Starlight flopped back on her spacesuited flanks, head down. "I don't feel like any hero," she said. "Cherry, sure, she got us down alive, and I don't think anybody else could. And back home Spitfire's all kinds of hero. Even Dragonfly here is a hero among the changelings."
"Too true," the changeling in question modestly admitted.
"But I'm a buck-up," Starlight continued. "Yes, I've done a few things, but I cause more problems than I fix. We wouldn't even be here if not for me— you'd be home with your crew, and we'd be doing, oh, I don't know what. And I'm just scared all the time, trying to save myself, and trying to think of ways to keep everyone alive a little longer."
"Which you're pretty darn good at, all things considered," Dragonfly replied.
Mark knelt and put a gloved hand on a pressurized shoulder, leaning into it so Starlight could feel it. "Heroes don't have to be fearless," he said. "They don't have to be extraordinary. I'm not Neil Armstrong. I'm not even Chris Hadfield. But a hero keeps going. A hero survives things that would kill most people. That's all it takes: don't die. People are going to look at you, and they're not going to say, `That Starlight Glimmer, she sure screwed the pooch a lot, didn't she?' No. They're going to say, `How did she survive a year and a half in another universe? On an almost airless planet? Growing her own food? Building her own escape vehicle? I could never do that.' That's what they're going to say about you."
"Really?" Starlight Glimmer picked herself off the dirt. "And what are they going to say about you, Mark Watney?"
"They're going to say, `Is that Mark Watney? I thought he'd be taller.'"
Pony and changeling snickered appreciatively.
"But seriously, I've been thinking about that," Mark continued. "How do ponies treat their heroes?"
Starlight Glimmer shrugged. "I live with the six biggest heroes of our time," she said. "One of them is a princess, and even now half the ponies on the street don't stop to look at her most of the time. If it's not Sun-princess or Luna-princess, we don't seem to get excited."
"It is so different with humans," Mark said. "The problem with becoming a human hero is, you can never stop. Do a heroic thing once and you're a hero for life. That name I mentioned, Neil Armstrong? Huge introvert. He talked to machines more than he talked to people, given a choice. Very private, very mysterious. He was the first human to walk on the moon. And he never had a moment's privacy after that until the day he died. He wasn't allowed to do anything, to be anything else. He was First Man on the Moon, forever."
Mark stood back up, dusting off the knee of his EVA suit. "And I think about that a lot. NASA is spending hundreds of millions of dollars and putting five lives in jeopardy just to get my worthless ass back to Earth. I owe them, and they're going to collect. Test subject for life for space medicine. Spokesperson at any astronaut event they want. Teacher of the next generation or two of astronauts. I've got a job for life whether I want it or not.
"And that's just the NASA side of things. Then there's the public. When I get back I'm going to be known as the first guy to colonize Mars. My alma mater actually pointed that out to me in an email— that if you live there and grow crops there, you've colonized a place. I'm going to go through the rest of my life as the first Martian. And because of that, every Tom, Dick and Harry is going to think I owe them my time, my ear, my handshake, my endorsement. And they're not totally wrong."
He looked out over the bowl. The kilometer-distant waterfall had ceased, the water already vanished completely. "Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot. Ever since I really began believing we'd get out of here."
A hoof touched his suited thigh— Dragonfly's. "And how do you feel about being a hero?" she asked.
Mark took a deep breath. "I think it's better than the alternative," he said. "Now, aren't you owed some magic-field time? And let's see how much salt you can find on top of a mountain."
The answer was: very little. They ended up going back down the mountain and halfway back to Site Epsilon in order to fill the salt box using Starlight's gathering spell.
Author's Notes:
I wanted to fit in a reference to Log Horizon, but couldn't manage it.
Even in the book, Mark wasn't always down about Mars. Yes, he hated the planet with a passion, but he enjoyed the moments when he could be what his vision of an astronaut was. Not enough to want to go back, mind you, but...
And yes, liquid water is possible on Mars— but just barely possible, and not for very long at all, and not on most of the planet. You need a low-altitude spot like Acidalia or Gusev Crater (or, come to think of it, Schiaparelli). You need very high (for Mars) air pressure (which you'll only find in the aforementioned low altitudes). And you need temperatures just a little above freezing, because at those pressures the range of temperature in which water can remain liquid is very, very narrow.
That one short film, shot on shaky-cam at distance using a suit cam on maximum magnification, would be worth the entire cost of Ares 3 plus the rescue operations by itself. That's how rare flowing water on Mars is. It exists— we've got satellite pictures after the fact— but it's damn rare. And Mark appreciates the moment, even if his companions don't.
PS — in other news, I got the fixed computer for my aunt and uncle today and finished getting them set up. That is now over, for given values of "I just volunteered myself as technical support for life."
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Sol 305
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AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE — MISSION DAY 309
ARES III SOL 305
"You break one of those," Fireball said, standing between Starlight Glimmer and the rainbow crystals, "over my dead body."
"Will you just move over? Seriously." Starlight snorted as she worked her way past the self-appointed guardian of beauty. "I need to get a close look at them. Besides, it's not like they're going to run out. According to Mark's photos, they're spreading."
That was true. Careful examination of Mark's photos of the rainbow crystals over the previous three or four days had shown that, somehow, whatever caused the shimmering colors that rippled through the crystal was spreading through the rest of the crystal— at a rate, more or less, of a row of crystals converted every three days. It wasn't an even growth; large crystals, the size of Starlight's barrel, took several days, but crystals the size of Mark's thumb or smaller seemed to change overnight, possibly faster.
Mark had taken another photo just before Starlight activated the magic field projector for a three-minute dose of ambient magic. He'd take another photo afterwards to see if any crystals had changed visibly from the exposure. In the meantime, Starlight needed to probe the crystals to see if there was some sort of enchantment in the things, and time was running out. They needed to rebuild power in the batteries too badly to run over schedule on the projector.
Starlight gently pushed the cocoon aside so she could get right up next to the crystals. She noticed that the cocoon had left a sort of shadow of unaffected crystals behind it, although it had obviously shrunk since the day of the magic blast that created the rainbow effect. The infection, or whatever it was, spread inward as well as outward.
She took a deep breath, concentrated, and focused her vision into and through a crystal, looking for an enchantment array, if one existed.
And... well, there was something there, but it wasn't any kind of array she'd ever learned about in her obsessive study of magic.
An enchantment array was above all orderly— usually a circle, but sometimes triangles or more complex geometrical designs were involved. Complex enchantments might have rings or layers of designs, intertwined or concentric, overlapping or entangled. But, if you were patient, you could see the sense of the design, and with knowledge you could work out what the thing was meant to do.
Staring at the enchantment within the rainbow crystals was like making sense of a restaurant-sized pot of spaghetti. Or possibly worms, since parts of it seemed to be moving just past the edge of Starlight's focus. And when she looked at another crystal and then back to the one she'd been looking at before, it'd be all different.
It made no sense. Absolutely, positively, no sense.
And then the sight was taken away from her, as the magic field was shut down. She refocused, concentrating her reserves, and looked again... and the spaghetti lines were still there, mocking her with their disorganization, with...
... with their chaos.
"Hey, Starlight?" Mark's voice cut through her thoughts. "Mind moving out of the way? I don't think you want a photo of your ass in a scientific study."
Starlight didn't mind the crass comment. She had an epiphany and she was ready to use it. "Give me a suit," she said. "Time to call home."
AMICITAS: Amicitas calling Baltimare, use suit SG for response, over.
ESA: Baltimare calling Amicitas, over.
AMICITAS: I need to talk to Discord, right now. Over.
ESA: Please repeat last message, over.
AMICITAS: SG — Repeating, I need to talk to Discord. Over.
ESA: TS — Are you crazy? You know we keep Discord as far away from any space center as possible!
DISCORD: And it's so impolite of you. I mean, here I am, one of your dearest and truest friends, and you won't let me help.
ESA: TS — How are you doing this, over?
DISCORD: Oh, Twilight, you really don't want the answer to that question. It'd only irritate you. And Celestia knows you've been so busy of late, with the launch of Angel Eleven. It's in all the papers, you know.
AMICITAS: Discord, there's this weird enchantment or something here. Have you kept up with the news from here? Over.
DISCORD: Oh, Fluttershy tells me this and that over our weekly teas, and then there's game night with Spike, Big Mac and Rainbow Dash, and of course the reforming tyrants support group with Queen Chrysalis.
ESA: TS — He made that last one up. Chrysalis is on Concordia performing retrieval duties for the Angel probes. Over.
AMICITAS: Fine. We blasted Dragonfly's cocoon with all the raw magic we had to energize her enough to come out. It more or less worked, but it turned the quartz behind her into these color-changing crystals, and the effect's slowly spreading. There's a really ugly enchantment that looks like all the crawling worms in the world turned to mana and took over each crystal. Know anything about it? Over.
DISCORD: Sorry, not my work or my knowledge. I can't even see the universe you're in directly— Twilight already asked. All I can tell is that where you are order and chaos are the same thing. Dependence on initial conditions mitigated by quantum indeterminacy. Dull, dull place, literally deathly dull. But I could...
ESA: TS — Discord? Could what, over?
AMICITAS: Discord, comms check, over.
DISCORD: Would you like a guess?
AMICITAS: Affirmative, over.
DISCORD: Ask your friend what he knows about "emergent properties". Not usually my field of chaos, but I do like to diversify now and then.
AMICITAS: Roger "emergent properties." Thank you, Discord, we appreciate the help. Over.
DISCORD: Oh, it is so delightful to be appreciated! It's something I get so very seldom. Well, must be back to my duty of spreading random acts and curious coincidences around the land! Ta-ta!
ESA: I think he's gone, over.
AMICITAS: No, he's not, over.
DISCORD: Yes I am. Over.
AMICITAS: Thanks to you both. Amicitas out.
"Dictionary," Starlight said as she pulled her suit away from the mud puddle beneath it. "I need to make sure I have this word exactly right."
Five minutes with the computer later, during which time the others sat and waited out of sheer curiosity, she said, "Chaos tells me to ask you about `emergent properties.' That is right, yes? Properties that come out of something?"
"Um." Mark shifted on his feet. "Where you come from there's a person named Chaos?"
"It's hard to explain," Starlight said. "It's more like there's a person who is chaos. Chaos isn't the right name, but one of his titles is `Lord of Chaos.' He makes impossible things happen at random around him— really, really impossible things."
"He's evil," Cherry Berry said, looking frightened. It occurred to Starlight, idly, that Cherry didn't let herself look afraid that often during their stay on Mars.
"He's a pest," Spitfire grumbled.
"He's scary," Dragonfly whispered, crouching as if she expected him to come out of thin air at any moment.
Fireball shrugged. "Not meet him," he said.
"Ooooookay," Mark said, looking around him in total confusion. "But how much do you know about chaos as a force of nature?"
"What? Chaos isn't nature!" Starlight insisted. "Chaos is... opposite of harmony? Chaos is broken! Ponies try studying chaos, and it drives them mad! Chaos even carries around little cards warning ponies not to study him anymore!"
"So, that'd be nothing," Mark said. "Okay. I'll try to keep this simple. Humans are the only species on my planet that can express abstract thoughts in the form of language and pass them down from generation to generation. There are a lot of other animals that are close— whales, some squids, elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees, parrots— but they don't quite get there. And for decades, human scientists wondered why.
"Then we figured out that, contrary to everything we'd expected, our brains weren't specifically designed to be intelligent and self-aware. Conscious thought is a by-product of the complexity of our brains. Even now, we're totally incapable of pointing to a cluster of neurons and saying, `That means he thought X.'"
"Okaaaaay... so are you saying the crystals think now?" Starlight asked.
"No, no, no," Mark said. "I'm saying that consciousness and the ability for abstract thought are emergent properties. They're unexpected products of an incredibly complex system. You can't predict them based solely on the pieces of the system itself. It's how the system works together that creates them."
"I don't see the point," Starlight said.
"Let me give you an example," Mark said. "About, oh, forty years ago, some scientists took a bunch of little robots with the ability to rewire their own internal circuitry— don't ask me how, I'm not a roboticist. The robots also had a radio receiver. If the robots could accurately detect a broadcast at a certain frequency, it got a reward. But the scientists didn't tell the robots how to do it. They just stood back and let the robots start guessing. The ones who came closest became templates for the next generation of robots, and so on. And by one hundred robot generations— they made new robots every other day or so.— the robots had become able to detect that signal ninety-eight percent of the time, without confusing it for another signal or detecting it when it wasn't there.
