In the Shadow of Deimos, page 8
part #1 of Terraforming Mars Series
But, as the ball came towards him, he found his skills were still there and he easily caught it at the side of his foot. He testily pushed the ball along the floor, and it moved obediently, if a little faster than he had anticipated. Walking rather than trying to jog in the Martian gravity, he dribbled it along the floor, adjusting his technique, tapping it left and right. Erik came towards him to challenge for the ball, but Luka swerved left, stumbled a little as his muscle memory tried to make him run, managed to recover in time and caught the ball on his right foot. Maneuvering in front of the goal, he remembered Erik’s advice to aim low and direct and kicked the ball between the two chairs.
“Goal!” cried Luka as the euphoria of his small victory tingled through his body. Like he was thirteen again and out on the grass playing with his mates.
“You’re too good,” said Erik. “I should have had you on my team.”
“I was in FC Cologne Under Sixteens,” said Luka.
“Seriously?” said Erik, appearing genuinely impressed. “You played professional football?”
“Soccer,” corrected Pete.
“Whatever,” said Erik. “You didn’t tell me you were a professional.”
“Under sixteens,” Luka emphasized. “It’s not like I played in the World Cup or anything.”
Erik didn’t seem to care about the distinction. “We should get you on the ThorGate team.”
“ThorGate has a team?” asked Luka.
“All the corporations have a football team,” said Erik. “There’s a Mars tournament every year and we absolutely have to stop Ecoline winning again.”
“I wasn’t that good when I was a kid,” Luka insisted. “They put me in defense, but I concentrated too much on my schoolwork, and they dropped me after a year.”
“Believe me, compared to the rubbish team we have at ThorGate, you’re good.”
The others had continued knocking the ball between them while the two men had been talking and, suddenly, a misjudged kick sent the ball sailing in the air towards them. Instinctively, Luka jumped up to intercept it on his chest. He absorbed the blow so it didn’t bounce right back, and allowed it to slowly drop towards the ground where he caught it with the bridge of his foot. It was so much easier in Martian gravity. He kicked it back up and transferred it to the other foot. Then higher to bounce on the top of each thigh. He laughed as he remembered the hours of practice it had taken him to master “keepie uppie” as a child. If only he had learnt to play soccer on Mars, he would have aced it in a matter of days!
Nevertheless, his demonstration was enough to entertain the crowd in the dining hall and he heard the surrounding conversation revert to a hush as more people turned to watch. On the next bounce, he added just enough energy for the ball to go a little higher and he leant forward to catch it on his neck. But he was out of practice, completely misjudged how slowly the ball would fall, it bounced off the top of his spine and dropped to the floor.
The crowd applauded anyway. Luka felt himself go red as he reached under a dining chair to retrieve the ball. When he stood up again, he saw Anita standing a few meters away from him, saying nothing, but glaring at him with her meal tray in her hands. Luka looked away, embarrassed.
Pete relieved him of the ball. “Let’s make arrangements for us to play another time, yeah?”
“Yeah,” said Luka.
Pete stuffed the ball back in his bag and the onlookers went back to their meals and their conversations. Luka glanced back at where Anita had been standing, but she had disappeared into the crowd.
•••
Luka lay back on the bed in his room and found himself smiling.
Maybe coming to Mars was going to be OK.
Mucking about and playing soccer with the others was such a normal thing to do. He felt warm inside as he remembered people applauding. It gave him a sense of what life on Mars, at a personal level, could be like.
Anita’s disapproving expression also lingered in his mind. Both in the dining hall and out at Noctis Labyrinthus. The way she berated Al made her seem angry and bitter, not like the woman Gianni had described being attracted to in his diary.
Luka delved into the drawer where he had hidden the data stick and stared at it for a moment. If Gianni had continued to talk about Anita in his diaries, then the key to understanding her better could lie within those videos. But part of him felt it would be intruding on Gianni’s privacy to watch the secret thoughts he had recorded in the solitude of his room.
Luka had never seen the point of recording a diary himself. Life was too busy, his mind too jumbled, and he was too embarrassed to think that his ramblings would be discovered and watched by other people if he ever videoed them. Apart from people who decided to share their life with the world in pursuit of fame and fortune, he didn’t really understand why anyone would want to keep a record of their innermost thoughts. Whatever the reason, he didn’t think it was for a stranger to pry into. And yet, the way that Gianni had hidden the stick in his room – as if expecting a stranger to find it – suggested the opposite.
Luka was torn. He could be intruding on a dead man’s private thoughts, or he could be honoring his memory. There was no way to tell without asking Gianni himself and, of course, that was impossible. In the end, his curiosity wouldn’t allow him to hold the stick in his hand and not discover more about what it contained. So, still buzzing after playing soccer and not wanting to sleep yet, he succumbed to temptation and decided to watch more.
“I had dinner with Anita tonight,” said Gianni to the camera.
He was smiling. An expression which didn’t involve just his lips but lit up his whole face.
“She’s new here and needs to get to know everybody,” Gianni continued. “So, we decided to have dinner. I don’t know if it was me who suggested it, or her, but we found we had enough credits between us to pay the extra to go to Cameron’s Restaurant. I hadn’t eaten at Cameron’s for a long time and the food’s not really any better than the daily rations, but they present it in a way which makes it appear more appetizing and it’s nice to be able to sit at a quiet table with just the two of us. I felt… we had a connection.”
Gianni paused, like he was thinking back to that moment. “We talked about work at first. Then things naturally moved onto why we had both come to Mars. I started off by repeating all the things I told the recruitment firm about wanting to contribute to the future of humanity on a new world and all that rubbish. But Anita made me feel so at ease that I started to tell her the truth. I told her how it sickens me to see how society resisted adaptation to deal with climate change on Earth, how the news of countries now supposedly under the control of one World Government continue to squabble over depleting resources, how it’s impossible to walk down the street without witnessing the result of overpopulation in the poverty of so many people. She listened so intently, I felt that she understood.
“That’s when she reminded me of the beauty of Earth.” His eyes sparkled at the memory. “The blue of oceans and the soothing swish of waves as they lap a sandy beach. The luscious green of forests, still there despite the global rise in temperatures. Especially after the rain, when the air smells fresh and the birds emerge from their hiding places to sing in the sunshine. Earth is so very different to the relentless dry dust of Mars, she said. It’s just a temporary thing, I told her. One day, Mars will be changed so all the natural resources we took for granted on Earth will be able to flourish here, but Anita doesn’t buy into all that propaganda. She’s a woman with her own mind, a woman who sees things as they really are.
“She looked sad as she reminded me that the Mars terraforming project will take hundreds of years. In our lifetimes we’ll see the temperature rise a little, the atmosphere thicken a little, maybe with enough oxygen in it to be more than a trace element. But our generation is only at the beginning. It will be the children of our children, many generations down the line, who will live on a Mars which holds a mirror to the natural beauty of Earth.
“It made me think of the possibility of having children on Mars. For the first time, I was thinking about not just my future on this planet, but a future I could build for a family.” He laughed to himself. “I didn’t say it, but my mind was racing ahead to the possibility of having a family with Anita. It’s stupid, right? After just one meal? But I have a good feeling about us.”
Gianni looked like he was about to say something else, then shook his head as if changing his mind. “Time to sleep,” he said, and told the window to stop recording.
The diary moved onto the next entry, which seemed to be about some technical issue which Gianni was grappling with at work. Luka turned it off while the man’s excitement at his first date hung in the room. He seemed so happy and yet, Luka knew, within six months of making that recording, Gianni would be dead.
Chapter Eleven
Julie sat back on her sofa in the living room of her apartment, sipping from a glass of water and feeling privileged that, as an executive, she could afford to pay for more than the metered daily allowance. She was using one of her favorite glasses from the pair she kept in the cupboard. It was engraved with a diamond pattern which caught the subdued light from her ceiling and cast tiny rainbows over her hand. In front of her, covering the whole wall, was a window which showed a live feed of the Martian night sky.
When Julie had first arrived on Mars, she had taken one of those nighttime tourist trips where they drive out onto Sinai Planum and invite the wide-eyed newcomers to step out in a rad-suit to view the stars. The tour guide had pointed out Phobos, the closest lumpy rock to be honored with the designation of “moon” , appearing about half as wide as Earth’s moon, as it moved across the sky in low orbit. So low, in fact, that it encircled the planet twice a day, orbiting faster than the rotation of Mars itself and appearing to move from west to east. Deimos, both smaller and further away, traveled a slower and more conventional route from east to west. To anyone standing near the equator, it would appear that the two celestial bodies would crash into each other above their heads. Julie remembered the anticipation and excitement as she, and the other newcomers, watched the moons converge on the collision zone. Only for the moons to safely pass each other with more than 17,000 kilometers to spare.
It had been a magical night when she was young and eager. Now even though she was older and more jaded, she still liked to watch the spectacle from time to time, although her days of joining a flock of tourists were over and she preferred to do it from the comfort of her sofa. With so much of her life taken up by meetings and reports, trapped inside some building in Tharsis City, it reminded her of the sense of wonder which drew people to venture into space in the first place. The unique orbits of the two moons was a sight only possible because humanity had the ingenuity to leave the planet where it had evolved and explore the solar system. It didn’t matter that Mars’ two natural satellites were most likely asteroids captured by the planet’s gravity and bore little resemblance to the large globe which was the Earth’s moon. It still evoked a lightning strike of excitement to witness the phenomenon.
The small, unassuming, gray lump of Deimos seemed to hang in the sky as it moved almost imperceptibly across the screen on Julie’s window. While, from the left, came its faster and larger brother, appearing as if it was ready to knock its sibling out of orbit. But, as Phobos closed in, it merely passed in front of the smaller object, gradually eclipsing it from view before continuing its journey and allowing Deimos to come into view again.
Julie sipped at her water, which always tasted better in her favorite glass, no matter how many times it had been recycled through the city’s reclamation system, and resigned herself to the task her WristTab reminded her she had to complete that evening. She told the window to turn off the view of the Martian night sky and activated her standard recording program. Making sure she was nicely framed by the camera, she began to record a message home.
“Hi, Mom, hi, Dad,” she said, seeing herself played back in real time on the screen. “Hope you are well. You’ve probably heard on the news that I’ve been put in charge of the investigation into the asteroid disaster. It shows I still hold a position of respect around here, I suppose. Although I could do without the extra hassle…”
Her WristTab bleeped and interrupted her flow. “Who the hell’s that?” she said to herself. Realizing she had just screwed up the recording, she told the window to stop.
It was Kareem calling. She diverted the call to her window.
Kareem looked tired. There was a redness surrounding the deep brown of his eyes and stubble was starting to appear on his chin. From the view of empty chairs and desks in the background, it was clear that he was still at work and calling from his screen. He blinked a couple of times as he stared at the screen where Julie’s image would be displayed. “What are you doing at home?” he asked.
“It’s after office hours,” said Julie. “It’s traditional for people go home after office hours. You should try it sometime.”
He glanced down at his WristTab. “Sorry, I didn’t realize it was that late.”
“What do you want?”
“Nothing. It can wait until tomorrow.”
“You’ve already disturbed me. You might as well tell me what it is, or I’ll be wondering all night what was so interesting to cause you to lose track of time.”
“Not over the screen,” said Kareem. “Tomorrow is fine. It’s not urgent.”
“Now I’m really curious,” said Julie, a touch alarmed. “Why don’t you come over? My place is on the way to yours – if you take the scenic route.”
“Only if you promise I can drink water out of one of your posh glasses.”
Julie chuckled. “You can sit on my ‘posh’ sofa, too, if you like.”
“Great! I’ll see you in a few minutes.”
Julie terminated the call. She wasn’t in the mood to record a message home anymore and rescheduled it in her diary for another day. She entered her kitchenette, took the second of her favorite glasses from the cupboard and used her account to pay for an extra ration.
Kareem arrived looking, if it was possible, even more disheveled than he had appeared on screen. He sat upright on the sofa, rather than take Julie’s relaxed approach of reclining, and drunk down his water in only two mouthfuls.
“Do you want some more?” Julie asked.
“I thought you invited me round to hear what I’ve found out.”
“I was trying to be a good host and pretend that I’m interested in your welfare and not just your brain.”
Kareem laughed. She knew he would understand that she was joking, even though she was eager to discover what he had to say.
“Well,” said Kareem, scratching the stubble on his chin. “According to my brain – and my research – the piece of metal attached to the asteroid fragment was definitely part of the guidance system. A squashed and severely damaged part of a propulsion engine to be precise.”
“Not exactly surprising. It’s how CrediCor brings asteroids from the belt.”
“It means the piece of asteroid which broke away was close to the vibrations caused by the engine,” said Kareem. “Those vibrations could have caused it to fracture and crash on Mars in two different locations: the first well away from a populated area as intended, and the second in Noctis Labyrinthus.”
“I thought we agreed the two pieces are probably not from the same rock.”
“I sent two samples away for analysis, but I’m not sure anymore. I placed the two rock samples next to each other and they look different, but after seeing the engine, I’m inclined to think the simplest explanation is the best. If the asteroid wasn’t made of a uniform material and had a hidden flaw, then it could have fractured and two different looking pieces could have come down in different locations.”
“Except the CrediCor data doesn’t support that. Their scans determined it was a C-type asteroid with no fractures.”
“I thought you didn’t trust what they sent you.”
“I don’t, not entirely. But why crash an object into Mars if there was a chance it could splinter on entry? It’s not like they’re limited for choice in the asteroid belt. How many asteroids are there supposed to be out there?”
“More than million,” said Kareem. “Give or take.”
“Precisely. So, if this asteroid had been unsuitable, they would simply have chosen another.”
“You’re saying the scans missed something or CrediCor misunderstood how the asteroid would behave?”
“Maybe.” Julie picked up her glass to take a sip of water, forgetting she had already drunk it all. Only a small droplet slid along the inside and touched her lip.
A myriad of thoughts filled her mind as she stood up from the sofa and walked across to the kitchenette for more water. How could CrediCor have miscalculated the asteroid’s behavior? They were the experts in all this, after all. It seemed so strange and made her feel unnerved. As she placed the glass under the dispenser, she somehow misjudged the height of the counter, and clonked the glass against the base of the machine. It was knocked from her grasp. She watched helplessly as her beautiful, engraved vessel tumbled to the floor in the relative slow motion of Martian gravity and smashed into pieces.
She stared at the shards around her feet and a sudden, irrational wave of loss came over her. On a planet where resources were tight, personal possessions were few and irreplaceable objects like the glass were inordinately precious.
“Are you okay?” Kareem called from the sofa.
“My glass.” Her voice sounded small.
He came over and stopped at the threshold of the kitchenette so as not to step on the shards. “Oh dear,” he said in an understated, English way. “Do you want me to clear it up?”
