Titans of Chaos

The windy shoreline, and the dead rocks and fine sands of the cracked surface, gave off ahigh-pitched wail. This shrilling wavered and rose and fell, like a woman of Arabia lamenting at afuneral: a nerve-racking noise. There was no smell I could smell. The horizon seemed strangelyclose. The sun was a dim smudge, smaller than seen from Earth, but the sky was rose, crimson,and pale orange in concentric bands centered on the sun, like a dust storm seen in the distance.

The zenith was a chilly deep indigo, strange to see.

I spent some minutes looking for Phobos and Deimos, but they were not the luminous hurlingmoons of Barsoom that John Carter had promised me. Perhaps that dim spot there, like aSputnik? The senses of my race are just not that good for picking out astronomical objects, whichhave no moral entanglements or immediate utility.

We set off, flying and levitating, toward the calculated location of the Mars lander. I wanted tounfurl my Union Jack where someone could see it I had had over a week to shift through thecandidates for the first words spoken on Mars. "That's one small step for a woman, one giant leapfor mankind," still seemed best. "God save the Queen!" had a nice ring to it, too. Traditional.

What had Roald Amundsen said when he planted a flag at the South Pole?

You'd think they'd teach children important facts like that in school.

Victor and I soared through the thin atmosphere. Supersonic dust particles bounced from his goldintegument, leaving steaks, or were turned aside by my extradimen-sionalaura.

As I said, Victor knew the longitude and latitude of the lander; our latitude we knew frommeasuring the rise and fall of northern stars. But we did not know our longitude. (ObviouslyPolaris is not the North Star, not here, nor were any of the stars I used to watch from mywindow-obvious, yet it was still strange.) Once we reached the correct latitude, we startedsearching west, hoping to come across the site. Soon Victor detected metallic pings, consistentwith the expected radar-contour of the lander we sought.