However, the Mars Society (hosts of NewMars.com and its services) has recently approved Tom Hill’s MPC project called Tempo^3. It stands for “Tethered Experiment for Mars interPlanetary Operations Cubed.” It’s basically a CubeSat designed to test the feasiblity of artificial gravity in space, which explains the ‘cube’ part of the acronym. I’ve set up a seperate forum for discussion and I’d love if the regular members of the forums jumped in there. The technical details are currently being worked out by professional Mars Society guys, and with their permission in the coming months I’d like to do updates regarding the project.

In the meantime if there’s anyone with any serious cash to spare, feel free to hop on over to the donation page and give a little to the project.

Tonight something happened – I spent two hours under a star filled sky. This is not unusual for me (in fact, two hours is a fairly short stint these days). What was unusual however was the fact that I had a telescope beside me, and I did not use it; I had a pair of binoculars on the table which remained untouched during the whole two hours; on my camera not one frame was exposed; and my laptop sat still in its case. In fact I did nothing but stand and stare, it was you could say a pre-Galileo observing session.

“So what?” I hear you cry. Well, it’s unusual for me to be surrounded by gadgets and gizmos and not to even want to play with them, and it’s unusual for me to ‘turn off’ my brain and just gaze at the night sky these days. There’s always another galaxy to hunt down, or another double star to split with the telescope. But once in a while it’s nice just to stand and stare. We are privileged people – we live in an age where we can connect our telescope to our laptop, then with a quick click of the mouse on a star chart have the telescope align itself with the desired object, then take an image through the telescope with a CCD camera. If that’s not good enough, then you can select one of the robotic telescope’s that’s available via the web and tell it what you’d like an image of, which type of filter to use, then sit back and wait for it to be delivered back to your computer.

Telescope images can only do so much though. Sometimes you’ve just got to be there, and if that’s not possible we’ve got unmanned probes and rovers to be there until we can. Since Ares Express 7 we have had what can only be described as a successful run for probes and rovers. Spirit and Opportunity are now out of their manufacturers warranty having both exceeded a year’s service; Deep Impact launched successfully and is now on its way to its meeting with comet Tempel 1; and Huygens probe despite a communications glitch landed on Titan. More on these later.

It would be hard to contemplate how say Galileo would feel if someone picked him up in a time machine and brought him forward in time, sat him down in front of a monitor and said, “look at this, it’s a video of man walking on the moon. Here’s a collection of photographs from the surface of Mars, and here’s what it sounded like when a probe descended onto Saturn’s moon Titan.”*

One thread in New Mars that would probably be of interest to Galileo and to anyone with an interest in astronomy is Celestial Cartography in which Cindy starts with a link to a wonderful set of images from an old celestial atlas, with the thread continuing to not only look at other images but at the people who shaped astronomy into what it is today.

*I’ll quickly gloss over the physics of time travel…

– Graeme Skinner

Unmanned Probes

Just take a look at the list of some of the topics currently active in the Unmanned Probes section; ‘Mercury Probe’, ‘Opportunity & Spirit **8**’, ‘Cassini-Huygens III’, ‘Interesting MOC pictures’, ‘Mars Express’; ‘Phoenix: Mars 2007′, ‘JIMO’, ‘New Horizons & SWAP’, ‘MRO’, ‘SMART-1′, and ‘Rosetta’. It would be hard to be bored if you have any interest in space, two rovers still alive and kicking on the surface of Mars with the Phoenix now very much a reality, add to that the wonderful MOC pictures means that it’s a good time for Mars fans. However if you want something other than Mars to look at what about Saturn? The images from Cassini are breathtaking, and the data returned from Huygens will keep scientists around the globe happy for some time to come.

As this is New Mars however, I shall start with a recap of Spirit and Opportunity, after all they have pretty much past most people’s expectations in their ability to just keep slogging on and on. If you’ve been following S&O since the beginning then the following may be a bit ‘old news’ for which I apologize, however there are probably a few that are new to space and Mars in particular that may find this recap useful.

The journey began with Spirit on the 10th June 2003, at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Spirit was strapped to the top of a Boeing Delta II launch vehicle and Opportunity followed on the 7th July 2003 using a Boeing Delta II H. For the journey to Mars each rover was fitted tightly inside its lander, which in turn was inside an aeroshell this was connected to a cruise stage. This cruise stage remained connected until 15 minutes prior to the rovers reaching the atmosphere of Mars.

For their flight through the atmosphere the rovers had the aeroshell pointed forward, atmospheric friction reduced the rover’s speed from around 12,000 miles per hour by around 90 percent in four minutes. Following this reduction in speed a parachute was deployed, then a short time later the heat shield was dropped. The lander was then lowered on a bridle that ran from the backshell. In the last 30 seconds of flight a camera on the lander positioned to point towards the surface took three photographs, which were analyzed by the onboard computer; this allowed it to calculate horizontal
motion, just before impact the air bags inflated and retro rockets halt its descent, the bridle was then cut and the lander in its airbag casing dropped to the surface.

Spirit’s initial bounce on 4th January 2004 was 27.6 feet high, which when you consider only a few minutes before it had been traveling at 12,000 miles per hour is not much of a bounce at all. After another 27 bounces, the lander started to roll before coming to a rest around 300 yards from its impact site in Gusev Crater.

It was another 21 days before Opportunity would make its entrance. When it did on the 25th of January 2004, it bounced 26 times and then rolled to a stop 220 yards from its impact site in Meridiani Planum. During its bounce and roll period it also managed a 90 degree turn!

Once safely on the surface, the rovers began their exploration of the surface. It’s worth noting that each rover has the same set of instruments to help them explore, as follows:

The Panoramic Camera is a high resolution stereo camera consisting of two cameras twelve inches apart on top of a five foot high mast. The camera not only has filters for full colour images but ones to allow it to make spectral analysis of minerals and the atmosphere.

The Mossbauer Spectrometer is mounted on the rovers arm, and is placed against rocks and soil target areas. It’s designed to identify iron contained in minerals.

The Miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometer uses infrared wavelengths to look at the surrounding area. This instrument can determine the type of minerals present. One particular use is to search for minerals that are normally formed in the presence of water.

The Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer. The APXS uses curium-244 to measure the concentrations of major elements in rocks and soil samples.

The Microscopic Imager – pretty self descriptive!

The Rock Abrasion Tool or Rat is used to grind away the top layer of rocks to reveal a clean surface for study.

The rovers’ front wheels can also be used to dig small trenches to allow the other instruments a better look at soil properties. Each rover also has a navigation camera, and hazard avoidance cameras front and back. The entire complement of equipment is pretty respectable when you consider the rovers weigh in at only 384 pounds each.

It seems a long time since January 16th 2004 when Spirit took its first microscopic image, but it’s not even 13 months ago yet. There have been many milestones passed by Spirit and Opportunity but perhaps the discovery of sedimentary rock that may have been drenched in salty water will stick in the minds of many. While everyone who’s followed Spirit & Opportunity over the past year will have a different favorite point to look back on, mine is divided between the ‘blueberries’ (give it enough time and we’ll have a blueberry collection on Earth to drool over), and the false colour
mosaic images such as the one of Bonneville crater by Spirit. What are yours? Why not drop into the current Opportunity and Spirit thread and let everyone know ;-)

Saturn’s turn….

Cassini-Huygens has proved that cooperation can work, albeit in mysterious ways at time. Having successfully negotiated its descent onto the surface of Titan on the 14th January 2005, the Huygens probe was a monumental achievement – whatever its detractors say. An ESA press conference on 21st January 2005 showed just how successful the probe had been as they announced that the data returned from Huygens revealed that Titan showed signs of moving liquid methane on the surface and a high likelyhood of precipitation at some unspecified point in its past. Data from Huygens probe will be analyzed over the coming weeks and months, so it’s a case of watch this space for further announcements. Read the current Cassini-Huygens thread.

Other threads of interest

Singularity

If singularities, black holes, gamma rays, and magnetars are your thing, then this is the thread for you! Seriously the thread contains a lot of interesting reading; Shaun Barrett, RobertDyck, and dickbill explain some of the more complicated issues that normally leave me with a headache. So even if you have no previous knowledge of the topic, it’s well worth a read.

Finally, a sensible solution to the Hubble debate

Discusses the possibility of the Hubble Origins Probe being commissioned to replace the Hubble Space Telescope. Although the topic title in full was “Finally, a sensible solution to the Hubble debate that we can all agree on, maybe,” this did not turn out to be the case. Indeed, it’s probably going to be a topic that will run for a while yet.

Backpacking on Mars: a base in a backpack

Trebuchet starts the thread by suggesting that a portable shelter could be made into a backpack for either recreational use by colonists or by the initial explorers of Mars. The thread goes on to discuss the possible material types, capacity for such a shelter, and how it would work in reality. Plenty of good ideas were being thrown around last time I looked in on it – it makes me wish I was off backpacking now!

The final thread this time round is Peter Ginz, Sci-Fi Writer, Artist, Holocaust Victim. This is simply a remarkable story; to manage to write anything at all at such an age whilst going through such torment is incredible.

Thanks to Cindy for suggesting the above threads. Anyone else who would like to suggest a thread for Ares Express 9 can do so here, or you can email me directly.

Although I have happy events to comment upon in Ares Express 7, it would not be right to ignore the recent events in Asia. The thread in Free Chat, Tsunami in Asia has seen reports of the death toll rise from 22000 on the 27th December ‘04 when the thread was started to well over 125000 – it’s an easy number to write, but not to comprehend. I will not comment any more upon it, other than to say the news reports have left me shocked and saddened – hopefully the thread on New Mars will stay active for a while, as it will mean the events are still in people’s minds and not forgotten.

– Graeme Skinner

Mars Rover News

Spirit celebrated its first birthday on Mars this week, although the primary mission for Spirit ended eight months ago the rover keeps on going (I bet a certain battery company wishes they’d sponsored it now!) Currently Spirit is moving (though very slowly following the removal of a trapped rock) up Husband hill, they are making a series of short slow movements to get the rovers wheel clear of the rock, as they don’t wish to get the rock trapped again! The journey up the hill has proved successful in one way with the discovery of a new type of rock that is rich in phosphorus. Opportunity meanwhile is only twenty days from its first birthday on Mars. Currently Opportunity is imaging heatshield fragments in order to see what effects entry to the atmosphere and landing had upon it. Visit the mission website and the forum thread.

Probe News

It’s fingers crossed time that Deep Impact will manage to launch on the 12th January ‘05. Having had a number launch related problems the mission will be looking for an alternative target if they miss the launch window this month. Deep Impact is basically going to crash a small impactor into comet Tempel 1 to see inside the comet and discover more about what they are made of. If the launch is successful on the 12th the arrival time at comet Tempel 1 is around the 4th of July 2005. Visit the mission website and the forum thread for any further developments.

Everyone with an interest in space will have their eye trained towards Titan this month, with the Huygens probe descent scheduled for the 14th January 2005 we now just have to hope the on board timer has not stopped and revives the probe for the descent phase. The descent is expected to last around two and a half hours and data will be relayed from the probe to Cassini then back to Earth. The Cassini-Huygens thread is currently one of the most popular in the unmanned probes section, and I expect it will get much busier around the 14th.

Comet Machholz

Just in case anyone has missed the thread in Events Calendar, Comet Machholz is now in the perfect position for any astrophotographers or indeed anyone with an interest in astronomy the forum thread has charts and info on the comet. Take a look, it’s well worth it!

Forum News

Since Ares Express 6, the number of posts to New Mars has broken through the 60000 mark, and the membership has risen to 1018.

Current hot topics in Human missions are Just cancel the Shuttle Programme in which Dayton3 suggested that NASA should cancel the Shuttle now. The thread is currently on the subject of what to replace the Shuttle with (and yes, Mars Direct has been brought into the discussion). Other topics of interest in human missions sees The need for a Moon Direct is popular as ever, along with Post Central for information on CEV which is at the stage where a third thread will soon be required.

In Interplanetary Transportation, Space Elevators and Pipelines started with John Creighton discussing the mathematics behind moving gasses into space, a discussion that is still ongoing.

Interesting MOC pictures is one of the hot topics in Unmanned Probes. Other hot topics already mentioned are Spirit & Opportunity 8 and Cassini-Huygens 2. A new interesting thread in the Life on Mars forum worth checking out is More fossil-like images from Spirit: Weird rock looks like brachiopod imprint – the thread title says it all!

In Science and Technology, the New Discoveries thread continues to provide a nice range of links and information.

2005 Astronomy & Space Flight calendar

Feel free to copy and print as required. Please post any amendments or additions in the thread in ‘Articles’.

January

2nd January – Earth at perihelion
3rd January – Quadrantids maximum, Spirit 1 Year today
4th January – Jupiter 0.4 degrees North of the Moon
6th January – Saturn 7 degrees South of Pollux
7th January – Mars 3 degrees North of the Moon
9th January – Mars, Mercury, Venus & the Moon (photo time?)
10th January – Moon at perigee
11th January – Neptune 5 degrees North of the Moon
12th January – Deep Impact spacecraft, to explore Comet Tempel 1 for NASA, on board a Boeing Delta 2 from Cape Canaveral. (launch date subject to change).
13th January – Uranus 4 degrees North of the Moon, Saturn at opposition
14th January – Huygens probe Titan descent, Mercury 0.3 degrees South of Venus
15th January – Venus 0.9 degrees South of Uranus
23rd January – Moon at apogee
24th January – Saturn 5 degrees South of the Moon, Opportunity 1 Year today
26th January – Tac-Sat 1 communications satellite on board a SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base.
27th January – Classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office in a flight staged from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
31st January – Jupiter 0.9 degrees North of the Moon

February

2nd February – Worldsat 2 telecommunications satellite onboard a Proton launcher, from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
3rd February – Neptune conjunction (Sun)
5th February – Mars 4 degrees North of the Moon
7th February – Moon at perigee
14th February – Mercury in superior conjunction, Venus 1 degree South of Neptune
20th February – Saturn 5 degrees South of the Moon, Moon at apogee. Classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office on a Lockheed Martin Titan 4B rocket from Cape Canaveral
25th February – Uranus in conjunction with the Sun
27th February – Jupiter 1.2 degrees North of the Moon. I-4 satellite on a Atlas 5 rocket, launching from Cape Canaveral
28th February – Progress 17 cargo ship on a Soyuz rocket to the ISS from Baikonur Cosmodrome

March

1st March – NROL-1 spacecraft to launch on a Being Delta 4 from Vandenberg Air Force Base
2nd March – DART spacecraft on board a Pegasus XL launch vehicle from Vandenberg Air Force Base. (launch subject to change)
6th March – Mars 5 degrees North of the Moon
8th March – Neptune 5 degrees North of the Moon, Moon at perigee
11th March – Mercury 3 degrees North of the Moon
19th March – Saturn 5 degrees South of the Moon, Moon at apogee, The NOAA-N spacecraft to launch on a Boeing Delta 2 from Vandenberg Air Force Base
25th March – European Space Agency’s Cryosat science spacecraft from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia
26th March – Jupiter 1 degree North of the Moon
29th March – Mercury inferior conjunction
31st March – Venus in superior conjunction

April

3rd April – Mars 4 degrees North of the Moon, Jupiter at opposition
4th April – Neptune 5 degrees North of the Moon, Moon at perigee
5th April – Uranus 3 degrees North of the Moon
7th April – Mercury 3 degrees North of the Moon
13th April – Mars 1.2 degrees South of Neptune
15th April – Expedition 11 to the International Space Station on board a Soyuz TMA-6 spacecraft and Soyuz booster from Baikonur Cosmodrome
18th April – Lyrids maximum
22nd April – Jupiter 0.6 degrees North of the Moon
29th April – Moon at perigee

May

1st May – Neptune 5 degrees North of the Moon
2nd May – Mars 3 degrees North of the Moon
3rd May – Uranus 3 degrees North of the Moon
6th May – Mercury 3 degrees South of the Moon
12th May to 3rd June – Launch window for NASA’s return to flight mission with STS-114 Discovery shuttle flight, Kennedy Space Centre in Florida
13th May – Saturn 5 degrees South of the Moon
14th May – Mars 1.2 degrees South of Uranus, Moon at apogee
19th May – Jupiter 0.4 degrees North of the Moon
26th May – CloudSat and Calipso spacecraft onboard Boeing Delta 2 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base Moon at perigee
28th May – Neptune 5 degrees North of the Moon
30th May – Uranus 3 degrees North of the Moon
31st May – Mars 0.5 degrees North of the Moon, Saturn 7 degrees South of Pollux

June

3rd June – Mercury in superior conjunction
5th June – DMSP 17 on a Delta 4 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base
8th June – Venus 4 degrees South of the Moon
10th June – Progress 18 cargo ship on a Soyuz rocket to the ISS from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Saturn 5 degrees South of the Moon
11th June – Moon at apogee
14th June – Pluto at opposition
16th June – Jupiter 0.4 degrees North of the Moon
21st June – Solstice
23rd June – Venus 5 degrees South of Pollux, Moon at perigee
25th June – Venus 1.3 degrees North of Saturn, Neptune 5 degrees North of the Moon
26th June – Mercury 1.4 degrees North of Saturn, Uranus 3 degrees North of the Moon
27th June – Mercury 0.08 degrees South of Venue
28th June – Moon at apogee, Saturn 5 degrees South of the Moon
30th June – Classified payload for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office on board a Titan 4B booster, from Vandenberg Air Force Base

July

4th July – Deep Impactor to arrive at comet Tempel 1
5th July – Earth at aphelion
7th July – Mercury 1.6 degrees South of Venus
8th July – Moon at apogee, Mercury 5 degrees South of the Moon, Venus 3 degrees South of the Moon
13th July – Jupiter 0.8 degrees North of the Moon
21st July – Moon at perigee
22nd July – Neptune 4 degrees North of the Moon, Venus 1.2 degrees North of Regulus
23rd July – Saturn in conjunction with the Sun
24th July – Uranus 2 degrees North of the Moon
27th July – Navstar GPS satellite 2R M-3 satellite on a Boeing-built Delta 2 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base Mars 4 degrees South of the Moon

August

1st August – Moon at apogee
6th August – Delta & Iota Aquarids maximum Mercury in inferior conjunction
8th August – Neptune at opposition, Venus 1.2 degrees South of the Moon
10th August – NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on a Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Jupiter 1.3 degrees North of the Moon
12th August – Perseids maximum
18th August – Neptune 5 degrees North of the Moon
19th August – Moon at perigee
20th August – Uranus 2 degrees North of the Moon
25th August – Mars 6 degrees South of the Moon
31st August – Saturn 5 degrees South of the Moon

September

1st September – Classified payload for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office on a Boeing Delta 4 booster from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Moon at apogee, Uranus at opposition
2nd September – Venus 1.4 degrees South of Jupiter
4th September – Mercury 1.1 degrees North of Regulus
5th September – Venus 1.8 degrees North of the Moon
7th September – Venus 0.6 degrees North of the Moon, Jupiter 1.8 degrees North of the Moon
15th September – Neptune 5 degrees North of the Moon
16th September – Moon at perigee, Uranus 2 degrees North of the Moon
22nd September – Mars 6 degrees South of the Moon, Equinox
28th September – Moon at apogee, Saturn 5 degrees South of the Moon

October

3rd October – Annular eclipse
6th October – Mercury 1.5 degrees South of Jupiter
7th October – Venus 1.4 degrees North of the Moon
12th October – GPS satellite 2R M-4on a Boeing Delta 2 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Neptune 5 degrees North of the Moon
14th October – Moon at perigee, Uranus 3 degrees North of the Moon
19th October – Mars 5 degrees South of the Moon
20th October – Orionids maximum
22nd October – Jupiter in conjunction with the Sun
25th October – Saturn 4 degrees South of the Moon
26th October – Moon at apogee
30th October – Mars closest approach

November

3rd November – Mercury 1.3 degrees North of the Moon, Taurids Maximum
5th November – Venus 1.4 degrees North of the Moon
7th November – Mars at opposition
8th November – Neptune 5 degrees North of the Moon
10th November – Moon at perigee, Uranus 3 degrees North of the Moon
11th November – WorldView imaging satellite on a Boeing Delta 2 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base
15th November – Mars 3 degrees South of the Moon
17th November – Leonids maximum
22nd November – Saturn 4 degrees South of the Moon
23rd November – Moon at apogee
29th November – Jupiter 3 degrees North of the Moon

December

4th December – Venus 2 degrees North of the Moon
5th December – Moon at apogee
6th December – Neptune 4 degrees North of the Moon
7th December – Uranus 2 degrees North of the Moon
12th December – Mars 1.3 degrees South of the Moon
15th December – GPS satellite 2R M-5 on a Boeing Delta 2 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station
16th December – Pluto in conjunction with the Sun
19th December – Saturn 4 degrees South of the Moon
21st December – Solstice, Moon at apogee
22nd December – Ursids maximum
27th December – Jupiter 4 degrees North of the Moon
30th December – Mercury 5 degrees North of the Moon

I’m very happy to announced that this issue of Ares Express (and hopefully future issues) was written by Graeme Skinner, a regular contributor to the New Mars forums. Graeme is currently studying with the Open University as an undergraduate, works full time in and around the scenic North of England, and in his spare time an active amateur astronomer.

– Adrian Hon, Editor

Since Ares Express 5, New Mars has seen its membership break through the 1000 mark, its number of posts cleared the 58000 mark, and of course the tenacious rovers Spirit and Opportunity have managed a whopping 640 days between them.

You could say 2004 has been a good year for people with an interest not only in Mars but space in general; two out the three Mars rovers sent have been producing amazing images virtually all year, and if that was not enough they’ve helped show a somewhat damper history for the Martian surface than many had expected. We’ve seen Cassini-Huygens safely reach Saturn and start sending back images that leave anyone with an inkling of interest in space spellbound. And if that was not enough since the last issue of Ares Express the Ansari Xprize was won by SpaceShipOne.

Spirit & Opportunity

Although the number of posts made to the Spirit and Opportunity threads have slowed down of late the two rovers are still (unsurprisingly) a source of interest to the members and visitors to New Mars, with the eight S&O threads are amongst the most viewed subjects in the unmanned probes section. Currently (7th December 04) Spirit is moving towards Machu Picchu in the Columbia Hills. Opportunity is taking the time to take high resolution images of Burns Cliff along with spectrometer observations before leaving Endurance. Despite a problem with the brakes on Spirit, which has been hopefully resolved the main problem for the two rovers at the moment is the position of the Sun for charging the solar panels. Find current mission status at and other information at the current Spirit & Opportunity thread.

On the Forums

The need for a Moon Direct is one of the week’s most active threads in the Human Mission section.

In the Unmanned Probes section Interesting MOC pictures looks to be another of the week’s hot threads with currently 155 posts on the subject, it also contains a great collection of links to keep your desktop images varied for weeks to come! Other Unmanned Probes threads to keep an eye on apart from Spirit & Opportunity is the Cassini-Huygens thread with the descent of Huygens probe to Titan in little over a month the thread could see a distinct rise in activity.

In Planetary Transportation, the hot thread of the week is Running on compressed air? The title says it all really, the thread started off discussing the use of compressed air to power rovers on the Martian surface. In a close second to this thread is Simple Mars vehicle.

In Science and Technology, the ever popular New Discoveries thread is now onto its fourth thread, but the hot thread is still Heliopolis with (153 posts and 1798 views) with all things solar being discussed.

A bet in Free Chat to my knowledge has not yet had a proven winner though its hard to tell :-)

Other Forum News

Since the last issue of AE we have a new collection of moderators in the form of Bill White and Cobra Commander to help keep the forum running smoothly.

And Finally…

A pointless piece of information about Mars. Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630) used observations of the orbit of Mars to deduce that celestial bodies did not always have to follow a circular orbit, this led him to formulate three laws of planetary motion which are still in use 375 years after his death. In fact you could say thanks to the observation of Mars all those years ago we now have the maths to be able to plan the route to go there!

Over the last few years, viewers in the United Kingdom have been enjoying a series of innovative new documentaries that combine cutting edge computer graphics with science to immerse them in the world of dinosaurs and wild beasts. Walking with Dinosaurs and Walking with Beasts have been met with international success and acclaim, and the latest series looks outwards, towards space. Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets (formerly known as ‘Walking with Spacemen’) will receive its premiere airing on November 9th, but Stuart Atkinson from New Mars has secured an exclusive interview with Series Producer Chris Riley. Read on to find out the inspiration behind the series, the creation of the spaceship featured in the show and how they chose the destinations for the astronauts.

New Mars: First of all, Chris, welcome to New Mars and thanks for agreeing to talk to us at what must be a very busy time, with your new book just hitting the shelves and your TV series about to air here in the UK. Could you tell everyone a little about the Space Odyssey project?

Chris Riley: Space Odyssey tells the story of a siarx year human spaceflight to the planets. The idea of doing a big series about a human spaceflight to the planets on TV had been knocking around ever since the late 1990s, but no one had been able to persuade anyone to give them the money to pull it off. But after the huge success of Walking with Dinosaurs and Walking with Beasts the creators of these series wanted to bring this kind of “specumentary” treatment to another subject and at the end of 2002 I got a call from Tim Haines – who’d made Dinosaurs, asking if I’d like to come and help make Walking with Spacemen, (working title). I didn’t need to think hard about it too much. It sounding like a lot of fun and the chance to make childhood dreams come true! I started the project in January 2003.

We would only have one shot at a series like this and those that had put up the money – principally the BBC and Discovery Channel wanted it to be a thrilling tour of our solar system. In that respect we had to cover an awful lot of ground in the two hours of TV that the series would fill. Mars of course was a must – but so was Venus, the Moon’s of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. I began by working hard on the trajectories that we could harness to take us on a trip that would accomplish all this if we were doing it for real. It was essential that we weaved a story that didn’t break any laws of physics. Everything had to be possible with current technology, even if it was perhaps improbable given the constraints of politics and economics that tend to suffocate big ideas like this. So I spent three months refining the trajectories and researching the propulsion systems that might be able to pull off such a journey.

NM: I’ve gone through the book several times now, and can’t find any actual dates anywhere. What’s the reason for leaving the date of the mission unknown?

CR: It is set in our time. We wanted it to feel “of this generation” and in that respect it’s as more of an alternative history as a look to the future. Our starting point in creating the story was to assume that if we had continued at the same rate as we did in the 1960s, with no financial or political constraints where could we have got to now? In the heady days of the 1960s, as Apollo 11 was heading for the Moon the Vice President Spiro Agnew had declared that we’d have a man on Mars by 1980. And if this too had happened then the idea of a voyage to the other planets in our solar system suddenly feels quite possible. So it is set in the early 21st century and although there is a very precise calendar that we drew up for the trajectories we never mention these actual dates anywhere as we didn’t want people distracted by things like fashion, clothes and hairstyles or the kind of watches being worn and whether they thought such technology would be around on Earth when we make this journey.

NM: As with many BBC projects now, Space Odyssey the series is complemented by a large format book, and as the book is out and the series is yet to air we’ll talk about the book first, then move on to the TV series, if that’s okay? Congratulations on the book, it’s beautiful. If the TV series is half as stunning as the book, all space buffs and enthusiasts are in for a real treat! Probably a daft question, but are you pleased with it?

CR: Yes delighted. We worked hard on the stills pictures in the book for around 6 months as the series was being filmed, to get the look we were after before embarking on the digital effects for the series. All the credit for the incredible pictures in the book must go to an exceptionally talented team of photoshop artists at a company called Framestore CFC in London. Two brothers in particular – Daren and Jason Horely created most of the stunning Mars images which you suggest in your review might be images stolen from the future. I do hope you are right.

As for the story, I wrote it through December and January just passed, immediately following a very grueling period of filming where I’d lived through the story for real as we filmed it. It contains far more information of course than we could fit into the series – and draws on the experiences of about a hundred astronauts – from interviews I’d done, books I’d read and documentaries I’d watched over the years, blurred with the results of over 160 robotic missions which we’ve now dispatched to the planets on our behalf.

NM: There have been lots of books in the past that have taken readers on a “virtual tour” of the solar system, but they’ve all been set in the distant future, with bustling spaceports, tourist flights, hotels on the Moon, etc. Why did you decide to set Pegasus’ mission in the near future, with less fanciful technology?

CR: I was adamant that this series shouldn’t feel like Science Fiction. It was always going to be more Apollo 13 and less Star Trek. Our crews would be landing in capsules – experiencing the gritty reality of a turbulent descent to the surface of Mars or Venus in the way it might eventually happen. In this way I hope it will bring a wider audience to the story than if we’d gone down the more futuristic Science Fiction route. Much as I love to immerse myself in certain science fiction stories (notably the Star Wars saga) I am aware that it is a turn off to a lot of people. There is a barrier between the early 21st century technology we are familiar with and the ultra-high tech worlds portrayed by most Science Fiction. And it was a barrier I was keen to avoid. Anyone who watches the series should be able to imagine themselves or their friends as one of these astronaut explorers – and in that respect it had to feel like it was happening today.

NM: It strikes me the book – the whole Space Odyssey concept – was conceived by someone with a real love of space exploration. So, like many New Mars readers, have you been “into space” ever since you were a kid? Or are you a late convert?

CR: Oh – ever since I was a kid. I wasn’t quite two years old when Armstrong and Aldrin had walked on the Moon and although I’m told that I was made to watch it live I sadly don’t remember it first hand. But by the time the Viking landers had touched down on Mars I knew only too well what the thrill of this mission meant. And with the help of my father I had often been out into the back garden with his binoculars to check out our nearest planets. Then in 1977 Star Wars hit the big screen. I’d never experienced other planets in such a way as George Lucas portrayed them from low orbits above their exotic surfaces. And when Luke Skywalker watched that double star system setting across the desert plains of the planet Tattooine. I was hooked. Planets truly were real worlds like Earth. Sagan’s Cosmos and the Horizon documentaries that the BBC made added to my sense of wonder and awe at this subject. I found a diary from 1979, that I’d kept when I was 11 years old, in a box the other day and over the summer months I’d been so thrilled by the Voyager missions that I’d drawn the whole solar system out across the pages – with the spacecraft trajectories marked on them and lots of exciting annotations of what they were finding in the atmosphere of giant Jupiter. The National Geographic magazine from January 1985 (it’s got a Gorilla on the front cover) was another seminal moment for me. A brilliantly illustrated article by Rick Gore painted our state of the art understanding of the geology of many of the planets and moons of our solar system. There was a wonderful artist’s impression of what one of the Venera spacecraft might look like on the surface of Venus which remained etched onto my mind for decades and inspired one of the scenes in Space Odyssey. I went on to study geology at University and picked a department that ran a third year module in planetary geology which I lapped up. So I guess I was always a bit of a space nut!

NM: Two of the landers used during the Pegasus mission are named after famous figures from the history of astronomy. Was that fun, choosing the names, or did you feel pressure to honour such important figures?

CR: Great fun yes. I really enjoyed picking the names of the spacecraft. I had to honour Clyde Tombaugh when it came to landing on Pluto. I have a bit of a soft spot for Clyde. I wish I’d met him. He died the year I begun researching the BBC series The Planets and so never had that opportunity. But I spent some time at the Lowell Observatory with the survey plates and the blink comparator he’d used during his search for Planet X. So that was an easy choice. Messier – our comet lander was slightly harder. There were so many astronomers to pick when it came to comets, but I guess Messier’s survey was particularly important.

NM: What specifically inspired you to create Space Odyssey? Did any one event trigger it in your mind… maybe the loss of Columbia, I’ve wondered?… or was this one of those long term, “nagging creative itches” we hear about?

The Columbia accident happened within a few weeks of starting to research and write the series. It had a profound effect on the story – in that human spaceflight suddenly seemed a million times harder to achieve. And here were we talking about landing on Venus, aerobraking in Jupiter’s atmosphere and touching down on Pluto! Suddenly Space Odyssey felt even more fanciful. If anything this event perhaps focused us even more on routing our story more firmly in the reality of the challenges and daunting engineering difficulties of trying to pull off such a space flight. I’d also been reading the Columbia crew’s diaries in the run up to the accident and there had been something that Kalpana Chawla had written the day before they died about seeing the whole Earth reflected in her eye and how mesmerising and wonderful the site had been. Some of Kalpana’s thoughts inspired parts of the book. But the concept of the series was born long before Columbia and it was something I’d longed to do since I was a child I guess.

NM: Reading the book I detected more than a hint of the vision of science fiction writers such as Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter. Have any sci-fi writers influenced you particularly during this project?

CR: I interviewed Kim Stanley Robinson a few years ago and was rather embarrassed that I hadn’t read his Mars trilogy properly at the time. So when we started this project I made a point of reading Red Mars – which tells the very realistic story of a first colonising mission to Mars. There’s lots of extremely well researched and well informed ideas about what such a mission might one day be like and I found it a very inspiring account. I also listened repeatedly to a BBC Radio production of Stephen Baxter’s Voyage story which I felt preserved the excitement of the “Apollo-convention” dialogue – lots of phraseology from the real Apollo mission transcripts and communication beeps. And this soundscape was something I was keen to create for our series as well.

NM: In the introduction to the book you say “A generation has grown up not knowing a time when humans could fly to other worlds. Until we decide to go once more, this book is for them”, which makes you sound very angry about the way space exploration has stalled since your childhood. Are you?

CR: Well as I’ve already mentioned I was wowed by the space missions of the 1960s and 70s. Once the Vikings were on Mars it was obvious humans would follow as they had to the Moon. But there was a terrible lack of planetary exploration (when it came to Mars) for the next 21 years and I have always felt rather robbed of that experience. I felt like a young child again in 1997 when Pathfinder bounced down onto Ares Valles and wished it had happened in the 1970s or 80s. We can’t get those lost years back, and I feel that way every time a mission fails. So many years still elapse between missions that it’s still very frustrating, although I do feel lucky to live at this time when so many planetary missions are flying again. As for human space exploration I don’t think it’s ever delivered the promise of what it could be since we left the Moon. Of course human missions to the planets are very costly and need a good reason to go. And it’s not always easy to find a good reason other than George Mallory’s “because it’s there” which was always enough for Kennedy. So why isn’t it enough anymore?

NM: Which space missions of the past have made the biggest impact on you? Judging from the book you’re a much bigger fan of manned missions than of unmanned missions..?

CR: I adore the robot missions to the planets as much as human missions. As I’ve already mentioned the Viking landers, Pathfinder, the Voyagers, Magellan, Mars Golbal Surveyor, Mars Express, and the MER landers have all thrilled me to bits. But I have a soft spot for human space flight. There’s a connection you can always make with a human that’s harder to make with a robotic flight. The Apollo-Soyuz mission held great significance for me, coming at a time when I was just about old enough to remember it – I felt it symbolised a hope for working in space together as a planet rather than for individual national pride. The first Space Shuttle flight was an immense influence too. The TV feed from the launch site in Florida was being shown in our school library all day and between each lesson I’d race over there to see what had happened. I was late for every single lesson that day! The other human missions that made a big impact on me where when the Shuttle started to dock with Mir. Tomorrow’s World covered STS-71 live and I was answering the phones during the programme to answer viewers questions. Someone called up with a ham radio receiver and patched the crew through to my phone call. “Dosvidanya Mir, Dosvidanya Mir” the caller cried. And back came a crackly Russian voice saying goodbye. I rushed outside after the call and saw the Shuttle and Mir shining brightly as it sailed by in the dusky sky overhead. But all these missions are knocked into touch by the Apollo series. Those men who left the relative safety of Earth orbit to head for the Moon undertook the most significant human endeavour ever to have been attempted. And it seems to me more incredible with every year that passes that they accomplished this immense undertaking so successfully all those years ago. I feel privileged to live on Earth at the same time as them and the gift of Apollo is one I shall always treasure and look to for inspiration as long as I live.

NM: Apollo 15 Commander Dave Scott was one of the project’s advisors. What was it like to work with one of the men who have actually walked on another world? Exciting? Humbling? Terrifying?

CR: With every brush I have every had with a Moon walker I always feel thrilled at each encounter. And working closely with Dave Scott was no exception. Yes I was nervous about our initial meeting. There is always a risk whenever you meet your heroes that you might say something to upset them, or vice versa. But I had nothing to fear. Dave is one of the most charming and delightful human beings you could hope to meet. He was both generous with his time and a joy to have on the project. Bringing his unique experience to our scripts and during filming on set as he coached the actors to deliver their lines and perform their space walks and surface exploration scenes in as accurate and realistic way as possible brought a realism to the series that few human beings could provide.

NM: Onto the Pegasus itself. It’s a beautiful ship. Who advised you on the design, and how realistic is its technology?

CR: Once we had our trajectories and planetary encounters plotted out we turned to a number of spacecraft engineers to help us design a spacecraft for the job. The design of Pegasus is completely inspired by necessity and the mission it needed to pull off. Former spacecraft engineer and historian Dr David Baker came up with the exterior design and Professor Chris Welch from Kingston University came up with the life support system designs and provided the calculations needed to keep the crew alive. The spacecraft company EADS Space in Stevenage helped to turn the initial sketches into engineering designs that our digital artists could work with and Pegasus was born. It’s divided into three portions – a giant 400 meter aerobraking shield at one end which also houses the nuclear fusion engine. A 700 meter truss separates the engine from the habitation module which is assembled from clusters of spent Space Shuttle external fuel tanks. An artifical gravity system rotates 100 meter arms with sleep and exercise modules at each end which rotate at 2.8 rpm to simulate 0.5Gs. Solar panels for emergency power in the inner solar system and radiators also adorn this portion of the ship and a couple of giant superconductor tarus cores at each end of the hab module create an artifical magnetosphere to protect the crew from extremes of ionising radiation. At the other end is another 300 meter truss and a y-shaped Brayton cycler – power system.

NM: When she saw it, a friend of mine commented that the 5 man crew of the Pegasus is very “politically-correct”… international, mixed race, mixed colour… a deliberate decision?

CR: This mission is for all mankind and we tried to represent a broad breadth of cultures and ethnic backgrounds in that respect. Not really politically correct but an attempt to reflect the whole planet. And it’s the same at Mission Control – we wanted an atmosphere that felt like the United Nations – drawing on the finest minds and greatest talents from every corner of the globe.

NM: The photo-realistic digital renderings in the book are absolutely stunning, among the best I’ve ever seen. Tell us a little about the team responsible for them.

CR: The digital artists are all from Framestore CFC – the creators of the Walking with…. documentaries and many of the finest films of our time. I agree. I was thrilled with their images – particularly their work on Mars. They are extremely talented artists and I found it a very rewarding collaboration between the planetary science community and these artists.

NM: Have you a favourite image in the book? (Mine would have to be the astronauts peering down into Valles Marineris, and the astronaut standing on Io, with an aurora flickering above her head…)

CR: Yes – I simply adore the Valles Marineris image too. Definitely my favourite.

NM: What about a favourite crew member? And why? I’d have to go with the Mission Scientist Zoe Lessard, she seems the most human to me.

CR: I do like Zoe’s character. She was based on astronaut Susan Helms, who I read moved out of her appartment and put all her possessions into storage before one of her missions so that she could think of the ISS as her home. I like the commander – Tom Kirby too. He’s got a lot of great leadership qualities, he’s very calm under pressure and carries the single minded conviction and drive to accomplish such an ambitious mission.

NM: The story of Pegasus’s epic journey isn’t a fairytale; without giving too much away, not all the crew make it home. Were you ever tempted to go for a “happy ending”, after the tragedies suffered by the real space program?

CR: A lot of space series tend to major on the doom and gloom of space – the next thing to threaten Earth. One of the criticisms of the Sam Neil series I heard was that it was too depressing. What with gamma ray bursts, the Sun running out of fuel and asteroid and comet impacts it was all a bit grim. But we were always adamant that we wanted to reflect the reality of the risks of this kind of mission and in that respect a totally happy ending wouldn’t have been totally appropriate.

NM: Although the Pegasus visits many places on its epic tour, it obviously can’t visit everywhere. Which worlds, or bodies, did you want to explore but couldn’t through lack of room? I’d have liked to have seen the crew exploring Phobos, and Mimas; I’d have loved to have seen one of the astronauts standing on the summit of the mountain in the centre of Herschel crater and looking up at Saturn’s rings cutting the planet in half…

CR: Yes – we were spoilt for choice with the series and it was frustrating – loosing worlds with dramatic views like those you describe. Personally I really wanted to land them on Titan – the thought of those extra-terrestrial oceans was a real treat. But they’re existence isn’t proved just yet and by January next year I hope we will know more for sure about the exotic surface of this weird world after the Huygens mission. But Tim felt it too risky to guess at Titan and then find we were proved wrong before the series airs in the US. So maybe next time!!

NM: On to the TV series now… If the book’s anything to go by the series will be visually stunning. British TV has certainly come a long way since the wobbly spaceships of Blakes 7 and the cardboard corridors and papier mache aliens Dr Who, hasn’t it?

CR: Oh yes – the processing power of affordable computers has transformed what we can do. Like you I grew up with Dr Who and Blakes 7 and never really questioned the effects, but the bar has been raised exponentially since then and TV has struggled to keep up with the multi-million pound movie industry. The trouble with doing something like this for a TV event is that it’s got to be as good as the movies or people will flick over, and that was very hard to do with the much smaller budget we had. Although it was a very generous documentary budget it was a very small drama budget – particularly a drama that had to look so visually stunning. Very daunting. But we squeezed very last penny out of the budget and everyone worked round the clock day and night to do it! Our director Joe Ahearne has gone on to direct the daleks in the new Dr Who series – and I wonder what he’ll make of them after Space Odyssey!

NM: Today, TV audiences are used to ultra-realistic special effects. Do you think Space Odyssey’s effects can compete with those seen in series such as Enterprise and Battlestar Galactica?

CR: I hope we are as good. Cos if we’re not people will switch over. It’s essential to match these series if we want to hold on to our audience.

NM: It’s generally agreed that Walking With Dinosaurs, another BBC series, set new standards for TV special effects. Do you consider Space Odyssey’s special effects to be as groundbreaking as the effects seen in Walking With Dinosaurs?

In this genre I do think Space Odyssey has set new standards on TV, but that’s for you lot to decide!

NM: For all its sfx, Space Odyssey is a very human story. What were the actors like to work with? Were any of them space fans already? Did any become space enthusiasts whilst working on the project?

CR: The actors were all space novices! We put them through a kind of space school to convert them – with lectures on planetary science, astronomy, engineering and human spaceflight. It was hard for them to get to grips with all the techno-babble but I think I do a very good job. By then end I think they’d gone as far as they could towards space without going all the way – floating weightless during parabolic flights wearing real cosmonaut space suits.

NM: How long did it take to film Space Odyssey?

CR: We filmed for just ten weeks during September to November last year (2003) but the series took two years to make. There was a year of post production alone.

NM: Which are your own personal favourite sequences in the series? Having seen how many pages are devoted to it in the book, I’m guessing you’re a big fan of Mars exploration…

CR: Mars is a place we know more about than any other planet beyond Earth. Our robots have spent more than 12 cumulative years on the surface and I felt we had a very good chance of simulating a very realistic human experience on Mars. There’s a very rich body of research to draw on for these scenes in the series and the pages in the book. My first draft of this chapter was twice the length it’s published at! There’s just so much to say!

NM: I gather the Mars sequences were filmed in Chile? Why did you shun the usual suspect pseudo-Mars locations, such as Death Valley, Arizona, etc?

CR: I looked at a place called Mars Hill in Death Valley which is a dead ringer of the Viking 1 landing site – but the thing that swung it to Chile was that we also needed a location that was a cloudy desert to pull off Venus, and we could get that on the coast in N.Chile and then pick up our Mars scenes further inland. The Atacama desert was also voted the most Mars like place on Earth by researchers at Mexico State University whilst we were filming there. So it was the right place to go for both planets!

NM: So far – with perhaps the honourable exception of Capricorn One – depictions of Mars seen on both the small and big screen have disappointed. Are you hoping that Space Odyssey’s Mars sequences will make up for the disappointing portrayals of Mars seen in Mission to Mars and Red Planet?

CR: We worked hard to get it right. The butterscotch skies, the dust storms, the reality of a dust devil and of course the 1/3rd gravity that no previous film seems to have every bothered with so I hope our recreations of Mars will help them to get it more accurate in the future!

NM: As a British writer and program maker, producing a project for the BBC, were you tempted to have the crew find Beagle 2 on Mars? Similarly, were you tempted to have the crew visit Spirit or Opportunity, to appeal to the US market?

CR: We’d already visited Venera 14 on Venus in the story when we reached Mars and although it was an idea we bounced around – finding Pathfinder in fact, (as when we filmed Spirit, Opportunity and Mars Express hadn’t arrived and we didn’t know what the outcome of these missions would be) it was decided that discovering one old robot in the series was enough and as many people don’t know we’ve been to Venus that was the one we wanted to pay tribute to.

NM: Are there any sequences missing from the book that we’ll see on TV? Things you wanted to keep for the series? I’m hoping to see the Shackleton probe gathering its samples on Europa. For that matter, why didn’t you land people on Europa, when there’s so much interest and excitement about it amongst exobiologists?

CR: The opposite in fact. There are scenes in the book, (like Juno – the nuclear ram jet exploring Jupiter) which didn’t make it into the film. We didn’t build Shackleton in the end – although its views of the surface of Europa are still in the series. The reason for not landing humans on Europa was that the radiation expose in Jupiter’s Van Allen belts is immense and only one EVA was feasible. It was easier to do a short (few hour) visit to Io than Europa – which required weeks of drilling to penetrate the ice. So we felt on balance it was better to do that bit of exploration with a robot. But you are correct – exobiology is a keystone part of the mission and something that underpins the whole series.

NM: Finally… when the Pegasus crew land on Pluto, they set up a telescope to detect and image planets orbiting other stars, far out in space. Is this a subtle hint that there may be a sequel one day? Will we see the great grandchildren of the Pegasus crew setting off for 51 Pegasi?

CR: Maybe. We’ve already written the treatment for a sequel and I’d love to make it. But that will depend on how well this series does. We’ll have to get a lot of viewers for another series to be made!

NM: Chris Riley, many congratulations on the book, and best wishes for the TV series – and thank you for talking to New Mars.

CR: It’s been a pleasure. I do hope you enjoy the series as much as the book, and that these truly are images stolen from the future. It would be a shame if this wonderful story didn’t happen for real one day!

“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 greet them.

“There’s one space left,” said Callie, more to herself than anyone else. Seeing the circle of famous air- and spacecraft was almost closed and complete, she couldn’t help wondering which famous spacecraft would fill it. She didn’t have to wait long to find out.

“Oh wow…” she heard Blare exclaim beside her, and when she saw what was falling out of the sky she couldn’t think of any better way to put it.

Of course, Callie smiled, it could only be…

Overhead, swinging from a trio of enormous red and white striped parachutes, was what looked like a huge aluminium can, or one of the Ares Base’s modules standing on end. Zooming in on it with her visor, Callie saw the two storey high “can” was encased within a box-like scaffolding framework of sturdy-looking struts and poles, from which, at various points, protruded aerials, satellite dishes and sensors. At each corner of the scaffolding frame was a long, thick leg, ending in a metre-wide, splayed foot. The sides of the frame bore clusters of attitude adjustment engines, a few of which puffed again and again, continually fine-tuning the angle and direction of the craft’s descent. While the top of the can was covered with spherical, gold-foil wrapped fuel tanks, its base was cluttered with the folded-away, wheels-sticking-out-everywhere jumble of a rover. All in all, it looked even less like a spacecraft than the Eagle lunar module did.

But yet again, appearances were deceptive.

The hilltop gradually fell silent as the members of the gathered crowd realised what they might actually be “seeing”. It was inevitable that one lone, brave voice would eventually say what everyone else was thinking. Just as it was inevitable that that person would be Blare.

“Is that the Ares..?” Blare asked breathlessly, as the spacecraft dropped towards them, parachutes billowing in the thin air.

Callie nodded. Yes, she told her son with a smile, that’s the Ares… Foale’s ship…

The crowd seemed to shuffle forwards as one, as people realised they were, impossibly, wonderfully, magically, about to witness the first manned landing on Mars.

No-one spoke as the Ares dropped past the hilltop, heading for the other craft. As it passed them, parachutes fat and full behind it, the colonists gazed at the ship, marvelling at its bold, brazen colours: the red stripes running around its top, centre and base like hoops; the NASA logo in its centre, just above a row of flags – a huge Stars and Stripes with smaller European, Chinese, Russian and Indian flags on either side. Even when a familiar face – not Foale himself, but Nadia Ivanova, the mission’s media-darling medic – appeared at one of the Ares’ windows no-one spoke, everyone was too stunned by what they were seeing.

Then the Ares was beneath the level of the hilltop, hidden from their view beneath the bloated canopies of its trio of parachutes as it drifted slowly but surely towards the waiting aviators and their craft. A faint ripple of applause went up into the thin Martian air when the parachutes were jettisoned, rolling and boiling away to one side, leaving the Ares to fly free, but it feld like everyone was holding their breath in anticipation of what they were about to see. They had seen it so many times before – on old 3D holos, in paintings, even in VRs, but this was very different; this was like being there on The Day, having a front row seat for one of the most important events in Mankind’s history -

Then the Ares was hovering in mid-air, hanging teasingly above the last remaining landing site in the great circle of flying machines harvested from history. On the ground beneath it, the crew of the Montgolfier’s balloon, the Wright Brothers, Gagarin, Shephard, Armstrong and Aldrin and the two crewmen from Spaceship One were all standing silently, respectfully, hand in hand, waiting, ignoring the clouds of red dust and grit billowing around them as the Ares began its last, powered descent…

“Easy girl… easy…” Callie whispered, repeating Foale’s own famous words as heard live by thousands of millions of people at the time. She knew he would be speaking them in the Ares’ cockpit right now, staring not at his flight control screens but out the window, using the Ares’ own jagged shadow to guide him during the last few moments of the flight -

Touchdown.

Everyone wanted to cheer, Callie could feel it, sense it, but everyone wanted to wait a little longer too, to wait for The Moment, the one that mattered.

With clouds of ochre-hued dust still billowing around it, the hatch in the Ares’ side opened, revealing a bulky figure moving around inside the brightly-lit airlock which lay beyond. As it was almost touching the ground, the Ares’ outer hatch and EVA bay was fitted with a short ramp rather than a ladder, and it was down this ramp that the spacesuited figure walked, gingerly, after stepping out of the airlock.
With its hard upper torso and oversized helmet, the snow-white EVA suit made its wearer look more like a giant white insect than a man as they moved, but the traditional red hoops around the astronaut’s upper arms and thighs identified them as a man. But not just any man. The Mission Commander. Foale.

Watching on top of the hill, five hundred Martians watched in awestruck silence as Foale made his way down the ramp, one careful step at a time, obviously aware of the significance of the moment. Pausing at the end of the ramp, he took a moment to scan his surroundings, sweeping his gaze from left to right, taking in every boulder, rock and dune in the Martian landscape. As he stood there, every one of the half dozen cameras mounted on the exterior of the craft swung towards him, capturing the moment from every possible angle, taking the pictures which would be seen by the billion-strong TV audience back on Earth ten minutes later.

Then, with his famous chuckle, Foale stepped off the Ares’ ramp, and onto the virgin surface of Mars.

The summit of Husband Hill erupted in noise. Applause, cheers, whoops, as everyone gathered upon it released all the tension and emotion they’d been repressing since their first sight of the Ares.

Callie could see Foale’s lips moving as he stood on Mars, talking to the people of Earth, but she couldn’t hear a single word, because even after the landing the historical accuracy of the VR show was maintained: Foale’s microphone had cut-out at the exact moment he uttered the first words ever spoken on the Martian surface. Callie laughed as she heard people around her frantically asking friends and neighbours what the astronaut had said, because she knew that no-one would know, not on Mars or Earth. She knew that in all the thousands of TV, radio and Net interviews which followed the Ares crew’s safe return from Mars, Foale had never revealed what his first words had been. All through the years to come, when asked why he wouldn’t reveal what he had said he would always reply, with that boyish, cryptic smile, “Sorry, that’s between Mars, and I.”

Another cheer went up as Foale was surrounded by his fellow historical explorers and pioneers of flight. He was soon lost from view altogether, lost amongst all the arms which reached out to embrace and welcome him.

“Well,” Callie heard someone say from behind her, “I suppose that’s it…” Callie’s spirits sank. Lewis had come back. Again. Why couldn’t he just stay the hell away?

“I suppose you’re going to moan about what a waste of time and money it all was,” Callie sighed, pre-empting the man’s complaints, “and tell us how it was a huge propoganda exercise, designed to make Martians feel more connected to Earth – ”

“Actually,” Lewis interrupted, sounding both aggrieved and weary, “I was going to say what a superb show it had been. The best I’ve ever seen. Shona and I both enjoyed it enormously, didn’t we, Shona?” he asked his daughter, who was standing beside him once more. She nodded without looking up at her father nor Callie, lost in shyness and her own thoughts.

“Oh,” said Callie, surprised.

“But it’s over now,” Lewis continued, “so I think we’ll be moving on – ”

“It’s not over,” Callie declared. “It’s not over yet, you can’t go back, you’ll miss the best – ”

“What do you mean, it’s not over?” Lewis demanded. “How do you know?”

“Think about it,” Callie said, smiling as she watched Armstrong and Aldrin hoisting Foale up onto their shoulders on the outskirts of the circle, to cheers from their fellow flyers, “why make a circle out of the craft, if they weren’t going to put something inside it?”

“What else could go inside it?” Lewis huffed. “Gagarin, Shephard, Armstrong and Foale… that’s it, the roll call of the great Terran space heroes, completed. Who else was there?”

Callie shook her head at him. “Hellas… You learned nothing in Eagle Crater that day, did you? Nothing.” she said sadly, unaware that next to her a stranger was pointing up at the sky.

“What are you talking about?” demanded Lewis angrily.

Callie just laughed at him, “Typical of you to think in human terms… It’s not a who… it’s a what…”

The woman next to her was going crazy now, jumping up and down and pointing at something in the sky, something which was heading towards them, and fast.

And without even looking up, Callie knew what it was.

It was another parachute, but a single one this time, a lone, perfectly white canopy falling out of the crisp orange-pink sky. Some distance below, connected to the bell-shaped chute by a long tether, was what looked like a cluster of huge frogspawn – a dozen or so globes, bunched up together like grapes, but coloured beige instead of green or red. As the bizarre payload fell from the sky it swung, to and fro, its parachute canopy catching the cross winds which blew over the crater floor, howling in from the gaping open mouth of the Ma’adim Vallis which split its mighty southern wall in two.

As Callie watched, entranced, the parachute canopy crackled, slapped repeatedly by the wind, and small rockets built into a shell-like structure halfway up the tether were forced to fire again and again to steady the payload as it descended. Before she knew it, the strange collection of spheres was past them, hurtling on down towards the crater floor -

Suddenly the bubble-wrapped payload jerked in the air, and Callie saw twin jets of bright fire sputtering out of the shell structure just above it: braking rockets, dramatically slowing its breakneck descent. A moment later – a bright flash, half-way up the cable, and, severed from its line, the payload fell free, leaving the parachute to drag the backshell away -

It hit the ground hard, and, convinced it would be shattered into a billion pieces by the jolting impact, a shocked “Oh!” went up from the watching colonists. But it didn’t shatter. It bounced. It bounced high into the air, five storeys – no, ten storeys high… then it came down again, slamming into the rock-strewn surface with, it seemed, even more force than before -

But the payload remained intact, and protected by its cushioning airbags it bounced upwards again, wobbling up into the sky… and fell and bounced again… and again, and again, each impact scuffing up a fresh cloud of dust and rock fragments that dirtied and stained the swollen airbags until, finally, the payload bounced one last time, soaring over the heads of the assembled aviators and their aircraft before hitting the ground again, rolling and eventually coming to a halt…

Right in the centre of The Circle.

A hush descended upon both the crater floor and the hilltop now, as all eyes turned towards the new arrival. Gagarin and Shephard, clearly fascinated and intrigued, edged forwards towards the new arrival, eager to see what it was, never having seen anything like it before, while Armstrong, Aldrin and Foale – well aware of what had happened and what was going to happen next – stayed back, content to watch events unfold from the background.

Slowly, so very slowly, the giant airbags started to deflate. One by one they sagged and crumpled, like balloons going down the morning after a party, revealing the small, pyramid-shaped object they had been protecting. Without warning, and making Gagarin and Shephard stumble backwards with alarm, the structure suddenly started to unfold, its sides opening up like the wings of a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, and inside, exposed to the cold Martian wind, air and dust for the first time, an even more bizarre creature: a strange beast of silver and gold, with shining, v-shaped, mirror-like wings of its own, wings which opened up as Callie watched from the hilltop. Within a few moments the strange machine had completely unfolded itself, and stood proudly on six spiky wheels, scanning its surroundings – and stunned audience – with its mast-mounted, unblinking electronic eyes…

Before trundling down the ramp and driving out of the circle, passing between the Montgolfier balloon and the Ares 1 Mars lander, leaving its audience behind, baffled and bewitched in equal measure.

Callie smiled. The Mars Exploration Rover Spirit was safely down on Mars. Again.

“See that, Cat?” Callie said, kneeling down beside her daughter and hooking a protective, proud arm around the girl’s tiny waist beneath her cloak.

“That’s Spirit, that’s why we’re here, on these hills… that’s the little rover that took the first pictures of this part of Mars, almost a hundred years ago – ”

“It can’t be,” Cat protested, “it’s in the Museum back home, isn’t it?”

You’ve got me there, thought Callie. Then her heart broke in two as her daughter spoke again.

“You took us there, with dad,”, her daughter continued, “we all had our picture taken with it, by that man in the uniform, remember?”

Oh yes, Callie shuddered, I remember -

“Blare put his fingers up behind my head, like bunny ears…” Cat continued, laughing merrily at the memory which, for her, was a good one.

“That’s right,” Callie replied, trying to ignore the shard of glass which tore a jagged line down her heart as she re-lived the day in her mind, “I didn’t mean that’s the real Spirit down there, I meant that’s what it looked like when it landed.” Callie looked at her daughter through tear-filled eyes, seeing the designs painted on her suit. Dinosaurs… rockets… more dinosaurs… a red-haired stick figure which Callie took to be herself, smiling, holding the hand of a stick-man with a mop of black hair, with two smaller stick figures standing in front of him -

“That’s not what you said,” Cat sighed, leaning against her mother, oblivious to the pain she had innocently caused. “and anyway, what’s that blue line?”

“What blue line?”asked Callie absently, not really hearing what her daughter was saying.

“That blue line,” Cat insisted, pointing. Reluctantly, Callie dragged her gaze away from the family portrait painted on her daughter’s torso and peered down at the crater floor. Nothing – nothing, that is, except the impossible and historic gathering of aircraft and aviators, spacecraft and spacemen -

There, just beneath the distant, northern hills which marked the rim of Gusev Crater: a thin, blue line, just beneath and parallel to the horizon…

Callie’s mind whirled. Blue. Mars had no blue, had had no blue for a billion years and a day -

That was it, surely. They – whoever the mysterious makers of the VR Transit Day show were – were “flooding” the crater, turning back the creaking hands of Time to the days when Gusev had been a lake, when the hill on which she, Cat and Blare were now stood had been surrounded by water. Clever, she congratulated them mentally, very clever -

“Wow, there are hundreds of them!” she heard Blare exclaim beside her. Hundreds? Of what?

Callie scanned the sky, wondering what had appeared above their heads while she had been staring at the crater floor. More spacecraft snatched from deep history? More airplanes reincarnated in VR? Maybe a squadron of World War II bombers, or -

But there was nothing. The sky was clear, pink, and empty. Only the shrunken Sun broke the endless dome of the Martian heavens, a lemon-coloured coin with a tiny black speck silhouetted against it.

“They’re pretty, don’t you think mom?” Cat asked, stifling a yawn. She was leaning against Callie more heavily now, obviously getting tired.

“What are honey?” Callie asked, bewildered. The sky was empty! What was she seeing?

“The ships…” Cat replied impatiently, nodding towards the crater floor. Callie turned away from the sky-

- and found herself staring down at the most beautiful, most serene sight she had ever seen.

The floor of Gusev Crater was flooding alright, but not with water. Sweeping across it from the north, like a silent tsunami, was a line of ships, stretched out as far and as wide as the eye could see. Skimming across the rock-strewn sands as if in a dream, the ships were tall, with prows as sharp and straight as razors and sails that were an achingly-beautiful blue, sails that even as Callie watched, dumbstruck, billowed and cracked as they were filled with the soft winds which breathed across the crater floor. The ships were so fragile-looking, so ghostly, so ethereal that it seemed to Callie that they were made out of smoke, or of light itself, and as they sped onwards, red and blue pennants streamed out behind them, flowing from their masts and sterns, writhing and rippling in the breeze…

Suddenly the ships tacked hard to port, as one, and as the whole line swung around, heading for the circle of air- and spacecraft assembled at the foot of the Hills, Callie gasped, seeing for the first time that each ship, each perfect ship, had a body of emerald, with gold and bronzed decorations everywhere across their sweeping hulls.

“Are they ghosts..?” Callie heard Cat asking, through the thumping of her heart and the pounding of blood rushing through her veins.

Even without looking, Callie knew exactly what her daughter was looking at and wondering about as one ship started to pull free from the advancing line and surge forwards at greater speed. But when she looked, she felt her heart actually stop beating.

Standing on the deck of the ship – and on the decks of every ship behind it – were a dozen figures. Dressed in long, flowing tunics whiter than snow, the ship’s crew were markedly smaller than humans, but stood so tall and straight they looked supremely regal. The skin of their long, exposed arms was fair and brown, the colour of warm caramel, while their faces were hidden, covered by beautiful masks made of finely-sculpted gold, silver or bronze. Elegant and moulded perfectly to their wearer’s features, as if they had been poured over their faces, each mask was like a sculpture, its mouth studded with glittering rubies which sparkled and shone in the bright sunlight. Hair as red as rust flowed out from beneath the masks, over necks which were both slim and powerful at the same time.

And the eyes…

Their eyes were pools of molten sunlight, discs of blazing gold which seemed to burn right though Callie like lasers as they turned towards her, studying her for an eternity, which was in truth a mere moment, before turning away again.

“No sweetheart,” Callie said to her entranced daughter, as the lead ship skimmed on towards the Spirit monument, “they’re not ghosts… they’re Martians…”

As the fleet of sand ships stopped directly beneath Husband Hill and its crowd of stunned colonists, Callie found she couldn’t breathe. Below her now, hundreds if not thousands of the ancient Martian craft stretched for as far as the eye could see, filling the crater floor, blanketing it, and as their sails fluttered and swayed in the breeze Callie could easily imagine she was staring down at an endless field of Forget Me Nots, Earth flowers she had seen on the flat, 2D pages of the antique National Geographic magazines left to her by Mr. Lovell, her teacher…

Callie watched in silence as the lead Martian sand ship slowed and halted directly beside the line of aviators and astronauts gathered at the pyramidal Spirit monument. Without saying a word the Martian who had been standing at the prow of the ship, as still as a statue, reached out a long, slender-fingered hand towards the men, his meaning obvious. At first, none of them moved, all seemed frozen to the spot. What should they do?

Gagarin moved first. Smiling his famous beaming smile, the Russian cosmonaut walked forwards, held out his own hand, and clasped the Martian’s. A moment later he was standing on the sand ship’s deck, having been pulled up there effortlessly by the Martian. Now standing beside the silver-masked alien, dwarfed by the huge blue-bell hued sails swaying and slapping gently above him, Gagarin beckoned the others forwards to join him. And they came, walking slowly towards the sand ship, one by one reaching out to take the child-slim hands offered by the Martians leaning down from the deck above them, smiling as they were pulled up onto the ship to stand beside the still-beaming Gagarin.

Foale – who, with customary British politeness, had stood aside to let everyone else board before him – was last to climb up onto the deck of the sand ship, where he stood, at the very point of the ship, with the Martian, looking up at the sky in bewildered, delighted silence, shielding his eyes from the Sun as his fellow explorers formed a line behind him.

The sand ship began to move again.

Slowly at first, then faster, picking up more and more speed. Sand and dust hissed out from beneath its keel as it cut across the crater floor, propelled by the wind filling its sails. The aviators and astronauts all grabbed at the ship’s sides for support – all except Foale, who was, as always, as steady as a rock as the sand ship raced across the boulder-strewn crater floor, heading south. Behind it, the rest of the ships started to move too, skimming over the rusty sand like snowflakes over glass.

“Bye ghosts…” sang Cat, waving happily at the departing sand ships, “byeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…”

And then they were gone, a blue tide sweeping down the crater floor, heading south to drain out of Gusev through the gaping mouth of Ma’adim Vallis.

Leaving behind a dusty, orange-brown landscape covered with boulders, rocks and stones – and nothing else. No balloon, no canvas-winger aircraft nor space capsule remained. They had vanished, gone. Vostok, Mercury, Apollo and Ares, all of them swept away by the Martian tide, leaving the crater floor as barren and bare as it had always been. It was as if the aircraft and spacecraft and their plucked-from-Time crews had never existed.

The show was over.

No-one said a word, or made a sound. No-one knew what to say, or do. They were all just numb, senses overloaded by what they had seen. All anyone could think of doing was stand, on the hilltop, trying to absorb their experience.

Some time later, Callie looked up at the Sun again, found Earth was almost a third of the way across the Sun. She found too that – inevitably – the novelty of the sight was beginning to wear off for many of the Martians gathered on the hilltop. Especially the younger ones. At some point – maybe even as soon as the VR show had ended, and the floor of Gusev crater had been restored to its original, rock-strewn, pristine condition, all traces of the historical air- and spacecraft, and their crews, removed she couldn’t be sure, she’d been in some kind of shock — Blare and Cat had bolted from Callie’s side, heading for a rendezvous with friends over on the opposite side of the hill’s summit, back by the crater Callie had passed on her way up. Leaving her alone again with Lewis and his daughter.

“Quite a sight, don’t you agree?” Lewis said, with more than a little satisfaction in his voice.

“The Transit?” Callie forced herself to reply brightly, deciding to be friendly for the child’s sake. There was no point in ruining the quiet young girl’s day by being rude to her father. “Yes, yes… quite a sight…”

“I didn’t mean the Transit,” Lewis huffed, “I could care less about that – ”

“You’re kidding,” Callie said, shaking her head in disbelief. “Hell, even you must appreciate how special this is, to see the first one of these ever seen by human beings..?”

“It’s a black dot on the Sun,” Lewis replied, speaking slowly, “big deal – ”

“But that ‘dot’ is – ”

“Is what?” Lewis cut in quickly. “Were you going to tell me how important it is because it’s Earth? The glorious Homeworld? The Cradle of Mankind?”

“Well… it is!” insisted Callie, taken aback by his blunt dismissal.

“Oh please, spare me the planet-hugging Saganistic crap,” Lewis said wearily, waving her objections away with a fat, gloved hand. “You can see Earth most of the time, Morning Star, Evening Star, even in the daytime somedays if you aim a scope at it. It’s no big deal.”

“I’m not going to argue with you,” Callie sighed, turning away, cursing herself for even trying to be nice to him as she felt the energy draining out of her, “there’s no point. You just don’t get it – ”

“What don’t I get?” Lewis asked. “The sense of occasion? Of drama? The…ooohhh…. the significance of the event? How privileged we are to be here to see it for the first time?” Callie stared at him, just stared, too angry to even nod her agreement. “Fine, you enjoy looking at the pretty lights in the sky, soak it up. Each to their own. Me? I’m more concerned with events down here, on the ground. Some of us have to be.”

“Meaning?” she bristled.

“Forget it,” he sighed. “Let’s just say that you don’t ‘get it’ either,” he added, throwing her own words back at her. “But it is good to see all these people gathered here, in one place,” he added.

“There have been bigger gatherings,” Callie said, puzzled by his observation. “The First Landing Anniversary, that always pulls a huge crowd… and almost everyone on Mars came to look at Beagle 2 when that was brought back to the base, remember? After those kids found it on their school trip last year..?”

“Yes, you’re right, as always,” Lewis replied, “but this time what they’re looking at is actually important, not some dented old Brit spaceprobe that got itself lost – ”

Callie would have scratched her head if she could, he wasn’t making sense. “Important? I don’t…” What was he on about?

Lewis took a deep breath, reminding her, strangely, of how Mr Lowell, their old teacher, used to do the same before beginning one of his long ‘It’s obvious, but I’ll go through it for you anyway…’ explanations. “Think about it. All these people, gathered here today,” Lewis began, sweeping his gaze over the hilltop, “they’ll go home with one overall impression, one lasting memory of the day…” He turned back towards her. “And you know what that will be..?” Callie shook her head. “They’ll go home thinking how small, and how insignificant, Earth really is,” Lewis concluded, with a triumphant smile.

“Small?” Callie bridled, “come on, it’s only small because it’s so far away – ”

“A long way away,” Lewis agreed smugly, “half-way across the solar system – ”

Callie was hitting her stride now. “But insignificant? Are you crazy? Lewis,” she laughed, “can you even hear yourself when you spout this garbage?”

“One woman’s garbage is another man’s truth,” Lewis smiled sweetly. “No, it’s okay. You can cling to your romantic ideas if you want… fill your head – and your kids’ – with all those ideas of how Earth is a paradise, the place where life began… but look at it up there, against the Sun… just a black pinprick… maybe this Transit will bring home to everyone here just how little influence Earth has over us, and how much more control we need over our future, and Mars’ future – ”

“Or maybe,” Callie argued, “it will remind people where we all came from, originally, and strengthen the bonds between Mars and Terra.”

“Perhaps a few will think that,” conceded Lewis, “but more, many more, will see it my way.” He paused. “Look around you, go on, look. How many people are still looking at the Sun and Earth? How many have got bored by it already?”

Callie looked around her, and saw that Lewis was right. Of the hundreds gathered on the summit of Husband Hill, barely a dozen were still staring at the Sun. The rest were talking among themselves, or exploring the hilltop itself, or paying their respects at the Astronaut Memorial. Some families were seated on the ground in tight circles, laughing and joking, enjoying the rare opportunity to grab some time together away from the rigours and hardship of life at Ares. Others were starting to walk back down the hill towards the parked shuttles. Going home.

“It’s just a light show Callie,” Lewis said quietly. “That’s what people came to see. And the best part is already over – ”

“Perhaps… perhaps some feel that way,” Callie agreed sadly, “but most – ”

“No, just face reality for once will you?” Lewis said forcefully. “It’s a rarity, sure, but that’s all… and when those people get back into their shuttles and fly home they’ll climb into bed and put out the light and realise for the first time – because they’ll have seen it with their own eyes – just how far away Earth is and how little it matters to us up here. That has to be a good thing – ”

Callie sensed what was coming next, but hoped she was wrong. She didn’t want to get into that argument. Not on such a special day. “A good thing? What do you mean, a good thing? Who for?”

Lewis didn’t look at her as he answered. He just stared out over the great crater lake, into the distance. “For everyone who realises how Mars has to change if it’s to be a real home – ”

“I knew it!” Callie growled, “you’re unbelieveable! Only you could turn such an exciting sight into more damned pro-terraforming propaganda!”

Shaking his head sadly, Lewis turned to her and said: “Why do you Reds insist on painting terraforming as evil? As Insane Science? It’s not. It’s natural, as natural a process as the development of farming or the rearing of animals for food.”

Callie bristled at that. “That’s bull – ”

“It is,” Lewis persisted, evenly and slowly, “Mars is simply a natural and available resource, like oil and coal were last century, and like lunar helium 3 is now, which we’d be stupid not to use.”

“But there’s no point!” Callie insisted, “even if it was technically possible – which I still think it isn’t, and never will be – it would take millennia to change Mars into the world you want it to be! By the time Mars is green and blue we’ll be out There,” she said, nodding towards the pink sky, “discovering and settling on worlds that are already like Earth… worlds that won’t need any of your damned tinkering – ”

“No!” Lewis barked angrily, prompting several bystanders to look around in surprise. “No,” he repeated, more quietly, “you can’t assume that, it’s dangerous – ”

That stunned her. “What do you mean, dangerous?”

Lewis let out a long, weary sigh. “It’s dangerous – and naive,” he added, “to smugly assume that the Universe is overflowing with Earths. Everyone assumes the Galaxy is knee-deep in them,” he continued, “billions of them, like drops of water sprayed out of a hose-pipe… and I know what you’re going fire back at me – statistics, the Drake Equation, the life cycles of stars… all those things can give you end figures suggesting that there are millions of Earth-like worlds spinning around stars out there – ”

“So – ”

“So what if they’re wrong?” he asked quietly. “What if those equations are wrong, and we’re not nearly as clever as we think we are? What if we’ve made a fundamental mistake somewhere? If we have, then maybe our solar system is unique, or at least very, very rare. Maybe our galaxy is barren, maybe there are no Earth 3’s or 4’s or 1000’s to fly to in our Starship Enterprises one day, have you considered that?”

Callie could feel anger starting to boil inside her. Talk about taking a pessimistic viewpoint! But in another dark, shadowed corner of the back of her mind, another voice was telling her to listen to what Lewis was saying. Some of it made sense. Had she – had anyone, the voice asked – really thought that possibility through?

Lewis gazed up at the sky. “And anyway, even if we do find a new Earth out there, it’ll be far far away Out There… we’d have to get to it, right? And you yourself just pointed out the timescale of terraforming – what about the timescale of developing star-flight? Faster than light drives? Their invention could be ten times further away.” He went quiet then, gathering his thoughts. Callie felt confused. When had Lewis – Lewis the bore, Lewis the bully, Lewis the power-hungry developer – become such a deep thinker anyway?

“Maybe our solar system really is all there is,” Lewis continued, his voice barely a whisper, “if that’s the case, then Earth is the Titanic and there are no lifeboats. When – not if, mind, when – it goes down, we’ll have nowhere else to go… unless we make one ourselves. A lifeboat, I mean.” He turned to her then. “Can’t you see that? Haven’t you ever thought of that?”

No, Callie admitted to herself, she hadn’t. And it disturbed her deeply to wonder now if Lewis was actually right.

“I know you think I… we… want to tear Mars apart just for the sake of it,” Lewis continued, “‘Do It Because We Can Science’, that’s what you Claybornes call it, right?” She nodded, despite herself. “Well, you’re wrong,” he said, “very wrong. This will be news to you, because you’ve never bothered to ask me about it, but I love Mars just as much as you do. The hills, valleys and canyons… I look at them and my heart swells so much I sometimes think it might burst,” he laughed, embarrassed by the admission, “but some of us have to think of the long term, of what will be needed in the future. Do you know what that is?” he asked her directly, looking at her. She shook her head dumbly.

“Room, that’s what we need, that’s what we’ve always needed. Room to grow more crops, rear more animals, raise more families… all through history we’ve always done whatever we could – whatever we had to – to preserve and enhance our way of life, expanding towards and then stepping over the borders into new territory. That’s all space is – room. You have to see that. You can, can’t you? Really?”

Callie said nothing. Yes, she could see it, it made sense – more sense than any other argument she’d heard a terraformer use – but she still wasn’t convinced that the loss of her beloved Red Mars was a price worth paying.

“A second home,” Lewis continued firmly, “that’s what we – Mankind – need; a lifeboat a damned sight closer to the ship than a few hundred light years away – ”

“Ah,” Callie smiled, the spell broken at last, “the ever-popular Cosmic Safety Net argument, eh? What if Earth is destroyed?” she said in a melodramatic, movie trailer voice, putting her gloved hand across her helmet’s ‘brow’ in a fake swoon, “how will Mankind survive? Oh Please.”

“It’s not a joke,” Lewis insisted darkly, “we need a true second home, a self-sustaining colony independent of Earth, to preserve what we and what we have done, and protect what we can become in the far future – ”

“You want an Ark, not a colony,” Callie said derisively.

“Ark, colony, settlement, call it what you like, I honestly don’t care,” Lewis sighed wearily, “what’s important is that it’s established, as soon as possible. The Universe is a dangerous place,” he added darkly, ” we’ve just been lucky until now…” His voice trailed away as he stared up into the sky.

“Calm down Flash,” Callie laughed, “I don’t think Ming the Merciless is going to let loose his death ray on us any time soon…”

“It’s no joke,” Lewis said, not looking at her, “if we don’t make Mars independent of Earth, stop being reliant on it, anything that affects Earth can affect us – ”

“Comets aren’t a big threat anymore,” Callie cut in, “the SpaceGuard telescopes on the Moon spot anything coming Earth’s way bigger than a – ”

“I don’t just mean Hollywood disasters like a comet strike, or a supernova,” he said dismissively, “I mean wars on Earth, natural disasters, hell, even just politics… we’re at the mercy of all of them up here. We’re just one US Presidential election away from having our plug pulled, haven’t you realised that? We’re just a figure in a line of a budget plan up here, a number to be increased or decreased.”

“They wouldn’t do that,” Callie insisted, “they’ve already invested too much – ”

“Yes, they have,” Lewis agreed, “a huge amount, hundreds of billions of dollars, yen and Euros, but for what return? What does Mars export back to Earth, to pay for all its air and water? Nothing. We’re an investment with absolutely no return, and that makes us vulnerable – ”

“To what?”

“To events down on Earth. The next big war breaks out on Earth, that’s it for us – the money for settling Mars will dry up, get diverted to war spending, and we’ll all be going Earthside because Mars won’t be able to sustain us. You’ve read The Martian Chronicles… ‘Come Home’ the radio messages said when the atomic war broke out, and home they all went. We’d have to, too…”

Lewis turned to look at her then, and as he did she saw both defiance and determination burning in his eyes. A powerful combination. “Until Mars has its own air, its own water and food, it can’t be our home, it can only ever be a stopover. We have to make Mars its own world, a real home for us. A place where a child born on Earth could wake up and not see, or feel, any difference…”

“Wow… when did you become the philosopher?” Callie laughed, confused – and a little disturbed, truth be told – by Lewis’s sudden display of passionate common-sense.

“When I saw her for the first time,” he replied quietly, looking down at his daughter, who was wrapped nervously, as ever, around his leg. “So you see, you’re wrong… I don’t want to terraform Mars because I hate the way it is,. I want to terraform it because I love it, and don’t want to leave it. And I don’t want her to have to leave it, either…”

Callie suddenly felt dizzy, as if something had shifted inside her, some emotional fault-line opened up. What he was saying actually made sense, damn him.

“So yes, it’s always been a joke, a science fiction cliche, Martians watching the End Of The World and all that,” Lewis conceded, “but it’s the real world now, our world… their world,” he added, looking at the children scattered around them, “it could really happen. So ask yourself… as beautiful as they are, what good would all Mars’s canyons, cliffs and valleys be if there were no people left alive to look at them?” Lewis asked quietly.

Callie looked up at the Sun again, saw Earth silhouetted against it, and shuddered as a terrifying vision came to her. Now she saw, clearly, in her mind, Cat, her own daughter – or it could have been Cat’s daughter, or grand-daughter, or great great grand-daughter? – standing on a Martian plain in the future, surrounded by rocks and boulders, looking up into the sky – and seeing Earth burning. The blue-white lantern every Martian grew up knowing as “Dawn’s Herald” or “The Angel of The Evening” was a ball of dirty red fire, a smouldering hot coal brooding in the dusk sky. Something had happened to it – a nuclear war perhaps, or a comet impact – something disastrous that had turned it into a seething ball of lava. And leaving Cat and the people of Mars alone in orbit far from the Sun…

Callie felt sick, physically sick. With Earth gone, what would be her daughter’s fate? What would happen to her and the rest of the Martians?

That depended, didn’t it? If those Martians were looking at Earth dying in a pink sky, a dust-darkened sky, they would possibly be facing their own extinction, too. With no food coming up from Earth, no water, no supplies of medicine, they would be doomed. But if they were staring up at Earth blazing in a blue sky, through an atmosphere thick and ripe with water, they would mourn for the lost billions – but survive, and move on.

But it would never happen, would it?

Would it?

Oh god, Callie thought, shuddering. Had she been wrong all along?

Conflict raged in side her suddenly, a battle of Troy-like intensity and savagery between what she had always believed and what she was now considering. She had always been so vehemently anti-terraforming, 1000% convinced that it was evil, nothing less than planetary vandalism. Now she was almost in shock with self-doubt. Now she was wondering if she had the right to deny her son and daughter – or rather their great great grandchildren – the chance of survival if and when the Universe eventually decided it had had enough of Earth’s violence and sickness.

Beyond simple survival, did she have the right to deny generations of unborn Martians the simple joys of paddling barefoot in a stream, or running up a long, long beach, gulping in great lungfuls of hot air to fuel their aching legs? She had never experienced such joys herself, of course, but she would have liked to have done -

But still that other voice persisted, Mars’s own voice, whispered from the heart of its rocks and the depths of its deepest canyons. I am beautiful as I am, it whispered in her ear, so proud and noble… so grand… magnificent and majestic… you would let them destroy me? Ruin me? Rape me?

No, Callie replied, I wouldn’t… I can’t…

But…

But what?

But… how much more beautiful would your canyons look if rivers ran down them, sparkling in the sunlight… And how much more majestic would your great cliffs look if kilometre-high waterfalls rushed and tumbled over them, their spray catching the sunlight and painting the sky with dazzling rainbows… ?

No… no No NO!!!!

Callie felt ill. It was as if the ground beneath her feet was giving way -

Then it came to her. Maybe there was an alternative future, a brighter one..? Maybe Bradbury’s nightmarish vision of Martians watching Earth’s death would remain just a stunning, frightening piece of fiction, and instead of her great great times-five-or-ten grandchildren being destined to stand on Mars and see Earth dying in flames above them, they were meant to be part of a brighter, bolder future?

Yes… now she could see it, the alternative, as clearly as she had seen the Wright Flyer, Eagle and Columbia soaring over Gusev: a starship of the far future – maybe even the very first starship – finally returning to the warmth of the Sun and the familiar canyons and mountains, rings and moons of the worlds of the Solar System after years of wandering in the deep, cold darkness. A long, slender needle of metal and glass, pushed forwards by raging nuclear fires, rushing impatiently past Saturn and Jupiter after decades spent exploring the cratered, barren worlds, asteroids and comets of Alpha Cantauri, Wolf 359, and Sol’s other nearest neighbours, looking for life but finding nothing, leaving its crew lonely and aching to come home again.

And that home would be Mars, not Earth, for the Martians – men and women who had grown-up far from the Sun, with their toes already dipped in the cool waters of the cosmic ocean, already at home in deep space – would have been the craft’s designers, builders and crew. Terrans, tied to the romantic image of Earth as “The Homeworld”, would have proved themselves unable to leave their past behind, would have wasted time and space sentimentally sculpting the starship into a miniature Earth, to provide comforting familiarity during their long absence. But Martians… they had designed and then built a ship with just one purpose – to keep its crew alive while they travelled, and explored, worlds bathed in the light of other stars. Conceived and crafted by Martians, natural space dwellers, the starship which made its way through the asteroid belt after passing Europa, Io and Ganymede would be a practical ship, a ship as strong and as beautiful as the walls of mighty Marineris, and as beautiful as the Sun setting over the summit of Olympus Mons…

And after years – decades, most likely – spent drifting through the star-dusted darkness of deep space, Callie wondered, what kind of a world would its crew deserve to come home to? What kind of a world would they want to come home to? A world as dead, dusty and dry as the ones they had walked on in the alien sunlight of Sirius, Barnard’s Star or Tau Ceti? Or a world of light, warmth and water? Would the first returning stellanauts really want to peer out of the windows of their ship and look down on yet another frozen, dusty world coloured red, brown and yellow, or would they want to gaze through the glass at a world of warmth, light and life?

Callie had another prescient vision then, another glimpse through the left ajar door of the future. She saw a young man with naggingly-familiar features stepping out of a starship shuttle, setting foot on his homeworld for the first time in a decade -

Ah, she recognised the star traveller now – Blare! It was Blare – or Blare’s great, great, great grandson at least. What kind of world would he want to set foot on, to raise his family on, Callie wondered, that distant descendant of hers..? A world buried in Sun-sterilised dust, and scattered with jagged, wind-scoured rocks, or a world with cool, fresh air to breathe and crisp, clean water to drink and bathe in, a world of rainbows and rivers? Would he want to bounce with his own sons and daughters across dead, dust-covered plains of rock and stone, or run laughing with them along the shores of softly-lapping seas? Would he want to step gingerly, in thick, insulated boots, between ankle-twisting boulders, or walk barefoot over cool, dew-drenched grass, feeling the blades thick and deliciously wet between his toes..?

“It’s frightening, isn’t it…” said Lewis gently, kindly, as if reading her mind, “the responsibility..?”

Callie nodded dumbly, lost in the future, in a future, adrift in possibilities. She saw it now, for perhaps the first time – that star-travelling descendant of hers wouldn’t decide which Mars he would come home to. It would be too late. Those decisions would have been made decades – centuries – before his birth, the process set in motion by an earlier generation.

Her generation.

Oh god…

“That’s why I do what I do, why I say what I say… why I believe what I believe,” Lewis explained softly, looking at the children running around crazily nearby, kicking up clouds of strawberry-coloured dust as they played, “I don’t want to destroy your Mars – I just want to give them theirs…”

“But they won’t see it,” Callie whispered, “or their children, or their – ”

“It doesn’t matter,” smiled Lewis gently, “honestly, it doesn’t. That’s not the point, don’t you get it? Don’t you see? The point is that if we don’t start it, right now, at the beginning, as soon as we can, it might never happen. Even then, something might happen to delay or even stop it, but at least we’ll have tried.”

She was struggling now. It was so hard to fight back her feelings, to turn her back on such strongly-held beliefs. “But – ”

“We won’t be here for ever Callie,” Lewis continued patiently, “even if your beloved Kim Robinson was right and some mad, Sax boffin type comes up with a wonder drug to stop us ageing. No matter how long we live, a hundred years or a thousand, we’ll still die before our kids, that’s just the way of things.

“So it’s the classic deathbed dilemma. As you drift away, what would you rather be thinking… that you’d left the world exactly as you found it, or helped make it a better place for those who will follow?”

Oh god.

“But – ”

“But… but… but!” he laughed, mocking her, but only gently this time. “Always but… You still can’t see it, I know you can’t. It’s okay, I understand. So here, let me show you something,” Lewis said, reaching into a pouch on his chest and retrieving a slim black wafer.

Callie scowled at the sight of the data chip. “What’s that, one of your Blue propaganda docu-dramas?” she asked, but this time – maybe for the first time – there was no razor-edged derision in her voice. “I’ve seen them all already thanks,” she said, folding her arms across her chest, blocking him and the offering, “you must have paid-off someone on the comms committee to get them broadcast on the base holo-net so often – ”

Lewis let the insult go. “Just trust me – ok,” he laughed, realising both how ridiculous that sounded, and how unlikely – and undeserved, if he was being honest – it was too, given their history, “just indulge me… five minutes, that’s all I’m asking. Five minutes..?” he asked, waving the data chip in front of her helmet, childishly, just as he had teased her with things at school. After stealing them from her, of course.

Callie looked around her, seeking out the kids. They were still nowhere in sight, but that didn’t worry her. Everyone looked out for everyone else’s children, that was just the way of things on Mars. They’d be safe, wherever they were.

“Five minutes,” Callie agreed brusquely, “but I warn you, I won’t be converted – ”

“Whatever you say,” Lewis agreed, handing her the chip. Callie took it and slid it into her helm’s data input slot. “Just look down at the crater floor, towards the Spirit Monument.”

Callie did as she was instructed, saw rocks, rocks, more rocks, the glint of sunlight playing on the sharp peak of the Spirit monument… but that was all.

“Now what?” Callie asked, puzzled when nothing appeared on the inside of her visor. “What am I supposed to – oh…”

Lewis smiled to himself. It had started.

Callie watched in silence as the crater floor below began to fill with what looked like molten silver. It began as a tiny patch, a circular area a few feet across that could have been, from her vantage point high on the highest of the Hills, a pool or pond of spilled mercury, but as she watched the pool gew larger, rippling and swelling outwards, blossoming, like silvery ink soaking through a paper towel, until it completely covered the crater floor. Soon even the largest rocks and boulders were drowned by it, hidden beneath it, lost from sight. As the pool deepened, she could see ripples on its surface as the winds played across it, and by the time the pool had reached the base of the Columbias slow, lazy waves were rolling across it as it expanded outwards, ever outwards…

Callie looked down with wide eyes. The floor of Gusev Crater was a lake.

Again.

Now the “waters” of the lake were rising steadily up the hills, creeping towards her as the crater continued to floor. Within moments the waters already reached half-way up Husband Hill, and showed no signs of stopping, and as it rose it began to change colour, changing from mercurian silver to a lighter grey, eventually becoming colourless and clear, allowing her to see the blurred, out-of-focus images of the rocks scattered across the crater floor beneath it. Then suddenly it began to take on another hue, a hue not seen on the surface of Mars for a billion years -

The water was blue, now, a shining, rich, lustrous blue. It looked like liquid sapphire -

“But how?” Callie asked, staring down at the blue lake filling the crater floor.

Then she looked up, and saw how.

The sky!

The water was blue simply because it was reflecting what was above it, as water always did, and now, craning back her head, Callie found herself gazing up into a sky that was a deeper, richer, more lustrous blue than she had ever imagined possible. All traces of its native Martian colours – its subtle pink, peach and butterscotch hues – were gone now, replaced by the blue of a kingfisher’s wing. Mars’s sky was no longer a brown bowl, it was a heart-achingly beautiful blue dome arching overhead, like an ocean waiting to fall down on her…

And now Mars had clouds too. As Callie watched, patches of white began to appear in the blue above her. The clouds grew larger, then larger still, blossoming in the sky like flowers, their insides and edges rolling and tumbling as if they were splashes of white paint squirted into blue water until the sky was full of clouds. But not the wispy veils of teased out cotton wool, or curled, copper shavings that Martians had grown used to seeing in their sky just before dawn or soon after dusk; these were real clouds, swollen, thick, fat pillows of billowing white, heavy with water and the threat of rain. Soon clouds covered a third of the sky – thick and grey where they piled up above the horizon, thinner and snow-white overhead – and as Callie gazed in wonder at the way the edges of one particular cloud near the zenith shone ice-white as the brilliant sunlight shone behind them, she became dimly aware of a voice…

“You see..?” Callie heard Lewis say, somewhere in the far distance, but before she had a chance to reply she was caught by surprise by the reappearance of the Sun; as it re-emerged it shot shafts of dazzling, golden sunlight through the gaps between the clouds and down onto the surface of the new lake below. It was all Callie could do to stop herself sinking to her knees in awe as the spearing sunbeams danced on the surface of the water, breaking it apart, shattering it into millions and millions of shimmering highlights until it seemed as if the water itself was covered with myriad tongues of flaming gold…

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” said Lewis from somewhere nearby. Somewhere. She could no longer see him. All she could see was blue sky, white clouds, shafts of light shining down from the sky like sunbeams in a dusty cathedral…

Yes, she had to agree. It was beautiful… so beautiful… but was it worth destroying the real Mars, her beloved Red Mars, for?

Again, it was as if he was tuned into her thoughts. “Wait… there’s more,” Lewis said, “watch… out there…”

Without warning, the centre of the lake exploded upwards in an eruption of spray, and as a rainbow formed it a huge, black shape burst up out of the water!

At first Callie thought it was a craft of some kind, a submersible, then she realised the truth. It wasn’t a machine, it was a living thing – a creature with curved, slender fins as long as three men, and a body bigger than the biggest shuttle ever flown above Mars…

Callie gasped, staggering backwards with shock and awe. The enormous beast rising out of the lake, dripping and trailing sloughs of water from its great body and climbing into the blue-and-white sky with such impossible grace might have been plucked straight from most Martians’ nightmares.

But not hers.

She had seen such creatures in her dreams ever since discovering them hiding on the faded, creased pages of yet another of her teacher’s ancient NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazines. Wrapped as tightly around her little finger as usual, he had agreed to let her take one of the issues home with her after school, and in the quiet of her room she had read it cover to cover, again and again, with eyes wide as saucers; it would have been hard enough to believe that Earth’s oceans had once been home to even one of the magnificent beasts, but the magazine insisted that before the planet’s great seas had been turned into barren deserts by over-fishing, there were tens of thousands of them swimming in its dark depths, singing to each other, their voices carrying their mournful, beautiful songs for thousands of miles…

She still had that battered, yellow-covered magazine somewhere. Typically, Lowell had let her keep it.

The photographs in the magazine had hypnotised and entranced her, and now, years later, one of the noble creatures themselves was rising up out of the water, turning slowly in mid-air, pirouetting around as a rainbow shone above it…

“Whale…” Callie whispered, feeling warm tears slipping down her cheeks as her pounding heart threatened to explode in her chest, “a whale on Mars…!”

Then the whale was falling, falling, its flippers flailing as its body twisted around in slow motion until it was on its back, and as the great beast struck the water, slapping hard against it, enormous curtains of spray erupted out from under it, obscuring it from Callie’s view. When the spray had dispersed, the creature was gone. All that remained to show it had ever been there were waves of tall ripples spreading through the water, moving outwards, towards the distant shores, shrinking, shrinking…

“You see?” Lewis said from behind her, “I’m not the monster you think I am… none of us pro-terraformers are… we don’t want to ruin Mars, we want to restore it – ”

“Restore? But there were never whales on Mars! Callie retorted, wishing she could dab the tears off her flushed cheeks. “This is what I mean! You keep telling lies! That’s a lie! A lie! You can’t do that! Perhaps bacteria could live here once, maybe even simple plants, but whales? Never!”

“No, there weren’t whales here,” Lewis agreed, “but there might have been, if things had been different, don’t you see?” Callie stared down at the lake. The ripples had almost dispersed now.

There had been a whale on Mars…

“This is what you keep doing, twisting the truth,” Callie said sadly, “you can’t keep doing it. You;ll never bring whales to life here, like some damned Martian Jurassic Park – ”

“Lewis held his hands up in defeat. “You’re right, you’re absolutely right. We can’t bring whales to Mars,” Lewis admitted, “it would be wrong because Mars was never like that, and we could never make it like that… but we can at least make it how it was…”

On a transmitted command from Lewis the VR scene projected onto the inside of Callie’s visor changed. As she watched, the waters of the lake began to recede, crawling back down the sides of the Columbia Hills, retreating as if a huge plug had been pulled out of the crater floor, allowing the deep waters to drain away into the planet’s core. And as the waters retreated, they changed colour; the beautiful deeper shades of blue faded from them, leaving only the palest shades, painting the sky a pale, water-colour blue which soon faded further to a dull silver. Callie looked up and saw what had brought about the change – the colour had bled from the sky, it was now a dome of pale silvery-blue, metallic almost. She felt her heart sink as, one by one, the fat white clouds which had blossomed in the sky boiled away again to nothing, leaving behind mere ghostly wisps of amber- and gold-hued mist.

Callie bit back a sob. The sense of betrayal she felt inside was sickening: as much as she tried to fight the feelings, to remain loyal and true to her beloved Red Mars, her heart ached to see the waters and the clouds go.

Lake Gusev was now a shadow of its former self. The waters, once deep enough to lap at the slopes halfway up the Columbia Hills, were now so shallow they barely covered the tops of the tallest boulders scattered across the crater floor. No waves lap-lapped across the lake, no beams of sunlight shone upon it from above. The colours had all gone. It was -

No. Now she saw not all the colours had gone.

The water wasn’t blue anymore – it was green. Only just barely green, a green that was almost grey, but green nonetheless. And around the edge of the lake, marking its boundary, was a band of brighter, more vivid colour. A crust of richer Green. Vivid, lush, verdant green. The green of wet grass after a downpour. But of course, Mars had never known grass. What then?

Callie zoomed in on the closest patch of green, saw strange shapes within it; what looked like petals and stronds, buds and blooms -

Algae…

“I know we can’t make a Mars that’s home for your whales, Callie,” said Lewis softly in her ear. “Maybe they’ll swim here one day, in centuries to come, when Gusev really is a lake again, but that’s not for us to do, or decide. We’ll start small… bring back simple life, like this, the life that Mars used to have… then we’ll see what our children want to do. One day, it’ll be their choice.”

Silence then, as Callie stared down into the depths of the lake. It looked like a pool of jade.

“I can’t stop you, can I?” Callie asked eventually.

Lewis paused before answering. “Truthfully? No, I don’t think you can. I don’t think you ever could. It’s inevitable. Like evolution, I think. We’ve already terraformed the deserts of Earth, started growing crops on the ocean floor, like in that cheesy old Seaquest series, but it’s happening. There are forests on the Moon now – in domes, I know, but they’re terraforming Luna crater by crater, that’s all. One day they’ll all join up – ”

“But we’d lose so much…” Callie insisted, “I don’t want to lose anything of this…” She looked around her, “of Mars…”

“You won’t,” Lewis replied. “You said it yourself before, the timescale is too long. There are studies to do, simulations to run… we have to scour the planet for life, make sure we’re not exterminating any of the natives – ”

“You care about that?” Callie asked, surprised.

“Of course I care,” he replied, sounding genuinely hurt, “not all terraformers are manic Zubrinites you know. We don’t all rush around like daleks shouting ‘Exterminate! Exterminate!’ at the rocks. Some of us have respect for what life is, even in its simplest form.”

Callie took a deep breath. She had to know. It was maybe all she had left to hope for.

“And if you found life? You’d stop?” she asked.

“We’d pause,” Lewis responded honestly. “We’d study it, try to understand it, preserve it as best we could… but we couldn’t stop making Mars a home for potentially billions of people just because of bacteria. That would be foolish – ”

“But if you respect life – ”

“I do,” he insisted, “but you have to keep perspective. Some of you Claybornes – and I’m not saying you’re one of them,” he added hurriedly, “shout about how all life is sacred, but when they have a cold and sneeze into a hankie, they don’t keep it, even though it’s full of life, do they? They scream that we should forget terraforming if we find even one bacterium on Mars, but if their kids get head lice, or they see a bug in their bed, they don’t lovingly collect them and feed them and nurture them, they kill them with shampoo, or a rolled up magazine! So don’t preach to me about the value of life, ok? It’s all relative.”

Callie didn’t know what to say. She felt trapped by his argument. Everything he was saying made perfect sense. Damn him.

“So what next?” Callie asked, feeling defeated, wounded.

“Well,” Lewis replied softly, looking down at his daughter, who had fallen asleep wrapped around his leg, like a bush baby, “I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to take this little angel here home, tuck her into bed, and then get on with some work. I suggest you gather your tribe back together and go home too. There’s not much more to see here now.”

Callie looked up at the Sun just as a line of text appeared in red on her visor-screen: LUNA TRANIT COMMENCEMENT MINUS ONE MINUTE. “I’m staying,” she announced. “I want to see the Moon, it’s where Conn’s family came from. He was going to take us there when the kids were older, show us around Aldrin City, take us out to the Apollo 11 landing site, take Cat’s photo standing next to Eagle… the usual stuff, you know…” Her voice trailed away.

“Yeah, I know…” Lewis said. “I’m sure you’ll all get there, one day. I’ve heard it’s beautiful, especially the water gardens at Aldrin.” Suddenly he didn’t know what else to say to her. Everything had been said.

“Come on then princess Shona,” he whispered, reaching down to give his sleeping daughter a little shake, “let’s get you back home.” The young Martian stirred, mumbling something as she came out of her doze, then reached up for him. Effortlessly but gently he scooped her up in his arms and cradled her against his chest, where she snuggled in and went straight back to sleep.

“I’m glad we… talked,” Lewis said, turning back towards Callie. “All these years of fighting, it’s stupid really. We both want the same thing – ”

“Do we?” Callie asked.

“Yes, we do,” he insisted, “a good, safe home for our kids… and their kids… and theirs after them…”

Callie nodded. “Have a safe flight back,” she said, “and say goodnight to Shona for me.”

“I will,” he replied, smiling. “Enjoy the rest of the Transit – ”

“Oh, wait, don’t forget your VR chip,” Callie said urgently, reaching up to retrieve the chip from her helmet. As she removed it the world around her changed in an instant – the lake vanished, as did the algae in an around it, and the blue sky too. Mars was red again. Rocky, dusty, and red.

Callie found she missed the water, and wondered what that meant.

“No, no, keep it, it’s yours,” Lewis told her as she tried to hand him back the data chip. “I made it for you, anyway.”

You did? Why?

“Show it to Blare and Cat sometime,” he added, “they might find it… interesting.”

“I will,” she promised, tucking the VR chip away safely in a pocket on her arm. “And I’ll let them make up their own minds.”

“That’s all I ask,” he said. “Thank you.” An awkward pause then, before “Well, time to go.” Callie nodded. “Have a safe flight back, all of you… good bye.”

“Bye,” Callie said, as Lewis turned his back on her and began to walk away. Suddenly he stopped and turned round again.

“Lowell would have been very proud of you,” he said, “Conn too. I really wish they could both have been here to see this with you.”

Callie didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing. And with a final smile, Lewis walked away, carrying his daughter close against his chest like she was the most precious thing on Mars.

Callie watched Lewis walk away until he was lost in the crowd, and found she was crying again.

“Mom… are you okay?” she heard a familiar voice ask, and looked down to see Cat standing beside her, with Blare close by. Both of them were filthy, their helmets, suits and cloaks caked and coated with red dust, but that didn’t matter.

“I’m fine,” Callie told them, “just fine… now you’re here.” She knelt down between them then, wrapping an arm around each of them to pull them close. “Okay, I want to show you something,” she said, steering their gaze upwards.

The young Martians smiled, seeing there were two black dots on the Sun, not just one.

“Will we go there one day? To the Moon, I mean,” Cat asked. “Dad always said he would – ”

“I know he did,” Callie said, bumping her helmet against her daughter’s affectionately, “and yes, maybe one day we will, you never know what’s in the future…”

“I wonder what Mars will be like then,” mused Blare sleepily, “when we grow up…”

Callie closed her eyes, feeling the VR chip bulging in her pocket, remembering the clouds, the blue sky, and the whale.

“I don’t know,” she told her son, and daughter, pulling them both even closer. “That’ll be totally up to you…”

Even if you haven’t heard of him, chances are that you’ve seen one of Kees Veenenbos’ works on the web or in a magazine such as National Geographic – Kees is one of the world’s foremost creators of Mars art. Kees uses data from NASA’s Mars spacecraft to create stunning renders of Mars as it is now, and may have been in a watery past.

View some of Kees’ artworks at his website

New Mars: Kees, first of all, welcome back to New Mars!

Kees Veenenbos: Nice to be back for an interview. A lot has happened since my first interview for New Mars :)

NM: Regular readers of New Mars will already know that you’re one of the world’s foremost Mars artists, and that your digital work is as acclaimed as the paintings of more conventional artists like Don Davis, Ron Miller and William K Hartmann. But for the many new readers and members who have joined us here since the Mars Exploration Rovers landed on Mars, could you describe briefly what it is you do? (explanation of how you create realistic renderings of Mars from MOLA data)

KV: I started to make landscapes about 5 years ago. At that time with random-made digital elevation models, but I discovered the USGS digital elevation maps and about 3 years ago also the first MOLA elevations models of Mars. Since that time I have focused on using these models to make visualizations of Mars, as it looks today, but also in the past when there was more water and ice present. You can talk about those circumstances but an image can tell you immediately how it looks. I make these situations visible for the public. And since the NASA rovers have proved that Mars was wet once, we can now conclude that below the surface there are still remains of ice and probably even water reservoirs, so I can continue with more certainty to make visualizations of a Mars with a watery past. The ground radar of the Mars Express will give us more evidence about the existence of ice and water in the crust of Mars, too.

NM: Since you were last interviewed here on New Mars, things seem to have gone a bit crazy for you. In fact, it seems no magazine article or TV news report is complete without one of your Mars renderings or animations! If it’s not too embarrassing for you, could you run through some of your recent showcases for our readers?

KV: I put a lot of those images online on my website. In the beginning there were not a lot of visitors, but magazines seem to have a nose and eye for visualizations that could show the audience about Mars’s past and present. The German magazine GEO started to publish some of them, and other magazines followed as my images showed a different and maybe a more artistic view on Mars. Magazines like Ciel et Espace, Focus in England and Italy, Muy Interessante in Spain, Sky and Telescope and lately National Geographic and Astronomy have used my images too.

NM: Appearing in/on which one of those gave you the biggest buzz?

KV: Appearing in National Geographic is of course an honour. And that assignment gave me an enormous boost to be as accurate and creative as possible to visualizise Mars as it could have looked during an ice age. They asked me first to make an image for the inside, but after that one was finished they seemed to be so happy with the result they asked me also to make the cover. Not a lot of people on this Earth are given that opportunity. I enjoyed every moment of it! They were very patient and we had numerous talks about how the image should be look like. They asked me to make two images and the Maraldi Crater was finally chosen.

NM: How did you feel the first time you saw your rendering of the Maraldi crater on a Nat Geo. cover in a newsagent’s?

KV: In fact: I had a first glance when I looked at the covers for next month on various sites of NGM. On some sites you can vote for the cover. But to have one in your hands is different. I hadn’t yet read the story, so I was also very curious about the article Oliver Morton wrote about the rovers and the Marsian ice age.

NM: How are you approached by people wanting to use your work?

KV: The magazines simply mail me or phone me. If you put my name in a search machine they’ll find a lot of links to my site with email address. It’s as easy as that.

NM: Where have they usually come across you?

KV: The magazines of course look also at the content of other magazines. Some just use a search machine and find to their surprise those images on my site.

NM: Can you give us a sneak preview of which other publications your work will be appearing in the near future?

KV: Some of my work will be published soon in magazines, books, TV documentairies and even cd covers. In general the publishers don’t want their stories revealed in advance, so I can only talk about that later on. But about the cd covers I can. Arturo Rodriguez is a young American composer who wrote a magnificent symphony called ‘Earth to Mars’. He asked me to use one of my renderings “Sunrise at Schiaparelli Crater”. He will sell this cd also through www.amazon.com (in a few weeks). And there is a rock band Salvaged which used one of my Aram Chaos images for their first cd. My HD animations will be used in a Mars documentary of the Mars Society and a large theater production might be using a few animations for I-MAX presentations. They are even talking a bout producing 3D. That will keep me busy up to August.

NM: I understand you went to the European Space Agency HQ for the planned landing of Beagle 2, back in December of last year. What was that like?

KV: I was asked just two weeks before the event by ESA to give a presentation of my work for the principal investigators, press and government representatives like the German Minister of Education and Science. It was night not to forget. To be so close to the operation rooms and to talk with the responsible people is also some event!

NM: Which members of the “Mars Community” did you meet there?

KV: People like David Southwood, ESA Director of Science, Michael McKay, Flight Operations Director, Augusto Chicarro, the Project Scientist, and Gerhard Neukum, the maker of the HRSC (Stereo Camera).

NM: Did you receive any favourable comments on your work?

KV: In general they are very positive. I always ask if there’s something ‘wrong’ about the visualizations, because I am not a scientist, so any help from those who know about the subject is very important for me to be more accurate. But they seem to be happy with my work and consider it as accurate. They enjoy especially my animations. Not many have seen my new animations. I have now about 15 minutes available at higher resolutions (1280×720). And those fly by’s have a real impact on the viewers; in such animations Mars comes more alive than when I present just the stills.

NM: It must have been exciting to be there at the centre of the action when everyone was looking forward to Beagle’s landing… describe it for us?

KV: The people were very confident about the insertion of the Mars Express spacecraft and the landing of the Beagle 2. Everything was programmed and the insertion went as predicted. But everybody was more nervous about the Beagle2. When the Beagle 2 missed its first contact David Southwood was very disappointed when he had to announce that Beagle 2 had made no contact.

NM: And what was it like when the awful realisation dawned that Beagle 2 wasn’t going to phone home as expected..?

KV: David Southwood looked very sad when he made his first announcement about the Beagle 2 not phoning home.. But at that moment there was still hope that Beagle 2 would bark.. :) At JPL we heard a discussion about he fact that they might have found the ‘crash site’ of the Beagle 2 on a photograph made by the MGS as I remember, but I haven’t seen the photo yet.

NM: Were the US scientists present very sympathetic to the European team?

KV: I haven’t met people of NASA at ESOC in Darmstadt. It was a genuine ESA party and of course the lines were open, because of the Odyssey probe which would act as relay station for the data of the Beagle 2. But I didn’t meet any people from NASA there. But there might be some of them in one of the other control rooms.

NM: What do you think of the pictures sent back by Mars Express? Have you a favourite?

KV: The first image of the HRSC is still my favourite. It shows a part of the far eastern Valles Marineris with canyons. It has a real high resolution of 12 meter per pixel! http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=34498 These are incredible results. But the media seem to have lost some interest in showing these high detailed images. But I visit the ESA site regularly to look at the newest photographs.

NM: Is Mars Express sending back any data you can use in your own work?

KV: The HRSC makes 3D images. From the data elevation models can be retrieved. But for the moment that is not their priority, which I can understand. But for future use it would be interesting to use the elevation models for creative new visualizations of Mars. Gerhard Neukum will look at that, but it might take still some time.. months? Years? One of the other problems is the size of the files that are produced by the camera. We are talking about terrabytes instead of gigabytes!! A normal pc can hardly handle those files.

NM: Moving on to the phenomenal success of the Mars Exploration Rovers now, have you been over to JPL since Spirit or Opportunity landed?

Kees Veenenbos with geologist Nathalie Cabrol and Artemis Westenberg.

KV: I was in California form 6-17 March. I had come to NASA Ames at Mountain View to attend and give a presentation at the Contact 2004 conference. That is a gathering for those who are interested in extraterrestrial life. This year the subject was The Challenge of Mars: Past, Present, Future… People like research scientists Chris McKay and Michael Sims, writer Kim Stanley Robinson, space artists Don Davis and Rick Sternbach and others were present. It’s an exchange of thoughts and they inform each other and the general public about what they are doing at the moment. The moment was right to visit one of my contacts at JPL, Nathalie Cabrol who is a geologist and investigates ‘her’ favourable site the Gusev Crater with the Spirit rover. She proposed this site and of course Gusev was finally chosen as landing site for the MER A Spirit. We e-mailed for a few years. I sent her numerous images of Gusev under different conditions. Of course also those with water and she seemed to have used these also in her presentations “The reason why we have to go to Gusev..” So the images might have contributed to the choice for the Gusev.

NM: How did JPL compare to Darmstadt, the ESA HQ?

KV: NASA is much larger when you look at the people involved. But as you look at the results it might be that they have equal important results from their missions. It’s a pity that the Beagle 2 has been lost, because the exploration for life (ancient or even today’s life) would have been the important event of the century. Now we have to wait for another years to be sure: was or is there life on Mars?

NM: What is your relationship with NASA like now? Do they perhaps supply you with specialist data for use in your work?

KV: I don’t have a special relationship to NASA or ESA. Now and then I send an image, or e-mail them that I have put a new one on my site, but they don’t have more interesting data for me at the moment. The only Mars data that would be nice to use is the HD data from the stereo camera on board of the ME.

NM: Does your work now have official approval from NASA?

KV: There’s no official approval of my work. I inform a few people of NASA, but I don’t have to have that as long as they are contented with the visualizations of this exciting red planet.

NM: Have you supported the MER missions for NASA in any way, perhaps by providing them with renderings of the landing sites?

KV: I might expect that a number of those who are involved with the MER missions have seen my images. When I was at JPL I met also Steve Squyres. Nathalie Cabrol picked him out from the corridor when we were in one of the control rooms. She introduced me as the ‘man who had made the renderings of the landing sites’. It was a surprise to talk to this man who seems to be the most enthusiastic and energetic man on the Mars mission.

NM: What do you think of the pictures returned by the MERs so far? Have you a favourite?

KV: I have three images in mind. Image one: the pancam photo from the Spirit with the Columbia Hills at the horizon. You seem so drawn to go there to see how they look at close range. Happy enough they are getting nearer and nearer now. The second image is the wall in the small crater where the Opportunity landed and which shows the layers of deposits. And the third one is the image with the blueberries, the small spherules, which shows once more the proof of water on Mars.

NM: Your renderings of a “warmer, watery Mars” now seem uncannily accurate, given the findings from Opportunity. Did you allow yourself just a moment of smugness when you heard that Media Briefing about Meridiani once having been underwater?

KV: I had to smile indeed, because when playing with the height data, you can see where water might have been standing on Mars. You see where the canals are and where they end, often in basins and craters. And near the Hematite there are still a lot of canals to be seen. Even on the larger scale of the MOLA data. And in general you can find such conditions all over the planet. Now the question has to be answered: when and for how long were these standing waters present. Opportunity is now nearing Endurance Crater and you can see the thick layers already. Question: are these all deposits in watery conditions? They appear to be meters thick!

NM: Are you working on any new renderings, using data returned by the MERs? When will we be able to see them on your website?

KV: I am experimenting now on 3D anaglyphs and some new renderings, but I am also extremely busy with the new HD animations that I am preparing for a Mars Society documentary about Mars. Not everything goes smoothly and I encounter still problems with the limitations of the software. But you have to be patient and not hasty. It’s the attitude, time and patience that will solve these problems… :)

NM: Which of your Mars images are you most proud of?

KV: I like the latest images most. They seem to come closer to reality, past and present. I enjoy especially the partial globe renderings like the one I made for National Geographic. The Candor Chasma is one the most beautiful I made, with sunbeams and the dusty atmosphere (see the image)

NM: Are you bored with imaging Mars yet?

KV: There’s still a lot of places I didn’t render. And the changing conditions of Mars are not yet all put in an image. Like the future of the planet. A terraformed Mars, but also the end of the solar system, when the sun is growing to a giant red star and Mars will be a red hot planet, instead of a red cold planet. So boring? No: it’s enjoying while virtual travelling on a distant planet.

NM: Looking ahead to the future now, is there a martian image you would love to make? Maybe a rendering of some surface feature you feel you haven’t done justice to yet?

KV: The Terragen program will be developed now regularly now that Matt Fairclough restarted the development. Once rocks can be rendered in the program I might start all over again with the low oblique views. And animating these landscapes will follow soon, after the software can visualise the details we miss now, giving a very realistic view on Mars. But competing with the photos of the multi million probes of the space agencies will remain a challenge.

NM: Leaving Mars behind… for now… which other bodies in the solar system would you like to give the Veenenbos treatment?

KV: Realistic rendering with Terragen demands elevation models. But there are not many really detailed ones. Mars has the best DEM’s. There is some of Venus and very low detailed of the Moon. We have to wait until the scientists decide to map all the planets with high detailed maps. In that way I could visualise the solar system with more realistic basic material. I read that the Messenger, that will be launched this July, will be equipped with the Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA): So there’s hope… :) But not before it has arrived in 2008.. (find out more about the Messenger)

NM: Will you be using any of the data from the CASSINI probe to render the landscapes of any of Saturn’s fascinating moons?

KV: The Cassini Huygens also has a radar on board, so I hope these data is suitable to use and will be placed on the web soon after it’s sent to Earth. In general it takes a few months to a year before NASA puts the data on the web. But these data might be a challenge to put my teeth in. Titan might give us a look at an astonishing new world.

NM: And finally, is there anything extra-special we should be looking forward to appearing on your website, or in print, soon?

KV: I’ll put some 3D images and a new animation on my site. The animation will be of a better quality than the previous ones. For the 3D anaglyphs you’ll need the red/blue glasses. But looking at renderings in 3D is a new way of looking at Mars.

NM: Kees, thanks for talking to New Mars again!

	Matthew Golombek

Matthew Golombek will be a name familiar to both young and old Mars enthusiasts. As the chief scientist for NASA’s Mars Pathfinder, he successfully landed the first rover on Mars and brought the dusty and alien landscapes one step closer to millions of people watching on Earth. The Mars Pathfinder and its Sojourner rover represented a turning point in NASA’s exploration of Mars, towards a more active, ambitious – and successful – programme.

Since the Mars Pathfinder, Matthew Golombek has been heavily involved in the planning of the current Spirit and Opportunity missions; he was Mars Exploration Program Landing Site Scientist and Co-chair of the NASA Landing Site Steering Committee that oversaw the selection process. Right now, he is working as a science team member heavily involved in day-to-day operations of the rovers. Stuart Atkinson, staff writer for New Mars, spoke to Matthew Golombek recently.

New Mars: First of all Matt, thanks for agreeing to talk to New Mars at what must be a ridiculously busy time for you. I know you won’t have time to just sit around net-surfing all day, but do you – or any of the other people on the MER team – follow the discussions and debates on websites like New Mars? I have often wondered if you check out what enthusiasts like ourselves are saying and thinking about your projects…

Matt Golombek: Some people on the project do as we often get e-mail notes or other postings on interesting, fun, or otherwise unusual reports.

NM: It must be an incredible time to be at JPL as we “invade” Mars. With two rovers on the surface, and various spacecraft in orbit, all sending back images and data, can you give us an idea of what it’s like to be in the middle of it all? What is the atmosphere there like?

MG: It is tremendously fun to rove around on Mars. There are days when you can’t wait for the downlink from the rover to find out what it has done and what its new location looks like.

NM: Going back to the very beginning of your story, why Mars? Were you a sky-watcher when you were young? Do you maybe have happy memories of gazing at Mars shimmering in a telescope eyepiece?

MG: I was interested in geology because I wanted to know why the Earth’s surface looked the way it did – why were there mountains and valleys. Planetary geology was even more fun because you could compare the Earth with its neighbours.

NM: What made you devote your career to exploring and studying Mars?

MG: Mars is the most Earth like planet with strong evidence for liquid water on its surface. It is a place where we can ask in a scientific manner – “are we alone in the universe?” Will life form anywhere that liquid water is stable, or is it chance happenstance?

NM: New Mars readers – and Mars enthusiasts in general – have grown up watching you on TV, and many will remember you from the PATHFINDER mission. You were never off our screens while Sojourner was trundling around Ares Vallis, and have featured on every Pathfinder retrospective made since. What was it like to be a part of that amazing, groundbreaking mission?

MG: Pathfinder was an amazing achievement by an absolutely committed, incredibly close, understaffed, and overworked team. It is an experience that could probably never be duplicated and one that I will never forget.

NM: How does working on the MER project differ from working on Pathfinder?

MG: MER is a much, much bigger project, with many, many more people. Pathfinder was small enough that I knew most everyone that worked on it. MER is so large that no single person knows everyone who works on it.

NM: What is your exact role within the MER project?

MG: I have two main roles. The first was during project development, when I led the 3 year effort to select the landing sites for the two rovers. I am the Mars Exploration Program Landing Site Scientist and Co-chair of the NASA Landing Site Steering Committee that oversaw the selection process. This occurred through project design and development, spacecraft build and launch, and final targeting with the trajectory correction maneuvers. My second role is as a science team member heavily involved in operating the rover on the surface and carrying out science investigations.

NM: Can you briefly describe for us a typical work day for Matt Golombek after he arrives at JPL?

MG: During the first three months of the MER surface mission, we were all living on Mars time. I would arrive at JPL 38 minutes later each day to synch up with daylight time on Mars for the solar powered rover I was working on. In 6 weeks, our schedule moved forward by 24 hours, so we were coming and going at all sorts of bizarre hours and we were always jet (er Mars) lagged and some of us moved back and forth between the rovers, which were separated by 12 hours. First thing on arriving at mission operations, I would review the data that was arriving at the end of the rovers day and then have several hours to analyze the data and decide what to do the next sol with the rover. Even though we were all in southern California, we were all really living on Mars with the rovers.

Opportunity looks back at its tracks after a record drive of 100 meters on Sol 70.

NM: Many New Mars readers sit at their PCs watching the MER Media Briefings live on NASA TV, and we’ve seen you up there on the stage a few times. What’s it like to be up there in front of the press pack? Do you get stage fright? You always seem supremely confident and cheerful…

MG: The whole point is to communicate the findings of the project as effectively as you can. Being afraid or boring doesn’t help and adding a bit of humor is usually a plus.

NM: On the subject of those briefings, in the aftermath of the media feeding frenzy which followed the now infamous announcement that fossils might have been found in the ALH 84001 meteorite, do the MER team feel under pressure to be 1000% certain of any findings they announce before the cameras?

MG: Any project science team is required to review its own finding before reporting to the media. The science process is to ask any and all questions and to test all sorts of different hypotheses. We have a responsibility to report truthfully and as well as we can what the consensus of the team is. Often this takes time to formulate the hypothesis and then make the observations to test it. Obviously for big impact hypotheses, it requires a larger burden of proof.

NM: We all shudder at the memory of the awful “Six minutes of silence” which followed the landing of Spirit. Did you fear that the rover had suffered the same fate as Beagle 2, which had vanished just a few days earlier?

MG: No, I was confident, but distracted as I was the live CNN commentator at the time.

NM: What were / are your thoughts on the loss of Beagle 2?

MG: A tragic loss. We were all looking forward to the scientific results. I felt sad for the entire Beagle team and in particular, Dr. John Bridges, who led the landing site selection effort for Beagle and with whom I interacted on the surface characteristics of the Isidis Planitia site.

NM: We all cheered along with you when Spirit eventually phoned home successfully, but can you tell us how you felt when the first black and white pictures of Gusev crater appeared on those screens?

MG: I was in an outdoor press tent with CNN. It was the middle of the night and very cold and the monitor with the images was too small to make out any of the details. Given the effort I had put in to select the landing site, I was anxious to see how the surface compared with our predictions, but the monitor was too small. As soon as the live commentary was over I raced over to the operations building to see them…

NM: And what about the first colour panorama? How did seeing that for the first time affect you, and your colleagues?

MG: I was joyous as the surface was very similar to what we predicted from the remote sensing data. We predicted a reasonably flat plain, generally similar in color (red and dusty) as the Viking and Pathfinder landing sites but with far fewer rocks.

NM: The rovers’ pictures are obviously the man or woman in the street’s main interest, and grab all the publicity and media attention, but can you describe for us how exciting it is for a scientist like yourself to receive and work on the data obtained by the other, less glamorous instruments?

MG: The story on the outcrop inside the crater we landed in in Meridiani needed results from all of the instruments to confirm that we were looking at an evaporite. The images gave the texture and morphology, but the chemistry and iron mineralogy were key. In fact, one of our eureka moments was when the first chemistry on the fresh outcrop was returned and many of us realized we were looking at a rock deposited in a shallow sea.

NM: The two rovers have now sent back many thousands of images. Which have particularly impressed or moved you?

MG: The images right after landing that showed what the surface is like (compared to what we predicted). The images at the end of long drives that show something completely new, and demonstrate real exploration. The images into Bonneville and Fram craters and the cracks in Meridiani Planum come to mind.

NM: What did you feel when you saw that stunning picture of Earth shining in Mars’s dusk sky? Many of us here were deeply moved by that.

MG: We tried to take pictures of the Earth with Pathfinder and we were always thwarted by night and early morning clouds, so when we succeeded with MER is was really fun.

NM: Is there a picture, as yet untaken, that you’re particularly looking forward to seeing?

MG: Most of us are looking forward to peering inside Endurance crater at Meridiani and looking at the Columbia Hills up close.

NM: Be honest now, do you and the other guys at JPL have a good laugh when you read the accusations on websites that you’ve discovered ancient martian artefacts – or even fossils or skulls – at Gusev and Meridiani but are covering them up? Or is it annoying and distracting?

MG: The more outrageous the more fun!

NM: What was your reaction when you realised that Opportunity’s cosmic “hole in one” had set it down just a short drive away from that rocky outcrop? That was an amazing stroke of luck, surely?

MG: I remember talking to a colleague in the elevator of the operations building after we had learned that Opportunity had landed safely, but before the images had been returned (I was on my way out to the CNN tent again). When he asked me what I thought the Meridiani Planum landing site would look like, I said it would look completely unlike anywhere we had landed before. It would be a dark and flat granule to basaltic sand plain with little dust and sparse outcroppings of a light unit. Fortunately, I could see the images on the CNN moniter better this time, so I got to celebrate all the way to the operations building.

NM: We’ve been searching for decades now for evidence or proof that Mars was once a warmer, wetter world, with water on its surface, and it looks like we’ve finally got it thanks to Opportunity’s study of that rocky outcrop in Eagle Crater. When you all realised for the first time that those rocks were sedimentary, and knew that Meridiani was once underwater, how did that feel? Did you all share a quiet “wow…” moment? Celebrate? What did you do to mark the historic discovery?

MG: There was one “eureka moment” I shared with two other geologists on the science team after the first chemical analysis showed the rocks were sulphates and we realized the rocks were evaporates. To us that really was the “wow” moment.

NM: So, we now know Mars was warmer, and wetter… that sedimentary rocks formed… that there’s sulphur in the rocks, ice beneath the surface, water locked up in the soil and hematite everywhere… We now also know that there’s methane in the martian atmosphere. To enthusiasts like us, this all seems to be preparing us for the Big Day when NASA announces it has discovered fossils, or even living micro-organisms…Is there a “buzz” about this possibility in the corridors and backrooms of JPL? Any betting pools going?

MG: The environment in which the rocks at Eagle crater were deposited are ideal for preserving whatever was in the water at the time. The chances of finding a fossil are remote. Even in fossiliferous sedimentary rocks on Earth, identifiable fossils tend to be rare and require quite a bit of hands on searching (such as splitting shale with a rock hammer). Even if the MER rover were to image something that might look like a fossil, there would be almost no way to prove it were a fossil as opposed to being formed by some inorganic process. Whether life actually began on Mars will need to be addressed by subsequent missions and will rely strongly on chemical and isotopic measurements and may even require the return of samples to the Earth for study in labs.

NM: Okay, leaving Spirit and Opportunity on Mars, we’re going to grant you a wish -just one, tho. You can snap your fingers and go to anywhere on Mars, anywhere you like. Where would you go? Which place would you like to see in person instead of through a probe’s camera eyes? And why?

MG: For those of us who worked on the MER landing sites, the Melas Chasma site was intriguing. It is at the bottom of Valles Marineris, so the view of the canyon walls (10 km high) would have been extraordinary and there were very interesting layered materials at the bottom.

NM: Which other solar system bodies would you like to explore – remotely, with probes, or in person? Do the ice plains of Europa beckon you? Or the bizarre landscape of Titan?

MG: They would all be great to see.

NM: Finally, with NASA now actively planning to send people to Mars within our lifetimes, it’s possible that the first person to set foot on the red planet is a young New Mars reader, and that he or she is reading this interview right now. Have you a message for them?

MG: Follow your heart.

NM: Matt Golombek, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us!

Visit the Mars Exploration Rover Mission homepage for more information.

“Bennett! Lewis! Get over here now, you’re holding everyone else up!”

Standing in the shadow of the yellow-coloured school rover, writing graffiti on its dusty sides with their fat, gloved fingers, the two boys just laughed at their teacher’s urgent command. His voice – always so stern and commanding in the classroom – was reduced to a tinny whine by the helmet comms systems, and the fear they usually felt when faced with his wrath back in the school module at Ares was replaced by amusement. Oh, let him wait. What was he going to do? Slit their air-hoses?

“If you’re not back here in twenty seconds you’ll both be cleaning out the toilet’s recycling tubes for the rest of the trip – ”

Bunny-hopping across the gritty plain, scuffing up clouds of red dust with their boots, the two young martians headed back to the camp-fire. It was an easy journey. The colour of powdered blood and with no landscape features within sight, except the raised rims of a handful of shallow craters, the centre of the Meridiani plain was virtually rock-free, with none of the boulders and shattered ejecta rubble found closer to Ares. Meridiani was the kind of exposed wilderness that had sent several Newcomers crazy with agoraphobia. But being two hundred klicks away from the nearest outpost, alone with just the elements, was perfectly natural to the two kids.

They made it back to the camp-fire – and the rest of their impatient classmates – with a good five seconds to spare.

It wasn’t a real camp fire, of course; Mars’ atmosphere was too thin and choked with carbon dioxide to allow anything to burn in the frozen vacuum that passed for the red planet’s “open air”. The camp fire the group was gathered around in a tight circle was a conical storm lantern, usually deployed when the big dust tsunamis boiled up from Hellas and Argyre, Now, wrapped in a thin sheet of orange plastic to give the impression of flame shining inside it, instead of a bright halogen bulb, it formed the centrepiece of the ritual get-together which marked the end of every day out in the deep desert. The sundown “campfire chat” was a chance for everyone to talk about what they’d seen and done that afternoon, and plan the next day’s activities.

An outsider would have found the scene quite bizarre: ten white space-suited figures, seated on sample boxes and supply cases retrieved from the rover’s hold, arranged in a ring around an electric lamp, casting a dull orange light just about bright enough to cast shadows. Ten snowmen huddled together for warmth around a pale, cold light, out in the centre of a flatter-than-flat, petrified, deep martian desert, beneath a huge alien sky painted purple and violet and rose by the glow of the approaching sunset…

Finally, with Bennett and Lewis seated on their boxes, the review of the day could begin.

“So…” their teacher began, stretching out the word annoyingly, as he always did, “did we all have a good day today?” Most heads nodded imperceptibly, a few stayed stubbornly still. Martin Lovell wasn’t surprised or offended. It had taken him less than a week after arriving at Mars to realise that moody martian teenagers were no different to terrans: acknowledging even their teacher’s presence, let alone responding to a question, was an absolute no-no. Now, five years later, he knew how to get them to open up. It took time, and effort, but he didn’t mind. They were all good kids really.

Teaching on Mars soon proved to be the hardest thing he had ever done. Everything was so complicated! Next to no resources, endless paperwork, unbending bureaucracy, Earth monitoring everything like a celestial Big Brother. They would have been more than enough problems to cope with, but the biggest complication was the surprise discovery that there were actually two types of “martian” child. Children born on Mars to incomer parents – couples who had both been born on Earth – were known as martians, spelt with a lower case “m”. Many people referred to them as “terratians” in an attempt to avoid confusion. Confusion that arose because native martians, i.e. the children born on Mars to parents who had themselves been born on Mars were – they insisted, loudly and proudly – the only true martians, the only ones entitled to call themselves Martians.

( After only a week of trying to differentiate between the two groups, Lovell had given up, telling them all in no uncertain terms that to him they were ALL ” just martians”. It made things so much easier.)

Relationships between the two different offshoots of humanity were spiky at best, and confrontational at worst, and arriving at Ares after the dreary, six month climb from Earth, Lovell had wondered if he had fallen into a 21st century version of West Side Story, with the two different genetic lines of Mars-born child assuming the roles of the infamous Sharks and Jets New York street gangs. It had been quite a jolt to see the teenagers of the Brave New World fronting up to each other, hurling insults, the native children calling the terratians “little m’s” and the martians calling their Mars-born attackers “Bird Bones”.

So much for “Mars, the planet of peace and science” as it was described ad-nauseum on the NewsNets…

But Lovell had been fascinated by how young martians on both sides of the genetic battlefield mimicked, without knowing it, the pseudo-tribal behaviour of their terran cousins. He was no psychologist, far from it, but his years of teaching back on Earth, in schools across America and, later, in the UK, had shown him the experts were right: children, especially teenagers, “joined” one of several Tribes at school, to fulfil some deeply-rooted subconscious need to belong to a family of some kind. In terran schools there was an impressive and puzzling range of Tribes to choose from: the black-clad, spiky-haired, vampire-mimicking Goths; the loud, confident, uber-social sport-worshipping Jocks; the reclusive, sleep-deprived web-surfing Geeks, and many more besides. After arriving on Mars he had encountered Tribes too, but tribes unique to Mars, and far fewer in number.

In fact, there were only two major groups here. While most teenage martians seemed content to just be themselves – tall, physically-fit, naturally confident and self-assured despite their sunlight-deprived pale skin – others, the more insecure ones, were drawn in one of two directions. The “Holo-Heads”, or Borg as they were known, worshipped technology and the internet, to the point where some constantly wore net-connected visors to ensure they were never out of reach of the data stream flowing and swirling around the worlds, space platforms and spacecraft of the inner solar system. Other Borg actually sewed soft-screens into their jacket and shirt sleeves, turning themselves into walking monitors, constantly displaying pages and images from the net. In moody tribute to their 20th century hero, Neo from the overblown Matrix films, all Borg wore as much black as they could find, stalking the corridors of Ares like coal-coloured ghosts, or shadows. When they met they they talked in computer code, screeching like fax machines – or so it sounded to Lovell, who was as baffled by their chit-chattering exchanges of abbreviations, acronyms and net slang as all of Mankind had been by the content of the alien radio signal detected briefly by the SETI telescope on Phobos in 2058.

Opposing – and, of course, in true tribal nature, despising – the HHs were the martians who saw the internet and most of the late 21st century’s technology as merely tools to enable them to explore and appreciate their homeworld in all its barren glory. These “Claybornes”, named after the most famous martian environmentalist in pre-First Landing fiction, left Ares Base at every opportunity, fleeing to the martian outback to lose themselves – sometimes literally – in its deep, twisting canyons and on the slopes of its ancient volcanoes, mesas and buttes. They loved Mars and its landscapes with an almost evangelical passion, each of them a martian John Muir, dedicated to protecting and preserving the real Mars, the old Mars. The Red Mars.

But there were no extreme HHs or Clayborne’s in Lovell’s group, not anymore. He had seen to that. It had taken two long years of skilful manipulation and scheming, but Lovell had successfully weeded them out, one by one, until, to the amazement and envy of the other teachers at Ares, he was left with just The Good Kids.

Like the young girl sitting opposite him across the circle, who was the key to the success of the whole trip. One of the true “native” martians, the daughter of Mars-born parents, he had high hopes for her. There was a spark of curiosity in her, a tongue of flame flickering weakly that could either flare brightly or gutter and fail. She was a natural leader, too. If he got her on his side, the others would follow. If she refused to play along, well…

“Callie…” Lovell continued brightly, ignoring the weary, melodramatic “huff!” from the girl as he spoke her name, “what did you find today? Anything interesting?”

Callie shuffled on her makeshift seat, uncomfortable at suddenly being the focus of the group’s attention. “Not really,” she replied, voice low, avoiding everyone else’s gaze, “small rocks, stones… the usual…”

“Well done,” the teacher laughed, “that is what we’re out here for after all, isn’t it?” Again, no response. He knew why.

It wasn’t personal, that was a comfort. No, the simple truth was that except for the Claybornes, the youngsters in his class considered his annual “Rock Hound” geology field trip to be a joke or, at best, an inconvenience. True, they resented and instinctively rebelled against the way their parents went positively giddy at the thought of sending their offspring out into the Deep Red to look for and collect interesting rock and mineral specimens for the Ares labs and its fledgeling new “Mars Heritage” museum. They hated the way their mothers and fathers told them how envious they were of them, then insisted no, they didn’t want swap places, thank you. It’ll be fun! they were told, again and again, a chance to get to know your classmates better, see the Real Mars, explore the landscape, maybe even discover something important! To the young martians though, it was just seven, seemingly-endless days of forcing down tasteless food, breathing sweaty, recycled air and drinking brackish recycled water whilst tossing and turning on lumpy rover beds. Forget discoveries and science, it was just a week deprived of their beloved Total Immersion VR sims and online parties…

But they had no say in the matter. The field trip was part of the formal education curriculum, and as such was well-funded by Earth, so their parents – and the financially-paranoid Base Commander – insisted they go along. You Are Going, they were told over breakfast, and that was that…

And so, as it had every year before, several days earlier the school rover “McAuliffe” had chugged out of Ares Base in the light of a cold dawn, laden with its reluctant passengers and a week’s worth of supplies, headed for… somewhere Out There.
Somewhere new, somewhere important, Mr Lovell, driving, had told them cryptically. Now, half-way into the expedition, it had stopped in the flat, barren heart of an ancient plain near Mars’equator, an area which their elderly teacher insisted was one of the most important sites in martian history.

But he still hadn’t said why.

“Why don’t you show us just what you found today, Callie?” Lovell suggested cheerfully, “I’m sure everyone’s interested – ”

“Yeah, we’re just fascinated…” yawned one of the girl’s friends sitting nearby, a quip which earned her a good-natured dig in the ribs from Callie and a weary shake of the head from Lovell.

“Just these…” Callie replied, reluctantly reaching down to her side and retrieving a bag which was bulging with irregularly-shaped contents. With a dismissive shrug she tipped up the bag, spilling her horde out onto the ground at her feet – three rocks, all pathetically small compared to the jagged, hefty boulders they ran and dodged around in the stone fields around Ares. In fact, she’d done well to find even that many. Meridiani was so flat, so featureless and downright barren, it was as if it had been deliberately cleared of rocks by some over-enthusiastic martian farmer in the distant past.

The rest of the group sniggered when they saw Callie’s haul. Three measly stones -

“Interesting…” Lovell said quietly, leaning forward for a closer look, “very interesting in fact… Callie,” he said, more loudly this time, “pass me that one by your foot would you?” The girl reached down. “No, your other foot… yes, that’s the one, the dark one. Let me see?”

With a mischevious glint in her eye the young girl tossed the stone at the teacher – harder and faster than was appropriate, or indeed safe. The rest of the group gasped, watching wide-eyed, shocked at her boldness, knowing full well she was trying to embarrass the old man by making him flinch away from the projectile -

“Thanks,” Lovell said, never taking his eyes off the girl as he reached out with a gloved hand and casually plucked the rock out of mid-air, as effortlessly as if it had been thrown in slow-motion. “Nice pitch,” he added approvingly.

Callie smiled and nodded at him, accepting she’d been caught out. Point to you, old man, she conceded, grudgingly.

“Ah, now this,” Lovell declared, holding the rock up to his visor for closer examination, “is a beauty… a real find… well done Callie!” The girl smiled back warmly, her guard let down for a moment. “You see, everyone, this is a meteorite – ”

“Big deal,” one of the older boys drawled derisively, scuffing at the ground with the toe of his already-scuffed boot, “the desert’s covered with them – ”

“Not out here it isn’t, Lewis,” Lovell said sharply, “and definitely not like this one…” Several heads jerked up at that cryptic reference, the young martians suddenly intrigued despite themselves. “This,” he continued, tossing the meteorite between his hands, “is a carbonaceous chondrite, a meteorite which contains a lot of water, and maybe even the building blocks of life itself…”

“Like Allende,” Callie whispered, betraying her well-hidden interest in geology before she could stop herself.

“Yes, like Allende,” Lovell replied, smiling approvingly. “In fact, it’s quite a coincidence you should find this here Callie, considering the history of this place…”

A deep sigh came from somewhere off to Lovell’s side. “There you go again…” Lewis groaned impatiently, scanning the landscape around them. He felt like a bug on a tabletop – it was so flat! Compared to the boulder-rich plains of Chryse, Utopia and elsewhere, Meridiani was a sheet of giants’ sandpaper, with less rocks scattered over it than anywhere else he’d ever been. It was wrong, just wrong. Why would anyone want to come out here to see…nothing? the boy wondered. It made no sense. Maybe it was because his parents had been born on Earth, and he’d seen their holos of Earth’s most beautiful places, taken during their pre-departure-for-Mars year. Sandy oceans kissed by slowly lap-lapping waves… lush rainforests of trees so tall they touched the blue blue sky… endless fields of golden wheat, rippling in the wind… he’d seen them all, and more. But instead of pining for Earth, as might have been expected of him, Lewis hated it, resented it. Resented it as deeply as he envied each and every child who was living down on Earth while he was exiled to a dry, dusty, cold ball of icy rock everyone around him seemed so desperately and deeply in love with.

The boy looked around him, again, taking in his surroundings, trying to find the reason for the class being there. The old teacher had parked the battered school rover to the south of a reasonable-sized crater, the raised, exposed rim of which was now a burning orange line against the dark ground and darkening sky. That crater, Lovell had told them as he killed the McAuliffe’s engines, was named after a very famous ship – not a spaceship, a “sailing ship”, which was, apparently, a wooden vessel from Old Earth which had floated (or “sailed”!) across Earth’s wide, ice-choked south polar seas on a great adventure almost two centuries earlier. What was its name..? Lewis asked himself, scrabbling to pin-down the word… no, no use, it just wouldn’t come.

Oh, who cared anyway?

He leaned back on his rock sample storage box to look up at the darkening sky. Already, overhead, a few stars were appearing, and low in the west one blue-green star was shining particularly brightly. Bennett knew what it really was, but didn’t particularly care.

“I said, what do you mean?” he heard Lovell ask him, apparently for the second time.

“Nothing,” he replied coldly, staring at the old teacher.

“I know what he means,” another voice interjected, and Lovell looked around to see Bennett – Lewis’ usual partner in crime, but a better kid – leaning forwards.

“Go on then…”

Lewis took a deep breath of suit-recycled air. “Well… you’ve been hinting at some kind of historical importance ever since we got here…” the young martian sighed, unable to hide his own bafflement at the old teacher’s raptures over one of the dullest, flattest places he had ever seen. It was desolate even for Mars.

Lovell shook his head. Could it be that they didn’t know? That they genuinely didn’t know..? Unbelievable.

“Doesn’t it look familiar to you? To any of you?” he asked, fighting – and failing – to mask the frustration and disappointment he felt at the blank expressions painted on the faces of those around him. He looked around him. “You’re honestly telling me no-one here knows where we are? The name Meridiani doesn’t fill you with a sense of history and wonder?”

The kids looked at each other. No. Should it?

“Oh well,” their teacher sighed, “I guess it was before your time, to be fair. The last time I saw this place was in a little window on my computer screen. … I was just a kid myself then, barely older than you, sat in my bedroom, surfing the web – the original web,” he added, “not the SolWeb you all spend half your lives on now. Back then the Internet was restricted to servers on just one planet, Earth; there were no sites on Mars, the asteroids or Europa, not even on Luna…”

Several of the kids laughed at that, and not for the first time. They were constantly amazed at how primitive the original web had been, and now Lovell could tell they were wondering yet again what it must have been like to have access to only a couple of billion websites. He still remembered overhearing Callie telling her friends how glad she was she didn’t have to suffer the tortoise-slow access speeds offered by the so-slow, pre-laser carrier, quaint old “broadband” technology…

“This plain we’re on, Meridiani, used to be underwater,” Lovell explained patiently, “back billions of years ago, when Mars was a warm, wet world, just like Earth is today.” That prompted yet more laughter. Some of the class, despite having “been” to Earth in 3D VR sims, and despite having seen it with their own eyes, shimmering and dancing in and out of focus in the eyepieces of telescopes, still refused to believe Earth could be as “wet and warm” as their parents and doddery old science teacher insisted. A world where water fell from the sky? Where there was so much water it formed pools miles deep and thousands of miles across, called oceans, crossed by sailing ships..?

Come on, be serious…

“Back in 2004,” Lovell continued, ignoring the sniggers, “almost sixty years ago, a robot lander was sent here, carrying a small rover, a machine no taller than yourself Lewis,” he added, ignoring the boy’s scowl. “Amazingly, with hundreds of klicks of flat open plain to land on, it ended up in a small crater, kind of a cosmic hole in one..!” He laughed at his joke then realised that like so many other Earth-centred jokes it had been wasted: none of the native martians sat around him had a clue what golf was. If it wasn’t a 3D real-time SIM program, a space battle or an alien invasion sharedonline with all their friends, well, they didn’t want to know…

“Eventually Opportunity climbed out of its crater and drove around here,” Lovell continued, “while Spirit, her sister ship, explored an ancient lake bed called Gusev, many thousands of klicks away…” He paused there, waiting for a reaction. The silence dragged on. “Is this ringing any bells yet?”

He studied the young faces around him, searching – hoping – for signs of appreciation for his story. Nothing.

Okay…

“You must have heard how Opportunity drove around this area for almost six Earth months,” he continued, “studying the rocks, exploring the landscape, sending back tens of thousands of photos – ”

“Photos?” repeated Callie.

“Come on Callie, we covered this already, remember?” the teacher said, letting out a deep, weary breath. “Photos were like holo-views,” he explained, “only they were flat, two-dimensional – ”

“…boring – ” added Lewis in a whisper.

“Oh no,” Lovell argued, “definitely not boring. They were postcards from another world, our first views of a new landscape on a world which was still very alien to us back then… each new picture was a revelation, a step in an amazing adventure. You’ve no idea what it was like to be a part of it, to run home from school each day and turn on the computer and see new pictures from Mars, from another planet!” He drifted off again, remembering long nights spent hunched in front of the flickering screen, eating a microwaved meal whilst peering at the latest 3D panoramas and rock close-ups through home made spectacles with transparent red and blue candy wrappers for lenses…

“You can’t imagine…”

Lewis stared back unimpressed, uncaring. Unmoved.

Lovell felt sorry for the boy in that moment. Growing up in his cyberpunk-made-real world of VR and 3D holos, a world where people from Mars and Earth met as avatars in artificial cyberspace nightclubs and museums, the young native martian would never feel the thrill of seeing the historic, exhilarating “first photo” of anywhere. Instead of beaming back enigmatic portraits of the smoggy moon’s bizarre landscapes line by frustrating line, the Sagan probe, with its AI brain and dozens of holocams, would beam VR “experiences” directly back to Earth to be enjoyed by subscribers to Microsoft’s global entertainment network.

Something had definitely got lost somewhere along the way.

“As I was saying,” the teacher continued with a sigh, “Meridiani is where Opportunity explored in ‘04, after landing on Mars the old-fashioned way – surrounded and cushioned by airbags. It hit the ground hard then bounce-bounce-bounced before stopping and opening up – ”

“Is that the beaten up old car thing in the museum back at Tharsis?” asked Bennett, suddenly joining the dots in his mind.

“Yes, that’s the one,” Lovell confirmed, pleased the boy had made the connection, but wincing at the disrespectful description of the amazing little rover which had captivated the watching world in his youth.

“Why didn’t they just leave it out here?” Bennett asked, genuinely puzzled.

The teacher took a deep breath, feeling the anger building again. “Because it would have been stolen by looters, souvenir hunters, collectors,” Lovell replied bitterly.

Now all the young martians looked puzzled, not just Bennett.

“Before you mob were born, salvaging pre-colony hardware from Mars was quite a little boom industry,” Lovell explained, “first it was just little bits, pieces that weren’t obvious – screws, bits of wire, insulation material, that kind of thing, but over time the collectors back on Earth grew more demanding, they wanted bigger and bigger pieces of hardware, and their people here on Mars were happy to oblige.” He fell silent then, memories swimming up to the surface. “The final straw was when it was discovered that the Columbia crew commemoration plaque mounted on the Spirit rover was missing. Some b-… someone had stolen it, the sick – ” He stopped himself from swearing just in time. “Everyone was sickened, it was like grave robbing. The thief wasn’t found of course, but it was the last straw for many of us. That’s when Mars Heritage was finally formed, and the Tharsis Museum group started gathering in all the old probes to keep them safe.”

“I heard you were one of the founders of MH,” Callie said, leaning forwards, elbows resting on her padded knees. “Were you?”

“Yes, I was,” Lovell confirmed proudly. “I was actually on the team that went upstream from the Base at Ares and found Sojourner, the little rover that landed here back in 1997. Luckily it was still intact, but only because it had fallen into a hollow and become covered over during storms afterwards. If it hadn’t been hidden beneath all that dust it would have been smuggled back to Earth, in bits, and ended up on display on some rich lawyer’s mahogany desk, just to impress his clients, you can be sure of that.” The steely edge to his voice prevented any of the young martians from saying anything to him.

All but one.

“I still don’t understand why you went to all the bother,” Bennett sighed, not unkindly, just speaking his mind. “Why go all that way into the Stone Fields just to find an old robot and take it back to Ares?”

“Because it’s part of our… your history,” Lovell replied, exasperated. “Just like terrans do when we look at the planes and objects in the Smithsonian… the Spirit of St Louis, the Hubble Telescope, the Discovery shuttle… when you go round that museum and see things like Sojourner, or Viking, any of those old 20th century probes, you should feel proud of the achievements of the people who built it and sent it here all those years ago – after all, it’s because of them that you’re here – ”

“On Mars?” Lewis asked.

“Yes, on Mars,” Lovell repeated, “and it’s maybe even why you’re alive at all… ”

That prompted the most baffled look yet.

“Think about it,” the teacher continued, “if Opportunity hadn’t been built and come here, to Meridiani, and found what it did, then it might have been another generation before astronauts were sent here… your mum and dad might never have met Bennett, might never have come to Mars together, and never would have had you – ”

“Shame we can’t go back in time and make the damned thing crash, then,” growled Callie under her breath. Lovell knew she had suffered teasing at the boy’s hands on more than one occasion, so he said nothing. Everyone else laughed, making the young martian boy blush darkly, even as he shot Callie a dagger-sharp look.

Lovell left the kids to their power-plays. Callie could look after herself. “Come on, think about it,” he expanded, “just think… that little rover travelled all the way here, and what it found meant human history took a sharp turn in a whole new direction -”

“So this is where Opportunity discovered The Brine!” Keisha, the quietest and most serious of the class, whispered suddenly, almost reverently.

Lovell smiled gently at the shy young girl before correcting her. “No, that was the other rover, Spirit, up in Gusev crater,” he said kindly, not wanting to show her up in front of the rest of the class. “Here, in Meridiani, Opportunity discovered proof that Mars wasn’t always as dry as a bone as it is today – ”

“So Keisha was right, it found water…” Lewis insisted.

“Nooooo…” Lovell persisted, wondering why Lewis insisted on challenging him at every opportunity, “it was Spirit that found briny – that means salty, Bennett, before you ask just to be awkward – water mixed in with the top layers of dirt at Gusev,” he explained, “digging a trench with its wheels it uncovered ‘The Brine’ as Keisha rightly called it, and when it did, wow, everything changed…” He turned back to Bennett, as if suddenly remembering what he had been talking about originally. “But here, in Meridiani, Opportunity found something… something wonderful, something that changed our view of Mars forever…”

“What did it find, sir?” Callie asked breathlessly. Lovell shook his head. Incredible, and heartbreaking too. How could these kids be ignorant of so much of their own history? he wondered silently.

Was it his fault?

True, he was just supposed to teach them science, not history, but could he have done more?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. But he could do something now. That was why he’d brought them there, after all.

“Opportunity found that some rocks in a crater in Meridiani had once been underwater,” he explained patiently, keeping his voice level even though he felt excited just thinking back to the Glory Days of early 2004 when the twin rovers had explored opposite sides of the planet simultaneously. “The rocks had actually had their shapes changed by the water, their internal structure too. The rover found minerals which could only have been formed in the presence of water. It was a scientific revolution, really…”

Lovell paused then, looking hard at Bennett. He was convinced he had him, had made a good case. Time for the wrap-up.

“Opportunity proved that Mars was once warm and wet enough for life to have possibly existed, even if it was only for a short time. That’s worth celebrating and preserving, worth coming out here to find the rover and giving it a safe home in a museum, surely?” Lovell challenged the squat young martian boy.

Bennett shrugged. “I’m not bothered, it could have stayed out here rusting and gathering dust for all I care.”

Lovell bit back the angry reply which flared in his mind like a bright shooting star.

Instead he looked at Bennett with sad eyes and said: “Yes, well, as terrifying a prospect as you breeding is Bennett, it may actually happen one day, and if it does, well, even if you don’t care about your history, your own children might.” More laughter greeted that, and even Bennett, who Lovell knew had more rough edges than an iron meteorite but was basically a good kid, joined in. Lovell smiled, enjoying the feel of the group relaxing as the day drew to an end. Above them the sky was plum-coloured now, dotted with diamond-bright stars, and behind each of the children a long shadow stretched off into the deep desert. Night was falling on Mars.

“Opportunity came here, didn’t it? To this very place?” Callie asked out of nowhere, as the truth dawned on her. The camp fire lantern’s reflection was distorted in her helmet’s curved visor as she spoke.

At last! Lovell smiled again, more broadly this time. The truth had lit up inside her like a torch.

“That’s why you brought us here…”

Lovell nodded, pleased to have been proved right for once. Of all the girls in the group Callie was by far the brightest, and although she wasn’t as deeply into it as Keisha, her interest in history was clearly growing. He’d been sure she would be the first one in the group to put the pieces together, and she had. Now, maybe, if she could shrug off the bad influences gathered around her, there was hope for her yet…

“Yes, to this exact spot…” Lovell answered. “I watched it explore here, on my computer, all those years ago.”

“But how do you know? That it came..?” Callie prompted, leaning further forward towards him. “How can you be so sure? I mean, doesn’t one place out here look just the same as all the others?”

Lovell grinned, unable to help himself any longer. It was the moment he had been waiting for.

“Okay, fun time’s over, I want you all to stand up,” he announced brightly. Looks of bewilderment greeted his command. “I mean it, stand up, now, come on…” he insisted, clapping his hands together to hurry them along, and slowly, one by one, the kids seated around him pushed themselves up off their boxes and cases until all were standing, awkwardly, in a circle around the lantern. Lovell marvelled at his young companions, thinking how the first-born martians, taller than children their age had any right to be, looked like standing stones in the deepening twilight…

“Right, we’re going for a little walk,” he continued, to a mixture of groans and sighs, and surprised, sharp intakes of breath. Was he kidding? A walk? At that time of day?

“See that crater edge over there, to the south?” he asked, nodding towards the southern horizon. The kids all followed his gaze. They couldn’t make out a crater, but the ground in that direction did seem to fall away somewhat, suggesting the lip of a crater. “That’s where we’re heading,” he explained, “it’s not far, maybe ten minutes walk away – ”

“But our air supply – “Lewis started to protest. Lovell cut him short with a raised hand.

“…will last for days, come on, you know that,” Lovell said.

To Lovell’s surprise the next objector was shy little Keisha. “But sir, surely safety protocols insist that – ” she began, suddenly finding her voice, but again, the teacher was ready to counter the complaint.

“…we won’t put ourselves at risk by losing sight of the rover Keisha,” he said softly, reciting the Rule Book. “We won’t, I promise. We’re only going for a short walk, and as Mr Lewis rightly pointed out earlier, this area is so flat there’s no risk of us losing sight of the rover.” A short pause before he added, more gently still, “Trust me Keisha… all of you… There’s just… I brought you out here because there’s something I want to show you, something you may not get another chance to see, the way things are going here on Mars. It’ll be worth it, I promise.”

Some of the kids still looked unsure, a couple, including Keisha, even looked a little frightened now. “I wouldn’t dream of putting you in any danger, you should all know that by now…” Lovell said, trying to reassure them.

He was struggling, he could feel it. Losing them. He felt his heart hammering in his chest with fear. The place he had imagined seeing with his own eyes for so long, for so many years was just a short walk away, within his reach, but if one of them started crying now, it was over. They’d call their parents and he would have to walk away from the place he had dreamed of visiting for half a century. And he knew he would never get a second chance.

Salvation came – as it often did on Mars, and in life – from the least expected place.

“Okay,” Bennett drawled, taking a step forward, “I’ve got nothing better to do… but,” he added, pointing a finger at the teacher, “if you get us all killed I swear I’m going to come back and haunt you…”

Lovell silently cheered inside as the tension broke like a ice shattered by a hammer, and the class declared, one by one, their wishes to walk to the crater. Nodding Bennett a subtle “thank you”, Lovell clapped his hands together to get the class’s attention. They didn’t hear him – couldn’t hear him, cocooned in their spacesuits – but the gesture caught their eye and they turned to face him, curved visors reflecting the purple-bruise coloured sky looming over them.

“Right, I want you all to put your helmet lights on,” Lovell said, “then just follow me.” Reaching up with his right hand he tapped the touch pad on the side of his helmet, activating a small torch built into the hardshell. A narrow beam of light shot out in front of him, illuminating a circle of the ground several feet across. One by one the kids followed his example until all of their helmet torches were shining brightly in the twilight gloom, each one illuminating a circular patch of the rocky, grainy desert floor. Rich with thick drifts of hematite powder and shingle, Meridiani’s hematite-dust covered surface shone a strange, ethereal purple-red colour in the torch beams. Distinctly un-martian, Lovell thought, as he started to walk towards the crater…

“Here we go…” he said, taking the lead, walking away from the lantern. He’d considered taking it with them but decided it would serve them better as a beacon, guiding them back to the rover.
The kids fell in behind him, forming a ragged line of pairs, trios and die-hard loners.

“You’re not going to ask us to hold hands are you..?” Bennett asked, walking just behind, the tone of his voice suggesting it would be pushing his support just a bit too far.

“Of course not,” Lovell laughed, “you’re too old for that. We could sing an Old Earth hiking song tho?” he suggested, as the group left the lantern – and their makeshift rover camp – behind. More groans, which Lovell ignored. “Hi ho….” he began, voice wavering at first, but growing stronger as he held the next note for several seconds, “hi hoooooo…… ”

Lovell paused, waiting for the young martians to join in.

Absolute silence.

“Oh never mind,” Lovell sighed, admitting defeat, and led them onwards.

It took them a good ten minutes to cross the distance from the rover to the crater, but with no ankle-twisting boulders, stones or rocks to negotiate it was an easy, even enjoyable walk. Some of the young martians spent the time chatting amongst themselves, swapping gossip and discussing the latest VR sims; others spent the time in quiet contemplation, thinking… well, whatever native martian children thought. Sometimes, Lovell thought, they seemed truly alien, inscrutable, unfathomable. It was hardly surprising, caught as they were between the dust-covered, historic culture of Olde Earth and the bright, shining promise of as-yet unwritten martian history. He didn’t envy them their roles at all.

Leaving the martians to their own devices, he preferred to take in the view. True, flat Meridiani was hardly on a par with the rock forests of Utopia, or the boulder-strewn plains of Ares, and compared to the Yosemite-dwarfing canyon lands of Noctis or the glacier-carved badlands of the polar rim, it could even be considered by some as simply boring. But not him. He’d wanted – ached – to come here ever since that day in January 2004 when he’d seen the first picture from Opportunity appear on his computer screen, scrolling down painfully slowly from the top, one line at a time, until he had been standing in a crater, surrounded by a high rim of dusty rock, looking at a ledge of what looked ridiculously like garden centre paving stone slabs…

He laughed to himself, remembering his first thought: What’s a Roman road doing on Mars..?

“Hey!” a voice exclaimed suddenly over the airwaves, and Lovell, snapped back into the present, turned quickly, spinning in place to seek out the source of the shout. What had happened? Had someone fallen? Had a space suit ripped? An air hose come free?

“What’s wrong?” he demanded, seeing one of the children staring towards the west, as if frozen in place. Several others were moving quickly towards him – or her; at this distance he couldn’t tell who it was. “What happened?” he demanded again, more urgently this time, pulse beginning to race. Man had been on Mars for half a century, but the planet still seemed determined to claim as many careless lives as it could. An unwanted statistic flared in his mind: ten people had died on the rusted sands of Mars in the past year, a new record.

Fearing the worst, Lovell bounded faster over to the group of kids.

“Calm down, nothing’s wrong, sir…” a familiar voice reassured him as he reached the martians, clouds of plum-hued dust scuffling up around his feet as he planted them down hard into the dirt to brake. “Keisha just saw… that…” Callie added, pointing towards the western sky.

Lovell made the classic terran mistake then. He assumed.

Blazing above the western horizon, barely a finger’s width high now, was a brilliant star, flashing and scintillating like a jewel reflecting candlelight. It was firing off sparks of sapphire, emerald and amethyst, needle-sharp shards of colour as if it was shattering, like fragile crystal, right before their eyes. But the shattering seemed to go on and on, and as he watched Lovell felt a hand wrapping around his heart, an ache that he knew – and hoped – would never go away, no matter how many times he caught sight of this…

Eight billion people lived on that “star”, he told himself, and many billions more had lived on it before them. All Mankind’s history, culture, art and poetry had flourished within the glow of that tiny spark of light, was contained in the minute halo of its flickering brilliance. True, Man had reached out and touched the Moon, and more recently Mars, but he had left barely the slightest traces of his presence on those worlds. bThat “star” was his birthplace, where he had evolved in the aftermath of the dinosaurs’ extinction, where he had discovered and tamed fire, where he had invented language, technology, and music.

That “star” was the birthplace of Mozart, Tutankamen and Rembrandt, and in the centuries and millennia to come, when Mankind had flown beyond the boundaries of his own solar system and made the planets of other stars his home – assuming he survived that long – men and women would stand in the dark, under alien skies, filled with unfamiliar constellations, and search out a honey-coloured star, knowing that huddling close to it, bathed in its light and warmth, was the small, blue-and-white world where the brave pioneers Gagarin, Armstrong, McAuliffe and Foale had been born. The world where Everything Began…

“Earth,” he whispered, “she looks beautiful tonight, don’t you think.”

“I guess so,” Keisha replied casually, “but we’re looking at the new comet, up there, see?” and looking more closely Lovell saw she was jabbing her gloved finger at a part of the sky above and to the left of Earth, where a silvery trail of light, as long as a pencil held at arm’s length, was floating serenely in the fading glow of twilight.

“Oh,” Lovell said, brutally deflated. “I thought you meant – ”

“They say it will be so bright when it passes us next year that it will cast shadows!” Keisha continued breathlessly, “I can’t wait to see that..!”

Lovell nodded quietly, but didn’t look at the comet. He couldn’t. Instead he stared at Earth, watching it dropping in silent slow motion towards the horizon, its blue light reddening and fading as it sank into the dustier layers of the atmosphere. Within moments it was as orange as a spark spat out from an open fire, or an iron forge – and then it was gone, surrendering the sky once more to the stars and the diaphanous, mottled trail of the Milky Way.

“What are you looking at?” he heard another familiar voice ask in his ear, and turned to see Bennett standing beside him.

“You just missed Earth-set,” Lovell replied distantly, still lost in the magic of the moment.

“Seen it before,” the boy replied, shrugging dismissively, “it’s nothing special. But hey, look up there, that’s the new comet!”

Lovell stared hard at boy, then at the horizon, missing Earth so much it hurt, willing it, begging it to reappear. It didn’t.

With stinging eyes Lovell turned away from the empty western sky, and let the alien children show him the comet.

They watched it together, happily tracing out the strands of spun-silver in the comet’s ghostly tail across several degrees of sky until it dropped towards the horizon, following Earth and then, dimmed by the same layers of atmospheric dust which had snuffed out Earth, it too became too faint to see with the naked eye.

“Okay, time we were moving,” Lovell said eventually, “come on,” and the young martians obediently followed him towards the crater.

As they made their way across the stretch of empty plain the ground beneath their feet cracked and crackled in the brutal cold, their patterned boot-soles leaving deep, ridged imprints in the dusty duricrust. It seemed to go on forever -

Then, suddenly, they were there.

Lovell didn’t need to tell the class to stop at the crater edge, they halted instinctively, as if sensing they should go no further without his say so. Instead, their helmet lights throwing circles of light on each other’s suits in the darkness, they just slowly moved apart to form a line along the lip of the crater, a white picket fence of space suits, and waited for him to speak.

He paused, taking in where he was. His pulse was racing. He was there, at last, he was actually there. Standing on the crater’s edge, he sensed the significance of the place, could feel a thrumming in his bones, the same thrumming he’d felt at special locations on Earth. Stalking silently in and out of the towering standing stones of Stonehenge, standing in the sharp-edged shadow of the Great Pyramid and gazing up at the sheer granite face of El Capitan from the grassy meadows at its base, he had felt an energy pulsing through him that he could not explain. He felt it again now, here, on the crater’s crumbling edge.

“This is it,” Lovell said quietly, “this is why I brought you out here.”

“”And where’s ‘here’?” a familiar voice asked sarcastically. Lewis.

Ignoring him, Lovell surveyed the scene. The small, shallow crater in front of them was known by many names. “Opportunity Crater”, “the Challenger Memorial Station”, “Squyres’ Hole In One”. But to him it would always be just The Crater. The Crater where, half a century earlier, a small rover had driven up to a small rock and turned Man’s understanding of Mars on its head.

“I want you all to pan your helmet torches down over the lip of the crater,” Lovell said slowly, trying to prevent his voice from breaking with emotion he was feeling. He added, with caution, “don’t move forwards yet, just cast light into the crater; I don’t want anyone falling in and breaking a leg or something…”

A few of the class mumbled their disapproval, and/or frustration, but they did as they were told, and Lovell nodded with satisfaction as the young martians moved their heads back, panning their torch beams first towards the crater rim and then over it, lighting up the inside slope and -

Lovell let out a satisfied sigh. There it was, just as it had been on his screen, all those years ago.

It was as if Time had stood still.

The bright beams cast by the martians’ helmet torches were bouncing off a fractured rocky outcrop half-way up the slope of the shallow crater’s wall. Running from left to right, and composed of dozens of small, sharp-edged plates, slabs and knubs of pale stone protruding from the dark wall of the crater, the outcrop looked uncannily like the half-exposed, fossilised spine of some ancient martian dinosaur…

“Kids… here we are… Opportunity Outcrop,” Lovell breathed, feeling the greying hairs on the back of his neck standing up, “this is where it all started, back in ‘04.”

He turned to Callie, saw her gazing down at the rock with an expressionless face, and his heart stopped. What was she thinking? he wondered. What was she feeling? Was she seeing the outcrop? Really seeing it?

“Well?” he asked simply. It had to be her choice. Would she walk towards her history, or away from it?

“Let’s go down there,” the young girl smiled back at him, her eyes flashing with reflected starlight, “I want to take a closer look.”

So one by one, steadying and supporting each other with outstretched hands, they stepped down into the crater.

As they assembled in front of the outcrop, the class let out sighs of disappointment. Lovell fully understood why. Up close, it was revealed to be much smaller than it had appeared from above, and standing in front of it again, mere feet from it, the old teacher was reminded of his first view of the rocky ledge all those years ago. When he had seen the first Pancam image of the outcrop, unveiled by a panel of beaming JPL scientists at the NASA media briefing, it had looked huge. Projected on the screen behind them, the outcrop had appeared tall, maybe even shoulder-high; imposing, as solid and as substantial as a dry stone wall. Lovell had saved the picture and spent an age looking at it that night, zooming in on section after section, again and again, imagining walking up to it and running his gloved hand along it, feeling the cold, hard edges of the stones even through his thick EVA suit gloves, before clambering over it to drop down on the other side…

Days later, the outcrop was revealed to be little more than a hard, knobbly ridge of small stone plates and slabs, embedded in the softer, darker material of the crater wall. Disappointingly, it was also found to be only a few inches tall – barely high enough to come up to the middle of Opportunity’s wheels, in fact. Lovell had been gutted. He felt cheated. No-one would be “clambering over” inches-high Opportunity Outcrop in years to come, let alone him. But as more days passed and more and more detail was resolved by the rover’s Hazcams and Pancams, he had fallen in love with the Outcrop all over again, and had looked forward to the day when Opportunity would drive right over it and out onto Meridiani Planum itself…

And then, the news. It seemed that the gods of Mars – which had taken cruel delight in past years in making NASA probes despatched to the Red Planet wander off course, blow-up or simply vanish without trace – had actually smiled upon JPL for once. Not only had they allowed the little rover to land safely, but they had actually guided it into a small crater which boasted the geologists’ Holy Grail …

“I know it doesn’t look like much,” conceded Lovell, playing his helmet’s light beam over the surface of the outcrop, slowly panning from left to right, “but this is actually some of the most important rock ever found on Mars.”

“It looks old…” one of the quieter children commented from off to Lovell’s right somewhere. Who was it? he wondered. Stella? He wasn’t sure. They were right though.

“It is old,” Lovell confirmed, “very old. In fact, this is bedrock,” he continued, “original rock, you might even call it – ”

Lewis stared hard at him. “You mean you brought us all the way out here just to show us some very old rock?” he asked, more than a note of condescension in his voice.

“Not just because it’s old,” Lovell replied patiently, “because it’s important – ”

Callie was growing restless now, too. “But why?” she demanded, “I don’t understand why it was…is… so special – ”

Lovell took a deep breath, gathering his thoughts. “The Opportunity rover’s studies of this rock proved, for the very first time, that Mars was once wetter and warmer than it is today,” Lovell told her. “You see, until then we thought it once had been, were pretty sure of that actually, but there was no proof. Opportunity changed that. Changed everything.”

“But it’s so… small…” Callie said. Others around her nodded in agreement. They all seemed totally underwhelmed. He could forgive them that. After all, how excited would he have been if, as a fifteen year old, he had been taken out into his own back yard and shown a piece of rock?

“Come on,” Lovell said, “let’s walk along it, take a closer look at some of the most interesting features – but you mustn’t touch anything, not even lightly,” he warned, turning to them, his voice suddenly deep and serious. “Some of this material is very fragile; you’d damage it with just a brush of your fingers, even if you didn’t mean to. Treat this place like an ancient tomb, or a relic, it really is that important…”

Lewis half-hid a weary “humpf” of disbelief and boredom, but didn’t say anything. Instead he quietly followed the others as they walked along the length of the outcrop, starting at the right hand side.

“This,” Lovell told them, as they halted in front of a pair of rocks which were almost touching, and marked the right edge of the outcrop, “is Stone Mountain, the first outcrop rock Opportunity observed close-up. Bennett,” he said, turning to the boy, hoping that involving him in the exploration of the feature would help him loosen up a little, “would you light it up with your helmet beam, please?” The boy duly did, illuminating the rock brightly. “Thanks.” The rest of the class shuffled closer to it, scuffing up clouds of purple-red dust with their boots.

Like all the other exposed sections of the Outcrop stretching off in a curved line to its left, Stone Mountain was a light brown colour, marked with hints of cream here and there, with a rough surface which was pitted and flaking and covered with too many cracks to count. But from close-up the pair of rocks was revealed to be a single rock, split in two, with an inch-wide gap separating the halves. While the left hand part jutted a respectable distance out of the crater wall, most of the right hand slab was buried deep in the side of the crater, hidden from view.

“Get closer,” Lovell told them, “it’s perfectly safe, just remember not to touch, please…”

Several of the group knelt down in the dust in front of the rock, their knees sinking into it an inch or so as they leaned towards it. That was when they noticed, for the first time, that the ground around the Outcrop was literally covered with tiny, blue-purple balls, like beads, or ball bearings. There were hundreds of them – no, thousands, as if the contents of a huge jar of purple glass beads had been poured down the crater’s slope and spread across its floor, piling up against the outcrop’s rocks, gathering in its hollows, cracks and holes. Bizarre.

Up close Stone Mountain’s exposed side was an equally bizarre sight. The rock wasn’t solid, wasn’t a single mass like the boulders around Ares; it was made of dozens of different sheets of thin and very fragile-looking material, laying on top of each other like pancakes, or the layers of a gateau. The whole thing looked like it would crumble away to dust if even the lightest martian breeze blew on it…

“Those layers, see them?” Lovell asked, playing his own torch beam over the exposed rock, “were laid down over millions of years, level after level after level. Geologists call them sedimentary. All the rocks here are just the same – very, very old, and made over a long, long period of time.”

Callie, inevitably one of the class members who had knelt down before the rock, turned towards him, looking up questioningly. “Is that why this place is so important? Because the rocks took so long to form? Because, well…” She stopped in mid-sentence, looked away, obviously feeling uncomfortable at the idea of asking what was on her mind.

“Go on,” Lovell prompted, he could tell something wasn’t making sense to her, “what is it?”

“Well,” she continued awkwardly, turning her attention back to the rock, “I thought all rocks take a long time to form…”

“They do,” Lovell replied, pleased by her insight, “but that’s not the main reason why these rocks are so special, or why they caused such a stir when… well, when I was your age.” Memories started to rise up yet again, but he pushed them back down. There was no time for nostalgic distractions. “Come on,” he said, “let’s walk a little further along, I want to show you the most important rock of all, that will help me explain better…”

Slowly, they made their way along the outcrop, their helmet beams casting bouncing white circles on the ground ahead of and alongside them, will’o the wisps accompanying them as they kicked their way through the thick purple hematite dust covering the crater floor. The rocks they passed all looked the same: shattered and fractured pale brown slabs and plates, some jutting up out of the ground, others almost completely buried in it, but all mottled and shot through with spider-web cracks, and all built of layer upon stacked layer of parchment-thin stone. And everywhere – the tiny purple-blue beads, looking like juice-fat berries freeze-dried by the cold martian air.

As they walked, Lovell recited names, picking-out individual rocks with his torch beam. They passed “Big Bend”, “Last Chance”, Cards” and “Shark Fin”, stopping for a few moments to examine each one before moving on. Each rock looked like an ancient book, perhaps a volume of spells or a medieval Bible, each buried spine-down in the dust of Mars, their exposed pages aged and yellowed by time and the brutally cold winds of Mars, flaking away sol by sol…

“How come there’s no sign of the lander here, sir?” a voice asked from the shadows. Lovell thought it was Cloud, one of Callie’s “gang”. A good sign, if they were starting to show curiousity too.

“It was taken away, Cloud,” Lovell replied, walking on slowly, carefully, “retrieved by a Mars Heritage team to prevent it being plundered by collectors, and taken back to Ares – ”

“I haven’t seen it in the museum…” Cloud said, suspiciously. Lovell wondered if the young girl had actually been to the museum or was just testing him.

“That’s because it isn’t there,” the teacher told her, “it was shipped back to Earth, for display in the Smithsonian.”

“Ah yes, of course it went to Earth…” Lewis snarled, “because they haven’t got enough things of their own to put in museums without taking stuff from us, too…”

Lovell was taken aback by the young boy’s out of the blue attack on Earth. Where had THAT come from? “I’m sure they have,” the teacher responded, “but the families of the JPL people who built and sent and operated the probe deserve to be able to see it, don’t you think?” Lewis’s face remained as expressionless as a stone mask.

“And besides,” Lovell added, “it was long before you were even born but trust me, there was such a public outcry after the Hubble telescope was allowed to burn up in 2009 that it was unthinkable to not bring back to Earth the ship which carried the equally-historic Opportunity trover to Mars…”

Absolutely unthinkable, he mused, remembering how, after CNN’s live pictures, taken from a high-flying Royal Air Force jet fighter, showing Hubble burning up in the atmosphere above the north of England – breaking apart in a tumbling hail of shooting stars which brought back uncomfortable memories of the shuttle Columbia’s final moments – had rippled around the world, literally millions of people had telephoned, emailed and written to NASA denouncing their decision to scuttle the amazingly-succesful instrument and demanding nothing like that ever be allowed to happen again.

“That’s the only thing that’d gone down-system,” Lovell reassured the young girl, “just like the Viking landers and Pathfinder, the lander from the first of the MERs will be put on display in Ares Museum, just as soon we’ve finished work on the gallery we’re planning to put it in. You’ll be able to see it soon Cloud, I promise.” Lovell said, confidently.

“What about tracks, then?” Cloud continued. “I thought the rovers left tracks in the dust? There are none here, and I didn’t see any out there on the plain… it would have driven past where we were on its way out of the crater… how come we didn’t see any?”

Lovell smiled a wry smile. It was a good question. But before he had a chance to answer it, another voice broke into the conversation.

“Maybe they were scooped up and taken back to Earth, too…” Lewis growled from nearby. Lovell ignored him.

“Because, Cloud, when the lander was retrieved by MH the crater was tidied-up,” Lovell replied, “all the wheel tracks, trenches, bits of air-bag, they were all collected up and taken away. One of Mars Heritage’s goals is to restore Visited locations to their original condition – ”

“But that’s ridiculous,” Lewis snorted, “why did they do that?”

“Because it’s history, and history is important,” Lovell replied testily, only to be cut-off again.

” – but surely the wheel tracks and trenches and stuff ARE history?” the young boy persisted. “They were part of the mission, part of its success… the rover couldn’t have discovered anything without driving around and leaving tracks, so why hide them? Unless you’re ashamed of them – ”

“Why would we be ashamed?” Lovell demanded, annoyed by the suggestion for reasons he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

“I don’t know, you tell me,” Lewis replied with forced brightness, “you’re the teacher…”

Lovell glowered at Lewis through his visor. Obviously the young martian was trying to intimidate him, but why?

There was no time to give it any further thought. They were there.

“Let’s stop here a moment,” Lovell said, halting just short of halfway along the line. “Over there,” he said, sweeping his torch beam over a rounded hummock of stones on the far side of the outcrop, “is El Capitan, probably the most important section of the whole outcrop.”

Again the class edged forwards for a better view. El Capitan was notably taller than the surrounding rocks – so much taller than Stone Mountain and the plate-flat Cards that it loomed over the outcrop’s centre like a mountain range.

Leaning forwards on her toes, wobbling slightly, Callie peered down and examined El Capitan closely. There was something even stranger about the oval-shaped rock than its unusual height. Right in its centre, surrounded by a “splash” of hardened, darker material, was a distinctly un-natural looking hole, maybe an inch across. And in the rock beneath El Capitan, separated from it by a berry-thick trough of dust, a second slab of rock was scarred with a second hole. Kneeling down, looking even more closely, she found similar holes in most of the rocks in front of her. It was as if someone had taken pot-shots at this section of the ledge with a blast pistol -

“What do you think they are, Callie?” Lovell asked quietly, noting the young martian’s focussed stare.

“It looks like something drilled into the rock here,” she replied, instinctively reaching out her hand to touch one of the markings, only to snatch it away again when she realised what she was doing. “Taking samples, maybe?”

Lovell knelt down beside the young martian. “The first part of your answer was right,” he told her, “this rock was drilled into, but the rover didn’t take any samples from here, or anywhere. It had a small drill on the end of its robot arm, and when it had smoothed an area a miniature microscope examined it in detail, taking images of any structures or features.” He was so close to the circular RAT marks now he felt dizzy.

“This is it, The Rock,” Lovell told the class, feeling the half century which had passed since he’d gazed wide-eyed at the latest images on the NASA MER website evaporating away. Suddenly he was back in his room at 7am on a dark winter’s morning, Saving picture after picture after picture on his computer, cursing it for being a school day, impatient to get home from lessons and study the pictures properly, to zoom-in on the rocks’ features and markings for himself -

Come on Lovell, remember where you are…

“When those early JPL scientists studied this rock they found that it had been altered by water, or rather by being in or underwater.” He looked down at El Capitan and yet again felt his pulse racing as he recalled watching the big press briefing. That night, with rain lashing against his window, wave after wave of it blown against his house by the strong winter winds, he had watched the JPL guys, dressed-up – and, after weeks of living in jeans, sneakers and NASA t-shirts, looking uncomfortable in – their best suits and ties, telling the world that they had proof, finally, that Mars was once a wet world. How Steve Squyres had beamed with pride – and relief? Probably. A lot had been riding on the mission, and, after the loss of previous probes, its success. If both – or even one of – the MERs had failed -

But they hadn’t failed, they had succeeded spectacularly, and drilling into a rock called El Capitan had proven once and for all what Mars nuts had known in their hearts all along – that the Red Planet was once painted with vivid slashes of cool, deep blue…

“There were… are… minerals inside this rock,” Lovell continued, sweeping his torch beam – shakily, because his hand was far from steady – over El Capitan’s hunched form, “which have been modified and changed by being exposed to a lot of water, for a long time…”

“So was this outcrop originally bigger?” Stella asked. “I mean, did later missions take pieces of it back to Earth to be studied?”

Lovell smiled at another good question; they seemed to be coming thick and fast now, just what every teacher dreamed of. “No, this is just about all of it,” he replied. “We thought that was what would happen,” he said, thinking back to the heated debates he had joined in on, discussions which lit up the Discussion Forums of websites like New Mars, “but Mars had other ideas. When Opportunity drove over to Endurance Crater – the big crater we saw from our rover, remember? – it found more outcrops of the same ancient bedrock, also modified by water, but they were much bigger, and thicker, and easier to break pieces off too, so later missions landed nearer Endurance and mined it, instead of this crater.”

Another memory whispered in his ear, and he looked at the rocks surrounding the base of El Capitan.

Ah, yes. Foale…

It was only because all those childhood hours spent pouring over the MER website’s picture gallery had given Lovell a mental map of the outcrop’s appearance that he could tell one of them was missing. He knew the bare patch of dusty-ground immediately behind and to the right of El Capitan should actually have had a walnut-sized stone protruding from it. Thanks to contacts within NASA’s Astronaut Corps he also knew what most only suspected – that the stone was now on Steve Squyres’ desk, set in the centre of a crystal globe of Mars – a gift from the first man on Mars, Michael Foale, who, on behalf of all the astronaut corps, had clambered down into the crater to retrieve a souvenir for the NASA engineer who had put so much of his heart, life and soul into the Mars Exploration Rovers.

It had been strictly against NASA’s rules of course; during mission training there had been no gasps of surprise when Foale’s idea had been dismissed out of hand. Strange then, that every single camera AND microphone trained on Foale as he walked the rim of Opportunity Crater, taking pictures, had failed at exactly the same time. When asked what he had done in the three minutes he had been out of contact Foale had shrugged and replied innocently, with his famous boyish grin, “Nothing, I just took in the view…” Dust-streaks on his legs and knees, “berries” embedded in the dirt caking his boots and a suspicious bulge in his breast pocket had suggested he had “taken” something else in those three minutes, but no-one had ever been able to prove it…

And Squyres himself insisted the unusually-flaky, yellow-brown rock in the paperweight on his desk had come from the floor of the Grand Canyon…

“So these rocks were once wet..?” Stella asked, her voice small in the darkness.

Another memory flickered into life inside Lovell’s mind: a tired but happy-looking Steve Squyres, beaming in front of the cameras at NASA HQ, telling the watching world how wet the rocks of Opportunity Outcrop had once been -

“Not just wet,” Lovell told the group, recalling the words that had made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end with excitement, “these rocks were once drenched with water – ”

Lewis started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Lovell asked, puzzled. Lewis shook his head, casting a sly glance at Callie, who looked away. Lovell let it go. “As I was saying,” he continued, “these rocks were once underwater, in fact this whole plain was probably underwater – ”

Lewis laughed again, harder this time.

“Okay, something’s obviously amusing you,” Lovell said with a weary sigh, “so come on, share it with the class.”

“Well,” Lewis replied, “I was just thinking…” He looked at Callie again, a strange, knowing look in his eye, smiling slyly as if what he was about to say was some kind of private joke between them. She stared back coldly. “These rocks will be ‘drenched’ again some day…”

Lovell felt the air chill suddenly. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Oh nothing,” Lewis continued, still smiling, “I just meant that, well, this plain will be a lake again one day – ” he shot another knowing look at Callie, this time a long, deep stare as he said, slowly and deliberately, “when the terraforming begins – ”

“It’s never going to happen…” Lovell heard a deep voice growl, a voice he didn’t recognise until he turned to see Callie staring icily at Lewis. Anger was burning in her eyes.

No, not anger – defiance.

“Yes, it is,” Lewis replied darkly, staring her down as the others in the group began to edge away from him, and from Callie, frightened by the confrontation developing in their midst. One by one they shuffled behind Lovell, using him as cover. They reminded him of bystanders in a western, clearing the street before a gunfight began. “One day,” Lewis went on, “when all these incomers are dead, and we’re in charge, when we’re making the decisions about the future, we’ll begin the terraforming – and there’s nothing you little m’s will be able to do about it…”

Callie was shaking now, her anger growing, a nuclear reaction of rage building inside her. Lovell was stunned, wondering where the children’s conflict had come from. He’d had no idea! All he could do was watch as Bennet, stepping forward to try and calm Lewis down, was pushed away by his friend.

“You stupid Bird Bone,” Callie hissed, edging towards Lewis, fists clenched, “you think we’ll just let you drown everything? You think we’ll sit back and let you ruin all… all…” she looked around her, “this?”

“All this?” Lewis repeated, “all this what? Look at it! It’s just dead rock, and dust and dirt,” he mocked, kicking at the ground with his boot, sending a cloud of cherry-coloured fines blossoming into the night air. “You stupid Claybornes,” he laughed derisively, looking at her through the slowly-falling dust and shaking his head, “always putting your beloved stone before people – ”

With a loud cry Callie lunged for him, arms outstretched, fingers curved like raptor claws. As the rest of the class shrieked, scuffling further behind Lovell for cover, Lewis span slowly to the left to avoid the girl’s attack, and almost succeeded.

Almost.

Callie managed to wrap one hand around the strap holding Lewis’ chest pack in place, and tugged on it as she stumbled past him, dragging him over with her. Tangled together, slowed by the low gravity, the two children fell to the ground, reminding Lovell of grainy black-and-white footage he’d seen of Apollo astronauts stumbling on the Moon. But on larger, higher-gravity Mars, the two young martians fell much faster, sending not clouds of ash-grey lunar dust into the air but showers of red and rose fines and purple berries in all directions -

- before slamming hard into the outcrop.

“No!!!”

Lovell let out a horrified cry but there was nothing he could do – flattened beneath the combined weight of the fighting martians, the small, fragile rocks clustered around El Capitan disintegrated, vanishing in a billowing cloud of red dust and berries, their ancient layers shattering into countless parchment-thin fragments.

When the dust had settled, Lovell found Lewis and Callie lying on the ground, limbs entangled. Dust and berries, dislodged from the crater slope by their impact, had fallen onto them like a purple-and-red waterfall, half-covering them and making it appear that they, like the rocks of the outcrop, were protruding from the crater wall.

Telling the rest of the class to stay where they were, Lovell edged forward, fearful the children had been injured in the fall. They were shocked and winded, but that was all. As Lovell watched, Callie raised her head, brushing dust off her visor with her hand. She was fine.

But El Capitan, and the whole historic middle section of the outcrop, had been crushed.

“How could you be so stupid?,” Callie said, turning furiously to Lewis, “this place is ruined forever now because of you, ruined…”

“What do you mean, because of me?” Lewis retorted, angrily slapping dust off his legs and arms, “you’re the one who slammed into me and sent us flying – ”

“Stupid lying Borg idiot!” Callie hissed, sweeping her gloved hand through the dust that had fallen around them, sending a shower of it towards and over Lewis, covering him again.

“Little ‘m fool!” Lewis fired back, his own hand sending a hail of berries flying towards the fallen girl. Some of the hard rock beads struck her helmet and pinged off in all directions. Enraged again Callie made a grab for Lewis’ outstretched leg, which Lewis promptly kicked at her -

“STOP it!! Both of you!!” Lovell shouted, so loudly that Callie, Lewis and all the other martian children instinctively threw their hands over the outside of their helmets, as if making to cover their ears. The two feuding children froze in place, stunned by his outburst.

“Just look what you’ve done…” Lovell said quietly.

Abashed, the young martians stared hard at the dust-covered ground.

“And over what?” Lovell demanded. “Terraforming? Terraforming? Lewis, that won’t happen for hundreds of years, if ever – ” Lewis started to protest about that but Lovell silenced him with a pointing finger. “Don’t,” the teacher warned him darkly, “just… just don’t.” Callie, rising slowly, started to chide her attacker, assuming she had the teacher’s support, but Lovell silenced her just as swiftly. “And you can be quiet too,” he told her forcefully, “I expected better of you than childish name calling! I thought you were the smart one in the class, not the clown!” Surprised by her rebuke, the young girl sat back down in the dust.

“This place has been undisturbed for billions of years,” Lovell said inbetween deep breaths, surveying the damage to the outcrop, “it’s survived ice ages, catastrophic floods, dust storms, meteor impacts, looters and collectors… and after just ten minutes of you two, and your stupid fighting, it’s in pieces..!”

“But he – ” Callie began to protest.

“But nothing,” Lovell replied, waving away her excuses, “enough talk, I’ve had it with you two, with this whole damned foolish teenage martian feud. You’re not in kindergarten arguing over who gets to play with the toys now! When are you all going to grow up? I mean… for pity’s sake!” he exclaimed, throwing his hands in the air, “Lewis usually talks a lot of garbage, but he was actually right for once: when all of us incomers have passed away you WILL be in charge; yours is the generation that’s going to have to decide what to do with Mars when the planet is fully explored! You’re going to have to choose between preserving this world and fully exploitating it – ”

“That’s just it!” protested Callie, “that’s just what I was trying to say! If they’re not stopped, they’ll ruin it!” She thumped her fist into the dirt, sending clouds of dust billowing up once again.

“Listen to yourself!” Lovell yelled at her, “you don’t get it, do you? There IS no ‘they’, just ‘you’,” He swept his gaze around the whole group, “ALL of you… you’re in this together, no matter how much Earth soil is in your cells or Earth blood in your DNA… you can’t afford to waste time with this Montague and Capulets crap!”

“Sir?” a puzzled voice asked from far away, obviously thinking: Montagu and Capulets?

“Forget it,” Lovell sighed. Shakespeare could wait. History could wait.

The future couldn’t.

“You Borg, Claybornes, Bird Brains and whatever the hell else you call yourselves are all going to have to learn how to work together if you’re going to make Mars a real home,” he said, “your home. And might as well start now.”

“What do you mean?” Lewis asked suspiciously.

“Well,” Lovell replied, kneeling down in front of the two young martians, ignoring the popping and creaking of his knees as he scooped-up a handful of red dirt, letting it trickle back thru his fingers. As it fell, the tiny grains and shards of hematite sparkled like fairy dust in the starlight. “There’s an old Earth saying… ‘you break it, you fix it’…”

He nodded sharply towards the ruined outcrop. “Fix it.”

Lewis and Callie exchanged a startled “what?” look.

“You heard me, fix it,” Lovell repeated slowly, sternly. “El Capitan. You broke it, you fix it. Use some of the smaller pieces to patch-up what’s left of El Capitan so it looks like it did before. No-one goes back to the rover until you’re done.” Sensing movement behind him he turned to see Bennett and Stella and several of Lewis’s and Callie’s other friends starting towards them, ready to assist. “Oh no, all of you can just stay where you are. In fact, sit down, make yourselves comfortable. They made this mess, they have to clear it up.” He shot Callie and Lewis a hard look as he added a clearly non-negotiable: “Alone.”

Quite convinced their teacher had gone insane, the martians sheltering behind him sat down, one by one, on the dusty floor of Opportunity Crater, watching silently as their two friends stood up, dusted themselves off and hesitantly started gathering fragments of outcrop bedrock from the ground around them.

There was nothing else they could do.

It took two hours.

Two long hours of stooping low over the ground, looking for pieces of rock just the right size and just the right shape; of fitting them together like pieces of the hardest jigsaw ever made; of peering at half century old, black and white 2D NASA MER images projected onto the insides of their helmet visors; of back-straining bending to pick up the fragments; of hair-pulling frustration at trying to fit them together to make El Capitan re-appear out of the shattered chaos of their fall…

As the sky darkened and filled with stars, they argued, hurled insults, even punched and kicked a few times. Phobos and Deimos both passed over them, casting their bone-white light down into the heart of the crater and onto the pair of martians struggling to recreate what they had broken. Kneeling side by side, rebuilding the historic outcrop, fingers growing numb with fatigue and cold, all the time watched by the others, the two young new-worlders grew tired, more tired than they had felt for ages, so tired they wanted to just lay down in the red dust and sleep and never wake up… but eventually their efforts began to pay off. First they recreated the basic, rough form of the shattered section of outcrop, scuplting progressively smaller chips, shards and flakes of cream-coloured bedrock into El Capitan’s distinctive hump-backed shape. When that was done they moved in to add detail with tools from their utility belts, scraping vugs into the rock with the sharp points of geology hammers, carving jagged scratches across and over the rock faces with diamond-tipped spikes used to secure tethers during dust storms, again and again consulting the old NASA photos painted on their HUD visors, checking their work for accuracy, over and over and over -

Until finally it was done.

“Not bad,” Lovell said, looking down at the repaired outcrop as the two exhausted martians sat down on the crater floor beside their creation with a deep, weary sigh. It was never going to fool an expert, or even anyone who had looked at those old NASA images for longer than a minute, but it would do until he could sneak a full MH team out there to do the job properly. He was owed favours. There would be no comeback on the kids.

“Yes… good work you two,” Lovell said approvingly, reaching out his hands to the two shattered martians and yanking them up off the crater floor. “Time to go home.”

With their bootprints smoothed over and all traces of their visit removed, the group made its way out of the crater. One by one, grabbing and pulling on each other’s hands for support, they climbed back out of the low dip in the martian desert that solar system atlases called the Challenger Memorial Station. Their boots slip-slipped in the loose dirt, so many times that they lost count, and each misplaced step sent another sheet of plum- and cherry-coloured dust hissing down onto the outcrop, spilling around it and covering their earlier footprints.

The “new” El Capitan was soon half-buried beneath dust, and looked just as ancient and undisturbed as the intact, original rocks standing on either side.

Lovell, bringing up the rear, was hauled out by Callie and Lewis, working together again for the second time that sol. As his boots landed on the solid ground of the Meridiani Plain once more, stained rose and purple by the hematite-rich dust laying deep in the crater, the old teacher stopped. Hands on his knees, bent over, Lovell gulped in deep lungfuls of stale, recycled air, savouring each brackish breath.

Only one thing left to do, he told himself, straightening up and gazing out over the crater.

The most important thing of all.

Without saying a word to the martian children, who had once again spread out to form a ragged line around the edge of the crater, Lovell reached over his right shoulder and retrieved a large metallic cylinder which had been pushed into a pouch on his backpack. With the young martians watching him intently, leaning and sagging against each other like half-melted snowmen, as weary as they were puzzled, and their confusion deepened when Lovell began to unscrew the flask’s tight lid, showing it wasn’t just an extra air tank as they had thought…

Carefully, slowly, Lovell unscrewed the top. No need to rush, he told himself, feeling the lid turning beneath his fat, gloved fingers, don’t spoil everything now, not when you’ve come all this way…

He felt a click. Ah. One turn remained, just one. After that, he knew, only a handful of seconds would remain.

Now.

“A billion years ago…” Lovell began, peering down into the shadowed depths of the crater, straining to make out the long, spine-like shape of the outcrop. There it was, only just visible in the deep dark of the martian night. From up on the crater rim it showed no sign of damage. Good. “A billion years ago,” he repeated, speaking to the star-strewn sky which dwarfed them all, “these ancient rocks tasted water. First it fell on them as rain from the sky, then it steadily rose up around them until it eventully covered them as this plain became a lake…”

A couple of the kids found enough energy to summon up a quiet giggle, which died away when Lovell turned his gaze towards them. But instead of snarling at the martians, as they had expected, the teacher simply smiled.

“I know, it doesn’t seem important to you,” he conceded, “you just want to get back to the comfort of your Habs, with your VR sims and your Net, but there’s something you have to think about, something you have to take back with you…

“If you decide it’s what you want when you grow up then maybe, one day in the far, far future,” Lovell continued, “rain will fall on these rocks again, before becoming submerged for a second and final time.” He didn’t use the word terraforming, he couldn’t bring himself to. “But that’s a long way away, maybe centuries…that’s a long time to go thirsty, don’t you think?” he asked the watching martians. Some – Callie and Lewis included – nodded in agreement.

“I say we should give them a taste now, don’t you?” Lovell asked, and completed the final turn of the flask’s lid. It came off without any resistance, silently in the thin air, and after peering inside Lovell held the flask out over the edge of the crater and tipped it upside down -

The watching martians gasped as turned to liquid silver by the light of the stars blazing in the sky above, fell in a sparkling, glittering torrent towards the outcrop below. Even tho it had been super-saturated with salt to lower its freezing point, making it ten times saltier than the famous waters of Earth’s Dead Sea, that just delayed the inevitable: as soon as the flask’s water was exposed to the vacuum-thin martian atmosphere most of it evaporated in mid-air before even coming close to the rocks, and wafted away into vapour which vanished before their eyes.

But a trickle stubbornly resisted, and fell directly onto the rocks below, freezing on contact with their stone surfaces, encasing them in a sheath of ice. Staring down from the crater rim, Lovell gazed at El Capitan and smiled at its new beauty: reflecting the starry sky above the crater, the ice was studded with a myriad of tiny points of light, each one sparkling and twinkling, as if a thousand spirits or sprites lived and danced within it.

“Come on,” Lovell said, curling his arms around the shoulders of Callie and Lewis, the old enemies, who had made their way to his side, “let’s go home.” As one they turned and walked away from the crater.

Leading the group, Lovell, exhausted beyond words, smiled contentedly, knowing that when the first rays of dawn speared down into the crater the next morning the ice encasing El Capitan would melt, evaporating away into the thin martian atmosphere in a flash, leaving the rock as dusty, bare, and bone-dry as it had been for billions of years…

But not before some water had trickled into its newly-carved cracks, caves and crevices…

And for just a few moments, the tiny caves and caverns hidden inside El Capitan, which had been dry for so many millennia, would be soaked with water once again.

No, not soaked.

Drenched.