onto the ceiling rail and the other three curled up around the ovoid like the arms of a chandelier. There was no means of picking up or prodding anything.
Sunday was helped into the next available suit, inside which she found a seat and basic directional controls. The dome clamped down and went pressure-tight, and then she was carried through a series of dilating pressure locks, finally exiting via a bunker-like entrance ringed by pulsing green bars. The suit’s curled-up legs flexed down and dug traction pitons into the light-sucking asphalt-black surface of the moon. The fourth leg uncoupled from the ceiling rail, and she was free. She could move the rover-suit in any direction she wanted just by tapping arrows or pushing a simple joystick. The suit took care of locomotion, maintaining a tarantula death grip against the moon’s feeble gravity.
Wherever Sunday looked there was another primary-coloured spider clambering with fluid agility over the soot- black undulating ground. No matter what contortions the legs had to perform as they navigated craters and grooves at all scales, the pressure capsules followed graceful trajectories. The more distant the spiders, the more acute the angle of view. She watched them tilt around the curvature of the world.
‘Phobos feels like a long way from Earth,’ Eunice said, her suited figure walking alongside Sunday’s rover. ‘But that’s not how it works, when you factor in the orbital-transfer mechanics.’
‘Right. I was wondering when you’d pop up.’
‘Not like I was going to miss an opportunity to revisit the old place, given the time I spent here.’ Eunice’s purposeful, bouncing stride belied the feeble gravity.
‘I don’t see how this place can be anything other than a long way from home,’ Sunday said.
‘Energetics, dear girl. Delta-vee. If you start from Earth, it costs you more fuel to land on the Moon than it does to reach Phobos. Counterintuitive, I suppose – although not if you have a thorough grasp of the principles.’
‘That’s me ruled out, then.’
‘Nature gave us this stepping stone for free. It’s just been sitting around Mars, waiting to be exploited. So we came and we saw and we conquered.’ Eunice swivelled her helmet to track Sunday. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Your old base camp. Where else are you likely to have buried a clue?’
‘Let’s look at Mars first,’ Eunice declared. ‘Then we’ll go to the base camp. You owe me that much.’
Sunday felt that she owed the construct nothing, but she caught her tongue before answering. Any utterance that was not the sort of thing she might have said to her living grandmother was at best noise, at worse a potentially damaging input.
‘You’ll get your wish.’
The rover-suit’s whirling, whisking limbs made brisk work of the necessary kilometres, processing the terrain with furious scuttling precision. Soon Mars began to rise over the horizon’s sharp black ridge.
Sunday did not stop until the clock was reading two hours, halfway into her rental agreement. Then it was time to take in the glory of this new world.
Mars ruled the sky. It was half-illuminated, the shadowed hemisphere serving only to emphasise that this was a three-dimensional thing, a sphere bulging out towards her. With no air between her and the atmosphere of Mars – and very little air in the atmosphere to begin with – the ground features appeared preternaturally sharp, defined with a mapmaker’s fastidiousness. The lit hemisphere was a warm salmon hue, tinged here and there with dusty swathes of ochre and burnt sienna. White snow frosted the visible pole. Cutting across the face, the claw-marks of some staggering canyon system gouged deep into the flesh of the world.
She was about to voke the aug to request a detailed topographic overlay when she realised that she was already travelling with the best possible guide.
‘Fond memories?’ Sunday asked.
‘It wasn’t like this when Jonathan and I landed on Phobos,’ Eunice said. ‘A planetwide dust storm had brewed up while we were on our way, so when we got here we couldn’t see much at all. We had no choice but to sit it out before we could head down to Mars.’
‘There were already people down there, though.’
Eunice used one gloved hand to screen glare from her helmet. ‘They had enough provisions and supplies to see out the storm, provided it didn’t last for months. But they couldn’t move around much, and it was far too dangerous to send anything up or down. This was before the elevator, of course.’
‘That much I figured.’
‘It wasn’t like Earth. Miss your landing point on Earth and you’re never far from rescue. Didn’t work that way on Mars, especially not in those days.’
Eunice had been thirty-one when she came with her husband to Phobos in 2062; not much younger than Sunday was now. She had been the ninety-eighth human being to set foot on that rusted soil, just before the influx became an inundation.
‘Can we look at the camp now?’ she said. ‘Clock’s ticking on my rental agreement.’
‘Follow me,’ Eunice said, sighing. ‘It’s not too far. Nothing’s far on Phobos.’
The dust storm wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened. Nevertheless, none of the early explorers had been pleased to have their journeys to Mars interrupted by surface weather. Phobos had benefited, though. Long a convenient staging point for Martian exploration, by 2062 an entire transnational shanty town had spontaneously self-organised on the little moon, consisting of a ramshackle, barely planned assortment of domes, surface shacks and dugout habitats, and home to a semi-permanent population already numbering dozens.
Even in those early days, some had already decided that they actually preferred life in orbit, rather than down in the Martian gravity well or back on the Moon or Earth. They got all the scenery they could take just by looking out of the window or venturing onto the moon’s surface, and the steady succession of arriving and departing ships made for endless variety. Their technical services were also highly valued, in a variety of enterprises ranging from vehicle maintenance to the supply of narcotics and paid sex.
