The Long Mars (18 page)

Suddenly there was a figure before him.

Frank staggered, shocked. A human, a spacesuited figure, with an outer garment coated in frost, had just appeared out of nowhere. And a stentorian voice sounded in Frank’s headset, bawling out a song. Frank didn’t recognize the lyrics, but he knew the tune. ‘That’s the Russian national anthem. What the—’

‘Too late to make claim, Yankee! Need bigger flag than that!’

Frank stood straight. ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘You’re late, Viktor,’ Willis Linsay called.

The Russian saluted the MEM. ‘Nice to see you too, Willis. You going to introduce this fellow here? Hey – what your name, Frank? You want I teach you chorus? Try in English.
Be glorious, our free Fatherland, age-old union of fraternal peoples
. . . Hey, Willis!’ He patted a plastic box at his waist. ‘Stepper box works on Mars, by the way.’

‘I can see that.’

‘
Ancestor-given wisdom of the people! Be glorious, our country! We are proud of you!
. . .’

17

T
HE CREW OF THE
Galileo
, with a little help from Viktor Ivanov, their unexpected welcome party – unexpected to Sally and Frank Wood anyhow – spent twenty-four hours closing down the MEM lander, and unpacking its cargo, which included the prefabricated components of two aircraft. Gliders they would be, and light, spindly affairs, as Sally could tell as soon as the parts were unpacked and laid out on fine sheets over the dusty ground. It was in these fragile craft that they would be exploring the Long Mars, she learned from her father. One was to be called
Woden
, the other
Thor
.

It took Sally a few hours to get used to the Martian conditions. In the thin air her pressure suit was doing its best to inflate like a balloon, but there were joints at the elbows and knees and ankles that made moving around relatively easy. It was going to get tougher yet on the stepwise Marses, where the air would be vastly thinner than this. In the lower gravity, one-third of Earth, she could lift massive objects, but once such loads were in motion they tended to keep moving, so she needed to take care. Walking was tricky, and running more so, with a tendency to lift off the ground with every step. Experimenting, she found in fact that running in a gentle jog was easier than walking. But to run properly she needed to keep her body low down so that her feet could push back at the Martian ground, maximizing traction.

Frank gently mocked her efforts. ‘We’ll have you in astronaut training yet.’

Sally just ignored him, head down, experimenting, concentrating. Being able to run away was a basic survival skill; therefore she intended to master running on Mars.

While Willis and Frank got busy assembling the gliders, Sally got to know their unexpected visitor. ‘You liked surprise? You land on empty Mars. God bless America. Whoosh! Big fat Russian here first. Haw! Haw!’

Viktor invited Sally to come and visit his own base, meet his companions there. ‘
Marsograd
. Willis calls it Marsograd. Not its name, you not pronounce real name. Not far from here, couple hundred miles. On flank of Arsia Mons, one of the big Tharsis volcanoes. We monitor volcanoes, big job, try to understand . . . Come visit.’

Why the hell not? Let Willis and Frank play with their toy aeroplanes.

Viktor’s vehicle, which he’d parked in a deep young crater out of sight of the MEM, was a big, tough-looking truck on fat tyres, with a cabin that was a bubble of scarred Perspex. To Sally, it was like some glorified tractor. Inside, the cabin smelled strongly of oil and greasy Russian males, and the air cycling system rattled alarmingly. But it was roomy and warm, and the bucket seats were comfortable enough as the truck rolled away.

Heading roughly north-east they bounced over a rock-strewn landscape, following tracks that the truck had presumably laid down itself. The sky, cloudless today, her second day on Mars, was blue except at the horizon, where it faded to a more Martian dusty red-brown. And there was life here, clearly visible: those things like cacti, round and hard, what looked like trees, gnarled and folded over with small, spiky leaves – even what looked like reeds, or maybe big grass blades, each with one indented side facing the sun. She imagined the blades tracking the sun as it wheeled across the sky during the Martian day.

‘Like a story book,’ she said.

‘Hmm?’

‘It’s like the way they imagined Mars to be, oh, more than a century ago. Austere but Earth-like, with tough life forms. Like in old science fiction stories. Not the sun-blasted airless desert that we actually found, when the space probes got there.’

Viktor grunted. ‘Most Marses like
our
Mars. You see. This the exception. Special circumstance.’ He seemed proud of his vehicle. He patted the heavy steering wheel. ‘Willis calls this
Marsokhod
. Not its name, you not pronounce. Runs on methane fuel from our wet-chemistry factories. You see.’

‘I never even knew the Russians were exploring the Gap.’

He grinned. He was about forty; his face was leathery, crumpled, sweat-crusted after hours behind a facemask, and his black greasy hair was a tangle. ‘GapSpace, cowboy outfit in England. Don’t know about Russians. Not interested to look. Of course Russians are here. We have base on world on
other
side of Gap, on Baltic coast, high latitude. Called Star City. Like university campus and manufacturing plant and military base, all in one. Also Chinese here, though not so much. Mostly don’t know about each other. How would we know? Big empty Earths. No spy satellites. What difference, if one here or all? Gap is door to big universe. Willis know.’

‘He would.’ Which was presumably how he had known about the true colour of the Martian sky, for instance. ‘So the Russians were first here, on this Gap Mars?’

‘Of course! Our flags, our anthems. But we help Willis. Why not? Humans together, few of us on big cold world. Now he will explore Long Mars. What he finds, he share.’

Maybe, she thought. ‘Listen, Viktor. When we first arrived, you said something about a Stepper working. What Stepper?’

He grinned again. ‘Daddy didn’t tell you? In back.’ He nodded his head at a pile of junk behind the seats.

She twisted and rummaged, bouncing uncomfortably as the truck rode low-gravity high over big boulders, until she found the plastic box that had been strapped to Viktor’s side when he’d first shown up. It opened easily after she popped a couple of catches. Inside was a tangle of wiring and electronic components that she recognized as the circuitry of a Stepper, the artificial aid that enabled people to step – most people anyhow, even if they didn’t have the natural ability shared by such as herself and Joshua. This was basically her father’s invention. The only difference from a thousand such boxes she’d seen before, from tangles lashed up by teenagers to sleek bulletproof models issued to cops and military, was that there was no potato in here, the earthy, almost comical ingredient that powered the box. Instead there was a grey-green puffball. ‘What’s this?’

‘Martian cactus. Native. My colleague Alexei Krilov gives fancy Latin names. Use here instead of potato. Of course we grow potatoes too. Can’t make vodka with a cactus. You see.’

It took only a few hours to reach Marsograd.

For the last hour or so the land rose steadily; they were entering Tharsis, province of giant volcanoes, including Olympus Mons. But when Viktor pointed north-west all Sally could see of Arsia Mons, actually one of the lesser volcanoes, was rising land, a kind of bulging horizon. The Tharsis volcanoes, on this Mars as on the Mars of the Datum, were so big that you couldn’t even see them from the ground.

The Russian base was centred on a cluster of yellowing plastic domes, evidently prefabricated. But huddled around these were structures that looked oddly like tepees, struts of what appeared to be the native ‘wood’ draped with leather of some kind.
Animal
skins? All these buildings were sealed up with ageing polythene sheets, and connected by piping to creaky-looking air circulation and scrubbing plants. Away from the central habitation, big solar cell arrays sprawled across the rocky ground.

Viktor rolled the tractor up to a plastic tube that turned out to be a crude kind of airlock, good enough on this peculiarly benign Mars. He led her through the tube and into a dome. Unzipping their surface suits as they walked, they came to what was evidently a galley, smelling strongly of coffee and alcohol, overlying an earthy stink of body odour and sewage. On a wall-mounted TV an ice hockey game was playing: Russia against Canada.

Viktor said mournfully, ‘TV show. Recorded, stepped across two million worlds and transmitted to us from Gap station. Now no more ice hockey.’

‘Because there’s no more Russia after Yellowstone?’

‘Exactly. We watch same games over and over. Sometimes drunk enough to forget result and bet on scores . . .’

Two more men came bustling in, evidently drawn by the sound of their voices. One was like Viktor, big, dark, maybe fifty; he wore a cosmonaut-type blue jumpsuit with a name tag lettered in Cyrillic and Latin: DJANIBEKOV, S. Viktor introduced him as Sergei. The other, slimmer, blond, maybe under forty – KRILOV, A. – was Alexei, and he wore a grubby white lab coat. These were three men without women, and they stared at her. But Sally met their gazes, Viktor’s too, with a certain look of her own. She had been travelling alone in the Long Earth since she had been a teenager, and was a veteran of such encounters. These three seemed harmless enough.

Once that tricky moment was over, they were fine. Indeed, they fussed over her, like kids eager to please. Sergei’s English was a lot worse than Viktor’s, Alexei’s a lot better. Of course even Sergei’s English was a hell of a lot better than Sally’s Russian, which was non-existent.

They showed her what they called their ‘guest room’, which was one of the tepee-like shacks. She explored the little space, curious. On the floor was a kind of rug made of thick brown-white wool. The tepee’s covering skin felt like ordinary leather, crudely treated, but the Martian wood of the structural frame was so hard and fine-grained it might have been a plastic imitation: this was some adaptation to enhance moisture retention, she imagined.

She returned to the galley. Sergei, gallant but almost wordless, offered her a big baggy sweater evidently knitted of the same wool as the rug. Although it smelled strongly of whoever wore it regularly, she pulled it on; the sweater was cosy in a base that never quite excluded the Martian chill. They fed her a late lunch, of cabbage and beets and even a couple of tiny, wizened apples, which she imagined were a treasure and a great honour to receive. They offered vodka, which she refused, and coffee, or some imitation of coffee, much-stewed, which she accepted.

Before the light faded Alexei insisted on showing her around the rest of the compound. ‘I am the station biologist,’ he said with some pride. ‘Also the nearest we have to a medic, among other things. We must all play multiple roles, in a team as small as this . . .’

There were clear plastic tunnels connecting the domes, so you could get around the base without exposure to the Martian climate, but there were simple self-sealing airlocks that would close up in the event of a pressure breach. Because the whole base was linked up in this way she never escaped the lingering stink of body odour, but at least it was more diluted the further she got from the central quarters. Alexei insisted that Sally carry her oxygen mask loose around her neck at all times, in case of a wall breach. Sally had survived decades alone in the Long Earth; she needed no persuading about such precautions.

Some of the domes were industrial, where compact, crude-looking machinery cracked the Martian atmosphere and water to produce breathable air and fuels such as methane and hydrogen, or processed the rusty dirt to produce iron. Alexei said they were also working on ‘Zubrin kits’, which he said were adapted to generate methane and oxygen in the sparser conditions of more typical versions of Mars, like the Mars of Datum Earth. ‘You must import hydrogen, to such impoverished Marses. But a ton of hydrogen processed with Martian air will give you sixteen tons of methane and oxygen – a good return, you see.’

They walked through the farm domes, which sheltered laboriously tilled fields of potatoes and yams and green beans. The work these Russians had put in was heartbreakingly clear from the quality of the soil they’d managed to create from Martian dirt. ‘Such a challenge, the native dirt is just rusty grit coated with sulphates and perchlorates . . .’ They’d even imported earthworms. But a spindly, yellowed crop was their only reward so far.

Beyond the domes, open to the Martian elements, was a small botanical garden Alexei had established, and he proudly showed Sally his collection of native stock. The cacti were shrivelled and tough-looking, and the trees he’d planted, from seeds collected from adult specimens on the slopes of Arsia Mons, were hardly grown.

He took particular pride in showing her a clump of plants a few feet tall, a kind of ice-cream swirl of yellowish leaves on a base of green leaves. ‘What do you make of this?’

She shrugged. ‘Ugly. But that green looks more Earthlike than Martian.’

‘So it is. It’s a
Rheum nobile
, a noble rhubarb – or rather a genetically tweaked version. Grows in the Himalayas. Those yellow leaves wrap around a seed-bearing stem within. It’s adapted for altitude, you see, for thin air. The yellow column is a kind of natural greenhouse.’

‘Wow. And here it is growing on Mars.’

He shrugged. ‘One of a suite of plants from Earth that could almost make it on Mars, on this Mars anyhow. And you can eat the stems, yum yum.’

His final surprise, kept in a dome to themselves, was a small herd of alpacas: awkward-looking beasts, imported as embryos from the mountains of South America, scraping at the scrubby grass that grew at their feet. They peered out at the humans, their woolly faces curious and oddly endearing.

‘Ah,’ Sally said. ‘So that’s where you get the wool. And the leather for the tepees.’