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 Fairy Graffiti  (12 ratings)by Stuart Atkinson Page 2 of 6 But there it was, illuminated by his helmet's spotlight beam.
It wasn't much to look at, just a crack in Mars' frozen skin, a
foot wide at most, surrounded by built-up mineral deposits
which looked like the dried remains of food on an unwashed
plate.
But that crack was filled with bubbling, boiling water which steamed in the half-light, and as the Solar System held its breath little Ikoshi's probing torch beam swept over the pool - and revealed its rainbow-coloured depths. It was as if some artist had emptied his left-over paint into the water and it had dried on the sides of the pool. Those first pictures hinted at patches of red, blue and green... something. But when the camera steadied it revealed hundreds of different colours: blues the colour of duck-eggs, or kingfisher feathers; reds so rich they almost convinced you that if you inhaled deeply enough you'd be able to smell poppies, cherries, ripe tomatoes or glasses of claret... and streaked through them all, like the layers in a gateau, were bands of tangerine-peel orange, green the colour of wet grass and dew-covered moss... As Ikoshi kept screaming, it shouldn't have been there, it was impossible. But it was there, and slowly it began to dawn on those of us watching that after all the centuries of fantastic stories, all the scientific papers, make-believe Faces, journal articles, controversy and arguments, we had finally found it. It was, admittedly, life in the simplest, most primitive form possible. But that didn't matter. There it was, in glorious technicolour - native martian life. The fact that it was little more than a crusting of organic compounds clinging stubbornly to the insides of a small volcanic vent in the planet's crust - feeding on its warmth and gases and minerals in much the same way that life survived at the bottom of Earth's oceans, huddled around the famous "black smokers" - instead of a three-eyed creature from War Of The Worlds was disappointing to most, but irrelevent to the astronomers, biologists, science buffs - and Moon-exiled trainee astronauts! - who screamed and cheered and clapped for days afterwards. It was party time! Of course, a few people demanded to know how we could have missed it for so long, how we could have wasted so much money searching for it when it was there all along, even when experts explained that the contours of the canyon had shielded it from the prying eyes of orbiting satellites, and no teams had ever ventured that deep into Marineris before because they'd never had to. But eventually the griping died down, and even the most hardened cynics began to appreciate the irony: that after all the decades of waiting for strange, alien signals from space, we found what we'd been looking for right in our own backyard. Okay, so our new-found relatives looked like a chemical spill, or something nasty you'd find under the bowl of a neglected toilet bowl, but hey, blood - or carbon - is thicker than water, right? Only some people didn't think like that. Hindsight's a wonderful thing. Now we know that while the vast majority of people cheered and the Governments of the world poured extra funds into the Mars Exploration program, hurling eager and excited men and women and machines by the dozen into space and towards Mars to study our long-lost carbon cousins, other groups were meeting around the world to mourn the discovery. And, to borrow a famous phrase from martian literary history, 'slowly, but surely, they drew their plans against us'. I suppose now that it's obvious that to those who had always feared such a thing, the discovery of native martian life was a catastrophe, a sign of the end of the world. The martians were a threat that couldn't be ignored. In cellars, Government offices and military bases all over the world, the lunatics who now so quaintly call themselves "The Children Of Adam" held their heads in their hands and mourned for their world as a second, a third and then a fourth life-bearing hot spring was found. In their eyes, in their minds, the End truly was Nigh. Logic as twisted as their minds told them that if samples of the martian lifeforms were returned to Earth they would surely bring a space plague which would decimate their beloved Homeworld. On the other hand, if they were left on Mars, to thrive, prosper and grow, nourished by the minerals and warmed by the heat of the springs, they would surely spread across the planet, eventually making it uninhabitable for humans, and the planned colonisation and terraforming projects (Terraforming, now there's a dumb idea if ever I heard one - playing God with planets when we've messed up our own. Are we arrogant sons of bitches or what?) would never get off the ground. It didn't matter to them that that wouldn't happen for billions of years, if ever. They were a threat. And threats had to be removed. Kids today ask me how come no-one knew about the Children until the first bomb. I have to tell them we were all too busy congratulating ourselves on the discovery of the tenth spring, slapping each other's backs to even consider that not everyone shared our joy. Well, we came back down to Earth - or rather, Mars - with a bump that cruel, terrible day in 2035. It's true you know, in everyone's lifetime, in every generation there is at least one "where were you when..?" history-making or -changing event. Philosophers have written thousands of pages on how such events are "forever burned in the collective consciousness of our race". Me, I'm no philosopher, I just know that people remember the bad and horrible things more than the good. We seem to feel this need to record things that sicken or disgust us, then watch them over and over. Centuries of disasters, assasinations, tragedies, outrages, centuries are immortalised on faded photographs, flickering, scratched film, video or hologram. Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2001 Stuart Atkinson, sffworld.com. 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