Brandon looked up. The rest of the group was looking at him. The tornado was retreating, staggering like a drunkard off toward the horizon.
“It’s a dust devil,” Ryan said gently. “We’ve been seeing them for an hour or so.”
“That one came right over us,” Tana said. “I could feel it when it passed.”
“They’re not dangerous?” Brandon felt incredibly stupid. Dust devils. He had been afraid of a dust devil.
“Don’t think so. Must be a wind of a couple of hundred kilometers an hour, maybe.” Ryan shrugged. “But with the thin atmosphere, it’s no big deal.”
“They’re pretty, though,” Tana said. “Break the monotony.”
What had made it hard to see was the fact that the dust devils were precisely the same shade as the sky, only a tiny bit darker. Now that he knew how to look, they were easy to spot. By the afternoon there were two, sometimes even three dust devils visible at any one time. Brandon wondered if this was natural, or if something was wrong. He could remember that the briefings had talked about dust devils, but were there supposed to be this many? But after his embarrassing dive to cover, he didn’t want to ask.
15
The Luckiest Boy in the World
The radio and the television and the VR stations had all converged at the front of the house. Brandon slipped into the back and quickly changed into Trevor’s favorite orange silk shirt, then put on the turquoise bolo that Trevor had gotten as a gift. Checking in the mirror, he was surprised at how much like Trevor he looked.
“I’m Trevor Whitman,” he said, testing it out. “I’m Trevor Whitman. I am Trevor Whitman.”
It was surprisingly easy to step into Trevor’s place. The instant that the announcement had been made public, Trevor’s life had changed completely, even before he went off to Houston to train. It was a surprise, really, how few people really had to know.
Brandon had been a virgin when the lottery had selected Trevor Whitman as the boy who won the trip to Mars. Not that he would ever possibly have admitted to it. But being the most famous boy in the world has its advantages, and Brandon took them. He could walk into a coffeehouse or a cabaret and say, “I’m Trevor Whitman, I’m going to Mars,” and half a dozen girls would tell him that they found him “fascinating” and wanted to know him better. He figured that if a girl wanted to know him for no other reason than the fact that he was famous, well, that meant that he had every right to take advantage. And he did. The first one, he was nervous, certain that she was going to tell him, hey, you’re too young, you can’t be Trevor Whitman. But after the first few, it was easy.
It was fun to be famous.
16
Geology Lessons
Her mind would wander. Sometimes Estrela imagined that her brother was with her. It had been decades since Gilberto had left her. She had not thought about him for years, nor about the streets of Rio. And yet she could bring him forth perfectly in her mind, just as he had been, wiry and street smart and still larger than her. “Hey, moça,” he might say. “These North Americans, you’re in some rich company, aren’t you?” He would give her a sly look, and she knew that he would be thinking, What did they have that he could grab? Yeah, that would be just like Gilberto, always on the lookout. “Better stay alert, moça, they don’t care about you. You’re fat, you lost your reflexes, haven’t you? Don’t think you’re like them. They look at us, they don’t even see us, they just see filth in the street. They’ll kill you and not even laugh when you’re gone.”
That’s not true, she wanted to tell him.
And sometimes she would imagine João walking beside her. She would call him up in her mind, and she would think of how he might comment on the rocks as they passed.
“Hold up a moment, look at that one. Look, that’s a layer of limestone. See how it weathers differently? There were ocean deposits here, I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t care about limestone,” she would tell him, but not aloud. Her throat hurt too much for her to say anything aloud. “Go away.” It felt bitter and yet also sweet for her to see him again, even if he was dead. Even when she ignored him.
But for a moment she would be happy, showing off for João, identifying rocks and landforms for him. “That’s gabbro,” she might say, trying to sound completely confident.
“Close. Andesite, I’d say. What’s that outcrop there?”
She looked at it. A rounded ridge, with an abrupt scarp at one end. “Anticline?” she imagined saying. “Dip and scarp.”
João shook his head, almost in pity at her ignorance. “Sheepback rock, I’d say,” he said. “There was a glacier here once, I’d bet on it.”
But João was gone.
They stopped for a break, and to Estrela’s complete surprise, Tana pulled her over and wanted to talk. They had been walking in silence for so long that it came as a surprise.
“Say, Estrela, you want to know something?”
Tana didn’t wait for Estrela to answer.
“Even with the chance that we won’t make it home,” Tana said, “you know, I’m still glad I came. This is the adventure that most people will never make in a lifetime; if it means my life, this is the price that we always knew we might have to pay. Sometimes I still can’t believe how lucky we are. Even with everything that’s happened—we’re on Mars. Nobody else can say that.”
Tana fell silent, staring off into the distance.
She is crazy, Estrela thought. She is completely crazy.
17
Devils in the Sand
The next day they saw the first dust devil at ten in the morning. Brandon watched two of them dance together like mating birds, circling each other, approaching in toward each other warily and then suddenly darting away, finally twisting around each other and then merging together into a single column that marched off over the horizon and vanished.
More followed. By noon there were a dozen at once.
When one passed directly over him, Brandon closed his eyes, but nothing happened. He could feel the wind as it passed, but it was a feeble push, barely enough to be noticeable by Earth standards. He was afraid that the scouring sand would sandblast his helmet, but when he mentioned that, Ryan quickly put him straight.
“What’s getting picked up is dust, not sand,” he said. “It’s fine particles. More like talcum powder than grit. It’s harmless. If you want to worry about grit, worry about the stuff we kick up walking, not about the stuff in the air.”
“It’s gotten noticeably dimmer,” Tana said.
Ryan looked up. The sky was a deep pale yellow. The sun was, in fact, dimmer. He could almost look directly at it without blinking. “Yeah.”
“Think it’s a dust storm?”
“Wrong season.” Ryan thought about it. “Not the season for a planetary dust storm, anyway. Maybe a local storm.” He thought about it some more. “That makes sense. We’re right about at the subsolar point; we’re getting maximum solar heating right about now. The heat is making a lot of thermals. I guess it’s not surprising it might pick up some dust. In fact, I bet this is how the dust gets into the atmosphere in the first place.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Not that I can see.” Ryan pointed forward. “Let’s keep moving.”
They had made fifty kilometers the first day of walking; fifty-five the second. Over sixty miles, Brandon calculated. No wonder his legs were aching. But that was sixty miles closer to the abandoned base at Acidalia, where Ryan hoped they could find supplies.