Which of course was now entirely academic.
And, driving on, she had tracked down the source of the signal she had come out to find.
In the end it had been just a beacon, a little unmanned three-legged lander no taller than she was, bleeping forlornly. Perhaps it had been intended to mark a landing site for a ship that had never followed. But there was no mystery about who had sent it: the markings on its equipment covers were undoubtedly Chinese.
She had made the trip for nothing. And the cost turned out to be unexpectedly high. When she had walked back to her faithful Beagle she found it had packed up, just like that. Its supposedly milspec electronics had presumably succumbed to the onslaught from the sun, leaving its essential systems, including life support, as dead as Mars.
So that was that. Without the rover, she couldnt get back to Aurora. Her suit reserves would last only a few more hours, which wouldnt be long enough to get another rover out to her. She was living, breathing, as healthy as she had been a sol before. But she was doomed by the cruel equations of survival on Mars.
Of course she wouldnt be the solar systems only casualty today.
At least she was special, she told herself. Though she hadnt been the first person to set foot on Mars, she would become the first human being to die here. Perhaps that was a memorial worth having.
And she would do her duty to the last. The space agencies had always had procedures for such eventualities. If she had died in spaceas had been discussed by NASA planners decades ago when the International Space Station had first been occupiedher body would have been zipped into a bag and tied to a truss until it could be returned to Earth. Here on Mars, her first duty was to the planet and its putative biosphere; she mustnt contaminate it with her own decaying corpse. All she had to do was stand here, in fact. When her suits heaters failed she would quickly freeze solid, thus sealing in any rogue bugs she had brought from Earth, until her body could be retrieved. Probably the suit wouldnt even topple over. She would be a statue, she thought, a monument to herself, and her own dumb luck.
She couldnt bear the thought of dying beside her poor, failed rover, though. So she had decided to walk on into the Martian wilderness, just so she could see a bit more of the planet that was killing her.
Even then her luck was all bad. She had trudged across a dull plain, to this dull canyon. Here she was in the midst of the greatest catastrophe the solar system had endured since its formation, and everybody else had a better view than she had.
Something stirred at her feet. On the ground little pits were formingcraters, she thought, but none wider than her thumbnail. Could she be caught in some peculiar micrometeorite shower? But now she heard a pattering on her helmet.
She looked up. She could see the drops falling out of the sky, big fat low-gravity drops drifting slowly down all around her. When they hit, they smeared the patina of dust on her faceplate.
It was rain, the first rain on Mars in a billion years.
The sun breathed fire into the faces of all its circling children.
On Mercury the sun-side face had melted, craters as old as the planet dissolving into magma palimpsests. Venus had been stripped of much of its crushing atmospherethe fate that might have become of Earth, if not for the shield. The ice moons of Jupiter were melted to depths of kilometers. In a strange and exquisite tragedy, the rings of Saturn, fragile bands of ice, had evaporated.
And on Mars volcanoes dormant for a hundred million years had begun to stir. The polar ice caps, thin smears of carbon dioxide and water ice, had quickly sublimed. And now rain was falling. Helena walked forward a few more steps, and watched the Martian rain falling deep into the shadows of the canyon.
One of her colleagues, excitedly, began to report on his own discoveries. I found a ship! And what a ship; it looks like the carcass of a beached whale. And its covered in Mandarin lettering. But it has a hull rip the size of Mariner Valley. It came down hard
Helena had listened to her comrades communications all this long sol. She had reported in at routine intervals, but she had decided against telling them what had become of hernot just yet, anyhow. Now she stood and listened to the voice of a colleague she would never see again.
Wait a minute. Im climbing inside the ship, taking care to avoid all sharp edges Oh. Oh, dear God.
There had been more than a hundred people on the ship. They were all young men and womenall breeding age, including the pilots. Their cargo had included inflatable shelters, mechanical diggers, hydroponic seed beds. The intention was clear. This was what the Chinese had been planning for the last five years: this was what had used up all their heavy-lift capacity, instead of contributing to the shield. And this was how the Chinese had planned to ensure that something of their culture would survive the sunstorm.
But the Chinese invasion of Mars failed They came so close. I wonder what kind of neighbors they would have been?
Helena suspected everybody would have got along. From here, China was very far away, just as far as Eurasia and America. Here, you were just a humanor rather, a Martian.
She looked up at the sun. Close to setting, it was smeared out in a ragged ellipse by air laden with dust and unaccustomed rain clouds. She knew the predicted schedule; the sunstorm should be abating by nowand yet something about that setting sun troubled her, as if there was still a nasty surprise to come.
The dust at her feet stirred. She looked down.
Amid the pattering raindrops, something was pushing out of the soil. No bigger than her thumb, it was like a leather-skinned cactus. It had translucent sections, windows to catch the sunlight, she thought, without losing a precious drop of moisture. And it was green: the first native green she had seen on Mars.
Her heart hammered.
The Auroracrew, during their long exile, had searched in vain for life on Mars. They had even risked a hazardous journey to the South Pole, where they had sought out the oldest, coldest, undisturbed permafrost on all of Mars, hoping to find Martian microorganisms trapped and preserved. Even there theyd found zilch. That epochal discovery would surely have made their years away from home worthwhile; it had been a crashing disappointment to find nothing.
And now here it was, just bubbling up out of the ground before her.
She felt a painful pull at her chest. She didnt need to check her monitors to know her suit was failing. To hell with her suit; she was going to report her discovery. Hastily she turned on her helmet camera, and bent over the little plant. Aurora, Helena. You wont believe this
Its roots were buried deep in the cold rock of Mars. It didnt need oxygen, but fueled its glacial metabolism with hydrogen released by the slow reaction of the volcanic rocks with traces of water ice. Thus it had survived a billion years. Like a spore waiting under a desert on Earth for the brief rains of spring, this patient little plant had waited out an eon for the Martian rains to return, so it could live again.
46: Aftershock
A chain of events stretching back millennia was almost complete. The sunstorm had been wasteful of energy, of coursebut not nearly so wasteful as humankind might one day have become, if allowed to infect the stars.
The sunstorm was ending. Though the suns relatively orderly cycles of activity would be disturbed for decades to come, the great release of energy had been cathartic, and the destabilization of the core was resolved. All this was just as Eugene Mangless remarkably successful mathematical models of the suns behavior had predicted.
But those models had not been, could never be, perfect. And before this long day was done, the sun had one more surprise for its weary children.