Stephen Baxter - The Martian in the Wood

“And speaking of wild animals, there’s lots of compelling detail too in your account of what you saw in that clearing – your scrap of Sussex savannah.”

“You’re laughing at me.”

“No! Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“But I thought I saw a unicorn!”

“You reported your impressions honestly. I think it may have been – if it was anything at all – an elasmotherium. Another beast of the Ice Age. Actually a relative of the rhino, but tall, horse-like, and with a single horn. First identified in Russia. Some archaeologists believe that historical sightings of survivors might actually have given rise to the legend of the unicorn.

“But I’ll tell you the one detail I find most authentic about your account, Miss Gardner. It’s the numbers in your herds: eight, ten, twelve beasts, you said. You see, those cold centuries favoured the growth of big animals, the megafauna, because the bigger the body the more inner heat it can retain. Less surface area per pound of flesh; an elephant can withstand a chill where a mouse will shiver to death. But their fodder is poor quality and sparse, and the land can afford to support only a few such big beasts. And so, small herds. It’s demonstrated in the modern Arctic, and in the fossil record. So what you say is very convincing. Why, the Neanderthals too lived in small, isolated groups, as you witnessed. Made them resilient in the short term, but prone to extinction when a smarter, more flexible competitor came along.”

But she seemed not to believe it herself. She shook her head. “Even now, as I sit here drinking Pierce’s weak tea, I can scarcely credit it all.”

“I believe you saw something.” I imagine him sitting forward, his gloved hands clasped – gloved to protect the scarring from his burns. If Zena had shown any reaction to his poor physical condition, his notes don’t report it. “I don’t necessarily believe that what you found was some Ice Age refugium, a domain of the Neanderthals and the giant elk – it does seem incredible that so much could have survived for so long. But then, something unusual happened to that Wood of yours before any of this started, didn’t it? Which was the reason you contacted me.”

“You mean, the coming of the Martian. If it was –”

“Well, the timing is right, if what your brother saw was a rogue fighting-machine, separated from the pack, its pilot cut off from fellows who were already dying. And as everyone remembers, the summer was plagued by thunderstorms. I sometimes wonder if the earth itself, outraged, was fighting back against the alien infection!

“Now, if the lightning did strike a fighting-machine in the Wood, then the machine could have been crippled, for its ‘musculature’ is a matter of metallic discs and sheaths controlled by electromagnetism. Crippled, and stranded there ever since. Oh, it seems quite plausible to me that a Martian might have got stuck in your Wood, like Br’er Rabbit, Miss Gardner!” He smiled now. “And as for the dioramas you saw, I fancy a Martian would have liked our Ice Age. Perhaps it dreams of the glaciers…

“It is the cold, after all, that drove the Martians to our Earth in the first place. Their world is doomed by the gradual cooling of the sun, just as much as ours. Lord Kelvin has proved it; our sun’s fuel is finite, and it will dim like an exhausted hearth – Flammarion says in only thirty million years. We are already in the autumn of the solar system. Now, the Martians have performed planet-scale miracles of hydrology, to bring water from the polar regions to the relative warmth of the lower latitudes – we can see their canals through the telescopes. But the secular cooling of our star has continued relentlessly, and the most ingenious of technological minds must, at last, admit defeat – on that world, at least. And, when they looked sunward, they saw our Earth, green and moist and vibrant…”

“But it’s too hot for them,” Zena hazarded. “Now that they are here.”

“Yes! Because they are habituated to the cold, you see. Just as to their world’s lower gravity.”

She seemed to be trying to imagine it. “So there you have this Martian, stranded, alone, uncomfortable, dreaming of cool Mars, of what he’s used to… But what has that to do with us, and Neanderthals?”

“Or rather visions of Neanderthals,” Walter said. “Miss Gardner, as I will describe in my forthcoming memoir, during the Martian War I observed the Martians in life as closely as anyone – yes, I still maintain it is so, despite certain critics. And I argue that the evidence I saw with my own eyes of their ability to carry through complex communal tasks, all without a word being spoken , is evidence of some kind of telepathy. A direct link, mind to mind. Why, isn’t it logical? The Martians have stripped away their bodies until they are nothing but mind. And as to how a Martian mind may contact, even influence others …

“Everybody knows that the Martians came to the Earth in cylinders, ten shots from the cannon on Mars. And the cylinders were cluttered with junk which they removed from the interiors after landing, to assemble into their various machines, and so forth. But, we have discovered since their demise, there are a few components that were not used for such a purpose – indeed, for which a purpose has yet to be identified.

“From the Wimbledon cylinder we retrieved a crystalline ovoid – it looks like an egg, like some eccentric antiquarian ornament – that was taken to the Royal College of Science for analysis. Crystalline and clear, and filled with elusive patterns of light, that you can see, just, if you turn it this way and that. Glimpses, of somewhere else… What’s it for? I’m better placed to guess than most.

“We know that the Martians use machines to replace many of the functions of their bodies: locomotion, manipulation, even feeding, it seems. Perhaps the Martians similarly have devices that can think for them – or at least that aid their own thinking, and its broadcast.

“Why not? If a Martian can speak to another Martian across a few feet, perhaps with some amplification it can reach to its fellow in a fighting-machine closing on London, or even shout back home to its companions on Mars! For the invaders must have had some way of reporting back what they found on the Earth, and we saw no sign of heliographs, or even of the remote-signalling electric devices of the kind Marconi has demonstrated. Why not mind to mind, with a little help, eh?”

Zena thought that over. “So you have a Martian alone in Holmburgh Wood –”

“Alone and desperately lonely,” Walter said. “For we have clear evidence that Martians are social beasts. I and many others saw the Martians come back for a fallen comrade, in the heat of battle. It is logical that it should be so. There can only be few of them, as individuals, and they must be loyal to each other – for they have no family. Freud, you know, speculates about the effect of their peculiar reproductive method on their psychology –”

“They bud, like polyps.”

“That’s it. No sex! No wonder old Sigmund is so intrigued.” He leaned forward. “Now, consider the picture. Of a Martian, isolated, perhaps consumed by a superhuman loneliness of an intensity we cannot imagine – and it is communicating those emotions, or trying to, by the power of the mind, with some technological enhancement. And a communication that perhaps can be picked up, if dimly, even by minds so coarse as ours. Think of it! It is as if it has built a signalling tower in that Wood of yours. Is it any wonder that humans, common beasts that we are, are dazzled by the light? Perhaps even a leakage of that intensity has blighted the feebler living things of the Earth around – the farmers’ wretched crops, their animals. And if you were wandering through a Martian’s dreams, perhaps it is no wonder you report distortions of space and time.”