He went on, "This ship has been systematically broken up, as if for salvage. Each pile is of a different metal. Look there. Titanium, steel, aluminum, and there," gesturing to a smaller pile of coiled wire, "copper."
He looked at the ground. Save for his own there were no other footprints, nor were there any tracks of other vehicles. The surface itself was unnatural, as if it had been graded, but by what, when, and by whom? "Somebody took this thing apart. Somebody who had heavy equipment and a hell of a cutting torch." He walked around the piles, this time looking out at the surrounding surface, seeking something that would give a clue to this mystery. There was nothing to be seen. No drag marks betrayed the secret. Not even the tracks of AIs.
He returned to the pile of electronic equipment and picked up a small motor of unknown function. 'MPN-1 Whirlpool Corporation, Oklahoma, USA,' he read, out loud. "Damn strange," he said, pocketing the motor.
He returned to the Rollagon and stood on the flying bridge as they circled the site, spiralling outwards, examining the surface. He found nothing; no trap doors or gullies closeted the equipment necessary to do such a mammoth job. The grading of the surface ended abruptly as if cut by a knife. He travelled along the border, completing a full circle, finding nothing.
"Very, very strange, this. Keep looking in the archives. I want to know more about this."
Later that day, the AI reported that an exhaustive search of dubs here and on Earth had shed no light on the ownership of the mysterious spacecraft.
"There is more here than meets the eye!"
The AI remained silent.
Vastitas Borealis
It was a big planet, for a small one. Each empty and abandoned manned site, with its piles of discarded equipment and waste, many with grave sites, served only to remind him of the accrued cost of being here, and reinforced his own sense of isolation. Some had been vandalized, the ships and landers picked over for souvenirs, and sometimes the very graves themselves had been desecrated.
Discouraged and depressed by the apparent lack of humanity, he abandoned his project of seeking them out, and for months they just sat and went nowhere while he wandered the countryside on foot, poking into valleys and climbing amongst hills. En route to nowhere in particular he made a stop at the MHM.
It had been a difficult decision; he had no notion of the ghosts that might be waiting. The solitary AI in residence had greeted him as long lost brother, then had followed him about until, annoyed by its presence, he had banished it abruptly from his sight. He wandered the empty halls, ate an apple from the greenhouse, sat alone in the darkened common room turning a coffee mug he was sure had been his own over and over in his hands, feeling its cold, hard surface, and bounced on the edge of the cot that had been his so many years ago.
Denying it any tears he was unmoved by it all, at least until he saw the small pile of rocks and pebbles deposited by returning walkers. The emotions he experienced in that moment were simultaneous and many: humour, sadness, revulsion, longing, and inexplicably, fear. Later, many miles away in the safety of the Rollagon, he was best able to recall just one—pathos. It had been both essential and a mistake to go there.
Suddenly he became possessed of a compulsion to travel again. He sped erratically about the land from one nowhere to another, seeking some thing, something of which he never spoke. If the AI thought him mad, she kept it to herself. Time ceased to be meaningful. As the saying went, the days dragged on, but the years flew by.
The current scenery of VB, as Sam called it, was monotonous. Flat as a pancake, the surface was broken only by small craters and the same varieties of ejecta that covered the entire planet. The days passed and the sun rose higher in the summer sky. He reflected upon the fact of his boredom, and occupied himself in reading, watching the skies, and strumming his long-neglected guitar. One day, as he sat watching the AI pick its way around a small crater, he was seized by an impulse to stop. The AI did as ordered.
"Is there a problem?"
"I saw something."
"Some thing?"
"Yes, I'm going out." He suited in haste and exited. It was crazy, he knew. He walked to the front of the Rollagon. He turned counter-clockwise three times with his eyes closed and before opening them pointed randomly with his right arm. He opened his eyes and saw that he was pointing at a small rock some 20 meters away.
Eyes fixed, he walked towards it, stumbling over other small rocks and kicking up dust clouds in careless haste. Bending over, he picked up the rock. It was about three kilograms and basalt, if he knew his rocks. It was one among billions, but surely there was some cosmic consequence to using mere chance as a selection process. He brushed it off and carried it back to the Rollagon.
There was a protocol for bringing such things into human space and the AI insisted on a full decontamination. By the time Sam completed his own clean up, it was ready. He opened the hatch of the decontamination chamber and carried his rock to the command chair. Pressing it to his face he noticed that the faint smell of blood and perhaps sulphur still clung to it. He turned it in his hands, looking at it from all angles. It was nothing special on the outside; perhaps its secret was within. He took it to the Science Module. A single blow shattered it cleanly in half.
No secret message was contained in a hidden chamber; no live frog jumped out; no diamond fell on the table. A black interior of uniform texture was revealed. Sam looked at it, feeling somewhat foolish. He tossed it on the examination table.
From behind he heard the AI softly, "Perhaps in a different light?" The room illumination dimmed and was replaced with the glow of UV. Sure enough, in the altered light the interior sparkled with purple diamonds in a ring with a yellow glowing center. He counted: one, two, three, four… nine bright sparks on a field of black, with a glowing sun in the middle. It was astounding. He turned it over and over in his hands, viewing it from all angles. It was nothing special, selected randomly from countless others, yet when viewed under a particular, more discerning light it showed its real worth.
"Mark this location in the log. Mark it as special." He carried the rock to his quarters and put it in the drawer with his few possessions, next to the photo of his wife and a yellowed, hand-written letter. Mars was now locked in his desk, too.
To France
His dishes, he found, were still much in use by paying customers on Earth. He cared little. On suitable days, if he got there first, he would swing one of the 30-meter dishes to Earth and tune a single receiver way down into the FM broadcast band. If he was lucky, and the Earth was oriented just so, and the dish was pointed just off the planet a wee bit, he could listen in on a single station. When the Western Hemisphere was oriented towards Mars, it was impossible. At broadcast frequencies, the dish did not have the resolution to sort out competing stations.
New Zealand, too, was surprisingly bad. It seemed every village and town had at least two radio stations. With low rates of frequency re-use and a large geographic dispersion, Australia and Siberia were the best bets. The strength and clarity of the signal was sometimes amazing.
Laying stretched out on the ground or on the deck of the Rollagon, he could imagine himself sitting in a car along a road near Sydney or Novosibirsk listening to the music, windows open, the scent of the country air drifting in. More often than not, though, he was treated to the competing sounds of scores of stations from dozens of countries.
On the rare occasion he could pick out individual words, and sometimes he could tell what tune was playing, but most often it was too much, too garbled. That in itself was not a disappointment. It was a connection, not to a single person, as through a video call, but to an entire hemisphere. Life still existed on Earth. Old folks were dying, babies were being born, the stock market went up and down and up, wars were being waged, people were dying of starvation and from obesity, all within ten thousand kilometers of each other, and sometimes much, much closer. From here it seemed such a small place.
Other times he tuned the dish away from Ear
th and pointed it at Jupiter and Saturn. The eerie whistles and moans generated by colossal lightning storms and dying particles trapped in these planet's enormous magnetic fields were like the clash of multiple Earth stations. What would they say if you could listen to just one? News, weather, and sports? Certainly it wouldn't be about the latest terrorist attack or cult suicide. Or famine in Central America. Or classic rock.
At the end of another nameless day of travel they sat parked at the edge of some nameless ravine in Candor Chasma. He was looking at images of his wife and children. This was familiar ground to him. He had done this a thousand times, or so it seemed. There were few photos of him. Pictures from the edge, those were. He clenched his fists and eyes.
Emotion Blue, he thought. Nobody else could make him happy. Nobody else could hurt him the way she did. She was the only one that mattered. He shook his head to clear away these bewildering and conflicting thoughts. He stared at her image until it faded away. 'The Untouchable One,' he had anointed her during one of his low spots. Then she was gone. He knew where this was going.
She was so beautiful. Through the years, as the children grew in number and size the lines had crept into her face. The sharp features melted into roundness. He looked at one image from before they were married. Seeing her in a favoured dress, he could recall the texture of the material—brocade—she had called it, and the softness of her breast beneath, touched for the first time on that very day. It seemed like it had happened only minutes ago, or paradoxically, that it was just moments in the future.
The sensation that this recollection raised in him was primal passion—the passion of youth. He swallowed in anticipation, now as he had then. But there was nothing, no passion, indeed no recollection of the next day, or the next week. Whole years were missing. Where did passion go when it was spent? Why could he not understand where all that life had gone? How could things that seemed so real, so immediate as to now cause his body to stir in passion, which were so easily and completely recalled, have happened to him so long ago? He found to his dismay that he could not recall her face unless it was from a photo. He closed the file and wept for a space. The AI watched silently.
Later that day he recalled a conversation with his grandfather, one that must have occurred before he had left his teen years. With no preamble or explanation, he had been handed a paper clipping. Yes, real paper, from a Reader's Digest. It contained a quote attributed to Wilder Penfield, M.D.
An elderly Penfield was speaking to a young man, trying to convey the thought that his own memories were as fresh and real to him as were the young women in the streets before them. Through this single act his grandfather, a man to whom displays of emotion did not come easily, had tried to express that it was the same for him. Sam had not then understood what he was being told, but he understood now that his grandfather had felt this same mystery of life, and that he too was trying to come to grips with it.
They moved southwest, headed for the great uplands of Syrtis. One sort of land replaced another; one sort of loneliness too, was replaced by another.
Sky, Blue and Black
Although he did not know exactly where he was, it was clear to his eye that this had been a beach. He had been on a lot of beaches in his life, and this was one. The patterns in the foreground that stretched to the horizon were unmistakable. He closed his eyes.
Beneath his feet the gentle slope felt like the sand beaches of the Pacific Northwest. To his left, the ancient shorelines made by primeval high water levels could easily be seen as a series of low ridges. To the right the land sloped gently out of sight over the horizon. It was low tide on Mars. The great waters had receded from here, leaving behind only frozen seas and lakes, buried, for the most part, under meters of volcanic debris, ejecta, and dust.
He walked along the shoreline and, after a short while, he felt that unmistakable feeling in the hips that one got when walking along a beach.
He walked head down, examining the surface. The platy material that covered so much of this area—duricrust they called it—was coated with dust. Each footstep was different, uncertain. At first the surface gave the promise of support, but then a moment later collapsed, leaving the feet perpetually surprised. It was like walking on the thin crust that formed when a warm day melted the snow and it refroze. Here firm, there the foot plunged down unpredictably, never the same.
He paused in his tracks, closed his eyes and listened. At first he was aware of no sound at all, but as his ears adapted he could hear the rhythmic breaking of waves. He held his breath and it went away, to be replaced in a few moments by the sound of more distant waves thudding on an unseen shore.
He had walked many beaches in his life and on some days had been irked at seeing a single set of footprints, while on others he had desperately wished to meet someone—anyone. Which was this?
He looked at the ground and thought about those other beaches. The Atlantic, the Pacific, the Arctic, the Antarctic, they were all the same: land worn down by time and tide, all in different stages of being reclaimed by Mother Ocean. It was the same here, except that in every other case signs of life had been present—in your face, in point of fact. The shore marked the dividing line between sea and land lifeforms, and Man had left his signs in the plastic debris and shaped wood that marked high water. It was everywhere. It was our mark.
He recalled this same phenomenon of ancient beaches on Cornwallis in the Arctic. That time too he had been miles from human habitation, and then as now he had been touring what he naively thought was land where no man had gone before. On a beach, now undoubtedly overwhelmed by rising sea levels, was the unmistakable litter of civilization—Styrofoam cups, six pack rings and tampon dispensers. Inland he had seen something flapping in the wind at the foot of a distant rock—a purchase order from NorthMart for toilet paper. You could not go far enough to escape it. Wind and tide spread the signs of man's presence around the world. An alien spacecraft seeking signs of life would only have to examine a minute patch of jetsam on a beach to know the Earth was occupied by an industrial civilization.
Then, by analogy, if there was life on Mars, its signs would be here at the seashore, but unlike Earth, not here at the high water mark. It would have to be at the low. He turned and walked down into the depths. It was a going to be a long walk.
Bending stiffly, he picked up a small pebble. It slipped from his gloved hand. Looking around he found a much larger one and examined it closely. The roundness of it displeased him; he was looking for a flat stone.
He settled on a shard about seven centimeters long and a couple thick, probably a fragment from some ancient meteor strike. With a lot of body English that nearly resulted in a spinning tumble he made a sidearm toss. The rock skittered across the hard crust, bounced upwards once, and then slid, spinning end for end, coming to rest about ten meters away. Hmmm.
He looked down the beach again. The voices suggested that something had happened here a long time ago. Perhaps, rather, he countered, something had happened to him on a similar beach a long time ago. A brief exchange took place between the invited and the uninvited. He closed his eyes and the voices diminished.
Yes. They had been walking on a beach just like this—he and his young wife. There had been other lovers up and down the strand. He recalled the sound of those waves and the cries of the seagulls circling the sands.
Somewhere fragments of a song were being carried down the wind from some radio. Above all, there was the low murmuring of a city in the distance. The remembrance of these things was accompanied by waves of longing, by a profound sense of loss, by desperation akin to panic, and the physical effects nearly caused him to drop to his knees. It was as if all his molecules had suddenly stopped their motion.
He knew the cause of this: he was missing his wife, long dead, again. The voices started in his head, louder now, almost crowding out those emotions with the beginnings of a dramatic reenactment. His lips moved in a whisper not indicative of the desperation of the just formi
ng thought, but it was too late. Something was not true about this memory, they said. Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!
Unavoidably, he remembered some words of poetry, or perhaps they were lyrics:
I hear the sound of the world where we played
And the far too simple beauty
Of the promises we made
Yes, they had walked on a beach, and he had made promises to her that he would always be there. And he believed he had followed through, except when his work had taken him away. That had been forgivable and had been forgiven, but time had passed and no matter how much he cared, or held her memory, or cried, he could not save her.
He felt the almost forgotten but unforgettable sadness as if Mars's gravity had suddenly increased by a factor of two. It pulled on his heart as if it was lead. Now he felt it throughout—his shoulders sagged, his face lost its tone, something pulled at his organs, drawing them down. Arms now limp at his sides, he became conscious of a lessening of his life force, as if he had been drained of all energy. Profound sadness, hopelessness, endless despair—all close, but mere words failed the mind. Inexpressible grief. Quantifying it momentarily consumed him. It was better than remembering.
Now he remembered all of the words. They were lyrics, and the song was old. He recalled the music and more. Too, he was certain they had never listened to it together. It began to play in his mind and he could not stop it. Even the voices could now not be heard above the sound of the music. It's not enough! It's not enough!
He walked sunward for hours, staring straight into the shining sun.
The suit beeped gently in warning; he had reached the point of no return. He stopped and looked about, seeing little, then turned and faced the setting sun. It was another decision point. Even the new suit had limits. Go forward five more minutes and he was one of the walking dead. The sky was turning pink, and indigo blue, and black. He remembered more now and stood stock still, playing it over in his mind: