The Sunborn (3 page)

The tree toppled, too.

In the low gravity the plunge seemed to take long moments. All the way down he fought to get air under his remaining wing. The right wing flapped and rattled and kept him off-kilter. His efforts brought his head down, and when he hit in the rocks near the pool, the skull struck first.

The smack was horrible. She cried out in the silence.

Andy had not uttered a sound on the way down.

T
HE TRADITIONAL DUNE BUGGY
with the shrouded body crawled slowly up the small hill. Footprints had made the entire area smooth, and the cortege followed a well-worn path. The stone cairn, which they’d erected twenty years ago when the first mission landed, had had many visitors. Also by tradition, the burial would be late in the day. Boot Hill looked out over the red and pink and brown wilderness of Mars. With the domes of the colony in the distance the mourners were reminded of the strangeness of their new world and surrounded with the beauty of a Mars sunset. It was a fitting send-off to a fellow explorer and served somehow to lessen their grief.

Julia well remembered that small party of five who’d established the graveyard with the mounds for Lee Chen and Gerda Braun. Today there were twelve mounds and ten times as many mourners. Every time they did this the line was longer.

We lost Alexev in a fall, Sheila Cabbot in an electrical failure. And, of course, two aerobraking tragedies. Andy is the thirteenth.

Over the years they’d added far more graves than Julia had ever wanted to see, and had to expand the original boundary circle of rocks several times.
None lost to disease yet. All accidents.
She reached the top of the hill and scanned back along the line of suited figures trudging up the rise. The newcomers were easy to pick out, stumbling slightly in an uncertain rhythm. The efficient “Mars gait” took a bit of time to master. Also, the harsh reality of Mars was likely hitting them full force for the first time. The younger ones tended to babble in times of stress. The chatter in the suit mikes was unsettling; she switched hers off.

Someone Julia didn’t immediately recognize was scanning a small vid around the scene. Most everything they did was recorded; she should have been used to it by now. But she still chafed under the watchful lens eyes. It seemed like an intrusion here, just to make a fleeting news item Earthside. But then, Andy had loved the spotlight. He wouldn’t mind.

She looked carefully at the figure holding the vid. Still no recognition.

We’ve
really
grown; I
used to know everyone instantly, just by gait and size. Usually without looking at their suit markings. Hope this guy is new, and not someone I’ve forgotten.

Viktor jogged her arm, and she turned back to the ceremony.

She leaned over and touched her helmet to his. “Who’s the guy with the vid? Is he new?”

“Didier Rabette. From machine shop. Here two years already.”

One of the geologists was a lay preacher, and she’d volunteered to officiate. That, too, was new; they were really beginning to specialize.
Progress.

The ceremony was brief but effective. Julia thought suddenly about navy sea burials. Regrets, but the mission must continue.

She let the bulk of the crowd leave, stung anew by the suddenness of death. She never got used to it: how someone you’d just talked to, or someone who had always been there, was now gone. She still held internal conversations with her parents, although both were gone. Her father had slowly declined from one of the newly emerging killer viral diseases, the zoonosis class that migrated from animals to humans, fresh out of the African cauldron. It was really no surprise when he died. But her mother’s death had been sudden: a brief respiratory illness, one of the “new” flus that roamed the crowded Earth, and she was gone in less than a week. From “doing fine” to “done for” in just over twenty-four hours, actually.

Julia realized that even if she’d not been 50 million miles away, she likely would not have rushed to her mother’s bedside, because the course of the disease had been so ambiguous, the decline so sudden. At least, she thought ruefully, it helped assuage her guilt a little. But now Andy—plucked from them in a heartbeat. As a biologist she understood intellectually that evolution requires death; if all the original forms were still around, there would be no room for the new ones. But emotionally it was very hard to understand.

Afterward, on the way down, she was surprised by how large the colony looked. In the gathering dark, lights twinkled in the distance, stirred by the dusty breeze. “Mars City” was beginning to take shape.

“W
E MUST MEET WITH
the new ones,” Viktor said crisply the next morning over breakfast in the compact cafeteria. “First thing today.”

They were sitting at their usual table, and nobody in the crew sat with them, by tradition. They were the founders, after all. Julia sometimes waved some of them over, but usually she and Viktor wanted privacy. It reminded them of the early years, when the two of them had had Mars to themselves. No one within 50 million miles. They’d staved off the lurking fears of abandonment and ever-present danger by creating their own private reality. By focusing closely they became the whole world to each other.

As they had come into the cafeteria, the audio switched to some gospel music, an unusual choice for her, but it fitted her current mood. “Trouble of This World” by Bill Landford rang gracefully amid the clatter of breakfast.

In the two days since Andy’s death a numb, gray pall had descended. Julia and Viktor had taken full responsibility, and meant it. The Consortium Board, meeting in emergency session, had rejected that explanation. Andy had flown inside the dome over a hundred times. Hang-glider enthusiasts around the world had endlessly rerun the pictures of Andy’s tight glide, and they emerged with a consensus: he had cut the margin too fine. Andy had never flown that tight a circle around the eucalyptus before. He had simply misjudged.

The vast Martian subscription audience felt the same. There had been the usual abrasive commentary, asking whether Julia and Viktor had simply lost their judgment from the long years of running the Gusev Mars Outpost, but that was so expected that nobody paid attention.

Not that any of it helped Julia and Viktor. They did feel responsible, and no media mavens could change that. “Trouble of This World” mournfully underlined their mood. Julia sipped coffee and let her doubts well up within. It was better to let the feelings wash over her and live in them fully, knowing they would pass.

They had found long before that music knitted together the small community here, made it seem less isolated from humanity. The occasional disputes over what to play—the opera buffs thought Wagner for breakfast was fine—were worth it. Today it certainly helped to hear a chorus singing quiet spirituals over the breakfast clatter.

She said nothing and gazed out the big window. Their table commanded its view, taking in the big new dome to the left, and beyond it the dozens of lesser domes, habs, Quonset huts and labs and depots. All with sandbags atop to shield against the solar wind and cosmic rays that sleeted down here eternally. Tracks crosshatched the whole area, and color-coded, suited figures moved everywhere in pressure suits.

Ugly, she had to admit. Immediately she looked beyond the bustling colony. There lay beauty. The roll of dark hills across the crater floor blended into the bright talus slopes that swept up into the craggy crater walls. A kilometer up, the rocky edges of the crater blended into a pink-brown sky that quickly faded into black. She never quite got used to that sky—blacker than ebony and holding a sun hard and bright against the dim backdrop of stars.

Raw Mars, still out there.

She got homesick, of course, often triggered by the similar desert landscapes here. On summers in her girlhood her family had returned to a small town of one thousand in The Mallee region of north Victoria. There were unending games with the kids of the town, flitting among the blue gum trees along the shaded billabongs. The dry heat had seemed to swarm up into her nostrils like a friend, welcoming her back into carefree summer.

There was cracker night, with fireworks shooting off in backyards and the town square. The dads drank XXXX beer and lit fuses with glee. Dogs hid whimpering under beds, and crowds
ooh
ed at bursting stars. The best part was the scary moments when something went wrong. Once her father somehow set fire to an old dunny in the yard, and the heavy stench of old dung came rising out of the pit when they hosed it down.

Her grandest adventure, carried out against the fearsome warnings of the boys, had been the Great Ascent of the grain silo. She’d waited until nobody was about in the late afternoon, and the door stood ajar at the base of the empty, echoing 120-foot concrete tower. There was only pale wheat dust inside, awaiting the harvest, but as she went up the narrow ladder with no rail, the dust made the rungs slippery.

When she reached the first landing, her right foot slipped on the slick dust and she fell to one knee, snatching at the step and barely holding on. That deserved a pause, but the light was fading inside, so she started up the next ladder, and without pause the next. The great cylinder above seemed infinite, and the six ladders took her at last to a narrow platform that capped the roof. She peered out across the chessboard fields and to the east sighted the next silo, gleaming crimson in the sunset. To the west was the next silo, and she imagined them marching all the way to the vast Nullarbor, the null-arbor land of no trees that stretched a full thousand miles.

Then she looked down. Her younger brother, Bill, waved up at her. He must have followed when she sneaked away. He was right below, staring up. He made his ghoul face, eyes wild. She spat a big gob—her mouth was dusty—and watched it dwindle away, skating on the breeze. He danced away, laughing. She was amazed, in her last long glance about, at how her feeling for the land changed just by getting above it. For the first time she sensed herself as a tiny creature on a great turning sphere beneath a forgiving star.

Back inside, on the way down, she slipped again and hung on with one hand. Somehow, though her heart thumped, she did not feel fear. When she got home, her brother told on her and they both got a spanking, her for the climbing and he for telling. But worth it, oh yes…

Back to business.
“Sorry, you were saying…”

“We must meet with new people,” Viktor said.

She sighed. “I suppose so.”

He grasped her hand and squeezed. “Andy would not want the work to stop.”

“Um. Earthside wanted—”

“Forget Earth.”

“I’ve got a desk of work to do—”

“Will wait.”

She recalled the schedule. Always the schedule. “Look, we’ve only got a day left before—”

“I know, excursion.” His face split with the familiar warm grin. “We’ve got descent scheduled at that new vent, site C4.”

“And it’s taken us a month to arrange it.”

“To overcome Consortium rules, you mean.”

“It’s like they don’t want us—you and me—to ever go out again.” She slurped up some coffee without taking her eyes from the view. His magic was working. She was getting back into life.

He shrugged, and his slight smile crinkled at the edges, joining the spidery lines that now laced down from his eyes. “We are too famous to lose.”

“So we have to sit inside
forever?
”

Viktor’s slightly lifted eyebrows reminded her that he knew well the edge in her voice. She could see him carefully look into her eyes and use the old tricks. “We not let them do this.”

“They can’t ship us back.” After decades at 0.38 g, returning to Earth would be agony. Or maybe worse. Nobody knew the long-term effects of returning, whether the stress to the body could ever be compensated.

Viktor nodded. “Is advantage, in a way. We can’t go home, so we sit here.”

She snorted. “Museum exhibits.”

“Axelrod sent message, said to talk to the new ones right away. Especially this”—he consulted a scribbled note—“Praknor person.”

“Come on, he can’t set schedules from the moon; we got away from that years ago.”

“Said was important,” Viktor went on stolidly, his hedgehog maneuver she knew so well.

“We had the usual welcoming ceremony, made them Martians, the water ritual, the reception—”

“I think is mostly political”—for Viktor this was the ultimate criticism—“and we must.”

“Let them look around while we’re gone. It’ll save time if they have a feel for—”

“Must.”

“Um.”

“Must.” Viktor was right, of course. She remembered the videographer she hadn’t recognized at the funeral; was she out of touch?

So right after breakfast they met with one Sandra Praknor—efficient, neat, intent, with a hawklike look to her. She was a science manager, her dossier said, a field that had risen to prominence recently. Research had gotten so complex back Earthside that a whole layer had grown to mediate between the actual researchers and the resources they needed—computational, simulations, data analysis, and most of all the artificial design intelligences.

Science manager? She was already overseeing the colony’s extensive research program. It made sense for that job to be on-site rather than at the Consortium. Paperwork was boring, even though it was all digital and Earthside-AI-assisted, but overall, the job was enjoyable; it let her vicariously experience all the studies going on, folded in with the huge Earthside effort. Even if they didn’t get to go on all the expeditions themselves, she thought ruefully. Viktor was right: there was increasing resistance Earthside and on the moon to their engaging in “risky” behavior.

She had sardonically observed, reading the dossier, “Praknor has a ‘cross-science degree’—what’s that?”

In person it was even harder to tell what areas Praknor knew. The Consortium had hired her away from a major lab, and she had a crisp, executive style. She opened with remarks about Andy, condolences, and hopes that the death did not compromise the future of exploration.