Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “And if they try?” John asked.

  “They will fail.” His easy assurance caught John’s attention; and John remembered the conversation with Arkady among the mirrors.

  So some of the things he now saw were the result of paying attention in a new way, of asking new questions. But others were the result of Arkady sending word down through his network of friends and acquaintances, to identify themselves to John and show him around. Thus when John stopped in settlements on the way from Sabishii to Senzeni Na, he was often approached by small groups of two, or three, or five, who introduced themselves and said, Arkady thought you might be interested to see this. . . . And they would lead him to see an underground farm with an independent power plant, or a cache of tools and equipment, or a hidden garage full of rovers, or complete little mesa habitats, empty but ready for occupation. John would follow them bug-eyed and slack-jawed, asking questions and shaking his head in amazement. Yes, Arkady was showing him things; there was a whole movement down here, a little group in every town!

  Eventually he came to Senzeni Na. He was returning because Pauline had identified two workers there as absent without explanation from their jobs on the day the truck had fallen on him. The day after he arrived he interviewed them, but they proved to have plausible explanations for their absence from the net; they had been out climbing. But after he had apologized for taking their time, and started back to his room, three other mohole technicians introduced themselves as friends of Arkady’s. John greeted them enthusiastically, glad that something would come of the trip; and in the end a group of eight took him in a rover to a canyon paralleling the mohole’s canyon. They drove down through the obscuring dust to a habitat dug into an overhanging canyon wall; it was invisible to satellites, its heat was released from a number of dispersed small vents which from space would look like Sax’s old windmill heaters. “We figure that’s how Hiroko’s group has done it,” one of his guides told him. Her name was Marian, and she had a long beak of a nose and eyes that were set too close together, so that her gaze was very intent.

  “Do you know where Hiroko is?” John asked.

  “No, but we think they’re in the chaos.”

  The universal response. He asked them about the cliff dwelling. It had been built, Marian told him, with equipment from Senzeni Na. It was currently uninhabited, but ready if needed.

  “Needed for what?” John said as he walked around the little dark rooms of the place.

  Marian stared at him. “For the revolution, of course.”

  “The revolution!”

  John had very little to say on the drive back. Marian and her companions sensed his shock, and it made them uneasy too. Perhaps they were concluding that Arkady had made a mistake in asking them to show John their habitat. “There are a lot of these being prepared,” Marian said defensively. Hiroko had given them the idea, and Arkady thought they might come in handy. She and her companions began ticking them off on their fingers: a whole stockpile of air- and ice-mining equipment, buried in a dry ice tunnel at one of the south polar cap processing stations; a wellhole tapping the big aquifer under Kasei Vallis; scattered greenhouse labs around Acheron, growing pharmacologically useful plants; a communications center in the basement of Nadia’s concourse at Underhill. “And that’s just what we know about. There are one-read samizdat appearing in the net that we had nothing to do with, and Arkady’s certain that there are other groups out there, doing the same thing we are. Because when push comes to shove, we’re all going to need places to hide and fight from.”

  • • •

  “Oh come on,” John said. “You all have to get it through your heads that this whole revolution scenario is nothing but a fantasia on the American Revolution, you know, the great frontier, the hardy pioneer colonists exploited by the imperial power, the revolt to go from colony to sovereign state— it’s all just a false analogy!”

  “Why do you say that?” Marian demanded. “What’s different?”

  “Well for one thing, we’re not living on land that can sustain us. And for another, we don’t have the means to revolt successfully!”

  “I disagree with both those points. You should talk to Arkady more about that.”

  “I’ll try. Anyway I think there’s a better way of doing it than all this sneaking around stealing equipment, something more direct. We simply tell UNOMA what the new Mars treaty is going to say.”

  His companions shook their heads scornfully.

  “We can talk all we want,” Marian said, “but that’s not going to change what they do.”

  “Why not? Do you think they can just ignore the people who are living here? They may have continuous shuttles now, but we’re still eighty million kilometers away from them, and we’re here and they’re not. It may not be North America in the 1760s, but we do have some of the same advantages: we’re at a great distance, and we’re in possession. The important thing is not to fall into their way of thinking, into all the same old violent mistakes!”

  And so he argued against revolution, nationalism, religion, economics— against every mode of Terran thought that he could think of, all mashed together in his usual style. “Revolution never even worked on Earth, not really. And here it’s all outmoded. We should be inventing a new program, just like Arkady says, including the ways to take control of our fate. With you all living a fantasy of the past you’re leading us right into the repression you’re complaining about! We need a new Martian way, a new Martian philosophy, economics, religion!”

  They asked him just what these new Martian modes of thought might be, and he raised his hands. “How can I say? When they’ve never existed it’s hard to talk about them, hard to imagine them, because we don’t have the images. That’s always the problem when you try to make something new, and believe me I know, because I’ve been trying. But I think I can tell you what it will feel like— it will feel like the first years here, when we were a group and we all worked together. When there was no purpose in life except to settle and discover this place, and we all decided together what we should do. That’s how it should feel.”

  “But those days are gone,” Marian said, and the others nodded. “That’s just your own fantasy of the past. Nothing but words. It’s like you’re holding a philosophy class in a giant gold mine, with armies bearing down on both sides.”

  “No no,” John said. “I’m talking about methods for resistance, methods appropriate to our real situation, and not some revolutionary fantasy out of the history books!”

  And around they went, again and again, until they were back at Senzeni Na, and had retired to the workers’ rooms on the lowest residential floor. There they argued passionately, through the timeslip and long into the night, and as they argued a certain elation filled John, because he could see them beginning to think about it— it was clear that they were listening to him, and that what he said, and what he thought of them, mattered to them. This was the best return yet on the old First Man fishbowl; combined with Arkady’s stamp of approval, it gave him an influence over them that was palpable. He could shake their confidence, he could make them think, he could force them to reevaluate, he could change their minds!

  And so in the murky purple Great Storm dawn they wandered down the halls to the kitchen and talked on, looking out the windows and bolting down coffee, glowing with a kind of inspiration, with the age-old excitement of honest debate. And when they finally quit to go catch a little sleep before the day got going, even Marian was clearly shaken, and all of them were deep in thought, half-convinced that John was right.

  John walked back to his guest suite feeling tired but happy. Whether Arkady had intended to or not, he had made John one of the leaders of his movement. Perhaps he would come to regret it, but there was no going back now. And John was sure it was for the best. He could be a sort of bridge between this underground and the rest of the people on Mars— operating in both worlds, reconciling the two, forging them into a single force that would be more effective than eith
er alone. A force with the mainstream’s resources and the underground’s enthusiasm, perhaps. Arkady considered that an impossible synthesis, but John had powers that Arkady didn’t. So that he could, well, not usurp Arkady’s leadership, but simply change them all.

  The door to his room in the guest quarters was open. He rushed in, alarmed, and there in the room’s two chairs sat Sam Houston and Michael Chang. “So,” Houston said. “Where have you been?”

  • • •

  “Oh come on,” John said. His temper flared, his good mood burnt off in a flash. “Did I pick the wrong door by mistake?” He leaned back out to look. “No, I didn’t. These are my rooms.” He lifted his arms and clicked on his wristpad’s recorder. “What are you doing in here?”

  “We want to know where you’ve been,” Houston said evenly. “We’ve got the authority to enter all the rooms here, and to get all our questions answered. So you might as well start.”

  “Come on,” John scoffed. “Don’t you ever get tired of playing the bad cop? Don’t you guys ever trade off?”

  “We just want answers to our questions,” Chang said gently.

  “Oh please, mister good cop,” John said. “We all want answers to our questions, don’t we.”

  Houston stood up— already he was on the edge of losing his temper, and John walked right over to him and stopped with their chests about ten centimeters apart. “Get out of my rooms,” he said. “Get out now, or I’ll throw you out, and then we’ll figure out who had the right to be in here.”

  Houston merely stared at him, and without warning John shoved him hard in the chest. Houston ran into his chair and sat down involuntarily, bounced up going for John, but Chang jumped between them, saying, “Wait a second, Sam, wait a second,” while John shouted, “Get out of my rooms!” over and over at the top of his lungs, bumping against Chang’s back and glaring over his shoulder into Houston’s red face. John nearly burst into laughter at the sight; his high spirits had returned with the success of the shove, and he stalked to the door bellowing “Get out! Get out! Get out!” so that Houston would not see the grin on his face. Chang pulled his angry colleague out into the hall and John followed. The three of them stood there, Chang carefully placing himself between his partner and John. He was bigger than either of them, and now he faced John with a worried, irritated look.

  “Now what did you want?” John said innocently.

  “We want to know where you’ve been,” Chang said doggedly. “We have reason to suspect that your so-called investigation of the sabotage incidents has been a very convenient cover for you.”

  “I suspect the same of you,” John said.

  Chang ignored him. “Things keep happening right after your visits, you see—”

  “They happen right during your visits.”

  “— hoppers of dust were dropped in every mohole you visited during the Great Storm. Computer viruses attacked the software in Sax Russell’s office at Echus Overlook, right after your consultation with him in 2047. Biological viruses attacked the fast lichens at Acheron right after you left. And so on.”

  John shrugged. “So? You’ve been here two months, and that’s the best you can do?”

  “If we’re right, it’s good enough. Where were you last night?”

  “Sorry,” John said. “I don’t answer questions from people who break into my rooms.”

  “You have to,” Chang said. “It’s the law.”

  “What law? What are you going to do to me?” He turned toward the open door of the room, and Chang moved to block him; he lost his temper again and jerked toward Chang, who flinched but remained in the doorway, immovable. John turned and walked away, back down to the commons.

  • • •

  He left Senzeni Na that afternoon in a rover, and took the transponder road north along the eastern flank of Tharsis. It was a good road and three days later he was 1,300 kilometers to the north, just northwest of Noctis Labyrinthus, and when he came to a big transponder intersection, with a new fuel station, he hung a right and took the road east to Underhill. Each day as the rover rolled along blindly through the dust, he worked with Pauline. “Pauline, would you please look up all planetary records for theft of dental equipment?” She was as slow as a human in processing an incongruous request, but eventually the data were there. Then he had her go over the movement records of every suspect he could think of. When he was sure where everyone had been, he gave Helmut Bronski a call to protest the actions of Houston and Chang. “They say they’re working with your authorization, Helmut, so I thought you should know what they’re doing.”

  “They are trying their best,” Helmut said. “I wish you would stop harassing them and cooperate, John. It could be helpful. I know you have nothing to hide, so why not be more helpful?”

  “Come on, Helmut, they don’t ask for help. It’s rank intimidation. Tell them to stop it.”

  “They are only trying to do their job,” Helmut said blandly. “I have not heard of anything illegitimate.”

  John broke the connection. Later on he called Frank, who was in Burroughs. “What’s with Helmut? Why is he turning the planet over to these policemen?”

  “You idiot,” Frank said. He was typing madly at a computer screen as he talked, so that he seemed to be only barely conscious of what he was saying. “Aren’t you paying any attention at all to what’s going on here?”

  “I thought I was,” John said.

  “We’re knee deep in gasoline! And these goddamned aging treatments are the match. But you never understood why we were sent here in the first place, so why should you understand anything now?” He typed on, staring hard into his screen.

  John studied the little image of Frank on his wrist. Finally he said, “Why were we sent here in the first place, Frank?”

  “Because Russia and our United States of America were desperate, that’s why. Decrepit outmoded industrial dinosaurs, that’s what we were, about to get eaten up by Japan and Europe and all the little tigers popping up in Asia. And we had all this space experience going to waste, and a couple of huge and unnecessary aerospace industries, and so we pooled them and came here on the chance that we’d find something worthwhile, and it paid off! We struck gold, so to speak. Which is only more gasoline poured onto things, because gold rushes show who’s powerful and who’s not. And now even though we got a head start up here, there are a lot of new tigers down there who are better at things than we are, and they all want a piece of the action. There’s a lot of countries down there with no room and no resources, ten billion people standing in their own shit.”

  “I thought you told me Earth would always be falling apart.”

  “This isn’t falling apart. Think about it— if this damned treatment only goes to the rich, then the poor will revolt and it’ll all explode— but if the treatment goes to everyone, then populations will soar and it’ll all explode. Either way it’s gone! It’s going now! And naturally the transnats don’t like that, it’s horrible for business when the world blows up. So they’re scared, and they’re deciding to try to hold things together by main force. Helmut and those policemen are only the smallest tip of the iceberg— a lot of policymakers think a world police state for a few decades or so is our only chance of getting to some kind of population stabilization without a catastrophe. Control from above, the stupid bastards.”

  Frank shook his head disgustedly, then leaned toward his screen and became absorbed in its contents.

  John said, “Did you get the treatment, Frank?”

  “Of course I did. Leave me alone, John, I’ve got work to do.”

  • • •

  The southern summer was warmer than the previous one that had been shrouded in the Great Storm, but still colder than any recorded. The storm was now almost two M-years long, over three Terran years, but Sax was philosophical about it. John called him at Echus Overlook, and when John mentioned the cold nights he was experiencing Sax only said, “We’ll very likely have low temperatures for the greater part
of the terraforming period. But warmer per se isn’t what we’re trying for. Venus is warm. What we want is survivable. If we can breathe the air, I don’t care if it’s cold.”

  Meanwhile it was cold, cold everywhere, the nights down to a hundred below every night, even on the equator. When John reached Underhill, a week after leaving Senzeni Na, he found there was a kind of pink ice covering the sidewalks; it was nearly invisible in the storm’s dim light, and walking around was a treacherous business. The people at Underhill spent most of their time indoors. John occupied a few weeks by helping the local bioengineering team field test a new fast snow algae. Underhill was crowded with strangers. Most of them were young Japanese or Europeans, who fortunately still used English to communicate with each other. John roomed in one of the old barrel vaults, near the northeast corner of the quadrant. The old quadrant was less popular than Nadia’s concourse, smaller and dimmer, and many of its vaults were now used for storage. It was strange to walk the square of hallways, remembering the pool, Maya’s room, the dining hall— now all dark, and stacked with boxes. Those years when the first hundred had been the only hundred. It was getting hard to remember what that had been like.