A devil on Mars is more dramatic visually than the ones on Earth: higher and wider but, in the negligible atmosphere here, much less destructive. To humans. Potentially not great for machinery, though it will finish cleaning the solar panels for them.
This simulated storm is probably a test of crew choreography and communication. And her own assessment of what protocol to follow. She sends a message to Mission Control, then switches to crew-link.
“Everybody see the weather report?”
“Confirm weather report.” Sergei is about sixty feet away.
“Yoshi, you there?”
“Here, Helen. I have them. Two dust devils.”
“Okey-doke, let’s use this as an opportunity to test our timing. Yoshi, turn on the porch lights for us, please. Sergei? Let’s give these guide cables a try and get back to the Hab. Yoshi, I’d like to know how smoothly we can prep everything for storm. I will take care of GAIA.”
“Green lights on,” says Yoshi. “I’m sealing off the greenhouse.”
“GAIA, I want you to go to the locker and power down.”
“Okay, Commander.”
GAIA’s locker is a kind of upright coffin, stir-welded to seamlessness to prevent dust contamination, and stocked with extra seeds. The round shape of the greenhouse should have no problem weathering a dust devil, which might last no more than fifteen minutes, and even withstand a more serious storm, though the plants will die. Even after they leave, if Mars huffs and puffs and blows the greenhouse down, GAIA should be able to survive inside the locker, and be able to repair or rebuild her home. It’s a good sequence to practice, getting her in and out of her coffin.
“Proceeding now to Hab. Sergei?”
“Let’s jam, Helen.”
“Right behind you. My guide cable is stuck. Hold on.”
“There is—” Sergei’s voice disappears under a fuzz of loud static. She can see him, just ahead. And then she can’t. A wall of color rises up between them, accompanied by some kind of ground force. Helen thinks of land mines, of geysers. She is not knocked off her feet, but she loses her equilibrium, staggers. Her faceplate is moving, no, playing a sort of high-speed kaleidoscope: brown, gray, blue, red, orange, pink. The static is loud in her ear. Everything slows. The static is terrific, confusing.
Sergei’s voice crackles back on the line.
“That’s not right,” he is saying, in Russian. The static erupts again, and the colors darken to a slate gray, then almost black.
She is standing. She is still standing. She is holding on to the cable, or rather, holding it down. Is she exerting pressure? It feels pinned to her glove.
It is possible, Helen thinks, that she is being electrocuted. She imagines the outline of her skeleton, like a cartoon. The pressure in her jaw and her lower back, the muscles of her right arm, the static in her ear—these sensations are suspended, not increasing or decreasing, coming or going.
She cannot feel the ground. She is not on the ground, but also not quite in the air, or maybe both these things, Earthly and suspended.
This might, then, be death, or it might be the space inhabited just before death, on the edge of the map, right before you fell off of life. Helen thinks, Dad?
It is a thing people tell you: that the dead are waiting for you in some nice place, heaven, usually, but maybe Mars, maybe a simulation in Utah.
And then, Helen thinks: No.
No, he’s not here. He’s not anywhere. He is dead. He is gone. For so long he had been alive and dead at the same time. Maybe, so had she. Maybe that’s why she thought “Dad?” She might as well have asked, “Helen?”
She is, like Michael Collins circling the moon, the most alone person in the history of people. She has always been the most alone person, it hasn’t needed going up or in any direction.
How does it feel?
It feels spectacular.
Helen can hear her own heartbeat, curiously not fast, but quite steady. This gives her a sense of power. There is a storm happening and she is inside it, either in a death way or a simulated way. It’s up to her to take control of the thing. Helen imagines that the storm—the devil—is not acting upon her but coming from her.
The veil of darkness is whisked off her face. Helen can see Sergei, kneeling, and the green lights of the east hatch. The heavy buzz of static separates into words. It is Yoshi, then Sergei. Sergei is fine, is getting to his feet. They can see a cloud of dust moving north, forming a loose conical shape, dissipating. She is still holding on to the guide cable. The diagnostics of her suit are nominal, and so is she. Helen turns back to Primitus and the greenhouse. They appear startling white against tawny regolith. The sky is paler, very beautiful, almost pearly. She can see the dark irregular shadow of Phobos overhead, more clearly than she’s ever seen it.
“I’m okay,” she says.
Sergei says he is okay.
Yoshi says it looked on camera four like a dust devil erupted right underneath Helen’s feet.
Normally they dock their spacesuits to the exterior of Primitus, but Helen would like to run some additional tests on their communications systems, so they use the eastern hatch to enter the Hab. Sergei is first out of his suit. His face is blank and white, as if he too has been bleached by the devil. He repeats that he is fine. He had not been knocked over, he says. He had knelt down on top of the guide cable when he felt it lurching out of his hands. “That was weird!” Helen says, which is a slight betrayal of what it was, but doesn’t feel bad to say. Sergei agrees that it was weird. “Very good sim.” Perhaps a little unrealistic, but good practice. He will get up to the Hab now, and see what images their remote cameras have captured of the event.
The exterior of her spacesuit is heavily crusted. Helen clambers out of it, and manages to displace a good deal of dust onto her compression jumpsuit. She grabs a hose to deal with it, but wrenches the nozzle too strongly and a section of the tube detaches, shooting a cloud of fines all over her, a second dust devil. Helen drops the hose and spreads her arms, gazing down at the mess she has made. “Look at me,” she says, with unexpected love.
YOSHI