Great Ushabti

“I doubt if they even have a real language – all the talk about psychological communication through those tentacles on their chest strikes me as bunk. What misleads people is their upright posture, just an accidental physical resemblance to terrestrial man.”

- In the Walls of Eryx, Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Ushabtis are a group of deltadactylians found across Mars, but their most famous member, the great ushabti, is only found in the Hellas Savannah. While the almond-shaped head, the antennae, the dark tuquoise skin colour, the single arm growing from the centre of the chest and the two-toed feet are clearly inhuman, these animals have always captured our imagination due to their upright, bipedal gait, which happens to parallel our bauplan so closely that these creatures even possess recognizable buttocks. When astronauts first encountered the ushabtis, they initially believed to have finally found the legendary Martians, the intelligent beings of folklore who built the infamous canals. Further observation quickly broke that illusion.

Ushabtis do not live in houses, they do not wear clothing and they use neither tools nor fire. They sleep in the open, cowering in fear of the savannah’s predators, and do not mourn their dead. Their corpses are left behind for the scavengers to feed on. They roam the plains in herds and feed on tall-growing plants using their long arm, spending most of the day either eating or sleeping. They do not process their tough, coniferoid food, they simply swallow it whole through their delicate beak and, like ostriches, let gastroliths do most of the work. Problems within the herd are solved either through head-bashing or fist-fights, sometimes to the death. Ushabtis are just beasts of the field, as intelligent as deer, in my opinion. They approach the human condition about as well as penguins.

And yet, some researchers claim to have observed at least glimmers of social intelligence. Great ushabtis, like most deltadactylians, give live birth (which, combined with the bipedal gait, may explain the human-like, “feminine” hips) and while the young come into the world developed well enough to walk shortly after, they are still greatly cared for by the rest of the herd, hinting at strong familial bonds. The communication among herd members has also frequently come under scrutiny. Like most onychognaths, they can produce chirps or stereo whistles through the spiracles above their collarbone or on their abdomen, but these are quite simple. More interesting is what ushabtis do with their single hand. Like its human counterpart, it is a very flexible organ, able to articulate in both directions at the wrist, with the four fingers being very dextrous and muscular. While it is mostly used for grabbing and drawing near the branches of fractarian trees, when in groups, the ushabtis have been observed contorting their fingers into odd gestures without clear function. Some have speculated that this may be a form of sign language, but if this is true, nobody has been able to decipher it yet. Most of the gestures are seemingly random and there are only very few that could be called distinctive signs. Amusingly, one of these identified signs is one wherein the ushabtis press one of the lower fingers between the other three. American astronauts have likened this to the “got-your-nose” gesture, whereas Soviet cosmonauts have compared it to the Eastern European fig sign. When ushabtis show this to each other, it is often followed by aggressive behaviour, but sometimes also playfulness. The position of the antennae, which, rare for most onychognaths, are placed at the very back of the skull, may also have meaning in some contexts, similar to how mammals show emotion through ear positions.

Interactions between humans and ushabtis are of an uneasy nature. For the most part, ushabtis are fearful of us, which makes sense, as we are completely foreign organisms. Sometimes, however, they may show curiosity and cautiously approach us. Perhaps, like penguins in the Antarctic, they see a bit of themselves in us due to our shared upright gait. Closely interacting with ushabtis is not recommended for any personnel. While they may look friendly or even playful, they are the only species on Mars that can exceed an average human in height and can therefore pose actual physical danger. Their large hands can be clenched into a fist that can actually pack a punch that hurts. As with Cecrops, their simple curiosity may also kill some cats. My colleague Jim of the Horus-23 was once approached by one overly curious individual, which, while not showing any signs of aggression, suddenly enveloped his whole helmet with its large, muscular hand and gently pulled on it, as if trying to take it off. Thankfully, Jim was able to resolve the situation without anyone getting hurt once the ushabti lost interest.

 Size comparison between Man and Martian

The phylogenetic placement of the ushabtis within Deltadactylia is so far unresolved. Until recently, due to their bipedal gait, they had been grouped among the Goniopoda, however, most known goniopods possess tails and walk on digitigrade feet with simple hinge-like ankle-joints. Ushabtis meanwhile walk on plantigrade feet with a more crurotarsal ankle. It seems far more likely that they represent a separate experiment in bipedalism among the deltadactylians. Possibly, their ancestor was a long-legged tripod browser with an already reduced tail that, like the gerenuk of Africa or ancient anoplotheres, regularly reared up onto its hindlegs to reach higher tree branches. Instead of evolving longer legs or a longer neck, evolution then drove these animals towards dedicated bipedalism. In that sense they may be the Martian analogue to the extinct sthenurine kangaroos, who are theorized to have also evolved a humanoid gait and buttocks. What this does not explain is the odd skeleton of the ushabtis. While all onychognaths use some degree of biosilicon in their body, especially for their solid eyes, ushabtis are unique for having a large part of their internal skeleton made of silicon dioxide, almost like a glass sponge. If these beings were ever brought to Earth, the mere attempt of standing upright may crush every bone in their body due to our home’s great gravity.

Ushabtis have had a great influence on Earth’s pop culture. Especially the very first reports made by astronauts about these supposedly being the Martians everyone was looking for, combined with some early speculations about language and culture, gave many people the mistaken impression that these were sapient beings. Consequently, the markets were flooded with books, comics, movies and videogames wherein ushabtis are depicted as tribal people defending their home against evil Soviet or Chinese spacefarers (a few stories do exist where American astronauts are the villains, but these have been censored until recently). In most of these, the ushabtis’ cultures are depicted as stereotypical, culturally insensitive pastiches of Native Americans or Islamic people (perhaps due to Mars’ reputation as a desert planet, although most of the surface is actually tundra and ice). The most egregious among the latter is the popular Dunes of Mars series by author Hank Sherbert. His ushabtis are depicted as desert nomads clothed in veils, with cultural practices that mirror a weird mix of Arabic, Jewish and Iranian elements. They possess a superstitious and irrational psychology, a corrupt, despotic rulership, a legal system based on trial by combat, trade an opium-like substance and are in a state of holy war against the local Soviet space colonies. They also worship and ride great “sandcrawlers”, a wholly fictional creature seemingly created to be the biological equivalent to a flying carpet. Their white saviour, who is of course an American astronaut, is obviously modelled after Thomas Edward Lawrence. I wonder if Edward Said would call this space orientalism if he were still alive.

More recent stories have acknowledged the true animalistic nature of the ushabtis, but adapt the pseudoscientific idea that they are the devolved descendants of a former Martian civilization. Most of these stories are moralistic author tracts about the "degeneration" of society and culture and what they think will cause the downfall of civilization. An infamous example is the novel Red Dusk by Michael Crichton, in which the Martian civilization collapsed due to environmental conspiracies, reflecting the author's own notorious scepticism of climate science and his rather loose adherence to facts.

An unfortunate byproduct of many ushabti stories is the bizarre sexualisation of the organisms, despite appearing inhuman anywhere except the pelvic region. This is especially common in media from East Asia and Europe, but there are also homegrown examples, like an episode of Star Trek where Captain Pike has an affair with an actress dressed in an obviously inaccurate ushabti costume made to show off her décolletage. Most infamous is however the fact that the last artwork ever created by the late C.M. Kosemen was an unfinished series of paintings wherein ushabtis are depicted engaging in all sorts of gigeresque acts of copulation. Kosemen had previously commented that, to primitive-minded men, ushabtis are the ideal woman, for they have the lower half of one but none of the intelligence above. What he and many others apparently failed to realize is that ushabtis, like nearly all animals on Mars, are hermaphrodites. While their vertical cloaca does have a vaguely vulvaic appearance, if one madman were to “probe” further inside, he would be in for a grave surprise.

As awareness of the actual scientific truth of Mars is growing in the general public, most of these tropes are thankfully fading away from pop culture. When it comes to children’s media, however, the trope of the intelligent ushabti is still popular. My own son was a big fan of such a cartoon show and asked me how it was meeting the Martians. I indeed had met ushabtis up close on one of my last missions, though it did not amount to much. It would have broken his heart if I told him that the Martians he knew from his action figure adventures were no smarter than sheep, so I obviously made up a bedtime story instead. The Martians invited use to their home, we had tea and cake, tried out an anti-gravity trampoline, they helped us repair our avrocar and together we fought off an attack by another group of evil aliens. John Carter was there too, in some versions. My boy is now an adult and obviously does not believe my stories anymore, but I made a pleasant discovery last Christmas. After I gifted my grandson as set of Martian and astronaut minifigures from some Danish brick company, I observed him using them to play out the exact same tall tale I had years ago told his father. This being my legacy is all I need to be happy.