“We interpret what we see to suit our own mindset,” I said pompously.
For a moment, his expression — downturned corners of his mouth, narrowed eyes, a little shake of his head — made me regret those words. If I was playing him like a fish on a line, I might have just snapped the line, and I suddenly felt terribly insecure. The touch of my glove on his thick sleeve did not seem adequate. “I still want to go and see,” I said.
Charles let go of the guide stick. The tractor smoothed to a stop and jerked. He half-turned in his seat. “Do I irritate you?” he asked.
“No, why?”
“I feel like you’re testing me. Asking me key questions to see if I’m suitable.”
I bit my lip and looked into my lap, trying for some contrition. “I’m nervous,” I said.
“Well, so am I. Maybe we should just let up a bit and relax.”
“I was just expressing an opinion,” I said, my own temper flaring. “I apologize for being clumsy. I haven’t been here before, I don’t know you very well, I don’t know what — ”
Charles held up his hands. “Let’s forget all of it. I mean, let’s forget everything that stands between us, and just try to be two friends out on a trip. I’ll relax if you will. Okay?”
I came dangerously close to tears at the anger in his tone. I looked out the window but did not see the ancient carved grotesques outside.
“Okay?” he asked.
“I don’t know how to be different,” I said. “I’m not good at masks.”
“I’m not either, and I don’t like trying. If I’m not the right person for you, let’s put it all aside and just enjoy the trip.”
“I don’t know what’s making you so angry.”
“I don’t know, either. I’m sorry.”
He pulled the stick forward and we drove in silence for several minutes. “Sometimes I dream about this,” he said. “I dream I’m some sort of native Martian, able to stand naked in the Up and feel everything. Able to travel back in time to when Mars was alive.”
“Coin-eyed, slender, nut-brown or bronze. ‘Dark they were, and golden-eyed.’ ”
“Exactly,” Charles said. “We live on three Marses, don’t we? The Mars they made up back on Earth centuries ago. LitVid Mars. And this.”
The tension seemed to have cleared. My mood shifted wildly. I felt like crying again, but this time with relief. “You’re very tolerant,” I said.
“We’re both difficult,” Charles said. He leaned to one side and bumped helmets with me. Our lips could get no closer, so we settled for that.
“Show me your Mars,” I told him.
The melt river canyon stretched for thirty kilometers, carving a wavering line across the flats. A service path had been carved into the cliffs on both sides, cheaper than a bridge, marring the natural beauty but making the canyon bottom accessible to tractors.
“The areology here is really obvious,” Charles said. “First comes the Glass Sea , then Tharsis One with deep ocean deposits, building up over a billion years, limestone… Then ice sheets and eskers… Then the really big winds at the end of the last glaciation.”
We rolled down the gentle packed tumble slope into the canyon. The walls on each side were layered with iron-rich hematite sands and darker strata of clumped till. “Wind and ice,” I said.
“You got it. Flopsand and jetsand, smear, cling and grind… There’s a pretty thick layer of northern chrome clay.” Charles pointed to a gray-green band on our right, at least a meter deep. He swerved the tractor around a recent boulder fall, squeezed through a space barely large enough to admit us, and we came out twenty meters below the flats. Our treads pushed aside flopsand to reveal paler grades of grind and heavy till.
“We have as many words for sand and dust as the Inuit have for snow,” Charles said.
“Used to be a school quiz,” I said. “ ‘Remember all the grades of dust and sand and name them in alphabetical order.’ I only remember twenty.”
“Here we are,” Charles said, letting the stick go. The tractor slowed and stopped with a soft whine. Outside the cabin, silence. The high wind of the night before had settled and the air was still. A dust-free sky stretched wall-to-wall pitch-black. We might have been on Earth’s moon but for the color of the canyon and the rippled red and yellow bed of the ancient melt river.
Charles enjoyed the silence. His face had a look of relaxed concentration. “There’s a rock kit in the boot. We’ll dig for an hour and return to the tractor.” He hesitated, thinking something over. “Then we’ll head home. I mean, back to the station.”
We checked our gear thoroughly, topped up our air supply from the tractor’s tanks, pumped the cabin pressure into storage, and stepped through the curtain lock with a small puff of ice crystals. The crystals fell like stones to the canyon floor.
“I remember this,” Charles said over the suit radio. “It hasn’t changed. The sand patterns are different, of course, and there have been a few slumps… but it looks real familiar. I had a favorite fossil bed about a hundred meters from here. My father showed it to me.”
Charles portioned out my share of tools to carry, took my gloved hand, and we walked away from the tractor. I saw two deposition layers clearly outlined in a stretch of canyon wall that had not slumped: a meter of brown and gray atop several meters of pale yellow limestone, and below that, half a meter of grays and blacks.
We walked across shaved flats now, covered with sand; the oldest limestones, and beneath, the Glass Sea bottom. I drew in my breath sharply, a kind of hiccup, startled at how this realization affected me. Old Mars, back when it had been a living planet… Alive for a mere billion and a half years.
Where life arose first was still at issue; Martians claimed primacy, and Terrestrials disputed them. But Earth had been a more violent and energetic world, closer to the sun, bombarded by more destructive radiation… Mars, farther away from its youthful star, cooling more rapidly, had condensed its vapor clouds into seas a quarter of a billion years earlier.
I believed — like most loyal Martians — that this was where life had first appeared in the Solar System. My feet pressed thin flopsand five or six centimeters above the graveyard of those early living things.
“Here,” Charles said, taking us into the inky shadow of a precarious overhang. I looked up, worried by the prominence. Charles saw my expression as he stooped and brought out his pick hammer. “It’s okay,” he said. “It was here when I was a kid. Can you shine a light?”
We worked by torch. Charles pried up a slab of dense crumbling limestone. I helped lift the slab away,“ twenty or thirty kilos of rock, piling it to one side. Charles handed me the pick.
“Your turn,” he said. “Under this layer. About a centimeter down.”
I swung the pick gently, then harder, until the layer cracked and I was able to finger and brush away the fragments, clearing a space a couple of hands wide. Charles held the torch.
I peered back through two billion Martian years and saw the jewel box of the past, pressed thin as a coat of paint, opalescent against the dark strata of those siliceous oceans.
Round, cubic, pyramidal, elongated, every shape imaginable, surrounded by glorious feathery filters, long stalks terminating in slender, gnarled roots: the ancient Glass Sea creatures appeared like illustrations in an old book, glittering rainbows of diffraction as the torch moved. I specked them waving in the soup-thick seas, sieving and eating their smaller cousins.
“Sometimes they’d lift from their stalks and float free,” Charles said. I knew that, but I didn’t mind him telling me. “The biggest colonies were maybe a klick wide, clustered floats, raising purple fans out of the water to soak up sunlight…”