The Martians

‘No, no – no – I’m going to have a look at the Scott and Shackleton huts. A matter of research. I’ll be right back.’

Her look showed that she did not believe it. Also that she cared where he went.

But it was in the nature of research, after all. The little cabins left behind by the first explorers of Antarctica were the remains of some of the very few expeditions in human history that resembled in any way what they were proposing to do on Mars. Though of course all analogy was false and misleading, and dangerous – this was a new thing they were thinking, a new event in history, nothing like it before.

Still, the first decades of Antarctic exploration had been somewhat like their planned expedition, he had to admit as the helicopter landed on the black rock of Cape Evans, and he followed the other distinguished visitors to the small snow-slabbed wooden hut above the beach. This was the nineteenth-century equivalent of their settlement at Lake Vanda, though their compound was ever so much more luxurious. Here at Cape Evans they had had only the necessities, all the necessities except for some vitamins, and the company of the opposite sex. How pale and odd they had become from those lacks, along with the lack of sunlight itself. Monastic malnourished troglodytes, suffering from seasonal affective disorder without knowing what a ferocious psychological problem this was (so that perhaps it hadn’t been). Writing newspapers, acting out sketches, pumping music rolls through player pianos, reading books, doing research, and producing some food, by fishing and killing seals. Yes – they had had their pleasures – deprived as they were, these men had still lived on Mother Earth, in contact with the cold fringe of her bounty. On Mars there would be none of those Inuit raptures to pass the time and ameliorate their confinement.

But the postmodern structure of feeling might already have made them used to disconnection from Earth. Everyone inhabiting their own personal spaceship, carrying it mobile with them like a hermit crab’s shell, moving from one component of it to the next: home, office, car, plane, apartment, hotel room, mall. An indoor life, even a virtual life. How many hours a day did they spend in the wind? So that perhaps Mars would not feel very different.

As he considered these matters Michel wandered the big main room of Scott’s hut, looking at all the artifacts in the grey light. Scott had erected a wall of boxes to separate the officers and scientists from the common seamen. So many different facets; Michel felt his thoughts ricocheting this way and that.

They flew up the coast to Cape Royds, where Shackleton’s hut stood like a rebuke to Scott’s – smaller, neater, more wind-sheltered. Everyone together. Shackleton and Scott had fallen out during the first expedition to Antarctica, in 1902. Similar disagreements were likely to occur in the Martian colony; but there would be no chance to build a new home elsewhere. At least not at first. And no going home. At least that was the plan. But was that wise? Here again the analogy to the first Antarcticans fell apart, for no matter how uncomfortable they had been in these huts (and Shackleton’s looked quite homely, actually) they knew they were only going to be here for a year or three, and then out and back home to England. Almost anything could be endured if there was some release foreseeable at the end of it, coming closer every day. Without that it would be a life sentence – no exit indeed. Exile, to a sur-antarctic wasteland of frigid airless rock.

Surely it made better sense to cycle the scientists and technicians to Mars in a way similar to that of the early Antarcticans. Tours of duty at small scientific stations, the stations built and then manned continuously, but by rotating teams, with individuals out there for three years each. This would be more in keeping with recommended lifetime maximum radiation doses. Boone and the others on the first trip there and back, two years before, had taken about thirty-five rad. Subsequent visiting scientists could stick to something like that.

But the American and Russian space programmers had decided otherwise. They wanted a permanent base, and they had invited scientists to move there for good. They wanted a commitment from people, no doubt hoping for a similar commitment of public interest back home – interest in a permanent cast of characters that could be learned, their lives become a matter of drama for public consumption back on Earth, with its bottomless addiction to narrative – biography as spectacle. Part of the funding effort. It made sense in its way.

But who would want to do such a thing? This was a matter that troubled Michel greatly; it headed the long list of double-binds he felt applicants were put in by the process of selection. In short, they had to be sane to be selected, but crazy to want to go.

Many other double-binds accompanied that basic one. Applicants had to be extroverted enough to socialize, but introverted enough to have studied a discipline to the point of mastering it. They had to be old enough to have learned these primary, secondary and sometimes tertiary professions, and yet be young enough to withstand the rigors of the trip out and the work there. They had to do well in groups, but want to leave everyone they knew behind forever. They were being asked to tell the truth, but clearly had to lie to increase their changes of getting what they wanted. They had to be both ordinary and extraordinary.

Yes, the double-binds were endless. Nevertheless this nearly final group had come from an initial pool of many thousands of applicants. Double-binds? So what! Nothing new to fear there. Everyone on Earth was strung up in vast networks of double-binds. Going to Mars might actually reduce their number, decrease their strain! Perhaps that was part of the appeal of going!

Perhaps that was why these men of the first Antarctic explorations had volunteered to come south. Still, looking around at the bare wooden room, it was amazing to Michel that those who had wintered down here had managed to stay sane. On the wall of Shackleton’s hut there was a photo of them: three men, huddled before a black stove. Michel stared long at this evocative photo. The men were worn-looking, battered, dirty, frostbitten, tired. Also calm, even serene. They could sit and do nothing but watch fire burn in a stove, entirely satisfied. They looked cold but warm. The very structure of the brain had been different then, more inured to hardship and the long slow hours of sheer animal existence. Certainly the structure of feeling had changed; that was culturally determined; and thus the brain must necessarily have changed too. A century later their brains depended on great dollops of mediated stimulation, quick-cut inputs which had not even existed for earlier generations. So that reliance on inner resources was harder. Patience was harder. They were different animals from the people in this photo. The epigenetic interplay of DNA and culture was now changing people so fast that even a century was enough to make a measurable difference. Accelerated evolution. Or one of the punctuations in the long tale of punctuated evolution. And Mars would be more of the same. There was no telling what they would become.

Back to Lake Vanda, and the old huts quickly became like a dream interrupting the only reality, a reality so cold that spacetime itself seemed to have frozen, leaving all of them living the same hour over and over again. Dante’s cold circle of hell, the worst of all, as he recalled.

The sensory deprivation was getting to them all. Every ‘morning’ he found himself waking up in low spirits. It took hours after waking to work the weight out of his stomach and focus on the day. After he reached level neutrality, as it was beginning to turn blue twilight at the windows, he was able to ask to join whoever was going outside that day. Out there in the numbing grey or blue or purple twilight he hiked along, trailing the other thickly-clad figures, who looked like pilgrims in a medieval winter, or prehistoric people struggling through the Ice Age. One slender bundle might be Tatiana, her beauty muffled but not entirely blanketed, for she moved like a dancer over the cracked mirror of the lake, under the high walls of the valley. Another might be Maya, focused on the others, though quite friendly and diplomatic to him too. It worried him. Beside her strode Frank, bulky and muffled.

Tatiana was easier to understand, and so attractive. Across the ice one day he followed her. On the far shore they stopped to inspect the dead body of a mummified seal. These disoriented Weddell seals were found far up all the Dry Valleys, dead for hundreds or thousands of years, frozen all that time, slowly frittered away by the winds, until the skeleton slowly emerged from the body like a soul taking off a fur coat, a soul white and wind-polished and articulated.

Tatiana grabbed his arm, exclaiming at the sight. She spoke French well, and had spent summers as a girl on the beaches of the Côte d’Azur; just the thought of that made him melt. Now they spoke, gloved hand in gloved hand, looking down through ski-masks at the memento mori in the grey light. His heart beat hard at the thought of the beauty encased in the chrysalis parka beside him, saying ‘It’s such a shock to come on one of these poor creatures’ vertebra, out on its own in all the rock, like someone’s lost bracelet.’

From across the lake Frank watched them.

And after that day Maya dropped Michel completely, with never a word nor any outward sign that things had changed, but only a single swift glance at Tatiana, in his presence, after which a purely formal politeness, no content whatsoever. And now Michel knew, very acutely, whose company in this group he craved the most; but would never have again.

Frank had done that.

And all around him it was happening: the pointless wars of the heart. It was all so small, petty, tawdry. Yet it mattered; it was their life. Sax and Ann had gone dead to each other, likewise Marina and Vlad, and Hiroko and Iwao. New cliques were forming around Hiroko and Vlad and Arkady and Phyllis, as they all spun out into their own separate orbits. No – this group would go dysfunctional. Was going dysfunctional, he could see it right before his eyes. It was too hard to live isolated in this sub-biological sensory deprivation; and this was paradise compared to Mars. There was no such thing as a good test. There was no such thing as a good analogy. There was only reality, unique and different in every moment, to be lived without rehearsal and without revision. Mars would not be like this cold continuous night on the bottom of their world; it would be worse. Worse than this! They would go mad. A hundred people confined in tanks and sent to a poisonous cold dead planet, a place to which winter in Antarctica was like paradise; a prison universe, like the inside of a head when your eyes are closed. They would all go mad.

In the first week of September the noonday twilight grew almost as bright as day, and they could see sunlight on the peaks of the Asgaard and Olympus Ranges, flanking the deep valley. Because the valley was such a narrow slot between such high ranges, it would be perhaps another ten days before the sun fell directly on the base, and Arkady organized a hike up the side of Mount Odin to catch an earlier glimpse of it. This turned into a general expedition, as almost everyone proved interested in seeing the sun again as soon as possible. So early on the morning of September 10th, they stood nearly a thousand metres above Lake Vanda, on a shelf occupied by a small ice pond and tarn. It was windy, so the climb had not warmed them. The sky was a pale starless blue; the east sides of the peaks of both ranges were glazed gold with sunlight. Finally to the east, at the end of the valley, over the burnished plate of the frozen Ross Sea, the sun emerged over the horizon and burned like a flare. They cheered; their eyes ran with emotion, also an excess of new light and cold wind. People hugged each other, bundle after bundle. But Maya kept on the other side of the group from Michel, with Frank always between them. And it seemed to Michel that everyone’s joy had a desperate edge to it, as of people who had barely survived an extinction event.

Thus when the time came to make his report to the selection committees, Michel advised against the project as designed. ‘No group can stay functional under such conditions indefinitely,’ he wrote. In the meetings he made his case point by point. The long list of double-binds was especially impressive.

This was in Houston. The heat and humidity were saunalike; Antarctica was already a nightmare memory, slipping quickly away.

‘But this is just social life,’ Charles York pointed out, bemused. ‘All social existence is a set of double-binds.’

‘No no,’ Michel said. ‘Social life is a set of contradictory demands. That’s normal, agreed. But what we’re talking about here are requirements to be two opposite things at once. Classic double-binds. And they are already causing a lot of the classic responses. Hidden lives. Multiple personalities. Bad faith. Repression, then the return of the repressed. A close look at the results of the tests given down there will show it is not a viable project. I would advise starting with small scientific stations, with rotating crews. As Antarctica itself is operated now.’

This caused a lot of discussion, even controversy. Charles remained committed to sending up a permanent colony, as proposed; but he had grown close to Mary. Georgia and Pauline tended to agree with Michel; though they too had had personal difficulties at Vanda.

Charles dropped by to see Michel in his borrowed office, shaking his head. He looked at Michel, serious but somehow still uninvolved, distanced. Professional. ‘Look, Michel,’ he said. ‘They want to go. They’re capable of adapting. A lot of them did very well with that, so well that you couldn’t pick them out of a crowd in any kind of blind test. And they want to go, it’s clear. That’s how we should choose who to send. We should give them their chance to do what they want. It’s not really our business to decide for them.’

‘But it won’t work. We saw that.’

‘I didn’t see that. They didn’t see that. What you saw is your concern, but they have the right to make their try at it. Anything could happen there, Michel. Anything. And this world is not so well-arranged that we should deny people who want to take their chance to try something different. It could be good for us all.’ He stood abruptly to leave the office. ‘Think about it.’

Michel thought about it. Charles was a sensible man, a wise man. What he had said had the ring of truth to it. And a sudden gust of fear blew through Michel, as cold as any katabatic downdraught in Wright Valley: he might, out of his own fear, be stopping something with greatness in it.

He changed his recommendation, describing all the reasons why. He explained his vote for the project to continue; he gave the committees his list of the best hundred candidates. But Georgia and Pauline continued to advise against the project as designed. And so an outside panel was convened to make an evaluation, a recommendation, a judgment. Near the end of the process Michel even found himself in his office with the American president, who sat down with him and told him he had probably been right the first time around, first impressions were usually that way, second-guessing was of little use. Michel could only nod. Later he sat in a meeting attended by both the American and Russian presidents; the stakes were that high. They both wanted a Martian base, for their own political purposes, Michel saw that clearly. But they also wanted a success, a project that worked. In that sense, the hundred permanent colonists as originally conceived was clearly the riskier of the options they had before them now. And neither president was a risk-taker. Rotating crews were intrinsically less interesting, but if the crews were large enough, and the base large enough, then the political impact (the publicity) would be almost the same; the science would be the same; and everything would be that much safer, radiologically as well as psychologically.

So they cancelled the project.

TWO EXPLORING FOSSIL CANYON

TWO HOURS BEFORE SUNSET their guide, Roger Clayborne, declared it was time to set camp, and the eight members of the tour trooped down from the ridges or up out of the side canyons they had been exploring that day as the group slowly progressed west, toward Olympus Mons. Eileen Monday, who had had her intercom switched off all day (the guide could override her deafness) turned to the common band and heard the voices of her companions, chattering. Dr Mitsumu and Cheryl Martinez had pulled the equipment waggon all day, down a particularly narrow canyon bottom, and their vociferous complaints were making Mrs Mitsumu laugh. John Nobleton was suggesting, as usual, that they camp farther down the ancient water-formed arroyo they were following; Eileen could not be sure which of the dusty-suited figures was him, but she guessed it was the one enthusiastically bounding up the wash, kicking up sand with every jump, and floating like an impala. Their guide, on the other hand, was unmistakable: tall even when sitting against a tall boulder, high on the spine flanking one side of the deep canyon. When the others spotted him, they groaned. The equipment waggon weighed less than seven hundred kilograms in Mars’s gravity, but still it would take several of them to pull it up the slope to the spot Clayborne had in mind.

‘Roger, why don’t we just pull it down the road we’ve got here and camp around the comer?’ John insisted.

‘Well, we certainly could,’ Roger said – he spoke so quietly that the intercoms barely transmitted his dry voice – ‘but I haven’t yet learned to sleep comfortably at a forty-five degree angle.’

Mrs Mitsumu giggled. Eileen snicked in irritation, hoping Roger could identify the maker of the sound. His remark typified all she disliked about the guide; he was both taciturn and sarcastic. And his wide derisive grin was no help either.

‘I found a good flat down there,’ John protested.

‘I saw it. But I suspect our tent needs a little more room.’

Eileen joined the crew hauling the waggon up the slope. I suspect,’ she mimicked as she began to pant and sweat inside her suit.

‘See?’ came Roger’s voice in her ear. ‘Ms Monday agrees with me.’

She snicked again, more annoyed than she cared to show. So far, in her opinion, this expedition was a flop. And their guide was a very significant factor in its failure, even if he was so quiet that she had barely noticed him for the first three or four days. But eventually his sharp tongue had caught her attention.

She slipped in some soft dirt and went to her knees; bounced back up and heaved again, but the contact reminded her that Mars itself shared the blame for her disappointment. She wasn’t as willing to admit that as she was her dislike for Clayborne, but it was true, and it disturbed her. All through her many years at the University of Mars, Burroughs, she had studied the planet, first in literature (she had read every Martian tale every written, she once boasted), then in areology, particularly seismology. But she had spent most of her twenty-four years in Burroughs itself, and the big city was not like the canyons. Her previous exposure to the Martian landscape consisted of visits to the magnificent domed section of Hephaestus Chasma called Lazuli Canyon, where icy water ran in rills and springs, in waterfalls and pools, and tundra grass grew on every wet red beach. Of course she knew that the virgin Martian landscape was not like Lazuli, but somewhere in her mind, when she had seen the advertisement for the hike – ‘Guaranteed to be terrain never before trodden by human feet’ – she must have had an image of something similar to that green world. The thought made her curse herself for a fool. The slope they were struggling up at that very moment was a perfect representative sample of the untrodden terrain they had been hiking over for the past week: it was composed of dirt of every consistency and hue, so that it resembled an immense layered cake slowly melting, made of ingredients that looked like baking soda, sulphur, brick dust, curry powder, coal slag, and alum. And it was only one cake out of thousands of them, all stacked crazily for as far as the eye could see. Dirt piles.

Just short of Roger’s flat campsite, they stopped to rest. Sweat was stinging in Eileen’s left eye. ‘Let’s get the waggon up here,’ Roger said, coming down to help. His clients stared at him mutinously, unmoving. The doctor leaned over to adjust his boot, and as he had been holding the waggon’s handle, the others were caught off-guard; a pebble gave way under the waggon’s rear wheel, and suddenly it was out of their grasp and rolling down the slope –

In an explosion of dust Roger dived headfirst down the hill, chocking the rear wheel with a stone the size of a loaf of bread. The waggon ploughed the chock downhill a couple of metres and came to a halt. The group stood motionless, staring at the prone guide, Eileen as surprised as the rest of them; she had never seen him move so fast. He stood up at his usual lazy pace and started wiping dust from his faceplate. ‘Best to put the chock down before it starts rolling,’ he murmured, smiling to himself. They gathered to pull the waggon up the flat, chattering again. But Eileen considered it; if the waggon had careened all the way down to the canyon bottom, there would have been at least the possibility that it would have been damaged. And if it had been damaged badly enough, it could have killed them all. She pursed her lips and climbed up to the flat.

Roger and Ivan Corallton were pulling the base of the tent from the waggon. They stretched it out over the posts that kept it level and off the frozen soil; Ivan and Kevin Ottalini assembled the curved poles of the tension dome. The three of them and John carefully got the poles in place, and pulled the transparent tent material out of the base to stretch it under the framework. When they had finished the others stood, a bit stiffly – they had travelled some twenty kilometres that day – and walked in through the flaccid airlock, hauling the waggon in behind them. Roger twisted valves on the side of the waggon, and compressed air pushed violently into their protective bag. Before it was full, Dr Mitsumu and his wife were disengaging the bath and the latrine assemblies from the waggon. Roger switched on the heaters, and after a few minutes of gazing at the gauges, he nodded. ‘Home again home again,’ he said as always. Condensation was beading on the inside of their dome’s clear skin. Eileen undipped her helmet from her suit and pulled it off. ‘It’s too hot.’ No one heard her. She walked to the waggon and turned down the heater, catching Roger’s sardonic grin out of the corner of her eye; she always thought the tent’s air was too hot. Dr Mitsumu, regular as clockwork, ducked into the latrine as soon as his suit was off. The air was filled with the smells of sweat and urine, as everyone stripped their suits off and poured the contents of the run-offs into the water purifier on the waggon. Doran Stark got to the bath first as always – Eileen was amused by how quickly a group established its habits and customs – and stood in the ankle-deep water, sponging himself down and singing ‘I Met Her in a Phobos Restaurant’. As she emptied her suit into the purifier Eileen found herself smiling at all their domestic routines, performed in a transparent bubble in the midst of an endless rust desolation.

She took her sponge bath last except for Roger. There was a shower curtain that could be pulled around the tiny tub at shoulder level, but nobody else used it, so Eileen didn’t either, although she was made a bit uncomfortable by the surreptitious glances of John and the doctor. Nevertheless, she sponged down thoroughly, and in the constantly moving air her clean wet skin felt good. Besides it was rather a splendid sight, all the ruddy naked bodies standing about on the ledge of a spine extending thousands of metres above and below them, the convolutions of canyon after canyon scoring the tilted landscape, Olympus Mons bulging to the west, rising out of the atmosphere so that it appeared to puncture the dome of the sky, and the blood-red sun about to set behind it. Roger did know how to pick a campsite, Eileen admitted to herself (he somehow sponged down with his back always to her, shower curtain partly pulled out, and dressed while still wet, signalling the gradual rehabiliment of the others). It was truly a sublime sight, as all of their campsite prospects had been. Sublime: to have your senses telling you you are in danger, when you know you are not; that was Burke’s definition of the sublime, more or less, and it fitted practically every moment of these days, from dawn to dusk. But that in itself could get wearing. The sublime is not the beautiful, after all, and one cannot live comfortably in a perpetual sense of danger. But at sunset, in the tent, it was an apprehension that could be enjoyed: the monstrous bare landscape, her bare skin; the utter serenity of the slow movement of Beethoven’s last string quartet, which Ivan played every day during the sun’s dying moments … ‘Listen to this,’ Cheryl said, and read from her constant companion, the volume, If Wang Wei Lived on Mars: