Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey Landis

  João was on television often, darkly handsome and with a rich, liquid voice; Estrela loved to watch him perform for the cameras. She was surprised when the television wanted her on camera as well, and even more surprised that they loved her. While João was away training, and later when he had launched to Mars, beating the Americans by a full two years, the cameras would follow her around, "the beautiful and mysterious Estrela, our luscious national flower." She has the body of an angel, the tabloids said, and, deeply hidden, a secret core of ice.

  "How can you be so calm, with all the women who make eyes at your husband," the commentator for Semana Brasil asked, a bubble-headed blond with a voice like a parakeet. "Aren't you just insanely jealous?"

  "No," Estrela said, and laughed. "Let them flirt. No woman could ever take my João away from me." And she had been so calm and certain and beautiful, that everyone in Brazil felt they knew her.

  When they asked her opinions of the geology of Mars, she saw no reason to remind them that she had, in the end, never been more than an average student, graduating with a degree to make her respectable but without the passion for the subject that João had. If the reporters wanted to paint her as an expert in the subject, with a mastery somehow absorbed from her closeness with João, that was their affair.

  And when the expedition failed, when international television broadcast the terrible images of the bodies of the Brazilian astronauts, lying uncovered in the snow a hundred million miles away from their native soil, she became the symbol of Brazil, beautiful and tragic.

  She knew in her heart that João had, in his own way, loved her. Perhaps he had never felt the intense physical ache she had felt for him, but still, he had loved her in a way that none of his silly blond boys could ever know.

  She never cried, but she grieved in her own way, and knew for certain that she would never love again.

  So when the time came for Brazil to send an astronaut on the third expedition to Mars, there was no real disagreement on the choice of who to send.

  PART THREE

  THE CANYON

  With a surface area of 144 million square kilometers, the Red Planet has as much terrain to explore as all the continents and islands of Earth put together. Moreover, the Martian terrain is incredibly varied...

  — Robert Zubrin (1996)

  Beautiful, beautiful. Magnificent desolation.

  — Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr. (1969)

  1

  LEAVING AFRICA

  The glow of sunset lasted far after the sun disappeared. The sky turned a deep, brick red, and the red faded until it was almost invisible. Two stars in the west, a brilliant blue-white one and a smaller one of tarnished silver next to it, were the Earth and the moon.

  And then it was dark.

  For some reason the hazy darkness reminded Radkowski of his last night in Africa. Sunset fell quickly in Africa, not like here on Mars, and on that night Venus has shone brilliant in the west.

  His flying comrades had thrown a going-away party that night. It was partly for him, but more than that, it had been a party for dead comrades who had not returned from the disaster of the last mission.

  They had lit torches, and they glowed like votive candles, forlorn hopes against the hot, sullen night. Two of the fliers had guitars, and they had set up amplifiers and played with an almost palpable violence, trying to cover up the badness of their playing by sheer intensity of sound.

  They partied desperately. They were in a dead-end war, and they knew it. He walked through the party like a dead man, not talking, not acknowledging anyone, numb, his mangled hand hurting. He was already separate from the group. To them, he was already on his way home.

  The party had gone on late into the morning, long after he had left it to collapse in his bunk, too drunk to move, too drunk to care any more.

  The Mars night was, really, nothing like that, except that he was alone, and the night was dark.

  I'm a hundred million miles away from that now, he thought. I have left it all behind.

  But John Radkowski knew that he could never, really, leave it all behind.

  Injured or not, tomorrow they would move on.

  2

  ONWARD

  The dirt-rover that Estrela had been riding had not been badly damaged, and any shop on Earth could have straightened the bent frame, replaced the smashed wheel bearings, and put it back in working condition in a few hours. With neither a machine shop nor parts, though, Ryan said that it was out for the duration.

  They loaded it on the rockhopper to use for spare parts to keep the second dirt-rover running.

  The Mars suits were form-fitting, and once Tana had cut the suit off of Estrela, her arm and ankle had both started to swell. It looked like she was wearing a balloon around her ankle now.

  Estrela's damage turned out to be a fractured left radius, a dislocated left shoulder, and a mildly sprained ankle. Possibly with torn ligaments, Tana said, although it was hard to tell without X rays. In any case, it was lucky that she had not been hurt worse. Tana worked calmly and quickly, without thinking beyond what needed to be done at the moment; it was what she did best. She immobilized the arm with an inflatable, and while the balloon held it in place, mixed up a liquid polymer to set it in a more durable cast. With the broken bone set, she relocated the shoulder and strapped it to Estrela's side to keep her from reinjuring it. She wrapped the ankle and instructed Estrela not to put weight on it, and finally, with the acute problems solved, made a more thorough examination. And only then, when she had verified that none of the other minor bruises masked deeper injuries, did she allow herself to think. An idiot, she thought. What the hell had Estrela thought she was doing?

  They had brought along a supply of the piezoelectric fabric, and while they were camped, Ryan spliced a gore of spare material to replace the part of the spacesuit destroyed when Tana had cut it away. It was slow and painstaking work. Each square centimeter of fabric required ten electrical connections to be spliced to the computer that controlled the suit's tension.

  He worked on it for several hours. "I think that this will do it," he said at last. He held out the arm of Estrela's Mars suit, flexing it this way and that and watching the seam with a critical eye. "You might have been a little more careful about slicing this thing—you don't want to know what this suit material costs per square centimeter."

  "She's not going to put on a suit for a while," Tana said.

  "Better to have it ready now for when she needs it later," Ryan said. "But next time, peel it away instead of cutting it, okay?"

  It was fortunate, Ryan thought, that Tana had had the presence of mind to insist that Estrela be taken to the rover for treatment, and not put in the bubble habitat. If she had cut away Estrela's suit in the habitat bubble, they would have had to stay where they were until she could put on her suit again; there was no way to get her out of the bubble with no suit. But in the pressurized cabin of the rover, they could resume their journey as soon as they were ready.

  Ryan was ready to rig up the block and tackle to take the rockhopper down the cliff the next morning, but that turned out not to be necessary. It was not much of a cliff, a minor upthrust fault, more of a step in the ground level than a real obstacle to their travel. Commander Radkowski walked the territory, and then directed the rockhopper along the edge for a little ways to a place where the height was low enough that the rockhopper was able to simply step down, the articulated struts dropping one wheel down at a time. Once on the bottom, he picked up the remaining dirt-rover with the rockhopper's robotic arm and lifted it down the cliff.

  Commander Radkowski directed Ryan to take the dirt-rover ahead to scout, but cautioned him to stay in direct line of sight of the rockhopper. Trevor, now perched in Tana's spot on the top, was given the binoculars, and was told to keep scanning ahead for any additional bad terrain, and to radio warnings ahead to Ryan as he saw fit.

  There were several more small cliffs, all of them running east to west, perpendicular to their line
of travel. In each case, Trevor was able to spot a place where the wall had slumped, or where a pile of rocks made a natural ramp for the vehicles to continue on. None of these was a significant obstacle.

  As it turned out, the next obstacle was more than just a small escarpment. It was a canyon.

  3

  THE LESSER GRAND CANYON

  Ryan parked ten meters or so back from the edge of the canyon and dismounted to look at it. Trevor jumped off the top of the rockhopper and walked over and past him to look over the edge. "Shit," Trevor said. "This is incredible."

  "Stand a little further back, kid," Ryan said. "We don't know how stable this edge is."

  The canyon was so wide that the opposite wall was misty in the distance. The edges were fluted. Looking down, it was a dizzying drop to an incline of broken rock fragments, the talus slope. Ryan Martin got down on his belly and looked over the edge. It was an absolutely vertical drop, maybe two hundred meters straight, before the rubble at the bottom began to slope outward. The wall looked layered, but it was pretty hard to tell from this angle.

  In both directions, the canyon extended out as far as they could see, disappearing in the distance.

  "Wow," Trevor said. "I never thought that Valles Marineris would be so spectacular. It's like the Grand Canyon."

  Ryan looked at him for a moment, and laughed.

  "I don't get it," Trevor said. "What's funny?"

  "You think this one is impressive?" Ryan shook his head. "Kid, we've still got a long way yet before we get to the big one. This isn't the Valles Marineris. Just the appetizer."

  "Does it have a name?"

  Commander Radkowski had exited the rockhopper and was now standing beside them. "Coprates Catena," he said. "We're getting close to the Valles Marineris territory; this is just a groove in the crust that didn't make it to the big time. It runs about five hundred kilometers, and then it ends."

  "You want to detour around?" Ryan said.

  Radkowski shook his head. "No, that would probably take at least two days, and we don't have extra time to spare. And, besides, we might as well get started rappelling. We're going to be forced to, later, anyway."

  Trevor looked into the canyon, and shuddered. "You're joking." He looked at them. "Tell me you're joking."

  But neither of the other two were laughing.

  Ryan went back to the rockhopper to fetch the block and tackle.

  The cable was made of a superfiber material called Spectra 10K. It consisted of a thread of buckminsterfullerine nanotubes woven in a matrix of polyethylene. It was nearly as thin as spiderweb, and despite a coating of fluoropolymer, almost as invisible.

  Fifty kilometers of the superfiber was wound up on a silicon-carbide deployment spool barely larger than Ryan's fist. Despite its thinness the cable was plenty strong enough to hold the weight of the entire team, and the rockhopper itself.

  Radkowski tested several rock outcroppings at the rim of the canyon, and chose one that was part of the bedrock, or at least something so large that the rockhopper could not move it. The bedrock was a dark, dense basalt, its surface smooth and uncracked. Radkowski drilled an anchor point into the rock, and Ryan fixed a titanium bolt into the hole with an epoxy plug. A second bolt was fixed for redundancy, and then a separate safety line was set with a third and fourth anchor. Radkowski affixed the cables, with Ryan watching over to check his work. When they were done, he called Tana over and made her repeat the checkout as he watched her.

  They were ready to go.

  Getting Estrela out of the rockhopper was a difficult task. Her sprained ankle, taped firmly, could be forced into the Mars suit's boot, but her arm was still too swollen to slide into the form-fitting sleeve of the Mars suit, even with the piezoelectric fabric fully relaxed. Tana finally solved this problem by taping Estrela's left arm firmly to her chest, as if she were cradling her breasts with her arm. They could then shut the chest carapace with her arm inside the shell. Estrela told her that as long as she did not try to inhale too deeply, it felt okay. A balloon patch sealed the opening where the sleeve should have been.

  "That should hold," Ryan said.

  "You'd better help me, I think," Estrela said.

  By leaning on Tana at one side, and with Ryan supporting her on the other, they got her out of the rockhopper and moved her over to a shelf of rock where she could watch.

  Radkowski entered the rockhopper, slaved the controls to a remote unit, and then sealed it up.

  "You all know enough not to try to touch the cable with your hands," Radkowski said. That had been covered in their training, but apparently he wanted to make sure. "If you have to handle it, use the deployment spool, or else use a handling tool. But it would be better just to stay clear." He looked at each of them, and waited until they nodded. "Good."

  A take-up reel specifically designed for fullerine superfiber was fixed onto the anchor cable. One control on the reel loosened or tightened a friction brake on the deployment reel. A second control allowed them to spool the fiber up onto the take-up reel at a gear ratio of a thousand. A separate attach-point held their safety line.

  Using the remote, Commander Radkowski inched the rover to the edge of the cliff. The nose of the vehicle dipped, and for a moment he hesitated.

  Then, trailing behind him a fiber as thin and as invisible as a spider's thread, he drove the rockhopper off the cliff.

  4

  THREAD

  John Radkowski had had experience with superfiber cable nearly ten years before. On the space station, it had been used to dispose of garbage.

  In the twenty-first century, Radkowski discovered, the job of astronaut was a half step down from truck driver.

  Expensive, high-tech satellites were delivered by unmanned space boosters: cheap, reusable, and too small to ferry humans, they made fortunes for the farsighted investors who had invested in the low-cost transportation and built the whirling network of satellites that surrounded the Earth like a plague of gnats.

  To launch people into space, though, they still used the ancient space shuttle. Refurbishing and upgrading had made the shuttles more efficient, adding all-electronic controls and liquid-propellant fly-back boosters, but they were still recognizably the fragile white elephants that had flown in the previous century. Decades of pampering care had made each shuttle orbiter idiosyncratic, with its own set of operating procedures and engineering work-arounds for misbehaving parts. With never quite enough money to adequately refurbish them, and far too little to engineer a new launch system, the space shuttles were still the best way to reliably launch humans into space.

  The job of astronaut meant that Radkowski ferried scientists up and down to the space station and was responsible for shepherding the scientists while they were in space, making sure that they followed safety regulations and didn't do anything that would jeopardize the station or their own lives. This, he discovered, was a tough job. The scientists—pierced and pony-tailed young men with goatees and glasses, earnest-faced young women with irreverent T-shirts and disconcertingly direct gazes that he had trouble meeting—had almost an uncanny instinct for skipping safety rules and getting in trouble.

  It was a job.

  The first time he had visited the space station he had been impressed with the sheer size of it. The modules had seemed small when he trained in the weightless tanks, but once out there, in orbit, all the modules together with trusses and external experiment modules and solar arrays and appendages, it seemed to be huge.

  Inside, the first thing to hit him was how noisy it was. He had expected silence, or perhaps the muted hum of an air circulation fan. Instead it had been full of sounds: clatters and clicking and hums, buzzes of machinery and whirring of fans, computers and lab equipment monitors beeping, voices carrying from modules far away. Then he was impressed with how cluttered it was. Later he amended that: not cluttered, exactly, just crammed. Every wall was filled with things, and in a space station, that meant the "floor" and the "ceiling" walls as well. It was a
lmost impossible to find anything, unless you remembered to make a clear note of where it had been put.

  His job was unglamourous, taking care of the routine. His real assignment, he knew, was to be prepared for an emergency, but in the interim there was no end of tasks: vacuuming air filters, calculating garbage dumps, scheduling orbital maintanance burns, and doing preventative upkeep on the ten thousand valves and fans and pumps that kept them alive.

  He met Ryan Martin on his fifth ferry trip up to the orbiting laboratory.

  Ryan had, at first, seemed to be just another of the scientists: a pony-tailed young man with a growth of facial hair just too short to be called an actual beard. He found Ryan buried in the equipment or taking data or talking with the other scientists; John Radkowski had never been good with people, and it took him a long time to even learn his name. Then it surprised him to find out that he was not one of the scientists at all, but actually one of the Canadian astronauts, on his first mission to the space station. It wasn't his job to fix the equipment; it wasn't his job to take data or talk to the scientists. He just liked doing it.

  The American space station—it was by name an international space station, but everybody called it American—was not the only space station in orbit.

  The Russians had originally been a partner in the American-led space station program, but after the bloody civil war and the war of Kamchatkan independence, they had dropped out. Nobody had ever thought that their space program would ever be resurrected, but, dogged and determined, the Russians had held on. Small, cramped, and perpetually on the verge of breaking down, the Mirusha was built and kept operational—barely—as a matter of national pride. Its name, the "little Mir," was a tribute to the earlier Mir space station, long since burned up in the Earth's atmosphere. The Russians did not intend for anybody to forget who had had a space station first. It also meant a little world, appropriate for the tiny cylinder of atmosphere in orbit around the Earth; or with a slight change in pronunciation and spelling, it meant "little Mary," which was the pet name the Russian cosmonauts unofficially favored.