Old Mars

The Dead Sea-Bottom Scrolls (A Re-creation of Oud’s Journey by Slimshang from Tharsis to Solis Lacus, by George Weeton, Fourth Mars Settlement Wave, 1981) HOWARD WALDROP

SO I AM STANDING HERE ON A COLD MORNING, BESIDE THE best approximation of a slimshang of which Terran science is capable—polycarbonates and (Earth) man-made fabrics instead of the original hardened plant fibers and outer coverings of animals long extinct. It looks fast, probably faster than any native-made slimshang, but it will have to do.

One thing it’s missing is the series of gears, cogs, plates, and knobs with which a sort of music was made as it rolled. Martians spoke of “coming at full melody”—since the reproduction was mechanical, like a music box, the faster the slimshang went, the louder and more rackety the tune.

Instead, I have a tape deck with me, on which I have chosen to put an endless loop of the early-1960s tune “The Martian Hop.”

It’s appropriate and fitting.

What I am doing is to set out in the re-created slimshang to follow the route (if not the incidents and feelings) of Oud’s famous journey from Tharsis to Solis Lacus.

It’s the most famous Martian travelogue we have (for many and varying reasons).

Oud was the first thinking commentator on the changes Mars was undergoing in his (long) lifetime. Others had noted the transformation, but not the underlying processes. And Oud’s personal experiences added much to the classic stature of his tale.

So on this cold morning at Settlement #6 (vying, like many, for the AAS to officially rechristen it Lowell City), I shook hands with the three people who had come outside the temporary bubble dome to see me off.

We stood exchanging small talk for a few minutes, then Oud’s words came to me: “A Being has to do what a Being has to do.”

So I climbed into my high-tech slimshang, up-sailed, waved to the others (who were already heading back for the haven of air they could breathe), and set my course west, playing “The Martian Hop” as I jumped some scattered pinkish dunes.

Think of Oud as a Martian Windwagon Smith.

He set out from Tharsis (on the old volcanic shield) toward Solis Lacus (the site of some till-then-inexact place of cultural revelation), and recorded what would have been to other Martians a pleasant (as we understand it) few-days jaunt in the equivalent of a hot-rod windwagon (which most slimshangs were, and Oud’s definitely was; I’m assuming that his approached mine in elegance, if not materials).

That Oud started in winter was unusual. The weather was colder and the winds less predictable then, given to frequent planet-girdling dust storms. Winter and spring trips were not unknown, but most were taken in mid–Martian summer, when temperatures sometimes rose to the low forties Fahrenheit.

This tradition was left over from an earlier Mars (along with cultural patterns and the development of the slimshang). No one thought to do it any other way.

The Martians were nothing if not a tradition-bound species. But there’s a lot to be said for customs that get you through 10 or 15 million years (the jury is still out).

I’m sure, in the future, someone will read my retracing of Oud’s journey and point out the know-it-allness of earlier humans jumping in with inexact knowledge and pronouncements of age off by factors of three or four, and will comment on them in footnotes.¹

From Oud: “Weather fine (for the time of year). Not much debris, sands fairly smooth and sessile. Skirted two or three eroded gullies. Smooth running till dark. Saw one other being all day, walking, near an aboveground single habitation. Pulled slimshang over at dark and buttoned up for the night. Very comfortable.”²

He should have seen the place today. I had to dodge erratic rocks the size of railroad freight cars, and the two or three eroded gulleys now look like the Channeled Scablands of the northwest United States.

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.

After the now-eroded features of my first day’s route, I was slowing myself where necessary to cover exactly the same distances as Oud: Only once in the whole trip had Oud’s slimshang, which must really have been something, made better time than mine through (in his day) worse terrain. Give or take a boulder the size of an Airstream trailer, the ground was a gradual slope off the Tharsis plateau.

I settled in for the night, calling in my position to Mars Central, watched the sunset (which comes fast in these parts), and saw one of the hurtling moons of Mars hurtle by. Then, like Oud, millennia before, I went to sleep.

OUD, ON HIS ORIGINAL ROUTE, COMMENTED THAT, IN FORMER days, slimshangs had made part of this day’s journey by “otherwise”—i.e., water. He dismissed how easy such an old journey must have been—on land, water for most of the day, then back to land.

Oud (and I) had to make our way around more dried channels. In Oud’s time, some still contained surface ice, as opposed to the open-water lakes they must have been in Oud’s ancestors’ times. Now not even ice remains, sublimated into the air. Just old worn watercourses, which made today’s trip a tough mother. I thought once I might have damaged a wheel (I have spares, but changing one out is not easy), but had only picked up a small, persistent rock.

Oud was one of the first to notice that the air was getting thinner. Others had seen the effects but had attributed it to other causes. The loss of water was one. Slimshang sails had once been small affairs: By Oud’s time, they were twice as large—my reproduction is 7/10 sail and sometimes that’s not enough.

It was also on this second day that Oud saw an asteroid hit in the distance.

From Oud: “A sudden plume of dust and steam on the horizon that rose a cretop (five miles) high. Much scattering of debris. Had to trim the slimshang close-to to avoid falling boulders and navigate carefully around many more. The cloud hung in the air till sundown, and probably after.”

My present course shows some remnants of Oud’s event and later ones, including a string of frosted craters off to my right. There are also a couple of shield craters or later volcanic (still active) cones that followed on that cataclysm.

The navigating was even dicier than Oud’s had been.

Some idea of the upheavals of Oud’s time may be gained by his referral (in an earlier narrative) to what is now Olympia Mons as “the new hill.”

So on went Oud on his winter journey, unconcerned by small things like the sky falling and mountains building on the horizon line.

It’s only an accident of sound that Oud’s name is the same as the English one for a Turkish mandolin. (I believe there is an album called The Kings of the Oud on Oud, put out by Picwick Records, supposedly music inspired by Oud’s journey, done by a bunch of studio musicians, rumored to have included Lou Reed and Glen Campbell, among others. I have never heard it: People who have said that it was “pretty uninspired by anything.”)

The third day of both our journeys was fairly downhill, uneventful, and of no great consequence. Night was the same. Oud did not even mention it.

The fourth day, I had some trouble with the rigging of the slimshang. Oud had troubles of a differing kind.

His narrative is deceptive. After complaining about the low quality of the foodstuffs he could find for his breakfast (he had noticed the decline in traditional plant life from his ancestors’ time earlier in the narrative), and speculating about his probably paltry lunch (“slim mossings” is the phrase he used), a few hours into the day comes the line, “If I didn’t know better, and this wasn’t winter season, I would think I was undergoing grexagging.”

Well. I wasn’t undergoing grexagging (no human ever had), but I was having the devil’s own time getting over a series of long gullies without my sail luffing. I resorted to the last ignominy of slimshanging: I got out and pushed.

Eventually, I gained height and wind simultaneously and made off at a fast clip, Solis Lacusward.

I had left Oud in his travels sure that he was not undergoing grexagging. After some more navigational and observational entries, his next sentence may take the reader by surprise.

“Bud has the tiller now. Since he knows almost everything I know, but is only just learning to use his pseudopodia, I let him learn by experience what a glorious thing a slimshang is, but also how ungainly it can become in seconds.”

Bud? asks the reader. Bud? Who is this? Where did he come from?

Oud cannot resist his little joke:

“I watch him clumsily take us around boulders and over dunes. I see how his movements and coordination become smoother and more assured as time—and miles—pass. He reminds me of myself when younger.”

Of course he did. Oud had undergone grexagging (meiosis). Bud was a younger Oud.

This is the only time in Martian literature that a narrator has grexagged in the course of an ongoing narrative. Grexagging usually took place in one’s domicile, attended by nest-brothers, and was celebrated with ritual exchanges of foodstuffs, chattel, and good wishes. Grexagging usually occurred in the spring or summer season, foretold by mood swings, dietary changes, and agrophobia.

It had happened to Oud in the winter, with no presaging except the slimshang wanderlust. He must have attributed his body’s stirrings to that, sublimating the others.

Scientist to the end, he described his changes: “I have less weight than in 393^rd year. To think I grexagged at such an advanced age, with no forewarnings, and in the winter season, is as surprising to me as anyone.

“It is said that Flimo of the (Syrtis Major) nest had an off-bud at 419 years, but that it was unviable and was ritually eaten at the Festival of Foregiving, and the nest stayed away for the customary year before being allowed to attend the next All-Nest Convention.

“Bud looks viable to me—in the last few hours, his handling of the slimshang has grown as assured as that of someone who’d been doing it for a century or so.

“We run now at full jangle across the flat of the former sea-bottom that stretches toward (Solis Lacus). It does a Being good to watch his bud-descendant proud and confident at the tiller of his slimshang.”

It’s still debated (especially by us first wave of humans on Mars) what event it was that took place at the cultural shrine toward which Oud and Bud made their way.

Before Oud, the literature was conflicting and rather noninformative. (On Earth, when anthropologists can’t find instant meaning in any cultural artifact, they say, “This obviously had deep religious significance.”)

What had happened in the dim Martian past? we asked, before Oud’s manuscript was unearthed. Was there some Fatima- or Lourdes-type event? Was it a recurring event and ritual, a Martian Eleusinian Mystery? Rather than either, it appeared to have been a singular event, so important that its effects lasted for several million years. Whatever it was, it must have been a doozy. No Being ever really talked about it before Oud. It seemed to be part of them, a piece of general knowledge, perhaps as known to Bud a few hours after his off-budding as to Oud after his 394 years.

So onward they went toward Solis Lacus; so onward I followed them (some three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand years later), me happy in the long-gone companions of the journey; Oud proud of his new offspring; Bud probably hooting from the sheer joy of being alive and at the tiller of a fine slimshang, on a dying planet that was losing its oxygen, its water, and its heat.

“As with all nest-fathers,” says Oud, “I instructed Bud on how to more efficiently rid himself of his waste products on waking in the morning and how to use his haze-eyes to better see distant objects. He only took a few minutes to learn those skills that would last him a lifetime.”

Now Oud the scientist takes over the narrative:

“I notice that for the past two days we have had only dry snow (carbon dioxide frost), with only a few patches of real snow here and there. Not like in our ancestors’ time, when dry snow was the rarity.”

His (and their, and my) next day of the trip would bring us to our goal—changed though it was since their time.

On old maps of Mars, Solis Lacus (The Lake of the Sun) was a bright circular feature in the midst of a darker area, thought at the time to be an irrigated, heavily vegetated patch, with the stark circularity of Solis Lacus in its midst.

We now know that the dark part was heavy volcanic dust and ash and the bright roundness a raised area swept by winds and kept clear.

In Oud’s time, it was a long fold of the edge of the old bottom of a remnant sea, like prehistoric Lake Bonneville on Earth. As they rolled toward it, Oud said, “Ancestors described the wonder and majesty of (Old Bitter Sea) with its rolled margin of amaranth and turquoise gleaming in the sunset after a long day’s slimshanging. Now it’s an almost featureless rise of the landscape, hardly worth a second two-looks.”

Oud reefed his sail as they slid out onto the brightness of the middle of Solis Lacus.

Bud said, “It is quiet here, Father.”

“Indeed,” said Oud, “for here is where it started.”

“Were you born here, Father?”

Oud looked around.

“We were all born here,” said Oud. He pointed to the raised lump in the cold distance. “That is where the Life-Rock fell from the sky. From where we, and all living things, come. In the ancestors’ days, we returned each year for the Festival of Wow, to appreciate that, and to think and wonder on its happening. It must have been something, then, all the nests gathered, all hooting and racket, such music as they had.”

“Are you sad, Father?” asked Bud.

“Sadness is for those who have personally lost something,” said Oud. “How can I be sad? I have made a fine journey in a good slimshang, in the low season. I have arrived at the place of our First-Birth. And I have a new bud-son who will live to see other wonders on this elder twilight world. How could I be sad?”

“Thank you for bringing me here,” said Bud.

“No,” said Oud, “thank you.”

Weeton here again. We leave Bud and Oud in a sort of valetudinarian idyll (I like to think), staring into the setting sun with Solis Lacus around them, and Thyle I and II far away.

Meanwhile, I’m out here on this empty rise where the edge of a sea once rolled, trying to find what is dragging on my retro-slimshang. The sun is setting here, probably adding to my anthropomorphization of those two Martians now dead four hundred thousand years.

After exploring the Life-Rock for a day (“If you’ve seen one rock, you’ve seen them all”—Oud), his narrative ends two days into the return journey back to Tharsis.

Oud, as far as we can find so far, never wrote another word.

Bud, except for his appearance in Oud’s narrative, is unknown to history or Martian literature.

I hope, so far as I’m able, that they lived satisfying, productive Martian lives.

We’ll never know. While Mars and the Martians were dying, we were still looking up, grunting, out of the caves, at the pretty red dot in the sky.

1 Well put. Weeton’s guess was fairly accurate, one of the few times early colonists and philologists were. Other places, he’s less reliable.

2 Elenkua N’Kuba, ed. Weeton’s Oud Narrative: A facsimile reproduction. Elsevier, the Hague: 2231.