And when the expedition failed, when international television broadcast the terrible images of the bodies of the Brazilian astronauts, lying uncovered in the snow a hundred million miles away from their native soil, she became the symbol of Brazil, beautiful and tragic.
She knew in her heart that João had, in his own way, loved her. Perhaps he had never felt the intense physical ache she had felt for him, but still, he had loved her in a way that none of his silly blond boys could ever know.
She never cried, but she grieved in her own way, and knew for certain that she would never love again.
So when the time came for Brazil to send an astronaut on the third expedition to Mars, there was no real disagreement on the choice of who to send.
PART THREE
The Canyon
With a surface area of 144 million square kilometers, the Red Planet has as much terrain to explore as all the continents and islands of Earth put together. Moreover, the Martian terrain is incredibly varied…
Beautiful, beautiful. Magnificent desolation.
1
Leaving Africa
The glow of sunset lasted far after the sun disappeared. The sky turned a deep, brick red, and the red faded until it was almost invisible. Two stars in the west, a brilliant blue-white one and a smaller one of tarnished silver next to it, were the Earth and the moon.
And then it was dark.
For some reason the hazy darkness reminded Radkowski of his last night in Africa. Sunset fell quickly in Africa, not like here on Mars, and on that night Venus has shone brilliant in the west.
His flying comrades had thrown a going-away party that night. It was partly for him, but more than that, it had been a party for dead comrades who had not returned from the disaster of the last mission.
They had lit torches, and they glowed like votive candles, forlorn hopes against the hot, sullen night. Two of the fliers had guitars, and they had set up amplifiers and played with an almost palpable violence, trying to cover up the badness of their playing by sheer intensity of sound.
They partied desperately. They were in a dead-end war, and they knew it. He walked through the party like a dead man, not talking, not acknowledging anyone, numb, his mangled hand hurting. He was already separate from the group. To them, he was already on his way home.
The party had gone on late into the morning, long after he had left it to collapse in his bunk, too drunk to move, too drunk to care any more.
The Mars night was, really, nothing like that, except that he was alone, and the night was dark.
I’m a hundred million miles away from that now, he thought. I have left it all behind.
But John Radkowski knew that he could never, really, leave it all behind.
Injured or not, tomorrow they would move on.
2
Onward
The dirt-rover that Estrela had been riding had not been badly damaged, and any shop on Earth could have straightened the bent frame, replaced the smashed wheel bearings, and put it back in working condition in a few hours. With neither a machine shop nor parts, though, Ryan said that it was out for the duration.
They loaded it on the rockhopper to use for spare parts to keep the second dirt-rover running.
The Mars suits were form-fitting, and once Tana had cut the suit off of Estrela, her arm and ankle had both started to swell. It looked like she was wearing a balloon around her ankle now.
Estrela’s damage turned out to be a fractured left radius, a dislocated left shoulder, and a mildly sprained ankle. Possibly with torn ligaments, Tana said, although it was hard to tell without X rays. In any case, it was lucky that she had not been hurt worse. Tana worked calmly and quickly, without thinking beyond what needed to be done at the moment; it was what she did best. She immobilized the arm with an inflatable, and while the balloon held it in place, mixed up a liquid polymer to set it in a more durable cast. With the broken bone set, she relocated the shoulder and strapped it to Estrela’s side to keep her from reinjuring it. She wrapped the ankle and instructed Estrela not to put weight on it, and finally, with the acute problems solved, made a more thorough examination. And only then, when she had verified that none of the other minor bruises masked deeper injuries, did she allow herself to think. An idiot, she thought. What the hell had Estrela thought she was doing?
They had brought along a supply of the piezoelectric fabric, and while they were camped, Ryan spliced a gore of spare material to replace the part of the spacesuit destroyed when Tana had cut it away. It was slow and painstaking work. Each square centimeter of fabric required ten electrical connections to be spliced to the computer that controlled the suit’s tension.
He worked on it for several hours. “I think that this will do it,” he said at last. He held out the arm of Estrela’s Mars suit, flexing it this way and that and watching the seam with a critical eye. “You might have been a little more careful about slicing this thing—you don’t want to know what this suit material costs per square centimeter.”
“She’s not going to put on a suit for a while,” Tana said.
“Better to have it ready now for when she needs it later,” Ryan said. “But next time, peel it away instead of cutting it, okay?”
It was fortunate, Ryan thought, that Tana had had the presence of mind to insist that Estrela be taken to the rover for treatment, and not put in the bubble habitat. If she had cut away Estrela’s suit in the habitat bubble, they would have had to stay where they were until she could put on her suit again; there was no way to get her out of the bubble with no suit. But in the pressurized cabin of the rover, they could resume their journey as soon as they were ready.
Ryan was ready to rig up the block and tackle to take the rockhopper down the cliff the next morning, but that turned out not to be necessary. It was not much of a cliff, a minor upthrust fault, more of a step in the ground level than a real obstacle to their travel. Commander Radkowski walked the territory, and then directed the rockhopper along the edge for a little ways to a place where the height was low enough that the rockhopper was able to simply step down, the articulated struts dropping one wheel down at a time. Once on the bottom, he picked up the remaining dirt-rover with the rockhopper’s robotic arm and lifted it down the cliff.
Commander Radkowski directed Ryan to take the dirt-rover ahead to scout, but cautioned him to stay in direct line of sight of the rockhopper. Trevor, now perched in Tana’s spot on the top, was given the binoculars, and was told to keep scanning ahead for any additional bad terrain, and to radio warnings ahead to Ryan as he saw fit.
There were several more small cliffs, all of them running east to west, perpendicular to their line of travel. In each case, Trevor was able to spot a place where the wall had slumped, or where a pile of rocks made a natural ramp for the vehicles to continue on. None of these was a significant obstacle.
As it turned out, the next obstacle was more than just a small escarpment. It was a canyon.
3
The Lesser Grand Canyon
Ryan parked ten meters or so back from the edge of the canyon and dismounted to look at it. Trevor jumped off the top of the rockhopper and walked over and past him to look over the edge. “Shit,” Trevor said. “This is incredible.”