More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

Reclining on the cot, which squeaked under his weight, he sensed a sleepless night on the way—though he had never lost a night’s sleep, the insomnia, too, was inevitable. That alarmed him. Not the prospect of a sleepless night so much as his body’s recalcitrance, signaling a vulnerability, a break in what was hitherto infallible, the mere thought of which, at this moment, connoted defeat. He was not content to lie there wide-eyed against his will, and so, even though it was silly, he sat up, stared vacantly at his pajamas, then shifted his gaze to the bookshelves.

Not expecting to find anything of interest, he was all the more startled to discover a row of thick-bound volumes above the compass-pocked plotting board. There, neatly arrayed, stood practically the entire history of areology, most of the titles being familiar to him from his reference library on Earth. He got up and ran his fingers along their solid spines. Herschel, the father of astronomy, was there; so was Kepler’s Astronomia Nova de Motibus Stellae Martis ex Observationibus Tychonis Brahe, in a 1784 edition. Then came Flammarion, Backhuysen, Kaiser, and the great dreamer, Schiaparelli—a dark-brown Latin edition of his Memoria terza—and Arrhenius, Antoniadi, Kuiper, Lowell, Pickering, Saheko, Struve, Vaucouleurs, all the way up to Wernher von Braun and his Exploration of Mars. And maps, rolls of them, inscribed with all the canals—Margaritifer Sinus, Lacus Solis, even Agathodaemon… He stood before the familiar, not really having to open any of these books with their burnished, plywood-thick covers. The musty effluvium of old linen bindings and yellowed pages, bespeaking both dignity and decrepitude, revived memories of long hours spent in contemplation of the mystery that had been attacked, besieged for two centuries by a horde of hypotheses, only to have their authors die, one by one, unrequited. Antoniadi went a lifetime without observing any canals, and only in the twilight of old age did he grudgingly acknowledge “some lines bearing a likeness to same.” The “canalists,” meanwhile, charted their observations at night, whiling away hours at the eyeglass for one of those fleeting moments of stationary atmosphere, at which time, they averred, a hair-thin geometric grid emerged on the fuzzy gray surface. Lowell made it dense, Pickering less so, but he was in luck with his “gemination,” as the incredible duplication of canals was called. An illusion? Why, then, did some canals never double?

He used to pore over these books as a cadet—in the reading room, of course, since they were too rare to be circulated. Pirx—need it be said?—sided with the “canalists.” Their arguments rang infallibly. Graff, Antoniadi, Hall —those incurable doubting Thomases—had their observatories in the air-polluted cities of the North, whereas Schiaparelli worked in Milan, and Pickering on his mountain overlooking the Arizona desert. The “anti-canalists” conducted the most ingenious experiments: they would chart a disk with randomly inscribed dots and blotches that, viewed from a distance, took on a gridlike pattern, and then ask: How could they escape the most powerful instruments? Why were the lunar canals visible with the naked eye? How could the earlier observers have missed them, and everyone after Schiaparelli take them as self-evident? And the “canalists” would counter: The lunar canals went undetected in the pretelescopic age. Earth’s atmosphere wasn’t stable enough to permit detection with high-powered telescopes; the drawing experiments only sidestepped the issue. The “canalists” had an answer for everything: Mars was a giant frozen ocean, the canals were rifts in its meteor-impacted ice mass or, rather, wide fluvial valleys watered by the spring thaws and graced with vernal efflorescence. When spectroscopy revealed an insufficient water content, they decided the canals were enormous troughs, long valleys covered with cloud masses borne by convex currents adrift from the pole to the equator. Schiaparelli never publicly acknowledged these as figments of a foreign imagination, playing on the ambiguity of the term “canal.” This reticence on the part of the Milanese astronomer was shared by many others, who never named, only charted and displayed, but in his papers Schiaparelli left behind drawings explaining the origin of the doubling phenomenon, the famous gemination process: when the parallel, hitherto arid rills were inundated, the water suddenly caused the helices to darken, like wood grooves filled with ink. The “anti-canalists,” meanwhile, did not just deny the existence of the canals and amass a body of counterargument, but over time became increasingly vindictive.

In his hundred-page pamphlet, Wallace, after Darwin the second architect of the theory of natural evolution, hence not even an astronomer by profession, a man who probably never even glimpsed Mars through the lenses, demolished the canal hypothesis, and any thought of life on Mars as well: Mars, he wrote, was not only not inhabited by sentient beings, as Lowell claimed, but was actually uninhabitable. None remained neutral; all had to proclaim their credos. The next generation of canalists began to speak of a Martian civilization, thus deepening the split: a realm bearing traces of sentient activity, some said; a corpselike desert, countered others. Then Saheko observed those mysterious flashes—volatile, extinguished by cloud formations, too fleeting to be volcanic eruptions, arising during the period of planetary conjunction, thus ruling out a solar reflection on the planet’s high glacial range.

Not until the unleashing of atomic energy was the possibility of nuclear tests on Mars broached. One side had to be right. By the mid-twentieth century, it was unanimously agreed that, although Schiaparelli’s geometrical canals were chimerical, there was something up there to suggest the presence of canals. The eye may embellish, but not hallucinate; the canals were observed by too many people, in too many places on Earth, to be an allusion. So: no glacial water, no cloud streams borne along the valleys, and most likely no zones of vegetation, either; yet something was up there—who knew, perhaps even more mind- boggling, more enigmatic—that only awaited the human eye, the camera lens, and unmanned space probes.

Pirx knew better than to divulge the thoughts inspired by these readings, but Boerst, bright and ruthless as befitted the class brain, soon discovered his true sympathies, and for a few weeks made him the laughingstock of the school, dubbing him “Pirx the canalist,” promotor of the doctrine “Credo, quia non est.” Pirx knew full well the canals were a fiction; worse, that there was nothing even faintly suggestive of them. How could he not have known, what with Mars having been colonized for years, and his having passed his qualifying exams, when he was obliged to orient detailed photographic maps under the vigilant eye of his TA, and even, in his mock-ups, to soft-land in the simulator on the same Agathodaemon floor where he now stood, under the project’s dome, by a bookshelf containing two centuries of astronomical discoveries and antique museum pieces. Yes, he knew, but it was a knowledge of a different order, remote, distanced, not to be verified by tests, by those exercises seemingly based on a hoax. It was as if there existed yet another, inaccessible, geometrically patterned, and mysterious Mars.

There is a stretch on the Ares-Terra line, a zone from which one can really see—continually, for hours on end—with the naked eye what Schiaparelli, Lowell, and Pickering were able to observe only during brief interludes of atmospheric stability. Through the ports one can see the canals, for up to twenty-four, sometimes forty-eight hours, vaguely outlined against the drab, inhospitable shield. Then, as the globe begins to swell on approach, they commence to fade, to dissolve, blurring one by one into a blank nothingness, leaving only the planet’s disk, purged of any sharp contours, to mock with its tedious gray nullity the hopes and expectations it had aroused. True, weeks later, certain surface details, fixed and well defined, begin to re-emerge, but these turn out to be the serrated rims of the largest craters, the wild accretions of weather-beaten rocks, a riot of rock scree buried under deep layers of drab sand, in no way evocative of that pristine, impeccable geometry. At close range, the planet yields its chaos, meekly and irrevocably, incapable of shedding that glaring image of a billion-year erosion; of a chaos not to be reconciled with that memorably lucid design, whose symmetry connoted something compelling, moving, which bespoke a rational order, an unintelligible but manifest logic, that required just a trifle more exertion to be grasped.

Where was that order, and whence came this mocking illusion? Was it a projection of the retina, of human optical processes? A figment of the cerebral cortex? The questions remained unanswered as the problem went the way of all hypotheses phased out and crushed by technological progress: It was swept into the trash. Since there were no canals—not even any topographical features to foster the illusion—the case was closed. A good thing that neither the “canalists” nor the “anti-canalists” lived to hear these sobering revelations, because the riddle was never really solved, merely phased out. Other planets had nebulous shields, and not a single canal was ever sighted on them. Unseen, uncharted. Why? Anyone’s guess.

Here, too, hypotheses could be advanced to explain this chapter of astronomy: the combination of distance and optical enlargement, of objective chaos and a subjective craving for order; the residual traces of something that, emerging from the blurred patch in the lens, just beyond the border of perceptibility, momentarily came within the eye’s grasp; the faintest visual suggestion combined with subconscious wishful thinking.

Requiring all to choose sides, entrenched in their respective positions, forever joined in noble conflict, generation after generation of astrophysicists had gone to the grave firmly believing that the issue would one day be resolved by the appropriate tribunals, fairly and irrevocably. Pirx was sure that all—each in his own way, each for