Nightfall. The rocky galleries flooded with shadow. Hurriedly David threw his samples into the back of the rover and set it to the laborious climb out of the Noctis Labyrinthus. The engine protested, groaning, crawling up the heavily eroded escarpment, pushed to the limit.
There. He achieved the last sheen of sunlight and was saved from creeping darkness. He sighed, relieved, and his visor fogged briefly with his breath. Before him, across the smoother ground, the trail was muted with the fine red dust that eddied like liquid cinnamon into the ruts. But it was a trail; it led to shelter. A human voice, and, of course, her.
The rover bounced on, hugging the rim of the light, gaining on the darkness. A cloud of crimson particles billowed from the oversized wheels, veiling the horizon and the face of a small, raw sun.
David glanced to his left, to where the world came to an abrupt edge. He hesitated, gauged the remaining light, turned aside from the path. A low rise, a jumbled set of ruts, and a chasm yawned before him. Pinnacles of layered rock, ravines flowing with rivers of dust, colors rippling and heaving as if the torn crust of Mars quivered like a wounded animal. Night pooled in the depths, drawing the wind from the light, voices wailing about the ocher spires.
Vertigo welled from the abyss, plucking at him. He shuddered in sudden fear. He inhaled deeply of his personal bubble of atmosphere, tilted his helmeted face to the lowering pink sky, raised his gloved hands and declaimed in a desperate defiance, "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
His voice emerged from the speaker, a feeble mutter that was whipped away and dissipated into darkness. The wind sang, echoing in his audio receivers. He turned, crushed. The rosy haze of dusk was almost upon him. "Nothing beside remains," he whispered. "Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away."
Shadows crept out of the Labyrinth of Night, pursuing the tiny rover like grasping fingers. David set his mouth; it would be foolish to look behind him, he was one of the only two living creatures in this entire sector of Mars. Still his neck prickled. Brought too much emotional baggage, he told himself. Think too much. Fear from within, not without.
There was the camp, the life unit like a giant clamshell half-buried in the sand. His first days there David had built a low rock wall around it, as carefully as a New England farmer clearing a field; now only a few boulders showed above the red dust. Mars was not quite ready to accept human artifacts. He slowed, edged the rover in close to the shelter, stopped. Clumsily he scrambled out and turned to retrieve the samples. In this batch, perhaps, the evidence of extraterrestrial life. But he doubted that man would ever find new life; we're alone, folks, stuck with our terrors.
)
A scientist searching for life on Mars finds it in a most unexpected place, leading him to re-evaluate not only his own life but what it means to be human. Like beauty, thought is its own excuse for being.
