The Martian Race (43 page)

“Roger.”

When the beam stabbed down she took her hand off the winch command instantly. About five meters below them were two space suits, one orange, one blue. Facedown. They did not move.

36

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

T
HEY DANGLED OVER THE TWO FACEDOWN SUITS AND
M
ARC CAREFULLY
lowered himself to within a foot of the orange one.

“Gerda,” he called on comm. Nothing. “Chen?”

They looked at each other, only a few feet apart. “Turn her over. Be careful—it looks like the mat has partly grown over them.”

“This
fast?”

“Don't think of it like a plant.”

“I wonder if I can turn her over from here.”

“Try. Don't put your weight on the mat.”

Marc pivoted in his yoke and took hold of Gerda's suit with both gloves. “Man, this stuff pulls hard.” His angle was bad, and finally he had to lift Gerda. The pale mat growths resisted, stretching until they popped free. In normal Earth gravity lifting that much would have been impossible, but with some grunting he managed to get her turned over. Her eyes were closed. No expression.

“I can make out her internals,” Marc said, shining his beam through her faceplate. “Air's to zero.”

“See those tanks lying to the left?” She craned her neck. “Reading full.”

“So they're … dead.”

“No way to be sure unless we crack their helmets.”

“They're way beyond the time limits on their tanks.”

“Explains why they didn't answer. Their audio connection shorted out along with the winch, I'll bet.”

Marc turned over Chen with the same difficulty and same result. Chen looked peaceful, somehow. “This damned mat, it's all over them.”

“Maybe they got snagged in it somehow. Looks like ropes of blue linguine.”

“For some reason they couldn't hook onto their oxy.”

Marc gestured at the small distance between the bodies and the tanks. “They were close enough. I can't see how the mat could stop them.”

“I have no idea what it can do.” She suddenly remembered the pale blue filaments in the mist chamber. “Marc, I saw some of these same shapes and colors in the Mat growing in the greenhouse. Only much smaller.”

“It's just a
plant,”
he insisted.

“It may be a lot stronger than it looks. That valve thing up there, it was pretty—”

“I'm not touching it, tell you that.”

“But they did … They must've detached their tanks from their line. Dropped them onto the mat. It would be hard to put them on, dangling here.”

“So they landed and tried to get their oxy—wait, what's that?”

Their beams found scattered instruments—cutters, sample bags, a big box. She said, “Chen was taking samples. Look at those filaments to the right—they're sliced. He was partway through with the job, looks like.”

“Did it before they changed tanks. Not smart.”

“They're new, not much real experience.”

“See that?” Marc swung toward the spot. “Looks like an oxygen burn, right by Chen.”

“He was testing it, maybe. Look, there are other burns over there. Deliberately spraying it with his exhale exhaust?”

“I still don't see what killed them. This film thing, how could it—”

They both looked up. A tremor had come down their lines.

“Oh damn,” Marc said. He started winching up at max speed, training his beam upward.

Julia thought she knew what was coming but turned back to Chen and Gerda. For a moment she was alone with them.
Why try to do it all? If you had just asked we would have warned you, shown our videos—

No point in going there, not now.

“That goddamn valve thing,” Marc called. “It's closed around the lines.”

“We've got to get out.”

“Right.” She could hear his breathing quicken. “Only we're down to around ten percent left on our tanks. I don't wanna get into the jam they did.”

“I agree,” she said, looking away from the bodies and trying to think. “Let's do the switch right now.”

“Agree.” He came winching down.

The change of tanks proved to be even harder than she had feared. On their last descent they had done the switch standing on a ledge. In air, even with lower gravity, it was a struggle to detach their nearly finished tanks and get the new ones in the sockets. They kept the old tanks secured to their lines. Each helped the other but it took over ten minutes.

“Whoosh, glad to get a full one,” Marc said.

“We had better think through what we do. It looks to me that Gerda and Chen didn't.”

“Okay, what'll we try? Me, I say we hammer at that valve up there. Leave these bodies.”

“I hate to leave them in the mat. Not just humanitarian reasons— don't want to contaminate this community.”

“Community?”

“This mat is a complex structure. Rootlike filaments, thick petals, moss, lichen … those are just analogies. Maybe it's like a higher plant in level of complexity and organization, even though it's a mixed community of microbes.”

“Ummm. I wonder if there's another way out of this place?”

“Another vent? Could be—but do we have time to look?”

“No,” he said decisively, “not with just a few hours left.”

They hung just above the mat and watched the slow, strange ebb and flow of phosphorescence. A chill came into her, not from temperature, but a shiver that ran along her spine with icy fingers as she felt the hair at the nape of her neck stand up.
Something more here … something different
… She looked to both sides, at the chum of somber luminosity that stretched away into the foggy darkness beyond their lamps’ ability to penetrate. There was a sense
of presence
, a weight in the slow, ponderous seethe of vapor and light, like a language beyond knowing. As a field biologist she had learned to trust her feel for a place, and this hollow of light far beneath a dry world had an essence she tried to grasp, not with human ideas, but with a blunt, root perception …

She was looking behind him and so saw the movement first. “It's rising.”

“What?”

By the time Marc had spun around the bulge in the mat was a foot high. A spaghetti swarm of pale blue strands was lacing through the dark mat, stretching and expanding like tendons in some strange muscle that rose just fast enough to see the change. It was a few meters away and tilted toward them as it sluggishly rose. Tubular stalks slid among cakes of brown crust. Fibers forked into layers of dark yellow mass and seemed to force up slabs of porous mat. An outline shaped itself and the whole structure seemed to bud up, as if a wholly new plant were emerging from the moist conglomerate surface.

Julia's heart thumped wildly. She held herself absolutely still in her harness and watched, timing the movement of the thing with her own breaths. In utter silence the mass forced itself up and toward them. She felt a palpable sense of something struggling, putting vast concentration into this one focal point.

“My God,” Marc said. “It's …”

A chunky rectangular form, the top turned toward them. Two branches sprouting at the top, shaped by the blue strands. She blinked. At its base, two more protrusions, slabs of dark mat forming with aching effort into thicker tubes … And from the upper sides, above the two thickening tubes that now jutted from each side … a third blob, of ebony as thick as tree bark, pulling itself out from the main trunk.

A part of her did not want to say it.
This is impossible. It can't be
… “A … human shape.”

No mistake. The mat was creating a pseudopod, pseudohuman.
Responding?

“What … ?”

“It's the mat's idea of us.”

“Another kind of echo?”

Marc could not take his eyes off the changing shape, which had now stopped thrusting out. It stood there, fully two feet above the surrounding mass, a blunt but recognizable outline of the human body. She tried to ask herself questions, to make her mind work. How could a mat enlarge itself into a particular mold, so quickly … ? How could it know … ?

She said through a dry throat, “It can see us, somehow. At least enough to work out our outlines.”

“It has eyes?”

“Maybe that's what all this glowing is about. It communicates across the cavern with light.”

“Sentience?”

“Must be. Of some kind. It has developed enough to control its environment. Life does.”

“But why'd it kill Gerda and Chen?” Marc asked as he twisted in his harness. His microcam flashed on and he took a long pan of the thing in available light. Was it glowing more now? He might capture its image, though the moist darkness seemed to absorb light. They had kept their beams away from the mat, relying on back-reflection from the mist to light up the area. The mat glow seemed stronger around the form. She aimed her own microcam at it and carefully swept the area to take it all in.

“It didn't,” she said softly, “except maybe by accident. Holding them, feeling all over them … to find out what they were?”

“They were out of their harnesses, couldn't winch out anyway. Then the mat got them.”

Can it hear us? What senses does it have … and are they remotely like ours?

She spoke rapidly, to quell a rising wave of unease. “Maybe in response to them, the Marsmat protected itself. That valve membrane above, it closed automatically. Its major threats come from above—peroxides and cold and vacuum. The mat could build up vapor pressure in here by sealing that exit. Chen and Gerda were trapped below it and got stuck in the mat itself.”

Marc spun carefully around the axis of his line, peering uneasily at the vast darkness that now seemed to close in, clasping them in gossamer veils of haze. “How do we convince it to let us go?”

“I expect it's sentient but probably not intelligent.”

“So?”

She was unsure of everything, and every breath narrowed their options. Was this extruded shape an attempt at communication? Or a threat? How to get it to release the valve above? Noises? Thin atmosphere, unlikely it would respond to sound. The flashlights? What signal to send? They had been sweeping their beams all over this cavern.

Her heart thudded harder. To fight the rising panic she knew she had to keep her thinking crisp, direct.
React later.

“Look, it must be responsive to chemical stimuli. If the gases coming up from deep in the interior are wrong for it, there's got to be a way to filter them, expel others.”

“So we make it want to let us go by poisoning it?”

“Maybe Chen figured that, too. That's why the burns in the mat.”

“Which failed.”

“Maybe to irk the whole system we have to pour it on.”

“With what?”

“Their oxygen tanks.”

“They're our reserve!” Marc was getting impatient.

“Notice their connectors? They're screw type, not the pressure clamps we have. So we can't tap them anyway.”

“Damn, no, I didn't.”

“So we might as well try with them.”

“Me, I'd rather bang on the door up there.”

“No reason we can't do both.”

“Not like I can think of anything else, either.”

She sent a call to Viktor, for the Rover to relay. At least they would know what had happened down here …

The winches labored hard—
don't burn them out!
—to lift them away from the glowing, phosphorescent mat with its strange humanoid shape, its elephant ears and festoons of every blobby shape, its mass of essential strangeness.

In the haunting darkness her muscles now ached and her breath came in ragged gasps.
Tired? Or scared?
…

Both.

A part of her thought of what message they would be sending to this strange place, how they would appear to this being, a truly advanced Martian life-form. No way to tell. But what choice did they have?

She looked down at the crude humanoid shape, still plain against the mat. A part of her wanted to stay and study it, but her nerves screamed
get away!

React later,
she reminded herself.
Think ahead.

During the ride up she opened the screws on her Airbus tank. It spewed out, a moist plume condensing immediately into crisp snow. Water in the compressed tanks froze on expanding. The air around them was still very cold.

This vapor is from the mat itself, not coming up in warm gas from below. The mat is releasing it … why?

The unseen oxygen made gusts in the foggy banks around their beams. She glided upward through a universe unlike anything she had ever imagined—a shadowy, clouded world of diffuse light that throbbed with a slow, softly radiant energy.

No easy explanations here. No immediate explanation for the deaths. This was life unlike any analogy with Earthly biology, still evolving from forms older than the continents, still hanging on, indestructible, still dealing in its own strange way with the hard conditions dealt it, still coming.

She directed the Airbus tank spout at a nearby outhanging. Frosty gas vented onto it. The mat jerked visibly.

“Good,” Marc called, and did the same.

They approached the valve membrane, drawing up through a somber fog that thickened toward the ceiling. Their lines slid easily through the narrow puckered center of the membrane.

“I'll give it a squirt,” Marc said.

Playing the Airbus reserves over nearby thick mat surfaces produced a curious rippling revulsion. The glow heightened here, ebbed there, in no apparent pattern. In her beam she saw tubers seem to swell with liquids, like fat roots. Without a sound she caught the sense of growing agitation.

“Now to knock on the door.” Marc brought himself up to the membrane and slammed his gloved hand into it. Nothing. He took a screwdriver out and punched a hole in the leathery pale skin, but it was thicker than the tool. He could tear away some fragments but the strength of the valve was obvious.

“Marc, stop!”

“Why? What's wrong?”

“I don't think we want to send the wrong signal. We want to
tickle
it open, induce it to cooperate.”

“What's wrong with a little force?”

“It's not a threat, and I don't want it to become one.”