Red Mars

Ann drove through these nights. She never told anyone about her moment of inattention at the wheel. And she never even came close to doing it again; she stayed focused with a desperate concentration, biting the inside of her mouth till it bled, oblivious to everything but what lay in the cones of light before her. She usually drove all night, forgetting to wake the next watch’s driver, or deciding not to. Frank Chalmers was dead, and it was her fault; desperately she wished she could reach back and change things, but it was hopeless. Some mistakes you can never make good. The white landscape was marred by an infinity of stones, each capped with its own cake of snow, and the salt-and-pepper landscape was such a patchwork that it was hard at night for the eye to make sense of it; sometimes they seemed to be plowing underground, or floating five meters over it. A white world. Some nights she understood she was driving a hearse, across the body of the deceased. The widows Nadia and Maya in back. And now she knew that Peter was dead too.

Twice she heard Frank calling out to her over the intercom, once asking for her to turn back and help him; the other crying, Go, idiot, go!

Maya was bearing up well. She was tough, somehow, despite all her moods. Nadia, whom Ann used to think of as the tough one, was silent most of the time. Sax stared at his screen and worked. Michel tried to talk to his old friends, and gave up unhappily when it was clear no one wanted to talk back. Simon watched Ann anxiously as always, with unbearable concern; she couldn’t stand it, and avoided his gaze. Poor Kasei must have felt like he was trapped in an asylum for the aged insane, it was almost funny to think of it, except that his spirit seemed to be somehow broken, she did not know why, perhaps the waste, perhaps the increasing likelihood that they would not survive; perhaps simple hunger, there was no way of telling. The young were odd. But he reminded her of Peter, and so she didn’t look at him either.

The snow made each night glow and pulse. All of it would melt eventually, carve new streambeds and carry her Mars away. Mars was gone. Michel sat beside her through the second shifts of the night, looking for signs of the way. “Are we lost?” Maya asked him once, just before dawn.

“No, not at all. It’s just. . we’re leaving tracks in the snow. I don’t know how long they’ll last, or how visible they are, but if. . Well, just in case they do last, I want to leave the car, and walk the last part of the way. So I want to be precisely sure of where we are before we do that. We’ve got some standing stones and dolmens erected that will tell us for sure, but I have to find one of those first. They’ll show on the horizon, you know. Boulders a bit taller than usual, or columns.”

“It will be easier to see those by day,” Simon said.

“True. We’ll have a look around tomorrow, and that should do it— we’ll be in an area of them. They were designed to help people lost like us. We’ll be okay.”

Except that their friends were dead. Her only child was dead. And their world was gone for good. Lying down by the windows at dawn, Ann tried to imagine life in the hidden shelter. Underground for years and years. She couldn’t do it. Go, idiot, go! Damn you!

At dawn Kasei hooted with hoarse triumph: out there on the northern horizon was a trio of standing stones. A lintel bridging two pillars, as if a single fragment of Stonehenge had flown here. Home was that way, said Kasei.

But first they would wait through the day. Michel was becoming extremely cautious about being seen from satellites, and wanted to continue on by night. They settled down to get some sleep.

Ann couldn’t sleep, she found herself energized by a new resolve. When the rest were out cold, Michel snoring happily, all of them asleep for the first time in about fifty hours, she tugged into her walker and tiptoed into the lock. She looked back and surveyed them; a hungry, ragged lot. Nadia’s crippled hand stuck out from her side. Getting out the lock made some unavoidable noise, but everyone was used to sleeping through noise, and the whirrs and clicks of the life-support system partially covered her exit. She got out without waking anyone.

The planet’s basal chill. She shuddered in it, and set off west, walking in the rover’s tracks so she couldn’t be followed. The sun was cutting through the mist. Snow was falling again, tinted pink in shafts of sunlight. She trudged along until she came on a little drumlin ridge, with its steep side clear of snow. She could traverse along the bare rock without leaving tracks. She did so until she got tired. It was really cold out, the snow falling straight down in tiny flakes, probably accreted around sand grains. At the end of the drumlin was a fat low boulder. She sat in its lee. She turned off her walker’s heating unit, and covered the blinking alarm light on her wristpad with a clump of snow.

It got colder fast. The sky was an opaque gray now, tinged with faint pink. Snow fell out of the pinkness onto her faceplate.

She had just stopped shivering, and was getting comfortably chill, when a boot kicked her hard in the helmet, and she was dragged up to her knees with her head ringing. A suited figure banged its faceplate into hers, hard. Then hands with a vise’s grip took her by the shoulders and flung her down to the ground. “Hey,” she cried weakly. She was yanked by her shoulders to her feet, and her left arm was pulled back and held up high behind her back. Her assailant worked at her wristpad, and then shoved her painfully forward, her arm still held high. She couldn’t fall without breaking her arm. She could feel the diamond pattern of her suit’s heating elements begin to flare against her skin, burning their pattern into her. Every few steps she was slapped hard in the helmet.

The figure marched her right back to their own rover, which astonished her. She was shoved into the lock, and the figure tumbled in after her, and closed and pumped the chamber, and tore off her helmet, and then his, and to her utter amazement it was her Simon, purple-faced and shouting at her, striking her still, his face soaking wet with tears— this her Simon, the quiet one, now yelling at her, “Why? Why? Damn you, you always do this, it’s always just you you you, off in your own world, you are so selfish!” Voice rising to a final painful shriek, her Simon who never said anything, never raised his voice, never spoke more than a word, now striking her and shrieking in her face, literally spitting, gasping with fury; and suddenly it made her mad. Why not before, why not when she had needed someone with some life in him? Why had it taken this to rouse him? She punched him right in the chest, hard, and he fell back. “Leave me alone,” she shouted. “Leave me alone!” And then the anguish shuddered through her, the chilled shiver of Martian death: “Why didn’t you leave me alone?”

He regained his balance, lunged forward and seized her by both shoulders, shook her. She had never noticed how powerful his hands were. “Because,” he shouted, and paused to lick his lips and catch his breath—”Because—” And his eyes bugged out, and his face darkened even further, as if a thousand sentences had all jammed in his throat at once, this her mild Simon! — and then he gave up on saying it, and roared, and shook her in his arms, shouting “Because! Because! Because!”

Snow fell. Though it was early morning, it was dim. Wind whipped across the chaos, swirling the spindrift over the shattered land. Boulders as big as city blocks lay jumbled against each other, and the landscape was broken in a million little cliffs, holes, mesas, ridges, peaks— also many peculiar spikes and towers and balancing rocks, held in place by kami alone. All the steep or vertical stone in this chaotic terrain was still black, white flatter areas were now white with snow, so that the landscape was a densely variegated black and white, all swirling in and out of visibility as billows and veils of snow gusted by.

Then the snow stopped. The wind died. The black verticals and white horizontals gave the world a definition it didn’t usually have. In the overcast there were no shadows, and the landscape glowed as if light were pouring up through the snow onto the bottoms of the dusky low clouds. Everything was sharp-edged and distinct, as if captured in glass.

Over the horizon appeared moving figures. One by one they appeared, until there were seven of them, in a ragged line. They moved slowly, their shoulders slumped, their helmets bent forward. They moved as if they had no destination. The two in front looked up from time to time, but they never paused, or pointed the way.

The western clouds gleamed like mother-of-pearl, the only sign on that dull day that the sun was lowering. The figures walked up a long ridge that emerged from the blasted landscape. From the upper slopes of the ridge one could see a long way in every direction.

It took a long time for the figures to climb the ridge. Finally they approached a peak, a bouldery knob where the ridge began to descend again. At the summit of the knob was a curious thing: a big flat-bottomed boulder standing high in the air, balanced on six slender stone pillars.

The seven figures approached this megalith. They stopped and regarded it for a time, under the dark bruised clouds. Then they stepped between the pillars, and under the boulder. It stood well over them, a massive