Red Mars

They followed her to the medina. Streetlights were broken, there was glass underfoot. They found a fire marshall and went to the Turkish Gate; he unlocked it and several of them hurried through, throwing on walkers at emergency speed. Then out into the night to look around, illuminated by the bathysphere glow of the city. Frank’s ankles hurt with the night cold, and he could feel the precise configuration of his lungs, as if two globes of ice had been inserted in his chest, to cool the rapid beat of his heart.

Nothing out there. Back inside. Over to the northern wall and the Syrian Gate, and out again under the stars. Nothing.

It took them a long time to think of the farm. By then there were about thirty of them in walkers, and they ran down and through the lock and flooded down the farm’s aisles, spreading out, running between crops.

They found him among the radishes. His jacket was pulled over his face, in the standard emergency air pocket; he must have done it unconsciously, because when they rolled him carefully onto one side, they saw a lump behind one ear.

“Get him inside,” Maya said, her voice a bitter croak – “Hurry, get him inside.”

Four of them lifted him. Chalmers cradled John’s head, and his fingers were intertwined with Maya’s. They trotted back up the shallow steps. Through the farm gate they stumbled, back into the city. One of the Swiss led them to the nearest medical center, already crowded with desperate people. They got John onto an empty bench. His unconscious expression was pinched, determined. Frank tore off his helmet and went to work pulling rank, bulling into the emergency rooms and shouting at the doctors and nurses. They ignored him until one doctor said, “Shut up. I’m coming.” She went into the hallway and with a nurse’s help clipped John into a monitor, then checked him out with the abstracted, absent look doctors have while working: hands at neck and face and head and chest, stethoscope …

Maya explained what they knew. The doctor took down an oxygen unit from the wall, looking at the monitor. Her mouth was bunched into a displeased little knot. Maya sat at the end of the bench, face suddenly distraught. Her domino had long since disappeared.

Frank crouched beside her.

“We can keep working on him,” the doctor said, “but I’m afraid he’s gone. Too long without oxygen, you know.”

“Keep working on him,” Maya said.

They did, of course. Eventually other medical people arrived, and they carted him off to an emergency room. Frank, Maya, Sax, Samantha, and a number of locals sat outside in the hall. Doctors came and went; their faces had the blank look they took on in the presence of death. Protective masks. One came out and shook his head. “He’s dead. Too long out there.”

Frank leaned his head back against the wall.

When Reinhold Messner returned from the first solo climb of Everest, he was severely dehydrated, and utterly exhausted; he fell down most of the last part of the descent, and collapsed on the Rongbuk glacier, and he was crawling over it on hands and knees when the woman who was his entire support team reached him; and he looked up at her out of a delirium, and said “Where are all my friends?”

It was quiet. No sound but the low hum and whoosh that one never escaped on Mars.

Maya put a hand on Frank’s shoulder, and he almost flinched; his throat clamped down to nothing, it really hurt. “I’m sorry,” he managed to say.

She shrugged the remark aside, frowned. She had somewhat the air of the medical people. “Well,” she said, “you never liked him much anyway.”

“True,” he said, thinking it would be politic to seem honest with her at that moment. But then he shuddered and said bitterly, “What do you know about what I like or don’t like.”

He shrugged her hand aside, struggled to his feet. She didn’t know; none of them knew. He started to go into the emergency room, changed his mind. Time enough for that at the funeral. He felt hollow; and suddenly it seemed to him that everything good had gone away.

He left the medical center. Impossible not to feel sentimental at such moments. He walked through the strangely hushed darkness of the city, into the land of Nod. The streets glinted as if stars had fallen to the pavement. People stood in clumps, silent, stunned by the news. Frank Chalmers made his way through them, feeling their stares, moving without thought toward the platform at the top of town; and as he walked he said to himself, Now we’ll see what I can do with this planet.

PART TWO The Voyage Out (#ulink_96419cd9-196e-5f8b-b625-3ac7b40c09be)

“Since they’re going to go crazy anyway, why not just send insane people in the first place, and save them the trouble?” said Michel Duval.

He was only half joking; his position throughout had been that the criteria for selection constituted a mind-boggling collection of double binds.

His fellow psychologists stared at him. “Can you suggest any specific changes?” asked the chairman, Charles York.

“Perhaps we should all go to Antarctica with them, and observe them in this first period of time together. It would teach us a lot.”

“But our presence would be inhibitory. I think just one of us will be enough.”

So they sent Michel Duval. He joined a hundred and fifty-odd finalists at McMurdo Station. The initial meeting resembled any other international scientific conference, familiar to them all from their various disciplines. But there was a difference: this was the continuation of a selection process that had lasted for years, and would last another. And those selected would go to Mars.

So they lived in Antarctica for over a year together, familiarizing themselves with the shelters and equipment that were already landing on Mars in robot vehicles; familiarizing themselves with a landscape that was almost as cold and harsh as Mars itself; familiarizing themselves with each other. They lived in a cluster of habitats located in Wright Valley, the largest of Antarctica’s Dry Valleys. They ran a biosphere farm, and then they settled into the habitats through a dark austral winter, and studied secondary or tertiary professions, or ran through simulations of the various tasks they would be performing on the spaceship Ares, or later on the red planet itself; and always, always aware that they were being watched, evaluated, judged.

They were by no means all astronauts or cosmonauts, although there were a dozen or so of each, with many more up north clamoring to be included. But the majority of the colonists would have to have their expertise in areas that would come into play after landfall: medical skills, computer skills, robotics, systems design, architecture, geology, biosphere design, genetic engineering, biology; also every sort of engineering, and construction expertise of several kinds. Those who had made it to Antarctica were an impressive group of experts in the relevant sciences and professions, and they spent a good bit of their time cross-training to become impressive in secondary and tertiary fields as well.

And all their activity took place under the constant pressure of observation, evaluation, judgement. It was necessarily a stressful procedure; that was part of the test. Michel Duval felt that this was a mistake, as it tended to ingrain reticence and distrust in the colonists, preventing the very compatability that the selection committee was supposedly seeking. One of the many double binds, in fact. The candidates themselves were quiet about that aspect of things, and he didn’t blame them; there wasn’t any better strategy to take, that was a double bind for you: it insured silence. They could not afford to offend anyone, or complain too much; they could not risk withdrawing too far; they could not make enemies.

So they went on being brilliant and accomplished enough to stand out, but normal enough to get along. They were old enough to have learned a great deal, but young enough to endure the physical rigors of the work. They were driven enough to excel, but relaxed enough to socialize. And they were crazy enough to want to leave Earth forever, but sane enough to disguise this fundamental madness, in fact to defend it as pure rationality, scientific curiosity or something of the sort – that seemed to be the only acceptable reason for wanting to go, and so naturally they claimed to be the most scientifically curious people in history! But of course there had to be more to it than that. They had to be alienated somehow, alienated and solitary enough not to care about leaving everyone they had known behind forever – and yet still connected and social enough to get along with all their new acquaintances in Wright Valley, with every member of the tiny village that the colony would become. Oh, the double binds were endless! They were to be both extraordinary and extra ordinary, at one and the same time. An impossible task, and yet a task that was an obstacle to their heart’s greatest desire; making it the very stuff of anxiety, fear, resentment, rage. Conquering all those stresses …

But that too was part of the test. Michel could not help but observe with great interest. Some failed, cracked in one way or another. An American thermal engineer became increasingly withdrawn, then destroyed several of their rovers and had to be forcibly restrained and removed. A Russian pair became lovers, and then had a falling out so violent that they couldn’t stand the sight of each other, and both had to be dropped. This melodrama illustrated the dangers of romance going awry, and made the rest of them very cautious in this regard. Relationships still developed, and by the time they left Antarctica they had had three marriages, and these lucky six could consider themselves in some sense “safe”; but most of them were so focused on getting to Mars that they put these parts of their lives on hold, and if anything conducted discreet friendships, in some cases hidden from almost everyone, in other cases merely kept out of the view of the selection committees.

And Michel knew he was seeing only the tip of the iceberg. He knew that critical things were happening in Antarctica, out of his sight. Relationships were having their beginnings; and sometimes the beginning of a relationship determines how the rest of it will go. In the brief hours of daylight, one of them might leave the camp and hike out to Lookout Point; and another follow; and what happened out there might leave its mark forever. But Michel would never know.

And then they left Antarctica, and the team was chosen. There were fifty men and fifty women: thirty-five Americans, thirty-five Russians, and thirty miscellaneous international affiliates, fifteen invited by each of the two big partners. Keeping such perfect symmetries had been difficult, but the selection committee had persevered.

The lucky ones flew to Cape Canaveral or Baikonur, to ascend to orbit. At this point they both knew each other very well and did not know each other at all. They were a team, Michel thought, with established friendships, and a number of group ceremonies, rituals, habits, and tendencies; and among those tendencies was an instinct to hide, to play a role and disguise their real selves. Perhaps this was simply the definition of village life, of social life. But it seemed to Michel that it was worse than that; no one had ever before had to compete so strenuously to join a village; and the resulting radical division between public life and private life was new, and strange. Ingrained in them now was a certain competitive undercurrent, a constant subtle feeling that they were each alone, and that in case of trouble they were liable to be abandoned by the rest, and yanked out of the group.

The selection committee had thus created some of the very problems it had hoped to prevent. Some of them were aware of this; and naturally they took care to include among the colonists the most qualified psychiatrist they could think of.

So they sent Michel Duval.

At first it felt like a shove in the chest. Then they were pushed back in their chairs, and for a second the pressure was deeply familiar: one g, the gravity they would never live in again. The Ares had been orbiting Earth at 28,000 kilometers per hour. For several minutes they accelerated, the rocket’s push so powerful that their vision blurred as corneas flattened, and it took an effort to inhale. At 40,000 kilometers per hour the burn ended. They were free of the Earth’s pull, in orbit to nothing but the sun.

The colonists sat in the delta V chairs blinking, their skin flushed, their hearts pounding. Maya Katarina Toitovna, the official leader of Russian contingent, glanced around. People appeared stunned. When obsessives are given their object of desire, what do they feel? It was hard to say, really. In a sense their lives were ending; and yet something else, some other life, had finally, finally begun … Filled with so many emotions at once, it was impossible not to be confused; it was an interference pattern, some feelings cancelled, others reinforced. Unbuckling from her chair Maya felt a grin contorting her face, and she saw on the faces around her the same helpless grin; all but Sax Russell, who was as impassive as an owl, blinking as he looked over the readouts on the room’s computer screens.

They floated weightlessly around the room. December 21st, 2026: they were moving faster than anyone in history. They were on their way. It was the beginning of a nine-month voyage – or of a voyage that would last the rest of their lives. They were on their own.

Those responsible for piloting the Ares pulled themselves to the control consoles, and gave the orders to fire lateral control rockets. The Ares began to spin, stabilizing at four rpm. The colonists sank to the floors, and stood in a pseudogravity of .38 g, very close to what they would feel on Mars. Many man-years of tests had indicated that it would be a fairly healthy g to live in, and so much healthier than weightlessness that rotating the ship had been deemed worth the trouble. And, Maya thought, it felt great. There was enough pull to make balance relatively easy, but hardly any feeling of pressure, of drag. It was the perfect equivalent of their mood; they staggered down the halls to the big dining hall in Torus D, giddy and exhilarated, walking on air.

In Torus D’s dining hall they mingled in a kind of cocktail party, celebrating the departure. Maya wandered about, sipping freely from a mug of champagne, feeling slightly unreal and extremely happy, a mix that reminded her of her wedding reception many years before. Hopefully this marriage would go better than that one had, she thought, because this one was going to last forever. The hall was loud with talk. “It’s a symmetry not so much sociological as mathematic. A kind of aesthetic balance.” “We’re hoping to get it into the parts per billion range, but it’s not going to be easy.” Maya turned down an offered refill, feeling giddy enough. Besides, this was work. She was co-mayor of this village, so to speak, responsible for group dynamics, which were bound to get complex. Antarctic habits kicked in even at this moment of triumph, and she listened and watched like an anthropologist, or a spy.

“The shrinks have their reasons. We’ll end up fifty happy couples.”

“And they already know the match-ups.”

She watched them laugh. Smart, healthy, supremely well-educated; was this the rational society at last, the scientifically-designed community that had been the dream of the Enlightenment? But there was Arkady, Nadia, Vlad, Ivana. She knew the Russian contingent too well to have many illusions on that score. They were just as likely to end up resembling an undergraduate dorm at a technical university, occupied by bizarre pranks and lurid affairs. Except they looked a bit old for that kind of thing; several men were balding, and many of both sexes showed touches of gray in their hair. It had been a long haul; their average age was forty-six, with extremes ranging from thirty-three (Hiroko Ai, the Japanese prodigy of biosphere design) to fifty-eight (Vlad Taneev, winner of a Nobel Prize in medicine).

Now, however, the flush of youth was on all their faces. Arkady Bogdanov was a portrait in red: hair, beard, skin. In all that red his eyes were a wild electric blue, bugging out happily as he exclaimed, “Free at last! Free at last! All our children are free at last!” The video cameras had been turned off, after Janet Blyleven had recorded a series of interviews for the TV stations back home; they were out of contact with Earth, in the dining hall anyway, and Arkady was singing, and the group around him toasted the song. Maya stopped to join this group. Free at last; it was hard to believe, they were actually on their way to Mars! Knots of people talking, many of them world class in their fields; Ivana had won part of a Nobel prize in chemistry, Vlad was one of the most famous medical biologists in the world, Sax was in the pantheon of great contributors to subatomic theory, Hiroko was unmatched in enclosed biological life support systems design, and so on all around; a brilliant crowd!

And she was one of their leaders. It was a bit daunting. Her engineering and cosmonautic skills were modest enough, it was her diplomatic ability that had gotten her aboard, presumably. Chosen to head the disparate, fractious Russian team, with the several commonwealth members – well, that was okay. It was interesting work, and she was used to it. And her skills might very well turn out to be the most important ones aboard. They had to get along, after all. And that was a matter of guile, and cunning, and will. Willing other people to do your bidding! She looked at the crowd of glowing faces, and laughed. All aboard were good at their work, but some were gifted far beyond that. She had to identify those people, to seek them out, to cultivate them. Her ability to function as leader depended on it; for in the end, she thought, they would surely become a kind of loose scientific meritocracy. And in such a society as that, the extraordinarily talented constituted the real powers. When push came to shove, they would be the colony’s true leaders – they, or those who influenced them.

She looked around, located her opposite number, Frank Chalmers. In Antarctica she had not gotten to know him very well. A tall, big, swarthy man. He was talkative enough, and incredibly energetic; but hard to read. She found him attractive. Did he see things as she did? She had never been able to tell. He was talking to a group across the length of the room, listening in that sharp inscrutable way of his, head tilted to the side, ready to pounce with a witty remark. She was going to have to find out more about him. More than that, she was going to have to get along with him.

She crossed the room, stopped by his side, stood so their upper arms just barely touched. Leaned her head in toward his. A brief gesture at their comrades: “This is going to be fun, don’t you think?”

Chalmers glanced at her. “If it goes well,” he said.

After the celebration and dinner, unable to sleep, Maya wandered through the Ares. All of them had spent time in space before, but never in anything like the Ares, which was enormous. There was a kind of penthouse at the front end of the ship, a single tank like a bowsprit, which rotated in the opposite direction the ship did, so that it held steady. Solar watch instruments, radio antennas, and all the other equipment which worked best without rotation were located in this tank, and at the very tip of it was a bulbous room of transparent plastic, a chamber quickly named the bubble dome, which provided the crew with a weightless, non-rotating view of the stars, and a partial view of the great ship behind it.