The Martians Read online

  In the first week of September the noonday twilight grew almost as bright as day, and they could see sunlight on the peaks of the Asgaard and Olympus Ranges, flanking the deep valley. Because the valley was such a narrow slot between such high ranges, it would be perhaps another ten days before the sun fell directly on the base, and Arkady organized a hike up the side of Mount Odin to catch an earlier glimpse of it. This turned into a general expedition, as almost everyone proved interested in seeing the sun again as soon as possible. So early on the morning of September 10, they stood nearly a thousand meters above Lake Vanda, on a shelf occupied by a small ice pond and tarn. It was windy, so the climb had not warmed them. The sky was a pale starless blue; the east sides of the peaks of both ranges were glazed gold with sunlight. Finally to the east, at the end of the valley, over the burnished plate of the frozen Ross Sea, the sun emerged over the horizon and burned like a flare. They cheered; their eyes ran with emotion, also an excess of new light and cold wind. People hugged each other, bundle after bundle. But Maya kept on the other side of the group from Michel, with Frank always between them. And it seemed to Michel that everyone's joy had a desperate edge to it, as of people who had just barely survived an extinction event.

  Thus when the time came to make his report to the selection committees, Michel advised against the project as designed. “No group can stay functional under such conditions indefinitely,” he wrote. In the meetings he made his case point by point. The long list of double binds was especially impressive.

  This was in Houston. The heat and humidity were saunalike; Antarctica was already a nightmare memory, slipping quickly away.

  “But this is just social life,” Charles York pointed out, bemused. “All social existence is a set of double binds.”

  “No no,” Michel said. “Social life is a set of contradictory demands. That's normal, agreed. But what we're talking about here are requirements to be two opposite things at once. Classic double binds. And they are already causing a lot of the classic responses. Hidden lives. Multiple personalities. Bad faith. Repression, then the return of the repressed. A close look at the results of the tests given down there will show it is not a viable project. I would advise starting with small scientific stations, with rotating crews. As Antarctica itself is operated now.”

  This caused a lot of discussion, even controversy. Charles remained for sending up a permanent colony, as proposed; but he had grown close to Mary. Georgia and Pauline tended to agree with Michel; though they too had had personal difficulties at Vanda.

  Charles dropped by to see Michel in his borrowed office, shaking his head. He looked at Michel, serious but somehow still uninvolved, distanced. Professional. “Look, Michel,” he said. “They want to go. They're capable of adapting. A lot of them did very well with that, so well that you couldn't pick them out of a crowd in any kind of blind test. And they want to go, it's clear. That's how we should choose who to send. We should give them their chance to do what they want. It's not really our business to decide for them.”

  “But it won't work. We saw that.”

  “I didn't see that. They didn't see that. What you saw is your concern, but they have the right to make their try at it. Anything could happen there, Michel. Anything. And this world is not so well arranged that we should deny people who want to take their chance to try something different. It could be good for us all.” He stood abruptly to leave the office. “Think about it.”

  Michel thought about it. Charles was a sensible man, a wise man. What he had said had the ring of truth to it. And a sudden gust of fear blew through Michel, as cold as any katabatic downdraft in Wright Valley: he might, out of his own fear, be stopping something with greatness in it.

  He changed his recommendation, describing all the reasons why. He explained his vote for the project to continue; he gave the committees his list of the best hundred candidates. But Georgia and Pauline continued to advise against the project as designed. And so an outside panel was convened to make an evaluation, a recommendation, a judgment. Near the end of the process Michel even found himself in his office with the American president, who sat down with him and told him he had probably been right the first time around, first impressions were usually that way, second-guessing was of little use. Michel could only nod. Later he sat in a meeting attended by both the American and Russian presidents; the stakes were that high. They both wanted a Martian base, for their own political purposes, Michel saw that clearly. But they also wanted a success, a project that worked. In that sense, the hundred permanent colonists as originally conceived was clearly the riskier of the options they had before them now. And neither president was a risk taker. Rotating crews were intrinsically less interesting, but if the crews were large enough, and the base large enough, then the political impact (the publicity) would be almost the same; the science would be the same; and everything would be that much safer, radiologically as well as psychologically.

  So they canceled the project.

  Exploring Fossil Canyon

  Two hours before sunset their guide, Roger Clayborne, declared it was time to set camp, and the eight members of the tour trooped down from the ridges or up out of the side canyons they had been exploring that day as the group slowly progressed west, toward Olympus Mons. Eileen Monday, who had had her intercom switched off all day (the guide could override her deafness) turned to the common band and heard the voices of her companions, chattering. Dr. Mitsumu and Cheryl Martinez had pulled the equipment wagon all day, down a particularly narrow canyon bottom, and their vociferous complaints were making Mrs. Mitsumu laugh. John Nobleton was suggesting, as usual, that they camp farther down the ancient water-formed arroyo they were following; Eileen could not be sure which of the dusty-suited figures was him, but she guessed it was the one enthusiastically bounding up the wash, kicking up sand with every jump, and floating like an impala. Their guide, on the other hand, was unmistakable: tall even when sitting against a tall boulder, high on the spine flanking one side of the deep canyon. When the others spotted him, they groaned. The equipment wagon weighed less than seven hundred kilograms in Mars's gravity, but still it would take several of them to pull it up the slope to the spot Clayborne had in mind.

  “Roger, why don't we just pull it down the road we've got here and camp around the corner?” John insisted.

  “Well, we certainly could,” Roger said—he spoke so quietly that the intercoms barely transmitted his dry voice—"but I haven't yet learned to sleep comfortably at a forty-five-degree angle.”

  Mrs. Mitsumu giggled. Eileen snicked in irritation, hoping Roger could identify the maker of the sound. His remark typified all she disliked about the guide; he was both taciturn and sarcastic, a combination Eileen did not like any more for considering it unusual. And his wide derisive grin was no help either.

  “I found a good flat down there,” John protested.

  “I saw it. But I suspect our tent needs a little more room.”

  Eileen joined the crew hauling the wagon up the slope. “I suspect,” she mimicked as she began to pant and sweat inside her suit.

  “See?” came Roger's voice in her ear. “Ms. Monday agrees with me.”

  She snicked again, more annoyed than she cared to show. So far, in her opinion, this expedition was a flop. And their guide was a very significant factor in its failure, even if he was so quiet that she had barely noticed him for the first three or four days. But eventually his sharp tongue had caught her attention.

  She slipped in some soft dirt and went to her knees; bounced back up and heaved again, but the contact reminded her that Mars itself shared the blame for her disappointment. She wasn't as willing to admit that as she was her dislike for Clayborne, but it was true, and it disturbed her. All through her many years at the University of Mars, Burroughs, she had studied the planet—first in literature (she had read every Martian tale ever written, she once boasted), then in areology, particularly seismology. But she had spent most of her twenty-four years in Burroughs it
self, and the big city was not like the canyons. Her previous exposure to the Martian landscape consisted of visits to the magnificent domed section of Hephaestus Chasma called Lazuli Canyon, where icy water ran in rills and springs, in waterfalls and pools, and tundra grass grew on every wet red beach. Of course she knew that the virgin Martian landscape was not like Lazuli, but somewhere in her mind, when she had seen the advertisement for the hike—"Guaranteed to be terrain never before trodden by human feet"—she must have had an image of something similar to that green world. The thought made her curse herself for a fool. The slope they were struggling up at that very moment was a perfect representative sample of the untrodden terrain they had been hiking over for the past week: It was composed of dirt of every consistency and hue, so that it resembled an immense layered cake slowly melting, made of ingredients that looked like baking soda, sulfur, brick dust, curry powder, coal slag, and alum. And it was only one cake out of thousands of them, all stacked crazily for as far as the eye could see. Dirt piles.

  Just short of Roger's flat campsite, they stopped to rest. Sweat was stinging in Eileen's left eye. “Let's get the wagon up here,” Roger said, coming down to help. His clients stared at him mutinously, unmoving. The doctor leaned over to adjust his boot, and as he had been holding the wagon's handle, the others were caught off guard; a pebble gave way under the wagon's rear wheel, and suddenly it was out of their grasp and rolling down the slope—

  In an explosion of dust Roger dived headfirst down the hill, chocking the rear wheel with a stone the size of a breadloaf. The wagon plowed the chock downhill a couple of meters and came to a halt. The group stood motionless, staring at the prone guide, Eileen as surprised as the rest of them; she had never seen him move so fast. He stood up at his usual lazy pace and started wiping dust from his faceplate. “Best to put the chock down before it starts rolling,” he murmured, smiling to himself. They gathered to pull the wagon up the flat, chattering again. But Eileen considered it; if the wagon had careened all the way down to the canyon bottom, there would have been at least the possibility that it would have been damaged. And if it had been damaged badly enough, it could have killed them all. She pursed her lips and climbed up to the flat.

  Roger and Ivan Corallton were pulling the base of the tent from the wagon. They stretched it out over the posts that kept it level and off the frozen soil; Ivan and Kevin Ottalini assembled the curved poles of the tension dome. The three of them and John carefully got the poles in place, and pulled the transparent tent material out of the base to stretch it under the framework. When they were done the others stood, a bit stiffly—they had traveled some twenty kilometers that day—and walked in through the flaccid airlock, hauling the wagon in behind them. Roger twisted valves on the side of the wagon, and compressed air pushed violently into their protective bag. Before it was full, Dr. Mitsumu and his wife were disengaging the bath and the latrine assemblies from the wagon. Roger switched on the heaters, and after a few minutes of gazing at the gauges, he nodded. “Home again home again,” he said as always. Condensation was beading on the inside of their dome's clear skin. Eileen unclipped her helmet from her suit and pulled it off. “It's too hot.” No one heard her. She walked to the wagon and turned down the heater, catching Roger's sardonic grin out of the corner of her eye; she always thought the tent's air was too hot. Dr. Mitsumu, regular as clockwork, ducked into the latrine as soon as his suit was off. The air was filled with the smells of sweat and urine, as everyone stripped their suits off and poured the contents of the runoffs into the water purifier on the wagon. Doran Stark got to the bath first as always—Eileen was amused by how quickly a group established its habits and customs—and stood in the ankle-deep water, sponging himself down and singing “I Met Her in a Phobos Restaurant.” As she emptied her suit into the purifier Eileen found herself smiling at all their domestic routines, performed in a transparent bubble in the midst of an endless rust desolation.

  She took her sponge bath last except for Roger. There was a shower curtain that could be pulled around the tiny tub at shoulder level, but nobody else used it, so Eileen didn't either, although she was made a bit uncomfortable by the surreptitious glances of John and the doctor. Nevertheless, she sponged down thoroughly, and in the constantly moving air her clean wet skin felt good. Besides it was rather a splendid sight, all the ruddy naked bodies standing about on the ledge of a spine extending thousands of meters above and below them, the convolutions of canyon after canyon scoring the tilted landscape, Olympus Mons bulging to the west, rising out of the atmosphere so that it appeared to puncture the dome of the sky, and the bloodred sun about to set behind it. Roger did know how to pick a campsite, Eileen admitted to herself (he somehow sponged down with his back always to her, shower curtain partly pulled out, and dressed while still wet, signaling the gradual rehabiliment of the others). It was truly a sublime sight, as all of their campsite prospects had been. Sublime: to have your senses telling you you are in danger, when you know you are not; that was Burke's definition of the sublime, more or less, and it fit practically every moment of these days, from dawn to dusk. But that in itself could get wearing. The sublime is not the beautiful, after all, and one cannot live comfortably in a perpetual sense of danger. But at sunset, in the tent, it was an apprehension that could be enjoyed: the monstrous bare landscape, her bare skin; the utter serenity of the slow movement of Beethoven's last string quartet, which Ivan played every day during the sun's dying moments. . . . “Listen to this,” Cheryl said, and read from her constant companion, the volume If Wang Wei Lived on Mars:

  Sitting out all night thinking.

  Sun half-born five miles to the east.

  Blood pulses through all this still air:

  The edge of a mountain, great distance away.

  Nothing moves but the sun,

  Blood to fire as it rises.

  How many, these dawns?

  How far, our home?

  Stars fade. Big rocks splinter

  The mind's great fear:

  Peace here. Peace, here.

  It was a fine moment, Eileen thought, made so by what was specifically human in the landscape. She dressed with the rest of them, deliberately turning away from John Nobleton as she rooted around in her drawer of the wagon, and they fell to making dinner. For more than an hour after Olympus Mons blotted out the sun the sky stayed light; pink in the west, shading to brick-black in the east. They cooked and ate by this illumination. Their meal, planned by Roger, was a thick vegetable stew, seemingly fresh French bread, and coffee. Most of them kept off the common band during long stretches of the day, and now they discussed what they had seen, for they explored different side canyons as they went. The main canyon they were following was a dry outflow wash, formed by flash floods working down a small fault line in a large tilted plateau. It was relatively young, Roger said—meaning two billion years old, but younger than most of the water-carved canyons on Mars. Wind erosion and the marvelous erratics created by volcanic bombardment from Olympus Mons gave the expedition members a lot of features to discuss: beach terracing from long-lost lakes, meandering streambeds, lava bombs shaped like giant teardrops, or colored in a way that implied certain gases in copious quantities in the Hesperian atmosphere. . . . This last, plus the fact that these canyons had been carved by water, naturally provoked a lot of speculation about the possibilities of ancient Martian life. And the passing water, and the resiliencies of the rock, had created forms fantastical enough to seem the sculpture of some alien art. So they talked, with the enthusiasm and free speculation that only amateurs seem to bring to a subject: Sunday paper areologists, Eileen thought. There wasn't a proper scientist among them; she was the closest thing to it, and the only thing she knew was the rudiments of areology. Yet she listened to the talk with interest.

  Roger, on the other hand, never contributed to these free-ranging discussions, and didn't even listen. At the moment he was engaged in setting up his cot and “bedroom” wall. There were panels provided so t
hat each sleeper, or couple, could block off an area around their cot; no one took advantage of them but Roger, the rest preferring to lie out under the stars together. Roger set two panels against the sloping side of the dome, leaving just enough room for his cot under the clear low roof. It was yet another way that he set himself apart, and watching him, Eileen shook her head. Expedition guides were usually so amiable—how did he keep his job? Did he ever get repeat customers? She set out her cot, observing his particular preparations: He was one of the tall Martians, well over two meters (Lamarckism was back in vogue, as it appeared that the more generations of ancestors you had on Mars, the taller you grew; it was true for Eileen herself, who was fourth-generation, or yonsei)—long-faced, long-nosed, homely as English royalty... long feet that were clumsy once out of their boots.... He rejoined them, however, this evening, which was not always his custom, and they lit a lantern as the wine-dark sky turned black and filled with stars. Bedding arranged, they sat down on cots and the floor around the lantern's dim light and talked some more. Kevin and Doran began a chess game.

  For the first time, they asked Eileen questions about her area of expertise. Was it true that the southern highlands now held the crust of both primeval hemispheres? Did the straight line of the three great Tharsis volcanoes indicate a hot spot in the mantle? Sunday paper areology again, but Eileen answered as best she could. Roger appeared to be listening.

  “Do you think there'll ever be a marsquake we can actually feel?” he asked with a grin.

  The others laughed, and Eileen felt herself blush. It was a common jest; sure enough, he followed it up: “You sure you seismologists aren't just inventing these marsquakes to keep yourselves in employment?”

  “You're out here enough,” she replied. “One of these days a fault will open up and swallow you.”

  “She hopes,” Ivan said. The sniping between them had of course not gone unnoticed.