The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  She tried to envision how it must have been here, billions of years ago. Did life give way with a grudging struggle, trying every possible avenue before retreating into the diminished role of mere microbes?

  The planet did not die for want of heat or air, but of mass. With greater gravity it could have held onto the gases its volcanoes vented, prevented its water vapor from escaping into vacuum. Split from hydrogen by the sun's stinging ultraviolet, the energetic oxygen promptly mated with the waiting iron in the rocks. The shallow gravitational well failed. Light hydrogen blew away into the yawning vastness of empty space. Had Mars been nearer the Sun, the sunlight and warmth would simply have driven water away faster.

  So those early life forms must have fought a slow, agonizing retreat. There were eras when lakes and even shallow, muddy seas had hosted simple life, Marc's cores had uncovered plenty of ancient silted plains, now compressed into sedimentary rock. But no fossil forests, nothing with a backbone, nothing with shells or hard body parts. If higher forms had basked in the ancient warmth here, they had left no trace.

  The squat hab came into view in the salmon sunset. Looking like a giant's drum, five meters high and eight meters across, it stood off the ground on sturdy metal struts. Long pink and white streamers of carbon dioxide and water vapor trailed from roof vents, signaling that Marc and Raoul were there. Inside, the two stacked decks had the floor space of a smallish condo, their home for the last two years. Not luxurious, but they would certainly be nostalgic for it in the cramped quarters of the Return Vehicle they would shortly be boarding.

  By now the hab was familiar to billions of Earthbound TV viewers and Net surfers. Everyone on Earth had the opportunity to follow their adventures, which were beamed daily from Ground Control and carried on the evening news. Their Web page registered over a hundred million hits in the week following the landing. Mars had ceased to be Space and had become a place.

  She told herself that she had done all anybody reasonably could. After finding the microbes, she had postulated that they used an enzyme like catalase to harvest the peroxides' energy. Then she had tested it in her small greenhouse set-up, found it worked. She would write that up on the half-year voyage home, squirt it e-mail to an eager audience of every biologist in the world. Heady stuff!

  She had data on chemical and biological toxicity of Martian substances to terrestrial biota. Another paper there, too. Plus work on the suitability of local soils to support greenhouse agriculture. Marc had even tried to grow kitchen herbs, but none of the plants survived. Her long searches for fossil microbial mats in the paleoseas had turned up plenty of oddities that might bear fruit under rigorous inspection back Earthside. But she still felt she was just nibbling at the edges, but of what?

  Raoul and Marc climbed down out of the hab as she approached, in the last slanting rays of a ruddy sunset, two chubby figures in dark parka suits. Only Raoul's slight limp distinguished them. The tracker system had alerted them, and they would have to carry Piotr in. Plus a little ceremony they had devised: salvaging water from the rover. The methane-oxygen burn made carbon dioxide, which the engine vented, and pure water. She backed the rover to the conical Return Vehicle, with its gaudy red-on-white Mars Consortium wrap-around letters, a meter high. Raoul and Marc hooked the water condensers to the input lines, so the chem factory inside could store it. They had full tanks of methane and oxygen for the liftoff, but water was always welcome, after the parching they had taken on the long flight here. The guys did this last task by way of saying "welcome home." In the bleak, rusty dusk, the cold of night biting already through her skinsuit, the symbolism was important. Mars was sharp, cold and unrelenting, and they all felt it to the bone.

  PART 2

  Despite Marc's best efforts, dinner was not a culinary success. Marc was the foodie among them, forever trying out new combinations of the limited range of kitchen stores. But they had long ago exhausted the narrow potential of the kitchen stores for new tastes, and now everything they ate was too familiar to the tongue, though Marc kept trying. He had even brought along spices as part of his personal mass allowance. Some of his infamous attempts had produced stomach-rumbling distress. The microwaved frozen vegetables especially resisted creativity. Still, the food was much better than the freeze-dried horrors of NASA days ... or so some said.

  They took turns in the tiny galley. On the outbound voyage Ann bowed to the public's expectation and dutifully did her time, but the others agreed that the results were definitely substandard, and she was relieved of cooking. Instead, she did extra cleanup. That didn't bother her, a dedicated non-foodie, who believed that eating was a somewhat irksome necessity. She went through school with a minimally equipped kitchen. Throwing a box of macaroni and cheese into boiling water stretched her limits. Piotr joked that he sure as Hell hadn't married her for her cooking. She actually liked good food, but wasn't interested in taking the time to produce it.

  "So what did you two do while we were gone?" Ann asked later over very slightly grainy pudding. The chocolate color disguised any visible traces of Martian dust, but the tongue found its sting.

  Marc licked his spoon carefully. "Well, we drilled another core. Found something ... interesting."

  "Where were you working?" asked Piotr.

  "We took the runabouts back to the mouth of the big canyon in Long Ridge you know, where we saw the fog a couple of months back on that early-morning trip." The base sported two open dune buggies that the crew used for short sprints of less than 10 klicks round-trip. By taking both buggies, it was possible to haul the drilling gear.

  Ann shivered, remembering the biting cold that morning she and Marc had seen the fog, suit heaters cranked to the max, looking like quilted penguins. Their picture now graced the cover of the Lands' End catalogue, wearing the parkas and leggings now called Marswear, of course. It was the latest rage in macho-type clothes, and the underwriting helped pay for the mission.

  As they'd prepared to leave the rover she'd grabbed her tea cosy and worn it like a knit ski cap. That was only the first time she'd used it as extra insulation.

  Marc continued, "We were down about thirty meters, going pretty slow through some resistant stuff, then all of a sudden the drill started to cut down real fast. I stopped it then so we wouldn't lose the tip. But when we pulled out the drill stern and core, it was smoking."

  "Uh-oh," said Ann, automatically sympathetic.

  "That's what it looked like, anyway, but it wasn't hot, wasn't even warm." He smiled, looking at Ann and Piotr slyly.

  "So how could it be smoke-oh, wait, it was water vapor!" shouted Ann. "You found water!"

  Marc grinned. "Yep. The drill tip was really wet, and making cloud like mad."

  It was so cold and dry on Mars that water on the surface never passed through a liquid stage, but sublimed directly from frozen to vapor. The team had concentrated their efforts to drill for water in places where early morning fogs hinted at subsurface moisture.

  "So, the deepest core is always the wettest. Makes sense. There really must be frozen oceans down there," said Ann. "What does Earth think?" asked Piotr.

  "Well, with all the data from the other cores, first indications are that it's probably good enough."

  "Good enough for the government, as they say," said Raoul with uncharacteristic levity. Raoul Molina, the compact and muscular fourth crew member, was the top mechanic on the team, and ritually cynical about governments. He even disliked the fact that NASA had separately contracted with the Consortium to supply some geological data.

  "Too bad we're not working for the government, eh?" shot back Marc.

  Ann looked over at him, surprised. The brief exchange left much unsaid, but all understood the shorthand. Tensions were definitely building as the launch date approached. No one wanted to be the cause of a delayed return. The search for subsurface water had gone slowly, disappointing some of the mission backers, and raising the specter that the team would be asked to stay longer to complete the mapping.

/>   After dinner it was time for their regular video transmission to Earth. They pulled Consortium logo shirts over their waffle weave longjohns and prepared to look presentable. In fact, they wore as little as possible when in the hab-loose clothing didn't aggravate the skin abrasions and frostbite spots they suffered in the suits. They kept the heat cranked up to compensate, but then nobody had to pay the electric bill, Marc pointed out. Competition was keen for creams and ointments for their dry skin rashes.

  "My turn, I think," said Marc.

  Ann smiled. "Janet on the other end tonight, then?" Janet Burton was a former test pilot who had trained with them, and clearly had hoped to make the trip. The Consortium had made a careful selection: individual talents balanced with strategic redundancy. The crew of four had to cover all the basics: mission technical, scientific and medical. They fit together like an intricately cut jigsaw puzzle.

  In the end it had come down to a choice between Janet and Piotr, and Ann was relieved at the final decision. She didn't know if she could have left Piotr behind so soon after their marriage, even for a trip to Mars.

  For the thousandth time she wondered if that had figured in the crew choice. Adding a woman had inevitably made for tensions, but on the other band, it also gave half the possible Earth audience somebody to identify with. And the Consortium could be subtle.

  "Let's play up the water angle, not the ankle," Piotr said.

  "Drama plays better than science," Ann said.

  "So we must educate, yes?" Piotr jabbed his chin at Marc.

  But Marc wasn't listening. The brief description of Piotr's accident had been squirted to Earth earlier, and be was downloading the reply. Due to the time delay of six minutes each way, normal back and forth conversations were not possible, and communications were more like an exchange of verbal letters. At times the round-trip delay was only a matter of four minutes, sometimes forty. Nonetheless, Earth and Mars teams agreed on a download at a specified time to preserve the semblance of a conversation. They did a short video sequence at the same time. It was great theater, but the Consortium also had a team of doctors scrutinize the footage.

  At the short delay times Marc and Janet tended to handle the bulk of the communications. And there was a little spark in the transmissions.

  The crew gathered around the screen to watch the latest video from Earth. It was Janet, all right, gesturing with a red Mars Bar. Waiting for a successful landing, Mars, Inc., the candy manufacturer, had agreed to become a mission underwriter, releasing a special commemorative wrapper-a red number featuring the four of them against a Martian backdrop. They had taken about twenty shots of each crew member holding up a standard Mars Bar before a scenic backdrop. They each got $5,000 per shot, with the Mars Bar people paying $10,000 per pound to ship a box of the bars out for the photo shoot. It would have been irritating after a while, except that they came to relish the damned things, keeping one for exterior shots, where it quickly got peroxide contaminated, and eating the rest as desserts. The cold sopped up calories and the zest of sugar was like a drug to Ann. She was quite sure she would never eat another, back home, even if she did get an endorsement contract out of the deal.

  Ann had dubbed the resulting red-wrapped candy the Ego Bar, unwilling to honor it with the name of a planet and an ancient god, and the team adopted the name. There had been some talk early on about producing another wrapper with Mars life pictured, but microbes weren't exciting enough, and the manufacturer had just decided to stick with the Ego Bar.

  Somehow, the commercialism of it all still grated on her. But she had signed on with eyes open, all the same. She had known that market-minded execs ran the Consortium, but going in had thought that meant something like, If we do this, people will like it. Soon enough she learned that even exploring Mars was seen by the execs as, If we do this, we'll maximize our global audience share and/or optimize near-term profitability. Such were the thoughts and motivations on Earth. Still, Mars the raw and unknown survived, unsullied and deadly.

  The spirit of getting to Mars on private capital was to shuck away all excess. No diversionary Moon base. No big space station to assemble a dreadnought fleet. No fleet at all-just missions launched from Earth, then propelled outward by the upper stage of the same booster rocket that launched them. They bad then landed on Mars after a long gliding journey, as the Apollo shots had.

  But the true trick was getting to Mars without squandering anybody's entire Gross National Product. When President Bush called in 1989 for a manned mission to Mars on the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Apollo landing, he got the estimated bill from NASA: 450 billion dollars.

  The sticker shock killed Bush's initiatives in Congress. The price was high because everyone in NASA and their parasite companies tacked every conceivable extra onto the mission.

  When evidence of ancient fossil microbes had turned up in 1996 and later, public interest returned. Soon enough, even Congress-creatures realized that the key to Mars was living off the land. Don't lug giant canisters of rocket fuel to Mars, just to burn it bringing the crew back to Earth. No fluids like water hauled along for an 18 month mission. Instead, get the basic chemicals from the Martian atmosphere.

  The Mars Consortium had begun by sending an unmanned lander, the Earth Return Vehicle. It carried a small nuclear reactor for power, an automated chemical processor, the rovers, and the Return Vehicle, unfueled. Using the nuclear reactor power, it started its compressors. They sucked in the thin Martian carbon dioxide and combined it with a store of hydrogen hauled from Earth. This made methane and water. The chemical plant was compact, laboring for half a year to separate the methane into the rocket fuel tanks and clean some of the water for later human use. The rest of the water got broken into oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen went into the tanks, and the oxygen was reserved for later combination with the methane in the combustion chambers of the Return Vehicle. Nothing was wasted.

  All this was simple chemistry: hauling to Mars only hydrogen as a feed stock for the process, the ship made 18 times as much rocket fuel as the mass of hydrogen it brought. Taking all that fuel to Mars would have cost billions, plus assembly of the mission in orbit. By going slim and smart, the Consortium saved all that. Had the early European explorers tried to carry all their food, water, and fodder to the New World, few could have gone.

  Slightly over a year after the first launch, the refueled Return Vehicle awaited the crew. They had launched on a big Saturn-style booster rocket, the contribution of the Russian partner, Energiya. Their closed-loop life-support system had recycled the air and water.

  As their upper stage burned out, it pulled away on a tether cable about 300 meters long. A small rocket fired on the habitation drum, setting it to revolving with the upper stage as its counter-weight. At two revolutions a minute, the hab drum had a centrifugal gravity of 0.38 Earth's, to get them used to Mars.

  At the end of six months gliding along a curving trajectory close to the minimum-energy orbit, the hab cut the cable. Rather than firing its rocket right away, it used an aeroshell-a cone-shaped buffer-to brake itself as it swung around the planet. They targeted on the radio beacon set up for them and landed right beside the fueled Return Vehicle.

  All this was risky; their loss of precious water on the way out had come close to doing them in. Making exploration super-safe was not only hugely expensive, it was impossible. Further, it was anti-dramatic: The public audience was thrilled all the more if lives truly were at stake.

  Risks were both obvious-a blowup at launch, as with the Challenger shuttle-and subtle, as with radiation dosage. The voyage exposed them to the solar particle wind and to cosmic rays. They could shelter from solar storms, which were infrequent, but the rest of their exposure amounted to about a I percent increased probability of having a fatal cancer within their life span.

  Further, Mars itself could do them in. Storms could collapse their habitat or blow over their return rocket. Dust could clog the pumps at the crucial blastoff.

  But the 19
70s Viking landers had been designed to last 90 days, yet one held out for four years against cold, wind and dust, and the other lasted six.

  Multiple backup systems are the key to safety-but the more backups, the higher the cost. Bush's 450 billion dollar program showed that a NASA-run program could easily turn into an enormous government pork farm.

  So a radical idea arose: The advanced nations could get this adventure on the cheap by simply offering a prize of 30 billion dollars to the first successfully returned, manned expedition.

  This mechanism European governments had used for risky explorations centuries ago. The advantages are that the government puts out not a dime until the job is done, and only rewards success; investors lose if their schemes fail. Also, if astronauts died, it was on somebody else's head, not an embarrassment to a whole government.

  So the Mars Consortium of Boeing, Microsoft, Lockheed and the Russian Energiya took the plunge. They originally wanted to use the name Mars, Inc., but discovered that a candy manufacturer had long ago beaten them to it. A Japanese partner bowed out, finally contributing only the smart-toilet, now dubbed the Marsbidet. At $10,000 to fly a pound to Mars, disposables were impossible. This went right down to writing paper-erasable slates served better, and could be digitally saved, even sent Earthside-and toilet items. Nobody had figured out how to recycle toothpaste, but toilet paper was dispensable. The smart toilet combined a bidet arrangement of water jets with a small blow-dryer. Since its inclusion on the mission it was the hottest piece of plumbing on two planets.

  A second mission attempt was being made by Airbus Iterspatiale, formed from the French Nationale Industrielle Aerospatiale, British Aerospace, the Spanish Construcciones Aeronauticas S.A. and Daimler-Benz Aerospace. The Airbus group had a more cautious method; their fully fueled Return Booster had arrived in Mars orbit four months before. The Airbus crew had launched 50 days later. They could win only if the Consortium's Return Vehicle failed at launch. The whole world was watching the race ... which made the Consortium's nightly "Hello, Earth" show rake in the dollars.