Firstborn

Emeline lost her stiffness. “All right. Just don’t go showing off your fancy gadgets in front of Mayor Rice and the Emergency Committee or you really will give offense. And anyhow,” she said more grimly, “it won’t make a blind bit of difference if that toy of yours is right about the world coming to an end. Has it got any more to say about how long we have left?”

“The data are uncertain,” the phone whispered. “Handwritten records of naked-eye observations, instruments scavenged from a crashed military helicopter—”

Bisesa said, “I know. Just give us the best number you have.”

“Five centuries. Maybe a little less.”

They considered that. Then Emeline laughed; it sounded forced. “You really have brought us nothing but bad news, Bisesa.”

But Abdikadir seemed unfazed. “Five centuries is a long time.

We’ll figure out what to do about it long before then.”

They spent the night in the train, as advertised.

The frosty night air, the primal smell of wood smoke, and the steady rattling of the train on its uneven tracks lulled Bisesa to sleep. But every so often the train’s jolting woke her.

And once she heard animals calling, far off, their cries like wolves’ howls, but deeper, throatier. She reminded herself that this was not a nostalgically reconstructed park. This was the real thing, and Pleistocene America was not a world yet tamed by man. But the sound of the animals was oddly thrilling — even satisfying. For two million years, humans evolved in a landscape full of creatures such as this. Maybe they missed the giant animals when they were gone, without ever knowing it. And so, maybe the Jefferson movement back home had the right idea.

It was kind of scary to hear them in the dark, however. She was aware of Emeline’s eyes, bright, wide open. But Abdikadir snored softly, wrapped in the immunity of youth.

38: EVA

March 2070

Yuri and Grendel invited Myra out on an excursion.

“Just a routine inspection tour and sample collection,” Yuri said. “But you might like the chance to go outside.”

Outside. After months stuck in a box of ice, in a landscape so flat and dark that even when the sun was up it was like a sensory deprivation tank, the word was a magic spell to Myra.

But when she joined Yuri and Grendel in their rover, by clambering through a soft tube from a hab dome to the rover’s pressurized cabin, she realized belatedly that she was only exchanging one enclosed volume for another.

Grendel Speth seemed to recognize what Myra was feeling.

“You get used to it. At least on this jaunt you’ll get a different view from out the window.”

Yuri and Grendel sat up front, Myra behind them. Yuri called,

“All strapped in?” He punched a button and sat back.

The hatch slammed shut with a rattle of sealing locks, the tunnel to the hab dome came loose with a sucking sound, and the rover lurched into motion.

It was northern summer now. Spring had arrived around Christmas time, with an explosive sublimation of dry ice snow that burst into vapor almost as soon as the sunlight touched it, and for a time the seeing had gotten even worse than during the winter. But now, though a diminishing layer of dry-ice snow remained, the worst of the spring thaw was over and the winter hood long dissipated, and the sun rolled low around a clear orange-brown sky.

This was actually the first time Myra had been for a trip in one of the base’s rovers. It was a lot smaller than the big beast she had ridden down from Lowell, its interior cramped by a miniature lab, a suiting-up area, a tiny galley, and a toilet with a sink where she would have to take sponge baths. It towed a trailer, which didn’t contain a portable nuke like Discovery from Port Lowell but a methane-burning turbine.

“We manufacture the methane using Mars carbon dioxide,”

Yuri called back. “More of Hanse’s ISRU.” He pronounced it iss-roo. In-situ resource utilization. “But it’s a slow process, and we have to wait for the tank to fill up. So we can only afford a few jaunts like this per year.”

“You need a nuke,” Myra said.

Yuri grunted. “Lowell’s got all the best gear. We get the dross.

But it’s fit for purpose.” And he banged the rover’s dash as if apologetically.

“This trip isn’t too exciting,” Grendel warned.

“Well, it’s new to me,” Myra replied.

“Anyhow you’re doing us a favor,” Yuri called. “Standing orders say we should take three out on every excursion more than a day’s walk back to the station. I mean, we can do what we like; we override. Sometimes I even do this route alone, or Grendel does.

But the AIs get pissy about rules, you know?”

“We are undermanned,” Grendel said. “Nominally Wells Station should house ten people. But there’s just too much to do on Mars.”

“And I guess Ellie is pretty much locked up with her work in the Pit.”

Grendel pulled a face. “Well, yes. But she isn’t one of us anyhow. Not a Martian.”

“What about Hanse?”

“Hanse’s a busy guy,” Yuri said. “When he’s not running the station, or drilling his holes in the ice, he’s running his ISRU experiments. Living off the land, here on Mars. You might think the north pole of Mars is an odd place to come try that. But, Myra, there’s water here, sitting right here on the surface, in the form of ice. There’s nowhere else on the inner worlds, save a scraping at the poles of the Moon, where you can say that.”

“And,” Grendel said, “Hanse is thinking bigger than that.”

Yuri said, “Myra, there are a lot of similarities between trying to live here on the Martian ice cap and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, which are generally nothing but big balls of frozen ice around nuggets of rock. So Hanse is trialing technologies that might enable us to survive anywhere out there.”

“Ambitious.”

“Sure,” Yuri said. “Well, he’s a South African on his mother’s side. And you know what the Africans are like nowadays. They were the big winners out of the sunstorm, politically, economically.

Hanse’s committed to Mars, I think. But he’s an African Martian, and he has deeper goals…”

After a couple of hours driving they came to the lip of a spiral canyon.

The wall of eroded ice was shallow, and the canyon wasn’t terribly deep; Myra thought the rover would easily be able to skim down to its floor, and indeed the rutted track they were following snaked on down into the canyon. But she could see that further ahead the canyon broadened and grew deeper, curving smoothly into the distance like a tremendous natural freeway.

They didn’t descend into the canyon immediately. Yuri tapped the dashboard, and the rover lumbered along the canyon’s lip until an insectile form loomed out of the dark before them. It was a complex platform maybe fifty centimeters across laden with instruments, and it stood on three spindly legs. The rover had a manipulator arm, which now unfolded delicately to reach out to the tripod.

“This is a SEP,” Yuri said. “A surface experiment package.

Kind of a weather station, together with a seismometer, laser mirrors, other instruments. We’ve been planting a whole network of them across the polar cap.” He spoke with a trace of pride.

To keep him talking she asked, “Why the legs?”

“To lift it above the dry ice snow, which can reach a depth of a few meters by the end of the winter. And