The Anguished Dawn Page 6

  Sariena looked puzzled. "You mean Vicki's son?"

  "Robin?" Charlie repeated.

  "He was in one of my classes," Farzhin said. "Some time after he and Vicki arrived in Kropotkin, he came to me with ancient depictions of the deity Shiva that we had been discussing, and pointed out how they could describe features on the surface of Mars. And he was right. The similarities were uncanny."

  "It's the kind of thing he comes up with." Vicki sighed resignedly, at the same time shrugging in a way that was almost apologetic.

  "We'll show you some examples later of what I mean," Farzhin said. "They fit with things in the Egyptian, Sumerian, and Greek accounts too."

  "But this is where we need your input," Vicki told Sariena and Charlie. "Why I wanted you to come here and talk about this. You're the orbital mechanics specialists. We've just been looking at ancient mythologies—and maybe reading too much into them. Tell us if something along the lines of what we think happened is possible."

  Sariena and Charlie glanced at each other. Clearly, they were interested. "Try us," Sariena invited.

  Vicki looked at Farzhin, but he nodded for her to carry on. She began, "Venus came out of Jupiter on a highly eccentric orbit—possibly sun-grazing, like Athena. After the two close flybys that scorched Earth, it commenced a series of interactions with Mars, which originally occupied an orbit inside Earth's."

  "Inside Earth's orbit?" Charlie repeated, raising his eyebrows. Farzhin and Vicki nodded. Sariena stared intently but didn't interrupt. Vicki continued, "This is what we want your opinion on. Could the two bodies have exchanged angular momentum in such a way as to progressively lift Mars to more distant orbits, at the same time reducing and circularizing Venus's to an inferior one?"

  She watched Charlie in particular as she said this. One of the reasons why Terran astronomers had opposed the young-Venus theory so strongly was the problem of how it could have circularized its orbit in a mere few thousand years. The Kronians had proposed two mechanisms for accomplishing this: the effect of electrical forces in the modified space environment induced by Venus's electrically active plasma tail; and the gravitational pumping of a hot, plastically deformable body to reduce tidal stresses. Charlie had never been convinced that these on their own would be sufficient, maintaining that something else was needed in addition. Well, Vicki was saying in effect, maybe here it is.

  Charlie was staring back at her with the incredulous half-smile of somebody who wasn't quite sure whether or not he wanted to believe it. He looked sideways at Sariena in an unspoken question. "It's an intriguing thought," she said. Evidently, she had no such problem.

  Farzhin came back in at this point. "From what we can make of the Vedic records, it seems that some kind of recurring pattern established itself, in which the three bodies kept coming back into mutual proximity." He made an appealing gesture at the two planetary scientists. "Could something like that happen?"

  Sariena pursed her lips. "A three-way resonance? Yes, it's possible in principle. But whether or not this particular configuration meets the necessary conditions would depend on the numbers. We'd need to set up a simulation with a credible range of limits and run the calculations."

  "Would you do that for us?" Farzhin asked.

  "Of course . . . How long do you think this pattern lasted? Have you any idea?"

  "Almost two thousand years . . . until the beginnings of the Roman Period, about 2700 b.p. So the visitation that brought the Exodus plagues and afflictions wasn't by Venus but by Mars, which if we're right, had by that time already been interacting with Earth for around sixteen hundred years. Although these approaches heralded times of trouble and destruction that the priests and prophets of many religions learned to read, they didn't cause anything like the global devastation that Venus had earlier—"

  "And Athena," Vicki put in.

  "Yes, of course."

  A few seconds of silence fell. Then Charlie waved vaguely with a hand. "It's fantastic . . . but we're all getting used to that by now. I'd like to see how it fits with the circularization criterion." He thought more and shook his head. "Fantastic," he said again.

  "You haven't heard the rest yet, Charlie," Vicki said dryly.

  "I must admit I have trouble accepting this part myself," Farzhin confessed. "But it fits so many facts. If the ancient narratives are telling us what I think they are, we're faced by a story so bizarre that nobody back on Earth ever managed to understand it, even after centuries of scholarly translations and debate." He paused. Sariena and Charlie just looked at him expectantly. Farzhin got up, moved over to the worktop running along the side of the room, and activated the holo-unit.

  The image that appeared in the tank-like viewing zone was of two planetary bodies locked in mutual gyration like a close-coupled binary star system. One was recognizable as pre-Athena Earth, though visibly deformed by a bulge in the region immediately opposite the companion body. The bulge was located in the region of what would normally have been northern India and Tibet—except that it consisted not of mountainous plateau, but ocean. The other body was smaller and more deformed, almost assuming the proportions of a pear. Again, it possessed an aqueous bulge on the facing side. A tenuous bridge of white mist connected the two bodies. Farzhin gazed at it for a few seconds and then turned toward Sariena and Charlie. "The earlier close passes by Venus had raised tidal bulges in the crusts of both Earth and Mars. The massive Tibetan uplift was a remnant of it in modern times. But back in the period we're talking about, starting at about fifty-three hundred years ago . . ."

  "Is that when you're saying the Venus encounters occurred?" Charlie queried.

  "Yes . . . It was much larger. Likewise on Mars. The Tharsis Bulge still exists as virtually a circular continent uplifted above the median terrain today. But back then, it was a huge deformation of the planet's shape—the smaller body would be far more affected by tidal forces than the larger."

  "Wait a minute, Emil," Sariena checked him. Farzhin raised an eyebrow. "Are you saying the other object there is Mars?"

  "Yes," Farzhin said. The problem Sariena had with it was plain enough: It bore no resemblance to the Mars of modern times. "That's what we think it was like."

  "That recently?"

  Farzhin nodded. "When the repeating cycle brought Mars and Earth together, the two gravitational anomalies locked them into synchronism. I'm not sure what broke them up again. Maybe Venus returning periodically disrupted the configuration and started the process again. That's another thing you might be able to help us with."

  "How long did each of these periods of mutual capture last?" Charlie asked.

  "I estimate around twelve years," Farzhin replied.

  "And this went on for almost two thousand years?"

  "Yes."

  "You're saying they were synchronous. Mars just hung there for twelve years at a time, stationary in the sky?"

  "Above northern India," Farzhin confirmed.

  "At what kind of distance?"

  "About forty thousand kilometers between centers."

  Charlie caught Sariena's eye. Vicki noted the strained looks being exchanged between them—but with an unspoken agreement to see it through. Farzhin saw it too. He had been prepared for it. Charlie looked back at Farzhin. "Inside the orbit of the Moon," he commented.

  "Well inside. Mars appeared ten times the Moon's size in the sky. The surface details were clearly visible. Faces and figures described in the Vedic hymns correlate with features identifiable on Mars today. Robin was the first to spot Shiva, as I mentioned earlier. That boy is amazing. . . . The Arsia and Ascraeus volcanoes, Valles Marineris, and the contours of the Tharsis bulge form the face. The myth tells of a third eye opening in Shiva's forehead, belching flames." Farzhin gestured at the holo image. "The position of the huge Olympus Mons volcano matches it perfectly."

  Sariena sat back, smoothing her hair over the nape of her neck with a hand. Her attitude seemed receptive, weighing things up. "Incredible," she murmured distantly, though
Vicki could see in her eyes that her mind was racing.

  "The big problem with trying to make sense of the Sanskrit texts as records of celestial happenings was the number of deities named in them," Vicki said. "There seemed to be too many for them to have any connection with planetary objects. But what happened was that people at different times over thousands of years gave different names to the same object as its appearance changed. When you realize that, it all starts coming together. Aditi, Agni, and Varuna, for instance, were all Venus, but respectively as a flare of light ejected from Jupiter, the fire that seared Earth during the early encounters, and the less threatening object that it became later. Mars had other names too, depending on its appearance at varying distances from Earth. Indra was the new, growing Mars when it was being carried outward by its first encounters with Venus. Brahma was the god that dominated Mars transformed by Earth's gravitational influence during the captures. Shiva, the destroyer, brought the collapse of Brahma's rule when the captures ended."

  Farzhin affirmed with rapid nods of his head. "And Vishnu, the sustainer, was the name of the permanent Mars deity that returned periodically in the various forms described by the Avataras," he completed.

  Finally, Sariena came back to the point she had balked at earlier. "And you're telling us that Mars had oceans that recently?" she said, indicating the display. The aqueous bulge was clearly a buildup of the planet's hydrosphere drawn toward the Earth-facing side in an enormous tide. That Mars had once possessed large bodies of water—evidenced by clearly defined flood plains and flow channels—had been known a long time before Athena, but orthodox Terran science had put their existence at billions of years in the past. Charlie was looking very interested. Vicki knew that he had been skeptical of the official view, mainly because the rates of creep for rock under its own weight and of material infall from space meant that such features should have been obliterated long before. This had been pointed out repeatedly, but the Establishment had never budged.

  "It fits with the picture of planetary geology happening much faster than used to be believed," he said, looking at Sariena.

  Sariena nodded, still keeping her eyes on the image. "So it must still have had an atmosphere then too." The presence of liquid water would have required it.

  "If our interpretation is correct, it had a surface pretty much like Earth's," Farzhin confirmed. "The earlier translators could never identify the seas and continents that the Vedas talked about, and so wrote them off as fairy tales. But they were looking for them on the wrong world."

  "They seem to describe a living world too," Vicki said. By now, Sariena and Charlie were beyond looking incredulous.

  Farzhin elaborated, "The color bands and changes that the texts describe could only be vegetation. The only way to be sure will be to send expeditions to search for the traces. Not by scratching around on the surface the way they did from the couple of bases that Earth set up there. We'll need to go deeper. What's left of Mars today is the remains of a battlefield. First it was torn apart and devastated by Venus, then mangled repeatedly by every tussle with Earth. The entire surface we see today is a blanket of planetwide flood deposits, lava extrusions, and debris from colossal volcanic events. Whatever's left of the original surface is buried way down."

  Sariena studied the image for a while in silence, and then got up and came around the table to peer closely at the vaporous bridge connecting Mars with Earth. She looked at Farzhin, still standing by the unit, with a sudden light of understanding in her eyes. "A condition of micro-gravity in the space between them. Low vapor pressure combined with tidal heating of the crust . . ."

  Farzhin nodded vigorously. "Yes, exactly what we think. Evaporated and drawn off. Scientists back on Earth kept asking for years where Mars's atmosphere and oceans went. But they were bogged down in their insistence that whatever happened had to have been billions of years ago. And all the time, the answer was all around them. Most of it was transferred to Earth!"

  At that, Charlie got up too and came around to join them. Here was another point that wouldn't be lost on him. Evidence had long been known that sea levels on Earth had risen massively in recent millennia from the edges of what in modern times were submerged continental shelves. But there had never been any reason to connect the increase in Earth's inventory of water with the loss from Mars. That was where the influx that had overfilled the oceans came from.

  "So you're claiming that this whole area around northern India was subject to immense flooding," Charlie said. "And it happened periodically, every time Mars returned. Is this what the Tethys really was?" That was the name given to the primordial ocean believed, according to the old plate tectonics, to have existed between India and Eurasia millions of years previously. Farzhin said nothing, letting him fill the details in for himself. "You'd have huge inflows and outflows across the surrounding areas every time the bulge built up and dissipated," Charlie went on. "That could account for the immense sediment deposits all over that region, couldn't it? And what cut the huge gorges of the Himalayan rivers."

  "Yes. And now think about the geology and archeology of the Middle East and China," Vicki said. "So much of the architecture in those areas just doesn't fit with the idea of the military constructions that the traditional view always made it out to be. But when you think of them as flood defenses, maybe, or sanctuaries for the population to retreat to when the next approach happened, it all makes sense."

  Sariena was stooping to examine the far side of Earth's globe, the face away from Mars. "Antipodal tides in the opposite hemisphere," she murmured. "Maybe a lesser crustal uplift from the Venus encounters, too . . . The Bolivian plateau. Those massive constructions in the Andes. Remnants of sea ports and cultivation up near what was the snow line when you knew it, Charlie."

  Farzhin waited, watching the two visitors curiously—and just a shade anxiously. Enough had been said. Charlie and Sariena looked at each other. It was already clear that Farzhin needn't have worried. "I'd like to get those simulations set up as soon as possible," Charlie said, looking back at him. "Would it be possible to go through the data you have sometime while we're here?"

  "We can do it right now in my office," Farzhin said, moving to shut down the viewer. "The door up there won't close because of the structural warping, but I'm told it isn't about to fall down anytime soon."

  "Can we let you get started without us and catch you later?" Sariena said. "There's somebody else in Kropotkin that I need to see, and Vicki said she'd show me the way. It's all changed since I was last here. If I let myself get involved in this now, I've a feeling I might not get away."

  "Go ahead. We'll see you when you get back," Charlie told her.

  "Maybe we could all make dinner somewhere afterward," Farzhin suggested. Everyone agreed that sounded good. Sariena and Vicki retrieved their suit packs from the rack by the door and slung them across their backs as they left. The packs were bulky but of inconsequential weight. In fact, they helped balance. Some people carried lead bricks in backpacks as an aid to walking. Weighted boots were normal.

  They came out into a broad corridor where the maintenance crew were working, with screw jacks emplaced at intervals to shore up the roof. "Well, this is a whole new angle you're showing us," Sariena said. "It could change everything."

  "And I've got a feeling we're just scratching the surface," Vicki replied. "There are all kinds of references that take on some new kind of significance in Emil's interpretation, but we don't know yet what they mean."

  "Such as?"

  "Oh . . . for example, not only the Indian texts, but others from Egypt, China, the Middle East, all talk about some kind of celestial staircase, a column or pillar in the sky. . . ."

  "You mean like Jacob's Ladder?"

  "That's one of them. We're sure they refer to something those people saw, but we don't know what. Then again, you find various symbols and pieces of imagery that turn up again and again. It's fascinating work."

  "You seem to have found something
that you fit right in with—Emil and his group," Sariena commented.

  "It's the kind of work I wanted to do ever since I got involved with you and the others here, working with Lan, back on Earth," Vicki replied. After a pause, she added, "It's what Kronia makes possible—to work at being what you really are."

  "It sounds as if Robin's doing well too."

  Vicki sighed. "He's still not back to his old self. Maybe he never will be. He still has nightmares . . . and long, withdrawn moods. The troglodyte existence here doesn't help. And this stress all the time . . . Maybe none of us will ever truly be our old selves again. Those selves were part of a world that's gone."

  They emerged into the labyrinth of interconnecting spaces, shafts, and galleries beneath Kropotkin center. Vicki indicated the way down a terraced stairwell to one of the walkways.

  "How about Lan?" Sariena asked. "Have you seen much of him lately?"

  "He's been busy on Titan. The artificial gravity project that they're working on at the Tesla Center. Have you heard about it?"

  "Oh yes. Jan Wernstecki has been working with us on recomputing orbital changes. The last I heard he was moving to join Lan's group. Are they really onto something?"

  "Oh, sure. They've got it working. It's just a case of scaling things up now."

  "I hadn't realized they were that far along."

  "He'll be back here visiting next week. Leo and Alicia will be here too. It's a pity you and Charlie couldn't have made it for then. It would have been a great reunion." Vicki meant Leo Cavan, Keene's close friend and former political insider. Alicia was the Polish girlfriend that Cavan had brought with him from Washington when he joined Keene in California, as Athena was closing with Earth.

  They touch-glided down the steps and carried on across one of the concourses. "How are . . . things?" Sariena asked after a long pause.

  There was more in the question than mere curiosity. After the way Keene had risked impossible odds to find her and Robin in the final days on Earth and get them out, most people who knew them had expected him and Vicki to lead a closer life together afterward than had been the case. True, the present conditions on Kronia made demands on everyone, but even so, Keene lived something of a distant life, visiting when circumstances permitted, but spending most of the time immersed in his work on Titan. In a way, it was a reversion to the role he had adopted on Earth, filling a need in Vicki's and Robin's lives that went beyond being just guardian and benefactor, but stopping short of any binding emotional commitment. She still wasn't sure if he was simply one of the kind whose personal feelings didn't extend to such depths, or if other complexities of his personality acted to protect him from such involvements. But it was thanks to Keene that she and Robin were alive and as safe as it was possible to be anywhere. That was enough.