Fourth Planet from the Sun, page 23
Site Burroughs proved to be a trial. Not the site itself, which was exactly as advertised, but the constant second-guessing from Takiguchi aboard Falcon, via Sputnik. On his last two sorties, Giram had been teamed with Pres, who managed to have “uplink anomalies” whenever the Japanese mission commander got too corporate for him. Tanya, who was lead for this sortie, merely sucked up the abuse and the litany of changes like a good little soldier. If Giram had balked, it would have looked bad for her, so he went along. And consequently, they got about half of their work done.
They were also late getting back to Eagle. “I’m pushing the margin on my consumables,” Tanya told Giram as the lander appeared above the rocks. Maybe it was true: She had been revved up for the whole eight hours. More likely, she just wanted to use the head on Eagle. Sanitary facilities in a MEMS were downright dangerous when they weren’t laughable.
“Go on in. I’ll configure T-Bird for tomorrow.”
She didn’t try to change his mind. “You’re a saint.”
Giram spent the next five minutes—the time it took to reach Eagle—looking for marks in the chocolate sand. What kind of marks, he wasn’t sure: giant three-toed footprints, maybe. Suddenly, he felt light-headed. Either he was nervous about something, or he was pushing the margin on his consumables, too.
As Tanya bounded up the ladder into Eagle, Giram attached the charging cable to T-Bird and did the pro forma walk-around.
“Falcon goes LOS in three minutes, Giram.” Pres was suddenly on the line, sounding, as he always did whenever Big Brother was listening, like Neil Armstrong. Did he wonder what was up? If so, the news that Falcon was going out of contact in a few minutes was helpful.
“On my way in.”
Giram busied himself for the next 180 seconds doing inventory on T-Bird. Time for Plan A. “Pres? I think we dropped a bag somewhere.”
“What kind?”
“Core samples, I think.”
“Did you leave it at Burroughs?”
“I don’t think so. I remember writing a label during the last stop. Shit.” Giram rarely cursed; he knew it would shake Pres up a little.
“Come on in. We can get it tomorrow.”
“I think it probably fell off between here and the ridge. Why don’t I just go look? Otherwise, you guys’ll be all screwed up tomorrow.”
Giram counted to six before Pres answered. “How are your consumables?”
“Fifteen minutes before redline.” He started walking up the trail. “The light’s in the window.”
He found the sack of core samples easily enough, considering that he’d let it slip off T-Bird halfway between the ridgeline and Eagle. He snapped it to his belt and turned around. Eagle’s stub nose loomed above the rocks less than three hundred yards to the east. Giram knew he was effectively invisible to Pres or Tanya: the cameras on T-Bird were too low to see him, and the two real-time monitors on Eagle were pointed north and south. Only the store-dump cameras would even show him at all, and then no one would know for weeks or months.
If he did this right.
“You OK out there?” Pres again, breaking up a bit.
“Just fine.” The machinations you had to go through to get five minutes of free time . . . no wonder robots were better suited for spaceflight.
Giram looked first to the south of the T-Bird trail, scuffling along in the cold chocolate dust, and finding no marks that could not have been caused by wind. Forty yards of that, and he crossed over, ranging to the south.
He glanced at his consumables. Twelve minutes to redline.
He was closer to Eagle here, but in a blind spot. No chance of Tanya looking out the window and asking him where he was going. (No doubt she and Pres were keeping watch.) The soil seemed looser and dustier. Giram found himself sinking in . . . like snow, he realized. Like the snow he’d seen around Nordvik one winter.
That’s when he saw the marks, a cluster of scrapings that gave way to two groups of parallel scrapings marching their way into the rocks. Go ahead, be anthropomorphic: the Martian came this way, saw the ship, turned, and ran. Ran this way.
Oops, don’t say Martian. Takiguchi wants only the new nomenclature. Emboss. MBOS. Mars-Based Organic Structure.
He was being stupid, he knew. Someday he would laugh at the memory of his futile search for life on Mars—
Then, of course, he found it: a lump the size of a small dog covered in the same fabric as the sample in his MEMS pocket. A lump with at least three arms that he could see. A lump that was visibly crouching away from him.
“Did you say something, Giram?” Pres’s voice, through static.
“Sorry. Did I?” He held out his hand, just like in the movies. The MBOS didn’t react.
“Sounded like you were laughing.”
“It’s an Ethiopian thing.” Wait . . . the thing clawed at the dirt, as if backing away from him. He spread his arms and stepped back himself, as if to say, Don’t worry about me.
“Time to come back in.”
“In five.” He knew he was ready to redline his consumables. No point in killing himself today when he could come back tomorrow. If the MBOS were still here. He fumbled in his pocket for the Object, unfolding it and presenting it to the MBOS. “I think this is yours,” he whispered. He set the Object down in front of the MBOS, then turned and headed back to Eagle.
Paralyzed with fear, weak with hunger, she did not move until the Great and Greater Moons rose. Even then, her only desire was for escape. But her route was blocked by the very rocks that had given her shelter: she had to go the same way the beast had, to use its tracks. It was terrifying, but she did it, one claw at a time.
She quickly reached the spot where the beast had dropped something and saw that it was a piece of her garment.
She clutched it, and found it so rich in scent that she almost fainted again. The beast smelled like bread. She wept as she rolled the fabric in her claw, and moved on.
“So you found gold.”
Two hours later, Pres cornered Giram in the mid-deck near the MEMS. Tanya was on the flight deck, out of earshot, cleaning up dinner. Giram had been doing a suit check, recharging the canisters.
“Excuse me?”
“You found something out there, didn’t you?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because ever since you got back, you’ve been acting like a guy who just won the lottery. So I’m guessing it’s gold.”
Giram was too tired to play games. Besides, he needed someone to trust. “Better than gold.”
He had the pleasure of seeing Pres, probably for the first time in years, react with surprise. “No shit? I was kidding. You really found . . . what? Frozen oil? A poppy field? Martian crack: there’s a concept. What?” he hissed.
“Better.”
Pres blinked. “Better. A skull, maybe? Wait till Takiguchi hears about this. Our ratings will go—”
“Pres, I found an MBOS.”
“Speak in English, Goddammit—”
“A Mars-Based Organic Structure. A Martian.”
Just like that, Pres was no longer excited. His eyes narrowed.
“You know, oxygen narcosis is a funny thing—”
“I’m a doctor, too, Pres. I know what I saw.”
“What exactly are we talking about here? Somebody looking over the same real estate?”
“No. A native MBOS.”
“Come on—”
“It’s the same color as the rocks. From a distance, it looks just like them—”
“Giram!” That was Tanya calling from the flight deck. “Takiguchi wants his debrief.”
As Giram reached for the ladder, Pres grabbed his shoulder. “I want to believe you.”
“Nothing’s stopping you.”
Pres grunted. “Are you going to tell Takiguchi?”
“I don’t know.”
Giram hated the debrief procedure: he sat in front of a camera and spoke to a real-time image of Takiguchi that was split-screened with the operator and support staff at Korolev—which was nine minutes behind. Ever since the landing, Giram had tried to finish his statement in eighteen minutes, before the assholes on Earth had a chance to start firing questions at him out of sequence. This never quite worked, because Takiguchi always had one more question . . . and Korolev saved up questions from the previous day.
The first seventeen minutes went well, with Giram giving his second thoughts on the efficiency of various experiments and assignments. He thought he had gotten away cleanly when Takiguchi suddenly said, “Channel B, Giram,” theoretically cutting Korolev out of the conversation. Then: “Why did you stay out late?”
“I dropped a sample bag—”
“I know what you said. I just don’t believe it.”
Giram knew his physical parameters were monitored during the sorties—his MEMS was wired for it. It hadn’t occurred to him until this moment that the same monitoring system could double as a lie detector. “You’re right. I deliberately dropped the bag.”
“I’m listening.”
“I think 1 just wanted some free time. We’re so programmed we can’t even take a walk.”
Giram listened to the hiss of the carrier for ten seconds, long enough to wonder if there had been a loss of signal. Finally Takiguchi said, “I understand. This is Mars, after all. But remember that Korolev holds me responsible for everything you do.”
“Sorry.”
“You’re not a free agent. Thousands of people put their lives and souls into this mission. It’s tough to remember, but you work for them. We can’t have any black zones: Record every step.” Another pause. “You can edit when we go downhill, you know.”
“I guess I didn’t think of that.”
“Just get through the next two days.”
Falcon went LOS, leaving Giram with his face burning, like a schoolboy sent to a corner. It was atypical Takiguchi performance—Pres called it the No-Yes-No Play. He’s on your side; he’s on their side; you don’t mind being spied on, do you? It’s all for the good of the mission. If you complained about him, people thought you were a crank.
Giram knew there was nothing Takiguchi could do about his “lapse” right now. Two days from now, when Eagle docked with Falcon, it would be different.
Takiguchi hadn’t wanted Giram on the mission, anyway. Giram was qualified, of course, through the European Agency, but so were hundreds of people. His background was too unstructured, too unfocused. Giram had not dreamed of going into space all his life, the way Takiguchi (who was both a test pilot and a Ph.D. astronomer) and Tanya and even Pres had. It had merely been an opportunity that presented itself, the same way a chance to go to medical school in France had suddenly appeared to an eighteen-year-old Ethiopian refugee. The same way a job with ESA designing medical equipment had happened to open up seven years later. Giram could just as easily have become a United Nations doctor—the U.N. had been behind the original medical scholarship—or even gone into business.
His selection had been a bone thrown to the Third World, nothing more. Consequently, he had always felt like an unwanted guest in the crew . . . when he didn’t feel like a traitor to the great god of the mission itself.
But then, as a child, Giram had never looked at the stars. He had never had the strength.
She regretted having touched the fragment given her by the beast. Not because it hadn’t refreshed her; it had. But because it had awakened things within her, things she had thought dead. Memories of her dead mate, physical stirrings of the kits she carried. Now they might be born . . . and now they would surely die.
Knowing she was condemning herself and her young . . . unable to do anything but crawl, she barely moved that night. Morning found her within sight of the silver rock that held the beast. She waited for it to come to her.
The Day Eleven sortie took Pres and Tanya to Site Weinbaum, which Giram could only monitor. Every few minutes, it seemed, during the eight hours they were gone, he would slip from one window to the other, various cameras in hand, hoping for a sign of the MBOS. Nothing showed up visually or thermally, which was not surprising: neither system was able to see through rock. Imaging radar would have helped, but the nearest one was overhead in Falcon.
He wasn’t that desperate.
And when Pres and Tanya returned right on the timeline, Giram wanted to scream with frustration. Obviously, Pres hadn’t been able to find the creature, meaning there was only tomorrow’s sortie remaining, and that one was half-duration. To pick up the garbage.
They didn’t even have a chance to talk before dinner because Pres—for the first time since leaving Earth orbit—insisted on taking his turn as cook. That left Giram to recharge the suits with Tanya on the mid-deck. All she offered was a tired smile. “One more day.”
“Sick of Mars?”
“Just tired.”
He began to think he should tell Tanya about the MBOS. She wouldn’t necessarily run right to Takiguchi, not if he begged—
“Giram, did you see anything funny out there yesterday”
“Funny in what way?”
“Geologically.” She popped a disk from her helmet cam into the player. The picture panned across the T-Bird trail looking back toward Eagle from the east. It had been taken on the trip out to Site Weinbaum, because shadows fell away from the camera. Giram felt his heart go into arrhythmia: in the upper left of the screen was a reddish lump that had to be the MBOS. “See that?” Tanya said.
Giram could only grunt as Tanya tapped the screen in the lower right. “Look at the edges on this wash. Doesn’t that look eolian to you?” Eolian. It took a moment for his geological training to come back: wind-formed.
“Uh, no.”
“I don’t think so, either. It looks like a new cut, maybe from a quake. Best one I’ve seen so far. Pres pointed it out.” A bit stunned, Giram watched her use the board to give the image the appropriate keywords—SORTIE/DAY 11/SOIL—then stash the disk in the case with fifty others. She scampered up the ladder. Then Pres slid down, a shit-eating smile on his face.
“Now you know where your MBOS is,” he said quietly. “Best I could do today, given the situation.” He glanced upward, meaning either Tanya or Takiguchi, or both.
“And she never saw it?”
“Sure she saw it. But she was interested in something else. It’s called The Purloined Letter method. Hide something in plain sight.”
“I’ll remember that.”
Pres looked his age for a moment. “What do you want to do with your MBOS, anyway? Since you aren’t gonna stick it in a bag and take it back to Earth.”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Well, whatever you do, don’t tell.”
“It’s the reason we came here—”
“Bullshit. We came here to keep people on Earth employed. Which is fine by me, since I’m one of those people. But if they knew about your . . . discovery, this whole fucking planet would be crawling with humanity in about five years. If we can’t keep that from happening, this should be the first and last Mars trip.”
He grinned. “I got a good look at it, you know. Threw down a scope when Tanya was busy rediscovering chocolate rocks. It was moving. Waving a claw.” He was silent. “Reminded me of something . . . it looks sick, listless. Almost like it was starved. Of course, that may be how it’s supposed to look.”
Tanya appeared in the access. “Are you two coming up or not?”
The Day Twelve sortie was the most structured of all, beginning with the last sweep by T-Bird to the northeast, the region of Arsia Base that had been surveyed least. There was to be a live-to-Earth farewell-to-Mars broadcast three hours in, which gave Giram and Pres barely enough time to learn their speeches.
“ ‘So we say, good-bye, Red Planet, until we meet again.’ ” Pres laughed. “Who wrote this, Takiguchi?”
“The fax said it came from headquarters. Probably one of the usual speechwriters.”
“Sounds like a translation from a foreign language.”
“Well, it’ll be subtitled for most of the planet.”
“The nine people who aren’t watching the war.”
In spite of Pres’s cynicism, the ceremony went well. Korolev surprised them by closing with a live song from schoolchildren, one from each global time zone. Giram found himself longing to be home again, in any of those time zones. Tanya did her part as TV commentator, too.
Then it was time to configure the site, as the timeline put it. The midday winds had kicked up a bit, making it difficult to tie down the Mylar flaps on T-Bird, in case some future visitors from Earth might want to use it again. They were almost through, when Giram heard, “Shit,” from Pres.
The U.N. flag had come loose and gone flapping away over the rocks. Air pressure on Mars was pretty low, but pure velocity made up for it.
“Giram,” Pres said, “Why don’t you go get that? I’ll finish up here.”
It took Giram at least a second to realize that Pres had deliberately sliced the line holding the flag. Giram had to act quickly. He had already put together a bag with scraps—food, water, even a blanket—and had been filling it with likely or unlikely objects from the landing site, not knowing, of course, whether any of it would be of use. Wondering if, in fact, it would kill the creature. But he had to do something.
He found MBOS cowering right where Pres had left it, less than a hundred yards downwind and east of Eagle. It hadn’t moved for a while: there was already a thin sprinkling of brown dust on its coat. He had no time for the pseudo-traditional first-contact niceties; all he could do was dump the “gifts” out and push them toward the MBOS. The creature was still alive: It actually shook as Giram came close, as if it needed calming or comfort. “You’re on your own,” Giram told it. “Stay the hell away from us.” Then he gathered up the U.N. flag and hustled back to Eagle.
