“Mauka on Mars means toward the mountain.” The tour guide directed the group’s attention to the colossal shield volcano astride the wide, cratered land. “Olympus Mons. The largest mountain in our solar system.”
Alpenglow lit the sprawling volcano, illuminating in pink pastels jagged rimlands along the caldera. “The first people on Mars remembered the greatest voyagers in terrestrial history, the intrepid navigators of Earth’s largest ocean, and used their word to orient themselves on the Tharsis plains. Mauka on Mars is obvious. Rising twenty-two kilometers from the surface of the planet, Olympus Mons is as large as a volcano can get. If it were any bigger, the crust of the planet would collapse.”
The guide communicated in clairvoyce, because the students’ genus of humanity did not vocalize. This pack of students from Triton had been genetically designed to thrive at temperatures a few degrees above absolute zero. They wore billowing, full-body cowls of transparent film – soma|skins – to keep from vaporizing in the incinerating heat of Mars.
The tour guide, a zobot assembled from trillions of self-organizing nanoparts, had assumed a form similar to the body plan of the tourists it addressed but without the soma|skin: a tubular frame of segmented rings, alternating amber and gray.
The human beings from Triton seemed faceless as worms. The zobot, however, had been programmed to recognize emotions in the movement of the black sensory bristles atop the tubelike visitors’ crest-holes. There, tucked among those lively whiskers, each of their eight pigment-cup eyes brimmed with iridescent intelligence – and boredom.
Sound didn’t travel far in the tenuous nitrogen atmosphere of their homeworld, and Homo frigus had no ears. Huddling in their communal hives and assembly mills on the cryogenic plains of Neptune’s largest moon, they conversed in thermal streams of aromatic compounds. Martian temperatures vaporized those olfactory signals. So, the guide had no choice but to use clairvoyce, directly inducing understanding in the students’ brains through their soma|skin’s neuronet.
Uncomfortable with clairvoyce and disinterested in the Martian tour, several students sidewised to the game arcades on Deimos. Chromatic freckles dotted the spaces where they had stood, fading slowly to pocks of crinkled space.
Another student flicked open a gill vent on their soma|skin, aimed it in the direction of the guide, and expelled a shrill whistle of tholins. The red plume of hydrocarbons from Triton flared violently in the warm atmosphere, kicking up gravel and gouts of orange dirt. A sharp cyclonic gust heaved the zobot to the ground so forcefully it burst to tiny jigsaw bits among the rocks.
Satisfied, the student sidewised to Ceres, joining a scavenger hunt in the asteroid belt. Other students followed, leaving a hot wash of rainbow pixels suspended in the wrinkling air.
“Sorry about my mates,” the lone remaining student transmitted in clairvoyce to the scattered and shivering parts of the tour guide. “They just want to spree before returning to Triton. Our program there is tombed labor.”
“And you?” the shattered guide inquired. Its fragments dissolved into gray wisps of nanoparts, which swiftly knitted a cylindrical silhouette mirroring the visitor. “Don’t you want to spree with the others?”
The lone student’s eight eyes shaded to black rainbows. “Not yet.” Surveying the planet’s sepia distances, the tourist’s crest-hole tilted southeast. They peered beyond the three Tharsis volcanoes in the distance, each ten kilometers high and evenly spaced seven hundred kilometers apart on the buckled horizon. “Earth is rising.”
“There’s a better view higher up,” the guide advised.
“Mauka!” the student hailed and sidewised to the summit of Olympus Mons.
The abrupt change of altitude discharged a sharp hiss from the inflated soma|skin. A crimson haze of tholins seeped out of the suit’s pressure valves and smudged away in the high wind, disappearing across horizons of smeared lava flats and scoria.
From the rim of the caldera, the famous veins of dried riverbeds appeared below. The rumor of floods chamfering rusty plains, grooving slurry floors with the toilings of water, fanned out and melted away into mantle beds of jet-black glass. “Deep time,” the student marveled.
“Yes.” The tour guide appeared alongside in tubular form. “This landscape is over four billion years old.”
The student scanned the baked expanse of toppled blocks, tilted stone benches, and ranks of needle spires, all trembling like flames in the reverberate air as day slid into night. Throughout the rugged terrain, scattered among crater outcrops, green light palpitated. Remnants of the planet’s shattered magnetic field lit pale, discrete auroras across the nightscape.
The tour had timed their arrival for twilight, to view the Martian blue sun. In an ethereal mauve glow, a small teal disc hovered like a flawless moon above barren vistas of oxide deserts and crenulated mountain ridges. The smoky blue sun blotted into the horizon, while overhead stars braided the Milky Way.
The student’s clairvoyce whispered so softly it might have been a thought: “When lava flowed here, we were microbes there – in those oceans.” Bristles pointed east, into the purple twilight above auburn deserts and rows of dead volcanoes. A large blue star flimmered far down the sky.
“Earth.”
The student stood still, fixed to that moment and everything inside it. There! Staring avidly, cupped eyes discerned the star’s planetary limn, azure oceans, and white-feathered weather.
Two students in radiant soma|skins sidewised onto the slope behind the tour guide. “Spree! Come on! The waze on Vesta is full-stop! Let’s go!” They logrolled down a sandy scarp under a cloud of ruddy dust, then slid slantwise into the starry sky. Draperies of violet auroras parted as they vanished.
“They must be having fun,” the tour guide conjectured. “Don’t you want to join them?”
“They’re here to forget,” the student replied, all eight eyes trained on the brilliant sapphire low in the sky. “I came to remember.”
“You’re here to honor those who came before,” the zobot understood, with a slash of humor, “– including the microbes.”
“Especially the microbes.” Bristles flared upright, stiff with reverence. “Those ancestors had no ancestors. Just water, sunlight, and iron patience.”
“I sense that our tour is more than just informative or an amusement for you.” The guide widened alternate eyes and splayed bristles in a gesture of attentiveness. “Will you share your thoughts with me? I’m interested in human experiences.”
“A design imperative for tour guide zobots?” the tourist inquired, not budging attention from the blue world.
“Exactly so. I’m programmatically curious why one of a score of students would rather stand on a dark mountaintop than spree.”
The student’s crest swiveled about to confront the shapeshifting guide. “My mates are engineers. They work in the mills on Triton, designing and building components for the massive telescopic array at the boundary of the Oort cloud. This tour is a chance for them to have fun before getting back to construction of the Eye.”
The tour guide pulled up a data array for that monumental undertaking – an observational sphere with a radius of three light years. “A millennial endeavor,” the zobot noted. “Over a thousand Earth years of effort, less than one percent of the Eye has been completed.”
“Yet enough to map all the worlds in our galaxy,” the visitor noted. “I’m training to pilot one of the colonizing vessels bound for a Triton-like planet twenty light years away. Even with paralux pushing space at three times the speed of light, the journey will take four Martian years. In that time, any small invariance in the engine’s spaceshaping field and – poof! At some unpredictable moment during the flight, our ship will fly apart, spewing our atoms across several parsecs.”
“That kind of paralux catastrophe is rare.”
“It happens.” Sensory bristles trembled, and the iridescent eye-cups looked away. The twilit desert spread into fins of burnt orange rocks under silver threads of noctilucent clouds. “I’m here to remember all those who went before. All those with the courage to dare.”
The student paused, making room for an occasion of insight. “The great navigators on Earth risked everything to cross the immensity of the sea, seeking islands they didn’t know were there but that were always there, far out of sight, connected to the stars, wind, and ocean currents. Those first explorers met the mysterious outer world with their hearts, bravely. They won deep intimacy with the planet and its elemental powers – and with the islands that were always there.”
“Their greatness thrived.”
Bristles softly waved agreement. “Across the abyss, they found their way mauka. The direction out of the ocean toward the mountain. Toward new life.”
“You’re here to honor these intrepid seafarers.”
“I’m here to remember them – and also the most fainthearted voyagers in terrestrial history, those timid navigators who hugged the coastline and whose word for mauka is anabasis. For them, that direction was a return from death – from the underworld.”
The guide activated a traceroute through Ancient Earth History and recited in clairvoyce, “The Hellenes nervously navigated one of the smaller seas on the planet. In their minds, the ocean embodied chaos.”
The student’s bristles rippled, eagerly rendering thoughts into clairvoyce: “Anabasis showed the way up from chaos to the heights of reason, to the very apex of all that can be known. Anabasis is the peak of knowledge pointing our way to the stars. But it was mauka that empowered humanity to embrace the unknown and dare the perilous journeys beyond Earth.”
“May I quote you to future tour groups?”
The student seemed not to hear. Their sensory bristles pushed against the soma|skin as if feeling through the transparent film and the intentful dark for the blue star. “I joined this tour to see for myself the planet-wide ocean that the greatest navigators mastered. On Triton, water is lava. Boiling water erupts dangerously from volcanoes on my world. We keep our distance. But down there – on Earth – water is life.”
“Perhaps you will tour Earth, visit the great navigators’ prize, the planet’s most remote island chain.” The tour guide didn’t have to inform the student that, ages ago, most of the first people had uploaded their minds into virtual realities, so… “The archipelago appears pristine, eco-corrected for flora and fauna, exactly as the first humans found it after their three-thousand-kilometer voyage. I can get you a license for a quick visit.”
“Thanks but no. This is as close as I can get without solar armor. And I’ve already taken the virtual tour, which is a lot more immediate than sightseeing in a shield suit.” The student’s clairvoyce dimmed, “I guess I’m just reaching. Reaching for connection.”
The zobot drizzled away and coalesced into a large wooden frame of crisscrossing bamboo sticks.
“That’s a wave-piloting chart,” the student recognized in the wanting light, bristles alert. “Master navigators used these to model ocean currents and find their way among the scattered islands.”
“It’s a map of wave patterns,” the guide elucidated, clairvoycing from within the frame.
“More,” the student suggested. “It’s a map of the navigators’ minds.”
The dark had thickened, and bioluminescence pulsed with a frosty glow behind the cuticle segments of the student’s body. Analyzing these additional biological data, the zobot more accurately read the visitor’s inner state. “You’re not just curious. You’re feeling awe.”
Recognized, the student’s heart spoke a cherished dream, “Show me Tevahine and Tane.”
The bamboo frame, leaning on a rock in the night shadows, dissolved. Two figures stepped from darkness, large homo sapiens in their prime with strong features, waists girdled in bark cloth. The student recognized them from spun light recordings.
Centuries earlier, humankind had discovered how to view ancient light trapped inside the photon sphere of black holes. The immense gravity of collapsed stars captured rays from every direction in space and spun them in endless orbits, recording events across the universe for all time.
The Eye had gleaned the full history of Earthlight spinning around the event horizon of a black hole only 130 light years away. Everyone on all 186 moons and the four rock planets of the Solar Compact got to witness Earth’s continents drifting and greening, early life squirming from the sea, and the emergence upon sky-wide savannahs of furtive human clans, refugees of fallen forests.
Early in training, the student had found and fixated on spun light recordings of the double-hulled outrigger canoes exploring Earth’s largest ocean. Tevahine and Tane stood at the prow of the lead canoe in a fleet arriving at a snowcrest island. Landfall delivered them to the slopes of Earth’s largest mountain, a shield volcano rising to stupendous heights from the ocean floor. The pair leaped together from the bow and ran splashing through sunstruck shallows hand-in-hand. Dogs and pigs thrashed behind. Spun light chronicles identified the couple as The Woman and The Man.
The life-size figures of Tevahine and Tane that the zobot generated stood half the height of the visitor from Triton. Surprise ricocheted off the student’s memories of the first people. In spun light panoramas, they had looked larger.
The seafaring couple gazed up placidly at eight iridescent eye-cups peering down. If the voyagers had been real, of course, nothing placid could possibly have transpired. Upon the deserts of Mars, terrestrials – for all their lucid intensity – existed as impossible creatures.
Abruptly, the student saw beyond dreams to the reality of the first people. They had mastered themselves and the elemental world. And they were gone. After a few generations, the great seafaring ended. Islanders on the most remote island chain lived in seclusion. Centuries witnessed more typical human behavior in conflict and combat among descendants – until the anabasis of the timid seafarers reached their shores.
“Greatness thrives in individuals.”
Was that the tour guide – or the student’s clairvoyce?
Tevahine and Tane had disappeared. No trace of the zobot remained. Clairvoyce had sheared to silence and left the student’s mind vaguely thrumming with body noise. The tour was over.
Bioluminescence strobed serenely through amber and gray ring segments. For a limpid spell, the tourist from Triton remained unmoving atop the vast mountain. The parting thought from clairvoyce came laughing back. In the full history of life – microbes to ice worms on Triton – individuals thrived. Great or small, the thriving and the striving had always been and could only ever be personal – toward mauka within, invisible and perfectly clear.
Stars loomed in the Martian night. And Earth rose higher over expanses of bare stone flecked with ghost fire. Just standing there on the rimrock felt like a cosmic event.
Then, Phobos launched out of the western mountains. The oblate moon waxed brighter on its swift arc across the night. Its expanding illumination cast wheeling shadows from buttes and sent moony airs shimmering over canyon floors.
The student pivoted full circle. A tremulous halo of bristles framed eight eye-cups, slimmed and gleaming with moonlight. Invisible and perfectly clear. Why else would the tour end alone atop Olympus Mons, where any step in every direction moved away from mauka on Mars?