Green Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  The region between Sabishii and Burroughs was saturated with crater impacts, so that they wound through the nights between flat-topped circular hills, stopping every dawn at small rim shelters crowded with Reds who were none too hospitable to Maya and Michel. But they listened to Coyote very attentively, and traded news with him about scores of places Maya had never heard of. On the third night of this they came down the steep slope of the Great Escarpment, through an archipelago of mesa islands, and abruptly onto the smooth plain of Isidis. They could see down the slope of the basin for a long way, all the way out to where a mound like the Sabishiians’ mohole mound ran across the land, in a great curve from Du Martheray Crater on the Great Escarpment, northwest toward Syrtis. This was the new dike, Coyote told them, built by a robot collection pulled from the Elysium mohole. The dike was truly massive, and looked like one of the basalt dorsa of the south, except that its velvety texture revealed it to be excavated regolith rather than hard volcanic rock.

  Maya stared at the long ridge. The cascading recombinant consequences of their actions were, she thought, out of their control. They could try to build bulwarks to contain them—but would the bulwarks hold?

  Then they were back in Burroughs, in through the Southeast Gate on their Swiss IDs, and secured in a safe house run by Bogdanovists from Vishniac, now working for Praxis. The safe house was an airy light-filled apartment about halfway up the northern wall of Hunt Mesa, with a view out over the central valley to Branch Mesa and Double Decker Butte. The apartment above it was a dance studio, and many of the hours of the day they lived to a faint thump, thump, thump-thump, thump-thump. Just over the horizon to the north an irregular cloud of dust and steam marked where the robots were working still on the dike; every morning Maya looked out at it, thinking over the news reports on Mangalavid and in the long messages from Praxis. Then it was into the day’s work, which was entirely underground, and often confined to meetings in the apartment, or to work there on video messages. So it was not at all like life in Odessa, and it was hard to develop any habits, which made her feel jangly and dark.

  But she could still walk the streets, of the great city, one anonymous citizen among thousands of others—strolling by the canal, or sitting in restaurants around Princess Park, or on one of the less trendy mesa tops. And everywhere she went, she saw the neat red print of their stenciled graffiti: FREE MARS. Or GET READY. Or, as if she were hallucinating a warning made to her by her own soul: YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK. These messages were ignored by the populace as far as she could tell, never discussed, and often removed by cleaning crews; but they kept popping up in their neat red, usually in English but sometimes in Russian, the old alphabet like a long-lost friend, like some subliminal flash out of their collective unconscious, if they had one; and somehow the messages never lost their little electnc shock. It was strange what powerful effects could be created with such simple means. People might come to do almost anything, if they talked about it long enough.

  Her meetings with small cells of the various resistance organizations went well, although it became clearer to her that there were profound divisions of all kinds among them, particularly the dislike that the Reds and Marsfirsters had for the Bogdanovists and Free Mars groups, whom the Reds considered green, and thus one more manifestation of the enemy. That could be trouble. But Maya did what she could, and everyone at least listened to her, so that she felt she made some progress. And slowly she warmed to Burroughs, and her hidden life there. Michel arranged a routine for her with the Swiss and Praxis, and with the Bogdanovists now tucked away in the city—a secure routine, which allowed her to meet groups fairly frequently without ever compromising the integrity of the safe houses they had established. And every meeting seemed to help a little. The only intransigent problem was that so many groups seemed to want to revolt immediately—Red or green, they tended to follow the radical lead of Ann’s Reds in the outback, and the young hotheads surrounding Jackie, and there were more and more incidents of sabotage in the cities, which caused a corresponding increase in police surveillance, until it seemed very possible that things could break wide open. Maya began to see herself as a kind of brake, and she often lost sleep worrying about how little people wanted to hear that message. On the other hand she was also the one who had to keep the old Bogdanovists and other veterans aware of the power of the native movement, cheering them up when they got depressed. Ann in the outback with the Reds, grimly wrecking stations: “It’s not going to happen like that,” Maya told her over and over, though there was no sign that Ann was getting the message.

  Still, there were encouraging signs. Nadia was in South Fossa, building a strong movement there which seemed under her influence, and closely aligned with Nirgal and his crowd. Vlad and Ursula and Marina had reoccupied their old labs at Acheron, under the aegis of the Praxis bioengineering company nominally in charge. They were in constant communication with Sax, who was in a refuge in Da Vinci Crater with his old terraforming team, being supported by the Dorsa Brevia Minoans. The inhabitation of that great lava tube had extended north much farther than it had been during the time of the congress, and most of the new segments apparently were devoted to shelter for the refugees from the wrecked or abandoned sanctuaries farther south, and a whole string of manufactories. Maya watched videos of people driving about in little cars from segment to tented segment, working under the clear brown light pouring down from the filtered skylights, engaged in what could only be called military production; they were building stealth fliers, stealth cars, surface-to-space missiles, reinforced block shelters (some of which were already installed in the lava tube itself, in case it was ever broached)—also air-to-ground missiles, antivehicle weapons, handguns, and, the Minoans told Maya, a variety of ecological weapons Sax was designing himself.

  This kind of work, and the destruction of the southern sanctuaries, had created what looked from a distance like a sort of war fever in Dorsa Brevia, and Maya was worried by that too. Sax, at the heart of it, was a stubborn secretive brilliant brain-damaged loose cannon, a bona fide mad scientist. He had still never spoken to her directly; and his strikes against the aerial lens and Deimos, while very effective, had in her opinion caused UNTA’s intensification of the assault on the south. She kept sending down messages advising restraint and patience, until Ariadne replied irritably, “Maya, we know. We Ye working with Sax here, we’ve got an idea of what we’re up to, and what you’re saying is either obvious or wrong. Talk to the Reds if you want to help, but we don’t need it.”

  Maya cursed the video and talked to Spencer about it. Spencer said, “Sax thinks if we’re going to pull this off we might need some weapons, if only in reserve. It seems sensible to me.”

  “What happened to the idea of a decapitation?”

  “Maybe he thinks he’s building the guillotine. Look, talk to Nirgal and Art about that. Or even Jackie.”

  “Right. Look, I want to talk to Sax. He’s got to talk to me sometime, goddammit. Get him to talk to me, will you?”

  Spencer agreed to try, and one morning he arranged a call over his private line to Sax. It was Art who answered the call, but he promised to try to get Sax to come to the line. “He’s busy these days, Maya. I like to see it. People are calling him General Sax.”

  “God forbid.”

  “That’s all right. They talk about General Nadia too, and General Maya.”

  “That’s not what they call me.” The Black Widow, more like, or the Bitch. The Killer. She knew.

  And Art’s squint told her she was right. “Well,” he said, “whatever. With Sax it’s kind of a joke. People talk about the revenge of the lab rats, that kind of thing.”

  “I don’t like it.” The idea of another revolution seemed to be gaining a life of its own now, a momentum independent of any real logic; it was just something they were doing, were always going to have done. Out of her control, and out of anyone else’s control. Even their collective efforts, scattered and hidden as they were, seemed not to be coordina
ted or conceived with any clear idea of what they were going to try to do, or why. It was just happening.

  She tried to express some of this to Art, and he nodded. “That’s history, I guess. It’s messy. You just have to ride the tiger and hold on. You’ve got a lot of different people in this movement, and they all have their own ideas. But look, I think we’re doing better than last time. I’m working on some initiatives back on Earth, negotiating with Switzerland and some people at the World Court and so on. And Praxis is keeping us really well informed about what’s going on among the metanationals on Earth, which means we won’t just get swept into something we don’t understand.”

  “True,” Maya admitted. The news and analysis packages sent up from Praxis were more thorough by far than any commercial news shows, and as the metanationals continued to drift into what was being called the metanatricide, they on Mars, in their sanctuaries and safe houses, were able to follow it blow by blow. Subarashii taking over Mitsubishi, and then its old foe Armscor, and then falling out with Amexx, which was working hard on breaking the United States out of the Group of Eleven; they saw it all from the inside. Nothing could have been less like the situation in the 2050s. And that was a comfort, if a very small one.

  And then there was Sax on the screen behind Art, and looking at her. He saw who it was, and said, “Maya!”

  She swallowed hard. Was she forgiven, then, for Phyllis? Did he understand why she had done it? His new face gave her no clues—it was as impassive as his old one had been, and harder to read because so unfamiliar still.

  She collected herself, asked him what his plans were.

  He said, “No plan. We’re still making preparations. We need to wait for a trigger. A trigger event. Very important. There are a couple of possibilities I’m keeping an eye against. But nothing yet.”

  “Fine,” she said. “But listen, Sax.” And then she told him everything she had been worrying about—the strength of the Transitional Authority troops, bolstered as they were by the big centrist metanats; the constant edging toward violence in the more radical wings of the underground; the feeling that they were falling into the same old pattern. And as she spoke he blinked in his old fashion, so that she knew it was really him listening under that new face—finally listening to her again, so that she went on longer than she had intended to, pouring out everything, her distrust of Jackie, her fear at being in Burroughs, everything. It was like talking to a confessor, or pleading—begging their pure rational scientist not to let things go crazy again. Not to go crazy again himself. She heard herself babbling, and realized how frightened she was.

  And he blinked in what seemed a kind of neuter, ratlike sympathy. But in the end he shrugged and said little. This was General Sax now, remote, taciturn, speaking to her from the strange world inside his new mind.

  “Give me twelve months,” he said to her. “I need twelve more months.”

  “Okay, Sax.” She felt reassured, somehow. “I’ll do my best.”

  “Thanks, Maya.”

  And he was gone. She sat there staring at the little AI screen, feeling drained, teary, relieved. Absolved, for the hour.

  So she returned to the work with a will, meeting groups almost every week, and making occasional off-the-net trips to Elysium and Tharsis, to talk to cells in the high cities. Coyote took charge of her travel, flying her across the planet in night voyages that reminded her of ’61. Michel took charge of her security, protecting her with the help of a team of natives, including several of the Zygote ectogenes, who moved her from safe house to safe house in every city they visited. And she talked and talked and talked. It was not just a matter of getting them to wait, but also coordinating them, forcing them to agree they were on the same side. Sometimes it seemed that she was having an effect, she could see it on the faces of the people who came to listen. Other times her whole effort was devoted to applying the brakes (worn, burning) to radical elements. There were a lot of these now, and more every day: Ann and the Reds, Kasei’s Marsfirsters, the Bogdanovists under Mikhail, Jackie’s “Booneans,” the Arab radicals led by Antar, who was one of Jackie’s many boyfriends—Coyote, Dao, Rachel. . . . It was like trying to stop an avalanche that she herself was caught up in, grasping at clumps even as she rolled down with them. In such a situation the disappearance óf Hiroko began to loom as more and more of a disaster.

  The attacks of déjá vu returned, stronger than ever. She had lived in Burroughs before, in a time like this—perhaps that was all it was. But the feeling was so disturbing when it struck, this profound unshakable conviction that everything had happened before in exactly this way, as ineluctably as if eternal recurrence were really true. . . . So that she would wake up and go to the bathroom, and certainly all that had happened before in just that way, including all the stiffness and small aches and pains; and then she would walk out to meet with Nirgal and some of his friends, and recognize that it was a genuine attack and not just a coincidence. Everything had happened just like this before, it was all clockwork. Strokes of fate. Okay, she would think, ignore it. That’s reality, then. We are creatures of fate. At least you don’t know what will happen next.

  She talked endlessly with Nirgal, trying to understand him, and get him to understand her. She learned from him, she imitated him in meetings now—his bright friendly quiet confidence, which so obviously drew people to him. They both were famous, they both were talked about on the news, they both were on UNTA’s wanted list. They both had to stay off the streets now. So they had a bond, and she learned all she could from him, and she thought he learned from her as well. She had an influence, anyway. It was a good relationship, her best link to the young. He made her happy. He gave her hope.

  But to have it all happen in the remorseless grip of an overmastering fate! The seen-again, the always-already: nothing but brain chemistry, Michel said. There was simply a neural delay or repetition, which was giving her the sensation that the present was a kind of past as well. As maybe it was. So she accepted his diagnosis, and took whatever drugs he prescribed, without complaint and without hope. Every morning and evening she opened the pocket in the container strip he prepared for her every week, and took whatever pills were in it, without asking questions. She did not lash out at him; she no longer felt the urge. Perhaps the night of the vigil in Odessa had cured her. Perhaps he had finally mixed the right cocktail of drugs. She hoped so. She went out with Nirgal to meetings, returned to the apartment under the dance studio, exhausted. And yet very often insomniac. Her health got bad, she was sick often, digestive troubles, sciatica, chest pains. . . . Ursula recommended another course of the gerontological treatment. Always helps, she said. And with the latest genomic mismatch scanning techniques, faster than ever. She would only have to take a week off, at most. But Maya didn’t feel like she had a week to take off. Later, she told Ursula. When this is all over.

  Some nights when she couldn’t sleep, she read about Frank. She had taken the photo from the Odessa apartment with her, and now it was stuck to the wail by her bed in the Hunt Mesa safe house. She still felt the pressure of that electrifying gaze, and so sometimes in the sleepless hours she read about him, and tried to learn more about his diplomatic efforts. She hoped to find things he had been good at to imitate, and also to identify what he had done that she thought had been wrong.

  One night in the apartment, after a tense visit to Sabishii and the community still hidden in its mound maze, she fell asleep over her lectern, which had been displaying a book about Frank. Then a dream about him woke her. Restlessly she went out to the living room of the apartment and got a drink of water, and went back and began to read the book again.

  This one focused on the years between the treaty conference of 2057 and the outbreak of the unrest in 206L These were the years when Maya had been closest to him, but she remembered them poorly, as if by flashes of lightning—moments of electric intensity, separated by long stretches of pure darkness. And the account in this particular book sparked no feelings of recog
nition in her at all, despite that fact that she was mentioned fairly frequently in the text. A kind of historical jamais vu.

  Coyote was sleeping on the couch, and he groaned in some dream of his own, and woke and looked around to find the source of the light. He padded behind her on the way to the bathroom, looked over her shoulder. “Ah,” he said meaningfully. “They say a lot about him.” And he went down the hall.

  When he came back Maya said, “I suppose you know better.”

  “I know some things about Frank that they don’t, that’s for sure.”

  Maya stared at him. “Don’t tell me. You were in Nicosia too.” Then she remembered reading that, somewhere.

  “I was, now you mention it.”

  He sat down heavily on his couch, stared at the floor. “I saw Frank that night, throwing bricks through windows. He started that riot single-handed.”

  He looked up, met her stare. “He was speaking to Selim el-Hayil in the apex park, about a half hour before John was attacked. You figure it out for yourself.”

  Maya clenched her teeth and stared at the lectern, ignoring him:

  He stretched out on the couch and began to snore.

  It was old news, really. And as Zeyk had made clear, no one would ever untangle that knot, no matter what they had seen or thought they remembered seeing. No one could be sure of anything that far in the past, not even of their own memories, which shifted subtly at every rehearsal. The only memories one could trust were those unbidden eruptions from the depths, the mémoires involuntaires, which were so vivid they had to be true—but often concerned unimportant events. No. Coyote’s was just one more unreliable account among all the rest.