Mars

Earth had always had a sentimental love affair with her depraved brother, a romantic notion of seeking an embrace with our star’s prodigal son—to make him right, bring him into the fold, change his wayward life to good health and make him productive.

In the 25thCentury it was generally accepted that terraforming of the fourth planet had succeeded.

***

Dr. Christopher Cooke was an angry Martian. Today’s irritation only added to the generalized fury that raged within him. Being sent to collect magnetic fluctuation data in the field, a major inconvenience, was only a small blip on the extensive range of his angerscape.

He was a quiet, tense man who seldom spoke up, which is why he was the one plucked out to perform field duty when one of the usual field technicians called in sick. Still, he felt, better here than there. He had put millions of kilometers between him and the feckless bureaucracy that had killed his wife on Earth. The distance didn’t mitigate his anger, but it allowed him to function. There was no one here that deserved his rants, so he had the luxury of remaining quiet and doing his work. Even the extra work he was saddled with today.

He pivoted the tripod, aiming it at the lodestone rock that was the magnetic center of the caldera at Arsia Mons. Even though the innards of the ṺberCollider were shielded, the surges needed to run it were at the mercy of magnetic turbulence. The MagScape satellite above, while helpful, was not accurate enough to guarantee pin-point magnetic stability at the surface; it was only good for predicting massive amounts of molten core that determined the entire planet’s magnetic flux. But here on the ground Dr. Cooke was able to render a holographic plot of the lines of force. In the small box that sat atop the tripod, all of the mathematics used to determine the ṺberCollider window of safe operation whirred silently with qubits in the background, reducing the result into a mere pushing of a needle into the green on the dial.

“It’s on the green,” Dr. Cooke radioed in on the infraband.

“Good work, Cooke,” Dr. Kubacki radioed back.

Twenty-five years of education, Dr. Cooke scowled, and I can tell when the needle’s in the green.

He eyed the Martian artifacts that had helped colonization: the perfectly spherical, metallic half-centimeter dollops that seemed strewn around the lodestone he was recording. There seemed to be more in this area than what he was used to seeing, because what he was accustomed to seeing was only a rare one, usually having been extruded from a site of erosion. And then he became very still. The thin air made him conscious of his breathing. The cold now was very noticeable.

Mars had been successfully terraformed, but he still needed to became aware of everything, because that was what one had to do when noticing something gone awry. This planet offered new ways to die or be injured, as horrible as they were novel, and it paid to pay attention. What he saw made him pay attention.

One of the dollops moved. This was a dead world, and the only movement, besides the dust that rode the gales, was solely of human origin. Yet, he was sure of it—it had moved. Was it the magnetic attraction of the lodestone? He closed the dustcover over his magnetometer and walked slowly toward the small object. Towering over it, it sat there inert. He remained as motionless as it was, straining to see, wondering if he should write off the movement as his imagination. He reached down to pick it up.

These small, round structures had jumpstarted the whole Martian colony, providing a ubiquitous supply of perfect ball bearings for all of the moving parts that made a colony run. Rarely seen on the surface, when the engineers dug, they seemed to just pour out of the excavations. He reached down to pick it up like so many engineers had done in the field to collect them. Before he touched it, he jumped, for it unrolled right in front of him.

“No one’s ever seen that before,” he murmured.

And then it fired at him. It snapped violently into a small ball again, launching itself with enough force to enter his head. He reeled back, slapping his hands to the circular wound on his forehead. He fell.

After a moment he recovered. He realized something altogether new had happened on Mars. And it was an attack by something that had been placed by the thousands in all of the machinery that made life possible on terraformed Mars.

He realized he had something Martian living in his head now. His mind was frenzied. How do I get it out? Is there brain damage? Will this thing jump back out on its own? Will I have brain damage then? What if all of the ball bearings decide to snap like that?

He ran through a series of neurological exercises. His thumb could oppose each of his fingers. He could touch his nose with his eyes closed. He stood and had no imbalance. He counted backwards from 100.

And his head didn’t hurt.

He now knew his days as a data analyst for the ṺberCollider were over. He knew he had a new job. He would be studied and he supposed that was good. Although he felt fine right now, no one could predict that something insidious wasn’t conspiring against him. Yes, let them study me. I want to know what’s coming, if anything.

But he wasn’t that angry anymore.

***

Sixty years before Dr. Cooke had received his ball bearing:

The vast engineering feat of terraforming Mars was finally deemed, announced, and celebrated a success. Not by the engineers or the geologists. Not by the scientists.

The planet itself made the announcement with its first-ever spontaneous thunderstorm.

The word success, for those on Mars who had witnessed it, seemed an exaggeration; the thickening of the atmosphere was still in progress back then and still required the breathing assistance of OxyVents for those who dared to inhale out-of-doors. And announcement seemed a somewhat premature declaration, the thinness of the atmosphere presenting the thunder to human ears four octaves higher than the roar of Earth thunder, as if a real Earth vinyl record had been played on an antique 78-RPM phonograph, reducing a bone-rattling planetary phenomenon to a cartoon sound effect. Nevertheless, the psychological victory went public as a monument to the next step in humanity’s evolution.

And to capitalism and the business model.

For the terraforming of Mars, too expensive for nations alone to pursue alongside the crippling obligations of their societal entitlements, necessitated partnerships with the incorporated rich of Earth –Big Energy, Big Pharma, Big Comm, Big Transport, Big This and Big That.

From the beginning, the terraforming of Mars was a business relationship between nations and the companies large enough to take the investment hit first in exchange for the payoff later. And so it was that the ballyhoo of terraforming was seized and hyped and was as profitable as any insider trading. The initial payoff for corporate investors was inflationary only: stocks rose to new heights and titans of industry towered even higher. Suddenly Valles Marineris was sexier than Silicon Valley and more intoxicating than Napa.

Participating nations waxed idealistic with proclamations of a new sphere of peace in the solar system, destined to host the best that Earth had to offer. “Mars vigila,” borrowed from Latin literature, was the official triumphant slogan: “Mars, awaken!”

Meanwhile, the thunder on Mars sounded comically falsettoed and anemic, like an adolescent’s voice breaking. Mars announced, Earth cheered, but the handful of colonists remained strangely silent, pressing on in pursuit of real red thunder, which would take another busy sixty years.

Moons Phobos and Deimos were euthanized by crashing them into their planet so their pulverized dust could partner with the radiodegradable nanoreflectors suspended high around the planet. They were ultimately replaced by the large near-Mars asteroid, Ancile. It was easy to force Phobos below the Roche limit into the planet, and Deimos, although about three times farther away than Phobos, was only half its size and easier to nudge. The two native moons’ deaths raised the temperatures and what debris escaped the upper atmosphere became an equatorial ring.

The new imported moon begot the polar magnetic fields that stabilized the atmosphere.

Once Ancile was tidally locked with its planet, water could accrue, dust could settle, oxygen and carbon dioxide could assume their rightful positions in and out of human lungs, and the OxyVents and ArEsuits could be stowed. By the sixty years after the first spontaneous thunderstorm, the colony population had grown to 2700 persons and the first compound was ready to bud off into a second. All had gone well until this point.

Then, the ferropods came alive.

Dr. Christopher Cooke, data analyst at the ṺberCollider on Mars, found this out the hard way. It was an astonishing surprise that set the program back six Earth years. Half a centimeter in diameter, these nearly perfectly round structures, made of primarily iron in an alloy mixture of silicon, zinc, and over a hundred other trace elements, thought inert and non-viable, were a mistaken natural resource used wherever in the colony ball bearings were useful. There was a duplicity in their perfection as bearings: they were also self-lubricating, covering themselves with a non-degradable slick that originated from deep within their concentric layers. They were easily available, littering the planet’s surface in the numerous canyons and calderas. In fact, all novel industrial design for Mars used the ferropod’s dimensions as the construction standard.

Perhaps it was the achievement of an ambient temperature above 40 degrees or a humidity self-sustaining at 2% or a combination of these and a dozen other man-made Martian corruptions, but with the ferropods no longer functional as ball bearings, the colony suddenly lost environmental and indoor climate control, refrigeration, flywheel use, turbines, transport steering, axles, universal joints, graviton cones, and engines of every sort.

The colony collapsed.

The entire settlement had to be retrofitted when these tightly stratified little balls came back to life and were not happy in whatever niches, crevices, or interfaces they had been placed. Like a part of one’s body rarely thought about until it is missed, something as mundane and unseen as a ball bearing threatened a whole world with its abdication. The problem was so devastating that the colony population was halved within four months as evacuees to Earth exchanged with massive crates of ball bearings of the inanimate type.

The ferropods, as seemingly simple as they were, ushered in a cultural upheaval: there was life elsewhere in the universe, and the fact that it was just next door implied that it was probably everywhere in the universe. A Cultural Psychology Committee was created, inviting from Earth a panel of distinguished psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers to assess and if possible implement responses to the colonists’ difficulties in grasping the gravity of the situation. But their being on Mars was already as surrealistic a life choice that no surprise could nonplus.

On Earth, philosophers sold books, evangelists sermonized, mental health workers evaluated, politicians strategized, and ball bearing tycoons became very rich.

The ball bearing dependent colony on Mars retrofitted and recovered. When prudent, the population again surged over 2500, but now included new talent. A Botany and Biology Consortium was established, along with its Veterinary Studies Division, or VSD. The ferropod was apprehended, studied, and also feared; it appeared that when their globular attitude stretched out into a linear, shiny, slug-like shape, snapping back into a ball released enough kinetic energy to make the reformed ball ballistic. So far, three humans, including Dr. Cooke, had suffered strikes to their heads, with varied results.

Two fantastic events resulted during the search for more of these strange little beasts in hopes of determining what they lived on. The first was the discovery of the Ares arboreta plant, an ambulatory green flora with functional limbs that had begun germinating from long-dormant spores; the second was the discovery of the Sonotomes—unearthly songs and vocalizations which were recorded out of thin air from the mountainous areas. The Botany Division of the Botany and Biology Consortium had swelled to parity with the Biology Division, and a new group, designated Electromagnetic Archeology, came on board in attempts to decipher the mysterious Sonotomes and hopefully find fossil remains of those who sang them.

Actual Martians.

The Botany and Biology Consortium joined the Cultural Psychology Committee, the Electromagnetic Archeology Council, and the old and long established Terraforming Maintenance section of the Geology College of Mars. Together, they made up the New Mars Colony Project Security Council, or MCPSC.

The business interests of Earth were not without representation on the MCPSC. The Nations of Earth—the NOE—formerly the United Nations which were no longer united except by business relationships, sent an NOE liaison to the MCPSC as a non-voting member. The official function of the NOE liaison was to authenticate that the colony did in fact consist of the best Earth had to offer—philosophically, ethically, and humanistically. The real function of the NOE liaison, unknown to the other members of the MCPSC, was to step in—to intercede—on behalf of the business interests of the NOE. Thoughts of independence—or even insubordination—were to be reported back to Earth and, if necessary, contained. This person had at his disposal a secret Prestige Guard who would help him secure the colony, should this ever become necessary. The MCPSC welcomed him as an interested guest; he accepted as nothing less than a predatory spy, forever crouched in a striking position.

It was a business decision.

But business was good, so the MCPSC kept administering and the NOE liaison kept observing politely and unobtrusively. Any such suspicion and intrigue was buried under the wonders of the discoveries thus far—life in two disparate species, spanning flora and fauna, botany and biology, and on the very next world at that! And evidence of a sentient species, extinct, but which left records for study. And now, even Martian thunder sounded right.

Mars was no longer comical; Mars was serious.

***

Renée Niemann the veterinarian was as wise and learned as any septuagenarian could be, but she didn’t look any older than she did when she was thirty-five. Telomorphing was optional and over half submitted to it. It wouldn’t grow new limbs, but if one were lucky enough to live life intact, one could look forward to a youthful appearance and feel for at least 120 years. Even those at the end of the bell curve, at about 150 years life expectancy, didn’t look any older than sixty or seventy.

Having undergone the process in her early thirties, she continued youthfully in her profession until celebrating her “Rebirth” at what normally would be her retirement. Rebirth was a new folk tradition in which telomorphs received a second birth certificate with great fanfare, similar in importance to a Bar Mitzvah, graduation, or marriage. In observance of this custom, Renée celebrated her Rebirth on her 65th birthday, the official event at which she would announce her new life’s direction.

In her “first life,” as the telomorphs were fond of saying, she had been a prominent veterinarian; she had enjoyed an academic position pioneering telomorphing efforts in mammals, which revolutionized animal husbandry world-wide. For these reasons, she was well known to all biologists, xenobiologists included.

At her Rebirth she stood before her friends, loved ones, and colleagues—no doubt, she thought, the same group who could have attended her funeral had she declined telomorphing like her late first husband had. She promised herself, determinedly, that she wouldn’t allow her thoughts to go there and spoil this day.

According to the newly minted Rebirth tradition, her future was kept secret so that, after great anticipation, she could make a surprise announcement of the direction of her new life, to be followed by the expected heart-felt congratulations.

Before telomorphing, it was, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” After telomorphing, people had the joy of announcing what they would do now that they weregrown up. The first half life of a telomorph, a long life in itself, often was shaped by all of the sobering near-misses and what-ifs of the world. In the new way of looking at it, the end of the first half, at age 65, was considered, finally, maturity; the time before, a childhood of preparation.

Certainly there were those whose first half of life was so successful and rewarding that the Rebirth announcement was just that they would continue on as before. And for those whose contributions impacted the world favorably, they were even encouraged to do so with tax credits and corporate perks. No one fancied the idea of an Einstein going into carpentry or a Shakespeare going into sports merchandise wholesaling.

But the majority, financially secure from doing what they had to do to get that way, now had wisdom of age and experience and the security of a life that pragmatic finances could create. And conversely, no one would have a problem with a car salesman becoming a Rembrandt.

The socializing, drinking, and eating prepared the attendees for Renée Niemann’s announcement. The new direction.

And they were not disappointed.

“Mars vigila!” she announced. “To Mars!” followed by a lengthy and starstruck round of applause. The questions followed, none of which she answered at first.

“Will you do veterinary medicine there?” “Will you be helping to look for any fossilized animals there?” “For fossils of actual Martians?”

“I will do more than that,” she answered, then paused in a show biz stunt of coquettish torment. “I’ll do more than that,” she repeated, “I hope to meet them.” But her gleam made it sound like a promise. Applause erupted again.

As is customary with Rebirth tradition, she now read her official statement that discussed her decision. “Dear friends, children, loved ones, and even ex-husbands,” she began, a snickering of the audience catching fire from a mischievous wink, “not all ex-husbands,” she confided, and the snickers coalesced into overt laughter, for after the death of her first spouse, her one true love, she became no stranger to carelessly re-marrying. “Some weren’t invited tonight,” she whispered playfully.

“We’ve all heard of the ferropods and the dangers they present. And we’ve all heard the strange sounds that are called the Sonotomes. There’s more to Mars than a bunch of rust, and there’s more to this,” she pointed to her head, “than a bunch of dust.”

“What about a bunch of lust?” someone wisecracked. She stopped to search the crowd for the culprit, who clearly got away with the playful barb.

“Oh,” she said, fluttering her eyelids, “My next boyfriend is going to be green.” Touché, but it was time to get serious.

“Since we’ve gotten the Higgs particle, the prisn, and the graviton in the bag, and now that we have harnessed their unruly stepchild, the chronoton, and,” she added, like a keynote speaker motivating a sales force, “now that temporal reconciliation has been documented at the quantum level, then the atomic level, molecular level, and on to grams and kilograms and even living things over at the Vet school, the Chronarchy has been readying to expand the experiment. I am happy to tell you I have been chosen to be in the first tempconciled colony to co-exist with the original Martians.” The awed hush pleased her. “Imagine, luring their time epoch from the past to co-exist with us now. This is a new age for Man, and hopefully, a re-age for native Martians. We have much to learn from that long-rusted race.

“To us, it will seem a visit from them; to them it will seem a visit from us. Two visitations during the same time. Of course,” she said apologetically, “outside of the tempconciled zone they will live and will have died in our past and we in their future. But in the zone, tempconciliation means an exciting, unprecedented present in TimePrime, where two beautiful races and evolutions will exchange knowledge and feelings.” She darted her eyes back and forth, as if sharing a secret. “It’s called the ‘Welcome-to-the-Solar-System’ Initiative, and you’ll be reading about it on your newsfloaters tomorrow with coffee.”

“Are they really little green men?” asked one of Renée’s grandchildren, seven, and one of twin girls.

“God, I hope so,” Renée answered the child directly. Then to the small crowd as a whole, “There’s going to be so many upset science fiction writers if they’re not.” She neutralized her smile. “The limited geological reconciliation trials on Mars over the harsh and sterile areas of the polar areas have not resulted in wave forms with exclusion zones—”

“English, please!” from deep in the crowd. Renée regrouped, her smile returning.

“It’s gonna work. And I expect the intermingling to be enormous. I expect to earn my salary, which I hope is out of this world.” Her audience groaned. She paused. “Sorry, couldn’t pass that phrase up.” Hers was a good audience, and she easily was able to swing the pendulum form flippant to serious, back and forth.

At five foot two and just over 50 kg., she seemed larger atop the stage from which she spoke, but she hoped thinner with the vertical stripes of her dress. She had already vowed to transport at least four Earth kilos to dump on Mars, transferring four kilos of potential energy she would release into Martian kinetic energy. She amused herself with the things she chose to worry about while giving a life-event speech.

“Now that I look back on my childhood, it appears that everything I’ve done, studied, learned, performed, and accomplished during my first sixty-five years, all of it has prepared me for the second half of my life.” She swept her eyes around the entire room. “I will of course be bringing all of you with me.”

“Really?” the twin asked again, her sister looking equally invested in the question.

“No, sweetie,” Renée answered, and pointed to her heart. “Just in here.”

“When do you leave?” asked Renée’s daughter, who—having declined telomorphing—looked easily many years older than her mother.

“Well,” Renée smiled a rascally smile, “maybe I’m already there.” Her gloating time reference served her well to conclude her speech.