Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey Landis

  Tana listened to what she said—her grandmother had always been a sharp cookie and a good judge of character—but she didn't actually believe it. She had every intention of getting where she was going, affirmative action or no.

  Her way to medical school was paid by a Hawthorne Foundation scholarship that covered her tuition and expenses and a little bit for her to live on as well. The very first day of med school, before she knew anybody, before she even could find her way around the strange new campus without the map in the med school handbook, one of the boys in her class cornered her in a hall. In a peremptory tone, he demanded to know whether she was paying her own way or if she had a scholarship. When she told him about the Hawthorne fellowship—maybe bragging a little bit, because she knew it was a highly competitive grant—he nodded. Obviously it confirmed what he had already known. And he explained to her that she had only received the grant because she was black. The full scholarships are reserved for minorities regardless of their qualifications, he explained. He, himself, had applied; he had gotten a better score on the MCAT and came from a poor family and needed it more. But it went to her because she was black.

  She was up all night, tossing and turning.

  The next day she went to the dean and told him that it the scholarship was awarded to her based on her color, they could take it back. She was going to earn her way based on merit or not at all.

  The dean pulled a pair of half-glasses with black plastic frames from his desk drawer, and put them on. "Just hold on to your horses, young lady." He turned to his file cabinet. "That name, again?"

  "Jackson. Tana Jackson," she said.

  "Your name, Ms. Jackson, I already know. The name of the young man who is making these peculiar accusations, please?"

  Tana hesitated. It hadn't been her intention to be a snitch on the other students, and then she realized that it didn't matter, she had forgotten his name anyway. Or maybe he hadn't bothered to introduce himself.

  Before she could gather her thoughts to answer, he picked up a file from his desk. "Ah, never mind, I have it here." Apparently he had known the boy's name from the start and already had the boy's file out. He barely gave the file a glance.

  "The Hawthorne scholarship, you said? Odd. According to his record here, he didn't even apply for one. But that is no surprise. He doesn't qualify for a Hawthorne scholarship at all, young woman. It is quite competitive, you know, one must have straight As to even apply. I can't divulge the young gentleman's grades to you, but let me assure you that this is rather far from being the case. In fact"—the dean flipped a page, reading a handwritten note that had been stapled to the folder—"it looks to me like he flunked out of linear algebra entirely, and some person intervened with the professor to allow him to repeat the final exam. Not that you heard any such thing from me, you understand."

  Tana's mouth was wide open. "So he was bullshitting me."

  The dean lowered his glasses and looked at her over them. "He was, as they call it, yanking your chain," he said. "The med school here is quite competitive—very competitive indeed, you know. I believe that some students may, on occasion, take it into their heads to try to get an edge over other students with a little bit of creative truth-telling. You shouldn't believe everything you hear." He pulled off his glasses and put them carefully back on his desk. "Now, was there something else you wanted?"

  She shook her head.

  An instant after she walked away, the dean called out after her.

  "One moment, Ms. Jackson."

  She turned and looked back through the door. "Yes, sir?"

  "Are you aware of the number of medical students needed to replace a lightbulb?"

  "No," Tana said, wondering just what he was up to. "I'm afraid I don't."

  "It takes four," he said. "One of them to screw it in, and the other three to pull the ladder out from under him."

  She wasn't quite sure whether that was funny.

  When she confronted the other student, he told her quite indignantly that everybody knew that she had won the scholarship because of her color, and he hadn't applied for the scholarship because he knew they wouldn't give it to him anyway.

  As it turned out—she discovered later—the boy wasn't from a poor family, either; that part of his story was another bit of his creative application of truth.

  "Bainbridge?" another student told her much later. "Him? He's a dickhead. You don't pay attention to him, do you?"

  For the rest of her years in medical school and her residency, she chose her friends carefully—and watched her back.

  4

  A WALK IN THE TWILIGHT

  John Radkowski walked along the edge of the cliff. The bottom was already in darkness, and it was as if he walked along an ocean of blackness, as if he could dive off of the edge and swim into the lapping pool of dark.

  Trevor had come to talk to him again, this time not even bothering to disguise the fact that he was pleading for his life, and he had again put Trevor off. Radkowski knew that it was time for him to face up to the decision that was his to make. The return vehicle could not save them all. Who should be saved?

  And with this, the thought that he had been avoiding. When they got to the return ship—and he would get them to the return ship, whatever the cost—when it came time for the ship to launch, he would not be one of the ones to return.

  He owed a debt.

  It was time for the debt to be paid.

  5

  THE ROAD TO HOUSTON

  Tana did her internship and her residency at a hospital in Pittsburgh. She married a bouncer at an East Pittsburgh bar, Derrick; she'd become fed up with doctors in her time at school and at work, and wanted nothing more than to get away from them in her personal life.

  Derrick was more than a tough guy; he aspired to be a poet and took her to poetry readings and to gatherings of folksingers and artists. Even in the bar, he would be more likely to deal with a drunken customer by jollying them out the door with a quip than by violence. Nevertheless, her father had not approved of him; he'd still cherished the idea that she might marry the son of one of his banker or lawyer friends, somebody closer to being worthy of her.

  Much later, Tana wondered whether, to some extent, her marriage had been an attempt to demonstrate to her father in the most vivid way possible that she had her own independence and was going to live her life her own way.

  After a year, she found herself pregnant. She hadn't wanted to have a baby, at least not yet, but Derrick was so pleased by her pregnancy that he almost glowed. They named the child Severna.

  When she completed her residency, she applied for a job as a flight surgeon for NASA. She considered it a long shot—she could barely remember her coursework in aerospace medicine after two years stuffing intestines back inside knife slits and sewing up gunshot wounds in the emergency room—but Houston was her best way to get inside, to find herself an inside track to get selected for the astronaut corps. When, to her own surprise, she was accepted, Derrick refused to leave Pittsburgh. "Houston?" he said, his voice incredulous. "Houston? In Texas? Girl, you've got to be joking."

  But she never joked about her career. This time, she had never been more serious in her life. Pittsburgh was nothing to her; she'd never even stopped there for gas before she moved there for her residency. But Derrick had roots, cousins and uncles and family back three generations, all living within half a mile.

  He was angry when she said she was going anyway, no matter what he thought. She made the paycheck in the family, not him, she told him, and Houston wasn't so bad. Besides, the salary she'd been offered was triple the meager amount she'd been earning. He could learn to live with it.

  A woman's place is to follow her man, he told her, and fuck if he's going to leave the city he grew up in to move to fucking Texas. Where was she going to go next, anyway? He had roots in this city. Roots.

  "I'm going, Derrick," she said. "With you or without you, I'm going."

  He grabbed her blouse and jerked her t
oward him, almost pulling her off the ground. "The hell you are!" he shouted. The muscles in his jaw, his neck, his shoulders were all bunched up with rage. "You think I'm going to let you just leave me?" His fist was clenched, and she knew that he was about to hit her. They'd had arguments before, but he had never hit her.

  She closed her eyes. "Go ahead, Derrick." She could feel his arm trembling with the strength of his anger, the motion of his other arm pulling back to strike. She screwed her eyes shut, clenched her jaw, willed herself not to scream.

  He let go.

  The release was so unexpected that she almost did scream, suddenly unbalanced. She was afraid to move, afraid to look.

  The door slammed, and when she looked up, Derrick was gone.

  It was an hour before he came back. He had been walking, he told her, he had to walk it off, or else he would hit her.

  Derrick made up to her when he realized what he'd done, how badly he'd frightened her. He was extravagantly affectionate, promised he'd never hit her, never, and they made love. She was still tense, though, still afraid of what he was capable of. He was slow and loving, but she got nothing out of it.

  She left with Severna and all the stuff she could cram into the car. She no longer knew Derrick, didn't know what he was, or was not, capable of.

  Derrick petitioned for custody. It made sense, he said: He had family in the area—his parents and aunts and brothers and cousins and their multitudinous children. And who did she know in Houston? Nobody.

  It was the one time that she broke her self-imposed rule: She went to her father for money. He knew better than to say that he'd told her so. The lawyer that her daddy's money bought told her not to sweat the custody hearing. It would be a slam dunk. The judge had never, he told her, never once awarded custody to the father unless the mother was dead, drunk, or in jail.

  The judge was an old, white-haired black man, who looked so old that he might have been on the bench since the Clinton administration. And he seemed sympathetic, cutting off Derrick in midsentence. And it had, indeed, seemed a slum dunk, right up until the judge told Derrick to cut the crap, and just tell him in simple terms, no bullshit, tell him just why he thought he should take the child away from her mother.

  "I just don't want my child growing up in the South, judge," Derrick said.

  "South," the judge had said. "The South?" He turned to Tana.

  Tana looked at her very expensive lawyer, but he seemed at a sudden loss.

  "Well?"

  "Houston isn't really the South, your honor," Tana replied.

  But the case was lost. "I don't think is in the child's best interests," the judge ruled, "to grow up surrounded by rednecks, when she could instead be surrounded by her family. Custody goes to the father." He slammed his gavel on the bench. "Case closed."

  Derrick's family bickered constantly—they seemed like they had a constant low-level feud—but they were, all in all, a loving clan. Severna will be okay, Tana told herself, she would never lack for a home to go to. She knew that if she told the court that Derrick had hit her, she could probably win an appeal. He had almost hit her, she told herself. It wouldn't really be a lie. She could say it in court.

  She didn't appeal. As a single mother, she would have no chance at becoming an astronaut. It came down to the child or her dreams, and dreams had come late to her; she didn't want to give them up.

  She felt guilty sometimes, even now, but she suppressed the feeling.

  Derrick had found himself a girlfriend before she had barely even left Pennsylvania, before the divorce was even final. Last she'd been in touch, he'd gone through two more wives, but still didn't have any problem finding women.

  6

  LETTER HOME

  Dearest Severna,

  I still don't know when I will be able to send this letter, but I promised to write you, and I will. We are waiting at the edge of a canyon. In the morning we will go down. This will be exciting.

  Mars has a stark and terrible beauty, rugged and untamed, more desolate than all the deserts of Earth. They call it the red planet, but when we got here it astonished me to see that it is not red at all, but a rich deep yellow, darker than beach sand, more like peanut butter only a little more yellow. Like buttered toast. The dark rocks look almost magenta, and the shadows are a dark brick red.

  I'm sorry that I don't write to you more often. Please know that your momma thinks about you every day and hopes and prays that everything good will be coming to you. I remember when I was your age, and I guess that life isn't always easy, but don't give up. You don't have to be the most popular or the most stylish girl in the class, just be yourself.

  I look at your picture every day. I have to say that I think that the shaved head looks funny on a girl to me, but everybody tell me that it's the style and lots of kids look like that, so I guess I'm just an old-fashioned trog.

  I'm sorry I can't talk with you every day, but the Earth is disappearing behind the sun and the good communications antenna was left behind at the ship.

  I'm sending all my love to you with this letter.

  Take good care of yourself and do your best in school and everything will turn out okay, I promise.

  all of my love,

  your mother

  Tana looked over the letter. Did it seem too cold, too trite? She never knew how to write to her daughter. She deleted the "mother" and substituted "mom," and looked through it another time to see what else might look stilted.

  What else could she add? Had she told Severna how stunningly beautiful Mars was?

  In the evenings, the two little moons come out and play tag across the sky. The larger one, Phobos, moves so fast that you can almost see it move across the sky; it goes all the way from crescent to full and back to crescent in the course of the night.

  Surely that was enough. She didn't even know when they might be able to send the message. And in another day they would be descending the canyon. That, certainly, would give her something to write about.

  7

  THE COLOR OF DIRT

  Houston was, in its way, something like medical school. Tana got along pretty well with the others, but she got tired of the rivalry to get on missions. Sometimes Tana was just simply tired of other people's assumptions. That because she was black, she must have grown up in a ghetto with a welfare mother and a drug-dealing father. That she listened to hip-hop music or—what were kids listening to now?—Afro stomp.

  Sometimes she went to the mostly black clubs, or to the gospel choir suppers, not because she wanted to hang out with people of her own race, but simply because, once in a while, it was a relief to just be simply taken for herself, not to have to be a representative of her race. She wasn't sure if she even believed in the idea of race, at least not the way that white people seemed to.

  People—other people—called her skin the color of coffee, or sometimes dark chocolate. She thought that was belittling. Her father had always said that they had skin the color of dirt. Not pale, worn-out soil, like some people, but rich soil, good farming topsoil. They would make things grow.

  Her father had never been a farmer—he was an engineer—but his grandfather had been a farmer, proud of it, and had instilled that pride into all of his grandsons.

  When she was depressed, when things weren't going well, when people dismissed her without even seeing anything but her color, she sometimes thought about that. We're the color of dirt, girl, don't you forget it. Nothing to hide about it, either. Rich and strong. Organic. Be proud of it.

  8

  DOWN THE CANYON

  They went down the canyon at first light.

  Ryan Martin had set the bolts into the rocks for the safety attachments the previous night. The dirt-rover was loaded onto its rack on the rock-hopper and strapped securely in place, along with their supplies. They lowered it first, a kilometer and a half straight down until it touched the talus slope, and then Ryan Martin went down the rope to secure it in place.

  As he descended, he gave
a running commentary over the radio link.

  "Fifty meters," his voice came over the radio. "Seventy. The rock of the canyon wall is black and dense, smooth in texture, maybe a basalt. I'm a hundred meters down now. Oh, that's weird, there's a sharp dividing line, and it turns to reddish stone. It's undercut. The rock has been, it's like it's been eaten away."

  "That's not surprising," Estrela said. Her voice was weak, almost a whisper. "The caprock is probably from lava flows, it's going to be harder than the sandstone below it. So the sandstone gets abraded away by sandstorms."

  "Maybe," Ryan said. He had stopped descending, and was just hanging in space against the side of the cliff. "It's a lot of overhang. I can't see how far in it goes. It's like a cave, but horizontal, a kind of slot extending the whole width of the cliff face."

  "Not exploring," Commander Radkowski interjected. His voice was a rough whisper. "Don't stop long. First priority secure rockhopper."

  "Got it, Captain. Just one moment more, let me get a light out. Okay. Wow, it's deep. It's really deep. Hold on, if I go down a little bit more, now if I can just swing a little—there. Okay, I'm standing on the ledge here."

  "Don't unhook safety," the captain said.

  "Got it. It's high enough to stand up in. Incredible. I still can't see how far back it goes—Hey, up there, the rock you're standing on? Seem solid? Well, underneath you, it's all hollow. It looks like it goes back for miles. The bottom of the cave is quite smooth and level. There are crystals here, they're reflecting my light. Some of them as big as a fingernail. I can't quite tell what they are. They're purple. Some of them are blue."