“And as for feelings!” She was dressed, standing at the door. She stopped to glare at him, a look like a lightning strike. He had been standing there too stunned to move and so now he stood there naked before her, exposed to the full blast of her scorn. “You don’t have any feelings, do you. I’ve tried, believe me, but you just—” She shuddered, apparently unable to think of words vile enough to describe him. Hollow, he wanted to say. Empty. An act. And yet—
She walked out.
• • •
So when they signed the new treaty, Maya was not at his side; not even in Burroughs. Which was a relief in many ways, really. And yet he could not help but feel empty, and cold in the chest; and certainly the others of the first hundred (at least) knew something had happened between them (again), which was infuriating, or so he told himself.
They signed the thing in the same conference room in which they had hammered it out, with Helmut doing the honors with a big smile, and each delegate coming up in turn, in penguin suit or black evening gown, to say a few words for the cameras and then put their hand to “the document,” a gesture that only Frank seemed to see as bizarrely archaic, like scratching a petroglyph. Ridiculous. When it was his turn he went up and said something about striking a balance, which was exactly it— he had arranged the competing interests to strike together at angles that matched their momentum exactly, arranging a traffic accident so that all the vehicles would collide into a single solidified mass. The result was something not all that dissimilar to the precious version of the treaty, with both emigration and investment, the two main threats to the status quo (if there was such a thing on Mars) mostly blocked, and (this was the clever part) blocked by each other. It was a good piece of work, and he signed with a flourish, “For the United States of America,” he announced emphatically, glaring around the room intently. That would play well on vid.
So he strode through the subsequent parade with the cold satisfaction of work well done. The grass-floored tents and walktubes of the city were crowded with thousands of spectators, and the parade wound through them, wandering down the big canalside tent with diversions up into the mesas, coming back down and crossing every canal bridge to cheers, and proceeding up to Princess Park for a great street party. The weather people had set for cool and crisp, with brisk downslope winds. Kites dueled under the tent roofs like raptors, their colors bright against the dark pink afternoon sky.
Frank found the party in the park unsettling, there were too many people watching him, too many who wanted to approach him and talk. That was fame: you talked to groups. So he turned around and walked back up the canalside tent.
Two parallel rows of white pillars ran down the side of the canal; each pillar was a Bareiss column, semicircular at top and bottom but with the half-circles rotated 180 degrees to each other. This simple maneuver created pillars that looked completely different depending on where you were when you looked at them, and the two rows of these pillars had a strange tumbledown look, as if they were already ruins, although the smoothness and whiteness of their diamond-coated salt belied that. They stood off the grass as white as sugar cubes, and gleamed as if wet.
Frank walked between the rows, touching each pillar in turn. Above them on each side the valley slopes rose to the window-walled bluffs of mesas. Massed greenery shone behind these cliffs of untinted glass, so that it looked as if the city were rimmed by enormous terrariums. A really elegant ant farm. The part of the valley slope under tenting was dotted with trees and tile roofs, and cut by broad grassy boulevards. The uncovered part was still a red rocky plain. A great number of buildings were just being finished, or still under construction; there were cranes everywhere rearing up toward the tent roofs, a kind of odd colorful skeletal statuary. Also scores of scaffolded buildings, so that Helmut had said the tented hillsides reminded him of Switzerland, no surprise since most of the construction was being done by Swiss. “They scaffold a house to replace a window box.”
Sax Russell was standing at the foot of one of these scaffolded buildings, looking up at it critically. Frank turned and walked up a tube to him, said hello.
“There’s twice as much support as they need,” Sax said. “Maybe more.”
“The Swiss like that.”
Sax nodded. They stared at the building.
“Well?” Frank said. “What do you think?”
“The treaty? It will reduce support for terraforming,” Sax said. “People are more inclined to invest than to give.”
Frank scowled. “Not all investment is good for terraforming, Sax, you have to remember that. A lot of that money is spent on other things entirely.”
“But terraforming is a way to reduce overhead, you see. A certain percentage of the total investment will always be devoted to it. So I want the total as high as possible.”
“Real benefits can only be calculated using real costs,” Frank said. “All the real costs. Terran economics never bothered to do that, but you’re a scientist and you should. You have to judge the environmental damage from higher population and activity, as well as the benefits to terraforming that go along with it. Better to up the investment devoted to pure terraforming, rather than compromising and taking a percentage of a total that in some ways is working against you.”
Sax twitched. “It’s funny to hear you speak against compromise after the last four months, Frank. Anyway, I say it’s better to up both the total and the percentage. The environmental costs are negligible. Managed right they can mostly be turned to benefits. An economy can be measured in terawatts or kilocalories, like John used to say. And that’s energy. And we can use energy here in any form, even a lot of bodies. Bodies are just more work, very versatile, very energetic.”
“Real costs, Sax. All of them. You’re still trying to play at economics, but it isn’t like physics, it’s like politics. Think what will happen when millions of displaced Terran emigrants arrive here, with all their viruses, biological and psychic. Maybe they’ll all join Arkady or Ann, ever thought of that? Epidemics, running through the mob’s body and mind— they could crash your whole system! Look, hasn’t the Acheron group been trying to teach you biology? You should pay attention! This isn’t mechanics, Sax. It’s ecology. And it’s a fragile, managed ecology, so it has to be managed.”
“Maybe,” Sax said. It was one of John’s mannerisms, that phrase. Frank missed what Sax was saying for a minute, then his attention was captured again:
“… this treaty isn’t going to make all that much difference anyway. The transnationals that want to invest will find a way. They’ll make a new flag of convenience and it’ll look like a country staking its claim here, exactly according to the treaty’s quotas. But behind it will be transnational money. There’ll be all kinds of that stuff happening, Frank. You know how it is. Politics, right? Economics, right?”
“Maybe,” Frank said harshly, upset. He walked away.
• • •
Later he found himself in an upper valley district, still being built. The scaffolding was extreme, as Sax had said, especially for Martian g. Some of it looked like it would be hard to bring down. He turned and looked out over the valley. The city was nicely placed, that was indisputable. The two sides of the valley meant there was going to be a lot visible from any point. Everywhere in town would have a view.
Suddenly his wristpad beeped, and he answered. It was Ann, staring up at him. “What do you want,” he snapped. “I suppose you think I sold you out too. Let in the hordes to overrun your playground.”
She grimaced. “No. You did the best that could be done, given the situation. That’s what I wanted to say.” She clicked off and his pad went blank.
“Great,” he said aloud. “I’ve got everyone on two worlds mad at me except Ann Clayborne.” He laughed bitterly, took off walking.
Back down to the canal and the rows of Bareiss columns. Lot’s wives. There were knots of celebrants scattered over the canalside sward, and in the late-afternoon light their shadows were long. The s
ight took on a somehow ominous cast, and Frank turned, uncertain where to go. He didn’t like the aftermath of things. Everything seemed finished, done, revealed as pointless. It was always this way.
A group of Terrans were standing under one of the more magnificent new office blocks in the Niederdorf tent. There was Andy Jahns among them.
If Ann was pleased, Andy would be furious. Frank walked up to him, wanting to witness that.
Andy saw him, and his face went still for a moment. “Frank Chalmers,” he said. “What brings you down here?”
His tone was amiable, but his eyes were unamused, even cold. Yes, he was angry. Frank, feeling better every second, said, “I’m just walking around, Andy, getting the blood flowing again. What about you?”
After the briefest of hesitations Jahns said, “We’re looking at office space.”
He watched as Frank digested the implications of the statement. His smile took on an edge, became a genuine smile. He went on: “These are friends of mine from Ethiopia, from Addis Ababa. We’re thinking of moving our home office there next year. And so—” his smile broadened, no doubt in response to the look on Frank’s face, which Frank could feel hardening over the front of his skull—”we have a lot to discuss.”
Al-Qahira is the name for Mars in Arabic, and Malaysian, and Indonesian. The latter two languages got it from the former; look at a globe, then, and see how far the Arabs’ religion spread. The whole middle of the world, from West Africa to the West Pacific. And most of that in a single century. Yes, it was an empire in its time; and like all empires, after death it had a long half-life.
The Arabs who live out of Arabia are called Mahjaris, and the Arabs who came to Mars, the Qahiran Mahjaris. When they arrived on Mars a good number of them began to wander Vastitas Borealis (“The Northern Badia”) and the Great Escarpment. These wanderers were mostly Bedouin Arabs, and they traveled in caravans, in a deliberate recreation of a life that had disappeared on Earth. People who had lived in cities all their lives went to Mars and moved around in rovers and tents. The excuses for their ceaseless travel included the hunt for metals, areology, and trade, but it seemed clear that the important thing was the travel, the life itself.
• • •
Frank Chalmers joined old Zeyk Tuqan’s caravan a month after the treaty was signed, in the northern autumn of M-year 15 (July 2057). For a long time he wandered with this caravan over the broken slopes of the Great Escarpment. He worked on his Arabic, and helped with their mining, and took meteorological observations. The caravan was composed of actual Bedouins from Awlad ‘Ali, the coast of Egypt west of the Nile delta. They had lived north of the area that the Egyptian government had named the New Valley Project, after a search for oil discovered a water aquifer holding an amount equal to a thousand years of the Nile’s flow. Even before the discovery of the gerontological treatment, the Egyptian population problem had been severe; with 96 percent of the country desert, and 99 percent of the population in the Nile Valley, it was inevitable that the hordes relocated in the New Valley Project would overwhelm the Bedouins and their entirely distinct culture. The Bedouins wouldn’t even call themselves Egyptians, and despised the Nile Egyptians as spineless and immoral; but that did not keep the Egyptians from crowding north from the New Valley Project into Awlad ‘Ali. Bedouins in the other Arab countries had taken the side of these overwhelmed outposts of their culture, and when the Arab commonwealth started a Mars program, and bought space on the continuous Earth-to-Mars shuttle fleet, they asked Egypt to give preference to their western Bedouins. The Egyptian government had been only too happy to oblige, and clear the region of its troublesome minority. So here they were, Bedouins on Mars, wandering the world-wrapping northern desert.
• • •
The weather observations piqued Frank’s interest in climatology like none of the scientists’ talk ever had. The weather on the escarpment was often violent, with katabatic winds rushing downslope and colliding with the Syrtis trade winds to create tall fast red tornadoes, or onslaughts of gritty hail. Currently the atmosphere was at around 130 millibars in the summer, in a mix about 80 percent carbon dioxide and 10 percent oxygen, the remainder mostly nitrogen from the new nitrite conversion plants. It wasn’t clear yet whether they were going to be able to overwhelm the CO2 with oxygen and the other gases, but Sax seemed satisfied with their progress so far. Certainly on a windy day on the escarpment it was clear that the air was thickening; it had some real heft to it, it threw heavy sand, and darkened the afternoons to the color of a scab. And in the hardest gales the gusts could knock you down quite easily. Frank timed one katabatic gust at 600 kilometers an hour; luckily it was part of such a hard general blow that everyone was in the rovers when it happened.
• • •
The caravan was a mobile mining operation. Metals and ore-bearing minerals were being discovered in all kinds of locations and concentrations on Mars, but one thing the Arab prospectors were discovering was that a lot of sulfides were very lightly scattered on the Great Escarpment and the flats immediately below it. Most of these deposits were in concentrations and total quantities that would not justify the use of conventional mining methods, and so the Arabs were engaged in pioneering new extraction and processing procedures; they had built an array of mobile equipment, altering construction vehicles and exploration rovers to suit their purpose. The resulting machines were big, segmented, and distinctly insectile, looking like things out of a truck mechanic’s nightmare. These creatures wandered the Great Escarpment in loose caravans, seeking the diffuse surface areas of stratiform copper deposits, preferably those with high amounts of tetrahedrite or chalcocite in them, so that they could recover silver as a byproduct of the copper. When they located one of these, they would stop for what they called the harvesting.
While they did this, prospector rovers would range ahead along the escarpment, on expeditions of a week or ten days, following the old flows and rifts. When Frank had arrived he had been welcomed by Zeyk, who told him to do whatever work he chose, so Frank commandeered one of the prospector rovers, and took it out on solo expeditions. He would spend a week out, puttering around on automatic search, reading the seismograph and the samplers and the weather instruments, doing an occasional boring, watching the skies.
• • •
All over both worlds, Bedouin settlements looked drab from the outside. When they abandoned tents, their neighborhoods took on a windowless thick-walled look, as if perpetually hunched over to protect themselves from the desert heat. Only when you got inside their homes did one see what was protected, the courtyards, the gardens, the fountains, the birds, the staircases, the mirrors, the arabesques.
The Great Escarpment was strange country, cut by north-south canyon systems, marred by old craters, overrun by lava flows, broken into hummocks and karsts and mesas and ridges; and all of them on a steep slope, so that on top of any rock or prominence one could see far down to the north. In his days of solitary travel, Frank let the prospector program make most of the decisions, and sat watching the land roll by: silent, stark, huge, torn like the dead past itself. Days would pass, and the shadows wheel. The winds swirled upslope in the mornings, and downslope in the late afternoons. Clouds stacked the sky, from low fog balls bouncing over the rocks to high cirrus shavings, with the occasional thunderhead spanning the whole distance, solid masses of cloud 20,000 meters high.
Occasionally he would turn on the TV and watch the Arabic news channel. Sometimes in the silence of the mornings he would talk back to the TV. There was a part of him that was outraged at the stupidity of the media, and of the events they packaged. The stupidity of the human race, playing out its spectacle. Except that the vast bulk of humanity never appeared on video, never once in their lives, not even in the crowd scenes when a camera swept the mob. Back there the Terran past still lived on in enormous regions, where village life was plodding on as it always had. Maybe that was wisdom, held to by old wives and shamans. Maybe. But it was hard to believe, bec
ause look what happened when they gathered in cities. Idiots on video, history in the making. “One can say that the lengthening of human life must, by definition, be a great boon.” These things made him laugh. “Haven’t you ever heard of secondary effects, you asshole!”
One night he watched a report on the fertilization of the Antarctic Ocean with iron dust, which was to act as a dietary supplement to phytoplankton, a population that was shrinking at an alarming rate for no obvious reason. The iron dust was dumped out of planes, it looked like they were fighting some kind of submarine fire. The project would cost ten billion dollars a year, and would have to be continued in perpetuity, but it had been calculated that a century’s worth of fertilization would reduce the global concentration of carbon dioxide by 15 percent plus or minus 10 percent, and given the ongoing warming and subsequent threat to the coastal cities, not to mention the death of most of the world’s coral reefs, the project had been judged worth it. “Ann’s going to love this,” Frank muttered. “Now they’re terraforming Earth.”
Each vocal outburst he made untied a knot in his chest. He came to realize that no one was watching him, no one was listening. The tiny imaginary audience inside his head did not exist; no one watches our life movies. No friend or enemy would ever know what he did here, he could do whatever he liked and normalcy be damned. Apparently this was what he had been craving, what he had instinctively sought. He could go out and kick stones down the side of a karst for a whole afternoon; or cry; or write aphorisms in the sand; or scream abuse at the moons, careening across the southern sky. He could talk back to himself over meals, he could talk back to the TV, he could have conversations with his parents or his lost friends, with the President, or John, or Maya. He could dictate long rambling entries into his lectern: bits of a sociobiological history of the world, a journal, a philosophical treatise, a pornographic novel (he could masturbate), an analysis of the Arab culture and their history. He did all these things, and when he and his prospector rolled back to the caravans, he would feel better: emptier, calmer. More truly hollow. “Live,” as the Japanese said helpfully, “as if you were already dead.”
Red Mars Page 45