KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
The Martians

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Map

ONE: Michel in Antarctica

TWO: Exploring Fossil Canyon

THREE: The Archaea Plot

FOUR: The Way the Land Spoke to Us

1. The Great Escarpment

2. Flatness

FIVE: Maya and Desmond

SIX: Four Teleological Trails

1. Wrong way

2. Mistakes can be good

3. You can’t lose the trail

4. The natural genius

SEVEN: Coyote Makes Trouble

EIGHT: Michel in Provence

NINE: Green Mars

TEN: Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars

ELEVEN: Salt and Fresh

TWELVE: The Constitution of Mars

THIRTEEN: Some Worknotes and Commentary on the Constitution, by Charlotte Dorsa Brevia

FOURTEEN: Jackie on Zo

FIFTEEN: Keeping the Flame

SIXTEEN: Saving Noctis Dam

SEVENTEEN: Big Man in Love

EIGHTEEN: An Argument for the Deployment of All Safe Terraforming Technologies

NINETEEN: Selected Abstracts from The journal of Areological Studies, vols. 56–64

TWENTY: Odessa

TWENTY-ONE: Sexual Dimorphism

TWENTY-TWO: Enough Is as Good as a Feast

TWENTY-THREE: What Matters

TWENTY-FOUR: Coyote Remembers

TWENTY-FIVE: Sax Moments

TWENTY-SIX: A Martian Romance

TWENTY-SEVEN: If Wang Wei Lived on Mars and other poems

1. Visiting

2. After a Move

3. Canyon Colour

4. Vastitas Borealis

5. Night Song

6. Desolation

7. The Names of the Canals

8. Another Night Song

9. Six Thoughts on the Uses of Art

i. What’s in My Pocket

ii. In the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth

iii. Reading Emerson’s journal

iv. The Walkman

v. Dreams Are Real

vi. Seen While Running

10. Crossing Mather Pass

11. Night in the Mountains

i. Camp

ii. The Ground

iii. Writing by Starlight

12. Invisible Owls

13. Tenzing

14. The Soundtrack

15. A Report on the First Recorded Case of Areophagy

16. The Reds’ Lament

17. Two Years

18. I Say Goodbye to Mars

TWENTY-EIGHT: Purple Mars

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

MAP

ONE MICHEL IN ANTARCTICA

AT FIRST IT WAS fine. The people were nice. Wright Valley was awesome. Each day Michel woke in his cubicle and looked out of his little window (everyone had one) at the frozen surface of Lake Vanda, a flat oval of cracked blue ice, flooding the bottom of the valley. The valley itself was brown and big and deep, its great rock side-walls banded horizontally. Seeing it all he felt a little thrill and the day began well.

There was always a lot to do. They had been dropped there in the largest of the Antarctic dry valleys with a load of disassembled huts and, for immediate occupancy, Scott tents. Their task through the perpetual day of the Antarctic summer was to build their winter home, which on assembly had turned out to be a fairly substantial and luxurious modular array of interconnected red boxes. In many ways it seemed analogous to what the voyagers would be doing when they arrived on Mars, and so of course to Michel it was all very interesting.

There were one hundred and fifty-eight people there, and only a hundred were going to be sent on the first trip out, to establish a permanent colony. This was the plan as designed by the Americans and Russians, who had then convened an international team to enact it. So this stay in Antarctica was a kind of test, or winnowing. But it seemed to Michel that everyone there assumed he or she would be among the chosen, so there was little of the tension one saw in people doing job interviews. As they said, when it was discussed at all – in other words when Michel asked about it – some candidates were going to drop out, others would be invalided out, and others placed on later trips to Mars, at worst. So there was no reason to worry. Most of the people there were not worriers anyway – they were capable, brilliant, assured, used to success. Michel worried about this.

They finished building their winter home by the autumn equinox, March 21st. After that the alternation of day and night was dramatic, the brilliant slanted light of the days ending with the sun sliding off to the north and over the Olympus Range, the long twilights leading to a black starry darkness that eventually would be complete, and last for months. At their latitude, perpetual night would begin a little after mid-April.

The constellations as they revealed themselves were the stars of another sky, foreign and strange to a northerner like Michel, reminding him that the universe was a big place. Each day was shorter than the one before by a palpable degree, and the sun burned lower through the sky, its beams pouring down between the peaks of the Asgaard and Olympus Ranges like vibrant stagelights. People got to know each other.

When they were first introduced, Maya had said ‘So you are to evaluate us!’ with a look that seemed to suggest this could be a process that went both ways. Michel had been impressed. Frank Chalmers, looking over her shoulder at him, had seen this.

They were a mix of personality types, as one might expect. But they all had the basic social skilfulness that had allowed them to make it this far, so that whether outgoing or withdrawn in their basic nature, they could still all talk easily. They were interested in each other, naturally. Michel saw a lot of relationships beginning to bloom around him. Romances too. Of course.

To Michel all the women in camp were beautiful. He fell a little in love with a lot of them, as was his practice always. Men he loved as elder brothers, women as goddesses he could never quite court (fortunately). Yes: every woman was beautiful, and all men were heroes. Unless of course they weren’t. But most were; this was humanity’s default state. So Michel felt, he always had. It was an emotional setting that called out for psychoanalysis, and in fact he had undergone analysis, without changing this feeling a bit (fortunately). It was his take on people, as he had said to his therapists. Naive, credulous, obtusely optimistic – and yet it made him a good clinical psychiatrist. It was his gift.

Tatiana Durova, for instance, he thought as gorgeous as any movie star, with also that intelligence and individuality that derived from life lived in the real world of work and community. Michel loved Tatiana.

And he loved Hiroko Ai, a remote and charismatic human being, withdrawn into her own affairs, but kind. He loved Ann Clayborne, a Martian already. He loved Phyllis Boyle, sister to Machiavelli. He loved Ursula Kohl like the sister he could always talk to. He loved Rya Jimenez for her black hair and bright smile, he loved Marina Tokareva for her tough logic, he loved Sasha Yefremova for her irony.

But most of all he loved Maya Toitovna, who was as exotic to him as Hiroko, but more extroverted. She was not as beautiful as Tatiana, but drew the eye. The natural leader of the Russian contingent, and a bit forbidding – dangerous somehow – watching everyone there in much the same way Michel was, though he was pretty sure she was a tougher judge of people. Most of the Russian men seemed to fear her, like mice under a hawk, or maybe it was that they feared falling hopelessly in love with her. If Michel were going to Mars (he was not) she was the one he would be most interested in.

Of course Michel, as one of the four psychologists there to help evaluate the candidates, could not act on any of these affections. That did not bother him; on the contrary he liked the constraint, which was the same he had with any of his clients. It allowed him to indulge his thoughts without having to consider acting on them. ‘If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling’ – maybe the old saying was right, but if you were forbidden to act for good reasons, then your feelings might not be false after all. So he could be both true and safe. Besides the saying was wrong, love for one’s fellow humans could be a matter of contemplation only. There was nothing wrong with it.

Maya was quite certain she was going to Mars. Michel therefore represented no threat to her, and she treated him like a perfect equal. Several others were like her in this respect – Vlad, Ursula, Arkady, Sax, Spencer, a few others. But Maya took matters beyond that; she was intimate from the very start. She would sit and talk to him about anything, including the selection process itself. They spoke English when they talked, their partial competence and strong accents making for a picturesque music.

‘You must be using the objective criteria for selecting people, the psychological profiles and the like.’

‘Yes, of course. Tests of various kinds, as you know. Various indexes.’

‘But your own personal judgments must count too, right?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘But it must be hard to separate out your personal feelings about people from your professional judgments, yes?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘How do you do it?’

‘Well … I suppose you would say it is a habit of mind. I like people, or whatever, for different reasons to the reasons that might make someone good on a project like this.’

‘For what reasons do you like people?’

‘Well, I try not to be too analytical about that! You know – it’s a danger in my job, becoming too analytical. I try to let my own feelings alone, as long as they aren’t bothering me somehow.’

She nodded. ‘Very sensible, I’m sure. I don’t know if I could manage that. I should try. It’s all the same to me. That’s not always good. Not appropriate.’ With a quick sidelong smile at him.

She would say anything to him. He thought about this, and decided that it was a matter of their respective situations: since he was staying behind, and she was going (she seemed so sure), it didn’t much matter what she said to him. It was as if he were dying to her, and she therefore giving herself to him, openly, as a farewell gift.

But he wanted her to care about what she said to him.

On April 18th the sun went away. In the morning it sparked in the east, shining directly up the valley for a minute or two, and then with a faint green flash it slipped behind Mount Newell. After that the dark days had midday twilights, shorter every day; then just night. Starry starry night. It was beyond Martian, this constant darkness – living by starlight with the aching cold outside, experiencing sensory deprivation in everything but one’s sense of cold. Michel, a Provençal, found that he hated both the cold and the dark. So did many of the others. They had been living in an Antarctic summer, thinking life was good and that Mars would not be such a challenge after all, and then with winter they were suddenly getting a better idea of what Mars would be like – not exactly, but in the sense of experiencing a massive array of deprivations. It was sobering how hard it hit.

Of course some did better than others. Some seemed not even to notice. The Russians had experienced cold and dark almost like this before. Tolerance of confinement was also good among the senior scientists – Sax Russell, Vlad Taneev, Marina Tokareva, Ursula Kohl, Ann Clayborne – these and other dedicated scientists seemed to have the capacity to spend great amounts of their time reading, working at their computers, and talking. Presumably lives spent largely in labs had prepared them.

They also understood that this was the life Mars was waiting to give them. Something not that different from the lives they had always led. So that the best analogy to Mars, perhaps, was not Antarctica, but any intense scientific laboratory.

This led him to thoughts of the optimum life history when considering inclusion in the group: middle-aged lab scientist, dedicated, accomplished; childless; unmarried or divorced. Lots of applicants fitted the criteria. In some ways you had to wonder. Though it wouldn’t be fair; it was a life pattern with its own integrity, its own rewards. Michel himself fitted the bill in every respect.

Naturally he had to divide his attention equally among all of the candidates, and he did. But one day he got to accompany Tatiana Durova alone, on a hike up the South Fork of Wright Valley. They hiked to the left of the flat-topped island ridge called the Dais that divided the valley lengthways, and continued up the southern arm of Wright Valley to Don Juan Pond.

Don Juan Pond: what a name for this extraterrestrial desolation! The pond was so salty that it would not freeze until the air chilled to –54 C; then the ice coating the shallow saline pond, having been distilled by the freezing, would be fresh-water ice, and so would not thaw again until the temperature rose above zero, usually in the following summer when trapped sunlight would greenhouse in the water under the ice, and melt it from below. As Tatiana explained the process it hovered in Michel’s mind as some kind of analogy to their own situation, hanging right on the edge of his understanding but never coming clear.

‘Anyway,’ she was saying, ‘scientists can use the pond as a single-setting minimum-temperature thermometer. Come here in the spring and you know immediately if the previous winter has got below minus 54.’

As it had already, some cold night this autumn; a layer of white ice sheeted the pond. Michel stood with Tatiana on the whitish, humped, salt-crusted shore. Over the Dais the noon sky was blue-black. Around them the steep valley walls fell to the floor of the canyon. Large dark boulders stuck out of the pond’s ice sheet.

Tatiana walked out onto the white surface, plunging through it with every step, boots crackling, water splashing – liquid salt water, spilling over the fresh ice, dissolving it and sending up a thin frost smoke. A vision: the Lady of the Lake, become corporeal and thus too heavy to walk on water.

But the pond was only a few centimetres deep, it barely covered the tops of her thick boots. Tatiana reached down and touched the tip of one gloved finger into the water, pulled up her mask to taste the water with her impossibly beautiful mouth – which puckered to a tight square. Then she threw back her head and laughed. ‘My God! Come taste, Michel, but just a touch, I warn you. It’s terrible!’

And so he clomped through the ice and over the wet sand floor of the pond, stepping awkwardly, a bull in a china shop.

‘It’s fifty times saltier than the sea, taste it.’

Michel reached down, put his forefinger in the water; the cold was intense, it was amazing that it was liquid still, so cold it was. He raised it to his tongue, touched gingerly: cold fire. It burned like acid. ‘My God!’ he exclaimed, spitting out involuntarily. ‘Is it poison?’ Some toxic alkali, or a lake of arsenic –

‘No no.’ She laughed. ‘Salts only. A hundred and twenty-six grams of salt per litre of water. As opposed to three point seven grams per litre, in seawater. Incredible.’ Tatiana was a geochemist, and so now shaking her head with amazement. This kind of thing was her work. Michel saw her beauty in a new way, masked but perfectly clear.

‘Salt raised to a higher power,’ he said absently. A concentrated quality. So it might be in the Mars colony; and suddenly the idea he had felt hovering over him descended: The ordinary sea-salt of humanity would be concentrated by their isolation into a poisonous pond.

He shuddered and spat again, as if he could reject such a bad thought. But the taste remained.

As the perpetual darkness stretches on it becomes hard not to think it permanent, as if we are lingering on after the local star has burnt out. People (some of them) are finally beginning to act as if they are being tested. As if the world has indeed ended, and we existing in some antechamber of the final judgment. Imagine a time of real religion, when everyone felt like this all the time.

Some of them avoided Michel, and Charles and Georgia and Pauline, the other psychologists. Others were too friendly. Mary Dunkel, Janet Blyleven, Frank Chalmers; Michel had to watch himself to avoid ending up alone with these people, or he would fall into a depression witnessing the spectacle of their great charm.

The best solution was to stay active. Remembering the pleasure of his hike with Tatiana, he went out as often as he could, accompanying the others as they performed various maintenance and scientific tasks. The days passed in their artificial rounds, everything measured out and lived just as if the sun were rising in the morning and setting in the evening. Wake, eat, work, eat, work, eat, relax, sleep. Just like home.

One day he went out with Frank on a hike up to an anemometer near the Labyrinth, an interlacing complex of canyons cutting the floor of upper Wright Valley. He wanted to try to see if he could penetrate the man’s pleasant surface. In the end it did not work; Frank was too cool, too professional, too friendly. Years of work in Washington DC had made him very smooth indeed. He had been involved in getting the first human expedition to Mars, a few years before; an old friend of John Boone, the first man to set foot on Mars. He was also said to be heavily involved in the planning for this expedition as well. He was certainly one of those who felt they were going to be among the hundred; extremely confident, in fact. He had a very American voice somehow, booming out to Michel’s left as they hiked. ‘Check those glaciers, falling out of the passes and being blown away before they reach the valley floor. What an awesome place, really.’

‘Yes.’

‘These katabatic winds – falling off the polar cap – nothing can stop them. Cold as hell. I wonder if that little windvane we set up here will even be there any more.’

It was. They pulled out its data cartridge, put in another one. Around them the huge expanse of brown rock formed a bowl under the starry sky. They started back down.

‘Why do you want to go to Mars, Frank?’

‘What’s this, we’re still at work out here are we?’

‘No, no. I’m just curious.’

‘Sure. Well, I want to try it. I want to try living somewhere where you can actually try to do something new. Set up new systems, you know. I grew up in the South, like you did. Only the American South is a lot different from the French South. We were stuck in our history for a long, long time. Then things opened up, partly because it got so bad. Partly just a lot of hurricanes hitting the coast! And we had a chance to rebuild. And we did, but not much changed. Not enough, Michel. So I have this desire to try it again. That’s the truth.’ And he glanced over at Michel, as if to emphasize not only that it was the truth, but that it was a truth he seldom talked about. Michel liked him a bit better after that.

Another day (or, in another hour of their endless night) Michel went out with a group, to check on the climatology stations located around the lake shore. They hauled banana sleds loaded with replacement batteries and tanks of compressed nitrogen and the like. Michel, Maya, Charles, Arkady, Iwao, Ben, and Elena.

They walked across Lake Vanda, Ben and Maya pulling the sleds. The valley seemed huge. The frozen surface of the lake gleamed and sparked blackly underfoot. To a northerner the sky already seemed overstuffed with stars, and in the ice underfoot each star was shattered into many pricks of light. Next to him Maya shone her flashlight down, lighting a field of cracks and bubbles under her; it was like shining light into a glass floor that had no bottom. She turned the flashlight off and it suddenly looked to Michel like the stars of the other hemisphere were shining up through a clear world, an alien planet much closer to the centre of its galaxy. Looking down into the black hole at the centre of things, through burred starlight. Like the shattered bottomless pool of the self. Every step broke the sight into a different refraction, a kaleidoscope of white points in black. He could gaze down into Vanda for a long time.

They came to the far shore of the lake. Michel looked back: their complex sparked like a bright winter constellation coming up over the horizon. Inside those boxes their companions were working, talking, cooking, reading, resting. Tensions in there were subtle but high.

A door opened in the complex, a wedge of light was thrown onto rust-coloured rock. It could have been Mars, sure; in a year or two it would be. Many of the current tensions would be resolved. But there would be no air. Outside they would go, yes, sometimes; but in spacesuits. Would that matter? The winter suit he was wearing at that moment was as much like a spacesuit as the designers could make it, and the frigid numbing downvalley breeze was like breathing purified oxygen just gasified from liquid stock, and insufficiently warmed. The sub-biological chill of Antarctica, of Mars; nothing much to choose between them. In that sense this year of training and testing had been a good idea. They were getting at least a taste of what it might be like.

Ben stepped down onto the uneven lower ice of the lake’s summertime moat, slipped and went down in a flash. He cried out and the others rushed to him, Michel first because he had seen it happen. Ben groaned and writhed, the others crouched around him –

‘Excuse me,’ Maya said, and ducked between Michel and Arkady to kneel at Ben’s side.

‘Is it your hip?’

‘Ah – yeah –’

‘Hold on. Hold steady.’ Ben clutched at her arm and she held him on his other side. ‘Here, let’s get your harness unclipped from the sled. Okay, slip the sled under him. Move him gently! Okay. Hold still there, we’ll get you back to the station. Can you stay steady or should we strap you down? Okay, let’s go. Help stabilize the sled. Someone radio the station and tell them to get ready for us.’ She clipped her own harness onto the banana sled and started back across the lake, quickly but steadily, almost ice-skating on her boots, flashlight lit to show her the ice underfoot. The others followed beside Ben.

Across the Ross Sea, McMurdo Station had an extra complement of winter staff precisely to help support them out at Vanda, and so the winter helicopter came yammering down in a huge noise only an hour or so after their return to the station. By that time Ben was furious at himself for falling, more angry than hurt, though they found out later that his hip had been fractured.

‘He went down in a flash,’ Michel said to Maya afterwards. ‘So fast he had no time to get a hand out. I’m not surprised it broke something.’

‘Too bad,’ Maya said.

‘You were good out there,’ Michel said, surprising himself. ‘Very quick.’

She blew this away with a sound and a wave of her hand. ‘How many times I’ve seen it. I spent my whole childhood on ice.’

‘Ah, of course.’ Expertise. A fund of experience was the basis of all natural decision making. This was true of Maya in many different realms, he felt. Ergonomics, her speciality, was a matter of people getting along well with things. She was going to Mars. He was not. He loved her. Well, but he loved many women. That was just the way it was. But with her …

From Michel’s personal notes, heavily encrypted:

Maya: very beautiful. A tiger slouches into the room, reeking of sex and murder. The alpha female before whom all submit. Quick in everything, including moods. I can talk to her. We have real conversations because she doesn’t care what I’m here for. Can that be true?

Spencer Jackson: a power. A secret soul. Depths beyond all calculation, even for him. The Vanda inside us. His the mind into which the whole community falls, transmuted to art. Can sketch any face in a dozen strokes, and there they are bare as a pebble. But I don’t think he’s happy.

Tatiana Durova: very beautiful. A goddess trapped in a motel. She’s looking for a way out. She knows everyone thinks she is beautiful, and therefore trusts none of us. She needs to get back to Olympus, where her appearance would be taken for granted, and she able to get through to someone. To her peers. Perhaps she takes Mars to be Olympus.

Arkady Bogdanov is a power. A very steady reliable fellow, earnest almost to the point of dullness. One sees everything he’s thinking, he doesn’t bother to conceal it. What I am is enough to get me to Mars, he says in his manner. Don’t you agree? And I do. An engineer, quick and ingenious, not interested in larger issues.

Marina Tokareva: a beauty. Very serious and intense, no small talk to her. One is forced to think about things. And she assumes you are as quick as she is. So it can be work to follow her. Narrow chiselled features, thick jet-black hair. Sometimes following her glances I think she is one of the homosexuals who must be among us; other times she seems fixated on Vlad Taneev, the oldest man here.

George Berkovic and Edvard Perrin are paired in their regard for Phyllis Boyle. Yet it is not a competition but a partnership. They both think they like Phyllis, but really what they like is the way the other one mirrors their affection. Phyllis likes this too.

Ivana is quite beautiful, despite a thin face and an overbite; a goofy smile lights up the face of the classic chemist nerd, and suddenly the goddess is revealed. Shared a Nobel Prize in chemistry, but one has to quash the thought that the smile is what won the prize. It makes one happy to see it. One would give her the Nobel Prize just to see that smile.

Simon Frazier: a very quiet power. English; public school education from age nine. He listens very closely, speaks well, but he says about one tenth as much as everyone else, which naturally gains him the reputation of a complete mute. He plays with this image, quietly. I think he likes Ann, who is like him in some ways, though not so extreme; in other ways very unlike. Ann does not joke with her image among the others, she is completely unaware of it – American lack of self-consciousness, versus Simon’s Brit irony.

Janet Blyleven: beautiful. Speaks rapidly, confidently. Friendly. Looks healthy. Nice breasts. Doggy friendship is no friendship at all.

Ann is a real beauty, though austere. Tall, angular, bony, strong; both body and face. She draws the eye. She certainly does take Mars seriously. People see that in her and like her for it. Or not, as the case may be. Her shadow is very distinct.

Alexander Zhalin is a power. He likes women with his eyes. Some of them know it, some don’t. Mary Dunkel and Janet Blyleven are both with him a lot. He is an enthusiast. Whatever has taken his fancy becomes the horizon of all interest.

Nadia Cherneshevsky: at first you think she is plain, then you see she is one of the most beautiful of all. It has to do with solidity – physical, intellectual, and moral. The rock everyone rests on. Her physical beauty is in her athleticism – short, round, tough, skilful, graceful, strong – and in her eyes, as her irises are parti coloured, a dense stippled carpet of colour dots, bits of brown and green mostly, with some blue and yellow, all flecked together in concentric rings of pattern, shot by rays of a different pattern, merging in a casual glance to a colour like hazel. You could dive into those eyes and never come out. And she looks back at you without fear.

Frank Chalmers: a power. I think. It’s hard not to see him as an adjunct to John Boone. The sidekick, or enabler. On his own out here, not so impressive. Diminished; less an historical character. He’s elusive. Big, bulky, dark-complexioned. He keeps a low profile. He is quite friendly, but it doesn’t seem to one that it is real friendliness. A political animal, like Phyllis; only they don’t like each other. It’s Maya he likes. And Maya makes sure he feels part of her world. But what he really wants is not clear. There’s a person in there one does not know at all.

More formally, he administered the Revised Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, giving the questionnaires in groups of ten. Hundreds of questions, calibrated to give statistically significant personality profiles. Only one of several different tests he was giving over the winter; testing was one of the main ways they passed the time.

They were taking this test in the Bright Room, which was lit by scores of high-wattage bulbs, until everything in it seemed incandescent, especially people’s faces. Looking at them as they worked, Michel suddenly felt how absurd it was to be schoolmaster to this brilliant crowd. And he saw very clearly in their glowing faces that they were not answering the questions to tell him what they were like, but rather to say what they thought they should in order to get to go to Mars. Of course reading the answers with that in mind would reveal almost as much as if they were being sincere. Still it was a shock to see it so clearly right there on their faces.

He shouldn’t have been surprised. Faces revealed mood and much else with extreme precision, in most people anyway. Perhaps all people; a poker face reveals someone who is feeling guarded. No, he thought while watching them, a whole language might be developed from this, if one paid proper attention. Blind people hear actors’ voices as completely artificial and false, and in this world they were all blind to faces, but if he looked at them more closely, it might yield a kind of phrenology of sight. He might become the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

So he watched their faces, fascinated. The Bright Room was very bright indeed; time spent in such spaces had been shown to ward off the worst of seasonal affective disorder. In this luminous glare each translucent face seemed not just to be speaking to him, but also to be a complete rebus of that person’s character: variously strong, intelligent, humorous, guarded, whatever, but in any case the entire personality, all right there on the surface. There was Ursula, faintly amused, thinking this was just one of the many silly things psychologists did; she as a medical person recognized that it was both ludicrous and necessary, she knew all the medical sciences were as much art as science. Sax, on the other hand, was taking it all very seriously, as he seemed to take everything: this was a scientific experiment to him, and he trusted that scientists in other disciplines were honestly dealing with the methodological difficulties of that discipline. All right there on his face.

They were all experts. Michel had studied NDM, or Naturalistic Decision Making; he was an expert on the subject; and he knew that experts took the limited data available to them in any situation and compared it to their vast fund of experiences, and then made quick decisions based on analogies to past experience. Thus now, in this situation, this group of experts were doing what they would do to win a grant, or to win over a committee judging a tenure application package. Something like that. The fact that they had never faced a task quite like this one was problematic but not debilitating.

Unless they considered the situation to be unstable beyond the point of prediction. Some situations were like that; even the best meteorologists could not well predict hailstorms, even the best battlefield commanders could not predict the course of surprise attacks. For that matter some recent studies had shown that it was much the same with psychologists when they attempted to predict people’s future mental diagnoses from their scores on standard psychological tests. In each case there wasn’t enough data. And so Michel stared intently at their faces, pink or brown summaries of their personalities, trying to read the whole in the part.

Except it was not really true. Faces could be deceptive, or uninformative; and personality theory was notoriously vexed by deep uncertainties of all kinds. The same events and environments produced radically different results in people, that was the plain fact. There were too many confounding factors to say much about any aspect of personality. All the models of personality itself – the many, many theories – came down to a matter of individual psychologists codifying their guesses. Perhaps all science had this aspect, but it was so obvious in personality theory, where new propositions were supported by reference to earlier theorists, who often supported their assertions by reference to even earlier theorists, in strings all the way back to Freud and Jung, if not Galen. The fascinating Psychoanalytic Roots of Patriarchy was a perfect example of this, as was Jones’s classic The New Psychology of Dreaming. It was a standard technique: citing a guess by a dead authority added weight to one’s assertions. So that often the large statistical tests administered by contemporary psychologists were designed mostly to confirm or disconfirm preliminary intuitive stabs by near-Victorians like Freud, Jung, Adler, Sullivan, Fromm, Maslow, etc. You picked the earlier expert whose guesses seemed right to you, then tested these intuitions using current scientific techniques. If going back to the original either/or, Michel chose Jung over Freud; after that he was partial to the whole Utopian self-definition crowd – Fromm, Erikson, Maslow – and the matching philosophers of freedom from the same era, people like Nietzsche and Sartre. And the latest in modern psychology, of course – tested, peer-reviewed, and published in the journals.

But all his ideas were elaborations of an original set of feelings about people. A matter of hunches. On that basis he was supposed to evaluate who would or would not do well if removed to Mars. Predicting hailstorms and surprise attacks. Interpreting personality tests designed according to the paradigms of alchemists. Even asking people about their dreams, as if these were anything more than the detritus of the sleeping brain! Dream interpretation: once Jung dreamed about killing a man named Siegfried, and he struggled mightily to figure out what the dream might have meant, never once wondering if it had anything to do with his immense anger at his old friend Freud. As Fromm noted later, ‘the slight change from Sigmund to Siegfried was enough to enable a man whose greatest skill was the interpretation of dreams, to hide the real meaning of this dream from himself.’

It was a perfect image for the power of their methodology.

Mary Dunkel sat beside him at lunch one day. Her leg pressed against his. This was not an accident. Michel was surprised; it was a tremendous risk on her part, after all. His leg responded with a matching pressure, before he had a chance to think things over. Mary was beautiful. He loved Mary for her dark hair and brown eyes and the turn of her hips as she went through doorways ahead of him, and now for her boldness. Elena he loved for the kindness in her beautiful pale eyes, and for her rangy shoulders, wide as any man’s. Tatiana he loved for being so gorgeous and self-contained.

But it was Mary pressed against him. What did she mean by it? Did she mean to influence his recommendation for or against her? But surely she would know this kind of behaviour might very possibly be counted against her. She had to know that. So knowing that and doing this anyway meant that she must be doing it for other reasons, more important to her than going to Mars. Meant it personally, in other words.

How easy he was. A woman only had to look at him right and he was hers forever. She could knock him down with the brush of a fingertip.

Now his body began to fall over yet again, reflexively, like the jerk of the lower leg when the knee is properly tapped. But part of his mind’s slow train of thought, trailing behind reality by a matter of some minutes (sometimes it was hours, or days), began to worry. He could not be sure what she meant. She could be a woman willing to risk all on a single throw of the dice. Try sidling up to a man to get on his good side. It often worked like a charm.

He realized that to have power over another’s destiny was intolerable. It corrupted everything. He wanted to slip away to the nearest bed with Mary, hers or his, to fall onto it and make love. But making love could by definition only occur between two free human beings. And as he was warden, judge and jury to this group …

He moaned at the thought, a little ‘uhnn’ in his throat as the problem struck him in the solar plexus and forced air upward through his vocal cords. Mary gave him a glance, smiled. Across the table Maya picked this up and looked at them. Maya had perhaps heard him groan. Maya saw everything; and if she saw him wanting silly reckless Mary, when really he wanted Maya with all his heart, then it would be a double disaster. Michel loved Maya for her hawklike vision, her fierce sharp intelligence, now watching him casually but completely.

He got up and went to the counter for a piece of cheesecake, feeling his knees weakly buckling. He dared not look back at either of them.

Though it was possible the leg contact and all their looks had been in his mind only.

It was getting strange.

Two Russians, Sergei and Natasha, had started a relationship soon after their arrival at Lake Vanda. They did not try to hide it, like some other couples Michel knew about or suspected. If anything they were a bit too demonstrative, given the situation; it made some people uncomfortable how affectionate they were with each other. Ordinarily one could ignore strangers kissing in public, watch them or not as one chose. Here there were decisions to be made. Was it worse to be a voyeur or a prude? Did one apply to the programme as an individual or as a part of a couple? Which gave one a better chance? What did Michel think?

Then during the winter solstice party, June 21st, after everyone had drunk a glass of champagne and was feeling good about getting past that ebb tide in the psychological year, Arkady called them out to see the aurora australis, a filmy electric dance of coloured veils and draperies, soft greens and blues and a pale pink flowing across the grain of their reality, shimmering through the black plenum in quick sine waves. And suddenly, in the midst of this magic, shouting erupted from inside the compound – muffled shrieks, bellows. Michel looked around and all the hooded ski-masked figures were looking at him, as if he should have known this was coming and forestalled it somehow, as if it were his fault – and he ran inside and there were Sergei and Natasha, literally at each other’s throats.

He tried to detach them and got hit in the side of the face for his trouble.

After that operatic debacle Sergei and Natasha were expelled to McMurdo – which itself took some doing, both getting the helicopter over during a week of stormy weather, and getting Sergei and Natasha to agree to leave. And after that people’s trust in Michel was heavily damaged, if not shattered completely. Even the administrators of the programme, back in the north, were faintly over-inquisitive when they asked him about it; they noted that records showed he had had an interview with Natasha the day before the fight, and asked what they had talked about, and if he could please share his notes on the meeting, which he declined to do for reasons of professional confidentiality.

Natasha Romanova: very beautiful. Magnificent posture. The calmest Russian woman I have ever met. Biologist, working in hydroponic farming. Met Sergei Davydov and fell in love with him here in the camp. Very happy now.

But everyone knew he had been involved with the investigation of the incident, and naturally they must have discussed the fact that he was testing and judging them. And keeping records of course. Mary no longer pressed his leg with hers, if she ever had, nor even sat next to him. Maya watched him more closely than ever, without appearing to. Tatiana continued to seek her peers, speaking always to the person inside one, or behind one. Or inside her. And Michel wondered more and more, as the arbitrary divisions of time they called days passed in their cycles – sleep, hunger, work, Bright Room, tests, relaxation, sleep – whether they could hold it together, mentally or socially, when they got to Mars.

This of course had been his worry from the start, expressed to the others on the planning committee only partially, as a nervous joke: Since they’re all going to go crazy anyway, why not send insane people in the first place, and save them the trouble?

Now, trying to shake the feeling of anxiety growing in him, in the bright rooms and out in the dark world, the joke got less and less funny. People were furtive. Relationships were forming, and Michel saw these relationships now by the absences created by their concealment. Like tracing footprints in air. People no longer caressed who had before; glances were exchanged, then avoided; some people never looked at each other any more, and yet drew toward each other as they passed in the halls out of an internal magnetism too strong to tell the others about, but also too strong to conceal. There were trips out into the frigid starry night, often timed so that both parties were out there together, although they did not leave or return together, but with other parties. Lookout Point, a knob low on the Dais, could be observed through night IR goggles, and sometimes one saw two flowing green bodies delineated out there against the black phosphor background, the two figures overlapping in a slow dance, a beautiful mime. Michel hummed an old song in English as he watched, absorbed beyond shame: ‘I’m a spy, in the house of love – I know the things, that you’re thinking of …’

Some of these relationships might knit the community together, others might tear it apart. Maya was playing a very dangerous game with Frank Chalmers now, for instance; she went out on walks with him, they talked late into the evenings; unselfconsciously she would put a hand to his arm and laugh, head thrown back, in a way that she never had with Michel. A prelude to a later intensification, Michel judged, as the two were beginning to look like the natural leaders of the expedition. But at the same time she was always playing him off against the Russian men, with whom she would joke in Russian about the non-Russians, unaware perhaps that Frank spoke some Russian, as he did French (atrociously) and several other languages. Frank just watched her, a small inner smile playing over his lips, even when she joked about him and he could understand it. He would even glance at Michel, to see if he too caught what she was doing. As if they were complicit in their interest in Maya!

And of course she played Michel as well. He could see that. Perhaps just instinctively, as a matter of habit. Perhaps something more personal. He couldn’t tell. He wanted her to care about him …

Meanwhile, other small groups were withdrawing from the main one. Arkady had his admirers, Vlad his close group of intimates; they were harem keepers, perhaps. On the other hand, Hiroko Ai had her group, and Phyllis hers, each distinct; polyandry as well as polygamy, then, or at least it seemed possible to Michel. They all existed already – in potentiality or in his imagination, it was hard to tell. But it was impossible not to perceive at least part of what was going on among them as the group dynamics of a troop of primates, thrown together all unknown to each other, and therefore sorting things out, establishing consorts, dominance hierarchies, and so on. For they were primates; apes shut in cages; and even though they had chosen the cages themselves, still – there they were. In a situation. Like Sartre’s Huis Clos. No exit. Social life. Lost in a prison of their own devise.

Even the stablest people were affected. Michel watched fascinated as the two most introverted personalities among them, Ann Clayborne and Sax Russell, became interested in each other. It was pure science for both of them, at first; they were very much alike in that, and also in that both were so straightforward and guileless that Michel was able to overhear many of their first conversations. They were all shop talk; Martian geology, with Sax grilling her for the most part, learning from her as from a professor, but always able to contribute from the standpoint of a theoretical physicist, one of the leading lights a decade or two before, in his postgraduate years. Not that Ann seemed to care about that. She was a geologist, a planetologist who had studied Mars ever since grad school, until now in her forties she was one of the acknowledged authorities. A Martian ahead of the fact. So if Sax was interested, she could talk Mars for hours; and Sax was interested. So they talked on and on.

‘It’s a pure situation, you have to remember that. There might even be indigenous life, left there underground from the early warm wet period. So that we have to make a sterile landing and a sterile colony. Put a cordon sanitaire between us and Mars proper. Then a comprehensive search. If Terran life were allowed to invade the ground before we determined the presence or absence of life, it would be a disaster for science. And the contamination might work the other way too. You can’t be too careful. No – if anyone tries to infect Mars, there will be opposition. Maybe even active resistance. Poison the poisoners. You can never tell what people will do.’

Sax said little or nothing in reply to this.

Then one day it was those two, appearing as deadpan and phlegmatic as ever, who went out for night walks at the (carefully offset) same time, and, Michel saw through his goggles, made their way to Lookout Point. They might have been among those Michel had already seen out there. They sat there beside each other for some time.

But when they came back Sax’s colour was high, and he saw nothing of the world inside the compound. Autistic to all. And Ann’s brow was furrowed, her eye distracted. And they did not talk to each other, or even look at each other, for many days after that. Something had happened out there!

But as Michel watched them, fascinated by this turn of events, he came to understand that he would never know what it had been. A wave of – what was it – grief? Or sorrow, at their distance from each other, their isolation – each in his or her own private world, sealed vessels jostling – cut off – the futility of his work – the deathly cold of the black night – the ache of living life so inescapably alone. He fled.

Because he was one of the evaluators, he could flee. He could leave Lake Vanda from time to time on the rare helicopter visits, and though he tried not to, in order to establish better solidarity with the group, still he had done it once before, in the darkest depth of winter before the solstice, after seeing Maya and Frank together. Now, though the midday twilights were returning, he took up an invitation from an acquaintance at McMurdo to visit the Scott and Shackleton huts, just north of McMurdo on Ross Island.

Maya met him in the lock as he left. ‘What – running away?’

‘No, no – no – I’m going to have a look at the Scott and Shackleton huts. A matter of research. I’ll be right back.’

Her look showed that she did not believe it. Also that she cared where he went.

But it was in the nature of research, after all. The little cabins left behind by the first explorers of Antarctica were the remains of some of the very few expeditions in human history that resembled in any way what they were proposing to do on Mars. Though of course all analogy was false and misleading, and dangerous – this was a new thing they were thinking, a new event in history, nothing like it before.

Still, the first decades of Antarctic exploration had been somewhat like their planned expedition, he had to admit as the helicopter landed on the black rock of Cape Evans, and he followed the other distinguished visitors to the small snow-slabbed wooden hut above the beach. This was the nineteenth-century equivalent of their settlement at Lake Vanda, though their compound was ever so much more luxurious. Here at Cape Evans they had had only the necessities, all the necessities except for some vitamins, and the company of the opposite sex. How pale and odd they had become from those lacks, along with the lack of sunlight itself. Monastic malnourished troglodytes, suffering from seasonal affective disorder without knowing what a ferocious psychological problem this was (so that perhaps it hadn’t been). Writing newspapers, acting out sketches, pumping music rolls through player pianos, reading books, doing research, and producing some food, by fishing and killing seals. Yes – they had had their pleasures – deprived as they were, these men had still lived on Mother Earth, in contact with the cold fringe of her bounty. On Mars there would be none of those Inuit raptures to pass the time and ameliorate their confinement.

But the postmodern structure of feeling might already have made them used to disconnection from Earth. Everyone inhabiting their own personal spaceship, carrying it mobile with them like a hermit crab’s shell, moving from one component of it to the next: home, office, car, plane, apartment, hotel room, mall. An indoor life, even a virtual life. How many hours a day did they spend in the wind? So that perhaps Mars would not feel very different.

As he considered these matters Michel wandered the big main room of Scott’s hut, looking at all the artifacts in the grey light. Scott had erected a wall of boxes to separate the officers and scientists from the common seamen. So many different facets; Michel felt his thoughts ricocheting this way and that.

They flew up the coast to Cape Royds, where Shackleton’s hut stood like a rebuke to Scott’s – smaller, neater, more wind-sheltered. Everyone together. Shackleton and Scott had fallen out during the first expedition to Antarctica, in 1902. Similar disagreements were likely to occur in the Martian colony; but there would be no chance to build a new home elsewhere. At least not at first. And no going home. At least that was the plan. But was that wise? Here again the analogy to the first Antarcticans fell apart, for no matter how uncomfortable they had been in these huts (and Shackleton’s looked quite homely, actually) they knew they were only going to be here for a year or three, and then out and back home to England. Almost anything could be endured if there was some release foreseeable at the end of it, coming closer every day. Without that it would be a life sentence – no exit indeed. Exile, to a sur-antarctic wasteland of frigid airless rock.

Surely it made better sense to cycle the scientists and technicians to Mars in a way similar to that of the early Antarcticans. Tours of duty at small scientific stations, the stations built and then manned continuously, but by rotating teams, with individuals out there for three years each. This would be more in keeping with recommended lifetime maximum radiation doses. Boone and the others on the first trip there and back, two years before, had taken about thirty-five rad. Subsequent visiting scientists could stick to something like that.

But the American and Russian space programmers had decided otherwise. They wanted a permanent base, and they had invited scientists to move there for good. They wanted a commitment from people, no doubt hoping for a similar commitment of public interest back home – interest in a permanent cast of characters that could be learned, their lives become a matter of drama for public consumption back on Earth, with its bottomless addiction to narrative – biography as spectacle. Part of the funding effort. It made sense in its way.

But who would want to do such a thing? This was a matter that troubled Michel greatly; it headed the long list of double-binds he felt applicants were put in by the process of selection. In short, they had to be sane to be selected, but crazy to want to go.

Many other double-binds accompanied that basic one. Applicants had to be extroverted enough to socialize, but introverted enough to have studied a discipline to the point of mastering it. They had to be old enough to have learned these primary, secondary and sometimes tertiary professions, and yet be young enough to withstand the rigors of the trip out and the work there. They had to do well in groups, but want to leave everyone they knew behind forever. They were being asked to tell the truth, but clearly had to lie to increase their changes of getting what they wanted. They had to be both ordinary and extraordinary.

Yes, the double-binds were endless. Nevertheless this nearly final group had come from an initial pool of many thousands of applicants. Double-binds? So what! Nothing new to fear there. Everyone on Earth was strung up in vast networks of double-binds. Going to Mars might actually reduce their number, decrease their strain! Perhaps that was part of the appeal of going!

Perhaps that was why these men of the first Antarctic explorations had volunteered to come south. Still, looking around at the bare wooden room, it was amazing to Michel that those who had wintered down here had managed to stay sane. On the wall of Shackleton’s hut there was a photo of them: three men, huddled before a black stove. Michel stared long at this evocative photo. The men were worn-looking, battered, dirty, frostbitten, tired. Also calm, even serene. They could sit and do nothing but watch fire burn in a stove, entirely satisfied. They looked cold but warm. The very structure of the brain had been different then, more inured to hardship and the long slow hours of sheer animal existence. Certainly the structure of feeling had changed; that was culturally determined; and thus the brain must necessarily have changed too. A century later their brains depended on great dollops of mediated stimulation, quick-cut inputs which had not even existed for earlier generations. So that reliance on inner resources was harder. Patience was harder. They were different animals from the people in this photo. The epigenetic interplay of DNA and culture was now changing people so fast that even a century was enough to make a measurable difference. Accelerated evolution. Or one of the punctuations in the long tale of punctuated evolution. And Mars would be more of the same. There was no telling what they would become.

Back to Lake Vanda, and the old huts quickly became like a dream interrupting the only reality, a reality so cold that spacetime itself seemed to have frozen, leaving all of them living the same hour over and over again. Dante’s cold circle of hell, the worst of all, as he recalled.

The sensory deprivation was getting to them all. Every ‘morning’ he found himself waking up in low spirits. It took hours after waking to work the weight out of his stomach and focus on the day. After he reached level neutrality, as it was beginning to turn blue twilight at the windows, he was able to ask to join whoever was going outside that day. Out there in the numbing grey or blue or purple twilight he hiked along, trailing the other thickly-clad figures, who looked like pilgrims in a medieval winter, or prehistoric people struggling through the Ice Age. One slender bundle might be Tatiana, her beauty muffled but not entirely blanketed, for she moved like a dancer over the cracked mirror of the lake, under the high walls of the valley. Another might be Maya, focused on the others, though quite friendly and diplomatic to him too. It worried him. Beside her strode Frank, bulky and muffled.

Tatiana was easier to understand, and so attractive. Across the ice one day he followed her. On the far shore they stopped to inspect the dead body of a mummified seal. These disoriented Weddell seals were found far up all the Dry Valleys, dead for hundreds or thousands of years, frozen all that time, slowly frittered away by the winds, until the skeleton slowly emerged from the body like a soul taking off a fur coat, a soul white and wind-polished and articulated.

Tatiana grabbed his arm, exclaiming at the sight. She spoke French well, and had spent summers as a girl on the beaches of the Côte d’Azur; just the thought of that made him melt. Now they spoke, gloved hand in gloved hand, looking down through ski-masks at the memento mori in the grey light. His heart beat hard at the thought of the beauty encased in the chrysalis parka beside him, saying ‘It’s such a shock to come on one of these poor creatures’ vertebra, out on its own in all the rock, like someone’s lost bracelet.’

From across the lake Frank watched them.

And after that day Maya dropped Michel completely, with never a word nor any outward sign that things had changed, but only a single swift glance at Tatiana, in his presence, after which a purely formal politeness, no content whatsoever. And now Michel knew, very acutely, whose company in this group he craved the most; but would never have again.

Frank had done that.

And all around him it was happening: the pointless wars of the heart. It was all so small, petty, tawdry. Yet it mattered; it was their life. Sax and Ann had gone dead to each other, likewise Marina and Vlad, and Hiroko and Iwao. New cliques were forming around Hiroko and Vlad and Arkady and Phyllis, as they all spun out into their own separate orbits. No – this group would go dysfunctional. Was going dysfunctional, he could see it right before his eyes. It was too hard to live isolated in this sub-biological sensory deprivation; and this was paradise compared to Mars. There was no such thing as a good test. There was no such thing as a good analogy. There was only reality, unique and different in every moment, to be lived without rehearsal and without revision. Mars would not be like this cold continuous night on the bottom of their world; it would be worse. Worse than this! They would go mad. A hundred people confined in tanks and sent to a poisonous cold dead planet, a place to which winter in Antarctica was like paradise; a prison universe, like the inside of a head when your eyes are closed. They would all go mad.

In the first week of September the noonday twilight grew almost as bright as day, and they could see sunlight on the peaks of the Asgaard and Olympus Ranges, flanking the deep valley. Because the valley was such a narrow slot between such high ranges, it would be perhaps another ten days before the sun fell directly on the base, and Arkady organized a hike up the side of Mount Odin to catch an earlier glimpse of it. This turned into a general expedition, as almost everyone proved interested in seeing the sun again as soon as possible. So early on the morning of September 10th, they stood nearly a thousand metres above Lake Vanda, on a shelf occupied by a small ice pond and tarn. It was windy, so the climb had not warmed them. The sky was a pale starless blue; the east sides of the peaks of both ranges were glazed gold with sunlight. Finally to the east, at the end of the valley, over the burnished plate of the frozen Ross Sea, the sun emerged over the horizon and burned like a flare. They cheered; their eyes ran with emotion, also an excess of new light and cold wind. People hugged each other, bundle after bundle. But Maya kept on the other side of the group from Michel, with Frank always between them. And it seemed to Michel that everyone’s joy had a desperate edge to it, as of people who had barely survived an extinction event.

Thus when the time came to make his report to the selection committees, Michel advised against the project as designed. ‘No group can stay functional under such conditions indefinitely,’ he wrote. In the meetings he made his case point by point. The long list of double-binds was especially impressive.

This was in Houston. The heat and humidity were saunalike; Antarctica was already a nightmare memory, slipping quickly away.

‘But this is just social life,’ Charles York pointed out, bemused. ‘All social existence is a set of double-binds.’

‘No no,’ Michel said. ‘Social life is a set of contradictory demands. That’s normal, agreed. But what we’re talking about here are requirements to be two opposite things at once. Classic double-binds. And they are already causing a lot of the classic responses. Hidden lives. Multiple personalities. Bad faith. Repression, then the return of the repressed. A close look at the results of the tests given down there will show it is not a viable project. I would advise starting with small scientific stations, with rotating crews. As Antarctica itself is operated now.’

This caused a lot of discussion, even controversy. Charles remained committed to sending up a permanent colony, as proposed; but he had grown close to Mary. Georgia and Pauline tended to agree with Michel; though they too had had personal difficulties at Vanda.

Charles dropped by to see Michel in his borrowed office, shaking his head. He looked at Michel, serious but somehow still uninvolved, distanced. Professional. ‘Look, Michel,’ he said. ‘They want to go. They’re capable of adapting. A lot of them did very well with that, so well that you couldn’t pick them out of a crowd in any kind of blind test. And they want to go, it’s clear. That’s how we should choose who to send. We should give them their chance to do what they want. It’s not really our business to decide for them.’

‘But it won’t work. We saw that.’

‘I didn’t see that. They didn’t see that. What you saw is your concern, but they have the right to make their try at it. Anything could happen there, Michel. Anything. And this world is not so well-arranged that we should deny people who want to take their chance to try something different. It could be good for us all.’ He stood abruptly to leave the office. ‘Think about it.’

Michel thought about it. Charles was a sensible man, a wise man. What he had said had the ring of truth to it. And a sudden gust of fear blew through Michel, as cold as any katabatic downdraught in Wright Valley: he might, out of his own fear, be stopping something with greatness in it.

He changed his recommendation, describing all the reasons why. He explained his vote for the project to continue; he gave the committees his list of the best hundred candidates. But Georgia and Pauline continued to advise against the project as designed. And so an outside panel was convened to make an evaluation, a recommendation, a judgment. Near the end of the process Michel even found himself in his office with the American president, who sat down with him and told him he had probably been right the first time around, first impressions were usually that way, second-guessing was of little use. Michel could only nod. Later he sat in a meeting attended by both the American and Russian presidents; the stakes were that high. They both wanted a Martian base, for their own political purposes, Michel saw that clearly. But they also wanted a success, a project that worked. In that sense, the hundred permanent colonists as originally conceived was clearly the riskier of the options they had before them now. And neither president was a risk-taker. Rotating crews were intrinsically less interesting, but if the crews were large enough, and the base large enough, then the political impact (the publicity) would be almost the same; the science would be the same; and everything would be that much safer, radiologically as well as psychologically.

So they cancelled the project.

TWO EXPLORING FOSSIL CANYON

TWO HOURS BEFORE SUNSET their guide, Roger Clayborne, declared it was time to set camp, and the eight members of the tour trooped down from the ridges or up out of the side canyons they had been exploring that day as the group slowly progressed west, toward Olympus Mons. Eileen Monday, who had had her intercom switched off all day (the guide could override her deafness) turned to the common band and heard the voices of her companions, chattering. Dr Mitsumu and Cheryl Martinez had pulled the equipment waggon all day, down a particularly narrow canyon bottom, and their vociferous complaints were making Mrs Mitsumu laugh. John Nobleton was suggesting, as usual, that they camp farther down the ancient water-formed arroyo they were following; Eileen could not be sure which of the dusty-suited figures was him, but she guessed it was the one enthusiastically bounding up the wash, kicking up sand with every jump, and floating like an impala. Their guide, on the other hand, was unmistakable: tall even when sitting against a tall boulder, high on the spine flanking one side of the deep canyon. When the others spotted him, they groaned. The equipment waggon weighed less than seven hundred kilograms in Mars’s gravity, but still it would take several of them to pull it up the slope to the spot Clayborne had in mind.

‘Roger, why don’t we just pull it down the road we’ve got here and camp around the comer?’ John insisted.

‘Well, we certainly could,’ Roger said – he spoke so quietly that the intercoms barely transmitted his dry voice – ‘but I haven’t yet learned to sleep comfortably at a forty-five degree angle.’

Mrs Mitsumu giggled. Eileen snicked in irritation, hoping Roger could identify the maker of the sound. His remark typified all she disliked about the guide; he was both taciturn and sarcastic. And his wide derisive grin was no help either.

‘I found a good flat down there,’ John protested.

‘I saw it. But I suspect our tent needs a little more room.’

Eileen joined the crew hauling the waggon up the slope. I suspect,’ she mimicked as she began to pant and sweat inside her suit.

‘See?’ came Roger’s voice in her ear. ‘Ms Monday agrees with me.’

She snicked again, more annoyed than she cared to show. So far, in her opinion, this expedition was a flop. And their guide was a very significant factor in its failure, even if he was so quiet that she had barely noticed him for the first three or four days. But eventually his sharp tongue had caught her attention.

She slipped in some soft dirt and went to her knees; bounced back up and heaved again, but the contact reminded her that Mars itself shared the blame for her disappointment. She wasn’t as willing to admit that as she was her dislike for Clayborne, but it was true, and it disturbed her. All through her many years at the University of Mars, Burroughs, she had studied the planet, first in literature (she had read every Martian tale every written, she once boasted), then in areology, particularly seismology. But she had spent most of her twenty-four years in Burroughs itself, and the big city was not like the canyons. Her previous exposure to the Martian landscape consisted of visits to the magnificent domed section of Hephaestus Chasma called Lazuli Canyon, where icy water ran in rills and springs, in waterfalls and pools, and tundra grass grew on every wet red beach. Of course she knew that the virgin Martian landscape was not like Lazuli, but somewhere in her mind, when she had seen the advertisement for the hike – ‘Guaranteed to be terrain never before trodden by human feet’ – she must have had an image of something similar to that green world. The thought made her curse herself for a fool. The slope they were struggling up at that very moment was a perfect representative sample of the untrodden terrain they had been hiking over for the past week: it was composed of dirt of every consistency and hue, so that it resembled an immense layered cake slowly melting, made of ingredients that looked like baking soda, sulphur, brick dust, curry powder, coal slag, and alum. And it was only one cake out of thousands of them, all stacked crazily for as far as the eye could see. Dirt piles.

Just short of Roger’s flat campsite, they stopped to rest. Sweat was stinging in Eileen’s left eye. ‘Let’s get the waggon up here,’ Roger said, coming down to help. His clients stared at him mutinously, unmoving. The doctor leaned over to adjust his boot, and as he had been holding the waggon’s handle, the others were caught off-guard; a pebble gave way under the waggon’s rear wheel, and suddenly it was out of their grasp and rolling down the slope –

In an explosion of dust Roger dived headfirst down the hill, chocking the rear wheel with a stone the size of a loaf of bread. The waggon ploughed the chock downhill a couple of metres and came to a halt. The group stood motionless, staring at the prone guide, Eileen as surprised as the rest of them; she had never seen him move so fast. He stood up at his usual lazy pace and started wiping dust from his faceplate. ‘Best to put the chock down before it starts rolling,’ he murmured, smiling to himself. They gathered to pull the waggon up the flat, chattering again. But Eileen considered it; if the waggon had careened all the way down to the canyon bottom, there would have been at least the possibility that it would have been damaged. And if it had been damaged badly enough, it could have killed them all. She pursed her lips and climbed up to the flat.

Roger and Ivan Corallton were pulling the base of the tent from the waggon. They stretched it out over the posts that kept it level and off the frozen soil; Ivan and Kevin Ottalini assembled the curved poles of the tension dome. The three of them and John carefully got the poles in place, and pulled the transparent tent material out of the base to stretch it under the framework. When they had finished the others stood, a bit stiffly – they had travelled some twenty kilometres that day – and walked in through the flaccid airlock, hauling the waggon in behind them. Roger twisted valves on the side of the waggon, and compressed air pushed violently into their protective bag. Before it was full, Dr Mitsumu and his wife were disengaging the bath and the latrine assemblies from the waggon. Roger switched on the heaters, and after a few minutes of gazing at the gauges, he nodded. ‘Home again home again,’ he said as always. Condensation was beading on the inside of their dome’s clear skin. Eileen undipped her helmet from her suit and pulled it off. ‘It’s too hot.’ No one heard her. She walked to the waggon and turned down the heater, catching Roger’s sardonic grin out of the corner of her eye; she always thought the tent’s air was too hot. Dr Mitsumu, regular as clockwork, ducked into the latrine as soon as his suit was off. The air was filled with the smells of sweat and urine, as everyone stripped their suits off and poured the contents of the run-offs into the water purifier on the waggon. Doran Stark got to the bath first as always – Eileen was amused by how quickly a group established its habits and customs – and stood in the ankle-deep water, sponging himself down and singing ‘I Met Her in a Phobos Restaurant’. As she emptied her suit into the purifier Eileen found herself smiling at all their domestic routines, performed in a transparent bubble in the midst of an endless rust desolation.

She took her sponge bath last except for Roger. There was a shower curtain that could be pulled around the tiny tub at shoulder level, but nobody else used it, so Eileen didn’t either, although she was made a bit uncomfortable by the surreptitious glances of John and the doctor. Nevertheless, she sponged down thoroughly, and in the constantly moving air her clean wet skin felt good. Besides it was rather a splendid sight, all the ruddy naked bodies standing about on the ledge of a spine extending thousands of metres above and below them, the convolutions of canyon after canyon scoring the tilted landscape, Olympus Mons bulging to the west, rising out of the atmosphere so that it appeared to puncture the dome of the sky, and the blood-red sun about to set behind it. Roger did know how to pick a campsite, Eileen admitted to herself (he somehow sponged down with his back always to her, shower curtain partly pulled out, and dressed while still wet, signalling the gradual rehabiliment of the others). It was truly a sublime sight, as all of their campsite prospects had been. Sublime: to have your senses telling you you are in danger, when you know you are not; that was Burke’s definition of the sublime, more or less, and it fitted practically every moment of these days, from dawn to dusk. But that in itself could get wearing. The sublime is not the beautiful, after all, and one cannot live comfortably in a perpetual sense of danger. But at sunset, in the tent, it was an apprehension that could be enjoyed: the monstrous bare landscape, her bare skin; the utter serenity of the slow movement of Beethoven’s last string quartet, which Ivan played every day during the sun’s dying moments … ‘Listen to this,’ Cheryl said, and read from her constant companion, the volume, If Wang Wei Lived on Mars:

‘Sitting out all night thinking. Sun half-born five miles to the east. Blood pulses through all this still air: The edge of a mountain, great distance away. Nothing moves but the sun, Blood to fire as it rises. How many, these dawns? How far, our home? Stars fade. Big rocks splinter The mind’s great fear: Peace here. Peace, here.’

It was a fine moment, Eileen thought, made so by what was specifically human in the landscape. She dressed with the rest of them, deliberately turning away from John Nobleton as she rooted around in her drawer of the waggon, and they fell to making dinner. For more than an hour after Olympus Mons blotted out the sun the sky stayed light; pink in the west, shading to brick-black in the east. They cooked and ate by this illumination. Their meal, planned by Roger, was a thick vegetable stew, seemingly fresh French bread, and coffee. Most of them kept off the common band during long stretches of the day, and now they discussed what they had seen, for they explored different side canyons as they went. The main canyon they were following was a dry outflow wash, formed by flash floods working down a small fault line in a large tilted plateau. It was relatively young, Roger said – meaning two billion years old, but younger than most of the water-carved canyons on Mars. Wind erosion and the marvellous erratics created by volcanic bombardment from Olympus Mons gave the expedition members a lot of features to discuss: beach terracing from long-lost lakes, meandering streambeds, lava bombs shaped like giant teardrops, or coloured in a way that implied certain gases in copious quantities in the Hesperian atmosphere … This last, plus the fact that these canyons had been carved by water, naturally provoked a lot of speculation about the possibilities of ancient Martian life. And the passing water, and the resiliencies of the rock, had created forms fantastical enough to seem the sculpture of some alien art. So they talked, with the enthusiasm and free speculation that only amateurs seem to bring to a subject: Sunday paper areologists, Eileen thought. There wasn’t a proper scientist among them; she was the closest thing to it, and the only thing she knew was the rudiments of areology. Yet she listened to the talk with interest.

Roger, on the other hand, never contributed to these free-ranging discussions, and didn’t even listen. At the moment he was engaged in setting up his cot and ‘bedroom’ wall. There were panels provided so that each sleeper, or couple, could block off an area around their cot; no one took advantage of them but Roger, the rest preferring to lie out under the stars together. Roger set two panels against the sloping side of the dome, leaving just enough room for his cot under the clear low roof. It was yet another way that he set himself apart, and watching him Eileen shook her head. Expedition guides were usually so amiable – how did he keep his job? Did he ever get repeat customers? She set out her cot, observing his particular preparations: he was one of the tall Martians, well over two metres (Lamarckism was back in vogue, as it appeared that the more generations of ancestors you had on Mars, the taller you grew; it was true for Eileen herself, who was fourth-generation, or yonsei): long-faced, long-nosed, homely as English royalty … long feet that were clumsy once out of their boots … He rejoined them, however, this evening, which was not always his custom, and they lit a lantern as the wine-dark sky turned black and filled with stars. Bedding arranged, they sat down on cots and the floor around the lantern’s dim light, and talked some more. Kevin and Doran began a chess game.

For the first time, they asked Eileen questions about her area of expertise. Was it true that the southern highlands now held the crust of both primeval hemispheres? Did the straight line of the three great Tharsis volcanoes indicate a hot spot in the mantle? Sunday paper areology again, but Eileen answered as best she could. Roger appeared to be listening.

‘Do you think there’ll ever be a marsquake we can actually feel?’ he asked with a grin.

The others laughed, and Eileen felt herself blush. It was a common jest; sure enough, he followed it up: ‘You sure you seismologists aren’t just inventing these marsquakes to keep yourself in employment?’

‘You’re out here enough,’ she replied. ‘One of these days a fault will open up and swallow you.’

‘She hopes,’ Ivan said. The sniping between them had of course not gone unnoticed.

‘So you think I might actually feel a quake some day,’ Roger said.

‘Sure. There’s thousands every day, you know.’

‘But that’s because your seismographs register every footstep on the planet. I mean, a big one?’

‘Of course. I can’t think of anyone who deserves a shaking more.’

‘Might even have to use the Richter scale, eh?’

Now that was unfair, because the Harrow scale was necessary to make finer distinctions between low-intensity quakes. But later in the same conversation, she got her own back. Cheryl and Mrs Mitsumu were asking Roger about where he had travelled before in his work, how many expeditions he had guided and the like. ‘I’m a canyon guide,’ he replied at one point.

‘So when will you graduate to Marineris?’ Eileen asked.

‘Graduate?’

‘Sure, isn’t Marineris the ultimate goal of every canyon man?’

‘Well, to a certain extent –’

‘You’d better get assigned there in a hurry, hadn’t you – I hear it takes a whole lifetime to learn those canyons.’ Roger looked to be about forty.

‘Oh not for our Roger,’ Mrs Mitsumu said, joining in the ribbing.

‘No one ever learns Marineris,’ Roger protested. ‘It’s eight thousand kilometres long, with hundreds of side canyons –’

‘What about Gustafsen?’ Eileen said. I thought he and a couple others knew every inch of it.’

‘Well …’

‘Better start working on that transfer.’

‘Well, I’m a Tharsis fan myself,’ he explained, in a tone so apologetic that the whole group burst out laughing. Eileen smiled at him and went to get some tea started.

After the tea was distributed, John and Ivan turned the conversation to another favourite topic, the terraforming of the canyons. ‘This system would be as beautiful as Lazuli,’ John said. ‘Can you imagine water running down the drops we took today? Tundra grass everywhere, finches in the air, little horned toads down in the cracks … alpine flowers to give it some colour.’

‘Yes, it will be exquisite,’ Ivan agreed. With the same material that made their tent, several canyons and craters had been domed, and thin cold air pumped beneath, allowing arctic and alpine life to exist. Lazuli was the greatest of these terraria, but many more were springing up.

‘Unnh,’ Roger muttered.

‘You don’t agree?’ Ivan asked.

Roger shook his head. ‘The best you can do is make an imitation Earth. That’s not what Mars is for. Since we’re on Mars, we should adjust to what it is, and enjoy it for that.’

‘Oh but there will always be natural canyons and mountains,’ John said. ‘There’s as much land surface on Mars as on Earth, right?’

‘Just barely.’

‘So with all that land, it will take centuries for it all to be terraformed. In this gravity, maybe never. But centuries, at least.’

‘Yes, but that’s the direction it’s headed,’ Roger said. ‘If they start orbiting minors and blowing open volcanoes to provide gases, they’ll change the whole surface.’

‘But wouldn’t that be marvellous!’ Ivan said.

‘You don’t seriously object to making life on the open surface possible, do you?’ Mrs Mitsumu asked.

Roger shrugged. I like it the way it is.’

John and the rest continued to discuss the considerable problems of terraforming, and after a bit Roger got up and went to bed. An hour later Eileen got up to do the same, and the others followed her, brushing teeth, visiting the latrine, talking more … Long after the others had settled down, Eileen stood under one edge of the tent dome, looking up at the stars. There near Scorpio, as a high evening star, was the Earth, a distinctly bluish point, accompanied by its fainter companion, the moon. A double planet of resonant beauty in the host of constellations. Tonight it gave her an inexplicable yearning to see it, to stand on it.

Suddenly John appeared at her side, standing too close to her, shoulder to shoulder, his arm rising, as if with a life of its own, to circle her waist. ‘Hike’ll be over soon,’ he said. She didn’t respond. He was a very handsome man; aquiline features, jet black hair. He didn’t know how tired Eileen was of handsome men. She had been as impetuous in her affairs as a pigeon in a park, and it had brought her a lot of grief. Her last three lovers had all been quite good-looking, and the last of them, Eric, had been rich as well. His house in Burroughs was made of rare stones, as all the rich new houses were: a veritable castle of dark purple chert, inlaid with chalcedony and jade, rose quartz and jasper, its floors intricately flagged patterns of polished yellow slate, coral and bright turquoise. And the parties! Croquet picnics in the maze garden, dances in the ballroom, masques all about the extensive grounds … But Eric himself, brilliant talker though he was, had turned out to be rather superficial, and promiscuous as well, a discovery that Eileen had been slow to make. It had hurt her feelings. And since that had been the third intimate relationship to go awry in four years, she felt tired and unsure of herself, unhappy, and particularly sick of that easy mutual attraction of the attractive which had got her into such painful trouble, and which was what John was relying on at this very moment.

Of course he knew nothing of all this, as his arm hugged her waist (he certainly didn’t have Eric’s way with words), but she wasn’t inclined to excuse his ignorance. She mulled over methods of diplomatically slipping out of his grasp and back to a comfortable distance. This was certainly the most he had made so far in the way of a move. She decided on one of her feints – leaning into him to peck his cheek, then pulling away when his guard was down – and had started the manoeuvre, when with a bump one of Roger’s panels was knocked aside and Roger stumbled out, in his shorts, bleary-eyed. ‘Oh?’ he said sleepily, as he noticed them; then saw who they were, and their position – ‘Ah,’ he said, and stumped away toward the latrine.

Eileen took advantage of the disturbance to slip away from John and go to bed, which was no-trespass territory, as John well knew. She lay down in some agitation. That smile – that ‘Ah’ – the whole incident irritated her so much that she had trouble falling asleep. And the double star, one blue, one white, returned her stare all the while.

The next day it was Eileen and Roger’s turn to pull the waggon. This was the first time they had pulled together, and while the rest ranged ahead or to the sides, they solved the many small problems presented by the task of getting the waggon down the canyon. An occasional drop-off was tall enough to require winch, block and tackle – sometimes even one or two of the other travellers – but mostly it was a matter of guiding the flexible little cart down the centre of the wash. They agreed on band 33 for their private communication, but aside from the business at hand, they conversed very little. ‘Look out for that rock.’ ‘How nice, that triangle of shards.’ To Eileen it seemed clear that Roger had very little interest in her or her observations. Or else, it occurred to her, he thought the same of her.

At one point she asked, ‘What if we let the waggon slip right now?’ It was poised over the edge of a six- or seven-metre drop, and they were winching it down.

‘It would fall,’ his voice replied solemnly in her ear, and through his faceplate she could see him smiling.

She kicked pebbles at him. ‘Come on, would it break? Are we in danger of our lives most every minute?’

‘No way. These things are practically indestructible. Otherwise it would be too dangerous to use them. They’ve dropped them off four-hundred-metre cliffs – not sheer you understand, but steep – and it doesn’t even dent them.’

‘I see. So when you saved the waggon from slipping down that slope yesterday, you weren’t actually saving our lives.’

‘Oh no. Did you think that? I just didn’t want to climb down that hill and recover it.’

‘Ah.’ She let the waggon thump down, and they descended to it. After that there were no exchanges between them for a long time. Eileen contemplated the fact that she would be back in Burroughs in three or four days, with nothing in her life resolved, nothing different about it.

Still, it would be good to get back to the open air, the illusion of open air. Running water. Plants.

Roger clicked his tongue in distress.

‘What?’ Eileen asked.

‘Sandstorm coming.’ He switched to the common band, which Eileen could now hear. ‘Everyone get back to the main canyon, please, there’s a sandstorm on the way.’

There were groans over the common band. No one was actually in sight. Roger bounced down the canyon with impeccable balance, bounced back up. ‘No good campsites around,’ he complained. Eileen watched him; he noticed and pointed at the western horizon. ‘See that feathering in the sky?’

All Eileen could see was a patch where the sky’s pink was perhaps a bit yellow, but she said ‘Yes?’

‘Duststorm. Coming our way, too. I think I feel the wind already.’ He put a hand up. Eileen thought that feeling the wind through a suit when the atmospheric pressure was thirty millibars was strictly a myth, a guide’s boast, but she stuck her hand up as well, and thought that there might be a faint fluctuating pressure on it.

Ivan, Kevin and the Mitsumus appeared far down the canyon. ‘Any campsites down there?’ Roger asked.

‘No, the canyon gets even narrower.’

Then the sandstorm was upon them, sudden as a flash flood. Eileen could see fifty metres at the most; they were in a shifting dome of flying sand, it seemed, and it was as dark as their long twilights, or darker.

Over band 33, in her left ear, Eileen heard a long sigh. Then in her right ear, over the common band, Roger’s voice: ‘You all down the canyon there, stick together and come on up to us. Doran, Cheryl, John, let’s hear from you – where are you?’

‘Roger?’ It was Cheryl on the common band, sounding frightened.

‘Yes, Cheryl, where are you?’

A sharp thunder roll of static: ‘We’re in a sandstorm, Roger! I can just barely hear you.’

‘Are you with Doran and John?’

‘I’m with Doran, and he’s just over this ridge, I can hear him, but he says he can’t hear you.’

‘Get together with him and start back for the main canyon. What about John?’

‘I don’t know, I haven’t seen him in over an hour.’

‘All right. Stay with Doran –’

‘Roger?’

‘Yes?’

‘Doran’s here now.’

‘I can hear you again,’ Doran’s voice said. He sounded more scared than Cheryl. ‘Over that ridge there was too much interference.’

‘Yeah, that’s what’s happening with John I expect,’ Roger said.

Eileen watched the dim form of their guide move up the canyon’s side-slope in the wavering amber dusk of the storm. The ‘sand’ in the thin air was mostly dust, or fines even smaller than dust particles, like smoke; but occasional larger grains made a light tik tik tik against her faceplate.

‘Roger, we can’t seem to find the main canyon,’ Doran declared, scratchy in the interference.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, we’ve gone up the canyon we descended, but we must have taken a different fork, because we’ve run into a box canyon.’

Eileen shivered in her warm suit. Each canyon system lay like a lightning bolt on the tilted land, a pattern of ever-branching forks and tributaries; in the storm’s gloom it would be very easy to get lost; and they still hadn’t heard from John.

‘Well, drop back to the last fork and try the next one to the south. As I recall, you’re over in the next canyon north of us.’

‘Right,’ Doran said. ‘We’ll try that.’

The four who had been farther down the main canyon appeared now like ghosts in mist. ‘Here we are,’ Ivan said with satisfaction.

‘Nobleton! John! Do you read me?’

No answer.

‘He must be off a ways,’ Roger said. He approached the waggon. ‘Help me pull this up the slope.’

‘Why?’ Dr Mitsumu asked.

‘We’re setting the tent up there. Sleep on an angle tonight, you bet.’

‘But why up there?’ Dr Mitsumu persisted. ‘Couldn’t we set up the tent here in the wash?’

‘It’s the old arroyo problem,’ Roger replied absently. ‘If the storm keeps up the canyon could start spilling sand as if it were water. We don’t want to be buried.’

They pulled it up the slope with little difficulty, and secured it with chock rocks under the wheels. Roger set up the tent mostly by himself, working too quickly for the others to help.

‘Okay, you four get inside and get everything going. Eileen –’

‘Roger?’ It was Doran.

‘Yes.’

‘We’re still having trouble finding the main canyon.’

‘We thought we were in it,’ Cheryl said, ‘but when we descended we came to a big drop-off!’

‘Okay. Hold on a minute where you are. Eileen, I want you to come up the main canyon with me and serve as a radio relay. You’ll stay right in the wash, so you’ll be able to walk right back down to the tent if we get separated.’

‘Sure,’ Eileen said. The others were carefully rolling the waggon into the lock. Roger paused to oversee that operation, and then he gestured at Eileen through the tawny murk and took off upcanyon. Eileen followed.

They made rapid time. On band 33 Eileen heard the guide say, in an unworried conversational tone, ‘I hate it when this happens.’ It was as if he were referring to a shoelace breaking.

‘I bet you do!’ Eileen replied. ‘How are we going to find John?’

‘Go high. Always go high when lost. I believe I told John that with the rest of you.’

‘Yes.’ Eileen had forgotten, however, and she wondered if John had too.

‘Even if he’s forgotten,’ Roger said, ‘when we get high enough, the radios will be less obstructed and we’ll be able to talk to him. Or at the worst, we can bounce our signals off a satellite and back down. But I doubt we’ll have to do that. Hey Doran!’ he said over the common band.

‘Yeah?’ Doran sounded very worried.

‘What can you see now?’

‘Um – we’re on a spine – it’s all we can see. The canyon to the right –’

‘South?’

‘Yeah, the south, is the one we were in. We thought the one here to the north would be the main one, but it’s too little, and there’s a drop-off in it.’

‘Okay, well, my APS has you still north of us, so cross back to the opposite spine and we’ll talk from there. Can you do that?’

‘Sure,’ Doran said, affronted. ‘It’ll take a while, maybe.’

‘That’s all right, take your time.’ The lack of concern in Roger’s voice was almost catching, but Eileen felt that John was in danger; the suits would keep one alive for forty-eight hours at least, but these sandstorms often lasted a week, or more.

‘Let’s keep moving up,’ Roger said on band 33. ‘I don’t think we have to worry about those two.’

They climbed up the canyon floor, which rose at an average angle of about thirty degrees. Eileen noticed all the dust sliding loosely downhill, sand grains rolling, dust wafting down; sometimes she couldn’t see her feet, or make out the ground, so that she had to step by feeling.

‘How are you doing back in camp?’ Roger asked on the common band.

‘Just fine,’ Dr Mitsumu answered. ‘It’s on too much of a tilt to stand, so we’re just sitting around and listening to the developments up there.’

‘Still in your suits?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. One of you stay suited for sure.’

‘Whatever you say.’

Roger stopped where the main canyon was joined by two large tributary canyons, branching in each direction. ‘Watch out, I’m going to turn up the volume on the radio,’ he warned Eileen and the others. She adjusted the controls on her wrist.

‘JOHN! Hey, John! Oh, Jo-uhnnn! Come in, John! Respond on common band. Please.’

The radio’s static sounded like the hiss of flying sand grains. Nothing within it but crackling.

‘Hmm,’ Roger said in Eileen’s left ear.

‘Hey Roger!’

‘Cheryl! How are you doing?’

‘Well, we’re in what we think is the main canyon, but … ’

Doran continued, embarrassed: ‘We really can’t be sure, now. Everything looks the same.’

‘You’re telling me,’ Roger replied. Eileen watched him bend over and, apparently, inspect his feet. He moved around some in this jack-knifed position. ‘Try going to the wash at the lowest point in the canyon you’re in.’

‘We’re there.’

‘Okay, lean down and see if you find any bootprints. Make sure they aren’t yours. They’ll be faint by now, but Eileen and I just went upcanyon, so there should still be –’

‘Hey! Here’s some,’ Cheryl said.

‘Where?’ said Doran.

‘Over here, look.’

Radio hiss.

‘Yeah, Roger, we’ve found some going upcanyon and down.’

‘Good. Now start downcanyon. Dr M., are you still in your suit?’

‘Just as you said, Roger.’

‘Good. Why don’t you get out of the tent and go down to the wash. Keep your bearing, count your steps and all. Wait for Cheryl and Doran. That way they’ll be able to find the tent as they come down.’

‘Sounds good.’

After some chatter: ‘You all down there switch to band 5 to talk on, and just listen to common. We need to hear up here.’ Then on band 33: ‘Let’s go up some more. I believe I remember a gendarme on the ridge up here with a good vantage.’

‘Fine. Where do you think he could be?’

‘You got me.’

When Roger located the outcropping he had in mind, they called again, and again got no response. Eileen then installed herself on top of the rocky knob on the ridge: an eerie place with nothing to see but the fine sand whipped about her, in a ghost wind barely felt on her back, like the lightest puff of an air-conditioner, despite the visual resemblance to some awful typhoon. She called for John from time to time. Roger ranged to north and south over difficult terrain, always staying within radio distance of Eileen, although once he had a hard time relocating her.

Three hours passed this way, and Roger’s easygoing tone changed; not to worry, Eileen judged, but rather to boredom, and annoyance with John. Eileen herself was extremely concerned. If John had mistaken north for south, or fallen …

‘I suppose we should go higher,’ Roger sighed. ‘Although I thought I saw him back when we brought the waggon down here, and I doubt he’d go back up.’

Suddenly Eileen’s earphones crackled. ‘Psss ftunk bdzz,’ and it was clear again. ‘Ckk ssssger, lo! ckk.’

‘Sounds like he may have indeed gone high,’ Roger said with satisfaction, and, Eileen noticed, just a touch of relief. ‘Hey, John! Nobleton! Do you read us?’

‘Ckk ssssssss … yeah, hey … sssss kuk sssss.’

‘We read you badly, John! Keep moving, keep talking! Are you all –’

‘Roger! ckk. Hey, Roger!’

‘John! We read you, are you all right?’

‘… sssss … not exactly sure where I am.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes! Just lost.’

‘Well not any more, we hope. Tell us what you see.’

‘Nothing!’

So began the long process of locating him and bringing him back. Eileen ranged left and right on her own, helping to get a fix on John, who had been instructed to stay still and keep talking.

‘You won’t believe it.’ John’s voice was entirely free of fear; in fact, he sounded elated. ‘You won’t believe it, Eileen, Roger, crk! Just before the storm hit I was way off down a tributary to the south, and I found …’

‘Found what?’

‘Well … I’ve found some things I’m sure must be fossils. I swear! A whole rock formation of them!’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘No seriously, I’ve got some with me. Very small shells, like little sea snails, or Crustacea. Miniature nautiloids, like. They just couldn’t be anything else. I have a couple in my pocket, but there’s a whole wall of them back there! I figured if I just left I wouldn’t be able to find the same canyon ever again, what with this storm, so I built a duck trail on the way back over to the main canyon, if that’s where I am. So it took me a while to get back in radio clear.’

‘What colour are they?’ Ivan asked from below.

‘You down there, be quiet,’ Roger ordered. ‘We’re still trying to find him.’

‘We’ll be able to get back to the site. Eileen, can you believe it? We’ll all be – Hey!’

‘It’s just me,’ Roger said.

‘Ah! You gave me a start, there.’

Eileen smiled as she imagined John startled by the ghostlike appearance of the lanky, suited Roger. Soon enough Roger had led John downcanyon to Eileen, and after John hugged her, they proceeded down the canyon to Dr Mitsumu, who again led them up the slope to the tent, which rested at a sharper angle than Eileen had recalled.

Once inside, the reunited group chattered for an hour concerning their adventure, while Roger showered and got the waggon on an even keel, and John revealed the objects he had brought back with him:

Small shell-shaped rocks, some held in crusts of sandstone. Each shell had a spiral swirl on its inside surface, and they were mottled red and black. By and large they were black.

They were unlike any rocks Eileen had ever seen; they looked exactly like the few Terran shells she had seen in school. Seeing them there in John’s hand, she caught her breath. Life on Mars; even if only fossil traces of it, Life on Mars. She took one of the shells from John and stared and stared at it. It very well could be …

They had to arrange their cots across the slope of the tent floor, and prop them level with clothes and other domestic objects from the waggon. Long after they were settled they discussed John’s discovery, and Eileen found herself more and more excited by the idea of it. The sand pelting the tent soundlessly only made its presence known by the complete absence of stars. She stared at the faint curved reflection of them all on the dome’s surface, and thought of it. The Clayborne Expedition, in the history books. And Martian life … The others talked and talked.

‘So we’ll go there tomorrow, right?’ John asked Roger. The tilt of the tent made it impossible for Roger to set up his bedroom.

‘Or as soon as the storm ends, sure.’ Roger had only glanced at the shells, shaking his head and muttering, ‘I don’t know, don’t get your hopes up too high.’ Eileen wondered about that. ‘We’ll follow that duck trail of yours, if we can.’

Perhaps he was jealous of John now?

On and on they talked. Yet the hunt had taken it out of Eileen; to the sound of their voices she suddenly fell asleep.

She woke up when her cot gave way and spilled her down the floor; before she could stop herself, she had rolled over Mrs Mitsumu and John. She got off John quickly and saw Roger over at the waggon, smiling down at the gauges. Her cot had been by the waggon; had he yanked out some crucial item of clothing? There was something of the prankster in the man …

The commotion woke the rest of the sleepers. Immediately the conversation returned to the matter of John’s discovery, and Roger agreed that their supplies were sufficient to allow a trip back upcanyon. And the storm had stopped; dust coated their dome, and was piled half a centimetre high on its uphill side, but they could see that the sky was clear. So after breakfast they suited up, more awkward than ever on the tilted floor, and emerged from their shelter.

The distance back up to where they had met John was much shorter than it had seemed to Eileen in the storm. All of their tracks had been covered, even the sometimes deep treadmarks of the waggon. John led the way, leaping upward in giant bounds that were almost out of his control.

‘There’s the gendarme where we found you,’ Roger said from below, pointing to the spine on their right for John’s benefit. John waited for them, talking nervously all the while. ‘There’s the first duck,’ he told them. I see it way over there, but with all the sand, it looks almost like any other mound. This could be hard.’

‘We’ll find them,’ Roger assured him.

When they had all joined John, they began to traverse the canyons to the south, each one a deep multi-fingered trench in the slope of Mars facing Olympus Mons. John had very little sense of where he had been, except that he had not gone much above or below the level they were on. Some of the ducks were hard to spot, but Roger had quite a facility for it, and the others spotted some as well. More than once none of them saw it, and they had to trek off in nine slightly different directions, casting about in hopes of running into it. Each time someone would cry ‘Here it is,’ as if they were children hunting Easter eggs, and they would convene and search again. Only once were they unable to locate the next duck, and then Roger pumped John’s memory of his hike; after all, as Ivan pointed out, it had been the full light of day when he walked to the site. A crestfallen John admitted that, each little red canyon looking so much like the next one, he couldn’t really recall where he had gone from there.

‘Well, but there’s the next duck,’ Roger said with surprise, pointing at a little niche indicating a side ravine. And after they had reached the niche John cried, ‘This is it! Right down this ravine, in the wall itself. And some of them have fallen.’

The common band was a babble of voices as they dropped into the steep-sided ravine one by one. Eileen stepped down through the narrow entrance and confronted the nearly vertical south wall. There, imbedded in hard sandstone, were thousands of tiny black stone snail shells. The bottom of the ravine was covered with them; all of them were close to the same size, with holes that opened into the hollow interior of the shells. Many of them were broken, and inspecting some fragments, Eileen saw the spiral ribbing that so often characterized life. Her earphones rang with the excited voices of her companions. Roger had climbed the canyon wall and was inspecting a particular section, his faceplate only centimetres from the stone. ‘See what I mean?’ John was asking. ‘Martian snails! It’s like those fossil bacterial mats they talk about, only further advanced. Back when Mars had surface water and an atmosphere, life did begin. It just didn’t have time to get very far.’

‘Nobleton snails,’ Cheryl said, and they laughed. Eileen picked up fragment after fragment, her excitement growing. They were all very similar. She was taxing her suit’s cooling system, starting to sweat. She examined a well-preserved specimen carefully, pulling it out of the rock to do so. The common band was distractingly noisy, and she was about to turn it off when Roger’s voice said slowly, ‘Uh-ohh … Hey, people. Hey.’

When it was silent he said hesitantly, ‘I hate to spoil the party, but … these little things aren’t fossils.’

‘What?’

‘What do you mean?’ John and Ivan challenged. ‘How do you know?’

‘Well, there are couple reasons,’ Roger said. Everyone was still now, and watching him. ‘First, I believe that fossils are created by a process that requires millions of years of water seepage, and Mars never had that.’

‘So we think now,’ Ivan objected. ‘But it may not be so, because it’s certain that there was water on Mars all along. And after all, here are these things.’

‘Well …’ Eileen could tell he was deciding to let that argument pass. ‘Maybe you’re right, but a better reason is, I think I know what these are. They’re lava pellets – bubble pellets, I’ve heard them called – although I’ve never seen ones this small. Little lava bombs from one of the Olympus Mons eruptions. A sort of spray.’

Everyone stared at the objects in their hands.

‘See, when lava pellets land hot in a certain sort of sand, they sink right through it and melt the sand fast, releasing gas that forms the bubble, and these glassy interiors. When the pellet is spinning, you get these spiral chambers. So I’ve heard, anyway. It must have happened on a flat plain long ago, and when the whole plain tilted and started falling down this slope, these layers broke up and were buried by later deposits.’

‘I don’t believe that’s necessarily so,’ John declared, while the others looked at the wall. But even he sounded pretty convinced to Eileen.

‘Of course we’ll have to take some back to be sure,’ Roger agreed in a soothing tone.

‘Why didn’t you tell us this last night?’ Eileen asked.

‘Well, I couldn’t tell till I had seen the rock they were in. But this is lava-sprayed sandstone. That’s why it’s so hard in its upper layers. But you’re an areologist, right?’ He wasn’t mocking. ‘Don’t they look like they’re made of lava?’

Eileen nodded, reluctantly. ‘Looks like it.’

‘Well, lava doesn’t make fossils.’

Half an hour later a dispirited group was stretched out over the duck trail, straggling along in silence. John and Ivan trailed far behind, weighted down by several kilos of lava pellets. Pseudofossils, as both areologists and geologists called them. Roger was ahead, talking with the Mitsumus, attempting to cheer them all up, Eileen guessed. She felt bad about not identifying the rock the previous night. She felt more depressed than she could easily account for, and it made her angry. Everything was so empty out here, so meaningless, so without form …

‘Once I thought I had found traces of aliens,’ Roger was saying. ‘I was off by myself around the other side of Olympus, hiking canyons as usual, except I was by myself. I was crossing really broken fretted terrain, when suddenly I came across a trail duck. Stones never stack up by themselves. Now the Explorer’s Society keeps a record of every single hike and expedition, you know, and I had checked before and I knew I was in fresh territory, just like we are now. No humans had ever been in that part of the badlands, as far as the Society knew. Yet here was this duck. And I started finding other ones right away. Set not in a straight line, but zigzagging, tacking like. And little. Tiny piles of flat rock, four or five high. Like they were set up by little aliens who saw best out of the sides of their eyes.’

‘You must have been astounded,’ Mrs Mitsumu said.

‘Exactly. But, you know – there were three possibilities. It was a natural rock formation – extremely unlikely, but it could be that breadloaf formations had slid onto their sides and then been eroded into separate pieces, still stacked on each other. Or they were set up by aliens. Also unlikely, in my opinion. Or someone had hiked through there without reporting it, and had played a game, maybe, for someone later to find. To me, that was the most likely explanation. But for a while there …’

‘You must have been disappointed,’ said Mrs Mitsumu.

‘Oh no,’ Roger replied easily. ‘More entertained than anything, I think.’

Eileen stared at the form of their guide, far ahead with the others. He truly didn’t care that John’s discovery had not been the remnants of life, she judged. In that way he was different, unlike John or Ivan, unlike herself; for she felt his obviously correct explanation of the little shells as a loss larger than she ever would have guessed. She wanted life out there as badly as John or Ivan or any of the rest of them did, she realized. All those books she had read, when studying literature … That was why she had not let herself remember that igneous rock would never be involved with fossilization. If only life had once existed here – snails, lichen, bacteria, anything – it would somehow take away some of this landscape’s awful barrenness.

And if Mars itself could not provide, it became necessary to supply it – to do whatever was necessary to make life possible on this desolate surface, to transform it as soon as possible, to give it life. Now she understood the connection between the two main topics of evening conversation in their isolated camps: terraforming, and the discovery of extinct Martian life forms; and the conversations took place all over the planet, less intently than out here in the canyons, perhaps, but still, all her life Eileen had been hoping for this discovery, had believed in it.

She pulled the half-dozen lava pellets she had saved from one of her suit pockets, and stared at them. Abruptly, bitterly, she tossed them aside, and they floated out into the rust waste. They would never find remnants of Martian life; no one ever would. She knew that was true in every cell of her. All the so-called discoveries, all the Martians in her books – they were all part of a simple case of projection, nothing more. Humans wanted Martians, that was all there was to it. But there were not, and never had been, any canal builders; no lamppost creatures with heat-beam eyes, no brilliant lizards or grasshoppers, no manta ray intelligences, no angels and no devils; there were no four-armed races battling in blue jungles, no big-headed skinny thirsty folk, no sloe-eyed dusky beauties dying for Terran sperm, no wise little Bleekmen wandering stunned in the desert, no golden-eyed golden-skinned telepaths, no doppelganger race – not a funhouse mirror-image of any kind; there weren’t any ruined adobe palaces, no dried oasis castles, no mysterious cliff dwellings packed like a museum, no hologrammatic towers waiting to drive humans mad, no intricate canal systems with their locks all filled with sand, no, not a single canal; there were not even any mosses creeping down from the polar caps every summer, nor any rabbitlike animals living far underground; no plastic windmill-creatures, no lichen capable of casting dangerous electrical fields, no lichen of any kind; no algae in the hot springs, no microbes in the soil, no microbacteria in the regolith, no stromatolites, no nanobacteria in the deep bedrock … no primeval soup.

All so many dreams. Mars was a dead planet. Eileen scuffed the freeze-dried dirt and watched through damp eyes as the pinkish sand lofted away from her boot. All dead. That was her home: dead Mars. Not even dead, which implied a life and a dying. Just … nothing. A red void.

They turned down the main canyon. Far below was their tent, looking as if it would slide down its slope any instant. Now there was a sign of life. Eileen grinned bleakly behind her faceplate. Outside her suit it was forty degrees below zero, and the air was not air.

Roger was hurrying down the canyon ahead of them, no doubt to turn on the air and heat in the tent, or pull the waggon out to move it all downcanyon. In the alien gravity she had lived in all her life, he dropped down the great trench as in a dream, not bounding gazelle-like in the manner of John or Doran, but just on the straightest line, the most efficient path, in a sort of boulder ballet all the more graceful for being so simple. Eileen liked that. Now there, she thought, is a man reconciled to the absolute deadness of Mars. It seemed his home, his landscape. An old line occurred to her: ‘We have met the enemy, and they is us.’ And then something from Bradbury: ‘The Martians were there … Timothy and Robert and Michael and Mom and Dad.’

She pondered the idea as she followed Clayborne down their canyon, trying to imitate that stride.

‘But there was life on Mars.’ That evening she watched him. Ivan and Doran talked to Cheryl; John sulked on his cot. Roger chatted with the Mitsumus, who liked him. At sunset when they showered (they had moved the tent to another fine flat site) he walked over to his panelled cubicle naked, and the flat onyx bracelet he wore around his left wrist suddenly seemed to Eileen the most beautiful ornamentation. She realized she was glancing at him in the same way John and the doctor looked at her – only differently – and she blushed.

After dinner the others were quiet, returning to their cots. Roger continued telling the Mitsumus and Eileen stories. She had never heard him talk so much. He was still sarcastic with her, but that wasn’t what his smile was saying. She watched him move and sighed, exasperated with herself; wasn’t this just what she had come out here to get away from? Did she really need or want this feeling again, this quickening interest?

‘They still can’t decide if there’s some ultra-small nanobacteria down in the bedrock. The arguments go back and forth in the scientific journals all the time. Could be down there, so small we can’t even see it. There’s been reports of drilling contamination … But I don’t think so.’

Yet he certainly was different from the men she had known in recent years. After everyone had gone to bed, she concentrated on that difference, that quality; he was … Martian. He was that alien life, and she wanted him in a way she had never wanted her other lovers. Mrs Mitsumu had been smiling at them, as if she saw something going on, something she had seen developing long before, when the two of them were always at odds … Earth girl lusts for virile Martian; she laughed at herself, but there it was. Still constructing stories to populate this planet, still falling in love, despite herself. And she wanted to do something about it. She had always lived by Eulert’s saying: If you don’t act on it, it isn’t a true feeling. It had got her in trouble, too, but she was forgetting that. And tomorrow they would be at the little outpost that was their destination, and the chance would be gone. For an hour she thought about it, evaluating the looks he had given her that evening. How did you evaluate an alien’s glances? Ah, but he was human – just adapted to Mars in a way she wished she could be – and there had been something in his eyes very human, very understandable. Around her the black hills loomed against the black sky, the double star hung overhead, that home she had never set foot on. It was a lonely place.

Well, she had never been particularly shy in these matters, but she had always favoured a more in-pulling approach, encouraging advances rather than making them (usually) so that when she quietly got off her cot and slipped into shorts and a shirt, her heart was knocking like a timpani roll. She tiptoed to the panels, thinking Fortune favours the bold, and slipped between them, went to his side.

He sat up; she put her hand to his mouth. She didn’t know what to do next. Her heart was knocking harder than ever. That gave her an idea, and she leaned over and pulled his head around and placed it against her ribs, so he could hear her pulse. He looked up at her, pulled her down to the cot. They kissed. Some whispers. The cot was too narrow and creaky, and they moved to the floor, lay next to each other kissing. She could feel him, hard against her thigh; some sort of Martian stone, she reckoned, like that flesh jade … They whispered to each other, lips to each other’s ears like headpiece intercoms. She found it difficult to stay so quiet making love, exploring that Martian rock, being explored by it … She lost her mind for a while then, and when she came to she was quivering now and again; an occasional aftershock, she though to herself. A seismology of sex. He appeared to read her mind, for he whispered happily in her ear, ‘Your seismographs are probably picking us up right now.’

She laughed softly, then made the joke current among literature majors at the university: ‘Yes, very nice … the Earth moved.’

After a second he got it and stifled a laugh. ‘Several thousand kilometres.’

Laughter is harder to suppress than the sounds of love.

Of course it is impossible to conceal such activity in a group – not to mention a tent – of such small size, and the next morning Eileen got some pointed looks from John, some smiles from Mrs M. It was a clear morning, and after they got the tent packed into the waggon and were on their way, Eileen hiked off, whistling to herself. As they descended toward the broad plain at the bottom of the canyon mouth, she and Roger tuned in to their band 33 and talked.

‘You really don’t think this wash would look better with some cactus and sage in it, say? Or grasses?’

‘Nope. I like it the way it is. See that pentagon of shards there?’ He pointed. ‘How nice.’

With the intercom they could wander far apart from each other and still converse, and no one could know they were talking, while each voice hung in the other’s ear. So they talked and talked. Everyone has had conversations that have been crucial in their lives: clarity of expression, quickness of feeling, attentiveness to the other’s words, a belief in the reality of the other’s world – of these and other elements are such conversations made, and at the same time the words themselves can be concerned with the simplest, most ordinary things:

‘Look at that rock.’

‘How nice that ridge is against the sky – it must be a hundred kilometres away, and it looks like you could touch it.’

‘Everything’s so red.’

‘Yeah. Red Mars, I love it. I’m for red Mars.’

She considered it. They hiked down the widening canyon ahead of the others, on opposite slopes. Soon they would be back into the world of cities, the big wide world. There were lots and lots of people out there, and anyone you met you might never see again. On the other hand … she looked across at the tall awkwardly-proportioned man, striding with feline Martian grace over the dunes, in the dream gravity. Like a dancer.

‘How old are you?’ she asked.

‘Twenty-six.’

‘My God!’ He was already quite wrinkled. More sun than most.

‘What?’

‘I thought you were older.’

‘No.’

How long have you been doing this?’

‘Hiking canyons?’

‘Yes.’

‘Since I was six.’

‘Oh.’ That explained how he knew all this world so well.

She crossed the canyon to walk by his side; seeing her doing it, he descended his slope and they walked down the centre of the wash.

‘Can I come on another trip with you?’

He looked at her: behind the faceplate, a grin. ‘Oh yes. There are a lot of canyons to see.’

The canyon opened up, then flattened out, and its walls melted into the broad boulder-studded plain on which the little outpost was set, some kilometres away. Eileen could just see it in the distance, like a castle made of glass: a tent like theirs, really, only much bigger. Behind it Olympus Mons rose straight up out of the sky.

THREE THE ARCHAEA PLOT

THE LITTLE RED PEOPLE did not like terraforming. As far as they were concerned it wrecked everything, the way global warming wrecked things on Earth, only two magnitudes worse, as usual. Everything on Mars is two magnitudes more than it is on Earth – two magnitudes more or less.

Of course the relationship between the little red people and the introduced Terran organisms was already complex. To understand it fully you have to remember the little red people’s even smaller cousins, the old ones. These were the Archaea, that third order of life along with bacteria and eucarya – and in this case, also citizens of the panspermic cloud which four billion years before fell on Mars from space, having flown many light-years from their point of spontaneous generation around an early second-generation star. Mostly Thermoproteus and Methanospirillum, it seems, with a few Haloferax thrown in as well. They were hyperthermophiles, so the early Mars of the heavy bombardment suited them just fine. But then some few of these travellers were blasted off the surface of Mars by a meteor strike, and crash-landed later on Earth, fructifying the third planet and sparking the long wild course of Terran evolution. Thus all Earthly life is Martian, in this limited sense, though in truth it is also far more ancient than that.

Then later Paul Bunyan, the distant descendant of these panspermic Archaea, came back to Mars to find it cold and ostensibly empty, though some of the old ones still persisted, golluming around in various submartian volcanic percolations. Paul and his big blue ox Babe were bested by Big Man, as you know, and inserted by him through the planetary interior; crust, mantle and core. From there Paul’s inner bacterial family spread through all the regolith on the planet, and began the so-called cryptoendolithic great leap forward, that first submartian terraforming, which produced at the end of its evolution the little red people as we know them.

So the Martians had come home again, almost as small as the first time around – about two magnitudes bigger than the old ones left behind, that’s right. But the relationship between the little red people and the Archaea was clearly not a simple one. Second cousins thrice removed? Something like that.

Despite this blood tie, the little red people discovered early on in their civilization that their ancestors, the Archaea, could be grown and harvested for food, also for building material, cloth and the like. Inventing this form of agriculture, or husbandry, or industry, allowed for a tremendous population explosion, as the little red people had just taken a step up the food chain, by exploiting the level of life just below theirs. Fine for them, and because they have helped us so much in their subtle way, fine for the humans on Mars as well; but the Archaea considered it barbarous. The little red people interpreted their sullen bovine glares as subservience only, but all the while the Archaea were looking at them thinking, You cannibals, we are going to get you some day.

And so they hatched a plot. They could see that the terraforming was just more of the aerobic same old same old; that the little red people would adapt to it, and become part of the new larger system, and move up onto the surface and take their little red place in the growing biosphere; and meanwhile the old ones would remain trapped in pitch darkness, living off heat and water, and the chemical reactions between hydrogen and carbon dioxide. It isn’t fair, the Archaea said to each other. It won’t do. It was our planet to begin with. We should take it back.

But how? some said. There’s oxygen everywhere you go now, except down here. And they’re making it worse every day.

We’ll find a way, some of the others replied. We are Thermoproteus, we’ll think of something. We’ll infiltrate somehow. They’ve poisoned us; we’ll poison them back. Just bide your time and keep in touch. The anaerobic revolt will have its day.

FOUR THE WAY THE LAND SPOKE TO US
1. THE GREAT ESCARPMENT

You know that the origin of the big dichotomy between the northern lowlands and the southern cratered highlands is still a matter of dispute among areologists. It might be the result of the biggest impact of the early heavy bombardment, and the north therefore the biggest impact basin. Or it may be that tectonic forces were still roiling the early crust, and an early proto-continental craton, like Pangaea on Earth, had risen in the southern hemisphere and then hardened into place, as the smaller planet cooled faster than Earth, without any subsequent tectonic plate break-up and drift. You would think these would be interpretations so diverse that areology would quickly devise questions that would make one or the other explanation either certain or impossible, but so far this is not the case; both explanations have attracted advocates making fully elaborated cases backing their views, and so the matter has shaped itself into one of the primary debates in areology. I myself have no opinion.

The question has ramifications for many other issues in areology, but it’s worth remembering just what the big dichotomy means for people walking across the face of Mars. Hiking across Echus Chasma to its eastern cliffs gives one perhaps the most dramatic approach to the so-called Great Escarpment.

The floor of Echus Chasma is chaos at its most chaotic, and for someone on foot, this means endless divagations and extravagances to make one’s way forward. Nowadays one can follow the trail, and minimize the ups and down, end-runs, dead-ends, and backtracking necessary to make one’s way in any direction; and the Maze Trail is the very model of route-finding efficiency through such torn terrain; nevertheless, if one wanted to get a sense of what it was like in the early days, it is perhaps better to leave the trail, and strike out to forge a new and unrepeatable cross-country ramble through the waste.

If you do that, you will quickly find that your view of your surroundings is inadequate to plan a forward course very far. Often you can see across the land for only a kilometre or less. Big blocks of chunky eroded basalt and andesite are the entirety of the landscape; it’s as if one were crossing a talus whose particulates were two or three magnitudes larger than the talus one usually crushes underfoot. So that one threads through the terrain as an ant must make its way through talus. Small but unclimbable cliffs confront one everywhere one looks. The only way to make progress is to keep to ridgelines, skirting great hole after great hole, while hoping the ridgelines will connect to each other in ways that can be clambered over. It’s like negotiating a hedge maze by staying on the hedge tops.

Chaotic terrain: the name is quite accurate. Here the surface of the world once lost its support, when the aquifer below it drained rapidly away, downhill and over the horizon in a great outflow flood – in this case, down Echus Chasma, round the big bend of Kasei Vallis, down Kasei’s gorge canyon and out onto Chryse Planitia, some two thousand kilometres away. And when that happened the land came crashing down.

So you walk, or climb, or crawl, for day after day, across the tilted surfaces and broken edges of the great blocks of the fallen crust. You can see just what happened: the land dropped; it shattered; there was more of it than there was room for, and so it came to rest all atilt and acrackle. The violence of this ancient collapse has been scarcely masked by the three billion subsequent years of wind erosion and dustfall. It is an irony that such an unstable-looking landscape should actually be so ancient and unchanged.

Then at the peak of one long roofbeam of a ridge, you find yourself high enough that off to the east, a great distance away, just poking over the crackle, lie the tops of a mountain range, pale orange in the late afternoon light. If you camp on this prominence, in the alpenglow the distant range looks like the side of a different world, rolling slowly up into the sky.

But the next morning you descend back into the maze of potholes and passlets, ridgelines and occasional flat block plateaux, like low rooftops in Manhattan. Crossing these terrains commands all your attention, and so you almost forget the sight of the distant mountain range, the problems are so great (it was in this region we found a providential crack in a thirty-metre cliff, which allowed us to climb down safely, lowering our packs on ropes) until at the next prominence in your path through the chaos, it heaves back into view, closer now and seemingly taller, as one can see farther down its side. Not a mountain range, one now sees, but a cliff, extending north and south from horizon to horizon, etched in the usual spur-and-gully formation of cliffs everywhere, and somewhat saw-toothed at its top, but massively solid for all that – the etchings without any depth, like the brushing you see on certain metal surfaces.

And each day, when it stands over your horizon at all, it’s closer. It tends to stay over the horizon longer; but never all the time, as very often you drop into the depths of the next sink in this sunken land. But eventually, continuing roughly eastward, every time you are not actually in the depths of a pothole, the cliff positively looms over the world to the east, towering over the horizon, which stubbornly remains no more than five kilometres away. So at that point you have two horizons, in effect; one near and low, the other far and high.

And eventually you get so close to it that the cliff simply fills the eastern sky. It rises astonishingly near the zenith; it’s like running into the side of a bigger world. Like crawling over a dry cracked sea bed to the side of a continental shelf. The gullies and embayments in the cliff are whole landscapes in themselves now, canyon worlds of great depth and even greater steepness. Every spur between them is now seen to be a huge buttress, ribbing the side of a higher world. The occasional horizontal ledges marking the buttresses appear big enough to support complete island estates. But it’s hard to tell from below.

And indeed, by the time you reach the point called Cliff Bottom View, where you stand on one of the last high points of the chaos, nearly as high as the narrow strip of hilly plateau between the chaos and the escarpment, and you can finally see all the land between where you are and the foot of the great cliff, you can no longer see the cliff’s top. The mass of it blocks your view, and what you see rimming the sky, so far up toward the zenith, is not the true top, though it can seem so if you have not been paying attention, but is rather some prominence part way down its side.

Only by getting into a small blimp and taking off into the air, and flying up and away from the cliff, backing out over the eastern part of the chaos, can you see the whole extent of it. If you keep sight of a reference mark, you can see that what down in the last camp you took for the top of the cliff was only about two-thirds of the way up it; the rest was blocked from view; and in any case the very strong optical effect of foreshortening had deceived you as to the true height of the thing. You keep floating up into the air, up and up and up, like a bird gyring on an updraught, and finally seeing all the cliff at once from this perspective we just started to laugh, we couldn’t help it – we were laughing or crying, or both at once, our mouths were hanging open to our chests, we positively goggled at it, and there was nothing really we could say, it was so big.

2. FLATNESS

There are places out in Argyre that are nothing but flat sand to the horizon in every direction.

Usually the sand is blown into dunes. Any kind of dune, from very fine ripples underfoot to truly gargantuan barchan dunes. But in some areas even that is missing, and it is simply a flat plane of sand or bedrock, with the sky arching over it.

They say that if you look at it closely, the sky forms the visual equivalent of a dome overhead. Not a true hemisphere, but flattened somewhat. This is a virtually universal human perception, the result of consistent over-estimation of horizontal distance compared to vertical distance. On Earth the horizon seems to be two to four times farther off than the zenith overhead, and if you ask someone to divide the arc between the zenith and the horizon evenly, the point chosen averages well less than forty-five degrees; about twenty-two degrees by day, I have found, and thirty by night. Redness increases this effect. If you look at the sky through red glass it appears flatter; if through blue glass, taller.

On Mars the unobstructed horizon is only about half as far away as it is on Earth – about five kilometres – and sometimes this simply makes the zenith seem even lower – perhaps two kilometres high. It depends on the clarity of the air, which of course varies a great deal: sometimes I have seen the dome of the sky appear ten kilometres high, or even transparent to infinity. Mostly lower than that. In fact the vault of the sky is a different shape every day, if you will take the time to look at it carefully.

But no matter the transparency of the sky, or the shape of the dome it makes overhead: the sand is always the same. Flat; reddish brown; redder out toward the horizon. The characteristic redness occurs if even one per cent of the bedrock or the dust on the ground is made up of iron oxides such as magnetite. This condition obtains everywhere on Mars, except for the lava plains of Syrtis, which when blown free of dust are nearly black – one of my favourite places (also the first feature to be seen from Earth through a telescope, by Christiaan Huygens in 1654).

In any case: a perfect red plane in all directions, to the round horizon. Inside certain flat craters, you stand at the centre and see a double horizon, in fact: the lower one five kilometres away, and perfectly straight; the higher one farther away, and usually less straight, even serrated. (This second horizon also considerably flattens the dome of the sky.)

But the completely flat areas are the purest view. Much of Vastitas Borealis is so flat that only millions of years of existence as the floor of an ocean can explain it. And parts of Argyre Planitia are equally flat. We cannot lose these places. In these regions one stands confronted by a radically simplified landscape. It is a surreal experience to look around oneself – surreal in the literal sense of the word, in that one seems to stand in a place ‘over-real’, or ‘more than real’ – a higher state than reality; or reality revealed in its barest, most heraldic simplicity. The world says then, This is what the cosmos consists of: rock, sky, sun, life (that’s you). What a massive aesthetic impact is conveyed by this so-simplified landscape! It forces you to pay attention to it; it is so remarkable you keep looking at it, you cannot do or think anything else – as if living in a perpetual total eclipse, or within any other physical miracle. Which of course is always the case. Remember.

FIVE MAYA AND DESMOND
1. FINDING HIM

After she saw the strange face through the bottle in the farm of the Ares, Maya couldn’t stop thinking of it. It frightened her, but she was no coward. And that had been a stranger, not one of the hundred. There on her ship.

And then she told John about it, and he believed her. He believed in her; and so she was going to have to track that stranger down.

She began by calling up the plans for the ship and studying them as she had never studied them before. It surprised her to find how many spaces it contained, how large their total volume. She had known the areas the way one knows a hotel or a ship or a plane, or one’s home town for that matter – as a set of her life-routes, wound through the whole in an internal mental map, which itself could be called up sharply visible in her mind’s eye; but the rest was only vagueness, deduced, if she ever thought about it, from the parts she knew; but deduced wrongly, as she now found out.

Still, there was only so much liveable space in the thing. The axis cylinders were not liveable, by and large, and the eight toruses were, for the most part; but they were also very heavily travelled. Hiding would not be easy.

She had seen him in the farm. It seemed possible, even perhaps likely, that the man had allies in the farm crew, helping him to hide. A lone stowaway, unknown to anyone aboard, was difficult for her to believe in.

So she began in the farm.

Each torus was octagonal, made of eight American shuttle fuel canisters that had been boosted into orbit and then coupled together. More bundled canisters formed the long axis that speared down the centres of the torus octagons, and the octagons were connected to the central axis by narrow spokelike passage tubes. The entire spacecraft spun on the long axis as it moved forward toward Mars, spinning at a speed which created a centrifugal force the equivalent of Martian gravity, at least for people walking on the floors set against the outside of the torus rings. The Coriolis force meant that if you walked against the rotation of the ship you felt as if you were leaning forwards a little. The opposite effect, walking in the other direction, was somehow not so noticeable. You had to lean into reality to make progress.

The farm chamber filled torus F, the well-lit rows of vegetables and cereals lined out in a circular infinity. Above the ceilings and under the floors the supplies were kept. A lot of spaces to hide, in other words, when you got right down to searching for someone. Especially if you were trying to search in secret, which Maya most definitely was. She did it at night, after people were asleep. Here they were in space and yet people were still incredibly diurnal, regular as clockwork; indeed only clockwork kept them to it, but it was the clockwork of their own biology; and indicative of just how much of their animal natures they were carrying with them. But it gave Maya her opportunity.

She started in the chamber where she had seen the face, and made sure that no one ever saw her at work. So already she was a kind of ally of the man. She worked her way forward through the farm, row by row, storage compartment by storage compartment, tank by tank. No one there. She moved down the ship one torus to the storage tanks, and did the same. Days were passing, and Mars was the size of a coin ahead of them.

As her search progressed she realized how much all the chambers looked the same, no matter how they had been customized for use. They were living inside tanks of metal, and each tank resembled the others, much like the years of a life. Much like city life everywhere, she saw one day: room after room after room. Occasionally the great bubble chamber that was the sky. Human life, a matter of boxes. The escape from freedom.

She searched all the toruses and didn’t find him. She searched the axis tanks and didn’t find him.

He could have been in someone’s room, many of which were locked, as in any hotel. He could be in a place she hadn’t looked. He could be aware of her, and moving away from her as she searched.

She began again.

Time was running out. Mars was the size of an orange. A bruised and mottled orange. Soon they would arrive and go through aerobraking and orbit calming.

It was almost as if she were being watched. She had always felt observed somehow, as if she were living her life on an invisible stage, performing it for an invisible audience who followed her story with interest, and judged her. There had to be something that heard her endless train of thoughts, didn’t there?

But this was more physical than that. She went through the crowded days prepping for arrival, slipping off to make love with John, fencing with Frank to avoid doing the same with him, and all the while feeling there was an eye on her, somewhere. She had learned that no matter where she was, she was in a tank filled with objects, and had trained herself to see the things filling the tank against the Platonic form of the tank itself, looking for discrepancies like false walls or floors, and finding some. Jumping around occasionally. But never catching that eye.

One night she came out of John’s room and felt she was alone. Immediately she returned to the farm, and went from its ceiling up to the axis tanks. Above the ceiling, under the low curve of the inner tank wall, was a storage chamber with a back wall that was too close to be the true end of the tank. She had seen that while eating breakfast one morning, without thinking about anything at all. Now she pulled away a stack of boxes set against this false wall, and saw the whole wall was a door, with a handle.

It was locked.

She leaned back, thought about it. She rapped lightly on the door, three times.

‘Roko?’ said a hoarse voice from within.

Maya said nothing. Her heart was beating hard and fast. The handle turned and she snatched it and yanked the door open, pulling out a thin brown arm. She let go of the door and grabbed the arm harder than the door; instantly she was yanked back into the tiny closet, and seized by hands with a talon grip.

‘Stop it!’ she cried, and as the man was trying to flee under her arm, she crashed down onto him, hitting boxes and insulation padding hard, but staying latched to a wrist. She sat on him with all her force, as if pinning an enraged child. ‘Stop it! I know you’re here.’

He gave up trying to escape.

They both shifted to get more comfortable, and she lessened her grip on the man’s arm, but still held on, not trusting him not to bolt. A small wiry black man, thin face bent or asymmetrical somehow, big brown eyes as frightened as a deer’s. Thin wrist, but forearm muscles like rocks under the skin. He was quivering in her grip. Years later when she remembered this first meeting, what she remembered was his flesh trembling in her grip, trembling like a frightened fawn.

Fiercely she said, ‘What do you think I’m going to do? Do you think I’m going to tell everyone about you? Or send you home? Do you think I’m that kind of person?’

He shook his head, face averted, but glancing at her with a new surmise.

‘No,’ he said, in almost a whisper. ‘I know you’re not. But I been so afraid.’

‘Not necessary with me,’ she said. Impulsively she reached out with her free hand and touched the side of his head. He shivered like a horse. Body like a bantamweight wrestler. An animal, moving involuntarily at the touch of another animal. Starved for touch, perhaps. She moved back away from him, let go of his arm, sat with her back leaning against the padding on the wall, watching him. An odd face somehow, narrow and triangular, with that asymmetry. Like pictures in magazines of Rastafarians from Jamaica. From below wafted the smell of the farm. He had no smell as far as she could tell, or else just more of the farm.

‘So who’s helping you?’ she said. ‘Hiroko?’

His eyebrows shot up. After a moment’s hesitation: ‘Yeah. Of course. Hiroko Ai, God damn her. My boss.’

‘Your mistress.’

‘My owner.’

‘Your lover.’

Disconcerted, he looked down at his hands, bigger than his body seemed to need. ‘Me and half the farm team,’ he said with a bitter little smile. ‘All of us wrapped around her little finger. And me living in a crawl space, for Christ’s sake.’

‘To get to Mars.’

‘To get to Mars,’ he repeated bitterly. ‘To be with her, you mean. Crazy man that I am, damn fool idiot crazy man.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘Tobago. Trinidad Tobago, do you know it?’

‘Caribbean? I visited Barbados once.’

‘Like that, yeah.’

‘But now Mars.’

‘Some day.’

‘We’re almost there,’ she said. ‘I was afraid we would get there before I found you.’

‘Hmph,’ he said, looking up at her briefly, thinking this over. ‘Well. Now I not in such a hurry to get there.’ He looked up again, with a shy smile.

She laughed.

She asked him more questions, and he replied, and asked more of his own. He was funny – like John in that – only sharper-edged than John. A bitterness there; and interesting, she suddenly realized, just as someone new, someone she didn’t already know all too well. You got to watch out for Hiroko, he warned her at one point. ‘Hiroko, Phyllis, Arkady – they be trouble. Them and Frank, of course.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘It’s quite a crew you have,’ he replied slyly, observing her.

‘Yes.’ She rolled her eyes: what could one say?

He grinned. ‘You won’t tell them about me?’

‘No.’

‘Thanks.’ Now it was him holding her by the wrist. ‘I’ll help you, I swear. I’ll be your friend.’ Staring her right in the eye, for the first time.

‘And I’ll be yours,’ she said, feeling touched, then suddenly happy. ‘I’ll help you too.’

‘We’ll help each other. There’ll be the hundred and all their jostle, and then you and me, helping each other.’

She nodded, liking the idea. ‘Friends.’

She freed her arm, and with a brief squeeze of his shoulder got up to leave. He still trembled slightly under her hand.

‘Wait – what’s your name?’

‘Desmond.’

2. HELPING HIM

Thus in Underhill Maya always knew her stowaway Desmond was out there in the farm, getting by in circumstances almost as prisonlike as those he had suffered on the Ares. For days and months at a time she forgot this as she mangled her relationships with John and Frank, irritating Nadia and Michel, who were both nearly worthless to her, and irritating herself just as often or more – feeling incompetent and depressed, she didn’t know why – having difficulty adjusting to life on Mars, no doubt. It was miserable in a lot of ways, to be cooped up in the trailers and then the quadrangle, with only each other. It wasn’t that much different from the Ares, to tell the truth.

But every once in a while Maya would see a movement in the corner of her eye, and think of Desmond. His situation was worse than hers by far, and he never complained, did he? Not that she knew, anyway. She didn’t want to bother him to find out. If he came to her, fine; if not, he would be observing from his hideaway, would see what he saw. He would know what kind of trouble she was facing, and if he cared to speak to her, he would come to her.

And he did. Every once in a while she would retire to her cubicle in the quadrangle of barrel vaults, or then to the larger one out in the arcade that Nadia built, and there would come that scritch-tap-scritch which was their private signal, somehow, and she would open the door and there he was, small and black and buzzing with energy and talk, always in an undertone. They would share their news. Out in the greenhouse it was getting strange, he said; Hiroko’s polyandry was catching, and Elena and Rya were also enmeshed in multiple relationships, all of them becoming some kind of commune. Desmond obviously remained apart from them, even though these were his only associates. He liked to come by and tell Maya all about them; and so when she saw them in the ordinary course of life, looking innocuous, it brought a smile to her face. It taught her that she was not the only one having trouble managing her affairs; that everyone was becoming strange. Everyone but Desmond and her, or so it felt as they sat there in her cubicle, on the floor, talking over every one of their colleagues as if numbering rosary beads. And each time as their talk wound down she would find some reason to reach out and touch him, hold his shoulder, and he would clasp her arm in his vicelike grip, quivering with energy, as if his internal dynamo was spinning so fast he could barely hold himself together. And then he would be off. And the days after that would be easier. It was therapeutic, yes; it was what talks with Michel should have been but weren’t, Michel being both too familiar and too strange. Lost in his own problems. Or overwhelmed by everyone else’s. Once, out walking with him to the salt pyramids they were constructing, he said something about the growing oddity of the farm team, and Maya pricked up her ears, thinking, If only you knew. But then he went on: ‘Frank is thinking they may have to be investigated by some kind of formal, I don’t know, tribunal. Apparently material has gone missing, equipment, supplies, I don’t know. They can’t account for their hours properly to him, and people back in Houston are beginning to ask questions. Frank says some down there are even talking about sending up a ship to evacuate anyone who has been actively stealing things. I don’t think that would do anyone any good, things are tenuous enough as it is. But Frank, well, you know Frank. He doesn’t like it when there are things going on outside his control.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Maya muttered, pretending to worry only about Frank. And you could pretend anything with Michel, he was oblivious, more and more lost in his own world.

But afterwards it was Desmond she worried about. The farm team she didn’t care about at all, serve them right to be busted and sent home, Hiroko especially, but really all of them, they were so self-righteous and self-absorbed, a clique in a village too small to have cliques; but of course cliques only ever existed in contexts too small for them.

But if they did get rousted as they deserved, Desmond would be in trouble.

She did not know where he hid, or how to contact him. But from her conversations with Frank about Underhill affairs she judged that the problem of dealing with the farm team was going to develop slowly; so instead of searching for Desmond, as she had in the Ares, she merely walked around in the greenhouse late in the night, when she normally would not have, asking Iwao questions about things she would not usually show an interest in; and a few nights later she heard the scritch-tap-scritch at her door, and she rushed to let him in, realizing from his initial downcast glance that she was wearing only a shirt and underwear. But this had happened before, they were friends. She locked the door and sat down on the floor next to him, and told him what she had heard. ‘Are they really taking things?’

‘Oh yeah, sure.’

‘But why?’

‘Well, to have things that are their own. To be able to go out and explore different parts of Mars, and have things to keep their trips under the radar.’

‘Are they doing that?’

‘Yeah. I’ve been out myself. You know, they say it’s just a trip to Hebes Chasma, and then they get over the horizon and set off to the east, mostly. Into the chaos. It’s beautiful, Maya, really beautiful. I mean maybe it’s just because I been cooped up so long, but I love being out there, I love it. It’s what I came for, here at last. In my life. I have a hard time convincing myself to come back.’

Maya looked at him closely, thinking it over. ‘Maybe that’s what you all ought to do.’

‘What?’

‘Take off.’

‘Where would I go?’

‘Not just you – all of you. Hiroko’s whole group. Take off and start your own colony. Go off where Frank and the rest of the police couldn’t find you. Otherwise you may get busted and sent home.’ She told him what she had heard from Michel.

‘Hmm.’

‘Could you do it, do you think? Hide them all, like you’ve hidden yourself?’

‘Maybe. There’s some cave systems in the chaoses east of here, you wouldn’t believe what I’ve seen.’ He thought it over. ‘We’d need all the basics. And we’d have to disguise our thermal signal. Send it down into the permafrost, melt our water for us. Yeah, I suppose it could be worked out. Hiroko has been thinking about it already.’

‘You should tell her to hurry up then. Before she gets busted.’

‘Okay, I will. Thanks Maya.’

And the next time he dropped by in the middle of the night, it was to say goodbye. He hugged her and she held onto him, clutching. Then she pulled him onto her, and instantaneously, without any transition, they were getting their clothes off and making love. She rolled over onto him, shocked at how slight he was, and he flexed up to clasp her and they were off into that other world of sex, a wild pleasure. She did not have to play it safe with this man, who was the perfect outsider, an outlaw, her stowaway, and at this hard point in her life, one of her only real friends. Sex as an expression of friendship; it had happened to her before, a few times when she was young, but she had forgotten how much fun it could be, how friendly and pure, neither romantic nor anonymous.

Afterwards she observed, ‘It’s been a while.’

He rolled his eyes, leaned up to gnaw on her collarbone. ‘Years since a time like that,’ he said happily. ‘Since I was about fifteen, I think.’

She laughed and squished him under her. ‘Flatterer. I take it your Hiroko doesn’t give you enough attention.’

He made a disgusted noise. ‘We’ll see how it goes in the outback.’

That made her sad. ‘I’m going to miss you,’ she said. ‘Things won’t be the same around here with you gone.’

‘I’ll miss you too,’ he said intently, face nearly touching hers. I love you, Maya. You’ve been a friend to me, a good friend when I didn’t have any. When I really needed one. I’ll never forget that. I’ll come back and visit you whenever I can. I’m a very tenacious friend. You’ll find out it’s true.’

‘Good,’ she said, feeling better. Her stowaway came and went, it had always been that way; no different even if he left Underhill. Or so she could hope.

3. HELPING HER

So off the farm crew went, disappearing into the badlands of the back country. Good riddance, Maya thought, insular smug mystics that they were – a cult, disfiguring the first town on Mars. In public she feigned surprise and indignation along with all the rest, her response unnoticed.

But she really was surprised, and indignant, to find that Michel had disappeared with them. Desmond had never mentioned him to her in any way that would indicate that Michel had been part of the farm’s cult, and it seemed so unlike him that Maya could hardly believe it. But Michel was gone too. And with him gone, she had lost two of her best friends in the colony – even if Michel, always present, had been as unsatisfactory as Desmond in his occasional visits had been helpful; nevertheless she had felt close to Michel, as two maladjusted people in a community of the ordinary. As the melancholy client of the melancholy therapist. She missed him too, and was angry at him for leaving without a goodbye; she couldn’t help but contrast that to Desmond. And as time passed she felt stronger than ever the afterglow of making love with a man who liked her but did not ‘love’ her, i.e. want to possess her, in the way of Frank, or John.

So life went on, without friends. She broke up with Frank, then with John. Nadia despised her, which made Maya furious – to be dismissed by such a grub! and her sister at that. It was depressing. The whole damned situation was depressing; Tatiana killed by a fallen crane; everyone off in their own world.

And so no one welcomed the arrival of other colonists on Mars more than Maya. She was sick of the first hundred. Other settlements were established, and as soon as she could Maya left Underhill and struck out on her own, intending never to go back, any more than she would intentionally return to Russia. You can never go home, as the American saying had it. Which was true, though wrong as well.

She moved to Low Point, the deepest place on Mars, out near the middle of the Hellas Basin; which being the lowest would be the first place they would be able to breathe the new air generated by the terraforming effort. So they believed at the time, and believed themselves very forward-thinking for it! Fools that they were. And she fell in love with an engineer named Oleg, and they moved in together, in a set of rooms at the end of one of the long worm-tube modules. And years passed while she worked like a dog to build a city that would end up at the bottom of a sea.

And fell out of love to boot, even though Oleg was a good man, admirable in many ways, and he loved her like anything. It was her problem; but it was his heart that was going to get broken. So that for a long time she couldn’t do it, and that made her angry, and so she fought with him, until they were as miserable as two people could make each other.

And still he clung to her, even as over time she made him come to hate her. Hated her but loved her; in love, frightened, scared to death that she would leave him; and Maya more and more disgusted at his cowardice and reliance on her. That he could love such a monster as she had become filled her with contempt and pity, and she would walk the crowded tubes home, slowing with every step, dreading the horrible evening and night that lay before her every day.

Then one day, out in a rover on the great flat plains of western Hellas, a suited figure stepped from behind a boulder knot and waved her down. It was Desmond. He got in her rover lock, vacuumed the outside of his suit free of dust, took off his helmet, came into the main compartment. ‘Hi!’

She almost crushed him with her hug. ‘What’s up?’

‘I wanted to say hi, that’s all.’

They sat in her rover and talked through the afternoon, holding hands or at least touching each other always, watching the shadow of the boulder knot lengthen over the empty ochre expanse.

‘Are you this Coyote they talk about?’

‘Yes.’ His crack-jawed grin. It was good to see him!

‘I thought so, I was sure of it! So now you are a legend.’

‘No, I’m Desmond. But Coyote is a damn good legend, yes. Very helpful.’

The lost colony was doing fine. Michel was prospering. They lived in shelters in the Aureum Chaos, for the most part, and made excursions in rovers disguised to look like boulders, completely insulated so that they had no heat signal. ‘The land is falling down so fast with this hydration that a new boulder in a satellite photo is the most ordinary thing in the world. So I get around a lot now.’

‘And Hiroko?’

He shrugged. I don’t know.’ He stared out of the window for a long time. ‘She’s Hiroko, that’s all. Making herself pregnant all the time, having kids. She’s crazy. But, you know. I like being with her. We still get along. I still love her.’

‘And her?’

‘Oh she loves everything.’

They laughed.

‘What about you?’

‘Oh,’ Maya said, stomach falling. Then it was all pouring out, in a way she hadn’t been able to say to anyone else: Oleg, his pitiful clinging, his noble suffering, how much she hated it, how she somehow could not make herself leave.

Sunset stretched over the land and their silence.

‘That sounds bad,’ he said finally.

‘Yes. I don’t know what to do.’

‘Sounds to me like you do know what to do, but you aren’t doing it.’

‘Well,’ she said, reluctant to say it out loud.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s love that matters. You have to go for love, whatever it takes. Pity is useless. A very corrosive thing.’

‘False love.’

‘No not false, but a kind of replacement for love. Or when it is … I mean, love and pity together, that’s compassion, I suppose. Something like Hiroko, and we need that. But pity without love, or instead of love, is a damn sorry thing. I been there and I know.’

When darkness fell and the stars blazed in the black sky, he gave her a hug and a peck on the cheek, intending only to leave, but she grabbed him, and then they fell into it and made love so passionately, out there alone together in a rover, that she could hardly believe it; it was like waking up after many years of sleep. Just to be off in their solitude; she laughed, she cried, she whooped, she moaned loudly when she came. Rhythmic shouts of freedom.

‘Drop by whenever you like,’ she joked when he was finally off. They laughed and then he was off into the night, not looking back.

She drove slowly back to Low Point, feeling warm. She had been visited by the Coyote, her stowaway, her friend.

That night, and for many nights after that, she sat in her little living room with Oleg, knowing she was going to leave him. They ate their dinner, and then she sat on the floor, leaning back against the wall, as she always did, while they watched the news on Mangalavid, drinking from little cups of ouzo or cognac. Huge cloudy feelings stuffed her chest – this was her life after all, these habitual evenings with Oleg, week after week the same, for year after year; and soon to end forever. Their relationship had gone bad but he was not a bad man, and after all, they had had their good times together – almost five years now, a whole life, all set in its shared ways. Soon to be smashed and gone. And she felt full of grief, for Oleg and for her too – for simply the passing of time, and the crash and dispersal of one life after another. Why, Underhill itself was gone forever! It was hard to believe. And sitting there in the little world she had made with Oleg, and was soon to unmake, she felt the stab of time like she never had before. Even if she didn’t leave him, it would still go smash eventually – so that there was no evening ever when one should not feel this same melancholy, a kind of nostalgia for the present itself, slipping away like water down the drain.

For many years after she remembered so clearly that odd painful time, as one of those periods when she had in some way stepped out of herself and looked at her life from the outside. It was curious how terribly significant certain quiet moments could be, how she felt these charged moments, as in the eye of the storm, so much more than she did the events of the storm itself, when things happened so fast that she lived almost unconsciously.

So she and John got the treatment together, and renewed their partnership, better than ever. Then he was murdered, and the revolution came, and failed; and she flew through all of it as in a dream, in a nightmare in which one of the worst aspects was her inability in the rush of events to feel things properly. She did her best to join Frank and help stop the chaos from coming, and it came anyway. And Desmond appeared out of the smoke of battle and saved them from the fall of Cairo, and she was reunited with Michel and they made their desperate drive down Marineris, and Frank drowned, and they escaped to the ice refuge in the far south – all reeling by so fast that Maya scarcely comprehended it. Only afterwards, in the long twilight of Hiroko’s refuge, did it all fall on her – grief, rage, sorrow. Not only that all these disasters had happened, but that they too were now gone. Times she had been so alive she had not even known it! But gone, and there only in memory. She felt things only afterwards, when they could not do her any good.

Years of grieving passed in Zygote, like hibernation. Maya taught the kids and ignored Hiroko and the rest of the adults. Among them, Sax’s flat manner was the least irritating to her. So she lived in a circular bamboo top room and taught the young brood of ectogenes with Sax, and kept to herself.

But the Coyote dropped by from time to time, and so she at least had someone to talk to. When he showed up she smiled, and some parts of her that were shut off turned on, and they took walks along the little lakeshore opposite Hiroko’s grove, to the Rickover and back, crunching over the frosty dune grass. He told her stories from the rest of the underground, she told him about the kids, and the survivors of the First Hundred. It was their own private world. Mostly they did not sleep together, but once or twice they did – just following the flow of their feelings, their friendship, which mattered more than any physical coupling. Afterwards he took off without goodbyes to anyone else.

Once he shook his head: ‘You need more than this, Maya; the big world is still out there. All of it waiting for you before it can make its next move, I judge.’

‘It can wait a while longer then.’

Another time: ‘Why aren’t you hooked up with a man?’

‘Who?’

‘That’s for you to say.’

‘Indeed.’

He dropped the subject. He never intruded, that was part of the friendship.

Then Sax left for what Desmond called the demimonde, which made Maya restless, and unexpectedly sad. She had thought Sax enjoyed her company as the other main teacher of the kids. Though of course it was hard to tell with him. But to have his face surgically altered, in order to move out of Zygote to the north; it felt like a kind of rebuke. Not only to be such a small factor in his plans, but then to be staying behind herself, in their little refuge, when the world was still out there, changing every day. And then she missed him too, his flat affect and his peculiar thought, like that of a large brilliant toddler, or a member of some other primate species, cousin to theirs: Homo scientificus. She missed him. And it began to feel like it was time for her to thaw, end her hibernation, and start another life.

Desmond helped with that. He came by after an unusually long time away, and asked Maya to go back out with him. ‘There’s a man from Praxis here on planet I want to talk to. Nirgal thinks he’s the something or other, the messenger, but I don’t know.’

‘Sure,’ Maya said, pleased to be asked.

Half an hour’s packing and she was ready to leave forever. She went to Nadia and told her to tell the others she was off, and Nadia nodded and said ‘Good, good, you need to get out,’ always the critical sister.

‘Yes yes,’ Maya said sharply, and she was off to the garage when she saw Michel going out to the dunes, and called to him. He had left Underhill without saying goodbye and it had bothered her ever since, and she wouldn’t do the same to him. She walked out to the first ridge of dune sand.

‘I’m going with Coyote.’

‘Not you too! Will you come back?’

‘We’ll see.’

He regarded her face closely. ‘Well, good.’

‘You should get out too.’

‘Yes … perhaps now I will.’ He was serious, even grave, watching her so closely. Maybe it was Michel Desmond had been referring to, she thought. ‘Do you think it’s time?’ he asked.

‘Time for?’

‘For us? For us to be out there?’

‘Yes,’ she ventured.

Then she was off, skulking north with the Coyote, to the equator west of Tharsis, following canyon walls and threading boulder plains. It was great to see the land again, but she didn’t like the skulking. They ducked under the fallen elevator cable in a glaciated region midway up west Tharsis, and followed the cable downhill west for two days. They came on a giant moving building that was running over the cable, processing it for little cars running back up tracks to Sheffield, and Desmond said, ‘Look, he’s out in a field car, let’s follow.’ Maya watched as Coyote disabled the poor man’s door to the building while he was out on a drive, and then stood by Coyote cautiously, ready for anything, as Coyote approached the man pounding fearfully on the door, and made his farcical greeting:

‘Welcome to Mars!’

Indeed. One look at the man and Maya knew he knew just who they were, and had been sent out to contact them, and learn what he could and report back to his masters on Earth.

‘He’s a spy,’ she said to Desmond when they were alone.

‘He’s a messenger.’

‘You don’t know that!’

‘Okay, okay. But be careful with him. Don’t be rude.’

But then they heard that Sax had been captured. Caution was thrown to the winds – and did not come back, in Maya’s life, for many years.

Desmond turned into a different version of himself, ferociously focused on rescuing Sax; this was the kind of friend he was, and he loved Sax as much as any of them. Maya watched him with something like fear. Then Michel and Nirgal joined them on their way to Kasei, and without a glance at her Desmond assigned her to Michel’s car, in the western arm of their attack on the security compound. And she saw that she had been right; it was Michel whom Desmond had meant for her.

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