Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey A. Landis

  She looked at the tiny pressurized cabin. Shit. She couldn’t go back in there. It was just too crowded. Now that she had stretched, she just couldn’t force herself to go back inside.

  She climbed up on the rockhopper and continued up, until she found a place to sit on the very top, her legs straddling around the crew cabin, one leg on either side. There was even a tie-down eyelet that could be used as a handhold.

  “Ryan? I’m staying out here.”

  “Negative. We’re ready to go.” There was a pause, and then he said, “Where are you?”

  She could see him standing below her, looking around in all directions. “Look up,” she said.

  “What?” He looked up at the mountain range, his back to her, rotating his whole body from side to side to scan the slope.

  “No, here,” she called. “Up here on the rockhopper.”

  He swiveled around to look at the rockhopper. “You can’t ride up there!”

  She smiled. “Want to bet I can’t? Think you can get me down? And, anyway, I’m just riding with you for fifteen more miles. If I ride up here, I can just hop off and switch with Estrela; you don’t even have open the hatch. Well, except to let her in.”

  Trevor was already inside, waiting. Ryan stared up at her in silence for a few moments, started to say something, and then stopped. “Well, don’t think we’re going to stop to pick you up if you fall off,” he said at last, and swung around and up into the hatch to the pressurized cabin.

  She knew that he would, in fact, stop for her if he had to; Ryan was not about to lose one of the crew. But she had no intention of falling off. She had won. “Got it, commandant,” she said. “Falling off not allowed.”

  “Damn kids gonna want to ride up there next, I know it,” he muttered.

  As the rockhopper started up, it lurched, and then swayed from one side to the other. “Yikes!” she said.

  The rockhopper stopped abruptly, and she had to grab suddenly to stay seated.

  “You okay up there?”

  “No problem,” she said. “I’m fine. Go ahead.” She kept a solid grip on the handhold this time. Once she got used to the side-to-side swaying and found her balance, it really wasn’t bad. No worse than balancing on skis or a skateboard, and far easier than the time she had tried riding on a camel.

  Now, this is more like it, she thought. Riding across Mars in style. Plenty of room, and the greatest view on the planet. Best seat on the bus.

  “Yahoo!” she shouted. She had made sure to turn her voice-activated microphone off before she shouted, and there was no reply, not even an echo. There should have been an echo, it would have completed the effect.

  “Yahoo!”

  8

  FATHER TOMÉ

  Nobody had told Estrela where she was being taken or tried to explain what was happening, nor did she ask any questions. Estrela already knew that her comfort, health, or opinions were of no interest to those who had her in their custody. She kept alert for a chance to dart away, to disappear into the shadows of the city. But she had been handcuffed—although she’d not been accused of a crime—and there were no clear opportunities. After the brief reprieve, she thought, she would be taken farther away and shot.

  Instead, they put her on an ancient bus, and without explanation she was driven what had seemed like hundreds of kilometers inland. She had huddled in the corner, hissing and baring her teeth when anybody got near her. She had never been inside a motor vehicle before; the experience made her queasy, and if she had not been fairly faint with hunger, she thought that she would certainly have thrown up.

  The School of the Beneficent Jesus of the South was a rude collection of tin-roofed cinder block huts and dirt pathways. She didn’t have any clear image in her mind of what a Father Tomé would look like, but the bald, smiling, roly-poly Anglo man in a faded Ipanema Beach Club T-shirt did not fit any of her expectations.

  “Oh, my,” he said. He looked at the driver, shook his head, and then looked pointedly at the plastic handcuffs.

  The driver’s hands were unexpectedly gentle as he cut the handcuff away from her. “She’s all yours now,” the man said, and went back to his bus.

  She was ready to bolt now, but the wide-open spaces and the mountains disoriented her. She had no idea where the city was, if it was near or far. She had no idea of what was safe, or where she could hide, or what she could eat, or who she could trust.

  Father Tomé smiled at her and held out his hand. In it was something, a little fur-covered purple object that, after she’d stared at it for a minute, she recognized as some sort of an animal, a stuffed animal. A lizard, no, a dinosaur. A purple stuffed dinosaur.

  “Here, my frightened little avocado, this is for you,” he said. “Take it. It’s yours.”

  It looked forlorn in his huge hand.

  She wanted it. She snatched it out of his hand, hugged it to her breast and began to cry.

  “Poor little avocado,” he said. “Welcome to Jesus do Sul. You are safe here.”

  She was turned over to the ministrations of three laughing girls, who were not really much older than she was, although in their self-confidence they seemed to be much older and more experienced. “I am Maria Bonita,” the first one told her. “I am Maria da Glória,” the second girl said. “I am Maria Araujo,” the third one said. “The Father calls us the three Marias,” they said, all three together, and they exchanged glances and nodded solemnly at each other, secure in their identities.

  They stripped her—she fought—and plunged her into hot water—she shrieked and flailed. Then they held her and scrubbed her firmly with huge wooden brushes, and she fought again. Finally they soaked her hair with kerosene. She screwed her eyes shut and held her breath, terrified, waiting for the flare of a match, and when they rubbed the kerosene briskly into her scalp, it felt as if her head was on fire, but a cold fire, chilling and burning at the same time. But the fire did not spread, and all they did was to wash it away again, covering the sharp odor with some bubbly soap that smelled like exotic flowers. Finally they dried her with huge fluffy towels. They gave her back the little stuffed dinosaur, which she clutched to her chest, and then dressed her in pajamas that were two sizes too large. It was the cleanest clothing she’d ever worn.

  She didn’t even know who she was. Not the starved street child. Not anybody she knew. She didn’t know who she was, and there was no point in fighting any more.

  “Why, she’s beautiful,” a voice said. “Father Tomé, your little waif is no avocado at all. She is an orchid, precious and beautiful.”

  She had been called many things in her life, but never beautiful. She peeked out from between her fingers to see who had said it.

  A young man stood next to Father Tomé, a mestico, tall and slender with dark skin and dark eyes and a lion’s mane of dark hair. He was smiling at her with a smile that lit up the very air and set her heart to glowing with an ache like a hunger she could never name. She ventured a smile of her own, tentative and small, and he raised his hand and took a half step backward as if her smile had the force of a sudden gale.

  “I am João,” he said, his voice rich and deep with the familiar street accent of the cariocas. “Ah, my beautiful little orchid, I can see that you will break many, many hearts, but you will never break mine.”

  Wherever he goes, she told herself, I will follow in his shadow.

  Following in João’s footsteps, she discovered, would not be easy. He had himself been a student of the Jesus do Sul. He had excelled in his education and, at age fifteen, had already been accepted at the College of Saint Adelbert, far away in North America, to study for a degree in geology. The Holy Order of Saint Anselm, Father Tomé’s order, was paying his tuition; the School of Jesus do Sul was itself assisting him with the expenses of travel. “The best of my children ever to leave Jesus do Sul,” Father Tomé said. “How could we do otherwise than to help him?” In return, João would return to Brazil every summer and assist with the teaching.

&nbs
p; Father Tomé, she discovered, called all of his wards avocado; she never learned why. He was a communist who talked fiercely of overthrowing the government of Brazil and redistributing the country’s wealth to the poor. What she knew of economics was that the rich people had huge houses and servants and drove around in chauffeured limousines with darkened windows and ate ice cream whenever they felt like it. The poor people had nothing and were invisible.

  She was going to be a rich person, and one day eat ice cream in her own automobile.

  No, Father Tomé told her, that’s wrong, my clever little avocado. You should learn to share.

  No, she told him. She would be rich.

  Father Tomé smiled. “Then you will have to learn. You will have to learn manners, and how to dress, and how to behave nicely, and how to have a nice mouth that does not swear. Sister Isabel will teach you.”

  I will, she promised herself. I will. I will!

  In later days, she rarely saw Father Tomé. There were always too many children in the escola, for Father Tomé could never turn one away, and the escola was as crowded with tossed-together shacks as any favela shantytown. The teacher who assisted most with the street children, the new ones who needed instruction in even the most simple matters of grammar and etiquette, was Sister Isabel. She was four feet tall and at least as wide, quite simply the ugliest woman Estrela had ever seen. Sister Isabel had a boundless patience and a deep love for her charges. “You shall be a little lady,” she told Estrela. “Don’t you want to be beautiful? Don’t you want people to love you? Then you must learn to talk properly.” She had a heart as big as Brazil. Estrela felt safe with sister Isabel.

  And so she found, for a while, a home, and learned to be a lady. She never forgot her brother Gilberto, although much later she would think back on her life before the school and wonder whether, after all, he really had been her brother.

  All things change. In time, Father Tomé was reprimanded for his support of radical politics and left the Catholic church. Sister Isabel left to be married, a fact which astonished Estrela, who had not believed it possible that she could have had any life outside of the school. And Estrela herself, driven by forces that she herself could not name, excelled in her studies and did exactly as she had promised the very first day she met him: followed in the footsteps of João Fernando Conselheiro, north to the United States of America to study geology.

  9

  ROVING ON MARS

  The surface beneath Estrela’s wheels turned from sand to a pea-sized gravel, and then from the gravel to a dark rock. Desert pavement, it was called, a bare rock surface swept clean of the sand overlayer. From time to time the rock was fractured with jagged cracks filled with smaller rubble. None of the fractures were deep enough to be a danger to the rover, but the ride was jarring, and the dirt-rover’s traction on the bare rock was poor.

  The fracture lines ran east and west, making them parallel to the Valles Marineris, invisible over the horizon to the north. Another sign of tectonic stress, she guessed.

  Estrela parked her dirt-rover on a rise and settled back to wait for the others. She looked out across the rocky plain, but didn’t really see it.

  Radkowski was the commander of the mission; he would be the one to make the final decision on who would return. Could she argue that, as a Brazilian, it was her right to return on the Jesus do Sul? It was, after all, a Brazilian ship; would he accept for that argument? Maybe. It would be worth a try.

  It might help him see it her way if she seduced him.

  She saw the dust long before the rockhopper came into view. The trail of disturbed dust hung in the air, winding like a fuzzy yellow worm across the landscape, the rockhopper an iridescent green insect ahead of it.

  Tana, she saw, was perched precariously on top of the rockhopper like a mahout riding an elephant. She jumped down when the rover stopped.

  “The territory’s getting a bit more interesting as we get closer to the Valles,” she said. “Not just the craters and boulders—was that a butte I saw back there? Did you get a chance to take a closer look at it?”

  “Wasn’t doing any sightseeing,” Estrela said. Was Tana blind or stupid? she wondered. Then she thought, no, she just hadn’t figured it out yet. Well, that might be all for the good. If Tana didn’t yet realize that somebody was going to get left behind, Tana wouldn’t be competition when she tried to seduce the commander.

  That was going to be tough. The members of the expedition were crowded together like bugs, and she couldn’t see where they would find any privacy. And the commander had good cock, but kept his pants zipped. She’d seen him eyeing her when she was changing, but he was prudish sometimes, didn’t like to diverge from the rule book. That struck her as odd: He talked like he grew up on the streets, and you’d think that he would know that you had to grab what you can get when you can get it. But he acted like God was watching him at every moment and he’d get blasted by a lightning bolt if he bent the rules a little. But that was the way commanders were, she knew. The ones who bent the rules didn’t get picked to command missions.

  Not like Ryan Martin. Ryan would bend rules. Of course, Ryan wouldn’t ever get promoted to captain.

  But then, the majority of them weren’t going to get promoted to anything but two meters of Martian soil and maybe a cairn of rocks.

  Hell, maybe she should be thinking about seducing Ryan.

  “So, you want the spot on top?” Tana said, breaking in to her thoughts. “Great view.”

  It did look like fun, but Estrela wanted to be inside with the commander. She shook her head, and then, realizing that with all the dust on her visor it was hard for Tana to see her, said, “No.” Then, to justify herself, she said, “Let the kid take it—he’ll enjoy the hell out of it.”

  Tana nodded. “You got that right.”

  10

  JOÃO

  The College of Saint Adelbert was a small but well-regarded college located in a city named Cleveland, in Ohio, in the United States of America—ten thousand kilometers distant from her home. In return for her tuition, Estrela was expected to tutor in the department of languages.

  She found the Americans almost incomprehensible. They spoke too fast, seemed interested in nothing except loud music and expensive clothes, and their slang was bizarre—the first time one of her students said to her, “I’m pooped,” she translated it in her mind and broke out into uncontrolled laughter. The student had been baffled; apparently in American dialect the phrase wasn’t even slightly naughty.

  The study required by the college was almost too easy. She was bright, and the mission school had been strict and rigorous and had punished errors with a firm rap on the knuckles with a stick of bamboo. It was the freedom of the university that was hard for her to adapt to; it was like the blast of some illicit drug. She struggled to keep her goals firmly in mind, to avoid distractions.

  And the college had boys as well, boys who would strut and preen for her, fighting over the chance to sit next to her and simply talk. The college made a token attempt to keep the girls under control, but the rules, she discovered, were openly ignored by the students. She was in a dormitory with two other girls, and they were surprised to find that she had no skill at flirting. Her roommates had to teach her how to enjoy teasing the boys with her presence, or by giving them a carefully casual glimpse of her bare shoulder. When that became boring, they taught her how to take them into her bedroom. It was not long before she had strings of lovers. The sex, to her, was not really the point; what she craved was the attention of their hands, their lips, their eyes on her body.

  It helped, sometimes, to take away the nightmares.

  When she caught up with João, she found him already a graduate instructor. He had op layer a handsome boy. He was dressed in a silk shirt covered over with a black leather vest gleaming with chrome studs and chains.

  She waited until he was leaving a class, and then walked up behind him. “One time,” she said, “you took me up the mountain to see the
stars. The sky over the school, it was very dark. You pointed out to me the glowing clouds, like a distant fire in the sky, and told me that it was a baby galaxy, the Magellanic Clouds, and it was so far away that we were seeing it as it had been thousands of years ago, and that if every star there had burned out, we would not know for a thousand years. Do you remember?”

  João did not turn around. “Yes,” he said. “I remember.”

  I thought you were going to kiss me, she thought. But you didn’t. She didn’t say it.

  “And the mountains,” she said. “You took me into the mountains. You had a hammer, and we looked at rocks. Do you remember that?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I remember that, too.”

  Without warning, she punched him on the upper arm, as hard as she could hit, hard enough to spin him halfway around.

  This time he looked at her.

  She smiled at him, with a smile that she knew had broken the hearts of a hundred other boys. “So,” she said. “How the hell have you been?”

  11

  TANA

  Commander Radkowski didn’t want to push the machines too hard on the first day out, while they were still getting used to the equipment, and so they quit for the night well before the sunset. Commander Radkowski and Estrela inflated the bubble habitat for them to sleep in, while Ryan downloaded the electronic navigation logs of the vehicles.

  “Perfect agreement,” Ryan announced. Each of the vehicles had a separate inertial navigation system, and comparing the three readings was a way to check that all of them were working, even over an extended traverse. “Two hundred ninety kilometers. Not bad for the first day.”

  Tana translated in her head; a hundred seventy-five miles. No, not bad. If they could keep up that rate it would take them twenty days to reach the pole. And they should go faster, once they got used to the feel of driving real equipment, instead of the virtuals they had trained on.