wytchcroft (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wytchcroft) wrote2009-02-09 03:51 am
wytchcroft) wrote2009-02-09 03:51 am
Entry tags:
A Martian Chronicle pt 1 of 2
There’s a lot of things we don’t admit to ourselves, thoughts, truths, memories, dreams. We hang them on a far peg in the battered closet we never use. You know the kind, every home has one; Guess that old thing needs a little repair and didn’t the handle use to be a different colour?
Well next spring cleaning, we always promise, and it’ll get fixed.
So yeah, we do that. And we do it in the oddest places and at the oddest times and in the strangest of ways.
It’s a curious trait.
Yes, you’re right, I guess I’m a curious kind of fellow – and in both senses of the word, but under the circumstances I can be forgiving. Being one of the last humans – and one of the first Martians - it has certain advantages that way.
Take today. I was flying over the hazy Martian tundra, keeping the mini-copter low and following the line of an old canal; it’s sensible practice, come a dust storm you can actually use the deeper of the dry canals as wind cover, at least while you try and head out of the way, if it’s a moderate storm. The big sand rippers we have to try and spot long before then because there’s no chance to out run them.
The mini-copter has been quite a find. One of the settlers must have assembled it and never used it. Never will now of course, so like everything else here, it’s ours, my family and me. You can fit just the one person – although the kids have tried and sworn to me they managed a double ride, I swore at them or nearly. The motor is small and it’s actually a very soothing sound, I like to hear it whirring away under the rotor blades – there’s something, I don’t know, middle aged about it. And I am middle aged.
It was not really all that long after setting out that my mind began to itch, there is no other word for it. Something in there needed scratching. Something wanted attention. Something inside the closet.
I was close to a number of old buildings, Martian buildings, not those of the settlers from Earth – most of those temporary shacks have blown clean away by now. They lay like pieces of fine porcelain or delicate egg shells gleaming whitely in the red of the Martian soil. Broken but still beautiful. There was a causeway near them, I remembered seeing it a while before and I decided to set the copter down and have a proper look.
This was scratching the itch. If my wife had been with me just then she would have noticed straightaway – because it was on a causeway such as this that I once met a Martian, as I later admitted. The encounter was a profound one.
But, being me, and being human and being middle aged, I simply said to myself – that will be an interesting spot to explore. And so, steering the nose of the gyro carefully down, I brought the copter in to land on the flat slab that marked the beginning of the causeway.
The blades had slackened and there was that particular Martian quiet that I have yet to find adequate words for. Certainly a ‘wider’ quiet than anything I had known back on Earth – even in the great deserts. ‘Wider’ in the sense of expansive and yet, oh I don’t know, intimate perhaps.
I thought of Spender.
Alone of my original crew Spender had experienced something like an epiphany – a religious feeling in a man unused to such things. He had travelled further than us and alone, he had heard the Martian quiet. He had felt it. And it drove him mad.
I had put Spender in the closet eventually – though I understand him far better now than when he first surprised us, dressed in Martian robes, ‘gone native’, his expression hidden behind a blank Martian mask – and his murderous intent as plain as the weapon in his hand.
I think that is why my wife likes me to avoid such places as the causeways and the old temples. She knows the memories it stirs. It used to bother me that Spender had sensed something alien and out of my comprehension. But we are closer now, though I am by nature cautious and pragmatic. Spender was a zealot his passion was a weakness ultimately. I do not visit his grave.
It used to worry me – the idea that he perhaps been closer to a truth of some sort. But I don’t think he was. I think he was beguiled.
And so it was that as my feet padded onto the dirt flooring of the causeway, my thoughts took shape and the Martian quiet was disturbed by the creaking of my closet door.
Unanswered questions – there were so many. For a moment I had to place a hand on the wide stone block that served as a marker, most were pillars topped by geometrical shapes triangles or globes – but this one was broken, the headstone long fallen into the dry canal below. I looked at my fingers, tanned, broad, the knuckles widening with the years – very human, for a Martian, I thought.
And again the questions were forming – the link – human/Martian… I stepped back and started to walk slowly forwards, I wanted to feel every footstep. I had to squint as the wide sun splayed off the marble.
I thought of the people before Spender – the first two expeditions. Lost. Killed by the Martians they had encountered. The Martians had been terrified of human contact and extinguished the visitors as quickly and as painlessly as they could. But that wasn’t enough to stop us – or the chicken pox that killed them in turn – a silent and unrecognised war, between two worlds. Both vanished now.
Oh, I am rambling slightly, you must excuse a man made garrulous with age and isolation.
They had expected us. That was the thing. They had met the first expedition attired, like Spender, in their ceremonial garb and shot them. The second expedition they had poisoned, whilst the humans believed themselves to be back on Earth, among friends and family; Details taken from their minds and from Martian fore-knowledge.
I stopped walking. I knew what was coming, my flesh had crawled. I was close to something, I could feel it. And when the air began to sing I knew it was a herald, I had heard the sound before. And so I stopped, and I stood, and I waited for the Martian to appear.
end of pt 1.
.................................................................
this was inspired by a prompt over at sci-fi muses, the prompt itself will appear in part two.
thanks to GH and Beshter for encouraging me!
this story has been inspired by Ray Bradbury's novel The Silver Locusts and by the TV series The Martian Chronicles, apologies to Ray!
Well next spring cleaning, we always promise, and it’ll get fixed.
So yeah, we do that. And we do it in the oddest places and at the oddest times and in the strangest of ways.
It’s a curious trait.
Yes, you’re right, I guess I’m a curious kind of fellow – and in both senses of the word, but under the circumstances I can be forgiving. Being one of the last humans – and one of the first Martians - it has certain advantages that way.
Take today. I was flying over the hazy Martian tundra, keeping the mini-copter low and following the line of an old canal; it’s sensible practice, come a dust storm you can actually use the deeper of the dry canals as wind cover, at least while you try and head out of the way, if it’s a moderate storm. The big sand rippers we have to try and spot long before then because there’s no chance to out run them.
The mini-copter has been quite a find. One of the settlers must have assembled it and never used it. Never will now of course, so like everything else here, it’s ours, my family and me. You can fit just the one person – although the kids have tried and sworn to me they managed a double ride, I swore at them or nearly. The motor is small and it’s actually a very soothing sound, I like to hear it whirring away under the rotor blades – there’s something, I don’t know, middle aged about it. And I am middle aged.
It was not really all that long after setting out that my mind began to itch, there is no other word for it. Something in there needed scratching. Something wanted attention. Something inside the closet.
I was close to a number of old buildings, Martian buildings, not those of the settlers from Earth – most of those temporary shacks have blown clean away by now. They lay like pieces of fine porcelain or delicate egg shells gleaming whitely in the red of the Martian soil. Broken but still beautiful. There was a causeway near them, I remembered seeing it a while before and I decided to set the copter down and have a proper look.
This was scratching the itch. If my wife had been with me just then she would have noticed straightaway – because it was on a causeway such as this that I once met a Martian, as I later admitted. The encounter was a profound one.
But, being me, and being human and being middle aged, I simply said to myself – that will be an interesting spot to explore. And so, steering the nose of the gyro carefully down, I brought the copter in to land on the flat slab that marked the beginning of the causeway.
The blades had slackened and there was that particular Martian quiet that I have yet to find adequate words for. Certainly a ‘wider’ quiet than anything I had known back on Earth – even in the great deserts. ‘Wider’ in the sense of expansive and yet, oh I don’t know, intimate perhaps.
I thought of Spender.
Alone of my original crew Spender had experienced something like an epiphany – a religious feeling in a man unused to such things. He had travelled further than us and alone, he had heard the Martian quiet. He had felt it. And it drove him mad.
I had put Spender in the closet eventually – though I understand him far better now than when he first surprised us, dressed in Martian robes, ‘gone native’, his expression hidden behind a blank Martian mask – and his murderous intent as plain as the weapon in his hand.
I think that is why my wife likes me to avoid such places as the causeways and the old temples. She knows the memories it stirs. It used to bother me that Spender had sensed something alien and out of my comprehension. But we are closer now, though I am by nature cautious and pragmatic. Spender was a zealot his passion was a weakness ultimately. I do not visit his grave.
It used to worry me – the idea that he perhaps been closer to a truth of some sort. But I don’t think he was. I think he was beguiled.
And so it was that as my feet padded onto the dirt flooring of the causeway, my thoughts took shape and the Martian quiet was disturbed by the creaking of my closet door.
Unanswered questions – there were so many. For a moment I had to place a hand on the wide stone block that served as a marker, most were pillars topped by geometrical shapes triangles or globes – but this one was broken, the headstone long fallen into the dry canal below. I looked at my fingers, tanned, broad, the knuckles widening with the years – very human, for a Martian, I thought.
And again the questions were forming – the link – human/Martian… I stepped back and started to walk slowly forwards, I wanted to feel every footstep. I had to squint as the wide sun splayed off the marble.
I thought of the people before Spender – the first two expeditions. Lost. Killed by the Martians they had encountered. The Martians had been terrified of human contact and extinguished the visitors as quickly and as painlessly as they could. But that wasn’t enough to stop us – or the chicken pox that killed them in turn – a silent and unrecognised war, between two worlds. Both vanished now.
Oh, I am rambling slightly, you must excuse a man made garrulous with age and isolation.
They had expected us. That was the thing. They had met the first expedition attired, like Spender, in their ceremonial garb and shot them. The second expedition they had poisoned, whilst the humans believed themselves to be back on Earth, among friends and family; Details taken from their minds and from Martian fore-knowledge.
I stopped walking. I knew what was coming, my flesh had crawled. I was close to something, I could feel it. And when the air began to sing I knew it was a herald, I had heard the sound before. And so I stopped, and I stood, and I waited for the Martian to appear.
end of pt 1.
.................................................................
this was inspired by a prompt over at sci-fi muses, the prompt itself will appear in part two.
thanks to GH and Beshter for encouraging me!
this story has been inspired by Ray Bradbury's novel The Silver Locusts and by the TV series The Martian Chronicles, apologies to Ray!