Ringclimber

Chapter 6 - Arsia Base Camp

Anne leans back in her seat, watching the Martian landscape below from the corner of her eye. Pat sits across the aisle, hunched forward intently, comparing a map on her datapad with the reality below. Beside Pat, Sharon sleeps, hair draped along the edge of the seat. Erin is up in the galley making bread, and the warm smell fills the cabin as she opens the oven.

They parallel the summit, crossing the northwest side of the volcano as the sun collapses toward the dust-cloaked horizon. They line the south side of the shuttle, peering through their imagers. Anne kneels on her seat and can't take her eyes from the vast, shallow cone and its faint fringe of clouds. Pat glances at her over the top of the seat. "Hey, can you imagine the walk?" Anne nods, but she is busy watching the slope, imagining.

It is night on the Tharsis plain. The shuttle has long since gone aloft and disappeared against the starless sky. The team meets before sleep in the central bubble, but the conversation breaks up early. As Pat heads back to her tiny sleeping bubble, she nearly collides with someone standing still in the darkness, staring up at the slope of the mesa and the volcano beyond.

"Oh, sorry," she said.

"It's all right," the figure replies. It is Anne.

"Looking at the mountain?"

"I can't get it out of my mind. I've tried everything. Silly. Still, it's always there, no matter what I do."

It is almost impossible to see her face in the dimness and the transmitters distort voices slightly, but Pat feels a sudden kinship for the woman. "I've always felt that way before we start. Mountains are worst. Gravity just waiting. I don't know how I ever got used to it. I always see the damn thing waiting over every ridge."

Anne is silent a while, debating the trust available to her. Finally, she continued: "I'm worried about the avalanches. The slide on Pavonis took me by surprise."

"I know," Pat replies. "I read your volume before we come out." She thinks it only fair to bring it into the open. "Your feelings were clear."

"Oh," Anne replies, startled. "Did everyone read it?"

"I don't know. I did. We haven't discussed it, if that's what you mean. Still, you'd better get used to the idea. The standards of privacy on a team, especially when everyone's published, aren't what you're used to. Everybody wants to know about each other. Everyone eventually does."

Anne flushes under the rebuke. "I...I don't want you to not have read it. It's just... I did the same thing, but I've tried not to use what I found out. It's... thinking of people judging me on what I wrote there... talking to people I only know from what they've written...no, not strange, exactly, but I just didn't think of it; the other way around, that is. I'm afraid I don't even consider it good. It is part of the need, though."

Pat shook her head. "So who thinks you're a coward? Nobody's going to judge you on your writing. We're climbers. You're a climber. That's what we're judging. At least, that's what I'm doing, and I don't think the others are much different."

"No, I hope not. Pat, I'm not a coward, whatever I wrote. I'm just afraid I'll do something wrong next time I'm in an avalanche."

"I know how you feel." She looks up at the slope. "It's part of that feeling I have about gravity. I keep being afraid I'll do some damn thing that makes perfect sense in space, and end up pitching myself over a cliff, or something. Still, nothing to worry about: I haven't blown it yet, and neither have you."

Anne smiles, hidden in the dark. "No, that's true, of course."

"See you in the morning," Pat said, touching Anne's arm briefly. She walks away to her bubble, leaving Anne in a turmoil over whether she has said too much, said the wrong thing, or not paid enough attention to what the Pat had to say; she feels guilty at having broken her promise to herself to be silent and strong. Maybe this is going to go badly. She wants to cry, briefly, but she recognizes her state of nerves and allows for it. She sighs and takes her eyes from the slope, heading away to bed.

Erin lies alone, feet up on her cot, staring at the shadows on the bubble, and at the sparks of light beyond that are her companions.

The Martian night is quiet, with only a thin wind tearing at the base of the bubble. She is feeling fit, and the unloading has only raised her pulse to the point where she knows sleep was going to come hard.

She rolls on her side to address the datapad. Her stylus scrapes gently glowing letters into memory.

I've been waiting so long for this, wondering if I'm ready. Here I am, Sharon back with me, just as I wanted. And Anne has turned out to be a good choice, fitting right into the team better that I or Sharon could have imagined. I should be elated. I should be afraid. I should be confident.

She leans back and considers her words. She always hates reading what she writes, especially when she has to deal with her own emotions. She feels that she does it so badly that pressure to revise tends to neutralize her message. But in the years she has climbed and written, she has learned to tolerate the dissatisfaction. She sighs and continues...

I want to feel this will all go well, but when I don't know what I feel, I can't know how it will go.

Sharon stares at the starless sky, the camplight glowing a dim circle on the floor beside her; she remembers coming to Mars so many years ago, to climb Arsia. The same taint of rust smell in the bubble, the same quiet whine of tenuous wind. The faint sensation of cold. She shivers. But it isn't entirely the temperature.

She remembers the slope. Richard had been leading a friction slab slanted up into infinity. He had been incautious and had fallen, rolling, over an edge. His ankle shattered, but he was alive. They limped down the mountain, Richard delirious with pain and drugs. It had taken two days, and he was feverish the second day. She had lain in the bubble beside him, listening to his breath rasping in his throat, terrified the sound would suddenly stop.

She puts her hands behind her head. Outside, one by one, the lights dim and the Martian plain is as it had always been.

It is still dark when she awakens from a sleep of forgotten and turbulent dreams. The dimness confuses her, and for a moment she thought she might still be dreaming, but the anticipation that had been dammed away all night behind the barriers of unconsciousness wakes her fully, and she remembers.

It is the day they will start. She dresses slowly in her skinsuit and light boots, savouring every movement, sound and smell.

Outside her bubble, the rock clanks underfoot, shifting in dimly seen cascades of pumice, basalt, and breccia. No one is awake, and the plain is hers alone. The mesa bulks heavily against a sky sprinkled with waning stars. The slope rises beyond to a faint cascade of wave clouds off the summit. She cannot breathe the air, she cannot feel the dawn wind, but she feels the sun rising behind the summit until the light explodes against the peak of the mesa, rolling ever so slowly down the rock, a glare, slick on dark shadow.

She turns herself away from the mountain and the sun.

Bubbles, opaqued, gleam. She is the only one who slept under the sky.

The supplies are strewn about the landing area, and she sighs, thinking of all the organizing to be done. Then, resolutely, datapad tucked under her arm, she begins.

She is warm, a half an hour into the work, a tenth of the containers ranked for carrying, the rest still an exasperating mess. She hears a bubble peel open, and turns around to see Pat poking her glass-hooded face out into the dawn.

"Hello," Pat calls, spotting her. Sharon waves back over her shoulder, busy looking for a particular crate. Pat emerges fully and walks with the excessive care of a spacer to where Sharon works. She looks around. "Beautiful," she whispers to herself. She glances at Sharon, and then takes a quick glance at her own datapad to see what Sharon is doing. "Oh, we should have done this last night," she mutters.

Sharon looks up. "Yeah, but who had the time?"

"Need a hand?"

"Sure. Got your pad? Good. See if you can find some breakfast. We're going to need it."

"Right. You want me to cook?" She loves cooking in gravity; the sights and the sounds that it allows.

Sharon shrugs. "Up to you." She turns back to her work.

They sit around the inside of the bubble, sun glaring across them as they eat, the smell of breakfast filling the dry air. Erin's eyes crinkle a bit, but she is in excellent spirits. Anne, on the other hand, is not quite awake, and her responses are terse and vague.

"So much to do!" Erin exclaims as Sharon finishes her report. She thrusts her plate at a startled Pat, throws the glass hood over her head and squeezes out the lock. Anne stares after her, bleary eyes wide open; then she laughs. "I guess so!" She jumps up, then looks around, uncertainly, holding out her dish. "What do I do with this?" she asks. Pat held out her hand, resigned, but Sharon intercepts the plate.

"No, I'll handle that. Go help Erin, and maybe we can get mounted up by ten. I won't be long."

Pat smiles with relief. "Thanks, chief. I'll take the stint next time. I promise."

"Right. You can have it."

No one likes to do dishes.

The prosthedons are unracked and powered up, gleaming skeletal ochre among the myriad scattered stones. There are two of them, hunched figures of metal, four legged, with outthrust arms for loading. The team walks cartons of supply from the dump to the waiting machines, lashing them to the arms and hips with sharp tugs on elastic straps.

The ancient silence of Arsia is broken by the movement of life and its machines.

Pat and Erin lie in their machines and walk, hand and foot quadruped, across the rock-littered Martian plain.

"Beautiful day," Erin comments.

"Yeah."

Rocks are ground beneath the prehensile toes of the prosthedon. The containers shift rhythmically in their tusks.

"How many days do you figure we'll be hiking like this?" Pat asks.

"Till day after tomorrow night."

"Be in base camp then?"

"No, won't have time to set up and get everyone in, too."

"Oh."

Content, Layout, and Images Copyright © 1999 by Mark Cashman except where indicated (NASA photos)