The Unknown

by Angel Wedge

  “I can think of people like that,” Elle nodded, “In university, and in school. People too smart to just do what they’re told, who can’t help thinking of a better way. There’s a lot of them on the ship.”

  “From what I hear, on the Wallace ships everybody was that guy. They saw a problem when the Earth politicians started making dumb decisions to appease the majority, and the solution they found was to make a new world, a new culture.”

  “Anyway, we seem to have missed the introductions. Boo, this is Jasper, he’s already regretting that he didn’t have a chance to talk to you last time. And this young lady is Boudica, who I believe is the oldest person born on Mars.”

  “That’s me,” Boo grinned and took a bow, “Jasper, eh? I’ll remember that, might not recognise you again though.”

  “Same here,” Elle chuckled briefly, “I wouldn’t have known it was you unless I heard your voice. Did you come looking for me, or just watching our first explorations of the Martian landscape?”

  “I heard your voice on the comms, and decided to say hi. And I wanted to show off my glider. Nobody takes me too seriously back in the city, I guess maybe I did a little too much rebellion when I was growing up.”

  “Must be hard, being the famous kid.” Jasper found himself nodding to show sympathy, and then realised that the bulky suit probably made his body language a complete mystery. “Were you like a celebrity? I think you would have been if it was Earth culture, but I don’t know about your travellers. I mean, the first of the new generation, that’s a big deal. I’m sure there’s guys back on Earth who’d want to make a movie about you as soon as they hear. The first real Martian, I guess. Do you call yourselves Martians?”

  “Yeah, but so do the Travellers, if they’re not trying to get someone younger to do more of the work. We’re all Martians, I always thought it was a bit weird really. I mean, when I read old books from before, from Earth, it’s like everybody calls themself by whatever bit of ground they grew up on. We sometimes say Martians if we want to mean everybody, and New Travellers for the guys who left, and Earthers or Earthy for the ones that stayed behind. But I never heard anybody think it’s important which city you live in. You know, when I was twelve, I read this book that my Dad had brought with him, and spent nearly a month trying to figure out what kind of work a New Yorker does. Never occurred to me it was a place, until I saw another character use their town like that.”

  “That’s pretty interesting,” Elle answered, her own mind racing. “So you don’t use district names or anything as a label? I’ve not even guessed at how big your city is, so maybe it’s like a small town that doesn’t need stuff like that, or… I don’t know. The linguists would have a field day with just what you told me there. Probably other social scientists too. Do you – your people, I mean – label yourselves in other ways? Like, is there solidarity based on which continent your ancestors came from? I’d be really surprised if the Travellers don’t still have accents. You’ve not had a long time to develop a new language, but i expect in an enclosed society it could evolve really quickly. Like, do terms for the same thing, like skin colour or ethnicity, is the distinction between acceptable terms and racial slurs drawn in the same place it is on Earth? I know it’s taking less than a century for an acceptable term to become offensive in many parts of Earth, and people have to find new words every generation, so I bet the linguists would be really interested to know how it’s different in a closed society. There’s like three linguists on the ship that I know of, all multidisciplinary, they expected they’d get a chance to see how our own language morphs. They never expected to meet you guys.”

  Then she realised that Boo hadn’t said anything in quite a while, and she’d rattled off a huge monologue. Maybe she should have stuck to one question at a time, but she was still getting over the surprise of a chance to study the culture of Mars without having to wait a year for it to develop. She already knew the girl well enough to know a minute of silence was an oddity, because Boo would always be able to get a word in edgeways. Elle forced herself to be quiet, not to keep on asking more questions.

  “I don’t get it,” Boo said, after a few minutes. “I’ve seen in old books, people call themselves different demonyms for the city they live in. We don’t do that. Does that still happen on Earth? And for nations too. Of course, we haven’t got those at all, but I kind of see why people who have a country would have a word for it. But words for skin colour? For genetic clusters? Do you have a word for a person with blue eyes? That’s just weird.”

  “Wait, you have different cities?” Jasper cut in, “I didn’t realise that. Kind of assumed there’s a single camp like ours. I guess the Martian civilisation is larger than I thought. Do you play sports? I mean, are there teams for the cities? What?” He turned towards Elle, who’d started giggling even though she was clearly trying to keep quiet.

  “Sorry, just… you find out there’s more than one city on Mars, and your first thought isn’t politics, or economy, or trade? Straight in with sports. Which, I’d guess, would be a huge capital expense. Can you imagine building a stadium of any kind with the kind of resources we’ve got? Maybe easier digging it out of the ground, but then you’ve got to consider the amount of air sealing you’d need, and probably supporting beams. Wouldn’t it be at least a decade into colonisation that they could even consider something like that?”

  “We have a gym on each ship,” he answered, “Maybe not football or anything, but I bet you could make space for a squash court in that mountain. Or competitive lifting. Is there a Strongest Man on Mars competition or something? Good way to channel aggression, too. I bet there’s some kind of sport.” He turned back to Boo, who shrugged.

  “I’m not sure about ‘sport’,” she answered, “I didn’t quite get the distinction. But there’s tournaments between teams from different departments in a lot of popular games. Capflag and Asteroids are pretty big. Chess used to be popular, but a lot of fans are going over to other games now because that one doesn’t stretch your body at all. I played Igo when I was in school, and I was in the youth football tournament to celebrate the new stadium opening. I was eight then, I think, and some of the schools said it’s not fair because I’m older than everyone else. I played roof attack, but had to miss the final.” Her voice turned into a growl of anger towards the end of the sentence. Frustration mainly, a bad childhood memory.

  “Sorry, we didn’t mean to–”

  “No, it’s fine,” Boo cut him off again, “Nothing you could have known about. Besides, if I hadn’t dropped out I would never have taken up music to fill the void, and I wouldn’t have met Gabby, and… Well, maybe it was a good thing for me overall, right? But yeah, you asked, so I’ll answer. We’ve got games. Measure of strength, speed, wits, tactics, endurance, or any permutation. But you better not be just asking me questions, right? I was wondering if we could be friends. I don’t want to be a research project for you two.”

  “No research here,” Jasper shrugged, “I’m an engineer, more into the hard sciences. And making friends sounds like a good way forward. Maybe we can set a good example for our bosses.”

  “Agreed,” Elle stepped forward, offering a hand to shake without consulting Jasper. “Now, you said you wanted to show us something?”

  “Yeah, my glider,” she nodded, “Want to take a look? I almost made it myself.” She led them around the crag, and once they were well out of sight of the camp, they saw what she meant by a glider. It wasn’t what anyone from Earth would have imagined given the word, that was for sure. Elle had visualised a lighter than air craft, a light laminate body with large wings to give it lift. Jasper’s mind had conjured up the same image, but quickly discarded it. The same technology wouldn’t work in the thin Martian atmosphere, even with lower gravity to contend with. He had no idea what he was expecting to see.

  But the craft in front of them looked more like a kid’s construction toy than anything they might have seen on Earth. Lightweight carbon fibre struts,
jointed by balls at the ends, with some kind of plastic film stretched over the craft’s body to keep the dust out. Maybe some kind of modular construction system, used for rapid prototyping of vehicles or training young engineers. That was probably a pretty good idea, and would be a big motivation for the students if Boo’s pride in her creation was anything to go by. Jasper could imagine how happy he would have been as a kid, to build a car out of life-size Lego blocks.

  The glider hugged the ground, and didn’t seem to have any obvious wings or wheels. There was no sign of how it was powered, or even if it was really a vehicle at all. Maybe if it was just light struts with a skin like a balloon stretched over them, it could be light enough for Boo to carry, but then it seemed unlikely she would have brought it all the way out here. It was some kind of vehicle, surely, with mechanisms hidden inside a yellow and black rubber shell, and the transparent part as a cockpit bubble. That idea was reinforced when Boo pulled at one of the clear panels, which stretched slightly, and unhooked it from a strut. Here was the hatch.

  “It’s different,” Jasper shrugged, “I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it. Care to show us what it can do?” They climbed inside, and found that there was just about space for three people inside the clear bubble, but no sign of any controls. There was an internal floor, though, more yellow rubber covering where any mechanisms would presumably be, and three rigid triangles which seemed designed as seats. Also, low down in the base there were no less than four of what Jasper vaguely recognised as atmosphere circulators. They could have been stamped out of a mould following a design that NASA had used a half century before. The proportions had changed, but they were clearly the same kind of technology.

  “Four air modules?” he pointed, “You can fill up the cockpit in a hurry, then? I guess when those rubbery sheets are pulled tight it makes a reasonable seal, and with four units it doesn’t matter if you lose a bit of air. But four seems like overkill, even if they were no more efficient than what we had when your parents left Earth. And everything else seems to have advanced, so the–”

  “It’s a hovercraft!” Elle giggled as she made the connection, “It glides on a cushion of air underneath it, right?”

  “You got it,” Boo grinned, “I thought you were the social scientist here?”

  “In such a small crew, they want people who know some of anything. So if something goes wrong in the camp, we can all at least spot a problem rather than leaving things unresolved until a specialist happens to come past.”

  There wasn’t much else to say, and Elle and Jasper were both speechless when they saw how fast the little craft could move. It was probably a dozen times faster than their buggies, if not more, and the red sand beneath them flew past in a blur. There was a giant plume behind them, rising up maybe three times as tall as the vehicle itself, that soon settled down behind them and covered any tracks that they might otherwise have left. There was still no sign of controls inside the glider, so they could only assume that it was operated by whatever input systems were built into Boo’s suit.

  “Could anybody in your cities build something like this?” Elle asked, when she’d got used to the feeling of movement, “Or is this the creation of a mechanical genius?”

  “I like to think I’m pretty good,” Boo shrugged, “Most of the Mars-born try building a buggy or something when they’re eight or ten years, it’s like a rite of passage. Some of them take a whole year to finish it though. And most of them couldn’t make a glider capable of doing three hundred nanos, not without a lot of trial and error. I reckon this one’s about as well tuned as they come. But my genius is more in software, so I got a computer to do the trial and error for me.”

  Away from the crag, away from the camp, across the desert. The journey took a lot longer than they’d expected, and Elle found herself worrying that someone would miss them back at camp. But when she said they’d need to head back soon, Boo only replied: “Don’t you want to see where I live?” And that was an opportunity they couldn’t miss out on; they were both so eager to see a Martian city that all the normal protocols were left far behind.

  The glider eventually slowed down, and drifted into a cave at the base of one of the towering Martian mountains. Neither Jasper nor Elle knew the skylines well enough to recognise this place. They were travelling more slowly now, and Boo wasn’t reckless with her machine once there were rocky walls that she could possibly collide with. Their speed was probably closer to fifty miles per hour when they finally arrived at a huge gateway. It was a similar design to the airlock they’d seen before, but much larger. Two buggies abreast could probably enter the cave system here, and the door was over three metres high as well. The logo, the Martian flag or whatever, was larger than the little glider.

  “Wow,” Jasper breathed, “I never thought about how big the city gates would be. I guess when I imagined a city hidden on Mars, I think about something self contained like a space station, or the kind of things we’ve had designed. There’s not that much reason to leave the camp except for research, so all our airlocks are man-sized.”

  “Well, stuff can’t grow outside,” Boo shrugged, “But there’s still trade. We knew Kells would be sending shipments of some stuff to other cities once it was properly established, so an entrance big enough for that was planned in. Anyway, give me a second, the sentry systems are being a pain.”

  “Sentry?” Elle gasped, suddenly realising that just as their own superiors didn’t know how far from the camp they’d gone, the Martian government probably wasn’t expecting them to be here.

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s all automatic, just a system to make sure a rescue team is dispatched if someone’s out of radio range too long. Tracks everybody out and in, you report how long you expect to be and how much air you’re carrying. You can opt out of monitoring if you prefer privacy over safety, but everybody knows that’s pretty dumb.” She sounded distracted, like she was still working on something. Presumably she had a computer with a head-up display built into her suit, but Jasper and Elle couldn’t see any kind of movement to indicate how she was controlling it. Just a couple of seconds passed until she continued: “There, we can go in now.”

  The big door started to move before she’d finished speaking. Unlike the other ones they’d seen, there appeared to be hinges along the bottom, and the door ground ponderously downwards. It was thick, presumably over engineered because of the danger it could present to the city if the difference in atmospheric pressure caused a leak. It moved smoothly as the weight shifted, until it touched the sand and started to sink below what appeared to be the ground level.

  “The sand here’s thick enough to compress,” Boo explained, “I don’t know why they designed it like that, but there was probably some reason. Maybe some mechanical genius worked out it’s efficient somehow, or maybe it’s making an ideological statement.” By the time it actually stopped moving, the inner surface of the door was partly buried in fine sand, which flowed like water on top of the door.

  “Guess it’s a gradual transition from soft sand to metal, maybe there’s some vehicles where that’s easier on the suspension?” Jasper guessed, though he couldn’t think of an example where it would matter. “Looks pretty impressive, anyway. The door mechanism must be able to exert tons of force.”

  The glider skimmed up the door, now slightly sloping, and into a steel-walled chamber that could have taken a half dozen vehicles that size. Neither of the two astronauts had ever seen an airlock even close to this size before, and Jasper was staring around in disbelief; this was an engineering marvel in its own right. His suit’s sensors couldn’t tell him how fast it was flushing out the Martian atmosphere while he was in a pressurised glider. But he was certainly surprised when Boo stretched out an arm and opened the hatch less than a minute after the door behind them had closed.

  The internal doors opened a lot more quickly than the outside one. There were several of them, meaning that each didn’t have to be the same weight. The airlock was also
a junction of paths, which probably had engineering advantages that the scientists on Earth hadn’t realised. Or maybe psychological advantages, influencing the way the Martians thought. Because from just a short time talking to Boo, Elle had already started thinking of the Martian society as something that had been planned in every detail. Experts everywhere, doing everything they could possibly imagine to make their colony perfect, studying people and their behaviours as intensely as the hostile environment outside or the innovations they would use to fight it.

  Jasper expected that their next stop would be some kind of garage or hangar, but the Martian culture surprised him again. A silent signal from Boo sent the glider drifting along a corridor, with all kinds of curiosities visible down side passages. It was polished steel on all sides, unlike the super-lightweight polymers and new ceramics that they might have expected. For there to be so much metal here, either this was part of a dismantled ship, or there was a mine and refinery somewhere on Mars. The ground beneath them looked like marble tiles, but Jasper guessed it had to be synthetic. Polymer, bare rock, or metal probably lay beneath a printed laminate. Psychological reasons, maybe, to distract people from the fact that they were living in a freshly constructed city with death so close every day. Something that looked old would have helped the camp to feel more like a home.

  The glider travelled more slowly here, maybe because Boo was being careful, or maybe because its propulsion was less effective with an Earth-type atmosphere outside. And then they were passing through another doorway, which zipped up and then down again behind them. There was a stark change in decor now. This wasn’t the optimal design that some psychiatrist had laid out to generate a perfect impression of safety and pride, but a space that had molded itself around the person who lived here. It was a home, that much was obvious in an instant.