Kevin J. Anderson - Climbing Olympus

Standing next to the rover, Rachel felt the weak but insistent wind push against her suit. Rust powder gusted into the air in tiny whirlwinds. She had been on Mars for a decade now, and she no longer felt light and springy on her feet. The red canyons, the extinct volcanoes, the growing tendrils of green in sheltered areas, no longer awed her. She had lost the energy for enthusiasm.

Rachel picked her way into the rubble, half expecting to hear some sound, some echo of the rocks crashing down into the gorge … the screams of dying dvas , pitched high in the thin air. All the tracks from the Lowell Base rescue missions and search parties had long ago been wiped away by storms and sifting microfine dust. Nothing left, just dreams.

In one wash of sloughing boulders that fell slowly in the low gravity, but with just as much mass and just as much inertia, thirty-one of Rachel’s best dvas were lost—a sixth of their population. Rachel could not understand why her augmented human beings had been fated to suffer such disasters.

The dvas , an English bastardization of the Russian word for “two,” were the second and most successful phase of humans surgically altered to live in the rigorous Martian environment. Performed under the bright lights of world scrutiny, the dva surgery had been much more successful than the great gamble of the adin , Rachel’s secret initial phase.

The dva volunteers had been willing individuals, rather than subjects pulled from Siberian labor camps. The first three shipments of dvas were tough and dedicated workers, while the fourth group of fifty were true jewels, members of the intelligentsia who had volunteered for the augmentation surgery because they considered it their duty to the human race. A brilliant flash of glory, now smothered forever.

Dr. Dmitri Pchanskii himself, a talented Belorussian obstetrician and surgeon, had set an example as the leader of the fourth group of dvas. Watching his outspoken commitment, other medical professionals and scientists volunteered for the extreme surgery, with the justification that becoming a dva would be the best way to do research on an alien world. After the surgeries, they could be part of the environment, studying Mars hands-on, the same way field researchers studied Earth.

Firebrand legal representatives for the dvas had even demanded of the UN that their clients actually “own” the land they worked, not just receive lifelong leases. A Volga German lawyer named Rotlein had played on public sympathies—everyone admired the dva bravery, especially after learning of the horrors that had befallen the adin phase. Why not throw the dvas a bone? The dvas would probably not live long in such a harsh environment anyway. …

For a time, the dva project appeared to be a complete success. Over the years, the dvas had received enormous, robotically piloted shipments containing the modules for Lowell Base and the four other human bases scattered across the surface of Mars. Before the first unmodified humans arrived to stay, the dvas completed all the prep work, like servants sent ahead to prepare the master’s room. Three years after the last dva landing, Rachel and fifty others arrived at Lowell Base to prepare for the “Grand Opening” of a terraformed Mars.

But, when a project was as large as an entire planet, the work never ended. Pchanskii’s team of dvas had been searching for subterranean water in Noctis Labyrinthus. But Pchanskii had been a surgeon on Earth, not a geologist or a construction engineer. He had not understood what he was doing when he blasted the fragile rocks.

When Lowell Base received no progress reports from them for several days, and with a large seasonal dust storm approaching, Rachel had dispatched a search team. She herself had rushed out on the rescue mission, as others watched the green-and-pink skies thicken with approaching waves of dust. Rachel had stared at the fallen rocks, the sheared-off cliffs, and the fine dust that refused to settle, whipped back into the air by precursor gusts of wind.

As much as a week could have gone by since the collapse; little wonder they found no survivors, no sign at all.

With grim irony, Pchanskii’s avalanche had exposed a rich vein of water ice that looked like a steaming white gash on the rock. It created a thick, temporary fog in the canyons as the ice sublimed in the thin air. …

The weather satellites politely advised everyone to take shelter at the base and ride out the storm. The rescue team, unable to recover dva bodies or precious equipment from under tons and tons of rock, was forced back to the base. Later, after the abrasion from the month-long storm, there had been little point in even looking.

Pchanskii’s group had been swallowed up by the tumbling walls of rock, but Rachel was left to face the avalanche of recriminations, and “I-told-you-so”s, and the sadly shaking heads. She had endured it, barely flinching, with no more than a tic in the right eye and a grim twitch at the corner of her wide mouth.

She could no longer deny that the entire dva project, her brainchild, was at an end, with only a few messy loose ends to tie up: 150 dvas still toiling on the surface of Mars, while spacesuited humans plowed ahead with their own work. In a few more decades, neither surgical augmentations nor environmental suits would be necessary to survive in the cold, brittle atmosphere. The remaining dvas were obsolete, the program a dead end, and they would live out their lives on Mars with no hope of returning to Earth.

Now, Rachel’s decade as commissioner seemed like such a grand folly. She stared at the motionless rubble in the canyon and listened to the whispers of wind and the burbling of her air-regeneration system.

In the first launch opportunity from Earth after the dva disaster, the UN Space Agency had dispatched a new commissioner along with a dozen more mission members assigned to Lowell Base. Jesús Keefer, her replacement, would arrive tomorrow. The Mars transfer vehicle was already in orbit. She craned her neck, looked through her polarized faceplate up into the frigid sky that sometimes showed a few bright stars even during daytime when the dust or the algae clouds weren’t too thick; but she saw no sign of the orbiter.

She stayed at Noctis Labyrinthus for a few useless and depressing hours. Finally, leaving the wreckage behind with the wreckage of her dvas ’ future, Rachel returned to the rover, brushing the clinging dust from her thermal suit.

She should get back to the base and put her things in order.

THE MARS TRANSPORT SLID into high orbit as if with an exhausted sigh after the long marathon across interplanetary space. Then, in a leisurely manner over the next two days, the captain damped velocity to shrink and circularize the orbit in preparation for deploying the lander to the surface of Mars.

During the final weeks of the slow approach, Jesús Keefer ran thin fingers through his neat, dark hair and watched the planet’s disk grow larger. Though the ground-based sensors indicated phenomenal improvement in the Martian environment, sixty years of aggressive terraforming had left little to be seen from this high up. It seemed disappointing, belittling the extensive efforts of mankind. But then, Mars was a big place.

Finally, Keefer distinguished a tinge of green through the on-board telescopes, a smear of murkiness in one of the deep canyons, which he insisted on showing to Tam Smith, the young agronomist, and Chetwynd, and Ogawa, and Shen, and any of the other passengers bound for Lowell Base. Everyone quickly learned to avoid him when his enthusiasm began to get out of control.