Seventeen

A Day in the Life of a Martian

Roger could not see the gentle shower of microwave energy coming down from Deimos, but he could feel it as a luxury of warmth. When he was nearby he preened his wings in it, soaking up strength. Outside the beam he carried part of it with him in his accumulators. There was no reason for him to hoard his strength now. More strength poured down from the sky whenever Deimos was above the horizon. There were only a few hours in each day when neither the sun nor the farther moon were in the sky, and his storage capacity was multiply adequate for those brief periods of drought.

Inside the domes, of course, the metal-foil antennae stole the energy before it reached him, so he limited his time with Brad and Kayman. He didn’t mind. It was what he preferred. Every day the gap between them widened anyway. They were going back to their own planet. Roger was going to stay on his. He had not told them that yet, but he had made up his mind. Earth had begun to seem like a pleasant, quaint foreign place he had visited once and hadn’t much liked. The pains and perils of terrestrial humanity were no longer his. Not even when they had been his own personal pains, and his own fears.

Inside the dome Brad, wearing G-string undershorts and a demand tank of oxygen, was happily planting carrot seedlings between the stands of Siberian oats. “Want to give me a hand, Rog?” His voice was reedily high in the thin atmosphere; he took frequent sips of oxygen from the mouthpiece that hung next to his chin, and then when he breathed out the voice was fractionally deeper, but still strange.

“No, Don wants me to pick up some more specimens for him. I’ll be gone overnight.”

“All right.” Brad was more interested in his seedlings than in Torraway, and Torraway was no longer very interested in Brad. Sometimes he would remind himself that this man had been his wife’s lover, but in order for that to feel like anything he had to remind himself that he had had a wife. It didn’t seem worth the effort. More interesting was the challenge of the high cupped valley just over that farther range of hills, and his own private farm plot. For weeks now he had been bringing samples of Martian life back to show Don Kayman. They were not plentiful — two or three together in a clump, perhaps, and nothing else for hundreds of meters around. But they were not hard to find — not for him. Once he had learned to recognize their special color — the hard UV lengths that their crystal caps reflected away from them, to let them survive in the harsh radiation environment — it was reflexive to filter his vision bands to see only that wavelength in color, and then they stood out a kilometer away.

So he had brought back a dozen of them, and then a hundred; there seemed to be four distinct varieties, and it was. not long before Kayman asked him to stop. He had all the samples he needed to study, and half a dozen more of each in formalin to bring back to Earth, and his gentle conserving soul was uneasy at despoiling the ecology of Mars. Roger began replanting some of them near the dome. He told himself it was to see whether the overflow of energy beamed down from the generator did native life forms any harm.

But what it was, he knew in his heart, was gardening. It was his planet, and he was beautifying it for himself.

He let himself out of the dome, stretched luxuriously for a moment in the double warmth of sun and microwave and checked his batteries. They could use topping off; he deftly plugged the leads into his own backpack and the gently whining accumulator at the base of the dome, and without looking toward the lander, said, “I’m going to take off now, Don.”

Kayman’s voice responded instantly over the radio. “Don’t be out of touch more than two hours, Roger. I don’t want to have to come looking for you.”

“You worry too much,” said Roger, detaching the leads and stowing them away.

“You’re only superhuman,” grumbled Kayman. “You’re not God. You could fall, break something—”

“I won’t. Brad? So long.”

Inside the triple dome Brad looked up over the armpit-high stalks of wheat and waved. His features could not be made out through the filmy domes; the plastic had been formulated to cut out the worst of the UV, and it blurred some of the visual wavelengths as well. But Roger could see him wave. “Take care. Give us a call before you go out of line of sight so we’ll know when to start worrying.”

“Yes, Mother.” It was curious, Roger reflected. He was actually feeling rather fond of Brad. The situation interested him as an abstract problem. Was it because he was a gelding? There was testosterone circulating in his system, the steroid implant they had given him took care of that. His dreams were sometimes sexual, and sometimes of Dorrie, but the hollow despair and the anger he had lived with on Earth had attenuated on Mars.

He was already almost a kilometer from the dome, running along easily in the warm sunlight, each step coming down precisely where it would find secure footing and each thrust lifting him surely an exact distance up and ahead. His vision was on low-energy surveillance mode, taking in everything in a moving teardrop shape whose point was where he was and whose lobe, fifty meters across, was more than a hundred meters in front of him. He was not unaware of the rest of the landscape. If something unusual had appeared — above all if something had moved — he would have seen it at once. But it did not distract him from his musings. He tried to remember what sex with Dorrie had been like. It was not hard to recall the objective, physical parameters. Much harder to feel what he had felt in bed with her; it was like trying to recall the sensuous joy of a chocolate malted when he was eleven, or his first marijuana high at fifteen. It was easier to feel something about Sulie Carpenter, although as far as he could remember he had never touched any part of her but her fingertips, and then by accident. (Of course, she had touched every part of him.) He had been thinking, from time to time, about Sulie’s coming to Mars. It had seemed threatening at first. Then it had seemed interesting, a change to look forward to. Now — Now, Roger realized, he wanted it to happen soon, not in four days, when she was due to land after her pilot completed the on-site tests of the 3070 and the MHD generator. Soon. They had exchanged a few casual greetings by radio. He wanted her closer than that. He wanted to touch her—

His wife’s image formed in front of him, wearing that same monotonous sunsuit. “Better check in, honey,” she said.

Roger stopped and looked around, on full vision mode in the Earth-normal spectrum.

He was almost halfway to the mountains, a good ten kilometers from the dome and the lander. He had been going uphill and the flat terrain had begun to be rolling; he could barely see the top of the dome, and the tip of the antennas of the lander was a tiny spike beyond it. Without conscious effort his wings deployed themselves behind him to make his radio signal more directional, as a shouting man might megaphone his hands around his mouth. “Everything’s okay,” he said, and Don Kayman’s voice answered inside his head: “That’s fine, Roger. It’ll be dark in three hours.”

“I know.” And after dark the temperature would plummet; six hours from now it might touch a hundred and fifty degrees below zero. But Roger had been out in the dark before, and all of his systems had performed beautifully. “I’ll check with you again when I’m high enough on a slope to reach you,” he promised, turned and started once more toward the mountains. The atmosphere was hazier than it had been. He allowed himself to feel his skin receptors and realized that there was a growing wind. Sandstorm? He had lived through them, too; if it got bad he would hedgehog somewhere until it stopped, but it would have to be very bad to make that necessary. He grinned inside himself — he had not reliably learned how to do it with his new face — and loped on…