Our nature lies in movement. Complete calm is death.
1
Night
Estrela would never tell it to other members of the crew, but the nightmares were coming again. In the middle of the night she would be alone, huddling in the dark, terror squeezing her ribs, afraid to breathe or move or make a sound. The purple afterimage of rifle fire faded away from her eyes and the urine stink of fear clogged her nostrils, far more real and more vivid than the smells of the ship or the sounds of the sleeping crew or the whir of the air circulation fans. Her ears straining at the darkness for sounds that she hoped she would never again hear.
She didn’t know why she was alive.
João had been the only one who could take the nightmares away, and João was dead. She clung to his memory, the one real thing she knew, and refused to cry.
They were going to die.
2
Journey
The journey started before dawn.
Estrela and Ryan set out first to scout the terrain ahead of them on the two dirt-rovers, heading north and east from the landing site. The dirt-rovers were laden down with supplies: spare zirconia cells, bubble tents, fuel cells and solar arrays, repair tools and extra parts for the dirt-rovers along with a spare thermophotovoltaic isotope generator, superfiber cable and a winch and pitons, water, and fifty days’ supply of the highly condensed and nearly tasteless bricks of food that the astronauts referred to as Purina Human Chow. The main supplies for the expedition would be carried on the rockhopper, of course, but they had loaded up the dirt-rovers to the limits of their carrying capacity in order to haul the maximum amount of support equipment on the expedition north. Their survival, they all knew, would depend on their forethought in bringing with them the equipment that they needed.
Northward and eastward.
The ground was smooth, easy traveling even for the overloaded little dirt-rovers, and as they moved the dust hung in the still air behind them like a pale yellow fog. They were traveling in a flat-floored valley between parallel ridges on either side.
The predawn light was orangish red. Ryan had intended to take the point position, with Estrela following, but she had quickly grown annoyed with his pace and took the lead without asking.
“Don’t get too far ahead,” he radioed to her.
“Relax,” she said. “No problem.”
A few kilometers down the trail, Ryan stopped his dirt-rover atop a small rise and got off. He had told himself that he would not look back, but after five minutes, he couldn’t help himself. Don Quijote stood on the side of a small dune, surrounded by the deflated airbags and tilted at a drunken angle, looking as if it would topple over at any moment. Behind her in the distance was Dulcinea. From here, it was impossible to guess that anything was wrong.
It looked so forlorn. He knew that he would never see them again. He had a sudden urge to turn back, that there must be some way to fix the problem, but he knew it was impossible.
Ryan got back on his dirt-rover and started the engine. The next time he looked back he was ten kilometers away, and the Don Quijote had disappeared over the horizon. There was nothing but gentle undulations of sand stretching as far as he could see.
Estrela’s dirt-rover had vanished ahead of him, but he could tell where she was by the plume of dust hanging in the air. He concentrated on following the tracks of her rover, distinct enough in the sand to follow easily. From time to time her voice would come in over the radio to remark on a possible obstacle or an interesting landmark, but for the most part they rode in silence.
The flatness of the terrain was broken by the occasional crater. At first he detoured around them, but after a while he saw that Estrela’s tracks didn’t deviate at all, and he started following. Up, teeter at the crest, and then down like a roller coaster to the flat, sand-covered bottom, then again at the other side.
During the drive, he mulled over their situation. Slowly, he began to convince himself that it might not be as bad as he’d thought. The Brazilians had surely put some margins of safety into their return ship. Engineers always plan for a worst case. If they would shave every single ounce of excess weight and rely on using up all of the safety margin, it was quite likely that they would be able to fly five back on the Jesus do Sul. He would work the numbers again as soon as he got a chance. He had been right, he told himself, not to alarm the crew by bringing up the problem of who should return. Hell, it would be a jinx to dwell on the possibility, but it was not out of the question that one of them might die on the trip north. It would be a tragedy, but surely the Jesus do Sul would be able to launch four. Four might be no problem at all.
“Rover one, Radkowski,” Commander Radkowski’s voice came over the radio. “Anything to report?”
Ryan slowed down and cued his radio. “The way has been fine,” he said. “Mostly compacted sand. A few rocky outcroppings and some boulders, but nothing we haven’t been able to go around.”
“Got it. Okay, we’ve packed up here and we’re setting out. Stay in touch.”
Behind them, the rockhopper set out.
3
Riding the Rockhopper
At first Trevor found it exciting. All through the morning, there were constantly new vistas, every mile a new planet, fresh and exciting. The occasional dry voice of Ryan or, less often, Estrela, broke in on the radio to apprise them of landmarks ahead. The six-wheel suspension kept the rockhopper level, and it moved over the sand with a motion more like a boat than a wheeled vehicle.
For Trevor, the drive was disconcerting. It continually seemed to him that they had made a mistake, that they had circled around and were heading south, instead of north. He would look at the inertial guidance readout on the rockhopper’s console, and think, That’s wrong. We’re going the wrong way. But then he would look at the sun, and realize, no we’re going the right way. And then the entire planet would seem to spin around him for a moment until he was reoriented.
Mars confused his sense of direction.
Three of them in the cabin of a Mars rover designed for two was one too many. They were crammed together so tight that Trevor could barely move without hitting one of the others with his elbow.
After a while watching Mars was almost hypnotic. It didn’t really change. One ridge of yellowish stone would dwindle down to a wall no higher than his waist and then disappear, and be replaced by another just like it. When they got closer to a ridge, he saw that the surfaces were smooth, blasted by millennia of sand to a soft, pillowed surface.
The sky was a sheet of hammered bronze.
“That one looks like a bear,” he said.
No one answered him. It was a boulder the size of a small house, half-buried in the sand, with a rough, dark gray surface, almost black. A chunk of lava that had been thrown out by one of the enormous volcanoes? Trevor wished that he had paid more attention in training to the geologists. When they had gone out on the training field trip to El Paso, the geologists had been ecstatic to point out minute details of the shapes and textures of the rocks they saw, but Trevor had forgotten most of it.