Moving Mars

by Greg Bear

  "Cailetet seems to know more about this than I do," I said. "Have you spoken with Crown Niger?"

  "We have," the third reporter said. "Off the record. He believes the interim government is behaving very foolishly and inviting a lot of pressure from Earth. He sounds frightened."

  "If Mr. Crown Niger wishes to express his views seriously, on whatever matter real or imagined, he should talk to us directly, not through the ex net."

  The first reporter blinked and nodded. "Crown Niger isn't stupid. What is he trying to do?"

  "I can't begin to guess," I said. I glanced at the info officer and he efficiently ended the meeting.

  There were no special perks in small stations like Mispec Moor. In a rickety cab traveling through the ancient tunnels, air thick everywhere with the yeasty smell of active nano, the info officer glanced at me cautiously and said, "What can we expect?"

  I shook my head grimly. "Crown Niger is trying to sink the elections."

  "Is there anything more the RIO should know?" he asked.

  "Not for the moment," I said. I leaned back in the stiff seat and felt the enhancement's tickle. Memories of the briefings from the Olympians mixed with my new sophistication. New questions tangled in my head. I visualized certain equations in the papers Charles had transferred to my slate. The symbols flared out in red, green, and purple, sorting themselves in the enhancement and being presented to conscious awareness. I did not savor the feeling yet — it was unsettling, having this powerful expert attached directly to both conscious and subconscious thinking.

  The equations — which I still only vaguely understood, the enhancement's assets not yet having penetrated deeply — kept pointing to vague discrepancies. I shut my eyes, trying to clear these distractions and think about Crown Niger. But the equations would not clear.

  There is more.

  I shook my head and swore under my breath.

  "Are you all right?" the officer asked.

  "I'm thinking," I said, the best answer I could give at the moment.

  Diane Johara had gained a couple of kilos in the years since I had seen her last, and her face had taken on a gentler, more knowing expression, but she was still Diane, and we hugged each other as if we were students and roommates again. Joseph and Ilya stood awkwardly beside each other, shaking hands, fresh male acquaintances sizing each other up. The apartment had three rooms and a sanitation alcove, spare even by Mispec Moor standards, but it was neat and comfortable and immaculately decorated with quilts from Diane's family and colorful, fanciful paintings from Joseph's.

  Diane wore a long black velvet dress and a tiny yarmulke on the crown of her head. In New Reform Judaism, men and women equally had to hide their heads from God's gaze. Her hair had been coiled into a dove-shaped bun on one side, and I found the style at once very dignified and very attractive. She had found her true beauty.

  I was so happy seeing her and being distracted from my almost painful welter of thoughts that I felt like crying with relief. I did cry a little, the allowed tears of renewed friendship. Joseph led us into the middle room, a circular dig about seven meters wide with banded red and black rock walls over insulation. Ilya recognized the mineral immediately and he and Joseph had something to talk about — deposition of oxidized iron during Mars's early history, the fluctuation of oxygen-producing organisms in the ancient Glass Sea and the chemical binding of their wastes.

  I was glad that Ilya and Joseph had found topics of interest to keep them occupied. Diane and I had a lot of catching up to do. The evening progressed pleasantly into dinner, and this was the surprise — after a day of yeasty smells and reduced expectations, the food Diane and Joseph prepared and served was wonderful. Fresh vegetables, the finest salad I had tasted in months, premium protein cakes wonderfully spiced with curry and laced with fresh chut-neys. We ate until we could hold no more, reconsidered, and tamped the excess down with a few more bites.

  "We keep our own farm vats here," Joseph explained. Whenever he looked at Diane, Joseph's face beamed rapture. I don't think I had ever seen a couple so much in love.

  "Joseph's family has had theirs for thirty years now," Diane said, smiling at her husband.

  Watching them and listening, I felt an odd pang. My feelings for Ilya were strong, and we were comfortable together. Of necessity, we had found ways to be apart without being devastated. I doubted that Diane and Joseph had been apart for more than a few hours in all the years of their marriage.

  They were beautiful.

  After dinner, Joseph and I cleared dishes while Ilya and Diane talked. Simplicity and self-reliance kept servant arbeiters out of their apartment. Joseph asked a few polite questions about the new government — questions I had long since grown used to, and answered easily. Then he frowned, put down the last plate, and turned to face me. "I'd like to mention something. Diane didn't think it worth bothering with, but I have different instincts," he said. "Oh?"

  "There have been requests from several sources to use Steinburg-Leschke territories for mineral exploration, to set up remote analyzers."

  "Is that unusual?" I asked.

  "No . . . But the requests don't make sense."

  "How?"

  "All the requests are for land mapped in the General Resource Survey twenty years ago. New surveys don't seem necessary."

  All of Mars was ready to find burglars under the bed. The President's office received more than a hundred warnings a week. If a little worry about the Republic was Joseph's worst flaw, I could accept that. I politely encouraged him. "And?"

  "I've traced the requests. They all come from former extensions of Cailetet, and contractors beholden to Cailetet."

  "Former BMs?"

  "All signatory to the Republic. None from Cailetet directly . . . but . . . all, indirectly."

  "That's interesting," I said, though it seemed normal enough. Cailetet might not wish to draw attention from a government it did not support — and it might not wish to be denied permissions by testy district governors.

  "I've asked around," Joseph said, sealing the kitchen washer and starting a cycle. "Nine out of ten of the districts Steinburg-Leschke deals with have gotten requests. That would cover half of Mars. Thousands of sites."

  My attention sharpened. "Why so many?"

  "I presume they wish to discover resources and stake shared claims before the election. They're afraid the rules will change after. But I'm puzzled — they couldn't possibly exploit so many sites."

  "Shotgun spread?" I asked, alluding to the old technique of filing many claims in the hopes of getting one or two that were productive. Erzul itself had not been innocent of such tactics. Hardscrabble mining was a tough enterprise.

  "Why in so many empty or depleted areas? Do they know something about areology the government should know? Or maybe my family?"

  I smiled and shook my head. "I'll look into it."

  "I apologize for talking business," Joseph said, "but I've always listened to my instincts."

  "Have they ever been wrong?"

  "Oh, frequently." He laughed. "I listen to them. I don't always act on them."

  We joined Ilya and Diane in the small living room. The talk wandered from business to politics — nothing impolite or too probing, for which I was grateful. Truly I was getting sick of this public self, longing for some relief, Ilya saw this and quickly moved the discussion over to food and farming. Diane watched me as Joseph took the bait and described Mispec Moor's plans for expansion.

  I took a toilet break as an excuse to be alone for a while and think. There would come a time, I realized, when I would hate even more this role of public person, whose ear was always being whispered in, whose life was the subject of LitVid stare-ups, who could not spend enough time with her husband to fill out half a marriage.

  By unspoken agreement, Ilya and I had postponed planning for children, and I realized children and a continuation of real life might not be possible for years if I joined Ti Sandra on a ticket, and we won . . .

 
I thought of Joseph, polite and smooth-faced and sincere, and his worries about potholes all over Mars — and of the thousands of warnings either dire or silly, the endless responsibilities focused impossibly on people who must delegate, and in delegating choose wisely and when some of those choices fail — as they will — trim mercilessly for a higher good, a good not always definable, certainly never agreed to by all the governed. I thought of the great grinding of the political wheels and felt very sorry for myself.

  It passed. I returned to the living room after washing my face. Ilya, too aware of my hidden emotions, patted the cushions of the couch beside him and hugged me as I sat.

  "We have good men, don't we?" Diane asked.

  I put my arm around Ilya and smiled, and Joseph blushed.

  I called a conference with the Olympians at Many Hills, two weeks after receiving my enhancement, and revealed my suspicions that not all had been told.

  I had not seen Ilya in a week. Criss-crossing Mars, campaigning with and without Ti Sandra, shaking hands and listening earnestly to a thousand well-wishers, ignoring those who simply turned their eyes away and did not offer their hands, I wondered if real life would ever return again, and whether I would recognize it.

  We met in the Vice President's office, just completed — large but not richly furnished, befitting our style.

  More than a little dazed, I stared at the full gathering of nine Olympians across a table laden with fresh fruit and grain breakfast goodies. For the first time I met Mitchell Maspero-Gambacorta, blocky and balding, dressed in black, who came from a small Martian BM in Hellas; Yueh Liu, tall and athletic, a mild transform, originally from Earth, who had joined the Olympians two years ago; Amy Vico-Persoff from Persoff BM in Amazonis, a solid-looking young woman with determined features and a quiet, steady voice; and Danny Pincher, a bland-faced man of middle years who seemed unconcerned about grooming or clothes. Charles sat at the opposite end, his expression calm and alert as I told them of reading the presentation papers over again.

  "There's something missing, and it's important," I concluded. "You haven't dropped the other boot."

  Charles looked at me with the glimmer of a smile. "What boot?"

  I struggled to find words for what my enhancement had encouraged me to think. "Seven league boots," I said.

  The room fell quiet. Nobody ventured to speak. I marched two stiff fingers across the desk in front of me. "Your equations imply a lot more. That much I've been able to puzzle through with the help of an enhancement. And if these things bother me, they surely must bother people on Earth."

  "Nobody on Earth has access to our data," Charles said.

  "How long can a discovery this important be kept secret?" I asked. "Weeks, months? Surely someone on Earth will understand — there are millions of people much brighter than I am — "

  "Maybe in a few years someone will stumble on what we've learned," Leander said, clearly uncomfortable. "A lot of what we're studying is speculative — "

  "I don't agree," said Yueh Liu, stretching his tight-muscled arms over his head. "The implications are clear, as Vice President Majumdar says. We should not be too cautious. I know a lot of our colleagues on Earth, and the whole picture is going to be clear to them sooner than we'd like."

  "The destiny tweak," I said.

  Charles shook his head forcefully. "Forget about that. It means nothing."

  "We should reveal all to everybody and put them on equal ground, Earth and Mars and the Belts," said Chinjia Park Amoy. "I would feel so much better if we could do that."

  "We've already decided on secrecy," Leander said with a worried frown. He sensed the group's cohesion loosening. They all looked uneasy, even frightened. I felt as if I had stuck my hand into a nest of sleeping hornets, waking them all.

  "Seven league boots," Maspero-Gambacorta said. "All the dreams."

  "Enough," Charles said quietly but firmly, his calm regained, at least on the surface. "What do you think we have left unsaid, Casseia?" He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and stared at me as if I were all that mattered on this world. "You have your enhancement now. Tell us. What do you think?"

  "I don't profess to genius, or to understand it all yet ..."

  "All the better," Charles said. "You give us some idea what others will think when they hear about the newest developments. And they will. In time. Tell us."

  I resented Charles's turnabout questioning. I felt as if I were a student up for an exam. "If you have access to the Bell Continuum — to everything that determines the nature of reality — "

  "All the hidden variables, nothing but," Nehemiah Royce said. Charles lifted his hand: no interruptions.

  "What else can you alter?" I asked. "Descriptors for momentum, angular momentum, spin, charge . . . " I waved my hand. "All of it. What else can you change or control?"

  "Not all descriptors are amenable to tweaking," Charles said.

  "Yet," Nehemiah Royce said.

  Charles barely tilted his head in acknowledgment. "But you're correct, and it's interesting you mention seven league boots."

  The hollow in my stomach expanded.

  "Your enhancement tells you more than you can consciously express, I suspect," Charles said. "Others with enhancements have the same problem. It's a design flaw, I think. Maybe they'll get better at it soon."

  "Please," I said.

  "We can reach into a particle and tweak the descriptor for its position in space-time. We can change the descriptor and move the particle."

  "Move it where?" I asked.

  "Anywhere we want. There's a problem, however. We haven't actually moved anything. The fact is ..." He looked down at the table. "We can't move anything small. We don't understand why, but the Bell Continuum ties a lot of position descriptors together. It has to do with scaling, with the rules that result in conservation of energy. We can't separate them out, so we can't access descriptors individually — or in smaller groups — for insignificant objects." Charles licked his lips and stared at me directly. "But we know how to tweak large numbers of descriptors simultaneously. Right now, we can't use our theory to move this bowl of rice," he said, shifting the bowl before him a few centimeters with his fingertip, "but most of us here think we can move a large object, if we're so inclined."

  "How large?" I asked.

  "The parameters are determined by size and density. The minimum we might move is an object of unit density, twenty kilometers in average diameter."

  "We're ready to try an experiment," Leander said. The room's atmosphere had become charged with a wicked kind of excitement. "Phobos is about the smallest local object we can move. Its major axis is twenty-eight kilometers, and its density is two grams per cubic centimeter. We suggest taking a trip on Phobos."

  I stared blankly. Charles leaned his head to one side and lifted an eyebrow, as if to prompt me. "Where?" I asked.

  "To Triton, actually," Charles said. "Around Neptune. Nobody claims Triton. It's sufficient in size ..."

  "Why Triton?"

  Charles pointed upward. "Volatiles. We could move it and mine it. It could supply Mars for millions of years."

  "We could put it in orbit," Maspero-Gambacorta said, "and shave ice from it — let the flakes drift into Mars's atmosphere. In time, the atmosphere would thicken — "

  Leander broke in. "Or we could use it as a vehicle and explore."

  "Why not both?" Royce said, looking at his colleagues with an expression of boyish speculation.

  "You've all been thinking about this a lot," I said. "Why didn't you tell us earlier?"

  Royce spoke first. "We haven't actually done an experiment, of course," he said. "Until we know for sure — moving something — it's hard to accept. You understand that."

  I nodded slowly, more dazed than ever. "Then there really is no such thing as distance. Space and time."

  Danny Pincher laughed abruptly. "I've been working on the time tweak," he said. "In theory, of course. The descriptors are tightly bound, co-respondent, as we s
ay. They keep a shell of causality in place. The whole system of descriptor logic is surprisingly classical. But the total bookkeeping leads to enormous complications if you only observe macroscopic nature. Only in the descriptor realm does the whole become simpler."

  "Ultimately," Charles said, "we may be able to reduce our knowledge of the universe to one brief equation."

  "Completing physics," Leander said, nodding as if this were already certain.

  "But moving a moon . . . Where does the energy come from?" I asked. Even with my enhancement, I could not draw a clear answer from the equations in their papers.

  "Energy and vector descriptors governing conservation are linked across greater and greater scales," Charles said. "If we transfer a large object, we draw from an even larger system. If we move Phobos, for example, automatic bookkeeping in the Bell Continuum would adjust descriptors for all particles moving within the galaxy, deducting a tiny amount of their total momentum, angular momentum, and kinetic energy. The net result would be a reduction in the corresponding quantities for the entire galaxy. Nobody would notice."

  "Not for millions of years, anyway," Royce said. "We'd have to ship thousands of stars back and forth all over the place to make any big difference."

  "It sounds so smooth," I said. "Could we actually move stars?"

  "No," Leander said. "We think there's an upper limit."

  "The upper limit seems to be two-thirds of an Earth mass, of any density," Royce said. "That may not be more than a temporary problem."

  "Some of us think it's a true limit," Chinjia Park Amoy said. Danny Pincher and Mitchell Maspero-Gambacorta raised their hands in agreement.

  "You could do this with the equipment you have now?" I asked.

  The Olympians looked to Charles to give a final answer.

  "We'd need to expand the thinker capacity," Charles said. "We've been working on that already. We'll have new thinkers grown and ready at Tharsis in a few weeks. We could do it in a few weeks or months. If we can do it at all."

  "Can you?' I persisted.