Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey A. Landis

  They followed the first lottery drawing on an ancient television; the cabin in Arizona was too primitive to have the bandwidth for a good VR connection. They knew the odds, but still, with the number of tickets that they had bought between them, it just felt impossible that they could fail to be chosen. At first with hope, and then with disappointment, and then with rising glee, they watched the winner be drawn, and then accept the second place prize instead.

  “This is it, Brandon,” Trevor said. “This one is us. For certain.”

  They both concentrated. It was going to be one them. It had to be one of them. But which one?

  They called out the winning ticket number, and then an instant later, checked the name against the data bank. It was some lawyer in Cincinnati.

  “Oh, man, Brandon,” Trevor said, when his description and picture were flashed across the world. “Look at that fat slob! Just look at him! How could he win, and we don’t?”

  “It sure doesn’t seem fair,” Brandon said. “Don’t seem fair.”

  “All that money,” Trevor said. “And what did we get? Nothing. Not a damn thing.”

  That night they got drunk on beer stolen from Brandon’s mother’s refrigerator.

  “No sense staying inside and moping, boys,” Brandon’s mother said the next day. “Moping isn’t going to do you any good. You boys get outside, go play. Climb your rocks or something.”

  She had no idea how they felt, Brandon thought. No possible idea.

  Trevor looked at him. “You want to go climb?”

  Brandon shrugged. “Might as well.”

  Trevor went out to get the gear and bring the car around, so Brandon took the time to log in to the outside world and check the news.

  The lawyer had washed out, for undisclosed reasons. Because he’s a fat slob, Brandon thought. He’d never make it to Mars. The news was just breaking on the television and VR channels. They had made a third drawing. The ticket number was posted on the net: 11A26B7.

  The insides suddenly dissolved away from Brandon. They hadn’t yet checked the database and announced the winner’s name, but they didn’t have to. He felt numb, like he wasn’t really present in his body, as if there were a sudden void where his body should have been, or as if he had been suddenly glued in place. He sat down.

  He knew that number. All the tickets they had bought had been 11A series. That tagged the sale to eastern Arizona.

  And 26B7 was his brother, Trevor Whitman.

  11

  THE LONG WALK

  Ryan told them to leave everything that they didn’t absolutely need behind with the rockhopper. Even so, the pile of stuff to be taken with them was enormous. The trailer towed behind the dirt-rover bulged out, three times the size of the dirt-rover itself. The vehicle looked like an ant attempting to pull an enormous beetle behind it.

  And so they began to walk. On foot, the land seemed a lot less flat. In a few minutes the rockhopper was hidden behind the folds of the terrain. When they crested a small ridge, a mile farther along, Brandon looked back and saw it. It was almost on the horizon. It looked like a toy, abandoned in the sand, the only patch of a color anything other than red in the entire landscape. He knew that they would never see it again and wanted to say something, but couldn’t think of anything worth saying.

  Ryan looked back at him. “Come on, Trevor,” he said. “We’ve got to keep the pace up.”

  He looked back at it one more time, then turned forward to the long road ahead.

  A day later, the dirt-rover failed. They were on foot.

  They went through the pile again and cut it down by ten percent. It was still too much to carry. There were too many things that they needed: The inertial navigation system, for one. Repair parts for the suits. Vacuum-sealed ration bricks. Electrolyte-balance liquid for the suits’ drinking bottles. The habitat bubble. They went through the list again.

  “What if we backpack some of the load?” Tana said.

  Ryan thought about it. “We might be able to carry thirty, maybe forty kilograms,” he said. “The life-support packs are already twenty kilograms, so that’s not much extra.”

  “We could carry more than that,” Tana said. “I’ve backpacked more than that on Earth.”

  “Maybe. But we don’t dare let the load slow us down. Better to travel light and travel fast.”

  “The gravity is lower than Earth.”

  Ryan nodded. “Low, but not that low. But it will help some.”

  “It will help a lot,” Tana said.

  “I figure we should target fifty kilometers per day,” Ryan said. “I’m counting on the low gravity helping a lot.”

  “Thirty miles a day,” Tana said. “Should be doable.”

  “If we’re not overloaded, yes. Barring another accident, it will be twelve days to reach the Agamemnon.”

  12

  THE FALL

  Brandon didn’t tell Trevor. Nor his mother, nor anybody else, but especially not Trevor.

  Later, he couldn’t precisely articulate why he didn’t tell. Perhaps he wanted one more day together with Trevor, climbing rocks with his twin brother, before Trevor suddenly became the most famous boy in the world and they were ripped apart by the pressure of training for the mission. Brandon knew that, no matter how Trevor said that they would always be brothers, things would be different, and Trevor would never have time for him again.

  It wasn’t much of a rock, really; just a small sandstone wall five miles outside of town that they sometimes liked to go practice on. It was barely thirty feet at the highest pinnacle.

  It wasn’t technical climbing at all, just something for them to do to keep their bodies active, while Trevor tried to forget that they had not been selected to go to Mars, and Brandon tried to think of what he should say to his brother. You’re going to Mars, asshole, he thought. You don’t even know it.

  You’re going to Mars, and I’m not.

  Maybe it was the hangover. Maybe they were lax. Maybe Trevor didn’t inspect the equipment well enough. They had been using the same rope for two years and had had more than a few falls; it was due for replacement.

  In any case, Trevor shouldn’t have slipped in the first place.

  Brandon was on belay, and when Trevor suddenly called out “falling,” he knew what to do. He braced himself, firmed his grip on the rope, got ready for the sudden tension as the rope hissed through the anchor nuts.

  The rope caught Trevor in mid-fall, and stretched. Trevor jerked to a stop in midair, windmilling with his arms to stop his tumble. He looks like an idiot, Brandon thought. The rope slacked, bounced, stretched, and suddenly snapped.

  The free end whipped upward like an angry snake. Trevor screamed as he fell.

  The scream stopped with a sudden thud when he hit the rocky ground below.

  For a moment Brandon was paralyzed. “Oh, shit. Oh shit. Hang on, Trevor, I’m coming.” He scrambled down the cliff as fast as he could. He was hyper-aware of his every movement, suddenly afraid of falling. “Hang on, hang on.”

  His brother’s crumpled body lay on the ground below, one leg twisted impossibly around, a coil of climbing rope spilled over him like a scribble. Brandon saw one arm move. He was alive.

  “Hang on, you’ll be all right. I’m calling an ambulance. Hang on, damn it, hang on!”

  It took ten minutes for the ambulance to arrive. On the emergency ride into town, the news of the Mars selection had played. The back of the ambulance was cramped and filled with equipment, but Brandon insisted on riding with Trevor. The paramedic had made only cursory objections.

  “Wow,” the paramedic said. He was watching the news with half of his attention, while immobilizing Trevor’s leg with the other. “I don’t know who that Trevor Whitman is, but”—he deftly set an intravenous drip of some clear fluid—“I tell you, he sure is one lucky son of a bitch. Wish I could change places with him.” He looked down at Trevor critically. “Hell, bet you wish you could trade places right now, too.”

  Trevo
r’s leg was broken in five places. Brandon could still see the jagged ends of white bone sticking through the skin. Trevor wasn’t going to Mars. Trevor wasn’t going anywhere but to a hospital bed, and to a long, painful recuperation.

  Brandon leaned over and whispered into Trevor’s ear. “You’re Brandon Weber,” he said. “Brandon.”

  Trevor’s face was white and covered with sweat. His teeth were clenched tightly together. Brandon couldn’t tell if he had heard him.

  “Brandon.” Trevor’s free hand reached out and grabbed him by the shirt. Brandon’s heart jumped. “You’re going to Mars. Make me proud, little brother. Make me proud.”

  A broken rope had given Brandon the chance to go to Mars. So, a year later and a hundred million miles away, when Commander Radkowski’s rope broke, Brandon Weber knew what it was like to be the one who watches. Trevor had given his slot to Brandon.

  It was cruel to think of it, but Radkowski had been the commander. Trevor knew that when the final moment came, Radkowski would want to go himself. Putting aside sentimentality (and Brandon had never really liked Radkowski), thinking with nothing but cold calculation, Radkowski’s death had opened the door for one of the crew to go back.

  13

  SURVIVAL

  Estrela was in a bleak foul depression—a depression that had followed her around for days, like sandpaper rubbing against her brain.

  Knives tore at her throat with every breath she took. She sucked down the water bottle in her suit within a few minutes of when she put it on, sometimes before she’d even made it outside of the bubble, and it didn’t help. She couldn’t speak, could barely croak sometimes.

  But the others didn’t seem to notice.

  She plodded methodically across the surface, not looking at the landscape, trying not to even think. Oh, that would be the best, if only she did not have to think! If only she didn’t know what was happening and could just be mindless, a piece of wood that walked on legs of wood and didn’t have a past or a future.

  Sometimes she pretended to herself that she was already dead. But somewhere inside her was a terrified animal, an animal all teeth and claws, a vicious biting thing with beady red eyes that said no, I’m not going to die. Whatever it takes to do it, I am going to survive. Other people die, but not me, never me, never never never me. She wondered that the others didn’t see it, that they didn’t flee in terror, that they somehow continued thinking her a civilized human being, and not a cornered rat-thing.

  She was going to survive.

  Estrela plodded across the Martian land, not thinking, not feeling, clenching her teeth to keep from paying attention to the pain in her throat and the claws ripping into her heart. All she knew was one thing. She was going to survive.

  14

  THE BROKEN LANDS

  The territory became increasingly rough and broken.

  As they traveled, the wind began to increase. It was very odd. Brandon could hear the wind, could hear a high-pitched whistling, almost (but not quite) too high to hear, but he could feel nothing. There was a gale blowing outside, and there was no force to it. He spread out his arms, and felt…nothing.

  “The subsolar point is moving north,” Ryan said. The northern hemisphere was turning from winter to spring. They were still deep in the Martian tropics, not that far from the equator. On Mars, the tropics still meant weather barely above freezing at noon, and well into the negative numbers during the middle of the night.

  At noon the sun was directly overhead. This made him feel completely disoriented. His sense of direction had gone bonzo, and with no shadows he had no clue which way was which.

  They were walking across sand today. The terrain was flat enough that, had they still been in the rockhopper, Brandon would have thought that it was perfectly level. On foot, he found how deceptive that was. The land had minute slopes to it, up and slowly down. The rims of craters, Ryan explained. The craters had formed, and eroded, and been buried by sand, and all that was left was the faint change in slope at the buried rim.

  It was in the afternoon that Brandon first noticed something moving. At first he caught a glimpse of motion out of the corner of his eye, but when he turned to look, there was nothing there. Your eyes are playing tricks on you, he thought. There’s nothing there. Then, later, he saw it again. This time he refused to turn to look. If I’m going crazy, he said, I don’t want to know.

  The third one was too close to ignore. At first he saw the movement, and he looked involuntarily. There was nothing to see. But then he noticed that, even with nothing there, there was a shadow moving across the land.

  And then he looked above it, looked at the sky, and saw the twisted rope of sky, a rotating column of a darker shade of yellow curling upward, writhing into the sky. It was—

  “Tornado,” he shouted. “Look out!”

  It turned and suddenly darted away across the land. Brandon craned his neck back. There was no top to it, not that he could see. It was hard to tell how far away it was, whether it was right next to them or a mile away.

  It turned again, and darted right toward them. He threw himself on the ground, spreading himself flat. “It’s coming!” he shouted. “Look out!”

  Nobody else moved.

  There was no place to take cover. He hugged the ground. A few inches in front of his helmet, two grains of sand started to move. They quivered, danced a few steps to the left, made a tiny circle, and then settled down.

  Brandon looked up. The rest of the group was looking at him. The tornado was retreating, staggering like a drunkard off toward the horizon.

  “It’s a dust devil,” Ryan said gently. “We’ve been seeing them for an hour or so.”

  “That one came right over us,” Tana said. “I could feel it when it passed.”

  “They’re not dangerous?” Brandon felt incredibly stupid. Dust devils. He had been afraid of a dust devil.

  “Don’t think so. Must be a wind of a couple of hundred kilometers an hour, maybe.” Ryan shrugged. “But with the thin atmosphere, it’s no big deal.”

  “They’re pretty, though,” Tana said. “Break the monotony.”

  What had made it hard to see was the fact that the dust devils were precisely the same shade as the sky, only a tiny bit darker. Now that he knew how to look, they were easy to spot. By the afternoon there were two, sometimes even three dust devils visible at any one time. Brandon wondered if this was natural, or if something was wrong. He could remember that the briefings had talked about dust devils, but were there supposed to be this many? But after his embarrassing dive to cover, he didn’t want to ask.

  15

  THE LUCKIEST BOY IN THE WORLD

  The radio and the television and the VR stations had all converged at the front of the house. Brandon slipped into the back and quickly changed into Trevor’s favorite orange silk shirt, then put on the turquoise bolo that Trevor had gotten as a gift. Checking in the mirror, he was surprised at how much like Trevor he looked.

  “I’m Trevor Whitman,” he said, testing it out. “I’m Trevor Whitman. I am Trevor Whitman.”

  It was surprisingly easy to step into Trevor’s place. The instant that the announcement had been made public, Trevor’s life had changed completely, even before he went off to Houston to train. It was a surprise, really, how few people really had to know.

  Brandon had been a virgin when the lottery had selected Trevor Whitman as the boy who won the trip to Mars. Not that he would ever possibly have admitted to it. But being the most famous boy in the world has its advantages, and Brandon took them. He could walk into a coffeehouse or a cabaret and say, “I’m Trevor Whitman, I’m going to Mars,” and half a dozen girls would tell him that they found him “fascinating” and wanted to know him better. He figured that if a girl wanted to know him for no other reason than the fact that he was famous, well, that meant that he had every right to take advantage. And he did. The first one, he was nervous, certain that she was going to tell him, hey, you’re too young, you can’t be T
revor Whitman. But after the first few, it was easy.

  It was fun to be famous.

  16

  GEOLOGY LESSONS

  Her mind would wander. Sometimes Estrela imagined that her brother was with her. It had been decades since Gilberto had left her. She had not thought about him for years, nor about the streets of Rio. And yet she could bring him forth perfectly in her mind, just as he had been, wiry and street smart and still larger than her. “Hey, moça,” he might say. “These North Americans, you’re in some rich company, aren’t you?” He would give her a sly look, and she knew that he would be thinking, What did they have that he could grab? Yeah, that would be just like Gilberto, always on the lookout. “Better stay alert, moça, they don’t care about you. You’re fat, you lost your reflexes, haven’t you? Don’t think you’re like them. They look at us, they don’t even see us, they just see filth in the street. They’ll kill you and not even laugh when you’re gone.”

  That’s not true, she wanted to tell him.

  And sometimes she would imagine João walking beside her. She would call him up in her mind, and she would think of how he might comment on the rocks as they passed.

  “Hold up a moment, look at that one. Look, that’s a layer of limestone. See how it weathers differently? There were ocean deposits here, I’m sure of it.”

  “I don’t care about limestone,” she would tell him, but not aloud. Her throat hurt too much for her to say anything aloud. “Go away.” It felt bitter and yet also sweet for her to see him again, even if he was dead. Even when she ignored him.