Mars Life (20 page)
Now they stood a dozen paces outside the main airlock, Carleton feeling decidedly edgy in the flimsy suit, with the ridiculous inflated balloon of a helmet over his head. Doreen stood in moody silence beside him. It was nearly sunset. Temperature must be down to fifty below, Carleton groused to himself. Still, he had to admit, it’s comfortable enough inside this glorified raincoat. Except for the radiation. The thought made his skin crawl.
To their left rose the towering cliffs of the canyon, the slanting rays of the setting sun casting shadows that brought out every seam and wrinkle in the ancient rocks. The glowing disk of the sun hung above the horizon on their right, small and wan, reminding Carleton that they were a long,
long
way from home.
long
way from home.
“All right,” he said, with a cheerfulness he didn’t really feel, “I’m wearing the suit. Are you satisfied?”
“Carter, we have to talk.”
That again.
Doreen reached into the pouch on her right thigh and pulled out a hair-thin wire. Plugging it into a hardly visible socket on the collar ring of her suit, she held the other end out to Carleton. He stepped closer and let her plug the wire into his suit’s receptacle.
“There, now we can talk without using the radios.”
So no one can overhear us, Carleton realized. Her voice sounded different over the wire, edgier, brittle.
Trying to hide his growing irritation, Carleton asked, “What’s this all about, Dorrie?”
“There’s going to be a resupply mission arriving in another six weeks,” she said.
“Yes. It’s supposed to bring that priest from the Vatican with it.”
“And take a dozen people who want to leave Mars.”
At last he understood. “You’re not leaving?”
“Yes I am, Carter.” Her voice was so low he barely could hear it.
“But why? Where are you going?”
“Back to Selene,” said Doreen. “That’s my home. It’s time for me to go back.”
“But why?” he repeated, thoroughly astonished. “I thought you and l-”
“Carter, it’s been good between us. For a while there I thought I really loved you.”
“You thought. . . ?” He felt bewildered, betrayed.
For long moments Doreen didn’t answer. Finally she said, “You don’t love me, Carter. I’m just a convenience for you, a body to warm your bed and stroke your ego.”
“That’s nonsense,” he snapped. “What’s your real reason? Is it somebody else? That Indian kid?”
“Of course not!” she said, genuinely shocked. “It’s you. You don’t care about me, not really. You don’t even care about my ideas, my work.”
“That nanomachine business? You want to terraform Mars with nanomachines?”
“Part of it, yes. So people can come here and live and work safely—in comfort.”
“Nanocrap,” he snarled. “It’s nonsense and you know it.”
Her face deadly serious, Doreen replied, “I’m not going to argue with you about it. I’m leaving when the resupply flight comes in.”
“And what about me?”
“What about you, Carter?” Her voice sounded almost sorrowful. “How do you feel about me? Do you feel anything at all except your own needs?”
Puzzled and slightly angry, he replied, “For god’s sake, Doreen, we’re living together aren’t we? We share our lives, our work, our bodies, everything.”
She fell silent again.
“Isn’t that enough?” he demanded.
Very softly, she said, “You’ve never said you love me.”
So that’s it, he thought. The same old ploy. They always want to hear you plight your troth.
“Doreen, love is a big word. . . .”
“It’s a four-letter word. The same as fuck.”
Carleton shook his head inside the inflated helmet. I’ll never understand them, he told himself. Never. Trying to control his growing irritation, he grasped Doreen by the wrist and started back to the airlock.
“You’re not leaving, Doreen,” he said, almost in a growl. “I want you here. I need you here.”
She didn’t reply as she let him lead her back to the dome. She simply pulled the wire from his suit collar and let it trail in the dust behind her.
And Carleton remembered a line from
Hamlet:
Where the offense is, let the great axe fall.
Hamlet:
Where the offense is, let the great axe fall.
TITHONIUM BASE: SUNSET
As Jamie and Vijay stepped out of the airlock they saw another couple striding forcefully toward the hatch, one of them trailing a hair-thin wire from the collar rim of her suit. Once they got close enough to recognize their faces, Jamie said hello to Doreen McManus and Carter Carleton.
Neither of them replied. They walked past Jamie and Vijay without a word, without a nod.
Turning to his wife, Jamie said, “Carter looks pissed.”
Vijay watched them step into the airlock and close its outer hatch. “You mean angry.”
Jamie nodded.
“In Oz pissed means drunk.”
“He’s not drunk,” Jamie said. “He’s sore as a guy who fell into a clump of cactus.”
Vijay snickered. “In Australia we’d say he’s mad as a frilled lizard.”
“Colloquialisms,” said Jamie.
“That’s a ten-dollar word,” she said. “I’m impressed.”
“Come on,” he said, tugging at her wrist. “Let’s see the sunset.”
They walked hand in gloved hand away from the airlock hatch, out onto the rock-strewn floor of the valley. The sun was just touching the uneven horizon; the cloudless sky was a deep butterscotch color, although behind them it had already darkened so much that the first stars were visible.
“Dr. Waterman,” Jamie heard in his headset, “please remember to stay within camera range.”
Jamie nodded inside his inflated bubble helmet. “We’re not going that far,” he replied to the safety monitor.
Vijay looked down at the dusty ground, stamped with boot prints and the tracks of wheeled vehicles.
“Not like the old days anymore,” she said. “I remember when you could actually step where no one had stood before.”
Jamie replied, “You still can, but you’ve got to go a lot farther.”
“We’ve never been to the other side of the valley, have we?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“D’you intend to go there?”
“Sooner or later,” he said. “Right now we’re concentrating on tracing the fossil river that ran along the valley floor.”
“Think you’ll find more villages?”
“That’s the hope.” Then Jamie added, “Chang wants to send a team to the south pole and study its melting firsthand.”
“That’s a long ways off,” said Vijay.
Nodding, Jamie went on, “The ice cap has lots of frozen carbon dioxide in it. The cee-oh-two doesn’t melt, it sublimes —goes straight from solid to gaseous carbon dioxide.”
“Isn’t that a greenhouse gas?”
“Right. Mars is undergoing global warming, just like Earth.”
Vijay laughed. “Maybe the temperature’ll get above freezing one of these days.”
Looking across the broad, barren valley floor, Jamie said, “Maybe it’ll get warm enough to melt the permafrost. Maybe this desert will bloom again, eventually.”
“In a million years.”
“More like ten million, I’d guess.”
Vijay fell silent for a few moments as they walked slowly away from the dome. Then she asked, “Will we be able to stay? I mean, from what Dex says about finances . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“We’ll have to stretch the available money. We certainly can’t afford to send a team to the south pole. Or even the other side of the valley. We’ve got to make this base as self-sufficient as we can and cut down on the number of resupply trips.”
“Will that be enough, Jamie?”
Grimly, he answered, “It’ll have to be.”
They walked a few paces farther, then Jamie stopped and slipped his arm around Vijay’s waist. The sun was halfway down the horizon, the sky already a deep violet.
“Couldn’t cuddle in the hard suits,” Vijay murmured.
With a chuckle, Jamie replied, “True, but you could squeeze Iwo people into one of the larger sizes.”
“Really?”
“So I’ve been told.”
Vijay thought about it for a moment. “Criminy, that’d be worse than doing it in an airliner’s lavatory, woul’n’t it.”
“Romance at its most poetic.”
“There goes the sun.”
The last spot of brightness winked out. There was only a moment of twilight, then the sky turned inky dark, spattered with brilliant stars.
“And if we’re lucky . . .” Jamie held his breath.
Vijay leaned closer to him as they watched the stars, bright, solemn, hardly twinkling at all.
“There it is!” she cried.
Jamie felt the breath gush out of him. Overhead the sky shimmered with delicate sheets of pale green, pink, ghostly white, curtains of the aurora that flickered like candlelight high above them.
“The Sky Dancers,” Jamie whispered.
For several minutes the two of them stood transfixed on the arid, dusty floor of the tremendous valley, staring up at the aurora that weaved and coiled above them. Jamie knew that with almost every sunset on Mars the aurora flared as high-energy subatomic particles from the solar wind impinged on the inert neon, xenon and other noble gases in the Martian atmosphere. But the Navaho part of his mind recalled the Sky Dancers on Earth, in the desert scrubland of New Mexico, the night that Grandfather Al died. They’re watching over us, he thought. We’re not alone.
“It’s fading,” Vijay sighed.
“It only lasts while we’re in darkness and the high atmosphere is still in sunlight,” Jamie said, knowing that the Sky Dancers had other places to go, other eyes to delight, other omens to warn of.
“Look!”
A meteor trail streaked across the deep violet sky like a fiery finger tracing a path through the heavens.
“Wow!” Jamie managed to say before the meteor’s blazing track winked out. “That was a big one.”
“Should we make a wish?”
“Yeah. Wish that we don’t get hit by a meteor shower,” Jamie said, remembering the shower that peppered the dome of the First Expedition. One of the tiny stones had even hit his helmet. Remembering how close he’d come to death, Jamie suddenly felt very vulnerable in the flimsy nanosuit.
“We’d better get inside,” he said to Vijay.
The safety monitor reinforced the notion. “Dr. Waterman, temperature’s dropping rapidly.”
“Right,” he said crisply. “We’re coming in.”
As they trudged back toward the lights of the dome and the airlock hatch, Vijay said, “That was spectacular, Jamie.”
He looked at her, but it was already too dark to make out her beautiful face. Smiling ruefully, Jamie said, “Mars is a beautiful world. But it can be dangerous.”
“You don’t want to leave, do you?”
“Hell no,” said Jamie.
Monsignor DiNardo sat in the barber’s chair while the makeup specialist smoothed a creamy lotion over his stubborn shadow of a beard.
“Italians,” the young woman muttered, more to herself than the priest. “All that testosterone.”
She was blond and blowsy. It was hard for DiNardo to tell her age, what with the cosmetic and rejuvenation treatments available.
DiNardo looked at the big wall mirror in front of him. His chin and jaw looked baby pink, although his shaved scalp still showed a face of stubble. “All my life my beard has given me difficulty,” he said. “I’m sorry if it’s making you work too hard.”
“Oh, that’s all right, Father,” she said, suddenly embarrassed. “It’s my job, after all.”
“You are Catholic?”
“Born to it,” she said, turning to the rows of bottles and jars on the counter.
“Irish?” he guessed.
“Nope. Italian, just like you.”
“Ah!
Que paese?”
Que paese?”
“Huh?”
“What part of Italy do you come from?”
“Oh, my family’s been here for a hundred years. More. I went to Italy once, though. To Rome and Florence.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
She broke into a major grin. “I never had it so good. Guys were after me everywhere I went.”
Of course. Blond and buxom, DiNardo thought.
“Boy, did I have impure thoughts on that trip!”
DiNardo laughed. “I could hear your confession, if you wish.”
She laughed, too. “I go every week at my parish church, Father.”
“Good.”
She studied his face for several moments. “I think we’re finished. You look fine.”
Glancing into the mirror again, DiNardo thought he looked much as he always looked. His jaw was smooth and pinkish, but his eyes still drooped and had those bags beneath them.
He started to get out of the chair, but the makeup woman put a hand on his shoulder. “Father, could I ask you something?”
“Certainly,” he said.
Her brows knit slightly. “I been watching them filming you in the studio. What you said about the Martians, is that real?”
“Of course.”
“There really were living people on Mars, just like us?”
DiNardo nodded. “We don’t know what they looked like, as yet. But they left buildings. They had a form of writing. They existed millions of years ago.”
“But I saw this show on TV, the guy there says it’s all a fake. He wrote a book about it and he said that the scientists have faked the whole thing just to get more money out of us.”
“I am a scientist,” he said gently.
The woman looked stricken. “Oh, I didn’t mean you, Father! Those other scientists. The secular ones. The ones who’re atheists and hate religion. They’d do anything to tear down our beliefs.”
“I don’t believe so,” DiNardo said. “I know many of them and they are as honest as you and I.”
“You really think so?”
“They are trying to understand how things work. On Mars, they are trying to puzzle out how the Martians lived. And how they died.”
“But they’re always changing their minds. They’re always putting up some theory about this or that. And their theories always attack religion and God.”
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