Read The God Mars Book Two: Lost Worlds for Free Online

left that could reach that ship before their very limited
life support ran out. We listened to them die alone in space as
well.”
    It takes her some moments to collect herself again. I
find I am impressed with her apparent candor and strength, but even
more by her ability to be so moved by events that probably happened
when she was too young to understand or remember.
    “We sent probes almost immediately, but lost contact
with them as soon as they made orbit around Mars. We could only
assume that the Discs had met them. After that, there were heated
debates about whether we should send a military force, but we had
lost so many lives already, and there seemed to be no hope of
finding survivors—especially by the time we could reach you—that
public pressure came down against a military mission.
    “I regret I cannot speak to the specific decisions
made; I was far too young to be truly aware of what was happening,
as were all of my generation that subsequently grew up in the
difficult aftermath of the disaster. The lessons of my childhood
were that we as a species had failed, had committed an unforgivable
sin, and that because of it, fifty-three thousand human beings did
not return—no one made it home, and hundreds more died in the hope
that someone would. We cannot even imagine what those times were
really like for our parents and grandparents, but they did shape
the world we live in now. I can only hope that, when you hear of
what we have done here in the last half century, that you will not
simply think us all cowards and economists for not returning to
Mars aggressively.
    “As for the delay in replying to your signals, I can
only partially speak to that issue. You will have to wait for
explanations from our technical and military advisors. I can tell you that part of our delay was that we did not hear you, or in
hearing you we did not understand your signals. Technology has
changed. If you were to see smoke signals, it would take you time
to realize you were not looking at some odd natural phenomenon,
longer to recognize the patterns, and even longer to translate the
message. I know that is a poor excuse, but understand it was
compounded by our ingrained belief that no one was alive on Mars to
send any kind of signal. We had stopped listening when I was still
in grade school, and the encoding you are using has not been in any
machine’s language in forty-five years.”
    I almost tune her out at that point—the excuse sounds
bogus. Someone should have kept listening; someone should at least
have preserved a means to recognize and translate our signals. Even
some die-hard crank, or fringe department buried in some nation’s
intelligence community. The look on Matthew’s face tells me he’s
thinking the same thing.
    “The rest of the delay betrays how our fears persist.
I cannot give you specifics, but you can imagine that any message
coming from a planet assumed to have no human life for five
decades, but unimaginably dangerous and possibly harboring evolving
nanotechnology, was taken by many as some kind of cruel ruse,
especially given the incredible tale of your long sleep, which I
admit is still an issue for debate. Some went as far as to believe
that the signals themselves might contain some kind of virus
designed to take control of us from across space, and should be
blocked absolutely. This was one of the reasons we had so radically
changed our communications codes and completely discontinued using
the old codes many years ago. It took time to argue that your story
might have any truth to it, and longer still to debate that the
potential rewards of reaching out to you would outweigh the risks
of infection-by-communication. I am sorry to say that this debate
remains unresolved and tenuous.”
    At least that sounds more likely, and more honest.
(And not just because Satrapi just addressed two of our more
popular assumptions almost exactly.)
    “I can only offer my own personal apologies for
whatever they are