Before Mars

by Emma Newman

  Petranek is waiting for me outside the dust lock, looking very comfortable in hir onesie as ze leans against the wall. With a broad smile Petranek pats me on the shoulder. “No need to look so scared!”

  I’m more nervous than I realized. I smile back. “I’ll be okay.”

  “You’ll be more than that! You’ll never forget the first moment you step outside. Let’s get suited up. If you need any help at any point, or if you have any questions, just ask—doesn’t matter how stupid it might sound. Sometimes people freeze up at certain points or forget the way to do something. That’s perfectly natural. The prince is watching everything we do, and ze will stop us doing anything stupid, okay?”

  I nod, noting the use of “ze” for the AI instead of “it.” When I think about it, the gender-neutral pronoun makes more sense. Certainly more sense than the way the engineers on Earth who sometimes used “he,” even though they didn’t call it the prince, and “she” when they were talking about the craft that brought me here.

  Petranek opens the first door of the dust lock. I expect the sense of familiarity; I trained in a sight-and-sound-only mersive that was recorded here, after all. It’s a relatively small room with an airtight door between us and the rest of the base. Ahead I can see the five closed slots that lead to the external suits. They are always prepped and ready for use as part of the base safety protocols; if for any reason we all have to evacuate the base in an emergency, we have to be able to suit up as fast as possible. There are five more suits in storage, along with the patterns and nonprintable components to make replacements should the backups fail too. When stepping outside without a suit means your own blood boiling in your body, a lot of care goes into keeping them well serviced and available.

  I go to the slot on the far left and Petranek picks the one next to it. Principia confirms that MyPhys reports my body to be functioning within normal parameters and that I have the permissions required to leave the base. A second dialog box requests that I actively confirm my intention to go outside and my commitment to observing all relevant safety protocols. I do so with a tap of my finger in the air, corresponding to where the box is displayed in my visual field, while Petranek says, “Acknowledged and confirmed, Principia. Thank you—we will.”

  There’s no message wishing me a good trip. Not even in text form. I shrug off the bizarre moment of feeling socially slighted by a bloody AI and try to roll some of the tension out of my shoulders as the panel in front of me slides up.

  The slot that I need to go through is only just wider than my body and about a meter high, the bottom of it at waist level. With the panel that usually seals it now drawn up, I can see the interior of the suit on the other side, waiting for me to climb into it. The seal between the suit opening and the slot is airtight, designed to keep the fine Martian dust out of this room.

  I grab the bar above the slot and lift myself up, putting my feet through the opening into the suit. I’ve done this dozens of times in training, but this time I am shaking. My hands feel slick with sweat as I grip the bar more tightly, tilting my body at enough of an angle for my feet to find their way into the concertinaed legs of the suit and then into the boots, which are being held up, ready for me to fill them. I feel the soft foam inside molding to my feet and then I get a ping from Principia telling me I should move into the rest of the suit.

  I slide my backside off the edge of the wall, standing with my legs fully in the suit now, taking care to plant my boots on the ground first, checking the legs are fully extended before shifting my hips forward. Once I feel confident to stand—albeit at an odd backward-leaning angle—I let go of the bar and plunge my hands through the suit’s arms and into the gloves, crouching slightly so I can duck my head to then come up into the helmet portion.

  The suit is light and well articulated but still feels odd to wear. I step forward slowly at the prompt from Principia, feeling the suit close behind me as the inner zipper, for all intents and purposes, is pulled upward by the movement. I know that behind me, pincers are closing the additional two layers and checking the seal. I wait as it’s pressurized and Principia makes the final suit-integrity checks. I focus on keeping my breathing steady and making sure that the suit has settled into a comfortable fit around me as the smart fabric makes its final adjustments. It gives very limited protection against cosmic radiation, but, most important, the suit is pressurized, insulated against the cold and heated too. A microenvironment to keep my fragile body alive on a planet it has not evolved to cope with.

  Principia confirms that my suit is sealed and I take in the second chamber of the dust lock through the plasglass of my helmet. It’s hard to see the dust against the red concrete, but then I notice the little drifts of it at the meeting between the floor and the walls. Looking down at my gloves, I can see it in the creases, even though the suit would have been cleaned just before coming back inside. The dust is so fine there’s no efficient way to clean it off completely without all sorts of extra equipment, hence the dust lock. It’s easier to keep the spaces separate and keep the dusty suits outside the habitable parts of the base.

  Petranek gives me a confident thumbs-up and I return the gesture. “You ready?” ze asks and I nod.

  We walk together through the next set of airtight doors into the proper air lock. The door to the dust lock closes behind us and I know that there is only one more set of doors between us and outside. There are many boot prints tracked through the thin film of dust that carpets the floor. It’s a big room, large enough to hold the two rovers. I first saw one of these in an appalling mersive game I played a couple of months before the dinner party. It was a first-person shooter with cheesy scientist stereotypes needing to be rescued from evil Martians who’d squashed their gelatinous tentacular forms into combat robots that, obviously, needed a good killing. I couldn’t go back to it after the first session, when one of the scientists propositioned me after a gunfight. My stomach flips when I realize that character looked really quite similar to Dr. Elvan.

  “Pick a rover,” Petranek says. “Banks would say to you that they’re both the same, but he’d be wrong. This one has better seats and that one has better suspension.”

  I point at the one with better suspension and Petranek gives a satisfied nod. We climb inside, me in the passenger seat without any need for discussion. I don’t want to be distracted on my first trip out. I check that the drones have been stored in the cargo area and then strap in. It’s comfortable enough, with better radiation shielding and a roaming range of more than four hundred miles on its first battery. Theoretically, you could charge the spare while driving, but this is contrary to safety protocols, which dictate that a backup battery always be available. It’s fully pressurized too, but once we’re roaming about and climbing in and out of it, we’ll switch that off to save power.

  On the windscreen interior, Principia flashes up a notification that the air lock is being activated and I can hear the whirring of the depressurization taking place around us. In less than a minute, the large bay doors ahead of us open up and I see a sliver of the Martian exterior being slowly revealed. Oh God, this is it.

  Petranek starts up the rover fully and the screen display changes, showing us the mapped route ahead with the same blue line projected over the view that I’m used to from taxis back home. Down the left-hand side there is a stream of environmental data including humidity, temperature, and wind speed, along with the option to view more. It’s been picked up from the satellites around the planet along with various environmental posts that have been planted across the region over the past forty-odd years. Until recently even Curiosity still contributed to that data.

  I’m not interested in the weather right now, however. I swipe my side of the screen to move the full display to the driver’s side, wanting to see Mars alone without all that crap displayed over the top of it.

  There’s a long slope ahead of us to take us up from the subterranean level of th
e base to the surface, so there’s no glimpse of the sky yet, just compacted regolith and pebbles. I can feel my guts clenching and my gloved hands gripping the armrests tightly as the rover rolls forward slowly while the last of the door disappears into the roof.

  Petranek guns the engine and we lurch forward, racing up the slope like it’s a ramp to clear a chasm in one great leap. I yelp as I’m pushed back in my seat, Petranek shouting “Wheeeee!” as the huge rover tires leave the ground at the top of the ramp and then land more slowly than my Earth-bound brain can handle easily.

  “I love that bit!” Petranek says with a huge grin. “So, Dr. Kubrin, welcome to Mars.”

  How many times have I been welcomed? I don’t know, but this feels like the right time to hear it.

  The barren red dust stretches away from us as far as I can see, punctuated by the occasional sensor array and a few small wind turbines that are twirling lazily in the breeze. The sky is the color of a winter dawn even though the sun is high and so very small and pale. Something inside me lurches, as if some base part of me, something fundamentally human, reels at the distance and cold light of that sun.

  There is a devastating beauty in this bleak place, just like in the harsh moorlands I roamed as a child, but without the abundance of life. I can’t help but search for it, as if the same part of me that reels from the distant sun is desperately seeking some blade of grass, some tuft of gorse somewhere here. I know, intellectually, that there is no life other than that contained within Principia’s walls and in this rover, but still I hope for it, stupidly.

  I scan the landscape, looking for details that are so familiar to me, thanks to years of studying satellite data and dozens of mersives. The particular shape of Elysium Mons in the distance, the outcrop of rock just to the northwest of the Mars Principia; the landmarks are there, just as they were in the mersives. Even that stupid shooter had perfectly rendered scenery because it was recorded here, by previous occupants, and I realize with a sinking dread that something is missing. But it isn’t something out there; it’s something that should be inside me, yet again.

  Where is the sense of true wonder? There was a flicker of it, just moments ago, but that was as much the reaction to Petranek’s dramatic exit from the base. JeeMuh, how fucking dead inside am I? Yet another life experience in which the reality has not matched up with the expectation. All these moments, these landmarks in our lives that are supposed to make us feel alive, supposed to make us understand what’s really important in life, and fuck, I am just empty every single time.

  What is wrong with me?

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it? The first time you come outside?” Petranek gushes. “How do you feel?”

  “Amazing,” I lie with an echo. Just like I lied all the other times I was asked that question. Always “Fine!” or “Excited!” or “So happy!,” those fake exclamation marks taking the form of an upbeat note in my voice. I have long since abandoned the hope that speaking that way could somehow make it true. I’ve always feared the social impact of speaking the actual truth and so I protect the one asking the question by hiding it. Why should they suffer just because I’m some sort of emotional zombie? Surely, holding my baby, I should have been feeling elated. Of course I had to say something to make the inquirer believe that in a brittle, chirpy voice. Otherwise they would have looked at me in horror.

  Motherhood is like a social minefield. From the moment you become aware of being pregnant, every single time that information is shared, you risk stepping on something explosive. MyPhys told me I was pregnant shortly after conception. I didn’t tell Charlie for a month because I knew that the moment I did, I would not be my own person anymore. And I knew that he’d think he’d won.

  No, I shouldn’t think of it that way.

  The squeals of joy that came every time we told someone, working our way out from the center of our social map, telling parents and siblings first—the latter only in Charlie’s case—then friends and coworkers. I had to suffer that in person, having an actual workplace, unlike Charlie, who worked from home. Besides, for him it was just a “congratulations,” a virtual pat on the back for his virility, and maybe a comment or two from some colleague who professed to know exactly what parenthood would be like for us and delighted in telling us how wonderful and awful it was going to be.

  For me, it was the constant looks, the commentary when I started to show, the sense that somehow, I was no longer Dr. Kubrin but something owned by society as a whole. Something precious and yet equally derided. As some put me on some unfathomable pedestal of womanhood, others downgraded me as just another baby factory, with a head addled by hormones. What a waste of a brilliant mind. I wanted to tear a new one in both kinds of people.

  But above everything else, what grated the most was the way people assumed how I would be feeling. “Oh, how wonderful—you must be so happy!” That started on day zero, with each call to spread the news. As much as I would have liked to, I couldn’t say, “Well, actually, I don’t feel so happy. It’s kinda complicated and I’m not sure how I feel but maybe if there was a way to score about twenty emotions on a sliding scale for each one, I might be able to convey an approximation of my reaction to this.” No one wants to hear anything like the truth during these landmark times. It has to be one emotion, a positive one—unless it’s a quiet, heartfelt confession of fear or nervousness that can utterly disarm listeners and give them the opportunity to be reassuring—just to keep the social wheels turning in the way that makes everyone feel secure.

  I didn’t have the right to be angry about any of this. Cantankerous sod that I am, I know I’m the freak, the outlier on the psychiatrist’s graph. And I understand how people want things to be nice. They just want a sense of connection. Validation. Some moment of confirmation from another human being that what they feel is normal. Having never had that, I know how much it is needed.

  There’s no point in being truthful. I can count on one hand the number of times that my defenses slipped and I burst into tears, spilling out the confession that I was not at all happy and felt nothing like everyone said I should. Every single time there was a long pause and then the confident conclusion that I was just tired. That’s what motherhood was. Feeling more tired and more guilty than ever before. All these “emotionally normal” people, so appalled by someone not feeling happy at these designated times, so much more comfortable with the idea that fatigue is a more likely explanation. And then the inevitable question about why MyPhys wasn’t intervening directly and maybe I should have my chip upgraded. “They can do marvelous things now,” my mother-in-law said. “Direct stimulation of the . . . things that . . . make the happy drugs in your brain.” I didn’t have the energy to tell her the way it worked, nor how I had deliberately not upgraded my chip since getting it fitted, nor what I thought about this chemical plastering over of cracks in our lives. “It’s all perfectly natural,” she added to the silence, and I ended the call, unable to cope with her ignorance at the same time as I was falling apart. No wonder she hates me. I pushed her away when she was only trying to help. Of all the things I can find bottomless wells of guilt for, strangely enough, that’s not one of them.

  How I feel now, as I look out over the Martian plains, isn’t the same. There is no real distress. And I am not just tired. I am . . . unmoved. Why should being here have made any difference now that we can experience Mars in mersives so powerful, so perfectly rendered, that our brains cannot help but convince us we are already there? I’m not seeing all of this for the first time. I have been looking at this vista for years.

  But then, I’m not here because of my needs. I am here to satisfy Gabor’s desire to have original art that he can sell at an extortionate price. It has to be special, to have a “unique selling point.” I could just accept that I can paint anything of Mars that I want, and that need will be satisfied. I could get it out of the way and focus on the geological research I’d like to pursue. But it seem
s such a waste of an opportunity. While the surface of Mars has been fully mapped from above, only a small percentage has been fully recorded for mersives. It wasn’t cost-effective to do more than that, not when the games companies can render pretty good approximations for the areas outside the fully recorded ones based on topographical data.

  I review the route that Petranek arranged, as I didn’t have any firm requests for my first trip onto the surface. Thinking that I’d be too emotionally overwhelmed to really do any proper work the first time out, I was happy to just be a passenger. The route passes through all the areas I’m most familiar with. And with good reason; they have the most dramatic backdrops, the most aesthetically pleasing scenery.

  “I’d like to change the route,” I say.

  “We can’t,” Petranek replies. “This one has been approved by Principia.”

  “So? I’m not going to suggest anywhere dangerous. The weather forecasts are excellent; I checked them myself before we left.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “I’ll keep it to the same range as the previous one,” I say, plotting it out. “I want to see this crater. It’s the same distance as the planned original end point anyway.”

  After a few moments of lip chewing, Petranek says, “Okay, ping it over to the prince and see if it’s okay.”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?” I ask. There are areas that can be unstable for a rover to cross in the summer—or what passes as one here—because of the ice melting in the regolith, but I know where those are. I was one of the people who mapped them!

  Petranek shrugs. “The prince can be fussy about keeping us within the safety margins.”