Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey Landis

  Tana wasn't sure if that was a proposition or not. She could feel her ears heating up. "Does it have to be the first night?" she asked.

  "Nah, that's just a phrase," Jasmine said.

  "There isn't any night up here anyway," Brittany said.

  "Sure there is—a new one every ninety-three minutes," Jasmine said. "Great if you like sunsets."

  "If you're feeling nauseous, you might want to wait a bit," Brittany said. "Don't want to spoil it."

  "Nah, you don't want to wait," Jasmine said. "The first couple of days they still have you on an easy work schedule."

  "Yeah, it'll be hard to find some free time," Brittany said.

  "Nah," Jasmine said, and laughed. "You can find time. I mean, you don't want to wait."

  She didn't know why she picked John Radkowski. He was certainly good looking, clean-cut, and athletic, but not much more so than most of the others. He was the commander of the station, but somehow, it seemed to her, he had more depth than the other flying jocks, a core of sadness. She waited until she momentarily brushed against him in a node, and none of the others were close by. She looked at him, and he looked back at her with a long, unwavering gaze, his gray eyes almost disconcertingly direct. And then he said softly, "Would you like to accompany me to the equipment module airlock?"

  She nodded, and he pushed off without a word, expecting her to follow.

  The airlock, she discovered, was one of the very few places on the space station that had a door that could be firmly and securely shut. Inside it, two space suits were stored. There was a small space, barely larger than a coffin, between the suits. John Radkowski pushed into the space and motioned her to follow.

  "You're not claustrophobic, are you?" he asked.

  She shook her head.

  "Good." He pulled the airlock door shut and twisted the wheel a quarter turn. "Too much room is a problem up here." He smiled. "For some things, anyway. Action and reaction, you know."

  There was a dim red illumination, emergency lighting, that was never shut off. The space was close; she was pressing against him slightly, but in the absence of gravity, it was comfortable. She could feel his breath, slow and warm. He had a slight odor of sweat, which she found not unpleasant.

  "Nothing is required," he said. He actually seemed slightly embarrassed. "I hope Brittany explained that. You're free to say no."

  She answered by pulling him closer to her and kissing him. She had to hold on to keep him from floating away from her. He was more muscular than she'd expected.

  "I wouldn't want to break tradition," she said.

  He was wearing a T-shirt and shorts; under the T-shirt, she found, his chest was covered with dark hair. Tana unzippered the front of her shirt and freed her breasts. In microgravity, her breasts had no sag, she was as firm as silicone. A side effect of fluid redistribution, she thought. He reached a hand out tentatively, and cupped one of her breasts; she reached up and stroked the back of his hand. She started to slip her arm out of her sleeve to take off her shirt, and he stopped her.

  "Leave it on," he said. "One of us has to wear something to hold on to."

  He stripped out of his shorts and sent them floating away. He floated nude in front of her. There was nothing tentative about him now. She reached down and touched him.

  Sex in microgravity, Tana discovered, was by necessity slow; sudden moves were impossible. She didn't have to worry that his weight would crush her, or it she put an arm around him her arm would be pinned. Even the climax, when it came, seemed almost in slow motion. She had a desperate urgency, but there was a frustrating lack of any leverage for her to take advantage of. She clasped her legs around his body, arched her back, and her whole body shook.

  He had one fist tangled in her shirt, keeping them from floating apart, and they floated together, silent. At last, he spoke.

  "Welcome to space station," he said. He pulled her to him and kissed her lightly on the nose. "I now declare you officially a member of the microgravity society, with all the rights and privileges that entails."

  14

  WAITING FOR ANGELS

  John Radkowski lay on his back, on a slope of broken rock and sand, and marveled. He wasn't dead.

  That was the surprise. He wasn't dead.

  The fall had been slow, so slow. But he had been moving awful fast. He tried to calculate how fast he must have been moving when he'd hit, but he couldn't quite think clearly.

  He didn't hurt.

  In fact, he couldn't feel anything, just a comfortable warmth about his body.

  The helmet hadn't shattered. It really did live up to its marketing, he thought, a technological marvel: light, clear as glass, and damn near unbreakable. He'd have to do a commercial for the company: "I fell off a cliff, half a mile down, hit rocks at the bottom, and the remarkable carbide helmet still held air!"

  He wished he could say the same about the rest of the suit. He could hear the shrill whine of escaping air.

  He was laying at a crazy angle, half tilted toward the sky. The sky was a most remarkable shade of peach, brushed with delicate yellow clouds like feathers. He wished he could move his head, look around. Out of the corner of his eye he could see blood. It seemed to be pooling in the bottom of the helmet, somewhere around his right ear.

  He tried to use the radio to call, but his voice wasn't working anymore. He doubted the radio was, either.

  The pool of blood in his helmet was getting deeper.

  He felt remarkably peaceful. He owed the universe a death, he knew. One death.

  His.

  There was no possible way that any of the others could get to him in time. And even if they could reach him, what could they possibly do?

  It was getting hard to breathe. The air was getting thin.

  Now one of the others would get a chance. Would that satisfy God? Would that, at last, be enough? It was a nice balance. He'd leave the universe with his debts paid.

  Around John Radkowski's right ear, the blood in his helmet was a pool six inches deep. It began to softly boil as the suit pressure reached equilibrium with the low atmospheric pressure of Mars.

  John Radkowski waited for angels.

  15

  DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON

  By the time they had reached the spot where Commander Radkowski had hit, Ryan Martin knew that it was far too late. The body was on a dangerous slope of loose rock. Ryan made sure that each of the crew members had a safety line firmly anchored to the solid rock of the cliff face before he let Tana go to examine him.

  Tana's examination was brief. The impact had killed him instantly, she told them. Even in the light gravity of Mars, nobody could survive a fall like that.

  "He looks peaceful," Tana said.

  "He looks dead," Estrela said.

  Radkowski's body had sealed to the slope by a glue of frozen blood. It took three of them to pry the corpse free, and the moment it came loose, Ryan could not keep his grip on it, and the corpse slid away, spinning slightly as it sledded down the slope in a tiny avalanche.

  It came to rest when one foot jammed in the crack between two enormous boulders a few hundred meters down. This time they did not try to move him. The slope was too rocky to dig a grave into. They left him in the notch between the boulders and brought fist-sized rocks to cover him. It was no problem to find rocks; the slope was covered with loose rocks, of every size from gravel to space-shuttle size.

  There was no funeral. Ryan made sure that everybody kept their safety lines attached as he got them organized. He wanted to get everybody moving, to get them focused on the task of getting down the slope before the reality of the death had time to sink in. It was too late to turn back, and there was nothing at Don Quijote to go back to anyway. There was nothing to do but go on.

  The surface they were on tilted downward at an angle of almost forty degrees. It was a treacherous slope. The smallest motion of loose rock set off a tiny landslide; Ryan had to constantly make sure that none of the crew ever stood downslope from
another crew member, and worried that a misstep would result in a twisted ankle, or worse.

  Under the circumstances, he decided that the best bet was to put all four of them into the rockhopper, and have the rockhopper work its way down the slope along a superfiber line solidly anchored in rock at the cliff face. He didn't want to trust the superfiber for anything except an emergency, and as a result the progress of the rockhopper was excruciatingly slow. It looked to be a good fifteen, maybe twenty kilometers of downward traverse to reach the level bottom of the canyon. The slope couldn't be this steep all the way to the bottom. Once it flattened out to only thirty degrees or so, they would go off the rope, to keep from depleting their spool of superfiber.

  Fitting four of them in the cabin of the rockhopper made for seriously cramped quarters. He had them keep the doors open and their suits on; it was the only way to get enough room for him to pilot it.

  And so, hanging out of the doors of the overloaded rockhopper like television hillbillies clinging to a dilapidated Model T pickup, at the head of an avalanche of sliding rocks and dirt and gravel, they drove down into the canyon.

  16

  IN THE ABYSS

  Ahead of them, the avalanches of rock that the rockhopper sent down the slope raised an enormous plume of dust, like a pillar of smoke marking the path to the holy land.

  Tana huddled inside her suit, blocking from her consciousness the details of the terrifying descent. Commander Radkowski was dead. She could hardly comprehend it; it was too enormous a concept to get her thoughts around. Commander Radkowski was dead.

  He was the one who had kept the team together, who had told them what to do, and where to go. How could they possibly survive now?

  Some day, long after they returned from Mars, when it was all just a shared experience they could look back on, John Radkowski would come to her apartment, and they would sit and laugh, reminisce, and maybe drink a little wine. Possibly they would get intimate—her dreams were a little fuzzy on this point—and maybe on that day he would tell her what was inside him, what demons of the past made him soft and sweet and innocent and hard and bitter and cynical.

  But that would never happen. John Radkowski would never leave Mars. She would tell herself that, and come to herself again, huddled inside the cramped cabin of the rover, creeping down the endless descent, a slippery incline of loose and shattered rock. Ryan was glued to the wheel, keeping the descent slow and controlled.

  When they got back home, all this would be something to remember. Perhaps she could invite John Radkowski over to her apartment, and he would—

  But John Radkowski was dead. Jarred free by the wheels of the rock-hopper, boulders broke loose and caromed down the slope, pinballing off other boulders toward a bottom that was so distant it was not even visible. It was not an adventure that someday they would laugh about. It was an adventure that would most likely kill them, as it had killed Radkowski, as it had killed Chamlong.

  17

  ROCK GLOW

  The slope leveled out a bit, and then a bit more, and Ryan cut free of the superfiber cable that served as a safety line for the rockhopper in order to increase their speed. And then the talus slope spilled out onto the canyon bottom. Ryan steered a labyrinthine path through a maze of boulders too large for the rockhopper to climb. And then even the boulder field diminished to scattered boulders, rocks the size of houses, of apartment buildings, but scattered enough that they loomed like alien monuments, no longer a hazard to driving.

  Except for the scattered boulders, the canyon bottom was flat. The ground was hard, like fired clay, brushed lightly with a flourlike dust. The canyon was so wide that from the bottom the far wall was invisible. Only the wall behind them was visible, looming dark and foreboding in the evening shadows. Ryan wanted to move as far from the slope, as far from the site of Radkowski's death as they could get. Evening was approaching, and he knew that they could not get across the canyon in the remaining sunlight. But still, he felt that they should move as far as they could, and in the waning sun he pushed the rover to its limits, without offering to stop and unload the dirt-rover.

  None of the others asked. They were each silent, each immersed in their own private thoughts.

  The shadow of the cliff chased him and caught up with him from behind, and in the sunset twilight he was driving across a landscape of slowly darkening blood. Colors drained away, and then, as the twilight deepened, new colors emerged. Not just the orange and yellow pallet of Mars, but the landscape actually started to seem to have a brightness of its own. Ryan rubbed his visor. The landscape seemed to have a soft glow, so faint that he was unable to tell if it was an illusion, a ghostly glow of neon hues, greens and purples and blues, colors alien to Mars.

  No, he was hallucinating, he must be.

  Estrela spoke. Her voice was hoarse, and he realized that she had not talked once since she had said goodbye to Radkowski. He had thought that she was asleep. "Milagroso," she said.

  "What?"

  "Don't you see it too? Look. Just look."

  The sky was almost completely dark, but the harder he looked, the more it seemed that speckles of the rocks were luminous, tiny dots of color, glowing so faintly that it must surely be an illusion brought on by exhaustion. After a moment of silence, he whispered, "What is it?"

  "Rock fluorescence," she said, and suddenly he understood.

  "Oh, of course!" With the sun just below the horizon, no direct sunlight illuminated the surface ... but the sky scattered sunlight. Rayleigh scattering, he thought: On Earth the scattered sky-light was blue, but with no ozone layer, on Mars the ultraviolet was even stronger, and the sky must be emitting a softly invisible bath of black light. In the near darkness the faint fluorescence of the rocks under the invisible sky-glow was just barely bright enough to see. "Wow," he said.

  And even as he spoke, the glow of the rocks began to fade. It must only be visible for a few minutes after sunset, he thought, when it grows dark enough for the faint luminescence to be visible, but before the sky-glow disappeared completely. Maybe it was only visible in the depth of the canyon.

  "Unless you are intending to kill us all," Estrela said, "I think it is time to stop now."

  18

  FALLING STARS

  They had inflated the bubble in the twilight, but never before in full darkness.

  Tana was too restless to be able to go to sleep; too many thoughts were crowding in her head. She had been crammed inside the rockhopper with the others for hours; she needed to be alone for a while. She hesitated outside the airlock to the bubble.

  It was against all safety regulations for her to stay outside unless at least one other was outside to be her suit-buddy. "It's been a long day," Ryan said. His voice was hoarse and sounded weary. "Come inside. We all need the rest."

  She shook her head, even though she knew that he couldn't see it inside her helmet. "I'm staying outside," she said. "Just a little while."

  "Come on, Tana. You know that you're not supposed to stay outside alone."

  "So try and stop me," she said, and she looked at Ryan with a look so haggard and forlorn that Ryan couldn't think of anything to say.

  "At least don't get out of sight of the hobbit bubble," he said, and she nodded, then turned and walked into the dark.

  The dark. It calmed her to just sit in the dark. She could let her mind go blank. She didn't have to think. She sat on a boulder, her back to the habitat so it didn't intrude on her consciousness. It was like a moonless night in the desert in West Texas, or anywhere. The stars were clear and bright; she was surprised how bright they were, barely dimmed by the dust. They were the same familiar constellations, but oddly tilted: Orion lying on his sword, Leo with his lion nose pointing to the ground. She couldn't find the pole star, and then she suddenly realized that she didn't even know what the pole star for Mars was, or whether it even had one.

  A meteor flared overhead, a bright streak of green in the sky, and then darkness again. Then a second meteor cr
ossed the sky, in the same westward direction as the first, and a third followed it, this one bright enough to illuminate the landscape with a taint light. A meteor shower, she thought.

  One summer night when she had been six, her grandmother had come into her room and gently shaken her awake. The clock in the kitchen showed two in the morning. They had gone outside, Tana in her pajamas, and her grandmother spread quilts on the grass for them to sit on. Philadelphia spread a ghostly glow on the horizon to the east, and they faced west, toward the darkest part of the sky. "Lie back and watch," her grandmother had told her. The night air was pleasantly cool against her pajamaed skin, but she wasn't at all sleepy. She had always been able to wake up at any time and stay awake. In the speckled darkness above her, she saw a flash of light streak across the sky. And another, and then a pack of three traveling together, and then one that streaked across the sky and exploded in a burst of color.

  "It's beautiful," she said. "What are they?

  "Folks call them falling stars," her grandmother told her. "They visit us round about this time every year."

  "But what are they?" she insisted.

  Her grandmother was silent for a moment. "When I was a little girl," she said softly, "my grandmother told me that it's the souls of dead folks, rising up to heaven. When they rise, you see, they go and shed all the sin they've been carrying with them, 'cause where they're going, they don't need to carry sins around with them no more." She paused, and another shooting star flashed by, so bright that it lit up the night like fireworks. "Some folks must be carrying around a powerful load of sin, I reckon."

  That was long ago. With her rational mind, Tana knew that it was a meteor shower; tiny bits of ice and sand whizzing through space, burning up in the tenuous outer reaches of the atmosphere. But somewhere deep inside, she thought, John Radkowski is making his last flight, and he's leaving behind everything he doesn't need, peeling it away like a soggy overcoat. I wonder what he was carrying round with him, that makes so much of a show when it burns up.