As if he knew what was transpiring, Chang remained closeted in his office the rest of the day. Jamie was reluctant to interrupt whatever the mission director was doing, even if it was nothing more than avoiding him. No confrontations, he told himself. This isn’t going to he settled by power politics, not here, not among these people. We’ve got to find a path that we can all travel, a method we can all agree on.
So Jamie spent the rest of the afternoon catching up on reports from Dex and the research groups scattered around more than a dozen universities on Earth—and Selene University, on the Moon. In his mind’s eye Jamie pictured a delicate web of thoughts and ideas as men and women in Asia, Europe, the Americas, Australia and even in the underground city of Selene, worked to puzzle out the history of Mars and its vanished people.
He couldn’t help thinking of the extinct Martians as people, even though he knew consciously that they probably did not look at all like human beings. But they thought the way we do, Jamie realized. They loved and feared and hoped and died the way we do. Maybe that’s what the Bible means when it says God created man in his image: it means intelligence, the moral knowledge of good and evil. It doesn’t matter what the body form looks like. It’s intelligence that makes us godlike.
Then he remembered the Navaho creation myth. The People had lived on a red world before coming to the blue world. A great flood had driven them out of the red world.
No, he told himself firmly. That is myth. The Martians didn’t migrate to Earth. They died here, every last one of them.
Jamie tried to use dinner as a social opportunity. Although he almost inevitably took his meal with Vijay, Jamie always attempted to invite one or two of the staff people to share their mealtime. It was easier to catch up on who was doing what over the dinner table. And the discussions weren’t always limited to the scientific work going on.
This evening they dined with Itzak Rosenberg and Saleem Hasdrubal at a table for four in a corner of the busy, noisy cafeteria. The area smelled of sizzling cooking oil and a vague aroma of vinegar. Whoever selected the evening’s music had picked Russian classics. Jamie thought he recognized the dark strains of Rachmaninoff over the clatter of dishware and hum of conversations.
Jamie wanted to ask the two of them about staying another year on Mars. But he wanted to approach the subject obliquely, carefully. Better to sound them out first, get to know them a little, before popping the big question.
Rosenberg seemed somewhat nervous at first, but Hasdrubal leaned back in his creaking plastic chair and, despite his stern, almost fierce appearance, joked about their disappointing stint at the crater Malzberg.
“It’s all Izzy’s fault,” Hasdrubal said, draping a long, lean arm around his colleague’s shoulders. “The crater wouldn’t pop a geyser as long as he was watching.”
Rosenberg looked uncomfortable, as if his partner’s arm weighed too heavily on him. “We’re accustomed to disappointments,” he murmured.
“We?” asked Vijay.
“The Children of Israel,” Hasdrubal answered immediately. “Their history has been full of disappointments and diasporas.”
“That’s not really funny, Sal,” said Rosenberg.
Hasdrubal looked at Rosenberg for a long, silent moment. “No, I guess it’s not, considering what happened to Israel.”
Thinking of the nuclear holocaust that had devastated much of the Middle East, Jamie glanced at his wife, then poked at the soymeat steak on his plate. Vijay’s a shade darker than Hasdrubal, he realized.
Trying to change the subject, Vijay asked, “What kind of a name is Hasdrubal?”
“Carthaginian,” said the biologist. Before anyone could ask more, he explained, “My great-grandfather was one of the original Black Muslims. When he changed his name from Jefferson he wanted something elegant, so he picked Hasdrubal.”
“He was a brother of Hannibal, wasn’t he?” Jamie asked.
Nodding, Hasdrubal added, “And my great-grandad was a reader of ancient history. Damned near took the name Caesar, but my great-grandmam talked him out of it.”
“Are you planning to go back to the crater?” Vijay asked.
Rosenberg answered, “No. We have it fully instrumented. If and when it blows we’ll get it all on record: imagery, heat flow, seismic data, the works.”
“I’ve analyzed the dirt for biological activity,” said Hasdrubal.
“And?” asked Vijay.
“Nada. Zip. Dirt’s loaded with superoxides. Not enough organic material in it to support a bacterium.”
“How deep does the superoxide layer go?” Jamie asked.
“It varies,” said Hasdrubal, waggling a long-fingered hand in the air.
“It’s more than twenty meters down at the Malzberg site,” said Rosenberg.
“That’s awfully deep, i’n’t it?” asked Vijay.
Hasdrubal nodded. “In some places it’s only a couple of meters down. Depends on where you are.”
“So what are you going to do now?” Jamie asked.
Hasdrubal took a swig of his fruit juice, then answered, “Carleton wants us to volunteer for his dig.” He broke into a toothy grin as he put his mug down. “But we have other plans.”
“We’re going to take a camper out and follow the path of the old river,” said Rosenberg.
“See if we can find other villages buried underground,” Hasdrubal put in.
“Dr. Chang has approved that?”
“Approved it?” Hasdrubal echoed, his grin going even wider. “He just about insisted on it. ’Specially when we told him Carleton had approached us.”
Rosenberg leaned his elbows on either side of his dish and dropped his voice several decibels. “If Carleton’s for it, Chang’s against it. They don’t like each other. Not at all.”
Jamie studied the geologist’s round, bland face with its mop of tightly curled strawberry hair and the silly-looking little tuft of a goatee. The man was grinning, as if he found the conflict amusing.
“That troubles me,” Jamie said.
Rosenberg made an elaborate shrug. “Not much you can do about it, actually.”
Hasdrubal interjected, “Unless you wanna get in the middle of it.”
Tithonium Chasma: The Cliff Dwellings
Jamie’s heart was thumping as he rode the cable lift up the sheer face of the cliff. He was excited, not afraid. Sealed inside a nanofabric suit, he felt almost as if he were in his shirtsleeves riding past layer after layer of Mars’s geologic history. Bands of red rock, then gray, then an almost golden tan. Cracked, seamed, striated. The history of a world sliding past his eyes as he dangled in the climbing harness that hauled him up to the cleft where the buildings stood.
He remembered the First Expedition, their third morning on Mars, the jolt of sheer exhilaration he’d gotten when he’d spotted a rock that bore a streak of green. He’d been certain, rationally, that the green was an inclusion of copper. But still, green in the middle of the planetwide desert of rusty red! It turned out to be copper, as Jamie had suspected, but the excitement that it might have been life—that was a moment he’d never forget.
And then he’d discovered the cliff dwellings. At first no one believed him. He had seen the niche from a distance; even the camera imagery he had brought back to their base was hazy, indistinct. A Navaho imagining things that remind him of home, they all said. It wasn’t until the Second Expedition when he and Dex had driven purposefully out to the edge of the canyon and rappelled nearly a full kilometer down to the cleft in the worn old cliffs that they saw beyond a doubt that the buildings actually were there.