The Mars of Malcontents

Chapter One

Chapter One

Feverish Fleeing

For the first time in her life, Valentina del Toro was completely alone. No cousins clamoring around her demanding food and attention, no brother wrapped around her leg impeding her movements as she went about her chores, no crowds of fellow shoppers jostling her elbows as she traded a pocketful of eggs for a small sack of lentils. All around her, all the way to the distant horizon in an immense circle around her, there was no one but her.

For the first time in her life, Valentina del Toro was outside the science station that had been her birthplace, outside the polar tunnels that had been her home since she was five, out in the dim Martian sunlight she had only rarely glimpsed through the station windows; the last glimpse was nearly a decade ago. The world around her dazzled, the dull glow from the ice under her feet broken up by glittering snaky patterns as the wind played with the loose drifts of snow that dusted the glacier tops. The orange sky above her was impossibly far away. The caverns in the mine under the ice cap were colossal, containing a small city whose lights never reached the rock above, but only now did Valentina realize how small they really were, how big her world really was. And she was still seeing only a small part of it.

The realization should have filled her with awe, wonder, some sort of happy feeling, but she had no happy feelings left. And if she didn’t keep her feet moving, the other feelings were going to catch up with her.

She bounded over the snowy wastes of the Martian ice cap, the sound of her own labored breathing reverberating inside her helmet, only occasionally glancing up at the southerly sun to keep track of the time. She knew she was near the magic moment, the point where if she went any further she would not be able to make it back home before darkness fell. She had been jogging for nearly four hours in the heavy space suit, two tanks of air and another smaller one of water weighing her down. She had thought a life filled with the labors of running a farm had left her prepared for any challenge. It was humbling how quickly she’d discovered she was wrong about that.

Only four hours down, as much again to go before she could stop. Tomorrow it would be ten hours. She wouldn’t have the late start that she’d had today; she could pace herself at a brisk walk. But still, ten hours on the march tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. She had no idea how many days it would take her just to get off the ice cap, let alone reach the equatorial cities. The ache in her joints, the weakness in her muscles that she kept pushing past by force of will, the off smell of her own sweat inside her suit all reminded her that until this morning she had been too sick to get out of bed. The last two weeks were nothing more than a few brief moments of wakefulness lost in a sea of fever dreams.

But there was no turning back. Valentina ducked her head, bounding harder. She left the magic moment behind without even slowing down. She had woken from her long illness to find her brother Arturo gone, whisked away to the equator in a corporate rocket. What choice did she have but to go after him, however she could? And the only way she could was on foot in a sort-of-stolen pressure suit.

The vernal equinox was still a few weeks off and the days were short. That had aggravated her when she’d first set out—all the hours she could be traveling lost to waiting out the night—but now she just hoped she could build up her stamina to match the days as they grew longer.

Sometime later, when the possibility of turning back was long gone, Valentina drew up briefly and took a short sip from the water tube near her mouth. Something in the suit was giving it a metallic tang, not unpleasant. Her feet were cold. Even with the running, her feet were cold. The suit’s diagnostics had all checked out OK, but clearly at least one of the systems was not quite up to spec. The indicator on her arm told her the internal temperature of her suit was 20 degrees Celsius but her toes achingly disagreed.

Valentina took another careful sip, tapping the screen with the gloved finger of her other hand. The indicator didn’t change. It calmly persisted in lying to her. She glanced at the others. The bar for water had gone down a bit. She had filled the bottle herself and reckoned what it said she’d consumed was pretty close to the mark. So that one was working properly. The air indicators were down as well, but she had no idea how to gauge their accuracy. She knew the tanks had been full when she’d locked them into the suit, but she’d never been outside before; she had no clue how much she should expect to have used up, especially jogging as she was.

She turned at the waist, to the left and then to the right. The locater went from full green to yellow, full green to yellow. She turned all the way around and it bounced down to orange, then to full green again. She was getting signals from the science station as well as the first checkpoint; that seemed to be working. So only the heating system was wonky, and even that was marginal—not a total failure.

Yet.

Valentina pushed that thought aside, resuming her rhythmic bounding over the glacier. If she was always running in the suit, her toes wouldn’t have a chance to freeze. She hadn’t planned on sleeping in the suit anyway.

Still she couldn’t help remembering don Abuelo’s old friend Pedro the rover driver. She had called him tío, and he had always had presents for her and her cousins in his many pockets, some little trinket from one of the other stations on his route. She and all her younger cousins used to run down to Hanako Willis’s machine shop to see him when he climbed out of his rover. He was always the first one out, leaving his more taciturn partner in the cab while he leapt out to greet Valentina and the others.

Until the day his partner had come out first, turning to help Pedro stumble out after. She had gotten the story later, how Pedro had gone out for only a moment in his faulty suit to get his rover engine restarted. Frostbite had blackened his face and hands, the less affected parts gone whitish-gray. She hadn’t known what was wrong with him at the time, only that something terrible had happened to him and he seemed to be dead.

Then he’d opened his mouth to gasp and Valentina’s first thought hadn’t been “he’s alive” but “he’s a ghoul.” She’d pressed a fist to her mouth to hold back her scream, but her younger cousins had shrieked and ran. He’d lived, thanks to his partner getting him to a medico straightaway, but he’d lost several fingers, the tips of his ears, and part of his nose. When he recovered he went back on his route, but the cousins never again clamored to see him. The ghoulishness hadn’t gone away; it lurked still in his shambling walk and in the twisted scar tissue of his nose and ears.

Valentina took a deeper breath to clear her mind. The image of the frostbitten face left her, but the chattering hurry-hurry-hurry voice kept on. It was timing the syllables to her steps.

The sun seemed frozen, unmoving in the sky, and Valentina’s bounds grew shorter, her pace slower. Finally, the lancinating pain under her ribs made it too hard to breathe and she had to slow to a walk. She tried to rub the pain away, but from inside the suit, she barely felt the glove pressing from the outside. She pressed harder, trying to get her thumb to massage in just the right spot to ease the stabbing, but it was useless.

Valentina laughed, although that hurt too. Her first thought upon taking don Abuelo’s suit and sneaking out of the airlock had been that finally, after a lifetime in the caverns deep under the glacier, she was going outside—out into the world.

Then she had stepped out of the airlock and realized that the ice under her booted feet felt the same as the tunnel floors, and while she could catch snowflakes on her gloved palm, she couldn’t feel them there. She hadn’t gone outside at all, not really. She’d just shifted location to a very small station that traveled with her. Looking out her helmet was pretty much the same as looking out the science station windows when she was a young girl. Only in the science station she could scratch her nose.

But her laugh now was for the irony. She had lamented not being able to go outside, but now Mars was working its way inside. Her toes were very clear on this point. She didn’t mind their complaining. She was going to worry when it stopped.

The laughter faded, leaving her dizzy, reminding her once more that just that morning she had been in her sickbed. She knew she wasn’t exactly well now; her suit indicator told her that her body temperature was still elevated, and her joints ached in a way that had nothing to do with exercise fatigue. She was crazy to be doing this, and to be doing it now. But it couldn’t wait. So much time had already been lost. He was so far away. There was no other way for her to follow but on foot.

She kept up a shambling walk, occasionally speeding back up to a bound to get the blood flowing. The sun had unfrozen and was moving down to the horizon faster than her locator was gaining bars. The checkpoint was directly ahead of her, but she had no idea how far. A more sophisticated suit system would tell her, but don Abuelo’s suit had once been his own abuelo’s suit and bordered on the outdated.

The wind picked up as the sun turned orangey-red. She couldn’t feel it, but it spun the loose snow cover in hypnotic eddies over the hard-packed ice. The only way to avoid its soporific spell was to gaze straight ahead into the sun until she saw spots.

Then the sun went below the horizon. Valentina drew to another halt. She had about another half hour of workable light to get to her destination. Maybe less; the sky behind her was already a deep purple, Phobos running toward that darkness as if fleeing the fading sun. Valentina tapped the indicator. She was doing all right for air, her tanks still about a quarter full. She felt around the top of her helmet and found the switch for the head lamp, but when she flipped it, nothing happened. She rapped the light, but there was not even a flicker.

She looked down at her hands and arms, turning them over, but she had no second built-in light. That was the problem with impetuous decisions to grab a space suit and run: one had no time to pack properly.

A memory intruded—herself that morning, although it felt like a lifetime ago already. Forcing herself onto her feet, dressing in what was closest and slipping away before Hanako came back. She couldn’t take the compassionate look her mother’s oldest friend had given her, the way she squeezed Valentina’s hand and told her it was okay to cry. Hanako with her rough mechanic’s hands and burly arms to match, Hanako with her close-cut hair and almost mannish laugh; Hanako should never be saying such things.

If she started crying she would never, ever stop. She had to get away before she broke down. And now, kilometers away in her space suit, she really couldn’t risk breaking down into tears. Valentina took a deeper breath and refocused her thoughts on her current, very specific, rational and not emotional situation.

A flashlight was probably only the first of a long line of things she was going to wish she had brought with her. Not that she could imagine trying to carry a heavy pack on top of the weight of the suit. All the pockets were full to bulging; it would have to be enough.

Valentina started moving again, this time in a loping rhythm that was faster than her walk, if not as ground-eating as bounding over the ice would have been. Her eyes scanned the horizon, searching for signs of the checkpoint, but there was no place for it to be hiding on the flat plain of ice. Further south there were fissures in the ice and places where the rock jutted up over the glacier, but this close to the pole Mars was pretty featureless. She should be able to see the checkpoint—unless it was embedded in ice.

Valentina swallowed hard but didn’t slow her pace. That was a real danger. The way station was built on top of the ice and had mechanisms that kept it up there, hydraulic legs on wide feet that could be lifted up and stepped forward onto the new surface. But they weren’t automated, they needed people to come by often enough to run them before the station got icebound. Valentina knew more about travelers than most, having spent so much of her time in Hanako Willis’s machine shop, but she had met few people who had walked to the polar station. Sometimes the rover drivers used the checkpoints, but mostly they didn’t; they packed enough supplies in the rover cabs to get them the whole way off the ice cap.

Valentina glanced at the indicator. Still green. If she had overshot a buried way station, she would know; the indicator would be showing the green behind her.

She kept up her slow jog as the sky before her darkened from purple to starry black. The ice reflected the starlight somewhat, but the only time in her life she had been in deeper darkness was the day their power generator had failed. Her mother had been out helping one of her sisters bring four sick children to the medico, and it had taken Valentina an eternity to find the door out of their cavern, back into the light.

She remembered the feel of Arturo’s hand in hers as she’d groped along the walls. He had been five or six at the time. Her heart had been hammering in her chest as the door kept not being where she thought it should be. Arturo had been perfectly calm, occasionally squeezing her hand but never asking why she couldn’t find the way out. He had trusted her completely. And it had taken three times as long as it should have, but in the end she hadn’t let him down.

Something beeped in her helmet and Valentina slid to a stop, looking at the panel on her arm. The top green bar of her locater was flashing. Valentina looked around, then raised her arm and tried to use the light from the instrument panel to see. She turned slowly around, eyes straining against the dark. The sky was black and the ground was white, but there was no sharp contrast between; everything blurred together and refused to come into focus.

Then she saw it, behind her and to her left. She had nearly walked right past it. It was smaller than she expected, windowless and featureless in the dark. It wasn’t icebound; in fact, it had been jacked up on columns nearly half a meter higher than the ice. Valentina opened the door and climbed into the airlock, noticing a light fixture over the door. She tapped the exposed bulb, but it was as dead as her head lamp.

Valentina pushed the airlock shut behind her. There was no control panel, only an unmarked lever. She pulled down on the lever and the door in front of her slowly rose. No contained atmosphere? Valentina looked at her panel. She had air left, but not much. And the coldness in her toes had spread halfway up her calves. This was bad.

Valentina climbed under when the door was halfway up, then pushed it back down behind her before looking around. There was frost glistening on every surface: a bad sign on account of cold, but a good one because glistening meant light. Valentina turned and saw a dull greenish glow coming from a bar-shaped light over the airlock door. Then she found another source: a panel in the wall nearby. She stepped up to it, looking over all the indicators. This wasn’t even as advanced as don Abuelo’s suit; these were knobs and dials with lights to show what was on or off. Valentina sounded out the words as she moved from knob to knob. The heat was on but set to freezing—warmer than outside, but not remotely comfortable. Valentina cranked it to 18 degrees. The air recycler was on if not doing much, no one having been around lately to offset its balance by breathing. She found switches for more lights and turned them all on, bathing the room in a harsh yellowish glow.

There were bunks built into the walls, a bathroom with two showers, and a stove. Valentina cracked the seal on her helmet and lifted it off.

The air was cold and dry, sucking the moisture out of her lungs and making each breath an ache. She leaned closer to one of the vents and felt a warm rush of air on her face. The heat was definitely working, and once the frost melted off of everything the air wouldn’t be so dry. She waited until the temperature indicator said 10 degrees before peeling off the rest of the heavy suit, shaking out her layers of clothing: thin T-shirt currently clinging to her sweaty skin, heavy long-sleeved T-shirt, flannel shirt, fisherman’s sweater with roll collar, knit stockings, long underwear, and two skirts.

She had left her boots behind, as they wouldn’t fit inside the suit. She hoped she wouldn’t regret that later.

Valentina detached the air cells from the back of the suit and snapped them into the way station’s air system to refill them. Then she headed for the bathroom. The water she washed her hands with was temptingly warm, but she opted not to try out the shower. The air wasn’t warm enough yet to air-dry and she had no towels.

She refilled her water bottle but didn’t snap it back into the suit, just drank from the opening as she looked around the room. The frost had faded from the walls and now she could see that they were covered in writing.

A sudden growl from her stomach distracted her and she went back to her suit, opening the cargo pocket on the belly and taking out an energy bar. There were twenty in there, but she didn’t dare have more than one a day. Perhaps further down the line she would meet other travelers willing to share food, but in case she didn’t she had to be very careful with her rationing. She had been impetuous, but she wasn’t stupid. The things she’d learned hanging about Hanako’s machine shop listening were going to be crucial in the next few days.

Valentina chewed on the bar, too hungry to mind its likeness to wood pulp, and walked along the wall, reading what notes she could make out. There were dates and short messages. Some were personal exchanges, inside jokes she didn’t understand, but most were general comments about travel conditions, way stations in need of repairs, obstacles to avoid. She found the end of the stream of dates and read backward. The last message was dated six months ago, but that wasn’t surprising. Winter was no time for traveling on foot over the ice cap.

Valentina went back to her suit and scrounged through the cargo pocket. No pen, but she found the small envelope with the last three pills inside it. She had forgotten about those. Hanako’s son Kiyoshi had given them to her after she’d woken up but he hadn’t said anything to her about them. To the best of her memory that boy had never spoken a word to her. Still, if they were like the drugs she had bought for Ma—the ones that hadn’t saved her—then she was supposed to keep taking them until they were all gone. She put one in her mouth and washed it down with a drink from her water bottle, then put the rest back in the pocket. She hoped it would kick in soon. Now that she had stopped moving the ache in her joints was pushing close to unbearable and she knew she was getting feverish again.

If she got bad sick again, too sick to get up like she’d been for the last two weeks, too out of it to even realize her brother was gone . . . if she got that sick here, alone . . .

Valentina pressed fisted hands to her temples and forced her thoughts back to more useful places. Playing the what-if game was not going to help her now. Assess the situation, figure out what you have to work with, solve the problems one at a time. That was what her mother had always taught her. Running a large household with no funds had made them both very good at those steps.

She examined the inside of the suit, halfheartedly hoping the problem with the heating system was obvious and easy to fix, but she couldn’t see anything amiss. The wiring nestled between the two layers was all intact, nothing broken or frayed.

Not having anything else to do, Valentina curled up on one of the bunks, tucking her stockinged feet into her skirts, and sleepily regarded the wall. She wished she had something to write with. She wanted to leave a message for the next northbound traveler to bring to Hanako Willis. She owed her an apology for taking the suit. It had once been don Abuelo’s, but her mother had sold it to Hanako years ago and it wasn’t Valentina’s to take. She wasn’t sure if she would ever be back to return it. And then there were the protein bars, in no way hers and not something she could ever return even if she did go back.

She reached into her skirt pocket and found the note she had stuffed there. She didn’t read it, just held it crumpled in her hands as the weariness of the day washed over her. She already knew the shape of every carefully rendered letter by heart. It was a brief note, the most her little brother could manage. It had been left on the little table next to her medicine, next to the other, thicker letter with a corporate logo on the seal she had never broken.

Tina, it will be OK—Arturo.

“Yes, it will,” Valentina said. “It will be OK because I’m coming to get you. I have to walk the whole distance you flew over, but I’m coming. I’m coming, Arturo.”