by Allen Steele
Anyway, there’s a scene in the movie where Gene Barry and Ann Robinson have made their way to L.A. after escaping the collapsed farmhouse where they’d been pinned down by the alien invaders. Barry meets with his fellow scientists at the Pacific Tech and presents them with a ruined camera-eye he managed to grab while fighting off the attackers. The camera-eye is wrapped in Ann Robinson’s scarf, which was splattered with gore when Gene clobbered a little green monster with a broken pipe.
“And this—” he says melodramatically, showing the scarf to the other scientists “—blood of a Martian!”
I’ve always loved that part. So when Dr. al-Baz said much the same thing, I wondered if he was being clever, copping a line from a classic movie that he figured most colonists might have seen. But there was no wink, no ironic smile. So far as I could tell, he was as serious as he could be.
I decided to let it wait until we had that drink together, so I held my tongue as I drove him into Rio Zephyria. The professor’s reservation was at the John Carter Casino Resort, located on the strip near the Mare Cimmerium beach. No surprise there: it’s the most famous hotel in Rio, so most tourists try to book rooms there. Edgar Rice Burroughs was having a literary renaissance around the time it was built, so someone decided that A Princess of Mars and its sequels would be a great theme for a casino. Since then, it’s become the place most people think of when they daydream about taking a vacation trip to Mars.
Good for them, but I want to throw a rock through its gold-tinted windows every time I drive by. It’s a ten-story monument to every stupid thing humans have done since coming here. And if I feel that way, as someone who was born and raised on Mars, then you can well imagine what the shatan think of it…when they come close enough to see it, that is.
It was hard to gauge Dr. al-Baz’s reaction when we pulled up in front of the hotel lobby. I was beginning to learn that his normal expression was stoical. But as a bellhop was unloading his stuff and putting it on a cart, the professor spotted the casino entrance. The doorman was dark-skinned and a little more than two meters in height; he wore the burnoose robes of an aborigine, with a saber in the scabbard on his belt.
Dr. al-Baz stared at him. “He’s not a Martian, is he?”
“Not unless he used to play center for the Blue Devils.” Dr. al-Baz raised an eyebrow, and I smiled. “That’s Tito Jones, star of the Duke basketball team…or at least until he came here.” I shook my head. “Poor guy. He didn’t know why the casino hired him to be their celebrity greeter until they put him in that outfit.”
Dr. al-Baz had already lost interest. “I was hoping he might be a Martian,” he said softly. “It would have made things easier.”
“They wouldn’t be caught dead here…or anywhere near the colonies, for that matter.” I turned to follow the bellhop through the revolving door. “And by the way…we don’t call them ‘Martians’. ‘Aborigines’ is the preferred term.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. And what do the Mar…the aborigines call themselves?”
“They call themselves shatan…which means ‘people’ in their language.” Before he could ask the obvious next question, I added, “Their word for us is nashatan, or ‘not-people’, but that’s only when they’re being polite. They call us a lot of things, most of them pretty nasty.”
The professor nodded, and was quiet for a little while.
The University of Arizona might not have sprung for a grad student’s marsliner ticket, but they made up for it by reserving a two-room suite. After the bellhop unloaded his cart and left, Dr. al-Baz explained that he’d need the main room, a large parlor complete with a bar, for the temporary lab he intended to set up. He didn’t unpack right away, though; he was ready for that drink I’d promised him. So we left everything in the room and caught the elevator back downstairs.
The hotel bar is located in the casino, but I didn’t want to drink in a place where the bartender is decked out like a Barsoomian warlord and the waitresses are dolled up as princesses of Helium. The John Carter is the only place on Mars where anyone looks like that; no one in their right mind would wear so few clothes outside, not even in the middle of summer. So we returned to the jeep and I got away from the strip, heading into the old part of town that the tourists seldom visit.
There’s a good watering hole about three blocks from my apartment. It was still late afternoon, so the place wasn’t crowded yet. The bar was quiet and dark, perfect for conversation. The owner knew me; he brought over a pitcher of ale as soon as the professor and I sat down at a table in the back.
“Take it easy with this,” I told Dr. al-Baz as I poured beer into a tallneck and pushed it across the table to him. “Until you get acclimated, it might hit you pretty hard.”
“I’ll take your advice.” The professor took a tentative sip and smiled. “Good. Better than I was expecting, in fact. Local?”
“Hellas City Amber. You think we’d have beer shipped all the way from Earth?” There were more important things we needed to discuss, so I changed the subject. “What’s this about wanting blood? When you got in touch with me, all you said was that you wanted me to take you to an aboriginal settlement.”
Dr. al-Baz didn’t say anything for a moment or so. He toyed with the stem of his glass, rolling it back and forth between his fingers. “If I’d told you the entire truth,” he finally admitted, “I was afraid you might not agree to take me. And you come very highly recommended. As I understand, you’re not only native-born, but your parents were among the first settlers.”
“I’m surprised you know that. You must have talked to a former client.”
“Do you remember Ian Horner? Anthropologist from Cambridge University?” I did indeed, although not kindly; Dr. Horner had hired me as his guide, but if you’d believed everything he said, he knew more about Mars than I did. I nodded, keeping my opinion to myself. “He’s a friend of mine,” Dr. al-Baz continued, “or at least someone with whom I’ve been in contact on a professional basis.”
“So you’re another anthropologist.”
“No.” He sipped his beer. “Research biologist…astrobiology, to be exact. The study of extraterrestrial forms of life. Until now, most of my work has involved studying Venus, so this is the first time I’ve been to Mars. Of course, Venus is different. Its global ocean is quite interesting, but…”
“Professor, I don’t want to be rude, but do you want to get down to it and tell me why you want the blood of a—” damn, he almost got me to say it! “—an aborigine?”
Sitting back in his chair, Dr. al-Baz folded his hands together on the tabletop. “Mr. Ramsey…”
“Jim.”
“Jim, are you familiar with the panspermia hypothesis? The idea that life on Earth may have extraterrestrial origins, that it may have come from somewhere in outer space?”
“No, I’ve never heard that…but I guess that when you say ‘somewhere,’ you mean here.”
“That is correct. I mean Mars.” He tapped a finger firmly against the table. “Have you ever wondered why there’s such a close resemblance between humans and Martian aborigines? Why the two races look so much alike even though they’re from worlds over 70 million kilometers apart?”
“Parallel evolution.”
“Yes, I expect that’s what you’ve learned in school. The conventional explanation is that, because both planets have similar environments, evolution took approximately the same course on both worlds, the differences being that Martians…aborigines, sorry…are taller because of lower surface gravity, have higher metabolisms because of colder temperature, have significantly darker skin because of the thinner ozone layer, so forth and so on. This has been the prevalent theory because it’s the only one that seems to fit the facts.”
“That’s what I’ve heard, yeah.”
“Well, my friend, everything you know is wrong.” He immediately shook his head, as if embarrassed by his momentary burst of arrogance. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound overbearing. However, several of my
colleagues and I believe that the similarities between Homo sapiens and Homo aresian cannot be attributed to evolution alone. We think there may be a genetic link between the two races, that life on Earth…human life in particular…may have originated on Mars.”
Dr. al-Baz paused, allowing a moment to let his words sink in. They did, all right; I was beginning to wonder if he was a kook. “Okay,” I said, trying not to smile, “I’ll bite. What leads you to think that?”
The professor raised a finger. “First, the geological composition of quite a few meteorites found on Earth is identical to those of rock samples brought from Mars. So there’s a theory that, sometime in the distant past, there was a cataclysmic explosion on the Martian surface…possibly the eruption of Mt. Daedalia or one of the other volcanoes in the Albus range…which ejected debris into space. This debris travelled as meteors to Earth, which was also in its infancy. Those meteors may have contained organic molecules which seeded Earth with life where it hadn’t previously existed.”
He held up another finger. “Second…when the human genome was sequenced, one of the most surprising finds was the existence of DNA strands which have no apparent purpose. They’re like parts of a machine that don’t have any function. There’s no reason for them to be there, yet nonetheless they are. Therefore, is it possible that these phantom strands may be genetic biomarkers left behind by organic material brought to Earth from Mars?”
“So that’s why you want a blood sample? To see if there’s a link?”
He nodded. “I have brought equipment that will enable me to sequence, at least partially, the genetic code of an aborigine blood sample and compare it to that of a human. If the native genome has nonfunctional archaic strands that match the ones found in the human genome, then we’ll have evidence that the hypothesis is correct…life on Earth originated on Mars, and the two races are genetically linked.”
I didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Dr. al-Baz didn’t sound quite as crazy as he had a couple of minutes earlier. As far-fetched as it may seem, what he said made sense. And if the hypothesis were true, then the implications were staggering: the shatan were close cousins to the inhabitants of Earth, not simply a primitive race that we’d happened to find when we came to Mars.
Not that I was ready to believe it. I’d met too many shatan to ever be willing to accept the idea that they had anything in common with my people. Or at least so I thought…
“Okay, I get what you’re doing.” I picked up my glass and took a long drink. “But let me tell you, getting that blood sample won’t be easy.”
“I know. I understand the aborigines are rather reclusive…”
“Now that’s an understatement.” I put down my glass again. “They’ve never wanted much to do with us. The Ares 1 expedition had been here for almost three weeks before anyone caught sight of them, and another month before there was any significant contact. It took years for us to even learn their language, and things only got worse when we started establishing colonies. Wherever we’ve gone, the shatan have moved out, packing up everything they owned, even burning their villages so that we couldn’t explore their dwellings. They’ve become nomads since then. No trade, and not much in the way of cultural exchange…”
“So no one has ever managed to get anything from them on which they may have left organic material? No hair samples, no saliva, no skin?”
“No. They’ve never allowed us to collect any artifacts from them, and they’re reluctant to even let us touch them. That outfit you saw Tito Jones wearing? It’s not the real thing…just a costume based on some pictures someone took of them.”
“But we’ve learned their language.”
“Just a little of one of their dialects…pidgin shatan, you might call it.” I absently ran a finger around the rim of my glass. “If you’re counting on me to be your native interpreter…well, don’t expect much. I know enough to get by and that’s about it. I may be able to keep them from throwing a spear at us, but that’s all.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Are they dangerous?”
“Not so long as you mind your manners. They can be…well, kinda aggressive…if you cross the line with them.” I didn’t want to tell him some of the worst stories—I’d scared off other clients that way—so I tried to reassure him. “I’ve met some of the local tribesmen, so they know me well enough to let me visit their lands. But I’m not sure how much they trust me.” I hesitated. “Dr. Horner didn’t get very far with them. I’m sure he’s told you that they wouldn’t let him into their village.”
“Yes, he has. To tell the truth, though, Ian has always been something of an ass—” I laughed out loud when he said this, and he gave me a quick smile in return “—so I imagine that, so long as I approach them with a measure of humility, I may have more success than he did.”
“You might.” Ian Horner had come to Mars with the attitude of a British army officer visiting colonial India, a condescending air of superiority that the shatan picked up almost immediately. He learned little as a result, and had come away referring to the “abos” as “cheeky bahstahds.” No doubt the aborigines felt much the same way about him…but at least they’d let him live.
“So you’ll take me out there? To one of their villages, I mean?”
“That’s why you hired me, so…yeah, sure.” I picked up my beer again. “The nearest village is about a hundred and fifty kilometers southeast of here, in a desert oasis near the Laestrygon canal. It’ll take a couple of days to get there. I hope you brought warm clothes and hiking boots.”
“I brought a parka and boots, yes. But you have your jeep, don’t you? Then why are we going to need to walk?”
“We’ll drive only until we get near the village. Then we’ll have to get out and walk the rest of the way. The shatan don’t like motorized vehicles. The equatorial desert is pretty rough, so you better prepare for it.”
He smiled. “I ask you…do I look like someone who’s never been in a desert?”
“No…but Mars isn’t Earth.”
I spent the next day preparing for the trip: collecting camping equipment from my rented storage shed, buying food and filling water bottles, putting fresh fuel cells in the jeep and making sure the tires had enough pressure. I made sure that Dr. al-Baz had the right clothing for several days in the outback and gave him the address of a local outfitter if he didn’t, but I need not have worried; he clearly wasn’t one of those tourists foolish enough to go out into the desert wearing Bermuda shorts and sandals.
When I came to pick him up at the hotel, I was amazed to find that the professor had turned his suite into a laboratory. Two flatscreen computers were set up on the bar, a microscope and a test-tube rack stood on the coffee table, and the TV had been pushed aside to make room for a small centrifuge. More equipment rested on bureaus and side tables; I didn’t know what any of it was, but I spotted a radiation symbol on one and a WARNING-LASER sticker on another. He’d covered the carpet with plastic sheets, and there was even a lab coat hanging in the closest. Dr. al-Baz made no mention of any of this; he simply picked up his backpack and camera, put on a slouch cap, and followed me out the door, pausing to slip the DO NOT DISTURB sign over the knob.
Tourists stared at us as he flung his pack into the back of my jeep; it always seemed to surprise some people that anyone would come to Mars to do something besides drink and lose money at the gaming tables. I started up the jeep and we roared away from the John Carter, and in fifteen minutes we were on the outskirts of town, driving through the irrigated farmlands surrounding Rio Zephyria. The scarlet pines that line the shores of Mare Cimmerium gradually thinned out as we followed dirt roads usually travelled by farm vehicles and logging trucks, and even those disappeared as we left the colony behind and headed into the trackless desert.
I’ve been told that the Martian drylands look a lot like the American southwest, except that everything is red. I’ve never been to Earth, so I wouldn’t know, but if anyone in New Mexico happens to spot a six-legged
creature that looks sort of like a shaggy cow or a raptor that resembles a pterodactyl and sounds like a hyena, please drop me a line. And stay away from those pits that look a little like golf course sand-traps; there’s something lurking within them that would eat you alive, one limb at a time.
As the jeep weaved its way through the desert, dodging boulders and bouncing over small rocks, Dr. al-Baz clung to the roll bars, fascinated by the wilderness opening before us. This was one of the things that made my job worthwhile, seeing familiar places through the eyes of someone who’d never been there before. I pointed out a Martian hare as it loped away from us, and stopped for a second to let him take pictures of a flock of stakhas as they wheeled high above us, shrieking their dismay at our intrusion.
About seventy kilometers southeast of Rio, we came upon the Laestrygon canal, running almost due south from the sea. When Percival Lowell first spotted the Martian canals through his observatory telescope, he thought they were excavated waterways. He was half-right; the shatan had rerouted existing rivers, diverting them so that they’d go where the aborigines wanted. The fact that they’d done this with the simple, muscle-driven machines never failed to amaze anyone who saw them, but Earth people tend to underestimate the shatan. They’re primitive, but not stupid.
We followed the canal, keeping far away from it so that we couldn’t be easily spotted from the decks of any shatan boats that might be this far north. I didn’t want any aborigines to see us before we reached the village; they might pass the word that humans were coming, and give their chieftain a chance to order his people to pack up and move out. We saw no one, though; the only sign of habitation was a skinny wooden suspension bridge than spanned the channel like an enormous bow, and even that didn’t appear to be frequently used.