Red Mars

A small smile from Michel. “You’re the expert in strange minds, Arkady.”

Then the few still watching the screens called out. The radiation count had started to fall. After a while it slipped back to just a little above normal.

Someone returned the Pastoral to the moment of the horn call. The last movement of the symphony, “Glad and Grateful Feelings After the Storm,” poured over the speaker system, and as they left the shelter and fanned out through the ship like dandelion seeds on a breeze, the beautiful old folk melody was broadcast throughout the Ares, elaborating itself in all its Brucknerian richness. While it played, they found that the ship’s hardened systems had survived intact. The thicker walls of the farm and the forest biome had afforded the plants some protection, and although there would be some die-offs and an entire crop they could not eat, the seed stocks were not harmed. The animals could not be eaten either, but presumably would give birth to a healthy next generation. The only casualties were some uncaptured songbirds from D’s dining hall; they found a scattering of them dead on the floor.

As for the crew, the shelter’s protection had shielded them from all but about 6 rem. That was bad for a mere three hours, but it could have been worse. The exterior of the ship had taken over 140 rem, a lethal dose.

Six months inside a hotel, with never a walk outside. Inside it was late summer, and the days were long. Green dominated the walls and ceilings, and people went barefoot. Quiet conversations were nearly inaudible in the hum of machinery, the whoosh of ventilators. The ship seemed empty somehow, whole sections of it abandoned as the crew settled down to wait. Small knots of people sat in the halls in Toruses B and D, talking. Some stopped their conversations when Maya wandered by, which she naturally found disturbing. She was having trouble falling asleep, trouble waking up. Work made her restless: all the engineers were only waiting, after all, and the simulations had gotten nearly intolerable. She had trouble gauging the passage of time. She stumbled more than she used to. She had gone to see Vlad and he had recommended over-hydration, more running, more swimming.

Hiroko told her to spend more time on the farm. She gave it a try, spending hours weeding, harvesting, trimming, fertilizing, watering, talking, sitting on a bench, looking at leaves: spacing out. The farm rooms were max chambers, their barrel roofs lined with bright sunstrips. The multi-leveled floors were crowded with crops, many new since the storm. There was not enough space to feed the crew entirely on farm food, but Hiroko disliked that fact and struggled against it, converting storage rooms as they emptied out. Dwarf strains of wheat, rice, soy and barley grew in stacked trays; above the trays hung rows of hydroponic vegetables and enormous clear jars of green and yellow algae, used to help regulate the gas exchange.

Some days Maya did nothing but watch the farm team work. Hiroko and her assistant Iwao were always tinkering at the endless project of maximizing the closure of their biological life support system, and they had a crew of other regulars working on it: Raul, Rya, Gene, Evgenia, Andrea, Roger, Ellen, Bob and Tasha. Success in the closure attempt was measured in K values, K representing closure itself. Thus for every substance they recycled,

where E was the rate of consumption in the system, e the rate of (incomplete) closure, and I a constant for which Hiroko, earlier in her career, had established a corrected value. The goal, K = I-1, was unreachable, but asymptotically approaching it was the farm biologists’ favorite game, and more than that, critical to their eventual existence on Mars. So conversations about it could extend over days, spiraling off into complexities that no one really understood. In essence the farm team was already at their real work, which Maya envied; she was so sick of simulations!

Hiroko was an enigma to Maya. Aloof and serious, she always seemed absorbed in her work and her team tended always to be around her, as if she was the queen of a realm that had nothing to do with the rest of the ship. Maya didn’t like that, but there was nothing she could do about it. And something in Hiroko’s attitude made it not so threatening: it was just a fact, the farm was a separate place, its crew a separate society. And it was possible that Maya could use them to counterbalance the influence of Arkady and John somehow; so she did not worry about their separate realm. In fact she joined them more than ever before. Sometimes she went with them up to the hub at the end of a work session, to play a game they had invented called tunneljump. There was a jump tube down the central shaft; all the joints between cylinders had been expanded to the same width as the cylinders themselves, making a single smooth tube. There were rails to facilitate quick movement back and forth along this tube, but in their game, jumpers stood on the storm shelter hatch, and tried to leap up the tube to the bubble dome hatch, a full five hundred meters away, without bumping into the walls or railings. Coriolis forces made this effectively impossible, and flying even halfway would usually win a game. But one day Hiroko came by on her way to check an experimental crop in the bubble dome, and after greeting them she crouched on the shelter hatch and jumped, and slowly floated the full length of the tunnel, rotating as she flew, and stopping herself at the bubble dome hatch with a single outstretched hand.

The players stared up the tunnel in stunned silence.

“Hey!” Rya called to Hiroko. “How did you do that?”

“Do what?”

They explained the game to her. She smiled, and Maya was suddenly certain she had already known the rules. “So how did you do it?” Rya repeated.

“You jump straight!” Hiroko explained, and disappeared into the bubble dome.

That night at dinner the story got around. Frank said to Hiroko, “Maybe you just got lucky.”

Hiroko smiled. “Maybe you and I should total twenty jumps and see who wins.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“What’ll we bet?”

“Money, of course.”

Hiroko shook her head. “Do you really think money matters anymore?”

A few days later Maya floated under the curve of the bubble dome with Frank and John, looking ahead at Mars, which was now a gibbous orb the size of a dime.

“A lot of arguments these days,” John remarked casually. “I hear Alex and Mary got into an actual fight. Michel says it’s to be expected, but still …”

“Maybe we brought too many leaders,” Maya said.

“Maybe you should have been the only one,” Frank jibed.

“Too many chiefs?” said John.

Frank shook his head. “That’s not it.”

“No? There are a lot of stars on board.”

“The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.”

“I leave the judgement to you, Captain.” John grinned at Frank’s scowl. He was, Maya thought, the only relaxed person left among them.

“The shrinks saw the problem,” Frank went on, “it was obvious enough even for them. They used the Harvard solution.”

“The Harvard solution,” John repeated, savoring the phrase.

“Long ago Harvard’s administrators noticed that if they accepted only straight A high school students, and then gave out the whole range of grades to freshmen, a distressing number of them were getting unhappy at their Ds and Fs and messing up the Yard by blowing their brains out on it.”

“Couldn’t have that,” John said.

Maya rolled her eyes. “You two must have gone to trade schools, eh?”

“The trick to avoiding this unpleasantness, they found, was to accept a certain percentage of students who were used to getting mediocre grades, but had distinguished themselves in some other way—”

“Like having the nerve to apply to Harvard with mediocre grades?”

“—used to the bottom of the grade curve, and happy just to be at Harvard at all.”

“How did you hear of this?” Maya asked.

Frank smiled. “I was one of them.”

“We don’t have any mediocrities on this ship,” John said.

Frank looked dubious. “We do have a lot of smart scientists with no interest in running things. Many of them consider it boring. Administration, you know. They’re glad to hand it over to people like us.”

“Beta males,” John said, mocking Frank and his interest in sociobiology. “Brilliant sheep.” The way they mocked each other—

“You’re wrong,” Maya said to Frank.

“Maybe so. Anyway, they’re the body politic. They have at least the power to follow.” He said this as if the idea depressed him.

John, due for a shift on the bridge, said goodbye and left.

Frank floated over to Maya’s side and she shifted nervously. They had never discussed their brief affair and it hadn’t come up, even indirectly, in quite a while. She had thought about what to say if it ever did: she would say that she occasionally indulged herself with men she liked. That it had been something done on the spur of the moment.

But he only pointed to the red dot in the sky. “I wonder why we’re going.”

Maya shrugged. Probably he meant not we, but I. “Everyone has their reasons,” she said.

He glanced at her. “That’s so true.”

She ignored his tone of voice. “Maybe it’s our genes,” she said. “Maybe they felt things going wrong on Earth. Felt an increased speed of mutation, or something like that.”