is other people. I hope we don’t prove the hypothesis.”
• • •
A few days later the landers were ready. They would descend over a period of five days; only the Phobos team would stay in what was left of the Ares, guiding it to its near-docking with the little moon. Arkady, Alex, Dmitri, Roger, Samantha, Edvard, Janet, Raul, Marina, Tatiana, and Elena said their farewells, absorbed already in the task at hand, promising to descend as soon as the Phobos station was built.
The night before the descent Maya couldn’t sleep. Eventually she gave up trying, and pulled herself through the rooms and corridors, up to the hub. Every object was sharp-edged with sleeplessness and adrenaline, and every familiarity of the ship was countered or overwhelmed by some alteration, a lashed-down stack of boxes or a dead-end in a tube. It was as if they had already left the Ares. She looked around at it one last time, drained of emotion. Then she pulled herself through the tight locks, into the landing vehicle she had been assigned to. Might as well wait there. She climbed into her spacesuit, feeling, as she so often did when the real moment came, that she was only going through another simulation. She wondered if she would ever escape that feeling, if being on Mars would be enough to end it. It would be worth it just for that: to make her feel real for once! She settled into her chair.
A few sleepless hours later she was joined by Sax, Vlad, Nadia, and Ann. Her companions belted in, and they ran through the check-out together. Toggles were flipped, there was a countdown. Their rockets fired. The lander drifted away from the Ares. Its rockets fired again. They fell toward the planet. They hit the top of the atmosphere, and their single trapezoidal window became a blaze of Mars-colored air. Maya, vibrating with the craft, stared up at it. She felt tense and unhappy, focused backward rather than forward, thinking of everyone still on the Ares; and it seemed to her that they had failed, that the five of them in the lander were leaving behind a group in disarray. Their best chance for creating some kind of concord had passed, and they had not succeeded; the momentary flash of happiness she had felt while brushing her teeth had been just that, a flash. She had failed, then. They were going their separate ways, splintered by their beliefs, and even after two separate years of enforced togetherness they were, like any other human group, no more than a collection of strangers. The die was cast.
Part 3
The Crucible
It formed with the rest of the solar system, around five billion years ago. That’s fifteen million human generations. Rocks banging together in space, and then coming back and holding together, all because of the mysterious force we call gravity. That same mysterious warp in the weft of things caused the pile of rocks, when it was big enough, to crush in on its center, until the heat of the pressure melted the rock. Mars is small but heavy, with a nickel-iron core. It is small enough that the interior has cooled faster than Earth’s; the core no longer spins inside the crust at a different speed, and so Mars has practically no magnetic field. No dynamo left. But one of the last internal flows of the molten core and mantle was in the form of a huge anomalous lumping outward on one side, a shove against the crust wall that formed a continent-sized bulge eleven kilometers high, three times as high as the Tibetan plateau is above its surroundings. This bulge caused many other features to appear: a system of radial fractures covering an entire hemisphere, including the largest cracks of all, the Valles Marineris, a lace of canyons that would cover the United States coast to coast. The bulge also caused a number of volcanoes, including three straddling its spine, Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Arsia Mons; and off on its northwest edge, Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system, three times the height of Everest and one hundred times the mass of Mauna Loa, the Earth’s largest volcano.So the Tharsis Bulge was the most important factor in shaping the surface of Mars. The other major factor was meteor fall. In the Noachian Age, three to four billion years ago, meteors were falling on Mars at a tremendous rate, millions of them, and thousands of them were