‘No, no. I’m just curious.’
‘Sure. Well, I want to try it. I want to try living somewhere where you can actually try to do something new. Set up new systems, you know. I grew up in the South, like you did. Only the American South is a lot different from the French South. We were stuck in our history for a long, long time. Then things opened up, partly because it got so bad. Partly just a lot of hurricanes hitting the coast! And we had a chance to rebuild. And we did, but not much changed. Not enough, Michel. So I have this desire to try it again. That’s the truth.’ And he glanced over at Michel, as if to emphasize not only that it was the truth, but that it was a truth he seldom talked about. Michel liked him a bit better after that.
Another day (or, in another hour of their endless night) Michel went out with a group, to check on the climatology stations located around the lake shore. They hauled banana sleds loaded with replacement batteries and tanks of compressed nitrogen and the like. Michel, Maya, Charles, Arkady, Iwao, Ben, and Elena.
They walked across Lake Vanda, Ben and Maya pulling the sleds. The valley seemed huge. The frozen surface of the lake gleamed and sparked blackly underfoot. To a northerner the sky already seemed overstuffed with stars, and in the ice underfoot each star was shattered into many pricks of light. Next to him Maya shone her flashlight down, lighting a field of cracks and bubbles under her; it was like shining light into a glass floor that had no bottom. She turned the flashlight off and it suddenly looked to Michel like the stars of the other hemisphere were shining up through a clear world, an alien planet much closer to the centre of its galaxy. Looking down into the black hole at the centre of things, through burred starlight. Like the shattered bottomless pool of the self. Every step broke the sight into a different refraction, a kaleidoscope of white points in black. He could gaze down into Vanda for a long time.
They came to the far shore of the lake. Michel looked back: their complex sparked like a bright winter constellation coming up over the horizon. Inside those boxes their companions were working, talking, cooking, reading, resting. Tensions in there were subtle but high.
A door opened in the complex, a wedge of light was thrown onto rust-coloured rock. It could have been Mars, sure; in a year or two it would be. Many of the current tensions would be resolved. But there would be no air. Outside they would go, yes, sometimes; but in spacesuits. Would that matter? The winter suit he was wearing at that moment was as much like a spacesuit as the designers could make it, and the frigid numbing downvalley breeze was like breathing purified oxygen just gasified from liquid stock, and insufficiently warmed. The sub-biological chill of Antarctica, of Mars; nothing much to choose between them. In that sense this year of training and testing had been a good idea. They were getting at least a taste of what it might be like.
Ben stepped down onto the uneven lower ice of the lake’s summertime moat, slipped and went down in a flash. He cried out and the others rushed to him, Michel first because he had seen it happen. Ben groaned and writhed, the others crouched around him –
‘Excuse me,’ Maya said, and ducked between Michel and Arkady to kneel at Ben’s side.
‘Is it your hip?’
‘Ah – yeah –’
‘Hold on. Hold steady.’ Ben clutched at her arm and she held him on his other side. ‘Here, let’s get your harness unclipped from the sled. Okay, slip the sled under him. Move him gently! Okay. Hold still there, we’ll get you back to the station. Can you stay steady or should we strap you down? Okay, let’s go. Help stabilize the sled. Someone radio the station and tell them to get ready for us.’ She clipped her own harness onto the banana sled and started back across the lake, quickly but steadily, almost ice-skating on her boots, flashlight lit to show her the ice underfoot. The others followed beside Ben.
Across the Ross Sea, McMurdo Station had an extra complement of winter staff precisely to help support them out at Vanda, and so the winter helicopter came yammering down in a huge noise only an hour or so after their return to the station. By that time Ben was furious at himself for falling, more angry than hurt, though they found out later that his hip had been fractured.
‘He went down in a flash,’ Michel said to Maya afterwards. ‘So fast he had no time to get a hand out. I’m not surprised it broke something.’
‘Too bad,’ Maya said.
‘You were good out there,’ Michel said, surprising himself. ‘Very quick.’
She blew this away with a sound and a wave of her hand. ‘How many times I’ve seen it. I spent my whole childhood on ice.’
‘Ah, of course.’ Expertise. A fund of experience was the basis of all natural decision making. This was true of Maya in many different realms, he felt. Ergonomics, her speciality, was a matter of people getting along well with things. She was going to Mars. He was not. He loved her. Well, but he loved many women. That was just the way it was. But with her …
From Michel’s personal notes, heavily encrypted:
Maya: very beautiful. A tiger slouches into the room, reeking of sex and murder. The alpha female before whom all submit. Quick in everything, including moods. I can talk to her. We have real conversations because she doesn’t care what I’m here for. Can that be true?
Spencer Jackson: a power. A secret soul. Depths beyond all calculation, even for him. The Vanda inside us. His the mind into which the whole community falls, transmuted to art. Can sketch any face in a dozen strokes, and there they are bare as a pebble. But I don’t think he’s happy.
Tatiana Durova: very beautiful. A goddess trapped in a motel. She’s looking for a way out. She knows everyone thinks she is beautiful, and therefore trusts none of us. She needs to get back to Olympus, where her appearance would be taken for granted, and she able to get through to someone. To her peers. Perhaps she takes Mars to be Olympus.
Arkady Bogdanov is a power. A very steady reliable fellow, earnest almost to the point of dullness. One sees everything he’s thinking, he doesn’t bother to conceal it. What I am is enough to get me to Mars, he says in his manner. Don’t you agree? And I do. An engineer, quick and ingenious, not interested in larger issues.
Marina Tokareva: a beauty. Very serious and intense, no small talk to her. One is forced to think about things. And she assumes you are as quick as she is. So it can be work to follow her. Narrow chiselled features, thick jet-black hair. Sometimes following her glances I think she is one of the homosexuals who must be among us; other times she seems fixated on Vlad Taneev, the oldest man here.
George Berkovic and Edvard Perrin are paired in their regard for Phyllis Boyle. Yet it is not a competition but a partnership. They both think they like Phyllis, but really what they like is the way the other one mirrors their affection. Phyllis likes this too.
Ivana is quite beautiful, despite a thin face and an overbite; a goofy smile lights up the face of the classic chemist nerd, and suddenly the goddess is revealed. Shared a Nobel Prize in chemistry, but one has to quash the thought that the smile is what won the prize. It makes one happy to see it. One would give her the Nobel Prize just to see that smile.
Simon Frazier: a very quiet power. English; public school education from age nine. He listens very closely, speaks well, but he says about one tenth as much as everyone else, which naturally gains him the reputation of a complete mute. He plays with this image, quietly. I think he likes Ann, who is like him in some ways, though not so extreme; in other ways very unlike. Ann does not joke with her image among the others, she is completely unaware of it – American lack of self-consciousness, versus Simon’s Brit irony.
Janet Blyleven: beautiful. Speaks rapidly, confidently. Friendly. Looks healthy. Nice breasts. Doggy friendship is no friendship at all.
Ann is a real beauty, though austere. Tall, angular, bony, strong; both body and face. She draws the eye. She certainly does take Mars seriously. People see that in her and like her for it. Or not, as the case may be. Her shadow is very distinct.
Alexander Zhalin is a power. He likes women with his eyes. Some