Red Desert - Point of No Return (2 page)

While travelling and
admiring the landscape surrounding me, more than once I fancied
taking some pictures but realised how silly that was. I should wait
to overtake the area we already knew and then send some images to
Earth, to let people admire from close up places that no human eye
had ever seen directly before. I wanted to share my experience in
the best way, because it might have been the last time.

A camera installed on
the top of my rover was recording my entire route, but I doubted
anyone would go out of their way to recover the footage from this
vehicle. I didn’t want to send it in real time. I wanted to keep
those moments for myself, at least as long as I was still here to
live them.

At that point Hassan
would have contacted Houston to tell them about my escape. I hoped
they would suspect him. The fact that, in a handful of days, one
person had died of cancer, another one had committed suicide and a
third one had fled to die somewhere in the Martian desert, wouldn’t
give a good impression of him and Robert, the last survivors.
Especially considering that Robert had stopped communicating with
Earth; how could they know he was still alive?

I smirked at myself
with naughtiness. I felt a kind of hatred for Hassan, because he
reminded me of my father.

He got my mother
pregnant, when she was a little more than a girl, and then he fled
to his country, back to his official fiancée. I’d never heard
anything from the man, even after my mother died. He had erased me,
and for a long time I had done the same. For some years I’d even
dyed my hair blonde, started using coloured contact lenses, and had
done my best to avoid getting tanned, so that my skin remained
snowy and didn’t reveal my Middle-Eastern blood.

It was useless,
because the features of my face betrayed my origins, as well as my
stature. Not that this had any importance in a multicultural city
like Stockholm. And so, once I’d completed my studies at
university, I decided to be myself again. I understood that what
defined me wasn’t my appearance, but what was inside my heart and
inside my head.

Perhaps that was what
I should have feared more than everything else.

I was walking in the
snow. The pathway was deserted and lit by a few street lamps.
Wrapped in a large padded jacket which almost reached my feet and
with a furry hood and a big scarf, I might have been anybody, even
a man. I was in no hurry, checking my direction on my mobile phone
from time to time to be sure it was the right one.

A low humming reached
me. From a distance I could see a club lit by a big sign. Someone
was entering, but when they closed the door the noise ceased. I
walked over and mixed in with a group of other local people. My
knowledge of German dated back to school and I hoped nobody would
talk to me.

I kept my eyes down
until I was inside. A sudden heat hit me. Everybody was dancing and
drinking beer. A band was playing on stage, but the most impressive
thing was the cacophony of voices and laughter produced by that
mass of people.

I started crossing the
crowd with caution. A man, he was twice the size of me, leapt out
with a jug in his hand and said something. In such an uproar I
couldn’t hear his words, but I sure as hell wouldn’t have
understood them anyway. I smiled and shook my head, hoping that
might be enough. He smiled back and stepped aside, turning his
attention to the woman behind me.

The throng was such
that it took a few minutes to cross the hall and reach the door
that connected the club to the small hotel located upstairs. Nobody
was on the front desk at that time. All the guests had their own
key to open the main entrance of the building, so that they could
go in and out, night and day as they wished.

I looked around,
searching for a place where I wouldn’t be spotted, from where I
could watch the guests’ comings and goings. The person I was
looking for was maybe in the club now, but he might already be in
his room and I didn’t know which one it was. Perhaps I could find
out.

I approached the desk
in a cagey manner and leaned over to see whether the computer was
on. A screensaver with the classic star field was on the display.
Maybe I had been lucky.

I reached out to touch
the mouse, but heard some voices behind me. I withdrew my hand just
in time before a young couple entered the lobby. They laughed,
while walking in an embrace. Their cheeks were red because of the
cold and the alcohol. Having seen me there, standing at the desk,
they stopped and scrutinised me. I pulled out my mobile phone and
pretended to check my messages, so they resumed laughing and aimed
for the stairs, taking leave with a “Gute Nacht!”

I repeated the same
words with an absent minded tone, and pricked up my ears as I
listened to their steps climbing to the upper floor, then onto the
corridor. The electronic key was inserted in the lock, the door
opened and then slammed. In a jiffy there was silence again.

Once I’d stowed my
mobile phone, I turned back to the desk and this time I reached the
mouse. As I touched it the screensaver disappeared, leaving in its
place a box for entering a password.

“Shit.” It couldn’t be
so easy.

I put aside any
caution, went to the other side of the desk and moved closer to a
panel hanging on the wall, with small post boxes for each hotel
room. Just few of them were empty. The boxes contained small
envelopes, all identical. What was inside them? I started to check
them one by one, hoping they bore the recipient’s name, but nothing
was written on them and they were all sealed. I turned my attention
to the piece of furniture again. Guests were asked to sign a form
at check-in and those sheets should be somewhere. I crouched down
and I opened the cupboard doors. There were all sorts of things in
it: yellowing paper reams, an old computer keyboard, cables of
various sizes and shapes, but no register or archive. They had to
be using an electronic one. In spite of the provincial look of the
place, they hadn’t closed themselves off from technology.

Discouraged, I slipped
down to the floor. I was near and so far at the same time.

The noise of a door
and some footsteps made me flinch.

I didn’t know what to
do. If I’d stood up, the person who had just come in would’ve found
my behaviour suspicious. Perhaps, if I stayed still, they wouldn’t
realise I was there and would go straight to their room.

What if it was someone
from the staff?

The footsteps stopped.
I could almost picture the person in front of the desk. Then there
was a ting of a bell. Whoever was there, was a guest. For a second
I weighed the possibility of appearing from behind the counter and
pretending to be someone from the hotel, but I discarded it right
away. My German was terrible and the chance that person was a
foreigner was small. But if he had looked over the desk, he would
have seen me.

I sensed him moving,
uncertain of what to do. Finally, he resumed walking. I heard him
going to the stairs. Overwhelmed by curiosity, I peeped out to
watch him from behind. He wasn’t really tall, but a robust,
grey-haired man.

“Omar!” a woman’s
voice called from the other side of the lobby. I hadn’t heard her
come in.

I felt paralysed. I
should pull back into my hiding place, but I had to see the face of
that man. He turned a moment later, to reply to the woman. He was
speaking a language I didn’t understand. When I saw his face my
heart skipped a beat.

The woman said
something else, and then she seemed to go back to where she came
from, because I couldn’t hear her anymore. Omar resumed walking up
the stairs. I waited until he passed the first flight and then
followed him. I was moving like a cat, trying to make the sound of
his steps cover mine. He was walking along the corridor. I looked
round the corner to see to which room he was going into. He stopped
before a door and inserted his key. I caught that movement and hid
myself, breathless, hoping he hadn’t seen me. After a brief
hesitation, I heard the door opening, his steps as he entered the
room and, at last, the door closing.

I breathed in silence
for some minutes, looking to find the courage for my next move. The
woman who was with him, maybe his wife, could come back at any
moment. I couldn’t postpone it. I closed my eyes, opened them
again, and then stalked towards the door. Once in front of it I
hesitated again, holding my hand in mid-air. I could turn back and
go away. In a week I was going to leave for the most important
journey of my life and I couldn’t believe I was wasting my last
days on Earth this way.

Almost out of my
control, my hand knocked on the door. It was late to change my mind
now.

“Leila?” Omar’s voice
said from inside.

I didn’t answer, but
the door opened straight away. When he saw me, his smile vanished
and he just looked at me with curiosity.

“Hi, Dad.”

It hadn’t been easy,
but in the end I had felt collected, capable of making decisions
about my life and my identity. Then I found myself in the same team
as Hassan, who had replaced the surgeon selected for the mission at
the last minute, and I knew he would be one of the four people with
whom I had to live on another planet. And that shattered my
certainties.

There was the hope
that at some point in the future others would join us. And they
talked about the possibility, in ten years or so, of a return to
Earth, for those of us who desired it. But Dennis’s cancer had
given rise to the feeling that the expectations on radiation
exposure, during the travel and the stay, had been too optimistic,
and that had drastically reduced the odds of a new expedition
anytime soon. During the thirty years since the previous Mars
mission, which had proved to be a complete failure, no great
strides had been made concerning this matter. It had been believed
that the problem was solved, without considering that the previous
astronauts hadn’t lived long enough to demonstrate it.

Nothing mattered
now.

When the sun set,
during the first day of my journey, and the darkness fell on the
planum, I stopped my rover, leaving just the life support on.
Travelling in the dark was nonsense. I lay in the back of the
vehicle and started watching the stars through the transparent
roof. The constellations weren’t different from those on Earth, but
their position in the sky was. There was no light pollution here,
or big clouds. The atmosphere had a pressure lower than 1% of the
terrestrial one. The result was a breathtaking sight. An impressive
number of stars was before my eyes, with the Milky Way that cut the
sky clean in two like a river.

I let my imagination
fly, which brought me back to Earth, when as a girl I watched the
night firmament with the same wonder. In all those years it had
never stopped having that effect on me.

That thought sweetly
accompanied me to sleep. It was one of the most peaceful slumbers
since my arrival on the Red Planet, maybe because I felt I had
achieved all that I always wanted and didn’t demand anything else
other than becoming one with those stars.

“Can you see it?”
Robert said, while pointing at a very big star out of a window in
the rear module of the
Isis
. In just a few days Earth had
turned from a blue, little ball to a bright point. We would see it
like that from now onwards.

We were hit by a
sudden melancholy.

“Yes,” I replied.

“I already miss it,”
Robert commented.

“I don’t.” There was
nothing more for me down there.

“I have something to
show you.” He displayed a conspiratorial look. “But you must
promise you won’t tell anybody.”

Intrigued, I smiled
and nodded.

“Come with me.”

We went to the middle
module, where an artificial gravity, similar to the one of Mars,
had been recreated. This assisted our movements and at the same
time allowed us to get accustomed to the life and working
conditions we’d have to face for the rest of our days. Our quarters
were there too. Robert led me to his.

“What’s on your mind?”
I asked, suspicious.

“Come on, sister, I
don’t want to jump you!” He laughed about my attitude, as usual.
“Get in.”

Amused by the
situation, I decided to obey. He closed the door behind us.

“Remember, you
promised.”

“Okay.” I pronounced
that word in a singsong voice.

Robert’s mouth widened
into a big smile, he seemed satisfied by my answer. Then, with a
circumspect manner, which was totally unnecessary since we were
alone, he opened a compartment and took out a seed storage box.
What would an aerospace engineer do with such a thing?

“I’ve brought
something which might prove
very useful
, once planted in the
greenhouse on Mars.”

I glanced at him,
puzzled, but avoided commenting.

He winked, and then
with extreme calm he lifted the lid to reveal the interior. There
were very peculiar seeds in it. Even if I weren’t a biologist, I
would have recognised them with no great effort.

“You want me to plant
marijuana in our greenhouse?!” I was indignant.

“Don’t shout!” he
replied in a low voice, stressing the concept with a hand gesture.
“Are you nuts? If Dennis hears you, he will get rid of it.”

“You’re out of your
mind.”

“Oh God, Anna, don’t
play the puritan with me. We have to spend the rest of our lives on
a desert planet without hard liquors, basketball matches, and
discos. We’ll need some action, won’t we?”

I shook my head in
disapproval.

“Not to mention the
medical uses.”

What an excuse.

“Do me this favour,
please.” With a theatrical gesture he joined his hands as if
begging me.