"Pho."

"Ah, hold on," he says. Below the sea, broken in places, lies some kind of new strip or stripe. "Something's there, I think." A thready line appears to emanate from Agyre, at the edge of the dead sea-perhaps the vanguard of a waterway project, now that he considers it in the light of France-Lanord's sketches. Other astronomers who have received the French sketches are also looking hard at the region tonight, seeking to detect a shadow, a discoloration, a figment at the limit of perception on the surface of an object that remains 130 million miles from Earth. Astronomers will study their drawings from previous oppositions. Photographs were taken at the 1892 approach, but their large-grained emulsions, the only ones available, were in-sufficiently sensitive to reveal what may be apprehended by the human eye. Not a single ca.n.a.l has ever been distinguished in a photograph.

Thayer looks for several minutes and makes a careful sketch in his notebook before he pulls away. "Have a look yourself."

"Let the poor girl look. She's s.h.i.+vering."

Thayer has already forgotten Bint, who's standing apart from the astronomer and his secretary. She's wrapped her robe tight against her frame, but it's hardly enough to keep out the sands' early morning chill.

Thayer raises his hand and shows Bint the eyepiece.

"Merrikh," he says.

She takes small steps as she approaches the instrument. Thayer wonders whether she comprehends the telescope's purpose; whether she will make the connection between the image in the eyepiece and the steady red beacon low above the horizon. She's small enough to stand erect at the eyepiece. She does as Thayer did, opening her right eye wide to the lens, a few sixteenths of an inch above it. She's motionless as she demonstrates the native patience that has been won from the desert's silence.

"Look well, Bint," Thayer instructs her. "Look hard. Everything worth seeing lies at the edge of visibility."

Miss Keaton murmurs her a.s.sent. This was one of the first lessons Thayer gave her, years ago, when she first came into his employ.

He adds, "Every discovery lies within the standard error of measurement. The most important truths about the cosmos can hardly be separated from illusion."

"She can't understand you, Sanford."

Offered a view through a telescope, most lay observers look briefly, presuming they have seen what they were supposed to. But Bint remains at the eyepiece for minutes, as if in fact she's directly executing his command. Waiting her turn, Miss Keaton believes she can pick out the reflection of the planet's image on the surface of the girl's eye. She thinks she may even see in this mirroring the creamy tip of the ice cap. Thayer also watches Bint attentively, expectantly. He too perceives the sanguine glint. Bint's moist, budlike lips are parted as she gazes into the eyepiece. Miss Keaton reconsiders. The girl is slender and submissive, her skin is clear, and the very crudeness of her features impart an almost cla.s.sical sensuality. Thayer could conceivably consider her attractive.

"Merrikh," the girl repeats, murmuring.

She continues to ignore Thayer and Miss Keaton. Her only motion is a small, peculiar one: the light, absentminded pa.s.sage of a finger from her right hand across the palm of her left.

When she finally draws away from the telescope she turns to Thayer, smiling openly, in a womanly way, without the deference that he should expect. He doesn't mind. She holds out her palm and traces a circle on it with a fingernail. Once that's complete she draws another line across her hand, where the memory of the circle is imprinted. If the circle represents Mars, then the line's termini may very possibly approximate the positions of Peneus and the arid patch of Martian ground known as Agyre.

"You've seen something?" Thayer's eyes light. "You've seen definite features!"

Miss Keaton knows that Bint's recognition of the new artifact is extraordinary. The first time laypeople observe the planet through a telescope they rarely see any landforms at all, not even the ice caps. Their impatience makes it difficult to convince skeptics of the ca.n.a.ls' reality: "I didn't see them, so they can't be there!" One would not then expect the ready detection of surface features by an unlettered Bedouin serving girl. Her confirmation of the shadowing gives substantial credence to the French astronomer's claim. France-Lanord will have to be cabled in the morning, which is almost upon them.

Bint gives up her place to the secretary, who's at first presented with the usual blank crimson disk. Regardless of her long experience with the instrument, she too is obliged to wait for her eyes to adapt. Miss Keaton's aware that in these several minutes, Thayer and Bint are in the position of having seen something that she has not. They stand behind her, waiting. Soon, though, the image appears, starting at the ice cap, an even gray line, something that wasn't there during the 1892 approach. The new ca.n.a.l can only confirm that the inhabitants of Mars remain capable of grand construction. Their race is still a worthy audience for the spectacle of the Equilateral. But a disquiet tugs at her. Something she can't quite make out.

Eleven.

The secretary requires the remaining hours before dawn to complete the report, which she signs with Thayer's name, adding that the observation was joined by Miss A. Keaton. The second witness provides superfluous confirmation, for Thayer's visual powers are unrivaled among his peers-he's identified incipient squalls in the atmosphere of the sun before they became raging cyclones the size of the Earth; he's mapped Himalayan peaks on the surface of Jupiter's Ganymede-but the astronomer routinely asks her to share priority.

The morning has not yet warmed when she steps from her tent on the way to the telegraphic bureau, the carefully typed paper in hand. The camp is still waking, and there's still no bird-song. The embers of last night's cooking fires are being stirred and reanimated. Men make their stiff-legged way toward the latrines. A fellahin work gang lingers in the distance, before departing for labors to be performed on Side AC. An unseen muezzin clears his throat, about to launch into the day's first devotions.

Miss Keaton's strides across the packed sands are long and confident, whatever uncertainty from the night having dissipated with the night itself. She sees men falling to the ground. The repeated cries in the muezzin's first line reach her now: Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! They're a kind of comfort and a kind of thrill. She reflects on how awful the song would seem to the women who were her school friends a decade earlier, girls who were bright, sophisticated, and daring-every one of them now married into anonymity. None would care to imagine herself under this sun, treading these wastes, and sharing this remote camp with thousands of men, or that Adele would possibly consider herself anything but unfortunate.

The night telegraph man is still on duty, another Turk with a tarbush, or perhaps it's the same Turk from the water bureau. He rises from his prayer rug. When she hands him the report, he bows with possibly exaggerated courtesy. She stands away, looking out on the sands while he tap-tap-taps the message to Europe. The mechanism produces another repet.i.tive sound, no less all-encompa.s.sing than the muezzin's prayers. The transmission concludes with her name reduced to a series of dots and dashes and rea.s.sembled thousands of miles away, with harm neither to her person nor to her reputation. At this moment, she herself takes in the distance between Point A and London, over desert and sea. By some similar magic or technology, she may yet someday span the vacancy between Point A and the planet Mars.

Twelve.

Thayer, Ballard, and several junior engineers ride out to mile 50 on Side AB, where there's a segment of the triangle that hasn't been reached by the work crews. The astronomer is perplexed. They were scheduled to complete it months before. This is some of the easiest territory they will have to cut through, the ground soft and un.o.bstructed, almost begging to be excavated.

Having dismounted, Thayer steps away from his party, engineers who can enumerate unequivocally the reasons this section has yet to see a spade or hand-barrow. He feels a rising disgust for the men's company. Once he turns, he's the last person on Earth, the last of everything. No living creature respires within his field of view, which extends hundreds of miles. His boots kick through some chalky sand that embed a reflection of the geometric design in their soles, a series of equilateral triangles. Thayer squats to run a hand through the loose dirt.

He picks up several small flat round stones about an inch wide, each stamped with the fanlike image of a brachiopod that is no longer represented among the Earth's extant species. A dozen such stones lie in the immediate area a few yards between him and the engineers, rebuking the numbskulls and scoundrels who deny the evidence for evolution by natural selection.

Thayer stands on land that was once the bottom of a shallow Saharan sea, in an epoch long before the supposed flood of Noah, but one that was just as wet, when the Earth was primarily an aqueous planet. Whales, dolphins, and fish plied the waters, nesting in future wadis and savoring the fresh, cooling streams that rose from the future oases. They were content in their dominions, unaware that evolution conspired against them. Then the waters receded, leaving sand and their fossilized remains, and providing for the emergence of another species, one that would establish his home on land and from that redoubt rule the planet.

The closing century has succeeded in proving what previous times have only fitfully suggested: that history moves in a single direction and that the direction is forward. Since 1800, railroads have replaced horse-drawn conveyances, photography has replaced the inexact daubings of painters, and representative legislatures have replaced despots. These innovations have dramatically enlarged man's imagination. Charles Darwin's theories have won acceptance precisely because the evolution of living species echoes the progress of our age.

Thayer has offered his own contributions to the idea, advanced most prominently by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, that evolution is a universal process that governs the development of inanimate matter as well as it does Earth's species of life and the progress of human societies. We may confirm this principle by simply lifting our heads to the sky, where gas and dust are constantly evolving into more complex celestial objects. In his pioneering 1890 expedition to Chile, Thayer observed diffuse ent.i.ties visible from the Southern Hemisphere, particularly the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. According to settled nineteenth century opinion, these nebulae are relatively close by, located within a Milky Way that comprises the entire universe. Thayer's observations have shown that they're individual stars precipitating from incandescent gas before our very eyes, dust and gas evolving into stars and planets, a process that eventually casts our individual human destinies-a process that at this moment in our planetary history demands the Equilateral.

The logic of the excavations is drawn from confirmed theory.

Like Darwin's species, the planets gain new attributes and lose others depending on conditions in their environment. Astronomers will catalogue these characteristics sometime in the next century, but one lesson that has already been learned, from observation through this century's best instruments, is that it's in the nature of planets to lose their water as they age. The Earth and its closest neighbors provide striking ill.u.s.trations of the principle. The youngest of the three, oceanic Venus, is shrouded by clouds and most likely lacks a single island of dry land from one pole to the other. As may be seen through even a small telescope, Mars between the ice caps is almost totally waterless, on the verge of extinction. Our home planet Earth, older than the second sphere from the sun but more youthful than the fourth, is delicately poised in what Thayer calls the terraqueous stage, its surface contested by vast seas and immense continents.

If life typically rises from a planet's aquatic depths, then Venus most likely hosts primitive organisms similar to the algae and plankton that dominated Cambrian Earth. Mars is then home to the most evolutionally developed fauna, capable of adapting to its harsh, arid climate.

These considerations imply that the driest of the three planets, Mars, should boast the oldest, most storied, most advanced civilization. As the construction of its planet-girdling ca.n.a.ls demonstrates, Mars has progressed far beyond mankind in the sciences and in technology. If men have operated steam engines for two hundred years, the engineers of Mars have employed them for two hundred thousand, continuously making refinements. They may have raised towers that reach the edges of the planet's attenuated atmosphere; they may have perfected airs.h.i.+ps and other vehicles, railed or not, that can cross the ruddy globe in hours. As we can observe, they've developed agricultural techniques that produce bountiful crops in lands far more desiccated than the Western Desert.

We may observe that morals are another trait subject to the forces of evolution. Human history shows that ethical practices ensuring a race's survival and well-being are naturally promoted, while malign behaviors are inexorably discarded. In the course of Earth's past two thousand years the principles of right and wrong have been bred into the Anglo-Saxon races, which have come to dominate the planet. In their native lands contracts are honored in letter and spirit. Girls grow into ladies with innate modesty, blessed by the sanct.i.ty of marriage. The Golden Rule has triumphed on both sides of the Atlantic. So has industry, sobriety, and self-possession.

Mars is home to a race in which the forces of natural selection have enjoyed further millennia to secure positive social traits. To judge from the planetary cooperation that must have been required to build the ca.n.a.l network, selflessness is imbued deeply within the Martian character. We may imagine then that Martian ethics, the product of many centuries' further wisdom, reflection, and natural selection, have far exceeded our own-though those scruples can't be identified in advance by the most refined, kindest man on Earth, trapped in his own species' intermediate stage of moral development.

Thayer a.s.serts that when we behold Mars, we're witnessing the manifestation of Darwin's theories on the grandest planetary scale. In demonstrating that Earth's terraqueous state is but a phase of planetary evolution, Mars permits us a vision of our own future, existential and moral. Our planet too is destined to lose its oceans and great lakes. Earth's...o...b..t runs closer to the sun, so our sphere will become even hotter and drier than Mars. The deserts will spread like an infection, until water becomes as precious for us as it is for our neighbors. What will civilized man do in that event? Following the Arab's example, he may fall into dissolution, unable to survive the climactic transformation. He may turn barbarous, atavistic, and idle. He may forget the sciences and arts that he invented, just as the Arab lost his mastery of mathematics and astronomy.

Or he may choose not to. After proving his capabilities in excavating the Equilateral, man will be ready to learn from Mars how to a.s.semble the social, spiritual, and material resources necessary to survive a dehydrating planet. Mars may well be the force that makes us truly civilized, truly kind to each other, wise, prudent, responsible to the natural world, courageous in facing our global challenges, and, paradoxically, truly human. Contact and communication with Mars must be the next step in human evolution. This is what Thayer believes and what he has told his audiences.

Thirteen.

The heat demands that they travel after the sun goes down. Two lines of camels transport the swaying, muttering fellahin. He rides among them, dozing in his Bedouin saddle. Every so often the beast's missteps jolt him awake, and Thayer is momentarily surprised to find himself there, the animal beneath him skeletal, sinewy, and hideous. The dead country is hideous too. No token of intelligence lies within his sight ...

... Until he lifts his head. The Milky Way spills across the sky in a riot of light, its component stars rampaging from Sagittarius to Ca.s.siopeia. Thayer wishes that he was already returned to Point A, where he can open the observatory. The plodding steps of his dromedary reminds the astronomer that on his own planet man lives as solitary as an anchorite on a wave-battered rock. His only companions are the animals over which he holds dominion: he can ride them, he can harness them, he can pet them, he can expect loyalty from some, and he can eat and skin them. But he can't converse with them, not profitably.

Yet each of these stars may illuminate a world on which dwell creatures no less conscious than man; they may enjoy an intelligence and an appreciation of existence more advanced than our own, perhaps far more advanced. Their worlds may have been in contact since men lived in caves. The sky may be congested with intellects and as lively and swarming and raucous as the Soho Bazaar on the Sat.u.r.day before Christmas. We can't hear their voices, but at this very moment sophisticated minds call to each other across the tangled, overgrown sky: instructing, inspiring, debating, and sharing their joys and sorrows.

The dragoman murmurs, "I believe it has been written so. The Forty-second sura."

Thayer was unaware that he was speaking. He thought the translator riding alongside him was asleep. The man's a young Cairene, with a jet-black beard and a neatly pressed galabiya, yet his eyelids are heavy and creased, heightening the typical impression of s.h.i.+ftiness. As dragomen go, he's been competent enough, though Thayer can't trust him to render fully what he's said to the fellahin or what the fellahin have replied.

"The Prophet," the dragoman says, taking note of Thayer's confusion. "The verse in the Quran: 'And one of His signs is the creation of the heavens and the Earth and what He has spread forth in both of them of living beings.'"

"I doubt that applies," Thayer snaps. "Mohammed was an illiterate trader nine hundred years before Copernicus. He couldn't have been aware of life on other planets."

When the dragoman bows, his head vanishes behind the hood of his cloak. "I'm certain you're correct, Effendi. What I know of the Quran and what the Quran may yet reveal are to each other only as a fragment of a grain of sand compares to a desert far greater than the one we traverse tonight."

They ride for a while and Thayer, irritated, observes that the dragoman's asleep again, if he was ever awake. In the moment before the Arab interrupted his thoughts, Thayer almost heard the celestial intercourse above his head-if not the actual words, then its beat and hum, its susurrations and sibilations.

On his own planet the man of intelligence is the loneliest creature of all. Thayer rides in a caravan of the illiterate and the ignorant, the faithless and the fanatical, for whom the waking state and the unconscious hold no important distinction, across a wasteland in which nine hundred thousand similarly shallow souls, dispersed in their rugs and buried in their trenches, drowse while their mouths work soundlessly in their slumbers, their muscles twitch, and their dreams remain incoherent.

He raises his head again and his eyes fill with starlight.

Fourteen.

A pit about forty feet deep has been opened in the trench on Side AC at mile 191, near Sitra. A pyramid a.s.sembled from blocks of stone stands partially uncovered within the hole, its apex only a few feet above the plane of the side's excavations.

Thayer walks with care along the circ.u.mference, the Greek foreman at his side. The pyramid's unweathered, neatly fitted stones are coolly luminous, nearly transparent. One of the cubes near the top has been removed, leaving a black s.p.a.ce through which snakes a rope ladder.

The foreman says, "This is an important discovery, sir. No one has found anything like it so far west of the Nile. Other pyramids may be buried nearby."

The monument is an ideal form made real, hewn from the rough, amorphous, uncooperative, imperfect, inexact Earth. Thayer nods at the ladder.

"Your men have gone in?"

"Only to investigate. Nothing was disturbed."

"Did they reach the base? How deep is it?"

The foreman candidly grins. "They tied six ladders together before they reached the bottom. Then we removed the ladders and measured the total length. I swear, we could not believe it. The pyramid's depth is four hundred feet!"

Thayer takes another walk around the structure. Each of the exposed faces appears to be equilateral.

The foreman whispers, "We found treasures, sir: golden bulls, rams of porphyry, papyrus scrolls on which are written the histories of unknown dynasties ..."

Thayer does the calculations in his head, estimating that the surface area of the four triangular sides and the square base is about eight hundred thousand square feet. Let's say each block is four feet deep: then beneath his boots are more than three million cubic feet of stone, transported to this stoneless plain four thousand years ago. The stones, like those of the famous pyramids at Gizeh, would have had to be quarried in the Arabian mountains, transported down the Nile and across the desert, and then a.s.sembled to a height greater than St. Paul's Cathedral-without the use of pulleys or the convenience of wheels, or the luxury of a lever.

"But we did remove one artifact, sir. It's a kind of toy or device."

Thayer takes the machine. It's a simple drafting compa.s.s, perfectly preserved, two flat arms of beaten metal hinged at their ends, their other extremities terminating in still-sharp points. A straightedge must have lain beside it. With a straightedge, a man may score a line segment on stone. Taking up the compa.s.s, he may then draw two circles around the segment's end points, each circle the same diameter as the segment. The circles will intersect at two points; each of those points is the vertex of an equilateral triangle drawn from the segment's end points, according to the first proposition of Euclid's first book, composed in Alexandria. The man may then go on to draw lines of equal lengths and manipulate lines and quant.i.ties that are unequal. With a straightedge and a compa.s.s he may plot further triangles right, acute, and obtuse, and then larger polygons; he may contemplate solid geometry. He may invent quadratic equations. He may survey the lands annually irrigated by the Nile. He may predict the motions of celestial objects. He may create a civilization.

Euclid's first proposition.

The pyramid must have been seen as an impossible endeavor by the savants of its time, yet the builder had maintained confidence in its completion. He knew that his idea for the monument, whatever the enigma of its purpose, was as perfect as his geometry. If the pharaoh ran short of funds, if the slaves rebelled, if the Nile ran dry and grounded the fleet of barges that were tasked to bring the stones from their distant quarries, the geometry's integrity would restore the project, compelling flawed men to kneel at the altar of its flawlessness.

"Thank you, but there's no time to be lost," Thayer says. "Please bury it again so that we can lay the pitch. We have to finish excavating the segment. My friend, Mars will not wait."

Fifteen.

Within days certain twittered, rumored threats fledge into actual trouble at mile 94 on Side BC, a segment of which is being paved by a squad of about two hundred men. The fellahin put down their spades and sit alongside them in the unremitting glare of the day, refusing to stir until their grievances are met. Two men are selected to present the demands, which are inchoate and unrealistic-more likely to be answered by Allah than by representatives of the Concession. The foreman has the delegates flogged in full view of the company. He empties the contents of the water cart into the sand.

News of the revolt spreads faster than the speed by which the fleetest runner can possibly communicate it to the other work sites. Strikes are called by companies on Side AC and at mile 180 on Side BC. Scuffles among workers break out farther down the side, too distant to be seen by their colleagues, who seem to know of them anyway. Thayer doesn't learn of the strikes until he's summoned by Ballard. The engineer has just returned from the pitch factory, where he was investigating the latest production delays.

Thayer hurries to Ballard's offices. The engineer is already in conference with the commander of the Nubians, accompanied by the segment managers in camp, most of them Europeans or Greeks and Turks. Thayer was probably notified as an afterthought, and not for his expertise in dealing with insurrectionists. Ballard wants only to remind him of what the project is up against.

The Nubian detachment is hardly adequate, with too few men and too few guns. When the Khedive, distrusting a new foreign military presence beyond those guarding the Ca.n.a.l and his ports, insisted on a small national guard for the project, the Powers chose not to contest the point. They had won agreement in favor of the Concession on nearly every other issue. The Nubians' only strength is their contempt for the fellahin, who in turn hate them for their khakis and their marginally higher pay.

The soldiers' captain, a florid Welshman, served Her Majesty in India for three decades, but Thayer knows Ballard finds him dodgy. The man listens to the report of the strike without asking questions or acknowledging the rebellion's severity. When the meeting disbands, several of the engineers exchange grimaces of concern. The Nubians ride off into the desert, kicking up plumes of sand before they vanish.

That evening rumors dire and persuasive ripple through the European quarters. The whites extinguish their lamps and turn in early. They hear the following: foremen have been killed; Point B has been overrun; the fellahin have joined with Mahdist dervishes and are marching on Point A. Although a detachment patrols Point A's perimeter, the Europeans are reminded that without the consolations of civilization, specifically loyal rifles, they're essentially alone in an indifferent desert. Dervishes were seeded among the fellahin months earlier. The whites listen for unusual sounds, yet the desert's every sound is unusual, manufactured by small animals beyond their acquaintance.

Given these circ.u.mstances, ordinary gallantry minimally demands that Thayer offer the secretary his company as night falls. He says, "Dee, I believe we have a game of chess left unfinished."

"Your total annihilation is what's left unfinished. I'll put up the tea."

They have plenty to discuss over tea, especially the shortfall in pitch production, which has been delayed at the satellite factories located throughout the Equilateral. Point B's plant is hardly operating at all. The entire enterprise seems to be slowing down. Miss Keaton has seen reports of prodigal water consumption. Excavators at mile 165 of Side AB have encountered previously unmapped marshes. In Europe an influential German philosopher has spoken out against an exchange of ideas and technology with Mars, speculating that its inhabitants will be so far advanced that they will make irrelevant our every endeavor in the sciences, industry, the arts, and ethics-circ.u.mventing millennia of future accomplishment and history. Man's inquisitiveness will be extinguished; his character will be degraded. Some newspapers have taken up the argument.

Thayer and Miss Keaton occupy plush upholstered armchairs, facing each other across a tea table. Floor rugs and a walnut armoire furnish the tent much like Thayer's Cambridge study. As in Cambridge, the walls are emblazoned with maps of Mars, Egypt, and the night sky.