CLIMBING OLYMPUS

Rachel Dycek

Rachel DycekBy the time Rachel brought the long-distance rover back to Lowell Base, meandering aimlessly across the Martian landscape as she gathered her thoughts, the distant sun had already fallen behind the line of crags called the Spine.

Operations manager Bruce Vickery was there to meet her at the parking shelter, hands on stocky hips, suited up and ready to clamber into Percival as soon as Rachel opened the airlock. The speakerpatch in Vickery’s helmet flattened his annoyance.

“Hey, Rachel, I needed to go out a lot earlier than this. You were scheduled to be back hours ago.” Vickery turned his back on her and popped open the rover’s storage compartment, slinging in a backpack of tools he had with him. It landed inside the bin with a hollow thunk. “It’s going to be damn tough to calibrate those meteorology stations without the sun.”

The strong tone in his usually even voice triggered her defensiveness, and she turned to him. The base had two long-distance rovers, after all. “Why couldn’t you take Schiaparelli?”

“It’s being serviced. Al-Somak is using it to meet the lander tomorrow, and he wants it bright and clean. I’ve been waiting here for you for hours. I wish you wouldn’t do this to me, Rachel.” Vickery sounded like an exasperated father trying to talk sense into his teenaged daughter. Rachel felt small, and hated herself for feeling that way.

“Take it then. It is all yours.” Behind her, she heard Vickery climb through the sphincter airlock. The thousands of small telescoping legs reset themselves with a whisking noise, levering the body of the rover high enough off the ground to clear any obstacles on the terrain. Like an impatient bull, Percival snorted a thin whistle of cold steam as it cleared its exhausts.

Still sluggish from her self-indulgent afternoon, Rachel walked along the packed-dirt path to the outer module’s entrance, then let herself through the main airlock into the changing area. She used one of the wall-mounted vacuum hoses to remove as much of the red dust as she could from her suit, then disconnected her helmet. The air smelled sour and metallic, with a musty, carbolic smell from the air-regenerating unit. She switched off the backpack and slipped it from her shoulders, then shucked her suit. Glowing resistance heaters shed small pools of warmth in the changing area, but they could not beat back the ever-present cold of Mars. The changing stool felt like ice against her bare legs as she tucked the suit components in the designated storage cubicle.

With a damp poly-sponge, Rachel rubbed down her body to remove the sweat and grit. The cold dampness made her skin tingle, like sitting in a sauna and then running across the snow in the camp in Siberia where she had secretly performed the adin surgeries.

As she dressed in a clean jumpsuit, Rachel checked her trim and compact body. Even under the one-third gravity, she had not degenerated to flab over ten years. At fifty she looked hard, annealed by the fire of human scorn and the cold of Mars.

Back on Earth, though, in the oppressive gravity of her forced retirement, she would become a fossil soon enough.

Rachel made her way through the bulkhead door into the narrow corridor connecting the inflatable modules. As she passed into the central module that housed the main computers and communications facilities, Dr. Evrani, the meteorologist, burst in on her, waving his hands and simmering in anger. He was a little man, scrawny and hyperactive, as if his body were too small to contain the energy he generated. Even after five years of listening to his loopy Pakistani accent, Rachel still found him hard to follow. He reminded her of the Indian inquisitor that had dissected her on the world newsnets during the UN adin hearings, which might partially account for her dislike of Evrani.

“You were not here, Commissioner!” Evrani said, his pecan-brown eyes wide, as if Rachel had somehow forgotten about being gone all day. “I had to accept the transmission myself from Commissioner Keefer in the orbiter. How could you forget? Why were you gone at a time like this?”

“So what did he want?” She walked to her desk screen and activated it. Leaning over the clutter in her personal area, Rachel read the message herself even as Evrani summarized it.

“They have reached orbital insertion on schedule and all systems have checked out. They will deploy the lander at our local sunup—”

“—tomorrow morning,” Rachel said, on top of his words. “Then everything is on schedule and routine? No problems?” She glared at him with cold gray eyes. “So what are you so upset about?”

Evrani shook his narrow, big-knuckled finger at her. “You should not go out of sight alone in a rover. We are on the buddy system. Those are the regulations.”

Rachel scowled at him. “I will take your words under advisement, Dr. Evrani.” In the back of her mind, she wondered how Evrani had ever passed all the human factors tests. Cooped up together under pressure on Lowell Base, the fifty people had broken into a bunch of insulated cliques, and Evrani had become the tattletale.

Tomorrow morning, Commissioner Jesús Keefer would land, and she had to prepare to be rotated home. After two weeks Captain Rubens would have refueled his interplanetary shuttle from the oxygen mining station on Phobos and prepared for the launch window to return to Earth. Rachel Dycek and five others would be rotated back home. Settling into her retirement, she would sit back in a comfortable dacha on Earth, maybe go on a speaking tour, maybe write her memoirs of the days of the adin project, or publish a final report on the success of the dva phase of human augmentation.

Though her work on Mars had been superseded by other terraforming concerns, Rachel did not want to go back home. Adapted humans had always been intended as a short-term phase in the overall scheme. But she was having trouble adjusting to that reality.

Erasing her screen, Rachel shut down the terminal. Feeling claustrophobic in the confined module, she envied the dvas out there in the open, breathing the air, feeling Martian breezes against polymer-insulated skin. “Excuse me, Dr. Evrani. I have a lot of preparations to make before tomorrow.”

Rachel made her way to the tiny cramped cabin that had been her private quarters for a decade—“cozy,” the habitation engineers had called it. No doubt they would have said the same thing about a coffin.

Rachel folded down her bunk and snapped it out from the wall with a tight clack to lock it into place, then adjusted the controls to soften the mattress. She lounged back on the thin, spongy layer and pulled a thermal blanket over herself to keep warm. As she closed her eyes, Rachel thought back, trying to count how much of her life she had wasted on augmentation projects.

For twenty-one years of her career she had been involved with the concept, initially as an assistant, then section leader, then overall head of the adin project while hiding in a secret installation built within the Neryungri labor camp. She had started the job when she was twenty-nine, rosy-cheeked and idealistic, with enough stamina to surpass her competitors and no politics to speak of—nothing to offend the changing groups in control of the Sovereign Republics. She had excelled in medical school, practiced surgery for two years, before her real work had begun. Separating from her husband Sergei after a lackluster marriage, Rachel had vanished into the labor camps at the far edge of the Earth.

As she worked her way up, she learned all phases of the project, supervising specialists who took care of the specific details in each area—artificial lungs, mechanical secondary diaphragm muscles, long-chain polymer skin insulation, genetically modified hemoglobin molecules to process precious oxygen more efficiently. She studied autopsies on the failures to improve the process for next time.

In the cold isolation of Siberia, under the gray skies of incessant winter, she had fallen into a brief affair with one of the other doctors. But the intensity of Rachel’s personality, her single-mindedness, had driven off close relationships all her life; the doctor had requested a transfer shortly afterward.

Throughout her career, Rachel marched straight ahead in a lockstep that allowed for no distraction, no deviation. Now she felt as if she had taken three steps beyond a precipice before realizing that the bridge was out beneath her feet. The adins and the dvas, were her life: her substitute for everything she had left behind along the way.

Rachel remembered the eleven months of intensive interviews with hardened prisoners who grasped at any sort of straw that might mitigate their sentences. She and her assistants searched for volunteers, conducted endless physiological and psychological tests, preliminary surgical inspections.

The sheer numbers of people were a blur, and she often forgot that they were people—not specimens. But she gave them hope, and they gave her a chance to make an impact for the Sovereign Republics, which sorely needed something to regain their lost prestige in the international community.

Many types of government had been tried since the fall of communism, and now the loose federation had many different flags, currencies, and languages. But the Sovereign Republics had been weaker many times before. The people viewed the seventy-five years of Communist control as a part of their history, a stumble in the progress of time, much the same as the Mongol invasions, the Polish invasions, the oppression of the Teutonic knights.

The “united Earth” terraforming project had been an enormous drain on the world’s treasury, siphoning off resources that—some said—might better be spent at home. Fifty years had passed, and still no humans smiled under the olive sky or romped through the rust-colored sands, as UNSA propaganda had promised. People were tired of waiting; the work seemed an unending quest, led by fools. With its own severe economic problems, the Sovereign Republics had declined to take an active role in making Mars fit for human inhabitants.

Officially, that is….

In her quarters, Rachel cracked open her gray eyes and searched for the chronometer on the wall. Tomorrow morning Keefer’s lander would be down, bringing another dozen workers for Lowell Base. Twelve hours from now, she would be shaking the hand of her replacement, welcoming him to Mars. She would make the transition in a politically smooth way, helping him to take over his new duties, helping him to take duties away from her. Rachel didn’t know how she could manage to be cordial. But she would, somehow.

She looked on the wall, at the yellowed hardcopy news clipping she had sandwiched between layers of transparent polymer.

“FRANKENSTEIN” DOCTOR EXONERATED OF CHARGES BY UN PANEL:

SECOND PHASE TO CONTINUE

The gray-eyed Rachel in the photograph, looking exhausted but ecstatic, seemed no younger than she looked now. Perhaps the Martian environment had stopped her aging, or perhaps she had done all her aging at once during the hearings. Her cinnamon-brown hair had become streaked with metallic gray. Her nose was a bit too large for her face, her lips too full. Her eyebrows traced dark arches highlighting a flinty gaze. She had never managed to be photogenic.

“FRANKENSTEIN DOCTOR” the newsnets had called her. Vivid memories lurched to the front of her mind, like screams from the depths of a nightmare.