Firstborn

And they found a bar, called “Ski’s”—apparently after Schia-parelli, inadvertent discoverer of the Lowellian canals. There was alcohol available, but only fruit wines and whiskeys. They tried an apple wine, but it tasted weak to Bisesa.

“Low gravity, low pressure,” Alexei said. “It’s easier to get drunk here.”

The last dome they explored was the largest, and looked the most expensive. It was constructed of panels laid over immense struts of what Myra identified as lunar glass. The interior was mostly disused. Aside from a few corners used for stores and small workshops, there were only dusty partitions, cables, and ducts lying over an unfinished floor.

“It’s as if they don’t quite know what to do with it,” Bisesa said.

“But it wasn’t the Martians’ choice,” Paula said. “After the sunstorm there was a lot of sentiment about what happened to the Aurora crew, and a lot of money was put into getting the Mars settlement going properly. And this was one result. It was going to be a slice of Earth, here on Mars.” She waved a hand. “Those glass struts came from the sunstorm shield itself. So this is a sort of memorial, you see. There would have been blue sky, projected onto that big dome. They were going to call it Oxford Circus.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No,” Alexei said. “There was even going to be a zoo here.

Farm animals. Maybe an elephant or two, Sol, I don’t know. All shipped up as zygotes.”

“And weather, like Earth’s, inside the dome,” Paula said.

“They even got that part of it working for a while, when I was little. The thunderstorm was quite scary. But it all broke down and nobody bothered to fix it. Why should we? Many of us have never seen Earth; we don’t miss it. And we have our own weather.” She smiled wider, her young face so like her mother’s, her eyes blank.

That night, Bisesa settled down in a stern monkish cell that seemed designed to remind her that she wasn’t a guest here, not welcome, that she was here on sufferance.

But there was a row of books above her bed — real paper books, or anyhow facsimiles. They were editions of classic novels of Mars as it had been dreamed of during the long years before spaceflight, from Wells through Weinbaum and Bradbury to Robinson and beyond. Flicking through the old books oddly pleased her; for the first time since she had arrived, she was reminded how many dreams had always been lodged on Mars.

She clambered into bed. She read a few chapters of Martian Dust by a writer called Martin Gibson. It was a colorful melodrama that, with the comforting gravity, soon lulled her to sleep.

19: The Sands of Mars

She was woken by Alexei, shaking her shoulder. “We have to move.”

She sat up, rubbing her eyes. “I thought you said we have to wait for a rover.”

“Well, we changed our plans. They don’t have too many assets on Mars, but they started to move during the night.”

“Who is they?”

“Astropol. The Space Council. Look, Bisesa, we’ll have time to discuss this. Please, right now you need to shift your ass.”

She had trusted him, and Myra, this far. She shifted.

The rover, trundling to its docking port on the central dome, was visible through a small window. The rover had a number: it was the fourth of Lowell’s fleet of six such long-distance exploratory vehicles.

But it also had a name, stamped in electric blue on its hull: Discovery.

About the size of a school bus, painted bright green, its hull bristled with antennae and sensor pods, and a remote manipulator arm was folded up at its side. The rover dragged an equally massive trailer at its back, connected to the parent by a thick conduit. The main body and the trailer were mounted on big complicated-looking wheels on loosely sprung axles. The trailer contained stores, spares, life support gear — and, unbelievably, a small nuclear power plant.

This rover was big enough to carry a crew of ten on a complete yearlong circumnavigation of Mars. Bisesa realized it was wrong to think of it as a mere bus. It was a spaceship on wheels.

And it had pressure suits stuck to the outside of the hull. Bisesa said, “Reminds me of Ahab strapped to the side of his whale.”

But none of them, not even Myra, had heard of Moby Dick.

“So why Discovery? For the old space shuttle?”

“No, no. For Captain Scott’s first ship,” Paula said. “You know, the Antarctic explorer? We use this particular rover for polar jaunts, north and south, so the name seems appropriate.”

Expeditions to the poles had always been a tradition of Lowell Base, Paula said. The astronauts of Aurora, in fact, in their long years as castaways before the sunstorm, had made expeditions to the south pole, intent on coring the ancient ices and so deciphering Mars’s climatic history.

Paula’s bright chat filled the time as they waited for access to the rover. But Alexei bit his nails, desperate to be away.

At last hatches swung open. They walked through an airlock and clambered into a roomy interior. There was even a small medical area, complete with robotic arms capable of manipulating a set of surgical instruments.

Paula said, “We’ll cover around a quarter of the planet’s circumference, traveling twenty hours a day at a nominal fifty klicks per hour. Five days should see us home.”

“Twenty hours a day?”

Myra and Bisesa exchanged glances. They had already been cooped up for weeks on the elevator and aboard the Maxwell. But these Spacers were used to lengthy confinement in small places.

“The Discovery will do the driving itself, of course. It’s done the route a dozen times already, and probably knows every boulder and ice field. It’s a smooth ride once we’re underway…”

Paula briefly spoke to a traffic control center, and then the rover briskly popped itself loose of the dome airlock.

Once they were sealed in Alexei sat and blew air through pursed lips. “Well, that’s that. What a relief.”

Myra glanced back at the Lowell domes. “Couldn’t we be chased?”

Alexei said, “The other rovers are out in the field. Mars is still very sparsely populated, Myra, sparsely equipped. Not a good place to mount a car chase. And it’s unlikely that Astropol and the other agencies have any assets at the polar base.” Bisesa had learned that Astropol was a federation of terrestrial police agencies dedicated to offworld operations. “Oh, they could come after us,” Alexei murmured. “But it would take something drastic to do it. They may not be ready to show their hand just yet.”

The rover swung itself around and set off to the north.

Bisesa and Myra sat up front behind a big observation window, and watched the view unfold. It was about midday, and the sun was to the south behind them; the rover’s shadow stretched ahead.

The domes of Lowell soon slipped behind the rear horizon, obscured by the rover’s immense rooster-tails of dust. The road was metaled at first, glassy; then it was hard-pressed dirt, a scar in the faded dust, and before long nothing but a rutted track. Away from the base there was no sign of human activity, save for the odd weather station, and those endless rutted tracks peeling off to the north. Bisesa could make out the remnants of the Ares flood in the scoured landscape, the teardrop islands, the huge scattered boulders. But everything was old, worn down with age, every rock surface rubbed smooth, every slope draped with thick dust.

With nothing to see but rocks, Myra soon went to join Alexei and Paula, who had a common interest in an exotic form of poker.

Bisesa sat alone in the bubble rover’s blister window, riding smoothly over Mars. As the sun wheeled through the sky, Mars began to work a kind of spell on her. It was like Earth, with some of the furniture of an earthly landscape: the land below, the sky above, the dust and the scattered rocks. But the horizon was too close, the sun too small, too pale. A corner of her hindbrain kept asking: how can the world be like this?