“I’ll try not to bore you with physics,” he said.
“I can take it,” I said. “What makes you think I was ever interested in Sean, romantically?” ,
Wisely, he didn’t answer, and immediately set about making late-night preparations.
Martians saw the surface of their world most often through the windows of a train. Perhaps nine or ten times in a life, a Martian would go Up and walk the surface in a pressure suit — usually in crowds and under close supervision, tourists on their own planet.
Call it fear, call it reason, most Martians preferred tunnels, and dubbed themselves rabbits, quite comfortably; red rabbits, to distinguish from the gray rabbits on Earth’s moon.
I think I was more nervous sitting in the tractor beside Charles than I had been in my skinseal months earlier. I trusted Charles not to lose us in the ravines and ancient glacier tongues; he radiated self-confidence. What unnerved me was the proximity to emotions I had safely kept locked away behind philosophy.
I will not explain my turnaround. I was becoming attracted to Charles, but the process was slow. As he drove, I sneaked looks at him and studied his lean features, his long, straight nose, slow-blinking eyes large and brown and observant, upper lip delicately sensuous, lower lip a trifle weak, chin prominent, neck corded and scrawny — a heady mix of features I found attractive and features I wasn’t sure I approved of. Unaesthetic, not perfection. Long fingers with square nails, broad bony shoulders, chest slightly sunken…
I knit my brows and turned my attention to the landscape. I was not inclined to physical science, but no Martian can escape the past; we are told tales in our infant beds.
Mars was dead; once, it had been alive. On the lowland plains, beneath the ubiquitous flopsands and viscous smear lay a thick layer of calcareous rock, limestone, the death litter of unaccounted tiny living things on the floor of an ancient sea that had once covered this entire region and, indeed, sixty percent of northern Mars.
The seas, half a billion Martian years before, had fallen victim to Mars’s aging and cooling. The interior flows of Mars slowed and stabilized just as Mars began to develop — and push aside — its continents, thus cutting short the migration of its four young crustal plates, ending the lives of chains of gas-belching volcanoes. The atmosphere began its long flight into space. Within six hundred million Martian years, life itself retreated, evolving to more hardy forms, leaving behind fossil sea beds and karsts and, last of all, the Mother Ecos and the magnificent aqueduct bridges. (“Ecos” is singular; “ecoi” plural.)
All around us, ridges of yellow-white limestone poked from the red-ochre flopsand. Rusted, broken boulders scattered from impact craters topped this mix like chocolate sprinkles on rhubarb sauce over vanilla ice cream. Against the pink sky, the effect was severe and heart-achingly beautiful, a chastening reminder that even planets are mortal.
“Like it?” Charles asked. We hadn’t talked much since leaving Durrey in the borrowed Klein tractor.
“It’s magnificent,” I said.
“Wait till we get to the open karsts — like prairie dog holes. Sure signs of aquifers, but it takes an expert to know how deep, and whether they’re whited.” Whited aquifers carried high concentrations of arsenic, which made the water a little more expensive to mine. “Whited seas had entirely different life forms. That’s probably where the mothers came from.”
I knew little about the mother cysts — single-organism repositories of the post-Tharsis Omega Ecos, a world’s life in a patient nutshell, parents of the aqueduct bridges. Their fossils had been discovered only in the past few years, and I hadn’t paid much attention to news about them. “Have you ever seen a mother?” Charles asked.
“Only in pictures.”
“They’re magnificent. Bigger than a tractor, heavy shells a foot thick — buried in the sands, waiting for one of the ancient wet cycles to come around again… The last of their kind.” His eyes shone and his mouth curved up in an awed half-smile. His enthusiasm distanced me for a moment. “Some might have lasted tens of millions of years. But eventually the wets never came.” He shook his head and his lips turned down sadly, as if he were talking about family tragedy. “Some hunters think we’ll find a live one someday. The holy grail of fossil hunters.”
“Is that possible?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are there any fossil mothers where we’re going?”
He shook his head. “They’re very rare. And they’re not found in karsts. Most have been found in the sulci.”
“Oh.”
“But we can look.” He smiled a lovely little boy’s smile, open and trusting.
The Klein BM winery, a noble experiment that hadn’t panned out, lay buried in the lee of a desiccated frost-heave plateau twenty kilometers west of Durrey Station. Now it was maintained by arbeiters, and fitfully at that, judging from the buildup of static flopsands on the exposed entrance. A gate carried a bright green sign, “Trés Haut Médoc.” Charles urged the tractor beneath the sign. The garage opened slowly and balkily, gears jammed with dust, and Charles parked the tractor in its dark enclosure.
We sealed our suits and climbed down from the cabin. Charles palmed the lock port and turned to face me. “I haven’t been here since the codes were changed. Hope I’ve been logged on the old general Klein net.”
“You didn’t check?” I asked, alarmed.
“Joking,” he said. The lock opened, and we stepped in.
Over the years, the arbeiters had repaired themselves into ugly lumps. They reminded me of dutiful little hunchbacks, moving obsequiously out of our way as we explored the narrow tunnels leading to the main living quarters. “I’ve never seen arbeiters this old,” I said.
“Waste not, want not. Klein’s a thrifty family. They took the best machines with them and left a skeleton crew, just enough to tend the water.”
“Poor things,” I said dubiously.
“Voila,” Charles announced, opening the door to the main quarters. Beyond lay a madman’s idea of order, air mattresses piled into a kind of shelter in one corner, sheets covering a table as if it were a bed, decayed equipment lovingly stacked in the middle of the floor for human attention, smelling of iodine. The machines had been bored. A large arbeiter, about a meter tall and half as wide, a big barrel of a machine with prominent arms, stood proudly in the middle of its domain. “Welcome,” it greeted in a scratchy voice. “There have been no guests at this estate for four years. How may we serve you?”
Charles laughed.
“Don’t,” I said. “You’ll hurt its feelings.”
The arbeiter hummed constantly, a sign of imminent collapse. “This unit will require replacements, if any are available,” it told us after a moment of introspective quiet.
“You’ll have to make do,” Charles said. “What we need is a place fit for habitation, by two humans… separate quarters, as soon as possible.”
“This is not adequate?” the arbeiter asked with mechanical dismay.
“Close, but it needs a little rearrangement.”
We couldn’t help giggling.
The arbeiter considered us with that peculiar way older machines have of seeming balky and sentient when in fact they are merely slow. “Arrangements will be made. I beg your pardon, but this unit will require replacement parts and nano recharge, if that is possible.”
Four hours later, with the living quarters in reasonable shape and our provisions for several days stored and logged in with the arbeiters, Charles and I stopped our rushing about and faced each other. Charles glanced away first, pretending to critically examine the interior furnishings. “Looks like a bunkhouse,” he said.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“Well, it’s not luxury.”
“I didn’t expect it to be.”
“I came here once when I was ten, with my dad,” Charles said, rubbing his hands nervously on his pants. “A kind of getaway for a couple of days while traveling from Amnesia to Jefferson , through Durrey… Klein holdings intrude into the old Erskine BM lands here. I don’t know how that happened.”