6
Letter Home
Dearest Severna,
I still don’t know when I will be able to send this letter, but I promised to write you, and I will. We are waiting at the edge of a canyon. In the morning we will go down. This will be exciting.
Mars has a stark and terrible beauty, rugged and untamed, more desolate than all the deserts of Earth. They call it the red planet, but when we got here it astonished me to see that it is not red at all, but a rich deep yellow, darker than beach sand, more like peanut butter only a little more yellow. Like buttered toast. The dark rocks look almost magenta, and the shadows are a dark brick red.
I’m sorry that I don’t write to you more often. Please know that your momma thinks about you every day and hopes and prays that everything good will be coming to you. I remember when I was your age, and I guess that life isn’t always easy, but don’t give up. You don’t have to be the most popular or the most stylish girl in the class, just be yourself.
I look at your picture every day. I have to say that I think that the shaved head looks funny on a girl to me, but everybody tell me that it’s the style and lots of kids look like that, so I guess I’m just an old-fashioned trog.
I’m sorry I can’t talk with you every day, but the Earth is disappearing behind the sun and the good communications antenna was left behind at the ship.
I’m sending all my love to you with this letter.
Take good care of yourself and do your best in school and everything will turn out okay, I promise.
all of my love,
Tana looked over the letter. Did it seem too cold, too trite? She never knew how to write to her daughter. She deleted the “mother” and substituted “mom,” and looked through it another time to see what else might look stilted.
What else could she add? Had she told Severna how stunningly beautiful Mars was?
In the evenings, the two little moons come out and play tag across the sky. The larger one, Phobos, moves so fast that you can almost see it move across the sky; it goes all the way from crescent to full and back to crescent in the course of the night.
Surely that was enough. She didn’t even know when they might be able to send the message. And in another day they would be descending the canyon. That, certainly, would give her something to write about.
7
The Color of Dirt
Houston was, in its way, something like medical school. Tana got along pretty well with the others, but she got tired of the rivalry to get on missions. Sometimes Tana was just simply tired of other people’s assumptions. That because she was black, she must have grown up in a ghetto with a welfare mother and a drug-dealing father. That she listened to hip-hop music or—what were kids listening to now?—Afro stomp.
Sometimes she went to the mostly black clubs, or to the gospel choir suppers, not because she wanted to hang out with people of her own race, but simply because, once in a while, it was a relief to just be simply taken for herself, not to have to be a representative of her race. She wasn’t sure if she even believed in the idea of race, at least not the way that white people seemed to.
People—other people—called her skin the color of coffee, or sometimes dark chocolate. She thought that was belittling. Her father had always said that they had skin the color of dirt. Not pale, worn-out soil, like some people, but rich soil, good farming topsoil. They would make things grow.
Her father had never been a farmer—he was an engineer—but his grandfather had been a farmer, proud of it, and had instilled that pride into all of his grandsons.
When she was depressed, when things weren’t going well, when people dismissed her without even seeing anything but her color, she sometimes thought about that. We’re the color of dirt, girl, don’t you forget it. Nothing to hide about it, either. Rich and strong. Organic. Be proud of it.
8
Down the Canyon
They went down the canyon at first light.
Ryan Martin had set the bolts into the rocks for the safety attachments the previous night. The dirt-rover was loaded onto its rack on the rock-hopper and strapped securely in place, along with their supplies. They lowered it first, a kilometer and a half straight down until it touched the talus slope, and then Ryan Martin went down the rope to secure it in place.
As he descended, he gave a running commentary over the radio link.
“Fifty meters,” his voice came over the radio. “Seventy. The rock of the canyon wall is black and dense, smooth in texture, maybe a basalt. I’m a hundred meters down now. Oh, that’s weird, there’s a sharp dividing line, and it turns to reddish stone. It’s undercut. The rock has been, it’s like it’s been eaten away.”
“That’s not surprising,” Estrela said. Her voice was weak, almost a whisper. “The caprock is probably from lava flows, it’s going to be harder than the sandstone below it. So the sandstone gets abraded away by sandstorms.”
“Maybe,” Ryan said. He had stopped descending, and was just hanging in space against the side of the cliff. “It’s a lot of overhang. I can’t see how far in it goes. It’s like a cave, but horizontal, a kind of slot extending the whole width of the cliff face.”
“Not exploring,” Commander Radkowski interjected. His voice was a rough whisper. “Don’t stop long. First priority secure rockhopper.”
“Got it, Captain. Just one moment more, let me get a light out. Okay. Wow, it’s deep. It’s really deep. Hold on, if I go down a little bit more, now if I can just swing a little—there. Okay, I’m standing on the ledge here.”
“Don’t unhook safety,” the captain said.
“Got it. It’s high enough to stand up in. Incredible. I still can’t see how far back it goes—Hey, up there, the rock you’re standing on? Seem solid? Well, underneath you, it’s all hollow. It looks like it goes back for miles. The bottom of the cave is quite smooth and level. There are crystals here, they’re reflecting my light. Some of them as big as a fingernail. I can’t quite tell what they are. They’re purple. Some of them are blue.”
Purple? Tana thought. Amethyst?
“Wait, further in the crystals are all white, kind of translucent. Doesn’t look like quartz, it’s not six-sided. Four-sided crystals.”
“Hold on,” Estrela said. “Four sided-crystals? You said four-sided?”
“Squares and rectangles. It looks familiar.”
“I bet it does,” Estrela said. “It’s halide. Salt.”
“Salt?” There was a long pause. “You know, I think that’s it. Salt. The cave is covered in salt.”
9
A Destiny on Mars
Tana was not extravagant or showy about her religion, but her family had been good Methodists, went to church every week without fail, and she had never questioned her faith. Her faith was just there, something that cradled her and supported her through the hard times, something that made her know for sure that her life had a meaning and a purpose, that even if nobody else loved her, she was loved by God, and that was enough.
It never would have occurred to her to articulate it, but her urge to explore was, for her, inseparable from her unquestioned religious faith. She saw exploration as a way to see the depths of the beauty of God’s creation.
Tana had not always been interested in space exploration. She had gone to medical school because it seemed to be something difficult, something that promised hard problems for her to solve, and she felt most alive when she was meeting challenges.