Meridien K - Chapter 22: The Neighborhood

"Looks like some of them forgot that we all volunteered for this," said Ben.

             

Only Ben and I stood on the bluffs overlooking the valley, the runway and the Settlement. A year on the twice-baked surface and the visual hadn't changed much. There wasn't the usual vista of the punctured strip and scattered evidence of M1's end-over-crooked-end roll, its wreckage still cooking under the Martian sun; instead of that spread, there was an angular ship, just as big as M1, "Mars-2" or "M2" painted on every surface, viewable from every angle. Whole, intact, uncompromised, parked on our runway.

             

"All we need is some ticker tape," said Ben, and it was one of the few times I wholly agreed. We sort of snickered and he went on, "And streamers and a parade with firetrucks and the local grade-school girls' softball team tossing candy from the back and…" scratching his rough chin and snapping into a different mode and, "If it weren't for their two-year contracts, I bet them candy-asses would hop on that ship and turn around in a sec."

             

"Yeah," I said.

             

Fresh faces got off the craft. For whatever reason, the pod survivors, massed below the fold-out ladder leading to the red soil, were clapping. The emerging astronauts looked around like they had landed in a leper colony, the difference magnified by their bulky second-gen surface suits in contrast to the sunburnt, dirty faces of those who stood in plain clothes on that alien planet. The astronauts all looked the same in uniform; as alien as sci-fi explorers.

             

"So that's it," Ben said, forecasting, then outlining it all with, no doubt deliberate, the middle finger on his right hand. "Build some permanent dorms, get the teams working, then before you know it there'll be strip malls, suburban tracts of identical housing, daycares, zoos, goddamn amusement parks, public fountains, billboards, ice cream parlors, chain burger joints, nail salons, stupid fancy bars and dive bars when you... when you…" and he was suddenly out of breath for a moment, a strong cough and, "when all you want is a fuckin' drink. All that clutter…" and tailing off.

             

Ben turned to leave.

             

"I suppose they'll be looking for us. Will want to say hello," I said.

             

"Fuck it," said Ben. "Rest of the slugs will say we're the wild men of the mountains, not worth talking to. Besides, I'll get Intihar to scam the supplies we need. You get Elliott to make contact with the science team and see if they've got the salt. Otherwise, we're as good as we've ever been. And I like living hard. Fuck air mattresses and that shit. I came here to hack it. Lived easy enough for all my life."

             

We went back down the ridge, down the half-shoveled, half-cleared path to our rogue camp. We came across a few dumbbots we had displaced, who all seemed very confused with why they were trying to build a runway down an incline, but they dutifully crunched and cleared rock as their crude reprogramming dictated.

             

Down on the rock shelf we entered our hidey hole, a pieced-together hut of M1 scraps, tarps, tent material and old clothes. Inside, the temperature immediately swelled fifteen degrees F. Arranged around were the loose cluster of "rooms," each the size of a large refrigerator box. We had our kitchen, our conference room with two lawn chairs, and in the central space my plywood desk and Ben's sharp-edged metal desk. We kicked aside our sleeping bags, which were thrown down every night in whatever part of the shelter was clearest. A year in the place, a year to fix it up and anchor it into the ground, and I still had to wipe away a fresh coat of red-brown dirt-dust off my workbooks every time I came inside.

             

And I didn't mind.

             

I shoved my scope into its changing bag. Contour fixes, eyeballs on my fingertips and real eyes shut. I took out the front glass and stripped the telescope and cleaned it, mindful of the all-pervasive grit in the bag. I figured we could scour M2 for better parts but no use junking something that wasn't broke, no matter how much tape I wound around the whole thing. I had my own notes on the desk proper, endless coordinates scribbled in an all-but-unreadable hand on coffee-stained gridpaper. Directly behind me, close enough that our chairs always bumped, Ben took out his star charts. One was the view from the terrestrial sky, drawn from memory, and the other sketched from clear nights on Red. He aligned his tracing-paper copies, marked a few points of interest in grease pencil, Hmm'd and rubbed his chin, circled large blank swaths far from the colored ribbons of galaxies and nebulae, looking for something unseen.

             

Trying to play it innocent and I said, "If M2 didn't forget our gear, we could set up something in the valley and run full spectrum. Link up a few ground sats. I don't care how many mirrors I have to polish. But, uh, then we could maybe look for--"

             

"Don't fucking say it."

             

"What?"

            

"Gravitational you-know-what."

             

"Lensing?"

             

"Fuck you, John. If I can't see it with my eyes, it's not worth it. Too many lightyears anyhow. And nothing is near terrestrial mass if we have to see a star's fucking light bend from a Jovian-sized turd. Jesus. How the fuck did you get published with this tripe?"

             

Ben wasn't deliberately hostile about it and I said nothing. After I finished reassembly we took our gear and loaded it in the Rover. Ben, as always, drove. We went up the hillside, zigzagging along the narrow switchbacks into the near mountains, only a mile or two up, just above the dustline. Still getting used to the bumps that lifted me out of my seat, the two-wheeled moments when the Rover caught a loose edge and near went over but plenty of time to sit down hard on the opposite edge of the vehicle and get it righted and straight. Some logic that if the crash couldn't kill us, we sure as shit weren't going to fall off a mountain.

             

Up on a plateau we set up. Both of us assembled our scopes on quadpods and screwed on the gears and set up the interface displayed on a flatscreen board off M1's main terminal, rigged with an old CPU our part-time saboteur Intihar ripped off an M1 cooling monitor. The late Sorkin managed to install our software and get a fix on our exact point in the physical, known universe. Elliott translated all the code from Cyrillic nonsense to English. The whole rogue idea we formulated involved hijacking the Kennedy probe and turning it into a deepspace imager, but it was only one satellite, it worked only within line-of-sight comms, it wasn't in synchronous orbit, was running long parabolas on the near side, far side, whatever, and… well… I ignored that stuff and pointed my glass down into the valley and the Settlement.

             

Sure enough, forklifts were rolling down an extended ramp off M2, delivering giant pallets of whatever. Right by the ship were bags of cement and piles of timber. That had been M1's plan all along but it didn't seem right. Everything suddenly backward. Like the shipwreck was supposed to happen the whole time and this was the real show.

             

"What's going on down there?"

            

 "Offloading. I don't think you want to look."

             

Ben turned and gave a naked-eye glance.

             

"My question is, Why the hell was M1 so bulky compared to the landing strip? Unless it touched down perfect, chance was it was going to roll anyway. Looks like they changed that for M2. And didn't they say M3 was going to come and just orbit like a waystation?"

             

"I think so. But I think that'll come in tandem once M2 returns to LEO."

             

"What?"

             

"That's what I remember, anyway."

             

"So some of them are going back?"

             

An unseen shrug and, "I guess. I mean, I don't know. Didn't get the whole buzz. I think they're still looking for water to split into hydrogen for the engines."

             

We stayed on the hilltop and no one bothered us. I saw some guy from M2 start for our shack, but one of the survivors intercepted him and probably cautioned against an unannounced visit. Back to work: I kept punching in coordinates, let the gears find the place in the sky, scanned it along a few different wavelengths, wrote down my hardcopy of the data. Repeat. Ben and I worked until it got dark, and then we worked some more.

             

Martian night skies no different than any other semi-hospitable rock in the System. You spend long enough up there in the dark and it's like that timelapse wheel of stars, the cosmos so comfortable to roll and twist and smile bright starsmiles while humans flit in and out of the image. At any given point, looking up, I had a hard time convincing myself that, within that great visage of stillness, we were simply hurtling through an emptiness far deeper than mere black.

(Chapter 23 coming Friday, January 6, 2012.)