“Ah, but I do care,” Ryan said. “We have been together too long for me to just leave you behind without ever knowing why. It’s too late for deception now. Tell me.”
“I did tell you. I changed my mind.”
Ryan shook his head. “That’s not enough. You said that you killed two people to get back home…and now that you’re here, you decided you don’t want to go. I’m not going to judge you, but I need to understand. Why?”
Estrela leaned back and closed her eyes. “All my life,” she said, “all my life I’ve been surrounded by people. In the city where I grew up. In the school. When they sent me north. Always, people all around me. Boys wanting to be with me to pull down my pants, reporters interviewing, even João, wanting to sit with me and drink coffee and talk, and talk.
“Even on Mars, we were never alone—here on Mars, we were more crowded than anywhere. Crowded in the habitats, crowded in the rovers. Always together. Even when I thought I was going off by myself, there were the voices in my earphones, telling me that I would never be alone.
“Did you know that this place terrified me at first? These huge, empty distances. But then, when we kept on walking, when the airplane crashed and you told us that we had to keep on walking, something changed. In that long walk, we were each of us alone, truly alone, and I found, yes, I can be alone. I can be just me. The snow doesn’t care who I am. The rocks don’t care who I am. The sky doesn’t care who I am.
“I tell you this. Always, all my life, I have been pretending to be somebody I’m not. For so long that I don’t think I even know who I really am.
“I’m done with that.
“I decided, I don’t care if I go back. I don’t need it. There’s nothing for me back there. I changed my mind. I like it here.
“I want to be alone.”
21
Leaving Mars
The sun on the horizon was almost blue, surrounded by a luminous golden orb of light and a double halo. The day was still; the snow reflected only the pale yellow sky.
And then the snow began to glow.
The snow erupted, cascading outward in a tidal wave of sudden incandescence, raising a billowing cloud that was lit brilliant red by a light from inside. The glow, a flame almost too bright to look at, rose slowly and silently, shrouded in the roiling cloud.
Jesus do Sul broke out of the cloud, and the light of its exhaust, a second and brighter dawn, set the icescape aglow. Gathering speed, it headed skyward. It was almost out of sight when the booster stage fell away. The Earth-return stage, only a tiny pinprick of light, sped off, like a fallen star rising again to return to its home, into space.
Below, an insignificant figure sat on a small ridge of ice. She continued to stare into the sky for long after the tiny speck of light had vanished.
And then she turned back to return to the habitat. There was no use continuing to watch; it would be nine months before their journey would finish. There was a lot for her to do before then.
Estrela Carolina Conselheiro was, at last, home.
Acknowledgments
This book owes a clear debt to Robert Zubrin and David Baker, from whose Mars mission concepts I have liberally borrowed. Thanks.
Thanks are also due to Mary, Levin, Toby, Julie, Malcolm, Ben, Becky, John, Bonnie, Astrid, Charlie, Steve, Marta, and Paula, for reading, comments, and general support.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
MARS CROSSING
Copyright © 2000 by Geoffrey A. Landis
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN 0-812-57648-9
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-056764
First Edition: December 2000
First mass market edition: November 2001
Printed in the United States of America
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