Red Planet Run (14 page)

“What’re these?” Sean said, staring into another locker a little farther around the hull.

“What?” I peered up, following his pointing finger, and grinned to myself. “Them’re wings, flyboy.”

He was quick, was my son. “You mean like on Terranova, and in the Bat’s Cave on Luna?”

“Exactly like that. I had Crip build us each a set when I knew for sure we were coming to Mars. I figure in one-third gee we ought to be able to log a few hours in the air.”

Paddy’s hands had stilled in their task. “Flying, Mom? Really?”

“Really.”

I saw excitement spark in both faces, but then their eyes met and they remembered how determined they were to dislike Mars and everything to do with it, and the spark died.

It hurt. I was surprised how much, and determined not to let it show. They wouldn’t let me be Mom again yet, fine. I stayed captain.

I would have yanked out all ten fingernails without benefit of anesthetic before I’d admit I was taking the easy way out. Discipline is always easier than love and of the two far less dangerous. By the time I realized how much this enforced mental and emotional separation hurt me and my children, it was almost too late.

· · ·

There was still a lot of work to be done before the
Kayak
would be shipshape enough to lift off, although after I assured and reassured myself we weren’t going to spring a leak and that we were going to have enough water to drink, I cut back our work hours to eight. That may have been a mistake.

For me, the free evenings were long and quiet. Far too quiet. A creak from either envelope, a rasp of a line against the side of the gondola, a murmur from either twin, and I was instantly on my feet, alert, ready to respond. One morning I woke to a horrendous cracking, tearing sound far above my head. I was heading for the hull breach alarm in my birthday suit when I realized the sound was merely a night’s worth of ice cascading down from the crown of the Montgolfier as the coated surface of the envelope heated beneath the rays of the rising sun.

I was an efficient and dedicated sleeper. On Outpost this had been no problem, as Archy had screened all my calls and knew not to wake me for anything less than an armed revolt. Now I had enough peace and quiet to keep a dead man happy and I couldn’t sleep through a little ice falling off the roof.

After three decades of so many people, so many department heads and employees and employers having first dibs on my attention, my time was my own.

I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with it.

I spent one evening hanging over Sean’s shoulder in the darkroom, until I switched on the right light at the wrong time and inadvertently overexposed a whole series of shots of some strata in the canyon wall Paddy was interested in. I’ve never been shown the door with more icy politeness.

I went around to the science station and offered to help Paddy reconstruct the series on the spectrometer. I didn’t know Martian strata from spumoni, but I was willing to try. Finally Paddy said, “Mom, give it a rest, will you? If you’ll get out of my way I’ll have the series back on disk in an hour.”

I couldn’t pace; there wasn’t room. One morning at breakfast I noticed that the cuticles on one hand had begun to bleed freely into the reconstituted scrambled eggs. Shocked, I examined the tips of my fingers. I’d been biting my fingernails without knowing it. In my life I’d never bitten my nails. I raised my head and found both twins regarding me with identical expressions of apprehension.

“Maybe you should read a book or something, Mom,” Paddy suggested.

“Yeah,” Sean said. “You brought enough of them with you.”

“I did?” I tried to remember.

That evening I broke out my own personal luggage allowance. I hadn’t given a lot of thought to spare time, since it had been so long since I’d had any. I hadn’t read much since Terranova, and after I married Caleb… well, if I were truthful, I told myself briskly, I hadn’t read much since those days on Norton Sound, trying to poke holes into a hydrocarbon reservoir that, for a change, turned out to be there. I wasn’t all that sure I remembered how.

In the rush to pack the
Kayak,
filling my personal baggage allowance was just another task in a long line of Things That Must Be Done Before Dropkick. Personal baggage allowance? I’d said to myself. What’d I tell the twins? Right, a hobby or something. Well, I used to read. I rooted out my supply of cartridges and tipped them into a bag sitting on a scale. The red numbers on the digital readout ran up. My eyes wandered while the readout made up its mind and encountered the guitar hanging on the wall of my cabin. I walked over and struck a chord. The resultant jangle made me wince. I hadn’t played it in twelve years. But it was just about the right weight. I set it on the scale along with the bag of cartridges. I looked at the readout. I added another handful of cartridges, took out one, and sealed the bag. There. All done.

I might as well have packed with a shovel.

On the
Kayak,
I picked up the cartridge on the top of the pile without reading the title, and curled up in a comfortable chair in the galley. I slipped the cartridge into the headset, settled the headset around my ears, and flipped it on. I hung my legs over the opposite arm of the chair and doggedly began not to bite my nails.

The cartridge hadn’t been rewound and the projection on my corneas began in mid-scene, the words sliding rapidly up the page. I adjusted the scroll speed and the letters came into focus. “Go bind thou up young dangling apricocks, which like unruly children cause their sire to stoop with oppression of their prodigal weight.”

Old Bill not only knew about unfit kings; he knew all about surly kids, too. I changed cartridges to something a little less close to home and restarted the headset.

Pawing through that knapsack of tapes was like rediscovering the Seldovia Public Library when I was five. For history I had Branch’s witty two-volume biography of Martin Luther King, Nordhoff’s irreverent look at the causes of the Third World War, Mattingly’s you-are-there account of the Spanish Armada, the log of Christopher Columbus (he’d had his problems with ship’s crews, too), Rhodes’s fascinating histories of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, Foote’s eerily empathic trilogy of the American Civil War, and every acerbic, exasperated word Barbara Tuchman had ever written about imbeciles in power anywhere. Johnny Ozone would have liked Barbara Tuchman.

For poetry I had several anthologies as well as the collected works of Frost and Don Marquis—I’d almost forgotten who Archy had been named for. For literature I had Thoreau, and for fun I had a variety of popular authors, Georgette Heyer and Nevil Shute and John D. MacDonald and Ross Thomas and Margaret Atwood, as well as some more recent works by Braz Albana and Julitta Mistral, writers Helen had recommended, whom I had never gotten around to reading.

Not bad, I decided, for packing with a shovel.

My cuticles healed and my fingernails grew back, but I was still restless. The atmosphere inside the gondola persisted in being colder than the atmosphere outside. We were plugging into enough permafrost to mine an adequate supply of oxygen to resupply the tanks on our goonsuits; I started taking long walks between dinner and dusk. I followed the tracks of Johnny Ozone’s
Runamuck
up over the rim and followed my nose from there.

The terrain was always magnificent, if not always easy going. I saw massive mesas of smooth, vertical slabs of stone, striated in layers of ages above, tumbled mounds of epochal debris below. Chasms opened up suddenly beneath my feet to slam together again a meter away, next to rusty red landslides the size of Rhode Island, next to smooth slip-faults of stone flat enough to hit a racquet ball off of. So much evidence of ancient activity somehow soothed the jagged edges of my nerves, and the walks tired me enough to sleep through a glacier rolling off the roof.

All in all, I think it would be fair to say that our first six weeks on Mars did not go well. Sean sulked (there is no other word), until he reminded me of the Andy Capp cartoon character who all the time ran around beneath his own personal rain cloud. Paddy was so efficiently noncommittal as to be almost invisible, her main purpose being to draw no attention whatever to herself, no matter how trivial or transient. I was unrelentingly perky, a self-proclaimed cheerleader without a pep squad. The Good Ship Lollipop we weren’t.

It was partly our situation. The three of us hadn’t spent this much time alone together since their father was alive and, simply put, we got on each other’s nerves. I’d told Helen I’d wanted people to stop looking to me for all the answers; I didn’t have them, I never had. What I didn’t know then was how much I’d miss the questions.

I was aware (had been made most painstakingly aware) that I had uprooted the twins from everything and everyone that was familiar to them, and I retained just enough common sense to realize that they had every right to be angry and resentful. Nothing would be accomplished by trying to force them not to be. I waited, patiently, for overtures that never came.

It wasn’t fair. The twins had each other. I had no one.

I was lonely.

The Sunday afternoon this realization struck me I was pretending to read Shelby Foote, but was really listening to the low hum of muted voices coming from the stateroom opposite mine, wishing I was part of the conversation, knowing I would not be welcome. And there, slipping in between the second battle of Bull Run and Chancellorsville, Caleb’s dark face looked up at me, grin wide and white, green eyes amused, black hair a riot of tight curls, one eyebrow twisted up by an old scar. I leapt to my feet as if stung by a bee, made a beeline for the goonsuit locker and the hatch in that order, and was beating feet for the nearest horizon shortly thereafter, striking out recklessly, choosing a previously unexplored path at random. My stride ate up the ground, and unfamiliar landmarks slid rapidly past. “Lonely,” I scoffed, panting up a slope of loose talus. “Poor baby, can’t handle a little solitude. Hah! Probably just can’t stand your own company! Of all the pathetic, adolescent—”

I reached the top of the slope and halted, breathing hard. It was because Caleb had been a soldier, and I’d been reading about soldiers. It was because Caleb had been black, and I’d been reading about the Civil War. It was because Caleb’s death had been absurd and useless, and I’d been reading of absurd, useless battles that ended in 25,000 casualties a day. It was
not
because I was lonely, it was
not
because I was grieving; I was all over Caleb’s death, I
was.
“Goddammit, men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love!”

It does not do to yell inside the helmet of a pressure suit. My voice echoed off the inside of the smooth, hard surface, beating against my eardrums in ringing waves, and it drove me to my knees. I shut my eyes and clenched my teeth and waited out the echo.

When I opened my eyes again, for the first time I focused on what was at the top of the slope.

My first thought was that, against all expectations and assurances to the contrary, Mars was proving to be awfully crowded.

It looked like a toppled column of thin, rounded silica, but the colors were all wrong, dull brass and steel-gray and leaden silver. So were the surfaces, polished to a metallic gleam only partially masked by a thin accumulation of red, powdery dust.

It was a habitat, an artificial, man-made dwelling. Or it had been. I took an involuntary step forward for a closer look and tripped over something.

It was a body.

Numbly, I knelt down, careless of the loose rock beneath the knees of my goonsuit. The body’s torso was almost severed at its waist. It was no longer a man or a woman, just a mummified husk, with all the life-giving moisture boiled out of it, the cardboard skin sunk into the bones, the head a grinning skull with an incongruously tousled mop of reddish hair, the hands curled into claws, the synthetic material of its clothes its only pitiful protection from the pitiless Martian atmosphere. Against my will, I was transported back in time and space to that horrible scene on Ceres and the memory of the dead weight of a dismembered hand. My breath came in shallow pants; a bead of sweat rolled down my nose. I felt a wave of nausea and checked it by sheer force of will.

“Chalk another one up to the Great Galactic Ghoul, Crip,” I said, determined on composure, if not nonchalance.

I looked further and had my worst fears confirmed. There were other bodies. Too many bodies, too many limbs from too many bodies, scattered haphazardly across the level ground in front of the burst structure like so much flotsam cast up by a plus tide.

It took me a minute to realize that none of them were suited up for outside work. It took another moment to realize that that couldn’t be right. What were these people doing outside in inside clothes?

I tried to think. A once-in-a-lifetime direct hit from a meteor, maybe? But that wouldn’t account for the way the hull of their habitat had been opened up.

A chill chased up my spine. Great Galactic Ghoul, my ass. I’d seen dead bodies in my time. I’d caused more than a few, if it came to that. There had been explosive decompression here, but all of the bodies had also taken current or post-ED hits from what must have been laser weapons at full charge, at close range. The edges of every wound I looked at were as neat as the open wound on the habitat itself, which had been sliced down its horizontal axis with almost surgical precision. That alone would have been sufficient to destroy all life inside, but that hadn’t been enough. These people had been sliced up like so much meat.

Like the freighter’s crew on Ceres.

The echo of Kwan’s amused, maniacal laughter was faint but clear.

I lumbered around the torn length of the bulkhead and was brought up short by letters, standing out stark and bold against a whole section of fuselage shaped down to a blunt point. Like the bow of the ship.

Of course. The cylindrical shape, the thinness of the metal bulkhead, the rectangular plastigraph tanks between the plasteel sandwich that must surely have held water and doubled as UV shielding. My head cleared a little. Of course. Not a habitat, a ship.