He turned to the available distractions to pass the time. Despite the nearly limitless selection of vids available from the library, he refused to watch any of the new, preferring the classic films of the late 1990's, particularly romantic comedies. His choice in music encompassed the entire last half of the 20th Century. His parents had infused him—no, the word 'pummelled' tasted better—with an appreciation for, or at least a knowledge of, all types of music, from the symphonic classics to rock and roll to blues and jazz. He knew what he liked.
Anything very new he considered to be crap, and if forced to listen (Ross was an ardent fan of the currently popular new-age Rock and Roll/Rap/Rant/Punk fusion and not above imposing his will upon visitors) he confidently declared the lyrics incomprehensible and the music mere populist noise, totally without merit.
He had his favorites, and and he played them over and over again, pushing the limits of the Rollagon's sound system, cranking them out at the highest possible volume which, the AI informed him, was potentially damaging to his hearing.
The first tune of the day replayed continually in his head until replaced by another or silenced by sleep. Sometimes the tunes and lyrics shaped his attitude and decisions for the entire day. Of this he was unaware.
He downloaded the lyrics and read them along with the singer. In the words of rock songs and ballads from that era he found certain phrases that seemed to take on a greater meaning here on Mars, and in this current isolation he marvelled at the genius of young Dylan, Browne and Henley.
It was nothing, he considered, to have insight into the pains of life at his age, but he considered it genius to have had it at nineteen, while running down 101.
Gethsemane
It was nineteen hundred kilometers to Opportunity from the Pathfinder site, as the crow flies. Their progress up the long outflow called Ares Vallis to the Opportunity landing site on Tempe Meridiani took many days and had no help from crows. Sometimes they made fewer than fifty kilometers in a day. He found himself having to resort to anti-nausea meds to avoid motion sickness, or else to do what was becoming a punishment—drive the Rollagon himself.
They picked their way slowly around the boulders and lesser rocks that littered the valley floor and along the ancient gravel beds. Often the AI had to use the exterior arm to clear boulders from their path, and the Rollagon would dip and sway as the extended arm plucked them from where they had lain for countless millennia and set them to the side. After they passed it would halt and put them back in their original position, carefully adjusting them to align with their imprints in the ground.
Sam observed this display of care silently but with great interest. Certain of the response, he briefly entertained and then discarded the idea of asking the AI to build an inukshuk.
Ares Vallis had been picked over pretty well by robotic missions, and for good reason. The dubs explained that the valley had been created by an immense flood in the Noachian era. There was no sign of that here and now; close up and personal it was dusty, bumpy and seemed specifically designed to impede Rollagon travel. The dark stripes that marked recent slips were frequently seen on the sunlit walls. Several times they crossed debris fields that had spilled clear across the valley floor. None were recent enough to retain the colour of newly exposed soil but their existence was plainly due to slides.
The valley walls, at first so distant and low, began to close in until they towered over him. He regarded the steep slopes with a suspicion born of experience. The AI assured him that they were not likely to trigger a fall, but he remained unconvinced. Something had caused them and he was sure it was something much less dynamic than a Rollagon's passing.
He was uneasy in this place and urged the AI to continue, even into the darkness of night. At last, after thirty days in Ares Valles they climbed up onto the heights above the valley of Margaritifer Terra. It was no more easily travelled, but the sense of imminent doom was gone.
After supper on another of those long days he pulled out his electric guitar and tried again for the umpteen-dozenth time to get through the obscure Providence version of Thompson's 'Gethsemane' without error. An accompanying acoustic guitar, electric bass and percussion filled in behind him. He whispered the words. Even by slowing the tempo he couldn't quite get through the finale. Old fingers could not learn new tricks, it seemed. He felt that given three years plus of practice he should have gotten it down by now.
How easy Clapton, Knopfler and others made it look. But then they had played their fingers raw in clubs, backrooms and concert halls for at least as long as he had been immersed in high school, undergraduate studies, a doctorate in quantum electrodynamics and probably his post doctoral thesis, too. Still, he could not see how it could be so difficult. He had the AI pull the old videos and analyze them to extract the individual notes and even play them for him at slower than normal speed. It seemed beyond his reach.
He remembered once having said to someone that he wanted to play like Knopfler, and being encouraged to take lessons. He'd realized then that he didn't want to take lessons, he just wanted to play like Knopfler. He tried again, starting at the troublesome section. From out of nowhere it seemed, the AI spoke:
"Would you like some assistance?"
"With what?"
"The guitar."
"I know how to play."
The AI repeated the offer. As this scene had been played out before in 04 he was slightly amused. But then, before his astonished eyes and slack jaw, 04 had grabbed the guitar from his hands and played the troublesome notes flawlessly, then had twirled the guitar about before presenting it back to him. Sam had nearly forgotten. Did she know?
"OK, but I don't want a lesson on finger placement. I need serious help. Maybe amphetamines."
"I think that would be counterproductive, but there is another way. Start playing."
He started in again with the intro. After the first few bars he expected the AI to break in with some acid criticism, but nothing was said. He continued. So far so good. But the quick changes from there to there that had always doomed him were still minutes away. He played in his usual fashion, head down, with an intense concentration on his fingering, trying to will them to go faster, to press more precisely, more accurately. The notes of truth were fast approaching where no amount of will would save him.
He bullied his way into the final chords of the guitar solo and to his surprise found that he was doing it: he was playing it as precisely as it could be done—perfectly. After a few seconds, he realized it was too perfect. He was playing over his head. He stopped suddenly and obviously, unexpectedly. His final note, plus another, hung in the air.
"Thanks a lot, I'll do it myself," he said and placed the guitar back in its case.
"We should play together sometime," offered the AI, unrepentant.
"Sure."
Later that night while Sam sat by the window re-reading 'The Mosquito Coast', the AI broke the silence.
"You play better than you think."
"Really?" He'd had this conversation before, too.
"Yes. You just won't let yourself."
"What?" 04 had merely faulted his lack of nimbleness.
"Your fingers know what to do, but you won't let them. You need to let them go. You need to trust them. Why don't you sing the words?"
Stung, Sam was quick to reply, "What do you know? All your playing is technical trickery. You could make a symphony out of a windstorm. Besides, I have a lousy voice."
"Perhaps you are correct."
***
Sam put on his suit and went outside for a walk. His mind wasn't on Mars though. He had watched the Providence vid of Gethsemane probably a hundred times. It always astonished him, with its relentless drumbeat and pacing bass. Thompson had said in an interview that the song was about nothing in particular—a poet's answer, certainly. The undertones of class were not surprising, considering the composer's upbringing in England in the nineteen fifties, but the admonition to 'be something fine' voiced strangely fl
at seemed an injection from somewhere else.
Gethsemane: the olive garden, the scene of Jesus' betrayal, where he asked to be relieved of the upcoming test. 'Father, relieve me of the burden you have given me.' The voices tossed the concepts back and forth unproductively, while Sam listened from the outside.
He sat on a boulder and stared into the setting sun, across the stark ground, with its lengthening shadows. It was the curse of all fathers, even God, it seemed, to place expectations on their sons to be something—something fine, something beyond their own accomplishments.
Sometimes it worked out, but sometimes it didn't. And as sure as the sun rose, it would be passed on.
For a moment the voices were stilled.
Symphony
Some weeks later, while they were parked by the edge of a small gully in the midst of a major dust storm in Meridiani the musical conversation was revisited. The AI, which had been silent for some time, spoke.
"There is something you should hear."
"Go ahead."
The cabin was suddenly filled with the sound of violins, cellos and violas, with a background of bells, cymbals, gongs and bass drums. Periodically a trumpet joined in. There were other instruments that Sam was unable to recognize—their sounds came and went. All the instruments clamoured in a seemingly random manner, devoid of any perceptible melody. The volume rose and fell, from a whisper to a roar, periodically dropping to become inaudible, then rising quickly. It was eerie, and not pleasing to the ear.
"What is that?"
"It is my symphony. You suggested I could write one. Dust particles are impacting upon the external sensors. I have assigned each musical instrument of the orchestra to a sensor. The wind speed modulates the volume. It is an original composition. What do you think?'
"I think you need more practice," Sam replied too honestly.
"Perhaps you are correct."
25
November 2046
2.0S, 5.9W
Opportunity
He stopped the Rollagon at what he deemed to be a respectful distance from Opportunity and suited up. He climbed the slight rise to the top of the dune carefully avoiding the tracks that had lain undisturbed for more than 40 years.
By most modern standards the vehicle was remarkable only for its small size and perhaps the tenacity it had shown in working until the project was ended, not by the inevitable mechanical failure that had terminated so many of its predecessors and successors, but by funding cuts. It looked exactly like the pictures. As at Sojourner, a new and thin layer of dust covered the flat surfaces. He circled around to view it from all angles, recording the scene as he walked.
On the far side from his approach, where there should have been nothing, there were the faint tracks of small vehicles. The marks were shallower and wider than those of Spirit. Sam supposed that the site had been visited by one of the exploratory AIs. It would be easily picked out of the background by its contrast with the Martian surface and deemed worthy of examination. There were no human footprints.
He completed his circle, pausing at Spirit's uphill track—degraded as it was—finding himself unable to step on it, and unwilling to even attempt to leap over. He paused a moment and then turned to retrace his steps.
His attention was drawn to something beside one of the rover's wheels. A piece of shiny material was caught under a small rock. He stooped to pick it up.
There were two others, partially obscured from view by the rover's wheel, and partially buried under a mini-dune of black dust. They were thin square sheets of a Mylar-like material. Each was covered with symbols, etchings really, that made no sense to Sam. Examining each in turn, he rotated them to view all four aspects, but they remained incomprehensible.
He had a moment of déjà vu. It could not be. The symbols were mysterious, but the whole thing was eerily familiar. The rocks had been placed to hold the tokens against the force of the wind.
As he had on Earth many, many years ago, Sam had the feeling of having intruded upon some very private thoughts. He replaced the sheets as he had found them, taking care to ensure they were securely held in place. He took a photo of the rover. With a last look, he started up the slope to the waiting Rollagon.
So much for being the first.
26
12 December 2046
40.67N, 9.62 W
Summit Day
Historical perspectives of space exploration at the turn of the century note a certain global fascination with Mars, and in particular, the landform colloquially known as the 'Face on Mars'.
The Cydonia region had been the object of much discussion in the popular media in the early days of modern Martian exploration due to the appearance in Viking I Orbiter imagery of geometrically shaped features, and in one case, an object with an uncanny resemblance to a human face. Public debate extended even to the point of attributing their existence to construction by ancient Martian civilizations for purposes ranging from religious expression to an attempt to communicate with Earth.
Despite it being only one otherwise insignificant landform tossed in amongst a vast hodgepodge of buttes, mesas, ridges, and knobs in the transition zone between cratered upland and the plain of the north, the 'Face', a well weathered massif that under some lighting conditions appeared to be, however improbably, a human visage of immense size, was the subject of endless conjecture, and had even been the central character in a respectable movie of the late 20th Century.
The 'ratings games' played by the media of that era undoubtedly prolonged the farce, which continued even after high resolution imaging of the area showed the objects to be eroded mesas and scarfs under certain (favorable?) lighting conditions.
That hard science was unable to put to bed the ridiculous supposition of a human face on Mars was attributed to the emergence of the phenomenon now known as newbonics—the substitution of possession of information for the comprehension of events and facts that became the backbone of the study of neo-political science—and by extension modern politics. Even now in this enlightened age a small segment persist in the belief that NASA and ESA were engaged in a cover-up of the real truth and that the current Martian colony and its exploration teams are complicit in the deceit.
***
The trip coming up from the south across Arabia Terra was largely uneventful, but due to the heavy cratering the pace of travel was, to Sam, intolerably slow. He spent much of it medicated for motion sickness.
Finally they came down onto Cydonia. Initially the ground varied little in elevation and composition, but in the space of a few dozen kilometers it changed from desperately plain to a chaotic jumble of rock slabs, the layers shattered by uplifting from beneath and eroded by the forces of wind and sand. The evidence of massive ground water melts was undeniable—landslides, slumps, and rockfalls were everywhere, and the jumble gave way periodically to immense pans of uplifted rock that had somehow remained intact. The AI had plotted a drunken course around the crevices that seemed to fill everything in between.
On the approach to the Face they had crossed the tracks of at least one of the automated expeditions that had previously explored the region. These had been sent in the 10s and 20s, not to debunk the various myths, but because of Cydonia's potential value in revealing the sub-surface of Mars, and because the weathering processes that shaped the planet were here laid bare for all to see.
That Viking had imaged this particular location was not an accident. While the Face, Pyramid, et cetera, had not actually been climbed, the surrounding area had been pretty well picked over. Sam, however, was not there to contribute to the substantial body of information concerning the region, nor was he there to drive the final nail into the coffin of Martian mythology (if that was indeed possible). He was there as a tourist, and as one who had a long connection to the region, if only through the sci-fi literature of his teen years.
They had surveyed all the possible climbing routes and found none clearly better than any other. Arriving at the south west corner
of the Face, he drove the Rollagon up the side until he felt it was cheating to go any further—after all, he wanted to do this on foot. He checked the suit over carefully, put it on, and exited the vehicle, stepping onto a steep slope of layered shale-like material littered with the usual combination of ejecta and dust.
The footing at first was easy, or at least it was no more difficult than usual. Before him the slope rose up and out of sight, blocking any view of the top. After about thirty minutes he came to a steeper section where the shale gave way to talus, the shattered, chaotic debris that had been sliding down from above for hundreds of millions of years, held in place against Mars' gravity by the chance meeting of jagged edges. It was treacherous climbing, and he found himself crawling on all fours at times, head down, breathing hard, his back aching at the unaccustomed load and effort, pawing at the rocky surface, sending pieces great and small skittering below.
He ignored the suit's repeated admonitions to make safe, and despite the increasing urgency and rising volume of the voice, carried on. Suddenly, he found he could not move his legs. The warning screen confirmed the final stage of intervention. The suit had gone rigid to protect him from himself. He fell forward onto outstretched arms.
Anger at this point was not helpful; there was no use in fighting the suit. With difficulty, he managed to turn himself over.
Looking back he could see little of the slope below but judging from the view across the plain he gauged his altitude to be less than 150 meters. He rested until the suit relaxed its hold and then resumed his upward crawl.
The scree soon gave way to a bedrock cliff too steep to climb. He was forced to crab sideways along a narrow rock-filled ledge in search of a less difficult path. After a hundred meters or so a split in the face allowed him to climb up above the cliff.
Here he received a reprieve of sorts. The slope was more gradual and a change in surface material made the footing more certain, but it was not to last—after another fifty meters of climbing, the slope steepened and he was again on all fours. This time, giving heed to the suit's urging, he paused periodically to rest.