ Poole said, ‘like my mother, would say it’s a provocation. When we ought to be showing a peaceful intent, at least.’
‘Well, whatever the rights and wrongs of that, there’s another mystery here. Look, you’re the engineer. Do you think it’s possible that this ship could have been designed and built with all these customisations since the Xeelee and its entourage showed up in the Solar System? Don’t answer. I looked it up; Poole Industries keeps records too. In fact ships of this class have been coming out of the Phobos yards for years now.’
‘How did you—? Never mind.’
‘Now why, do you think, has the peace-loving Martian government been building warships, for years?’
Poole rubbed his nose. ‘I don’t follow politics much.’
She grunted. ‘That’s typical. Harry says the Martians are restless. I know there are factions agitating for independence. They want to be able to press ahead with their terraforming initiatives, for instance, without having to argue against what they see as Earth’s lingering post-Bottleneck psychological problems about geoengineering. Mars, with ten million people already and growing fast, with its own shipyards, and envious eyes looking out to Titan and other resources – it will be a long time before Earth is happy to let that fledgling leave the nest. And so here are the Martians quietly preparing for a day when negotiations with Earth might heat up a little.’
‘A war for independence? Well – maybe that shows how seriously the Martians are taking the Xeelee issue, that they’d risk tipping their hand to Earth over this covert armament.’
‘Maybe so. The Cache is in their back yard, their Lagrange point. Mars is the front line – for now.’ She grinned. ‘I know there are utopian types – like your mother, no offence – who like to think humanity has grown up, that we have put behind us war and religion and such. Yet the first time somebody pokes our own particular ant nest with a stick, we come swarming out, armed to the teeth. Gladdens your heart. Bellona, goddess of war.’
Xeelee: Vengeance Page 15