She watched him, thinking, This is the reality.

Not feeling a thing.

He finally got the little black-velvet pill out of his jacket and opened it. It was very large and simple, a diamond of at least three carats, orbited by a smaller ruby, set in a mathematically perfect swirl of platinum.

“Patrice, will you marry me?” Jere said.

For long moments, Patrice couldn’t say anything. She looked at the ring, thinking, The red is probably Mars. She looked up at Jere. The sweat was back on his brow. His eyes were wide and frightened, as if he was holding a gun on a wild animal that the gun might be too small to take down. His bottom lip quivered, just once.

Patrice became aware that the restaurant had gone almost silent in breath-held anticipation. She wanted to turn and look at all the tourists and not-so-hip people, and say, yes, I’m being proposed to, what’s the big deal, why can’t you go back to your fucking dinner. That’s why he did it here. Because everyone would be watching. Including the networks. The thought was sudden, clear, and ice-cold.

Jere still looked at her. She waited for beads of sweat to coagulate and run down his forehead, like something you’d see in a linear. But they remained stubbornly discrete. Jere’s lips parted, as if he wanted to say something else.

If he says please, I’ll tell him to go soak his head.

Jere settled for licking his lips, but he said nothing.

No. Tell him no. This isn’t real. This is a fucking stage-play.

“Yes,” Patrice said.

All the tension went out of Jere’s body. He bowed his head forward, before quickly lifting it. He smiled at Patrice.

If he says thank you, I’m going to take it back, Patrice said. Jere opened his mouth.

Patrice reached out and put a hand over it.

“Shh,” she said.

Over the palm of her hand, his eyes looked almost relieved.

Even if this is a farce, it’s important, Patrice said. Even if this is always what I wanted. Even if this is always what I dreaded.

Falling

Being paired with the lesbians wasn’t distracting to Geoff. During the long trip in the Can, they’d never been openly affectionate. And they’d never invited Geoff Smith to join them in any of their pilot’s-cabin activities. They dressed in shapeless clothes, and stayed away from the barbarian and the other contestants as much as they could. And Geoff had his own thoughts, important thoughts, so far beyond sex that it didn’t really matter who they were. And, when sex got bothersome, he had his own interactive library.

So he didn’t really catch himself looking at them until the day of the drop, when they put on their squeezesuits. They came out to the ring where the drop pods were, looking like whitejumpsuited versions of Tomb Raider, or some other early interactive heroine. Perfectly sculpted buttocks, breasts that stood out full and firm (a little more full than the glances he’d seen on board, Geoff thought). Even their crotches were sculpted, hiding nothing. Which made no sense, Geoff knew, because even at their thinnest, the squeezesuits were at least four millimeters thick. Which was enough to hide any detail.

Maybe they did it to better balance the pressure of the suit on our skin, Geoff thought. Struggling not to look. Struggling to keep his racing thoughts on track. Because, suddenly, all the activities Laci and Wende took part in seemed to grow in importance, until they were all there was.

“This thing hurts!” Laci said, rubbing at the front of her thighs with the heel of her hand. Her voice was tinny and compressed, coming over the suit com.

“Did you use the depilatory?” Frank said.

“Of course,” Laci said, still rubbing.

Frank frowned and looked back at the passenger cabin. Only the three of them were in the launch ring, per Frank’s instructions and Petrov’s enforcement. It made sense. The ring was a small, cold crawlway around the outside of the ship. There wasn’t much room for even the four of them.

“It pinches,” Geoff said, scissoring his legs. And the suit was painful. Even after the depilatory and the whole-body lubricant.

“You used the lube?” Frank said.

“Of course!” Laci said.

Frank looked at Wende. “What about you?”

“If he’s complaining, I’m fine,” Wende said.

“If the suit is painful, that might mean . . .”

“I’m fine!” Wende snapped.

“Blistering, epidermis tears, internal bleeding, none of these would be fun.”

“I read the manual. I’m fine.” Wende said, arms crossed.

“It’s really painful,” Laci said.

“Bad enough to strip down?” Wende said. “Bad enough to maybe lose our drop window?”

She pointed at the blue numbers, flickering down towards zero. There were only eleven minutes left.

Laci frowned.

“If you got a problem, better strip and get it fixed,” Wende said.

“No, no problem.”

“Good,” Wende said.

“If there’s a suit problem, we’ll blame you for it,” Frank said. Wende started. “What does that mean?”

“We have this all on film. You bullied her into going.”

“We don’t have time!”

Frank frowned and flew over to Laci. “If you’ve got a problem, let’s get it fixed now. He popped off Laci’s header and opened her suit, turning her away from Wende and Geoff. Wende’s frown deepened. “Come on! We don’t have time for this.”

“Shut up,” Frank said, and his hands went back to Laci’s crotch.

“There,” he said. “A small fold. I did what I could to smooth it out. You’ve lost weight.”

Laci nodded.

“Come on,” Wende said, from the door of their drop capsule. Laci followed.

“What about you?” Frank asked Geoff.

“I’m fine.”

“You said it pinched.”

“I’m fine!” Geoff tried to slide past the old man.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Frank said, grabbing Geoff’s arm. “I’m not going to have you die down there, either.

“No, it’s OK, really.”

“Where is it?” Frank said, popping off Geoff’s header and splitting the suit.

“I don’t have a problem!”

“I can make you stay on the ship.” Old gray eyes, cold and hard. Geoff didn’t doubt Frank meant it. And he had no doubt Frank would do it, even if it killed Laci and Wende’s chance. And he’d have to share the ship with them on the way back.

Unable to speak, Geoff pointed at his groin.

Frank split the suit further and thrust his hand down inside it. Geoff felt his facce go hot and red. They’re recording all of this, he thought. Even if it doesn’t go on the show, it’s in a digital archive somewhere. Or somebody was intercepting it. They’d play this damn clip at parties until the end of time.

Geoff looked heavenward as Frank fingered his balls. He pulled out a hand. “I don’t feel anything.”

“It’s not that bad,” Geoff said. “It’s better.”

“Is it?”

“Yes! Yes!”

“Come the fuck on!” Wende called from the pod, gesturing frantically with her hand. Frank chuckled as he helped Geoff get his suit sealed back up. “Go on,” he said, shoving Geoff towards the hatch.

Wende grabbed him and stuffed him into one of the drop chairs. They were nicely padded with open-cell foam, and looked very comfortable until the top closed on him like a clam, compressing his body in a foam sandwich. The other lids flipped down. Geoff looked around. Laci and Wende lay on one side of him. Ahead was a tiny round porthole. It showed the blackness of space, devoid of even a star.

If I turned out the cabin lights, I could see stars, Geoff thought.

“One minute until drop,” Petrov’s voice came through the suit comm. The pinching, tingling feeling in Geoff’s crotch slowly came back. He grimaced. It would go away. It didn’t matter.

Or maybe it would matter. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to do anything. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to do any of his experiments.

No! Geoff thought.

“Thirty seconds,” Petrov again.

Geoff wondered if Laci and Wende were holding hands, deep under the foam. He tried to wiggle his fingers nearer to Wende, but they wouldn’t move.

“Ten seconds.”

The suit wouldn’t be a problem.

“Nine.”

Or maybe it would.

“Eight.”

He’d be able to do the experiments. Even the IBM ones.

“Seven.”

He’d prove there was life on Mars, once and for all.

“Six.”

Or he wouldn’t.

“Five.”

Or the Wheel would break, and they wouldn’t go anywhere.

“Four.”

Or they’d hit a little too hard, and they’d be stuck.

“Three.”

Or the airbags wouldn’t inflate at all, and they’d go splat.

“Two.”

Geoff felt sweat crawl its way down his temple. It landed in his eye, stinging.

“One.”

Explosive bolts went bang! And he was turning, rolling. The pod hissed and darted this way and that as it maneuvered away from the Enterprise. There was a long hiss, and Geoff felt the little capsule accelerate. It was a strange sensation. To feel something outside his body, for the first time in 6 months. Geoff wondered how well he’d walk on Mars. Or when he got home. Then the capsule rotated around and Mars filled the little porthole, salmon-red and streaked with yellows and blacks.

This is it, Geoff thought. I’m falling towards another planet. Falling.

Towards.

Another damn planet!

Geoff wanted to pump a fist in the air. Take that, NASA! He thought. Take that, skeptics!

I’m here, I’m going to prove there’s life here, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me. It was an indescribable feeling. A little like the day he got accepted to the show. But deeper, sharper, and edged with fear.

Because, of course, he was falling.

Towards another planet.

A lot of things had to go right before he stepped out of the capsule and onto the pink dust of Mars.

But in that moment, that was okay. Things would go right. Nothing would stop him. Geoff heard the echo of his breathing, high and fast.

Mars grew slowly in the porthole.

Bar

Patrice suggested Herald’s Under Melrose for the evening of Winning Mars’ first drop, but Ron vetoed it.

“You have a higher composite profile than any current head of state,” Ron said. “You can’t hide. People are going to be watching your show, and they’re going to be watching you, too, in little windows right beside it.”

“They’ll kill me if anyone goes splat,” Jere said.

“That’s a chance you take.”

So the three of them ended up going to The View, an ultra-touristy place filled with smartfog displays and ghost-windows and rent-by-the-minute somatics, as well as the latest notyet-scheduled psychoactives, delivered in ultra-expensive cocktails. Evan found them, either by happy chance or by location service, and the four of them held down seats at the bar, just below the non-interactive smartfog display that kept cycling through various famous cityscapes. Just eye-candy, marshmallow shapes of familiar spires, but something that the tourists liked to goggle at.

Jere sipped his dry space-distilled Stoli Orbit martini and tried to ignore the eyes. It was like he was on display, and everyone knew what was happening. He caught fragments of conversation: That’s Jere. That’s him. Winning Mars. They start tonight. He’s here to bewatched. Fucking showoff.

Patrice sat pressed against him, her warm flesh mostly bare against his thin silk shirt. She’d chosen the most minimal cocktail dress she had, a tiny bit of silvered silk with some intelligence that kept it from revealing bits of Patrice as she sat, walked, and stood. It was supposed to get attention, but people only glanced at her before staring at Jere. Great idea, dad, Jere thought. If someone dies . . .

“If someone croaks, you’re gonna get massacred,” Evan said, leaning close. “You sure you don’t want to visit the restroom right about now?”

“I can’t,” Jere said. “I need to be seen.”

“What, are you a fucking pope, raising the glad-hand?”

“Apparently.” Nodding at Ron.

“Fuck the old bastard. They aren’t going to rip him apart.”

“You sound so certain someone’s gonna die.”

Evan shrugged. “Better safe than dead.”

Jere shook his head. His eyepod counted down the final minutes. Near the end of the time, The View made its smartfog go flat and used it to project a realtime of Winning Mars on its front. Necks snapped up.

For a while, there was no sound. Just the image of Mars, huge and red. Then, soundlessly, one of the passenger pods flew out from their point of view, to drop towards the planet. The view changed to a camera on the pod. The planet turned slowly in their view.

“First contestant module released,” Frank’s voice came over The View’s PA system. Jere jumped and looked around. Glittering eyes were fixed on him. He tried to smile at them. He turned back around to look at the display.

“The Kirschoff team,” Ron said, loud enough for everyone to hear. The music in back ramped down, so that soon the only sound in The View was the creak of the passenger pod and, later, the thin scream of the Martian atmosphere, as the pod went deeper into the atmosphere. The planet swelled larger.

“Atmospheric insertion successful,” Frank said.

“As if there was any doubt,” Evan said. “Those things are supposed to drop like rocks.”

People at the bar heard him and turned around.

“Shut. The fuck. Up.” Ron said, slowly and deadly.

It was like watching your first landing at an airport. The planet drew closer and closer. More and more details became clear. The rate of change slowly increased. It was almost hypnotic.

“Following predicted course,” Frank said. “Impact in thirty seconds.”

“Impact?” someone at the bar said.

“They’re bouncing,” someone else said.

Now, the bar was quiet enough to hear the breathing of the contestants in the drop pod. Their breath came quick and sharp, as if they were afraid.

Of course they are, Jere thought.

The ground rushed by, faster than Jere had ever seen a plane land. It looked sharp and twisted and ugly.

This will never work, Jere thought.

“Ten seconds,” Frank’s voice.

A small whimper from the cabin.

We shouldn’t be hearing this, Jere thought. But of course they should be hearing this. They should be seeing this, too. They should have thought to put cameras in the drop pods. It was the money shot. It was what made people tune in.

“Five seconds,” Frank again.

Over the whistle of the wind, sharp bangs. Screams from the cabin. People in The View looked around sharply.

“Airbags,” Evan said, loudly.

“Three . . . two . . . one . . .” Frank’s voice said.

A tremendous crash, and the picture disappeared to fuzz and static. People in The View stared up at projection, mouths open, in that moment between shock and acceptance. Are they dead? Jere thought.

A murmur went through the patrons. It started small and deepened quickly to ugly. After a moment, Frank’s face appeared. He was thin and unshaven. “For those of you following the raw feed, this communication failure was expected. Telemetry indicates the module is intact. We should hear from them shortly.”

For the next minute, nobody moved. Nobody raised a drink. Nobody even seemed to breathe. This is the most important thing I’ve ever seen, Jere thought. They’re not even drinking.

He looked at Patrice, but she didn’t even look back. She saw only the screen, still displaying Frank’s worried face. Her mouth was slightly open, as if in wonder. Jere still didn’t know what to think about her. She wore his ring, but it was just a thing, just another thing. There were times when the curves lined up so well it was impossible to fight them. The curves pushed you along. And she was at the nexus of those curves. It felt right, in many ways. Jere smiled, trying to be happy.

The picture above the bar was replaced by an image of two people wearing squeezesuits and headers — a blonde girl and a vaguely dorky-looking guy. There was the sound of someone blowing out a breath.

“Wow, what a landing,” Wende Kirshoff said. “But hey, you know what they say, any landing you can walk away from . . .”

“And we’re walking!” the dork said.

Behind Jere, a cheer rose. It was loud and happy and sustained. It made the hair on the back of his neck rise.

“Turn around,” Ron said. “Take a bow.”

“Why?”

“Because in this moment, you’re a fucking hero. Use it.”

Jere stood up and turned. Every eye was on him. He’d addressed crowds before, but they’d never looked like this. Smiling. Open-mouthed. Applauding. Looking at him with something like awe.

The cheer rose again. Hands pumped in the air. The crowd surged forward to meet him. Their hero.

Death

Glenn Rothman was still shaking from his drop when he saw it. A thin white line, arcing through the light blue Martian sky. Like a single strand of spider-silk, glinting and gossamer. There was no sound.

Nandir’s team, Glenn Rothman thought, stopping for a moment to watch it disappear into the pinkish haze of the horizon.

Chatter from Frank in the can went softly hysterical. Their fearless leader’s voice rose until Glenn had to pay attention to it. Nandir’s drop had gone unstable and tumbled in the thin atmosphere. The airbags had never deployed. A software glitch. Or something in the hardware. They were trying to figure out the details. Glenn stood rooted to the spot, feeling a chill through the wet heat of his squeezesuit.

It could have been us. Glenn shivered. He had almost picked Nandir’s route, which seemed easier on the rolling and flying legs but more difficult on the Overland Challenge to the travel pod. Perfect for him and . . .

“Come on!” Alena said, over the local comm. She stood thirty feet in front of him, looking back, her face twisted into an angry mask.

“We just lost Nandir.”

“I know! I can hear!”

“But . . .”

“And I’m going to lose you if you don’t get moving!”

“Don’t you care?”

An inarticulate growl. Then a sigh. They were, after all, on camera, all the time. “Of course I care. But I want to win. Come on!”

Glenn bounced over to her. Her face was flushed with exertion, but tears glittered in the corners of her eyes. She wouldn’t look at him.

She’s more scared than she’ll admit, he thought. He tried to take her hand, but she pulled away.

“Stop that!” she said. Her topaz eyes transfixed him for a moment, her normally full lips compressed into a thin line, the soft arcs of her face pulled into something harder and more brutal. The face he used to love. The face he still loved.

She bounded away, moving fast in the low gravity.

Glenn hurried to catch up. I know how you feel, he wanted to say. I know, and I understand. The stories about people losing brain cells were one thing, the brief acquaintances with half-remembered names in wheelchairs were another. Everything they’d done before carried risks, but the risks were well-quantified. Even their insurance agent had said, Oh yeah, you do extreme sports, and ticked off every one they did on the form before he submitted it. And the bill came with a surcharge, clearly outlined, that covered every single one of their activities. But she’d never really seen someone die. And neither had Glenn. Suddenly it was like there was nothing inside him but vacuum, looking to be filled. He thought, for a moment, Things will be different when we’re back.

And then: If we get back.

Glenn caught up with Alena and tried to give her a smile. She refused to look at him, staring ahead grimly. The terrain was getting more rugged. Ahead of them rose the Unnamed Ridge, a three-thousand-foot near-vertical they would have to freeclimb to reach their transpo pod. The good news was that it looked climbable, especially in the low gravity. The low gravity was both a blessing and a curse. Glenn was still getting used to what he could do. The squeezesuit and header made him topheavy, throwing off his balance, but his total weight here was still less than half of what he was used to on earth. Getting comfortable with taking eight-feet vertical jumps and twenty-foot flying leaps wasn’t easy. Momentum still worked.

“More human interest,” Petrov’s voice blatted at him from his private channel. Piss off, he thought. But he couldn’t really do that. It was part of their contract. They had to do what they were told. Frank and Petrov reminded them, every time they had a chance.

“Glenn, we need to see Alena.” Frank’s voice, this time.

He plodded ahead.

“Glenn, we’re close to contract breach.” Frank, sounding sad.

“Shit!” he said, but turned obediently to focus on Alena. The squeezesuit clung to her curves, and the transparent header was designed to show as much as her pretty face as possible. Less attractive now, perhaps, with her hair hanging with sweat and her mouth set in a hard line.

“More,” they said.

Glenn tried running in front of her and feeding the view from one of his rear cameras, but it was too hard to concentrate on the terrain ahead and maintain a decent frame. Eventually he dropped back to focus on the exaggerated hourglass shape of her suit. I should be thinking about Nandir, he thought. I should be worried about climbing the Unnamed Ridge. Instead, I’m a fucking cameraman.

“Good,” Frank said. “Stay there for a while.”

“Okay,” he said. Assholes.

Funeral

“Oh, shit,” Jere said, watching the monitor as Frank talked through the loss of Nandir’s team. He was very, very drunk, and the ancient flatscreen seemed to float and dance a million miles away. He could almost believe it wasn’t happening.

“Jere, did someone just die?” Patrice said. She leaned against him, warm and soft.

“Yes!” Jere snapped.

They’d agreed to go to a more private party from The View, invited by some investment assholes from New York who had a quaint old house near Ron’s in the Hollywood Hills. Jere looked around the room. The investment assholes watched him in the reflection in the mirror on the backside of the bar. A couple sat in a loveseat, ignoring everyone but themselves. A very, very beautiful woman, dark hair and pale skin and strange silver eyes, who’d made a pass at Jere on the ride over, pretended to ignore him.

“I have to go,” Jere said.

“Yes, you do,” Ron said. Jere started. He’d forgotten Ron was there.

“Do you have to?” Patrice said.

“Yes.”

“Can you get in front of a camera?” Ron said.

Jere nodded. “Long enough to do what needs to be done.”

“I’ll drive you,” Evan said.

“I’ll take you up on that,” Jere said.

On the ride to Neteno, Evan shook his head. “Rotten luck,” he said.

“You knew it would happen. You said it’d happen.”

“No. Not that. Nandir. It had to be Nandir. You lost the minorities. Someone’s going to have something to say about that.”

Jere frowned. Evan, asshole that he was, was right. Someone would have something to say about that.

At Neteno, Jere downloaded an insta-script about sadness and loss. He looked at the camera and did his best to deliver the lines.

And the entire time he was on camera, he thought about Evan’s words. He worried about how he looked. And he thought, bitterly,

Of course someone’s going to die. Probably lots of someones. All you have to do is makethe proper horrified noises and move on from there.

Or whatever Evan had said.

Asshole.

When it was done, Jere expected to see crowds outside the Neteno building, holding torches and screaming for his head. But there was nothing, just the faceless traffic on Vine. Evan was gone. He thought of looking at his public ratings in his eyepod, but decided it wasn’t a good idea. He turned it off.

“What do you want to do?” Patrice asked.

“Let’s go home.”

“Home?”

“If they’re going to kill me, it might as well be at home.” Jere popped his eyepod off his face and stuck it in his pocket. Patrice watched him do it with big, unbelieving eyes.

“Do you want me there?” she asked.

Jere looked at her. She was very beautiful. She could never understand. He didn’t know what to feel.

“Of course,” he said.

Crash

“Pull it out! Come on! Pull!” Sam Ruiz shouted through their local comm. Mike Kinsson and Juelie Peters tugged at the shattered plastic shell. Suddenly the whole side folded and twisted off, and all three of them ended up in a tangled heap on the dusty ground. Mike Kinsson noticed absently that the Disney and Red Bull and Wal-Mart logos on Juelie’s suit were covered in dust, and reached out to brush them off.

“What are you doing?” Sam said, yanking Juelie to her feet.

“Dust . . .” Mike said, and trailed off. It was stupid anyway. Why should he worry about their sponsors? Why should he worry about anything? They were dead. Sam’s team had been given the easiest Overland Challenge, essentially nothing more than a fast run over rocky ground, because they had been assigned the toughest rolling and flying part. Soaring over the Valles Marinaris was part of their air journey, partly to make it more dramatic and partly to bring back some great images.

But after their brief Overland, they’d bounced up to the scene of a disaster. Their transpo pod had come down in the lee of a huge boulder, and had smashed itself in-between it and the ground. Its smooth globular shape was now twisted into something that more resembled a crushed basketball.

It was supposed to hit and bounce, Mike thought. Which meant all the kinetic energy of the fall had been absorbed at once by the boulder, rather than a series of lazy bounces. A terrible design, something from last-century NASA that didn’t work then, even with triple-redundant systems and all the overbuilding the government could throw at it. Now, with Russian manufacture, the Wheel and Kite inside were probably . . .

“Junk,” he said softly, as Sam and Juelie began pulling out bundles of bent and sheared struts and shreds of fabric. It didn’t look anything like the training. Not at all.

“Are you going to help, or not?” Juelie asked.

Like a robot, Mike went and helped them pull out all the contents of the pod. He noticed that the big Timberland and Kia and Cessna logos emblazoned on the outside of the pod had survived intact, and he had to suppress the urge to laugh. He had to crawl inside to try to get some of the last pieces, but they had been wedged into the rock and wouldn’t come out. He noted, with no great emotion, that one of the final items was the hydrazine engine that was intended to power both the Wheel and Kite. It was twisted almost beyond recognition.

“Where’s the rest of it?” Sam yelled, when he came back out.

“Stuck.”

Sam glared at him and crawled in himself. There was a great volume of cursing on the local comm network. When Sam crawled out again, sweat was running down his cheeks and there was a strange, faraway look in his eyes. Mike looked around at the twisted pieces strewn around them and shook his head. Sam saw it and grabbed him.

“What?” he said. “What are you shaking your head for?”

“We’re dead,” Mike said. “It’s over.”

“No! We can make something! We can do some hybrid thing, like a wheel,” he began rooting through the wreckage, frantic, eyes bright and intent.

“Powered by what?” Mike said softly.

“We can power it! Or we can make skis! Or we can . . .

Juelie went over to Mike and laid a hand on his shoulder. As soon as he felt her touch, he stopped. He stayed still on his hands and knees, looking down at the rocks and dust, panting.

“Mike’s right,” Juelie said. “I saw the engine.”

“Then what do we do? Give up?”

“Rest, at least.”

Sam stood up. The pale sun reflected off his shiny bronze face. He looked from the wreckage to the horizon and back again. “I don’t want to stop!” he said.

“Why?” Juelie said. “We can’t win.”

Sam looked at her for long moments, as if trying to decipher a strange phrase in an unknown language. Then he slumped. All the tension left him. He sat on a boulder and hugged his knees. Something like a wail escaped him. Under the cloudless alien sky, amidst a red desert unrelieved by water or leaf or lichen, it was a chilling sound.

“What do we do?” he said finally. “How do we get to the Returns?”

“We don’t,” Mike said, standing carefully away.

Sam just looked up at him.

“Walk overland,” Juelie said. “It doesn’t matter how long it takes.”

“There’s not enough food and water,” Mike said.

“We’ll eat less!”

“We can’t cross the Valles Marinaris.”

“Why not?”

“Mile-high vertical walls.”

“The gravity is less—”

“We’ll still go splat!”

Juelie was silent for a while. “They’ll have to come rescue us,” she said finally.

“No,” Mike said.

“We’ve lost,” Sam said.

“Wait,” Julie said. “What do you mean, ‘no?’”

“They can’t just come down and get us,” Mike told her. “Other than our drops and the return modules, there’s no way to get down here and back again.”

Julie looked confused.

“They can’t rescue us,” Mike said. “They don’t have the capability.”

“Then what do we do?” Sam said. “Sit here and die?”

Mike looked away. Even he knew better than to answer that. Juelie walked over and offered Sam her hand. After a moment, he took it, head hanging low. Mike edged away from the two, not wanting to be part of any coming outburst. Sam was driven by a single purpose: to win his share of the thirty million dollars. That’s what he wanted. Nothing more, nothing less. He hadn’t disguised it, hadn’t hid it. But now that was taken away. And more, his life was forfeit. We knew the risks when we signed, Sam thought, walking farther away. Or at least I did. Sam and Juelie were probably part of the walking dead, the people who never really thought much about life, who never really thought they could die. They probably hadn’t read the contract at all, just signed it and sent it off.

But I didn’t care, he thought. All I ever wanted to do was to see another planet. All Iever wanted to do was to get away. To get away from mom and dad and their ideas about the perfect life, the planned life, the work-until-you’re-old-and-hope-to-save-enough life, the life that most everyone took.

Thoughts came quick and bitter. He was still better off to die here. Earth was a dead-end world pursuing dead-end dreams, the majority of the population interested in nothing more than making money and amusing themselves. Nobody produced anything anymore. Nobody explored. Nobody took chances. There were no places to take chances in. And yet I never did anything either, Mike thought. This is the only chance I ever took. Until this, I was too scared to give up my job, too insecure to let go of my condo, my ‘Actives, my things. I was a geek. There was no other way to describe it. Endlessly yearning, but unable to commit.

And so, this great leap. Finally.

And so, now you die.

Mike tried to make himself feel something, but he couldn’t. It was too far away, too remote. They had maybe five days worth of food and water in their packs. They had a blow-up shelter for the night, but it was nothing more than an insulated bubble to keep out the worst of the frigid Martian night. It wouldn’t allow them to take off their suits. Five days, and then a week or more for the sweat recycling to stop working, or the batteries to die, or some other suit malfunction to take your life. Or you could just take your helmet off and be done with it. It’s too bad they didn’t give the science pack to me, Mike thought. I would have infinitetime to do the experiments. Or at least many days. But it had gone to the other asshole on the Thorens team. Too bad. It would have been good to have, THE FIRST MAN TO CONFIRM LIFE

ON MARS, or something like that, on his headstone. They could put up a monument to him, when people came to Mars for good.

Or maybe they’d never come to Mars for good, Mike thought. Maybe this is the last shot, one stupid game-show and then nothing. Everyone content to just do their thing, live their safe and planned life.

It wouldn’t surprise him. First Nandir. Now them. Not exactly a rousing endorsement of interplanetary travel.

Mike wandered a hundred feet or so away from the couple when Frank’s voice from the Can blatted in his ear.

“We’re aware of your situation,” Frank said.

“So?” he heard Sam ask.

“We’re asking the Paul team to divert and rescue,” they said. “We think he can carry you in his Wheel. Is your fuel bladder undamaged?”

“Yes!” Juelie said, hope rising in her voice.

“Good. We’re transmitting the request to him now.”

“Great!” Juelie said. “Sam, did you hear that? We’re going to be rescued.”

“Nope,” Sam said.

“What do you mean?” Juelie’s voice, edging into the strident.

“It’s a request,” Sam said. “Re-quest. Do you think Paul is going to give up his thirty million?”

Sudden silence over the comm.

“Do you think he’ll do it for you?” Sam asked.

More silence.

“Did you have something so special with him that he’d throw away his chance to win—”

“Shut up! Shut up!” Juelie screamed.

Mike couldn’t help grinning, just a little. You see how your boyfriend is, now, he thought. He wanted to go back to Juelie and comfort her. She stood far away from Sam, pacing and wrapping her arms around herself. But there was no way Mike would get in front of Sam. That would just be a faster way to die.

“Keith might do it,” she said. “He still might.”

Sam’s laughter echoed in the dying Martian day.

Buried

“Don’t be a fucking baby,” Ron said. “Get back on camera. Now.”

“And tell them what?” Jere said, staring at the image of his dad, on the kitchen flatscreen.

“Tell them there need to be sacrifices. If the next missions to Mars are going to mean a damn thing, you’ve got to scramble some eggs now. And you’re on the point of the thing!”

“You’re not making any sense,” Jere said. “You’re mixing metaphors.”

Ron’s face went bright red, and he leaned into the camera. His nose grew to the size of a beet. “Shut. Up. Stupid. Son. Get on camera. Tell them something. You’re blazing the trail. Whatever!”

“There aren’t going to be any other shows.”

Ron stared into the phone, his breathing rough and ragged. He said nothing for a long time. Finally, in a strange quiet voice, he said, “Yes. There will be.”

“What do you mean?”

“Yours is the spectacle. Before things really get started.”

“Dad, you’re talking crazy.”

Ron shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Get on camera. Talk about new frontiers. You can do it. I know you can.” Then he cut the connection.

Jere sighed. “Drive me back to the studio?” he asked Patrice.

Patrice shook her head. “No. Do it here. With me.”

“Are you sure?”

Patrice reached out, squeezed his hand. “I’m sure.”

They set up the camera to show them on the couch. Jere called into Neteno and had them set up a live feed. He didn’t care about what it looked like. He didn’t care about scripts. He sat down, faced the camera, and thought, eight hundred million people.

“I’m not going to apologize for the Ruiz team,” Jere said. His voice was soft, low. “When I started this, I knew the risks. I knew people could die. And yes, I did it for the money. But during the development of the show, I discovered, hey, this is really important. Like, so important that maybe some people will die doing this, and so important that might just be all right.”

“I’m sad to see the Ruiz team stranded, but I tell you this. Maybe it needed to happen. Maybe we needed to be reminded that life isn’t all tea and cookies. There are eight hundred million of you out there watching the show. What do you feel? Horror that a company like Neteno can put on a show like this? Or the thrill that there are people, on Mars, right now. People, standing on another planet.

“When I started this, I didn’t know that we put probes on Mars in 1976, over forty years ago. Billions of dollars in government programs later, and we still hadn’t put anything more than a few Roombas on Mars. The Chinese gave up at the Moon, because it was more interesting to gather up the old United States stuff — now over fifty years old, think about it, that’s half a century since we had people standing on the moon — and take down our flags than go on to Mars. You can see the Lunar Rover and the original flag in a Beijing museum, I’m told.”

“So, here we are. So I ask you: are you outraged, or are you thrilled? I will do everything I can to get the Ruiz team, and all the other contestants, back to Earth safely. But they knew what they were signing up for. And they are on Mars right now, looking back at earth from an alien sky.”

“I’m thrilled. I hope you are. If not, I understand. But, even if you are outraged, ask yourself one thing: if not this way, then how?”

Jere thumbed the remote control that turned off the camera. He wanted nothing more than to go to sleep. It had been a very, very long day.

Patrice held out his eyepod. Jere shook his head. He would find out what everyone thought eventually.

But not now.

Offer

The only thing that kept Keith Paul from swatting the tiny cam that dangled in front of him was that he knew that would lose him the thirty million dollars. Contract breach, the asswipe Frank would say, in that gruff old-man voice of his his. Words from the training came back to him. You’re all camera, all the time. We can tap in at any time we want. You won’t know when we’ll be using your footage, but we’ll always be watching. Yeah, and I hope you get a shot of me taking a great huge shit, Keith thought. Broadcast that to your eight hundred million viewers. Here is Keith Paul, taking a dump on your ratings. But they woudn’t do that. Oh, no. That might offend someone. Some fucking wanked-out chick might faint dead away at the sight of his weewee. They were too pussified to do that. He would be sure to say that when he won. When they pointed the camera at his face, he would tell them exactly what he thought of them. It would be his crowning moment, his first major televised fuck-you-all.

And he would win. No doubt about that. Teams were for pussies and faggots. He’d been able to skin the Wheel and string the Kite faster than any team back when they were training. Because he was one man. One strong man. He didn’t have arguments with himself, or forget where something went. He didn’t have to discuss things, or worry about someone loafing. They called him a machine, and that was exactly what he was, a machine made for winning. Spin that, Neteno assholes.

Keith had picked a long overland romp that looked fairly easy, unlike the extreme sports fucksticks who wanted to go almost a mile straight up, or the geeks who wanted to fly to dry tanks and then chance walking in. The only team he’d worried about was the one with the dot and the slant.

And now they weren’t a problem. Keith allowed himself a slow, lazy smile. No, everything was great. Keith grinned up at the light blue sky. Really not that different from Earth. Not as weird as the photos they had shown him, with the pink skies and all that. He could almost be tramping through the Mojave back home, carrying his old M-16 and looking for shit to shoot.

And that was the one creepy thing. Nothing moved. In the Mojave, shit moved. You’d see a rabbit go tearing-ass out of a bush, you’d see the Joshua trees swaying in the breeze, maybe even an ancient-ass desert tortoise clumping around.

Not Mars. The ground just lay there. There were no plants to move around, no animals to dart around. The land felt old and scarred and unnatural. The sun didn’t seem to be turned up all the way, either. He kept wiping at his header’s visor as if to clear it, but it wasn’t cloudy or tinted. That was just the way Mars looked. Because it was farther away from the sun. Farther away from home.

“We need to make a request,” said Frank, from the Can channel.

“What?” They always had requests. Look at this, do that, scratch your ass, pick yournose. But it was usually Petrov who made them. Frank sucked. That John Glenn asshole could talk for hours. Keith frowned.

“The Ruiz team’s transpo pod had a landing malfunction. They have no transport.”

“So?” Two down, three to go. The odds get better all the time. Plus, the Ruiz team was the one with that bitch Juelie. Keith’s memory of his beating was still a little too recent. Thinking about the three of them starving in the desert made him smile.

“We’d like you to divert your Wheel and collect them.”

What? “I haven’t even reached my transpo yet.”

“After you get there.”

“And you’re going to give me extra time for this?”

A pause. “No.”

“Then how the hell am I supposed to win?”

Another pause, this one longer. “They’ll die if you don’t pick them up.”

“Again, so?”

“Do you just not get it?” Frank’s voice edged to anger.

“Do you just not get it?” Keith said. “I don’t give a shit. Let them die.”

A long pause. When Frank came back on, he spoke slowly, in a carefully controlled voice. Keith imagined him damn near chewing through his knuckles having to be nice to him, and he smiled.

“Keith, we’d really like you to consider this. Even if you don’t win the prize money – and you still might – the act of rescue will likely create its own reward.”

“They’ll pay me to do this?” Now, that was interesting. Why didn’t you say so in the firstplace, dumbass?

Pause. “I’m sure they will.”

“Like, they’ll pay me more than thirty million bucks for it?”

“I’m sure our sponsors will be very generous.”

“More than thirty million?”

Another pause. For long moments, Keith thought they had given up on him. Good. But Frank started in again as he caught the first glimpse of his iridescent transpo pod, glittering in the distance.

He would win.

“Keith, we’ve got buy-in from several of the sponsors. We can get you a million. Plus other things. Cars . . .”

“No.”

“They’ll die. That will be on your conscience.”

“They can’t prosecute me for it.” It would be just like them, to dredge up the fact that he was the only former felon, even though he was pardoned, even though his record was wiped clean when he signed the deal with Neteno.

Long pause. “No.”

“I think I’ll ignore you now.”

“Keith . . .”

Keith looked up at the thin sky, as if to try and see the Can spinning overhead. “A million is not thirty. A million and promises is not thirty. Sorry, no can do.”

“You may not win.”

“I will win. And you know it.”

Another pause. This one longer. “Two million.”

“Did you fail math? Two million is not greater than thirty. Give me an offer more than thirty, and they’re saved.”

“We . . . probably can’t do that.”

“I . . . probably can’t save them,” Keith said, mocking his tone. “Shoulda thought of that when you built the damn Can.”

Silence. Blissful silence. Long yards passed and the transpo pod swelled in his view. As he reached its smooth, unmarred surface, Frank’s voice crackled to life again.

“Even if you win,” he said. “People will hate you.”

“That’s all right,” Keith said. “I love myself enough for all of them.”

“You’re terrible.”

Yes, Keith thought, But I’ll win.

Jere

“Can’t we get any more money from the sponsors?” Jere said. They were in his office, him and Evan and Ron. “Make the asshole a big enough offer, and he’ll divert.”

“It’ll have to be a big offer,” Ron said.

“Not thirty-one million.”

“No, but it would have to be big. And the sponsors are tapped. They aren’t going to throw in dime one more. Even if you are Teflon right now.”

“Is that true?” Jere asked Evan.

“Pretty much,” Evan said. “They don’t trust your ratings. Fifty-three percent thrilled to forty-seven percent outraged, with a polarization scale that has them fighting each other in bars, ain’t exactly confidence-inspiring. Your rating could slip at any moment. They don’t want to put any more money into this until something firms up.”

“Until the contestants are back on board,” Ron said. “Until we have a winner.”

“How will they like Paul winning this?” Jere said. “Ask them that.”

Evan shook his head and rolled his eyes.

“Don’t even fucking say it,” Jere said. Yes, I know, I should’ve thrown the whole thing, whatever, he still might not win.

“They don’t believe that Paul’ll win this,” Evan said. “They don’t believe you haven’t rigged it.”

“Fuck. Shit.”

“My sentiments exactly.”

“Put them on,” Jere said. “One by one. Let me see if I can get anything more out of them.”

Experiments

Geoff Smith looked down the contours of his chest. It was like something you’d see in a home gym commercial, except painted white and covered with sponsor logos. They’d sculpted muscles into his squeezesuit, but he’d never noticed it before. He looked from his own chest to (what he’d thought were) the skin-tight curves of Laci and Wende, as they performed various acrobatic maneuvers to get their Wheel put together. Their transpo pod had come down a little further away than the Can had planned, so they’d run over the rough, uneven terrain for what seemed like hours to meet it. It didn’t help that Geoff had to lug the heavy IBM experiments package — and his own, smaller one — the whole way. But now the girls were putting the wheel together, and here he was, Geoff Smith, on an alien planet! And he was going to prove there was life on it! He would do what a million scientists back on earth wanted to do! Him, with nothing more than a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, would do what all the Ph.Ds told him he couldn’t do. He would put Martian life under a microscope for the first time! He would look at it with his own eyes! He would be famous!

Revered!

Because the big problem was that nobody had ever really looked. They’d tried the Carbon-14 tagging trick on Viking, they’d tried spectrographic analysis, they’d even had a little drill and lots of other really silly experiments on the later rovers, but they’d never just taken a sample of dirt, put it on a microscope slide, and looked at it. Because even with all their robots and automation and fancy measurements, they weren’t here. Now he was. And he would show them!

“Damn!” Wende Kirkshoff said. She hung from the top curve of their Wheel, holding a strut and looking at it disgustedly. She was a pretty blonde girl with freckles and a pleasant demeanor, but Geoff could never help but think she was avoiding him.

“What’s the matter?” Laci Thorens said. She was on the ground, assembling the engine into a subframe with the kind of intensity of six-year-old might devote to a paint-by-numbers picture that was designed for the 12+ set.

“This strut doesn’t have the little fitting dealie on the end,” Wende said. “It won’t stay in.”

“Aren’t there spares?”

“Uh, no, I don’t think so.”

“Look for them.”

Geoff shook his head and hurried off, before the girls could rope him in. He remembered Wende’s implied threat. They hadn’t noticed him yet, and he wanted to keep it that way. They didn’t think big. All they cared about was the money.

Who cared about the cash? With his discovery, he would be so famous that he could name his price.

Geooff set the IBM box in the lee of the transpo pod like the instructions said, digging down enough to ensure that it was placed somewhere its sampling tube could penetrate. He was supposed to let it sniff around, suck up a sample, run it through a bunch of tests and processing he didn’t quite understand (he knew what an atomic force microscope was, but what was a scanning cantilever sensor, or a tomographic mapping array?) and then take the whole thing with them when they left.

Which was stupid. IBM was doing the same old thing. When all they had to do, really, was give him a bag and a microscope.

So he’d brought his own. It was the smallest and lightest one that he could find. Now it was just a matter of getting some dirt, throwing some water on it, putting it on the slide, and looking for wrigglies.

“There aren’t any spares,” Wende said, over the local comm. Geoff looked back at here to see if she was looking at him yet. She wasn’t.

“Shit. Let me see.” Geoff caught a glimpse of Laci’s squeezesuit as she hopped up to the top of the Wheel.

When he got his thoughts back again, he fumbled the little vial of water out of the tiny pocket of his squeezesuit. The microscope was already out, sitting perched on top of a mediumsized rock, away from the dust and grit. How had Viking done it? It had moved a rock, hadn’t it? And this new one from IBM was digging down. Probably best to just combine both techniques, Geoff thought, and shoved a medium-sized boulder out of the way. The Martian gravity was cool! It made him feel really light and strong. He knew it would be that way, but actually bouncing along and moving rocks like Superman was really a lot of fun.

I could get used to living here, he thought.

He dug down into the dust with his fingers, feeling the chill seep through his squeezesuit. At about six inches down, he struck another rock and dug sideways until he had a trench about two feet long and he could dig down some more.

At about a foot down, he hit rock again and decided to call it quits. The dust was clinging to his transparent header, and the front half of his suit was pink. He took a pinch of dust from the shallow hole and dropped it onto a glass slide. The water had gone frosty around the top, and when he opened it, it started to steam furiously. He dropped a couple of drops on the slide and they froze almost instantly, making something that looked like red ice cream.

Damn, I didn’t think of that, he thought. There was no way he was going to see something through all that gunk with the microscope. He remembered that from when he was a kid, and his parents got him a microscope. If you couldn’t get light through it, you couldn’t see anything.

He sloshed some more water on it and pushed it around with the tip of his finger, trying to get the mixture thin enough to see through. After a couple of tries, he managed to get a thin pink film that looked reasonably transparent in places. Surely he could see something there at the edges.

“Geoff!” Laci said. “We need your help!”

Damn damn. They’d noticed him. “Can’t,” he said. “In the middle of an experiment.”

“We need your help or we ain’t rolling anywhere!”

Geoff slid the slide into the microscope and looked at the watch embedded in his suit.

“We have time.” And in fact, they did have almost half an hour left. The girls were just greedy, thinking about money rather than glory. He thought of trying to explain to them how important his experiments were, but decided they’d never understand. They’d never listened to him aboard ship. They were even less likely to listen now, if they saw their money slipping away.

“We have to do it now!” Wende said.

“Wait a minute,” Geoff said. Slide in place. Microscope to eye. Nothing but fuzzy grey darkness. Focus. Dark, dark. Sliding into focus. Becoming great boulders. Sand under three hundred power magnification.

“Geoff, now!” Laci said. Her voice was low, impatient, dangerous.

“Just a few seconds,” Geoff said. “Then you can have me.” Focus. Ah. Crystal-clear. Scan it over a bit and find a brighter area. There. Ah.

Water crystals. Boulders. Bright light. Nothing else.

Well, of course it wouldn’t move. But where was the rounded wall of a bacterium, or thejelly of an amoeba?

“Now,” Laci said, and strong hands picked him up. He felt his grip on the microscope slipping. He grabbed it tighter, and it popped from his hands. He was jerked back as he watched it fall, with agonizing slowness, into the dust and grit.

He wrenched out of Laci’s grip and scooped up the microscope. It was dusty, but looked OK. He looked through it. The slide was out of position, but he could still see. He reached for the focus knob . . .

The microscope was torn out of his hands. He looked up to see Laci standing in front of him, holding the microscope behind her back.

“Give it back!” he said. “This is important. I’m right . . .”

She punched his header. Hard. He could see the soft transparent plastic actually conform to her fist. It didn’t quite touch him, but the kinetic energy of the blow knocked him to the ground.

“Go,” she said. “Help Wende. You’ll get your toy back when you’re done.”

“Give it back!”

Laci raised the instrument and made as if to smash it on a boulder. Geoff lunged forward at her, but she danced away. “No,” she said. “Go help. I’ll give it back later.”

“Laci, this is important!”

“Yeah, and so is winning. Go help.”

Geoff knew when he was beaten. He sighed and joined Wende atop the Wheel, where they quickly discovered another problem: the epoxy they’d provided for quick repairs wasn’t setting in the Martian cold.

“Damnit!” Wendy said, when she saw what was happening. “What do we do now?”

Geoff stopped looking longingly at the microscope (now sitting on top of their hydrazine engine) and inspected the problem. The strut was one of the main load-bearers that held them suspended under the top of the Wheel. They couldn’t ignore it, because after a few good shocks, the structure might collapse and tear the wheel apart.

“Tape?” he said, half-jokingly.

“None,” Wende said. Her voice quavered.

Oh crap, he thought. Don’t panic. Not now. Not when I’m so close.

“What about the Kite?” Geoff said. “Doesn’t it share components with this? Maybe it has a strut with the right connector on it.”

“It’s packed.”

“Then let’s unpack it.”

“What about when we have to fly?”

“We make sure we don’t forget the damn thing. Wende, you want to stay here?”

“No.”

“Then show me where the Kite is.”

She did, and they dug into the bundle of struts and fabric. The components were the same, and many of them were the same length. When Geoff found one with the right connector on the end, he pulled it out and handed it to Wende.

“Just like Ikea,” he said.

“They aren’t the sponsor!”

“Same idea.” Maybe I can save the mission and discover life, too, he thought. Then he noticed that Laci was frantically tightening the straps that held the little engine in place.

“We’re late!” she said. “Check the time! Come on come on come on! Let’s go!”

Wende grabbed him and had him help set the bottom end of the strut. Then Laci was starting the engine. Near the Wheel, his microscope was still parked on top of a rock.

“Wait!” he said, running to get it.

The Wheel was already moving. “Hurry up!” Laci said.

He grabbed the microscope and ran back, throwing himself up the scaffold towards the perch by the cabin. The landscape moved by, slowly at first and then with increasing speed. The soft rim of the Wheel bounced over rocks and boulders. It was like riding a giant beachball. But he had his microscope. Between that and the IBM package, he would surely find something. He would still be famous. And they might even win!

The IBM package!

Oh, shit, no! No no no!

He’d never picked it up.

“Stop! he cried. “You have to go back!”

“Why?” Laci said.

“I left the IBM package. The research one!”

Laci gave him a disgusted look. “How could you be that stupid?”

“Go back.”

She just looked at him. A slow smile spread on her face. “Sorry,” she said. Geoff looked back at the remains of their transpo pod, but it had already disappeared over a hill. They were moving. And he was lost.

Loss

“So much for getting anything more out of IBM,” Evan said. “In fact, they’re probably going to want a refund of their sponsorship so far.”

“Shut up,” Jere said, already calculating losses from the IBM experiments package. The replay rights would have to go for a ridiculous sum to offset it. All because of one dumbass geek. They should’ve given the experiments package to the other starry-eyed loon, like Ron had suggested.

All this shit, Jere thought. I’m buried in it. Finances so complex that it looked like a three-dimensional topo map of the Alps, with deep valleys to navigate and impossible heights to scale. All moving in real time with the shifting of international currencies, interest rates, and a thousand other variables and derivatives that Jere could never hope to understand. The real fortunes, Ron had often said, Are now controlled by the people who channel them. Who erect the dams, who cut new channels for the rivers to flow. My own little holding, what you called almighty, isn’t even a crumb on the hors’d’ouevre plate at the banquet of the true monetary giants. They play with percentages of gross national products, with fractions of the balance of global trade. They’ve made it a game to devalue the currency and reap the rewards, three or four percent a year, but three or four percent a year of the global output of the world. What could we buy with that? Jere wondered. They bought themselves mansions and expensive cars and parties that cost millions of dollars, on top of the real entrée, the ability to broker power around the world, so as to make the ongoing rape of the world possible. We could have sent hundreds of missions, we could have sent thousands of people, we could have built cities on Mars, like the stuff from Burroughs, recently at the linear palaces. They buy control, the softest noose ver laid around the necks of men but a noose nonetheless. Jere had a moment of crystalline clarity. I would never have thought this way when I started this endeavor, he thought. I’m parroting dad, even in my thoughts. Because of this, he’s forever changed me.

And suddenly, all the money, all the positioning, all the power seemed completely meaningless and empty. They have their palaces here on Earth, but they’ve never looked up to the sky.

Was this what Ron wanted him to see? Was this the final epiphany?

Was Winning Mars to be the crowning achievement, before the frontier closed once again, this time for the last time? Is this what Ron bought into?

Jere looked at Ron, his face lit by the glow of Los Angeles at night, coming in from the windows of his Neteno office overlooking neon Hollywood. Ron looked back at him and pushed his face into something like a smile. Jere could see virtually every muscle moving in his face, he could feel each pull taut in turn. It was a completely mechanical movement, something that Ron had to think about to do. It was grim and forbidding and wonderful. Jere felt tears begin to well in the corners of his eyes. He blinked them rapidly away.

Without factoring in the loss of IBM’s monies, they’d managed to put a couple of million dollars into their buying-out-the-asshole fund. Jere polled his eyepod. It told him that taking any more from his own reserves, or from Neteno’s, would navigate them towards one of those valleys that yawned like a crevasse from which Himalayan hikers never returned. Go too far down, and the company would never recover, no matter the changes in the financial markets.

“It’s time,” Jere said. “Let’s talk to the asshole.”

“We don’t have enough money,” Evan said.

“Shut up.” Ron’s voice, perfunctory now. He made his effortful smile grow fractionally wider as he nodded at Jere.

Jere covered his mouth to hide a grin.

Ascent

They were half-way up the sheer face, and the way Alena was climbing, they were going to die. Glenn watched her almost literally fly up the rock, making twenty-foot jumps from handhold to handhold, reaching out and grasping the smallest outcropping and crevice with fluid grace and deceptive ease.

Dangerous ease, he thought. Climbing in the low gravity seemed childishly simple compared to climbing on Earth. Which meant it was easy to take one too many chances. Easy to get overconfident and make mistakes.

Alena made one last lunge and scrabbled for grip in a tiny crevice. Her feet skidded and she slid down the face for one terrible instant before catching on another tiny outcropping. Pebbles and sand bounced off Glenn’s visor.

“Slow down!” he said. “A fall from here’ll kill you as dead as one on Earth.”

“We need to keep moving!”

“Alena . . .”

Labored breathing over the comm. “Listen to them!” Alena said. “Laci’s team is already rolling, and that psycho guy is, too! We’re falling behind.”

Glenn cursed. The voices from the Can, when they weren’t giving orders, provided a blow-by-blow of what the other teams were doing. As if it would do anything more than irritate them.

Which is probably why they’re doing it, he thought. To get them doing something stupid. And Glenn knew exactly how that would work on Alena. It would drive her harder. She’d take stupid chances. Because the climbing wasn’t fun for her. It was a career. And she always had to get ahead. Telling her they had a different schedule, that they didn’t have to roll until the next morning, would mean nothing to her.

Knowing that, in that tiny instant, Glenn could almost hate her. Almost. Glenn pulled himself up nearer to Alena. She resumed climbing, too.

“Let me get nearer,” he said. “So we can safety each other.”

“We have to keep going.”

“The others have more time to roll. We aren’t falling behind.”

Alena stopped for a moment. “I know, but . . .”

“It’s hard not to think it, yeah.” Glenn finished for her. He pulled himself even higher. She stayed in place for once. Higher. Higher.

“We’ll make the top before nightfall,” he said. “Then we shelter and wait it out. We’ve got a short roll and a reasonable flight. We still have the best chance of winning, Alena.”

Pant, pant. He was close enough to be her failsafe now.

Alena looked back, gave him a thin smile, and pulled herself up again. For a while it was all by the book, then Alena began stretching it a bit, leaping a bit too far, aiming at crevices just a tiny bit too small. With the sun below the cliff, the shadows were deep, purple-black, and the cliff was losing definition in the dying day.

Just the thing to trick the vision, Glenn thought. Something they didn’t need. He redoubled his efforts to keep up with Alena, even though he knew it was dangerous, and there were more skids and mini-slips than he cared for.

It was completely different than climbing on Earth. He felt as if he weighed almost nothing, but he couldn’t feel the rock at all. Just the cold, through the tips of his fingers where the squeezesuit grew thin. But not thin enough to feel texture. Not thin enough to be able to put your hand on rock and know what you were grabbing, whether it was weathered granite or loose shale, or rock solid enough to bend an old-style piton. Most of the rock was reasonably solid, with a rough, pock-marked finish that looked windblown. And much of the ascent was less than vertical. But still, he worried.

And yet the adrenaline was going, he was rushing, he could hear the roar in his ears and he felt powerful, omnipotent, charged with energy. It was wonderful. When they reached a deep crevice in the rock, Glenn thought things were getting better. But here, the rock was fragile and crumbly, and rust-red chunks came off easily in his hands. With the weight of the backpack pulling him away from the cliff face, it was dangerous. More than dangerous. Glenn was about to tell Alena that they should get out of there when she reached up and grabbed an outcropping that looked solid and it broke off in her hand. She scrabbled for purchase on the cliff face and found none. From ten feet above Glenn, she began to fall, agonizingly slowly at first. Glenn felt his heart thundering, like an engine out of control in his chest. He had a momentary vision of the two of them tumbling out of the crevice to fall thousands of feet to the rocks below. He tested his handholds and footholds, and a small cry escaped his lips when he realized he probably wouldn’t be able to keep his grip when Alena impacted him.

Glenn jumped downward, seeking better purchase. Slip and slide. Nothing more. Down once again. Nope.

Down again, and then Alena piled into him, an amazingly strong shock in the weak gravity. Mass still works, Glenn thought, wildly, a moment after he’d lost all contact with the cliff face.

Alena flailed, trying to catch the rock surface as it skidded by. Glenn knew that soon they would be moving too fast to stop, and reached frantically himself. He slowed their fall, but didn’t stop it.

Where was the edge of the crevasse?

He looked below him. Right here. But there was one outcropping that looked reasonably solid. If he could catch it . . .

He hit hard with his feet and felt a shooting pain go up his right leg. His knees buckled and his feet slid to the side, away from the ourcropping, towards destruction. One last thing. He reached out and caught the outcropping, keeping one hand around Alena’s waist. For a moment he thought their momentum was still too great, but he was able to hold on. Alena skidded to a stop within feet of the opening.

For long moments, Glenn didn’t dare move. He could hear the harsh rasp of Alena’s breathing. Meaning they were both alive. Alive!

Alena looked up at him with something in her eyes that might almost have been gratitude. He looked down at her and smiled. For a brief instant, she smiled back. He hadn’t seen that for a long, long time. His heart soared, and his breath came in short gasps. Slowly, they backed out of the crevice and continued on up the cliff face. Glenn’s right leg roared with pain, and he knew he was slowing Alena down. But she didn’t run away from him. She didn’t take chances. She didn’t say anything at all until they had reached the top, and the last dying rays of the sun painted them both blood-red.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly.

He was about to say something, but Petrov’s voice blatted in his ear. “What imagery! Pan slowly across sunset.”

“Thanks,” he said, bitterly, as Alena turned away.

Relief

Jere watched the raw feeds from the slice and dice screen at Neteno, deep in the dark warrens where the infogods and story-precisioners worked. They were still hot on Keith Paul, who had been singing popular songs with his own bawdy lyrics for the past hour. So it was still wait and watch. Even Jere’s offer waited for the cameras.

At least Glenn and Alena had made it up over the cliff. What, hours ago? Something like that. When they were both up, he breathed a little easier. Even was out of the room, so there were no stupid comments about how “at least we didn’t lose them.” Jere didn’t want to think about the fallout of a show where they lost three teams out of five. He was sure he could call up predictions on his eyepod.

Keith’s voice went hoarse and coughs exploded from the audio channel. Thank God, Jere thought. Maybe he’ll shut the fuck up.

But no. The asshole hacked up pheghm, swallowed it, and resumed singing. Jere cursed silently.

“You can go on now,” one of the infogods said, in Jere’s ear.

“No more maughty nursery rhymes?”

“No. It was a good edit point. We’re live on Glenn and Alena, fifteen minutes past. You have a solid seventeen to twenty minute block.”

“Put me on.”

“You realize this will not be a realtime conversation? You’ll have to say your piece and wait for a response?”

“Yes. Do it.”

“Done.”

The sound of rough singing rang in Jere’s ears.

Rejection

Wheeling had been easy back on Earth. The training out by the 395, on the nice smooth sand and little rocks, was no big deal. You could bounce over the flat as long as you wanted, and hardly ever have a problem, unless you were an idiot.

But Wheeling was a bitch and a quarter here on Mars. Keith Paul stopped singing for a moment and gritted his teeth as he came to another long downhill run. It was scattered with boulders as big as houses and ravines that could catch the edge of the Wheel and fuck him up good. He’d already dug the Wheel out twice, once when he swerved to avoid a slope that would pitch it over and ended up in a ditch, and once when he got to bouncing and bounced over a hill into a ravine.

And man, did it bounce! On Earth, it kind of scooted along, absorbing the shocks with its plastic “rim.” But here, whenever it hit a rock, it bounced. Sometimes a foot, sometimes a couple, sometimes ten or twenty feet in the air. And that was with you running almost blind, hoping there wasn’t anything in front of you.

They probably got some good vid of my terrified mug, Keith thought. Before he started singing. That was smart. Don’t show scared. Ever. That was how you got fucked. And the singing was fun. Keith imagined them beaming that into an almighty living room, full of live-in kids with kids. That’d spice up their evening.

But he was being strong on other things. He was making good time across the desert. He’d been up rolling at the moment dawn’s light made the landscape even dimly guessable. And he’d been able to keep up a fair clip, even with the setbacks. Other idiots are probably picking their way along like grandma in a traffic jam, he thought, and smiled. He would take the chances. Even if it was scary. Because he was going to win.

And he was strong on the offers. Frank and Petrov both tried, about every hour on the hour. They were like some kind of fucked-up cookoo clock. Keith liked making fun of them. They’d promised him everything but a blow-job and a hot dog, but the money hadn’t changed. Neither had his position.

Now, he was getting near the Kite part of the trip. They’d probably try to talk him into it then, unless they’d found some other suckers.

Almost on cue, the voice. This time it was some new asshole

“Hello, Keith, this is Jere Gutierrez on Earth—”

“Who’re you?” Keith said.

“. . . don’t know who I am, but I am the founder and CEO of Neteno. Not like I’m trying to show off, I just wanted you to know how important this is—”

“Who. The fuck. Are you?” Like the asshole wasn’t going to ackowledge him.

“. . . since there’s a several minute gap between my speaking and you hearing. Let me repeat, because you probably think I’m an inconsiderate asshole—”

“What?” Keith said, but Jere had his attention.

“—I have to run through this just once, in one shot, because there’s a several minute gap between me speaking and you hearing.”

“Ah.”

“Let me just start by saying, this is our final offer,” Jere said. “And it’s a very generous one. Take this offer, and you will be a very well-off man. And you will be a hero. I will personally use all the resources of Neteno to make you a legend, a star. By the time you come home, they’ll be giving you parades, and your hometown will have a sculpture of you up in the square. Or whatever they do. Take this, and you win both ways. But this is your last chance.”

“Yeah, yeah, what’s the fucking offer?” Keith said. What a fucking windbag.

“By air, you have a good chance of picking up the Ruiz team. It’s even conceivable you could win the show, as well. You are currently leading the three remaining teams by a fair margin.”

“What’s the offer?” Jesus.

“If you rescue the Ruiz team we’re upping out offer to four million. Plus all the gifts and benefits we’ve discussed before. Plus the PR campaign to make you a hero. This is our final offer. Let us know your decision. Frank is standing by to hear your response.”

Keith shook his head. Fucking windbag. That’s the way it always was. Butter up that fucking dry toast before you shove it up my ass.

“Keith?” Frank said.

“Yeah.”

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re all very bad at math, even your fearless leader.” Though, he had to admit, the idea was intriguing. With four million, he could live pretty well if he went to a low-rent part of the world like Mexico or something like that. And as a hero, he could probably get the chicks. Pretty much any one. He wouldn’t even have to spend for that.

For a moment, he actually could see himself down there, living on the beach, fishing every day, hooking up with some pretty little senorita . . .

No! Stupid! You’re a winner. You’re in the lead. Four is not thirty. Long silence from the Can. Then, Frank: “You heard Mr. Guitierrez. That’s our final offer.”

“No.”

A long, long silence. Keith expected the fearless leader to come back on and plead with him some more. That would be fun.

Finally, Frank came back. “Your decision has been noted,” Frank said. He didn’t sound surprised. If anything, he sounded tired.

Noted?

“Hey, what does that mean?” Keith said. Like, were they going to try to disqualify him or something? That wasn’t in the contract! They said so themselves!

Silence.

“Ass! What the hell does ‘noted’ mean?”

Silence.

“Fuck you, then!”

Silence. On and on.

Was it possible that he could run this whole thing and not win due to some technicality?

Could he take the offer now, or would they try to screw him out of it?

No. No. He was a winner. He was going to win.

And if they tried to take that away from him, God help them.

Contingency

“I’ll go back on, offer him eight million,” Jere said.

“It won’t matter,” Ron said.

“Sixteen.”

“Run the projections with a sixteen million dollar hole.”

“No.” Jere already knew what they’d look like. Ruin. Total and complete. A smoking crater.

“But it’s not that much money!” Jere said. His voice was high, cracking. Ron closed his mouth, blew out a big breath. We don’t have it, that breath said. Everything we have is leveraged, and the leverages leveraged. There was nothing to turn into money.

“Oversight,” Jere said.

“No.”

“They might do it. We could grassroots it, like we did last time.”

“I don’t want them in it. Even if I thought we could.”

“But they—”

Ron came over, put a hand on Jere’s shoulder. His hand was hard, like the hand of an automaton. Wood. Unfeeling. He squeezed Jere’s shoulder hard, once.

“It should’ve worked,” Jere said. “I thought it would work.”

“Not this time,” Ron said.

Performance

Last. Dead last. No denying it now. No excuses. No rationalization. It had taken Glenn and Alena way too long to assemble the Wheel that morning, far longer than they had taken back on Earth. Blame it on the cold, or the parts that didn’t want to fit together, or the arcane changes to the engine assembly, but facts were facts. The others hadn’t let it keep them back, as Petrov in the Can (rather gleefully, Glenn thought) told them. And yet Glenn was strangely happy, oddly content. Just like that one freeclimb in Tibet, their second time up, when it wasn’t about Everest, but about rock that was supposed to be unclimbable, when it was clear they were beaten, hanging exhausted from numb fingertips beneath a thin sun rapidly disappearing behind a front of ominous purple-grey clouds. That moment when he realized they weren’t going to make it, that they would have to go back down, that they would have to forget being the first. The stress and the worry suddenly lifted from him, making him feel light and free, as if he could do anything. And his great surprise when Alena, tears freezing on her cheeks, agreed with him. They scrambled down the rock as the icy rain hit. The icy rain that would have killed them.

They’d made love back in what passed for a hotel with incredible intensity, golden and yellow sparks flying in a perfect night sky, impossible to describe, infinite and endless in a moment’s perfection. They’d finally collapsed, sated, face to face, sweat cooling to an icy chill in the cold room. He’d waited until her breathing had slowed, and lengthened, and deepened, then said, very softly, “Marry me.”

Alena’s eye’s opened. In the dark they were like the glassy curve of two crystal spheres, unreadable.

Glenn’s breath caught. Had she heard him? What would she think? Would she . . .

“Yes,” she said softly, and closed her eyes again.

He’d lain awake for a long time after that, looking at the curves of her face, limned in the pale moonlight. Had he imagined it? Had she really heard him? He fell asleep with questions resonating in his mind.

When he woke in the morning, she was already pulling on her gear. Glenn had a moment of sleepy pleasure, watching her slim form, before he remembered his question – and her answer – from the night before.

She looked down at him. The light fell pale and grey on her face. She looked like the ghost of an angel.

“Yes,” she said. “I said yes.”

“Glenn!” Alena shrieked. “Watch out!”

Glenn jerked back to the present as the Wheel caromed off a boulder and promptly went bouncing across a field. He pulled on his harness and leaned outside of the Wheel’s edge, shortening the bounces on his side and bringing them back on course. They’d rigged the harnesses so they run flat out and catamaran the wheel, which allowed them to run full out. Each of them leaned out the side of the Wheel, giving a better view of the terrain ahead than through the translucent dust-coated fabric, and allowing them to shift its direction more rapidly by leaning in and out to shift the center of gravity.

A risk, yes, but a risk that Glenn knew they had to take. Alena wouldn’t settle for less. And it might even be better, balancing the time of use with the fatigue on the Wheel. If it broke before they were done, they’d have no chance. So the shorter time they spent inside it, the better. Or at least that’s what Glenn told himself. “Pay attention!” Alena said. “A few more inches, and we might have lost a strut.”

“I know, I know,” Glenn said. “I’m sorry.”

“What were you thinking?”

“Tibet,” he said.

Silence for a time. “Oh,” she said finally.

“Remember?”

“I remember we didn’t make it.”

And she was right. A series of storms had kept them from ever trying the climb again. The next year, a guy from the UK had succeeded in climbing the ridge. Before they could save to go back again. Glenn had found the printout from the freeclimb website posted to the refrigerator, when he’d come home from work. That was the beginning of the silence. It was, in a way, the beginning of the end, though their marriage limped along another three years after that.

Glenn said nothing. There was nothing to say.

“I just don’t like losing,” she said, after a time.

“Neither do I.”

“We don’t have to lose if you pay attention.”

“I am.”

“We’re making up time.”

“I know.”

“The others may have problems with the Kite.”

“They will.”

Alena stopped and shot him and puzzled look. “Why are you so agreeable for once?”

Because I love you, Glenn thought. That’s another thing I never wanted to lose. But again, he said nothing.

There was nothing to say.

Joy

Patrice couldn’t drag Jere away from the darkened room of the slice and dice screens, so she brought him pizza from Pizza One, the new italo-californian place on Vine. His eyes were big and round from the litter of espresso cups in front of him, but the skin hung in dark bags beneath them. His right eye, glazed with eyepod-dazzle, looked faraway into space. His left eye jittered, focused on her.

“You need to sleep,” she said.

“What?” Jere said. He hadn’t seen her at all. Not at all.

“Sleep. You know, the bit where you lay down on a bed, close your eyes—”

“I’ll sleep when its over.” Petulant. Whiny. Like a six-year-old.

“You’ll be dead when it’s over.

Jere glanced at her, glanced at the pizza. Looked away.

Silence.

Evan snored softly on a recliner in the corner. The creepy dad was gone, which was fine by Patrice. He was too serious. She could imagine strange calculations, going on behind his eyes. She didn’t like to think about that.

“What are you doing?”

“Huh? Finances.”

“I thought Keith was already flying.”

“Uh. Yeah. He is. But we might—” Jere’s gaze went away, reflecting strange landscapes.

“Marry me,” Patrice said.

“Huh?” Jere looked at her. Really looked at her. “I will.”

“Now.”

“Now?” Jere looked like a kid in school, faced with calculus for the first time.

“Now.”

“But—”

“We can do it. It’s easy.”

“But, a priest, a ring, a service—”

“We don’t need a priest, I don’t need a ring, and I don’t care about a service.”

Jere reached up to turn off his eyepod. He looked at her with both eyes. The next thing you say will make or break this, she thought. I’ll love you or I’ll hate you, depending on what it is. But I’ll marry you either way. Because you need this.

“Why?” he said.

Patrice smiled. That why was enough. It said, Why do you want me? I have nothing togive you. Everything is up in the air. There is no prize.

“Because,” she said. “I believe in you.”

Jere just looked at her. His bloodshot eyes darted left and right. He opened his mouth, but no words came out. She let him sit there, open-mouthed, for a while, before she said, “Come on.”

Patrice took him out into the street, where the hangers-on had come to watch Winning Mars on the big screens outside Neteno. When they stepped out onto the sidewalk, people stopped and stared. A hush fell. Eyes turned towards them, until they were like glittering marbles in the sunset above the Hollywood Hills. Couples leaned together, to whisper Jere and Patrice’s name.

“What are you doing?” Jere said.

“Marrying us,” she said.

She turned to address the crowd. “I believe in Jere,” she said. “So I’m marrying him.”

“Let all the flyeyes and netcams take this as proof. I take Jere as my husband, to have and to hold, forever and ever.”

She looked at him. He could blow it now. He could. It was possible. His eyes quivered with fear.

But he stepped forward, took her hand. He looked at the crowd. And in a loud, clear voice, he said, “And I take Patrice as my wife, to have and to hold, forever and ever. Because I believe in her.”

The crowd gave a little cheer. Some tourists with old-fashioned cameras snapped pictures. And, Patrice knew, the news was already winging its way around the world. So you have what you want, she thought. And Jere has your support. Which was good. He needed it.

“What do we do now?” Jere said.

“I have no idea,” Patrice said. Smiling happily. Because, just for that moment, everything was right.

Mirage

Geoff Smith felt dazed. Leaving the IBM package was one thing, but the slide was inexcusable. If only he could turn back the clock and check the microscope before they’d left! If only he could have remembered to pick up the IBM package! All it would have taken was a glance, and a five-second diversion, and everything would have been all right. He would have both, and his fame and fortune would be assured.

Now, his best possible fate was winning a prize. Just cash. Only money. And then having to endure the endless interviews that came after it, reporters asking snickering questions about how it was to be teamed with Wende and Laci, if they ever let him watch, if he got any. As if he cared!

But that was his only hope. And now, in this instant of time, as they flew over the rugged Martian terrain, it looked like they might actually have a chance of winning. Chatter from the Can told them: the felon’s Kite setup wasn’t going well, his lead had evaporated, and every second left him further behind. The extreme sports geeks had never really been in the running. They’d been slow at everything – assembling the Wheel, navigating, assembling the Kite – and were many, many minutes behind.

Money, he thought dreamily, watching the landscape pass below. Money money money. He’d hoped that he would be able to put together another slide as Laci and Wende built the Kite, but his water was lost and they wouldn’t let him have the time. He’d swapped struts while Laci rerigged the engine and Wende did the electronics checks. And truth was, he didn’t really feel like making another slide. It was as if losing the slide had taken all the fight out of him.

Of course, he could scope the dust all he wanted when they were back on the Can, but that would be surface dust, stuff that had been flying around in the UV. What if the dust had to be from a few feet down? Or what if the dust had to be from near the water flows that they had seen from MGS, so many years ago? What if he’d never had a chance at all, and they knew that, and they didn’t care? His thoughts whirled like a cyclone, all destructive energy and dark currents.

Wende looked back at him from the pilot’s sling and smiled at him. Geoff tried to smile back, but his lips felt frozen in place. After a moment, Wende turned away and looked at Laci. Laci looked back at him and frowned.

Yes, I know you don’t like me, he thought. You’ve made that abundantly clear. Nowturn back around and be a good copilot.

Laci was probably thinking how much faster they would be running if he accidentally fell off. He looked up nervously at his tether, but it was solid and unfrayed. Movement on the ground caught his eye, and his heart pounded. Movement? He strained his eyes. It was a wispy shivering that played at the edges of the mini-dunes that hid between rocky fields. Could it be something under the sand, twisting and dancing? Could there be real macro-organisms on Mars, maybe something like sand-fleas or worms or . . . Geoff was about to say something when they whisked over a hill to a larger dune field that was aboil with movement. He made a sound deep in his throat as they were shoved sideways. Wende cried and grappled with the manual controls.

Wind.

Of course. Geoff felt instantly stupid. The wind was kicking up. Even in the thin Martian atmosphere, it was enough to kick up sand and dust.

There was no life underground. Just mindless, lifeless sand, pushed by the wind. Sandstorm? He wondered, looking at the horizon. But it was the customary light pink, shading to pale blue above. No mass of pink dust hung like a curtain near them. His head swam for a moment, and he shook it. His vision blurred and doubled as if his head was a giant bell, just struck. He gripped his perch tighter and held his head still. After a moment, it passed. The landscape streamed by beneath him, soothing and hypnotic. We’ve always looked down at the surface of Mars and imagined things. Shciapiarelli’s canals, Hoagland’s faces and cities, Clarke’s trees. Everyone saw what they wanted to see in Mars. First, God of War. Next, an arid desert world where intelligence clung to life with massive feats of engineering. Then, an incredible fantasy-land where all manner of strange creatures hid the secrets of eons past. Then, suddenly, the real photography, exposing the dead, dry thing they knew it to be now.

But it wasn’t dead! He knew there was life here. If they’d just let him have enough time, he would have seen microbes. If they’d given him a shovel and even more time, he’d dig up fossils. He knew it! And somehow, he would still prove it!

The landscape changed again from dunefield to dark rocks, rectilinear and almost artificial in appearance. It reminded him of ancient Mayan ruins. Like that other guy had said. That guy online, who was always seeing cities in every photograph the latest probes sent back. Geoff thought he was a little crazy about it, ancient Mayans and spacemen and stuff like that. Or was it Egypt? Or Stonehenge? He shook his head.

Details swam and ran and resolved themselves again. The rectilinear lines became sharper and more regular. Now he could see individual stones, etched into fantastic designs by the passage of time.

Etched? By what? He shook his head again, and details leaped out: fantastic whorls and patterns, ancient art of the highest order. It wasn’t etched by weather. It was etched by intelligence! He was looking at carvings. Alien, to be sure, but deliberate carvings. Someone had done these, thousands or millions of years ago!

Were those patterns he saw in the sand as well? Did they cover ancient squares where people once gathered? For a blinding instant, he could see the entire city as it had stood, towering, over the rough Martian surface, with wise-looking, robed people with big golden eyes congregating . . .

“Stop!” he cried. His voice sounded strangely high and strangled.

“What?” Wendy said. “Why? What’s wrong.”

“It’s them!” Geoff said. “Intelligence! The city below us . . . there’s a city below us!”

The two looked down, scanning back and forth with puzzled looks. Probably not even looking down, Geoff thought. Just looking ahead. Always ahead. To the prize. That was all that mattered to them.

“Geoff?” Wende said. “What are you talking about?”

How could they not see it? He could see its lines, etched into the rocks, buried in the sands. There was the remains of an entire civilization below them. “The city! Look at the stones!

They’re square! Look at the language on them!”

“Geoff, that isn’t funny.”

A crackle. The voice of Frank Sellers from the Can. “What do you see?”

“A city,” Geoff said. “The remains of a city. Stones. Writing! Decoration!”

“Land,” Frank said.

“What?” Laci said.

“Put your Kite down.”

“No way!” Laci said. “We’re winning!”

“The Roddenberry clause says you have to investigate any overt evidence of life you might find,” Frank said.

“Fuck with that! We’re not stopping!”

“If you don’t stop, it’s contract breach.”

“But there’s nothing below us!” Wende broke in. “Just a rockfield.”

“You have to land. Or you forfeit all winnings.” Slow and steady, as if speaking to a child. Geoff had to stifle a grin.

“Shit!” Laci said. Wende grumbled, but they began to fall from the sky.

“Turn around,” Geoff said. “The best part is behind us.”

Wende wheeled around and he saw it all, the geometric perfection, the ancient city and all its splendor.

“I still don’t see it,” Wende said. “Frank, can you review our last imagery?”

“Yep,” Frank said. “Continue with your landing. It’ll take me a few minutes.”

“Shit.” But still they dropped lower.

Silence for long seconds as they fell out of the sky. Wende picked a relatively clear section of sand and for a moment they all acted as landing gear, running over the sand. Geoff’s legs felt heavy and weak, and he buckled under the weight of the Kite. Down this close, he could see nothing. Rocks were just rocks. Sand was just sand. There was no great city. Like Nazca! he thought. You have to be up in the air to see it. Smart! Real smart! Like the Face!

“Geoff? You alright?” That was Wende. Pretty Wende. Nice of her to think about him. Frank’s voice crackled back on. “False alarm,” he said. “I don’t see anything other than some regular volcanic cracking. That’s probably what fooled you, Geoff.”

Fooled? “I’m no fool!” he shouted. He had seen it! He had!

Silence for a time. Finally: “Laci, Wende: what does Geoff look like? Is he blue?”

“No,” Wende said. “But he is looking a bit funny. Patchy, splotchy. Oh, shit. Does he have a bug?”

“More likely a life support malfunction. Is his suit torn? Is he cold?”

“Fuck him,” Laci said, and started the engine again. Wende glanced at her and shrugged out of her harness.

“No,” Laci said. “Wende, get back in. We need to fly!”

“It’ll only take a minute,” Frank said.

“It won’t kill him.”

“It might,” Frank said.

“Then we take the chance.”

Wende had stopped shrugging out of her harness, under Laci’s hard glare. Frank said nothing. Geoff watched them for a moment, thinking, I saw it! I did! I really did! There was a distant babble on the comm and things got very bright.

Then rough hands picked him up. Wende’s face bent over him.

“What do I do?”

“Check his suit. He may have torn it.”

Wende spun Geoff around, looking at his suit. He tried to think of a snappy retort, but everything was fuzzy. “Stop it!” he said, and tried to twist out of her grasp.

“Nothing,” Laci said.

“Check his oxygen,” Frank said. “It may be cranked up too high. Funny, that usually doesn’t cause hallucinations, but I suppose . . .”

“I saw it!” Geoff said. “I really did!”

He said it would only take a minute, but it seemed to take forever. They did something on the back of Geoff’s suit, and he sucked in big breaths of air. His head began to clear. But when they were all back on board and soaring into the sky, even the Rothman team had passed them.

Face

When Jere and Patrice came back from their short honeymoon at his apartment, Evan was holding forth to the slice and dice room. “If only they’d found a city,” Evan said. “That’d make this whole trip worthwhile.”

“What, did you expect to find the Martian crown jewels?” Ron said.

“Who knows?”

“You’re an idiot,” Ron said.

“Just remember who came up with this idea.”

“And the completely bullshit numbers that got us in this mess.”

Evan stood up. He glanced at Patrice and Jere, and played dum-dum-de-dum out of the corner of his mouth, ironically. “You just don’t think big enough. We should be selling this as a series! We should be pitching for the next show! Haven’t you looked at the numbers? This is the biggest thing to ever hit linears, even in the age of TV. This is the superbowl of superbowls. This is the Holy motherfucking Grail. And you sit there, hand-wringing, when you’re right on the fucking top!”

“Shut up, Evan,” Ron said.

“No. I won’t. I shouldn’t have to. I’ve shut up for long enough. I should go out and sell the next show to someone else, right now. You just don’t get the power. Not at all.”

“If you think you can sell it, do it,” Ron said.

Evan looked from Ron to Jere. “Are you formally severing my contract?”

Silence from Ron. He looked down at a progam planning screen, as if engrossed in the details.

“Am I released? Because if I am, I want it for the record.”

Silence.

“Tell me! Tell me right now!”

“You’re not released,” Ron said, softly.

Evan laughed. “Of course not. Because you know this is a big idea. You know this is the big deal, the big power. You know, if you sell it right, you can do whatever you want with this.”

“Shut up, Evan.”

This time, he did. Ron looked up at Jere with dull, ironic eyes. “Welcome the newlyweds.”

“What a fucking stunt,” Evan said.

Ron moved with more grace and speed than Jere had ever seen him use. In one motion, he stood up, swung, and placed his fist squarely in the center of Evan’s face. There was a dull crunching noise, very much like the foley guys pounding celery, from the dim days of the art. Evan squealed like a girl and retreated, clutching his nose.

“You fucking nut!” Evan said.

“You don’t talk to my son like that. Or his wife.”

“I’ll . . . I’ll have you fucking arrested!”

“Try it.”

The two old men stared at each other, both motionless. Jere waited tensely, expecting Evan to rush his father. But he just took a couple of steps back. Blood was streaming over his hand.

“Go,” Ron said. “Have the nose fixed.”

After a while, Evan did.

Dying

Frank was lying to them again. Mike Kinsson didn’t blame the man. What was he going to tell them otherwise? Sorry, you’re out of luck, best to just ditch the headers and pop offquick.

“We’re still seeing if we can rig one of the Returns for remote operation,” Frank said. “If we can remote it, we can bring it to your location and you can return to the ship from there.”

“How much longer?” Juelie whined. “I’m bored.”

She and Sam had their arms around each other. The tiny half-dome shelter was still up, but everyone was out of it for the thin grey light of morning. The morning of the third day. The last day. Later, Mike would go and wander around, like he’d done on the days before. Sam hadn’t gotten aggressive yet, but Mike didn’t want to be around when he did. Juelie and Sam were like two teenagers who had just discovered sex, and they were probably happy to have the privacy. He’d walked over to the nearby cliffs, turning over rocks, hoping beyond hope to see the tell-tale color of lichen or moss, something that might be able to survive in Mars’ hostile environment. He still remembered the first time his mother and father had taken him to the Griffith Observatory in Southern California, and they had talked about what life might be like on other planets. Lichens and primitive plants for Mars, they’d said. Maybe. That was about the best they could hope for. Or just bacteria. Things you couldn’t see. It had fascinated him in a way that nothing had ever done, before or since. What if there was life on other planets? What if Mars could be made to support human life? There were an endless variety of “What ifs.”

“We’re hoping to have a definitive answer by the end of the day,” Frank said.

“What if it takes longer?” Sam said.

“Then we wait.”

“We’re running out of food!” Juelie said.

“We know. Please do what you can to save food and conserve energy.”

They both looked at Mike. Mike looked right back at them, thinking, Like what you weredoing wasn’t more strenuous than my walk.

He started edging away from them again. What would they do when they found out there really wasn’t any rescue coming? Maybe it would be best just to wander off, and stay wandered off. Maybe the Martian night would be cold enough to overwhelm his squeezesuit. Maybe the movies were right. Maybe freezing was a pleasant way to die.

“He’s heading off again!” Juelie said.

“Mild physical exertion won’t hurt,” Frank said.

They watched Mike as he walked away, but they didn’t come after him. More lichen-hunting. He walked past the cliffs from the day before and came to a place where sand and rocks made a steep slope down into a small valley. Rivulets had been cut in the surface of the slope, some still knife-edged.

He remembered old satellite images. Could he be near a place where water was near the surface? He paused to dig into one of the little channels, but turned up only dry sand and dust and pebbles. If there was water here, it was deeper than he could find. Which was too bad. Because if there was life here, they’d likely find it somewhere where there was liquid water. That’s what they’d always said. Their best hope for finding earthlike life hinged on water.

He wandered on. There would be no rescue. He knew that. The Returns weren’t designed for remote operation. If they were, they would have had one out to them the first day. He’d keep walking, and see where his feet took him. Until it was time to lie down and turn down the heaters as far as they went. Maybe some real pioneer, fifty years from now, would find his desiccated body and say, This is the other guy, the one who wandered away fromcamp. We finally found him!

Mike shivered. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

But it was better than imagining Juelie and Sam, when the real news came down. Bittersweet

“It’s a lie, isn’t it?” Patrice said. “What you’re telling Sam and Mike and Juelie.”

Jere turned to her. This is my wife, he thought. It was one of the weirdest things he’d ever thought.

“It—” he began. And stopped himself.

“Of course it is,” he said.

Patrice looked down. “I want to talk to them,” she said. “Before the end.”

“I—”

I’ll wake up to her the rest of my life.

“I’ll make it happen,” he said.

Honeymoon

“Come on!” Alena said. “Come on come on come on!”

And they were close. The Can was embargoing the status of the teams, but Glenn knew they were close. They’d made it from dead last to nearly tied with the Paul guy when Frank and Petrov finally shut up.

“What can I do?” he asked, over the local comm.

“I don’t know! I was talking to the Kite, not you!”

“I’ll think positive thoughts.”

“Good for you!”

Glenn smiled. And what could he do, other than stay lashed up under the belly of the Kite for minimum aerodynamic drag? Nothing.

The next one they should make more manual, he thought. Human-powered Kites andWheels. None of this motor crap. Or at least have us be able to add our output to the engines. What was the fun in flying, anyway? The Wheel had taken some skill and technique, and that was where they’d made up most of their time. But the Kite was nothing more than a big powered hang-glider. What was the fun in that?

“Look!” Alena said, pointing.

Glenn strained his eyes. Ahead of them, the rocky plain rolled uninterrupted for as far he could see.

“What?”

“The Returns! We’ve made it!”

Glenn squinted. Very far in the distance, he could just catch the glint of metal. “Is that really it?”

“Yeah, that’s it! Come on come on come on come on!”

“Talking to the machine again?”

“It can’t hurt!”

Alena looked at him, and he saw the girl who he’d fallen in love with, the woman he’d proposed to, all the goodness in her. She was smiling, exultant, her color high and eyes flashing. She was at her best when she was not only competing, but winning. It was impossible not to love her.

She saw him looking and smiled wider. Oh, what that promised!

He shoved the throttle hard against its stops, as if another few micrometers could make any difference in their velocity. It was already hard open, always had been. There was only one setting, in the thin atmosphere of Mars.

Where was Paul? If the race was as close as he thought, he should be able to see his Kite, bright white against the pale sky. He scanned from left to right, but saw nothing. 211

And it comes down to this, Glenn knew. Whoever makes it to the Returns, wins. The returns went back to the Can automatically. There was no race to orbit. Another scan. No Kite. Was it possible that Paul had run into trouble? Could they really be first?

Karma will get you all the time, he thought. You should have picked up the Ruiz team. From ahead of them, a bright flare. The kite rocked as Alena started violently. One of the returns climbed slowly into the sky, then moved faster, darting upward out of view.

“No!” she said. “No no no no no!”

“Paul,” Glenn said softly.

“How much longer do we have?” Alena asked.

“A couple of minutes. But it’s . . .”

“Go faster!”

“It only takes three minutes to orbit!”

“I don’t care! Go faster!” Her eyes were brighter now, brighter with tears. Her face was twisted into a mask of anguish.

“Are you talking to me, or the machine?” Glenn said softly.

“Anybody! Anybody who’ll listen!”

Glenn fell silent and let the only sound be that of the rushing wind and roaring motor. The Return field grew ahead of them, big enough so they could see the remains of Paul’s Kite. It lay there, an almost unrecognizable tangle of aluminum struts and fabric. He had had a hard landing.

“We’ve lost,” he said.

“No!”

“Yes, we have.”

When they landed, Alena scrambled to the nearest return pod and began the launch prep.

“Hurry up!” she said. “Come on! Hurry up!”

When the prep was still less than halfway done, the voices from the Can came back. This time it was the Frank. He sounded tired, and sad, and more than a little disgusted.

“We have a winner,” she said. “Keith Paul is now back on board the Mars Enterprise. To our other teams, thank you for an excellent competition. Please do whatever you can to travel safely on your way back. There is no need to hurry now.”

“No!” Alena wailed. She beat on the low bench of the Return pod. Glenn tried to gather her in his arms, but she pushed him away violently. He tumbled out onto the cold sand and lay for a moment, stunned, staring up at the alien sky.

“Glenn?” Alena, on their local channel. Glenn shook his head, but said nothing.

“Glenn?” Frightened.

She came out of the pod and knelt atop him, her eyes red from crying, her mouth pulled taut in worry. “Glenn!” she said, shaking him.

“What?” he said.

“Glenn, I can’t hear you! Are you OK?”

“What?” He reached behind him and felt the suit’s radio. Nothing. It seemed OK. Of course, he could have hit something in his fall . . . He shrugged and gave her the thumb-andforefinger “OK” sign.

“I heard you hit and a big hiss and I thought you’d broken your header, that I’d killed you.” She was crying even more now, big tears hitting the inside of her header and running down towards her chest.

He pushed his header to hers. “I’m OK,” he said.

“I can hear you now.”

“Yeah, old trick. Frank told me. Touch helmets.”

She helped him up. The return pod gaped open like a mouth.

“Let’s go,” she said, touching helmets again.

“Wait a minute.” Glenn looked from the Return pods – all four of them – to the sky, and then towards the east, where the Ruiz team was stranded.

Could they? The Can had been talking about rigging one of the Returns for automatic flight, but they obviously hadn’t. Would it be possible to fly one over to Ruiz, pick them up, and save them? Would it be possible to fly two? Would they have enough fuel? Could they refuel?

It was worth a shot.

“Alena,” he said. “Do you want to be the real winner?”

She got it. Her eyes got big, and she nodded. She stayed helmet-to-helmet with him as she called the Can.

“Frank,” she said. “Let’s talk about the Ruiz team.”

Show

Evan’s bandaged nose didn’t get in the way of his presentations. In the darkness of Jere’s office, animated charts showed realtime Viewing Audience, feedback Ratings, inferred Attentiveness, inferred Buyer Motivation, plotted against Neteno’s historicals and an average of other Linear, Free-Access networks. This was the crap, the stuff they had to do for the sponsors, the wrap up.

The consolation prize for having the asshole win.

“We broke the ‘Near downtrend,” Evan said. “Broke it hard.”

“Advertisers received excellent value for their investment,” Evan said. “Viewer Attentiveness times Inferred Engagement is a record for ‘Near networks, maybe even interactives.”

“Typical networks would have upped ad rates midcourse,” Evan said. “As it is, the stage is set for a sequel.”

“Not with the long-term historical sequel return at 58%,” Ron said. Evan frowned. “We could break the trend. We broke one, hard. All the development is done.”

“Don’t even think it,” Ron said.

“What?”

Ron shook his head. “I know that look. That starry-eyed shit that gave us the second Star Wars threequel. The one with that irritating droopy bastard, whatever his name was . . .”

Evan shuddered. “I know who you’re talking about.”

“Point is, this show ain’t golden. And we aren’t perfect. Leave it now and let them clamor for more. Like Star Trek.”

Evan frowned. “We could do it,” he said.

“Shut up, Evan,” Ros said.

Jere nodded. We’re on top for the moment, he thought. And let that be enough.Winner

“I won, right?” Keith Paul said.

“Yeah,” Frank said.

“I’ll get the money?”

“Yeah.”

“So where are the cameras?”

Frank ripped off his earplug and pushed away from the comm board. He grabbed Keith’s shirt with both hands and pulled him close. The momentum took them off the floor, spinning through Mars Enterprise’s navigational room.

“There are no cameras!” Frank yelled. His eyes were wide and bright, quivering with that adrenaline-fueled, amped-up look that guys got when they were ready to take you apart with their bare hands. Keith had seen that look a few times in his life, and he knew one thing: he wanted absolutely no part of it.

“Nobody fucking cares about you!” Frank screamed, shaking Keith like he was made out of tissue. “Everyone’s watching the real fucking heroes now! You’ll get your goddamned money, just like you wanted, but don’t expect anyone to care! Now fuck off! I’ve got important things to do!”

Frank gave him one last shove, pushing Keith into the bulkhead above. His head clanged on metal and he saw stars.

“Okay, man, okay,” Keith said, as Frank drifted slowly back down and took his seat.

“Get out of here,” Frank said. “I don’t want to see you anymore.”

Heroes

“Look at these showboating dickweeds,” Evan said.

In the hushed velvet darkness of the slice and dice room, Evan’s words were incredibly loud. Visigods, almost used to not seeing Ron and Jere anymore, swiveled and started at the sight of the weary executives. Patrice put her hand on Jere’s shoulder, and he reached up to touch it. He felt beyond tired, beyond beaten, lost in some strange netherland. Instead of Winning Mars, they were all looking at the competitive feeds. The slice-anddice screen showed the story. Fox, Helmers, and the SciFi Channel were all tuned on a crappy little town down in Mexico, where a slim needle was being assembled in a shabby old warehouse. Outside, a makeshift derrick grew from a field of concrete. And some hairy guy wearing a dirty coverall was talking about building a colony ship to send to Mars. He called it Mayflower II.

“This is the real show,” he said. “Not that publicity stunt they did in Hollywood. We’re going, but we’re going to stay.”

There were shots of wild-eyed engineers and ex-scientists and geeks galore, thrusting what looked like old-time tickets in the air. “I’m going,” one of them crowed!

The show talked about grass-roots funding and an angel investors and breakthroughs in low-cost spaceflight, and the lottery of the best and brightest who’d signed up to be the first to go to Mars and stay.

“They timed it,” Evan said. “Perfect. They wait till we have the Ruiz team back safe and sound, then they spring this shit.”

But it was nothing, Jere thought. Just an incomplete ship. A bunch of nuts talking about open-source technology and happy-happy solidarity and helping each other and crap like that. They didn’t have a ship ready. And Jere knew what it would take for them to get it off the ground.

“They knew the ratings would die the instant everyone was back in the Can,” Evan said.

“They knew it, and they are fucking taking it!”

“What are our ratings like?” Jere said.

Evan shook his head and clicked on the realtime feed. The downward spike was still small, but he could see it accelerating. As he watched, it clicked down a few pixels more.

“Do we have anyone down in Mexico?” Jere said. “Can we get a line on this colony stuff too?”

“No,” Evan said. “We weren’t ready for this. The fuckers probably talked to every network except for us. Shitheads. By the time we fly someone down, the big story’s over. Assuming they’ll even talk to us at all.

It’s just a news story, Jere thought. One that everyone will forget as soon as they log off. A fifteen-minuter on Yahoo.

But he remembered the people, coming down from the hills to stand in front of Oversight. He remembered his face on the big screens at Hollywood and Highland. He remembered getting in front of eight hundred million eyes, and telling them the truth. Because that was what they wanted to see. The truth.

You can go back to the harness, Jere thought. Silk-lined, down-padded as it is. But still a harness. Or you can go forward. These people are going forward. They’re taking up where we left off.

He looked at Ron. Ron was watching the competitive feeds. His jaw should be set, his eyes should be hard and glassy. Seeing everything taken. Seeing Neteno slide towards one of thos crevasses where their finances would never recover. But Ron was looking up at the feeds, at that primitive rocket that made even the rough, dirty Can look sleek and well-crafted, and his face was soft. His mouth was slightly open. Perhaps, just perhaps, the edges of his lips turned up into a smile.

“We need to announce another show,” Evan said. “Now!”

“What are we going to say?” Jere asked.

“I don’t know! Asteroids! Jupiter! I don’t know! It doesn’t matter. We need an announcement, and we need a big one!”

“No,” Jere said.

“No? Are you fucking nuts? You’re going to let them steal everything we built?”

“No,” Jere said.

“What are you talking about?” Evan said.

“I need to get on camera,” Jere said, looking at Ron.

“What are you going to say?” Ron said.

“I’m going to tell them the truth.”

“Which is?”

“This is what we wanted all along. We planned it this way. Winning Mars wasn’t just a show, it was a spark.”

Ron nodded. He did his mechanical smile trick, arranging each muscle in his face in a precisely measured order. Jere didn’t find it chilling anymore. He found it very, very sad. He squeezed Patrice’s hand, and thought, I hope I never end up like that. Having to calculate a smile.

In the monitors, the same dirty talking head was going on with that intensity that geeks have, when you activate their center of geekery. He said they wanted to launch sometime in the next eighteen months, to time it for the opposition. He made a very lame joke about having to travel a few million miles farther than Neteno. He looked very excited, and also very scared. They’ll never make it, Jere thought. They’ll fucking die up there. All of them. They might not even make it off the launch pad.

But if they do . . .

“Go do it,” Ron said. “Go make your legacy.”

Jere kissed Patrice and turned to leave. Evan started after him, but Ron caught his sleeve. “No,” he said. “Not you.”

“It was my show!” Evan wailed.

“Not anymore,” Ron said.

Jere hurried out, into the bright hall.

Coda

Mike Kinnson’s second going-away party was a lot smaller. Just his parents. There were no banners, no ribbons. Maybe because he still didn’t look too good. He was thin, and he still had to use crutches to walk.

“Mexico,” his mother said.

“Then Mars again,” his dad said.

Mike grinned. What could he say? He had experience on Mars. The crew of the other ship, the Potemkin, wanted him. Even though he wasn’t a real scientist, wasn’t a real brain. It’ll be hard, they’d told him. We’ll probably die. We don’t know if we can maintain a technological base, and if our technology falls below a certain level, we expire. But we’re going to try it.

“That’s right,” he told his parents. “I’m going.”

This time to stay.