He was a white boy, something that might have mattered to her parents, but was pretty much irrelevant to her. She saw him every single day through her last year of college and the summer afterward, and then she went off to medical school in Cleveland, and he went away to join the Peace Corps and then become a lawyer. They wrote to each other, but the letters came further and farther apart, and years later she would remember him with fondness and wonder what ever happened to him.
2
The Big Canyon
Another thirty miles across broken terrain—not even an hour’s traverse—and they came to the edge of the world.
Or so it seemed.
The commander was being silent. He always tended to be quiet, but now he was like a mime, not talking at all, gesturing with a wave of his hand where he wanted them to go and not answering any questions.
The end of the trail came suddenly. The horizon in front of them seemed funny, too close, and then abruptly there was nothing.
The Valles Marineris spreads east to west across Mars nearly at the equator, stretching from the eastern edge at chaotic terrain of the Chasm of Dawn well over two thousand miles to the western extremity where it separates into a myriad of twisting canyons, the Labyrinth of the Night. Unlike the far smaller canyons of Earth, though, it was carved by no river, but formed when the immense bulge of Tharsis rose on the magma of long-extinct interior fire, cracking open the planet like the split crust of a rising loaf of bread.
Parallel to it were lesser chasms, places where the same tectonic forces that had formed the Valles Marineris had formed additional cracks on a lesser scale through the rocky crust of the planet. It was these that they had crossed before. But this was not one of the lesser canyons. They had reached the real thing, the full-scale Valles Marineris.
Tana Jackson stood on the lip of infinity and looked out, and out, and out. There was no far wall to the canyon; it was well beyond the horizon. The hazy ochre of the sky merged imperceptibly with the haze of the canyon floor.
Before her was a vertical drop of a mile, straight down, and then a slope of broken rock and detritus that extended downward and away for ten miles or more, to a bottom so distant that the features were blurred by the omnipresent atmospheric dust. Tana’s voice was almost awed.
“Yikes,” she said. “Are we really going down this?”
Radkowski’s voice, when it came, was a hoarse whisper. “Yes,” he said. “Down and across.” I to paused, and then in a whisper so soft that it was almost inaudible through the radio noise, added, “We have no choice.”
3
Tana in School
Tana’s grandmother had told her about affirmative action—that whatever she managed to achieve, white people were going to assume that she got it simply by being black. “Ain’t no way you’re gonna avoid it,” she told Tana. “You just go and pay no attention to them, ignore it and do a good job.”
It seemed unfair, Tana told her, but her grandmother disagreed.
“Not a one of them white folks got where they were without help,” she said. “Not one. Their parents knew people, they got into the right schools, they got connections, they got a job because their uncle knew somebody. No, they won’t admit it. Maybe they don’t even know it themselves. But they got help, every single one of ’em.”
Tana listened to what she said—her grandmother had always been a sharp cookie and a good judge of character—but she didn’t actually believe it. She had every intention of getting where she was going, affirmative action or no.
Her way to medical school was paid by a Hawthorne Foundation scholarship that covered her tuition and expenses and a little bit for her to live on as well. The very first day of med school, before she knew anybody, before she even could find her way around the strange new campus without the map in the med school handbook, one of the boys in her class cornered her in a hall. In a peremptory tone, he demanded to know whether she was paying her own way or if she had a scholarship. When she told him about the Hawthorne fellowship—maybe bragging a little bit, because she knew it was a highly competitive grant—he nodded. Obviously it confirmed what he had already known. And he explained to her that she had only received the grant because she was black. The full scholarships are reserved for minorities regardless of their qualifications, he explained. He, himself, had applied; he had gotten a better score on the MCAT and came from a poor family and needed it more. But it went to her because she was black.
She was up all night, tossing and turning.
The next day she went to the dean and told him that it the scholarship was awarded to her based on her color, they could take it back. She was going to earn her way based on merit or not at all.
The dean pulled a pair of half-glasses with black plastic frames from his desk drawer, and put them on. “Just hold on to your horses, young lady.” He turned to his file cabinet. “That name, again?”
“Jackson. Tana Jackson,” she said.
“Your name, Ms. Jackson, I already know. The name of the young man who is making these peculiar accusations, please?”
Tana hesitated. It hadn’t been her intention to be a snitch on the other students, and then she realized that it didn’t matter, she had forgotten his name anyway. Or maybe he hadn’t bothered to introduce himself.
Before she could gather her thoughts to answer, he picked up a file from his desk. “Ah, never mind, I have it here.” Apparently he had known the boy’s name from the start and already had the boy’s file out. He barely gave the file a glance.
“The Hawthorne scholarship, you said? Odd. According to his record here, he didn’t even apply for one. But that is no surprise. He doesn’t qualify for a Hawthorne scholarship at all, young woman. It is quite competitive, you know, one must have straight As to even apply. I can’t divulge the young gentleman’s grades to you, but let me assure you that this is rather far from being the case. In fact”—the dean flipped a page, reading a handwritten note that had been stapled to the folder—“it looks to me like he flunked out of linear algebra entirely, and some person intervened with the professor to allow him to repeat the final exam. Not that you heard any such thing from me, you understand.”
Tana’s mouth was wide open. “So he was bullshitting me.”
The dean lowered his glasses and looked at her over them. “He was, as they call it, yanking your chain,” he said. “The med school here is quite competitive—very competitive indeed, you know. I believe that some students may, on occasion, take it into their heads to try to get an edge over other students with a little bit of creative truth-telling. You shouldn’t believe everything you hear.” He pulled off his glasses and put them carefully back on his desk. “Now, was there something else you wanted?”
She shook her head.
An instant after she walked away, the dean called out after her.
“One moment, Ms. Jackson.”
She turned and looked back through the door. “Yes, sir?”
“Are you aware of the number of medical students needed to replace a lightbulb?”
“No,” Tana said, wondering just what he was up to. “I’m afraid I don’t.”
“It takes four,” he said. “One of them to screw it in, and the other three to pull the ladder out from under him.”
She wasn’t quite sure whether that was funny.
When she confronted the other student, he told her quite indignantly that everybody knew that she had won the scholarship because of her color, and he hadn’t applied for the scholarship because he knew they wouldn’t give it to him anyway.