The Light on Mars

The summer I turned forty-one, I was ghostwriting a book for an astronomer, which is how I came to be watching Mars when it started watching us.

Her name was Lena Okafor, and she ran the telescope at Meridian Ridge, a silver dome stapled to a ridge at six thousand feet, forty minutes of switchbacks above my town. Ash Grove sits in the high desert of the eastern side of the state, eleven thousand people, a paper mill that closed in my father's time, a county fair, a hospital with four doctors, and a stretch of the Mica River where the water goes green and slow in August. It was the kind of place people drove through with their windows up. I had come to it from the city twenty years earlier for a job at the small press and never left, and by that summer I had published two books nobody read and made a living writing other people's books for them.

Dr. Okafor wanted a memoir about the years she had spent chasing the atmosphere of a dead world. She was sixty-eight, precise, funny in a dry register, and impatient with my first three drafts, all of which she had called "sentimental." On the last night of July she called me at home and said, "Come up tonight. Bring your own coat."

The observing room smelled of old coffee and machine oil. The dome above us was open to a sky so clear it looked manufactured. She sat me down at a monitor and pulled up a sequence of exposures taken over the previous six nights.

"Tell me what you see," she said.

"A planet," I said. "Polar cap. Some dark patches."

"Now the third frame. And then the fourth. The same patch of the disk, twenty minutes later."

I looked. There was a bright point on the terminator, the line where night meets day, that had not been in the earlier frame. In the next frame it was gone.

"A cosmic ray," I said. "Or a bad pixel."

"A bad pixel," she said, "that appears at nine different positions along the sunlit edge in one night, and again the following night, in a pattern?" She leaned back. She was not a woman who leaned back much. "There are papers on this going back a hundred years. Flashes, glows, projections. Every generation of astronomers has seen something and explained it away, because the alternative was embarrassing."

"The alternative being?"

"Someone turning on lights."

She let me take notes that night, which she almost never did. She gave me the numbers: Mars near opposition, closer to us than it had been in eleven years; a series of light points along the sunlit limb, each lasting minutes, each repeating on a cycle. Two nights later there was a new cluster, and this one appeared in the space of twenty-four hours after the first, at a different longitude, as if a lamp had been carried from one room of a dark house into another.

"What would you call it if you had to put it in print?" I asked her.

"I'd call it a localized emission of unknown origin and let other people do the screaming," she said. "It will be a volcanic plume. Or static discharge in a dust storm. Ninety-seven percent." She turned the monitor off. "But I've been doing this for forty years, Mr. Marsh, and I've never seen a storm keep a schedule."

The story ran small. A wire item, three paragraphs: FLARES REPORTED ON MARS, ASTRONOMERS CAUTIOUS. Ray Kessler, who wrote for a paper downriver in St. Anselm and picked up half his copy from police scanners, called me for a quote and I gave him one about planetary atmospheres being complicated. He ran it under a headline about mystery lights, got a few hundred clicks, and moved on to a crop fraud case. Nobody I knew talked about it at all.

Let me be honest about that summer, because the accounts written later, the official ones, made it sound as if the country had been blind. We were not blind. There were four nights in August when I stood in my own yard with a pair of birding binoculars and could find the red planet without effort, a steady coal of light in the southeast, and I thought: there is weather there, or fire, or light, and it is not our business, and I went to bed. Everybody did. The distances did their usual work. A thing happening forty million miles away is a fact, and facts about other worlds do not reach down into the body. That is the whole of it. We read the item, if we read it, and we slept.

Nora understood it differently, or she claimed to afterward. My wife taught eighth-grade English at the middle school; she had grown up on a wheat farm two counties east and had the particular patience of people who watch weather for a living. On the second Sunday of August we drove up the ridge road with a thermos and lay on the hood of the car next to the closed dome and she watched Mars with the binoculars for a long time.

"It's bright," she said.

"It's close."

"Mm," she said. She kept watching. Then she said, "You know how in August the air over the flats shakes? How you can see the heat coming off the blacktop? I always think that's what the surface of a planet is like from up here. Close enough to see it shake. Too far to know what's shaking."

"Beautiful," I said, meaning the sentence, and she laughed at me and put the binoculars away.

Two entries from my notebook that week, because the notebook is the only honest witness either of us has left. August the ninth: L.O. says the flashes favor the older terrain, the high ground, as if whatever it is has business in the mountains. August the fourteenth: three clusters tonight, timed, she says, like a lighthouse in fog. And under both, in my handwriting, in the cursive of a man who believes the world is a large and mostly empty place: no one we know has ever been hurt by another world. I underlined it, and the underlining belongs in the record. It was not a stupid thing to believe. It was the belief of every serious person I had ever met, and it had held for all of human history, and it had eleven days left.

It was on the twenty-sixth of August that the schedule changed. Okafor called me at nine in the morning, which she never did, and her voice was different, not excited, more like a person reading a gauge in a cockpit.

"The longitude jumped," she said. "The new cluster is two thousand miles, their miles, from the old one, and it appeared inside an hour. Whatever it is, it moves faster than weather." A pause. "I've got a call scheduled this afternoon with the observatory director's office in the capital. Halloran's people want the raw frames."

Dr. Emmett Halloran was the director of the national observatory, a television-comfortable man I had once watched give a graduation speech about wonder. That his office wanted anything from a ridge telescope in the dry side of the state was, by itself, news.

"How bad is ninety-seven percent now?" I asked.

"Lower," she said, and hung up.

That evening I sat on the porch with Nora and told her about the call while she shelled beans into a bowl, and she said, "So they're going to point everything they have at it," and I said yes, and she said, "Good," and kept shelling beans. The evening paper came, and there was nothing in it. The river went on being green and slow. I remember thinking the word consequences and having it feel like a word from another language, something from a book I had read in school.

The light came on the fifth night after that. I had gone up to the ridge to work through Okafor's chapter drafts, and I was driving down at half past ten, windows open, when I saw the second star.

I say star because that is what it looked like at first: a point of white fire low in the southwest, brighter than anything in that part of the sky. Then it moved. It crossed half the sky in the time I watched it, trailing a ribbon of green light that peeled and reformed, and there was a sound then, though I did not understand at first that the sound was attached to it, a long tearing noise like the sky ripping along a seam, and then a shockwave hit the car hard enough to rock it on its springs. Ahead of me the whole western horizon lit up, a dome of orange light over the dark shoulder of Dozier Ridge, and the light was still burning when I pulled over, and still burning when I turned the car around and drove home with the accelerator on the floor.

Nora was in the yard. Behind her the sky over Hartwell Flats, the wide sagebrush bottom ten miles west of town, was the color of a forge.

"Earthquake," she said. "The whole house shook. And then the light." She had the phone in her hand; the county group channel was full of the same story from every direction. Something fell. Something on the flats. It's on fire. Are you OK, are you home, did you feel it.

We stood together in the yard and watched the glow pulse and settle and hold, a steady ember-light on the underside of the dust cloud, and I remember her hand found mine and gripped it, and I remember thinking, with a clarity that has never left me: that light is too steady. Fires flicker. This did not flicker.

Up on the ridge behind us, unseen in the dark, every telescope in the dome was already swinging west and down, toward our own sky.