Geoffrey Landis - Mars Crossing

So Tana stayed silent. It was, in its way, better. She could be moved by what she saw, with no barriers of language between her and the landscape, no need to communicate her feelings with others.

With all its inhuman majesty, its cold distances, its flat and unaccented sky, Tana loved Mars.

Brandon Weber was nine years old before he discovered that he had an identical twin brother who was three years older than he was.

His parents, back when they had been married, had been unable to have children. In the early 2000s, this had been no big challenge. The fertility specialists they visited had advised in-vitro fertilization; their medical insurance paid the bill. An egg was harvested from his mother, Allison. A sample of sperm had been gathered from his father, examined under a microscope, and a single healthy spermatozoon was selected. By micro-manipulation, the sperm cell was injected through the outer cellular wall of the egg to fertilize it.

And then the technician watched. It took the technician three times to get one to successfully fertilize. When the ovum divided, and divided again, it was clear that the fertilization had succeeded. The four cells had been carefully separated, and each one allowed to divide to the blastocyst stage. One of these was sacrificed to microdissection, to verify that the chromosomes held no abnormalities. No Down’s syndrome chromosomes, no cystic fibrosis, no less-than-perfect babies would be good enough for Ted and Allison Whitman.

One egg had been implanted back into Allison Whitman’s uterus.

And the two others had been perfused and frozen, to serve as backups. If Allison Whitman failed to become pregnant on the first egg, there would be two more tries. As it happened, the backups were unnecessary; Allison got pregnant on the first try.

Ted Whitman, as it turned out, also had a backup plan: He had told his girlfriend Frissa that he had had a vasectomy and that “precautions” would be unnecessary. Now Frissa, too, was pregnant.

In the divorce settlement, Ted held out for custody of the newborn, and in order to get it, he ended up paying off Allison with a good chunk of his accumulated wealth. He had been getting tired of her anyway, and he didn’t really need the money. Me named the kid Trevor, close enough to his own name of Ted to satisfy his vanity, and got a court order canceling all of Allison’s visitation privileges. The last thing that he wanted was some ex hanging around with a claim on his child.

Allison moved back to western Colorado, where her family was from, and took back her maiden name. Unlike Ted—who went through two more wives before eventually giving up on marriage—she never remarried. Once was enough for her. Between the divorce settlement and her job as a private tutor in American history on the Internet, she was pretty well off. But it did occur to her, after a few years on her own, that she would like her own child. An inquiry to the fertility clinic revealed that the remaining fertilized eggs were still there, still waiting in the freezer, and by the peculiarities of Arizona law, were legally her property.

The result was Brandon Weber.

When Ted Whitman died, of a coronary at age fifty-two, his family—a mother and two unmarried sisters—asked to keep custody of Trevor. With Ted’s inability to hold onto a wife, they had been doing most of the raising of Trevor anyway. In due course a lawyer visited Allison to ask whether she was planning to sue for her rights. It was then that nine-year-old Brandon unexpectedly discovered that he had an older twin brother. The news to Ted Whitman’s family that Ted had a second son, one that they had never heard of, proved to be equally unexpected.

The lawyers turned out to be unnecessary; Allison had always liked Ted’s sisters, and they discovered that they had a lot in common, not the least of which was Ted. They got along fine. It was only Ted himself that she had had problems with.

Another day of insanely boring driving over flat, uninteresting territory.

Brandon had to keep on checking the position of the sun to verify that they were driving toward the north. His sense of direction told him that they were driving east, then a moment later that they had doubled back around south, and then that they were driving due west. They were approaching the Martian equator now, and at noon the sun was very near directly overhead. At this time he had to just trust the rockhopper’s inertial navigation system on faith. He didn’t like it.

Estrela had withdrawn into herself. She said nothing for hours, often not bothering to reply when spoken to. Tana had gone weird. She was talking about the Mars landscape as if it were still exciting, just as if the scenery that they saw today was any different from what they saw yesterday or, for that matter, at the landing site. Only Commander Ryan seemed sane to Brandon, and he seemed to have a fixed, unchangeable mission: to put in as many miles on the road as possible.

Everybody was hoarse, everybody’s eyes were red and itching.

The rockhopper was showing wear; on the second day out of the canyon, red warning lights flashed in the cockpit of the rockhopper. The front left wheel had seized up.

Ryan examined it. The wheel was frozen, and he pulled it off to examine it. He traced the problem to abrasion due to grit leaking through the seal and into the bearing. It was far beyond any possible repair—the friction of the wheel seizing up had melted parts of the bearing, and then when it froze, twisted it into scrap. Feedback circuitry on the drive motor should have shut it off when the motor current increased; instead, it had burned out the motor as well.

There was nothing Ryan could do about it, and there no spare. He picked up the useless wheel, and hurled it as far away from the rockhopper as he could. It careened off of a rock and spun to a stop in a sand drift.

“Shouldn’t we save it?” Brandon asked. “What if we need it later?”

“For what?” Ryan said. “Nothing here can fix it, that’s for sure. It’s just dead weight.”

He cannibalized the motor and the wheel from the middle left side and moved it to the front to replace the one that had frozen. “This one isn’t in mint condition either, but it should do,” he said. It was fortunate that the six-wheeled rockhopper had a lot of redundancy; the wheels were designed to be independent and interchangeable precisely so that the loss of any one of them would not cripple the rover.

“Can you fix the seals?”

Ryan shook his head. “They just weren’t made for this much constant use. Okay, we’re ready to roll. Let’s go.”

They switched drivers. Tana, who’d had the last shift running scout on the dirt-rover, dismounted to take over driving the rockhopper.

As Tana walked toward him, Brandon noticed something odd. Through the dusty faceplate of the helmet, it was hard to tell, but he inspected her again, carefully; it wasn’t an illusion. “You’re blond,” he said.

“What?” Tana laughed. “Not by a long shot, boy.”

He peered through the faceplate of her helmet. She looked funny; the light hair stood out in stark contrast to her dark skin. “That’s what’s different. You’re a blond.”

“No way, guy.”

“Yes! Really.” Brandon looked around. There was nothing like a mirror anywhere around. Finally he went to the rockhopper. He scrubbed the dust off of one of the windows until he could see his own reflection, and invited Tana over to look. “Look.”

Tana looked at her reflection for a long time. Her hair, although not exactly golden, had turned to a light shade of brown, like wheat. “You’re right. There aren’t any mirrors around, or I would have noticed it.” She turned and looked at Brandon. “You’re blond, too. Take a look at yourself. And, come to think of it, so is Estrela. I’ve been thinking that she was doing something to her hair—it was just so gradual that I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. She used to have dark black hair.”