What was the gravity situation on Mars, Steve Watanabe wanted to remember. Would it be easier to climb up the cliff wall? Could he somehow make leaps and bounds that were out of range for him back on Earth? He began climbing without answering these pertinent questions, and mainly because he remembered the smell of his wife’s body, and in the process of remembering this warm-bread smell, he came to remember that he had a son too, and perhaps it was the wife and son who had brought him to this place, this ledge on the wall somehow. Because if he was able to get into this predicament in pursuit of the elusive reunion with wife and son, then Steve Watanabe could extricate himself from this predicament, because now it was the case that reunion was a reason to keep moving, and maybe they would be looking for him, whoever they were, the other people with whom he had come to this place, to Mars, and this would make the matter of rescue and reunion with the wife and son that much more likely and that much more sweet. How many days, weeks, months, had he been here on Mars, and wasn’t there some space agency that was meant to prevent things like this on the planet Mars? Bodily injury?
He fitted his hand into one crevice, and fitted his foot into another, and happily the erosion of the high winds did seem to make footholds and handholds a likelihood, except that occasionally he heard scree plummeting down underneath him. The plummeting took a very long time. Watanabe did not look down, despite the bodily shooting pains; he kept climbing, and when other shelves presented themselves for rest, he rested, and over the course of some hours, he did see that he was coming near to the ledge, the ledge of the cliff, and what concerned him, at this point, was the exact nature of the sights that he would behold upon summiting and peering over the lip of that cliff. What would he find? Would he find some other cliff on the other side? Would he find some limitless assortment of ridges and cliff faces, extending into nothingness? Would he find his fellow astronauts?
There were some near misses. Some moments when he hung on dangerously with his good arm. And there were rips and tears in the gloves of his jumpsuit. But he continued going up. As the middle of the Martian day gave way to the afternoon, Watanabe was at last reassured that his exertions were paying off. The summit was no more than thirty or forty feet up, and there was an excellent seam between sheets of the cliff wall, probably due to some kind of tectonic activity or perhaps volcanic tremors. He didn’t know for certain; he was just making these things up. All of his prior life seemed to be in preparation for this moment, the moment when he would climb over the top of the cliff, thinking of the smell of his wife and the sound of his son eating breakfast cereal, which seemed, in these last thirty or forty feet, like the times he remembered his son best, at least since the accident that brought him to the ledge. His son was a series of small audio samples, the sound of cereal being chewed, this was very memorable, some kind of particularly crunchy cereal; his son battering a set of wind chimes with a stick out on the porch… the porch, he had a porch, and it was next to a canal, and the weather was humid and it was… it was in Florida. Steve Watanabe now felt the humid summer air of Florida, felt its tropical heat, the oncoming hurricane season, heard the sound of the emergency vehicles rumbling through the streets, saw the water levels swelling over the years, taking out another atoll of expensive real estate in the Keys; they came back in one big, moldy steamer trunk, the memories of Florida, just as he reached out a desperate grasping hand to the top of the cliff, and it crumbled, and some of the Martian scree again fell however many hundreds, if not thousands, of feet down beneath him. He didn’t even want to know. He swung a leg up and screamed, he could hear himself screaming in the helmet, as though it were some distant sound, and then he was up. He was up! He lay there, giddy with laughter, on his back on the summit of the cliff, and he lay there awhile because he knew what would happen as soon as he stopped laughing. When he stopped laughing, he would have to get up and think about which way to go next. There was something running out of his eyes, tears, he supposed, he was laughing so hard. It was good to just lie there and think about the swirling of memories like solar winds in him.
Then Watanabe, who remembered that he had assumed a name, an Anglo first name, at some point in his youth, but who now chose to cast off the Anglo name — if he had to be named, he would just go by the surname, just Watanabe, first name no longer applicable — rose up on one knee, and then onto his feet, and looked around. Perhaps there had been tracks before, but if the faint declivities were tire tracks, they quickly became indistinguishable from the waves of sand. And in the other direction a nothingness just as perfect and exacting. Watanabe tried to decide if the ruined vehicle at the bottom of the canyon had been coming this way to get away from something, on its way home, or if home, whatever the word meant on Mars, was in the direction of the expunged track. He had no way of knowing, having no other data from which to make a reasoned decision. And so he set off, kids, into the wilderness.
Book Two[1]
SOME MONTHS later, on the eighth day of the tenth month of the year 2026: Vance Gibraltar, sleep-deprived budgetary director at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, found himself in one of the conference rooms in Houston along with the new director of the agency, that woman named Levin. Debra Levin. A Washington appointee if he’d ever seen one. What became of the former chief executive of NASA, Dr. Anatoly Thatcher, was a cautionary tale. For one and all. Someone had to suffer for the unremitting botch of the Mars mission, a mission once intended to restore luster to the national space program. It wasn’t going to be Vance Gibraltar, who unlike the eggheads around here had political instincts. Thatcher, who’d always been an intellectual in what amounted to a military program, was going back to duck hunting in the Upper Peninsula, or so the press release indicated. Gibraltar had to deal instead with this Levin woman.
True, she had a little background in the earth sciences, and a degree from the Ivy League, where she likely consorted with Islamists and professors of Queer Studies. No doubt she’d taken a year off to live with the Inuit to see if she could forestall the clubbing of seal pups. She believed she had a mandate from the White House. If she could complete the Mars mission without further political fallout, put the punctuation mark on it, Gibraltar thought, she could go back to academe or onto the lecture circuit with a most handsome curriculum vitae.
Across the table in the conference room: Mars mission flight director Rob Antoine, the middle manager with the comb-over and imperfect hygiene, whom Gibraltar had hired himself and had once loved like a son. Like all sons, Comb-Over had disappointed him, especially in the matter of personnel. Gibraltar could not look at Rob and his tonsorial stylings without wanting to launch him out toward Mercury. There were others in the room, deputies with too many opinions, people whom Gibraltar didn’t bother to get to know — because everything went more smoothly in an absence of personal relationships.
Why was Vance Gibraltar the de facto general administrator at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration? Anyone who’d ask obviously wasn’t traveling in the right circles. Gibraltar was kingmaker by design; Gibraltar was eager to get down in the trenches to protect his agency interests. He had the one desire, the desire to maximize visibility and profitability for the agency. He was looking anywhere and everywhere for additional research dollars, and was willing to invite foreign governments into bed with him, even Asian governments, if necessary. And so Gibraltar had been at the job almost twenty years. He’d had every heart procedure that you could have these days, valve replacement, a pacemaker; he was working toward the complete artificial pumper. All he cared about was space. Not himself, not his country, not God, not his congregation. Space. He’d never been thin; he’d never been good at football. He’d stammered as a kid. He couldn’t be an astronaut; he’d have failed the physical. But what he could be was a man who financed the astronauts, and a man who was at every launch whether successful or not. He wept by himself, alone, away from the cameras, when rockets went down or missions collapsed. And when they were successful he sent the reporters to interview someone else, some hard scientist, some academic, some engineer, men and women who would be happy to take the credit. He was effective, merciless, and silent to those on the outside.
1
Astute fans of the genre in whose field I am plowing (people who are familiar with the just-released film