Then the messages had stopped altogether. nasa’s last official act had been the launch of a final shuttle, deploying a lightsail vehicle full of medicine, electronic components, food, and chemicals. But a solar flare had scrambled the drone’s guidance system and sent it hurtling off into the asteroid belt.
The sight of the decaying Deimos base had turned Kane’s imagination loose, conjuring endless hideous details of the disaster on Mars: cryptic, desperate messages typed into video terminals, slaughtered livestock, tiny deformed skeletons.
Sleep, he thought. Just get through these next few minutes and sleep.
The entry module was only a little larger than the old Apollo spacecraft Kane had seen at nasa, but with its fuel tanks and conical shielding, the descent vehicle stood over thirty feet tall. Reese, who had obviously taken over for Takahashi, was uncoupling the flox hose that led to the tank of fluorine/liquid oxygen built into the base’s refinery complex. He held up one thumb and Kane managed to acknowledge him with a wave of the hand.
A ramp led up inside the cowling, and from there Kane climbed three rungs to the open cockpit. He stowed his duffel under the canvas slings and then crawled in next to Lena. She didn’t ask how he was and he didn’t volunteer any conversation. It was enough to close his eyes for a few minutes.
His nerves kept him from falling completely asleep.As Reese and Takahashi strapped themselves in, he gave up and opened his eyes again. He waited in cold silence while Lena and Takahashi ran through the pre-flight checklist, and then, with no more than a sort of throat-clearing “de wa,” Takahashi lifted them gently off Deimos’s surface and turned them toward the “high gate,” the point where they would hit the Martian atmosphere.
Kane forced himself to focus on the pranayama exercises Reese had taught him, separating his breathing into outgoing, incoming, and the long kumbhaka between them.
The shielded bottom of the capsule brushed the outer layers of the atmosphere and the screaming started again. Kane opened his eyes to columns of data scrolling down the screen in front of him. The capsule bucked as the braking rockets fired and Kane ground his teeth together. No more than two Gs this time, Kane told himself. It’s almost over.
Within a minute or two, Kane could feel the pressure easing.As the mem hit terminal velocity, the gravity stabilized at Mars normal and the module began to fall straight toward the caldera of Arsia Mons.
When the soft, female voice came through his helmet speakers, Kane was too startled to manage a reaction.
“This is Frontera Base. Since you’re obviously not going to turn around and go home, why don’t you set down southeast, repeat, south
east of the dome.We’ll send somebody out for you.” “Reese?” Lena said.“Reese, did you hear that?” Jesus Christ, Kane thought. They’re alive.
With a whine like a muezzin’s call to prayer, the eastern mirror opened to the light of the Martian dawn. After twelve years I should be used to it, Molly thought, holding a pillow over her ears against the noise, able to sleep right through it.
She rolled onto her left side and watched a rectangle of muted light crawl across Curtis’s smooth, depilated scalp. He slept flat on his back, the breath rasping quietly in his open mouth. Nothing bothered him, not noises in the night or bad dreams or life-and-death decisions. She could remember when she used to admire him for it.
She tried to go back to sleep but it was no use; she felt alternately like she was waiting for Christmas morning or for a final exam. It had been this way since they first picked up the signals from Reese’s ship, and today was the worst.Today they would be landing.
The phone rang and Molly got noiselessly out of bed to pick it up.“Yes?”
“They’re coming in.” The awkward Slavic consonants told her it was Blok, on night duty at the monitors.
“And the others?”
“At least another day away. No signals.”
“All right.” She looked down, saw that she had instinctively covered her breasts with one arm, as if she could feel a stranger’s eyes on her. It’s starting, she thought.Already they’re an alien presence, already they’re changing things, and they haven’t even landed yet.“I’ll be right there,” she said, and put the phone back on the table.
She got into her T-shirt and her last, worn pair of jeans from the night before. Blue used to be my favorite color, she thought, and now look. No oceans, the sky a sickly green on a clear day, and these jeans faded nearly white. Maybe, she thought, maybe they brought new blue jeans with them, like the tourists used to take to Russia.
Sure they did. Blue jeans and French wines and Vogue magazines. They don’t even know we’re alive.
She slid her feet. into moccasins and debated, just for a second, waking Curtis and letting him deal with it. But they’d been over it and over it, and there was nothing he could do that she couldn’t. He’d be furious, of course, but he’d survive.
She closed the bedroom door behind her and took her mask and oxygen tank off the hook by the front door. She stifled a yawn behind the mask and stepped out into the warm co2 under the dome.
The clear plastic walls rose over her like the sides of a giant bottle buried in the sand.The components of the western mirror, like huge foil shades pulled down the curvature of the dome, scattered morning sunlight into the gardens below. To her left and right, durofoam living modules alternated with fields of crops in various stages of ripeness.The corn outside her bedroom window stood two meters tall, ready for harvest, and the fields behind her kitchen had just been sown with sugar beets.
She squatted for an instant on the dirt path, trying to really see the colony, to reduce it to some kind of single, simple image, but the vision eluded her. She had been here too long, become too bogged down in the details. She could only find distance through an effort of will, putting herself, for example, in Reese’s position, coming in from above.
First there would be the volcano, leveling off to no more than a persistent slope of the rocky land.Then his eyes would find the dome, a cylindrical bubble half a kilometer long and over two hundred meters wide, capped at the southern end by the main airlock and garage, and at the northern end by the greater thickness of the machine shops and the compressors and solar furnaces that mined the Martian atmosphere.
Closer still and he could see the land under the dome divided into two chessboards, one due north of the other, with ten squares on a side instead of eight.What would have been the white squares held the houses, the living modules, one- and two-bedroom cottages sculpted from durofoam at the whim of the original occupant.The black squares were green, most of them anyway, planted with wheat or cotton or pineapples and not, thank God, with radishes anymore. In the beginning, radishes had been the only crop that would grow in the salty Martian soil, and they had always tasted to Molly of failure.
Between the two chessboards lay the inverted bowl of the Center, bracketed by the animal pens where the colony’s goats and chickens fought for their few centimeters of space.The Center was the only two-story building under the dome. Some well-intentioned planner back on Earth had meant for it to be the focus of the colony’s bustling social life, a shopping mall in space complete with video theaters, a bar, a gym, and a row of shops where the docile colonists were supposed to sell their handicrafts to each other.
The problem was the colony’s social life didn’t bustle, and the one thing most of them wanted was a little privacy, a little time completely alone.