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“And they already know the match-ups.”
She watched them laugh. Smart, healthy, supremely well-educated; was this the rational society at last, the scientifically-designed community that had been the dream of the Enlightenment? But there was Arkady, Nadia, Vlad, Ivana. She knew the Russian contingent too well to have many illusions on that score. They were just as likely to end up resembling an undergraduate dorm at a technical university, occupied by bizarre pranks and lurid affairs. Except they looked a bit old for that kind of thing; several men were balding, and many of both sexes showed touches of gray in their hair. It had been a long haul; their average age was forty-six, with extremes ranging from thirty-three (Hiroko Ai, the Japanese prodigy of biosphere design) to fifty-eight (Vlad Taneev, winner of a Nobel Prize in medicine).
Now, however, the flush of youth was on all their faces. Arkady Bogdanov was a portrait in red: hair, beard, skin. In all that red his eyes were a wild electric blue, bugging out happily as he exclaimed, “Free at last! Free at last! All our children are free at last!” The video cameras had been turned off, after Janet Blyleven had recorded a series of interviews for the TV stations back home; they were out of contact with Earth, in the dining hall anyway, and Arkady was singing, and the group around him toasted the song. Maya stopped to join this group. Free at last; it was hard to believe, they were actually on their way to Mars! Knots of people talking, many of them world class in their fields; Ivana had won part of a Nobel prize in chemistry, Vlad was one of the most famous medical biologists in the world, Sax was in the pantheon of great contributors to subatomic theory, Hiroko was unmatched in enclosed biological life support systems design, and so on all around; a brilliant crowd!
And she was one of their leaders. It was a bit daunting. Her engineering and cosmonautic skills were modest enough, it was her diplomatic ability that had gotten her aboard, presumably. Chosen to head the disparate, fractious Russian team, with the several commonwealth members – well, that was okay. It was interesting work, and she was used to it. And her skills might very well turn out to be the most important ones aboard. They had to get along, after all. And that was a matter of guile, and cunning, and will. Willing other people to do your bidding! She looked at the crowd of glowing faces, and laughed. All aboard were good at their work, but some were gifted far beyond that. She had to identify those people, to seek them out, to cultivate them. Her ability to function as leader depended on it; for in the end, she thought, they would surely become a kind of loose scientific meritocracy. And in such a society as that, the extraordinarily talented constituted the real powers. When push came to shove, they would be the colony’s true leaders – they, or those who influenced them.
She looked around, located her opposite number, Frank Chalmers. In Antarctica she had not gotten to know him very well. A tall, big, swarthy man. He was talkative enough, and incredibly energetic; but hard to read. She found him attractive. Did he see things as she did? She had never been able to tell. He was talking to a group across the length of the room, listening in that sharp inscrutable way of his, head tilted to the side, ready to pounce with a witty remark. She was going to have to find out more about him. More than that, she was going to have to get along with him.
She crossed the room, stopped by his side, stood so their upper arms just barely touched. Leaned her head in toward his. A brief gesture at their comrades: “This is going to be fun, don’t you think?”
Chalmers glanced at her. “If it goes well,” he said.
After the celebration and dinner, unable to sleep, Maya wandered through the Ares. All of them had spent time in space before, but never in anything like the Ares, which was enormous. There was a kind of penthouse at the front end of the ship, a single tank like a bowsprit, which rotated in the opposite direction the ship did, so that it held steady. Solar watch instruments, radio antennas, and all the other equipment which worked best without rotation were located in this tank, and at the very tip of it was a bulbous room of transparent plastic, a chamber quickly named the bubble dome, which provided the crew with a weightless, non-rotating view of the stars, and a partial view of the great ship behind it.
Maya floated near the window wall of this bubble dome, looking back at the ship curiously. It had been constructed using space shuttle external fuel tanks; around the turn of the century NASA and Glavkosmos had begun attaching small booster rockets to the tanks and pushing them all the way into orbit. Scores of tanks had been launched this way, then tugged to work sites and put to use – with them they had built two big space stations, an L5 station, a lunar orbit station, the first manned Mars vehicle, and scores of unmanned freighters sent to Mars. So by the time the two agencies agreed to build the Ares, the use of the tanks had become routinized, with standard coupling units, interiors, propulsion systems and so forth; and construction of the big ship had taken less than two years.
It looked like something made from a children’s toy set, in which cylinders were attached at their ends to create more complex shapes – in this case, eight hexagons of connected cylinders, which they called toruses, lined up and speared down the middle by a central hub shaft, made of a cluster of five lines of cylinders. The toruses were connected to the hub shaft by thin crawl spokes, and the resulting object looked somewhat like a piece of agricultural machinery, say the arm of a harvester combine, or a mobile sprinkler unit. Or like eight knobby doughnuts, Maya thought, toothpicked to a stick. Just the sort of thing a child would appreciate.
The eight toruses had been made from American tanks, and the five bundled lengths of the central shaft were Russian. Both were about fifty meters long and ten meters in diameter. Maya floated aimlessly down the tanks of the hub shaft; it took her a long time, but she was in no hurry. She dropped down into Torus G. There were rooms of all shapes and sizes, right up to the largest, which occupied entire tanks. The floor in one of these she passed through was set just below the halfway mark, so its interior resembled a long Quonset hut. But the majority of the tanks had been divided up into smaller rooms. She had heard there were over five hundred of them in all, making for a total interior space roughly the equivalent of a large city hotel.
But would it be enough?
Perhaps it would. After the Antarctic, life on the Ares seemed an expansive, labyrinthine, airy experience. Around six every morning the darkness in the residential toruses would lighten slowly to a gray dawn, and around six-thirty a sudden brightening marked “sunrise.” Maya woke to it as she had all her life. After visiting the lavatory she would make her way to Torus D’s kitchen, heat a meal, and take it into the big dining hall. There she sat at a table flanked by potted lime trees. Hummingbirds, finches, tanagers, sparrows and lories pecked underfoot and darted overhead, dodging the creeping vines that hung from the hall’s long barrel ceiling, which was painted a gray-blue that reminded her of St Petersburg’s winter sky. She would eat slowly, watch the birds, relax in her chair, listen to the talk around her. A leisurely breakfast! After a lifetime of grinding work it felt rather uncomfortable at first, even alarming, like a stolen luxury. As if it were Sunday morning every day, as Nadia said. But Maya’s Sunday mornings had never been particularly relaxed. In her childhood that had been the time for cleaning the one-room apartment she had shared with her mother. Her mother had been a doctor and like most women of her generation had had to work ferociously to get by, obtaining food, bringing up a child, keeping an apartment, running a career; it had been too much for one person, and she had joined the many women angrily demanding a better deal than they had gotten in the Soviet years, which had given them half the money jobs while leaving them all the work at home. No more waiting, no more mute endurance; they had to take advantage while the instability lasted. “Everything is on the table!” Maya’s mother would exclaim while cooking their meager dinners, “everything but food!”
And perhaps they had taken advantage. In the Soviet era women had learned to help each other, a nearly self-contained world had come into being, of mothers, sisters, daughters, babushkas, women friends, colleagues, even strangers. In the commonwealth this world had consolidated its gains and thrust even further into the power structure, into the tight male oligarchies of Russian government.
One of the fields most affected had been the space program. Maya’s mother, slightly involved in space medical research, always swore that cosmonautics would need an influx of women, if only to provide female data for the medical experimentation. “They can’t hold Valentina Tereshkova against us forever!” her mother would cry. And apparently she had been right, because after studying aeronautic engineering at Moscow University, Maya had been accepted in a program at Baikonur, and had done well, and had gotten an assignment on Novy Mir. While up there she had redesigned the interiors for improved ergonomic efficiency, and later spent a year in command of the station, during which a couple of emergency repairs had bolstered her reputation. Administrative assignments in Baikonur and Moscow had followed, and over time she had managed to penetrate Glavkosmos’s little politburo, playing the men against each other in the subtlest of ways, marrying one of them, divorcing him, rising afterwards in Glavkosmos a free agent, becoming one of the utmost inner circle, the double triumvirate.
And so here she was, having a leisurely breakfast. “So civilized,” Nadia would scoff. She was Maya’s best friend on the Ares, a short woman round as a stone, with a square face framed by cropped salt-and-pepper hair. Plain as could be. Maya, who knew she was good-looking, and knew that this had helped her many times, loved Nadia’s plainness, which somehow underlined her competence. Nadia was an engineer and very practical, an expert in cold-climate construction. They had met in Baikonur twenty years before, and once lived together on Novy Mir for several months; over the years they had become like sisters, in that they were not much alike, and did not often get along, and yet were intimate.
Now Nadia looked around and said, “Putting the Russian and American living quarters in different toruses was a horrible idea. We work with them during the day, but we spend most of our time here with the same old faces. It only reinforces the other divisions between us.”
“Maybe we should offer to exchange half the rooms.”
Arkady, wolfing down coffee rolls, leaned over from the next table. “It’s not enough,” he said, as if he had been part of their conversation all along. His red beard, growing wilder every day, was dusted with crumbs. “We should declare every other Sunday to be moving day, and have everyone shift quarters on a random basis. People would get to know more of the others, and there would be fewer cliques. And the notion of ownership of the rooms would be reduced.”
“But I like owning a room,” Nadia said.
Arkady downed another roll, grinned at her as he chewed. It was a miracle he had passed the selection committee.
But Maya brought up the subject with the Americans, and though no one liked Arkady’s plan, a single exchange of half the apartments struck them as a good idea. After some consulting and discussion, the move was arranged. They did it on a Sunday morning; and after that, breakfast was a little more cosmopolitan. Mornings in the D dining hall now included Frank Chalmers and John Boone, and also Sax Russell, Mary Dunkel, Janet Blyleven, Rya Jimenez, Michel Duval, and Ursula Kohl.
John Boone turned out to be an early riser, getting to the dining hall even before Maya. “This room is so spacious and airy, it really has an outdoor feel to it,” he said from his table one dawn when Maya came in. “A lot better than B’s hall.”
“The trick is to remove all chrome and white plastic,” Maya replied. Her English was fairly good, and getting better fast. “And then paint the ceiling like real sky.”
“Not just straight blue, you mean?”
“Yes.”
He was, she thought, a typical American: simple, open, straightforward, relaxed. And yet this particular specimen was one of the most famous people in history. It was an unavoidable, heavy fact; but Boone seemed to slip out from under it, to leave it around his feet on the floor. Intent on the taste of a roll, or some news on the table screen, he never referred to his previous expedition, and if someone brought the subject up he spoke as if it were no different from any of the flights the rest of them had taken. But it wasn’t so, and only his ease made it seem that way: at the same table each morning, laughing at Nadia’s lame engineering jokes, making his portion of the talk. After a while it took an effort to see the aura around him.
Frank Chalmers was more interesting. He always came in late, and sat by himself, paying attention only to his coffee and the table screen. After a couple of cups he would talk to people nearby, in ugly but functional Russian. Most of the breakfast conversations in D hall had now shifted to English, to accommodate the Americans. The linguistic situation was a set of nesting dolls: English held all hundred of them, inside that was Russian, and inside that, the languages of the commonwealth, and then the internationals. Eight people aboard were idiolinguists, a sad kind of orphaning in Maya’s opinion, and it seemed to her they were more Earth-oriented than the rest, and in frequent communication with people back home. It was a little strange to have their psychiatrist in that category.
Anyway English was the ship’s lingua franca, and at first Maya had thought that this gave the Americans an advantage. But then she noticed that when they spoke they were always on stage to everyone, while the rest of them had more private languages they could switch to if they wanted.
Frank Chalmers was the exception to all that, however.
He spoke five languages, more than anyone else aboard. And he did not fear to use his Russian, even though it was very bad; he just hacked out questions and then listened to the answers, with a really piercing intensity, and a quick startling laugh. He was an unusual American in many ways, Maya thought. At first he seemed to have all the characteristics, he was big, loud, maniacally energetic, confident, restless; talkative enough, after that first coffee; friendly enough. It took a while to notice how he turned the friendliness on and off, and to notice how little his talk revealed. Maya never learned a thing about his past, for instance, despite deliberate efforts to chat him up. It made her curious. He had black hair, a swarthy face, light hazel eyes – handsome in a tough-guy way – his smile brief, his laugh sharp, like Maya’s mother’s. His gaze too was sharp, especially when looking at Maya; a matter of evaluating the other leader, she assumed. He acted toward her as if they had an understanding built on long acquaintance, a presumption which made her uneasy given how little they had spoken together in Antarctica. She was used to thinking of women as her allies, and of men as attractive but dangerous problems. So a man who presumed to be her ally was only the more problematic. And dangerous. And … something else.
She recalled only one moment when she had seen further into him than the skin, and that had been back in Antarctica. After the thermal engineer had cracked and been sent north, news of his replacement had come down, and when it was announced everyone was quite surprised and excited to hear that it was going to be John Boone himself, even though he had certainly received more than the maximum radiation dosage on his previous expedition. While the evening room was still buzzing with the news Maya had seen Chalmers come in and be told of it, and he had jerked his head around to stare at his informant; and then for a fraction of a second she had seen a flash of fury, a flash so fast it was almost a subliminal event.
But it had made her attentive to him. And certainly he and John Boone had an odd relationship. It was difficult for Chalmers, of course; he was the Americans’ official leader, and even had the title Captain; but Boone, with his blond good looks and the strange presence of his accomplishment, certainly had more natural authority – he seemed the real American leader, and Frank Chalmers something like an overactive executive officer, doing Boone’s unspoken bidding. That could not be comfortable.
They were old friends, Maya had been told when she asked. But she saw few signs of it herself, even watching closely. They seldom talked to each other in public, and did not seem to visit in private. Thus when they were together she watched them more closely than ever, without ever consciously considering why; the natural logic of the situation just seemed to demand it. If they had been back at Glavkosmos, it would have made strategic sense to drive a wedge between them; but she didn’t think of it that way here. There was a lot that Maya didn’t think about consciously.
She watched, though. And one morning Janet Blyleven wore her video glasses into D hall for breakfast. She was a principal reporter for American television, and often she wove her way through the ship wearing her vidglasses, looking around and talking the commentary, collecting stories and transmitting them back home where they would be, as Arkady put it, “predigested and vomited back into that baby bird consensus.”
It was nothing new, of course. Media attention was a familiar part of every astronaut’s life, and during the selection process they had been more scrutinized than ever. Now, however, they were the raw material for programs magnitudes more popular than any space program had been before. Millions watched them as the ultimate soap opera, and this bothered some of them. So when Janet settled at the end of the table wearing those stylish spectacles with the optical fibers in the frame, there were a few groans. And at the other end of the table Ann Clayborne and Sax Russell were arguing, oblivious to any of them.
“It’ll take years to find out what we have there, Sax. Decades. There’s as much land on Mars as on Earth, with a unique geology and chemistry. The land has to be thoroughly studied before we can start changing it.”
“We’ll change it just by landing.” Russell brushed aside Ann’s objections as if they were spiderwebs on his face. “Deciding to go to Mars is like the first phrase of a sentence, and the whole sentence says—”
“Veni, vidi, vinci.”
Russell shrugged. “If you want to put it that way.”
“You’re the weenie, Sax,” Ann said, lip curled with irritation. She was a broad-shouldered woman with wild brown hair, a geologist with strong views, difficult in argument. “Look, Mars is its own place. You can play your climate-shifting games back on Earth if you want, they need the help. Or try it on Venus. But you can’t just wipe out a three billion year-old planetary surface.”
Russell rubbed away more spiderwebs. “It’s dead,” he said simply. “Besides, it’s not really our decision. It’ll be taken out of our hands.”
“None of these decisions will be taken out of our hands,” Arkady put in sharply.
Janet looked from speaker to speaker, taking it all in. Ann was getting agitated, raising her voice. Maya glanced around, and saw that Frank didn’t like the situation. But if he interrupted it he would give away to the millions the fact that he didn’t want the colonists arguing in front of them. Instead he looked across the table and caught Boone’s gaze. There was an exchange of expressions between the two so quick it made Maya blink.
Boone said, “When I was there before, I got the impression it was already Earthlike.”
“Except 200° Kelvin,” Russell said.
“Sure, but it looked like the Mojave, or the Dry Valleys.
The first time I looked around on Mars I found myself keeping an eye out for one of those mummified seals we saw in the Dry Valleys.”
And so on. Janet turned to him; and Ann, looking disgusted, picked up her coffee and left.
Afterward Maya concentrated, trying to recall the looks Boone and Chalmers had exchanged. They had been like something from a code, or the private languages invented by identical twins.
The weeks passed, and the days each began with a leisurely breakfast. Mid-mornings were far busier. Everyone had a schedule, although some were fuller than others. Frank’s was packed, which was the way he liked it, a maniacal blur of activity. But the necessary work was not really all that great: they had to keep themselves alive and in shape, and keep the ship running, and keep preparing for Mars. Ship maintenance ranged from the intricacy of programming or repairs to the simplicity of moving supplies out of storage, or taking trash to the recyclers. The biosphere team spent the bulk of its time on the farm, which occupied large parts of Toruses C, E, and F; and everyone aboard had farm chores. Most enjoyed this work, and some even returned in their free hours. Everyone was on doctors’ orders to spend three hours a day on treadmills, escalators, running wheels, or using weight machines. These hours were enjoyed or endured or despised, depending on temperament; but even those who claimed to despise them finished their exercises in noticeably (even measurably) better moods. “Beta endorphins are the best drug,” Michel Duval would say.
“Which is lucky, since we don’t have any others,” Arkady would reply.
“Oh, there’s caffeine …”
“Puts me to sleep.”
“Alcohol …”
“Gives me a headache.”
“Procaine, darvon, morphine—”
“Morphine?”
“In the medical supplies. Not for general use.”
Arkady smiled. “Maybe I’d better get sick.”
The engineers, including Maya, spent many mornings in training simulations. These took place on the back-up bridge in Torus B, which had the latest in image synthesizers; the simulations were so sophisticated that there was little visible difference between them and the act itself. This did not necessarily make them interesting: the standard orbital insertion approach, simulated weekly, was dubbed “The Mantra Run,” and became quite a bore to every conceivable flight crew.
But sometimes even boredom was preferable to the alternatives; Arkady was their training specialist, and he had a perverse talent for designing problem runs so hard that they often “killed” everybody. These runs were strangely unpleasant experiences, and did not make Arkady popular among his victims. He mixed problem runs with Mantra Runs randomly, but more and more often they were problem runs; they would “approach Mars” and red lights would flash, sometimes with sirens, and they were in trouble again. Once they struck a planetesimal weighing approximately fifteen grams, leaving a large flaw in the heat shield. Sax Russell had calculated that their chances of hitting anything larger than a gram were about one in every seven thousand years of travel, but nevertheless there they were, emergency!, adrenalin pouring through them even as they decided the very idea of it, rushing up to the hub and into EVA suits, going out to fill the pothole before they hit the Martian atmosphere and burned to a crisp; and halfway there, Arkady’s voice came over their intercoms: “Not fast enough! All of us are dead.”
But that was a simple one. Others … The ship, for instance, was guided by a fly-by-wire system, meaning that the pilots fed instructions to flight computers which translated them into the actual thrusts needed to achieve the desired result. This was how it had to be, because when approaching a gravitational mass like Mars at their speed, one simply could not feel or intuit what burns would achieve the desired effects. So none of them were flyers in the sense of a pilot flying a plane. Nevertheless, Arkady frequently blew the entire massively redundant system just as they were reaching a critical moment (which failure, Russell said, had about a one in ten billion chance of happening) and they had to take over and command all the rockets mechanically, watching the monitors and an orange-on-black visual image of Mars bearing down on them, and they could either go long and skip off into deep space and die a lingering death, or go short and crash into the planet and die instantly; and if the latter, they got to watch it right down to the simulated hundred and twenty klicks per second final smash.
Or it might be a mechanical failure: main rockets, stabilizing rockets, computer hardware or software, heat shield deployment; all of them had to work perfectly during the approach. And failures of these systems were the most likely of all – in the range, Sax said (though others contested his risk assessment methods), of one in every ten thousand approaches. So they would do it again and red lights would flash, and they would groan, and beg for a Mantra Run even as they partly welcomed the new challenge. When they managed to survive a mechanical failure, they were tremendously pleased; it could be the high point of a week. Once John Boone successfully aerobraked by hand, with a single main rocket functioning, hitting the safe millisecond of arc at the only possible speed. No one could believe it. “Blind luck,” Boone said, grinning widely as the deed was talked about at dinner.
Most of Arkady’s problem runs ended in failure, however, meaning death for all. Simulated or not, it was hard not to be sobered by these experiences, and after that, irritated with Arkady for inventing them. One time they repaired every monitor in the bridge just in time to see the screens register a hit by a small asteroid, which sheared through the hub and killed them all. Another time Arkady, as part of the navigation team, made an “error” and instructed the computers to increase the ship’s spin rather than decrease it. “Pinned to the floor by six gs!” he cried in mock horror, and they had to crawl on the floor for half an hour, pretending to rectify the error while weighing half a ton each. When they succeeded, Arkady leaped off the floor and began pushing them away from the control monitor. “What the hell are you doing?” Maya yelled.
“He’s gone crazy,” Janet said.
“He’s simulated going crazy,” Nadia corrected her. “We have to figure out—” doing an end run around Arkady “— how to deal with someone on the bridge going insane!”
Which no doubt was true. But they could see the whites of Arkady’s eyes all the way around, and there wasn’t a trace of recognition in him as he silently assaulted them; it took all five of them to restrain him, and Janet and Phyllis Boyle were hurt by his sharp elbows.
“Well?” he said at dinner afterward, grinning lopsidedly, as he was growing a fat lip. “What if it happens? We’re under pressure up here, and the approach will be worst of all. What if someone cracks?” He turned to Russell and the grin grew wider. “What are the chances of that, eh?” And he began to sing a Jamaican song, in a Slavic Caribbean accent: “'Pressure drop, oh pressure drop, oh-o, pressure going to drop on you-oo-oo!'”
So they kept trying, handling the problem runs as seriously as they could, even the attack by Martian natives or the decoupling of Torus H caused by “explosive bolts installed by mistake when the ship was built,” or the last minute veering of Phobos out of its orbit. Dealing with the more implausible scenarios sometimes took on a kind of surreal black humor, and Arkady replayed some of his videotapes as after-dinner entertainment, which sometimes got people launched into the air with laughter.
But the plausible problem runs … They kept on coming, morning after morning. And despite the solutions, despite the protocols for finding solutions, there was that sight, time after time: the red planet rushing at them at an unimaginable forty thousand kilometers an hour, until it filled the screen and the screen went white, and small black letters appeared on it: Collision.
They were traveling to Mars in a Type II Hohmann Ellipse, a slow but efficient course, chosen from among other alternatives mainly because the two planets were in the correct position for it when the ship was finally ready, with Mars about 45° ahead of Earth in the plane of the ecliptic. During the voyage they would travel just over halfway around the Sun, making their rendezvous with Mars some three hundred days later. Their womb time, as Hiroko called it.
The psychologists back home had judged it worthwhile to alter things from time to time, to suggest the passing of the seasons on the Ares. Length of days and nights, weather, and ambient colors were shifted to accomplish this. Some had maintained their landfall should be a harvest, others that it should be a new spring; after a short debate it had been decided by vote of the voyagers themselves to begin with early spring, so that they would travel through a summer rather than a winter; and as they approached their goal, the ship’s colors would turn to the autumn tones of Mars itself, rather than to the light greens and blossom pastels they had left so far behind.
So in those first months, as they finished their morning’s business, leaving the farm or the bridge, or staggering out of Arkady’s merrily sadistic simulations, they walked into springtime. Walls were hung with pale green panels, or mural-sized photos of azaleas, and jacarandas and ornamental cherries. The barley and mustard in the big farm rooms glowed vivid yellow with new blooms, and the forest biome and the ship’s seven park rooms had been stocked with trees and shrubs in the spring of their cycles. Maya loved these colorful spring blossoms, and after her mornings’ work she fulfilled part of her exercise regimen by taking a walk in the forest biome, which had a hilly floor, and was so thick with trees one could not see from one end of the chamber to the other. Here she often met Frank Chalmers of all people, taking one of his short breaks. He said he liked the spring foliage, though he never seemed to look at it. They walked together, and talked or not as the case might be. If they did talk, it was never about anything important; Frank didn’t care to discuss their work as leaders of the expedition. Maya found this peculiar, though she didn’t say so. But they did not have exactly the same jobs, which might account for his reluctance. Maya’s position was fairly informal and non-hierarchical; cosmonauts among themselves had always been relatively egalitarian, this had been the tradition since the days of Korolyov. The American program had a more military tradition, indicated even in titles: while Maya was merely Russian Contingent Co-ordinator, Frank was Captain Chalmers, and supposedly in the strong sense of the old sailing navies.
Whether this authority made it more or less difficult for him, he didn’t say. Sometimes he discussed the biome, or small technical problems, or news from home; more often he just seemed to want to walk with her. So – silent walks, up and down on narrow trails, through dense thickets of pine and aspen and birch. And always that presumption of closeness, as if they were old friends, or as if he were, very shyly (or subtly), courting her.
Thinking about that one day, it occurred to Maya that starting the Ares in springtime might have created a problem. Here they were in their mesocosm, sailing through spring, and everything was fertile and blooming, profligate and green, the air perfumed with flowers and windy, the days getting longer and warmer, and everyone in shirts and shorts, a hundred healthy animals, in close quarters, eating, exercising, showering, sleeping. Of course there had to be sex.
Well, it was nothing new. Maya herself had had some fantastic sex in space, most significantly during her second stint on Novy Mir, when she and Georgi and Yeli and Irina had tried every weightless variant imaginable, which was a great many indeed. But now it was different. They were older, they were stuck with each other for good: “Everything is different in a closed system,” as Hiroko often said in other contexts. The idea that they should stay on a fraternal basis was big at NASA: out of the 1,348 pages of the tome NASA had compiled called Human Relations In Transit To Mars, only a single page was devoted to the subject of sex; and that page advised against it. They were, the tome suggested, something like a tribe, with a sensible taboo against intra-tribal mating. The Russians laughed hilariously at this. Americans were such prudes, really. “We are not a tribe,” Arkady said.’ “We are the world.”
And it was spring. And there were the married couples aboard, some of whom were pretty demonstrative; and there was the swimming pool in Torus E, and the sauna and whirlpool bath. Bathing suits were used in mixed company, this because of the Americans again, but bathing suits were nothing. Naturally it began to happen. She heard from Nadia and Ivana that the bubble dome was being used for assignations in the quiet hours of the night; many of the cosmonauts and astronauts turned out to be fond of weightlessness. And the many nooks in the parks and the forest biome were serving as hideaways for those with less weightless experience; the parks had been designed to give people the sense that they could get away. And every person had a private soundproofed room of their own. With all that, if a couple wanted to begin a relationship without becoming an item in the gossip mill, it was possible to be very discreet.
Maya was sure there was more going on than any one person could know.
She could feel it. No doubt others did as well. Quiet conversations between couples; changes in dining room partners; quick glances, small smiles; hands touching shoulders or elbows in passing; oh yes, things were happening. It made for a kind of tension in the air, a tension that was only partly pleasant. Antarctic fears came back into play; and besides, there was only a small number of potential partners, which tended to give things a musical chairs kind of feeling.
And for Maya there were additional problems. She was even more wary than usual of Russian men, because in this case it would mean sleeping with the boss; she was suspicious of that, knowing how it had felt when she had done it herself. Besides, none of them … well, she was attracted to Arkady, but she did not like him; and he seemed uninterested. Yeli she knew from before, he was just a friend; Dmitri she didn’t care for; Vlad was older, Yuri not her type, Alex a follower of Arkady’s … on and on like that.
And as for the Americans, or the internationals; well, that was a different kind of problem. Cross cultures, who knew? So … she kept to herself. But she thought about it. And occasionally, while waking up in the morning, or finishing a workout, she floated on a wave of desire that left her washed up on the shore of bed or shower, feeling alone.
Thus late one morning, after a particularly harrowing problem run, which they had almost solved and then failed to solve, she ran into Frank Chalmers in the forest biome and returned his hello, and they walked for about ten meters into the woods, and stopped. She was in shorts and tank-top, barefoot, sweaty and flushed from the crazed simulation. He was in shorts and a T-shirt, barefoot, sweaty and dusty from the farm. Suddenly he laughed his sharp laugh, and reached out to touch her upper arm with two fingertips. “You’re looking happy today.” With that darting smile.
The leaders of the two halves of the expedition. Equals. She lifted her hand to touch his, and that was all it took.
They left the trail and ducked into a tight thicket of pine. They stopped to kiss, and it had been long enough since the last time that it felt strange to her. Tripping over a root Frank laughed under his breath, that quick secretive laugh which gave Maya a shiver, almost of fear. They sat on pine needles, rolled together like students necking in the woods. She laughed; she had always liked the quick approach, the way she could just knock a man down when she wanted to.
And so they made love. For a time passion took her away. Afterwards she relaxed, enjoying the wash of afterglow. But then it got a bit awkward, somehow; she didn’t know what to say. There was something hidden still about him, as if he were hiding even when making love. And even worse, what she could sense behind his reserve was some kind of triumph, as if he had won something and she had lost. That Puritan streak in Americans, that sense that sex was wrong and something that men had to trick women into. She had closed up a little herself, annoyed at that hidden smirk on his face. Win and lose, what children.
And yet they were co-mayors, so to speak. So if it was put on a zero sum basis …
Well, they talked for a while in a jovial enough way, and even made love again before they left. But it wasn’t quite the same as the first time, she found herself distracted. So much in sex was beyond rational analysis. Maya always felt things about her partners that she could not analyze or even express; but she always either liked what she felt or didn’t, there was no doubt about that. And looking at Frank Chalmers’s face after the first time, she had been sure that something wasn’t right. It made her uneasy.
But she was amiable, affectionate; it would not do to be put off at such a moment, no one would forgive that. They got up and dressed and went back into Torus D, and ate dinner at the same table with some others, and that was when it made perfect sense to become more distant. But then in the days after their encounter, she was surprised and displeased to find herself putting him off a little bit, making excuses to avoid being alone with him. It was awkward, not what she had wanted at all. She would have preferred not to feel the way she did, and once or twice after that they went off alone again, and when he started things she made love with him again, wanting it to work, feeling that she must have made a mistake or been in a bad mood somehow. But it was always the same, there was always that little smirk of triumph, that I-got-you that she disliked so much, that moralistic Puritan double-standard dirtiness.
And so she avoided him even more, to keep from getting into the start situation; and quickly enough he caught the drift. One afternoon he asked her to go for a walk in the biome and she declined, claiming fatigue; and a staccato look of surprise passed over his face, and then it had closed up like a mask. She felt badly, because she couldn’t even explain it to herself.
To try to make up for such an unreasonable withdrawal, she was friendly and forthright with him after that, as long as it was a safe situation. And once or twice she suggested, indirectly, that for her their encounters had been only a matter of sealing a friendship, something she had done with others as well. All this had to be conveyed between words, however, and it was possible he misunderstood; it was hard to say. After that first jolt of comprehension, he only seemed puzzled. Once, when she left a group just before it broke up, she had seen him give her a sharp glance; after that, only distance and reserve. But he had never been really upset, and he never pressed the issue, or came to her to talk about it. But that was part of the problem, wasn’t it? He didn’t seem to want to talk to her about that kind of thing.
Well, perhaps he had affairs going with other women, with some of the Americans, it was hard to say. He really did keep to himself. But it was … awkward.
Maya resolved to abolish the knockover seduction, no matter the thrill she got from it. Hiroko was right; everything was different in a closed system. It was too bad for Frank (if he did care), because he had served as her education in this regard. In the end she resolved to make it up to him, by being a good friend. She worked so hard at doing this that once, almost a month later, she miscalculated and went a little too far, to the point where he thought she was seducing him again. They had been part of a group, up late talking, and she had sat next to him, and afterwards he had clearly gotten the wrong impression, and walked with her around Torus D to the bathrooms, talking in the charming and affable way he had at this stage of things. Maya was vexed with herself; she didn’t want to seem completely fickle, although at this point either way she went it would probably look that way. So she went along with him, just because it was easier, and because there was a part of her that wanted to make love. And so she did, upset with herself and resolved that this should be the last time, a sort of final gift that would hopefully make the whole incident a good memory for him. She found herself becoming more passionate than ever before, she really wanted to please him. And then, just before orgasm, she looked up at his face, and it was like looking in the windows of an empty house.
That was the last time.
Δ V. V for velocity, delta for change. In space, this is the measure of the change in velocity required to get from one place to another – thus, a measure of the energy required to do it.
Everything is moving already. But to get something from the (moving) surface of the Earth into orbit around it, requires a minimum Δ v of ten kilometers per second; to leave Earth’s orbit and fly to Mars requires a minimum Δv of 3.6 kilometers per second; and to orbit Mars and land on it requires a Δv of about one kilometer per second. The hardest part is leaving Earth behind, for that is by far the deepest gravity well involved. Climbing up that steep curve of spacetime takes tremendous force, shifting the direction of an enormous inertia.
History too has an inertia. In the four dimensions of spacetime, particles (or events) have directionality; mathematicians, trying to show this, draw what they call “world lines” on graphs. In human affairs, individual world lines form a thick tangle, curling out of the darkness of prehistory and stretching through time: a cable the size of Earth itself, spiraling round the sun on a long curved course. That cable of tangled world lines is history. Seeing where it has been, it is clear where it is going – it is a matter of simple extrapolation. For what kind of Δ v would it take to escape history, to escape an inertia that powerful, and carve a new course?
The hardest part is leaving Earth behind.
The form of the Ares gave a structure to reality; the vacuum between Earth and Mars began to seem to Maya like a long series of cylinders, bent up at their joints at 45° angles. There was a runner’s course, a kind of steeplechase, around Torus C, and at each joint she slowed down in her run and tensed her legs for the increased pressure of the two 22.5° bends, and suddenly she could see up the length of the next cylinder. It was beginning to seem a rather narrow world.
Perhaps in compensation, the people inside began to get somehow larger. The process of shedding their Antarctic masks continued, and every time someone displayed some new and hitherto unknown characteristic, it made all who noticed it feel that much freer; and this feeling caused more hidden traits to be revealed. One Sunday morning the Christians aboard, numbering a dozen or so, celebrated Easter in the bubble dome. It was April back home, though the Ares’ season was midsummer. After their service they came down to the D dining hall for brunch. Maya, Frank, John, Arkady, and Sax were at a table, drinking cups of coffee and tea. The conversations among them and with other tables were densely interwoven, and at first only Maya and Frank heard what John was saying to Phyllis Boyle, the geologist who had conducted the Easter service.
