Red Mars (81 page)

It had happened before several times, but she was annoyed with herself for getting distracted by the irrelevant spectacle of the sky.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Frank shouted over the intercom. Ann jumped in her chair; she would never get used to Frank’s biting vehemence. “Get going!” he shouted.

“I ran it onto a rock,” she said.

“Damn you! Why don’t you watch where you’re going! Here, stop the wheels, stop them! I’m gonna put the grip cloths under the front wheels and lever you forward, and then you get it off this rock and up the slope as quick as you can, understand? There’s another surge coming!”

“Frank!” Maya cried. “Get inside!”

“Soon as I get the fucking pads down! Be ready to go!”

The pads were strips of spiked metal mesh, set under wheels that had dug holes into sand, and then pegged out ahead so that the wheels had something to grip. An ancient desert method, and Frank ran around the front of the rover cursing under his breath and snapping directions to Ann, who obeyed with her teeth clenched and her stomach knotted.

“Okay, go!” Frank shouted. “Go!”

“Get in first!” Ann cried.

“There’s no time, go, it’s almost here! I’ll hang on the side, go, damn it,
go
!”

So Ann gently accelerated the front wheels, and felt them catch on the grips and scrape the car forward over the rock, until the rear wheels touched down again and they scraped off and were free. But the roar of the flood suddenly doubled and redoubled behind them, and then there were chunks of ice bounding past the car, bursting along with a hideous cracking, and then the ice was overwhelmed by a dark wave of steaming bubbling slurry, a surge that washed up over the windows of the car. Ann floored the accelerator and held the wheel with a death grip as it bounced in her hands. Mixed with the crashing of the surge wave she heard Frank’s voice shouting “Go, idiot, go!” and then they were hit hard and the car slewed off to the left, out of control. Ann hung onto the wheel as it threw her from side to side. Her left ear throbbed with pain, she had hit something with it. She held on to the wheel and kept her foot jamming the accelerator to the floor. The wheels caught on something and the rover ground through water, it poured from right to left and there was a dull banging against the side of the car. “Go!” She kept the accelerator floored and turned uphill, bouncing wildly in the driver’s seat, all the windows and TV screens liquid madness. Then the water ran under the rover, and the windows were clear. The rover’s headlights showed rocky ground, falling snow, and ahead a bare flat area. Ann kept it floored and jounced wildly toward it, the flood still roaring behind them. When she reached the flat rise she had to pull her leg and foot away from the accelerator with her hands. The car stopped. They were above the flood, on a narrow bench terrace. It looked like the surge was already receding. But Frank Chalmers was gone.

Maya insisted that they return and look for him, and as it was likely that the initial surge would be the largest one they did so, but it was futile. In the twilight the headlights cut fifty meters into the snowfall, and in the two intersecting yellow cones, and the dark gray world outside them, they saw only the ragged surface of the flood, a pouring sea of flotsam and jetsam without the slightest hint of any regular shape; in fact it looked like a world in which such shapes were impossible. No one could survive in such madness. Frank was gone, either knocked off the car in its jouncing, or swept off it in its brief and nearly fatal encounter with the wave.

His final curses still seemed to bubble out of the static on the intercom, out of the roar of the flood. His final imprecation rang in Ann’s ears like the judgment it was: Go, idiot, go! It had been her fault, all her fault—

Maya was weeping, choking on sobs, doubling over her stomach as if cramping. “No!” she cried. “Frank, Frank! We have to look for him!” Then she was crying too hard to speak. Sax went over and dug into the medicine chest, and walked over to her and crouched by her side. “Here, Maya, do you want a sedative?” And she uncoiled and dashed the pills from his hand, “No!” she screamed, “they’re
my
feelings, they’re
my
men, do you think I’m a coward, do you think I would want to be a zombie like
you
!”

She collapsed into helpless, involuntary, racking sobs. Sax stood over her, blinking, face twisted with a stricken look; Ann found herself cut to the quick by that look, “Please,” she said. “Please, please.” She got up from the driver’s seat, went back to them and held Sax briefly by the arm. She crouched to help Nadia and Simon pick Maya up off the floor, and get her to her bed. Already Maya was quieter, withdrawing from them, her eyes red and her nose running, off in her own grief, one hand clenched in a death grip over Nadia’s wrist. Nadia looked down at her with a doctor’s detached expression, withdrawn in her own way, murmuring in Russian.

“Maya, I’m sorry,” Ann said. Her throat was cramped, it hurt to talk. “It was my fault. I’m sorry.”

Maya shook her head. “It was an accident.”

Ann couldn’t bring herself to say aloud that she had stopped paying attention. The words stuck in her throat, and another spasm of sobs racked Maya, and the chance to speak was gone.

Michel and Kasei took over the drivers’ seats, and started the rover along the bench again.

Not far east of that, the southern canyon wall finally sank down into the surrounding plain, and they were free to move away from the flood, which was in any case following Eos Chasma in a swing to the north, off to a distant reunion with Capri Chasma. Michel ran across the hidden colony’s trail, but lost it again, as the trail ducks were often buried in snow. He tried throughout all one day to locate a cache he thought was nearby, but failed. Rather than waste more time they decided to drive on at full speed, a bit north of east, toward the refuge they had been trying to reach, which Michel said was in the broken terrain just south of Aureum Chaos. “It’s not our main colony anymore,” he explained to the others. “It’s where we went first, after we left Underhill. But Hiroko wanted to leave for the south, and after a few years we did. She said she didn’t like this first shelter because Aureum is a sink, and she thought it might become a lake someday. I thought that was crazy, but I see now that she was right. It looks like Aureum may even be the final drainage for this flood, I don’t know. But the refuge is at a higher elevation than we are now, so it will be okay. It may be empty of people, but it will be stocked with supplies. And any port in a storm, yes?”

No one had the spirit to reply.

On the second day of hard driving the flood disappeared over the horizon to the north. The roar of it went away soon after. The ground, covered with a meter of dirty snow, no longer trembled underfoot; the world seemed dead, strangely silent and still, shrouded in white. When it wasn’t snowing the sky was still hazy, but it seemed clear enough for them to be spotted from above, so they stopped traveling by day. They moved at night without headlights, across a snowscape that glowed faintly under the stars.

Ann drove through these nights. She never told anyone about her moment of inattention at the wheel. And she never even came close to doing it again; she stayed focused with a desperate concentration, biting the inside of her mouth till it bled, oblivious to everything but what lay in the cones of light before her. She usually drove all night, forgetting to wake the next watch’s driver, or deciding not to. Frank Chalmers was dead, and it was her fault; desperately she wished she could reach back and change things, but it was hopeless. Some mistakes you can never make good. The white landscape was marred by an infinity of stones, each capped with its own cake of snow, and the salt-and-pepper landscape was such a patchwork that it was hard at night for the eye to make sense of it; sometimes they seemed to be plowing underground, or floating five meters over it. A white world. Some nights she understood she was driving a hearse, across the body of the deceased. The widows Nadia and Maya in back. And now she knew that Peter was dead too.

Twice she heard Frank calling out to her over the intercom, once asking for her to turn back and help him; the other crying, Go, idiot, go!

Maya was bearing up well. She was tough, somehow, despite all her moods. Nadia, whom Ann used to think of as the tough one, was silent most of the time. Sax stared at his screen and worked. Michel tried to talk to his old friends, and gave up unhappily when it was clear no one wanted to talk back. Simon watched Ann anxiously as always, with unbearable concern; she couldn’t stand it, and avoided his gaze. Poor Kasei must have felt like he was trapped in an asylum for the aged insane, it was almost funny to think of it, except that his spirit seemed to be somehow broken, she did not know why, perhaps the waste, perhaps the increasing likelihood that they would not survive; perhaps simple hunger, there was no way of telling. The young were odd. But he reminded her of Peter, and so she didn’t look at him either.

The snow made each night glow and pulse. All of it would melt eventually, carve new streambeds and carry her Mars away. Mars was gone. Michel sat beside her through the second shifts of the night, looking for signs of the way. “Are we lost?” Maya asked him once, just before dawn.

“No, not at all. It’s just. . . we’re leaving tracks in the snow. I don’t know how long they’ll last, or how visible they are, but if. . . Well, just in case they do last, I want to leave the car, and walk the last part of the way. So I want to be precisely sure of where we are before we do that. We’ve got some standing stones and dolmens erected that will tell us for sure, but I have to find one of those first. They’ll show on the horizon, you know. Boulders a bit taller than usual, or columns.”

“It will be easier to see those by day,” Simon said.

“True. We’ll have a look around tomorrow, and that should do it— we’ll be in an area of them. They were designed to help people lost like us. We’ll be okay.”

Except that their friends were dead. Her only child was dead. And their world was gone for good. Lying down by the windows at dawn, Ann tried to imagine life in the hidden shelter. Underground for years and years. She couldn’t do it. Go, idiot, go! Damn you!

At dawn Kasei hooted with hoarse triumph: out there on the northern horizon was a trio of standing stones. A lintel bridging two pillars, as if a single fragment of Stonehenge had flown here. Home was that way, said Kasei.

But first they would wait through the day. Michel was becoming extremely cautious about being seen from satellites, and wanted to continue on by night. They settled down to get some sleep.

Ann couldn’t sleep, she found herself energized by a new resolve. When the rest were out cold, Michel snoring happily, all of them asleep for the first time in about fifty hours, she tugged into her walker and tiptoed into the lock. She looked back and surveyed them; a hungry, ragged lot. Nadia’s crippled hand stuck out from her side. Getting out the lock made some unavoidable noise, but everyone was used to sleeping through noise, and the whirrs and clicks of the life-support system partially covered her exit. She got out without waking anyone.

The planet’s basal chill. She shuddered in it, and set off west, walking in the rover’s tracks so she couldn’t be followed. The sun was cutting through the mist. Snow was falling again, tinted pink in shafts of sunlight. She trudged along until she came on a little drumlin ridge, with its steep side clear of snow. She could traverse along the bare rock without leaving tracks. She did so until she got tired. It was really cold out, the snow falling straight down in tiny flakes, probably accreted around sand grains. At the end of the drumlin was a fat low boulder. She sat in its lee. She turned off her walker’s heating unit, and covered the blinking alarm light on her wristpad with a clump of snow.

It got colder fast. The sky was an opaque gray now, tinged with faint pink. Snow fell out of the pinkness onto her faceplate.

She had just stopped shivering, and was getting comfortably chill, when a boot kicked her hard in the helmet, and she was dragged up to her knees with her head ringing. A suited figure banged its faceplate into hers, hard. Then hands with a vise’s grip took her by the shoulders and flung her down to the ground. “Hey,” she cried weakly. She was yanked by her shoulders to her feet, and her left arm was pulled back and held up high behind her back. Her assailant worked at her wristpad, and then shoved her painfully forward, her arm still held high. She couldn’t fall without breaking her arm. She could feel the diamond pattern of her suit’s heating elements begin to flare against her skin, burning their pattern into her. Every few steps she was slapped hard in the helmet.

The figure marched her right back to their own rover, which astonished her. She was shoved into the lock, and the figure tumbled in after her, and closed and pumped the chamber, and tore off her helmet, and then his, and to her utter amazement it was her Simon, purple-faced and shouting at her, striking her still, his face soaking wet with tears— this her Simon, the quiet one, now yelling at her, “Why? Why? Damn you, you
always
do this, it’s always just you you you, off in your own world, you are so
selfish
!” Voice rising to a final painful shriek, her Simon who never said anything, never raised his voice, never spoke more than a word, now striking her and shrieking in her face, literally spitting, gasping with fury; and suddenly it made her mad. Why not before, why not when she had needed someone with some life in him? Why had it taken this to rouse him? She punched him right in the chest, hard, and he fell back. “Leave me alone,” she shouted. “Leave me alone!” And then the anguish shuddered through her, the chilled shiver of Martian death: “
Why didn’t you leave me alone?
”

He regained his balance, lunged forward and seized her by both shoulders, shook her. She had never noticed how powerful his hands were. “Be
cause
,” he shouted, and paused to lick his lips and catch his breath—”Because—” And his eyes bugged out, and his face darkened even further, as if a thousand sentences had all jammed in his throat at once, this her mild Simon!— and then he gave up on saying it, and roared, and shook her in his arms, shouting “
Because! Because! Because!
”