Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Maybe so,” Ann said. “But you ought to listen to yourself when you say things like that. You and Arkady are the biggest advocates of some kind of new Martian society, you two plus Hiroko, maybe. But the way Russell and Frank and Phyllis are bringing up Terran capital, the whole thing’s going to be out of your hands. It’ll be business as usual, and all your ideas will disappear.”

  “I tend to think we all want something similar here,” John said. “We want to do good work in a good place. We just emphasize different parts of the process of getting there, that’s all. If we only coordinated our efforts, and worked as a team—”

  “We don’t want the same things!” Ann said. “You want to change Mars, and I don’t. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Well . . .” John faltered before her bitterness. They were moving slowly around the hill, in a complicated dance that imitated the conversation, sometimes face to face, sometimes back to back; and always her voice was right in his ear, and his in hers. He liked that about walker conversations, and used it, that insidious voice in the ear which could be so persuasive, caressing, hypnotic. “It’s not that simple, even so. I mean, you ought to be helping those of us who are closest to your beliefs, and opposing those furthest away.”

  “I do that.”

  “Which is why I came to ask you what you know about these saboteurs. It makes sense, right?”

  “I know nothing about them. I wish them luck.”

  “In person?”

  “What?”

  “I’ve traced your movements in the last couple of years, and you’ve always been near every incident, within a month or so before it happened. You were in Senzeni Na a few weeks ago on your way here, right?”

  He listened to her breathe. She was angry. “Using me as cover,” she muttered, and something more he didn’t catch.

  “Who?”

  She turned her back on him. “You should ask the coyote about this stuff, John.”

  “The coyote?”

  She laughed shortly. “Haven’t you heard of him? He wanders around on the surface without a walker, people say. Pops up here and there, sometimes on both sides of the world in a single night. Knew Big Man himself, back in the good old days. And a big friend of Hiroko’s. And a big enemy of terraforming.”

  “Have you met him?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Look,” he said after nearly a minute of their shared breathing, “people are going to get killed. Innocent bystanders.”

  “Innocent bystanders are going to get killed when the permafrost melts and the ground collapses under our feet. I don’t have anything to do with that either. I just do my work. Trying to catalog what was here before we came.”

  “Yes. But you’re the most famous red of all, Ann. These people must have contacted you because of that, and I wish you’d discourage them. It might save some lives.”

  She turned to face him. Her helmet’s faceplate reflected the western skyline, purple above, black below, the border between the two colors jagged and raw. “If you left the planet alone, it would save lives. That’s what I want. I’d kill you if I thought it would help.”

  • • •

  After that there was little to say. On the way back down to the trailer, he tried another topic. “What do you think happened to Hiroko and the rest of them?”

  “They disappeared.”

  John rolled his eyes. “She didn’t talk to you about it?”

  “No. Did she talk to you?”

  “No. I don’t think she talked to anyone but her group. Do you know where they went?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any idea why they left?”

  “They probably wanted to get free of us. Make something new. What you and Arkady say you want, they really wanted.”

  John shook his head. “If they do it, they’ll do it for twenty people. I mean to do it for everyone.”

  “Maybe they’re more realistic than you.”

  “Maybe. We’ll find out. There’s more than one way to do this, Ann. You have to learn that.”

  She didn’t reply.

  The others stared at them as they entered the trailer, and Ann, storming into the kitchen nook, was no help. John sat on the arm of the one couch and asked them more questions about their work, and about groundwater levels in Argyre and the southern hemisphere generally. The big basins were low in elevation, but had been dehydrated in the impacts that formed them, and in general it appeared that the planet’s water had mostly seeped north. Another part of the mystery: no one had ever explained why the northern and southern hemispheres were so different, it was the problem in areology, a solution to which might prove the key to explaining all the other enigmas of the Martian landscape, as tectonic plate theory had once explained so many different problems in geology. In fact some people wanted to use the tectonic explanation again, postulating that an old crust had slid over itself onto the southern half, leaving the north to form a new skin, then all of it freezing in position when planetary cooling stopped all tectonic movement. Ann thought that was ridiculous; in her opinion the northern hemisphere was simply the biggest impact basin of all, the ultimate bang of the Noachian. A similar-sized strike had knocked the moon out of the Earth, probably around the same time. The areologists discussed various aspects of the problem for a while, and John listened, asking an occasional neutral question.

  They turned on the TV for news from Earth, and watched a short feature on the mining and oil drilling that was starting in Antarctica.

  “That’s our doing you know,” Ann said from the kitchen. “They kept mining and oil out of Antarctica for almost a hundred years, ever since the IGY and the first treaty. But when terraforming began here it all collapsed. They’re running out of oil down there, and the Southern Club is poor, and there’s a whole continent of oil and gas and minerals right next to them, being treated like a national park by the rich northern countries. And then the south saw these same rich northern countries start to take Mars completely apart, and they said What the hell, you can tear a whole planet apart and we’re supposed to protect this iceberg we’ve got right next door with all these resources we desperately need? Forget it! So they broke the Antarctic Treaty, and there they are drilling and no one’s done a thing about it. And now the last clean place on Earth is gone too.”

  She walked over and sat before the screen, stuck her face in a mug of steaming hot chocolate. “There’s more if you want,” she said to John rudely. Simon gave him a sympathetic glance, and the others stared round-eyed at the both of them, looking appalled to see a fight between two of the first hundred: what a joke that was! It almost made John laugh, and when he got up to pour a mug for himself, he leaned over impulsively and kissed Ann on the top of the head. She stiffened and he went on to the kitchen. “We all want different things from Mars,” he said, forgetting he had just said the opposite to Ann out on the hill. “But here we are, and there aren’t that many of us, and it’s our place. We make what we want of it, like Arkady says. Now you don’t like what Sax or Phyllis want, and they don’t like what you want, and Frank doesn’t like what anyone wants, and more people are coming every year supporting one position or another, even if they don’t know it. So it could get ugly. In fact it’s started to get ugly already, with these attacks on equipment. Can you imagine that happening at Underhill?”

  “Hiroko’s group was ripping off Underhill the whole time they were there,” Ann said. “They had to’ve been, to take off like that.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But they weren’t endangering people’s lives.” The image of the truck falling down the shaft came to him again, quick and vivid. He drank hot cocoa and scalded his mouth. “Damn! Anyway, whenever I get discouraged about all this I try to remember that it’s natural. It’s inevitable that people are going to fight, but now we’re fighting about Martian things. I mean people aren’t fighting over whether they’re American or Japanese or Russian or Arab, or some religion or race or sex or whatnot. They’re fighting because
they want one Martian reality or other. That’s all that matters now. So we’re already halfway there.” He frowned at Ann, who stared at the floor. “Do you see what I mean?”

  She glanced at him. “It’s the second half that matters.”

  “All right, maybe so. You take too much for granted, but that’s the way people are. But you have to realize that you’re having your effect on us, Ann. You’ve changed the way everyone thinks about what we’re doing here. Hell, Sax and a lot of others used to talk about doing anything possible to terraform as quick as possible— driving a bunch of asteroids directly into the planet, using hydrogen bombs to try and start volcanoes— whatever it took! Now all those plans have been scrapped because of you and your supporters. The whole vision of how to terraform and how far to go with it has changed. And I think we can eventually reach a compromise value, where we get some protection from radiation, and a biosphere and maybe air we can breathe, or at least not die in immediately— and still leave it pretty much like it was before we came.” Ann rolled her eyes at this, but he forged on: “No one’s talking about pumping it up into a jungle planet you know, even if they could! It’ll always be cold, and the Tharsis Bulge will always stick right out into space, in effect, so there’ll be a huge part of the planet that’s never touched. And that’ll be partly because of you.”

  “But who’s to say that with that first step done, you won’t want more?”

  “Maybe some will. But I for one will try to stop them. I will! I may not be on your side, but I see your point. And when you fly over the highlands like I did today, you can’t help but love it. People may try to change the planet, but all the while the planet will be changing them too. A sense of place, an aesthetics of landscape, all those things change with time. You know the people who first saw the Grand Canyon thought it was ugly as hell because it wasn’t like the Alps. It took them a long time to see its beauty.”

  “They drowned most of it anyway,” Ann said blackly.

  “Yeah yeah. But who knows what our kids will think is beautiful? It’s sure to be based on what they know, and this place will be the only place they know. So we terraform the planet; but the planet areoforms us.”

  “Areoforming,” Ann said, and a rare little smile flashed over her face. Seeing it John felt his face flush; he hadn’t seen her smile like that in years, and he loved Ann, he loved to see her smile.

  “I like that word,” she said now. She pointed a finger at him: “But I’ll hold you to it, John Boone! I’ll remember what you’ve said tonight!”

  “Me too,” he said.

  • • •

  The rest of the evening was more relaxed. And the next day Simon saw him down to the airstrip, to the rover he was going to drive northward, and Simon, who usually would have seen him off with a smile and a handshake, at most a “nice to see you,” suddenly said to him, “I really appreciate what you said last night. I think it really cheered her up. Especially what you said about kids. She’s pregnant, you see.”

  “What?” John shook his head. “She didn’t tell me. Are you the, the father?”

  “Yeah.” Simon grinned.

  “How old is she now, sixty?”

  “Yeah. It’s stretching things a bit, so to speak, but it’s been done before. They took an egg frozen about fifteen years ago, fertilized it and planted it in her. We’ll see how it goes. They say Hiroko stays pregnant all the time these days, just keeps popping them like an incubator, same C section over and over.”

  “They say a lot of things about Hiroko, but it’s all just stories.”

  “Well, but we heard this from someone who supposedly knows.”

  “The coyote?” John said sharply.

  Simon raised his eyebrows. “I’m surprised she told you about him.”

  John grunted, obscurely annoyed. No doubt his fame meant he missed out on a lot of gossip. “It’s good that she did. Well, anyway—” He extended his right hand and they shook, hooking their fingers in the stiff clasp that had developed in the old space days. “Congratulations. Take care of her.”

  Simon shrugged. “You know Ann. She does what she wants.”

  So Boone drove north from Argyre for three days, enjoying the countryside and the solitude, and spending a few hours each afternoon ransacking the planetary records to track people’s movement, looking for correlations with the sabotage incidents. Early on the fourth morning he reached the Marineris canyons, which were some 1,500 kilometers north of Argyre. He ran into a north-south transponder road, and followed it up a short rise to the southern rim of Melas Chasma, and got out of the rover to have a proper look.

  He had never been to this part of the great canyon system; before the completion of the Marineris Transverse Highway it had been extremely hard to get to. It was dramatic, no doubt about it; the Melas cliff dropped a full 3,000 meters from rim to canyon floor, so that the rim had a kind of glider’s view north. The other wall of the canyon was just visible out there, its rim peeking over the horizon; and between the two cliffs lay the spacious expanse of Melas Chasma, the heart of the whole Marineris complex. He could just make out the gaps in distant cliffs that marked the entrances to other canyons: Ius Chasma to the west, Candor to the north, Coprates to the east.

  John walked the broken rim for more than an hour, pulling his helmet’s binocular lenses down over his faceplate for long periods of time, taking in as much as he could of the greatest canyon on Mars, feeling the euphoria of red land. He threw rocks over the side and watched them disappear, he talked to himself and sang, he hopped on his toes in a clumsy dance. Then he got back in his rover, refreshed, and drove a short distance along the rim, to the start of the cliff road.

  Here the Transverse Highway became a single concrete lane, and switchbacked down the spine of an enormous rock ramp that extended down from the south rim to the canyon floor. This odd feature, called the Geneva Spur, pointed north almost perpendicularly from the cliff, straight toward Candor Chasma; it was so perfectly placed for their purposes that with the road on it, it looked like a ramp that the road-builders had constructed.

  It was a steep spur, however, and the road had been forced to switchback all the way down, to keep the grade within reason. It was all visible from above, a thousand switchbacks snaking down the spine, looking like yellow thread stitched down a bump in a stained orange carpet.

  Boone drove down this marvel carefully, turning the rover’s steering wheel left then right then left then right, time after time until he actually had to stop to rest his arms, and give himself a chance to look back and up at the southern wall behind him; it was steep indeed, fluted by a fractal pattern of deeply eroded ravines. Then it was off again for another half hour’s drive, hairpins left and right, again and again, until finally the road extended straight down the top of the flattening spur, which eventually spread out and merged into the canyon floor. And down there was a little cluster of vehicles.

  It turned out to be the Swiss team that had just finished building the road, and he ended up spending the night with them. They were a group of about eighty: mostly young, mostly married, speaking German and Italian and French and, for his benefit, English in several different accents. They had kids with them, and cats, and a portable greenhouse thick with herbs and garden vegetables. Soon they would be off like gypsies, in a caravan made up mostly of their earthmoving vehicles, traveling up to the west end of the canyon, to thread a road through Noctis Labyrinthus and onto the east flank of Tharsis. After that there would be other roads; perhaps one over the Tharsis Bulge between Arsia Mons and Pavonis Mons, perhaps one north to Echus Overlook. They weren’t sure yet, and Boone got the impression they didn’t really care; they planned to spend the rest of their lives traveling around building roads, so it didn’t much matter to them where they went next. Road gypsies forever.

  They made sure all their kids shook John’s hand, and after dinner he gave a short talk, rambling in his usual way about their new life on Mars. “When I see you people out here it makes me rea
lly happy because it’s part of a new pattern to life, we’ve got the chance to create a new society out here, everything’s changing on the technical level and the social level might as well follow. I’m not exactly sure what the new society should be or should look like, that’s the hard part after all, but I know that it should be done, and I think you and all the other small groups out on the surface are figuring it out on an empirical basis. And seeing you helps me to think about it.” Which it did, though he was never much at doing it on his feet; so he just slithered along a bit more in his free associational way, plucking whatever stuck out of the bag of his thoughts. And their eyes shone in the lamplight as they listened to him.

  Later he sat with a few of them in a circle around a single lit lamp, and they stayed up through the night talking. The young Swiss asked him questions about his first trip, and about the first years in Underhill, both of which obviously had mythic dimensions for them, and he told them the real story, sort of, and made them laugh a lot; and asked them questions about Switzerland, how it worked, what they thought of it, why they were here rather than there. A blond woman laughed when he asked that. “Do you know about the Böögen?” she said, and he shook his head. “He’s part of our Christmas. Sami Claus comes to all the houses one by one, you see, and he has an assistant, the Böögen, who wears a cloak and a hood and carries a big bag. Sami Claus asks the parents how the children have been that year, and the parents show him the ledger, the record you know. And if the children have been good, Sami Claus gives them presents. But if the parents say the children have been bad, the Böögen sweeps them up in his bag and carries them away, and they’re never seen again.”

  “What!” John cried.

  “That is what they tell you. That is Switzerland. And that is why I am here on Mars.”

  “The Böögen carried you here?”

  They laughed, the woman too. “Yes. I was always bad.” She grew more serious. “But we will have no Böögen here.”