Escape Pod

Murmuration
by E. Catherine Tobler

Sita Balachandran found the bone on her forty-first birthday, its pale wind-scoured point emerging from the dry Martian floodplain like the splintered stalk of a flower. At first, she thought it was a stone, the floodplain a riot of similar, jagged debris, but the shape and color told her otherwise. A fossilized rib bone, she was sure.

The Martian atmosphere was well-known for the tricks it would play, even the earliest collected images of Mars calling to mind familiar shapes. A rock that resembled a crouched squirrel. A swirl of dark dust that took on the shape of a mourning woman. People sought what they understood, preferring the familiar rather than contemplating what they did not know. Especially when it came to distant worlds. But archaeologists couldn't afford to look away; they had to look at everything from a new perspective, in order to assemble the broken past.

No matter how Sita looked at the bone, no matter how she tried to see it from a new perspective, it remained a bone. Beneath the shadow of the ancient, excavated Pathfinder lander shell, a bone.