Red Mars

The next day she looked at Janet curiously; she had had no idea. Janet was friendly, she leaned in at you as you talked, and really paid attention. And she had a quick smile. But … well, the ship had been built to insure a lot of privacy. No doubt there was more happening than anyone could know.

And among these secret lives, might there not be another secret life, led in solitude, or in teamwork with some few among them, some small clique or cabal?

“Have you noticed anything funny lately?” she asked Nadia one day, at the end of their regular breakfast chat.

Nadia shrugged. “People are bored. It’s about time to get there, I think.”

Maybe that was all it was.

Nadia said, “Did you hear about Hiroko and Arkady?”

Rumors were constantly swirling about Hiroko. Maya found it distasteful, disturbing. That the lone Asian woman among them should be the focus of that kind of thing – dragon lady, mysterious orient… Underneath the scientific rational surfaces of their minds, there were so many deep and powerful superstitions. Anything might happen, anything was possible.

Like a face seen through a glass.

And so she listened with a tight feeling in her stomach as Sasha Yefremov leaned over from the next table and responded to Nadia’s question by wondering if Hiroko were developing a male harem. That was nonsense; although an alliance of some sort between Hiroko and Arkady had an unsettling sort of logic to Maya, she was not sure why. Arkady was very open in advocating independence from mission control, Hiroko never talked about it at all; but in her actions hadn’t she already led the whole farm team away, into a mental torus the others could never enter?

But then when Sasha claimed in a low voice that Hiroko had plans to fertilize several of her own ova with sperm from all the men on the Ares and store them cryonically for later growth on Mars, Maya could only sweep up her tray and head for the dishwashers, feeling something like vertigo. They were becoming strange.

The red crescent grew to the size of a quarter, and the feeling of tension grew as well, as if it were the hour before a thunderstorm, and the air charged with dust and creosote and static electricity. As if the god of war were really up there on that blood dot, waiting for them. The green wall panels inside the Ares were now flecked with yellow and brown, and the afternoon light was thick with sodium vapor’s pale bronze.

People spent hours in the bubble dome, watching what none among them but John had seen before. The exercise machines were in constant use, the simulations performed with renewed enthusiasm. Janet took a swing through the toruses, sending back video images of all the changes in their little world; then she threw her glasses on a table, and resigned her post as reporter. “Look, I’m tired of being an outsider,” she said. “Every time I walk into a room everyone shuts up, or starts preparing their official line. It’s like I was a spy for an enemy!”

“You were,” Arkady said, and gave her a big hug.

At first no one volunteered to take over her job. Houston sent messages of concern, then reprimands, then veiled threats. Now that they were about to reach Mars, the expedition was getting a lot more TV time, and the situation was about to “go nova,” as mission control put it. They reminded the colonists that this burst of publicity would eventually reap the space program all kinds of benefits; the colonists had to film and broadcast what they were doing, to stimulate public support for the later Mars missions on which they were going to depend. It was their duty to transmit their stories!

Frank got on the screen and suggested that mission control could concoct their video reports out of footage from robot cameras. Hastings, head of Mission Control in Houston, was visibly infuriated by this response. But as Arkady said, with a grin that extended the realm of the question to everything: “What can they do?”

Maya shook her head. They were sending a bad signal, she knew; and revealing what the video reports had so far hidden, that the group was splintering into rival cliques. Which indicated Maya’s own lack of control over the Russian half of the expedition. She was about to ask Nadia to take over the reporting job as a favor to her, when Phyllis and some of her friends in Torus B volunteered for the job. Maya, laughing at the expression on Arkady’s face, gave it to them. Arkady pretended not to care. Irritated, Maya said in Russian, “You know you’ve missed a chance! A chance to shape our reality, in effect!”

“Not our reality, Maya. Their reality. And I don’t care what they think.”

Maya and Frank began conferring about landfall assignments. To a certain extent these were predetermined by the crew members’ areas of expertise, but because of all the skill redundancies, there were still some choices to be made. And Arkady’s provocations had had this effect at least: Mission Control’s preflight plans were now generally regarded as provisional at best. In fact no one seemed all that inclined to acknowledge Maya’s or Frank’s authority either, which made things tense when it became known what they were working on.

Mission Control’s preflight plan called for the establishment of a base colony on the plains north of Ophir Chasma, the enormous northern arm of Valles Marineris. All the farm team was assigned to the base, and a majority of the engineers and medical people – altogether, around sixty of the hundred. The rest would be scattered on subsidiary missions, returning to the base camp from time to time. The largest subsidiary mission was to dock a part of the disassembled Ares on Phobos, and begin transforming that moon into a space station. Another smaller mission would leave the base camp and travel north to the polar cap, to build a mining system which would transport blocks of ice back to the base. A third mission was to make a series of geological surveys, traveling all over the planet; a glamor assignment for sure. All the smaller groups would become semi-autonomous for periods of up to a year, so selecting them was no trivial matter; they knew well, now, how long a year could be.

Arkady and a group of his friends – Alex, Roger, Samantha, Edvard, Janet, Tatiana, Elena – requested all the jobs on Phobos. When Phyllis and Mary heard about it, they came to Maya and Frank to protest. “They’re obviously trying to take over Phobos, and who knows what they’ll do with it?”

Maya nodded, and she could see Frank didn’t like it either. The problem was, no one else wanted to stay on Phobos; even Phyllis and Mary weren’t clamoring to replace Arkady’s crew, so it wasn’t clear how to oppose him.

Louder arguments broke out when Ann Clayborne passed around her crew list for the geological survey. A lot of people wanted to join that one, and several of those left off her list said they were going on surveys whether Ann wanted them or not.

Arguments became frequent, and vehement. Almost everyone aboard declared themselves for one mission or another, positioning themselves for the final decisions. Maya felt that she was losing all control of the Russian contingent; she was getting furious at Arkady. In a general meeting she suggested sarcastically that they let the computer make the assignments. The idea was rejected with no regard for her authority. She threw up her hands. “Then what do we do?”

No one knew.

She and Frank conferred in private. “Let’s try giving them the illusion of making the decision,” he said to her with a brief smile; she realized that he was not displeased to have seen her fail in the general meeting. Their encounter was coming back to haunt her, and she cursed herself for a fool. Little politburos were dangerous …

Frank polled everyone concerning their wishes, and then displayed the results on the bridge, listing everyone’s first, second and third choices. The geological surveys were popular, while staying on Phobos was not. Everyone already knew this, and the posted lists proved that there were fewer conflicts than it had seemed. “There are complaints about Arkady taking over Phobos,” Frank said at the next public meeting. “But no one but him and his friends want that job. Everyone else wants to get down to the surface.”

Arkady said, “In fact we should get hardship compensation.”

“It’s not like you to talk about compensation, Arkady,” Frank said smoothly.

Arkady grinned and sat back down.

Phyllis wasn’t amused. “Phobos will be a link between Earth and Mars, like the space stations in Earth orbit. You can’t get from one planet to the other without them, they’re what naval strategists call choke points.”

“I promise to keep my hands off your neck,” Arkady said to her.

Frank snapped, “We’re all going to be part of the same village! Anything we do affects all of us! And judging by the way you’re acting, dividing up from time to time will be good for us. I for one wouldn’t mind having Arkady out of my sight for a few months.”

Arkady bowed. “Phobos here we come!”

But Phyllis and Mary and their crowd still were not happy. They spent a lot of time conferring with Houston, and whenever Maya went into Torus B, conversations seemed to cease, eyes followed her suspiciously – as if being Russian would automatically put her in Arkady’s camp! She damned them for fools, and damned Arkady even more. He had started all this.

But in the end it was hard to tell what was going on, with a hundred people scattered in what suddenly felt like such a large ship. Interest groups, micropolitics; they really were fragmenting. One hundred people only, and yet they were too large a community to cohere! And there was nothing she or Frank could do about it.

One night she dreamed again of the face in the farm. She woke shaken, and was unable to fall back asleep; and suddenly everything seemed out of control. They flew through the vacuum of space inside a small knot of linked cans, and she was supposed to be in charge of this mad argosy! It was absurd!

She left her room, climbed D’s spoke tunnel to the central shaft. She pulled herself to the bubble dome, forgetting the tunneljump game.

It was four a.m. The inside of the bubble dome was like a planetarium after the audience has gone: silent, empty, with thousands of stars packed into the black hemisphere of the dome. Mars hung directly overhead, gibbous and quite distinctly spherical, as if a stone orange had been tossed among the stars. The four great volcanoes were visible pockmarks, and it was possible to make out the long rifts of Marineris. She floated under it, spreadeagled and spinning very slightly, trying to comprehend it, trying to feel something specific in the dense interference pattern of her emotions. When she blinked, little spherical teardrops floated out and away among the stars.

The lock door opened. John Boone floated in, saw her, grabbed the door handle to stop himself. “Oh, sorry. Mind if I join you?”

“No.” Maya sniffed and rubbed her eyes. “What gets you up at this hour?”

“I’m often up early. And you?”

“Bad dreams.”

“Of what?”

“I can’t remember,” she said, seeing the face in her mind.

He pushed off, floated past her to the dome. “I can never remember my dreams.”

“Never?”

“Well, rarely. If something wakes me up in the middle of one, and I have time to think about it, then I might remember it, for a little while anyway.”

“That’s normal. But it’s a bad sign if you never remember your dreams at all.”

“Really? What’s it a symptom of?”

“Of extreme repression, I seem to recall.” She had drifted to the side of the dome; she pushed off through the air, stopped herself against the dome next to him. “But that may be Freudianism.”

“In other words something like the theory of phlogiston.”

She laughed. “Exactly.”

They looked out at Mars, pointed out features to each other. Talked. Maya glanced at him as he spoke. Such bland, happy good looks; he really was not her type. In fact she had taken his cheeriness for a kind of stupidity back at the beginning. But over the course of the voyage she had seen that he was not stupid.

“What do you think of all the arguments about what we should do up there?” she asked, gesturing at the red stone ahead of them.

“I don’t know.”

“I think Phyllis makes a lot of good points.”

He shrugged. “I don’t think that matters.”

“What do you mean?”

“The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims, with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgement on what they think of X and Y.”

“But we’re scientists! We’re trained to weigh the evidence. ”

John nodded. “True. In fact, since I like you, I concede the point.”

She laughed and pushed him, and they tumbled down the sides of the dome away from each other.

Maya, surprised at herself, arrested her motion against the floor. She turned and saw John coming to a halt across the dome, landing against the floor. He looked at her with a smile, caught a rail and launched himself into the air, across the domed space on a course aimed at her.

Instantly Maya understood, and forgetting completely her resolution to avoid this kind of thing, she pushed off to intercept him. They flew directly at each other, and to avoid a painful collision had to catch and twist in mid-air, as if dancing. They spun, hands clasped, spiraling up slowly toward the dome. It was a dance, with a clear and obvious end to it, there to reach whenever they liked: whew! Maya’s pulse raced, and her breath was ragged in her throat. As they spun they tensed their biceps and pulled together, as slowly as docking spacecraft, and kissed.

With a smile John pushed down from her, sending her flying to the dome, and him to the floor, where he caught and crawled to the chamber’s hatch. He locked it.

Maya let her hair loose and shook it out so it floated around her head, across her face. She shook it wildly and laughed. It was not as though she felt on the verge of any great or overmastering love; it was simply going to be fun; and that feeling of simplicity was … She felt a wild surge of lust, and pushed off the dome toward John. She tucked into a slow somersault, unzipping her jumper as she spun, her heart pounding like tympanis, all her blood rushing to her skin, which tingled as if thawing as she undressed, banged into John, flew away from him after an overhasty tug at a sleeve; they bounced around the chamber as they got their clothes off, miscalculating angles and momentums until with a gentle thrust of the big toes they flew into each other and met in a spinning embrace, and floated kissing among their floating clothes.

In the days that followed they met again. They made no attempt to keep the relationship a secret; so very quickly they were a known item, a public couple. Many aboard seemed taken aback by the development; and one morning walking into the dining hall, Maya caught a swift glance from Frank, seated at a corner table, that chilled her; it reminded her of some other time, some incident, some look on his face that she couldn’t quite call to mind.

But most of those aboard seemed pleased. After all it was a kind of royal match, an alliance of the two powers behind the colony, signifying harmony. Indeed the union seemed to catalyze a number of others, which either came out of the closet or, in the newly supersaturated medium, sprang into being. Vlad and Ursula, Dmitri and Elena, Raul and Marina; newly evident couples were everywhere, to the point where the singletons among them began to make nervous jokes about it. But Maya thought she noticed less tension in voices, fewer arguments, more laughter.

One night, lying in bed thinking about it (thinking of wandering over to John’s room) she wondered if that was why they had gotten together: not from love, she still did not love him, she felt no more than friendship for him, charged by lust that was strong but impersonal – but because it was, in fact, a very useful match. Useful to her – but she swerved from that thought, concentrated on the match’s usefulness to the expedition as a whole. Yes, it was politic. Like feudal politics, or the ancient comedies of spring and regeneration. And it felt that way, she had to admit; as if she were acting in response to imperatives stronger than her own desires, acting out the desires of some larger force. Of, perhaps, Mars itself. It was not an unpleasant feeling.

As for the idea that she might have gained leverage over Arkady; or Frank; or Hiroko … well, she successfully avoided thinking about that. It was one of Maya’s talents.

Blooms of yellow and red and orange spread across the walls. Mars was now the size of the moon in Earth’s sky. It was time to harvest all their effort; only a week more, and they would be there.

There was still tension over the unsolved problems of landfall assignments. And now Maya found it less easy than ever to work with Frank: it was nothing obvious, but it occurred to her that he did not dislike their inability to control the situation, because the disruptions were being caused more by Arkady than anyone else, and so it looked like it was more her fault than his. More than once she left a meeting with Frank and went to John, hoping to get some kind of help. But John stayed out of the debates, and threw his support behind everything that Frank proposed. His advice to Maya in private was fairly acute, but the trouble was he liked Arkady and disliked Phyllis; so often he recommended to her that she support Arkady, apparently unaware of the way this tended to undercut her authority among the other Russians. She never pointed this out to him, however. Lovers or not, there were still areas she didn’t wish to discuss with him, or with anyone else.

But one night in his room her nerves were jangling, and lying there, unable to sleep, worrying about first this and then that, she said, “Do you think it would be possible to hide a stowaway on the ship?”

“Well, I don’t know,” he said, surprised. “Why do you ask?”

Swallowing hard, she told him about the face through the algae bottle.

He sat up in bed, staring at her. “You’re sure it wasn’t …”

“It wasn’t any of us.”

He rubbed his jaw. “Well … I suppose if he were getting help from someone in the crew …”

“Hiroko,” Maya suggested. “I mean, not just because she’s Hiroko, but because of the farm and all that. It would solve his food problem, and there’s a lot of places to hide there. And he could have taken shelter with the animals during the radiation storm.”

“They got a lot of rems!”

“But he could have gotten behind their water supply. A little one-man shelter wouldn’t be too hard to set up.”

John still hadn’t gotten over the idea of it. “A whole year in hiding!”

“It’s a big ship. It could be done, right?”

“Well, I suppose so. Yeah, it could, I guess. But why?”

Maya shrugged. “I have no idea. Someone who wanted on, who didn’t make the selection. Someone who had a friend, or friends …”

“Still! I mean, a lot of us had friends who wanted to come. That doesn’t mean that …”

“I know, I know.”

They talked about it for most of an hour, discussing the possible reasons, the methods that could have been used to slip a passenger on board, to hide him, and so on. And then Maya suddenly noticed that she felt much better; that she was, in fact, in a wonderful mood. John believed her! He didn’t think she had gone crazy! She felt a wash of relief and happiness, and threw her arms around him. “It’s so good to be able to talk to you about this!”

He smiled. “We’re friends, Maya. You should have brought it up before.”

“Yes.”

The bubble dome would have been a wonderful place to view their final approach to Mars, but they were going to be aerobraking to reduce speed, and the dome would be behind the heat shield that they now deployed. There would be no view.

Aerobraking saved them from the necessity of carrying the enormous amount of fuel it would have taken to slow down, but it was an extremely precise operation, and therefore dangerous. They had a leeway of less than a millisecond of arc, and so several days before MOI the navigation team began to tweak their course with small burns on an almost hourly basis, fine tuning the approach. Then as they got closer they stopped the ship’s rotation. The return to weightlessness, even in those used to it, was a shock; suddenly it came home to Maya that it wasn’t just another simulation. She lofted through the windy air of the hallways, seeing everything from a strange new high perspective; and all of a sudden it felt real.

She slept in snatches, an hour here, three hours there. Every time she stirred, floating in her sleeping bag, she had a moment of disorientation, thinking she was in Novy Mir again. Then she would remember, and adrenalin would knock her awake: almost there. She would pull through the halls of the torus, pushing off the wall panels of brown and gold and bronze. On the bridge she would check with Mary or Raul or Marina, or someone else in navigation; everything still on course. They were approaching Mars so quickly it seemed they could see it expanding on the screens.

They had to miss the planet by thirty kilometers, or about one ten-millionth of the distance they had traveled. No problem, Mary said, with a quick glance at Arkady. So far they were on the Mantra Run, and hopefully none of his mad problems would crop up.

The crew members not involved with navigation worked to batten down, preparing everything for the torque and bumps that two and half g were sure to bring. Some of them got to go out on EVAs, to deploy subsidiary heat shields and the like. There was a lot to do; and yet the days seemed long anyway.

It was going to happen in the middle of the night, and so that evening all the lights stayed on, and no one went to bed. Everyone had a station – some on duty, most of them only waiting it out. Maya sat in her chair on the bridge, watching the screens and the monitors, thinking that they looked just like they would if it were all a simulation in Baikonur. Could they really be going into orbit around Mars?

They could. The Ares hit Mars’s thin high atmosphere at forty thousand kilometers per hour, and instantly the ship was vibrating heavily, Maya’s chair shaking her fast and hard, and there was a faint low roar, as if they flew through a blast furnace – and it looked like that too, because the screens were bursting with an intense pink-orange glow. Compressed air was bouncing off the heat shields and blazing past all the exterior cameras, so that the whole bridge was tinged the color of Mars. Then gravity returned with a vengeance; Maya’s ribs were squeezed so hard that she had trouble breathing, and her vision was blurred. It hurt!

They were plowing through the thin air at a speed and height calculated to put them into what aerodynamicists call transitional flow, a state halfway between free molecular flow and continuum flow. Free molecular flow would have been the preferred mode of travel, with the air that struck the heat shield shoved to the sides, and the resulting vacuum refilled mostly by molecular diffusion; but they were moving too fast for that, and they could only just barely avoid the tremendous heat of continuum flow, in which air would have moved over shield and ship as part of a wave action. The best they could do was to take the highest possible course that would slow them enough; and this put them into transitional flow, which vacillated between free molecular and continuum flow, making for a bumpy ride. And there lay the danger. If they were to hit a high pressure cell in the Martian atmosphere, where heat or vibration or g forces caused some sensitive mechanism to break, then they could be cast into one of Arkady’s nightmares at the very time they were crushed in their chairs, “weighing” four hundred pounds apiece, which was something Arkady had never been able to simulate very well. In the real world, Maya thought grimly, at the moment when they were most vulnerable to danger, they were also most helpless to deal with it.