Old Mars

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.

Day 2:

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.