Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey Landis

  "Oh, no problem," Geroch said. "You've got an excellent appendix; I'd be sorry to see it go, too. But there's no medical evacuation from Mars, and the crew will be leaving their appendices on Earth. Wisdom teeth too, although I see you've already had yours out. Didn't they tell you that?"

  It was probably somewhere in the stacks of briefing documents. Tana hadn't read them all.

  "Well, forget it," Tana said. "The chances of appendicitis are trivial, and if it comes to it, I can remove an appendix. I've done dozens of emergency appendectomies; you know full well that I was a surgeon on call for the E.R. I don't know who called for this procedure, but I don't approve of unnecessary surgery. You can never be one hundred percent sure that there won't be a complication."

  "Sure," Geroch said agreeably. "And we'd rather have a complication here on Earth than halfway to Mars."

  "I can do an appendectomy," Tana retorted. "And I can deal with complications, thank you."

  "That's fine, Doctor Jackson," Geroch replied. "And tell me, can you remove your own appendix?"

  "Sure. If I had to."

  "No problem, then. We won't schedule an appendectomy, then."

  Tana smiled, relieved. She had no qualms doing surgery on other people—once you've done it a few times, pulling an appendix was no more challenging, say, than replacing the fuel-cell charge-discharge regulator on her Pontiac—but she didn't like the thought of other people's hands inside her own personal body.

  "—as long as you can prove that you can remove your own appendix," Geroch continued smoothly. "Here's the deal. The way you prove that is for you to do it. So, when do you want to schedule the operating room?"

  "Let me get this straight," Tana said. "If I show you I can remove my appendix, by removing my appendix, then I don't have to have my appendix removed?"

  Dr. Geroch nodded, smiling. "That is correct."

  "Either way, the appendix is gone," Tana said.

  "That's right."

  Tana sighed. "Okay, okay. Let's schedule the damn surgery then."

  "Now, you're talking sense. So. A week from Thursday works for you?"

  26

  UP THE CREEK

  Tana and Trevor took the path up, trailing the superfiber from the spool on the rockhopper. Ryan insisted that they rope themselves together, worried that the loose and fragmented rock would give way under one of them, and they would slide down the face along with a few hundred tons of boulders. They carried with them an extra spool of superfiber and a rock drill.

  The cliff was farther away than it looked. It took them four hours of hard climbing to reach the face, and at the end of it, even with several breaks for rest, Tana's body was slick with sweat inside the chest-carapace of her suit. Despite the freezing temperature of the Martian air surrounding her, her suit was straining the limits of its thermal control unit to take away her body heat. Trevor undipped the rope, and they took a well-deserved rest.

  "It was a river," Trevor said. "Look at it! Look!"

  The spot where they were sitting was a level, sandy area, nearly circular, surrounded by low banks on all sides except the side they had climbed up. A dry pool at the bottom of an ancient, long dead waterfall. Now that Trevor had pointed it out, it was too clear to miss. Tana had suspected that they were climbing an ancient creek bed the whole climb, from seeing the way the stones were rounded, the way the stream had undercut the banks, and the way the path wound around, seeking the lowest level. But the dry pool was clear evidence.

  "There was water here," Tana agreed. "No doubt."

  Trevor was inspecting the banks. "I wonder if there are fossils?" he said.

  After a brief rest, Tana moved to the cliff face and began the process of drilling bolts into the rock to attach anchors for the superfiber. When she had the bolts drilled and the anchors set, she radioed back down to Ryan. "Got the superfiber anchored. Go ahead and reel it in."

  "Copy anchored," Ryan's voice came. "I'm ready to reel."

  "Take it slow," she advised. "Copy that," Ryan said. "Slow it is."

  Tana noticed that Trevor had disappeared. Exploring, she guessed. The kid couldn't stay put. Typical.

  27

  AT THE BASE OF THE CLIFF

  This cliff would be easy, Trevor thought, looking up the rock face to the chimney above. A long climb, but not a difficult one. He considered climbing to the top just to show how easy it would be, but decided at last that Ryan would tell him he was violating safety and keep him from exploring any more.

  He checked back to verify that he was still in sight of Tana. She was still drilling anchors into the rock. Her bright purple suit, even with a spattered layering of Mars dust over it, was easy to spot. He could still go a little ways without Ryan shouting about safety regulations.

  Should he start calling him Commander Martin now? Ryan hadn't said anything. He seemed less interested in formality than Commander Radkowski had been.

  He could see, looking up the cliff face, an overhang. He would be willing to bet that it was another cave, a horizontal slot in the rock that was a mirror image of the one on the south rim. The commander's death had cut off his opportunity to explore that one, but if he climbed up the splinter of rock angled against the cliff face, he could get a chance to look at this one. Would that be against safety regulations? Probably would, he concluded with some reluctance.

  Anyway, according to Tana and Ryan, who had explored it, it was boring anyway. Nothing but salt. Not even any stalactites.

  Instead, he followed the base of the cliff around to the right. It wasn't as if he could get lost here; his sense of direction was still screwy on Mars, but if he just kept his right hand on the wall, he had to come back to the waterfall.

  It was a dizzying view down, like the ski slope from hell. It must be miles down; tens of miles, maybe. He couldn't see where the rockhopper was parked on the slope below, it was so far. He tuned in to the radio for a moment to see what Tana and Ryan were doing, but they were just discussing the superfiber cable, so he turned the radio off again.

  The cliff face was extremely interesting. It wasn't all uniform sandstone, like he'd first thought, but a whole variety of different layers, even different colors, some of it a smooth, grayish blue stone, other layers made of a mixture of rocks all cemented together. Conglomerate; he remembered that from his geology classes. They had that in Arizona, too. Below the conglomerate was a smooth layer of gray rock that looked like slate. Or shale; he always got those two confused. It jutted out and made a little shelf a few inches thick, strong enough that he could stand on it. He thought about jumping up and down to see how strong it was, but decided that it would be a bad idea.

  It must have been a flood or something, he thought. No, more likely a lake bottom, or even the bottom of an ocean. All the mud on the bottom settled in a layer, more rocks and stuff got layered on top, and it squished down on it until the mud got squeezed into rock. All this was once muddy ocean floor. And then the ocean or lake or flood or whatever dried up.

  Slate—or shale, whatever—was where you find fossils, he recalled. He followed the ledge along, looking carefully, but it was completely flat and uniformed. Boring.

  Sometime you had to break the shale open, and the fossil is inside. He wished he had one of those hammers that geologists use. Estrela would have one, he knew, but she was down at the rockhopper. He looked around. Above the shale layer, he found a piece of the conglomerate about the size of a brick that looked ready to come loose. Trevor pried at it with his fingers, worked it back and forth until all of a sudden it popped loose.

  He used the rock as a hammer. The shale broke easily, peeling off in flakes like the pages of a book. He looked at each one carefully, hoping for a fossil, but there was still nothing.

  When his arm got tired, he put his hammer rock down on the ledge for a rest. He was so tired that his eyes had been looking at it for minutes before his brain noticed that there was something there to look at.

  The piece of conglomerate he had been holdin
g had a smooth, concave surface. It had been molded around something. It was hard to tell just what, but it couldn't be natural. He raced back to the place he had found the rock. The trail of broken shale showed just exactly where he'd been. Yes, there it was, embedded in the rock, the piece that was left behind when he pried out the rock he used as a hammer, like a bas-relief protruding from the wall.

  But what was it?

  It was maybe six inches long, the diameter of his thumb, a perfect cylinder, but curved slightly, like a piece of macaroni. Looking closer at it, he could see slight pumpkin-ridges on the surface.

  He tugged on the rock, but couldn't pull it free. It didn't matter. A fossil, he had found a fossil. There were fossils on Mars. There had been life on Mars.

  And he, Brandon Weher, had found it.

  PART FIVE

  BRANDON WEBER

  But the ethereal and timeless power of the land, that union of what is beautiful with what is terrifying, is insistent ... The beauty here is a beauty you feel in your flesh. You feel it physically, and that is why it is sometimes terrifying to approach. Other beauty takes only the heart, or the mind.

  — Barry Holstun Lopez, Arctic Dreams (1986)

  The horizon was a sea of mirage. Gigantic sand columns whirled over the plain, and on both sides of our road were huge piles of bare rocks standing detached upon the surface of sand and clay. Here they appeared in oval clumps, heaped up with a semblance of symmetry; there a single boulder stood, with its narrow foundation based upon a pedestal of low, dome-shaped rock.

  — Richard Francis Burton, A Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina (1855)

  1

  FOSSIL HUNTERS

  They all clustered around the base of the cliff, looking at the layer of shale with his fossil embedded in it, examining his find. He felt inordinately proud. He had found it! Everybody else had stopped looking, but he had kept on. He, Brandon, had found fossils of life on Mars.

  "It's a great find, Trevor," Ryan said, and he almost couldn't help from dancing at the praise. "You've got sharp eyes."

  He ran fingers over it once again, feeling its surface, hoping that from tactile sense alone some message from the distant past would be transmitted through his fingertips. But the gloves were too thick, or perhaps no message was there to be sent.

  It looked like nothing more than a six-inch length of some ordinary, dark brown garden hose that had somehow gotten glued into the rock. But that was impossible, of course. There were no garden hoses on Mars.

  "Estrela," Ryan said. "You're the rock expert here. What do you think?"

  "Me?" Estrela seemed startled to be asked. She seemed worn out, he suddenly thought. He was surprised how haggard Estrela looked. The pain of her arm must be wearing on her, he thought. Perhaps Tana needed to prescribe a stronger painkiller. "Clearly a fossil," Estrela said. "I think."

  "What do you mean, you think?" Ryan pressed. "What is it?"

  "Let me think." Estrela's voice was distant, a little weary. "This whole stratum was under the ocean," she said. "We're below the salt layer here, right? These are sedimentary layerings from the ocean floor. This one"— she touched the smooth blue rock layer—"is siltstone. Dried and compressed mud. This one here"—she touched another layer—"is a sandstone. This must have been a very shallow layer here. The layer with the fossil is a conglomerate; lots of different sediments pressed together. It's right above the shale layer; more layered mud. Santa Luzia, shales often have a high carbon content. We've got to get the mass-spec here, look for organics."

  "But what is it?" Ryan repeated. "Is it a fossil, or not?"

  "Truthful? I don't know." Estrela shrugged, and even through the helmet, he could see from her expression that the gesture must have been painful. "The only way to tell would be to see if there are more."

  Ryan shook his head. "We can't. Time." He looked at the others and repeated, "Really, we can't. We're spending too long as it is. You know how tight our supplies are; we've been almost ten days on the road so far, and we aren't even a third of the way to the waypoint. Trevor may have found a fossil, but—"

  They like me, Brandon thought. It was now or never. He interrupted. "Say," he said, hesitantly. "Commander Ryan? I was, like, wondering. Would you do something? Like, a favor, you know?"

  "Of course, Trevor," Tana said, without thinking. "Anything. You name it."

  Ryan was slightly slower in replying. "I suppose that depends what, Trevor," he said.

  There was a big lump in his throat, he could barely squeak out his name. "Brandon," he said.

  "What?"

  He took a deep breath. The air was cold, dry, metallic. "Brandon, not Trevor. Call me Brandon, okay?"

  "Brandon? But your name's Trevor. Isn't it?"

  "Oh, yeah, sure, my name is Trevor. Yeah. But Brandon is, like, a nickname, okay? I like it better. So could you call me Brandon?" He looked down and kicked a rock. It sailed off down the slope, bounced twice, and skidded downward in a tiny avalanche of dust.

  Tana looked at Ryan. Ryan gave a minute shrug. "Sure, why not? From now on, you're Brandon." He looked around at them. "But we still have to get everybody up this cliff, anchor some cables, and get the rockhopper winched up. And it's halfway into the afternoon, and we don't have much time.

  "So, let's get moving now, shall we?"

  2

  DIRECTIONS

  Brandon Weber had an absolute sense of direction. He never questioned it, never thought about it, but no matter where they were, or how many twisty turns they had made in the wilderness, his built-in compass always knew which way was north.

  He never bothered to think how extraordinary this was. After all, his brother Trevor had it too.

  One time in high school he, along with a bunch of his high school buddies, had decided to go explore a cave. They weren't organized or anything—Rip, one of his friends, had heard from another friend about a cave that somebody had found over in New Mexico. Kaipo, another one of his friends, had a car, and they drove out to explore it before the authorities found out about it and closed it up.

  When he was younger, Brandon had often gone out exploring and rock climbing with his brother Trevor, but Trevor was a junior in high school now, and was busy being too cool to hang around much with his little brother. Brandon didn't even invite him on this one. He'd tell Trevor about it later. This would be an adventure for him.

  It was an awesome and claustrophobic experience. The mouth, hidden behind boulders on the side of a cliff, was an irregular hole barely large enough to wriggle through. It opened out into a large chamber. Just enough sunlight came in through the narrow opening to show that the floor held the charred logs of burned-out campfires and the shards of several dozen beer bottles. "Hey, we should have brought some beer," Rip said. Shining their flashlights up, they saw the rock walls were covered with spray-painted names and dates. The oldest, "Dave" and "QT," were written in charcoal. Dave and QT, whoever they were, must have been the first to discoverer the cave. At least their signatures, dated 2015, ten years ago, were the earliest dates on the wall.

  Out of five of them, two had refused to venture any further into the cave than the distance that they could see the light from the mouth. The remaining three Brandon, Rip, and Kaipo—squeezed through a vertical cleft between two boulders at the back and into the real darkness. Only a few names were painted here, in smaller letters. In twenty feet, the passage had turned enough times that, with their flashlights off, it was pitch dark. "A maze of twisty, narrow passages, all alike," Kaipo said.

  It would have been smart of them to have brought a GPS, or even a compass, but they had not originally intended to go far into the cave. But none of the three of them wanted to be the one who suggested turning back. Instead, at each branching they marked their path on the walls with a piece of chalk that Rip had had the foresight to bring.

  Carlsbad was only a hundred miles or so further on; they had all hoped that the unnamed cave they were exploring might have wonders to rival its vast chambers a
nd arching pillars. But this one seemed to be a labyrinth of rough passages, branching and winding in all directions, only rarely opening into cramped, dome-ceilinged rooms. Sometimes they had to crawl on their bellies, and they never quite dared to stand fully upright. But when one passage came to a blind end, they always found a branch that went on, that might go on to open out into some large chamber just ahead.

  After several hours, Kaipo admitted what they had all been thinking: That's enough. Their flashlight beams were growing yellow, and by unspoken agreement they were already beginning to conserve, never shining more than one light at a time. They had better get back while they still had enough light in them to pick out the chalk marks. Rip quickly agreed, and the two of them turned and shone their flashlights back the way they'd come.

  "Hey, why are you going that way?" Brandon had asked.

  "The chalk marks, you dimwit," Kaipo said.

  "But—" He started to point, and then suddenly realized that it was senseless for him to point when none of them were shining their flashlights in his direction. "The entrance is just a little way over here," he concluded.

  "No way," Kaipo said. "We're miles away from the entrance by now."

  "You're lost, Brandon," Rip said.

  "The hell I am."

  In the end, he convinced them to follow him a little way farther, probably for no other reason than that they wanted to gloat over him when he failed to get to the entrance. A hundred feet farther, they came into the chamber with the graffiti.

  It had seemed no big deal to him. Over several hours, and several miles underground, through twisting passages, Brandon had always known unerringly where he was. On the surface of the Earth, for his entire seventeen years of life, Brandon's sense of direction had never failed him, not even for a moment.