I reached down with my gloved hand to touch them. They had been glued firmly against their deathbed; they were tough, even across the eons.
“They’re gorgeous,” I said.
“The first examples of a Foster co-genotypic bauplan,” Charles said. “These are pretty common specimens. No speciation, all working from one genetic blueprint, making a few hundred different forms. All one creature, really. Some folks think Mars never had more than nine or ten species living at a time. Couldn’t call them species, actually — co-genotypic phyla is more like it. No surprise this kind of biology would give rise to the mother cysts.”
He took a deep breath and stood. “I’m going to make a pretty important decision here. I’m trusting you.”
I looked up from the Glass Sea , puzzled. “What?”
“I’d like to show you something, if you’re interested. A short walk, another couple of hundred meters. A billion and a half years up. Earth years. First and last.”
“Sounds mysterious,” I said. “You hiding a mother deposit here?”
He shook his head. “It’s on a secure registry, and we license it to scholars only. Father took me there. Made me swear to keep it secret.”
“Maybe we should skip it,” I said, afraid of leading Charles into violating family confidences.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Father would have approved.”
“Would have?”
“He died on the Jefferson .”
“Oh.” The interplanetary passenger ship Jefferson had suffered engine failure boosting from around the Moon five Martian years before. Seventy people had died.
Charles had made a judgment on behalf of his dead father. I could not refuse. I stood and hefted my bag of tools.
The canyon snaked south for almost a hundred meters before veering west. At the bend, we took a rest and Charles chipped idly at a sheet of hard clay. “We’ve got about an hour more,” he said. “We need fifteen minutes to get to where we’re going, and that means we can only spend about ten minutes there.”
“Should be enough,” I said, and immediately felt like kicking myself.
“I could spend a year there and it wouldn’t be enough,” Charles said.
We climbed a gentle slope forty or fifty meters and abruptly came upon a deep fissure. The fissure cut across the canyon diagonally, its edges windworn smooth with age.
“The whole flatland is fragile,” Charles said. “Quake, meteor strike… Something shook it, and it cracked. This is about six hundred million years old.”
“It’s magnificent.”
He lifted his glove and pointed to a narrow path from the canyon floor, across the near wall of the fissure. “It’s stable,” he said. “Just don’t slip on the gravel.”
I hesitated before following Charles. The ledge was irregular, uneven, no wider than half a meter. I pictured a slip, a fall, a rip or prick in my suit.
Charles looked at me over his shoulder, already well down the ledge. “Come on,” he said. “It’s not dangerous if you’re careful.”
“I’m not a rock climber,” I said. “I’m a rabbit, remember?”
“This is easy. It’s worth it, believe me.”
I chose each step with nervous deliberation, mumbling to myself below the microphone pickup. We descended into the crevice. Suddenly, I couldn’t see Charles. I couldn’t hear him on radio, either. We were out of line of sight and he was not getting through to a satcom transponder. I called his name several times, clinging to the wall, each moment closer to panic and fury.
I was looking back over my left shoulder, creeping to my right, when my hand fell into emptiness. I stopped with a low moan, trying to keep my balance on the ledge, waving for a grip, and felt a gloved hand take hold of my arm.
I turned and saw Charles right beside me. “Sorry,” he said. “I forgot we wouldn’t be able to talk through the rock. You’re fine. Just step in…”
We stood in the entrance to a cave. I hugged Charles tightly, saying nothing until my hammering heart had settled.
The cavern stabbed deep into the fissure wall, ending in black obscurity. Its ceiling rose five or six meters above our heads. The fissure’s opposite wall reflected enough afternoon sunlight into the cavern that we could see each other clearly. Charles lifted the torch and handed it to me. “It’s the last gasp,” he said.
“What?” I still hadn’t recovered my wits.
“We’ve gone from alpha to omega.”
I scowled at him for his deliberate mystery, but he wasn’t looking at me.
Gradually, I realized the cavern was not areological. The glass-smooth walls reflected the backwash of light with an oily green sheen. Gossamer, web-like filaments hard as rock stretched across the interior and flashed in my wavering torch beam. Shards of filament littered the floor like lost fairy knives. I stood in the silence, absorbing the obvious: the tunnel had once been part of something alive.
“It’s an aqueduct bridge,” Charles said. “Omega and Mother Ecos.”
This wasn’t a cavern at all, but part of a colossal pipeline, a fossil fragment of Mars’s largest and last living things. I had never heard of an aqueduct bridge surviving intact.
“This section grew into the fissure about half a billion years ago. Loess and flopsand filled the branch because it ran counter to the prevailing winds. Cling and jetsand covered the aqueduct, but didn’t stop it from pumping water to the south. When the Ecos failed and the water stopped, this part died along with all the other pipes, but it was protected. Come on.”
Charles urged me deeper. We stepped around and under the internal supports for the vast organic pipe. Water once carried by this aqueduct had fed billions of hectares of green and purple lands, a natural irrigation system greater than anything humans had ever built.
These had been the true canals of Mars, but they had died long before they could have been seen by Schiaparelli or Percival Lowell.
I swallowed a lump in my throat. “It’s beautiful,” I said as we walked deeper. “Is it safe?”
“It’s been here for five hundred million years,” Charles said. “The walls are almost pure silica, built up in layers half a meter thick. I doubt it will fall on us now.”
Light ghosted ahead. Charles paused for me to pick my way through a lattice of thick green-black filaments, then extended his arm for me to go first. My breath sounded harsh in the confines of the helmet.
“It’s easier up ahead. Sandy floor, good walking.”
The pipe opened onto a murky chamber. For a moment, I couldn’t get any clear notion of size, but high above, a hole opened to black sky and I saw stars. The glow that diffused across the chamber came from a patch of golden sunlight gliding clockslow across the rippled sand floor.
“It’s a storage tank,” Charles said. “And a pumping station. Kind of like Trés Haut Médoc.”
“It’s immense,” I said.
“About fifty meters across. Not quite a sphere. The hole probably eroded through a few hundred years ago.”
“Earth years.”
“Right,” he said, grinning.
I looked at the concentric ripples in the sand, imagining the puff and blow of the winds coming through the ceiling breach. I nudged loose dust and flopsand with my boot. This went beyond confidence. Charles had guided me into genuine privilege, vouchsafed to very few. “I can’t believe it.”
“What?” Charles asked expectantly, pleased with himself.
I shrugged, unable to explain.
“I suppose eventually we’ll bring in LitVid, maybe even open it to tourists,” he said. “My father wanted it kept in the family for a few decades, but I don’t think any of my aunts or uncles or the Klein BM managers agreed. They’ve kept it closed all these years in his memory, I suspect, but they think that’s long enough, and there is the resource disclosure treaty to consider.”