The Martians. Kim Stanley Robinson

Eileen saw the spiral ribbing that so often characterized life. Her earphones rang with the excited voices of her companions. Roger had climbed the canyon wall and was inspecting a particular section, his faceplate only centimetres from the stone. ‘See what I mean?’ John was asking. ‘Martian snails! It’s like those fossil bacterial mats they talk about, only further advanced. Back when Mars had surface water and an atmosphere, life did begin. It just didn’t have time to get very far.’

      ‘Nobleton snails,’ Cheryl said, and they laughed. Eileen picked up fragment after fragment, her excitement growing. They were all very similar. She was taxing her suit’s cooling system, starting to sweat. She examined a well-preserved specimen carefully, pulling it out of the rock to do so. The common band was distractingly noisy, and she was about to turn it off when Roger’s voice said slowly, ‘Uh-ohh … Hey, people. Hey.’

      When it was silent he said hesitantly, ‘I hate to spoil the party, but … these little things aren’t fossils.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘What do you mean?’ John and Ivan challenged. ‘How do you know?’

      ‘Well, there are couple reasons,’ Roger said. Everyone was still now, and watching him. ‘First, I believe that fossils are created by a process that requires millions of years of water seepage, and Mars never had that.’

      ‘So we think now,’ Ivan objected. ‘But it may not be so, because it’s certain that there was water on Mars all along. And after all, here are these things.’

      ‘Well …’ Eileen could tell he was deciding to let that argument pass. ‘Maybe you’re right, but a better reason is, I think I know what these are. They’re lava pellets – bubble pellets, I’ve heard them called – although I’ve never seen ones this small. Little lava bombs from one of the Olympus Mons eruptions. A sort of spray.’

      Everyone stared at the objects in their hands.

      ‘See, when lava pellets land hot in a certain sort of sand, they sink right through it and melt the sand fast, releasing gas that forms the bubble, and these glassy interiors. When the pellet is spinning, you get these spiral chambers. So I’ve heard, anyway. It must have happened on a flat plain long ago, and when the whole plain tilted and started falling down this slope, these layers broke up and were buried by later deposits.’

      ‘I don’t believe that’s necessarily so,’ John declared, while the others looked at the wall. But even he sounded pretty convinced to Eileen.

      ‘Of course we’ll have to take some back to be sure,’ Roger agreed in a soothing tone.

      ‘Why didn’t you tell us this last night?’ Eileen asked.

      ‘Well, I couldn’t tell till I had seen the rock they were in. But this is lava-sprayed sandstone. That’s why it’s so hard in its upper layers. But you’re an areologist, right?’ He wasn’t mocking. ‘Don’t they look like they’re made of lava?’

      Eileen nodded, reluctantly. ‘Looks like it.’

      ‘Well, lava doesn’t make fossils.’

      Half an hour later a dispirited group was stretched out over the duck trail, straggling along in silence. John and Ivan trailed far behind, weighted down by several kilos of lava pellets. Pseudofossils, as both areologists and geologists called them. Roger was ahead, talking with the Mitsumus, attempting to cheer them all up, Eileen guessed. She felt bad about not identifying the rock the previous night. She felt more depressed than she could easily account for, and it made her angry. Everything was so empty out here, so meaningless, so without form …

      ‘Once I thought I had found traces of aliens,’ Roger was saying. ‘I was off by myself around the other side of Olympus, hiking canyons as usual, except I was by myself. I was crossing really broken fretted terrain, when suddenly I came across a trail duck. Stones never stack up by themselves. Now the Explorer’s Society keeps a record of every single hike and expedition, you know, and I had checked before and I knew I was in fresh territory, just like we are now. No humans had ever been in that part of the badlands, as far as the Society knew. Yet here was this duck. And I started finding other ones right away. Set not in a straight line, but zigzagging, tacking like. And little. Tiny piles of flat rock, four or five high. Like they were set up by little aliens who saw best out of the sides of their eyes.’

      ‘You must have been astounded,’ Mrs Mitsumu said.

      ‘Exactly. But, you know – there were three possibilities. It was a natural rock formation – extremely unlikely, but it could be that breadloaf formations had slid onto their sides and then been eroded into separate pieces, still stacked on each other. Or they were set up by aliens. Also unlikely, in my opinion. Or someone had hiked through there without reporting it, and had played a game, maybe, for someone later to find. To me, that was the most likely explanation. But for a while there …’

      ‘You must have been disappointed,’ said Mrs Mitsumu.

      ‘Oh no,’ Roger replied easily. ‘More entertained than anything, I think.’

      Eileen stared at the form of their guide, far ahead with the others. He truly didn’t care that John’s discovery had not been the remnants of life, she judged. In that way he was different, unlike John or Ivan, unlike herself; for she felt his obviously correct explanation of the little shells as a loss larger than she ever would have guessed. She wanted life out there as badly as John or Ivan or any of the rest of them did, she realized. All those books she had read, when studying literature … That was why she had not let herself remember that igneous rock would never be involved with fossilization. If only life had once existed here – snails, lichen, bacteria, anything – it would somehow take away some of this landscape’s awful barrenness.

      And if Mars itself could not provide, it became necessary to supply it – to do whatever was necessary to make life possible on this desolate surface, to transform it as soon as possible, to give it life. Now she understood the connection between the two main topics of evening conversation in their isolated camps: terraforming, and the discovery of extinct Martian life forms; and the conversations took place all over the planet, less intently than out here in the canyons, perhaps, but still, all her life Eileen had been hoping for this discovery, had believed in it.

      She pulled the half-dozen lava pellets she had saved from one of her suit pockets, and stared at them. Abruptly, bitterly, she tossed them aside, and they floated out into the rust waste. They would never find remnants of Martian life; no one ever would. She knew that was true in every cell of her. All the so-called discoveries, all the Martians in her books – they were all part of a simple case of projection, nothing more. Humans wanted Martians, that was all there was to it. But there were not, and never had been, any canal builders; no lamppost creatures with heat-beam eyes, no brilliant lizards or grasshoppers, no manta ray intelligences, no angels and no devils; there were no four-armed races battling in blue jungles, no big-headed skinny thirsty folk, no sloe-eyed dusky beauties dying for Terran sperm, no wise little Bleekmen wandering stunned in the desert, no golden-eyed golden-skinned telepaths, no doppelganger race – not a funhouse mirror-image of any kind; there weren’t any ruined adobe palaces, no dried oasis castles, no mysterious cliff dwellings packed like a museum, no hologrammatic towers waiting to drive humans mad, no intricate canal systems with their locks all filled with sand, no, not a single canal; there were not even any mosses creeping down from the polar caps every summer, nor any rabbitlike animals living far underground; no plastic windmill-creatures, no lichen capable of casting dangerous electrical fields, no lichen of any kind; no algae in the hot springs, no microbes in the soil, no microbacteria in the regolith, no stromatolites, no nanobacteria in the deep bedrock … no primeval soup.

      All so many dreams. Mars was a dead planet. Eileen scuffed the freeze-dried dirt and watched through damp eyes as the pinkish sand lofted away from her boot. All dead. That was her home: dead Mars. Not even dead, which implied a life and a dying. Just … nothing. A red void.

      They turned down the main canyon. Far below was their tent, looking as if it would slide down its slope any instant. Now there was a sign of life. Eileen grinned