On a well-settled Mars, the five major city Council regimes
struggle to meld into a stable, working government. Embracing an official
Unified Faith In Humanity, the Councils are teetering on the verge of pogrom
directed against Christians, Molesters, Jews, Rapists, Buddhists, Murderers,
Muslims, Thieves, Hindu, Embezzlers and Artificial Humans – anyone who threatens
the official Faith and the consolidating power of the Councils. It makes good
sense, right – get rid of religion and Human divisiveness on a societal level
will disappear? An instrument of such a pogrom might just be a Roman
holiday...To see the rest of the chapters, go to SCIENCE FICTION: Martian Holiday on
the right and scroll to the bottom for the first story. If you’d like to read
it from beginning to end (70,000+ words as of now), drop me a line and I’ll
send you the unedited version.
On a long stone table
stood three squarish, smooth slabs of Martian stone. On each, Paolo Marcillon
could see some sort of pattern. Nothing that would suggest letters or images or
hash marks. But they had been marked.
OrcAH, a small, blue man
who had either been allowed to age as a Natural or had been taken from the vat
looking like a wizened, Earth fantasy dwarf, said, “We have studied these three
– we call them the Stele – by exposing them to the entire length of the EM
spectrum. But there is only one kind of energy that reveals what are admittedly
ancient marking. Even under this energy, they are barely discernible…”
“Ultrasound,” Paolo
whispered.
Without missing a beat,
OrcAH whispered, “Ultrasound.” He paused, “How did you know?”
Paolo paused, took a
deep breath, then told how he’d come across both the satellite and the bones.
OrcAH interrupted, “What bones?”
“In my travels, I came
across The Cydonia Fellowship of Free Martians.
They had incontrovertible proof that something
had lived on Mars and left its complex bones behind –
something that had a…a…side fin,”
“It’s
called a pectoral fin,” OrcAH said.
“A
pectoral fin, like that of an Earth dolphin. There haven’t been oceans on Mars
for three and a half billion years. Given that the Solar System was only four
or five billion years old, there’s no time at all for complex life – let alone
intelligent life – to have evolved on Mars. The Free Martians believe that the
dolphin-like bones had come from somewhere else.”
OrcAH paused before
saying, “So, you think this satellite might be of alien design.” He gestured to
the Stele, “You believe that the Stele might hold some sort of secret about
this satellite you’ve discovered?” Paolo nodded slowly. “What makes you think
that?”
“I was studying it…”
“You have a lab?”
Paolo laughed, “No. I
was studying it in the airlock of my marsbug.”
“So, you haven’t really
studied it and you have no idea what you really have?”
He shrugged. “None.” He
lifted his chin in the direction of the Stele. “But I do want to see what these
look like under ultrasound.”
OrcAH had been leaning,
staring closely at the Stele. He stood up abruptly, “We will not allow you to
do this.”
“What?”
“These messages – from the
aliens – they belong to Mars.”
“Mars was the god of
war. The aliens belong to the god of war?”
OrcAH nodded. “We are
the children of this world, more than you who were Naturally born. We were
created to serve you, but we were created here and are the real natives.” He
paused, then smiled before saying, “Though you kindly refrained from adding an
extra pair of arms.” He paused. “We also have some reason to think that the
swimmers were some sort of watchers and were here at the time Mars was covered
with shallow seas. A time before the shattering of the spheres.”
“The what?”
“The spheres of the
solar system were shattered by some immense force which also ripped away the
atmosphere of Mars, leaving behind oceans that boiled away into space.” He
gestured to the Stele. “We think that some of that story is on the Stele.” He
looked up, blinked, and said, “That is why we cannot allow you to decipher
them, nor can we allow you to decipher the markings on your satellite.” He
stepped closer. “That is why we will take the satellite from you. Now.”
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