New Mars

In a few days time, Venus will be making a transit across the sun, a once in a lifetime event. In Transit Day, Stuart Atkinson imagines what a different kind of transit might be like, seen from Mars, and what effect it might have on colonists young and old…

“Are we there yet?”

Callie sighed, and pinched the bridge of her nose with her fingers. A classic travel headache was coming on, she could feel it. She was sure - and kept telling herself - that it would be worth it, that once they got to their destination what they saw from the hallowed hilltops would leave an impression on them all which would last a lifetime… But right now, only two hours into the day-long shuttle flight from Ares, she was ready to open an airlock door and jump for it -

“No Blare,” she replied calmly, deliberately not turning around, knowing that would only encourage her young son to continue the interrogation, “we’re not there yet… if you’d bothered to look at the screen on the back of my seat you’d have seen that in the five minutes that have passed since you last asked me that question we’ve travelled only a dozen klicks or so. Long way to go yet.”

The boy let out a deep sigh, pushing himself back into his chair. “I was only asking,” he said huffily, and she could tell his arms were folded tightly and sulkily across his chest, “no need for a lecture…”

“Not a lecture honey,” Callie replied sweetly, “just answering your question.” Then, added, “again…”

Another deep sigh from behind her, wearier than the last.

“What is it?” she asked, still determined not to turn around, knowing that one look at her son’s Forget-Me-Not blue eyes would melt her resolve and she’d give him anything he wanted. “You want a drink?”

Dismissively: “Not thirsty - ”

“Some food then? I could buzz and have you something brought from the galley - ”

Sulkily: “Not hungry - ”

Don’t turn round… don’t turn round… “What then?”

Melodramatic pause. “Bored.”

Callie stared at the ceiling. Boone help me…

“Bored. Blare… come on… you’re on a spaceship, travelling over the surface of Mars, flying over billion-year old craters and canyons, heading towards one of the most historic places in the history of mankind, to watch something amazing and wonderful, something no human being has ever seen before, ever? Think about it.”

There was a short pause then, during which Callie dared to believe her words had made her son reappraise his situation. Then his soft voice spoke again. “I’ve thought about it mom,” her son replied, enjoying her impatience with him, “and I’m still bored. Bored stiff.”

Around them, the shuttle’s seven other passengers, all friends, laughed quietly at the boy’s cheek, and Callie allowed herself a proud smile. Typical Blare, charming the pants off everyone he met.

So like his father had been, before -

No, don’t think about him. Not yet. Wait until you’ve landed and your helmet’s on, and you’re outside, she told herself, then they won’t ask why you’re crying -

“Then just do what you usually do when you’re bored,” Callie replied, pushing the thoughts of Conn away, “torment your sister.”

“Mom!” Catriona protested, but only half-heartedly. She knew her little brother’s efforts to aggravate her wouldn’t last longer than five minutes. They never did.

Callie smiled again. “If you’re going to kill him, kill him quietly Cat, ok? I’ve got work to do before we land.”

“Okay, deal,” the young girl agreed, reaching out towards her brother, her hands clawing for him menacingly, “Blare, come here…”

“Leave me alone! Mom! She’s…ow! Ow!” Blare laughed, the musical sound sending ripples through his mother’s heart as he fought off his sister.

Callie smiled to herself and, knowing the two children were too busy fighting to see her, allowed herself a short peek over the back of her chair. She couldn’t help herself. God, they were beautiful. Look at them… Supremely self-confident Blare, with his sapphire-blue eyes and ragged mop of night-black hair, melted every female heart - regardless of age - wherever he went. Catriona, a genuine pale-skinned Martian princess, with hair the colour of spun gold and a heart as big as Phobos… How had she and Conn, probably Mars’ two ugliest ducklings, managed to produce such spectacular children? she wondered, not for the first time.

The ever-present nagging voice which kept her on schedule reminded her then that she had work to do, so reluctantly she reached into her breast pocket for her computer, setting it down on the small table in front of her. Barely the size of an old-fashioned cell phone, the mini-com contained more information than a dozen desktop pc’s, literally tens of thousands of files and documents - among them, unfortunately, several urgent Parliamentary reports which needed reading and replying to before they reached their destination…

How the hell did I become a politician? Callie wondered, for possibly the millionth time. It was a mystery, and crazy, too. She’d never intended to enter politics; had never had even a passing interest in joining the Parliament. True, as a student, when she wasn’t buried beneath geology texts or stalking her way across Mars’s most desolate deserts, gathering rock samples, she’d been a “red”, or an “activist”, to use either of the quaint old terms, but her involvement in politics had been limited to speaking in the college debates about terraforming, where she was always passionate and sincere, always ready to listen to the views of others whilst steadfastly refusing to change her own views…

Somewhere along the line her Guavarian banner-waving had stopped and she had stood for, and been elected to, the Martian Parliament as an official Red. How?

It didn’t matter. All that mattered now was that here she was, the most famous - and some said best-loved - single mother politician on Mars, travelling half-way around the Red Planet with two kids to watch an event which, inspired by accounts of it in science fiction stories from the past two hundred years, the media both on Earth and on Mars had been going crazy about for months; an event no-one would see again from the planet’s surface for perhaps centuries -

How the hell did this happen, Conn? She asked, closing her eyes.

God, she wished he was with her, wished that he hadn’t gone on that damn foolish climbing expedition to Marineris, wished the rock ledge hadn’t given way beneath his feet and -

No, there’s no time for this… she told herself. Focus. Concentrate.

With just a couple of fingertip taps she activated the computer’s systems, surprised as always by the speed at which the holographic keyboard and screen appeared in mid-air in front of her.

“Okay, what’s first..?” Callie wondered aloud, tapping away “on” the keyboard and opening up her To Do folder. A list of tasks appeared in front of her face, written in glowing but subtle holo-neon. Wait a minute, hadn’t she already answered him? Hmmm, apparently not. Oh well -

“Mom..?”

“Hmmm?”

“Are we there yet?” two giggling voices asked in unison from behind her.

Little monsters, Callie grinned, as her friends laughed around her. But she kept typing. The work of a Parliamentarian never stopped.

Not even on the long-awaited Transit Day.

Three hours later, the cabin intercom chimed twice and the shuttle pilot’s voice informed them they were, finally, approaching their destination.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am happy to be able to inform you that we will be landing in approximately ten minutes’ time, that’s one zero minutes. Those of you seated on the starboard side will be able to see our destination, the famous Gusev Crater, out your window, with the Ma’adim Valley opening out into it’s southern plain…”

Callie and the kids were, of course, on the correct side; as a Parliamentarian she would automatically have been given seats on the shuttle’s starboard side without even requesting them, but with the shuttle only half-full - a surprising number of colonists, both native- and Terra-born had decided to either just watch the Big Event from Ares or miss it altogether - there had been no unseemly scrabble for positions, so as Callie looked out through the window, shielding it from the glare of the shuttle cabin’s lights with her cupped hands, she was able to enjoy the view.

Beneath a vast, overpowering butterscotch-coloured sky, Gusev was a vast, almost-circular pit; a vast, steep-walled crater with a floor dotted with smaller craters and marked and streaked with dust dines, escarpments and undulating ranges of low hills.

To the south, exactly as the pilot had said, the entrance to the huge Ma’adim Valley was a wide gap in the crater’s looming, mountainous wall, the gaping mouth of a valleys which meandered and sneaked its way towards the south pole. Once, she knew, that valley had carried raging torrents of icy water into Gusev…

None of which made it anything special, of course. There were dozens of craters just like it on Mars, some larger, some smaller. But none of them had Gusev’s Claim To Fame.

None of them could declare themselves “Home Of The First Fossils Found On Mars…”

“We will be landing on Husband Hill,” the pilot continued over the intercom, “the tallest of the Columbia Hills range which lies almost exactly in the centre of the crater, from where - if the Beakers have done their sums correctly - we will all enjoy the best possible view of today’s historic transit. With landing now imminent, I need to ask you all to pack your travel things away and strap yourselves in. I won’t be speaking to you again until after the landing, so I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you all a successful and enjoyable Transit Day, especially our member of Parliament and her shy, retiring children…” Much to Catriona’s amusement, Blare actually blushed at the attention and applause (applause? For pity’s sake…), and turned his face away from the smiles beamed towards him by their fellow passengers. “Thank you, and I’ll see you by the Monument,” the pilot concluded, and the intercom went dead.

“Oh, you’re such a celebrity, mom,” Catriona swooned, leaning over the next seat, “can I have your autograph? Can I? Can I?.

“Shut up, Cat,” Callie replied kindly, ruffling her daughter’s hair, “and strap yourself in. And make sure Blare’s strapped in okay too - ”

“Okay, but I think we should gag him, too,” Cat suggested, tugging the straps across her lap. “You know, just to be sure.”

“I do too honey,” Callie agreed, smiling reassuringly at her son as the shuttle seemed to buck in mid-air, braking, “but not with all these witnesses around us. Maybe on the way back.”

“Okay,” Cat said, and ducked back behind the chair and out of sight.

Out the window the horizon suddenly tilted, and the cabin filled with the tell-tale whine of the shuttle’s retro-engines. They were going in.

“I can see other shuttles, mom,” Blare announced, leaning over his protesting sister to peer out of their row’s window a minute later. “They look very small… either we’re very high up still, or those hills aren’t very big..?”

“Big enough,” Callie replied distantly, remembering her first - and, before today, only - visit to the hills, “big enough…”

Half a dozen years ago she’d come to Gusev with Conn to celebrate a remarkable triple anniversary - the first anniversary of Conn’s arrival from Earth, their first wedding anniversary, and the anniversary of the Spirit rover’s landing in the crater, almost three quarters of a century earlier. Then, it had been just the two of them - Cat, a baby, had been left with delighted grandparents at Ares, and Blare was little more than a frogspawn-like blob of cells, his existence as yet unknown to them. After pinning-it down with the Martian gps, they had parked their rover close to the rover’s landing site, and had walked in reverent silence through the rocks and boulders to the stunningly beautiful crystal pyramid erected on the site of the Columbia Memorial Station Spirit by Mars Heritage.

All the landing site commemorations were the same - a six feet high pyramid of crystal, transparent but tinged slightly blue, like ice, with a life-size, 3D laser-etched depiction of the site’s lander or rover deep inside it. Gusev’s pyramid contained a laser-portrait of the Spirit rover as it had appeared before it trundled off its lander, with its wheels clean and shining, yet to feel the brittle duricrust crunching and fracturing beneath their spiky treads. Callie had wandered around the pyramid again and again, heart thumping, thinking back to how she had visited the landing site of “Opportunity”, Spirit’s twin, many years before, on a school trip - a school trip which had set in motion changes to her life which had transformed it beyond all recognition. Conn had almost had to drag her away in the end, and had laughed at her reluctance to leave the landing site behind as they set off across the desert plain, following the “Spirit Trail” from the shining pyramid to the rim of Bonneville Crater and on to the foot of the Columbia Hills themselves, tracking-down along the way some of the rocks and boulders the little rover had studied and marked with its brush and drill as it drove across the crater floor.

Using the excellent Mars Heritage “Spirit Trail” booklet as a guide they’d found Adirondack, Humphrey and others, stopping beside each one to take the obligatory tourist photos and examine and run their fingers over the historic circular brush marks and into the drill holes. After an hour of searching they’d tracked-down the slab-like Mazatzl and, like excited tourists, beaming with pride as they photographed each other pointing to the famous “daisy” of six closely-clustered, Venn diagram-like brush marks…

Soon after, they’d stood on the edge of Bonneville and peered down into it, seeing for themselves the huge, jagged blocks of ejecta which had exploded out of the ground in the impact which had formed the crater, countless millions of years before, and then they’d driven to the foothills of the Columbias, faithfully following Spirit’s route, stopping every hour or so to go and search for some trace of the rover’s own historic tracks, but always in vain; the winds and dust devils of Mars had erased all traces of the rover’s epic trek within a handful of years of its completion. They did, however, find the bootprints of previous visitors to Gusev. The dust devils which snaked and shimmied their way across the crater floor weren’t so common that they removed all traces of humanity from Mars.

And they couldn’t remove the vandalism, either. Wandering up the Spirit Trail they had come across several large boulders defaced with graffiti, the names of colonists etched and scratched into their millennia-old faces with unknown sharp instruments. On one level, it was understandable, perhaps even human nature. Conn told her - though she took some convincing - of how terran lovers took great delight in carving their initials into the living bark of trees. It was, he claimed, some kind of ancient mating ritual. That the ritual would find its way to Mars was, he said, apologetically, inevitable. First trees, then lunar boulders, now Martian rocks. It was just human nature to record one’s presence in a new place. Perhaps, Callie had thought, but it still filled her with disgust.

Then the huff-and-puff hike up into the hills themselves - not to the summit of the tallest, Husband Hill, but to the top of the nearby Chawla Hill, a gentler, more forgiving ascent with almost as stunning a view at the end. Three hours after first stepping off the floor of the crater they’d reached the top and stared down at the vast expanse of Gusev stretched out beneath and around them. In the far distance, dimmed and blurred by the dusty atmosphere, the crater’s walls were pale and out of focus, but impressive nonetheless. The mouth of the Ma’adim had looked like the gaping maw of some giant Martian dragon, a gap in the surrounding crater wall which looked like it had been hacked out by a furious god’s axe…

But it wasn’t the view which had moved them to tears that day, it was thinking about how the Hills had got their name, all those decades ago. Standing there, arm in arm, blissfully unaware that Blare was with them too, they had watched a holo projected onto the insides of their helmet visors, watched seven smiling men and women - four of them as wide-eyed as children, betraying the fact that they were ttravelling into space for the very first time - dressed in unflattering, baggy orange pressure suits, shaking hands with white-suited techs in a ridiculously-small white cubicle… watched them take their seats, close together, laughing and smiling… watched their sleek white and black-trimmed spacecraft - “space shuttle” - thunder off its launch pad into a breathtakingly-blue Florida sky, riding piggyback on an enormous, bullet-like fuel tank… watched an innocent-looking puff of brown smoke appear beneath the spacecraft’s wing as it ascended on twin pillars of blindingly-bright flame… watched the shuttle hanging serenely above the Earth, its snow-white hull reflecting the achingly-beautiful blue light of the world turning so, so slowly beneath it as its crew stared out the window, faces pressed against the glass, besotted with their front row seat view of the universe in all its glory…

…watched the spacecraft streaking across a bluer-than-blue sky after re-entry, a bright white star shining at the end of a laser-straight vapour trail, a star which, as millions watched from roadsides, schoolyards and gardens, and on TV, suddenly flared and shattered into countless smaller stars, each one skidding and skipping across the sky like a stone across the surface of a pond, separating into yet smaller flaring pieces, again and again, until only a blizzard of twinkling lights remained…

Columbia, the first of the beautiful shuttles, and its brave, final crew of seven souls, was gone.

A year later those same seven souls had been immortalised on Mars, their names given to a range of hills photographed by the Spirit rover as it opened its unblinking electronic eyes on the floor of Gusev crater and stared out over the rock-strewn landscape - a landscape which, in the years and decades which followed, became marked with the footprints of countless colonists, men, women and eventually children who travelled from the international bases, outposts and stations scattered all over the Red Planet to pay their respects to the Columbia Seven.

Callie let out a deep breath, fighting back painfully-sweet memories of how she had stood on the summit of Chawla with her husband, unaware of the life developing inside her as they stared up at the clear, butterscotch sky, offering their thanks to the Columbia Seven. Now she was back. But things were different.

Very different.

Now the hills were alive, crowded. A dozen shuttles, shining stark, bone white against the ochre- and tan-hued rocks of the crater, were already parked on Chawla and the other lower hills, Anderson, Brown, Clark, McCool and Ramon, looking like tiny white flowers against the wind-scoured red rock. As her own shuttle descended, Callie could see dozens - no, hundreds - of tiny white dots swarming away from the shuttlecraft, making their way, one by one, or in small groups, towards and then up the gently climbing slopes of Husband Hill, the tallest hill in the range, named after the Commander of the lost shuttle.

“I’ve never seen so many people!” Catriona declared, excitedly pushing her brother away from the window. “Everyone on Mars must have come!”

No, thought Callie, not everyone. Some people had stayed behind to keep vital systems running, selflessly ensuring the safety of the colony and its scattered outposts, but others had chosen not to come because they simply weren’t interested. What was going to happen, what she, the kids, and hundreds of other colonists had travelled so far and so long to see, meant nothing to them, less than nothing. It was a curiosity in the sky, nothing more.

The jumbled crowd swarming over the hills beneath them was perhaps two thirds of the population of Mars.

It was sobering to think that Earth now meant so little to a third of the people on her world.

Suddenly the shuttle bucked beneath them, and there was a stomach-dropping lurch as the craft banked steeply. Out the window the Columbia Hills began to get bigger, very quickly, and she could see their craft’s shadow rippling across the crater floor towards Husband Hill. Callie made a quick mental calculation, raised her eyebrows at the result: a minute more, at most, and they would be down.

“You two buckled in back there?” she asked. Both kids assured her they were, and she believed them. Her children were jokers, no doubt about that, and delighted in playing tricks on her, but when it came to matters of safety, in-flight and on the ground, they were, like all Martians, deadly serious.

The shuttle’s braking engines fired again, and banked over sharply, making everyone lurch suddenly and violently in their seats.

“Oh Blare, dear..?” Callie called sarcastically over her shoulder, as the shuttle began to fall from the sky like a stone, “you remember saying you were bored? Well, you’re about to find out just how ‘exciting’ a shuttle landing on a small, crowded hilltop is…”

Blare smiled back at her, gulping back the bile which was rising in his throat, while beside him Cat grinned smugly, wondering what all the fuss was about.

A moment later the shuttle’s retro rockets fired for the final time, slamming everyone down into their seats like the solar system’s scariest rollercoaster ride, and she knew…

After landing - if the bone-crunching, skull-jarring, lop-sided impact of the shuttle on the hilltop could be called a landing - Callie insisted that all the other passengers disembarked before her and her family. It wasn’t just that she knew she’d need the extra time to gather together all Blare and Cat’s things; she was only too well aware that if she went first she would be accused, by some, of using her position on the Parliament to queue-jump. Of course, remaining onboard until last would mean some people would accuse her of hanging back in order to “make an entrance”. She couldn’t win. Eventually they all made their way up the aisle to the airlock outer door, stepped inside, and, pulling their surface suits off the rack, helped each other to suit-up, checking, double- and then triple-checking each other’s seals and backpacks.

As they dressed, Callie was struck again by how beautiful their spacesuits were, and by how much work Cat and Blare had put into theirs. The first spacesuits had been sterile, off-the-peg affairs: bland, ice-cream white affairs, decorated - if that was the right word - only with the odd flag or label above the breast or on the upper arm. A quick skim through the net-archives showed how the astronauts who had risked their lives bouncing across the Sea of Tranquility, or Fra Mauro, or floating in the cavernous payload bays of the Space Shuttle orbiters, or crawling up and down the girders and trusses of the International Space Station had been anonymous-looking clones, and the only distinguishing features were coloured hoops around thighs, designating an astronaut’s mission rank, and maybe a family photo stuck (strictly against regulations, of course) to the back of a glove.

Then people went to Mars, and things changed.

On Mars, Earth - and Mission Control - was simply too far away to tell astronauts what they could or could not do, certainly too far away to tell them what they could or could not do to make their spacesuits a little more “personal”.
Hoops and bands of vivid, unapproved colour were first - garish rings of red, green and blue which clashed with the tons of Mars’s surface quite criminally. Then some of the explorers started decorating their suits with more artistic designs - portraits of their wives and kids; pictures of their homes, or places dear to them, things like that. Soon spacesuits were as individual as their owners, decorated with all manner of strange, bizarre, and personal designs. Some subtle, some less so. Within a generation, the men and women exploring the surface of Mars began to resemble something from a medieval tale, their 21st century hi-tech suits of puncture-resistant Kevlar and woven with insulation tubing were adorned with striking designs, just like the knights of the Dark Ages had decorated their suits of armour with crests and coats of arms.

Mission Controllers back on Earth were incandescent with anger. It didn’t matter. No-one on Mars cared.

Callie marvelled at her daughter’s suit. The girl, fascinated by dinosaurs for as long as she’d been able to read and net-surf, had covered her suit with pictures of the gigantic “terrible lizards”, adding a new one every week until now it resembled a walking art gallery of dinosaur pictures. Here, a bloody-snouted T-Rex roaring at the sky; there a three-horned triceratops, glaring at a stalking allosaur, daring it to charge…

“Is that a new design?” Callie asked Cat, noticing an unfamiliar - and dinosaur free - splash of colour on her daughter’s right shoulder.

“Yes, I just finished it yesterday,” Cat replied proudly, turning around to allow her mother a better view of her handiwork. Callie leaned forwards and down, staring at the small but perfectly-reproduced landscape painted on the young girl’s shoulder plate. It was a valley of some kind, a lush, green field squeezed between two huge, vertical grey-stone cliff faces, all beneath a bluer-than-blue sky. It looked too beautiful to be real, like a painting of some make-believe fantasy kingdom… but it was naggingly familiar too -

“It’s a place on Earth, dad used to talk about it… Yosemite Valley,” Cat prompted, “remember?”

Callie drew in a deep breath. Oh yes, she remembered, of course she did. Yosemite Valley, Conn’s favourite place in the whole world. A place he’d visited as a child. A place he had vowed to take them to when they could afford the trip down to Earth -

“It’s beautiful Cat, well done.” Callie managed to say. Without saying a word, Blare - his own suit decorated with sleek, chrome Flash Gordon rockets and bug-eyed aliens - squeezed her hand. She squeezed back, also in silence. It was more than enough.

After what seemed like an age they pulled on helmets and their anti-radiation cloaks. Finally they were ready to go. A quick game of paper and scissors - always funny when played in surface suits, with their fat, pressurised gloves - awarded Cat the fiercely-contested prize of “outer door opener”, and she stabbed the egress button with a triumphant smile. The door hissed open, air rushed past them in a misty cloud, carrying with it a miniature storm of shuttle cabin dust and dirt, then all was still.

“Whoa there,” Callie growled, thrusting her arm across the open door as a barrier, halting Cat and Blare in their tracks, “before you rush out I need to let you know today’s rules…” Heavy, world-weary sighs were their reply. Ignoring them, as usual, Callie raised a finger and started to run through her checklist. “One… serious now… there’s a LOT of people out there, more than you’ve seen in one place ever before… don’t be frightened by it, you’ll be safe with me.”

A second finger pointed towards the airlock ceiling. “Two… and this is even more serious than One,” she warned, “I know that because this is an exciting new place to you you’ll be tempted to dash about like lunatics, but please remember this isn’t a playground… this is a very special, very serious place, a memorial - ”

“Like a graveyard?” Cat asked innocently. Blare rolled his eyes.

“No honey, not a graveyard, no-one’s buried here,” Callie replied gently, placing a hand on her daughter’s helmet, “but people are remembered here, and those people were very special… I’m not asking you both to tiptoe around,” she clarified, “just… be good out there ok..?”

“Respectful…” Blare said, quietly.

“Well… yes, Blare, respectful,” Callie repeated, impressed and surprised by her son’s uncharacteristic display of sensitivity.

“We learned about the Columbia in history in school, mom,” the young boy explained seriously, “we watched what happened. Don’t worry, we won’t do anything inappropriate.” Beside him, Cat nodded solemnly.

Callie felt her heart thudding with pride in her chest. “I know you won’t,” she said, smiling at them both. Then, sensing it was time to lighten up, added: “but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun while you’re here, really! You understand what I’m saying?” Both children nodded. “Okay, then you’re almost ready to go - ” Both kids lunged forwards. “I said almost…” Callie repeated, blocking the kids’ exit with her arm again. Reluctantly they edged backwards once more.

“Before you go, I have something for you,” Callie said. Instantly the children’s eyes lit up, an early exit from the airlock forgotten.

“These… these were made by your father,” she said slowly, reaching into a pouch which hung from her belt by a cord. When she withdrew her hand it was closed, clenched into a fist. Cat and Blare leaned forwards, straining to get a better look at whatever it was their mother was holding. When Callie opened her hand there were two fine silver chains coiled up in her palm, with what looked like dark brown discs fixed to one end of each. Cat’s eyes widened again. Jewelery?

“These,” Callie said slowly, handing them each a pendant, “were made by your father, especially for today. Three years ago, when he heard about what was going to be happening today, he decided you should both have something special to wear while you watched it.” She laughed then. “You know your dad, always planning ahead…”

Blare held the pendant up to his face to get a closer look, fascinated as it span slowly on the end of its delicate chain. Surrounded by a ring of dark brown, almost black stone, was a chip of lighter, tan-coloured rock. Rough-edged, but with a smooth polished face, it sparkled and twinkled as tiny specks of metal embedded within it reflected the glow of the ceiling strip lights. Beside him, Cat gasped, watching her own pendant flashing as it turned and turned…

“The dark rock around the outside is from the slopes of Olympus Mons,” Callie told them, “your father collected it himself on one of his expeditions, from right up near the caldera at the summit…”

“And the rock in the middle..?” Blare asked, hypnotised.

“A piece of a meteorite… from - ”

“Earth,” Blare finished for her, “it’s rock from Earth, isn’t it?”

Callie nodded. “Yes, it is… Conn wanted you to be able to see Earth and hold a piece of it at the same time,” she told them. Then, darkly, sadly, as memories flooded back: “He wanted to give you them himself, here, today, but - ”

“It’s beautiful, thank you,” Cat said quickly, skilfully snapping Callie back to the present by wrapping her small arms around her mother’s neck. “I love it.”

“Me too,” Blare said distantly, still staring at the chip of rock spinning in front of his face.

“Good,” Callie said, managing a smile as she dropped to her knees, “let’s put them on you now…” In silence the two young Martians dipped their heads and looped their pendants’ silver chains around their necks. Against the multi-coloured metal and material of their spacesuits, the chips of meteorite looked very striking.

“Okay, speech over,” Callie said, clapping her hands as she rose again, “go on, get out of here, and I’ll see you in a little while - ”

The two young Martians bolted past her in a blur, bunny-hopping down the ramp as if they’d never been out in the open before, and within moments were heading away from the shuttle and into the crowd, cloaks swirling around them. “Come when I call you, ok? No hiding. I mean it!” Callie called after them, and thought she caught a glimpse of Blare’s upraised, acknowledging hand, but couldn’t be sure.

Oh well. See you guys later, she thought, stepping carefully down the ramp and onto the dusty Martian surface, suddenly feeling very, very alone.

Pausing at the foot of the ramp she took in the view, getting her bearings. They had arrived mid-morning local time, an hour before the start of the Show, and the low Sun was casting long shadows behind the rocks and boulders which were scattered across the hillside. As always, the sky was an awesome sight, a weak coffee-coloured dome stretching over them, immense, overpoweringly grand. The Sun embedded in it was a bright - but, as yet, not brilliant - lemon-gold coin, shining high above the hill, surrounded by a subtly beautiful display of rings - ice haloes, uniquely Martian in their patterns, totally unlike anything ever seen on Earth. Also unlike Earth’s sky, no clouds were in sight, and none were forecast for the rest of the day, ensuring them all a grandstand view of the transit.

Not for the first time Callie found herself wondering how skywatchers on Terra didn’t go insane pursuing their hobby. What must it be like, she wondered, to look forward to something - perhaps an eclipse, or a meteor shower, instead of a Transit - only to have it hidden by clouds! It would have made her scream!

But there were no such worries here on Mars. They would get an amazing view of the show in just under an hour, and people down on Earth would only be able to see the show on their holo-v’s. Jealous, they’d possibly go outside to stand in their gardens and parks and look for Mars in their sky, find it blazing like a brilliant garnet, close to a fat Moon, and feel even more envy…

Enough gloating, she told herself, they see things we can’t; how wonderful it must be to see the Sun totally hidden by Earth’s huge Moon. Or to see that big blue Moon turn as red as wine when it passes into Earth’s own shadow…

Lowering her gaze, she studied her immediate surroundings. Chawla Hill was perhaps the second highest of the Columbias, a gentle rise of ochre-coloured rock, dotted with gneiss-like outcrops and discoloured areas of darker, heavier stone. Rugged, and covered with pieces of ejecta from the formation of nearby craters, it was as desolate a place as any on Mars, but its historical significance more than made up for that. Named in honour of the beautiful Indian astronaut scientist Kalpana Chawla who had perished onboard the Columbia shuttle, Chawla was the “next hill north” from Husband Hill, the tallest of the Columbias, and because of its proximity to Husband it had, sensibly, been designated as the “shuttle park” for the day’s activities. Now, looking around her, Callie counted eight shuttles parked on the hilltop, some of them many times larger than the one which had brought her from Ares. If they had all been full, she calculated quickly, that would mean over three hundred people had made the journey - pilgrimage? - to Gusev to watch the show…

And at least a hundred of them were still gathered on the summit of Chawla, clustered together in twos, threes and fours, either waiting for friends to arrive, or preparing themselves for the hike up to the top of Husband, from where everyone would watch the Transit together.

Time I was moving, she thought, and, taking a deep breath, turned her back on the shuttle and set off towards the crowd, her anti-radiation cloak swirling around her like giant wings.

Callie reached the edge of the crowd after just a few minutes, and then started to move through it, aiming for what she knew lay at its centre, hoping in vain that no-one would recognise her. Her anonymity lasted barely a minute, and she cringed as she heard her name spoken out loud by someone, someone she didn’t recognise. Before she knew it hands were reaching out for her, shaking hers, and people she had never met before were wishing her well, enquiring after Blare and Cat, quizzing her about her hopes for the day… She answered them all kindly and warmly, keeping her answers short, trying to keep moving onwards and not get sidetracked.

It was a political skill she had developed over the years - make people think you had stopped to talk to them individually without actually doing so - and eventually, without snubbing or offending anyone, she broke through the inner ring of the crowd gathered at the summit and found herself looking at the Monument.

Like all the Columbias, the summit of Chawla was marked with a cairn-like monument to honour “its” astronaut. All seven monuments were identical - eight foot high rectangular slabs of glass, polished and smooth over many months until they were as clear and as perfect as the very finest terran crystal.

Each crystal monolith was laser-etched with the face of the Columbia astronaut in whose honour the hill had been named, but they were very subtle portraits, almost not there, like they were face-shaped wisps of smoke trapped within the crystal rather than etched upon it.

The first time she had seen a Monument, Callie had felt tears well up in her eyes, and had turned to see Conn blinking furiously too, not even bothering to claim something was in his eye. Now, as she stood before the Chawla monument, seeing her own reflection on its tall, flat face, she felt the same surge of emotion. As was the tradition, she reached out a gloved hand and touched the surface of the monument lightly, making contact with just her fingertips. The monolith was mirror-smooth, so perfectly polished her fingers almost slid right off it, but she maintained contact for long enough to silently mouth a prayer of thanks to the astronauts, then dropped her hand and stepped away -

“Glad you could make it,” a familiar voice said in her ear.

Oh no.

“You left it rather late,” the voice continued, male, gruff, cold; “we’re going to have to stomp up that track if we’re going to find a good place before the show starts - ”

“We’re not going to stomp anywhere,” she said, pointedly turning away from the space-suited figure which had come up beside her, “I’m going to go up there on my own, and I’m sure that any place I find will be just fine, as long as it’s nowhere near you.” With that she set off towards the base of Husband and the start of the narrow track which ran up to its summit, leaving the figure in her wake. Damn it, she thought, bounding across the hilltop, cloak cracking and flapping behind her, navigating her way through gaps and holes in the throng, why did he have to be here? This is the last place I thought he’d be today…

Soon, though, thoughts of him were replaced by thoughts of the next leg of her journey - the trek to the top of Husband Hill. After re-checking her suit’s critical survival systems she off up the track at her usual breakneck pace, ignoring the scratchy skittering of loose stones shooting out from beneath her feet and enjoying, for a while, the feeling of freedom as she made her way up from the summit of Chawla. But soon the track began to narrow, and by the time she reached the half-way point it was barely two metres wide and blocked by people making their way up to the summit in twos and threes. Forced to slow right down, Callie, travelling alone, found her path repeatedly blocked, and every five minutes, it seemed, she had to ask people to let her through please, or let her pass please, which made progress up the slope painfully slow.

Along the way she saw many people struggling with the climb, pausing to bend over at the waist, clutching their sides as stitches stabbed them through with agony. She saw others actually stumble and fall, losing their footing on the loose pebbles and scuffling gravel of the track-way, and realised they were probably lab staff - or “beakers” - unused to being out in the open at all, let alone trudging up a hillside.

It must have been a shock for them, she thought, to leave their air-conditioned, strip-lit labs behind and plunge into the Outback, but it would do them good. Now the initial excitement of exploration and discovery had faded, replaced by the less glamorous side of colonisation - handling budgets, managing resources and, of course, establishing a political system - some found it too easy to just retreat, to lurk underground or in labs, keeping their heads down, never seeing the Sun or feeling the ‘crust crunch beneath their feet.

She smiled at one red-faced man as she passed him. Once surely a fit, healthy colonist candidate he was now overweight and unfit, had let himself go since stepping off the shuttle. Welcome to Mars… she thought, stepping lightly past him.

Eventually, after what seemed like a day’s huffing and puffing, she made it to the small, ancient crater blasted into the top of Husband, and, stepping off the side of the track and onto the crater rim to let others pass, wrapped her cloak tightly around her and drank in the view.

Scattered and strewn with boulders and chunks of ejecta, some as tall as herself, many tossed there from impacts which had occurred at sites a thousand miles away or more, the red, ochre and brown plain of Gusev crater’s floor stretched out beneath her like a scene from an ancient Wild West movie. No meandering channels like those found at Ares; no shallow, outcrop-lined craters, like those at Meridiani. Just a seemingly endless rolling plain of rocks, rocks and more rocks, each one casting its own jagged, black shadow.

Down on the crater floor directly in front of her, the “famously featureless” Bonneville crater, the only feature of any note within view, was a shallow, orange-floored bowl rimmed with jagged pieces of ejecta. It was a stark, rocky landscape of utter desolation.

And she adored it.

Like she adored all of Mars, from its vast, butterscotch-coloured mid-day sky to its even more vast plains of dust and powdered stone. She was in love with its twin, silver-shard moons, towering volcanoes and impossibly-vast canyons. Mars was her home, and looking down upon it from the summit of Husband Hill, watching as a solitary dust devil lazily whipped and coiled its way across the plain far below, she knew that she would fight to keep it as beautiful as it had always been -

“Glad you could make it,” a familiar voice said from somewhere behind her, and she stiffened again, ready to fire another angry retort at him, but when she turned to face the owner of the voice she found herself looking into the eyes of someone else entirely.

“Oh Benj, it’s you,” she sighed, relieved.

“Yes, just me, so sorry to disappoint you,” the man replied, faking a flouncing humph.

“No, no, I’m glad to see you,” Callie reassured him. “I just thought you were someone else - ”

Benj growled. “You mean he came? To see the Transit? Wow, I thought this was the last - ”

“Yeah, me too… ” she sighed, “but never mind, I’m not going to let him spoil it for me, or the kids.”

“They’re here?” Benj asked, looking around. “I don’t see them…”

“Well, they’re here somewhere,” Callie replied, “just look for a riot or fight breaking out somewhere and that’s where they’ll be…”

“Or a group of women and girls giggling and melting at Blare’s lines,” Benj laughed. Callie nodded, relaxing in her friend’s company. “They’ll be fine,” he reassured her, taking her arm, “come on, I’ve asked Leta to save us a good spot on the top, right on the edge, if you’re game?”

Callie nodded. “Of course I’m game… I didn’t come all this way to watch the show from back here!” And together they made their way over the summit to the far slope, pausing only to touch their fingers to the crystal monument.

The ridge was heaving with people, a crowd of easily two hundred stretched out along it, in places two or three deep, and it took them several minutes to find Benj’s wife among them, but eventually they spotted her arm waving frantically above the rows of heads, and pushed their way through the crowd to her side. The two friends hugged hard, bumping helmet visors together three times, as was the Martian custom.

“Glad you could make it!” Leta gushed.

“People keep telling me that,” Callie laughed, kicking away stones from beneath her feet to give her a flatter area to stand on. It was going to be a long afternoon, she wanted to be as comfortable as possible. The rocks arced over the edge of the ridge and dropped out of sight, heading for the crater floor far below. “The kids with you?” she asked her childhood friend.

Leta hesitated before answering, and Callie knew why. “Well, you know what it’s like,” her friend began, “…they have exams coming up, so much work to do…they decided to stay home and study…”

Callie nodded in agreement, but knew the real reason for her friends’ children’s absence. Her twin boys were both Blues, committed to terraforming Mars as soon as possible. The Transit was an irrelevance for them, nothing more than a reminder of how far away, and small, the so-called Homeworld was.

“Blare and Catriona will be sorry to have missed them,” Callie offered, “speaking of which, I’d better rein my two in…” With a tap of her fingers on her helmet’s control panel she switched comms channels to their own private family band. “Blare… Cat…I want you here with me now,” she said, “I’m right at the front, about two thirds of the way along the ridge… I’m waving now…” She pushed up her hand and swayed it from side to side several times. “You have five minutes to get here, or I’ll take someone else with me to the Viking Museum next week…” That’ll do the trick, she thought, congratulating herself, they’d both been nagging her to take them out to Chryse for months…

While she waited for her children to arrive, and with her friend subdued and quiet, embarrassed by having to lie about the reason for her own children’s absence, Callie took the opportunity to survey the landscape below. The crater floor was a huge basin, dotted here and there with hummocks, ridges and crests. In the far, far distance, dimmed by atmospheric dust and the sheer scale of the landscape, the crater’s walls were little more than pale purple ripples above the horizon, hundreds of klicks away.

Up close, she knew, they reared up out of the ground in a frighteningly vertical way, like an endless wall of El Capitans, but from the Columbias they were so far away they were hard to even see.

And around her, stretching away on either side, people, a laughing, excited, nervous crowd of people, Martians all, hundreds of souls gathered together to watch an astronomical event never before witnessed by a human being - an event which would unite the people of two of the Sun’s worlds across hundreds of millions of kilometres of space. What the future held, she had no idea. Whether Mars’ destiny was to turn blue or remain red, she had no idea.

All she knew was that for one special day - this day - the people of Mars would all be able to see where they Came From, regardless of their political or moral beliefs. That would affect them, surely? Bring them together?

It had to. With the political and cultural fractures in Martian society widening every day, something had to -

“Old Lovell would have loved this, don’t you think?” Leta said beside her, laughter in her voice. “All this ‘coming together’ stuff, it was his dream, wasn’t it? For everyone to get along and work together?”

Callie nodded, feeling a sudden tightening in her chest, the same sensation she experienced every time she thought about the Terran teacher who had influenced her life so deeply all those years ago. Thanks to him, she’d left behind her childhood obsession with “fitting in” with the rest of the crowd, and blending into the background, and decided to make the most of her life. She’d started to study, really study, specialising in geology and life sciences. She’d started speaking up for the beliefs she’d kept hidden in her angry heart for so long. She’d dedicated her life to preserving and protecting the Mars that she - and Lovell - loved so desperately.

When he’d died she’d been there, at his bedside, and when he’d used his last breath to tell her how proud he was of her she’d cried so much she’d thought her tears would never stop…

“Yes,” Callie agreed, gazing out over the crowd, watching two thirds of the population of Mars standing shoulder to shoulder beneath the enormous, empty sky, “he’d have loved this…”

“Did we miss anything?” Blare asked, nudging into his mother’s side with his helmet. Callie patted his head, wondering where he had come from and what he had been doing. Then decided she was better off not knowing.

“Well, take a look, tell me if you can see anything yet…” she replied, smiling as she saw Catriona appear on her other side. They were all together again.

Blare tipped his head back, looking up at the Sun. It dazzled him instantly, making him look away, blinking tears from his eyes. “I know, I forgot to turn the filter on,” he laughed sheepishly, admitting to his mistake before his older sister advertised it to everyone. A quick tap of his fingers on the controls instructed his helmet visor to darken, and as it did so, becoming denser than welding glass, it allowed him to stare directly at the Sun. “A few small sunspots… little prominence at the top… think that’s it…” he reported to his mother and sister.

“That’s because there’s ten more minutes to go yet,” Catriona announced, “if the times I’ve calculated are correct.”

“You’ve calculated? You’re so bad at maths we might have the wrong day…” Blare joked, earning him a gentle thump on the top of his head from his sister.

“You’re right, Cat,” Callie said, “there are five minutes left before anything happens… so before things start going crazy let’s all just enjoy a few moments of peace and quiet, and the view, shall we?”

“Yes, what a good idea,” a gruff male voice agreed from behind her, and Callie’s heart sank like a stone as she saw a familiar - and unwelcome - face slide into view. Damn you, she thought, glaring at the man, a whole hilltop and you have to stand next to me…

Blood boiling, she prepared to unleash a brutal verbal broadside at the man, but then she noticed he wasn’t alone. Standing beside him, so close she was almost wrapped around his leg, was a young Martian - a girl, even younger than Blare.

“See, Shona?” Lewis said, smiling down at his daughter, “I told you we’d find someone friendly up here to stand with…” The young girl looked up at him with wide eyes, clearly uncomfortable. “This is Callie, one of my oldest…” Lewis paused, dragging out the moment - and Callie’s own discomfort as she wondered how he was going to describe their relationship. “…one of my oldest friends, from school,” he concluded, with an ironic smile, just daring Callie to correct him.

Callie forced herself to hold her tongue and bite back her words. No matter how much she detested him, everything he had done and everything he stood for, and wanted, there was no way she could launch into her attack in front of Lewis’ daughter. She was blameless and, from the look of it, was just as close to her father as Blare and Catriona were to her. You’ll keep, she thought, glaring at Lewis icily, oh yes, you’ll keep…

“Hi,” she said brightly, bending down to kneel in front of the young girl, “it’s nice to finally meet you.”

Shona promptly fled behind her father’s legs, hiding from view.

“She’s shy, and not used to being in such a big crowd,” Lewis explained, placing his hand gently on the top of his daughter’s helmet, stroking it softly, reassuringly. “I wasn’t sure about bringing here but I didn’t want her to miss it…”

“I’m sure you didn’t want to miss a chance to show her how small and far away Earth is,” Callie heard herself saying, too quietly for Shona to hear but loud enough for the words to reach Lewis’ ears. She regretted it instantly, as she saw a look of genuine hurt warp the man’s face.

“Actually, I thought it would be a good opportunity for her to meet other kids,” Lewis said quietly, “she hasn’t been out much since her mother died.” Callie felt guilt wrap around her like a heavy, wet cloak as Lewis looked right at her and said, with his steely blue eyes impaling her like blades, “I’m sure you can appreciate how hard that has been for her.”

“I’m sorry,” Callie said, “that was unkind of me, I - ”

“Mom… what’s that?” she heard Cat ask, and looked away from Lewis’ pained face to see what her daughter was doing. The young girl was staring up at the sky, craning her neck backwards so far she was in danger of toppling over.

“The Transit hasn’t started yet dear,” Callie replied, “you calculated the times yourself, you should know - ”

“No, not the Transit… I mean that…” Cat replied impatiently. Callie suddenly realised her daughter wasn’t looking at the Sun, she was looking at the overhead sky, at something else. Callie looked too, saw -

She wasn’t actually sure what she saw. High overhead, far from the Sun, there was a dark speck in the sky. And it was moving. She tried to zoom in on it with her helmet’s Vis-systems, but even demanding maximum magnification didn’t help. It remained a puzzling black speck. That was moving.

“Is that Earth?” asked Blare from beside her. Obviously he was seeing “it” too.

“No,” Callie replied, “think about it Blare… if Earth is just a couple of minutes away from starting its transit, it can’t be that far from the Sun in the sky now, can it?”

“I guess not,” the young Martian replied with a “here she goes again” sigh.

“Maybe it’s a bird!” Cat suggested excitedly, her eyes smiling out from behind her visor, and the words came out in a pause-free rush. “We learned about birds in school with Miss Beadle she showed us a holo of a bird called a hummingbird that lives on Earth and its wings move so quick you can’t even see them you just see its body hanging in the air and there was another bird called a dodo but they’re all dead now and - ”

“There are no birds on Mars, stupid,” Blare huffed, but the insult was hurled with a smile, telling his sister he didn’t mean it nastily. “No air here to breathe or lift the wings, that’s why we have to wear these, remember?” he asked, rapping his knuckles on the top of her helmet. She shook him off.

“What IS it then, if you’re so smart?” she demanded to know.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, looking up at the mystery object, “a piece of garbage high up in the air - paper, insulation material, something,” he shrugged, “… maybe the wind blew it up there.”

“Mom,” Cat complained, turning to Callie, “tell him it could be a bird, tell him…”

Callie wished she could rub her temples again. Around them now, several other people were staring up into the sky, pointing out the whatever-it-was to their friends and neighbours. “Cat, I know it’s a lovely idea, and I’d love for you to be able to see one… I’d like that too, believe me… but there can’t be birds up there,” she gestured to the zenith with her hand, “or anywhere on Mars… I don’t want to give him a big head but your brother was right, the air is too thin here, their wings wouldn’t work - ”

“They would if they were huge wings,” insisted Cat, clearly unwilling to let go of her fantasy without a fight.

“You’re right, but no bird has wings big enough to fly on Mars, Cat,” Callie persisted, “I’m sorry.” And in truth she was. As a child she’d been left breathless with wonder and fascination whenever her father had described the birds of Earth, and Conn’s tales of his months spent working in the depths of the Amazon, amongst the last surviving groups of brilliantly-coloured parrots and macaws of the rainforest had almost driven her to tears. What would it be like, she had wondered, to see a family of blue and green and red parrots flapping about their heads -

Cat paused, re-considering for a moment. “You’re right,” she admitted finally, “it’s not a bird…” Callie smiled at her daughter’s common sense, Blare grinned a smug “made you give in” big brother grin too.

“It’s one of those big flying dinosaurs,” Cat declared, with what seemed to her like perfect logic, “only they would have wings big enough - ”

Blare shook his head. “Oh for pity’s sake - ”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” an unfamiliar female voice announced over their headsets. She sounded nervous, gulping on her words slightly as if she was unused to addressing crowds. “There are only four minutes to go until First Contact now…”

“Who’s that?” Blare asked Callie, turning to look up at her. Callie shrugged. She had no idea.

“I bet it’s a Beaker,” Lewis said derisively, “they spend so much time hunched over their rocks and microscopes none of them can string more than a few words together.” Still feeling guilty about her previous remark, Callie let the deliberate jibe at her go.

“My name is Gale Murray,” the woman continued, relaxing slightly, “and on behalf of the Ares Astronomical Society I’d like to welcome you all to our Transit Watch, here at the Columbia Hills. If you haven’t met me yet, I’m standing over on the west side of the hilltop… this is me waving now…” Callie looked around, scanning the crowd until she saw a short space-suited figure frantically waving both arms in the air. “I’m not going to prattle on too long, I promise, but I do need to give you all some safety hints and tips… don’t want the Commander here sending me back to Earth for letting anyone go blind..!”

Callie laughed. Murray had meant the comment as a reassuring joke, clearly, but it made several people look up in alarm. Blind? They could go blind? Why hadn’t anyone told them that?

“But before I do that, I know the Commander himself is wanting to say a few words, to mark this historic occasion,” Murray went on, blissfully unaware of the fear she had created on the hilltop. Her voice faded slightly as she spoke off the microphone. “Commander?” A faint, background shuffling, then another voice.

“Thank you, Ms Murray,” said the Base Commander gruffly and slowly. Callie winced. He’d used her surname. Poor Gale was in trouble. And no-one ever enjoyed being on the wrong side of the BC.

“People of Mars,” he began grandly, and, as the heartfelt groans of people around her rose into the thin air, Callie shook her head with disbelief. Why did he insist on calling them that? Still? She couldn’t understand it; he must be aware of how ridiculous it sounded? If he wasn’t, it showed amazing - and surely worrying, for a man in his position - lack of understanding. People of Mars… he sounded like a character from a bad science fiction holo -

“People of Mars,” the BC repeated, for effect, “this is a historic day for us… for us and the entire human race,” he continued, “for the first time in history, human beings will gather to see their Homeworld move across the face of the Sun, silhouetted against it, reduced to a mere black speck on the brilliant face of our home star…”

“Guess no-one told him about the transits seen by crews flying out here… or from the asteroid belt…” Lewis sneered.

“This is different,” Callie argued, her tolerance finally worn down by his bad temper, “he’s right, this is the first time people on another world have deliberately gathered in one place to watch an Earth Transit… it is historic. If you’re not going to join in with the mood, why did you come here?”

“What?” Lewis replied, “and miss the chance to share such warm conversation with you?”

Callie turned away, patience running thin but determined not to let him ruin her day.

“This Transit,” the Base Commander continued, “will, I hope, bring us all together, unite us in our common goal of making our fledgeling Martian colony - and Mars - a better place to live. When we see Earth, the birthworld of Mankind, it should remind us of our common ancestry, our roots…”

“Oh please,” sighed Lewis, staring out across the crater floor. Out on the far horizon, a pair of dust devils were spinning slowly across the dusty plain, drifting along together, like ghosts in a silent dance…

“People on Earth have seen transits many times through history,” the BC said, “they have watched Mercury and Venus drift across the face of the Sun many times since the invention of the telescope, but they have always been looking at dead worlds, worlds of Sun-scorched rock and acid rain, worlds which have never known and will never know life… This is different. For the first time, human beings observing a Transit will be looking at a living, breathing world… when we look at that black speck moving in front of the Sun, we’ll be looking at all our history, culture and art compressed into a black point, a black point which gave the universe the great civilisations of Greece and Egypt, the wonders of the Pyramids and the Colliseum… the poetry of Byron and the paintings of Van Gogh…”

“Ares, how long is this list?” Lewis yawned, and Callie had to agree; the BC really was grandstanding. As usual, she thought.

The BC was really getting into his stride now. “As we watch the Transit,” he continued regally, “we should - ” A voice was heard behind him, interrupting his speech. A few of the colonists gathered on the hilltop cheered, some also clapped. “Ah, I see,” the BC said, “I understand the Transit is about to begin, so I’ll hand you back to Gale to tell you about the safety precautions we must all take… ” More scuffling noises and Callie imagined the two people changing positions as the astronomer resumed her commentary.

“Thank you, Sir,” she said pointedly, “there’s just enough time now for me to tell you how to watch this safely.” Callie tapped Cat and Blare on their helmets, ordering them to listen closely. “Firstly, I want everyone to darken their visors right now, this moment, we’re going to do nothing else until I’m satisfied that’s done… ok?”

Callie obediently tapped the touch pad on the right side of her helmet, selecting the “Shield” option from the Visor Filters menu that flashed upon her Head Up Display. The coating of her helmet’s visor promptly darkened until it was denser than welding glass. In an instant the world was transformed.

Details on the hilltop, the faces of people in the crowd around her, on everything around her vanished from view, only their vague outlines remained visible against a chocolate-coloured sky. The only thing she could see clearly and sharply was the Sun, now reduced to a creamy orange button by the light-absorbing filter.

“You guys both done that?” Callie asked Cat and Blare. Both nodded, and she could tell from the way they were telling the truth by the way that they were sweeping their heads back and forth excitedly, understandably fascinated by the dark-filtered view of the world around them.

“Now, please boost the magnification of your visor to 100 times,” Murray said, and Callie followed the instruction, tapping at the control panel again, pulling down another menu and selecting “100x”. She actually gasped as the Sun swelled before her eyes, expanding from a tiny coin-sized orange circle to a canary yellow disc which filled half her field of view. It was disorienting. Around her several people actually staggered backwards as they were taken by surprise by the Sun’s apparent motion towards them as they zoomed in on it, and she felt as if she was flying towards the Sun, seeing it grow before her eyes… or was the Sun flying towards her? Exploding and expanding towards Mars, ready to engulf it in plasma and fire and char it to a cinder -

“Wow… cool…” Callie heard Blare enthuse, and looked down to see the vague outline of his helmet bobbing up and down as he played with his visor’s zoom controls, making the Sun leap forwards and then fall back again…and again… and again.

Callie took a moment to look at the Sun. It was a perfect yellow circle, its edge as sharp as a knife blade, its face mottled here and there with pale patches. In three or four places across the disc she could see dark markings, like splashes of paint. Sunspots, she told herself, enormous magnetic storms on the Sun’s surface… even the smallest ones I can see are many times the size of Mars -

“Two minutes left…” the astronomer announced, her voice quivering slightly now as her own excitement rose. Callie felt a tingle run up her own spine too, and, looking around her, saw people in the crowd nudging each other, pointing at the Sun, or reaching for a partner’s hand, couples preparing to share the experience. “Time for me to quickly tell you what you’ll see… Everything is going to happen really slowly, so don’t worry, you won’t miss it if you blink… First you’ll see a black notch appear on the bottom left edge of the Sun as the Earth starts to move onto the Sun. Then, watch for the famous ‘Black Drop’ effect just before the Earth moves fully into view, Earth will appear to be extended, very unusual. When Earth is clear of the limb you’ll be able to see it as a tiny, perfectly round dot… if you want to, you might like to zoom in on it even more, just for fun… but whatever you do,” the young astronomer said darkly, “be careful, don’t go switching off the filter by mistake. If the full glare of the Sun hits your eyes at that magnification they’ll bubble and melt like fried eggs…”

“Cool..!” Callie heard Blare say, and gave his helmet a warning rap with her knuckles.

“Not cool, don’t even think about it,” she warned him.

“One minute left…” Murray said, breathlessly. “After the Earth moves onto the Sun there’s quite a wait before anything else happens, you may even decide to go home. But if you do decide to hang around with us here, you’ll be able to see a second, much smaller dot appear on the Sun’s face - Earth’s moon, Luna. Half Mars’s size, but still home to several thousand people by now. Some of you may even have stayed at Armstrong Base before coming up here to join us…”

Callie saw a few heads around her nodding. She’d read about Armstrong Base, the first lunar city. Built underground near the South Pole, within easy reach of the polar water deposits, it was the first real space tourist destination. She had often wondered what it would be like to walk around its tree-lined paths, maybe sit beside its tinkling fountains and trail her hands through its cool “streams” of melted, five billion year old comet water. It was yet one more place she’d planned to visit with Conn when they were older, when Cat and Blare had grown up.

Maybe one day, she told herself. Maybe.

“Earth will move away from the Sun about an hour before sunset,” Murray explained, “but I don’t expect many of you will still be here by then. As I said, it’s a very slow event. Actually, anyone wanting to watch Luna clear the disc is going to be disappointed, that won’t happen until long after the Sun has set behind the crater rim. But there’ll be plenty to see before then, I promise.”

Callie suddenly felt her hands gripped, and looked down to see Cat and Blare were holding on to her. For support? Reassurance? She wasn’t sure. She didn’t care, either. It just felt right.

“Thirty seconds…” Murray reported, breathing heavily now. “One other thing to look out for… Earth’s path across the Sun will take it right in front of that large sunspot you can see near the centre of the disc at the bottom… as it drifts across it, you might like to bear in mind that the sunspot is actually five times bigger than Earth itself, making it ten times bigger than Mars…”

That made Callie’s breath catch in her throat.

“Lastly,” Murray said, “just to let you know… we won’t be able to see it of course, because of the glare of the Sun, but the hemisphere facing us during the transit is the western hemisphere, so we’ll be looking down on Europe, north Africa and the Americas as Earth crosses Sol… no promises, but if you boost the contrast on your visors to maximum you might just be able to make out the lights of London, Paris, New York and Miami glowing on Earth’s disc… and think about how the people there are looking up at their night sky and seeing Mars shining in it like a brilliant orange lantern among the stars of Aries, between the beautiful Pleiades star cluster and the Moon…”

Now it was Callie’s turn to whisper “Wow…”

“Ten seconds now…”

Callie could hear, and feel, her heart thumping in her chest. Cat and Blare were squeezing her hand now, too.

“Before he died,” Murray continued, her own voice barely a whisper now, “my father told me about the Great Venus Transit of 2004… He watched it from underneath a tree, in a small park in a town in the north of England, with a group of friendly amateur astronomers. They let him use their telescopes to look at it directly, and used another to project the Sun’s image onto a white sheet too… he said that when he came away he felt more like a part of the Universe, more connected to it… I hope our event here today, on these historic hills, sends you away with the same feeling.”

Then, cryptically, she added: “We won’t be using any white sheets today, I think we’ve advanced a little since my father’s day. Yes, I think we can do better than that…”

Callie gasped.

There was a tiny nick out of the side of the Sun.

There it was.

Earth.

And on the summit of the Columbia Hills, in the centre of Gusev Crater, four hundred Martians began to clap and cheer, hugging each other, staring up at a shrunken Sun burning in a caramel-coloured sky.

“Something’s eating the Sun!” Cat exclaimed, prompting tension-breaking laughter from people around them. “Mom, mom! Something’s taken a bite out of the Sun!”

“That’s the Earth,” Blare told his sister in a hushed voice. “That’s where mom’s grandmother and grand-dad came from…”

Callie felt her heart leap up into her throat. He was right… she’d never thought of it that way before. That little black dot silhouetted against the Sun, that was where her parents’ parents had come from… It had all begun there, for her, her family, for all Mankind.

Callie glanced down at her children then, and suddenly she had a vision, a glimpse into the future. The realisation hit her, like a slap across the face, that in years to come people would watch Earth Transits like this from further and further away from the Homeworld… Perhaps Cat, when she was grown up, would join the first expedition to Jupiter’s huge moon Europa, and would stand in silence on one of its fractured, fault-shattered ice plains to watch Earth drift across the face of a Sun a fraction of the size of the one which shone there on Mars… Years later, Cat’s own sons and daughters - Callie’s grandchildren - might watch a Transit from Saturn’s moon Mimas, gathered with others on the summit of the Olympian six klick high peak which stabbed skywards from the centre of the enormous Herschel crater…

Later still, Cat’s own grandchildren might well watch Earth crossing the Sun through the eyepiece of a telescope set-up on a ledge at the top of Verona Rupes, the iron-hard ice cliffs which jutted ten kilometres up from the chaotically jumbled surface of Uranus’ moon Miranda. And a generation later their children would see Transits from the barely-lit, icy surfaces of distant Pluto. Years later still, out beyond Pluto, on the sunlight-starved surfaces of Quaoar, Sedna, and other bodies in the Kuiper Belt, distant generations of their family would turn their eyes back towards the Sun and spot Earth silhouetted against it as a tiny, tiny mote…

And as yet more generations were born, members from each would watch Earth Transits from worlds progressively farther away from the Homeworld. Their distant descendants would travel deeper and deeper into space until they settled on an alien world circling a distant, alien sun, a planet so far from Earth that the Sun itself was reduced to a mere pinprick of light, a twinkling spark shining in the night sky… their home would be a planet so far from Earth that the original Homeworld’s solar Transits could no longer be watched, only detected, recorded as mere blips on a spectroscope’s screen -

“I thought you said they came from the Angel Of The Evening?” Cat said, puzzled. “You took em outside and pointed at it, told me that was where they came from, I remember - ”

“It’s the same place,” Blare explained with - Callie thought - surprising patience, “the Day’s End Star is the Earth… you’re just seeing the Day’s End Star moving in front of the Sun, that’s all.

“Oh…” Cat replied slowly, mulling things over, as if all the pieces of the puzzle were fitting into place properly for the first time. “So… that means there are people On the Day’s End Star looking up at us right now? While we’re looking at them?”

“That’s right,” Callie told her, “right now there are people on Earth looking up at their night sky and seeing Mars shining there like a big red star - ”

Suddenly Cat started jumping up and down, kicking up clouds of peach-coloured dust every time she landed, and as she jumped she waved both hands at the Sun excitedly.

“Cat! What are you doing?” Callie asked, terrified her dsughter would slip and fall.

“I’m waving at the people,” Cat said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Hello!” she called, “hello down there on Urth,” she called, hands swaying this way and that, “helloooooooo…!”

Blare hid his face with his hands in embarrassment, and Callie was about to tell Cat to stop when she realised that other people around them had taken the girl’s lead and were joining in. First one, then another, then more and more of the settlers started waving too - not jumping up and down, just waving. Within a few moments the hilltop was covered in people waving excitedly at the sky, laughing and cheering as they shouted “Hello!” at the tiny black speck silhouetted against the Sun…

Oh well, Callie thought, kneeling down beside Cat, if you can’t beat them…

“Hello…!” she called out, wrapping one arm around her daughter’s waist and waving at the sky with her free hand, “hello Earth… hello down there…” Beside her, Cat beamed with delight, and bumped her helmet against Callie’s happily as a party atmosphere descended on the top of Husband Hill.

“For pity’s sake, look at yourselves,” a disapproving, thick voice growled in her ear, “it makes me sick…”

Lewis. She’d forgotten he was even there.

“It’s called having fun..?” Callie retorted. “Look it up on the net, Google should have a few million pages about it - ”

“It’s disgusting,” Lewis sneered, “paying homage to our masters or - ”

That was it, just too much. “It’s nothing like that!” bit Callie, “this is a special occasion for the kids, and some of us too, can’t you see? Don’t you get it? Really? Not everyone’s life is as emty as yours. Not everyone is as obsessed with politics and power as you are. Can’t you stop preaching to people just for a few hours and let us all be?”

Lewis seemed frozen in place, his eyes burning into hers through their visors. Without saying a word he turned from her and walked away, leading his daughter with him. The young girl was confused, bewildered by what was going on as she was led away, asking her father several times what was wrong but receiving no answer as they were lost in the crowd.

“He’s a very grumpy man,” Cat declared, then asked “why is he so unhappy?”

Callie stared after Lewis, trying to catch a glimpse of the top of his helmet in the sea of people, but there was no sign. “He’s just afraid,” Callie replied quietly.

“Of what?” Cat asked, “there are no T-Rex’s here…”

Callie smiled sadly. “No, there are no T-Rex’s here,” she agreed, “But when you grow up you’ll learn that adults find some things even more frightening than dinosaurs.”

Like the future, she thought.

And being alone.

“It’s back, mum,” Blare announced, nudging her hip and looking up into the clear sky off to the side of the Sun. Callie craned her head back, searching - yes, there it was: the strange black dot they had seen before the start of the Transit was drifting across the sky again.

“It’s getting lower,” Blare said, and Callie had to agree. The black… whatever it was… was growing in size, suggesting it was indeed dropping towards them, and looking more closely Callie found she could see a vague shape now. The object was elongated, and appeared to have irregular edges along one side. And was that a smaller section extending out the back?

“What is that..”? Callie heard a neighbour ask, and she had to admit she didn’t have a clue.

Or did she? There was something inside her - a voice, a feeling, something - telling her that she did know what it was, insisting that it was familiar, something she knew…

Then it was over them, directly over them, just a few dozen feet above their heads, and Cat announced the impossible truth to everyone.

“A bird! Mom, it’s a bird!”

“I told you,” Blare said wearily, “there aren’t any birds here - the air’s too thin, and poisonous anyway, it’s just - ”

His next words were lost amidst shrieks and cries as people around them ducked in alarm, covering their heads with their arms as the object swooped low over them, skimming their helmets almost, and as she hugged Cat close to her, protecting her, Callie caught a glimpse of the “thing” as it shot overhead. Golden-brown, with flashes of white here and there, it had long, long wings, tattered at the ends and frayed at the rear, and the amber-orange eyes which glared down at the cowering settlers from behind a cruelly-curved, hooked beak were bright and sharp as diamonds. And as everyone uncovered their heads again, daring to get up from their protective crouches and huddles, Callie looked up to see their attacker shooting up into the sky again, wings outstretched…

“That can’t be…” whispered Blare beside her, watching the impossible creature climb higher, pirouetting in mid-air like a feathered ballerina, “it just can’t - ”

“I told you,” Cat grinned, “I told you it was a bird! Mr Know It All - ”

“It’s not just any bird,” a stranger said from beside them, her voice, rich with wonder, barely a whisper, “it’s an eagle, a golden eagle…I’ve seen holos of them, and my grandmother told me how she had seen one once in something called a zoo -”

A bird, Callie said to herself, yes, I recognise it now, even though I can’t; I’ve never seen one, they can’t exist here on Mars, only on Earth, where the air is warm and thick enough to support their wings… but inside I know about them, there are memories of them stored inside me…

“Impossible,” Blare insisted, shaking his head.

“Well it looks like you’re going to get a chance to tell it it’s impossible,” Cat said smugly, shielding her eyes from the Sun as she stared off into the distance, “because it’s coming back - ”

“No, that’s something else,” Callie said, “the bird… the eagle… the whatever it is is way up there, see?”

Cat looked up, saw the bird was now just a black dot high overhead. That was puzzling. Then what had she seen coming towards the hills from the south?

“That’s… I don’t believe it… it’s a balloon…” someone said from the depths of the crowd, “it’s a damned hot air balloon - ”

“No… no…” Blare was saying, repeating it over and over, searching for an
explanation. “There’s no air here! Birds, balloons… this is crazy!” he insisted, “we’re all hallucinating or something! Mass hysteria because of the excitement maybe, the altitude, I don’t know - ”

Then the balloon began to drift slowly past them, level with the hilltops, propelled by some unseen, unfelt Martian breeze, and as it slid silently past him, barely a hundred feet away, Blare simply couldn’t speak anymore.

It was huge, a bloated, bulb-shaped bag of hot air maybe thirty feet across, made of some material so flimsy that it actually rippled as Blare watched. In stark contrast to the orange-pink sky it flew through, and the red and tan crater floor it drifted over, the balloon was an achingly-beautiful blue, a rich blue, a royal blue, the colour of the tropical skies he’d seen in holos at school, a blue which hadn’t occurred or even been seen on Mars for a billion years. The main body of the balloon was decorated grandly and ridiculously, intricately-stitched designs, golden rope and thread had been used to create faces, sunbursts and scrolls which caught the Martian sunlight and shone wondrously. But around the base of the balloon another colour dominated - rich scarlet banners and lengths of gold-tassled cloth were draped everywhere, decorating the body of the balloon above a ring-shaped gondola which -

- which, as Blare watched, open-mouthed, was revealed to be carrying two people: men, but not dressed in spacesuits, they were clothed instead in long coats, and scarves, and hats, hats which they took off and waved around their heads as their fantastic craft drifted past the watching crowd.
Blare was so dumbfounded he couldn’t speak. All he could do was wave back, silently, purely out of instinctive politeness, wondering when he had fallen asleep because surely he was deep in some vivid, realistic dream -

“What is that?” a voice asked from the crowd, spurring Callie into action. Enough was enough; she needed to know what was going on. Quickly calling up an imaging program with her visor’s HUD she snapped a picture of the balloon and, flash-mailing it back to Ares, instructed her suit’s onboard computer to search for an image match in the Base’s computer library. A moment later, revealing words began to scroll across the inside of her helmet visor.

“Match located: subject confirmed as the Montgolfier Balloon, the first hot air balloon to ever fly. Built by the Montgolfier Brothers in France, on November 21st 1783 the ballon carried its two occupants - Marquis D’Arlandes and Piatre de Rozier - on a 9,000 yard flight across Paris which lasted just 25 minutes. The balloon had a capacity of 79 thousand feet - ”

1783? Three hundred years ago?

“It’s not real,” she said, more to herself than anyone around her, but obviously some heard.

“Not real? Two men flying past us in a hot air balloon, without spacesuits, wearing top hats?” a man laughed coldly from nearby, “whatever gave you that idea..?”

“No,” Callie said, “I mean it’s not a physical model or a recreation, it’s something else - ”

“It’s landing, that’s what it is,” Blare interrupted, pointing down to the crater floor. He was right. Having dropped down the side of the Columbia Hills, the huge balloon was now drifting over the ground at a height of just a few feet, so low the base of its gondola occasionally scraped the tops of the tallest rocks and boulders. Its occupants were throwing out big bags of sand which, tethered to the gondola by thick lines, dragged across the ground, slowing the balloon’s progress. Anchors, Callie realised, as she watched the balloon slow to a halt, very clever -

Then it hit her.

“Look where it’s landing,” she said outloud, to anyone who was listening, and by now many people were. “That’s where Spirit landed… the first Mars Exploration Rover..?” she added, as she saw several pairs of eyes staring back at her blankly, “landed here in 2004…?” Down on the crater floor the balloon skated to a halt, stirring up a thick cloud of dust. Moments later its two pilots hopped over the side of the gondola and dropped down onto the rock-strewn ground, where they proceeded to secure their craft by tying ropes around nearby tall rocks before turning and waving at Callie and the rest of the settlers watching from the summit of the overlooking hills. Ever courteous, but still surprised by the arrival of the balloon, the watching Martians began to clap, slowly, hesitantly at first, then more enthusiastically. In response, the two balloonists bowed grandly at the waist, and waved back…

Ignoring all this, Callie kept the cogs turning in her mind. The choice of “landing site” was deliberate, she was convinced of it; someone was making great efforts to impress them -

What had that woman - the amateur astronomer - said in the build-up to the transit? “We won’t be using any white sheets today… I think we can do better than that…”?

“Look mom,” Cat said, pointing towards the east, “another bird…”

Callie turned to look, saw another black speck above the horizon, but didn’t bother to zoom-in it. There was no point. Whatever it was would be with them soon enough.

It flew right over them, low and fast, just as the eagle had done, forcing everyone to duck and shield their heads with upraised arms. When Callie eventually dared to look up, what she saw flying past made her shake her head with disbelief. If the eagle and ballon had been impossible, this was beyond impossible.

It was an aircraft of some kind, that much was clear just from the fact that it had wings, but it was like no aircraft she had ever seen before. A flimsy, skeletal thing, its wings were little more than two lengths of parchment-brown fabric stretched taut over, and separated by, a framework of stick-thin wooden rods and struts. It had no wheels, no undercarriage to speak of, just skids, like those found on a child’s sled. From the front jutted a smaller pair of “wings” which she took to be stabilisers of some kind, and - positioned between a pair of crude propellers - a tall, thin, double rudder extended at the back, its twin panels swaying from side to side as the plane rode the winds over the hills…

But its most impossible feature of all was lying inside it, facing forwards, into the wind.

Lying on his belly in a cradle mounted across the centre of the plane was a man, moustachioed, dressed in a dark suit, wearing a peaked cap, controlling the pitch of the wings by rocking his body from side to side, and changing the pitch of the plane’s nose by pulling backwards or forwards on another part of the frame. He was flying the plane manually. Literally, by hand.

I know what that is..! she thought, and couldn’t prevent a wide grin from forming on her face. She recognised the bizarre craft’s shape from a picture her old teacher, Lovell, had pinned up on the wall of their school module in a history lesson one day, a day so many years ago.

The picture - downloaded from a history site on the net - had been very old, much older even than Lovell; faded and grainy, in black and white not even in colour, it had shown a small, skeletal airplane flying low - very, very low - over a sandy beach. A man was just visible inside the plane, little more than a dark shape lost amongst the struts and beams supporting the wings which stretched out above and beneath him. A second man was visible close-by, on the ground, possibly running alongside she had never been sure, but he was obviously tremendously excited about what was going on…

Intrigued by the picture, Callie had gone online at home, determined to research the strange picture’s background. What she had learned that night, staring at her computer screen, had stayed with her forever.

“The Wright Flyer,” Callie breathed, at last, “Blare, Cat, take a good look… that’s the Wright Flyer… the very, very first airplane!”

“It’s not real,” Blare said slowly, his voice low. He sounded lost, deeply confused by what was going on. It hurt her to hear him like that.

“It doesn’t matter Blare,” Callie told him, squeezing his hand reassuringly. “I know it’s not real, it can’t be, you’re right, but that’s not the point… I think this is just something we have to accept, and enjoy, ok?” He nodded, uncertainly, not knowing what else he could do.

“Who’s that man inside?” Cat asked, adding, content to just accept what she was seeing, however impossible it was, “and isn’t he cold?”

“That’s a man called Orville Wright,” Callie replied, “he and his brother, Wilbur, built that plane almost two hundred years ago… they flew it at a place called Kitty Hawk, which was just a beach until that day, but they made it one of the most famous places on the whole of Earth. Their plane was the first one ever built with engines, and it only flew a hundred feet or so, but it was enough to completely change the world, forever - ”

“What?” Blare asked, incredulously. “That little thing? It looks like one of my kites!”

“I know it does,” agreed Callie, laughing - and wincing a little - at the comparison. Off in the distance, looking like a child’s model built of straws or sticks or matches as it flew through the pink Martian sky, the Wright Flyer was banking hard to the right, coming around for another pass over the hill. Callie could see its pilot pushing down on its control bar, tipping the wings to starboard. “But that plane changed history, Blare. Once they’d seen the Wright Brothers succeed, other people started to build and fly planes, bigger and better ones, which travelled farther and farther. Thanks to the Wright Flyer the world was given airliners which crossed the oceans, jet fighters, the space shuttle… and the Ares, too.” She saw her children’s eyes go wide as saucers. “Yes, really Blare… the ship which brought Foale to Mars all those years ago would never have been built if it wasn’t for that little thing there…”

“It’s landing, too…” Blare told her, and they all turned to see the airplane gliding down towards the crater floor far below. Callie wasn’t surprised to see it heading right for the hot air balloon which had landed a few minutes earlier. Somehow, it made perfect sense. Moments later the little aircraft was bumping and skating across the dusty ground towards the balloon, nose skywards, riding on the back of its skids, scuffing up clouds of dust on either side. Eventually the nose dropped and the Flyer was down, but now it span round so quickly Callie feared it might actually roll over. She let out a deep, relieved breath as its regained control just in time, bringing the fragile Flyer to a shuddering halt, and as Orville Wright clambered out of the aircraft, threading his way carefully through its framework, the crowd gathered on the top of Husband Hill broke out in appreciative applause, applause which Wright acknowledged with a jaunty doff of his peaked cap before jogging over to join the balloonists - who had, somehow, already been joined by his brother, Wilbur.

“Crazy,” Blare sighed, “absolutely crazy…”

Yes, Callie thought, it is… impossibly crazy… but wonderful too -

A loud thrumming began to sound in Callie’s earphones then; a low-pitched almost-buzzing which seemed to make her whole body vibrate within her suit, as if the ground beneath her feet was shaking as vibrations from something rippled through it. Focussing on the sound, Callie turned towards it, found herself staring to the south, to where an ominous, black shape was silhouetted against the pale Martian sky - a jagged-edged, irregular shape, yes, but instantly recognisable.

It was an aircraft, another aircraft, but as far removed from the Wright Flyer as that machine had been from the hot air balloon which had floated across the floor of Gusev before it. This aircraft, approaching them slowly but relentlessly, casting its malevolent shadow on the crater floor far below, growing before their eyes, was huge - a silvery, metallic beast, a round-nosed monster with long, wide wings, each one bearing not one but two mighty, growling engines, each engine fitted with four chopping, spinning blades, and each blade longer than the Wright Flyer itself.

“A dragon…” breathed Cat, nudging closer to her mother. Callie laid a protective hand on her daughter’s helmet as the young Martian stared at the approaching machine. It did look like a dragon, Callie had to concede; an angry, predatorial dragon -

Suddenly a coloured flash appeared below it, a spark of orange the colour of flame, and as Callie watched the spark accelerated away from the aircraft, exploded away from it at such a high speed that it left its carrier standing in the air as if suspended in time and space, or gripped by some unseen hand. Within moments the red spark resolved itself into another aircraft, a fraction of the size of the beast that had carried it, but sleeker, more elegant-looking - an orange bullet with a pointed nose with flames roaring out behind it.

“Wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” exclaimed Blare as the tiny aircraft shot overhead, clearing the hilltop by less than a hundred feet. And as it passed over them it seemed as if the air exploded with a deafening “crack!” Callie almost fell over with shock and fright as the air around them shook, the ground shook, everything shook. When she eventually looked up, the orange-coloured aircraft was long gone, reduced to a mere pinpoint in the sky, far, far overhead…

“What was THAT?” asked Blare, astounded, too excited to realise how scared he had been.

“I think that was Yaeger, in the X-1…” Callie whispered, watching the tiny jet climb higher. Was it? she wondered. Could it have been?

“Is that the eagle again?” Callie heard Cat ask, and as people around them instinctively ducked, Callie looked up where her daughter was pointing. Overhead, another black speck was visible against the orange-pink sky -

Suddenly the “speck” increased in size dramatically, blossoming outwards to become an orange-and-white circle as large as Callie’s fist. Then a second similarly-coloured circle appeared in the sky, a short distance away from the first. Callie felt her breath catch in her throat. Both circles were descending, and both had small, dark objects in their centres. What were they?

“Parachutes,” Blare announced, with a weary sigh, “which is also wrong, because we don’t use those anymore…”

“No, we don’t,” Callie agreed, smiling, because she was now pretty sure what was going on, “but people in the past did, in the days before braking rockets and shuttle craft…”

She zoomed-in on the lower of the two falling circles to check if her hunch was right. It was. Dangling from the nearest parachute was a round capsule. Blackened and scorched, it looked like it had been dragged through the fiercest fires of hell. Which, Callie mused, was probably what it had felt like for its occupant as the tiny spacecraft had hurtled down through Earth’s atmosphere…

It was then that she noticed the hole in the capsule’s side. The hatch was missing, blown wide open.

Which meant the second parachute must be carrying -

“That’s a man!” Cat exclaimed, pointing up at the sky and literally bouncing on the spot with excitement. “Mom! There’s a man falling out of the sky!”

Not just any man, Callie smiled, as the figure dropped towards the crater floor, guiding their parachute skilfully towards the other flyers, both human and mechanical.

The parachutist was dressed in baggy, bright orange overalls, high-laced black boots and a white helmet of antique design. As he drifted towards the waiting balloon, aircraft and aviators he tucked up his legs in preparation for landing, and at the moment of impact flopped over, crumpling sideways as if all the bones had suddenly been removed from his body.

And as the orange and white parachute billowed and collapsed around him, and his heat-blackened, battered Vostok 1 capsule landed on the rocky plain a short distance away, rolling several times before coming to a halt, Major Yuri Gagarin stood up, brushed himself down, pulled off his helmet and waved heartily at the cheering crowds.

“Another one!” a voice shouted eagerly, and the crowd turned as one to gaze up at the sky, to where a third parachute was falling fast - a second capsule, returning from space.

Only this one was shaped like a bell, not a ball, and as it fell from the burnt pink sky it swung on the end of its tethers, to and fro, buffetted by the winds. When it finally landed it didn’t roll over and over like a tossed ball, as Vostok had done; it lay on its side, rocking gently as a hatch opened on its top and its occupant hauled himself out.

Standing on the top of his capsule, dressed in his close-fitting, silver-foil spacesuit, the proud astronaut sparkled and shone in the afternoon sunshine as he pulled off his helmet to reveal close-cropped hair. And standing on the top of Husband Hill, Callie felt her eyes fill with tears as she watched Alan Shephard Jr, jump down off the top of the Mercury capsule and run towards Gagarin, wrapping his arms around him in a warm, bear-hug embrace before walking over with the Russian cosmonaut to where the other flyers were waiting…

It’s a show, Callie realised, watching the balloonists enthusiastically shaking Shephard’s hand, it’s a history lesson, like a Timeline, but moving, living…

What else were they going to see?

“Wow, Earth has hardly moved at all,” Callie heard Blare say, and as she looked back towards the Sun again she felt shocked - and more than a little guilty - that she had forgotten the transit so easily. But it was true: Earth had barely nudged its way fully onto the disc. But that was wrong, surely… Callie called-up her visor’s chrono display -

Half an hour? Was that all the time that had passed since the start of the Transit? So much had been happening in the sky and down on the crater floor that she had thought an hour had passed, at least…

“Mom… there’s another… thing, ” Callie heard Cat say, a moment before she saw several of the crowd around her start to point excitedly towards the north.

She recognised this one! Even though it had flown over a hundred years ago, its timeless image was burned into her mind, and into the mind of everyone alive, no matter where they stood, or had been born, in the Solar System.

It was a small spacecraft -much smaller than Callie had imagined it to be over the years. Looking more like a model than a crew-carrying vehicle as it drifted slowly past the hilltop, flying level with it, Callie saw that in contrast to the primitive-but-functional-looking ball- and bell-shaped capsules which had “landed” in Gusev immediately before it, the new arrival was a bizarre creation indeed. Some aspects were familiar.

A quartet of spindly, stick-thin legs showed that it was designed to physically land on a solid surface, rather than splash-down in water, and the skeletal legs jutted out at sharp angles from opposite corners of a box-like, hexagonal landing stage, which boasted a single, large conical engine set into its base. So far so normal.

But where as the capsules had been dark, black almost, creatures of metal plate and rivets, the landing stage, legs and plate-like foot pads of the new arrival were covered in beautiful golden foil, which rippled and flashed prettily in the Martian sunlight…

Set on the top of the landing stage wa an odd, angular structure which, though basically spherical, was more like some kind of misshapen jewel than a crew compartment. It had too many facets and faces to count, bulging outwards here, sinking inwards there, and sprouted numerous aerials, comms dishes and clusters of attitude adjustment rockets too, all of which jutted out of its body like growths or thorns. Inset with a pair of eye-like, slanted, triangular windows and a mouth-like, keystone-shaped hatch, the forward-facing section of the capsule looked like a twisted parody of the face of a giant -

“It looks like a bug!” Cat exclaimed, feigning fright, and Callie had to agree. With its spindly, thin legs and pinched “face” the ancient, historic craft flying past them did indeed look like some breed of huge insect. But appearances were deceptive.

“That’s no bug dear,” Callie corrected her daughter kindly, “that’s an Eagle…”

And Callie’s heart almost stopped as she peered into the dark, triangular window of the Eagle Apollo 11 lunar lander, and saw Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin looking right back at her, smiling.

Then it was gone, dropping down to the crater floor, crabbing across the boulder-strewn surface towards its landing site. Puffs of gas shot out of the lunar module’s directional rockets as Armstrong steered the fragile craft towards the waiting crowd of aviators and their machines. And as Eagle pulled up to hover in front of them, pirouetting in mid-air, balancing tip-toe like on the point of a bright cone of rocket fire which blasted down from its descent engine, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shephard all waved their greetings at Armstrong and Aldrin, who beamed down at them from Eagle’s deeply-recessed windows.

“Unbelievable…” was all Callie could think of to say as she watched the lunar module float gently downwards, beams of red dust spraying out from beneath it.
It was hard to see clearly, her eyes were swimming with tears, and looking around her she could see many of her fellow colonists holding hands or embracing, sharing the moment. Others stood alone, lost in their own thoughts. But all were stunned into silence by the wondrous sight.

Oh Conn, Callie sighed, I wish you could have seen this -

Then the lunar module was down, and as the dust cleared, and Cat grabbed her hand tightly, Callie heard the voice, and the words, which she had heard a million timed before…

“Tranquility… Gusev Base here,” Amstrong corrected himself, crisply and clearly, and impossibly, “the Eagle has landed…”

A few heartbeats later the hatch of the Eagle lunar module opened and Armstrong, dressed in his bulky, snow-white Apollo suit, started to back his way carefully down the ladder, step-stepping one rung at a time. As he had done over a century earlier, he hesitated at the bottom, taking a moment to drink in the view, and the solemnity of the occasion.
Then, with a deep breath, he reached out with his leg and firmly planted his boot onto the ground, pressing in, leaving a deep boot-print in the Martian dust before stepping completely off the leg’s footpad to stand freely on the surface of another world.

And as his immortal “One small step…” speech drifted over the airwaves and the crater floor, that world went crazy. The Wrights, Gagarin, Shephard and the balloon pilots all rushed forwards to greet the famous lunar explorer, hugging him wildly as he walked into their arms. And as Aldrin came down the ladder and was - to his obvious amazement - greeted with just as enthusiastic hugs and handshakes, around Callie the hilltop erupted in cheers and applause, everyone celebrating not just what they had seen personally, but what had happened all those decades before -

“Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice interrupted, and Callie recognised it as belonging to Gayle Murray, the amateur astronomer who had arranged the Transit Watch, “by now I’m sure most of you will have realised that what you’re seeing is not real…”

“It isn’t?” a nearby settler replied sarcastically, “and here was me thinking all those old rocket jocks had been miraculously reincarnated here on Mars…”

“I’m sorry if our presentation startled or shocked you,” Murray continued, “but we couldn’t warn you beforehand, obviously; that would have ruined the surprise. But while there’s a break in proceedings I’d like to tell you what’s been going on…”

Callie smiled, wondering if the picture she had been piecing together in her mind since the start of the display was accurate. It was.

“You have been watching a virtual reality show,” Murray continued, “probably the most sophisticated, life-like VR show ever produced here on Mars, or anywhere for that matter. As you know, all our helmets’ have HUDs which we use to show us information - suit diagnostic reports, material retrieved from MarsNet, and personal comms transmissions too. You will also know that Ares Base controllers can over-ride our HUDs and use them to show other kinds of material - emergency weather reports and updates, news bulletins, that kind of thing…

“A year ago, in anticipation of this great day, and realising how important an event it would be for us all, some of us decided to secretly produce a VR presentation, a history of flight which we would show during the transit, to celebrate it and our own place in history. That’s what you’ve been watching - a sophisticated 3D VR show, broadcast from Ares. We apologise for not giving you advance warning,” she said, and clearly meant it, “but, well, that would have ruined the surprise, wouldn’t it?” Callie had to agree; yes, it would have completely ruined everything. She - everyone on the hilltop - had known that the air- and space-craft flying past them and landing on the crater floor far below weren’t real, there was no way they possibly could have been, but a part of them all had wanted them to be real, had actually believed…

“There’s a lot more to come yet,” the amateur astronomer assured them all, finding it hard to keep the pride and excitement out of her voice, “and we hope you enjoy the rest of the show…”

“So,” said Cat, her brow furrowed with concentration as she digested what she had just heard “we’re not really seeing these things..?”

Callie hesitated before answering. “Well, we’re seeing them…projected onto the inside of our helmets,” she explained, “but they’re not real, I mean thespaceships aren’t actually down there on the floor. Just the usual rocks and boulders, and the Spirit commemorative plaque.

If you took off your helmet so you weren’t looking through your visor you wouldn’t see the balloon, or the capsules…”

Without saying a word Cat’s hands went up towards her helmet latches, as if she was going to undo them, and the young Martian let out a wicked laugh as Callie made an urgent grab for them. “Just joking, mom,” Cat grinned, and ducked from the fake hand-swipe aimed in her direction.

“But… what’s the point of all this?” asked Blare, huffing with frustration and creeping boredom.

“What’s the point?” repeated Callie with disbelief. “It’s history,” she said, “your history - everyone’s history. This is very, very special Blare… all those spacecraft down there are in a museum down on Earth, the Smithsonian, a huge place, but they’re just standing there, surrounded by ropes and information boards, gathering dust as fat tourists and visitors stand at gawk at them. You’re getting to see them actually flying! It’s unbelievable - ”

“Exactly, it’s unbelievable,” her son sighed, “even more so now we know how it’s done.” He made a decision and turned to his sister, seeking a collaborator. “Bored now,” he said simply, “want to go for a wander?” he asked Cat, and, not at all used to actually being invited somewhere by her brother, she readily accepted. Moments later they were threading their way through the legs of the crowd, in search of something better to do. Callie considered calling something after them but, realising there was no point, she let them go, returning her attention to the brilliant ball of the Sun which was blazing high in the sky now. Yes, Earth was still there… a third of the way across the disk now -

“Oh, that’s beautiful…” she heard someone say admiringly, and turned to see a v-formation of six objects approaching from the south, from the gaping mouth of the Gusev-draining Ma’adim Vallis.

Six more spacecraft.

The six spacecraft were all identical, with long narrow bodies, rounded noses and wide, sweeping delta wings - gleaming white arrowheads which shone with an icy brilliance in the dusky Martian sky. In terms of size they were impressive, easily twice the size of the shuttle which had brought Callie and her family out to Gusev, and their sharp and sharply-angled tail fins were taller than the Wright Flyer was wide jutted up out of their rears.

Some were a perfect, untouched, fresh-snow white. Others had splashes and lines of black here and there - on the leading edges of wings and tailfins, around their noses -

Callie knew the approaching spacecraft had never flown together in that way, not even once. In fact, no two had ever flown together at the same time, and one of them had never even flown under its own power at all; they had taken so long to prepare between missions that each one flew solo around and above the Earth, completely alone. In fact, if she remembered her history, the one at the very tip of the approaching arrowhead had never actually flown in space at all…

“Enterprise…Challenger… Atlantis… Discovery…Endeavour, and Columbia…” Callie recited their names as the arrowhead formation of six ancient spacecraft flew by, slowly, gracefully. Looking out from the hilltop at them, watching each Space Shuttle Orbiter pass by, she was secretly pleased with herself for remembering them all correctly. In the lead, Enterprise, the Shuttle That Never Flew - except from the back of a jumbo jet, but that didn’t count, not as a spaceflight at least. Then Challenger roared past, arrogantly and defiantly waggling her wings as her delta-winged shadow rippled over the crater floor far below. Watching it, Callie bowed her head in tribute to the beautiful spacecraft which had been destroyed so totally and publicly on that terrible day in 1986.
Although it had happened long, long before her birth, Callie knew the story of “The Challenger Disaster” in minute detail; Mr. Lovell had ensured that…

Atlantis passed silently by next, then Discovery, followed by Endeavour, the youngest of the shuttle fleet, built to replace Challenger after it was blown apart in the breathtakingly-blue Florida sky on that January day in the year of Halley’s Comet’s last visit to the inner solar system.

And then last of all, came Columbia.

The oldest of the fleet, and immediately recognisable on any photo - and gliding down from any clear Florida sky - because of the unique black designs on the leading edges of her graceful wings, Columbia had first flown on the twentieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s historic first manned spaceflight, thundering up into the kingfisher-blue sky above the Kennedy Space Centre to the sound of a million people cheering and clapping. Two decades later, returning to the same space centre at the end of yet another outstandingly successful mission, she had broken apart in a horrifyingly-beautiful fireworks display. Falling to the ground in pieces, her sleek lines and perfect body had been reduced to chunks of charred, twisted metal, found smoking and scattered across a thousand miles of farm fields, car parks and school yards.

Callie felt a familiar lump forming in her throat as she remembered Mr. Lovell’s personal account of the loss of Columbia. A space-mad child at the time, it had affected him very deeply.

Because not only had Lovell lived through it, he had seen it, with his own eyes. Standing on his porch in the early hours of that chilly February morning, wrapped up in multiple jackets and jumpers, protection against the wicked cold, he had seen Columbia appear in the west - a bright, blue-white “star” which grew brighter and brighter as it approached. Passing overhead it had flared, intensely, not just once but several times, and Lovell had thought he was seeing the orbiter catching the light of the Sun, reflecting it like a satellite, but then, as it dropped down into the east, it had split into two, then three, splitting over and over until it was just a hail of stars sparkling and flickering as they fell to the ground, winking out one by one… He’d only realised the terrible truth when he heard his father crying beside him, openly, unable to speak but knowing what they had just witnessed.

In the days which followed the world had mourned, weeping silently - and angrily, having learned that the tragedy could have been avoided if warnings had been heeded and money spent - for the seven brave men and women who had perished on the shuttle as it broke apart into a shower of falling stars.

And two years later, a range of low hills, discovered rising up from the boulder-strewn centre of an ancient crater on Mars by a robotic rover, had been named in their honour.

And now, standing on the summit of the Columbia Hills, the crowd around Callie fell respectfully silent as the shuttle orbiter Columbia approached them. Everyone - without exception, young or old - stood perfectly still as the sleek, snow-white spaceplane flew past, level with the summit of the hill named after the Commander of her final, tragic flight.

Callie was glad, and relieved, that the VR show’s programmers had left the shuttle’s windows black, and that no sadly-familiar faces were visible in them; that would have been too realistic, she thought, too much. Her gratitude changed to disbelief and admiration as, in the moment before she passed by, the orbiter rolled gracefully to starboard, slowly flipping her long, wide wings completely around in a barrel roll until she was flying level and true again. No-one applauded the orbiter’s acrobatics, it didn’t feel right. Instead the colonists just nodded in respect as the spacecraft flew away, becoming smaller and smaller until it was eventually, like its five sister ships, lost from view altogether.

“I hope you’ll agree that was a fitting tribute,” Murray said quietly over the radio, and Callie felt Cat’s fingers tightening around hers. It was a surprise, as she hadn’t even seen her daughter come back after vanishing into the crowd. Callie squeezed back -

- just as a splash of blue and white flashed over her head!

Helmets all around her turned frantically this way and that, seeking out the latest participant in the Great Fly-By, as it would come to be known in future years, and peering between the heads of two of her nearest, tallest neighbours rewarded Callie with a glimpse of what looked like a white bullet soaring almost vertically up into the pink sky. When it became silhouetted against the Sun - a very nice touch by the programmers, she thought - Callie could see the new arrival sported a pair of stubby, multi-finned wings and a single, conical engine at the rear. After hanging in front of the Sun for a moment the little bullet-craft then fell back towards the hilltop, like a diver falling backwards from a high board, and as it fell its smooth, sleek white hull shone brightly in the sunshine. Only when it was less than a few dozen feet above the hilltop did it pull up out of its dive, allowing Callie to see the dark blue circles painted on the pointed front of the craft. Then it was wheeling away, racing down towards the crater floor.

“That’s some fancy flying…” Blare whistled appreciatively as, without any further fanfare, the little white plane touched down on the ground just short of the other flying vehicles. Effortlessly, the pilot skidded their craft around, kicking up huge clouds of red dust as they slid to a dramatic halt right beside the lunar module, which was perhaps three times its size…

“Spaceship One,” Murray announced, “in the summer of 2004 it won the X-Prize, a competition to stage the world’s first privately-funded manned spacecraft…”

More cheers went up from the hilltop as the tiny winged spacecraft’s crew of two hauled themselves up out of its cabin and dropped down to the surface of Mars, clapping, shaking hands and dancing around their craft wildly in celebration as the other aviators came to gree