What she had truly come out to see was rising as the glorious crimson sunset began to fade. A ruby radiance suffused the horizon, and above it rose a lustrous blue-white dot. Earthrise.
A resplendent smudge, brimming brighter than Venus. She peered closely and could make out the small white point to one side. The only primary-and-moon visible to the naked eye in the solar system.
Until now, that tiny little interval had been the full extent of the human reach. On the bigger creamy-blue dot, a million years of hominid drama had been acted out, blood and dreams playing on a stage a few miles thick, under a blanket of forgiving air.
Then those brawling hominids had reached out. Half a century of sweat and ingenuity and courage had taken the species to the other dot, its alabaster, beckoning brilliance.
Now she could stand here and see the twin worlds of her birthplace for their true nature, a small neighborhood wonderland gliding through a hard darkness. One world was an airless desert, the other a moist promise.
The ground she stood upon had also held promise, once. Water had swirled here, Marc said, a kilometer deep. Volcanoes had belched and fumed into that ancient lake bed. Cooked by heat and violence, organic chemistry had worked its slow magic. Life arose and briefly bloomed.
What had it come to? Anything?
18
JANUARY 19, 2018
SHE WOKE TO THE BITING TANG OF BLACK COLOMBIAN PERKING IN THE pot, the scent mingling with a buttery aroma of pancakes, the sizzle of bacon in its lake of fat, all lacing in their steamy collaboration to make a perfect moist morning—
And then she snapped awake, really awake—on the hard rover bunk, hugging herself in her thermoelectric blanket. Once all her waking dreams had been about sex; now they were about food. She wasn’t getting enough of either, especially not since Viktor’s ankle.
The sprain would heal by the time they were on the long glide Earthward; their rations would not improve until they were back eating steak. She pushed the thought of meat out of her mind and sat up. First feelers of ruddy dawn laced a wisp of carbon dioxide cirrus high up; good. Today she got to burrow, at last.
“Hey Marc! I’ll start the coffee.”
No dallying over breakfast, though the hard cold that came through the rover walls made her shiver. She peered out the viewport as she munched a quick-heat breakfast bar. They would run on in-suit rations today, no returning to the Spartan comforts of the rover.
By the early pink glow the cable rigs still looked secure, anchored to the rover’s twin winches, which revved up nicely with a thin electrical whine. Marc didn’t trust the soil here to hold, based on some nasty close calls. So first they arranged cross-struts of monofilament cabling, to take lateral shear as they went down the steep incline. She helped drive into the loose soil a Y-brace that would keep their lines from scraping on the rim.
Care taken now would pay off in speed down below. They each had a separate winch and driver, rugged and light. Metal cable was much too heavy to fly to Mars, and not necessary under the lighter gravity. So far the peroxide dust did not seem to have affected the tough fibers. So far.
The first part was easy, just backing over. She always felt a bit funny, stepping backwards down a steep drop. They had practiced in Nevada deserts, but here the utterly unknown was at her back, where she couldn’t see it. A ruddy sunup was just breaking in pink streamers across the distant hills. Shadows the color of dried blood stretched across the hummocked land.
At the rim the rock was smooth, and this time, dry. There was no trace of the ice and intriguing organic scum she had harvested with Viktor only a week earlier. Any vapor from the vent had evaporated away. The Martian atmosphere was an infinite sponge.
The vent snaked around and steepened as the pale light of late dawn from above lost out to the gloom. The rock walls were smooth and eight meters wide.
“Big hole,” she said, “once you get inside.”
“Promising,” Marc allowed. “Gotta be cautious about geology we don’t understand yet.”
They reeled themselves down, letting the winches do the work. Quickly they reached a wide platform and the passage broadened further. Every ten meters down they checked to be sure the cable was not getting fouled. They were both clipped to it and had to time their movements to keep from getting snarls.
Cautiously they edged along the ledge, headlamps stabbing into the darkness. She was trying to peer ahead but her eyes were cloudy for some reason. She checked her faceplate but there was no condensate on it; the little suit circulators took care of that, even in the cold of full Martian night. Still, the glow from Marc’s suit dimmed.
“Marc, having trouble seeing you. Your lamp die?”
“Thought I was getting fogged. Here—” He clambered over on the steep slope of the ledge and shone his handbeam into her face. “No wonder. There’re drops of something all over your faceplate and helmet. Looks like water drops!”
“Water…?”
“We’re in a fog!” He was shouting.
She saw it then, a slow, rising mist in the darkness. “Vapor on Mars?”
“A water-ice blend, I’d say. Condenses out pretty fast, see?” White crusts coated nearby rocks.
“Not pure water.”
“No, probably hydrogen sulfide and stuff, too.”
She wanted to snap her fingers, but of course her gloves stopped her. “Yes! It could be a fog desert in here.”
“A what?”
“Ever been out in a serious fog? There’s not much water falling, but you get soaked anyway. There are deserts where it doesn’t rain for years, like the Namib and the coast of Baja California. Plants and animals living there have to trap the fog to get water.”
She thought quickly, trying to use what she knew to think about this place. In fact, frogs and toads in any desert exploited a temperature differential to get water out of the air even without a fog. When they came up out of their burrows at night they were cooler than the surrounding air. Water in the air condensed on their skin, which was especially thin and permeable.
Julia peered at the thin mist. “Are you getting a readout of the temperature? What’s it been doing since we started down?”
He fumbled at his waist pack for the thermal probe, switched it to readout mode. “Minus fourteen, not bad.” He thumbed for the memory and nodded. “It’s been climbing some, jumped a few minutes ago. Hmm. It’s warmer since the fog moved in.”
They reached the end of the ledge, which fell away into impenetrable black. “Come on, follow the evidence,” she said, playing out cable through her clasps. Here the low gravity was a big help. She could support her weight easily with one hand on the cable grabber, while she guided down the rock wall with the other.
“Evidence of what?” Marc called, grunting as he started down after her.
“A better neighborhood than we’ve been living in.”
