Analog SFF, June 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Mr. Shu, this is Nnamdi Okonkwo from UNSA.” A low voice, cultured.

  “UNSA? Really?” Why would anyone from the UN Space Agency be calling me? I was just a second-string newsblogger.

  “Really. This concerns your application for the Citizen-Astronaut Program.”

  “Oh, that.” I'd made it as far as the semifinals, but when the finalists had been announced my name hadn't been on the list. That had been over a year ago. I picked up my screwdriver and resumed poking at the clog. “What about it?”

  “You have probably heard the terrible news about Kim Yeun-ja.”

  “Yeah.” She was the Korean painter who'd been selected as the first Citizen-Astronaut. Two weeks ago, less than two months before her scheduled launch, she'd broken her neck on a recreational hike in the Alps. She'd recover, but she wouldn't be up for a trip to Mars any time soon. A tragic story, and an excellent hook for a fundraising call. I kept trying to pry the whatever-it-was out of the disposal's blades.

  “You are probably also aware of the difficulties we've been having with funding and public opinion.” We'd had people on Mars continuously for over eight years now. The initial discoveries of water and life—frozen, subsurface water and fossils of microscopic, long-extinct life—had been newsworthy, but after that, interest had declined steadily. And with declining public interest came a declining willingness by the UN's various governments to fund the ongoing mission.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, squinting down the disposal's throat. By now I was just waiting for the pitch so I could hang up on the guy in good conscience. “So what's the purpose of this call?”

  “My superiors have decided that the loss of Ms. Kim provides an opportunity for us to . . . reprioritize the Citizen-Astronaut Program. Rather than call on Ms. Kim's backup, we have been instructed to bring in someone who is in a better position to influence public opinion. Someone such as yourself.”

  The screwdriver clattered to the floor. “Guh?” I managed.

  “Can you come to Geneva right away?”

  “Uh?” I swallowed. “Uh, for how long?”

  He chuckled. “In Geneva? Thirty-seven days. But after that it might be quite a bit longer. . . .”

  Thirty-seven days? I checked my phone's calendar.

  Thirty-seven days was the time until the Kasei 18 spacecraft launched for Mars.

  * * * *

  The sixty-five-day voyage to Mars was about as exciting as a long bus trip, bracketed by the thundering, shuddering terrors of launch and aerobraking. Though I did what I could to make the trip interesting to my viewers, my ratings dropped steadily the whole time. I was handicapped by limited bandwidth—I couldn't embed even a single Spin or Jumbo3D frame in my reports, and was reduced to plain text and flat, still images—and by the fact that every day was the same. Although we were going almost two hundred thousand kilometers per hour, from inside the ship there was no way to tell we were moving at all.

  But as I lay on my back after touchdown, heart pounding and sweat pooling in the small of my space-suited back, I knew everything had changed. I was on Mars! I couldn't wait to step out of the lander, to see the endless red desert spread out before me, to feel the dry, lifeless dust crunch under my boots.

  The exit protocol was one of the things we'd had plenty of time to negotiate during the long trip out. The commander of our craft, the American-born Flemish climatologist Lynne Ann Morse, had graciously ceded her commander's prerogative to me as Citizen- Astronaut. I would be the first one out of the lander: the sixty-seventh person to set foot on Mars.

  But before I could even unstrap myself, the hatch clanged open and Nam Dae-jung's scratched helmet poked in. I recognized his face immediately—he was one of the three members of the current crew who would be staying on, and with our arrival he was now commander of Expedition18. A Korean geochemist, he was a small man, built like a fireplug, and his face was just about as red as one. “Get your butts out here,” he shouted. “We've got a leak.”

  We four new arrivals got ourselves unstrapped and tumbled out of the hatch as quickly as we could, bouncing and stumbling in our haste. We immediately saw the problem: A pipe on the lander's underside had split open, and a white jet of steam and ice crystals was spewing out into the thin Martian atmosphere. Frost was already building up around the gap. I activated the camera in my helmet and began snapping pictures of the dramatic scene for my blog. Finally some excitement!

  “That's just water,” said Kabir Abuja, our Nigerian engineer, and scuttled to the back of the lander where the main valve panel was located. A moment later the stream of vapor cut off.

  Kabir, Lynne Ann, and Dae-jung ducked under the lander to inspect the damage. I joined them, mindful of the descent engine's bell-shaped nozzle, which was still nearly red-hot.

  I saw a dusty red streak leading up to the damaged pipe. “Look at that,” I said, pointing. “Looks like a rock got kicked up by the descent engine.” I took pictures of that too.

  “Easily repaired,” said Kabir, and started backing out of the confined space. “It's only water anyway. No shortage of that.” Even through his faceplate I could see the confident smile that almost never left his dark, handsome face.

  We'd brought a stock of liquid hydrogen and a cunning little chemical plant that would combine it with carbon dioxide from Mars's atmosphere to produce the methane rocket fuel we'd eventually use to leave the planet. This chemical process threw off water as a byproduct, some of which was cracked into oxygen and more hydrogen.

  “Don't be so sure,” said Dae-jung.

  We all looked at him. My breath was loud in my helmet, which was beginning to fog up.

  Dae-jung looked right back at us, his flat face defiant. “We've been having some plumbing problems.”

  Lynne Ann stepped up to him, their faceplates practically touching. “There was nothing about that in the daily reports.”

  Dae-jung turned away from her. “There are things we don't tell Mission Control. Come on now, let's get you unloaded. We've only got a few hours of daylight left.”

  While Kabir and Suma Handini, the current crew's Pakistani engineer, set up the insulated hoses to pipe our hydrogen into the habitat's buried tanks, the rest of us set up a bucket brigade to transfer the tonnes of food and other supplies from the lander's cargo bay. Our lander had set down right between the current crew's four-person lander and the two-person emergency ascent vehicle, less than fifty meters from the hab, and the boxes and canisters weighed only a third what they would on Earth, but their mass was unchanged so it was still a lot of work to move them around. By the time we got everything shifted my space-adapted muscles were screaming with fatigue. “Why do we have to get all this stuff inside so quickly anyway?” I asked Li Huang, the current crew's Chinese climatologist, as we struggled with a case of dehydrated meats. “It was fine in hard vacuum for the last two months.”

  “They used to leave everything in the landers,” he said, “to save space in the hab. But a couple of expeditions ago a lander fell over right after landing, and all the supplies were inaccessible until they could get it jacked up again.”

  “The lander fell over?!"

  “Subsidence under the landing pad, I think it was.”

  That hadn't been in the official reports either.

  We got everything shifted inside, took off and stowed our suits, and gathered in the wardroom. This half-circular room, eight meters in diameter, took up half of Deck 2 of the cylindrical hab. The largest enclosed space on Mars, it would serve as our meeting room, work room, dining room, and living room. It had one long table and with ten people seated around it, we were all bumping elbows. We knew we'd have to get used to the crowding, though, as it wasn't going to change for the next 107 days.

  Each new ship from Earth brought four new crew. The usual procedure was that four of the old crew would depart almost immediately, leaving a crew of six: four new crew members, and two experienced ones to provide continuity. But the inexorable mathematics of orbital mechanic
s dictated that on this particular rotation the old crew could not depart until 107 days after the new crew had arrived. This 107-day period, long for a turnaround but short for an expedition, was my personal territory—I had arrived with the new crew and would be departing with the old crew. Until then, ten people would have to share a space designed for six.

  The ten of us introduced ourselves around the table—purely for etiquette's sake, of course, as we were all familiar with each other's dossiers. When it came to me, I told them how much I looked forward to posting my first blog from the surface of Mars, and showed off some of the exciting photos I'd gotten after the landing.

  “You can't post those,” Dae-jung said.

  I stared at him. “Doesn't the habitat have at least as much communications bandwidth as the ship?”

  “Not bandwidth,” he said, raising one finger. “Politics. We don't let the public know about small problems that don't seriously impact the mission.” All of the current crew nodded their heads in agreement.

  I wasn't happy about the situation, but rather than provoke a conflict in my first day on Mars, I acquiesced. That night I posted a blog about our aerobraking, descent, and landing, emphasizing the noise and vibration; it wasn't bad, but I really felt that it lacked something.

  It wasn't until hours later, lying on my hard narrow bunk with a gluey rehydrated meal in my belly, that I realized I had no idea who had wound up being the sixty-seventh person to set foot on Mars.

  * * * *

  The next day, once we had breakfasted and unpacked our few personal items into our tiny, Spartan quarters, we found out we had a lot to learn.

  It turned out that all the training we had received before departure, and the manuals we had read on the trip out, were almost completely worthless. Just about every system in the habitat, from the surface suits to the sinks, had been repaired, modified, or updated. “Do not under any circumstances touch this button,” Dae-jung said, pointing to the toilet's FLUSH button, which was crossed with an X of tape. He and the four new kids—as he called us—were all crammed into the habitat's one tiny bathroom. “We don't flush urine at all, and when it's time to flush feces you wash it down with one liter of gray water.” On a shelf glued to the wall stood a scarred plastic pitcher, above which a tap hand-labeled GRAY WATER protruded from a hole that looked like it had been melted through the plastic wall with a soldering iron.

  “What happens if we push the button?” Lynne Ann asked, quite reasonably.

  “We call it the Blue Spew. And whoever pushes the button has to clean up the mess.”

  Kabir looked dubious. “So why don't you just disconnect it?”

  Dae-jung gave a little smirk and pulled a panel off of the wall, revealing a disordered nest of variously-colored wires, conduits, and pipes. It didn't look a thing like the tidy pictures in the training manuals. “The last time we tried it, we lost power in the kitchen for half a week. Best to leave well enough alone.”

  Despite the close quarters and hassles of the hab, I was excited by actually being on Mars after the boring months of travel. Just about every day I got to put on my surface suit and tromp around on the surface of Mars—Mars! Lifeless and airless though it might be, it had a desolate beauty to it; the low-gravity mineral formations were spectacular and their colors changed from hour to hour as the sun passed across the sky. We'd brought a supply of new weather balloons, ultra-light hydrogen-filled spheres that carried tiny instrument packages high into Mars's thin atmosphere, and they brought back more great pictures and interesting scientific data. I supplemented the limited number of photographs I could post each day with text: moments of personal drama and exciting new findings in biology, climatology, paleontology, and geology. My blog's ratings started to climb.

  You might think that science is inherently dull, but personally I was fascinated by the question of why Mars's climate had changed from hospitable to inhospitable all those millions of years ago. I agreed with Secretary- General Zirinowski, who'd declared over twenty years ago that only through study of our dead sister planet could we find a way to reverse the climate change that was threatening to kill our own. I was thrilled by the opportunity to share my enthusiasm with the public, and I think that passion came through in my blog.

  We new kids made a lot of mistakes in our first few weeks in the habitat, though. Lynne Ann forgot to plug in her backpack after her first EVA, so the battery ran down overnight and she couldn't go out at all the next day. (We called our outings EVAs because the hab was, technically, a vehicle—the first crewed vehicle to land on Mars, in fact—even though it wasn't going anywhere anymore.) Audra Miskinis, our Lithuanian paleobiologist, was the first of us to do a Blue Spew, but all four of us made the same mistake at least once in the first two weeks. Even Kabir the engineer managed to mess up, damaging the pressurized rover's gearbox the first time he tried to shift it into reverse.

  I managed not to break any of the hab's systems, but the error I made was much worse.

  The day Kabir stripped the rover's gears, I was riding in the shotgun seat. When the horrendous grinding noise came vibrating through the rover's frame, we looked at each other in horror, but it soon became clear what had happened—the exact same kind of boneheaded mistake any teenage driver might make with the family car. The necessary parts were just steps away in the hab, Kabir and I worked together to repair the damage, and by dinner that day the rover was again ready to go, and we were both laughing our heads off at the whole incident. It made such a good story that I led off with it in my daily post that evening, and I was still chuckling about it when my head hit the pillow.

  Nobody was laughing the next morning, though. While we'd slept, my humorous blog story had turned into a political scandal. A US senator, one who'd been opposed to the Kasei program since its inception, had seized on the incident as yet another example of waste and mismanagement, with a racial slur for Kabir thrown in for good measure. Mission Control had managed to blunt the public-relations damage, but they were none too pleased with Kabir for breaking the rover or with me for mentioning it in my post.

  Dae-jung's face was dark as a storm cloud when he came thundering into my narrow little room. “Give me one good reason not to shut you out of the network right now,” he said through clenched teeth.

  I looked him straight in the eye. “I was just doing my job!” I said. “I'm here to represent the average citizen and increase public interest in the mission. All I did was report a minor incident in a humorous way.”

  He didn't back down. “I told you there are things we don't share with Mission Control, never mind blabbing it all over the public nets! Your little blog has undone years of careful political maneuvering in the UNSA Council.”

  “It's not my fault some senator used my blog to grind his own well-worn axe!”

  “It's your fault for not thinking!” He slammed his fist against the cracked plastic wall. “Everything we do is being analyzed by people who want to shoot us down, and we can't hand them any ammunition!”

  I had to look away. He was right—I'd been foolish to forget about how many political enemies the program had. “I'll be more careful in the future.”

  “You'll be more than careful,” Dae-jung said. “From now on, you will not mention anything in your blog that could cast this program in a negative light.”

  “Now wait just a—”

  “I will review your entries before they are posted.”

  “You can't do that!”

  He straightened, and even though he was at least ten centimeters shorter he managed to look down his nose at me. “I am the commander of this expedition,” he said. “You will obey my orders or you will be subject to discipline.”

  “I'll go over your head!”

  In reply he gave me a smug little grin. “I'm sure Mission Control will give your protests the full attention they deserve.”

  I matched his grin with a level stare, jaw clenched and breathing hard through my nose. But he had the authority, he had the admin
istrative passwords, and I was as certain as he was that in case of a dispute our superiors would side with him. They were already upset with me, and insubordination wouldn't help my case.

  “All right,” I said after I had gotten my temper under control, “I'll let you review my posts. For a while.”

  “We will see,” was all he said. He shut the door behind himself, leaving me seething in my narrow little stall like an angry bull with no rider.

  * * * *

  I came back to my quarters after a grueling geological EVA to find a blinking video-message indicator on my display. Even though I had red dust caked in every crease of my body, I played it right away—it wasn't often anyone back home cared enough to spend the money on sending a video all the way to Mars.

  It was my agent. “I'll get right to the point,” she said. “The syndicate isn't happy.”

  Of course they weren't. Dae-jung insisted that anything negative, controversial, or unprofessional—in other words, anything of interest to the average viewer—be removed from my blog, and that the scientific content be accurate and complete. Thanks to his careful editing, my blog had turned into the same snooze-inducing stream of technical bafflegab that all the non-Citizen Astronauts had produced before I'd come along. After almost two months of this, my ratings were in the toilet.

  “They're giving you three weeks. If your ratings don't improve substantially by the fifteenth of next month, they're moving you off the front page.”

  I sighed and put my head in my hands. They couldn't drop me completely—I had a contract through the end of my mission—but if my blog didn't appear on the syndicate's front page my already puny ratings would vanish off the bottom of the chart. I'd come home to a tiny paycheck and a smoking hole where my career used to be. I'd have to start over from scratch.

  I sent my agent a text message reminding her of the censorship I was facing—not that it should be a surprise to her; I'd kept her in the loop all along—and promising that I'd do everything I could to make my blog more interesting. But after I'd sent the message I found myself sitting and staring disconsolately at the blank screen.