“Never fear, Ernie, never fear. Besides, Berling has transferred—and I’m not fool enough to get into a fistfight with someone who’s presumably had mods for surface work.”
“Oh, right,” said Gargalian. “He’s got that actor’s face now, doesn’t he? I don’t hold with that.” He made a circular motion in front of his own round visage. “If I were ever to transfer, I’d want to go on looking exactly as I always have. You aren’t the same person if you change your appearance.”
Ernie liked to call me “Mr. Double-X” because both my names ended in that letter, but he’d need an artificial body in Triple-X at least, and I doubted such things were stock items. But I didn’t say that aloud; some jokes are best kept to yourself, I’d learned—after two broken noses.
A prospector came in, a woman in her thirties, biological, pulling a surface wagon with big springy wheels. Little wagons on Earth were traditionally red—I’d had one such myself as a kid—but they tended to get lost outside here if they were painted that color. This one was fluorescent green, and it was overflowing with gray and pink hunks of rock, including one on top that I recognized, thanks to Pickover’s little lesson, as a counter slab.
Our town’s name harked back to the Great Klondike Gold Rush, but at the end of a good day those stampeders had carried their bounty of dust in small pokes. Fossil matrix was bulky; extracting and preparing the specimens was part of what Ernie and his staff did for their thirty-five percent of every transaction they brokered for prospectors with Earth-based collectors. It was much too expensive to ship rock to Earth that was going to be thrown away there. The tailings were discarded outside our dome; there was a small mountain of them to the east.
Ernie went to tend to the female prospector, and I looked around the shop. The fossils on display were worth millions, but they were being watched by ubiquitous cameras, and, besides, no one would try to steal from Gargantuan Gargalian, if they knew what was good for them. Ernie was one of the richest men on Mars, and he had on retainer lots of muscle to help guard that wealth. On Earth, a multimillionaire might own a mansion, a yacht, and a private jet. There was no point in owning a yacht on Mars, but Ernie certainly had the big house—I’d seen it from the outside, and the damn thing had turrets, for God’s sake—and he had the airplane, too, with an impossibly wide wingspan; it was one of only four planes I knew of here on the Red Planet.
There was a chart on one of Ernie’s walls: side-by-side geologic timelines for Earth and Mars. Both planets were 4.5 billion Earth years old, of course, but their stories had been very different. Earth’s prehistory was broadly divided into Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic eras—and I knew a few were pushing for a new era, the Transzoic, to have begun the year Howard Slapcoff had perfected the uploading of consciousness. But on a meter-high chart, that slice wouldn’t have been thick enough to see without one of the microscopes that dotted Ernie’s shop.
Martian prehistory, meanwhile, was divided into the Noachian, Hesperian, and Amazonian eras, each named, the chart helpfully explained, for a locale on Mars where rocks characteristic of it were found (and yes, ironically for a time scale that stretched back billions of years, the place that gave us the term Noachian had been named by Schiaparelli in honor of Noah’s flood).
Both worlds developed life as soon as they’d cooled enough to allow it—some four billion Earth years ago. But Earth life just twiddled its—well, its nothings—for the next three and a half billion years; it was mostly unicellular and microscopic until the dawn of the Paleozoic, 570 million years ago.
But Mars produced complex, macroscopic invertebrates with exoskeletons within only a hundred million years. All of the fossils collected here dated from the Noachian, which covered the first billion years. By the time multicellular creatures appeared on Earth, life on Mars had been extinct for hundreds of millions of years: two ships that didn’t quite pass in the cosmic night . . .
Ernie and the woman were exchanging words. “Surely these are worth more than that!” she declared.
“My sincerest apologies, dear lady,” he replied, “but Longipes bedrossiani is the most common of finds; they were everywhere. And see here?