Written in Dust

Written in Dust

by Melinda M. Snodgrass

She banked to come in next to him, and they flew wingtip to wingtip as they passed over the Martian city. She wondered what her dream Martians would make of it now. The jewel-tone towers were still the same, but now the avenues were washed with red dust and filled with the whine and moan of the incessant Martian wind instead of with songs.

The shadow of the ultralights’ wings swept across the red sand and rock of the planet, and played tag with the swirling whirlwinds dancing across the craters and plateaus. The fragile light of the distant sun sparkled on the domes covering the farm fields of the settlers.

Through the front windshield, she watched the looming mass of Mons Olympus, the solar system’s largest volcano, draw closer. The peak scraped at the red sky of Mars, and a few tattered clouds coiled about the shoulders of the mountain as if the massif were trying to wrap itself in a thin shawl.

Written in Martian Dust. Painting by Elena

… They found a level area not far from the sharp cut of the canal and landed. In Mars’s low gravity they were able to take long, flauting strides that quickly carried them to the edge of the canal. It was obvious that it wasn’t natural. The edges were clean, as if cut by a laser, and the walls were impossibly straight. Tilde knew that early explorers had lowered probes into the canals but nothing had been found. Just sheer walls of fused glass. Why had the Martians made them? What purpose had they served?

Initially, the fear that something lived in those deep cuts had discourages colonization, but years passed and nothing ever emerged from the canals, and necessity replaced fear. The home world, gripped in climate change and lacking enough cropland for her teeming billions, needed a new breadbasket. So the doomsayers had been overridden, and the settlers had arrived.

Mechanical Flower

Mechanical Flower

As I spoke, I craned my neck to look up at the night sky. The major constellations gleamed brightly: Ursa Major, Draco, Cygnus, with Denes as the north star. You can’t see the Milky Way very well in the city; you have to go out into the desert to get a decent view of the Martian night sky. (Martian Blood, by Allen M. Steele)

The sea beast’s image was almost completely defaced by the miner’s tracks. The behemoth’s mechanical growls fades as it turned a far-off corner in its programmed course, putting walls between it and the Earthman. (The ugly Duckling, by Matthew Hughes)

Mars now loomed above the bow, glowing red and huge as the dome of St. Peter’s at sunset. The great north polar cap gleamed white and pristine atop the ruddy globe, but Sexton had rejected Edmond’s idea of landing there to melt water from snow, fearing that the air of the polar regions might be so cold that their limited supply of coal could not heat it sufficiently to raise the ship again. (The Wreck of the Mars Adventure, by David D. Levine)

“Mars isn’t older than Earth. It just feels older”, Tom Beckworth said, as they walked, renewing a discussion they’d been having off and on all the way from Kennedy Base on the icebound shores of the Artic Sea. (S.M. Stirling, Swords of Zar-tu-Kan).

Colors of Mars. The light of Martian Sun. Painting: Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

“My race is not the first to inhabit this world”, answered Qudipai. “Before us, there was a race that strode across Mars like the giants they were. A tall man like you would not come up to the waist of even the smallest of them. Nothing could stand in there way, but soon their triumphs made them arrogant. It was when they decided that they themselves must be gods that the true God brought His fist down and flattened their kingdom with a single blow”. (In the Tombs of the Martian Kings, by Mike Resnick)

I slept, but with the strange dreams that I remembered from earlier times here, tormenting images of leatherblack wings and a girl’s face, seen through fire. (Liz Williams, Out of Scarlight)

Oud lived, we think, at the start of the Great Bombardment (see later), before the largest of the geologic upheavals, the rise of the shield volcanoes and the great asteroid impacts that released untold amounts of suddenly boiling permafrost and loosed water vapor and pyroclastic flows that changed the even-then-ever changing face of Mars. (The Dead Sea-Bottom Scrolls – A Re-creation of Oud’s Journey by Slimshang from Tharsis to Solis Locus by George Weeton, Fourth Mars Settlement Wave, 1981, Howard Waldrop).

Shall I recount to you the battle at the edge of the Palace of the Underworld, and how young Carter saved us all by scaling the massive spider-ship as though it were rigging, his dagger in his teeth? Or the fateful meeting with Hermeton, brother to Carina Meer, and the fearful duplicity of his plan to defeat the Ikkeans? Shall I describe to you the great caverns below the martian surface and detail the mystery and madness of the Elanin Chorus? The death dwarves of Inren-Kah? The hawk-men of Nis? The Plant-Queen of Venus? Like Scheherazade to her Caliph, Il believe I could beguile you with these tales for countless nights. But to what end? (A Man without Honor by James S.A. Corey).

Tilda pushed back the canopy and climbed into her garishly painted ultralight plane. Was it the unremitting red of Mars that made settlers so crazy for color? she wondered. Hers was painted silver, with blue stars and moons and streaks and swirls across the overly long wings and fuselage. (Written in Dust by Melinda M. Snodgrass).

Colors of Mars. The light of Martian Sun. Image : Megan Jorgensen.

The Lost Canal

The Lost Canal

by Michael Moorcock

The canals were deep and wide once, designed to get the most from dwindling water supplies. The meteors leveled them. But this Ia canal? It was underground?

« My clan’s ancestors planned to build this great underground canal, protected from all foreseeable danger, completely encircling the planet, with branches serving other local systems. The canal was named for an ancient water goddess, Ia. Ia would connect to a series of hubs serving other canal systems. Its creators thought that it would, through the trade it would stimulate, bring peace to the entire planet. Ia would circle Mars from pole to pole, where the melting ice caps would continuously refill it. The project was abandoned long before my time.”

« Abandoned? What happened? » In spite of his circumstances, Stone found the story engaging. « It sounds a grea idea ».

« During construction at the Pataphal cross-waterway intersection, after hundreds of miles of the Ia system had already been built, a terrible disaster struck. A whole section of the great Nokedu Cavern floor, which had been tested and found solid, fell away. Hundreds were killed. More of the cavern kept falling, until it formed a massive chasm, miles deep and far too wide to bridge. Black, unfathomable, the Nokedu Falls dropped deep into the planet’s heart.

The Lost Canal. Painting by Elena

The entire project was abandonded. No more would have been said had not an extraordinary phenomenon occurred maybe a month after the project was closed for good. A guard reported seeing the canal slowly filling with water.

Some freak of natural condensation created a system that had the effect of filling the Ia canal with enough water to float a good-size barge. But of course, at Nokedu the water again rushed into the great chasm. Damming didn’t work. It became pretty clear that the water had to circulate. Several expeditions had been made into the Nokedu Deep to find the cause of the phenomenon. The expeditions were lost or returned without success. The water supply remained continuous…

…

He moved his head to his right. In the helmet’s crisp illumination, he saw black water rippling, making its rapid way toward the falls, which had to be miles away and yet were already distinct. A distant roar. At a discreet sound from the helmet, Stone turned right, keeping the water on his left as the walkway widened, revealing the dark bulk of buildings, low houses, all abandoned.

This had been a busy, thriving port.

People had traded down here and been entertained, had families and lived complex lives. Mac wished that he had time to explore the town. Unlike the canal itself, the settlements along the bank were on a human scale and in different styles. This was where the last humanoid Martians had lived. The place had a bleak atmosphere. Mac saw no evidence for the legends he’d grown up hearing in the Low-Canal of enduring pockets of Martians still living down here.

They were not the last native Martians. Those were the raïfs. Never wholly visible, the flitted around the Low-Canal settlements – the so-called mourning Martians, whose songs sometimes drifted in from the depths of the dead sea-bottoms and whose pink-veined outlines were almost invisible by noon. They drifted like translucent rays, feeding on light. Their songs could be heartbreaking. Storytellers insisted that they were not a new race at all but the spirits of the last humanoid Martians forever doomed to haunt the Low-Canal.

Stone had never felt quite so alone. The buildings were thinning out as he walked, and his helmet showed him an increasing number of great natural arches, of stalagmites and stalactites forming a massive stone forest beside the whispering water of the Ia canal. Some had been carved by ancient artists into representations of long-since-extinct creatures. Every so often, he was startled by a triangular face with eldritch, almost Terran, features. Mac, used to so much strangeness, felt almost in awe of those petrified faces, which stared back at him with sardonic intelligence.

Nothing lived here, not even the savage crocs. Nothing flew or scampered or wriggled over the smooth marble, among the stone trunks of stone trees whose stone boughs bent back to the ground. The only noise came from the rushing water, and even that was muted.

Destroying the Future. Painting by Megan Jorgensen.

The Sunstone

The Sunstone

by Phyllis Eisentstein

The scooter had a mapper, but he didn’t need it; he had a good sense of direction, it wasn’t all that far, and you couldn’t get los following the Hiddekel canal. The sky was dark when he started out, but the scooter’s headlight was bright and the road was in good shape, well cleared of the water-seeking nettles that perpetually encroached on the canal. He made it to Charlestown by dawn.

Charlestown had never been much of a town, even though it was on the route to the confluence of two canals, but then, even the major cities on Mars were nothing compared to the ones on Earth. But Dave had had enough of the crowds and bustle of Earth, and Charlestown looked very good to him, its single main street lined on both sides with ramshackle houses that doubled as stores and bars, with lanes of smaller homes spreading outward on the side away from the canal. North of the town was the boat dock, with half a dozen barges and there small sailboats moored there, and beyond that, the arc or Martian cottages where Rekari and his extended family lived. As Dave expected, only a few people were on the main street that early, and he recognized them all. One even called his name as he passed, and he raised an arm in greeting though he didn’t stop.

His father’s place, close to the north end of town, was both office and home, with a sign above the door that announced, in faded lettering, “Ben Miller and Sons, Tourism. See the Ancient Ruins”.

Guy’s out in the desert. He beds down for the nigh. Wakes up suddenly. He hears water. He listens more carefully. Running water. It’s the ghost canal. A kind of mirage, leading travelers astray so they die of thirst convinced there’s water all around them.

They told him about a cave system. Legend said it was a way into another world. Some argued it came out on Terra, in Arizona somewhere. Some thought ancient Mars. Others linked it to the discoveries of the so-called hidden universe obscured from our astronomers by drifting clouds of cosmic fog. (The Lost Canal by Michael Moorcock)

Some were Marsmen like him, some were new settlers, still filled with enthusiasm for the open land that had been so effectively advertised to them, and a few were wealthy tourists. Dave had made sure the latter had his contact information: “Tour the ruins of the lost Martian civilization with the men who discovered them,” said his card. It was not quite a lie in his own case because, as a teenager, he had found a cluster of foundations and a few lengths of sand-scoured wall no higher than his knee near on of the lesser canals that splayed out from Nilicaus Lacus, and Rekari, his father’s Martian business partner, had pronounced them seven or eight thousand Martian years abandoned…

 Sunstone. … as a teen, he had found a cluster of foundations and a few lengths of sand-scoured broken walls… Photo by Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

…

The arc of cottages there, with its open side to Hiddekel, which the Martians called Moreyah, had stood, Rekari once said, for a thousand years, which wasn’t all that long by Martian standards. The cottages themselves were made of a local soft red stone. The Martians grew the plant for their seeds, which humans considered inedible, and fed the seeds not just to themselves but to small lizards living in burrows in the canal walls. The lizards were their primary source of protein, and humans also considered them inedible. Dave had tried lizard stew once, and on courtesy kept him from spitting out his first and only mouthful. He had always thought it was a good thing that Rekari’s people felt much the same about human food – that meant there was little competition for those kinds of resources between Martians and Marsmen.

Mariner

Mariner

By Chris Roberson

The week after he had graduated from high school, and after tearful farewells with his friends and family, Jason set off from Galveston, Texas, in a twenty-four-foot cutter, intending to continue sailing until he came back to port from the other direction.

But he hadn’t even managed to complete the first leg of his journey. He was still in the Caribbean when, under the light of a fool moon, he came upon a strange vortex in the dark waters. A swirling whirlpool, it grew from nothing in a matter of moments, to quickly for Jason to change course to avoid it. One instant Jason was sailing along under a starry sky, and the next his boat hit the vortex and everything changed.

Jason had squinted his eyes, bracing for impact, and when he opened them again, he looked out onto another world.

He was on Mars, he would later learn. Not the Mars he’d seen in pictures sent back by NASA probes though. Had he been transported to the distant past of the Red planet, or its future? Or perhaps on the some analogue of the fourth planet that existed in another dimension? Jason had never learned for certain. He tried to see what the Earth looked like, to give him some sense of context, but the best telescopes he had managed to construct showed him only a blurry image of a blue-green planet in the sky, and his knowledge of constellations did not extend to calculating how those same stars would appear on another world and at another time.

But those were facts that Jason would only discover later. On that first day, at that first instant he knew only that he was somewhere he’d never seen before.

Mariner. The Suffocated God, forgive my blasphemy (Chris Roberson). Photo by Elena

The cutter lay half-buried in fine sands, under a brilliant blue sky, across which two moons sailed in their stately orbits toward each other. Jason had stepped off the deck of his boat onto the sands, in a daze, and immediately sunk up to his waist. The grains of sand were so small, so fine, that the ground behaved more like a liquid than a solid, almost like quicksand. And as he floundered in the sands, barely able to keep afloat, he noticed the menacing silhouette of a bony ridge knifing through the red sands toward him.

Jason’s first day on his new world would be his last, his journeys ended in the belly of a sand-shark, had a passing Praxian naval ship not hauled him on board. The crew had never seen a human before and returned to the Praxis canals in the south with Jason as much as object of curiosity as he was their captive. Despite the language barrier that separated them when they reached port, Jason managed to communicate to his captors that he needed air to breathe. Had he taken much longer to get his message across, he would have drowned, as they began to force him down into their underwater community with them.

In the days that followed, Jason learned just enough of the common tongue in Praxis to offend the sensibilities of the Praxian Hegemony, who refused to entertain the notion that life might exist anywhere in the universe but the red planet, despite any and all evidence to the contrary. He was convicted of heresy and confined to a cell where he would await execution. It was there that Jason met the first Martian whom he would call “friend”, and the course of his life was forever changed.

But through it all, Jason cursed the editors of National Geographic. Had it not been for them, he might just have gone to college or gotten a job like any other regular person.