The way Wardani laid it out for me, one desert evening on the balcony at Roespinoedji’s warehouse:
Bradbury, 2089 pre-colonial reckoning. The founder-heroes of human antiquity are exposed for the pig-ignorant mall bullies they probably always were, as decoding of the first Martian data systems brings in evidence of a starfaring culture at least as old as the whole human race. The millennial knowledge out of Egypt and China starts to look like a ten-year-old child’s bedroom datastack. The wisdom of the ages shredded at a stroke into the pipe-cooked musings of a bunch of canal-dive barflies. Lao Tzu, Confucius, Jesus Christ, Muhammed—what did these guys know? Parochial locals, never even been off the planet. Where were they when the Martians were crossing interstellar space.
Of course—a sour grin out of one corner of Wardani’s mouth—established religion lashed back. The usual strategies. Incorporate the Martians into the scheme of things, scour the scriptures or make up some new ones, reinterpret. Failing that, lacking the grey matter for that much effort, just deny the whole thing as the work of evil forces and firebomb anyone who says otherwise. That ought to work.
But it didn’t work.
For a while it looked as if it might. Upwelling hysteria brought sectarian violence and the recently established university departments of xenology frequently up in flames. Armed escorts for noted archaeologues and a fair few campus firefights between fundamentalists and the public order police. Interesting times for the student body…
Out of it all, the new faiths arose. Most of them not that much different to the old faiths by all accounts, and just as dogmatic. But underlying, or maybe floating uneasily atop, came a groundswell of secular belief in something that was a little harder to define than God.
Maybe it was the wings. A cultural archetype so deep—angels, demons, Icarus and countless idiots like him off towers and cliffs until we finally got it right—that humanity clung to it.
Maybe there was just too much at stake. The astrogation charts with their promise of new worlds we could just go to, assured of a terrestroid destination because, well, it says so here.
Whatever it was, you had to call it faith. It wasn’t knowledge; the Guild wasn’t that confident of its translation back then, and you don’t launch hundreds of thousands of stored minds and clone embryos into the depths of interstellar space without something a lot stronger than a theory.
It was faith in the essential workability of the New Knowledge. In place of the terracentric confidence of human science and its ability to Work It All Out someday, a softer trust in the overarching edifice of Martian Knowledge that would, like an indulgent father, let us get out into the ocean and drive the boat for real. We were heading out the door, not as children grown and leaving home for the first time, but as toddlers gripping trustingly with one chubby fist at the talon of Martian civilisation. There was a totally irrational sense of safety and wrapped-up warmth to the whole process. That, as much as Hand’s much vaunted economic liberalisation, was what drove the diaspora.
Three-quarters of a million deaths on Adoracion changed things. That, and a few other geopolitical shortcomings that cropped up with the rise of the Protectorate. Back on Earth, the old faiths slammed down, political and spiritual alike, iron-bound tomes of authority to live by. We have lived loosely, and a price must be paid. In the name of stability and security, things must be run with a firm hand now.
Of that brief flourishing of enthusiasm for all things Martian, very little remains. Wycinski and his pioneering team are centuries gone, hounded out of university posts and funding and in some cases actually murdered. The Guild has drawn into itself, jealously guarding what little intellectual freedom the Protectorate allows it. The Martians are reduced from anything approaching a full understanding to two virtually unrelated precipitates. On the one hand a textbook-dry series of images and notes, as much data as the Protectorate deems socially appropriate. Every child dutifully learns what they looked like, the splayed anatomy of their wings and skeleton, the flight dynamics, the tedious minutiae of mating and young-rearing, the reconstructions in virtual of their plumage and colouring, drawn from the few visual records we’ve managed to access or filled in with Guild guesses. Roost emblems, probable clothing. Colourful, easily digestible stuff. Not much sociology. Too poorly understood, too undefined, too volatile, and besides do people really want to bother themselves with all that…
“Knowledge tossed away,” she said, shivering a little in the desert chill. “Wilful ignorance in the face of something we might have to work to understand.”
At the other end of the fractionating column the more esoteric elements gather. Weird religious offshoots, whispered legend and word of mouth from the digs. Here, something of what the Martians were to us once has remained—here, their impact can be described in murmured tones. Here they can be named as Wycinski once named them; the New Ancients, teaching us the real meaning of that word. Our mysteriously absent winged benefactors, swooping low to brush the nape of our civilisation’s neck with one cold wingtip, to remind us that six or seven thousand years of patchily recorded history isn’t what they call ancient around here.
This Martian was dead.
A long time dead, that much was apparent. The body had mummified in the webbing, wings turned parchment thin, head dried out to a long narrow skull whose beak gaped half open. The eyes were blackened in their backward-slashed sockets, half hidden by the draped membrane of the eyelids. Below the beak, the thing’s skin bulged out in what I guessed must have been the throat gland. Like the wings, it looked paper-thin and translucent.
Under the wings, angular limbs reached across the webbing and delicate-looking talons grasped at instrumentation. I felt a tiny surge of admiration. Whatever this thing had been, it had died at the controls.
“Don’t touch it,” snapped Wardani from behind me, and I became aware that I was reaching upward to the lower edge of the webbing frame.
“Sorry.”
“You will be, if the skin crumbles. There’s an alkaline secretion in their subcutaneous fat layers that runs out of control when they die. Kept in balance by food oxidation during life, we think, but it’s strong enough to dissolve most of a corpse, given a decent supply of water vapour.” As she spoke, she was moving around the webbing frame with the automatic caution of what must have been Guild training. Her face was utterly intent, eyes never shifting from the winged mummy above us. “When they die like this, it just eats through the fat and dries out to a powder. Very corrosive if you breathe it in, or get it in your eyes.”
“Right.” I moved back a couple of steps. “Thanks for the advance warning.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t expect to find them here.”
“Ships have crews.”
“Yeah, Kovacs, and cities have populations. We’ve still only ever found a couple of hundred intact Martian corpses in over four centuries of archaeology on three dozen worlds.”
“Shit like that in their systems, I’m not surprised.” Schneider had wandered over and was rubbernecking on the other side of the space below the webbing frame. “So what happened to this stuff if they just didn’t eat for a while?”
Wardani shot him an irritated glance. “We don’t know. Presumably the process would start up.”
“That must have hurt,” I said.
“Yes, I imagine it would.” She didn’t really want to talk to either of us. She was entranced.
Schneider failed to take the hint. Or maybe he just needed the babble of voices to cover the huge stillness in the air around us and the gaze of the winged thing above us. “How come they’d end up with something like that? I mean,” he guffawed, “it’s not exactly evolutionarily selective, is it? Kills you if you’re hungry.”