A Time Odyssey Omnibus

by Arthur C Clarke - Stephen Baxter

  Mars was young in an age of continuing massive bombardment, as the relics of the solar system’s violent formation smashed into the new worlds. But that battering ensured that an immense amount of material, blasted off the roiling surfaces, was transferred between the planets. And that material contained life.

  Bisesa gazed out at the patient cacti. “So these are our cousins.”

  “But more distantly related than we are to any other life-forms from Earth. The last significant biomass transfer must have been so early that the final form of DNA coding wasn’t yet settled on either world. But the relationship is close enough to be useful.”

  “Useful? How?”

  Paula tapped a softscreen on the Discovery’s dashboard, and produced images showing how Lowell scientists were finding ways to splice Martian genes into terrestrial plants. And that was how a new breed of plant was being developed, neither purely terrestrial nor purely Martian, able to grow outside the pressurized domes of the colonies, and yet capable of providing food for humans—and of injecting oxygen into the air. Some of the biologists thought it was a route to terraforming, a first step toward making Mars like Earth. An informal grouping of them even had a slogan: All These Worlds Are Ours.

  “In fact,” Paula said, “I’m glad we happened on the cacti. It’s important you know about this, Bisesa.”

  “Why?”

  “So you can understand what they’ve found at the pole.”

  “I can’t wait,” Myra said dryly.

  “And I can’t wait for the bathroom,” Bisesa said. She pushed her way out of her chair, letting the blanket drop. “Alexei? Are you done in there yet?”

  The Discovery rolled on, patient, silent, for kilometer after kilometer, a cybernetic Stakhanovite. By the middle of that day they were through the green, and rolled across a dull, undulating plain.

  After that, each day of the journey the sun climbed lower. At last it panned around the horizon, and there was no full daylight, only a kind of twilight glow that washed around the obscured sky.

  Bisesa understood. Mars was tilted on its axis, just as was Earth; in northern winter the pole pointed away from the sun, and as she headed north she was driving into a twelve-month-long Arctic night. What was different about Mars was how quickly the changes came; here, the lines of latitude clicked away rapidly. She had a very clear sense that she was driving over the surface of a small round world, an ant crawling over an orange.

  One sunset they saw a bank of clouds on the northern horizon.

  By dawn they were under it. The polar hood was thick enough to obscure all but the brightest stars; Deneb and the celestial pole were lost.

  By midday it had begun to snow.

  20: LIBERATOR

  “It’s taken us under five days to cross the solar system, Thea. Think of that. And now there’s only a few hours to go before Q-hour, our rendezvous with the bomb…”

  The Liberator had the mass and rough dimensions of the old Saturn V launchers. But whereas most of a Saturn’s mass would have burned itself up and been discarded in minutes, leaving its payload to coast unpowered most of the way to its destination, the Liberator’s mighty engine could maintain a thrust of a full gravity or more for days, even weeks. That had enabled the ship to cut a straight-line trajectory from one point on the J-line to another, from the Trojan base to the position of the bomb. Its path was a rectilinear oddity in a solar system of circles and ellipses.

  And Edna had crossed half the distance between Jupiter and the distant sun in a hundred hours.

  “We’re actually slowing down now. We’re approaching the Q-bomb tail-first, our exhaust blasting out…

  “Most of the officers serving in space have been transferred from the U.S. Navy, because most spacecraft are more like submarines than anything else. But the Liberator is different. We’ve so much energy to burn that we have more room on this ship than on any spacecraft since Skylab. If you’ve never heard of that, look it up. John Metternes and I share a kind of big apartment, with bedrooms, showers, and a stateroom with softscreens and coffee-makers. When we go to the ports and look down at the flank of the ship, it’s like looking out of the window of a high-rise hotel on Earth. But most hotels don’t have antennae and sensor booms. Or gun ports.

  “I need to go, love. The drive’s about to be cut, and it would be embarrassing to meet the bogey with me stranded in midair!…

  “How do I feel? I’m frightened. Excited. I have confidence in my abilities, and John’s, and in the Liberator, which has already proven herself a fine ship. I just hope that’s enough to carry the day. I—I guess that’s all, Libby. Close file.”

  “Yes, Edna. It is time.”

  “I know. Call John, would you?”

  21: POLE

  Bisesa couldn’t see a thing.

  The Discovery plowed its way through a half-meter thickness of carbon dioxide snow. The fragile dry-ice stuff sublimated before the rover’s heat, so they drove into a blinding mist, and even beyond the mist it was a murky dark. Nobody said anything, the poker players continuing their endless tournaments. Bisesa just had to put up with the unnerving drive alone.

  Then, through the gloom, she saw bright green lights, brilliant sparks. The rover slowed to a halt. The rest of the crew hurried forward.

  A vehicle of some kind sat on the ice, with big balloon wheels and straddled by two spacesuited occupants. Their helmets were illuminated, but Bisesa couldn’t make out their faces. When they caught the rover’s lights they waved.

  “That’s a tricycle,” Myra said, wondering.

  “Actually,” Paula said mildly, “they call it a General Utility Vehicle. For operations close to the pole station—”

  “I want one.”

  Alexei tapped a softscreen. “Yuri. Is that you?”

  “Hi, Alexei. We cleared a path for you with the sublimation blade. The snow’s heavier than usual this season.”

  “Appreciated.”

  “Discovery, just follow us and you’ll be fine. Eleven, twelve hours or so and we’ll be home with no trouble. See you at Wells.” The vehicle turned and drove ahead. Mist burst around it in a spray, brightly illuminated by the floods.

  With Discovery following easily, the little convoy’s speed soon passed forty kilometers an hour.

  As they roared on into the dark, the hard ground under the snow began to change. It was layered, alternating light and dark in strata as thick as Bisesa’s arm, like a vast sedimentary bed. And it looked polished, with a fine patina that glistened in the trucks’ lights.

  After a couple of hours of this they crunched up onto a firmer, paler surface, a grimy white tinged with Mars red.

  “Water ice,” Paula announced. “Mostly, anyhow. This is the permanent ice cap, the residue that’s left after the carbon dioxide snow sublimes away every spring. Here at the edge we’re about five hundred klicks from Wells Station, which is near the geographic pole. The drive will be smoother now. The rover’s wheels are reconfigurable for different surface types.”

  Bisesa said, “I’m surprised Discovery isn’t lowering a set of skis.”

  Alexei looked at her, a bit pained. “Bisesa, this is Mars. The temperature out there is the freezing point of dry ice—at this pressure, that’s about a hundred fifty K.”

  She worked that out. “A hundred and twenty degrees below freezing.”

  “Right,” Paula said. “At these temperatures water ice is so hard it would be like skiing on basalt.”

  Bisesa was chagrined. “You’ve given this little lecture a dozen times, haven’t you?”

  “You didn’t have time for the usual orientation. Don’t worry about it.”

  Now that they were on the ice Bisesa expected a smooth, straight ride on to the pole. But the lead truck soon turned aside from its dead-straight northern track, and embarked on a grand, sweeping detour, turning clockwise. Peering out of the left-hand window, Bisesa glimpsed a canyon.

  She swallowed her pride and asked Paula about it.

 
Paula said it was a “spiral canyon,” one of many gouged into the ice cap. She pulled up an image of the whole cap, taken from space in the summer, when the dry ice snow wasn’t there to obscure it. The ice cap looked like a twisting storm system, with those spiral canyons twisting in from the edge and reaching almost to the pole. It was astounding, like nothing Bisesa knew of on Earth. But after her jaunt across the solar system there wasn’t much wonder left in her soul.

  As they drove on the snow grew deeper, until they were driving along a path between two walls of snow heaped up maybe two meters deep. The snow looked compact, harder than snow on Earth, denser maybe.

  She was relieved when she saw a cluster of lights ahead, and the rounded shoulders of living modules.

  A row of green lights stretched off into the distance, as if they were driving down a runway. As the rover rolled closer Bisesa saw that the lights were on poles maybe four meters high, perhaps to keep above the snow. Glancing back, she saw that looking the other way the lights were bright white—so, in the murk of a Martian blizzard, you could always tell if you were heading toward or away from the base.

  The structures that loomed out of the dark, lifted up off the ground on stilts, were not domes but flattened pie-shapes, round above and below. They were colored bright green, and huddled close together, interlinked by short tunnels. Bisesa saw that these big hab modules were in fact mounted on wheels, and had been tied down to the ice by cables fixed to pitons. They were like monstrous caravans, she thought.

  As the rover neared the station, the walls of dry ice snow thinned away, until the rover was driving over an ice surface almost clear of snow but covered with an open black mesh. Heating elements, perhaps, designed to keep off the dry ice. The rover nuzzled up to a low dome at the foot of one of the stilts. Two station vehicles were already parked here, heavy-looking, smaller than the rover from Lowell.

  Paula led them through the hatch, and Bisesa found herself facing a staircase, roofed over with blue-green plastic, that evidently led up to the nearest of the stilted habs. Alexei’s suitcase couldn’t climb the stairs and had to be hauled up on a plastic rope.

  At the top of the stairs, the station crew were waiting for the newcomers. There were four of them, two women, two men, Mars-spindly in the limbs though a little heavy in the belly. All were pretty young, Bisesa guessed, none older than forty. Their coveralls were clean but well-patched, and they all smelled faintly greasy. None of them had cheek ident tattoos.

  They stared at Bisesa, and stood a little too close together.

  One burly twenty-five-year-old came forward and shook Bisesa’s hand. “You’ll have to forgive us. We don’t get too many visitors up here.” He had a big, blotchy drinker’s nose, grimy black hair pulled back into a ponytail, and a mass of curly beard. His accent was indistinct, like American but laced with longer European vowels.

  “You’re Yuri, right? You were on the ice bike.”

  “Yes. We exchanged a wave. Yuri O’Rourke. Resident glaciologist, climatologist, what have you.” Briskly he introduced the rest of the base crew: Ellie von Devender, a physicist, Grendel Speth, a doctor-biologist, and Hanse Critchfield, an engineer responsible for power, transport, and essential systems, but also a specialist in the drilling rig, the base’s main scientific function. “Although we all multitask,” Yuri said. “We’re all trained paramedics, for instance…”

  Ellie von Devender approached Bisesa. The physicist was maybe thirty, stocky in her jumpsuit, with her hair tightly pulled back. She wore thick-rimmed spectacles, an affectation that hid her eyes and made her look hostile.

  Bisesa said curiously, “I guess I would have expected a glaciologist, a biologist. But a physicist?”

  Ellie said, “The glaciology is the reason the base is here, along with Grendel and her wet lab. I am the reason you’re here, Ms. Dutt.”

  Yuri clapped Bisesa on the shoulder. “Come see the place.” He led them briskly through the hab. “This is what we call Can Six,” he said. “The EVA port…”

  Can Six was a bubble of fabric, the walls colored a bright sea-green with an eye-deceiving wave pattern. It had a honeycomb floor that straddled its interior at the widest point, and looking down Bisesa could see stores stacked up in the underfloor space. There were no spacesuits in evidence, but there were odd hatches in the walls that might have led to externally-mounted suits, like the rover’s. Equipment was stacked up here, what looked like spare parts and other gear for the rovers, and also a small science lab, and a medical area, a single bed surrounded by equipment, sealed off from the rest by a zippered plastic curtain. It was dark, and felt cold and dusty, as if not much used.

  Yuri hurried them through a small airlock to another module: “Can Five, science,” he said. Here there was another, more comprehensive lab suite, and a larger hospital area, and what looked like a small gym. It was brighter, with glowing panels plastered to walls that seemed to be decorated with scenes of mountains and rivers.

  Bisesa murmured to Myra, “Why two lab suites, two medical bays?”

  Myra shrugged. “To avoid contamination maybe. You come in from EVA, and can process your samples and treat injuries without breaking the seals to the rest of the base.”

  “Contamination of the crew by Martians?”

  “Or of Martians by the crew.”

  In Can Five, Grendel Speth, small, neat, slim, her black hair speckled with gray, briskly took blood, urine, and cheek-swab samples from each of the visitors. “Just so the station can keep you healthy,” she said. “Testing for allergies, nutritional genomics, that sort of thing. Our food comes from freeze-dried stores from Lowell, and homegrown vegetables from our garden. We’ll add supplements to make sure your specific nutritional needs are met. You won’t even know they are there…”

  Now Yuri hurried them through a third module—Can Three, evidently a sleeping area, divided up into pie-slice bedrooms, dark, evidently not used. They came to another module, Can Two. Bizarrely this module had been fitted out to simulate a city-center hotel called the “Mars-Astoria.” But many of the internal partitions here had been torn down to give a more open, shared space, though the core section was dedicated to a small galley and a shower-toilet. There were four beds in this round space, with small cupboards and chairs beside them, all of them cluttered with clothes and other gear. Softscreens had been plastered over the unregarded urban landscape, cycling through what looked like personal images of families, pets, domestic landscapes.

  Myra said curiously, “You’re not using this as the makers intended, are you?”

  Yuri said, “Wells was built for ten; there are only four of us. The nights are long here, Myra. We prefer living like this, together.”

  After that, Yuri apologetically led them down another staircase to a small surface dome, and then down steps cut into the ice. “Sorry about this. You can see we only have the four beds set up, and we’ve pretty much shut down the modules we don’t use. We generally put up visitors down here, in our radiation storm shelter…If you’re not comfortable we can open up another of the cans.”

  Bisesa glanced around as she descended. The cavern in the ice was a squat cylinder, sliced up by partitions into pie-shaped segments. She recognized a galley, a comms station, a shower block, a cluttered space that looked like a lab or a medical station. The place was lived-in. There were ruts in the floor around the galley and the shower block, the walls and metal surfaces looked scuffed and polished with use and reuse, and there was a faintly stale smell, of air that had been cycled too often.

  Some of the cavern wall was exposed, and she saw it was decorated with an odd design, a thin band marked with faint bars and a more general meter-scale wash of dark and light. This barcode frieze wrapped itself all around the wall’s curving surface like the flayed skin of a tremendous snake.

  The room Myra and Bisesa were to share was just a truncated pie-slice, big enough for bunk beds, a table, a couple of chairs. Its back wall was ice, layered over with translucent plastic, and dec
orated with that odd barcode design that passed across the length of wall, from one side to the other.

  As they sorted themselves out Yuri sat on the bunk. He took up a lot of space in the little room. “It’s kind of cozy up here at Wells, but we survive. Actually the polar cold doesn’t make much difference. On Mars, if you stepped outdoors at high noon in midsummer on the equator, you’d still freeze your butt off. The main issue up here is the dark—half a Martian year at a time, twelve Earth months. Polar explorers on Earth had the same challenges. We did learn a lot of lessons from those guys. Though more from Shackle-ton than from Scott.”

  Myra said, “Yuri, I’m having trouble placing your accent.”

  “My mother was Russian like my forename, my father Irish like my surname. I’m officially a citizen of Ireland, so of Eurasia.” He grinned. “But that doesn’t count for much up here. Things get kind of mixed up, away from Earth.” He turned to Bisesa. “Look, Ms. Dutt—”

  “Bisesa.”

  “Bisesa. I know you’re here for the thing in the Pit.”

  Bisesa eyed Myra. What thing? What Pit?

  “But you need to know what we’re really doing here.” He passed a hand along the striped designs on the wall. The lines were faint, of irregular widths and colors. It did look like a barcode, or a spectrograph. “Look at this. This is why I came here. This wallpaper is an image of the most complete core we’ve yet been able to extract.”

  Myra nodded. “An ice core from Mars.”

  “Right. We drilled right down from here, from the top of the ice dome, and we got all the way down to two and a half klicks deep—Hanse Critchfield is going to enjoy showing off his rig. Of course it would have been three klicks if not for the sunstorm burning the top ice layers away.” He shook his head. “Damn shame.”