newmars

When the people of Old Earth realized that interstellar travel wasn’t quite as hard, as they’d for decades believed, there was a sudden enthusiasm to explore the wider Universe. In truth, it was an enthusiasm to find a planet with blissful, blue oceans, gentle hills, endless, rolling plains, azure but sometimes weeping skies & snow-covered mountains: A New Earth.

Within a few years of sophisticated, systematic sky searching, it was triumphantly announced, that they’d failed thus far, to find a New Earth but had found a New Mars. It was only a short distance that is if you consider short distances can be measured in light years but of course, it was reasonably safe to assume that things would be the same as the received images; no major catastrophe would have occurred. They reported that in so many ways it resembled Old Mars. It was largely red desert, occasionally ravaged by impossible sand storms, short of water & even the axial, rotation period was similar. It was not much smaller than Earth & with gravity at 9.6 it seemed to persuade them it was ideal for colonization. Not a really heart-warming discovery, in view of the Mars we all knew & hated.

Though only 8 at the time, I was in the first of what turned out to be the only wave of colonists. I could envy an orphan because the Orphans Outing is a less daunting prospect than a one way ticket to New Mars & I have my parents to thank for that one. Like it or not, I’m a New Martian. Well not quite because I was born on Earth. Janie dust is a New Martian but that’s got nothing to do with anything.

I remember much of the eight year journey [more passed on Earth of course] was fairly uneventful but as the ship approached the New Martian Solar System; there was a random, quantum fracture in sub-space, which fatally damaged the 4th & 7th components of the modulated hyper-drive. No one likes it when that happens. Worst of all we were alone & our only option was to limp the rest of the way, repair & salvage everything we could & get down to the surface. At that time, there were just over 600 of us remaining & everyone was expecting the rest of the mission to arrive within weeks. As I tell you this story, nearly 16 years after the accident, they still haven’t arrived. I was old enough by then to recognize a bad thing, when it was staring me in the face. Adapting the remains of the ship & incorporating the shuttles to form the habitation & sleeping quarters was heavy but building the stockade wall from surface rocks, was reminiscent of ancient Egypt. Guess which section I was assigned to. Anyone who’s ever lived in the middle ages will have an idea what life here is like. You really have to try though, to picture a middle Ages scenario on Mars.

There are other differences from Old Mars. It’s a lot warmer with a pleasantly, breathable atmosphere & although most of us find it all rather incredible, just like in the old theory, it has canals & is populated by little green men. Little green men is a somewhat misleading term, since while you could say they’re men, humanoid at least, they’re less than a meter tall & have a behavior pattern more akin to wasps, except they lack flight capability. They have no language as such; they’re completely sexually aggressive & have the social graces of warthogs.

The majority of them are female, which poses the question, ‘why aren’t there more of them'? Such a large percentage of females coupled to their obsession with sexual activities, should have produced a planet wide, standing room only situation but as far as we can tell, this is not the case. Janie Dust, who I only mention in passing, is plagued by nightmares about them & there’s not one among us, that can look at them without at least a concealed shudder. We call them the greenies, no doubt from the Little Green Men suppositions of Old Earth. Actually, they’re not green at all.

We have a sort of leader. He's self-appointed, of course but except for those mainly in charge of menial tasks, people here tend to be self-appointed. He makes most of the policy decisions, which are more often than not, seriously lacking in any thought or vision & fail to take into account the special needs of our situation. Even worse, he talks incessantly behind my back, calling me 'the thinking man's Jesse James', a rebellious idiot & worst of all a pedophile. Irrelevantly, he's also Janie Dust's father. I've never known what he means by 'the thinking man's Jesse James' but I'm confident that he does intend it to be derogatory. I'm the explorer cum one man think tank here, self-appointed naturally.

Living as we do, with the ship & shuttles as a central unit inside the stockade, we have an odd combination of ancient & modern. Plenty of the electronic systems are still working but drainage systems are Stone Age. We used to pile up the human waste & other undesirable garbage just inside the perimeter walls every night. It had always vanished by morning. We concluded that the greenies are subterranean nocturnes & were stealing it for some bizarre purpose. Finding this a useful waste disposal system, we began leaving just outside the walls but instead of spiriting it away they changed to piling it around our sleeping quarters. Now wherever we leave it, they pile it around our sleeping quarters. Of all the displeasures here, certainly the Greenies are the most intolerable. Although they appear to be only barely sentient, they know exactly where to hurt us. Using hit & run tactics they do everything in their power to put us to maximum inconvenience. Nobody ever leaves the stockade at night but in the fairly rare daylight encounters with them, there have been a number of serious, sexual assaults.

Apart from usually pleasant climatic conditions, between the violent sandstorms, the only real upside is the canal system. Every canal has a transparent, semi-circular covering & it’s possible to walk through it onto the pathways beside the water. It seems to work at any point, just as if the covering were not present but if anyone makes an oblique approach, it becomes very present & very hard. Ninety degrees would be a good rule but it’s tolerant to a few degrees error. Every few hours, the water changes direction of flow, presumably an automated, cleaning system, which no one here yet understands. Coincidently, I’m sometimes sitting by the waterside with Janie Dust. Whenever I've been able to divert her from playing the ecdysiast, we've pondered this but have never been able to totally work it through. Janie Dust is of no importance to me.

Most of us on New Mars would agree that the canals are a Godsend. They’re full of edible, easy to catch fish & shell fish of all varieties, although many are ridiculously shaped. For a hundred meters or so each side of a canal, there’s a band of cereal, much like wheat but larger. It requires no attention whatsoever & can be harvested at any time. From this we can make bread & a variety of foodstuff. We also use it to ferment, and then distil a spirit, which is strong but by Earth standards, fairly unsophisticated. It's good for getting drunk though. In truth, Janie Dust drinks too much of it at times, not that I'm bothered about anything she does. I was just mentioning it. The weeds in the canals are delicious but there appears to be no other plant life. With the exception of the Greenies & a few birds there’re no other surface fauna, unless you count the giant bugs, which are prolific & horrific, although harmless.

The Greenies could never have built the canals. They have nothing beyond an animal intelligence & in any case, water is repugnant to them. They won't even approach the smell of it, so providing that we can make the short journey, the canals are safe even at night. We think the Greenies live on a fungus that grows in their burrows & so would have no interest in the cereal, even if it was farther from the water. It seems that the whole system must have been planned & constructed by some advanced civilization, which have left the planet, perhaps tormented by the Greenies. Maybe they're still here somewhere. I must find out about that.

Sometimes at night, waves of coloured lights pass overhead in vast formations.

I believe that they're aircraft or spacecraft & they have some bearing on the mysteries that surround us here. No one else is enthusiastic about my theories. The only person who agrees with me is Janie Dust. She always agrees with me & that means nothing but it's a pity her father couldn't be as accommodating. We call them the Friendly Lights, simply because they've never shown any sign of being unfriendly. No one argues about that. In truth, they're spectacular: even oddly reassuring.

It’s absurd to think that the follow up ships from Earth will arrive now. Our self-appointed leader thinks that we should learn to live without progress. He believes that if we all cultivate a frugal lifestyle & deal only with the simplicities of daily survival, we’ll all be happier. I disagree passionately with almost everything he says. I believe that somewhere here there could still be a higher civilization. If you think about it, the clues are overwhelming. It must at least once have existed & the Friendly Lights suggest that it still could.

There are times, when even I feel that I can hear the fat lady singing faintly in the distance but I'm optimistic enough to speculate. There may be cities, with wide avenues, teeming with culture & entertainment. There may even be an access to space travel. The land area of New Mars exceeds that on Earth but I’m going to team up with Janie Dust, as soon as she’s old enough & explore at least some of it. We're close to the equator & other parts may be very different.

No doubt the people of Old Earth have chosen to forget us & gone on to discover a variety of habitable worlds or New Earths. Unusually, I probably speak for everyone here when I say that if ever they find another New Mars, we’d rather not be told about it.