He could feel every bump, every tiny slip of the wheels, and with minute precision, corrected the steering to hold him to the exact top of the ridge. He couldn’t tell how long he inched along the crest, eyes glued to the ridgeline under his wheels. Later, when he could spare his attention to look at the time, he was surprised to realize it had been less than half an hour. Below him, the ridge curved to a bottom, and then slowly began to rise. They were halfway across. And then, slowly, the ridgeline began to get wider, inch by inch, and then at last he could get all six wheels on the top.
His throat still hurt. His eyes were dry, and it felt like the inside of his eyelids had been sandpapered with a rough grit.
They had crossed the canyon.
The next one would not be so easy.
14
The canopy of Creation
With part of her attention Tana Jackson watched her feet; ropes or not, to stumble here could be a fatal error. But the part of her attention that watched her feet was on autopilot; it was as if somebody else were taking care of the walking. The ridgeline curved ahead of her, and with the main part of her attention, Tana just looked out across the vast sweep of the canyon that stretched to either side of her.
The canyon walls were striped, horizontal bands of deep orange and light yellow, separated by hair-thin lines of black; in the midday sunlight they sparkled as if bits of diamond were embedded in them. Even the sky was colorful, shading gracefully from an almost lemon shade at the horizon to a deeper adobe color higher up. There was no other description for it, Tana thought; it was simply stunningly beautiful.
It was more beautiful, in its own desolate way, than anything else that she had ever seen. Impulsively, she turned on the mike, and said so.
There was no answer. She looked over her shoulder at the two roped behind her. Ryan Martin, she could see, was silently enjoying the view. But Trevor was white-faced, his jaw clenched, his face covered with sweat. He’s afraid, she thought.
The rockhopper followed along behind them, going sidewise along the ridge, a mechanical spider. It couldn’t be easy to keep it balanced exactly on the top of the ridge, but it was driven so smoothly, it looked as if it belonged nowhere else. A marvel of piloting, she thought. John Radkowski, whatever else he was, was a cool pilot.
She felt a sudden stab of pity for Trevor. He seemed so young, younger than his twenty-one years. Her heart suddenly went out to him. They had lured him away from everything he knew and loved, and now he was going to die with them, die on Mars, his body, desiccating in the dry cold, mummified in the sand. For her, that was okay—she had always known the risks. But for Trevor, it suddenly seemed so unfair. He shouldn’t even be here, away from his music and his friends and his virtual realities, she thought. He’s not astronaut material, and if it hadn’t been for the lottery, that damn silly fund-raising publicity stunt, he would never even have considered becoming one. He’d be safe and having fun with his stomp music and his friends, just at the age when he would be learning to live, learning to love.
No. That was defeatist thinking.
And, despite it all, it was spectacularly beautiful. They were alone under the awesome canopy of God’s extravagant creation, this magnificent canyon, never beheld by human eyes since the day of its creation.
Tana Jackson was at peace with the world.
PART FOUR
Tana Jackson
We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most where His works are on the grandest scale spread before us: and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence.
It was a desert, peopled only with echoes; a place of death, for what little there is to die in it. A wilderness where, to use my companion’s phrase, “there is none but Allah.”
1
A Philadelphia Childhood
Tanisha Yvonne Jackson’s father had wanted her to be the perfect BAP, a black American princess, sweet and rich and virginal.
Tana wanted nothing to do with that. From the time she could walk, Tana was a tomboy, “carrying on and raising hell,” as her grandmother put it. She never wanted to wear the frilly, feminine dresses that her father bought for her, played hooky from the lessons in deportment and proper manners, scrubbed off the expensive makeovers and cut short her plaited hair.
All through his life, although her father dutifully attended her graduations, from her valedictorian speech graduating from Drexel to her acceptance of M.D. and Ph.D. diplomas from Case medical school, she knew that deep down her father was disappointed in her. While he would brag to his cronies and the pretentious men in his country club about his daughter the doctor, she always knew that, in his heart, he would rather have had a sweet little girl, perfumed and feminine, a daughter charming and demure who sang in church and broke the boys’ hearts, without a single original thought in her head. The kind of girl that she could never be.
She broke her arm falling out of a tree when she was seven; broke the other one playing football with the neighborhood boys when she was ten; collected scrapes and bruises and skinned knees and stubbed toes in the rough and tumble of growing up. She was halfway through high school before it occurred to her that she wasn’t pretty, and another two years later before she thought about it again, and decided she didn’t care. Men wanted boobs, not muscles, and until she was most of the way through college, all of her boyfriends were companions, not lovers. That was fine with her.
In high school she grew dreadlocks, more to disturb the establishment—and most particularly her family—than to make any statement. She sported a beret in a shade of purple so deep that it was nearly ultraviolet and spent her free time hanging out with the poets and the misfits. Reading science fiction was her one guilty secret; she knew that the aspiring poets and literary snobs she associated with would turn their noses up if they ever knew her reading habits, so she made certain to also have a copy of Proust or Baudelaire to quote. But she loved the heroes in the science fiction books, men who took charge and changed the world. It took her a long time to notice that there were no characters like her, that the books she loved best featured heroes who were mostly white men with Anglo names. But, she decided later with the arrogance of youth, that really didn’t matter. They would find out about her soon enough.
She lost her virginity her senior year at Drexel, to a boy who was sweet and serious and believed unquestioningly in all of her hopes and dreams and ambitions. They would talk all through the night, and the next morning go to classes so silly from lack of sleep that their friends wondered if they were drunk. She didn’t even realize that they were dating until one day he brought her flowers—a bouquet of pansies and snapdragons and nasturtiums—and she looked at them in puzzlement and asked what they were for, and he told her shyly that it was because they had been seeing each other for six months. She thought back in wonder and realized that, yes, it was true. Shortly after that she admitted him into her bed.