Mars (26 page)

The Russian did most of the driving; Jamie did most of the outside work. They covered little more than a hundred kilometers the first day out, driving only during the daylight hours. The dull upland plain of their landing site quickly gave way to the rougher terrain of Noctis Fossae, crisscrossed with cracks and faults like the battlefield of two entrenched armies.

The badlands grew much more rugged, until they were threading through a jagged stony forest of rock spires that loomed high above them; rock pillars carved into eerie sculptures
that reminded Jamie of wildly abstract totem poles. The wind’s eroded away the soft stone and left these pillars of granitic stuff standing, he told himself. Then he realized that the gentle winds of Mars had to work for hundreds of millions of years to carve their magic this way.

For hours they drove through the towering spires of stone. Jamie sat fascinated, staring, waiting to see symbols of eagles or bears scratched into the rock.

The crevasses ran generally north-south, which made their southward journeying easier, but with the rocks that seemed to cover the ground everywhere, and the craters and spires and sand dunes, they seldom reached a speed of even thirty kilometers per hour.

Like driving a pickup on reservation land, Jamie said to himself as they rode jouncing through the desolate country. Except there are no roads at all. Not even a trail or an animal track.

They stopped virtually every hour. Jamie would go outside in his sky-blue hard suit to take rock and soil samples and plant an automated meteorology/geology beacon that would measure air temperature and pressure, humidity, wind velocity, and record heat flow coming up from underground, as well as any seismic activity. The beacon sent its signal to the pair of spacecraft hovering in synchronous orbit some twenty thousand kilometers above the equator. The communications equipment aboard the spacecraft automatically relayed the signals both to their base camp and back to Earth.

Despite the rover’s pressurized interior both Jamie and Vosnesensky found themselves living inside their hard suits. The Russian went strictly by the mission rules that said he had to be suited up whenever Jamie went outside, in case an emergency arose. More often than not, the cosmonaut came out with Jamie. At first he busied himself with inspecting the rover’s exterior: the wheels, the antennas, the way the iron-rich Martian sand powdered the finish of the rover’s skin.

By the second morning, though, it seemed to Jamie that Vosnesensky came outside merely to have some human company and to enjoy the scenery.

“You say your New Mexico looks like this?” the Russian asked.

Jamie heard his voice in his helmet earphones. Bent stiffly over a waist-deep gully that exposed a seam of basaltic rock,
he said, “Yep. Cliffs and arroyos—canyons. Clear skies. Not much rain.”

“It must be very barren, then.”

Smiling to himself, Jamie replied, “Compared to this it’s the Garden of Eden.”

The Russian fell silent.

Jamie straightened up and took the video camera from his belt. The gully ran all the way out to the horizon, almost as straight as train tracks except for some slumping here and there where the ground had slid down to partially fill it in. A fault line, Jamie recognized. The area’s crisscrossed with them. But this one’s been eroded by running water. Had to be. Or mass wasting, permafrost melting beneath the surface and undermining everything. But when? There’s been no liquid water around here for hundreds of millions of years, most likely. Could a rill remain unchanged all that time?

He returned the camcorder to its clip on his belt and went to work chipping at the exposed rock ledge. Then he put the samples into a pouch and picked up the drill. As usual, the drill bit into the ground easily for the first meter or so, then hit resistance. Permafrost, thought Jamie. This whole region is sitting on top of a frozen ocean just a few feet below the surface. Once he had pulled the core sample from the drill bit and carefully deposited it in a sample case, he started back toward the rover.

Vosnesensky was standing there watching in his fire-engine red hard suit.

“Okay,” Jamie said. “I’m finished here. All I’ve got to do is …”

He realized that the Russian had already taken one of his sensor beacons from the equipment bay in the rover’s middle section. Jamie took it from him.

“Thanks, Mikhail.”

He could sense the man’s shrug. “I had nothing better to do.”

“Thanks,” Jamie repeated.

Minutes later they were back in the rover’s cockpit, Vosnesensky in the left seat. They had both removed their helmets and gloves; their hard suits bulked in the cockpit’s bucket seats like a pair of brightly colored armor-plated polar bears.

Vosnesensky steered between a boulder the size of a small
house and a shallow circular depression that looked to Jamie like the weathered fossil of an ancient meteor crater. The Russian had small, almost delicate hands, Jamie noticed. He maneuvered the tiny steering wheel with nothing more than a fingertip’s pressure.

“We should reach the canyons today,” he said, “if we do not have to make more stops.”

Jamie took the hint. “We’ll stop only to fill in the net of beacons. Of course, if there’s some important change in the landforms …”

Vosnesensky smiled slightly without turning his eyes away from his driving. “Of course.”

Jamie tried to settle back and get comfortable, but the hard shell of the pressure suit was not meant to sit in. The damned armpit was still chafing despite the padding he had packed into it. He watched the landscape unrolling as they drove slowly toward the strangely close horizon. It bothered him, seeing the horizon so near. Almost frightened him down at the subliminal level where nightmares take root. Jamie felt as if they were driving toward the edge of a cliff.

“The horizon looks awfully close, doesn’t it?” he said to Vosnesensky.

The Russian bobbed his head once. “The smaller the planet the shorter the horizon. It is even closer on the moon.”

“I’ve never been to the moon.”

“Much closer than here. And much more barren.”

DiNardo had been on the moon, Jamie knew. I was called in so suddenly I never got farther off the Earth than the space stations until we started out for Mars.

He forced his attention away from the too-close horizon and concentrated on the land they were driving through. To anyone but a geologist the scenery would have looked dull, monotonous, barren. But Jamie’s mind was leaping from rock to fault crack, crater to sand dune, trying to puzzle out the forces that had shaped this land, sculpted it into its present form.

“I have flown over New Mexico,” Vosnesensky said, almost as if to himself. “In the
Mir 3
space station, while training for this mission.”

“Then you saw how much it looks like Mars.”

“I did not realize it at the time. I did not pay sufficient attention.”

Jamie studied the Russian’s face. He was dead serious, as always. Somber. Grim.

“Did you always want to be a cosmonaut?” Jamie asked suddenly. “Ever since you were a little child?”

Vosnesensky swiveled his head toward Jamie for an instant, then immediately turned back to look ahead. The expression on his face, fleetingly, was almost angry.

I shouldn’t have asked, Jamie thought. He resents my prying into his personal history.

But the Russian muttered, “When I was very little, before starting school even, I wanted to be a cosmonaut. To me it meant everything. Gagarin was my hero; I wanted to be like him.”

“The first man in space.”

Vosnesensky nodded again, another single curt bob of his head. “Gagarin was first in orbit. Armstrong was first on the moon. I told myself I would be first on Mars.”

“And you were.”

“Yes.”

“You must feel very proud about it.”

The cosmonaut glanced at Jamie again. “Proud, yes. Maybe even happy. But that moment has passed. Now I feel the responsibility. I am in charge. I am responsible for all your lives.”

“I see.”

“Do you? You are a scientist. You are happy to be here, to explore. You have a new world to play with. I am the man of authority. I am the one who must say no to you when you want to go too far, when you might endanger yourself or the others.”

“We all understand that,” Jamie said. “We accept it.”

“Yes? Does Dr. Malater accept it? She hates me. She goes out of her way to annoy me every chance she gets.”

“Ilona isn’t …” Jamie’s voice trailed off. He realized he had no defense for her.

“She is a Jewish bitch who hates all Russians. I know that. She has made it very clear to me.”

“Her grandparents fled Hungary.”

“So? Was that my fault? Am I to be blamed for things that happened in our grandparents’ day? She risks the success of
this mission because of a grudge that is two generations old?”

Jamie laughed softly. “Mikhail, I know people who have kept grudges going for two
centuries
, not just two generations.”

The Russian said nothing.

“There are American Indians who’re still righting battles from colonial times.”

“The Yankee imperialists took your land from you,” Vosnesensky said. “They engaged in genocide against your people. We learned this in school.”

“That happened a long time ago, Mikhail,” said Jamie. “Should I spend my life hating all the whites? Should I hate my mother because she’s descended from people who killed my ancestors? Should Pete Connors hate Paul Abell because his ancestors were slaves and Paul’s were slave owners?”

“You feel no bitterness at all?”

The question stopped Jamie. He did not truly know what he felt. He had hardly ever considered the matter in such a light. Was Grandfather Al bitter? No, he seemed to accept the world as he found it.

“Use what’s at hand, Jamie,” Al would say. “When they hand you a lemon, make lemonade. Use what’s at hand and make the best of what you find.”

At length Jamie answered, “Mikhail, my parents are both university professors. I was born in New Mexico and went back there to spend summer vacations when I was a kid, but I grew up in Berkeley, California.”

“A hotbed of radicalism.” Vosnesensky said it flatly, as if reciting a memorized line. Jamie could not tell if the Russian were joking or serious.

“My father has spent most of his life trying not to be an Indian, although he’d never admit it. Probably doesn’t even realize it. He earned a scholarship to Harvard University. He married a woman who’s descended from the original
Mayflower
colonists. Neither one of them wanted me to be an Indian. They always told me to be a success, instead.”

“They deny your father’s heritage.”

“They try to. Dad’s scholarship came through a program designed especially to help minority groups—such as Native Americans. And the history texts he’s written have sold to
universities all around the U.S. mainly because they present American history from the minority viewpoint.”

“Hmp.”

“They were never active in Indian affairs and neither was I. If it weren’t for my grandfather I’d be more white than you are. He taught me to understand my heritage, to accept it without hating anybody.”

“But Malater, she hates me.”

“Not you, Mikhail. She hates the
idea
of Russians. She doesn’t see you as an individual. In her eyes you’re part of an inhuman system that hanged her grandfather and forced her grandmother to run away from her native land.”

Vosnesensky muttered, “That is not much help.”

“Just like people who don’t see individuals among the Indians, or even tribes,” Jamie went on. “There’s a lot of whites who still see ‘the Indian’ instead of individual men and women. They don’t understand that some people
want
to live in their own way and don’t
want
to become white.”

“And you? How do you want to live?”

Jamie no longer had to think it over. “I’m the descendant of Indians. My skin is darker than yours. But if you take our brains out of our skulls, Mikhail, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between them. That’s where we really live. In our minds. We were born on opposite sides of the world and yet here we are together on a totally other planet. That’s what’s important. Not what our ancestors did to one another. What we’re doing now. That’s the important thing.”

Vosnesensky nodded somberly. “Now you must give that little speech to Malater.”

Jamie nodded soberly. “Okay. Maybe I will.”

“It won’t do any good.”

“Probablv not,” Jamie agreed. “But there’s no harm trying.”

“Perhaps.”

A new thought struck Jamie. “Mikhail—is that why you decided to come out on this traverse with me, instead of letting Pete do it? Just to get away from Ilona?”

“Nonsense!” spat the Russian with a vehemence that convinced Jamie he had hit on the truth. Ilona’s hurting him, Jamie realized. She’s really hurting the poor guy.

“Why can’t you be reasonable, like your brother?”

Mikhail Andreivitch had heard that cry from his father all his life, it seemed. Nikolai was the older of the two boys, the paragon of the family. He studied hard at school and won excellent marks. He was quiet; his favorite pastime was reading books. His friends were few, but they were as studious and well mannered as Nikolai himself.

Mikhail, the second son (there was a younger daughter), sailed through school hardly even glancing at his textbooks. Somehow he got good grades; not quite as good as his older brother’s, of course, but good enough to send him to the engineering college. Instead of studying, Mikhail listened to music, imported American rock mostly. The noise drove his father wild. Mikhail had lots of friends, girls as well as boys, and they all liked to listen to loud rock music and dress in blue jeans and leather jackets like bikers.

And he gambled. “The curse of the Russians,” his father called it. His mother wept. Mikhail played cards with his friends and, sometimes, with older men who dressed well and had faces of stone. His parents feared the worst for him.

“You’re turning your mother gray!” his father shouted when Mikhail announced he was going to buy a motorbike. He had worked for two years in secret, spending his afternoons in a garage helping the mechanic instead of attending classes. Somehow he had still managed to pass his examinations at school. Even so, two years’ wages were not enough to buy the handsome machine he coveted. Mikhail had risked every ruble on a card game, vowing that if he won he would never gamble again. He won, mainly because he had been
willing to take greater risks and had more money to put up than the other gamblers that night.