Mars (12 page)

Finally the noise ceased, the sand stopped blowing, and the segments of the aeroshell drooped to the ground like wilted petals of a huge metal flower.

Jamie heard in his earphones, “That’s it! We’re down!”

There had been surprisingly little argument over the language to be used on Mars. For more than half a century scientists had used English as their common worldwide tongue. As had aircraft pilots and their ground controllers. A few of the politicians had put up something of a struggle, more for their own national egos than for any serious reason. The French had been especially difficult. Yet in the end they had to face the fact that the one language all of their prospective explorers understood was English.

Still, Vosnesensky spoke in Russian through his suit radio to the pilot of the second lander, Aleksander Mironov, while Ilona Malater and Tony Reed set up the hand-sized video cameras on their tripods.

Joanna Brumado, in her Day-Glo-orange hard suit, turned toward Jamie. “I suppose we are just the spear carriers.”

“Waterman!” Vosnesensky’s voice rang in Jamie’s earphones. “Take the still camera and photograph the aerobrake structure.”

Jamie said to Joanna, “One spear carrier.”

“Brumado!” the Russian called. “Monitor the gas emissions from the landing craft.”

He heard the Brazilian woman’s laughter. “No spear carriers.”

After slightly more than a quarter hour, the hatch of the
landing vehicle popped open and the slim metal ladder slid down to the red dust. A figure encased in a brilliant red pressure suit appeared at the hatch. Must be the other Russian, Jamie thought as he snapped photos for the expedition’s official history.

Six hard-suited figures trooped slowly down the ladder, one after the other, and gathered in front of the video cameras with their lander behind them. They too spoke solemn words about the triumph of the human quest and the glories of human intelligence and drive.

Jamie knew the six to be a Russian, an American, a Japanese meteorologist, a fellow geologist from India, an Egyptian geophysicist, and a French geochemist who was the only woman among the second landing team.

The politicians had worked frantically to please as many nations as possible—and to get as many as possible to help fund the quarter-trillion-dollar Mars Project. To their credit, where it was necessary for them to balance national pride against scientific needs, national pride did not win every round. But if an Israeli biochemist was selected to go to Mars, then it became absolutely necessary to send a follower of Islam along. It was imperative that both Japan and France be represented. And of course, there must be the same number of Russians and Americans.

Jamie’s last-minute substitution for Father DiNardo had upset the Soviet-American balance, and while that could not be helped, it was not accepted gladly either in Moscow or, strangely, in Washington.

The first team started to help the second team unload their landing/ascent vehicle. More equipment would be sent later in the day by automated, unmanned one-way landers from the spacecraft in orbit. Vosnesensky was in charge of all the ground team, with Pete Connors his ostensible second-in-command. But Jamie heard a lot of Russian chatter in his earphones; the two cosmonauts were already talking to each other to the exclusion of the others.

Jamie was surprised, then, when Vosnesensky tapped him on the shoulder of his hard suit.

“Come to the communications center,” the Russian said. “The expedition commander wishes to speak to you.”

Without a word, Jamie hefted the crate of chemical analysis equipment he was already carrying and followed Vosnesensky
into the airlock. After it cycled and they had vacuumed the red dust off their boots, they stepped inside the dome. Jamie put the equipment crate down just inside the hatch and unconsciously slid his helmet visor up as he walked alongside the Russian to the comm console.

His ears popped again. The air inside the dome was an Earth-normal mix of oxygen and nitrogen, pumped up to normal terrestrial pressure and heated to a comfortable temperature. The hard suits operated at almost normal terrestrial atmospheric pressure. Almost, but not quite. The transition from suit to “regular” air made itself felt in Jamie’s inner ear. It was one of those minor maladies that no Mars explorer would even whisper about during training, for fear of being scratched from the team. Here on Mars, though, it was already annoying. And this was only the second day.

Dr. Li Chengdu, the expedition commander, was exceedingly angry with Jamie Waterman. The only visible sign of his anger was the slight throbbing of a vein in his forehead above the left eye. Otherwise his face was a mask of calm. The olive drab coveralls he wore were not quite standard issue: Dr. Li affected a stiff collar instead of the open-necked style everyone else wore. In the back of his mind Jamie wondered if that was supposed to be symbolic.

Puzzled, Jamie sat at the comm desk in front of the main display screen. The six other screens flanking it showed views of the unloading chores going on outside. Vosnesensky stood behind Jamie like a policeman guarding a prisoner about to be interrogated.

“Dr. Li,” said Jamie, still in his blue suit and helmet.

“Dr. Waterman.”

“You wanted to speak to me?”

Li took in a silent breath, nostrils flaring as if in distaste. “I have just received a most unhappy transmission from Kaliningrad, which was relayed from Houston.”

Jamie tried to keep his face as stiffly unemotional as the expedition commander’s.

“Your American mission controllers are quite upset that you did not speak the words they gave you for your first statement from the surface of Mars.”

“Yes, I suppose they are.” Of course they’d be upset. The
Anglos in Washington always get upset when a red man doesn’t follow their script.

“Why did you say what you did? And what does it mean? Apparently it has caused a sensation in the media in the United States.”

With a slight shake of his head Jamie replied, “I had no intention of causing a sensation. I didn’t know I was going to say that until I heard myself speaking. The words … they simply popped out of my mouth.”

“What do they mean?”

“It’s an old Navaho greeting. Like
‘aloha’
among the Hawaiians or the Italians’
‘ciao.’
Literally it means something like, ‘It is good.’”

Li’s stiff shoulders relaxed visibly. The throbbing vein eased. “Your government people are very angry with you.”

Jamie tried to shrug inside the hard suit and found that it could not be done. He said, “What can they do about it? Send me home?”

“They can instruct me to remove you from the ground team and bring you up here!” Li’s voice flared. “They can insist that I send Dr. O’Hara to the surface and keep you in orbit for the remainder of the mission!”

Jamie felt his guts lurch. “You wouldn’t do that!” It was more of a question than a statement.

“They have not ordered me to do so. Not yet.”

Thank god, Jamie breathed silently.

“However, they want a clarification of your words: a written statement from you as to what they mean to you and why you said them instead of what you had been instructed to say.”

It suddenly struck Jamie as ludicrous. Sitting inside a space suit on a world a hundred million kilometers from Earth, he was being told that he had to write an apology for three words he had blurted unthinkingly. Or be punished like a truant schoolboy.

“You will write such a statement?” Li prompted.

“If I don’t …?”

“They will insist on removing you from the ground team, I fear. You must recall that your assignment to the landing team at the last minute caused some anxious moments in Washington and elsewhere. Please do not jeopardize your position any further.”
Jamie remembered that frantic weekend of hurried telephone conferences and impromptu visits with his family. And Edith saying good-bye to him.

The expedition commander seemed to draw himself up into a taller, calmer, more regal posture. “My advice, for what it is worth, is to write a brief statement that explains how you were overwhelmed with emotion upon stepping onto the surface of Mars and lapsed into the language of your ancestors. No one can fault you for that.”

“It’s even the truth,” Jamie said.

The Chinese allowed himself a fatherly smile. “You see? A soft answer turns away wrath.”

Jamie nodded. “I see. Thank you.”

Jamie was nine years old the first time he was sent back to New Mexico to spend the summer with his grandfather Al. His mother did not like the idea, but she and her husband had a summer of foreign travel ahead of them, lectures and seminars that would take the two professors across the Pacific to Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Hong Kong. They had little desire to drag their nine-year-old with them, and no intention whatever of turning down the all-expenses-paid junket.

So for the first time since he had been in kindergarten Jamie returned to Santa Fe. He learned to fish and hunt and to love his grandfather Al, even though he actually spent most of his days in Al’s store on the plaza in Santa Fe. Al was a good grandfather but a better businessman. Anglo ladies cooed over the “little Indian boy” all summer long.

The very last week, while Jamie was already moping about his return to Berkeley, Al took him to one of the Navaho pueblos up in the mountains where he bought the pottery and carpets for which the Anglo tourists paid so dearly.

Most of Al’s business that day was conducted at the trading post, a combination bar and general store with uncarpeted creaking floorboards, worn old wooden counters, warped shelves half bare, and a big ceiling fan that hardly moved at all. A half dozen older men sat at the bar, silent and virtually motionless beneath their drooping broad-brimmed hats, while Al bargained patiently, interminably in Navaho with the pueblo’s head man. To Jamie the old men at the bar seemed as dusty and time ravaged as the room itself.

Bored with his grandfather’s endless low-pitched haggling in a language he did not understand, Jamie went outside and
sat on the sagging wooden steps. The late afternoon sun felt hot as molten lava, coloring the whole land copper red.

A scrawny cat slinked past his feet, gray and silent. A pair of mangy, mean-eyed dogs lay panting in the dust on the other side of the street beneath the shade of a cottonwood tree. Jamie could count their ribs.

Across the way, on the shaded porch that fronted an adobe house badly in need of patching, a little girl, maybe six or seven years old, was playing with a puppy, a joyful bundle of wriggling fur. Jamie thought about going over to her, but he did not know how to speak Navaho. The girl cuddled the puppy, petted it, crooning to it in her language.

She put the puppy down briefly, then picked it up by its tail. The pup yelped and snapped at her. She dropped the puppy and jumped to her feet. Then, breaking into English, she cried, “You bad boy! Bad! You always want make trouble, always fighting! I send you to principal. Get out of this classroom! Go to principal! I tell your mother on you!”

Even though he was only nine, Jamie immediately recognized that the girl was imitating an Anglo school teacher.

Her mother called from the cool darkness of the house, through its open door, and spoke sternly in Navaho to her. Jamie realized his grandfather was standing beside him now, laughing at the scene.

Scrambling to his feet, Jamie asked, “What’d she say, Al?”

“Aw, she just told her daughter not to hurt the puppy.” He laughed. “Then she told her not to make jokes about her teacher in front of a white man.”

“A white man?”

“You, son!”

“But I’m not a white man.”

“Guess you look like one to her,” said Al.

The following week Jamie was sent back to Berkeley, where his parents expressed great pleasure that their son had not turned into “a wild Indian.”

It was damned annoying to be a sage.

Li Chengdu stared at the blank comm screen and still saw James Waterman’s stubborn face. An honest face, slightly square with broad cheekbones and just a hint of distant Asian ancestry in the shape of his eyes. Piercing black eyes that were an open pathway to the young man’s soul.

I should not have lost my temper with him, Li scolded himself. I was angry because he is down there on the planet and I am forced to ride in this celestial tin can without ever setting foot on Mars.

There was more to it than that, he knew. Russians, Americans, Japanese—nineteen different nationalities living cheek by jowl a hundred million kilometers from Earth. If there isn’t a mental breakdown before we return home I’ll be surprised beyond words. Not even the Japanese were meant to live this close together.

The engineers had anticipated all the physical problems of the Mars mission, but they had studiously ignored the worries of the psychologists. No, rather, they had passed over all those worries by ordering the psychologists to pick “well-balanced” personalities who could remain stable even under the pressure-cooker conditions of this mission. Li did not know whether he should laugh or weep. Remain stable under these conditions! How does a man remain stable when he is supposed to deny himself sex for nearly two years? This mission should have been planned by Polynesians, not Russians and Americans. The two most prudish peoples in the world.

And now this American Indian has his government upset with his foolish words. That is something none of us had planned for.

At least the crowding had eased now that half the ship’s complement had departed for the surface. Li leaned back in his softly yielding chair. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the ruddy curve of Mars float past in his compartment’s round window. The orbiting
Mars 2
spacecraft was still tethered to its
Mars 1
twin, five kilometers away, the two of them still rotating about their common center to maintain a feeling of Martian-level gravity. If it became necessary to send one of the backup personnel down to the surface, he or she could go instantly. They were all acclimated to the gravity of Mars.

Li was grateful that their long voyage had not required them to live in zero gravity for any length of time. He always became nauseous in zero gravity; even thinking of unending months of it made him feel queasy.