by Greg Bear
Hours after we arrived, Ilya introduced me to a cracked cyst in the shed. "Casseia, meet mother," he said. "Mother, this is Casseia. Mother isn't feeling well today." Two meters wide, it lay in a steel cradle in the unpressurized building. He let me run my gloved hands along its dark rocky exterior. As he shined a torch to cast out the gloom, I reached into the interior and felt with gloved fingers the tortuous, sparkling folds of silicate, the embedded parallel lines of zinc clays.
"These were the last," he said. "The Omega."
Nobody knew how cysts bloomed. Nobody knew the significance of this purely inorganic structure. The generally accepted theory was that the cysts once contained soft reproductive organs, but no remains of such organs had been found.
I studied the cyst's interior closely, vainly hoping to see some clue the scientists might have missed. "You've found offspring around open cysts — and mothers themselves — but no actual connections between."
"All we've found have been late Omega hatchings," Ilya said. "They died before their ecos could reach maturity. The remains were close enough to convince."
I listened to the sound of my own breathing for a moment, the gentle sighs of the cycler. "Have you ever dug an aqueduct bridge?"
"When I was a student," Ilya said. "Beautiful things."
We left the shed and stood under the comparatively clear sky. I was almost used to being Up. The surface of my world was becoming familiar; however hostile, it touched me deeply, its past and present. I had been seeing it through Ilya's eyes, and Ilya did not judge Mars by any standards but its own.
"Which part of Earth would you like to visit?" I asked.
"The deserts," he said.
"Not the rain forests?"
He grinned behind his face plate. "Better fossils in dry places."
We climbed into the lab, destatted and sucked off our dust, and ate soup in the cramped kitchen. We had barely finished our cups when a shrill alarm came from our slates and the lab's com.
Emergency displays automatically flickered before us. The distinctive masculine voice of Security Mars spoke. "A cyclonic low-pressure system in Arcadia Planitia has produced a force ten pressure surge moving southwest at eight-hundred and thirty kiphs. All stations and teams between Alba Patera in the north and Gordii Dorsum in the south are advised to take emergency precautions." Graphs of the surge and a low-orbit satellite picture appeared, superimposed on a projected map. The surge resembled a thin curving smudge of charcoal drawn over the terrain. Its numbers were impressive: two thousand kilometers long, following a great-circle contour, absolutely clear atmosphere ahead and murk behind, with a dark pressure curl along its central axis. The surge had already reached a pressure of one third of a bar — almost fifty times normal.
First seen in the twentieth in early Viking photographs, surges were the worst Mars had to offer. Induced by supersonic shock-waves, the high-pressure curls were unique to Mars, with its thin atmosphere, cold days, and even colder nights. Here, the borders between night and day could become weather fronts in themselves. There were no oceans, as on Earth, to liberate heat slowly and mediate between ground and sky ... At nightfall, the ground cooled quickly, and the thin air above the ground descended dramatically, only to warm and rise rapidly at daybreak. Most of the time, the worst weather patterns Mars could muster were the thin, high-wind-speed storms familiar to all. These spread across basins and plains, covering everything with dust but producing only slight changes in barometric pressure.
Under the right conditions, however, and in the proper terrain — crossing the plains of the northern lowlands, in mid-morning or late evening — winds generated by the terminator could exceed the speed of sound, compressing the air to as much as a hundred times its normal pressure of four to seven millibars. Passing from the plains to rough terrain, the shock-wave could be given a deft horizontal spin, producing a super-dense rolling curl that picked up huge volumes of fine clay and sand, and at peak, even pebbles and rocks.
Ilya and I immediately suited and set to work lowering the mobile lab and shooting anchors deep into the soil and rock beneath. We slung cables over the lab from anchor to anchor, then pulled folded plastic foils from the boot in the lab's round stern, stretching them from the ground and fastening them to the lab's sides to make a wind ramp. The foil stiffened quickly into the proper shape. It would also function as a shield against debris.
"We've got about ten minutes," I said. We both looked into the arroyo at the slab-sided shed with its precious specimens, a tin shanty that would love to fly.
"There's a spare tarp and foil," Ilya said. "We can rig it in six minutes — or we can get inside."
"Rig it," I said. He grabbed my hand and squeezed it.
We worked quickly. Surges could be terribly destructive even to a buried station if it was unprepared. The center of a surge's curl could compress to as much as half a bar, a rolling-pin of tight-packed air moving at well over eight hundred kiphs; and the farther a surge rolled, the tighter it packed, until it blew itself out against a volcano or plateau and spread dust and cyclones over half of Mars.
We stiffened the shed's foil and kicked the tarp pegs. All was firm. We ran for the lab and sealed the flap behind us. A little excavator clambered up from a fresh-dug trench under the lab's cylindrical body and fastened itself to its receptacle in the bottom of the lab. We crawled into the trench and spread our personnel foils. The foils undulated, stiffened, and glued themselves to the edges of the trench.
Ilya switched on a torch and shined it in our faces. We lay in the coffin-shaped ditch, with two layers of foil and the ponderous mobile lab over our heads, hands tight-clenched.
Outside: a horrid empty silence. Even the rock was quiet; the surge was still dozens of kilometers away. Ilya removed his slate from his utility belt and instructed the mobile lab's roof camera to show us what was happening. To the northwest, all was dark gray shot through with streaks of brown.
"Are we cozy?" he asked. Our helmet radios whined faintly, we lay so close together.
"Snug as bunnies in a pot," I said, teeth clenched.
"I'm sorry I got you into this, Casseia ..."
I couldn't clamp my hand over his mouth, but I made the gesture against his helmet anyway. "Shh," I said. "Tell me a story."
Ilya excelled at making up fairy tales on the spur of the moment. "Now?" he asked.
"Please."
"Long ago," he began, voice husky, "and long after now, two rabbits dug a hole in the farmer's garden and ate through all of his water lines ..."
I closed my eyes, listening.
Our helmets pressed against the rocks and each other. Before Ilya had finished the story, I laid my hand against the bottom of the ditch, palm flat to pick up vibrations. The line of dust and compressed atmosphere to the west stretched inky-black and very close. It began to obscure the horizon. Only seconds now . . .
All around, through the rocks, we heard a low grumbling, then a distinct, rhythmic pounding. "There it is," I said. "Plains buffalo." We had all seen Terrie Westerns.
Ilya placed his hand over mine. "Freight trains," he said. "Hundreds of them."
I began to shiver. "Have you been through one of these?" I asked.
"When I was a kid," he said. "In a station."
"Anybody hurt?"
He shook his head. "Small one. Only a quarter of a bar. Made a lot of noise when it went over."
"What does it sound like when it goes over?"
He was about to tell me when I heard for myself. The sound started out ghostly — the sibilant patient whine of a strong Martian wind, audible through our helmets even in the trench, backed by the staccato of pebbles and dust striking against the foils and tarps. The blackness seemed to leap over the land.
I felt pressure in my ears, thin fingers pushing into my head. I opened my eyes to slits — my eyelids had pressed themselves tight shut instinctively — to see Ilya. He lay on his back, shoulder wedged against the side of the trench, staring up, eyes searching.
"This is going to be a bad one," he said. "I'll finish the story later, okay?"
"Okay. But don't forget" I shut my eyes again.
For a moment, the surge sounded like huge drums. A thin shriek descended into a monstrous, horrifying bellow. I thought of a ravening god marching over the land, Mars itself, god of war, furious and implacable, searching for things that might be frightened, things that might die.
The pressure suit loosened around me, then clung tight to my skin. A sharp pain in my ears made me screw up my face and groan. The torch fell between us. Ilya grabbed it again, shined it on his face, shook his head, face slick with tears, and held me tightly, I could feel his heart through the suits.
The vibration of the trench walls stopped. We lay for a moment, waiting for it to begin again. I started to get up, pushing against the tarp, frantic to see daylight — but Ilya grabbed my shoulder and pressed me down. I could not hear very well. The torch illuminated his face; he was trying to mouth words to me. Somehow I understood through my fear — rocks and dust would be falling outside. We might be killed by rocks falling from thousands of meters in the wake of the surge, striking at eighty or ninety meters per second. I pressed myself against him, mind racing, grimacing at the pain.
Time passed very slowly. My fear turned to numbness, and the numbness faded into relief. We were not going to die. The worst of the surge had passed over and we were still in the trench — but a new fear hit me, and I had to fight myself to keep from clawing out of Ilya's embrace. We could be buried under a fresh dune — tons of dust and sand, dozens of meters high. We would never dig out Our oxygen would be depleted and we would suffocate, this trench would become just what it seemed, a grave ... I began to squirm, breath harsh and short, and Ilya struggled to keep his arms around me. "Let me go!" I shouted.
Suddenly, I flinched and stopped thrashing. A light had hit me in the face, not our torch. The lab's arbeiters were ripping away the foils and tarps, searching for us.
The chief arbeiter appeared on the edge of our trench. A jointed arm had been wrenched loose and the machine was covered with dents and red smears
— rock impacts. It had weathered the storm outside, tending the edges of the foil until the last moment. It must have been blown around like a small can.
Ilya pulled me up out of the ditch in deathly silence. The mobile lab was still intact above us; we might be able to get to a station on our own.
We brushed each other down, more for the reassurance of physical contact than any other reason. I felt light-headed, giddy with still being alive. We walked beneath the main foil and tarps, inspecting the lab, then emerged to stand in the open.
The foil on the specimen shed had failed. It was nowhere to be seen.
The sky from horizon to horizon glowered charcoal-gray, almost black. Dust fell in thick snaking curtains, great sheets unrolling, drifting, hiding. We gathered the arbeiters beneath the lab and climbed the steps into the airlock, quickly sucking the gray dust from our suits, then stripped.
Ilya insisted I lie on the narrow fold-down cot. He lay on his cot across from me, then got up and pushed in close beside me. We shivered like frightened children.
We slept for an hour. When we awoke, I felt ecstatic as if from drinking far too much high-powered tea. Everything seemed sharply defined and highly colored. Even the dust in the lab interior smelted sweet and essential. The pain in my ears had subsided to a dull throb. I could still hear, but just barely.
Ilya showed me the lab's weather record. The surge had topped at two bars.
"That's impossible," I said.
He shook his head and smiled, tapping his own ears with a finger. Then he wrote on his slate, "Compressible fluids — a lot to learn." He added with a rueful grimace, "Some honeymoon. I love you!"
With little ceremony, and not much in the way of clothing left to remove, we celebrated still being alive.
We checked in with the satcoms to tell everybody we had survived and could take care of ourselves. Resources were strained from Arcadia to Mariner Valley
— the surge had sheared into three parts crossing the Tharsis volcanoes, and twenty-three stations had been hit by the three-headed monster. There were casualties — seven dead, hundreds injured. Even UMS had suffered damage.
Ilya and I inspected the lab from outside, elevating the tires again and cutting the tie-downs. The foils and tarps had protected it against most of the boulders flung by the surge. Minor damage could be fixed by patches.
We decided to collect what specimens we could from the shed's remains and drive the lab back to Olympus Station. Replacing our suit tanks and purifiers, we walked west from the lab several dozen meters.
Ilya was somber. My tinnitus had passed but hearing was still difficult — his voice in my com was a barely understandable buzz. "Looks as if we've lost the cyst," he said. The shed itself was nowhere to be found — it might have blown clear to Tharsis by now. But it would undoubtedly have spilled its heavy contents.
I looked up through the thinning curtains of dust. The sky peeking through the gray seemed greenish. I had never seen that color before. I pointed it out to Ilya. He frowned, looked back at the lab, then set his jaw and said we should keep searching.
The air temperature hovered just above zero. It should have been thirty or forty below at this latitude, at this time of the year.
My ecstasy was fading rapidly. "Please," I muttered. "Enough. I'm not an adventurous woman."
"What?" Ilya asked.
"It's hot out here and I don't know what that means."
"Neither do I," Ilya said. "But I don't think it's dangerous. There haven't been any more warnings."
"Maybe something local is brewing," I said. "Everyone knows weird weather lives in the sulci."
He vaulted across a wind-exposed boulder and picked up a pale brown cylindrical rock. "One of our core specimens. Maybe the shed dumped its load here."
"I think we should go back."
Ilya stood and frowned deeply, caught between wanting to please me and a powerful need to find something, anything, of the broken cyst and the other specimens. Suddenly, I regretted being such a coward. "But let's look a little longer."
"Just a few more minutes," he agreed. I followed him to the edge of a canyon. A hundred meters below, fine dust drifted like a river through the canyon bottom. Gray dust mixed with swirls of ochre and red, immiscible fluids, Jovian; I had never seen anything like it. Ilya kneeled and I squatted beside him.
"If they fell down there — " he said, and shook his head. Our suits were covered with clinging gray dust; the suck and destat in the lab might not be able to remove enough to keep it from getting into the recycling systems, into our skin. I imagined smear rashes itching all night long.
Something fogged the outside of my face-plate. I reached up to wipe it. A muddy streak formed under my touch. I swore and removed a static rag from my waist pack. The rag did not work. I could hardly see.
"The dust is wet," I said.
"Can't be. There's not enough pressure," Ilya said. He looked at my suit and streaked the muck on my arm with one finger, then examined the finger. "You're right. You're wet. Am I?"
His face plate had fogged as well. I touched his helmet. "Yeah," I said.
"Jesus. Just a few more minutes," he pleaded. Over the canyon, afternoon sun broke through clouds of dust. Green-tinted rays swept across the rugged furrows of the sulci, casting the landscape in a ghoulish light interrupted by deep shadows.
We backed away from the rubble at the edge of the canyon. Ilya kicked wind-exposed rocks aside and slogged through drifts of familiar red smear and the superfine gray dust There was no sizzle anywhere. It had been mixed with unradiated clays and flopsand. Years might pass before ultraviolet could convert the surface to crackly sizzle again.
"The surge must have uncovered an ice aquifer nearby. Pebble saltation blasted it," Ilya said. "This gray stuff must be ice dust, and down here, it's just warm enough to melt — "
/> He stopped and gave out a groan. "Up there," he said, pointing to the top of a low ridge. A jagged lump of rock about a meter wide presented a flash of crystal in the broken rays of afternoon sun. We climbed.
I looked back over my shoulder at the lab, half a kilometer away. My back muscles tensed with a red rabbit's instinct to run and hide. The surge was gone, but wet dust was completely outside my experience. We might sink into a depression and drown. I had no idea how our filters and seals would function in water.
Ilya reached the top of the ridge first. He knelt before the exposed lump of rock. "Is it the cyst?" I asked.
He did not answer. I stood behind him and peered at the shiny exposed face. It was indeed part of a cyst — very likely the cyst that had tumbled from the shed. It lay half-buried in a hole filled with gray dust. The intricate patterns of quartz and embedded zinc clays seemed less distinct, blurred; I thought it might be the weird light. But where the fragment of cyst met the pool of dust, a thick gelatinous layer spilled and churned.
"What's that?" I asked.
"Something in suspension," Ilya suggested. He reached out to touch the gelatinous material. It clung to his glove.
"Snail spit," I said.
"Genuine grade-A slime," Ilya agreed, lifting his glove.
"Why doesn't it dry out?" I asked.
He looked at me, forehead pale, cheeks flushed, eyes wide. I could hear his rapid breathing over the com. "There's water all around. The gray dust is ice and clays, and the clays are keeping the ice from sublimating. But the temperature is high enough that the ice melts, and the cyst can get at the moisture. It's the right mix. It has what it wants."
The slime grew thicker as we watched. Within, white streaks formed little lacework doilies.
"How much do you think this masses?" he asked, measuring the fragment with his arms.
"Maybe a quarter ton," I said.