It was for his own good. We amortals take seriously our pledge to help our genetic and technological forebears. Besides, he was only a human, his rights outweighed by what we would learn.
I couldn’t read his mind directly, of course. Wetware circuitry, neutral pathways, memory patterns, and response triggers all vary tremendously from human to human, and there’d been no time to record Paul Norris’s patterns, much less win his cooperation. But I was receiving a full sensory download, experiencing what he experienced as he experienced it, and my impressions were being recorded for later study.
They were also available on the Net, for anyone who cared to tap in. Over fifteen thousand amortals had already linked in from Marsnet, and more were coming online every second, from Solarnet and even Earthnet, where more and more humans were logging on.
I remembered what Paul had said about large audiences, and smiled to myself. He had no idea … .
There wasn’t much to sense at first, save the discomfort. It took almost three hours for the shock wave to make it to Paul’s domie, and by that time, Eos Chasma was across the morning terminator, though the bottom of the canyon was still shrouded in morning shadow and ground fog. Eos Ops relayed updates to Paul by conventional com every few minutes; the cameras mounted on the outside of his Mars hut showed little but the swiftly illuminating sky framed by towering black cliffs.
“You’ve got ten seconds,” Andr’s voice reported, speaking in Paul’s ear.
Paul’s focus shifted from the big wall monitor to the computer display mounted across his lap, where seconds were ticking off and a systems check was drawing to a close. “I see it,” Paul replied. He appeared calm, though I could hear rising stress in his voice. Sweat tickled my own face as it beaded above his eyes and trickled down nose and cheeks. “S’funny, y’know, knowin’ that the rock hit hours ago and not feelin’ a—”
The jolt was like a savage kick in the tail, and the container-packed compartment whirled wildly around my head as the gimbaled seat swung freely. My view went dark, too, as the lights failed, and I cursed the OS-strain’s lack of IR vision.
Computers were still online, filling the compartment with a cool glow. In another moment, the reserve-lighting came up. I felt an unpleasant trembling through every bone in my body, and my view through Paul’s eyes was jittering hard, worse than the vibrations of aerobrake reentry.
Paul looked around the compartment, checking each of the stacked and strapped-down hardfoam crates, cryocases, and storage containers. He must be worried about the delicate fossils stored inside, especially the ice fossils, the way he kept looking at the cryocases. I wanted to tell him to relax, that the way he’d secured them they would ride out the shocks, no problem, but I decided that he wouldn’t appreciate knowing just how close at his shoulder I was.
I did wish he would spend less time checking his cases and readouts, and more looking up at the big screen, affixed to his ceiling—the Mars hut’s floor—with massive bolts and polyplas braces.
The thunderclap of that first shock wave had faded but not died completely. The raw, rumbling noise was growing louder again, and at last Paul looked up at the main screen … and stared into an awful glory.
The gold-pink of the Martian dawn sky was gone, masked by a fast-spreading blanket of ocher-brown and black sweeping down the valles from the northeast. I could see the distant cliffs vanishing into that cloud one by one as it drew closer, and the thunder increased with the approach. The robexcavator, visible on the left side of the screen, was trembling … the thickly strewn rocks on the ground were vibrating as tiny sand dunes gradually collapsed and flattened. The sound was something I … something we could feel in our bones as the second wave approached.
I was watching for the onrushing wall of water. I didn’t see it before the screen, and then vision itself, went black.
I felt again the cool embrace of the linkpod. All sensory input had ceased, and for a gut-twisting moment of disorientation and fear, I thought, I knew that Paul had been killed. Then the side-channel telemetry filtered through my blinkered awareness, recording his heartbeat, his breathing, his brain’s electrical activity.
“Neg scan on the satfeed,” Andr chirped in a high-speed transfer. I lost part of his feed input … but gathered that the tidal wave that had just swept over Paul Norris’s camp had been seventy meters high, and that he couldn’t see the Mars hut on any of the satellite views. “Did he scrag?”
“Neg,” I said on the Ops channel. “Vitals okay. I think he’s unconscious.”
“There!” Dahlen said, pointing at another monitor. “Balyuts deployed!”
The monitor she was indicating showed the Martian surface at an oblique angle, one just peering in past the towering, red and ocher-banded cliffs of Eos Chasma’s south wall. The bottom of that valley was now lost in a surging, whirling mass of, not water, but mud … thick and red and viscous but still churning and frothing like whitewater rapids. The Mars hut, very tiny and very, very alone, had just bobbed into view riding on the surface, five of its six balyuts air-filled and taut, supporting the hut’s foundation slab like pallbearers lugging a rich sapiens’ coffin. There was no sign of the sixth balloon. Perhaps it had not deployed, or possibly the violence of the tidal wave’s arrival had shredded its tough fabric.
No matter. Paul, obviously, understood redundant engineering. His vessel bumped and shuddered along now on the foaming waves with only a tendegree list to the right … what Paul would have called “starboard” in his sailing days on Earth. I felt his sensory link returning, and submerged myself again in his awareness.
His … our heads hurt, a dull throb, and we tasted the salty bite of blood. Our eyes weren’t focusing well—I couldn’t read the lap display, but when he looked up at the big screen, I saw the mudflow from the point of view of a piece of flotsam racing along with the current, through eyes scant centimeters above the roiling muck. Clifftops, their golden caprocks shrouded now in boiling storm clouds kilometers above my head, raced past, while the mud-thick water, despite its churning and foaming, seemed static around me. The scene jittered and trembled, occasionally jolting hard, as though someone had slammed against the camera, and at those times my worldview would pitch and yaw wildly as Paul’s gimbaled chair absorbed the shock. I could hear him shouting something into the din, felt the rasp in my throat and the movements of my jaw … but I couldn’t make out the words above the keening, savage thunder engulfing his frail habitat.
Injection event …
Was it my imagination, or were we moving faster now? The cliffs on our left hand were blurring as they raced past, and I felt myself instinctively trying to edge to the right, trying to stay clear. Paul’s thumb depressed a button on the joystick he held in a trembling right hand, and I felt a hard bump in my spine and gut as the chemical thrusters nudged us away from that hurtling, deadly wall.
Minutes passed with the banded rock walls. The thunder dimmed, somewhat, though we could still hear a thrumming, keening roar of Armageddaic proportions, howling just beyond the thin steel-and-durplast shell.
“You amorts watchin’, up there?” Paul shouted as thunder screamed and boomed. “You see? This is what it means to be alive!” Then he twisted his helmeted head back and vented a long, shrill ya-hoooo that rang from walls already ringing with the chaos outside.
Indeed, my own heart rate was up, in sympathy with Paul’s. There was no physiological danger in the link for me, of course, not with full buffers and safety cutouts; I would never have consented to a Life-risking link. I’ve heard of a handful of amortals who risk everything in a too-close link with a human facing extinction, and could never imagine why.
I knew why, now. Until this moment, I had existed for 193 stadyers in a sterile, muffled cocoon; it was all I could do not to shout myself from the sheer, heart-leaping emotion of the instant.
Others must have agreed. A side-channel told me there were now 21,867 amortals linked in with this experience, almost half of all of the amortals in
existence, together with an unknown number of AIs. More than that, humans were logging on as well in unprecedented numbers, from Mars, from Luna and the microworlds, from Earth herself. The total now was over 12.8 million—a number that continued rising rapidly from moment to moment as word of Paul Norris’s voyage spread.
The water’s speed had increased in the narrow confines of Coprates Chasma, a one-thousand-kilometer straight-line channel far grander and more spectacular than anything Percival Lowell could have imagined. At four hundred kilometers per hour, the passage took two-and-a-half hours, but this was the easy part, a straight, steady rush requiring only occasional bumps from the thrusters to keep the Ark in the center of the stream. There was worse, much worse, to come.
“How ’bout that, Ann?” Paul’s voice sounded in our ears, audible now as the thunder continued to fade. “Y’ever think we’d see this? Last time water flowed in these canyons was a billion years ago, as Tharsis bulged and the permafrost melted, and here we are riding it, by damn! Dear, sweet Christ, it’s good to share this with you …”
I wondered if the experience had accelerated his dementia. His wife’s corpse, I knew, must be stored somewhere inside the hut in a lovingly secured cryocase coffin. He was talking to her again.
“Y’see the expression on that amort’s face, when I told her off? Heh. They want it all so skekkin’ neat and orderly! No room for clutter. No room for improvisin’ the unexpected. Hell, no room in the preservin’ of life for enjoyin’ it!” Our seat fell away suddenly as the Mars hut went into a sudden drop, following the surge as it spilled into a lower-lying stretch of the chasma. My stomach twisted hard and I almost screamed. “Hah!” Paul shouted, exultant. “Cessie, that one’s fer you!”
Spray and spume exploded across the clumsy craft’s bow, momentarily obliterating the view ahead in myriad droplets clinging to the camera lens. The lens was probably bonded with a frictionless coating, or the mud and grit splashing over it would have completely obscured our vision.
Three hours after the wave had first thundered across Paul’s Mars hut, the unlikely lifeboat was swept out of the Coprates Channel, at that point only 150 kilometers wide, following the wave as it surged out into the far broader basin of the Mela Chasma. The sky was very dark now, and there was a steady drumming on the slab surface of the hut. Rain. The first rain to fall on Mars in … what? A billion years? Two?
“Got a choice here,” he called. His voice sounded weaker … tired, we suspected. “Keep headin’ west, or I could try swingin’ north, head for Candor and Ophir. But the terrain’s pretty broken up there. Lots of mensae, lots of mountaintops for me to smack into. An’ I’m still movin’ at a pretty fair clip.” He cocked his head to one side. “Don’t much like the squeaks and hisses I’m hearing in here. Not sure I’m still watertight.”
I could hear it too, above the deeper booming of the water outside. The creakings might have been the packing cases shifting against their constraints, but there was also a shrill, high whistle that could only be escaping air. These old Mars huts had a self-sealer sandwiched between the thin, double shells, but that would work only for a small puncture. If a seam in the hull opened … or both of the airtight seals at the airlock, the interior was going to start losing air. After fifty-one stadyers of terraforming, air pressure on Mars still ran at only a hundredth of a bar. Worse, if the compartment began flooding, the Mars hut would sink in water that might be as much as a kilometer deep. We had no equipment capable of finding and recovering so tiny an artifact, certainly not in the time his pressure suit would grant him.
How much of an air supply did he have, anyway? He hadn’t checked his suit systems or PLSS readouts, so I couldn’t tell. Zet! Wasn’t the human interested in his own life-support capabilities?
“Listen, Paul,” Andr’s voice said in our ear, speaking over his helmet’s com circuit. He’d obviously lowered his own clock speed for the attempt, but his voice still sounded strangely high-pitched and chirpy, with the ragged fringes caused by unrealized sidebands. “We’re monitoring the wave front from the impact. It’s already climbed the Juvantae Dorsa and started spilling into Ophir Chasma. The whole region is masked by steam and spray. If you head that way, well, your ride’s going to get pretty rough.”
“Yup.” Paul didn’t sound worried. “‘Fraid a’ that. Tryin’ to picture a waterfall four kilometers high, ’cause that’s how high the cliffs are at the north rim of Ophir.” He shook his head inside his helmet. “I’d get swept into a cliff for sure. West it is, then. Used to prospect in Ius Chasma, way back when. Found our very first Martian fossil there, in fact. Remember that, Ann? So beautiful. So perfect … .”
I suppressed a cold shudder at that. At times, Paul seemed almost rational. At others …
I remembered studying meter-resolution holos of the Valles. Technically, there were two narrow canyons running west out of the Mela Chasma, Tithonium in the north and Ius in the south, but the east end of Tithonium wasn’t much more than a chain of craters, broken ground and sinkholes at the caprock level, a dead end as far as the Ark’s voyage was concerned. Ius Chasma was long—another thousand kilometers—and gently curving, but it was deeper and narrower than the Coprates Chasma he’d already traversed, and the western end tilted up, toward the fossae-riddled highlands of the Noctis Labyrinthus.
“Here are the figures,” Andr’s voice went on. I saw them when Paul glanced down at the laptop console screen, block upon block of differential equations dealing with fluid dynamics, pressure and gravity, and the far subtler workings of chaos. They proved what I’d already feared. The surge we rode had slowed as it entered the broad expanse of Melas Chasma, and the Ark was now bobbing along at a relatively sedate eighty kilometers an hour … but when the waters cascading now into Ophir Chasma to the north came sweeping down, Paul’s speed was going to increase again. In effect, he would be riding a second injection event, one that would squirt him down the long curve of Ius like a wet pip squeeze-popped from between thumb and finger.
And at the end … well, the land rose sharply, where the Valles Marineris had their birth within the tangled and thickly channeled ground of the Noctis Labyrinthus. The city of Pittsburgh was located high up in the Labyrinth; a thousand kils beyond were the three Tharsis Montes, Arsia, Pavonis, and Ascraeus, the ancient, three-in-a-row volcanic attendants of great Olympus Mons himself.
The question was how far the wave would travel up the Tharsis Bulge. Our calculations suggested that it would not get as far as Pittsburgh … but just to make sure, most of the population had evacuated to Denver-Olympus, twenty-five hundred kilometers further to the northwest.
Somewhere on that thousand-kilometer slope of broken, chaotic terrain, the Ark would come to rest. But where? And … how gently?
For a time, the voyage was almost idyllic, but Paul continued handling the thruster controls, judiciously nudging us across the rising flood toward the west, where the broad, wide basin of Melas gradually constricted like a funnel, until the walls of the canyon were less than eighty kils apart.
I could feel our speed increasing again, could feel the rising shudder of the battered Mars hut’s shell, the thrum of hammering currents, the hiss of bleeding air. I pulled back from my link enough to check the log-on numbers. Over half of all amortals—24,925 in all—were following Paul’s ride; the human log-on numbers were nothing less than phenomenal … two billion and some, the number flickering higher with each second!
What were they watching for? The vicarious sense of danger and probable disaster? Or did they identify, somehow, with the ancient Paul Norris?
“Fossils,” Paul muttered … to Andr, to himself, to Ann, I couldn’t tell. “I s’pose we’re as out-of-date as an old spine-wheel, eh? But if the fossils tell us anything, it’s that life adapts, or it goes under. Y’get too set in your ways, y’get to dependin’ too much on your neighbors, and the next thing y’know, the ocean’s gone and you’re dyin’ in a place you were never meant t’imagine.”
L
ightning flared, igniting the bellies of black-ocher clouds billowing above the Chasma and briefly turning the clifftops white. Dust clouds and water droplets could carry a tremendous static charge. Rock walls blurred once more, as savage currents tore and slashed at the wildly bobbing bit of steel and durplast flotsam. One of Paul’s monitors showed a view from an orbiter, a vast and angry, counterclockwise spiral of lightning-strobing clouds embracing a quarter of Mars’s western hemisphere. It was catastrophism on a planetary scale, something unseen in the Solar System since the Chicxulub impact that ended the dinosaurs and their age sixty-five million years ago.
And on the fringe of that fire-shot hurricane was one ancient OS human, in his frail and makeshift ark.
Noah. I’d downloaded more of the myth before linking in. Was this Martian Noah preserving samples of ancient Martian life unknown to us? Unlikely. But he might well be preserving something more … the spirit of a species long dormant and in the twilight of its span. Everyone knew that H. amortalis would replace the saps, that there was really no point in their continued existence beyond what they, themselves, found for themselves.
Almost three billion humans were logged on now, watching, feeling. An astonishing awareness.
I found myself pleading with Life to spare his life. Zet. Irrational, I know, but I was now facing powers that far surpassed the skills and grasp of the Amortals, even though it had been we who’d released them.
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