11

Vision Quest

 

Will put the tray, loaded with the dishes, cups, and silverware of himself and his two children, in the dishwashing unit. The unit, fortunately, was able to separate items and move them into a washing section. He headed for the revolving door of building 1 some twenty meters away, leaving the chatter of the patio, where half the Outpost was still eating brunch.

The kids were way ahead of him; Marshall was now strong enough to turn the revolving door and had helped Lizzie to pass through. By the time Will entered the building, the kids were already down the stairs and yelling at the front door of the apartment, telling it to unlock. As Will entered, he passed Greg coming down from the second floor and heading out.

“I really enjoyed your sermon on community and morality this morning,” he said to the former priest. “I agree with your effort to define a balance; sometimes we have to keep our morality private to some extent, and sometimes we have to stand and insist that a certain moral principle is essential for building true community. Of course, how one decides when a moral principle falls in which position is the problem.”

“Oh, I agree with you. But that’s part of our community here. As a Catholic, I have to speak up about matters of personal morality even if it makes others uncomfortable; however, I have to speak up in a way that is courteous.”

“Exactly! And that’s hard enough with 47 adults; I don’t know how we’ll maintain that standard when we have 47,000 or 47 million people here. We can’t create a society where police have to use tear gas to break up demonstrations that have gotten out of hand. We don’t have the air for it.”

“Well, maybe that fact will help maintain our civility.” Greg smiled. “I get a lot more feedback on my sermons here than I ever got in a parish church, where hundreds would hear me! Thank you for coming, Will. And let me apologize again for offering you communion. I had forgotten you had previously told me you wouldn’t take it when I gave you the cup. Thanks for passing it along.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it; you were concentrating on your actions. I wasn’t offended in the least. I’ll try to make it to more masses; I think with such a small population, we need to support each other’s worship programs.”

“And I’ll attend the next interfaith service as well. I think they’re important, and I think religious people have to pray together. Let’s build a community of faithful people who trust each other, so as Mars grows, the trust is preserved.”

“We can be a model for Earth! I agree. Greg, come visit us out in the yard some time this afternoon. The kids will be playing, we’ll be chatting, and there will be a volleyball game at 4 p.m.”

“I will! I’m on my way to sick bay right now, but I’ll be back later.” Greg nodded and headed out the door.

Will hurried down the stairs to his home. The door was open, so he walked right in. He changed out of his nice clothes and put on a teeshirt and shorts; one of only two he had, since no one had had the place to wear them until the biome had been completed. Ethel had just finished changing as well. When he came out he found Marshall listening to a videomail from his friend Jerome on Will’s attaché; the boy had gotten good at navigating to his own message area. “Dad, I want to send Jerry a video message, so I’ll be outside later, okay?”

“Okay,” replied Will. He headed out the door. John Hunter was coming out of his unit as well. “Good sol. Are you joining us in the yard?”

“Yes, for a while. I’m bringing my attaché; I want to catch up with some newspapers.”

“How does your tobacco grow?”

“Very well. Do you want to see?”

“Sure!”

John opened his door and they walked in. His court was verdant with all sorts of plants. “Where did you get all the pots?”

“Ethel made them; there’s a small supply available!” John led him out his door to his two by five meter courtyard. “I’m so glad Lisa was able to check every seed in the pouches and ‘weed out’ the weeds.”

“And she kept them, too; you never know when we’ll need them! My, the tobacco is growing well. It likes something.”

“The light, I think. Some kinds of tobacco are shade lovers, and the light down here is indirect. The gourds need sun lamps.” He pointed. “Lisa has been coming in and tending them while I’m away. She knows plants really well. They’re doing so well partly because of her.”

“She’s good. I’ve had to turn my roses over to her; they almost died in my apartment, Marshall wouldn’t let me put them on his patio and Lizzie almost destroyed them when they were on hers.”

“I hope they survive; I like roses.”

“So, you’re back from Cassini for a week. How was it?”

“Fascinating geology; the hydrothermal complexes and igneous intrusions are all over the place, interpenetrating, melting and transforming each other, then the whole area was rained and snowed on, flooded with lakes, drained and eroded by catastrophic floods, and all the time it was bombarded like crazy by planetesimals, smashed to pieces, soaked by groundwater, fused back together by magma, dissolved and redeposited by volcanically heated water. . . really amazing. We found three new mineral types, and new minerals aren’t found that easily any more.”

“And a lot of gold, but not much that’s high grade. Gold recovery’s been going pretty slowly. But there’s still hope.”

“Andries has good instincts, the sunwings are still gathering detailed data, and we’ve got three mining companies pouring over every byte of data. As a geochemist, I can see a hundred doctoral dissertations that need to be written. We’ve studied the combination of water and oxygen in the Earth’s crust under terrestrial temperature and pressures, but not water and carbon dioxide in Martian crustal temperatures and pressures.”

“Your research will lay the foundation for those dissertations. I want to get down to Cassini some time, but administration keeps me pretty busy.”

“Go down; you’ll have a better feel for the place.”

“Did you get a ‘feel for the land’ there?”

John paused to reflect. “Some. Father Mars is different from Mother Earth. That reminds me. I want to go up to the dacha some time this week, but I want to go up alone. I know the rule says we have to go with at least someone else. But I can’t do what I want to do with someone else around.”

“Hum.” Will considered. “I suppose we can make an exception. No one’s up there most of the time on the weeksols. Sure; do it.”

John smiled. “Thank you very, very much.”

They headed out of the apartment. Ethel and Madhu were standing outside the Andersons’ apartment, which was directly above the Elliotts’. Will stopped. “Did Marshall come by, yet? He was sending a video to Jerry.”

Ethel shook her head. “No, he must still be taping something. Yestersol he taped every joke he knew and laughed at all of them. But Jerry did the same, so I guess they’re having fun.”

“But he’s playing with Sam less, and Sam’s jealous,” noted Madhu. “He’s looking forward to playing with Marshall this afternoon.”

“We’ve told him to play with Sam more,” said Ethel. “I hope you understand; Marshall’s got no one who’s really his age, and he misses it. But in a few years they’ll be closer developmentally and they’ll play more.”

“I know. Sam’s lucky to have Corazon and Marshall.” Madhu looked at Will. “Do you want to see my design for the space between Yalta, Clarke, Renfrew, and Joseph?”

“Sure.”

She turned and led him into the apartment; Ethel trailed behind. The Andersons had a three-bedroom unit, with Sam’s bedroom right above Marshall’s; they had had to order the boys to stop talking to each other via the balconies at night. The bedroom above Lizzie’s was Madhu’s art studio; it was small and crammed with shelves of rock and mineral samples, unusually shaped or colored rocks, several large sacks of clays of different colors, a potter’s wheel, and a bunch of plaster of paris sculptures. “On, Muse,” she ordered, and the large screen on the wall responded by glowing. She had named her attaché “muse,” a fairly common moniker for the attachés of artists. “Project Labyrinth 1 design onto the screen, please; view only,” she added. A complex pattern of colors appeared. “This space is eighteen meters wide and between twenty and forty meters long, and complex in shape because it has two rectangles bordering the southern and western sides, but two circles on the eastern and northern sides, all connected by pressure tunnels. No one will bother to get in a space suit and walk in it; it’s a piece of Mars that’s cut off from everything. It’s our largest piece of dead space inside the Outpost. But it has windows facing it on all sides, some on second stories. So I plan to lay out a big labyrinth pattern in yellow sandstone and black basalt, with three internal destinations; a spring of water, a crater, and a mesa.”

“But no one will be able to walk on it.”

“You explore it with your eyes! It’s quite complex; people can spend fifteen minutes looking at it one sol, and five minutes the next. It will have a meditative quality; in the Middle Ages labyrinths were used for meditation. One reason people like to go outside, or look outside, is to see things that are complex and changing. Labyrinths fill the bill. And they can be very Martian; they’re geometrical but can have Martian images in them, which we can change periodically.”

“Even a labyrinth?”

“This is designed so that if we change a few bends and connections, we change the path in the labyrinth drastically. It’ll take an hour to make the changes. Gardens require a lot more maintenance.”

“And won’t grow outside! This is fantastic, Madhu!”

“I hope people like it. If so, I’ll design labyrinths for all the shut-off spaces within the Outpost, and maybe a few outside as well where people can walk, with Martian wind sculptures for them to look at.”

“Oh, I think people will love it. I suppose this will take a week or two of work to make, and we’ll have to blow the dust off periodically, but it’ll be worth all the work we do.”

“Thank you.”

“I told her the same thing,” said Ethel. “She showed this to me while you were talking to John.”

The three of them headed out of the apartment. “How’s your health, by the way?” Will asked.

Madhu shurgged. “The spot on my lung had been shrinking, and now it seems to be growing. Columbus 6 will include an oncologist, and she’s bringing equipment to biopy the spot, so we can figure out what it is.”

“We may need oncologists here, anyway.”

“I’m afraid that’s true.” Madhu sighed. “I’ve lived with this for four years, now. It’ll be good to get it resolved.”

They went out through the revolving door. About half the Outpost was sitting in chairs, usually in semi-circles under the buildings’ overhangs where there was shade and protection from cosmic and solar radiation. Some chairs faced the swimming pool; others faced a game of petanque, a bowling like game several were playing. Small children ran on the grassy areas under the fruit and nut trees and sometimes trampled flowers or vegetables. Ethel and Will headed toward a group of chairs. Martha, Charles, Irina, and Eammon were already seated there. “Ethel, we need chaise-longes,” said Martha, as they approached.

“I know; it’s on my list, and I suppose some day we’ll get around to making them,” Ethel replied. She sat. Caitlin, age five months, was nursing at Martha’s breast. “How’s the little one?”

Martha smiled. “Oh, she’s coming along quite well. Growing and growing.” She pointed at Patrick O’Hare. “Look at him, crawling all over the place!”

“And he’s just eight months!” added Irina, standing to grab her son and pull him back. “Eammon says he walked at nine months.”

“So I’m told,” added Eammon.

“It runs in the family,” agreed Will. He looked at Charles. “So, you’ve been back from Deimos five months now; any chance your wife will let you go out on the range?” He smiled and winked.

“Can’t I have him for another month?” asked Martha.

“Yes, but Roger’s trying to figure out how to rotate people in and out of the range and it’s hard when people have to stay at the Outpost.”

“Next month,” replied Charles. “I’m anxious to get out, too, but only for four or five weeks, please. I can make a series of relatively short field trips until Caitlin’s a year old.”

“That’ll help,” agreed Will. “Martha, it’s great that you can spend as much time as you have in the office. We really appreciate it.”

“Well, Charles wanted part of the family leave, and I wanted him to have part of it. And the infant care here is good; it seems to be good for Caitlin to be around other kids. So we’re managing pretty well. I’m sorry Enlai and I haven’t been able to press forward with the MarTech plans.”

“MarTech?”

“Sorry; we’re calling the Mariner Institute of Technology ‘MarTech,’ on analogy to ‘CalTech.’ Enlai and I have had no time to do much more than collection speculations and brain storms.”

“It’ll happen, and right now we’ve got practically everyone working sixty hours a week on other things anyway.”

“I know. But I will have a report for you about mental health here in another week or two.”

“Really?”

She nodded. “The faster pace is putting us under a lot of stress, but levels of depression are okay, and overall we’re doing better than the average in developed societies. Of course, we aren’t a random selection of citizens, either.”

“No; there’s psychological screening. I’m glad to hear that the quality of life is reasonably good.”

“I didn’t say that! There’s a difference between mental health—the level of depression, for example—and quality of life! But our quality of life ain’t bad, I suppose.”

“Better than many people in poverty on Earth,” agreed Ethel. “It has its disadvantages, certainly.”

“Like risky pregnancy,” agreed Irina, sighing. “This one is not proceeding as well as the first one, I’m afraid.”

“What’s wrong?” asked Will, alarmed.

“I’m really tired, this time; exhausted! Eve’s still not sure why. She plans to do an ultrasound in a few sols and see whether the baby’s developing right.”

“You’ll be fine,” said Eammon, leaning over.

Will looked around. Marshall and Lizzie were playing with Samie and Corazon. The smaller ones were running around or were with their parents. “We’ve been on Mars nine and a half years and we’ve got nine children; and Shinji and Michiko will have number ten in a few weeks. And you’ve got another one in the oven, and at least three other couples are contemplating parenthood. . . . life really moves on.”

“Not particularly profound, Will,” said Martha.

“I suppose it’s an emotional point, not an intellectual one,” replied Will. “I really feel blessed. We come from different cultures, we speak different languages, but we’ve managed to become friends, and we support each other’s families. We have community in spite of our disagreements. And that’s more important than whether we have access to fifty thousand possible consumer items or whether our chance of dying of cancer over our lifetime here is 28% instead of 21%.”

“Here, here,” agreed Martha.

-----------------------------

It was Monsol afternoon about 1 p.m. when John Hunter stepped into ranger 5—one of the three left at the Outpost—loaded an overnight pack, some special gear, and his spacesuit inside, and drove out through the airlock of Joseph Hall, heading for the Dacha. Soon he was driving up Little Colorado Canyon, steadily up and up, 1,500 meters vertically in six kilometers of horizontal road. The ranger reached the top, then he turned and drove it southward, back to the edge of the escarpment. It entered the tunnel-like metal airlock of the Dacha. He drove inside the air bubble, opened the door, and stepped out.

He moved his overnight bag into room 1, though he doubted he would actually stay there. He walked into several rooms and took their small electric hotplates. He pulled out a large metal container filled with plastic and other materials he had brought and walked around the enclosure, between the building and the western end, to find a good spot. He chose an area in the middle.

John emptied the metal container, placed it on top of the four hotplates, connected them to the building’s outdoor plug, and turned them on. He scrounged around the enclosure and filled it with spare rocks; Madhu had brought in rocks to make some artistic designs, but had not yet started on them. While the rocks heated up, John built a frame of metal rods and tape that he had brought, then he draped the plastic sheeting over it and folded it under to make a floor. He had a sweat lodge.

It was close to 4 p.m. when the sweat lodge was ready and the rocks were hot. He returned to his room and changed into a breachcloth—one of the few traditional items he had with him—then carried the container of hot rocks into his makeshift sweat lodge, placing it on a large flat rock to elevate it off the floor. First he threw some sage that he had brought from Earth on the stones—it smoked and released its special aroma, the aroma he associated with the sweat. He prayed to Tunkašila Wakantanka, the great mystery, the father of all, in the traditional way that his father had taught him. It felt strange performing a sweat by himself, but he had no one to assist him, so he had to make do. He pulled out his pipe, filled it with tobacco, prayed, then smoked it. Finally he threw water on the stones to make steam, and he prayed. Steam condensed on the plastic sides and trickled down onto the floor, making sweat-like beads of water there. And still he prayed.

Finally, he opened the sides of the sweat lodge and stepped outside. He walked to the rounded western end of the crescent shaped bubble, which covered a prominence that stuck out from the top of the cliff and projected over the precipice, There he was as far from the ranger, the building, and the patio as possible, on bare kevlar bubble stretching over father Mars just a millimeter below. The sun was setting.

He sat facing the waning sun and pulled his blanket tightly around him against the evening chill that was already invading the dacha. Scarcely looking at the mind-boggling expanse of cliff falling away to vast stonescapes stretching a hundred kilometers before him, yet intensely aware of father Mars all around him, he prayed to the spirits of the place; to the spirit of Paul Renfrew still walking the world; to the spirit of the unborn Joseph Stroger, hovering over Joseph Hall; to the spirit of Ethel MacGregor’s mother that partially inhered to the stone gazebo built in her honor on top of Boat Rock; to the spirits of the future born and of the future dead; to the spirits of Spheruloides Gangii and the quadrillions of life forms, arrayed in at least fifty known species, arranged into at least four known phyla, that had once considered this world their home. Mars, indeed, was alive with spirits.

The sun was gone and a myriad of intense stars popped into the sky. Venus rode high in the west; Jupiter glowed low in the east with Saturn. Cygnus, the northern cross of Mars, which pointed steadfastly north just as the outer two stars of the Big Dipper did on Earth, floated in the northern sky, Deneb pointing downward. And John prayed. After an hour he pulled out his sacred pipe, filled it with tobacco again, and lit it, raising it to the six directions—north, south, east, west, up, and down—repeating the words his father had taught him. Finished, he sat and cried for a vision, as his people would say, yet silently.

He waited, in silence, crosslegged, blanket pulled around him. Time seemed to hang in suspension. The stars slowly wheeled in the sky. Then a light in the west disturbed him. He looked up, surprised, and at first he saw a yellow face hovering just above the horizon, its light glinting off of thousands of rock surfaces to the distant horizon. It was Phobos, which had just rose; and yet it was also a face, so easy and plain to see as he looked at the yellow apparition. A woman’s face. Phobos was a female. In the myriad reflections off the rolling land below he saw her coming toward him; or perhaps she was leaving, returning to the Great Sacred that sent her, just as the White Buffalo Calf woman had brought the sacred pipe to Hehlokecha Najin, then took the form of a red and brown buffalo calf and trotted away, then laid in the grass and rolled around and rose as a white buffalo, then walked, rolled in the grass, and rose as a black buffalo, then bowed to the four directions and disappeared over a hill.

And then a light in the east disturbed him as well. He turned; it was small, intense, yellow, another miniature female face. Deimos. The child of Mother Phobos and Father Mars. A face yearning for reunion, anxious, yet unable to come to her mother; and her mother raced toward her and was already almost overhead, half way to union with her child.

As John looked up in wonder, he moved his head side to side as he prayed, and he suddenly saw hundreds, thousands of stars moving across the heavens, in and among the other, fixed stars. The spirits were there. He could hear them whooshing through the heavens as he swayed, and he suddenly felt terrified. He clutched his pipe and prayed as he swayed, and as he swayed the spirits moved and whooshed, yet none came to hurt him. The land groaned and heaved slightly beneath him as he swayed.

Phobos came across the sky to her child and for a brief moment they embraced. Then they separated and she fled on east, and soon she dropped to the eastern horizon. Where she touched it, the land glowed, and John realized there was a place of sacred power there to the east, and not all that far away. He would have to look for it some time.

Then the mother dropped below the horizon and was gone. John grieved at her loss. He sat crosslegged, lit his pipe again, and prayed, and the stars wheeled. He could feel spirits, of little round ones, of two-leggeds, of clouds, but it seemed there were no spirits of four-leggeds, for Mars had never had any.

The eastern horizon glowed, a halo of light appeared, then suddenly the sun was there. It shook him from his state. He looked around, glanced up at the frost flecks clinging to the dome above him, stared at the rolling terrain suddenly visible outside the dome. The entire night had passed. And he had had the vision he had cried for. But what did it mean? That would require a lot of meditation.

He heated up the metal container of stones again, went back into the sweat lodge and prayed again, thanking the Great Spirit for the vision he had received. He smoked his pipe and reflected. Then he took down the sweat lodge, threw the stones back on the pile where he had taken them, changed back into his normal clothes, and drove back to the Outpost.

---------------------------

Will walked to his office on Tuesol morning past the sickbay in habitat 2 and was surprised to see Shinji and Michiko there, sitting and waiting. He stopped. “Is it time?”

“It seems to be!” exclaimed Shinji, an unnatural excitement in his voice.

“Contractions every half an hour,” added Michiko, sounding more anxious.

Let me kiss you in congratulations.” Will walked over and kissed Michiko on the cheek, then embraced his old friend Shinji. “I’ll keep you in my thoughts all day.”

“And all night,” added Michiko, worried.

Eve Gilmartin’s examining room door opened. Irina and Eammon came out, and they looked excited. “We know why I’ve been so tired!” she announced. “Twins!”

“Twins! I have to kiss you, too, then.” Will came over and kissed her on the cheek. “Congratulations and felicitations.” He took Eammon’s hand and gave it a vigorous shake.

“That’s all the women expecting babies I plan to see this sol,” said Eve. “It is a joyful sol. Come in, Michiko. So, you’re going to have a baby. . .” She led Shinji and Michiko inside and closed the door. They nodded a good bye to Will.

He whistled as he walked the last twenty meters to his office in Habitat 1; he was now in a very good mood. He commanded his attaché to awake and switch to the message center. He was surprised to find a videomessage from Sebastian Langlais, commander of Columbus 2, who had been the Primary Commander of Shackleton Station for four years and Vice Director of the Lunar Commission for two. He and Sebastian had exchanged messages on and off since Columbus 2 had ended, though they had not been in touch for the last six months.

“Good sol, Will,” he began. “I thought you’d like to hear some special news that I just got a few hours ago. Shackleton has gotten permission to build a space vehicle ‘dry dock.’ It’ll be a kevlar reinforced cylinder based on the technology that produces your biomes, thirty meters high and fifteen in diameter; we’ll be able to roll in a Lifter, a Mars shuttle, an interplanetary hab, anything that fits in the space, close the door, pressurize the space, and work on the vehicle without spacesuits. The dry dock will be protected from micrometeoroids by a metal shell we’ll build here, and the shell will be covered by sandbags.

“I’m sure you can imagine the advantages of this facility for everyone. One sixth gee is just about ideal for this sort of work; equipment is easier to move than on Earth and stays put better than in weightlessness. We’ve needed something like this for decades, but it was too expensive. Repairing Lifters outside in space suits has always been very difficult; refurbishing Mars shuttles at Gateway has been difficult and expensive. Costs will be dropping a bit more for everyone, and Shackleton’s making more money. We need it too, as I’m sure you can imagine! Good luck with your quest for gold deposits. I’ve been following the news closely. Bye.”

Will hit reply. “Thanks for the news, Sebastian. Congratulations! A dry dock will be immensely valuable for everyone, and I suppose it means you’ll have more staff permanently up there. I’m thrilled for you! You’ve been doing very well in the last year, between the expansion in tourism and the interest in mining lunar ice and meteoritic nickel-iron. I’m envious.

“Gold prospecting is going slowly, but we’re confident that in the next few months we’ll find some good deposits. This world appears to be as mineralogically rich and diverse as the archaean era on Earth, and as you know, that’s when a lot of the mineral deposits formed there. Everyone says if we’re patient, we’ll find plenty of ores. It looks like with the decline in transportation costs, that’s the way we’ll go in the next few years.

“Anyway, keep in touch. Bye.”

Will sent the message and reflected about the moon’s position. Shackleton had expanded further since David’s visit. It now had ten tourists almost continuously, almost two hundred per year; it had four support staff for them; about twenty geologists, technicians, and Prospector drivers; another six astronomers; a dozen engineers and construction personnel; and twelve support staff of various sorts, for a total of sixty staff. The Chinese national station and the European station at LeMonnier had a dozen more each, and the Japanese station at Grimaldi had six, giving the moon a population of one hundred when the tourists were included. It had twice the population of Mars, and the dry dock would push it forward even more. It would be some time before Mars, so far away, would catch up. He was a bit envious.

He pushed a button to listen to a message from Louisa Turner that had arrived in the middle of the night. “Good sol, Will. I thought I’d give you a progress report. Tina’s a real hit on several networks, and Boris is doing pretty well as a videojournalist. Tina’s training is paying off. I’m sorry you’ve had to switch two people to basically full time media work, but it’s proving to be effective, and the public support will translate into funding that exceeds their salaries anyway. We need to find a few more people who can do science and reporting well; there are still some slots on Columbus 6 to fill, after all.

“As for the message, the gold prospecting is getting old, as you can imagine, but the human interest side of their reporting is still strong. Roger’s expedition will reach the fretted terrain along the dichotomy later this week, and the video will be interesting. That should boost our ratings, as it were. Magellan’s been quiet lately and the public is not so interested watching people in orbit drive small tank-like rovers around in smog. The moon will steal some headlines tomorrow—did you hear about the dry dock?—but we’re doing pretty well right now. Bye.”

Will hit reply. “Thanks, Louisa, I’m glad the report’s good. Tina and Boris have both testified to your lengthy quizzing of them about sol to sol life and the diaries you are requiring them to send to you, so you can get back to them about human interest stories to pursue. So I think it isn’t just Tina training Boris; you’re training both of them! We’re extremely grateful, up here. I wish we could sit down and have a coffee together, face to face. Maybe we should try something virtual at opposition when the time delay is minimized. Bye.”

Will sent the message and glanced at his watch: noontime already. He had to get lunch. But then he saw that a new message had come in; an email with a video attachment. It was sent by John Hunter, which surprised him, since his staff could call or visit; they rarely send video messages. With a bit of trepidation he opened the message.

The email was simple: Will, I just taped this description of last night for Big Toe, my great uncle back home, and I thought you should know about it as well. This is private, of course; not for anyone else. Thanks. John.

Intrigued, Will clicked on the video attachment. He sat entranced, watching John describe his experience of the night before; the entire night before, which had flashed by for him. When it ended he sat there, thinking about the remarkable vision his Lakota colleague had had.

“What did you think?”

He turned, startled. John was standing in the door. “I hope you don’t mind that I sent it to you. I just felt that I had to share it with someone here, and you were the only one I could think of. Greg would be a possibility, but he’s too. . . Catholic.”

“I feel very privileged. Thank you.”

John closed the door and came in. He sat. Will was tempted to get up from behind the desk, but for some reason the desk seemed irrelevant. They looked at each other. John continued. “I suppose there are all sorts of logical explanations. You can see a face in just about anything. But I have looked at Deimos since I came back to the Outpost and I can’t see a face in her. And all the moving spirits that I saw in the sky, the swaying stars? . . . I suppose they were ice crystals on the dome, reflecting the Phobos light.”

Will shrugged. “Maybe they were ice crystals and spirits.”

John was startled by the suggestion. “Perhaps my science background is intruding.”

“I think you are blessed with multiple insights. The scientific is one; the spiritual is another.”

John bowed his head slightly. “Thank you. Phobos will be up this afternoon, and I’ll take a close look. I don’t remember seeing a face in her before, either.”

“I haven’t. I’m intrigued by the glowing patch on the eastern horizon. There is a special spot on the escarpment east and a bit north of the dacha; a natural bridge. It was formed when flowing water ate out a tunnel under a lava flow.”

“Really? I’ll have to see whether that was in the right spot.”

The attaché rang; a videophone message was coming in. Will ignored it. “So, what do you think it means?”

“I don’t know. I’ve asked Big Toe for his opinion.” There was a long pause. The silence was broken only by the beeping videophone, which neither heard. “Mars is alive. This world is filled with wakan. Wakan means the unknowable, incomprehensible dimension of things; you could translate it as the sacred in something, or even the spirit of something. It isn’t just Paul and Joseph, or your mother in law. It isn’t just the ghosts of the various spheruloides species that have been catalogued. It’s the rocks that blasted the craters; their spirits are here, the shattered remnants of ancient worlds. It’s the rocks themselves. It’s the particles of pulverized dust coating everything. Wakan fills this world. It’s lela wakan, very sacred. I think that’s what I learned.”

“And what does that mean to you?”

John looked at him “You ask difficult questions! It means I am in relationship with this world, just as I was on our home world, on my home land. It means this can be my home land as well. It means we have to learn to respect this world, just as we have to respect the Earth. It means the sacred is here; that Wakan Tanka, the Great Incomprehensible, is here.”

“I agree,” said Will. “Because I pray. I hope that, some day, it will be possible for you to share this experience with others. That is up to you, of course. Many people are not ready for it. There will always be people who will dismiss this; psychiatrists who will attribute it to mania or sleep deprivation; humanists who will smile and say they appreciate the myth you’ve brought to Mars. But there will be people of faith who will appreciate what you’ve experienced. I hope it will be possible for them to learn from this.”

The videophone began to ring again, and this time the tone was faster. Will looked at the attaché’s screen; it was from Andries Underwood and the message description included an exclamation mark. “I’m sorry, John, this seems to be urgent,” Will said. John nodded and left the office. Will reached over and opened the call.

“Good sol, Will! I called a minute ago and you didn’t answer!”

“I was having a private conversation. What’s the situation? There are no warning bells on the bridge.”

“No, this is not an emergency; this is a victory! Will, we’ve found gold, lots of it!”

“Where?”

“About twenty-three klicks northeast of the landing strip! Very close; we’ve been searching as much as one hundred kilometers from here! We’ve been looking in the loose, most recent gravel bars and other placer deposits. We haven’t done badly; we’ve recovered two tonnes of gold that way. But we started looking at the older alluvial deposits last week, and bullseye, we found a boulder conglomerate full of nuggets!”

“Lithified?”

“Yes; hard as rock! It’s Noachian, the remains of a catastrophic flood, possibly triggered by the Cassini impact event, then lithified by silica. We just pried a gold and quartz block out of the conglomerate that weighs thirty kilos, and the mass is half gold! It’s incredible! There are a lot of smaller nuggets, too! But we’ll need all the explosives you can send, the two drills, and at least one more ranger if you can spare it. That probably means three or four more people, too.”

“Okay.” Will paused to think. “We need an evaluation of the deposit; its dimensions and potential for gold recovery—”

“Will, we’re talking about a deposit two thousand meters long, a hundred meters wide, and an average of fifty meters thick. . .ten million cubic meters of rock, say twenty-five million tonnes, and it’s assaying at 25 grams per tonne!”

“Write it up. Take your time and make the preliminary report as accurate and thorough as you can. We can get started here with the resupply without the report. But we need the exact details because of the mining companies. They’re fascinated.”

“I understand. Can you send a shuttle? That’s the fastest and even the safest way to get things to us. You can’t fly the equipment down by sunwing and driving it down would take two weeks.”

“We’ll probably have to use a shuttle. You’ve got the Hadriaca and the Apollinaris refueled, right?”

“They each have thirty-five tonnes of fuel; enough for a one-way flight anywhere on the planet for both and a two-way flight anywhere between Cassini and the Outpost for one of them. That’s basically the requirement to fly another shuttle from the Outpost.”

“Okay. I’ll get Érico started, planning a shuttle flight down. Get us a good report in the next twenty-four hours. I’ll probably fly down.”

 

© 2004 Robert H. Stockman

 

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