Zieman nodded wordlessly, thinking, If he returns. If.

SOL 40: MORNING

Just as he had expected — no, as he had known — there was a stairway cut into the sheer wall of the cliff, leading up to the city built in the giant cleft high above.

Jamie stood in the brightly warm sunlight of New Mexico even though the sky was a delicate Martian pink. He slid his helmet visor up, knowing he no longer needed his hard suit to protect him. He was coming home, his true home, where two worlds met and blended in the unity and balance that he had unconsciously sought since childhood. For the first time in his life Jamie felt in harmony with the world, with both his worlds, with all the worlds.

He climbed the stairs slowly, almost unwilling to end the happiness, the peacefulness of this moment. Yet he knew that at the top his people would be waiting to welcome him. Like an ancient priest of the Old Ones climbing the temple stairs in solemn dignity, Jamie moved his booted feet from one stone stair to the next. He saw that the steps had been cut into the living rock long ages ago; their stone surfaces had been worn smooth and saddle-backed by countless generations of climbing feet.

Piece by piece his protective hard suit disappeared as he climbed. His helmet vanished first, and he could drink in the clean cool air of the true world. Then his boots, the torso shell, the leggings. By the time he reached the top he was naked and possessed nothing except the bear fetish that his grandfather had given him hundreds of millions of kilometers ago.

Sweat trickled along his flanks, his legs, ran down his face. The air was cool but the sun warmed him, filled him with its life-giving energy.

He was nearing the top of the stairway. He could hear the breeze sighing, hear fully leafed trees up there calling to him. He looked down at the fetish in his hand and the bear smiled at him. Only a few steps more, my son, said his grandfather’s voice. Only a few steps more.

Jamie reached the top. The city was there, just as he had known it would be. Magnificent. Straight clean walls of fresh adobe brick. Tier upon tier of houses rising to the top of the cleft where the overhanging rock sheltered them like the protective arm of god.

"It is good," Jamie said. "Ya’aa’tey."

His grandfather appeared before him, young and strong and naked as Jamie himself. "It is good," his grandfather said.

All the people poured out of their homes, thronging into the central plaza where Jamie stood with his grandfather, smiling, singing, carrying wreaths of flowers that they put over Jamie’s head. The women were beautiful, the men strong and handsome.

Yet Jamie turned to his grandfather. "I can’t stay. The others — they need me."

"I know," said the old man. "Go in beauty, my grandson."

Jamie’s eyes snapped open.

The dream had been so vivid, so real. He dug his hand into the pocket of his coveralls and felt the fetish resting there, a warm comforting lump of stone. Only then did he allow himself to relax in his bunk and take stock of the new day.

His entire body ached with a dull sullen pain that sapped his strength. His head throbbed, pulse thumping in his ears like a drum slowly beating out the cadence of death. Next to him Connors moaned softly in his troubled sleep, his breath whistling slightly.

Quietly, Jamie slid out of his bunk. His legs were almost too weak to hold him up. For long minutes he gripped the edge of Joanna’s bunk, uncertain that he could squeeze past the bunks and make it to the lavatory. She was huddled in a fetal position. Ilona lay facedown, unmoving. For a moment Jamie feared she might be dead, but then he saw the slow rhythm of her breathing.

He pushed past the bunks, grabbing at the hand grips set into the bulkheads to make his way to the lav. In the polished metal mirror above the tiny sink his face stared back at him, gaunt, unshaven, hollow eyed. Slowly, with the deliberate care of a drunk or an old, old man, Jamie washed his face and hands. When he brushed his teeth the brush came away bloody. The teeth even felt loose in his gums. He peeled off his night coveralls and pulled on his day pair. Not much between them, he realized. They were both wrinkled and smelly.

The others did not begin to awaken until he had mixed himself a glass of instant orange drink and a mug of steaming coffee. They got up slowly, looking as exhausted and pain wracked as Jamie himself felt. Gaunt faces, red eyes, hands trembling, legs almost too weak to hold them up.

They barely said a dozen words to one another. Mumbles. Grunts. Sighs that turned into gasping, labored breathing.

Jamie slid past them, the coffee mug in one hand, and forced himself to the cockpit. Sliding into the right-hand seat, he punched up the comm unit and put in a call to the dome.

Paul Abell’s face appeared on the screen. He was smiling — weakly, but smiling. His cheeks and chin looked freshly shaved, slightly red. His bulging frog’s eyes were clearer than Jamie remembered them.

"Good morning!" Abell was almost cheerful.

"How are you?" Jamie’s voice was a scratchy croak.

"Yang’s vitamin doses seem to be helping," Abell said brightly. "Got a good night’s sleep. I feel better this morning than I have in days. Not one hundred percent yet, but better."

"That’s good."

Abell pointedly did not ask how Jamie felt. He could see.

"Heard from the Russkies yet?"

"Who?"

"Mikhail and Ivshenko. They ought to be just about at the canyon’s edge by now."

"No. No contact yet."

"This morning, for sure," Abell said.

"This morning," Jamie echoed.

"Be careful now," Vosnesensky muttered. "The horizon is so close that you could become confused."

Ivshenko, driving the rover, shot him a dark glance. "Mikhail Andreivitch, I have had as many hours in the simulators and in training exercises as you, have I not? I drove this beast most of the night, did I not? Why do you constantly…"

"Stop!" Vosnesensky bellowed. Ivshenko tromped his booted foot on the brakes so hard that they would have both pitched into the canopy if Vosnesensky had not insisted that they wear the safety harnesses. Tony Reed, standing behind Vosnesensky’s seat, lunged into the chair back with a painful grunt.

The Grand Canyon of Mars stretched out in front of them, its rim a bare twenty meters from the rover’s nose. Ivshenko gaped, jaw slack, chest heaving.

"Good god!" Reed gasped.

"That is what I was trying to warn you about," Vosnesensky said calmly. "What appears at first to be the crest of another ridge is actually the edge of the precipice."

"You… you should have said so."

Vosnesensky chuffed out a weary sigh, like a teacher disappointed with a pupil.

The canyon was filled with mist, billowing gently in the morning sun, looking almost thick enough to walk on. From inside the cockpit they could not see the bottom of the canyon; it was far too deep for that even if the air had been perfectly clear. To their right and left the cliff walls marched off beyond the horizon, red rock battlements, rugged with untold eons of weathering, tall and proud. Looking straight across the canyon, Vosnesensky thought he could make out the jagged outline of the opposite wall, faint and wavering in the hazy distance. So far away.

"I don’t see the landslide," Reed said.

"Nor do I. We must have drifted off course during the night. I will take a navigational fix. Dmitri Iosifovitch, you contact the base and tell them we have reached the canyon — without falling into it."

Ivshenko muttered to himself as he leaned over slightly to reach the comm unit switches. He did not see the slight grin on his commander’s face.

Within a quarter hour they had pinpointed their location with a fix from one of the navigation satellites deployed around the planet and were on their way to the lip of the landslide, some five kilometers westward.