Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey A. Landis

  “But what is it?” Ryan repeated. “Is it a fossil, or not?”

  “Truthful? I don’t know.” Estrela shrugged, and even through the helmet, he could see from her expression that the gesture must have been painful. “The only way to tell would be to see if there are more.”

  Ryan shook his head. “We can’t. Time.” He looked at the others and repeated, “Really, we can’t. We’re spending too long as it is. You know how tight our supplies are; we’ve been almost ten days on the road so far, and we aren’t even a third of the way to the waypoint. Trevor may have found a fossil, but—”

  They like me, Brandon thought. It was now or never. He interrupted. “Say,” he said, hesitantly. “Commander Ryan? I was, like, wondering. Would you do something? Like, a favor, you know?”

  “Of course, Trevor,” Tana said, without thinking. “Anything. You name it.”

  Ryan was slightly slower in replying. “I suppose that depends what, Trevor,” he said.

  There was a big lump in his throat, he could barely squeak out his name. “Brandon,” he said.

  “What?”

  He took a deep breath. The air was cold, dry, metallic. “Brandon, not Trevor. Call me Brandon, okay?”

  “Brandon? But your name’s Trevor. Isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure, my name is Trevor. Yeah. But Brandon is, like, a nickname, okay? I like it better. So could you call me Brandon?” He looked down and kicked a rock. It sailed off down the slope, bounced twice, and skidded downward in a tiny avalanche of dust.

  Tana looked at Ryan. Ryan gave a minute shrug. “Sure, why not? From now on, you’re Brandon.” He looked around at them. “But we still have to get everybody up this cliff, anchor some cables, and get the rockhopper winched up. And it’s halfway into the afternoon, and we don’t have much time.

  “So, let’s get moving now, shall we?”

  2

  DIRECTIONS

  Brandon Weber had an absolute sense of direction. He never questioned it, never thought about it, but no matter where they were, or how many twisty turns they had made in the wilderness, his built-in compass always knew which way was north.

  He never bothered to think how extraordinary this was. After all, his brother Trevor had it too.

  One time in high school he, along with a bunch of his high school buddies, had decided to go explore a cave. They weren’t organized or anything—Rip, one of his friends, had heard from another friend about a cave that somebody had found over in New Mexico. Kaipo, another one of his friends, had a car, and they drove out to explore it before the authorities found out about it and closed it up.

  When he was younger, Brandon had often gone out exploring and rock climbing with his brother Trevor, but Trevor was a junior in high school now, and was busy being too cool to hang around much with his little brother. Brandon didn’t even invite him on this one. He’d tell Trevor about it later. This would be an adventure for him.

  It was an awesome and claustrophobic experience. The mouth, hidden behind boulders on the side of a cliff, was an irregular hole barely large enough to wriggle through. It opened out into a large chamber. Just enough sunlight came in through the narrow opening to show that the floor held the charred logs of burned-out campfires and the shards of several dozen beer bottles. “Hey, we should have brought some beer,” Rip said. Shining their flashlights up, they saw the rock walls were covered with spray-painted names and dates. The oldest, “Dave” and “QT,” were written in charcoal. Dave and QT, whoever they were, must have been the first to discoverer the cave. At least their signatures, dated 2015, ten years ago, were the earliest dates on the wall.

  Out of five of them, two had refused to venture any further into the cave than the distance that they could see the light from the mouth. The remaining three Brandon, Rip, and Kaipo—squeezed through a vertical cleft between two boulders at the back and into the real darkness. Only a few names were painted here, in smaller letters. In twenty feet, the passage had turned enough times that, with their flashlights off, it was pitch dark. “A maze of twisty, narrow passages, all alike,” Kaipo said.

  It would have been smart of them to have brought a GPS, or even a compass, but they had not originally intended to go far into the cave. But none of the three of them wanted to be the one who suggested turning back. Instead, at each branching they marked their path on the walls with a piece of chalk that Rip had had the foresight to bring.

  Carlsbad was only a hundred miles or so further on; they had all hoped that the unnamed cave they were exploring might have wonders to rival its vast chambers and arching pillars. But this one seemed to be a labyrinth of rough passages, branching and winding in all directions, only rarely opening into cramped, dome-ceilinged rooms. Sometimes they had to crawl on their bellies, and they never quite dared to stand fully upright. But when one passage came to a blind end, they always found a branch that went on, that might go on to open out into some large chamber just ahead.

  After several hours, Kaipo admitted what they had all been thinking: That’s enough. Their flashlight beams were growing yellow, and by unspoken agreement they were already beginning to conserve, never shining more than one light at a time. They had better get back while they still had enough light in them to pick out the chalk marks. Rip quickly agreed, and the two of them turned and shone their flashlights back the way they’d come.

  “Hey, why are you going that way?” Brandon had asked.

  “The chalk marks, you dimwit,” Kaipo said.

  “But—” He started to point, and then suddenly realized that it was senseless for him to point when none of them were shining their flashlights in his direction. “The entrance is just a little way over here,” he concluded.

  “No way,” Kaipo said. “We’re miles away from the entrance by now.”

  “You’re lost, Brandon,” Rip said.

  “The hell I am.”

  In the end, he convinced them to follow him a little way farther, probably for no other reason than that they wanted to gloat over him when he failed to get to the entrance. A hundred feet farther, they came into the chamber with the graffiti.

  It had seemed no big deal to him. Over several hours, and several miles underground, through twisting passages, Brandon had always known unerringly where he was. On the surface of the Earth, for his entire seventeen years of life, Brandon’s sense of direction had never failed him, not even for a moment.

  That was why Mars was such a shock.

  3

  AT THE TOP

  In fact, it had taken longer than expected to climb the cliff. Once at the top, it was their task to raise the rockhopper up, but the winching operation was slow and painstaking, and the sun touched the horizon with the rock-hopper less than halfway up. Rather than risk damaging it against an unseen protuberance, Ryan called a halt.

  “Can we just leave it there, dangling like that?” Brandon asked.

  “Sure, it’ll be fine,” Ryan said.

  Brandon was still dubious. “What if the wind picks up over the night?”

  “At this atmospheric pressure? Don’t worry about it. It would take a hurricane just to get it to budge.”

  “What about earthquakes?”

  Ryan laughed. “It will be fine, Trevor. Don’t worry.”

  “Brandon,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah. Right. I forgot. It will be fine, Brandon. Just fine. Don’t worry.”

  As usual, in the morning Brandon was the first one up, and started the day by suiting up and walking around the campsite while the others were still getting up. This time Ryan didn’t even bother to remind him not to forget the suit checklist, and so Brandon was the first one to look down. The rover was covered by a fine white fuzz. He looked down at it in horror, for a moment too startled to speak. Then he keyed on his radio. “Ryan, come quick,” he called. “The rockhopper—it’s covered with mold!”

  Ryan was checking the winch.

  The rockhopper was easy to spot; it gleamed brilliantly white, almost bloody in t
he red morning sunlight. Fine, fuzzy tendrils seemed to grow out of it and reach up the invisible line of the superfiber cable. Ryan walked cautiously to the cliff edge and looked down. For a moment Ryan seemed disconcerted. Then he laughed. He went back to the winch.

  “Well?” Brandon said. “What is it?”

  “Frost,” Ryan said. “Only frost. No big deal.”

  “Frost?” Brandon sounded doubtful. “Frost on Mars?”

  Ryan spoke us he continued checking the winch. “The rover cooled down more than the rocks. Lower heat capacity. Suspended in the air—I expect it reached minus one-fifty, easy. Water condensed out on it. That’s all.”

  “But I thought Mars was dry.”

  “Yep, it’s pretty dry,” Ryan agreed. “But there’s still a little water in the atmosphere. More at lower altitudes. No surprise that it would condense on the rover.”

  By the time they had winched it to the top of the cliff, the frost had sublimed away from the rockhopper. The frost bath had failed to clean it, though; it was still coated with a layer of yellowish dust.

  They headed north and west. The ground they drove across was rocky, with a fine soil packing all the cracks and packed into the angles between rocks. Brandon saw Tana, driving the dirt-rover ahead, fighting to keep the dirt-rover under control on the smooth rock.

  In the cabin of the rockhopper they still wore the chest-carapaces of their suits, but they all had their helmets and gloves off. It was beginning to smell rank, like the inside of a gym locker; they spent too much time in their suits.

  Brandon clutched his fossil, rubbing the tips of his fingers over the smooth stone. Back at the bottom of the cliffs, Estrela had given him her rock hammer. Commander Ryan had complained that they didn’t have time to collect specimens, but if Ryan had found it himself, Brandon expected that he would have found the time. So while they had worked on setting up the winch, Brandon had carefully chipped it out of the rock to bring with them.

  With his bare fingers, he could feel a lot more. It had fine, almost invisible ripples on the surface, like the pebbly skin of a lizard. It was relaxing to rub it.

  Estrela was being quiet. She hadn’t been talking much since the accident, Brandon realized. She held her left arm awkwardly, bracing it with her right. He wondered if her arm still hurt.

  “Hey, Estrela,” Brandon said. “How you doing?”

  She turned to him. Her eyes had red rims, he suddenly noticed. His own eyes hurt just looking at her.

  “Lousy.” Estrela’s voice was no louder than a whisper. “Go away. Leave me alone.”

  In the rover there was no place to go. He wanted to ask Commander Ryan whether he had thought about who he would put on the rocket back to Earth, but decided to wait until he was alone with the commander instead of asking in front of Estrela. He thought about trying to sing a song in his head, but the landscape was too cold, too discordant. There was no way he could reconcile it to music. So instead he just watched the ground disappear under them, mile after mile after mile of endless yellow desert stone.

  4

  EXPERIENCING MARS

  Yellow stone desert, stretching endlessly away in all directions.

  But after your eyes got used to the shades of rust and gold, Tana thought, the subtle differences in shade and the true complexity of the landscape emerged. On the ground they were now traversing, a thin plate of sandstone had been laid down over an immense flow of solidified lava. She could now readily distinguish the dark, almost magenta shades of the underlying lava in the places where the sandstone had been broken away, the lighter yellowish orange of the sandstone, and the lighter yet shade of the wind-deposited dust layer. Boulders were scattered across the landscape like children’s toys, spewed out by eruptions of immense volcanoes invisible far over the horizon. In places the sandstone had buckled up to stand in angled walls like the dorsal scales of a buried dragon.

  It was tricky to drive the dirt-rover across, but interesting. The landscape was fantastic, always changing, always different. Tana suddenly regretted that she was not a geologist; she had a million questions about the landscape. She passed a column standing vertically in the desert, a black obelisk pointing a hundred feet into the sky. What was it, she wondered? The solidified core of a dead volcano, she guessed. Perhaps it had been buried, and the softer material on the outside eroded away by ten million years of sand-laced winds. She thought about calling back to the rockhopper on the radio and asking Estrela, but Estrela had not been very forthcoming, answering earlier questions only with uninformative monosyllables. Certainly she had spoken with none of the puppyish enthusiasm for rocks and landforms of the geologists that had briefed them.

  So Tana stayed silent. It was, in its way, better. She could be moved by what she saw, with no barriers of language between her and the landscape, no need to communicate her feelings with others.

  With all its inhuman majesty, its cold distances, its flat and unaccented sky, Tana loved Mars.

  5

  THE TWINS

  Brandon Weber was nine years old before he discovered that he had an identical twin brother who was three years older than he was.

  His parents, back when they had been married, had been unable to have children. In the early 2000s, this had been no big challenge. The fertility specialists they visited had advised in-vitro fertilization; their medical insurance paid the bill. An egg was harvested from his mother, Allison. A sample of sperm had been gathered from his father, examined under a microscope, and a single healthy spermatozoon was selected. By micro-manipulation, the sperm cell was injected through the outer cellular wall of the egg to fertilize it.

  And then the technician watched. It took the technician three times to get one to successfully fertilize. When the ovum divided, and divided again, it was clear that the fertilization had succeeded. The four cells had been carefully separated, and each one allowed to divide to the blastocyst stage. One of these was sacrificed to microdissection, to verify that the chromosomes held no abnormalities. No Down’s syndrome chromosomes, no cystic fibrosis, no less-than-perfect babies would be good enough for Ted and Allison Whitman.

  One egg had been implanted back into Allison Whitman’s uterus.

  And the two others had been perfused and frozen, to serve as backups. If Allison Whitman failed to become pregnant on the first egg, there would be two more tries. As it happened, the backups were unnecessary; Allison got pregnant on the first try.

  Ted Whitman, as it turned out, also had a backup plan: He had told his girlfriend Frissa that he had had a vasectomy and that “precautions” would be unnecessary. Now Frissa, too, was pregnant.

  In the divorce settlement, Ted held out for custody of the newborn, and in order to get it, he ended up paying off Allison with a good chunk of his accumulated wealth. He had been getting tired of her anyway, and he didn’t really need the money. Me named the kid Trevor, close enough to his own name of Ted to satisfy his vanity, and got a court order canceling all of Allison’s visitation privileges. The last thing that he wanted was some ex hanging around with a claim on his child.

  Allison moved back to western Colorado, where her family was from, and took back her maiden name. Unlike Ted—who went through two more wives before eventually giving up on marriage—she never remarried. Once was enough for her. Between the divorce settlement and her job as a private tutor in American history on the Internet, she was pretty well off. But it did occur to her, after a few years on her own, that she would like her own child. An inquiry to the fertility clinic revealed that the remaining fertilized eggs were still there, still waiting in the freezer, and by the peculiarities of Arizona law, were legally her property.

  The result was Brandon Weber.

  When Ted Whitman died, of a coronary at age fifty-two, his family—a mother and two unmarried sisters—asked to keep custody of Trevor. With Ted’s inability to hold onto a wife, they had been doing most of the raising of Trevor anyway. In due course a lawyer visited Allison to ask whether she was pla
nning to sue for her rights. It was then that nine-year-old Brandon unexpectedly discovered that he had an older twin brother. The news to Ted Whitman’s family that Ted had a second son, one that they had never heard of, proved to be equally unexpected.

  The lawyers turned out to be unnecessary; Allison had always liked Ted’s sisters, and they discovered that they had a lot in common, not the least of which was Ted. They got along fine. It was only Ted himself that she had had problems with.

  6

  ROCKHOPPER

  Another day of insanely boring driving over flat, uninteresting territory.

  Brandon had to keep on checking the position of the sun to verify that they were driving toward the north. His sense of direction told him that they were driving east, then a moment later that they had doubled back around south, and then that they were driving due west. They were approaching the Martian equator now, and at noon the sun was very near directly overhead. At this time he had to just trust the rockhopper’s inertial navigation system on faith. He didn’t like it.

  Estrela had withdrawn into herself. She said nothing for hours, often not bothering to reply when spoken to. Tana had gone weird. She was talking about the Mars landscape as if it were still exciting, just as if the scenery that they saw today was any different from what they saw yesterday or, for that matter, at the landing site. Only Commander Ryan seemed sane to Brandon, and he seemed to have a fixed, unchangeable mission: to put in as many miles on the road as possible.