"Let me know if those ones come around again."
Aurora was taken aback by the comment. How much did Xiao Li know?
"Let’s get back with the others Shel." Aurora’s face flushed as she changed the subject.
When they returned to the canteen Terry and Phillipa were stuck into each other again. Phillipa was in full form, fresh from an early morning on the Neuronet where she had been organising and reorganising funding and alliances, issuing carefully worded press mnemes, and corresponding with the Yanks about something. Terry was annoyed with Phillipa for taking unilateral action on issues that had not properly been discussed amongst the group. The rest of the crew was enjoying the spectacle of Terry getting well and truly up Phillipa’s nose.
Lately, Aurora was finding it difficult to sit through these arguments. She had never felt particularly comfortable contributing to them in any case because the others seemed to be encouraged by her joining in. Her apparent, possibly short term, immunity to Outlanders somehow translated into a responsibility for setting the example, which was a responsibility that she would prefer to do without. She excused herself, glancing guiltily over her shoulder at Xiao Li. What had gone on there?
Aurora climbed back up on her bunk and flicked on her neurovisor to check her e-mail. At the top of her mneme queue were the three constant letters in her wandering, interplanetary existence, ‘MUM’. Aurora cracked open the mneme and invited her mother's thoughts into her mind. And was predictably disappointed. Like all her mother’s communications it was all a bit too clean, with words carefully selected to strip away any subtext that might betray what she left unsaid. Not that what she shared was untrue, and the sentiments were lovely, exactly what a lonely but proud daughter on the other side of the solar system would want to hear. What annoyed Aurora was that all her dealings she had with her mother were like that. Too sanitised.
There was plenty that might never be said. Aurora still following in Dad’s footsteps, and even after he had stopped for good? How did it feel that Aurora had chosen him over her? But Mum liked clarity and wrapped up loose ends. The clear lines in Aurora's mind that made her into a half decent scientist - those came from Mum.
Why on Earth had she married Dad? Why, at thirty-six, did this still matter? A habitual flick of attention brought a mneme board into Aurora’s neuroview and she began her response.
Dear Mum. Full stop.
That was all Aurora could manage. And then her words flowed away with unseen currents into an endless sea.
She switched off her neurovisor and lay back.
This was crazy. Why was she keeping this to herself? She need to tell someone about this now, but then she forgot to.
The next day day she decided to take Julia on a short field outing, bundling her up in the sled in a thick swag and bungees pulled tight. She argued that the cramped confines of the station were making Julia’s condition worse. Phillipa had disapproved, but Aurora was in no mood to compromise. Chandra had backed her up provided safety protocols were followed to the letter.
"Great. The two people who should be on observation going on an outing. Am I the only one who sees this?" griped Phillipa.
The woman could get stuffed. Still, in the part of her mind that mattered, the guilt stuck. Anyway, it was ridiculous to get wound up about it. Aurora still passed all the standard tests as well as she ever had.
"Don't worry Julia. I'll keep an eye on everything for us."
"Wheee," enthused Julia softly.
Denali had dragged them out for a grand view south along the Chasma. As they went, Aurora shared Wheatbelt Wallaby stories with her friend, and they seemed to brighten Julia's spirits. She filled in her creation myth, the story of the sisters and the brothers and the lecherous Mars, with new embellishments.
"So Ror," There was a long pause as Julia recovered herself. "The planet - the planet just needs to get – to get laid."
Aurora snorted. Jules was still a funny bitch. "True? I think you are onto something. The poor horny old guy. Tell that to the terraformers."
Wheatbelt Wallaby and Blue Bilby followed dry skin shed by the Waugal, the Rainbow Serpent, who had long ago left the land following the water and now coils up under the polar ice with nowhere else to go. Maybe Blue Bilby is lucky, Wheatbelt Wallaby tells her, because snakes will eat little bilby bunnies. Blue Bilby points ahead, far down the skin, where it kinks over itself and then grows fat further on. The Waugal, Wheatbelt Wallaby explained, had eaten too many bilbies and numbats and was digesting them when he happened to slither through holes in the skull of Ginga, the salty croc, where he had been stranded by the retreating tide that never came back. There was nothing else for the Waugal to do but back out, and the skin slithered out off was left on both sides as this dry valley. That bit you can walk across where the skin breaks in two, that's what's left of Ginga, his eye socket bone. Hyblaeus Chasma to the west of it is the shape made by the weight of his bony head.
Julia didn't respond, and a quick check confirmed she had fallen asleep.
Dad should see this, Aurora thought happily. He'd love stomping around out here and the Dreamings he would have strewn about might just be strong enough to bring the Waugal back. It was fifteen years now she'd been exploring on her own. After Mum left him, to free him to his own devices and to move in with Joe, Dad had just pitched down stakes at the end of the same road in a bush block and began to wait for something that never happened.
When Aurora moved in with him, usually subtly and sometimes not, trying to get him back out walk-about, Dad had just shrugged. Sometimes he humoured her, but they never went far.
"No purpose left in it," he'd say.
"You can't go out without a fight with Mum. That's crazy. You don't have to do that anymore. You can go anytime you like."
"It's how I knew she loved me Darl, no point to it now."
That comment still pissed Aurora off.
"What about me Dad? What about Wheatbelt Wallaby?"
And then he'd shrug, and they'd go somewhere, usually to visit a mate and have a bush tucker barby and talk about the old days.
So, she'd left him puttering around his shed as he did most days, never more than a few stone's throws from Mum and her new husband, but almost never stopping by. Aurora had left and borrowed his spirit for the long journey as he apparently had one to spare. She was in Antarctica when the cancer came, and part of her was glad she hadn't made it back in time to see him give in to that too. Mum had been there to help daily, so it might have felt crowded. The other part of her felt like crap.
"What do you think Dad?"
"Not bad Darl, not bad at all," answered Waijungari.
Aurora studied the thin ridge at the confluence of the Chasma. It was just the right size to walk across, and too small for the Djambi rover to follow. A straight-line East was the center of the world of Elysium, the great Goanna Man himself. He called out to her heart, serenading her.
"I'll be soon on my way," Wheatbelt Wallaby sang back.
"Who are you – who are you talking to Ror?" whispered Julia.
“Nobody.”
As they returned to the station Julia woke in a panic. "Rory, do you know who I am? Do you know who I am? Everything keeps disappearing in turns. I don’t know what’s left any more. Is it all like this? Are we just a crazy quilt patched together in our minds? When we die. When I die. Ror? Will anything be left?"
The answers drained away from Aurora’s heart, like water into sand. Any reassurance she tried to offer just masked over the mirror Julia was holding up to her own face and she felt like a hypocrite.
As Aurora carried her friend in through the station airlock, Julia died. The finality of Julia’s death, unexpected and sudden, was shattering. The worst of it was the unbidden feelings of relief; that she was off the hook from this claustrophobic responsibility. More terrible still was Aurora’s anxiety that attention would now shifted to her own state of mind. That she wasn’t being as clever as she thought in disguising her stran
ge watery spells. Chandra was watching her every move now. Phillipa’s hostility toward her seemed more overt, as if it were Aurora’s fault the Julia had passed away on her watch. The woman kept twitching to say something but was biding her time until it would not be unseemly to say it. And what was truly unbearable is that any of this mattered. Julia, beautiful Julia. Gone.
Phillipa delivered a somewhat inappropriate eulogy. “And if any of you need to share your grief or talk things through, my door is always open.” She seemed disappointed at the silence which followed.
Aurora had sprinted out to the utility shed after the funeral was over. She had to be by herself. Before the hour was out the door behind her opened and Phillipa slid in. Aurora pretended to not notice.
“I suppose you think you are awfully smart.”
Aurora put down the rock core she was examining and waited for the inevitable accusation she had been covering up her Outlanders. How was she going to respond?
“Smart? How do you mean?”
“That little trick of yours at the AGM. Going over my head. As far as you could go really, I shouldn’t have thought you had it in you.”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, I’m sorry to inform you that it hasn’t worked out as you intended.”
“I’m sorry Pip but I really have no idea.”
“Really. Nothing about this.”
A light flashed in Aurora’s peripheral vision announcing the arrival of the mneme Phillipa had sent her. Aurora closed her eyes to view it. Her hands gripped the workbench as she watched in disbelief.
It was an invasion; August Bridges had that right. That someone would go into her personal mnemes and throw one out there like that - it felt like having her skin ripped off while everyone watched. The only thing that kept her from losing the plot was her anger. That smarmy bastard implying that they were mates. Twisting her words around so they meant the opposite. Suggesting that she was off her nut. Aurora could count on one finger the people she’d come to hate, and August Bridges was earning that honor right now. And to think she’d ever found that asshole attractive.
Phillipa was waiting.
“Phillipa, would I have done that to myself?”
“No. I think you were caught out.”
“What?”
“It has been a long time since you were on-board with our primary mission. You’ve always been pushing the boundaries to make a name for yourself.”
“A name?”
“Well this time you’ve obviously gone too far. I’m putting my foot down.”
“Pip. My name has nothing to do with it. This is our only chance to find Martian life. If we don’t now, they’ll wipe it out before we even know if it exists.”
“Well, you may be right Aurora. ‘We’ will have to consider that, but that decision, that effort, won’t involve you.”
“Who else? It will take years to get anyone up to speed. Elysium Mons is on our doorstep.”
Phillipa shook her head. “And I am going to put a risky mission like that in the hands of someone obviously suffering advanced stages of Outlanders?”
Aurora said nothing.
“You don’t deny it. And to think it took August Bridges to point it out. I will tell you this isn’t a good look for me as Chief Scientific Officer.”
“Phillipa. How many notes has Chandra put against me?”
“You are looking to your friends to cover for you? Without you as cover they’d have to stop pushing their own pet projects and actually listen to me.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“You don’t think so? Do you think I achieved my position through naiveté regarding group politics? Everyone looks up to you as the one who has logged the most mission hours without distress, and this justifies them pushing their limits.”
The accusation was over the top.
“That’s not true. I’ve never been a stirrer.”
“No. You are worse than that.”
“What do you mean? I keep my head down. I concentrate on my work.”
“You don’t even realise, do you?”
“Realise what?”
“That you are their leader.”
“Bullshit.”
“Doubt as you may. The rest all hang on your every word. You set the example. I will not let that example be one which compromises safety. You will be leaving with the supply ship that was meant to take Julia.”
The walls of the room began to diverge from the space they contained. Aurora tried to ignore them and find some way to respond to this impossible situation, but the feeling of disconnect was pervasive. Everything in the shed, including Phillipa and herself, seemed, for the moment, to dissolve into liquid. It felt strangely good, as if she could merge into an invisible ocean and perfect anonymity.
Wheatbelt Wallaby intervened suddenly, singing the water away. The walls and the world beyond solidified.
Phillipa watched her closely; and Aurora was annoyed at herself for giving herself away so obviously.
"Well then, since apparently I don’t have a say in any of this, I’ll go pack."
Aurora strode out of the shed, relieved when she arrived at the bunk station. A whirlwind of thought dispelled the burden of thinking unduly about her little spells or the fact that Phillipa might possibly be right. Could she be right? When she reached her bunk tube she gave the wall a frustrated kick. Screw her. Pack up and ship out then. Pass the buck on saving Martian life to someone else. Who else? Who else?
August Bridges, what a shit. It’s good to see how concerned he was with doing the right thing. She could see his true colours now. This wasn’t just a decision that Pip would have made by herself. She always played it safe with higher ups. No, that mneme would have put the wind-up August Bridges and, in response, he was shutting everything down. It would be personal too. He’d put the nail in by pronouncing that life did not, in fact, exist on Mars. And then he’d hung it all on Aurora, on her supposed irrationality, and then turned her convenient removal into a safety concern. He was the devil incarnate.
As the edge came off her anger Aurora began to grieve. How long would it be before anyone followed up on her work with priorities being redirected? A hundred years? Who knew really? And in that time, they probably could develop the kind of economical space flight August was after, and then it really would be the end of any indigenous life on this planet.
The weight of responsibility from this line of thinking became overwhelming for Aurora. Wasn’t she getting a little ahead of herself? How could one person be that important? If that was the way things were going to turn out, who was she to get in the way? Then again, who was she not to get in the way?
Better to do anything rather than sit around. Packing was easy. All she had to take with her were the few carefully weighed possessions she had brought with her. In fact, most of these could be left behind. And then there was nothing to do. Terry came in to commiserate and, in turns, so did the others.
Aurora didn’t feel like talking because talking felt like giving something away. The others finally gave up trying to milk some resistance from her and left her to her own devices. Which was fine with her.
She flipped down her neurovisor and began to review her findings, flying over her samples examining the wealth of information they contained. An entire fossilised microbiota. Why was she making such a big deal out of this? Any university department in the world would be happy to have her.
She could take her place standing on the broad shoulders of the pantheon of giants in her field. Sagan, Runnegar, Hoffman and Grey, Pella, Swedell, Shakya, Rieselbach, Yu – the heroes in her love affair with the astro-paleontological world, whose names appeared as citations to nearly every observation she made. It was not a bad fate. There was enough in these samples for lifetimes of papers. A lifetime of looking back.
Other names joined the timeline. The irregular men in her life who could never keep up with where she was going. All those names between Mum in the beginning and Dad on the oth
er side were just points in the line that extrapolated to Mars. She had climbed that line with passion and now that she had gone as far as she could. What exactly was there to return to?
Aurora scrutinised the specimens as they scrolled past her view - microscopic blemishes that the untrained eye would mistake for crystals or layers of sand. Details, details, details. Life was in these details. Or rather within them was the skeleton of life.
Wheatbelt Wallaby waved her paw and her power shook through the ages. The small dots began to agitate and then stretched after their long sleep. The power of Life grew in them, an essence powerful enough, even at small scales, to create atmospheres and precipitate mountains, tenacious enough to survive trips to Earth on the backs of meteorites, to ossify for centuries and then to carry on as if nothing had happened. The small Dreamtime animalcules all cheered her for awakening into her Dreaming, for singing them back into existence.
Was there any question that Life was still out there somewhere on Mars? She imagined for a moment August Bridges’ smirk that had sent her off to this whole adventure. Pointing out an impossible responsibility to her and then pulling the rug out from under her at the same time - the cruelty in that was unbelievable. How she loathed that man. Imagine his surprise when she came back from the field with actual samples.
Aurora brought up a neuroview map of Mars and began to scroll over it. On the scale of the map the journey did not look all that long. Weren't they already on the foothills of Elysium Mons? The only real barrier was walking across the rock bridge she had pondered when out with Julia. The journey would be uphill, but the topography was still accessible by sand sled. She and Denali could make it in a month, at most, with stops for drilling, and sampling the still-liquid groundwater. She had argued the case to anyone who cared to listen. For years, the plan, all the particulars, the lines on the map were all fixed in her head. All she needed was the Djambi and a few crew. Terry and Xiao Li had been chomping at the bit to go with her. What was the big deal?
Aurora was bitter as she contemplated her impending exit from the world she had grown to love. A world calling urgently for her to defend its heart. She had neglected to answer the call because of the dull anxieties of accountants, lawyers, and bureaucrats millions of miles away.
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