Botterogator if you want me to inspire the new generation of Martians, you have to let me tell the truth. Sam cared about having a home, I didn’t. You can flash your damn red light. It’s true.
Anyway, while the fitters rebuilt Goodspeed, we stayed in a rented cabinsquat, sleeping in, reading, and eating food we didn’t cook. We soaked in the hot tub at the Riebecker Olympic every single day—the only way Sam got warm. Up north, she had thought she was cold all the time because we were always working, she was small, and she just couldn’t keep weight on no matter how much she ate, but even loafing around Olympic City, where the most vigorous thing we did was nap in the artificial sun room, or maybe lift a heavy spoon, she still didn’t warm up.
We worried that she might have pneumonia or TB or something she’d brought from Earth, but the diagnostic machines found nothing unusual except being out of shape. But Sam had been doing so much hard physical work, her biceps and abs were like rocks, she was strong. So we gave up on the diagnosis machines, because that made no sense.
Nowadays everyone knows about Martian heart, but back then nobody knew that hearts atrophy and deposit more plaque in lower gravity, as the circulation slows down and the calcium that should be depositing into bones accumulates in the blood. Let alone that maybe a third of the human race have genes that make it happen so fast.
At the time, with no cases identified, it wasn’t even a research subject; so many people got sick and died in the first couple decades of settlement, often in their first Martian year, and to the diagnostic machines it was all a job, ho hum, another day, another skinny nineteen-year-old dead of a heart attack. Besides, all the transportees, not just the ones that died, ate so much carb-and-fat food, because it was cheap. Why wouldn’t there be more heart attacks? There were always more transportees coming, so put up another site about healthful eating for Mars, and find something else to worry about.
Checking the diagnosis machine was everything we could afford to do, anyway, but it seemed like only a small, annoying worry. After all, we’d done well, bought our own gig, were better geared up, knew more what we were doing. We set out with pretty high hopes.
Goodspeed was kind of a dumb name for a prospector’s gig. At best it could make maybe forty km/hr, which is not what you call roaring fast. Antarctic summer prospecting started with a long, dull drive down to Promethei Lingula, driving south out of northern autumn and into southern spring. The Interpolar Highway in those days was a gig track weaving southward across the shield from Olympic City to the Great Marineris Bridge. There was about hundred km of pavement, sort of, before and after the bridge, and then another gig track angling southeast to wrap around Hellas, where a lot of surface prospectors liked to work, and there was a fair bit of seasonal construction to be done on the city they were building in the western wall.
But we were going far south of Hellas. I asked Sam about that. “If you’re cold all the time, why are we going all the way to the edge of the south polar cap? I mean, wouldn’t it be nicer to maybe work the Bouches du Marineris or someplace near the equator, where you could stay a little warmer?”
“Cap, what’s the temperature in here, in the gig cabin?”
“Twenty-two C,” I said, “do you feel cold?”
“Yeah, I do, and that’s my point,” she said. I reached to adjust the temperature, and she stopped me. “What I mean is, that’s room temperature, babe, and it’s the same temperature it is in my suit, and in the fingers and toes of my suit, and everywhere. The cold isn’t outside, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s the temperature of a warm day on Earth or there’s CO2 snow falling, the cold’s in here, in me, ever since we came to Mars.”
The drive was around ten-thousand km as the road ran, but mostly it was pleasant, just making sure the gig stayed on the trail as we rolled past the huge volcanoes, the stunning view of Marineris from that hundred-mile-long bridge, and then all that ridge and peak country down south.
Mostly Sam slept while I drove. Often I rested a hand on her neck or forehead as she dozed in the co-driver’s chair. Sometimes she shivered; I wondered if it was a long-running flu. I made her put on a mask and get extra oxygen, and that helped, but every few weeks I had to up her oxygen mix again.
All the way down I practiced pronouncing Promethei Lingula, especially after we rounded Hellas, because Sam looked a little sicker every week, and I was so afraid she’d need help and I wouldn’t be able to make a distress call.
Sam figured Promethei Lingula was too far for most people—they’d rather pick through Hellas’s or Argyre’s crater walls, looking for chunks of something worthwhile thrown up from deep underground in those impacts, and of course the real gamblers always wanted to work Hellas because one big Hellas Diamond was five years’ income.
Sam already knew what it would take me fifteen marsyears to learn: she believed in making a good bet that nobody else was making. Her idea was that a shallow valley like the Promethei Lingula in the Antarctic highlands might have more stuff swept down by the glaciers, and maybe even some of the kinds of exposed veins that really old mountains had on Earth.
As for what went wrong, well, nothing except our luck; nowadays I own three big veins down there. No, botterogator, I don’t feel like telling you a damned thing about what I own, you’re authorized to just look all that up. I don’t see that owning stuff is inspiring. I want to talk about Sam.
We didn’t find any veins, or much of anything else, that first southern summer. And meanwhile Sam’s health deteriorated.
By the time we were into Promethei Lingula, I was fixing most meals and doing almost all the maintenance. After the first weeks I did all the exosuit work, because her suit couldn’t seem to keep her warm, even on hundred percent oxygen. She wore gloves and extra socks even inside. She didn’t move much, but her mind was as good as ever, and with her writing the search patterns and me going out and grabbing the rocks, we could still’ve been okay.
Except we needed to be as lucky as we’d been up in Boreas, and we just weren’t.
Look here, botterogator, you can’t make me say luck had nothing to do with it. Luck always has a shitload to do with it. Keep this quibbling up and just see if I inspire any new Martians.
Sometimes there’d be a whole day when there wasn’t a rock that was worth tossing in the hopper, or I’d cover a hundred km of nothing but common basalts and granites. Sam thought her poor concentration made her write bad search patterns, but it wasn’t that; it was plain bad luck.
Autumn came, and with it some dust storms and a sun that spiraled closer to the horizon every day, so that everything was dimmer. It was time to head north; we could sell the load, such as it was, at the depot at Hellas, but by the time we got to the Bouches de Marineris, it wouldn’t cover more than a few weeks of prospecting. We might have to mortgage again; Hsieh Chi, unfortunately, was in the Vikingsburg pen for embezzling. “Maybe we could hustle someone, like we did him.”
“Maybe I could, babe,” Sam said. “You know the business a lot better, but you’re still nobody’s sales guy, Cap. We’ve got food enough for another four months out here, and we still have credit because we’re working and we haven’t had to report our hold weight. Lots of gigs stay out for extra time—some even overwinter—and nobody can tell whether that’s because they’re way behind like us, or they’ve found a major vein and they’re exploiting it. So we can head back north, use up two months of supplies to get there, buy about a month of supplies with the cargo, go on short term credit only, and try to get lucky in one month. Or we can stay here right till we have just enough food to run for the Hellas depot, put in four months, and have four times the chance. If it don’t work Goodspeed’ll be just as lost either way.”