I always thought of Mars as a desert and somehow expected it to look like home. Other than being dry, it doesn't. The soil color is wrong, for one thing, for another, the only erosion on Mars is wind erosion. For another, there are more rocks. I guess most of our soil comes from water and the action of plants and insects on rock. Pictures of some of the areas down at the pole show stuff that looks more like the baked ground of home, but a great deal of it is huge, cracked areas, like baked mud. Except the plates of cracked soil are meters across, and the cracks are bigger. Step into bigger. Martian landscapes are exaggerated, simplified. Every school child has seen pictures of Olympus Mons; there's not a mountain on the whole of earth as pure or as huge as Olympus Mons. The crater is 90 klicks across.
Still, I like coming out once in awhile. There's no real distance in the Ridge, no vista, no perspective. Everything feels inside. Most of the time I don't think about it, but when I get outside in the sunlight I always find myself stretching. Unfortunately when I stretch in the ARC the power pack digs into my back, but it still feels good.
Walking on Mars is difficult. I've tried to make a kind of path to the tank but the stones are wobbly and there's no flat place to put my feet. I pick my way across, arms waving for balance, and check the filters.
They're full of sand, but they're built for that. I empty them but the next sandstorm will fill them. The big, black O2 holding tank looks fine. I take the panel off. My fingers are cold. Just my luck, the last suit I had overheated, this one doesn't heat at all. The panel covering the instrument readouts is, of course, on the windward side. I turn my back into the wind, hoping the back pack will keep me a little warmer. It's only about ten centimeters thick at the dorsal ridge, not very protective, and even so the backs of my legs begin to get cold. Everything looks fine, all the quaintly old fashioned L.E.D.s registering the way they should. There's no way to jack into the system out here, no external jack on the ARC anyway.
I pick my way back to the airlock and squat, pull the door closed over my head and crank it shut, feel the goosebumps on my arms and thighs while the pump tries to force most of the CO2 out.
The ladder is still there, too. I swing down to it.
Martine is standing by the screen door with two trays of seedlings. She was supposed to be building a bee box, either she finished or she's taking a break. She waits while I pop the helmet. "How's the tank?"
"Fine," I say. "I emptied the filters. The heater doesn't work on this thing."
"I thought you were back in a hurry." She puts down the trays.
"Have you seen Min?" I ask.
"The cat? She's up on the ductwork, in a snit."
"She doesn't like the suit, either," I say.
Bright words. I didn't expect to find anything wrong out there. Maybe it's not the system. Maybe I'll find the problem re-programming.
"Are you going to check the programming this afternoon?" Martine asks.
"Not this afternoon," I say, "I've been fiddling with this thing for days, I've got to get caught up on some other things." I don't look at Martine. Martine gets right down to things and if it takes all night, it takes all night. But I'm not Martine.
The bed is too warm, I can't get comfortable. I'm aware I'm keeping Martine awake, I should go and sleep in the other room, but I'm not really awake or asleep, and if I get up she'll ask what I'm doing. I don't know if she prefers sleeping with me or not. I think that we have a decent sex life, I mean she's never said anything one way or another. Not that she should have to, of course. I mean that the act seems satisfying enough to her, and although she once made the comment that she had gotten accustomed to sleeping alone, I feel she prefers to have someone in bed with her now. I have tried to make her feel it was a good idea to marry me, that it benefited her as much as it did me. I am grateful, for myself and for Theresa.
Sometimes I feel as if I carry this marriage on my back. There were times I felt trapped by my first marriage, by Geri, and the obligation of a child in that situation, it's a normal enough feeling in any marriage and I'm certain that there are times Martine wonders why she ever took us on. But I have to believe that this marriage is what Martine wants.
I jerk awake, the alarm has gone off and for a moment I am thinking that it can't be morning and I can see the chron blinking 2:18 in blue numbers, and then I realize it's Martine's alarm signaling that the air mixture is off somewhere. A leak. Sometimes she'll have three in a month, sometimes we'll go three months without one.
I hear her get out of bed, listen to her move around the room, out into the main room. I won't be able to go back to sleep until she leaves, and I won't really sleep well until she's back, which tonight probably means I won't get much sleep because it usually takes a couple of hours.
I hear her come back, the light is on in the main room and I am trying to avoid it, digging my face in the crook of my arm. "Alexi?" she says.
"Hmm?" I say.
"The alarm is from our yards."
"What?" I say.
"The alarm." She speaks quietly, but doesn't whisper. "It's ours, the air mixture is off in our goat yards. It's pretty far off in the new yard, not as bad in the old."
I get out of bed, grab my pants and check the system. Our system shows a high CO2 level in the old yard so I jack in to manually raise the O2 levels but I can't manipulate the system. I'm doing everything I'm supposed to do and the relays feel frozen.
I jack out, run a clear, jack back in. I feel the tension that says I'm controlling the regulator and change it, but instead of changing it freezes up on me again. I know we're screwed. That's not programming, that's a glitch in the actual system.
Martine is waiting. "The system's frozen," I say. "It's not regulating the house or the yards." I shut it down, throwing everything on the little back-up, manual system. Then I jack in and turn on the lights in the yards and the kitchen. "I don't know how high the CO2 is out there, I don't know if the system was registering correctly or not."
"I'll test," Martine says.
"Put one up in the kitchen, too." I use the back-up system to start cycling CO2 out of the yards, but it can take a couple of hours. I check the house temperature, we're running a little cold.
The O2 levels in the kitchen are a little high. I wonder why the system would do better in the house than in the yards. I hear Martine calling me from the garden.
"Alexi, there's too much CO2, the goats are groggy."
"It's okay in here, how's the garden?"
"It's all right." Martine frowns. "I can't put the goats in the garden."
They'd have a field day and we'd never see strawberries again. "Bring them in the kitchen," I say.
Martine looks at me as if I have lost my mind. "Nineteen goats in our kitchen?"
"What else are you going to do with them? It'll be a couple of hours before the air quality is all right in the yard."
I use furniture to block off the kitchen from the Main Room.
"What are you doing?" Theresa asks. She's standing in the hall, wearing her white nightgown, her hair sleeptangled and her fist under her chin the way she used to do when she was younger.
"The air mixture is bad in the goat yards," I say. "We're going to put the goats in the kitchen. Can you go out and help, hold the doors open? Go get your slippers."
Martine comes in, a goat under each arm. She drops them splay legged on the floor, and one of the nannies, Carlotta, I think, folds to her knees with a plop. The goats close their slit-pupiled eyes. I climb over the furniture and follow her back to the new yard. The air smells stale, or is it just because I know? The goats lie around, most not bothering to move when we come in. Strange sight, all the quiescent goats, black and whites, whites, bearded. I pick up a nanny and Einstein, who, groggy or not, manages knock my in the chin tossing his head. Next trip back he is standing just in the door to the kitchen, shaking his head to warn me back.