Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 104

by Kressel, Matthew

  And suddenly they were all there, all the Moon People, coming from their houses: Chang’e and her children and the Jade Rabbit and the Woodcutter, looking at her gravely and nodding their heads.

  Tyche could not bear to look at them. She covered her helmet with her hands, turned around, crawled through the Secret Door and ran away, away from the Other Moon. She ran, not a Rabbit run but a clumsy jerky crying run, until she stumbled on a boulder and went rolling higgledy-piggledy down. She lay curled up in the chilly regolith for a long time. And when she opened her eyes, the ants were all around her.

  The ants were arranged around her in a half-circle, stretched into spiky pyramids, waving slightly, as if looking for something. Then they spoke. At first, it was just noise, hissing in her helmet, but after a second it resolved into a voice.

  “—hello,” it said, warm and female, like Chang’e, but older and deeper. “I am Alissa. Are you hurt?”

  Tyche was frozen. She had never spoken to anyone who was not the Brain or one of the Moon People. Her tongue felt stiff.

  “Just tell me if you are all right. No one is going to hurt you. Do you feel bad anywhere?”

  “No,” Tyche breathed.

  “There is no need to be afraid. We will take you home.” A video feed flashed up inside her helmet, a spaceship that was made up of a cluster of legs and a globe that glinted golden. A circle appeared elsewhere in her field of vision, indicating a tiny pinpoint of light in the sky. “See? We are on our way.”

  “I don’t want to go to the Great Wrong Place,” she gasped. “I don’t want you to cut me up.”

  There was a pause.

  “Why would we do that? There is nothing to be afraid of.”

  “Because Wrong Place people don’t like people like me.”

  Another pause.

  “Dear child, I don’t know what you have been told, but things have changed. Your parents left Earth more than a century ago. We never thought we would find you, but we kept looking. And I’m glad we did. You have been alone on the Moon for a very long time.”

  Tyche got up, slowly. I haven’t been alone. Her head spun. They would do anything to have you.

  She backed off a few steps.

  “If I come with you,” she asked in a small voice, “will I see Kareem and Sofia again?”

  A pause again, longer this time.

  “Of course you will,” Alissa the ant-woman said finally. “They are right here, waiting for you.”

  Liar.

  Slowly, Tyche started backing off. The ants moved, closing their circle. I am faster than they are, she thought. They can’t catch me.

  “Where are you going?”

  Tyche switched off her radio, cleared the circle of the ants with a leap and hit the ground running.

  Tyche ran, faster than she had ever run before, faster even than when the Jade Rabbit challenged her to a race across the Shackleton Crater. Finally, her lungs and legs burned and she had to stop. She had set out without direction, but had gone up the mountain slope, close to the cold fingers. I don’t want to go back to the Base. The Brain never tells the truth either. Black dots danced in her eyes. They’ll never catch me.

  She looked back, down towards the crater of the Secret Door. The ants were moving. They gathered into the metal sheet again. Then its sides stretched upwards until they met and formed a tubular structure. It elongated and weaved back and forth and slithered forward, faster than even Tyche could run; a metal snake. The pyramid shapes of the ants glinted in its head like teeth. Faster and faster it came, flowing over boulders and craters like it was weightless, a curtain of billowing dust behind it. She looked around for a hiding place, but she was on open ground now, except for the dark pool of the mining crater to the west.

  Then she remembered something the Jade Rabbit had once said. For anything that wants to eat you, there is something bigger that wants to eat it.

  The ant-snake was barely a hundred meters behind her now, flipping back and forth in sinusoid waves on the regolith like a shiny metal whip. She stuck out her tongue at it, accidentally tasting the sweet inner surface of her helmet. Then she made it to the sunless crater’s edge.

  With a few bounds, she was over the crater lip. It was like diving into icy water. Her suit groaned, and she could feel its joints stiffening up. But she kept going, towards the bottom, almost blind from the contrast between the pitch-black and the bright sun above. She followed the vibration in her soles. Boulders and pebbles rained on her helmet and she knew the ant-snake was right at her heels.

  The lights of the sandworm almost blinded her. Now. She leaped up, as high as she could, feeling weightless, reached out for the utility ladder that she knew was on the huge machine’s topside. She grabbed it, banged painfully against the worm’s side, felt its thunder beneath her.

  And then, a grinding, shuddering vibration as the mining machine bit into the ant-snake, rolling right over it.

  Metal fragments flew into the air, glowing red-hot. One of them landed on Tyche’s arm. The suit made a bubble around it and spat it out. The sandworm came to an emergency halt, and Tyche almost fell off. It started disgorging its little repair grags, and Tyche felt a stab of guilt. She sat still until her breathing calmed down and the suit’s complaints about the cold got too loud.

  Then she dropped to the ground and started the climb back up, towards the Secret Door.

  There were still a few ants left around the Secret Door, but Tyche ignored them. They were rolling around aimlessly, and there weren’t enough of them to build a transmitter. She looked up. The ship from the Great Wrong Place was still a distant star. She still had time.

  Painfully, bruised limbs aching, she crawled through the Secret Door for one last time.

  The Moon People were still there, waiting for her. Tyche looked at them in the eye, one by one. Then she put her hands on her hips.

  “I have a wish,” she said. “I am going to go away. I’m going to make the Brain obey me, this time. I’m going to go and build a Right Place, all on my own. I’m never going to forget again. So I want you all to come with me.” She looked up at the Magician. “Can you do that?”

  Smiling, the man in the top hat nodded, spread his white-gloved fingers and whirled his cloak that had a bright red inner lining, like a ruby—

  Tyche blinked. The Other Moon was gone. She looked around. She was standing on the other side of the Old One and the Troll, except that they looked just like rocks now. And the Moon People were inside her. I should feel heavier, carrying so many people, she thought. But instead she was empty and light.

  Uncertainly at first, then with more confidence, she started walking back up Malapert Mountain, towards the Base. Her step was not a rabbit’s, nor a panther’s, nor a maiden’s silky tiptoe, just her very own.

  Originally published in Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan, 2012.

  About the Author

  Hannu Rajaniemi was born in Ylivieska, Finland, but spent many years in Edinburgh, Scotland where he received a Ph.D. in string theory, and currently lives in Oakland, California. He is the co�founder of ThinkTank Maths, which provides consultation service and research in applied mathematics and business development. Rajaniemi has had a big impact on the field with only a relatively small body of work. His first novel, The Quantum Thief, was published in 2010 to a great deal of critical buzz and response, and has been followed by two sequels, The Fractal Prince and The Causal Angel. His most recent book is a collection, Hannu Rajaniemi: Collected Stories. Coming up is a new novel, Summerland.

  Destination: Mars

  Andrew Liptak

  In recent years, Mars has been back in the news. The wildly successful and dramatic landing of the MINI Cooper-sized rover Curiosity in 2012 has brought a renewed interest in the red planet. In his 2015 State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama reaffirmed NASA’s goal to put an astronaut on Mars at some point in the future and organizations such as the Mars One Foundation and SpaceX have set their sights firmly o
n Martian mission programs.

  Mars has always been a likely destination for humanity, and in particular, it has captivated science fiction audiences as a new home, port of call, or simply just a new place to explore. Science fiction’s own history of the place has largely evolved alongside that of our own understanding of the planet. As much as we’ve learned from pictures, probes, and rovers on Mars, the world still has a particular fascination for science fiction authors who have told stories about it up to the present day.

  From early in Mars’ history, a dichotomy has existed between the urge to study and observe the planet, but also to create and tell stories about it. The Romans named the blood-red point in the sky after their god of war. At the same time, numerous ancient astronomers located in Egypt, Babylon, Greece and others, observed the motion of Mars, and recognized early on that it was different from the other points in the sky: it was a planet, not a star.

  Fast forward to the industrial revolution. New scientific principles defined the movements of objects in the solar system, which helped scientists to focus extensively on study of the planets with the aid of new telescopes. Accordingly, authors who had begun to write scientific tales also begun to turn their attention to our nearest neighbors in the solar system. Brave New Worlds: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction identifies the first use of the word Martian in 1874, in an American magazine called The Galaxy: “The Martians would therefore be in a better position to understand our attempts at opening up a communication than the Venerians.”

  First Contact

  In 1877, Giovanni Schiaparelli created the first detailed map of Mars using a telescope. From his observations, he detailed channels, continents, and seas, terminology rooted in Earth’s own geology. In particular, his description of canali (channels) was widely mistranslated as canals in English, sparking a wide-spread belief that Mars was home to someone who built them. The description planted the seeds to an idea: Mars was another world like ours, one that could potentially harbor intelligent life.

  Percival Lowell followed Schiaparelli’s lead in 1894 by constructing an observatory in Arizona, and later publishing a book titled Mars in 1895. The book covered his observations of the planet, all the while he speculated on the nature of how beings might live on the planet, drawing from the belief that canals were indeed present on the planet’s surface.

  In 1897, H.G. Wells published what is possibly the best-known work of science fiction involving Mars: The War of the Worlds. From the very beginning of his book, Wells mixes the scientific knowledge of the day into his story: “The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of one hundred forty million miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world,” all the while constructing a relevant, political story of the day.

  The following year, a pair of Edisonade novels: The Fighters from Mars (a re-written version of The War of the Worlds), and Garrett P. Serviss’, Edison’s Conquest of Mars, was a direct sequel which followed a counterattack on Mars led by Thomas Edison. By basing his aliens on Mars, Wells’ The War of the Worlds and the various inspired books helped to instill a renewed sense of the historical association of the planet with that of war and destruction.

  Romantic Mars

  This only continued into the new century, most notably with Edgar Rice Burroughs and some of his best-known works: the Barsoom series featuring Civil War veteran John Carter. Beginning in 1912 with A Princess of Mars, Burroughs transports Carter to an inhabited and wild Mars, populating the planet with a rich and complicated civilization for his pulp adventures. His stories inspired numerous others in a burgeoning planetary romance genre: authors ranging from C.S. Lewis with his Space Trilogy, C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith adventures, and Stanley G. Weinbaum with “A Martian Odyssey.”

  In pulp magazines throughout the early twentieth century, science fiction emerged as its own world and authors began to look beyond Earth for inspiration. Certainly, the idea of a red world would have appealed to the likes of Burroughs, who had spent some time as a cavalry scout in the United States Army before turning to writing. Astronomers had already discerned features from Mars’ surface and several authors latched on to the image of the wild west when looking to our nearer planetary neighbors. In “Shambleau,” C.L. Moore transported the reader to a dusty and lawless locale that served her stories and characters well.

  As late as the 1930s, scientists and astronomers had speculated about the possibility of vegetation on the planet: “The [American Interplanetary Society] Bulletin carried an article in January 1932 suggesting the possibility of ‘luxuriant vegetation’ on Mars along what may or may not have been Lowell’s canals.”

  By the end of the 1940s, Ray Bradbury had taken up the mantle of the planetary romances, with what would later become his own collective work, The Martian Chronicles (1950), heavily influenced by the works of Burroughs and other pulp authors. Bradbury’s work stood as the last vanguard of a romantic Mars: Bradbury’s vividly imagined Mars has helped place it as one of the best works of his generation.

  The romantic Mars was a place where we knew people could walk, if not live. While the moon was closer (and certainly had its own share of science fiction stories), Mars held possibility, shrouded in mysteries. Did it have an atmosphere? Was there life? It was a place that sparked our collective imaginations and called to us as a place to go.

  And, go we did. In November of 1964, the United States launched a pair of rockets towards Mars. They were the culmination in a larger battle for the planets between the Soviet Union and the United States.

  Following the end of the Second World War, each began to develop greater long-ranged weapons to deploy their respective nuclear arsenals. The resulting Space Race followed, which began massive manned spaceflight programs in each country. The United States and Soviet Union looked first to our Moon as a destination, but many in the space program believed that once we reached the lunar surface, Mars would be our next destination.

  Less visible was the race for scientific supremacy, and accordingly, each looked to our two closest neighbors in space: Venus and Mars. Venus, the closer of the two, became the first such battleground, and was closely followed by Mars. Between October 1960 and November 1962, the Soviet Union launched five satellites to Mars: none were successful due to a variety of system or launch failures. The United States didn’t fare any better at first either: their first mission, Mariner 3, failed to shed a protective cover, and lost power. Mariner 4, however, successfully reached Mars on July 14th, and would become humanity’s first glimpse to the world that we had dreamt so much about.

  This first introduction, according to William Burrows in This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age, “ . . . was terrible. Mars was no longer an elusive orange blur with whitish poles and alluring dark blotches. It had been transformed from a place that had recognizable features with which earthlings could identify. Gone were the canals or anything else that could have been purposely dug or built. Gone were the oases holding precious supplies of water. Gone were creatures of any form. Gone, too, were ocean basins, vegetation, or any landscape that even remotely looked like Earth.” (Burrows, 464)

  The romantic and exotic images of Mars that had been written about from Wells to Burroughs to Moore to Bradbury had been completely shattered. The grainy images transmitted back to Earth showed an alien world—alien even to science fiction authors. Mars was cold, uninhabitable, and dead. While many might have doubted that Mars would have been home to alien life, it was a stark reminder that our science fiction stories sometimes fall short of reality.

  Cold Mars

  While science fiction’s collective vision for what Mars didn’t match the real nature of Mars, it did learn and begin to change.

  New unmanned missions to Mars followed in the next launch window in 1969. The United States launched Mariner 6 and 7 in February and March, while the USSR missions 2M No.521 in March and 2M No.522 in April failed. 1
971 brought new missions: Mariner 8 and Kosmos 419 both failed, but Mariner 9, which launched on May 30th, successfully became the first spacecraft to orbit Mars, where it would spend the next five hundred sixteen days, taking pictures of the planet below. As this happened, humans landed on the Moon for the first time. We were slowly beginning to step into the solar system.

  As Mariner 9 approached Mars, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory held a conference with several notable figures: Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Carl Sagan, and others. There, the science fiction authors paid tribute to Stanley G. Weinbaum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and H.G. Wells for their works in bringing Mars to the imaginations of millions of readers. However, what had become clear was that Mars was not the world so richly imagined; it was a cold, dead world that was difficult to reach. There, Clarke made a bold prediction: “Whether or not there is life on Mars now, there will be by the end of the century.” It was a bold claim for a country that would soon be shuttering its manned lunar program, and he would eventually step his estimate ahead several decades. His remarks are important, however, because they positioned how we would tell stories about Mars: no longer a world of exotic life and mystery, it would become the home for a colony, a way point on the way to other planets, a distant outpost.

  1976 brought us our next best look at Mars. At the next available window, NASA launched Viking 1 and Viking 2 on August 20th and September 9th, a pair of complicated missions that would, for the first time, land equipment on the surface of Mars. The pair of landers arrived on the surface of the planet on June 19th and August 7th, respectively, and served as humanity’s first ambassadors. Their scientific missions included biological and chemical experiments, yielding new insights into the red planet.

  The results of the Viking missions provided planetary scientists with a wealth of information, and caught the interest of new science fiction authors. Kim Stanley Robinson noted that he had been particularly inspired by the images sent back by the Viking probes, and felt a yearning to hike and explore the planet’s mountain ranges. Over the next decade, he thought about how to terraform the planet, and in 1990, he published the first installment of his Mars trilogy: Red Mars, and followed with Green Mars and Blue Mars, examining a wide range of topics from the planetary science that was being uncovered to the ethical considerations of terraforming a world like Mars. Over the course of the 1990s, other hard science novels about exploring the surface of Mars came out, such as Ben Bova’s Mars and its sequels.