Red Planet Run (22 page)

“So, Star,” Nick said. “You will go back to your ship now, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Or—” He paused delicately. “You could stay here.”

I must have looked blank, because he huffed out an impatient sigh at my obtuseness. “With me. Tonight.”

I still didn’t get it. I think I thought that part of me died with Caleb.

Nick moved pretty fast for someone of his bulk. The next thing I knew I had that luxuriant beard and several chins and all three of his bellies pressing up against me and two tree-trunk-sized arms wrapped around me. The last time somebody had tried that, he’d wound up in traction. I kept very still within Nick’s embrace.

His voice rumbled up out of his chest like a bass played strictly in G. “Your children tell me your husband is dead, yes?”

“Yes.”

“For these twelve years and more, yes?”

“And more,” I echoed.

“And you have not—?”

“No. I have not.”

“This is a very long time,” he observed.

A very long time.

Nick put one massive hand beneath my chin and kissed me. His beard tickled. He kissed me again and murmured a few sweet nothings in my ear.

I always go a little weak at the knees at the sound of English spoken with an accent. I stayed. Nick was a kind and generous lover. It felt good to be held again.

The following Monday all hands were involved in routine maintenance on board the
Kayak,
and Paddy said, “What’s that you’re humming, Mom?”

“What?” I had to think, and when I realized, I think I may even have blushed a little. “Oh. ‘Moscow Nights’.”

“Pretty tune,” she said solemnly. I gave her a sharp look but her expression was perfectly sober.

“I like it, too,” Sean called down the curve.

“Yeah,” I said, and I grinned at Paddy. “Me, too.”

· · ·

We stayed at Vernadsky for four months, waiting out the storm season. We worked side by side with the New Martians, tilling their fields, tending their animals, cleaning their air scrubbers, helping with the thousand and one chores that come with being a homeowner, especially a homeowner on Mars. We swam often in the ocean biome, spent an inordinate amount of time at the very top of the mountain biome letting the wind blow through our hair, and waded through the jungle biome hunting for a sighting of the bush babies. I saw the Lady of Shalott from time to time, always at a distance, always rocking, always crooning to her invisible baby.

At solstice there was a harvest festival, with feasting and dancing to a three-piece band, and I dusted off my guitar and brought it in. It was worth it to see the expressions on the twins’ faces when I opened my mouth and a not half-bad soprano came out. I spelled the band with “The Hills of Connemara” and “The Green Hills of Earth,” and taught the Martians every sea chanty I’d ever learned, starting with “Blow Ye Winds” and finishing up with “Rolling Down to Old Maui,” which they all loved because of the verse featuring the cold Kamchatka Sea. When the balalaikas took over again I saw maidens with garlands of marigolds in their hair making merry with Sean. Paddy sat sipping punch surrounded by half the Martian male population. Both sightings would have alarmed me if I’d been given time to think about it. There was even vodka—no wonder the potato patch was so big—and I found myself matching shot for shot with Nick, who outweighed me by fifty kays, and awoke the next morning with a surprisingly clear head and a Russian the size of Dubuque taking enthusiastic advantage of me. Clearly there was nothing to do but cooperate.

When the skies cleared once again and we prepared to lift ship, Nick said, “You must go?”

I thought of Helen. “Yes.”

“Why?”

I shrugged and spread my hands. “Got to see what’s there.”

He looked at me oddly. “What do you expect to find?”

“At Cydonia? I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.” I looked at him. “You could come with us. Always room for one more.”

His refusal was probably the most graceful and painless rejection I’d ever received. “No, Starushka. The drillers have struck a pocket of sweet water, and soon we will be adding another cube to the ocean biome. No, you go.” He snatched me up—I’d never felt petite before in my life until I met Nikolai Yevtushenko—and kissed me long and hard. “But come back. And make it soon.”

I promised I would. A week later we lifted off and set course for 40 degrees 86 minutes north and 120 degrees east. It wasn’t until we were three days out that I discovered the pair of golden-crowned sparrows in Paddy’s room. “They’re both male, right?” I said hopefully after the first shock passed. Paddy shook her head. “Both female?” Nope. Sean avoided my glance.

I could hear the rumble of Nick’s laughter from a thousand kilometers distant. I only hoped the sparrows weren’t horny, and if they were, that they were at least infertile.

Can these bones live?

 

—Ezekiel 37:3

 

“WE’RE NOT GOING TO BYPASS
Olympus Mons, are we, Mom?”

“Which way is the wind blowing?”

“South-southwest,” Sean replied promptly.

“Then I don’t see how we can miss it.”

He whooped and charged down to Sciences to tell Paddy, leaving me to pop both jibs for a run before the wind.

The Tharsis uplift was an extra-large bulge of Martian crust that occurred at almost exactly the same latitude on Mars that the island of Hawaii did on Terra, that the Great Red Spot appeared on Jupiter, that Perry Austin’s volcanoes erupted in on Io, that some of the major ring formations occurred on Saturn, and that the Great Dark Spot manifests on Neptune. This regular recurrence of interesting planetary phenomena had to do with the vorticular fluid dynamics in the formation of planets. Every planetary geologist I’d ever met was more than happy to instruct me in Platonic solids and tetrahedral geometry, so I usually ran when a planetologist made a move in my direction. I’ve never been all that interested in the way planets form. They are the gift of a benevolent universe. It’s enough that they’re there and I can get down on them and poke around.

There is of course no sea on Mars, so no sea level. Instead, the mean level of Martian topography rejoiced in the term “datum surface.” Mars’ datum surface was the altitude against which other topographical features were measured, and was what the zero meant on the
Kayak
’s altimeter. Mars is shaped like an egg with a soft shell that had been dropped once on the narrow end; most of the northern hemisphere is below datum surface, some of it to the tune of two and a half kilometers. Whereas most of the southern hemisphere rises higher than the datum surface, from two and a half to six-plus kilometers higher, as witness Vernadsky’s altitude.

On the whole, I disapproved of the design. I’d never build a habitat that rudely shaped—just think of trying to get the gravity right when you put on spin. Ever try to throw a pot with all that wet clay even just a little off-center? No, thank you. Centrifugal force, unlike gravity (so far), was a force that could be generated, tamed, and made to serve, but if you’re smart you don’t ever get into its cage without whip and chair firmly in hand.

However much I disapproved, Olympus Mons was the crowning jewel in the Tharsis bulge, the largest volcano in the Solar System. The
Kayak
was incapable of making the summit, 27,450 meters, an altitude at which Mars’ already tenuous grip on its atmosphere was at its feeblest. The twins bemoaned the fact that they wouldn’t be able to look at the caldera (a mere 3,050 meters deep and a paltry 81 kilometers wide), but even they had to admit that there was plenty to see at the lower latitudes. Olympus Mons was the size of Arizona and, like its companion volcanoes at Tharsis, very like Mauna Loa in its gradual rise. It was so big and it weighed so much that the Martian crust couldn’t hold it up; the surface of the planet itself sank beneath it, so that a kind of trough encircled the entire mountain like a drainage ditch. Martian gravity was stronger on Tharsis Montes than anywhere else on the Red Planet—big surprise.

The sky had faded from pink to a pinkish kind of azure, and the way the light slid around the gentle slope of the enormous volcano the curve of the terrain was so pronounced it was as if we were looking at Mars from orbit. A wisp of shadow caught my eye. “What’s that? Down there, to your left.”

“I don’t know, Mom,” Paddy said. “Doesn’t really look like fog or haze, does it?”

“All the fog should be burned off by this time, anyway,” Sean said, peering over my shoulder.

The hint of white tantalized me, but the sun was lowering inexorably into the west and we still hadn’t found a place to drop the hook overnight. Get thee behind me, Satan. “Time to find us a parking space. Mark that spot. We’ll take a closer look first thing in the morning. Paddy, man the jib controls just in case. Sean, stand by the altimeter.”

“Jib controls, aye.”

“Altimeter holding steady at twelve thousand meters,” Sean reported.

“Eek. Nobody look down.” I blew some more air, and the pockmarked, cratered surface of Olympus and its environs grew clearer in our windows.

“Looks like God used it for target practice,” Sean commented.

Paddy agreed. “This whole planet is just lousy with craters, isn’t it?”

“Not the northern hemisphere, though,” Sean replied. “How come?”

“Good question. Let’s drop a rock bug and take some pictures.”

The rock bug, or roboprospector, was essentially a robot with a bag and a hammer designed to random-sample geologic specimens and then home in on the
Kayak
’s signal by liftoff the next day. We dropped the bug and shot spectra and pixels all the way down, mooring eventually inside a small splosh crater halfway down the volcano’s eastern slope.

At sunup we played scissors-paper-stone and I lost, so I suited up again and went out to retrieve the rock bug. It was nuzzling up to the Number Three leg like the runt of the litter goes for Mama. Sean was standing by in Sciences and I set the database to fast forward. “Data received,” Sean said over my headset, and I reset and restowed the rock bug.

It was almost anticlimactic to look up and see an automated probe trundle over the rim of the crater. I was startled, and for a moment disbelieving—Oh Helen, Helen, and you told me we’d be all alone on our Red Planet! There is no truth in you. It was a measure of how relaxed I was by then that I didn’t immediately blast the probe to bits with my laser pistol, which was a good thing. When we—the twins suited up and joined me—went out for a closer look, it turned out to be an Agoot Gallivanter, the eighth in a series of planetary probes launched every two years by Maria Mitchell Observatory to whatever System destination Tori deemed worthy of study. It looked like a very large centipede, a segmented, tracked vehicle with a solar-paneled umbrella for power, cameras pointing in every direction including up, and waldoes busily stuffing anything they could grab into its spectrometrical maw. I toyed with the idea of interrupting its data transmission to send Tori a howdy, but I didn’t want to mess with the equipment— didn’t want to tempt the Great Galactic Ghoul.

The twins were not so restrained. That evening I discovered they had fed one of the waldoes a peanut butter sandwich; “just to see if Tori’s paying attention,” was how Paddy explained it, her eyes big and blue and oh-so-innocent. I stamped and snorted and made maternal noises of disapproval, and then I went to my room and smothered my laughter in a pillow. I would have killed to have been a fly on the wall at Maria Mitchell Observatory when that transmission came in.

· · ·

“Why do you think life never developed on Mars?” Sean said at breakfast the next morning.

“That’s easy,” Paddy said, her mouth full of herbed eggs.

“No water. Not bad, Mom. These are almost edible.”

“You overwhelm me, Paddy.”

“But there was water once, or else what are all those dry river beds we’ve been charting?”

“Rivers are one thing. You need a stable body of water to develop life forms. Ponds of liquid water may never have existed long enough in any one place on Mars to allow living organisms to evolve. And then there’s the ultraviolet. It does sort of sanitize the surface.”

Sean’s brow puckered. “Did the lack of atmosphere and the resulting flood of UV cause the water to boil off? Or did the water boil off and then the atmosphere, and then the UV got in?”

“Maybe there never was enough gravity on Mars to hold down an atmosphere,” Paddy suggested, and snickered. “Remember the Mons.”

Sean winced but persevered. “Perhaps there once were organisms—”

“You think we should be looking for fossils?” Paddy sounded skeptical.

Sean shrugged. “It’s possible. We never did get really down and dirty in some of the deeper channels of the Valley. Maybe there is life here, just in long-term hibernation.” He stared through the port, as if he looked hard enough he would find some sign.

“It’d be nice,” Paddy agreed, “but hardly likely. They’d have found something at Vernadsky by now.”

I sighed. “I don’t need this.”

“Need what?”

“Mother.”

The twins looked mystified. “What about her?”

“If there is life on Mars, no matter how microbiotic, she’ll say we should leave it alone. She’ll probably say we should leave, period.”

“ ‘Never underestimate the tenacity and stubbornness of life,’ ” Paddy quoted Helen.

“ ‘Don’t sell life short,’ ” Sean counter-quoted. “ ‘It’s more ingenious than we think.’ Maybe Emaa’s right.”

“Still, you never know. Mars is the closest thing we’ve got in the Solar System to a sterile planet. Who knows what kinds of skeletal mummies we’re going to find in what kind of sedimentary tombs? Sermons in stones, books in the running brooks.”

“Maybe Helen’s right. Maybe at Cydonia we’ll find out what happened to Prometheus.”