The Sunborn Read Free Page B

up the small hill. Footprints had made the entire area smooth, and the cortege followed a well-worn path. The stone cairn, which they’d erected twenty years ago when the first mission landed, had had many visitors. Also by tradition, the burial would be late in the day. Boot Hill looked out over the red and pink and brown wilderness of Mars. With the domes of the colony in the distance the mourners were reminded of the strangeness of their new world and surrounded with the beauty of a Mars sunset. It was a fitting send-off to a fellow explorer and served somehow to lessen their grief.
    Julia well remembered that small party of five who’d established the graveyard with the mounds for Lee Chen and Gerda Braun. Today there were twelve mounds and ten times as many mourners. Every time they did this the line was longer.
    We lost Alexev in a fall, Sheila Cabbot in an electrical failure. And, of course, two aerobraking tragedies. Andy is the thirteenth.
    Over the years they’d added far more graves than Julia had ever wanted to see, and had to expand the original boundary circle of rocks several times. None lost to disease yet. All accidents. She reached the top of the hill and scanned back along the line of suited figures trudging up the rise. The newcomers were easy to pick out, stumbling slightly in an uncertain rhythm. The efficient “Mars gait” took a bit of time to master. Also, the harsh reality of Mars was likely hitting them full force for the first time. The younger ones tended to babble in times of stress. The chatter in the suit mikes was unsettling; she switched hers off.
    Someone Julia didn’t immediately recognize was scanning a small vid around the scene. Most everything they did was recorded; she should have been used to it by now. But she still chafed under the watchful lens eyes. It seemed like an intrusion here, just to make a fleeting news item Earthside. But then, Andy had loved the spotlight. He wouldn’t mind.
    She looked carefully at the figure holding the vid. Still no recognition.
    We’ve really grown; I used to know everyone instantly, just by gait and size. Usually without looking at their suit markings. Hope this guy is new, and not someone I’ve forgotten.
    Viktor jogged her arm, and she turned back to the ceremony.
    She leaned over and touched her helmet to his. “Who’s the guy with the vid? Is he new?”
    “Didier Rabette. From machine shop. Here two years already.”
    One of the geologists was a lay preacher, and she’d volunteered to officiate. That, too, was new; they were really beginning to specialize. Progress.
    The ceremony was brief but effective. Julia thought suddenly about navy sea burials. Regrets, but the mission must continue.
    She let the bulk of the crowd leave, stung anew by the suddenness of death. She never got used to it: how someone you’d just talked to, or someone who had always been there, was now gone. She still held internal conversations with her parents, although both were gone. Her father had slowly declined from one of the newly emerging killer viral diseases, the zoonosis class that migrated from animals to humans, fresh out of the African cauldron. It was really no surprise when he died. But her mother’s death had been sudden: a brief respiratory illness, one of the “new” flus that roamed the crowded Earth, and she was gone in less than a week. From “doing fine” to “done for” in just over twenty-four hours, actually.
    Julia realized that even if she’d not been 50 million miles away, she likely would not have rushed to her mother’s bedside, because the course of the disease had been so ambiguous, the decline so sudden. At least, she thought ruefully, it helped assuage her guilt a little. But now Andy—plucked from them in a heartbeat. As a biologist she understood intellectually that evolution requires death; if all the original forms were still around, there would be no room for the new ones. But emotionally it was very hard to