Red Planet Run (21 page)

We waited. A three-note trill broke off into an inquiring chirp. There was a rustle in the branches, a whir of wings, and suddenly we were surrounded by little brownish birds with yellow-gold streaks down their heads, pecking up the grains, moving ever closer to Yevtushenko, and to the twins.

Cautiously, so as not to frighten the aviary, I leaned forward to look at Sean’s face. He was mesmerized, his eyes fixed on the tiny birds. Paddy was similarly entranced. It was the first time in what seemed like years that I had seen them looking exactly and precisely like what they were: children. In that moment I wanted Caleb back, to see what wonders we had wrought, to share my pride, and, I admit freely, to share my fear for their future. It would be a long time before I forgot how frightened I had been the previous afternoon, watching Sean light out for cover. Not for nothing do they call children hostages to fortune.

I blinked my eyes clear and looked back at Nikolai. One of the sparrows was eating out of his hand. In another moment a second had hopped up onto his wrist, a third to his shoulder. Beneath them, Nikolai and his many chins and bellies sat like a benign, very hairy Buddha. Moving very slowly, very carefully, Sean rose and returned with a double handful of grain that he split with Paddy. He sank down to the floor and divided the remaining grain between both hands and rested them palms up on his knees. A tiny bird with greenish-yellow feathers and black markings and a slightly curved beak watched him, head tilted first to one side and then the other. He hopped cockily forward to perch on Sean’s wrist and peck up a seed. Sean turned to me, his smile blinding. A bluebird came tenderly up to alight on Paddy’s knee, and she sighed, a long, drawn-out sound of pure enchantment.

When the food was gone, the birds chirped and marched around for a bit longer, looking expectant. When Nikolai didn’t move, they gave what appeared to be a collective sigh for all good things past and flew back into the surrounding trees in a blizzard of wings. A moment later, a three-note scale rang out.

For the rest of the time we remained at Gagarin City the twins walked in Nick’s shadow and quoted him verbatim, Paddy as if he were Maria Mitchell, Sean as if he were God.

· · ·

Only it wasn’t Gagarin City to its inhabitants, it was Vernadsky. Gagarin City, Nick explained, was a name wished on them by the UER’s Department of Space. The twins looked at me and smiled, and I knew they were remembering the naming ceremony. “Why Vernadsky?” I asked him.

“Vladimir Vernadsky,” Sean said, “born 1863, died 1945. He was the first Terran scientist to envision the planet as a whole and entire ecosystem, self-correcting and self-sustaining. He’s called the father of biospherics.”

Nikolai was delighted with Sean. Paddy pouted a little. Nikolai noticed, and promptly became equally delighted with her. A man not to be underestimated.

Whatever they called it, the New Martians’ habitat was a model of successful communal effort, a mini-city with a fully functioning environment, all enclosed beneath a series of domes. New domes were added as adequate material was distilled, cultivated, hacked, mined, and refined out of the raw materials Mars provided. They’d made a good start by choosing the right location, the south-facing inner slope of a splosh crater, two kilometers above mean datum surface and half a minute off the equator. They had continued in the right direction by building out into the crater’s center. They bored their wells horizontally, into the north cliff, to avoid endangering the habitat’s foundation with possible subsurface subsidence. At least half of each dome was buried to protect it from ultraviolet radiation, the exposed half treated to deflect UV back into space.

Since planetfall twenty-five years before, the first three hundred colonists had tripled in population, and some of the first children were now hard at work on the 15-hectare farm that was projected to double in size within the next decade, enabling the habitat to support an increased population, currently projected for two thousand people. The ecosystem was modeled after experiments in the Arizona desert on Terra and the Luna habitats at Copernicus Base and Orientale. It included a miniature salt water ocean, in which Paddy and Sean had their first swim. There was always a waiting list for the beach, Nikolai said. It was understandably the habitat’s most popular attraction, and the marine biotechnologist was very firm about the number of people he would allow in the water at a time. The health of the seafood stocks came first, which included oysters, clams, and mussels. There were angel fish, too, which I think got by mostly on their looks, and sea urchins and starfish, which didn’t. There was a rain forest, where fog generated at upper levels dripped down the leaves of the tallest plants to coalesce into a warm rain at ground level. There was a marsh, a savanna, and a desert with real snakes, which I considered carrying the commitment to a balanced ecosystem entirely too far.

Everything was recycled. The carbon dioxide exhaled by the colonists was inhaled by the plants; they returned the favor by exhaling oxygen. Human waste fertilized crops and fed the fish. Five different kinds of termites ate their way through the city dump.

The agricultural diversity rivaled that of Terranova’s original design; crops included figs, berries, beans, potatoes, peanuts, oats, tomatoes, peppers, spinach, bananas, papayas, oranges, and grapefruit. Those were rubber trees I’d spied in the forest, along with bamboo and coconut palms; they also grew plants for medicinal purposes, including agave and jojoba. A resident herbalist tended to these, and Sean ingratiated himself into her notice and picked her brain, as well as a few cuttings to further diversify his own agricultural inventory.

The livestock had been raised from test tubes and was thriving; goats, chickens, and pigs. There were sheep, too, and I made a mental note to find out if there was yarn on the premises. I hadn’t knitted in years, since my last sweater had left this part of the galaxy on Elizabeth’s back, but it might be fun to try my hand at it again.

Each unattached settler had his or her own apartment, each family the same. There was a large library filled with tapes and even a few real books, a gymnasium equipped with pool and track, and they had just completed a five-hundred-seat auditorium, buried beneath the west wall of the crater.

The entire habitat had its own respiratory system, with three lungs. The lungs were three huge oval diaphragms, hollow elastic mounds, sited equidistantly around the habitat and connected to it by three buried tunnels. As the air inside the habitat heated, it expanded. Instead of blowing out the various roofs, as it expanded it rushed through the tunnels into the lungs, whose elastic construction expanded with the heat of day and contracted with the cold of night. The twins got a kick out of standing at the mouths of one or the other of those tunnels at the beginning or end of the day, shouting down the howl of the wind.

Vernadsky even had a propellant factory, consisting of a single compressor to suck up Martian atmosphere and extract the carbon dioxide, which was then shipped off to a thermal converter which broke it down into its individual components. They were in the process of developing planetary probes, but I was surprised at the small size of Vernadsky’s transportation department. There was one engineer and two overworked technicians, and the rocket factory was only a cramped little shop on the outskirts of the habitat, lacking adequate space and sufficient tools to complete a rover, let alone a satellite. As near as I could discover, Vernadsky had launched two vehicles thus far, one a land probe and the other a satellite. The first had blown up on the launch pad. The second, yet another victim of the Great Galactic Ghoul, had failed to achieve orbit, and it was probably just dumb luck the
Kayak
hadn’t had a close encounter of the third kind with it on the way down. When I asked why they didn’t initiate a flight test program with miniature boosters, the engineer looked at me blankly. “If it works, it works,” Nick translated. “If it doesn’t, we try again. There’s no hurry.”

In the meantime, they stayed close to home. They had plenty to keep them busy. They mined iron; made glass bricks from the soil residue left by Meekmakers after the microwaves had boiled off the hydrogen and helium; tapped into calcium carbonate deposits for lime; experimented with ceramics; mined sulfur for explosives, insecticides, and fungicides; manufactured acids, dyes, and detergents; and with the iron they mined, smelted steel. In their immediate surroundings, say within a hundred kilometers in every direction, or the distance their two go-carts could go and return in a day, they had discovered and mined small but adequate amounts of phosphorous, zinc, lead, and magnesium chloride. They were an industrious bunch, I’d grant them that, and yet…

In many respects life for the Vernadsky colonists was idyllic. There was no rain that was not planned and no sleet, no snow, no floods, no mud slides, no forest fires. Marsquakes were weak and rarely registered with anything except the seismometer. Dust storms were their only real problem, as every two years or so the entire population had to turn out, shovel in hand, and clear the solar receptors of sand. Everybody had enough to eat, a place to sleep, and clothes to wear. The temperature never got below 12.5 degrees Celsius.

Still, something about the place bothered me. The New Martians were well-fed, well-housed, and seemed content, but they had also cut themselves off from everything in the outside environment, everything that made Mars what it was. Except for sunlight, and even that was filtered and refined down to its most basic and nonthreatening essence. They’d mapped and spec’d the surrounding countryside, but only far enough to identify and flag essential mineral deposits. They were either so wrapped up in colony construction or so incurious or both, as to ignore what might unlock the mystery of Prometheus and provide answers to the beginning of human life. They had escaped the Terran cage and the geocentric viewpoint of people inextricably bound to the earth, what spacers contemptuously called flatlanders, only to construct another and even smaller cage on the first available planet.

I realized that I was describing myself when Helen had first offered me the
Kayak.
I’d been on Outpost for so long, had run the mining and A World of Your Own operations for so many years, that at the time she approached me I must have thought there was no other life. It was an unflattering realization, and I squirmed beneath it.

I was hiking in one of the biomes early one morning soon after this realization, climbing the steep path that led up the cliff face from the ocean below to the savanna plateau above. It was good to stretch my muscles without the necessity of first donning a goonsuit, good to sweat and have the breeze fan my cheeks. I stood at the edge of the cliff, breathing in the cool morning air. Sol was just raising his sleepy head, and through the habitat window I watched him yawn and stretch and begin the slow climb to his feet. The first rays touched the roof of the biome. The breeze slowed, and then stilled completely, like the slack between tides on Terra.

I heard a sound, a low, keening wail. At first I thought it was the beginning stir of the wind, coming back from the other direction. Then a movement caught my eye. There was someone, squatting or kneeling in a clump of rubber tree fronds, farther down the cliff and dangerously close to its edge.

It was a woman, her uncombed hair streaked with white. She sat with her legs crossed beneath her, her staring eyes fixed on some object only she could see. Her jumpsuit was worn and filthy, her arms cradled an invisible baby, and she rocked gently back and forth, all the while crooning that thin, wordless wailing sound that had first attracted my attention and, even now that I knew where it came from, froze me where I stood.
The mirror crack’d from side to side,
and I started forward to help, only to be brought up short by a firm hand on one shoulder.

“There are some in whom this planet inspires at first sight not love, but hate and fear,” Nick said softly. “For a few it is too much.” He stepped around me. “Anya.” She made no reply. One large hand caressed her hair. She took no notice of him, or of me.

I was a fixer. I wanted to fix this. I wanted to fix her. I wanted to pick her up bodily, wash her, clothe her, jolt her out of her abstraction, make her see me, make her see herself, call her back from her waking nightmare.

The Lady of Shalott rocked back and forth, keening her macabre lullaby to a misbegotten child. Nick led me away.

· · ·

During our first week at Vernadsky another dust storm hit, effectively obliterating any trace of Kwan’s trail. The second week, Nick invited us to summer at Vernadsky, or stay at least until the worst of the dust storms had passed, whichever came first. After consultation with Sean and Paddy, we were pleased to accept. We still hadn’t been able to raise Cydonia on the net or off the beacon on Phobos, so I updated our initial looped message to include recent history and present location and set it to transmit once a day. I included a description of Kwan’s vehicle and advised the archaeologists to go armed at all times. Kwan and company would have gone to ground to wait out the storm season, same as us, or so I hoped, but I worried about the eggheads at Cydonia. From the personnel files in the
Kayak
’s computer, there wasn’t one of them I’d trust to back me up in a playground fistfight.

“You’ve got us,” Sean pointed out.

I looked at him, sitting next to his sister and regarding me with no little degree of cockiness. I supposed they were entitled to it. They had seen their first combat and proved themselves capable of performing in the clutch. With Kwan on the loose, Mars felt awfully small to me, and I feared their experience would have an opportunity to broaden all too soon. “So I do,” I said, and left it at that.

Nick helped us move the
Kayak
to a sheltered tie-down closer to the habitat. I powered down the He-maker so there was just enough pressure inside the Charliere to keep the envelopes off the ground and no more. That evening one of the New Martians’ teenage daughters invited Paddy for a pajama party, and her mother seconded the motion. Sean had been invited to the herbalist’s home, so I let them both off the leash for a weekend.