Memories of Mars: Custodian Library Archives, #1

By Colin Yeoman

What if we've already had our second chance?

Earth. Humankind is preparing to send its first pioneers to colonize Mars to ensure the survival of our species. Josiah Lamples uncovers a mystery that threatens to destroy plans for human settlement on the Red Planet. His discovery will also challenge everything he has accepted to be true of himself.

Memories of Mars documents Josiah's account of what he found and his introduction to an obscure network of people who refer to themselves as The Custodians.

This is a story about new frontiers, dreams, despair, endurance, and hope… lost and found.

(2nd Edition: Series Edition)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Silvertree
• Release date: Dec 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781990930140

Book preview

20070125.20090323

PART I : Earth

DISCOVERY

If you do not expect it,

You will not find the unexpected,

For it is hard to find and difficult.

Heraclitus

1.1

THE LANDSCAPE WAS RED and rugged and harsh, undeniably beautiful but in a haunted way. My body felt insubstantial, almost as if my bones were hollow, and my first steps would always feel as though I couldn’t touch the ground. There weren’t any clouds this time however the sky was heavy and tinted red by the dust that floated everywhere. The dust was as fine as talcum powder and when it went in my mouth, it would soak up all the saliva and form sticky, metallic clumps that tasted like blood on my tongue. It was difficult to swallow and almost impossible to spit out. On previous trips so much dust had made its way into my mouth I couldn’t breathe and my choking ended the excursion within seconds. This time I knew to keep my mouth closed in order to explore the area properly.

Far behind the hills on the horizon there was the faintest image of a mountain of unimaginably large proportions. The suspended dust would blow thicker and then thinner on the breeze, so this view of the mountain would keep disappearing, making it impossible to determine whether it was real or just an illusion.

On the right, in front of the hills, were burnt silhouettes of what looked like very tall cedar trees. To the left was sand the colour of terracotta pottery and small boulders sparsely interspersed with bushes which had thorns the length of daggers. In open spaces were the charred remains of animals and human beings. Some human forms seemed to reach toward the heavens with fingers curled and snapped like twigs on a tree after a brush-fire.

Looking down at my feet to figure out why it felt like I was floating over the terrain instead of feeling it through my boots, I saw each footfall scatter tentacles of red sand. They hung in the atmosphere and thickened the surrounding dust cloud. Some tentacles would cling to my legs and writhe their way up my body. When they reached my chest, I’d strike them and they would drift apart then reform. I started to run, looking to stamp this dust out of my clothes onto a rocky patch, but running seemed to multiply the tentacles. The dust stuck to my sweat, my eyes, my nostrils, and in my desperation I forgot to keep my mouth closed. Tentacles worked their way into my mouth and I felt them scratching down my throat, pulling the breath from my body. I screamed - a silent scream with no air left in my lungs.

I now know this landscape was Mars, but when the dreams first started - I was six or seven years old - I didn’t take any notice of the setting. In retrospect it always felt like an alien world when I was in it but there were many years when I would wake up breathless and terrified as soon as the rocky terrain appeared. The dreams never progressed further than the first few moments. After a while though, I would anticipate the feeling of being able to almost float across the landscape as I walked and to lift impossibly large rocks and leap over ravines. The cruel beauty of that other world attracted me despite the inevitable choking that would draw me back to my sweat-soaked bed on Earth.

During my youth there was a lot of media attention given to the Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity missions to Mars. When those rovers first started sending pictures back to us they riveted me to them with a mixture of familiarity, longing and wonder. A voice inside whispered ‘Those pictures are snapshots of your future’. I suppose this is what some people would describe as a calling. I studied the pictures and absorbed all available information about our neighbouring planet. Over time, these dreams became more vivid and the lonely world of their substance came to define the course of my life as powerfully as the sun determines the orbit of our Earth.

And so it was that, after impatiently jumping through the required hoops of the applied sciences, I started my job working for the Mars program of the United Council for Frontiers (UCF), a multi-national organisation dedicated to the research of, and missions to, Deep-Sea and Deep-Space. The Deep-Sea work was funded by a coalition of nations to search and explore, ever deeper, to find the resources that kept Earth’s economies lubricated. Deep-Space exploration was funded under the premise that the scientific knowledge and technological innovations gained would benefit both humankind and the planet. The cross-purposes of the official work of the Space and Sea departments was lost on the people in the higher echelons of governance but not on the public who shortened the agency’s clumsy name to ‘the Front’. Some people suspected the only reason government supported deep space work was because ‘whoever rules space rules Earth’, while, for the rest of us, deep-space was attractive because Earth was in deep-trouble and we needed a viable exit plan.

However, I’m not a politician, an environmentalist or a philosopher... I’m Josiah Lamples, a scientist and an explorer, and the Front’s Deep-Space Mandate suited me perfectly.

1.2

IN THE EARLY DAYS of the Mars program, Rover Driver groups at ‘the Front’ had been