Green Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  All existence immediately reduced itself to that, in a way sharply reminiscent of ’61. She felt her stomach knotting as of old, tightening past any usual levels of tension into an iron walnut at the center of her being, painful and constricting. She had been taking medicine recently to reduce stomach acids, but it was woefully inadequate against this kind of assault. Come on, she told herself. Be calm. This is the moment. You’ve expected it, you’ve worked on it. You’ve laid the groundwork for it. Now came the chaos. At the heart of any phase change there was a zone of cascading recombinant chaos. But there were methods to read it, to deal with it.

  She crossed the little mobile habitat, and glanced briefly down at the idyllic beauty of the canyon floor of Shalbatana, with its pebble-pink stream and the new trees, including strings of cotton-wood on the banks and islands. It was possible, if things went drastically wrong, that no one would ever inhabit Shalbatana Vallis, that it would remain an empty bubble world until mudstorms caved the roof in, or something in the mesocosmic ecology went awry. Well—

  She shrugged and woke her crew, and told them to get ready to leave for Underhill. She told them why, and as they were all part of the resistance in one way or another, they cheered.

  It was just after dawn, on what was looking to be a warm spring day, the kind that had allowed them to work in loose walkers and hoods and facemasks, with only the insulated hard boots to remind Nadia of the bulky clothing of the early years. Friday, Ls 101, 2 July 2, M-year 52, Terran date (she checked her wristpad) October 12, 2127. Somewhere near the hundredth anniversary of their arrival, though it was a date no one seemed to be celebrating. A hundred years! It was a bizarre thought.

  Another July revolution, then, and another October revolution too. A decade past the bicentennial of the Bolshevik revolution, she seemed to remember. Which was another strange thought. Well, but they too had tried. All the revolutionaries, all through history. Mostly desperate peasants, fighting for their children’s fives. As in her Russia. So many in that bitter twentieth century, risking all to make a better life, and even so it had led to disaster. It was frightening—as if history were a series of human wave assaults on misery, failing time after time.

  But the Russian in her, the cerebellum Siberian, decided to take the October date as a good auspice. Or a reminder of what not to do, if nothing else—along with ’61. She could, in her Siberian mind, dedicate this time to all of them: to the heroic suffering of the Soviet catastrophe, to all her friends dead in ’61, to Arkady and Alex and Sasha and Roald and Janet and Evgenia and Samantha, all of whom still haunted her dreams and her attenuated insomniac memories, spinning like electrons around the iron walnut inside her, warning her not to screw it up, to get it right this time, to redeem the meanings of their lives and their deaths. She remembered someone saying to her, “Next time you have a revolution you’d better try some other way.”

  And now they were. But there were Marsfirst guerrilla units under Kasei’s command, out of contact with the headquarters in Burroughs, as well as a thousand other factors coming to bear, most of them completely out of her control. Cascading recombinant chaos. So how different was it going to be?

  She got her crew into rovers and over to the little piste station, some kilometers to the north of them. From there they rode in a freight train, on a mobile piste laid for the Shalbatana job, on to the main Sheffield-Burroughs line. Both those cities were metanat strongholds, and Nadia worried that they would take pains to secure the piste linking them. In that sense Underhill was strategically important, as occupying it would cut the piste. But for that very reason she wanted to get away from Underhill, and off the piste system entirely. She wanted to get into the air, as she had in ’61—all the instincts learned in those few months were trying to take over again, as if sixty-six years had not passed. And those instincts told her to hide.

  As they glided southwest over the desert, shooting the gap between Ophir and Juventae chasmas, she kept her wristpad linked to Sax’s headquarters in Da Vinci Crater. Sax’s team of technicians were trying to imitate his dry style, but it was obvious that they were just as excited as her young construction crew. About five of them got on the wrist at once to tell her that they had set off a barrage of the surface-to-space missiles which Sax had arranged to have placed in hidden equatorial silos over the past decade, and this barrage had gone off like a fireworks display, and had knocked out all of the orbiting metanat weapons platforms that they knew of, and many of their communications satellites as well. “We got eighty percent of them in the first wave!—We sent up our own communications satellites!—Now we’re dealing with them on a case-by-case basis—”

  Nadia interrupted. “Are your satellites working?”

  “We think they’re fine! We can only tell for sure after a full test, and everyone’s kind of busy right now.”

  “Let’s try one out now. And some of you make that a priority, you understand? We need a redundant system, a very redundant system.”

  She clicked off and tapped out one of the frequency and encryption codes Sax had given her. A few seconds later she was talking to Zeyk, who was in Odessa, helping to coordinate activities in the Hellas Basin. Everything there was going according to plan so far, he said; of course they were only a few hours into it, but it looked like Michel and Maya’s organizing there had paid off, because all the cell members in Odessa had poured into the streets and told people what was happening, sparking a spontaneous mass work stoppage and demonstration. They were in the process of closing down the train station, and occupying the corniche and most other public spaces, in a strike that looked like it would soon he a takeover. The Transitional Authority personnel in the city were retreating to the train station or the physical plant, as Zeyk had hoped they would. “When most of them are inside we’re going to override the plant’s Al, and then it’ll become a jail holding them. We’ve got control of the backup life-support systems for the town, so there’s very little they can do, except maybe blow themselves up, but we don’t think they’ll do that. A lot of the UNTA people here are Syrians under Niazi, and I’m talking to Rashid while we try to disable the physical plant from the outside, just to make sure no one in there can decide to become a martyr.”

  “I don’t think there will be too many martyrs to the metanationals,” Nadia said.

  “I hope not, but you never can tell. So far so good here, though. And elsewhere around Hellas it’s been even easier—the security forces were minimal, and most of the population are natives or radicalized emigrants, and they’ve simply been surrounding security and daring them to do anything violent. It has resulted either in a standoff, or else in the security forces being disarmed. Dao and Harmakhis-Reull have both declared themselves free canyons, and invited anyone who wants to take refuge there if they need it.”

  “Good!”

  Zeyk heard the surprise in her voice, and warned, “I don’t think it will be as easy in Burroughs and Sheffield. And we need to shut down the elevator, so they don’t start shooting at us from Clarke.”

  “At least Clarke is stuck over Tharsis.”

  “True. But it sure would be nice to seize that thing, and not have the elevator come crashing down again.”

  “I know. I heard the Reds have been working with Sax on a plan for seizure.”

  “Allah preserve us. I must be off, Nadia. Tell Sax that the programs for the plant worked perfectly. And listen, we should come up and join you in the north, I think. If we can secure Hellas and Elysium quickly, it will help our chances with Burroughs and Sheffield.”

  So Hellas was going as planned. And just as important, or more, they were still in communication with each other. This was critical; among all the nightmare images of ’61, scenes illuminated in her memory by lightning bolts of fear or pain, few were worse than the feeling of sheer helplessness that had struck her when their communication system had crashed. After that nothing they did had mattered, they had been like insects with their antennae ripped off, stumbling around inef
fectually. So in the last few years Nadia had repeatedly insisted to Sax that he come up with a plan for hardening their communications; and he had built, and now put in orbit, a whole fleet of very small communications satellites, stealthed and hardened as much as possible. So far they were functioning as planned. And the iron walnut within her, while not gone, was at least not pulling in so hard at her ribs. Calm, she told herself. Thisness. This is the moment and the only moment. Concentrate on it.

  Their mobile piste reached the big equatorial line, rerouted the year before to avoid the Chryse ice, and they shunted onto the piste for local trains, and headed west. Their train was only three cars long, and Nadia’s whole crew, some thirty people, were all gathered in the first car to watch the incoming reports over the car’s screen. These were official news reports from Mangalavid in South Fossa, and they were confused and inconsistent, combining regular weather reports and the like with brief accounts of strikes in many cities. Nadia kept her wristpad in contact with either Da Vinci or the Free Mars safe house in Burroughs, and as they slid on she watched both the car screen and her wrist, taking in simultaneous bursts of information as if listening to polyphonic music, finding she could track the two sources at once without any trouble, and was hungry for more. Praxis was sending up continuous reports on the Terran situation, which was confused, but not incoherent or opaque as it had been in ’61; for one thing Praxis was keeping them informed, and for another, much of the current activity on Earth was devoted to moving the coastal populations out of the reach of the floods, which so far were like very high tides, as Sax had said they would be. The metanatricide was still being played out in the form of surgical strikes and decapitation coups, commando raids and counterraids on various corporate compounds and headquarters, combined with legal actions and PR of all sorts—including a number of suits and countersuits finally introduced to the World Court, which Nadia considered encouraging. But these strategic raids and maneuvers were much reduced in the face of the global flood. And even at their worst (video of exploding compounds, airplane crash sites, stretches of road craterized by the bombing of passing limousines) they were still infinitely better than any kind of escalating war, which in biological form could kill millions. As became clear, unfortunately, with a shocking report from Indonesia that came over the car’s screen—a radical liberation group from East Timor, modeled on Peru’s Shining Path, had poisoned the island of Java with an as yet unidentified plague, so that along with the travails of the flooding there, they were losing hundreds of thousands to disease. On a continent such a plague could become a terminal disaster, and there was no guarantee it wouldn’t happen still. But meanwhile, with that one awful exception, the war down there, if that was what one called the chaos of the metanatricide, was proceeding as a fight at the top. A style similar to what they were attempting on Mars, in fact. This was comforting in a way, although if the metanats became adept at the style, they could presumably wage it on Mars as well—if not in this first moment of surprise, then later when they had reorganized. And there was an ominous item in the flow of reports from Praxis Geneva, indicating they might be responding already: a fast shuttle with a large force of “security experts” had left Earth orbit for Mars three months ago, the report said, and was expected to reach the Martian system “in a few days.” The news was being released now to encourage security forces beleaguered by rioting and terrorism, according to the UN press release.

  Nadia’s concentration on the screens was broken by the appearance of one of the big round-the-world trains on the piste beside them. One second they were gliding smoothly over the bumpy plateau of Ophir Planum, and the next a big fifty-car express was whooshing by them. But it didn’t slow down, and there was no way of telling who, if anyone, sat behind its darkened windows. Then it was past them, and soon after that over the horizon ahead, and gone.

  The news shows continued at their manic pace, the reporters obviously astonished by the developments of the day. Riots in Sheffield, work stoppages in South Fossa and Hephaestus—the accounts overlapped each other in such rapid succession that Nadia found it hard to believe they were real.

  When they came into Underhill Nadia’s feeling of unreality persisted, for the sleepy semiabandoned old settlement was now abuzz with activity, as in M-year 1. Resistance sympathizers had been pouring in all day from small stations around Ganges Catena and Hebes Chasma, and the north wall of Ophir Chasma. The local Bogdanovists had apparently organized them into a march on the little unit of UNTA security personnel at the train station. This had led to a standoff just outside the station itself, under the tent that covered the old arcade and the original quadrant of barrel vaults, now looking very small and quaint.

  So when Nadia’s train pulled in, there was a loud argument going on between ä man with a bullhorn surrounded by about twenty bodyguards, and the unruly crowd facing them. Nadia got off the train as soon as it stopped, and went over to the edge of the group hemming in the Stationmaster and his troops. She commandeered a bullhorn from a surprised-looking young woman and began shouting through it. “Stationmaster! Stationmaster! Station-master!” She repeated this in English and Russian, until everyone had gone quiet to find out who she was. Her construction team had filtered out through the crowd, and when she saw that they were positioned, she walked right up to the duster of men and women in their flak jackets. The Stationmaster appeared to be a Mars old-timer, his face weathered and scarred across the forehead. His young team wore the Transitional Authority insignia, and looked scared. Nadia let the bullhorn fall to her side and said, “I’m Nadia Cherneshevsky. I built this town. And now we’re taking control of it. Who do you work for?”

  “The United Nations Transitional Authority,” the Stationmaster said firmly, staring at her as if she had stepped out of the grave.

  “But what unit? Which metanational?”

  “We’re a Mahjari unit.”

  “Mahjari is working with China now, and China with Praxis, and Praxis with us. We’re on the same side, and you don’t know it yet. And no matter what you think about that, we’ve got you outgunned hem.” She shouted out to the crowd, “Everyone armed raise their hand!”

  Everyone in the crowd raised their hand, and all of her crew had stun guns or nail guns or soldering-beam guns in hand.

  “We don’t want bloodshed,” Nadia said to the ever-tighter knot of bodyguards before her. “We don’t even want to take you prisoner. There’s our train right there; you can take it, and go to Sheffield and join the rest of your team. There you’ll find out the new status of things. It’s that or else we’ll all leave the station here, and blow it up. We’re taking over one way or another, and it would be stupid for anyone to get killed when this revolt is already a done deal. So take the train. I’d advise going to Sheffield, where you can get a ride out on the elevator if you want. Or if you want to work for a free Mars, you can join us right now.”

  She stared calmly at the man, feeling more relaxed than she had all day. Action was such a relief. The man ducked his head to confer with his team, and they talked in whispers for most of five minutes.

  The man looked at her again. “Well take your train.”

  And so Underhill was the first town freed.

  That night Nadia went out to the trailer park, which was near the new tent coping wall. The two habitats that had not been turned into labs were still outfitted with the original living quarters equipment, and after inspecting them, and then-going back out and walking around the barrel vaults, and the Alchemists’ Quarter, she finally returned to the one she had lived in at the very start, and lay down on one of the floor mattresses, feeling exhausted.

  It was strange indeed to lie by herself among all the ghosts, trying to feel again the presence of that distant time in her. Too strange; despite her exhaustion she could not sleep, and near dawn she had a hazy vision, of worrying about uncrating goods from freight rockets, and programming robot bricklayers, and taking a call from Arkady on Phobos. She even slept a while in t
his state, dozing uneasily, until a tingling in her ghost finger woke her up.

  And then, rising with a groan, it was just as hard to imagine that she was waking up to a world in turmoil, with millions of people waiting to see what the day would bring. Looking around at the tight confines of her first home on Mars, it suddenly seemed to her that the walls were moving—beating very lightly—a kind of standing wave of double vision, as if she were standing in the low morning light looking through a temporal stereopticon, which revealed all four dimensions at once with a pulsating, hallucinatory light.

  They breakfasted in the barrel vaults, in the large hall where Ann and Sax had once argued the merits of terraforming. Sax had won that argument, but Ann was out there fighting it still, as if it had not been decided long since.

  Nadia focused on the present, on her AI screen and the flood of news pouring through it this Saturday morning: the top of the screen given over to Maya’s safe house in Burroughs, the bottom to Praxis reports from Earth. Maya was performing heroically as usual, vibrant with apprehension, hectoring everyone in sight to conform to her vision of how things should happen, haggard and yet buzzing with her internal spin. As Nadia listened to her describe the latest developments she chewed breakfast methodically, scarcely noticing Under bill’s delicious bread. It was afternoon already in Burroughs, and the day had been busy. Every town on Mars was in turmoil. On Earth all the coastal areas were now flooded, and the mass dislocations were causing chaos inland. The new UN had condemned the rioters on Mars as heartless opportunists who were taking advantage of a time of unprecedented suffering to advance their own selfish cause. “True enough,” Nadia said to Sax as he walked in the door, fresh from Da Vinci Crater. “They’ll hold that against us later, I bet.”