Halfway House on Mars

TThe Perihelion came down on the pad at Jezero Station at fourteen minutes past noon, local time, on the first sol of the new arrival season, in a long roaring shudder of retro-rockets and a cloud of rust-colored dust that took nine minutes to settle.

Mara felt every second of it, strapped into a couch on the lander's second deck between a large silent welder and a ten-year-old girl who had been sick twice on the way down and was now holding Mara's hand so hard that her fingers had gone numb. Seven months in transit. Seven months of recycled air and freeze-dried food and exercise bands and the same forty faces, and the stars outside the one small porthole never changing. And now, through the porthole, at last, something else: a flat brown-orange plain under a butterscotch sky, scattered with rocks, and on the horizon, low and dark, the far wall of a crater forty kilometers wide.

Mars.

When the engines stopped, the silence was enormous. Then somebody on the deck above started clapping, and then everybody was, forty people strapped into couches clapping and laughing and crying, and the girl beside Mara let go of her hand and wiped her eyes and said, in a small, astonished voice, "I feel heavy."

She was not heavy. None of them were. Mars pulled at a body with a little more than a third of the force of Earth. But after seven months of nothing at all, a third felt like a great deal. When the crew chief called them to unstrap, Mara stood up, and wobbled, and sat down again hard, and laughed out loud at the strangeness of it: of having weight again, of having the floor be the floor.

It took two hours to get off the lander. There were checks, and suit fittings, and a long patient queue for the umbilical tunnel to the crawler, a pressurized bus on six enormous mesh wheels that would carry them the three kilometers from the pad to the station. Through its thick windows, as it rocked and crunched across the plain, Mara saw Jezero Station for the first time.

There was not much to see. That was the first surprise. Mara had imagined domes, gleaming towers, something from a poster. What there was, mostly, was ground: low long mounds of piled regolith, rust-red and smooth, like enormous sleeping animals, with here and there a hatch, or a mast with an antenna, or a field of dark solar panels tilted toward the sun. Everything important was buried, a meter and a half under the dirt, out of the radiation. Only the greenhouses showed above the surface, a long row of them on the south side, their roofs of thick layered glass glowing faintly pink with the light of the lamps inside. And beyond everything, rising on the western horizon, the rim of the crater, gray-brown and worn, and above it the small pale sun.

"Your first time?" said the crawler driver, a cheerful woman with a buzz cut and a patch on her sleeve, over her shoulder, and then laughed. "Of course it is. Everybody's is. Where are you headed?"

"The Halfway," said Mara. "I'm the new host."

The driver's eyebrows went up, and she looked at Mara in the mirror with new interest.

"You're replacing Otti?" She whistled. "Good luck. She's been running that place since before I got here. Since before most people got here." She swung the crawler round a boulder. "You'll be fine. Probably. Just don't touch her kettle."

"What's she like? Otti?"

The driver laughed.

"Otti Brask," she said, "is the grumpiest, kindest person on this planet. She'll tell you off for tracking dust in the door and then stay up all night with you when you can't sleep because you miss rain. She came out on the second ship, nine, ten years ago. She was a cook on an Antarctic base before that, for twenty years. She says Mars is just Antarctica with worse weather and better neighbors." She swung the crawler round another boulder. "When I came, I didn't talk to anybody for three weeks. Just sat in my room. Otti brought me tea every night and left it outside the door and never said a word. On the twenty-second night I opened the door and she was sitting on the floor in the hallway, waiting. We talked till four in the morning." She glanced at Mara in the mirror. "She's retiring. Moving to the greenhouses. She says she's too old to say hello to forty strangers every two years. I don't believe her."

The Halfway was at the western edge of the station, at the end of a long buried corridor that smelled of dust and machine oil and, faintly, impossibly, of something baking. From outside, if you could have seen it, it was just another long mound of red regolith. From the inside, when the inner door of the dust lock hissed open and Mara stepped through, it was a kitchen.

A real kitchen. Low-ceilinged and warm and bright, with a long scarred table down the middle and mismatched chairs and shelves crowded with jars and tins, and a rack of green herbs growing under a purple lamp in the corner, and on a hot plate by the wall, steaming gently, a battered steel kettle that looked as if it had come all the way from Earth. Beyond the kitchen, through an archway, Mara could see a common room with a worn couch and cushions and bookshelves, and at the far end of it, set deep into the wall, a window.

It was the window that stopped Mara in the doorway. A great thick slab of glass, a meter and a half wide, beveled deep into the regolith, and through it, perfectly framed, the floor of Jezero crater going away west in rust and ochre, and the long gray wall of the rim, and the butterscotch sky, and the small pale sun beginning to go down toward the rim. And around the sun, very faintly, a halo of something that was almost, but not quite, blue.

"You'll get used to it," said a voice. "No, you won't. Nobody does. Shut the inner door; you're letting the dust in."

She was standing by the kettle. A short, square, white-haired woman of sixty-eight, in a faded blue station jumpsuit with the sleeves rolled up and an apron over it, with a broad weathered face and small sharp blue eyes and enormous forearms, holding a wooden spoon like a weapon. She looked Mara up and down for a long moment, the way a cook looks at a delivery.

"Otti Brask," she said. "You're Mara. You're late. The others will be here in half an hour, all six of them, and they'll be tired and frightened and they'll have dust in their hair and none of them will know how to work the shower." She held out the spoon. "Stir this. Don't let it stick. It's lentils. It's always lentils on the first night. Tradition."

Mara took the spoon. The pot was heavy and warm, and the lentils smelled of cumin and onion and something green from the herb rack, and the kitchen was warm, and the window was going slowly gold and blue, and for the first time in seven months Mara felt the floor solid under her feet.

Somewhere behind the walls a fan was humming, and a pump ticked, steady as a clock, and the air had the faint flat dry taste that Mara would learn, later, was simply the taste of air that had been breathed before.

Otti watched Mara stir. Then she turned away, and filled two mugs from the battered kettle, and set one down at Mara's elbow without a word.

"Welcome to Mars," she said gruffly, to the kettle. "Welcome to the Halfway. Ninety sols. Then they're on their own." She sipped her tea. "And then you do it again."