New Mars

Fifty years from now, will we be receiving Christmas messages from Mars? Stuart Atkinson thinks so, and no matter how far we travel from Earth, there are some traditions we’ll never forget.

Hi mom, hi dad, and everyone gathered there at home! (and I guess everyone you forward this email to, too!) Merry Christmas!!

See, I told you I’d get a message to you from Mars for Christmas Day somehow! It meant giving-up my New Year comms time allocation, but that’s okay, I only write to you, and I know that come morning on New Year’s Day you’ll all either be still out partying or sleeping off the effects of the night before. Hope you all have a great night, you certainly deserve it. I don’t imagine there’ll be many people not happy to see the end of 2051, godawful year for everyone that it was. Those terrible floods and earthquakes all coming one after another, then the asteroid strike in South America, which we were able to see the aftermath of through our biggest telescopes here… awful, just awful, it must have felt like the world was coming to an end.

Anyway, here I am now, as promised, with a Christmas message from half-way across the Solar System, (I know, I know, I’m not literally half-way, Mars is “only” a couple of hundred million klicks away, virtually “next door”, but I feel much further away. And I know for a fact Lucy was sure I wouldn’t be in touch at all. Sorry sis, wrong again!) on Mars, just like I always dreamed of being. And mom, dad, I made it, top of the world! I’m at the pole!

Yes, my transfer came through, and I landed here about a month ago, replacing another poor geologist who had to be rushed back to Tharsis for an emergency operation (shattered his hip after falling down a crevasse, very messy, lucky to be alive everyone says.) I know many people consider a “Polar Posting” to be little short of a criminal sentence, but I reckon you probably heard my whoop! of joy when I got the email notification from the Boss up on Phobos. She said I was “uniquely qualified”! I think, truth be told, no-one else wanted to come up here.

And now it’s Christmas, and as things are winding-down here for a few days I finally have time to send you the long letter I’ve been meaning to (and you’ve been nagging me for!). Up here on the so-called “Great Ice” it looks very festive already, of course, snow and ice on all sides. Add a few reindeer and fir trees and I could be in Lapland, just up the valley from Santa himself! Still, if the terraformers have their way your great great great great grandchildren might wake up on Christmas Eve and see fir trees out their window…

I’ll tell you all about what Christmas is like on Mars soon, but I know you’re eager to hear what I’ve been up to, so let me fill you in on my trip here. The flight north from Tharsis was fairly uneventful; like most trips between any “A” and “B” on Mars it meant a day of chatting, playing cards and staring out the window of a tiny tin-can shuttle. But the landscape which passed below us was stunning: the flat northern plains of Arcadia gradually gave way to harsher, more broken landscapes, until eventually we were soaring low over the famous “Polar Band”, the collar of deep, dark dust dunes which surrounds the pole. Looking down on it from the shuttle I was amazed at the sight… row after row after row of dunes, with deep rift valleys between them, looking like a sepia-tinted snapshot of the Pacific, wave after wave of dunes, frozen in time… Soon we were over the dunes, and edging into the icy wilderness of the north polar desert, lit by the fading light of the sinking Sun… just a magical trip, I loved every minute of it.

I shared the shuttle with half a dozen other people. Three of them were members of a terraforming studies group, on an expedition to collect deep ice core samples from a different Outpost near Kison Tholus, which is further around the limb of Mars than the one I have been posted to, here near the edge of Chasma Borealis. Of course, being a Red I just smiled at them politely but didn’t speak. (No, not being petty Lucy, I was just being *safe*: if I’d got into a conversation it would have developed into an argument, and almost 200 million klicks from home you have to try and get on with people, you know? Mars would be torture for you! hehe…) so I just smiled thru my gritted teeth, wished them well and stared thru the window.

Eventually the Sun touched the horizon, and the ice-covered land below us turned a heart-stopping charred orange colour, reflecting the Impressionistic sunset… Then night fell like a guillotine blade. With nothing else to see out the window I closed my eyes and let the steady drone of the shuttle’s engines lull me off to sleep…

When I woke up it was to find that we had landed. Like everyone else onboard I had travelled in my suit, so once inside the airlock all I had to do was twist my helmet on and wait for the pressure to equalise with the outside. I knew it had when a red light on the control panel beside the outer door turned green. The door hissed open then, to reveal a tall, space-suited figure waiting for me, hand outstretched in welcome. I took it and shook it, and introduced myself, stifling another yawn as I was led across the shuttle pad to the Outpost’s own airlock. Through bleary, sleep-heavy eyes I tried to take in the landscape as we walked, or in my case stumbled, but could see nothing. It was dark, just dark, there was nothing *to* see…

I’m ashamed to admit it, but what happened after we reached the airlock door is a mystery to me. All I know is that when I woke up briefly, several hours later, I was wrapped snugly inside a thickly-quilted sleeping back, laid out on a couch of some kind in a room that looked like the living room of my sci-module back home at the Settlement. The only light came from a dimmed lamp on the table beside me, so I turned it off and wriggled my way deeper into my deliciously warm and comfortable quilted coccoon, giving myself up to sleep once again…

Next morning I had only one thought in mind - explore! (Well, actually that was thought no.2, no 1 was “Coffee! Now!”) so I went through the required paperwork as quickly as I could and then made my way to the Personnel Office, to check-in with my immediate superior, the Outpost’s geology officer, Lara. She told me - as I sipped the day’s first coffee (which was delicious!) - that everyone else was already outside on a Drill, but they hadn’t wanted to wake me cos I had obviously been so tired. But if I wanted to join them I could..? Did I?!! Half an hour later I was suited up and the airlock, where Lara was already waiting for me. Checking my suit, as I checked, she warned me that when she opened the outer door I’d be in a different world, it would be like nothing I’d ever seen before, or even imagined. I smiled politely, biting back what I really wanted to say - that I’d imagined how the pole would look since I was a baby thank you, I pretty much knew what to expect.

Then the door opened, and my own arrogance slapped me in the face. Hard.

White. The whole world was a blazing, crisp white.

I was on White Mars.

It’s hard for me to describe what it felt like to be plunged into such an alien environment; I’m so used to being surrounded by what I guess you’d call the “traditional” colours of Mars - the reds, browns oranges and tans - that when I stepped out onto that snow-covered plateau I honestly felt a moment of panic as I told myself, ridiculously, that I’d been abducted in my sleep and taken to another planet entirely: Europa! I thought, staring at the vast expanse of ice all around me, I’ve been kidnapped and taken to Europa!

But no… looking more closely I saw that the plateau stretching away from me in all directions was smooth, its surface was flat, just plain ice and snow. There were no fractures or rilles or ridges anywhere in sight. So, I wasn’t on Europa - maybe I was a tiny spaceman novelty figure stood on the top of a huge, iced cake..! :-)

I took a tentative step forwards, moving away from the airlock, and my eyes opened wide in surprise as I heard, and felt, my boots crunching down into the snow. That was so odd! Beyond “odd”, it was Wrong! Unnatural! I took a few more steps, and gasped each time my boots sank into the ground with a softly-muffled scrunching noise as the snow compressed beneath my weight. I lifted up my foot and saw clumps of snow pasted over its sole and heel, and tried in vain to shake them off, balancing precariously on one leg, like a stork -

Then Lara started to lead me away from the airlock and away from the Outpost. We walked for ten minutes or so, scrunching through the martian snow. I felt like Scott, or one of those early Terran arctic explorers, the only thing missing was a sled behind me. Then the strangest thing happened - Lara told me to trust her, and to close my eyes. I wasn’t at all sure about this; after all, I’d only met her an hour earlier, for all I knew she could have been a psycho or something… but she had been friendly until then I decided to take a chance, and squeezed my eyes tight shut.

The world went dark, and I felt her take my hand in hers and start walking forwards. I followed her blindly, taking small, uncertain steps, hearing only the scrunch-crunch-crisch of snow flattening beneath my boot soles -

Suddenly I felt hands on my waist, holding me steady, and wondered why, but didn’t have time to ask why. “Okay, we’re here..!” Lara said brightly through my headphones, “you can look now, if you like…” I took a deep breath. “Look straight up… tilt your head right back… that’s it, right back…” I heard her whisper, and opened my eyes -

Oh guys… I wish you could have seen it. Up at 80 degrees latitude there are no mountains, no hills or jagged crater rims, no vertical relief in the landscape at all and so no intrusions along the skyline. The horizon is simply that, a horizon, a flat, razor-sharp line separating ground from sky. And that sky is… immense, huge, overpowering, greater even than the sky from the deep Outback, or from the flat lava plains over in Tharsis…

And the colour! I’ve described the colours of the Tharsis Outback sky to you before - the caramel, honey and tan tones which run into each other during the day - but this was… unique. The sky was pink - no, *not* the pale, washed-out colour people think of when they hear something described as “pink”; the polar sky is a deep, rich colour which seems to glow as if it was being lit from behind, and standing there, staring straight up into it, I felt as if I was inside one of those snow-scene paper-weights and someone was shining a red lamp in at me through the glass dome. I’ve seen a lot of big skies out here mom, but never one like that. It was … luxurious, that’s the only word for it…

“On Earth they have roses that colour,” Lara told me, staring up at the sky. But I didn’t believe her. Something that beautiful can surely only be seen on Mars… ;-)

Lara told me to close my eyes again - which I did without hesitation this time; sensing she was giving me a “tour” of polar sights I just surrendered myself to her, like a volunteer in a hypnotist’s show - and steered me around until I had turned almost ninety degrees. Then, very gently, she laid her gloved hand on the top of my helmet and tilted my head down from the vertical until I was facing the horizon.

“Open…” she commanded me, and I opened my eyes -

I was standing on the edge, the very edge, of a canyon. Not as deep as Marineris, not as steep, but the ground a few inches ahead of me just dropped away into an abyss!

My heart leapt up into my mouth, and if Lara’s hands hadn’t clamped themselves quickly onto my hips again I would have toppled backwards - or forwards! - like a sapling caught in a storm. I closed my eyes again quickly, fighting the dizziness and disorientation -

“It’s okay, I won’t let you fall,” she reassured me, “open your eyes again… look…”

Heart still pounding, I did what she said…

Ohhhh… :-) I was stood at the end of a canyon, with walls stretching away from me on either side into the distance. But the canyon wasn’t straight, like Marineris; it was a winding valley, which undulated and swerved snake-like from side to side, so that one outcrop after another jutted into my field of view. With the Sun off to my right the canyon walls on my left were bathed in golden fire, leaving those on my right drowned in inky shadows. The canyon floor, far below, was dark and featureless -

Then I realised what was different. Unlike the sides of Great Marineris and other fault canyons, which are bare and evenly-coloured, the canyon walls rushing away on either side of me were dramatically striped: deep, dusky red layers were horizontally sandwiched between white layers - or vice versa, depending on if you started counting from the top or the bottom! I had been wrong earlier; I wasn’t standing on an iced cake, I was balanced on the top of a huge column of ice-cream covered pancakes, piled high, one on top of another, and someone had taken a jagged-edged slice out of the stack inches from where I stood…

“That’s the ancient history of Mars, laid bare for us to see,” Lara said with an appreciative sigh, and I nodded in agreement. She began to explain how the layers had formed, what they were, but I tuned her out as she got more and more carried away. After all, it’s really pretty simple.

Over millions and millions of years fierce storms blowing from the south (go on, say it: “of course they were, idiot, *everywhere’s* “south” from the north pole!”!) deposited huge amounts of fine dust - blown up from the desert plains - and volcanic ash - blown out of the active caldera in Tharsis and Elysium - onto the landscape, and after every storm more snow fell, more ice formed… storm followed by snowfall, followed by storm… the result was a frozen, frigid landscape, banded, ringed, like an ancient tree. Millennia of erosion by winds, melting and subsidence had carved the valley into ever more twisted, contorted shapes and structures. It was breathtaking.

“Have you seen the sky?” I heard Lara asking, her voice distant.

“Many times, yes thanks..!” I laughed.

“Maybe,” she said, seriously, “but you haven’t seen it from here…” What did she have in mind? I wondered. “Maybe you should take a look, to the west… now…” she suggested strongly, with a hint of a smile in her voice. Shrugging, but curious, and, as always, eager to please people higher up the ladder than myself, I turned away from the valley to look to the west.

The Sun was a ball of white fire, hanging an outstretched hand’s width above the horizon. It was so low that it cast long, loooooong shadows behind everything, every stone, every rock, every snow-covered nub of ground… The shadow thrown behind the clustered Outpost buildings seemed to stretch for miles and miles across the ice towards me. In a moment of inspiration I looked over my shoulder and saw my own shadow stretching away from me, dozens and dozens of feet long - and at its end, around my head, shone a halo of silvery blue light… a glory, the first I’d ever seen..! For a moment I was Nirgal, in Green Mars, staring beside Jackie Boone, watching my glory merge with hers…

But as impressive as the Sun itself was, the sky around it was a cosmic work of art.

I’ve seen optical effects around the Sun before, many times, but I’d never seen a sky like the one I saw that day. That’s when I discovered that although the sky looks clear as crystal, there’s actually a thin haze of “dry ice” and water ice crystals up above the pole, more than enough to refract and shatter the light coming from the Sun into wonderful shapes. And that day, the Sun was the centrepiece of a spectacular natural light display.

Not one, but two haloes surrounded it, the closest one many times brighter and more clearly defined than the outermost, and each halo’s extreme left and right was marked by a parhelia or “sundog”, a miniature, glowing rainbow. Cutting into the top of the inner halo was a narrow arc of beautifully-coloured light, like an upturned rainbow - a rare circum-zenithal arc…

“Worth coming all this way for..?” a now-familiar voice asked me over the radio.

“Oh yes,” I breathed, staring into the rose-coloured sky, tracing haloes around the Sun, “thank you Lara…”

She didn’t say anything in reply to that. There was no need.

… and that was just day 1! Since then I’ve done a lot less sightseeing and a lot more work - no, honestly, I have! Well, I have to justify my pay somehow, don’t I? My drilling crew goes out every 3 days in a rover to drill into the polar ice and retrieve cylindrical core samples of the rock beneath the cap. Then the samples go into the labs and are studied by the “Beakers” who inhabit them for the traces of gas, dust deposits and other geological clues which are gradually helping us piece-together a history of this fascinating planet’s fascinating past. Sounds like a year-long skiing vacation I know, but it’s hard work: we all sweat like hogs in our hardsuits, and are given a very wide berth by everyone else when we get back to the Outpost and shuck-off our shells, but we’re making a difference up here, doing real science, so I love it. And the people are great, they really are. I guess you’d recognise them as old-fashioned “roughnecks” dad, from what I can gather they’re a lot like the guys you say you used to work with on the oil rigs and derricks back in Texas… back when there was oil in Texas, or anywhere.

In my spare time I like to go out onto the ice with a few fellow rock-hounds and hunt for meteorites. Somedays we find nothing, others it seems almost embarrassingly-easy,; we just come across them lying there on the snow and ice, black rocks standing out against the white and pink, looking for all the world like they’d fallen there that very morning. Of course, most have been lying there for millennia, a sobering thought in itself. And hey, big news! You know how pieces of Mars have been found on Earth? Well, I may have found a meteorite which came from Earth! Ugly-looking thing it is, about the size of a walnut, almost as gnarled too, but the guys in the lab say it is almost certainly terrestrial in origin - maybe even a piece of Earth blasted into space in the impact which killed the dinosaurs! Hope so, I’ll be rich! (and yes, Lucy, first thing I’ll do id pay you back that $200 I owe you, sheesh… ;-) )

But now it’s Christmas Eve, and everything has stopped - at least, as far as work is concerned; there’s a big party planned for tonight! Obviously it’s hard to make the Outpost look as festive as we’d like, but we’ve done our best, and insulation foil streamers and decorations are now hanging off every wall and ceiling. Comms are piping carols thru the intercom, people are (rather self-consciously!) wearing make-shift reindeer antlers and red noses, and we’ve festive pictures hanging up everywhere, lots of smiling Santas and the like. We even have a tree! The gals in the hangar made one out of the green packaging material the rovers’ cooling units come wrapped in. Even the Outpost’s shuttle has a big Rudolph-red nose made out the end of a cargo cylinder! We’re all playing “Secret Santa” to a colleague, and the base of the tree is now surrounded by a very respectable pile of (badly!)-wrapped gifts… picture attached. Yes, we’re all set for a Christmas none of us will ever forget.

But I wish you could have been here last night, when the spirit of Christmas truly came to Mars…

At the end of the last shift a general comms order went out, telling everyone to assemble outside around the rear of the Outpost. So we pulled on our suite and helms and out we went into the late afternoon sunshine, crump-crumping out onto the orange-painted snow currently laying thick around the modules, wondering what was going on -

…and outside we found a second tree, a much larger one than the one inside. Someone had gathered together every scrap of aerial, tubing and insulation tape they could find, and the result was beautiful, just beautiful. Over ten feet tall, and decorated with strings of lights, the tree was one of the most exquisite things I’ve ever seen, I swear. I’ll attach a pic, but I know in advance it won’t do it justice, I’m sorry!

And as the Sun sank towards the horizon it turned the Great Ice a brilliant, vibrant orange, then red, then purple - and then the Sun vanished, snuffed-out like a candle flame in a gale, and as the voices of the others rang in my ears I looked up to the sky, half-expecting to see snow falling -

… but instead of snow I saw something which was so beautiful I honestly thought my heart was going to break.

The brightest stars and planets were slowly emerging out of the darkness of the martian night… And they had haloes.

Each and every bright spark of light, each bright planet and star, was surrounded in a misty corona, as if it was shining in the centre of its own tiny nebula. The brighter the object, the brighter and wider the halo encircling it, and the halo’s colour was the same as the object at its centre, only softer, smoother, somehow warmer. Blue-white Deneb was framed inside a ring of elegant silver; yellow-white Arcturus nestled within a halo the colour of saffron, or lemon peel, and copper-coloured Aldebaran was trapped inside a ball of polished, clear amber. So many halos they almost touched and blurred together! The whole sky looked like a Van Gogh painting…

Then it came to me, what we should do. Turning my back on the tree I started to walk away from the Outpost, out onto the Great Ice. Puzzled voices called out after me, asking what on Mars I was doing. Stop singing, I told them, and follow me…

Amazingly they did, and soon there was a line of ten figures strung-out across the snow, stomping away from the Outpost, like migrating mammoths heading south for the winter. I counted my footsteps carefully, calculating that twenty, maybe thirty feet would be far enough…

Okay, I said, digging my heels into the snow, stop now, and look back…

We all turned back towards the Outpost as one. Thankfully, I’d been right. There, shining right above the top of the Christmas tree, was a brilliant, sapphire spark, bathed in a shimmering halo of cornflower-blue.

Earth was our Christmas star…

And as we stood there, on the ancient ice of an ancient world so far from our own that we could cover it with one finger, we all joined hands and began to sing; ten of us, looking for all the world like snowmen in our hardsuits, our curved visors reflecting the azure-blue spark of Earth as we sang one of the oldest carols of all. And moments later - unknown to us - our singing was being beamed right around the planet too, into each and every Station and Outpost on the Red Planet. A choked voice in our helmets told us then that there were people pulling on suits and heading outside all across the night-side of Mars, to follow our lead and stand together, holding hands, and look back at Earth through tear-filled eyes…

Each and every one of them singing “Silent Night”…

And yes, I cried too, as I waved at you, and wished you all a Merry Christmas.

I’ll have to close now, cos if I make this any longer they’ll refuse to transmit it; there’s a limit on the size of outgoing emails. But I want you to know that even though I’m here, on the ice cap of a different planet, so far from home that it will take this message almost half an hour to reach you once the Comms guy hits the Send button, I’m thinking of you and missing you all. I’ll be back home in a year.

Save me some of that turkey!

All my love,

Kyle Lowrie, USGS
Dec 24th, 2051
Chasma B Outpost
Mars

Filed under: Fiction on December 27th, 2001