29

Candor Chasma

For eight Martian days and eight Martian nights, the dust storm raised waves ten meters high, howled through the rigging, and pounded the little felucca northward toward the leeward shore and death for all hands, including the two moravecs.

The little green men aboard were competent sailors, but they ceased to function at night and now were inert much of the day when the dust clouds overhead blotted out the sun. To Mahnmut, when the LGM found their dark corners beneath decks and curled up in niches to keep from rolling around, it was like sailing in a ship of the dead, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where the ship arrives crewed only by corpses.

The felucca’s sails were made of a tough, lightweight polymer rather than canvas, but the ferocity of the wind out of the southeast and the particles and pebbles being blasted at them tore the sheets to shreds. The deck was no longer a safe place to be, and, during a brief interval of sunlight, twenty LGM helped Mahnmut cut a hole in the mid-deck and lower Orphu to the deck below, where Mahnmut constructed a wood and tarp shelter for the Ionian and tucked him away from the pelting wind. Mahnmut himself sensed the airborne grit getting into his seams and works when he spent too much time helping the LGM abovedecks, so he hunkered down on the lower deck near Orphu when he could, making sure his friend was roped and bolted into place as the felucca pitched forty degrees to each side and the water—now mixed with the blowing red sand and as red as blood—forced its way through every crack. A dozen of the forty little green men aboard manned handpumps every hour they were conscious, pumping out the bilge and lower decks, and Mahnmut worked alone on a pump through the long nights.

They had used the wind to good advantage before the sails, rigging, and sea anchor were all damaged, working hard, tacking hard, sailing into the wind, waves crashing over the bow, to get deeper into the central inland sea, obviously all worried about the kilometer-high cliffs behind them to the north, and covering hundreds of kilometers in the first two days of the storm. They were somewhere now between Coprates Chasma and the islands of Melas Chasma, with the huge flooded-canyon complex of Candor Chasma ahead somewhere on their starboard side.

Then the storms grew worse, the skies grew darker, the LGM tucked and tied themselves into secure places belowdecks while they shut down in the sandstorm gloom, and both the bow and stern sea anchors—two elaborate curves of polycanvas dragging on cable trailing hundreds of meters beneath the ship—gave way on the same day. Mahnmut knew from earlier sightings that there were kilometer-high cliffs to their north, and—somewhere—the broad opening to the flooded canyons of Candor Chasma—but the electrostatic charge in the dust storm was defeating his GPS receiver, and it had been two days since he’d had a decent star or sunsight. The cliffs and their doom might be a half hour away for all he knew.

“Is there a chance we might sink?” asked Orphu that afternoon of the fourth day.

“The odds are good,” said Mahnmut. He didn’t want to lie to his friend, so he tried to couch the phrase as ambiguously as he could.

“Can you swim in this storm?” asked Orphu. He’d understood that the “good” odds in that sentence was bad news for the both of them.

“Not really,” said Mahnmut. “But I can swim under the waves.”

“I’ll sink like the proverbial rock,” said Orphu with a soft rumble. “How deep did you say Valles Marineris was here?”

“I didn’t say,” said Mahnmut.

“Well, say now.”

“About seven kilometers deep,” said Mahnmut, who had echo-sounded it just an hour earlier.

“Would you crush at that depth?” asked Orphu.

“No. I’ve worked at much deeper pressures. I’m designed for it.”

“Would I crush?”

“I . . . don’t know,” said Mahnmut. In truth, he did not, but he knew that Orphu’s moravec line had been designed for the zero pressure of space and for the occasional forays into the upper reaches of a gas giant or the sulfur pits of Io—not for the punishing pressures of a saline sea seven thousand meters deep. Most likely, his friend would be crushed to the size of a crumpled can or simply implode long before he reached three kilometers of depth.

“Is there any chance of putting ashore?” asked Orphu.

“I don’t think so,” said Mahnmut. “The cliffs I saw were enormous, sheer, with giant boulders at their base. Waves must be crashing fifty or a hundred meters high there now.”

“An interesting image,” said Orphu. “Is there any chance of the LGM bringing us to safe harbor?”

Mahnmut looked around at the gloomy space on the lower decks. The LGM were tucked away and lashed to the decks like so many chlorophyll dolls, green arms and legs flopping with the wild pitching and rolling of the ship. “I don’t know,” he said, and let his tone convey his skepticism.

“Then you’ll just have to get us through this,” said Orphu.

Mahnmut did his damnedest to save them. On the fifth day, with the sky a bloody darkness and the wind howling through the tattered sails, the LGM stowed like cordwood below, and the double-wheel on the rear deck tied to hold the rudder straight, Mahnmut lowered what was left of the sails and brought out the cord and huge needles he’d seen the LGM use to mend the polycanvas; only now he was sewing while the ship was lurching to and fro, fifteen-meter waves striking it side-on, slewing the felucca around, waves washing over the mid-deck.

He rigged a smaller, makeshift sea anchor first, deploying it from the bow anchor cable to bring the bow into the wind again, trying to beat away from the unseen but ever-present lee shore behind them. He’d started work mending the triangular mainsail when the rudder cables belowdeck snapped. The felucca staggered, shipped several huge waves of red water, tore away its weatherhelm, and then slewed around and ran before the wind again, tall waves crashing over the rear deck. Only the crude sea anchor had kept them from capsizing when the rudder went. Mahnmut went to the bow, and there—as the red clouds parted for just a moment and as the felucca rose to the top of the next wind-driven wave—he could see the high cliffs of the north side of Valles Marineris visible through the spume and gloom. The ship would be on the rocks in less than an hour if the steering wasn’t fixed and fixed soon.

Mahnmut rigged a rope and went down over the stern to make sure that the rudder was still physically attached—it was, but swinging free on its massive gimbal—and then he climbed the wet rope through crashing waves, crossed the mid-deck, slid down stairways to the second deck, found the emergency steering center there—just a platform with pulleys where the LGM could steer the ship by physically pulling on the tiller ropes if the steering mechanism was damaged above, found the two large cables there slack, scrambled down another ladder to the darkness of the third deck, flicked on his chest and shoulder lamps to illuminate his way, exchanged his manipulatives for cutting edges, and hacked through the deck to where he guessed the tiller ropes had parted. The moravec had no idea if this was the way the ancient Earth feluccas had been rigged—he guessed not—but this large Martian felucca was steered by a double-wheel on the high stern deck, which turned two massive hemp ropes that parted ways, ran along each side of the ship through a system of pulleys, and then came together again to run through this long wooden shaft to the physical tiller that turned the rudder. During the weeks of voyage, he’d wandered the ship, learning the rigging and the layout of the various cable systems. If one or both of the great cables had simply parted—unthreaded by the stress of the storm—he might be able to splice them, but he had to be able to reach them. If they’d snapped farther back toward the tiller where he couldn’t reach them, everyone aboard the ship was doomed. Would he jump at the last moment, try to swim beneath the crashing surf past the high cliffs, searching for a calm harbor somewhere along the thousand kilometers of shoreline of Candor Chasma from which to drag himself from the sea? One thing was certain—he couldn’t bring Orphu of Io with him. Breaking through into the tiller rope shaft, he switched his beams to bright and looked fore and aft. He couldn’t see the cables.