“Yes.”
“These katabatic winds—falling off the polar cap—nothing can stop them. Cold as hell. I wonder if that little wind vane we set up here will even be there anymore.”
It was. They pulled out its data cartridge, put in another one. Around them the huge expanse of brown rock bowled to the starry sky. They started back down.
“Why do you want to go to Mars, Frank?”
“What's this, we're still at work out here are we?”
“No no. I'm just curious.”
“Sure. Well, I want to try it. I want to try living somewhere where you can actually try to do something new. Set up new systems, you know. I grew up in the South, like you did. Only the American South is a lot different than the French south. We were stuck in our history for a long, long time. Then things opened up, partly because it got so bad. Partly just a lot of hurricanes hitting the coast! And we had a chance to rebuild. And we did, but—not much changed. Not enough, Michel. So I have this desire to try it again. That's the truth.” And he glanced over at Michel, as if to emphasize not only that it was the truth, but that it was a truth he seldom talked about. Michel liked him a bit better after that.
Another day (or, in another hour of their endless night) Michel went out with a group, to check on the climatology stations located around the lakeshore. They hauled banana sleds loaded with replacement batteries and tanks of compressed nitrogen and the like. Michel, Maya, Charles, Arkady, Iwao, Ben, and Elena.
They walked across Lake Vanda, Ben and Maya pulling the sleds. The valley seemed huge. The frozen surface of the lake gleamed and sparked blackly underfoot. To a Northerner the sky already seemed overstuffed with stars, and in the ice underfoot each star was shattered into many pricks of light. Next to him Maya shined her flashlight down, lighting a field of cracks and bubbles under her; it was like shining light into a glass floor that had no bottom. She turned the flashlight off and it suddenly looked to Michel like the stars of the other hemisphere were shining up through a clear world, an alien planet much closer to the center of its galaxy. Looking down into the black hole at the center of things, through burred starlight. Like the shattered bottomless pool of the self. Every step broke the sight into a different refraction, a kaleidoscope of white points in black. He could gaze down into Vanda for a long time.
They came to the far shore of the lake. Michel looked back: Their complex sparkled like a bright winter constellation coming up over the horizon. Inside those boxes their companions were working, talking, cooking, reading, resting. Tensions in there were subtle but high.
A door opened in the complex, a wedge of light was thrown onto rust-colored rock. It could have been Mars, sure; in a year or two it would be. Many of the current tensions would be resolved. But there would be no air. Outside they would go, yes, sometimes; but in space suits. Would that matter? The winter suit he was wearing at that moment was as much like a space suit as the designers could make it, and the frigid numbing down-valley breeze was like breathing purified oxygen just gasified from liquid stock, and insufficiently warmed. The sub-biological chill of Antarctica, of Mars; nothing much to choose between them. In that sense this year of training and testing had been a good idea. They were getting at least a taste of what it might be like.
Ben stepped down onto the uneven lower ice of the lake's summertime moat, slipped and went down in a flash. He cried out and the others rushed to him, Michel first because he had seen it happen. Ben groaned and writhed, the others crouched around him—
“Excuse me,” Maya said, and ducked between Michel and Arkady to kneel at Ben's side.
“Is it your hip?”
“Ah—yeah—”
“Hold on. Hold steady.” Ben clutched at her arm and she held him on his other side. “Here, let's get your harness unclipped from the sled. Okay, slip the sled under him. Move him gently! Okay. Hold still there, we'll get you back to the station. Can you stay steady or should we strap you down. Okay, let's go. Help stabilize the sled. Someone radio the station and tell them to get ready for us.” She clipped her own harness onto the banana sled and started back across the lake, quickly but steadily, almost ice-skating on her boots, flashlight lit to show her the ice underfoot. The others followed beside Ben.
Across the Ross Sea, McMurdo Station had an extra complement of winter staff precisely to help support them out at Vanda, and so the winter helicopter came yammering down in a huge noise only an hour or so after their return to the station. By that time Ben was furious at himself for falling, more angry than hurt, though they found out later that his hip had been fractured. “He went down in a flash,” Michel said to Maya afterward. “So fast he had no time to get a hand up. I'm not surprised it broke something."