“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!”