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23: The Majesty of Mars
We did not have time to join the drunken youths in their frivolous use of the local Time Trains as a vehicle for moving from party to party, drug to drug, erotic encounters end to end. We figured our way through the system until we found ourselves at the transfer point to Mars. Like all Time Trains, the technology was the same at its core, but this was not so much a train as it was a huge airliner, almost a Queen Mary sort of vessel if one seeks a suitable comparison. To board, we had only to take the local to an upworld transfer point. That took us from London into the Temporale and away from any meaningful reference points connected with Earth or for that matter the solar system. We were now beyond the reach of Earthly gravity and in the Temporale itself, in the strings and tunnels that dug through the ash-like dark matter of the underverse and create miniature world-strips complete with houses, telephone poles, villages, people who spent their entire lives in such places without ever questioning the nature of those trains that they took locally from one stop to another, one village to another. Perhaps they knew that going too far would remove you forever from the comfort and safety of your little community. Some that we encountered in the corridors of the liner spoke languages we could understand, while others droned and nattered in languages far from the roots of our own.
We noticed all these things in passing, but stayed focused on our mission of trying to help our future Mars survive. As an adjunct to that, we were determined to help restore the legitimate line of Holy Mothers and keep Balesso from becoming an absolute tyrant.
If there is ever any question about the majesty of our world Mars, the person would only have to sit where we did, glued anxiously to the windows of the liner that took us from Earth to Mars through the interstices between times and spaces. This was no zeppelin of wood and aluminum trundling along in the air on a methane wormgear. This was a building in motion—graceful in its complex glass and steel architecture, not a simple shape at all, but an elongated complex of sub-units with their own atmospheres and artificial gravity. Since it never passed through any atmosphere, it had no need to be aerodynamic, and it was far from that. Because it was fueled by the technologies of the Temporale, it had virtually limitless energy supplies and did not need any sort of earth-based refueling. It had been outfitted by humans, working under Faraos direction, to be self-sufficient in recycling water and waste (things one does not speak about in any era), and it only needed to on-load and off-load its cargo, its human passengers, its aliens if any (they stayed sequestered in their own sections of the ships), and the food they would eat.
Mars, Divine and Amber, hung massive and glowing in the large windowport of our efficiency. We were lucky to get our own lounge, and this came complete with bathroom, couches arranged around a low table on which sat green plants, and every other comfort imaginable. Just as we were comfortably seated inside our private suite, the area outside was sealed out of the actual universe. We appeared to be sailing along in orbit of Mars, but in reality we were traveling along an invisible trackway in the Temporale. The building materials of the aliens who had built the network included whatever materials were at hand. The doorway and Membrane were the most difficult challenge, and they excelled at masking them so a person could pass by all his life and never suspect that a few steps to the side could take him into the world between worlds. The Laars apparently accomplished all this, in the naturally occurring interstitial world they discovered, by creating Rules or self-replicating programs whose function it was to build preconfigured structures in these spaces, using dark materials that abound in the universes. This matter is subquark, and it's been called many things. Metaphorically, it resembles those round black and white game pieces of the Japanese game No. It lacks any attributes measurable in our larger universe, but our universe is built on that foundation. The go-dots borrow attributes, so to speak—temporarily exchanging heat or motion or potential energy from the valence shells of our known elements. If a go-dot touching a hydrogen atom, say, borrows the atom's heat energy, the atom briefly melts into a Bose-Einstein Condensate at just above absolute zero. This form of dark matter borrows mass from the popcorn universes all around it, like the one we live in, so—although a planet's worth can otherwise be tossed on a child's snow shovel—when adhering to the hiersein (opposite of dasein) of a real universe, dark matter becomes as massive and real as any visible stuff that universe. Even a stretch that hovers in nothingness, and is no thicker than an asteroid, bridging far places, joins the massive gravity field of the adjoining planet where you or I step through a doorway on a moonlight night, leaving Washington, Kansas or LaGrange 5, and we end up in a sort of permanent zone of twilight lit only by the gegenschein of light leaking from the sky next door. Complicated, I know—but this only scratches the surface of what we already know about this enigmatic matrix in which universes pop, expand, and disintegrate to make room for the next universe. And there are eternally many such universes, infinitely many levels of size upward or downward, and limitless variations in alternate worlds. To expand (no pun intended) the metaphor, the multiverse is like the bag that holds the popping kernels, and the space between the kernels is the Temporale, full of debris and salt and dusk and molecules of butter and paper and even human fingernail and skin, if you think about it. I have no doubt that this entire multiverse is no more than a dustmote in a far larger omniverse that is itself merely a dustmore in far larger supersets.
The Laars could not have done all that they did by themselves. But the self-replicating Rules they released multiplied ceaselessy while continuing the building of the Temporale long after its creators had become nothing more than dust lost long ago on small, faraway paths. One of those paths, as we shall find shortly, crossed through our solar system eons ago.
* * * *
You may be asking: how could we travel about so freely? The answer is that the human race at that point had adopted a subservient mentality. Let the Overlords worry about it was the retort in discussions of budget or levels of effort, from small town meetings to national congresses. Since the global corporations of the early 21st Century had made national governments all but meaningless, just as socialist and democratic franchises had made the monarchies obsolete, there was little to stand in the way of the Faraos' easily ruling the world through their corporate henchmen. My point is that the Faraos and the Farao-controlled governments don't bother you unless you bother them. Until that point, you are free to enjoy what is really the best-run and best-ordered world humans have ever managed to enjoy. The price of order was simply and entirely liberty. That began soon to grind on us as we noticed a quality of not really caring that had particularly been so evident in the Communist nations of Eastern Europe in the late 20th Century (where we had gone to test the theories of some of Wells' more radical colleagues among the Fabians and other societies). It was all new to us, so we eagerly learned about Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, and followed the execution of their ideas through famines, wars, and other disasters until we were more convinced than ever that the Free Domers on our Mars possessed more wisdom than we'd ever given them credit for—albeit balanced by the huge whale in the water of the King's Olympus Mons. (I am startled at times to think, as Grandfather Abbot told me, that I might have become that king one day).
Our feelings were mixed but we were very excited—even though one of the Faraos' black rectangular floating platforms hovered in the sky of Mars. They were everywhere, and people understood we were their pawns, but nobody had any idea why. It was sort of like when Pizarro and his cut-throats seized the Inca. The native Americans of Peru had no idea why the Spaniards became hallucinatory around gold—to them, it was just a nice shiny metal. Only if the Faraos were killing us or doing some other terrible thing to us, it wasn't readily apparent. One just knew they were getting something out of their occupation of our solar system.
The Faraos had harnessed this segment of the Temporale, as sometimes happens with advanced races around the universe. They open the secret portals and make it a part of the world itself. In so doing they run the risk of sucking that part of the universe out into the Temporale the way a vacuum pulls matter into itself. A serious enough rupture can destroy an entire universe—something that unfortunately is happening to our own universe for reasons that will be discussed later. Here, the Membrane was still very powerful and kept the two worlds apart. We passed through as we walked through a great orbiting transfer station that bridged the invisible wall between the Temporale and the universe itself. There was just an unexpected, momentary shimmer and a tingle, and we were back in our own universe. Trini did one thing before we left the orbiting complex: she bought a camera.
* * * *
From orbit, we descended in gas-filled flying wing landers. "There is no vegetation," Sindi observed glumly.
"They haven't begun to terraform yet," Trini said.
"That red landscape looks familiar. We're home!" I said.
In our time, vegetation darkened the canyons, and ponds and lakes of honest to goodness water were a common sight in the lowlands of the Tribers. At this point in time, apparently the oxygen stations known to us as Godrocks had not yet been installed.
"Home in space but not in time," Trini said as she leaned her chin on her fingers on the sill beneath the porthole beside her window seat.
Mars in 2600 looked desolate, I must be honest. After enjoying the green Earth, especially, Mars looked lifeless. The light of Holy Sol—pardon me, the Sun—looked wan and distant. The light were was about the equivalent of a drizzly dusk in some nameless, soulless Earth metropolis in the industrial age.
"Let's not be glum," I said. "We've come on a mission, and we'll get out of their way as soon as possible."
"The founding fathers," Trini echoed in a stricken voice as we watched ordinary men and women in atmosphere suits moving girders, driving motor-tows, doing the building of our world as if they were children moving blocks about.
"The Building Fathers," Sindi snickered. She appeared more capable of absorbing the blow of learning that your world isn't what you thought.
We took a silvery plane that streaked at high speed through a salmon sky. The plane left a faint moisture contrail amid its own exhaust. Soon, we roared down to a breezy landing in the main crater. There wasn't a city there yet—just a mess of industrial domes like dull silver blisters. They had no need for fences yet. We rented atmosphere suits with bubble helmets and rode in an orange metal cart to the river bank. Where the palace and the temple would one day raise their golden domes, today there was only a dry river bed meandering through lifeless cuts and chops in the sandstone.
Trini took pictures with her digital camera. Each little ten or twenty second movie would convey to our own people, 2000 years in the future, what the creation period was really like.
High up, the plain black rectangle of the Faraos' orbiting station silently and slowly moved across the pinkish blue stratosphere.
I waited as a groundcar drove closer along a primitive riverside path. The driver, a middle-aged man in a blue suit and bubble helmet slowed and looked at me curiously. I raised a hand to flag him down, and we had a brief conversation as I leaned on his window. "Howdy."
"Howdy," he said.
"We are business people from London, and we've come to scout the place out."
He boomed: "Make yourselves at home. It's wide open. Long as you pay, you can play."
"I understand the powers that be are encouraging people to invest here."
"Oh yes," he said. "The Faraos, them fuckers, they're all for it. Can't say I know what they're all about, but when they opened up that ancient travel lane, they made it possible to bring a load of cargo here from Earth in less than a day. Isn't that amazing?"
"It truly is. What company do you work for?"
"I'm an American. I work for NASA."
"Of course. Do you like working for them?"
He shrugged. "It's government work. Great pension, good benefits, pay's so so. I like the security. Best of all, I get my forty acres and a mule." He bellowed at his own prize humor. "That's an old saying for the government gives you land cheap. I think it's going to be worth something one day." He pointed to some of the distant sheds and warehouses. "You take them Upholder Corporation employees, they get paid big money, but no benefits, no land."
"Upholder," I said innocently, "what do they do?"
"They are building the dome infrastructure."
"The what?"
"They rough out the domes, put in the power and the glass, rig the lighting, you know, the basics."
"Is there an Eastgarden outfit?"
He nodded. "Yeah. They do the sewers. You know, they make the shit flow south." He laughed.
I had to laugh also. "Tell me, friend, is there a way to find out if there is heavy metal under the ground?"
He gave me a pitying look. "Aw, chum, don't tell me you've got some pipe dream about prospecting up here. Gold, is that what you're after?"
"Water," I said.
He brightened. "Now that's a worthy purpose. So what does that have to do with metals?"
"I just wonder if there are heavy deposits in the area. How would I find out?"
He leaned out of his cab and pointed. "See that bluish dome over there? Go in there and ask to speak with the Land Engineer. He or his secretary will show you all the maps and soundings you want to see."
"Thank you," I said.
"Don't mention it." He started to put his wagon in gear.
"Say, does the name Balesso mean anything to you?"
He paused. "Balesso?" He thought for a second. "Yeah. Come to think of it, there is a lazy, good for nothing young fella named Tommy Balesso, just started last week. He's a rigger. Goes down in the drill shafts and sets up the explosives. Dangerous job."
"I think I met him some time ago," I said. "Ambitious fellow."
"Greedy," the man said.
"Your name—?"
"Freddy. Frederick L. Graniston. My dad owns the biggest transportation company on Mars."
I stood back. "You mean, like Graniston Cargo, Graniston Power...?"
He shrugged as if he didn't see the big deal in that. "Yeah, sure. Those are modules we shot up here before the Faraos took over and opened the Temporale. You're talking about pods we dropped in the hills down in Syrtis to set up our base camp."
"Was it the first camp on Mars?" I asked, hungry for information.
"I dunno," he said. "Maybe. Maybe not. Definitely one of the first. We had a race going, the various korps, before the Faraos showed up and changed the whole game. I gotta go now."
"Thanks"
"Take care." He left in a cloud of dust. I had learned a lot.
Trini and Sindi, unaware of the conversation, had been shooting pictures by the river. They drifted back. "Time to go soon."
I told them about the sounding office. We walked over and talked with the engineer, who was a crusty older man. He confirmed what I suspected. "Yeah, sure, there is a huge Anomaly about a thousand feet down. I don't think we'll have the means to drill down that far in my lifetime."
"What do you suppose it is?" I asked.
He looked at me as if I were a nuisance. "An ore deposit, most likely. You thinking of digging?"
"No."
"No?" He seemed incredulous. "Then what the hell are you doing up here?"
"Just asking questions," I said. I didn't thank him as we left.
* * * *
Brief conference near the future Holy City.
Sindi: "We're running out of money and oxygen."
I: "We need to return to Earth."
Trini: "What good will that do?"
I: "Free air to breathe?"
Sindi: "Funny."
I: "Ha ha."
Trini: "I'm serious. What next? We let Wells and Tatnall go. We should have had them wait and gone with them. We're played out."
Sindi: "Easy, girl."
Trini: "I liked London in Victorian times, except the starving matchbook girls being child prostitutes."
I: "The Victorians had a great way of dealing with things. If they didn't like something, they didn't permit you to talk about it. Child prostitutes? Just charming little matchbook girls."
Sindi: "The birth of advertising at the dawn of the corporate age."
Trini: "We've lost our minds."
Sindi: "We've lost our money."
I: "Let's get back to Earth, please?"
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