Martian Old Ones

The Martian Old Ones are the discorporate elders who hold the central authority in Martian society. To the living, they are not remote abstractions but present and powerful members of the population: the source of learnings, the recipients of the dead, and the judges of what should happen next. Their influence reaches Earth through Valentine Michael Smith, whom they sent to observe humanity, and through the possibility that they may eventually decide humanity’s fate. Their patience is as consequential as their power: even a decision that could destroy a planet might remain under consideration for centuries or millennia.

Nature and Authority

For Smith, the Old Ones are the source of knowledge and the authorities to whom questions are referred. The Martian language does not separate human categories such as religion, philosophy, and science into distinct concepts; Smith understands them together as learnings from the Old Ones. He has no familiar framework of doubt or research with which to challenge those teachings. What he knows, he has received within a culture in which the Old Ones are treated as omniscient and infallible within his experience.

That authority is sustained by the Martian understanding of death. A Martian who chooses to die does so voluntarily, after discussion with friends and the consent of ancestral ghosts. The body is subsequently consumed by close friends in a formal, religiously significant practice of grokking and praise. The newly discorporate person attends the feast and thereby attains the status of Old One. In the account Jubal Harshaw gives Duke, the Old Ones are thus not a separate species but the continuing community into which the dead enter; the living Martians are comparatively the workers who serve them.

The Old Ones are not distinguished from corporate Martians by a single visible appearance. Smith tells Jubal that they look like Martians, while the range of adult Martian appearances is itself greater than that among humans. Nor does the ability to pass through walls identify them, since Smith says that any Martian can do so. Their defining distinction is their discorporate status and the place they occupy in Martian life, not an outward marker that a human observer could use to identify them.

Knowledge, Art, and Collective Deliberation

The Old Ones’ influence includes the arts and the standards by which art is understood. Martian art is divided between the vigorous, often radical and primitive works of living adults and the conservative, technically complex works associated with the Old Ones; each category is judged separately. That distinction becomes difficult to maintain when an artist accidentally discorporates while composing a work. He continues the composition without noticing his changed status, while an Old One sets the work’s final form. The result belongs at once to the living artist’s undertaking and to the discorporate realm, raising a question that the Old Ones discuss through ruminative rapport: by which standards should it be judged?

The work’s subject makes that artistic problem consequential. It concerns the Martian encounter with the people of the Fifth planet, whom the Martians fully grokked and eventually destroyed. The planet’s ruins remain, while the Martians continue to cherish and praise the people they destroyed. The artist’s opus attempts to contain the encounter as a whole, including its emotional and religious significance. The Old Ones’ extended deliberation over how to judge such a work therefore reflects their broader habit of treating understanding as something to be achieved before action or verdict.

Their response to the artist also shows how they can direct attention without haste and then return to other concerns. They had sent the human nestling to Earth to learn what he could, then turned back to the artistic problem. After they reached a trial solution to that problem, they set it aside for several Martian intervals so that it could generate further questions. The sequence is characteristic: a conclusion need not end inquiry, and a possible answer can be held provisionally while new considerations emerge.

Smith’s Assignment and the Earth Record

The Old Ones sent Smith to the third planet to observe his own species. He later explains to Jubal that they remained linked with him while leaving him to experience Earth independently. When they triggered the collection, the things he had seen, heard, done, felt, and grokked poured into their permanent records. The process copied his experience rather than erasing it, but Smith was aware of the triggering only as it happened, and it was complete before he could intervene. The Old Ones then ended the linkage and dropped him from their attention.

Smith says he would have volunteered had he known the purpose before leaving Mars; he does not describe himself as objecting to the use of his experience. What troubled him was that the Old Ones had withheld the assignment so he could observe without interference. His account places their project beyond ordinary human ideas of surveillance: they sought not merely reports, but an undistorted record of what their observer encountered and understood. At the same time, their decision to stop attending to him once he was no longer useful reveals the instrumental limit of their care. They had cherished the human nestling, but their purposes determined when that attention ended.

Earth Under Judgment

Smith identifies the Old Ones as responsible for the destruction of the Fifth planet, presenting it to Jubal as established history rather than myth. He warns that they might decide to destroy Earth or instead attempt to conquer humanity culturally, remaking it in their own image. These are possibilities, not decisions he claims to know: Smith stresses that he is guessing, not speaking as an Old One.

His estimate of the timescale is central to the threat. If the Old Ones chose destruction, he believes at least five hundred years would pass before action, and more likely five thousand. In his account, they could regard humanity as diseased and crippled because people fail to understand one another and persist in wars, disease, famine, and cruelty. A decision to end that condition could appear to them as mercy, though Smith does not say that they have reached it. He also explains that the physical capacity to destroy a planet does not necessarily entail the will to do so: complete self-awareness and self-control would, in his view, make a human capable of such power unable to choose that outcome. His distinction is between technical possibility and volition, not between power and danger.

The Old Ones’ response to Earth is therefore still open. They may judge humanity, attempt cultural transformation, or leave it undisturbed; Smith cannot know which. What he can convey is the difference in tempo between the two civilizations. Humans hurry, while the Martians prefer to consider a question for another century, or several, until they believe they have grokked its fullness. The Old Ones’ deliberation is not a promise of safety. It is the condition that keeps the consequences of their judgment suspended across an immense stretch of time.

Narrative Significance

The Old Ones connect the novel’s private and planetary scales. Smith’s education and assignment begin as the experience of one human raised within Martian authority; the later revelation turns that upbringing into an observation mission whose findings have entered a collective record. The same elders who transmit knowledge and receive the dead also possess the history of the Fifth planet’s destruction and are considering what Earth’s future might require.

Their treatment of time complicates the usual shape of a threat. They are not portrayed as rushing toward an invasion or an immediate verdict; the evidence instead emphasizes long waiting, successive reconsideration, and action only after understanding. Yet that patience magnifies rather than removes the stakes. Humanity’s fate may depend on a judgment made by beings whose standards are profoundly unlike its own, and whose capacity to act is paired with a willingness to leave the question unresolved for generations.