Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey A. Landis

  “Yeah, sure, kid, I’m okay.” She could barely keep her teeth from chattering with the pain. Nothing seemed to be broken, but her left shoulder, where she had thrown her arm out for balance and come down with her full weight on it, felt funny. It felt as if it weren’t part of her body at all, but was a dead weight fastened to her shoulder with nails of fire. It would be a good time to go to sleep right now, she thought. I could take a little nap before Trevor gets here. “Say, kid,” she said. “Better call up the doctor, okay? Maybe she ought to take a look at me. Just for kicks, you know?”

  She was lying on broken rocks and rubble at the base of the embankment. It was surprisingly comfortable. Seems to be entirely igneous rock, she noted. No schist, no slate, no limestone. Some loose fines she couldn’t immediately categorize.

  Trevor’s dirt-rover appeared at the top of the ridge line. He seemed impossibly small and far away. She decided to go to sleep; now that Trevor was here it would be okay to sleep, but when she tried to close her eyes her eyelids hurt, so she decided to go to sleep with her eyes open.

  “Shit! Are you okay? Talk to me! Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” she said. It was rather hard to talk when she wanted to keep her teeth clenched.

  It seemed like hours before the rockhopper showed up—she kept hearing Trevor call to it, although she didn’t really pay much attention to what he was saying.

  The big robotic arm of the rockhopper wasn’t quite long enough to reach down the cliff face and pick her up. It lowered a rope with Ryan and Tana, and the two of them arranged the rope around her. “Not around that arm,” she said. “Ouch! You fuckers, not that arm.”

  With some difficulty, they got a sling around her and lifted her up to the rockhopper. Radkowski was already starting to inflate the bubble habitat.

  “Forget the habitat,” Tana ordered. “Get her in the rockhopper. Now!”

  Inside the pressurized cabin, there was only room for the two of them. It seemed to take forever to get the pressure back up. At last the pressure was high enough for Tana to pull her helmet off. “Stay with me here. Stay awake, stay awake.”

  “Where would I go?” Estrela said, or maybe she just imagined she said it.

  Then Tana started cutting the suit away from her arm, and she was suddenly wide awake again. Her arm was two sizes too large for the suit, and despite the fact that the piezoelectric fabric was fully relaxed, it was as tight around her arm as an athletic bandage. The piezoelectric fibers made the fabric nearly as tough as armor, and Tana had to bring the scalpel up under the fabric and saw at it. The instant that the pressure was released, the arm began to hurt. Estrela bit her lip to keep from whimpering as Tana slowly and carefully sawed it away.

  Tana looked up. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to tough it out,” she said. “I certainly hope we can replace this from the spares we brought. I’m sorry.”

  “No problem,” Estrela whispered, and then she fainted.

  “Damn,” Tana said.

  20

  RETURN TO BRAZIL

  Estrela had intended never to return to Brazil. It was ironic, in its way, that when she did return, it was to become one of the most famous women in the country.

  The nightmares had never truly gone away, but she had forgotten how friendly Brazil was. She had forgotten how bright the colors were, how comfortable it was to hear a babble of conversation in the familiar carioca accent again, she had forgotten the scent of the air, humid and polluted and dense with humanity but still tangy with the sea, and the comforting presence of the mountains backing up the city.

  She had forgotten what it was like to be home.

  And João was selected for the Mars mission.

  She had her friends and her lovers. As long as she was discreet, she could find interludes of enjoyment. João was a little more discreet, now that he was in the public eye, but he found that, as long as the public image was pure, in Brazil, few people cared what he did in private. And, even in Brazil, there were lithe blond men for him to share body heat with.

  João was on television often, darkly handsome and with a rich, liquid voice; Estrela loved to watch him perform for the cameras. She was surprised when the television wanted her on camera as well, and even more surprised that they loved her. While João was away training, and later when he had launched to Mars, beating the Americans by a full two years, the cameras would follow her around, “the beautiful and mysterious Estrela, our luscious national flower.” She has the body of an angel, the tabloids said, and, deeply hidden, a secret core of ice.

  “How can you be so calm, with all the women who make eyes at your husband,” the commentator for Semana Brasil asked, a bubble-headed blond with a voice like a parakeet. “Aren’t you just insanely jealous?”

  “No,” Estrela said, and laughed. “Let them flirt. No woman could ever take my João away from me.” And she had been so calm and certain and beautiful, that everyone in Brazil felt they knew her.

  When they asked her opinions of the geology of Mars, she saw no reason to remind them that she had, in the end, never been more than an average student, graduating with a degree to make her respectable but without the passion for the subject that João had. If the reporters wanted to paint her as an expert in the subject, with a mastery somehow absorbed from her closeness with João, that was their affair.

  And when the expedition failed, when international television broadcast the terrible images of the bodies of the Brazilian astronauts, lying uncovered in the snow a hundred million miles away from their native soil, she became the symbol of Brazil, beautiful and tragic.

  She knew in her heart that João had, in his own way, loved her. Perhaps he had never felt the intense physical ache she had felt for him, but still, he had loved her in a way that none of his silly blond boys could ever know.

  She never cried, but she grieved in her own way, and knew for certain that she would never love again.

  So when the time came for Brazil to send an astronaut on the third expedition to Mars, there was no real disagreement on the choice of who to send.

  PART THREE

  THE CANYON

  With a surface area of 144 million square kilometers, the Red Planet has as much terrain to explore as all the continents and islands of Earth put together. Moreover, the Martian terrain is incredibly varied…

  —Robert Zubrin (1996)

  Beautiful, beautiful. Magnificent desolation.

  —Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr. (1969)

  1

  LEAVING AFRICA

  The glow of sunset lasted far after the sun disappeared. The sky turned a deep, brick red, and the red faded until it was almost invisible. Two stars in the west, a brilliant blue-white one and a smaller one of tarnished silver next to it, were the Earth and the moon.

  And then it was dark.

  For some reason the hazy darkness reminded Radkowski of his last night in Africa. Sunset fell quickly in Africa, not like here on Mars, and on that night Venus has shone brilliant in the west.

  His flying comrades had thrown a going-away party that night. It was partly for him, but more than that, it had been a party for dead comrades who had not returned from the disaster of the last mission.

  They had lit torches, and they glowed like votive candles, forlorn hopes against the hot, sullen night. Two of the fliers had guitars, and they had set up amplifiers and played with an almost palpable violence, trying to cover up the badness of their playing by sheer intensity of sound.

  They partied desperately. They were in a dead-end war, and they knew it. He walked through the party like a dead man, not talking, not acknowledging anyone, numb, his mangled hand hurting. He was already separate from the group. To them, he was already on his way home.

  The party had gone on late into the morning, long after he had left it to collapse in his bunk, too drunk to move, too drunk to care any more.

  The Mars night was, really, nothing like that, except that he was alone, and the night was dark.

&nbs
p; I’m a hundred million miles away from that now, he thought. I have left it all behind.

  But John Radkowski knew that he could never, really, leave it all behind.

  Injured or not, tomorrow they would move on.

  2

  ONWARD

  The dirt-rover that Estrela had been riding had not been badly damaged, and any shop on Earth could have straightened the bent frame, replaced the smashed wheel bearings, and put it back in working condition in a few hours. With neither a machine shop nor parts, though, Ryan said that it was out for the duration.

  They loaded it on the rockhopper to use for spare parts to keep the second dirt-rover running.

  The Mars suits were form-fitting, and once Tana had cut the suit off of Estrela, her arm and ankle had both started to swell. It looked like she was wearing a balloon around her ankle now.

  Estrela’s damage turned out to be a fractured left radius, a dislocated left shoulder, and a mildly sprained ankle. Possibly with torn ligaments, Tana said, although it was hard to tell without X rays. In any case, it was lucky that she had not been hurt worse. Tana worked calmly and quickly, without thinking beyond what needed to be done at the moment; it was what she did best. She immobilized the arm with an inflatable, and while the balloon held it in place, mixed up a liquid polymer to set it in a more durable cast. With the broken bone set, she relocated the shoulder and strapped it to Estrela’s side to keep her from reinjuring it. She wrapped the ankle and instructed Estrela not to put weight on it, and finally, with the acute problems solved, made a more thorough examination. And only then, when she had verified that none of the other minor bruises masked deeper injuries, did she allow herself to think. An idiot, she thought. What the hell had Estrela thought she was doing?

  They had brought along a supply of the piezoelectric fabric, and while they were camped, Ryan spliced a gore of spare material to replace the part of the spacesuit destroyed when Tana had cut it away. It was slow and painstaking work. Each square centimeter of fabric required ten electrical connections to be spliced to the computer that controlled the suit’s tension.

  He worked on it for several hours. “I think that this will do it,” he said at last. He held out the arm of Estrela’s Mars suit, flexing it this way and that and watching the seam with a critical eye. “You might have been a little more careful about slicing this thing—you don’t want to know what this suit material costs per square centimeter.”

  “She’s not going to put on a suit for a while,” Tana said.

  “Better to have it ready now for when she needs it later,” Ryan said. “But next time, peel it away instead of cutting it, okay?”

  It was fortunate, Ryan thought, that Tana had had the presence of mind to insist that Estrela be taken to the rover for treatment, and not put in the bubble habitat. If she had cut away Estrela’s suit in the habitat bubble, they would have had to stay where they were until she could put on her suit again; there was no way to get her out of the bubble with no suit. But in the pressurized cabin of the rover, they could resume their journey as soon as they were ready.

  Ryan was ready to rig up the block and tackle to take the rockhopper down the cliff the next morning, but that turned out not to be necessary. It was not much of a cliff, a minor upthrust fault, more of a step in the ground level than a real obstacle to their travel. Commander Radkowski walked the territory, and then directed the rockhopper along the edge for a little ways to a place where the height was low enough that the rockhopper was able to simply step down, the articulated struts dropping one wheel down at a time. Once on the bottom, he picked up the remaining dirt-rover with the rockhopper’s robotic arm and lifted it down the cliff.

  Commander Radkowski directed Ryan to take the dirt-rover ahead to scout, but cautioned him to stay in direct line of sight of the rockhopper. Trevor, now perched in Tana’s spot on the top, was given the binoculars, and was told to keep scanning ahead for any additional bad terrain, and to radio warnings ahead to Ryan as he saw fit.

  There were several more small cliffs, all of them running east to west, perpendicular to their line of travel. In each case, Trevor was able to spot a place where the wall had slumped, or where a pile of rocks made a natural ramp for the vehicles to continue on. None of these was a significant obstacle.

  As it turned out, the next obstacle was more than just a small escarpment. It was a canyon.

  3

  THE LESSER GRAND CANYON

  Ryan parked ten meters or so back from the edge of the canyon and dismounted to look at it. Trevor jumped off the top of the rockhopper and walked over and past him to look over the edge. “Shit,” Trevor said. “This is incredible.”

  “Stand a little further back, kid,” Ryan said. “We don’t know how stable this edge is.”

  The canyon was so wide that the opposite wall was misty in the distance. The edges were fluted. Looking down, it was a dizzying drop to an incline of broken rock fragments, the talus slope. Ryan Martin got down on his belly and looked over the edge. It was an absolutely vertical drop, maybe two hundred meters straight, before the rubble at the bottom began to slope outward. The wall looked layered, but it was pretty hard to tell from this angle.

  In both directions, the canyon extended out as far as they could see, disappearing in the distance.

  “Wow,” Trevor said. “I never thought that Valles Marineris would be so spectacular. It’s like the Grand Canyon.”

  Ryan looked at him for a moment, and laughed.

  “I don’t get it,” Trevor said. “What’s funny?”

  “You think this one is impressive?” Ryan shook his head. “Kid, we’ve still got a long way yet before we get to the big one. This isn’t the Valles Marineris. Just the appetizer.”

  “Does it have a name?”

  Commander Radkowski had exited the rockhopper and was now standing beside them. “Coprates Catena,” he said. “We’re getting close to the Valles Marineris territory; this is just a groove in the crust that didn’t make it to the big time. It runs about five hundred kilometers, and then it ends.”

  “You want to detour around?” Ryan said.

  Radkowski shook his head. “No, that would probably take at least two days, and we don’t have extra time to spare. And, besides, we might as well get started rappelling. We’re going to be forced to, later, anyway.”

  Trevor looked into the canyon, and shuddered. “You’re joking.” He looked at them. “Tell me you’re joking.”

  But neither of the other two were laughing.

  Ryan went back to the rockhopper to fetch the block and tackle.

  The cable was made of a superfiber material called Spectra 10K. It consisted of a thread of buckminsterfullerine nanotubes woven in a matrix of polyethylene. It was nearly as thin as spiderweb, and despite a coating of fluoropolymer, almost as invisible.

  Fifty kilometers of the superfiber was wound up on a silicon-carbide deployment spool barely larger than Ryan’s fist. Despite its thinness the cable was plenty strong enough to hold the weight of the entire team, and the rockhopper itself.

  Radkowski tested several rock outcroppings at the rim of the canyon, and chose one that was part of the bedrock, or at least something so large that the rockhopper could not move it. The bedrock was a dark, dense basalt, its surface smooth and uncracked. Radkowski drilled an anchor point into the rock, and Ryan fixed a titanium bolt into the hole with an epoxy plug. A second bolt was fixed for redundancy, and then a separate safety line was set with a third and fourth anchor. Radkowski affixed the cables, with Ryan watching over to check his work. When they were done, he called Tana over and made her repeat the checkout as he watched her.

  They were ready to go.

  Getting Estrela out of the rockhopper was a difficult task. Her sprained ankle, taped firmly, could be forced into the Mars suit’s boot, but her arm was still too swollen to slide into the form-fitting sleeve of the Mars suit, even with the piezoelectric fabric fully relaxed. Tana finally solved this problem by taping Estre
la’s left arm firmly to her chest, as if she were cradling her breasts with her arm. They could then shut the chest carapace with her arm inside the shell. Estrela told her that as long as she did not try to inhale too deeply, it felt okay. A balloon patch sealed the opening where the sleeve should have been.

  “That should hold,” Ryan said.

  “You’d better help me, I think,” Estrela said.

  By leaning on Tana at one side, and with Ryan supporting her on the other, they got her out of the rockhopper and moved her over to a shelf of rock where she could watch.

  Radkowski entered the rockhopper, slaved the controls to a remote unit, and then sealed it up.

  “You all know enough not to try to touch the cable with your hands,” Radkowski said. That had been covered in their training, but apparently he wanted to make sure. “If you have to handle it, use the deployment spool, or else use a handling tool. But it would be better just to stay clear.” He looked at each of them, and waited until they nodded. “Good.”

  A take-up reel specifically designed for fullerine superfiber was fixed onto the anchor cable. One control on the reel loosened or tightened a friction brake on the deployment reel. A second control allowed them to spool the fiber up onto the take-up reel at a gear ratio of a thousand. A separate attach-point held their safety line.

  Using the remote, Commander Radkowski inched the rover to the edge of the cliff. The nose of the vehicle dipped, and for a moment he hesitated.

  Then, trailing behind him a fiber as thin and as invisible as a spider’s thread, he drove the rockhopper off the cliff.

  4

  THREAD

  John Radkowski had had experience with superfiber cable nearly ten years before. On the space station, it had been used to dispose of garbage.