Green Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Ahead the land dropped to the crater-pocked Noachis Planum, and down there was a camp of mining rovers, drawn up in a circle like a wagon train. Maya drove hard down the rough road to this camp, reaching it in the late afternoon. There she was welcomed by a small contingent of old Bedouin friends, plus Nadia, who was visiting to consult on the drilling rig for the newly discovered aquifer. They all were impressed with this one. “It extends past Proctor Crater, and probably out to Kaiser,” Nadia said. “And it looks like it goes way far south, so far it might be coextensive with the Australis Tholus aquifer. Did you ever establish a northern boundary for that one?”

  “I think so,” Maya said, and started tapping at her wristpad to find out. They talked about water through an early dinner, only occasionally pausing to exchange other news. After dinner they sat in Zeyk and Nazik’s rover, and relaxed eating sherbet that Zeyk passed around, while staring into the coals of a little brazier fire on which Zeyk had earlier cooked shish kebab. The talk turned inevitably to the current situation, and Maya said again what she had said to Art—that they should foment trouble between the metanationals back on Earth, if they could.

  “That means world war,” Nadia said sharply. “And if the pattern holds, it would be the worst one yet.” She shook her head. “There has to be a better way.”

  “It will not take our meddling for it to start,” Zeyk said. “They’re on the spiral down into it now.”

  “Do you think so?” Nadia said. “Well, if it happens . . . then we’ll have our chance for a coup here, I guess.”

  Zeyk shook his head. “This is their escape hatch. It will take a lot of coercion to make the powerful give up a place like this.”

  “There are different kinds of coercion,” Nadia said. “On a planet where the surface is still deadly, we should be able to find some kinds that don’t involve shooting people. There should be a whole new technology for waging war. I’ve talked with Sax about this, and he agrees.”

  Maya snorted, and Zeyk grinned. “His new ways resemble the old ones, as far as I can tell! Bringing down that aerial lens—we loved that! As for firing Deimos out of orbit, well. But I can see his point, to an extent. When the cruise missiles come out. . .”

  “We have to make sure it doesn’t come to that.” Nadia had the mulish expression she got when her ideas were set in concrete, and Maya regarded her with surprise. Nadia, revolutionary strategist—Maya wouldn’t have believed it possible. Well, she no doubt thought of it as protecting her construction projects. Or a construction project itself, in a different medium.

  “You should come talk to the communes in Odessa,” Maya suggested to her. “They’re followers of Nirgal, basically.”

  Nadia agreed, and leaned forward with a miniature poker to tap one of the coals back into the center of the brazier. They watched the fire burn, a rare sight on Mars, but Zeyk liked fires enough to take the trouble. Films of gray ash fluttered over the Martian orange of hot coals. Zeyk and Nazik talked in low voices, describing the Arab situation on the planet, which was complex as usual. The radicals among them were almost all out in caravans, prospecting for metals and water and areothermal sites, looking innocuous and never doing a thing to reveal that they were not part of the metanat order. But they were out there, waiting, ready to act.

  Nadia got up to go to bed, and when she had gone, Maya said hesitantly, “Tell me about Chalmers.”

  Zeyk stared at her, calm and impassive. “What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know how he was involved with Boone’s murder.”

  Zeyk squinted uncomfortably. “That was a very complicated night in Nicosia,” he complained. “The talk about it among Arabs is endless. It gets tiresome.”

  “So what do they say?”

  Zeyk glanced at Nazik, who said. “The problem is they all say different things. No one knows what really happened.”

  “But you were there. You saw some of it. Tell me first what you saw.”

  At this Zeyk eyed her closely, then nodded. “Very well.” He took a breath, composed himself. Solemnly, as if giving witness, he said, “We were gathered at the Hajr el-kra Meshab, after the speeches you gave. People were angry at Boone because of a rumor that he had stopped a plan to build a mosque on Phobos, and his speech hadn’t helped. We never liked that new Martian society he talked about. So we were there grumbling when Frank came by. I must say, it was an encouraging sight to see him at that moment. It seemed to us that he was the only one with a chance to counter Boone. So we looked to him, and he encouraged us to—he slighted Boone in subtle ways, made jokes that made us angrier at Boone while making Frank seem the only bastion against him. I was actually annoyed with Frank for stirring up the young ones even more. Selim el-Hayil and several of his friends from the Ahad wing were there, and they were in a state—not just at Boone, but also at the Fetah wing. You see the Ahad and Fetah were split over a variety of issues—pan-Arab versus nationalist, relations to West, attitude to the Sufis . . . it was a fundamental division in that younger generation of the Brotherhood.”

  “Sunni-Shiite?” Maya asked.

  “No. More conservative and liberal, with the liberals thought to be secular, and the conservatives religious, either Sunni or Shiite. And el-Hayil was a leader of the conservative Ahad. And he had been in the caravan Frank had traveled with that year. They had talked often, and Frank had asked him a lot of questions, really bored into him, in that way he had, until he felt that he understood you, or understood your party.”

  Maya nodded, recognizing the description.

  “So Frank knew him, and that night el-Hayil almost spoke at one point, and decided not to when Frank gave him a look. I saw this. Then Frank left, and el-Hayil left almost immediately after.”

  Zeyk paused to sip coffee and think it over.

  “That was the last I saw of either of them for the next couple of hours. It began to get ugly well before Boone was killed. Someone was cutting slogans on the windows of the medina, and the Ahad thought it was the Fetah, and some Ahad attacked a group of Fetah. After that they were fighting throughout the city, and fighting some American construction crews as well. Something happened. There were other fights going on as well. It was as if everyone had suddenly gone crazy.”

  Maya nodded. “I remember that much.”

  “So, well, we heard that Boone had disappeared, and we were down at the Syrian Gate checking the lock codes to see if he had gone out that way, and we found someone had gone out and hadn’t come back in, so we were on our way out when we heard the news about him. We couldn’t believe it. We went down to the medina and everyone was gathered there, and they all told us it was true. I got into the hospital after about a half hour of moving through the crowd. I saw him. You were there.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Well, you were, but Frank had already left. So I saw him, and went back out and told the others it was true. Even the Ahad were shocked, I am sure of that—Nasir, Ageyl, Abdullah.. . .”

  “Yes,” Nazik said.

  “But el-Hayil and Rashid Abou, and Buland Besseisso, were not there with us. And we were back at the residence facing Hajr el-kra Meshab when there was a very hard knocking at the door, and when we opened it el-Hayil fell into the room. He was already very sick, sweating and trying to vomit, and his skin all flushed and blotchy. His throat had swollen and he could barely talk. We helped him into the bathroom and saw he was choking on vomit. We called Yussuf in, and were trying to get Selim out to the clime in our caravan when he stopped us. They have killed me,’ he said. We asked him what he meant, and he said, ‘Chalmers.’”

  “He said that?” Maya demanded.

  “I said, ‘Who did this?’ and he said, ‘Chalmers.’”

  As if from a great distance Maya heard Nazik say, “But there was more.”

  Zeyk nodded. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ and he said, ‘Chalmers has killed me. Chalmers and Boone.’ He was choking it out word by word. He said, We planned to kill Boone.’ Nazik an
d I groaned to hear this, and Selim seized me by the arm.” Zeyk reached out with both hands and clutched an invisible arm. “ ‘He was going to kick us off Mars.’ He said this in such a way—I will never forget it. He truly believed it. That Boone was somehow going to kick us off Mars!” He shook his head, still incredulous.

  “What happened then?”

  “He—” Zeyk opened his hands. “He had a seizure. He held his throat first, then all his muscles—” He clenched his fists again. “He seized up and stopped breathing. We tried to get him breathing, but he never did. I didn’t know—tracheotomy? Artificial respiration? Antihistamines?” He shrugged. “He died in my arms.”

  There was a long silence as Maya watched Zeyk remembering. It had been half a century since that night in Nicosia, and Zeyk had been old at the time.

  “I’m surprised how well you remember,” she said. “My own memory, even of nights like that. . .”

  “I remember everything,” Zeyk said gloomily.

  “He has the opposite problem to everyone else,” Nazik said, watching her husband. “He remembers too much. He does not sleep well.”

  “Hmph.” Maya considered it. “What about the other two?”

  Zeyk’s mouth pursed. “I can’t say for sure. Nazik and I spent the rest of that night dealing with Selim. There was an argument about what to do with his body. Whether to take it out to the caravan and then hide what had happened, or to get the authorities in immediately.”

  Or to go to the authorities with a lone dead assassin, Maya thought, watching Zeyk’s guarded expression. Perhaps that had been argued as well. He was not telling the story in the same way. “I don’t know what really happened to them. I never found out. There were a lot of Ahad and Fetah in town that night, and Yussuf heard what Selim had said. So it could have been their enemies, their friends, themselves. They died later that night, in a room in the medina. Coagulants.”

  Zeyk shrugged.

  Another silence. Zeyk sighed, refilled his cup. Nazik and Maya refused.

  “But you see,” Zeyk said, “that is just the start. That’s what we saw, what we could tell you for sure. After that, whew!” He made a face. “Arguments, speculation—conspiracy theories of all kind. The usual thing, right? No one is ever simply assassinated anymore. Ever since your Kennedys, it is always a matter of how many stories you can invent to explain the same body of facts. That is the great pleasure of conspiracy theory—not explanation, but narrative. It is like Scheherazade.”

  “You don’t believe in any of them?” Maya asked, feeling suddenly hopeless.

  “No. I have no reason to. The Ahad and Fetah were in conflict, I know that. Frank and Selim were connected somehow. How that affected Nicosia—whether it did—” He blew out a breath. “I don’t know, and I don’t see how one could know. The past . . . Allah forgive me, the past seems a sort of demon, here to torture my nights.”

  “I’m sorry.” Maya stood. The brilliant little chamber suddenly seemed cramped and florid. Catching a glimpse of the evening stars in a window, she said, “I’m going to go for a walk.”

  Zeyk and Nazik nodded, and Nazik helped her get her helmet on. “Don’t be long,” she said.

  The sky was matted with the usual spectacular array of stars, with a band of mauve on the western horizon. The Hellespontus reared to the east, late alpenglow turning its peaks a dark pink that sawed at the indigo above it, both colors so pure that the transition line seemed to vibrate.

  Maya walked slowly toward an outcropping perhaps a kilometer away. There was something growing in the cracks underfoot, lichen or piggyback moss, its greens all black. She stepped on rocks where she could. Plants had it hard enough on Mars without being stepped on as well. All living things. The chill of the twilight seeped into her, until she could feel the × of the heating filaments in her pants against her knees as she walked. She stumbled and blinked to clear her vision. The sky was full of blurry stars. Somewhere north, in the Aureum Chaos, the body of Frank Chalmers lay in a wash of ice and sediments, his walker for a coffin. Killed while saving the rest of them from being swept away. Though he would have scorned such a description with all his heart. An accident of timing, he would insist, nothing more. The result of having more energy than anyone else, energy fueled by his anger—at her, at John, at UNOMA and all the powers of Earth. At his wife. At his father. At his mother, and himself. At everything. The angry man; the angriest man who had ever lived. And her lover. And the murderer of her other lover, the great love of her life, John Boone, who might have saved them all. Who would have been her partner forever.

  And she had set them on each other.

  Now the sky was starry black, with no more than a dark purple band left on the western skyline. Her tears were gone, along with her feelings; nothing left but the black world and a slash of purple bitterness, like a wound bleeding into the night.

  Some things you must forget. Shikata ga nai.

  Back in Odessa Maya did the only thing she could with what she had learned, and forgot it, throwing herself into the work of the Hellas project, spending long hours at the office poring over reports, and assigning crews to the various drilling and construction sites. With the discovery of the Western Aquifer the dowsing expeditions lost their urgency, and more emphasis was placed on tapping and pumping the aquifers already found, and constructing the infrastructure of the rim settlements. So drillers followed dowsers, and pipeline crews went out after the drillers, and tent teams were out all around the piste, and up the Reull canyon above Harmakhis, helping the Sufis deal with a badly fretted canyon wall. New emigrants were arriving at a spaceport built between Dao and Harmakhis, and moving into upper Dao, and helping to transform Harmakhis-Reull, and also settling the other new tent towns around the rim. It was a massive exercise in logistics, and in almost every respect it conformed to Maya’s old dream of development for Hellas. But now that it was actually happening, she felt extremely jangly and odd; she was no longer sure what she wanted for Hellas, or for Mars, or herself. Often she felt at the mercy of her mood swings, and in the months after the visit to Zeyk and Nazik (though she did not make this correlation) they were especially violent, an irregular oscillation from elation to despair, with the equinox time in the middle wrecked by the knowledge that she was either on her way up or down.

  She was often hard on Michel in these months, often annoyed by his composure, by the way he seemed so at peace with himself, humming along through his life as if his years with Hiroko had answered all his questions. “It’s your fault,” she told him, pushing to get a reaction. “When I needed you, you were gone. You weren’t doing your job.”

  Michel would ignore that, would soothe and soothe until it made her angry. He was not her therapist now but her lover, and if you couldn’t make your lover angry, then what kind of lover was he? She saw the awful bind that one was put in when one’s lover was also one’s therapist—how that objective eye and soothing voice could become the distancing device of a professional manner. A man doing his job—it was intolerable to be judged by such an eye, as if he were somehow above it all, and did not have any problems himself, any emotions that he could not control. That had to be disproved. And so (forgetting to forget): “I killed them both! I snared them and played them against each other, to increase my own power. I did it on purpose and you were no help at all! It was your fault too!”

  He muttered something, beginning to get worried, as he could see what was coming, like one of the frequent storms that blew over the Hellespontus into the basin, and she laughed and slapped him hard in the face, punching him as he retreated, shouting “Come on, you coward, stand up for yourself!” until he ran out onto the balcony and held the door shut with the heel of his foot, staring over the trees of the park and cursing out loud in French while she battered the door. Once she even broke one of the panes and showered glass over his back, and he yanked the door open, still cursing in French as he shoved by her and out the door, out of the building.

  But usually he jus
t waited until she collapsed and started to cry, and then he came back in and spoke in English, which marked the return of his composure. And with only a slightly disgusted air he would return to the intolerable therapy again. “Look,” he would say, “we were all under great pressure then, whether we could tell it or not. It was an extremely artificial situation, and dangerous as well—if we had failed in any number of different ways, we all could have died. We had to succeed. Some of us dealt with the pressure better than others. I did not do so well, and neither did you. But here we are now. And the pressures are still there, some different, some the same. But we are doing better at dealing with them, if you ask me. Most of the time.”

  And then he would leave and go out to a café on the corniche, and nurse a cassis for an hour or two, drawing sketches of faces in his lectern, mordant caricatures that he erased at the moment of completion. She knew this because some nights she would go out and find him, and sit by him in silence with her glass of vodka, apologizing with the set of her shoulders. How to tell him that it helped her to fight now and then, that it started her on the upward curve again—tell him without causing that sardonic little shrug of his, melancholy and oppressed? Besides, he knew. He knew and he forgave. “You loved them both,” he would say, “but in different ways. And there were things you didn’t like about them as well. Besides, whatever you did, you can’t take responsibility for their actions. They chose to do what they did, and you were only one factor.”

  It helped her to hear that. And it helped her to fight. It would be all right; she would feel better, for a few weeks or days at least. The past was so shot full of holes anyway, a ragged collection of images—eventually she would forget for real, surely. Although the memories that held the firmest seemed to stick because of a glue made of pain, and remorse. So it might take a while to forget them, even though they were so corrosive, so painful, so useless. Useless! Useless. Better to focus on the present.