Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Why?” Sax said.

  “Because I’m trying to stop this. I’m trying for a cease-fire, then a general amnesty, then a reconstruction joined by all.”

  “But under whose direction?”

  “UNOMA’s, of course. And the national offices.”

  “But UNOMA agrees only to the cease-fire?” Sax ventured. “While the rebels only agree to the general amnesty?”

  Frank nodded curtly. “And neither like the reconstruction joined by all. But the current situation is so bad they may go for it. Four more aquifers have blown since the cable came down. They’re all equatorial, and some people are saying it’s cause and effect.”

  Ann shook her head at this, and Frank looked pleased to see it. “They were broken open, I was pretty sure. They broke one at the mouth of Chasma Borealis, it’s pouring out onto the Borealis dunes.”

  “The weight of the polar cap probably puts that one under a good bit of pressure,” Ann said.

  “Do you know what happened to the Acheron group?” Sax asked Frank.

  “No. They’ve disappeared. It might be like with Arkady, I’m afraid.” He glanced at Nadia, pursed his lips unhappily. “I should get back to work.”

  “But what’s happening on Earth?” Ann demanded. “What does the U.N. have to say about all this?”

  “

  ‘Mars is not a nation but a world resource,’

  ” Frank quoted heavily. “They’re saying that the tiny fraction of humanity that lives here can’t be allowed to control the resources, when the human material base as a whole is so deeply stressed.”

  “That’s probably true,” Nadia heard herself say. Her voice was harsh, a croak. It felt like she hadn’t spoken in days.

  Frank shrugged.

  Sax said, “I suppose that’s why they’ve given the transnationals such a free hand. It seems to me there’s more of their security here than U.N. police.”

  “That’s right,” Frank said. “It took the U.N. a while to agree to deploy their peacekeepers.”

  “They don’t mind having the dirty work done by someone else.”

  “Of course not.”

  “And Earth itself?” Ann asked again.

  Frank shrugged. “The Group of Seven seems to be getting things under control.” He shook his head. “It’s hard to say from here, it really is.”

  He went to his screen to make more calls. The others went off to eat, to clean up, to sleep, to catch up on friends and acquaintances, on the rest of the first hundred, on what news there was from Earth. The flags of convenience had been destroyed by attacks from the have-nots in the south, but apparently the transnationals had fled to the Group of Seven, and had been taken in and defended by the seven’s giant militaries. The twelfth attempt at a cease-fire had held for several days now.

  So they had a bit of time to try and recover. But when they went through the comm room, Frank would still be there, shifting ever more surely into a bitter black fury, snapping his way through what seemed an endless nightmare of screen diplomacy, talking on and on in an urgent, scornful, biting tone. He was past cajoling anyone into anything now, it was purely an exertion of will. Trying to move the world without a fulcrum, or with the weakest of fulcrums, his leverage consisting mainly of his old American connections and his current personal standing with a variety of insurrection leaders, both nearly severed by events and the TV blackouts. And both becoming less important daily on Mars itself, as UNOMA and the transnational forces took over town after town. It seemed to Nadia that Frank was now trying to muscle the process along by the sheer force of his anger at his lack of influence. She found she could not stand to be around him; things were bad enough without his black bile.

  But with Sax’s help he got an independent signal to Earth, by contacting Vega and getting the technicians there to transmit messages back and forth. That meant a few hours between transmission and reception, but in a long couple of days after that, he got in five coded exchanges with Secretary of State Wu, and while waiting through the night for return messages, the people on Vega filled the gaps with tapes of Terran news programs that they had not seen. All these reports, when they referred to the Martian situation at all, portrayed the insurrection as a minor disruption caused by criminal elements, principally by escaped prisoners from Korolyov, who had gone on a rampage of senseless property damage, in the process killing great numbers of innocent civilians. Clips of the frozen naked guards outside Korolyov were featured prominently in these reports, as were satellite telephotos of the aquifer outbursts. The most skeptical programs mentioned that these and all other clips from Mars were provided by UNOMA, and some stations in China and the Netherlands even questioned the accuracy of the UNOMA accounts. But they provided no alternative explanation of events, and for the most part, the Terran media disseminated the transnationals’ version of things. When Nadia pointed this out, Frank snorted. “Of course,” he said contemptuously. “Terran news is transnational.” He turned off the sound.

  Behind him Nadia and Yeli leaned forward instinctively on the bamboo couch, as if that might help them to hear the silent clip better. Their two weeks of being cut off from outside news had seemed like a year, and now they watched the screen helplessly, soaking in whatever information they could. Yeli even stood to turn the sound back up, but saw that Frank was asleep in his chair, his chin on his chest. When a message from the State Department came in Frank jerked awake, turned up the sound, stared at the tiny faces on the screen, snapped out a reply in a hoarse rasp. Then he closed his eyes and slept again.

  At the end of the second night of the Vega link, he had gotten Secretary Wu to promise to press the U.N. in New York to restore communications, and halt all police action until the situation could be assessed. Wu was also going to try to get transnational forces ordered back to Earth, though that, Frank noted, would be impossible.

  The sun had been up for a couple of hours when Frank sent a final acknowledgment to Vega, and shut down. Yeli was asleep on the floor. Nadia stood up stiffly and went for a walk around the park, taking advantage of the light to have a look around. She had to step over bodies sleeping in the grass, in groups of three or four spooned together for warmth. The Swiss had set up big kitchens, and rows of outhouses lining the city wall; it looked like a construction site, and suddenly she found tears running down her face. On she walked. It was nice to be able to walk around in the open light of day.

  Eventually she returned to the city offices. Frank was standing over Maya, who was asleep on a couch. He stared down at her with a blank expression, then looked up bleary-eyed at Nadia. “She’s really out.”

  “Everyone’s tired.”

  “Hmph. What was it like at Hellas?”

  “Under water.”

  He shook his head. “Sax must be loving it.”

  “That’s what I kept saying. But I think it’s too out of control for him.”

  “Ah yes.” He closed his eyes, appeared to sleep for a second or two. “I’m sorry about Arkady.”

  “Yes.”

  Another silence. “She looks like a girl.”

  “A little.” Actually Nadia had never seen Maya look older. They were all pushing eighty, they couldn’t keep the pace, treatments or not. In their minds they were old.

  “The folks on Vega told me that Phyllis and the rest of the people on Clarke are going to try to get across to them in an emergency rocket.”

  “Aren’t they out of the plane of the ecliptic?”

  “They are now, but they’re going to try to push down to Jupiter, and use it to swing back down-system.”

  “That’ll take a year or two, won’t it?”

  “About a year. Hopefully they’ll miss entirely, or fall into Jupiter. Or run out of food.”

  “I take it you’re not happy with Phyllis.”

  “That bitch. She’s responsible for a lot of this. Pulling in all those transnats with promises of every metal ever put to use— she figured she would be queen of Mars with all those folks backi
ng her. You should have seen her up there on Clarke, looking down at the planet like a little tin god. I could have strangled her. How I wish I could have seen her face when Clarke took off and went flying!” He laughed harshly.

  Maya stirred at the sound, woke. They pulled her up and went out into the park in search of a meal. They got in a line of people huddled in their walkers, coughing, rubbing their hands together, blowing out plumes of frost like white cotton balls. Very few talked. Frank surveyed the scene with a disgusted look, and when they got their trays of röshti and tabouli he devoured his and began conversing to his wristpad in Arabic. “They say Alex and Evgenia and Samantha are coming up Noctis with some Bedouin friends of mine,” he told them when he shut down.

  That was good news. Alex and Evgenia had been heard from last in Aureum Overlook, a rebel bastion that had destroyed a number of orbiting U.N. ships before being incinerated by missile fire from Phobos. And no one had heard from Samantha the whole month of the war.

  So all the first hundred in town went to the north gate of Cairo that afternoon to greet them. Cairo’s north gate looked down a long natural ramp that ran into one of the southernmost canyons of Noctis. The road rose up from the canyon floor on this ramp, and they could see all the way down it to the canyon bottom. There, in the early afternoon, came a rover caravan, churning up a small dust cloud and moving slowly.

  It was nearly an hour before the cars rolled up the last part of the ramp. They were no more than three kilometers away when great gouts of flame and ejecta burst into being among them, knocking some rovers into the cliff wall, some over the ramp into space. The rest twisted to a halt, shattered and burning.

  Then an explosion rocked the north gate, and they dove for the wall. Cries and shouts over the common band. Nothing more; they stood back up. The fabric of the tent still held, although the gate lock was apparently stuck fast.

  Down on the road thin plumes of tan smoke lofted into the air, tattering to the east, pulled back down into Noctis on the dusk wind. Nadia sent a robot rover down to check for survivors. Wristpads crackled with static, nothing but static, and Nadia was thankful for that; what could they have hoped for? Screams? Frank was cursing into his wristpad, switching between Arabic and English. Trying vainly to find out what had happened. But Alexander, Evgenia, Samantha. . . Nadia looked fearfully at the little images on her wrist, directing the robot cameras with dread. Shattered rovers. Some bodies. Nothing moved. One rover still smoked.

  “Where’s Sasha?” Yeli’s voice cried. “Where’s Sasha?”

  “She was in the lock,” someone said. “She was going out to greet them.”

  They went to work opening the inner lock door, Nadia at the front punching all the codes and then working with tools and finally a shape charge that someone handed to her. They moved back and the lock blew out like a crossbow bolt, and then they were there, crowbarring the heavy door back. Nadia rushed in and dropped to her knees by Sasha, who was huddled head-in-jacket, in the emergency posture; but she was dead, the flesh of her face Martian red, her eyes frozen.

  Feeling that she had to move or else turn to stone on the spot, Nadia broke and ran back to the town cars they had come in. She jumped in one and drove away; she had no plan, and the car seemed to choose the direction. Her friends’ voices cut through the crackle on her wristpad, sounding like crickets in a cage, Maya muttering viciously in Russian, crying— only Maya was tough enough to keep feeling in all of this—”That was Phobos again!” her little voice cried. “They’re psychotic up there!”

  The others were in shock, their voices like AIs’. “They’re not psychotic,” Frank said. “It’s perfectly rational. They see a political settlement coming and they’re getting in as many shots as they can.”

  “Murderous bastards!” Maya cried. “KGB fascists. . . .”

  The town car stopped at the city offices. Nadia ran inside, to the room where she had stashed her stuff, at this point no more than her old blue backpack. She dug in it, still unaware of what she was looking for until her claw hand, still the strong one, reached into a bag and pulled it out. Arkady’s transmitter. Of course. She ran back to the car and drove to the south gate. Sax and Frank were still talking, Sax sounding the same as always, but saying, “Every one of us whose location is known is either here, or else has been killed. I think they’re after the first hundred in particular.”

  “Singling us out, you mean?” Frank said.

  “I saw some Terran news that said we were the ringleaders. And twenty-one of us have died since the revolt began. Another forty missing.”

  The town car arrived at the south gate. Nadia turned off her intercom, got out of the car, went into the lock and put on boots, helmet, gloves. She pumped up and checked out, then slammed the open button and waited for the lock to empty and open. As it had on Sasha. They had lived a lifetime together in just the last month alone. Then she was out onto the surface, into the glare and push of a windy hazy day, feeling the first diamond bite of the cold. She kicked through drifts of fines and red puffs blew out ahead of her. The hollow woman, kicking blood. Out the other gate were the bodies of her friends and others, their dead faces purplish and bloated, as after construction accidents. Nadia had seen several of those now, seen death several times, and each had been a horror— and yet here they were deliberately creating as many of these horrible accidents as they could! That was war; killing people by every means possible. People who might have lived a thousand years. She thought of Arkady and of a thousand years, and hissed. They had quarreled so in recent years, mostly about politics. Your plans are all anachronism, Nadia had said. You don’t understand the world. Ha! he had laughed, offended. This world I understand. With an expression as dark as any she had ever seen from him. And she remembered when he had given her the transmitter, how he had cried for John, how crazy he had been with rage and grief. Just in case, he had said to her refusals, pleading. Just in case.

  And now it had happened. She couldn’t believe it. She took the box from her walker’s thigh pocket, turned it over in her hand. Phobos shot up over the western horizon like a gray potato. The sun had just set, and the alpenglow was so strong that it looked like she was standing in her own blood, as if she were a creature as small as a cell standing on the corroded wall of her heart, while around her swept the winds of her own dusty plasma. Rockets were landing at the spaceport north of the city. The dusk mirrors gleamed in the western sky like a cluster of evening stars. A busy sky. U.N. ships would soon be descending.

  Phobos crossed the sky in four-and-a-quarter hours, so she didn’t have to wait long. It had risen as a half moon, but now it was gibbous, almost full, halfway to the zenith, moving at its steady clip across the coagulating sky. She could make out a faint point of light inside the gray disk: the two little domed craters, Semenov and Leveykin. She held the radio transmitter out and tapped in the ignition code, MANGALA. It was like using a TV remote.

  A bright light flared on the leading edge of the little gray disk. The two faint lights went out. The bright light flared even brighter. Could she really perceive the deceleration? Probably not; but it was there.

  Phobos was on its way down.

  • • •

  Back inside Cairo, she found that the news had already spread. The flare had been bright enough to catch people’s eyes, and after that they had clumped together around the blank TV screens, by habit, and exchanged rumors and speculation, and somehow the basic fact had gotten around, or been worked out independently. Nadia strolled past group after group, and heard people saying “Phobos has been hit! Phobos has been hit!” And someone laughed, “They brought the Roche limit up to it!”

  She thought she was lost in the medina, but almost directly she came to the city offices. Maya was outside: “Hey Nadia!” she cried, “Did you see Phobos?”

  “Yes.”

  “Roger says when they were up there in year One, they built a system of explosives and rocketry into it! Did Arkady ever tell you about it?”

&
nbsp; “Yes.”

  They went in to the offices, Maya thinking aloud: “If they manage to slow it down very much, it’ll come down. I wonder if it’ll be possible to calculate where. We’re pretty damn close to the equator right here.”

  “It’ll break up, surely, and come down in a lot of places.”

  “True. I wonder what Sax thinks.”

  They found Sax and Frank bunched before one screen, Yeli and Ann and Simon before another. A UNOMA satellite was tracking Phobos with a telescope, and Sax was measuring the moon’s speed of passage across the Martian landscape to get a fix on its velocity. In the image on the screen Stickney’s dome shone like a Fabergé egg, but the eye was drawn away from that to the moon’s leading edge, which was blurry and streaked with white flashes of ejecta and gases. “Look how well balanced the thrust is,” Sax said to no one in particular. “Too sudden a thrust and the whole thing would have shattered. And an unbalanced thrust would have set it spinning, and then the thrust would have pushed it all over the place.”

  “I see signs of stabilizing lateral thrusts,” his AI said.

  “Attitude jets,” Sax said. “They turned Phobos into a big rocket.”

  “They did it in the first year,” Nadia said. She wasn’t sure why she was speaking, she still seemed out of control, observing her actions from several seconds behind. “A lot of the Phobos crew was from rocketry and guidance. They processed the ice veins into liquid oxygen and deuterium, and stored it in lined columns buried in the chondrite. The engines and the control complex were buried centrally.”

  “So it is a big rocket.” Sax was nodding as he typed. “Period of Phobos, 27,547 seconds. So it’s going. . . 2.146 kilometers per second, approximately, and to bring it down it needs to decelerate to. . . to 1.561 kilometers per second.

  So, .585 kilometers per second slower. For a mass like Phobos. . . wow. That’s a lot of fuel.”

  “What’s it down to now?” Frank asked. He was black-faced, his jaw muscles pulsing under the skin like little biceps— furious, Nadia saw, at his inability to predict what would happen next.