Kim Robinson - Blue Mars

Ann looked at him, scowled at the sight of him; presumably he was a bloody mess. “Worth a try!” she shouted.

So Sax detached the protection bar from the emergency panel, and with a final look at Ann — their eyes meeting, a gaze with some content he could not articulate, but which warmed him — he put his fingers on the switches. Hopefully the altitude control would be obvious when the time came. He wished he had spent more time flying.

As the boat rose up the foamy face of each wave, there came a nearly weightless moment at the top, just before the falldown into the next icy trough. In one of these moments Sax flicked the switches on the panel. The boat fell down the waveback anyway, hit the growlers with its usual jar — then bounced right up and away, lifted, and tilted right over on its lee hull, so that they were hanging in their restraints. Balloons entangled no doubt, the next wave would capsize them and that would be that; but then the boat was dragging away over ice and water and foam, almost free of contact, rolling them head over heels in their restraints. A wild tumbling interval, and then the boat righted itself, and began to swing back and forth like a big pendulum, side to side, front to back — oops then all the way over again, topsyturvy — then righted, and swinging again. Up up up, thrown this way and that, hold on — his shoulder harness came free and his shoulder slammed against Ann’s, even though he had been pressed against her. The tiller was bashing his knee. He held on to it. Another crash together and he held on to Ann, twisted in his seat and clutched her, and after that they were like Siamese twins, arms around each other’s shoulders, in danger at every slam of breaking each other’s bones. They looked at each other for a second, faces centimeters apart, blood on both of them from some cut or other, or no it was probably just from his nose. She looked impassive. Up they shot into the sky.

His collarbone hurt, where Ann’s forehead or elbow had struck it. But they were flying, up and up in an awkward embrace. And as the boat was accelerated to something nearer the wind’s speed, the turbulence lessened greatly. The balloons seemed to be connected by rigging to the top of the mast. Then just when Sax was beginning to hope for some kind of zeppelinlike stability, even to expect it, the boat shot straight up and began its horrible tumbling again. Updraft no doubt. They were probably over land by now, and it was all too possible they were being sucked up into a thunderhead, like a hail ball. On Mars there were thun-derheads ten kilometers tall, often powered by howlers from far to the south, and balls of hail flew up and down in these thunderheads for a long time. Sometimes hail the size of cannonballs had come crashing down, devastating crops and even killing people. And if they were pulled up too high they might die of altitude, like those early balloonists in France, was it the Montgolfiers themselves it had happened to? Sax couldn’t remember. Up and up, tearing through wind and red haze, no chance to see very far —

BOOM! He jumped and hurt himself against his seat belt, came down hard. Thunder. Thunder banging around them, at what had to be well over 130 decibels. Ann seemed limp against him, and he shifted sideways, reached up awkwardly and twisted her ear, trying to turn her head so he could see her face. “Hey!” she cried, though it sounded to him like a whisper in the roar of the wind. “Sorry,” he said, though he was sure she couldn’t hear him. It was too loud to talk. They were spinning again, but without much centrifugal force. The boat was shrieking as the wind pushed it up; then they dove, and his eardrums hurt to bursting, he wiggled his jaw back and forth, back and forth. Then up again and they popped, painfully. He wondered how high they would go; very possible they would die of thin air. Though maybe the Da Vinci techs had thought to pressurize the cockpit, who knew. It behooved him to try to understand the boat as blimp, or at least master the altitude adjustment system. Not that there was much to be done against the force of such updrafts and downdrafts. Sudden rattle of hail against the cockpit shell. There were small toggles on the emergency panel; in a moment of less violent tumbling he was able to put his face down near the bar and read the display terminal embedded in it. Altitude … not obvious. He tried to calculate how high the boat would go before its weight caused it to level off. Hard when he wasn’t actually sure of the boat’s weight, or the amount of helium deployed.

Then some kind of turbulence in the storm tossed them again. Up, down, up; then down, for many seconds in a row. Sax’s stomach was in his throat, or so it felt. His collarbone was an agony. Nose running or bleeding continuously. Then up. Gasping for air, too. He wondered again how high they were, and whether they were still ascending; but there was nothing to be seen outside the shell of the cockpit, nothing but dust and cloud. He seemed in no danger of fainting. Ann was motionless beside him, and he wanted to tug her ear again to see if she was conscious, but couldn’t move his arm. He elbowed her side. She elbowed back; if he had elbowed her as hard as that, he would have to remember to go lighter next time. He tried a very gentle elbowing, and felt a less violent prod in return. Perhaps they could resort to Morse code, he had learned it as a boy for no reason at all, and now in his reborn memory he could hear it all, every dit and dot. But perhaps Ann had not learned it, and this was no time for lessons.

The violent ride went on for so long he couldn’t estimate it: an hour? Once the noise lessened to the point where they could shout to each other, which they did just because it could be done; there actually wasn’t much to say.

“We’re in a thunderhead!”

“Yes!”

Then she pointed down with one finger. Pink blurs below. And they were descending rapidly, his eardrums aching again. Being spit out the bottom of the cloud, as hail. Pink, brown, rust, amber, umber. Ah yes — the surface of the planet, looking not very different than it ever had from the air. Descent. He and Ann had come down in the same landing vehicle, he recalled, the very first time.

Now the boat was scudding along under the cloud’s bottom, in falling hail and rain; but the helium might pull them back up into the cloud. He pushed down a likely toggle on the panel, and the boat began to descend. A pair of small toggles; manipulating them seemed to dip them forward or raise them up. Altitude adjusters. He pushed them both gently down.

They seemed to be descending. After a while it was clearer below. In fact they appeared to be over jagged ridges and mesas; that would be the Cydonia Mensa, on the mainland of Arabia Terra. Not a good place to land.

But the storm continued to carry them along, and soon they were east of Cydonia, out over the flat plains of Arabia.

Now they needed to descend soon, before they were flung out over the North Sea, which might very well be as wild and ice-filled as Chryse had been. Below lay a patchwork of fields, orchards — irrigation canals and curving streams, lined by trees. It had been raining a lot, it looked like, and there was water all over the surface of the land, in ponds, in canals, in little craters, and covering the lower parts of fields. Farmhouses clustered in little villages, only outbuildings in the fields — barns, equipment sheds. Lovely wet countryside, quite flat. Water everywhere. They were descending, but slowly. Ann’s hands were a bluish white in the dim afternoon; and so were his.

He pulled himself together, feeling very weary. The landing would be important. He pushed down the adjusters hard.

Now they were descending more swiftly. They were being blown over a line of trees, then down, rapidly over a broad field. At the far end it was inundated, brown rainwater filling the furrows. Beyond the field stood an orchard, and a water landing would be perfect anyway; but they were moving horizontally quite fast, and still perhaps ten or fifteen meters over the field. He shoved the adjusters full forward and saw the underhulls tilt down like diving dolphins, and the boat tilted as well, and then the land came right up at them, brown water, big splash, white waves winging away to both sides, and they were being dragged through muddy water until the boat skated right into a line of young trees, and stopped hard. Down the line of trees a group of kids and a man were running toward them, their mouths all perfect round O’s in their faces.