Stephen Baxter: The Martian in the Wood

“There was the clearing with the animals. The megafauna. And then, the Neanderthals’ hearth. It’s not as before.”

“Something different, then. Good! Come on.”

He led the way.

It was only a little further before they came upon the valley.

That, at least, was how Zena labelled it in her head, on first glance. She and Walter, as if by instinct, quickly dropped down behind the shelter of a low bluff, and out of sight.

The dense forest had given way, quite abruptly, to a wide landscape – as expansive as the clearing where she had spotted the elasmotheriums and the giant elks – but there were no megafauna here, she saw immediately. And the ground itself, the very geology, was changed too. She and Walter were at the top of a kind of cliff, perhaps fifty feet high, overlooking a broad, straight valley. The hard, rocky ground under her feet, and the outcrops by the edge, were rust red.

Walter picked at the rock with a fingernail. “No grains,” he murmured. “Not any kind of sandstone. It could be basalt, if heavily weathered. Rusted. Are there basaltic outcrops in Sussex?”

Zena had no idea. She stared at him, and the bit of rock he studied, and back at the wall of forest from which they emerged. It looked a hundred yards away, at least, though she thought they had come only a few paces to this bluff. She was cold, too, but it was a dry, sharp cold, oddly less uncomfortable than the damp murk of an English winter.

She looked up. The sky was clear, where it had been overcast, and the sun was low. Still the morning, then. But the sun looked pale, oddly shrunken. The sky was a deep, deep blue.

And before her was this valley, where no valley had existed before.

Cautiously she leaned forward, and peered out over the bluff. A valley, yes, wide and with a flat floor, and walled by this low cliff, and by a matching parallel line on the horizon. But where the cliffs were rust red, the valley floor was mostly green or grey, for it was covered with a greyish sort of vegetation. It was difficult to see the detail at this remove, but she thought she saw low trees, and grass, or perhaps moss.

And the valley was evidently inhabited.

The main features were a single great building – like a museum, was her first thought – and a canal. It could only be that, a waterway that was much narrower than the valley that enclosed it, that ran dead straight between the rocky cliffs. The land along its banks, perhaps irrigated, was thick with the grey-green vegetation. But the water itself, flowing only sluggishly, was stained blood red.

“Just as the astronomers see,” Walter murmured. “The red waters, red oceans, and grey-green land.”

Astronomers? She tucked that word away for now.

“It looks like blood,” she said. “The water in the canal. But –”

“The red weed,” Walter said. “Or some cladistic relative. Without a doubt.”

As he spoke a shadow passed over them, crossing the sun; Zena looked up, blinking – her eyes were still adapted to the dark of the forest – but she saw nothing.

“I think we are observing generations of technology at play here, Zena. Spanning millennia – or millions of years, perhaps. The wider valley is surely too straight to be natural. I think these basaltic cliffs once contained a much wider waterway – perhaps it was more like a sea way, connecting vanished oceans. But as the great aridity tightened its hold, the way was largely abandoned – except for that canal, whose straightness, you see, follows the rectilinearity of its vanished forebear.”

She pointed to the building. “ That looks like South Kensington.”

Walter laughed, surprised. “So it does.”

The single building, not far from the canal’s flow, was big, on a rectangular base, with a roof that glittered, metallic – Zena thought it might be aluminium, and if so fabulously expensive – and before its portico was a broad terrace of some pale pink stone. Masts stood on this terrace, topped with artefacts that glinted in the sun; they were like raindrops, but must be much bigger, she thought: lenses, perhaps.

This was the only building in sight.

“It is like a museum, yes,” Walter said. “Interesting perception. Previous generations would have thought of a church, or temple, or some grand classical building. Perhaps a taste for the grandiose spans the ages. Even spans the worlds.” He eyed her.

She smiled grimly. “That’s another pretty broad hint about where you think we are, Mr Jenkins.”

“Or where we seem to be, at least.”

She looked further, seeking more detail. Beyond the building’s broad terrace was a roadway, itself roughly following the line of the valley, floored by broken stone.

And on this roadway, she saw now, sat a man, alone, cross-legged.

Her heart thumped.

He sat still, apparently at peace. A small pile of belongings was heaped up next to him, and behind him was a kind of frame from which another figure dangled, inert. Zena could not make this out clearly. She later told Walter it reminded her of the articulated human skeletons hanging from a frame that you might see in a teaching hospital – but inverted, with the skull at the bottom, the feet at the top. Understandably, given what she had seen before, she felt unwilling to look more closely for now.

Again that shadow flickered across the sun. She looked up, shading her eyes.

She made out the occluding object now. At first she thought it was a monstrous bird. Around a central, spherical mass, bat-like wings spread wide, flapping and folding; where the sunlight caught them she could see the wings were translucent, and were supported by ribs, like huge, splayed fingers. No, it was too big to be a bird, she realised now, but surely smaller and more graceful than the flying machines in America and elsewhere of which she had read.

And as she watched this object seemed to be circling closer, and lower.

“Whether or not that flyer has seen us, I believe it is descending, towards him .” She pointed to the man sitting patiently on the ground.

Walter studied her. “You know where we are, don’t you?”

“I believe so. And I know who he must be. I think we should get down to him before the flyer reaches him.”

“Agreed.” Walter picked up his pack, handed Zena her shotgun, and looked around for an easy way down to the valley floor.

Where they found that the man, sitting alone, was of course Nathan Gardner.

Zena and Walter approached cautiously, Zena for one keeping an eye out for the flyer.

But she faced her brother.

Sitting cross-legged, his hands open and resting on his knees, he seemed serene, at ease. Yet he was in rags, his hair and beard unkempt, and he was gaunt, as if he hadn’t been eating. She could see the shape of his skull under the skin of his face, the eyes bright, his teeth stained from bleeding from the gums when he smiled.

The wretched creature beside him, dangling from its frame, was long dead: human or at least humanlike, male, naked, and inverted. A kind of cannula, like a tap, was fixed to its neck.

Walter, briefly and with reluctance, examined the corpse; he took care not to touch it. “This is the creature you saw in the cave of the Neanderthals.”

Zena confirmed it.

“Yes, that looks like the Heidelberg jaw, though the body would have to be dissected by a competent anatomist to be sure… Tall as he is, I think this fellow was young when he died. A boy.”

Nathan spoke for the first time. “He was an animal, without mind. He could not understand. His suffering was brief.” His voice was scratchy, hoarse.

Zena knelt before him. “And what about yourself? What about your suffering, Nathan? You look scarcely better than he does.”