The surviving crew and passengers of the Sunflower had to wait a day in orbit while a small flotilla of vessels came out to meet them, from Mars’s outer moon Deimos, a resource-rich rock itself which served as a centre for orbital operations. Many of the craft brought paramedics and automated medical equipment; some of the injured passengers and crew would be taken to the low-gravity hospital on Deimos for treatment before facing the rigours of a descent from orbit. There were only a handful of bodies to process. Most of the relatives of the dead had been content for the remains of their loved ones to be ejected into interplanetary space. Wei had officiated over these services himself, supported by the faithful of relevant creeds and cultures.
He may no longer have regarded himself as a captain, but the crew of the Deimos station paid him a certain honour. When the last passengers and crew had been lifted off, they sent out a final shuttle just for him, so he could be the last of the crew to leave his ship. But of course the Sunflower was not left empty; it already swarmed with repair crews, human and robotic, as it was towed gently by tugs to an orbital rendezvous with Deimos. An interplanetary ship was too valuable to scuttle, even one so grievously injured.
The shuttle itself was a small, fat-bodied glider coated with battered-looking heatshield tiles. In orbit, driven by powerful attitude thrusters, it was a nimble, nippy craft. The pilot, a young woman, allowed Wei to sit beside her in the co-pilot’s seat as she took a quick final tour around the drifting hulk of the Sunflower.
He pointed out a great gash in the hull. “There. That is the wound that killed her.”
“I see. The fusion containment failed, I read from the report.”
“We lost our ion drive immediately, and many of the tethers to the lightsail were severed...”
Ships like the Sunflower, dedicated to long-haul interplanetary spaceflight, were roomy lightweight hulls driven by the gentle but persistent thrust of ion-drive engines, and by the push of sunlight on their huge sails. A journey from Earth to Mars on such a ship still took months, but months less than an unpowered trajectory, a Hohmann ellipse.
The pilot was watching his face. “The incident was a news headline on Earth and Mars, and elsewhere. The heroic efforts to stabilise the environment systems and save the passengers –”
“That was the achievement of my crew, not of myself.”
“While you, Captain, manipulated your surviving propulsion system, a lightsail like a bird’s broken wing, to put the ship on the Hohmann orbit that eventually brought you to Mars. It was an achievement of courage and improvisation to compare with the rescue of Apollo 13, some commentators have remarked.”
He glanced at her. It was unusual in his experience for such young people to have knowledge of pioneering space exploits a hundred and forty years gone; to many of them it was as if the age of space had begun in 2003, when Yang Liwei became the first Chinese to reach Earth orbit aboard the Shenzhou 5.
But he didn’t feel like being congratulated. “I lost my ship, and many of my passengers. And such a slow crawl out to sanctuary, on a ship full of the injured, was agonising.” He had made daily visits from the bridge to the huddled remains of the passenger compartments. There were broken families back there, families who had lost a father or mother or children, and now were forced to endure more months of confinement, deprivation and suffering, unable even to escape from the scene of their loss. There were even orphans. He remembered one little girl in particular, no more than five years old; her name was Xue Ling, he had learned, and her father, mother and brother were all gone, an optimistic pioneer family wiped out in an instant. She had looked lost, bewildered, even as she rested her head against the stiff fabric of a kindly ship’s officer’s tunic.
“I am sure it was terrible,” said the pilot. “But you brought your ship home.” She tapped her control panels and the shuttle turned its nose to the planet. Soon the craft bit into the air. The atmosphere of Mars was thin, tall; the ride was surprisingly gentle compared with a re-entry at Earth, and the shuttle, shedding its orbital energy in frictional heat, made big swooping turns over a ruddy landscape. “We will be down shortly, Captain –”
“I am no longer a captain. I have resigned, formally. Please do not use that honorific.”
“So I understand. You have decided to give up your career, to commit yourself to Mars.”
“People trusted me to bring them here safely; I failed. The least I can do is honour their memory by –”
She grunted. “By doing what? Becoming a lichen farmer? I suppose to become a living monument is a noble impulse. But somewhat self-destructive, and a waste of your expertise, if you want my opinion, sir.”
He didn’t want it particularly, but he bit back a reprimand. He no longer held rank over this woman.
“You have no family on Earth?”
“No wife, no.”
“Perhaps that will be your destiny on Mars. To help raise the first generation of pioneers, who will –”
“That will not be possible. During the accident – the failure of the shielding around the fusion reactor, and then a loss of shielding fluids from the ship as a whole...” He could see she understood. “I was baked for many months by the radiation of interplanetary space. The doctors tell me I have a high propensity for cancers in the future. And if I am not sterile, I should be.”
“How old are you, sir?”
“Only a little over thirty.”
She did not speak again.
The shuttle came down at a small, young settlement in a terrain in the southern hemisphere called the Terra Cimmeria. This was a landscape peculiarly shaped by sprawling crater walls and steep-sided river valleys; from the high air it reminded Wei of scar tissue, like a badly healed burn. The settlement, called Fire City, nestled on the floor of a crater called Mendel, itself nearly eighty kilometres across, its floor incised by dry channels and pocked by smaller, younger craters. From the air he glimpsed domes half-covered by heaped-up Martian dirt, the gleaming tanks and pipes of what looked like a sprawling chemical manufacturing plant, and a few drilling derricks, angular frames like rocket gantries.
The shuttle swept down smoothly onto a long runway blasted across the crater floor. When it had come to rest, the pilot briskly helped Wei pull on a pressure suit. They clambered into an airlock, where they were briefly bathed in sterilizing ultraviolet. Then the hatch popped, and they climbed down a short stair.
Wei Binglin took a step on the surface of Mars, and another, exploring the generously low gravity, considering the clear impressions his boots made in the ubiquitous, clinging, rust-coloured dust. He could not see the walls of Mendel from here, or anything of the geologically complicated landscape beyond. The crater floor itself was a plain littered with rocks, like a high desert, and a small sun hung in a sky of washed-out brown. A few domes nestled nearby, and a single derrick was visible at the horizon, gaunt, still, like a dead tree. Wei had visited Mars four times before, but each time he had stayed in orbit with his interplanetary craft, or had visited the moon Deimos for work and recreation. He had never walked on Mars before. And now, he realised, he would never walk on any other world, ever again.
That was when he spotted the cairn.
It stood near the runway, a roughly pyramidal heap of rocks. He walked over. The cairn was taller than he was, and evidently purposefully constructed. “What is this?”
The pilot followed him. “This is the landing site of Cao Xi.” The first to reach Mars, who had survived no more than an hour on the surface after his one-man lander crashed. “His body has been returned to his family on Earth.”
“I once saw the mausoleum.”
“But still, this place, where he walked, is remembered. The runway was built here as an appropriate gesture, it was thought; a link between ground and sky, space and Mars. This is a young place still, and everything is rather rough and ready.”
Wei looked around. He selected a rock about the size of his head; it was sharp-edged, but easy to lift in the low gravit
y, if resistant to be moved through inertia. He hauled the rock up and settled it on the upper slope of the cairn.
“Everybody does that, on arrival,” said the pilot.
“Why was I brought here, to this particular settlement?”
The pilot shrugged.
But the answer was obvious. Knowing nothing of the colonising of Mars, he had asked his former superiors to nominate a suitable destination, a new home. They had been drawn by the symbolism of this place. But Cao Xi had been a hero; Wei was not.
The cairn struck Wei as oddly steep-sloped. “You could not build such a structure on Earth.”
“Perhaps not.”
“I wonder how tall you could make such a mound, here in this partial gravity?”
“I do not know.” She pointed at a rooster-tail of dust behind a gleaming speck, coming from one of the domes. “Your hosts. A family, husband and wife, themselves former interplanetary crew. They have volunteered to be your guides as you find your feet, here on Mars.”
Wei felt a peculiar reluctance to meet these people, these Martians. He did not belong here. Yet he felt no impulse, either, to climb back on the shuttle and return to orbit. He belonged nowhere, he thought, as if he was dead himself. Yet he lived, breathed, was capable of curiosity, such as about this cairn. “Perhaps I will find purpose here.”
“I am sure you will.” The shuttle pilot touched his arm. He could feel the pressure through the suit layers, a kind gesture. “Perhaps you will be keeper of the cairn.”
That made him laugh. “Perhaps so.” It struck him that he did not even know her name. He turned to face the approaching rover.
AS XUE LING got up to leave his office, Wei checked the schedule on the slate built into his desk. He looked for his next appointment, not for the time. This office was in a privileged position, built into the dome wall so he had an exterior view, and he could judge the time pretty well by the way the afternoon sun slid around the flanks of the cairn.
He was dismayed to see that his next appointment was Bill Kendrick. Trouble for him again, with this American, who had been more or less dumped on him from the UN colony at Eden.
Kendrick was waiting when Xue Ling opened the door. He was tall, taller than most Chinese, wiry. His file said he was forty-five years old, only a little older than Wei; he looked younger save for a shock of prematurely grey hair, which was probably as much an engineered affectation as his apple-smooth cheeks, the taut flesh at his neck.
As he entered Wei’s office, he carried a heavy-looking satchel. He held the door open for Xue Ling as she departed, and he looked after her with an odd wistfulness. “Pretty girl, Mr Mayor.”
Wei winced. After four years here, Kendrick’s Standard Chinese was pretty good, but when he addressed Wei he always stuck to the English form of that inappropriate appellation. A subtle form of rebellion, Wei supposed. He wanted to deter any interest Kendrick might have in Xue Ling, before it even started. “She is sixteen years old. She is my daughter. My adopted daughter.”
“Oh.” Kendrick glanced around the uncluttered office, and settled on one of the two empty chairs facing Wei’s desk. “Your daughter? I didn’t know you had one, adopted or otherwise. She looks kind of sad, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
Wei shrugged. “She is an orphan. She lost her family, in fact, during the flight of the Sunflower, the ship which –”
“Your ship. I see. And now you’ve adopted her?”
“It is a formality. She needs a legal guardian. Since being brought to Mars a decade ago, she has failed to settle with foster or adoptive parents, though many attempts were made. She ended up in the school at Phlegra Montes.”
Kendrick frowned. “I heard of that place. Where they send all the broken kids.”
Wei winced again. But the man was substantially right. Childbirth and child-rearing were chancy processes here on Mars. Because of the low gravity, the sleet of solar radiation, intermittent accidents like pressure losses or eco collapses, there were many stillbirths, many young born unhealthy one way or another. Even a healthy child might not grow well, simply because of the pressure of confinement in the domes; there was something of a plague of mental disorder, or autism. Hence Phlegra Montes. But the school also served as a last-resort refuge for children like Ling who simply didn’t fit in. “In fact, the UN and the Chinese run the school together. One of our few cooperative acts on Mars.”
Kendrick nodded. “Admirable. And good for you for giving her a home now. I can see why you’d feel responsible.”
You could say this for Kendrick, Wei thought. He was prepared to express things bluntly, things that others danced around. Perhaps this was a relic of his own past. He had, after all, pursued a successful career of his own before falling foul of Heroic-Generation legislation on Earth, and being banished to Mars; no doubt plain speaking had served him well.
“We are here to discuss you, Mr Kendrick, not my daughter.” He tapped his slate. “Once again I have to read reports about your indiscipline –”
“I wouldn’t call it that,” Kendrick said. “Call it inappropriately applied energy. Or the generation of inappropriate ideas, which the dead-heads you put me under can’t recognise as potentially valuable contributions.”
Wei felt hugely weary, even as they began this exchange. Kendrick was learning the language, but consciously or otherwise he was not fitting into the local culture. A big noisy American here in a Chinese outpost, he was too vivid, too loud. “Once again, Mr Kendrick, I am using up valuable time on your antics, which –”
“You volunteered for the job, Mr Mayor.”
That term again. In fact Wei had nothing like the autonomy of the ‘mayors’ of western cities to which Kendrick alluded. Wei was actually the chair of the colony’s council, with only local responsibilities; he reported up to a whole hierarchy of officials above him that extended across Mars and even back to Earth. Nevertheless, it was a burden of responsibility. And it was a role he had drifted into, almost naturally, given his experience and background, despite his own reluctance. Once again it was as if he was a captain, of this colony-ship grounded on Mars, sailing through interplanetary space. It was a burden he accepted as gladly as he could. Perhaps it was atonement.
But if not for this role, he thought, he would not have to confront issues like the management of this man, Bill Kendrick.
“You are not here for ideas,” he said, exasperated. “Or for ‘energy.’ You are to work on the new derrick.” The latest plunge into the rocky ground of Mars, to bring up precious water from the deep-lying aquifers beneath.
“Oh, I can do the roughneck stuff in my sleep.”
“And what is it you do when awake, then?”
Kendrick seemed to take that as a cue. “I make these.” He opened his satchel now, and produced two rust-red squared-off blocks, each maybe thirty centimetres long, five to ten centimetres in cross-section. He set these on the desk, scattering a little dust.
Wei picked one up; on Mars, like everything else, it was lighter than it looked. “What’s this? Cut stone?”
“No. Bricks. I made bricks, out of Martian dust.”
“Bricks?”
He half-listened as Kendrick briskly ran through the steps in his brick-making process: taking fine Martian dust, wetting it, adding a little straw from the domed gardens or shreds of waste cloth, then baking it in a solar-reflector furnace he had improvised from scrap parts. “It’s a process that’s as old as civilisation.”
Wei smiled. “Whose civilisation do you mean?”
“So simple a child could run it.”
“You say you need water –”
“Which is precious here, I know that, I’m breaking my own back drilling for it. But most of what I use can be recovered from the steam that comes off during baking.”
“Tell me why anybody would want to make bricks.”
Kendrick leaned forward. “Because it’s a quick and dirty way for this township to expand. Think about it. Most of your people are sti
ll living crammed into these domes, and most of them are still shipped from Earth. Your plastics industry here is in its infancy, along with everything else.”
Wei piled the two bricks one on top of the other. “How could I build a useful dwelling of brick? Our buildings have to be pressurised. A brick structure would be blown apart by the internal pressure; remember that Martian air is at only a fraction of –”
Kendrick rummaged in his satchel again. “I’ve got plans for two kinds of structure you can build from Martian brick. The first is dwelling spaces.” He showed Wei hand-drawn plans of domes and vaults, half-buried in the Martian ground. “See? Pile it up with dirt, which you need for radiation shielding anyhow.” Which was true. On Mars, there was no ozone layer, and the sun’s ultraviolet reached all the way to the ground. “And the weight of the dirt will maintain the compression you need. This is only a short-term solution, but it could be an effective one. There’s no shortage of dust on Mars, God knows; you could make as many bricks as you like, build as wide and deep as you can manage. It would give you room to grow your population fast, even before longer-term industries like plastics and steel kick in at production scales, and you can begin to achieve your strategic goals.”
Wei held up his hand. “As always, you over-reach yourself, Mr Kendrick. Remember, you have no rank here, no formal role. You were sent here from the UN base at Eden because of the trouble you caused there; it is better that you are used as a labourer here at Fire City than to rot in some prison at Eden, breathing the expensive air –”
“I always think big,” Kendrick said, grinning, unabashed. “What got me in trouble in the first place. Even if I did achieve great things when I had a chance.”
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