Before Mars

by Emma Newman

  “I’m going back in now,” Banks says. “Come find me as soon as you get back, okay?”

  I can see the guilt in the way that he hesitates before each movement. He feels bad about this—that much is clear—and I really do think he’d come with me if he wasn’t afraid. That’s the power they have over him.

  I start the rover and drive up the ramp, wanting to get out of his sight as soon as I can. I want him to get back inside and safe again, and the longer I hang around, the greater the risk. The “do not disturb” notice I put in place on my public profile is still there and I can only hope it’s enough to stop people from going to my room to find me.

  There are several hours of daylight left and it’s as fine a day as Mars gets. The sun is only as strong as it would be on an early-spring day back home, even though it’s summer here now, but in the heated rover it makes no difference to me anyway.

  The rover’s controls soon feel familiar. What I lack in muscle memory I more than make up for with concentration, and soon I’m bouncing across the surface, leaving a satisfying dust trail behind me. The fear that I won’t be able to drive well enough subsides, giving room for other fears to increase, most centered around being alone should anything terrible happen. I need a distraction.

  I find some Russian soul music from the ’50s to play in my helmet, thinking of the boyfriend who introduced me to it in the summer before I met Charlie. He was a fellow geologist, less ambitious and more gregarious than I, always dragging me out to clubs that tried a little too hard to seem edgy. The band I’m listening to now was one of the few I actually liked, and we’d danced in the humid darkness, pressed close to each other.

  I can’t help but smile at the memory of Elvan’s hands resting on my hips as we swayed to the singer’s mournful voice, how they moved into the small of my back, pulling me closer. How we kissed—

  I jolt, braking instinctively. No, that wasn’t Elvan; that was . . . Jordan? Jorg? Something like that. Back on Earth, years ago. I’ve never danced with Elvan. Just as I’ve never danced with Charlie.

  Shit. I change the music to some harmless electronica and move off again, keeping my mind fixed on the route. I’ve examined it so much in trying to work out what Principia has been hiding that I’m fairly certain I’ll be able to get there without needing to activate the nav system. Not wanting to risk pinging the satellites, I trust in my visual memory of the route Petranek and I took. Soon enough I pick up the old tire tracks, yet more evidence that not even a little storm has passed over since our trip.

  Strangely enough, driving helps this to feel far more real than the trip out with Petranek. Each bounce of the rover, every large rock I have to steer around, makes me feel like I am actually interacting with what I can see. It helps that I didn’t play that stupid Mars game long enough to merit driving the rovers in it, and that the mersive training for using this vehicle was set in a massively simplified environment to keep my attention on the controls.

  I change the music again, this time to something I can sing along to, a playlist of all sorts of songs from the happiest times in my life. Soon the rover is filled with an old twentieth-century crooner classic and my voice warbling its way through the notes with it.

  I can’t remember the last time I sang. I can’t remember the last time I felt alone and so damn happy about it. The novelty soon wore off in the ship on the way over, and that was why I spent too much time in my mersives. But now, knowing that there are people whom I will be going back to before the day is out, this solitude feels like a gift. No Charlie to face on my return, no Mia to feel drained by in moments. I turn up the volume and sing even louder.

  The time passes quickly and I reach the crater sooner than I expected. I park and jump out of the rover to scrabble up the slope of the Cerberus Palus crater edge, disturbing my and Petranek’s footprints to reach the top. I find the original print in the lee of the boulder again and gaze down into the expanse below.

  It’s simple enough to work out which way I need to go; I’ve moved around this crater enough times in the doctored mersive, staring at its edge in relation to distant volcanoes, to be fairly confident of where the target area is. The only thing I need to decide is whether to risk driving up and down the lip of the crater so that I can take the most direct route across.

  The sides are steep and the ejecta is very loose in places. I tentatively step down from the lip and the powdery dust slides beneath my boots, making me scrabble upward in a panic to get back to the top of the rim. That answered the question well enough. I’ll drive around it, keeping the crater on my right as best I can. Surely by the time I reach the far side I’ll be able to see that mast at least.

  Back in the rover, singing as loudly as I can, keeping the crater edge in sight, I don’t feel like I’m on my way to uncover some sort of corporate conspiracy. I feel like I’m on a day trip. I never seem to be able to match my mood with my environment. Being worried about Dad at my mum’s party, when everyone else was laughing and celebrating. Being scared of him on one of our family walks out of the valley, as Geena chittered away, oblivious. And endless days as a new mother at home, feeling like I was trapped in some bizarre limbo between life and death when I should have been filled with joy.

  Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if the apartment block’s club for new parents hadn’t been filled with people who could somehow find delight in the contents of nappies. Who could find a sense of achievement in getting through a pile of laundry and clearing a space on the floor that would remain pristine for all of five minutes.

  I simply couldn’t understand why they all wanted to talk about baby stuff. We were immersed in it, twenty-four hours a day; it made no sense to me to meet up with people I barely knew and talk to them about it too. I wanted to find someone like me, someone desperate for human contact with an adult and conversation about anything other than milk and sleep and shit.

  I went only twice. The first time I just tried to fit in, only to return to our apartment and sob for an hour. At the second meeting I resolved to make an effort, hoping to discover another outlier like me who had merely been pretending to blend in, like I had.

  But no. Any time I tried to draw the subject away from babies, I was met with blank stares or mild confusion. Comments about how they hadn’t had a moment to keep up with anything on the feeds. It was as if the world outside had ceased to exist for them, while I was craving it. And what made it worse was that they simply didn’t care that their lives had imploded. They were filled with that incredible, deep, brain-numbing love. I couldn’t be around them, feeling like a monstrous collection of raw nerves.

  Charlie thought I was still going to the group until one of the other fathers asked him why I’d stopped. He couldn’t understand my revulsion, declaring it just another example of me not permitting myself to be like other people. As if it were a conscious decision on my part. Of course, when we switched roles and he became primary caregiver, he went to that club and jumped right in. He started spouting tips he’d gleaned from so-and-so at the club, even passing on gossip. He’d been sucked in, assimilated, like non-player characters in conspiracy mersives who start off as your friend at the beginning of the game and then start saying the catchphrases used by the enemy. Unlike in those mersives, I couldn’t express my horror with a gunshot to his head.

  As a child, I never appreciated how much I needed to be accepted by the people around me. I grew up in a community that celebrated diversity, encouraged independent thinking and defended those who wanted to live differently. But I’m sure that even those people couldn’t have accepted what I became. A mother who feels no joy, no love . . . that’s the sort of deviance from the norm that no one seems to celebrate.

  Perhaps if I were braver, if I’d found courage enough to go online and find communities of other freakish mothers, it would have been different. But there was no way I wanted my online profile to show membership in such groups. No matter
how many times GaborCorp claimed that our private time online was our business and not taken into account, I never believed it. I didn’t want Drew or any other future line manager to know how much I struggled with being a mother. It was too fundamental a flaw to admit to the world. As soon as you have a child, it feels like that’s the only metric you can be measured by unless you actively push against it. Even now, with people living on Mars, with others having left our solar system, motherhood is still held at the center of being a woman and it sucks.

  Sometimes, on the worst days stuck at home in the first month, I’d fantasize about dying, but only in a painless, romanticized way. Like lying down on some distant grass to slip into an endless sleep. But then that would always be followed by some imagined autopsy in which a man reports on my dead body. “Female in her early thirties. Has recently had a child . . .” and it would all fall apart in a confused mess of hating everything.

  I have stopped singing. Even on another planet, I can still be sucked into that well of self-hatred. “Okay,” I say into my helmet. “That’s enough. There is nothing you can do about any of that right now. Park that shit and focus on something else.” After a pause, I say, “Okay.” I am talking to myself as I drive on Mars. I smirk, unconcerned. When people really go mad, they don’t speak to themselves like this, and definitely not with a pep talk.

  Three songs later, I’ve traveled around to the opposite side of the crater, so I stop the rover and get out. I take a moment to orient myself, confirming my position as best I can without any GPS, before clambering up the ladder riveted to the side of the rover. Standing on top, gaining just that tiny bit more distance to the horizon, I see the top of a familiar mast.

  My heart ramps up its activity as I use my retinal lens to zoom in. It looks like a comms mast, probably about five kilometers away, pretty much in line with the estimate I worked out with my geometry program. I can’t see anything else, but there are rocks and small canyons between here and that region. Who knows what else could be out there?

  Carefully, mindful of how I really cannot afford to have a silly accident out here on my own, I climb back down and get back in the driver’s seat. As I set off on the new bearing, I try not to think too much about the fact that I don’t have any data on the region I’m driving across. Given the time of year and the fact that I’m not too far away from Principia, I’m not worried about changes caused by the fluctuations in water liquidity in the regolith, but there are other risks. It’s not like there are roads here, built on properly surveyed and prepared ground.

  The irony that I would really appreciate Principia’s input right now doesn’t escape me. I slow down, examine the landscape ahead of me with more caution and hope for the best. It increases the risk that someone will discover I’m not where I’m supposed to be, but that’s better than increasing the risk of an accident.

  The landscape dips and the mast goes out of sight. I hate not using any navigation support and realize that the last time I went anywhere this blind was before I was chipped. When I was a teenager, I was happy to go wriggling into holes in the side of the valley, following cave networks that were far more dangerous than I appreciated. I loved nothing more than getting away from my sister with little more than a head torch, a packed lunch and a geology app. How I craved that life once I left it, where satisfaction at the end of the day could be measured in how many new rock samples I could arrange on my dressing table.

  Geena never understood my fascination with “boring old stones,” no matter how many times I tried to explain it. For me, it was like a heady mix of time travel and treasure hunting. She was far more interested in animals and insects, always bringing some new critter into the house to be her latest pet. When she brought a snake inside, Dad went ballistic, despite her protestations that it wasn’t poisonous. She just wanted to look after everything that couldn’t talk back to her. Mother them. I saw no appeal in it, unsurprisingly. I wonder if she had kids.

  We were never close as children and positively hated each other in our teens. She blamed me for Dad’s imprisonment after I testified against him. She didn’t see the difference between a secure mental health facility and a prison. Despite everything he did to us, despite the fact that he almost killed Mum, she couldn’t let go of the idea that I was disloyal. She got it into her head—after hearing Mum say as much—that if he was sick, the best place for him was at home. She was too young to understand how dangerous he was and too young to appreciate how much I’d shielded her from him. All those times I came up with excuses to get him out of the house, away from her and Mum, when I could see one of his episodes approaching, she believed I was selfishly monopolizing him.

  “You want him all to yourself, all the time!” she blurted out at me one day, not knowing that I’d just spent three hours sitting at the top of the valley with him, convincing him that there was no need to burn our house down. I was too exhausted to argue, shutting her out as best I could and taking solace in identifying the samples I’d gathered on my last trip. The psychiatrists gave it a fancy name after the fact: dissociation. I didn’t think a fancy label was needed for the fact that it was easier and safer to think about rock classification than about why my father would hit me for things I hadn’t even said.

  As I close the distance between myself and the mast, it suddenly occurs to me that there might be other sensors out here, able to pick up the rover, or even just the vibrations caused by its bumping around over the rocks. Without knowing how Banks is hiding me from Principia, I can’t be certain if I am hidden from whatever else could be out here. There’s nothing to be done about it though. If I want to see what that mast is for, I have to physically go there.

  When the terrain starts to rise again out of the depression, I check the mileage for the current journey. I’ve traveled four and a half kilometers since I last stopped the vehicle. Halfway up the next shallow incline, I park the rover once more, convinced that whatever the mast is part of must be on the other side of this hill.

  This feels like proper Martian exploring as I fight the downward pull of the scree to climb to the top edge. Even though this area has been mapped from above, the sense that there is something unknown—indeed, something being actively hidden—is quite thrilling. Such a rare flavor of excitement when out of a mersive.

  The top of the mast reappears, along with my thrumming heartbeat in my ears. As I near the top, I start to crouch, just in case there are cameras or people. If it’s a comms tower, there won’t be either. But if it’s part of something else, there might be.

  At the crest of the hill I crouch behind an outcrop of rock and look down into what appears to be a man-made crater. The mast rises from the edge of an area about half a kilometer in diameter that’s been cleared of rocks and is covered in trackways of compressed dust, but it’s the least interesting thing here.

  There’s a launchpad, just like the one at Principia; the strut that holds the rocket firm is on its side, in the position it would be in after takeoff. The pad itself is clear of dust and scorched black. Something has taken off recently and there is a fresh channel in the dust left by the newly retracted umbilical corridor that would have connected it to the base. JeeMuh! Another base that must be down there, below the surface!

  A little way away from the launchpad I can see the telltale hump of the access-ramp cover and a few rover tracks nearby. Over on the far side, in the best position to gather the meager sunlight, is a bank of solar panels. There are cam points poking out of the surface and I zoom in on one. It’s covered in dust but I still daren’t go down there, just in case it can still pick me up.

  For a few minutes, all I can do is stare at the launchpad. All this time, there was another base, when I had been told—in fact the whole world had been told—that there was only Principia. It must have been built at the same time, maybe even before our base, and its activity masked by Principia. This is what Travis was hoping I would find.

  Even t
hough I can see it with my own eyes, I find myself disbelieving it. Surely a base with its own rovers and a rocket would have been discovered? Unless everyone knows already. Maybe even Banks does.

  JeeMuh, what if he tricked me into coming out here?

  Get a grip! This is wild speculation and it won’t serve me here. I need to find out more about that base without getting close enough to be detected.

  I slide down the slope to the rover and retrieve the ground scanner. Like before, I use the panel instead of a direct interface through my chip, to avoid inadvertently pinging Principia. Figuring that I’m actually on the other side of the man-made slope, I take it down to the bottom and put it on the flattest ground I can find. From here, the pulse will go under this artificial hill between us and get a cleaner reading of the subterranean base.

  I set a wide scan area and a strong pulse, choosing to take the risk that it will be detected in favor of getting all the information I need in one hit. I double-check the settings and hit the green button.

  The data is shown on the screen since I daren’t risk sending it to my chip in case it screws with what Banks is doing.

  The base is huge! At least three times the size of Principia. There’s a massive open space close to the launchpad, large enough to hold a rocket underground, and lots of bizarre shapes that make no sense. I can’t see any people on this sort of scan—the pulse bounces back off solid structures—or the sorts of things contained within the rooms, but there are sections that look like replicas of parts of Principia. The living-quarters layout is the same, but repeated three times. A crew of about twenty people could live there.