He piled the last rocks up around the buggy.
Even if they tracked him this far, they wouldn't be able to do it in a single afternoon, stopping here and there as they figured out his path. He smiled. Now he was getting into the spirit of the game, crazy as it was. Maybe that was it: life really was a game and history was the summation of all the little games and big games people had played....
He still had an hour. That was cutting it almost too close.
Now he stood beside the buggy, puffy in his blue suit. He patted the fender. "Faithful steed..." He sealed everything, carefully threw the brown tarp over her, and tied it down with patient attention. Good. Completely wrapped. In a few weeks they would have to come and fetch her. He didn't give a damn about disciplinary procedures—what could they do, take him out and shoot him? With no guns on Mars? He wanted to be able to say the buggy was in good condition.
He had to hurry. He piled some rocks in front of the buggy, on the side facing the entrance to the crater. No use making it too easy for them. To keep Sturgis happy, he had to make at least a pretense of slowing them down at every turn.
At last he picked up the transmitter beacon and clambered carefully uphill, choosing the least dusted rock tops, leaving no footprints. Up the crater wall he climbed, enjoying the exercise and the view of the circular expanse below him. Curious, how nature occasionally produced symmetry in a random universe. In a few minutes, he gained the rim. The buggy, covered by its dusty tarp, was an inconspicuous dot among the crags.
After a last look into the crater, he turned on the rim crest and peered away from the crater, to the southwest. There it was—the smooth expanse that Sturgis had selected from the orbital photos. An unusual expanse of smooth, firm bedrock, with only the thinnest dust cover. Good. Just what they needed. All he had to do was make a surface inspection, pick the best spot, do a little clearing, and send them the coordinates.
He bounced lightly down the rim, selecting a path among the clusters of ejected boulders. Soon he was out on the flats, checking the broad expanse of featureless ground. He examined the area on foot. Good. Firm ground, no boulders, no sinkholes. He unfolded the transmitter beacon.
In the red glow of the slowly sinking sun he climbed atop a massive, fractured rock back on the cinder cone slope. It was a good viewpoint. He laughed to himself, suddenly, as he realized he was posed atop a jutting prominence like some conquering hero.
He didn't feel like a hero. This is the craziest thing you've ever done, said the little voice of his conscience. Still ... The high rock offered a magnificent view as dusk settled in. Long rosy shadows crossed the landscape, and the sky took on the unearthly pearly glow of the high, illuminated dust. It reminded him of the sunsets on Earth the year after the Owens Valley eruption.
He turned slowly, admiring the panorama. Suddenly he caught a glimpse of something moving. He turned quickly, frightened as much by his own surge of adrenaline as by the object itself. It was an object moving low across the northwestern sky. That's not right, he thought. They shouldn't be over there.
As the object exceeded twenty degrees above the horizon and assumed a tiny, lumpy shape, he smiled to himself. It was Phobos, of course. Now he could see two little stars alongside it like satellites of a satellite. Ships. The Phobos shuttle, and perhaps a cargo ship from Earth.
Phobos and its attendants faded in the east as silently as they had come.
Well, it was a nice view, and a nice way to cap a great day, for that matter. But it was not what he came here for. He scanned again toward the south.
Finally he caught sight of another moving light in the sky. High in the sky, this time, and getting brighter. He began to relax.
17
BLACK MOON IN SIX SCENES
Scene One: Somewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy. Time: 4600 million years ago.
Stardust swirled in the dark, spawning a star. It was an average star, yet destined for peculiarity. It was born in one of the ragged spiral arms of an undistinguished galaxy, ten thousand million years after the universe flashed itself into existence.
The star took shape in one of ten thousand black, interstellar clouds— each ten thousand times as big as the present solar system. Like Newton's apple falling to Earth, each grain of grit in this cloud, each psi-wave singing atom of hydrogen and helium, felt itself tugged toward the cloud's ethereal center. So the cloud shrank, spun, and broke into smaller, shrinking clouds, each becoming denser and hotter. Each became a star. A prehistoric Pleiades had formed, one of a thousand star clusters illuminating the arms of the galaxy. The stars orbited lazily around each other like slow-motion bees in a swarm. Eventually, with each star trying to pursue its own trajectory, the stars drifted apart, each to follow its own galactic destiny, sibling birds leaving the nest. They were lost to one another forever. The sun was on its own.
Scene Two: Inside the disk-shaped cloud of debris surrounding the early sun, two astronomical units away from the sun. Time: Fifty million years later.
The solar system aborning was all sky, a sky full of rubble, a sky full of surprises. Like snowflakes clumping together, bits of drifting dust collided and aggregated into clumsy fluff balls. In the earlier days, the fluff balls drifted slowly like snowflakes, and gravity held them together once they hit. They grew to the size of snowballs, breadbaskets, mastodons, houses, skyscrapers, mountains, worldlets.
Now they were bigger and had stronger gravity. They fell together faster. Gentle collisions evolved to explosive crashes. Impacts excavated craters, blasted silent sprays of debris, and gave each object a case of the pox.
Gravel-pile mountains and worldlets grew toward something more significant. The bigger they grew, the faster they grew, so that the largest ones ran away from the pack, emerging suddenly big and important from the swarm of lesser debris, like presidential candidates from a field of anonymous politicians, when their time had come. The bigger the world, the greater its gravitational appetite. The few biggest worlds eventually snared most of the rest, sucking them in, digesting them into mantle and crust. A system of a million worldlets transformed itself to a system of a few genuine planets.
One was Mars, a modest world, not yet red. It had pleasantly gray-tan rocks, a dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide and water vapor, with thick white fogs. New craters were blasted out every day as the remaining meteoroidal debris streaked through the high blue sky, punched through the fog, and exploded on the ground. At Mars' distance from the sun, many of the bodies hitting it contained ice. Molecule by molecule, the iceborne primordial water floated in the air, froze into polar snowfields, or condensed into Nature's rare blessing, rain. When conditions were right—a rarity in the universe—the water gurgled its way down valleys in glittering, frothing, laughing rivers, forming deep Martian lakes with only limited patience.
Scene Three: The orbit of Jupiter, five astronomical units from the sun. Time: Forty million years later.
Jupiter was growing to the largest size of any of the planets. By the time it reached a mass fifteen times that of Earth, its voracious gravity began to trap the very gas from the surrounding nebula. Jupiter became no solid planet with a reliable surface, but a murky, lightning-laced gas giant three hundred times as massive as Earth. It had a malevolent disposition and a potential for violence.
Gestating Jove's neighboring worldlets, those that had not yet been swept up or flung aside were different from the worldlets of the inner solar system. Not for them the inviting warm gray colors of the rocky planets formed in the inner solar system, but velvet black of sooty carbon compounds condensed in the dusty darkness. Though black, they were full of ice and tinted with flecks of red and orange, organic compounds condensed also in the carbon-rich coldness. Tinted or not, they were blacker than the ash-black snow pushed off winter roads in Jersey City. The planet-spawning process of devil-may-care collisions in the night had produced a distant sky full of icy soot balls.
Gravitationally, each planet now reached out for the last remaining worldle
ts in its own orbital domain. Mighty Jupiter, winner of the gravity sweepstakes, was the master. Millions of black icy worldlets, passing nearby, were deflected from their original, comfortable circular orbits around the sun onto new, out-of-kilter orbits. Jupiter's long gravitational broom reached from the asteroid belt halfway to Saturn, and swept black planetesimals skittering across the solar system, like the countless spaceships that would, four thousand million years later, swing by Jupiter, giving happy space engineers a free "gravity assisted" midcourse maneuver.
Many of these icy soot balls were thrown nearly out of the solar system where they wandered for aeons in the exile of the Oort cloud, waiting to return toward the sun one day, when their ices would be warmed and turned to gas, creating diaphanous streamer-tails, and they would be enshrined as comets in the tapestries and equations of the transient creatures of the third planet. Others of them collided with planets and made craters. Still others were swept by Jupiter onto new orbits that took them inward toward the sun, across the orbit of Mars.
Scene Four: Near Mars. Time: A million years later; 4509 million years ago.
Of the millions of black, flying mountains scattered around the solar system by Jupiter, thousands approached Mars. Of those thousands, most escaped Mars' weak gravitational grasp, and sailed on. But a very few were targeted by chance at a critical distance from the planet. Had the miss-distance been a little farther, each would have sailed on to join its errant brothers. Had it been a little less, each would have been dragged down by the friction of Mars' thick primordial atmosphere toward Skylab doom, to break up in the atmosphere or crash on the surface of the new planet— one more crater among the millions. But at the Goldilocks distance, just the right distance from Mars, an asteroid could be slowed just enough by the atmosphere to swing into an orbit around Mars.
Chance giveth and chance taketh away. Of the objects that established themselves in miraculous orbits, most kept feeling the drag of the Martian atmosphere. They spiraled closer and closer to the planet, eventually crashing. But...
This was a critical era in the history of the planets. Radiant winds from the newly formed sun were blowing away the rest of the interplanetary gas. Suddenly (from a cosmic point of view) the infant planets were no longer bathed in a nurturing, nebular placenta of gas. Space around them grew empty. Their own natal atmospheres began to leak away, molecule by molecule, into this surrounding void. Small planets like Mars suffered the greatest indignity; they lacked adequate gravity to slow the rapid escape of their original dense atmospheres.
At this magic moment at the end of planetary formation, one black asteroid found itself destined for a special history. It plunged into the extended but thinning Martian atmospheric envelope. Like many of its brothers who had come this way, it was laced with cracks, having already suffered countless meteorite collisions in the asteroid belt. Like many of them, it broke into pieces due to tidal forces and the stresses of deceleration as it encountered Mars' atmosphere. The smaller pieces were the most affected by drag: they spiraled inward and crashed in a celestial fireworks display. But the two largest fragments had a different fate. Like their siblings, they had begun the inexorable inward spiral, but the thin air around them was dissipating too fast. After some centuries their rate of inward spiraling came to a halt. They were hung up, as it were, in orbit. Mars now had two moons. They were scrappy tiny moons, as moons go; flying islands. Deimos, which ended up in a relatively distant orbit, was a lumpy potato only eleven by fifteen kilometers across. Phobos, stranded in a closer orbit, was a larger potato of nineteen by twenty-seven kilometers.
No more moons could be captured. Mars' outer atmosphere was now too thin.
Scene Five: Earth. Time: 4509 million years later, in the golden age when all things seemed possible, before World War I.
On Earth, more or less as induced in the gospel according to Darwin, life had evolved to the level of intelligence where people could settle arguments with guns instead of stones. On Mars, microbial life remained more peaceful but less interesting. Long ago, Mars' atmosphere had lost most of its water, and the day of the last rains had come and gone. Like iron garden tools left to dry in the sun, the iron-bearing rocks had rusted; Mars had become the Red Planet.
In the late 1800s, the American astronomer Percival Lowell concluded that life had evolved on Mars and had produced civilizations even greater than that of France. France had tried and failed to construct the Panama Canal, whereas the Martians had constructed a whole system of desertspanning canals to irrigate their otherwise dry and barren planet. Fine, cobwebby lines crisscrossed the whole planet, according to Lowell and many astronomers. Single-minded as a spider, Lowell built his own observatory to map them and spun a whole theory from the web of lines that he created. Mars was drying up, don't you see, turning into the desert that would shame the Sahara; and the Martians built their canals to bring water from the melting polar ice caps to cities of the warm, habitable, but dry equator.
Unfortunately, Lowell's pen was mightier than his telescope. His eye/brain equipment was peculiarly inclined to perceive fine straight lines where Nature had placed only streaky splotches. His canals turned out to be the streaky, dusty deposits that prevailing winds left in the Martian desert, only a bit less illusory than other beckoning chimeras of the desert.
Fired by Victorian Mars enthusiasms, another American astronomer, Asaph Hall, set out with less poetic vision but a more mundane mind to search for moons around the Red Planet. During the same golden age, when astronomy could still be done from observatories in cities, Asaph Hall sought Martian moons at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. The two mini-moons of Mars were so small and so black that Asaph Hall failed to see them, even though he searched night after night with a great telescope, during Mars' close approach to Earth in the summer of 1877. Discouraged, he was about to give up. His wife encouraged him to press on. He went back to the dome and found them. He named them after the two mythological horses that drew the chariot of the war god Mars. Phobos and Deimos: Fear and Terror.
A century later, when a spindly, human-built, camera-bearing probe, Mariner 9, first mapped these moons, the largest crater on Phobos was given, during an academic's scramble to respond to feminist philosophies, Mrs. Hall's maiden name: Stickney.
Mars' two demonic moons, errant carbonaceous asteroids, were destined to attract both men and women. Chock-full of water, vitamins, and minerals, they became prime bits of attractive real estate on the path to Mars. The Viking orbiters and the Phobos-2 orbiter, sent from Earth during the era when America and the Soviet Union were working to resolve their mutual testosterone complexes seeing who had the biggest rocket booster, hung around for a while, courting both Phobos and Deimos with their cameras, but never got up the nerve to touch them. Later robotic probes landed on them, danced on their mini-gravity surfaces, and pursued ecstatic intercourse by means of various obscene probes. The first manned expeditions began to coax forth buried moisture and used Phobos as a supply cache outside the gravity well. Eventually they emplaced their own permanent orbital station. With the giant international Phobos/Mars expedition of 2010, scholars and scientists arrived en masse to stay for many months, and Phobos University was born: the first permanent habitation outside the Earth-moon system.
Scene Six: The shuttle to Phobos University. Time: 2031, February 55, Friday.
What struck Annie Pohaku was that everyone here treated the flight as routine, these people who lived far from Earth. How could such a thing be routine, flying between worlds where humans had lived for only a generation? Had it been like this when her ancestors, the first Polynesians—there was Hawaiian blood on her grandmother's side—arrived in the Hawaiian archipelago two thousand years ago, and shuttled from one island to another in their tough double-hulled boats? She imagined the terror with which she would face a canoe crossing from Maui to the Big Island, not to mention sailing all the way from Hawaii to Tahiti on an ocean as empty as space.
And now she was ge
tting used to flying at five kilometers per second in an aluminum can. What's worse, everyone was getting used to it.
As a writer, Annie liked to watch the people on the flight. She noticed that of the few who carried old-fashioned books, no one opened to the middle of a story in progress. They strapped into their cocoons, and opened their books to page one. Books were not part of their lives, but merely entertainments for flights. And most of the passengers from Mars City were not reading at all. They were young—the engineers who ran things and even a few students from the University. She watched them punch up the credit numbers on their screens, and call up the latest action VRs. With blank and passive expressions, they disappeared into VR cyberspace.
It depressed her. That's something she liked about both Carter and Philippe. They seemed to have lives that reached beyond electronics.
She had debated catching the Phobos shuttle. But something had to be done. The thread she had been following into the desert had ended. It had been cut, and she needed to find the matching end, lying somewhere in the future. The next part of the story, she was sure, would begin with Carter. Carter, she found out, had flown off to Phobos the day before, without saying anything to Philippe or herself. Why hadn't he talked to her first? That's the way he is, Philippe said. He doesn't tell you much. Just goes off to work.
He intrigued her. She knew she had hurt him, being with Philippe. Philippe, supposedly sensitive, yet who had seemed at some level oblivious to what was happening among the three of them.
They'll find Stafford's body someday, Philippe had said. That was the theory that everyone seemed primed to accept: that Stafford had wandered off and gotten into trouble, somewhere in that landscape. Yet no one—not even Braddock's subsequent search party that had brought back the buggy—had been able to find a trace of him. So Philippe had gone back to his own work. Until Carter needs me again, he said. "It's not that I don't care," he had added sadly; "sometimes you just have to work, to let your good karma begin to build again." She smiled to herself: Philippe and his ceaseless internal life.
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