by Allen Steele
We were in trouble.
“(Who dares say that shatan and nashatan have the same ancestors?)” he snapped, hands curling into fists as he leaned forward from his throne. “(Who dares believe that your people and mine are alike in any way?)”
I repeated what he’d said to Dr. al-Baz. The professor hesitated, then looked straight at the chieftain. “Tell him that no one believes these things,” he said, his tone calm and deliberate. “It is only a hypothesis…an educated guess…that I want to either prove or disprove. That’s why I need a blood sample, to discover the truth.”
I took a deep breath, hoped that I was going to get out of there alive, then translated the professor’s explanation. The chieftain continued to glare at us as I spoke, but he seemed to calm down a little. For several long seconds, he said nothing. And then he reached a decision.
Reaching into his robes, he withdrew a bone dagger from a sheath on his belt. My heart skipped a beat as the light fell upon its sharp white blade, and when he stood up and walked toward us, I thought my life had come to an end. But then he stopped in front of Dr. al-Baz and, still staring straight at him, raised his left hand, placed the knife against his palm, and ran its blade down his skin.
“(Take my blood),” he said, holding out his hand.
I didn’t need to translate what he’d said. Dr. al-Baz quickly dropped his backpack from his shoulders and opened it. He withdrew a syringe, thought better of it, and pulled out a plastic test tube instead. The chieftain clenched his fist and let the blood trickle between his fingers, and the professor caught it in his test tube. Once he’d collected the specimen, he pulled out a tiny vial and added a couple of drops of anticoagulant. Then he capped the tube and nodded to the chieftain.
“Tell him that I greatly appreciate his kindness,” he said, “and that I will return to tell him what I have found.”
“Like hell we will!”
“Tell him.” His eyes never left the chieftain’s. “One way or another, he deserves to know the truth.”
Promising the chieftain that we intended to return was the last thing I wanted to do, but I did it anyway. He didn’t respond for a moment, but simply dropped his hand, allowing his blood to trickle to the floor.
“(Yes),” he said at last. “(Come back and tell me what you’ve learned. I wish to know as well.)” And then he turned his back to us and walked back to his chair. “(Now leave.)”
“Okay,” I whispered, feeling my heart hammering against my chest. “You got what you came for. Now let’s get out of here while we still have our heads.”
Two days later, I was sitting in the casino bar at the John Carter, putting away tequila sunrises and occasionally dropping a coin into the video poker machine in front of me. I’d discovered that I didn’t mind the place so long as I kept my back turned to everything going on around me, and I could drink for free if I slipped a quarter into the slots every now and then. At least that’s what I told myself. The fact of the matter was that there was a certain sense of security in the casino’s tawdry surroundings. This Mars was a fantasy, to be sure, but just then it was preferable to the unsettling reality I’d visited a couple of days earlier.
Omar al-Baz was upstairs, using the equipment he’d brought with him to analyze the chieftain’s blood. We’d gone straight to the hotel upon returning to the city, but when it became obvious that it would take awhile for the professor to work his particular kind of magic, I decided to go downstairs and get a drink. Perhaps I should have gone home, but I was still keyed up from the long ride back, so I gave Dr. al-Baz my cell number and asked him to call me if and when he learned anything.
I was surprised that I stuck around. Usually when I return from a trip into the outback, all I really want to do is get out of the clothes I’d been wearing for days on end, open a beer, and take a nice, long soak in the bathtub. Instead, there I was, putting away one cocktail after another while demonstrating that I knew absolutely nothing about poker. The bartender was studying me and the waitresses were doing their best to stay upwind, but I could have cared less about what they thought. They were make-believe Martians, utterly harmless. The ones I’d met a little while ago would have killed me just for looking at them cross-eyed.
In all the years that I’d been going out in the wilderness, this was the first time I’d ever been really and truly scared. Not by the desert, but those who lived there. No shatan had ever threatened me, not even in an implicit way, until the moment the chieftain pulled out a knife and creased the palm of his hand with its blade. Sure, he’d done so to give Dr. al-Baz a little of his blood, but there was another meaning to his actions.
It was a warning…and the shatan don’t give warnings lightly.
That was why I was doing my best to get drunk. The professor was too excited to think of anything except the specimen he’d just collected—all the way home, he’d babbled about nothing else—but I knew that we’d come within an inch of dying, and that ours would have been a really nasty death.
Yet the chieftain had given his blood of his own free will, and even asked that we return once the professor learned the truth. That puzzled me. Why would he be interested in the results, if the thought of being related to a human was so appalling?
I threw away another quarter, pushed the buttons and watched the machine tell me that I’d lost again, then looked around to see if I could flag down a princess and get her to fetch another sunrise. Dejah or Thuvia or Xaxa or whoever she was had apparently gone on break, though, because she was nowhere to be seen; I was about to try my luck again when something caught my eye. The TV above the bar was showing the evening news, and the weatherman was standing in front of his map. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he was pointing at an animated cloud system west of Rio Zephyria that was moving across the desert toward the Laestrygon canal.
It appeared that a sandstorm was brewing in Mesogaea, the drylands adjacent to the Zephyria region. This sort of weather isn’t uncommon in the summer; we call them haboobs, the Arabic name for sandstorms on Earth that somehow found its way to Mars. From the looks of things, it would reach the Zephyria outback sometime tomorrow afternoon. Good thing I’d come home; the last thing anyone would want is to be caught out in the desert during a bad storm.
A waitress strolled by, adjusting a strap of her costume bikini top. I raised my glass and silently jiggled it back and forth, and she feigned a smile as she nodded and headed for the bar. I was searching my pockets for another quarter so that she’d see that I was still pretending to be a gambler when my cell buzzed.
“Jim? Are you still here?”
“In the bar, professor. Come down and have a drink with me.”
“No! No time for that! Come upstairs right away! I need to see you!”
“What’s going on?”
“Just come up here! It’s better if I show you!”
Dr. al-Baz opened the door at the first knock. Spotting the cocktail glass in my hand, he snatched it from me and drained it in one gulp. “Good heavens,” he gasped, “I needed that!”
“Want me to get you another one?”
“No…but you can buy me a drink when I get to Stockholm.” I didn’t understand what he meant, but before I could ask he pulled me into the room. “Look!” he said, pointing to one of the computers set up on the bar. “This is incredible!”
I walked over to the bar, peered at the screen. Displayed upon it were rows of A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s, arranged in a seemingly endless series of combinations, with smears that looked a little like dashes running in a vertical bar down the right side of the screen. A five-line cluster of combinations and smears was highlighted in yellow.
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Professor, I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to…”
“You have no idea what you’re looking at, do you?” he asked, and I shook my head. “This is the human genome…the genetic code present in every human being. And these—” his hand trembled as he pointed to the highlighted cluster “—are stra
nds that are identical to the partially sequenced genome from the aborigine specimen.”
“They’re the same?”
“Exactly. There is no error…or at least none that the computers can detect.” Dr. al-Baz took a deep breath. “Do you see what I’m getting at? The hypothesis is correct! Human life may have originated on Mars!”
I stared at the screen. Until then, I hadn’t really believed anything that Dr. al-Baz had told me; it seemed too unlikely to be true. But now that the evidence was in front of me, I realized that I was looking at something that would shake the foundations of science. No, not just science…it would rattle history itself, forcing humankind to reconsider its origins.
“My god,” I whispered. “Have you told anyone yet? On Earth, I mean.”
“No. I’m tempted to send a message, but…no, I need to confirm this.” The professor walked over to the window. “We have to go back,” he said, his voice quiet but firm as he gazed out at the city lights and, beyond them, the dark expanse of the desert. “I need to get another blood sample, this time from a different shatan. If the same sequence appears in the second sample, then we’ll know for sure.”
Something cold slithered down my spine. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. The chieftain…”
“The chieftain told us that he wanted to know what we discovered. So we’ll tell him, and explain that we need more blood…just a little…from one of his tribesmen to make sure that it’s the truth.” Dr. al-Baz glanced over his shoulder at me. “Not an unreasonable request, no?”
“I don’t think he’s going to be very happy about this, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He was quiet for a few moments, contemplating what I’d just said. “Well…that’s a risk we’ll just have to take,” he said at last. “I’ll pay you again for another trip, if that’s your concern…double your original fee, in fact. But I must go back as soon as possible.” He continued to gaze out the window. “Tomorrow morning. I want to leave tomorrow morning.”
My head was beginning to ache, dull blades pressing upon my temples. I shouldn’t have had so much to drink. What I should have done was turn him down right then and there. But his offer to double my fee for a return trip was too good to pass up; I needed the money, and that would pay my rent for a couple of months. Besides, I was too drunk to argue.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll head out first thing.”
I went back to my place, took some aspirin, stripped off my filthy clothes, and took a shower, then flopped into bed. But I didn’t fall asleep for quite a while. Instead, I stared at the ceiling as unwelcome thoughts ran an endless loop through my mind.
What would the chieftain do when Omar al-Baz informed him that shatan blood and nashatan blood were very much alike and that our two races might be related? He wouldn’t be pleased, that much was certain. The aborigines never wanted to have anything to do with the invaders from Earth; as soon as our ships had arrived, they had retreated into the wilderness. This was the reason why they’d become nomads…
But they weren’t any more, were they? The significance of what I’d seen at the village suddenly became clear to me. Not only had this particular tribe built permanent houses, but they were also erecting a wall around them. That meant they were planning to remain where they were for some time to come, and were taking measures to defend themselves. They were tiring of running from us; now they were digging in.
Until now, the human colonists had been content to ignore the shatan, thinking of them as reclusive savages best left alone. This would change, though, if humans came to believe that Homo sapiens and Homo aresians were cousins. Suddenly, we’d want to know all about them. First would come more biologists like Dr. al-Baz, more anthropologists like Dr. Horner. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad…but right behind them would be everyone else. Historians and journalists, tour buses and camera safaris, entrepreneurs looking to make a buck, missionaries determined to convert godless souls, real estate tycoons seeking prime land on which to build condos with a nice view of those quaint aborigine villages…
The shatan wouldn’t tolerate this. And the chieftain would know it was inevitable the moment Dr. al-Baz told him what he’d learned. First, he’d order his warriors to kill both him and me. And then…
In my mind’s eye, I saw the horrors to come. Wave upon wave of shatan warriors descending upon Rio Zephyria and the other colonies, hell-bent on driving the invaders from their world once and for all. Oh, we had superior weapons, this was true…but they had superior numbers, and it would only be a matter of time before they captured a few of our guns and learned how to use them. Ships from Earth would bring soldiers to defend the colonies, but history is unkind to would-be conquerors. Either we would be driven back, step by inexorable step, or we would commit genocide, exterminating entire tribes and driving the few survivors further into the wilderness.
Either way, the outcome was inevitable. War would come to a world named for a god of war. Red blood would fell upon red sand, human and Martian alike.
A storm was coming. Then I thought of a different storm, and knew what I had to do.
Two days later, I was found staggering out of the desert, caked with red sand from my hair to my boots save for raccoon-like patches around my eyes where my goggles had protected them. I was dehydrated and exhausted to the point of delirium.
I was also alone.
Ironically, the people who rescued me were another guide and the family from Minneapolis whom he’d escorted into the desert just outside Rio Zephyria. I remember little of what happened after I collapsed at their feet and had to be carried to the guide’s land rover. The only things I clearly recall were the sweet taste of water within my parched mouth, a teenage girl gazing down at me with angelic blue eyes as she cradled my head in her lap, and the long, bouncing ride back into the city.
I was still in my hospital bed when the police came to see me. By then, I’d recovered enough to give them a clear and reasonably plausible account of what had happened. Like any successful lie, this one was firmly grounded in truth. The violent haboob that suddenly came upon us in the desert hills. The crash that happened when, blinded by wind-driven sand, I’d collided with a boulder, causing my jeep to topple over. How Dr. al-Baz and I had escaped from the wreckage, only to lose track of each other. How only I had managed to find shelter in the leeside of a pinnacle. The professor becoming lost in the storm, never to be seen again.
All true, every word of it. All I had to do was leave out a few facts, such as how I’d deliberately driven into the desert even though I knew a haboob was on its way, or that even after we saw the scarlet haze rising above the western horizon, I’d insisted upon continuing to drive south, telling Dr. al-Baz that we’d be able to outrun the storm. The cops never learned that I’d been careful to carry with me a pair of sand goggles and a scarf, but refrained from making sure that the professor took the same precautions. Nor did they need to know that I’d deliberately aimed for that boulder even though I could have easily avoided it.
I broke down when I spoke about how I’d heard Omar al-Baz calling my name, desperately trying to find me even as the air was filled with stinging red sand and visibility was reduced to only arm’s length. That much, too, was true. What I didn’t say was that Dr. al-Baz had come within three meters of where I was huddled, my eyes covered by goggles and a scarf wrapped around the lower part of my face. And yet I remained silent as I watched his indistinct form lurch past me, arms blindly thrust out before him, slowly suffocating as sand filled his nose and throat.
My tears were honest. I liked the professor. But his knowledge made him too dangerous to live.
As an alibi, my story worked. When a search party went out into the desert, they located my overturned jeep. Omar al-Baz’s body was found about fifteen meters away, face-down and covered by several centimeters of sand. Our footprints had been erased by the wind, of course, so there was no way of telling how close the professor had been to me.
That settled any doub
ts the cops may have had. Dr. al-Baz’s death was an accident. I had no motive for killing him, nor was there any evidence of foul play. If I was guilty of anything, it was only reckless and foolish behavior. My professional reputation was tarnished, but that was about it. The investigation was officially concluded the day I was released from the hospital. By then, I’d realized two things. The first was that I would get away with murder. The second was that my crime was far from perfect.
Dr. al-Baz hadn’t taken the chieftain’s blood specimen with him when he’d left the hotel. It was still in his room, along with all his equipment. This included the computers he’d used to analyze the sample; the results were saved in their memories, along with any notes he might have written. In fact, the only thing the professor had brought with him was his room key…which I’d neglected to retrieve from his body.
I couldn’t return to his hotel room; any effort to get in would have aroused suspicion. All I could do was watch from the hotel lobby as, a couple of days later, the bellhops wheeled out a cart carrying the repacked equipment cases, bound for the spaceport and the shuttle which would ferry them to a marsliner docked at Deimos Station. In a few months, the professor’s stuff would be back in the hands of his fellow faculty members. They would open the digital files and inspect what their late colleague had learned, and examine the blood specimen he’d collected. And then…
Well. We’ll just have to see, won’t we?
So now I sit alone in my neighborhood bar, where I drink and wait for the storm to come. And I never go into the desert again.
Some stories take a long time to produce. I’m not the sort of writer who gets an idea and runs straight to the keyboard…because, when it comes right down to it, I’m more interested in people than technology, so if I can’t find people I’d like to write about, I’m not going to do a story that’s just about a cool toy. The process of creating such characters takes time, though, so more often than not, story ideas gets jotted down in my pocket notebook and carried around for months or even years before I do anything with them. I prefer a slow-cooked meal to fast food, but sometimes the upstairs kitchen is really slow.