Analog SFF, January-February 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The murmur of voices was pretty loud before we got to the mess hall. It sounded like a cocktail party, though the only thing to drink was water, and you don't dare spill a drop.

  The mess hall was big enough for about two dozen people to eat at once, and now there were a hundred or so, sitting on the tables as well as the chairs, milling around saying hello. We twenty-three were the first new faces they'd seen in a year and a half—about one Martian year, one “are,” pronounced air-ee. I'd better start thinking that way.

  The room had two large false windows, like the ones on the ship, looking out onto the desert. I assumed they were real-time. Nothing was moving, but then all the life on the planet was presumably right here.

  You could see our lander sitting at the end of a mile-long plowed groove. I wondered whether Paul had cut it too close, stopping a couple of hundred feet away. He'd said the landing was mostly automatic, but I didn't see him let go of the joystick.

  I saw Oz immediately, and threaded my way over to him. We shook hands and then hugged. He was a little bit shorter than me, which was a surprise. He held me by both shoulders and looked at me with a bright smile, and then looked around the room. “It's pretty strange, isn't it? All these people.”

  Seventy-five new faces after seeing the same three dozen for months. “They look like a bunch of Martians.”

  He laughed. “Was the landing rough?”

  “Pretty awful. But Paul seemed in control.”

  “He was my pilot, too. Good old ‘Crash’ Collins.”

  “'Crash'?”

  “Ask him about it someday.”

  An Asian woman a little taller than Oz came over, and he put his arm around her waist. “Josie, this is Carmen.”

  We shook hands. “I've seen your picture,” she said. Josie Tang, Oz's lover. “Welcome to our humble planet.”

  I tapped my foot on the metal plate. “Nice to have real gravity.”

  “The same no matter where you go,” Oz said. “I'll give you a tour after the formalities.”

  When Paul and the other two came into the room, an older woman started tapping on a glass with a spoon. Like many of them, men and women, she was wearing a belted robe made of some filmy material. She was pale and bony.

  “Welcome to Mars. Of course I've spoken with most of you. I'm Dargo Solingen, current general administrator.

  “The first couple of sols"—Martian days—"you are here, just settle in and get used to your new home. Explore and ask questions. We've assigned temporary living and working spaces to everyone, a compromise between the wish list you sent a couple of weeks ago and ... reality.” She shrugged. “It will be a little tight until the new modules are in place. We will start on that as soon as the ship is unloaded.”

  She almost smiled, though it looked like she didn't have much practice with it. “It is strange to see children. This will be an interesting social experiment.”

  “One you don't quite approve of?” Dr. Jefferson asked.

  “You probably know that I don't. But I was not consulted.”

  “Dr. Solingen,” a woman behind her said in a tone of warning.

  “I guess none of you were,” he said. “It was an Earth decision, the Corporation.”

  “That's right,” Solingen said. “This is an outpost, not a colony. They don't have families on Moonbase or even Antarctica.”

  Oz cleared his throat. “We were polled. Most of us were very much in favor.” And most of them did call it “the colony,” rather than Mars Base One.

  The woman who had cautioned Solingen continued. “A hundred percent of the permanent party. Those of us who are not returning to Earth.” She was either pregnant or the only fat person in the room. Looking more carefully, I saw one other woman who appeared to be pregnant.

  You'd think that would have been on the news. Maybe it was, and I missed it, not likely. Mother and I exchanged significant glances. Something was going on.

  (It turned out to be nothing more mysterious than a desire for privacy on the women's part, and everybody's desire to keep Earth out of their hair. When the first child was born, the Earth press would be all over them. Until then, there was no need for anyone to know the blessed event was nigh. So they asked that we not mention the pregnancies when writing or talking to home.)

  Solingen went on to talk about work and living schedules. For those of us in school, study schedules would continue as on the John Carter, and we'd be assigned light duties “appropriate to our abilities.” Probably fetch-and-carry or galley slave, as we called kitchen work on ship.

  Then she introduced each new arrival, stating where they were from, what their specialties were, and lists of honors and awards, all from memory. It was an impressive performance. She even knew about us youngsters—Mike Baker's national (Canadian) spelling bee, Yuri's solo with the St. Petersburg orchestra, and my swimming medal, an extremely useful skill on this planet.

  The way she looked at me left no doubt who it was who forbade Paul from being with me. I would try to stay out of her way.

  People got together with friends or coworkers—almost everybody had been working along with one of the Martian teams en route—and moved toward the workstations and labs to talk. Oz and Josie took me and Card for a guided tour.

  We'd already walked through the “hospital,” an aid station about three meters wide by ten long. It was connected to the changing room by an automated airlock; if there was an accident with the main airlock, it would seal off the whole colony.

  That was the standard size for most of the buildings, three by ten meters, but most of them were divided into smaller sections. The mess hall where we all met was about two thirds that size, two-hundred square meters for a hundred not-too-crowded people, the rest of the space a very compressed kitchen and pantry.

  About half of the overall floor space was “cabins,” more like walk-in closets, where people slept. Most of them were two meters long by a meter wide, three meters high, with upper and lower bunks for two people who better be compatible. The bunks folded up to the wall, and desks for working or reading folded down. Four of the cabins were a half meter longer, for seven-footers.

  The walls were colorful, in sometimes odd combinations. Each unit, twelve to thirty-two people, voted on a weekly color scheme. The walls glowed a comforting warm beige or cool blue most places, but there were bright yellows and moody purples and a Halloween orange.

  We walked down the main corridor, about a meter wide, past six rows of cabins. The last bunch of sixteen had temporary partitions and improvised bunks, where most of us newcomer Earthlings will sleep. In normal times, that would be the recreation area, so people had real motivation to set up the new living areas we'd brought.

  Then there were three large work areas, which besides labs and computer stations contained separate rooms for administration, power regulation, and environmental control—water, air, and heat. Finally, there was an airlock leading to the biosciences laboratory, where there were strict controls. We tried to be careful not to contaminate the Martian environment, and conversely, if there were dormant alien microorganisms in the rock and soil specimens, we didn't want to let even one of them into our air and water. The consensus was that it was unlikely Martian microbes could affect us, but who wants to put it to the test? The whole area was kept at a slightly lower air pressure than the rest of the colony, discouraging leaks.

  Here I was on a brand new world, making history, and my phone beeped to remind me that I had a history paper due tomorrow. I thumbed that it would be a day late, 10 percent grade reduction.

  Oz invited Card and me back to the cabin he shared with Josie. The four of us could sit comfortably on the lower bunk. He showed me how the desk worked, folding down with retractable arms, revealing a small high-definition screen. The work surface was flat but had a virtual keyboard. The arms were a clever parallelogram construction that let you position the desk at various heights.

  The walls were covered with pictures, only two his own work. From art
history class I recognized Rembrandt, Pollack, and Wyeth paintings; the others were by Scandinavian artists I'd never heard of.

  A public address system called all “new colonists” to dinner. It was fantastic, after months of ship rations. Salad with fresh greens and tomatoes, hot cornbread, fried tilapia.

  After the meal, we were invited to come up and look at the farm. Those tilapia weren't the happiest-looking fish I'd ever seen, crowded into a small tank of murky water with agricultural waste (their food) floating on top.

  Most of the crops had supplemental lights over their beds, Martian sunlight being pretty thin. It was easy to recognize stands of corn and apple trees, tomato plants, and beds of lettuce and cabbage. I didn't know what rice looked like, but it was probably different on Earth anyhow; not enough water here for paddies. Kaimei laughed when she saw it.

  We went back down to get our assigned sleeping areas straight and get on the shower roster. There were two showers, and you could sign up for a twenty-minute interval for the female one. (The men only had fifteen minutes; there were more of them.) There was a complicated list of instructions in the small dressing room.

  We were allowed 160 minutes per month, two showers a week. The twenty shower minutes you had included ten for undressing and dressing. The ten minutes you were actually in the shower included only five minutes of actual running water: get wet, then soap and shampoo, and then try to rinse off.

  All of us newbies were penciled in for showers if we wanted them—if! I had one scheduled for 1720, and waited outside the door for ten minutes. Mrs. Washington came out, radiantly clean, and I slipped in to undress and wait for Kaimei to finish, behind the shower curtain. The dressing room was the same size as the shower, about a meter square, and unsurprisingly smelled like a girls’ locker room on Earth.

  I chatted with Kaimei through the curtain when her water stopped and she switched to the dryer. No towels, just a hot-air machine. She came out, looking all new and shiny, and I moved my sweaty corpus in to be sluiced.

  It was an odd sensation. The water that sprayed from the handheld nozzle was warm enough, but the rest of your body gets really cold, the water on your skin evaporating fast in the thin air.

  The amber liquid that served as both soap and shampoo was watery and weak, probably formulated more for its recycling efficiency than its cleaning power. But I did get pretty clean, much cleaner than I'd ever felt on the ship. I used the last thirty seconds of rinse time letting the warm water roll down my tired back.

  There was a fixed dryer about four feet off the ground, somewhat amiable, to get your back and butt dry, and a handheld thing like a powerful hair dryer for the rest. The heat was welcome, and I felt pretty wonderful when I pulled the curtain.

  Dargo Solingen stood there naked, bony and parchment pale. She marched by me without a word. I managed “Hello?”

  I dressed quickly and looked at the roster. There had been someone else's name after mine, someone unfamiliar, but now it was Dargo Solingen. I supposed she could butt in line any time she wanted, pulling rank. But it was an odd coincidence. Did she want to see the sexy body that seduced her pilot? As if you would have to be a great beauty to appeal to a guy who's been celibate for three months. I think “nominally female” would fill the bill.

  * * * *

  18. Marswalk

  I shared a small temporary space with Elspeth and Kaimei—an air mattress on the floor and a bunk bed. We agreed to rotate, so everyone would have a bed two thirds of the time.

  No romantic trysts for a while. I could ask the girls to look the other way, but Paul might feel inhibited.

  Hanging sheets for walls and only one desk, with a small screen and a clunky keyboard and an old VR helmet with a big dent on the side. The timing for that worked out okay, since Elspeth had classes seven hours before Eastern Time, and Kaimei three hours later. We drew up a chart and taped it over the desk. The only conflict was my physical science class versus Kaimei's History of Tao and Buddhism. Mine was mostly equations on the board, so I used the screen and let her have the helmet.

  Our lives were pretty regimented the first couple of weeks, because we had to coordinate classes with the work roster here, and leave a little time for eating and sleeping.

  Everybody was impatient to get the first new module set up, but it wasn't just a matter of unloading and inflating it. First there was a light exoskeleton of spindly metal rods that became rigid when they were all pulled together. Then floorboards to bear the weight of the things and people inside. Then the connection to the existing base, through an improvised airlock until they were sure the module wouldn't leak.

  I enjoyed working on that, at first outdoors, unloading the ship and sorting and preassembling some parts; then later, down in the cave, attaching the new to the old. I got used to working in the Mars suit and using the “dog,” a wheeled machine about the size of a large dog. It carried backup oxygen and power.

  About half the time, though, my work roster put me inside, helping the younger ones do their lessons and avoid boredom. “Mentoring,” they called it, to make it sound more important than babysitting.

  I hardly ever saw Paul. It's as if whoever was in charge of the work details—guess who—took a special effort to keep us apart. One day, though, while I was just getting off work detail, he found me and asked whether I'd like to go exploring with him. What, skip math? I got fresh oxygen and helped him check out one of the dogs, and we went for a walk.

  The surface of Mars might look pretty boring to an outsider, but it's not at all. It must be the same if you live in a desert on Earth: you pretty much have the space around your home memorized, every little mound and rock—and when you venture out it's, “Wow! A different rock!”

  He took me off to the left of Telegraph Hill, walking at a pretty good pace. The base was below the horizon in less than ten minutes. We were still in radio contact as long as we could see the antenna on top of the hill, and if we wanted to go farther, the dog had a collapsible booster antenna that went up ten meters, which we could leave behind as a relay.

  We didn't need it for that, but Paul clicked it up into place when we came to the edge of a somewhat deep crater he wanted to climb into.

  “Be really careful,” he said. “We have to leave the dog behind. If we both were to fall and be injured, we'd be in deep shit.”

  I followed him, watching carefully as we picked our way to the top. Once there, he turned around and pointed.

  It's hard to say how strange the sight was. We weren't that high up, but you could see the curvature of the horizon. The dog behind us looked tiny but unnaturally clear, in the near vacuum. To the right of Telegraph Hill, the pad where the John Carter had been raised to stand on its tail, waiting for the synthesizer to slowly make fuel from the Martian air.

  Paul was carrying a white bag, now a little rust-streaked from the dust. He pulled out a photomap of the crater, unfolded it, and showed it to me. There were twenty X's, with numbers from one to twenty, starting on the top of the crater rim, where we must have been standing, then down the incline, and across the crater floor to its central peak.

  “Dust collecting,” he said. “How's your oxygen?”

  I chinned the readout button. “Three hours forty minutes.”

  “That should be plenty. Now you don't have to go down if you—”

  “I do! Let's go!”

  “Okay. Follow me.” I didn't tell him that my impatience wasn't all excitement, but partly anxiety at having to talk and pee at the same time. Peeing standing up, into a diaper, trying desperately not to fart. “Funny as a fart in a spacesuit” probably goes back to the beginning of space flight, but there's nothing real funny about it in reality. I'd taken two anti-gas tablets before I came out, and they seemed to still be working.

  Keeping your footing was a little harder, going downhill. And it had been some years since I'd walked with a wet diaper. I was out of practice.

  Paul had the map folded over so it only showed the path down t
he crater wall; every thirty or forty steps he would fish through the bag and take out a pre-labeled plastic vial and scrape a sample of dirt into it.

  On the floor of the crater I felt a little shiver of fear at our isolation. Looking back the way we'd come, though, I could see the tip of the dog's antenna.

  The dust was deeper than I'd seen anyplace else, I guess because the crater walls kept out the wind. Paul took two samples as we walked toward the central peak.

  “You better stay down here, Carmen. I won't be long.” The peak was steep, and he scrambled up it like a monkey. I wanted to yell, “Be careful,” but kept my mouth shut.

  Looking up at him, the sun sinking under the crater's rim, I could see Earth gleaming blue in the ochre sky. How long had it been since I thought of Earth, other than “the place where school is"? I guess I hadn't been here long enough to feel homesickness. Nostalgia for Earth—crowded place with lots of gravity and heat.

  It might be the first time I seriously thought about staying. In five years I'd be twenty-four and Paul would still be in his early thirties. I didn't feel as romantic about him as I had on the ship. But I liked him and he was funny. That would put us way ahead of a lot of marriages I'd observed.

  But then how did I really feel about him? Up there being heroic and competent and, admit it, sexy.

  Turn down the heat, girl. He's only twelve years younger than your father, Probably sterile from radiation, too. I didn't think I wanted children, but it would be nice to have the option.

  Meanwhile, he would be fun to practice with.

  He collected his samples and tossed the bag down. It drifted slowly, rotating, and landed about ten feet away. I was enough of a Martian to be surprised to hear a faint click when it landed, the soles of my boots picking the noise up, conducted through the rock of the crater floor.

  He worked his way down slowly, which was a relief. I was holding the sample bag; he took it and made the hand signal for “turn off your communicator.” I did and he stepped over close enough to touch helmets. His face close enough to kiss. He spoke, and his voice was a faraway whisper. “Can you come sleep with me tonight?”