“Of course,” Viktor said. “That is a given. I wish to discuss one principle, before we go to details.”
Claudine frowned. “I do not understand how we can plan the return flight.”
“Principle is,” Viktor said soberly, “we decide here all such matters. Not Axelrod, not Airbus. We.”
They all nodded.
They went back in force to recover the bodies.
Julia had made the case for it, expecting opposition, but there was none. “We can’t let the mat get into the suits,” she said anyway. “It may find a way to breach them. Intermingling cells, who knows what damage that could do?”
Plus it could mess up doing clean science down there!
Only then did she think of the more humanitarian reason—the way Earthside would play it, of course: a decent burial.
Five Earthlings, two rovers, and three winches strong—the team of four prepared with aching detail. Viktor remained in Red Rover, to keep Earthside informed and to brood. His ankle was still not up to a major job.
They brought every spare air tank on the planet. Triple-checking every step, they planned meticulously and in the first leg of the descent made no mistakes. Raoul and Claudine unjammed the Airbus winch so they had enough lifting power to make the recovery possible. In the end it wasn’t that difficult.
As she lowered into the vast main chasm Julia felt a prickly sensation returning, a feeling she had not had the time to register before. Not fear, not curiosity…something with wonder in it: awe.
The mat was dim, hardly glowing at all. Their beams did not excite it. “Maybe it’s exhausted from the last time,” she said to Marc as the two lowered themselves gingerly. “Plants have a recovery time.”
“You said it’s not a plant.”
“Right. But basic metabolic laws should apply. Anaerobes are not as efficient as oxy users.”
The big valve they had found open, and so left Raoul and Claudine above it. Insurance, and to handle what was to come.
“I sure don’t want to wake it up,” Marc replied, dimming his hand beam.
The bodies did not seem to have changed at all. To all sides the mat lay like a dim, dormant rug. It did not seem to have swarmed further over the suits. The blue filaments were flaccid. The mist was less dense, and she got a clearer look at them. They looked more like giant tube worms than linguine. So much to learn.
But today was not for science.
Julia was cautious as they attached clasps and ties and stays to the Airbus lines, hovering over the bodies, but no awaking radiance rose from the surrounding mat.
They gave the signal. The Airbus winch labored to break free of the mat that encased the suits. They both came out with some hard pulling and the mat slithered away, collapsing below. Still no luminosity from it.
They rose together up into the misty atmosphere of the enormous vault. She longed to study it, watch its reaction to their breathing exhaust. As they neared the valve membrane some shifting colors came through the fog, as if from distant features. She still had no idea how far away the walls of this huge place were. It could go on for kilometers, part of an underground web of intricate implications…
They got the bodies through the narrow passage of the valve—and she was sure that term did indeed describe its function. Somehow the mat kept this region thick with vapor, and by ordinary gas dynamics that could not be sustained for long. The valve must cut off the losses to the surface, manage this eerie environment. A pressure lock.
But how did it know to close? How to respond to pressures and moisture densities? She was convinced that the glows and gas densities somehow carried messages, organizing this whole shadowy realm.
Raoul and Claudine were of great help in maneuvering the bodies around the edges and angles of the ascent. They were all careful of the bodies, working almost without speaking up through hundreds of meters of the vent. Sunlight beckoned above like a promise and she felt a surge of an odd, joyous energy. Still, when they got back to Red Rover, they were all exhausted.
“It’s the spookiness does it,” Raoul remarked. “I never figured on that.”
“Who could?” Marc said tersely.
They rested and ate in the hab. Inevitably, reaction from Earth-side had to be at least considered, though no one felt in the mood. Billions were jostling to peer through the media knothole at five people many millions of miles away…who didn’t much want to talk, thank you.
On her personal slate she saw that Airbus had accused her and a Consortium conspiracy of “driving the two to their deaths” because she wouldn’t share her Marsmat samples.
Axelrod’s PR people had been massaging the events, issuing a list of reasons to retrieve the bodies: salvage the suits; not contaminate the Mat; most featured: “It’s just not right to leave them there.”
She glanced at the immense backup of files and shuddered. “ALIENS KILL TWO ON MARS!” screamed the tabloids.
In all, it was like reading a barely understandable foreign tongue.
38
FEBRUARY 5, 2018
THEY MADE A LITTLE PROCESSION, A SHORT CORTEGE, SHE THOUGHT, following the dune buggy and its burden to the site.
With unspoken agreement they walked slowly up a low rise. A crimson sunset spread across the sky. Raoul brought the backhoe down the slope below the stone cairn they had erected early in the mission, at the christening of the base.
Julia glanced up at Claudine walking ahead, her suit still a deep blue, barely dusted with the pink stain of Mars. She walked tentatively, bouncing, uncertain.
They came upon the little perimeter circle of rocks. In the ensuing months, small pink sand dunes had invaded, piling up skirts on the lee side of the cairn. Raoul dug a pit with the backhoe on the buggy’s rear. Viktor and Marc picked up some nearby rocks and started building two more cairns. As they worked, Julia recorded the scene on vid. No one spoke.
She thought about all the little outposts on Earth, each with its tiny cemetery. Cemeteries behind ghost towns, underground catacombs dug out of rock, mummies in desert caves, single graves lost forever in the wilderness.
The act of remembering their dead connected them to all the rest of humanity, down through uncountable myriad millennia and across a vast black star-studded void. How long had people been doing this? she wondered. From before we were fully human. Neanderthals, unnamed, lost hominids…
This mission, cloaked in technology and driven by both greed and desire and something as old as the species—it, too, was part of an unstoppable exploring impulse that had conquered an entire planet, and now was starting on a second one. “Wagon Train in Space,” some wag had described an old sci-fi TV series. An apt description for them as well.
