Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  So John stayed and talked with the Egyptians for a while, and when he left them he was feeling better. He wandered back to his vault, listening to the rowdy voices pouring into the hallway from every room; shouts, shrieks, happy scientist talk, “these things are such halophytes that they don’t like brine because there’s too much water in it,” peals of laughter.

  He had an idea. Spencer Jackson lived in the vault next door to John’s, and was passing through when John hurried in, so John told him the idea. “We ought to gather everyone we can for a big celebration of the storm’s end. All the sort-of Mars-centered groups, you know, or really everyone who can possibly make it. Anyone who wants to be there.”

  “Where?”

  “Up on Olympus Mons,” he said without considering it. “We could probably get Sax to time the arrival of his ice asteroid so that we could watch it from there.”

  “Good idea!” Spencer said.

  Olympus Mons is a shield volcano, and therefore a cone that is not steep in most places, its great height resulting from its even greater breadth; it is twenty-five kilometers higher than the surrounding plain, but eight hundred kilometers across, so its slope averages about six degrees. But around the circumference of its great bulk there is a circular escarpment some seven kilometers high, and this spectacular cliff, twice as tall as that at Echus Overlook, is in many places close to vertical. Sections of it had already lured the few climbers on the planet, but no one had yet succeeded in climbing it, and for most of the inhabitants of the planet it remained merely a stupendous impediment on the way to the summit caldera. Travelers on the ground made it up the escarpment by way of a wide ramp on the north side, where one of the last lava flows had overrun the cliff. Areologists told tales of what that must have been like, of a river of molten rock a hundred kilometers wide, too bright to look at, falling seven thousand meters onto the black lava-crusted plain, piling higher and higher and higher . . . This spill of lava had left a rampway with nothing more than a slight jog in it where the escarpment had been overrun; it was an easy ascent, and after it an uphill drive of some two hundred kilometers took one to the rim of the caldera.

  The summit rim of Olympus Mons is so broad and flat that while it has an excellent view down into the many-ringed caldera, the rest of the planet cannot be seen from it. Looking outward one sees only the outer edge of the rim, and then the sky. But on the south side of the rim there is a small meteor crater, with no name but its map designation, THA-Zp. The interior of this little crater is somewhat sheltered from the thin jet stream rushing over Olympus Mons, and standing on the southern arc of its fresh spiky rim, an observer finally has a view down the slope of the volcano, and then over the vast rising plain of west Tharsis; it is like looking down at the planet from a platform in low space.

  • • •

  It took almost nine months before the asteroid was brought to a rendezvous with Mars, and word of John’s celebration had had time to get around. So they came in scattered rover caravans, in twos and fives and tens, up the north ramp and around to the southern outer slope of Zp. There they erected a number of big crescent-shaped clear-walled tents, with rigid clear floors that stood two meters off the ground, resting on clear entry stalks. They were the very latest thing in temporary shelter, in fact, and all set with their inner arcs facing uphill, so that when they were done they had a row of crescents stacked like stairs, like greenhouse gardens on a terraced hillside, overlooking the immense sweep of a bronze world. Every day for a week the caravans arrived, and dirigibles labored up the long slope, and were tethered inside Zp, filling it so that the interior of the little crater looked like a bowl of birthday balloons.

  The size of the crowd surprised John, as he had expected only a few friends to travel to such a remote site. It was yet another proof of his inability to comprehend the planet’s current population; there were nearly a thousand people gathered there together, it was amazing. Although many were faces he had seen before, and quite a few he knew by name. So it was a collection of friends, in a way. It was as if a home town that he hadn’t known existed had suddenly sprung up around him. And many of the first hundred had come, forty of them in all, including Maya and Sax, Ann and Simon and Nadia and Arkady, Vlad and Ursula and the rest of the Acheron group, Spencer, Alex and Janet and Mary and Dmitri and Elena and the rest of the Phobos group, and Arnie and Sasha and Yeli and several more, some of whom he hadn’t seen in twenty years— everyone he was close to, in fact, except for Frank, who had said he was too busy, and Phyllis, who hadn’t replied to the invitation at all.

  And it wasn’t just the first hundred. Many of the others were old friends as well, or friends of friends— a lot of Swiss, including the road-building gypsies; Japanese from all over; most of the Russians on the planet; his Sufi friends. And all of them were scattered up and down the terraced crescent tents, in collections of caravan groups and dirigible teams, rushing from time to time to the locks to greet the latest arrivals.

  During the days many of them wandered around outside the tents, collecting loose rock from the great curved slope. The Zp meteor’s impact had scattered chunks of brecciated lava everywhere, including stishovite shatter-cones like pottery shards, some dead black, others a bright blood red, or flecked with impact diamonds. An areological team from Greece started laying these in a pattern on the ground under the raised floor of their tent, and they had brought a little kiln with them, so they could glaze some shards yellow or green or blue, to accent their designs. This idea caught on as soon as others saw it, and within two days each clear tent floor stood over a flagged parquet with a mosaic design: circuitry maps, pictures of birds and fish, fractal abstracts, Escher drawings, the Tibetan calligraphy spelling Om Mani Padme Hum, maps of the planet and of smaller regions, equations, people’s faces, landscapes, and so on.

  John spent his time wandering from tent to tent, talking with people and enjoying the carnival atmosphere— an atmosphere which did not preclude arguments, there were a lot of those— but most people spent the time partying, talking, drinking, going out on excursions on the wavy surface of the old lava flows, making mosaic floors, and dancing to music made by various amateur bands. The best of these was a magnesium-drum band, the instruments local, the players from Trinidad Tobago, a notorious transnational flag of convenience with a vigorous local resistance movement, of which the band were representatives. There was also a country western group with a good slide guitar player, and an Irish band with homemade instruments and a large shifting membership, which allowed it to play more or less nonstop. These three bands were all surrounded by crowds of dancers, and indeed the tents they occupied had all of their movement transformed into a kind of pulsing dance, as just getting from here to there was suddenly stuffed with the grace and exuberance of the music, the gravity, the view.

  So it was a great festival, and John was pleased, partying hard in every waking moment. He didn’t need any omegendorph or pandorph, and once when Marian and the Senzeni Na crowd hustled him in a corner and started passing tabs around, he could only laugh. “I don’t think so right now,” he said to the young hotheads, waving a hand weakly. “It’d be carrying a coals to Newcastle at this point, really it would.”

  “Carrying coals to Newcastle?”

  “He means it’d be like taking permafrost to Borealis.”

  “Or pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere.”

  “Bringing lava to Olympus.”

  “Putting more salt in the goddamn soil.”

  “Putting any more ferric oxide anywhere on the whole damn planet!”

  “Exactly,” John said, laughing. “I’m already full red.”

  “Not as red as these folks,” one of them said, pointing down to the west. A string of three sand-colored dirigibles floated up the slope of the volcano. They were small and antiquated, and did not answer radio inquiries. By the time they had scraped over Zp’s rim and anchored among the larger and more colorful dirigibles in the crater, everyone was waiting to hear from the
observers at the lock who they might be. When their gondolas popped open, and twenty or so figures in walkers stepped out, a silence fell. “That’s Hiroko,” Nadia said suddenly over the common band. The first hundred made their way quickly to the upper tent, looking up at the walktube that ran over the rim. And then the new visitors were walking down the tube to the tent lock, and were through and inside, and yes, it was Hiroko— Hiroko, Michel, Evgenia, Iwao, Gene, Ellen, Rya, Raul, and a whole crowd of youngsters.

  Shrieks and shouts pierced the air, people were embracing, a few crying, and there were a good number of angry accusations; John himself couldn’t help it when he got a chance to hug Hiroko, after all those hours in his rover worrying about things, wishing he could have talked to her; now he took her shoulders in his hands and almost shook her, ready for hot words to pour from his throat; but her grinning face was so much like his memory of her and yet not— her face thinner and more lined, not her and yet clearly her— that her face blurred and flowed in his vision, from what he expected to see to what he saw. He was confused enough by this hallucinatory smear (in his feelings too) that he only cried, “Oh, I’ve wanted to talk to you so!”

  “And me to you,” she said, although it was hard to hear her in the din; Nadia was intervening between Maya and Michel, for Maya was shouting “Why didn’t you tell me?” again and again, before bursting into tears. John was distracted by this, and then he saw Arkady’s face over Hiroko’s shoulder, bunched in an expression that said, There’s going to be questions answered later, and he lost his train of thought. There were going to be some hard things said— but still, here they were! Here they were. Down in the tents the noise level had jumped twenty decibels. People were cheering their reunion.

  • • •

  Late in the afternoon John convened the first hundred, now numbering almost sixty. They gathered in the highest tent by themselves, and looked out over those below, and the land beyond.

  It was all so much huger than Underhill and the tight rocky plain around it. Everything had changed, it seemed; the world and its civilization all grown vastly larger and more complicated. And yet there they stood nevertheless, all the oh-so-familiar faces changed, aged in all the ways human faces age: time texturing them with erosion as if they had lived for geological ages, giving them a knowing look, as if one could see the aquifers behind their eyes. They were in their seventies now, most of them. And the world was indeed larger— in many different ways: after all it was now quite possible that they were destined to watch each other age a lot more, if they were lucky. It was a strange sensation.

  So they milled about, looking at the people in the tents below, and beyond them to the variegated orange carpet of the planet; and the conversations rushed this way and that in quick chaotic waves, creating interference patterns, so that sometimes they all went still at once and stood there together, stunned or bemused or grinning like dolphins. In the tents below, people occasionally looked up through the plastic arcs at them, curious to catch a glimpse of such a historic meeting.

  Finally they sat in a scattering of chairs, passing around cheese and crackers and bottles of red wine. John leaned back in his chair and looked around. Arkady had one arm over Maya’s shoulders, the other over Nadia’s, and the three of them were laughing at something Maya had said. Sax was blinking his owlish pleasure, and Hiroko was beaming. John had never seen that look on her face in the early years. It was a shame to disturb such a mood, but there would never be a good time; and the mood would return. So in a quiet moment he said to Sax in clear loud tones, “I can tell you who’s behind the sabotages.”

  Sax blinked. “You can?”

  “Yes.” He looked Hiroko in the eye. “It’s your people, Hiroko.”

  That sobered her, though she still smiled: but it was the contained, private smile of old. “No no,” she said mildly, and shook her head. “You know I wouldn’t do that.”

  “I figured not. But your people are doing it without your knowledge. Your children, in fact. Working with the coyote.”

  Her eyes narrowed, and she threw a quick glance down at the tents below.

  When she looked at John again he went on. “You grew them, right? Fertilized a bunch of your eggs, and grew them in vitro?”

  After a pause she nodded.

  “Hiroko!” Ann said. “You don’t have any idea how well that ectogene process works!”

  “We tested it,” Hiroko said. “The kids have turned out all right.”

  Now the whole group was silent, and watching Hiroko and John. He said, “Maybe so, but some of them don’t share your ideas. They’re doing things on their own, like kids will. They have eyeteeth made of stone, isn’t that right?”

  Hiroko wrinkled her nose. “They’re crowns. A composite rather than true stone. A silly fashion.”

  “And a kind of badge. And there are people out on the surface who have picked it up, people in contact with your kids, helping them with the sabotages. I almost got killed by some of them in Senzeni Na. My guide there had a stone eyetooth, although it took me a long time to remember where it was I had seen it. I assume it was an accident that we were down there at the time the truck fell. I hadn’t given them any warning I was going to visit, so I assume the whole thing was planned before I got there, and they didn’t know to stop it. Okakura probably went down the hole thinking he was going to get squished like a bug for the cause.”

  After another pause Hiroko said, “Are you sure?”

  “I’m pretty sure. It was confusing for a long time, because it’s not just them— there’s more than one thing going on. But when I remembered where I had seen that first stone tooth I looked into it, and I found out that a whole shipment of dental equipment from Earth arrived empty, back in 2044. A whole freighter ripped off. It made me think I was onto something. And then, the sabotages kept happening in places and at times when no one who was in the net could possibly have done it. Like that time I visited Mary at the Margaritifer aquifer, and the well housing was blown up. It was clear it hadn’t been done by anyone stationed there, it just wasn’t possible. But that’s a really isolated station, and there was no one else anywhere nearby at the time. So it had to be someone outside the net. And so I thought of you.”

  He shrugged apologetically. “When you check it out, you find that about half the sabotages simply couldn’t have been done by anyone in the net. And in the other half, someone with a stone tooth was usually spotted in the area. It’s becoming a pretty widespread fashion now, but still. I figured it was you, and I had my AI do an analysis which showed that about three-quarters of the cases have happened in the lower southern hemisphere, that or else inside a three-thousand-kilometer circle with the chaotic terrain at the east end of Marineris as its center point. That’s a circle that holds a lot of settlements, but even allowing for that it seemed to me the chaos was a logical place for the saboteurs to hide. And we’ve all figured for years that that was where you folks went when you left Underhill.”

  Hiroko’s face revealed nothing. Finally she said, “I will look into this.”

  “Good.”

  Sax said, “John, you said there was more than one thing going on?”

  John nodded. “It hasn’t just been sabotage, you see. Someone’s been trying to kill me.”

  Sax blinked, and the rest of them looked shocked. “At first I thought it was the saboteurs,” John said, “trying to stop my investigation. It made sense, and the first incident really was an act of sabotage, so it was easy to get confused. But now I’m pretty sure that that time was a mistake. The saboteurs aren’t interested in killing me— they could have done it and they didn’t. One night a group of them stopped me, including your son Kasei, Hiroko, and the coyote, who I take it is the same as the stowaway that you were hiding on the Ares—”

  This caused an uproar— apparently a fair number of them had had suspicions about this stowaway, and Maya rose to her feet and pointed a dramatic finger at Hiroko, crying out. John shouted them all down and forged on:
“Their visit— their visit!— that was the best proof of my theory about the sabotages, because I managed to get a few skin cells off one of them, and I was able to get his DNA read and compared with some other samples found at some of the sabotage sites, and this person had been there. So those were the saboteurs, but they weren’t trying to kill me, obviously. But one night at Hellas Low Point I was knocked down, and my walker cut open.”

  He nodded at his friends’ exclamations. “That was the first intentional attack on me, and it came pretty soon after I went up to Pavonis, and talked to Phyllis and a bunch of transnational types about internationalizing the elevator and so on.”

  Arkady was laughing at him, but John ignored him and forged on. “After that, I was harassed several times by UNOMA investigators that Helmut allowed to come up, and he did that under pressure from those same transnationals. And in fact I found out that most of those investigators had worked for Armscor or Subarishii on Earth, rather than for the FBI like they told me. Those are the transnationals most involved with the elevator project and the mining on the Great Escarpment, and now they’ve got their own security people established everywhere, and this roving team of so-called investigators. And then, just before the big storm ended, some of those investigators tried to get me accused of that murder that happened at Underhill. Yes they did! It didn’t work, and I can’t absolutely prove it was them, but I saw two of them working on the set-up. And I think they killed that man, too, just to get me in trouble. To get me out of their way.”

  “You should tell Helmut,” Nadia said. “If we present a united front and insist that these people be sent back to Earth, I don’t think he could deny us.”