The Sunborn by Gregory Benford Read Free Book Online Page A

was Eucalyptus papuana, appearing in its silvery grace on postage stamps, calendars, and tea towels. They framed the human world of tea-colored, dammed-up ponds, of hot paddocks of milling sheep, of rusting, corrugated sheds tilted into trapezoids—trees standing as silent sentinels at sunset, glowing like aluminum in the settling quiet.
    On impulse she had ordered a didgeridoo, the ancient echoing instrument of the Aborigines. It came at her personal expense in their fourth shipment—at nearly a million dollars, but they were rich in what Viktor called pseudomoney, from the book and interview rights; though Axelrod seemed to get most of it. The slender tube was labeled in the manifest a “wood trumpet,” but it sounded nothing like that.
    Some Aboriginals had complained that women were not allowed to play didgeridoos in their culture, that she was showing disrespect, but when worldwide sales of didgeridoos and concert tickets rocketed, they fell silent. She learned the trick of holding air in her bulging cheeks and breathing it out while her lungs drew air in, so that she could maintain a long, hollow tone. The skill was unique; normally people never needed to speak while they breathed. The long, low notes fit into her memory of the great Australian deserts, and when she played, the notes somehow sang also of red Mars.
    Watching Gusev Crater through the wall screens—which improved in resolution and size with every upgrade, so that these days it was as though they had a bay window in each hab room—and playing the didgeridoo, called forth her sense of bleak oblivion. The spareness of deserts had always made her mind roam freely. She could find fresh perspectives on her field biology that way, and in those years had made her reputation as the central authority on the Marsmat. Labs Earthside worked at her behest, comparing Marsmat DNA to Earthly forms.
    Somehow in her mind her girlhood and Mars blended. She had come to see biology as the frame of the world in those girlish years—the whole theater, in which vain humans were only actors. Mars confirmed this. On Earth, knowing biology quietly brought order to the ragtag rustling of people, ensured that their lives had continuity with the hushed natural world.
    Just as it could to Mars. On that article of faith she had built their years here together.
    Over a rise and there ahead the Vent R opening yawned, faint sulfur stains spreading from its mouth. The sharp ridges framing this canyon could not dispel the sensation of spacious wealth. Satellite observations had first detected vapor here, then found hints of vent chemicals. Sure enough, the lambent light glowed through an early morning fog before them. Iron-dark stains mingled near the vent splashes of yellow and orange. Red slopes nearby rose up and darkened to cobalt, then into indigo. Evidence of other ventings, long ago?
    A dust devil in the distance wrote a filigree path across the rusty plains. She had always wanted to somehow sense their sandstorm sting and the moist kiss of the dawn fogs. All this time, and she had never felt Mars on her skin. Not quite. Then she recalled the hard days of the second year here, just before the first return launch—which she and Viktor declined. There had been one emergency, when she had been forced to run from their first, collapsing greenhouse—headed for the hab’s lock in a stretching minute of panic that she would never forget. Raw Mars, sucking at her lungs, drying her skin—
    “Looks like an easy one,” Viktor called out as they ground to a stop beside the broad mouth of the thermal vent. Splashes of yellow and dingy brown marked the sand near the mouth. He pointed. “Vapor deposition from active periods, too.”
    Uchida was robo-master, and he put them to work unloading. Julia paced around Vent R, letting her senses take in details it was easy to miss. Inside a suit made it harder to get the feel of a new vent, the traceries of vapor deposition, stains, erosions.