Mars Crossing

1 A Philadelphia Childhood

Tanisha Yvonne Jackson’s father had wanted her to be the perfect BAP, a black American princess, sweet and rich and virginal.

Tana wanted nothing to do with that. From the time she could walk, Tana was a tomboy, “carrying on and raising hell,” as her grandmother put it. She never wanted to wear the frilly, feminine dresses that her father bought for her, played hooky from the lessons in deportment and proper manners, scrubbed off the expensive makeovers and cut short her plaited hair.

All through his life, although her father dutifully attended her graduations, from her valedictorian speech graduating from Drexel to her acceptance of M.D. and Ph.D. diplomas from Case medical school, she knew that deep down her father was disappointed in her. While he would brag to his cronies and the pretentious men in his country club about his daughter the doctor, she always knew that, in his heart, he would rather have had a sweet little girl, perfumed and feminine, a daughter charming and demure who sang in church and broke the boys’ hearts, without a single original thought in her head. The kind of girl that she could never be.

She broke her arm falling out of a tree when she was seven; broke the other one playing football with the neighborhood boys when she was ten; collected scrapes and bruises and skinned knees and stubbed toes in the rough and tumble of growing up. She was halfway through high school before it occurred to her that she wasn’t pretty, and another two years later before she thought about it again, and decided she didn’t care. Men wanted boobs, not muscles, and until she was most of the way through college, all of her boyfriends were companions, not lovers. That was fine with her.

In high school she grew dreadlocks, more to disturb the establishment—and most particularly her family—than to make any statement. She sported a beret in a shade of purple so deep that it was nearly ultraviolet and spent her free time hanging out with the poets and the misfits. Reading science fiction was her one guilty secret; she knew that the aspiring poets and literary snobs she associated with would turn their noses up if they ever knew her reading habits, so she made certain to also have a copy of Proust or Baudelaire to quote. But she loved the heroes in the science fiction books, men who took charge and changed the world. It took her a long time to notice that there were no characters like her, that the books she loved best featured heroes who were mostly white men with Anglo names. But, she decided later with the arrogance of youth, that really didn’t matter. They would find out about her soon enough.

She lost her virginity her senior year at Drexel, to a boy who was sweet and serious and believed unquestioningly in all of her hopes and dreams and ambitions. They would talk all through the night, and the next morning go to classes so silly from lack of sleep that their friends wondered if they were drunk. She didn’t even realize that they were dating until one day he brought her flowers—a bouquet of pansies and snapdragons and nasturtiums—and she looked at them in puzzlement and asked what they were for, and he told her shyly that it was because they had been seeing each other for six months. She thought back in wonder and realized that, yes, it was true. Shortly after that she admitted him into her bed.

He was a white boy, something that might have mattered to her parents, but was pretty much irrelevant to her. She saw him every single day through her last year of college and the summer afterward, and then she went off to medical school in Cleveland, and he went away to join the Peace Corps and then become a lawyer. They wrote to each other, but the letters came further and farther apart, and years later she would remember him with fondness and wonder what ever happened to him.

2 The Big Canyon

Another thirty miles across broken terrain—not even an hour’s traverse—and they came to the edge of the world.

Or so it seemed.

The commander was being silent. He always tended to be quiet, but now he was like a mime, not talking at all, gesturing with a wave of his hand where he wanted them to go and not answering any questions.

The end of the trail came suddenly. The horizon in front of them seemed funny, too close, and then abruptly there was nothing.

The Valles Marineris spreads east to west across Mars nearly at the equator, stretching from the eastern edge at chaotic terrain of the Chasm of Dawn well over two thousand miles to the western extremity where it separates into a myriad of twisting canyons, the Labyrinth of the Night. Unlike the far smaller canyons of Earth, though, it was carved by no river, but formed when the immense bulge of Tharsis rose on the magma of long-extinct interior fire, cracking open the planet like the split crust of a rising loaf of bread.

Parallel to it were lesser chasms, places where the same tectonic forces that had formed the Valles Marineris had formed additional cracks on a lesser scale through the rocky crust of the planet. It was these that they had crossed before. But this was not one of the lesser canyons. They had reached the real thing, the full-scale Valles Marineris.

Tana Jackson stood on the lip of infinity and looked out, and out, and out. There was no far wall to the canyon; it was well beyond the horizon. The hazy ochre of the sky merged imperceptibly with the haze of the canyon floor.

Before her was a vertical drop of a mile, straight down, and then a slope of broken rock and detritus that extended downward and away for ten miles or more, to a bottom so distant that the features were blurred by the omnipresent atmospheric dust. Tana’s voice was almost awed.

“Yikes,” she said. “Are we really going down this?”

Radkowski’s voice, when it came, was a hoarse whisper. “Yes,” he said. “Down and across.” I to paused, and then in a whisper so soft that it was almost inaudible through the radio noise, added, “We have no choice.”

3 Tana in School

Tana’s grandmother had told her about affirmative action—that whatever she managed to achieve, white people were going to assume that she got it simply by being black. “Ain’t no way you’re gonna avoid it,” she told Tana. “You just go and pay no attention to them, ignore it and do a good job.”

It seemed unfair, Tana told her, but her grandmother disagreed.

“Not a one of them white folks got where they were without help,” she said. “Not one. Their parents knew people, they got into the right schools, they got connections, they got a job because their uncle knew somebody. No, they won’t admit it. Maybe they don’t even know it themselves. But they got help, every single one of ’em.”

Tana listened to what she said—her grandmother had always been a sharp cookie and a good judge of character—but she didn’t actually believe it. She had every intention of getting where she was going, affirmative action or no.

Her way to medical school was paid by a Hawthorne Foundation scholarship that covered her tuition and expenses and a little bit for her to live on as well. The very first day of med school, before she knew anybody, before she even could find her way around the strange new campus without the map in the med school handbook, one of the boys in her class cornered her in a hall. In a peremptory tone, he demanded to know whether she was paying her own way or if she had a scholarship. When she told him about the Hawthorne fellowship—maybe bragging a little bit, because she knew it was a highly competitive grant—he nodded. Obviously it confirmed what he had already known. And he explained to her that she had only received the grant because she was black. The full scholarships are reserved for minorities regardless of their qualifications, he explained. He, himself, had applied; he had gotten a better score on the MCAT and came from a poor family and needed it more. But it went to her because she was black.

She was up all night, tossing and turning.

The next day she went to the dean and told him that it the scholarship was awarded to her based on her color, they could take it back. She was going to earn her way based on merit or not at all.

The dean pulled a pair of half-glasses with black plastic frames from his desk drawer, and put them on. “Just hold on to your horses, young lady.” He turned to his file cabinet. “That name, again?”

“Jackson. Tana Jackson,” she said.

“Your name, Ms. Jackson, I already know. The name of the young man who is making these peculiar accusations, please?”

Tana hesitated. It hadn’t been her intention to be a snitch on the other students, and then she realized that it didn’t matter, she had forgotten his name anyway. Or maybe he hadn’t bothered to introduce himself.

Before she could gather her thoughts to answer, he picked up a file from his desk. “Ah, never mind, I have it here.” Apparently he had known the boy’s name from the start and already had the boy’s file out. He barely gave the file a glance.

“The Hawthorne scholarship, you said? Odd. According to his record here, he didn’t even apply for one. But that is no surprise. He doesn’t qualify for a Hawthorne scholarship at all, young woman. It is quite competitive, you know, one must have straight As to even apply. I can’t divulge the young gentleman’s grades to you, but let me assure you that this is rather far from being the case. In fact”—the dean flipped a page, reading a handwritten note that had been stapled to the folder—“it looks to me like he flunked out of linear algebra entirely, and some person intervened with the professor to allow him to repeat the final exam. Not that you heard any such thing from me, you understand.”

Tana’s mouth was wide open. “So he was bullshitting me.”

The dean lowered his glasses and looked at her over them. “He was, as they call it, yanking your chain,” he said. “The med school here is quite competitive—very competitive indeed, you know. I believe that some students may, on occasion, take it into their heads to try to get an edge over other students with a little bit of creative truth-telling. You shouldn’t believe everything you hear.” He pulled off his glasses and put them carefully back on his desk. “Now, was there something else you wanted?”

She shook her head.

An instant after she walked away, the dean called out after her.

“One moment, Ms. Jackson.”

She turned and looked back through the door. “Yes, sir?”

“Are you aware of the number of medical students needed to replace a lightbulb?”

“No,” Tana said, wondering just what he was up to. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

“It takes four,” he said. “One of them to screw it in, and the other three to pull the ladder out from under him.”

She wasn’t quite sure whether that was funny.

When she confronted the other student, he told her quite indignantly that everybody knew that she had won the scholarship because of her color, and he hadn’t applied for the scholarship because he knew they wouldn’t give it to him anyway.

As it turned out—she discovered later—the boy wasn’t from a poor family, either; that part of his story was another bit of his creative application of truth.

“Bainbridge?” another student told her much later. “Him? He’s a dickhead. You don’t pay attention to him, do you?”

For the rest of her years in medical school and her residency, she chose her friends carefully—and watched her back.

4 A Walk in the Twilight

John Radkowski walked along the edge of the cliff. The bottom was already in darkness, and it was as if he walked along an ocean of blackness, as if he could dive off of the edge and swim into the lapping pool of dark.

Trevor had come to talk to him again, this time not even bothering to disguise the fact that he was pleading for his life, and he had again put Trevor off. Radkowski knew that it was time for him to face up to the decision that was his to make. The return vehicle could not save them all. Who should be saved?

And with this, the thought that he had been avoiding. When they got to the return ship—and he would get them to the return ship, whatever the cost—when it came time for the ship to launch, he would not be one of the ones to return.

He owed a debt.

It was time for the debt to be paid.

5 The Road to Houston

Tana did her internship and her residency at a hospital in Pittsburgh. She married a bouncer at an East Pittsburgh bar, Derrick; she’d become fed up with doctors in her time at school and at work, and wanted nothing more than to get away from them in her personal life.

Derrick was more than a tough guy; he aspired to be a poet and took her to poetry readings and to gatherings of folksingers and artists. Even in the bar, he would be more likely to deal with a drunken customer by jollying them out the door with a quip than by violence. Nevertheless, her father had not approved of him; he’d still cherished the idea that she might marry the son of one of his banker or lawyer friends, somebody closer to being worthy of her.

Much later, Tana wondered whether, to some extent, her marriage had been an attempt to demonstrate to her father in the most vivid way possible that she had her own independence and was going to live her life her own way.

After a year, she found herself pregnant. She hadn’t wanted to have a baby, at least not yet, but Derrick was so pleased by her pregnancy that he almost glowed. They named the child Severna.

When she completed her residency, she applied for a job as a flight surgeon for NASA. She considered it a long shot—she could barely remember her coursework in aerospace medicine after two years stuffing intestines back inside knife slits and sewing up gunshot wounds in the emergency room—but Houston was her best way to get inside, to find herself an inside track to get selected for the astronaut corps. When, to her own surprise, she was accepted, Derrick refused to leave Pittsburgh. “Houston?” he said, his voice incredulous. “Houston? In Texas? Girl, you’ve got to be joking.”

But she never joked about her career. This time, she had never been more serious in her life. Pittsburgh was nothing to her; she’d never even stopped there for gas before she moved there for her residency. But Derrick had roots, cousins and uncles and family back three generations, all living within half a mile.

He was angry when she said she was going anyway, no matter what he thought. She made the paycheck in the family, not him, she told him, and Houston wasn’t so bad. Besides, the salary she’d been offered was triple the meager amount she’d been earning. He could learn to live with it.

A woman’s place is to follow her man, he told her, and fuck if he’s going to leave the city he grew up in to move to fucking Texas. Where was she going to go next, anyway? He had roots in this city. Roots.

“I’m going, Derrick,” she said. “With you or without you, I’m going.”

He grabbed her blouse and jerked her toward him, almost pulling her off the ground. “The hell you are!” he shouted. The muscles in his jaw, his neck, his shoulders were all bunched up with rage. “You think I’m going to let you just leave me?” His fist was clenched, and she knew that he was about to hit her. They’d had arguments before, but he had never hit her.

She closed her eyes. “Go ahead, Derrick.” She could feel his arm trembling with the strength of his anger, the motion of his other arm pulling back to strike. She screwed her eyes shut, clenched her jaw, willed herself not to scream.

He let go.

The release was so unexpected that she almost did scream, suddenly unbalanced. She was afraid to move, afraid to look.

The door slammed, and when she looked up, Derrick was gone.

It was an hour before he came back. He had been walking, he told her, he had to walk it off, or else he would hit her.

Derrick made up to her when he realized what he’d done, how badly he’d frightened her. He was extravagantly affectionate, promised he’d never hit her, never, and they made love. She was still tense, though, still afraid of what he was capable of. He was slow and loving, but she got nothing out of it.

She left with Severna and all the stuff she could cram into the car. She no longer knew Derrick, didn’t know what he was, or was not, capable of.

Derrick petitioned for custody. It made sense, he said: He had family in the area—his parents and aunts and brothers and cousins and their multitudinous children. And who did she know in Houston? Nobody.

It was the one time that she broke her self-imposed rule: She went to her father for money. He knew better than to say that he’d told her so. The lawyer that her daddy’s money bought told her not to sweat the custody hearing. It would be a slam dunk. The judge had never, he told her, never once awarded custody to the father unless the mother was dead, drunk, or in jail.

The judge was an old, white-haired black man, who looked so old that he might have been on the bench since the Clinton administration. And he seemed sympathetic, cutting off Derrick in midsentence. And it had, indeed, seemed a slum dunk, right up until the judge told Derrick to cut the crap, and just tell him in simple terms, no bullshit, tell him just why he thought he should take the child away from her mother.

“I just don’t want my child growing up in the South, judge,” Derrick said.

“South,” the judge had said. “The South?” He turned to Tana.

Tana looked at her very expensive lawyer, but he seemed at a sudden loss.

“Well?”

“Houston isn’t really the South, your honor,” Tana replied.

But the case was lost. “I don’t think is in the child’s best interests,” the judge ruled, “to grow up surrounded by rednecks, when she could instead be surrounded by her family. Custody goes to the father.” He slammed his gavel on the bench. “Case closed.”

Derrick’s family bickered constantly—they seemed like they had a constant low-level feud—but they were, all in all, a loving clan. Severna will be okay, Tana told herself, she would never lack for a home to go to. She knew that if she told the court that Derrick had hit her, she could probably win an appeal. He had almost hit her, she told herself. It wouldn’t really be a lie. She could say it in court.

She didn’t appeal. As a single mother, she would have no chance at becoming an astronaut. It came down to the child or her dreams, and dreams had come late to her; she didn’t want to give them up.

She felt guilty sometimes, even now, but she suppressed the feeling.

Derrick had found himself a girlfriend before she had barely even left Pennsylvania, before the divorce was even final. Last she’d been in touch, he’d gone through two more wives, but still didn’t have any problem finding women.

6 Letter Home

Tana looked over the letter. Did it seem too cold, too trite? She never knew how to write to her daughter. She deleted the “mother” and substituted “mom,” and looked through it another time to see what else might look stilted.

What else could she add? Had she told Severna how stunningly beautiful Mars was?

In the evenings, the two little moons come out and play tag across the sky. The larger one, Phobos, moves so fast that you can almost see it move across the sky; it goes all the way from crescent to full and back to crescent in the course of the night.

Surely that was enough. She didn’t even know when they might be able to send the message. And in another day they would be descending the canyon. That, certainly, would give her something to write about.

7 The Color of Dirt

Houston was, in its way, something like medical school. Tana got along pretty well with the others, but she got tired of the rivalry to get on missions. Sometimes Tana was just simply tired of other people’s assumptions. That because she was black, she must have grown up in a ghetto with a welfare mother and a drug-dealing father. That she listened to hip-hop music or—what were kids listening to now?—Afro stomp.

Sometimes she went to the mostly black clubs, or to the gospel choir suppers, not because she wanted to hang out with people of her own race, but simply because, once in a while, it was a relief to just be simply taken for herself, not to have to be a representative of her race. She wasn’t sure if she even believed in the idea of race, at least not the way that white people seemed to.

People—other people—called her skin the color of coffee, or sometimes dark chocolate. She thought that was belittling. Her father had always said that they had skin the color of dirt. Not pale, worn-out soil, like some people, but rich soil, good farming topsoil. They would make things grow.

Her father had never been a farmer—he was an engineer—but his grandfather had been a farmer, proud of it, and had instilled that pride into all of his grandsons.

When she was depressed, when things weren’t going well, when people dismissed her without even seeing anything but her color, she sometimes thought about that. We’re the color of dirt, girl, don’t you forget it. Nothing to hide about it, either. Rich and strong. Organic. Be proud of it.

8 Down the Canyon

They went down the canyon at first light.

Ryan Martin had set the bolts into the rocks for the safety attachments the previous night. The dirt-rover was loaded onto its rack on the rock-hopper and strapped securely in place, along with their supplies. They lowered it first, a kilometer and a half straight down until it touched the talus slope, and then Ryan Martin went down the rope to secure it in place.

As he descended, he gave a running commentary over the radio link.

“Fifty meters,” his voice came over the radio. “Seventy. The rock of the canyon wall is black and dense, smooth in texture, maybe a basalt. I’m a hundred meters down now. Oh, that’s weird, there’s a sharp dividing line, and it turns to reddish stone. It’s undercut. The rock has been, it’s like it’s been eaten away.”

“That’s not surprising,” Estrela said. Her voice was weak, almost a whisper. “The caprock is probably from lava flows, it’s going to be harder than the sandstone below it. So the sandstone gets abraded away by sandstorms.”

“Maybe,” Ryan said. He had stopped descending, and was just hanging in space against the side of the cliff. “It’s a lot of overhang. I can’t see how far in it goes. It’s like a cave, but horizontal, a kind of slot extending the whole width of the cliff face.”

“Not exploring,” Commander Radkowski interjected. His voice was a rough whisper. “Don’t stop long. First priority secure rockhopper.”

“Got it, Captain. Just one moment more, let me get a light out. Okay. Wow, it’s deep. It’s really deep. Hold on, if I go down a little bit more, now if I can just swing a little—there. Okay, I’m standing on the ledge here.”

“Don’t unhook safety,” the captain said.

“Got it. It’s high enough to stand up in. Incredible. I still can’t see how far back it goes—Hey, up there, the rock you’re standing on? Seem solid? Well, underneath you, it’s all hollow. It looks like it goes back for miles. The bottom of the cave is quite smooth and level. There are crystals here, they’re reflecting my light. Some of them as big as a fingernail. I can’t quite tell what they are. They’re purple. Some of them are blue.”

Purple? Tana thought. Amethyst?

“Wait, further in the crystals are all white, kind of translucent. Doesn’t look like quartz, it’s not six-sided. Four-sided crystals.”

“Hold on,” Estrela said. “Four sided-crystals? You said four-sided?”

“Squares and rectangles. It looks familiar.”

“I bet it does,” Estrela said. “It’s halide. Salt.”

“Salt?” There was a long pause. “You know, I think that’s it. Salt. The cave is covered in salt.”

9 A Destiny on Mars

Tana was not extravagant or showy about her religion, but her family had been good Methodists, went to church every week without fail, and she had never questioned her faith. Her faith was just there, something that cradled her and supported her through the hard times, something that made her know for sure that her life had a meaning and a purpose, that even if nobody else loved her, she was loved by God, and that was enough.

It never would have occurred to her to articulate it, but her urge to explore was, for her, inseparable from her unquestioned religious faith. She saw exploration as a way to see the depths of the beauty of God’s creation.

Tana had not always been interested in space exploration. She had gone to medical school because it seemed to be something difficult, something that promised hard problems for her to solve, and she felt most alive when she was meeting challenges.

That changed in the spring of her first year of medical school. There was a talk on the campus sponsored by the Mars Society, and she had almost not gone at all. It was certainly far removed from studying medicine. In the end that was why she had gone, because she needed to take a break; she wanted to get away from the medical school and the arrogant pricks who were her fellow students, and the lecture was cheaper than a movie.

They had brought in an astronaut to speak. He was a Canadian, younger than Tana had expected, a boy with long dark hair tied in a ponytail.

Much later, when she spent two years training with him, she would never mention that she had first seen Ryan Martin at a lecture at Case Western Reserve. She doubted that he realized she had met him before; the auditorium was packed, and she was in back, and who was she then, anyway? Just another anonymous face in the crowd. And she would certainly never admit that, once long ago, she’d had an intense puppy crush on him.

But he had spoken with such evangelistic fervor. Mars, he told them, was not an impossible target. With clever planning, it could be done. Should be done. He showed slides and talked about evolution, and about human destiny, and about how, someday, humans would not only have colonies on Mars, but they would terraform the planet. Mars is cold and dry and lifeless, but with coaxing, with engineering, it could be warmed, could be made into an inviting, living planet. And a trip to Mars need not be expensive. It all depends, he told them, on the ability to make rocket fuel on Mars, and he laid out all the elements of the Mars expedition, almost exactly the way that, fifteen years later, it would actually happen. “And you can go,” he said. He pointed into the crowd. “You.” He pointed a different direction. “You, too.” And then he pointed at the back of the crowd, directly at Tana. “And you.”

And Tana had been hooked. In college she’d set aside her science fiction as foolish fantasies of childhood. She’d never considered becoming an astronaut before, hadn’t even considered the possibility, but now she was ready to go to Mars.

Her infatuation with Ryan Martin didn’t last; he left the campus the next day, and she never even spoke with him. Later, when she married Derrick, she had already long forgotten that she’d ever even briefly had a crush on a lecturer. But the dream of going to Mars had been ignited, and it was a flame that would never, quite, go out.

10 Cave

Tana was the next down, and in fifteen minutes she was standing on the smooth floor of the cave and added the beam of her light to Ryan’s. The crystals were indeed salt, she realized. Even the purple ones; eons of exposure to cosmic rays had slowly infused color into the crystals nearest the edge of the canyon.

Except for the salt crystals, the cave was almost entirely featureless, with a smooth flat ceiling, and an equally even floor, devoid of stalactites or stalagmites or any other cavelike geology.

The explanation, Tana realized, was that there must once have been immense salt flats here, remnants of some ancient ocean bed that had long since dried up, leaving only the salt behind. And then, over the ages, the salt flats had been buried under ash and lava from the eruptions of the great Tharsis volcanoes. Then, when the Valles Marineris had been carved like a knife-cut into the crust of the planet, exposure to water had dissolved away the salt layer, leaving a wide, horizontal cave in the side of the canyon, ten feet high and hundreds of miles, perhaps thousands of miles long.

How extensive was the salt layer, Tana wondered? Had the entire planet been covered with an ancient ocean? Did the entire planet have a buried layer of salt, hidden under the crust? Or was it just this area near the equator? And, more important, had the ancient ocean ever developed life?

She wanted to stay, to explore the caves, to investigate the rocks with a microscope to search for possible microfossils, but it was impossible. They had to move on or die.

But it wouldn’t hurt for her to look just a little bit. In fact, it made sense for the others to rappel down before she moved on.

The crystals—Ryan hadn’t mentioned how big they were. Here was a cluster of crystals, each one the size of a milk carton, with edges so rigorously square that they looked as though they had been machined; another one was a perfect octahedron, like some modern sculpture of glass. Were they all salt? The top layer certainly was, but it looked like there was something else underneath, something a whiter color, almost a milky blue. She scraped off the top layer. Yes, it was something softer, definitely different, not just rock salt. There was a mass spec back at the rockhopper; if she took some samples, they could analyze them later.

Was it the same all the way back?

Tana shone her beam into the back of the cave and walked farther to see just how far back it went.

11 Interview

It was a big conference room, with a faux-mahogany table and upholstered seats that swiveled and tilted. With only two of them in the conference room, it seemed empty. Tana fought the impulse to lean back in the comfortable chair while waiting for the interviewer to speak. She knew she had the credentials; what was important now was not to blow her chances by saying something stupid or giving the wrong impression. She sat up rigidly straight to make it clear she was interested.

At last the interviewer looked up at her. She didn’t know him personally. He was one of many anonymous, well-groomed men in impeccably tailored suits. One of a network of interconnecting country-club acquaintances that—regardless of what the organization charts may imply—held the real power in the center. He said, “Do you think you deserve a spot on the expedition because you’re black?”

“No, sir,” Tana said. “A Mars expedition is no place for deadwood. I deserve a position because I’m the best qualified for the spot.”

He looked back down and flipped through her papers again. She could see her application form stapled to the top, then transcripts, then employment files. “Hmmm,” he said, without looking at her. “Says here you did your residency in an emergency room…Still up to date on your skills?”

“Yes, sir. I volunteer at the free clinic every other week.”

“Well, that counts for something. We’ll need quick response if we have an emergency. But you’re not the only one with ER experience, you know. How’s your exobiology?”

“I’m working with Feroz and Papadopoulos,” she said. “It’s in there.”

She suddenly had to pee. She couldn’t possibly need to; she knew better than that. Before she went to an interview, especially one as important as this, she always hit the ladies’ room. But it sure felt as if she suddenly had a desperate need.

“Yes, Feroz and Papadopoulos…good credentials.” He looked up at her. “How’s the work going?”

They were cataloging stereoisomers found in Antarctic meteorites and in meteoritic dust samples gathered from high-altitude airplanes. The point was to establish whether a chiral asymmetry existed in samples from the primordial nebular material, and, if so, whether it had been modified in the subsequent five billion years of solar system evolution. If they found conclusive evidence that chiral asymmetry predated life on Earth, it would be a landmark achievement in exobiology, since so far the chiral nature of organic compounds on Earth was a sure signature of life. But so far, like the signs of life in Martian meteorites, their evidence remained tantalizingly suggestive, but inconclusive.

She resisted the urge to shrug. “It’s going well,” she said.

“You like the lab work?”

“I love it,” she said. And, to her own surprise, she did. She had started working with Feroz simply as a way to get some exobiology publications on her resume, but she found that she liked being back in a laboratory. It was painstaking, and ten seconds of inattention could ruin ten hours of work, but she found that she liked the challenge.

“Good. I’m sure you do. But all that’s not worth a hill of beans, really, is it?”

Obviously, he wanted some response from her here, and she didn’t know what it was. Play it cool. “I’m not quite sure what you mean.”

“What matters here is just one thing. Can you handle the public?”

“Yes, I think so. In my application, I have listed—”

“I don’t care what’s in your file. Everybody has a great file.” He flipped the file of papers away from him, and it skidded across the table. “I’ve read two hundred great files. What I care about is, can you handle the public?”

Time to be firm. “Yes, sir, I can.”

“Well, good. I hope you can.” He looked at his watch and then stood up. Was the interview over? Tana hastily stood up as well.

He walked toward the door at the far end of the conference room, and then turned back to look at her. Perhaps there was a slight smile on his face; if there was, it was the first trace of any emotion she’d seen him express. She wished she could remember his name. He had introduced himself to her when the interview had started, but she hadn’t been able to place the name.

“As you may know, on Tuesday afternoons we invite elementary school classes to tour the center. Today we’ve got a class of fifth graders on a field trip all the way from Tulsa, Oklahoma. We’ve promised them a special lecture. You’re it.” He looked at his watch. “You’re going to tell them about Mars.”

He opened the door. It led to a main lecture hall, with every seat occupied by fidgeting, talking, wrestling, gum-chewing, airplane-throwing, shouting, sleeping, bored children. “They’ve been waiting about five minutes now, they’re probably getting a little restless. There’s about two hundred of them, I’d say.”

Yikes.

He turned to her, and this time it was quite clear, he was smiling. “You said that you’re good with the public, did you now? Well, here you have a chance to demonstrate. Don’t let’s keep them waiting, shall we?”

Now she really had to pee. She ignored it, took a deep breath, and walked out. Get their attention now, she thought, or else lose it.

She found the microphone and tapped it. For a moment, just a moment, the din of conversation in the room let up. “Hi,” she said, and smiled. “I’m Tanisha Jackson. I’m a biologist here at NASA Johnson, and I’m here to tell you all those things about space biology that you haven’t quite had the nerve to ask yet. Like, for example, how you go to the bathroom in space.”

There was a giggle, first just one, then a bunch all at once, and then outright laughter, and she knew she’d caught their attention.

“But, first, maybe you’d like to hear me tell you a little bit about Mars.”

12 Pause in the Descent

Captain Radkowski stopped briefly at the slot cave—it was, in fact, a convenient ledge to pause on—but did not unhook from the superfiber to join Tana and Ryan at the back wall of the cave marveling over the wonders of salt. From the radio reports, he knew that they had determined that the slot in the side of the canyon wall extended back about a hundred feet and then came to an end.

“It’s completely smooth,” Ryan’s voice said. “Seems almost polished. A blank white wall.”

“I wonder how far the salt layer continues?” Tana.

“Don’t think we can tell without a drill.” Ryan. “A long way, I bet.”

“Hundreds of miles?”

It was not of great interest to him. Radkowski was more worried about getting the crew down the cliff to the rockhopper, and making sure it was secure for the long traverse to the bottom of the canyon.

He thought about reprimanding Ryan Martin for slowing down the expedition by stopping to explore the cave, but decided that it was understandable. They had, after all, come to Mars to explore. He would talk to Ryan privately later, caution him that regardless of what they found, getting north as fast as possible had to remain their first priority.

Before descending from the cave level, he checked his rappelling line and safety line attachments again. Both good. He pulled at the superfiber. “On belay,” he said.

His anchor points, for both the rappelling line and the safety line, were still up at the top. From his radio, Trevor’s voice said, “On belay.”

He looked down—it was a long drop, still most of a vertical mile of drop—and then stepped backward off the edge. The superfiber held him, and then, without warning, it gave, and he was in freefall.

Shit. “Falling,” he called. “Tension!”

The safety line caught, and he swung out from the cliff, twisted around awkwardly.

And then the safety line broke.

He started to tumble, and instinctively he assumed the skydiver’s position, arms spread, legs in a V. “Tension,” he shouted, but he knew that it wasn’t going to do him any good. The line had snapped, and there was nothing between him and the ground but two thousand feet of thin Martian air.

It took him a long time to fall.

13 On Station

Tana Jackson’s selection for the medical position on the Mars mission pushed her to the top of the priority list for assignment to the space station. Her name would not be publicly announced for the Mars billet until after she had been tested in orbit. None of the crew had been announced yet. They wanted to see how she worked out in microgravity, how well she got along with the station crew when she was confined in a tin can, with no new faces to see, with nowhere to go to get away. Her nomination to fly on the Mars mission was a recommendation, not a right; at any time she could be reassigned if they decided she might not work out.

The orders for her to start training for a ninety-day shift on the space station arrived the next day. At the same time, she was directed to take refresher courses in epidemiology, most importantly to memorize the medical details of the reports of the three independent review panels that had evaluated the Agamemnon disaster. She was also expected to become an expert on the hypothetical biology of Martian life. And, in addition to all of this, she was to appear cheerful and knowledgeable whenever the press needed a warm body to interview.

She began to train with the microgravity emergency medical kit, until she could unerringly find each piece upside-down and blindfolded: tracheotomy tubes, laryngoscope, oxygen mask, miniature oxygen tank, compresses, syringes, dressings, adhesives, scalpel, stethoscope, blood oximeter.

She had never worked harder in her life. The launch to the space station, when it came, seemed almost like a vacation. She was so excited that she barely noticed the launch, and only when she saw her notepad floating out of her pocket did she realize, I’m really here; I’m in zero gravity. I made it.

Tana’s billet was to be the blue-shift medical officer, and in her spare time, a biology research technician and an experimental subject. The bio labs always needed both technicians and subjects.

She liked being on space station. Ft was crowded and noisy and confusing. It was remarkably easy to get confused, and even—despite its small size—momentarily lost. The familiar route from one module to another that you’ve memorized as a left turn would, if you happen to be flipped, mutate into a right turn, or even an up or down turn. Compartments that she thought she knew completely suddenly became completely unfamiliar when she came in with a different orientation, and the floor had become the ceiling. In a way, it was as if the space station were far larger on the inside than its mere volume, when every floor was also a wall and a ceiling.

On her arrival at the space station, Brittany and Jasmine, two crew members who were already old hands on the station, were detailed to give her the orientation. Brittany was big-boned, tall and square and blonde; Jasmine was small and dark, with a round face. They acted as smoothly as if they had been working with one another since they had been born.

“It’s big and ugly and smelly,” Brittany said, waving her hand at the station.

“Isn’t it just,” Jasmine said. “God, don’t you love it here?”

“Yeah,” Brittany said. She looked at Tana. “Girl, you may not know it, but the moment you get back down, let me warn you, you’re going to start scheming how to get back up here.”

“Home,” Jasmine said. “Come on. I think there’s nobody in the number two biology lab.” She contorted her body, jackknifed, and with a sudden jerk, was facing the opposite direction. Tana had no idea how she had accomplished it without touching a wall. “Let’s go over there, and we can”—she winked at Tana—“give you a briefing in private.”

Tana already knew about the zero-gravity rite of passage, or at least the outline of it. The grapevine at the center had been pretty explicit. She didn’t bother to try Jasmine’s maneuver, but instead pushed off the wall to follow.

As the newcomer, Brittany explained, a tradition as old as the space station itself gave her the jus primae noctis, the right to choose who she wanted for the first night, any one of the seasoned crew.

“And it doesn’t have to be one of the men, either,” Jasmine said, and winked. “If you go that way.”

Tana wasn’t sure if that was a proposition or not. She could feel her ears heating up. “Does it have to be the first night?” she asked.

“Nah, that’s just a phrase,” Jasmine said.

“There isn’t any night up here anyway,” Brittany said.

“Sure there is—a new one every ninety-three minutes,” Jasmine said. “Great if you like sunsets.”

“If you’re feeling nauseous, you might want to wait a bit,” Brittany said. “Don’t want to spoil it.”

“Nah, you don’t want to wait,” Jasmine said. “The first couple of days they still have you on an easy work schedule.”

“Yeah, it’ll be hard to find some free time,” Brittany said.

“Nah,” Jasmine said, and laughed. “You can find time. I mean, you don’t want to wait.”

She didn’t know why she picked John Radkowski. He was certainly good looking, clean-cut, and athletic, but not much more so than most of the others. He was the commander of the station, but somehow, it seemed to her, he had more depth than the other flying jocks, a core of sadness. She waited until she momentarily brushed against him in a node, and none of the others were close by. She looked at him, and he looked back at her with a long, unwavering gaze, his gray eyes almost disconcertingly direct. And then he said softly, “Would you like to accompany me to the equipment module airlock?”

She nodded, and he pushed off without a word, expecting her to follow.

The airlock, she discovered, was one of the very few places on the space station that had a door that could be firmly and securely shut. Inside it, two space suits were stored. There was a small space, barely larger than a coffin, between the suits. John Radkowski pushed into the space and motioned her to follow.

“You’re not claustrophobic, are you?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Good.” He pulled the airlock door shut and twisted the wheel a quarter turn. “Too much room is a problem up here.” He smiled. “For some things, anyway. Action and reaction, you know.”

There was a dim red illumination, emergency lighting, that was never shut off. The space was close; she was pressing against him slightly, but in the absence of gravity, it was comfortable. She could feel his breath, slow and warm. He had a slight odor of sweat, which she found not unpleasant.

“Nothing is required,” he said. He actually seemed slightly embarrassed. “I hope Brittany explained that. You’re free to say no.”

She answered by pulling him closer to her and kissing him. She had to hold on to keep him from floating away from her. He was more muscular than she’d expected.

“I wouldn’t want to break tradition,” she said.

He was wearing a T-shirt and shorts; under the T-shirt, she found, his chest was covered with dark hair. Tana unzippered the front of her shirt and freed her breasts. In microgravity, her breasts had no sag, she was as firm as silicone. A side effect of fluid redistribution, she thought. He reached a hand out tentatively, and cupped one of her breasts; she reached up and stroked the back of his hand. She started to slip her arm out of her sleeve to take off her shirt, and he stopped her.

“Leave it on,” he said. “One of us has to wear something to hold on to.”

He stripped out of his shorts and sent them floating away. He floated nude in front of her. There was nothing tentative about him now. She reached down and touched him.

Sex in microgravity, Tana discovered, was by necessity slow; sudden moves were impossible. She didn’t have to worry that his weight would crush her, or it she put an arm around him her arm would be pinned. Even the climax, when it came, seemed almost in slow motion. She had a desperate urgency, but there was a frustrating lack of any leverage for her to take advantage of. She clasped her legs around his body, arched her back, and her whole body shook.

He had one fist tangled in her shirt, keeping them from floating apart, and they floated together, silent. At last, he spoke.

“Welcome to space station,” he said. He pulled her to him and kissed her lightly on the nose. “I now declare you officially a member of the microgravity society, with all the rights and privileges that entails.”

14 Waiting for Angels

John Radkowski lay on his back, on a slope of broken rock and sand, and marveled. He wasn’t dead.

That was the surprise. He wasn’t dead.

The fall had been slow, so slow. But he had been moving awful fast. He tried to calculate how fast he must have been moving when he’d hit, but he couldn’t quite think clearly.

He didn’t hurt.

In fact, he couldn’t feel anything, just a comfortable warmth about his body.

The helmet hadn’t shattered. It really did live up to its marketing, he thought, a technological marvel: light, clear as glass, and damn near unbreakable. He’d have to do a commercial for the company: “I fell off a cliff, half a mile down, hit rocks at the bottom, and the remarkable carbide helmet still held air!”

He wished he could say the same about the rest of the suit. He could hear the shrill whine of escaping air.

He was laying at a crazy angle, half tilted toward the sky. The sky was a most remarkable shade of peach, brushed with delicate yellow clouds like feathers. He wished he could move his head, look around. Out of the corner of his eye he could see blood. It seemed to be pooling in the bottom of the helmet, somewhere around his right ear.

He tried to use the radio to call, but his voice wasn’t working anymore. He doubted the radio was, either.

The pool of blood in his helmet was getting deeper.

He felt remarkably peaceful. He owed the universe a death, he knew. One death.

His.

There was no possible way that any of the others could get to him in time. And even if they could reach him, what could they possibly do?

It was getting hard to breathe. The air was getting thin.

Now one of the others would get a chance. Would that satisfy God? Would that, at last, be enough? It was a nice balance. He’d leave the universe with his debts paid.

Around John Radkowski’s right ear, the blood in his helmet was a pool six inches deep. It began to softly boil as the suit pressure reached equilibrium with the low atmospheric pressure of Mars.

John Radkowski waited for angels.

15 Death in the Afternoon

By the time they had reached the spot where Commander Radkowski had hit, Ryan Martin knew that it was far too late. The body was on a dangerous slope of loose rock. Ryan made sure that each of the crew members had a safety line firmly anchored to the solid rock of the cliff face before he let Tana go to examine him.

Tana’s examination was brief. The impact had killed him instantly, she told them. Even in the light gravity of Mars, nobody could survive a fall like that.

“He looks peaceful,” Tana said.

“He looks dead,” Estrela said.

Radkowski’s body had sealed to the slope by a glue of frozen blood. It took three of them to pry the corpse free, and the moment it came loose, Ryan could not keep his grip on it, and the corpse slid away, spinning slightly as it sledded down the slope in a tiny avalanche.

It came to rest when one foot jammed in the crack between two enormous boulders a few hundred meters down. This time they did not try to move him. The slope was too rocky to dig a grave into. They left him in the notch between the boulders and brought fist-sized rocks to cover him. It was no problem to find rocks; the slope was covered with loose rocks, of every size from gravel to space-shuttle size.

There was no funeral. Ryan made sure that everybody kept their safety lines attached as he got them organized. He wanted to get everybody moving, to get them focused on the task of getting down the slope before the reality of the death had time to sink in. It was too late to turn back, and there was nothing at Don Quijote to go back to anyway. There was nothing to do but go on.

The surface they were on tilted downward at an angle of almost forty degrees. It was a treacherous slope. The smallest motion of loose rock set off a tiny landslide; Ryan had to constantly make sure that none of the crew ever stood downslope from another crew member, and worried that a misstep would result in a twisted ankle, or worse.

Under the circumstances, he decided that the best bet was to put all four of them into the rockhopper, and have the rockhopper work its way down the slope along a superfiber line solidly anchored in rock at the cliff face. He didn’t want to trust the superfiber for anything except an emergency, and as a result the progress of the rockhopper was excruciatingly slow. It looked to be a good fifteen, maybe twenty kilometers of downward traverse to reach the level bottom of the canyon. The slope couldn’t be this steep all the way to the bottom. Once it flattened out to only thirty degrees or so, they would go off the rope, to keep from depleting their spool of superfiber.

Fitting four of them in the cabin of the rockhopper made for seriously cramped quarters. He had them keep the doors open and their suits on; it was the only way to get enough room for him to pilot it.

And so, hanging out of the doors of the overloaded rockhopper like television hillbillies clinging to a dilapidated Model T pickup, at the head of an avalanche of sliding rocks and dirt and gravel, they drove down into the canyon.

16 In the Abyss

Ahead of them, the avalanches of rock that the rockhopper sent down the slope raised an enormous plume of dust, like a pillar of smoke marking the path to the holy land.

Tana huddled inside her suit, blocking from her consciousness the details of the terrifying descent. Commander Radkowski was dead. She could hardly comprehend it; it was too enormous a concept to get her thoughts around. Commander Radkowski was dead.

He was the one who had kept the team together, who had told them what to do, and where to go. How could they possibly survive now?

Some day, long after they returned from Mars, when it was all just a shared experience they could look back on, John Radkowski would come to her apartment, and they would sit and laugh, reminisce, and maybe drink a little wine. Possibly they would get intimate—her dreams were a little fuzzy on this point—and maybe on that day he would tell her what was inside him, what demons of the past made him soft and sweet and innocent and hard and bitter and cynical.

But that would never happen. John Radkowski would never leave Mars. She would tell herself that, and come to herself again, huddled inside the cramped cabin of the rover, creeping down the endless descent, a slippery incline of loose and shattered rock. Ryan was glued to the wheel, keeping the descent slow and controlled.

When they got back home, all this would be something to remember. Perhaps she could invite John Radkowski over to her apartment, and he would—

But John Radkowski was dead. Jarred free by the wheels of the rock-hopper, boulders broke loose and caromed down the slope, pinballing off other boulders toward a bottom that was so distant it was not even visible. It was not an adventure that someday they would laugh about. It was an adventure that would most likely kill them, as it had killed Radkowski, as it had killed Chamlong.

17 Rock Glow

The slope leveled out a bit, and then a bit more, and Ryan cut free of the superfiber cable that served as a safety line for the rockhopper in order to increase their speed. And then the talus slope spilled out onto the canyon bottom. Ryan steered a labyrinthine path through a maze of boulders too large for the rockhopper to climb. And then even the boulder field diminished to scattered boulders, rocks the size of houses, of apartment buildings, but scattered enough that they loomed like alien monuments, no longer a hazard to driving.

Except for the scattered boulders, the canyon bottom was flat. The ground was hard, like fired clay, brushed lightly with a flourlike dust. The canyon was so wide that from the bottom the far wall was invisible. Only the wall behind them was visible, looming dark and foreboding in the evening shadows. Ryan wanted to move as far from the slope, as far from the site of Radkowski’s death as they could get. Evening was approaching, and he knew that they could not get across the canyon in the remaining sunlight. But still, he felt that they should move as far as they could, and in the waning sun he pushed the rover to its limits, without offering to stop and unload the dirt-rover.

None of the others asked. They were each silent, each immersed in their own private thoughts.

The shadow of the cliff chased him and caught up with him from behind, and in the sunset twilight he was driving across a landscape of slowly darkening blood. Colors drained away, and then, as the twilight deepened, new colors emerged. Not just the orange and yellow pallet of Mars, but the landscape actually started to seem to have a brightness of its own. Ryan rubbed his visor. The landscape seemed to have a soft glow, so faint that he was unable to tell if it was an illusion, a ghostly glow of neon hues, greens and purples and blues, colors alien to Mars.

No, he was hallucinating, he must be.

Estrela spoke. Her voice was hoarse, and he realized that she had not talked once since she had said goodbye to Radkowski. He had thought that she was asleep. “Milagroso,” she said.

“What?”

“Don’t you see it too? Look. Just look.”

The sky was almost completely dark, but the harder he looked, the more it seemed that speckles of the rocks were luminous, tiny dots of color, glowing so faintly that it must surely be an illusion brought on by exhaustion. After a moment of silence, he whispered, “What is it?”

“Rock fluorescence,” she said, and suddenly he understood.

“Oh, of course!” With the sun just below the horizon, no direct sunlight illuminated the surface…but the sky scattered sunlight. Rayleigh scattering, he thought: On Earth the scattered sky-light was blue, but with no ozone layer, on Mars the ultraviolet was even stronger, and the sky must be emitting a softly invisible bath of black light. In the near darkness the faint fluorescence of the rocks under the invisible sky-glow was just barely bright enough to see. “Wow,” he said.

And even as he spoke, the glow of the rocks began to fade. It must only be visible for a few minutes after sunset, he thought, when it grows dark enough for the faint luminescence to be visible, but before the sky-glow disappeared completely. Maybe it was only visible in the depth of the canyon.

“Unless you are intending to kill us all,” Estrela said, “I think it is time to stop now.”

18 Falling Stars

They had inflated the bubble in the twilight, but never before in full darkness.

Tana was too restless to be able to go to sleep; too many thoughts were crowding in her head. She had been crammed inside the rockhopper with the others for hours; she needed to be alone for a while. She hesitated outside the airlock to the bubble.

It was against all safety regulations for her to stay outside unless at least one other was outside to be her suit-buddy. “It’s been a long day,” Ryan said. His voice was hoarse and sounded weary. “Come inside. We all need the rest.”

She shook her head, even though she knew that he couldn’t see it inside her helmet. “I’m staying outside,” she said. “Just a little while.”

“Come on, Tana. You know that you’re not supposed to stay outside alone.”

“So try and stop me,” she said, and she looked at Ryan with a look so haggard and forlorn that Ryan couldn’t think of anything to say.

“At least don’t get out of sight of the hobbit bubble,” he said, and she nodded, then turned and walked into the dark.

The dark. It calmed her to just sit in the dark. She could let her mind go blank. She didn’t have to think. She sat on a boulder, her back to the habitat so it didn’t intrude on her consciousness. It was like a moonless night in the desert in West Texas, or anywhere. The stars were clear and bright; she was surprised how bright they were, barely dimmed by the dust. They were the same familiar constellations, but oddly tilted: Orion lying on his sword, Leo with his lion nose pointing to the ground. She couldn’t find the pole star, and then she suddenly realized that she didn’t even know what the pole star for Mars was, or whether it even had one.

A meteor flared overhead, a bright streak of green in the sky, and then darkness again. Then a second meteor crossed the sky, in the same westward direction as the first, and a third followed it, this one bright enough to illuminate the landscape with a taint light. A meteor shower, she thought.

One summer night when she had been six, her grandmother had come into her room and gently shaken her awake. The clock in the kitchen showed two in the morning. They had gone outside, Tana in her pajamas, and her grandmother spread quilts on the grass for them to sit on. Philadelphia spread a ghostly glow on the horizon to the east, and they faced west, toward the darkest part of the sky. “Lie back and watch,” her grandmother had told her. The night air was pleasantly cool against her pajamaed skin, but she wasn’t at all sleepy. She had always been able to wake up at any time and stay awake. In the speckled darkness above her, she saw a flash of light streak across the sky. And another, and then a pack of three traveling together, and then one that streaked across the sky and exploded in a burst of color.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “What are they?”

“Folks call them falling stars,” her grandmother told her. “They visit us round about this time every year.”

“But what are they?” she insisted.

Her grandmother was silent for a moment. “When I was a little girl,” she said softly, “my grandmother told me that it’s the souls of dead folks, rising up to heaven. When they rise, you see, they go and shed all the sin they’ve been carrying with them, ’cause where they’re going, they don’t need to carry sins around with them no more.” She paused, and another shooting star flashed by, so bright that it lit up the night like fireworks. “Some folks must be carrying around a powerful load of sin, I reckon.”

That was long ago. With her rational mind, Tana knew that it was a meteor shower; tiny bits of ice and sand whizzing through space, burning up in the tenuous outer reaches of the atmosphere. But somewhere deep inside, she thought, John Radkowski is making his last flight, and he’s leaving behind everything he doesn’t need, peeling it away like a soggy overcoat. I wonder what he was carrying round with him, that makes so much of a show when it burns up.

Goodbye, John. Goodbye.

19 Meteors

Ryan Martin had inspected the dome and was hesitating outside when a sudden flash of light attracted his attention. Wow, that was an impressive one, he thought. Looks like it almost hit us. And then there was another, and then a third.

It’s a meteor shower, he thought. No, more than just a shower—this was rally a meteor storm. Streaks of light, yellow, blue. One streaked by and seemed barely over his head, as if it were close enough to touch. Jesus, he thought. Could that one really have been as close as it looked?

Are we in danger? Are we going to get hit?

For a moment Ryan was frightened, and then his rational mind whispered, you know better than that. On Earth, meteors burn up in the tenuous fringes of the atmosphere, a hundred kilometers up. A very few of the largest ones may penetrate as low as forty kilometers before being slowed and shattered by the atmosphere. The atmosphere of Mars was thin, but it was not that thin—the meteor shower might look close, but it was still no more than grains of dust burning up tens of kilometers above their heads, a light show of no practical danger to anyone on the surface.

Meteor showers on Mars have different dates, he thought, different radiants from those on Earth. Who knows the dates of Mars meteor showers? This one probably happens every Mars year at this time, and since Mars is closer to the asteroid belt than Earth, the show is correspondingly more impressive.

He watched it for a few more minutes—on Earth he’d always loved meteor showers; he marked them on his calendar so he wouldn’t forget to watch—and then went into the habitat.

20 On the Ridge

In the morning the first task was to unpack the dirt-rover from its carrying harness on the rockhopper.

Trevor, as usual, was the first one awake. He stepped outside the dome. He stopped, astounded. The yellow-red of Mars had vanished. The adobe-yellow sky had vanished, and had been replaced with a dome of opalescent white. Not one, but three suns were rising into the sky, and around the central sun was an enormous half-circle of light, a red-rimmed halo that just met the twin suns to either side. Even as he watched, the two second suns stretched out into arcs, and a third luminous arc formed above the sun.

At last Trevor found his voice. “What is it,” he said. “What is it?”

Ryan stood beside him. Trevor hadn’t noticed him leave the dome. He was silent for a moment, taking in the sight, and then said, “Parhalia.”

“What?”

“Ice crystal halos.” He looked at Trevor. “It’s microscopic crystals of ice, suspended at high altitudes in the atmosphere. They reflect light. I’ve heard about it.”

There were three complete circles in the sky now, and partial arcs of three more. It was geometrically perfect, as if a computer artist had drawn glowing circles across the heavens.

“This must be an ice haze filling up the canyon, because the canyon bottom is so low,” Ryan said. “Miles below sea level, if you can say Mars has a sea level.”

“Yikes!” Tana said. She had just emerged from the habitat dome. “That’s incredible.”

The canyon bottom had seemed flat the previous day, but today they realized that, in fact, they had been traveling parallel to a set of ridges. The light, diffusing through the layer of ice crystals, blurred the shadows, gave the rocky plains a softer, more Earthlike look.

The ridge nearest them was a bare hundred meters away. While the others were setting up the rockhopper and deflating and packing away the dome, Trevor climbed up to the top of it and looked out across the landscape. From below it had looked like a sand dune, but the surface under his boots was hard and unyielding, rough, more like concrete than sand. From the top, for as far as he could see in either direction, there were dunes, like an endless sea of frozen waves. The walls of the canyon itself were invisible.

His sense of direction was still acting screwy. He had no idea which way was north, which was south. No matter which way he looked, he could not see the canyon walls. Even from the ridge, the canyon walls were over the horizon.

Trevor was still trying to sort out his feelings about Commander Radkowski’s death. Radkowski had never cut him the least bit of slack. It was hard for him to grieve too much at Radkowski’s death, but he wondered how bad it had hurt their chances of returning. Ryan had already taken over as mission commander, he guessed—he had been pretty decisive in getting them moved out and away from the canyon wall, when the other two astronauts had been pretty much shocked and useless.

And, with Radkowski gone, his chances of joining the ride home had noticeably improved.

The luminous arcs of light in the sky had slowly faded and vanished, burned away by the heat of the rising sun, and now it was just another clear Martian morning. The sky was a dirty yellow, with only a thin tracery of clouds in the east, a pale shade of translucent blue, like gauze. When the sun comes up on lonely peaks, he’s vanished with the wind, Trevor hummed. His throat was a little sore, and he didn’t feel like singing, but he could still hum. With the sighing of the lonely desert wind.

21 The View From the Space Station

The cupola was the viewing area of the space station, a tiny observation atrium with windows on all sides. When Tana had no other duties, she often drifted there to just look down. It was a place to meditate.

Tana looked out at the everchanging panorama of the Earth. She was beginning to feel comfortable on the space station now. She was fitting in, running the little medical clinic, participating in experiments. Just as planned, she was getting familiar with space. She wondered if the Mars mission would be like this.

Tana felt somebody float up behind her. She shifted to make room—the cupola was barely large enough for two—but didn’t turn. “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “Always changing. Always different.”

Out the cupola, the ocean streamed past below. It was a delicate shade of aqua, a color so bright that it looked artificial. The blue was brushed with the crescent shapes of islands outlined in pale yellow sand and deep green vegetation. It looked so fragile, as if it could be made out of blown crystal, eggshell-thin, that might shatter with a touch.

“Yes,” the voice came from behind her. “A fractal beauty.”

It was Ryan Martin’s voice, but she would have known who it was even if she hadn’t recognized the voice. Only the Canadian astronaut would see the beauty in terms of the fractal spatter-pattern of large and small islands, the tiniest islets so small as to be no more than specks of yellow in the yellow-green sea.

She didn’t recognize any of it. Tana had won an eighth-grade ribbon for her knowledge of geography, but here, where there were no national borders marked, where “north” was not up but could be any direction depending on the space station attitude, she was always lost.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“South Pacific somewhere,” Ryan answered. “Want to know exactly? I could find a laptop with STK.” He turned to swim down into the station.

“No, no. Pacific—that’s fine.”

The scenery scrolled past, the aqua of the shallow waters deepening to a rich dark blue, with a wash of thin clouds. She smiled inwardly, knowing that Ryan would probably also be thinking of the cloud patterns as a fractal shape, the graceful pattern of swirls repeated in the smaller bird-feather clouds.

The Mars crew selections wasn’t yet official, but she knew that Ryan would be the third member of the Mars team. He had just arrived at the space station for a training mission. She was glad he was on the team.

She had seen him around NASA Johnson, but until they started to train together, she hadn’t recognized him as the young astronaut who had given the talk that had given her the incentive to apply to NASA to be a flight surgeon. Why, without a doubt he was the reason she was here, and he didn’t even know it. She had a sudden wild urge to turn around, tell him thank you, and kiss him. She wondered what he would do.

She did nothing, of course. It wouldn’t be appropriate.

22 Suspicions

The rope shouldn’t have broken, Tana explained to Estrela, when they stopped for a moment to rest and swap drivers. It was rated for more than a hundred tons of breaking strength; it could have held a truckload of elephants. “I’m thinking that it might not have been an accident.”

“What are you saying?” Estrela asked. “Of course it was an accident. What else?”

“Don’t play dumb, you’re not blond,” Tana said. “You’ve figured out that only two of us can be on that rocket back, maybe three, no more. Everybody on the whole team knows it. If there are fewer of us, that’s more chances to get home.”

“Murder,” Estrela said. She didn’t look at Tana.

“You have another idea?”

Estrela nodded slowly. “So you’re saying, we should watch our backs.”

“You got it.” Tana shook her head. “Trust nobody.”

Estrela asked, “Not even me?”

Tana looked at her for a long time, and then shook her head again. “Not even you,” she said.

23 Cliff

Twice they came across dry riverbeds, with dust-covered bottoms of smooth gray stone that looked like slate. “A good place to look for fossils,” Estrela whispered, but only Trevor wanted to stop.

And, slowly, the cliffs of the opposite wall grew in the distance, at first no more than a thin ruddy line faintly visible against the horizon, and then a massive presence that came closer and closer, until the stark rocks seemed to be looming over their heads.

Ryan stopped the rockhopper to inspect the embankment with the binoculars. Like the cliff on the south edge of the canyon, eons of undercutting had given the embankment an extensive talus slope of fragmented boulders at the base. He examined it minutely, trying to determine where the slope was least steep, where it came closest to the top of the vertical face. It was a forbidding prospect; the jumbled slope of loose, angular rock would be a dangerous climb, and it rose for miles before it met the face of the cliff.

“Hey, come on,” Trevor said at last. “Can’t I look too?”

“This isn’t a game,” Ryan snapped, and then instantly regretted it. “Wait, I’m sorry.” He wasn’t getting anywhere, might as well let the kid try. He handed him the binoculars “Here. See if you can find a good way up.”

Trevor put the binoculars to his faceplate, adjusted the electronic focus, and scanned upward. After a few seconds he stopped. “There,” he said.

“What?”

“Right there.” Trevor lowered the binoculars and pointed. “See?”

Ryan took the binoculars back and looked at where Trevor was pointing. “Where?” He didn’t see anything.

“Wait, let me guide you. See the big boulder that looks like a thumb?”

Ryan didn’t see anything that looked like a thumb. He scanned left and right, and then suddenly saw a peach-colored boulder that sat alone, sticking straight up out of the ground. It did look like a thumb, now that Trevor had pointed it out. “Got it.”

“Okay, go up from there. Up and a little left of that there are two boulders together, almost round? They look like a pair of tits. Okay, now right behind that and a little left you can see a groove. Looks like a stream bed. That’s a natural path up the slope.”

“Yeah, got it,” Ryan said. “But I don’t see a path.”

“Give me the binoculars for a moment,” Trevor said, and Ryan handed them to him before he even had a chance to think, Why the hell am I giving these to him?

Trevor put the binoculars to his faceplate. “Okay, from the two breasts, look upward and left. There’s one shaped like a skull, kind of, and one shaped like, um, maybe sort of like an elephant’s ass. The path goes between those.” He handed the binoculars back to Ryan. “Take a look.”

A skull. He found that one, and then the elephant’s buttocks. Shit, it was rough, but if you looked at it right, it almost did look like a path.

“See how it goes up toward that notch?” Trevor said. “Okay, now follow it up, keep going. Where it meets the cliff, see that? It’s dried up, but looks like it used to be a waterfall. Just to the right there’s a big splinter of rock, looks like a knife blade, leaning up against the cliff. You could climb right up that. And then at the top, see the groove in the cliff? That’s a natural chimney. Climb up that just as easily as walking down the street, I bet. Easier.”

Ryan could see it now. He wasn’t sure about the waterfall part, but the rest looked right. He felt foolish. He had been scanning the cliff face for ten minutes, looking for a possible way to get up it, and then in twenty seconds Trevor pointed out a route he hadn’t even noticed. “Hey, kid, that’s good. How could you find that so fast?”

Trevor shrugged and looked away, but Ryan could tell he was pleased with the praise. “Heck, I live in Arizona. I’ve been looking at rocks since, I don’t know, my big brother used to take me when I was just a kid. Since forever.”

Ryan looked around, and saw that the two women were watching him. They’d seen the whole exchange. He cleared his throat, which had been awfully dry and scratchy lately. “Okay. Let’s get back on the road. We’ll get to the base of the slope and camp. I think that Trevor has just found us a path.”

24 Inspection Detail

Again at sunrise the sky was a luminous white, with a halo surrounding the true sun. Ryan was annoyed to see that Trevor had once again gotten up far earlier than the rest of them—didn’t that kid need sleep? By the time the rest of them awoke, he had already donned his suit and was doing the suit check to go out on a morning walk. Radkowski would never have let him get away with it; he’d been quite strict about nobody going out without a buddy. Ryan thought about telling him to forget it, to stick around and help with the deflation of the hobbit hab, but he didn’t really feel like being the bad guy first thing in the morning, and really there was little Trevor could do to help until the others had breakfasted. So he let Trevor go out, with the admonition that he was not to get out of view of the hab.

They finished breakfast and deflated and packed away the habitat before Trevor wandered back. Ryan doubted if he had stayed in sight.

“Find anything?” Tana asked, when he came back to the rockhopper.

Trevor shook his head.

“What were you looking for out there, anyway?”

“Anything. Maybe fossils, I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Or old NASA Mars probes.”

“Didn’t find anything at all?”

“Rocks.” Trevor shrugged again. “Lots of rocks.”

“Well, keep looking,” Tana said cheerfully. “Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

In the early morning sunlight Ryan drove the rockhopper as far up the slope as he dared. He gained almost a kilometer and a half of altitude above the canyon floor. When the wheels of the rockhopper started to slide on loose rock, he stopped, backed down to a less slippery spot, and chocked the wheels of the rockhopper with rocks.

He detailed Tana and Trevor to climb the slope on foot.

He still intended to drive the rockhopper up to the base of the cliff under its own power, but the slope was getting dangerous, and a slide would mean the end of the expedition. He wanted a superfiber rope—better, two superfiber ropes—as a safety line.

Ryan wondered if he should do a centimeter by centimeter inspection of each line. He had examined the severed ends of the fibers that had broken to kill commander Radkowski. They had broken cleanly, both the main rope and the safety line the same way, with no sign of wear, friction, or damage. The breaks were so clean that they might have been done with a razor blade. The superfiber wouldn’t break like that from simple overload; a clean break like that had to have happened by some preexisting nick or flaw in the rope.

Or a deliberate action. But he wasn’t going to think about that. They had to be able to trust each other, they just had to, or else they would all die.

No, it must have been a nick in the fiber. He had discarded the spool that had held the superfiber that had failed, just in case there was a problem with the batch.

An inspection would be a good cautionary step, he decided. Tedious, but safe. As they paid the line out from the reel on the rockhopper, he watched it as it came off the spool, alert for any infinitesimal flaws.

“You’re just going to sit there and watch it unreel?” Trevor asked, incredulous. “Every inch of it?”

“Every centimeter.”

“Wow,” Trevor said. “I don’t know if that’s dedication or stupidity.”

Ryan shrugged. “A flaw killed one of us. I’d just as soon it didn’t kill another.”

It wasn’t easy.

25 Elective Surgery

“Overall, I’d say you’re in fine shape,” Doctor Geroch said to Tana. “I can tell you, I wish I had a heart like yours.” She laughed.

Julie Geroch, the NASA flight surgeon assigned to oversee the mission, wasn’t in bad shape herself, but she was a little overweight. If Tana had been her physician, she would have suggested exercising more. But there was no point in saying that. The point of the exam was for Tana to get certified as medically fit for the mission, not for her to give advice to others on their personal habits. “Thanks,” she said. She slipped off the hospital gown and reached behind the door to fetch her shirt.

“I’ll be scheduling you for surgery a week from Thursday,” Geroch said. “Is that date okay for you?”

With her brassiere halfway fastened, Tana suddenly froze. “Surgery?”

Dr. Geroch looked at her in surprise. “Sure.” She flipped through the stack of papers on her clipboard, and pulled out a color printout, an MRI image of Tana’s abdomen. “Your appendectomy.”

“Let me see that.” Tana’s bra dropped on the floor as she grabbed the clipboard away from the doctor. She stared at the image. “Looks fine to me. No swelling—” She checked the legend for the metabolic and physio-chemical data. “Fluids normal, white cell count, nothing special either way, looks good to me. What’s the problem here?”

“Oh, no problem,” Geroch said. “You’ve got an excellent appendix; I’d be sorry to see it go, too. But there’s no medical evacuation from Mars, and the crew will be leaving their appendices on Earth. Wisdom teeth too, although I see you’ve already had yours out. Didn’t they tell you that?”

It was probably somewhere in the stacks of briefing documents. Tana hadn’t read them all.

“Well, forget it,” Tana said. “The chances of appendicitis are trivial, and if it comes to it, I can remove an appendix. I’ve done dozens of emergency appendectomies; you know full well that I was a surgeon on call for the ER. I don’t know who called for this procedure, but I don’t approve of unnecessary surgery. You can never be one hundred percent sure that there won’t be a complication.”

“Sure,” Geroch said agreeably. “And we’d rather have a complication here on Earth than halfway to Mars.”

“I can do an appendectomy,” Tana retorted. “And I can deal with complications, thank you.”

“That’s fine, Doctor Jackson,” Geroch replied. “And tell me, can you remove your own appendix?”

“Sure. If I had to.”

“No problem, then. We won’t schedule an appendectomy, then.”

Tana smiled, relieved. She had no qualms doing surgery on other people—once you’ve done it a few times, pulling an appendix was no more challenging, say, than replacing the fuel-cell charge-discharge regulator on her Pontiac—but she didn’t like the thought of other people’s hands inside her own personal body.

“—as long as you can prove that you can remove your own appendix,” Geroch continued smoothly. “Here’s the deal. The way you prove that is for you to do it. So, when do you want to schedule the operating room?”

“Let me get this straight,” Tana said. “If I show you I can remove my appendix, by removing my appendix, then I don’t have to have my appendix removed?”

Dr. Geroch nodded, smiling. “That is correct.”

“Either way, the appendix is gone,” Tana said.

“That’s right.”

Tana sighed. “Okay, okay. Let’s schedule the damn surgery then.”

“Now, you’re talking sense. So. A week from Thursday works for you?”

26 Up the Creek

Tana and Trevor took the path up, trailing the superfiber from the spool on the rockhopper. Ryan insisted that they rope themselves together, worried that the loose and fragmented rock would give way under one of them, and they would slide down the face along with a few hundred tons of boulders. They carried with them an extra spool of superfiber and a rock drill.

The cliff was farther away than it looked. It took them four hours of hard climbing to reach the face, and at the end of it, even with several breaks for rest, Tana’s body was slick with sweat inside the chest-carapace of her suit. Despite the freezing temperature of the Martian air surrounding her, her suit was straining the limits of its thermal control unit to take away her body heat. Trevor unclipped the rope, and they took a well-deserved rest.

“It was a river,” Trevor said. “Look at it! Look!”

The spot where they were sitting was a level, sandy area, nearly circular, surrounded by low banks on all sides except the side they had climbed up. A dry pool at the bottom of an ancient, long dead waterfall. Now that Trevor had pointed it out, it was too clear to miss. Tana had suspected that they were climbing an ancient creek bed the whole climb, from seeing the way the stones were rounded, the way the stream had undercut the banks, and the way the path wound around, seeking the lowest level. But the dry pool was clear evidence.

“There was water here,” Tana agreed. “No doubt.”

Trevor was inspecting the banks. “I wonder if there are fossils?” he said.

After a brief rest, Tana moved to the cliff face and began the process of drilling bolts into the rock to attach anchors for the superfiber. When she had the bolts drilled and the anchors set, she radioed back down to Ryan. “Got the superfiber anchored. Go ahead and reel it in.”

“Copy anchored,” Ryan’s voice came. “I’m ready to reel.”

“Take it slow,” she advised. “Copy that,” Ryan said. “Slow it is.”

Tana noticed that Trevor had disappeared. Exploring, she guessed. The kid couldn’t stay put. Typical.

27 At the Base of the Cliff

This cliff would be easy, Trevor thought, looking up the rock face to the chimney above. A long climb, but not a difficult one. He considered climbing to the top just to show how easy it would be, but decided at last that Ryan would tell him he was violating safety and keep him from exploring any more.

He checked back to verify that he was still in sight of Tana. She was still drilling anchors into the rock. Her bright purple suit, even with a spattered layering of Mars dust over it, was easy to spot. He could still go a little ways without Ryan shouting about safety regulations.

Should he start calling him Commander Martin now? Ryan hadn’t said anything. He seemed less interested in formality than Commander Radkowski had been.

He could see, looking up the cliff face, an overhang. He would be willing to bet that it was another cave, a horizontal slot in the rock that was a mirror image of the one on the south rim. The commander’s death had cut off his opportunity to explore that one, but if he climbed up the splinter of rock angled against the cliff face, he could get a chance to look at this one. Would that be against safety regulations? Probably would, he concluded with some reluctance.

Anyway, according to Tana and Ryan, who had explored it, it was boring anyway. Nothing but salt. Not even any stalactites.

Instead, he followed the base of the cliff around to the right. It wasn’t as if he could get lost here; his sense of direction was still screwy on Mars, but if he just kept his right hand on the wall, he had to come back to the waterfall.

It was a dizzying view down, like the ski slope from hell. It must be miles down; tens of miles, maybe. He couldn’t see where the rockhopper was parked on the slope below, it was so far. He tuned in to the radio for a moment to see what Tana and Ryan were doing, but they were just discussing the superfiber cable, so he turned the radio off again.

The cliff face was extremely interesting. It wasn’t all uniform sandstone, like he’d first thought, but a whole variety of different layers, even different colors, some of it a smooth, grayish blue stone, other layers made of a mixture of rocks all cemented together. Conglomerate; he remembered that from his geology classes. They had that in Arizona, too. Below the conglomerate was a smooth layer of gray rock that looked like slate. Or shale; he always got those two confused. It jutted out and made a little shelf a few inches thick, strong enough that he could stand on it. He thought about jumping up and down to see how strong it was, but decided that it would be a bad idea.

It must have been a flood or something, he thought. No, more likely a lake bottom, or even the bottom of an ocean. All the mud on the bottom settled in a layer, more rocks and stuff got layered on top, and it squished down on it until the mud got squeezed into rock. All this was once muddy ocean floor. And then the ocean or lake or flood or whatever dried up.

Slate—or shale, whatever—was where you find fossils, he recalled. He followed the ledge along, looking carefully, but it was completely flat and uniformed. Boring.

Sometime you had to break the shale open, and the fossil is inside. He wished he had one of those hammers that geologists use. Estrela would have one, he knew, but she was down at the rockhopper. He looked around. Above the shale layer, he found a piece of the conglomerate about the size of a brick that looked ready to come loose. Trevor pried at it with his fingers, worked it back and forth until all of a sudden it popped loose.

He used the rock as a hammer. The shale broke easily, peeling off in flakes like the pages of a book. He looked at each one carefully, hoping for a fossil, but there was still nothing.

When his arm got tired, he put his hammer rock down on the ledge for a rest. He was so tired that his eyes had been looking at it for minutes before his brain noticed that there was something there to look at.

The piece of conglomerate he had been holding had a smooth, concave surface. It had been molded around something. It was hard to tell just what, but it couldn’t be natural. He raced back to the place he had found the rock. The trail of broken shale showed just exactly where he’d been. Yes, there it was, embedded in the rock, the piece that was left behind when he pried out the rock he used as a hammer, like a bas-relief protruding from the wall.

But what was it?

It was maybe six inches long, the diameter of his thumb, a perfect cylinder, but curved slightly, like a piece of macaroni. Looking closer at it, he could see slight pumpkin-ridges on the surface.

He tugged on the rock, but couldn’t pull it free. It didn’t matter. A fossil, he had found a fossil. There were fossils on Mars. There had been life on Mars.

And he, Brandon Weber, had found it.