Moving Mars

by Greg Bear

  "Not my problem," Dickinson said.

  "And what do you get, personally?"

  "Exile, I suppose," Dickinson said. "No Martian will tolerate Gretyl and me now. No doubt we'll be dead in a few months if we stay here. We'll go to Earth."

  "You're happy with that?"

  "For the end of a Martian state, I'd gladly accept my own death, and Gretyl's," Dickinson said. "I am true to my ideals. I haven't changed, Casseia."

  "Every history has its traitors," I said.

  Dickinson dismissed that with a subtle toss of his head and flicker of his eyelids. "I'll need your answer soon."

  "How soon?"

  "Within one hour."

  "We don't have a quorum. If you could bring the rest of the government together — "

  "Please don't try to stall. We're all here to avert an even greater catastrophe. If we fail, stronger measures will be taken."

  "Locusts."

  "I truly don't know. As President, you are allowed, by your constitution, to negotiate foreign treaties."

  "But not to negotiate surrender during wartime," I said.

  "This is not war," Dickinson said.

  "What is it, for God's sake?"

  "Clever, devastating disruption imposed by a vastly superior power," Dickinson said. "Why mince words? I don't think you're stupid. We have one hour. I understand that if Earth does not receive a reply by then, the knot will tighten."

  These were not negotiations; they were ultimatums. Mars would strangle if I did not agree to everything. I felt lightheaded, almost giddy with suppressed rage.

  "Have you any human heart whatsoever?" I asked Dickinson. "Have you any feelings for what your planet is suffering?"

  "I was not the one who made this situation," he answered briskly.

  "We are honorable Martians," Gretyl said.

  No choice. No way out. Selling out the Republic's future, all we had worked for; I would be branded the traitor. A kind of delirium smoothed itself around me with seductive insistence. Die, but do not do this. I could not listen.

  Lieh had been monitoring her slate closely for several minutes. Now, she stood up from the gallery and approached me like a delicate crab, eyes full of hatred turned on Dickinson. She bent over and whispered in my ear, "Madam President, we've established contact with the Olympians. I'm told that you are not to sell the farm, and that you are to leave this meeting and come with me to the surface. Charles says he has to go see a man about a scary dog."

  I looked at her, baffled. Lieh straightened and backed away.

  "I'd like to discuss this with the people I've assembled here," I said to Dickinson. He nodded, appearing faintly bored. "You'll have your answer," I said.

  I left the table and gestured for Smith and Bly to follow me out of the chamber. We met Firkazzie in the governors' cloakroom. "What's going on?" I asked Lieh and Firkazzie, my nerves shot, all confidence fled.

  Lieh deferred to Firkazzie.

  "We're to take you Up in the next ten minutes. There's an observation deck on the top of the main capitol building, but it isn't pressurized yet."

  "By whose orders?"

  "It was not an order, Ma'am," Firkazzie said. "Charles Franklin requested your presence, and said it was very important."

  I started to laugh and caught myself before it turned into a hysterical bray. "What in hell is more important than negotiating with Earth?"

  "I only carry the message," Lieh said, stiffening and looking me firmly in the eye. I felt adequately chastened.

  "Let's go, then," I said.

  "We don't have much time," Firkazzie said. "We have to suit up and climb past the construction barriers."

  Dandy, Firkazzie, and Lieh accompanied me; all the others, senators and aides, were left behind, not essential to this task.

  We took an elevator to the upper levels, two stories above the surface. I was too numb and confused to be concerned with politics and protocol. I felt the bleak threat of Mars devastated by Terrie power, by armies in the sands; I could not get over the thought that this pollution, this disruption had caused deaths already, and must end soon, or else. Dickinson had given me an unacceptable ultimatum — and I had no choice but to accept. What could anyone do or say that would change that?

  I stood in a dim cold room while Dandy and Lieh dragged out suits, tested them and found them secure. We put them on and attached cyclers. The seals activated. My suit adjusted to my body automatically.

  Lieh, Dandy, and an architect whose name I did not catch took me through a short maze of nutritional vats and construction slurry tanks. Beyond the safety barriers, the dark, silent hall opened onto a short, curved corridor, an open hatch with a blinking red low-pressure light, a glimpse of dark brown sky and scattered clouds reddening in the dawn.

  We stood on a parapet overlooking Many Hills, surrounded by Schiaparelli Basin, twenty meters above the reddish-brown surface. Smooth scrubbed lava streaked with pockets of smear stretched for kilometers all around. The air was cold and still, the quiet profound. We had not turned on our suit radios for fear of attracting attention from assassins. Terrie ships could spot us from thousands of klicks and do whatever they wished to us.

  I lifted my arms in bafflement, wondering what I was supposed to be witnessing. I was almost by accident that I fixed my gaze west and saw Phobos, one hour into its ascent, four hours from setting in the east. I glanced past it, then felt my neck stiffen and my eyes begin to water. Scary dog.

  Charles said he was going to see a man about a scary dog. I did not know what Charles was going to do. But a hopeless wish, a wildest guess within me, pushed forward, fantasy turning to conviction. It fit. The Mercury could take them there, the equipment and the thinkers, and Charles was just the quiet sort of megalomaniac to think of such a thing and secretly offer it to Ti Sandra.

  I started to speak but realized nobody would hear me. I pointed to the moon. I pulled Lieh toward me, touching helmets, and practically screamed the phrase from Shakespeare. '"Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war! Fear! Fear and panic, the dogs of war! Look at Phobos! My God, Lieh! He's going to do it! He's going to do it!"

  She pulled away, her almond eyes squinting in concern, as if I might be insane. I laughed and wept, convinced I knew, convinced that somehow this horrible burden was about to be lifted from my shoulders. Dandy touched his helmet to mine and said, solicitously, "Something wrong, Ma'am?"

  I grabbed his shoulders and spun him to look west, to face that familiar moon we had seen so often since our births, that dread canine Fear that accompanies the God of War, so innocuous and innocent for such a dreadful name, small and nicked away by meteoroids and early settlement mining, circling Mars every seven hours forty minutes at six thousand kilometers, low and fast, accompanied by its fellow dog Panic.

  Lieh, Dandy and I all faced west. The architect stayed in shadow, not caring to expose himself to whatever had made us mad.

  Bright and full against the dark star-strewn sky, Phobos climbed behind a low wisp of ice cloud. It turned ghostly in the cloud, shimmered, and then emerged crystalline, as real and sharp as anything I had ever seen. I focused my will on it, as if helping Charles, as if a psychic link had risen between us all in this extremity and we could each of us know what the other was thinking and doing. My will went out and touched the moon and I was half insane with a terrified desire.

  Phobos disappeared. There were no clouds between, no obscuring dust. The clarity of deep gray orbiting stone simply vanished.

  My desire became epiphany. Dandy and Lieh scanned the sky, not understanding; they did not know what I knew.

  Then Lieh turned to me and her eyes widened with fear. She and Dandy touched helmets with me simultaneously. "Have they blown it up?" Dandy asked.

  "No," I said, weeping. "No! They've shown Earth what we can do!"

  They still did not comprehend. I didn't care. In my relief and ecstasy — in my absolute terror for Charles — I loved them as if they had been my own children. I grabbed their arms
and shouted, helmets pressed together firmly, "They've gone to Phobos and they've moved it. Never forget this! Never! Never forget!"

  On the parapet of the future observation deck, I did a mad little pirouette, then fetched up against a pillar and stared out over the red and orange vast-ness of the basin. Phobos had left the skies of Mars, and I did not know when or if it would return.

  But I knew, as surely as if Charles and Ti Sandra had told me themselves, where they had sent it. And I knew Charles was riding it . . . Across the Solar System, to Earth, a dreadful warning from her oppressed child.

  Phobos now rose in the skies of the Mother of us all.

  Don't tread on me.

  Dickinson sat where I had left him, Gretyl nearby. They seemed at peace, content to play their roles in this grand comeuppance. It would be almost an hour before a message could be sent from Earth. Until then, he was mine to toy with, and I felt more than wicked.

  As ignorant as Dickinson, the legislators resumed their seats after standing at my entrance.

  "Mr. Dickinson," I said, "I refuse your ultimatum. I'm placing you under arrest. Under the laws of the Federal Republic of Mars ..." I consulted my slate, leaned over the table, and pointed my finger at him, "you are accused of high crimes against the Republic, including treason, espionage, not registering as a foreign agent, and threatening the security of the Republic." I turned to Gretyl. "You, too, honey," I said.

  Dickinson glanced at the four Cailetet aides. He turned back to me, blinking. His equanimity impressed me no end. "That's your answer?" he said.

  "No. My answer to you and the groups you represent is that at the duly appointed time and under fee proper circumstances, when order has been restored to this Republic and all threats have been rescinded, we will discuss issues of substance with properly identified Earth governments like civilized peoples. There will be a quorum of elected and appointed officials in this chamber, and duly recognized diplomats and negotiators from Earth. We'll do it legally and openly."

  Gretyl lost some of her bearing; she flicked her eyes around the chamber like a deer in a cage. I remembered intense Gretyl ripping away her mask, willing to martyr herself on the Up. And I remembered, with sad clarity, how I had once thought Sean Dickinson the most noble male figure I had ever seen — brave, quiet and forthright. Had he offered, I would have bedded him instantly. And in bed he would have been quiet and reserved, a little chilly. I would have fallen into destructive love with him. He would have torn me up and discarded me.

  I felt blessed for never having had that opportunity.

  "Are you certain that's what you want me to say?" he asked.

  "Yes," I said. "Tell Crown Niger and Earth that your credentials are not acceptable." I turned to Dandy. "After he's done," I said, "arrange for their arrest. All of them."

  Governor Henry Smith of Amazonis seemed close to fainting.

  Dickinson stood, face suddenly ashen. "I hope you know what you're doing," he said.

  For a moment, we stared at each other. Sean blinked, turned away slowly, and said, "I never trusted you. Not from the beginning."

  "I would have given my life for you," I said. "But I was young and stupid."

  I'd like to pull back now and take a moment to rest and rethink my telling. I remember the emotions of that moment so vividly that I am back in that chamber. I wrote the above lines weeping like a young girl. It was the high moment of my life, perhaps because what came after was too sad and immense to be real.

  From this time on, events fall in my memory like dead creatures across an old sea floor, flat and compressed, unreal.

  I do not say I was not responsible. I was more involved, and therefore more responsible, than most; the blame has fallen squarely on me, and I accept it.

  * * *

  Phobos appeared in the skies over Earth in a broad elliptical orbit inclined at thirty degrees to the equator with a perigee of one thousand kilometers and apogee of seven thousand.

  Phobos's bright face, quickly waxing and waning, changed the entire equation as nothing else could. Mars could drop moons on Earth. In the strategic balance, we now tipped the scales.

  Earth did not know that on Phobos rode the equipment and the individuals essential to the wielding of this power. What they did not know, weakened them.

  And what Earth would soon know or guess could ultimately weaken us.

  The evolvons withdrew within six hours, on command from Earth's satellites around Mars. Those satellites then self-destructed, leaving tiny streaks of red against the dark sky. We received assurances that locusts had not been planted; confusion and weakness, for the moment, forced us to accept that. Mars began to come alive again; its dataflow blood coursed.

  The networks of communication set up by amateurs in the preceding days were charted, formalized, organized, made ready for further duties. We would not be caught so vulnerable again. In stations across Mars, engineers rigged simpler, more secure dataflow systems, setting us back fifty years or more, but guaranteeing that we would breathe, drink clean water, see no more the vivid horror of vacuum rose in blown-out tunnels.

  Mars began counting its dead, and every horror was broadcast around the Triple. Earth's tactics had backfired — for the time being.

  Alice One and Two were among the casualties. Half of the high-level thinkers could not be reactivated. Their memory stores were salvaged, and portions of personality could be recorded for use in other thinkers, but the essence — the soul of the thinker — was gone. I could not mourn her; there was too much to mourn. If I began to mourn, it would never stop; and I still waited for word of Ilya and Ti Sandra.

  For two days, shuttles and trains coursed into the new capital, bringing legislators, jurists, eager to re-confirm the Republic's independence, its very existence; bringing fresh equipment, experts determined to sweep again and clean out the pollution of Earth.

  For two days, I coordinated as President, knowing my position was temporary — believing but not knowing for sure that Ti Sandra was alive somewhere. I worried that she did not present herself now. It wasn't like her not to take the slight risk. Politics demanded that she return, if only to reassure the citizens of Mars.

  I did not sleep, barely had time to eat, and I moved from station to station around Arabia Terra by train and shuttle, spending no more than a few hours in one place at any time. We did not trust Earth's statements. Once betrayed, a hundred times shy.

  Five days after the Phobos transfer, I was invited to observe its return from an observation dome in Paschel Station near Cassini Basin. The governor of Arabia Terra, Lexis Caer Cameron, three of her top aides, Dandy Breaker, and Lieh Walker stood beside me under a broad plastic dome. We lifted glasses of champagne, looking east this time.

  "I wish to hell I knew what this all means," Governor Cameron said.

  "So do I," I said.

  Lieh ventured a rare opinion. "It means we never have to knuckle under again."

  I smiled but could not share her optimism. Our triumph would be short-lived.

  "Thirty seconds," Lieh said.

  We waited. I could barely think through my accumulated exhaustion. I needed a full body cleanse; hell, I felt as if I could use a whole new body.

  Phobos winked into existence, a crescent rising nine or ten degrees above the horizon. After a few measurements by Lieh, we confirmed that Phobos was back in its proper orbit.

  The scary dog was home, apparently none the worse for its journey.

  I did not drink my champagne. Thanking the governor, I handed her my glass, and Dandy escorted me quickly from the center. No time to linger . . .

  Lieh made connections with new satcoms and showed me LitVid reaction throughout the Triple. I watched and listened silently, beyond numbness and into frozen isolation.

  I hadn't heard of Ilya since the Freeze — the name assigned by Martian LitVids to the brief war.

  Around the Triple, the sense of outrage against Earth had flared, subsided, and flared anew, into a call for general b
oycotts by all space resource providers. That wasn't practical — Earth had stockpiled resources for several years, as a hedge against market fluctuations. But the political repercussions would be serious.

  Engineers in asteroid cities descended in close floating ranks on Terrie consulates, demanding explanations for the aggression.

  The Moon, predictably, tried to keep a low profile. But even on the Moon, independent nets bristled with fearful, angry calls for resignations, investigations, recall plebiscites. A few independent Lunar BMs expressed solidarity with the beleaguered Federal Republic of Mars. I could feel the fear echoing across the Solar System, especially in the vulnerable Belts. Nobody in the Triple could trust the old Mother now.

  Finally, the President of the United States of the Western Hemisphere asked for an investigation into the causes of the conflict. "We must understand what happened here, and discover who took it upon themselves to give these orders, and do these things," he concluded, "in order to avoid even worse disasters in the future."

  "Look to your own house," I murmured. I trusted nothing spoken by Terrie politicians.

  "This is very interesting," Lieh said, placing her slate before me. She had worked her way through several layers to a small and exclusive Terrie advisement net called Lumen. She didn't tell me how she'd accessed such a subscription — Mars had its penetrators and seekers after forbidden knowledge, and no doubt Point One had recruited many of the best. "This went out to subscribers about six hours ago."

  A handsome elderly woman with weary, wrinkled features and an immaculately tailored green suit sat stiffly in flat image, talking and calling up text reports from around Earth. At first glance, the program seemed dull and old-fashioned even by Martian standards. But I forced myself to listen to what was being said.

  "No nation or alliance has taken responsibility for starting the action against Mars, and no pundit has given an adequate explanation for why any authority would do so. The calls for plebiscite judgment, absent any clear perpetrators, worries this observer a great deal ... I think we are dealing, yet again, with gray eminences who have sealed themselves away from plebiscites, above even the alliances, and I look for them in the merged minds who ride the greatest and most secure Thinkers, those which oversee Earth's estate and financial situation. Arising from the old system of national surveillance established in the United States over a century and a half ago, once limited to oversight alone, these merged minds — rumored but never confirmed — have become the greatest processors of data in human history.