Red Planet Run (17 page)

I tried not to imagine what would have happened if it had been Kwan who had seen us come down instead of Johnny Ozone, and succeeded most of the time.

We had our backs to a wall, albeit a fractured one, and a clear view of the only direction anyone could come at us from, except from above, and the canyon was deep enough that, properly anchored, we were invisible from the surrounding plateau. It was a quiet harbor, out of wind and sand, but in my eyes now saw double duty as a position defensible in case of attack. We needed some time off, and I was going to see that we took it, crazed killers loose on the planet or no.

The twins were cleaning up after breakfast when I poked my head in the galley. “You about done? Good. Suit up.”

Paddy groaned, this time a sixteen-year-old groan I thrilled to hear. “Again?”

“But I wanted to prune the herbs today—” Sean began.

I interrupted him. “The herbs can wait until tomorrow. Come on, suit up. And don’t forget your pistols.”

Identical martyred sighs, but they suited up and followed me out of the lock. When I popped the exterior portside locker, they perked up. I grinned inside my helmet and parceled out wings for three all around. “Okay, kids. Let’s go flying.”

The airfoils and harnesses had survived the journey intact. We lubricated the moving parts with a moistureless graphite solution, and packed the pieces up the ramp and out of the canyon to a stubby cliff that rose out of the landscape like a squat, square bookshelf, a bookshelf fifty meters high. Three sides went straight up; the fourth sloped just enough to walk on and no more.

The airfoils were made of a plastic and graphite composite, the harness of graphabric, and the journey up might have been sweatier if Mars had not been so obliging in its low gravity. As it was we were all panting by the time we made the summit. The top of the Bookshelf was as level as I could have wished; I cleared an edge of loose gravel and a few larger rocks, stuck a telltale on a collapsible pole at one end, and we had a launch site and a landing strip.

I snapped my airfoils into the harness and donned both. Everything fit, no chafing of shoulder and body straps, the hand controls for the wing flaps fitting cleanly over goonsuit gloves, my helmet and shoulders locked securely into the extended wing. I tried the toe controls for the rudder one at a time; my boots snugged sweetly home, and the rudder shifted easily.

I shrugged free and assisted the twins. When I was sure the twins had Introduction to Martian Aviation 101 cold, I looked at the telltale. It stood straight out to one side, so I knew there was a steady breeze up on the plateau—I didn’t really care from which direction—and the sun was rising higher in the sky every moment, warming the Martian surface and generating thermals even as I thought. I looked at Paddy and Sean with a wide grin that materialized of its own free will. “Okay, I’m going to take a short test flight, check out the equipment and the conditions. You stay put.”

“No fair,” somebody muttered.

“Stay put,” I repeated, “and watch me.” I circumvented further discussion by the simple expedient of stepping to the edge and falling off. I fell straight forward, arms/wings straight out, hooking my boots into the toe controls almost by habit, as if I were back on Orville on Terranova, as if I’d never left. It was like riding a bike; once you’ve mastered the technique, you never forget how.

At seven millibars pressure there wasn’t much immediate lift, but at one-third my Terranovan weight there didn’t need to be. I didn’t fall for long, with pressure gathering beneath my wings even in that skinny Martian air. I grabbed for all I could get and banked right, swooping for a dark patch of ground I’d spotted earlier, and caught the first thermal of the day to spiral rapidly up and over the Bookshelf. The controls responded like they were my own nerve endings. I pulled rudder and came in low and clean, a meter over the top of the little butte, scattering twins before me.

“Whoopee!” somebody yelled over my headset. “Ride ’em cowgirl!”

These kids had never seen a bird in flight before and I got a little cocky, pulled up too sharply, and stalled. Nose down and around and around I went, leveling out well before impact but considerably chastened in spirit. Not chastened enough not to come in hot on final, though, and the expression on the twins’ faces, even through their visors, was worth it.

“Wow, Mom, that was incredible!”

Sean didn’t waste time with words, shrugging into his harness and stepping to the edge. I grinned over at him. “Ready? Okay, go!”

We spent the whole day falling off the Bookshelf. Atmosphere wasn’t vacuum, and a rudder wasn’t a vernier jet, but the twins had been on friendly terms with the basic principles of flight since first-grade science. They caught on fast, and before dark Paddy had taught herself to snap roll, reminding me so sharply of Elizabeth and all the hours spent in the air off the North Cap of Terranova that the memory was like an actual physical pain. This time I didn’t run and hide. Where was Elizabeth now? What was she doing? Was she happy? Was she lonely? Did she miss us? I had in the space of ten minutes trusted the Librarians to provide for her every need, halfway across the galaxy from the globe that gave her birth, so far away from everyone and everything that was familiar to her. Had they?

“Hey, Mom, watch this!” Sean stalled and recovered, all in one smooth movement, homesteaded a thermal, and began a smooth, circular climb. In an instant Paddy was on his tail, and I on hers.

The sun was setting by the time I called a halt, barely making it back inside the
Kayak
before the last light failed. We were all sore through the shoulders and our calf muscles ached from the stretch it took to operate the rudder, but we assembled huge sandwiches and ate two apiece, slept ten hours straight through, and were back in harness an hour after daybreak the following morning. I declared a school holiday and cut back our daily chores to the absolute, basic, must-do life-support minimum. For the next week, we flew.

It was the best week of my life.

We’d figured out our approximate location, the great canyon just south of the equator. On Terra, Valles Marineris would stretch from one side of the North American continent to the other, long enough for it to be day on one end and night on the other. You could tuck Everest inside one of its deeper channels and never miss it, and in some places it would take Crip a hundred hours to trundle a 15-kph solar scooter from one side to the other. It was the gaudiest tourist attraction in the Solar System this side of Saturn’s rings. We’d come down at or about midpoint, near Melas Chasma. It made for incredible air time.

There were canyon walls etched like crystal, entire mountains worn down by wind and sand to mere mesas, hundreds of pedestal rocks carved into weird and wonderful shapes. No two were the same; here an hourglass, there a judge’s gavel, the hammer of Thor, a stately, ridged column that but for its pigment would have looked more at home holding up the frieze on the Parthenon. One morning, impatient, we took to the air immediately after sunrise and I saw a rough red shape like the spindle off a spinning wheel, its base surrounded by a puff of mist that looked like clean, white, freshly carded wool.

“Have you ever seen anything like it?” Paddy said, her voice hushed.

“It’s like a temple,” Sean murmured.

“Have you, Mom?”

In our three-man crew I was the admitted planetary expert, but this… “Once, in the American Southwest. A place called Monument Valley. The Grand Canyon, of course. And there’s another canyon on Kauai…” I shook my head. “No, Paddy. I’ve never seen anything like this, anywhere, ever.”

· · ·

Sunday afternoon we packed the foils and harnesses away for the first time in a week. Dinner that evening was eaten to the accompaniment of much laughter and many swooping hand gestures describing impossible feats of derring-do aloft. Crip would have felt right at home. For the first time in a long while, so did I.

Over dessert (fresh strawberries from the barrel outside the sciences station) Sean said, “So we’re leaving in the morning?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s time. It’s been almost two months since we landed, and”—I gave the bulkhead an affectionate pat—“the
Kayak
’s shipshape.”

“You figure on heading us northeast right off?”

I stretched and grinned at Paddy. Like Sean and myself, she was sunburned and more relaxed than any of us had been in years. “I don’t know. There’s an awful lot of Valles Marineris we haven’t seen. Plus, I was wondering, how do you feel about mountain climbing?”

Sean sat up. “Olympus Mons?”

“Well, it’s just down the, er, street. Biggest mountain in the Solar System. Be a shame to get this close and not take a look.”

“A shame,” Sean echoed. “What about Cydonia?”

“The ruins at Cydonia have been there for five thousand centuries. I imagine they’ll still be there when we get around to them.”

Paddy said with undisguised glee, “Helen is going to be
furious
.”

“We’ll tell her we took the scenic route,” Sean suggested.

“It’s her own fault, anyway,” I said, as piously as Brother Moses on a Sunday morning. “She’s the one who sent us here in a balloon. It’s not our fault if we have to go where the wind blows.”

When the laughter died down, I judged the time ripe to ask a question I’d been dying to know the answer to for three months and the last million kilometers. “Guys? How
did
you turn Brother Moses green?”

They sobered, and their eyes met. They had stoutly denied all knowledge of the incident, but I wasn’t a mother for nothing. “Why do you think it was us?”

“A lucky guess,” I said dryly. “Might have something to do with the mystery datatech who reprogrammed the Outpost galley menus to require a daily half-kay of chocolate for all hands in November.”

“I don’t know what she’s talking about,” Paddy told Sean. “Do you know what she’s talking about?”

Sean, the most notorious chocoholic on two planets, three moons and 100,000 asteroids, spread his hands wide, innocent bewilderment writ large upon his countenance. “I haven’t a clue.”

“Or it might have been that study on physical fitness in zero gravity commissioned by and forwarded to Outpost from the Terranovan Institute of Physical Health last September.” When they said nothing, I added helpfully, “You remember. The one debunking the beneficial effects of prolonged exercise in a zero gravity environment. The one with the statistics that put your Auntie Charlie into orbit without benefit of spacecraft. Only it turned out there was no Terranovan Institute of Physical Health, so they couldn’t have commissioned a study, or compiled statistics, or forwarded them to Outpost.”

Paddy, whose favorite physical position was prone, clicked her tongue. “How dreadfully irresponsible of someone.”

“Simply dreadful,” Sean agreed sadly.

“So tell me about Brother Moses.”

They looked at each other, turning on the twin high-beams. Sean raised an eyebrow. Paddy gave a faint shrug and decided to talk. “It wasn’t our fault,” she said, with a piety to match my own.

“It sure wasn’t,” Sean agreed. “We meant to turn him blue.”

“Blue?”

“Well, we were running this experiment in the physics lab, and we rearranged a set of atoms into coal tar.”

“Coal tar?”

Paddy nodded. “Uh-huh. After we figured out what it was, we looked up what it does. And one of the things it does best is indigo dye.”

“Oh.”

“There were a lot of possibilities,” Sean said.

I held up a hasty hand. “Don’t tell me. It’s better I should not know. You made indigo dye from the coal tar.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you put it in 55Pandora’s plant food supply,” I said, and was gratified to see their jaws drop.

“How did you know?”

I faked an elaborate yawn. “You were studying hydroponics that month. I figure you made a chemical adjustment that made the plants think the fake indigo was chlorophyll. Second, the people on 55Pandora turned green from the inside out, so it had to be something they were ingesting. Third, you wanted to make a trip out to Mom and Pop’s, also known as the Apothecaries to the Asteroids. If you needed something refined down to a substance palatable for organic consumption, without losing its original dyeing capabilities, they would be the ones to see.”

Sean’s face darkened. “Yeah, and if you’d let us, Brother Moses would have been blue.”

“Instead of that tacky green,” Paddy said, equally accusing.

“And fourth and last, I saw you marching in the procession behind Brother Moses the day of his demonstration.” I looked at Paddy. “ ‘Honk if you love asteroids’?” I looked at Sean. “ ‘Clap if you believe in kobolds’?” I gave my head a slow, mournful shake. “And I thought Caleb’s limericks were bad.”

I stopped Paddy’s furtive giggle with my best stern, maternal look. “I would like to make one thing perfectly clear. There will be no turning of mothers, grandmothers, aunts, uncles, or cousins green or any other color. Is that clear?” I paused. “Well, maybe we could make an exception for aunts. But definitely not mothers.”

“Oh no, Mom,” Paddy said virtuously. “We wouldn’t think of such a thing.”

“Certainly not,” Sean agreed.

Yeah, right. “Good,” I said. “Glad to hear it. Go to bed, you monsters.”

· · ·

The next morning I turned on the He-maker and by the time the breakfast dishes were done the pressure gauge on the inner envelope had climbed 10 degrees. The sun rose, the air in the outer envelope expanded, and it was time to retract the drillers in the gear before the
Kayak
took off without them. The gondola, tethered to a small, collapsible anchor, began an almost imperceptible sway beneath our feet.

“Paddy, stand by the anchor.”

“Standing by the anchor, aye.”

“Sean, you’re on watch. Stand by the port in the sciences station.”

“Standing by sciences, aye.”

The
Kayak
strained at her slender leash as the nav board blinked green all the way across. “Okay, Paddy, release the anchor.”