A Martian Affair

I’m not usually like this. Family, work, even a mission. I have it all. Lucky, I admit.

One of my mothers is still alive. The other died two Earth years ago. No parent ever dies at the right time, but she died much honored and beloved. She told us she was ready. She wanted to spare us, I guess. So, how could I have problems? I’ve managed.

I have come to sit in my favorite place. The one I come to when I need it. I have just heard something very disturbing, and I don’t know what to do.

I should remember this is one of my mothers I’m stewing about. One who delighted in my sister and me. One who helped raise us and protect us. A fem of importance to me. She deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Sitting here, looking out there, settles me. In the displayscreen window is the Valles Marineris, eternal and unchanging. But it is marked by my mother Monica’s works, as is all of Mars. We can’t forget what she did. It is all around us. In the center of my view of the Valles is this end of the four thousand kilometer long airship line she built. Our station, the Boroughs station, lies there.

The long line of the station blocks a good part of the near view. Its looming glass boarding shed, topped with its thick, dark, mineral glass overhanging roof, sits there. It has been cleverly configured to work with the shielding of the cliffs on either side of the chasm to protect its users from the ever present radiation that comes from the skies. When you look out from inside that structure, waiting for your train to take you across Mars to Lowell at the other end of the giant chasm that slices across Mars, you feel like you are standing in the open on the surface of your home planet. She did that. The same fem whose unfathomable action is now bedeviling me.

Yet this creation, impressive as it is, is just an atom in the universe of the blasted landscape of the Valles, which is itself a modest slice on the surface of the vast planetary surface. There is so much more to it than us, as there is so much more to my mother’s confession than her words. That is a volcano erupting from our family’s netherworld. My mother Monica is never simple.

I am trying to make sense of what she has just told me but can’t.

The view soothes me because I can imagine I am somewhere else, looking back at my figure sitting at one of the single tables. People like to be alone sometimes. It is the only sight of the outside that faithfully simulates direct perception. The vast size of the composite displayscreen installed on the inner wall, added to the undivided space of the Commons, rise up twenty stories to clear the top rank of apartment units, pleasuring the eye with a virtual space as big as all outdoors. The spyeyes are sprinkled all over now and you can see many places on the surface, but it is the only sight you can imagine is real. You see it as it is right as if you could see through the canyon wall to its outer side. It pictures every stone, every gust of wind whipping up the endless sand, and every dust devil lifting that sand high above the surface.

Of course, you cannot see it directly through any known window material with any degree of safety. Mars’ radiation, unhindered by atmospheric shielding, would make you sick in short order. But that would be the same as on the Moon, or in deep space. On a planet with some atmosphere, though, you don’t need to cope with endless vistas of universal nothingness. Our planet is ultimately relatable. It looks like some arid desert on Earth.

I have lived here for only eight of my thirty two years, but the city where I was born had a space almost exactly the same as this one. That was my favorite place when I lived there, and it still is here.

Both these cities are on Mars. Lowell, where I was born, is built on the same plan as this one, Burroughs. Oh, they have made improvements over the years. The tiebacks that restrain the canyon wall have more tensile strength and look even more lacy than the ones at Lowell, and they have made a myriad of other detail improvements. And we have Air Marineris to give us someplace to go. But most everything else is the same.

There are positional variations in the two sites, although they are both in the same kind of sedimentary strata. They are approximately the same size and height differences are negligible. At this end, though, there is no adjacent ancient tributary to the mighty river that once ran down the Valles,corners Lowell to provide another (smaller) canyon view. It may seem to be cheating, but we use theirs. It’s nicer.

What is important, however, is the sustaining force that our 1-Briefing is to us. Without its link to the wider world we would be wedged between rocks five kilometers deep just inside a cliff, cut off from it all.

So, when I immersed myself in its healing balm, I was not alone. Everybody needs something when it gets bad. This is no paradise. We still have a lot of problems. It had been a bad day.

My birth mother is Monica Chapata. Yes, that one. My care mother was Ondine Levesque. She was famous too. She was the first surgeon on this planet, and she co-founded Mars Medical School. She did most of the early research on post surgical healing on Mars, and somehow she found the time to raise my sister, Urpi, and me. You could say that we grew up clinging to the hem of her skirt. She took us everywhere, That was the only way she could do it. I may be prejudiced in favor of my mother, but I think she did extremely well with us, considering her responsibilities.

To us children, our parents seemed happy, if so busy we didn’t often have a chance to get together. We spent our family time almost exclusively with our mother Ondine. We were not often with Monica, who was almost always busy at work. Yet there was something buried that made us both anxious. I am sure my sister Urpi sensed it more than me, because she became a very serious child. It seemed a bit strange to us that Uncle Boris, who we found out later, was also our biological father, had so much time to spend with us, when our mother Monica, who did the same work, did not. We just assumed she had to work more. Maybe it was true.

Our mother Ondine died two years ago. She was much lamented by all. She had done much good. She was a sweet and caring person always, and, though we had two mothers, it should be no mystery that she was the one we were both most attached to. I never expected I would be happy that she died when she did. Of course, it would have all turned out differently had she survived. She was so good with people that she would have found a way around the trouble we’re in.

Monica had asked Urpi and I to meet her up top in her office very early, well before anyone else was there. She had something to tell us and she obviously wanted some privacy for it. Her office was more her home than the apartment was. She often slept there after late nights. The way she drove everyone, and insisted in staying in front of them, just late hours wouldn’t have been sufficient.

In the early hours, there is no one there. The staff need to sleep sometime. All the residential quarters are in the city of Burroughs, far below. People go to work up top, where the facilities are, but they don’t often sleep there. Industrial space is much cheaper to build on top of the cliffs, where one need only scoop and put the fill on top for shielding. In the low gravity, the structure of the buildings can be much more basic than it needed to be below, or on Earth, for that matter. It is up there where the farms were situated, and all the industrial and commercial facilities too. The essential connection was the pair of industrial sized elevators that transported all and sundry from the city below to the top where we were about to meet.

Burroughs was to be a transport hub to connect with our next step, the planets, from this end of the line. We were assembling a skyhook fed by a Spinlaunch facility, already constructed. It sends up construction parts for the skyhook. Lowell was pointed insystem, but, at Burroughs, we were pointed out. We were going to Ceres, and Titan, eventually. There were lots of resources there. And it was closer to the stars, for all the good that did us. No one had figured a practical way to them yet.

Momma Mo’s office looks more or less the same as the aerie she used to take us to at Lowell. That was not often, but it was frequent enough for us to become familiar with it from an early age.

I had met Urpi at the elevator lobby before we went up and we had asked one another what was going on. Neither of us had an answer. It certainly wasn’t promising. Poor Urpi was even more cut off than I was. She had spent more time at Lowell, finishing up at the medical school, than I, being only recently transferred here. Her contact was restricted to the infrequent calls Momma Mo made. At least, I saw her fairly often and ate with her occasionally. I had come here to be in the first class of engineering students at the new polytechnic as soon as I had finished my primary education.

When we stepped out of the elevator cabin, Momma Monica stood in front of us. She was in the vast hall leading to the various offices. To check whether we were accompanied? We didn’t know that either. We followed her anxiously to her office with its cubby at the front, showing its raptors view of the valley below from horizon to horizon.

She motioned us to sit in the two black metal chairs in front of her desk and we faced her across it, more like business colleagues than family. With Momma Monica, our connection was different. It was not the intimate, apron strings connection we had had with Momma Dini. And it showed in her slightly formal mode of expression. She started with no introduction.

“I need to tell you something about your mother and me. We were both deeply in love with one another. They selected your mom for me, but that was mere happenstance. From the first moment I saw her I loved her, and she, me. I never loved anyone the way I loved her. But even though we were in love, we were not perfectly matched. No two people are that. You are both old enough to understand that. There are always differences between partners. There were between your mom and me.

“It’s no secret that your mom was more maternal than I am or ever wanted to be. The truth is that she was the one who insisted on kids. Unfortunately, her health made that problematic, and we decided that I was the one to bear you. As we have told you, Uncle Boris donated the sperm. I felt a bit uncomfortable with that, but that’s what your mom wanted. I loved her, and I went along. We got you two, and I have never been unhappy with that. You are two amazing kids.”

Urpi, who is more outspoken than I am, became impatient:

“You didn’t bring us here to tell us that, Mom, we know all the background already. You’ve been spinning and we have been sitting patiently. So, what is it?”

Monica backed off from her slouch over the desk that brought her closer to us and sat straight up in her chair.

“For a long time while I was with your mother, I was also with Chantelle. We loved each other too.”

Urpi responded:

“What? Say that again? I didn’t get it.”

“I said, I was having a long term affair with Chantelle.”