Return to Mars (27 page)

IT WAS BAD ENOUGH BEING YET ANOTHER DAUGHTER IN A FAMILY OF FOUR girls and only one boy. Being bright and physically attractive only made things worse. Being a dark-skinned Hindu young woman growing up in Melbourne among fair-haired Aussie males who were either tongue-tied around women or aggressively machismo did not help matters, either.

In grammar school the teachers called out her name as it was written in their records: V. J. Shektar. The other children immediately dubbed her Vijay and she happily adopted the name, more comfortable with it than Varuna Jarita, the names her parents had given her.

Her mother had dedicated her as a baby to the powerful goddess Sakti, whose name means “energy.” In the teeming Hindu pantheon, Sakti embodies both virginal innocence and bloodthirsty destruction: both an eternal virgin and the goddess of illicit pleasures.

Her father largely ignored her except to worry about where he could find the money for still another dowry on his slender salary as a CPA in a small accounting agency whose clientele was almost exclusively local Indian business firms.

The family’s youngest daughter, she was born with spirit. Her mother tried to instill maidenly virtues in Vijay while her older sisters started dating and then, one by one, dropped out of secondary school to get married and start having babies of their own. Her one brother went on to college, his father’s pride.

Vijay refused to quit her classes and find a husband. When her father threatened to beat some obedience into her, she left home and lived on her own with several friends, working nights in restaurants or video stores or anyplace that would hire an earnest, honest high school senior who had no intention of letting any man seduce her.

She went on to Melbourne University on the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, promising to repay the state most of her college expenses out of her income after she graduated. Still living on her own, she easily qualified for a medical school scholarship. Her mother despaired of her ever getting married and starting a proper family. Her lather succumbed to cancer in her final school year, admitting only on his deathbed that he was proud of what she had accomplished.

By the time Vijay was doing her internship in the university hospital she had learned that sex can be used not merely for fun, but for power. Usually, she chose fun, although often enough she enjoyed wielding the power that sex lent her. While most of her female friends complained that Australian men were “either boors or boobs,” Vijay found that there were plenty of intelligent and thoughtful men in her world. Most of them were shy, at first, but that merely added to their charm, as far as she was concerned. For Vijay, sex was a way of learning rather than an all-consuming passion. She enjoyed the power it gave her, and she kept her freedom to choose who, and when, and what she wanted.

She got hurt, of course; more than once. But by the time she began practicing emergency medicine in the rundown hospital of the St. Kilda neighborhood where she had grown up, she considered herself an experienced woman of the world.

Unfortunately, she fell deeply in love with an older man, a physician who was already married. Vijay found that even a woman of the world can be tripped up by an urbane, well-to-do scoundrel who tells lies convincingly. By the time she finally faced the truth, she knew she had to get away from this man, away from Melbourne, away from Australia entirely. And she knew she would never again allow love to overwhelm her.

Her trip to California started as a vacation, a time to heal her emotional wounds and get some fresh air into her lungs. She stayed five years, starting a new career in space medicine. First with the American NASA and then with Masterson Aerospace Corporation, Vijay became a specialist in the effects of low gravity on the human body and mind.

She spent three ninety-day tours on space stations and was thinking about signing up for a year at Moonbase when she heard about the Second Mars Expedition.

Vijay Shektar won the position of physician/psychologist for the expedition. It was not easy. She had to prove herself in surgery, radiation medicine and even emergency dentistry. The competition was very exacting. But she won. Even though she promised herself she would not sleep with any of the decision-makers, she won the appointment anyway.

For Vijay had learned how to go after what she wanted. And she knew that if she worked hard enough, used all her strength and skills, she could usually get what she wanted.

The trick was to know what she wanted. That was the difficult part.

She thought of her patron goddess often. Love and destruction, the twin and inseparable attributes of Sakti. She did not believe in the ancient religion, but she was certain that love carried with it a terrible destructive power, a power that she was determined to keep from hurting her again.

FOLLOWING HIS ASTRONAUT TEAMMATE, MITSUO FUCHIDA CLAMBERED stiffly down the ladder from the plane’s cockpit and set foot on the top of the tallest mountain in the solar system.

In the pale light of the rising sun, it did not look like the top of a mountain to him. He had done a considerable amount of climbing in Japan and Canada and this was nothing like the jagged, snow-capped slabs of granite where the wind whistled like a hurled knife and the clouds scudded by below you.

Here he seemed to be on nothing more dramatic than a wide, fairly flat plain of bare basalt. Pebbles and larger rocks were scattered here and there, but not as thickly as they were back at the base dome. The craters that they had seen from the air were not visible here; at least, he saw nothing that looked like a crater.

But when he looked up he realized how high they were. The sky was a deep blue, instead of its usual butterscotch hue. The dust particles that reddened the sky of Mars were far below them. At this altitude on Earth they would be high up in the stratosphere.

Fuchida wondered if he could see any stars through his visor, maybe find Earth. He turned, trying to orient himself with the rising sun.

“Watch your step,” Rodriguez’s voice warned in his earphones. “It’s—”

Fuchida’s boot slid out from under him and he thumped painfully on his rear.

“… slippery,” Rodriguez finished lamely.

The astronaut shuffled carefully to Fuchida’s side, moving like a man crossing an ice rink in street shoes. He extended a hand to help the biologist up to his feet.

Stiff and aching from a night of sitting in the cockpit, Fuchida now felt a throbbing pain in his backside. I’ll have a nasty bruise there, he told himself. Lucky I didn’t land on the backpack and break the life-support rig.

“Feels like ice underfoot,” Rodriguez said.

“It couldn’t be frost, we’re up too high for water ice to form.”

“Dry ice?”

“Ah.” Fuchida nodded inside his helmet. “Dry ice. Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere condenses out on the cold rock.”

“Yep.”

“But dry ice isn’t slippery …”

“This stuff is.”

Fuchida thought quickly. “Perhaps the pressure of our boots on the dry ice causes a thin layer to vaporize.”

“So we get a layer of carbon dioxide gas under our boots.” Rodriguez immediately grasped the situation.

“Exactly. We skid along on a film of gas, like gas-lubricated ball bearings.”

“That’s gonna make it damned difficult to move around.”

Fuchida wanted to rub his butt, although he knew it was impossible inside the hard suit. “The sun will get rid of the ice.”

“I don’t think it’ll get warm enough up here to vaporize it.”

“It sublimes at seventy-eight point five degrees below zero, Celsius,” Fuchida said.

“At normal pressure,” Rodriguez pointed out.

Fuchida looked at the thermometer on his right cuff. “It’s already up to forty-two below,” he said, feeling cheerful for the first time. “Besides, the lower the pressure, the lower the boiling point.”

“Yeah. That’s right.”

“That patch must have been shaded by the plane’s wing,” Fuchida pointed out. “The rest of the ground seems clear.”

“Then let’s go to the beach and get a suntan,” Rodriguez said humorlessly.

“No, let’s go to the caldera, as planned.”

“You think it’s safe to walk around?”

Nodding inside his helmet, Fuchida took a tentative step. The ground felt smooth, but not slick. Another step, then another.

“Maybe we should’ve brought football cleats.”

“Not necessary. The ground’s okay now.”

Rodriguez grunted. “Be careful, anyway.”

“Yes, I will.”

While Rodriguez relayed his morning report from his suit radio through the more powerful transmitter in the plane, Fuchida unlatched the cargo bay hatch and slid their equipment skid to the ground. Again he marveled that this plane of plastic and gossamer could carry them and their gear. It seemed quite impossible, yet it was true.

“Are you ready?” he asked Rodriguez, feeling eager now to get going.

“Yep. Lemme check the gyrocompass …”

Fuchida did not wait for the astronaut’s check. He knew the direction to the caldera as if its coordinates were printed on his heart.

Jamie woke up and found that he was alone. His eyes felt gummy, and he wanted nothing more than another hour or two of sleep. But the clock’s red digital display said 6:58, and seven A.M. was the official start of the working day.

He sat up and smiled. The bunk smelled of sex. It had been great: rushed and eager at first, demanding, and then more languid, gentler, more loving. They had talked, whispered to each other, between the risings of passion. Jamie learned a little of what a dark-skinned woman had to overcome in a male-dominated world: family, school, even in her profession Vijay had not had an easy time of it. Being so damned attractive worked against her as much as for her.

He blinked, then rubbed at his eyes, trying to remember how much he had told her about himself. He recalled mentioning Al and the hidden streak of Navaho mysticism that his grandfather revealed now and then. He told her about the sky dancers, and promised to show them to her tonight.

Tonight. Jamie’s smile faded into a troubled uncertainty. Was last night a one-time fling, or is this the start of something serious? He did not know. The last time he got involved with a woman, it had started on Mars and ended in divorce.

With a troubled sigh he got to his feet and began to face the day.

Pale morning sun slanted through the rover’s curved windshield as Dex drove steadily across the rolling, rock-strewn plain. Each pebble and gully cast long early morning shadows. The sunlight looks different here, Dex thought. Weaker, pinker … something.

He and Craig had been underway for nearly an hour when Dex saw a red light suddenly glare up from the control panel.

“Hey, Wiley,” he called over his shoulder. “We’ve got a problem here.”

Craig shuffled into the cockpit and sat in the right seat, muttering, “What’s this ‘we,’ white man?”

Dex jabbed a finger at the telltale.

“Uh-oh,” said Craig.

“That doesn’t sound so good, Wiley.”

“Fuel cells’re discharging. They shouldn’t oughtta do that.”

“We don’t have to stop, do we?”

“Naw,” said Craig. “I’ll take a look.”

He headed for the rear of the rover module. The fuel cells were the backup electrical system, to he used if the solar panels outside were unable to charge up the batteries that ran the rover’s systems at night. The fuel cells on this old rover were powered by hydrogen and oxygen, which meant that their “waste” product was drinkable water. The fuel cells on the newer rovers ran on methane and oxygen generated from permafrost water and the Martian atmosphere.

Trumball drove on across the monotonous landscape. “Miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles,” he murmured to himself. He knew he should be studying the land with a geologist’s curious eye, categorizing the rock formations, watching how the sand dunes built up, checking the density of the rocks scattered everywhere, looking for craters. Instead he simply felt bored.

Precisely at the one-hour mark the timer on the panel chimed.

Dex called back to Craig, “Time to stop and plant a beacon, Wiley.”

“Keep goin’,” Craig said. “I’ll suit up; gotta go outside anyway to check out the damned fuel cells.”

Dex kept the rover trundling along while Craig struggled into his hard suit on his own. Once Craig announced he was ready, Dex stopped the vehicle and went back to check the older man’s suit and backpack.

“Looks good, Wiley,” he said.

“Okay,” came Craig’s voice, muffled by the sealed helmet. “Gimme one of the beacons.”

Dex did that, and then started to tug on his own suit. Stupid flathead safety regs, he said to himself as Craig cycled through the airlock and went outside. I’ve gotta stand here in this tin can like some deadhead just because Wiley’s outside. If anything goes wrong, he’ll pop back into the airlock; he won’t need me to come out and rescue him.

While Dex grumbled to himself he thought briefly about the safety regulation that required a second person to check out his suit. How the hell can you do that when the second man is already outside? He complained silently. He had no intention of going outside anyway, not unless Craig got into some unimaginable difficulty. The morphs who wrote these regulations must be the kind of guys who wear suspenders and a belt, he told himself. Old farts like Jamie.

Dex clomped back to the cockpit and sat awkwardly in the left seat. All the lights on the board were green, except the one for the fuel cells.

“How’s it going, Wiley?” he called on the intercom.

“Checkin’ these drat-damn fuel cells. Gimme a few minutes.”

“Take your time,” said Dex.