Green Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Not if we help them out.”

  “Hmm.” She offered him bread, regarding him closely. Despite his changed features he was looking more like Sax every day, standing there impassively, blinking as he looked around the old brick chamber. It seemed as though revolution was the last thing on his mind. She said, “Are you ready to fly to Elysium?”

  “That’s what I was going to ask you.”

  “Good. Let me go get my bag.”

  While she was throwing her clothes and AI into her old black backpack, her wrist beeped and there was Kasei, his long gray hair wild around his deeply lined face, which was the strangest mix of John and Hiroko—John’s mouth, at the moment stretched into a wide grin; Hiroko’s Oriental eyes, now slitted with delight. “Hello, Kasei,” Nadia said, unable to conceal her surprise. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you on my wrist before.”

  “Special circumstances,” he said, unabashed. She was used to thinking of him as a dour man, but the outbreak of the revolution was obviously a great tonic; she understood suddenly by his look that he had been waiting for this all his life. “Look, Coyote and I and a bunch of Reds are up here in Chasma Borealis, and we’ve secured the reactor and the dam; everyone working here has been cooperative—”

  “Encouraging!” someone beside him yelled.

  “Yes, there’s been a lot of support up here, except for a security team of about a hundred people who are holed up in the reactor. They’re threatening to melt it down unless we give them safe passage to Burroughs.”

  “So?” Nadia said.

  “So?” Kasei repeated, and laughed. “So Coyote says we should ask you what to do.”

  Nadia snorted. “Why do I find that hard to believe.”

  “Hey, no one here believes it either! But that’s what Coyote said, and we like to indulge the old bastard when we can.”

  “So, well, give them safe passage to Burroughs. That’s a no-brainer if I’ve ever seen one. It won’t matter if Burroughs has an extra hundred cops, and the fewer reactor meltdowns the better, we’re still wading around in the radiation from last time.”

  Sax came into the room while Kasei was thinking it over. “Okay!” Kasei said. “If you say so! Hey talk to you later, I have to go, ka.”

  Nadia stared at her blank wrist screen, scowling.

  Sax said, “What was that about?”

  “You’ve got me,” Nadia said, and described the conversation while trying to call Coyote. She got no answer.

  Sax said, “Well, you’re the coordinator.”

  “Shit.” Nadia pulled her backpack over one shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  They flew in a new 51B, very small and very fast. They took a great circle route, which headed northwest over the Vastitas ice sea, and avoided the metanat strongholds of Ascraeus, and Echus Overlook. Very soon after takeoff they could see the ice filling Chryse to the north, the shattered dirty bergs dotted with pink snow algae and amethyst melt ponds. The old transponder road to Chasma Borealis was of course long gone, that whole system of bringing water south forgotten, a technical footnote for the history books. Looking down at the ice chaos Nadia suddenly remembered what the land had looked like on that first trip, the endless hills and hollows, the funnel-like alases, the great black barchan dunes, the incredible laminated terrain in the last sands before the polar cap . . . all gone now, overwhelmed by ice. And the polar cap itself was a mess, nothing but a collection of great melt zones and ice streams, slush rivers, ice-covered liquid lakes—every manner of slurry, and all of it crashing downslope off the high round plateau that the polar cap rested on, down into the world-wrapping northern sea.

  Landing was therefore out of the question for much of their flight. Nadia watched the instruments nervously, all too aware of the many things that could go wrong in a new machine during a crisis, when maintenance was down and human error up.

  Then billows of white and black smoke appeared on the horizon to the southwest, pouring east in what was clearly a high wind. “What’s that?” Nadia asked, moving to the left side of the plane to look.

  “Kasei Vallis,” Sax said from the pilot’s seat.

  “What’s happened to it?”

  “It’s burning.”

  Nadia stared at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Heavy vegetation there in the valley. And along the foot of the Great Escarpment. Resinated trees and shrubs, for the most part. Also fireseed trees—you know. Species that require fire to propagate. Engineered at Biotique. Thorny resin manzanita, blackthorn, giant sequoia, some others.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I planted them.”

  “And now you’ve set them on fire?”

  Sax nodded. He glanced down at the smoke.

  “But Sax, isn’t the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere really high now?”

  “Forty percent.”

  She stared at him some more, suddenly suspicious. “You jacked that up too, didn’t you! Jesus, Sax—you might have set the whole world on fire!”

  She stared down at the bottom of the column of smoke. There in the big trough of Kasei Vallis was a line of flame, the leading edge of the fire, burning brilliant white rather than yellow—it looked like molten magnesium. “Nothing will put that out!” she cried. “You’ve set the world on fire!”

  “The ice,” Sax said. “There’s nothing downwind but the ice covering Chryse. It should only burn a few thousand square kilometers.”

  Nadia stared at him, amazed and appalled. Sax was still glancing down at the fire, but most of the time he watched the plane’s instruments, his face set in a curious expression: reptilian, stony—utterly inhuman.

  The metanat security compounds in the curve of Kasei Vallis came over the horizon. The tents were all burning furiously, like torches of pitch, the craters on the inner bank like beach firepits, spurting white flame into the air. Clearly there was a strong wind pouring down Echus Chasma and funneling through Kasei Vallis, fanning the flames. A firestorm. And Sax stared down at it unblinking, his jaw muscles bunched under the skin.

  “Fly north,” Nadia ordered him. “Get clear of that.”

  He banked the plane, and she shook her head. Thousands of square kilometers, burned—all that vegetation, so painstakingly introduced—global oxygen levels raised by a significant percentage. . . . She regarded the strange creature sitting beside her warily.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

  “I didn’t want you to stop it.”

  As simple as that.

  “So I have that power?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Meaning I’m kept ignorant of things?”

  “Only of this,” Sax said. His jaw muscles were bunching and relaxing, in a rhythm that reminded her suddenly of Frank Chalmers. “The prisoners were all moved out into asteroid mining. This was the training site for all their secret police. The ones who would never give up. The torturers.” He turned that lizard gaze on her. “We’re better off without them.” And he returned to his piloting.

  Nadia was still looking back at the fierce white line of the firestorm when the plane’s radio beeped her code. This time it was Art, cross-eyed with worry. “I need your help,” he said. “Ann’s people have retaken Sabishii, and a lot of the Sabishiians have come up out of the maze to reoccupy it, and the Reds in control there are telling them to go away.”

  “What?”

  “I know, well, I don’t think Ann knows about this yet, and she isn’t answering my calls. There are Reds out there that make her look like a Boonean, I swear. But I reached Ivana and Raul, and got them to stop the Reds in Sabishii till they heard from you. That’s the best I could do.”

  “Why me?”

  “I think Ann told them to listen to you.”

  “Shit.”

  “Well, who else is going to do it? Maya’s made too many enemies holding things together the last few years.”

  “I thought you were the big diplomat here.”

  “I am! But what I
got was everyone agreeing to defer to your judgment. That was the best I could do. Sony, Nadia. I’ll help you anyway you want me to.”

  “You’d damn well better, after setting me up like this!”

  He grinned. “It’s not my fault everyone trusts you.”

  Nadia clicked off and tried the various Red radio channels. At first she couldn’t find Ann. But while she was running through their channels she heard enough messages to realize that there were young Red radicals whom Ann would certainly condemn, or so she hoped—people who, with the revolt still in the balance, were busy blowing up platforms in Vastitas, slashing tents, breaking pistes, threatening to end their cooperation with the other rebels unless they were joined in their ecotage and all their demands were met, etc., etc.

  Finally Ann answered Nadia’s call. She looked like an avenging Fury, righteous and slightly mad. “Look,” Nadia said to her without preamble, “an independent Mars is the best chance you’ll ever have to get what you want. You try holding the revolution hostage to your concerns and people will remember, I’m warning you! You can argue all you want once we’ve gotten the situation under control, but until then it’s just blackmail as far as I’m concerned. It’s a stab in the back. You get those Reds in Sabishii to turn the city back over to its residents.”

  Ann said angrily, “What makes you think I can tell them what to do?”

  “Who else if not you?”

  “What makes you think I disagree with what they’re doing?”

  “My impression that you are a sane person, that’s what!”

  “I don’t presume to order people about.”

  “Reason with them if you can’t order them! Tell them stronger revolts than ours have failed because of this kind of stupidity. Tell them to get a grip.”

  Ann cut the connection without a reply.

  “Shit,” Nadia said.

  Her AI continued to pour out news. The UNTA expeditionary force was coming back up from the southern highlands, and appeared to be on its way to Hellas, or Sabishii. Sheffield was still in the control of Subarashii. Burroughs was an open situation, with security forces seemingly in control; but refugees were pouring into the city from Syrtis and elsewhere, and there was a general strike going on as well. The vids made it look like most of the populace was spending the day out on the boulevards and in the parks, demonstrating against the Transitional Authority, or merely trying to watch what was going on.

  “We’ll have to do something about Burroughs,” Sax said.

  “I know.”

  They flew southward again, past the bump of Hecates Tholus on the northern end of the Elysium massif, to the South Fossa spaceport. Their flight had taken twelve hours, but they had gone west through nine time zones, and crossed the date line at 180° longitude, so it was midday Sunday when their airport bus drove to the rim of South Fossa, and through the roof lock.

  South Fossa and the other Elysium towns, Hephaestus and Elysium Fossa, had all come out for Free Mars in a big way. They made a kind of geographical unit; a southern arm of the Vastitas ice now ran between the Elysium massif and the Great Escarpment, and though the ice had already been spanned by pistes on pontoon bridges, Elysium was in the process of becoming an island continent. In all three of its big towns crowds had poured into the streets, and occupied the city offices and the physical plants. Without the threat of attacks from orbit to back them up, the few Transitional Authority police in the towns had either changed into civilian clothes and melted into the crowds, or else gotten on the train to Burroughs. Elysium was uncontestedly part of Free Mars.

  Down at the Mangalavid offices Nadia and Sax found that a large armed group of rebels had taken over the station, and were now busy churning out twenty-four and a half hours a day of video reports on all four channels, all sympathetic to the revolt, with long interviews from people in all the independent towns and stations. The timeslip was going to be devoted to a montage of the previous day’s events.

  Some outlying mining stations in Elysium’s radial cracks, and in the Phlegra Montes, were purely metanat operations, mostly Amexx and Subarashii. These were staffed largely by new emigrants who had holed up in their camps, and either gone silent or eke started to threaten anyone who tried to bother them; some even declared their intention to retake the planet, or hold out until reinforcements from Earth arrived. “Ignore them,” Nadia advised. “Avoid them and ignore them. Jam their communications systems if you can, and leave them alone.”

  Reports from elsewhere on Mars were more promising. Senzeni Na was in the hands of people who called themselves Booneans, though they were not associated with Jackie—they were issei, nisei, sansei, and yonsei, who had immediately named their mohole John Boone, and declared Thaumasia a “Dorsa Brevia Peaceful Neutral Place.” Korolyov, now a small mining town only, had revolted almost as violently as in ’61, and its citizens, many of them descendants of the old prison population, had renamed the town Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov, and declared it an undocumented anarchist free zone; the old prison compounds were to be converted into a giant bazaar and communal living space, with a particular welcome made to refugees from Earth. Nicosia was likewise a free city. Cairo was under the control of Amexx security. Odessa and the rest of the Hellas Basin towns were still holding firm for independence, although the circumHellas piste had been cut in some places. The maglev train system was bad that way; the magnetic systems had to be operating for the pistes to function and the trains to move, and these systems were easy to break. For that reason many trains were running empty or were canceled, as people took to rovers or planes to make sure they didn’t get stranded in the outback somewhere, in vehicles that didn’t even have wheels.

  Nadia and Sax spent the rest of Sunday monitoring developments and making suggestions, if asked, about problem situations. In general it seemed to Nadia that things were going well. But on Monday, bad news came in from Sabishii. The UNTA expeditionary force had arrived there from the southern highlands, and retaken the surface portion of the city after a bitter all-night fight with the Red guerrillas in control of the city. The Reds and the original Sabishiians had retreated into the mound maze or the outlying shelters, and the prospect of continued bloody fighting in the maze was clear. Art predicted that the security force would be unable to penetrate the maze, and so would be forced to abandon Sabishii, and train or fly up to Burroughs, to consolidate with the forces already there. But there was no way to be sure; and poor Sabishii was sadly battered by the assault, and back in security’s hands.

  Monday evening at dusk Nadia went out with Sax to get something to eat. South Fossa’s canyon floor was thick with mature trees, the giant sequoias standing over an understory of pines and junipers and, in the lower stretch of the canyon, aspens and canyon oaks. As they walked down the streamside park, Nadia and Sax were introduced by the Mangalavid people to group after group, most of them natives, all of them unfamiliar faces, but all very happy to meet them, it was clear. It was strange to see so many people obviously, visibly happy; in normal life, Nadia realized, one simply didn’t see it—smiles everywhere, strangers talking to each other . . . there was more than one way for things to go when a social order disappeared. Anarchy and chaos, definitely all too possible; but also communion.

  They ate in an outdoor restaurant by the central stream, and then returned to the Mangalavid offices. Nadia got back in front of her screen, and went to work talking to as many organizing committees as she could reach. She felt like Frank in ’61, working the phones in frantic overdrive; only now they were in communication with all of Mars, and she had the distinct impression that while she was not by any means in control, she at least had a good sense of what was going on. And that was gold, that was. The iron walnut in her stomach began to shift to something more like wood.

  After a couple of hours, she began to fall asleep in the seconds between one call and the next; it was the middle of the night back in Underhill and Shalbatana, and she hadn’t slept much since the call from Sax about Antar
ctica. That meant four or five days without sleep—no, wait—she figured it out—three days. Though it already felt like two weeks.

  She had just lain down on a couch when there was an outcry, and everyone ran into the hall, then out onto the stone-flagged plaza surrounding the Mangalavid offices. Nadia stumbled blearily after Sax, who grabbed her by the arm and helped her keep her balance.

  Apparently there was a hole in the roof tent. People pointed, but Nadia couldn’t make it out. “This is where we’re better off,” Sax said with a satisfied little purse of the mouth. “The pressure under the roof is only a hundred and fifty millibars higher than the pressure outside.”

  “So roofs don’t pop like pricked balloons,” Nadia said, remembering with a shudder some of the domed craters of ’61.

  “And even though some outside air is getting in, it’s mostly oxygen and nitrogen. Still too much CO2, but not so much that we’re all poisoned instantly.”

  “But if the hole were bigger,” Nadia said.

  “True.”

  She shook her head. “We need to secure the whole planet, to really be safe.”

  “True.”

  Nadia went back inside, yawning. She sat at her screen again, and began watching the four Mangalavid channels, switching among them rapidly. Most of the big cities were either openly for independence or in various kinds of stalemate, with security in control of the physical plants but nothing happening, and much of the population in the streets, waiting to see what would happen next. There were a number of company towns and camps that were still supporting their metanats, but in the case of Bradbury Point and Huo Hsing Vallis, neighboring towns up on the Great Escarpment, their parent metanats Amexx and Mahjari had been fighting each other on Earth. What effect that would have on these northern towns wasn’t clear, but Nadia was sure it did not help them to sort out their situation.

  There were several important towns still in the grasp of Subarashii and Amexx, and these were serving as magnets for isolated metanat and UNTA security units. Burroughs was obviously chief among these, but it was true also of Cairo, Lasswitz, Sudbury, and Sheffield. In the south, the sanctuaries that had not been abandoned or destroyed by the expeditionary force were coming out of hiding, and Vishniac Bogdanov was building a surface tent over the old robot vehicle parking complex next to its mohole. So the south would no doubt return to its status as a resistance stronghold, for what that was worth; Nadia didn’t think it was worth much. And the northern polar cap was in such environmental disarray that it almost didn’t matter who held it—with most of its ice draining down into Vastitas, but the polar plateau covered by new snow every winter, it was the most inhospitable region on Mars, and there were almost no permanent settlements left up there.