Parting Words

[this serves as the "afterword" for the short story collection, "Marsilani."]

“What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant .... The change which the writing wrought in me (and of which I did not write) was only a beginning- only to prepare me for the gods’ surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound.”
-C. S. Lewis, “Till We Have Faces”

One day, far into the future, an alien intelligence will land on Mars, drawn by curiosity. It will follow the landrovers Spirit and Freedom, still operating centuries, eons, after their mission was supposed to have ended. It will examine the computerized records of the rovers, pore over the countless digital images in their memory. And it will ask: Who made these rovers, and what were they looking for? Barren geological formations? Water and ice? Life perhaps?

This intelligence will wonder at the names, “Spirit,” “Freedom,” unable to read them, incapable of understanding. How could it know that the landrovers had a mission lifespan of roughly three years, but somehow outlasted their makers, now long since departed from their own barren world? How could it know that the unstated mission goal of the rovers was to discover the possibility of life on Mars, a persistent rumor of the now extinct Earthlings, generated once upon a time by the misperception of canals on its surface? How could it appreciate the irony, that now, the only traces of life in the solar system are the tracks of these very landrovers, scrawled like straight canals all across its barren landscape?