Ooops, I’m blundering into that again…let’s just change the subject.
“It’s been kinda dicey with Marc and Raoul. Nothing basic, just prickly, irritable. They are, I mean. I’m the soul of warm sympathy, just like always.”
She grinned, paused and looked around, wondering what they would appreciate about the landscape. Viktor panned with her gaze; he was really good at that by now.
“See that outcrop over there? I figure it was thrown out by the meteor that made Thyra Crater. Signature splash effect, radially outward. So I was looking around, sniffing for signs of how much water there was here, maybe break open a few rocks and look at the mineralization. The usual, in other words. Nobody’ll be able to say that at the tail end, I slowed up on the job!”
She sighed, feeling the old sensation of an emotional logjam: she could not switch from bright-eyed to real, not right away. She should have put some of the Thyra stuff in the public footage. Try again, then.
“I really miss you guys, as usual. Hope your viro treatments went easy, Dads. You looked great, last squirt I got. We had some trouble with the high-bandwidth signal, maybe lost your latest two days ago. Hope there’s one waiting when I get back to base. I had a dream about taking a bath last night. Just that, nothing but the bath. Shows you what sensory delights I miss, huh? A long scrub in a big tub, the one we had in the old place, remember? Well, love to the rest of the family!”
Short, but she couldn’t do any more without starting to go stilted on them. Maybe she had already. The first few months, she had replayed her squirts, both public and private, and edited them before the high-gain antenna sent them Earthside. Now she just let it go. History was history—over. If she scratched on camera, so be it.
“Was good,” Viktor said, smartly shutting off the camera.
“Let’s move.”
She started toward the rover, its sulfurous yellow standing out violently against the pink sands and rocks. At midday Mars was a bit less red, because the light coming nearly straight down wasn’t scattered as much by the perpetual fine dust that hung in the air.
In the distance a dust devil snaked lazily across the barren plain. They’d seen hundreds, nearly one a day. Kilometers high, they unceasingly threw the rusty fines of the surface into the thin atmosphere.
She had long ago given up yearning for green hills or ocean swells. Now Mars held for her a subtle but varied palette, its tans and rosy shades fraught with meaning. The mind adapted. Even so, iron oxides were a limited medium for nature’s work. She kept the flatscreen in her personal room set permanently on a green Irish hill sloping down to a pounding sea. When she got back, she was going to find that exact spot and live there a while. Maybe forever. And hang on the wall a real-time flatscreen of Gusev Crater.
“What’s that?”
Viktor peered out the big viewport and let the rover slow. “Cloud. Nearby.”
The filmy white mist faded. “How far?” Her heart was pounding, her biologist senses instantly alert. A water cloud at this time of day meant an underground vent.
“Hard to tell. Could be on horizon, long way off.”
“Or close. Damn, it’s gone.” She had caught it out of the corner of her eye and the haze had lasted only seconds.
“Was rising.”
“Yeah, I thought so too.”
They had skirted around some hummocky hills. To save time Viktor was taking a fast route back to base, angling over a long sandy slope. The cloud had hung over the hills to the east, in an area they had not crisscrossed in detail because it was tricky terrain.
“Go in there, slow work.”
One last try? “Let’s go look anyway.” Better late than never to find an outgassing vent.
An hour later she was ready to give up. Viktor was being good about it, carefully driving them across dry washes that had perhaps run with water or mud back before amphibians had first crawled up onto the beaches of Earth. They navigated around slumped pits that might have evaporated away ice deposits. Marc’s seismology had probed this region, mapping ice layers several tens of meters below, plus some enticing tendrils that might be lava tubes. But eons of erosion and shifting dust had obscured most telltales.
“There!” he whispered.
A plume of yellow-white furled up from behind a low crest. “It’s close!”
He floored the rover and its rumble echoed her quickening pulse. They had seen nothing like this through 500 days of patient crawling over the floor of Gusev Crater, a hundred fifty kilometers across. All along she’d harbored the hope that life would be hanging on underground, away from the cold and dry. With Marc she’d inspected the smaller Thyra Crater with microscopic attention, to no avail.
Over the rise, down a rocky slope toward a pit that didn’t look any different from thousands she had seen before. Yet above this one a teardrop plume faded into the pink air, towering a hundred meters like a dirty exhalation of—what?
“Thermal vent, uh?” Viktor flashed her a quick grin.
“Hush. The gods of Mars will hear you and take it away.”
He parked at the edge of the pit as she unclipped her gear from the wall mounts. The pit slope was fairly steep, and she got out all the climbing equipment. She had learned to keep it inside, where the fine dust could not get into the moving parts. Even the tough rope got worn away by the stuff where it rubbed.
Viktor sent Marc a quick radio message that they were going outside, and where they were. No need to get their hopes up with a description.
Out through the lock, consciously being systematic in moving the gear despite her excitement. Haste made accidents, and the lock was getting pesky, sticking around the seals.
Outside, she studied the whole area carefully, frowning. Steep, sandy descents were not her favorite. The fifteen-degree slope ran down about ten meters to a hole at the bottom about three meters across. It looked something like a giant ant lion pit. She guessed it was a volcanic blowout crater, rock walls obscured by the perpetually moving sands. “Looks like an old crater.”
“See those rocks at rim?” Viktor pointed.
“Right, the yellow and white patches? Unusual discoloration.”
“Condensate, could be.”
“Hope so.”
She had the irrational urge to sniff the air, guess what the gas plume had been. They looped the cable and pulley rig onto the rover’s back harness and winch. Going down the slope was a little tricky because the sandy dust had a funny layered feel, slipping away suddenly beneath her boots. A gritty skid. Viktor followed in her boot steps. They had secured the rope through their suit loops. She felt quite secure walking to the edge of the hole, but placed each step slowly to see if the rock rim would bear her weight. Months ago Marc had suffered a sudden fall when a shelf had given way, and he had limped for weeks. Looking down, she saw plenty of discoloration on the rocky throat that extended into blackness.
Viktor had knelt beside an outcrop. “Ice.”
“What? Where?”
