“Ice crystal halos.” He looked at Trevor. “It’s microscopic crystals of ice, suspended at high altitudes in the atmosphere. They reflect light. I’ve heard about it.”
There were three complete circles in the sky now, and partial arcs of three more. It was geometrically perfect, as if a computer artist had drawn glowing circles across the heavens.
“This must be an ice haze filling up the canyon, because the canyon bottom is so low,” Ryan said. “Miles below sea level, if you can say Mars has a sea level.”
“Yikes!” Tana said. She had just emerged from the habitat dome. “That’s incredible.”
The canyon bottom had seemed flat the previous day, but today they realized that, in fact, they had been traveling parallel to a set of ridges. The light, diffusing through the layer of ice crystals, blurred the shadows, gave the rocky plains a softer, more Earthlike look.
The ridge nearest them was a bare hundred meters away. While the others were setting up the rockhopper and deflating and packing away the dome, Trevor climbed up to the top of it and looked out across the landscape. From below it had looked like a sand dune, but the surface under his boots was hard and unyielding, rough, more like concrete than sand. From the top, for as far as he could see in either direction, there were dunes, like an endless sea of frozen waves. The walls of the canyon itself were invisible.
His sense of direction was still acting screwy. He had no idea which way was north, which was south. No matter which way he looked, he could not see the canyon walls. Even from the ridge, the canyon walls were over the horizon.
Trevor was still trying to sort out his feelings about Commander Radkowski’s death. Radkowski had never cut him the least bit of slack. It was hard for him to grieve too much at Radkowski’s death, but he wondered how bad it had hurt their chances of returning. Ryan had already taken over as mission commander, he guessed—he had been pretty decisive in getting them moved out and away from the canyon wall, when the other two astronauts had been pretty much shocked and useless.
And, with Radkowski gone, his chances of joining the ride home had noticeably improved.
The luminous arcs of light in the sky had slowly faded and vanished, burned away by the heat of the rising sun, and now it was just another clear Martian morning. The sky was a dirty yellow, with only a thin tracery of clouds in the east, a pale shade of translucent blue, like gauze. When the sun comes up on lonely peaks, he’s vanished with the wind, Trevor hummed. His throat was a little sore, and he didn’t feel like singing, but he could still hum. With the sighing of the lonely desert wind.
21
The View From the Space Station
The cupola was the viewing area of the space station, a tiny observation atrium with windows on all sides. When Tana had no other duties, she often drifted there to just look down. It was a place to meditate.
Tana looked out at the everchanging panorama of the Earth. She was beginning to feel comfortable on the space station now. She was fitting in, running the little medical clinic, participating in experiments. Just as planned, she was getting familiar with space. She wondered if the Mars mission would be like this.
Tana felt somebody float up behind her. She shifted to make room—the cupola was barely large enough for two—but didn’t turn. “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “Always changing. Always different.”
Out the cupola, the ocean streamed past below. It was a delicate shade of aqua, a color so bright that it looked artificial. The blue was brushed with the crescent shapes of islands outlined in pale yellow sand and deep green vegetation. It looked so fragile, as if it could be made out of blown crystal, eggshell-thin, that might shatter with a touch.
“Yes,” the voice came from behind her. “A fractal beauty.”
It was Ryan Martin’s voice, but she would have known who it was even if she hadn’t recognized the voice. Only the Canadian astronaut would see the beauty in terms of the fractal spatter-pattern of large and small islands, the tiniest islets so small as to be no more than specks of yellow in the yellow-green sea.
She didn’t recognize any of it. Tana had won an eighth-grade ribbon for her knowledge of geography, but here, where there were no national borders marked, where “north” was not up but could be any direction depending on the space station attitude, she was always lost.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“South Pacific somewhere,” Ryan answered. “Want to know exactly? I could find a laptop with STK.” He turned to swim down into the station.
“No, no. Pacific—that’s fine.”
The scenery scrolled past, the aqua of the shallow waters deepening to a rich dark blue, with a wash of thin clouds. She smiled inwardly, knowing that Ryan would probably also be thinking of the cloud patterns as a fractal shape, the graceful pattern of swirls repeated in the smaller bird-feather clouds.
The Mars crew selections wasn’t yet official, but she knew that Ryan would be the third member of the Mars team. He had just arrived at the space station for a training mission. She was glad he was on the team.
She had seen him around NASA Johnson, but until they started to train together, she hadn’t recognized him as the young astronaut who had given the talk that had given her the incentive to apply to NASA to be a flight surgeon. Why, without a doubt he was the reason she was here, and he didn’t even know it. She had a sudden wild urge to turn around, tell him thank you, and kiss him. She wondered what he would do.
She did nothing, of course. It wouldn’t be appropriate.
22
Suspicions
The rope shouldn’t have broken, Tana explained to Estrela, when they stopped for a moment to rest and swap drivers. It was rated for more than a hundred tons of breaking strength; it could have held a truckload of elephants. “I’m thinking that it might not have been an accident.”
“What are you saying?” Estrela asked. “Of course it was an accident. What else?”
“Don’t play dumb, you’re not blond,” Tana said. “You’ve figured out that only two of us can be on that rocket back, maybe three, no more. Everybody on the whole team knows it. If there are fewer of us, that’s more chances to get home.”
“Murder,” Estrela said. She didn’t look at Tana.
“You have another idea?”
Estrela nodded slowly. “So you’re saying, we should watch our backs.”
“You got it.” Tana shook her head. “Trust nobody.”
Estrela asked, “Not even me?”
Tana looked at her for a long time, and then shook her head again. “Not even you,” she said.
23
Cliff
Twice they came across dry riverbeds, with dust-covered bottoms of smooth gray stone that looked like slate. “A good place to look for fossils,” Estrela whispered, but only Trevor wanted to stop.
And, slowly, the cliffs of the opposite wall grew in the distance, at first no more than a thin ruddy line faintly visible against the horizon, and then a massive presence that came closer and closer, until the stark rocks seemed to be looming over their heads.
Ryan stopped the rockhopper to inspect the embankment with the binoculars. Like the cliff on the south edge of the canyon, eons of undercutting had given the embankment an extensive talus slope of fragmented boulders at the base. He examined it minutely, trying to determine where the slope was least steep, where it came closest to the top of the vertical face. It was a forbidding prospect; the jumbled slope of loose, angular rock would be a dangerous climb, and it rose for miles before it met the face of the cliff.