The retinue settled themselves in the front seats, while Dreiser and I sat under the great photograph of the flaming zeppelin, in the dazzle of Suung Saybin’s lighting.
Dreiser began by saying that he wished to inform everyone of the little he knew concerning the nature of the life form called Olympus. He reminded us that Olympus had maintained its present existence for far longer than terrestrial telescopes had been around to be trained on Mars. It was an object, a life form, of immense antiquity, almost as ancient as the rocks to which it clung.
To remind us of its size, he zapped before the audience a 3D vidslide showing Olympus in profile, with a dawn light on its higher reaches, while its tall serrated skirts remained in a dusky red twilight. Its vast span covered 600 kilometres of ground.
‘There it is, waiting for we know not what, amid ancient cratered topography over three billion years old.’
A shot of Earth’s Mount Everest was superimposed over Olympus. It showed as the merest pimple below the central caldera.
‘As you see,’ said Dreiser, ‘Olympus is unusually large for a volcano. For a life form it defies the imagination.’
An uneasy hush fell on the audience.
I remarked that Mars had previously been ruled out as an abode of life.
But this, Dreiser argued, was merely a reference to the many studies that had been conducted of soil and rock samples, of the analysis of the atmosphere, and of drillings made down into the crust. None had revealed any evidence for Martian life of any kind – even when allowances were made for the fact that life here might be completely different from life on Earth.
It was still difficult, I said, not to think of Olympus as simply an extraordinarily large volcano among other Martian volcanoes, admittedly of smaller size, such as Elysium, Arsia and Pavonis. Or were they also the carapaces of living beings?
He thought not. ‘Reproduction is a basic evolutionary function. Nevertheless it seems that Olympus has not spawned. Maybe it is a hermaphrodite. Maybe it simply lacks a partner.’
We would come to what it resembled later, Dreiser said. He wished to state that he had no quarrel with all the previous research centering on the quest for life. Those conclusions were definitive. Olympus was unique.
At this juncture, Dreiser said, he believed that the spotlight should shine on his associate, who had first brought the movements of Olympus to scientific notice. Those movements were so unprecedented that at first they were not credited. In introducing Kathi Skadmorr, he knew she was already celebrated as the YEA who had courageously gone down into the throat of the Valles Marineris and found considerable underground reservoirs of water.
Kathi now came to the dais and spoke without preamble, almost before the clapping had finished. ‘I’m campaigning to call Olympus Mons by a more vital name. It was christened in ignorance, long ago. I propose rechristening it, in the light of our new-found knowledge, Chimborazo, which means the “Watchtower of the Universe”. So far my campaign has only one member, but I’m still hoping.
‘We don’t as yet know what we have here. Okay, Chimborazo moves, but whole mountains have been known to move. So movement does not necessarily mean life. Here’s where we detected movement.’
She zapped a vidslide taken from the satcam, showing the tumbled regolith on Chimborazo’s westerly side, and continued to speak.
‘The broken regolith shows where our friend upped stumps and began to move. We secured one of those elusive white tongues you will all have seen. They are in fact inorganic, but with organic nerves and feelers lacing them. It seems not all tongues are identical, and that they serve different functions.
‘Our hypothesis at present is that the tongues, more scientifically termed exteroceptors and proprioceptors, were once digestive organs, and that they have been modified over the eons. Not only do they provide nourishment to Chimborazo: they also function as rudimentary detectors. Thus, you see, they provide evidence that Chimborazo is not only a massive life form: it is also a life form with some kind of intelligence.
‘Now I will hand over to Tom and Dreiser again.’ She did not leave the dais, but took a seat next to me.