Forget it, she thought. By the time they’ve recovered enough to notice our slums or our kids they’re going to have other things to worry about.
A pack of half a dozen five- to ten-year-old kids raced past her, following the dirt track around the inside walls of the dome.When they got bored enough, they would work for a while with their parents, helping out in the fields or the machine shops, studying at night on computers. Healthy, normal kids, except for a tendency towards fat—the Martian gravity never seemed to burn up the calories their appetites demanded—but Molly still found them strange.They had so little sense of history, such vague, contradictory notions of Earth that she wondered what they would pass on to their own children.
She crossed the track and shut herself in the changing room, put on a suit and went outside.
To her right, the great volcano Arsia Mons climbed gently into the sunrise. In the clear morning, she could see the lip of the caldera, twenty kilometers high and nearly a hundred kilometers away. She’d climbed it once; most of them had, at one time or another. It had taken her three days to reach the top, leaping over fissures in the rock with a recklessness unimaginable on Earth, climbing glacial sheets with only a rock hammer to support her, sliding down the shallower inclines on the hard plastic seat of her suit.
The effort had been worth it. In those three days she had literally walked into outer space. She had stood on a knob of ragged brown basalt at midday, the sun blazing down on her, and looked up to see a sky of unwinking stars overhead.
Curtis had been the first, of course, and he’d symbolized his conquest by draining his urine collection bag over the lip of the crater.That had been his “hero thing” in the tradition of the Antarctic explorers, and at least three of his subordinates had killed or crippled themselves trying to follow his example, skiing down a glacier or running naked between the garage and the air lock.
She knew some kind of pressure valve was necessary, but the adolescent macho tone of it all offended her.Their current fad was the “sapping expedition,” where five or six of them would take off in jeeps and blow up underground ice deposits with lasers. Of course they were “releasing valuable volatiles” and “contributing to the density of the atmosphere,” but she knew they did it just to watch the ground explode.
She started for the cave, watching a small pocket of ice glitter faintly from a rift high on the volcano’s flank. Curtis had promised they would melt that ice and be swimming in it within their lifetimes, back when people had wanted to hear that kind of thing.
It could still happen, she thought. But it would be because of the kids, not Curtis.
The entrance to the cave was invisible from the locks, a few hundred meters up the rocky slope and concealed behind a lip of frozen lava, bright orange with iron oxides and silica.The airlock was a cylindrical unit pulled off of one of the early mission modules, cemented in place with durofoam and painted to blend with the background. Molly and the other adults had to crawl on their hands and knees to get into the cave.The kids liked it that way.
As she pushed the inner hatch open, a large white rat scrambled past her into the lock. It took her a minute to corner it and carry it back into the cave, by which time she felt her temper beginning to unravel.
The room smelled of the lab animals they left running around, and looked even worse than it smelled. Reese, she thought, would not understand how it could have happened.The cave had been the first permanent habitation on Mars, used while Frontera was being built, and by all rights should have been some kind of monument. .
But they’d needed a physics lab, one far enough away that an accident wouldn’t take the entire dome with it.And maybe more importantly, they’d needed a place for the kids that couldn’t or wouldn’t fit in, the deformed, the strange, the unwanted. Friction had been building since the first years of the settlement, and the decision just seemed to happen, more and more of the kids spending the night in the lab, until a dozen or so of them were hardly home at all.
This morning they had the red lights on, barely illuminating the distant corners where the durofoam floors and ceilings met the natural walls of the cave.The rats had dragged used computer paper across the floor for their nests, leaving what they didn’t need in crumpled heaps. Children slept on mattresses on the floor, in niches along the walls, some of them under the desks and tables in the front area of the huge room.
“Verb?” she said.The girl had been named Sarah, once, but five years ago the children had come up with their own names for each other and had stopped answering to the ones their parents had given them.“Verb, are you here?”
A head of close-cut blonde hair, just a little too large for the body it rested on, lifted itself from one of the desks.“Mom?”
“How’s it coming?” Molly asked, hearing the unnatural cadence of stress in her voice.
“Okay. I’ve got some new math to show you.”
Molly picked her way carefully to the desk. In a distant corner one of the children gave a brief, strangled scream in its sleep and then went quiet.
On the girl’s crt screen, Molly saw the calculation for quantum shifts in the apparent mass and charge of an electron in an electromagnetic field. In quantum mechanics the solution produced divergent integrals, but Verb’s equation balanced.
There had been a time when Molly had to choose between the doctoral program at the University of Texas and a slot on one of the Mars missions. She opted for Mars because she thought it could give her science and adventure, and besides, grant money had dried up and universities, even state universities, were folding as fast as the steel mills. She couldn’t have guessed that she was going to end up at the cutting edge of a new physical theory.
She watched the numbers scroll by. Like all the great ideas, she thought, the math was beautiful in itself, elegant, symmetrical, not just in the flow of logic but in the very patterns of the numbers.
“Look Ma,”Verb said,“no infinities.”
Molly smiled at the obscure, ingrown humor, resisted an impulse to touch her daughter’s hair. None of them liked to be touched, even by each other.Too much like sex, Molly thought, the imperfect chromosomal dance that had spawned them.“It’s beautiful,” Molly said.“It’s almost there, isn’t it?”
“Almost,” the girl said.
It had better be, Molly thought. For the thousandth time she almost said it, almost let the words out: Sarah, I have to talk to you. But they wouldn’t come. She’d waited too long, could not just blurt out the fact that her daughter was dying and that she had waited this long to tell her. Waited because she was afraid, waited because she’d kept hoping they were wrong, waited because she didn’t want to interfere with the work.
She told herself it was for the girl’s sake, that the work meant so much to her. But it meant as much to Molly, to all of them, because if Verb really could harness antimatter, if she really could build a working transporter, then all their lives depended on her.
Verb sat back, revealing the heavy, flat lines of her body, the stains on her dull yellow shift.“It’s almost finished.All but a few of the transitions. I can see where it’s going but I can’t always...can’t quite see how to get there.Why don’t you tell me what it is you’re afraid of ?”
The girl’s startling intuition of quantum physics seemed to be part of some larger, more general empathy. She can’t really read your mind, Molly told herself. She’s just reading your emotions.
“Remember I told you about the ships from Earth?” It wasn’t the whole truth, maybe not even half, but it was the reason she’d come. “One of them is about to land.”