He padded to the bathroom and shut the door as quietly as he could.
Another day, Jamie thought as he looked into the shaving mirror. Just like yesterday and the day before. Just like tomorrow will be. Going through the motions. The excitement’s gone. Now we’re just trying to hold on, trying to keep them from shutting us down.
Why bother? he asked himself. Why not let the bastards close down the program and bring everybody home? Why fight the inevitable?
His unhappy face stared back at him: broad cheeks, coppery skin, dark brooding eyes. Strands of gray flecked his close-cropped jet black hair. His mouth turned downward unhappily. He saw his father’s Navaho face; his mother’s golden hair and pink skin were inside him, didn’t show.
Jamie showered, then shaved even though he felt he didn’t really need to. When he slowly opened the door to the bedroom, Vijay hadn’t stirred in their bed.
If the shower and the shaver didn’t wake her she must be really out. Good, he thought. She deserves her rest. Putting up with me isn’t easy.
He dressed as quietly as he could in his newest jeans and a crisply starched white shirt. Rummaging carefully through his dresser drawer, he pulled out his best bolo, the silver and onyx one that he usually reserved for formal receptions at the university. Softly, softly he filled his pockets with change and keys and facial tissues. And the bear fetish with the wispy white eagle’s feather that Al had lovingly tied to it just before Jamie left for Mars the first time.
The feather’s looking pretty shoddy, he thought. Worn down by the years. Just like me.
Vijay slept on. Sleep is the best healer, Jamie said to himself. She says she’s okay; she smiles and acts normal and pretends she’s over it. For me. She puts on the good face for my sake. But Jimmy’s death still haunts us. We should’ve done what real Navahos do: we should’ve left this condo and moved someplace else, someplace far away from all these memories.
With his boots in one hand he tiptoed to the edge of the bed. So beautiful, he thought as he gazed down at her. It shouldn’t have happened to her like this. She deserves better.
Help her find her path through this, he prayed silently to gods he didn’t really believe in. With a grimace he added, And while you’re at it, I could use some help myself.
Tithonium Chasma: The Rift Valley
“It’s hard to think of this as a valley,” said Doreen.
Carleton heard her in the earphones built into his suit’s glassteel helmet. “A rift valley,” he said.
She made a little frown. “I’ve had some geology classes, Professor.”
“Please call me Carter.”
“Sure.”
Her nanosuit was transparent. It looked to Carleton as if she were wearing nothing over her coveralls more than a plastic rain suit with an inflated bubble over her head. Even the life support pack on her back looked too small to do its job, flimsy. Yet she was standing out on the surface of Mars in the morning sunlight, snug and apparently perfectly safe.
Carleton felt like a shambling Neanderthal beside her. His spacesuit was a heavy, cumbersome shell of cermet with flexible joints at the elbows, knees and waist. Semiflexible, he corrected himself. I’ll know what arthritis feels like when it hits me, trying to move around in this outfit. He pictured himself like Falstaff, clanking unwillingly into battle inside his heavy suit of armor.
Doreen had volunteered to help him lug his equipment out to the digging site, so he had allowed her to carry the spades and tongs and brushes while he pushed the cart that was loaded with the explosives and detonators.
She’s right, he thought as he looked past her at the cliffs looming over them. It doesn’t look like a valley. The cliffs on Carleton’s left were more than three kilometers high. The valley was so wide that he couldn’t see its other walclass="underline" it was over the horizon.
They call Mars the red planet, he mused as they trudged along to the site. Yes, most of its surface is rust red dust. Iron oxides. A red desert, from pole to pole. But look at that cliff face: bands of ochre and pale yellow and light brown along with the iron red. You can’t stand here for ten minutes without wanting to be a geologist.
Several klicks along the cliff face was the sloping ramp of dirt and rocks that Jamie Waterman had used for the first transit down to the floor of Tithonium, back during the First Expedition, more than twenty years ago. The original Mars base had been up on the plateau in those early days. But it was down here on the valley floor that the Martian lichen had been discovered, struggling to stay alive through frigid nights and dust storms that smothered everything in their path.
And in that notch high up in the cliff wall Waterman had found the ruins of buildings: brick structures erected by intelligent Martians more than sixty million years ago. Intelligent Martians who were wiped out by an extinction-level meteor strike, just as the dinosaurs on Earth had been driven into extinction by a killer meteor impact.
There were three buckyball cables running along the cliff face now, to carry people and equipment from the base on the valley floor to Waterman’s village up in the cleft in the rocks. Only, it wasn’t a village. Carleton was convinced of that. Some sort of shrine, more likely. Or a fortress. The village was down here, on the valley floor. Had to be. If only I could find it, he thought. If the damned lichen are smart enough to live down here, where it’s warmer and there’s some moisture from the frost that forms overnight, then the Martians must’ve been smart enough to do the same.
Except that he hadn’t found any village. Not yet, he told himself. It’s here, you just haven’t gone deep enough yet.
“Is that the site?” Doreen asked, pointing with a spade toward the edge of the pit a few dozen meters ahead.
“That’s it,” Carleton said.
“And you think there’s a village buried here?” Doreen put down the spade and the bag of brushes.
They stopped at the edge of the pit. It was fifty meters across and about twenty meters deep, almost square in shape. Its bottom looked freshly swept, cleaned of all debris and dust, nothing but bare jagged rock. To one side of where they were standing rested the tables bearing mesh grids for sifting rubble and the hoist that Carleton used to lower himself into the pit.
As he carefully took his packages from the cart and lowered them to the ground in his stiff-jointed suit, Carleton said, “Ground-penetrating radar showed indications of a gridwork about thirty meters below the surface. Nature doesn’t produce grids; intelligence does.”
“But you haven’t found anything,” Doreen said, not accusingly, he thought. If anything, she sounded sympathetic.
“Haven’t gone deep enough yet. The village is underneath sixty-some million years of compacted dust.” If it’s here at all, he added silently.
“And you excavate with explosives?”
“Beats digging.”
“But doesn’t that blow up the fossils you’re looking for?”
“I’m not down deep enough for fossils yet. When I find something I’ll start digging by hand.”
“Sounds weird, blasting away like that.”
He chuckled at her. “There’s precedent for it. Dart or Broom or one of those paleontologists in South Africa a century or more ago, they used dynamite to excavate fossil sites.”
“It still sounds weird,” Doreen insisted gently.
“Don’t sweat it,” he said. “I sift through the rubble after each blast, to see if there’s anything in it. So far, nothing. It takes a long time, but digging by hand would be really tedious.”
He could see Doreen’s face clearly through the nanofabric bubble of her helmet. She looked intrigued, but he thought he saw doubt in her big doe’s eyes, as well.