Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey Landis

  When a ship sinks, sometimes people would kill to get on the lifeboat.

  A climbing accident. A broken rope.

  And once again, Brandon got what he wanted.

  It was all clear to her now. She'd thought that the broken rope was suspicious. It had been Brandon.

  And now Brandon was dead.

  28

  SCOTT'S FOSSILS

  The fossils that Brandon had found on his last night were magnificent. Tana stood in front of them and marveled. How had he managed to find it? Was this what he was looking for? Was this what he had died to find?

  The fossil his body had been found next to looked as if it were the complete organism, or possibly a casting of the complete organism, permineralized by a more durable material. It looked as though it were carved from onyx.

  The organism itself looked something like a medusa, or perhaps some branching plant, with sinuous branches or tentacles radiating out from a cylindrical body. Was it an animal or a plant, Tana wondered? Or, on Mars, was there even a difference?

  She took out the rock hammer and began, carefully, to chip around the edges. "You want to give me some help in excising this specimen?" she said.

  Ryan, standing behind her, said nothing.

  She looked up, slightly annoyed. "Come on! It'll go faster if you give me a hand here."

  "There's no point in it, Tana," he said softly. "We can't take them with us. I'm sorry."

  "Ryan, you don't understand." She put down the hammer and looked directly at him. "This is the greatest discovery of the twenty-first century. Life existed on Mars. This proves it. Even if we don't return ourselves, we have to preserve these. We have to! This is why we're here." She picked up the hammer again and began to chip at the stone, using sharp, clean blows now that she had defined the edges. "This is more important than any of us."

  "Like the Scott expedition," Ryan said.

  Tana put down the hammer and looked up. "What?"

  "Antarctica," Ryan said. "They were the second to reach the south pole. When they got there, they found Amundsen's abandoned camps, and discovered that they had missed being first by thirty-four days. It must have been a crushing disappointment. But it was a scientific expedition. On the way, they found fossils in the mountains near the south pole. Fossils, almost at the south pole! At the time, it must have been quite an important scientific find. They were perilously low on supplies, fighting frostbite and blizzards and ferocious winds. They were dying slowly of vitamin deficiency, but they collected fifty pounds of rocks from those mountains and dragged the samples behind them for over a thousand kilometers on foot, because they thought that the scientific samples would make their expedition a success, even though they failed to reach the pole first."

  "And?" Tana asked.

  "And they died," Ryan said. "Every one of them."

  Tana was silent for a moment. "It was the fossils?" she said.

  Ryan shrugged. "If they hadn't tried to carry rocks with them, useless dead weight, would they have made it? Who can say? But I can tell this: It didn't help."

  Tana dropped the rock hammer and sighed.

  "Okay," she said, and stood up. "We leave the fossils."

  Ryan had brought one rock with him, the small fossil that Brandon had found that day at the wall of the Valles Marineris. The fist-shaped rock seemed small and tawdry next to the large fossils of the fault wall, but it was the one Brandon had found.

  They had left Brandon's body propped up where he had died, leaning against the wall and sightlessly staring toward the eastern horizon. Ryan leaned down, placed the little fossil in Brandon's right hand, and closed his left hand over it. "Trevor—Brandon—whoever you are," he said. "I guess it's too late now to really even know. Goodbye, Brandon."

  He paused. "Wherever you are—good luck."

  When they returned to the habitat for the night, Ryan gathered them together to talk about their plans. It was frightening to see how few the expedition had become. We knew people were going to die, he thought. We knew it, and yet, when it happens, we still can't quite get a grip on it. Chamlong, and then John, and now Trevor, gone. He knew that Trevor— Brandon, he should think of him as Brandon now—had deceived all of them, that he must have killed Radkowski, but somehow he still couldn't quite believe it. He lied right from the beginning, he thought. He deceived all of us.

  What secrets did the others have?

  Ryan had liked him. The betrayal was somehow worse for that. And now he's dead, too.

  "We can't afford any more accidents," he said. "The expedition is already dangerously small. We can't lose anybody else; we can't make any mistakes. From here, we travel light and last, no sidetracks, no exploration, no sight-seeing, just speed. No more wandering. We make a straight-line dash for the Agamemnon site.

  "We leave behind everything that we don't absolutely need. Agamemnon was the Cadillac of expeditions. They had everything, and they abandoned it at the site, for the most part completely unused. We'll resupply there."

  "Showers," Tana said.

  "Decent food," Estrela whispered.

  "All that," Ryan said. "All that, and one thing, the most important thing of all.

  "Agamemnon brought an airplane."

  PART SIX

  RYAN MARTIN

  Above, the cold sun hovers half the year,

  And half the year, the dark night covers all.

  A place more barren than the very pole

  No green, no brooks, no trace of life appears.

  The worst of all the horrors of this world

  The cold cruelty of this sun of ice,

  The night, immense, resembling ancient Chaos.

  — Charles Baudelaire, "De Profundis Clamavi,"

  Les Fleurs du Mal

  There are no eyes here

  In this valley of dying stars

  In this hollow valley

  This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

  In this last of meeting places

  —T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

  1

  ARES VALLIS

  It gave him a sense of deja vu.

  Ryan had been here before. When could he have been here? Never; it was impossible. But yet he felt that the territory was familiar.

  They had crossed an area of low hills, and then for two days they had walked through a region of immense buttes, imposing flat-topped mesas that loomed hundreds of meters above them. Ryan felt the pressure of the landscape, felt that they were as small as ants moving across an inhumanly large landscape.

  Now they had left the mesa territory behind. The land was furrowed. Low, rolling ridges ran parallel to their direction of travel, with half-buried boulders tumbled in clusters around. It was a flood plain, Ryan realized. An ancient deluge had carved these grooves and moved these boulders. In his memory this rang a distant bell, but he couldn't quite bring it to mind.

  A low, lone mountain—a volcano, perhaps—rose up out of the plain, and it too looked weirdly familiar. As they moved across the land, and moved into a new perspective, he saw that it was doubled, like the twin humps of a Bactrian camel, and that didn't surprise him. Of course it was a double peak.

  Because now he remembered where they were. He'd been here hundreds of times in virtual reality, learning about Mars geology. Suddenly it all came back to him in vivid detail: the Twin Peaks, the oddly named rocks: Yogi, Flat-top, Barnacle Bill, Moe. As a kid, he'd spent whole days downloading the pictures of this place from the Internet; it was when he'd first become interested in Mars. More than anything else, this place was the whole reason he was here. It was the landscape of his dreams.

  It was the Pathfinder site.

  They were crossing Ares Vallis. Yes, of course, to get from Coprates Chasma to Acidalia they had to cross Ares Vallis, they had no choice. But of all the spots to cross it, right here! "But this is history," he whispered. "We're walking on history."

  "Say again?" Tana's voice said.

  Instead of answering, Ryan started to walk faster. I
t had to be right here, just ahead of them. He started to jog, barely even noticing the boulders he had to detour around. Right, exactly here. They couldn't be far away from the actual landing site; it couldn't be more than a hundred meters.

  Right here!

  He stopped abruptly.

  Where?

  The ridged terrain spread out in all directions. He could tell from the perspective of the mountain that they had to be at the right place. All the rocks looked familiar, but every time he looked closer at any one of them, it turned to be not quite right. It couldn't be far away, but where, exactly, was it?

  "Ryan!" It was Tana, coming up behind him, panting. "Are you all right?"

  His legs ached. They had been walking for days, and even the brief exertion of breaking into a jog made him suddenly aware of the ache in his muscles. "This is the Pathfinder site," he gasped. "Look!"

  Tana looked around. "Say, you could be right. It does kind of look like it, doesn't it? Is that why you were running?"

  "It is! Take a look!" He pointed. "There are the Twin Peaks." He swung around. "That big one over there? That rock is named Couch. Or maybe that one." He stopped, momentarily unsure. It was easy to get confused. Was either of them really the boulder named Couch? Or was it another one that looked similar?

  Tana looked around. "Wow," she said. "Pretty neat. So, where's the Pathfinder itself? It wouldn't have moved, would it? So it must be here."

  "Let's find it!" Ryan said.

  "Wait a second," Tana said. "You said that we weren't going to make any stops, we weren't going to go exploring."

  "It won't take long," Ryan said. "We must be standing practically right on top of it. It's gotta be right around here. It's got to stick out like a sore thumb in this."

  But it didn't. After an hour of searching, Ryan finally had to admit that the Pathfinder was invisible. Even the inertial navigation system he had scavenged from the dirt-rover was no help; it told them exactly where on the planet they were, but the navigation system of the ancient spacecraft had only given its position on the planet to within a few kilometers. But they should be able to see it. "We know it's here," Ryan said. "So why can't we find it?"

  "Dust," Tana said. "Think about it. How long ago did that land? Thirty years ago? How many dust storms have there been since then?" She thought for a second. "It'll be so covered with dust that it will blend right in. Just a funny, lumpy patch of the soil."

  "Dust," Ryan said, dejected. "You're right. I didn't think of that. Shit. We probably walked right past it and couldn't see it. What now?"

  "Onward," Tana said. She quoted his own words back to him. "No sidetracks, no exploration, no sight-seeing, just speed. Agamemnon, or bust."

  "Agamemnon or bust," Ryan echoed. "Okay. Let's get a move on!"

  2

  THE ARROW

  Ryan Martin could not even remember a time when he had not wanted to be an astronaut. He could remember being six, and riding on his father's shoulders. The Canadian night had been cool and clear, and he had leaned back and just gazed at the stars blazing above him, tiny lighthouses on the road to infinity. He could imagine that he was falling upward, endlessly falling among the stars, and thought, there. I'm going out there. He had leaned back, farther and farther on his father's shoulders, and then let go, to feel himself falling upward.

  His father had caught him by the legs before he hit the ground—his father had always had incredible reflexes—and all that he had felt was disappointment.

  In the Scouts, he had been on the archery range. He hadn't cared much about target shooting, and unlike the other boys, he had no secret longing to hunt and kill. But the bow itself seemed to him a thing of perfect beauty, an object that could not have been more elegantly designed. He marveled over its clean and simple design. One day he took his bow, drew it back as far as he could, and aimed it directly upward into the sky.

  The arrow flew up, straight and true, and vanished with a whisper into the aching blue above, and he stared after it, his bow arm still extended in the air, mesmerized by the beauty of the flight.

  "Martin!" the scoutmaster shouted. "What the hell are you—"

  The arrow came down, so fast it was only a streak, and with a soft whickersnack buried itself to the feathers in the Earth.

  The scoutmaster turned pale, his eyes bulging, and then he exploded. "Martin! Get over here!" He grabbed him, his fingers digging painfully into his shoulder, and ripped the bow out of his hands.

  Ryan had almost forgotten he still held it.

  None of the other boys had been watching when Ryan had launched his arrow skyward, and they all turned to stare, battled at the sudden inexplicable fury of the scoutmaster.

  "You—you—" The scoutmaster was completely incoherent, and slowly, almost as if from a dream, Ryan came to his senses and realized, yes, it might have killed someone. It might have killed him. It had been a dangerous thing to do.

  But in his mind's eye he could still see it, that one perfect moment when the arrow hangs in the air, quivering, straining, longing to go higher, and then falls, defeated.

  And he realized, that is me, the arrow is me. That is where I want to go.

  To go upward, forever upward, and to never come down.

  3

  CAMP AGAMEMNON

  They were tired, and then more than tired, a complete weariness that transcended all consciousness. The world compressed down to one step, then another, then another. The landscape had changed color, darkening from the light, almost orange color of their original landing site to a dark burned-brick color. They were walking on bare bedrock. But none of them looked at the landscape, none of them focused any farther ahead than the next step.

  Ryan kept a readout of their position using the inertial navigation system from the dirt-rover. Occasionally he would read out their progress— "Three hundred kilometers to go"—until at last Tana told him to stop; it was too depressing. None of them dared to think of what would happen if the inertial navigation failed, if they were unable to find the Agamemnon site as they had been earlier unable to find the Pathfinder.

  Two hundred kilometers to go.

  One hundred kilometers.

  When they came to the edges of the Agamemnon camp, it took them several minutes before they even recognized it. A discarded drilling-lubricant cylinder. Not far past that, a seismic recording station. They were beyond curiosity now, and the technological detritus went unremarked.

  They crested a dune, and started down the far side, and none of them looked up until they almost stumbled over the camp.

  Agamemnon lay before them.

  "We're here," Tana said, almost in a whisper.

  Ryan looked up. "We're here. It's here!"

  Estrela, trailing behind, echoed in a whisper, "Here. Here!"

  The Agamemnon camp was spread out. The Agamemnon lander itself sat a kilometer off to the east, a squashed hemispherical shell sitting on its heat shield and surrounded by the shreds of its airbag cushion like a half-melted mushroom. Spread all around were the remains of the encampment: the abandoned fuel-manufacturing plant and its electrical generator plant; two bubble habitats, long deflated; a toolshed; a domed greenhouse module; a half dozen scientific stations; communications antennae; a sheet metal quonset hut; piles of trash and discarded equipment; electrical and data cables spread spaghetti-style across the ground. No one from the doomed Agamemnon had bothered to be neat; they were too worried about survival.

  Every horizontal surface was covered with a layer of dust.

  There was no hope that Agamemnon's electrical generating plant would still work, but the bubble habitats both seemed intact. Over the six years they had been on Mars the gas that had originally inflated them had slowly leaked away, but when Ryan checked, they were still intact.

  Using the Agamemnon camp was a risk. If any of the original fungus had survived the six years on Mars and was still viable, and still virulent, they could face a repeat of the runaway infection that had ultimately led to the Ag
amemnon disaster. In theory it would not survive the six years without a host. In theory, even if it survived, it would not colonize healthy humans. In theory, even if it did, they had the pharmaceuticals to be prepared for it this time. In theory.

  But they had little choice.

  Ryan salvaged several solar array panels from the lander, and after cleaning away the dust layers, found them still functioning. It would be enough power to provide heat and light for the habitat.

  And, if the transmitters still functioned, enough to communicate with Earth.

  "We've got a new camp, crew," Ryan announced. He should have felt triumph. Instead, all he felt was weary. "And it looks like everything still works."

  4

  THE MINIONS

  Through grade school Ryan had built model rockets, taught himself calculus and aerodynamics, built his own telescope and a special tracking platform for it so he could watch the Russian space station Mir when it passed overhead and plan for the day when he, too, would be up there, looking down on Canada from above. In high school his science fair project, a gyroscopic stability system for a model rocket, had won a prize and a scholarship, enough that, along with earnings from an outside job programming computers to recognize speech, he could afford to go to MIT.

  To Ryan, being an undergraduate at MIT had been like being at a banquet with each course more appetizing than the last. Finally he was stimulated to stretch his limits, and sometimes to exceed them.

  At the end of his freshman year, Ryan got involved with a project to fly a student-designed satellite. He volunteered for the task of building the control system. It was a small but intensely dedicated team.

  They had two unofficial mottoes. The first was, "It doesn't have to be good—it does have to be done." The second was, "We don't need no stinkin' sleep!" Everybody else called them the satellite gang, but to one another, they were the Minions of the Satellite God. They made a pact with each other: The satellite came first. Everything else—their sleep, their health, their grades, their lives—came second.