Pleas to the Pleiades

“Mars is a lonely, cold, and dry planet … but there is water in places, and the temperature can sometimes reach as high as thirty or more degrees centigrade in a few valleys.”

The two old and dear friends sat in their tank-suits, gazing at the stars from the top of a crater’s rim on Mars, outside of their arcovale. Their tank-suits were much like Earthian scuba divers’ suits, protecting them from the cold and dry air with a thin layer of insulating material, and providing them with air through special helmets. Tank-suits did not need to be absolutely air-tight, because most of Mars had enough air pressure that people’s blood did not boil out. Your eyes did not pop out, you did not explode in the low pressure. It was like being on the top of Everest. The air the helmets provided was simply filtered Martian air, enriched by a little extra oxygen.

The helmets also allowed them to speak in the thin Martian air, through vibrating diaphragms near their mouths like microphones without electricity, and to hear through vibrating diaphragms like speakers near their ears.

For a long time, neither spoke.

“Many a night I saw the Pleiade, rising through the mellow shade, glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid,” said Jimmie Memnon.

“Who said that, Jimmie? Think Ah heard it,” his friend Osha said.

“Alfred, Lord Tennyson.” Jimmie Memnon paused and breathed a bit. The air the tank-suits provided was still as thin as the air in high Tibet. “See the Pleiades, Osha? Good view tonight. How you like it here on Mars?”

“Well … here’s whar Ah am, more or less stranded on … Mars. Used to be mah dream.” Osha paused and breathed, his helmet’s pipes making sucking and wheezing sounds. “The ideal desert. Mars, red and beautiful. It’s relatively peaceful here, but compared to the violence of Earth, almost anything would be. Nothing to do here but skip flat rocks into dust-devils, like I used to skip rocks onto the lakes of Earth.”

“I like it here all right, but the emerald Earth I remember from my childhood, I liked better, and that’s not merely nostalgia. It’s a real dream. Nothing to do here but skip flat rocks into dust-devils. Ain’t no lakes. No place to swim, unless we get the money to build a swimming pool.” Jimmie sighed, as he often did.

“Thar’s Mars Bars on Mars, but they’re very ’spensive.”

“And that’s not all. There’s a Mars Hotel, also expensive. It’s hi-tech, with cosmo-Victorian architecture, and it has a swimming pool under its protective dome, but we can’t afford it.”

“Ah was thar in Syrtis for only a few minutes before Ah took the night-train shuttle-bottle here to Hesperia. It ate up almost all mah credits. Ah seen some pitchers, though. It’s a perfect Victorian replica, the Mars Hotel, under the Syrtis dome. Everthang’s ’spensive there in Syrtis. Didn’t want to stay thar long.”

“There’s a Temple of Mars, the God of Wars. It’s very expensive too, in case you haven’t heard. War is expensive. We were born when they were just starting to send up rockets, the Sputnik era. But it was also the start of the last days of Nature on Earth.”

“Nature … there was lots of it, all kinds, wet and dry.” Osha paused and wheezed. “I ’member when Ah was young, and Ah would hike for miles near Many Farms in Navajo country. We real Cherokees finally gained the Big Rez Rights, through the Cherokee Outlet agreement. Not all the Navajo or other tribes like it, though.”

“… on the high plateaus of the Dine’tah. Red rocks that look like mythical monsters. I’ve often joked with friends that the cat box of an ex-girlfriend one morning looked like the Face on Mars, after the cat had finished with its business. Anything can look like anything. The Valley of the Monuments on the Navajo Reservation, where John Ford filmed his westerns, and all the country around it, has rocks that look like eagles spreading wings, and all sorts of other things. Those rocks last for a very long time. Rocks here last longer, unless a meteorite hits.”

Osha laughed, coughed, and licked his red cruddy lips. “The Big Rez was a lawt like this – red stone cliffs, strangely shaped rocks, and lots of dry red sand always blowin’ ever-whar, gittin’ into ever-thang, formin’ a gritty rang of red crud ‘round the moist edges of your mouth. Only it’s redder and cruddier here, and you cain’t hardly breathe. You sure this filter is working? Ah’m still a-gittin’ dust.”

“The filter lets in a little dust in small particles. You’ll get used to it. On Mars, you breathe hard and heavy, if at all, even after the terra-forming, and so there is always a lot of spitting and wheezing. Sometimes it’s hard to be polite, and even the young feel old. But there’s another side to that. The lack of air forces us to be more polite.”

“There’s more oxygen on Earth, sure, but it just seems to keep everybody worked up for nothin’. Burnin’, all about burnin’ – so those old Mars hippie women been a-tryin’ to teach us. They invoke the Burning Man, the symbol of human self-destruction. Like they used to do in Nevada.”

“Here it is peaceful, tranquil, and harsh, of course, but beautiful, and perhaps it is good that nothing can burn, and certainly it is an easier environment for life than that of the Moon. It is a big exertion here to do anything without the more expensive air tanks you can buy from the government, and it is impossible to venture up out of the canyons without air, but down in the deep canyons, the air is enough for slow steady activity, and the lighter-than-Earth gravity means less oxygen is required – if you take it easy and get into the Martian pace.”

“You begin to do things like a sloth or sumpin’ – more thoughtfully. You think about how much energy ever little exertion’ll take.”

“That is the heaviest lesson of the God of War. C’mon, let’s go downtown.”

Jimmie and Osha descended down a trail. The airlock to the dome gasped as they entered. They entered the Hesperia Canyon where they were living.

Osha also gasped, “Way oxygen on Earth keeps goin’ down, way dessert-I-fecation is continuin’, maybe soon the breatheability of air on the two planets’ll be similar.”

Jimmie threw off his tank-suit. “I like going without a tank of air down here in the canyon. Our air here is sparse, but it is good and clean. Burning is prohibited. If you want to smoke, or have a barbecue, you must supply the oxygen.” He breathed deeply. “Our efforts toward the greening of Mars, the terraforming that was begun in the middle of the twenty-first century, have met with some success, but only in a few places. We still do not really know this planet well. It has many hidden mysteries for us still …”

Inside the Hesperia Canyon dome, there were colonies with villas and small gardens terraced into the cliffs.

“The colonies are mostly here in these deep canyons, places that were once under deep water, some of them. Big greenhouses have been built, stretched across chasms, and domes built over craters. The places that are in the right angle to the more-distant sun, there it is not so difficult to get some varieties of Earth plants to grow. We have greenhouses with hydroponic and Mars-soil gardens. The length of the day is close enough to Earth’s, and there are seasons, so the plants don’t get too confused,” Jimmie explained, as Osha gradually peeled off his tank-suit, exhausted.

Jimmie continued, “For humans though, the subtle effect of a day that is thirty-seven minutes longer gets to some people after awhile. Some people seem to actually prefer it. I’ve never met anybody who likes the six-hundred-eighty-seven-day year though. It’s almost twice as long as what people are used to. It really drags on, but some here say it helps them feel younger.”

Osha, thirsty, said, “A little more water would make me feel younger. C’mon, Jimmie, I seen all that on the teller-vision already.”

“We have a few original Martian holidays based on the four quarters of the orbit, and on the best viewing of Earth, which really looks sweet, wet, and tempting from here, even without a telescope, when we’re at perigee. The Earth looks a bit brighter from here than Mars looks from Earth. And even with binoculars, you can make out the Moon.”

“I miss the dad-burn Moon already. Seems to have pertekted us. C’mon, Jimmie, Ah’m a-gittin’ hungry.”

“We also have the Dust Days, an ironic holiday period centered on the not-so-hot pestilential perihelion, when we get hit by radiation, and are not well protected. The Moon? Most people here sorely miss the moon. They sing about it all night, and they teach their children pathetic stories about it.”

“All we got here’s a couple a’little lumps. Ah’m a-hungry, Jimmie.”

“The mere flecks of Fear and Terror, Phobos and Deimos, but they are quick enough to be useful timepieces. I’m not sentimental about Earth’s Moon. Sometimes the dust obscures everything, but on other nights the starry skies are reassuringly the same as seen from Earth.”

“‘Cept for the missin’ Moon. C’mon, Jimmie.”

“Celestial latitude is also shifted. We basically use Deneb – The Tail of the Swan – for our polar star. See it?” Jimmie pointed to Deneb, visible through the dome. “Although a scarcely visible neighbor is a more accurate reference. The northern hemisphere here makes spring and summer seem to be longer, and some people like that. But if you want to feel anything remotely warm, you have to go to our southern hemisphere in its short summer, when the temperature actually often reaches eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit. Hellish Basin is hellish for a few weeks. Too much radiation, though. Gives people cancer, and ages them. They don’t seem to care. They’re making money with their wild vacation offers in an almost anarchic lack of government.”

As the sun went down further, the temperature began to drop dramatically.

“But everything still gets colder than witch’s tits at night, everywhere, even in summer. In the winter anywhere, it becomes a serious technological question, keeping warm. Some people here like to hang out in the South for those few weeks, then spend most of the year here in the North.”

Osha responded, “For all that, thangs just ain’t as heavy here as on Earth. The gravity is a third, and for a long time after comin’ here, y’ feel Superman-strong. Y’ kin leap and dance all about. Ah like that, it’s fun. Like the Moon was. Ah jumped around today outside, three times as high as Ah could on Earth! The Moon was even more fun, but y’ had to wear a very bulky spacesuit.”

“Here, with a jumpsuit, if you’re agile, you’re Nijinsky.”

“Then you adapt, and Ah know from experience, if y’go back to Earth you’re a wimp for quite a while. That part’s different from the comics.”

“The old folks from Mars who return to Earth can hardly handle it, but they do it. It’s like the Moon that way. The Moon has a sixth, Mars has a third. That’s how heavy it is. It’s fun, skipping a flat rock into an approaching dust devil.

“Hey, my new research has answered those questions. Gravity is NOT based on mass! It’s based on shielding size.”

“You’re losin’ me, old bud. Y’ know very well I ain’t no scientist.”

“Let me make it simple. The Moon is NOT one-sixth the mass of Earth, but it is one-sixth the diametre. Likewise, Mars is NOT a third of the mass of Earth, but it is close to one third of the diametre. Actually, a little more.”

“And so, what’s the difference?”

“Wish I knew, bro.” Jimmie paused and changed back the subject.

“Now, there are five Earthian cities on Mars, one for each of the major political power groups that persist on Earth. Only here, they don’t do much fighting, and when they do, it’s usually an extension of some Earth conflict. The Marfia and the Mariads have some sort of agreement. They’ll follow a guy here to do the whack if he’s a bi-planetary guy. We are now in a small canyon north of Hesperian Plain. It’s only a couple thousand clicks from Syrtis. We are very neutral about politics.”

“Ah think Ah seen a durgeon today. Looked like a big desert alligator.”

“The durgeons don’t seem to be bothering us lately. They are all around us though. Just east of us, the Serpentine Sea was aptly named it seems, for it teems with reptilians in underground caves there, dracos, durgeons, sapents, you name it. All kinds, the big three, and some other more exotic types are all crawling underground.”

“Ha, they thought there warn’t no life here for a while, didn’t they? Well, it is mostly desert, but – wow! – the thangs they got here. Not near as many livin’ thangs as Earth, but like Ah say, they’re gittin’ more and more similar every day … from what Ah hear.”

“And they are going extinct here already too. I am assuming you do not know about most of these developments, because you left the Earth’s Moon with the Asteropians, or was it the Taygetians, around 2020, was it not?”

“Maybe 2018. Hard to ’member.”

“Ah, such adventures we had before then, old friend, and you kept going. We thought we were old already, in our sixties, but then we learned how to Harmonize.”

“Used to be, we woulda thought that was just singin’! Now, here Ah am a-hunnert and thirty-two, and feelin’ younger than Ah did at forty. Ah kin JUMP here! Almost as good as on the Moon, but with much less to wear!”

Osha jumped gleefully. “Hey, it’s what year? Two-thousand-eighty-two.”

“The cleanliness of the Martian air may have something to do with it, too. It’s dusty here, but it’s clean dust, as long as you are not too near one of the volcanoes. How’s your health? Some do well here and some don’t, especially as to health and stealth. If you already have a heart or lung condition, Mars is probably not the place to move to, unless you plan to stay inside and filtered all the time, paying for the extra air pressure. They’re not going to pressure all the way up just for you in the general dome.

“They keep it like Cuzco in Hesperia. But if you’re in good cardiovascular condition, Mars might work for you. Let’s go to a pickin’ party, play some music. There will be some food.”

“Sounds good. Food?”

“Yeah. Some barbecue of lizards.”

Jimmie and Osha entered an auditorium, built on the ruins of an ancient amphitheatre much like those of ancient Greece or Rome. Musicians from all over the arcovale – and even a few other ones – came to the Hesperian Hippodrome, and had a great time. People kept coming up to Jimmie and slapping a hand on his shoulder.

“Hey, Jimmie Mack, when are you comin’ back? To my villa,” an old Martian hippie woman asked.

A guy with a wild mane of flaming red hair came up and shook hands with Jimmie. “Hey, Jim, this your friend who plays bass?”

“Yeah, Binger, this is Osha. You guys get acquainted, then set up your drums, we’ll do some classic tunes.”

First, Osha had to see what there was to eat on Mars – his first meal there, and he was famished. Most of it was like on the EMME cruiser on the long trip in: hydroponic tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, parsley, and green onions. Dishes of rice, beans, and condiments. There was also a large broiled turning carcass of an animal, off to one side. Osha knew that over half the hippie Hesperian community were weak vegans, but he and Jimmie, and Binger, were of the camp that liked meat.

“What is this beast we’re eating?” Osha asked.

Binger Shaker answered, “Durgeon.”

“Tasty enough. Lot like ’gator.”

“Yeah, we catch a few durgeons once in a while.”

They played a lot of old tunes, as well as some new compositions that some of them had done. It was mostly acoustic, but there were a few electric instruments. Binger Shaker had loaned Osha an amp.

Jimmie explained to Osha, after a few songs in which he had played guitar and sang, and Osha had played bass, “For some reason, a lot of old bluegrass lovers and Deadheads end up here. And Binger ended up here. Can you believe it? The only super-group member who is still alive.”

Binger said, “Well that’s because I can’t get a visa anywhere on Earth.”

Jimmie flat-picked his old red Guild D-28 through “Friend of the Devil” and “Orange Blossom Special,” then, electrically, on his Gibson SG, “Tales of Brave Ulysses,” and “Outside Woman Blues,” then they took a break again.

“If you lose your woman, pray to God you don’t lose your mind..”

Jimmie explained further, “The Hippodrome is on the site of an actual ancient Martian arena, minimally restored so that it has an aura of antiquity. The weathered Martian stone blocks have the remnants of traces of the ancient Mars script, which is remarkably like Phoenician.”

“Sunset in the Hesperian Hip with live music is otherworldly for any world!” Binger exclaimed. “I like it here. It’s almost anarchy, but not violent, unless I get mad.”

“Huh, you get mad, Binger? That’s an understatement. I’m glad you’re my friend –at least you never get mad at me. Let’s get mad at some other people.”

“Later. It was the archaeology that was found that really inspired everyone to develop Mars, Osha. Those first pieces that were sold to museums and collectors had brought stellar prices, Martian pottery, pieces of old buildings remarkably like ancient Greek, glassware, gadgets that used to do who-knows-what, weapons that no longer worked, but damn sure interesting,” Binger said, his red hair flaming against the Martian red rocks.

“If ancient humans who lived on Mars did it, so can we,” said Osha.

“But as time went on, it became more and more clear that they had had water, water in quantities, and oxygen, at least more oxygen than there is now. So we explanetriates huddled in our caves and greenhouses, and it was not too bad a life, as long as a durgeon from Hydaspis or Hydraotes Chaos didn’t choose to come by and eat you, or abduct you for experimentation in one of the sapents’ laboratories,” said Jimmie.

Jimmie explained more, “The durgeons ain’t dumb, they’re as smart as dogs or sharks. Edible but not kosher. There’s a rabbi here, and a Sufi sheikh, and a Lama from Tibet, because Jews and Muslims like to go everywhere, and Tibetans adapt well to our very rare air. So, we do have some certified kosher and hala foods.

“But the sapents and other dracos are super-smart. They’re like enlarged lizard-like birds with big braincases … like small dinosaurs. Except they’re so obviously smart that they seem to have come from the future more than from the past. They can look at you and that’s it, you’re under their control, unless you know how to look past them or glance askance; but even then, the best of them can pull you under. You can run, you can run, and get behind a large rock or hide in a cave, or a metal craft, to shield yourself from their withering hypnotic emanation, for that is what it is, not a stare really, although the stare itself is also quite a fearsome, awesome thing. You don’t want to remember it quite, to call it up in image clearly, for the power of their minds is so strong that such an image could summon them, or one of them, which is enough. They are cruel …”

“Aye they are – all of them, all the dad-burn gall-durn dragons. Lots of people got religion about it, when it first came out that yes, the Earth, Mars, and plenty of other places besides were … simultaneously inhabited by underground reptilian blue and red meanies resembling devils or satans. I like ’em sometimes. I’d like to live in a Yellow Submarine.”

Binger was a paradox of a person.

Osha reflected. “It sure makes all them old sturries make a lot more sense. But why they been hidin’ from us humans for most of the past few centuries, and why they come out ag’in in force in the twenty-first?”

Jimmie said, “Really, most of the apparent demons are not intentionally so – they’re just absolutely amoral.”

Binger said, “They simply aren’t mammals …”

`Jimmie continued, “… so they don’t care about any mere mammal feelings in the least, because they don’t have such feelings themselves. Their bodies tolerate temperatures better, although they can’t think or act properly at very cold temperatures for long. They regenerate and heal better than mammals, and their nerves are less sensitive to pain. Wounds are of less significance to them, because the parts can usually grow back, and anyway, they have such high-technology medicine that they can grow or regenerate almost anything biological. Only because of their cold intelligence, they can be very reasonable.”

Everybody paused, and a group had gathered around to listen to them.

“It’s the way to relate to them, on purely pragmatic, usually mercenary terms. They don’t always want to eat you, but it could happen. You really seriously have to protect your human babies – they are tasty morsels to them, as are any small dogs, or other pets.”

“That’s the way they are, and they got us, uh?” Osha despaired.

“Tell us some of the history again, Jimmie,” said Binger.