Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey A. Landis

  Three of them in the cabin of a Mars rover designed for two was one too many. They were crammed together so tight that Trevor could barely move without hitting one of the others with his elbow.

  After a while watching Mars was almost hypnotic. It didn’t really change. One ridge of yellowish stone would dwindle down to a wall no higher than his waist and then disappear, and be replaced by another just like it. When they got closer to a ridge, he saw that the surfaces were smooth, blasted by millennia of sand to a soft, pillowed surface.

  The sky was a sheet of hammered bronze.

  “That one looks like a bear,” he said.

  No one answered him. It was a boulder the size of a small house, half-buried in the sand, with a rough, dark gray surface, almost black. A chunk of lava that had been thrown out by one of the enormous volcanoes? Trevor wished that he had paid more attention in training to the geologists. When they had gone out on the training field trip to El Paso, the geologists had been ecstatic to point out minute details of the shapes and textures of the rocks they saw, but Trevor had forgotten most of it.

  It did look like a bear, crouching with its head turned away.

  Trevor hummed, softly so as not to attract unwelcome attention from the others. It was too cramped to tap his feet, but he cracked the joints in his toes to the beat of the music in his head. The rockhopper’s wheels bumping over Martian rocks set up a syncopated percussion line, and inside his head, Negative Ions accompanied it with a stomp soundtrack:

  —though no voyage has an ending,

  though the winds forbid returning,

  still our path is ever onward,

  even yet we’re on our journey.

  4

  COMPARISONS

  It was all his fault.

  John Radkowski thought about his brother like a dog worrying at a wound, knowing that it hurts, but unable to keep from chewing at it.

  Karl had been a hero, not him. In the moment of truth, he had failed to speak up. He had run.

  And now, he had not run far enough. The expedition was failing; his leadership was failing, and it was all his fault.

  It was his fault.

  His fault.

  To the others in the crew, the expedition to Mars was the fulfillment of a dream. From childhood they had wanted to see the small blue planet dwindle to no more than one bright star among a million others, and know that they were on their way, part of something larger than themselves, the expansion of humanity into the cosmos.

  John Radkowski had not looked at the stars. His brother Karl had told him what to do: Get out of the projects, get away from the gangs, go as far away from here as you can get and don’t ever look back.

  To John Radkowski, leading the expedition to Mars was nothing more than following his brother’s instructions. And, driving across the desolation, he had only one thought:

  What would Karl do?

  5

  THE CALCULUS OF SACRIFICE

  Estrela drove her dirt-rover as far and as fast as she could. She barely paid any attention to the scenery, and she had turned her radio to the “emergency only” setting, where only a priority-one page would beep through to her.

  Estrela had some thinking to do.

  When Ryan Martin had proposed his plan, she had instantly noticed the huge and disturbing fact that Ryan failed to present to the rest of the crew. She knew the Jesus do Sul very well. She, more than anybody else, knew that at its heart Brazil was still a poor country, and that the mission had no luxuries, nothing extra—not even the capability to return more than few grams of Martian dust.

  The margin that Ryan Martin had been counting on did not exist.

  The Brazilian Mars mission hadn’t been designed to carry samples back. Perhaps once, in the optimistic days when first the mission had been designed, the sample return had been real. But by the time that Jesus do Sul was being built, Brazil was in the slow process of national bankruptcy. There was no money for extras. Jesus do Sul was, first and foremost, a public-relations mission, designed to show off the expertise of an insolvent nation in a desperate attempt to attract investors from outside, richer nations. The well-publicized two hundred kilograms of rocks to be returned, the weight that Ryan had counted on leaving behind, was a carefully crafted fiction.

  The Brazilian ship had not been designed to carry back even one kilogram of rocks. João had explained it all to her one evening, slowly and patiently. With any extra payload it would fail to get into orbit. The Brazilians had sent an expedition of two; they could return an expedition of two. Two astronauts, and not a kilogram more, was what their return ship was capable of launching home.

  She had remained silent. If Ryan Martin did not mention to the crew that his plan could, at best, only save two of them, why should she?

  The fact that he had left it out frightened her as much as anything else. It showed that he knew that their situation was desperate, and that in his opinion sacrificing some members of the crew would be an improvement on their current situation. He was afraid that the crew would panic if they knew. At that moment, she knew that they must be very close to death.

  Could it possibly be that he didn’t know? The specifications of the Jesus do Sul were not public knowledge. Could he possibly believe that they could cram five people into a ship that had been designed for two? It seemed unlikely.

  Estrela turned her head to take a sip from the nipple of the drinking bottle. The suits had not been designed for long-term use; until she took her helmet off, the electrolyte-replacement drink would be the only nourishment she’d get. She reminded herself not to suck too much; it would have to last. But the thought only made her thirstier.

  The alternative was slightly more sinister. Suppose that Ryan Martin did know that only two of them could return to Earth. Could he have a reason to keep this fact secret?

  Clearly, he intended to be one of those persons.

  A trek to the north pole would be an ambitious traverse even for a fully functional, well-planned mission. It would take the skills of the full team of five to make it. Once they got to the north pole, though, three of the five must somehow be persuaded to remain on Mars. The easiest way to do that would be to make sure that three of them were already dead.

  She knew what it was like to have to kill for her life. When it comes to a matter of life or death, anybody would learn to lie and to kill.

  Any way she looked at it, Ryan Martin looked to her like a killer.

  6

  A CHILDHOOD IN RIO

  Whenever anybody would ask her where she came from, Estrela Carolina Conselheiro would tell them she was from Ipanema. “I’m the girl from Ipanema,” she said, tossing her head and smiling. “Just like in the song.”

  It was a lie. She was from Rio, yes, but although the mother she could barely remember had given birth to her no more than ten kilometers from the chic restaurants and boutiques of the Visconde de Piraja, Ipanema might as well have been farther away than the moon.

  Most of her history was a lie. She had not grown up sheltered, staying out of public schools with a private tutor. Her parents, she said, had been an artist and a successful businesswoman who had been killed in the earthquake and fire of 2009, the same fire that destroyed her birth records. It was quite plausible. Earthquakes are so uncommon in Brazil that the 2009 earthquake, catching Rio completely unprepared, had devastated a large portion of the city, including many records. It was also completely untrue.

  She had grown up on the streets. She had her virginity taken away by age seven, and seen her first man killed with a knife at age nine. All she knew about the beaches of Ipanema was that, if you were caught shoplifting there, after they shot you they would take your body up to Madureira to dump it, so as not to frighten the tourists away.

  Her brother Gilberto had taught her how to read. He had been all the family she ever had. “You have to learn to read, Estrela,” he had told her. “Then, one day, when you’ve become rich, we’ll kill them all.” His smile gleamed in t
he dim light. He had been completely serious.

  But there was no way they would ever become rich.

  They survived by stealing, begging, selling drugs for the gangs when they could, and going through garbage when there was nothing to steal and nothing to beg and no European tourists to sell drugs to. When there was no garbage, they ate nothing. Gilberto would offer to sell her body when he thought he could find a taker who would pay for the thrill of sex with a girl not yet even close to puberty, but most of the customers he offered her to would only curl up their lips in disdain. There was little market for a whore that was starved and dirty and probably diseased.

  That life ended when she was eleven.

  It had been a warm night, and a full moon shone down on the alleys. She slept huddled up against Gilberto, for the little comfort it gave her rather than for warmth.

  Gilberto was flatlined. He had stolen a quarter of a liter of gasoline and had spent the evening with his head in a bag, inhaling the fumes. Once he passed it over to her, and she had tried it as well, sticking her head into the bag and taking a big inhalation from the gas-soaked rag, but she had gone reeling back, her head singing from the fumes, her nose suddenly feeling as if cockroaches had crawled inside her nostrils and were clawing around somewhere above her mouth. Gilberto watched her and laughed, his eyes red and swollen from the fumes.

  Now he was asleep, fallen over on his back with his mouth wide open, not even hidden away in a doorway. His instincts, his secret antennae that sensed trouble before it showed itself, his secret sense that had kept them both alive, had failed him, blotted away by gasoline fumes.

  The policemen were not quiet. They came down the alley with flashlights so bright that they hurt her eyes, swinging their rifles like clubs. She tugged at Gilberto’s arm frantically, and at last he moved. He looked up, his eyes out of focus and leaking a gummy fluid, said “Huh,” and then threw up a thin stream of watery yellow.

  It would not have mattered even if they had run. The police had blockaded both ends of the alley. She couldn’t see the faces of the policemen; they were wearing riot helmets with darkened bulletproof visors lowered down over their eyes. One grabbed her arm and pulled her to her feet, than shoved her down the alley. She staggered and ran, and another policeman hit her with a rifle-butt and knocked her down again. Guided by blows from the butts of guns, she and Gilberto were herded down the alley until they were crowded together with a dozen other street urchins, ranging in age from four to almost fifteen.

  She knew almost all of them, the children who lived on the streets. When they had extra, they would share it with her, and she with them. The had no loyalty and no love, but they were as close a thing to friends as she had ever known.

  No one talked to her, no one ventured a reason for the roundup, nor did she expect to hear one. Perhaps a policeman had been killed up in one of the favelas, and they were exacting revenge. Perhaps a merchant had complained of shoplifting, or of shit bespoiling the street, and the police had decided to clean out the human vermin. Maybe there was no reason. Street children in Rio did not expect to live very long.

  She was kicked, and then picked up and tossed against the brick wall. She looked up, stunned and bleeding. She knew this place. It was an empty lot where a building had been torn down two years earlier. They had slept there for several weeks, until the people who owned it has seen fit to send guards around to kick them out. Was that it? Were they still mad that they had had squatters? Where was Gilberto? She couldn’t see him.

  Somewhere in the darkness, one of the policemen shoved a cassette of the Rolling Stones into a portable stereo tape player and turned up the volume. It was cheap stereo, and the distortion turned the lyrics of “Under My Thumb” into an angry, shouted manifesto.

  The flash of the first rifle was like a brief strobe light; the report punctuating the distorted base line of the music.

  The policemen had moved back. They formed a line, dark silhouettes with rifles raised, laughing and smoking American cigarettes and shooting children. One at a time the rifles flashed, and at each shot, another of the children jerked and died.

  She would be next. She huddled over, whimpering. The humidity of the night was suddenly oppressive, like a weight pressing down on her chest. She wished Gilberto was next to her.

  And then suddenly there was bright light, not just flashlights, but the burning glare of searchlights. Someone kicked the tape player, and in the sudden silence the cut-off guitar chord echoed off the buildings. Then there was the amplified booming of voices too loud to comprehend. “DROP YOUR WEAPONS. YOU ARE SURROUNDED. DROP YOUR WEAPONS AND RAISE YOUR HANDS.”

  “Gilberto!” she shouted. In the harsh blue illumination of the searchlights, the bodies of the street children looked like no more than piles of empty clothes, heaped helter-skelter in a puddle of blackness that slowly seeped away toward the gutter. She ran to it; frantic, searching the faces.

  Gilberto was not there. No, there. There was the dark red shirt, torn at the sleeves, the shirt he had worn, and those were his pants, but where was Gilberto? Surely that could not be him. She ran to the body inside Gilberto’s clothes, but it was too small. Surely Gilberto couldn’t have been this small, barely more than a mannequin made out of sticks. The body couldn’t have weighed more than twenty kilos. She looked into its face, and Gilberto’s eyes, bloodshot from gasoline fumes, stared back at her out of a lifeless body. But it couldn’t be Gilberto, Gilberto was too clever, Gilberto had escaped, he always escaped.

  Then they dragged her away.

  She didn’t cry; long ago Gilberto had told her never to cry, never to show emotion, never show weakness. No one looked at her, no one comforted her, no one even treated her as a human being. She didn’t expect it.

  “Thieves,” one of the policemen said. “Beggars, drug dealers, and whores. Who cares about them?”

  “The death squads make us look bad, you know that,” his companion told him. “It’s the foreign journalists.”

  “Yeah, but why couldn’t we have waited until they finished shooting before coining in to arrest them? Or we should sell ’em for their organs. I hear that the North Americans pay a thousand dollars per kidney.” He looked down at Estrela, a look like a hawk examining a mouse in its claws. “You figure that’s right?”

  “How should I know? But you better not try to sell this one; the lieutenant saw her rounded up alive.”

  The first policeman snorted. “What, you think I’d dirty my hands?” He spat on the ground in front of Estrela’s feet. “So what do we do with her?”

  “What do you think? She goes to Father Tomé.” The second one shrugged. “He takes in all the filth of the city. One more, to him, it’s nothing.”

  And so, in one night, her life on the streets of Rio ended. Estrela the street urchin of Rio vanished silently away, and a new Estrela, a person she had never imagined that it was possible to become, was born.

  7

  RIDING THE ROCKHOPPER

  Tana was excited.

  The desire to explore is a disease, and for all that Tanisha Jackson had been struck by it later than most, she had been still been hit hard. Driving the rockhopper across the sands of Mars was, to her, the fulfillment of her wildest imaginings. Everything about it was exciting. The color of the shadows, the patina of cementation on the soil, the very shapes of the rocks told her she was not on Earth. Every mile they drove she saw something new.

  After two hours of driving, Radkowski called for a stop to give them a chance to stretch. Two hours was long enough inside a tiny pressurized cabin meant for a crew of only two, and they all needed some relief, a chance to stretch, to walk around a little, to give their stiff muscles a chance to relax.

  Ryan Martin, on one of the dirt-rovers, pulled in next to them and dismounted. His suit was filthy, spattered from head to foot with a coating of dust. “All yours, Commander,” he said. “I’d hand you the keys, but I seem to have misplaced them. Guess you’ll have to hotwire it.”


  He turned the dirt-rover over to Radkowski, who would take the next shift on forward scouting, and Radkowski in turn gave him command of the rockhopper and wobbled away slowly on the dirt-rover for a test drive.

  “How is it out there?” Tana asked.

  “Wild and desolate,” he said. “But in its own way, beautiful.” Through his visor, she could see him shaking his head. “No place to raise children, though.”

  That was an odd thing to say, she thought. Ryan had never expressed any interest in children. He was widely known as a confirmed bachelor. The girls had privately tagged him the heartbreaker of Houston; he was interested enough in the opposite sex, sure, but just for the night. He just didn’t seem to have intentions of settling down with one woman.

  Tana was scheduled to take over from Estrela on the second dirt-rover, but Estrela was nowhere around. Ryan said that she had called in, saying that she was twenty kilometers ahead and didn’t see any point in backtracking to meet them; she would wait for them, and they could change drivers when they caught up.

  So she would have to get back in the rockhopper. Fine. That was just like Estrela, thoughtless and self-centered. But she didn’t have to get in just yet.

  “I’m going to look around,” she told Ryan.

  “Fine, as long as you don’t go far away from the rover,” he said. “It’s a fifteen-minute stop, no more.”

  “Got it, boss,” she said.

  They weren’t far from the ridge. Although it was covered with loose rocks, it looked like it would be easy enough to climb, but she knew she wouldn’t have time. It was basic basin-and-range territory; she knew that from the geology field trips in Nevada and Texas that had prepared them for what they would see on Mars. Not a good place to look for signs of fossil life. Still, she examined three rocks that looked like they had signs of carbonate globules, and cracked one open to inspect the cross section. The call to return to the cabin came all too soon.