Geoffrey Landis - Mars Crossing

“What is it?” Brandon whispered.

“Peroxides in the soil,” she said. “It’s a natural bleach. No matter how we try to keep the dust out, we can’t help getting a little exposure to the soil every time we put on and take off our suits. We’re all getting a peroxide job.”

Suddenly Brandon put it together. “That’s why our eyes are so itchy all the time.”

“Yours too? I thought it was just me. Yeah, that’s probably it.”

“What do we do about it?”

“Aren’t blonds supposed to have more fun? So, let’s have some fun.” She laughed. “The dust sure isn’t going to go away, I can tell you that. So we’d better learn to adapt.” Tana looked at Brandon. “Say, are you all right? You look a little run-down.”

“I’m fine,” Brandon said. I’m stuck on Mars with psychotics, he thought. Half of us aren’t going to make it back. And there’s nothing to do, nothing to distract us. I’m going to go nuts. “Fine, fine, fine, fine.”

At first meeting, Brandon hated his newfound brother Trevor. They fought like cats, backs arched, hissing at each other and threatening to scratch. “No use bitching about it, Branny,” his mother told him. “Like it or no, he’s going to stay your brother.” And so every vacation, every summer, every holiday they were together.

But it was eerie how similar they were. Trevor liked the same virtual reality world that Brandon did, Dirt City Blue. He loved history and hated algebra, like Brandon did, and had a crush on the same virtual actor, Tiffany Li, the one that all the other kids thought was flat-chested and ugly. Brandon could quote a single word from the lyrics of a stomp song, and Trevor would know what song it was. He would complete the quote and toss a single word back, and just like he could read Trevor’s mind, Brandon always knew which song Trevor was thinking of, even if it was a stupid dumb word like “love” or “night” or even, once, “the.”

Despite the difference in their ages, they looked so much alike that sometimes when Trevor was visiting Colorado, people would think he was Brandon, and when Brandon went down to Arizona, people would talk to him as though he were Trevor, especially when he wore some of Trevor’s outgrown clothes.

Trevor was a shade more obedient, Brandon just a little more rebellious toward authority, and Brandon’s mother considered Trevor a good influence on him. Trevor was a Scout, and knew about rock climbing, something Brandon had always wanted to do. So Trevor taught him, and after that every summer they would go out rock climbing.

And when the announcement came out about the expedition to Mars, they both looked at each other. Trevor was twenty now, a junior at Arizona State. They didn’t see each other as often—Brandon was just applying to colleges—but when they did, they still instantly clicked together, as if they’d never been separated.

“You’re thinking what I’m thinking,” Trevor said. It was a statement, nut a question.

“Yeah.”

“Too young.”

“Yeah.”

Trevor thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. “Okay,” he said.

“Great!” Brandon broke into an enormous grin. He didn’t need to ask what Trevor was talking about; as always, they were thinking the same way. “Thanks a lot!”

Tickets to the Mars lottery were a thousand dollars. They bought thirty tickets each.

Brandon reached his hand over his head, and Trevor clasped it. “Brothers forever!” Their words were spoken so nearly simultaneously that, had there been anybody else there, they would have thought it was a single voice.

It hadn’t occurred to Brandon to doubt Trevor for even a moment; his single word—okay—was as good as a vow. The problem had been simple: Brandon was too young for the Mars lottery. Trevor would be twenty-one by the time the tickets were drawn, but Brandon would barely be turning eighteen. The rules were clear: If your ticket won the lottery, if you were over twenty-one and could pass the health screening, you got a slot on the Mars crew. If you were too young, or too old, or couldn’t pass the health exam, you had to take an alternative prize.

Brandon was too young to go to Mars But Brandon could pass for Trevor; he’d done it dozens of times.

What Trevor had agreed to, with barely a moment’s contemplation, was a substitution. If Brandon won the lottery, he could take Trevor’s identification. They were genetically identical; the identity tests would show a perfect five-sigma identity match to Trevor Whitman.

Brandon Weber could become Trevor Whitman, and take the trip to Mars.

The next day was no better. The horizon dropped away on their right, and they found themselves paralleling the rim of another enormous chasm. “Gangis Chasma,” Ryan announced. “The orbital views show some large landslides from the rim. They’re over on the north side, but I don’t know if we can trust how stable the rim is.” He was beginning to lose his voice and continued in almost a whisper. “We’d best not venture too close.”

Brandon wanted to ask how serious the danger really was—Mars had been around for billions of years, was it really likely that there would be a landslide at the exact moment they were passing by? But by now all of their throats hurt, and nobody talked more than necessary. They kept moving.

And the following day a second wheel of the rockhopper jammed and had to be pulled off and junked.

The part that Brandon liked most was when he had a shift driving the dirt-rover. They all traded off on the dirt-rover, except for Estrela, who still had one arm in a sling. It allowed him to be alone, to play his music in his head and remind himself of what it would be like when he got back home. Home seemed farther and farther away, though, and it was hard for him to remember what it had been like. It seemed as though he’d been here, driving across Mars, for forever, and the idea that he would return home seemed like something far away and unobtainable.

Driving as the trailbreaker, it was his task to find the easiest route, and it was quite a while before he realized that, for several hours now, the gentle valley that they had been following was the path of a long dried-up riverbed. Once he realized it, it was easy enough to spot. The ancient river had cut into the rock on either side, exposing the strata in parallel stripes of the darker rock. When they stopped for a break, and to trade off drivers, Brandon walked to the embankment to examine the rock in more detail.

To his disappointment, it was not the sandstone or shale they had seen in the canyon, but apparently some volcanic rock.

No place to look for more fossils.

The closer they got to the equator, the stronger the wind blew. The rockhopper had been designed for a scientific exploration and had a science instrumentation panel set in a position in front of the copilot’s seat. Brandon happened to glance at the science panel, and saw that the record of wind gusts was hitting a hundred kilometers per hour. He mentally converted—

“That’s over sixty miles an hour,” he said out loud.

Ryan glanced over at the panel. “Yep,” he said. He didn’t seem surprised.

“But that’s, like, almost hurricane speed.”

Ryan shook his head. “Not on Mars.”

It was true. The next time they stopped, he stood out in the wind with his arms outstretched. He could feel the breeze, but barely. The sand didn’t move.

In another day they approached the equator itself.

“Shouldn’t there be some sort of ceremony?” Brandon asked.

“Like what, exactly?” Ryan said.

“I don’t know. Champagne?”

“Yeah, you wish.”