said, “How you doing, big guy?”
“Okay,” said Sekou very softly. Then, louder, “It’s wet and icky and smelly in here. How long before we go home?”
Zora closed her eyes and thanked whatever gods controlled their fate that Sekou was in a bubble, because she was very close to hitting him. “We aren’t going—”
Marcus swiftly and seamlessly interrupted her. “Sekou, here’s a trick for getting over the bad parts. Make up good thoughts. Like, if you wanted to invent a toy, what would it be?”
“A camera to take smells and tastes,” said Sekou promptly.
“Those pictures you took, those were good,” Marcus continued. “Maybe help us get a new home. Your Daddy’s going to get the camera.”
“Can I take more pictures then?”
Zora focussed on the back of Marcus’s suit. “When did you tear your suit?” she asked.
Marcus wheeled around and looked at her. “Playing me, girl? My indicators say the suit’s fine.”
“It’s not torn through,” she said reasonably. “But it has a weak spot. That’s bad, baby.”
“Slap some tape on it.”
She rummaged the storage compartment and got out the tape. “I can’t handle this in my gloves,” she said.
He was quiet. “Have to pressurize the rover cabin then, to mend it. That what you want? Mend it.”
She tried not to smile. The nearly invisible spot she had seen on his suit was not likely to cause problems. “You can’t go out into the hab in a weakened suit.”
Marcus stared at her. “What kind of jive is that, Zora?”
“No, Marcus, no! Sekou, tell Daddy he’s got a little tear in his suit.”
Sekou tried to crane his neck, but of course he couldn’t see anything.
“Girl, I know you’re playing me. I know this.”
She threw the tape at his feet. “Be a fool, then. Get us all killed.”
“You’re counting that I can’t take the chance.” He stooped slowly and picked up the tape.
Zora continued, as if she had just thought of it. “You can pressurize the cabin and fix your suit. But it’ll take awhile to pressurize. A half hour at least. I’ll go get the camera with the photo while you the atmosphere builds up.”
“When you come back, we’ll lose all that good atmosphere again.”
She looked at him blandly. “It can’t be helped. You can take the opportunity to get Sekou out and cleaned up. We have no clean clothes for him, but ten minutes over the heater will at least dry his britches.”
Marcus stared back unsmiling. “You’re a jive fool, girl. You get serious radiation sick, I’ll kill you.”
“You saying don’t go?”
He stared longer. Then, “Go.”
* * * *
Zora didn’t look back at the rover as she loped awkwardly in her environment suit to the front airlock of the hab. Once inside, she felt a sense of unreality, her family home having turned alien. Odd to fumble to open the door to Sekou’s tiny room, not to feel the softness of his blanket through her thick glove. Everything was changed, charmed, deadly.
Her com still connected her to her child and her husband back in the rover. “Sekou,” she asked, matter of fact. “Tell Mama where the camera is.”
Sleepy, Sekou’s voice came back, “Under the bed.”
Environment suits aren’t built for crawling on hands and knees. Under the bed Sekou had stowed all sorts of things, pitiful toys made of household scraps and discards. A whole fleet of rovers made of low quality Mars ceramics with wobbly wheels that only a child would consider round. A doll she had made of scraps of cloth, and upon which he had put a helmet made of a discarded jar.
And way back toward the wall, where her clumsy fat-fingered glove could scarcely reach, the camera.
“The picture is still in the camera, Sekou?”
“Yes, Mama.”
She felt a flash of fury for not having paid more attention to her own child’s plaything. “How do you get the pictures out?”
“You have to develop them.”
“Say what?”
Marcus broke in. “It’s a chemical process. The film emulsion is sensitive to light, you apply chemicals to fix it. You unload the film into the chemical bath in the dark.”
Sekou had done this by himself? Mars god almighty, her boy was going to be something fine as a grown man. “Why can’t we just give the camera to Hesperson? And why can’t we do the developing in the rover?”
“It needs water, if I understand correctly. And I’m not sure Hesperson has the chemicals.”
Sekou’s voice broke in, excited. “They’re already all mixed up. Look behind the sanitizer. And Mama, it has to be way dark or you’ll spoil them. Take them in the bathroom.”
Marcus added, “It’s nineteenth century technology, Zora. Just do as the boy says.”
“Nineteenth century,” she said. “What game are you two running on me?” She felt the fool. She had a Ph.D. in biochemical engineering. How could she not know how to work a nineteenth century gadget? But then she couldn’t weave cloth, or knit, or make a fire with flint, either.
“Turn off your helmet light, too,” Sekou added.
* * * *
Thirty minutes later, she was staring at film negatives. “Why is there no color? Insufficient band width? And how could anybody be recognizable?”
“I think any computer could deal with that. Try it on your com.”
She scanned the tiny transparent images into her com and was rewarded with a bright, colorized image of Valkiri. After the com had thought a minute, it added a third dimension to the colorized image, although both color and third dimension looked a little off from the memory she had of Valkiri.
Marcus’s voice in her com startled her. “Bail out of there, woman. You’ve absorbed enough REMs to light up Valles Marineris.”
* * * *
Marcus was back in his suit, Sekou in his bubble, and the pressure in the rover falling rapidly when she got it.
“My suit doesn’t show a radiation load,” she said.
“Something wrong with it. They probably sabotaged our suits, too. Let’s book for Borealopolis.”
Sekou
