Life on Mars

by Jonathan Strahan (Ed)

  She was curious about the crater, though. She’d seen craters before, on the moon, but not on Mars. She scraped her way down the valley side, kicking up a flurry of dust that sparkled yellow in the pale daylight.

  The crater was a shallow, regular bowl, its rim sharp and fragile. Her faceplate was misted up, her breath rapid. She leaned forward. In the lee of the crater rim, something sparkled.

  It was frost. Frost in a crater. “Well, you don’t see that on the moon, Benedicte—”

  “Who are you talking to?”

  The girl in the valley whirled around, kicking up dust.

  “So did she hear us this time?” Jonno was leaning on Vikram. They were limping forward, toward the girl and the wreck of her clamshell, step-by-step through the clinging dust.

  “I think so,” Vikram said. “Her comms setup must be really short range. We were practically on top of her before she heard us.”

  The girl replied, “My main comms system is in the clamshell. And that’s smashed up.”

  “Funny kind of accent,” Vikram said.

  “That’s Earth girls for you.” Jonno tried to lift his head. “I can’t see her too well.”

  “She’s wearing a kind of skinsuit,” Vikram said scornfully. “Bright green stripes. Looks like it’s painted on. Typical Earthworm.”

  They were only meters apart now. The girl put her hands on her hips and glared at them. “Martians, are you?”

  “What do you think?” Vikram set Jonno down in the soft dirt and glanced around theatrically. “So who’s Benedicte? Your imaginary friend?”

  “I’m recording my observations,” she said defensively. “My name is Natalie Rivers.”

  “I’m Jonno. This is Vikram,” Jonno gasped, massaging his chest through his suit.

  Vikram could make out her face through a dusty, scarred visor. High cheekbones, picked out by the low sun. She was frowning, uncertain.

  “Are you from Kahra?”

  Kahra is the capital of Mars. Jonno laughed, but it hurt him and he groaned. “Why do Earthworms think every Martian is from Kahra? No. We’re from Argyre. South of here.”

  “One of those domed towns.”

  “Yes, one of those domed towns.”

  “So what do you want? Have you come to rescue me?”

  Vikram snorted. “Do we look like it? I’ll tell you who we are. We’re the two guys you nearly killed with your dumb clamshell.”

  Her mouth opened in an O, and Vikram clearly remembered the face he had glimpsed at the moment of collision. “There was something in the way as I came down.”

  “That,” Jonno said, “was our flycycle. Now it’s smashed to pieces.”

  Vikram snapped, “You Earthworms should keep out of our airspace.”

  “And you should have got out of the way,” she shot back. “There was a whole swarm of us. Why didn’t you just—”

  “Why didn’t you—”

  “Not helping,” Jonno wheezed. “It’s not helping, to argue about blame. Let’s work out whose fault it is after we’re all safe. Agreed?”

  Natalie stayed silent, and Vikram nodded curtly.

  “So,” she said. “What’s the plan?”

  Vikram laughed. “Plan? What plan?”

  “You must have comms. Do your people know where you are?”

  Vikram hesitated.

  “Tell her the truth,” Jonno said.

  “No,” Vikram admitted. “Our primary comms system was built into the flycycle.”

  She nodded. “As mine was built into the clamshell. So where’s your backup?”

  Vikram took a breath. “In my room, back in Argyre.”

  Natalie stared. “Why, of all the stupid—”

  “Save it,” Vikram said, chagrined. “I’ve been getting that from Jonno since the crash.”

  “We all make mistakes,” Jonno said. “What’s important is what we do now.”

  Natalie said, “Maybe there’s some kind of beacon at that cairn.”

  Vikram frowned. “What cairn?”

  “I saw it before.” She climbed the bank and pointed. “Over there. Come on.” She strode away without hesitation, although Vikram was spitefully glad to see she stumbled a couple of times in the apparently unfamiliar gravity.

  With no better idea, Vikram helped Jonno to his feet and trudged after her.

  “I never heard of a cairn,” Jonno wheezed. “Or a beacon.”

  “No.”

  “Confident, isn’t she?”

  “Yes. But she’ll be wrong about the cairn. It’ll just be a pile of rocks.”

  As it turned out, it was more than a pile of rocks.

  Natalie stood there, looking at the “cairn.” Vikram helped Jonno sit down in a bank of soft dust.

  The cairn was a machine—a big one, topped off by a dust-filled dish antenna about two meters off the ground, above their heads. Its body was a six-sided box that stood on four legs. On the box’s upper surface was a forest of gadgets, and an arm thrust out the side, with a trenching tool on the end stuck in the dirt. Dust had drifted up against the machine, and its surfaces were yellowed and cracked from long exposure to the sunlight. It had evidently been here a long time.

  A blue plaque stood on a post, a marker left by the planetary preservation authorities. Vikram didn’t bother to read it. It didn’t matter what it said.

  “Here’s your cairn,” he said to Natalie. “Here’s your beacon. A stupid old space probe.”

  “Not just any probe.” Vikram saw she was taking images with her visor. “This is Viking One. The first successful lander.”

  A thin wind kicked up dust that sifted against the silent carcass. “Been here centuries.

  “Well—about a hundred and fifty years. It’s what I was looking for when I dipped down in the clamshell.”

  “Looks like you found it,” Vikram said. “Congratulations. Some kind of robot, is it? So it’s got no water tank or first aid kit. This is going to save us?”

  “Oh, shut up, dust-digger,” she said, her cultivated voice full of withering contempt. “At least I tried. What have you done but moan and bitch?”

  Vikram would have replied, but Jonno cut him off. “She’s got a point. It will be night soon.”

  Natalie frowned. “We’ll be found before dark. Surely.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” Jonno said. “Does anybody know you’re down here? No? Nobody’s going to miss us either, not for a couple of days until our next check-in time.”

  “You only have to check in every couple of days?”

  Vikram shrugged. “We ‘dust-diggers’ are self-reliant.”

  “You don’t look very self-reliant to me. They’ll see us.” She glanced up. “Surely you have surveillance satellites.”

  “Few and far between,” Jonno said. “This isn’t Earth. This is Mars. The frontier.”

  “But this stupid little rock of a planet—it’s so small! How can you possibly get lost?”

  “It’s a rock with about as much land area as Earth,” Vikram said. “Most of it unexplored. There are only a few thousand of us, you know. Martians. Plenty of room to get lost in. And besides, just how visible do you think we are from space?”

  She laughed. “Look at the color of my suit!” But when she looked down she saw that the bright green and blue design was already obscured by rust-colored dust. She brushed at it with her gloved hands, but it stuck.

  Vikram smiled. “Clingy stuff, isn’t it? Natural camouflage.”

  Jonno said, “Look, surely we’ll be missed in a day, two days, by your people or ours, and they will come looking for us. But we’re going to have to get through at least one night. Mars gets cold quickly. We’re already down to minus twenty-five. It’s liable to fall to minus ninety before dawn—”

  “I get the picture,” Natalie said. Vikram grudgingly admired the way she was staying calm. “So what do we do?”

  Vikram said, “We’ve got a little food and water in our packs. Some basic first aid stuff. But we’ve no shelter. We should
have reached our camp before nightfall.”

  “I’ve got a pressurization bag,” Natalie said. “But I’ve got nothing else, no food.”

  “So we share,” Jonno said, and he grimly tried to get to his feet. “Because if we don’t share, we’ve all had it. Maybe we can use the Viking to rig up some kind of tent. . . .”

  Natalie got her pressurization bag out of her backpack. It was a sack of silvered material that folded down to a mass smaller than her fist, but when she shook it out it opened up into a spherical bag about two meters across.

  Jonno suggested they set it up on the Viking platform. When Natalie asked why, Vikram said, “So we don’t get chewed by the rock bugs. They come up at night, you know.”

  Natalie glanced down. Everybody knew there was life deep in the rocks of Mars, native life, microbes with some kind of relationship to Earth life. But she’d never heard of it rising up in the dark.

  Jonno took pity on her. “He’s teasing you. It’s just to keep us off the cold ground, that’s all.”

  Vikram laughed, and Natalie turned away, fuming.

  They used a bit of cable that the boys had scavenged from their wrecked flycycle to attach the sack to the Viking’s antenna pole. Then, clumsy in their suits, they all clambered onto the platform and inside the bag, and Natalie fumbled to zip it up. There was a hiss of air, and the bag inflated to a sphere, slightly distorted where it was pushed up against the old probe’s instruments. There was a faint glow from light filaments embedded in the bag walls, and the air rapidly got warmer.

  Cautiously Natalie lifted her faceplate. The air was cold, and had a tang of industrial chemicals, and it was thin, so thin her lungs seemed to drag at it. But it was breathable. She pushed back her hood and unzipped the neck of her suit. She caught Vikram staring at the stubbly pink hair that coated one half of her scalp, the latest London fashion.

  She and the boys were sitting cross-legged. There was so little room they were pushed up against each other, and every move brought them into contact. As Vikram opened his own suit, and helped Jonno with his, he kept brushing against Natalie, which they both put up with in stiff silence.

  Jonno let Vikram remove his faceplate, but he kept his suit closed up, and he clutched his chest, breathing raggedly. It was obvious he’d been hurt in the crash, but he wouldn’t let Vikram see the wound. Vikram was patient with his friend, calm, reassuring, even gentle. When he behaved that way, Natalie thought reluctantly, unlike when he was snapping at her, Vikram didn’t seem so bad. Almost decent-looking, if he’d had a wash, and a sensible haircut with a shade of some modern color like silver or electric blue, instead of that drab natural brown.

  Vikram dug food bars out of his pack and passed them around. Natalie bit into her bar. It was tough, stringy stuff, faintly like meat, but she was pretty sure there were no cows or sheep on Mars. It had probably come out of a tank of seaweed. She preferred not to ask. There wasn’t much to the food, but it was filling.

  At least the lack of a bathroom wasn’t a problem. All their suits had facilities for processing waste. But when Vikram offered her water she learned it was the product of his suit’s recycling system—it was, in fact, Vikram’s pee. She politely declined.

  Vikram touched the wall of the bag. “Nice piece of kit,” he said grudgingly.

  “Thanks.”

  “How does it store its air, in that little packet you opened it out of? And the energy for the heat and light.”

  Natalie shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  “Some kind of chemical reactions,” Jonno said. “Probably.” He winced with every word.

  Natalie said, “It’s an emergency pressurization bag. Meant for space, really. You suffer a blowout, you zip yourself in and wait for rescue. Meant for one person, which is why it’s a bit snug. It should last twelve hours.”

  Jonno grunted. “Then it’s no use for more than one night.”

  Vikram studied her. “So you’re a space traveler, are you?”

  “I’m here on a school trip,” Natalie said, refusing to be riled again. “But I’ve been to the moon and on a Venus flyby cruise, and I’m here, of course. I suppose you’ve traveled all over.”

  Jonno laughed, though it clearly hurt him. “Earthworms always think Martians spend their time whizzing through space. We’ve got too much to do down here.”

  “I’ve been to Phobos,” Vikram said defensively. “One of Mars’s moons.”

  “When you were two years old!” Jonno said.

  Vikram, embarrassed, turned on Natalie. “And you never set foot down here before today, did you? I could tell by the way you were stumbling around in the gravity.”

  She shrugged. “Landing wasn’t in our itinerary at all for this trip. Mars is so pricey. Even the wilderness areas, now that the whole place is a planetary park.”

  “What about the cities?”

  “The dome towns? I know people who’ve been there. Expensive again. And, you know, small.” Stuck in this bag for the night with these two boys, she didn’t want to give any more offense. “Look, you have to see it from my point of view. I grew up in London! You don’t want to come all the way to Mars and stay in some poky little village in a bubble.”

  “No,” Jonno said. “So you don’t spend your euros in our shops and inns, you just muck about in the upper atmosphere and then you go home again. No wonder you’re so popular.”

  “Well, it’s not my fault,” she said, feeling defensive. “Look, my family has connections to Mars. My grandfather was a trader here for a while. He’s the reason I’m called Natalie. I was named after the heroine of some old book that was published a hundred years before I was born. The first human on Mars, in the book . . . Anyway, where were you going, cycling across Mars?”

  Vikram began to say something about community duties, doing maintenance on weather stations around the north pole water-ice cap.

  But Jonno cut in, “I’ll tell you where Vikram was going. Anywhere but Hellas.”

  “Jonno—”

  Natalie asked quickly. “What’s in Hellas?”

  Jonno said, “The question is who is in Hellas. And the answer is, a lovely lady called Hiroe.”

  Natalie felt her face redden, and she was glad the lighting was dim. “Your girlfriend.”

  “No!” Vikram said. “Not my girlfriend. I never even met her—”

  “His fiancée,” Jonno said slyly. “His wife-to-be.”

  “Shut up.”

  Natalie was discovering she knew even less about these Martians than she had imagined. “You’re engaged? How old are you?”

  “Fifteen,” Vikram said. “How old are you?”

  “Not much younger.”

  “It’s an arranged marriage,” Jonno said. “Their fathers are business partners. They sorted out the arrangement, and had it cleared with the genetic health people. All Vikram’s got to do is marry her. Oh, and produce lots of healthy little dust-diggers.”

  Vikram didn’t look happy about this deal at all.

  “And he never even met her? Eeeww. That’s so weird. We don’t have arranged marriages on Earth. Well, we don’t, in Britain. Maybe they still do in some cultures. Why do it on Mars? It seems—old-fashioned.”

  “There aren’t enough of us,” Vikram said. “Simple as that. Only a few thousand on the whole planet. We have to avoid inbreeding. So we have systems to ensure that doesn’t happen.”

  “Inbreeding? Eeeww! And you’ll go through with this?”

  Jonno answered for Vikram. “Unless he finds a better option before his sixteenth birthday, yes. And a better option means somebody else he likes more, but who has at least the same degree of genetic difference from him as the lovely Hiroe.”

  “It’s the law,” Vikram said miserably. “It’s my responsibility—everybody’s responsibility to the future. Oh, shut up, Jonno. Let’s get some sleep. Because unless we have a good day tomorrow, it’s not going to make any difference anyhow, is it?”

  “That’s the first intelligent thing y
ou’ve said all day,” Jonno said. “Good night.”

  So they scrunched around in the bag, the three of them curled up like fetuses, head to toe, and tried to sleep. Knobbly bits of the old Viking stuck into Natalie’s sides. Even in the low gravity it was uncomfortable. She thought she could hear Jonno sobbing softly, under his breath—sobbing at the pain of the injury he wouldn’t let the others see. But she was aware of Vikram’s presence, strong and warm and calm.

  And she heard the thin wind of Mars, just millimeters away from her head, a thin hiss as sand sifted against the bag’s fabric. She wondered if that was normal. She kept thinking about Vikram’s Martian rock bugs, a whole world of bacterial communities kilometers deep beneath her.

  Under all this was the fear, the fundamental gnawing fear that she’d tried to distract herself from since the moment the clamshell went down. The fear that she wasn’t going to live through this, that this desolate Martian plain was where she would die.

  She’d never been so alone in her life. She wished she could talk to Benedicte or her parents. She wished she could hold somebody’s hand. Even Vikram’s.

  She didn’t sleep well.

  And when they woke, things looked even worse.

  It started with Jonno. He still wouldn’t let Vikram look at his injury. He had weakened, his face pale from a loss of blood.

  At least Natalie continued to look calm and composed, under that silly pink hairstyle. Vikram supposed all this was even stranger, more scary, for her than it was for the two of them.

  They sealed up their pressure suits and zipped open Natalie’s bag. The dimming lights of the bag’s power supply were overwhelmed by the thin Martian dawn, and a sifting of crimson dust caught the light.

  They pushed out of the collapsing bag and found that everything, the bag, the old Viking, was covered with a fine layer of dust, blown by the wind.

  “They can’t see us under this,” Natalie said, fretfully shaking the dust off her bag.