Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey Landis

  That was why Mars was such a shock.

  3

  AT THE TOP

  In fact, it had taken longer than expected to climb the cliff. Once at the top, it was their task to raise the rockhopper up, but the winching operation was slow and painstaking, and the sun touched the horizon with the rock-hopper less than halfway up. Rather than risk damaging it against an unseen protuberance, Ryan called a halt.

  "Can we just leave it there, dangling like that?" Brandon asked.

  "Sure, it'll be fine," Ryan said.

  Brandon was still dubious. "What if the wind picks up over the night?"

  "At this atmospheric pressure? Don't worry about it. It would take a hurricane just to get it to budge."

  "What about earthquakes?"

  Ryan laughed. "It will be fine, Trevor. Don't worry."

  "Brandon," he said.

  "Oh, yeah. Right. I forgot. It will be fine, Brandon. Just fine. Don't worry."

  As usual, in the morning Brandon was the first one up, and started the day by suiting up and walking around the campsite while the others were still getting up. This time Ryan didn't even bother to remind him not to forget the suit checklist, and so Brandon was the first one to look down. The rover was covered by a fine white fuzz. He looked down at it in horror, for a moment too startled to speak. Then he keyed on his radio. "Ryan, come quick," he called. "The rockhopper—it's covered with mold!"

  Ryan was checking the winch.

  The rockhopper was easy to spot; it gleamed brilliantly white, almost bloody in the red morning sunlight. Fine, fuzzy tendrils seemed to grow out of it and reach up the invisible line of the superfiber cable. Ryan walked cautiously to the cliff edge and looked down. For a moment Ryan seemed disconcerted. Then he laughed. He went back to the winch.

  "Well?" Brandon said. "What is it?"

  "Frost," Ryan said. "Only frost. No big deal."

  "Frost?" Brandon sounded doubtful. "Frost on Mars?"

  Ryan spoke us he continued checking the winch. "The rover cooled down more than the rocks. Lower heat capacity. Suspended in the air—I expect it reached minus one-fifty, easy. Water condensed out on it. That's all."

  "But I thought Mars was dry."

  "Yep, it's pretty dry," Ryan agreed. "But there's still a little water in the atmosphere. More at lower altitudes. No surprise that it would condense on the rover."

  By the time they had winched it to the top of the cliff, the frost had sublimed away from the rockhopper. The frost bath had failed to clean it, though; it was still coated with a layer of yellowish dust.

  They headed north and west. The ground they drove across was rocky, with a fine soil packing all the cracks and packed into the angles between rocks. Brandon saw Tana, driving the dirt-rover ahead, fighting to keep the dirt-rover under control on the smooth rock.

  In the cabin of the rockhopper they still wore the chest-carapaces of their suits, but they all had their helmets and gloves off. It was beginning to smell rank, like the inside of a gym locker; they spent too much time in their suits.

  Brandon clutched his fossil, rubbing the tips of his fingers over the smooth stone. Back at the bottom of the cliffs, Estrela had given him her rock hammer. Commander Ryan had complained that they didn't have time to collect specimens, but if Ryan had found it himself, Brandon expected that he would have found the time. So while they had worked on setting up the winch, Brandon had carefully chipped it out of the rock to bring with them.

  With his bare fingers, he could feel a lot more. It had fine, almost invisible ripples on the surface, like the pebbly skin of a lizard. It was relaxing to rub it.

  Estrela was being quiet. She hadn't been talking much since the accident, Brandon realized. She held her left arm awkwardly, bracing it with her right. He wondered if her arm still hurt.

  "Hey, Estrela," Brandon said. "How you doing?"

  She turned to him. Her eyes had red rims, he suddenly noticed. His own eyes hurt just looking at her.

  "Lousy." Estrela's voice was no louder than a whisper. "Go away. Leave me alone."

  In the rover there was no place to go. He wanted to ask Commander Ryan whether he had thought about who he would put on the rocket back to Earth, but decided to wait until he was alone with the commander instead of asking in front of Estrela. He thought about trying to sing a song in his head, but the landscape was too cold, too discordant. There was no way he could reconcile it to music. So instead he just watched the ground disappear under them, mile after mile after mile of endless yellow desert stone.

  4

  EXPERIENCING MARS

  Yellow stone desert, stretching endlessly away in all directions.

  But after your eyes got used to the shades of rust and gold, Tana thought, the subtle differences in shade and the true complexity of the landscape emerged. On the ground they were now traversing, a thin plate of sandstone had been laid down over an immense flow of solidified lava. She could now readily distinguish the dark, almost magenta shades of the underlying lava in the places where the sandstone had been broken away, the lighter yellowish orange of the sandstone, and the lighter yet shade of the wind-deposited dust layer. Boulders were scattered across the landscape like children's toys, spewed out by eruptions of immense volcanoes invisible far over the horizon. In places the sandstone had buckled up to stand in angled walls like the dorsal scales of a buried dragon.

  It was tricky to drive the dirt-rover across, but interesting. The landscape was fantastic, always changing, always different. Tana suddenly regretted that she was not a geologist; she had a million questions about the landscape. She passed a column standing vertically in the desert, a black obelisk pointing a hundred feet into the sky. What was it, she wondered? The solidified core of a dead volcano, she guessed. Perhaps it had been buried, and the softer material on the outside eroded away by ten million years of sand-laced winds. She thought about calling back to the rockhopper on the radio and asking Estrela, but Estrela had not been very forthcoming, answering earlier questions only with uninformative monosyllables. Certainly she had spoken with none of the puppyish enthusiasm for rocks and landforms of the geologists that had briefed them.

  So Tana stayed silent. It was, in its way, better. She could be moved by what she saw, with no barriers of language between her and the landscape, no need to communicate her feelings with others.

  With all its inhuman majesty, its cold distances, its flat and unaccented sky, Tana loved Mars.

  5

  THE TWINS

  Brandon Weber was nine years old before he discovered that he had an identical twin brother who was three years older than he was.

  His parents, back when they had been married, had been unable to have children. In the early 2000s, this had been no big challenge. The fertility specialists they visited had advised in-vitro fertilization; their medical insurance paid the bill. An egg was harvested from his mother, Allison. A sample of sperm had been gathered from his father, examined under a microscope, and a single healthy spermatozoan was selected. By micro-manipulation, the sperm cell was injected through the outer cellular wall of the egg to fertilize it.

  And then the technician watched. It took the technician three times to get one to successfully fertilize. When the ovum divided, and divided again, it was clear that the fertilization had succeeded. The four cells had been carefully separated, and each one allowed to divide to the blastocyst stage. One of these was sacrificed to microdissection, to verify that the chromosomes held no abnormalities. No Down's syndrome chromosomes, no cystic fibrosis, no less-than-perfect babies would be good enough for Ted and Allison Whitman.

  One egg had been implanted back into Allison Whitman's uterus.

  And the two others had been perfused and frozen, to serve as backups. If Allison Whitman failed to become pregnant on the first egg, there would be two more tries. As it happened, the backups were unnecessary; Allison got pregnant on the first try.

  Ted Whitman, as it turned out, also had a backup plan: He had told his gir
lfriend Frissa that he had had a vasectomy and that "precautions" would be unnecessary. Now Frissa, too, was pregnant.

  In the divorce settlement, Ted held out for custody of the newborn, and in order to get it, he ended up paying off Allison with a good chunk of his accumulated wealth. He had been getting tired of her anyway, and he didn't really need the money. Me named the kid Trevor, close enough to his own name of Ted to satisfy his vanity, and got a court order canceling all of Allison's visitation privileges. The last thing that he wanted was some ex hanging around with a claim on his child.

  Allison moved back to western Colorado, where her family was from, and took back her maiden name. Unlike Ted—who went through two more wives before eventually giving up on marriage—she never remarried. Once was enough for her. Between the divorce settlement and her job as a private tutor in American history on the Internet, she was pretty well off. But it did occur to her, after a few years on her own, that she would like her own child. An inquiry to the fertility clinic revealed that the remaining fertilized eggs were still there, still waiting in the freezer, and by the peculiarities of Arizona law, were legally her property.

  The result was Brandon Weber.

  When Ted Whitman died, of a coronary at age fifty-two, his family— a mother and two unmarried sisters—asked to keep custody of Trevor. With Ted's inability to hold onto a wife, they had been doing most of the raising of Trevor anyway. In due course a lawyer visited Allison to ask whether she was planning to sue for her rights. It was then that nine-year-old Brandon unexpectedly discovered that he had an older twin brother. The news to Ted Whitman's family that Ted had a second son, one that they had never heard of, proved to be equally unexpected.

  The lawyers turned out to be unnecessary; Allison had always liked Ted's sisters, and they discovered that they had a lot in common, not the least of which was Ted. They got along fine. It was only Ted himself that she had had problems with.

  6

  ROCKHOPPER

  Another day of insanely boring driving over flat, uninteresting territory.

  Brandon had to keep on checking the position of the sun to verify that they were driving toward the north. His sense of direction told him that they were driving east, then a moment later that they had doubled back around south, and then that they were driving due west. They were approaching the Martian equator now, and at noon the sun was very near directly overhead. At this time he had to just trust the rockhopper's inertial navigation system on faith. He didn't like it.

  Estrela had withdrawn into herself. She said nothing for hours, often not bothering to reply when spoken to. Tana had gone weird. She was talking about the Mars landscape as if it were still exciting, just as if the scenery that they saw today was any different from what they saw yesterday or, for that matter, at the landing site. Only Commander Ryan seemed sane to Brandon, and he seemed to have a fixed, unchangeable mission: to put in as many miles on the road as possible.

  Everybody was hoarse, everybody's eyes were red and itching.

  The rockhopper was showing wear; on the second day out of the canyon, red warning lights flashed in the cockpit of the rockhopper. The front left wheel had seized up.

  Ryan examined it. The wheel was frozen, and he pulled it off to examine it. He traced the problem to abrasion due to grit leaking through the seal and into the bearing. It was far beyond any possible repair—the friction of the wheel seizing up had melted parts of the bearing, and then when it froze, twisted it into scrap. Feedback circuitry on the drive motor should have shut it off when the motor current increased; instead, it had burned out the motor as well.

  There was nothing Ryan could do about it, and there no spare. He picked up the useless wheel, and hurled it as far away from the rockhopper as he could. It careened off of a rock and spun to a stop in a sand drift.

  "Shouldn't we save it?" Brandon asked. "What if we need it later?"

  "For what?" Ryan said. "Nothing here can fix it, that's for sure. It's just dead weight."

  He cannibalized the motor and the wheel from the middle left side and moved it to the front to replace the one that had frozen. "This one isn't in mint condition either, but it should do," he said. It was fortunate that the six-wheeled rockhopper had a lot of redundancy; the wheels were designed to be independent and interchangeable precisely so that the loss of any one of them would not cripple the rover.

  "Can you fix the seals?"

  Ryan shook his head. "They just weren't made for this much constant use. Okay, we're ready to roll. Let's go."

  They switched drivers. Tana, who'd had the last shift running scout on the dirt-rover, dismounted to take over driving the rockhopper.

  As Tana walked toward him, Brandon noticed something odd. Through the dusty faceplate of the helmet, it was hard to tell, but he inspected her again, carefully; it wasn't an illusion. "You're blond," he said.

  "What?" Tana laughed. "Not by a long shot, boy."

  He peered through the faceplate of her helmet. She looked funny; the light hair stood out in stark contrast to her dark skin. "That's what's different. You're a blond."

  "No way, guy."

  "Yes! Really." Brandon looked around. There was nothing like a mirror anywhere around. Finally he went to the rockhopper. He scrubbed the dust off of one of the windows until he could see his own reflection, and invited Tana over to look. "Look."

  Tana looked at her reflection for a long time. Her hair, although not exactly golden, had turned to a light shade of brown, like wheat. "You're right. There aren't any mirrors around, or I would have noticed it." She turned and looked at Brandon. "You're blond, too. Take a look at yourself. And, come to think of it, so is Estrela. I've been thinking that she was doing something to her hair—it was just so gradual that I couldn't quite put my finger on it. She used to have dark black hair."

  "What is it?" Brandon whispered.

  "Peroxides in the soil," she said. "It's a natural bleach. No matter how we try to keep the dust out, we can't help getting a little exposure to the soil every time we put on and take off our suits. We're all getting a peroxide job."

  Suddenly Brandon put it together. "That's why our eyes are so itchy all the time."

  "Yours too? I thought it was just me. Yeah, that's probably it."

  "What do we do about it?"

  "Aren't blonds supposed to have more fun? So, let's have some fun." She laughed. "The dust sure isn't going to go away, I can tell you that. So we'd better learn to adapt." Tana looked at Brandon. "Say, are you all right? You look a little run-down."

  "I'm fine," Brandon said. I'm stuck on Mars with psychotics, he thought. Half of us aren't going to make it back. And there's nothing to do, nothing to distract us. I'm going to go nuts. "Fine, fine, fine, fine."

  7

  BROTHERS PACT

  At first meeting, Brandon hated his newfound brother Trevor. They fought like cats, backs arched, hissing at each other and threatening to scratch. "No use bitching about it, Branny," his mother told him. "Like it or no, he's going to stay your brother." And so every vacation, every summer, every holiday they were together.

  But it was eerie how similar they were. Trevor liked the same virtual reality world that Brandon did, Dirt City Blue. He loved history and hated algebra, like Brandon did, and had a crush on the same virtual actor, Tiffany Li, the one that all the other kids thought was flat-chested and ugly. Brandon could quote a single word from the lyrics of a stomp song, and Trevor would know what song it was. He would complete the quote and toss a single word back, and just like he could read Trevor's mind, Brandon always knew which song Trevor was thinking of, even if it was a stupid dumb word like "love" or "night" or even, once, "the."

  Despite the difference in their ages, they looked so much alike that sometimes when Trevor was visiting Colorado, people would think he was Brandon, and when Brandon went down to Arizona, people would talk to him as though he were Trevor, especially when he wore some of Trevor's outgrown clothes.

  Trevor was a shade more o
bedient, Brandon just a little more rebellious toward authority, and Brandon's mother considered Trevor a good influence on him. Trevor was a Scout, and knew about rock climbing, something Brandon had always wanted to do. So Trevor taught him, and after that every summer they would go out rock climbing.

  And when the announcement came out about the expedition to Mars, they both looked at each other. Trevor was twenty now, a junior at Arizona State. They didn't see each other as often—Brandon was just applying to colleges—but when they did, they still instantly clicked together, as if they'd never been separated.

  "You're thinking what I'm thinking," Trevor said. It was a statement, nut a question.

  "Yeah."

  "Too young."

  "Yeah."

  Trevor thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. "Okay," he said.

  "Great!" Brandon broke into an enormous grin. He didn't need to ask what Trevor was talking about; as always, they were thinking the same way. "Thanks a lot!"

  Tickets to the Mars lottery were a thousand dollars. They bought thirty tickets each.

  Brandon reached his hand over his head, and Trevor clasped it. "Brothers forever!" Their words were spoken so nearly simultaneously that, had there been anybody else there, they would have thought it was a single voice.

  It hadn't occurred to Brandon to doubt Trevor for even a moment; his single word—okay—was as good as a vow. The problem had been simple: Brandon was too young for the Mars lottery. Trevor would be twenty-one by the time the tickets were drawn, but Brandon would barely be turning eighteen. The rules were clear: If your ticket won the lottery, if you were over twenty-one and could pass the health screening, you got a slot on the Mars crew. If you were too young, or too old, or couldn't pass the health exam, you had to take an alternative prize.