The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

He told of the night with the crisp of autumn first on the air when his father lit a bonfire on the beach and his children, following the sparks up into the night sky, had seen one that did not fly and fade. “That is no spark,” he remembered his father saying. “That is another world. Its name is Mars.” Another world! As complete and self-contained and full as this. A childhood of frequent illnesses was self-educated with old People’s Encyclopedias. Short on the rest of the world, but long on the wonders of astronomy. Sitting up late, late to listen to the beep on the radio that was Sputnik calling Earth. Again, that hot summer day when his father came running from the house to call him in from football to see the pictures of the capitalists walking on the Moon.

“That was when I decided I wanted to be a cosmonaut,” Antti said. “The Americans had put their flag on the Moon, but Mars, Red Mars; that was always ours.”

As he spoke, he became aware of the young man Ashwin’s voice, telling his own story: a strange and mighty one, of a world very alien to his own, and all the other voices on this featureless white plain, telling their tales and dreams of that little red light in the night.

Antti told them of the Air Force, when it had been a thing of pride and honor, and the passion and energy of young men who drive themselves toward a single ambition. The trials, the tests, the skills, the physical rigors and disciplines, the sacramental hours alone in the training jet, up on the lonely edge of the world, only the stars above him. The tensor mathematics would have finished him had he not found the humility to go home to his father, a schoolteacher, and ask his help.

“And cosmonaut training!”

It was only after that Kazakhstan morning, when ATOM 12 died, that Antti Selkokari realized his entire life and energy had been focused on that red dot in the sky, like a laser sight. As he told of the hours in the centrifuge, the constant medical testing-his childhood sickness a permanent dread-the team-building exercises, the Kamchatka survival course, the hours in the underwater tank, the hours and hours in the mock-ups and simulators, doing it over and over and over and over until they could do it blindfolded; the hours and hours and hours at the desks in front of the blackboards, working it out again and again and again. The crew interviews; how he thought his heart would stop when the letter came with the crest of the space agency, yet his fingers had no hesitation ripping it open. He still could not remember what it said beyond the key words. Glad. Successful. Mars. Novy Mir. Report.

He told about Milena. How overjoyed she had been, how proud! A cosmonaut’s wife! They celebrated with Cuban cigars and good vodka. A party member’s daughter could get the good stuff. She came at him fast and hot that night: there was a child to be conceived. A keep-safe, in case. Space was big. Radiation hard. Mars far and cold. Unflinching how it had all fallen apart, afterward. The failure had not been his, but it is a sin women do not forgive.

That morning, always coming back to that morning. The cold; clear Kazakhstan light; the jokes in the back of the truck that died one by one as they drew nearer to the great white rocket. The frosting he had noticed on the rippled white skin as they rode up the elevator, helmets under their arms. The cameraman crouching beside the gantry, their nonchalant waves. Hi, we’re going to Mars! Vorontsev, Nitin, Rozdevshensky, Selkokari. The startled birds flapping across the steppe. The hatch dogging, screwing the umbilical into the LSU. The startled grunt on the intercom as Mission Commander Rozdevshensky was told something they could not hear and he could not quite believe. The dogs turning. The ray of golden morning light. Barsamian’s hand reaching in: come now, quick now, get unfastened there and come with me. The ride down in the elevator. The ride no one had ever thought to take. The van bouncing over the rutted dirt road to the control bunker, and the word from Kirilenko that the thing was poisoned, had always been poisoned, was nothing but a tool in Politburo maneuvers.

From his trip to Mars, Antti Selkokari brought back a Kazakh rug and a fabric badge with the names of the crew of Novy Mir. He brought them home to the wooden house by the Baltic that had been his father’s and, since his death, was now his, his alone. A party official invited himself for tea to tell Cosmonaut Selkokari Mars was dead, no one was going now or ever, never to mention Mars; forget Mars, but even then their authority was on the wane and Antti had nodded and signed the forms and consents and that night gone out on the pale sand beach to look up at that red dot in the sky. First loves are enduring loves.