Surely it made better sense to cycle the scientists and technicians to Mars in a way similar to that of the early Antarcticans. Tours of duty at small scientific stations, the stations built and then manned continuously, but by rotating teams, with individuals out there for three years each. This would be more in keeping with recommended lifetime maximum radiation doses. Boone and the others on the first trip there and back, two years before, had taken about 35 rad. Subsequent visiting scientists could stick to something like that.
But the American and Russian space programs had decided otherwise. They wanted a permanent base, and they had invited scientists to move there for good. They wanted a commitment from people, no doubt hoping for a similar commitment of public interest back home—interest in a permanent cast of characters that could be learned, their lives become a matter of drama for public consumption back on Earth, with its bottomless addiction to narrative—biography as spectacle. Part of the funding effort. It made sense in its way.
But who would want to do such a thing? This was a matter that troubled Michel greatly; it headed the long list of double binds he felt applicants were put in by the process of selection. In short, they had to be sane to be selected, but crazy to want to go.
Many other double binds accompanied that basic one. Applicants had to be extroverted enough to socialize, but introverted enough to have studied a discipline to the point of mastering it. They had to be old enough to have learned these primary, secondary, and sometime tertiary professions, and yet be young enough to withstand the rigors of the trip out and the work there. They had to do well in groups, but want to leave everyone they knew behind forever. They were being asked to tell the truth, but clearly had to lie to increase their chances of getting what they wanted. They had to be both ordinary and extraordinary.
Yes, the double binds were endless. Nevertheless this nearly final group had come from an initial pool of many thousands of applicants. Double binds? So what! Nothing new to fear there. Everyone on Earth was strung up in vast networks of double binds. Going to Mars might actually reduce their number, decrease their strain! Perhaps that was part of the appeal of going!
Perhaps that was why these men of the first Antarctic explorations had volunteered to come south. Still, looking around at the bare wooden room, it was amazing to Michel that those who had wintered down here had managed to stay sane. On the wall of Shackleton’s hut there was a photo of them: three men, huddled before a black stove. Michel stared long at this evocative photo. The men were worn-looking, battered, dirty, frostnipped, tired. Also calm, even serene. They could sit and do nothing but watch fire burn in a stove, entirely satisfied. They looked cold but warm. The very structure of the brain had been different then, more inured to hardship and the long slow hours of sheer animal existence. Certainly the structure of feeling had changed; that was culturally determined; and thus the brain must necessarily have changed too. A century later their brains depended on great dollops of mediated stimulation, quick-cut inputs which had not even existed for earlier generations. So that reliance on inner resources was harder. Patience was harder. They were different animals than the people in this photo. The epigenetic interplay of DNA and culture was now changing people so fast that even a century was enough to make a measurable difference. Accelerated evolution. Or one of the punctuations in the long tale of punctuated evolution. And Mars would be more of the same. There was no telling what they would become.
Back to Lake Vanda, and the old huts quickly became like a dream interrupting the only reality, a reality so cold that space-time itself seemed to have frozen, leaving all of them living the same hour over and over. Dante’s cold circle of hell, the worst of all, as he recalled.
The sensory deprivation was getting to them all. Every “morning” he found himself waking up in low spirits. It took hours after waking to work the weight out of his stomach and focus on the day. After he reached level neutrality, as it was beginning to turn blue twilight at the windows, he was able to ask to join whoever was going outside that day. Out there in the numbing gray or blue or purple twilight he hiked along, trailing the other thickly clad figures, who looked like pilgrims in a medieval winter, or prehistoric people struggling through the Ice Age. One slender bundle might be Tatiana, her beauty muffled but not entirely blanketed, for she moved like a dancer over the cracked mirror of the lake, under the high walls of the valley. Another might be Maya, focused on the others, though quite friendly and diplomatic to him too. It worried him. Beside her strode Frank, bulky and muffled.
Tatiana was easier to understand, and so attractive. Across the ice one day he followed her. On the far shore they stopped to inspect the dead body of a mummified seal. These disoriented Weddell seals were found far up all the Dry Valleys, dead for hundreds or thousands of years, frozen all that time, slowly frittered away by the winds, until the skeleton slowly emerged from the body like a soul taking off a fur coat, a soul white and wind-polished and articulated.
Tatiana grabbed his arm, exclaiming at the sight. She spoke French well, and had spent summers as a girl on the beaches of the Côte d’Azur; just the thought of that made him melt. Now they spoke, gloved hand in gloved hand, looking down through ski masks at the memento mori in the gray light. His heart beat hard at the thought of the beauty encased in the chrysalis parka beside him, saying, “It’s such a shock to come on one of these poor creatures’ vertebra, out on its own in all the rock, like someone’s lost bracelet.”
From across the lake Frank watched them.
And after that day Maya dropped Michel completely, with never a word nor any outward sign that things had changed, but only a single swift glance at Tatiana, in his presence, after which a purely formal politeness, no content whatsoever. And now Michel knew, very acutely, whose company in this group he craved the most; but would never have again.
Frank had done that.
And all around him it was happening: the pointless wars of the heart. It was all so small, petty, tawdry. Yet it mattered; it was their life. Sax and Ann had gone dead to each other, likewise Marina and Vlad, and Hiroko and Iwao. New cliques were forming around Hiroko and Vlad and Arkady and Phyllis, as they all spun out into their own separate orbits. No—this group would go dysfunctional. Was going dysfunctional, he could see it right before his eyes. It was too hard to live isolated in this sub-biological sensory deprivation; and this was paradise compared to Mars. There was no such thing as a good test. There was no such thing as a good analogy. There was only reality, unique and different in every moment, to be lived without rehearsal and without revision. Mars would not be like this cold continuous night on the bottom of their world; it would be worse. Worse than this! They would go mad. A hundred people confined in tanks and sent to a poisonous cold dead planet, a place to which winter in Antarctica was like paradise; a prison universe, like the inside of a head when your eyes are closed. They would all go mad.
In the first week of September the noonday twilight grew almost as bright as day, and they could see sunlight on the peaks of the Asgaard and Olympus Ranges, flanking the deep valley. Because the valley was such a narrow slot between such high ranges, it would be perhaps another ten days before the sun fell directly on the base, and Arkady organized a hike up the side of Mount Odin to catch an earlier glimpse of it. This turned into a general expedition, as almost everyone proved interested in seeing the sun again as soon as possible. So early on the morning of September 10, they stood nearly a thousand meters above Lake Vanda, on a shelf occupied by a small ice pond and tarn. It was windy, so the climb had not warmed them. The sky was a pale starless blue; the east sides of the peaks of both ranges were glazed gold with sunlight. Finally to the east, at the end of the valley, over the burnished plate of the frozen Ross Sea, the sun emerged over the horizon and burned like a flare. They cheered; their eyes ran with emotion, also an excess of new light and cold wind. People hugged each other, bundle after bundle. But Maya kept on the other side of the group from Michel, with Frank always between them. And it seemed to Michel that everyone’s joy had a desperate edge to it, as of people who had just barely survived an extinction event.