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gathered the arbeiters beneath the lab and climbed the steps into the airlock,
quickly sucking the gray dust from our suits, then stripped.
Ilya insisted I lie on the narrow fold-down cot. He lay on his cot across from
me, then got up and pushed in close beside me. We shivered like frightened
children.
We slept for an hour. When we awoke, I felt ecstatic as if from drinking far
too much high-powered tea.
Everything seemed sharply defined and highly colored. Even the dust in the lab
interior smelled sweet and essential. The pain in my ears had subsided to a
dull throb. I could still hear, but just barely.
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Ilya showed me the lab's weather record. The surge had topped at two bars.
"That's impossible," I said.
He shook his head and smiled, tapping his own ears with a finger. Then he
wrote on his slate, "Compressible fluids
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a
270 Greg Bear
lot to learn."
He added with a rueful grimace, "Some honeymoon. I love you!"
With little ceremony, and not much in the way of clothing left to remove, we
celebrated still being alive.
We checked in with the satcoms to tell everybody we had survived and could
take care of ourselves.
Resources were strained from Arcadia to Mariner Valley the surge had sheared
into three parts crossing the Tharsis volcanoes, and twenty-three stations had
been hit by the three-headed monster. There were casualties seven dead,
hundreds injured. Even UMS had suffered damage.
Ilya and I inspected the lab from outside, elevating the tires again and
cutting the tie-downs. The foils and tarps had protected it against most of
the boulders flung by the surge. Minor damage could be fixed by patches.
We decided to collect what specimens we could from the shed's remains and
drive the lab back to
Olympus Station. Replacing our suit tanks and purifiers, we walked west from
the lab several dozen meters.
Ilya was somber. My tinnitus had passed but hearing was still difficult his
voice in my com was a barely understandable buzz. "Looks as if we've lost the
cyst," he said. The shed itself was nowhere to be found it might have blown
clear to Tharsis by now. But it would undoubtedly have spilled its heavy
contents.
I looked up through the thinning curtains of dust. The sky peeking through the
gray seemed greenish. I
had never seen that color before. I pointed it out to Ilya. He frowned, looked
back at the lab, then set his jaw and said we should keep searching.
The air temperature hovered just above zero. It should have been thirty or
forty below at this latitude, at this time of the year.
My ecstasy was fading rapidly. "Please," I muttered. "Enough. I'm not an
adventurous woman."
"What?" Ilya asked.
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"It's hot out here and I don't know what that means."
"Neither do I," Ilya said. "But I don't think it's dangerous. There haven't
been any more warnings."
"Maybe something local is brewing," I said. "Everyone knows weird weather
lives in the sulci."
He vaulted across a wind-exposed boulder and picked up a pale brown
cylindrical rock. "One of our core specimens. Maybe the shed dumped its load
here."
"I think we should go back."
Ilya stood and frowned deeply, caught between wanting to please me and a
powerful need to find something, anything, of the broken cyst and the other
specimens. Suddenly, I regretted being such a coward. "But let's look a little
longer."
"Just a few more minutes," he agreed. I followed him to the edge of a canyon.
A hundred meters below, fine dust drifted like a river through the canyon
bottom. Gray dust mixed with, swirls of ochre and red, immiscible fluids,
Jovian; I had never seen anything like it. Ilya kneeled and I squatted beside
him.
"If they fell down there " he said, and shook his head. Our suits were covered
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with clinging gray dust;
the suck and destat in the lab might not be able to remove enough to keep it
from getting into the recycling systems, into our skin. I imagined smear
rashes itching all night long.
Something fogged the outside of my face-plate. I reached up to wipe it. A
muddy streak formed under my touch. I swore and removed a static rag from my
waist pack. The rag did not work. I could hardly see.
"The dust is wet," I said.
"Can't be. There's not enough pressure," Ilya said. He looked at my suit and
streaked the muck on my arm with one finger, then examined the finger. "You're
right. You're wet. Am I?"
His face plate had fogged as well. I touched his helmet. "Yeah," I said.
"Jesus. Just a few more minutes," he pleaded. Over the canyon, afternoon sun
broke through clouds of dust. Green-
272 Greg Bear
tinted rays swept across the rugged furrows of the sulci, casting the
landscape in a ghoulish light interrupted by deep shadows.
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We backed away from the rubble at the edge of the canyon. Ilya kicked
wind-exposed rocks aside and slogged through drifts of familiar red smear and
the superfine gray dust. There was no sizzle anywhere. It had been mixed with
unradiated clays and flopsand. Years might pass before ultraviolet could
convert the surface to crackly sizzle again.
"The surge must have uncovered an ice aquifer nearby. Pebble saltation blasted
it," Ilya said. "This gray stuff must be ice dust, and down here, it's just
warm enough to melt "
He stopped and gave out a groan. "Up there," he said, pointing to the top of a
low ridge. A jagged lump of rock about a meter wide presented a flash of
crystal in the broken rays of afternoon sun. We climbed.
I looked back over my shoulder at the lab, half a kilometer away. My back
muscles tensed with a red rabbit's instinct to run and hide. The surge was
gone, but wet dust was completely outside my experience. We might sink into a
depression and drown. I
had no idea how our filters and seals would function in water.
Ilya reached the top of the ridge first. He knelt before the exposed lump of
rock. "Is it the cyst?" I asked.
He did not answer. I stood behind him and peered at the shiny exposed face. It
was indeed part of a cyst very likely the cyst that had tumbled from the shed.
It lay half-buried in a hole filled with gray dust. The intricate patterns of
quartz and embedded zinc clays seemed less distinct, blurred; I thought it
might be the weird light. But where the fragment of cyst met the pool of dust,
a thick gelatinous layer spilled and churned.
"What's that?" I asked.
"Something in suspension," Ilya suggested. He reached out to touch the
gelatinous material. It clung to his glove.
"Snail spit," I said.
"Genuine grade-A slime," Ilya agreed, lifting his glove.
MOVING MARS 273
"Why doesn't it dry out?" I asked.
He looked at me, forehead pale, cheeks flushed, eyes wide. I could hear his
rapid breathing over the com.
"There's water all around. The gray dust is ice and clays, and the clays are
keeping the ice from sublimating. But the temperature is high enough that the
ice melts, and the cyst can get at the moisture.
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It's the right mix. It has what it wants."
The slime grew thicker as we watched. Within, white streaks formed little
lacework doilies.
"How much do you think this masses?" he asked, measuring the fragment with his
arms.
"Maybe a quarter ton," I said.
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