MORNING: SOL 102
GRANDFATHER AL WAS WAITING FOR HIM WHEN HE RETURNED to the village, smiling from beneath his droop-brimmed hat, the black one with the silver band that he liked to wear when he went out to the pueblos.
“I told you it was here, didn’t I?” Al said. He was bundled up in a fleece-lined leather jacket, hands dug deep into the pockets of his jeans. It was cold on Mars.
Jamie, still in his hard suit, shook his head inside the helmet. “As a matter of fact, Al, I don’t remember you saying anything about it.”
“Aw, I must’ve,” Al said. “Hell, I’ve been leading you here ever since you were a kid.”
“I know, Grandfather,” said Jamie. His hard suit had disappeared. Like Al, he was in jeans and windbreaker. And a sky-blue baseball cap. “I’m grateful.”
Al laughed delightedly. “Come on, Jamie, let me show you around the old place.”
From somewhere behind him, Jamie could hear water running freely.
Jamie woke up with a start. He sat up, saw that Dex’s bunk was empty, heard the water recycler running in the lavatory.
The dream dwindled away. Jamie felt disappointed that it had ended too soon, that Al would never be able to show him the village, that they would not be able to discover its secrets together.
Dex came out of the lav looking bright and shining. “Hey, y’know it’s going to be Christmas in just two days?”
Jamie grunted as he swung his feet onto the floor. “That’s right. I hadn’t thought about it.”
“You’ve given the world a helluva Christmas present, Jamie boy.”
He looked at the younger man. “Not me. Us. We. You and the rest of the team back at the dome.”
Dex grinned at him. “You, pal. You drove us here. We wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t pushed it.”
Standing, wiggling his bare toes on the cold plastic flooring, Jamie said, “Well, we’re here now. Let’s get to work.”
“Right.”
They grabbed a pair of snack bars and drank some juice in lieu of a real breakfast, anxious to get out and down to the village. While Dex started putting on his hard suit, Jamie checked their overnight messages. The list scrolled for what seemed like half an hour.
“Everybody and his uncle has something to say to us,” he called back to Dex.
Trumball came clumping up to the cockpit in his hard suit boots and leggings.
“Anything from dear old Dad?” he asked.
Jamie scrolled up and down the list, then shook his head. Connors—or whoever was working the comm console—had starred the messages he considered important. Every news network was starred. Two messages had double stars next to them; Jamie opened them. One was a flowery congratulations from Walter Laurence of the ICU; Jamie suspected it was written more for the media’s appreciation than his own. The other was from the chief of the ICU’s archeology division, a parched-faced bald middle-aged man with piercing green eyes.
“Do not touch anything,” he warned, four times in a row. “Whatever is in or around those structures, touch nothing, I want that understood with crystal clarity. Touch nothing. Do not disturb anything.”
Trumball laughed. “I think he doesn’t want us to touch anything.”
Jamie grinned back at him. “Looks that way, doesn’t it?”
“Why don’t you send him a reply asking if it’s okay if we pick up a few souvenirs?”
“And give him apoplexy? No thanks.”
Laughing, Trumball headed back for the rear of the module, to finish suiting up. Jamie scrolled through the message list one more time; there was nothing from Dex’s father, although he saw personal messages for himself from Li Chengdu and Fr. DiNardo.
They’ll have to wait, Jamie thought. We have work to do, even if we’re not supposed to touch anything.
The long descent down the cable was like a pilgrimage, Jamie thought. Gives you time to cleanse your mind of everything else and prepare for the experience.
Trumball had insisted on dropping one of the spare video minicams on a separate line, alongside Jamie. He had plugged a palm-sized radio transceiver to it so it could transmit automatically back to the dome. They would mount the pair on a tripod near the edge of the cleft, so they could get a steady view of the village and a communications relay that could pick up their suit radios even when they were inside the building.
Jamie reached the top of the cleft, then slowed his descent manually. The morning sun was streaming into the niche in the cliff face, making the building glow warmly.
It’s still here, Jamie thought gratefully. It wasn’t a dream. It’s real.
He thought he heard his grandfather chuckling at him. Of course it’s real, Al said. It’s always been real.
He swung himself into the cleft and planted his boots firmly on the rock floor. Then he unclipped the harness and started it back up toward Dex, waiting impatiently up at the Canyon rim.
Jamie walked slowly to the nearest opening in the wall, noticing that he left bootprints on the ground. Dust. It accumulates here from the storms. I wonder if it’s worth digging into it to see what might be buried underneath it.
Touch nothing, the cranky old archeologist had said. How can we be here and touch nothing?
The doorway was as wide as a normal human doorway, but only half its height. They weren’t very tall, Jamie thought. Or maybe this was an entrance for pets or animals.
He reached out and touched the wall. Hard and smooth. Not like adobe. Some kind of stone. Could it be schist?
“I’m. starting down,” Dex’s voice called.
“Okay,” Jamie said absently, wanting to crawl through that doorway and see what was inside the building. But he had promised Dex he would wait so they could go together.
He looked down the length of the wall, down into the shadows deeper in the rock cleft. Two more entrances, both the same size as this one.
On a hunch, he turned back and walked to the edge of the cleft. He paced along the rim while listening to Dex grunting and panting his way down the cable.
There! I knew it’d be along here someplace. Steps, carved into the cliff face. Nothing fancy, just little nicks in the stone, enough to grab with a hand or put a foot into. Jamie got slowly down onto his hands and knees and peered over the edge. The cliff dropped dizzyingly down to the Canyon floor, kilometers below.
He saw a ragged, meandering line of steps carved into the cliff face. They took advantage of all the ledges and every possible resting place. It’s a damned long way up here, especially if they were carrying things.
They had hands and feet, he thought. Maybe not exactly like ours, but they had hands and feet that could use those steps to get up here. Maybe they grew their crops down at the Canyon floor.
What made them build their village all the way up here? What drove them to hide it up here?
“Where are you?” Dex demanded.
He saw Trumball’s spacesuited form hanging in the harness, just below the roof of the cleft, legs dangling, gloved hands gripping the cable tightly.
“Off to your left, along the edge,” Jamie said. “Oh. I thought maybe the temptation got to you,” said Trumball.
“No, I waited for you,” Jamie said as he looked across at Dex, hanging in the harness, swaying slightly.
“What’re you doing? Praying?”
Hauling himself up to his feet, Jamie realized that it must have looked that way. The last time I was in a church was my wedding, he remembered.
“Maybe I’ll build a shrine here,” he said.
“Not a bad idea,” Dex replied.
Jamie strode toward Dex and grabbed him when he swung himself into the cleft. Once the younger man planted his feet on the floor of the crevice, Jamie helped him out of the harness and tied it down on the spike he had left the previous day.
“Okay,” Dex said brightly. “Let’s go see what they left for us.”
Jamie led him to the nearest entrance.
“That’s the way in?”
“Either this one or one of the others just like it.”
Dex hmphed, then started to bend down.
“Remember the protocol,” Jamie said. “Whatever we find inside there, we touch nothing.”
“Except for souvenirs,” Dex wisecracked.
“Nothing,” Jamie repeated flatly.
Dex crawled through the low rectangular opening in the wall, careful not to bang the VR cameras. They had decided to let him wear them today. Bending down to his hands and knees, Jamie crawled through after him, into the Martian dwelling. He got to his feet in a room that was spaciously wide but uncomfortably low; his helmet-mounted video camera scraped the ceiling, forcing Jamie to hunch over slightly.
“We’d beat them at basketball,” Dex said, turning slowly as he stepped to the middle of the room.
“The interplanetary Olympics,” Jamie mused.
The windowless chamber was surprisingly bright, but utterly empty, its floor thick with reddish dust.
“We ought to take samples of this dust,” Dex said.
“Not yet.”
“Come on, Jamie! That old fart didn’t mean that we couldn’t even touch the dust on the floor.”
“Let’s check with the old fart first,” Jamie said. “Or whoever’s going to work with us on this.”
Dex was silent for a heartbeat, then said, chuckling, “They’re probably killing each other back home, fighting to get on the committee that oversees this.”
Jamie had seen his share of academic infighting. “You might be right, Dex.”
“I can just see the archeologists and paleontologists at each other’s throats.”
“Science at its finest.”
“Well,” Dex said, “we’ll have to rope these rooms off, so the tourists won’t go tramping through them.”
Jamie’s heart lurched in his chest. “Tourists?”
“Like museums, y’know,” Dex went on, “where they show you a room some old king lived in. They rope off the entrance so you can peek in, but you can’t touch anything.”
“We can’t have tourists in here,” Jamie said.
“They’re probably lining up right now, pal. Paging through their L. L. Bean catalogues to buy hard suits and camping gear for their vacations on Mars.”
“That’s not funny, Dex.”
For several moments Trumball said nothing. Then he answered in a low voice, “Yeah. I know. But it’s going to happen, Jamie. There’s nothing either one of us can do to stop it.”
Jamie had no desire to fight with Dex. Not here, he told himself. Not now.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s see what else is here.”
“Wait a sec.” Dex pulled a digital camera from his belt. “Better take some stills as we go. Old fart-face won’t object to a camera flash, d’you think?”
“Go right ahead,” said Jamie, thinking, We ought to take scrapings from the walls and try to fix a date for this structure. The dust is probably recent, contemporary. But how old is the building?
Dex popped away with the camera while Jamie turned a slow circle, allowing the video camera fixed to his helmet to take in the full three-hundred-sixty degrees of the chamber.
Then they walked, slightly stooped, from one chamber to another, forced to their hands and knees whenever they crawled through one of the low doorways, shambling like a pair of apes as they prowled through the ancient dwelling, leaving boot prints on the rust-colored Martian dust.
How old is this structure? Jamie kept wondering. How long has it been since anyone lived here?
They entered a bigger, central chamber that had a rectangular opening in its ceiling.
“A light well,” Jamie said. “That’s how they get light into the rooms inside.”
“Like the palace at Knossos,” Dex agreed.
Nodding, Jamie murmured, “Minoan. Ancient Crete.”
“That’s the way upstairs,” Dex said, pointing at the square hole.
But there were no stairs, no ladders leading upward to the next floor. The ceilings were so low, however, that Jamie could grip the edge of the opening and lift himself through it. Straining even under the light Martian gravity, he got a knee up on the floor, dragged himself away from the opening, and got to his feet.
“Need a hand?” he offered Dex.
“If you can do it, so can I,” the younger man said. Jamie heard him grunt and snort as he climbed up and finally stood beside him.
“Nothing to it,” Dex panted.
Inside his helmet, Jamie grinned.
Slowly they made their way to the roof and strode its length with the sturdy sheltering rock hardly a meter above their helmets. It made Jamie feel a tinge of claustrophobia to have the massive, pressing rock looming so close.
“It’s all empty,” Dex said. “Not a stick of furniture or a basket or a piece of pottery.”
“Maybe there’s something buried in the dust,” Jamie suggested, knowing that he was grasping at straws.
“Nah, the dust isn’t thick enough to hide a pottery shard, for chrissakes.”
“They must have taken everything with them.”
“They sure didn’t leave anything here.”
The entire building was empty. As if it had been cleaned out, eons ago. Looted? Abandoned by its builders? Jamie wondered. Why? When?
And it struck him all over again, hit him so hard his knees went watery.
Intelligent Martians lived here! They climbed up from the Canyon floor and built this dwelling. When? How long ago? What happened to them? Where did they go?