I wished I knew why I was so attracted to her.
The trip to Old L.A. had been a cusp in our relationship. On the trip we had just been fellows, co-adventurers and nothing more. Afterwards, Leah accepted the fact that I tagged along after her as just a facet of the environment, hardly worth commenting on. We’re not, actually, a team, although it must seem like it to others. Leah was the hotshot scientist, and, well, every team needs a tech and a pilot.
Eventually she had noticed.
“Look,” Leah had said. “You’re as skittery as a colt, you’re stammering, I can’t get one full grammatical sentence out of you in a cartload, and you’re so nervous I’m sure you’re going to break something. Do you want to sleep with me? Is that it?”
Her gaze was direct. It was always direct.
I couldn’t say anything. I had trouble closing my mouth,
“If you do,” she said, “fine, do it, or don’t do it, I don’t care … just will you quit stumbling around?”
And, later, after she’d taken off her clothes, she said, “Just don’t think it means something, okay? I couldn’t stand that.”
But it did. Maybe not to her, but to me.
And so we came to Mars. When the authorities had finally noticed that the missing science team had stopped filing status reports to Spacewatch, and the orbital eye they sent to report got a break in the heavy Martian cloud cover and saw pieces of the habitat spread across ten kilometers of landscape—a “presumed fatal malfunction,” as it was reported—Spacewatch had asked for Leah; she had a rep for unraveling tough balls of fur, and I scrambled to rate the slot to go along. Not that this was so hard; I had my skills, piloting and mechanicking and, yes, troubleshooting, and most crews were glad to have me aboard. In this investigation, the third slot on the team was special, in case the accident we were investigating was no accident at all, and the perpetrators might not be finished. The third slot needed a professional paranoid.
We both knew exactly the survival expert who was right for that place.
“Still hanging ’round with that long-legged white girl, I see”—Tally had greeted me, when I came to ask if she wanted to join the team. “Give it up, boy, she’s too good for you.”
“Don’t I know it,” I’d said.
But that was the past, and brooding over the past wasn’t going to get me to bed, or explain Leah Hamakawa to me. She had undressed without the least trace of self-consciousness and gotten into the cubby’s tiny bed. I undressed, with a lot more trepidation, and lay down beside her. She turned and watched me with a pellucid gaze, free of any emotion I could interpret. She wouldn’t let me understand her, but for whatever reason of her own, she would let me love her.
For the moment, that would have to be enough.
The next day I worked on decoding the data from the damaged opticals, while Leah put together the jigsaw puzzle of the exploded habitat pieces, and Tally ranged in ever-wider loops from the habitat, exploring. I succeeded in getting large blocks of data, but nothing was of any evident value: lengthy descriptions of bacteria, lists of bacteria count per square millimeter in a hundred different habitats.
“Here’s something,” Leah said. “Take a look at my collection of pieces. What’s missing?”
I looked over the junk pile. Skin, electronics, window fragments, plastic shards. “What?”
“Don’t you see it? Aluminum, titanium, carbon-composite, plastic—anything missing here?”
Now that she had given the hint, I could see it, too. “Steel. Nothing out of steel, or iron. Is that surprising? Steel’s heavy.” Hardly anything in a spacegoing technology is made out of steel. In space, every extra gram is paid for over and over again in fuel.
“There’s not a lot of steel on a hab module,” Leah said, “but there is some. Look around our hab, not everything is made of the light metals. But, no steel in the pieces here. And, take a look here.” She chose a piece out of the pile and handed it to me. It was a damaged recording unit. The capstan flopped loose in the absence of the steel axle it should have rotated on. She handed me another, a piece with a neat hole where a steel grommet should have fit.
“Does that mean anything?”
She shrugged. “Who can tell? Probably not.”
“Any steel fixtures hold pressure?”
Leah shook her head. “I checked the plans. No, all the iron and steel parts are incidentals. No steel penetration of the pressure hull.”
Tally came back from her scouting, and looked at us both. “You are working too hard,” she said. “It’s time for a break. Way past time, you ask me. And I know just the thing.”
“What do you have in mind?” I asked.
“Here.” She handed me a sheet of aluminum. It was about a meter long, slightly curved, one side coated with a carbon-composite facing. In a corner 117 Outer was written in Leah’s neat printing. A panel from the outer skin of the exploded habitat. A mounting flange with a hole for bolting interior fixtures was at one end. She handed another one to Leah. “Sure you don’t need these panels, now?” she asked Leah.
“Already looked at them.” Leah shook her head. “That was the side opposite the explosion. Nothing but junk now.”
After we had suited-up for outside and smeared one another’s faces white with sunblock, we each took a panel, and Tally led us up to the top of the ridge that rose above the habitat. The hill surface was comprised of sand held in place with a thin veneer of purple-brown algae, slick as powdered Teflon. We had to choose our footing carefully to avoid skidding back down.
It was a gorgeous day. From the ridge, the Marscape appeared striped, brown and purple strips in alternation all the way to the horizon. The purple was the algae, covering the sunnier face of each ridge; the brown anaerobic scum colonizing the shadier back-face. The characteristic north-south wind pattern was clearly manifest in the form of long streaks trailing behind each of the larger boulders. Today, though, the wind was once again slight, erratic light gusts of no fixed direction.
We reached the top, and Tally smiled. She threaded a lanyard through the bolthole on her aluminum sheet, dropped it on the ground, and put one foot on it. “You might try this sitting down first,” she said. Holding the lanyard in one hand like a set of reins, she pushed off down the hill.
At first she didn’t move very fast. As the sled gathered speed, each bump sent it increasingly higher. Her balance seemed precarious, but in the one-third-normal gravity of Mars, she had plenty of time. As she leaned to control the sled, her movements were a slow-motion ballet. We could hear her shout, muffled by her rebreather, trailing behind her.
“Yahoo!”
I looked at Leah. She looked back at me, then shrugged. She dropped her sled on the ground and pushed it with her toe, testing how well it slid over the scum. Then she sat down on it, grasped the lanyard with both hands and pulled it taut, and looked back over her shoulder. “Give me a push,” she said.
It took a little more skill than Tally had let on, but after a few spills, we got the hang of it, and organized scum-sledding races. Tally on one sled and Leah and me together on another; then Leah and Tally together; then finally all three of us on one sled, Leah and I sitting docked together and Tally standing with her knees gripping my chest from behind.
At a rest break, sitting exhausted from climbing, I said to Tally, “So this means that you think there’s no danger? I mean, nobody trying to kill us?”
“Never said that.” Tally shook her head. “No, I’m not about to be calling all-clear, not quite yet. But I’m pretty sure that there’s no danger right exactly this instant. Not unless these killers are invisible and don’t leave footprints.” She paused. “And ‘sides,” she continued, “this is pretty much the tallest ridge in the area. If they were coming for us, we’d see ’em miles away.”
“But what if we did? What could we do? We’d be sitting ducks.”
Tally grinned a broad grin. “Sitting ducks, you say? Take a peep at that ridge over there.” She pointed.
I had glanced away for only an instant, but suddenly Tally had an omniblaster in her right hand, a knife in her left, and a projectile rifle with an infrared targeting scope resting at her feet. I had no idea how she could have concealed such armament on her.
“How ’bout you?” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re naked?”
I was far from naked—the temperature couldn’t have been more than a few degrees above freezing—but I wasn’t carrying a weapon.
“Didn’t I tell you to always wear a gun?” she said. “Dangerous out here. Who knows who might want to shoot you?”
“Carry an omniblaster? No, I don’t think you ever told us that.”
“Yes I did. Told you both. Back in O.L.A.” She paused for a second. “Shit. I bet Leah’s walking around naked, too.” She shook her head. “You two just a bunch of children. I’m surprised you’ve lived this long, I really am.”
“Say, look,” said Leah, coming up behind us. “The sun’s out.”
We both looked up. The sky had been steadily overcast ever since we had landed, but the clouds were breaking up, and between them we had a glimpse of the sun.
“Take a look at that sky!” Tally said. “Isn’t that gaudy!” Behind the clouds, the Martian sky was a startling blue, a bright, nearly turquoise shade that I’d never seen on Earth. I couldn’t think of a reason offhand why the sky should be a different color but, naturally, Leah could.
“Methane,” she said, after a second of thought. “After carbon dioxide, methane is the main atmospheric component here. Strongly absorbs red light, so the sky color is a deeper blue than just the Rayleigh scattering would predict.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Explains why the colors here are so muted,” Leah said.
With the sunlight, the wind had picked up as well, a steadily rising wind out of the north. Suddenly the coveralls we had on weren’t enough to keep us warm. We ran for the habitat.
The overcast had cleared completely the next day. The sky was preternaturally blue, and the wind had become a steady near-gale from the north. Leah and I worked inside. Tally still did her reconnaissance patrol outside, but I think that even she must have spent much of her time huddled in the windscreen of one or another of the boulders. Now we knew what had scattered the pieces of the habitat.
The missing iron, as it turned out, wasn’t a mystery at all. Once Leah realized what to look for, she found it easily enough, in the form of grit scattered in with the rest of the habitat pieces.
“It’s a sulfur-rich planet,” she said. “I should have thought of it. In the year-and-a-half of exposure, everything iron or steel got converted to iron sulfide. It looked just like part of the regolith, so I overlooked it the first time.”
“In just a year?” I asked. “Isn’t that kinda fast?”
Leah shrugged. “Seems fast to me, too, but don’t forget the UV. The surface here is more reactive than we’re used to.”
I worked on deciphering their electronic records. They hadn’t kept personal logs, or perhaps if they had, they were on some optical I hadn’t found yet. The opticals I had were mostly data, with occasional notes about where or how the samples were collected. By afternoon I had enough to determine when the last data had been recorded, and could at least put a date to the disaster.
“Sometime on August tenth,” I told Leah. “Two years ago.”
“Really,” Leah said. “That’s interesting.”
“Interesting?” I said. “Not really. But you asked me for a date.”
“No, but it is interesting,” Leah said. “Today is June twenty-third.”
“So?”
“That’s Earth reckoning, of course. The Mars year is 687 Earth-days long—one year, ten months, and a few weeks. So in Mars reckoning, it’s nearly the first anniversary of the disaster. Five days from now, in fact.”
“Spooky,” I said.
“No, I wouldn’t call it spooky,” she said. “But it is an odd coincidence.”
I marked it on the calender.
I liked working alone with Leah, with Tally outside on patrol. I didn’t exactly resent Tally, but I did sometimes envy her effortless camaraderie with Leah. I welcomed the chance to be alone with her, even though, for the most part, we worked in silence.
“Tinkerman,” Leah said.
“Yes?”
“Once you start getting the data you’ve recovered indexed, do a search on weather for me.”
I shrugged. “No problem.” I looked at her. “You think it’s relevant to the investigation?”
She shook her head. “Just curious.”
They had, I discovered, not taken detailed observations of the Martian weather. But occasionally there was a mention of conditions outside. Their own experience mirrored ours. About the same time in the Martian year, the overcast had cleared, and a steady wind had arisen out of the north. The day before the disaster, data had been marked with a note that samples from two sites had been missed; the wind had blown away the stakes marking the site locations.
On another optical I found satellite photos of Mars. I looked at these with interest. The weather clearing we’d seen wasn’t local to the Syrtisian saddle; the photos showed the northern hemisphere completely obscured by cloud cover, and then a sudden clearing across the entire hemisphere. The view must have been an infrared falsecolor, since the ocean was white and the land areas, in contrast, looked nearly black. I checked the dates on the photos, and converted them in my head into Martian season. The clearing started at just about the end of northern-hemisphere spring.
Leah nodded when I showed her what I’d recovered. She’d already radioed up to ask Langevin for orbital photographs, and he’d confirmed that the clearing of the clouds we’d seen was ubiquitous, starting with breaks in the cloud cover at northern midlatitudes, then slowly spreading south. “Apparently it’s a seasonal thing.”
Langevin had also mentioned that the rover had arrived, after a long, slow transit from the Moon. Did we still want it? Where should he set it down?
Oh, yes, we still wanted it.
“Time for a vacation!” Tally said, when the unpiloted utility lander had dropped the rover off and I had checked out the systems and declared it fully functional. The rover was the same awful shade of yellow-green as the lander had been, a color chosen for maximum contrast against the browns and purples of Mars. It had six webbed wheels mounted on a rocker-bogey suspension that would give it incredible hill-climbing ability; I had little doubt that it would have been able to crawl right over the hab-lab, if an incautious pilot had tested poorly on navigation. I said as much to the team after the brief test-drive.
“Are you seriously suggesting that the habitat was crushed by a rover?” Leah said. “No tread-marks were found on any of the pieces we found.”
“A rover would have left tracks,” Tally said. “Even after two years, we’d have seen them.”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I was just giving an example of how robust the suspension is.”
“I see.”
“So,” Tally said. “Time for a trip.”
“A trip,” Leah said. “Why not? Where did you want to go?”
“Why not go the beach?” Tally said. “Head north. See what a Mars ocean is like.”
“Mmm,” Leah said. “Not today. I’ll still be busy tomorrow, too, I think. Maybe the next day.”
“Copacetic,” said Tally. “I wouldn’t mind a day to do some long-range recon with the rover, anyway. That is, if Tink says it’s checked out okay.”
“All systems in perfect shape,” I said. “No reason for you not to drive around a bit.”
A lot of the work Leah asked me to do seemed to have nothing to do with the investigation of the accident. She was conducting her own investigation, I decided, a scientific investigation of the progress of terraforming—no, ecopoesis—on Mars. She had me decipher all the data I could out of the opticals; data on
bacteria counts and atmosphere, and checked it against the measurements she could make herself. “Cripes, I wish I were a biologist,” had become her favorite phrase, muttered as she stared into the screen of a microscope, counting bacteria, but she was clearly happy doing the work, and I was happy to assist, to do anything that made Leah happy.
More methane in the atmosphere, she said, at a break. Some ethane, ethylene, even acetylene. And quite a bit more oxygen than expected.
“Oxygen and methane? Isn’t that explosive?”
“No, oxy is still way under one percent; all in all, it’s still mostly a reducing atmosphere. The hydrocarbons are all greenhouse gases.”
“Gaia,” I said, suddenly realizing what she was getting at.
“Gaia,” she agreed, a soft smile creeping slowly across her face. The bacteria were producing greenhouse gases, warming the planet up. Making it a better abode for life.
I was getting bored with the claustrophobic spaces of the habitat, and the sameness of the landscape, and I was sure that Leah and Tally were, as well. We were all looking forward to the jaunt north to the shores of the Boreal Ocean. So I was rather surprised when, at breakfast on the morning designated, Tally shook her head, and said, “It’ll be just you two loverbirds. I’m not coming.”
I pretended interest in my food. I never could guess how Leah would react. For me, the idea of a trip in the pressurized rover, a thousand-kilometers alone with Leah, was as close to heaven as I was likely to ever find.
“Why?” Leah said.
Tally smiled. “A trap.”
Despite assiduous searching, Tally had found no evidence whatsoever of sabotage. Anybody else would have said that means it was an accident. Tally said it meant they were clever.
We made a great show of our departure, deliberately packing the rover slowly and openly with all the supplies for three people to take an extended trip. Then all three of us got in. From outside, through the bubble canopy, it would be clear that three people were in the piloting compartment, eagerly watching the terrain.
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