Old Mars

The Ugly Duckling MATTHEW HUGHES

IT TOOK FRED MATHER THE BETTER PART OF AN HOUR TO drive over the blue hills that stood between the base camp and the bone city. At the highest point of the switchbacking ancient road of crushed white stone, the thin Martian air grew even thinner. He had to take long, slow breaths to fill his lungs, while dark spots danced at the edges of his vision and he worried about steering the New Ares Mining Corporation’s jeep over one of the precipices.

He could have gotten there more quickly—and more safely—by paralleling the dried-up canal down to the glass-floored sea. Then he could have plowed fifteen miles through its carpeting dust to the promontory girdled by a seawall that had not felt a wave’s slap in ten thousand years. The towers of the dead Martian town stood like an abandoned, unsolved chess puzzle, white against the faded sky.

The road at the landward end of the town was lined on either side by low, squat structures, windowless but with arched doors of weathered bronze. He was just wondering if they might be tombs—nobody knew yet what the Martians had done with their dead—when the hand radio on the passenger seat squawked and Red Bowman’s voice said, “Base to Mather, over.”

He picked up the set, keyed the mike switch, and said, “Mather, over.”

“How you coming?” said the crew chief. Mather thought he heard a note of suspicion in the man’s voice.

“I’m just pulling into the town now.”

There was a silence, then the radio said, “The hell you been playing at? You should’ve been there an hour already.”

“I took the hill road.”

“What the hell for?”

“I thought it might be quicker. It looked shorter on the map.” Mather was lying. The reason he hadn’t gone by the canal road was that he hadn’t wanted to meet any other traffic. He had wanted, for a little while at least, to be able to pretend that he was the only Earthman on Mars instead of just the only archaeologist.

The radio crackled back at him. “We got a schedule to meet, egghead. Now you get those transponders planted, then you get your heinie back here mucho pronto.”

Bowman hadn’t said “Over,” but Mather was about to confirm and sign off when the crew chief continued with, “And you come home by the seabed. You wreck that jeep, and you’ll be going back Earthside on the next rocket, with a forfeiture of all pay and benefits!”

“Roger, over and out,” Mather said. He put down the radio and steered the vehicle through a gateway of bone pillars carved in twin spirals that led to a small plaza surrounded by two-story white buildings, their walls pierced by narrow doors and slits for windows.

The Martians had been light-boned and graceful, brown-skinned and golden-eyed, though they had often worn masks when they went out—silver or blue for the men, crimson for the women, gold for the children. Back on Earth, he had seen the long-distance images recorded by the earliest expeditions—the ones that had failed, for reasons still unknown. There were no close-up, postcontact likenesses of Martians because between the third and fourth landings, Terran diseases to which they had no resistance had killed off almost all of them in a few weeks. Their flesh had dried to leaves and their bones had become sticks; the floors of their homes were littered with the stuff.

Mather would have loved to meet a Martian, though he knew they could be strange. Telepathic was the prevailing opinion among academics, though with brains that worked at a sideways tangent to what humans meant when they said, “Common sense.”

You still heard tales of surviving Martians, spotted at a distance in remote places—such as the blue hills behind him. That had been another reason Mather had come that way, just in case.

He sat in the jeep and took a long, slow look at as much of the town as he could see from here. “Get a good overview,” his graduate-thesis advisor used to say, “before you plunge into the detail. That way the details will form themselves into a pattern sooner and you may save yourself from running up a lot of blind alleys.”

The plaza held only one object of note. At the center of the open space that surrounded him was a substantial circular structure, four ascending, concentric rings of white material that would probably turn out to be bone—there was a reason why the dead town was called “the bone city.”

Mather could see a bronze pipe standing up from the smallest, highest circle. From it would have flowed water to fill the first round of the four, to trickle over the sides and fill the others in turn. Of course, not a drop of liquid had dampened the object in millennia: this part of Mars was believed to have been abandoned tens of centuries ago, after the seas had vanished and the soft rains that had gently sculpted the hills ceased to come over the green water.

Having finished his survey, Mather climbed out of the jeep, hooked the radio to his belt, and approached the nearest building. Its door was ajar, but he had to push it all the way open to squeeze through the narrow entry. He found himself in a circular foyer, its bone walls decorated with lines of copper—once gleaming, now a dull green—that had been inset into incisions in the white hardness.

Some of the lines were curved, some straight. They met at odd angles and somehow contrived to draw Mather’s gaze into what seemed to be three-dimensional shapes. It seemed to him that the silence in the dead town had managed to deepen. Then, as he continued to stare, trying to make sense of the forms emerging from the matrix, the lines moved of their own accord. He experienced a growing vertigo. One moment, he was looking into an infinite distance; the next, he was about to fall into it.

He clapped his hands to his eyes and held them there while he slowly counted to ten. When he took them away, he was looking again at lines of verdigrised copper set into bone. But immediately they started their pull. He dropped his gaze to the floor, saw a spiral mosaic of gold and silver tiles, faded and half-obscured by dust that had drifted through the doorway. At least it did not move.

The radio hissed and squawked again. “Base to Mather,” said Bowman’s voice, “we’re not seeing any transponder signals.”

He went outside. “I’m in the town, just scoping for the best sites,” he said.

The backseats of the jeep had been taken out to make room for a large wooden box with a hinged lid. Inside, nestled in packing straw, were dozens of small, black oblongs, each one a radio transponder with a telescoping steel antenna that could be pulled up from its top and a red on-off switch.

Mather’s job was to place the devices in a rough grid. As he positioned each one, he was to throw its switch to on. The transponders would broadcast signals that would delineate the layout of the ancient town to the electronic brain of a huge tracked machine that was even now being slowly hauled from the base camp down to the dry seabed. Tonight, it would be eased down to the seabed, there to be loaded onto a multiwheeled transporter. Tomorrow, it would creep the rest of the way to the bone town, to be off-loaded at the base of a sloping ramp topped by a set of stairs from which, presumably, the ancient Martians had once launched their shining boats.

The leviathan would trundle up into the town, deploy its hydraulic grapples, and begin stuffing the bone city, piece by piece, into its mechanical maw. It would grind up the town, house by house, separating metal and stone from the ossiferous material that the Martians had built the place from. The valueless stone would be spat out, the metal compacted and excreted like cubic droppings.

The metal was valuable, but it was the bone that really mattered. It would be pulverized, sacked, and stacked on a detachable trailer that rolled along behind the behemoth. As a trailer was filled, it would be detached and another put in its place. Then the loaded trailer would be hooked to a tractor, and the eight-wheeler would head off across the dry sea until it met the Martian road-and-canal network. Then it would go to one of the newly built Earthman towns that were surrounded by farms whose soil, even after lying fallow for thousands of years, was not all it might be.

The ground bones of Martian cities would fertilize the crops that would feed the tens of thousands of Earthmen arriving each month as the silver-rocket armada continued to cross the black gulf between the worlds.

Mather was one of the most recent arrivals. He had been unable to secure funding to come to Mars as an archaeologist. The new old world needed brawny pioneers, not pointy-headed academics, he was told. Archaeologists objected to the destruction of the ancient Martian cities, so the company was being careful not to let any of them anywhere near them.

So Mather had concocted a résumé that should not have withstood even the most cursory scrutiny, but New Ares Mining Corporation had lucrative contracts to fulfill and was desperate for men to mine the bone cities. Mather was on the next rocket out.

The trip was long and the quarters close. The men he would be working with soon deduced that Fred Mather had not come, as they had, from the coal mines of Kentucky or the oil leases of west Texas. His hands were too soft and his neck not rough enough. The crew chief, Red Bowman, a veteran of the Alaska gold fields, marked him down as a city-boy tenderfoot on a job that had no slack to cut for greenhorns.

Mather worked quickly, quartering the town on foot, placing the transponders according to a rough map made from an aerial photograph snapped by a New Ares rocket. Two hours after he began, he threw the switch on the last device, then walked back to where he had left the jeep.

He lifted the hood, removed the cover of the carburetor, and dropped a pinch of Martian grit into its barrel. Then he radioed base to say that the vehicle wasn’t running right—he suspected dirt in the carburetor or fuel line—so he would stay the night in the town and repair the faulty part in the morning.

“I wouldn’t want to risk overturning the jeep coming home in the dark,” he said. “Those roads can ice up pretty bad, I hear.”

Bowman was on his supper break. The radioman said, “Roger that. Talk to you tomorrow. Base out.”

In the dwindling sunlight, Mather dug under the jeep’s front seat for the scuffed satchel that contained his field notebook. He equipped himself with a heavy-duty flashlight.

“Okay,” he said to himself, “let’s see what we can accomplish.”

It was no good saying to the directors and shareholders of New Ares Mining Corporation that the bone cities of Mars were a priceless asset. New Ares accountants and engineers had already worked out the figures: The cities were only priceless in that they were free for the taking; the profits from mining them, however, would start in the tens of millions and climb sharply into the hundreds. It was conceivable that, if Mars filled up and more of the bone-built dead towns were found, New Ares’ earnings could eventually total a billion.

“Imagine,” one of Mather’s workmates had said on the trip out, as they swung side by side in their hammocks in the passenger hold. “A billion dollars. And we’re gonna be part of that.”

“Yeah,” Mather had said. “Imagine.”

The Martians had built their towns mostly out of stone and metal, crystal and glass. They had run water through channels in the floors—to cool the rooms and, Mather hypothesized, their slender feet—and grown fruit hydroponically from the walls.

But in some parts of the planet, there had once been a fashion—perhaps it was a ritual requirement—for building in bone. Martian architects had designed houses walled and floored in thin sheets of ossiferous material that must have been peeled like veneer from the huge bones of gigantic sea creatures. Sometimes, the great ribs and femurs were used whole as structural members, trimmed and squared or rounded to the needed dimensions, often ornately carved into pillars and lintels. Still more of the stuff had been crushed into powder, then bound together with burnt lime to make a durable concrete for roads and doorsteps.

Building in bone made for houses that were filled with a diffuse and airy light that threw no shadows. The material was also porous, so the rooms breathed even though the windows were narrow and sealed with bronze shutters. The walls also had the quality of absorbing rather than reflecting sound; Mather imagined that conversations in Martian rooms must have been muted, even the shouts and tumults of the aureus-eyed children softened and calmed.

He chose houses at random, traversing hallways and peering into chambers. The places were empty, the inhabitants having packed up in no apparent hurry. Occasionally, he found items of abandoned furniture—more bone, a couple of metal frames, the less durable wooden parts long since turned to dust.

In a corner of one upstairs room, he found a bone table on which rested a scatter of Martian books. He’d heard of these: sheets of thin silver inscribed in snakelike symbols of indelible blue ink. No one could read them, though it was said that someone had once done so and had become deranged. The subsequent murders had been hushed up.

Mather leafed through the books but could derive nothing from them other than that they had been beautifully made. He gazed at a page for almost a minute, waiting to see if he would be drawn into the twisting patterns as he had been with the wall design, ready to drop the book if anything untoward occurred. But nothing did. Finally, he placed the artifacts in his satchel—a willful violation of his terms of employment—and went outside.

The town sloped gradually from the landward end to the place where the sea had been, the finger of rock on which it was built also narrowing as it neared the vanished waves. At the very tip, the Martians had laid out a wide plaza, this one without a fountain. The pavement was fashioned from thousands of small tiles, their original bright colors now sun-faded to pale pastels, arranged in a border of stylized waves and sailing ships, blue against bronze, surrounding a great, sinuous sea creature with huge eyes and triangular flukes.

A broad flight of bone-concrete steps led down from the open space to the former harbor, where two curved moles enclosed a sheltered basin with a seaward opening only wide enough for two of the slim, burnished craft to pass at once.

The buildings that stood at the edge of the open space were grander than the houses he had entered so far. Their entrances were wide metal doors between carved pillars of bone. The surfaces of the doors were worked in raised snake-script in bas relief. Unlike the mouths of the houses, these were all closed.

It was natural for an archaeologist to wonder when presented with the unexplained behavior of vanished folk. Did the Martians, on the day they abandoned their homes, observe a ritual that decreed their doors must forever lie open? Was there a converse requirement to seal the entrances of public buildings, as Mather assumed the wide-doored edifices to be?

He did not know, would probably never know, but he would enjoy speculating in the professional journals when he returned at last to Earth, the only one of his kind to have done the fieldwork. And so it was with a frisson of anticipation that Fred Mather took hold of the handles of a pair of bronze doors and pulled.

The portals opened easily and he stepped into a wide, well-lit space. The building contained one high-ceilinged room, domed above in thinnest bone so that a translucent illumination fell upon the ringed tiers of seats that descended from the doorway to make a flat-bottomed bowl. In the middle of the amphitheater, rising from the floor, was a great cube of white stone, its top a little higher than the uppermost row of seats.

On the side facing Mather as he stepped down from tier to tier, the surface of the block was incised with a complex design, inlaid with greened-over copper, like the wall in the first house he had entered. It drew his eyes so that his steps began to falter. He lowered himself to a seat midway down the bowl. This time he would study the effect. He pulled his eyes away and fetched out his notebook, unclipped a pen from its wire-spiral spine, and took a deep breath.

Then he looked again at the cube. As before, he found that whichever part of the design he focused on, his gaze was pulled toward its center. Abruptly, the two-dimensional pattern took on depth, so that instead of staring at something, he was now peering into it.

Unable to look away, he flung a forearm across his eyes, then used the limb to restrict his vision as he made quick notes on the effect. At one point, he looked up to see if he could sketch the pattern of green on white, but immediately the pulling-in effect resumed—this time even stronger—and he had to use his arm to blind himself again while he noted this new observation.

From the satchel, the radio squawked. He paid it no heed, continued to write. Red Bowman’s voice came, harsh and incongruous in this Martian space, “Base to Mather, over.”

The archaeologist ignored the summons, continued to make notes. He had a sense that he was about to discover something new and remarkable, to acquire some transformative knowledge to which he would say, at first, “That’s incredible!” followed almost immediately by, “But, of course!”

Bowman’s voice intruded again on the moment. He reached inside the satchel to switch off the radio, but a momentary flash of cunning stayed his hand: If he didn’t answer, they might think he was hurt; if they thought he was hurt, they might come to help him; if they came, they would take him away from … from whatever was about to fill him with—

“Base to Mather, are you all right?”

He keyed the mike switch. “Mather to base. What’s up?”

“What took you so long?”

The lie came smoothly. “I was cleaning out the carburetor. Wanted to wipe my hands before I picked up the radio.”

There was a silence. He could imagine the crew chief digesting the information, filtering it through his undisguised dislike of the greenhorn—an impersonal dislike that extended to all the Fred Mathers of the two worlds, with their soft palms, their long words and longer sentences. He probably suspected that people like him secretly hoarded books that should have been burned on the great bonfires Bowman would remember from his childhood, when the government had cleansed the people’s minds.

At last, Bowman said, “We may have trouble getting the harvester down the ramp to the seabed tomorrow. It’s steeper than it looked. So it might not arrive on schedule.”

“Okay,” said Mather. “Doesn’t bother me.”

“But we’re all gonna be tied up with this. So if you can’t get the jeep running, nobody’s gonna come and get you.”

“Okay.”

“Or bring you any food or water.”

Mather shrugged. “I’ve got sandwiches and a gallon or so. I’ll get by.”

“You say so,” said Bowman. “I wouldn’t want to spend too long in one of those places. People have seen ghosts.”

“Ghosts don’t bother me,” said Mather. “Over and out.”

He turned off the radio and put it back in the satchel. Then he methodically finished his note-taking. All this time, he had been shielding his gaze from the figured cube. Now he took a settling breath and said, “Okay, here we go.”

He lowered his arm. The pattern seemed to reach out for him. A small, involuntary gasp escaped him, then he nodded and said, “Ah.”

It was the evening of the Touching of the Sea. He had invited neighbors to dine before they went down to the gathering above the harbor. His wife cooked meats in the house, then brought them on golden plates out into the inner courtyard, where they sat on bone chairs and drank the fruited wine from his own trees.

The conversation was relaxed and mellow. The two couples were friends as well as each other’s next-door neighbors. They talked of people they knew; the husbands compared their expectations for the coming season’s hunt up in the hills; the wives discussed the plays they planned to see—mostly timeless revivals, though there was to be a new work by a playwright from across the sea who was developing a reputation for deliberately stimulating his audiences.

When the meal was done and the last, formal toast drunk, they went down to the festival, through darkening streets lit by crystal torches and aflow with golden-eyed folk in their holiday clothes. No one wore a mask this night; it was not a time for circumspection.

The plaza by the sea was thronged. All of the town was there, the oldest given places on the steps of the surrounding buildings, the youngest on the shoulders of their parents, so that all could witness the Touching. A coterie of musicians played the festival anthem and the crowd swayed, humming to the ancient song.

As the last notes died, all of them turned toward the harbor. The boats that usually filled most of the circular basin had been rowed to the sides, tethered to bronze rings set in the stones of the moles or to each other, so that a wide channel lay open from the foot of the steps to the gap where the enclosing barriers did not meet.

One musician struck a single, plangent tone from his harp. As one, the crowd craned forward. Now a sound somewhere between a sigh and a moan rose up from each throat. It mingled and became one common note, rising not in volume but in intensity. It filled the plaza like an invisible mist, then it flowed down the steps and across the harbor and out over the sea. And carried with it a single thought.

Minutes piled upon minutes, became almost an hour, the sound continuously pouring from the crowd, the thought uniting them. Then, out beyond the harbor mouth, the waveless summer sea rippled, once, twice. A triangular-fluked tail rose and slapped the surface gently. A dark, gleaming back showed, then disappeared, only to come up once more in the channel between the boats.

The monotonous song intensified. Golden eyes shone in the torchlight. A pressure wave rolled across the surface of the basin and wet the bottom steps. As the water ran back down, the sea parted. A broad-mouthed head broke the surface, its eyes as big as dinner plates, though these were not gold but resembled silver-rimmed onyx.

The sea beast’s tail thrashed, driving its head and forefins clear of the water and up onto the harbor steps. The crowd’s moaning song grew stronger still, the carried thought more imperative. The tail went deep, scraping the floor of the basin, the sinuous body hunched and straightened, and, as water ran from its dark, striated skin back into the sea, the summoned creature forced itself higher up the stairs, until its head touched the plaza’s tiles.

Silence fell. The women took the children to join the old people, while the men descended the steps to stand on either side of the sea beast. The sky above the town was black, the stars like chips of bone. The harpist plucked another string. In one motion, the men drew their curved knives, then waited for the final note.

Fred Mather awoke to find himself in near-total darkness at the top of the steps above the dry harbor. The stars and the two small moons gave just enough light to show the bone town as a pale fog seen from the corners of his eyes, but when he looked straight ahead, he could see almost nothing. The sky was as black as it had been in the vision, but, near the horizon, he could see the small green orb that was Earth. He did not know how long he had been standing at the top of the steps, but it had been long enough for the wind off the dead seabed to chill him. Shivering, he rubbed the pebbled skin of his bare forearms.

He had to make notes. He felt his way back to the amphitheater and to the seat where he had left the satchel. His notepad was not there, but the flashlight was. By its hard beam, he found the spiral-bound book outside. It lay on the tiled surface of the plaza, covering the eye of the sea-creature mosaic. He went and retrieved it, found the pen a few feet away.

But when he sat on a doorstep to write by the flashlight’s glow, the making of ink marks on paper struck him as faintly ridiculous. The straight and curved blue lines would not always resolve themselves into words; they kept turning into mere chicken-scratchings, as if his ability to read was waxing and waning.

His mind kept going back to the vision of the festival: the death of the sea beast, the solemn taking of its flesh and the wrapping of the dripping pieces in squares of cloth the women had brought with them, the people walking home, leaving the creature’s bones to be cared for by those who had earned that honor.

And something else. He did not know how he knew it, but he was aware that this Touching had been the last, that there were no more beasts left to call. He struggled to put that knowledge into words, then transpose the words into letters of blue ink scratched onto paper. But he kept losing the knack.

Finally, he abandoned the effort and lit his way back into the amphitheater. Some instinct told him to sit in another part of the great room, facing another side of the cube. He stared into its matrix of incised lines and instantly felt himself falling into …

They were four, all friends from boyhood, now grown to maturity. They had trained hard, challenging one another, encouraging one another, daring one another. And it had paid off: They had been victorious in the annual games and had thus won the honor of being the first hunting party into the blue hills above the bone town.

They ran now in single file along a trail they had known as children, when they had played at what they now did in earnest. They knew every curve and fold of the land, the ridges, shoulders, and valleys, and they knew as well that there was a certain place where the birds sheltered through the day, emerging at dusk to light up the night sky with their scintillating streaks and fire-trails, sparks falling like red snow.

It was a tall and narrow cave mouth, where the ground had parted a million years ago. But such was the lay of the land that the crevice was almost invisible unless viewed from a precise angle. The four men knew that angle, knew the chamber that widened behind the slit of the opening. In there, the birds would be sleeping, huddled together on the ground like a pool of banked embers, rustling and breathing together.

The four hunters crept to the mouth of the cleft, wire nets ready. Still in single file, they scraped backs and chests against the rough rock—it had been easier when they were boys—and eased into the cavern. Silently, breath abated, they ranged themselves around the sleeping quarry. Then, at a signal from the eldest, they cast their nets in a prearranged sequence.

The birds awoke as the first net fell, and rose up as one, swiftly bearing the wire mesh aloft. But the second net fell, its edges weighted, and the birds’ upward motion slowed. Then came the third net, and the fourth. Weighed down, the overlapping meshes too dense to escape through, the creatures settled back to the floor with a mournful sound.

Elated, the hunters carefully brought the borders of the nets together, made a bundle whose gathered mouth they briskly tied with metal cords.

The birds, pressed into a sphere, flowed rustling over one another, like a boiling sun of gold and red. The men used their weapons to widen the crevice, then gently bore the captive birds out into the sunlight. The creatures voiced their displeasure, but the hunters struck up the traditional hymn of consolation with its promises of respect and good treatment.

The birds quieted, whether soothed by the blandishments or lulled by the sonorous rhythm of the song. Where the white road left the hills and ran down to the town, the men stopped to order their garments and brush off any dust or detritus. Then they hoisted the netted birds over their heads like a collective halo, and, at a measured pace, made their triumphant return.

Before they were halfway to the spiral-pillared gate, the people were coming out to sing them home.

The song was still echoing in Mather’s mind when he came back to the here and now. He was not surprised to find himself outside the gate at the landward end of town. The shrunken sun was graying the Martian sky from somewhere behind the rumpled silhouette of the hills, making the road of crushed stone to shine ghostly at his feet.

This time, he did not even think to write any notes. He turned and walked slowly—he was unaccountably tired—through the dead town, back to the harbor plaza. Although he had not eaten or drunk in quite some time, he passed by the sandwiches and water can in the jeep without noticing them.

“He’s mostly just dehydrated,” said the roughneck who’d had first-aid training. “The air’s so dry here, if you forget to keep drinking, you can start to get woozy pretty fast.”

“Pour another cup into him,” said Bowman, “then put him in the shade.”

They’d found Mather facedown on the tiles of the harbor plaza when the truck carrying the mining machine arrived in the late afternoon of the second day. Now, as Bowman leafed through the notebook he’d found not far from the collapsed man, he knew why Mather hadn’t been answering his radio calls since the day before.

Most of it was illegible scribbles, but a few words stood out—communal, ritual, bonding—enough to confirm the crew chief’s long-held suspicion that Mather was another one of those longhaired intellectuals who got all Mars-struck and came out here thinking they’d find … What? Bowman had no idea what kind of foolishness filled a mind like Mather’s. And he didn’t want to.

He went to the top of the harbor steps and threw the notebook down toward where the mechanical behemoth’s front tracks were already finding purchase on the bottom riser. Black smoke belched from the machine’s exhaust as the operator goosed the throttle, and it began to climb, the bone steps cracking and powdering beneath grinding metal. The right-side track reached Mather’s book and shredded it.

Bowman watched to make sure the miner was coming on in the way it was designed to. When it reached the top, and its front end crashed down onto the tiles, shattering them, he ordered the operator out and climbed into the control compartment. The machine’s screen lit up, green on black, showing a gridwork based on bright points: the transponders Mather had placed, thankfully before he went outbacky-wacky, as Bowman had once heard an Australian desert prospector describe it.

The radio signals were all five-by-five. Bowman set the controls, stepped down from the cab, and watched as the great machine oriented itself and set to work. It labored over to the building nearest the harbor steps, deployed its heavy chain-link thrashers, and began to demolish the front wall in a spray of bone dust and chips.

“Looks good,” the crew chief said, shouting to his men over the noise of the automated miner. “Let’s get the jeep down here. I want to get back to base before it’s too dark. First drink’s on me.”

When they were all loaded and ready to go, he sent a man to fetch Fred Mather. But Mather was gone.

The silvery-paged books were not really books, Mather now knew. The raised hieroglyphic squiggles weren’t meant for the Martian eye but for Martian fingers. You ran the pads of the fingertips over the sinuous forms and out came, not text, but music. The songs formed in your head and played themselves out as you stroked the pages: all kinds of songs—from dancing tunes to soft ballads, from hymns to anthems, but each one tinged with a melancholic sweetness that he had come to associate with Martianness.

In his lucid moments, he contemplated the balance and the contrast that were inherent in the meeting of Martians and Earthmen: One race was fading into its purple twilight just as the other was setting out to see what the bright day would bring.

Over the music, he could hear Bowman and some other men calling his name. He was disappointed. He’d thought that when they set off back to camp, they’d report him as missing and forget about him. People did wander off on Mars, never to be seen again. And he had not made any friends among the miners. They’d all seen him for the ugly duckling he was.

But, as he sat in the birds’ cave and thought about it, he recognized that they’d have had to come back to restart the machine. The morning after they’d left, he’d climbed aboard and thrown the big main switch that stopped it. The machine paused in its digestion of a house that stood halfway between the harbor and the gate. The land leviathan had been making substantial progress. Earthmen knew how to build reliable machinery.

But there were books to be gathered, and a few other objects that the Martians had left behind: masks, some children’s toys, items of clothing, a cup that might have been carved from alabaster. He’d wanted to bring them to the cave. But when he’d gathered all that he could find and returned to restart the miner, he found that he did not know how to set its controls to follow the transponder grid. So he had left it with its engine idling in neutral, knowing that Red Bowman would come out in the jeep to get it running again.

He had hoped that they’d think the miner had malfunctioned on its own, but the calling voices from outside the cave told him that the crew chief was not given to innocent explanations. Mather crept to the narrow mouth, which he’d made even harder to see by dragging prickle bushes into the cleft. Through the thin branches, he could see Bowman and the others. They were standing on a ridgeline, cupping their callused hands around their mouths to call his name. They had binoculars. They also had guns.

The men looked for him all day, but Mather remembered the Martian hunting skills he’d acquired from the memory-visions—that’s what he had taken to calling the phenomena—and he had no trouble avoiding capture. In the evening, the searchers climbed into the jeep and drove off across the empty sea. From the hills, he watched their dust plume hang in the air almost motionless, so slowly did the fine particles sift down in the lesser gravity and the windless Martian air.

When full darkness fell, he went down to the town. He had discovered that the lines incised into the walls of the houses performed a similar function to those graven into the sides of the cube. But, whereas the latter were memory-visions of public events, the ones in the houses were of private occasions. They were the Martians’ family photo albums.

At first, he had thought he should disable the machine completely, to save these intimate records. But after sampling several, he realized that they were all much the same: memories of births and deaths and unions, naming-day ceremonies, and other mundane rites of passage. But each was imbued with the same soft sadness that permeated the communal gatherings. These were not records taken from the middle of a community’s life but from its end. They were memorials, left by the long-ago Martians when they packed up their possessions, and, leaving the doors of their houses open, went away forever.

Red Bowman was not happy. He had a production schedule to fulfill. Having the automated miner standing idle because crazy Mather had interfered with its controls threatened the crew chief’s chances of winning the substantial bonus that would be due him if he delivered truckloads of bone fertilizer before the specified date. So when the jeep had gone far enough out across the seabed, he stopped it and got off, sending it on to base with the other men while he walked back along its vague track, trudging through the fine dust to the bone town.

Night fell before he got there, but he could see the white towers glimmering before him, occasionally lit by sparks and flashes as the tireless machine that was grinding its way through the walls encountered metal. But even if he’d been blind, Bowman could have found his way just by going toward the sound of the diesel engines. Or by the stench of its exhaust.

He came up the harbor steps and crossed the plaza. The sea beast’s image was almost completely defaced by the miner’s tracks. The behemoth’s mechanical growls faded as it turned a far-off corner in its programmed course, putting walls between it and the Earthman. Bowman used the lull to listen for sounds of Mather’s moving about the town. In a few moments, he heard something.

At first, he thought it was a wind wuthering beneath a building’s eaves. But there was no wind, and the Martians’ roofs were flat and no wider than the walls that supported them. He moved in the direction of the sound. It was coming from across the plaza, from one of the larger buildings that the behemoth would not reach for a couple of days.

The place had a bronze door, figured in the flowing script that Bowman did not like to look at; it reminded him of snakes, and snakes reminded him of the Devil. He sometimes wondered if there had been a deal between God and Lucifer: God would rule on Earth and the Devil would have Mars.

He eased through the door, a flashlight ready for use in his left hand, a pistol in his right. He didn’t want to have to shoot Mather, but everybody knew the story of the man on the early expedition who’d gone mad and murdered his crewmates. He thought the fellow might have been an archaeologist—some kind of ologist, for sure—and he’d gone kill-crazy after rubbing up against too much Martian evil.

The sound came again, a keening, crooning note without words. It was like something a cat would sing, Bowman thought, maybe to a mouse it had caught. He didn’t like cats either. Killing was all right when you had to, really had to, but you ought to do it clean.

He could dimly see the general layout inside the building: an open space, seats or steps in descending circles, a great white shape at the bottom. The sound came from the opposite side, louder now that Bowman was inside the place and the hoo-hooing was echoing so softly around the bone walls. The hairs on his neck and forearms rose of their own accord. He slid his thumb over his weapon’s safety catch, making sure it was off.

He edged around the upper deck of the amphitheater. Against the white vagueness, he saw a dark shape, seated halfway down the tiers. He readied the pistol, then thumbed the flashlight’s switch.

A Martian sat in the middle of the terraced seats, clad in a robe of metallic cloth that dully reflected the beam. His whole head was enclosed in a cloche-mask of silver, the facial features chased in gold, the thin eyebrows elevated, and the mouth pursed in an expression of permanent surprise. Bowman could not see the color of the eyes through the mask’s slits, but the figure’s gaze did not turn to him. Instead, it remained fixed on the side of the cube down in front.

The Earthman played the flashlight’s beam over the man. He could see the hands, five-fingered instead of six. From beneath the robe came the cuffs of the blue jeans they all wore, and the scuffed boots were also New Ares company issue.

“Mather!” Bowman called. The man in Martian garb gave no sign of having heard. The crew chief moved in on the runaway, keeping the beam on him, with the pistol lined up just beside and behind the flashlight. “Mather!”

The masked head did not turn, the limbs did not move. Bowman stood beside him, poked his shoulder with the muzzle of the gun. “Snap out of it!”

Still no response. Bowman set the flashlight down on one of the tiered seats so that it illuminated the still figure. Then he hooked his fingers below the rim of the head-enclosing mask and yanked upward.

The Martian warriors marched to battle in gleaming companies of 144. Six companies made a battalion of 864. They carried shields of hammered bronze that matched their burnished armor and guns capable of spitting streams of metal insects that, finding flesh, would sting and burrow. On their flanks and scouting ahead raced knee-high electric spiders, their joints clicking with a rhythm that combined into a continuous whir.

Six battalions had gone out through the bone gate of Ipsli, almost the town’s entire male complement. They took the coastal road toward Huq, and, by midday, they arrived at the chosen field, a place where the hills fell back to widen the coastal plain. They formed up, four battalions in front, two in reserve, and sat down to await the enemy.

The Huq army came late, earning themselves some justified mocking from Ipsli. Questions were shouted across the open ground as to whether they’d had something better to do today, whether their beds had been too comfortable to leave. Or their wives.

The Huq replied with taunts of their own, recalling past encounters when Ipsli’s war aims had not been realized. Then the heralds went to meet in the space between the two hosts, to decide on the order of battle. As usual, it would be individual combats first, then small groups. Ipsli’s first battalion was anxious for a rematch with their Huq counterparts; it was felt that last year’s engagement was decided more by the state of the ground—it had rained the night before—than by the relative skills of the combatants.

Youths fought first, with minimized weapons. Then came the midranked warriors, in pairs and quatrains. Ipsli was doing well, only two deaths and one maiming, while several Huqs had had to be carried from the field. Sentiment within the ranks was leaning toward ending the day with a general melee.

There came a break for lunch while the spiders fought their bouts. Huqs and Ipslis wagered against each other on the outcomes, the heralds holding the takes and disbursing the winnings. Then it was time for individual champions to take the field.

Fred Mather was in the form of Ipsli’s paramount, wearing his great-great-grandsire’s armor of laminated strips of bronze overlaid with polished electrum. When, late in the afternoon, the trumpets called his sign, he took up the long spear, its black shaft bound with strengthening wire. He disdained to fight with a shield.

As he stepped out in front of Ipsli, the spear over his shoulder, a shout went up from the battalions behind him. He strode toward the center of the field, watching as the Huq champion came to meet him. Unlike last year, his opponent had chosen only the long, two-handed electric sword. It would be a memorable contest, Mather thought. Next year, they might well be singing songs about today.

He had gotten used to the strangeness of being two persons in one mind. The Martian memory-visions were like the documentary dramas he had seen on television at home, where actors took the parts of historical figures—except that here the spectator took the actor’s place. He had wondered at first if the experience was similar to what fiction books had done to readers, before the cleansing of the world.

Now Mather-as-warrior strode calmly to where the heralds waited on the fighting ground. He grounded the butt of his spear, then tipped back his helmet to rest it on the crown of his long, narrow head. The man who had come out to face him set his sword’s point against the turf and tilted back his own headgear. His golden eyes gazed at Mather with no sign of fear.

The first herald sang the traditional song. As he heard the last line begin, Mather gripped the shaft of the spear, took a slow and steady breath, and pulled his helmet down. He assumed the ready stance. The swordsman also covered his face and raised his blade.

Bowman yanked the cloche-mask clear of the lunatic’s face, but it fit too tightly to come all the way off. Mather’s eyes, in the flashlight beam, were wide and opaque. For a moment, they looked almost golden, but the crew chief put that down to a reflection of the pale bone walls in the man’s grossly dilated pupils.

Mather blinked, once, then after a moment, twice more.

“Snap out of it!” Bowman said. He poked him again with the pistol’s muzzle.

The archaeologist came up off the bench, turning toward the crew chief in one fluid motion. With the back of his left hand, he brushed the pistol away, while his right struck out at Bowman’s belly. But the blow did not connect, and not just because the other man stumbled back.

Mather looked down at his right hand, as if puzzled. From the way he held it, Bowman first had the impression that there was something in the madman’s grasp—did the Martians have invisible knives?—and that he had tried to stick him with it. But then, as he saw Mather blink, Bowman realized that the crackpot must be seeing things.

Somehow, that made him more angry than anything yet. It wasn’t right that this soft-handed college boy’s insanity was threatening Red Bowman’s bonus and the life it would buy for him here on Mars: a place of his own and a solid business to run. He was willing to work hard for what he wanted, and no dreamy-eyed book-fiend was going to rob him of his earned reward.

He stepped forward and smacked Mather across the side of the head with the pistol barrel. But the steel did not hit flesh. Instead, it struck the dull gleam of the Martian head covering. The sound of the impact was a musical note, but the helmet seemed to absorb the shock. Mather barely registered the blow.

Yet something had gotten through. The archaeologist blinked again, and now it seemed for the first time that he was actually focusing on the crew chief. He looked down again at his right hand, curled around empty air. Then he shook his head as if coming out of a daze.

“You’re coming with me,” Bowman said. He raised the gun, and so that the madman would have no doubt as to the consequences of disobedience, he thumbed back the hammer.

Mather’s shoulders slumped. He reached up with both hands and wriggled the silver cloche-mask free of his head. He lowered it and gazed sadly at its polished, figured surface, the perpetual surprise that looked back at him. Then, when Bowman said, “Move it,” he flung the metal object up and into the crew chief’s face.

Bowman fell back, blood spurting from his nose. He lost his footing and toppled over the bench seat beside him, banging the elbow of his gun arm. The pistol fell, clattering on the bone floor right beside his foot, and he was glad it did not go off. But by the time he had recovered the weapon and swung the flashlight around, he had only enough time to catch Mather disappearing through the door to the plaza, the Martian robe flying like a flag from his shoulders.

He hunted for the madman all night, light and gun at the ready. He steeled himself to shoot on sight, but when the thin Martian dawn came he was still alone.

The mechanical behemoth ground on, house by house, street by street, filling its hoppers with the dust of millennia-dead sea beasts, excreting its cubes of gold and silver, copper and bronze, still warm from the atomic smelter. Bowman fretted that Mather would return from his hiding place in the blue hills and try to stop the work. He took men from other projects, gave them guns, and put them on guard.

The sentries reported seeing occasional flashes of sunlight on metal up in the blue hills, but the madman made no more attempts to interfere with the reduction of the bone city. Finally, the day came when they reloaded the automated miner onto its multiwheeled transporter and prepared to move it across the dusty, glass-bottomed sea to the next deposit. The operation proceeded without incident.

Red Bowman’s bonus was safe again. He had been a man short for a while, but had managed to make up a full crew’s complement by hiring an experienced hard-rock mining man who had come to Mars hoping to get rich prospecting in the barrens but had found nothing.

The crew chief watched the transporter slowly carry the leviathan away, followed by its floating contrail of pale dust. Then he started up his jeep and drove through the scar where the town had been. The houses were gone, as well as the pavement of the streets on which they had stood for thousands of years. The miner had scraped right down to the packed earth beneath, and in places to the rufous Martian bedrock. After it had uncovered the first urn buried beneath a courtyard, Bowman had called in the technician to reset the automatic controls. The machine had then proceeded to find scores of the gold, silver, and electrum containers, increasing the operation’s precious-metals yield by a solid percentage. New Ares had awarded Bowman an “attaboy” bonus for showing initiative.

He came to where the gate had stood and put the jeep onto the ribbon of crushed white rock. He drove slowly toward the hills, then up into them as the road began to climb. He moved his gaze from side to side, watching for flashes of light.

The hills always gave him the creeps. They were as silent as the ancient towns, but somehow the silence was different here. The towns were not human-made, but they had been manufactured by beings who, for all their peculiarities, shared some commonalities with Earthmen. The land itself, though, that was pure Mars. It had never had any connection to humankind, not all the way back to the gelling of the planets. Men might come and build on it, but they would never be of it. And those who tried to be of it, like Mather, would always be driven mad.

That was Bowman’s way of thinking, and before he moved off to the next demolition, he wanted to talk about it with the one man he knew who might understand. So he drove higher into the hills, stopping every now and then, his head turning from side to side, waiting for the bright wink.

Late in the afternoon, he saw it from the corner of an eye and turned toward the long, boulder-strewn slope from which it had come. There was a group of tall rocks halfway up the hill. They might have been a natural occurrence, or they might have been placed there for some obscure Martian purpose. But when he trained his binoculars on the formation, he saw motion through a gap between two of the stones.

He got out of the jeep and walked toward the place, his hands held out to show that they were empty. “Mather!” he called. “We’re leaving! Nobody’s going to come after you!”

A voice came from the rocks, thin on the less substantial Martian air. It had a flutey quality, as if a musical instrument were speaking. “What do you want?”

“I just wanted to say good-bye,” Bowman said. He was closer now, close enough to see between the gaps in the rocks. He saw silver and touches of gold. “You know,” he said, “that mask rightly belongs to New Ares Mining.”

“No,” said the thin voice, “I don’t know that.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Bowman said. “We’ll get it later, I suppose. After you die.”

There was no response to that.

“You are going to die, you know,” said the Earthman, trudging up the slope. “Fact is, I don’t know how you’ve managed to survive this long without water. Were you sneaking in at night to steal it?”

“No.”

“Then how?”

Again there was no answer. Bowman had reached the rocks. He could see glimpses of Mather through the gaps. The man was wearing the Martian robe and another mask, this one with an expression of serene amusement. “Come out and we’ll talk,” he said.

“About what?”

The crew chief shrugged. “About what you’re going to do, how you’re going to live.”

“Does that matter to you?” said the musical voice.

“A little. Listen, at first, I was angry at having you on my crew because I didn’t think you’d pull your weight. Then I got scared that you’d screw up the operation and wreck everything.”

Bowman waited a moment to see if the other man would respond, then said, “But once you left us alone to get on with it, you were not my problem anymore. And now that we’re pulling out, I can afford to wonder about what you think you’re achieving up here.”

He waited again, this time letting the silence extend. It made him uncomfortable. He was thinking that it wasn’t just a silence between him and Mather; it was a silence between him and the hills, between him and Mars.

Finally, the man behind the rocks spoke. “There’s nothing to achieve.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“There’s nothing to do. Nothing to be done.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s all been done,” said Mather. “That’s the point. That’s what Mars is.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“I know.” There was another silence, then, although Bowman had heard no footsteps, Mather’s musical voice came as if from farther away. “Good-bye.”

The Earthman skirted the standing rocks and climbed above them. There was no sign of the other man. He called his name, twice, but heard only the eloquent silence of the Martian hills.

Bowman went back to the jeep, back to the base camp, then on to the next job. In later years, he would sometimes tell people, “Just because you can come up with a question, that doesn’t mean there’s an answer.”

Some years later, a prospector came by, his picks and shovels and magnetometer clattering with each step of his walking machine. He spotted the cube of white stone that the automated miner had left as valueless and went to take a look. To one side, he found a mummified corpse clothed in Martian cloth, seated on a chair carved from Martian ironwood. A silver mask rested on the desiccated lap.

At first, the prospector thought that he’d discovered a genuine Martian, though people said they were all gone now. It was the eyes that fooled him: wide and dried, and turned toward the cube, they had looked from a distance like golden coins.

But the mask was a good one. The prospector’s day had not been wasted.