Geoffrey Landis - Mars Crossing

It was fun to be famous.

Her mind would wander. Sometimes Estrela imagined that her brother was with her. It had been decades since Gilberto had left her. She had not thought about him for years, nor about the streets of Rio. And yet she could bring him forth perfectly in her mind, just as he had been, wiry and street smart and still larger than her. “Hey, moça ,” he might say. “These North Americans, you’re in some rich company, aren’t you?” He would give her a sly look, and she knew that he would be thinking, What did they have that he could grab? Yeah, that would be just like Gilberto, always on the lookout. “Better stay alert, moça, they don’t care about you. You’re fat, you lost your reflexes, haven’t you? Don’t think you’re like them. They look at us, they don’t even see us, they just see filth in the street. They’ll kill you and not even laugh when you’re gone.”

That’s not true, she wanted to tell him.

And sometimes she would imagine João walking beside her. She would call him up in her mind, and she would think of how he might comment on the rocks as they passed.

“Hold up a moment, look at that one. Look, that’s a layer of limestone. See how it weathers differently? There were ocean deposits here, I’m sure of it.”

“I don’t care about limestone,” she would tell him, but not aloud. Her throat hurt too much for her to say anything aloud. “Go away.” It felt bitter and yet also sweet for her to see him again, even if he was dead. Even when she ignored him.

But for a moment she would be happy, showing off for João, identifying rocks and landforms for him. “That’s gabbro,” she might say, trying to sound completely confident.

“Close. Andesite, I’d say. What’s that outcrop there?”

She looked at it. A rounded ridge, with an abrupt scarp at one end. “Anticline?” she imagined saying. “Dip and scarp.”

João shook his head, almost in pity at her ignorance. “Sheepback rock, I’d say,” he said. “There was a glacier here once, I’d bet on it.”

But João was gone.

They stopped for a break, and to Estrela’s complete surprise, Tana pulled her over and wanted to talk. They had been walking in silence for so long that it came as a surprise.

“Say, Estrela, you want to know something?”

Tana didn’t wait for Estrela to answer.

“Even with the chance that we won’t make it home,” Tana said, “you know, I’m still glad I came. This is the adventure that most people will never make in a lifetime; if it means my life, this is the price that we always knew we might have to pay. Sometimes I still can’t believe how lucky we are. Even with everything that’s happened—we’re on Mars. Nobody else can say that.”

Tana fell silent, staring off into the distance.

She is crazy, Estrela thought. She is completely crazy.

The next day they saw the first dust devil at ten in the morning. Brandon watched two of them dance together like mating birds, circling each other, approaching in toward each other warily and then suddenly darting away, finally twisting around each other and then merging together into a single column that marched off over the horizon and vanished.

More followed. By noon there were a dozen at once.

When one passed directly over him, Brandon closed his eyes, but nothing happened. He could feel the wind as it passed, but it was a feeble push, barely enough to be noticeable by Earth standards. He was afraid that the scouring sand would sandblast his helmet, but when he mentioned that, Ryan quickly put him straight.

“What’s getting picked up is dust, not sand,” he said. “It’s fine particles. More like talcum powder than grit. It’s harmless. If you want to worry about grit, worry about the stuff we kick up walking, not about the stuff in the air.”

“It’s gotten noticeably dimmer,” Tana said.

Ryan looked up. The sky was a deep pale yellow. The sun was, in fact, dimmer. He could almost look directly at it without blinking. “Yeah.”

“Think it’s a dust storm?”

“Wrong season.” Ryan thought about it. “Not the season for a planetary dust storm, anyway. Maybe a local storm.” He thought about it some more. “That makes sense. We’re right about at the subsolar point; we’re getting maximum solar heating right about now. The heat is making a lot of thermals. I guess it’s not surprising it might pick up some dust. In fact, I bet this is how the dust gets into the atmosphere in the first place.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Not that I can see.” Ryan pointed forward. “Let’s keep moving.”

They had made fifty kilometers the first day of walking; fifty-five the second. Over sixty miles, Brandon calculated. No wonder his legs were aching. But that was sixty miles closer to the abandoned base at Acidalia, where Ryan hoped they could find supplies.

And then what, Brandon wondered? What it they did find supplies? Would there be enough to get them to the pole?

As the sun set and their eyes adjusted to the dusk, they noticed an odd phenomenon. The bases of the dust devils were surrounded by pale sheets of blue flame.

“I don’t believe it,” Brandon said. “They’re on fire.”

All of them stared. The pale fire brightened and flickered. Sometimes it wrapped around and then in a flash coiled all the way up the dust devil, a column of light disappearing into the heavens. For a moment it would vanish, and then flicker back to life, a blue glow dancing at the base of the column of dust.

“Plasma discharge,” Ryan said.

“What?”

“Static electricity,” he said. “The wind blowing over the dust must generate an electric potential. Like, like rubbing over a carpet on a dry day. Something like lightning, but the pressure is too low for an arc. They’re natural fluorescent lights.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“I don’t know.” Ryan pointed ahead. “But I think we’re about to find out.”

Brandon stepped back involuntarily as the dust devil raced forward. It seemed fixated on Ryan, and enveloped him. For a moment it hovered over him, dust swirling all around. Ryan began to glow, first with blue light from his fingertips, then the blue glow jumping to his helmet, his backpack, and then for a moment he was entirely outlined in blue fire.

“Ryan!” came Tana’s voice over the radio. “Are you okay?”

For an answer there was only a burst of static. And then, almost reluctantly, the dust devil peeled away. The sheet of pale fire clung to Ryan for an instant and then faded.

Ryan looked down, then up, and then his voice came across the radio. “Testing, one, two. You hear me?”

“Coming through fine,” Tana said.

Ryan flexed his fingers, and then laughed. “Well. I guess that answers your question.”

Ryan’s suit, a moment ago covered with a film of brick-colored dust, was as clean as if it had been through the laundry.

“Still,” he said. “I think that maybe it’s time we should get inside.”

The next day they were in the middle of a fully developed dust storm. There were no more dust devils; now the dust was all around them.

The landscape was odd. It was dimmer than before, lit by a soft, indirect light that was easy on the eyes. The sun was a fuzzy bright patch in the yellow sky. It was the exact color of the gravy on the creamed chicken that the high school cafeteria served, Brandon thought. Babyshit yellow, that was what the kids called it.

Brandon wondered what the kids back at his school were doing right now. He looked at the clock, but then realized that it wouldn’t help him; it was set for Martian time, for a twenty-four-hour-and-thirty-nine-minute Martian sol, not for an Earth day. He could ask Ryan—Ryan always seemed to be able to calculate that kind of stuff in his head—but what would be the point?