Helena Umfraville stumbled across an ocher plain.
She came to a slight rise. She climbed it, but it led to nothing but more broken, rock-littered ground. Resentfully she made her way forward.
She was dog-tired, and her EVA suit had never felt so heavy. She had no real idea how long she had been walking—hours, anyhow. And yet she walked on. There was nothing else to do.
Now she found herself on the lip of a canyon. She stopped, breathing hard. It was a complex of ravines and cliffs, their slopes pocked with small craters. In the thin air of the Martian afternoon the spectacle was clear all the way to the horizon. That diminished its scale, of course; there was none of the mist-softening that gave Earth’s Grand Canyon its sense of three-dimensional immensity. She might as well have been looking at a beautiful painting, done in Mars’s constrained palette of ocher and red and burnt orange.
It wasn’t interesting. Mars was full of canyons. In fact Helena felt pissed at the canyon. It was quite unreasonable of her. After all, none of it was its fault. She sucked at the last of her suit’s water supply.
During the worst of the storm she had hidden in the Beagle, huddling under rock overhangs. It was the only shelter she had. The rover’s hull had screened her, and her suit had labored to keep her cool. So she had survived—although for all she knew she had shipped a radiation dose enough to kill her.
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 couldn’t get back to Aurora. Her suit reserves would last only a few more hours, which wouldn’t 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 wouldn’t be the solar system’s only casualty today.
At least she was special, she told herself. Though she hadn’t 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 space—as had been discussed by NASA planners decades ago when the International Space Station had first been occupied—her 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 mustn’t contaminate it with her own decaying corpse. All she had to do was stand here, in fact. When her suit’s 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 wouldn’t even topple over. She would be a statue, she thought, a monument to herself, and her own dumb luck.
She couldn’t 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 forming—craters, 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 atmosphere—the 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 it’s 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 her—not just yet, anyhow. Now she stood and listened to the voice of a colleague she would never see again.
“Wait a minute. I’m 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 women—all 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 human—or 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 now—and 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 they’d 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.