Now that wasnt going to happen. After two years the first crew remained stuck hereand the word was, because of the priority of the shield work, there wasnt likely to be a retrieval mission until after sunstorm day itself, more than four years into the future.
The crew understood the need to stay, for they were all intensely aware of the threat posed by the sun. Despite its greater distance, the sun was actually a much more baleful presence here on Mars than on Earth. The home worlds thick atmosphere offered you the equivalent shielding of meters of aluminum; Marss thin air gave you only centimetersno better than if you were riding a tin-can spacecraft in interplanetary space. The neighborhood magnetosphere was no use either. Mars was still and cold, frozen deep inside, and its magnetic field wasnt a global, dynamic structure like Earths, but a relic of arcs and patches. On Mars, the solar climatologists liked to say, the sun engaged directly with the ground, and you had to hide from flares that wouldnt even be noticed on Earth. So they understood, but that didnt make the prospect any warmer.
The mood was hard to lift. They were tired, all the time: a sol, Marss day, was half an hour longer than Earths, just too long for the human circadian system to cope with. In all their simulations, nobody had anticipated that one of the most serious problems on Mars would turn out to be a kind of jet-lag. And now they were stranded. Thanks to Aurora Zero there was no fear of running out of resources. They could tough it out here; Mars would feed them. Still, most of the crew had been bereft at being cut off from their families and homes for so long.
But Helena, though horrified about the prospect of the sunstorm, and perturbed at the work they were going to have to do to ride it out themselves, was quietly pleased. She was growing to love this place, this strange little world where the sun raised a tide in the atmosphere. And Mars hadnt even begun to give up its secrets to her yet. She wanted to travel to the poles, where every winter there were blizzards of carbon dioxide, or the deep basin of Hellas where, it was said, it got so warm and the air so thick you could pour out liquid water and it would stand, without freezing, on the ground.
And there were human secrets on Mars too.
British-born Helena still remembered her disappointment at the age of six after being woken in the small hours of Christmas Day, 2003, to listen for a signal from Mars that had never come. Now she had come all the way to Mars herselfand had seen with her own eyes the dust-strewn wreckage on Isidis Planitia, all that remained of the brave little craft that had come so far. This hadnt meant much to the Americans on the crew, but Helena had been pleased when they had allowed her to christen this rover Beagle
Lowell, Beagle. The voice of Bob Paxton, back at Lowell, spoke softly in her headset, cutting through the Presidents words. Almost time. Look up.
Beagle, Lowell. Thanks, Bob. She tipped back her head to inspect the sky.
The spaceship from Earth came rising grandly out of the east, bright in the Martian morning. Helena waited by her rover until the glinting star that should have taken her home had started to dim in the dust at the horizon, its single pass over Mars complete.
Goodbye, Aurora2, goodbye.
President Alvarez folded her hands and looked into the camera.
The coming days will be difficult for all of us. I would not pretend otherwise.
Our space agencies, including our own NASA and U.S. Astronautical Engineering Corps, will of course play a crucial role, and I have every confidence they will rise to this new challenge as they have in the past. The controller of the ill-fated Apollo 13 lunar mission once memorably said, Failure is not an option. Nor is it now.
But the space engineers cannot win through alone. To achieve this we will all have a role to play, every one of us. My dreadful news may shock you now, but tomorrow another day will dawn. There will be newspapers and websites, e-mails to send and phone calls to make; the stores will open; the transport systems will run as they always doand every workplace and school will, must, be open for business as usual.
I urge you to go to work. I urge you to do the best job you can, every minute of every day. We are like a pyramid, a pyramid of work and economic contributions, a pyramid supporting at its peak the handful of heroes who are trying to save us all.
We all lived through June 9, and we overcame the lesser problems posed on that difficult day. I know we can now rise to this new challenge, together.
As long as humankind survives, our descendants will look back on these fleeting years. And they will envy us. For we were here, on this day, at this hour. And we achieved greatness.
Good fortune to us all.
Youre missing the point.
Bisesa wanted to scream at the softwall, to throw a cushion at the President. This shield is heroic. But you have to look beyond that. You have to recognize that all this has been engineered. You have to listen to me!
But for Myras sake, as she learned about the impending end of the world, she stayed outwardly calm.
The vagueness of the dates Alvarez quoted baffled her. Why be so elusive? The astrophysicists who had come up with this prediction seemed so precise about everything else that they would surely have narrowed it down to a day.
The date was surely selected by the Firstborn, of course, as was everything about this event. They would pick a day that mattered to them, somehow. But what could matter about a day in April 2042? Surely nothing in the human domain: the Firstborn were creatures of the stars Something astronomical, then.
Aristotle, she said softly.
Yes, Bisesa?
April 2042. Can you tell me whats going on in the sky in that month?
You mean an ephemeris?
A what?
A table of astronomical data that predicts the daily position of the planets, stars, and
Yes. Thats it.
The Presidents image shrank down to a corner of the wall. The rest of it filled up with columns of figures, like map coordinates. But even the columns titles meant little to Bisesa; evidently astronomers spoke a language of their own.
Im sorry, Aristotle said. Im not sure of your level of expertise.
Assume nonexistent. Can you show me this graphically?
Of course. The tables were replaced by an image of the night sky. The view from London on April 1, 2042, midnight, Aristotle said.
At the vision of the impossibly clear, starry sky, a sharp memory prodded at Bisesas mind. She remembered sitting with her phone, under the crystalline sky of another world, as the little gadget had labored to map the sky and work out the date But shed had to leave everything behind on Mir, even her phone.
Aristotle scrolled through display options, showing her stick-figure constellation diagrams, lines of celestial longitude and latitude.
She dumped all that. Just show me the sun, she said.
A yellow disk began to track, impossibly, against a black, star-filled sky, and a date and time box flickered in the corner. She ran through the month, April 2042, from end to end, and watched the sun ride across the sky, over and over.
And then she thought of what she had seen on her strange journey back from Mir with Josh. Please show me the Moon.
A gray disk with a sketchy man-in-the-Moon mottling appeared.
Now start from April 1 and run forward again.
The Moon made its stately way across the sky. Its phase welled until it became full, and then it began to shrink down, through half full, and to a crescent that enclosed a disk of darkness.
That black disk tracked across the image of the sun.
Stop. The image froze. I know when its going to happen, she breathed.
Bisesa?