Crossing Chao Meng Fu
by G. David Nordley
Begin a ghostly plain
Dim white in pale starlight.
Flat as far as you can see
To where a distant black ridge
Divides reality.
Above the stars shine
Below the ground crunches;
Hillary, Byrd, Peary and Amundsen,
Are your guides. It is beautiful.
But you cannot stop long;
The plain is life itself;
Move on now, trod onward,
Or stand and freeze, they say.
Illustration by George H. Krauter
I am in the middle of a line of people walking determinedly across the most everything-forsaken boring waste in the Solar System. I am so sore and tired I could scream—if there were a warm bed around somewhere, I’d crawl in it to shudder. My attitude has hit rock bottom, but it is time to file my report and if I want anything good out of this pain, I’d best sound positive:
“I am Wojciech Bubka, college teacher, occasional poet and now your…” I take a breath of sterile suit air, “… guide to the natural universe, courtesy of the Solar System Astro-graphic Society and its many sponsors and members. Welcome to my personal journey through exotic, dangerous, and unusual places of the Solar System.” I take another deep breath-got to keep up with everyone else. “Come with me while there are still such places to explore—for as we approach the twenty-third century, this frontier, too, is receding.”
I try to gain a little ground to stop briefly and pan my helmet cam over the dirty ice field. Despite the exertion, the change of pace lifts my spirits a bit. But not even a ten-to-one vertical exaggeration will make this landscape interesting. Come on, Bubka. You’re a poet? Find meaning.
“These are not robot explorations to be experienced in a video display, but personal ones. I seek authentic, not virtual, reality. I seek the go there, see there, and be there experience of the human explorer, not sterile pixels.” Breathe deep. “There is nothing between me and the crunch of crampon spikes on this frozen mud, the strike of an axe into virgin scarps, the strain of muscles, the hiss of sliding ropes, and the sight of wonders. Such is the dream and the experience I seek to share with you here, today, on the frozen wastes of Chao Meng Fu crater on Mercury.”
Said strain of muscles gets my attention as I start walking again, and I groan involuntarily. I am tired from the almost week of walking under a pack that brought my weight close to Earth normal—when what is normal for me is Mars. I wiggle my toes as hard as I can—despite vacuum insulation, thermistor environmental control and loose, fluffy socks, I think my feet are beginning to get cold.
“Come on, mate. Another hour will get us there.” That is Ed Blake, a gentleman adventurer from New Zealand with Antarctic experience. Ed is my tentmate, lanky, mostly bald and prematurely gray, confident, competent, and reserved—unless he gets that kind of twinkle in his eye. Then beware a terrible pun. He’s cheerful enough to me, but I sense a certain condescension.
Understandable, I think. What the frozen hell am I doing here?
I had been getting bored at Jovis Tholis University. Poetry, these days, includes video as well as text—something which would have delighted Will Shakespeare, I assure you—and has blended with drama so much that we distinguish the two by picking nits over length and symbolic content. But even in its media-inflated majesty, a dozen years of going over the same basic stuff while fighting battles with New Reformation censors and left-wing nihilists—neither of whom take kindly to the display of material contrary to their philosophies—has me well on my way to burnout.
JTU is in a dome over an ostensibly extinct volcano on Tharsis, roughly halfway to Olympus Mons from the tether tube terminal on Ascraeus. The location worked, and it became the biggest university on Mars—of which I was an increasingly small and out-ofstep part.
As the politics of being an important academic became increasingly burdensome, my dreams of “out there” grew. I might teach at Saturn High Station with its magnificent view of the rings. Or I could compose random meter verse at Hyperion institute, the lonely retreat of mathematical philosophers set on a detached mountain peak that careens about Saturn as metaphor of an uncertain future. Or I could volunteer to ride a comet and watch robots turn it into Martian air while writing my epics in the freedom of isolation as the comet fell for a decade into the inner Solar System. Or, and this was my most favorite, I might become a journalist in the old sense on the first expedition to Pluto and Charon.
Thus did I dream. But so, of course, dream millions of others. Only a chosen few can go anywhere the first time or do anything the first time. I dabbled at trail writing; journals of hikes and visits to parts of the vanishing “Red” Mars, but got little notice beyond a reasonably nice “been there, done that” rejection from the Solar System Astrographic Society. I needed an entree, a contact, an idea, something to lift me out of the background.
Then, last year (Martian year, everyone; almost two standard years ago), Miranda Lotati, the daughter of the man in charge of Solar System Astro-graphic Society’s expeditions division, walked into my literature class at Jovis Tholis University, a junior transfer from Stanford on Earth. She looked to be a hard, vigorous, and exciting person but could barely choke two words out in succession—about as contrary to stereotype as one could be and still have breasts.
She was not really beautiful—too muscular, too thin in the face, too boyish a figure, but I saw the possibilities in that. Less competition, and perhaps a complement to my esthetic, well, softness, I told myself. I saw the romance of an attraction of opposites who themselves were opposites of conventionality, and I was looking for some romance somewhere—the women of my normal circles were hopeless and helpless in anything but words, and even seemed to take pride in that. I saw in her an invitation to beyond and away from here. If I played it right—and I resolved to do so.
It wasn’t easy. Miranda was a rough-edged, prickly student, and her essays were condensed dullness, never more than the required length. A spoken sentence of more than a half dozen words was a rarity from her, and she sometimes seemed to speak a language so far evolved from today’s English in its lack of articles and verbs that, had it been deliberate, would have been considered art in some circles. Nonetheless I was intent. I persisted in bringing her along. I bided my time.
I had to expend some moral capital, but convinced myself that she covered the ground on her final well enough to let me pass her. She liked me, I think. But I said nothing unethical to her, nor hinted at anything romantic while she was my student—I have my standards.
I saw her on the last day of classes of the winter semester, after the final grades were in.
“You’re off to Mercury, I hear, to be along on your father’s attempt to walk across Chao Meng Fu Crater?” Shielded from the Sun, that huge crater was an ice field—Mercury’s Antarctica.
She nodded.
“Have you set the expedition membership?”
She shook her head, confirming what was known publicly.
“Will you have any journalists along? It would make a very exciting nature piece.”
She smiled a bit. “Like your Ascraeus Mons hike piece? Dad liked that and sent me here.”
He’d seen that? I tried to remember the rejection letter. I was flattered but a bit worried that it was a little light for a Lotati expedition. Then the alarm bells rang in my head. My competition for the position of expedition bard was standing in front of me.