I was tempted to enter, but a quick look at the sky showed me I did not have that much time. I hurried on toward the Great Hall. The Circle of Juno, with its judgment seats. The Romulus and Remus Blocks. Further on, the Athena Stone, definitely graceful, quite feminine, yet regal, and quite, quite beyond recognition. Then the entrance to the Great Hall. I turned and looked back, wondering at the Grecian and Roman mythology that had been force-fit onto what man had found here. “We have to call it something,” Evans had said, “and Athena Stone is better than Item XV-4, 3 meters high, at coordinates M-12, subsector A-7.” I had to admit he was right, but I wondered how this nomenclature might blind someone to the discovery of something else. Simpson, in the twentieth century said, “It’s good that things can be found by accident—otherwise you’d never find anything you weren’t looking for.”
So far, everything is “yet.” So far we haven’t met an intelligent race. Yet. Men are not gods. Yet.
I turned and went in.
There is something about proportions that makes a structure greater than the sum of the parts. The Parthenon, that Doric temple to Athena on the Acropolis, is often cited as the perfect building because of its proportions. The Great Temple of Amon at Luxor, the Aztec Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, the Shinto Shrine at Nikko, the Temple of Heaven at Peking, Persepolis, Angkor Wat, Versailles, and of course the Taj Mahal, have all been lauded as “perfect buildings,” and rightly so. But they were all made by humans. As diverse as their builders were they were all Homo sapiens. The Xeno ares or, hopefully, the Homo ares, were simply alien. Their idea of proportions was different, and possibly everything else about them was different, too. The Great Hall was unlike Terran structures that were rigid, rectangular or circular or even trisoctahedral. It flowed, an enormous enclosed space of great majesty. It was more like visual music than walls, a floor, and (once) a ceiling. From no one spot could you see all of it, so it was always exciting. The walls tilted and curved and flowed and changed texture and color. The floor rose and fell, becoming a cozy swirl of stone where you might sit with a small group, then rising and becoming a pulpit-like protuberance. It swept away and flowed upwards to become a wall, then down again to become what might have been a pool. Walls thinned and melted away to become windows, then thickened and drew close to form side passages to other, lost, rooms. I wandered past the spot where the Colossus had once stood and into a large cul-de-sac of once-bright blood-rock, a cylinder open to the sky. The floor flattened and dipped down in a gentle series of wide terraces toward the Throne.
It could only be that. If it wasn’t, it should have been. Only the rounded stubs of something remained in the center of the dais that rose up slightly before the last terrace. No great lord here to stand high above his groveling subjects, but a servant of the people, a listener, a being who was the focus of his subjects.
The sunlight made long dark shadows across the broken floor, accenting the aged rock. Everything stood out in textural relief, reddened by the setting sun. Courtiers and peasants had stood here, judgments had been made, boons awarded, decisions handed down. Perhaps here the last Martian had died, his alien bones long ground into the sand that drifted around the floor, filling the cracks in the stones. The King is dead, long live the King!
But the Queen is alive.
I turned and went out under the carvings of leaping alien beasts and dim views of what might be seas filled with what might be ships. I turned at the Athena Stone and my boots kicked up plumes of red-brown sand as I went through the Sungate and climbed up into the sandcat. I started the engine, spun the wheel, and raced through the failing light toward the Center.
I had things to do.
7
There was a big sandstorm the next day, out on the Ausonia Borealis between Ares Center and Grandcanal City. Nova had already taken the only fast direct transport to Bradbury, so I had two choices. The short loop up to Grandcanal City and down to Bradbury, which wouldn’t start for almost a week, or until the sandstorm eased up. Or the long loop southwest to Redrock, then southeast to Nabokov, east to Marsport, and north to Bradbury. Because the transporter was leaving the next day and I wanted to move, as well as to see Mars, I chose the longer way, which actually would be quicker.
The big GM Transporter, with the roller capsules behind, stood ready outside the main dome in the dawn light of the following day. I shook hands with Johann and told him to give what was left of the shimmercloth bolt to What’s-her-name. He gave me a maiming blow on the shoulder and shoved me on up into the cabin, slamming the hatch behind me.
Everyone works on Mars. There are no passengers as such. As neophyte cleanboot I was given the simple job of watching the cabin pressure and fuel telltales and punching frozen meals out of the dispenser. By the time we got to Redrock four days later I had been promoted to topwatch, up there in my own little blister-bubble and as important as hell. When I wasn’t defrosting yeast pies and algae bricks in the zap ovens, that is.
It’s pretty drab country going down to Redrock. Just sand and craters and all that weathered worn look we’re familiar with. The country rises in the Isidis Regio area and becomes more rocky than sandy, then nothing much but rock until the mesa rises at Redrock.
Of course it was Martian drabness we were crossing and that alone made it fascinating. Although the trails were clearly marked by previous tracks and by bleepers every few kilometers it was common practice to wander off and parallel the route, taking meandering side trips and detours from the meanderings. One literally never knew what might be found this way. The ruins at Burroughs were discovered by a curious tracker named Solari who was taking a big arc from Touchdown to the Grabrock mines, and that find led to the development of the bubble-cluster “city” itself.
Redrock was nothing more than a pair of dusty domes looking much like the castoff brassiere of some giant Amazon. The converging tracks turned the area into patterned facepowder. We made our cargo drop and picked up other material for transport around our route. The ore itself would be run through the fusion torches, fired along the mass accelerator where the disintegrated molecules would be dropped out automatically at their atomic weight. Thus only very pure elements were transported, for things were costly enough as they were. How “pure” the material in the hoppers was depended on how critical the process was or how often the same material was processed. For Earthside shipping it was the purest possible, but less than perfect samples were used at the site.
We didn’t even sleep in the domes that night but stayed in our cramped but “homey” transporter. Those big fusion-powered GMs are beauties, with multiple wheels that can roll up over most anything on Mars. The control cabin is self-contained, with an airlock to the personnel capsule behind. Bunks, toilet, Varifreezer with IR oven, and oxy bottles took up almost all the space. Some cargo was carried on top, in racks, but most was in the trainlike capsule rolling along behind. We had two on this trip, but I was told in the flatter area between Ares Center and Bradbury and between Touchdown and Wells they could pull as many as six.