His face plate had fogged as well. I touched his helmet. “Yeah,” I said.
“Jesus. Just a few more minutes,” he pleaded. Over the canyon, afternoon sun broke through clouds of dust. Green-tinted rays swept across the rugged furrows of the sulci, casting the landscape in a ghoulish light interrupted by deep shadows.
We backed away from the rubble at the edge of the canyon. Ilya kicked wind-exposed rocks aside and slogged through drifts of familiar red smear and the superfine gray dust. There was no sizzle anywhere. It had been mixed with unradiated clays and flopsand. Years might pass before ultraviolet could convert the surface to crackly sizzle again.
“The surge must have uncovered an ice aquifer nearby. Pebble saltation blasted it,” Ilya said. “This gray stuff must be ice dust, and down here, it’s just warm enough to melt — ”
He stopped and gave out a groan. “Up there,” he said, pointing to the top of a low ridge. A jagged lump of rock about a meter wide presented a flash of crystal in the broken rays of afternoon sun. We climbed.
I looked back over my shoulder at the lab, half a kilometer away. My back muscles tensed with a red rabbit’s instinct to run and hide. The surge was gone, but wet dust was completely outside my experience. We might sink into a depression and drown. I had no idea how our filters and seals would function in water.
Ilya reached the top of the ridge first. He knelt before the exposed lump of rock. “Is it the cyst?” I asked.
He did not answer. I stood behind him and peered at the shiny exposed face. It was indeed part of a cyst — very likely the cyst that had tumbled from the shed. It lay half-buried in a hole filled with gray dust. The intricate patterns of quartz and embedded zinc clays seemed less distinct, blurred; I thought it might be the weird light. But where the fragment of cyst met the pool of dust, a thick gelatinous layer spilled and churned.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Something in suspension,” Ilya suggested. He reached out to touch the gelatinous material. It clung to his glove.
“Snail spit,” I said.
“Genuine grade-A slime,” Ilya agreed, lifting his glove.
“Why doesn’t it dry out?” I asked.
He looked at me, forehead pale, cheeks flushed, eyes wide. I could hear his rapid breathing over the com. “There’s water all around. The gray dust is ice and clays, and the clays are keeping the ice from sublimating. But the temperature is high enough that the ice melts, and the cyst can get at the moisture. It’s the right mix. It has what it wants.”
The slime grew thicker as we watched. Within, white streaks formed little lacework doilies.
“How much do you think this masses?” he asked, measuring the fragment with his arms.
“Maybe a quarter ton,” I said.
“We couldn’t carry it far. The lab might roll close enough, we could get the strongest arbeiter up here…”
I removed my slate and set it for visual record.
“Good thinking,” Ilya said. He put a sample of the slime into a vial, capturing parts of the lacework as well.
“Do you think it’s — ” I began to ask.
“Don’t even say it,” he warned. “Whatever it is, it’s a tricking wonder.” He sounded like a little boy with a new toy.
I looked up at the curtains of gray, the sun dazzling through the clouds. This was as close as Mars could get to rain.
“It’s just a fragment,” Ilya said, trying to rock the piece of cyst in its cradle of pebbles and dust. “What can a fragment make? The whole ecos?”
He passed me the vial. As he took more samples, I stared at the lacework within the captured fluid. It measured no more than two centimeters across, as fine as gossamer. I had no idea what it was — a bit of cellular skeleton, a template for cytoplasm, a seed, an egg, a tiny little baby.
Perhaps a Martian.
Within two days of returning to Olympus Station, we were famous. Journals on LitVid and ex nets across the Triple lauded us for making an epochal discovery — the first viable, non-Terrestrial life discovered in our Solar System. That we had made the discovery on our honeymoon only threw petrol on the celebrity fires.
The discovery was more than a little embarrassing to the Martian science community. Ilya was a fossil hunter and areologist, a digger, hardly trained in biochemistry at all; there was considerable resentment, even skepticism, at first — that we should have been in the right place, at the right time, to witness a cyst bloom…
We spent much of the next two weeks accepting or dodging interviews. Messages flooded in: offers of vast fortunes for a whole cyst (Ilya did not personally own any of the cysts he had found — they belonged to Erzul, of course); requests for information from schoolchildren; offers to turn our story into LitVids and sims.
No one in the general public seemed to care that the plasm from the cyst died before we got it back to Olympus . The “Martian” degenerated in a few hours to simple proteins and monosaccharides, remarkable enough coming from clay and quartz and mineralrrich water, but hardly the stuff of romance.
We had demonstrated two things, however. The cysts might still be viable, and the genetic information for a Martian ecos was contained in the mineral formations within the cyst, locked in the minute intricacies of clay and quartz. There had probably never been extra organs to help ecos reproduction.
But cyst fragments could not reproduce even a portion of an ecos. Whole cysts were necessary.
Biologists could understand some of the process — but not all of it. The trick to reproduction was still elusive. Whole cysts simply did not respond to being doused in water. There was some combination of water, water-soluble minerals, and temperature that triggered the cysts, and the combination had existed in Cyane Sulci, but no attempt to duplicate those conditions in a lab worked.
Back in the sulci, the gray ice dust had long since broken down and soaked into the soil or evaporated; the snake-canyoned landscape offered no immediate clues. The moment had passed, and no cyst, buried or dug up, had germinated successfully.
Perhaps their time was over, after all.
I received a message from Charles.
Dear Casseia,
Congratulations on joining Big Science! How nice that you ‘ve stuck with fossils. I wish you and Ilya the best — I admire his work a lot. But this — !
Serendipity abounds.
My reply — brief and polite — went unanswered. I was frankly too busy to worry. My new life held many more satisfactions than my old, chief among them Ilya, who handled the brief nova of our celebrity with high wit. He was not self-impressed.
He answered mail to schoolchildren before he replied to scientists. I helped him frame the replies.
Miss Anne Canmie
Darwin Technical Pre-Form
Darwin , Australia GSHA-EF2-ER3-WZ16
Dear Anne,
I remember being very elated when we found the broken cyst, and saw that it was “coming alive.” But both Casseia and I knew that there was so much more to be done, and frankly, we would not be the people to do it.
Your ambition to come to Mars and work on the cysts — what a lovely goal! Perhaps you will be the one to solve the problem — and it’s a thorny problem indeed. Casseia and I have some hopes of reaching your part of the system some day. Perhaps we can meet and compare notes. (Attached: LitVid imprimatur, greetings to the students and faculty of Darwin Technical Pre-Form.)
The celebrity glow faded. We declined the sims and LitVid project offers, knowing few if any would have come to fruition, and we did not need the money. Erzul BM was doing well and I was being drawn back into management, and there would soon be little enough time for us to be together.
Being close to death had triggered something deep in me. It took me weeks to sort it out. I was subjected to a string of nightmares — dreams of choking, or ecstatic flight reduced to terror as I plunged into the red soil and smothered… I sometimes woke beside Ilya, tangled in bedclothes, wondering if I would need some sort of therapy. But fear of our close call was not the cause of my nightmares.