Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey A. Landis

  None of the others asked. They were each silent, each immersed in their own private thoughts.

  The shadow of the cliff chased him and caught up with him from behind, and in the sunset twilight he was driving across a landscape of slowly darkening blood. Colors drained away, and then, as the twilight deepened, new colors emerged. Not just the orange and yellow pallet of Mars, but the landscape actually started to seem to have a brightness of its own. Ryan rubbed his visor. The landscape seemed to have a soft glow, so faint that he was unable to tell if it was an illusion, a ghostly glow of neon hues, greens and purples and blues, colors alien to Mars.

  No, he was hallucinating, he must be.

  Estrela spoke. Her voice was hoarse, and he realized that she had not talked once since she had said goodbye to Radkowski. He had thought that she was asleep. “Milagroso,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t you see it too? Look. Just look.”

  The sky was almost completely dark, but the harder he looked, the more it seemed that speckles of the rocks were luminous, tiny dots of color, glowing so faintly that it must surely be an illusion brought on by exhaustion. After a moment of silence, he whispered, “What is it?”

  “Rock fluorescence,” she said, and suddenly he understood.

  “Oh, of course!” With the sun just below the horizon, no direct sunlight illuminated the surface…but the sky scattered sunlight. Rayleigh scattering, he thought: On Earth the scattered sky-light was blue, but with no ozone layer, on Mars the ultraviolet was even stronger, and the sky must be emitting a softly invisible bath of black light. In the near darkness the faint fluorescence of the rocks under the invisible sky-glow was just barely bright enough to see. “Wow,” he said.

  And even as he spoke, the glow of the rocks began to fade. It must only be visible for a few minutes after sunset, he thought, when it grows dark enough for the faint luminescence to be visible, but before the sky-glow disappeared completely. Maybe it was only visible in the depth of the canyon.

  “Unless you are intending to kill us all,” Estrela said, “I think it is time to stop now.”

  18

  FALLING STARS

  They had inflated the bubble in the twilight, but never before in full darkness.

  Tana was too restless to be able to go to sleep; too many thoughts were crowding in her head. She had been crammed inside the rockhopper with the others for hours; she needed to be alone for a while. She hesitated outside the airlock to the bubble.

  It was against all safety regulations for her to stay outside unless at least one other was outside to be her suit-buddy. “It’s been a long day,” Ryan said. His voice was hoarse and sounded weary. “Come inside. We all need the rest.”

  She shook her head, even though she knew that he couldn’t see it inside her helmet. “I’m staying outside,” she said. “Just a little while.”

  “Come on, Tana. You know that you’re not supposed to stay outside alone.”

  “So try and stop me,” she said, and she looked at Ryan with a look so haggard and forlorn that Ryan couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “At least don’t get out of sight of the hobbit bubble,” he said, and she nodded, then turned and walked into the dark.

  The dark. It calmed her to just sit in the dark. She could let her mind go blank. She didn’t have to think. She sat on a boulder, her back to the habitat so it didn’t intrude on her consciousness. It was like a moonless night in the desert in West Texas, or anywhere. The stars were clear and bright; she was surprised how bright they were, barely dimmed by the dust. They were the same familiar constellations, but oddly tilted: Orion lying on his sword, Leo with his lion nose pointing to the ground. She couldn’t find the pole star, and then she suddenly realized that she didn’t even know what the pole star for Mars was, or whether it even had one.

  A meteor flared overhead, a bright streak of green in the sky, and then darkness again. Then a second meteor crossed the sky, in the same westward direction as the first, and a third followed it, this one bright enough to illuminate the landscape with a taint light. A meteor shower, she thought.

  One summer night when she had been six, her grandmother had come into her room and gently shaken her awake. The clock in the kitchen showed two in the morning. They had gone outside, Tana in her pajamas, and her grandmother spread quilts on the grass for them to sit on. Philadelphia spread a ghostly glow on the horizon to the east, and they faced west, toward the darkest part of the sky. “Lie back and watch,” her grandmother had told her. The night air was pleasantly cool against her pajamaed skin, but she wasn’t at all sleepy. She had always been able to wake up at any time and stay awake. In the speckled darkness above her, she saw a flash of light streak across the sky. And another, and then a pack of three traveling together, and then one that streaked across the sky and exploded in a burst of color.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. “What are they?”

  “Folks call them falling stars,” her grandmother told her. “They visit us round about this time every year.”

  “But what are they?” she insisted.

  Her grandmother was silent for a moment. “When I was a little girl,” she said softly, “my grandmother told me that it’s the souls of dead folks, rising up to heaven. When they rise, you see, they go and shed all the sin they’ve been carrying with them, ’cause where they’re going, they don’t need to carry sins around with them no more.” She paused, and another shooting star flashed by, so bright that it lit up the night like fireworks. “Some folks must be carrying around a powerful load of sin, I reckon.”

  That was long ago. With her rational mind, Tana knew that it was a meteor shower; tiny bits of ice and sand whizzing through space, burning up in the tenuous outer reaches of the atmosphere. But somewhere deep inside, she thought, John Radkowski is making his last flight, and he’s leaving behind everything he doesn’t need, peeling it away like a soggy overcoat. I wonder what he was carrying round with him, that makes so much of a show when it burns up.

  Goodbye, John. Goodbye.

  19

  METEORS

  Ryan Martin had inspected the dome and was hesitating outside when a sudden flash of light attracted his attention. Wow, that was an impressive one, he thought. Looks like it almost hit us. And then there was another, and then a third.

  It’s a meteor shower, he thought. No, more than just a shower—this was rally a meteor storm. Streaks of light, yellow, blue. One streaked by and seemed barely over his head, as if it were close enough to touch. Jesus, he thought. Could that one really have been as close as it looked?

  Are we in danger? Are we going to get hit?

  For a moment Ryan was frightened, and then his rational mind whispered, you know better than that. On Earth, meteors burn up in the tenuous fringes of the atmosphere, a hundred kilometers up. A very few of the largest ones may penetrate as low as forty kilometers before being slowed and shattered by the atmosphere. The atmosphere of Mars was thin, but it was not that thin—the meteor shower might look close, but it was still no more than grains of dust burning up tens of kilometers above their heads, a light show of no practical danger to anyone on the surface.

  Meteor showers on Mars have different dates, he thought, different radiants from those on Earth. Who knows the dates of Mars meteor showers? This one probably happens every Mars year at this time, and since Mars is closer to the asteroid belt than Earth, the show is correspondingly more impressive.

  He watched it for a few more minutes—on Earth he’d always loved meteor showers; he marked them on his calendar so he wouldn’t forget to watch—and then went into the habitat.

  20

  ON THE RIDGE

  In the morning the first task was to unpack the dirt-rover from its carrying harness on the rockhopper.

  Trevor, as usual, was the first one awake. He stepped outside the dome. He stopped, astounded. The yellow-red of Mars had vanished. The adobe-yellow sky had vanished, and had been replaced with a do
me of opalescent white. Not one, but three suns were rising into the sky, and around the central sun was an enormous half-circle of light, a red-rimmed halo that just met the twin suns to either side. Even as he watched, the two second suns stretched out into arcs, and a third luminous arc formed above the sun.

  At last Trevor found his voice. “What is it,” he said. “What is it?”

  Ryan stood beside him. Trevor hadn’t noticed him leave the dome. He was silent for a moment, taking in the sight, and then said, “Parhalia.”

  “What?”

  “Ice crystal halos.” He looked at Trevor. “It’s microscopic crystals of ice, suspended at high altitudes in the atmosphere. They reflect light. I’ve heard about it.”

  There were three complete circles in the sky now, and partial arcs of three more. It was geometrically perfect, as if a computer artist had drawn glowing circles across the heavens.

  “This must be an ice haze filling up the canyon, because the canyon bottom is so low,” Ryan said. “Miles below sea level, if you can say Mars has a sea level.”

  “Yikes!” Tana said. She had just emerged from the habitat dome. “That’s incredible.”

  The canyon bottom had seemed flat the previous day, but today they realized that, in fact, they had been traveling parallel to a set of ridges. The light, diffusing through the layer of ice crystals, blurred the shadows, gave the rocky plains a softer, more Earthlike look.

  The ridge nearest them was a bare hundred meters away. While the others were setting up the rockhopper and deflating and packing away the dome, Trevor climbed up to the top of it and looked out across the landscape. From below it had looked like a sand dune, but the surface under his boots was hard and unyielding, rough, more like concrete than sand. From the top, for as far as he could see in either direction, there were dunes, like an endless sea of frozen waves. The walls of the canyon itself were invisible.

  His sense of direction was still acting screwy. He had no idea which way was north, which was south. No matter which way he looked, he could not see the canyon walls. Even from the ridge, the canyon walls were over the horizon.

  Trevor was still trying to sort out his feelings about Commander Radkowski’s death. Radkowski had never cut him the least bit of slack. It was hard for him to grieve too much at Radkowski’s death, but he wondered how bad it had hurt their chances of returning. Ryan had already taken over as mission commander, he guessed—he had been pretty decisive in getting them moved out and away from the canyon wall, when the other two astronauts had been pretty much shocked and useless.

  And, with Radkowski gone, his chances of joining the ride home had noticeably improved.

  The luminous arcs of light in the sky had slowly faded and vanished, burned away by the heat of the rising sun, and now it was just another clear Martian morning. The sky was a dirty yellow, with only a thin tracery of clouds in the east, a pale shade of translucent blue, like gauze. When the sun comes up on lonely peaks, he’s vanished with the wind, Trevor hummed. His throat was a little sore, and he didn’t feel like singing, but he could still hum. With the sighing of the lonely desert wind.

  21

  THE VIEW FROM THE SPACE STATION

  The cupola was the viewing area of the space station, a tiny observation atrium with windows on all sides. When Tana had no other duties, she often drifted there to just look down. It was a place to meditate.

  Tana looked out at the everchanging panorama of the Earth. She was beginning to feel comfortable on the space station now. She was fitting in, running the little medical clinic, participating in experiments. Just as planned, she was getting familiar with space. She wondered if the Mars mission would be like this.

  Tana felt somebody float up behind her. She shifted to make room—the cupola was barely large enough for two—but didn’t turn. “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “Always changing. Always different.”

  Out the cupola, the ocean streamed past below. It was a delicate shade of aqua, a color so bright that it looked artificial. The blue was brushed with the crescent shapes of islands outlined in pale yellow sand and deep green vegetation. It looked so fragile, as if it could be made out of blown crystal, eggshell-thin, that might shatter with a touch.

  “Yes,” the voice came from behind her. “A fractal beauty.”

  It was Ryan Martin’s voice, but she would have known who it was even if she hadn’t recognized the voice. Only the Canadian astronaut would see the beauty in terms of the fractal spatter-pattern of large and small islands, the tiniest islets so small as to be no more than specks of yellow in the yellow-green sea.

  She didn’t recognize any of it. Tana had won an eighth-grade ribbon for her knowledge of geography, but here, where there were no national borders marked, where “north” was not up but could be any direction depending on the space station attitude, she was always lost.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “South Pacific somewhere,” Ryan answered. “Want to know exactly? I could find a laptop with STK.” He turned to swim down into the station.

  “No, no. Pacific—that’s fine.”

  The scenery scrolled past, the aqua of the shallow waters deepening to a rich dark blue, with a wash of thin clouds. She smiled inwardly, knowing that Ryan would probably also be thinking of the cloud patterns as a fractal shape, the graceful pattern of swirls repeated in the smaller bird-feather clouds.

  The Mars crew selections wasn’t yet official, but she knew that Ryan would be the third member of the Mars team. He had just arrived at the space station for a training mission. She was glad he was on the team.

  She had seen him around NASA Johnson, but until they started to train together, she hadn’t recognized him as the young astronaut who had given the talk that had given her the incentive to apply to NASA to be a flight surgeon. Why, without a doubt he was the reason she was here, and he didn’t even know it. She had a sudden wild urge to turn around, tell him thank you, and kiss him. She wondered what he would do.

  She did nothing, of course. It wouldn’t be appropriate.

  22

  SUSPICIONS

  The rope shouldn’t have broken, Tana explained to Estrela, when they stopped for a moment to rest and swap drivers. It was rated for more than a hundred tons of breaking strength; it could have held a truckload of elephants. “I’m thinking that it might not have been an accident.”

  “What are you saying?” Estrela asked. “Of course it was an accident. What else?”

  “Don’t play dumb, you’re not blond,” Tana said. “You’ve figured out that only two of us can be on that rocket back, maybe three, no more. Everybody on the whole team knows it. If there are fewer of us, that’s more chances to get home.”

  “Murder,” Estrela said. She didn’t look at Tana.

  “You have another idea?”

  Estrela nodded slowly. “So you’re saying, we should watch our backs.”

  “You got it.” Tana shook her head. “Trust nobody.”

  Estrela asked, “Not even me?”

  Tana looked at her for a long time, and then shook her head again. “Not even you,” she said.

  23

  CLIFF

  Twice they came across dry riverbeds, with dust-covered bottoms of smooth gray stone that looked like slate. “A good place to look for fossils,” Estrela whispered, but only Trevor wanted to stop.

  And, slowly, the cliffs of the opposite wall grew in the distance, at first no more than a thin ruddy line faintly visible against the horizon, and then a massive presence that came closer and closer, until the stark rocks seemed to be looming over their heads.

  Ryan stopped the rockhopper to inspect the embankment with the binoculars. Like the cliff on the south edge of the canyon, eons of undercutting had given the embankment an extensive talus slope of fragmented boulders at the base. He examined it minutely, trying to determine where the slope was least steep, where it came closest to the top of the vertical face. It was a forbidding prospect; the jumbled slope of loose
, angular rock would be a dangerous climb, and it rose for miles before it met the face of the cliff.

  “Hey, come on,” Trevor said at last. “Can’t I look too?”

  “This isn’t a game,” Ryan snapped, and then instantly regretted it. “Wait, I’m sorry.” He wasn’t getting anywhere, might as well let the kid try. He handed him the binoculars “Here. See if you can find a good way up.”

  Trevor put the binoculars to his faceplate, adjusted the electronic focus, and scanned upward. After a few seconds he stopped. “There,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Right there.” Trevor lowered the binoculars and pointed. “See?”

  Ryan took the binoculars back and looked at where Trevor was pointing. “Where?” He didn’t see anything.

  “Wait, let me guide you. See the big boulder that looks like a thumb?”

  Ryan didn’t see anything that looked like a thumb. He scanned left and right, and then suddenly saw a peach-colored boulder that sat alone, sticking straight up out of the ground. It did look like a thumb, now that Trevor had pointed it out. “Got it.”

  “Okay, go up from there. Up and a little left of that there are two boulders together, almost round? They look like a pair of tits. Okay, now right behind that and a little left you can see a groove. Looks like a stream bed. That’s a natural path up the slope.”

  “Yeah, got it,” Ryan said. “But I don’t see a path.”

  “Give me the binoculars for a moment,” Trevor said, and Ryan handed them to him before he even had a chance to think, Why the hell am I giving these to him?