Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  It was nothing new, of course. Media attention was a familiar part of every astronaut’s life, and during the selection process they had been scrutinized more than ever. Now, however, they were the raw material for programs magnitudes more popular than any space program had been before. Millions watched them as the ultimate soap opera, and this bothered some of them. So when Janet settled at the end of the table wearing those stylish spectacles with the optical fibers in the frame, there were a few groans. And at the other end of the table Ann Clayborne and Sax Russell were arguing, oblivious to any of them.

  “It’ll take years to find out what we have there, Sax. Decades. There’s as much land on Mars as on Earth, with a unique geology and chemistry. The land has to be thoroughly studied before we can start changing it.”“Veni, vidi, vici.”

  “We’ll change it just by landing.” Russell brushed aside Ann’s objections as if they were spiderwebs on his face. “Deciding to go to Mars is like the first phrase of a sentence, and the whole sentence says—”

  Russell shrugged. “If you want to put it that way.”

  “You’re the weenie, Sax,” Ann said, lip curled with irritation. She was a broad-shouldered woman with wild brown hair, a geologist with strong views, difficult in argument. “Look, Mars is its own place. You can play your climate-shifting games back on Earth if you want, they need the help. Or try it on Venus. But you can’t just wipe out a three-billion-year-old planetary surface.”

  Russell rubbed away more spiderwebs. “It’s dead,” he said simply. “Besides, it’s not really our decision. It’ll be taken out of our hands.”

  “None of these decisions will be taken out of our hands,” Arkady put in sharply.

  Janet looked from speaker to speaker, taking it all in. Ann was getting agitated, raising her voice. Maya glanced around, and saw that Frank didn’t like the situation. But if he interrupted it he would give away to the millions the fact that he didn’t want the colonists arguing in front of them. Instead he looked across the table and caught Boone’s gaze. There was an exchange of expressions between the two so quick it made Maya blink.

  Boone said, “When I was there before, I got the impression it was already Earthlike.”

  “Except two hundred degrees Kelvin,” Russell said.

  “Sure, but it looked like the Mojave, or the Dry Valleys. The first time I looked around on Mars I found myself keeping an eye out for one of those mummified seals we saw in the Dry Valleys.”

  And so on. Janet turned to him, and Ann, looking disgusted, picked up her coffee and left.

  Afterward Maya concentrated, trying to recall the looks Boone and Chalmers had exchanged. They had been like something from a code, or the private languages invented by identical twins.

  • • •

  The weeks passed, and the days each began with a leisurely breakfast. Mid-mornings were far busier. Everyone had a schedule, although some were fuller than others. Frank’s was packed, which was the way he liked it, a maniacal blur of activity. But the necessary work was not really all that great: they had to keep themselves alive and in shape, and keep the ship running, and keep preparing for Mars. Ship maintenance ranged from the intricacy of programming or repairs to the simplicity of moving supplies out of storage, or taking trash to the recyclers. The biosphere team spent the bulk of its time on the farm, which occupied large parts of toruses C, E, and F; and everyone aboard had farm chores. Most enjoyed this work, and some even returned in their free hours. Everyone was on doctors’ orders to spend three hours a day on treadmills, escalators, running wheels, or using weight machines. These hours were enjoyed or endured or despised, depending on temperament, but even those who claimed to despise them finished their exercises in noticeably (even measurably) better moods. “Beta endorphins are the best drug,” Michel Duval would say.

  “Which is lucky, since we don’t have any others,” John Boone would reply.

  “Oh, there’s caffeine . . .”

  “Puts me to sleep.”

  “Alcohol . . .”

  “Gives me a headache.”

  “Procaine, Darvon, morphine—”

  “Morphine?”

  “In the medical supplies. Not for general use.”

  Arkady smiled. “Maybe I’d better get sick.”

  The engineers, including Maya, spent many mornings in training simulations. These took place on the backup bridge in Torus B, which had the latest in image synthesizers; the simulations were so sophisticated that there was little visible difference between them and the act itself. This did not necessarily make them interesting: the standard orbital insertion approach, simulated weekly, was dubbed “The Mantra Run,” and became quite a bore to every conceivable flight crew.

  But sometimes even boredom was preferable to the alternatives. Arkady was their training specialist, and he had a perverse talent for designing problem runs so hard that they often “killed” everybody. These runs were strangely unpleasant experiences, and did not make Arkady popular among his victims. He mixed problem runs with Mantra Runs randomly, but more and more often they were problem runs; they would “approach Mars” and red lights would flash, sometimes with sirens, and they were in trouble again. Once they struck a planetesimal weighing approximately fifteen grams, leaving a large flaw in the heat shield. Sax Russell had calculated that their chances of hitting anything larger than a gram were about one in every seven thousand years of travel, but nevertheless there they were, emergency!, adrenaline pouring through them even as they pooh-poohed the very idea of it, rushing up to the hub and into EVA suits, going out to fill the pothole before they hit the Martian atmosphere and burned to a crisp; and halfway there, Arkady’s voice came over their intercoms: “Not fast enough! All of us are dead.”

  But that was a simple one. Others. . . .The ship, for instance, was guided by a fly-by-wire system, meaning that the pilots fed instructions to flight computers which translated them into the actual thrusts needed to achieve the desired result. This was how it had to be, because when approaching a gravitational mass like Mars at their speed, one simply could not feel or intuit what burns would achieve the desired effects. So none of them were flyers in the sense of a pilot flying a plane. Nevertheless, Arkady frequently blew the entire massively redundant system just as they were reaching a critical moment (which failure, Russell said, had about a one-in-ten-billion chance of happening) and they had to take over and command all the rockets mechanically, watching the monitors and an orange-on-black visual image of Mars bearing down on them, and they could either go long and skip off into deep space and die a lingering death, or go short and crash into the planet and die instantly, and if the latter, they got to watch it right down to the simulated 120 kilometer per second final smash.

  Or it might be a mechanical failure: main rockets, stabilizing rockets, computer hardware or software, heatshield deployment; all of them had to work perfectly during the approach. And failures of these systems were the most likely of all— in the range, Sax said (though others contested his risk-assessment methods), of one in every ten thousand approaches. So they would do it again and red lights would flash, and they would groan, and beg for a Mantra Run even as they partly welcomed the new challenge. When they managed to survive a mechanical failure, they were tremendously pleased; it could be the high point of a week. Once John Boone successfully aerobraked by hand, with a single main rocket functioning, hitting the safe millisecond of arc at the only possible speed. No one could believe it. “Blind luck,” Boone said, grinning widely as the deed was talked about at dinner.

  Most of Arkady’s problem runs ended in failure, however, meaning death for all. Simulated or not, it was hard not to be sobered by these experiences, and after that, irritated with Arkady for inventing them. One time they repaired every monitor in the bridge just in time to see the screens register a hit by a small asteroid, which sheared through the hub and killed them all. Another time Arkady, as part of the navigation team, made an “error” and instructed the computers to incre
ase the ship’s spin rather than decrease it. “Pinned to the floor by six gs!” he cried in mock horror, and they had to crawl on the floor for half an hour, pretending to rectify the error while weighing half a ton each. When they succeeded, Arkady leaped off the floor and began pushing them away from the control monitor. “What the hell are you doing?” Maya yelled.

  “He’s gone crazy,” Janet said.

  “He’s simulated going crazy,” Nadia corrected her. “We have to figure out—” doing an end run around Arkady “— how to deal with someone on the bridge going insane!”

  Which no doubt was true. But they could see the whites of Arkady’s eyes all the way around, and there wasn’t a trace of recognition in him as he silently assaulted them. It took all five of them to restrain him, and Janet and Phyllis Boyle were hurt by his sharp elbows.

  “Well?” he said at dinner afterward, grinning lopsidedly, as he was growing a fat lip. “What if it happens? We’re under pressure up here, and the approach will be worst of all. What if someone cracks?” He turned to Russell and the grin grew wider. “What are the chances of that, eh?” And he began to sing a Jamaican song, in a Slavic Caribbean accent: “Pressure drop, oh pressure drop, oh-o, pressure going to drop on you-oo-oo!”

  So they kept trying, handling the problem runs as seriously as they could, even the attack by Martian natives or the decoupling of Torus H caused by “explosive bolts installed by mistake when the ship was built,” or the last-minute veering of Phobos out of its orbit. Dealing with the more implausible scenarios sometimes took on a kind of surreal black humor, and Arkady replayed some of his videotapes as after-dinner entertainment, which sometimes got people launched into the air with laughter.

  But the plausible problem runs . . . They kept on coming, morning after morning. And despite the solutions, despite the protocols for finding solutions, there was that sight, time after time— the red planet rushing at them at an unimaginable 40,000 kilometers an hour, until it filled the screen and the screen went white, and small black letters appeared on it: Collision.

  • • •

  They were traveling to Mars in a Type II Hohmann Ellipse, a slow but efficient course, chosen from among other alternatives mainly because the two planets were in the correct position for it when the ship was finally ready, with Mars about forty-five degrees ahead of Earth in the plane of the ecliptic. During the voyage they would travel just over halfway around the sun, making their rendezvous with Mars some three hundred days later. Their womb time, as Hiroko called it.

  The psychologists back home had judged it worthwhile to alter things from time to time, to suggest the passing of the seasons on the Ares. Length of days and nights, weather, and ambient colors were shifted to accomplish this. Some had maintained their landfall should be a harvest, others that it should be a new spring; after a short debate it had been decided by vote of the voyagers themselves to begin with early spring, so that they would travel through a summer rather than a winter; and as they approached their goal, the ship’s colors would turn to the autumn tones of Mars itself, rather than to the light greens and blossom pastels they had left so far behind.

  So in those first months, as they finished their morning’s business, leaving the farm or the bridge, or staggering out of Arkady’s merrily sadistic simulations, they walked into springtime. Walls were hung with pale green panels, or mural-sized photos of azaleas, and jacarandas, and ornamental cherries. The barley and mustard in the big farm rooms glowed vivid yellow with new blooms, and the forest biome and the ship’s seven park rooms had been stocked with trees and shrubs in the spring of their cycles. Maya loved these colorful spring blossoms, and after her morning’s work she fulfilled part of her exercise regimen by taking a walk in the forest biome, which had a hilly floor, and was so thick with trees one could not see from one end of the chamber to the other. Here she often met Frank Chalmers, of all people, taking one of his short breaks. He said he liked the spring foliage, though he never seemed to look at it. They walked together, and talked or not as the case might be. If they did talk, it was never about anything important; Frank didn’t care to discuss their work as leaders of the expedition. Maya found this peculiar, though she didn’t say so. But they did not have exactly the same jobs, which might account for his reluctance. Maya’s position was fairly informal and nonhierarchical— cosmonauts among themselves had always been relatively egalitarian, this had been the tradition since the days of Korolyov. The American program had a more military tradition, indicated even in titles: while Maya was merely Russian Contingent Coordinator, Frank was Captain Chalmers, and supposedly in the strong sense of the old sailing navies.

  Whether this authority made it more or less difficult for him, he didn’t say. Sometimes he discussed the biome, or small technical problems, or news from home; more often he just seemed to want to walk with her. So— silent walks, up and down on narrow trails, through dense thickets of pine and aspen and birch. And always that presumption of closeness, as if they were old friends, or as if he were, very shyly (or subtly), courting her.

  Thinking about that one day, it occurred to Maya that starting the Ares in springtime might have created a problem. Here they were in their mesocosm, sailing through spring, and everything was fertile and blooming, profligate and green, the air perfumed with flowers and windy, the days getting longer and warmer, and everyone in shirts and shorts, a hundred healthy animals, in close quarters, eating, exercising, showering, sleeping. Of course there had to be sex.

  Well, it was nothing new. Maya herself had had some fantastic sex in space, most significantly during her second stint on Novy Mir, when she and Georgi and Yeli and Irina had tried every weightless variant imaginable, which was a great many indeed. But now it was different. They were older, they were stuck with each other for good: “Everything is different in a closed system,” as Hiroko often said in other contexts. The idea that they should stay on a fraternal basis was big at NASA: out of the 1,348 pages of the tome NASA had compiled called Human Relations in Transit to Mars, only a single page was devoted to the subject of sex; and that page advised against it. They were, the tome suggested, something like a tribe, with a sensible taboo against intratribal mating. The Russians laughed hilariously at this. Americans were such prudes, really. “We are not a tribe,” Arkady said. “We are the world.”

  And it was spring. And there were the married couples aboard, some of whom were pretty demonstrative; and there was the swimming pool in Torus E, and the sauna and whirlpool bath. Bathing suits were used in mixed company, this because of the Americans again, but bathing suits were nothing. Naturally it began to happen. She heard from Nadia and Ivana that the bubble dome was being used for assignations in the quiet hours of the night; many of the cosmonauts and astronauts turned out to be fond of weightlessness. And the many nooks in the parks and the forest biome were serving as hideaways for those with less weightless experience; the parks had been designed to give people the sense that they could get away. And every person had a private soundproofed room of their own. With all that, if a couple wanted to begin a relationship without becoming an item in the gossip mill, it was possible to be very discreet. Maya was sure there was more going on than any one person could know.Dé0#0;000;^She could feel it. No doubt others did as well. Quiet conversations between couples, changes in dining-room partners, quick glances, small smiles, hands touching shoulders or elbows in passing— oh yes, things were happening. It made for a kind of tension in the air, a tension that was only partly pleasant. Antarctic fears came back into play; and besides, there was only a small number of potential partners, which tended to give things a musical chairs kind of feeling.

  And for Maya there were additional problems. She was even more wary than usual of Russian men, because in this case it would mean sleeping with the boss. She was suspicious of that, knowing how it had felt when she had done it herself. Besides, none of them . . . well, she was attracted to Arkady, but she did not like him, and he seemed uninterested. Yeli she knew
from before, he was just a friend; Dmitri she didn’t care for; Vlad was older, Yuri not her type, Alex a follower of Arkady’s . . . on and on like that.

  And as for the Americans, or the internationals— well, that was a different kind of problem. Cross cultures, who knew? So she kept to herself. But she thought about it. And occasionally, while waking up in the morning, or finishing a workout, she floated on a wave of desire that left her washed up on the shore of bed or shower, feeling alone.

  • • •

  Thus late one morning, after a particularly harrowing problem run, which they had almost solved and then failed to solve, she ran into Frank Chalmers in the forest biome and returned his hello, and they walked for about ten meters into the woods and stopped. She was in shorts and tank top, barefoot, sweaty and flushed from the crazed simulation. He was in shorts and a T-shirt, barefoot, sweaty and dusty from the farm. Suddenly he laughed his sharp laugh, and reached out to touch her upper arm with two fingertips. “You’re looking happy today.” With that darting smile.

  The leaders of the two halves of the expedition. Equals. She lifted her hand to touch his, and that was all it took.

  They left the trail and ducked into a tight thicket of pine. They stopped to kiss, and it had been long enough since the last time that it felt strange to her. Tripping over a root Frank laughed under his breath, that quick secretive laugh which gave Maya a shiver, almost of fear. They sat on pine needles, rolled together like students necking in the woods. She laughed; she had always liked the quick approach, the way she could just knock a man down when she wanted to.

  And so they made love, and for a time passion took her away. When it was over she relaxed, enjoying the wash of afterglow. But then it got a bit awkward, somehow; she didn’t know what to say. There was something hidden still about him, as if he were hiding even when making love. And even worse, what she could sense behind his reserve was some kind of triumph, as if he had won something and she had lost. That Puritan streak in Americans, that sense that sex was wrong and something that men had to trick women into. She closed up a little herself, annoyed at that hidden smirk on his face. Win and lose, what children.