The Sunborn (2 page)

She ducked as a white shape hurtled by, narrowly missing her head. “Chicken alert!” she said lightly, gesturing toward it with her head. It squawked and flapped, turning like a feathered blimp with wings. “Who would have thought chickens could have so much fun up here, in the low gravity? They find it far easier to fly here than on Earth. Of course, we brought them here so we could have fresh eggs, and they do lay, so we predicted that part correctly. But we don’t always know everything that’s going to happen in a biological experiment. This is the Mars version of the chicken and egg problem.”

Viktor smiled dutifully; they’d shared this little joke before. The Earthside producer would more probably wince.
Okay, back to the script.

She waved a hand to her right, and Viktor followed the gesture with the camera, bringing in the view of the slopes and hills in the distance, beyond the green lances of the eucalyptus limbs. The slopes were still rusty red in the afternoon light, far beyond the dome that sloped down to its curved tie-down wall eighty meters away. They stood out nicely with the green eucalyptus foreground. The other trees—ranging from drought- and cold-resistant shrubs from Tasmania to hardy high-altitude species—almost made a convincing forest. The “grass” was really a mixture of mosses, lichens, and small tundra species, too. A big favorite of the staff was “vegetable sheep,” soft, pale clumps from New Zealand’s high country. Convincing to the visual audience—
a golf course on Mars!
—but also able to survive a cold Martian night and even a sudden pressure drop. The toughest stuff from Earth, made still more rugged with bioengineering.

Axelrod had insisted on the visuals. Make
it look Earthy, yes.
She had worked for years to make the inflated domes support life, and there was still plenty to do. Making the raw regolith swarm with microbes to build soil, coaxing lichens onto the boulders used to help anchor the dome floors in place, being sure the roots of the first shrubs could survive the cold and prickly alkaline dirt… Years, yes, grubbing and figuring and trying everything she could muster. For a beginning.

Pay attention!
You’re
on-Camera, and Viktor hates to reshoot.

“Ah, one of my faves…” She altered course to pass by a baobab—a tall, fat, tubular tree from Western Australia, with only a few thin, spidery limbs sprouting from its top, like a nearly bald man. Early settlers had used them for food storage, take shelter, even jail cells. On Mars they grew spectacularly fast, like eucalyptus, and nobody knew why. Aussie plants generally did better here, from the early greenhouse days of the first landing onward. Maybe, the biologist in her said, this came from the low-energy biology of Australia. The continent had skated across the Pacific, its mountains getting worn down, minerals depleted, rainfall lessening, and life had been forced to adapt. A hundred million years of life getting by with less and less…much like Mars.

“For those of you who’ve loyally stuck with us through these—wow!—twenty-two years, I say thanks. Sometimes I think that this is all a dream, and days like this prove it. Grass on Mars! Or—” She grinned, tilting her head up a bit to let the filtered sunlight play on her still-dark hair, using the only line she had prepared for this ’cast. “Another way to say it, I started out with nothing and still have most of it left. Out there—in wild Mars.”

Not that this little patch is so domesticated. It’s how we find out if raw regolith can become true soil, and what will grow well here.

“Already, there are environmental groups trying to preserve original, ancient Mars from us invaders.” She chuckled. “If Mars were just bare stone and dust, I’d laugh—I never did believe that rocks have rights. But since there’s life here, they have a point.”

This was just editorial patter, of course, while Viktor followed her on the walk toward the fountain. It tinkled and splashed in the foreground while she approached, Viktor shooting from behind her, so the camera looked through the trees, on through the clear dome walls to the dusty red landscape beyond. “I like to gaze out, so that I can imagine what Mars was like in its early days, a hospitable planet.” She turned, spread her hands in self-mockery. “Okay, we now know from fossils that there were no really big trees—nothing larger than a bush, in fact. But I can dream…”

She smiled and tried not to make it look calculated. After a quarter century of peering into camera snouts she had some media savvy. Still, she and Viktor thought in terms of,
If we do this, people will like it.
That had been a steadier guide through the decades than taking the advice about exploring Mars from the Earthside media execs of the Consortium, whose sole idea was,
If we do this, we’ll maximize our global audience share, get ideas for new product lines, and/or optimize near-term profitability.

She paused beside the splashing fountain. She plucked up a cup they had planted there, and drank from it. “On Earth you can drink all the water you want and leave the tap on between cupfuls. Here, nobody does.” She smiled and walked on. “You’ve seen this before, but imagine if it were the only fountain you’d seen in a quarter century. That’s why I come here to read, meditate, think. That—and our newest wonder…”

Let them wait.
She had learned that trick early on. Mars couldn’t be chopped up into five-second “image bites” and leave any lasting impression. She circled around the constant-cam that fed a view to Earthside for the market that wanted to have the Martian day as a wall or window in their homes. She knew this view sold especially well in the cramped rooms of China and India. It was a solid but subtle advertisement.

Crowded? Here’s a whole world, only a few dozen people on it
—
well, actually, about ten dozen
—
and it has the same land area as Earth. A different world entirely.

Things were different, all right. The dome was great, the biggest of several, a full 150 meters tall. It would have been far more useful in the first years, when they still lived in apartment-sized habs. Now her pressure suit was supple, moving fluidly over her body as she walked and stooped. The first expedition suits were the best of their era, but they still made you as flexible as a barely oiled Tin Man, as dextrous as a bear in mittens. The old helmets misted over unless you remembered to swab the inside with ordinary dish soap. And the catheters had always been irksome, especially for women; now they fit beautifully.

Outside, the wind whistled softly around the dome walls. Another reason she enjoyed the big dome—the sighing winds. Sounds didn’t carry well in Mars’ thin atmosphere, and the habs were so insulated they were cut off from any outdoor noise.

The grass ended, and she crunched over slightly processed regolith. Lichens could break the rock down, but they took time—lots of it. So they’d taken shortcuts to make an ersatz soil. They mixed Martian dust and small gravel-sized rock bits with a lot of their organic waste, spaded in over decades—everything from kitchen leftovers to slightly cleaned excrement. Add compost-starter bacteria, keep moist, and wait. And hope. Microbes liked free carbon, using it with water to frame elaborate molecules. She and Viktor had doled it out for years under the first, small dome before even trying to grow anything. The Book of Genesis got it all done in six days, but mere humans took longer.

She hit the marker they had laid out—a rock—and turned, pointing off-camera. “And now—
ta’daah!
—we have a surprise. The first Martian swimming pool.”

Okay, no swimming pools in Genesis
—
but it’s a step.

“I’m going for my first swim—now.” She shucked off her blue jumpsuit to reveal a red bikini. Her arms and legs were muscular, breasts midsize, skin pale, not too many wrinkles. Not really a babe, no, but she still got mash notes from middle-aged guys, somehow leaking through the e-mail filters.

Hey
,
we’re looking for market share here!
She grinned, turned, and dove into the lapping clear water. Surfaced, gasped—she wasn’t faking, this really was her first swim in a quarter century—and laughed with sheer pleasure (not in the script). Went into a breaststroke, feeling the tug and flex of muscle, and something inexpressible and simple burst in her.
Fun, yes
—
not nearly enough fun on Mars.

Or water.
They had moved from the original base camp about eighteen years before. Once Earthside had shipped enough gear to build a real water-retrieval system, and a big nuke generator to run it, there seemed no point in not moving the hab and other structures—mostly light and portable—to the ice hills.

Mars was in some ways an upside-down world. On Earth one would look for water in the low spots, stream channels. Here in Gusev water lay waiting in the hilly hummocks, termed by geologists “pingos.” When water froze beneath blown dust, it thrust up as it expanded, making low hills of a few hundred meters. She recalled how Marc and Raoul had found the first ice, their drill bit steaming as ice sublimed into fog. Now Marc was a big vid star and Raoul ran Axelrod’s solar energy grid on the moon. Time…

She stopped at the pool edge, flipped out, and sprang to her feet—
thanks, 0.38 g!
“The first swim on Mars, and you saw it.”
Planned this shot a year ago, when I ordered the bikini.
She donned a blue terry-cloth bathrobe; the dryness made the air feel decidedly chilly. “In case you’re wondering, swimming doesn’t feel any different here. That’s because the water you displace makes you float—we’re mostly made of water, so the effect compensates. It doesn’t matter much what the local gravity is.”

Okay, slipped in some science while their guard was down.

“Behind all this is our improved water-harvesting system.” She pointed out the dome walls, where pipes stretched away toward a squat inflated building. “Robotic, nuclear-powered. It warms up the giant ice sheets below us, pumps water to the surface. Took nine years to build—whoosh! Thank you, engineers.”

What did the water mean? She envisioned life on a tiny fraction of Mars with plentiful water—no longer a cold, dusty desert. Under a pressurized dome the greenhouse effect raised the temperature to something livable. Link domes, blow up bigger ones, and you have a colony. They could grow crops big-time. Red Kansas…

A gout of steam hissed from a release value, wreathing her in a moist, rotten-egg smell. Andy had put the finishing touches on the deep thermal system, spreading the upwelling steam and hot water into a pipe system two meters below the dome floor. Their nuke generators ran the system, but most of the energy came for free from the magma lode kilometers below. Once the geologists—“areologists” when on Mars, the purists said—had drilled clean through the pingos and reached the magma, the upwelling heat melted the ice layers. Ducted upward, it made possible the eight domes they now ran, rich in moist air. Soon they would start linking them all. She smiled as she thought about strolling along treelined walkways from dome to dome, across windblown ripe wheat fields, no helmet or suit. Birds warbling, rabbits scurrying in the bushes.

In the first years their diet had been vegetarian. It made sense to eat plant protein directly, rather than lose 90 percent of the energy by passing it through an animal first. But from the first four rabbits shipped out they now had hundreds, and relished dinner on “meat nights.” They’d have one tonight, after this media show.

“So that’s it—life on Mars gets a bit better. We’re still spending most of our research effort on the Marsmat—the biggest conceptual problem in biology, we think. We just got a new crew to help. And pretty soon, on the big nuke rocket due in a week, we’ll get a lot more gear and supplies. Onward!”

She grinned, waved—and Viktor called, “Is done.”

She had waited long enough. She shucked off the bathrobe and tossed the wireless mike on top of the heap.

“Am still running.”

“Check it for editing,” she said quickly. “I’m going to splash.” She dove into the pool again. Grinning, Viktor caught it in slow-mo.

Julia rolled over onto her back and took a few luxurious strokes. She caught Andy’s kick off the platform and watched him swoop gracefully around the dome. It was still a bit of a thrill to see. They kept the dome at high pressure to support it, which added more lift for Andy. He kept his wings canted against the thermals that rose from the warm floor, camera-savvy, grinning relentlessly.

Even with the lower gravity and higher air density, Viktor and Julia had been skeptical that it could work. But Axelrod and the Consortium Board had loved the idea, seeing tourism as a long-term potential market.

And Andy did look great, obviously having a lot of fun, his handsome legs forming a neat line as he arced above. He rotated his arms, mimicking the motion birds make in flight, pumping thrust into his orbit. His turn sharpened into a smaller circle, coming swiftly around the steepled bulk of the big eucalyptus. His wings pitched to drive him inward, and wind rippled his hair. Julia watched Viktor follow the accelerating curve with the camera, bright wings sharp against the dark sky. Good stuff.

But he was cutting it close to the tree, still far up its slope. The Consortium Board had chosen Andy both for his engineering skills and for this grinning, show-off personality, just the thing to perk up their audience numbers.

His T-shirt flapped, and he turned in closer still. She lost sight of him behind the eucalyptus, and when he came within view again, there seemed to be no separation at all between his body and the tree. Ahead of him a limb stuck out a bit farther than the rest. He saw it and turned his right wing to push out, away, and the wing hit the limb. For an instant it looked as though he would bank down and away from the glancing brush. But the wing caught on the branch.

It ripped, showing light where the monolayer split away from the brace. Impact united with the change in flow patterns around his body. The thin line of light grew and seemed to turn Andy’s body on a pivot, spinning him.

The eucalyptus wrenched sideways. It was thin, and the collision jerked.

He fought to bring the wing into a plane with his left arm, but the pitch was too much. Julia gasped as his right arm frantically pumped for leverage it did not have. The moment froze, slowed—and then he was tumbling in air, away from the tree, falling, gathering speed.