1

Hike

It was a clean whack. The golf ball soared high into the violet sky and momentarily disappeared from sight. Then the ball reappeared against the pinker sky closer to the horizon. It landed in a cluster of boulders to the right of the fairway.

Roger Anderson pushed the screen built into the front of his spacesuit downward into a horizontal position and waited a moment for the computer to display the result of his shot. He smiled. “Eight hundred fifteen yards; not bad.”

“Best shot of the hole,” agreed Skip Carson. “But even though I’m farther from the hole, I think I’ll have a better shot; I’m not in a nest of boulders!”

“That’s going to be a hard shot,” agreed Rosa. “I was in there once, and I bounced off of boulders twice.”

“Maybe I’m lucky to be where I am,” said Brian Stark.

“Not really; three hundred yards away and you broke our number 3!” replied Roger.

“These clubs weren’t designed for fifty below,” replied Brian.

“We have to be gentle,” replied Rosa. “Fortunately we have another one on the way.”

“Yes, but the idea was to have two complete sets of clubs,” pointed out Roger.

“I’ll send you a replacement. In 2037.” Brian had to chuckle at the thought of sending a replacement two years hence.

“I’ll probably send the Aurorae Golf Club a whole new set; you need the newest,” replied Skip. “Much better; you’ll see. And the expert I emailed says they’ll deal with Martian weather, too.” He turned to Brian. “And I’ve got to get you some lessons how to golf. Once we’re back home, I’ll take you to Pebble Beach.”

“I’ll probably be golfing the way we do on Mars for the first six months and missing everything,” replied Brian.

“You’re missing everything here,” commented Skip.

“You’re a member of Pebble Beach?” asked Roger.

Skip nodded, though it was hard to tell in his spacesuit. “Yes indeed, and I’ve paid my dues every year from here. By the way, I plan to remain a member of the Aurorae Golf Club as well. You can count on my support even after I’m on Earth.”

“The Treasurer thanks you,” replied Rosa. “Maybe Pebble Beach can adopt Aurorae; we’re the finest golf course on Mars.”

They all laughed at that; it was the only golf course on Mars, and after ten years it was still only partially complete.

They began to climb onto their buggies, small single-person all terrain vehicles they had equipped with golf club carrying bags for that sol. Just then Will Elliott, Governor of Mars Operations, and his ten year old son Marshall walked up. “Out for a hike?” asked Roger over the common frequency.

“We went to the bottom of Silcock,” replied Marshall. It was a two-hundred meter crater nearby; the sixth hole ended and the seventh hole started on its rim.

“He figured out the imbrication in the deposits,” added Will, a touch of pride in his voice.

“He’ll be a good geologist!” said Skip. “I bet you’ll see that crater a lot in the next decade.”

“Why?” asked Marshall.

“Every high school and university geology class will take a field trip there,” agreed Will, nodding. Skip smiled. Will put his arm on Marshall’s shoulder. “Let’s go, geologist.” The Elliotts headed toward the Outpost along the golf path while the foursome headed the other direction in their buggies.

“Is golf that much fun, dad?”

“It’s not bad, though it’s more fun on Earth when the weather’s nice.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure it’s the best way to spend six hours in a spacesuit.”

“I’ve played a few games on our course. You hit balls a lot farther here because of the gravity, so you have to walk forever or ride everywhere. And it’s hard to swing a club in a suit; I don’t find that part very satisfying. And there’s not much nature to see; I remember one golf course I’d play on near mom’s house and I’d always see Canadian geese, deer, or something interesting.”

“No, nothing like that out here.” Marshall was silent for a minute. “Why would you see Canadian geese in Connecticut?”

“They don’t just live in Canada.”

“Oh.”

Will felt a bit sad that his son could not know much about nature on Earth, except by watching videos. The “biomes” forty or fifty meters across that made up the Outpost were more like small artificial parks, and they were devoid of wild animals except bees, butterflies, and a few canaries.

They continued toward the Outpost; from their approach on the northeast side they could see the four original twelve-meter habitats in two rows, covered with three meters of dirt and ice for radiation protection and then shielded by white plastic, which made them look like large igloos; beyond them were a pair of forty-meter bubbles, Yalta, Catalina; beyond them another pair of forty-meter bubbles, Riviera and Shikoku; then a fifty-meter pair, Huron and agricultural Shenandoah; beyond them was the bubble of the newest biome, sixty-meter Colorado, which was inflated but only partially completed inside. They couldn’t see the buried industrial facility on the north side of the biomes or the spaceport, a scattering of launching and landing pads flung among the stone fields south of the Outpost beyond Boat Rock.

“Dad, can we climb to the top of Boat Rock?” asked Marshall.

“I thought you were tired.”

“I was, but I’d like to climb to the top. I love it up there.”

Will considered. “Okay, but we have to watch the time a bit; supper’s soon.”

They chatted about Marshall’s homework—he was in fifth grade and was doing a lot with rock collections outside and insect collections inside—as they trudged along the trail, occasionally stopping and turning to see each other’s faces through the helmets, otherwise contented to hear each other’s voices over the radio. In fifteen minutes they reached the base of the cliff-edged mesa at its eastern end, where Face Rock, a large detached outlier of the mesa, had the profile of a man’s face when looked at from the north-northwest side. They walked through Aurorae Park, a hectare of sand sculptures, colorful mazes of natural materials, and wind-sculptured rocks brought from all over the planet. They passed the Memorial where the remains of two fallen astronauts and of one infant lay, perpetually frozen, their names inscribed on a sandstone façade that could hold many more names, and probably would hold them some day. Then they set out along the base of Boat Rock until they reached the natural ramp on which a flagstone stair had been built. At the top they carefully climbed up the stairs cut in a crevasse in the bedrock until they reached the top.

Boat Rock was a mass of sedimentary rock three hundred meters long, two hundred meters wide, and one hundred meters high, with a smooth, curved top like the overturned bottom of a boat. Billions of years of wind erosion had polished the surface and blown all large loose material off. Except for one small remnant of an impact crater marring the surface, there were no natural irregularities. Marshall took the lead and headed for the crater; he wanted to compare it to what he had seen earlier that sol. The bowl was small, about thirty meters across and ten deep, irregular, and bouldery. He took a sample and asked his father, the principal author of the principal work on Martian geology, a few questions. They turned west briefly because they were near the far end of the mesa and walked to “the point,” a prominence that faced due west toward “Layercake Mesa,” a four-kilometer long continuation of the same outcrop, which was separated from Boat Rock by a natural gap called “the Notch.” Layercake was notable for its fifteen slowly-turning wind turbines. It had room for about thirty more and they could see work being done on a new one in the distance.

Marshall looked south, toward the spaceport. The nearest Mars shuttle—a conical vehicle six meters across at the base and thirteen meters high, resting on six legs at the center of a dirt pad—was about three kilometers away. Closer to them was the three-kilometer runway for sunwings, large gossimer-winged aircraft covered with solar panels that could carry passengers and light cargo all the way around Mars in three days.

“Dad, when do you think I’ll get to fly in a shuttle?”

Will considered. “Well, you’re only ten. I suppose when you graduate from high school, if you decide to go to university on Earth, you’ll fly in one then.”

“I don’t want to go to Earth; I want to see Phobos.” The boy turned and pointed to Mars’s inner moon, which had just risen above the western horizon a few minutes earlier. Marshall had always been good at spotting Phobos and Deimos.

“I suppose if you go to Mariner Institute of Technology and take a course in the geology of Phobos, we’ll fly the whole class up for a long field trip.”

“Really? That would be cool. I bet they don’t fly lunar geology classes from the Earth to the moon.”

“No, it’s way too expensive.”

“Dad, do you and mom want to go back to Earth?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because whenever university comes up, you say I have to decide, but I don’t want to decide if that means you and mom have to go back to Earth.”

Will smiled. “Tell you what, when the time comes to decide, we’ll all talk together, okay? Don’t worry about your mother and I.”

“Okay.” Marshall looked at Phobos. “It would be nice to meet grandma. But I don’t think I want to go back to Earth otherwise. I can always go to Martech.”

“If you want. It doesn’t offer many courses right now, but by then it’ll offer a lot more, and there are thousands of distance-learning courses you could take through the MIT-Sorbonne Consortium. And by the time you’re ready to go to college, grandma will be almost 90; she may not be alive any more.”

“I don’t know I’d feel safe on Earth, either; there are so many murders there!”

“Yes, but remember there are billions of people and the few murders get a lot of attention. It’s not that dangerous.” Will had to admit to himself, though, that he worried about a naïve kid from Mars trying to negotiate the vast array of choices and dangers of urban life. Not to mention the exposure to dozens of germs his system had never experienced before, and dealing with almost three times as much gravity as his body was used to.

“But if I went to Earth, would I go to the U.S., or Scotland, or even somewhere else in Europe?”

“You could go to either; you’re a citizen of both the U.S. and the E.U.”

“I know.” Marshall seemed lost in thought, reflecting on these places that he knew about only from television.

“Are you wondering whether you’re an American, or a European?”

“I guess. I’m wondering about being a citizen of Mars.”

“Well, you could think of yourself as a citizen of Mars, I guess. We really don’t have citizenship. What we have is ‘residency.’”

“What’s the difference?”

“It’s hard to explain. Mars isn’t a nation; it’s too small. Citizenship comes with being a nation. But we live here and we participate in society here, so we’re residents.”

“I see.” But he seemed dissatisfied with that answer. Will put an arm on his shoulder. “Ten years ago when you were born here, I would have said you were a dual citizen of the United States and European Union and left it at that. Five years ago I would have said you were partly from Mars, partly from the U.S., and partly from Europe. But now I guess we’re Marsian, whether we have some other citizenship or not.”

Marshall nodded. “I don’t know what it feels like to be American or European. I feel Marsian.”

“Of course. You wear a spacesuit when you go outside and you don’t shop in a mall. We have to live in a very different way; we have a different culture. We’re all Marsians here, now.”

Will found the term ‘Marsian’ strange on his lips. They had been using it for less than a year, since he had made a speech as Governor of Mars Operations and the President of the United States had reacted by laughingly called them all ‘Martians’ in public comments. The residents of the Red Planet had adopted the term of derision with pride, though they had started to spell it with an “s” and pronouncing it “Mar-zi-an.”

“Dad, do you think Mars will ever be a nation of its own?”

“Yes, and you may live to see it. We need more people up here, that’s all. But even though there are only 150 or so of us right now, we’ve had to develop our own way of doing things and working together; our own culture. So we’re Marsians anyway, nation or not.” Will glanced at the sun. “Come on, we better get home. It’s getting late.”

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