First contact had been made and a common language of sorts had been established. I had also become the first true xenobiologist and xenolinguist, though I had just barely scratched the surface of those fields. On the advice of NASA scientists, I dropped many of the planned experiments from the mission schedule in order to spend some more time with my new crustacean friend. The creature had what appeared to be spiracles or breathing holes scattered all through the top and bottom of its carapace. Given the thin Martian atmosphere, the rate of gas exchange needed to sustain life would be much higher than on earth. Near the peak of Mt Kilimanjaro which I had climbed as a young man, the air is thin, and I remembered breathing very hard even though I was just walking slowly. I could hear a puff-puff-puff sound almost like a steam engine when the beast was above ground and active. Whenever it exhaled through its bottom vents, its breath would kick up clouds of red dust. I concluded that the alien and those of its kind must spend most of their time dormant in order to save energy.
I never saw the creature eat and it did not appear to have a mouth. I did see it periodically bask in the dim light of the Martian sun. Perhaps it survived through some form of photosynthesis unknown to science. The problem of low power persisted despite my attempts to repair the system and communication with mission control was frustratingly slow. The launch had been timed to minimize to the travel time, but this meant that once on Mars, my maximum distance from earth would actually increase to the maximum. At that distance, every message I sent took 22 minutes to reach earth and the same for their replies to reach me. Combine that with the time it took for me and NASA to read and compose our replies, it made for a very slow conversation. In a way, it was reminiscent of the era of handwritten letters, whereby the correspondents wrote long messages in anticipation of having to wait weeks or months for an answer.
It seemed the best use of my time was to build rapport with the alien. As luck would have it, I once saw it easily moving a gigantic boulder. Surely the creature had enough strength to both lift my ship and straighten the bent landing gear legs. I put that idea in the back of my mind for the time being. To ask such favor would require a closer relationship. That was both my conclusion and the consensus of the scientists following my predicament back on earth. They had an interesting suggestion for me: that I take a selfie with the alien. Though apparently intelligent, I had not seen it use any tools or machines. I retrieved a tablet device from the spacecraft and beckoned the creature to come take a look. First, I showed it the diagram of the inner solar system I had drawn in the sand during our first contact. Then I showed it a few pictures of earth and myself. The creature watched intently with clear fascination. I turned to take a picture of my stranded spacecraft and showed it to the beast. It seemed to understand the purpose of the device and scuttled to pose with the ship. I set the tablet up on a tripod so we could all pose together. The photo came out well and the alien spent several minutes studying it. Of course, the support crew back at mission control were absolutely delighted when I managed to transmit the photo back to earth.
The scientists back home encouraged to document as much of the alien language as possible. To this end, I had many long conversations with the creature where I would show it a picture with a one-word description. In this way, I was able to determine the written Martian words for such things as "sun", "star", "sky", and many other basic terms. I could tell the creature wished to reciprocate, and way day it beckoned me into a nearby cave. Once underground, it used a kind of bioluminescence to light the interior, though it dimmed it when I turned on my flashlight. It waved its mighty claw in a broad sweeping gesture to draw my attention to a stone wall carved with all manner of strange symbols and drawings. I recognized some of the symbols from our earlier conversations, but those had all been in isolation without context. I concluded that the wall was a kind of illustrated history of Mars told from the perspective of the ancestors of my alien companion. I photographed each portion of it and transmitted it back to earth. I had no formal training in linguistics or archaeology, and so this was a problem best left to the experts.
Even so, from what I could gather, Martian history stretched back many thousands of years. It was an advanced civilization long before humans existed. My alien friend was descended from a native Martian species which was divided into many tribes. After a long period of many wars, they became peaceful and devoted themselves to poetry and art while their technology stagnated at a level not much beyond the Stone Age. Later, another race of aliens invaded Mars from some distant and unknown world. To me, they looked vaguely like the stereotypical grey aliens found in science fiction and mentioned so often in reports of abduction. Perhaps some of those people who claimed to have been abducted were telling the truth after all. The grey aliens enslaved the Martians and used them as beasts of burden and for entertainment in gigantic gladiator tournaments. The invaders devastated the environment of Mars with industry and pollution, which resulted in the extinction of most of the species native to Mars. Eventually, after countless centuries of oppression, the enslaved Martians rose up in a catastrophic revolt which the invaders attempted to quash with what must have been nuclear weapons of some sort.
It was a Pyrrhic victory for the Martians, for though the remnants of the invaders retreated into space, Mars was left shattered with only a handful of survivors here and there struggling to survive. The evolutionary pressures of the new environment shaped the bodies their descendants into a hardier, primordial form, yet the still retained many aspects of their old culture which seemed doomed to extinction. It seemed to me a fitting tribute to document their struggle so that at least their memory could be preserved.
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