The Sunborn, Page 4

  “We have lost money from beginning,” Viktor said.

  Julia, cooling down, added, “Since we decided to stay on here, and let the nuke take Raoul and Marc back. But Axelrod found a way to keep us resupplied through the lean years. Now he seems to think he has to make a buck.”

  “The stockholders want to see improved profitability,” Praknor said evenly.

  “Why do I sense another agenda here?” Julia spread her hands.

  Praknor looked at them both without blinking. “Perhaps we need to meet again, tomorrow. Give you time to think these ideas through.”

  “We think fast here,” Viktor said.

  “Let’s meet tomorrow, same time, okay?” Praknor said with utterly hollow brightness, tone rising on the last words.

  “Uh, I suppose so,” Julia said dubiously. Another meeting like this was going to be even worse. “I just don’t think we agree on which way the outpost has to go.”

  “We are merely capitalizing on the two most famous people on Earth,” Praknor said in a friendly tone.

  “On Mars,” Viktor corrected.

  Julia and Viktor never regretted staying on Mars; the whole sweaty, frenetic hubbub on Earth repelled them even then; now it was unimaginable.

  She recalled an e-letter from Marc shortly after he’d returned to Earth, sentiments echoed by every other returned Marsnaut.

  “You rush into big halls,” he had written, “and right away there are reporters and legions of devoted waiting, and they want you to talk. You’re there to radiate certitude, and they want lots of that. Even though you’ve become a walking mouth that shakes hands and you don’t really have conversations because everybody wants pronouncements. You are the center of attention of every room you enter and it gets old, old, old. ‘What’s it like out there?’ gets asked a thousand different ways, and it doesn’t help to answer, ‘Read my book,’ because they already have, and yet want more. They want a meta-you, the complexity of your experiences shrunken down to recycled moments and phrases: explorer, adventurer, authority on everything above the atmosphere.

  “You start to notice that as your image swells, the actual you gets smaller, lost. It’s a queen bee life, with handlers and lawyers and worse. Compliments rain down on you and it’s embarrassing. You do ‘events’ at which nothing happens except you talk. You enter to applause and make the same opening jokes and pretend it is all happening for the very first time, because it is for them. Even adulation stops thrilling you after a while. The threshold rises, and routine superlatives wing by you with no effect. You don’t really know whether they’re clapping for you or for the meta-you, enshrined in history yet still walking around, looking for the way offstage.

  “After you run out of talk and the questions run down, too, out come the cameras. Everybody wants a picture taken with you, and your fixed grin doesn’t matter. Celebs move with an aura around them, and to step inside that halo for a moment, get it frozen into digital, is a kind of immortality for them, you suppose, from their excited eyes. They come up to you and flatter you beyond all believability. So many want a precious moment with you, some with whispered theories about alien life and others about God, somehow. So your exit is measured out in ten-second bursts of sudden intimacy. Some might even be genuine if you had time to stop and let all the others fall away and just talk to this one real person.

  “No moment goes unrecorded, even down to the farts getting up onstage and the nose-blowing when you have a cold. The camera lenses follow you into the men’s room. You get advice shouted at you on the street, most of it hopelessly vague (‘Get more funding for Mars!’) or uselessly narrow (‘Get behind mission profile redesign at Huntsville’). You’re the boy in the bubble and the walls are always transparent.”

  She took the letter out and read it to Viktor every few months. It worked wonders when their morale was low.

  4.

  VENT R

  JULIA TRIED TO FORGET the whole hour with Praknor, which had seemed like a day, by tending to the rabbits. She fed them, petted them, and tried not to think.

  In the last two decades they had mined ice, inflated high-tech greenhouses, and grown crops, and were never in danger of lean diets. But sending meat 100 million kilometers was pricey, so early on they asked for rabbits. The vegetarian movement had continued to grow Earthside, so there were demonstrations, some violent, against shipping rabbits or any other living, high-protein source.

  In reply Viktor made a video showing how much grunt work they did in a day, with his voice-over saying, “Hard labor needs solid food.”

  It worked. Omaha Steaks won the bidding to ship big canisters of beef and the fish Julia preferred to Mars, at their expense. Axelrod actually made a profit on the deal. The rabbits mated avidly, leaping about, giving them both pets and a long-term meat source.

  Julia saw no contradiction between caring for the animals and later slaughtering them, but then, she was a biologist. Which wasn’t a lot different from being a farmer. And while she had longed for a cat as a pet, she knew the price in meat to feed it.

  Viktor came in and sat beside her while she stroked a big white female named Roberta. “Forget her,” he said, rubbing her neck.

  “Hard to do.”

  “She got nowhere.”

  “Just like the other ideas, yeah,” Julia said, grinning with false cheer.

  This wasn’t the first weird marketing attempt. Years back there was the idea the Consortium had flirted with for a while: send small interest groups to Mars. The “high concept” was that members of the newest Earthside social movement, polyamory—multiple loving partners, with few strings attached—were just the sort to colonize. They were “high-novelty-seeking individuals,” so they needed alternative sexual hijinks over the long journeys, or so the argument went. And many of them were wealthy, some from Hollywood, and so could buy their own passage. Further evidence of a society with far too much time on its hands, Viktor had remarked. But there was some sanity left Earthside. The media got wind of the Consortium’s marketing research and headlined this as the “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll in space agenda,” and the marketing director got fired. Mercifully.

  “I been thinking,” Viktor said softly, his way of introducing a new idea. He stroked a big male rabbit thoughtfully. Julia realized it was the one they had named Andy.

  “You want to get away,” she guessed.

  He chuckled. “Wife always knows what husband is thinking, before he does.”

  She twisted her mouth. “Um. Tell Praknor?”

  “She is busy talking to Earthside. We should not bother her.”

  “I heard there’s a big solar storm on the way, too. It might cut off some of the low-frequency bands to Earthside, the data streams.” She grinned. “Praknor will be busy with that, too.”

  “So…let her show up for our meeting, find us gone.”

  Happily she said, “I like that.”

  The Vent R team of eight was ready, details delegated. Viktor quietly mustered them and got a liftoff time, 0600 the next day. Julia and Viktor were nominally in charge, but they had picked a young biologist, Daphne Newmarket, to call the stages of the descent. Daphne was a lab whiz and had done some limited descents in Vents A and C, nearby. She had a ready smile and ample muscles, infectious enthusiasm, blond hair tied back in a ponytail, and at times made Julia feel a thousand years old.

  They all went about their tasks without a word to the newbies, particularly Praknor, who was busy setting up her own office and grousing about its size. The bigger habitats adjoined the first domes, affording views and much more space than the rambling, added-on hab Viktor and Julia shared. They used the minicams distributed through the outpost to be sure Praknor was preoccupied by staff and learning the endless details of life inside the linked cans and domes.

  After the first expedition, the Consortium had reached an accord with their losing Chinese-Euro competitors, the Airbus Group. Once the race for prize money idea worked, big-time, it became the model for all fur
ther solar system exploration. In the Vent R descent team were a Brazilian, a Chinese, and an Indian veteran biologist and medical tech, Vaquabal. Those countries plus a dozen others had paid into the International Exploration Coalition, though the Consortium and Airbus still played major roles, grandfathered in—after all, they had put up the money and talent when no single nation would.

  At 0530 they met in the assembly building, a half-cylinder of carbon composite laid flat side down at the edge of the landing field. The three other crew members were old hands, and they made quick work of the systems checks. Their biggest suborbital lifter was ready, maintenance crew certified, and they loaded swiftly. Gear slid into slot-carries, secured by bungee cords and clamps.

  Julia got a good seat in the observing bubble. Viktor was copilot, running inboard systems monitors the whole flight. He would have liked to fly the bird, but the Consortium had its protocols… The liftoff was a steady rumble below them that pressed them at 3 g’s, the rusty land falling away quickly. Mars had just enough atmosphere to allow some aerodynamic lift in the rocket plane, so they spent five minutes flying due west and then flipped and began the parachuted descent. A rumbling burst at an altitude of three kilometers settled them down without a jar in rumpled terrain.

  First, suiting up. Unlike the old days, this was now almost a pleasure. Julia’s skinsuit was a marvel of elastic threads that slipped on like velvet.

  She and Viktor checked and rechecked their seals, oxy, temp. The newer staff rolled their eyeballs a bit, and Julia knew they were thinking, Hey, the new systems self-monitor, y’know. And she did know, but decades of triple-checking did not wear off. One of the job specs for astronauts was an obsessive-compulsive profile. No longer, it seemed. Someday, she was sure, one of the bright, techno-savvy types would end up gasping for air in a remote canyon. There would be a panel review and, my, my, a new malf route would be discovered.

  Second, out into the big rover that rolled forth from their rear cargo bay. There was far more room inside, thick radiation shielding by water in the walls, and eight big tractor wheels. She could close her eyes and imagine she was in a limousine. Viktor insisted on driving, as usual.

  Finally, out. Immediately Julia breathed easier. Here was raw Mars. Smooth basaltic flow below them, nonfriable, visible in the belly cam. They crossed low sandy basins ringed by ruddy hills, scribbling tracks across the belly of an ocean now 100 million years dry.

  The vent mouth was a few klicks away. Viktor wanted to pick up the local geomonitors he had sent over by rocket months before. He yanked each of the silvery lances out of the ground, using the rover robo arm. The crew read them and downloaded their data into a diagnostic program.

  After the fifth geomonitor, Viktor turned over driving the rover and studied the analysis screens. Frowning, he said, “These show same pattern we saw in Gusev.”

  Uchida, a sharp-eyed geologist, asked, “The magnetic field strength?”

  Viktor pointed to colored lines that peaked several times over the last several months. “Local magnetic fields go up, so does vapor pressure in the upper Marsmat chamber—only hours later. Same delay when fields fall.”

  Uchida called up a figure on an inset window. “Here’s the cause, I bet. We’ve got lotsa satellite data on this. Here’s a figure from a paper on the anomalies in the south. In the north the solar wind flows smoothly around, as it does on Venus. But the incoming solar wind veers around these field peaks—”

  “Look like magnetic mountains,” Viktor said, running his eyes down the sheets of data, histograms, and plots beneath the cartoon figure, checking, checking. The usual scientific acronyms could not obscure the flow of incoming solar winds—like the big one currently blowing—around pronounced mountainlike peaks in magnetic field.

  “Question is, what causes them? The geologists say it’s magma sheets, cooled off into magnetized rock.”

  Viktor looked at Uchida skeptically. “You are geologist.”

  “Yeah, but the agreement between this data and what we know about the magma from seismology, well…” Uchida shrugged.

  “Not good,” Viktor said.

  “The trouble is, it varies with time.” Uchida produced curves showing the rise and fall of the “magnetic mountains”—not everywhere, but in certain spots around Mars. Long silence.

  “And here’s the local vapor pressure at those places.”

  “Um.” Viktor studied the curves. More silence.

  “Julia, what do you think?” Viktor said.

  Distracted by the view, she studied the curves. Physics had never been her strong point, and she had no idea why the local magnetic fields should vary. But they did, the red line peaking every few weeks, the blue line of vapor pressure following. “Correlations don’t have to mean cause,” she said.

  Uchida asked, “Which means…?”

  “Maybe there’s magma underlying this whole area, moving now and then. When it flows in, the magnetic field rises. It melts deep layers of ice, which percolates up into the mat chambers.”

  Uchida pursed his lips. “But there are waves, too. Magnetic waves.” He showed them different curves, these labeled with dates. Long sinusoids pulsed for hours, then faded. They combined at times, shaping into complex waveforms.

  “Hey, I’m not a geophysicist,” Julia said, throwing up her hands.

  “It doesn’t make sense to me, either,” Uchida said. “Using the magma model”—he nodded to Julia with, it seemed to her, totally unnecessary diffidence—“these waves would come from fluid movements of the magma in constricted passages.”

  He and Viktor got into an extended technical discussion.

  Julia turned to the big port view bubble and relaxed, preparing herself for the coming descent, and watched a new vista unfold. Crystalline strata sparkled with diamondlike facets in the hard sunlight. Sullen lava flows were as dull as asphalt in spots, and in others where the dust had worn them, shiny as black glass. And everywhere, reds and pinks in endless profusion, myriad shades depending on composition, time of day, and angle of sunlight. The crater cliffs began as brooding maroon ramparts at dawn, then lightened to crimson at noon and slid into blood red in the afternoon’s slanting rays.

  Ayers Rock cm Mars. I went so far away and found myself still at home.

  In the red twilights of the long years here she had recalled her girlhood in Australia. Not the rural summers with relatives north of Adelaide, with their droughts, brush fires, and smelly sheep, no. Nor the flies and hard work. Instead, the wide skies and wildlife returned to her in memory. The eucalyptus trees were beautiful and endlessly varied, with names like rose-of-the-West, yellow jacket, jarrah, Red River gum, half mahogany, grey ironbark, and especially the ghost gum, which she soon learned was Eucalyptus papuana, appearing in its silvery grace on postage stamps, calendars, and tea towels. They framed the human world of tea-colored, dammed-up ponds, of hot paddocks of milling sheep, of rusting, corrugated sheds tilted into trapezoids—trees standing as silent sentinels at sunset, glowing like aluminum in the settling quiet.

  On impulse she had ordered a didgeridoo, the ancient echoing instrument of the Aborigines. It came at her personal expense in their fourth shipment—at nearly a million dollars, but they were rich in what Viktor called pseudomoney, from the book and interview rights; though Axelrod seemed to get most of it. The slender tube was labeled in the manifest a “wood trumpet,” but it sounded nothing like that.

  Some Aboriginals had complained that women were not allowed to play didgeridoos in their culture, that she was showing disrespect, but when worldwide sales of didgeridoos and concert tickets rocketed, they fell silent. She learned the trick of holding air in her bulging cheeks and breathing it out while her lungs drew air in, so that she could maintain a long, hollow tone. The skill was unique; normally people never needed to speak while they breathed. The long, low notes fit into her memory of the great Australian deserts, and when she played, the notes somehow sang also of red Mars.

  Watching Gusev Crater t
hrough the wall screens—which improved in resolution and size with every upgrade, so that these days it was as though they had a bay window in each hab room—and playing the didgeridoo, called forth her sense of bleak oblivion. The spareness of deserts had always made her mind roam freely. She could find fresh perspectives on her field biology that way, and in those years had made her reputation as the central authority on the Marsmat. Labs Earthside worked at her behest, comparing Marsmat DNA to Earthly forms.

  Somehow in her mind her girlhood and Mars blended. She had come to see biology as the frame of the world in those girlish years—the whole theater, in which vain humans were only actors. Mars confirmed this. On Earth, knowing biology quietly brought order to the ragtag rustling of people, ensured that their lives had continuity with the hushed natural world.

  Just as it could to Mars. On that article of faith she had built their years here together.

  Over a rise and there ahead the Vent R opening yawned, faint sulfur stains spreading from its mouth. The sharp ridges framing this canyon could not dispel the sensation of spacious wealth. Satellite observations had first detected vapor here, then found hints of vent chemicals. Sure enough, the lambent light glowed through an early morning fog before them. Iron-dark stains mingled near the vent splashes of yellow and orange. Red slopes nearby rose up and darkened to cobalt, then into indigo. Evidence of other ventings, long ago?

  A dust devil in the distance wrote a filigree path across the rusty plains. She had always wanted to somehow sense their sandstorm sting and the moist kiss of the dawn fogs. All this time, and she had never felt Mars on her skin. Not quite. Then she recalled the hard days of the second year here, just before the first return launch—which she and Viktor declined. There had been one emergency, when she had been forced to run from their first, collapsing greenhouse—headed for the hab’s lock in a stretching minute of panic that she would never forget. Raw Mars, sucking at her lungs, drying her skin—