Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Mad cheers. The magnesium-drum band picked them up into its staccato flurry of plinks and plonks, and the crowd heaved into motion again.

  They partied all night long. John spent the time wandering from tent to tent, shaking hands and hugging people, “Thanks, thanks, thanks. I don’t know, I don’t remember what I said. But this is what I meant all along, this right here.” His old friends laughed at him. Sax, drinking coffee and looking supremely relaxed, said to him, “Syncretism is it? Very interesting, very well put”— with the tiniest of smiles. Maya kissed him, Vlad and Ursula and Nadia kissed him; Arkady lifted him up and with a great roar swirled him around in the air, giving him a hairy kiss on each cheek and shouting, “Hey, John, could you repeat that please?” hooting at the very thought. “You amaze me, John, you always amaze me!” And Hiroko with her private smile, with Michel and Iwao beside her, grinning at him. . . .

  Michel said, “I think this is what Maslow meant by the term peak experience,” and Iwao groaned and elbowed him, while Hiroko reached out and touched John on the arm with her forefinger, as if to pass along a certain animating touch, a power, a gift.

  • • •

  The next day they sorted and bagged the party wreckage and took down the tents, leaving the flagstone terraces behind, like strands of a cloisonné necklace draped down the side of the old black volcano. They said good-bye to the dirigible crews, and the dirigibles drifted down the slope like balloons slipped from a child’s fist; the sand-colored ones of the hidden colony got hard to see very quickly.

  As he got in his rover with Maya John said good-byes, and as they drove around the rim of Olympus Mons they caravanned with rovers containing Arkady and Nadia, and Ann and Simon and their son Peter. In conversations that day John said, “We need to talk to Helmut, and get the U.N. to accept us as speakers at large for the local population. And we need to present the U.N. with a draft of the revised treaty. Around Ls ninety I’m scheduled to go to a dedication ceremony for a new tent city on east Tharsis. Helmut is supposed to be there, maybe we could meet then?”

  Only a few of them could make it, but they were named delegates for the rest, and the plan was agreed on. After that they talked about what the contents of the draft treaty should be, calling around to all the caravans and the dirigibles. The next day they came to the ramp down the northern escarpment, and at its foot they took off each in a different direction. “That was a good party!” John said over the radio to each in turn. “See you at the next one!”

  The Sufis rolled by while they were stopped, and they waved from their windows and came on the radio to say good-bye as well. John recognized the voice of the old woman who had tended him at the toilet after his dance in the storm; as he was waving at their caravan she said over the radio,

  “Whether it be of this world or of that,

  Your love will lead us yonder at the last.”

  Part 6

  Guns Under the Table

  The day John Boone was assassinated we were up on east Elysium and it was morning and this meteor shower came raining down on us, there must have been thirty streaks or so and they were all black, I don’t know what those meteorites were made of but they burned black instead of white. Like smoke from crashing planes except straight and fast as lightning. It was so strange to see that we all were amazed and we hadn’t even yet heard the news, but when we did we figured back, and it happened at exactly the same time.

  We were down in Hellas Lakefront and the sky went dark and a sudden wind whipped over the lake and blew every walktube in that town away, and then we heard.

  We were in Senzeni Na where he worked a lot, and it was night and lightning started hammering us, giant bolts of lightning were shooting right down into the mohole, no one could believe it, and it was so loud you couldn’t hear. And there was a picture of him down in the workers’ quarters, up on the wall of one suite, and a lightning bolt hit the concourse window and everyone was blinded for a second, and when our sight returned the frame of that picture was busted and the glass cracked and it was smoking. And then we heard the news.

  We were in Carr and we couldn’t believe it. All the first hundred there were crying, he must have been the only one in that whole gang that everyone liked, if most of them were killed a good half of the rest would be cheering. Arkady was out of his mind, he cried for hours and it was so scary because it was so unlike him, Nadia kept trying to comfort him and she was saying It’s all right, it’s all right and Arkady kept saying It’s not all right, it’s not all right, and roaring and throwing things and then falling into Nadia’s arms again, even Nadia was freaked. And that was when he ran off to his room and came back with one of the ignition transmitter boxes, and when he explained what it was Nadia got really furious at all of us, she said Why would you ever do a thing like that? And Arkady was crying and yelling What do you mean why? Because of this, because of what just happened to John, they killed him, they killed him! Who knows which of us will be next! They’ll kill all of us if they can! And Nadia kept trying to give the transmitter back and he got so upset, he kept making her hold it saying Please Nadia please, just in case, just in case, please, until finally she had to keep it to get him to calm down. I never saw anything like it.

  We were in Underhill and the power went off, and when it came back on every plant in the farm had frozen solid. The lights and heat came back on and the plants all began to wilt. We sat around all night telling stories about him. I remembered what it was like when he first touched down back in the twenties, a lot of us did. I was just a kid at the time but I remember everyone laughing at his first words, I thought it was funny myself but I remember being very surprised that all the adults were laughing too, everyone was so tickled, I think everyone fell in love with him at that moment, I mean how could you not like someone who was the first person on another planet walking out there and saying Well, here we are. It was impossible not to like him.

  Oh I don’t know. I saw him punch a man once, it was on the Burroughs train and he was in our car obviously high, and there was this woman who had some kind of deformity, a big nose and no chin and when she went down to the toilets some guy said My Lord that woman has really been beat hard with the ugly stick, and Boone bam! knocks him into the next seat and says, There is no such thing as an ugly woman.

  That’s what he thought.

  That is what he thought, why he slept with a different woman every night, and he didn’t care what they looked like. Or how old they were, he had to talk fast when they found him with that fifteen-year-old. I don’t suppose Toitovna ever heard of that one or it would have been his balls, and hundreds of women would have gone wanting. He used to like to do it in two-person gliders with the woman on top of him while he piloted.

  Oh man once I saw him pull a glider out of a downdraft that would have killed anyone else, it was a shear-off and it would have ripped the glider apart if he’d tried to resist it, but he just went with it and the plane dropped like a Rickover a thousand meters in a second, three or four times terminal velocity, and then when it was about to go smash he just tweaked it to the side and up and pancaked it in about twenty meters. Came out with his nose and ears bleeding. He was the best pilot on Mars, he could fly like an angel. Hell the whole first hundred would’ve been dead if he hadn’t hand flown them into their orbital insertion, that’s what I heard.

  There were people who hated him. And with good reason too. He stopped the mosque on Phobos from being built. And he could be cruel, I’ve never met a man more arrogant.

  We were on Olympus Mons and the whole sky went black.

  Well, back before the beginning, Paul Bunyan came to Mars, and he brought his blue ox Babe with him. He walked around looking for lumber and his every footprint cracked the lava and left a rift canyon. He was so tall that he could reach into the asteroid belt while he walked around, and he chewed those rocks like Bing cherries and spit the pits out and boom there would be another crater.

  And then he ran into Big Man. It was the
first time Paul had ever seen anyone bigger than himself, and believe me Big Man was bigger— the usual two magnitudes, and that ain’t just twice as big let me tell you. But Paul Bunyan didn’t care. When Big Man said Let’s see what you can do with that axe of yours Paul said Sure, and with one stroke he hit the planet so hard that all the cracks of Noctis appeared at once. But then Big Man scratched the same spot with his toothpick, and the entire Marineris system yawned open. Let’s try bare fists, Paul said, and he landed a right cross on the southern hemisphere and there was Argyre. But Big Man tapped a spot nearby with his pinky and there was Hellas. Try spitting, Big Man suggested, and Paul spat and Nirgal Vallis ran as long as the Mississippi. But Big Man spat and all the big outflow channels ran at once. Try shitting! Big Man said, and Paul squatted and pushed out Ceraunius Tholus— but Big Man threw back his butt and there was the Elysium massif right next to it, steaming hot. Do your worst, Big Man suggested. Take a shot at me. And so Paul Bunyan picked him up by the toe and swung his whole bulk around and slammed him into the North Pole so hard that that whole northern hemisphere is depressed to this day. But without even getting up Big Man grabbed Paul by the ankle, and caught up his blue ox Babe in that same fist, and swung them into the ground and slammed them right through the planet and almost out the other side. And that’s the Tharsis Bulge— Paul Bunyan, almost sticking out— Ascraeus his nose, Pavonis his cock, and Arsia his big toes. And Babe is off to one side, pushing up Olympus Mons. The blow killed Babe and Paul Bunyan both, and after that Paul had to admit that he was beat.

  But his own bacteria ate him, naturally, and they crawled all around down on the bedrock and under the megaregolith, down there going everywhere, sucking up the mantle heat, and eating the sulfides, and melting down the permafrost. And everywhere they went down there, every one of those little bacteria said I am Paul Bunyan.

  It’s a matter of will, Frank Chalmers said to his face in the mirror. The phrase was the only residue of the dream he had been having when he awoke. He shaved with quick decisive strokes, feeling tense, crammed with energy ready to be unleashed, wanting to get to work. More residue: Whoever wants it the most wins!

  He showered and dressed, padded down to the dining hall. It was just after dawn. Sunlight flooded Isidis with horizontal beams of red-bronze light, and high in the eastern sky cirrus clouds looked like copper shavings.

  Rashid Niazi, the Syrian representative to the conference, passed by and gave Chalmers a cool nod. Frank returned it and walked on. Because of Selim el-Hayil, the Ahad wing of the Moslem Brotherhood had gotten blamed for Boone’s assassination, and Chalmers had always been quick and public in defending them from all such accusations. Selim had been a lone assassin, he always asserted, a mad murder-suicide. This underlined the Ahads’ guilt while at the same time commanding their gratitude. Naturally Niazi, an Ahad leader, was a bit frustrated.

  Maya came into the dining room and Frank greeted her cordially, automatically covering the discomfort he always felt in her presence.

  “May I join you?” she said, watching him.

  “Of course.”

  Maya was perceptive, in her way; Frank concentrated on the moment. They chatted. The subject of the treaty began to come up, and so Frank said, “How I wish John were here now. We could use him.” And then: “I miss him.” This kind of thing would distract Maya instantly. She put her hand over his; Frank scarcely felt it. She was smiling, her arresting gaze full on him. Despite himself he had to look away.

  The TV wall was showing the news package beamed up from Earth, and he tapped on the table console and turned up the sound. Earth was in bad shape. The video was of a massive protest march in Manhattan, the whole island packed with a crowd the protesters would call ten million and the police five hundred thousand. The helicopter images were quite arresting, but there were a lot of places these days that, although less visual, were much more dangerous. In the advanced nations people were marching because of draconian birth reduction acts, laws that made the Chinese look like anarchists, and the young had erupted in fury and dismay, feeling their lives pulled out of their hands by a great crowd of ancient unnatural undead, by history itself come alive. That was bad, sure. But in the developing countries they were rioting over “inadequate access” to the treatments themselves, and that was far worse. Governments were falling; people were dying by the thousands. Really these images of Manhattan were probably meant to reassure; everything’s still orderly! they said. People conducting themselves in a civil manner, even if it be civil disobedience. But Mexico City and São Paulo and New Delhi and Manila were in flames.

  Maya looked at the screen and read aloud one of the Manhattan banners: send the old to mars.

  “That’s the essence of a bill someone’s introduced in Congress. Reach a hundred and you’re off, to retirement orbitals, the moon, or here.”

  “Especially here.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “I suppose that explains their stubbornness about emigration quotas.”

  Frank nodded. “We’ll never get those. They’re under too much pressure down there, and we’re seen as one of the few escape valves. Did you see that program aired on Eurovid about all the open land on Mars?” Maya shook her head. “It was like a real estate ad. No. If the U.N. delegates gave us any say in emigration, they’d be crucified.”

  “So what do we do?”

  He shrugged. “Insist on the old treaty at every point. Act like every change is the end of the world.”

  “So that’s why you were so crazy about the preface material.”

  “Sure. That stuff may not be all that important, but we’re like the British at Waterloo. If we give at any point the whole line collapses.”

  She laughed. She was pleased with him, she admired his strategy. And it was a good strategy, although it was not the one he was pursuing. For they were not like the British at Waterloo; they were if anything like the French, making a last-ditch assault which they had to win if they wanted to survive. And so he had been very busy giving in on many points in the treaty, hoping to thrust forward and hold on to what he really wanted in other areas. Which certainly included some remaining role for the American Martian Department, and its Secretary; after all, he needed a base from which to work.

  So he shrugged, dismissing her pleasure. On the TV wall the crowds boiled up and down the great avenues. He clenched his teeth a few times. “We’d better get to it again.”

  Upstairs the conferees were milling about in a sequence of long high rooms that were divided by tall partitions. Sunlight streamed into the big central room from the eastern meeting chambers, throwing a ruddy glare over the white pile carpet and the squarish teak chairs and the dark pink stone of the long tabletop. Knots of people were chatting casually against the walls. Maya went off to confer with Samantha and Spencer. The three of them were now the leaders of the MarsFirst coalition, and as such had been invited to the conference as nonvoting representatives of the Martian population: the people’s party, the tribunes, and the only ones there actually elected to their positions, although they were there only at Helmut’s sufferance. Helmut had been as inclusive as anyone could ask. He had allowed Ann to attend as a nonvoting member representing the Reds, even though they were part of the coalition; Sax was there observing for the terraforming team; and any number of mining and development executives were observing as well. There was a whole crowd of observers, in fact; but the voting members were the only ones to sit at the central table, where Helmut was now ringing a small bell. Fifty-three national representatives and eighteen U.N. officials took their seats, and another hundred continued to wander in the eastern rooms, watching the discussion through the open portals or on small TVs. Outside the windows, Burroughs crawled with figures and vehicles, moving around in the clear-walled mesas, and the tents on and between the mesas, and in the network of connecting clear walktubes that lay on the ground or arched through the air, and in the huge valley tent with its wide streetgrass boulevards and its canals.
A little metropolis.

  Helmut called the session to order. In the eastern rooms people clustered around the TVs. Frank glanced through a portal into the east room nearest him; there would be rooms like that all over Mars and Earth, thousands of them, with millions of observers. Two worlds watching.

  The day’s topic, as it had been for the past two weeks, was emigration quotas. China and India had a joint proposal to make, which the head of the Indian office rose and read in his musical Bombay English. Stripped of camouflage it came down to a proportional system, of course. Chalmers shook his head. India and China between them had 40 percent of the world’s population, but they were only two votes of fifty-three at this conference, and their proposal would never pass. The Brit in the European delegation rose to point out this fact, not in so many words of course. Wrangling began. It would go on all morning. Mars was a real prize, and the rich and poor nations of Earth were struggling over it as they were over everything else. The rich had the money but the poor had the people, and the weapons were pretty evenly distributed, especially the new viral vectors that could kill everyone on a continent. Yes, the stakes were high, and the situation existed in the most fragile of balances, the poor surging up out of the south and pressing the northern barriers of law and money and pure military force. Gun barrels in their faces, in essence. But now there were so many faces, a human-wave attack might explode at any instant, it seemed, just from the expansive pressure of sheer numbers— attackers shoved over the barricades by the press of babies in the rear, raging for their chance at immortality.