Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “No I don’t. Who are you?”

  The man’s grin was asymmetrical, as if his face had been cracked at the point of the jaw. Underneath the streetlight it looked warped, half-crazed.

  “Who are you?” Frank said again.

  The man raised a finger. “The last time we met, you were bringing down the town. Tonight it’s my turn. Ha!” He strode off laughing, each sharp “Ha!” higher than the last.

  Back at the city manager’s, Maya clutched his arm. “I was worried, you shouldn’t be walking around alone in this town!”

  “Shut up.” He went to a phone and called the physical plant. Everything was normal. He called the UNOMA police, and told them to mount an armed guard at the plant and the train station. He was still repeating the order to someone higher up the chain of command, and it seemed likely it would go all the way up to the new factor for final confirmation, when the screen went blank. There was a tremor underfoot, and every alarm bell in town went off at once. A concerted, adrenal brinnnnng!

  Then there was a sharp jolt. The doors all hissed shut; the building was sealing, meaning pressures outside had made a rapid drop. He and Maya ran to the window and looked out. The tent over Nicosia was down, in some places stretched over the tallest rooftops like saran wrap, in others blowing away on the wind. People down on the street were pounding on doors, running, collapsing, huddled in on themselves like the bodies in Pompeii. Frank wheeled away, his teeth pounding with hot pain.

  Apparently the building had sealed successfully. Below all the noise Frank could hear or feel the hum of a generator. The video screens were blank, which had the effect of making it hard to believe the view out the window. Maya’s face was pink, but her manner calm. “The tent is down!”

  “I know.”

  “But what happened?”

  He didn’t reply.

  She was working away at the video screens. “Have you tried the radio yet?”

  “No.”

  “Well?” she cried, exasperated by his silence. “Do you know what’s going on?”

  “Revolution,” he said.

  Part 7

  Senzeni Na

  On the fourteenth day of the revolution Arkady Bogdanov dreamed he and his father sat on a wooden box, before a small fire at the edge of the clearing— a kind of campfire, except that the long low tin-roofed buildings of Ugoly were just a hundred meters behind their backs. They had their bare hands extended to the radiant heat, and his father was once again telling the story of his encounter with the snow leopard. It was windy and the flames gusted. Then a fire alarm rang out behind them.

  It was Arkady’s alarm, set for four A.M. He got up and took a hot sponge bath. An image from the dream recurred to him. He had not slept much since the revolt’s beginning, just a few hours snatched here or there, and his alarm had awakened him from several deep-sleep dreams, the kind one normally did not remember. Almost all had been undistorted memories of his childhood, memories never once recalled before. It made him wonder just how much the memory held, and if its storage might not be immensely more powerful than its retrieval mechanism. Might one be able to remember every second of one’s life, but only in dreams that were always lost on waking? Might this be necessary, somehow? And if so, what would happen if people started living for two or three hundred years?

  Janet Blyleven came by, looking worried. “They’ve blown up Nemesis. Roald has analyzed the video, and guesses they hit it with a bunch of hydrogen bombs.”

  They went next door to Carr’s big city offices, where Arkady had spent most of the previous two weeks. Alex and Roald were inside watching the TV. Roald said, “Screen, replay tape one.”

  An image flickered and held: black space, the thick net of stars, and midscreen a dark irregular asteroid, visible mostly as a patch of occluded stars. For a few moments the image held, and then a white light appeared on the side of the asteroid. The expansion and dispersal of the asteroid was immediate. “Fast work,” Arkady remarked.

  “There’s another angle from a camera farther away.”

  This clip showed the asteroid as oblong, and it was possible to make out the silver blisters of its mass driver. Then there was a white flash, and when the black sky returned the asteroid was gone; a shimmering of stars to the right of the screen indicated the passage of fragments, then they steadied and it was over. No fiery white cloud, no roar on the soundtrack; just a reporter’s tinny voice, chattering about the end of the Martian rioters’ doomsday threat, and the vindication of the concept of strategic defense. Although apparently the missiles had come from the Amex lunar base, launched by rail gun.

  “I never did like the idea,” Arkady said. “It was mutual assured destruction all over again.”

  Roald said, “But if there’s mutual assured destruction, and one side loses the capability . . .

  “We haven’t lost the capability here, though. And they value what’s here as much as we do. So now we’re back to the Swiss defense.” Destroy what they wanted and take to the hills, for resistance forever. It was more to his liking.

  “It’s weaker,” Roald said bluntly. He had voted with the majority, in favor of sending Nemesis on its course toward the Earth.

  Arkady nodded. It couldn’t be denied that one term had been erased from the equation. But it wasn’t clear if the balance of power had changed or not. Nemesis had not been his idea; Mikhail Yangel had proposed it, and the group in the asteroids had carried it out on their own. Now a lot of them were dead, killed by the big explosion or by smaller ones out in the belt, while Nemesis itself had created the impression that the rebels would countenance mass destruction on Earth. A bad idea, as Arkady had pointed out.

  But that was life in a revolution. No one was in control, no matter what people said. And for the most part it was better that way, especially here on Mars. Fighting had been severe in the first week, UNOMA and the transnationals had beefed up their security forces in the previous year. A lot of the big cities had been instantly seized by them, and it might have happened everywhere except that there turned out to be so many more rebel groups than they or anyone else had known about. Over sixty towns and stations had gotten on the net and declared independence, they had popped out of the labs and the hills and simply taken over. And now with Earth on the far side of the sun, and the nearest continuous shuttle destroyed, it was the security forces who were looking under siege, big cities or not.

  A call came from the physical plant. They were having some trouble with the computers, and wanted Arkady to come have a look.

  He left the city offices and walked across Menlo Park to the plant. It was just after sunrise, and most of Carr Crater was still in shadow. Only the west wall and the tall concrete buildings of the physical plant were in sunlight at this hour, their walls all yellow in the raw morning light, the pistes running up the crater wall like gold ribbons. In the shadowed streets the city was just waking. A lot of rebels had come in from other towns or the cratered highlands, and they slept on the park grass. People sat up, sleeping bags still draped over their legs, eyes puffy, hair wild. Night temperatures were being kept up, but it was still cool at dawn, and those out of their bags crouched around stoves, blowing into their hands and puttering with coffee pots and samovars, and checking to the west to see how close the line of sunlight had crept. When they saw Arkady they waved, and more than once he was stopped by people who wanted to get his opinion of the news, or give him advice. Arkady answered them all cheerfully. Again he felt that difference in the air, the sense that they were all in a new space together, everyone facing the same problems, everyone equal, everyone (seeing a heating coil glowing under a coffee pot) incandescent with the electricity of freedom.

  He walked feeling lighter, chattering into his wristpad’s diary file as he went. “The park reminds me of what Orwell said about Barcelona in the hands of the anarchists— it is the euphoria of a new social contract, of a return to that child’s dream of fairness we all began with—”

  His wristpad be
eped and Phyllis’s face appeared on the tiny screen, which was annoying. “What do you want?” he asked.

  “Nemesis is gone. We want you to surrender before any more damage is done. It’s simple now, Arkady. Surrender or die.”

  He almost laughed. She was like the wicked witch in the Oz movie, appearing unexpectedly in his crystal ball.

  “It’s no laughing matter!” she exclaimed. Suddenly he saw that she was scared.

  “You know we had nothing to do with Nemesis,” he said. “It is irrelevant.”

  “How can you be such a fool!” she cried.

  “It is not foolishness. Listen, you tell your masters this— if they try to subdue the free cities here, we will destroy everything on Mars.” That was the Swiss defense.

  “Do you think that matters?” She was white-lipped, her tiny image like a primitive fury mask.

  “It matters. Look, Phyllis, I’m only the polar cap of this, there’s a massive underground lens that you can’t see. It’s really vast, and they’ve got the means to strike back at you if they want.”

  She must have let her arm fall, because the image on his little screen swung wildly, then showed a floor. “You were always a fool,” her disembodied voice said. “Even back on the Ares.”

  The connection went dead.

  Arkady walked on, the city’s bustle no longer as exhilarating as it had been. If Phyllis were frightened . . .

  At the physical plant they were busy running a malfunction search. A couple of hours before, oxygen levels in the city had begun to rise, and no warning lights had gone off. A tech had discovered it accidentally.

  Half an hour’s work and they found it. A program had been substituted. They replaced it, but Tati Anokhin was not happy. “Look, that had to be sabotage, and there’s still more oxygen than even this accounts for. Look, it’s nearly forty percent out there right now.”

  “No wonder everyone is in such a good mood this morning.”

  “I’m not. Besides that mood thing is a myth.”

  “Are you sure? Go through the programming again, and look at the encryption IDs, and see if there are any other substitutions hidden under this one.”

  He headed back to the city offices. He was halfway there when there was a loud pop overhead. He looked up and saw a small hole in the dome. The air suddenly took on an iridescent shimmer, as if they were inside a great soap bubble. A bright flash and a loud boom knocked him to his feet. Struggling back up, he saw everything ignite simultaneously; people were burning like torches; and right before his eyes his arm caught fire.

  It was not hard to destroy Martian towns. No harder than breaking a window, or popping a balloon.

  Nadia Cherneshevsky discovered this while holed up in the city offices of Lasswitz, a tent town which had been punctured one night just after sunset. All the surviving occupants were now huddled in the city offices or the physical plant. For three days they had spent their time going out to try to repair the tent, and watching TV to try and figure out what was going on. But the Terran news packages were concerned with its own wars, which seemed to be coalescing into one. Only infrequently was there a brief report on the wrecked Martian towns. One said that many domed craters had been hit by missiles from over the horizon, usually in a sequence where oxygen or aerated fuels were introduced and then quickly followed by an ignitor that caused explosions of varying severity— from antipersonnel fires, to blasts that blew the domes off, to really big explosions that in effect re-excavated the crater. Antipersonnel oxygen fires appeared to be the most common; these left the infrastructure intact, for the most part.

  Tent towns were simpler still. Most of them had been punctured by Phobos-based lasers; some had had their physical plants targeted by guided cruise missiles; others had been invaded by troops of one kind or another, their spaceports seized, armored rovers crashing through city walls, and in rare cases rocketpack paratroopers descending from above.

  Nadia watched the jiggling video images that so clearly revealed the fear of the camera operators, her stomach collapsing to a tight walnut inside her. “What are they doing, testing methods?” she cried.

  “I doubt it,” said Yeli Zudov. “It’s probably just a matter of different groups using different methods. Some look like they’re trying to do as little damage as possible, others seem to want to kill as many of us as they can. Make more room for emigration.”

  Nadia turned away, sickened. She got up and took off for the kitchen, bent slightly over her collapsed stomach, desperate to do something. In the kitchen they had turned on a generator and were microwaving frozen dinners. She helped hand them out, moving up and down a line of people sitting in the hall outside. Unwashed faces, splashed with black frostnip blisters: some people talked animatedly, others sat like statues, or slept leaning against each other. Most of them had been residents of Lasswitz, but a good number had driven in from tents or hideouts that had been destroyed from space, or attacked by ground forces. “Is stupid,” an old Arab woman was saying to a gnarled little man. “My parents were Red Crescent in Baghdad when the Americans bombed it, if they have the sky is nothing you can do, nothing! We have to surrender. Surrender as soon as possible!”

  “But to whom?” the little man asked wearily. “And for whom? And how?”

  “To anyone, from everybody, and by radio, of course!” The woman glared at Nadia, who shrugged.

  Then her wristpad beeped, and Sasha Yefremov babbled in a tinny wristphone voice. The water station north of town had gone up in an explosion, and the well it had capped was now fountaining in an artesian eruption of water and ice.

  “I’ll be right there,” Nadia said, shocked. The town’s water station tapped the lower end of the Lasswitz aquifer, which was a big one. If any significant part of the aquifer broached the surface, the water station and the town and the entire canyon they lay in would disappear in a catastrophic flood— and worse, Burroughs was located only 200 kilometers down the slope of Syrtis and Isidis, and the flood could very conceivably run that far. Burroughs! Its population was far too large to evacuate, especially now that it had become a refuge for people escaping the war; there was simply no other place to go.

  “Surrender!” the Arab woman insisted from the hall. “All surrender!”

  “I don’t think that will work anymore,” Nadia said, and ran for the building’s lock.

  • • •

  A part of her was immensely relieved to be able to do something, to stop huddling in a building watching disasters on TV, and do something. And Nadia had platted and overseen the construction of Lasswitz, only six years before, so now she had an idea what to do. The town was a Nicosia-class tent, with the farm and physical plant in separate structures, and the water station well off to the north. All the structures were down on the floor of a big east-west rift called Arena Canyon, the walls of which were nearly vertical and half a kilometer high. The water station was located only a couple hundred meters from the canyon’s north wall, which in that area had an impressive overhang at the top. As Nadia drove with Sasha and Yeli to the water station, she quickly outlined her plan: “I think we can bring down the cliff onto the station, and if we can, the landslide ought to be enough to cap the leak.”

  “Won’t the flood just carry the landslide’s rock away?” Sasha asked.

  “It will if it’s a full aquifer outbreak, sure. But if we cover it when it’s still just an uncapped well, then the escaping water will freeze in the landslide, and hopefully form a dam heavy enough to hold it. Hydrostatic pressure in this aquifer is only a bit greater than the lithostatic pressure of the rock over it, so the artesian flow isn’t all that high. If it were we’d be dead already.”

  She braked the rover. Out the windshield they could see the remains of the water station, under a cloud of thin frost steam. A rover came bouncing full speed toward them, and Nadia flashed their headlights and turned the radio to the common band. It was the water-station crew, a couple named Angela and Sam, rabid with the adventures of the last hou
r. When they had driven alongside and finished their story, Nadia explained to them what she had in mind. “It could work,” Angela said. “Certainly nothing else will stop it now, it’s really pumping.”

  “We’ll have to hurry,” Sam said. “It’s eating the rock at an unbelievable rate.”

  “If we don’t cap it,” Angela said with a certain morbid enthusiasm, “it’ll look like when the Atlantic first broke through the Straits of Gibraltar and flooded the Mediterranean basin. That was a waterfall that lasted ten thousand years.”

  “I never heard of that one,” Nadia said. “Come on with us to the cliff and help us get the robots going.”

  During the ride over she had directed all the town’s construction robots from their hangar to the foot of the north wall, next to the water station; when the two rovers got there, they found a few of the faster robots had already arrived, and the rest were grinding over the canyon floor toward them. There was a small talus slope at the foot of the cliff, which towered over them like an enormous frozen wave, gleaming in the noon light. Nadia linked into the earthmovers and bulldozers and gave them instructions to clear paths through the talus; when that was done, tunnelers would bore straight into the cliff. “See,” Nadia said, pointing at an areological map of the canyon that she had called onto the rover’s screen, “there’s a big fault there behind that whole overhanging piece. It’s causing the lip of the wall to slump a bit— see that slightly lower shelf at the top? If we set off all the explosives we’ve got at the bottom of that fault, it’s sure to bring down the overhang, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Yeli said. “It’s worth a try.”

  The slower robots arrived, bringing an array of explosives left over from the excavation of the town’s foundation. Nadia went to work programming the vehicles to tunnel into the bottom of the cliff, and for most of an hour she was lost to the world. When she was finished she said, “Let’s get back to town and get everyone evacuated. I can’t be sure how much of the cliff might come down, and we don’t want to bury everyone. We’ve got four hours.”