The Long Count

by Bronisław Malinowski, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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From the field notebook of Dr. Joanna Zabłocka, engaged by Borealis Haulage to report on the custom of the passing on the ice road between Boreum Head and Lyot Depot. Mars, northern spring.

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Sol 1. Lyot Depot.

The Productivity Office has given me a desk on the upper floor of the depot dome, by a window over the marshalling yard. From it one can watch the rigs come in off the road with their tanks frosted to the axles, and the drivers climb down and cross the yard to the canteen, and that is all one can watch. Mr. Greaves showed me the window as if it were the principal instrument of the study. He has been on Mars six years. He has been north of the depot once, by air, for a ribbon.

His memorandum, read three times now. When a northbound rig meets a southbound one on the road, both stop. Both drivers suit up, cycle out through the cab airlocks, and walk across the regolith to exchange a small object, which they call a passenger. Then they walk back, cycle in and drive on. Mean duration, twenty-six minutes. Mean number of passings on a one-way run, eleven. A hundred and forty rigs on the road. He has worked it out in tonnes of ice not delivered per Martian year and has underlined the figure twice. The drivers, asked, say it is for luck. He would like an anthropologist to confirm that it is a superstition, so that it can be replaced by a radio check-in "with due cultural sensitivity." He was pleased with the phrase. I could see him being pleased with it.

I said I would ride the road. He said the telemetry of every rig on the road came to this desk, live. I said telemetry is what a rig says about itself. He found me a driver: a woman called Arrieta, who would not mind company, he said, because she does not mind anything.

Sol 2. Northbound, km 140.

Domenica Arrieta minds a great many things. She minds that I came from the upper floor. She minds the way I hold my cup, which is apparently the way people hold cups who expect the cup to be refilled. She minds my questions and answers about one in three.

The cab is three metres by two and smells of reconstituted coffee, warm plastic and feet. She plays the same fourteen songs in the same order. Behind us the three tanks ride empty and booming. We are making thirty-eight kilometres an hour along a line of reflector poles, one every two hundred metres, which is all the road there is: graded regolith the colour of a flowerpot, and on either side the plain going away to a horizon so near it looks like a table edge.

I will write this down now, because later I shall be ashamed of it and leave it out. I have a headache I do not expect to lose for a fortnight. I want to go home, and home is a hundred and ninety million kilometres off, and the next ship is in eleven months. I find Arrieta's music unbearable and her face, in profile against the window, entirely closed, like a house in winter.

The first passing, km 212.

Twenty minutes before it, the radio: a man's voice, southbound. Northbound at two-one-two. Seen anything? And Arrieta: Only you. Visibility was perhaps forty kilometres; there was nothing on that plain to see but the two of us. Asked her why. "That's what you say." I wrote down the words exactly.

We stopped. I suited up with her, which took me four times as long, and she watched me do it without offering help until the end. Then she put her glove flat on my chest pack, pressed, and turned away to the lock. I took it for impatience.

Outside, what I observed, in order. Arrieta did not walk straight to the other driver. She walked the length of his rig, along the tanks, round the back, and up the other side, and as she went she looked at the wheels, all eighteen of them, and twice she crouched. He did the same with ours. They met at the front of his tractor. Each put a glove flat on the other's chest pack, exactly as she had done to me. Then they leaned together until their helmets touched, visor beside visor, and stayed like that. They were talking: sound will go through the shells where there is no air to carry it. I could not hear a word. It went on for four minutes by my watch.

Then the passengers. His was a brass tap handle, dented, worn bright at the grip, which he called Lady Grey. Hers was a lump of green glass. They exchanged them and walked back. Twenty-four minutes.

In the cab I asked why she had walked round his rig. "You walk round." Why the helmets, when we have radios? "That's how you talk." At a passing? "At a passing." And Lady Grey, what is she for? "Luck." Will you keep her? The look she gave me would have taken the frost off a tank. "She's going south on the Haugland rig, sol after next."

So. The rule, as told: a passenger is exchanged, for luck. The thing done: a walk round the other man's rig, a hand on his chest, four minutes with your face against his face. Greaves has the first. The second is not in his memorandum at all.

Sol 3. Northbound, km 680.

Words. I am collecting them before they stop sounding strange to me.

Passenger: the object. Never "token", never "charm". One carries a passenger; one never owns one.

Walk round: what I saw. Done every passing, both drivers, without exception so far (four passings).

Show your face: the helmet-to-helmet talk. Arrieta has started saying it to me, impatiently, when I hang back.

Seen anything / Only you: the radio exchange. Said on every approach. Never varied. Arrieta can no more tell me what it means than I could tell her what how do you do means. It does not mean anything. That is its use.

The long count: for an old passenger, says Arrieta. What happens in a long count? "You come in and sit down." That is all I can get.

The passengers have names and histories, and the drivers know roughly where each famous one is on the road at any time, the way the old men of a village know whose cow is in calf. Lady Grey, the Bishop (an actual chess bishop, white, cast resin), Little Ludo (a die with a pip missing), Margaret. Margaret is a woman's wristwatch with a cracked glass, which does not go. Asked who Margaret was. Arrieta said a driver killed in the first year of the road. The southbound man at km 455 said she was the wife of the company's first manager. A third driver, a boy, said Margaret was the watch's maker, in Switzerland. All three said it with complete assurance. I have stopped asking and started writing the answers down side by side.

To hold Margaret is something. Drivers talk of having carried her as men in the canteen at Lyot talk of a promotion.

Did anyone ever keep a passenger? Arrieta, after a long while: "Fellow called Dunmore kept the Bishop. Said he'd lost it. He drove for the company two more years."

And then?

"Nobody stopped for him."

Nobody walked round his rig, in two years. I have underlined this, Mr. Greaves, twice.

Sol 4. Northbound, km 1,220.

A message from the upper floor, relayed to the tablet. The radio check-in protocol is to begin trial on the night rigs next week. Drivers will report status by voice at each passing and proceed without stopping. Greaves hopes my preliminary findings will "support a smooth transition."

Bad day. Could not sleep in the bunk, which is shelved above the driver's seat like luggage. Arrieta snores. Ate one of the pastes cold, out of temper, and was sick. Thought with real hatred of Greaves at his window. Then of Arrieta, then of myself. Wrote nothing for six hours.

One small thing, noted at the eighth passing, because it happened again. Before I cycle out, she puts her glove flat on my chest pack and presses, and before she cycles out she does the same to herself, a quick flat press, as a woman pats her pocket for her keys. I watched it on the other driver too, through his window, before he came out. The pack is where the suit's regulator and seals are.

Nobody has told me this. I have not asked. If I ask she will say: "You do that."

Sol 5. Northbound, km 1,440.

Northbound at fourteen-forty. Seen anything?

The southbound driver was a man called Pell Ostrander. His answer came late. Seen anything, he said. He gave her the question back instead of the answer.

Arrieta said it again. Seen anything, Pell?

Only you. Only you, Domi. Only you.

She said nothing for a while. Then she asked me for the tablet. The office had given me the telemetry of every rig on the road; she had never once asked to look at it. She found Ostrander's rig and read down it with her finger. All green. Cab pressure, temperature, oxygen, carbon dioxide at four tenths of a per cent, which is within the limits. She gave the tablet back and slowed us down a full kilometre earlier than she usually does.

At the passing he was a long time coming out. When he came, he started to walk round his own rig instead of ours, and stopped, and stood. Arrieta did not walk round anything. She went straight to him across the regolith, put her glove on his chest pack, and leaned her helmet to his. I stood by his tanks and watched his hands. They kept going to the catch at his side and stopping.

Then on the open channel, for the road and the office both, Arrieta: Pell's carrying Margaret. We're doing the long count.

She brought him into our cab. When his helmet came off his face was dark red, as if he had been running, and he laughed at things that were not said. He could not work the latches on his gloves. She sat him in the driver's seat with the cab's air blowing on his face and told me to talk to him. "About what?" "Anything. Make him answer." So I told him about Kraków, and asked him questions about it, and made him answer, and Arrieta suited up again and went across to his rig alone.

She was gone fifty minutes. She came back with two things. One was the scrubber cartridge from his cab, the bed in it gone grey and hard as cake. The other was the head of his carbon dioxide sensor, unscrewed from the panel. She put them on the console in front of me and said nothing.

I took the tablet and opened the history of his cab. Carbon dioxide at four tenths of a per cent. The same at the start of the sol, the sol before, the sol before that. Six sols back the line had gone flat. It had not moved by a hundredth since. A sensor will send its last reading forever, if nobody asks it for another.

He slept two hours in my bunk. She fitted a spare cartridge in his cab from our stores, and ran his air through twice, and when he woke he was grey and ashamed and able to do up his gloves. Before he went, he took Margaret out of the thigh pocket of his suit and held her out. Not to Arrieta. To me.

Arrieta nodded. I took the watch.

The office log shows a passing at km 1,440 of three hours and ten minutes. I expect Mr. Greaves has seen it already. I expect he has underlined it.

Sol 7. Boreum Head.

Wrote to Greaves from the mine. Short. I attached the carbon dioxide trace from Ostrander's cab, all six flat sols of it, and a list of the eleven passings of our run with the duration of each, and what was done at each, in order, as I saw it done. I recommended that the figure of twenty-six minutes be kept in the schedule. I did not use the word superstition. I did not use the word function either. Greaves would only underline it.

We load tonight. Arrieta says the tanks take nine hours to fill and the ice comes up out of the cap at a hundred and twenty below and the hoses frost so thick you can break pieces off them. I shall go and watch.

Margaret is in my thigh pocket. Arrieta passed the green glass at both the last passings northbound and did not once ask me for the watch. "You'll know," she said, which is what she says instead of explaining anything.

I have stopped noticing the smell of the cab. Note that I have stopped noticing it.

Sol 8. Southbound, km 96.

Southbound at nine-six. Seen anything?

Arrieta did not reach for the handset. She looked at me. I had heard it eleven times northbound and had never been asked to say it, and for a moment I could not remember the words, which is absurd: there are two of them.

Only you, I said.

A boy's voice, northbound, the one who believes Margaret was made in Switzerland. I knew it before I saw his rig.

We stopped. I suited up, slowly still, but in half the time. Arrieta put her glove flat on my chest pack and pressed, and I put mine on my own and pressed it too, and she let that go without comment. She stayed in the cab.

Outside, the light was low and yellow along the reflector poles, and the cold came through the boots at once. I walked the length of his rig, round the back of the third tank and up the other side, and looked at the wheels. I did not know what I was looking for. I looked anyway, all eighteen, and crouched where I had seen her crouch. He was doing the same along ours, and we came round to the front of his tractor at the same moment, and stood.

I put my glove on his chest pack. Firm, flat. It did not give. Then I leaned in until my helmet touched his, and his face was there behind two visors and a hand's breadth of nothing, very young, with a cold sore at the corner of his mouth.

"Seen anything," he said, and the words came through the shell into my head as if he were speaking from inside it.

"Only you," I said.

I took Margaret out of my thigh pocket and put her in his glove, and closed his fingers over her, and turned back towards our rig.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Bronislaō Malinowskiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Bronisław Malinowski, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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