"Why do you always have to be so negative, Ben? You're always off predicting some doom-and-gloom future scenario. Think of the positives. Think of how far we've come. Sure, they delayed the Mars mission ten years, but because of that, we can actually breathe here. And no one thought it'd happen. We crashed and we lived. Now we're doing our jobs. And still you're moping around, avoiding the new guys - who are quite nice, by the way, except, well, the colonel - and you keep lamenting how Mars is going to shit. About how they'll commercialize it, and how tycoons will take luxury trips here, jaunt around in a surf suit, take some snaps. You know what? Who gives a fuck if that happens? We can find our own inhospitable place away from the equator and live like hermits and keep working. Turn a blind eye toward so-called Progress if it tears you up inside. Mars will never be earth. We don't want it to be. We won't build cities and separate countries and continents. There won't be a League of Nations. We won't be shuttling in nukes just to make sure some of the Soviet boys play nice. It's the Wild West without all that gunslinging and sheriffing.
"Reminds
me. I heard M3 is bringing animals. Dogs, cats, monkeys, horses. Horses, Ben!
Can you imagine that? Jesus. Once a horse figures out how to gallop in
point-three g and once they build like
a, uh, super-horseshoe that can break down all these rocks, hell, that's
something to look forward to, isn't it? You always talked about the Frontier.
What says 'frontier' more than horses? C'mon, slow down. Horses, cookouts,
campfires, hell, maybe they'll let us bring some booze up.
"What's
that look for? You don't wanna be a cowboy? Then what the hell has half of this
been about, Ben? Back in Easthaven and Newport you looked around and couldn't
stand the sight of everyone plugged into something other than the Real World.
People sucked into books on the train, people on the street sealed up inside
headphones, no one to give you a straight glance, everyone crammed together
with no sense of togetherness.
"I
feel it too. Partly why I came up to Red. Not start a community in that
hippie-commune sense. But go back to something, I don't know, tribal or
whatever. Where you know everyone and everyone knows you. Where, shit, crappy
maxims mean something, like how it takes a village to raise a child or whatever
it is they say. But it's not in some rueful, back-in-the-day crap. Because our
back-in-the-day wasn't too rosy. Those were hard times that were our
generation's burden to haul. Same as how my sons are getting their hands dirty
trying to end something we started fighting before I was even born.
"All
right, all right. I know. I broke The Rule. No family talk. Just shoptalk about
Red, remote terra, extrasolar, optics, wavelengths, lensing, relativity,
sustainability. Hooray. Thrilling pillowtalk. But come on. You can't ignore the
reality of it. Like when you're on a vacation and you have to keep reminding
yourself how cool it is that you're so far away from home even when the
situation itself isn't particularly thrilling. We're on Mars, Ben. Look up at that haunted sky. Look down off
that cliff and see that red waste going off into forever. Remember the first
day we crashed, when people were thinking of ways to kill themselves and we saw
our first sunset? Not everyone knew that sunsets are blue on Mars. Red skies
back… well… and blue here. And goddamn it was beautiful. And it didn't make a single person wistful of home
or made them want to leave... well, except the two who X'd themselves but, eh,
whatever. It made them realize that we were on a New World, not a worthless
rock.
"And
it's not about the history books. About how John Kraid and Ben Meridien were
the heroic survivors of the M1 crash, or how they discovered the
selfishly-named Meridienkraid, or were the first terrestrial-born humans to
cross the heliopause… though, you have to admit, that last part would be pretty
neat. Or will be. But we won't be around
to read those books.
"Okay,
okay, forget it. I think we're on separate pages. What I mean is: Fuck glory.
Fuck it even though we deserve it. Yeah, yeah, I know, I don't mind that I'm -
that we're - getting semi-famous over
all this. We were probably front-page news when we crashed, though probably not
much longer afterward once they interviewed a NASA suit who talked about
contingencies and sacrifice and whatever, and once it came out that we had no
way to communicate, I'm sure the story died. But I wouldn't be surprised if
they have, like, a reporter on M2. I wouldn't run it past that colonel to pull
some stunt like that to make him look good. One look at that dude and you can
tell he'll eat untold buckets of shit to climb the chain.
"Still
funny the way a piss arc goes in slow-motion. Christ, no, I'm not looking, Ben.
You want me to plug my ears. I just hear it, and I have this mental image. No,
not of your massive dick, Ben. See? You always end it too fast, you cram it in
your pants while it's still dripping. It looks like you pissed yourself.
Technically, you did, I guess. Point-three g swings both ways. Like how Mons is three times the size of Everest but
is, now, only feeling like the size of one Everest and fuck me, how did you
convince me to do this? Yeah, we can climb up, but can we climb down? That'd be
in line with my whole life. Survivor of a massive crash on an alien planet,
then a long, fatal fall trying to climb the biggest mountain in the Solar
System. An easily-preventable death.
"Oh,
jesus, are you serious? You want to fucking base jump off the summit? Oh,
wonderful. Like the M1 crash didn't remind you that duststorms can seriously
fuck up your visibility and, oh, I don't know, the chance of landing into a
ravine so deep you can see the Red core, might as well plunge into Marineris.
Why I pulled you through grad school is beyond me, 'cause now I'm doing the
same stupid shit I used to talk you out of. Like breaking into the astro
department to get spare parts for your own rig on top of the dorms. And like
they weren't going to notice both A, the theft, and B, the stolen parts on your
highly-visible scope right across campus?
"Oh,
what, so past memories are off limits now? What's the limit? Can I talk about
the month in M1, getting here? Or is the Zero Point the crash? Or after? Maybe
the first supply drop? Or, shit, last month when M2 showed? Fuck you, Ben,
living off in Meridienland. You know, things happen in this magical place we
live called The Present, not all off in your own superfuture."
We
kept the pace on the steep hike, along a rocky expanse leading obliquely up the
side of the gentler face of the mountain. We were almost above the dustline. It
was a hard trek, hauling gear and supplies. Neither of us gave, though. We
still were trying to one-up each other every moment on Red. Ben hadn't said
anything for hours. He was probably trying to save each dusty breath for its
maximum worth.
My
communicator buzzed on my hip.
"Turn
that off," said Ben.
(Chapter 27 coming Monday, January 16, 2012.)
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