The Sunborn, Page 2

  Outside, the wind whistled softly around the dome walls. Another reason she enjoyed the big dome—the sighing winds. Sounds didn’t carry well in Mars’ thin atmosphere, and the habs were so insulated they were cut off from any outdoor noise.

  The grass ended, and she crunched over slightly processed regolith. Lichens could break the rock down, but they took time—lots of it. So they’d taken shortcuts to make an ersatz soil. They mixed Martian dust and small gravel-sized rock bits with a lot of their organic waste, spaded in over decades—everything from kitchen leftovers to slightly cleaned excrement. Add compost-starter bacteria, keep moist, and wait. And hope. Microbes liked free carbon, using it with water to frame elaborate molecules. She and Viktor had doled it out for years under the first, small dome before even trying to grow anything. The Book of Genesis got it all done in six days, but mere humans took longer.

  She hit the marker they had laid out—a rock—and turned, pointing off-camera. “And now—ta’daah!—we have a surprise. The first Martian swimming pool.”

  Okay, no swimming pools in Genesis—but it’s a step.

  “I’m going for my first swim—now.” She shucked off her blue jumpsuit to reveal a red bikini. Her arms and legs were muscular, breasts midsize, skin pale, not too many wrinkles. Not really a babe, no, but she still got mash notes from middle-aged guys, somehow leaking through the e-mail filters.

  Hey, we’re looking for market share here! She grinned, turned, and dove into the lapping clear water. Surfaced, gasped—she wasn’t faking, this really was her first swim in a quarter century—and laughed with sheer pleasure (not in the script). Went into a breaststroke, feeling the tug and flex of muscle, and something inexpressible and simple burst in her. Fun, yes—not nearly enough fun on Mars.

  Or water. They had moved from the original base camp about eighteen years before. Once Earthside had shipped enough gear to build a real water-retrieval system, and a big nuke generator to run it, there seemed no point in not moving the hab and other structures—mostly light and portable—to the ice hills.

  Mars was in some ways an upside-down world. On Earth one would look for water in the low spots, stream channels. Here in Gusev water lay waiting in the hilly hummocks, termed by geologists “pingos.” When water froze beneath blown dust, it thrust up as it expanded, making low hills of a few hundred meters. She recalled how Marc and Raoul had found the first ice, their drill bit steaming as ice sublimed into fog. Now Marc was a big vid star and Raoul ran Axelrod’s solar energy grid on the moon. Time…

  She stopped at the pool edge, flipped out, and sprang to her feet—thanks, 0.38 g! “The first swim on Mars, and you saw it.” Planned this shot a year ago, when I ordered the bikini. She donned a blue terry-cloth bathrobe; the dryness made the air feel decidedly chilly. “In case you’re wondering, swimming doesn’t feel any different here. That’s because the water you displace makes you float—we’re mostly made of water, so the effect compensates. It doesn’t matter much what the local gravity is.”

  Okay, slipped in some science while their guard was down.

  “Behind all this is our improved water-harvesting system.” She pointed out the dome walls, where pipes stretched away toward a squat inflated building. “Robotic, nuclear-powered. It warms up the giant ice sheets below us, pumps water to the surface. Took nine years to build—whoosh! Thank you, engineers.”

  What did the water mean? She envisioned life on a tiny fraction of Mars with plentiful water—no longer a cold, dusty desert. Under a pressurized dome the greenhouse effect raised the temperature to something livable. Link domes, blow up bigger ones, and you have a colony. They could grow crops big-time. Red Kansas…

  A gout of steam hissed from a release value, wreathing her in a moist, rotten-egg smell. Andy had put the finishing touches on the deep thermal system, spreading the upwelling steam and hot water into a pipe system two meters below the dome floor. Their nuke generators ran the system, but most of the energy came for free from the magma lode kilometers below. Once the geologists—“areologists” when on Mars, the purists said—had drilled clean through the pingos and reached the magma, the upwelling heat melted the ice layers. Ducted upward, it made possible the eight domes they now ran, rich in moist air. Soon they would start linking them all. She smiled as she thought about strolling along treelined walkways from dome to dome, across windblown ripe wheat fields, no helmet or suit. Birds warbling, rabbits scurrying in the bushes.

  In the first years their diet had been vegetarian. It made sense to eat plant protein directly, rather than lose 90 percent of the energy by passing it through an animal first. But from the first four rabbits shipped out they now had hundreds, and relished dinner on “meat nights.” They’d have one tonight, after this media show.

  “So that’s it—life on Mars gets a bit better. We’re still spending most of our research effort on the Marsmat—the biggest conceptual problem in biology, we think. We just got a new crew to help. And pretty soon, on the big nuke rocket due in a week, we’ll get a lot more gear and supplies. Onward!”

  She grinned, waved—and Viktor called, “Is done.”

  She had waited long enough. She shucked off the bathrobe and tossed the wireless mike on top of the heap.

  “Am still running.”

  “Check it for editing,” she said quickly. “I’m going to splash.” She dove into the pool again. Grinning, Viktor caught it in slow-mo.

  Julia rolled over onto her back and took a few luxurious strokes. She caught Andy’s kick off the platform and watched him swoop gracefully around the dome. It was still a bit of a thrill to see. They kept the dome at high pressure to support it, which added more lift for Andy. He kept his wings canted against the thermals that rose from the warm floor, camera-savvy, grinning relentlessly.

  Even with the lower gravity and higher air density, Viktor and Julia had been skeptical that it could work. But Axelrod and the Consortium Board had loved the idea, seeing tourism as a long-term potential market.

  And Andy did look great, obviously having a lot of fun, his handsome legs forming a neat line as he arced above. He rotated his arms, mimicking the motion birds make in flight, pumping thrust into his orbit. His turn sharpened into a smaller circle, coming swiftly around the steepled bulk of the big eucalyptus. His wings pitched to drive him inward, and wind rippled his hair. Julia watched Viktor follow the accelerating curve with the camera, bright wings sharp against the dark sky. Good stuff.

  But he was cutting it close to the tree, still far up its slope. The Consortium Board had chosen Andy both for his engineering skills and for this grinning, show-off personality, just the thing to perk up their audience numbers.

  His T-shirt flapped, and he turned in closer still. She lost sight of him behind the eucalyptus, and when he came within view again, there seemed to be no separation at all between his body and the tree. Ahead of him a limb stuck out a bit farther than the rest. He saw it and turned his right wing to push out, away, and the wing hit the limb. For an instant it looked as though he would bank down and away from the glancing brush. But the wing caught on the branch.

  It ripped, showing light where the monolayer split away from the brace. Impact united with the change in flow patterns around his body. The thin line of light grew and seemed to turn Andy’s body on a pivot, spinning him.

  The eucalyptus wrenched sideways. It was thin, and the collision jerked.

  He fought to bring the wing into a plane with his left arm, but the pitch was too much. Julia gasped as his right arm frantically pumped for leverage it did not have. The moment froze, slowed—and then he was tumbling in air, away from the tree, falling, gathering speed.

  The tree toppled, too.

  In the low gravity the plunge seemed to take long moments. All the way down he fought to get air under his remaining wing. The right wing flapped and rattled and kept him off-kilter. His efforts brought his head down, and when he hit in the rocks near the pool, the skull struck first.

  The smack was
horrible. She cried out in the silence.

  Andy had not uttered a sound on the way down.

  2.

  BOOT HILL

  THE TRADITIONAL DUNE BUGGY with the shrouded body crawled slowly up the small hill. Footprints had made the entire area smooth, and the cortege followed a well-worn path. The stone cairn, which they’d erected twenty years ago when the first mission landed, had had many visitors. Also by tradition, the burial would be late in the day. Boot Hill looked out over the red and pink and brown wilderness of Mars. With the domes of the colony in the distance the mourners were reminded of the strangeness of their new world and surrounded with the beauty of a Mars sunset. It was a fitting send-off to a fellow explorer and served somehow to lessen their grief.

  Julia well remembered that small party of five who’d established the graveyard with the mounds for Lee Chen and Gerda Braun. Today there were twelve mounds and ten times as many mourners. Every time they did this the line was longer.

  We lost Alexev in a fall, Sheila Cabbot in an electrical failure. And, of course, two aerobraking tragedies. Andy is the thirteenth.

  Over the years they’d added far more graves than Julia had ever wanted to see, and had to expand the original boundary circle of rocks several times. None lost to disease yet. All accidents. She reached the top of the hill and scanned back along the line of suited figures trudging up the rise. The newcomers were easy to pick out, stumbling slightly in an uncertain rhythm. The efficient “Mars gait” took a bit of time to master. Also, the harsh reality of Mars was likely hitting them full force for the first time. The younger ones tended to babble in times of stress. The chatter in the suit mikes was unsettling; she switched hers off.

  Someone Julia didn’t immediately recognize was scanning a small vid around the scene. Most everything they did was recorded; she should have been used to it by now. But she still chafed under the watchful lens eyes. It seemed like an intrusion here, just to make a fleeting news item Earthside. But then, Andy had loved the spotlight. He wouldn’t mind.

  She looked carefully at the figure holding the vid. Still no recognition.

  We’ve really grown; I used to know everyone instantly, just by gait and size. Usually without looking at their suit markings. Hope this guy is new, and not someone I’ve forgotten.

  Viktor jogged her arm, and she turned back to the ceremony.

  She leaned over and touched her helmet to his. “Who’s the guy with the vid? Is he new?”

  “Didier Rabette. From machine shop. Here two years already.”

  One of the geologists was a lay preacher, and she’d volunteered to officiate. That, too, was new; they were really beginning to specialize. Progress.

  The ceremony was brief but effective. Julia thought suddenly about navy sea burials. Regrets, but the mission must continue.

  She let the bulk of the crowd leave, stung anew by the suddenness of death. She never got used to it: how someone you’d just talked to, or someone who had always been there, was now gone. She still held internal conversations with her parents, although both were gone. Her father had slowly declined from one of the newly emerging killer viral diseases, the zoonosis class that migrated from animals to humans, fresh out of the African cauldron. It was really no surprise when he died. But her mother’s death had been sudden: a brief respiratory illness, one of the “new” flus that roamed the crowded Earth, and she was gone in less than a week. From “doing fine” to “done for” in just over twenty-four hours, actually.

  Julia realized that even if she’d not been 50 million miles away, she likely would not have rushed to her mother’s bedside, because the course of the disease had been so ambiguous, the decline so sudden. At least, she thought ruefully, it helped assuage her guilt a little. But now Andy—plucked from them in a heartbeat. As a biologist she understood intellectually that evolution requires death; if all the original forms were still around, there would be no room for the new ones. But emotionally it was very hard to understand.

  Afterward, on the way down, she was surprised by how large the colony looked. In the gathering dark, lights twinkled in the distance, stirred by the dusty breeze. “Mars City” was beginning to take shape.

  3.

  THE MARS EFFECT

  “WE MUST MEET WITH the new ones,” Viktor said crisply the next morning over breakfast in the compact cafeteria. “First thing today.”

  They were sitting at their usual table, and nobody in the crew sat with them, by tradition. They were the founders, after all. Julia sometimes waved some of them over, but usually she and Viktor wanted privacy. It reminded them of the early years, when the two of them had had Mars to themselves. No one within 50 million miles. They’d staved off the lurking fears of abandonment and ever-present danger by creating their own private reality. By focusing closely they became the whole world to each other.

  As they had come into the cafeteria, the audio switched to some gospel music, an unusual choice for her, but it fitted her current mood. “Trouble of This World” by Bill Landford rang gracefully amid the clatter of breakfast.

  In the two days since Andy’s death a numb, gray pall had descended. Julia and Viktor had taken full responsibility, and meant it. The Consortium Board, meeting in emergency session, had rejected that explanation. Andy had flown inside the dome over a hundred times. Hang-glider enthusiasts around the world had endlessly rerun the pictures of Andy’s tight glide, and they emerged with a consensus: he had cut the margin too fine. Andy had never flown that tight a circle around the eucalyptus before. He had simply misjudged.

  The vast Martian subscription audience felt the same. There had been the usual abrasive commentary, asking whether Julia and Viktor had simply lost their judgment from the long years of running the Gusev Mars Outpost, but that was so expected that nobody paid attention.

  Not that any of it helped Julia and Viktor. They did feel responsible, and no media mavens could change that. “Trouble of This World” mournfully underlined their mood. Julia sipped coffee and let her doubts well up within. It was better to let the feelings wash over her and live in them fully, knowing they would pass.

  They had found long before that music knitted together the small community here, made it seem less isolated from humanity. The occasional disputes over what to play—the opera buffs thought Wagner for breakfast was fine—were worth it. Today it certainly helped to hear a chorus singing quiet spirituals over the breakfast clatter.

  She said nothing and gazed out the big window. Their table commanded its view, taking in the big new dome to the left, and beyond it the dozens of lesser domes, habs, Quonset huts and labs and depots. All with sandbags atop to shield against the solar wind and cosmic rays that sleeted down here eternally. Tracks crosshatched the whole area, and color-coded, suited figures moved everywhere in pressure suits.

  Ugly, she had to admit. Immediately she looked beyond the bustling colony. There lay beauty. The roll of dark hills across the crater floor blended into the bright talus slopes that swept up into the craggy crater walls. A kilometer up, the rocky edges of the crater blended into a pink-brown sky that quickly faded into black. She never quite got used to that sky—blacker than ebony and holding a sun hard and bright against the dim backdrop of stars.

  Raw Mars, still out there.

  She got homesick, of course, often triggered by the similar desert landscapes here. On summers in her girlhood her family had returned to a small town of one thousand in The Mallee region of north Victoria. There were unending games with the kids of the town, flitting among the blue gum trees along the shaded billabongs. The dry heat had seemed to swarm up into her nostrils like a friend, welcoming her back into carefree summer.

  There was cracker night, with fireworks shooting off in backyards and the town square. The dads drank XXXX beer and lit fuses with glee. Dogs hid whimpering under beds, and crowds oohed at bursting stars. The best part was the scary moments when something went wrong. Once her father somehow set fire to an old dunny in the yard, and the heavy
stench of old dung came rising out of the pit when they hosed it down.

  Her grandest adventure, carried out against the fearsome warnings of the boys, had been the Great Ascent of the grain silo. She’d waited until nobody was about in the late afternoon, and the door stood ajar at the base of the empty, echoing 120-foot concrete tower. There was only pale wheat dust inside, awaiting the harvest, but as she went up the narrow ladder with no rail, the dust made the rungs slippery.

  When she reached the first landing, her right foot slipped on the slick dust and she fell to one knee, snatching at the step and barely holding on. That deserved a pause, but the light was fading inside, so she started up the next ladder, and without pause the next. The great cylinder above seemed infinite, and the six ladders took her at last to a narrow platform that capped the roof. She peered out across the chessboard fields and to the east sighted the next silo, gleaming crimson in the sunset. To the west was the next silo, and she imagined them marching all the way to the vast Nullarbor, the null-arbor land of no trees that stretched a full thousand miles.

  Then she looked down. Her younger brother, Bill, waved up at her. He must have followed when she sneaked away. He was right below, staring up. He made his ghoul face, eyes wild. She spat a big gob—her mouth was dusty—and watched it dwindle away, skating on the breeze. He danced away, laughing. She was amazed, in her last long glance about, at how her feeling for the land changed just by getting above it. For the first time she sensed herself as a tiny creature on a great turning sphere beneath a forgiving star.