TWO EXPLORING FOSSIL CANYON

      TWO HOURS BEFORE SUNSET their guide, Roger Clayborne, declared it was time to set camp, and the eight members of the tour trooped down from the ridges or up out of the side canyons they had been exploring that day as the group slowly progressed west, toward Olympus Mons. Eileen Monday, who had had her intercom switched off all day (the guide could override her deafness) turned to the common band and heard the voices of her companions, chattering. Dr Mitsumu and Cheryl Martinez had pulled the equipment waggon all day, down a particularly narrow canyon bottom, and their vociferous complaints were making Mrs Mitsumu laugh. John Nobleton was suggesting, as usual, that they camp farther down the ancient water-formed arroyo they were following; Eileen could not be sure which of the dusty-suited figures was him, but she guessed it was the one enthusiastically bounding up the wash, kicking up sand with every jump, and floating like an impala. Their guide, on the other hand, was unmistakable: tall even when sitting against a tall boulder, high on the spine flanking one side of the deep canyon. When the others spotted him, they groaned. The equipment waggon weighed less than seven hundred kilograms in Mars’s gravity, but still it would take several of them to pull it up the slope to the spot Clayborne had in mind.

      ‘Roger, why don’t we just pull it down the road we’ve got here and camp around the comer?’ John insisted.

      ‘Well, we certainly could,’ Roger said – he spoke so quietly that the intercoms barely transmitted his dry voice – ‘but I haven’t yet learned to sleep comfortably at a forty-five degree angle.’

      Mrs Mitsumu giggled. Eileen snicked in irritation, hoping Roger could identify the maker of the sound. His remark typified all she disliked about the guide; he was both taciturn and sarcastic. And his wide derisive grin was no help either.

      ‘I found a good flat down there,’ John protested.

      ‘I saw it. But I suspect our tent needs a little more room.’

      Eileen joined the crew hauling the waggon up the slope. I suspect,’ she mimicked as she began to pant and sweat inside her suit.

      ‘See?’ came Roger’s voice in her ear. ‘Ms Monday agrees with me.’

      She snicked again, more annoyed than she cared to show. So far, in her opinion, this expedition was a flop. And their guide was a very significant factor in its failure, even if he was so quiet that she had barely noticed him for the first three or four days. But eventually his sharp tongue had caught her attention.

      She slipped in some soft dirt and went to her knees; bounced back up and heaved again, but the contact reminded her that Mars itself shared the blame for her disappointment. She wasn’t as willing to admit that as she was her dislike for Clayborne, but it was true, and it disturbed her. All through her many years at the University of Mars, Burroughs, she had studied the planet, first in literature (she had read every Martian tale every written, she once boasted), then in areology, particularly seismology. But she had spent most of her twenty-four years in Burroughs itself, and the big city was not like the canyons. Her previous exposure to the Martian landscape consisted of visits to the magnificent domed section of Hephaestus Chasma called Lazuli Canyon, where icy water ran in rills and springs, in waterfalls and pools, and tundra grass grew on every wet red beach. Of course she knew that the virgin Martian landscape was not like Lazuli, but somewhere in her mind, when she had seen the advertisement for the hike – ‘Guaranteed to be terrain never before trodden by human feet’ – she must have had an image of something similar to that green world. The thought made her curse herself for a fool. The slope they were struggling up at that very moment was a perfect representative sample of the untrodden terrain they had been hiking over for the past week: it was composed of dirt of every consistency and hue, so that it resembled an immense layered cake slowly melting, made of ingredients that looked like baking soda, sulphur, brick dust, curry powder, coal slag, and alum. And it was only one cake out of thousands of them, all stacked crazily for as far as the eye could see. Dirt piles.

      Just short of Roger’s flat campsite, they stopped to rest. Sweat was stinging in Eileen’s left eye. ‘Let’s get the waggon up here,’ Roger said, coming down to help. His clients stared at him mutinously, unmoving. The doctor leaned over to adjust his boot, and as he had been holding the waggon’s handle, the others were caught off-guard; a pebble gave way under the waggon’s rear wheel, and suddenly it was out of their grasp and rolling down the slope –

      In an explosion of dust Roger dived headfirst down the hill, chocking the rear wheel with a stone the size of a loaf of bread. The waggon ploughed the chock downhill a couple of metres and came to a halt. The group stood motionless, staring at the prone guide, Eileen as surprised as the rest of them; she had never seen him move so fast. He stood up at his usual lazy pace and started wiping dust from his faceplate. ‘Best to put the chock down before it starts rolling,’ he murmured, smiling to himself. They gathered to pull the waggon up the flat, chattering again. But Eileen considered it; if the waggon had careened all the way down to the canyon bottom, there would have been at least the possibility that it would have been damaged. And if it had been damaged badly enough, it could have killed them all. She pursed her lips and climbed up to the flat.

      Roger and Ivan Corallton were pulling the base of the tent from the waggon. They stretched it out over the posts that kept it level and off the frozen soil; Ivan and Kevin Ottalini assembled the curved poles of the tension dome. The three of them and John carefully got the poles in place, and pulled the transparent tent material out of the base to stretch it under the framework. When they had finished the others stood, a bit stiffly – they had travelled some twenty kilometres that day – and walked in through the flaccid airlock, hauling the waggon in behind them. Roger twisted valves on the side of the waggon, and compressed air pushed violently into their protective bag. Before it was full, Dr Mitsumu and his wife were disengaging the bath and the latrine assemblies from the waggon. Roger switched on the heaters, and after a few minutes of gazing at the gauges, he nodded. ‘Home again home again,’ he said as always. Condensation was beading on the inside of their dome’s clear skin. Eileen undipped her helmet from her suit and pulled it off. ‘It’s too hot.’ No one heard her. She walked to the waggon and turned down the heater, catching Roger’s sardonic grin out of the corner of her eye; she always thought the tent’s air was too hot. Dr Mitsumu, regular as clockwork, ducked into the latrine as soon as his suit was off. The air was filled with the smells of sweat and urine, as everyone stripped their suits off and poured the contents of the run-offs into the water purifier on the waggon. Doran Stark got to the bath first as always – Eileen was amused by how quickly a group established its habits and customs – and stood in the ankle-deep water, sponging himself down and singing ‘I Met Her in a Phobos Restaurant’. As she emptied her suit into the purifier Eileen found herself smiling at all their domestic routines, performed in a transparent bubble in the midst of an endless rust desolation.

      She took her sponge bath last except for Roger. There was a shower curtain that could be pulled around the tiny tub at shoulder level, but nobody else used it, so Eileen didn’t either, although she was made a bit uncomfortable by the surreptitious glances of John and the doctor. Nevertheless, she sponged down thoroughly, and in the constantly moving air her clean wet skin felt good. Besides it was rather a splendid sight, all the ruddy naked bodies standing about on the ledge of a spine extending thousands of metres above and below them, the convolutions of canyon after canyon scoring the tilted landscape, Olympus Mons bulging to the west, rising out of the atmosphere so that it appeared to puncture the dome of the sky, and the blood-red sun about to set behind it. Roger did know how to pick a campsite,