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(Page 2 of 17) The Spirit Lingers by Stuart Atkinson
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Laughing along with them, Lauren hopped off the ramp and bounded towards them. Without looking back.
They bounded across the rocky, ruddy-hued land in a line, with Lauren on its far left, and as they left the rover behind Lauren tried to slot together the few pieces of the puzzle she had. She could tell from the direction of the Sun that they were heading south. She could also tell from bronzed colour of the darkening sky - and from the long, sharp shadows jutting behind each and every one of the rocks, boulders, cobbles and stones strewn over the landscape around them - that they had arrived Wherever They Were quite late in the afternoon.
She didn't need to look over her shoulder to know that there was something big behind them. She felt it there, looming up behind them, a dark, brooding presence.
She also felt something else here. History. This place was important. Something had happened here.
But what?
Well, she'd been to the preserved landing sites of both Viking probes, and had walked through the famous "Rock Garden" where the little Sojourner rover had trundled and trolled around too, so she knew she hadn't been brought to see any of those. And she had been so to the landing site of Ares 1, the first manned mission, so many times she knew every inch of it by heart, so she wasn't there either...
Where then?
Wherever they were, it certainly was dusty. The walk to the Viking 1 landing site at Chryse had been a quiet stroll across beautifully flat and compact ground, with rocks scattered around her by the thousand. It had been "like walking across a
sand-covered road" Lauren had written in her diary that night. But this place was different. There were fewer rocks, a lot fewer, and ridges and outcrops rose up out of the ground like the long-buried spines of martian dinosaurs. Elsewhere, small mounds, hummocks and hillocks rose up like bumps on a banged forhead, rusted domes topped with their own rocks, shingle and shale.
But the features that really caught her attention were the dunes.
This was a place of dust dunes, they were everywhere, all around her, ripples and swirls and crests of orange- and tan-hued fines dominated the landscape, each casting its own soft shadow over the rocks and cobbles around it. Some were little more than little waves on the ground, small and fragile enough to be scuffed and obliterated with a thoughtless sweep of her toe; others were as high as her knees, and looked like they would take some hiking up and over, with quite a drop on the other side. Chryse, Utopia and Ares had all been open air museums of stone sculptures carved by the wind; this place, wherever it was, had been shaped by the wind too, but more lovingly, more patiently. More beautifully. Chryse was a desolate, rugged no-man's land in comparison.
And that gave it a beauty all of its own. Wherever she went on Mars, Lauren found it beautiful. Mars was, she insisted to all Incomers, a world without ugliness; there was always beauty there – in the colour of the sky, the sharp, jagged angles of the rocks, the serene light of a winter sunset – if you were patient enough to just look for it.
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