The Unknown

by Angel Wedge

  “You’re the eldest, then? The first real Martian?”

  “Yeah, guess I’m kind of famous. A good example what happens when the city doesn’t know how to raise a kid yet. But I’m not the first, really. I’m just the first to survive. The oldest of my people, twenty years give or take. There were others, who would have been born first. A lot of our parents wanted to be the first to have kids on the new world. It was a big deal for the ones who wanted to prove this is a permanent thing.”

  “Even if that meant they were testing the effects of reentry on a pregnant mother,” Elle muttered, finding herself a little angry at the thought. After much debate on ethics, about the only time religion had come into the mission planning, the ship’s commanders had done everything possible to make sure contraception was readily available to the entire crew. There had been long parts of the voyage when there wasn’t enough work to occupy the crew, and training would only fill so much of their time. They’d been really sure that nobody wanted to conduct that particular experiment unexpectedly.

  “Nine gees,” Boudica nodded, “Or eight if you’re really lucky. They were crazy, the ones who planned it like that. Not all of them did. Oh, that’s Earth gees, I should probably say that, we still use a unit based on another planet. Mars years, though, I have no idea what the conversion there is.”

  “You’d be thirty-four years old on Earth,” Elle guessed, “Or thirty-five. Maybe a little older than me, but you don’t look it.”

  “That’ll be my youthful vitality. Everyone mentions it. I think they just mean I’ve got a lot of nerve.”

  “Anyway, you said about half the original travellers are left, right? So there’s quite a city under that mountain. But what happened to the rest? Are there any dangers we should be aware of before we run into them ourselves?”

  “I don’t know, I was just a kid when they were first digging in. But I don’t think there were any big dangers. We’ve been here long enough that a lot of the travellers have got old. It’s a hard life, and there aren’t enough young ones to give the older ones an easy time. They… most of them work until they can’t carry on any more, until they get sick. And the medical centre here isn’t so well stocked, compared to what I read about in the old books, so I guess that’s it too. And the travellers, of course.”

  “Travellers?” that was an odd enough statement to need a question of its own, “The people who came from Earth?”

  “Some of them moved on, as well. When there were enough ships here. Some of them put the pieces back together, processed new fuel, and launched a mission to another planet, farther away. That’s something the travellers don’t talk about, though, not to us. They thought it was crazy, maybe like the Earthers thought about Wallace. You’d have to talk to the old timers if you want to know more.”

  Elle’s first thought was to wonder where they would have selected as a target. And why people who were still building a civilisation would take a drastic step like that. Were they the ones disappointed that they’d gotten too old to raise a family, and didn’t want to spend their lives building something for somebody else’s children? Or were they somehow addicted to travelling? When the rest of the fleet arrived, would the present-day settlers have to deal with a similar petition to leave? But then her mind presented her with the second thing that had caught her attention in that little speech, and declared it much more important.

  “They processed fuel?” Boo nodded, like she didn’t even understand why that would be a question.

  “We’re reliant on Earth for fuel,” the Commander explained, after only a second’s thought, “For now, anyway. There was a huge project to work out how efficient our aeroponics systems would have to be to produce enough grain alcohol to get off the surface again. Turned out we’d need a plant more than a hundred times larger than the ones we brought to feed the whole crew, if we wanted to head back while anyone’s still alive.”

  “Your people are going back?” Boo was just as incredulous.

  “No. At least, we didn’t plan to. But we didn’t know how well people would cope with being separated from their families on Earth, or if there were personality conflicts that were too large to simply separate the people involved. If some people might not be able to cope without going outside. We can plan for physical and physiological problems, but the psyche is still a mystery. And there’s always a chance someone will have a medical problem we simply can’t synthesise medications for here. So against all the unexpected problems, there was always the insurance policy: that if it comes to the worst we have the ability to send a single ship back. It meant reducing the crew capacity of ships three and four by twenty members each, so they’ve got the folks who’d shown themselves to be most capable of working in tight teams, trusting everyone and not going stir crazy. But we’ll have fuel if we really need it.”

  “Oh, I guess that’s something our people didn’t really think about. They were all ready to die if they got sick, because the project was bigger than them. That’s what I get, from the official records and the diaries they’ve published. Sometimes I think I can understand my parents, and sometimes I’ve got no idea. I can’t tell you how the fuel process works, though. Just that it’s a big building that goes deep underground, and the people who work there are weird. Like, nobody outside the facility really knows how it works.”

  “There’s a lot of technologies that have been kept under wraps when they were first invented,” Elle muttered slowly, “Because people feared they’d be misused. But from the look on your face, and your ships being named after Wallace, I’m guessing you’ve grown up knowing freedom of research as the greatest good. So secrets just seem wrong, something you can’t understand.”

  “Hey, it’s not like that. Not like, well, kept from anybody. It’s just that… I mean, there’s things everyone doesn’t know. There’s no time to learn everything, you’d never get work done. So unless you’re a researcher, an innovator, you’re not allowed to spend too much study time outside your own specialism. But this isn’t just saying it’s not worth an outsider studying it, it’s like they never even wrote the books, you know? They use electrical energy to bind heavy metals into synthetic polymers with an incredibly high chemical potential; that’s what they teach us in school. But there’s nothing about what the actual chemicals are, or how it’s done. There’s no beginners’ guide, and if you ask, they’ll say they haven’t got anything written in a format an outsider can understand. Not even a studyguide, working through the steps to replicate the discovery!”

  Everyone was silent then, and Boo stared down at her hands. She’d gone from simple explanation to an emotional rant in five seconds flat. It was certainly the most emotion Elle had ever heard attached to a bunch of organochem jargon. She was sure this had been bugging the girl for months, years even, but there was nobody within the Martian community who would listen.

  “Sorry,” she muttered, before the silence got too oppressive. “It’s just, like, those chemicals could be used for so many other things. But we can’t take their research any further, we can’t work out what other discoveries could come out of it. All because of a couple of guys who don’t know how to put it in layman’s terms.”

  “Maybe they stumbled on it by chance?” Elle suggested, with a little laugh. “They found this formula that works, and they’re ashamed to admit that they haven’t figured out how or why yet.”

  “Yeah,” Boo managed a little smile, “I thought about that too. That’d be better than thinking they’re keeping it to themselves for some reason. I get mad thinking about it, even if it’s not my field, like those guys are holding back all of–” she stopped again, at the realisation she was starting to rant. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Elle answered, resting one hand on top of Boo’s without even thinking, “Everybody has things that get to them. Some of them aren’t so rational. If you don’t want to think about it, I’m sure some of our specialists will bring it up with your specialists sooner or later. Can we
still be friends?”

  “Friends?” she giggled just a little, “I guess. Sorry, this just isn’t how I expected it to be, meeting Earthers. I’m like, half expecting someone to pop out and surprise me with torture tools and cruel interrogators, or something. Like when my parents left, Earth was on track to become a crazy dystopia, and it’s weird thinking they should have been more optimistic after all.”

  “Earth has its bad points,” Elle admitted, “But it’s got a good side too. We’ve messed up an awful lot now, but when your life goes to hell because of your grandparents’ mistakes, it seems most people suddenly start thinking about not letting it get any worse. The last twenty years, before we left anyway, I think maybe Earth’s matured a bit. Maybe now, they’re a planet your elders wouldn’t mind communicating with.”

  “Maybe. They’re stubborn though, some of them. They say all the smart ones left, and Earth is bound to be Hell.”

  “We’ve got people who think the same. Maybe the grass is always greener, or… we need a new idiom, don’t we? We could say ‘all the smart ones fly to Mars’ or something.”

  “That’s just a fact,” Boo grinned, “Okay, friends. You’re easy to like, and I trust you’re not going to torture me on behalf of the Earth government now. Wait…” she caught a brief chuckle from the Commander, and obviously knew she’d been working on a false assumption even if it was hard to figure out what. “You’ve got a single government, haven’t you? It’s not still all wars and borders like the books talk about last century?”

  “No, and no,” Lemuel wondered how to put it. “There’s no single government. There’s dozens of them. But they don’t have the wealth now, they don’t have the power. They’re this weird kind of anachronism, that people are kind of embarrassed to know too much about. An office in the slums, filling out pro-forma paperwork because they’ve got nothing better to do, while the innovators and the executives change the world around them. You still see a lot of presidents and kings in movies, but nobody takes them seriously in the real world.”

  From there, the conversation descended back into the minutiae of life on Mars. The different ways the two expeditions had solved the same engineering challenges, and the different ranks they used to label their specialists, and the food available in the camp and the caves, and so many little differences in cultures that had been separated for less than a century. The commander reassured Boo that she was free to go, and free to come visit any time. He told her to pass on their greetings to the people in charge of the older colony, and that the new arrivals would be happy to discuss their position. They all said they hoped that the two colonies would be able to work together, and become stronger by cooperation. They weren’t as confident as they could have been, though. It was easy to see that some of the older Martians, who had practically fled Earth in an era of what they saw as anti-intellectual persecution, would find it hard to trust the newcomers. And it was easy to see that the leaders of Earth could have problems with a civilisation that seemed too far outside their control.

  * * *

  Jasper watched the buggy speed away, and wondered who was at the controls. He wasn’t supposed to be watching, the crew weren’t supposed to give the visitor’s departure any special attention. But he was sure nobody would notice him taking in the scene from above. He was in a lab module in the ship, one of the ones that hadn’t yet been disassembled for moving down to the camp outside. It gave him a higher viewpoint, from where he could see horizons much wider than those visible from the ground, but the cave entrance wasn’t visible from up here. The indentations at the bottom of the cliffs were narrow, and you might not even realise they were there until you were really close to them. He kept one eye on the buggy until it drifted out of sight, and wondered what measures the command staff were taking to monitor her journey home. There was bound to be something, some kind of tracker on the girl or on her equipment. They would have to try to find out more, even if there was really nothing to gain by subterfuge.

  And then he realised he was thinking about the real world like it was a novel, one of the political thrillers he’d loaded onto his reader before the long journey. The Commander and his specialists weren’t like a board of directors back on Earth. They didn’t feel the need to defend their position, because they were idealists setting out to tame a hostile world. There was no reason to assume they would fall into any of the stereotypes of executives, or of the military/intelligence community. Jasper hoped they wouldn’t.

  And then he looked out at the landscape again. Red deserts, though they were never as red as the pictures that had been in textbooks back on Earth. Level sands, concealing a treacherous maze of passable and impassable terrain. The size of their new world was too large to possibly comprehend. Smaller than Earth, certainly, but no scientist or explorer ever had to consider discovering everything that Earth had to offer. They were specialists in one region. And Mars was so much larger than any rainforest, or any desert. He could only think of it as the largest piece of terrain he had ever had any reason to contemplate.

  So what, then, were the odds that they would land within reach of an earlier colony? Astronomical, surely. Unless there were some features of this site that had made it particularly well suited for landing colonists. He didn’t actually know how the site had been chosen, but there would be something there.

  His mind still presented him with worst case scenarios, though. Old Martians moving to the right place to organise an ambush, maybe. Or someone in one of the mission’s sponsor organisations who secretly knew about the existing colony. Would they have put a ship nearby, so they could find and plunder the resources of an existing settlement? It would increase the odds of their investment paying off. But once you started thinking along that path, the question would become whether they were expecting the crew of the five ships to find a deserted camp in a cave system, with free stocks of food and fuel ripe for the taking. Surely their aims must be more benevolent if it was a case of dealing with other travellers from Earth.

  “What you staring at?” the voice behind him almost made Jasper jump out of his skin. He was that used to coming up here to look at the view, and he’d never been interrupted before. But these were public parts of the ship, so he only had his own expectations to blame.

  It was Caitlyn Mae, a geologist. She could have come up here to run some experiments, the lab had functional equipment even though it was a long walk up corridors and stairs to get here from the camp. But she didn’t have sample containers in her hands, or paperwork.

  “I like the view,” he shrugged, “and our visitor’s headed home, thought I’d watch her along the way. I should have been there for the interview, really. I wish I had. History’s unfolding, right here. Even more revelations than we were expecting to find.”

  “You can say that again. I mean, people living on Mars? Families? We were planning to do that, but not right away. They’ve beaten us to it, the conspiracy freaks. What do we do now? Is there a point doing all our experiments, setting up a camp to prove it’s possible to live on Mars, when some old timers have already got here? How many of our mission objectives are still meaningful, or even valid?”

  “Don’t talk like that. We came here to live on Mars, and to find out if the red planet can support life. And we’ve got an answer sooner than we expected, but there’s still so much to learn, and so much to prove. We came here to build a foundation, not just to be the first.”

  “I guess. We’ve got a whole colony to build, and we got to get ready for everybody that comes later, right? However many people are left in their camp, they can at least tell us what problems we’re going to face, maybe they can even help us out. But it’s still down to us to prove to the world that we can live here. That humanity is ready.”

  “And to prove we can make peace,” he nodded, “Before the CEOs get involved. There’s still so many people who’d be happy to throw us away as pawns, just to prove themselves right. Or to hold onto views from the last century.”

  �
��Been reading too many of those thrillers?” she shook her head, but a second later she was serious again. “You’re right, though. There’s probably contingency plans among the sponsors. Some way to turn a profit out of this project going down in flames.”

  There was nothing Jasper could say to that. He hoped the two peoples could work together, but he was pretty sure not everybody would agree. Some people didn’t feel like they were succeeding unless they could also see someone else fail.

  Negotiator

  Boudica didn’t come back the next day, or the day after that. Nor did any other visitors from the mysterious caves. And the administrators at the camp quickly took what steps they could to prevent any scientist with free time heading out there. The procedure for taking a buggy was more rigorous now. The maintenance teams had to stick to the letter of the rules, so you could only leave the camp with an assigned task to complete. And they made it clear that nobody was permitted to visit the cave city of the other Martians, because they had too much of their own work to do and didn’t want to risk one scientist with a free moment portraying his own philosophies as those of the camp.

  Each day that went past without visitors led to wilder speculation about what was going to become of this camp. People loved to speculate about things that were completely unknown. Or what the other Martians really wanted, the biggest mystery of them all. Maybe they had some similar protocol, or maybe they just had no interest in establishing contact. It was easy to believe that these were people who’d come away from Earth for a reason. But then, it was easy to believe any number of things with so little real information. There were more and more guesses, as one day passed, and then another. More than one astronaut was frozen in fear, expecting an attack at any minute.

  * * *

  Day 23

  On the eighth day, there was a buggy coming quickly closer on the horizon. Commander Lemuel rushed to don his formal uniform, in case this was the official welcoming committee. He called as many of his senior officers as he could find at short notice, and they joined him to walk calmly but quickly to the edge of the camp.