Red Mars
Red Mars
Kim Stanley Robinson
Another timeless masterpiece in the Voyager Classics seriesMars – the barren, forbidding planet that epitomises mankind’s dreams of space conquest.From the first pioneers who looked back at Earth and saw a small blue star, to the first colonists – hand-picked scientists with the skills necessary to create life from cold desert – Red Mars is the story of a new genesis. It is also the story of how Man must struggle against his own self-destructive mechanisms to achieve his dreams: before he even sets foot on the red planet, factions are forming, tensions are rising and violence is brewing… for civilization can be very uncivilized.
RED MARS
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
Copyright (#ulink_0539bd3c-18d1-5ae9-ad70-5c5f4962fec0)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1992
Copyright © Kim Stanley Robinson 1992
Cover photograph © Detlev van Ravenswaay/Science Photo Library
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013
Kim Stanley Robinson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007115907
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2013 ISBN: 9780007401703
Version: 2018-07-17
Dedication (#u5d3f7ba7-4647-51f5-83bf-1e8258d7cb52)
For Lisa
Contents
Cover (#u79b1754d-15f1-5e7f-97dc-3fbb9e8fe6f9)
Title Page (#uc84b88e5-ce7f-5cad-a3d1-2aef1b024a43)
Copyright (#u6ef001e8-3cc3-5f50-82fa-b9b92e85f8e9)
Dedication (#uaeb28313-8c3e-5367-8447-674cbf0f56ab)
PART ONE Festival Night (#u2b5d4870-a3f7-562a-85b3-119e613947fc)
PART TWO The Voyage Out (#u7367d78d-6af3-5e79-8dcd-c63d28a24ee1)
PART THREE The Crucible (#ueb7af50f-0e46-5fe8-8bcc-c363b08f8f03)
PART FOUR Homesick (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FIVE Falling Into History (#litres_trial_promo)
PART SIX Guns Under the Table (#litres_trial_promo)
PART SEVEN Senzeni Na (#litres_trial_promo)
PART EIGHT Shikata Ga Nai (#litres_trial_promo)
Chronology (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ONE Festival Night (#ulink_91bf37dc-f9c9-5537-8c3e-6dd4d82dbf64)
Mars was empty before we came. That’s not to say that nothing had ever happened. The planet had accreted, melted, roiled and cooled, leaving a surface scarred by enormous geological features: craters, canyons, volcanoes. But all of that happened in mineral unconsciousness, and unobserved. There were no witnesses – except for us, looking from the planet next door, and that only in the last moment of its long history. We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever had.
Now everybody knows the history of Mars in the human mind: how for all the generations of prehistory it was one of the chief lights in the sky, because of its redness and fluctuating intensity, and the way it stalled in its wandering course through the stars, and sometimes even reversed direction. It seemed to be saying something with all that. So perhaps it is not surprising that all the oldest names for Mars have a peculiar weight on the tongue – Nirgal, Mangala, Auqàkuh, Harmakhis – they sound as if they were even older than the ancient languages we find them in, as if they were fossil words from the Ice Age or before. Yes, for thousands of years Mars was a sacred power in human affairs; and its color made it a dangerous power, representing blood, anger, war and the heart.
Then the first telescopes gave us a closer look, and we saw the little orange disk, with its white poles and dark patches spreading and shrinking as the long seasons passed. No improvement in the technology of the telescope ever gave us much more than that; but the best Earthbound images gave Lowell enough blurs to inspire a story, the story we all know, of a dying world and a heroic people, desperately building canals to hold off the final deadly encroachment of the desert.
It was a great story. But then Mariner and Viking sent back their photos, and everything changed. Our knowledge of Mars expanded by magnitudes, we literally knew millions of times more about this planet than we had before. And there before us flew a new world, a world unsuspected.
It seemed, however, to be a world without life. People searched for signs of past or present Martian life, anything from microbes to the doomed canal-builders, or even alien visitors. As you know, no evidence for any of these has ever been found. And so stories have naturally blossomed to fill the gap, just as in Lowell’s time, or in Homer’s, or in the caves or on the savannah – stories of microfossils wrecked by our bio-organisms, of ruins found in dust storms and then lost forever, of Big Man and all his adventures, of the elusive little red people, always glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. And all of these tales are told in an attempt to give Mars life, or to bring it to life. Because we are still those animals who survived the Ice Age, and looked up at the night sky in wonder, and told stories. And Mars has never ceased to be what it was to us from our very beginning – a great sign, a great symbol, a great power.
And so we came here. It had been a power; now it became a place.
“…And so we came here. But what they didn’t realize was that by the time we got to Mars, we would be so changed by the voyage out that nothing we had been told to do mattered anymore. It wasn’t like submarining or settling the Wild West – it was an entirely new experience, and as the flight of the Ares went on, the Earth finally became so distant that it was nothing but a blue star among all the others, its voices so delayed that they seemed to come from a previous century. We were on our own; and so we became fundamentally different beings.”
All lies, Frank Chalmers thought irritably. He was sitting in a row of dignitaries, watching his old friend John Boone give the usual Boone Inspirational Address. It made Chalmers weary. The truth was, the trip to Mars had been the functional equivalent of a long train ride. Not only had they not become fundamentally different beings, they had actually become more like themselves than ever, stripped of habits until they were left with nothing but the naked raw material of their selves. But John stood up there waving a forefinger at the crowd, saying “We came here to make something new, and when we arrived our earthly differences fell away, irrelevant in this new world!” Yes, he meant it all literally. His vision of Mars was a lens that distorted everything he saw, a kind of religion.
Chalmers stopped listening and let his gaze wander over the new city. They were going to call it Nicosia. It was the first town of any size to be built free-standing on the Martian surface; all the buildings were set inside what was in effect an immense clear tent, supported by a nearly invisible frame, and placed on the rise of Tharsis, west of Noctis Labyrinthus. This location gave it a tremendous view, with a distant western horizon punctuated by the broad peak of Pavonis Mons. For the Mars veterans in the crowd it was giddy stuff: they were on the surface, they were out of the trenches and mesas and craters, they could see forever! Hurrah!
A laugh from the audience drew Frank’s attention back to his old friend. John Boone had a slightly hoarse voice and a friendly Midwestern accent, and he was by turns (and somehow even all at once) relaxed, intense, sincere, self-mocking, modest, confident, serious, and funny. In short, the perfect public speaker. And the audience was rapt; this was the First Man On Mars speaking to them, and judging by the looks on their faces they might as well have been watching Jesus produce their evening meal out of the loaves and fishes. And in fact John almost deserved their adoration, for performing a similar miracle on another plane, transforming their tin can existence into an astounding spiritual voyage. “On Mars we will come to care for each other more than ever before,” John said, which really meant, Chalmers thought, an alarming incidence of the kind of behavior seen in rat overpopulation experiments; “Mars is a sublime, exotic and dangerous place,” said John – meaning a frozen ball of oxidized rock on which they were exposed to about fifteen rem a year; “And with our work,” John continued, “we are carving out a new social order and the next step in the human story” – i.e. the latest variant in primate dominance dynamics.
John finished with this flourish, and there was, of course, a huge roar of applause. Maya Toitovna then went to the podium to introduce Chalmers. Frank gave her a private look which meant he was in no mood for any of her jokes; she saw it and said, “Our next speaker has been the fuel in our little rocket ship,” which somehow got a laugh. “His vision and energy are what got us to Mars in the first place, so save any complaints you may have for our next speaker, my old friend Frank Chalmers.”
At the podium he found himself surprised by how big the town appeared. It covered a long triangle, and they were gathered at its highest point, a park occupying the western apex. Seven paths rayed down through the park to become wide, tree-lined, grassy boulevards. Between the boulevards stood low trapezoidal buildings, each faced with polished stone of a different color. The size and architecture of the buildings gave things a faintly Parisian look, Paris as seen by a drunk Fauvist in spring, sidewalk cafes and all. Four or five kilometers downslope the end of the city was marked by three slender skyscrapers, beyond which lay the low greenery of the farm. The skyscrapers were part of the tent framework, which overhead was an arched network of sky-colored lines. The tent fabric itself was invisible, and so taken all in all, it appeared that they stood in the open air. That was gold. Nicosia was going to be a popular city.
Chalmers said as much to the audience, and enthusiastically they agreed. Apparently he had the crowd, fickle souls that they were, about as securely as John. Chalmers was bulky and dark, and he knew he presented quite a contrast to John’s blond good looks; but he knew as well that he had his own rough charisma, and as he warmed up he drew on it, falling into a selection of his own stock phrases.
Then a shaft of sunlight lanced down between the clouds, striking the upturned faces of the crowd, and he felt an odd tightening in his stomach. So many people there, so many strangers! People in the mass were a frightening thing – all those wet ceramic eyes encased in pink blobs, looking at him … it was nearly too much. Five thousand people in a single Martian town. After all the years in Underhill it was hard to grasp.
Foolishly he tried to tell the audience something of this. “Looking,” he said. “Looking around – the strangeness of our presence here is – accentuated.”
He was losing the crowd. How to say it? How to say that they alone in all that rocky world were alive, their faces glowing like paper lanterns in the light? How to say that even if living creatures were no more than carriers for ruthless genes, this was still, somehow, better than the blank mineral nothingness of everything else?
Of course he could never say it. Not at any time, perhaps, and certainly not in a speech. So he collected himself. “In the Martian desolation,” he said, “the human presence is, well, a remarkable thing” (they would care for each other more than ever before, a voice in his mind repeated sardonically). “The planet, taken in itself, is a dead frozen nightmare” (therefore exotic and sublime), “and so thrown on our own, we of necessity are in the process of – reorganizing a bit” (or forming a new social order) – so that yes, yes, yes, he found himself proclaiming exactly the same lies they had just heard from John!
Thus at the end of his speech he too got a big roar of applause. Irritated, he announced it was time to eat, depriving Maya of her chance for a final remark. Although probably she had known he would do that and so hadn’t bothered to think of any. Frank Chalmers liked to have the last word.
People crowded onto the temporary platform to mingle with the celebrities. It was rare to get this many of the first hundred in one spot anymore, and people crowded around John and Maya, Samantha Hoyle, Sax Russell and Chalmers.
Frank looked over the crowd at John and Maya. He didn’t recognize the group of Terrans surrounding them, which made him curious. He made his way across the platform, and as he approached he saw Maya and John give each other a look. “There’s no reason this place shouldn’t function under normal law,” one of the Terrans was saying.
Maya said to him, “Did Olympus Mons really remind you of Mauna Loa?”
“Sure,” the man said. “Shield volcanoes all look alike.”
Frank stared over this idiot’s head at Maya. She didn’t acknowledge the look. John was pretending not to have noticed Frank’s arrival. Samantha Hoyle was speaking to another man in an undertone, explaining something; he nodded, then glanced involuntarily at Frank. Samantha kept her back turned to him. But it was John who mattered, John and Maya. And both were pretending that nothing was out of the ordinary; but the topic of conversation, whatever it had been, had gone away.
Chalmers left the platform. People were still trooping down through the park, toward tables that had been set in the upper ends of the seven boulevards. Chalmers followed them, walking under young transplanted sycamores; their khaki leaves colored the afternoon light, making the park look like the bottom of an aquarium.
At the banquet tables construction workers were knocking back vodka, getting rowdy, obscurely aware that with the construction finished, the heroic age of Nicosia was ended. Perhaps that was true for all of Mars.
The air filled with overlapping conversations. Frank sank beneath the turbulence, wandered out to the northern perimeter. He stopped at a waist-high concrete coping: the city wall. Out of the metal stripping on its top rose four layers of clear plastic. A Swiss man was explaining things to a group of visitors, pointing happily.
“An outer membrane of piezoelectric plastic generates electricity from wind. Then two sheets hold a layer of airgel insulation. Then the inner layer is a radiation-capturing membrane, which turns purple and must be replaced. More clear than a window, isn’t it?”
The visitors agreed. Frank reached out and pushed at the inner membrane. It stretched until his fingers were buried to the knuckles. Slightly cool. There was faint white lettering printed on the plastic: Isidis Planitia Polymers. Through the sycamores over his shoulder he could still see the platform at the apex. John and Maya and their cluster of Terran admirers were still there, talking animatedly. Conducting the business of the planet. Deciding the fate of Mars.
He stopped breathing. He felt the pressure of his molars squeezing together. He poked the tent wall so hard that he pushed out the outermost membrane, which meant that some of his anger would be captured and stored as electricity in the town’s grid. It was a special polymer in that respect; carbon atoms were linked to hydrogen and fluorine atoms in such a way that the resulting substance was even more piezoelectric than quartz. Change one element of the three, however, and everything shifted; substitute chlorine for fluorine, for instance, and you had saran wrap.
Frank stared at his wrapped hand, then up again at the other two elements, still bonded to each other. But without him they were nothing!
Angrily he walked into the narrow streets of the city.
Clustered in a plaza like mussels on a rock were a group of Arabs, drinking coffee. Arabs had arrived on Mars only ten years before, but already they were a force to be reckoned with. They had a lot of money, and they had teamed up with the Swiss to build a number of towns, including this one. And they liked it on Mars. “It’s like a cold day in the Empty Quarter,” as the Saudis said. The similarity was such that Arabic words were slipping quickly into English, because Arabic had a larger vocabulary for this landscape: akaba for the steep final slopes around volcanoes, badia for the great world dunes, nefuds for deep sand, seyl for the billion year-old dry river beds … people were saying they might as well switch over to Arabic and have done with it.
Frank had spent a fair bit of time with Arabs, and the men in the plaza were pleased to see him. “Salaam aleykl” they said to him, and he replied, “Marhabba!” White teeth flashed under black moustaches. Only men present, as usual. Some youths led him to a central table where the older men sat, including his friend Zeyk. Zeyk said, “We are going to call this square Hajr el-kra Meshab, ‘the red granite open place in town.’” He gestured at the rust-colored flagstones. Frank nodded and asked what kind of stone it was. He spoke Arabic for as long as he could, pushing the edges of his ability and getting some good laughs in response. Then he sat at the central table and relaxed, feeling like he could have been on a street in Damascus or Cairo, comfortable in the wash of Arabic and expensive cologne.
He studied the men’s faces as they talked. An alien culture, no doubt about it. They weren’t going to change just because they were on Mars, they put the lie to John’s vision. Their thinking clashed radically with Western thought; for instance the separation of church and state was wrong to them, making it impossible for them to agree with Westerners on the very basis of government. And they were so patriarchal that some of their women were said to be illiterate – illiterates, on Mars! That was a sign. And indeed these men had the dangerous look that Frank associated with machismo, the look of men who oppressed their women so cruelly that naturally the women struck back where they could, terrorizing sons who then terrorized wives who terrorized sons and so on and so on, in an endless death spiral of twisted love and sex hatred. So that in that sense they were all madmen.
Which was one reason Frank liked them. And certainly they would come in useful to him, acting as a new locus of power. Defend a weak new neighbor to weaken the old powerful ones, as Machiavelli had said. So he drank coffee, and gradually, politely, they shifted to English.
“How did you like the speeches?” he asked, looking into the black mud at the bottom of his demitasse.
“John Boone is the same as ever,” old Zeyk replied. The others laughed angrily. “When he says we will make an indigenous Martian culture, he only means some of the Terran cultures here will be promoted, and others attacked. Those perceived as regressive will be singled out for destruction. It is a form of Ataturkism.”
“He thinks everyone on Mars should become American,” said a man named Nejm.
“Why not?” Zeyk said, smiling. “It’s already happened on Earth.”
“No,” Frank said. “You shouldn’t misunderstand Boone. People say he’s self-absorbed, but—”
“He is self-absorbed!” Nejm cried. “He lives in a hall of mirrors! He thinks that we have come to Mars to establish a good old American superculture, and that everyone will agree to it because it is the John Boone plan.”
Zeyk said, “He doesn’t understand that other people have other opinions.”
“It’s not that,” Frank said. “It’s just that he knows they don’t make as much sense as his.”
They laughed at that, but the younger men’s hoots had a bitter edge. They all believed that before their arrival Boone had argued in secret against UN approval for Arab settlements. Frank encouraged this belief, which was almost true – John disliked any ideology that might get in his way. He wanted the slate as blank as possible in everybody who came up.
The Arabs, however, believed that John disliked them in particular. Young Selim el-Hayil opened his mouth to speak, and Frank gave him a swift warning glance. Selim froze, then pursed his mouth angrily. Frank said, “Well, he’s not as bad as all that. Although to tell the truth I’ve heard him say it would have been better if the Americans and Russians had been able to claim the planet when they arrived, like explorers in the old days.”
Their laughter was brief and grim. Selim’s shoulders hunched as if struck. Frank shrugged and smiled, spread his hands wide. “But it’s pointless! I mean, what can he do?”
Old Zeyk lifted his eyebrows. “Opinions vary.”
Chalmers got up to move on, meeting for one instant Selim’s insistent gaze. Then he strode down a side street, one of the narrow lanes that connected the city’s seven main boulevards. Most were paved with cobblestones or streetgrass, but this one was rough blond concrete. He slowed by a recessed doorway, looked in the window of a closed boot manufactory. His faint reflection appeared in a pair of bulky walker boots.
Opinions vary. Yes, a lot of people had underestimated John Boone – Chalmers had done it himself many times. An image came to him of John in the White House, pink with conviction, his disobedient blond hair flying wildly, the sun streaming in the Oval Office windows and illuminating him as he waved his hands and paced the room, talking away while the President nodded and his aides watched, pondering how best to co-opt that electrifying charisma. Oh, they had been hot in those days, Chalmers and Boone; Frank with the ideas and John the front man, with a momentum that was practically unstoppable. It would be more a matter of derailment, really.
Selim el-Hayil’s reflection appeared among the boots.
“Is it true?” he demanded.
“Is what true?” said Frank crossly.
“Is Boone anti-Arab?”
“What do you think?”
“Was he the one who blocked permission to build the mosque on Phobos?”
“He’s a powerful man.”
The young Saudi’s face twisted. “The most powerful man on Mars, and he only wants more! He wants to be king!” Selim made a fist and struck his other hand. He was slimmer than the other Arabs, weak-chinned, his moustache covering a small mouth.
“The treaty comes up for renewal soon,” Frank said. “And Boone’s coalition is bypassing me.” He ground his teeth. “I don’t know what their plans are, but I’m going to find out tonight. You can imagine what they’ll be, anyway. Western biases, certainly. He may withhold his approval of a new treaty unless it contains guarantees that all settlements will be made only by the original treaty signatories.” Selim shivered, and Frank pressed; “It’s what he wants, and it’s very possible he could get it, because his new coalition makes him more powerful than ever. It could mean an end to settlement by non-signatories. You’ll become guest scientists. Or get sent back.”
In the window the reflection of Selim’s face appeared a kind of mask, signifying rage. “Battal, battal,” he was muttering. Very bad, very bad. His hands twisted as if out of his control, and he muttered about the Koran or Camus, Persepolis or the Peacock Throne, references scattered nervously among non-sequiturs. Babbling.
“Talk means nothing,” Chalmers said harshly. “When it comes down to it, nothing matters but action.”
That gave the young Arab pause. “I can’t be sure,” he said at last.
Frank poked him in the arm, watched a shock run through the man. “It’s your people we’re talking about. It’s this planet we’re talking about.”
Selim’s mouth disappeared under his moustache. After a time he said, “It’s true.”
Frank said nothing. They looked in the window together, as if judging boots.
Finally Frank raised a hand. “I’ll talk to Boone again,” he said quietly. “Tonight. He leaves tomorrow. I’ll try to talk to him, to reason with him. I doubt it will matter. It never has before. But I’ll try. Afterwards – we should meet.”
“Yes.”
“In the park, then, the southernmost path. Around eleven.”
Selim nodded.
Chalmers transfixed him with a stare. “Talk means nothing,” he said brusquely, and walked away.
The next boulevard Chalmers came to was crowded with people clumped outside open-front bars, or kiosks selling couscous and bratwurst. Arab and Swiss. It seemed an odd combination, but they meshed well.
Tonight some of the Swiss were distributing face masks from the door of an apartment. Apparently they were celebrating this stadtfest as a kind of Mardi Gras, Fassnacht as they called it, with masks and music and every manner of social inversion, just as it was back home on those wild February nights in Basel and Zurich and Luzern … On an impulse Frank joined the line. “Around every profound spirit a mask is always growing,” he said to two young women in front of him. They nodded politely and then resumed conversation in guttural Schwyzerdüütsch, a dialect never written down, a private code, incomprehensible even to Germans. It was another impenetrable culture, the Swiss, in some ways even more so than the Arabs. That was it, Frank thought; they worked well together because they were both so insular that they never made any real contact. He laughed out loud as he took a mask, a black face studded with red paste gems. He put it on.
A line of masked celebrants snaked down the boulevard, drunk, loose, at the edge of control. At an intersection the boulevard opened up into a small plaza, where a fountain shot sun-colored water into the air. Around the fountain a steel drum band hammered out a calypso tune. People gathered around, dancing or hopping in time to the low bong of the bass drum. A hundred meters overhead a vent in the tent frame poured frigid air down onto the plaza, air so cold that little flakes of snow floated in it, glinting in the light like chips of mica. Then fireworks banged just under the tenting, and colored sparks fell down through the snowflakes.
Sunset, more than any other time of day, made it clear that they stood on an alien planet; something in the slant and redness of the light was fundamentally wrong, upsetting expectations wired into the savannah brain over millions of years. This evening was providing a particularly garish and unsettling example of the phenomenon. Frank wandered in its light, making his way back to the city wall. The plain south of the city was littered with rocks, each one dogged by a long black shadow. Under the concrete arch of the city’s south gate he stopped. No one there. The gates were locked during festivals like these, to keep drunks from going out and getting hurt. But Frank had gotten the day’s emergency code out of the fire department AI that morning, and when he was sure no one was watching he tapped out the code and hurried into the lock. He put on a walker, boots, and helmet, and went through the middle and outer doors.
Outside it was intensely cold as always, and the diamond pattern of the walker’s heating element burned through his clothes. He crunched over concrete and then duricrust. Loose sand flowed east, pushed by the wind.
Grimly he looked around. Rocks everywhere. A planet sledgehammered billions of times. And meteors still falling. Someday one of the towns would take a hit. He turned and looked back. It looked like an aquarium glowing in the dusk. There would be no warning, but everything would suddenly fly apart, walls, vehicles, trees, bodies. The Aztecs had believed the world would end in one of four ways: earthquake, fire, flood, or jaguars falling from the sky. Here there would be no fire. Nor earthquake nor flood, now that he thought of it. Leaving only the jaguars.
The twilight sky was a dark pink over Pavonis Mons. To the east stretched Nicosia’s farm, a long low greenhouse running downslope from the city. From this angle one could see that the farm was larger than the town proper, and jammed with green crops. Frank clumped to one of its outer locks, and entered.
Inside the farm it was hot, a full 60° warmer than outside, and 15° warmer than in the city. He had to keep his helmet on, as the farm air was tailored to the plants, heavy on CO
and short on oxygen. He stopped at a work station and fingered through drawers of small tools and pesticide patches, gloves and bags. He selected three tiny patches and put them in a plastic bag, then slipped the bag gently into the walker’s pocket. The patches were clever pesticides, biosaboteurs designed to provide plants with systemic defenses; he had been reading about them, and knew of a combination that in animals would be deadly to the organism …
He put a pair of shears in the walker’s other pocket. Narrow gravel paths led him up between long beds of barley and wheat, back toward the city proper. He went in the lock leading into town, unclipped his helmet, stripped off the walker and boots, transferred the contents of the walker pockets to his coat. Then he went back into the lower end of town.
Here the Arabs had built a medina, insisting that such a neighborhood was crucial to a city’s health; the boulevards narrowed, and between them lay warrens of twisted alleyways taken from the maps of Tunis or Algiers, or generated randomly. Nowhere could you see from one boulevard to the next, and the sky overhead was visible only in plum strips, between buildings that leaned together.
Most of the alleys were empty now, as the party was uptown. A pair of cats skulked between buildings, investigating their new home. Frank took the shears from his pocket and scratched into a few plastic windows, in Arabic lettering, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew. He walked on, whistling through his teeth. Corner cafes were little caves of light. Bottles clinked like prospectors’ hammers. An Arab sat on a squat black speaker, playing an electric guitar.
He found the central boulevard, walked up it. Boys in the branches of the lindens and sycamores shouted songs to each other in Schwyzerdüütsch. One ditty was in English: “John Boone, Went to the moon, No fast cars, He went to Mars!” Small disorganized music bands barged through the thickening crowd. Some moustached men dressed as American cheerleaders flounced expertly through a complicated can-can routine. Kids banged little plastic drums. It was loud; the tenting absorbed sound, so there weren’t the echoes one heard under crater domes, but it was loud nevertheless.
Up there, where the boulevard opened into the sycamore park – that was John himself, surrounded by a small crowd. He saw Chalmers approaching and waved, recognizing him despite the mask. That was how the first hundred knew each other—
“Hey, Frank,” he said. “You look like you’re having a good time.”
“I am,” Frank said through his mask. “I love cities like this, don’t you? A mixed-species flock. It shows you what a diverse collection of cultures Mars is.”
John’s smile was easy. His eyes shifted as he surveyed the boulevard below.
Sharply Frank said, “A place like this is a crimp in your plan, isn’t it?”
Boone’s gaze returned to him. The surrounding crowd slipped away, sensing the antagonistic nature of the exchange. Boone said to Frank, “I don’t have a plan.”
“Oh come on! What about your speech?”
Boone shrugged. “Maya wrote it.”
A double lie: that Maya wrote it, that John didn’t believe it. Even after all these years it was almost like talking to a stranger. To a politician at work. “Come on, John,” Frank snapped. “You believe all that and you know it. But what are you going to do with all these different nationalities? All the ethnic hatreds, the religious manias? Your coalition can’t possibly keep a thumb on all this. You can’t keep Mars for yourselves, John, it’s not a scientific station anymore, and you’re not going to get a treaty that makes it one.”
“We’re not trying to.”
“Then why are you trying to cut me out of the talks!”
“I’m not!” John looked injured. “Relax, Frank. We’ll hammer it out together just like we always have. Relax.”
Frank stared at his old friend, nonplussed. What to believe? He had never known how to think of John – the way he had used Frank as a springboard, the way he was so friendly … hadn’t they begun as allies, as friends?
It occurred to him that John was looking for Maya. “So where is she?”
“Around somewhere,” Boone said shortly.
It had been years since they had been able to talk about Maya. Now Boone gave him a sharp look, as if to say it was none of his business. As if everything of importance to Boone had become, over the years, none of Frank’s business.
Frank left him without a word.
The sky was now a deep violet, streaked by yellow cirrus clouds. Frank passed two figures wearing white ceramic dominoes, the old Comedy and Tragedy personas, handcuffed together. The city’s streets had gone dark and windows blazed, silhouettes partying in them. Big eyes darted in every blurry mask, looking to find the source of the tension in the air. Under the tidal sloshing of the crowd there was a low tearing sound.
He shouldn’t have been surprised, he shouldn’t. He knew John as well as one could know another person; but it had never been any of his business. Into the trees of the park, under the hand-sized leaves of the sycamores. When had it been any different! All that time together, those years of friendship; and none of it had mattered. Diplomacy by other means.
He looked at his watch. Nearly eleven. He had an appointment with Selim. Another appointment. A lifetime of days divided into quarter hours had made him used to running from one appointment to the next, changing masks, dealing with crisis after crisis, managing, manipulating, doing business in a hectic rush that never ended; and here it was a celebration, Mardi Gras, Fassnacht! and he was still doing it. He couldn’t remember any other way.
He came on a construction site, skeletal magnesium framing surrounded by piles of bricks and sand and paving stones. Careless of them to leave such things around. He stuffed his coat pockets with fragments of brick just big enough to hold. Straightening up, he noticed someone watching him from the other side of the site – a little man with a thin face under spiky black dreadlocks, watching him intently. Something in the look was disconcerting, it was as if the stranger saw through all his masks and was observing him so closely because he was aware of his thoughts, his plans.
Spooked, Chalmers beat a quick retreat into the bottom fringe of the park. When he was sure he had lost the man, and that no one else was watching, he began throwing stones and bricks down into the lower town, hurling them as hard as he could. And one for that stranger too, right in the face! Overhead the tent framework was visible only as a faint pattern of occluded stars; it seemed they stood free, in a chill night wind. Air circulation was high tonight, of course. Broken glass, shouts. A scream. It really was loud, people were going crazy. One last paving stone, heaved at a big lit picture window across the grass. It missed. He slipped further into the trees.
Near the southern wall he saw someone under a sycamore – Selim, circling nervously. “Selim,” Frank called quietly, sweating. He reached into his jumper pocket, carefully felt in the bag and palmed the trio of stem patches. Synergy could be so powerful, for good or ill. He walked forward and roughly embraced the young Arab. The patches hit and penetrated Selim’s light cotton shirt. Frank pulled back.
Now Selim had about six hours. “Did you speak with Boone?” he asked.
“I tried,” Chalmers said. “He didn’t listen. He lied to me.” It was so easy to feign distress: “Twenty-five years of friendship, and he lied to me!” He struck a tree trunk with his palm, and the patches flew away in the dark. He controlled himself. “His coalition is going to recommend that all Martian settlements originate in the countries that signed the first treaty.” It was possible; and it was certainly plausible.
“He hates us!” Selim cried.
“He hates everything that gets in his way. And he can see that Islam is still a real force in people’s lives. It shapes the way people think, and he can’t stand that.”
Selim shuddered. In the gloom the whites of his eyes were bright. “He has to be stopped.”
Frank turned aside, leaned against a tree. “I – don’t know.”
“You said it yourself. Talk means nothing.”
Frank circled the tree, feeling dizzy. You fool, he thought, talk means everything. We are nothing but information exchange, talk is all we have!
He came on Selim again and said, “How?”
“The planet. It is our way.”
“The city gates are locked tonight.”
That stopped him. His hands started to twist.
Frank said, “But the gate to the farm is still open.”
“But the farm’s outer gates will be locked.”
Frank shrugged, let him figure it out.
And quickly enough Selim blinked, and said “Ah.” Then he was gone.
Frank sat between trees, on the ground. It was a sandy damp brown dirt, product of a great deal of engineering. Nothing in the city was natural, nothing.
After a time he got to his feet. He walked through the park, looking at people. If I find one good city I will spare the man. But in an open area masked figures darted together to grapple and fight, surrounded by watchers who smelled blood. Frank went back to the construction site to get more bricks. He threw them and some people saw him, and he had to run. Into the trees again, into the little tented wilderness, escaping predators while high on adrenalin, the greatest drug of all. He laughed wildly.
Suddenly he caught sight of Maya, standing alone by the temporary platform up at the apex. She wore a white domino, but it was certainly her: the proportions of the figure, the hair, the stance itself, all unmistakably Maya Toitovna. The first hundred, the little band; they were the only ones truly alive to him any more, the rest were ghosts. Frank hurried toward her, tripping over uneven ground. He squeezed a rock buried deep in one coat pocket, thinking Come on, you bitch. Say something to save him. Say something that will make me run the length of the city to save him!
She heard his approach and turned. She wore a phosphorescent white domino, with metallic blue sequins. It was hard to see her eyes.
“Hello, Frank,” she said, as if he wore no mask. He almost turned and ran. Mere recognition was almost enough to do it …
But he stayed. He said, “Hello, Maya. Nice sunset, wasn’t it?”
“Spectacular. Nature has no taste. It’s just a city inauguration, but it looked like Judgement Day.”
They were under a streetlight, standing on their shadows. She said, “Have you enjoyed yourself?”
“Very much. And you?”
“It’s getting a little wild.”
“It’s understandable, don’t you think? We’re out of our holes, Maya, we’re on the surface at last! And what a surface! You only get these kind of long views on Tharsis.”
“It’s a good location,” she agreed.
“It will be a great city,” Frank predicted. “But where do you live these days, Maya?”
“In Underhill, Frank, just as always. You know that.”
“But you’re never there, are you? I haven’t seen you in a year or more.”
“Has it been that long? Well, I’ve been in Hellas. Surely you heard?”
“Who would tell me?”
She shook her head and blue sequins glittered. “Frank.” She turned aside, as if to walk away from the question’s implications.
Angrily Frank circled her, stood in her path. “That time on the Ares,” he said. His voice was tight, and he twisted his neck to loosen his throat, to make speech easier. “What happened, Maya? What happened?”
She shrugged and did not meet his gaze. For a long time she did not speak. Then she looked at him. “The spur of the moment,” she said.
And then it was ringing midnight, and they were in the Martian time slip, the thirty-nine and a half minute gap between 12:00:00 and 12:00:01, when all the clocks went blank or stopped moving. This was how the first hundred had decided to reconcile Mars’s slightly longer day with the twenty-four hour clock, and the solution had proved oddly satisfactory. Every night to step for a while out of the flicking numbers, out of the remorseless sweep of the second hand—
And tonight as the bells rang midnight, the whole city went mad. Forty minutes outside of time; it was bound to be the peak of the celebration, everyone knew that instinctively. Fireworks were going off, people were cheering; sirens tore through the sound, and the cheering redoubled. Frank and Maya watched the fireworks, listened to the noise.
Then there was a noise that was somehow different: desperate cries, serious screams. “What’s that?” Maya said.
“A fight,” Frank replied, cocking an ear. “Something done on the spur of the moment, perhaps.” She stared at him, and quickly he added, “Maybe we should go have a look.”
The cries intensified. Trouble somewhere. They started down through the park, their steps getting longer, until they were in the Martian lope. The park seemed bigger to Frank, and for a moment he was scared.
The central boulevard was covered with trash. People darted through the dark in predatory schools. A nerve-grating siren went off, the alarm that signaled a break in the tent. Windows were shattering up and down the boulevard. There on the streetgrass was a man flat on his back, the surrounding grass smeared with black streaks. Chalmers seized the arm of a woman crouched over him. “What happened?” he shouted.
She was weeping. “They fought! They are fighting!”
“Who? Swiss, Arab?”
“Strangers,” she said. “Ausländer.” She looked blindly at Frank. “Get help!”
Frank rejoined Maya, who was talking to a group next to another fallen figure. “What the hell’s going on?” he said to her as they took off toward the city’s hospital.
“It’s a riot,” she said. “I don’t know why.” Her mouth was a straight slash, in skin as white as the domino still covering her eyes.
Frank pulled off his mask and threw it away. There was broken glass all over the street. A man rushed at them. “Frank! Maya!”
It was Sax Russell; Frank had never seen the little man so agitated. “It’s John – he’s been attacked!”
“What?” they exclaimed together.
“He tried to stop a fight, and three or four men jumped him. They knocked him down and dragged him away!”
“You didn’t stop them?” Maya cried.
“We tried – a whole bunch of us chased them. But they lost us in the medina.”
Maya looked at Frank.
“What’s going on!” he cried. “Where would anyone take him?”
“The gates,” she said.
“But they’re locked tonight, aren’t they?”
“Maybe not to everyone.”
They followed her to the medina. Streetlights were broken, there was glass underfoot. They found a fire marshall and went to the Turkish Gate; he unlocked it and several of them hurried through, throwing on walkers at emergency speed. Then out into the night to look around, illuminated by the bathysphere glow of the city. Frank’s ankles hurt with the night cold, and he could feel the precise configuration of his lungs, as if two globes of ice had been inserted in his chest, to cool the rapid beat of his heart.
Nothing out there. Back inside. Over to the northern wall and the Syrian Gate, and out again under the stars. Nothing.
It took them a long time to think of the farm. By then there were about thirty of them in walkers, and they ran down and through the lock and flooded down the farm’s aisles, spreading out, running between crops.
They found him among the radishes. His jacket was pulled over his face, in the standard emergency air pocket; he must have done it unconsciously, because when they rolled him carefully onto one side, they saw a lump behind one ear.
“Get him inside,” Maya said, her voice a bitter croak – “Hurry, get him inside.”
Four of them lifted him. Chalmers cradled John’s head, and his fingers were intertwined with Maya’s. They trotted back up the shallow steps. Through the farm gate they stumbled, back into the city. One of the Swiss led them to the nearest medical center, already crowded with desperate people. They got John onto an empty bench. His unconscious expression was pinched, determined. Frank tore off his helmet and went to work pulling rank, bulling into the emergency rooms and shouting at the doctors and nurses. They ignored him until one doctor said, “Shut up. I’m coming.” She went into the hallway and with a nurse’s help clipped John into a monitor, then checked him out with the abstracted, absent look doctors have while working: hands at neck and face and head and chest, stethoscope …
Maya explained what they knew. The doctor took down an oxygen unit from the wall, looking at the monitor. Her mouth was bunched into a displeased little knot. Maya sat at the end of the bench, face suddenly distraught. Her domino had long since disappeared.
Frank crouched beside her.
“We can keep working on him,” the doctor said, “but I’m afraid he’s gone. Too long without oxygen, you know.”
“Keep working on him,” Maya said.
They did, of course. Eventually other medical people arrived, and they carted him off to an emergency room. Frank, Maya, Sax, Samantha, and a number of locals sat outside in the hall. Doctors came and went; their faces had the blank look they took on in the presence of death. Protective masks. One came out and shook his head. “He’s dead. Too long out there.”
Frank leaned his head back against the wall.
When Reinhold Messner returned from the first solo climb of Everest, he was severely dehydrated, and utterly exhausted; he fell down most of the last part of the descent, and collapsed on the Rongbuk glacier, and he was crawling over it on hands and knees when the woman who was his entire support team reached him; and he looked up at her out of a delirium, and said “Where are all my friends?”
It was quiet. No sound but the low hum and whoosh that one never escaped on Mars.
Maya put a hand on Frank’s shoulder, and he almost flinched; his throat clamped down to nothing, it really hurt. “I’m sorry,” he managed to say.
She shrugged the remark aside, frowned. She had somewhat the air of the medical people. “Well,” she said, “you never liked him much anyway.”
“True,” he said, thinking it would be politic to seem honest with her at that moment. But then he shuddered and said bitterly, “What do you know about what I like or don’t like.”
He shrugged her hand aside, struggled to his feet. She didn’t know; none of them knew. He started to go into the emergency room, changed his mind. Time enough for that at the funeral. He felt hollow; and suddenly it seemed to him that everything good had gone away.
He left the medical center. Impossible not to feel sentimental at such moments. He walked through the strangely hushed darkness of the city, into the land of Nod. The streets glinted as if stars had fallen to the pavement. People stood in clumps, silent, stunned by the news. Frank Chalmers made his way through them, feeling their stares, moving without thought toward the platform at the top of town; and as he walked he said to himself, Now we’ll see what I can do with this planet.
PART TWO The Voyage Out (#ulink_96419cd9-196e-5f8b-b625-3ac7b40c09be)
“Since they’re going to go crazy anyway, why not just send insane people in the first place, and save them the trouble?” said Michel Duval.
He was only half joking; his position throughout had been that the criteria for selection constituted a mind-boggling collection of double binds.
His fellow psychologists stared at him. “Can you suggest any specific changes?” asked the chairman, Charles York.
“Perhaps we should all go to Antarctica with them, and observe them in this first period of time together. It would teach us a lot.”
“But our presence would be inhibitory. I think just one of us will be enough.”
So they sent Michel Duval. He joined a hundred and fifty-odd finalists at McMurdo Station. The initial meeting resembled any other international scientific conference, familiar to them all from their various disciplines. But there was a difference: this was the continuation of a selection process that had lasted for years, and would last another. And those selected would go to Mars.
So they lived in Antarctica for over a year together, familiarizing themselves with the shelters and equipment that were already landing on Mars in robot vehicles; familiarizing themselves with a landscape that was almost as cold and harsh as Mars itself; familiarizing themselves with each other. They lived in a cluster of habitats located in Wright Valley, the largest of Antarctica’s Dry Valleys. They ran a biosphere farm, and then they settled into the habitats through a dark austral winter, and studied secondary or tertiary professions, or ran through simulations of the various tasks they would be performing on the spaceship Ares, or later on the red planet itself; and always, always aware that they were being watched, evaluated, judged.
They were by no means all astronauts or cosmonauts, although there were a dozen or so of each, with many more up north clamoring to be included. But the majority of the colonists would have to have their expertise in areas that would come into play after landfall: medical skills, computer skills, robotics, systems design, architecture, geology, biosphere design, genetic engineering, biology; also every sort of engineering, and construction expertise of several kinds. Those who had made it to Antarctica were an impressive group of experts in the relevant sciences and professions, and they spent a good bit of their time cross-training to become impressive in secondary and tertiary fields as well.
And all their activity took place under the constant pressure of observation, evaluation, judgement. It was necessarily a stressful procedure; that was part of the test. Michel Duval felt that this was a mistake, as it tended to ingrain reticence and distrust in the colonists, preventing the very compatability that the selection committee was supposedly seeking. One of the many double binds, in fact. The candidates themselves were quiet about that aspect of things, and he didn’t blame them; there wasn’t any better strategy to take, that was a double bind for you: it insured silence. They could not afford to offend anyone, or complain too much; they could not risk withdrawing too far; they could not make enemies.
So they went on being brilliant and accomplished enough to stand out, but normal enough to get along. They were old enough to have learned a great deal, but young enough to endure the physical rigors of the work. They were driven enough to excel, but relaxed enough to socialize. And they were crazy enough to want to leave Earth forever, but sane enough to disguise this fundamental madness, in fact to defend it as pure rationality, scientific curiosity or something of the sort – that seemed to be the only acceptable reason for wanting to go, and so naturally they claimed to be the most scientifically curious people in history! But of course there had to be more to it than that. They had to be alienated somehow, alienated and solitary enough not to care about leaving everyone they had known behind forever – and yet still connected and social enough to get along with all their new acquaintances in Wright Valley, with every member of the tiny village that the colony would become. Oh, the double binds were endless! They were to be both extraordinary and extra ordinary, at one and the same time. An impossible task, and yet a task that was an obstacle to their heart’s greatest desire; making it the very stuff of anxiety, fear, resentment, rage. Conquering all those stresses …
But that too was part of the test. Michel could not help but observe with great interest. Some failed, cracked in one way or another. An American thermal engineer became increasingly withdrawn, then destroyed several of their rovers and had to be forcibly restrained and removed. A Russian pair became lovers, and then had a falling out so violent that they couldn’t stand the sight of each other, and both had to be dropped. This melodrama illustrated the dangers of romance going awry, and made the rest of them very cautious in this regard. Relationships still developed, and by the time they left Antarctica they had had three marriages, and these lucky six could consider themselves in some sense “safe”; but most of them were so focused on getting to Mars that they put these parts of their lives on hold, and if anything conducted discreet friendships, in some cases hidden from almost everyone, in other cases merely kept out of the view of the selection committees.
And Michel knew he was seeing only the tip of the iceberg. He knew that critical things were happening in Antarctica, out of his sight. Relationships were having their beginnings; and sometimes the beginning of a relationship determines how the rest of it will go. In the brief hours of daylight, one of them might leave the camp and hike out to Lookout Point; and another follow; and what happened out there might leave its mark forever. But Michel would never know.
And then they left Antarctica, and the team was chosen. There were fifty men and fifty women: thirty-five Americans, thirty-five Russians, and thirty miscellaneous international affiliates, fifteen invited by each of the two big partners. Keeping such perfect symmetries had been difficult, but the selection committee had persevered.
The lucky ones flew to Cape Canaveral or Baikonur, to ascend to orbit. At this point they both knew each other very well and did not know each other at all. They were a team, Michel thought, with established friendships, and a number of group ceremonies, rituals, habits, and tendencies; and among those tendencies was an instinct to hide, to play a role and disguise their real selves. Perhaps this was simply the definition of village life, of social life. But it seemed to Michel that it was worse than that; no one had ever before had to compete so strenuously to join a village; and the resulting radical division between public life and private life was new, and strange. Ingrained in them now was a certain competitive undercurrent, a constant subtle feeling that they were each alone, and that in case of trouble they were liable to be abandoned by the rest, and yanked out of the group.
The selection committee had thus created some of the very problems it had hoped to prevent. Some of them were aware of this; and naturally they took care to include among the colonists the most qualified psychiatrist they could think of.
So they sent Michel Duval.
At first it felt like a shove in the chest. Then they were pushed back in their chairs, and for a second the pressure was deeply familiar: one g, the gravity they would never live in again. The Ares had been orbiting Earth at 28,000 kilometers per hour. For several minutes they accelerated, the rocket’s push so powerful that their vision blurred as corneas flattened, and it took an effort to inhale. At 40,000 kilometers per hour the burn ended. They were free of the Earth’s pull, in orbit to nothing but the sun.
The colonists sat in the delta V chairs blinking, their skin flushed, their hearts pounding. Maya Katarina Toitovna, the official leader of Russian contingent, glanced around. People appeared stunned. When obsessives are given their object of desire, what do they feel? It was hard to say, really. In a sense their lives were ending; and yet something else, some other life, had finally, finally begun … Filled with so many emotions at once, it was impossible not to be confused; it was an interference pattern, some feelings cancelled, others reinforced. Unbuckling from her chair Maya felt a grin contorting her face, and she saw on the faces around her the same helpless grin; all but Sax Russell, who was as impassive as an owl, blinking as he looked over the readouts on the room’s computer screens.
They floated weightlessly around the room. December 21st, 2026: they were moving faster than anyone in history. They were on their way. It was the beginning of a nine-month voyage – or of a voyage that would last the rest of their lives. They were on their own.
Those responsible for piloting the Ares pulled themselves to the control consoles, and gave the orders to fire lateral control rockets. The Ares began to spin, stabilizing at four rpm. The colonists sank to the floors, and stood in a pseudogravity of .38 g, very close to what they would feel on Mars. Many man-years of tests had indicated that it would be a fairly healthy g to live in, and so much healthier than weightlessness that rotating the ship had been deemed worth the trouble. And, Maya thought, it felt great. There was enough pull to make balance relatively easy, but hardly any feeling of pressure, of drag. It was the perfect equivalent of their mood; they staggered down the halls to the big dining hall in Torus D, giddy and exhilarated, walking on air.
In Torus D’s dining hall they mingled in a kind of cocktail party, celebrating the departure. Maya wandered about, sipping freely from a mug of champagne, feeling slightly unreal and extremely happy, a mix that reminded her of her wedding reception many years before. Hopefully this marriage would go better than that one had, she thought, because this one was going to last forever. The hall was loud with talk. “It’s a symmetry not so much sociological as mathematic. A kind of aesthetic balance.” “We’re hoping to get it into the parts per billion range, but it’s not going to be easy.” Maya turned down an offered refill, feeling giddy enough. Besides, this was work. She was co-mayor of this village, so to speak, responsible for group dynamics, which were bound to get complex. Antarctic habits kicked in even at this moment of triumph, and she listened and watched like an anthropologist, or a spy.
“The shrinks have their reasons. We’ll end up fifty happy couples.”
“And they already know the match-ups.”
She watched them laugh. Smart, healthy, supremely well-educated; was this the rational society at last, the scientifically-designed community that had been the dream of the Enlightenment? But there was Arkady, Nadia, Vlad, Ivana. She knew the Russian contingent too well to have many illusions on that score. They were just as likely to end up resembling an undergraduate dorm at a technical university, occupied by bizarre pranks and lurid affairs. Except they looked a bit old for that kind of thing; several men were balding, and many of both sexes showed touches of gray in their hair. It had been a long haul; their average age was forty-six, with extremes ranging from thirty-three (Hiroko Ai, the Japanese prodigy of biosphere design) to fifty-eight (Vlad Taneev, winner of a Nobel Prize in medicine).
Now, however, the flush of youth was on all their faces. Arkady Bogdanov was a portrait in red: hair, beard, skin. In all that red his eyes were a wild electric blue, bugging out happily as he exclaimed, “Free at last! Free at last! All our children are free at last!” The video cameras had been turned off, after Janet Blyleven had recorded a series of interviews for the TV stations back home; they were out of contact with Earth, in the dining hall anyway, and Arkady was singing, and the group around him toasted the song. Maya stopped to join this group. Free at last; it was hard to believe, they were actually on their way to Mars! Knots of people talking, many of them world class in their fields; Ivana had won part of a Nobel prize in chemistry, Vlad was one of the most famous medical biologists in the world, Sax was in the pantheon of great contributors to subatomic theory, Hiroko was unmatched in enclosed biological life support systems design, and so on all around; a brilliant crowd!
And she was one of their leaders. It was a bit daunting. Her engineering and cosmonautic skills were modest enough, it was her diplomatic ability that had gotten her aboard, presumably. Chosen to head the disparate, fractious Russian team, with the several commonwealth members – well, that was okay. It was interesting work, and she was used to it. And her skills might very well turn out to be the most important ones aboard. They had to get along, after all. And that was a matter of guile, and cunning, and will. Willing other people to do your bidding! She looked at the crowd of glowing faces, and laughed. All aboard were good at their work, but some were gifted far beyond that. She had to identify those people, to seek them out, to cultivate them. Her ability to function as leader depended on it; for in the end, she thought, they would surely become a kind of loose scientific meritocracy. And in such a society as that, the extraordinarily talented constituted the real powers. When push came to shove, they would be the colony’s true leaders – they, or those who influenced them.
She looked around, located her opposite number, Frank Chalmers. In Antarctica she had not gotten to know him very well. A tall, big, swarthy man. He was talkative enough, and incredibly energetic; but hard to read. She found him attractive. Did he see things as she did? She had never been able to tell. He was talking to a group across the length of the room, listening in that sharp inscrutable way of his, head tilted to the side, ready to pounce with a witty remark. She was going to have to find out more about him. More than that, she was going to have to get along with him.
She crossed the room, stopped by his side, stood so their upper arms just barely touched. Leaned her head in toward his. A brief gesture at their comrades: “This is going to be fun, don’t you think?”
Chalmers glanced at her. “If it goes well,” he said.
After the celebration and dinner, unable to sleep, Maya wandered through the Ares. All of them had spent time in space before, but never in anything like the Ares, which was enormous. There was a kind of penthouse at the front end of the ship, a single tank like a bowsprit, which rotated in the opposite direction the ship did, so that it held steady. Solar watch instruments, radio antennas, and all the other equipment which worked best without rotation were located in this tank, and at the very tip of it was a bulbous room of transparent plastic, a chamber quickly named the bubble dome, which provided the crew with a weightless, non-rotating view of the stars, and a partial view of the great ship behind it.
Maya floated near the window wall of this bubble dome, looking back at the ship curiously. It had been constructed using space shuttle external fuel tanks; around the turn of the century NASA and Glavkosmos had begun attaching small booster rockets to the tanks and pushing them all the way into orbit. Scores of tanks had been launched this way, then tugged to work sites and put to use – with them they had built two big space stations, an L5 station, a lunar orbit station, the first manned Mars vehicle, and scores of unmanned freighters sent to Mars. So by the time the two agencies agreed to build the Ares, the use of the tanks had become routinized, with standard coupling units, interiors, propulsion systems and so forth; and construction of the big ship had taken less than two years.
It looked like something made from a children’s toy set, in which cylinders were attached at their ends to create more complex shapes – in this case, eight hexagons of connected cylinders, which they called toruses, lined up and speared down the middle by a central hub shaft, made of a cluster of five lines of cylinders. The toruses were connected to the hub shaft by thin crawl spokes, and the resulting object looked somewhat like a piece of agricultural machinery, say the arm of a harvester combine, or a mobile sprinkler unit. Or like eight knobby doughnuts, Maya thought, toothpicked to a stick. Just the sort of thing a child would appreciate.
The eight toruses had been made from American tanks, and the five bundled lengths of the central shaft were Russian. Both were about fifty meters long and ten meters in diameter. Maya floated aimlessly down the tanks of the hub shaft; it took her a long time, but she was in no hurry. She dropped down into Torus G. There were rooms of all shapes and sizes, right up to the largest, which occupied entire tanks. The floor in one of these she passed through was set just below the halfway mark, so its interior resembled a long Quonset hut. But the majority of the tanks had been divided up into smaller rooms. She had heard there were over five hundred of them in all, making for a total interior space roughly the equivalent of a large city hotel.
But would it be enough?
Perhaps it would. After the Antarctic, life on the Ares seemed an expansive, labyrinthine, airy experience. Around six every morning the darkness in the residential toruses would lighten slowly to a gray dawn, and around six-thirty a sudden brightening marked “sunrise.” Maya woke to it as she had all her life. After visiting the lavatory she would make her way to Torus D’s kitchen, heat a meal, and take it into the big dining hall. There she sat at a table flanked by potted lime trees. Hummingbirds, finches, tanagers, sparrows and lories pecked underfoot and darted overhead, dodging the creeping vines that hung from the hall’s long barrel ceiling, which was painted a gray-blue that reminded her of St Petersburg’s winter sky. She would eat slowly, watch the birds, relax in her chair, listen to the talk around her. A leisurely breakfast! After a lifetime of grinding work it felt rather uncomfortable at first, even alarming, like a stolen luxury. As if it were Sunday morning every day, as Nadia said. But Maya’s Sunday mornings had never been particularly relaxed. In her childhood that had been the time for cleaning the one-room apartment she had shared with her mother. Her mother had been a doctor and like most women of her generation had had to work ferociously to get by, obtaining food, bringing up a child, keeping an apartment, running a career; it had been too much for one person, and she had joined the many women angrily demanding a better deal than they had gotten in the Soviet years, which had given them half the money jobs while leaving them all the work at home. No more waiting, no more mute endurance; they had to take advantage while the instability lasted. “Everything is on the table!” Maya’s mother would exclaim while cooking their meager dinners, “everything but food!”
And perhaps they had taken advantage. In the Soviet era women had learned to help each other, a nearly self-contained world had come into being, of mothers, sisters, daughters, babushkas, women friends, colleagues, even strangers. In the commonwealth this world had consolidated its gains and thrust even further into the power structure, into the tight male oligarchies of Russian government.
One of the fields most affected had been the space program. Maya’s mother, slightly involved in space medical research, always swore that cosmonautics would need an influx of women, if only to provide female data for the medical experimentation. “They can’t hold Valentina Tereshkova against us forever!” her mother would cry. And apparently she had been right, because after studying aeronautic engineering at Moscow University, Maya had been accepted in a program at Baikonur, and had done well, and had gotten an assignment on Novy Mir. While up there she had redesigned the interiors for improved ergonomic efficiency, and later spent a year in command of the station, during which a couple of emergency repairs had bolstered her reputation. Administrative assignments in Baikonur and Moscow had followed, and over time she had managed to penetrate Glavkosmos’s little politburo, playing the men against each other in the subtlest of ways, marrying one of them, divorcing him, rising afterwards in Glavkosmos a free agent, becoming one of the utmost inner circle, the double triumvirate.
And so here she was, having a leisurely breakfast. “So civilized,” Nadia would scoff. She was Maya’s best friend on the Ares, a short woman round as a stone, with a square face framed by cropped salt-and-pepper hair. Plain as could be. Maya, who knew she was good-looking, and knew that this had helped her many times, loved Nadia’s plainness, which somehow underlined her competence. Nadia was an engineer and very practical, an expert in cold-climate construction. They had met in Baikonur twenty years before, and once lived together on Novy Mir for several months; over the years they had become like sisters, in that they were not much alike, and did not often get along, and yet were intimate.
Now Nadia looked around and said, “Putting the Russian and American living quarters in different toruses was a horrible idea. We work with them during the day, but we spend most of our time here with the same old faces. It only reinforces the other divisions between us.”
“Maybe we should offer to exchange half the rooms.”
Arkady, wolfing down coffee rolls, leaned over from the next table. “It’s not enough,” he said, as if he had been part of their conversation all along. His red beard, growing wilder every day, was dusted with crumbs. “We should declare every other Sunday to be moving day, and have everyone shift quarters on a random basis. People would get to know more of the others, and there would be fewer cliques. And the notion of ownership of the rooms would be reduced.”
“But I like owning a room,” Nadia said.
Arkady downed another roll, grinned at her as he chewed. It was a miracle he had passed the selection committee.
But Maya brought up the subject with the Americans, and though no one liked Arkady’s plan, a single exchange of half the apartments struck them as a good idea. After some consulting and discussion, the move was arranged. They did it on a Sunday morning; and after that, breakfast was a little more cosmopolitan. Mornings in the D dining hall now included Frank Chalmers and John Boone, and also Sax Russell, Mary Dunkel, Janet Blyleven, Rya Jimenez, Michel Duval, and Ursula Kohl.
John Boone turned out to be an early riser, getting to the dining hall even before Maya. “This room is so spacious and airy, it really has an outdoor feel to it,” he said from his table one dawn when Maya came in. “A lot better than B’s hall.”
“The trick is to remove all chrome and white plastic,” Maya replied. Her English was fairly good, and getting better fast. “And then paint the ceiling like real sky.”
“Not just straight blue, you mean?”
“Yes.”
He was, she thought, a typical American: simple, open, straightforward, relaxed. And yet this particular specimen was one of the most famous people in history. It was an unavoidable, heavy fact; but Boone seemed to slip out from under it, to leave it around his feet on the floor. Intent on the taste of a roll, or some news on the table screen, he never referred to his previous expedition, and if someone brought the subject up he spoke as if it were no different from any of the flights the rest of them had taken. But it wasn’t so, and only his ease made it seem that way: at the same table each morning, laughing at Nadia’s lame engineering jokes, making his portion of the talk. After a while it took an effort to see the aura around him.
Frank Chalmers was more interesting. He always came in late, and sat by himself, paying attention only to his coffee and the table screen. After a couple of cups he would talk to people nearby, in ugly but functional Russian. Most of the breakfast conversations in D hall had now shifted to English, to accommodate the Americans. The linguistic situation was a set of nesting dolls: English held all hundred of them, inside that was Russian, and inside that, the languages of the commonwealth, and then the internationals. Eight people aboard were idiolinguists, a sad kind of orphaning in Maya’s opinion, and it seemed to her they were more Earth-oriented than the rest, and in frequent communication with people back home. It was a little strange to have their psychiatrist in that category.
Anyway English was the ship’s lingua franca, and at first Maya had thought that this gave the Americans an advantage. But then she noticed that when they spoke they were always on stage to everyone, while the rest of them had more private languages they could switch to if they wanted.
Frank Chalmers was the exception to all that, however.
He spoke five languages, more than anyone else aboard. And he did not fear to use his Russian, even though it was very bad; he just hacked out questions and then listened to the answers, with a really piercing intensity, and a quick startling laugh. He was an unusual American in many ways, Maya thought. At first he seemed to have all the characteristics, he was big, loud, maniacally energetic, confident, restless; talkative enough, after that first coffee; friendly enough. It took a while to notice how he turned the friendliness on and off, and to notice how little his talk revealed. Maya never learned a thing about his past, for instance, despite deliberate efforts to chat him up. It made her curious. He had black hair, a swarthy face, light hazel eyes – handsome in a tough-guy way – his smile brief, his laugh sharp, like Maya’s mother’s. His gaze too was sharp, especially when looking at Maya; a matter of evaluating the other leader, she assumed. He acted toward her as if they had an understanding built on long acquaintance, a presumption which made her uneasy given how little they had spoken together in Antarctica. She was used to thinking of women as her allies, and of men as attractive but dangerous problems. So a man who presumed to be her ally was only the more problematic. And dangerous. And … something else.
She recalled only one moment when she had seen further into him than the skin, and that had been back in Antarctica. After the thermal engineer had cracked and been sent north, news of his replacement had come down, and when it was announced everyone was quite surprised and excited to hear that it was going to be John Boone himself, even though he had certainly received more than the maximum radiation dosage on his previous expedition. While the evening room was still buzzing with the news Maya had seen Chalmers come in and be told of it, and he had jerked his head around to stare at his informant; and then for a fraction of a second she had seen a flash of fury, a flash so fast it was almost a subliminal event.
But it had made her attentive to him. And certainly he and John Boone had an odd relationship. It was difficult for Chalmers, of course; he was the Americans’ official leader, and even had the title Captain; but Boone, with his blond good looks and the strange presence of his accomplishment, certainly had more natural authority – he seemed the real American leader, and Frank Chalmers something like an overactive executive officer, doing Boone’s unspoken bidding. That could not be comfortable.
They were old friends, Maya had been told when she asked. But she saw few signs of it herself, even watching closely. They seldom talked to each other in public, and did not seem to visit in private. Thus when they were together she watched them more closely than ever, without ever consciously considering why; the natural logic of the situation just seemed to demand it. If they had been back at Glavkosmos, it would have made strategic sense to drive a wedge between them; but she didn’t think of it that way here. There was a lot that Maya didn’t think about consciously.
She watched, though. And one morning Janet Blyleven wore her video glasses into D hall for breakfast. She was a principal reporter for American television, and often she wove her way through the ship wearing her vidglasses, looking around and talking the commentary, collecting stories and transmitting them back home where they would be, as Arkady put it, “predigested and vomited back into that baby bird consensus.”
It was nothing new, of course. Media attention was a familiar part of every astronaut’s life, and during the selection process they had been more scrutinized than ever. Now, however, they were the raw material for programs magnitudes more popular than any space program had been before. Millions watched them as the ultimate soap opera, and this bothered some of them. So when Janet settled at the end of the table wearing those stylish spectacles with the optical fibers in the frame, there were a few groans. And at the other end of the table Ann Clayborne and Sax Russell were arguing, oblivious to any of them.
“It’ll take years to find out what we have there, Sax. Decades. There’s as much land on Mars as on Earth, with a unique geology and chemistry. The land has to be thoroughly studied before we can start changing it.”
“We’ll change it just by landing.” Russell brushed aside Ann’s objections as if they were spiderwebs on his face. “Deciding to go to Mars is like the first phrase of a sentence, and the whole sentence says—”
“Veni, vidi, vinci.”
Russell shrugged. “If you want to put it that way.”
“You’re the weenie, Sax,” Ann said, lip curled with irritation. She was a broad-shouldered woman with wild brown hair, a geologist with strong views, difficult in argument. “Look, Mars is its own place. You can play your climate-shifting games back on Earth if you want, they need the help. Or try it on Venus. But you can’t just wipe out a three billion year-old planetary surface.”
Russell rubbed away more spiderwebs. “It’s dead,” he said simply. “Besides, it’s not really our decision. It’ll be taken out of our hands.”
“None of these decisions will be taken out of our hands,” Arkady put in sharply.
Janet looked from speaker to speaker, taking it all in. Ann was getting agitated, raising her voice. Maya glanced around, and saw that Frank didn’t like the situation. But if he interrupted it he would give away to the millions the fact that he didn’t want the colonists arguing in front of them. Instead he looked across the table and caught Boone’s gaze. There was an exchange of expressions between the two so quick it made Maya blink.
Boone said, “When I was there before, I got the impression it was already Earthlike.”
“Except 200° Kelvin,” Russell said.
“Sure, but it looked like the Mojave, or the Dry Valleys.
The first time I looked around on Mars I found myself keeping an eye out for one of those mummified seals we saw in the Dry Valleys.”
And so on. Janet turned to him; and Ann, looking disgusted, picked up her coffee and left.
Afterward Maya concentrated, trying to recall the looks Boone and Chalmers had exchanged. They had been like something from a code, or the private languages invented by identical twins.
The weeks passed, and the days each began with a leisurely breakfast. Mid-mornings were far busier. Everyone had a schedule, although some were fuller than others. Frank’s was packed, which was the way he liked it, a maniacal blur of activity. But the necessary work was not really all that great: they had to keep themselves alive and in shape, and keep the ship running, and keep preparing for Mars. Ship maintenance ranged from the intricacy of programming or repairs to the simplicity of moving supplies out of storage, or taking trash to the recyclers. The biosphere team spent the bulk of its time on the farm, which occupied large parts of Toruses C, E, and F; and everyone aboard had farm chores. Most enjoyed this work, and some even returned in their free hours. Everyone was on doctors’ orders to spend three hours a day on treadmills, escalators, running wheels, or using weight machines. These hours were enjoyed or endured or despised, depending on temperament; but even those who claimed to despise them finished their exercises in noticeably (even measurably) better moods. “Beta endorphins are the best drug,” Michel Duval would say.
“Which is lucky, since we don’t have any others,” Arkady would reply.
“Oh, there’s caffeine …”
“Puts me to sleep.”
“Alcohol …”
“Gives me a headache.”
“Procaine, darvon, morphine—”
“Morphine?”
“In the medical supplies. Not for general use.”
Arkady smiled. “Maybe I’d better get sick.”
The engineers, including Maya, spent many mornings in training simulations. These took place on the back-up bridge in Torus B, which had the latest in image synthesizers; the simulations were so sophisticated that there was little visible difference between them and the act itself. This did not necessarily make them interesting: the standard orbital insertion approach, simulated weekly, was dubbed “The Mantra Run,” and became quite a bore to every conceivable flight crew.
But sometimes even boredom was preferable to the alternatives; Arkady was their training specialist, and he had a perverse talent for designing problem runs so hard that they often “killed” everybody. These runs were strangely unpleasant experiences, and did not make Arkady popular among his victims. He mixed problem runs with Mantra Runs randomly, but more and more often they were problem runs; they would “approach Mars” and red lights would flash, sometimes with sirens, and they were in trouble again. Once they struck a planetesimal weighing approximately fifteen grams, leaving a large flaw in the heat shield. Sax Russell had calculated that their chances of hitting anything larger than a gram were about one in every seven thousand years of travel, but nevertheless there they were, emergency!, adrenalin pouring through them even as they derided the very idea of it, rushing up to the hub and into EVA suits, going out to fill the pothole before they hit the Martian atmosphere and burned to a crisp; and halfway there, Arkady’s voice came over their intercoms: “Not fast enough! All of us are dead.”
But that was a simple one. Others … The ship, for instance, was guided by a fly-by-wire system, meaning that the pilots fed instructions to flight computers which translated them into the actual thrusts needed to achieve the desired result. This was how it had to be, because when approaching a gravitational mass like Mars at their speed, one simply could not feel or intuit what burns would achieve the desired effects. So none of them were flyers in the sense of a pilot flying a plane. Nevertheless, Arkady frequently blew the entire massively redundant system just as they were reaching a critical moment (which failure, Russell said, had about a one in ten billion chance of happening) and they had to take over and command all the rockets mechanically, watching the monitors and an orange-on-black visual image of Mars bearing down on them, and they could either go long and skip off into deep space and die a lingering death, or go short and crash into the planet and die instantly; and if the latter, they got to watch it right down to the simulated hundred and twenty klicks per second final smash.
Or it might be a mechanical failure: main rockets, stabilizing rockets, computer hardware or software, heat shield deployment; all of them had to work perfectly during the approach. And failures of these systems were the most likely of all – in the range, Sax said (though others contested his risk assessment methods), of one in every ten thousand approaches. So they would do it again and red lights would flash, and they would groan, and beg for a Mantra Run even as they partly welcomed the new challenge. When they managed to survive a mechanical failure, they were tremendously pleased; it could be the high point of a week. Once John Boone successfully aerobraked by hand, with a single main rocket functioning, hitting the safe millisecond of arc at the only possible speed. No one could believe it. “Blind luck,” Boone said, grinning widely as the deed was talked about at dinner.
Most of Arkady’s problem runs ended in failure, however, meaning death for all. Simulated or not, it was hard not to be sobered by these experiences, and after that, irritated with Arkady for inventing them. One time they repaired every monitor in the bridge just in time to see the screens register a hit by a small asteroid, which sheared through the hub and killed them all. Another time Arkady, as part of the navigation team, made an “error” and instructed the computers to increase the ship’s spin rather than decrease it. “Pinned to the floor by six gs!” he cried in mock horror, and they had to crawl on the floor for half an hour, pretending to rectify the error while weighing half a ton each. When they succeeded, Arkady leaped off the floor and began pushing them away from the control monitor. “What the hell are you doing?” Maya yelled.
“He’s gone crazy,” Janet said.
“He’s simulated going crazy,” Nadia corrected her. “We have to figure out—” doing an end run around Arkady “— how to deal with someone on the bridge going insane!”
Which no doubt was true. But they could see the whites of Arkady’s eyes all the way around, and there wasn’t a trace of recognition in him as he silently assaulted them; it took all five of them to restrain him, and Janet and Phyllis Boyle were hurt by his sharp elbows.
“Well?” he said at dinner afterward, grinning lopsidedly, as he was growing a fat lip. “What if it happens? We’re under pressure up here, and the approach will be worst of all. What if someone cracks?” He turned to Russell and the grin grew wider. “What are the chances of that, eh?” And he began to sing a Jamaican song, in a Slavic Caribbean accent: “'Pressure drop, oh pressure drop, oh-o, pressure going to drop on you-oo-oo!'”
So they kept trying, handling the problem runs as seriously as they could, even the attack by Martian natives or the decoupling of Torus H caused by “explosive bolts installed by mistake when the ship was built,” or the last minute veering of Phobos out of its orbit. Dealing with the more implausible scenarios sometimes took on a kind of surreal black humor, and Arkady replayed some of his videotapes as after-dinner entertainment, which sometimes got people launched into the air with laughter.
But the plausible problem runs … They kept on coming, morning after morning. And despite the solutions, despite the protocols for finding solutions, there was that sight, time after time: the red planet rushing at them at an unimaginable forty thousand kilometers an hour, until it filled the screen and the screen went white, and small black letters appeared on it: Collision.
They were traveling to Mars in a Type II Hohmann Ellipse, a slow but efficient course, chosen from among other alternatives mainly because the two planets were in the correct position for it when the ship was finally ready, with Mars about 45° ahead of Earth in the plane of the ecliptic. During the voyage they would travel just over halfway around the Sun, making their rendezvous with Mars some three hundred days later. Their womb time, as Hiroko called it.
The psychologists back home had judged it worthwhile to alter things from time to time, to suggest the passing of the seasons on the Ares. Length of days and nights, weather, and ambient colors were shifted to accomplish this. Some had maintained their landfall should be a harvest, others that it should be a new spring; after a short debate it had been decided by vote of the voyagers themselves to begin with early spring, so that they would travel through a summer rather than a winter; and as they approached their goal, the ship’s colors would turn to the autumn tones of Mars itself, rather than to the light greens and blossom pastels they had left so far behind.
So in those first months, as they finished their morning’s business, leaving the farm or the bridge, or staggering out of Arkady’s merrily sadistic simulations, they walked into springtime. Walls were hung with pale green panels, or mural-sized photos of azaleas, and jacarandas and ornamental cherries. The barley and mustard in the big farm rooms glowed vivid yellow with new blooms, and the forest biome and the ship’s seven park rooms had been stocked with trees and shrubs in the spring of their cycles. Maya loved these colorful spring blossoms, and after her mornings’ work she fulfilled part of her exercise regimen by taking a walk in the forest biome, which had a hilly floor, and was so thick with trees one could not see from one end of the chamber to the other. Here she often met Frank Chalmers of all people, taking one of his short breaks. He said he liked the spring foliage, though he never seemed to look at it. They walked together, and talked or not as the case might be. If they did talk, it was never about anything important; Frank didn’t care to discuss their work as leaders of the expedition. Maya found this peculiar, though she didn’t say so. But they did not have exactly the same jobs, which might account for his reluctance. Maya’s position was fairly informal and non-hierarchical; cosmonauts among themselves had always been relatively egalitarian, this had been the tradition since the days of Korolyov. The American program had a more military tradition, indicated even in titles: while Maya was merely Russian Contingent Co-ordinator, Frank was Captain Chalmers, and supposedly in the strong sense of the old sailing navies.
Whether this authority made it more or less difficult for him, he didn’t say. Sometimes he discussed the biome, or small technical problems, or news from home; more often he just seemed to want to walk with her. So – silent walks, up and down on narrow trails, through dense thickets of pine and aspen and birch. And always that presumption of closeness, as if they were old friends, or as if he were, very shyly (or subtly), courting her.
Thinking about that one day, it occurred to Maya that starting the Ares in springtime might have created a problem. Here they were in their mesocosm, sailing through spring, and everything was fertile and blooming, profligate and green, the air perfumed with flowers and windy, the days getting longer and warmer, and everyone in shirts and shorts, a hundred healthy animals, in close quarters, eating, exercising, showering, sleeping. Of course there had to be sex.
Well, it was nothing new. Maya herself had had some fantastic sex in space, most significantly during her second stint on Novy Mir, when she and Georgi and Yeli and Irina had tried every weightless variant imaginable, which was a great many indeed. But now it was different. They were older, they were stuck with each other for good: “Everything is different in a closed system,” as Hiroko often said in other contexts. The idea that they should stay on a fraternal basis was big at NASA: out of the 1,348 pages of the tome NASA had compiled called Human Relations In Transit To Mars, only a single page was devoted to the subject of sex; and that page advised against it. They were, the tome suggested, something like a tribe, with a sensible taboo against intra-tribal mating. The Russians laughed hilariously at this. Americans were such prudes, really. “We are not a tribe,” Arkady said.’ “We are the world.”
And it was spring. And there were the married couples aboard, some of whom were pretty demonstrative; and there was the swimming pool in Torus E, and the sauna and whirlpool bath. Bathing suits were used in mixed company, this because of the Americans again, but bathing suits were nothing. Naturally it began to happen. She heard from Nadia and Ivana that the bubble dome was being used for assignations in the quiet hours of the night; many of the cosmonauts and astronauts turned out to be fond of weightlessness. And the many nooks in the parks and the forest biome were serving as hideaways for those with less weightless experience; the parks had been designed to give people the sense that they could get away. And every person had a private soundproofed room of their own. With all that, if a couple wanted to begin a relationship without becoming an item in the gossip mill, it was possible to be very discreet.
Maya was sure there was more going on than any one person could know.
She could feel it. No doubt others did as well. Quiet conversations between couples; changes in dining room partners; quick glances, small smiles; hands touching shoulders or elbows in passing; oh yes, things were happening. It made for a kind of tension in the air, a tension that was only partly pleasant. Antarctic fears came back into play; and besides, there was only a small number of potential partners, which tended to give things a musical chairs kind of feeling.
And for Maya there were additional problems. She was even more wary than usual of Russian men, because in this case it would mean sleeping with the boss; she was suspicious of that, knowing how it had felt when she had done it herself. Besides, none of them … well, she was attracted to Arkady, but she did not like him; and he seemed uninterested. Yeli she knew from before, he was just a friend; Dmitri she didn’t care for; Vlad was older, Yuri not her type, Alex a follower of Arkady’s … on and on like that.
And as for the Americans, or the internationals; well, that was a different kind of problem. Cross cultures, who knew? So … she kept to herself. But she thought about it. And occasionally, while waking up in the morning, or finishing a workout, she floated on a wave of desire that left her washed up on the shore of bed or shower, feeling alone.
Thus late one morning, after a particularly harrowing problem run, which they had almost solved and then failed to solve, she ran into Frank Chalmers in the forest biome and returned his hello, and they walked for about ten meters into the woods, and stopped. She was in shorts and tank-top, barefoot, sweaty and flushed from the crazed simulation. He was in shorts and a T-shirt, barefoot, sweaty and dusty from the farm. Suddenly he laughed his sharp laugh, and reached out to touch her upper arm with two fingertips. “You’re looking happy today.” With that darting smile.
The leaders of the two halves of the expedition. Equals. She lifted her hand to touch his, and that was all it took.
They left the trail and ducked into a tight thicket of pine. They stopped to kiss, and it had been long enough since the last time that it felt strange to her. Tripping over a root Frank laughed under his breath, that quick secretive laugh which gave Maya a shiver, almost of fear. They sat on pine needles, rolled together like students necking in the woods. She laughed; she had always liked the quick approach, the way she could just knock a man down when she wanted to.
And so they made love. For a time passion took her away. Afterwards she relaxed, enjoying the wash of afterglow. But then it got a bit awkward, somehow; she didn’t know what to say. There was something hidden still about him, as if he were hiding even when making love. And even worse, what she could sense behind his reserve was some kind of triumph, as if he had won something and she had lost. That Puritan streak in Americans, that sense that sex was wrong and something that men had to trick women into. She had closed up a little herself, annoyed at that hidden smirk on his face. Win and lose, what children.
And yet they were co-mayors, so to speak. So if it was put on a zero sum basis …
Well, they talked for a while in a jovial enough way, and even made love again before they left. But it wasn’t quite the same as the first time, she found herself distracted. So much in sex was beyond rational analysis. Maya always felt things about her partners that she could not analyze or even express; but she always either liked what she felt or didn’t, there was no doubt about that. And looking at Frank Chalmers’s face after the first time, she had been sure that something wasn’t right. It made her uneasy.
But she was amiable, affectionate; it would not do to be put off at such a moment, no one would forgive that. They got up and dressed and went back into Torus D, and ate dinner at the same table with some others, and that was when it made perfect sense to become more distant. But then in the days after their encounter, she was surprised and displeased to find herself putting him off a little bit, making excuses to avoid being alone with him. It was awkward, not what she had wanted at all. She would have preferred not to feel the way she did, and once or twice after that they went off alone again, and when he started things she made love with him again, wanting it to work, feeling that she must have made a mistake or been in a bad mood somehow. But it was always the same, there was always that little smirk of triumph, that I-got-you that she disliked so much, that moralistic Puritan double-standard dirtiness.
And so she avoided him even more, to keep from getting into the start situation; and quickly enough he caught the drift. One afternoon he asked her to go for a walk in the biome and she declined, claiming fatigue; and a staccato look of surprise passed over his face, and then it had closed up like a mask. She felt badly, because she couldn’t even explain it to herself.
To try to make up for such an unreasonable withdrawal, she was friendly and forthright with him after that, as long as it was a safe situation. And once or twice she suggested, indirectly, that for her their encounters had been only a matter of sealing a friendship, something she had done with others as well. All this had to be conveyed between words, however, and it was possible he misunderstood; it was hard to say. After that first jolt of comprehension, he only seemed puzzled. Once, when she left a group just before it broke up, she had seen him give her a sharp glance; after that, only distance and reserve. But he had never been really upset, and he never pressed the issue, or came to her to talk about it. But that was part of the problem, wasn’t it? He didn’t seem to want to talk to her about that kind of thing.
Well, perhaps he had affairs going with other women, with some of the Americans, it was hard to say. He really did keep to himself. But it was … awkward.
Maya resolved to abolish the knockover seduction, no matter the thrill she got from it. Hiroko was right; everything was different in a closed system. It was too bad for Frank (if he did care), because he had served as her education in this regard. In the end she resolved to make it up to him, by being a good friend. She worked so hard at doing this that once, almost a month later, she miscalculated and went a little too far, to the point where he thought she was seducing him again. They had been part of a group, up late talking, and she had sat next to him, and afterwards he had clearly gotten the wrong impression, and walked with her around Torus D to the bathrooms, talking in the charming and affable way he had at this stage of things. Maya was vexed with herself; she didn’t want to seem completely fickle, although at this point either way she went it would probably look that way. So she went along with him, just because it was easier, and because there was a part of her that wanted to make love. And so she did, upset with herself and resolved that this should be the last time, a sort of final gift that would hopefully make the whole incident a good memory for him. She found herself becoming more passionate than ever before, she really wanted to please him. And then, just before orgasm, she looked up at his face, and it was like looking in the windows of an empty house.
That was the last time.
Δ V. V for velocity, delta for change. In space, this is the measure of the change in velocity required to get from one place to another – thus, a measure of the energy required to do it.
Everything is moving already. But to get something from the (moving) surface of the Earth into orbit around it, requires a minimum Δ v of ten kilometers per second; to leave Earth’s orbit and fly to Mars requires a minimum Δv of 3.6 kilometers per second; and to orbit Mars and land on it requires a Δv of about one kilometer per second. The hardest part is leaving Earth behind, for that is by far the deepest gravity well involved. Climbing up that steep curve of spacetime takes tremendous force, shifting the direction of an enormous inertia.
History too has an inertia. In the four dimensions of spacetime, particles (or events) have directionality; mathematicians, trying to show this, draw what they call “world lines” on graphs. In human affairs, individual world lines form a thick tangle, curling out of the darkness of prehistory and stretching through time: a cable the size of Earth itself, spiraling round the sun on a long curved course. That cable of tangled world lines is history. Seeing where it has been, it is clear where it is going – it is a matter of simple extrapolation. For what kind of Δ v would it take to escape history, to escape an inertia that powerful, and carve a new course?
The hardest part is leaving Earth behind.
The form of the Ares gave a structure to reality; the vacuum between Earth and Mars began to seem to Maya like a long series of cylinders, bent up at their joints at 45° angles. There was a runner’s course, a kind of steeplechase, around Torus C, and at each joint she slowed down in her run and tensed her legs for the increased pressure of the two 22.5° bends, and suddenly she could see up the length of the next cylinder. It was beginning to seem a rather narrow world.
Perhaps in compensation, the people inside began to get somehow larger. The process of shedding their Antarctic masks continued, and every time someone displayed some new and hitherto unknown characteristic, it made all who noticed it feel that much freer; and this feeling caused more hidden traits to be revealed. One Sunday morning the Christians aboard, numbering a dozen or so, celebrated Easter in the bubble dome. It was April back home, though the Ares’ season was midsummer. After their service they came down to the D dining hall for brunch. Maya, Frank, John, Arkady, and Sax were at a table, drinking cups of coffee and tea. The conversations among them and with other tables were densely interwoven, and at first only Maya and Frank heard what John was saying to Phyllis Boyle, the geologist who had conducted the Easter service.
“I understand the idea of the universe as a superbeing, and all its energy being the thoughts of this being. It’s a nice concept. But the Christ story …” John shook his head.
“Do you really know the story?” Phyllis asked.
“I was brought up Lutheran in Minnesota,” John replied shortly. “I went to confirmation class, had the whole thing drilled into me.”
Which, Maya thought, was probably why he bothered to get into discussions like this. He had a displeased expression that Maya had never seen before, and she leaned forward a bit, suddenly concentrating. She glanced at Frank; he was gazing into his coffee cup as if in a reverie, but she was sure he was listening.
John said, “You must know that the gospels were written decades after the event, by people who never met Christ. And that there are other gospels which reveal a different Christ, gospels that were excluded from the Bible by a political process in the third century. So he’s a kind of literary figure really, a political construct. We don’t know anything about the man himself.”
Phyllis shook her head. “That’s not true.”
“But it is,” John objected. This caused Sax and Arkady to look up from the next table. “Look, there’s a history to all this stuff. Monotheism is a belief system that you see appearing in early herding societies. The greater their dependence on sheep herding, the more likely their belief in a shepherd god. It’s an exact correlation, you can chart it and see. And the god is always male, because those societies were patriarchal. There’s a kind of archeology, an anthropology – a sociology of religion, that makes all of this perfectly clear – how it came about, what needs it fulfilled.”
Phyllis regarded him with a small smile. “I don’t know what to say to that, John. It’s not a matter of history, after all. It’s a matter of faith.”
“Do you believe in Christ’s miracles?”
“The miracles aren’t what matter. It’s not the church or its dogma that matters. It’s Jesus himself that matters.”
“But he’s just a literary construct,” John repeated doggedly. “Something like Sherlock Holmes, or the Lone Ranger. And you didn’t answer my question about the miracles.”
Phyllis shrugged. “I consider the presence of the universe to be a miracle. The universe and everything in it. Can you deny it?”
“Sure,” John said. “The universe just is. I define a miracle as an action that clearly breaks known physical law.”
“Like traveling to other planets?”
“No. Like raising the dead.”
“Doctors do that every day.”
“Doctors have never done that.”
Phyllis looked nonplussed. “I don’t know what to say to you, John. I’m kind of surprised. We don’t know everything, to pretend we do is arrogance. The creation is mysterious. To give something a name like ‘the big bang,’ and then think you have an explanation – it’s bad logic, bad thinking. Outside your rational scientific thought is an enormous area of consciousness, an area more important than science. Faith in God is part of that. And I suppose you either have it or you don’t.” She stood. “I hope it comes to you.” She left the room.
After a silence, John sighed. “Sorry, folks. Sometimes it still gets to me.”
“Whenever scientists say they’re Christian,” Sax said, “I take it to be an aesthetic statement.”
“The church of the wouldn’t-it-be-pretty-to-think-so,” Frank said, still looking into his cup.
Sax said, “They feel we’re missing a spiritual dimension of life that earlier generations had, and they attempt to regain it using the same means.” He blinked in his owlish way, as if the problem were disposed of by being defined.
“But that brings in so many absurdities!” John exclaimed.
“You just don’t have faith,” Frank said, egging him on.
John ignored him. “People who in the lab are as hard-headed as can be – you should see Phyllis grilling the conclusions her colleagues draw from their data! And then suddenly they start using all kinds of debater’s tricks, evasions, qualifications, fuzzy thinking of every kind. As if they were an entirely different person.”
“You just don’t have faith!” Frank repeated.
“Well I hope I never get it! It’s like being hit by a hammer in the head!”
John stood and took his tray to the kitchen. The rest looked at each other in silence. It must have been, Maya thought, a really bad confirmation class. Clearly none of the others had known any more than her about this side of their easygoing hero. Who knew what they would learn next, about him or any of them?
News of the argument between John and Phyllis spread through the crew. Maya wasn’t sure who was telling the story; neither John nor Phyllis seemed inclined to speak of it. Then she saw Frank with Hiroko, laughing as he told her something. Walking by them she heard Hiroko say, “You’ve got to admit Phyllis is right about that part – we don’t understand the why of things at all.”
Frank, then. Sowing discord between Phyllis and John. And (not a trivial point) Christianity was still a major force in America, and elsewhere. If word got around back home that John Boone was anti-Christian, it could give him problems. And that wouldn’t be such a bad thing for Frank. They were all getting media play on Earth, but if you watched some of the news and features, it became clear that some were getting more than others, and this made them seem more powerful, and so they became more powerful in fact, by association. Among this group were Vlad and Ursula (whom she suspected were more than friends, now), Frank, Sax – all people who had been well known before their selection – and none so much as John. So that any diminution in Earth’s regard for one of them might have a kind of corresponding effect on their status within the Ares. This at any rate seemed to be Frank’s operating principle.
It felt as if they were confined to the interior of a hotel with no exits, without even any balconies. The oppression of hotel life was growing; they had been inside now for four long months, but it was still less than half their trip. And none of their carefully designed physical surroundings or daily routines could hasten its end.
Then one morning the second flight team was dealing with another of Arkady’s problem runs, when all at once red lights burned on several screens.
“A solar flare has been detected by the solar monitoring equipment,” Rya said.
Arkady stood quickly. “That’s not me!” he exclaimed, and leaned over to read the screen nearest him. He looked up, met his colleagues’ skeptical stares, grinned. “Sorry, friends. This is the real wolf.”
An emergency message from Houston confirmed him. He could have faked those as well, but he was headed for the nearest spoke and there was nothing they could do; fake or not, they had to follow.
In fact, a big solar flare was an event they had simulated many times before. Everyone had tasks to perform, quite a few of them in a very short time, so they ran around the toruses, cursing their luck and trying not to get in each other’s way. There was a lot to do, as battening down was complicated and not very automated. In the midst of dragging plant trays into the plant shelter Janet yelled, “Is this one of Arkady’s tests?”
“He says not!”
“Shit.”
They had left Earth during the low point in the eleven-year sunspot cycle, specifically to reduce the chance of a flare like this occurring. And here it was anyway. They had about half an hour before the first radiation arrived, and no more than an hour after that the really hard stuff would follow.
Emergencies in space can be as obvious as an explosion or as intangible as an equation, but their obviousness has nothing to do with how dangerous they are. The crew’s senses would never perceive the subatomic wind approaching them, and yet it was one of the worst things that could have happened. And everyone knew it. They ran through the toruses to get their bit of battening done – plants had to be covered or moved to protected areas, the chickens and pigs and pygmy cows and the rest of the animals and birds had to be herded into their own little shelters, seeds and frozen embryos had to be collected and carried along, sensitive electrical components had to be boxed or likewise carried along. When they were done with these high-speed tasks they yanked themselves up the spokes to the central shaft as fast as they could, and then flew down the central shaft tube to the storm shelter, which was directly behind the tube’s aft end.
Hiroko and her biosphere team were the last ones in, banging through the hatch a full twenty-seven minutes after the initial alarm. They hurtled into the weightless space flushed and out of breath. “Has it started yet?”
“Not yet.”
They plucked personal dosimeters from a velcro pad of them, pinned them to their clothing.
The rest of the crew already floated in the semi-cylindrical chamber, breathing hard and nursing bruises and a few sprains. Maya ordered them to count off, and was relieved to hear the whole hundred run through without gaps.
The room seemed very crowded. They hadn’t gathered the whole hundred in one spot for many weeks, and even a max room didn’t seem large enough. This one occupied a tank in the middle strand of the hub shaft. The four tanks surrounding theirs were filled with water, and their tank was divided lengthwise between their room and another semi-cylinder that had been filled with heavy metals. This semi-cylinder’s flat side was their “floor,” and it was fitted inside the tank on circular tracks, and rotated to counteract the spin of the ship, keeping the tub between the crew and the sun.
So they floated in a non-rotating space, while the curved roof of the tank rotated over them at its usual four rpm. It was a peculiar sight, which along with the weightlessness made some people begin to look thoughtful in a pre-seasick kind of way. These unfortunates congregated down at the end of the shelter where the lavatories were located, and to help them out visually, everyone else oriented themselves to the floor. The radiation was therefore coming up through their feet, mostly gamma rays scattering out of the heavy metals. Maya felt an impulse to keep her knees together. People floated in place, or put on velcro slippers to walk over the floor. They talked in low voices, instinctively finding their next-door neighbors, their working partners, their friends. Conversations were subdued, as if a cocktail party had been told that the hors d’oeuvres had been tainted.
John Boone rip-ripped his way to the computer terminals at the fore end of the room where Arkady and Alex were monitoring the ship. He punched in a command, and the exterior radiation data were suddenly displayed on the room’s biggest screen. “Let’s see how much is hitting the ship,” he said brightly.
Groans. “Must we?” exclaimed Ursula.
“We might as well know,” John said. “And I want to see how well this shelter works. The one on the Rust Eagle was about as strong as the bib you wear at the dentist’s.”
Maya smiled. It was a reminder, rare from John, that he had been exposed to much more radiation than any of the rest of them – about a hundred and sixty rem over the course of his life, as he explained now in response to someone’s question. On Earth one caught a fifth of a roentgen equivalent man per year; orbiting Earth, still inside the protection of the Earth’s magnetosphere, one took around thirty-five per year. So John had taken a lot of heat. And somehow that gave him the right, now, to screen the exterior data if he wanted to.
Those who were interested – about sixty people – clumped behind him to watch the screen. The rest relocated at the far end of the tank with the people worrying about motion sickness, a group that definitely didn’t want to know how much radiation they were taking. Just the thought was enough to send some of them into the heads.
Then the full force of the flare struck. The exterior radiation count shifted to well above the solar wind’s usual level, and then soared in a sudden rush. An indrawn hiss came from several observers at once, and there were some shocked exclamations.
“But look how much the shelter is stopping,” John said, checking the dosimeter pinned to his shirt. “I’m still at 1.3 rem.”
That was several lifetimes of dentists’ X-rays, to be sure; but the radiation outside the storm shelter was already 70 rem, well-on its way to a lethal dose, so they were getting off lightly. Still, the amount flying through the rest of the ship! Billions of particles were penetrating the ship and colliding with the atoms of water and metal they were huddled behind; hundreds of millions were flying between these atoms and then through the atoms of their bodies, touching nothing, as if they were no more than ghosts. Still, thousands were striking atoms of flesh and bone. Most of those collisions were harmless; but in all those thousands, there were in all probability one or two (or three?) in which a chromosome strand was taking a hit, and kinking in the wrong way: and there it was. Tumor initiation, begun with just that typo in the book of the self. And years later, unless the victim’s DNA luckily repaired itself, the tumor promotion that was a more or less unavoidable part of living would have its effect, and there would appear a bloom of Something Else inside: cancer. Leukemia, most likely; and, most likely, death.
So it was hard not to regard the figures unhappily. 14.658 rems, 1.786, 19.004. “Like an odometer,” Boone said calmly as he looked at his dosimeter. He was gripping a rail with both hands and pulling himself back and forth, as if doing isometric exercises. Frank saw it and said, “John, what the hell are you doing?”
“Dodging,” John said. He smiled at Frank’s frown. “You know – moving target!”
People laughed at him. With the extent of the danger precisely charted on screens and graphs, they were beginning to feel less helpless. This was illogical, but naming was the power that made every human a scientist of sorts. And these were scientists by profession, with many astronauts among them as well, trained to accept the possibility of such a storm. All those mental habits began channeling their thoughts, and the shock of the event receded a bit. They were coming to terms with it.
Arkady went to a terminal and called up Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, picking it up in the third movement, when the village dance is disrupted by storm. He turned up the volume, and they floated together in the long half-cylinder, listening to the intensity of Beethoven’s fierce tempest, which suddenly seemed to enunciate perfectly the lashings of the silent wind pouring through them. It would sound just like that! Strings and woodwinds shrieking in wild gusts, out of control and yet beautifully melodic at the same time – a shiver ran down Maya’s spine. She had never listened to the old warhorse this closely before, and she looked with admiration (and a bit of fear) at Arkady, who was beaming ecstatically at the effects of his inspired disk jockeying, and dancing like some red knot of fluff in the wind. When the symphony’s storm peaked, it was difficult to believe that the radiation count wasn’t rising; and when the musical storm abated, it seemed like theirs should be over too. Thunder muttered, the last gusts whistled through. The French horn sang its serene all-clear.
People began to talk about other things, discussing the various business of the day that had been so rudely interrupted, or taking the opportunity to talk about other things. After a half hour or more, one of those conversations got louder; Maya didn’t hear how it began, but suddenly Arkady said, very loudly and in English, “I don’t think we should pay any attention to plans made for us back on Earth!”
Other conversations went silent, and people turned to look at him. He had popped up and was floating under the rotating roof of the chamber, where he could survey them all and speak like some mad flying spirit.
“I think we should make new plans,” he said. “I think we should be making them now. Everything should be redesigned from beginning, with our own thinking expressed. It should extend everywhere, even to first shelters we build.”
“Why bother?” Maya asked, annoyed at his grandstanding. “They’re good designs.” It really was irritating; Arkady often took center stage, and people always looked at her as if she were somehow responsible for him, as if it were her job to keep him from pestering them.
“Buildings are the template of a society,” Arkady said.
“They’re rooms,” Sax Russell pointed out.
“But rooms imply the social organization inside them.” Arkady looked around, pulling people into the discussion with his gaze. “The arrangement of a building shows what the designer thinks should go on inside. We saw that at the beginning of the voyage, when Russians and Americans were segregated into Torus D and B. We were supposed to remain two entities, you see. It will be same on Mars. Buildings express values, they have a sort of grammar, and rooms are the sentences. I don’t want people in Washington or Moscow saying how I should live my life: I’ve had enough of that.”
“What don’t you like about the design of the first shelters?” John asked, looking interested.
“They are rectangular,” Arkady said. This got a laugh, but he persevered: “Rectangular, the conventional shape! With work space separated from living quarters, as if work were not part of life. And the living quarters are taken up mostly by private rooms, with hierarchies expressed, in that leaders are assigned larger spaces.”
“Isn’t that just to facilitate their work?” Sax said.
“No. It isn’t really necessary. It’s a matter of prestige. A very conventional example of American business thinking, if I may say so.”
There was a groan, and Phyllis said, “Do we have to get political, Arkady?”
At the very mention of the word, the cloud of listeners ruptured; Mary Dunkel and a couple of others pushed out and headed for the other end of the room.
“Everything is political,” Arkady said at their backs. “Nothing more so than this voyage of ours. We are beginning a new society, how could it help but be political?”
“We’re a scientific station,” Sax said. “It doesn’t necessarily have much politics to it.”
“It certainly didn’t last time I was there,” John said, looking thoughtfully at Arkady.
“It did,” Arkady said, “but it was simpler. You were an all-American crew, there on a temporary mission, doing what your superiors told you to do. But now we are an international crew, establishing a permanent colony. It’s completely different.”
Slowly people were drifting through the air toward the conversation, to hear better what was being said. Rya Jiminez said, “I’m not interested in politics,” and Mary Dunkel agreed from the other end of the room: “That’s one of the things I’m here to get away from!”
Several Russians replied at once. “That itself is a political position!” and the like. Alex exclaimed, “You Americans would like to end politics and history, so you can stay in a world you dominate!”
A couple of Americans tried to protest, but Alex overrode them: “It’s true! The whole world has changed in the last thirty years, every country looking at its function, making enormous changes to solve problems – all but the United States. You have become the most reactionary country in the world.”
Sax said, “The countries that changed had to because they were rigid before, and almost broke. The United States already had flex in its system, and so it didn’t have to change as drastically. I say the American way is superior because it’s smoother. It’s better engineering.”
This analogy gave Alex pause, and while he was thinking about it John Boone, who had been watching Arkady with great interest, said, “Getting back to the shelters. How would you make them different?”
Arkady said, “I’m not quite sure – we need to see the sites we build on, walk around in them, talk it over. It’s a process I advocate, you see. But in general I think work space and living space should be mixed as much as is practical. Our work will be more than making wages – it will be our art, our whole life. We will give it to each other, we will not buy it. Also there should be no signs of hierarchy. I don’t even believe in the leader system we have now.” He nodded politely at Maya. “We are all equally responsible now, and our buildings should show it. A circle is best – difficult in construction terms, but it makes sense for heat conservation. A geodesic dome would be a good compromise – easy to construct, and indicating our equality. As for the insides, perhaps mostly open. Everyone should have their room, sure, but these should be small. Set in the rim, perhaps, and facing larger communal spaces — “ He picked up a mouse at one terminal, began to sketch on the screen. “There. This is architectural grammar that would say ‘All equal.’ Yes?”
“There’s lots of prefab units already there,” John said. “I’m not sure they could be adapted.”
“They could if we wanted to do it.”
“But is it really necessary? I mean, it’s clear we’re already a team of equals.”
“Is it clear?” Arkady said sharply, looking around. “If Frank and Maya tell us to do something, are we free to ignore them? If Houston or Baikonur tell us to do something, are we free to ignore them?”
“I think so,” John replied mildly.
This statement got him a sharp look from Frank. The conversation was breaking up into several arguments, as a lot of people had things to say, but Arkady cut through them all again:
“We have been sent here by our governments, and all of our governments are flawed, most of them disastrously. It’s why history is such a bloody mess. Now we are on our own, and I for one have no intention of repeating all of Earth’s mistakes just because of conventional thinking. We are the first Martian colonists! We are scientists! It is our job to think things new, to make them new!”
The arguments broke out again, louder than ever. Maya turned away and cursed Arkady under her breath, dismayed at how angry people were getting. She saw that John Boone was grinning. He pushed off the floor toward Arkady, came to a stop by piling into him, and then shook Arkady’s hand, which action swung them both around in the air, in an awkward kind of dance. This gesture of support immediately set people to thinking again – Maya could see it on their surprised faces; along with John’s fame he had a reputation for being moderate and low-keyed, and if he approved of Arkady’s ideas, then it was a different matter.
“Goddammit, Ark,” John said. “First those crazy problem runs, and now this – you’re a wild man, you really are! How in the hell did you get them to let you on board this ship, anyway?”
Exactly my question, thought Maya.
“I lied,” Arkady said.
Everyone laughed. Even Frank, looking surprised. “But of course I lied!” Arkady shouted, a big upside-down grin splitting his red beard. “How else could I get here? I want to go to Mars to do what I want, and selection committee wanted people to go and do what they were told. You know that!” He pointed down at them, shouted: “You all lied, you know you did!”
Frank was laughing harder than ever. Sax wore his usual Buster Keaton, but he raised a finger and said, “The Revised Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory,” and a great jeer went up from them all. They had all been required to take this exam: it was the world’s most widely used psychological test, and well regarded by experts. Respondents agreed or disagreed to five hundred and fifty-six statements, and a profile was formed from the replies; but the judgements concerning what the answers meant were based on the earlier responses of a sample group of 2,600 white, married, middle class Minnesota farmers of the 1930s. Despite all subsequent revisions, the pervading bias created by the nature of that first test group was still deeply engrained in the test; or at least some of them thought so. “Minnesota!” Arkady shouted, rolling his eyes. “Farmers! Farmers from Minnesota! I tell you this now, I lied in answer to every single question! I answered exactly opposite to what I really felt, and this is what allowed me to score as normal!”
Wild cheers greeted this announcement. “Hell,” John said, “I’m from Minnesota and I had to lie.”
More cheers. Frank, Maya noted, was crimson with hilarity, incapable of speech, hands clutching his stomach, nodding, giggling, helpless to stop himself. She had never seen him laugh like that.
Sax said, “The test made you lie.”
“What, not you?” Arkady demanded. “Didn’t you lie too?”
“Well, no,” Sax said, blinking as if the concept had never occurred to him before. “I told the truth to every question.”
They laughed harder than ever. Sax looked startled at their response, but that only made him look funnier.
Someone shouted, “What do you say, Michel? How do you account for yourself?”
Michel Duval spread his hands. “You may be underestimating the sophistication of the RMMPI. There are questions which test how honest you are being.”
This statement brought down a rain of questions on his head, a methodological inquisition. What were his controls?
How did the testers make their theories falsifiable? How did they repeat them? How did they eliminate alternative explanations of the data? How could they claim to be scientific in any sense of the word whatsoever? Clearly a lot of them considered psychology a pseudoscience, and many had considerable resentment for the hoops they had been forced to jump through to get aboard. The years of competition had taken their toll. And the discovery of this shared feeling sparked a score of voluble conversations. The tension raised by Arkady’s political talk disappeared.
Perhaps, Maya thought, Arkady had defused the one with the other. If so it had been cleverly done, but Arkady was a clever man. She thought back. Actually it had been John Boone who had changed the subject. He had in effect flown to the ceiling and come to Arkady’s rescue, and Arkady had seized the chance. They were both clever men. And it seemed possible they were in some sort of collusion. Forming a kind of alternative leadership, perhaps, one American, one Russian. Something would have to be done about that.
She said to Michel, “Do you think it’s a bad sign we all consider ourselves such liars?”
Michel shrugged. “It’s been healthy to talk about it. Now we realize we’re more alike than we thought. No one has to feel they were unusually dishonest to get aboard.”
“And you?” Arkady asked. “Did you present yourself as most rational and balanced psychologist, hiding the strange mind we have come to know and love?”
A small smile from Michel. “You’re the expert in strange minds, Arkady.”
Then the few still watching the screens called out. The radiation count had started to fall. After a while it slipped back to just a little above normal.
Someone returned the Pastoral to the moment of the horn call. The last movement of the symphony, “Glad and Grateful Feelings After the Storm,” poured over the speaker system, and as they left the shelter and fanned out through the ship like dandelion seeds on a breeze, the beautiful old folk melody was broadcast throughout the Ares, elaborating itself in all its Brucknerian richness. While it played, they found that the ship’s hardened systems had survived intact. The thicker walls of the farm and the forest biome had afforded the plants some protection, and although there would be some die-offs and an entire crop they could not eat, the seed stocks were not harmed. The animals could not be eaten either, but presumably would give birth to a healthy next generation. The only casualties were some uncaptured songbirds from D’s dining hall; they found a scattering of them dead on the floor.
As for the crew, the shelter’s protection had shielded them from all but about 6 rem. That was bad for a mere three hours, but it could have been worse. The exterior of the ship had taken over 140 rem, a lethal dose.
Six months inside a hotel, with never a walk outside. Inside it was late summer, and the days were long. Green dominated the walls and ceilings, and people went barefoot. Quiet conversations were nearly inaudible in the hum of machinery, the whoosh of ventilators. The ship seemed empty somehow, whole sections of it abandoned as the crew settled down to wait. Small knots of people sat in the halls in Toruses B and D, talking. Some stopped their conversations when Maya wandered by, which she naturally found disturbing. She was having trouble falling asleep, trouble waking up. Work made her restless: all the engineers were only waiting, after all, and the simulations had gotten nearly intolerable. She had trouble gauging the passage of time. She stumbled more than she used to. She had gone to see Vlad and he had recommended over-hydration, more running, more swimming.
Hiroko told her to spend more time on the farm. She gave it a try, spending hours weeding, harvesting, trimming, fertilizing, watering, talking, sitting on a bench, looking at leaves: spacing out. The farm rooms were max chambers, their barrel roofs lined with bright sunstrips. The multi-leveled floors were crowded with crops, many new since the storm. There was not enough space to feed the crew entirely on farm food, but Hiroko disliked that fact and struggled against it, converting storage rooms as they emptied out. Dwarf strains of wheat, rice, soy and barley grew in stacked trays; above the trays hung rows of hydroponic vegetables and enormous clear jars of green and yellow algae, used to help regulate the gas exchange.
Some days Maya did nothing but watch the farm team work. Hiroko and her assistant Iwao were always tinkering at the endless project of maximizing the closure of their biological life support system, and they had a crew of other regulars working on it: Raul, Rya, Gene, Evgenia, Andrea, Roger, Ellen, Bob and Tasha. Success in the closure attempt was measured in K values, K representing closure itself. Thus for every substance they recycled,
where E was the rate of consumption in the system, e the rate of (incomplete) closure, and I a constant for which Hiroko, earlier in her career, had established a corrected value. The goal, K = I-1, was unreachable, but asymptotically approaching it was the farm biologists’ favorite game, and more than that, critical to their eventual existence on Mars. So conversations about it could extend over days, spiraling off into complexities that no one really understood. In essence the farm team was already at their real work, which Maya envied; she was so sick of simulations!
Hiroko was an enigma to Maya. Aloof and serious, she always seemed absorbed in her work and her team tended always to be around her, as if she was the queen of a realm that had nothing to do with the rest of the ship. Maya didn’t like that, but there was nothing she could do about it. And something in Hiroko’s attitude made it not so threatening: it was just a fact, the farm was a separate place, its crew a separate society. And it was possible that Maya could use them to counterbalance the influence of Arkady and John somehow; so she did not worry about their separate realm. In fact she joined them more than ever before. Sometimes she went with them up to the hub at the end of a work session, to play a game they had invented called tunneljump. There was a jump tube down the central shaft; all the joints between cylinders had been expanded to the same width as the cylinders themselves, making a single smooth tube. There were rails to facilitate quick movement back and forth along this tube, but in their game, jumpers stood on the storm shelter hatch, and tried to leap up the tube to the bubble dome hatch, a full five hundred meters away, without bumping into the walls or railings. Coriolis forces made this effectively impossible, and flying even halfway would usually win a game. But one day Hiroko came by on her way to check an experimental crop in the bubble dome, and after greeting them she crouched on the shelter hatch and jumped, and slowly floated the full length of the tunnel, rotating as she flew, and stopping herself at the bubble dome hatch with a single outstretched hand.
The players stared up the tunnel in stunned silence.
“Hey!” Rya called to Hiroko. “How did you do that?”
“Do what?”
They explained the game to her. She smiled, and Maya was suddenly certain she had already known the rules. “So how did you do it?” Rya repeated.
“You jump straight!” Hiroko explained, and disappeared into the bubble dome.
That night at dinner the story got around. Frank said to Hiroko, “Maybe you just got lucky.”
Hiroko smiled. “Maybe you and I should total twenty jumps and see who wins.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“What’ll we bet?”
“Money, of course.”
Hiroko shook her head. “Do you really think money matters anymore?”
A few days later Maya floated under the curve of the bubble dome with Frank and John, looking ahead at Mars, which was now a gibbous orb the size of a dime.
“A lot of arguments these days,” John remarked casually. “I hear Alex and Mary got into an actual fight. Michel says it’s to be expected, but still …”
“Maybe we brought too many leaders,” Maya said.
“Maybe you should have been the only one,” Frank jibed.
“Too many chiefs?” said John.
Frank shook his head. “That’s not it.”
“No? There are a lot of stars on board.”
“The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.”
“I leave the judgement to you, Captain.” John grinned at Frank’s scowl. He was, Maya thought, the only relaxed person left among them.
“The shrinks saw the problem,” Frank went on, “it was obvious enough even for them. They used the Harvard solution.”
“The Harvard solution,” John repeated, savoring the phrase.
“Long ago Harvard’s administrators noticed that if they accepted only straight A high school students, and then gave out the whole range of grades to freshmen, a distressing number of them were getting unhappy at their Ds and Fs and messing up the Yard by blowing their brains out on it.”
“Couldn’t have that,” John said.
Maya rolled her eyes. “You two must have gone to trade schools, eh?”
“The trick to avoiding this unpleasantness, they found, was to accept a certain percentage of students who were used to getting mediocre grades, but had distinguished themselves in some other way—”
“Like having the nerve to apply to Harvard with mediocre grades?”
“—used to the bottom of the grade curve, and happy just to be at Harvard at all.”
“How did you hear of this?” Maya asked.
Frank smiled. “I was one of them.”
“We don’t have any mediocrities on this ship,” John said.
Frank looked dubious. “We do have a lot of smart scientists with no interest in running things. Many of them consider it boring. Administration, you know. They’re glad to hand it over to people like us.”
“Beta males,” John said, mocking Frank and his interest in sociobiology. “Brilliant sheep.” The way they mocked each other—
“You’re wrong,” Maya said to Frank.
“Maybe so. Anyway, they’re the body politic. They have at least the power to follow.” He said this as if the idea depressed him.
John, due for a shift on the bridge, said goodbye and left.
Frank floated over to Maya’s side and she shifted nervously. They had never discussed their brief affair and it hadn’t come up, even indirectly, in quite a while. She had thought about what to say if it ever did: she would say that she occasionally indulged herself with men she liked. That it had been something done on the spur of the moment.
But he only pointed to the red dot in the sky. “I wonder why we’re going.”
Maya shrugged. Probably he meant not we, but I. “Everyone has their reasons,” she said.
He glanced at her. “That’s so true.”
She ignored his tone of voice. “Maybe it’s our genes,” she said. “Maybe they felt things going wrong on Earth. Felt an increased speed of mutation, or something like that.”
“So they struck out for a clean start.”
“Yes.”
“The selfish gene theory. Intelligence only a tool to aid successful reproduction.”
“I suppose.”
“But this trip endangers successful reproduction,” Frank said. “It isn’t safe out here.”
“But it isn’t safe on Earth either. Waste, radiation, other people …”
Frank shook his head. “No. I don’t think the selfishness is in the genes. I think it’s somewhere else.” He reached out with a forefinger, and tapped her between the breasts – a solid tap on the sternum, causing him to drift back to the floor. Staring at her the whole while, he touched himself in the same place. “Good night, Maya.”
A week or two later Maya was in the farm harvesting cabbages, walking down an aisle between long stacked trays of them. She had the room to herself. The cabbages looked like rows of brains, pulsing with thought in the bright afternoon light.
Then she saw a movement and looked to the side. Across the room, through an algae bottle, she saw a face. The glass of the bottle warped it: a man’s face, brown-skinned. The man was looking to the side and didn’t see her. It appeared he was talking to someone she couldn’t see. He shifted, and the image of his face came clear, magnified in the middle of the bottle. She understood why she was watching so closely, why her stomach was clenched: she had never seen him before.
He turned and looked her way. Through two curves of glass their eyes met. He was a stranger, thin-faced and big-eyed.
He disappeared in a brown blur. For a second Maya hesitated, scared to pursue him; then she forced herself to run the length of the room and up the two bends of the joint, into the next cylinder. It was empty. She ran through three more cylinders before stopping. Then she stood there, looking at tomato vines, her breath rasping hard in her throat. She was sweating yet felt chilled. A stranger. It was impossible. But she had seen him! She concentrated on the memory, tried to see the face again. Perhaps it had been … but no. It had been none of the hundred, she knew that. Facial recognition was one of the mind’s strongest abilities: it was amazingly accurate. And he had run away at the sight of her.
A stowaway. But that too was impossible! Where would he hide, how would he live? What would he have done in the radiation storm?
Had she begun to hallucinate, then? Had it come to that?
She walked back to her room, sick to her stomach. The hallways of Torus D were somehow dark despite their bright illumination, and the back of her neck crawled. When the door appeared she dove into the refuge of her room. But her room was just a bed and a side table, a chair and a closet, some shelves of stuff. She sat there for an hour, then two. But there was nothing there for her to do, no answers, no distractions. No escape.
Maya found herself unable to mention her sighting to anyone, and in a way this was more frightening than the incident itself, as it emphasized to her its impossibility. People would think she had gone mad. What other conclusion was there? How would he eat, where would he hide? No. Too many people would have to know, it really wasn’t possible. But that face!
One night she saw it again in a dream, and woke up in a sweat. Hallucination was one of the symptoms of space breakdown, as she well knew. It happened fairly frequently during long stays in Earth orbit, a couple dozen incidences had been recorded. Usually people started by hearing voices in the ever-present background noise of ventilation and machinery, but a fairly common alternative was the sighting of a workmate who wasn’t there, or worse yet of a doppelgänger, as if empty space had begun to fill with mirrors. Shortage of sensory stimuli was believed to cause the phenomena, and the Ares, with its long voyage, and no Earth to look at, and a brilliant (and some might say driven) crew, had been judged a potential hazard. This was one of the main reasons the ship’s rooms had been given so much variety of color and texture, along with changing daily and seasonal weather. And still she had seen something that couldn’t be there.
And now when she walked through the ship, it seemed to her that the crew was breaking up into small and private groups, groups which rarely interacted. The farm team spent almost all its time in the farms, even eating meals there on the floors, and sleeping (together, rumor had it) among the rows of plants. The medical team had its own suite of rooms and offices and labs in Torus B and they spent their time in there, absorbed with experiments and observations and consultations with Earth. The flight team was preparing for MOI, running several simulations a day. And the rest were … scattered. Hard to find. As she walked around the toruses the rooms seemed emptier than ever before. The D dining hall was never full anymore. And then again in the separated clumps of diners that were there she noticed arguments broke out fairly frequently, and were hushed with peculiar speed. Private spats, but about what?
Maya herself said less at table, and listened more. You could tell a lot about a society by what topics of conversation came up. In this crowd, the talk was almost always science. Shop talk: biology, engineering, geology, medicine, whatever. You could chat forever about that stuff.
But when the number of people in a conversation fell below four, she noticed, the topics of conversation tended to change. Shop talk was augmented (or replaced entirely) by gossip; and the gossip was always about those two great forms of the social dynamic, sex and politics. Voices lowered, heads leaned in; and word got around. Rumors about sexual relations were becoming more common and more quiet, more caustic and more complex. In a few cases, as in the unfortunate triangle of Janet Blyleven, Mary Dunkel and Alex Zhalin, it went very public and became the talk of the ship; in others it stayed so hidden that the talk was in whispers, accompanied by pointed, inquisitive glances. Janet Blyleven would walk into the dining hall with Roger Calkins, and Frank would remark to John, in an undertone meant to reach Maya’s ears, “Janet thinks we’re a panmixia.” Maya would ignore him, as she always did when he spoke in that sneery tone of voice; but later she looked up the word in a sociobiology lexicon, and found that a panmixia was a group where every male mated with every female.
The next day she looked at Janet curiously; she had had no idea. Janet was friendly, she leaned in at you as you talked, and really paid attention. And she had a quick smile. But … well, the ship had been built to insure a lot of privacy. No doubt there was more happening than anyone could know.
And among these secret lives, might there not be another secret life, led in solitude, or in teamwork with some few among them, some small clique or cabal?
“Have you noticed anything funny lately?” she asked Nadia one day, at the end of their regular breakfast chat.
Nadia shrugged. “People are bored. It’s about time to get there, I think.”
Maybe that was all it was.
Nadia said, “Did you hear about Hiroko and Arkady?”
Rumors were constantly swirling about Hiroko. Maya found it distasteful, disturbing. That the lone Asian woman among them should be the focus of that kind of thing – dragon lady, mysterious orient… Underneath the scientific rational surfaces of their minds, there were so many deep and powerful superstitions. Anything might happen, anything was possible.
Like a face seen through a glass.
And so she listened with a tight feeling in her stomach as Sasha Yefremov leaned over from the next table and responded to Nadia’s question by wondering if Hiroko were developing a male harem. That was nonsense; although an alliance of some sort between Hiroko and Arkady had an unsettling sort of logic to Maya, she was not sure why. Arkady was very open in advocating independence from mission control, Hiroko never talked about it at all; but in her actions hadn’t she already led the whole farm team away, into a mental torus the others could never enter?
But then when Sasha claimed in a low voice that Hiroko had plans to fertilize several of her own ova with sperm from all the men on the Ares and store them cryonically for later growth on Mars, Maya could only sweep up her tray and head for the dishwashers, feeling something like vertigo. They were becoming strange.
The red crescent grew to the size of a quarter, and the feeling of tension grew as well, as if it were the hour before a thunderstorm, and the air charged with dust and creosote and static electricity. As if the god of war were really up there on that blood dot, waiting for them. The green wall panels inside the Ares were now flecked with yellow and brown, and the afternoon light was thick with sodium vapor’s pale bronze.
People spent hours in the bubble dome, watching what none among them but John had seen before. The exercise machines were in constant use, the simulations performed with renewed enthusiasm. Janet took a swing through the toruses, sending back video images of all the changes in their little world; then she threw her glasses on a table, and resigned her post as reporter. “Look, I’m tired of being an outsider,” she said. “Every time I walk into a room everyone shuts up, or starts preparing their official line. It’s like I was a spy for an enemy!”
“You were,” Arkady said, and gave her a big hug.
At first no one volunteered to take over her job. Houston sent messages of concern, then reprimands, then veiled threats. Now that they were about to reach Mars, the expedition was getting a lot more TV time, and the situation was about to “go nova,” as mission control put it. They reminded the colonists that this burst of publicity would eventually reap the space program all kinds of benefits; the colonists had to film and broadcast what they were doing, to stimulate public support for the later Mars missions on which they were going to depend. It was their duty to transmit their stories!
Frank got on the screen and suggested that mission control could concoct their video reports out of footage from robot cameras. Hastings, head of Mission Control in Houston, was visibly infuriated by this response. But as Arkady said, with a grin that extended the realm of the question to everything: “What can they do?”
Maya shook her head. They were sending a bad signal, she knew; and revealing what the video reports had so far hidden, that the group was splintering into rival cliques. Which indicated Maya’s own lack of control over the Russian half of the expedition. She was about to ask Nadia to take over the reporting job as a favor to her, when Phyllis and some of her friends in Torus B volunteered for the job. Maya, laughing at the expression on Arkady’s face, gave it to them. Arkady pretended not to care. Irritated, Maya said in Russian, “You know you’ve missed a chance! A chance to shape our reality, in effect!”
“Not our reality, Maya. Their reality. And I don’t care what they think.”
Maya and Frank began conferring about landfall assignments. To a certain extent these were predetermined by the crew members’ areas of expertise, but because of all the skill redundancies, there were still some choices to be made. And Arkady’s provocations had had this effect at least: Mission Control’s preflight plans were now generally regarded as provisional at best. In fact no one seemed all that inclined to acknowledge Maya’s or Frank’s authority either, which made things tense when it became known what they were working on.
Mission Control’s preflight plan called for the establishment of a base colony on the plains north of Ophir Chasma, the enormous northern arm of Valles Marineris. All the farm team was assigned to the base, and a majority of the engineers and medical people – altogether, around sixty of the hundred. The rest would be scattered on subsidiary missions, returning to the base camp from time to time. The largest subsidiary mission was to dock a part of the disassembled Ares on Phobos, and begin transforming that moon into a space station. Another smaller mission would leave the base camp and travel north to the polar cap, to build a mining system which would transport blocks of ice back to the base. A third mission was to make a series of geological surveys, traveling all over the planet; a glamor assignment for sure. All the smaller groups would become semi-autonomous for periods of up to a year, so selecting them was no trivial matter; they knew well, now, how long a year could be.
Arkady and a group of his friends – Alex, Roger, Samantha, Edvard, Janet, Tatiana, Elena – requested all the jobs on Phobos. When Phyllis and Mary heard about it, they came to Maya and Frank to protest. “They’re obviously trying to take over Phobos, and who knows what they’ll do with it?”
Maya nodded, and she could see Frank didn’t like it either. The problem was, no one else wanted to stay on Phobos; even Phyllis and Mary weren’t clamoring to replace Arkady’s crew, so it wasn’t clear how to oppose him.
Louder arguments broke out when Ann Clayborne passed around her crew list for the geological survey. A lot of people wanted to join that one, and several of those left off her list said they were going on surveys whether Ann wanted them or not.
Arguments became frequent, and vehement. Almost everyone aboard declared themselves for one mission or another, positioning themselves for the final decisions. Maya felt that she was losing all control of the Russian contingent; she was getting furious at Arkady. In a general meeting she suggested sarcastically that they let the computer make the assignments. The idea was rejected with no regard for her authority. She threw up her hands. “Then what do we do?”
No one knew.
She and Frank conferred in private. “Let’s try giving them the illusion of making the decision,” he said to her with a brief smile; she realized that he was not displeased to have seen her fail in the general meeting. Their encounter was coming back to haunt her, and she cursed herself for a fool. Little politburos were dangerous …
Frank polled everyone concerning their wishes, and then displayed the results on the bridge, listing everyone’s first, second and third choices. The geological surveys were popular, while staying on Phobos was not. Everyone already knew this, and the posted lists proved that there were fewer conflicts than it had seemed. “There are complaints about Arkady taking over Phobos,” Frank said at the next public meeting. “But no one but him and his friends want that job. Everyone else wants to get down to the surface.”
Arkady said, “In fact we should get hardship compensation.”
“It’s not like you to talk about compensation, Arkady,” Frank said smoothly.
Arkady grinned and sat back down.
Phyllis wasn’t amused. “Phobos will be a link between Earth and Mars, like the space stations in Earth orbit. You can’t get from one planet to the other without them, they’re what naval strategists call choke points.”
“I promise to keep my hands off your neck,” Arkady said to her.
Frank snapped, “We’re all going to be part of the same village! Anything we do affects all of us! And judging by the way you’re acting, dividing up from time to time will be good for us. I for one wouldn’t mind having Arkady out of my sight for a few months.”
Arkady bowed. “Phobos here we come!”
But Phyllis and Mary and their crowd still were not happy. They spent a lot of time conferring with Houston, and whenever Maya went into Torus B, conversations seemed to cease, eyes followed her suspiciously – as if being Russian would automatically put her in Arkady’s camp! She damned them for fools, and damned Arkady even more. He had started all this.
But in the end it was hard to tell what was going on, with a hundred people scattered in what suddenly felt like such a large ship. Interest groups, micropolitics; they really were fragmenting. One hundred people only, and yet they were too large a community to cohere! And there was nothing she or Frank could do about it.
One night she dreamed again of the face in the farm. She woke shaken, and was unable to fall back asleep; and suddenly everything seemed out of control. They flew through the vacuum of space inside a small knot of linked cans, and she was supposed to be in charge of this mad argosy! It was absurd!
She left her room, climbed D’s spoke tunnel to the central shaft. She pulled herself to the bubble dome, forgetting the tunneljump game.
It was four a.m. The inside of the bubble dome was like a planetarium after the audience has gone: silent, empty, with thousands of stars packed into the black hemisphere of the dome. Mars hung directly overhead, gibbous and quite distinctly spherical, as if a stone orange had been tossed among the stars. The four great volcanoes were visible pockmarks, and it was possible to make out the long rifts of Marineris. She floated under it, spreadeagled and spinning very slightly, trying to comprehend it, trying to feel something specific in the dense interference pattern of her emotions. When she blinked, little spherical teardrops floated out and away among the stars.
The lock door opened. John Boone floated in, saw her, grabbed the door handle to stop himself. “Oh, sorry. Mind if I join you?”
“No.” Maya sniffed and rubbed her eyes. “What gets you up at this hour?”
“I’m often up early. And you?”
“Bad dreams.”
“Of what?”
“I can’t remember,” she said, seeing the face in her mind.
He pushed off, floated past her to the dome. “I can never remember my dreams.”
“Never?”
“Well, rarely. If something wakes me up in the middle of one, and I have time to think about it, then I might remember it, for a little while anyway.”
“That’s normal. But it’s a bad sign if you never remember your dreams at all.”
“Really? What’s it a symptom of?”
“Of extreme repression, I seem to recall.” She had drifted to the side of the dome; she pushed off through the air, stopped herself against the dome next to him. “But that may be Freudianism.”
“In other words something like the theory of phlogiston.”
She laughed. “Exactly.”
They looked out at Mars, pointed out features to each other. Talked. Maya glanced at him as he spoke. Such bland, happy good looks; he really was not her type. In fact she had taken his cheeriness for a kind of stupidity back at the beginning. But over the course of the voyage she had seen that he was not stupid.
“What do you think of all the arguments about what we should do up there?” she asked, gesturing at the red stone ahead of them.
“I don’t know.”
“I think Phyllis makes a lot of good points.”
He shrugged. “I don’t think that matters.”
“What do you mean?”
“The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims, with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgement on what they think of X and Y.”
“But we’re scientists! We’re trained to weigh the evidence. ”
John nodded. “True. In fact, since I like you, I concede the point.”
She laughed and pushed him, and they tumbled down the sides of the dome away from each other.
Maya, surprised at herself, arrested her motion against the floor. She turned and saw John coming to a halt across the dome, landing against the floor. He looked at her with a smile, caught a rail and launched himself into the air, across the domed space on a course aimed at her.
Instantly Maya understood, and forgetting completely her resolution to avoid this kind of thing, she pushed off to intercept him. They flew directly at each other, and to avoid a painful collision had to catch and twist in mid-air, as if dancing. They spun, hands clasped, spiraling up slowly toward the dome. It was a dance, with a clear and obvious end to it, there to reach whenever they liked: whew! Maya’s pulse raced, and her breath was ragged in her throat. As they spun they tensed their biceps and pulled together, as slowly as docking spacecraft, and kissed.
With a smile John pushed down from her, sending her flying to the dome, and him to the floor, where he caught and crawled to the chamber’s hatch. He locked it.
Maya let her hair loose and shook it out so it floated around her head, across her face. She shook it wildly and laughed. It was not as though she felt on the verge of any great or overmastering love; it was simply going to be fun; and that feeling of simplicity was … She felt a wild surge of lust, and pushed off the dome toward John. She tucked into a slow somersault, unzipping her jumper as she spun, her heart pounding like tympanis, all her blood rushing to her skin, which tingled as if thawing as she undressed, banged into John, flew away from him after an overhasty tug at a sleeve; they bounced around the chamber as they got their clothes off, miscalculating angles and momentums until with a gentle thrust of the big toes they flew into each other and met in a spinning embrace, and floated kissing among their floating clothes.
In the days that followed they met again. They made no attempt to keep the relationship a secret; so very quickly they were a known item, a public couple. Many aboard seemed taken aback by the development; and one morning walking into the dining hall, Maya caught a swift glance from Frank, seated at a corner table, that chilled her; it reminded her of some other time, some incident, some look on his face that she couldn’t quite call to mind.
But most of those aboard seemed pleased. After all it was a kind of royal match, an alliance of the two powers behind the colony, signifying harmony. Indeed the union seemed to catalyze a number of others, which either came out of the closet or, in the newly supersaturated medium, sprang into being. Vlad and Ursula, Dmitri and Elena, Raul and Marina; newly evident couples were everywhere, to the point where the singletons among them began to make nervous jokes about it. But Maya thought she noticed less tension in voices, fewer arguments, more laughter.
One night, lying in bed thinking about it (thinking of wandering over to John’s room) she wondered if that was why they had gotten together: not from love, she still did not love him, she felt no more than friendship for him, charged by lust that was strong but impersonal – but because it was, in fact, a very useful match. Useful to her – but she swerved from that thought, concentrated on the match’s usefulness to the expedition as a whole. Yes, it was politic. Like feudal politics, or the ancient comedies of spring and regeneration. And it felt that way, she had to admit; as if she were acting in response to imperatives stronger than her own desires, acting out the desires of some larger force. Of, perhaps, Mars itself. It was not an unpleasant feeling.
As for the idea that she might have gained leverage over Arkady; or Frank; or Hiroko … well, she successfully avoided thinking about that. It was one of Maya’s talents.
Blooms of yellow and red and orange spread across the walls. Mars was now the size of the moon in Earth’s sky. It was time to harvest all their effort; only a week more, and they would be there.
There was still tension over the unsolved problems of landfall assignments. And now Maya found it less easy than ever to work with Frank: it was nothing obvious, but it occurred to her that he did not dislike their inability to control the situation, because the disruptions were being caused more by Arkady than anyone else, and so it looked like it was more her fault than his. More than once she left a meeting with Frank and went to John, hoping to get some kind of help. But John stayed out of the debates, and threw his support behind everything that Frank proposed. His advice to Maya in private was fairly acute, but the trouble was he liked Arkady and disliked Phyllis; so often he recommended to her that she support Arkady, apparently unaware of the way this tended to undercut her authority among the other Russians. She never pointed this out to him, however. Lovers or not, there were still areas she didn’t wish to discuss with him, or with anyone else.
But one night in his room her nerves were jangling, and lying there, unable to sleep, worrying about first this and then that, she said, “Do you think it would be possible to hide a stowaway on the ship?”
“Well, I don’t know,” he said, surprised. “Why do you ask?”
Swallowing hard, she told him about the face through the algae bottle.
He sat up in bed, staring at her. “You’re sure it wasn’t …”
“It wasn’t any of us.”
He rubbed his jaw. “Well … I suppose if he were getting help from someone in the crew …”
“Hiroko,” Maya suggested. “I mean, not just because she’s Hiroko, but because of the farm and all that. It would solve his food problem, and there’s a lot of places to hide there. And he could have taken shelter with the animals during the radiation storm.”
“They got a lot of rems!”
“But he could have gotten behind their water supply. A little one-man shelter wouldn’t be too hard to set up.”
John still hadn’t gotten over the idea of it. “A whole year in hiding!”
“It’s a big ship. It could be done, right?”
“Well, I suppose so. Yeah, it could, I guess. But why?”
Maya shrugged. “I have no idea. Someone who wanted on, who didn’t make the selection. Someone who had a friend, or friends …”
“Still! I mean, a lot of us had friends who wanted to come. That doesn’t mean that …”
“I know, I know.”
They talked about it for most of an hour, discussing the possible reasons, the methods that could have been used to slip a passenger on board, to hide him, and so on. And then Maya suddenly noticed that she felt much better; that she was, in fact, in a wonderful mood. John believed her! He didn’t think she had gone crazy! She felt a wash of relief and happiness, and threw her arms around him. “It’s so good to be able to talk to you about this!”
He smiled. “We’re friends, Maya. You should have brought it up before.”
“Yes.”
The bubble dome would have been a wonderful place to view their final approach to Mars, but they were going to be aerobraking to reduce speed, and the dome would be behind the heat shield that they now deployed. There would be no view.
Aerobraking saved them from the necessity of carrying the enormous amount of fuel it would have taken to slow down, but it was an extremely precise operation, and therefore dangerous. They had a leeway of less than a millisecond of arc, and so several days before MOI the navigation team began to tweak their course with small burns on an almost hourly basis, fine tuning the approach. Then as they got closer they stopped the ship’s rotation. The return to weightlessness, even in those used to it, was a shock; suddenly it came home to Maya that it wasn’t just another simulation. She lofted through the windy air of the hallways, seeing everything from a strange new high perspective; and all of a sudden it felt real.
She slept in snatches, an hour here, three hours there. Every time she stirred, floating in her sleeping bag, she had a moment of disorientation, thinking she was in Novy Mir again. Then she would remember, and adrenalin would knock her awake: almost there. She would pull through the halls of the torus, pushing off the wall panels of brown and gold and bronze. On the bridge she would check with Mary or Raul or Marina, or someone else in navigation; everything still on course. They were approaching Mars so quickly it seemed they could see it expanding on the screens.
They had to miss the planet by thirty kilometers, or about one ten-millionth of the distance they had traveled. No problem, Mary said, with a quick glance at Arkady. So far they were on the Mantra Run, and hopefully none of his mad problems would crop up.
The crew members not involved with navigation worked to batten down, preparing everything for the torque and bumps that two and half g were sure to bring. Some of them got to go out on EVAs, to deploy subsidiary heat shields and the like. There was a lot to do; and yet the days seemed long anyway.
It was going to happen in the middle of the night, and so that evening all the lights stayed on, and no one went to bed. Everyone had a station – some on duty, most of them only waiting it out. Maya sat in her chair on the bridge, watching the screens and the monitors, thinking that they looked just like they would if it were all a simulation in Baikonur. Could they really be going into orbit around Mars?
They could. The Ares hit Mars’s thin high atmosphere at forty thousand kilometers per hour, and instantly the ship was vibrating heavily, Maya’s chair shaking her fast and hard, and there was a faint low roar, as if they flew through a blast furnace – and it looked like that too, because the screens were bursting with an intense pink-orange glow. Compressed air was bouncing off the heat shields and blazing past all the exterior cameras, so that the whole bridge was tinged the color of Mars. Then gravity returned with a vengeance; Maya’s ribs were squeezed so hard that she had trouble breathing, and her vision was blurred. It hurt!
They were plowing through the thin air at a speed and height calculated to put them into what aerodynamicists call transitional flow, a state halfway between free molecular flow and continuum flow. Free molecular flow would have been the preferred mode of travel, with the air that struck the heat shield shoved to the sides, and the resulting vacuum refilled mostly by molecular diffusion; but they were moving too fast for that, and they could only just barely avoid the tremendous heat of continuum flow, in which air would have moved over shield and ship as part of a wave action. The best they could do was to take the highest possible course that would slow them enough; and this put them into transitional flow, which vacillated between free molecular and continuum flow, making for a bumpy ride. And there lay the danger. If they were to hit a high pressure cell in the Martian atmosphere, where heat or vibration or g forces caused some sensitive mechanism to break, then they could be cast into one of Arkady’s nightmares at the very time they were crushed in their chairs, “weighing” four hundred pounds apiece, which was something Arkady had never been able to simulate very well. In the real world, Maya thought grimly, at the moment when they were most vulnerable to danger, they were also most helpless to deal with it.
But as fate would have it, Martian stratospheric weather was stable, and they remained on the Mantra Run, which in actuality turned out to be a roaring, shuddering, breath-robbing eight minutes. No hour Maya could remember had lasted as long. Sensors showed that the main heat shield had risen to 600° Kelvin —
And then the vibration stopped. The roar ended. They had skipped out of the atmosphere, after skidding around a quarter of the planet. They had decelerated by some twenty thousand kilometers an hour, and the heat shield’s temperature had risen to 710° Kelvin, very near its limit. But the method had worked. All was still. They floated, weightless again, held down by their chair straps. It felt as if they had stopped moving entirely, as if they were floating in pure silence.
Unsteadily they unstrapped themselves, floated like ghosts around the cool air of the rooms, an airy faint roar sounding in their ears, emphasizing the silence. They were talking too loudly, shaking each other’s hands. Maya felt dazed, and she couldn’t understand what people were saying to her; not because she couldn’t hear them, but because she wasn’t paying attention.
Twelve weightless hours later their new course led them to a periapsis thirty-five thousand kilometers from Mars. There they fired the main rockets for a brief thrust, increasing their speed by about a hundred kilometers an hour; after that they were pulled toward Mars again, carving an ellipse that would bring them back to within five hundred kilometers of the surface. They were in Martian orbit.
Each elliptical orbit of the planet took around a day. Over the next two months, the computers would control burns that would gradually circularize their course just inside the orbit of Phobos. But the landing parties were going to descend to the surface well before that, while apogee was so close.
They moved the heat shields back to their storage positions, and went inside the bubble dome to have a look.
During apogee Mars filled most of the sky, as if they flew over it in a high jet. The depth of Valles Marineris was perceptible, the height of the four big volcanoes obvious: their broad peaks appeared over the horizon well before the surrounding countryside came into view. There were craters everywhere on the surface: their round interiors were a vivid sandy orange, a slightly lighter color than the surrounding countryside. Dust, presumably. The short rugged curved mountain ranges were darker than the surrounding countryside, a rust color broken by black shadows. But both the light and dark colors were just a shade away from the omnipresent rusty-orangish-red, which was the color of every peak, crater, canyon, dune, and even the curved slice of the dust-filled atmosphere, visible high above the bright curve of the planet. Red Mars! It was transfixing, mesmerizing. Everyone felt it.
They spent long hours working, and at last it was real work. The ship had to be partially disassembled. The main body would be eventually parked in orbit near Phobos, and used as an emergency return vehicle. But twenty tanks from the outer lengths of the hub shaft had only to be disconnected from the Ares and prepped to become planetary landing vehicles, which would take the colonists down in groups of five. The first lander was scheduled to descend as soon as it was decoupled and prepped; so they worked in round-the-clock shifts, spending a lot of time in EVA. They pulled in to the dining halls tired and ravenous, and conversations were loud; the ennui of the voyage seemed forgotten. One night Maya floated in the bathroom getting ready for bed, feeling stiffened muscles that she hadn’t heard from in months. Around her Nadia and Sasha and Yeli Zudov were chattering away, and in the warm wash of voluble Russian it suddenly occurred to her that everyone was happy – they were in the last moment of their anticipation, an anticipation that had lain in their hearts for half a lifetime, or ever since childhood – and now suddenly it had bloomed below them like a child’s crayon drawing of Mars, growing huge then small, huge then small, and as it yo-yoed back and forth it loomed before them in all its immense potential: tabula rasa, blank slate. A blank red slate. Anything was possible, anything could happen – in that sense they were, in just these last few days, perfectly free. Free of the past, free of the future, weightless in their own warm air, floating like spirits about to invest a material world. In the mirror Maya caught sight of the toothbrush-distorted grin on her face, and grabbed a railing to hold her position. It occurred to her that they might never be so happy again. Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real. But this time who could say? This time might be the golden one at last.
She released the railing and spit toothpaste into a wastewater bag, then floated backwards into the hallway. Come what may, they had reached their goal. They had earned at least the chance to try.
Disassembling the Ares made a lot of them feel odd. It was, as John remarked, like dismantling a town and flinging the houses in different directions. And this was the only town they had. Under the giant eye of Mars all their disagreements became taut; clearly it was critical now, there was little time left. People argued, in the open or under the surface. So many little groups now, keeping their own council … what had happened to that brief moment of happiness? Maya blamed it mostly on Arkady. He had opened Pandora’s box; if not for him and his talk, would the farm group have drawn so close around Hiroko? Would the medical team have kept such close counsel? She didn’t think so.
She and Frank worked hard to reconcile differences and forge a consensus, to give them the feeling they were still a single team. It involved long conferences with Phyllis and Arkady, Ann and Sax, Houston and Baikonur. In the process a relationship developed between the two leaders that was even more complex than their early encounters in the park; though that was part of it; Maya saw now, in Frank’s occasional flashes of sarcasm and resentment, that he had been bothered by the incident more than she had thought at the time. But there was nothing to be done about it now.
In the end the Phobos mission was indeed given to Arkady and his friends, mainly because no one else wanted it. Everyone was promised a spot on a geological survey if they wanted one; and Phyllis and Mary and the rest of the “Houston crowd” were given assurances that the construction of base camp would go according to the plans made in Houston. They intended to work at the base to see that it happened that way. “Fine, fine,” Frank snarled at the end of one of these meetings. “We’re all going to be on Mars, do we really have to fight like this over what we’re going to do there?”
“That’s life,” Arkady said cheerfully. “On Mars or not, life goes on.”
Frank’s jaw was clenched. “I came here to get away from this kind of thing!”
Arkady shook his head. “You certainly did not! This is your life, Frank. What would you do without it?”
One night shortly before the descent, they gathered and had a formal dinner for the entire hundred. Most of the food was farm-grown: pasta, salad and bread, with red wine from storage, saved for a special occasion.
Over a dessert of strawberries, Arkady floated up to propose a toast. “To the new world we now create!”
A chorus of groans and cheers; by now they all knew what he meant. Phyllis threw down a strawberry and said, “Look, Arkady, this settlement is a scientific station. Your ideas are irrelevant to it. Maybe in fifty or a hundred years. But for now, it’s going to be like the stations in Antarctica.”
“That’s true,” Arkady said. “But in fact Antarctic stations are very political. Most of them were built so that countries that built them would have a say in the revision of the Antarctic treaty. And now the stations are governed by laws set by that treaty, which was made by a very political process! So you see, you cannot just stick your head in sand crying ‘I am a scientist, I am a scientist!'” He put a hand to his forehead, in the universal mocking gesture of the prima donna. “No. When you say that, you are only saying, ‘I do not wish to think about complex systems!’ Which is not really worthy of true scientists, is it?”
“The Antarctic is governed by a treaty because no one lives there except in scientific stations,” Maya said irritably. To have their final dinner, their last moment of freedom, disrupted like this!
“True,” Arkady said. “But think of the result. In Antarctica, no one can own land. No one country or organization can exploit the continent’s natural resources, without the consent of every other country. No one can claim to own those resources, or take them and sell them to other people, so that some profit from them while others pay for their use. Don’t you see how radically different that is from the way the rest of the world is run? And this is the last area on Earth to be organized, to be given a set of laws. It represents what all governments working together feel instinctively is fair, revealed on land free from claims of sovereignty, or really from any history at all. It is, to say it plainly, Earth’s best attempt to create just property laws! Do you see? This is the way entire world should be run, if only we could free it from the straitjacket of history!”
Sax Russell, blinking mildly, said, “But Arkady, since Mars is going to be ruled by a treaty based on the old Antarctic one, what are you objecting to? The Outer Space Treaty states that no country can claim land on Mars, no military activities are allowed, and all bases are open to inspection by any country. Also no Martian resources can become the property of a single nation – the UN is supposed to establish an international regime to govern any mining or other exploitation. If anything is ever done along that line, which I doubt will happen, then it is to be shared among all the nations of the world.” He turned a palm upward. “Isn’t that what you’re agitating for, already achieved?”
“It’s a start,” Arkady said. “But there are aspects of that treaty you haven’t mentioned. Bases built on Mars will belong to the countries that build them, for instance. We will be building American and Russian bases, according to this provision of the law. And that puts us right back into the nightmare of Terran law and Terran history. American and Russian businesses will have the right to exploit Mars, as long as the profits are somehow shared by all the nations signing the treaty. This may only involve some sort of percentage paid to UN, in effect no more than bribe. I don’t believe we should acknowledge these provisions for even a moment!” ‘
Silence followed this remark.
Ann Clayborne said, “This treaty also says we have to take measures to prevent the disruption of planetary environments, I think is how they put it. It’s in Article Seven. That seems to me to expressly forbid the terraforming that so many of you are talking about.”
“I would say that we should ignore that provision as well,” Arkady said quickly. “Our own well-being depends on ignoring it.”
This view was more popular than his others, and several people said so.
“But if you’re willing to disregard one article,” Arkady pointed out, “you should be willing to disregard the rest. Right?”
There was an uncomfortable pause.
“All these changes will happen inevitably,” Sax Russell said with a shrug. “Being on Mars will change us in an evolutionary way.”
Arkady shook his head vehemently, causing him to spin a little in the air over the table. “No, no, no, no! History is not evolution! It is a false analogy! Evolution is a matter of environment and chance, acting over millions of years. But history is a matter of environment and choice, acting within lifetimes, and sometimes within years, or months, or days! History is Lamarckian! So that if we choose to establish certain institutions on Mars, there they will be! And if we choose others, there they will be!” A wave of his hand encompassed them all, the people seated at the tables, the people floating among the vines: “I say we should make those choices ourselves, rather than having them made for us by people back on Earth. By people long dead, really.”
Phyllis said sharply, “You want some kind of communal Utopia, and it’s not possible. I should think Russian history would have taught you something about that.”
“It has,” Arkady said. “Now I put to use what it has taught me.”
“Advocating an ill-defined revolution? Fomenting a crisis situation? Getting everyone upset and at odds with each other?”
A lot of people nodded at this, but Arkady waved them away. “I decline to accept blame for everyone’s problems at this point in the trip. I have only said what I think, which is my right. If I make some of you uncomfortable, that is your problem. It is because you don’t like the implications of what I say, but can’t find grounds to deny them.”
“Some of us can’t understand what you say,” Mary exclaimed.
“I say only this!” Arkady said, staring at her bug-eyed: “We have come to Mars for good. We are going to make not only our homes and our food, but also our water and the very air we breathe – all on a planet that has none of these things. We can do this because we have technology to manipulate matter right down to the molecular level. This is an extraordinary ability, think of it! And yet some of us here can accept transforming the entire physical reality of this planet, without doing a single thing to change ourselves, or the way we live. To be twenty-first century scientists on Mars, in fact, but at the same time living within nineteenth century social systems, based on seventeenth century ideologies. It’s absurd, it’s crazy, it’s – it’s —” he seized his head in his hands, tugged at his hair, roared “It’s unscientific! And so I say that among all the many things we transform on Mars, ourselves and our social reality should be among them. We must terraform not only Mars, but ourselves.”
No one ventured a rebuttal to that; Arkady at full throttle was pretty much unopposable, and a lot of them were genuinely provoked by what he had said and needed time to think. Others were simply disgruntled, but unwilling to cause too much of a fuss at this particular dinner, which was supposed to be a celebration. It was easier to roll one’s eyes, and drink to the toast. “To Mars! To Mars!” But as they floated around after finishing dessert, Phyllis was disdainful. “First we have to survive,” she said. “With dissension like this, how good will our chances be?”
Michel Duval tried to reassure her. “A lot of these disagreements are symptoms of the flight. Once on Mars, we’ll pull together. And we have more than just what we brought on the Ares to help us – we’ll have what the unmanned landers have brought already, shipments of equipment and food all over the surface and the moons. All that’s there for us. The only limit will be our own stamina. And this voyage is part of that – it’s a kind of preparation, a test. If we fail this part, we won’t even get to try on Mars.”
“Exactly my point!” Phyllis said. “We are failing in this.”
Sax stood, looking bored, and pushed off toward the kitchen. The hall was filled with the seashell roar of many small discussions, some of them acrimonious in tone. A lot of people were angry at Arkady, clearly; and others were angry at them for getting upset.
Maya followed Sax into the kitchen. As he cleaned his tray he sighed. “People are so emotional. Sometimes it seems like I’m stuck in an endless performance of the play No Exit.”
“That’s the one where they can’t get out of a little room?”
He nodded. “Where hell is other people. I hope we don’t prove the hypothesis.”
A few days later the landers were ready. They would descend over a period of five days; only the Phobos team would stay in what was left of the Ares, guiding it to its near-docking with the little moon. Arkady, Alex, Dmitri, Roger, Samantha, Edvard, Janet, Raul, Marina, Tatiana, and Elena said their farewells, absorbed already in the task at hand, promising to descend as soon as the Phobos station was built.
The night before the descent Maya couldn’t sleep. Eventually she gave up trying, and pulled herself through the rooms and corridors, up to the hub. Every object was sharp-edged with sleeplessness and adrenalin, and every familiarity of the ship was countered or overwhelmed by some alteration, a lashed-down stack of boxes or a dead-end in a tube. It was as if they had already left the Ares. She looked around at it one last time, drained of emotion. Then she pulled herself through the tight locks, into the landing vehicle she had been assigned to. Might as well wait there. She climbed into her spacesuit, feeling, as she so often did when the real moment came, that she was only going through another simulation. She wondered if she would ever escape that feeling, if being on Mars would be enough to end it. It would be worth it just for that: to make her feel real for once! She settled into her chair.
A few sleepless hours later she was joined by Sax, Vlad, Nadia, and Ann. Her companions belted in, and they ran through the check-out together. Toggles were flipped, there was a countdown; and their rockets fired. The lander drifted away from the Ares. Its rockets fired again. They fell toward the planet. They hit the top of the atmosphere, and their single trapezoidal window became a blaze of Mars-colored air. Maya, vibrating with the craft, stared up at it. She felt tense and unhappy, focused backward rather than forward, thinking of everyone still on the Ares; and it seemed to her that they had failed, that the five of them in the lander were leaving behind a group in disarray. Their best chance for creating some kind of concord had passed, and they had not succeeded; the momentary flash of happiness she had felt while brushing her teeth had been just that, a flash. She had failed, then. They were going their separate ways, splintered by their beliefs, and even after two separate years of enforced togetherness they were, like any other human group, no more than a collection of strangers. The die was cast.
PART THREE The Crucible (#ulink_408b4b2f-f485-54a9-8ed5-7c3afffae05a)
It formed with the rest of the solar system, around five billion years ago. That’s fifteen million human generations. Rocks banging together in space and then coming back and holding together, all because of the mysterious force we call gravity. That same mysterious warp in the weft of things caused the pile of rocks, when it was big enough, to crush in on its center until the heat of the pressure melted the rock. Mars is small but heavy, with a nickel-iron core. It is small enough that the interior has cooled faster than Earth’s: the core no longer spins inside the crust at a different speed and so Mars has practically no magnetic field. No dynamo left. But one of the last internal flows of the molten core and mantle was in the form of a huge anomalous lumping outward on one side, a shove against the crust wall that formed a continent-sized bulge, eleven kilometers high: three times as high as the Tibetan plateau is above its surroundings. This bulge caused many other features to appear: a system of radial fractures covering an entire hemisphere, including the largest cracks of all, the Valles Marineris, a lace of canyons that would cover the United States coast to coast. The bulge also caused a number of volcanoes, including three straddling its spine, Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons and Arsia Mons; and off on its northwest edge, Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system, three times the height of Everest, one hundred times the mass of Mauna Loa, the Earth’s largest volcano.
So the Tharsis Bulge was the most important factor in shaping the surface of Mars. The other major factor was meteor fall. In the Noachian Age, three to four billion years ago, millions of meteors were falling on Mars at a tremendous rate, and thousands of them were planetesimals, rocks as big as Vega or Phobos. One of the impacts left behind Hellas Basin, 2000 kilometers in diameter, the largest obvious crater in the solar system; although Daedalia Planum appears to be the remains of an impact basin 4500 kilometers across. Those are big; but then there are areologists who believe that the entire northern hemisphere of Mars is an ancient impact basin.
These big impacts created explosions so cataclysmic that it is hard to imagine them; ejecta from them ended up on the Earth and the Moon, and as asteroids in Trojan orbits; some areologists think that the Tharsis Bulge started because of the Hellas impact; others believe that Phobos and Deimos are ejecta. And these were only the largest impacts. Smaller stones fell every day, so that the oldest surfaces on Mars are saturated with cratering, the landscape a palimpsest of newer rings obscuring older ones, with no patch of land untouched. And each of these impacts released explosions of heat that melted rock: elements were broken out of their matrix and fired away in the form of hot gases, liquids, new minerals. This and the outgassing from the core produced an atmosphere, and lots of water; there were clouds, storms, rain and snow, glaciers, streams, rivers, lakes, all scouring the land, all leaving unmistakable marks of their passage – flood channels, stream beds, shorelines, every kind of hydrologic hieroglyphic.
But all that went away. The planet was too small, too far from the sun. The atmosphere froze and fell to the ground. Carbon dioxide sublimed to form a thin new atmosphere, while oxygen bonded to rock and turned it red. The water froze, and over the ages seeped down through the kilometers of meteor-broken rock. Eventually this layer of regolith became permeated with ice, and the deepest parts were hot enough to melt the ice; so there were underground seas on Mars. And water always flows downhill; so these aquifers migrated down, slowly seeping, until they pooled behind some stoppage or another, a rib of high bedrock or a frozen soil barrier. Sometimes intense artesian pressures built against these dams; and sometimes a meteor would hit, or a volcano appear, and the dam would burst apart and a whole underground sea would spew over the landscape in enormous floods, floods ten thousand times the flow of the Mississippi. Eventually, however, the water on the surface would freeze and sublime away in the ceaseless dry winds, and fall on the poles in every winter’s fog hood. The polar caps therefore thickened, and their weight drove the ice underground until the visible ice was only the tip of two world-topping lenses of underground permafrost, lenses ten and then a hundred times the visible caps’ volume. While back down toward the equator, new aquifers were being filled from below, by outgassing from the core; and some of the old aquifers were refilling.
And so this slowest of cycles approached its second round. But as the planet was cooling, all of it happened more and more slowly, in a long ritard like a clock winding down. The planet settled into the shape we see. But change never stops; the ceaseless winds carved the land, with dust that grew finer and finer; and the eccentricities of Mars’s orbit meant that the southern and northern hemispheres traded the cold and warm winters in a 51,000 year cycle, so that the dry ice cap and the water ice cap reversed poles. Each swing of this pendulum laid down a new stratum of sand, and the troughs of new dunes cut through older layers at an angle, until the sand around the poles lay in a stippled cross-hatching, in geometrical patterns like Navajo sand paintings, banding the whole top of the world.
The colored sands in their patterns, the fluted and scalloped canyon walls, the volcanoes rising right through the sky, the rubbled rock of the chaotic terrain, the infinity of craters, ringed emblems of the planet’s beginning … Beautiful, or harsher than that: spare, austere, stripped down, silent, stoic, rocky, changeless. Sublime. The visible language of nature’s mineral existence.
Mineral; not animal, nor vegetable, nor viral. It could have happened but it didn’t. There was never any spontaneous generation out of the clays or the sulphuric hot springs; no spore falling out of space, no touch of a god; whatever starts life (for we do not know), it did not happen on Mars. Mars rolled, proof of the otherness of the world, of its stony vitality.
And then, one day …
She hit the ground with both feet solid, nothing tricky about it, the g familiar from nine months in the Ares; and with the suit’s weight, not that much different from walking on Earth, as far as she could remember. The sky was a pink shaded with sandy tans, a color richer and more subtle than any in the photos. “Look at the sky,” Ann was saying, “look at the sky.” Maya was chattering away, Sax and Vlad spun like rotating statues. Nadezhda Francine Cherneshevsky took a few more steps, felt her boots crunch the surface. It was salt-hardened sand a couple of centimeters thick, which cracked when you walked on it; the geologists called it duricrust or caliche. Her boot tracks were surrounded by small systems of radial fractures.
She was out away from the lander. The ground was a dark rusty orange, covered with an even litter of rocks the same color, although some of the rocks showed tints of red or black or yellow. To the east stood a number of rocket landing vehicles, each one a different shape and size, with the tops of more sticking over the eastern horizon. All of them were crusted the same red-orange as the ground: it was an odd, thrilling sight, as if they had stumbled upon a long-abandoned alien spaceport. Parts of Baikonur would look like this, in a million years.
She walked to one of the nearest landing vehicles, a freight container the size of a small house, set on a skeletal four-legged rocket assembly. It looked like it had been there for decades. The sun was overhead, too bright to look at even through her faceplate; it was hard to judge through the polarization and other filters, but it seemed to her that the daylight was much like that on Earth, as far as she could remember. A bright winter’s day.
She looked around again, trying to take it in. They stood on a gently bumpy plain, covered with small sharp-edged rocks, all half-buried in dust. Back to the west the horizon was marked by a small flat-topped hill. It might be a crater rim, it was hard to say. Ann was already halfway there, still quite a large figure; the horizon was closer than seemed right, and Nadia paused to take note of that, suspecting that she would soon become accustomed to it, and never notice. But it was not Earthlike, that strangely close horizon, she saw that clearly now. They stood on a smaller planet.
She made a concerted effort to recall Earth’s gravity, wondering that it should be so hard. Walking in the woods, over tundra, on the river ice in winter … and now: step, step. The ground was flat, but one had to thread a course between the ubiquitous rocks; there was no place on Earth that she knew of where they were distributed so copiously and evenly. Take a jump! She did, and laughed; even with her suit on she could tell she was lighter. She was just as strong as ever, but weighed only thirty kilos! And the forty kilos of the suit … well, it threw her off balance, that was true. It made her feel that she had gone hollow. That was it: her center of gravity was gone, her weight had been shifted out to her skin, to the outside of her muscles rather than the inside. That was the effect of the suit, of course. Inside the habitats it would be as it had been in the Ares. But out here in a suit, she was the hollow woman. With the aid of that image she could suddenly move more easily, hop over a boulder, come down and take a turn, dance! Simply pop in the air, dance, land on top of a flat rock – watch out—
She tumbled, landed on a knee and both hands. Her gloves broke through the duricrust. It felt like a layer of caked sand at the beach, only harder and more brittle. Like hardened mud. And cold! Their gloves weren’t heated the way their boot soles were, and there wasn’t enough insulation when actually touching the ground. It was like touching ice with the bare fingers, wow! Around 215° Kelvin, she recalled, or –90° Centigrade; colder than Antarctica, colder than Siberia at its worst. Her fingertips were numb. They would need better gloves to be able to work, gloves fitted with heating elements, like their boot soles. That would make the gloves thicker and less flexible. She’d have to get her finger muscles back into shape.
She had been laughing. She stood and walked to another freight drop, humming “Royal Garden Blues.” She climbed the leg of the next drop and rubbed the crust of red dirt off an engraved manifest on the side of the big metal crate. One John Deere/Volvo Martian bulldozer, hydrazine-powered, thermally protected, semi-autonomous, fully programmable. Prostheses and spare parts included.
She felt her face stretched in a big grin. Backhoes, front loaders, bulldozers, tractors, graders, dump trucks; construction supplies and materials of every kind; air miners to filter and collect chemicals from the atmosphere; little factories to render these chemicals into other chemicals; other factories to combine those chemicals; a whole commissary, everything they were going to need, all at hand in scores of crates scattered over the plain. She began to hop from one lander to the next, taking stock. Some of them had obviously hit hard, some had their spider legs collapsed, others their bodies cracked, one was even flattened into a pile of smashed boxes, half-buried in dust; but these were just another kind of opportunity, the salvage and repair game, one of her favorites! She laughed aloud, she was a bit giddy, she noticed the comm light on her wrist console blinking; she switched to the common band and was startled by Maya and Vlad and Sax all talking at once, “Where’s Ann, you women get back here, hey Nadia, come help us get this damned habitat online, we can’t even get the door open!”
She laughed.
The habitats were scattered like everything else, but they had landed near one that they knew was functional; it had been turned on from orbit some days before, and run through a complete check. Unfortunately the outer lock door could not be included in the check, and it was stuck. Nadia went to work on it, grinning; it was odd to see what looked like a derelict trailer home sporting a space station lock door. It only took a minute for her to get it open, by tapping out the emergency open code while pulling out on the door. Stuck with cold, differential shrinking perhaps. They were going to have a lot of little problems like that.
Then she and Vlad were into the lock, and then inside the habitat. It still looked like a trailer home, but with the latest in kitchen fixtures. All the lights were on. The air was warm, and circulating well. The control panel looked like a nuclear power plant’s.
While the others came inside, Nadia walked down a row of small rooms, through door after door, and the oddest feeling suddenly came over her: things seemed out of place. The lights were on, some of them blinking; and down at the far end of the hall, a door was swinging slightly back and forth on its hinges.
Obviously the ventilation. And the shock of the habitat’s landing probably had disarranged things slightly. She shook off the feeling and went back to greet the others.
By the time everyone had landed and walked across the stony plain (stopping, stumbling, running, staring off at the horizon, spinning slowly, walking again), and had entered into the three functioning habitats, and gotten out of their EVA suits, and put them away, and checked out the habitats, and eaten a bit, talking it all over the whole while, night had fallen. They continued working on the habitats and talking through most of that night, too excited to fall asleep; then most of them slept in snatches until dawn, when they woke and suited up and went out again, looking around and checking manifests and running machines through checks. Eventually they noticed they were famished, and went back in to jam down a quick meal; and then it was night again!
And that was what it was like, for several days; a wild swirl of time passing. Nadia would wake to the bip of her wrist console and eat a quick breakfast looking out of the habitat’s little east window: dawn stained the sky rich berry colors for a few minutes, before shifting rapidly through a series of rosy tones to the thick pink-orange of daytime. All over the floor of the habitat her companions slept, on mattresses that would fold up against the wall during the day. The walls were beige, tinted orange by the dawn. The kitchen and living room were tiny, the four toilet rooms no more than closets. Ann would stir as the room lightened and go to one of the four toilets. John was already in the kitchen, moving around quietly. Conditions were so much more crowded and public than they had been on the Ares that some of them were having trouble adjusting; every night Maya complained she couldn’t sleep in such a crowd, but there she was, mouth open girlishly. She would be the last to rise, snoozing through the noise and bustle of the others’ morning routines.
Then the sun would crack the horizon, and Nadia would be done with her cereal and milk, the milk made of powder mixed with water mined from the atmosphere (it tasted just the same); and it was time to get into her walker, and out to work.
The walkers were designed for the Martian surface, and were not pressurized like spacesuits, but were rather made of an elastic mesh, which held in the body at about the same pressure that the Terran atmosphere would have. This prevented the severe expansion bruising that would result if skin were exposed to Mars’s minimal atmosphere, but it gave the wearer a lot more freedom of movement than a pressurized spacesuit would have. Walkers also had the very significant advantage of being fail-operational; only the hard helmet was airtight, so if you ripped a hole at knee or elbow you would have a badly bruised and frozen patch of skin, but would not suffocate and die within minutes.
Getting into a walker, however, was a workout in itself. Nadia wriggled the pants over her long underwear, then the jacket, and zipped the two sections of the suit together. After that she jammed into big thermal boots, and locked their toprings to the suit’s ankle rings; pulled on gloves, and locked the wrist rings; put on a fairly standard hard helmet, and locked it to the suit’s neck ring; then shouldered into an airtank backpack, and linked its air tubes to her helmet. She breathed hard a few times, tasting the cool oxygen-nitrogen in her face. The walker’s wristpad indicated that all the seals were good; and she followed John and Samantha into the lock. They closed the inner door; the air was sucked back into containers; John unlocked the outer door. The three of them stepped outside.
It was a thrill every morning to step out onto that rocky plain, with the early morning sun casting long black shadows to the west, and the various small knolls and hollows revealed clearly. There was usually a wind from the south, and loose fines moved in a sinuous flow over the ground, so that the rocks sometimes seemed to creep. Even the strongest of these winds could scarcely be felt against an outstretched hand, but they hadn’t yet experienced one of the storm winds; at five hundred kilometers per hour they were pretty sure to feel something. At twenty, nearly nothing.
Nadia and Samantha walked over to one of the little rovers they had uncrated and climbed in. Nadia drove the rover across the plain to a tractor they had found the day before about a kilometer to the west. The morning cold cut through her walker in a diamond pattern, as the result of the X weave of the heating filaments in the suit material. A strange sensation, but she had been colder in Siberia many a time and she had no complaints.
They came to the big lander and got out. Nadia picked up a drill with a Phillips screwdriver bit, and started dismantling the crate on top of the vehicle. The tractor inside the lander’s crate was a Mercedes-Benz. She poked the drill into the head of a screw, pulled the trigger and watched the screw spin out. She moved to the next, grinning. Innumerable times in her youth she had gone out in cold like this, with numb white chopped-up hands, and fought titanic battles to unscrew frozen or stripped screws … but here it was ziiip, another one out. And really with the walker it was warmer than it had been in Siberia, and freer than in space, the walker no more restrictive than a thin stiff wetsuit. Red rocks were scattered all around in their uncanny regularity; voices chattered on the common band: “Hey, I found those solar panels!” “You think that’s something, I just found the goddamn nuclear reactor.” Yes, it was a great morning on Mars.
The stacked crate walls made a ramp to drive the tractor off the lander; they didn’t look strong enough, but that was the gravity again. Nadia had turned on the tractor’s heating system as soon as she could reach it, and now she climbed into the cab and tapped a command into its autopilot, feeling that it would be best to let the thing descend the ramp on its own, with her and Samantha watching from the side, just in case the ramp was more brittle in the cold than expected, or otherwise unreliable. She still found it almost impossible to think in terms of Martian g, to trust the designs that took it into account. The ramp just looked too flimsy!
But the tractor rolled down without incident, and stopped on the ground: eight meters long, royal blue, with wire mesh wheels taller than they were. They had to climb a short ladder into the cab. The crane prosthesis was already attached to the mount on the front end, and that made it easy to load the tractor with the winch, the sandbagger, the boxes of spare parts, and finally the crate walls. When they were done, the tractor looked as overloaded and topheavy as a steam calliope; but the g made it only a matter of balance. The tractor itself was a real pig, with six hundred horsepower, a wide wheelbase, and wheels big as tracks. The hydrazine motor had pick-up even worse than diesel, but it was like the ultimate first gear, completely inexorable. They took off and rolled slowly toward the trailer park – and there she was, Nadezhda Cherneshevsky, driving a Mercedes-Benz across Mars! She followed Samantha to the sorting lot, feeling like a queen.
And that was the morning. Back into the habitat, helmet and tank off, a quick bite in walker and boots. With all that running around they were famished.
After lunch they went back out in the Mercedes-Benz, and used it to haul a Boeing air miner to an area east of the habitats, where they were going to gather all the factories. The air miners were big metal cylinders, somewhat resembling 737 fuselages except that they had eight massive sets of landing gear, and rocket engines attached vertically to their sides, and two jet engines mounted above the fuselage fore and aft. Five of these miners had been dropped in the area some two years before. In the time since, their jet engines had been sucking in the thin air and ramming it through a sequence of separating mechanisms, to divide it into its component gases. The gases had been compressed and stored in big tanks, and were now available for use. So the Boeings each now held 5,000 liters of water ice, 3,000 liters of liquid oxygen, 3,000 liters of liquid nitrogen, 500 liters of argon, and 400 liters of carbon dioxide.
It was no easy task hauling these giants across the rubble to the big holding tanks near their habitats, but they needed to do it, because after they were drained into the holding tanks they could be turned on again. Just that afternoon another group had gotten one emptied out and turned back on, and the low hum of its jets could be heard everywhere, even in a helmet or a habitat.
Nadia and Samantha’s miner was more stubborn; in the whole afternoon they only managed to haul it a hundred meters, and they had to use the bulldozer attachment to scrape a rough road for it all the way. Just before sunset they returned through the lock into the habitat, their hands cold and aching with fatigue. They stripped down to their dust-caked underwear and went straight to the kitchen, ravenous once more; Vlad estimated they were each burning about six thousand calories a day. They cooked and gulped down rehydrated pasta, nearly scalding their partially-thawed fingers on their trays. Only when they had finished eating did they go to the women’s changing room and start trying to clean themselves up, sponging down with hot water, changing into clean jumpers. “It’s going to be hard to keep our clothes clean, that dust even gets through the wristlocks, and the waist zippers are like open holes.” “Well yeah, those fines are micron-sized! We’re going to have worse trouble from it than dirty clothes, I can tell you that. It’s going to be getting into everything, our lungs, our blood, our brains …”
“That’s life on Mars.” This was already a popular refrain, used whenever they encountered a problem, especially an intractable one.
On some days after dinner there were a couple hours of sunlight left, and Nadia, restless, would sometimes go back outside. Often she spent the time wandering around the crates that had been hauled to base that day, and over time she assembled a personal tool kit, feeling like a kid in a candy store. Years in the Siberian power industry had given her a reverence for good tools, she had suffered brutally from the lack of them. Everything in north Yakut had been built on permafrost, and the platforms sank unevenly in the summer, and were buried in ice in the winter, and parts for construction had come from all over the world, heavy machinery from Switzerland and Sweden, drills from America, reactors from the Ukraine, plus a lot of old scavenged Soviet stuff, some of it good, some indescribably shoddy, but all of it unmatched – some of it even built in inches – so that they had had to improvise constantly, building oil wells out of ice and string, knocking together nuclear reactors that made Chernobyl look like a Swiss watch. And every desperate day’s work accomplished with a collection of tools that would have made a tinker weep.
Now she could wander in the dim ruby light of sunset, her old jazz collection piped from the habitat stereo into her helmet headphones, as she rooted in supply boxes and picked out any tool she wanted. She would carry them back to a small room she had commandeered in one of the storage warehouses, whistling along with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, adding to a collection that included, among other items, an Allen wrench set, some pliers, a power drill, several clamps, some hacksaws, an impart wrench set, a brace of cold-tolerant bungie cords, assorted files and rasps and planes, a crescent wrench set, a crimper, five hammers, some hemostats, three hydraulic jacks, a bellows, several sets of screwdrivers, drills and bits, a portable compressed gas cylinder, a box of plastic explosives and shape charges, a tape measure, a giant Swiss Army knife, tin snips, tongs, tweezers, three vises, a wirestripper, X-acto knives, a pick, a bunch of mallets, a nut driver set, hose clamps, a set of end mills, a set of jeweler’s screwdrivers, a magnifying glass, all kinds of tape, a plumber’s bob and ream, a sewing kit, scissors, sieves, a lathe, levels of all sizes, long nosed pliers, vise grip pliers, a tap and die set, three shovels, a compressor, a generator, a welding and cutting set, a wheelbarrow—
and so on. And this was just the mechanical equipment, her carpenter’s tools. In other parts of the warehouse they were stockpiling research and lab equipment, geological tools, and any number of computers and radios and telescopes and videocameras; and the biosphere team had warehouses of equipment to set up the farm, the waste recyclers, the gas exchange mechanism, in essence their whole infrastructure; and the medical team had more warehouses of supplies for the clinic, and their research labs, and the genetic engineering facility. “You know what this is,” Nadia said to Sax Russell one evening looking around her warehouse. “It is an entire town, disassembled and lying in pieces.”
“And a very prosperous town at that.”
“Yes, a university town. With first-rate departments in several sciences.”
“But still in pieces.”
“Yes. But I kind of like it that way.”
Sunset was mandatory return-to-habitat time, and in the dusk she would stumble into the lock and inside, and eat another small cold meal sitting on her bed, listening to the talk around her which mostly concerned the day’s work, and the arrangement of the tasks for the next morning. Frank and Maya were supposed to be doing this, but in fact it was happening spontaneously, in a kind of ad hoc barter system. Hiroko was particularly good at it, which was a surprise given how withdrawn she had been on the voyage out; but now that she needed help from outside her team, she spent most of every evening moving from person to person, so single-minded and persuasive that she usually had a sizeable crew working on the farm every morning. Nadia couldn’t really see this; they had five years of dehydrated and canned food on hand, fare that suited Nadia fine, she had eaten worse for most of her life and she paid little attention to food anymore, she might as well have been eating hay, or refueling like one of the tractors. But they did need the farm for growing bamboo, which Nadia planned to use as a construction material in the permanent habitat that she hoped to start building soon. It all interlocked; all their tasks linked together, were necessary to each other. So when Hiroko plopped down beside her, she said, “Yeah, yeah, be there at eight. But you can’t build the permanent farm until the base habitat itself is built. So really you ought to be helping me tomorrow, right?”
“No, no,” Hiroko said, laughing. “Day after, okay?”
Hiroko’s main competition for labor came from Sax Russell and his crowd, who were working to start all the factories. Vlad and Ursula and the biomed group were also hungry to get all their labs set up and running. These three teams seemed willing to live in the trailer park indefinitely, as long as their own projects were progressing; but luckily there were a lot of people who were not so obsessed by their work, people like Maya and John and the rest of the cosmonauts, who were interested in moving into larger and better-protected quarters as soon as possible. So Nadia’s project would get help from them.
When she was done eating, Nadia took her tray into the kitchen and cleaned it with a little swab, then went over to sit by Ann Clayborne and Simon Frazier and the rest of the geologists. Ann looked nearly asleep; she was spending her mornings taking long rover trips and hikes, and then working hard on the base all afternoon, trying to make up for her trips away. To Nadia she seemed strangely tense, less happy about being on Mars than one would have thought. She appeared unwilling to work on the factories, or for Hiroko; indeed she usually came to work for Nadia, who, since she was only trying to build housing, could be said to be impacting the planet less than the more ambitious teams. Maybe that was it, maybe not; Ann wasn’t saying. She was hard to know, moody – not in Maya’s extravagant Russian manner, but more subtly, and, Nadia thought, in a darker register. In Bessie Smith land.
All around them people cleaned up after dinner and talked, and looked over manifests and talked, and bunched around computer terminals and talked, and washed clothes and talked; until most were stretched out on their beds, talking in lower voices, until they passed out. “It’s like the first second of the universe,” Sax Russell observed, rubbing his face wearily. “All crammed together and no differentiation. Just a bunch of hot particles rushing about.”
And that was just one day; and that was what it was like every day, for day after day after day. No change in the weather to speak of, except occasionally a wisp of cloud, or an extra-windy afternoon. In the main, the days rolled by one like the next. Everything took longer than planned. Just getting into the walkers and out of the habitats was a chore, and then all the equipment had to be warmed; and even though it had been built to a uniform set of standards, the international nature of the equipment meant that there were inevitable mismatches of size and function; and the dust (“Don’t call it dust!” Ann would complain. “That’s like calling dust gravel! Call it fines, they’re fines!”) got into everything; and all the physical work in the penetrating cold was exhausting, so that they went slower than they thought they would and began to collect a number of minor injuries. And, finally, there was just an amazing number of things to do, some of which had never even occurred to them. It took them about a month, for instance (they had budgeted ten days) just to open all the freight loads, check their contents and move them into the appropriate stockpiles – to get to the point where they could really begin to work.
After that, they could begin to build in earnest. And here Nadia came into her own. She had had nothing to do on the Ares, it had been a kind of hibernation for her. But building things was her great talent, the nature of her genius, trained in the bitter school of Siberia; and very quickly she became the colony’s chief troubleshooter, the universal solvent as John called her. Almost every job they had benefited from her help, and as she ran around every day answering questions and giving advice, she blossomed into a kind of timeless work heaven. So much to do! So much to do! Every night in the planning sessions Hiroko worked her wiles, and the farm went up: three parallel rows of greenhouses, looking like commercial greenhouses back on Earth except smaller and very thick-walled, to keep them from exploding like party balloons. Even with interior pressures of only three hundred millibars, which was barely farmable, the differential with the outside was drastic; a bad seal or a weak spot, and they would go bang. But Nadia was good at cold weather seals, and so Hiroko was calling her in a panic every other day.
Then the materials scientists needed help getting their factories operational, and the crew assembling the nuclear reactor wanted her supervision for every breath that they took: they were petrified with fright that they would do something wrong, and were not reassured by Arkady sending radio messages down from Phobos insisting they did not need such a dangerous technology, that they could get all the power they needed from wind generation: he and Phyllis had bitter arguments about this. It was Hiroko who cut Arkady off, with what she said was a Japanese commonplace: “Shikata ga nai,” meaning there is no other choice. Windmills might have generated enough power, as Arkady contended, but they didn’t have windmills, while they had been supplied with a Rickover nuclear reactor, built by the US Navy and a beautiful piece of work; and no one wanted to try bootstrapping themselves into a wind-powered system: they were in too much of a hurry. Shikata ga nai. This too became one of their oft-repeated phrases.
And so every morning the construction crew for Chernobyl (Arkady’s name, of course) begged Nadia to come out with them and supervise. They had been exiled far to the east of the settlement, so that it made sense to go out for a full day with them. But then the medical team wanted her help building a clinic and some labs inside, from some discarded freight crates that they were converting into shelters. So instead of staying out at Chernobyl she would go back midday to eat and then help the med team. Every night she passed out exhausted.
Some evenings before she did, she had long talks with Arkady, up on Phobos. His crew was having trouble with the moon’s micro-gravity, and he wanted her advice as well. “If only we could get into some g just to live, to sleep!” Arkady said.
“Build train tracks in a ring around the surface,” Nadia suggested out of a doze. “Make one of the tanks from the Ares into a train, and run it around the track. Get on board and run the train around fast enough to give you some g against the ceiling of the train.”
Static, then Arkady’s wild cackle. “Nadezhda Francine, I love you, I love you!”
“You love gravity.”
With all this advisory work, the construction of their permanent habitat went slowly indeed. It was only once a week or so that Nadia could climb into the open cab of a Mercedes and rumble over the torn ground to the end of the trench she had started. At this point it was ten meters wide, fifty long, and four deep, which was as deep as she wanted to go. The bottom of the trench was the same as the surface: clay, fines, rocks of all size. Regolith. While she worked with the bulldozer the geologists hopped in and out of the hole, taking samples and looking around, even Ann who did not like the way they were ripping up the area; but no geologist ever born could keep away from a land cut. Nadia listened to their conversation band as she worked. They figured the regolith was probably much the same all the way down to bedrock, which was too bad; regolith was not Nadia’s idea of good ground. At least its water content was low, less than a tenth of a percent, which meant they wouldn’t get much slumping under a foundation, one of the constant nightmares of Siberian construction.
When she got the regolith cut right, she was going to lay a foundation of Portland cement, the best concrete they could make with the materials at hand. It would crack unless they poured it two meters thick, but shikata ga nai; and the thickness would provide some insulation. But she would have to box the mud and heat it to get it to cure; it wouldn’t below 13° Centigrade, so that meant heating elements … Slow, slow, everything was slow.
She drove the dozer forward to lengthen the trench, and it bit the ground and bucked. Then the weight of the thing told, and the scoop cut through the regolith and plowed forward. “What a pig,” Nadia said to the vehicle fondly.
“Nadia’s in love with a bulldozer,” Maya said over their band.
At least I know who I’m in love with, Nadia mouthed. She had spent too many of the evenings of the last week out in the tool shed with Maya, listening to her rattle away about her problems with John, about how she really got along in most ways better with Frank, about how she couldn’t decide what she felt, and was sure Frank hated her now, etc. etc. etc. Cleaning tools Nadia had said Da, da, da, trying to hide her lack of interest. The truth was she was tired of Maya’s problems and would rather have discussed building materials, or almost anything else.
A call from the Chernobyl crew interrupted her bulldozing. “Nadia, how can we get cement this thick to set in the cold?”
“Heat it.”
“We are!”
“Heat it more.”
“Oh!” They were almost done out there, Nadia judged: the Rickover had been mostly preassembled, it was a matter of putting the forms together, fitting in the steel containment tank, filling the pipes with water (which dropped their supply to nearly nothing), wiring it all up, piling sandbags around it all, and pulling the control rods. After that they would have three hundred kilowatts on hand, which would put an end to the nightly argument over who got the lion’s share of generator power the next day.
There was a call from Sax: one of the Sabatier processors had clogged, and they couldn’t get the housing off it. So Nadia left the bulldozing to John and Maya, and took a rover to the factory complex to have a look. “I’m off to see the alchemists,” she said.
“Have you ever noticed how much the machinery here reflects the character of the industry that built it?” Sax remarked to Nadia as she arrived and went to work on the Sabatier. “If it’s built by car companies, it’s low-powered but reliable. If it’s built by the aerospace industry, it’s outrageously high-powered but breaks down twice a day.”
“And partnership products are horribly designed,” Nadia said.
“Right.”
“And chemical equipment is finicky,” Spencer Jackson added.
“I’ll say. Especially in this dust.”
The Boeing air miners had been only the start of the factory complex; their gases were fed into big boxy trailers to be compressed and expanded and rendered and recombined using chemical engineering operations such as dehumidification, liquefaction, fractional distillation, electrolysis, electro-synthesis, the Sabatier process, the Raschig process, the Oswald process … Slowly they worked up more and more complex chemicals, which flowed from one factory to the next, through a warren of structures that looked like mobile homes caught in a web of color-coded tanks and pipes and tubes and cables.
Spencer’s current favorite product was magnesium, which was plentiful; they were getting twenty-five kilos of it from every cubic meter of regolith, he said, and it was so light in Martian g that a big bar of it felt like a piece of plastic. “It’s too brittle when pure,” Spencer said, “but if we alloy it just a bit we’ll have an extremely light and strong metal.”
“Martian steel,” Nadia said.
“Better than that.”
So, alchemy; but with finicky machines. Nadia found the Sabatier’s problem and went to work fixing a broken vacuum pump. It was amazing how much of the factory complex came down to pumps, sometimes it seemed nothing but a mad assemblage of them; and by their nature they kept clogging with fines and breaking down.
Two hours later the Sabatier was fixed. On the way back to the trailer park, Nadia glanced into the first greenhouse. Plants were already blooming, the new crops breaking out of their beds of new black soil. Green glowed intensely in the reds of this world, it was a pleasure to see it. The bamboo was growing several centimeters a day, she had been told, and the crop was already nearly five meters tall. It was easy to see they were going to need more soil. Back at the alchemists’ they were using nitrogen from the Boeings to synthesize ammonia fertilizers: Hiroko craved these because the regolith was an agricultural nightmare, intensely salty, explosive with peroxides, extremely arid, and completely without biomass. They were going to have to construct soil just like they had the magnesium bars.
Nadia went into her habitat in the trailer park for a standing lunch. Then she was out again, to the site of the permanent habitat. The floor of the trench had been almost leveled in her absence. She stood on the edge of the hole, looking down in it. They were going to build to a design that she liked tremendously, one she had worked on herself in Antarctica and on the Ares: a simple line of barrel-vaulted chambers, sharing adjacent walls. By setting them in the trench the chambers would be half-buried to begin with; then when completed they would be covered by ten meters of sandbagged regolith to stop radiation and also, because they planned to pressurize to 450 millibars to keep the buildings from exploding. Local materials were all they needed for the exteriors of these buildings: Portland cement and bricks were it, basically, with plastic liner in some places to insure the seal.
Unfortunately the brickmakers were having some trouble, and they gave Nadia a call. Nadia’s patience was running short, and she groaned. “We travel all the way to Mars and you can’t make bricks?”
“It’s not that we can’t make bricks,” said Gene. “It’s just that I don’t like them.” The brickmaking factory mixed clays and sulphur extracted from the regolith, and this preparation was poured into brick molds and baked until the sulphur began to polymerize, and then as the bricks cooled they were compressed a bit in another part of the machine. The resulting blackish-red bricks had a tensile strength that was technically adequate for use in the barrel vaults, but Gene wasn’t happy. “We don’t want to be at minimum values for heavy roofs over our heads,” he said. “What if we pile one sandbag too many on top of it, or if we get a little marsquake? I don’t like it.”
After some thought Nadia said, “Add nylon.”
“What?”
“Go out and find the parachutes from the freight drops, and shred them real fine, and add them to the clay. That’ll help their tensile strength.”
“Very true,” Gene said, after a pause. “Good idea! Think we can find the parachutes?”
“They must be east of here somewhere.”
So they had finally found a job for the geologists that actually helped the construction effort. Ann and Simon and Phyllis and Sasha and Igor drove long-distance rovers over the horizon to east of the base, searching and surveying far past Chernobyl; and in the next week they found almost forty parachutes, each one representing a few hundred kilos of useful nylon.
One day they came back excited, having reached Ganges Catena, a series of sinkholes in the plain a hundred kilometers to the southeast. “It was strange,” Igor said, “because you can’t see them until the last minute, and then they’re like huge funnels, about ten kilometers across and a couple deep, eight or nine in a row, each smaller and shallower. Fantastic. They’re probably thermokarsts, but they’re so big it’s hard to believe it.”
Sasha said, “It’s nice to see such a distance, after all this near horizon stuff.”
“They’re thermokarsts,” Ann said. But they had drilled and found no water. This was getting to be a concern; they hadn’t found any water to speak of in the ground, no matter how far down they drilled: it forced them to rely on the supplies from the air miners.
Nadia shrugged. The air miners were pretty tough. She wanted to think about her vaults. The new improved bricks were appearing and she had started the robots building the walls and roofs. The brick factory filled little robot cars, which rolled like toy rovers across the plain to cranes at the site; the cranes pulled out bricks one by one, and placed them on cold mortar spread by another set of robots. The system worked so well that soon the bottleneck became brick production itself. Nadia would have been pleased, if she had had more faith in the robots: these seemed okay, but her experiences with robots in the years on Novy Mir had made her wary. They were great if everything went perfectly, but nothing ever went perfectly, and it was hard to program them with decision algorithms that didn’t either make them so cautious that they froze every minute, or so uncontrolled that they could commit unbelievable acts of stupidity, repeating an error a thousand times and magnifying a small glitch into a giant blunder, as in Maya’s emotional life. You got what you put into robots; but even the best were mindless idiots.
One evening Maya snagged her out in her tool room and asked her to switch to a private band. “Michel is useless,” she complained. “I’m really having a hard time, and he won’t even talk to me! You’re the only one I trust, Nadia. Yesterday I told Frank that I thought John was trying to undercut his authority in Houston, but that he shouldn’t tell anyone I thought so and the very next day John was asking me why I thought he was bothering Frank. There’s no one who will just listen and stay quiet!”
Nadia nodded, rolling her eyes. Finally she said, “Sorry, Maya, I have to go talk to Hiroko about a leak they can’t find.” She banged her faceplate lightly against Maya’s – symbol for a kiss on the cheek – switched to the common band and took off. Enough was enough. It was infinitely more interesting to talk to Hiroko: real conversations, about real problems in the real world. Hiroko was asking Nadia for help almost every day, and Nadia liked that, because Hiroko was brilliant, and since landfall had obviously raised her estimate of Nadia’s abilities. Mutual professional respect, a great maker of friendships. And so nice to talk nothing but business. Hermetic seals, lock mechanisms, thermal engineering, glass polarization, farm/human interfaces (Hiroko’s talk was always a few steps ahead of the game); these topics were a great relief after all the emotional whispered conferences with Maya, endless sessions about who liked Maya and who didn’t like Maya, about how Maya felt about this and that, and who had hurt her feelings that day … bah. Hiroko was never strange, except when she would say something Nadia didn’t know how to deal with, like, “Mars will tell us what it wants and then we’ll have to do it.” What could you say to something like that? But Hiroko would just smile her big smile, and laugh at Nadia’s shrug.
At night the talk still went everywhere, vehement, absorbed, unselfconscious. Dmitri and Samantha were sure that they could soon introduce genetically engineered micro-organisms into the regolith that would survive, but they would have to get permission first from the UN. Nadia herself found the idea alarming: it made the chemical engineering in the factories look relatively straightforward, more like brickmaking than the dangerous acts of creation Samantha was proposing … Although the alchemists were performing some pretty creative things themselves. Almost every day they came back to the trailer park with samples of new materials: sulphuric acid, sorel cements for the vault mortar, ammonium nitrate explosives, a calcium cyanamide rover fuel, polysulfide rubber, silicon-based hyperacids, emulsifying agents, a selection of test tubes holding trace elements extracted from the salts; and, most recently, clear glass. This last was a coup, as earlier attempts at glassmaking had produced only black glass. But stripping silicate feedstocks of their iron content had done the trick; and so one night they sat in the trailer passing around small wavy sheets of glass, the glass itself filled with bubbles and irregularities, like something out of the seventeenth century.
When they got the first chamber buried and pressurized, Nadia walked around inside it with her helmet off, sniffing the air. It was pressurized to 450 millibars, the same as the helmets and the trailer park, with an oxygen-nitrogen-argon mix, and warmed to about 15° Centigrade. It felt great.
The chamber had been divided into two stories by a floor of bamboo trunks, set in a slot in the brick wall two and a half meters overhead. The segmented cylinders made a sweet green ceiling, lit by neon tubes hung under them. Against one wall was a magnesium and bamboo staircase, leading through a hole to the upper story. She climbed up to have a look. Split bamboo over the trunks made a fairly flat green floor. The ceiling was brick, rounded and low. Up there they would locate the bedrooms and bathroom; the lower floor would be living room and kitchen. Maya and Simon had already put up wall hangings, made of nylon from the salvaged parachutes. There were no windows: lighting came only from the neon bulbs. Nadia disliked this fact, and in the larger habitat she was already planning, there would be windows in almost every room. But first things first. For the time being these windowless chambers were the best they could do. And a big improvement over the trailer park, after all.
As she went back down the stairs she ran her fingers over the bricks and mortar. They were rough, but warm to the touch, heated by elements placed behind them. There were heating elements under the floor as well. She took off her shoes and socks, luxuriating in the feel of the warm rough bricks underfoot. It was a wonderful room; and nice, too, to think that they had gone all the way to Mars, and there built homes out of brick and bamboo. She recalled vaulted ruins she had seen years ago on Crete, at a site called Aptera; underground Roman cisterns, barrel-vaulted and made of brick, buried in a hillside. They had been almost the same size as these chambers. Their exact purpose was unknown; storage for olive oil, some said, though it would have been an awful lot of oil. Those vaults were intact two thousand years after their construction, and in earthquake country. As Nadia put her boots back on she grinned to think of it. Two thousand years from now, their descendants might walk into this chamber, no doubt a museum by then, if it still existed – the first human dwelling built on Mars! And she had done it. Suddenly she felt the eyes of that future on her, and shivered. They were like Cro-Magnons in a cave, living a life that was certain to be pored over by the archeologists of subsequent generations; people like her who would wonder, and wonder, and never quite understand.
More time passed, more work got done. It blurred for Nadia: she was always busy. The interior construction of the vaulted chambers was complicated, and the robots couldn’t help much: plumbing, heating, gas exchange, locks, kitchens; they had all the fixtures and tools and could work in pants and sweatshirts, but still it took an amazing amount of time. Work work work, day after day!
One evening, just before sunset, Nadia trudged across torn-up dirt to the trailer park, feeling hungry and beat and extremely relaxed, not that you didn’t have to be careful at the end of a day: she had torn a centimeter hole in the back of a glove the other evening being careless, and the cold hadn’t been so bad, about –50° Centigrade, nothing compared to some Siberian winter days – but the low air pressure had sucked out a blood bruise instantly, and then that had started to freeze up, which made the bruise smaller no doubt, but slower to heal as well. Anyway, you had to be careful, but there was something so fluid about tired muscles at the end of a day’s construction work, the low rust sunlight slanting across the rocky plain, and all of a sudden she could feel that she was happy. Arkady called in from Phobos at just that moment, and she greeted him cheerily; “I feel just like a Louis Armstrong solo from 1947.”
“Why 1947?” he asked.
“Well, that was the year he sounded the most happy. Most of his life his tone has a sharp edge to it, really beautiful, but in 1947 it was even more beautiful because it has this relaxed fluid joy, you never hear it in him before or after.”
“A good year for him, I take it?”
“Oh yes! An amazing year! After twenty years of horrible big bands, you see, he got back to a little group like the Hot Five, that was the group he headed when he was young, and there it was, the old songs, even some of the old faces – and all of it better than the first time, you know, the recording technology, the money, the audiences, the band, his own power … It must have felt like the fountain of youth, I tell you.”
“You’ll have to send up some recordings,” Arkady said. He tried to sing: “I can’t give you any thing but love, baby!” Phobos was about over the horizon, he had just been calling to say hi. “So this is your 1947,” he said before he went.
Nadia put her tools away, singing the song correctly. And she understood that what Arkady had said was true; something had happened to her similar to what had happened to Armstrong in 1947 – because despite the miserable conditions, her youthful years in Siberia had been the happiest of her life, they really had. And then she had endured twenty years of big band cosmonautics, bureaucracy, simulations, an indoor life – all to get here. And now suddenly she was out in the open again, building things with her hands, operating heavy machinery, solving problems a hundred times a day, just like Siberia only better. It was just like Satchmo’s return!
Thus when Hiroko came up and said, “Nadia, this crescent wrench is absolutely frozen in this position,” Nadia sang to her, “That’s the only thing I’m thinking of – baby!” and took the crescent wrench and slammed it against a table like a hammer, and twiddled the dial to show Hiroko it was unstuck, and laughed at her expression. “The engineer’s solution,” she explained, and went humming into the lock, thinking how funny Hiroko was, a woman who held their whole ecosystem in her head, but couldn’t hammer a nail straight.
And that night she talked over the day’s work with Sax, and spoke to Spencer about glass, and in the middle of that conversation crashed on her bunk and snuggled her head into her pillow, feeling totally luxurious, the glorious final chorus of “Ain’t Misbehaving” chasing her off to sleep.
But things change as time passes; nothing lasts, not even stone, not even happiness. “Do you realize it’s Ls 170 already?” Phyllis said one night. “Didn’t we land at Ls 7?”
So they had been on Mars for half a Martian year. Phyllis was using the calendar devised by planetary scientists; among the colonists it was becoming more common than the Terran system. Mars’s year was 668.6 local days long, and to tell where they were in this long year it took the Ls calendar. This system declared the line between the sun and Mars at its northern spring equinox to be 0°, and then the year was divided into 360°, so that Ls = 0°–90° was the northern spring, 90–180° the northern summer, 180–270° the fall, and 270–360° (or 0° again) the winter.
This simple situation was complicated by the eccentricity of the Martian orbit, which is extreme by Terran standards, for at perihelion Mars is about forty-three million kilometers closer to the sun than it is at aphelion, and thus receiving about 45% more sunlight. This fluctuation makes the southern and northern seasons quite unequal. Perihelion arrives every year at Ls = 250°, late in the southern spring; so southern springs and summers are much hotter than northern springs and summers, with peak temperatures as much as thirty degrees higher. Southern autumns and winters are colder, however, occurring as they do near aphelion; so much colder that the southern polar cap is mostly carbon dioxide, while the northern one is mostly water ice.
So the south was the hemisphere of extremes, the north that of moderation. And the orbital eccentricity caused one other feature of note; planets move faster the closer they are to the sun, so the seasons near perihelion are shorter than those near aphelion; the northern autumn is 143 days long, for instance, while northern spring is 194. Spring fifty-one days longer than autumn! Some claimed this alone made it worth settling in the north.
In any case, in the north they were; and spring had arrived. The days got longer by a little bit every day and the work went on. The area around the base got more cluttered, more criss-crossed with tracks; they had laid a cement road to Chernobyl and the base itself was now so big that from the trailer park it extended over the horizon in all directions: the alchemists’ quarter and the Chernobyl road to the east, the permanent habitat to the north, the storage area and the farm to the west, and the biomed center to the south.
Eventually everyone moved into the finished chambers of the permanent habitat. The nightly conferences there were shorter and more routinized than they had been in the trailer park, and days went by when Nadia got no calls for help. There were some people she saw only once in a while; the biomed crew in its labs, Phyllis’s prospecting unit, even Ann. One night Ann flopped on her bed next to Nadia’s, and invited her to go along on an exploration to Hebes Chasma, some 130 kilometers to the southwest. Obviously Ann wanted to show her something outside the base area; but Nadia declined. “I’ve got too much work to do, you know.” And seeing Ann’s disappointment: “Maybe next trip.”
And then it was back to work on the interiors of the chambers, and the exteriors of a new wing. Arkady had suggested making the line of chambers the first of four, arranged in a square, and Nadia was going to do it; as Arkady pointed out, it would then be possible to roof the area enclosed by the square. “That’s where those magnesium beams will come in handy,” Nadia said. “If only we could make stronger glass panes …”
They had finished two sides of the square, twelve chambers entirely done, when Ann and her team returned from Hebes. Everyone spent that evening looking at their videotapes. These showed the expedition’s rovers rolling over rocky plains; then ahead there appeared a break extending all the way across the screen, as if they were approaching the edge of the world. Strange little meter-high cliffs finally stopped the rovers, and the pictures bounced as one explorer got out and walked with helmet camera turned on.
Then abruptly the shot was from the rim, a one-eighty pan shot of a canyon that was so much bigger than the sinkholes of Ganges Catena that it was hard to grasp. The walls of the far side of the chasm were just visible on the distant horizon. In fact they could see walls all the way around, for Hebes was an almost-enclosed chasm, a sunken ellipse about two hundred kilometers long and a hundred across. Ann’s party had come to the north rim in late afternoon, and the eastern curve of the wall was clearly visible, flooded by sunset light; out to the west the wall was just a low dark mark. The floor of the chasm was generally flat, with a central dip. “If you could float a dome over the chasm,” Ann said, “you’d have a nice big enclosure.”
“You’re talking miracle domes, Ann,” Sax said. “That’s about ten thousand square kilometers.”
“Well, it would make a good big enclosure. And then you could leave the rest of the planet alone.”
“The weight of a dome would collapse the canyon walls.”
“That’s why I said you’d have to float it.”
Sax just shook his head.
“It’s no more exotic than this space elevator you talk about.”
“I want to live in a house located right where you took this video,” Nadia interrupted. “What a view!”
“Just wait till you get up on one of the Tharsis volcanoes,” Ann said, irritated. “Then you’ll get a view.”
There were little spats like that all the time now. It reminded Nadia unpleasantly of the last months on the Ares. Another example: Arkady and his crew sent down videos of Phobos, with his commentary: “The Stickney impact almost broke this rock in pieces, and it’s chondritic, almost twenty percent water, so a lot of the water outgassed on impact and filled the fracture system and froze in a whole system of ice veins.” Fascinating stuff, but all it did was cause an argument between Ann and Phyllis, their two top geologists, as to whether this was the real explanation for the ice. Phyllis even suggested shipping water down from Phobos, which was silly, even if their supplies were low and their demand increasing. Chernobyl took a lot of water, and the farmers were ready to start a little swamp in their biosphere; and Nadia wanted to install a swimming complex in one of the vaulted chambers, including a lap pool, three whirlpool baths, and a sauna. Each night people asked Nadia how it was coming along, because everyone was sick of washing with sponges and still being dusty, and of never really getting warm. They wanted a bath; in their old aquatic dolphin brains, down below the cerebrums, down where desires were primal and fierce, they wanted back into water.
So they needed more water, but the seismic scans were finding no evidence of ice aquifers underground, and Ann thought there weren’t any in the region. They had to continue to rely on the air miners, or scrape up regolith and load it into the soil-water distilleries. But Nadia didn’t like to overwork the distilleries, because they had been manufactured by a French-Hungarian-Chinese consortium, and were sure to wear out if used for bulk work.
But that was life on Mars; it was a dry place. Shikata ga nai.
“There are always choices,” Phyllis said to that. This was why she had suggested filling landing vehicles with Phobos ice, and bringing it on down; but Ann thought that was a ridiculous waste of energy; and they were off again.
It was especially irritating to Nadia because she herself was in such a good mood. She saw no reason to quarrel, and it disturbed her that the others didn’t feel the same. Why did the dynamics of a group fluctuate so? Here they were on Mars, where the seasons were twice as long as Earth’s, and every day was forty minutes longer: why couldn’t people relax? Nadia had a sense that there was time for things even though she was always busy, and the extra thirty-nine and half minutes per day was probably the most important component of this feeling; human circadian biorhythms had been set over millions of years of evolution, and now suddenly to have extra minutes of day and night, day after day, night after night – no doubt it had effects. Nadia was sure of it, because despite the hectic pace of every day’s work, and the way she passed out in sheer exhaustion every night, she always woke rested. That strange pause on the digital clocks, when at midnight the figures hit 12:00:00 and suddenly stopped, and the unmarked time passed, passed, passed, sometimes it seemed for a very long time indeed; and then snapped on to 12:00:01, and began its usual inexorable flicker; well, the Martian timeslip was something special. Often Nadia was asleep through it, as were most of the rest of them. But Hiroko had a chant that she chanted during it when she was up, and she and the farm team, and many of the rest of them, spent every Saturday night partying and chanting that chant through the timeslip – something in Japanese, Nadia never learned what, though she sometimes hummed along, sitting enjoying the vault and her friends.
But one Saturday night when she sat there, nearly comatose, Maya came over and sat against her shoulder for a talk. Maya with her beautiful face, always well-groomed, always the latest in chicarnost even in their everyday jumpsuits, looking distraught. “Nadia, you have to do me a favor, please, please.”
“What?”
“I need you to tell something to Frank for me.”
“Why don’t you do it yourself?”
“I can’t have John seeing us talk! I have to get a message to him, and please, Nadezhda Francine, you’re my only way.”
Nadia made a disgusted noise.
“Please.”
It was surprising how much Nadia would have rather been talking to Ann, or Samantha, or Arkady. If only Arkady would come down from Phobos!
But Maya was her friend. And that desperate look on her face: Nadia couldn’t stand it. “What message?”
“Tell him that I’ll meet him tonight in the storage area,” Maya said imperiously. “At midnight. To talk.”
Nadia sighed. But later she went to Frank, and gave him the message. He nodded without meeting her eye, embarrassed, grim, unhappy.
Then a few days later Nadia and Maya were cleaning up the brick floor of the latest chamber to be pressurized, and Nadia’s curiosity got the best of her; she broke her customary silence on the topic, and asked Maya what was going on. “Well, it’s John and Frank,” Maya said querulously. “They’re very competitive. They’re like brothers, and there’s a lot of jealousy there. John got to Mars first, and then he got permission to come back again, and Frank doesn’t think it was fair. Frank did a lot of the work in Washington to get the colony funded, and he thinks John has always taken advantage of his work. And now, well. John and I are good together, I like him. It’s easy with him. Easy, but maybe a little … I don’t know. Not boring. But not exciting. He likes to walk around, hang out with the farm crew. He doesn’t like to talk that much! Frank, now, we could talk forever. Argue forever, maybe, but at least we’re talking! And you know, we had a very brief affair on the Ares, back at the beginning, and it didn’t work out, but he still thinks it could.”
Why would he think that? Nadia mouthed.
“So he keeps trying to talk me into leaving John and being with him, and John suspects that’s what he’s doing, so there’s a lot of jealousy between them. I’m just trying to keep them from each other’s throats, that’s all.”
Nadia decided to stick to her resolve and not ask about it again. But now she was involved despite herself. Maya kept coming to her to talk, and to ask her to convey messages to Frank for her. “I’m not a go-between!” Nadia kept protesting, but she kept doing it, and once or twice when she did she got into long conversations with Frank, about Maya of course; who she was, what she was like, why she acted the way she did. “Look,” Nadia said to him, “I can’t speak for Maya. I don’t know why she does what she does, you have to ask her yourself. But I can tell you, she comes out of the old Moscow Soviet culture, university and CP for both her mother and her grandmother. And men were the enemies for Maya’s babushka, and for her mother too, it was a matrioshka. Maya’s mother used to say to her, ‘Women are the roots, men are just the leaves.’ There was a whole culture of mistrust, manipulation, fear. That’s where Maya comes from. And at the same time we have this tradition of amicochonstvo, a kind of intense friendship where you learn the very tiniest details of your friend’s life, you invade each other’s lives in a sense, and of course that’s impossible and it has to end, usually badly.”
Frank was nodding at this description, recognizing something in it. Nadia sighed and went on. “These are the friendships that lead to love, and then love has the same sort of trouble only magnified, especially with all that fear at the bottom of it.”
And Frank – tall, dark, and somehow handsome, bulky with power, spinning with his own internal dynamo, the American politician (or so Nadia thought of him), now wrapped around the finger of a neurotic Russian beauty – Frank nodded humbly, and thanked her, looking discouraged. As well he should.
Nadia did her best to ignore all that. But it seemed everything else had turned problematic as well. Vlad had never approved of how much time they were spending on the surface in the daytime, and now he said, “We ought to stay under the hill most of the time, and bury all the labs as well. Outdoor work should be restricted to an hour in the early mornings and another in the late afternoons, when the sun is low.”
“I’ll be damned if I stay indoors all day,” Ann said, and many agreed with her.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Frank pointed out.
“But most of it could be done by teleoperation,” Vlad said. “And it should be. What we are doing is the equivalent of standing ten kilometers from an atomic explosion —”
“So?” Ann said. “Soldiers did that — ”
“ — every six months,” Vlad finished, and stared at her. “Would you do that?”
Even Ann looked subdued. No ozone layer, no magnetic field to speak of; they were getting fried by radiation almost as badly as if they were in interplanetary space, to the tune of ten rems per year.
And so Frank and Maya ordered them to ration their time outdoors. There was a lot of interior work to be done under the hill, getting the last row of chambers finished; and it was possible to dig some cellars below the vaults, giving them some more space protected from radiation. And many of the tractors were equipped to be teleoperated from indoor stations, their decision algorithms handling the details while the human operators watched screens below. So it could be done; but no one liked the life that resulted. Even Sax Russell, who was content to work indoors most of the time, looked a bit perplexed. In the evenings a number of people began to argue for immediate terraforming efforts, and they made the case with renewed intensity.
“That’s not our decision to make,” Frank told them sharply. “The UN decides that one. Besides it’s a long-term solution, on the scale of centuries at best. Don’t waste time talking about it!”
Ann said, “That’s all true, but I don’t want to waste my time down here in these caves, either. We should live our lives the way we want. We’re too old to worry about radiation.”
Arguments again, arguments that made Nadia feel as if she had floated off the good solid rock of her planet back into the tense weightless reality of the Ares. Carping, complaining, arguing; until people got bored, or tired, and went to sleep. Nadia started leaving the room whenever it began, looking for Hiroko and a chance to discuss something concrete. But it was hard to avoid these matters, to stop thinking about them.
Then one night Maya came to her crying. There was room in the permanent habitat for private talks, and Nadia went with her down to the northeast corner of the vaults, where they were still working on interiors, and sat by her arm to arm, shivering and listening to her, and occasionally putting an arm over her shoulder and giving her a hug. “Look,” Nadia said at one point, “why don’t you just decide? Why don’t you quit playing one off against the other?”
“But I have decided! It’s John I love, it’s always been John. But now he’s seen me with Frank and he thinks I’ve betrayed him. It’s really petty of him! They’re like brothers, they compete in everything, and this time it’s just a mistake!”
Nadia resisted learning the details, she didn’t want to hear it. She sat there listening anyway.
And then John was standing there before them. Nadia got up to leave, but he didn’t appear to notice. “Look,” he said to Maya. “I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. It’s over.”
“It’s not over,” Maya said, instantly composed. “I love you.”
John’s smile was rueful. “Yes. And I love you. But I want things simple.”
“It is simple!”
“No it isn’t. I mean, you can be in love with more than one person at the same time. Anyone can, that’s just the way it is. But you can only be loyal to one. And I want … I want to be loyal. To someone who is loyal to me. It’s simple, but …”
He shook his head; he couldn’t find the phrase. He walked back into the eastern row of chambers, disappeared through a door.
“Americans,” Maya said viciously. “Fucking children!” Then she was up through the door after him.
But soon she came back. He had retreated to a group in one of the lounges, and wouldn’t leave. “I’m tired,” Nadia tried to say, but Maya wouldn’t hear it, she was getting more and more upset. For over an hour they discussed it, over and over. Eventually Nadia agreed to go to John and ask him to come to Maya and talk it over. Nadia walked grimly through the chambers, oblivious to the brick and the colorful nylon hangings. The go-between that nobody noticed. Couldn’t they get robots to do this? She found John, who apologized for ignoring her earlier. “I was upset, I’m sorry. I figured you’d hear it all eventually anyway.”
Nadia shrugged. “No problem. But look, you have to go talk to her. That’s the way it is with Maya. We talk, talk, talk; if you contract to be in a relationship, you have to talk your way all the way through it, and all the way out of it. If you don’t it will be worse for you in the long run, believe me.”
That got to him. Sobered, he went off to find her. Nadia went to bed.
The next day she was out working late on a trencher. It was the third job of the day, and the second had been trouble: Samantha had tried to carry a load on the earthmover blade while making a turn, and the thing had taken a nosedive and twisted the rods of the blade lifters out of their casings, spilling hydraulic fluid over the ground, where it had frozen before it even flattened out. They had had to set jacks under the airborne back end of the tractor, and then decouple the entire blade attachment and lower the vehicle on the jacks, and every step of the operation had been a pain.
Then as soon as that was finished, Nadia had been called over to help with a Sandvik Tubex boring machine, which they were using to drill cased holes through large boulders they ran into while laying a water line from the alchemists’ to the permanent habitat. The down-the-hole pneumatic hammer had apparently frozen at full extension, as stuck as an arrow fired most of the way through a tree. Nadia stood looking down at the hammer shaft. “Do you have any suggestions for freeing the hammer without breaking it?” Spencer asked.
“Break the boulder,” Nadia said wearily, and walked over and got in a tractor with a backhoe already attached. She drove it over, and dug down to the top of the boulder, and then got out to attach a little Allied hydraulic impact hammer to the backhoe. She had just set it in position on the top of the boulder when the down-the-hole hammer suddenly jerked its drill back, pulling the boulder with it and catching the outside of her left hand against the underside of the Allied Hy-Ram.
Instinctively she pulled back, and pain lanced up her arm and into her chest. Fire filled that side of her body and her vision went white. There were shouts in her ears: “What’s wrong? What happened?” She must have screamed. “Help,” she grated. She was sitting, her crushed hand still pinned between rock and hammer. She pushed at the front wheel of the tractor with her foot, shoved with all her might and felt the hammer rasp her bones over rock. Then she was flopped on her back, the hand free. The pain was blinding, she felt sick to her stomach and thought she might faint. Pushing onto her knees with her good hand, she saw that the crushed hand was bleeding heavily, the glove ripped apart, the little finger apparently gone. She groaned and hunched over it, pressed it to her and then jammed it against the ground, ignoring the flash of pain. Even bleeding as it was, the hand would freeze in … how long? “Freeze, damn you, freeze,” she cried. She shook tears out of her eyes and forced herself to look at it. Blood all over, steaming. She pushed the hand into the ground as hard as she could stand. Already it hurt less. Soon it would be numb, she would have to be careful not to freeze the whole hand! Frightened, she prepared to pull it back into her lap; then people were there, lifting her, and she fainted. After that she was maimed. Nadia Nine Fingers, Arkady called her over the phone. He sent her lines by Yevtushenko, written to mourn the death of Louis Armstrong: “Do as you did in the past/And play.”
“How did you find that?” Nadia asked him. “I can’t imagine you reading Yevtushenko.”
“Of course I read him, it’s better than McGonagall! No, this was in a book on Armstrong. I’ve taken your advice and been listening to him while we work, and lately reading some books on him at night.”
“I wish you’d come down here,” Nadia said.
Vlad had done the surgery. He told her it would be all right. “It caught you clean. The ring finger is a bit impaired, and will act like the little finger used to, probably. But ring fingers never do much anyway. The two main fingers will be strong as ever.”
Everyone came by to visit. Nevertheless she spoke more with Arkady than anyone else, in the hours of the night when she was alone, in the four and a half hours between Phobos’s rising in the west and its setting in the east. He called in almost every night, at first, and often thereafter.
Pretty soon she was up and around, hand in a cast that was suspiciously slender. She went out to troubleshoot or consult, hoping to keep her mind occupied. Michel Duval never came by at all, which she thought was strange. Wasn’t this what psychologists were for? She couldn’t help feeling depressed: she needed her hands for her work, she was a hand laborer. The cast got in the way and she cut off the part around the wrist, with shears from her tool kit. But she had to keep both hand and cast in a box when outside, and there wasn’t much she could do. It really was depressing.
Saturday night arrived, and she sat in the newly filled whirlpool bath, nursing a glass of bad wine and looking around at her companions, splashing and soaking in their bathing suits. She wasn’t the only one to have been injured, by any means; they were all a bit battered now, after so many months of physical work: almost everyone had frostburn marks, patches of black skin that eventually peeled, leaving pink new skin, garish and ugly in the heat of the pools. And several others wore casts, on hands, wrists, arms, even legs; all for breaks or sprains. Actually they were lucky no one had gotten killed yet.
All these bodies, and none for her. They knew each other like family, she thought; they were each other’s physicians, they slept in the same rooms, dressed in the same locks, bathed together; an unremarkable group of human animals, eyecatching in the inert world they occupied, but more comforting than exciting, at least most of the time. Middle-aged bodies. Nadia herself was as round as a pumpkin, a plump tough muscular short woman, squarish and yet rounded. And single. Her closest friend these days was only a voice in her ear, a face on the screen. When he came down from Phobos … well, hard to say. He had had a lot of girlfriends on the Ares, and Janet Blyleven had gone to Phobos to be with him …
People were arguing again, there in the shallows of the lap pool. Ann, tall and angular, leaning down to snap something at Sax Russell, short and soft. As usual, he didn’t appear to be listening. She would hit him one day if he didn’t watch out. It was strange how the group was changing again, how the feel of it was changing. She could never get a fix on it; the real nature of the group was a thing apart, with a life of its own, somehow distinct from the characters of the individuals that constituted it. It must make Michel’s job as their shrink almost impossible. Not that one could tell with Michel; he was the quietest and most unobtrusive psychiatrist she had ever met. No doubt an asset, in this crowd of shrink-atheists. But she still thought it was odd he hadn’t come by to see her after the accident.
One evening she left the dining chambers and walked down to the tunnel they were digging from the vaulted chambers to the farm complex, and there at the tunnel’s end were Maya and Frank, arguing in a vicious undertone that carried down the tunnel not their meaning but their feeling: Frank’s face was contorted with anger, and Maya as she turned from him was distraught, weeping; she turned back to shout at him, “It was never like that,” and then ran blindly toward Nadia, her mouth twisted into a snarl, Frank’s face a mask of pain. Maya saw Nadia standing there and ran right by her.
Shocked, Nadia turned and walked back to the living chambers. She went up magnesium stairs to the living room in chamber two, and turned on the TV to watch a twenty-four hour news program from Earth, something she very rarely did. After a while she turned down the sound, and looked at the pattern of bricks in the barrel vault overhead. Maya came in and started to explain things to her: there was nothing between her and Frank, it was in Frank’s mind only, he just wouldn’t give up on it even though it had been nothing to begin with; she wanted only John, and it wasn’t her fault that John and Frank were on such bad terms now, it was because of Frank’s irrational desire, it wasn’t her fault, but she felt so guilty because the two men had once been such close friends, like brothers.
And Nadia listened with a careful show of patience, saying “Da, da,” and “I see,” and the like, until Maya was lying flat on her back on the floor, crying, and Nadia was sitting on the edge of a chair staring at her, wondering how much of it was true. And what the argument had really been about. And whether she was a bad friend to distrust her old companion’s story so completely. But somehow the whole thing felt like Maya covering her tracks, practising another manipulation. It was just this: those two distraught faces she had seen down the tunnel had been the clearest evidence possible of a fight between intimates. So Maya’s explanation was almost certainly a lie. Nadia said something soothing to her and went off to bed, thinking, you already have taken too much of my time and energy and concentration with these games, you cost me a finger with them, you bitch!
It was getting toward the end of the long northern spring, and they still had no good supply of water, so Ann proposed to make an expedition to the cap and set up a robot distillery, along the way establishing a route that rovers could follow on automatic pilot. “Come with us,” she said to Nadia. “You haven’t seen anything of the planet yet, just the stretch between here and Chernobyl, and that’s nothing. You missed Hebes and Ganges, and you’re not doing anything new here. Really, Nadia, I can’t believe what a grub you’ve been. I mean why did you come to Mars, after all?”
“Why?”
“Yes, why? I mean there’s two kinds of activities here, there’s the exploration of Mars and then there’s the life support for that exploration. And here you’ve been completely immersed in the life support, without paying the slightest attention to the reason we came in the first place!”
“Well, it’s what I like to do,” Nadia said uneasily.
“Fine, but try to keep some perspective on it! What the hell, you could have stayed back on Earth and been a plumber! You didn’t have to come all this way to drive a goddamn bulldozer! Just how long are you going to go on grubbing away here, installing toilets, programming tractors?”
“All right, all right,” Nadia said, thinking of Maya and all the rest. The square of vaults was almost finished, anyway. “I could use a vacation.”
They took off in three big long-range rovers: Nadia and five of the geologists, Ann, Simon Frazier, George Berkovic, Phyllis Boyle and Edvard Perrin. George and Edvard were friends of Phyllis’s from their NASA days, and they supported her in advocating “applied geological studies", meaning prospecting for rare metals; Simon on the other hand was a quiet ally of Ann’s, committed to pure research and a hands-off attitude. Nadia knew all this even though she had spent very little time alone with any of these people, except for Ann. But talk was talk; she could have named all the allegiances of everyone at base if she had to.
The expedition rovers were each composed of two four-wheeled modules, coupled by a flexible frame: they looked a bit like giant ants. They had been built by Rolls-Royce and a multinational aerospace consortium, and had a beautiful sea green finish. The forward modules contained the living quarters and had tinted windows on all four sides; the aft modules contained the fuel tanks, and sported a number of black rotating solar panels. The eight wire mesh wheels were 2.5 meters high, and very broad.
As they headed north across Lunae Planum they marked their route with little green transponders, dropping one every few kilometers. They also cleared rocks from their path that might disable a robot-driven rover, using the snowplow attachment or the little crane at the front end of the first rover. So in effect they were building a road. But they seldom had to use the rockmoving equipment on Lunae; they drove northeast at nearly their full speed of thirty kilometers an hour for several days straight. They were heading northeast, to avoid the canyon systems of Tempe and Mareotis, and this route took them down Lunae to the long slope of Chryse Planitia. Both these regions looked much like the land around their base camp, bumpy and strewn with small rocks; but because they were heading downhill they often had much longer views than they were used to. It was a new pleasure to Nadia, to drive on and on and see new countryside continually pop over the horizon: hillocks, dips, enormous isolated boulders, the occasional low round mesa that was the outside of a crater.
When they had descended to the lowlands of the northern hemisphere, they turned and drove straight north across the immense Acidalia Planitia, and again ran straight for several days. Their wheel tracks stretched behind them like the first cut of a lawnmower through grass, and the transponders gleamed bright and incongruous among the rocks. Phyllis, Edvard and George talked about making a few side trips, to investigate some indications seen in satellite photos that there were unusual mineral outcroppings near Perepelkin Crater. Ann reminded them irritably of their mission. It made Nadia sad to see that Ann was nearly as distant and tense out here as she was back at base; whenever the rovers were stopped she was outside walking around alone, and she was withdrawn when they sat together in Rover One to eat dinner. Occasionally Nadia tried to draw her out: “Ann, how did all these rocks get scattered around like this?”
“Meteors.”
“But where are the craters?”
“Most are in the south.”
“But how did the rocks get here, then?”
“They flew. That’s why they’re so small. It’s only smaller rocks could be tossed so far.”
“But I thought you told me that these northern plains were relatively new, while the heavy cratering was relatively old.”
“That’s right. The rocks you see here come from late meteor action. The total accumulation of loose rock from meteor strikes is much greater than what we can see, that’s what gardened regolith is. And the regolith is a kilometer deep.”
“It’s hard to believe,” Nadia said. “I mean, that’s so many meteors.”
Ann nodded. “It’s billions of years. That’s the difference between here and Earth, the age of the land goes from millions of years to billions. It’s such a big difference it’s hard to imagine. But seeing stuff like this can help.”
Midway across Acidalia they began running into long, straight, steep-walled, flat-bottomed canyons. They looked, as George noted more than once, like the dry beds of the legendary canals. The geological name for them was fossae, and they came in clusters. Even the smallest of these canyons were impassable to rovers, and when they came on one they had to turn and run along its rim, until its floors rose or its walls drew together, and they could continue north over flat plain again.
The horizon ahead was sometimes twenty kilometers off, sometimes three. Craters became rare, and the ones they passed were surrounded by low mounds that rayed out from the rims: splosh craters, where meteors had landed in permafrost that had turned to hot mud in the impact. Nadia’s companions spent a day wandering eagerly over the splayed hills around one of these craters; the rounded slopes, Phyllis said, indicated ancient water as clearly as the grain in petrified wood indicated the original tree. By the way she spoke Nadia understood that this was another of her disagreements with Ann; Phyllis believed in the long wet past model, Ann in the short wet past. Or something like that. Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.
Further north, around latitude 54°, they drove into the weird-looking land of thermokarsts, hummocky terrain spotted by a great number of steep-sided oval pits, called alases. These alases were a hundred times bigger than their Terran analogues, most of them two or three kilometers across, and about sixty meters deep. A sure sign of permafrost, the geologists all agreed; seasonal freezing and thawing of the soil caused it to slump in this pattern. Pits this big indicated that water content in the soil must have been high, Phyllis said. Unless it was yet another manifestation of Martian time scales, Ann replied. Slightly icy soil, slumping ever so slightly, for eons.
Irritably Phyllis suggested that they try collecting water from the ground, and irritably Ann agreed. They found a smooth slope between depressions, and stopped to install a permafrost water collector. Nadia took charge of the operation with a feeling of relief; the trip’s lack of work had begun to get to her. It was a good day’s job: she dug a ten-meter long trench with the lead rover’s little backhoe; laid the lateral collector gallery, a perforated stainless steel pipe filled with gravel; checked the electric heating elements running in strips along the pipe and filters; then filled in the trench with the clay and rocks they had dug out earlier.
Over the lower end of the gallery was a sump and pump, and an insulated transport line leading to a small holding tank. Batteries would power the heating elements, and solar panels charge the batteries. When the holding tank was full, if there was enough water to fill it, the pump would shut off and a solenoid valve would open, allowing the water in the transport line to drain back into the gallery, after which the heating elements would shut off as well.
“Almost done,” Nadia declared late in the day, as she started to bolt the transport pipe onto the last magnesium post. Her hands were dangerously cold, and her maimed hand throbbed. “Maybe someone could start dinner,” she said. “I’m almost done here.” The transport pipe had to be packed in a thick cylinder of white polyurethane foam, then fitted into a larger protective pipe. Amazing how much insulation complicated a simple piece of plumbing.
Hex nut, washer, cotter pin, a firm tug on the wrench. Nadia walked along the line, checking the coupling bands at the joints. Everything firm. She lugged her tools over to Rover One, looked back at the result of the day’s work: a tank, a short pipe on posts, a box on the ground, a long low mound of disturbed soil running uphill, looking raw but otherwise not unusual in this land of lumps. “We’ll drink some fresh water on our way back,” she said.
They had driven north for over two thousand kilometers, and finally rolled down onto Vastitas Borealis, an ancient cratered lava plain that ringed the northern hemisphere between latitudes 60° and 70°. Ann and the other geologists spent a couple of hours every morning out on the bare dark rock of this plain, taking samples, after which they would drive north for the rest of the day, discussing what they had found. Ann seemed more absorbed in the work, happier. One evening Simon pointed out that Phobos was running just over the low hills to the south; the next day’s drive would put it under the horizon. It was a remarkable demonstration of just how low the little moon’s orbit was; they were only at latitude 69°! But Phobos was only some five thousand kilometers above the planet’s equator. Nadia waved goodbye to it with a smile; she would still be able to talk to Arkady using the newly arrived areosynchronous radio satellites.
Three days later the bare rock ended, running under waves of blackish sand. It was just like coming on the shore of a sea. They had reached the great northern dunes, which wrapped the world in a band between Vastitas and the polar cap; where they were going to cross, the band was about eight hundred kilometers wide. The sand was a charcoal color, tinged with purple and rose, a rich relief to the eye after all the red rubble of the south. The dunes trended north and south, in parallel crests that occasionally broke or merged. Driving over them was easy; the sand was hard-packed, and they only had to pick a big dune and run along its humpbacked western side.
After a few days of this, however, the dunes got bigger, and became what Ann called barchan dunes. These looked like huge frozen waves, with faces a hundred meters tall and backs a kilometer wide; and the crescent that each wave made was several kilometers long. As with so many other Martian landscape features, they were a hundred times larger than their Terran analogs in the Sahara and Gobi. The expedition kept a level course over the backs of these great waves by contouring from one wave back to the next, their rovers like tiny boats, paddlewheeling over a sea that had frozen at the height of a titanic storm.
One day on this petrified sea, Rover Two stopped. A red light on the control panel indicated the problem was in the flexible frame between the modules; and in fact the rear module was tilted to the left, shoving the left side wheels into the sand. Nadia got into a suit and went back to have a look. She took the dust cover off the joint where the frame connected to the module chassis, and found that the bolts holding them together were all broken.
“This is going to take a while,” Nadia said. “You guys might as well have another look around.”
Soon the suited figures of Phyllis and George emerged, followed by Simon and Ann and Edvard. Phyllis and George took a transponder from Rover Three and set it out three meters to the right of their “road”. Nadia went to work on the broken frame, handling things as little as possible: it was a cold afternoon, perhaps seventy below, and she could feel the diamond chill right down to the bone.
The ends of the bolts wouldn’t come out of the side of the module, so she got out a drill and started drilling new holes. She began to hum “The Sheik of Araby”. Ann and Edvard and Simon were discussing sand. It was so nice, Nadia thought, to see ground that wasn’t red. To hear Ann absorbed in her work. To have some work to do herself.
They had almost reached the arctic circle, and it was Ls = 84, with the northern summer solstice only two weeks away; so the days were getting long. Nadia and George worked through the evening while Phyllis heated supper, and then after the meal Nadia went back out to finish the job. The sun was red in a brown haze, small and round even though it was near setting; there wasn’t enough atmosphere for oblation to enlarge and flatten it. Nadia finished, put her tools away, and had opened the outer lock door of Rover One, when Ann’s voice spoke in her ear. “Oh Nadia, are you going in already?”
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Kim Stanley Robinson
Another timeless masterpiece in the Voyager Classics seriesMars – the barren, forbidding planet that epitomises mankind’s dreams of space conquest.From the first pioneers who looked back at Earth and saw a small blue star, to the first colonists – hand-picked scientists with the skills necessary to create life from cold desert – Red Mars is the story of a new genesis. It is also the story of how Man must struggle against his own self-destructive mechanisms to achieve his dreams: before he even sets foot on the red planet, factions are forming, tensions are rising and violence is brewing… for civilization can be very uncivilized.
RED MARS
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
Copyright (#ulink_0539bd3c-18d1-5ae9-ad70-5c5f4962fec0)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1992
Copyright © Kim Stanley Robinson 1992
Cover photograph © Detlev van Ravenswaay/Science Photo Library
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013
Kim Stanley Robinson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007115907
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2013 ISBN: 9780007401703
Version: 2018-07-17
Dedication (#u5d3f7ba7-4647-51f5-83bf-1e8258d7cb52)
For Lisa
Contents
Cover (#u79b1754d-15f1-5e7f-97dc-3fbb9e8fe6f9)
Title Page (#uc84b88e5-ce7f-5cad-a3d1-2aef1b024a43)
Copyright (#u6ef001e8-3cc3-5f50-82fa-b9b92e85f8e9)
Dedication (#uaeb28313-8c3e-5367-8447-674cbf0f56ab)
PART ONE Festival Night (#u2b5d4870-a3f7-562a-85b3-119e613947fc)
PART TWO The Voyage Out (#u7367d78d-6af3-5e79-8dcd-c63d28a24ee1)
PART THREE The Crucible (#ueb7af50f-0e46-5fe8-8bcc-c363b08f8f03)
PART FOUR Homesick (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FIVE Falling Into History (#litres_trial_promo)
PART SIX Guns Under the Table (#litres_trial_promo)
PART SEVEN Senzeni Na (#litres_trial_promo)
PART EIGHT Shikata Ga Nai (#litres_trial_promo)
Chronology (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ONE Festival Night (#ulink_91bf37dc-f9c9-5537-8c3e-6dd4d82dbf64)
Mars was empty before we came. That’s not to say that nothing had ever happened. The planet had accreted, melted, roiled and cooled, leaving a surface scarred by enormous geological features: craters, canyons, volcanoes. But all of that happened in mineral unconsciousness, and unobserved. There were no witnesses – except for us, looking from the planet next door, and that only in the last moment of its long history. We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever had.
Now everybody knows the history of Mars in the human mind: how for all the generations of prehistory it was one of the chief lights in the sky, because of its redness and fluctuating intensity, and the way it stalled in its wandering course through the stars, and sometimes even reversed direction. It seemed to be saying something with all that. So perhaps it is not surprising that all the oldest names for Mars have a peculiar weight on the tongue – Nirgal, Mangala, Auqàkuh, Harmakhis – they sound as if they were even older than the ancient languages we find them in, as if they were fossil words from the Ice Age or before. Yes, for thousands of years Mars was a sacred power in human affairs; and its color made it a dangerous power, representing blood, anger, war and the heart.
Then the first telescopes gave us a closer look, and we saw the little orange disk, with its white poles and dark patches spreading and shrinking as the long seasons passed. No improvement in the technology of the telescope ever gave us much more than that; but the best Earthbound images gave Lowell enough blurs to inspire a story, the story we all know, of a dying world and a heroic people, desperately building canals to hold off the final deadly encroachment of the desert.
It was a great story. But then Mariner and Viking sent back their photos, and everything changed. Our knowledge of Mars expanded by magnitudes, we literally knew millions of times more about this planet than we had before. And there before us flew a new world, a world unsuspected.
It seemed, however, to be a world without life. People searched for signs of past or present Martian life, anything from microbes to the doomed canal-builders, or even alien visitors. As you know, no evidence for any of these has ever been found. And so stories have naturally blossomed to fill the gap, just as in Lowell’s time, or in Homer’s, or in the caves or on the savannah – stories of microfossils wrecked by our bio-organisms, of ruins found in dust storms and then lost forever, of Big Man and all his adventures, of the elusive little red people, always glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. And all of these tales are told in an attempt to give Mars life, or to bring it to life. Because we are still those animals who survived the Ice Age, and looked up at the night sky in wonder, and told stories. And Mars has never ceased to be what it was to us from our very beginning – a great sign, a great symbol, a great power.
And so we came here. It had been a power; now it became a place.
“…And so we came here. But what they didn’t realize was that by the time we got to Mars, we would be so changed by the voyage out that nothing we had been told to do mattered anymore. It wasn’t like submarining or settling the Wild West – it was an entirely new experience, and as the flight of the Ares went on, the Earth finally became so distant that it was nothing but a blue star among all the others, its voices so delayed that they seemed to come from a previous century. We were on our own; and so we became fundamentally different beings.”
All lies, Frank Chalmers thought irritably. He was sitting in a row of dignitaries, watching his old friend John Boone give the usual Boone Inspirational Address. It made Chalmers weary. The truth was, the trip to Mars had been the functional equivalent of a long train ride. Not only had they not become fundamentally different beings, they had actually become more like themselves than ever, stripped of habits until they were left with nothing but the naked raw material of their selves. But John stood up there waving a forefinger at the crowd, saying “We came here to make something new, and when we arrived our earthly differences fell away, irrelevant in this new world!” Yes, he meant it all literally. His vision of Mars was a lens that distorted everything he saw, a kind of religion.
Chalmers stopped listening and let his gaze wander over the new city. They were going to call it Nicosia. It was the first town of any size to be built free-standing on the Martian surface; all the buildings were set inside what was in effect an immense clear tent, supported by a nearly invisible frame, and placed on the rise of Tharsis, west of Noctis Labyrinthus. This location gave it a tremendous view, with a distant western horizon punctuated by the broad peak of Pavonis Mons. For the Mars veterans in the crowd it was giddy stuff: they were on the surface, they were out of the trenches and mesas and craters, they could see forever! Hurrah!
A laugh from the audience drew Frank’s attention back to his old friend. John Boone had a slightly hoarse voice and a friendly Midwestern accent, and he was by turns (and somehow even all at once) relaxed, intense, sincere, self-mocking, modest, confident, serious, and funny. In short, the perfect public speaker. And the audience was rapt; this was the First Man On Mars speaking to them, and judging by the looks on their faces they might as well have been watching Jesus produce their evening meal out of the loaves and fishes. And in fact John almost deserved their adoration, for performing a similar miracle on another plane, transforming their tin can existence into an astounding spiritual voyage. “On Mars we will come to care for each other more than ever before,” John said, which really meant, Chalmers thought, an alarming incidence of the kind of behavior seen in rat overpopulation experiments; “Mars is a sublime, exotic and dangerous place,” said John – meaning a frozen ball of oxidized rock on which they were exposed to about fifteen rem a year; “And with our work,” John continued, “we are carving out a new social order and the next step in the human story” – i.e. the latest variant in primate dominance dynamics.
John finished with this flourish, and there was, of course, a huge roar of applause. Maya Toitovna then went to the podium to introduce Chalmers. Frank gave her a private look which meant he was in no mood for any of her jokes; she saw it and said, “Our next speaker has been the fuel in our little rocket ship,” which somehow got a laugh. “His vision and energy are what got us to Mars in the first place, so save any complaints you may have for our next speaker, my old friend Frank Chalmers.”
At the podium he found himself surprised by how big the town appeared. It covered a long triangle, and they were gathered at its highest point, a park occupying the western apex. Seven paths rayed down through the park to become wide, tree-lined, grassy boulevards. Between the boulevards stood low trapezoidal buildings, each faced with polished stone of a different color. The size and architecture of the buildings gave things a faintly Parisian look, Paris as seen by a drunk Fauvist in spring, sidewalk cafes and all. Four or five kilometers downslope the end of the city was marked by three slender skyscrapers, beyond which lay the low greenery of the farm. The skyscrapers were part of the tent framework, which overhead was an arched network of sky-colored lines. The tent fabric itself was invisible, and so taken all in all, it appeared that they stood in the open air. That was gold. Nicosia was going to be a popular city.
Chalmers said as much to the audience, and enthusiastically they agreed. Apparently he had the crowd, fickle souls that they were, about as securely as John. Chalmers was bulky and dark, and he knew he presented quite a contrast to John’s blond good looks; but he knew as well that he had his own rough charisma, and as he warmed up he drew on it, falling into a selection of his own stock phrases.
Then a shaft of sunlight lanced down between the clouds, striking the upturned faces of the crowd, and he felt an odd tightening in his stomach. So many people there, so many strangers! People in the mass were a frightening thing – all those wet ceramic eyes encased in pink blobs, looking at him … it was nearly too much. Five thousand people in a single Martian town. After all the years in Underhill it was hard to grasp.
Foolishly he tried to tell the audience something of this. “Looking,” he said. “Looking around – the strangeness of our presence here is – accentuated.”
He was losing the crowd. How to say it? How to say that they alone in all that rocky world were alive, their faces glowing like paper lanterns in the light? How to say that even if living creatures were no more than carriers for ruthless genes, this was still, somehow, better than the blank mineral nothingness of everything else?
Of course he could never say it. Not at any time, perhaps, and certainly not in a speech. So he collected himself. “In the Martian desolation,” he said, “the human presence is, well, a remarkable thing” (they would care for each other more than ever before, a voice in his mind repeated sardonically). “The planet, taken in itself, is a dead frozen nightmare” (therefore exotic and sublime), “and so thrown on our own, we of necessity are in the process of – reorganizing a bit” (or forming a new social order) – so that yes, yes, yes, he found himself proclaiming exactly the same lies they had just heard from John!
Thus at the end of his speech he too got a big roar of applause. Irritated, he announced it was time to eat, depriving Maya of her chance for a final remark. Although probably she had known he would do that and so hadn’t bothered to think of any. Frank Chalmers liked to have the last word.
People crowded onto the temporary platform to mingle with the celebrities. It was rare to get this many of the first hundred in one spot anymore, and people crowded around John and Maya, Samantha Hoyle, Sax Russell and Chalmers.
Frank looked over the crowd at John and Maya. He didn’t recognize the group of Terrans surrounding them, which made him curious. He made his way across the platform, and as he approached he saw Maya and John give each other a look. “There’s no reason this place shouldn’t function under normal law,” one of the Terrans was saying.
Maya said to him, “Did Olympus Mons really remind you of Mauna Loa?”
“Sure,” the man said. “Shield volcanoes all look alike.”
Frank stared over this idiot’s head at Maya. She didn’t acknowledge the look. John was pretending not to have noticed Frank’s arrival. Samantha Hoyle was speaking to another man in an undertone, explaining something; he nodded, then glanced involuntarily at Frank. Samantha kept her back turned to him. But it was John who mattered, John and Maya. And both were pretending that nothing was out of the ordinary; but the topic of conversation, whatever it had been, had gone away.
Chalmers left the platform. People were still trooping down through the park, toward tables that had been set in the upper ends of the seven boulevards. Chalmers followed them, walking under young transplanted sycamores; their khaki leaves colored the afternoon light, making the park look like the bottom of an aquarium.
At the banquet tables construction workers were knocking back vodka, getting rowdy, obscurely aware that with the construction finished, the heroic age of Nicosia was ended. Perhaps that was true for all of Mars.
The air filled with overlapping conversations. Frank sank beneath the turbulence, wandered out to the northern perimeter. He stopped at a waist-high concrete coping: the city wall. Out of the metal stripping on its top rose four layers of clear plastic. A Swiss man was explaining things to a group of visitors, pointing happily.
“An outer membrane of piezoelectric plastic generates electricity from wind. Then two sheets hold a layer of airgel insulation. Then the inner layer is a radiation-capturing membrane, which turns purple and must be replaced. More clear than a window, isn’t it?”
The visitors agreed. Frank reached out and pushed at the inner membrane. It stretched until his fingers were buried to the knuckles. Slightly cool. There was faint white lettering printed on the plastic: Isidis Planitia Polymers. Through the sycamores over his shoulder he could still see the platform at the apex. John and Maya and their cluster of Terran admirers were still there, talking animatedly. Conducting the business of the planet. Deciding the fate of Mars.
He stopped breathing. He felt the pressure of his molars squeezing together. He poked the tent wall so hard that he pushed out the outermost membrane, which meant that some of his anger would be captured and stored as electricity in the town’s grid. It was a special polymer in that respect; carbon atoms were linked to hydrogen and fluorine atoms in such a way that the resulting substance was even more piezoelectric than quartz. Change one element of the three, however, and everything shifted; substitute chlorine for fluorine, for instance, and you had saran wrap.
Frank stared at his wrapped hand, then up again at the other two elements, still bonded to each other. But without him they were nothing!
Angrily he walked into the narrow streets of the city.
Clustered in a plaza like mussels on a rock were a group of Arabs, drinking coffee. Arabs had arrived on Mars only ten years before, but already they were a force to be reckoned with. They had a lot of money, and they had teamed up with the Swiss to build a number of towns, including this one. And they liked it on Mars. “It’s like a cold day in the Empty Quarter,” as the Saudis said. The similarity was such that Arabic words were slipping quickly into English, because Arabic had a larger vocabulary for this landscape: akaba for the steep final slopes around volcanoes, badia for the great world dunes, nefuds for deep sand, seyl for the billion year-old dry river beds … people were saying they might as well switch over to Arabic and have done with it.
Frank had spent a fair bit of time with Arabs, and the men in the plaza were pleased to see him. “Salaam aleykl” they said to him, and he replied, “Marhabba!” White teeth flashed under black moustaches. Only men present, as usual. Some youths led him to a central table where the older men sat, including his friend Zeyk. Zeyk said, “We are going to call this square Hajr el-kra Meshab, ‘the red granite open place in town.’” He gestured at the rust-colored flagstones. Frank nodded and asked what kind of stone it was. He spoke Arabic for as long as he could, pushing the edges of his ability and getting some good laughs in response. Then he sat at the central table and relaxed, feeling like he could have been on a street in Damascus or Cairo, comfortable in the wash of Arabic and expensive cologne.
He studied the men’s faces as they talked. An alien culture, no doubt about it. They weren’t going to change just because they were on Mars, they put the lie to John’s vision. Their thinking clashed radically with Western thought; for instance the separation of church and state was wrong to them, making it impossible for them to agree with Westerners on the very basis of government. And they were so patriarchal that some of their women were said to be illiterate – illiterates, on Mars! That was a sign. And indeed these men had the dangerous look that Frank associated with machismo, the look of men who oppressed their women so cruelly that naturally the women struck back where they could, terrorizing sons who then terrorized wives who terrorized sons and so on and so on, in an endless death spiral of twisted love and sex hatred. So that in that sense they were all madmen.
Which was one reason Frank liked them. And certainly they would come in useful to him, acting as a new locus of power. Defend a weak new neighbor to weaken the old powerful ones, as Machiavelli had said. So he drank coffee, and gradually, politely, they shifted to English.
“How did you like the speeches?” he asked, looking into the black mud at the bottom of his demitasse.
“John Boone is the same as ever,” old Zeyk replied. The others laughed angrily. “When he says we will make an indigenous Martian culture, he only means some of the Terran cultures here will be promoted, and others attacked. Those perceived as regressive will be singled out for destruction. It is a form of Ataturkism.”
“He thinks everyone on Mars should become American,” said a man named Nejm.
“Why not?” Zeyk said, smiling. “It’s already happened on Earth.”
“No,” Frank said. “You shouldn’t misunderstand Boone. People say he’s self-absorbed, but—”
“He is self-absorbed!” Nejm cried. “He lives in a hall of mirrors! He thinks that we have come to Mars to establish a good old American superculture, and that everyone will agree to it because it is the John Boone plan.”
Zeyk said, “He doesn’t understand that other people have other opinions.”
“It’s not that,” Frank said. “It’s just that he knows they don’t make as much sense as his.”
They laughed at that, but the younger men’s hoots had a bitter edge. They all believed that before their arrival Boone had argued in secret against UN approval for Arab settlements. Frank encouraged this belief, which was almost true – John disliked any ideology that might get in his way. He wanted the slate as blank as possible in everybody who came up.
The Arabs, however, believed that John disliked them in particular. Young Selim el-Hayil opened his mouth to speak, and Frank gave him a swift warning glance. Selim froze, then pursed his mouth angrily. Frank said, “Well, he’s not as bad as all that. Although to tell the truth I’ve heard him say it would have been better if the Americans and Russians had been able to claim the planet when they arrived, like explorers in the old days.”
Their laughter was brief and grim. Selim’s shoulders hunched as if struck. Frank shrugged and smiled, spread his hands wide. “But it’s pointless! I mean, what can he do?”
Old Zeyk lifted his eyebrows. “Opinions vary.”
Chalmers got up to move on, meeting for one instant Selim’s insistent gaze. Then he strode down a side street, one of the narrow lanes that connected the city’s seven main boulevards. Most were paved with cobblestones or streetgrass, but this one was rough blond concrete. He slowed by a recessed doorway, looked in the window of a closed boot manufactory. His faint reflection appeared in a pair of bulky walker boots.
Opinions vary. Yes, a lot of people had underestimated John Boone – Chalmers had done it himself many times. An image came to him of John in the White House, pink with conviction, his disobedient blond hair flying wildly, the sun streaming in the Oval Office windows and illuminating him as he waved his hands and paced the room, talking away while the President nodded and his aides watched, pondering how best to co-opt that electrifying charisma. Oh, they had been hot in those days, Chalmers and Boone; Frank with the ideas and John the front man, with a momentum that was practically unstoppable. It would be more a matter of derailment, really.
Selim el-Hayil’s reflection appeared among the boots.
“Is it true?” he demanded.
“Is what true?” said Frank crossly.
“Is Boone anti-Arab?”
“What do you think?”
“Was he the one who blocked permission to build the mosque on Phobos?”
“He’s a powerful man.”
The young Saudi’s face twisted. “The most powerful man on Mars, and he only wants more! He wants to be king!” Selim made a fist and struck his other hand. He was slimmer than the other Arabs, weak-chinned, his moustache covering a small mouth.
“The treaty comes up for renewal soon,” Frank said. “And Boone’s coalition is bypassing me.” He ground his teeth. “I don’t know what their plans are, but I’m going to find out tonight. You can imagine what they’ll be, anyway. Western biases, certainly. He may withhold his approval of a new treaty unless it contains guarantees that all settlements will be made only by the original treaty signatories.” Selim shivered, and Frank pressed; “It’s what he wants, and it’s very possible he could get it, because his new coalition makes him more powerful than ever. It could mean an end to settlement by non-signatories. You’ll become guest scientists. Or get sent back.”
In the window the reflection of Selim’s face appeared a kind of mask, signifying rage. “Battal, battal,” he was muttering. Very bad, very bad. His hands twisted as if out of his control, and he muttered about the Koran or Camus, Persepolis or the Peacock Throne, references scattered nervously among non-sequiturs. Babbling.
“Talk means nothing,” Chalmers said harshly. “When it comes down to it, nothing matters but action.”
That gave the young Arab pause. “I can’t be sure,” he said at last.
Frank poked him in the arm, watched a shock run through the man. “It’s your people we’re talking about. It’s this planet we’re talking about.”
Selim’s mouth disappeared under his moustache. After a time he said, “It’s true.”
Frank said nothing. They looked in the window together, as if judging boots.
Finally Frank raised a hand. “I’ll talk to Boone again,” he said quietly. “Tonight. He leaves tomorrow. I’ll try to talk to him, to reason with him. I doubt it will matter. It never has before. But I’ll try. Afterwards – we should meet.”
“Yes.”
“In the park, then, the southernmost path. Around eleven.”
Selim nodded.
Chalmers transfixed him with a stare. “Talk means nothing,” he said brusquely, and walked away.
The next boulevard Chalmers came to was crowded with people clumped outside open-front bars, or kiosks selling couscous and bratwurst. Arab and Swiss. It seemed an odd combination, but they meshed well.
Tonight some of the Swiss were distributing face masks from the door of an apartment. Apparently they were celebrating this stadtfest as a kind of Mardi Gras, Fassnacht as they called it, with masks and music and every manner of social inversion, just as it was back home on those wild February nights in Basel and Zurich and Luzern … On an impulse Frank joined the line. “Around every profound spirit a mask is always growing,” he said to two young women in front of him. They nodded politely and then resumed conversation in guttural Schwyzerdüütsch, a dialect never written down, a private code, incomprehensible even to Germans. It was another impenetrable culture, the Swiss, in some ways even more so than the Arabs. That was it, Frank thought; they worked well together because they were both so insular that they never made any real contact. He laughed out loud as he took a mask, a black face studded with red paste gems. He put it on.
A line of masked celebrants snaked down the boulevard, drunk, loose, at the edge of control. At an intersection the boulevard opened up into a small plaza, where a fountain shot sun-colored water into the air. Around the fountain a steel drum band hammered out a calypso tune. People gathered around, dancing or hopping in time to the low bong of the bass drum. A hundred meters overhead a vent in the tent frame poured frigid air down onto the plaza, air so cold that little flakes of snow floated in it, glinting in the light like chips of mica. Then fireworks banged just under the tenting, and colored sparks fell down through the snowflakes.
Sunset, more than any other time of day, made it clear that they stood on an alien planet; something in the slant and redness of the light was fundamentally wrong, upsetting expectations wired into the savannah brain over millions of years. This evening was providing a particularly garish and unsettling example of the phenomenon. Frank wandered in its light, making his way back to the city wall. The plain south of the city was littered with rocks, each one dogged by a long black shadow. Under the concrete arch of the city’s south gate he stopped. No one there. The gates were locked during festivals like these, to keep drunks from going out and getting hurt. But Frank had gotten the day’s emergency code out of the fire department AI that morning, and when he was sure no one was watching he tapped out the code and hurried into the lock. He put on a walker, boots, and helmet, and went through the middle and outer doors.
Outside it was intensely cold as always, and the diamond pattern of the walker’s heating element burned through his clothes. He crunched over concrete and then duricrust. Loose sand flowed east, pushed by the wind.
Grimly he looked around. Rocks everywhere. A planet sledgehammered billions of times. And meteors still falling. Someday one of the towns would take a hit. He turned and looked back. It looked like an aquarium glowing in the dusk. There would be no warning, but everything would suddenly fly apart, walls, vehicles, trees, bodies. The Aztecs had believed the world would end in one of four ways: earthquake, fire, flood, or jaguars falling from the sky. Here there would be no fire. Nor earthquake nor flood, now that he thought of it. Leaving only the jaguars.
The twilight sky was a dark pink over Pavonis Mons. To the east stretched Nicosia’s farm, a long low greenhouse running downslope from the city. From this angle one could see that the farm was larger than the town proper, and jammed with green crops. Frank clumped to one of its outer locks, and entered.
Inside the farm it was hot, a full 60° warmer than outside, and 15° warmer than in the city. He had to keep his helmet on, as the farm air was tailored to the plants, heavy on CO
and short on oxygen. He stopped at a work station and fingered through drawers of small tools and pesticide patches, gloves and bags. He selected three tiny patches and put them in a plastic bag, then slipped the bag gently into the walker’s pocket. The patches were clever pesticides, biosaboteurs designed to provide plants with systemic defenses; he had been reading about them, and knew of a combination that in animals would be deadly to the organism …
He put a pair of shears in the walker’s other pocket. Narrow gravel paths led him up between long beds of barley and wheat, back toward the city proper. He went in the lock leading into town, unclipped his helmet, stripped off the walker and boots, transferred the contents of the walker pockets to his coat. Then he went back into the lower end of town.
Here the Arabs had built a medina, insisting that such a neighborhood was crucial to a city’s health; the boulevards narrowed, and between them lay warrens of twisted alleyways taken from the maps of Tunis or Algiers, or generated randomly. Nowhere could you see from one boulevard to the next, and the sky overhead was visible only in plum strips, between buildings that leaned together.
Most of the alleys were empty now, as the party was uptown. A pair of cats skulked between buildings, investigating their new home. Frank took the shears from his pocket and scratched into a few plastic windows, in Arabic lettering, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew. He walked on, whistling through his teeth. Corner cafes were little caves of light. Bottles clinked like prospectors’ hammers. An Arab sat on a squat black speaker, playing an electric guitar.
He found the central boulevard, walked up it. Boys in the branches of the lindens and sycamores shouted songs to each other in Schwyzerdüütsch. One ditty was in English: “John Boone, Went to the moon, No fast cars, He went to Mars!” Small disorganized music bands barged through the thickening crowd. Some moustached men dressed as American cheerleaders flounced expertly through a complicated can-can routine. Kids banged little plastic drums. It was loud; the tenting absorbed sound, so there weren’t the echoes one heard under crater domes, but it was loud nevertheless.
Up there, where the boulevard opened into the sycamore park – that was John himself, surrounded by a small crowd. He saw Chalmers approaching and waved, recognizing him despite the mask. That was how the first hundred knew each other—
“Hey, Frank,” he said. “You look like you’re having a good time.”
“I am,” Frank said through his mask. “I love cities like this, don’t you? A mixed-species flock. It shows you what a diverse collection of cultures Mars is.”
John’s smile was easy. His eyes shifted as he surveyed the boulevard below.
Sharply Frank said, “A place like this is a crimp in your plan, isn’t it?”
Boone’s gaze returned to him. The surrounding crowd slipped away, sensing the antagonistic nature of the exchange. Boone said to Frank, “I don’t have a plan.”
“Oh come on! What about your speech?”
Boone shrugged. “Maya wrote it.”
A double lie: that Maya wrote it, that John didn’t believe it. Even after all these years it was almost like talking to a stranger. To a politician at work. “Come on, John,” Frank snapped. “You believe all that and you know it. But what are you going to do with all these different nationalities? All the ethnic hatreds, the religious manias? Your coalition can’t possibly keep a thumb on all this. You can’t keep Mars for yourselves, John, it’s not a scientific station anymore, and you’re not going to get a treaty that makes it one.”
“We’re not trying to.”
“Then why are you trying to cut me out of the talks!”
“I’m not!” John looked injured. “Relax, Frank. We’ll hammer it out together just like we always have. Relax.”
Frank stared at his old friend, nonplussed. What to believe? He had never known how to think of John – the way he had used Frank as a springboard, the way he was so friendly … hadn’t they begun as allies, as friends?
It occurred to him that John was looking for Maya. “So where is she?”
“Around somewhere,” Boone said shortly.
It had been years since they had been able to talk about Maya. Now Boone gave him a sharp look, as if to say it was none of his business. As if everything of importance to Boone had become, over the years, none of Frank’s business.
Frank left him without a word.
The sky was now a deep violet, streaked by yellow cirrus clouds. Frank passed two figures wearing white ceramic dominoes, the old Comedy and Tragedy personas, handcuffed together. The city’s streets had gone dark and windows blazed, silhouettes partying in them. Big eyes darted in every blurry mask, looking to find the source of the tension in the air. Under the tidal sloshing of the crowd there was a low tearing sound.
He shouldn’t have been surprised, he shouldn’t. He knew John as well as one could know another person; but it had never been any of his business. Into the trees of the park, under the hand-sized leaves of the sycamores. When had it been any different! All that time together, those years of friendship; and none of it had mattered. Diplomacy by other means.
He looked at his watch. Nearly eleven. He had an appointment with Selim. Another appointment. A lifetime of days divided into quarter hours had made him used to running from one appointment to the next, changing masks, dealing with crisis after crisis, managing, manipulating, doing business in a hectic rush that never ended; and here it was a celebration, Mardi Gras, Fassnacht! and he was still doing it. He couldn’t remember any other way.
He came on a construction site, skeletal magnesium framing surrounded by piles of bricks and sand and paving stones. Careless of them to leave such things around. He stuffed his coat pockets with fragments of brick just big enough to hold. Straightening up, he noticed someone watching him from the other side of the site – a little man with a thin face under spiky black dreadlocks, watching him intently. Something in the look was disconcerting, it was as if the stranger saw through all his masks and was observing him so closely because he was aware of his thoughts, his plans.
Spooked, Chalmers beat a quick retreat into the bottom fringe of the park. When he was sure he had lost the man, and that no one else was watching, he began throwing stones and bricks down into the lower town, hurling them as hard as he could. And one for that stranger too, right in the face! Overhead the tent framework was visible only as a faint pattern of occluded stars; it seemed they stood free, in a chill night wind. Air circulation was high tonight, of course. Broken glass, shouts. A scream. It really was loud, people were going crazy. One last paving stone, heaved at a big lit picture window across the grass. It missed. He slipped further into the trees.
Near the southern wall he saw someone under a sycamore – Selim, circling nervously. “Selim,” Frank called quietly, sweating. He reached into his jumper pocket, carefully felt in the bag and palmed the trio of stem patches. Synergy could be so powerful, for good or ill. He walked forward and roughly embraced the young Arab. The patches hit and penetrated Selim’s light cotton shirt. Frank pulled back.
Now Selim had about six hours. “Did you speak with Boone?” he asked.
“I tried,” Chalmers said. “He didn’t listen. He lied to me.” It was so easy to feign distress: “Twenty-five years of friendship, and he lied to me!” He struck a tree trunk with his palm, and the patches flew away in the dark. He controlled himself. “His coalition is going to recommend that all Martian settlements originate in the countries that signed the first treaty.” It was possible; and it was certainly plausible.
“He hates us!” Selim cried.
“He hates everything that gets in his way. And he can see that Islam is still a real force in people’s lives. It shapes the way people think, and he can’t stand that.”
Selim shuddered. In the gloom the whites of his eyes were bright. “He has to be stopped.”
Frank turned aside, leaned against a tree. “I – don’t know.”
“You said it yourself. Talk means nothing.”
Frank circled the tree, feeling dizzy. You fool, he thought, talk means everything. We are nothing but information exchange, talk is all we have!
He came on Selim again and said, “How?”
“The planet. It is our way.”
“The city gates are locked tonight.”
That stopped him. His hands started to twist.
Frank said, “But the gate to the farm is still open.”
“But the farm’s outer gates will be locked.”
Frank shrugged, let him figure it out.
And quickly enough Selim blinked, and said “Ah.” Then he was gone.
Frank sat between trees, on the ground. It was a sandy damp brown dirt, product of a great deal of engineering. Nothing in the city was natural, nothing.
After a time he got to his feet. He walked through the park, looking at people. If I find one good city I will spare the man. But in an open area masked figures darted together to grapple and fight, surrounded by watchers who smelled blood. Frank went back to the construction site to get more bricks. He threw them and some people saw him, and he had to run. Into the trees again, into the little tented wilderness, escaping predators while high on adrenalin, the greatest drug of all. He laughed wildly.
Suddenly he caught sight of Maya, standing alone by the temporary platform up at the apex. She wore a white domino, but it was certainly her: the proportions of the figure, the hair, the stance itself, all unmistakably Maya Toitovna. The first hundred, the little band; they were the only ones truly alive to him any more, the rest were ghosts. Frank hurried toward her, tripping over uneven ground. He squeezed a rock buried deep in one coat pocket, thinking Come on, you bitch. Say something to save him. Say something that will make me run the length of the city to save him!
She heard his approach and turned. She wore a phosphorescent white domino, with metallic blue sequins. It was hard to see her eyes.
“Hello, Frank,” she said, as if he wore no mask. He almost turned and ran. Mere recognition was almost enough to do it …
But he stayed. He said, “Hello, Maya. Nice sunset, wasn’t it?”
“Spectacular. Nature has no taste. It’s just a city inauguration, but it looked like Judgement Day.”
They were under a streetlight, standing on their shadows. She said, “Have you enjoyed yourself?”
“Very much. And you?”
“It’s getting a little wild.”
“It’s understandable, don’t you think? We’re out of our holes, Maya, we’re on the surface at last! And what a surface! You only get these kind of long views on Tharsis.”
“It’s a good location,” she agreed.
“It will be a great city,” Frank predicted. “But where do you live these days, Maya?”
“In Underhill, Frank, just as always. You know that.”
“But you’re never there, are you? I haven’t seen you in a year or more.”
“Has it been that long? Well, I’ve been in Hellas. Surely you heard?”
“Who would tell me?”
She shook her head and blue sequins glittered. “Frank.” She turned aside, as if to walk away from the question’s implications.
Angrily Frank circled her, stood in her path. “That time on the Ares,” he said. His voice was tight, and he twisted his neck to loosen his throat, to make speech easier. “What happened, Maya? What happened?”
She shrugged and did not meet his gaze. For a long time she did not speak. Then she looked at him. “The spur of the moment,” she said.
And then it was ringing midnight, and they were in the Martian time slip, the thirty-nine and a half minute gap between 12:00:00 and 12:00:01, when all the clocks went blank or stopped moving. This was how the first hundred had decided to reconcile Mars’s slightly longer day with the twenty-four hour clock, and the solution had proved oddly satisfactory. Every night to step for a while out of the flicking numbers, out of the remorseless sweep of the second hand—
And tonight as the bells rang midnight, the whole city went mad. Forty minutes outside of time; it was bound to be the peak of the celebration, everyone knew that instinctively. Fireworks were going off, people were cheering; sirens tore through the sound, and the cheering redoubled. Frank and Maya watched the fireworks, listened to the noise.
Then there was a noise that was somehow different: desperate cries, serious screams. “What’s that?” Maya said.
“A fight,” Frank replied, cocking an ear. “Something done on the spur of the moment, perhaps.” She stared at him, and quickly he added, “Maybe we should go have a look.”
The cries intensified. Trouble somewhere. They started down through the park, their steps getting longer, until they were in the Martian lope. The park seemed bigger to Frank, and for a moment he was scared.
The central boulevard was covered with trash. People darted through the dark in predatory schools. A nerve-grating siren went off, the alarm that signaled a break in the tent. Windows were shattering up and down the boulevard. There on the streetgrass was a man flat on his back, the surrounding grass smeared with black streaks. Chalmers seized the arm of a woman crouched over him. “What happened?” he shouted.
She was weeping. “They fought! They are fighting!”
“Who? Swiss, Arab?”
“Strangers,” she said. “Ausländer.” She looked blindly at Frank. “Get help!”
Frank rejoined Maya, who was talking to a group next to another fallen figure. “What the hell’s going on?” he said to her as they took off toward the city’s hospital.
“It’s a riot,” she said. “I don’t know why.” Her mouth was a straight slash, in skin as white as the domino still covering her eyes.
Frank pulled off his mask and threw it away. There was broken glass all over the street. A man rushed at them. “Frank! Maya!”
It was Sax Russell; Frank had never seen the little man so agitated. “It’s John – he’s been attacked!”
“What?” they exclaimed together.
“He tried to stop a fight, and three or four men jumped him. They knocked him down and dragged him away!”
“You didn’t stop them?” Maya cried.
“We tried – a whole bunch of us chased them. But they lost us in the medina.”
Maya looked at Frank.
“What’s going on!” he cried. “Where would anyone take him?”
“The gates,” she said.
“But they’re locked tonight, aren’t they?”
“Maybe not to everyone.”
They followed her to the medina. Streetlights were broken, there was glass underfoot. They found a fire marshall and went to the Turkish Gate; he unlocked it and several of them hurried through, throwing on walkers at emergency speed. Then out into the night to look around, illuminated by the bathysphere glow of the city. Frank’s ankles hurt with the night cold, and he could feel the precise configuration of his lungs, as if two globes of ice had been inserted in his chest, to cool the rapid beat of his heart.
Nothing out there. Back inside. Over to the northern wall and the Syrian Gate, and out again under the stars. Nothing.
It took them a long time to think of the farm. By then there were about thirty of them in walkers, and they ran down and through the lock and flooded down the farm’s aisles, spreading out, running between crops.
They found him among the radishes. His jacket was pulled over his face, in the standard emergency air pocket; he must have done it unconsciously, because when they rolled him carefully onto one side, they saw a lump behind one ear.
“Get him inside,” Maya said, her voice a bitter croak – “Hurry, get him inside.”
Four of them lifted him. Chalmers cradled John’s head, and his fingers were intertwined with Maya’s. They trotted back up the shallow steps. Through the farm gate they stumbled, back into the city. One of the Swiss led them to the nearest medical center, already crowded with desperate people. They got John onto an empty bench. His unconscious expression was pinched, determined. Frank tore off his helmet and went to work pulling rank, bulling into the emergency rooms and shouting at the doctors and nurses. They ignored him until one doctor said, “Shut up. I’m coming.” She went into the hallway and with a nurse’s help clipped John into a monitor, then checked him out with the abstracted, absent look doctors have while working: hands at neck and face and head and chest, stethoscope …
Maya explained what they knew. The doctor took down an oxygen unit from the wall, looking at the monitor. Her mouth was bunched into a displeased little knot. Maya sat at the end of the bench, face suddenly distraught. Her domino had long since disappeared.
Frank crouched beside her.
“We can keep working on him,” the doctor said, “but I’m afraid he’s gone. Too long without oxygen, you know.”
“Keep working on him,” Maya said.
They did, of course. Eventually other medical people arrived, and they carted him off to an emergency room. Frank, Maya, Sax, Samantha, and a number of locals sat outside in the hall. Doctors came and went; their faces had the blank look they took on in the presence of death. Protective masks. One came out and shook his head. “He’s dead. Too long out there.”
Frank leaned his head back against the wall.
When Reinhold Messner returned from the first solo climb of Everest, he was severely dehydrated, and utterly exhausted; he fell down most of the last part of the descent, and collapsed on the Rongbuk glacier, and he was crawling over it on hands and knees when the woman who was his entire support team reached him; and he looked up at her out of a delirium, and said “Where are all my friends?”
It was quiet. No sound but the low hum and whoosh that one never escaped on Mars.
Maya put a hand on Frank’s shoulder, and he almost flinched; his throat clamped down to nothing, it really hurt. “I’m sorry,” he managed to say.
She shrugged the remark aside, frowned. She had somewhat the air of the medical people. “Well,” she said, “you never liked him much anyway.”
“True,” he said, thinking it would be politic to seem honest with her at that moment. But then he shuddered and said bitterly, “What do you know about what I like or don’t like.”
He shrugged her hand aside, struggled to his feet. She didn’t know; none of them knew. He started to go into the emergency room, changed his mind. Time enough for that at the funeral. He felt hollow; and suddenly it seemed to him that everything good had gone away.
He left the medical center. Impossible not to feel sentimental at such moments. He walked through the strangely hushed darkness of the city, into the land of Nod. The streets glinted as if stars had fallen to the pavement. People stood in clumps, silent, stunned by the news. Frank Chalmers made his way through them, feeling their stares, moving without thought toward the platform at the top of town; and as he walked he said to himself, Now we’ll see what I can do with this planet.
PART TWO The Voyage Out (#ulink_96419cd9-196e-5f8b-b625-3ac7b40c09be)
“Since they’re going to go crazy anyway, why not just send insane people in the first place, and save them the trouble?” said Michel Duval.
He was only half joking; his position throughout had been that the criteria for selection constituted a mind-boggling collection of double binds.
His fellow psychologists stared at him. “Can you suggest any specific changes?” asked the chairman, Charles York.
“Perhaps we should all go to Antarctica with them, and observe them in this first period of time together. It would teach us a lot.”
“But our presence would be inhibitory. I think just one of us will be enough.”
So they sent Michel Duval. He joined a hundred and fifty-odd finalists at McMurdo Station. The initial meeting resembled any other international scientific conference, familiar to them all from their various disciplines. But there was a difference: this was the continuation of a selection process that had lasted for years, and would last another. And those selected would go to Mars.
So they lived in Antarctica for over a year together, familiarizing themselves with the shelters and equipment that were already landing on Mars in robot vehicles; familiarizing themselves with a landscape that was almost as cold and harsh as Mars itself; familiarizing themselves with each other. They lived in a cluster of habitats located in Wright Valley, the largest of Antarctica’s Dry Valleys. They ran a biosphere farm, and then they settled into the habitats through a dark austral winter, and studied secondary or tertiary professions, or ran through simulations of the various tasks they would be performing on the spaceship Ares, or later on the red planet itself; and always, always aware that they were being watched, evaluated, judged.
They were by no means all astronauts or cosmonauts, although there were a dozen or so of each, with many more up north clamoring to be included. But the majority of the colonists would have to have their expertise in areas that would come into play after landfall: medical skills, computer skills, robotics, systems design, architecture, geology, biosphere design, genetic engineering, biology; also every sort of engineering, and construction expertise of several kinds. Those who had made it to Antarctica were an impressive group of experts in the relevant sciences and professions, and they spent a good bit of their time cross-training to become impressive in secondary and tertiary fields as well.
And all their activity took place under the constant pressure of observation, evaluation, judgement. It was necessarily a stressful procedure; that was part of the test. Michel Duval felt that this was a mistake, as it tended to ingrain reticence and distrust in the colonists, preventing the very compatability that the selection committee was supposedly seeking. One of the many double binds, in fact. The candidates themselves were quiet about that aspect of things, and he didn’t blame them; there wasn’t any better strategy to take, that was a double bind for you: it insured silence. They could not afford to offend anyone, or complain too much; they could not risk withdrawing too far; they could not make enemies.
So they went on being brilliant and accomplished enough to stand out, but normal enough to get along. They were old enough to have learned a great deal, but young enough to endure the physical rigors of the work. They were driven enough to excel, but relaxed enough to socialize. And they were crazy enough to want to leave Earth forever, but sane enough to disguise this fundamental madness, in fact to defend it as pure rationality, scientific curiosity or something of the sort – that seemed to be the only acceptable reason for wanting to go, and so naturally they claimed to be the most scientifically curious people in history! But of course there had to be more to it than that. They had to be alienated somehow, alienated and solitary enough not to care about leaving everyone they had known behind forever – and yet still connected and social enough to get along with all their new acquaintances in Wright Valley, with every member of the tiny village that the colony would become. Oh, the double binds were endless! They were to be both extraordinary and extra ordinary, at one and the same time. An impossible task, and yet a task that was an obstacle to their heart’s greatest desire; making it the very stuff of anxiety, fear, resentment, rage. Conquering all those stresses …
But that too was part of the test. Michel could not help but observe with great interest. Some failed, cracked in one way or another. An American thermal engineer became increasingly withdrawn, then destroyed several of their rovers and had to be forcibly restrained and removed. A Russian pair became lovers, and then had a falling out so violent that they couldn’t stand the sight of each other, and both had to be dropped. This melodrama illustrated the dangers of romance going awry, and made the rest of them very cautious in this regard. Relationships still developed, and by the time they left Antarctica they had had three marriages, and these lucky six could consider themselves in some sense “safe”; but most of them were so focused on getting to Mars that they put these parts of their lives on hold, and if anything conducted discreet friendships, in some cases hidden from almost everyone, in other cases merely kept out of the view of the selection committees.
And Michel knew he was seeing only the tip of the iceberg. He knew that critical things were happening in Antarctica, out of his sight. Relationships were having their beginnings; and sometimes the beginning of a relationship determines how the rest of it will go. In the brief hours of daylight, one of them might leave the camp and hike out to Lookout Point; and another follow; and what happened out there might leave its mark forever. But Michel would never know.
And then they left Antarctica, and the team was chosen. There were fifty men and fifty women: thirty-five Americans, thirty-five Russians, and thirty miscellaneous international affiliates, fifteen invited by each of the two big partners. Keeping such perfect symmetries had been difficult, but the selection committee had persevered.
The lucky ones flew to Cape Canaveral or Baikonur, to ascend to orbit. At this point they both knew each other very well and did not know each other at all. They were a team, Michel thought, with established friendships, and a number of group ceremonies, rituals, habits, and tendencies; and among those tendencies was an instinct to hide, to play a role and disguise their real selves. Perhaps this was simply the definition of village life, of social life. But it seemed to Michel that it was worse than that; no one had ever before had to compete so strenuously to join a village; and the resulting radical division between public life and private life was new, and strange. Ingrained in them now was a certain competitive undercurrent, a constant subtle feeling that they were each alone, and that in case of trouble they were liable to be abandoned by the rest, and yanked out of the group.
The selection committee had thus created some of the very problems it had hoped to prevent. Some of them were aware of this; and naturally they took care to include among the colonists the most qualified psychiatrist they could think of.
So they sent Michel Duval.
At first it felt like a shove in the chest. Then they were pushed back in their chairs, and for a second the pressure was deeply familiar: one g, the gravity they would never live in again. The Ares had been orbiting Earth at 28,000 kilometers per hour. For several minutes they accelerated, the rocket’s push so powerful that their vision blurred as corneas flattened, and it took an effort to inhale. At 40,000 kilometers per hour the burn ended. They were free of the Earth’s pull, in orbit to nothing but the sun.
The colonists sat in the delta V chairs blinking, their skin flushed, their hearts pounding. Maya Katarina Toitovna, the official leader of Russian contingent, glanced around. People appeared stunned. When obsessives are given their object of desire, what do they feel? It was hard to say, really. In a sense their lives were ending; and yet something else, some other life, had finally, finally begun … Filled with so many emotions at once, it was impossible not to be confused; it was an interference pattern, some feelings cancelled, others reinforced. Unbuckling from her chair Maya felt a grin contorting her face, and she saw on the faces around her the same helpless grin; all but Sax Russell, who was as impassive as an owl, blinking as he looked over the readouts on the room’s computer screens.
They floated weightlessly around the room. December 21st, 2026: they were moving faster than anyone in history. They were on their way. It was the beginning of a nine-month voyage – or of a voyage that would last the rest of their lives. They were on their own.
Those responsible for piloting the Ares pulled themselves to the control consoles, and gave the orders to fire lateral control rockets. The Ares began to spin, stabilizing at four rpm. The colonists sank to the floors, and stood in a pseudogravity of .38 g, very close to what they would feel on Mars. Many man-years of tests had indicated that it would be a fairly healthy g to live in, and so much healthier than weightlessness that rotating the ship had been deemed worth the trouble. And, Maya thought, it felt great. There was enough pull to make balance relatively easy, but hardly any feeling of pressure, of drag. It was the perfect equivalent of their mood; they staggered down the halls to the big dining hall in Torus D, giddy and exhilarated, walking on air.
In Torus D’s dining hall they mingled in a kind of cocktail party, celebrating the departure. Maya wandered about, sipping freely from a mug of champagne, feeling slightly unreal and extremely happy, a mix that reminded her of her wedding reception many years before. Hopefully this marriage would go better than that one had, she thought, because this one was going to last forever. The hall was loud with talk. “It’s a symmetry not so much sociological as mathematic. A kind of aesthetic balance.” “We’re hoping to get it into the parts per billion range, but it’s not going to be easy.” Maya turned down an offered refill, feeling giddy enough. Besides, this was work. She was co-mayor of this village, so to speak, responsible for group dynamics, which were bound to get complex. Antarctic habits kicked in even at this moment of triumph, and she listened and watched like an anthropologist, or a spy.
“The shrinks have their reasons. We’ll end up fifty happy couples.”
“And they already know the match-ups.”
She watched them laugh. Smart, healthy, supremely well-educated; was this the rational society at last, the scientifically-designed community that had been the dream of the Enlightenment? But there was Arkady, Nadia, Vlad, Ivana. She knew the Russian contingent too well to have many illusions on that score. They were just as likely to end up resembling an undergraduate dorm at a technical university, occupied by bizarre pranks and lurid affairs. Except they looked a bit old for that kind of thing; several men were balding, and many of both sexes showed touches of gray in their hair. It had been a long haul; their average age was forty-six, with extremes ranging from thirty-three (Hiroko Ai, the Japanese prodigy of biosphere design) to fifty-eight (Vlad Taneev, winner of a Nobel Prize in medicine).
Now, however, the flush of youth was on all their faces. Arkady Bogdanov was a portrait in red: hair, beard, skin. In all that red his eyes were a wild electric blue, bugging out happily as he exclaimed, “Free at last! Free at last! All our children are free at last!” The video cameras had been turned off, after Janet Blyleven had recorded a series of interviews for the TV stations back home; they were out of contact with Earth, in the dining hall anyway, and Arkady was singing, and the group around him toasted the song. Maya stopped to join this group. Free at last; it was hard to believe, they were actually on their way to Mars! Knots of people talking, many of them world class in their fields; Ivana had won part of a Nobel prize in chemistry, Vlad was one of the most famous medical biologists in the world, Sax was in the pantheon of great contributors to subatomic theory, Hiroko was unmatched in enclosed biological life support systems design, and so on all around; a brilliant crowd!
And she was one of their leaders. It was a bit daunting. Her engineering and cosmonautic skills were modest enough, it was her diplomatic ability that had gotten her aboard, presumably. Chosen to head the disparate, fractious Russian team, with the several commonwealth members – well, that was okay. It was interesting work, and she was used to it. And her skills might very well turn out to be the most important ones aboard. They had to get along, after all. And that was a matter of guile, and cunning, and will. Willing other people to do your bidding! She looked at the crowd of glowing faces, and laughed. All aboard were good at their work, but some were gifted far beyond that. She had to identify those people, to seek them out, to cultivate them. Her ability to function as leader depended on it; for in the end, she thought, they would surely become a kind of loose scientific meritocracy. And in such a society as that, the extraordinarily talented constituted the real powers. When push came to shove, they would be the colony’s true leaders – they, or those who influenced them.
She looked around, located her opposite number, Frank Chalmers. In Antarctica she had not gotten to know him very well. A tall, big, swarthy man. He was talkative enough, and incredibly energetic; but hard to read. She found him attractive. Did he see things as she did? She had never been able to tell. He was talking to a group across the length of the room, listening in that sharp inscrutable way of his, head tilted to the side, ready to pounce with a witty remark. She was going to have to find out more about him. More than that, she was going to have to get along with him.
She crossed the room, stopped by his side, stood so their upper arms just barely touched. Leaned her head in toward his. A brief gesture at their comrades: “This is going to be fun, don’t you think?”
Chalmers glanced at her. “If it goes well,” he said.
After the celebration and dinner, unable to sleep, Maya wandered through the Ares. All of them had spent time in space before, but never in anything like the Ares, which was enormous. There was a kind of penthouse at the front end of the ship, a single tank like a bowsprit, which rotated in the opposite direction the ship did, so that it held steady. Solar watch instruments, radio antennas, and all the other equipment which worked best without rotation were located in this tank, and at the very tip of it was a bulbous room of transparent plastic, a chamber quickly named the bubble dome, which provided the crew with a weightless, non-rotating view of the stars, and a partial view of the great ship behind it.
Maya floated near the window wall of this bubble dome, looking back at the ship curiously. It had been constructed using space shuttle external fuel tanks; around the turn of the century NASA and Glavkosmos had begun attaching small booster rockets to the tanks and pushing them all the way into orbit. Scores of tanks had been launched this way, then tugged to work sites and put to use – with them they had built two big space stations, an L5 station, a lunar orbit station, the first manned Mars vehicle, and scores of unmanned freighters sent to Mars. So by the time the two agencies agreed to build the Ares, the use of the tanks had become routinized, with standard coupling units, interiors, propulsion systems and so forth; and construction of the big ship had taken less than two years.
It looked like something made from a children’s toy set, in which cylinders were attached at their ends to create more complex shapes – in this case, eight hexagons of connected cylinders, which they called toruses, lined up and speared down the middle by a central hub shaft, made of a cluster of five lines of cylinders. The toruses were connected to the hub shaft by thin crawl spokes, and the resulting object looked somewhat like a piece of agricultural machinery, say the arm of a harvester combine, or a mobile sprinkler unit. Or like eight knobby doughnuts, Maya thought, toothpicked to a stick. Just the sort of thing a child would appreciate.
The eight toruses had been made from American tanks, and the five bundled lengths of the central shaft were Russian. Both were about fifty meters long and ten meters in diameter. Maya floated aimlessly down the tanks of the hub shaft; it took her a long time, but she was in no hurry. She dropped down into Torus G. There were rooms of all shapes and sizes, right up to the largest, which occupied entire tanks. The floor in one of these she passed through was set just below the halfway mark, so its interior resembled a long Quonset hut. But the majority of the tanks had been divided up into smaller rooms. She had heard there were over five hundred of them in all, making for a total interior space roughly the equivalent of a large city hotel.
But would it be enough?
Perhaps it would. After the Antarctic, life on the Ares seemed an expansive, labyrinthine, airy experience. Around six every morning the darkness in the residential toruses would lighten slowly to a gray dawn, and around six-thirty a sudden brightening marked “sunrise.” Maya woke to it as she had all her life. After visiting the lavatory she would make her way to Torus D’s kitchen, heat a meal, and take it into the big dining hall. There she sat at a table flanked by potted lime trees. Hummingbirds, finches, tanagers, sparrows and lories pecked underfoot and darted overhead, dodging the creeping vines that hung from the hall’s long barrel ceiling, which was painted a gray-blue that reminded her of St Petersburg’s winter sky. She would eat slowly, watch the birds, relax in her chair, listen to the talk around her. A leisurely breakfast! After a lifetime of grinding work it felt rather uncomfortable at first, even alarming, like a stolen luxury. As if it were Sunday morning every day, as Nadia said. But Maya’s Sunday mornings had never been particularly relaxed. In her childhood that had been the time for cleaning the one-room apartment she had shared with her mother. Her mother had been a doctor and like most women of her generation had had to work ferociously to get by, obtaining food, bringing up a child, keeping an apartment, running a career; it had been too much for one person, and she had joined the many women angrily demanding a better deal than they had gotten in the Soviet years, which had given them half the money jobs while leaving them all the work at home. No more waiting, no more mute endurance; they had to take advantage while the instability lasted. “Everything is on the table!” Maya’s mother would exclaim while cooking their meager dinners, “everything but food!”
And perhaps they had taken advantage. In the Soviet era women had learned to help each other, a nearly self-contained world had come into being, of mothers, sisters, daughters, babushkas, women friends, colleagues, even strangers. In the commonwealth this world had consolidated its gains and thrust even further into the power structure, into the tight male oligarchies of Russian government.
One of the fields most affected had been the space program. Maya’s mother, slightly involved in space medical research, always swore that cosmonautics would need an influx of women, if only to provide female data for the medical experimentation. “They can’t hold Valentina Tereshkova against us forever!” her mother would cry. And apparently she had been right, because after studying aeronautic engineering at Moscow University, Maya had been accepted in a program at Baikonur, and had done well, and had gotten an assignment on Novy Mir. While up there she had redesigned the interiors for improved ergonomic efficiency, and later spent a year in command of the station, during which a couple of emergency repairs had bolstered her reputation. Administrative assignments in Baikonur and Moscow had followed, and over time she had managed to penetrate Glavkosmos’s little politburo, playing the men against each other in the subtlest of ways, marrying one of them, divorcing him, rising afterwards in Glavkosmos a free agent, becoming one of the utmost inner circle, the double triumvirate.
And so here she was, having a leisurely breakfast. “So civilized,” Nadia would scoff. She was Maya’s best friend on the Ares, a short woman round as a stone, with a square face framed by cropped salt-and-pepper hair. Plain as could be. Maya, who knew she was good-looking, and knew that this had helped her many times, loved Nadia’s plainness, which somehow underlined her competence. Nadia was an engineer and very practical, an expert in cold-climate construction. They had met in Baikonur twenty years before, and once lived together on Novy Mir for several months; over the years they had become like sisters, in that they were not much alike, and did not often get along, and yet were intimate.
Now Nadia looked around and said, “Putting the Russian and American living quarters in different toruses was a horrible idea. We work with them during the day, but we spend most of our time here with the same old faces. It only reinforces the other divisions between us.”
“Maybe we should offer to exchange half the rooms.”
Arkady, wolfing down coffee rolls, leaned over from the next table. “It’s not enough,” he said, as if he had been part of their conversation all along. His red beard, growing wilder every day, was dusted with crumbs. “We should declare every other Sunday to be moving day, and have everyone shift quarters on a random basis. People would get to know more of the others, and there would be fewer cliques. And the notion of ownership of the rooms would be reduced.”
“But I like owning a room,” Nadia said.
Arkady downed another roll, grinned at her as he chewed. It was a miracle he had passed the selection committee.
But Maya brought up the subject with the Americans, and though no one liked Arkady’s plan, a single exchange of half the apartments struck them as a good idea. After some consulting and discussion, the move was arranged. They did it on a Sunday morning; and after that, breakfast was a little more cosmopolitan. Mornings in the D dining hall now included Frank Chalmers and John Boone, and also Sax Russell, Mary Dunkel, Janet Blyleven, Rya Jimenez, Michel Duval, and Ursula Kohl.
John Boone turned out to be an early riser, getting to the dining hall even before Maya. “This room is so spacious and airy, it really has an outdoor feel to it,” he said from his table one dawn when Maya came in. “A lot better than B’s hall.”
“The trick is to remove all chrome and white plastic,” Maya replied. Her English was fairly good, and getting better fast. “And then paint the ceiling like real sky.”
“Not just straight blue, you mean?”
“Yes.”
He was, she thought, a typical American: simple, open, straightforward, relaxed. And yet this particular specimen was one of the most famous people in history. It was an unavoidable, heavy fact; but Boone seemed to slip out from under it, to leave it around his feet on the floor. Intent on the taste of a roll, or some news on the table screen, he never referred to his previous expedition, and if someone brought the subject up he spoke as if it were no different from any of the flights the rest of them had taken. But it wasn’t so, and only his ease made it seem that way: at the same table each morning, laughing at Nadia’s lame engineering jokes, making his portion of the talk. After a while it took an effort to see the aura around him.
Frank Chalmers was more interesting. He always came in late, and sat by himself, paying attention only to his coffee and the table screen. After a couple of cups he would talk to people nearby, in ugly but functional Russian. Most of the breakfast conversations in D hall had now shifted to English, to accommodate the Americans. The linguistic situation was a set of nesting dolls: English held all hundred of them, inside that was Russian, and inside that, the languages of the commonwealth, and then the internationals. Eight people aboard were idiolinguists, a sad kind of orphaning in Maya’s opinion, and it seemed to her they were more Earth-oriented than the rest, and in frequent communication with people back home. It was a little strange to have their psychiatrist in that category.
Anyway English was the ship’s lingua franca, and at first Maya had thought that this gave the Americans an advantage. But then she noticed that when they spoke they were always on stage to everyone, while the rest of them had more private languages they could switch to if they wanted.
Frank Chalmers was the exception to all that, however.
He spoke five languages, more than anyone else aboard. And he did not fear to use his Russian, even though it was very bad; he just hacked out questions and then listened to the answers, with a really piercing intensity, and a quick startling laugh. He was an unusual American in many ways, Maya thought. At first he seemed to have all the characteristics, he was big, loud, maniacally energetic, confident, restless; talkative enough, after that first coffee; friendly enough. It took a while to notice how he turned the friendliness on and off, and to notice how little his talk revealed. Maya never learned a thing about his past, for instance, despite deliberate efforts to chat him up. It made her curious. He had black hair, a swarthy face, light hazel eyes – handsome in a tough-guy way – his smile brief, his laugh sharp, like Maya’s mother’s. His gaze too was sharp, especially when looking at Maya; a matter of evaluating the other leader, she assumed. He acted toward her as if they had an understanding built on long acquaintance, a presumption which made her uneasy given how little they had spoken together in Antarctica. She was used to thinking of women as her allies, and of men as attractive but dangerous problems. So a man who presumed to be her ally was only the more problematic. And dangerous. And … something else.
She recalled only one moment when she had seen further into him than the skin, and that had been back in Antarctica. After the thermal engineer had cracked and been sent north, news of his replacement had come down, and when it was announced everyone was quite surprised and excited to hear that it was going to be John Boone himself, even though he had certainly received more than the maximum radiation dosage on his previous expedition. While the evening room was still buzzing with the news Maya had seen Chalmers come in and be told of it, and he had jerked his head around to stare at his informant; and then for a fraction of a second she had seen a flash of fury, a flash so fast it was almost a subliminal event.
But it had made her attentive to him. And certainly he and John Boone had an odd relationship. It was difficult for Chalmers, of course; he was the Americans’ official leader, and even had the title Captain; but Boone, with his blond good looks and the strange presence of his accomplishment, certainly had more natural authority – he seemed the real American leader, and Frank Chalmers something like an overactive executive officer, doing Boone’s unspoken bidding. That could not be comfortable.
They were old friends, Maya had been told when she asked. But she saw few signs of it herself, even watching closely. They seldom talked to each other in public, and did not seem to visit in private. Thus when they were together she watched them more closely than ever, without ever consciously considering why; the natural logic of the situation just seemed to demand it. If they had been back at Glavkosmos, it would have made strategic sense to drive a wedge between them; but she didn’t think of it that way here. There was a lot that Maya didn’t think about consciously.
She watched, though. And one morning Janet Blyleven wore her video glasses into D hall for breakfast. She was a principal reporter for American television, and often she wove her way through the ship wearing her vidglasses, looking around and talking the commentary, collecting stories and transmitting them back home where they would be, as Arkady put it, “predigested and vomited back into that baby bird consensus.”
It was nothing new, of course. Media attention was a familiar part of every astronaut’s life, and during the selection process they had been more scrutinized than ever. Now, however, they were the raw material for programs magnitudes more popular than any space program had been before. Millions watched them as the ultimate soap opera, and this bothered some of them. So when Janet settled at the end of the table wearing those stylish spectacles with the optical fibers in the frame, there were a few groans. And at the other end of the table Ann Clayborne and Sax Russell were arguing, oblivious to any of them.
“It’ll take years to find out what we have there, Sax. Decades. There’s as much land on Mars as on Earth, with a unique geology and chemistry. The land has to be thoroughly studied before we can start changing it.”
“We’ll change it just by landing.” Russell brushed aside Ann’s objections as if they were spiderwebs on his face. “Deciding to go to Mars is like the first phrase of a sentence, and the whole sentence says—”
“Veni, vidi, vinci.”
Russell shrugged. “If you want to put it that way.”
“You’re the weenie, Sax,” Ann said, lip curled with irritation. She was a broad-shouldered woman with wild brown hair, a geologist with strong views, difficult in argument. “Look, Mars is its own place. You can play your climate-shifting games back on Earth if you want, they need the help. Or try it on Venus. But you can’t just wipe out a three billion year-old planetary surface.”
Russell rubbed away more spiderwebs. “It’s dead,” he said simply. “Besides, it’s not really our decision. It’ll be taken out of our hands.”
“None of these decisions will be taken out of our hands,” Arkady put in sharply.
Janet looked from speaker to speaker, taking it all in. Ann was getting agitated, raising her voice. Maya glanced around, and saw that Frank didn’t like the situation. But if he interrupted it he would give away to the millions the fact that he didn’t want the colonists arguing in front of them. Instead he looked across the table and caught Boone’s gaze. There was an exchange of expressions between the two so quick it made Maya blink.
Boone said, “When I was there before, I got the impression it was already Earthlike.”
“Except 200° Kelvin,” Russell said.
“Sure, but it looked like the Mojave, or the Dry Valleys.
The first time I looked around on Mars I found myself keeping an eye out for one of those mummified seals we saw in the Dry Valleys.”
And so on. Janet turned to him; and Ann, looking disgusted, picked up her coffee and left.
Afterward Maya concentrated, trying to recall the looks Boone and Chalmers had exchanged. They had been like something from a code, or the private languages invented by identical twins.
The weeks passed, and the days each began with a leisurely breakfast. Mid-mornings were far busier. Everyone had a schedule, although some were fuller than others. Frank’s was packed, which was the way he liked it, a maniacal blur of activity. But the necessary work was not really all that great: they had to keep themselves alive and in shape, and keep the ship running, and keep preparing for Mars. Ship maintenance ranged from the intricacy of programming or repairs to the simplicity of moving supplies out of storage, or taking trash to the recyclers. The biosphere team spent the bulk of its time on the farm, which occupied large parts of Toruses C, E, and F; and everyone aboard had farm chores. Most enjoyed this work, and some even returned in their free hours. Everyone was on doctors’ orders to spend three hours a day on treadmills, escalators, running wheels, or using weight machines. These hours were enjoyed or endured or despised, depending on temperament; but even those who claimed to despise them finished their exercises in noticeably (even measurably) better moods. “Beta endorphins are the best drug,” Michel Duval would say.
“Which is lucky, since we don’t have any others,” Arkady would reply.
“Oh, there’s caffeine …”
“Puts me to sleep.”
“Alcohol …”
“Gives me a headache.”
“Procaine, darvon, morphine—”
“Morphine?”
“In the medical supplies. Not for general use.”
Arkady smiled. “Maybe I’d better get sick.”
The engineers, including Maya, spent many mornings in training simulations. These took place on the back-up bridge in Torus B, which had the latest in image synthesizers; the simulations were so sophisticated that there was little visible difference between them and the act itself. This did not necessarily make them interesting: the standard orbital insertion approach, simulated weekly, was dubbed “The Mantra Run,” and became quite a bore to every conceivable flight crew.
But sometimes even boredom was preferable to the alternatives; Arkady was their training specialist, and he had a perverse talent for designing problem runs so hard that they often “killed” everybody. These runs were strangely unpleasant experiences, and did not make Arkady popular among his victims. He mixed problem runs with Mantra Runs randomly, but more and more often they were problem runs; they would “approach Mars” and red lights would flash, sometimes with sirens, and they were in trouble again. Once they struck a planetesimal weighing approximately fifteen grams, leaving a large flaw in the heat shield. Sax Russell had calculated that their chances of hitting anything larger than a gram were about one in every seven thousand years of travel, but nevertheless there they were, emergency!, adrenalin pouring through them even as they derided the very idea of it, rushing up to the hub and into EVA suits, going out to fill the pothole before they hit the Martian atmosphere and burned to a crisp; and halfway there, Arkady’s voice came over their intercoms: “Not fast enough! All of us are dead.”
But that was a simple one. Others … The ship, for instance, was guided by a fly-by-wire system, meaning that the pilots fed instructions to flight computers which translated them into the actual thrusts needed to achieve the desired result. This was how it had to be, because when approaching a gravitational mass like Mars at their speed, one simply could not feel or intuit what burns would achieve the desired effects. So none of them were flyers in the sense of a pilot flying a plane. Nevertheless, Arkady frequently blew the entire massively redundant system just as they were reaching a critical moment (which failure, Russell said, had about a one in ten billion chance of happening) and they had to take over and command all the rockets mechanically, watching the monitors and an orange-on-black visual image of Mars bearing down on them, and they could either go long and skip off into deep space and die a lingering death, or go short and crash into the planet and die instantly; and if the latter, they got to watch it right down to the simulated hundred and twenty klicks per second final smash.
Or it might be a mechanical failure: main rockets, stabilizing rockets, computer hardware or software, heat shield deployment; all of them had to work perfectly during the approach. And failures of these systems were the most likely of all – in the range, Sax said (though others contested his risk assessment methods), of one in every ten thousand approaches. So they would do it again and red lights would flash, and they would groan, and beg for a Mantra Run even as they partly welcomed the new challenge. When they managed to survive a mechanical failure, they were tremendously pleased; it could be the high point of a week. Once John Boone successfully aerobraked by hand, with a single main rocket functioning, hitting the safe millisecond of arc at the only possible speed. No one could believe it. “Blind luck,” Boone said, grinning widely as the deed was talked about at dinner.
Most of Arkady’s problem runs ended in failure, however, meaning death for all. Simulated or not, it was hard not to be sobered by these experiences, and after that, irritated with Arkady for inventing them. One time they repaired every monitor in the bridge just in time to see the screens register a hit by a small asteroid, which sheared through the hub and killed them all. Another time Arkady, as part of the navigation team, made an “error” and instructed the computers to increase the ship’s spin rather than decrease it. “Pinned to the floor by six gs!” he cried in mock horror, and they had to crawl on the floor for half an hour, pretending to rectify the error while weighing half a ton each. When they succeeded, Arkady leaped off the floor and began pushing them away from the control monitor. “What the hell are you doing?” Maya yelled.
“He’s gone crazy,” Janet said.
“He’s simulated going crazy,” Nadia corrected her. “We have to figure out—” doing an end run around Arkady “— how to deal with someone on the bridge going insane!”
Which no doubt was true. But they could see the whites of Arkady’s eyes all the way around, and there wasn’t a trace of recognition in him as he silently assaulted them; it took all five of them to restrain him, and Janet and Phyllis Boyle were hurt by his sharp elbows.
“Well?” he said at dinner afterward, grinning lopsidedly, as he was growing a fat lip. “What if it happens? We’re under pressure up here, and the approach will be worst of all. What if someone cracks?” He turned to Russell and the grin grew wider. “What are the chances of that, eh?” And he began to sing a Jamaican song, in a Slavic Caribbean accent: “'Pressure drop, oh pressure drop, oh-o, pressure going to drop on you-oo-oo!'”
So they kept trying, handling the problem runs as seriously as they could, even the attack by Martian natives or the decoupling of Torus H caused by “explosive bolts installed by mistake when the ship was built,” or the last minute veering of Phobos out of its orbit. Dealing with the more implausible scenarios sometimes took on a kind of surreal black humor, and Arkady replayed some of his videotapes as after-dinner entertainment, which sometimes got people launched into the air with laughter.
But the plausible problem runs … They kept on coming, morning after morning. And despite the solutions, despite the protocols for finding solutions, there was that sight, time after time: the red planet rushing at them at an unimaginable forty thousand kilometers an hour, until it filled the screen and the screen went white, and small black letters appeared on it: Collision.
They were traveling to Mars in a Type II Hohmann Ellipse, a slow but efficient course, chosen from among other alternatives mainly because the two planets were in the correct position for it when the ship was finally ready, with Mars about 45° ahead of Earth in the plane of the ecliptic. During the voyage they would travel just over halfway around the Sun, making their rendezvous with Mars some three hundred days later. Their womb time, as Hiroko called it.
The psychologists back home had judged it worthwhile to alter things from time to time, to suggest the passing of the seasons on the Ares. Length of days and nights, weather, and ambient colors were shifted to accomplish this. Some had maintained their landfall should be a harvest, others that it should be a new spring; after a short debate it had been decided by vote of the voyagers themselves to begin with early spring, so that they would travel through a summer rather than a winter; and as they approached their goal, the ship’s colors would turn to the autumn tones of Mars itself, rather than to the light greens and blossom pastels they had left so far behind.
So in those first months, as they finished their morning’s business, leaving the farm or the bridge, or staggering out of Arkady’s merrily sadistic simulations, they walked into springtime. Walls were hung with pale green panels, or mural-sized photos of azaleas, and jacarandas and ornamental cherries. The barley and mustard in the big farm rooms glowed vivid yellow with new blooms, and the forest biome and the ship’s seven park rooms had been stocked with trees and shrubs in the spring of their cycles. Maya loved these colorful spring blossoms, and after her mornings’ work she fulfilled part of her exercise regimen by taking a walk in the forest biome, which had a hilly floor, and was so thick with trees one could not see from one end of the chamber to the other. Here she often met Frank Chalmers of all people, taking one of his short breaks. He said he liked the spring foliage, though he never seemed to look at it. They walked together, and talked or not as the case might be. If they did talk, it was never about anything important; Frank didn’t care to discuss their work as leaders of the expedition. Maya found this peculiar, though she didn’t say so. But they did not have exactly the same jobs, which might account for his reluctance. Maya’s position was fairly informal and non-hierarchical; cosmonauts among themselves had always been relatively egalitarian, this had been the tradition since the days of Korolyov. The American program had a more military tradition, indicated even in titles: while Maya was merely Russian Contingent Co-ordinator, Frank was Captain Chalmers, and supposedly in the strong sense of the old sailing navies.
Whether this authority made it more or less difficult for him, he didn’t say. Sometimes he discussed the biome, or small technical problems, or news from home; more often he just seemed to want to walk with her. So – silent walks, up and down on narrow trails, through dense thickets of pine and aspen and birch. And always that presumption of closeness, as if they were old friends, or as if he were, very shyly (or subtly), courting her.
Thinking about that one day, it occurred to Maya that starting the Ares in springtime might have created a problem. Here they were in their mesocosm, sailing through spring, and everything was fertile and blooming, profligate and green, the air perfumed with flowers and windy, the days getting longer and warmer, and everyone in shirts and shorts, a hundred healthy animals, in close quarters, eating, exercising, showering, sleeping. Of course there had to be sex.
Well, it was nothing new. Maya herself had had some fantastic sex in space, most significantly during her second stint on Novy Mir, when she and Georgi and Yeli and Irina had tried every weightless variant imaginable, which was a great many indeed. But now it was different. They were older, they were stuck with each other for good: “Everything is different in a closed system,” as Hiroko often said in other contexts. The idea that they should stay on a fraternal basis was big at NASA: out of the 1,348 pages of the tome NASA had compiled called Human Relations In Transit To Mars, only a single page was devoted to the subject of sex; and that page advised against it. They were, the tome suggested, something like a tribe, with a sensible taboo against intra-tribal mating. The Russians laughed hilariously at this. Americans were such prudes, really. “We are not a tribe,” Arkady said.’ “We are the world.”
And it was spring. And there were the married couples aboard, some of whom were pretty demonstrative; and there was the swimming pool in Torus E, and the sauna and whirlpool bath. Bathing suits were used in mixed company, this because of the Americans again, but bathing suits were nothing. Naturally it began to happen. She heard from Nadia and Ivana that the bubble dome was being used for assignations in the quiet hours of the night; many of the cosmonauts and astronauts turned out to be fond of weightlessness. And the many nooks in the parks and the forest biome were serving as hideaways for those with less weightless experience; the parks had been designed to give people the sense that they could get away. And every person had a private soundproofed room of their own. With all that, if a couple wanted to begin a relationship without becoming an item in the gossip mill, it was possible to be very discreet.
Maya was sure there was more going on than any one person could know.
She could feel it. No doubt others did as well. Quiet conversations between couples; changes in dining room partners; quick glances, small smiles; hands touching shoulders or elbows in passing; oh yes, things were happening. It made for a kind of tension in the air, a tension that was only partly pleasant. Antarctic fears came back into play; and besides, there was only a small number of potential partners, which tended to give things a musical chairs kind of feeling.
And for Maya there were additional problems. She was even more wary than usual of Russian men, because in this case it would mean sleeping with the boss; she was suspicious of that, knowing how it had felt when she had done it herself. Besides, none of them … well, she was attracted to Arkady, but she did not like him; and he seemed uninterested. Yeli she knew from before, he was just a friend; Dmitri she didn’t care for; Vlad was older, Yuri not her type, Alex a follower of Arkady’s … on and on like that.
And as for the Americans, or the internationals; well, that was a different kind of problem. Cross cultures, who knew? So … she kept to herself. But she thought about it. And occasionally, while waking up in the morning, or finishing a workout, she floated on a wave of desire that left her washed up on the shore of bed or shower, feeling alone.
Thus late one morning, after a particularly harrowing problem run, which they had almost solved and then failed to solve, she ran into Frank Chalmers in the forest biome and returned his hello, and they walked for about ten meters into the woods, and stopped. She was in shorts and tank-top, barefoot, sweaty and flushed from the crazed simulation. He was in shorts and a T-shirt, barefoot, sweaty and dusty from the farm. Suddenly he laughed his sharp laugh, and reached out to touch her upper arm with two fingertips. “You’re looking happy today.” With that darting smile.
The leaders of the two halves of the expedition. Equals. She lifted her hand to touch his, and that was all it took.
They left the trail and ducked into a tight thicket of pine. They stopped to kiss, and it had been long enough since the last time that it felt strange to her. Tripping over a root Frank laughed under his breath, that quick secretive laugh which gave Maya a shiver, almost of fear. They sat on pine needles, rolled together like students necking in the woods. She laughed; she had always liked the quick approach, the way she could just knock a man down when she wanted to.
And so they made love. For a time passion took her away. Afterwards she relaxed, enjoying the wash of afterglow. But then it got a bit awkward, somehow; she didn’t know what to say. There was something hidden still about him, as if he were hiding even when making love. And even worse, what she could sense behind his reserve was some kind of triumph, as if he had won something and she had lost. That Puritan streak in Americans, that sense that sex was wrong and something that men had to trick women into. She had closed up a little herself, annoyed at that hidden smirk on his face. Win and lose, what children.
And yet they were co-mayors, so to speak. So if it was put on a zero sum basis …
Well, they talked for a while in a jovial enough way, and even made love again before they left. But it wasn’t quite the same as the first time, she found herself distracted. So much in sex was beyond rational analysis. Maya always felt things about her partners that she could not analyze or even express; but she always either liked what she felt or didn’t, there was no doubt about that. And looking at Frank Chalmers’s face after the first time, she had been sure that something wasn’t right. It made her uneasy.
But she was amiable, affectionate; it would not do to be put off at such a moment, no one would forgive that. They got up and dressed and went back into Torus D, and ate dinner at the same table with some others, and that was when it made perfect sense to become more distant. But then in the days after their encounter, she was surprised and displeased to find herself putting him off a little bit, making excuses to avoid being alone with him. It was awkward, not what she had wanted at all. She would have preferred not to feel the way she did, and once or twice after that they went off alone again, and when he started things she made love with him again, wanting it to work, feeling that she must have made a mistake or been in a bad mood somehow. But it was always the same, there was always that little smirk of triumph, that I-got-you that she disliked so much, that moralistic Puritan double-standard dirtiness.
And so she avoided him even more, to keep from getting into the start situation; and quickly enough he caught the drift. One afternoon he asked her to go for a walk in the biome and she declined, claiming fatigue; and a staccato look of surprise passed over his face, and then it had closed up like a mask. She felt badly, because she couldn’t even explain it to herself.
To try to make up for such an unreasonable withdrawal, she was friendly and forthright with him after that, as long as it was a safe situation. And once or twice she suggested, indirectly, that for her their encounters had been only a matter of sealing a friendship, something she had done with others as well. All this had to be conveyed between words, however, and it was possible he misunderstood; it was hard to say. After that first jolt of comprehension, he only seemed puzzled. Once, when she left a group just before it broke up, she had seen him give her a sharp glance; after that, only distance and reserve. But he had never been really upset, and he never pressed the issue, or came to her to talk about it. But that was part of the problem, wasn’t it? He didn’t seem to want to talk to her about that kind of thing.
Well, perhaps he had affairs going with other women, with some of the Americans, it was hard to say. He really did keep to himself. But it was … awkward.
Maya resolved to abolish the knockover seduction, no matter the thrill she got from it. Hiroko was right; everything was different in a closed system. It was too bad for Frank (if he did care), because he had served as her education in this regard. In the end she resolved to make it up to him, by being a good friend. She worked so hard at doing this that once, almost a month later, she miscalculated and went a little too far, to the point where he thought she was seducing him again. They had been part of a group, up late talking, and she had sat next to him, and afterwards he had clearly gotten the wrong impression, and walked with her around Torus D to the bathrooms, talking in the charming and affable way he had at this stage of things. Maya was vexed with herself; she didn’t want to seem completely fickle, although at this point either way she went it would probably look that way. So she went along with him, just because it was easier, and because there was a part of her that wanted to make love. And so she did, upset with herself and resolved that this should be the last time, a sort of final gift that would hopefully make the whole incident a good memory for him. She found herself becoming more passionate than ever before, she really wanted to please him. And then, just before orgasm, she looked up at his face, and it was like looking in the windows of an empty house.
That was the last time.
Δ V. V for velocity, delta for change. In space, this is the measure of the change in velocity required to get from one place to another – thus, a measure of the energy required to do it.
Everything is moving already. But to get something from the (moving) surface of the Earth into orbit around it, requires a minimum Δ v of ten kilometers per second; to leave Earth’s orbit and fly to Mars requires a minimum Δv of 3.6 kilometers per second; and to orbit Mars and land on it requires a Δv of about one kilometer per second. The hardest part is leaving Earth behind, for that is by far the deepest gravity well involved. Climbing up that steep curve of spacetime takes tremendous force, shifting the direction of an enormous inertia.
History too has an inertia. In the four dimensions of spacetime, particles (or events) have directionality; mathematicians, trying to show this, draw what they call “world lines” on graphs. In human affairs, individual world lines form a thick tangle, curling out of the darkness of prehistory and stretching through time: a cable the size of Earth itself, spiraling round the sun on a long curved course. That cable of tangled world lines is history. Seeing where it has been, it is clear where it is going – it is a matter of simple extrapolation. For what kind of Δ v would it take to escape history, to escape an inertia that powerful, and carve a new course?
The hardest part is leaving Earth behind.
The form of the Ares gave a structure to reality; the vacuum between Earth and Mars began to seem to Maya like a long series of cylinders, bent up at their joints at 45° angles. There was a runner’s course, a kind of steeplechase, around Torus C, and at each joint she slowed down in her run and tensed her legs for the increased pressure of the two 22.5° bends, and suddenly she could see up the length of the next cylinder. It was beginning to seem a rather narrow world.
Perhaps in compensation, the people inside began to get somehow larger. The process of shedding their Antarctic masks continued, and every time someone displayed some new and hitherto unknown characteristic, it made all who noticed it feel that much freer; and this feeling caused more hidden traits to be revealed. One Sunday morning the Christians aboard, numbering a dozen or so, celebrated Easter in the bubble dome. It was April back home, though the Ares’ season was midsummer. After their service they came down to the D dining hall for brunch. Maya, Frank, John, Arkady, and Sax were at a table, drinking cups of coffee and tea. The conversations among them and with other tables were densely interwoven, and at first only Maya and Frank heard what John was saying to Phyllis Boyle, the geologist who had conducted the Easter service.
“I understand the idea of the universe as a superbeing, and all its energy being the thoughts of this being. It’s a nice concept. But the Christ story …” John shook his head.
“Do you really know the story?” Phyllis asked.
“I was brought up Lutheran in Minnesota,” John replied shortly. “I went to confirmation class, had the whole thing drilled into me.”
Which, Maya thought, was probably why he bothered to get into discussions like this. He had a displeased expression that Maya had never seen before, and she leaned forward a bit, suddenly concentrating. She glanced at Frank; he was gazing into his coffee cup as if in a reverie, but she was sure he was listening.
John said, “You must know that the gospels were written decades after the event, by people who never met Christ. And that there are other gospels which reveal a different Christ, gospels that were excluded from the Bible by a political process in the third century. So he’s a kind of literary figure really, a political construct. We don’t know anything about the man himself.”
Phyllis shook her head. “That’s not true.”
“But it is,” John objected. This caused Sax and Arkady to look up from the next table. “Look, there’s a history to all this stuff. Monotheism is a belief system that you see appearing in early herding societies. The greater their dependence on sheep herding, the more likely their belief in a shepherd god. It’s an exact correlation, you can chart it and see. And the god is always male, because those societies were patriarchal. There’s a kind of archeology, an anthropology – a sociology of religion, that makes all of this perfectly clear – how it came about, what needs it fulfilled.”
Phyllis regarded him with a small smile. “I don’t know what to say to that, John. It’s not a matter of history, after all. It’s a matter of faith.”
“Do you believe in Christ’s miracles?”
“The miracles aren’t what matter. It’s not the church or its dogma that matters. It’s Jesus himself that matters.”
“But he’s just a literary construct,” John repeated doggedly. “Something like Sherlock Holmes, or the Lone Ranger. And you didn’t answer my question about the miracles.”
Phyllis shrugged. “I consider the presence of the universe to be a miracle. The universe and everything in it. Can you deny it?”
“Sure,” John said. “The universe just is. I define a miracle as an action that clearly breaks known physical law.”
“Like traveling to other planets?”
“No. Like raising the dead.”
“Doctors do that every day.”
“Doctors have never done that.”
Phyllis looked nonplussed. “I don’t know what to say to you, John. I’m kind of surprised. We don’t know everything, to pretend we do is arrogance. The creation is mysterious. To give something a name like ‘the big bang,’ and then think you have an explanation – it’s bad logic, bad thinking. Outside your rational scientific thought is an enormous area of consciousness, an area more important than science. Faith in God is part of that. And I suppose you either have it or you don’t.” She stood. “I hope it comes to you.” She left the room.
After a silence, John sighed. “Sorry, folks. Sometimes it still gets to me.”
“Whenever scientists say they’re Christian,” Sax said, “I take it to be an aesthetic statement.”
“The church of the wouldn’t-it-be-pretty-to-think-so,” Frank said, still looking into his cup.
Sax said, “They feel we’re missing a spiritual dimension of life that earlier generations had, and they attempt to regain it using the same means.” He blinked in his owlish way, as if the problem were disposed of by being defined.
“But that brings in so many absurdities!” John exclaimed.
“You just don’t have faith,” Frank said, egging him on.
John ignored him. “People who in the lab are as hard-headed as can be – you should see Phyllis grilling the conclusions her colleagues draw from their data! And then suddenly they start using all kinds of debater’s tricks, evasions, qualifications, fuzzy thinking of every kind. As if they were an entirely different person.”
“You just don’t have faith!” Frank repeated.
“Well I hope I never get it! It’s like being hit by a hammer in the head!”
John stood and took his tray to the kitchen. The rest looked at each other in silence. It must have been, Maya thought, a really bad confirmation class. Clearly none of the others had known any more than her about this side of their easygoing hero. Who knew what they would learn next, about him or any of them?
News of the argument between John and Phyllis spread through the crew. Maya wasn’t sure who was telling the story; neither John nor Phyllis seemed inclined to speak of it. Then she saw Frank with Hiroko, laughing as he told her something. Walking by them she heard Hiroko say, “You’ve got to admit Phyllis is right about that part – we don’t understand the why of things at all.”
Frank, then. Sowing discord between Phyllis and John. And (not a trivial point) Christianity was still a major force in America, and elsewhere. If word got around back home that John Boone was anti-Christian, it could give him problems. And that wouldn’t be such a bad thing for Frank. They were all getting media play on Earth, but if you watched some of the news and features, it became clear that some were getting more than others, and this made them seem more powerful, and so they became more powerful in fact, by association. Among this group were Vlad and Ursula (whom she suspected were more than friends, now), Frank, Sax – all people who had been well known before their selection – and none so much as John. So that any diminution in Earth’s regard for one of them might have a kind of corresponding effect on their status within the Ares. This at any rate seemed to be Frank’s operating principle.
It felt as if they were confined to the interior of a hotel with no exits, without even any balconies. The oppression of hotel life was growing; they had been inside now for four long months, but it was still less than half their trip. And none of their carefully designed physical surroundings or daily routines could hasten its end.
Then one morning the second flight team was dealing with another of Arkady’s problem runs, when all at once red lights burned on several screens.
“A solar flare has been detected by the solar monitoring equipment,” Rya said.
Arkady stood quickly. “That’s not me!” he exclaimed, and leaned over to read the screen nearest him. He looked up, met his colleagues’ skeptical stares, grinned. “Sorry, friends. This is the real wolf.”
An emergency message from Houston confirmed him. He could have faked those as well, but he was headed for the nearest spoke and there was nothing they could do; fake or not, they had to follow.
In fact, a big solar flare was an event they had simulated many times before. Everyone had tasks to perform, quite a few of them in a very short time, so they ran around the toruses, cursing their luck and trying not to get in each other’s way. There was a lot to do, as battening down was complicated and not very automated. In the midst of dragging plant trays into the plant shelter Janet yelled, “Is this one of Arkady’s tests?”
“He says not!”
“Shit.”
They had left Earth during the low point in the eleven-year sunspot cycle, specifically to reduce the chance of a flare like this occurring. And here it was anyway. They had about half an hour before the first radiation arrived, and no more than an hour after that the really hard stuff would follow.
Emergencies in space can be as obvious as an explosion or as intangible as an equation, but their obviousness has nothing to do with how dangerous they are. The crew’s senses would never perceive the subatomic wind approaching them, and yet it was one of the worst things that could have happened. And everyone knew it. They ran through the toruses to get their bit of battening done – plants had to be covered or moved to protected areas, the chickens and pigs and pygmy cows and the rest of the animals and birds had to be herded into their own little shelters, seeds and frozen embryos had to be collected and carried along, sensitive electrical components had to be boxed or likewise carried along. When they were done with these high-speed tasks they yanked themselves up the spokes to the central shaft as fast as they could, and then flew down the central shaft tube to the storm shelter, which was directly behind the tube’s aft end.
Hiroko and her biosphere team were the last ones in, banging through the hatch a full twenty-seven minutes after the initial alarm. They hurtled into the weightless space flushed and out of breath. “Has it started yet?”
“Not yet.”
They plucked personal dosimeters from a velcro pad of them, pinned them to their clothing.
The rest of the crew already floated in the semi-cylindrical chamber, breathing hard and nursing bruises and a few sprains. Maya ordered them to count off, and was relieved to hear the whole hundred run through without gaps.
The room seemed very crowded. They hadn’t gathered the whole hundred in one spot for many weeks, and even a max room didn’t seem large enough. This one occupied a tank in the middle strand of the hub shaft. The four tanks surrounding theirs were filled with water, and their tank was divided lengthwise between their room and another semi-cylinder that had been filled with heavy metals. This semi-cylinder’s flat side was their “floor,” and it was fitted inside the tank on circular tracks, and rotated to counteract the spin of the ship, keeping the tub between the crew and the sun.
So they floated in a non-rotating space, while the curved roof of the tank rotated over them at its usual four rpm. It was a peculiar sight, which along with the weightlessness made some people begin to look thoughtful in a pre-seasick kind of way. These unfortunates congregated down at the end of the shelter where the lavatories were located, and to help them out visually, everyone else oriented themselves to the floor. The radiation was therefore coming up through their feet, mostly gamma rays scattering out of the heavy metals. Maya felt an impulse to keep her knees together. People floated in place, or put on velcro slippers to walk over the floor. They talked in low voices, instinctively finding their next-door neighbors, their working partners, their friends. Conversations were subdued, as if a cocktail party had been told that the hors d’oeuvres had been tainted.
John Boone rip-ripped his way to the computer terminals at the fore end of the room where Arkady and Alex were monitoring the ship. He punched in a command, and the exterior radiation data were suddenly displayed on the room’s biggest screen. “Let’s see how much is hitting the ship,” he said brightly.
Groans. “Must we?” exclaimed Ursula.
“We might as well know,” John said. “And I want to see how well this shelter works. The one on the Rust Eagle was about as strong as the bib you wear at the dentist’s.”
Maya smiled. It was a reminder, rare from John, that he had been exposed to much more radiation than any of the rest of them – about a hundred and sixty rem over the course of his life, as he explained now in response to someone’s question. On Earth one caught a fifth of a roentgen equivalent man per year; orbiting Earth, still inside the protection of the Earth’s magnetosphere, one took around thirty-five per year. So John had taken a lot of heat. And somehow that gave him the right, now, to screen the exterior data if he wanted to.
Those who were interested – about sixty people – clumped behind him to watch the screen. The rest relocated at the far end of the tank with the people worrying about motion sickness, a group that definitely didn’t want to know how much radiation they were taking. Just the thought was enough to send some of them into the heads.
Then the full force of the flare struck. The exterior radiation count shifted to well above the solar wind’s usual level, and then soared in a sudden rush. An indrawn hiss came from several observers at once, and there were some shocked exclamations.
“But look how much the shelter is stopping,” John said, checking the dosimeter pinned to his shirt. “I’m still at 1.3 rem.”
That was several lifetimes of dentists’ X-rays, to be sure; but the radiation outside the storm shelter was already 70 rem, well-on its way to a lethal dose, so they were getting off lightly. Still, the amount flying through the rest of the ship! Billions of particles were penetrating the ship and colliding with the atoms of water and metal they were huddled behind; hundreds of millions were flying between these atoms and then through the atoms of their bodies, touching nothing, as if they were no more than ghosts. Still, thousands were striking atoms of flesh and bone. Most of those collisions were harmless; but in all those thousands, there were in all probability one or two (or three?) in which a chromosome strand was taking a hit, and kinking in the wrong way: and there it was. Tumor initiation, begun with just that typo in the book of the self. And years later, unless the victim’s DNA luckily repaired itself, the tumor promotion that was a more or less unavoidable part of living would have its effect, and there would appear a bloom of Something Else inside: cancer. Leukemia, most likely; and, most likely, death.
So it was hard not to regard the figures unhappily. 14.658 rems, 1.786, 19.004. “Like an odometer,” Boone said calmly as he looked at his dosimeter. He was gripping a rail with both hands and pulling himself back and forth, as if doing isometric exercises. Frank saw it and said, “John, what the hell are you doing?”
“Dodging,” John said. He smiled at Frank’s frown. “You know – moving target!”
People laughed at him. With the extent of the danger precisely charted on screens and graphs, they were beginning to feel less helpless. This was illogical, but naming was the power that made every human a scientist of sorts. And these were scientists by profession, with many astronauts among them as well, trained to accept the possibility of such a storm. All those mental habits began channeling their thoughts, and the shock of the event receded a bit. They were coming to terms with it.
Arkady went to a terminal and called up Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, picking it up in the third movement, when the village dance is disrupted by storm. He turned up the volume, and they floated together in the long half-cylinder, listening to the intensity of Beethoven’s fierce tempest, which suddenly seemed to enunciate perfectly the lashings of the silent wind pouring through them. It would sound just like that! Strings and woodwinds shrieking in wild gusts, out of control and yet beautifully melodic at the same time – a shiver ran down Maya’s spine. She had never listened to the old warhorse this closely before, and she looked with admiration (and a bit of fear) at Arkady, who was beaming ecstatically at the effects of his inspired disk jockeying, and dancing like some red knot of fluff in the wind. When the symphony’s storm peaked, it was difficult to believe that the radiation count wasn’t rising; and when the musical storm abated, it seemed like theirs should be over too. Thunder muttered, the last gusts whistled through. The French horn sang its serene all-clear.
People began to talk about other things, discussing the various business of the day that had been so rudely interrupted, or taking the opportunity to talk about other things. After a half hour or more, one of those conversations got louder; Maya didn’t hear how it began, but suddenly Arkady said, very loudly and in English, “I don’t think we should pay any attention to plans made for us back on Earth!”
Other conversations went silent, and people turned to look at him. He had popped up and was floating under the rotating roof of the chamber, where he could survey them all and speak like some mad flying spirit.
“I think we should make new plans,” he said. “I think we should be making them now. Everything should be redesigned from beginning, with our own thinking expressed. It should extend everywhere, even to first shelters we build.”
“Why bother?” Maya asked, annoyed at his grandstanding. “They’re good designs.” It really was irritating; Arkady often took center stage, and people always looked at her as if she were somehow responsible for him, as if it were her job to keep him from pestering them.
“Buildings are the template of a society,” Arkady said.
“They’re rooms,” Sax Russell pointed out.
“But rooms imply the social organization inside them.” Arkady looked around, pulling people into the discussion with his gaze. “The arrangement of a building shows what the designer thinks should go on inside. We saw that at the beginning of the voyage, when Russians and Americans were segregated into Torus D and B. We were supposed to remain two entities, you see. It will be same on Mars. Buildings express values, they have a sort of grammar, and rooms are the sentences. I don’t want people in Washington or Moscow saying how I should live my life: I’ve had enough of that.”
“What don’t you like about the design of the first shelters?” John asked, looking interested.
“They are rectangular,” Arkady said. This got a laugh, but he persevered: “Rectangular, the conventional shape! With work space separated from living quarters, as if work were not part of life. And the living quarters are taken up mostly by private rooms, with hierarchies expressed, in that leaders are assigned larger spaces.”
“Isn’t that just to facilitate their work?” Sax said.
“No. It isn’t really necessary. It’s a matter of prestige. A very conventional example of American business thinking, if I may say so.”
There was a groan, and Phyllis said, “Do we have to get political, Arkady?”
At the very mention of the word, the cloud of listeners ruptured; Mary Dunkel and a couple of others pushed out and headed for the other end of the room.
“Everything is political,” Arkady said at their backs. “Nothing more so than this voyage of ours. We are beginning a new society, how could it help but be political?”
“We’re a scientific station,” Sax said. “It doesn’t necessarily have much politics to it.”
“It certainly didn’t last time I was there,” John said, looking thoughtfully at Arkady.
“It did,” Arkady said, “but it was simpler. You were an all-American crew, there on a temporary mission, doing what your superiors told you to do. But now we are an international crew, establishing a permanent colony. It’s completely different.”
Slowly people were drifting through the air toward the conversation, to hear better what was being said. Rya Jiminez said, “I’m not interested in politics,” and Mary Dunkel agreed from the other end of the room: “That’s one of the things I’m here to get away from!”
Several Russians replied at once. “That itself is a political position!” and the like. Alex exclaimed, “You Americans would like to end politics and history, so you can stay in a world you dominate!”
A couple of Americans tried to protest, but Alex overrode them: “It’s true! The whole world has changed in the last thirty years, every country looking at its function, making enormous changes to solve problems – all but the United States. You have become the most reactionary country in the world.”
Sax said, “The countries that changed had to because they were rigid before, and almost broke. The United States already had flex in its system, and so it didn’t have to change as drastically. I say the American way is superior because it’s smoother. It’s better engineering.”
This analogy gave Alex pause, and while he was thinking about it John Boone, who had been watching Arkady with great interest, said, “Getting back to the shelters. How would you make them different?”
Arkady said, “I’m not quite sure – we need to see the sites we build on, walk around in them, talk it over. It’s a process I advocate, you see. But in general I think work space and living space should be mixed as much as is practical. Our work will be more than making wages – it will be our art, our whole life. We will give it to each other, we will not buy it. Also there should be no signs of hierarchy. I don’t even believe in the leader system we have now.” He nodded politely at Maya. “We are all equally responsible now, and our buildings should show it. A circle is best – difficult in construction terms, but it makes sense for heat conservation. A geodesic dome would be a good compromise – easy to construct, and indicating our equality. As for the insides, perhaps mostly open. Everyone should have their room, sure, but these should be small. Set in the rim, perhaps, and facing larger communal spaces — “ He picked up a mouse at one terminal, began to sketch on the screen. “There. This is architectural grammar that would say ‘All equal.’ Yes?”
“There’s lots of prefab units already there,” John said. “I’m not sure they could be adapted.”
“They could if we wanted to do it.”
“But is it really necessary? I mean, it’s clear we’re already a team of equals.”
“Is it clear?” Arkady said sharply, looking around. “If Frank and Maya tell us to do something, are we free to ignore them? If Houston or Baikonur tell us to do something, are we free to ignore them?”
“I think so,” John replied mildly.
This statement got him a sharp look from Frank. The conversation was breaking up into several arguments, as a lot of people had things to say, but Arkady cut through them all again:
“We have been sent here by our governments, and all of our governments are flawed, most of them disastrously. It’s why history is such a bloody mess. Now we are on our own, and I for one have no intention of repeating all of Earth’s mistakes just because of conventional thinking. We are the first Martian colonists! We are scientists! It is our job to think things new, to make them new!”
The arguments broke out again, louder than ever. Maya turned away and cursed Arkady under her breath, dismayed at how angry people were getting. She saw that John Boone was grinning. He pushed off the floor toward Arkady, came to a stop by piling into him, and then shook Arkady’s hand, which action swung them both around in the air, in an awkward kind of dance. This gesture of support immediately set people to thinking again – Maya could see it on their surprised faces; along with John’s fame he had a reputation for being moderate and low-keyed, and if he approved of Arkady’s ideas, then it was a different matter.
“Goddammit, Ark,” John said. “First those crazy problem runs, and now this – you’re a wild man, you really are! How in the hell did you get them to let you on board this ship, anyway?”
Exactly my question, thought Maya.
“I lied,” Arkady said.
Everyone laughed. Even Frank, looking surprised. “But of course I lied!” Arkady shouted, a big upside-down grin splitting his red beard. “How else could I get here? I want to go to Mars to do what I want, and selection committee wanted people to go and do what they were told. You know that!” He pointed down at them, shouted: “You all lied, you know you did!”
Frank was laughing harder than ever. Sax wore his usual Buster Keaton, but he raised a finger and said, “The Revised Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory,” and a great jeer went up from them all. They had all been required to take this exam: it was the world’s most widely used psychological test, and well regarded by experts. Respondents agreed or disagreed to five hundred and fifty-six statements, and a profile was formed from the replies; but the judgements concerning what the answers meant were based on the earlier responses of a sample group of 2,600 white, married, middle class Minnesota farmers of the 1930s. Despite all subsequent revisions, the pervading bias created by the nature of that first test group was still deeply engrained in the test; or at least some of them thought so. “Minnesota!” Arkady shouted, rolling his eyes. “Farmers! Farmers from Minnesota! I tell you this now, I lied in answer to every single question! I answered exactly opposite to what I really felt, and this is what allowed me to score as normal!”
Wild cheers greeted this announcement. “Hell,” John said, “I’m from Minnesota and I had to lie.”
More cheers. Frank, Maya noted, was crimson with hilarity, incapable of speech, hands clutching his stomach, nodding, giggling, helpless to stop himself. She had never seen him laugh like that.
Sax said, “The test made you lie.”
“What, not you?” Arkady demanded. “Didn’t you lie too?”
“Well, no,” Sax said, blinking as if the concept had never occurred to him before. “I told the truth to every question.”
They laughed harder than ever. Sax looked startled at their response, but that only made him look funnier.
Someone shouted, “What do you say, Michel? How do you account for yourself?”
Michel Duval spread his hands. “You may be underestimating the sophistication of the RMMPI. There are questions which test how honest you are being.”
This statement brought down a rain of questions on his head, a methodological inquisition. What were his controls?
How did the testers make their theories falsifiable? How did they repeat them? How did they eliminate alternative explanations of the data? How could they claim to be scientific in any sense of the word whatsoever? Clearly a lot of them considered psychology a pseudoscience, and many had considerable resentment for the hoops they had been forced to jump through to get aboard. The years of competition had taken their toll. And the discovery of this shared feeling sparked a score of voluble conversations. The tension raised by Arkady’s political talk disappeared.
Perhaps, Maya thought, Arkady had defused the one with the other. If so it had been cleverly done, but Arkady was a clever man. She thought back. Actually it had been John Boone who had changed the subject. He had in effect flown to the ceiling and come to Arkady’s rescue, and Arkady had seized the chance. They were both clever men. And it seemed possible they were in some sort of collusion. Forming a kind of alternative leadership, perhaps, one American, one Russian. Something would have to be done about that.
She said to Michel, “Do you think it’s a bad sign we all consider ourselves such liars?”
Michel shrugged. “It’s been healthy to talk about it. Now we realize we’re more alike than we thought. No one has to feel they were unusually dishonest to get aboard.”
“And you?” Arkady asked. “Did you present yourself as most rational and balanced psychologist, hiding the strange mind we have come to know and love?”
A small smile from Michel. “You’re the expert in strange minds, Arkady.”
Then the few still watching the screens called out. The radiation count had started to fall. After a while it slipped back to just a little above normal.
Someone returned the Pastoral to the moment of the horn call. The last movement of the symphony, “Glad and Grateful Feelings After the Storm,” poured over the speaker system, and as they left the shelter and fanned out through the ship like dandelion seeds on a breeze, the beautiful old folk melody was broadcast throughout the Ares, elaborating itself in all its Brucknerian richness. While it played, they found that the ship’s hardened systems had survived intact. The thicker walls of the farm and the forest biome had afforded the plants some protection, and although there would be some die-offs and an entire crop they could not eat, the seed stocks were not harmed. The animals could not be eaten either, but presumably would give birth to a healthy next generation. The only casualties were some uncaptured songbirds from D’s dining hall; they found a scattering of them dead on the floor.
As for the crew, the shelter’s protection had shielded them from all but about 6 rem. That was bad for a mere three hours, but it could have been worse. The exterior of the ship had taken over 140 rem, a lethal dose.
Six months inside a hotel, with never a walk outside. Inside it was late summer, and the days were long. Green dominated the walls and ceilings, and people went barefoot. Quiet conversations were nearly inaudible in the hum of machinery, the whoosh of ventilators. The ship seemed empty somehow, whole sections of it abandoned as the crew settled down to wait. Small knots of people sat in the halls in Toruses B and D, talking. Some stopped their conversations when Maya wandered by, which she naturally found disturbing. She was having trouble falling asleep, trouble waking up. Work made her restless: all the engineers were only waiting, after all, and the simulations had gotten nearly intolerable. She had trouble gauging the passage of time. She stumbled more than she used to. She had gone to see Vlad and he had recommended over-hydration, more running, more swimming.
Hiroko told her to spend more time on the farm. She gave it a try, spending hours weeding, harvesting, trimming, fertilizing, watering, talking, sitting on a bench, looking at leaves: spacing out. The farm rooms were max chambers, their barrel roofs lined with bright sunstrips. The multi-leveled floors were crowded with crops, many new since the storm. There was not enough space to feed the crew entirely on farm food, but Hiroko disliked that fact and struggled against it, converting storage rooms as they emptied out. Dwarf strains of wheat, rice, soy and barley grew in stacked trays; above the trays hung rows of hydroponic vegetables and enormous clear jars of green and yellow algae, used to help regulate the gas exchange.
Some days Maya did nothing but watch the farm team work. Hiroko and her assistant Iwao were always tinkering at the endless project of maximizing the closure of their biological life support system, and they had a crew of other regulars working on it: Raul, Rya, Gene, Evgenia, Andrea, Roger, Ellen, Bob and Tasha. Success in the closure attempt was measured in K values, K representing closure itself. Thus for every substance they recycled,
where E was the rate of consumption in the system, e the rate of (incomplete) closure, and I a constant for which Hiroko, earlier in her career, had established a corrected value. The goal, K = I-1, was unreachable, but asymptotically approaching it was the farm biologists’ favorite game, and more than that, critical to their eventual existence on Mars. So conversations about it could extend over days, spiraling off into complexities that no one really understood. In essence the farm team was already at their real work, which Maya envied; she was so sick of simulations!
Hiroko was an enigma to Maya. Aloof and serious, she always seemed absorbed in her work and her team tended always to be around her, as if she was the queen of a realm that had nothing to do with the rest of the ship. Maya didn’t like that, but there was nothing she could do about it. And something in Hiroko’s attitude made it not so threatening: it was just a fact, the farm was a separate place, its crew a separate society. And it was possible that Maya could use them to counterbalance the influence of Arkady and John somehow; so she did not worry about their separate realm. In fact she joined them more than ever before. Sometimes she went with them up to the hub at the end of a work session, to play a game they had invented called tunneljump. There was a jump tube down the central shaft; all the joints between cylinders had been expanded to the same width as the cylinders themselves, making a single smooth tube. There were rails to facilitate quick movement back and forth along this tube, but in their game, jumpers stood on the storm shelter hatch, and tried to leap up the tube to the bubble dome hatch, a full five hundred meters away, without bumping into the walls or railings. Coriolis forces made this effectively impossible, and flying even halfway would usually win a game. But one day Hiroko came by on her way to check an experimental crop in the bubble dome, and after greeting them she crouched on the shelter hatch and jumped, and slowly floated the full length of the tunnel, rotating as she flew, and stopping herself at the bubble dome hatch with a single outstretched hand.
The players stared up the tunnel in stunned silence.
“Hey!” Rya called to Hiroko. “How did you do that?”
“Do what?”
They explained the game to her. She smiled, and Maya was suddenly certain she had already known the rules. “So how did you do it?” Rya repeated.
“You jump straight!” Hiroko explained, and disappeared into the bubble dome.
That night at dinner the story got around. Frank said to Hiroko, “Maybe you just got lucky.”
Hiroko smiled. “Maybe you and I should total twenty jumps and see who wins.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“What’ll we bet?”
“Money, of course.”
Hiroko shook her head. “Do you really think money matters anymore?”
A few days later Maya floated under the curve of the bubble dome with Frank and John, looking ahead at Mars, which was now a gibbous orb the size of a dime.
“A lot of arguments these days,” John remarked casually. “I hear Alex and Mary got into an actual fight. Michel says it’s to be expected, but still …”
“Maybe we brought too many leaders,” Maya said.
“Maybe you should have been the only one,” Frank jibed.
“Too many chiefs?” said John.
Frank shook his head. “That’s not it.”
“No? There are a lot of stars on board.”
“The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.”
“I leave the judgement to you, Captain.” John grinned at Frank’s scowl. He was, Maya thought, the only relaxed person left among them.
“The shrinks saw the problem,” Frank went on, “it was obvious enough even for them. They used the Harvard solution.”
“The Harvard solution,” John repeated, savoring the phrase.
“Long ago Harvard’s administrators noticed that if they accepted only straight A high school students, and then gave out the whole range of grades to freshmen, a distressing number of them were getting unhappy at their Ds and Fs and messing up the Yard by blowing their brains out on it.”
“Couldn’t have that,” John said.
Maya rolled her eyes. “You two must have gone to trade schools, eh?”
“The trick to avoiding this unpleasantness, they found, was to accept a certain percentage of students who were used to getting mediocre grades, but had distinguished themselves in some other way—”
“Like having the nerve to apply to Harvard with mediocre grades?”
“—used to the bottom of the grade curve, and happy just to be at Harvard at all.”
“How did you hear of this?” Maya asked.
Frank smiled. “I was one of them.”
“We don’t have any mediocrities on this ship,” John said.
Frank looked dubious. “We do have a lot of smart scientists with no interest in running things. Many of them consider it boring. Administration, you know. They’re glad to hand it over to people like us.”
“Beta males,” John said, mocking Frank and his interest in sociobiology. “Brilliant sheep.” The way they mocked each other—
“You’re wrong,” Maya said to Frank.
“Maybe so. Anyway, they’re the body politic. They have at least the power to follow.” He said this as if the idea depressed him.
John, due for a shift on the bridge, said goodbye and left.
Frank floated over to Maya’s side and she shifted nervously. They had never discussed their brief affair and it hadn’t come up, even indirectly, in quite a while. She had thought about what to say if it ever did: she would say that she occasionally indulged herself with men she liked. That it had been something done on the spur of the moment.
But he only pointed to the red dot in the sky. “I wonder why we’re going.”
Maya shrugged. Probably he meant not we, but I. “Everyone has their reasons,” she said.
He glanced at her. “That’s so true.”
She ignored his tone of voice. “Maybe it’s our genes,” she said. “Maybe they felt things going wrong on Earth. Felt an increased speed of mutation, or something like that.”
“So they struck out for a clean start.”
“Yes.”
“The selfish gene theory. Intelligence only a tool to aid successful reproduction.”
“I suppose.”
“But this trip endangers successful reproduction,” Frank said. “It isn’t safe out here.”
“But it isn’t safe on Earth either. Waste, radiation, other people …”
Frank shook his head. “No. I don’t think the selfishness is in the genes. I think it’s somewhere else.” He reached out with a forefinger, and tapped her between the breasts – a solid tap on the sternum, causing him to drift back to the floor. Staring at her the whole while, he touched himself in the same place. “Good night, Maya.”
A week or two later Maya was in the farm harvesting cabbages, walking down an aisle between long stacked trays of them. She had the room to herself. The cabbages looked like rows of brains, pulsing with thought in the bright afternoon light.
Then she saw a movement and looked to the side. Across the room, through an algae bottle, she saw a face. The glass of the bottle warped it: a man’s face, brown-skinned. The man was looking to the side and didn’t see her. It appeared he was talking to someone she couldn’t see. He shifted, and the image of his face came clear, magnified in the middle of the bottle. She understood why she was watching so closely, why her stomach was clenched: she had never seen him before.
He turned and looked her way. Through two curves of glass their eyes met. He was a stranger, thin-faced and big-eyed.
He disappeared in a brown blur. For a second Maya hesitated, scared to pursue him; then she forced herself to run the length of the room and up the two bends of the joint, into the next cylinder. It was empty. She ran through three more cylinders before stopping. Then she stood there, looking at tomato vines, her breath rasping hard in her throat. She was sweating yet felt chilled. A stranger. It was impossible. But she had seen him! She concentrated on the memory, tried to see the face again. Perhaps it had been … but no. It had been none of the hundred, she knew that. Facial recognition was one of the mind’s strongest abilities: it was amazingly accurate. And he had run away at the sight of her.
A stowaway. But that too was impossible! Where would he hide, how would he live? What would he have done in the radiation storm?
Had she begun to hallucinate, then? Had it come to that?
She walked back to her room, sick to her stomach. The hallways of Torus D were somehow dark despite their bright illumination, and the back of her neck crawled. When the door appeared she dove into the refuge of her room. But her room was just a bed and a side table, a chair and a closet, some shelves of stuff. She sat there for an hour, then two. But there was nothing there for her to do, no answers, no distractions. No escape.
Maya found herself unable to mention her sighting to anyone, and in a way this was more frightening than the incident itself, as it emphasized to her its impossibility. People would think she had gone mad. What other conclusion was there? How would he eat, where would he hide? No. Too many people would have to know, it really wasn’t possible. But that face!
One night she saw it again in a dream, and woke up in a sweat. Hallucination was one of the symptoms of space breakdown, as she well knew. It happened fairly frequently during long stays in Earth orbit, a couple dozen incidences had been recorded. Usually people started by hearing voices in the ever-present background noise of ventilation and machinery, but a fairly common alternative was the sighting of a workmate who wasn’t there, or worse yet of a doppelgänger, as if empty space had begun to fill with mirrors. Shortage of sensory stimuli was believed to cause the phenomena, and the Ares, with its long voyage, and no Earth to look at, and a brilliant (and some might say driven) crew, had been judged a potential hazard. This was one of the main reasons the ship’s rooms had been given so much variety of color and texture, along with changing daily and seasonal weather. And still she had seen something that couldn’t be there.
And now when she walked through the ship, it seemed to her that the crew was breaking up into small and private groups, groups which rarely interacted. The farm team spent almost all its time in the farms, even eating meals there on the floors, and sleeping (together, rumor had it) among the rows of plants. The medical team had its own suite of rooms and offices and labs in Torus B and they spent their time in there, absorbed with experiments and observations and consultations with Earth. The flight team was preparing for MOI, running several simulations a day. And the rest were … scattered. Hard to find. As she walked around the toruses the rooms seemed emptier than ever before. The D dining hall was never full anymore. And then again in the separated clumps of diners that were there she noticed arguments broke out fairly frequently, and were hushed with peculiar speed. Private spats, but about what?
Maya herself said less at table, and listened more. You could tell a lot about a society by what topics of conversation came up. In this crowd, the talk was almost always science. Shop talk: biology, engineering, geology, medicine, whatever. You could chat forever about that stuff.
But when the number of people in a conversation fell below four, she noticed, the topics of conversation tended to change. Shop talk was augmented (or replaced entirely) by gossip; and the gossip was always about those two great forms of the social dynamic, sex and politics. Voices lowered, heads leaned in; and word got around. Rumors about sexual relations were becoming more common and more quiet, more caustic and more complex. In a few cases, as in the unfortunate triangle of Janet Blyleven, Mary Dunkel and Alex Zhalin, it went very public and became the talk of the ship; in others it stayed so hidden that the talk was in whispers, accompanied by pointed, inquisitive glances. Janet Blyleven would walk into the dining hall with Roger Calkins, and Frank would remark to John, in an undertone meant to reach Maya’s ears, “Janet thinks we’re a panmixia.” Maya would ignore him, as she always did when he spoke in that sneery tone of voice; but later she looked up the word in a sociobiology lexicon, and found that a panmixia was a group where every male mated with every female.
The next day she looked at Janet curiously; she had had no idea. Janet was friendly, she leaned in at you as you talked, and really paid attention. And she had a quick smile. But … well, the ship had been built to insure a lot of privacy. No doubt there was more happening than anyone could know.
And among these secret lives, might there not be another secret life, led in solitude, or in teamwork with some few among them, some small clique or cabal?
“Have you noticed anything funny lately?” she asked Nadia one day, at the end of their regular breakfast chat.
Nadia shrugged. “People are bored. It’s about time to get there, I think.”
Maybe that was all it was.
Nadia said, “Did you hear about Hiroko and Arkady?”
Rumors were constantly swirling about Hiroko. Maya found it distasteful, disturbing. That the lone Asian woman among them should be the focus of that kind of thing – dragon lady, mysterious orient… Underneath the scientific rational surfaces of their minds, there were so many deep and powerful superstitions. Anything might happen, anything was possible.
Like a face seen through a glass.
And so she listened with a tight feeling in her stomach as Sasha Yefremov leaned over from the next table and responded to Nadia’s question by wondering if Hiroko were developing a male harem. That was nonsense; although an alliance of some sort between Hiroko and Arkady had an unsettling sort of logic to Maya, she was not sure why. Arkady was very open in advocating independence from mission control, Hiroko never talked about it at all; but in her actions hadn’t she already led the whole farm team away, into a mental torus the others could never enter?
But then when Sasha claimed in a low voice that Hiroko had plans to fertilize several of her own ova with sperm from all the men on the Ares and store them cryonically for later growth on Mars, Maya could only sweep up her tray and head for the dishwashers, feeling something like vertigo. They were becoming strange.
The red crescent grew to the size of a quarter, and the feeling of tension grew as well, as if it were the hour before a thunderstorm, and the air charged with dust and creosote and static electricity. As if the god of war were really up there on that blood dot, waiting for them. The green wall panels inside the Ares were now flecked with yellow and brown, and the afternoon light was thick with sodium vapor’s pale bronze.
People spent hours in the bubble dome, watching what none among them but John had seen before. The exercise machines were in constant use, the simulations performed with renewed enthusiasm. Janet took a swing through the toruses, sending back video images of all the changes in their little world; then she threw her glasses on a table, and resigned her post as reporter. “Look, I’m tired of being an outsider,” she said. “Every time I walk into a room everyone shuts up, or starts preparing their official line. It’s like I was a spy for an enemy!”
“You were,” Arkady said, and gave her a big hug.
At first no one volunteered to take over her job. Houston sent messages of concern, then reprimands, then veiled threats. Now that they were about to reach Mars, the expedition was getting a lot more TV time, and the situation was about to “go nova,” as mission control put it. They reminded the colonists that this burst of publicity would eventually reap the space program all kinds of benefits; the colonists had to film and broadcast what they were doing, to stimulate public support for the later Mars missions on which they were going to depend. It was their duty to transmit their stories!
Frank got on the screen and suggested that mission control could concoct their video reports out of footage from robot cameras. Hastings, head of Mission Control in Houston, was visibly infuriated by this response. But as Arkady said, with a grin that extended the realm of the question to everything: “What can they do?”
Maya shook her head. They were sending a bad signal, she knew; and revealing what the video reports had so far hidden, that the group was splintering into rival cliques. Which indicated Maya’s own lack of control over the Russian half of the expedition. She was about to ask Nadia to take over the reporting job as a favor to her, when Phyllis and some of her friends in Torus B volunteered for the job. Maya, laughing at the expression on Arkady’s face, gave it to them. Arkady pretended not to care. Irritated, Maya said in Russian, “You know you’ve missed a chance! A chance to shape our reality, in effect!”
“Not our reality, Maya. Their reality. And I don’t care what they think.”
Maya and Frank began conferring about landfall assignments. To a certain extent these were predetermined by the crew members’ areas of expertise, but because of all the skill redundancies, there were still some choices to be made. And Arkady’s provocations had had this effect at least: Mission Control’s preflight plans were now generally regarded as provisional at best. In fact no one seemed all that inclined to acknowledge Maya’s or Frank’s authority either, which made things tense when it became known what they were working on.
Mission Control’s preflight plan called for the establishment of a base colony on the plains north of Ophir Chasma, the enormous northern arm of Valles Marineris. All the farm team was assigned to the base, and a majority of the engineers and medical people – altogether, around sixty of the hundred. The rest would be scattered on subsidiary missions, returning to the base camp from time to time. The largest subsidiary mission was to dock a part of the disassembled Ares on Phobos, and begin transforming that moon into a space station. Another smaller mission would leave the base camp and travel north to the polar cap, to build a mining system which would transport blocks of ice back to the base. A third mission was to make a series of geological surveys, traveling all over the planet; a glamor assignment for sure. All the smaller groups would become semi-autonomous for periods of up to a year, so selecting them was no trivial matter; they knew well, now, how long a year could be.
Arkady and a group of his friends – Alex, Roger, Samantha, Edvard, Janet, Tatiana, Elena – requested all the jobs on Phobos. When Phyllis and Mary heard about it, they came to Maya and Frank to protest. “They’re obviously trying to take over Phobos, and who knows what they’ll do with it?”
Maya nodded, and she could see Frank didn’t like it either. The problem was, no one else wanted to stay on Phobos; even Phyllis and Mary weren’t clamoring to replace Arkady’s crew, so it wasn’t clear how to oppose him.
Louder arguments broke out when Ann Clayborne passed around her crew list for the geological survey. A lot of people wanted to join that one, and several of those left off her list said they were going on surveys whether Ann wanted them or not.
Arguments became frequent, and vehement. Almost everyone aboard declared themselves for one mission or another, positioning themselves for the final decisions. Maya felt that she was losing all control of the Russian contingent; she was getting furious at Arkady. In a general meeting she suggested sarcastically that they let the computer make the assignments. The idea was rejected with no regard for her authority. She threw up her hands. “Then what do we do?”
No one knew.
She and Frank conferred in private. “Let’s try giving them the illusion of making the decision,” he said to her with a brief smile; she realized that he was not displeased to have seen her fail in the general meeting. Their encounter was coming back to haunt her, and she cursed herself for a fool. Little politburos were dangerous …
Frank polled everyone concerning their wishes, and then displayed the results on the bridge, listing everyone’s first, second and third choices. The geological surveys were popular, while staying on Phobos was not. Everyone already knew this, and the posted lists proved that there were fewer conflicts than it had seemed. “There are complaints about Arkady taking over Phobos,” Frank said at the next public meeting. “But no one but him and his friends want that job. Everyone else wants to get down to the surface.”
Arkady said, “In fact we should get hardship compensation.”
“It’s not like you to talk about compensation, Arkady,” Frank said smoothly.
Arkady grinned and sat back down.
Phyllis wasn’t amused. “Phobos will be a link between Earth and Mars, like the space stations in Earth orbit. You can’t get from one planet to the other without them, they’re what naval strategists call choke points.”
“I promise to keep my hands off your neck,” Arkady said to her.
Frank snapped, “We’re all going to be part of the same village! Anything we do affects all of us! And judging by the way you’re acting, dividing up from time to time will be good for us. I for one wouldn’t mind having Arkady out of my sight for a few months.”
Arkady bowed. “Phobos here we come!”
But Phyllis and Mary and their crowd still were not happy. They spent a lot of time conferring with Houston, and whenever Maya went into Torus B, conversations seemed to cease, eyes followed her suspiciously – as if being Russian would automatically put her in Arkady’s camp! She damned them for fools, and damned Arkady even more. He had started all this.
But in the end it was hard to tell what was going on, with a hundred people scattered in what suddenly felt like such a large ship. Interest groups, micropolitics; they really were fragmenting. One hundred people only, and yet they were too large a community to cohere! And there was nothing she or Frank could do about it.
One night she dreamed again of the face in the farm. She woke shaken, and was unable to fall back asleep; and suddenly everything seemed out of control. They flew through the vacuum of space inside a small knot of linked cans, and she was supposed to be in charge of this mad argosy! It was absurd!
She left her room, climbed D’s spoke tunnel to the central shaft. She pulled herself to the bubble dome, forgetting the tunneljump game.
It was four a.m. The inside of the bubble dome was like a planetarium after the audience has gone: silent, empty, with thousands of stars packed into the black hemisphere of the dome. Mars hung directly overhead, gibbous and quite distinctly spherical, as if a stone orange had been tossed among the stars. The four great volcanoes were visible pockmarks, and it was possible to make out the long rifts of Marineris. She floated under it, spreadeagled and spinning very slightly, trying to comprehend it, trying to feel something specific in the dense interference pattern of her emotions. When she blinked, little spherical teardrops floated out and away among the stars.
The lock door opened. John Boone floated in, saw her, grabbed the door handle to stop himself. “Oh, sorry. Mind if I join you?”
“No.” Maya sniffed and rubbed her eyes. “What gets you up at this hour?”
“I’m often up early. And you?”
“Bad dreams.”
“Of what?”
“I can’t remember,” she said, seeing the face in her mind.
He pushed off, floated past her to the dome. “I can never remember my dreams.”
“Never?”
“Well, rarely. If something wakes me up in the middle of one, and I have time to think about it, then I might remember it, for a little while anyway.”
“That’s normal. But it’s a bad sign if you never remember your dreams at all.”
“Really? What’s it a symptom of?”
“Of extreme repression, I seem to recall.” She had drifted to the side of the dome; she pushed off through the air, stopped herself against the dome next to him. “But that may be Freudianism.”
“In other words something like the theory of phlogiston.”
She laughed. “Exactly.”
They looked out at Mars, pointed out features to each other. Talked. Maya glanced at him as he spoke. Such bland, happy good looks; he really was not her type. In fact she had taken his cheeriness for a kind of stupidity back at the beginning. But over the course of the voyage she had seen that he was not stupid.
“What do you think of all the arguments about what we should do up there?” she asked, gesturing at the red stone ahead of them.
“I don’t know.”
“I think Phyllis makes a lot of good points.”
He shrugged. “I don’t think that matters.”
“What do you mean?”
“The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims, with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgement on what they think of X and Y.”
“But we’re scientists! We’re trained to weigh the evidence. ”
John nodded. “True. In fact, since I like you, I concede the point.”
She laughed and pushed him, and they tumbled down the sides of the dome away from each other.
Maya, surprised at herself, arrested her motion against the floor. She turned and saw John coming to a halt across the dome, landing against the floor. He looked at her with a smile, caught a rail and launched himself into the air, across the domed space on a course aimed at her.
Instantly Maya understood, and forgetting completely her resolution to avoid this kind of thing, she pushed off to intercept him. They flew directly at each other, and to avoid a painful collision had to catch and twist in mid-air, as if dancing. They spun, hands clasped, spiraling up slowly toward the dome. It was a dance, with a clear and obvious end to it, there to reach whenever they liked: whew! Maya’s pulse raced, and her breath was ragged in her throat. As they spun they tensed their biceps and pulled together, as slowly as docking spacecraft, and kissed.
With a smile John pushed down from her, sending her flying to the dome, and him to the floor, where he caught and crawled to the chamber’s hatch. He locked it.
Maya let her hair loose and shook it out so it floated around her head, across her face. She shook it wildly and laughed. It was not as though she felt on the verge of any great or overmastering love; it was simply going to be fun; and that feeling of simplicity was … She felt a wild surge of lust, and pushed off the dome toward John. She tucked into a slow somersault, unzipping her jumper as she spun, her heart pounding like tympanis, all her blood rushing to her skin, which tingled as if thawing as she undressed, banged into John, flew away from him after an overhasty tug at a sleeve; they bounced around the chamber as they got their clothes off, miscalculating angles and momentums until with a gentle thrust of the big toes they flew into each other and met in a spinning embrace, and floated kissing among their floating clothes.
In the days that followed they met again. They made no attempt to keep the relationship a secret; so very quickly they were a known item, a public couple. Many aboard seemed taken aback by the development; and one morning walking into the dining hall, Maya caught a swift glance from Frank, seated at a corner table, that chilled her; it reminded her of some other time, some incident, some look on his face that she couldn’t quite call to mind.
But most of those aboard seemed pleased. After all it was a kind of royal match, an alliance of the two powers behind the colony, signifying harmony. Indeed the union seemed to catalyze a number of others, which either came out of the closet or, in the newly supersaturated medium, sprang into being. Vlad and Ursula, Dmitri and Elena, Raul and Marina; newly evident couples were everywhere, to the point where the singletons among them began to make nervous jokes about it. But Maya thought she noticed less tension in voices, fewer arguments, more laughter.
One night, lying in bed thinking about it (thinking of wandering over to John’s room) she wondered if that was why they had gotten together: not from love, she still did not love him, she felt no more than friendship for him, charged by lust that was strong but impersonal – but because it was, in fact, a very useful match. Useful to her – but she swerved from that thought, concentrated on the match’s usefulness to the expedition as a whole. Yes, it was politic. Like feudal politics, or the ancient comedies of spring and regeneration. And it felt that way, she had to admit; as if she were acting in response to imperatives stronger than her own desires, acting out the desires of some larger force. Of, perhaps, Mars itself. It was not an unpleasant feeling.
As for the idea that she might have gained leverage over Arkady; or Frank; or Hiroko … well, she successfully avoided thinking about that. It was one of Maya’s talents.
Blooms of yellow and red and orange spread across the walls. Mars was now the size of the moon in Earth’s sky. It was time to harvest all their effort; only a week more, and they would be there.
There was still tension over the unsolved problems of landfall assignments. And now Maya found it less easy than ever to work with Frank: it was nothing obvious, but it occurred to her that he did not dislike their inability to control the situation, because the disruptions were being caused more by Arkady than anyone else, and so it looked like it was more her fault than his. More than once she left a meeting with Frank and went to John, hoping to get some kind of help. But John stayed out of the debates, and threw his support behind everything that Frank proposed. His advice to Maya in private was fairly acute, but the trouble was he liked Arkady and disliked Phyllis; so often he recommended to her that she support Arkady, apparently unaware of the way this tended to undercut her authority among the other Russians. She never pointed this out to him, however. Lovers or not, there were still areas she didn’t wish to discuss with him, or with anyone else.
But one night in his room her nerves were jangling, and lying there, unable to sleep, worrying about first this and then that, she said, “Do you think it would be possible to hide a stowaway on the ship?”
“Well, I don’t know,” he said, surprised. “Why do you ask?”
Swallowing hard, she told him about the face through the algae bottle.
He sat up in bed, staring at her. “You’re sure it wasn’t …”
“It wasn’t any of us.”
He rubbed his jaw. “Well … I suppose if he were getting help from someone in the crew …”
“Hiroko,” Maya suggested. “I mean, not just because she’s Hiroko, but because of the farm and all that. It would solve his food problem, and there’s a lot of places to hide there. And he could have taken shelter with the animals during the radiation storm.”
“They got a lot of rems!”
“But he could have gotten behind their water supply. A little one-man shelter wouldn’t be too hard to set up.”
John still hadn’t gotten over the idea of it. “A whole year in hiding!”
“It’s a big ship. It could be done, right?”
“Well, I suppose so. Yeah, it could, I guess. But why?”
Maya shrugged. “I have no idea. Someone who wanted on, who didn’t make the selection. Someone who had a friend, or friends …”
“Still! I mean, a lot of us had friends who wanted to come. That doesn’t mean that …”
“I know, I know.”
They talked about it for most of an hour, discussing the possible reasons, the methods that could have been used to slip a passenger on board, to hide him, and so on. And then Maya suddenly noticed that she felt much better; that she was, in fact, in a wonderful mood. John believed her! He didn’t think she had gone crazy! She felt a wash of relief and happiness, and threw her arms around him. “It’s so good to be able to talk to you about this!”
He smiled. “We’re friends, Maya. You should have brought it up before.”
“Yes.”
The bubble dome would have been a wonderful place to view their final approach to Mars, but they were going to be aerobraking to reduce speed, and the dome would be behind the heat shield that they now deployed. There would be no view.
Aerobraking saved them from the necessity of carrying the enormous amount of fuel it would have taken to slow down, but it was an extremely precise operation, and therefore dangerous. They had a leeway of less than a millisecond of arc, and so several days before MOI the navigation team began to tweak their course with small burns on an almost hourly basis, fine tuning the approach. Then as they got closer they stopped the ship’s rotation. The return to weightlessness, even in those used to it, was a shock; suddenly it came home to Maya that it wasn’t just another simulation. She lofted through the windy air of the hallways, seeing everything from a strange new high perspective; and all of a sudden it felt real.
She slept in snatches, an hour here, three hours there. Every time she stirred, floating in her sleeping bag, she had a moment of disorientation, thinking she was in Novy Mir again. Then she would remember, and adrenalin would knock her awake: almost there. She would pull through the halls of the torus, pushing off the wall panels of brown and gold and bronze. On the bridge she would check with Mary or Raul or Marina, or someone else in navigation; everything still on course. They were approaching Mars so quickly it seemed they could see it expanding on the screens.
They had to miss the planet by thirty kilometers, or about one ten-millionth of the distance they had traveled. No problem, Mary said, with a quick glance at Arkady. So far they were on the Mantra Run, and hopefully none of his mad problems would crop up.
The crew members not involved with navigation worked to batten down, preparing everything for the torque and bumps that two and half g were sure to bring. Some of them got to go out on EVAs, to deploy subsidiary heat shields and the like. There was a lot to do; and yet the days seemed long anyway.
It was going to happen in the middle of the night, and so that evening all the lights stayed on, and no one went to bed. Everyone had a station – some on duty, most of them only waiting it out. Maya sat in her chair on the bridge, watching the screens and the monitors, thinking that they looked just like they would if it were all a simulation in Baikonur. Could they really be going into orbit around Mars?
They could. The Ares hit Mars’s thin high atmosphere at forty thousand kilometers per hour, and instantly the ship was vibrating heavily, Maya’s chair shaking her fast and hard, and there was a faint low roar, as if they flew through a blast furnace – and it looked like that too, because the screens were bursting with an intense pink-orange glow. Compressed air was bouncing off the heat shields and blazing past all the exterior cameras, so that the whole bridge was tinged the color of Mars. Then gravity returned with a vengeance; Maya’s ribs were squeezed so hard that she had trouble breathing, and her vision was blurred. It hurt!
They were plowing through the thin air at a speed and height calculated to put them into what aerodynamicists call transitional flow, a state halfway between free molecular flow and continuum flow. Free molecular flow would have been the preferred mode of travel, with the air that struck the heat shield shoved to the sides, and the resulting vacuum refilled mostly by molecular diffusion; but they were moving too fast for that, and they could only just barely avoid the tremendous heat of continuum flow, in which air would have moved over shield and ship as part of a wave action. The best they could do was to take the highest possible course that would slow them enough; and this put them into transitional flow, which vacillated between free molecular and continuum flow, making for a bumpy ride. And there lay the danger. If they were to hit a high pressure cell in the Martian atmosphere, where heat or vibration or g forces caused some sensitive mechanism to break, then they could be cast into one of Arkady’s nightmares at the very time they were crushed in their chairs, “weighing” four hundred pounds apiece, which was something Arkady had never been able to simulate very well. In the real world, Maya thought grimly, at the moment when they were most vulnerable to danger, they were also most helpless to deal with it.
But as fate would have it, Martian stratospheric weather was stable, and they remained on the Mantra Run, which in actuality turned out to be a roaring, shuddering, breath-robbing eight minutes. No hour Maya could remember had lasted as long. Sensors showed that the main heat shield had risen to 600° Kelvin —
And then the vibration stopped. The roar ended. They had skipped out of the atmosphere, after skidding around a quarter of the planet. They had decelerated by some twenty thousand kilometers an hour, and the heat shield’s temperature had risen to 710° Kelvin, very near its limit. But the method had worked. All was still. They floated, weightless again, held down by their chair straps. It felt as if they had stopped moving entirely, as if they were floating in pure silence.
Unsteadily they unstrapped themselves, floated like ghosts around the cool air of the rooms, an airy faint roar sounding in their ears, emphasizing the silence. They were talking too loudly, shaking each other’s hands. Maya felt dazed, and she couldn’t understand what people were saying to her; not because she couldn’t hear them, but because she wasn’t paying attention.
Twelve weightless hours later their new course led them to a periapsis thirty-five thousand kilometers from Mars. There they fired the main rockets for a brief thrust, increasing their speed by about a hundred kilometers an hour; after that they were pulled toward Mars again, carving an ellipse that would bring them back to within five hundred kilometers of the surface. They were in Martian orbit.
Each elliptical orbit of the planet took around a day. Over the next two months, the computers would control burns that would gradually circularize their course just inside the orbit of Phobos. But the landing parties were going to descend to the surface well before that, while apogee was so close.
They moved the heat shields back to their storage positions, and went inside the bubble dome to have a look.
During apogee Mars filled most of the sky, as if they flew over it in a high jet. The depth of Valles Marineris was perceptible, the height of the four big volcanoes obvious: their broad peaks appeared over the horizon well before the surrounding countryside came into view. There were craters everywhere on the surface: their round interiors were a vivid sandy orange, a slightly lighter color than the surrounding countryside. Dust, presumably. The short rugged curved mountain ranges were darker than the surrounding countryside, a rust color broken by black shadows. But both the light and dark colors were just a shade away from the omnipresent rusty-orangish-red, which was the color of every peak, crater, canyon, dune, and even the curved slice of the dust-filled atmosphere, visible high above the bright curve of the planet. Red Mars! It was transfixing, mesmerizing. Everyone felt it.
They spent long hours working, and at last it was real work. The ship had to be partially disassembled. The main body would be eventually parked in orbit near Phobos, and used as an emergency return vehicle. But twenty tanks from the outer lengths of the hub shaft had only to be disconnected from the Ares and prepped to become planetary landing vehicles, which would take the colonists down in groups of five. The first lander was scheduled to descend as soon as it was decoupled and prepped; so they worked in round-the-clock shifts, spending a lot of time in EVA. They pulled in to the dining halls tired and ravenous, and conversations were loud; the ennui of the voyage seemed forgotten. One night Maya floated in the bathroom getting ready for bed, feeling stiffened muscles that she hadn’t heard from in months. Around her Nadia and Sasha and Yeli Zudov were chattering away, and in the warm wash of voluble Russian it suddenly occurred to her that everyone was happy – they were in the last moment of their anticipation, an anticipation that had lain in their hearts for half a lifetime, or ever since childhood – and now suddenly it had bloomed below them like a child’s crayon drawing of Mars, growing huge then small, huge then small, and as it yo-yoed back and forth it loomed before them in all its immense potential: tabula rasa, blank slate. A blank red slate. Anything was possible, anything could happen – in that sense they were, in just these last few days, perfectly free. Free of the past, free of the future, weightless in their own warm air, floating like spirits about to invest a material world. In the mirror Maya caught sight of the toothbrush-distorted grin on her face, and grabbed a railing to hold her position. It occurred to her that they might never be so happy again. Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real. But this time who could say? This time might be the golden one at last.
She released the railing and spit toothpaste into a wastewater bag, then floated backwards into the hallway. Come what may, they had reached their goal. They had earned at least the chance to try.
Disassembling the Ares made a lot of them feel odd. It was, as John remarked, like dismantling a town and flinging the houses in different directions. And this was the only town they had. Under the giant eye of Mars all their disagreements became taut; clearly it was critical now, there was little time left. People argued, in the open or under the surface. So many little groups now, keeping their own council … what had happened to that brief moment of happiness? Maya blamed it mostly on Arkady. He had opened Pandora’s box; if not for him and his talk, would the farm group have drawn so close around Hiroko? Would the medical team have kept such close counsel? She didn’t think so.
She and Frank worked hard to reconcile differences and forge a consensus, to give them the feeling they were still a single team. It involved long conferences with Phyllis and Arkady, Ann and Sax, Houston and Baikonur. In the process a relationship developed between the two leaders that was even more complex than their early encounters in the park; though that was part of it; Maya saw now, in Frank’s occasional flashes of sarcasm and resentment, that he had been bothered by the incident more than she had thought at the time. But there was nothing to be done about it now.
In the end the Phobos mission was indeed given to Arkady and his friends, mainly because no one else wanted it. Everyone was promised a spot on a geological survey if they wanted one; and Phyllis and Mary and the rest of the “Houston crowd” were given assurances that the construction of base camp would go according to the plans made in Houston. They intended to work at the base to see that it happened that way. “Fine, fine,” Frank snarled at the end of one of these meetings. “We’re all going to be on Mars, do we really have to fight like this over what we’re going to do there?”
“That’s life,” Arkady said cheerfully. “On Mars or not, life goes on.”
Frank’s jaw was clenched. “I came here to get away from this kind of thing!”
Arkady shook his head. “You certainly did not! This is your life, Frank. What would you do without it?”
One night shortly before the descent, they gathered and had a formal dinner for the entire hundred. Most of the food was farm-grown: pasta, salad and bread, with red wine from storage, saved for a special occasion.
Over a dessert of strawberries, Arkady floated up to propose a toast. “To the new world we now create!”
A chorus of groans and cheers; by now they all knew what he meant. Phyllis threw down a strawberry and said, “Look, Arkady, this settlement is a scientific station. Your ideas are irrelevant to it. Maybe in fifty or a hundred years. But for now, it’s going to be like the stations in Antarctica.”
“That’s true,” Arkady said. “But in fact Antarctic stations are very political. Most of them were built so that countries that built them would have a say in the revision of the Antarctic treaty. And now the stations are governed by laws set by that treaty, which was made by a very political process! So you see, you cannot just stick your head in sand crying ‘I am a scientist, I am a scientist!'” He put a hand to his forehead, in the universal mocking gesture of the prima donna. “No. When you say that, you are only saying, ‘I do not wish to think about complex systems!’ Which is not really worthy of true scientists, is it?”
“The Antarctic is governed by a treaty because no one lives there except in scientific stations,” Maya said irritably. To have their final dinner, their last moment of freedom, disrupted like this!
“True,” Arkady said. “But think of the result. In Antarctica, no one can own land. No one country or organization can exploit the continent’s natural resources, without the consent of every other country. No one can claim to own those resources, or take them and sell them to other people, so that some profit from them while others pay for their use. Don’t you see how radically different that is from the way the rest of the world is run? And this is the last area on Earth to be organized, to be given a set of laws. It represents what all governments working together feel instinctively is fair, revealed on land free from claims of sovereignty, or really from any history at all. It is, to say it plainly, Earth’s best attempt to create just property laws! Do you see? This is the way entire world should be run, if only we could free it from the straitjacket of history!”
Sax Russell, blinking mildly, said, “But Arkady, since Mars is going to be ruled by a treaty based on the old Antarctic one, what are you objecting to? The Outer Space Treaty states that no country can claim land on Mars, no military activities are allowed, and all bases are open to inspection by any country. Also no Martian resources can become the property of a single nation – the UN is supposed to establish an international regime to govern any mining or other exploitation. If anything is ever done along that line, which I doubt will happen, then it is to be shared among all the nations of the world.” He turned a palm upward. “Isn’t that what you’re agitating for, already achieved?”
“It’s a start,” Arkady said. “But there are aspects of that treaty you haven’t mentioned. Bases built on Mars will belong to the countries that build them, for instance. We will be building American and Russian bases, according to this provision of the law. And that puts us right back into the nightmare of Terran law and Terran history. American and Russian businesses will have the right to exploit Mars, as long as the profits are somehow shared by all the nations signing the treaty. This may only involve some sort of percentage paid to UN, in effect no more than bribe. I don’t believe we should acknowledge these provisions for even a moment!” ‘
Silence followed this remark.
Ann Clayborne said, “This treaty also says we have to take measures to prevent the disruption of planetary environments, I think is how they put it. It’s in Article Seven. That seems to me to expressly forbid the terraforming that so many of you are talking about.”
“I would say that we should ignore that provision as well,” Arkady said quickly. “Our own well-being depends on ignoring it.”
This view was more popular than his others, and several people said so.
“But if you’re willing to disregard one article,” Arkady pointed out, “you should be willing to disregard the rest. Right?”
There was an uncomfortable pause.
“All these changes will happen inevitably,” Sax Russell said with a shrug. “Being on Mars will change us in an evolutionary way.”
Arkady shook his head vehemently, causing him to spin a little in the air over the table. “No, no, no, no! History is not evolution! It is a false analogy! Evolution is a matter of environment and chance, acting over millions of years. But history is a matter of environment and choice, acting within lifetimes, and sometimes within years, or months, or days! History is Lamarckian! So that if we choose to establish certain institutions on Mars, there they will be! And if we choose others, there they will be!” A wave of his hand encompassed them all, the people seated at the tables, the people floating among the vines: “I say we should make those choices ourselves, rather than having them made for us by people back on Earth. By people long dead, really.”
Phyllis said sharply, “You want some kind of communal Utopia, and it’s not possible. I should think Russian history would have taught you something about that.”
“It has,” Arkady said. “Now I put to use what it has taught me.”
“Advocating an ill-defined revolution? Fomenting a crisis situation? Getting everyone upset and at odds with each other?”
A lot of people nodded at this, but Arkady waved them away. “I decline to accept blame for everyone’s problems at this point in the trip. I have only said what I think, which is my right. If I make some of you uncomfortable, that is your problem. It is because you don’t like the implications of what I say, but can’t find grounds to deny them.”
“Some of us can’t understand what you say,” Mary exclaimed.
“I say only this!” Arkady said, staring at her bug-eyed: “We have come to Mars for good. We are going to make not only our homes and our food, but also our water and the very air we breathe – all on a planet that has none of these things. We can do this because we have technology to manipulate matter right down to the molecular level. This is an extraordinary ability, think of it! And yet some of us here can accept transforming the entire physical reality of this planet, without doing a single thing to change ourselves, or the way we live. To be twenty-first century scientists on Mars, in fact, but at the same time living within nineteenth century social systems, based on seventeenth century ideologies. It’s absurd, it’s crazy, it’s – it’s —” he seized his head in his hands, tugged at his hair, roared “It’s unscientific! And so I say that among all the many things we transform on Mars, ourselves and our social reality should be among them. We must terraform not only Mars, but ourselves.”
No one ventured a rebuttal to that; Arkady at full throttle was pretty much unopposable, and a lot of them were genuinely provoked by what he had said and needed time to think. Others were simply disgruntled, but unwilling to cause too much of a fuss at this particular dinner, which was supposed to be a celebration. It was easier to roll one’s eyes, and drink to the toast. “To Mars! To Mars!” But as they floated around after finishing dessert, Phyllis was disdainful. “First we have to survive,” she said. “With dissension like this, how good will our chances be?”
Michel Duval tried to reassure her. “A lot of these disagreements are symptoms of the flight. Once on Mars, we’ll pull together. And we have more than just what we brought on the Ares to help us – we’ll have what the unmanned landers have brought already, shipments of equipment and food all over the surface and the moons. All that’s there for us. The only limit will be our own stamina. And this voyage is part of that – it’s a kind of preparation, a test. If we fail this part, we won’t even get to try on Mars.”
“Exactly my point!” Phyllis said. “We are failing in this.”
Sax stood, looking bored, and pushed off toward the kitchen. The hall was filled with the seashell roar of many small discussions, some of them acrimonious in tone. A lot of people were angry at Arkady, clearly; and others were angry at them for getting upset.
Maya followed Sax into the kitchen. As he cleaned his tray he sighed. “People are so emotional. Sometimes it seems like I’m stuck in an endless performance of the play No Exit.”
“That’s the one where they can’t get out of a little room?”
He nodded. “Where hell is other people. I hope we don’t prove the hypothesis.”
A few days later the landers were ready. They would descend over a period of five days; only the Phobos team would stay in what was left of the Ares, guiding it to its near-docking with the little moon. Arkady, Alex, Dmitri, Roger, Samantha, Edvard, Janet, Raul, Marina, Tatiana, and Elena said their farewells, absorbed already in the task at hand, promising to descend as soon as the Phobos station was built.
The night before the descent Maya couldn’t sleep. Eventually she gave up trying, and pulled herself through the rooms and corridors, up to the hub. Every object was sharp-edged with sleeplessness and adrenalin, and every familiarity of the ship was countered or overwhelmed by some alteration, a lashed-down stack of boxes or a dead-end in a tube. It was as if they had already left the Ares. She looked around at it one last time, drained of emotion. Then she pulled herself through the tight locks, into the landing vehicle she had been assigned to. Might as well wait there. She climbed into her spacesuit, feeling, as she so often did when the real moment came, that she was only going through another simulation. She wondered if she would ever escape that feeling, if being on Mars would be enough to end it. It would be worth it just for that: to make her feel real for once! She settled into her chair.
A few sleepless hours later she was joined by Sax, Vlad, Nadia, and Ann. Her companions belted in, and they ran through the check-out together. Toggles were flipped, there was a countdown; and their rockets fired. The lander drifted away from the Ares. Its rockets fired again. They fell toward the planet. They hit the top of the atmosphere, and their single trapezoidal window became a blaze of Mars-colored air. Maya, vibrating with the craft, stared up at it. She felt tense and unhappy, focused backward rather than forward, thinking of everyone still on the Ares; and it seemed to her that they had failed, that the five of them in the lander were leaving behind a group in disarray. Their best chance for creating some kind of concord had passed, and they had not succeeded; the momentary flash of happiness she had felt while brushing her teeth had been just that, a flash. She had failed, then. They were going their separate ways, splintered by their beliefs, and even after two separate years of enforced togetherness they were, like any other human group, no more than a collection of strangers. The die was cast.
PART THREE The Crucible (#ulink_408b4b2f-f485-54a9-8ed5-7c3afffae05a)
It formed with the rest of the solar system, around five billion years ago. That’s fifteen million human generations. Rocks banging together in space and then coming back and holding together, all because of the mysterious force we call gravity. That same mysterious warp in the weft of things caused the pile of rocks, when it was big enough, to crush in on its center until the heat of the pressure melted the rock. Mars is small but heavy, with a nickel-iron core. It is small enough that the interior has cooled faster than Earth’s: the core no longer spins inside the crust at a different speed and so Mars has practically no magnetic field. No dynamo left. But one of the last internal flows of the molten core and mantle was in the form of a huge anomalous lumping outward on one side, a shove against the crust wall that formed a continent-sized bulge, eleven kilometers high: three times as high as the Tibetan plateau is above its surroundings. This bulge caused many other features to appear: a system of radial fractures covering an entire hemisphere, including the largest cracks of all, the Valles Marineris, a lace of canyons that would cover the United States coast to coast. The bulge also caused a number of volcanoes, including three straddling its spine, Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons and Arsia Mons; and off on its northwest edge, Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system, three times the height of Everest, one hundred times the mass of Mauna Loa, the Earth’s largest volcano.
So the Tharsis Bulge was the most important factor in shaping the surface of Mars. The other major factor was meteor fall. In the Noachian Age, three to four billion years ago, millions of meteors were falling on Mars at a tremendous rate, and thousands of them were planetesimals, rocks as big as Vega or Phobos. One of the impacts left behind Hellas Basin, 2000 kilometers in diameter, the largest obvious crater in the solar system; although Daedalia Planum appears to be the remains of an impact basin 4500 kilometers across. Those are big; but then there are areologists who believe that the entire northern hemisphere of Mars is an ancient impact basin.
These big impacts created explosions so cataclysmic that it is hard to imagine them; ejecta from them ended up on the Earth and the Moon, and as asteroids in Trojan orbits; some areologists think that the Tharsis Bulge started because of the Hellas impact; others believe that Phobos and Deimos are ejecta. And these were only the largest impacts. Smaller stones fell every day, so that the oldest surfaces on Mars are saturated with cratering, the landscape a palimpsest of newer rings obscuring older ones, with no patch of land untouched. And each of these impacts released explosions of heat that melted rock: elements were broken out of their matrix and fired away in the form of hot gases, liquids, new minerals. This and the outgassing from the core produced an atmosphere, and lots of water; there were clouds, storms, rain and snow, glaciers, streams, rivers, lakes, all scouring the land, all leaving unmistakable marks of their passage – flood channels, stream beds, shorelines, every kind of hydrologic hieroglyphic.
But all that went away. The planet was too small, too far from the sun. The atmosphere froze and fell to the ground. Carbon dioxide sublimed to form a thin new atmosphere, while oxygen bonded to rock and turned it red. The water froze, and over the ages seeped down through the kilometers of meteor-broken rock. Eventually this layer of regolith became permeated with ice, and the deepest parts were hot enough to melt the ice; so there were underground seas on Mars. And water always flows downhill; so these aquifers migrated down, slowly seeping, until they pooled behind some stoppage or another, a rib of high bedrock or a frozen soil barrier. Sometimes intense artesian pressures built against these dams; and sometimes a meteor would hit, or a volcano appear, and the dam would burst apart and a whole underground sea would spew over the landscape in enormous floods, floods ten thousand times the flow of the Mississippi. Eventually, however, the water on the surface would freeze and sublime away in the ceaseless dry winds, and fall on the poles in every winter’s fog hood. The polar caps therefore thickened, and their weight drove the ice underground until the visible ice was only the tip of two world-topping lenses of underground permafrost, lenses ten and then a hundred times the visible caps’ volume. While back down toward the equator, new aquifers were being filled from below, by outgassing from the core; and some of the old aquifers were refilling.
And so this slowest of cycles approached its second round. But as the planet was cooling, all of it happened more and more slowly, in a long ritard like a clock winding down. The planet settled into the shape we see. But change never stops; the ceaseless winds carved the land, with dust that grew finer and finer; and the eccentricities of Mars’s orbit meant that the southern and northern hemispheres traded the cold and warm winters in a 51,000 year cycle, so that the dry ice cap and the water ice cap reversed poles. Each swing of this pendulum laid down a new stratum of sand, and the troughs of new dunes cut through older layers at an angle, until the sand around the poles lay in a stippled cross-hatching, in geometrical patterns like Navajo sand paintings, banding the whole top of the world.
The colored sands in their patterns, the fluted and scalloped canyon walls, the volcanoes rising right through the sky, the rubbled rock of the chaotic terrain, the infinity of craters, ringed emblems of the planet’s beginning … Beautiful, or harsher than that: spare, austere, stripped down, silent, stoic, rocky, changeless. Sublime. The visible language of nature’s mineral existence.
Mineral; not animal, nor vegetable, nor viral. It could have happened but it didn’t. There was never any spontaneous generation out of the clays or the sulphuric hot springs; no spore falling out of space, no touch of a god; whatever starts life (for we do not know), it did not happen on Mars. Mars rolled, proof of the otherness of the world, of its stony vitality.
And then, one day …
She hit the ground with both feet solid, nothing tricky about it, the g familiar from nine months in the Ares; and with the suit’s weight, not that much different from walking on Earth, as far as she could remember. The sky was a pink shaded with sandy tans, a color richer and more subtle than any in the photos. “Look at the sky,” Ann was saying, “look at the sky.” Maya was chattering away, Sax and Vlad spun like rotating statues. Nadezhda Francine Cherneshevsky took a few more steps, felt her boots crunch the surface. It was salt-hardened sand a couple of centimeters thick, which cracked when you walked on it; the geologists called it duricrust or caliche. Her boot tracks were surrounded by small systems of radial fractures.
She was out away from the lander. The ground was a dark rusty orange, covered with an even litter of rocks the same color, although some of the rocks showed tints of red or black or yellow. To the east stood a number of rocket landing vehicles, each one a different shape and size, with the tops of more sticking over the eastern horizon. All of them were crusted the same red-orange as the ground: it was an odd, thrilling sight, as if they had stumbled upon a long-abandoned alien spaceport. Parts of Baikonur would look like this, in a million years.
She walked to one of the nearest landing vehicles, a freight container the size of a small house, set on a skeletal four-legged rocket assembly. It looked like it had been there for decades. The sun was overhead, too bright to look at even through her faceplate; it was hard to judge through the polarization and other filters, but it seemed to her that the daylight was much like that on Earth, as far as she could remember. A bright winter’s day.
She looked around again, trying to take it in. They stood on a gently bumpy plain, covered with small sharp-edged rocks, all half-buried in dust. Back to the west the horizon was marked by a small flat-topped hill. It might be a crater rim, it was hard to say. Ann was already halfway there, still quite a large figure; the horizon was closer than seemed right, and Nadia paused to take note of that, suspecting that she would soon become accustomed to it, and never notice. But it was not Earthlike, that strangely close horizon, she saw that clearly now. They stood on a smaller planet.
She made a concerted effort to recall Earth’s gravity, wondering that it should be so hard. Walking in the woods, over tundra, on the river ice in winter … and now: step, step. The ground was flat, but one had to thread a course between the ubiquitous rocks; there was no place on Earth that she knew of where they were distributed so copiously and evenly. Take a jump! She did, and laughed; even with her suit on she could tell she was lighter. She was just as strong as ever, but weighed only thirty kilos! And the forty kilos of the suit … well, it threw her off balance, that was true. It made her feel that she had gone hollow. That was it: her center of gravity was gone, her weight had been shifted out to her skin, to the outside of her muscles rather than the inside. That was the effect of the suit, of course. Inside the habitats it would be as it had been in the Ares. But out here in a suit, she was the hollow woman. With the aid of that image she could suddenly move more easily, hop over a boulder, come down and take a turn, dance! Simply pop in the air, dance, land on top of a flat rock – watch out—
She tumbled, landed on a knee and both hands. Her gloves broke through the duricrust. It felt like a layer of caked sand at the beach, only harder and more brittle. Like hardened mud. And cold! Their gloves weren’t heated the way their boot soles were, and there wasn’t enough insulation when actually touching the ground. It was like touching ice with the bare fingers, wow! Around 215° Kelvin, she recalled, or –90° Centigrade; colder than Antarctica, colder than Siberia at its worst. Her fingertips were numb. They would need better gloves to be able to work, gloves fitted with heating elements, like their boot soles. That would make the gloves thicker and less flexible. She’d have to get her finger muscles back into shape.
She had been laughing. She stood and walked to another freight drop, humming “Royal Garden Blues.” She climbed the leg of the next drop and rubbed the crust of red dirt off an engraved manifest on the side of the big metal crate. One John Deere/Volvo Martian bulldozer, hydrazine-powered, thermally protected, semi-autonomous, fully programmable. Prostheses and spare parts included.
She felt her face stretched in a big grin. Backhoes, front loaders, bulldozers, tractors, graders, dump trucks; construction supplies and materials of every kind; air miners to filter and collect chemicals from the atmosphere; little factories to render these chemicals into other chemicals; other factories to combine those chemicals; a whole commissary, everything they were going to need, all at hand in scores of crates scattered over the plain. She began to hop from one lander to the next, taking stock. Some of them had obviously hit hard, some had their spider legs collapsed, others their bodies cracked, one was even flattened into a pile of smashed boxes, half-buried in dust; but these were just another kind of opportunity, the salvage and repair game, one of her favorites! She laughed aloud, she was a bit giddy, she noticed the comm light on her wrist console blinking; she switched to the common band and was startled by Maya and Vlad and Sax all talking at once, “Where’s Ann, you women get back here, hey Nadia, come help us get this damned habitat online, we can’t even get the door open!”
She laughed.
The habitats were scattered like everything else, but they had landed near one that they knew was functional; it had been turned on from orbit some days before, and run through a complete check. Unfortunately the outer lock door could not be included in the check, and it was stuck. Nadia went to work on it, grinning; it was odd to see what looked like a derelict trailer home sporting a space station lock door. It only took a minute for her to get it open, by tapping out the emergency open code while pulling out on the door. Stuck with cold, differential shrinking perhaps. They were going to have a lot of little problems like that.
Then she and Vlad were into the lock, and then inside the habitat. It still looked like a trailer home, but with the latest in kitchen fixtures. All the lights were on. The air was warm, and circulating well. The control panel looked like a nuclear power plant’s.
While the others came inside, Nadia walked down a row of small rooms, through door after door, and the oddest feeling suddenly came over her: things seemed out of place. The lights were on, some of them blinking; and down at the far end of the hall, a door was swinging slightly back and forth on its hinges.
Obviously the ventilation. And the shock of the habitat’s landing probably had disarranged things slightly. She shook off the feeling and went back to greet the others.
By the time everyone had landed and walked across the stony plain (stopping, stumbling, running, staring off at the horizon, spinning slowly, walking again), and had entered into the three functioning habitats, and gotten out of their EVA suits, and put them away, and checked out the habitats, and eaten a bit, talking it all over the whole while, night had fallen. They continued working on the habitats and talking through most of that night, too excited to fall asleep; then most of them slept in snatches until dawn, when they woke and suited up and went out again, looking around and checking manifests and running machines through checks. Eventually they noticed they were famished, and went back in to jam down a quick meal; and then it was night again!
And that was what it was like, for several days; a wild swirl of time passing. Nadia would wake to the bip of her wrist console and eat a quick breakfast looking out of the habitat’s little east window: dawn stained the sky rich berry colors for a few minutes, before shifting rapidly through a series of rosy tones to the thick pink-orange of daytime. All over the floor of the habitat her companions slept, on mattresses that would fold up against the wall during the day. The walls were beige, tinted orange by the dawn. The kitchen and living room were tiny, the four toilet rooms no more than closets. Ann would stir as the room lightened and go to one of the four toilets. John was already in the kitchen, moving around quietly. Conditions were so much more crowded and public than they had been on the Ares that some of them were having trouble adjusting; every night Maya complained she couldn’t sleep in such a crowd, but there she was, mouth open girlishly. She would be the last to rise, snoozing through the noise and bustle of the others’ morning routines.
Then the sun would crack the horizon, and Nadia would be done with her cereal and milk, the milk made of powder mixed with water mined from the atmosphere (it tasted just the same); and it was time to get into her walker, and out to work.
The walkers were designed for the Martian surface, and were not pressurized like spacesuits, but were rather made of an elastic mesh, which held in the body at about the same pressure that the Terran atmosphere would have. This prevented the severe expansion bruising that would result if skin were exposed to Mars’s minimal atmosphere, but it gave the wearer a lot more freedom of movement than a pressurized spacesuit would have. Walkers also had the very significant advantage of being fail-operational; only the hard helmet was airtight, so if you ripped a hole at knee or elbow you would have a badly bruised and frozen patch of skin, but would not suffocate and die within minutes.
Getting into a walker, however, was a workout in itself. Nadia wriggled the pants over her long underwear, then the jacket, and zipped the two sections of the suit together. After that she jammed into big thermal boots, and locked their toprings to the suit’s ankle rings; pulled on gloves, and locked the wrist rings; put on a fairly standard hard helmet, and locked it to the suit’s neck ring; then shouldered into an airtank backpack, and linked its air tubes to her helmet. She breathed hard a few times, tasting the cool oxygen-nitrogen in her face. The walker’s wristpad indicated that all the seals were good; and she followed John and Samantha into the lock. They closed the inner door; the air was sucked back into containers; John unlocked the outer door. The three of them stepped outside.
It was a thrill every morning to step out onto that rocky plain, with the early morning sun casting long black shadows to the west, and the various small knolls and hollows revealed clearly. There was usually a wind from the south, and loose fines moved in a sinuous flow over the ground, so that the rocks sometimes seemed to creep. Even the strongest of these winds could scarcely be felt against an outstretched hand, but they hadn’t yet experienced one of the storm winds; at five hundred kilometers per hour they were pretty sure to feel something. At twenty, nearly nothing.
Nadia and Samantha walked over to one of the little rovers they had uncrated and climbed in. Nadia drove the rover across the plain to a tractor they had found the day before about a kilometer to the west. The morning cold cut through her walker in a diamond pattern, as the result of the X weave of the heating filaments in the suit material. A strange sensation, but she had been colder in Siberia many a time and she had no complaints.
They came to the big lander and got out. Nadia picked up a drill with a Phillips screwdriver bit, and started dismantling the crate on top of the vehicle. The tractor inside the lander’s crate was a Mercedes-Benz. She poked the drill into the head of a screw, pulled the trigger and watched the screw spin out. She moved to the next, grinning. Innumerable times in her youth she had gone out in cold like this, with numb white chopped-up hands, and fought titanic battles to unscrew frozen or stripped screws … but here it was ziiip, another one out. And really with the walker it was warmer than it had been in Siberia, and freer than in space, the walker no more restrictive than a thin stiff wetsuit. Red rocks were scattered all around in their uncanny regularity; voices chattered on the common band: “Hey, I found those solar panels!” “You think that’s something, I just found the goddamn nuclear reactor.” Yes, it was a great morning on Mars.
The stacked crate walls made a ramp to drive the tractor off the lander; they didn’t look strong enough, but that was the gravity again. Nadia had turned on the tractor’s heating system as soon as she could reach it, and now she climbed into the cab and tapped a command into its autopilot, feeling that it would be best to let the thing descend the ramp on its own, with her and Samantha watching from the side, just in case the ramp was more brittle in the cold than expected, or otherwise unreliable. She still found it almost impossible to think in terms of Martian g, to trust the designs that took it into account. The ramp just looked too flimsy!
But the tractor rolled down without incident, and stopped on the ground: eight meters long, royal blue, with wire mesh wheels taller than they were. They had to climb a short ladder into the cab. The crane prosthesis was already attached to the mount on the front end, and that made it easy to load the tractor with the winch, the sandbagger, the boxes of spare parts, and finally the crate walls. When they were done, the tractor looked as overloaded and topheavy as a steam calliope; but the g made it only a matter of balance. The tractor itself was a real pig, with six hundred horsepower, a wide wheelbase, and wheels big as tracks. The hydrazine motor had pick-up even worse than diesel, but it was like the ultimate first gear, completely inexorable. They took off and rolled slowly toward the trailer park – and there she was, Nadezhda Cherneshevsky, driving a Mercedes-Benz across Mars! She followed Samantha to the sorting lot, feeling like a queen.
And that was the morning. Back into the habitat, helmet and tank off, a quick bite in walker and boots. With all that running around they were famished.
After lunch they went back out in the Mercedes-Benz, and used it to haul a Boeing air miner to an area east of the habitats, where they were going to gather all the factories. The air miners were big metal cylinders, somewhat resembling 737 fuselages except that they had eight massive sets of landing gear, and rocket engines attached vertically to their sides, and two jet engines mounted above the fuselage fore and aft. Five of these miners had been dropped in the area some two years before. In the time since, their jet engines had been sucking in the thin air and ramming it through a sequence of separating mechanisms, to divide it into its component gases. The gases had been compressed and stored in big tanks, and were now available for use. So the Boeings each now held 5,000 liters of water ice, 3,000 liters of liquid oxygen, 3,000 liters of liquid nitrogen, 500 liters of argon, and 400 liters of carbon dioxide.
It was no easy task hauling these giants across the rubble to the big holding tanks near their habitats, but they needed to do it, because after they were drained into the holding tanks they could be turned on again. Just that afternoon another group had gotten one emptied out and turned back on, and the low hum of its jets could be heard everywhere, even in a helmet or a habitat.
Nadia and Samantha’s miner was more stubborn; in the whole afternoon they only managed to haul it a hundred meters, and they had to use the bulldozer attachment to scrape a rough road for it all the way. Just before sunset they returned through the lock into the habitat, their hands cold and aching with fatigue. They stripped down to their dust-caked underwear and went straight to the kitchen, ravenous once more; Vlad estimated they were each burning about six thousand calories a day. They cooked and gulped down rehydrated pasta, nearly scalding their partially-thawed fingers on their trays. Only when they had finished eating did they go to the women’s changing room and start trying to clean themselves up, sponging down with hot water, changing into clean jumpers. “It’s going to be hard to keep our clothes clean, that dust even gets through the wristlocks, and the waist zippers are like open holes.” “Well yeah, those fines are micron-sized! We’re going to have worse trouble from it than dirty clothes, I can tell you that. It’s going to be getting into everything, our lungs, our blood, our brains …”
“That’s life on Mars.” This was already a popular refrain, used whenever they encountered a problem, especially an intractable one.
On some days after dinner there were a couple hours of sunlight left, and Nadia, restless, would sometimes go back outside. Often she spent the time wandering around the crates that had been hauled to base that day, and over time she assembled a personal tool kit, feeling like a kid in a candy store. Years in the Siberian power industry had given her a reverence for good tools, she had suffered brutally from the lack of them. Everything in north Yakut had been built on permafrost, and the platforms sank unevenly in the summer, and were buried in ice in the winter, and parts for construction had come from all over the world, heavy machinery from Switzerland and Sweden, drills from America, reactors from the Ukraine, plus a lot of old scavenged Soviet stuff, some of it good, some indescribably shoddy, but all of it unmatched – some of it even built in inches – so that they had had to improvise constantly, building oil wells out of ice and string, knocking together nuclear reactors that made Chernobyl look like a Swiss watch. And every desperate day’s work accomplished with a collection of tools that would have made a tinker weep.
Now she could wander in the dim ruby light of sunset, her old jazz collection piped from the habitat stereo into her helmet headphones, as she rooted in supply boxes and picked out any tool she wanted. She would carry them back to a small room she had commandeered in one of the storage warehouses, whistling along with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, adding to a collection that included, among other items, an Allen wrench set, some pliers, a power drill, several clamps, some hacksaws, an impart wrench set, a brace of cold-tolerant bungie cords, assorted files and rasps and planes, a crescent wrench set, a crimper, five hammers, some hemostats, three hydraulic jacks, a bellows, several sets of screwdrivers, drills and bits, a portable compressed gas cylinder, a box of plastic explosives and shape charges, a tape measure, a giant Swiss Army knife, tin snips, tongs, tweezers, three vises, a wirestripper, X-acto knives, a pick, a bunch of mallets, a nut driver set, hose clamps, a set of end mills, a set of jeweler’s screwdrivers, a magnifying glass, all kinds of tape, a plumber’s bob and ream, a sewing kit, scissors, sieves, a lathe, levels of all sizes, long nosed pliers, vise grip pliers, a tap and die set, three shovels, a compressor, a generator, a welding and cutting set, a wheelbarrow—
and so on. And this was just the mechanical equipment, her carpenter’s tools. In other parts of the warehouse they were stockpiling research and lab equipment, geological tools, and any number of computers and radios and telescopes and videocameras; and the biosphere team had warehouses of equipment to set up the farm, the waste recyclers, the gas exchange mechanism, in essence their whole infrastructure; and the medical team had more warehouses of supplies for the clinic, and their research labs, and the genetic engineering facility. “You know what this is,” Nadia said to Sax Russell one evening looking around her warehouse. “It is an entire town, disassembled and lying in pieces.”
“And a very prosperous town at that.”
“Yes, a university town. With first-rate departments in several sciences.”
“But still in pieces.”
“Yes. But I kind of like it that way.”
Sunset was mandatory return-to-habitat time, and in the dusk she would stumble into the lock and inside, and eat another small cold meal sitting on her bed, listening to the talk around her which mostly concerned the day’s work, and the arrangement of the tasks for the next morning. Frank and Maya were supposed to be doing this, but in fact it was happening spontaneously, in a kind of ad hoc barter system. Hiroko was particularly good at it, which was a surprise given how withdrawn she had been on the voyage out; but now that she needed help from outside her team, she spent most of every evening moving from person to person, so single-minded and persuasive that she usually had a sizeable crew working on the farm every morning. Nadia couldn’t really see this; they had five years of dehydrated and canned food on hand, fare that suited Nadia fine, she had eaten worse for most of her life and she paid little attention to food anymore, she might as well have been eating hay, or refueling like one of the tractors. But they did need the farm for growing bamboo, which Nadia planned to use as a construction material in the permanent habitat that she hoped to start building soon. It all interlocked; all their tasks linked together, were necessary to each other. So when Hiroko plopped down beside her, she said, “Yeah, yeah, be there at eight. But you can’t build the permanent farm until the base habitat itself is built. So really you ought to be helping me tomorrow, right?”
“No, no,” Hiroko said, laughing. “Day after, okay?”
Hiroko’s main competition for labor came from Sax Russell and his crowd, who were working to start all the factories. Vlad and Ursula and the biomed group were also hungry to get all their labs set up and running. These three teams seemed willing to live in the trailer park indefinitely, as long as their own projects were progressing; but luckily there were a lot of people who were not so obsessed by their work, people like Maya and John and the rest of the cosmonauts, who were interested in moving into larger and better-protected quarters as soon as possible. So Nadia’s project would get help from them.
When she was done eating, Nadia took her tray into the kitchen and cleaned it with a little swab, then went over to sit by Ann Clayborne and Simon Frazier and the rest of the geologists. Ann looked nearly asleep; she was spending her mornings taking long rover trips and hikes, and then working hard on the base all afternoon, trying to make up for her trips away. To Nadia she seemed strangely tense, less happy about being on Mars than one would have thought. She appeared unwilling to work on the factories, or for Hiroko; indeed she usually came to work for Nadia, who, since she was only trying to build housing, could be said to be impacting the planet less than the more ambitious teams. Maybe that was it, maybe not; Ann wasn’t saying. She was hard to know, moody – not in Maya’s extravagant Russian manner, but more subtly, and, Nadia thought, in a darker register. In Bessie Smith land.
All around them people cleaned up after dinner and talked, and looked over manifests and talked, and bunched around computer terminals and talked, and washed clothes and talked; until most were stretched out on their beds, talking in lower voices, until they passed out. “It’s like the first second of the universe,” Sax Russell observed, rubbing his face wearily. “All crammed together and no differentiation. Just a bunch of hot particles rushing about.”
And that was just one day; and that was what it was like every day, for day after day after day. No change in the weather to speak of, except occasionally a wisp of cloud, or an extra-windy afternoon. In the main, the days rolled by one like the next. Everything took longer than planned. Just getting into the walkers and out of the habitats was a chore, and then all the equipment had to be warmed; and even though it had been built to a uniform set of standards, the international nature of the equipment meant that there were inevitable mismatches of size and function; and the dust (“Don’t call it dust!” Ann would complain. “That’s like calling dust gravel! Call it fines, they’re fines!”) got into everything; and all the physical work in the penetrating cold was exhausting, so that they went slower than they thought they would and began to collect a number of minor injuries. And, finally, there was just an amazing number of things to do, some of which had never even occurred to them. It took them about a month, for instance (they had budgeted ten days) just to open all the freight loads, check their contents and move them into the appropriate stockpiles – to get to the point where they could really begin to work.
After that, they could begin to build in earnest. And here Nadia came into her own. She had had nothing to do on the Ares, it had been a kind of hibernation for her. But building things was her great talent, the nature of her genius, trained in the bitter school of Siberia; and very quickly she became the colony’s chief troubleshooter, the universal solvent as John called her. Almost every job they had benefited from her help, and as she ran around every day answering questions and giving advice, she blossomed into a kind of timeless work heaven. So much to do! So much to do! Every night in the planning sessions Hiroko worked her wiles, and the farm went up: three parallel rows of greenhouses, looking like commercial greenhouses back on Earth except smaller and very thick-walled, to keep them from exploding like party balloons. Even with interior pressures of only three hundred millibars, which was barely farmable, the differential with the outside was drastic; a bad seal or a weak spot, and they would go bang. But Nadia was good at cold weather seals, and so Hiroko was calling her in a panic every other day.
Then the materials scientists needed help getting their factories operational, and the crew assembling the nuclear reactor wanted her supervision for every breath that they took: they were petrified with fright that they would do something wrong, and were not reassured by Arkady sending radio messages down from Phobos insisting they did not need such a dangerous technology, that they could get all the power they needed from wind generation: he and Phyllis had bitter arguments about this. It was Hiroko who cut Arkady off, with what she said was a Japanese commonplace: “Shikata ga nai,” meaning there is no other choice. Windmills might have generated enough power, as Arkady contended, but they didn’t have windmills, while they had been supplied with a Rickover nuclear reactor, built by the US Navy and a beautiful piece of work; and no one wanted to try bootstrapping themselves into a wind-powered system: they were in too much of a hurry. Shikata ga nai. This too became one of their oft-repeated phrases.
And so every morning the construction crew for Chernobyl (Arkady’s name, of course) begged Nadia to come out with them and supervise. They had been exiled far to the east of the settlement, so that it made sense to go out for a full day with them. But then the medical team wanted her help building a clinic and some labs inside, from some discarded freight crates that they were converting into shelters. So instead of staying out at Chernobyl she would go back midday to eat and then help the med team. Every night she passed out exhausted.
Some evenings before she did, she had long talks with Arkady, up on Phobos. His crew was having trouble with the moon’s micro-gravity, and he wanted her advice as well. “If only we could get into some g just to live, to sleep!” Arkady said.
“Build train tracks in a ring around the surface,” Nadia suggested out of a doze. “Make one of the tanks from the Ares into a train, and run it around the track. Get on board and run the train around fast enough to give you some g against the ceiling of the train.”
Static, then Arkady’s wild cackle. “Nadezhda Francine, I love you, I love you!”
“You love gravity.”
With all this advisory work, the construction of their permanent habitat went slowly indeed. It was only once a week or so that Nadia could climb into the open cab of a Mercedes and rumble over the torn ground to the end of the trench she had started. At this point it was ten meters wide, fifty long, and four deep, which was as deep as she wanted to go. The bottom of the trench was the same as the surface: clay, fines, rocks of all size. Regolith. While she worked with the bulldozer the geologists hopped in and out of the hole, taking samples and looking around, even Ann who did not like the way they were ripping up the area; but no geologist ever born could keep away from a land cut. Nadia listened to their conversation band as she worked. They figured the regolith was probably much the same all the way down to bedrock, which was too bad; regolith was not Nadia’s idea of good ground. At least its water content was low, less than a tenth of a percent, which meant they wouldn’t get much slumping under a foundation, one of the constant nightmares of Siberian construction.
When she got the regolith cut right, she was going to lay a foundation of Portland cement, the best concrete they could make with the materials at hand. It would crack unless they poured it two meters thick, but shikata ga nai; and the thickness would provide some insulation. But she would have to box the mud and heat it to get it to cure; it wouldn’t below 13° Centigrade, so that meant heating elements … Slow, slow, everything was slow.
She drove the dozer forward to lengthen the trench, and it bit the ground and bucked. Then the weight of the thing told, and the scoop cut through the regolith and plowed forward. “What a pig,” Nadia said to the vehicle fondly.
“Nadia’s in love with a bulldozer,” Maya said over their band.
At least I know who I’m in love with, Nadia mouthed. She had spent too many of the evenings of the last week out in the tool shed with Maya, listening to her rattle away about her problems with John, about how she really got along in most ways better with Frank, about how she couldn’t decide what she felt, and was sure Frank hated her now, etc. etc. etc. Cleaning tools Nadia had said Da, da, da, trying to hide her lack of interest. The truth was she was tired of Maya’s problems and would rather have discussed building materials, or almost anything else.
A call from the Chernobyl crew interrupted her bulldozing. “Nadia, how can we get cement this thick to set in the cold?”
“Heat it.”
“We are!”
“Heat it more.”
“Oh!” They were almost done out there, Nadia judged: the Rickover had been mostly preassembled, it was a matter of putting the forms together, fitting in the steel containment tank, filling the pipes with water (which dropped their supply to nearly nothing), wiring it all up, piling sandbags around it all, and pulling the control rods. After that they would have three hundred kilowatts on hand, which would put an end to the nightly argument over who got the lion’s share of generator power the next day.
There was a call from Sax: one of the Sabatier processors had clogged, and they couldn’t get the housing off it. So Nadia left the bulldozing to John and Maya, and took a rover to the factory complex to have a look. “I’m off to see the alchemists,” she said.
“Have you ever noticed how much the machinery here reflects the character of the industry that built it?” Sax remarked to Nadia as she arrived and went to work on the Sabatier. “If it’s built by car companies, it’s low-powered but reliable. If it’s built by the aerospace industry, it’s outrageously high-powered but breaks down twice a day.”
“And partnership products are horribly designed,” Nadia said.
“Right.”
“And chemical equipment is finicky,” Spencer Jackson added.
“I’ll say. Especially in this dust.”
The Boeing air miners had been only the start of the factory complex; their gases were fed into big boxy trailers to be compressed and expanded and rendered and recombined using chemical engineering operations such as dehumidification, liquefaction, fractional distillation, electrolysis, electro-synthesis, the Sabatier process, the Raschig process, the Oswald process … Slowly they worked up more and more complex chemicals, which flowed from one factory to the next, through a warren of structures that looked like mobile homes caught in a web of color-coded tanks and pipes and tubes and cables.
Spencer’s current favorite product was magnesium, which was plentiful; they were getting twenty-five kilos of it from every cubic meter of regolith, he said, and it was so light in Martian g that a big bar of it felt like a piece of plastic. “It’s too brittle when pure,” Spencer said, “but if we alloy it just a bit we’ll have an extremely light and strong metal.”
“Martian steel,” Nadia said.
“Better than that.”
So, alchemy; but with finicky machines. Nadia found the Sabatier’s problem and went to work fixing a broken vacuum pump. It was amazing how much of the factory complex came down to pumps, sometimes it seemed nothing but a mad assemblage of them; and by their nature they kept clogging with fines and breaking down.
Two hours later the Sabatier was fixed. On the way back to the trailer park, Nadia glanced into the first greenhouse. Plants were already blooming, the new crops breaking out of their beds of new black soil. Green glowed intensely in the reds of this world, it was a pleasure to see it. The bamboo was growing several centimeters a day, she had been told, and the crop was already nearly five meters tall. It was easy to see they were going to need more soil. Back at the alchemists’ they were using nitrogen from the Boeings to synthesize ammonia fertilizers: Hiroko craved these because the regolith was an agricultural nightmare, intensely salty, explosive with peroxides, extremely arid, and completely without biomass. They were going to have to construct soil just like they had the magnesium bars.
Nadia went into her habitat in the trailer park for a standing lunch. Then she was out again, to the site of the permanent habitat. The floor of the trench had been almost leveled in her absence. She stood on the edge of the hole, looking down in it. They were going to build to a design that she liked tremendously, one she had worked on herself in Antarctica and on the Ares: a simple line of barrel-vaulted chambers, sharing adjacent walls. By setting them in the trench the chambers would be half-buried to begin with; then when completed they would be covered by ten meters of sandbagged regolith to stop radiation and also, because they planned to pressurize to 450 millibars to keep the buildings from exploding. Local materials were all they needed for the exteriors of these buildings: Portland cement and bricks were it, basically, with plastic liner in some places to insure the seal.
Unfortunately the brickmakers were having some trouble, and they gave Nadia a call. Nadia’s patience was running short, and she groaned. “We travel all the way to Mars and you can’t make bricks?”
“It’s not that we can’t make bricks,” said Gene. “It’s just that I don’t like them.” The brickmaking factory mixed clays and sulphur extracted from the regolith, and this preparation was poured into brick molds and baked until the sulphur began to polymerize, and then as the bricks cooled they were compressed a bit in another part of the machine. The resulting blackish-red bricks had a tensile strength that was technically adequate for use in the barrel vaults, but Gene wasn’t happy. “We don’t want to be at minimum values for heavy roofs over our heads,” he said. “What if we pile one sandbag too many on top of it, or if we get a little marsquake? I don’t like it.”
After some thought Nadia said, “Add nylon.”
“What?”
“Go out and find the parachutes from the freight drops, and shred them real fine, and add them to the clay. That’ll help their tensile strength.”
“Very true,” Gene said, after a pause. “Good idea! Think we can find the parachutes?”
“They must be east of here somewhere.”
So they had finally found a job for the geologists that actually helped the construction effort. Ann and Simon and Phyllis and Sasha and Igor drove long-distance rovers over the horizon to east of the base, searching and surveying far past Chernobyl; and in the next week they found almost forty parachutes, each one representing a few hundred kilos of useful nylon.
One day they came back excited, having reached Ganges Catena, a series of sinkholes in the plain a hundred kilometers to the southeast. “It was strange,” Igor said, “because you can’t see them until the last minute, and then they’re like huge funnels, about ten kilometers across and a couple deep, eight or nine in a row, each smaller and shallower. Fantastic. They’re probably thermokarsts, but they’re so big it’s hard to believe it.”
Sasha said, “It’s nice to see such a distance, after all this near horizon stuff.”
“They’re thermokarsts,” Ann said. But they had drilled and found no water. This was getting to be a concern; they hadn’t found any water to speak of in the ground, no matter how far down they drilled: it forced them to rely on the supplies from the air miners.
Nadia shrugged. The air miners were pretty tough. She wanted to think about her vaults. The new improved bricks were appearing and she had started the robots building the walls and roofs. The brick factory filled little robot cars, which rolled like toy rovers across the plain to cranes at the site; the cranes pulled out bricks one by one, and placed them on cold mortar spread by another set of robots. The system worked so well that soon the bottleneck became brick production itself. Nadia would have been pleased, if she had had more faith in the robots: these seemed okay, but her experiences with robots in the years on Novy Mir had made her wary. They were great if everything went perfectly, but nothing ever went perfectly, and it was hard to program them with decision algorithms that didn’t either make them so cautious that they froze every minute, or so uncontrolled that they could commit unbelievable acts of stupidity, repeating an error a thousand times and magnifying a small glitch into a giant blunder, as in Maya’s emotional life. You got what you put into robots; but even the best were mindless idiots.
One evening Maya snagged her out in her tool room and asked her to switch to a private band. “Michel is useless,” she complained. “I’m really having a hard time, and he won’t even talk to me! You’re the only one I trust, Nadia. Yesterday I told Frank that I thought John was trying to undercut his authority in Houston, but that he shouldn’t tell anyone I thought so and the very next day John was asking me why I thought he was bothering Frank. There’s no one who will just listen and stay quiet!”
Nadia nodded, rolling her eyes. Finally she said, “Sorry, Maya, I have to go talk to Hiroko about a leak they can’t find.” She banged her faceplate lightly against Maya’s – symbol for a kiss on the cheek – switched to the common band and took off. Enough was enough. It was infinitely more interesting to talk to Hiroko: real conversations, about real problems in the real world. Hiroko was asking Nadia for help almost every day, and Nadia liked that, because Hiroko was brilliant, and since landfall had obviously raised her estimate of Nadia’s abilities. Mutual professional respect, a great maker of friendships. And so nice to talk nothing but business. Hermetic seals, lock mechanisms, thermal engineering, glass polarization, farm/human interfaces (Hiroko’s talk was always a few steps ahead of the game); these topics were a great relief after all the emotional whispered conferences with Maya, endless sessions about who liked Maya and who didn’t like Maya, about how Maya felt about this and that, and who had hurt her feelings that day … bah. Hiroko was never strange, except when she would say something Nadia didn’t know how to deal with, like, “Mars will tell us what it wants and then we’ll have to do it.” What could you say to something like that? But Hiroko would just smile her big smile, and laugh at Nadia’s shrug.
At night the talk still went everywhere, vehement, absorbed, unselfconscious. Dmitri and Samantha were sure that they could soon introduce genetically engineered micro-organisms into the regolith that would survive, but they would have to get permission first from the UN. Nadia herself found the idea alarming: it made the chemical engineering in the factories look relatively straightforward, more like brickmaking than the dangerous acts of creation Samantha was proposing … Although the alchemists were performing some pretty creative things themselves. Almost every day they came back to the trailer park with samples of new materials: sulphuric acid, sorel cements for the vault mortar, ammonium nitrate explosives, a calcium cyanamide rover fuel, polysulfide rubber, silicon-based hyperacids, emulsifying agents, a selection of test tubes holding trace elements extracted from the salts; and, most recently, clear glass. This last was a coup, as earlier attempts at glassmaking had produced only black glass. But stripping silicate feedstocks of their iron content had done the trick; and so one night they sat in the trailer passing around small wavy sheets of glass, the glass itself filled with bubbles and irregularities, like something out of the seventeenth century.
When they got the first chamber buried and pressurized, Nadia walked around inside it with her helmet off, sniffing the air. It was pressurized to 450 millibars, the same as the helmets and the trailer park, with an oxygen-nitrogen-argon mix, and warmed to about 15° Centigrade. It felt great.
The chamber had been divided into two stories by a floor of bamboo trunks, set in a slot in the brick wall two and a half meters overhead. The segmented cylinders made a sweet green ceiling, lit by neon tubes hung under them. Against one wall was a magnesium and bamboo staircase, leading through a hole to the upper story. She climbed up to have a look. Split bamboo over the trunks made a fairly flat green floor. The ceiling was brick, rounded and low. Up there they would locate the bedrooms and bathroom; the lower floor would be living room and kitchen. Maya and Simon had already put up wall hangings, made of nylon from the salvaged parachutes. There were no windows: lighting came only from the neon bulbs. Nadia disliked this fact, and in the larger habitat she was already planning, there would be windows in almost every room. But first things first. For the time being these windowless chambers were the best they could do. And a big improvement over the trailer park, after all.
As she went back down the stairs she ran her fingers over the bricks and mortar. They were rough, but warm to the touch, heated by elements placed behind them. There were heating elements under the floor as well. She took off her shoes and socks, luxuriating in the feel of the warm rough bricks underfoot. It was a wonderful room; and nice, too, to think that they had gone all the way to Mars, and there built homes out of brick and bamboo. She recalled vaulted ruins she had seen years ago on Crete, at a site called Aptera; underground Roman cisterns, barrel-vaulted and made of brick, buried in a hillside. They had been almost the same size as these chambers. Their exact purpose was unknown; storage for olive oil, some said, though it would have been an awful lot of oil. Those vaults were intact two thousand years after their construction, and in earthquake country. As Nadia put her boots back on she grinned to think of it. Two thousand years from now, their descendants might walk into this chamber, no doubt a museum by then, if it still existed – the first human dwelling built on Mars! And she had done it. Suddenly she felt the eyes of that future on her, and shivered. They were like Cro-Magnons in a cave, living a life that was certain to be pored over by the archeologists of subsequent generations; people like her who would wonder, and wonder, and never quite understand.
More time passed, more work got done. It blurred for Nadia: she was always busy. The interior construction of the vaulted chambers was complicated, and the robots couldn’t help much: plumbing, heating, gas exchange, locks, kitchens; they had all the fixtures and tools and could work in pants and sweatshirts, but still it took an amazing amount of time. Work work work, day after day!
One evening, just before sunset, Nadia trudged across torn-up dirt to the trailer park, feeling hungry and beat and extremely relaxed, not that you didn’t have to be careful at the end of a day: she had torn a centimeter hole in the back of a glove the other evening being careless, and the cold hadn’t been so bad, about –50° Centigrade, nothing compared to some Siberian winter days – but the low air pressure had sucked out a blood bruise instantly, and then that had started to freeze up, which made the bruise smaller no doubt, but slower to heal as well. Anyway, you had to be careful, but there was something so fluid about tired muscles at the end of a day’s construction work, the low rust sunlight slanting across the rocky plain, and all of a sudden she could feel that she was happy. Arkady called in from Phobos at just that moment, and she greeted him cheerily; “I feel just like a Louis Armstrong solo from 1947.”
“Why 1947?” he asked.
“Well, that was the year he sounded the most happy. Most of his life his tone has a sharp edge to it, really beautiful, but in 1947 it was even more beautiful because it has this relaxed fluid joy, you never hear it in him before or after.”
“A good year for him, I take it?”
“Oh yes! An amazing year! After twenty years of horrible big bands, you see, he got back to a little group like the Hot Five, that was the group he headed when he was young, and there it was, the old songs, even some of the old faces – and all of it better than the first time, you know, the recording technology, the money, the audiences, the band, his own power … It must have felt like the fountain of youth, I tell you.”
“You’ll have to send up some recordings,” Arkady said. He tried to sing: “I can’t give you any thing but love, baby!” Phobos was about over the horizon, he had just been calling to say hi. “So this is your 1947,” he said before he went.
Nadia put her tools away, singing the song correctly. And she understood that what Arkady had said was true; something had happened to her similar to what had happened to Armstrong in 1947 – because despite the miserable conditions, her youthful years in Siberia had been the happiest of her life, they really had. And then she had endured twenty years of big band cosmonautics, bureaucracy, simulations, an indoor life – all to get here. And now suddenly she was out in the open again, building things with her hands, operating heavy machinery, solving problems a hundred times a day, just like Siberia only better. It was just like Satchmo’s return!
Thus when Hiroko came up and said, “Nadia, this crescent wrench is absolutely frozen in this position,” Nadia sang to her, “That’s the only thing I’m thinking of – baby!” and took the crescent wrench and slammed it against a table like a hammer, and twiddled the dial to show Hiroko it was unstuck, and laughed at her expression. “The engineer’s solution,” she explained, and went humming into the lock, thinking how funny Hiroko was, a woman who held their whole ecosystem in her head, but couldn’t hammer a nail straight.
And that night she talked over the day’s work with Sax, and spoke to Spencer about glass, and in the middle of that conversation crashed on her bunk and snuggled her head into her pillow, feeling totally luxurious, the glorious final chorus of “Ain’t Misbehaving” chasing her off to sleep.
But things change as time passes; nothing lasts, not even stone, not even happiness. “Do you realize it’s Ls 170 already?” Phyllis said one night. “Didn’t we land at Ls 7?”
So they had been on Mars for half a Martian year. Phyllis was using the calendar devised by planetary scientists; among the colonists it was becoming more common than the Terran system. Mars’s year was 668.6 local days long, and to tell where they were in this long year it took the Ls calendar. This system declared the line between the sun and Mars at its northern spring equinox to be 0°, and then the year was divided into 360°, so that Ls = 0°–90° was the northern spring, 90–180° the northern summer, 180–270° the fall, and 270–360° (or 0° again) the winter.
This simple situation was complicated by the eccentricity of the Martian orbit, which is extreme by Terran standards, for at perihelion Mars is about forty-three million kilometers closer to the sun than it is at aphelion, and thus receiving about 45% more sunlight. This fluctuation makes the southern and northern seasons quite unequal. Perihelion arrives every year at Ls = 250°, late in the southern spring; so southern springs and summers are much hotter than northern springs and summers, with peak temperatures as much as thirty degrees higher. Southern autumns and winters are colder, however, occurring as they do near aphelion; so much colder that the southern polar cap is mostly carbon dioxide, while the northern one is mostly water ice.
So the south was the hemisphere of extremes, the north that of moderation. And the orbital eccentricity caused one other feature of note; planets move faster the closer they are to the sun, so the seasons near perihelion are shorter than those near aphelion; the northern autumn is 143 days long, for instance, while northern spring is 194. Spring fifty-one days longer than autumn! Some claimed this alone made it worth settling in the north.
In any case, in the north they were; and spring had arrived. The days got longer by a little bit every day and the work went on. The area around the base got more cluttered, more criss-crossed with tracks; they had laid a cement road to Chernobyl and the base itself was now so big that from the trailer park it extended over the horizon in all directions: the alchemists’ quarter and the Chernobyl road to the east, the permanent habitat to the north, the storage area and the farm to the west, and the biomed center to the south.
Eventually everyone moved into the finished chambers of the permanent habitat. The nightly conferences there were shorter and more routinized than they had been in the trailer park, and days went by when Nadia got no calls for help. There were some people she saw only once in a while; the biomed crew in its labs, Phyllis’s prospecting unit, even Ann. One night Ann flopped on her bed next to Nadia’s, and invited her to go along on an exploration to Hebes Chasma, some 130 kilometers to the southwest. Obviously Ann wanted to show her something outside the base area; but Nadia declined. “I’ve got too much work to do, you know.” And seeing Ann’s disappointment: “Maybe next trip.”
And then it was back to work on the interiors of the chambers, and the exteriors of a new wing. Arkady had suggested making the line of chambers the first of four, arranged in a square, and Nadia was going to do it; as Arkady pointed out, it would then be possible to roof the area enclosed by the square. “That’s where those magnesium beams will come in handy,” Nadia said. “If only we could make stronger glass panes …”
They had finished two sides of the square, twelve chambers entirely done, when Ann and her team returned from Hebes. Everyone spent that evening looking at their videotapes. These showed the expedition’s rovers rolling over rocky plains; then ahead there appeared a break extending all the way across the screen, as if they were approaching the edge of the world. Strange little meter-high cliffs finally stopped the rovers, and the pictures bounced as one explorer got out and walked with helmet camera turned on.
Then abruptly the shot was from the rim, a one-eighty pan shot of a canyon that was so much bigger than the sinkholes of Ganges Catena that it was hard to grasp. The walls of the far side of the chasm were just visible on the distant horizon. In fact they could see walls all the way around, for Hebes was an almost-enclosed chasm, a sunken ellipse about two hundred kilometers long and a hundred across. Ann’s party had come to the north rim in late afternoon, and the eastern curve of the wall was clearly visible, flooded by sunset light; out to the west the wall was just a low dark mark. The floor of the chasm was generally flat, with a central dip. “If you could float a dome over the chasm,” Ann said, “you’d have a nice big enclosure.”
“You’re talking miracle domes, Ann,” Sax said. “That’s about ten thousand square kilometers.”
“Well, it would make a good big enclosure. And then you could leave the rest of the planet alone.”
“The weight of a dome would collapse the canyon walls.”
“That’s why I said you’d have to float it.”
Sax just shook his head.
“It’s no more exotic than this space elevator you talk about.”
“I want to live in a house located right where you took this video,” Nadia interrupted. “What a view!”
“Just wait till you get up on one of the Tharsis volcanoes,” Ann said, irritated. “Then you’ll get a view.”
There were little spats like that all the time now. It reminded Nadia unpleasantly of the last months on the Ares. Another example: Arkady and his crew sent down videos of Phobos, with his commentary: “The Stickney impact almost broke this rock in pieces, and it’s chondritic, almost twenty percent water, so a lot of the water outgassed on impact and filled the fracture system and froze in a whole system of ice veins.” Fascinating stuff, but all it did was cause an argument between Ann and Phyllis, their two top geologists, as to whether this was the real explanation for the ice. Phyllis even suggested shipping water down from Phobos, which was silly, even if their supplies were low and their demand increasing. Chernobyl took a lot of water, and the farmers were ready to start a little swamp in their biosphere; and Nadia wanted to install a swimming complex in one of the vaulted chambers, including a lap pool, three whirlpool baths, and a sauna. Each night people asked Nadia how it was coming along, because everyone was sick of washing with sponges and still being dusty, and of never really getting warm. They wanted a bath; in their old aquatic dolphin brains, down below the cerebrums, down where desires were primal and fierce, they wanted back into water.
So they needed more water, but the seismic scans were finding no evidence of ice aquifers underground, and Ann thought there weren’t any in the region. They had to continue to rely on the air miners, or scrape up regolith and load it into the soil-water distilleries. But Nadia didn’t like to overwork the distilleries, because they had been manufactured by a French-Hungarian-Chinese consortium, and were sure to wear out if used for bulk work.
But that was life on Mars; it was a dry place. Shikata ga nai.
“There are always choices,” Phyllis said to that. This was why she had suggested filling landing vehicles with Phobos ice, and bringing it on down; but Ann thought that was a ridiculous waste of energy; and they were off again.
It was especially irritating to Nadia because she herself was in such a good mood. She saw no reason to quarrel, and it disturbed her that the others didn’t feel the same. Why did the dynamics of a group fluctuate so? Here they were on Mars, where the seasons were twice as long as Earth’s, and every day was forty minutes longer: why couldn’t people relax? Nadia had a sense that there was time for things even though she was always busy, and the extra thirty-nine and half minutes per day was probably the most important component of this feeling; human circadian biorhythms had been set over millions of years of evolution, and now suddenly to have extra minutes of day and night, day after day, night after night – no doubt it had effects. Nadia was sure of it, because despite the hectic pace of every day’s work, and the way she passed out in sheer exhaustion every night, she always woke rested. That strange pause on the digital clocks, when at midnight the figures hit 12:00:00 and suddenly stopped, and the unmarked time passed, passed, passed, sometimes it seemed for a very long time indeed; and then snapped on to 12:00:01, and began its usual inexorable flicker; well, the Martian timeslip was something special. Often Nadia was asleep through it, as were most of the rest of them. But Hiroko had a chant that she chanted during it when she was up, and she and the farm team, and many of the rest of them, spent every Saturday night partying and chanting that chant through the timeslip – something in Japanese, Nadia never learned what, though she sometimes hummed along, sitting enjoying the vault and her friends.
But one Saturday night when she sat there, nearly comatose, Maya came over and sat against her shoulder for a talk. Maya with her beautiful face, always well-groomed, always the latest in chicarnost even in their everyday jumpsuits, looking distraught. “Nadia, you have to do me a favor, please, please.”
“What?”
“I need you to tell something to Frank for me.”
“Why don’t you do it yourself?”
“I can’t have John seeing us talk! I have to get a message to him, and please, Nadezhda Francine, you’re my only way.”
Nadia made a disgusted noise.
“Please.”
It was surprising how much Nadia would have rather been talking to Ann, or Samantha, or Arkady. If only Arkady would come down from Phobos!
But Maya was her friend. And that desperate look on her face: Nadia couldn’t stand it. “What message?”
“Tell him that I’ll meet him tonight in the storage area,” Maya said imperiously. “At midnight. To talk.”
Nadia sighed. But later she went to Frank, and gave him the message. He nodded without meeting her eye, embarrassed, grim, unhappy.
Then a few days later Nadia and Maya were cleaning up the brick floor of the latest chamber to be pressurized, and Nadia’s curiosity got the best of her; she broke her customary silence on the topic, and asked Maya what was going on. “Well, it’s John and Frank,” Maya said querulously. “They’re very competitive. They’re like brothers, and there’s a lot of jealousy there. John got to Mars first, and then he got permission to come back again, and Frank doesn’t think it was fair. Frank did a lot of the work in Washington to get the colony funded, and he thinks John has always taken advantage of his work. And now, well. John and I are good together, I like him. It’s easy with him. Easy, but maybe a little … I don’t know. Not boring. But not exciting. He likes to walk around, hang out with the farm crew. He doesn’t like to talk that much! Frank, now, we could talk forever. Argue forever, maybe, but at least we’re talking! And you know, we had a very brief affair on the Ares, back at the beginning, and it didn’t work out, but he still thinks it could.”
Why would he think that? Nadia mouthed.
“So he keeps trying to talk me into leaving John and being with him, and John suspects that’s what he’s doing, so there’s a lot of jealousy between them. I’m just trying to keep them from each other’s throats, that’s all.”
Nadia decided to stick to her resolve and not ask about it again. But now she was involved despite herself. Maya kept coming to her to talk, and to ask her to convey messages to Frank for her. “I’m not a go-between!” Nadia kept protesting, but she kept doing it, and once or twice when she did she got into long conversations with Frank, about Maya of course; who she was, what she was like, why she acted the way she did. “Look,” Nadia said to him, “I can’t speak for Maya. I don’t know why she does what she does, you have to ask her yourself. But I can tell you, she comes out of the old Moscow Soviet culture, university and CP for both her mother and her grandmother. And men were the enemies for Maya’s babushka, and for her mother too, it was a matrioshka. Maya’s mother used to say to her, ‘Women are the roots, men are just the leaves.’ There was a whole culture of mistrust, manipulation, fear. That’s where Maya comes from. And at the same time we have this tradition of amicochonstvo, a kind of intense friendship where you learn the very tiniest details of your friend’s life, you invade each other’s lives in a sense, and of course that’s impossible and it has to end, usually badly.”
Frank was nodding at this description, recognizing something in it. Nadia sighed and went on. “These are the friendships that lead to love, and then love has the same sort of trouble only magnified, especially with all that fear at the bottom of it.”
And Frank – tall, dark, and somehow handsome, bulky with power, spinning with his own internal dynamo, the American politician (or so Nadia thought of him), now wrapped around the finger of a neurotic Russian beauty – Frank nodded humbly, and thanked her, looking discouraged. As well he should.
Nadia did her best to ignore all that. But it seemed everything else had turned problematic as well. Vlad had never approved of how much time they were spending on the surface in the daytime, and now he said, “We ought to stay under the hill most of the time, and bury all the labs as well. Outdoor work should be restricted to an hour in the early mornings and another in the late afternoons, when the sun is low.”
“I’ll be damned if I stay indoors all day,” Ann said, and many agreed with her.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Frank pointed out.
“But most of it could be done by teleoperation,” Vlad said. “And it should be. What we are doing is the equivalent of standing ten kilometers from an atomic explosion —”
“So?” Ann said. “Soldiers did that — ”
“ — every six months,” Vlad finished, and stared at her. “Would you do that?”
Even Ann looked subdued. No ozone layer, no magnetic field to speak of; they were getting fried by radiation almost as badly as if they were in interplanetary space, to the tune of ten rems per year.
And so Frank and Maya ordered them to ration their time outdoors. There was a lot of interior work to be done under the hill, getting the last row of chambers finished; and it was possible to dig some cellars below the vaults, giving them some more space protected from radiation. And many of the tractors were equipped to be teleoperated from indoor stations, their decision algorithms handling the details while the human operators watched screens below. So it could be done; but no one liked the life that resulted. Even Sax Russell, who was content to work indoors most of the time, looked a bit perplexed. In the evenings a number of people began to argue for immediate terraforming efforts, and they made the case with renewed intensity.
“That’s not our decision to make,” Frank told them sharply. “The UN decides that one. Besides it’s a long-term solution, on the scale of centuries at best. Don’t waste time talking about it!”
Ann said, “That’s all true, but I don’t want to waste my time down here in these caves, either. We should live our lives the way we want. We’re too old to worry about radiation.”
Arguments again, arguments that made Nadia feel as if she had floated off the good solid rock of her planet back into the tense weightless reality of the Ares. Carping, complaining, arguing; until people got bored, or tired, and went to sleep. Nadia started leaving the room whenever it began, looking for Hiroko and a chance to discuss something concrete. But it was hard to avoid these matters, to stop thinking about them.
Then one night Maya came to her crying. There was room in the permanent habitat for private talks, and Nadia went with her down to the northeast corner of the vaults, where they were still working on interiors, and sat by her arm to arm, shivering and listening to her, and occasionally putting an arm over her shoulder and giving her a hug. “Look,” Nadia said at one point, “why don’t you just decide? Why don’t you quit playing one off against the other?”
“But I have decided! It’s John I love, it’s always been John. But now he’s seen me with Frank and he thinks I’ve betrayed him. It’s really petty of him! They’re like brothers, they compete in everything, and this time it’s just a mistake!”
Nadia resisted learning the details, she didn’t want to hear it. She sat there listening anyway.
And then John was standing there before them. Nadia got up to leave, but he didn’t appear to notice. “Look,” he said to Maya. “I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. It’s over.”
“It’s not over,” Maya said, instantly composed. “I love you.”
John’s smile was rueful. “Yes. And I love you. But I want things simple.”
“It is simple!”
“No it isn’t. I mean, you can be in love with more than one person at the same time. Anyone can, that’s just the way it is. But you can only be loyal to one. And I want … I want to be loyal. To someone who is loyal to me. It’s simple, but …”
He shook his head; he couldn’t find the phrase. He walked back into the eastern row of chambers, disappeared through a door.
“Americans,” Maya said viciously. “Fucking children!” Then she was up through the door after him.
But soon she came back. He had retreated to a group in one of the lounges, and wouldn’t leave. “I’m tired,” Nadia tried to say, but Maya wouldn’t hear it, she was getting more and more upset. For over an hour they discussed it, over and over. Eventually Nadia agreed to go to John and ask him to come to Maya and talk it over. Nadia walked grimly through the chambers, oblivious to the brick and the colorful nylon hangings. The go-between that nobody noticed. Couldn’t they get robots to do this? She found John, who apologized for ignoring her earlier. “I was upset, I’m sorry. I figured you’d hear it all eventually anyway.”
Nadia shrugged. “No problem. But look, you have to go talk to her. That’s the way it is with Maya. We talk, talk, talk; if you contract to be in a relationship, you have to talk your way all the way through it, and all the way out of it. If you don’t it will be worse for you in the long run, believe me.”
That got to him. Sobered, he went off to find her. Nadia went to bed.
The next day she was out working late on a trencher. It was the third job of the day, and the second had been trouble: Samantha had tried to carry a load on the earthmover blade while making a turn, and the thing had taken a nosedive and twisted the rods of the blade lifters out of their casings, spilling hydraulic fluid over the ground, where it had frozen before it even flattened out. They had had to set jacks under the airborne back end of the tractor, and then decouple the entire blade attachment and lower the vehicle on the jacks, and every step of the operation had been a pain.
Then as soon as that was finished, Nadia had been called over to help with a Sandvik Tubex boring machine, which they were using to drill cased holes through large boulders they ran into while laying a water line from the alchemists’ to the permanent habitat. The down-the-hole pneumatic hammer had apparently frozen at full extension, as stuck as an arrow fired most of the way through a tree. Nadia stood looking down at the hammer shaft. “Do you have any suggestions for freeing the hammer without breaking it?” Spencer asked.
“Break the boulder,” Nadia said wearily, and walked over and got in a tractor with a backhoe already attached. She drove it over, and dug down to the top of the boulder, and then got out to attach a little Allied hydraulic impact hammer to the backhoe. She had just set it in position on the top of the boulder when the down-the-hole hammer suddenly jerked its drill back, pulling the boulder with it and catching the outside of her left hand against the underside of the Allied Hy-Ram.
Instinctively she pulled back, and pain lanced up her arm and into her chest. Fire filled that side of her body and her vision went white. There were shouts in her ears: “What’s wrong? What happened?” She must have screamed. “Help,” she grated. She was sitting, her crushed hand still pinned between rock and hammer. She pushed at the front wheel of the tractor with her foot, shoved with all her might and felt the hammer rasp her bones over rock. Then she was flopped on her back, the hand free. The pain was blinding, she felt sick to her stomach and thought she might faint. Pushing onto her knees with her good hand, she saw that the crushed hand was bleeding heavily, the glove ripped apart, the little finger apparently gone. She groaned and hunched over it, pressed it to her and then jammed it against the ground, ignoring the flash of pain. Even bleeding as it was, the hand would freeze in … how long? “Freeze, damn you, freeze,” she cried. She shook tears out of her eyes and forced herself to look at it. Blood all over, steaming. She pushed the hand into the ground as hard as she could stand. Already it hurt less. Soon it would be numb, she would have to be careful not to freeze the whole hand! Frightened, she prepared to pull it back into her lap; then people were there, lifting her, and she fainted. After that she was maimed. Nadia Nine Fingers, Arkady called her over the phone. He sent her lines by Yevtushenko, written to mourn the death of Louis Armstrong: “Do as you did in the past/And play.”
“How did you find that?” Nadia asked him. “I can’t imagine you reading Yevtushenko.”
“Of course I read him, it’s better than McGonagall! No, this was in a book on Armstrong. I’ve taken your advice and been listening to him while we work, and lately reading some books on him at night.”
“I wish you’d come down here,” Nadia said.
Vlad had done the surgery. He told her it would be all right. “It caught you clean. The ring finger is a bit impaired, and will act like the little finger used to, probably. But ring fingers never do much anyway. The two main fingers will be strong as ever.”
Everyone came by to visit. Nevertheless she spoke more with Arkady than anyone else, in the hours of the night when she was alone, in the four and a half hours between Phobos’s rising in the west and its setting in the east. He called in almost every night, at first, and often thereafter.
Pretty soon she was up and around, hand in a cast that was suspiciously slender. She went out to troubleshoot or consult, hoping to keep her mind occupied. Michel Duval never came by at all, which she thought was strange. Wasn’t this what psychologists were for? She couldn’t help feeling depressed: she needed her hands for her work, she was a hand laborer. The cast got in the way and she cut off the part around the wrist, with shears from her tool kit. But she had to keep both hand and cast in a box when outside, and there wasn’t much she could do. It really was depressing.
Saturday night arrived, and she sat in the newly filled whirlpool bath, nursing a glass of bad wine and looking around at her companions, splashing and soaking in their bathing suits. She wasn’t the only one to have been injured, by any means; they were all a bit battered now, after so many months of physical work: almost everyone had frostburn marks, patches of black skin that eventually peeled, leaving pink new skin, garish and ugly in the heat of the pools. And several others wore casts, on hands, wrists, arms, even legs; all for breaks or sprains. Actually they were lucky no one had gotten killed yet.
All these bodies, and none for her. They knew each other like family, she thought; they were each other’s physicians, they slept in the same rooms, dressed in the same locks, bathed together; an unremarkable group of human animals, eyecatching in the inert world they occupied, but more comforting than exciting, at least most of the time. Middle-aged bodies. Nadia herself was as round as a pumpkin, a plump tough muscular short woman, squarish and yet rounded. And single. Her closest friend these days was only a voice in her ear, a face on the screen. When he came down from Phobos … well, hard to say. He had had a lot of girlfriends on the Ares, and Janet Blyleven had gone to Phobos to be with him …
People were arguing again, there in the shallows of the lap pool. Ann, tall and angular, leaning down to snap something at Sax Russell, short and soft. As usual, he didn’t appear to be listening. She would hit him one day if he didn’t watch out. It was strange how the group was changing again, how the feel of it was changing. She could never get a fix on it; the real nature of the group was a thing apart, with a life of its own, somehow distinct from the characters of the individuals that constituted it. It must make Michel’s job as their shrink almost impossible. Not that one could tell with Michel; he was the quietest and most unobtrusive psychiatrist she had ever met. No doubt an asset, in this crowd of shrink-atheists. But she still thought it was odd he hadn’t come by to see her after the accident.
One evening she left the dining chambers and walked down to the tunnel they were digging from the vaulted chambers to the farm complex, and there at the tunnel’s end were Maya and Frank, arguing in a vicious undertone that carried down the tunnel not their meaning but their feeling: Frank’s face was contorted with anger, and Maya as she turned from him was distraught, weeping; she turned back to shout at him, “It was never like that,” and then ran blindly toward Nadia, her mouth twisted into a snarl, Frank’s face a mask of pain. Maya saw Nadia standing there and ran right by her.
Shocked, Nadia turned and walked back to the living chambers. She went up magnesium stairs to the living room in chamber two, and turned on the TV to watch a twenty-four hour news program from Earth, something she very rarely did. After a while she turned down the sound, and looked at the pattern of bricks in the barrel vault overhead. Maya came in and started to explain things to her: there was nothing between her and Frank, it was in Frank’s mind only, he just wouldn’t give up on it even though it had been nothing to begin with; she wanted only John, and it wasn’t her fault that John and Frank were on such bad terms now, it was because of Frank’s irrational desire, it wasn’t her fault, but she felt so guilty because the two men had once been such close friends, like brothers.
And Nadia listened with a careful show of patience, saying “Da, da,” and “I see,” and the like, until Maya was lying flat on her back on the floor, crying, and Nadia was sitting on the edge of a chair staring at her, wondering how much of it was true. And what the argument had really been about. And whether she was a bad friend to distrust her old companion’s story so completely. But somehow the whole thing felt like Maya covering her tracks, practising another manipulation. It was just this: those two distraught faces she had seen down the tunnel had been the clearest evidence possible of a fight between intimates. So Maya’s explanation was almost certainly a lie. Nadia said something soothing to her and went off to bed, thinking, you already have taken too much of my time and energy and concentration with these games, you cost me a finger with them, you bitch!
It was getting toward the end of the long northern spring, and they still had no good supply of water, so Ann proposed to make an expedition to the cap and set up a robot distillery, along the way establishing a route that rovers could follow on automatic pilot. “Come with us,” she said to Nadia. “You haven’t seen anything of the planet yet, just the stretch between here and Chernobyl, and that’s nothing. You missed Hebes and Ganges, and you’re not doing anything new here. Really, Nadia, I can’t believe what a grub you’ve been. I mean why did you come to Mars, after all?”
“Why?”
“Yes, why? I mean there’s two kinds of activities here, there’s the exploration of Mars and then there’s the life support for that exploration. And here you’ve been completely immersed in the life support, without paying the slightest attention to the reason we came in the first place!”
“Well, it’s what I like to do,” Nadia said uneasily.
“Fine, but try to keep some perspective on it! What the hell, you could have stayed back on Earth and been a plumber! You didn’t have to come all this way to drive a goddamn bulldozer! Just how long are you going to go on grubbing away here, installing toilets, programming tractors?”
“All right, all right,” Nadia said, thinking of Maya and all the rest. The square of vaults was almost finished, anyway. “I could use a vacation.”
They took off in three big long-range rovers: Nadia and five of the geologists, Ann, Simon Frazier, George Berkovic, Phyllis Boyle and Edvard Perrin. George and Edvard were friends of Phyllis’s from their NASA days, and they supported her in advocating “applied geological studies", meaning prospecting for rare metals; Simon on the other hand was a quiet ally of Ann’s, committed to pure research and a hands-off attitude. Nadia knew all this even though she had spent very little time alone with any of these people, except for Ann. But talk was talk; she could have named all the allegiances of everyone at base if she had to.
The expedition rovers were each composed of two four-wheeled modules, coupled by a flexible frame: they looked a bit like giant ants. They had been built by Rolls-Royce and a multinational aerospace consortium, and had a beautiful sea green finish. The forward modules contained the living quarters and had tinted windows on all four sides; the aft modules contained the fuel tanks, and sported a number of black rotating solar panels. The eight wire mesh wheels were 2.5 meters high, and very broad.
As they headed north across Lunae Planum they marked their route with little green transponders, dropping one every few kilometers. They also cleared rocks from their path that might disable a robot-driven rover, using the snowplow attachment or the little crane at the front end of the first rover. So in effect they were building a road. But they seldom had to use the rockmoving equipment on Lunae; they drove northeast at nearly their full speed of thirty kilometers an hour for several days straight. They were heading northeast, to avoid the canyon systems of Tempe and Mareotis, and this route took them down Lunae to the long slope of Chryse Planitia. Both these regions looked much like the land around their base camp, bumpy and strewn with small rocks; but because they were heading downhill they often had much longer views than they were used to. It was a new pleasure to Nadia, to drive on and on and see new countryside continually pop over the horizon: hillocks, dips, enormous isolated boulders, the occasional low round mesa that was the outside of a crater.
When they had descended to the lowlands of the northern hemisphere, they turned and drove straight north across the immense Acidalia Planitia, and again ran straight for several days. Their wheel tracks stretched behind them like the first cut of a lawnmower through grass, and the transponders gleamed bright and incongruous among the rocks. Phyllis, Edvard and George talked about making a few side trips, to investigate some indications seen in satellite photos that there were unusual mineral outcroppings near Perepelkin Crater. Ann reminded them irritably of their mission. It made Nadia sad to see that Ann was nearly as distant and tense out here as she was back at base; whenever the rovers were stopped she was outside walking around alone, and she was withdrawn when they sat together in Rover One to eat dinner. Occasionally Nadia tried to draw her out: “Ann, how did all these rocks get scattered around like this?”
“Meteors.”
“But where are the craters?”
“Most are in the south.”
“But how did the rocks get here, then?”
“They flew. That’s why they’re so small. It’s only smaller rocks could be tossed so far.”
“But I thought you told me that these northern plains were relatively new, while the heavy cratering was relatively old.”
“That’s right. The rocks you see here come from late meteor action. The total accumulation of loose rock from meteor strikes is much greater than what we can see, that’s what gardened regolith is. And the regolith is a kilometer deep.”
“It’s hard to believe,” Nadia said. “I mean, that’s so many meteors.”
Ann nodded. “It’s billions of years. That’s the difference between here and Earth, the age of the land goes from millions of years to billions. It’s such a big difference it’s hard to imagine. But seeing stuff like this can help.”
Midway across Acidalia they began running into long, straight, steep-walled, flat-bottomed canyons. They looked, as George noted more than once, like the dry beds of the legendary canals. The geological name for them was fossae, and they came in clusters. Even the smallest of these canyons were impassable to rovers, and when they came on one they had to turn and run along its rim, until its floors rose or its walls drew together, and they could continue north over flat plain again.
The horizon ahead was sometimes twenty kilometers off, sometimes three. Craters became rare, and the ones they passed were surrounded by low mounds that rayed out from the rims: splosh craters, where meteors had landed in permafrost that had turned to hot mud in the impact. Nadia’s companions spent a day wandering eagerly over the splayed hills around one of these craters; the rounded slopes, Phyllis said, indicated ancient water as clearly as the grain in petrified wood indicated the original tree. By the way she spoke Nadia understood that this was another of her disagreements with Ann; Phyllis believed in the long wet past model, Ann in the short wet past. Or something like that. Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.
Further north, around latitude 54°, they drove into the weird-looking land of thermokarsts, hummocky terrain spotted by a great number of steep-sided oval pits, called alases. These alases were a hundred times bigger than their Terran analogues, most of them two or three kilometers across, and about sixty meters deep. A sure sign of permafrost, the geologists all agreed; seasonal freezing and thawing of the soil caused it to slump in this pattern. Pits this big indicated that water content in the soil must have been high, Phyllis said. Unless it was yet another manifestation of Martian time scales, Ann replied. Slightly icy soil, slumping ever so slightly, for eons.
Irritably Phyllis suggested that they try collecting water from the ground, and irritably Ann agreed. They found a smooth slope between depressions, and stopped to install a permafrost water collector. Nadia took charge of the operation with a feeling of relief; the trip’s lack of work had begun to get to her. It was a good day’s job: she dug a ten-meter long trench with the lead rover’s little backhoe; laid the lateral collector gallery, a perforated stainless steel pipe filled with gravel; checked the electric heating elements running in strips along the pipe and filters; then filled in the trench with the clay and rocks they had dug out earlier.
Over the lower end of the gallery was a sump and pump, and an insulated transport line leading to a small holding tank. Batteries would power the heating elements, and solar panels charge the batteries. When the holding tank was full, if there was enough water to fill it, the pump would shut off and a solenoid valve would open, allowing the water in the transport line to drain back into the gallery, after which the heating elements would shut off as well.
“Almost done,” Nadia declared late in the day, as she started to bolt the transport pipe onto the last magnesium post. Her hands were dangerously cold, and her maimed hand throbbed. “Maybe someone could start dinner,” she said. “I’m almost done here.” The transport pipe had to be packed in a thick cylinder of white polyurethane foam, then fitted into a larger protective pipe. Amazing how much insulation complicated a simple piece of plumbing.
Hex nut, washer, cotter pin, a firm tug on the wrench. Nadia walked along the line, checking the coupling bands at the joints. Everything firm. She lugged her tools over to Rover One, looked back at the result of the day’s work: a tank, a short pipe on posts, a box on the ground, a long low mound of disturbed soil running uphill, looking raw but otherwise not unusual in this land of lumps. “We’ll drink some fresh water on our way back,” she said.
They had driven north for over two thousand kilometers, and finally rolled down onto Vastitas Borealis, an ancient cratered lava plain that ringed the northern hemisphere between latitudes 60° and 70°. Ann and the other geologists spent a couple of hours every morning out on the bare dark rock of this plain, taking samples, after which they would drive north for the rest of the day, discussing what they had found. Ann seemed more absorbed in the work, happier. One evening Simon pointed out that Phobos was running just over the low hills to the south; the next day’s drive would put it under the horizon. It was a remarkable demonstration of just how low the little moon’s orbit was; they were only at latitude 69°! But Phobos was only some five thousand kilometers above the planet’s equator. Nadia waved goodbye to it with a smile; she would still be able to talk to Arkady using the newly arrived areosynchronous radio satellites.
Three days later the bare rock ended, running under waves of blackish sand. It was just like coming on the shore of a sea. They had reached the great northern dunes, which wrapped the world in a band between Vastitas and the polar cap; where they were going to cross, the band was about eight hundred kilometers wide. The sand was a charcoal color, tinged with purple and rose, a rich relief to the eye after all the red rubble of the south. The dunes trended north and south, in parallel crests that occasionally broke or merged. Driving over them was easy; the sand was hard-packed, and they only had to pick a big dune and run along its humpbacked western side.
After a few days of this, however, the dunes got bigger, and became what Ann called barchan dunes. These looked like huge frozen waves, with faces a hundred meters tall and backs a kilometer wide; and the crescent that each wave made was several kilometers long. As with so many other Martian landscape features, they were a hundred times larger than their Terran analogs in the Sahara and Gobi. The expedition kept a level course over the backs of these great waves by contouring from one wave back to the next, their rovers like tiny boats, paddlewheeling over a sea that had frozen at the height of a titanic storm.
One day on this petrified sea, Rover Two stopped. A red light on the control panel indicated the problem was in the flexible frame between the modules; and in fact the rear module was tilted to the left, shoving the left side wheels into the sand. Nadia got into a suit and went back to have a look. She took the dust cover off the joint where the frame connected to the module chassis, and found that the bolts holding them together were all broken.
“This is going to take a while,” Nadia said. “You guys might as well have another look around.”
Soon the suited figures of Phyllis and George emerged, followed by Simon and Ann and Edvard. Phyllis and George took a transponder from Rover Three and set it out three meters to the right of their “road”. Nadia went to work on the broken frame, handling things as little as possible: it was a cold afternoon, perhaps seventy below, and she could feel the diamond chill right down to the bone.
The ends of the bolts wouldn’t come out of the side of the module, so she got out a drill and started drilling new holes. She began to hum “The Sheik of Araby”. Ann and Edvard and Simon were discussing sand. It was so nice, Nadia thought, to see ground that wasn’t red. To hear Ann absorbed in her work. To have some work to do herself.
They had almost reached the arctic circle, and it was Ls = 84, with the northern summer solstice only two weeks away; so the days were getting long. Nadia and George worked through the evening while Phyllis heated supper, and then after the meal Nadia went back out to finish the job. The sun was red in a brown haze, small and round even though it was near setting; there wasn’t enough atmosphere for oblation to enlarge and flatten it. Nadia finished, put her tools away, and had opened the outer lock door of Rover One, when Ann’s voice spoke in her ear. “Oh Nadia, are you going in already?”
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Kim Stanley Robinson
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Фэнтези про драконов
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Another timeless masterpiece in the Voyager Classics seriesMars – the barren, forbidding planet that epitomises mankind’s dreams of space conquest.From the first pioneers who looked back at Earth and saw a small blue star, to the first colonists – hand-picked scientists with the skills necessary to create life from cold desert – Red Mars is the story of a new genesis. It is also the story of how Man must struggle against his own self-destructive mechanisms to achieve his dreams: before he even sets foot on the red planet, factions are forming, tensions are rising and violence is brewing… for civilization can be very uncivilized.