Red Mars (77 page)

In the silence that ensued they could hear the tires, grinding over the gravel of the road.

“These rovers are really fast,” Sax remarked.

“Yes. And great shock absorbers. Made for just this kind of situation, I’m afraid. We’ll have to abandon them once we get down into Noctis; they’re much too visible.”

“You have invisible cars?” Frank asked.

“In a manner of speaking.”

After half an hour of bouncing in the lock they stopped briefly, and transferred into the rovers’ main rooms. And there in one was Michel Duval, white-haired, wrinkled— an old man, gazing at Maya and Nadia and Frank with tears in his eyes. He embraced them one by one, laughing an odd, choked laugh.

“You’re taking us to Hiroko?” Maya said.

“Yes, we will try. But it’s a long way, and conditions are not good. But I think we can do it. Oh, I am so glad we have found you! You don’t know how horrible it has been to look and look, and find only bodies.”

“We know,” Maya said. “We found Arkady, and Sasha was just killed today, and Alex and Edvard and Samantha, and I guess Yeli too, just now. . . .”

“Yes. Well. We will try to make sure there aren’t any more.”

The rover’s TV showed the interior of the following car, where Ann and Simon and Sax were greeted stiffly by a young stranger. Michel turned to look over his shoulder out the windshield, and hissed. They were at the head of one of the many box canyons leading down into Noctis, a rounded canyon end that dropped rapidly away. The road that descended this headwall had followed an artificial ramp that had been built to support it, but now the ramp was gone, blasted away, and the road with it.

“We will have to walk,” Michel said after a while. “We would have had to abandon these cars at the bottom anyway. It’s only about five kilometers. Are your suits fully supplied?”

They refilled their tanks from the rover, and put their helmets back on. Then it was back out through the locks.

When they were all out, they stood staring at each other: the six refugees, Michel and the younger driver. The eight of them set off on foot, in darkness, using headlamps only during the tricky climb down the broken-off section of the road ramp. Once back on the road, they turned their headlamps off and strode down the steeply sloping gravel path, falling naturally into the long lope that was the most comfortable pace in this angle of descent. The night was starless, and the wind whistled down-canyon around them, sometimes in gusts so strong that it felt like they were being shoved in the back. It felt like another dust storm was indeed beginning; Sax muttered about equatorial versus global, but it was impossible to tell what it would be. “Let’s hope it goes global,” Michel said. “We could use the cover.”

“I doubt it will,” Sax said.

“What’s our destination?” Nadia asked.

“Well, there is an emergency station in Aureum Chaos.”

So they had to thread the entire length of Valles Marineris—5,000 kilometers! “How will we do it!” Maya cried.

“We have canyon cars,” Michel said briefly. “You’ll see.”

The road was a steep one, and they kept up the fast pace, punishing their joints. Nadia’s right knee began to throb, and her ghost finger itched for the first time in years. She was thirsty, and cold in the old diamond pattern. It got so dusty and dark that they turned on their headlamps. Each bobbing cone of yellow light barely reached to the road surface, and glancing back up Nadia thought they looked like a string of deep-sea fish, their luminous spots glowing on a great ocean floor. Or like miners in some fluid smoky tunnel. Some part of her began to enjoy the situation— it was a tiny stirring, a sensation mostly physical, but still, the first positive feeling she could remember since finding Arkady. Pleasure like the ghost itching of her lost finger, faint and slightly irritating.

It was still the middle of the night when they came to the bottom of the canyon, a broad U, very common to all the Noctis Labyrinthus canyons. Michel approached a boulder, pushed its side with a finger, then lifted a hatch in the boulder’s side. “Get in,” he said.

There were two of these boulder cars, it turned out; big rovers, shelled by a thin layer of actual basalt. “What about their thermal signals?” Sax asked as he ducked into one.

“We direct all the heat into coils, and bury the coils. So there’s no signal to speak of.”

“Good idea.”

The young driver helped them into the new cars. “Let’s get out of here,” he said brusquely, almost shoving them through the outer lock doors. Light from the lock illuminated his face, framed by his helmet: Asian, perhaps twenty-five, he aided the refugees without meeting their eye, appearing disgruntled, disgusted, perhaps frightened. He said to them scornfully, “Next time you have a revolution you’d better try some other way.

The car and the elevator dwindled eastward and quickly disappeared. The cloud of spacesuits began to disperse. Many of them stabilized with their feet toward Mars, which lay below them like a dirty basketball. When steady, they ignited their main rockets and lofted upward. The group doing the calculations was still on the common band, talking it over as if it were a chess problem. They were near the areosynchronous orbit, but with a downward velocity of several hundred kilometers an hour; burning half their main packs’ fuel would counteract most of that, and then they would be in an orbit much more stable than would be strictly necessary, given their air supplies. In other words they would die later of asphyxiation rather than sooner of reentry heat. But then that had been the whole point of bailing out in the first place. It was possible rescuers might appear in the grace period, one never knew. Clearly most people were willing to give it a try.

The young man pulled his rocket-control rods out of his wrist consoles and put his fingers and thumbs on the buttons and got the world between his boots, and shot away from it for a while. Some of the others were trying to stay together, but he judged it impossible and a waste of fuel, and let them drift off above him until they were just more stars. He wasn’t as frightened as he had been in the locker, but he was angry and sad: he didn’t want to die. A spasm of grief for his lost future shook through him and he cried aloud, and wept. After a while the physical manifestations went away, even though he felt just as miserable as before. He stared dully at the stars. Occasional gusts of fright or despair shuddered through him, but they became less frequent as the minutes dragged on and then the hours. He tried to slow his metabolism but the effort had the opposite effect to that intended, and he decided to forget about it, although first he did call up his pulse rate on his wrist console: 108 beats a minute. Lucky he hadn’t checked when they were suiting up and bailing out. He grimaced and tried identifying constellations. Time dragged by.

He woke up, and when he realized he had fallen asleep he was both appalled and amused, and promptly fell back asleep. Then after a time he was awake again, this time for good. The other refugees from the car were out of sight, though some stars seemed to move against the backdrop, and could have been them. No sign of the elevator, in space or down on the planet’s surface.

It was an odd way to go. Something like the night before a date with the firing squad, perhaps, spent in a dream of space. Death would be like space, except without the stars or the thinking. It was a tedious wait in some ways; it made him impatient, and he considered turning off his heating system and having done with it. Knowing he could do that made the wait easier, and he figured he would do it when the air supply was about to run out. The thought put his pulse up to 130, and he tried to concentrate on the planet below. Home sweet home. He was still in almost areosynchronous orbit, it had been hours and Tharsis was still below, though a bit farther west. He was over Marineris.

Hours passed and without intending to, he fell asleep again. When he woke there was a small silver spacecraft hanging before him like a UFO and he shouted with surprise, and started tumbling helplessly. He worked the rockets feverishly to bring himself under control, and when he managed it the craft was still there. There was a woman’s face in a side-window port, talking to him and pointing to her ear. He turned on the common band but she wasn’t on it; he couldn’t find her. He rocketed over toward the craft and scared the woman by nearly crashing into it. He managed to arrest and draw back a bit. The woman was gesturing; did he want in? He made a clumsy circle with gloved forefinger and thumb, nodding so vigorously that he started tumbling again. As he spun he saw a bay door open behind the window, on top of the craft. He got the suit stabilized and puffed toward the bay, wondering if it would be real when he got to it. He touched the open doorway and tears sprang to his eyes; he blinked and the teardrop spheres floated into his faceplate as he flattened against the bottom of the bay. He had an hour of air left.

When the bay was closed and pumped he unsealed his helmet and lifted it off. The air was thin and oxygen-rich, and cool. The bay lock door opened and he pushed through.

Women were laughing. There were two of them aboard, and they were in high spirits. “What were you going to do, land in that?” one asked.

“I was on the elevator,” he said, voice cracking. “We had to jump off. Have you picked up anyone else?”

“You’re the only one we’ve seen. Want a ride down?”

He could only gulp. They laughed at him.

“We’re amazed to run into anyone out here, boy! How many gs are you comfortable with?”

“I don’t know— three?”

They laughed again.

“Why, how many can you take?”

“A lot more than that,” said the woman who had looked out at him.

“A lot more,” he scoffed. “How many more can a person take?”

“We’ll find out,” the other woman said, and laughed. The little craft began to accelerate down toward Mars. The youth lay exhausted in a g chair behind the two women, asking questions and sucking down water and cheddar cheese from a tube. They had been on one of the mirror complexes and had hijacked this emergency descender after sending the mirrors tumbling in a tangle of molecule-thin sheets. They were complicating their descent by shifting into a polar orbit; they were going to land near the south polar cap.

Peter absorbed this in silence. Then they were bouncing wildly and the windows went white, then yellow, then a deep angry orange. Gravity forces jammed him back in his chair, his vision blurred and his neck hurt. “What a lightweight,” one of the women said, and he didn’t know if she meant him or the descender.

Then the g forces let off and the window cleared. He looked out and saw that they were dropping toward the planet in a steep dive, and were only a few thousand meters above the surface. He couldn’t believe it. The women kept the craft in its radical stoop until it seemed they were going to spear the sand, and then at the last minute they flattened out and again he was shoved back into his chair. “Sweet,” one of the women commented, and then boom, they were down and running over the layered terrain.

Gravity again. Peter clambered out of the descender after the two women, down a walktube and into a big rover, feeling stunned and ready to cry. There were two men in the rover, shouting greetings and hugging the women. “Who’s this?” they cried. “Oh, we picked him up up there, he jumped off the elevator. He’s still a bit spaced. Hey,” she said to him with a smile, “we’re down, it’s okay.”

Ann Clayborne sat in the back of Michel’s rover, sprawled across three seats, feeling the wheels rise and fall over the rocks. Her mistake had been in coming to Mars in the first place, and then falling in love with it. Falling in love with a place everyone else wanted to destroy.

Outside the rover, the planet was being changed forever. Inside, the main room was lit by floor-level windows, which gave a snake’s-eye view out under the skirt of the rover’s stone roof. Rough gravel road, scattered rockfall in the way. They were on the Noctis Highway, but a lot of rock had fallen on it. Michel wasn’t bothering to drive around the smaller samples; they rolled along at about sixty kph, and when they hit a big one they all jounced in their seats. “Sorry,” Michel said. “We have to get out of the Chandelier as soon as possible.”

“The Chandelier?”

“Noctis Labyrinthus.”

The original name, Ann knew, given to it by the Terran geologists staring at Mariner photos. But she didn’t speak. The will to speech had left her.

Michel talked on, his voice low and conversational, reassuring. “There’s several places where if the road were cut it would be impossible to get the cars down. Transverse scarps that run from wall to wall, giant boulder fields, that kind of thing. Once we get into Marineris we’ll be okay, there’s all kinds of cross-country routes there.”