Blue Mars m-3

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  She dreamed of the long run-out.The landslide was rolling across the floor of Melas Chasma, about to strike her. Everything visible with surreal clarity. Again she remembered Simon, again she groaned and got off the little dike, going through the motions, appeasing a dead man inside her, feeling awful. The ground was vibrating—

  She woke, by her own volition she thought — escaping, running away — but there was a hand, pulling hard on her arm.

  “Ann, Ann, Ann.”

  It was Nadia. Another surprise. Ann struggled up, disoriented. “Where are we?”

  “Pavonis, Ann. The revolution. I came over and woke you because a fight has broken out between Kasei’s Reds and the greens in Sheffield.”

  The present rolled over her like the landslide in her dream. She jerked out of Nadia’s grasp, groped for her shirt. “Wasn’t my rover locked?”

  “I broke in.”

  “Ah.” Ann stood up, still foggy, getting more annoyed the more she understood the situation. “Now what happened?”

  “They launched missiles at the cable.”

  “They did!” Another jolt, further clearing away the fog. “And?”

  “It didn’t work. The cable’s defense systems shot them down. They’ve got a lot of hardware up there now, and they’re happy to be able to use it at last. But now the Reds are moving into Sheffield from the west, firing more rockets, and the UN forces on Clarke are bombing the first launch sites, over on Ascraeus, and they’re threatening to bomb every armed force down here. This is just what they wanted. And the Reds think it’s going to be like Burroughs, obviously, they’re trying to force the action. So I came to you. Look, Ann, I know we’ve been fighting a lot. I haven’t been very, you know, patient, but look, this is just too much. Everything could fall apart at the last minute — the UN could decide the situation here is anarchy, and come up from Earth and try to take over again.”

  “Where are they?” Ann croaked. She pulled on pants, went to the bathroom. Nadia followed her right in. This too was a surprise; in Underbill it might have been normal between them, but it had been a long long time since Nadia had followed her into a bathroom talking obsessively while Ann washed her face and sat down and peed. “They’re still based in Lastflow, but now they’ve cut the rim piste and the one to Cairo, and they’re fighting in west Sheffield, and around the Socket. Reds fighting greens.”

  “Yes yes.”

  “So will you talk to the Reds, will you stop them?”

  A sudden fury swept through Ann. “You drove them to this,” she shouted in Nadia’s face, causing Nadia to crash back into the door. Ann got up and took a step toward Nadia and yanked her pants up, shouting still: “You and your smug stupid terraforming, it’s all green green green green, with never a hint of compromise! It’s just as much your fault as theirs, since they have no hope!”

  “Maybe so,” Nadia said mulishly. Clearly she didn’t care about that, it was the past and didn’t matter; she waved it aside and would not be swerved from her point: “But will you try?”

  Ann stared at her stubborn old friend, at this moment almost youthful with fear, utterly focused and alive.

  “I’ll do what I can,” Ann said grimly. “But from what you say, it’s already too late.”

  * * *

  It was indeed too late. The rover camp Ann had been staying in was deserted, and when she got on the wrist and called around, she got no answers. So she left Nadia and the rest of them stewing in the east Pavonis warehouse complex, and drove her rover around to Lastflow, hoping to find some of the Red leaders based there. But Lastflow had been abandoned by the Reds, and none of the locals knew where they had gone. People were watching TVs in the stations and cafe windows, but when Ann looked too she saw no news of the fighting, not even on Mangalavid. A feeling of desperation began to seep into her grim mood; she wanted to do something but did not know how. She tried her wrist-pad again, and to her surprise Kasei answered on their private band. His face in the little image looked shockingly like John Boone’s, so much so that in her confusion Ann didn’t at first hear what he said. He looked so happy, it was John to the life!

  “…had to do it,” he was telling her. Ann wondered if she had asked him about that. “If we don’t do something they’ll tear this world apart. They’ll garden it right to the tops of the big four.”

  This echoed Ann’s thoughts on the ledge enough to shock her again, but she collected herself and said, “We’ve got to work within the framework of the discussions, Kasei, or else we’ll start a civil war.”

  “We’re a minority, Ann. The framework doesn’t care about minorities.”

  “I’m not so sure. That’s what we have to work on. And even if we do decide on active resistance, it doesn’t have to be here and now. It doesn’t have to be Martians killing Martians.”

  “They’re not Martian.” There was a glint in his eye, his expression was Hiroko-like in its distance from the ordinary world. In that sense he was not like John at all. The worst of both parents; and so they had another prophet, speaking a new language.

  “Where are you now?”

  “West Sheffield.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Take the Socket, and then bring down the cable. We’re the ones with the weapons and the experience. I don’t think we’ll have much trouble.”

  “You didn’t bring it down first try.”

  “Too fancy. We’ll just chop it down this time.”

  “I thought that wasn’t the way to do it.”

  “It’ll work.”

  “Kasei, I think we need to negotiate with the greens.”

  He shook his head, impatient with her, disgusted that she had lost her nerve when push came to shove. “After the cable is down we’ll negotiate. Look Ann, I’ve gotta go. Stay out of the fall line.”

  “Kasei!”

  But he was gone. No one listened to her — not her enemies, not her friends, not her family — though she would have to call Peter. She would have to try Kasei again. She needed to be there in person, to get his attention as she had Nadia’s — yes, it had come to that: to get their attention she had to shout right in their faces.

  The possibility of getting blocked around east Pavonis kept her going west from Lastflow, circling counterclockwise as she had the day before, to come on the Red force from its rear, no doubt the best approach anyway. It was about a 150-kilometer drive from Lastflow to the western edge of Sheffield, and as she sped around the summit, just outside the piste, she spent the time trying to call the various forces on the mountain, with no success. Explosive static marked the fight for Sheffield, and memories of ‘61 erupted with these brutal bursts of white noise, frightening her; she drove the rover as fast as it would go, keeping it on the piste’s narrow outside apron to make the ride smoother and faster — a hundred kilometers per hour, then faster — racing, really, to try to stave off the disaster of a civil war — there was a terrible dreamlike quality to it. And especially in that it was too late, too late. In moments like these she was always too late. In the sky over the caldera, starred clouds appeared instantaneously — explosions, without a doubt missiles fired at the cable and shot down in midflight, in white puffs like incompetent fireworks, clustered over Sheffield and peaking in the region of the cable, but puffing into existence all over the vast summit, then drifting off east on the.jet stream. Some of those rockets were getting nailed a long way from their target.

  Looking up at the battle overhead she almost drove into the first tent of west Sheffield, which was already punctured. As the town had grown westward new tents had attached to the previous ones like lobes of pillow lava; now the construction moraines outside the latest tent were littered with bits of framework, like shards of glass, and the tent fabric was missing in the remaining soccer-ball shapes. Her rover bounced wildly over a mound of basalt rubble; she braked, drove slowly up to the wall. The vehicle lock doors were stuck shut. She put on her suit and helmet, ducked into the rover’s own lock, left the car.
Heart pounding hard, she walked up to the city wall and climbed over it into Sheffield.

  The streets were deserted. Glass and bricks and bamboo shards and twisted magnesium beams lay scattered on the streetgrass. At this elevation, tent failure caused flawed buildings to pop like balloons; windows gaped empty and dark, and here and there complete rectangles of unbroken windows lay scattered, like great clear shields. And there was a body, face frosted or dusted. There would be a lot of dead, people weren’t used to thinking about decompression anymore, it was an old settlers’ worry. But not today.

  Ann kept walking east. “Look for Kasei or Dao or Marion or Peter,” she said to her wrist again and again. But no one replied.

  She followed a narrow street just inside the southern wall of the tent. Harsh sunlight, sharp-edged black shadows. Some buildings had held, their windows in place, their lights on inside. No one to be seen in them, of course. Ahead the cable was just visible, a black vertical stroke rising into the sky out of east Sheffield, like a geometric line become visible in their reality.

  The Red emergency band was a signal transmitted in a rapidly varying wavelength, synchronized for everyone who had the current encryption. This system cut through some kinds of radio jamming very well; nevertheless Ann was surprised when a crow voice cawed from her wrist, “Ann, it’s Dao. Up here.”

  He was actually in sight, waving at her from a doorway into a building’s little emergency lock. He and a group of some twenty people were working with a trio of mobile rocket launchers out in the street. Ann ran over to them, ducked into the doorway beside Dao. “This has to stop!” she cried.

  Dao looked surprised. “We’ve almost got the Socket.”

  “But what then?”

  “Talk to Kasei about that. He’s up ahead, going for Arsiaview.”

  One of their rockets whooshed away, its noise faint in the thin air. Dao was back at it. Ann ran forward up the street, keeping as close as she could to the buildings siding it. It was obviously dangerous, but at that moment she didn’t care if she was killed or not, so she had no fear. Peter was somewhere in Sheffield, in command of the green revolutionaries who had been there from the beginning. These people had been efficient enough to keep the UNTA security forces trapped on the cable and up on Clarke, so they were by no means the hapless pacifistic young native street demonstrators that Kasei and Dao seemed to have assumed they were. Her spiritual children, mounting an attack on her only actual child, in complete confidence that they had her blessing. As once they had. But now —

  She struggled to keep running, her breath hard and ragged, the sweat beginning to flood through all over her skin. She hurried to the south tent wall, where she came on a little fleet of Red boulder cars, Turtle Rocks from the Acheron car manufactory. But no one inside them answered her calls, and when she looked closer she saw that their rock roofs were punctured by holes at their fronts, where the windshields would have been, underneath the rock overhang. Anyone inside them was dead. She ran on eastward, staying against the tent wall, heedless of debris underfoot, feeling a rising panic. She was aware that a single shot from anyone could kill her, but she had to find Kasei. She tried again over the wrist.

  While she was at it, a call came in to her. It was Sax.

  “It isn’t logical to connect the fate of the elevator with terraforming goals,” he was saying, as if he was speaking to more people than just her. “The cable could be tethered to quite a cold planet.”

  It was the usual Sax, the all-too-Sax: but then he must have noticed she was on, because he stared owlishly into his wrist’s little camera and said, “Listen Ann, we can take history by the arm and break it — make it. Make it new.”

  Her old Sax would never have said that. Nor chattered on at her, clearly distraught, pleading, visibly nerve-racked; one of the most frightening sights she had ever seen, actually: “They love you, Ann. It’s that that can save us. Emotional histories are the true histories. Watersheds of desire and devolution — devotion. You’re the — the personification of certain values — for the natives. You can’t escape that. You have to act with that. I did it in Da Vinci, and it proved — helpful. Now it’s your turn. You must. You must — Ann — just this once you must join us all. Hang together or hang separately. Use your iconic value.”

  So strange to hear such stuff from Saxifrage Russell. But then he shifted again, he seemed to pull himself together. “… logical procedure is to establish some kind of equation for conflicting interests.” Just like his old self.

  Then there was a beep from her wrist and she cut Sax off, and answered the incoming call. It was Peter, there on the Red coded frequency, a black expression on his face that she had never seen before.

  “Ann!” He stared intently at his own wristpad. “Listen, Mother — I want you to stop these people!”

  “Don’t you Mother me,” she snapped. “I’m trying. Can you tell me where they are?”

  “I sure as hell can. They’ve just broken into the Arsiaview tent. Moving through — it looks like they’re trying to come up on the Socket from the south.” Grimly he took a message from someone off-camera. “Right.” He looked back at her. “Ann, can I patch you into Hastings up on Clarke? If you tell him you’re trying to stop the Red attack, then he may believe that it’s only a few extremists, and stay out of it. He’s going to do what he has to to keep the cable up, and I’m afraid he’s about to kill us all.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  And there he was, a face from the deep past, a time lost to Ann she would have said; and yet he was instantly familiar, a thin-faced man, harried, angry, on the edge of snapping. Could anyone have sustained such enormous pressures for the past hundred years? No. It was just that kind of time, come back again.

  “I’m Ann Clayborne,” she said, and as his face twisted even further, she added, “I want you to know that the fighting going on down here does not represent Red party policy.”

  Her stomach clamped as she said this, and she tasted chyme at the back of her throat. But she went on: “It’s the work of a splinter group, called the Kakaze. They’re the ones who broke the Burroughs dike. We’re trying to shut them down, and expect to succeed by the end of the day.”

  It was the most awful string of lies she had ever said. She felt like Frank Chalmers had come down and taken over her mouth, she couldn’t stand the sensation of such words on her tongue. She cut the connection before her face betrayed what falsehoods she was vomiting. Hastings disappeared without having said a word, and his face was replaced by Peter’s, who did not know she was back on-line; she could hear him but his wristpad was facing a wall, “If they don’t stop on their own we’ll have to do it ourselves, or else UNTA will and it’ll all go to hell. Get everything ready for a counterattack, I’ll give the word.”

  “Peter!” she said without thinking.

  The picture on the little screen swung around, came onto his face.

  “You deal with Hastings,” she choked out, barely able to look at him, traitor that he was. “I’m going for Kasei.”

  Arsiaview was the southernmost tent, filled now with smoke, which snaked overhead in long amorphous lines that revealed the tent’s ventilation patterns. Alarms were ringing everywhere, loud in the still-thick air, and shards of clear framework plastic were scattered on the green grass of the street. Ann stumbled past a body curled just like the figures modeled in ash in Pompeii. Arsiaview was narrow but long, and it was not obvious where she should go. The whoosh of rocket launchers led her eastward toward the Socket, the magnet of the madness — like a monopole, discharging Earth’s insanity onto them.

  There might be a plan revealed here; the cable’s defenses seemed to be capable of handling the Reds’ lightweight missiles, but if the attackers thoroughly destroyed Sheffield and the Socket, then there would be nothing for UNTA to come down to, and so it would not matter if the cable remained swinging overhead. It was a plan that mirrored the one used to deal with Burroughs.

  But it was a bad plan. Bu
rroughs was down in the lowlands, where there was an atmosphere, where people could live outside, at least for a while. Sheffield was high, and so they were back in the past, back in ‘61 when a broken tent meant the end for everyone in it exposed to thfe elements. At the same time most of Sheffield was underground, in many stacked floors against the wall of the caldera. Undoubtedly most of the population had retreated down there, and if the fighting tried to follow them it would be impossible, a nightmare. But up on the surface where fighting was possible, people were exposed to fire from the cable above. No, it wouldn’t work. It wasn’t even possible to see what was happening. There were more explosions near the Socket, static over the intercom, isolated words as the receiver caught bits of other coded frequencies cycling through: “ — taken Arsiaviewpkkkkkk — ” “We need the AI back but I’d say x-axis three two two, y-axis eightpkkkkk — ”

  Then another barrage of missiles must have been launched at the cable, for overhead Ann caught sight of an ascending line of brilliant explosions of light, no sound to them at all; but after that, big black fragments rained down on the tents around her, crashing through the invisible fabrics or smashing onto the invisible framework, then falling the last distance onto the buildings like the dropped masses of wrecked vehicles, loud despite the thin air and the intervening tents, the ground vibrating and jerking under her feet. It went on for minutes, with the fragments falling farther outward all the time, and any second in all those minutes could have brought death down on her. She stood looking up at the dark sky, and waited it out.