“Eventually it will, but the initial investment must be huge.”
Sax shrugged. “Push an Amor asteroid into orbit, set up a robot factory, let it go to work. It’s not as expensive as you might think.”
John rolled his eyes. “Sax, who’s paying for all this?”
Sax tilted his head, blinked. “The sun.”
John stood, suddenly hungry. “Then the sun calls the shots. Remember that.”
Mangalavid broadcast six hours of local amateur video every evening, a weird grab bag of stuff that John watched every chance he got. So after building a big green salad in the kitchen he went to the window room on the dorm floor, and watched while eating, glancing from time to time at the florid sunset over Ascraeus. The first ten minutes of that evening’s broadcast had been shot by a sanitary engineer working on a waste processing plant in Chasma Borealis. Her voice-over was enthusiastic but boring, “What’s nice is we can pollute all we want with certain materials, oxygen, ozone, nitrogen, argon, steam, some biota— which gives us leeway we didn’t have back home, we just keep grinding what they give us till we can let it loose.” Back home, John said to himself. A newcomer. After her there was an attempt at a karate bout, both hilarious and beautiful at the same time; and then twenty minutes of some Russians staging Hamlet in pressure suits at the bottom of the Tyrrhena Patera mohole, a production that struck John as crazy until Hamlet caught sight of Claudius kneeling to pray, and the camera tilted up to show the mohole as cathedral walls, rising above Claudius to an infinitely distant shaft of sunlight, like the forgiveness he would never receive.
John shut off the TV and took the elevator down to the dorm. He got into bed and relaxed. Karate as ballet. The newcomers were all still engineers, construction workers, scientists of all kinds. But they didn’t seem as single-minded as the first hundred, and that was probably good. They still had a scientific mindset and worldview, they were practical, empirical, rational; one could hope that the selection process on Earth was still working against fanaticism, sending up people with a kind of traveling-Swiss sensibility, practical but open to new possibilities, able to form new loyalties and beliefs. Or so he hoped. He knew by now it was a bit naíve. You only had to look at the first hundred to realize scientists could become as fanatical as anybody else, maybe more so; educations too narrowly focused, perhaps. Hiroko’s team disappearing. . . . Out there in the wild rock somewhere, lucky bastards. . . . He fell asleep.
He worked at Echus Overlook a few days more, then got a call from Helmut Bronski in Burroughs, who wanted to confer with him about the new arrivals from Earth. John decided to take the train to Burroughs and see Helmut in person.
The night before his departure, he went to see Sax in his labs. When he walked in Sax said in his monotone, “We’ve found an Amor asteroid that’s ninety percent ice, in an orbit that will bring it near Mars in three years. Just what I’ve been looking for, in fact.” His plan was to place a robot-controlled mass driver on an ice asteroid and push it into an aerobraking orbit around Mars, thus burning it up in the atmosphere. This would satisfy UNOMA protocols forbidding the kind of mass destruction that a direct impact would cause, but it would still add huge quantities of water and separated hydrogen and oxygen to the atmosphere, thickening it with precisely the gases they needed most. “It could raise the atmospheric pressure by as much as fifty milli-bars.”
“You’re kidding!” The pre-arrival average at the datum had been between seven and ten millibars (Earth’s sea level averaged 1,013), and all their efforts so far had only raised the average to around fifty. “One iceball will double the atmospheric pressure?”
“That’s what the simulations indicate. Of course with the initial level so low, doubling is not as impressive as it sounds.”
“Still, that’s great, Sax. And it’ll be hard to sabotage.”
But Sax didn’t want to be reminded of that. He frowned slightly, and slipped away.
John laughed at his skittishness, and went to the door. Then he stopped to think, and looked up and down the hall. Empty. And no video monitors in Sax’s offices. He went back in, grinning at his own furtive tiptoes, and glanced around at the paper chaos on Sax’s desk. Where to start? Presumably his AI would be the repository of anything interesting, but probably it would only respond to Sax’s voice, and would surely keep a record of any other inquiries. Quietly he opened a desk drawer. Empty. All the drawers in the desk were empty; he almost laughed out loud, stifled it. There was a stack of correspondence on a lab bench, and he picked through it. Mostly notes from the biologists at Acheron. At the bottom of the stack was a single sheet of unsigned mail, with no return address or origin code. Sax’s printer had spit it out without any identification that John could see. The message was brief:
“1. We use suicide genes to curb proliferation. 2. There are so many heat sources now on the surface that we don’t think anyone can tell our exhaust from the rest of it. 3. We simply agreed we wanted to get off and work on our own, without interference. I’m sure you understand now.”
After a minute of staring at this John whipped his head up and looked around. Still alone. He glanced at the note again, put it back where he had found it and walked quietly out of Sax’s offices, back to the guest quarters. “Sax,” he said admiringly, “you tricky congress of rats!”
• • •
The train to Burroughs carried mostly freight, thirty narrow cars of it, with two passenger cars up front, running over a superconducting magnetic piste so quickly and smoothly that it was hard to believe the view; after John’s endless plods cross-country in rovers, it was almost frightening. The only thing to do was flood the pleasure centers in the old brain with omegendorph and sit back and enjoy it, looking out at what appeared to be some kind of terrain-following supersonic flight.
The piste had been routed roughly parallel to the 10 ° N latitude; eventually the plan was to ring the planet, but so far only the hemisphere between Echus and Burroughs had been finished. Burroughs had become the biggest town in the far hemisphere; the original settlement had been built by an American-based consortium using a French-led EC design, and was located at the upper end of Isidis Planitia, which was in effect a huge trough where the northern plains made a deep indentation into the southern highlands. The sides and head of the trough counteracted the planet’s curvature in such a way that the landscape around the town had something like Terran horizons, and as the train flew down the great trough Boone could see across mesa-dotted dark plains to horizons some sixty kilometers away.
Burroughs’s buildings were almost all cliff-dwellings, cut into the sides of five low mesas that were grouped together on a rise in the bend of an ancient curving channel. Big sections of the mesas’ vertical sides had been filled by rectangles of mirrored glass, as if postmodern skyscrapers had been turned on their sides and shoved into the hills. A startling sight, in fact, and far more impressive than Underhill, or even Echus Overlook, which had a great view but could not be seen. No, the glass-sided mesas of Burroughs, on their rise over a channel that seemed to be begging for water, with a view out to distant hills; these features combined to give the new town a quickly growing reputation as the most beautiful city on Mars.
Its western train station was inside one of the excavated mesas, a glass-walled room sixty meters high. John stepped out into this grand space and made his way through the crowds of people, head craned back like a hick in Manhattan. Train crews were dressed in blue jumpers, prospecting teams in walker green, UNOMA bureaucrats in suits, construction workers in work jumpers, colored like rainbows to suggest sportswear. UNOMA headquarters had been located in Burroughs three years before, causing a real building boom; it was a close thing whether there were more UNOMA bureaucrats or construction workers in the station.
At the far end of the great room John found a subway entrance, and took a little subway car to the UNOMA headquarters. In the car he shook hands with a few people who recognized and approached him, feeling the old weirdness of th
e fishbowl return. He was back among strangers. In a city.
That night he had dinner with Helmut Bronski. They had met many times before, and John was impressed by the man, a German millionaire who had gotten into politics: tall, beefy, blond and red-faced, impeccably groomed, dressed in an expensive gray suit. He had been the EC’s minister of finance when he took the UNOMA post. Now he told John the latest news, in a very urbane British English, eating roast beef and potatoes rapidly between bursts of sentences, holding his silverware in the workmanlike German fashion. “We are going to award a prospecting contract in Elysium to the transnational consortium Armscor. They will be shipping up their own equipment.”
“But Helmut,” John said, “won’t that violate the Mars treaty?”
Helmut made a wide gesture with the hand holding the fork; they were men of the world, his look said, they understood these kinds of things. “The treaty is superannuated, this is obvious to everyone dealing with the situation. But its scheduled revision is ten years away. In the meantime, we have to try to anticipate certain aspects of the revision. That’s why we give some concessions now. There is no rational reason to delay, and if we tried there would be trouble in the General Assembly.”
“But the General Assembly can’t be happy that you’ve given the first concession to an old South African weapons manufacturer!”
Helmut shrugged. “Armscor has very little relation to its origins. It is just a name. When South Africa became Azania, the company moved its home offices to Australia, and then to Singapore. And now of course it has become very much more than an aerospace firm. It is a true transnational, one of the new tigers, with banks of its own, and controlling interest in about fifty of the old Fortune 500.”
“Fifty of them?” John said.
“Yes. And Armscor is one of the smallest of the transnationals, that is why we picked it. But it still has a bigger economy than any but the largest twenty countries. As the old multinationals coalesce into transnationals, you see, they really gather quite a bit of power, and they have influence in the General Assembly. When we give one a concession, some twenty or thirty countries profit by it, and get their opening on Mars. And for the rest of the countries, that serves as a precedent. And so pressure on us is reduced.”
“Uh huh.” John thought it over. “Tell me, who negotiated this agreement?”
“Well, it was a number of us, you know.”
Helmut ate on, serenely ignoring John’s steady gaze.
John pursed his lips, looked away. He understood suddenly that he was talking with a man who, though a functionary, considered himself to be vastly more important on the planet than Boone. Genial, smooth-faced (and who cut his hair?), Bronski leaned back and ordered them after-dinner drinks. His assistant, their waitress for the evening, scurried off to oblige.
“I don’t believe I’ve been waited on before on Mars,” John observed.
Helmut met his gaze calmly, but his beefy color had heightened. John almost smiled. The UNOMA factor wanted to seem menacing, the representative of powers so sophisticated that John’s little weather-station mentality couldn’t even comprehend them. But John had found in the past that a few minutes of his First Man On Mars routine was usually enough to crush that kind of attitude; so he laughed, and drank, and told tales, and alluded to secrets only the first hundred were privy to, and made it clear to the assistant-waitress that he was the one in command at the table, and so on— behaving in general in an unconcerned, knowing, arrogant manner— and by the time they were finished with their sherbet and brandy Bronski was loud and blustery himself, clearly nervous and on the defensive.
Functionaries. John had to laugh.
But he was curious concerning the ultimate point of their conference, which still wasn’t clear to him. Perhaps Bronski had wanted to see in person how news of the new concession would affect one of the first hundred— perhaps to gauge the reaction of the rest? That would be silly, for to get a good gauge on the first hundred you would need to poll eighty of them at least; but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. John was used to being taken for a representative of things, for a symbol. The figurehead again. It could definitely be a waste of time.
He wondered if he could salvage something of his own from the evening, and as they were walking back to his guest suite, he said, “Have you ever heard of the coyote?”
“An animal?”
He grinned, left it at that. In his room he lay on his bed, Mangalavid on the TV, thinking things over. Brushing his teeth before going to sleep, he looked his mirror image in the eye and scowled. He waved his toothbrush in the expansive gesture: “Vell,” he said in an unfair parody of Helmut’s slight accent, “ziss is business, you know! Business as usual!”
• • •
The next morning he had a few hours before his first meeting, and so he spent the time with Pauline, going over what he could find out about Helmut Bronski’s doings in the last six months. Could Pauline get into the UNOMA diplomatic pouch? Had Helmut ever been to Senzeni Na, or any of the other sabotage sites? While Pauline ran through her search algorithms John swallowed an omegendorph to kill his hangover, and thought about what lay behind this inspiration to search Helmut’s records. UNOMA constituted the ultimate authority on Mars these days, at least according to the letter of the law. In practice, as last night had made clear, it had the U.N.’s usual toothlessness before national armies and transnational money. Unless it did their bidding it was helpless, it could not succeed against their desires and probably would never even try, as it was their tool. So what did they want, the national governments and the transnational boards of directors? If enough sabotages occurred, would that constitute a reason to bring in more of their own security? Would it tend to increase their control?
He made a disgusted noise. Apparently the only result of his investigation so far was that the list of suspects had tripled. Pauline said, “Excuse me, John,” and the information came up on her screen. The diplomatic pouch, she had found, was coded in one of the new unbreakable encryptions; you’d have to get the decryptions to enter it. Helmut’s movements, on the other hand, were easily traceable. He had been to Pythagoras, the mirror station that had been spun out of orbit, ten weeks ago. And to Senzeni Na two weeks before John’s visit. And yet no one at Senzeni Na had mentioned his appearance.
Most recently, he had just returned from the mining complex being set up at a place called Bradbury Point. Two days later John left to visit it.
• • •
Bradbury Point was located some 800 kilometers north of Burroughs, at the easternmost extension of the Nilosyrtis Mensae. The mensae were a series of long mesas, like islands of the southern highlands standing out in the shallows of the northern plains. The island mesas of Nilosyrtis had recently been found to be a rich metallogenic province, with deposits of copper, silver, zinc, gold, platinum and other metals. Concentrations of ore like this had been discovered in several locations on the so-called Great Escarpment, where the southern highlands dropped to the northern lowlands. Some areologists were going so far as to label the entire escarpment region a metallogenic province, banding the planet like the stitching on a baseball. It was another odd fact to add to the great north-south mystery, and a fact that was, of course, getting more than its share of attention. Excavations accompanied by intensive areological studies were being conducted by scientists working for UNOMA and, John discovered as he checked new arrivals’ employment records, the transnationals— all trying to find clues that would enable them to locate more deposits. But even on Earth the geology of mineral formation was not well understood, which was why prospecting still had large elements of chance in it; and on Mars, it was more mysterious yet. The recent finds on the Great Escarpment had been mostly an accident, and only now was the region becoming the main focus for prospecting.
The discovery of the Bradbury Point complex had accelerated this hunt, as it was turning out to be as big as the largest Terran complexes, perhaps the equal of the Bushveldt Com
plex of Azania. So, a gold rush in Nilosyrtis. And Helmut Bronski had visited the scene.
Which turned out to be small and utilitarian, a mere beginning; a Rickover and some refineries, next to a mesa hollowed out and filled by a habitat. The mines were scattered in the lowlands between mesas. Boone drove up to the habitat, coupled to the garage, then ducked through the locks. Inside a welcoming committee greeted him, and took him up to a window-walled conference room to talk.
There were, they said, about 300 people in Bradbury, all employees of UNOMA, and trained by the transnational Shellalco. When they took John on a brief tour, he found they were a mix of ex-South Africans, Australians, and Americans, all happy to shake his hand; about three-quarters men, pale and clean, looking more like lab techs than the blackened trolls John envisioned when he heard the word miner. Most of them were working on two-year contracts, they told him, and keeping track of the time they had left, by the week or even by the day. They ran the mines mostly by teleoperation, and looked shocked when Boone asked to go down into a mine for a look around. “It’s just a hole,” one said. Boone stared at them innocently, and after another moment’s hesitation, they scrambled to gather an escort team to take him out.
It took them two hours to get into walkers and out a lock. They drove to the rim of a mine, and then down a ramp road into a terraced oval pit some two kilometers long. There they got out, and followed John as he walked around. Surrounded by big robotic dozers and dump trucks and earthmovers, his four escorts’ faceplates were all eyes— on the alert for a behemoth on the loose, John guessed. He stared at them, amazed at their timidity; it made him realize, all of a sudden, that Mars could be just another version of the hardship assignment, a hellish combination of Siberia, the interior of Saudi Arabia, the South Pole in winter, and Novy Mir.
Red Mars Page 30