Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  She asked him to accompany her, and he was too exhausted to run a cost/benefit analysis of the act. With a twist of the mouth he agreed. It was easier just to tag along.

  They took the train down to the next station, made their way through the police and inside. The Russian tent was packed like a circuit board. “You’re going to have a harder job of it than I did,” Frank said as he looked around.

  “Russians are used to it,” she said. “These tents aren’t that different from Moscow apartments.”

  “Yes, yes.” Russia had become a kind of immense Korea, sporting the same brutal streamlined capitalism, perfectly Taylorized and with a veneer of democracy and consumer goods covering the junta. “It’s amazing how little you need to keep starving people strung along.”

  “Frank, please.”

  “Just remember that and it will go okay.”

  “Are you going to help or not?” she demanded.

  “Yes, yes.”

  • • •

  The central square smelled of bean curd and borscht and electrical fires, and the crowd was much more unruly and loud than in the American tent, everyone there a defiant leader, ready to unleash a declamation. A lot more of them were women than in the American tent. They had unpisted a train and this had galvanized them, they were anxious for more action. Maya had to use a hand megaphone, and all the time that she stood on a chair and talked, the crowd swirled around them and participants in several loud arguments ignored her, as if she were a cocktail-lounge pianist.

  Frank’s Russian was rusty, and he couldn’t understand most of what the crowd shouted at Maya, but he followed her replies pretty well. She was explaining the emigration moratorium, the bottleneck in town robot production and in water supplies, the necessity for discipline, the promise of a better life to come if all was enacted in an orderly fashion. He supposed it was a classic babushka harangue, and it had the effect of pacifying them somewhat, as there was a strong reactionary streak in many Russians now; they remembered what social unrest really meant, and were justifiably afraid of it. And there was a lot to promise, it all seemed plausible: big world, few people, lots of material resources, some good robot designs, computer programs, gene templates. . . .

  In one really loud moment of the discussion he said to her in English, “Remember the stick.”

  “What?” she snapped.

  “The stick. Threaten them. Carrot and stick.”

  She nodded. Into the megaphone again: the never-to-be-taken-for-granted fact of the poisonous air, the deadly cold. They were alive only because of the tents, and the input of electricity and water. Vulnerable in ways they hadn’t fully thought out, in ways that didn’t exist back home.

  She was quick, she always had been. Back to promises. Back and forth, stick and carrot, a jerk on the leash, some niblets. Eventually the Russians too were pacified.

  Afterward on the train up to Sheffield Maya gabbled with nervous relief, face flushed, eyes brilliant, hand clutching his arm as she threw her head back abruptly and laughed. That nervous intelligence, that arresting physical presence. . . He must have been exhausted himself, or more shaken than he had realized by the time in the tents, or maybe it was the encounter with Phyllis; because he felt himself warming to her, it was like stepping into a sauna after a freezing day outside, with that same sense of relief from vigilance, of penetrating ease. “I don’t know what I would have done without you,” she was saying rapidly, “really you are so good in those situations, so clear and firm and sharp. They believe you because you don’t try to flatter them or soften the truth.”

  “That’s what works best,” he said, looking out the window at the tents running by. “Especially when you’re flattering them and lying to them.”

  “Oh Frank.”

  “It’s true. You’re good at it yourself.”

  This was an example of the trope under discussion, but Maya didn’t see it. There was a name for that in rhetoric, but he couldn’t recall it. Metonymy? Synecdoche? But she only laughed and squeezed his shoulder, leaning against him. As if the fight in Burroughs had never happened, not to mention everything before that. And in Sheffield she ignored her stop, and got off the train with him at his stop, walking at his shoulder through the spaciousness of the rim station, and then to his rooms, where she stripped and showered and put on one of his jumpers, chattering all the while about the day and the situation at large, as if they did this all the time: went out to dinner, soup, trout, salad, a bottle of wine, every night sure! Leaning back in their chairs, drinking coffee and brandy. Politicians after a day of politics. The leaders.

  She had finally wound down, and was poured into her chair, content just to watch him. And for a wonder it didn’t make him nervous, it was as if some force field protected him from all that. Perhaps the look in her eye. Sometimes it seemed you really could tell if someone liked you.

  She spent the night. And after that she divided her time between her quarters at the MarsFirst office and his rooms, without ever discussing what she was doing, or what it meant. And when it was time for bed, she would take off her clothes and roll in next to him, and then onto him, warm and calm. The touch of a whole body, all at once.. . . And if he ever started things, she was so quick to respond; he only had to touch her arm. Like stepping into a sauna. She was so easy these days, so calm. Like a different person, it was amazing. Not Maya at all; but there she was, whispering Frank, Frank.

  But they never talked about any of that. It was always the situation, the day’s news, and in truth that gave them a lot to talk about. The unrest on Pavonis had gone into abeyance temporarily, but the troubles were planetwide, and getting worse: sabotages, strikes, riots, fights, skirmishes, murder. And the news from Earth had plummeted through even the blackest of gallows humor, into just plain awfulness. Mars was the picture of order in comparison, a little local eddy spun away from the vortex of a giant maelstrom, which looked to Frank like a death spiral for everything that fell into it. Little wars like matchheads were flaring everywhere. India and Pakistan had used nuclear weapons in Kashmir. Africa was dying, and the North bickered over who should help first.

  One day they got word that the mohole town Hephaestus, west of Elysium, manned by Americans and Russians, had been entirely deserted. Radio contact had stopped, and when people went down from Elysium to look, they had found the town empty. All Elysium was in an uproar, and Frank and Maya decided to see if they could do something in person. They took the train down Tharsis together, back down into the thickening air and across the rocky plains now piebald with snowdrifts that never melted, with snow that was a dirty granular pink, conforming tightly to the north slope of every dune and rock, like colored shadows. And then onto the glistening crazed black plains of Isidis, where the permafrost melted on the warmest summer days, and then refroze in a bright black crackle. A tundra in the making, maybe even a marsh. Flying by the train windows were tufts of black grass, perhaps even arctic flowers. Or maybe it was just litter.

  Burroughs was quiet and uneasy, the broad grassy boulevards empty, their green as shocking as a hallucination or an afterimage of looking into the sun. While waiting for the train to Elysium, Frank went to the station’s storage room and reclaimed the contents of his Burroughs room, which he had left behind. The attendant returned with a single large box, containing a bachelor’s kitchen equipment, a lamp, some jumpers, a lectern. He didn’t remember any of it. He put the lectern in his pocket and tossed the rest of it in a trash dumper. Wasted years— he couldn’t remember a day of them. The treaty negotiation was now revealed as pure theater, as if someone had kicked a stage strut and brought down the whole backdrop, revealing real history on the back steps, two men exchanging a handshake and a nod.

  The Russian office in Burroughs wanted Maya to stay and deal with some business there, so Frank took a train on to Elysium by himself, and then joined a rover caravan out to Hephaestus. The people in his car were subdued by his presence, and irritably he ignored them and glanced through his o
ld lectern. A standard selection for the most part, a great book series only slightly augmented by some political philosophy packages. A hundred thousand volumes; lecterns today beat that a hundredfold, although it was a pointless improvement, as there was no longer time to read even a single book. He had been fond of Nietzsche in those days, apparently. About half the marked passages were from him, and glancing through them Frank couldn’t see why, it was all windy drivel. And then he read one that made him shudder: “The individual is, in his future and his past, a piece of fate, one law more, one necessity more for everything that is and everything that will be. To say to him ‘change yourself’ means to demand that everything should change, even in the past. . . .”

  In Hephaestus a new mohole crew was settling in, old-timers for the most part, tech and engineering types, but much more sophisticated than the newcomers on Pavonis. Frank talked with quite a few of them, asking about those who had disappeared, and one morning at breakfast, next to a window that looked out on the mohole’s solid white thermal plume, an American woman who reminded him of Ursula said, “These people have seen the videos all their life, they’re students of Mars, they believe in it like a grail, and organize their lives around getting here. They work for years, and save, and then sell everything they have to get passage, because they have an idea of what it will be like. And then they get here and they’re incarcerated, or at best back in the old rut, in indoor jobs so it’s all just like it’s still on TV. And so they disappear. Because they’re looking for more of the kind of thing they came here for.”

  “But they don’t know how the disappeared live!” Chalmers objected. “Or even if they survive at all!”

  The woman shook her head. “Word gets around. People come back. There are one-play videos that show up occasionally.” The people around her nodded. “And we can see what’s coming up from Earth after us. Best to get into the country while the chance is still there.”

  Frank shook his head, amazed. It was the same thing the bench presser in the mining camp had been saying, but coming from this calm middle-aged woman it was somehow more disturbing.

  That night, unable to sleep, he put out a call for Arkady, and got him half an hour later. Arkady was on Olympus Mons of all places, up at the observatory. “What do you want?” Frank said. “What do you imagine will happen if everyone here slips away into the highlands?”

  Arkady grinned. “Why then we will make a human life, Frank. We will work to support our needs, and do science, and perhaps terraform a bit more. We will sing and dance and walk around in the sun, and work like maniacs for food and curiosity.”

  “It’s impossible,” Frank exclaimed. “We’re part of the world, we can’t escape it.”

  “Can’t we? It’s only the blue evening star, the world you speak of. This red world is the only real one for us, now.”

  Frank gave up, exasperated. He had never been able to talk to Arkady, never. With John it had been different; but then he and John had been friends.

  He trained back to Elysium. The Elysium massif rose over the horizon like an enormous saddle dropped on the desert; the steep slopes of the two volcanoes were pinkish white now, deep in snows that had packed down to firn, and would become glaciers before too long. He had always thought of the Elysium cities as a counterweight to Tharsis— older, smaller, more manageable and sane. But now people there were disappearing by the hundreds; it was a jump-off point into the unknown nation, hidden out there in the cratered wilderness.

  In Elysium they asked him to give a speech to a group of American newcomers, on the first evening of their orientation. A formal speech, but there was an informal gathering before, and Frank wandered around asking questions as usual. “Of course we’ll get out if we can,” one man said to him boldly.

  Others chipped in immediately. “They told us not to come here if we wanted to get outdoors much. It’s not like that on Mars, they said.”

  “Who do they think they’re fooling?”

  “We can see the video you sent back as well as they can.”

  “Hell, every other article you read is about the Mars underground, and how they’re communists or nudists or Rosicrucians—”

  “Utopias or caravans or cave-dwelling primitives—”

  “Amazons or lamas or cowboys—”

  “What it is, is everyone’s projecting their fantasies out here because it’s so bad back there, do you understand?”

  “Maybe there’s a single coordinated counterworld—”

  “That’s another big fantasy, the totalizing fantasy—”

  “The true masters of the planet, why not? Hidden away, maybe led by your friend Hiroko, maybe in contact with your friend Arkady, maybe not. Who knows? No one knows for sure, not on Earth they don’t.”

  “It’s all stories. It’s the best story going right now, and millions of people on Earth are into it, they’re addicted to it. A lot of them want to come, but only a few of us get to. And a good percentage of those of us who got chosen went through the whole selection process lying through our teeth to get here.”

  “Yes, yes,” Frank interjected gloomily. “We all did that.” It reminded him of Michel’s old joke; since they were all going to go crazy anyway . . .

  “Well there you are! What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know.” He shook his head unhappily. “But it’s all fantasy, do you understand? The need to stay hidden would hamper any community in a crippling way. It’s all stories, when you get right down to it.”

  “Then where are all the disappeared going?”

  Frank shrugged uneasily, and they grinned.

  An hour later he was still thinking about it. Everyone had moved out into an open-air amphitheater, built from fixed salt blocks in classical Greek style. The semicircle of rising white benches was filled with bodies topped by attentive faces, waiting for his speech, curious to see what one of the first hundred would say to them; he was a relic of the past, a character out of history, he had been on Mars ten years before some of the people in the audience were born, and his memories of Earth were of their grandparents’ time, on the other side of a vast and shadowy chasm of years.

  The classical Greeks had certainly gotten the size and proportions right for a single orator; he hardly had to raise his voice, and they all heard him. He told them some of the usual things, his standard address, all chopped and censored, as it was sadly tattered by current events. It didn’t sound very coherent, even to him. “Look,” he said, desperately revising as he spoke, ad libbing, searching through the faces in the crowd, “when we came up here we came to a different place, to a new world, and that necessarily makes us different beings than we were before. None of the old directives from Earth matter. Inevitably we will make a new Martian society, just in the nature of things. It comes out of the decisions we make together, by our collective action. And they are decisions that we’re making in our time, in these years, right now at this very instant. But if you dodge off into the outback and join one of the hidden colonies, you isolate yourself! You remain whatever you were when you came, never metamorphosing into a Martian human. And you also deprive the rest of us of your expertise and your input. I know this personally, believe me.” Pain lanced through him, he was astonished to feel it. “As you know, some of the first hundred were the first to disappear, presumably under the leadership of Hiroko Ai. I still don’t understand why they did it, I really don’t. But how we have missed her genius for systems design in the years since, I can hardly tell you! Why, I think you can accurately say that part of our problems now result from her absence these many years.” He shook his head, tried to gather his thoughts. “The first time I saw this canyon we’re in, I was with her. It was one of the first explorations to this area, and I had Hiroko Ai at my side, and we looked down into this canyon, its floor bare and flat, and she said to me, ‘It’s like the floor of a room.’

  ” He stared at the audience, trying to remember Hiroko’s face. Yes. . . no. Strange how one remembered faces until
you tried to look at them in your mind, when they turned away from you. “I’ve missed her. I come here, and it’s impossible to believe it’s the same place, and so. . . it’s hard to believe I ever really knew her.” He paused, tried to focus on their faces. “Do you understand?”

  “No!” someone bellowed.

  A flicker of his old anger boiled through his confusion. “I’m saying we have to make a new Mars here! I’m saying we’re completely new beings, that nothing is the same here! Nothing is the same!”

  He had to give up, go sit down. Other speakers took over, and their droning voices floated over him as he sat, stunned, looking out the open end of the amphitheater into a park of wide-set sycamore trees. Slender white buildings beyond, trees growing on their roofs and balconies. A green and white vision.

  He couldn’t tell them. No one could tell them. Only time, and Mars itself. And in the meantime they would act in obvious contradiction to their own best interests. It happened all the time, but how could it, how? Why were people so stupid?

  He left the amphitheater, stalked through the park and the town. “How can people act against their own obvious material interests?” he demanded of Slusinski over his wristpad. “It’s crazy! Marxists were materialists, how did they explain it?”

  “Ideology, sir.”

  “But if the material world and our method of manipulating it determine everything else, how can ideology happen? Where did they say it comes from?”

  “Some of them defined ideology as an imaginary relationship to a real situation. They acknowledged that imagination was a powerful force in human life.”