Carleton seemed strangely subdued. “He’s waited sixty-five million years. A few more minutes won’t bother him.”
There were eight men and women standing at the edge of the grave, Billy Graycloud among them. Jamie was surprised to see Mo Zeroual, too. What’s a number cruncher from Selene doing out here? he asked himself. He must have volunteered.
Jamie looked down into the uncovered grave. It was filled with odd-looking bones, crushed by the weight of eons, flattened, distorted. But he thought he could make out what looked like a spine, and maybe those were limbs. Six of them?
“That’s a Martian?” he whispered.
“That’s a Martian,” Carleton replied, his voice also hushed, choked. “And more.”
Jamie glanced at the anthropologist, then looked back into the grave.
Pointing, Carleton said, “Those look like beads, don’t you think? And that little object there might have been a small vase or a cup of some sort.”
“It’s hard to tell,” said Jamie.
“It’s all been flattened by the overburden,” Carleton said, still half-whispering. “It’s going to take some time to put it all together and find out how they were actually built.”
“Six legs?” Jamie asked.
Carleton nodded inside his bubble helmet. “At least. Two of them end in grasping appendages. Hands. See?”
“Hard to tell,” Jamie repeated.
Graycloud spoke up. “They must’ve been built close to the ground. Like turtles.”
“Not necessarily,” said Carleton. “The skeleton’s been flattened by the weight of thirty meters of soil pressing down on it.”
Someone else made a comment, and Carleton answered. But Jamie stared into the grave and saw at last the Martians that he had dreamed about. They didn’t look human at all, but they had legs and arms and hands, eyes and ears, they spoke a language and wrote pictographs and built this village and the shrine high up on the canyon wall. They had minds. We could have communicated with them, if only…
Carleton sank to his knees and bent to reach into the grave.
“Careful!” one of the group gasped.
“I know,” said Carleton, leaning over. His gloved fingers reached for the flattened, odd-shaped bone at one end of the skeleton. It was only slightly larger than his hand, mottled rusty gray, hard looking.
Holding it up in his hands like a kneeling worshiper raising a holy grail, Carleton said, “This is a cranium. Got to be.”
“The brain case isn’t all that big.”
“Are those eye sockets?”
“They look straight ahead. Binocular vision.”
“They saw things in depth: three-dimensional vision, just like us.”
Resting back on his haunches, Carleton turned the fossil around in his hands. “Ha. See this?” He pointed with his free hand.
Jamie saw a hole in the back of the skull.
“Foramen magnum, I’ll bet my last breath on it,” Carleton said in a strangely hushed, almost worshipful voice. “This is where the spinal cord went through the cranium to connect with the brain.”
“If its brain was in its cranium,” one of the biologists said.
Ignoring the remark, Carleton went on, “It must have been four-legged.”
“Or six?”
“It held its body horizontal to the ground. It didn’t stand upright, the way we do.”
Jamie thought that was a lot to assume in the first five minutes of examination, but he said nothing. This was Carleton’s moment and he was entitled to his surmises. Who knows? Jamie asked himself. He might even be right.
Carleton slapped his gloved hands together, startling Jamie out of his musings. “All right,” he said, his voice loud and commanding now. “We start removing the bones, one piece at a time. I want a complete photographic record. Every clod, every molecule we remove has got to be recorded down to the nanometer. This is history, people! Let’s get to work!”
And Jamie heard his grandfather’s enigmatic words: This village don’t exist yet.
Tithonium Base: The Translation
Jamie helped Carleton and his team to tenderly lift the fossilized bones out of the grave, together with the beads and shards of pottery that lay with the body, and carry them inside the dome. Under Carleton’s exacting direction, they laid everything on the big stereo table in exactly the same positions as they had been in the grave.
Two technicians spent the next hour taking stereo photographs of the remains, while Carleton’s people gathered in the cafeteria to relax after a long, exciting, tension-filled day. Jamie went with them.
“Well, they buried their dead, all right,” said Alonzo Jenkins as he lounged back in a cafeteria chair, legs stretched out and a plastic glass of fruit juice in his hand.
“With trinkets,” added Shirley Macintyre, one of the medical technicians who had volunteered to help at the dig. She was in her midtwenties, and had dropped out of astronaut training in Britain to join the medical team on Mars. Tall, lean and muscular, she had been pursued by several of the men but stayed aloof from them all.
“They must have believed in an afterlife,” Billy Graycloud said softly. Eyebrows went up; people looked surprised that Graycloud would speak up.
Jamie smiled at the young man and said, “So they must have had some form of religion.” Everyone nodded.
“I wonder how much they were like us,” murmured one of the men.
“Or we’re like them.”
“Not physically,” said Jamie. “We don’t look anything alike.”
“But mentally?”
“Spiritually?”
“They lived in villages,” Jamie said, ticking off points on his fingers. “They had a rudimentary form of writing. They buried their dead—”
“With beads and pottery,” Macintyre interjected.
“Like Billy said, they believed in an afterlife,” said Jenkins. “So they must have had some kind of religion.”
“That’s the basis for religion, sure enough.”
They looked up to see Carter Carleton walking toward them from the juice dispensers, a glass in his hand, a happy smile on his handsome face.
“The promise of life beyond death,” Jenkins said. “That’s what religion’s all about.”
“It’s a powerful lure,” Carleton said, joining the conversation as he sat himself next to Macintyre. “It’s pure nonsense, of course, but it’s certainly suckered people into accepting religion everywhere, even on Mars.”
“What do you mean, it’s nonsense?” Macintyre asked. “How can you be sure?”
“Catholic, aren’t you?” said Carleton, frowning slightly. “You’ve had it pounded into your skull since before you could walk.”
Jenkins objected, “That’s not fair, Dr. Carleton. Everyone’s entitled to their beliefs.”
“Besides,” Macintyre said, “there’s a lot more to religion than the promise of an afterlife. There’s the whole ethical basis. Society would be impossible without religion’s ethical teachings.”
Carleton smirked. “Like ‘Thou shalt not kill’? Except when your church says it’s okay. Like the Crusades: kill the Saracens! Or the suicide bombers: kill the unbelievers!”
“They were extremists.”
“Were they? How about the good Christians back in the USA who’ve made homosexuality a crime in their states? Outlawed abortion. Hell, they’re even trying to make all forms of family planning illegal.”
“They’re acting on their beliefs,” Macintyre insisted.
Jamie got to his feet and left them arguing. To himself he thought, How about the religious believers who don’t want us here on Mars? How about the terrorists who set off those bombs back at the university? How about—