I took other jobs, bookkeeping, supervising, cartography, anything where I could earn wages with which to pay off the indenture faster, especially jobs I could do online in my nominal hours off. At every job, because I’d promised Sam, I learned as much as I could. Eventually, a few days before my forty-third birthday, I paid off the indenture, quit all those jobs, and went into business for myself.
By that time I knew how the money moved, and for what, in practically every significant business on Mars. I’d had a lot of time to plan and think too.
So that was it. I kept my word—oh, all right, botterogator, let’s check that box too. Keeping promises is important to success. After all, here I am.
Sixty-two earthyears later, I know, because everyone does, that a drug that costs almost nothing, which everyone takes now, could have kept Sam alive. A little money a year, if anyone’d known, and Sam and me could’ve been celebrating anniversaries for decades, and we’d’ve been richer, with Sam’s brains on the job too. And botterogator, you’d be talking to her, and probably learning more too.
Or is that what I think now?
Remembering Sam, over the years, I’ve thought of five hundred things I could have done instead of what I did, and maybe I’d have succeeded as much with those too.
But the main question I think about is only—did she mean it? Did she see something in me that would make my bad start work out as well as it did? Was she just an idealistic smart girl playing house with the most cooperative boy she could find? Would she have wanted me to marry again and have children, did she intend me to get rich?
Every so often I regret that I didn’t really fulfill that second promise, an irony I can appreciate now: she feared the icy grave, but since she burned to mostly water and carbon dioxide, on Mars she became mostly snow. And molecules are so small, and distribute so evenly, that whenever the snow falls, I know there’s a little of her in it, sticking to my suit, piling on my helmet, coating me as I stand in the quiet and watch it come down.
Did she dream me into existence? I kept my promises, and they made me who I am . . . and was that what she wanted? If I am only the accidental whim of a smart teenage girl with romantic notions, what would I have been without the whim, the notions, or Sam?
Tell you what, botterogator, and you pass this on to the new generation of Martians: it’s funny how one little promise, to someone or something a bit better than yourself, can turn into something as real as Samantha City, whose lights at night fill the crater that spreads out before me from my balcony all the way to the horizon.
Nowadays I have to walk for an hour, in the other direction out beyond the crater wall, till the false dawn of the city lights is gone, and I can walk till dawn or hunger turns me homeward again.
Botterogator, you can turn off the damn stupid flashing lights. That’s all you’re getting out of me. I’m going for a walk; it’s snowing.
JOHN BARNES has commercially published twenty-eight volumes of fiction, probably twenty-nine by the time you read this, including science fiction, men’s action adventure, two collaborations with astronaut Buzz Aldrin, a collection of short stories and essays, one fantasy, and one mainstream novel. He has done a rather large number of occasionally peculiar things for money, mainly in business consulting, academic teaching, and show business, fields which overlap more than you’d think. Since 2001, he has lived in Denver, Colorado, where he has a wonderful girlfriend, an average income, and a bad attitude, which he feels is actually the best permutation.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I don’t know where stories come from, much of the time; this one had a more tangled genesis than most. Mars stories, I think, should be frontier stories, mainly because of my strong sense that by the time there are cities on Mars, they will be essentially like large luxury hotels, where nothing much interesting usually happens (well, extramarital affairs and international intrigue, but those aren’t what I usually like to write stories about). I was thinking about things that would be hard to do on a Martian frontier and scribbled out a list; after a while I settled on “cremation.” That, of course, brought me to the single best-known poem about a difficult cremation of which I am aware, and there, anyway, was the beginning of an outline.
Somehow in my mind that connected with Eric Hoffer’s observation that happy, successful people don’t go to frontiers. That in turn got me thinking about the students I teach at a career college, who have essentially been brought up by a mixture of peer culture, mass culture, and government services; in particular I thought about the strict, harsh code of honor that many of them live by, in which personal loyalty to peers is the highest and sometimes only value, which very likely helps to keep them trapped and broke, but also keeps them alive and determined. That brought me back to the Robert Service poem, with its emphasis on keeping promises, and somewhere eventually to the thought that many people have been made by a promise they kept, and more by the keeping than by what they promised, or who they promised it to. That, and perhaps a difficult drive through Kansas ground blizzards (on Christmas Day, which again intersected with the poem), which made me reflect on keeping your word when it is inconvenient, and perhaps a dozen other things that I’m not consciously aware of, finally gave me an ending to this story.
DISCOVERING LIFE
Kim Stanley Robinson
The final approach to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a narrow road running up the flank of the ugly brown mountains overlooking Los Angeles, is a fine road in ordinary circumstances, but when something newsworthy occurs it is inadequate to handle the influx of media visitors. On this morning the line of cars and trailers extended down from the security gate almost to the freeway off-ramp, and Bill Dawkins watched the temperature gauge of his old Ford Escort rise as he inched forward, all the vehicles adding to the smog that already made the air a tangible gray mist. Eventually he passed the security guards and drove up to the employee parking lot, then walked down past the guest parking lot overflowing with TV trailers topped by satellite dishes. Surely every language and nation in the world was represented, all bringing their own equipment of course.
Inside the entry building Bill turned right and looked in the press conference room, also jammed to overflowing. A row of Bill’s colleagues sat up on the stage behind a long table crowded with mics, facing the cameras and lights and reporters. Bill’s friend Mike Collinsworth was answering a question about contamination, trying to look like he was enjoying himself. But very few scientists like other scientists listening in on them when they are explaining things to nonscientists, because then there is someone there to witness just how gross their gross simplifications are; so an affair like this was by its very nature embarrassing. And to complicate the situation, this press corps was a very mixed crowd, ranging from experts who in some senses (social context, historical background) knew more than the scientists themselves, all the way to TV faces who could barely read their prompters. That plus the emotional load of the subject matter, amounting almost to hysteria, gave the event an excruciating quality that Bill found perversely fascinating to watch.
A telegenic young woman got the nod from John and took the radio mic being passed around. “What does this discovery mean to you?” she asked. “What do you think the meaning of this discovery will be?”
The seven men on stage looked at each other, and the crowd laughed. John said, “Mike?” and Mike made a face that got another laugh. But John knew his crew; Mike was a smart-ass in real life, indeed Bill could imagine some of his characteristic answers scorching the air—It means I have to answer stupid questions in front of billions of people; It means I can stop working eighty-hour weeks and see what a real life is like again—but Mike was also good at the PR stuff, and with a straight face he answered the second of the questions, which Bill would have thought was the harder of the two.
“Well, the meaning of it depends, to some extent, on what the exobiologists find out when they investigate the organisms more fully. If the organisms follow the same biochemica
l principles as life on Earth, then it’s possible they are a kind of cousin to terran life, bounced on meteorites from Mars to here, or here to Mars. If that’s the case then it’s possible that DNA analysis will even be able to determine about when the two families parted company, and which planet has the older population. We may find out that we’re all Martians originally.”
He waited for the obligatory laugh. “On the other hand, the investigation may show a completely alien biochemistry, indicating a separate origin. That’s a very different scenario.” Now Mike paused, realizing he was at the edge of his sound bite envelope, and also of deep waters. He decided to cut it short. “Either way that turns out, we’ll know that life is very adaptable, and that it can either cross space between planets or begin twice in the same solar system, so either way we’ll be safer in assuming that life is fairly widespread in the universe.”
Bill smiled. Mike was good; the answer provided a quick summary of the situation, bullet points, potential headlines: “BACTERIA ON MARS PROVES LIFE IS COMMON IN THE UNIVERSE.” Which wasn’t exactly true, but there was no winning the sound bite game.
Bill left the room and crossed the little plaza, then entered the big building forming the north flank of the compound. Upstairs the little offices and cubicles all had their doors open and portable TVs on, all tuned to the press conference just a hundred yards away; there was a holiday atmosphere, including streamers and balloons, but Bill couldn’t feel it somehow. There on the screens under the CNN logo his friends were being played up as heroes, young devoted rocket scientists replacing astronauts by necessity as the exploration of Mars proceeded robotically—silly, but very much preferable to the situation when things went wrong, when they were portrayed as harried geek rocket scientists not quite up to the task, which was the extremely important (though underfunded) task of teleoperating the exploration of the cosmos from their desks. They had played both roles several times at JPL and had come to understand that for the media and perhaps the public there was no middle ground, no recognition that they were just people doing their jobs, difficult but interesting jobs in difficult but not intolerable circumstances. No, for the world they were a biannual nine-hours’ wonder, either nerdy heroes or nerdy goats, and the next day forgotten.
That was just the way it was, and not what was bothering Bill. He felt at loose ends. Mission accomplished, his to-do list almost empty; it left him feeling somewhat empty, but that was not it either. He still had phone and e-mail media questions waiting, and he worked through those on automatic pilot, his answers honed by the previous week’s work. The lander had drilled down and secured a soil sample from under the sands at the mouth of Shalbatana Vallis, where thermal sensors had detected heat from a volcanic vent, which meant the permafrost ice in that region had liquid percolations in it. The sample had been placed in a metal sphere that had been hermetically sealed and boosted to Martian orbit. After a rendezvous with an orbiter, it had been flown back to Earth and released in such a manner that it had dropped into Earth’s atmosphere without orbiting at all and slammed into Utah’s Dugway Proving Grounds a mere ten yards from its target. An artificial meteorite, yes. No, the ball could not have broken on impact; it had been engineered for that impact, indeed could have withstood striking a sidewalk or a wall of steel, and had been recovered intact in the little crater it had made—recovered by robot and flown robotically to Johnson Space Center in Houston, where it had been placed inside hermetically sealed chambers in sealed labs in sealed buildings before being opened, everything having been designed for just this purpose. No, they did not need to sterilize Dugway, or all of Utah, they did not need to nuke Houston (not to kill Martian bacteria anyway), and all was well; the alien life was safely locked away and could not get out. People were safe.
Bill answered a lot of questions like these, feeling that there were many people out there who badly needed a better education in risk assessment. They got in their cars and drove on freeways, smoking cigarettes and holding high-energy radio transmitters against their heads in order to get to newsrooms where they were greatly concerned to find out if they were in danger from microbacteria locked away behind triple hermetic seals in Houston. By the time Bill broke for lunch he was feeling more depressed than irritated. People were ignorant, short-sighted, poorly educated, fearful, superstitious, deeply enmeshed in magical thinking of all kinds. And yet that was not really what was bothering him either.
Mike was in the cafeteria, hungrily downing his lunchtime array of flavinoids and antioxidants, and Bill joined him, feeling cheered. Mike was giving them a low-voiced recap of the morning’s press conference (many journalists were in the JPL cafeteria on guest passes). “What is the meaning of life?” Mike whispered urgently. “It means metabolism, it means hunger at lunchtime, please God let us eat, that’s what it means.” Then the TVs overhead began to show the press conference in Houston, and like everyone else they watched and listened to the tiny figures on the screen. The exobiologists at Johnson Space Center were making their initial report: the Martian bacteria were around one hundred nanometers long, bigger than the fossil nanobacteria tentatively identified in ALH 84001 (the meteorite found in the Antarctic in 1984), but smaller than most terran bacteria; they were single-celled, they contained proteins, ribosomes, DNA strands composed of base pairs of adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine—
“Cousins,” Mike declared.
—the DNA resembled certain terran organisms like the Columbia basement archaea Methanospirillum jacobii, thus possibly they were the descendant of a common ancestor—
“Cousins!”
—very possibly mitochondrial DNA analysis would reveal when the split had happened. “Separated at birth,” one of the Johnson scientists offered, to laughter. They were just like the JPL scientists in their on-screen performances. Spontaneous generation versus panspermia, frequent transpermia between Earth and Mars; all these concepts poured out in an half-digested rush, and people would still be calling for the nuclear destruction of Houston and Utah in order to save the world from alien infection, from andromeda strains, from fictional infections—infictions, as Mike said with a grin.
The Johnson scientists nattered on solemnly, happy still to be in the limelight; it had been an oddity of NASA policy to place the Mars effort so entirely at JPL, in effect concentrating one of the major endeavors of human history in one small university lab, with many competing labs out there like baby birds in the federal nest, ready to peck JPL’s eyes out if given the chance. Now the exobiology teams at Johnson and AMES were finally involved, and it was no longer just JPL’s show, although they were still headquarters and had engineered the sample-return operation just as they had all the previous Martian landers. This diffusion of the project was a relief of course, but could also be seen as a disappointment—the end of an era. But no—watching the TV Bill could tell that wasn’t what was bothering him either.
Mike returned with Bill and Nassim to their offices, and they continued to watch the Johnson press conference on a desk TV in Nassim’s. Apparently the sample contained more than one species, perhaps as many as five, maybe more. They just didn’t know yet. They thought they could keep them all alive in Mars jars, but weren’t sure. They were sure that they had the organisms contained, and that there was no danger.
Someone asked about ramifications for the human exploration of Mars, and the answers were scattered. “Very severely problematized,” someone said; it would be a matter for discussion at the very highest levels, NASA of course but also NSF, the National Academy of Sciences, the International Astronomical Union, various UN bodies—in short, the scientific government of the world.
Mike laughed. “The human mission people must be freaking out.”
Nassim nodded. “The Ad Martem Club has already declared that these things are only bacteria, like bathroom scum—we kill billions of them every day, they’re no impediment to us conquering Mars.”
“They can’t be serious.”
“They are seriou
s, but crazy. We won’t be setting foot there for a very long time. If ever.”
Suddenly Bill understood. “That would be sad,” he said. “I’m a humans-to-Mars guy myself.”
Mike grinned and shook his head. “You’d better not be in too much of a hurry.”
Bill went back in his office. He cleaned up a little, then called Eleanor’s office, wanting to talk to her, wanting to say, “We did it, the mission is a success and the dream has therefore been shattered,” but she wasn’t in. He left a message that he would be home around the usual time, then concentrated on his to-do list, no longer adding things to the bottom faster than he took them off at the top, trying to occupy his mind but failing. The realization was sinking in that he had always thought that their work was about going to Mars, about making a better world there; this was how he had justified everything about his life—the killing hours of the job, the looks on his family’s faces, Eleanor’s being fully sympathetic but disappointed, frustrated that it had turned out this way, the two of them caught despite their best efforts in a kind of 1950s marriage, the husband gone all day every day. Except of course that Eleanor worked long hours too, so that their kids had always been day care and after-school care kids, all day every weekday. Once Bill had dropped Joe, their younger one, off at day care on a Monday morning, and looking back through the window he had seen an expression on the boy’s face—of abandonment and stoic solitude, of facing another ten hours at the same old place, to be gotten through somehow like everyone else—a look which on the face of a three-year-old had pierced Bill to the heart. And all that—all the time he had put in, all those days and years, had been so that one day humans would inhabit Mars and make a decent civilization at last; his whole life burned in a cubicle because the start of this great project was so tenuous, because so few people believed or understood, so that it was down to them, one little lab trying its best to execute the “faster better cheaper” plan which contained within it (as they often pointed out) a contradiction of the second law of thermodynamics among other problems, a plan that they knew could only really achieve two out of the three qualities in any real-world combination, but making the attempt anyway, finding that the only true “cheaper” involved was the cost of their own labor and the quality of their own lives, rocket scientists running like squirrels in cages to make the inhabitation of Mars a reality—a project which only the future Martians of some distant century would truly appreciate and honor. Except now there weren’t going to be any future Martians.
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