The Far Shore

by Glenn Damato

  “You have no idea what’s in my head.”

  “If we’re going to get along out here without an Autoridad to lord over us and watch us and tell us what to do, we have to trust each other. And respect each other.”

  My face heats up. “Is this the obvious bullshit you wanted to tell me? Are you done?”

  “You’re fighting the wrong battle. The environment here is the enemy, not us. You made some good calls during the flight, but ask yourself this one question. Could you have solved any of those problems by yourself?”

  “I never claimed I could.”

  “Even so, it’s not a rhetorical question. If you had been by yourself, you’d be dead. Eric saved us, Indra saved us, Paige saved us, a dozen other engineers saved us, people with knowledge and creative initiative, which is why they were selected to begin with.”

  “So why was I selected? To dig out ice and clean the shitter?”

  “You have cojones. But they were made for a different world. We all have to adapt and give up our old ways. Think in terms of working on a team. You need us, and you can trust us. And that’s perfect because we all need each other.” He takes my shoulders in his hands. “Your father, Cristina. Did you trust him?”

  “Of course!”

  The instant the words come out I know it’s a lie. Ryder sees it too.

  I love Paco. He will always be the anchor of my life. He taught me so much, and would have taught me much more had the cancer not taken him. He made me, and without Paco I wouldn’t be here and I’d never have a chance to be free.

  I’m eight, and Alex is gone.

  Alex is gone, and Paco did nothing.

  Ryder waits; how much time passed?

  “Paco did nothing,” I tell him, and crunch my eyes shut so he can’t see the tears.

  Ryder waits some more.

  “He did nothing.”

  “What could he do?”

  “You have no idea what I’m talking about.” I turn away because there’s no chance of hiding anything now. “Alex! My brother. So small. They pulled him out, and Paco did nothing. He did nothing to stop them, didn’t even try.”

  Ryder says gently, “There was nothing he could have done. They would have killed him.”

  Yes. But I didn’t understand when I was eight. I only understood they took Alex and Paco did nothing.

  Paco never taught me to fight for what I want. He taught me many things, but not that.

  I face Ryder. My face is wet, but so what? “Why just Alex? Why didn’t they take me, too?”

  Ryder holds me for a while.

  “There’s a reason,” he whispers. “You’re here with us now. That’s the reason.”

  “If they had taken me,” I sob, “I never would have known Paco, not really. I’m not going to let any of you . . .”

  I can’t finish. Ryder’s arms grip tighter. We’re alone, bodies entwined, but he won’t sleep with me like he does the others, because that’s not what we have between us. That’s me, all on me, and that’s the way I want it for now.

  “Trust us, Cristina. Every last person here has been through their own personal hell. We don’t know each other’s full story, and maybe that’s a good thing. Mikki and I worked together.” He sees the surprise in my eyes. “You probably suspected we knew each other. Well, we did. They had us on a physiological control project, mind control really, and we both should have refused . . . because, what that would have meant to so many people . . .”

  Ryder, for once, is out of words. We look anywhere but at each other.

  “It was wrong, this project, but we both knew, refusal could be a death sentence, or at a minimum a wasted life. Our friends, my younger brother, what about them?”

  “We’re all cowards, is that what you’re saying?”

  “No. What I mean is this. We learned from a young age to deal with painful truths by avoiding them, or by pretending better truths exist. This made us tough in some ways, but it also makes it hard for us to look at ourselves honestly.”

  I sit up. “That’s what I’ve been telling you. Truth is hard. The hardest truth is about ourselves. Harmony wants selfless people. The focus is on the group, always the group, always a quest to please the leader, to appear perfect in the eyes of the leader and everyone else. Don’t you see? This is what we have to overcome.”

  No, he doesn’t see.

  “What I want you to know, Cristina, is that you can still salvage your situation. Jürgen’s forming a leadership circle. We’ll be the ones in charge as our population grows.”

  How is this different from how we were taught to behave at the Academy? Trust others to tell you what to do, and keep your own opinions to yourself. Don’t speak thoughts others don’t want to hear. That would be arrogant.

  I pull away from him. “You’re in this great leadership circle, I suppose.”

  “Yes I am. With Eric, Tess, Senuri, and Andre.”

  “Tess? Tess?”

  “Don’t underestimate her. But that’s not my point. Do you realize you had a shot at becoming part of the core leadership?”

  “While you’re all patting each other on the back, I’m trying to understand how the power generator works.”

  “That’s why I like you. You speak your mind. You were a problem for the Autoridad. That’s why you’re here. But if you can’t adapt, if you can’t be part of our team, you’re going to be an outcast. Is that what you want?”

  ◆◆◆

  Right now I just want sleep. But there’s one last hurt.

  Tess pushes me a text.

  Jürgen opposed your selection for Mars. You got the chance only because his

  grandfather and Michael Gusman convinced some others on the Genesis team.

  I stare at the words, unable to think. My stomach rumbles and a cold wave sweeps my face.

  Why did Jürgen oppose my selection?

  Who else knows this? Who has she told?

  Tess is one of the people I’m supposed to trust?

  I re-read some of Vijay’s old texts. Cristina, I know it is difficult to understand the actions and points of view of some of our compatriots. We will all need time to acclimate to this wonderful thing called liberty.

  Better, for a moment.

  But who has she told?

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Jürgen’s first expedition changed everything. People smile more. A symbolic hurdle has been cleared. We’re making this planet our home. The low-level dread that clung to their souls since they left Earth is replaced with excitement.

  Mikki and Ryder take charge of Liberty’s methanol production. The day’s quota is two hundred liters. The Sab tank and the catalyst bed make oxygen and pure water as byproducts of the reactions, which means a daily shower from now on—two minutes max.

  The entire hygiene pit serves as a shower stall. I make the water as hot as it will go and stand under the wonderfully wet flow. My hair is filthy—but at least it’s still short. I soap up fast because there’s an automatic shutoff timer.

  We have a shower timer, but no way to determine battery charge.

  Maybe there is a way. The issue is whether the AC bus is energized by the reactor generator or the battery inverter. If all five battery banks were isolated, a voltmeter applied across the reactor cables would tell the true story. A voltmeter is integral to the system anyhow. But how to isolate those cables?

  Eric and Ryder are best qualified to guide, but they already decided it’s wasted effort. I’ll have to do it alone.

  Or maybe not. Darien pushed a message late last night, subject line batteries. Six strange pics of the equipment bay on Constitution, strange because they used an infrared sensor Darien had printed. Pics of heat instead of light. The reactor cables were cool, and only the on-line pack was warmer than the others. The charging pack was no hotter than the standby packs. So how could it be charging?

  Did he show these to Eric?

  He did, but Eric explained everything.

  Figure this out alone, but alone with
Darien. Except Darien is out on the second Discovery Team. Darien helped solve the propellent deficit problem with a cool rationality. He didn’t let himself get sucked into the delusion of the crowd. He analyzed and calculated a solution.

  Focus. Is there something wrong with the reactor? Mikki says no.

  The manual is complex with lots of terms that need referencing. Natural convection. Secondary loop. Stability margins. Inlet subcooling. Startup rate. Reactivity feedback. Movable reflector. I know neutron flux—that’s basic physics.

  The reactors are intended to be operated hands-off, as the manual puts it. Self-contained, self-maintained, few moving parts, started by running scripts. This is proven technology, used successfully at the Chēngzhăng lunar outposts for years. But there’s nothing to test, nothing to see.

  Eric says the cables are cool because the batteries are fully charged. Heat image shows only one warm cell, the one discharging.

  Apparently this is a day of rest for everyone not on the Discovery Team. Once they know the methanol production chain has an ample supply of water, Ryder and Senuri watch vids of their snow volcanoes and exploration sites. Alison and Mikki analyze the mineral samples collected yesterday. Norberto and Irene test a spotter they designed for the third Discovery Team. The idea is to scout ahead of the trucks for obstacles or anything interesting. The thing has to be extremely light to fly in the thin atmosphere. By late afternoon the thing is flying around Liberty and peering into windows.

  Just what Mars needs—spotters.

  They spend the rest of the day watching old Mars-themed vids— Mission to Mars, Red Planet, Last Days on Mars, The Martian, Angry Red Planet. I can’t help sneaking a few peaks. The people who made these vids portrayed Mars in dull red tones, nothing like the diverse textures and vibrant yellows, browns, and grays on the actual Mars. And the spacecraft interiors are always so huge. In The Martian they had a separate gym room in their enormous rotating spacecraft, the gym alone at least ten times the size of our whole control deck. Why did people think spacecraft would have such vast interiors?

  Allison wants to know the frequency of dust storms. The Mars vids show lots of storms killing people and wreaking all sorts of havoc. Senuri informs us that due to the incredibly thin atmosphere, dust storms and high winds are not dangerous at all, but large amounts of dust in the atmosphere can attenuate sunlight down to a fraction of normal.

  The second Discovery Team returns just before sunset. They boast about reaching fifty kilometers. What if both trucks had broken down? The mountains block VHF radio communication. They had plenty of oxygen, Paige asserts, and they could have walked back by midnight.

  “We spent two hours at the edge of an exposed glacier,” Jürgen says before taking a bite of dinner. They hadn’t eaten all day, subsisting on a watery nutrient fluid sipped inside the helmets. “We found hundreds of spots where ground ice converted to gas and left a void. This is a hazard, so I’m asking everyone to study these pics so you can recognize these formations and avoid them. The surface crust can cave in under your feet. Happened to me three times! Fortunately, the voids weren’t deeper than my knees.”

  Mikki is named for the third Discovery Team.

  “You made two hundred and six liters,” Paige complements her. Paige’s eyes are red and beat. “That’s twice my output. You deserve to get out there.” She glances at me, opens her mouth, but decides to say nothing at all. People want to please the Captain. That’s what matters the most.

  ◆◆◆

  Doing this alone isn’t working. Darien also suspects something amiss with the batteries, but he doesn’t make any public announcements.

  “Darien, did you show those heat images to anyone else?”

  He casts his eyes down. “I don’t want them to know I’m questioning their word.”

  “All right. Fine. You have a degree in physics? How is it possible for the AC bus to be down with the reactor connected?”

  “Physics, not engineering.”

  “You must have some kind of theory. Look. I promise this conversation is private.”

  He pushes a complete schematic of the electrical system. “Do you know the meaning of the term C-rate?”

  “It has something to do with discharge rate.”

  “It means the rate a battery will discharge relative to maximum capacity. One C means the present current will discharge the entire battery in one hour.”

  He indicates a row of figures next to each battery symbol.

  161C 163C 160C 159C 161C

  “They’re almost all the same,” he says. “And they’re too high, at least for the online bank and the charging bank. They can’t be all fully charged all the time, not if the SMB is doing its job. They’re supposed to cycle.”

  It hits me. “Did Eric tell you about re-writing the battery software?”

  Darien glares back, his cheeks moving with each breath. He doesn’t know?

  “Eric rewrote some of the code,” I inform him. “He said it was necessary because the system wasn’t calculating charge correctly. The indicated charge jumped from the low seventies to ninety-eight percent.”

  He nods. “This is what we would see if he made the SMB treat five cells as one and use the total voltage to derive state of charge. The true state of charge would be a lot lower than indicated.”

  “Darien, is it possible the reactors aren’t charging anything? Have we been pulling all this power directly from the batteries and nothing else?”

  “I don’t see how that could be. All that energy has to dissipate somewhere.”

  “Suppose the reactors aren’t operating?”

  His eyes dart left and right. “All three of them? All this time? I can ask Eric to verify the status, but he’s been doing that on a daily basis.”

  “Eric’s been wrong before. Go out there, disconnect the reactor power cables, apply a voltmeter. That will tell us for sure.”

  “No, it won’t. The generator shuts down instantly on no load.”

  “Thanks for saving me from making a total ass of myself,” I tell him with a forced smile. He smiles back, but the rest of his face is joyless.

  “I’m going to take this directly to Jürgen,” he says.

  “Good. They don’t take it seriously coming from me.”

  “There’s an old maxim that goes, it’s not a problem unless you have a solution. I think I can make a case for temporarily stopping fuel production and conserving our oxygen and battery power until we figure this out.”

  “One hundred percent,” I assure him in my best Dr. Mike style.

  THIRTY-NINE

  A perfect peaceful night’s rest. On track to solve the power anomalies, finally.

  I bypass the pit and go straight to the power panel. But the panel’s blank, except for two orange words.

  ADMIN LOCKED

  They’re working on it. Why else would it say that?

  Eric pushes a text to everyone. He has taken control of all electrical and life-support systems in order to increase reliability. Nothing to be concerned about. Methanol production is to proceed as usual.

  Ryder and Paige begin a new project—printing parts for a surface mining rover. Once assembled it would cover hundreds of square meters of ground and accumulate a massive pile of rock-free sand for making construction bricks.

  “We’ll be baking bricks in a few days,” says Paige. She assigns Alison and me to assemble and test each part that comes out of the printer. The rover will be powered by a small methanol-oxygen motor.

  Just before lunch I push a text to Darien. No response comes back.

  He must be immersed in a deep technical troubleshooting process with Eric. Ryder says he’s been asked to hike out to Independence, no reason given. I start to mention Darien—but no, I cannot. I promised the conversation would be private.

  Once again the Discovery Team returns as the sun touches the western mountains. Mikki and Ryder stay on Independence. Jürgen reports that multiple sources of phosphates, copper, and nickel have b
een identified within fifteen kilometers. He expects polymer production to begin within twenty days.

  And they discovered flowing water. From the base of a small glacier, meter-wide brooks of water roll over rocks and down gullies, the low gravity creating an illusion of thickness and slow-motion.

  “Mikki Tischler made this discovery,” Jürgen says. “The water’s briny and it lasted almost an hour before it evaporated.”

  There’s a vid of Mikki and Andre at the edge of a shallow pond splashing each other. Mikki floats an empty sample container, the lid fashioned as a sail. Jürgen remarks, “Witness Mars’s first sea-going vessel.”

  All they want to do is watch spotter vids of today’s newly-discovered landscape. I text Darien again. A full day since our talk, and nothing has changed—except ADMIN LOCKED.

  How private is private? Should I assume Eric has already been informed about my supposedly private conversation with Darien? I text Eric. No response.

  No dinner, and no sleep either. Focus my mind on something? But there’s nothing else, just a cold emptiness, an aloneness, like when Faye wasn’t around, or just after Paco passed.

  What’s the use thinking about such things here? Different planet, different life.

  Eric does push a vid, but not about batteries. It’s dust he’s worried about. Dust is tracked inside every time people cycle through the airlock. It blows inside, too. He shows pics of the edges of the outer hatch on Independence encircled by a ten-centimeter wide smudge of red-brown. Ultra-fine dust is picked up by the wind and somehow migrates past the hatch seal.

  “Short of smearing the hatch gasket with petroleum jelly, which we don’t have, nothing can be done about it,” he informs us. “Blair says the stuff is harmless, just don’t snort it. But watch out for the abrasiveness. It’ll eventually affect high-precision equipment because it can find its way anywhere. One of our challenges will be to invent a means of accessing our future living quarters without admitting any dust.”

  That’s it? He’s scared of dust?