forefinger and thumb, nodding so vigorously that he started tumbling again. As he spun he saw a bay door open behind the window, on top of the craft. He got the suit stabilized and puffed toward the bay, wondering if it would be real when he got to it. He touched the open doorway and tears sprang to his eyes; he blinked and the teardrop spheres floated into his faceplate as he flattened against the bottom of the bay. He had an hour of air left.
When the bay was closed and pumped he unsealed his helmet and lifted it off. The air was thin and oxygen-rich, and cool. The bay lock door opened and he pushed through.
Women were laughing. There were two of them aboard, and they were in high spirits. “What were you going to do, land in that?” one asked.
“I was on the elevator,” he said, voice cracking. “We had to jump off. Have you picked up anyone else?”
“You’re the only one we’ve seen. Want a ride down?”
He could only gulp. They laughed at him.
“We’re amazed to run into anyone out here, boy! How many gs are you comfortable with?”
“I don’t know—three?”
They laughed again.
“Why, how many can you take?”
“A lot more than that,” said the woman who had looked out at him.
“A lot more,” he scoffed. “How many more can a person take?”
“We’ll find out,” the other woman said, and laughed. The little craft began to accelerate down toward Mars. The youth lay exhausted in a g chair behind the two women, asking questions and sucking down water and cheddar cheese from a tube. They had been on one of the mirror complexes and had hijacked this emergency descender after sending the mirrors tumbling in a tangle of molecule-thin sheets. They were complicating their descent by shifting into a polar orbit; they were going to land near the south polar cap.
Peter absorbed this in silence. Then they were bouncing wildly and the windows went white, then yellow, then a deep angry orange. Gravity forces jammed him back in his chair, his vision blurred and his neck hurt. “What a lightweight,” one of the women said, and he didn’t know if she meant him or the descender.
Then the g forces let off and the window cleared. He looked out and saw that they were dropping toward the planet in a steep dive, and were only a few thousand meters above the surface. He couldn’t believe it. The women kept the craft in its radical stoop until it seemed they were going to spear the sand, and then at the last minute they flattened out and again he was shoved back into his chair. “Sweet,” one of the women commented, and then boom, they were down and running over the layered terrain.
Gravity again. Peter clambered out of the descender after the two women, down a walktube and into a big rover, feeling stunned and ready to cry. There were two men in the rover, shouting greetings and hugging the women. “Who’s this?” they cried. “Oh, we picked him up up there, he jumped off the elevator. He’s still a bit spaced. Hey,” she said to him with a smile, “we’re down, it’s okay.”
Some mistakes you can never make good.
Ann Clayborne sat in the back of Michel’s rover, sprawled across three seats, feeling the wheels rise and fall over the rocks. Her mistake had been in coming to Mars in the first place, and then falling in love with it. Falling in love with a place everyone else wanted to destroy.
Outside the rover, the planet was being changed forever. Inside, the main room was lit by floor-level windows, which gave a snake’s-eye view out under the skirt of the rover’s stone roof. Rough gravel road, scattered rockfall in the way. They were on the Noctis Highway, but a lot of rock had fallen on it. Michel wasn’t bothering to drive around the smaller samples; they rolled along at about sixty kph, and when they hit a big one they all jounced in their seats. “Sorry,” Michel said. “We have to get out of the Chandelier as soon as possible.”
“The Chandelier?”
“Noctis Labyrinthus.”
The original name, Ann knew, given to it by the Terran geologists staring at Mariner photos. But she didn’t speak. The will to speech had left her.
Michel talked on, his voice low and conversational, reassuring. “There’s several places where if the road were cut it would be impossible to get the cars down. Transverse scarps that run from wall to wall,