320 Terraforming Mars: Part 8

“At least we can figure out what happened to them,” Renée told her well-wishers. “The attacks of ferropods on some of the colonists is not unlike what is seen in animal interactions with parasites, so this is where I come in.”

“Where does temporal reconciliation come in?” a young cousin asked.

“When my new green boyfriend comes in.” Her pendulum had swung back. “When we finally find the Martians, whenever they are. Hopefully it will be in my lifetime, or better yet, while I’m there, although I don’t know if ‘when I’m there’ is correct grammar for TimePrime.”

Inherent in any science is the expectation of, besides the observation, recording, and explanation, a nomenclature that cordons it off from the other sciences. The new science of temporal reconciliation was no exception.

TimePrime was the standard of time against which any temporal reconciliation—or tempconciliation—was measured. This and the other new terms played in Renée’s head. To go to Mars in her immediate future and then try to retrieve a past—one that existed before this night, before her birth, before Man crawled slithering out of the water—and jam this past into her near future, made her realize that time indeed was (is?) a tricky thing. To hunt year after year until the Martians were finally found—what a thing to consider! And to answer the elusive question as to where they all went. No cemeteries, no mass graves, not even fossils had been discovered.

Preferably, tempconciliation would lurch in small steps. Just studying Martian remains could prelude a more generous 4-D overlap between the colonists and their actual living Martians. And then what? Allow them to stay in our present beyond the five years of their past? Was that even possible? If so, could that make up for our impolite “arriving” unannounced and uninvited? Could that be our gift to them? Some in the Chronarchy called this hubris, but as always with humanity, hubris prevailed.

And if anyone had a problem with hubris, wait till they got a load of capitalism. The profit motive placed an ṺberCollider completely around the current colony Renée would call home for at least the next two and a half years.