“That will be useful,” Yuri said dryly.
Paula said, “Also we’ve been running predictions of the state of your nuclear power plant. You’re aware you’re running out of fuel.”
“Of course,” Yuri said stiffly. “Resupply has been somewhat problematic.”
“We predict you’ll make it through to the Rip. Just. It might not be too comfortable in the last few days.”
“We can economize. There are only two of us here.”
“Okay. But there’s always room for you here at Lowell.”
Yuri glanced at Myra, who grinned back. She said, “And leave home? No. Thanks, Paula. Let’s finish it here.”
“I thought you’d say that. All right. If you change your mind the rovers are healthy enough to pick you up.”
“I know that, thanks,” Yuri said heavily. “Since one of them is ours.”
They talked of bits of business, and how they were all coping.
It was as if Mars’s last summer had been cut drastically short. The sun had vanished two months before what should have been midsummer, and the planet’s terminal winter had begun.
In a way it didn’t make much difference here at the pole, where it had been dark half the time anyhow. Myra’s main loss was the regular download from Earth of movies and news, and letters from home. She didn’t miss Earth itself as much as she missed the mail.
But if there was a winter routine to fall back on here at Wells, they weren’t so used to darkness down at Lowell, near the equator, and it was a shock when the air started snowing out there. They had none of the equipment they needed to survive. So Yuri and Myra had loaded up one of the pole station’s two specialized snowplow rovers with sublimation mats and other essentials. They left one rover at Lowell for the crew’s use there, and then drove the other rover all the way back to Wells. That journey, a quarter of the planet’s circumference each way through falling dry-ice snow, had been numbing, depressing, exhausting. Myra and Yuri hadn’t left the environs of the base since.
“We’ll speak again,” Paula said. “Take care.” Her image disappeared.
Myra looked at Yuri. “So that’s that.”
“Back to work,” he said.
“Coffee first?”
“Give me an hour, and we’ll break the back of some of the day’s chores.”
“Okay.”
The routine work had got a lot harder since the final evacuation. Without the scheduled resupply and replacement drops it wasn’t just the nuke that was failing but much of the other equipment as well. And now there were only two of them, in a base designed for ten, and Myra, though she was a quick learner, wasn’t experienced here.
However Myra had thrown herself into the work. This morning she tended clogging hydroponic beds, and cleaned out a gunged-up bioreactor, and tried to figure out why the water extraction system was failing almost daily. She also had work to do with the AI, managing the flood of science data that continued to pour in from the SEPs and tumbleweed balls and dust motes, even though the sensor systems were steadily falling silent through various defects, or were simply getting stuck in the thickening snow.
Mostly the AI was able to work independently, even setting its own science goals and devising programs to achieve them. But today was PPP day, planetary protection, when she had to make her regular formal check to ensure the environment was properly sampled in a band kilometers wide around the station, thus monitoring the slow seepage of their human presence into the skin of Mars. There was even a bit of paper she had to sign, for ultimate presentation to an agency on Earth. The paper was never going to get to Earth, of course, but she signed it anyway.
After an hour or so she had the AI hunt for Yuri. He was supposed to be out in the drill rig tent, mothballing equipment that had been shut down for the final time, thus fulfilling a promise he had made to Hanse Critchfield. In fact he was in Can Six, the EVA station.
She made some coffee, and carried it carefully through the locks to Six. She kept a lid on the cups; she still hadn’t quite got used to one-third-G coffee sloshes.
She found Yuri kneeling on the floor of Six. He had gotten hold of a Cockell pulk, a simple dragging sled; adapted for Martian conditions it was fitted with fold-down wheels for running over basalt-hard water ice. He was piling up this little vehicle with a collapsed tent, food packets, bits of gear that looked to have been scavenged from life support.
She handed him his coffee. “So what now?”
He sat back and sipped his drink. “I’ve got an unfulfilled ambition. I’ve got many, actually, but this one’s killing me.”
“Tell me.”
“An unsupported solo assault on the Martian north pole. I always planned to try it myself. I’d start at the edge of the permanent cap, see, just me and an EVA suit and a sled. And I’d walk, dragging the sled all the way to the pole. No drops, no pickup, nothing but me and the ice.”
“Is that even possible?”
“Oh, yes. It’s a thousand kilometers tops, depending on the route you take. The suit would slow me down—and no suit we’ve got is designed for that kind of endurance and mobility; I’d have to make some enhancements. But remember, with one-third G I can haul three times as much as I could in Antarctica, say four hundred kilograms. And in some ways Mars is an easier environment than the Earth’s poles. No blizzards, no white-outs.”
“You’d have to carry all your oxygen.”
“Maybe. Or I could use one of these.” He picked up some of his life-support gadgets, a small ice-collector box, an electrolysis kit for cracking water into oxygen and hydrogen. “It’s a trade-off, actually. The kits are lighter than oxygen bottles would be, but using them daily would slow me down. I know it’s a stunt, Myra. But it’s one hell of a stunt, isn’t it? And nobody’s tried it before. Who better but me?”
“You’ve got some mission designing to do, then.”
“Yes. I could figure it all out during the winter. Then when the summer comes, I could pick some period when Earth is above the horizon to try it. I could get the gear together and try it out on the ice around the base. The darkness wouldn’t make any difference to that.” He seemed pleased to have found this new project. But he looked up at her, uncertain. “Do you think I’m crazy?”
“No crazier than any of us. I mean, I don’t think I believe in May 12. Do you? None of us believes it’s ever going to happen, that death will come to us. If we did we couldn’t function, probably. It’s just a bit more definite for us on Mars, that’s all.”
“Yes. But—”
“Let’s not talk about it,” she said firmly. She knelt down with him on the cold floor. “Show me how you’re going to pack this stuff up. How would you eat? Unpack the tent twice a day?”
“No. I thought I’d unpack it in the evening, and eat overnight and in the morning. Then I could have some kind of hot drink through the suit nozzle during the day…”
Talking, speculating, fiddling with the bits of kit, they planned the expedition, while the frozen air of Mars gathered in snowdrifts around the stilts of the station modules.
61: GRASPER
It was Grasper who first noticed the change in the Eye.
She woke up slowly, as always clinging to her ragged dreams of trees. Suspended between animal and human, she had only a dim grasp of future and past. Her memory was like a gallery hung with vivid images—her mother’s face, the warmth of the nest where she had been born. And the cages. Many, many cages.
She yawned hugely, and stretched her long arms, and looked around. The tall woman who shared this cave still slept. There was light on her peaceful face.
Light?
Grasper looked up. The Eye was shining. It was like a miniature sun, caught in the stone chamber.
Grasper raised a hand toward the Eye. It gave off no heat, only light. She stood and gazed at the Eye, eyes wide, one arm raised.
Now there was something new again. The glow of the Eye was no longer uniform: a series of brighter horizontal bands straddle
d an underlying grayness, a pattern that might have reminded a human of lines of latitude on a globe of the Earth. These lines swept up past the Eye’s “equator,” dwindling until they vanished at the north pole. Meanwhile another set, vertical this time, began the same pattern of emergence, sweeping from a pole on one side of the equator, disappearing on the other side. Now a third set of lines, sweeping to poles set at right angles to the first two pairs, came shining into existence. The shifting, silent display of gray rectangles was entrancing, beautiful.
And then a fourth set of lines appeared—Grasper tried to follow where they went—but suddenly something inside her head hurt badly.
She cried out. She rubbed the heels of her palms into her watering eyes. She felt warmth along her inner thighs. She had urinated where she stood.
The sleeping woman stirred.
62: LITTLE RIP
May 12, 2072
They began the day wordlessly.
They followed the routine they had established in the months they had spent together. Even though, when Myra woke, there were only a few hours left before the Little Rip. She couldn’t think of anything else they should be doing.
Yuri had to begin the day, as he did every day now, by getting suited up for an ice collection expedition. The ISRU water extraction system had finally broken down. So Yuri had to go outside daily to a trench he was digging in the water ice, and with an improvised pickax he broke off slabs of the ice, to carry into the warmth of the house to melt. In fact it wasn’t so difficult; the heavily stratified ice was like a fine-grained sandstone, and it split easily. Once they got the ice inside the house they had to filter out the dust from the sludge that resulted on melting it.
When he was done with that, Yuri disappeared to do Hanse’s job, as he put it, tending to the power plant and the air system and the other mechanical support systems that kept them alive. He went off whistling, in fact. Yesterday he had got hold of some stuff he had been waiting for. An unpiloted rover had turned up, sent down by the crew of New Lowell; Paula and the crew there had been scavenging equipment from the radioactive ruin of Lowell itself. Yuri had been pleased with what he had found in this last delivery, and he had been looking forward to his work this morning.
He had sent the rover back the way it came, although the journey would take several days to complete, beyond the day of the Rip. Yuri seemed to have an instinct that their sentient machines needed to be kept occupied as much as their human masters, and Myra had no reason to argue with him.
Myra too went off to work. She had one job she had been saving up for today.
She scrambled into her EVA suit, as always fully respecting all planetary protection protocols, and went out to the little garden of outdoor plants that were weathering this new Martian winter. A regular task was to blow away the snow, the frozen air that congealed out every day. She used a hot-air blower like a fat hairdryer.
As she worked, Myra was aware of an Eye hovering over the garden. There were Eyes all over the place, even inside some of the base’s hab elements. As usual she deliberately ignored it.
She made an extra effort today. She left the equipment in as good a condition as she could manage. And she touched the sturdy leathery leaves of each of the plants, wishing she could feel them through her thick-gloved fingers.
On the last day Bella came back to the locus of Mars.
From space, from the flight deck of the Liberator, you could see that there was still something there. The thing that had replaced Mars was roughly spherical, and it glowed a dull, dim red, a dying ember. It returned no echoes, and attempts to land a probe on it had ended in the loss of the spacecraft, and if you studied it with a spectroscope you would see that that strange surface appeared to be receding, that its light was reduced to crimson weariness by redshift.
It was a knot of mass-energy orbiting where Mars should have been. It exerted a gravity field sufficient to tether a flock of watching spacecraft, and even to keep Mars’s small moons, Phobos and Deimos, circling in their ancient tracks. But it was not Mars.
Edna said, “It’s just the scar that was left when Mars was cut away.”
“And today that scar heals,” Bella said.
She watched softscreen displays that showed more ships arriving, more ghoulish spectators for this last act of the drama. She wondered what was happening on Mars itself—if Mars still existed in any meaningful sense at all.
Yuri and Myra were making lunch.
It would be dried eggs, reconstituted potatoes, and a little Martian greenery, rubbery but flavorsome. Yuri suggested wine, a Martian vintage from a domed vineyard at Lowell, once remarkably expensive. But it didn’t seem appropriate, and he left the bottle unopened. Anyhow it was poor wine, Myra had always thought, expensive or not.
They worked together on the lunch, setting the base’s table and preparing the food, without once getting in each other’s way. “We’re like an old married couple,” Yuri had said, more than once. So they were, Myra supposed, though they had their spats—and though there had never been any physical intimacy between them, nothing save hugs for comfort, and you had to expect that of the only two human beings at the pole of a world.
It hadn’t been a bad interval in her life, these last months. She had always been in somebody’s shadow, she thought: first her mother’s, then Eugene’s. She’d never had a chance to build a home of her own. She couldn’t say she had done that here on Mars. But this was where Yuri had put down his own roots, this was the world he’d built. And in these last months she’d been able to share his home with him. Sex or not, she’d had far worse relationships than with Yuri.
But she missed Charlie with an intensity she wouldn’t have believed possible. As Rip day approached, it was like a steel cable tearing at her belly, ever harder. She didn’t know if Charlie would know what had become of her mother. She didn’t even have any up-to-date images, still or animated, she could look at. She had done her best to put this aside, to keep it in a compartment in her mind. Yuri knew, of course.
She glanced at the clock. “It’s later than I thought. Only an hour left.”
“Then we’d better tuck in.”
They sat down.
Yuri said, “Hey, I had a good morning, by the way. The Lowell guys finally sent down those replacement filters I asked for. Now our air ought to stay sweet for another year. And I shut down the reactor. We’re running on cell power, but it will see us out. I wanted that old tub of uranium to be closed down in an orderly way. I was kind of rushing to get it all done, but I mothballed it well enough, I think.”
She could see that his work had pleased him, just as her own had pleased her.
“Oh, there was another package from Paula, in the rover yesterday. She said we should open it about now.” He fetched it from the heap of equipment he’d sorted to find his filters. It was a small plastic box that he put on the table.
He opened it up to reveal a padded interior, within which nestled a sphere, about the size of a tennis ball. A plastic bag of pills had been tucked into the box, under the ball. He put these out on the table.
Myra took the sphere. It was heavy, with a smooth black surface.
Yuri said, “I was expecting this. It’s coated with the stuff they make heatshield tiles out of. It can soak up a lot of heat.”
“So it will survive the planet breaking up?”
“That’s the idea.”
“I don’t see what good that will do.”
“But you understand how the Q-expansion works,” Yuri said, speaking around a mouthful of egg. “The Rip works down the scales, larger structures breaking up first. The planet will go first, then the human body. This little gadget ought to survive the end of the planet, even if it’s cast adrift in space, and it should last a bit longer than a suited human, say. Surrounded by debris, I suppose. Rocks popping into dust, at smaller and smaller scales.”
“Are there instruments inside?”
“Yes. It should keep working, taking data until the ex
pansion gets down to the centimeter scale, and the Rip cracks the sphere open. Even then there’s a plan. The sphere will release a cloud of even finer sensor units, motes we call them. It’s nanotechnology, Myra, machines the size of molecules. They will keep gathering data until the expansion reaches molecular scales. There’s nothing they could come up with beyond that. Paula says the design goal is to make it through to the last microsecond. You could gather another thirty minutes of data that way.”
“Then it’s worth doing.”
“Oh, yes.”
Myra hefted the sphere. “What a wonderful little gadget. It’s a shame nobody will be able to use its data.”
“Well, you never know,” Yuri said.
She set the sphere on the table. “And these pills?”
He fingered the bag of pills dubiously. “Jenny at Lowell said she would prepare something like this.” Jenny Mortens was New Lowell’s doctor, the only one left on Mars. “You know what they are. It might be easier, this way, just to take them.”
“It would be a shame to come this far and then give up at the last minute. Don’t you think? And besides, I have my mother to think about.”
“Fair enough.” He grinned, and with a flip he lobbed the pill bag into a waste bin.
She looked at her watch. “I think we’d better get moving. There isn’t much time.”
“Right.” He stood, and stacked the dishes. “I think we can waste a little water and wash up.” He glanced back at her. “How are you feeling about using the suits?”
They both wanted to be outside the base in the final moments. But she had been unsure about wearing a suit. “I do think I’ll want a bit of human contact, Yuri.”
He smiled. “Quaintly put. Too late to be embarrassed now.”
“You know what I mean,” she said, a bit irritated to be teased about it.
“Of course I do. Look—I’ve fixed it. Come out with me into the suits and see what I’ve done. Trust me. I think you’ll like it. And there’ll always be time to come back inside if not.”
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