Old Mars Read online

  “How does who bear it?” Dave asked.

  Rekari laid his hand on his chest. Then he slid his fingers into the opening of his shirt and pulled out his own sunstone and held it for a moment, looking at it, and it glimmered in the afternoon light. Then he tucked it away again. “The elders,” he said, and he reached back with one hand and cut the motor. “I believe we have arrived.” He swung the tiller over.

  The boat bumped the canal bank at a set of steps, and while Rekari saw to the anchor, Dave climbed them. At the top, he was surprised to see a broad, open space. So far from the settled areas of Mars, and so close to a canal, it should have been covered by nettles, but a half circle some fifty meters in diameter was bare of them, though beyond it, starting just past a clump of huge boulders, they grew thickly in every direction, all the way to the distant low hills. His father had always said that big nettle fields implied underground water and marked the oases in the vast deserts of Mars—good places to hunt for lost cities. They had certainly helped him find some of the ruins now on the tourist round. He must have cleared these away himself, probably with the traditional herbicide the Martians used. Which meant he really thought something significant was here.

  Rekari came up the steps to join him. “I buried your father over there,” he said, pointing to the north.

  Martians marked their gravesites with an outline of rocks pressed hard into the soil—whatever rocks happened to be around—and if there were no rocks nearby, they just used a raised rim of soil, which meant that their graves tended to disappear over time, rocks scattered or covered by windblown dust, shallow earthworks worn away. It didn’t seem to bother them; they weren’t in the habit of visiting their dead later on. His father’s grave was still visible, not far from the canal, its rocks lined up neatly, though some dust had gathered on them. Dave knelt and brushed them clean with his hands. He wished he could have been there to help dig the grave and to stand with Rekari in the brief Martian ritual that marked the end of life. He had witnessed the ritual once, with his father. Now he could only kneel beside the grave and remember the last time he saw the famous Dr. Benjamin Miller, at the Meridiani spaceport, waving and shouting good-bye. He could almost hear his father’s voice now, calling his name. And then, for a moment, he thought he really could hear that voice, and he looked up automatically, but of course no one was there but Rekari. He shook his head and got to his feet and looked out over the nettle-free space that stretched north and east from the grave. A city, Rekari had said. Was that reality or just myth? It was hard to tell with Martians, with a civilization so much older than any on Earth.

  He began to walk, charting a mental grid over the barren ground. It didn’t take him long to find the area his father had stripped of its surface soil and, within it, a smaller space where he had focused his efforts—the trowel marks were unmistakable. What had he seen here? Dave wasn’t sure he could make out anything that hinted at ancient structures. He went back to the boat for a large flask, which he filled with canal water, and for the spray nozzle that fit it, and he used them to begin dampening the area, a standard archaeological technique to bring out markings that had faded away due to the dryness of the soil. Rekari helped him, making a dozen trips for more water and even scattering some of it by hand, and between the two of them, they left the ground moist but not muddy. The sky was beginning to darken when they spread the sail over their efforts, weighting its edges with rocks, to let the dampness work overnight. Then they ate their evening meals and slept on land for the first time in two weeks.

  The next morning, after a quick breakfast, Dave gathered up his other tools—the folding shovel, the stiff-bristled brush, and the sharp trowel he had brought from Earth that fit into a scabbard at his belt. Then he went to the sail, took a deep breath, and pulled the fabric aside. As expected, the dampness had spread under the protective cloth, and after some minutes on his hands and knees, Dave thought he could see variations in its absorption—the faint shadows of wooden footings, long since rotted away, forming a vanished entrance that framed a rectangular space of long-ago disturbed soil. The differences were subtle, but something in him said yes, they really were there. The idea that the entrance had been made of alaria wood popped into his mind, though he assumed that was because Rekari had mentioned alarias.

  He pulled out the trowel and scraped at the damp soil with its finely honed edge. When the top layer came up fairly easily, he decided to use the excavator, and Rekari helped him maneuver it out of the boat and roll it into place. He flipped the switch, and the small machine came to life and began to scuff at the surface and toss the soil aside. He ran it over the suspicious area, and at each pass, it dug deeper, a centimeter at a time.

  Fifty centimeters below the surface, it exposed a polished stone surface. He jumped down into the shallow pit and went to work with trowel and brush to clean it off and find its edges.

  Fully exposed, the smooth stone measured a little less than one meter by two, oriented with the longer side running almost precisely north and south. The western edge merged with rougher stone that extended toward the canal. The eastern edge ended sharply, and when he dug a narrow trench downward there, he found a smooth vertical face about fifteen centimeters in depth, with another horizontal surface at the bottom. He lengthened his trench eastward, found another edge after about forty centimeters, another vertical face, and another horizontal surface below that. It looked like the beginning of a stairway. He started the excavator again, set the depth control to maximum, and spent the rest of the afternoon clearing the three steps. Not long before sunset he had a hole two meters by three, almost a meter deep, and three steps that led … to what?

  Rekari had been sitting at the edge of the hole for most of the excavation. Now Dave climbed up and sat beside him in the waning sunlight. “There has to be something down there,” he said. “Nobody builds stairs to nowhere.”

  Rekari signed his agreement.

  “If this were Earth, I’d say maybe a sunken amphitheater. There’s room for a pretty broad arc before you reach those boulders.” He gestured toward them.

  “An interesting thought,” said Rekari.

  “Maybe there’s a polygon of steps.” He looked left and right, measuring the area with his eyes. “That would be a major excavation. I’d have to ask for a grant from Syrtis University and a crew of grad students to help. It could be very exciting.”

  “It’s only three steps,” said Rekari.

  Dave signed agreement. “I’ll need more evidence before I can write that grant proposal.” He swiveled his legs out of the hole and stood up. “Well, more digging tomorrow.” He smiled at Rekari. “It begins to seem like Dad had a really good lead.”

  Rekari looked down at the steps, now in deep shadow. “Your father taught me a great deal in the years of our partnership,” he said. “He might have wondered if the ground level was lower thousands of years ago, and if these steps might not have led upward from there to something that no longer exists.”

  Dave crossed his arms over his chest and looked into the hole, too. “Well, that’s possible,” he said. “And a lot less exciting. But I have to find out. I could use some peanut butter now, and a good night’s sleep.”

  The next day, he found more steps leading downward. And more. Periodically, he pulled the excavator back to the surface and lengthened the opening, two meters at a time, so that the forward wall would not collapse from being undercut. In the pit, the excavator was soon beyond its ability to loft soil the entire distance to the surface, and so he and Rekari alternated using the shovel to finish clearing away what the machine tossed to the higher steps. By midafternoon, the hole was more than five meters long, and there were ten steps leading down. By midafternoon two days later, it was ten meters long, with twenty steps.

  That was when they hit the door.

  It was an elliptical panel, vertical, about two meters tall and a meter and a third wide. As he brushed the packed soil away and examined it with his flash, Dave saw that i
t was set flush into a smooth stone wall, but the panel itself was made of metal, and he was amazed at its condition—the corrosion was minimal, as if the door had been left there a hundred years ago instead of thousands.

  “Look at this,” he whispered, as if Rekari, standing behind him, needed to be told that something was there.

  Rekari stretched out a hand and touched the door almost reverently.

  There was no handle, no lock that might admit a key or a tool, no obvious way to open it. But it was wider than the step in front of it was deep, which meant it had to open away from the stairway. Dave set both of his hands against its right side and pushed tentatively, then with increasing effort. The door did not move. He tried the other side, with the same results. “I didn’t think I’d need to bring a crowbar,” he muttered. Holding the flash close, he peered at the metal, going over it centimeter by centimeter, but all he could find were two hairline joins, one the length of the vertical axis, the other at the horizontal, both too tight to admit even the sharp edge of his trowel.

  He leaned his forehead against the cold metal. Most archaeologists considered chisels too destructive, but he was beginning to wish he had brought one along. He took a deep breath. Patience, he reminded himself, was the essence of archaeology. Dad, he thought, I know this is what you were looking for. He leaned his whole body against the door from his cheek to his knees and pushed with every muscle he had. He could feel the sunstone under his shirt biting into his chest from the pressure.

  The panel shivered.

  He kept pushing.

  Suddenly the door parted along those hairline joins, each quarter drawing back into the stone frame, leaving the ellipse open.

  Beyond, illuminated by a dozen green lamps set on as many tripods, stood two Martian men. They stared at Dave.

  He stared back. What the hell …?

  Rekari had caught his arms to keep him from falling through the opening. Now he let go slowly, and in Martian, he said, “This is the son of my friend.”

  The two men did not sign a greeting in response to the introduction. They just kept staring.

  Dave stepped over the curving threshold and looked around. The room inside the door was perhaps five meters square, and its walls were as smoothly polished as the steps had been, and empty of any decoration. At the far end of the room was another downward stairway, this one lit by green lamps hanging on its walls; he could see them descending. He signed a greeting to the two men, and when they did not answer it, he went to the stairway and started down. They did not try to stop him, but he could hear them following and speaking to Rekari in Martian.

  “He cannot wear the stone,” one of them said. “He is a stranger.”

  Dave guessed that Rekari signed the negative, because he said, “I cradled this child in my arms the day he was born. He is not a stranger.”

  “He is of Earth,” said one of the men.

  “He went to Earth for his education,” said Rekari. “He did not stay.”

  Dave didn’t look back to see what else they might have been signing at each other. He was more interested in finding out what lay at the bottom of the steps. The door alone was an archaeological treasure; what else could be hidden below, where rain and wind and dust couldn’t touch it? He could feel so many things drawing him downward—curiosity, fascination, regret that his father couldn’t be here with him. Especially regret. And yet, he felt he was fulfilling his father’s goals by descending those stairs.

  It was a long, long way down, but finally the steps opened up into a huge room that seemed originally to have been a natural cavern, with walls rippled by deposits left behind by water. Green lamps lit the space, standing on tripods ranged in concentric arcs all around. In the center of the room was a pair of large tables shaped like two half circles with an arm’s-length gap between them. There were no chairs.

  The two men moved to either side of him then. “We are the caretakers,” they said in English. “Now you will give us the sunstone.”

  Dave looked at Rekari. “You said it was mine.”

  “They cannot take it from you,” said Rekari, and he seemed to be speaking to them as much as to him. “The elders won’t allow it. We saw that with Venori’s cousins.”

  “You must leave it here,” said one of the men.

  Dave signed the negative. “My father gave it to me,” he said in Martian. “I will not give it up.”

  “You will,” said the man. Gesturing for Dave to follow him, he walked over to the tables and stood at one end of the gap between them. There, he traced a symbol on one table with his left hand and on the other with his right, and a panel of dark wood rose up between them, almost filling the space.

  It was crowded with sunstones, row upon row of them, hanging on hooks shaped like miniature fingers.

  “You will leave the sunstone here,” said the Martian, “with all of the others whose families have ended.”

  Dave stared at the stones. There were so many of them. So very many families gone. He could almost feel them calling to him from the dust of ages, and without thinking, he eased past the caretaker and slid two steps into the gap. He reached out with both hands and spread his fingers, so much shorter than Martian fingers, across as many stones as he could.

  A sudden kaleidoscope of images sprang up around him, blotting out the array of stones, the table, the cavern. He found himself surrounded by strange tall trees with multicolored leaves, by boats with sails as colorful as the leaves, gliding across a glassy sea, by sprawling buildings topped with spires like blades pointing to the pale sky, by crowds of Martian men, women, and children, walking, running, gesticulating, all of those myriad images overlaid upon each other in a riot of color and motion. It was day, it was night, it was rain, snow, and sunshine. And the noise was deafening, a thousand thousand voices laughing, weeping, calling out, a chattering cacophony, with snatches of music rising above it all, like the singing of birds and the creaking of hinges in need of oil. The stones were speaking to him, speaking through his own stone, and inundating him with Mars as it was and would never be again.

  And then, in his vision, someone reached out to him, took his shoulders with immaterial hands, and steadied the dizzying rush. All motion halted, all sound receded, and in front of everything a form coalesced.

  Dr. Benjamin Miller.

  “Hello, son,” he said.

  Dave felt his mouth open, but no words came out. He didn’t know what to say or do first. He wanted to throw his arms around his father, but when he reached out to him, there was nothing to touch but air. Finally, hoarsely, he said, “Dad!”

  His father smiled. “It’s good to see you, son. I’m sorry I couldn’t be at Meridiani to meet you.”

  “Dad …”

  “I wanted us to go out into the field together one more time. But the old pump didn’t make it.” He shook his head and sighed. “I remember lying on the ground and hearing Rekari call my name, then the pain was just too much. The next thing I knew, I was here.”

  “Here in the cavern?” said Dave.

  His father made the Martian sign of negation. “In the sunstone I’d been wearing, that you’re wearing now.”

  Dave’s fingers went to the stone. “In it?”

  “In it,” said his father, “with Venori and all of his elders. Sun-stones turn out to be much more than symbols, son. Everyone who wears a stone carries his elders in it—every elder who ever wore it, their memories, their knowledge, their personalities. I still haven’t finished sorting it all out, even with Venori’s help. I think it must be easier for the Martians since they expect it. He and I will both help you.”

  Dave swallowed hard. “So I’m dead, too?”

  His father made the negative sign again. “You’ve just had the full experience for the first time. Venori says it was triggered by all these stones being so close to you. But it’s been growing. I know you noticed it.”

  Dave thought back to all the feelings he’d had, all the intuitions, all the impulses. “I gu
ess I have.”

  “And now that you’ve seen this place, you have to decide whether you want to make your reputation from it, or whether you want to search for something else. It’s a great find, son. The kind an archaeologist spends a lifetime hoping for.”

  Dave looked past his father to the frozen multitudes, and he thought again about all those sunstones and the lives they represented—the parents, the children, the long history that archaeologists only guessed at. And he said, “What do they think?”

  His father shook his head. “They’re in the past, son. As I’m in the past. The future has to make that decision. But first, you have to get out of here. And to do that, you have to open your eyes.”

  “What?”

  “Open your eyes. Open your eyes now.”

  His father’s voice faded away, and his form wavered, became translucent, and beyond him all the frozen figures began to move and talk, faster and faster, until they closed in on him and he couldn’t be told apart from the multilayered blur of the rest. Dave felt surrounded by that dizzying motion again, and he pressed his hands to his eyes and took deep breaths and tried to push it all away. He felt himself crumple, felt the pain of hip and knee and elbow slamming against an unyielding surface, felt himself curl into fetal position, then black silence overwhelmed him.

  Some time later—he didn’t know how long—he opened his eyes behind his hands, and when he pulled his hands away from his face, it didn’t make any difference. He was lying on a cold stone floor in darkness. He rolled to his knees, wincing at the pain of his bruises. He pushed up to his feet. “Rekari?” he said. There was no answer. In the Martian language, he called out, “Is anyone nearby?” Again, there was no answer.