Читать книгу The Martians - Kim Stanley Robinson - Страница 6

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.