Firstborn

21: Pole

Bisesa couldn’t see a thing.

The Discovery plowed its way through a half-meter thickness of carbon dioxide snow. The fragile dry-ice stuff sublimated before the rover’s heat, so they drove into a blinding mist, and even beyond the mist it was a murky dark. Nobody said anything, the poker players continuing their endless tournaments. Bisesa just had to put up with the unnerving drive alone.

Then, through the gloom, she saw bright green lights, brilliant sparks. The rover slowed to a halt. The rest of the crew hurried forward.

A vehicle of some kind sat on the ice, with big balloon wheels and straddled by two spacesuited occupants. Their helmets were illuminated, but Bisesa couldn’t make out their faces. When they caught the rover’s lights they waved.

“That’s a tricycle,” Myra said, wondering.

“Actually,” Paula said mildly, “they call it a General Utility Vehicle. For operations close to the pole station —”

“I want one.”

Alexei tapped a softscreen. “Yuri. Is that you?”

“Hi, Alexei. We cleared a path for you with the sublimation blade. The snow’s heavier than usual this season.”

“Appreciated.”

“Discovery, just follow us and you’ll be fine. Eleven, twelve hours or so and we’ll be home with no trouble. See you at Wells.”

The vehicle turned and drove ahead. Mist burst around it in a spray, brightly illuminated by the floods.

With Discovery following easily, the little convoy’s speed soon passed forty kilometers an hour.

As they roared on into the dark, the hard ground under the snow began to change. It was layered, alternating light and dark in strata as thick as Bisesa’s arm, like a vast sedimentary bed. And it looked polished, with a fine patina that glistened in the trucks’ lights.

After a couple of hours of this they crunched up onto a firmer, paler surface, a grimy white tinged with Mars red.

“Water ice,” Paula announced. “Mostly, anyhow. This is the permanent ice cap, the residue that’s left after the carbon dioxide snow sublimes away every spring. Here at the edge we’re about five hundred klicks from Wells Station, which is near the geographic pole. The drive will be smoother now. The rover’s wheels are re-configurable for different surface types.”

Bisesa said, “I’m surprised Discovery isn’t lowering a set of skis.”

Alexei looked at her, a bit pained. “Bisesa, this is Mars. The temperature out there is the freezing point of dry ice — at this pressure, that’s about a hundred fifty K.”

She worked that out. “A hundred and twenty degrees below freezing.”

“Right,” Paula said. “At these temperatures water ice is so hard it would be like skiing on basalt.”

Bisesa was chagrined. “You’ve given this little lecture a dozen times, haven’t you?”

“You didn’t have time for the usual orientation. Don’t worry about it.”

Now that they were on the ice Bisesa expected a smooth, straight ride on to the pole. But the lead truck soon turned aside from its dead-straight northern track, and embarked on a grand, sweeping detour, turning clockwise. Peering out of the left-hand window, Bisesa glimpsed a canyon.

She swallowed her pride and asked Paula about it.

Paula said it was a “spiral canyon,” one of many gouged into the ice cap. She pulled up an image of the whole cap, taken from space in the summer, when the dry ice snow wasn’t there to obscure it.

The ice cap looked like a twisting storm system, with those spiral canyons twisting in from the edge and reaching almost to the pole.

It was astounding, like nothing Bisesa knew of on Earth. But after her jaunt across the solar system there wasn’t much wonder left in her soul.

As they drove on the snow grew deeper, until they were driving along a path between two walls of snow heaped up maybe two meters deep. The snow looked compact, harder than snow on Earth, denser maybe.

She was relieved when she saw a cluster of lights ahead, and the rounded shoulders of living modules.

A row of green lights stretched off into the distance, as if they were driving down a runway. As the rover rolled closer Bisesa saw that the lights were on poles maybe four meters high, perhaps to keep above the snow. Glancing back, she saw that looking the other way the lights were bright white — so, in the murk of a Martian blizzard, you could always tell if you were heading toward or away from the base.

The structures that loomed out of the dark, lifted up off the ground on stilts, were not domes but flattened pie-shapes, round above and below. They were colored bright green, and huddled close together, interlinked by short tunnels. Bisesa saw that these big hab modules were in fact mounted on wheels, and had been tied down to the ice by cables fixed to pitons. They were like monstrous caravans, she thought.

As the rover neared the station, the walls of dry ice snow thinned away, until the rover was driving over an ice surface almost clear of snow but covered with an open black mesh. Heating elements, perhaps, designed to keep off the dry ice. The rover nuzzled up to a low dome at the foot of one of the stilts. Two station vehicles were already parked here, heavy-looking, smaller than the rover from Lowell.

Paula led them through the hatch, and Bisesa found herself facing a staircase, roofed over with blue-green plastic, that evidently led up to the nearest of the stilted habs. Alexei’s suitcase couldn’t climb the stairs and had to be hauled up on a plastic rope.

At the top of the stairs, the station crew were waiting for the newcomers. There were four of them, two women, two men, Mars-spindly in the limbs though a little heavy in the belly. All were pretty young, Bisesa guessed, none older than forty. Their coveralls were clean but well-patched, and they all smelled faintly greasy.

None of them had cheek ident tattoos.

They stared at Bisesa, and stood a little too close together.

One burly twenty-five-year-old came forward and shook Bisesa’s hand. “You’ll have to forgive us. We don’t get too many visitors up here.” He had a big, blotchy drinker’s nose, grimy black hair pulled back into a ponytail, and a mass of curly beard. His accent was indistinct, like American but laced with longer European vowels.

“You’re Yuri, right? You were on the ice bike.”

“Yes. We exchanged a wave. Yuri O’Rourke. Resident glaciologist, climatologist, what have you.” Briskly he introduced the rest of the base crew: Ellie von Devender, a physicist, Grendel Speth, a doctor-biologist, and Hanse Critchfield, an engineer responsible for power, transport, and essential systems, but also a specialist in the drilling rig, the base’s main scientific function. “Although we all multitask,” Yuri said. “We’re all trained paramedics, for instance…”

Ellie von Devender approached Bisesa. The physicist was maybe thirty, stocky in her jumpsuit, with her hair tightly pulled back. She wore thick-rimmed spectacles, an affectation that hid her eyes and made her look hostile.

Bisesa said curiously, “I guess I would have expected a glaciologist, a biologist. But a physicist?”

Ellie said, “The glaciology is the reason the base is here, along with Grendel and her wet lab. I am the reason you’re here, Ms.Dutt.”

Yuri clapped Bisesa on the shoulder. “Come see the place.” He led them briskly through the hab. “This is what we call Can Six,” he said. “The EVA port…”

Can Six was a bubble of fabric, the walls colored a bright sea-green with an eye-deceiving wave pattern. It had a honeycomb floor that straddled its interior at the widest point, and looking down Bisesa could see stores stacked up in the underfloor space.