Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey A. Landis

  He was nowhere to be found.

  By nightfall they realized that Brandon was not coming back.

  25

  SENSE OF WHERE YOU ARE

  By nightfall Brandon realized he was not going to find his way back.

  He had been walking for hours. He remembered running blindly and screaming, only coming to his senses when he tripped over a fracture in the sandstone. His sense of direction, always infallible on Earth, had betrayed him. He had no idea where the others were, one mile away or a hundred, or even whether they had decided he was gone and left without him.

  At last, too tired to go on, he climbed to the top of one of the endless maze of buttes. In every direction, nothing but empty Mars. Even the sunset was a disappointment, a slow dimming of the light into brick red haze.

  There was a fracture line running down the middle of the butte; one half of it was two feet higher than the other. It made a natural seat. Without any sense of wonder, without even a sense of irony, he reached out and touched it. Embedded in the layered sandstone exposed by the crack, it held a perfectly preserved fossil. It looked like a cluster of shiny black hoses, clumped together at the bottom, branching out into a dozen tentacles at the top. In the same section of rock, he could see others, of every size from tiny ones to one three feet long. There were other fossils too, smaller ones in different shapes, a bewildering variety.

  “I name you Mars Life Brandonii,” he said.

  There was not much he could do. The suits needed service, he knew. Every night Ryan changed out the oxygen generators. He wasn’t sure quite what was done to make them keep on working, but he knew that the oxygen supply wouldn’t run overnight. He could even remember, with a near-hallucinogenic clarity, the lessons that they had been given about the suit’s life-support systems. The briefing technician had told them that twenty hours was an absolute, complete, do-not-exceed design limit for the suit’s oxygen generation capacity. The technician had chuckled. “Of course, you won’t ever have any reason to put in more than a quarter of that.”

  The water recycler had already quit on him, and his throat was dry and hurt like hell.

  He was going to die on Mars.

  With the geologic hammer that Estrela had given him, he scratched into the stone beside the fossils. It was soft, as easy to carve as soap. BRANDON WEBER WAS HERE, he wrote, and then tried to think of a witty line. He couldn’t. At last he added I DID IT.

  It would be his tombstone, he thought. The idea seemed vaguely funny, nothing to be taken seriously. But tombstones need dates, so he added: 2010-2028.

  And then, he wrote: SO LONG, STOMPERS.

  Brandon Weber sat down, rested against the sandstone ledge, and stared into the dark toward the sunrise he would never live to see.

  26

  SEARCHING

  Estrela had been silent for almost a week. Her throat hurt too much for her to talk. She wanted to say, stop searching, it’s too late, he’s dead. We need go get moving. But she had no voice.

  But Ryan was adamant; they wouldn’t abandon one of the crew.

  They continued the search the next day.

  It was afternoon when Ryan thought he saw something on top of a mesa. It was the same color as the rocks, but the shape was different, and something seemed to be reflecting skylight. One side of the mesa had crumbled away to form an easy ramp to the top. He climbed up to look.

  It was Brandon.

  “I’ve got him,” he said. “Tana, Estrela, I found him.” They were about five kilometers away from where they had camped. Over the horizon; it was hard to believe that he would have wandered this far. What could he have been thinking?

  Tana’s voice over the radio. “Where are you?”

  Ryan walked over to the edge and looked around. Estrela and Tana were visible below, only a hundred meters away. “Up above you,” he said. “Look up.”

  In a few moments they had climbed up to reach him.

  Brandon was sitting on the top of the fractured mesa, his back against a low wall. His body was covered with a fine layer of dust, and at first it looked like just a different shape of stone.

  “You found him!” Tana came up beside him. “Is he okay?” She reached out and shook his shoulder. “Trevor! Trevor, are you okay?”

  Brandon leaned over, and slowly toppled onto his side.

  “I think we’re too late,” Ryan said. He knelt down, brushed the dust away from Brandon’s faceplate, and peered inside, trying to see. Brandon’s eyes were open, looking at nothing.

  Tana was trying to take a pulse, a nearly hopeless task through the stiff suit fabric. Ryan checked Brandon’s suit pack. The life-support system said it all. The oxygen traction was too low to breathe; the carbon dioxide level up to nearly twenty percent, well above the poison level. He checked the electronic readout. Brandon had not drawn a breath for seventeen hours.

  Estrela had reached them now. “How is he?” she whispered.

  Tana shook her head.

  Estrela knelt down across from Ryan and reached down to the body. She unclipped something from the suit, looked at it, handed it to Ryan.

  It was Brandon’s emergency beacon. Ryan examined it, turned it over. Nothing visible seemed to be wrong with it. The thermal battery was unused. It was disconnected from the beacon. Had Brandon taken it apart, trying to fix it? The beacon was supposed to be unbreakable. He replaced the battery connections, broke the arming seal, and pulled the activation tab. The thermal battery grew warm in his hands, and a red light started flashing in his suit indicator panel, showing the direction and strength of the emergency signal.

  The beacon was working perfectly. So why hadn’t Brandon used it?

  Ryan looked up, and for the first time focused on the wall behind Brandon. There was writing there, crudely incised into the soft sandstone. BRANDON WEBER WAS HERE. I DID IT. 2010-2028. Underneath, in smaller letters, it said, SO LONG, STOMPERS. He knew he was going to die, Ryan thought.

  But that didn’t explain it, he realized. The inscription didn’t make any sense. Why would Trevor Whitman sign the name Brandon Weber? Why had he demanded to be called Brandon at all? Why were the dates 2010-2028? The last date was correct, but Trevor had been born in 2007. What did he mean, he did it?

  He looked at it. There was only one answer. Ryan Martin didn’t like it, but it seemed to stare him in the face. Trevor Whitman was not, had never been, the person he said he was.

  27

  HARD QUESTIONS

  Once back in the hobbit habitat, they went through Brandon’s things.

  Brandon Weber, Tana thought. Not Trevor Whitman. All this time he had deceived them.

  It had taken only a few minutes to find where Brandon had written down the password to unlock his communications. Brandon had saved just a tiny clip of his incoming mail, but it was enough. The boy who stared out of the picture looked just like Brandon.

  Ho, Brand. Man, I hope you’re having a ball up here. I can walk on the leg now, but it still hurts some, mostly when it rains. I wish I stayed back in Arizona. Oh, man, I wish I could have made it. I just hate you, you know that? Nah, don’t worry, I’m not going to tell our secret. Hey, I hope you’ve got into the pants of that Brazilian babe by now, she’s hot. Do good stuff out there, okay? Kill ’em for me. Trevor signing off.

  The picture of the two of them together, geared up in climbing harness, was uncanny, a mirror of the same person twice, one slightly older, one slightly younger.

  It took an hour of sleuthing through Brandon’s effects to piece together the story. When she found out about Trevor’s climbing accident, Tana gave out a long, low whistle. Wow.

  She called to Estrela. Estrela looked up at her, questioning.

  “Climbing accident,” Tana said. “Broken rope. And Brandon Weber gets what he wanted. Sound familiar?”

  Estrela nodded.

  Tana was remembering something now. She was remembering how many times she had seen Brandon alone with Commander Radkowski. He was begging, she realized,
pleading with Radkowski to pick him when it came time to choose who would go home on the Brazilian ship.

  Radkowski hadn’t made a choice. It wouldn’t be like him to choose before he had to. But Tana wondered if maybe he’d said something that Brandon had interpreted to mean that he had made the selection, and Brandon wasn’t it.

  When a ship sinks, sometimes people would kill to get on the lifeboat.

  A climbing accident. A broken rope.

  And once again, Brandon got what he wanted.

  It was all clear to her now. She’d thought that the broken rope was suspicious. It had been Brandon.

  And now Brandon was dead.

  28

  SCOTT’S FOSSILS

  The fossils that Brandon had found on his last night were magnificent. Tana stood in front of them and marveled. How had he managed to find it? Was this what he was looking for? Was this what he had died to find?

  The fossil his body had been found next to looked as if it were the complete organism, or possibly a casting of the complete organism, permineralized by a more durable material. It looked as though it were carved from onyx.

  The organism itself looked something like a medusa, or perhaps some branching plant, with sinuous branches or tentacles radiating out from a cylindrical body. Was it an animal or a plant, Tana wondered? Or, on Mars, was there even a difference?

  She took out the rock hammer and began, carefully, to chip around the edges. “You want to give me some help in excising this specimen?” she said.

  Ryan, standing behind her, said nothing.

  She looked up, slightly annoyed. “Come on! It’ll go faster if you give me a hand here.”

  “There’s no point in it, Tana,” he said softly. “We can’t take them with us. I’m sorry.”

  “Ryan, you don’t understand.” She put down the hammer and looked directly at him. “This is the greatest discovery of the twenty-first century. Life existed on Mars. This proves it. Even if we don’t return ourselves, we have to preserve these. We have to! This is why we’re here.” She picked up the hammer again and began to chip at the stone, using sharp, clean blows now that she had defined the edges. “This is more important than any of us.”

  “Like the Scott expedition,” Ryan said.

  Tana put down the hammer and looked up. “What?”

  “Antarctica,” Ryan said. “They were the second to reach the south pole. When they got there, they found Amundsen’s abandoned camps, and discovered that they had missed being first by thirty-four days. It must have been a crushing disappointment. But it was a scientific expedition. On the way, they found fossils in the mountains near the south pole. Fossils, almost at the south pole! At the time, it must have been quite an important scientific find. They were perilously low on supplies, fighting frostbite and blizzards and ferocious winds. They were dying slowly of vitamin deficiency, but they collected fifty pounds of rocks from those mountains and dragged the samples behind them for over a thousand kilometers on foot, because they thought that the scientific samples would make their expedition a success, even though they failed to reach the pole first.”

  “And?” Tana asked.

  “And they died,” Ryan said. “Every one of them.”

  Tana was silent for a moment. “It was the fossils?” she said.

  Ryan shrugged. “If they hadn’t tried to carry rocks with them, useless dead weight, would they have made it? Who can say? But I can tell this: It didn’t help.”

  Tana dropped the rock hammer and sighed.

  “Okay,” she said, and stood up. “We leave the fossils.”

  Ryan had brought one rock with him, the small fossil that Brandon had found that day at the wall of the Valles Marineris. The fist-shaped rock seemed small and tawdry next to the large fossils of the fault wall, but it was the one Brandon had found.

  They had left Brandon’s body propped up where he had died, leaning against the wall and sightlessly staring toward the eastern horizon. Ryan leaned down, placed the little fossil in Brandon’s right hand, and closed his left hand over it. “Trevor—Brandon—whoever you are,” he said. “I guess it’s too late now to really even know. Goodbye, Brandon.”

  He paused. “Wherever you are—good luck.”

  When they returned to the habitat for the night, Ryan gathered them together to talk about their plans. It was frightening to see how few the expedition had become. We knew people were going to die, he thought. We knew it, and yet, when it happens, we still can’t quite get a grip on it. Chamlong, and then John, and now Trevor, gone. He knew that Trevor—Brandon, he should think of him as Brandon now—had deceived all of them, that he must have killed Radkowski, but somehow he still couldn’t quite believe it. He lied right from the beginning, he thought. He deceived all of us.

  What secrets did the others have?

  Ryan had liked him. The betrayal was somehow worse for that. And now he’s dead, too.

  “We can’t afford any more accidents,” he said. “The expedition is already dangerously small. We can’t lose anybody else; we can’t make any mistakes. From here, we travel light and last, no sidetracks, no exploration, no sight-seeing, just speed. No more wandering. We make a straight-line dash for the Agamemnon site.

  “We leave behind everything that we don’t absolutely need. Agamemnon was the Cadillac of expeditions. They had everything, and they abandoned it at the site, for the most part completely unused. We’ll resupply there.”

  “Showers,” Tana said.

  “Decent food,” Estrela whispered.

  “All that,” Ryan said. “All that, and one thing, the most important thing of all.

  “Agamemnon brought an airplane.”

  PART SIX

  RYAN MARTIN

  Above, the cold sun hovers half the year,

  And half the year, the dark night covers all.

  A place more barren than the very pole

  No green, no brooks, no trace of life appears.

  The worst of all the horrors of this world

  The cold cruelty of this sun of ice,

  The night, immense, resembling ancient Chaos.

  —Charles Baudelaire, “De Profundis Clamavi,”

  Les Fleurs du Mal

  There are no eyes here

  In this valley of dying stars

  In this hollow valley

  This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

  In this last of meeting places

  —T. S. Eliot,

  “The Hollow Men”

  1

  ARES VALLIS

  It gave him a sense of déjà vu.

  Ryan had been here before. When could he have been here? Never; it was impossible. But yet he felt that the territory was familiar.

  They had crossed an area of low hills, and then for two days they had walked through a region of immense buttes, imposing flat-topped mesas that loomed hundreds of meters above them. Ryan felt the pressure of the landscape, felt that they were as small as ants moving across an inhumanly large landscape.

  Now they had left the mesa territory behind. The land was furrowed. Low, rolling ridges ran parallel to their direction of travel, with half-buried boulders tumbled in clusters around. It was a flood plain, Ryan realized. An ancient deluge had carved these grooves and moved these boulders. In his memory this rang a distant bell, but he couldn’t quite bring it to mind.

  A low, lone mountain—a volcano, perhaps—rose up out of the plain, and it too looked weirdly familiar. As they moved across the land, and moved into a new perspective, he saw that it was doubled, like the twin humps of a Bactrian camel, and that didn’t surprise him. Of course it was a double peak.

  Because now he remembered where they were. He’d been here hundreds of times in virtual reality, learning about Mars geology. Suddenly it all came back to him in vivid detail: the Twin Peaks, the oddly named rocks: Yogi, Flat-top, Barnacle Bill, Moe. As a kid, he’d spent whole days downloading the pictures of this place from the Internet; it was when he’d first become interested in M
ars. More than anything else, this place was the whole reason he was here. It was the landscape of his dreams.

  It was the Pathfinder site.

  They were crossing Ares Vallis. Yes, of course, to get from Coprates Chasma to Acidalia they had to cross Ares Vallis, they had no choice. But of all the spots to cross it, right here! “But this is history,” he whispered. “We’re walking on history.”

  “Say again?” Tana’s voice said.

  Instead of answering, Ryan started to walk faster. It had to be right here, just ahead of them. He started to jog, barely even noticing the boulders he had to detour around. Right, exactly here. They couldn’t be far away from the actual landing site; it couldn’t be more than a hundred meters.

  Right here!

  He stopped abruptly.

  Where?

  The ridged terrain spread out in all directions. He could tell from the perspective of the mountain that they had to be at the right place. All the rocks looked familiar, but every time he looked closer at any one of them, it turned to be not quite right. It couldn’t be far away, but where, exactly, was it?

  “Ryan!” It was Tana, coming up behind him, panting. “Are you all right?”

  His legs ached. They had been walking for days, and even the brief exertion of breaking into a jog made him suddenly aware of the ache in his muscles. “This is the Pathfinder site,” he gasped. “Look!”

  Tana looked around. “Say, you could be right. It does kind of look like it, doesn’t it? Is that why you were running?”

  “It is! Take a look!” He pointed. “There are the Twin Peaks.” He swung around. “That big one over there? That rock is named Couch. Or maybe that one.” He stopped, momentarily unsure. It was easy to get confused. Was either of them really the boulder named Couch? Or was it another one that looked similar?