Red Mars

Thinking about that one day, it occurred to Maya that starting the Ares in springtime might have created a problem. Here they were in their mesocosm, sailing through spring, and everything was fertile and blooming, profligate and green, the air perfumed with flowers and windy, the days getting longer and warmer, and everyone in shirts and shorts, a hundred healthy animals, in close quarters, eating, exercising, showering, sleeping. Of course there had to be sex.

Well, it was nothing new. Maya herself had had some fantastic sex in space, most significantly during her second stint on Novy Mir, when she and Georgi and Yeli and Irina had tried every weightless variant imaginable, which was a great many indeed. But now it was different. They were older, they were stuck with each other for good: “Everything is different in a closed system,” as Hiroko often said in other contexts. The idea that they should stay on a fraternal basis was big at NASA: out of the 1,348 pages of the tome NASA had compiled called Human Relations In Transit To Mars, only a single page was devoted to the subject of sex; and that page advised against it. They were, the tome suggested, something like a tribe, with a sensible taboo against intra-tribal mating. The Russians laughed hilariously at this. Americans were such prudes, really. “We are not a tribe,” Arkady said.’ “We are the world.”

And it was spring. And there were the married couples aboard, some of whom were pretty demonstrative; and there was the swimming pool in Torus E, and the sauna and whirlpool bath. Bathing suits were used in mixed company, this because of the Americans again, but bathing suits were nothing. Naturally it began to happen. She heard from Nadia and Ivana that the bubble dome was being used for assignations in the quiet hours of the night; many of the cosmonauts and astronauts turned out to be fond of weightlessness. And the many nooks in the parks and the forest biome were serving as hideaways for those with less weightless experience; the parks had been designed to give people the sense that they could get away. And every person had a private soundproofed room of their own. With all that, if a couple wanted to begin a relationship without becoming an item in the gossip mill, it was possible to be very discreet.

Maya was sure there was more going on than any one person could know.

She could feel it. No doubt others did as well. Quiet conversations between couples; changes in dining room partners; quick glances, small smiles; hands touching shoulders or elbows in passing; oh yes, things were happening. It made for a kind of tension in the air, a tension that was only partly pleasant. Antarctic fears came back into play; and besides, there was only a small number of potential partners, which tended to give things a musical chairs kind of feeling.

And for Maya there were additional problems. She was even more wary than usual of Russian men, because in this case it would mean sleeping with the boss; she was suspicious of that, knowing how it had felt when she had done it herself. Besides, none of them … well, she was attracted to Arkady, but she did not like him; and he seemed uninterested. Yeli she knew from before, he was just a friend; Dmitri she didn’t care for; Vlad was older, Yuri not her type, Alex a follower of Arkady’s … on and on like that.

And as for the Americans, or the internationals; well, that was a different kind of problem. Cross cultures, who knew? So … she kept to herself. But she thought about it. And occasionally, while waking up in the morning, or finishing a workout, she floated on a wave of desire that left her washed up on the shore of bed or shower, feeling alone.

Thus late one morning, after a particularly harrowing problem run, which they had almost solved and then failed to solve, she ran into Frank Chalmers in the forest biome and returned his hello, and they walked for about ten meters into the woods, and stopped. She was in shorts and tank-top, barefoot, sweaty and flushed from the crazed simulation. He was in shorts and a T-shirt, barefoot, sweaty and dusty from the farm. Suddenly he laughed his sharp laugh, and reached out to touch her upper arm with two fingertips. “You’re looking happy today.” With that darting smile.

The leaders of the two halves of the expedition. Equals. She lifted her hand to touch his, and that was all it took.

They left the trail and ducked into a tight thicket of pine. They stopped to kiss, and it had been long enough since the last time that it felt strange to her. Tripping over a root Frank laughed under his breath, that quick secretive laugh which gave Maya a shiver, almost of fear. They sat on pine needles, rolled together like students necking in the woods. She laughed; she had always liked the quick approach, the way she could just knock a man down when she wanted to.

And so they made love. For a time passion took her away. Afterwards she relaxed, enjoying the wash of afterglow. But then it got a bit awkward, somehow; she didn’t know what to say. There was something hidden still about him, as if he were hiding even when making love. And even worse, what she could sense behind his reserve was some kind of triumph, as if he had won something and she had lost. That Puritan streak in Americans, that sense that sex was wrong and something that men had to trick women into. She had closed up a little herself, annoyed at that hidden smirk on his face. Win and lose, what children.

And yet they were co-mayors, so to speak. So if it was put on a zero sum basis …

Well, they talked for a while in a jovial enough way, and even made love again before they left. But it wasn’t quite the same as the first time, she found herself distracted. So much in sex was beyond rational analysis. Maya always felt things about her partners that she could not analyze or even express; but she always either liked what she felt or didn’t, there was no doubt about that. And looking at Frank Chalmers’s face after the first time, she had been sure that something wasn’t right. It made her uneasy.

But she was amiable, affectionate; it would not do to be put off at such a moment, no one would forgive that. They got up and dressed and went back into Torus D, and ate dinner at the same table with some others, and that was when it made perfect sense to become more distant. But then in the days after their encounter, she was surprised and displeased to find herself putting him off a little bit, making excuses to avoid being alone with him. It was awkward, not what she had wanted at all. She would have preferred not to feel the way she did, and once or twice after that they went off alone again, and when he started things she made love with him again, wanting it to work, feeling that she must have made a mistake or been in a bad mood somehow. But it was always the same, there was always that little smirk of triumph, that I-got-you that she disliked so much, that moralistic Puritan double-standard dirtiness.

And so she avoided him even more, to keep from getting into the start situation; and quickly enough he caught the drift. One afternoon he asked her to go for a walk in the biome and she declined, claiming fatigue; and a staccato look of surprise passed over his face, and then it had closed up like a mask. She felt badly, because she couldn’t even explain it to herself.

To try to make up for such an unreasonable withdrawal, she was friendly and forthright with him after that, as long as it was a safe situation. And once or twice she suggested, indirectly, that for her their encounters had been only a matter of sealing a friendship, something she had done with others as well. All this had to be conveyed between words, however, and it was possible he misunderstood; it was hard to say. After that first jolt of comprehension, he only seemed puzzled. Once, when she left a group just before it broke up, she had seen him give her a sharp glance; after that, only distance and reserve. But he had never been really upset, and he never pressed the issue, or came to her to talk about it. But that was part of the problem, wasn’t it? He didn’t seem to want to talk to her about that kind of thing.

Well, perhaps he had affairs going with other women, with some of the Americans, it was hard to say. He really did keep to himself. But it was … awkward.

Maya resolved to abolish the knockover seduction, no matter the thrill she got from it. Hiroko was right; everything was different in a closed system. It was too bad for Frank (if he did care), because he had served as her education in this regard. In the end she resolved to make it up to him, by being a good friend. She worked so hard at doing this that once, almost a month later, she miscalculated and went a little too far, to the point where he thought she was seducing him again. They had been part of a group, up late talking, and she had sat next to him, and afterwards he had clearly gotten the wrong impression, and walked with her around Torus D to the bathrooms, talking in the charming and affable way he had at this stage of things. Maya was vexed with herself; she didn’t want to seem completely fickle, although at this point either way she went it would probably look that way. So she went along with him, just because it was easier, and because there was a part of her that wanted to make love. And so she did, upset with herself and resolved that this should be the last time, a sort of final gift that would hopefully make the whole incident a good memory for him. She found herself becoming more passionate than ever before, she really wanted to please him. And then, just before orgasm, she looked up at his face, and it was like looking in the windows of an empty house.

That was the last time.

Δ V. V for velocity, delta for change. In space, this is the measure of the change in velocity required to get from one place to another – thus, a measure of the energy required to do it.

Everything is moving already. But to get something from the (moving) surface of the Earth into orbit around it, requires a minimum Δ v of ten kilometers per second; to leave Earth’s orbit and fly to Mars requires a minimum Δ v of 3.6 kilometers per second; and to orbit Mars and land on it requires a Δ v of about one kilometer per second. The hardest part is leaving Earth behind, for that is by far the deepest gravity well involved. Climbing up that steep curve of spacetime takes tremendous force, shifting the direction of an enormous inertia.

History too has an inertia. In the four dimensions of spacetime, particles (or events) have directionality; mathematicians, trying to show this, draw what they call “world lines” on graphs. In human affairs, individual world lines form a thick tangle, curling out of the darkness of prehistory and stretching through time: a cable the size of Earth itself, spiraling round the sun on a long curved course. That cable of tangled world lines is history. Seeing where it has been, it is clear where it is going – it is a matter of simple extrapolation. For what kind of Δ v would it take to escape history, to escape an inertia that powerful, and carve a new course?

The hardest part is leaving Earth behind.

The form of the Ares gave a structure to reality; the vacuum between Earth and Mars began to seem to Maya like a long series of cylinders, bent up at their joints at 45° angles. There was a runner’s course, a kind of steeplechase, around Torus C, and at each joint she slowed down in her run and tensed her legs for the increased pressure of the two 22.5° bends, and suddenly she could see up the length of the next cylinder. It was beginning to seem a rather narrow world.

Perhaps in compensation, the people inside began to get somehow larger. The process of shedding their Antarctic masks continued, and every time someone displayed some new and hitherto unknown characteristic, it made all who noticed it feel that much freer; and this feeling caused more hidden traits to be revealed. One Sunday morning the Christians aboard, numbering a dozen or so, celebrated Easter in the bubble dome. It was April back home, though the Ares’ season was midsummer. After their service they came down to the D dining hall for brunch. Maya, Frank, John, Arkady, and Sax were at a table, drinking cups of coffee and tea. The conversations among them and with other tables were densely interwoven, and at first only Maya and Frank heard what John was saying to Phyllis Boyle, the geologist who had conducted the Easter service.

“I understand the idea of the universe as a superbeing, and all its energy being the thoughts of this being. It’s a nice concept. But the Christ story …” John shook his head.

“Do you really know the story?” Phyllis asked.

“I was brought up Lutheran in Minnesota,” John replied shortly. “I went to confirmation class, had the whole thing drilled into me.”

Which, Maya thought, was probably why he bothered to get into discussions like this. He had a displeased expression that Maya had never seen before, and she leaned forward a bit, suddenly concentrating. She glanced at Frank; he was gazing into his coffee cup as if in a reverie, but she was sure he was listening.

John said, “You must know that the gospels were written decades after the event, by people who never met Christ. And that there are other gospels which reveal a different Christ, gospels that were excluded from the Bible by a political process in the third century. So he’s a kind of literary figure really, a political construct. We don’t know anything about the man himself.”

Phyllis shook her head. “That’s not true.”

“But it is,” John objected. This caused Sax and Arkady to look up from the next table. “Look, there’s a history to all this stuff. Monotheism is a belief system that you see appearing in early herding societies. The greater their dependence on sheep herding, the more likely their belief in a shepherd god. It’s an exact correlation, you can chart it and see. And the god is always male, because those societies were patriarchal. There’s a kind of archeology, an anthropology – a sociology of religion, that makes all of this perfectly clear – how it came about, what needs it fulfilled.”

Phyllis regarded him with a small smile. “I don’t know what to say to that, John. It’s not a matter of history, after all. It’s a matter of faith.”

“Do you believe in Christ’s miracles?”

“The miracles aren’t what matter. It’s not the church or its dogma that matters. It’s Jesus himself that matters.”

“But he’s just a literary construct,” John repeated doggedly. “Something like Sherlock Holmes, or the Lone Ranger. And you didn’t answer my question about the miracles.”

Phyllis shrugged. “I consider the presence of the universe to be a miracle. The universe and everything in it. Can you deny it?”

“Sure,” John said. “The universe just is. I define a miracle as an action that clearly breaks known physical law.”

“Like traveling to other planets?”

“No. Like raising the dead.”

“Doctors do that every day.”

“Doctors have never done that.”

Phyllis looked nonplussed. “I don’t know what to say to you, John. I’m kind of surprised. We don’t know everything, to pretend we do is arrogance. The creation is mysterious. To give something a name like ‘the big bang,’ and then think you have an explanation – it’s bad logic, bad thinking. Outside your rational scientific thought is an enormous area of consciousness, an area more important than science. Faith in God is part of that. And I suppose you either have it or you don’t.” She stood. “I hope it comes to you.” She left the room.

After a silence, John sighed. “Sorry, folks. Sometimes it still gets to me.”

“Whenever scientists say they’re Christian,” Sax said, “I take it to be an aesthetic statement.”

“The church of the wouldn’t-it-be-pretty-to-think-so,” Frank said, still looking into his cup.

Sax said, “They feel we’re missing a spiritual dimension of life that earlier generations had, and they attempt to regain it using the same means.” He blinked in his owlish way, as if the problem were disposed of by being defined.

“But that brings in so many absurdities!” John exclaimed.

“You just don’t have faith,” Frank said, egging him on.

John ignored him. “People who in the lab are as hard-headed as can be – you should see Phyllis grilling the conclusions her colleagues draw from their data! And then suddenly they start using all kinds of debater’s tricks, evasions, qualifications, fuzzy thinking of every kind. As if they were an entirely different person.”

“You just don’t have faith!” Frank repeated.

“Well I hope I never get it! It’s like being hit by a hammer in the head!”

John stood and took his tray to the kitchen. The rest looked at each other in silence. It must have been, Maya thought, a really bad confirmation class. Clearly none of the others had known any more than her about this side of their easygoing hero. Who knew what they would learn next, about him or any of them?

News of the argument between John and Phyllis spread through the crew. Maya wasn’t sure who was telling the story; neither John nor Phyllis seemed inclined to speak of it. Then she saw Frank with Hiroko, laughing as he told her something. Walking by them she heard Hiroko say, “You’ve got to admit Phyllis is right about that part – we don’t understand the why of things at all.”

Frank, then. Sowing discord between Phyllis and John. And (not a trivial point) Christianity was still a major force in America, and elsewhere. If word got around back home that John Boone was anti-Christian, it could give him problems. And that wouldn’t be such a bad thing for Frank. They were all getting media play on Earth, but if you watched some of the news and features, it became clear that some were getting more than others, and this made them seem more powerful, and so they became more powerful in fact, by association. Among this group were Vlad and Ursula (whom she suspected were more than friends, now), Frank, Sax – all people who had been well known before their selection – and none so much as John. So that any diminution in Earth’s regard for one of them might have a kind of corresponding effect on their status within the Ares. This at any rate seemed to be Frank’s operating principle.

It felt as if they were confined to the interior of a hotel with no exits, without even any balconies. The oppression of hotel life was growing; they had been inside now for four long months, but it was still less than half their trip. And none of their carefully designed physical surroundings or daily routines could hasten its end.

Then one morning the second flight team was dealing with another of Arkady’s problem runs, when all at once red lights burned on several screens.

“A solar flare has been detected by the solar monitoring equipment,” Rya said.

Arkady stood quickly. “That’s not me!” he exclaimed, and leaned over to read the screen nearest him. He looked up, met his colleagues’ skeptical stares, grinned. “Sorry, friends. This is the real wolf.”

An emergency message from Houston confirmed him. He could have faked those as well, but he was headed for the nearest spoke and there was nothing they could do; fake or not, they had to follow.

In fact, a big solar flare was an event they had simulated many times before. Everyone had tasks to perform, quite a few of them in a very short time, so they ran around the toruses, cursing their luck and trying not to get in each other’s way. There was a lot to do, as battening down was complicated and not very automated. In the midst of dragging plant trays into the plant shelter Janet yelled, “Is this one of Arkady’s tests?”

“He says not!”

“Shit.”

They had left Earth during the low point in the eleven-year sunspot cycle, specifically to reduce the chance of a flare like this occurring. And here it was anyway. They had about half an hour before the first radiation arrived, and no more than an hour after that the really hard stuff would follow.

Emergencies in space can be as obvious as an explosion or as intangible as an equation, but their obviousness has nothing to do with how dangerous they are. The crew’s senses would never perceive the subatomic wind approaching them, and yet it was one of the worst things that could have happened. And everyone knew it. They ran through the toruses to get their bit of battening done – plants had to be covered or moved to protected areas, the chickens and pigs and pygmy cows and the rest of the animals and birds had to be herded into their own little shelters, seeds and frozen embryos had to be collected and carried along, sensitive electrical components had to be boxed or likewise carried along. When they were done with these high-speed tasks they yanked themselves up the spokes to the central shaft as fast as they could, and then flew down the central shaft tube to the storm shelter, which was directly behind the tube’s aft end.

Hiroko and her biosphere team were the last ones in, banging through the hatch a full twenty-seven minutes after the initial alarm. They hurtled into the weightless space flushed and out of breath. “Has it started yet?”

“Not yet.”

They plucked personal dosimeters from a velcro pad of them, pinned them to their clothing.

The rest of the crew already floated in the semi-cylindrical chamber, breathing hard and nursing bruises and a few sprains. Maya ordered them to count off, and was relieved to hear the whole hundred run through without gaps.

The room seemed very crowded. They hadn’t gathered the whole hundred in one spot for many weeks, and even a max room didn’t seem large enough. This one occupied a tank in the middle strand of the hub shaft. The four tanks surrounding theirs were filled with water, and their tank was divided lengthwise between their room and another semi-cylinder that had been filled with heavy metals. This semi-cylinder’s flat side was their “floor,” and it was fitted inside the tank on circular tracks, and rotated to counteract the spin of the ship, keeping the tub between the crew and the sun.

So they floated in a non-rotating space, while the curved roof of the tank rotated over them at its usual four rpm. It was a peculiar sight, which along with the weightlessness made some people begin to look thoughtful in a pre-seasick kind of way. These unfortunates congregated down at the end of the shelter where the lavatories were located, and to help them out visually, everyone else oriented themselves to the floor. The radiation was therefore coming up through their feet, mostly gamma rays scattering out of the heavy metals. Maya felt an impulse to keep her knees together. People floated in place, or put on velcro slippers to walk over the floor. They talked in low voices, instinctively finding their next-door neighbors, their working partners, their friends. Conversations were subdued, as if a cocktail party had been told that the hors d’oeuvres had been tainted.

John Boone rip-ripped his way to the computer terminals at the fore end of the room where Arkady and Alex were monitoring the ship. He punched in a command, and the exterior radiation data were suddenly displayed on the room’s biggest screen. “Let’s see how much is hitting the ship,” he said brightly.

Groans. “Must we?” exclaimed Ursula.

“We might as well know,” John said. “And I want to see how well this shelter works. The one on the Rust Eagle was about as strong as the bib you wear at the dentist’s.”

Maya smiled. It was a reminder, rare from John, that he had been exposed to much more radiation than any of the rest of them – about a hundred and sixty rem over the course of his life, as he explained now in response to someone’s question. On Earth one caught a fifth of a roentgen equivalent man per year; orbiting Earth, still inside the protection of the Earth’s magnetosphere, one took around thirty-five per year. So John had taken a lot of heat. And somehow that gave him the right, now, to screen the exterior data if he wanted to.

Those who were interested – about sixty people – clumped behind him to watch the screen. The rest relocated at the far end of the tank with the people worrying about motion sickness, a group that definitely didn’t want to know how much radiation they were taking. Just the thought was enough to send some of them into the heads.

Then the full force of the flare struck. The exterior radiation count shifted to well above the solar wind’s usual level, and then soared in a sudden rush. An indrawn hiss came from several observers at once, and there were some shocked exclamations.

“But look how much the shelter is stopping,” John said, checking the dosimeter pinned to his shirt. “I’m still at 1.3 rem.”

That was several lifetimes of dentists’ X-rays, to be sure; but the radiation outside the storm shelter was already 70 rem, well-on its way to a lethal dose, so they were getting off lightly. Still, the amount flying through the rest of the ship! Billions of particles were penetrating the ship and colliding with the atoms of water and metal they were huddled behind; hundreds of millions were flying between these atoms and then through the atoms of their bodies, touching nothing, as if they were no more than ghosts. Still, thousands were striking atoms of flesh and bone. Most of those collisions were harmless; but in all those thousands, there were in all probability one or two (or three?) in which a chromosome strand was taking a hit, and kinking in the wrong way: and there it was. Tumor initiation, begun with just that typo in the book of the self. And years later, unless the victim’s DNA luckily repaired itself, the tumor promotion that was a more or less unavoidable part of living would have its effect, and there would appear a bloom of Something Else inside: cancer. Leukemia, most likely; and, most likely, death.

So it was hard not to regard the figures unhappily. 14.658 rems, 1.786, 19.004. “Like an odometer,” Boone said calmly as he looked at his dosimeter. He was gripping a rail with both hands and pulling himself back and forth, as if doing isometric exercises. Frank saw it and said, “John, what the hell are you doing?”

“Dodging,” John said. He smiled at Frank’s frown. “You know – moving target!”

People laughed at him. With the extent of the danger precisely charted on screens and graphs, they were beginning to feel less helpless. This was illogical, but naming was the power that made every human a scientist of sorts. And these were scientists by profession, with many astronauts among them as well, trained to accept the possibility of such a storm. All those mental habits began channeling their thoughts, and the shock of the event receded a bit. They were coming to terms with it.

Arkady went to a terminal and called up Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, picking it up in the third movement, when the village dance is disrupted by storm. He turned up the volume, and they floated together in the long half-cylinder, listening to the intensity of Beethoven’s fierce tempest, which suddenly seemed to enunciate perfectly the lashings of the silent wind pouring through them. It would sound just like that! Strings and woodwinds shrieking in wild gusts, out of control and yet beautifully melodic at the same time – a shiver ran down Maya’s spine. She had never listened to the old warhorse this closely before, and she looked with admiration (and a bit of fear) at Arkady, who was beaming ecstatically at the effects of his inspired disk jockeying, and dancing like some red knot of fluff in the wind. When the symphony’s storm peaked, it was difficult to believe that the radiation count wasn’t rising; and when the musical storm abated, it seemed like theirs should be over too. Thunder muttered, the last gusts whistled through. The French horn sang its serene all-clear.

People began to talk about other things, discussing the various business of the day that had been so rudely interrupted, or taking the opportunity to talk about other things. After a half hour or more, one of those conversations got louder; Maya didn’t hear how it began, but suddenly Arkady said, very loudly and in English, “I don’t think we should pay any attention to plans made for us back on Earth!”

Other conversations went silent, and people turned to look at him. He had popped up and was floating under the rotating roof of the chamber, where he could survey them all and speak like some mad flying spirit.

“I think we should make new plans,” he said. “I think we should be making them now. Everything should be redesigned from beginning, with our own thinking expressed. It should extend everywhere, even to first shelters we build.”

“Why bother?” Maya asked, annoyed at his grandstanding. “They’re good designs.” It really was irritating; Arkady often took center stage, and people always looked at her as if she were somehow responsible for him, as if it were her job to keep him from pestering them.

“Buildings are the template of a society,” Arkady said.

“They’re rooms,” Sax Russell pointed out.

“But rooms imply the social organization inside them.” Arkady looked around, pulling people into the discussion with his gaze. “The arrangement of a building shows what the designer thinks should go on inside. We saw that at the beginning of the voyage, when Russians and Americans were segregated into Torus D and B. We were supposed to remain two entities, you see. It will be same on Mars. Buildings express values, they have a sort of grammar, and rooms are the sentences. I don’t want people in Washington or Moscow saying how I should live my life: I’ve had enough of that.”

“What don’t you like about the design of the first shelters?” John asked, looking interested.