The Martians. Kim Stanley Robinson
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alone, as long as they aren’t bothering me somehow.’
She nodded. ‘Very sensible, I’m sure. I don’t know if I could manage that. I should try. It’s all the same to me. That’s not always good. Not appropriate.’ With a quick sidelong smile at him.
She would say anything to him. He thought about this, and decided that it was a matter of their respective situations: since he was staying behind, and she was going (she seemed so sure), it didn’t much matter what she said to him. It was as if he were dying to her, and she therefore giving herself to him, openly, as a farewell gift.
But he wanted her to care about what she said to him.
On April 18th the sun went away. In the morning it sparked in the east, shining directly up the valley for a minute or two, and then with a faint green flash it slipped behind Mount Newell. After that the dark days had midday twilights, shorter every day; then just night. Starry starry night. It was beyond Martian, this constant darkness – living by starlight with the aching cold outside, experiencing sensory deprivation in everything but one’s sense of cold. Michel, a Provençal, found that he hated both the cold and the dark. So did many of the others. They had been living in an Antarctic summer, thinking life was good and that Mars would not be such a challenge after all, and then with winter they were suddenly getting a better idea of what Mars would be like – not exactly, but in the sense of experiencing a massive array of deprivations. It was sobering how hard it hit.
Of course some did better than others. Some seemed not even to notice. The Russians had experienced cold and dark almost like this before. Tolerance of confinement was also good among the senior scientists – Sax Russell, Vlad Taneev, Marina Tokareva, Ursula Kohl, Ann Clayborne – these and other dedicated scientists seemed to have the capacity to spend great amounts of their time reading, working at their computers, and talking. Presumably lives spent largely in labs had prepared them.
They also understood that this was the life Mars was waiting to give them. Something not that different from the lives they had always led. So that the best analogy to Mars, perhaps, was not Antarctica, but any intense scientific laboratory.
This led him to thoughts of the optimum life history when considering inclusion in the group: middle-aged lab scientist, dedicated, accomplished; childless; unmarried or divorced. Lots of applicants fitted the criteria. In some ways you had to wonder. Though it wouldn’t be fair; it was a life pattern with its own integrity, its own rewards. Michel himself fitted the bill in every respect.
Naturally he had to divide his attention equally among all of the candidates, and he did. But one day he got to accompany Tatiana Durova alone, on a hike up the South Fork of Wright Valley. They hiked to the left of the flat-topped island ridge called the Dais that divided the valley lengthways, and continued up the southern arm of Wright Valley to Don Juan Pond.
Don Juan Pond: what a name for this extraterrestrial desolation! The pond was so salty that it would not freeze until the air chilled to –54 C; then the ice coating the shallow saline pond, having been distilled by the freezing, would be fresh-water ice, and so would not thaw again until the temperature rose above zero, usually in the following summer when trapped sunlight would greenhouse in the water under the ice, and melt it from below. As Tatiana explained the process it hovered in Michel’s mind as some kind of analogy to their own situation, hanging right on the edge of his understanding but never coming clear.
‘Anyway,’ she was saying, ‘scientists can use the pond as a single-setting minimum-temperature thermometer. Come here in the spring and you know immediately if the previous winter has got below minus 54.’
As it had already, some cold night this autumn; a layer of white ice sheeted the pond. Michel stood with Tatiana on the whitish, humped, salt-crusted shore. Over the Dais the noon sky was blue-black. Around them the steep valley walls fell to the floor of the canyon. Large dark boulders stuck out of the pond’s ice sheet.
Tatiana walked out onto the white surface, plunging through it with every step, boots crackling, water splashing – liquid salt water, spilling over the fresh ice, dissolving it and sending up a thin frost smoke. A vision: the Lady of the Lake, become corporeal and thus too heavy to walk on water.
But the pond was only a few centimetres deep, it barely covered the tops of her thick boots. Tatiana reached down and touched the tip of one gloved finger into the water, pulled up her mask to taste the water with her impossibly beautiful mouth – which puckered to a tight square. Then she threw back her head and laughed. ‘My God! Come taste, Michel, but just a touch, I warn you. It’s terrible!’
And so he clomped through the ice and over the wet sand floor of the pond, stepping awkwardly, a bull in a china shop.
‘It’s fifty times saltier than the sea, taste it.’
Michel reached down, put his forefinger in the water; the cold was intense, it was amazing that it was liquid still, so cold it was. He raised it to his tongue, touched gingerly: cold fire. It burned like acid. ‘My God!’ he exclaimed, spitting out involuntarily. ‘Is it poison?’ Some toxic alkali, or a lake of arsenic –
‘No no.’ She laughed. ‘Salts only. A hundred and twenty-six grams of salt per litre of water. As opposed to three point seven grams per litre, in seawater. Incredible.’ Tatiana was a geochemist, and so now shaking her head with amazement. This kind of thing was her work. Michel saw her beauty in a new way, masked but perfectly clear.
‘Salt raised to a higher power,’ he said absently. A concentrated quality. So it might be in the Mars colony; and suddenly the idea he had felt hovering over him descended: The ordinary sea-salt of humanity would be concentrated by their isolation into a poisonous pond.
He shuddered and spat again, as if he could reject such a bad thought. But the taste remained.
As the perpetual darkness stretches on it becomes hard not to think it permanent, as if we are lingering on after the local star has burnt out. People (some of them) are finally beginning to act as if they are being tested. As if the world has indeed ended, and we existing in some antechamber of the final judgment. Imagine a time of real religion, when everyone felt like this all the time.
Some of them avoided Michel, and Charles and Georgia and Pauline, the other psychologists. Others were too friendly. Mary Dunkel, Janet Blyleven, Frank Chalmers; Michel had to watch himself to avoid ending up alone with these people, or he would fall into a depression witnessing the spectacle of their great charm.
The best solution was to stay active. Remembering the pleasure of his hike with Tatiana, he went out as often as he could, accompanying the others as they performed various maintenance and scientific tasks. The days passed in their artificial rounds, everything measured out and lived just as if the sun were rising in the morning and setting in the evening. Wake, eat, work, eat, work, eat, relax, sleep. Just like home.
One day he went out with Frank on a hike up to an anemometer near the Labyrinth, an interlacing complex of canyons cutting the floor of upper Wright Valley. He wanted to try to see if he could penetrate the man’s pleasant surface. In the end it did not work; Frank was too cool, too professional, too friendly. Years of work in Washington DC had made him very smooth indeed. He had been involved in getting the first human expedition to Mars, a few years before; an old friend of John Boone, the first man to set foot on Mars. He was also said to be heavily involved in the planning for this expedition as well. He was certainly one of those who felt they were going to be among the hundred; extremely confident, in fact. He had a very American voice somehow, booming out to Michel’s left as they hiked. ‘Check those glaciers, falling out of the passes and being blown away before they reach the valley floor. What an awesome place, really.’
‘Yes.’
‘These katabatic winds – falling off the polar cap – nothing can stop them. Cold as hell. I wonder if that little windvane we set up here will even be there any more.’
It was. They pulled out its data cartridge, put in another one. Around them the huge expanse of brown rock formed a bowl under the starry sky. They started back down.
‘Why do you want to go to Mars, Frank?’