She continued outward, stepping on opaque ice. On the surface of the bay. Like a world covered in semen. Once the ice cracked under her boot.
When she was well out on the bay she stopped and had a look around. Tight horizons indeed; she climbed a flat-topped berg, which gave her a larger view over the expanse of ice, out to the circle of the crater rim, just under the running clouds. Though cracked and jumbled and lined by pressure ridges, the ice nevertheless clearly conveyed the flatness of the water beneath it. To the north the gap to the sea was obvious. Tabular bergs stuck out from the ice like deformed castles. A white waste.
After struggling to come to grips with the scene, and failing, she clambered off the berg and hiked back to the shore, then back toward her car. As she was crossing the little ridge cape, movement down at the edge of the ice caught her eye.
A white thing moved — a person in a white walker, on all fours — no. A bear. A polar bear. Walking along the edge of the ice.
It spotted the dust devil of skuas over the dead seal. Ann crouched behind a boulder, went prone on a patch of frosty sand. Cold all along the front of her body. She looked over the boulder.
The bear’s ivory fur yellowed on its flanks and legs. It raised a heavy head, sniffed like a dog, looked around curiously. It shambled to the corpse of the seal, ignoring the column of squealing birds. It ate from the seal like a dog from a bowl. It raised its head, muzzle dark red. Ann’s heart pounded. The bear sat on its haunches and licked a paw, rubbed its face until it was clean, catlike in its fastidiousness. Then without warning it dropped to all fours and started up the slope of rock and sand, toward Ann’s hiding place behind the boulder. It trotted, moving both the legs on one side of its body in the same motion, left, right, left.
Ann rolled down the other side of the little cape and got up and ran up the trough of a shallow fracture, leading her southwest. Her rover was almost directly west of her, she reckoned, but the bear was coming from the northwest. She clambered up the short steep side of the southwest-trending canyon, ran over a strip of high ground to another little fracture canyon, trending a bit more to the west than the previous one. Up again, onto the next strip of high ground between these shallow fossae. She looked back. Already she was panting, and her rover was still at least two kilometers away, to the west and a little south. It was still out of sight, behind ragged hillocks. The bear was north and east of her; if it made directly for the rover it would be almost as close to it now as she was. Did it hunt by sight or by smell? Could it plot the course of its prey, and move to cut it off?
No doubt it could. She was sweating inside her windsuit. She hustled down into the next canyon and ran in it for a while, west southwest. Then she saw an easy ramp and ran up to the next intercanyon strip, a kind of wide high road between the shallow canyons on both sides. Looking back she found herself staring at the polar bear. It stood on all fours, behind and two canyons over, looking like a very big dog, or a cross between a dog and a person, draped in straw-white fur. It amazed her to see such a creature out there, the food chain couldn’t possibly support such a large predator, could it? They must surely be feeding it at feed stations. Hopefully so, or else it would be very hungry. Now it dropped into the canyon two over, out of sight, and Ann started to run down the strip toward her rover. Despite her running around, and the tight rugged horizon, she was confident of her sense of the car’s location.
She kept to a pace she thought she could sustain for the whole distance. It was hard not to let loose and sprint at full speed, but no, no, that would lead to a collapse eventually. Pace yourself, she thought, gasping in short pants. Get down off the high ground into a graben so you’re out of sight. Keep oriented, are you passing south of the rover? Back up to the higher ground, for just a moment to look. There behind that low flat-topped hill, which was a small crater, with a hump on the south end of the rim — she was certain — though the rover was still out of sight, and the jumbled land was easy to get confused in. A thousand times she had gotten briefly semilost, unsure of her exact location in relation to some fixed point, usually her parked rover — not a big deal usually, as her wrist’s APS could always lead her back. As it could now too, but she was sure it was over there behind that bump of a crater.
The cold air burned in her lungs. She recalled the emergency face mask in her backpack, and stopped and yanked off the backpack and dug, pulled off the CO2 mask and put on the air mask; it contained a short supply of compressed oxygen in its frame, and with it pulled over her mouth and nose and turned on, she was suddenly stronger, faster, could hold a better pace. She ran along a strip of high ground between canyons, hoping to get a sighting of the rover round the slope of the crater apron. Ah, there it was! Panting triumphantly she sucked down the cool oxygen; it tasted lovely, but was not enough to stop her gasping. If she went down into the trough to her right it looked like it would run straight to the rover.
She glanced back and saw the polar bear running too, legs now in a shambling kind of gallop — lumbering — but it ate up the ground with that run, and the shallow canyon walls seemed no impediment to it, it flowed over them like a white nightmare, a thing beautiful and terrifying, the liquid flow of its muscles loose under thick yellow-tipped white fur. All this she saw in a single moment of the utmost clarity, everything in her field of vision distinct and acute and luminous, as if lit from within. Even running as hard as she could, focusing on the ground to make sure she didn’t trip over anything, she still saw the bear flowing over the red slope, like an afterimage. Pounding, running hard, boulder ballet; the bear was fast and the terrain nothing to it, but she too was an animal, she too had spent years in the back country of Mars, many more years in fact than this young bear, and she could run like an ibex over the terrain, from bedrock to boulder to sand to rubble, pushing hard but perfectly balanced, in control of the dash and running for her life. And besides the rover was near. Just up one last canyon side, and the slope of the apron, and there it was, she almost ran into it, stopped, reared up and pounded the curved metal side with a hard triumphant wham, as if it were the bear’s snout, and then with a second more controlled punch to the lock door console she was inside, inside, and the outer-lock door closed behind her.
She hurried upstairs to the driver’s aerie to look back. Through the glass she saw the polar bear below, inspecting her vehicle from a respectful distance. Out of dart-gun range, sniffing thoughtfully. Ann was sweating hard, still gasping hard for air, in and out, in and out — what violent paroxysms the rib cage could go through! And there she was, sitting safe in the driver’s seat! She only had to close her eyes and she saw again that heraldic image of the bear flowing over the rock; but open them and there the dashboard gleamed, bright and artificial and familiar. Ah so strange!
She was still in a kind of shock a couple of days later, able to see the polar bear if she closed her eyes and thought about it; distracted. By night the ice in the bay boomed and groaned, sometimes cracked explosively, so that she dreamed of the assault on Sheffield, groaning herself. By day she drove so carelessly that she had to put the rover on automatic pilot, instructing it to make its way along the shore of the crater bay.
While it rolled she wandered around the driver’s compartment, her mind racing. Out of control. Nothing to be done but laugh and endure it. Strike the walls, stare out the windows. The bear was gone but it wasn’t. She looked it up: Ursus maritimus, ocean bear; the Inuit called it Tomassuk, “the one who gives power.” It was like the landslide that had almost caught her in Melas Chasma, now a part of her life forever. Facing the landslide she had not moved a muscle; this time she had run like hell. Mars could kill her, no doubt it would kill her, but no big zoo creature from Earth was going to kill her, not if she could help it. Not that she was so enamored of life, far from it; but one should be free to choose one’s death. As she had chosen in the past, twice at least. But Simon and then Sax — like little brown bears — had snatched her death away from her. She still didn’t know what to make of that, how to feel about it. Her mind was racing so fast. She held on to the back of the driver’s seat. Finally she reached forward and punched Sax’s old First Hundred number on the rover’s screen keyboard, XY23, and waited for the AI to route the call to the shuttle returning Sax and the others to Mars; and after a while there he was, with his new face, staring into a screen.