Red Planet Run (27 page)

“Amedeo, I think I hear Dr. Woolley calling you,” I said.

Dr. Woolley was at the Ghoul some kilometers distant, but Amadeo gave an inarticulate murmur and brushed past me. Paddy met my eyes calmly. “Yes, Mom?”

This was going to be difficult. I took a deep breath and the plunge. “You’re sixteen years old, Paddy.”

“So I am,” she agreed cordially. “So?”

“Don’t get defensive.”

“I’m not getting defensive. You said I was sixteen and I agreed. So?”

Very difficult. “All I meant was that you’re sixteen, is all, and that sixteen is a little young for those kind of, er, shenanigans.”

“Sex,” she said helpfully. “You think I’m too young to have sex.”

“Yes,” I said, meeting her eyes bravely, “I do. You are too young, and I wish you’d wait.” I spread my hands. “I know it’s up to you; I can’t watch you every minute.”

“You could trust me,” she suggested.

“I could,” I agreed, “and I do. But you’re at an impressionable age, and so are your hormones, and you’re all going to have to realize that at this stage of your life Caspar Milquetoast is going to look like Lazarus Long simply because he’s got something you want.” With real feeling, I added, “And Amedeo certainly qualifies.”

The twinkle lurking in the back of her eyes was there if you looked for it. “I heard that.” She thought. “What about kissing?”

“Is even just a little kissing fair to Amedeo? No, Paddy; think about it for a minute. You know what the situation is with the expedition; sexually it’s artificial, to say the least. Is it fair to tease Amedeo with what he can’t have?”

“I suppose not,” she said grudgingly.

“Okay, then. Hands off?”

“Hands off.”

I put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “I know, there is no itch you want to scratch worse than this one. But you are only sixteen, and it isn’t a decision to be taken lightly, or on impulse. You don’t have to wait till you’re married, or even in love, but if it’s just propinquity…” I made a face. “Take your time, Paddy. Making love is the closest you’ll ever get to another human being, and when the time and the guy are right, believe me, it’s worth the wait. Okay?”

“Okay.” She eyed me curiously. “How was it with you and Dad?”

“None of your business,” I said in my primmest voice, but I made no effort to hold back the grin that spread across my face.

She laughed, and we hugged and kissed, and then I got out the first-aid kit and gave both her and Sean a contraceptive implant, something I should have done before turning them loose inside Vernadsky, where the opportunities for letting propinquity have its head had been far greater than at Cydonia. “What’s going on?” Sean said plaintively. “Ouch!”

I swabbed his buttock with antiseptic. “There. You’re set for five years. Paddy?”

“I sure wish somebody’d tell me what’s been going on around here,” Sean grumbled, and stalked out of the room, hauling up his jumpsuit. Paddy, rubbing her behind, followed, presumably to fulfill his wish. I suited up and ran Amedeo down in the campsite on the rim. “She’s only sixteen, Amedeo,” I said. Why change a winning opening line? “She’s tall for her age, and more mature, but she’s still just a kid.”

Looking like he’d just robbed a bank and been caught cash in hand, he muttered, “I know. It’s just that she was there and so was I, and she was curious.” He caught my expression. “All right, and so was I. It won’t happen again, Star, I give you my word.” He paused. “I do like her, you know. I like them both. They’re good kids. I do want them as friends. Both of them.”

“Hold that thought. It’s not fair to tease friends, Amedeo, especially given our situation here.”

“I know; believe me I know. I am sorry.”

Magnanimous in victory, I bestowed my gracious forgiveness and went outside to lean up against the nearest bulkhead and take the first real breath of air I’d had in three hours.

Art, on the other hand, wasn’t Paddy’s problem; he was mine. The Cydonia team photographer, as well as ship’s co-pilot, he made Sean his closest and most personal friend and was underfoot from dawn to dusk. He was a good photographer and was sincerely interested in Sean’s work, so it took a while for the twins to catch on. When they did, they naturally found it all too hilarious, and delighted in finding excuses, the more idiotic the better, to leave us alone together.

I was tempted. He was the original long, tall Texan, a slow-walking, slow-talking man with knowing gray eyes and a lazy grin, and if there’d been anything remotely resembling privacy within a hundred square kilometers, I might have taken him up on the promise in that grin. There wasn’t. I didn’t.

· · ·

The archaeologists’ campsite was made of aerogel cells; prefab, pressurized foam structures that, released from their containers, inhaled and expanded into cubicles placed side by side. Known across the Solar System as “Camp in a Can,” they snuggled together in a hollow on the rim of the crater. Sticky on assembly, they accumulated local color at a geometric rate, and shortly looked as if they’d been there as long as the Tholus. Inside, the walls were the original color of the aerogel mixture, a kind of hospital green. “Tacky,” Paddy said under her breath. “I bet we could—” I looked at her and she shut up. Furnishings leaned toward the utilitarian; nearly every item, including chairs and beds, were inflated. They’d knocked out the walls of four cubicles placed in a square to create a large common room in which they ate and played; another four cubes was the work area and there was a Lilliputian cubicle for each of the couples and singles.

I took one look at Stalag 17 and issued a nightly invitation to dinner to each expedition member on a rotational basis, with the proviso that weekends were reserved for the twins and me to recuperate. The Cydonia Expedition was well-stocked in essential foodstuffs and no one ever came not bearing gifts, so it wasn’t a strain on our pantry.

Our second day in the hole with the Ghoul we broke out our wings, climbed up to the rim of the crater, and launched toward the pillar. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done, since the Ghoul could have nudged me into plowing a furrow with my nose. But it didn’t, supporting the argument that it wasn’t meant to discourage an interest demonstrated inside planetary atmosphere. The three of us spent a day sectioning and quartering the floor of the splosh crater that housed the pillar. We relayed what we saw from the air to Sukenik, the surveyor, on the ground.

The longer I looked at the crater, the more convinced I became that it wasn’t a naturally occurring geological phenomenon. The walls were too equal in height, the slant from base to rim too even, the centering of the pillar too exact on a crater floor that, beneath the cloaking effect of centuries of sand drift, was still entirely too flat. “Although,” Sestieri said over my headset, “it could have been constructed from a previously existing crater. From what we’ve seen so far, it would be in character for whoever built this place to take advantage of whatever topography was handy. There’s the Cliff on the edge of that impact crater, for example. And we’re pretty sure the Face was carved out of a pre-existing mound. These guys never wasted a move if they could avoid it.”

“True,” I admitted. “I can’t fault them for that; I’m a charter member of the Keep-It-Simple Department myself.”

“Why don’t you make a circuit of the exterior rim? While you’re up?”

From the corner of one eye I saw one of the twins falter a little. “Tomorrow. We’ve been up long enough for one day.”

“Oh. Well, okay.” She sounded a little disgruntled, and I didn’t blame her. I would have killed for my view, too, and I’ve always disliked getting my data second hand. The Cydonia Expedition had not included wings in its mission inventory, and lacked the skill or the equipment to fabricate individual pairs from our design, although Howard and Art had hopes of jury-rigging an observation balloon from an aerogel, with the help of our He-maker.

That evening, after dinner guest Agatha had departed to the general relief of all hands, Paddy said over a game of cutthroat pinochle, “That Ghoul sure is a nice piece of engineering.”

“Uh-huh.” I concentrated on the deal.

She sorted her cards. Paddy was always very methodical in sorting her cards, by suit and numerically, diamonds, spades, hearts, clubs. The diamonds began on her left with the highest card in the suit and ended on the right with the lowest club. She’d been sorting her cards this way for ten years, and still couldn’t figure out why she always went out the back door.

Sean gathered his cards together in an untidy fan, didn’t bother to sort them by suit or by strength, and left them that way.

Paddy adjusted what I was pretty sure was a spade, so that each card was neatly spaced between its neighbors. “Mom?”

I compromised; I sorted, but only by suit, not by value, and never put my suits in the same order from hand to hand. “What?”

“I’ve been thinking.” The tone of her voice made me look up. “If the Cydonians, if whoever it was who built this place could build a Ghoul to protect its structures from falling meteors…” She hesitated, her expression troubled.

I laid down my hand, which had nothing but nines in it anyway. “If they did?”

She took a deep breath and looked at me, serious, a little stern. “If they could build a Ghoul strong enough to do that, could they build a—” She hesitated again. “I don’t know, a weapon of some kind?” She saw my expression. “I know, I heard Art say they hadn’t found anything. But they haven’t looked, either.”

Sean and I were silent. It wasn’t as if we hadn’t conjured up that Boojum out of the dark reaches of the night ourselves.

“Maybe a weapon strong enough to destroy a planet?” Her face lost color beneath its dark skin as she spoke her worst fear out loud. “Could Helen be right? Could the Cydonians have blown up Prometheus?”

“I don’t know, Paddy,” I said gently. “That’s one of the things we’re here to find out.”

“I don’t know if I want to know that,” Sean muttered.

“Oh, sweetheart.” I reached across the table and took one of his hands in mine. With my other I reached for Paddy’s. “Is this the young man who only last week preached the moral imperative of establishing the facts, no matter where we find them or what uncomfortable things they tell us?”

Her head down, Paddy said, “What’s the use? If Sean’s right and we were planted, what’s the use of any of it?” Suddenly angry, her head came up, eyes blazing. “Somebody plants us here like bacteria on a wet sponge, and then maybe they decide they don’t like the fact that we evolved with binocular vision and so they swat us out of the sky and we don’t have anything to say about it. Is that right? Is that fair?”

“What’s really bothering you, Paddy?” Sean asked wryly. “Spit it out.”

“I don’t know.” Frustrated, she pounded her free fist on the table. “I don’t know! All I know is I’m going to hate it if we were put here, instead of grew here on our own. What does that say about the universe? Every new star I find, has it been put there, too? Every new planet I identify orbiting around that star, has it been incubated and colonized by somebody bigger and smarter and stronger, who can end the experiment on a whim? Or maybe not even a whim, maybe he just accidentally knocks the Petri dish off the counter with his elbow.”

“Cydonia’s giving you an inferiority complex,” Sean said. He held up his hand and said quickly, “No, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that, Paddy.”

Her shoulders slumped. “I know. You’re probably right, anyway.” She looked at him, her smile rueful. “Be careful what you wish for, little boy, you might just get it.”

He matched her smile with his own. “ ‘All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untrodden world.’ ”

It was time for me to step in and from the wellspring of superior age and experience draw forth words of authority and comfort and encouragement, to buck up my little band of merry men, to reassure them that because we were right and virtuous and showered once a day, in the end we would prevail over the Sheriff of Nottingham, no matter how many evil King Johns backed him up or how great his strength of arms. Our strength was as the strength of ten because our hearts were pure.

I understood their feelings all too well. Like Paddy, I’d never taken kindly to being limp in the hands of Fate. Like Sean, I’d never turned my back on the truth, no matter how unpalatable. There were no easy answers. There never were, or at least none to the questions that mattered.

Today’s great thought. Star Svensdotter, resident philosopher. I was glad I hadn’t said it out loud.

I picked up my hand. I just knew there was a jack of clubs in the kitty; I felt it in my bones. “I’ll open.”

“Sixteen,” Paddy said.

“Twenty,” Sean said.

I threw in my hand. Paddy ran up the bid and got it, then went in the hole when Sean shot the moon. I only hoped his luck ran as well in real life.

Does the road wind uphill all the way? Yes, to the very end.

 

—Christina Rossetti

 

A WEEK AFTER WE ARRIVED
, the gravediggers got a message from the Champollions to break camp and move the forty-plus kilometers east to the Pyramid. I was all for it; we’d pretty much exhausted the possibilities of the Ghoul. After three days in the air, the area had been mapped down to the smallest pebble. We took a series of core samples, over Woolley’s strenuous objections—we might do irreparable damage to something below the surface, he didn’t say what; we should wait for infrared satellite reconnaissance and spectrographic study, in spite of that the fact that there were no satellites orbiting Mars at the moment and none scheduled to do so any time soon. I was beginning to think Helen was smarter than she knew when she sent me on this trip; I overbore Woolley with my air of female dominance and told Sestieri to get on with it. He harrumphed and stamped off in a rage, and she sent me a look of burning gratitude and got on with it.