If There are No Men on Mars Then I am Not a Man

      I have not spoken to another human being in twenty-five years. I was at that time, the best astral projectionist on the planet, able to extend my consciousness an almost unlimited distance away from my physical body, and so I was chosen to search for extraterrestrial life, living or extinct, in a place where men cannot go. It was the most pressing question on the human mind and what fools we were, for as long as my body lies preserved unconscious in a lab I am unable to return to it. I cannot even write in the Martian sand and report the futility of my findings, if I could I would write this...

IF THERE ARE NO MEN ON MARS THEN I AM NOT A MAN

           It was believed there might be surface water on Mars due to photographs of runoff that appeared to be salt crystals. But somehow my government knew (perhaps from my predecessors) that a planetary ecosystem, intelligent life included, had had its entire run beyond the age of our own civilization all the way to extinction. They could have known from this information alone what to expect, but I wasn’t given any geological training except that I knew a rock from my own head and now I’m not so sure.

           Magazines showed a beautiful pink landscape with bubble-headed children toiling outside a future enclosed settlement. There was something called a “water seeker”, an imaginary animal that probes the soil with its long snout and closes its ears over its body at night. The real Mars is so dead one might say it’s a place where rocks go to die. Imagine the driest place on Earth, the Atacama Desert in Chile where the rovers were tested, if the most lifeless square mile of that desert was global. I spent a year exploring curiously, able to pass through any surface but unable to see through the darkness inside it, unable to sleep through the long Martian nights. In time I explored the polar regions, where it is too cold for rocks as much as that puzzled me. I figured there must have been an ice age when a great deal of the planet was covered in ice sheets. But the temperature is always 80 degrees below zero, one would think moisture never rises unless there is such a thing as negative moisture. One would think it would have to be warmer to have more ice, but this was the least of my revelations.

           It was also believed that certain mountain formations resembled pyramids. There was a group of three (one big mountain and two little ones) that reminded them of the pyramid complex at Giza if one used a lot of imagination, so that is where I was sent first. From the orbital photos they did seem to rise from an empty plain with only the rubble that had fallen from their own slopes, and they did seem to have the right proportions with the “divine ratio”, but as I stood there they looked disappointingly like ordinary mountains. I passed through them searching for any internal chambers, trying to discern if they were connected to the bedrock, a job that could have been done by sending a backhoe or even the ability for me to brush some dirt aside with my hand. (Not only has a backhoe not been sent in all these years, they have not sent a probe of any kind to those mountains.) I can only assume the theory they were so convinced of has been abandoned.

           After searching the nearby crater for any signs of quarrying, I started to wonder if there was any visible difference between a million-year-old pyramid and a natural mountain. If the ones at Giza were a million years old we might think they were natural hills. (But that would mean the Egyptians didn’t build them but found them and quarried them off just as their descendants did, which would mean they were not tombs in the first place.)

           I was instructed to project myself back in time 100 million years, to a time when there might have been life in this desert and the pyramids might have been in use. Projection is like having a waking dream where someone at your bedside is telling you what to do, so I did my best to transition to that time. Someone in the past would have perceived me as a ghost or something they imagined.

           Mars 100 million years ago looks much like it does today. The mountains did look a bit more like pyramids albeit on a gigantic scale; the sides were cleaner, the ground was smoother as if someone had swept with a broom a thoroughfare wide enough for a million people to assemble around the complex. But there were no signs of life, and in this form I can gravitate instantly to the thoughts of a single individual, even someone who has been buried in the ground. Archaeology as I understand it reveals mostly human waste and there was none. There was no trash, no homes for the laborers who built these structures, no discarded material from their stoneworking, no channels in the ground for plumbing, no signs of agriculture, there were no graves.

           I would come to explore five of these locations within an area of 100 square miles, each of them slightly different but just as deserted. The massive cul-de-sac around the complex did not lead anywhere, I perceived only a distant memory of its occupancy and it was then I started to doubt if it was only what I was seeing that made me think there was a memory. Perhaps it wasn’t a cul-de-sac and they weren’t pyramids, but it did remind me of something I’d seen before.

           As a child I remember seeing a movie version of Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles that wasn’t very good, it might even have been a school production. The scenes with the Martians were filmed through a lens to make them indistinct; instead of the shining cities described in the novel there were only cones, spheres and geometric shapes filmed in a patch of desert. Movie props probably made of foam covered in gritty-looking reddish earth. This reminded me of that, like a mirage.

           Then as I knelt to the ground it occurred to me this was a landscape scoured by a natural disaster. A storm that moves boulders farther than the eye can see (or perhaps destroys them with lightning?), and I came to the realization I should have made in the first place: A civilization far older than ours, more advanced, on a dying planet. Which means they either died with it…  or settled somewhere else at a time when there was no human life.

           We ourselves are able to travel to other worlds right now, we just choose not to because the Earth is divided among too many rivals and agendas. So a spacefaring civilization more ancient and perhaps wiser was still faced with destruction from planetary forces?

           I went back even further, one billion years which is so vast an amount of time to my human brain I could barely hold myself there. It was like moving and thinking through soup, but the pyramid did have an entrance and a dark chamber for sleeping at this time, sleeping through storms. For how long I wondered. They could have projected as I do from their sleeping chambers to explore the nearest planet before they left. I perceived something like an ark transporting them to a new place, but then my logic disabled me.

           For them to be pyramid-builders who came to Earth in ancient times and inspired our own pyramid-building was not possible. An architectural style doesn’t outlast the entire span of evolution including five mass extinctions, observing from a time when they were the only predators to a time when they were hunted themselves and then watch the predators die out. No, an architectural fad belongs in a book on the history of architecture, each generation making changes all the way to the styles of the Atomic Age. Was it even knowable that Earth had been visited so long ago? There are no fossils that old except for bacteria. The Appalachians where I grew up are a billion years old; what would a human body or a vehicle be reduced to in all that time?

           So my thoughts returned to the possibility of a hoax. What if someone had wanted people to think there was life here? It’s an age-old prospect from the imaginary “canals” to Orson Welles’ radio broadcast. Our knowledge is still mostly telescope-based, even though we probably have the ability to place a few props knowing no one would come along to discern them in decades. Astral projection was not recognized by science in my time, my handlers didn’t identify themselves as NASA or anything else. What was the alternative? That the Martians obliterated all signs of themselves leaving only the most base monoliths behind to keep them from becoming our gods?

           Just then as I turned to leave the sleeping chamber, I perceived I saw a man or something like a man standing at the gaping triangular entrance for only a millisecond; a man with a padlock in place of a mouth. Perhaps it was only something that made me think of a padlock, pierced through his nose like a portable respirator. But in a moment I was sure there was no one there, and I returned to the present day.

--

           Little did I know my doubtful statements would result in me never hearing the voice of my handlers again. From time to time I thought I heard something, orderlies whispering around my body perhaps. I had no way of knowing which doubts were the problem, my theory that this was staged or that Martians were our progenitors, and so my global wanderings began.

           I thought of how time travel makes the concept of history meaningless. An advanced race shouldn’t have to be present for disasters or even their own past; not if they gravitate to a time of paradise and live there in perpetuity observing all eons. The only remnants visible to us would be from the time they chose to abandon their original form, like discarded library books they no longer care to go back and erase. The job of the scorched-earth policy, leaving nothing visible to confuse us might have fallen to a janitor or the last Martian standing. I imagined a heat beam fired from orbit or wherever they went to, unless… we ourselves did it? I started looking for traces of glass or other signs of a burn area having no knowledge of archaeology.

           Deep down my list of things to investigate, of less importance than the top ten attractions on Mars was something I never expected to bring up. The lander that was sent in 1995 took panoramic images of the landscape that included an oddly-shaped rock someone thought might be a fallen statue, and another that slightly resembled a human skull, and another that looked like a bear swinging its arms or whatever people imagined it to be. They seemed to think a lander that touched down at a random location, facing a random direction, happened to capture this unlikely moment. It was a sort of idolatry as they poured over every photo leaving no stone unspeculated. But I didn’t have to go to that random spot when I could find more bizarre formations no rover has ever seen.

           So I willed myself to gander at thousands of potential objects until the day I came to a giant rock slab a hundred meters across, which had sprouting like a tree from its far corner a figure like a deformed person with one arm hideously bent at the wrist and the other arm pointing at the Sun like a statue of a discus thrower. I looked at it wondering how the wind could possibly have sculpted it into this shape.

           What is it that first makes something an idol? Does a person speaking to it automatically make it one? There’s another story by Bradbury I knew only in name, “And the Rock Cried Out”. And why shouldn’t it? Introspection is a healthy measure when one is completely alone, yes? So I began speaking to this inanimate object, for how else was I to glean its wisdom?

           “Inhabitants of this planet settling on Earth so far in the past doesn’t just precede our natural history but theological history.” I voiced the foremost thought on my mind. “One Billion BC unless I’m mistaken must predate the War of Heaven. What would they have found on Earth at that time? And why was it deemed not necessary for us to know about them? Unless… they were our gods.”

           The formation stood there in the wind as I continued.

           “What makes a god different from an idol?” I finally asked.

           Its grotesque pose never altered nor did it once turn its stone head to look at me.

           “The difference is who is on the losing side.” the rock cried out.

           I squinted in the sun neither bowing in admonition to my psychosis nor ignoring it.

           “Not only gods but facts themselves vanish if no one believes in them.” it continued. “Your quarreling with yourself is not necessary; you are still abiding by considerations that are no longer real. You should be an acolyte of your beliefs, there is no one here to doubt them. These are your own words.”

           “Yes I am aware of that.” I responded. “I have crossed vast distances of space and time in search of answers to those questions.”

           “I will tell you whatever you wish, but only if you take it as your imagination.” it replied in a sly, stony voice.

           I considered this strange condition for a moment.

           “Very well, I’ll take whatever you say as my imagination.” I conceded. “The man I saw in the past, was he the last of his kind?”

           I had no way to interpret its silence.

           “You must have seen a reflection of yourself.” it answered.

           “Yes, that’s what I thought. I am in the same position as him, which means vicariously he is the same as me.”

           “It is as you say.” it gave a non-committal answer.

           “And what are you?” I demanded next.

           “I am your *Ngggh*.” it made an unpronounceable sound that pealed like a bell in my ears.

           “You are my what?” I repeated.

           “But that is not the question you have come here to ask.” it said.

           I thought for a moment.

           “How do I get out of this predicament?” I posed.

           “You already know the answer. In time they will send someone else.”

           “Yes, there is a manned mission projected for 2009.” I admitted. “That is quite a few years from now, but I will sense him wherever he lands. But what if I fail to convince him to tell others about me or he thinks I am just a delusion? Murder him in his dreams and take his place?”

           I had just answered my own question.

           “I didn’t think that was possible.” I flummoxed. “What do you know about that?”

           “Pass through me…” it beckoned with its twisted hand, and I obeyed.

--

           I am not the man I was, for he shared things with me no man knows. Of course it wasn’t my first choice to subdue an unsuspecting spacefarer chosen by his people. A fool who wanders a trackless wasteland to my resting place should know better, for a man who lies to himself receives bad information. He becomes his own god. But it wasn’t my first choice, I still have *ngghs!* to tell me… My thoughts jumped like a scratched disk skipping over what I was going to say.

           But I did not wish to wait for so long. Projection requires a voice from someone in the outside world and there are risks. I wished to go back and talk to the silent man first.

           So I returned to the pyramid a billion years in the past. I stood in the doorway transitioning through weeks, months, decades so that someone would think I was a monument. I probed thought itself past the limitations of my surroundings for another presence, peeling them back like layers to reveal the hand that built them. And there beyond the rationality of colors, one half of the sky black and the other white, there he was as if I had disturbed him.

           He was hairless, his face pursed by some irreconcilable conundrum, and indeed his mouth was a padlock. It was my own from ages ago, and I was not in a position to help him.

           From the time before I first set foot on this planet there have been two possibilities we are led to believe, both supported by prevalent institutions with countless scholars and reasons, one black and one white, both competing for our loyalty. And if we try to find out which it is, we end up riding a line that stretches to infinity because the revelations are too important for us to know. On that both sides are in agreement, and those two truths are *Ngh!* and *NGGGH!*… I mean they are… they’re unattainable to us.

           And so I wait, no longer able to see the colors of this landscape since my perception was broken. I am waiting for the first man on Mars, waiting to know him, but I have looked as far into the future as I am able to go and they still have never sent one.