“But are you sure, really sure?” Tana asked, and when Ryan nodded, she said, “So what should we do?”
Ryan considered for a moment. “What do you suggest? The death penalty?”
“No, no,” Tana said. “But we could—” she stopped. “I don’t know.”
“What more do you want from her? We can’t take her home and put her on trial. And even if we could, we don’t have any actual evidence of a crime, do we?”
“But, we have to tell somebody.”
Ryan shook his head. “Who would we tell? What would we say?” He waved his hand to indicate the planet around them. “She says she’s going to stay behind on Mars. Think of it this way. Mars is a prison more secure than Alcatraz could ever be, a prison with walls that cannot be climbed. Are you really worried that this isn’t penance enough?”
“But what do we do!? How can we just leave her here?”
“Ah.” Ryan sighed. Yes, that was it. Despite what Estrela had told them, leaving her behind still seemed a betrayal. After all the distance they had traveled together, how could they just leave her behind? But was there an alternative? “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”
He bent back to his inspection. After a while Tana was gone.
At last the night came, and the three of them ate in silence. After eating, they gathered in the pressurized module. The habitat was still cold, but not as cold as it had been. Ryan sat down and looked at Estrela with a long, steady gaze.
She looked back. “Well?” she said.
“No more holding back,” Ryan said. “I need to know. Tell me, why do you want to stay behind?”
“Do you really care?” she said. “I’m telling you that you get to go home. Take it, it’s your life, and I’m giving it to you free. Do you care why?”
“Ah, but I do care,” Ryan said. “We have been together too long for me to just leave you behind without ever knowing why. It’s too late for deception now. Tell me.”
“I did tell you. I changed my mind.”
Ryan shook his head. “That’s not enough. You said that you killed two people to get back home…and now that you’re here, you decided you don’t want to go. I’m not going to judge you, but I need to understand. Why?”
Estrela leaned back and closed her eyes. “All my life,” she said, “all my life I’ve been surrounded by people. In the city where I grew up. In the school. When they sent me north. Always, people all around me. Boys wanting to be with me to pull down my pants, reporters interviewing, even João, wanting to sit with me and drink coffee and talk, and talk.
“Even on Mars, we were never alone—here on Mars, we were more crowded than anywhere. Crowded in the habitats, crowded in the rovers. Always together. Even when I thought I was going off by myself, there were the voices in my earphones, telling me that I would never be alone.
“Did you know that this place terrified me at first? These huge, empty distances. But then, when we kept on walking, when the airplane crashed and you told us that we had to keep on walking, something changed. In that long walk, we were each of us alone, truly alone, and I found, yes, I can be alone. I can be just me. The snow doesn’t care who I am. The rocks don’t care who I am. The sky doesn’t care who I am.
“I tell you this. Always, all my life, I have been pretending to be somebody I’m not. For so long that I don’t think I even know who I really am.
“I’m done with that.
“I decided, I don’t care if I go back. I don’t need it. There’s nothing for me back there. I changed my mind. I like it here.
“I want to be alone.”
21
LEAVING MARS
The sun on the horizon was almost blue, surrounded by a luminous golden orb of light and a double halo. The day was still; the snow reflected only the pale yellow sky.
And then the snow began to glow.
The snow erupted, cascading outward in a tidal wave of sudden incandescence, raising a billowing cloud that was lit brilliant red by a light from inside. The glow, a flame almost too bright to look at, rose slowly and silently, shrouded in the roiling cloud.
Jesus do Sul broke out of the cloud, and the light of its exhaust, a second and brighter dawn, set the icescape aglow. Gathering speed, it headed skyward. It was almost out of sight when the booster stage fell away. The Earth-return stage, only a tiny pinprick of light, sped off, like a fallen star rising again to return to its home, into space.
Below, an insignificant figure sat on a small ridge of ice. She continued to stare into the sky for long after the tiny speck of light had vanished.
And then she turned back to return to the habitat. There was no use continuing to watch; it would be nine months before their journey would finish. There was a lot for her to do before then.
Estrela Carolina Conselheiro was, at last, home.
Since his first short story was published in 1984, Geoffrey A. Landis has written more than fifty works of short fiction, garnering all of science fiction’s highest honors. As a working scientist he has published more than 150 scientific papers in the fields of photovoltaics and astronautics, holds four patents on solar cell designs, and is the principle investigator and designer of a number of experiments running on unmanned space probes. In 1999, he was awarded a fellowship from the NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts to help design laser-pushed light-sails for interstellar vehicles.
GEOFFREY LANDIS lives near Cleveland, Ohio, with his wife, author Mary Turzillo, where he works on advanced concepts for the NASA John Glenn Research Center.
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