Man is an explorer, but always he has needed to seek shelter from the environment and predators, and in his caves he found the rest to reflect, tell stories, and make paintings on the walls.
They are looking for a good cave.
This is a man’s job. Well, technically it will first be a robot’s job to enter a cave. The thought of introducing a human to subsurface Mars makes the collective Office of Planetary Protection throw up with anxiety, and while a robot from Earth is not a perfectly clean thing, it is judged to be cleaner than a man. Once the robot confirms that there is no life to destroy in the cave, man can follow.
First, they must get the robot to the cave, and this is a man’s job because a robot is slow and can’t make decisions on the spot. Also it is not a simple thing, to instruct a robot to spelunk with style.
The Rover drives itself, although one of them must remain in the front of the cab, ready to manually override the automation if necessary. Sergei amuses himself by imagining how Prime is conducting this particular sim. They cannot drive all over the San Rafael Swell, but it feels like the Rover is going the right distance. It is possible that Prime is driving them in circles. He has a very good internal compass. Nothing in his body believes they are driving in a circle.
Who knows? Sergei sometimes wonders if the muove of the eppur si muove was Prime shipping them to Antarctica. He does not know how Prime is getting it to feel so cold. He is feeling the cold more because various suit malfunctions have caused the heaters in his gloves and boots to fail at different times, and in those situations his fingers and toes went numb. At first he was proud that Prime was making this extra effort to give him a convincing Mars experience, it spoke to their respect for his skepticism. (Unless it spoke to his vulnerability to irritation.) Anyway, now he has decided to make a conscious effort to accept what is put before him. Both Helen and Yoshi are better pretenders than he is, and he does not want to be left out of the experience. Also, he would like Prime to stop monkeying around with his equipment. These thirty days will be the best part of Eidolon, and they are going too fast. He does not want to be hobbled in any way.
What walks you could take on Mars. He would like to walk the whole planet. With thirty days you could do almost nothing, but a year and a half would be so good you would not mind getting back inside a little tuna can for nine months. You would not mind so much. This is a flaw in the Eidolon plan. They had shortened the Mars time to only thirty days, and so the feelings that the crew would have about getting into Red Dawn and leaving the planet would be totally different than they would be after a year and a half on the planet. Maybe after a year and a half, they would be ready to return home.
The Rover is packed with equipment and supplies, they can move around very little and mostly they stay up front, watching the terrain or napping in the back. Lava fields are not the most exciting views, but Helen is a good companion, not too chatty. They are permitted to perform short EVAs when the solar batteries of the Rover are recharging.
Almost there.
When lava courses in flows underground, you have the possibility that when it subsides it will leave tubes. This has happened on Earth, and it appears to have happened on Mars. Some of the roofs of these tubes on Mars are meters thick, and many of them are much larger than the ones found on Earth. Caves! For the geologists a lava tube is an excellent opportunity to examine unsullied bedrock kept safe from the shock modifications and dust storms on the surface. It is the kind of environment congenial for chemosynthetic organisms. You might find biosignatures: the handwriting on the wall, the graffito of life. For a man, it is the place for him to get away from solar proton event radiation, and the cold, and all this fucking dust. If man wants to come back to Mars and stay a while, and have nice things, he will need something a little better than his own poop to shield him and his instruments, or bags of Martian regolith on top of a Hab. And it would be good if the place were protected from the dust, because dust is not great for scientific equipment or the mood of the scientist. A lava tube is just smart camping. Why bring heavy payloads of shelter materials all the way to Mars when there are possible underground shelters just waiting for someone to come inside?
Always, man has desired entrance into a dark hole.
Dena, Chloe, Wendy, Annie, Abbey, Nikki, Jeanne, and—more recently discovered—Marnie. The names for the skylights around Arsia Mons, the dark holes that lead to something warm and wet and safe. Well, not really any of those things, ha ha.
It is not lost on Sergei that Prime has prescribed him a daily ingestion of liquorice tea. In women, it seems that liquorice is a natural aphrodisiac, but it has the opposite effect on men. Well, it is all very up front. He does not have to wonder if Prime is slipping potassium bromide into his dumplings; they would tell him if they were. He has noticed that Yoshi is not drinking liquorice tea, so it is to be supposed that RoMeO is not reporting elevated levels of Yoshi’s testosterone. If someone were seen drinking liquorice tea on the space station, everyone else would drink it, whether or not it was prescribed for him. No one wants to be the guy with less testosterone, or fewer morning erections. But Yoshi, if he noticed Sergei’s new regimen, is either not bothered or too honest.
Soon they will reach their first major site. Then a two-kilometer (real!) walk to Marnie. She is a promising skylight. They will be able to conduct science. Exploration without science is merely adventure. Not that the distinction bothers him.
Sergei will be happy to get out of the Rover. He wants to walk. Sitting in the Rover and looking at the sims and doing a little work is exhaustively boring. The Rover does not have an exercise machine. Sergei is storing too much internal energy and it is tiring him. It is not a terrible feeling, he is repressed, not depressed. Anything can be borne when you know you have a release waiting. Sol-morrow he will have a good walk. Get things out of his body.
“The first one is for you; the second one is for me.” That’s how Talia always characterized their having sex after he had been away. She had that division, anyway, that there were sex things for her and ones for him. He could point out that doing things for her also made him feel good, but he doesn’t think she ever believed him. There were good and bad points to her being so practical about sex.
“If you want to do something with my ass, please just let me know beforehand. A few hours.”
She was funny that way. He wasn’t sure what happened in those hours. Some sort of preparations, hygienic or otherwise. She was also specific with his technique.
“It doesn’t do anything if you touch it like that,” she might say.
It could be exciting, scorn. It gave you something to do.
“I suppose you want to have sex,” Talia had said in Utah.
She was not an idiot. He had strawberries in his room. It was her favorite thing, to lie in his lap and have him feed her strawberries. Any kind of food, but Sergei particularly liked the way Talia’s mouth had to work on a strawberry. That was a good example of something that pleased them both, but he’d never told her, as it might have ruined it.
“Of course I want to,” he said. He had thought about saying “But I respect Alexander.” Actually, he did respect him, liked him. It was a thing to remember, though, that a man could not seduce a woman. You couldn’t be upset with a man, even a friend, if your wife slept with him. Yes, the man could say no, but everyone had a different idea of loyalty. You shouldn’t be upset with your wife either. Only blame yourself in these situations.
“Come sit with me,” he said to Talia. He had put a pillow in his lap and given her the look.
Interestingly, his ex-wife had done two new things when they had sex, so these would be things she had learned from Alexander. She made specific requests, and she moved her hips more aggressively. Was more aggressive altogether. In bed, Talia was indolent, but she hadn’t been in Utah. Perhaps she missed him.
“Did you miss me?” He had been a fool to ask. Such a terrible question, at any time.
“Not anymore,” she said, which could mean different things, considering the ring on her finger from another man, or the fact that when she said it, he was holding that hand.
Talia hadn’t stayed all night with him, because of the boys, because of everything. They’d had a laugh, and he thanked her, which made her make a funny face. Such a generous woman.
“Are you happy?” he asked.
“If I were mean, I would say no, but because I am a good person, I will say yes.” She was, he thought. Happy. Which was the whole point of the thing. You couldn’t leave sad women behind, not with children. Not if you ever wanted. Well. He didn’t know what that was anymore, when it came to women. Had he ever? It seemed to him that there had been a time of certainty. And when Talia had asked for the divorce, that too had seemed clear, like something he could do, a course of action that would be positive in the end. It was to the end that he had looked. The boys, safe. Talia, happy. Sergei, walking, with only himself to tire or hurt or blame. Granting Talia a divorce had seemed both noble and punishing, which was how he knew it was the right thing to do.
Before she left him that night in Utah, she did his favorite thing. This was to be stroked. After sex, not before. After, when he was tired and depleted and could take his reward. Sometimes he would turn and stretch like a cat and Talia would scratch his chest or his back or his thighs. Wonderful. Sometimes it was just having her hand move slowly up and down. Not sexual, it could be his arm even.
The surface of Mars rolls by. There are those that say we should not disturb Mars, not drill, not examine, not gather rocks, not submit it to thermal emission spectography. Too late. There are robots on Mars. There are nuclear reactors on Mars. Worse, Prime will send him.