The shuttle floated into dawn. The topography, now definitely "below," took shape in a tangle of pale, long shadows, hazy with dawn fogs. After her childhood in the green-blue-white contours of Hawaii and the angular urban geometries of Earth, the pastel apricot dawns and red afternoons of Mars excited her in some way she had not expected. Mars offered some possibility of surprise.
Weightless in her cocoon, she stretched like a cat.
By the time Carter got to the main arcade he was calming down at last. Anyway, there was this clerk at Music N Books; in the last few days she smiled at him when he went by. No doubt about it. Tomorrow he'd have to go in and start talking to her. A great thing, women smiling. Besides, against all odds, maybe she actually liked music and books.
He liked having women on his mind.
He had avoided wasting energy psycho-profiling himself, but Philippe did it for him. Philippe would ask questions about his childhood, and then analyze the answers, whether Carter asked for analysis or not. When Carter was ten years old, back in Illinois, his American father had separated from his Russian mother. It was amicable, but he never saw his father much after that. Carter had convinced himself that this had not affected him. He had always liked his father, and his father's middle-American pragmatism, which he had inherited. His mother, with her Russian romanticism, had always been different from other people he knew, a loving mystery.
Philippe said that this parentage made Carter the perfect citizen of Mars, with its Council set up through Russian-American collaboration in the second decade of the century.
Carter's mother had been a beautiful woman with enormous eyes, which always seemed wide open in private amazement. Even now, when he saw the old videos of her, laughing as a young woman, there was a shock in recognizing her extraordinary beauty. What bit of genetics, he wondered, makes it so difficult to see our mothers as beautiful women?
Early one day in Illinois, with the morning fog hanging in the fields beyond the screen of trees at the edge of town, his mother had taken him for a walk. She had talked about Russia, ruined and reborn every century.
While the whirlwind of technology was stagnating in the rest of the world after 2010, Russia was booming and blasting its way through its resources. Using technologies and ideas of the twentieth century, it had become the America of the twenty-first century. The two countries were amazingly alike, she said: shaped by frontiers. But she said that they would never fully understand each other, that the Americans were too set in their ways to try. "And it's important for you to understand this," she said. "Soon you'll be out in the world and you'll always have a foot in both camps."
Like a parent revealing the facts of life, she had explained the twentieth century to him—as much as anyone could explain chaos and chance. She owed her own existence to an accident in 1942, she told him. Her grandmother, as a little girl, had been sent out for a bottle of milk at a chance moment when Hitler's men—or was it Stalin's men—had come to the house. When she returned there was no one there.... It was a century of chance survivals and narrow escapes and the luck of being born in the right country, or finding your way there. It was the century, his mother remarked gravely, that turned existentialism from a dry philosophy into reality.
She had been one of the lucky ones, she said. At least that's what she thought when she arrived in America during the collapse of the seventy-year Soviet experiment. But she found America to be a strange world. The Americans crowed of their success and exported their ideas around the planet, but it was the streets of the most Americanized cities of Earth that were haunted by the most tragic derelicts.
She told him an old Russian joke to explain the difference between the Russian and American social systems. In America, if a man struck it rich, his neighbor said, "What a success! I hope I can be rich like my neighbor." In Russia, if a man got rich, his neighbor said, "I hope a disaster strikes him so he becomes an ordinary guy again, like me."
The problem of wealth concentration, she taught him, had been the key to the last two centuries—the widening gulf between the haves and have-nots. Her country had at least recognized it in the 1900s and tried to solve it in a grand, terrible, failed experiment. The Americans had never admitted the problem. Their upper classes produced complacent sons and daughters who cheerfully burned through most of Earth's riches. Now, as the Russian upper classes became the richest on Earth, the problem had returned. Earth's last chance at sustainability was being squandered.
Carter had absorbed a sense of irony from his mother, who had met his father in Moscow during his tour of engineering facilities of the old USSR. She had arrived in America just in time to witness its slow downward slide. She had left Russia just before its fortunes ascended on the double tide of resources and climate change. Carter was lucky, she said, to have a foot in both camps.
Now, on Mars, he seemed to be carrying out some dream that she had prepared him to dream, trying to build a new world. She had given him a picture of history as something dense, having a gravity that held events down, fitting into some dialectic that only her generation had seen. He came to see that his father's people had believed that anyone could change history, while his mother's side believed that it had a large and random component of fate. The more he saw of the world, the more it became a marvel to him that he had been born in Moscow. "Our beautiful Moscow," she had called it sadly. Ever since, whether he was on the Earth, moon, or Mars, he could feel each world's ponderous, silent turning as it churned out the history of the ants crawling across its back.
It frightened Carter, now, to look back at his mother's ideas and realize that one's experience of life pivoted entirely on the random spot where he was born into the four-dimensional yu-chou of spacetime. His own great-grandmother, shaped by an era of war, saved by a one-minute quirk of fate. And what if you were born a middle-class, educated Jew, in Munich in 1905? What sense could you make out of a life that rode a mono-tonic tide from comfort to catastrophe, a train ride toward the abyss with a free ticket provided by the state bureaucracy?
Carter couldn't help but feel that Philippe viewed all this through a different filter. His was such a long, European view of history that history was relegated to the background; not up front as in his mother's consciousness. If history was a series of random waves and tides, it was not something in which you wanted to be immersed, but something that you tried to ignore because immersion led to drowning. You tried to stay afloat on the stormy surface of history.
Carter and Philippe had formed their friendship as soon as Philippe arrived in '29, the year after Carter came. They felt brotherly similarities. Both had experienced a variety of cultures. Both were, in effect, citizens of the solar system and of no single country, except on paper. Both were born in the magic year of 2000. (How did other people remember their age, Carter mused.)
Almost with a start, Carter came back to the present to find he was still striding through the garden area that Philippe called the Tuileries. A pair of lovers were immersed in the world of their bench among the palms and the flowers. The garden was one of Carter's favorite spots. It was like a gift from the designers to the inhabitants, a place that worked wonders for people's psyches. Even the plants looked happy. Martians loved plants, the companions they had brought with them from Earth because they couldn't bring animals. Plants had evolved the perfect means of transporting life through space—seeds. The arrivals at Mars City, the only Martians, had brought seeds of philodendrons and potted rubber trees and blazing ginger flowers.
The hallways of Mars City were nothing if not horticulturally exuberant. An article in the English Garden Society Journal applauded the Martians for their interest, but said that they lacked a sense of taste. A gardener who was a Japanese National Treasure, sent to Mars for a visit by a Japanese television network, gave up in bewilderment and went home. Gardeners, flitting from plant to plant, reminded Carter that the debate about whether to introduce certain species of insects on Mars had not been settled in Council. Carter himsel
f had argued that the "insect-free Mars" experiment was working so far; "besides," he said, "which would you rather have, gardeners or bugs?"
Carter hurried on through the garden, feeling better.
Having become a cynic about urgent messages, Carter had cut himself off from the news that pulsed back and forth on invisible pathways through the nonexistent ether. For an hour the news had been flashing from dusty Hellas Base. Silently it sped back and forth, through comsats to Mars City and dark Phobos, and southward to the Polar Station, and outward through the surging solar wind toward Earth, and even to the tiny Phobos shuttle.
Aboard the shuttle, Annie Pohaku's 'corder pipped to get her attention. She had programmed it to alert her to any new Martian postings on Newsnet. She had not expected much, but she always wanted to be on top of anything that developed in her vicinity. Career and all that. She fished uncomfortably for the screen in her bag, and turned it on. She read the full announcement with growing horror... and excitement. This could be big. Takemitsu had defined for her the quality that made the top journalists. Luck. The right place at the right time....
Carter found Philippe in the Nix Olympica Bar, in his usual corner table, spread out like an octopus. He wiped his unkempt hair from his brow as Carter approached. "I was reading this novel," Philippe said. "Czech. Last century. The author describes the Russian tanks rumbling into the heart of Prague, because he and other writers were publishing things that were too ... frank. You know? For the government. So your Russians sent in the tanks. Right in the heart of Europe!"
"Times have changed."
"Perhaps yes; perhaps no. We never know, do we? Anyway, he talks about a lover who returns from a trip and has lost six kilograms. He wants to know what happened to those six kilos. Did they just dissipate into thin air? He was attached to those kilograms. But my question is different. My question is: If I have a lover and she comes back from a trip minus six kilograms, perhaps only ninety percent of her is left. As her lover, have I lost something? Is she the same person? Scientists would never accept this—to have something come back with only ninety percent of its mass, and say casually, 'Oh, well, we will just ignore the fact that ten percent of the mass is missing.' "
"Yes, but you're not a scientist." It wasn't quite true. Philippe had studied physics, along with everything else. A couple of years, then gave it up. Said he wasn't interested in picturing the universe as if it were uninhabited.
"Ahh, you are wrong. We are all scientists. You understand nothing, as this writer would say. Kundera, you know him?" Philippe did not wait for an answer. "We are all scientists because we have to figure out how to live in the universe. You, especially, you are a scientist because you have a theory of how we will live on Mars. You try to force other people to live according to your theory, like the Communists did in your mother's country. This time you had better be right."
"You going to be like this all night?"
"People expect me to be this way."
It was true. Philippe was stimulated by the fact that people wanted him to be unusual. He was their visiting French artist. He used their expectations to advantage. His youth in Paris, with seasons in London and points global, lent him a cosmopolitan air. He had learned English mannerisms that he could turn on and off at will. "Right. Won't be a moment, thank you very much," he could rattle off in perfect BBC. Americans, who dominated Mars City, wanted Philippe to be French, because he was an artist. When they were in the company of others, Carter teasingly called him "The Artiste." He had olive Mediterranean skin, which emphasized the incongruity of his longish fair hair. Though he was Carter's age, his thinness and extra height made him look younger and more awkward. He had won the annual Mars Residency Prize, which gave him two years on Mars to produce work tor Mars City, with the option to renew for a third year by vote of the Mars Council.
Carter Jahns and Philippe Brach were happy to sit under an arching giant fern in the Nix Olympica Bar and recycle their old arguments. The pulsing blue neon lights around the door reflected off the chrome fittings around the room. Fans overhead added a noir atmosphere, though Carter could not see them without remembering a flap over their impact on the larger air circulation filtration system.
A sign over the door was rendered in green self-glo, in the latest side-ways-turned Martian lettering that the previous artist-in-residence thought would be a cute design innovation to export from Mars back to Earth:
2020 VISION
The subtitle referred to the year of the establishment's birth—one night after a Russian team had pulled an American team out of an emergency hut on its last night of air. This according to apocryphal tradition.
Carter mused about the sign, with its faintly pulsing bright color. It reminded him of his screen, flashing in the darkness of his office.... The current fad for signs that consumed little energy was a sort of reverse ostentation. With the fusion generators, there was plenty of power on Mars, yet energetic sign illumination was viewed as being in poor taste. The attitude was a remnant of social tradition from polluted Earth.
The barkeep sent over a waitress with their customary drinks, Martian blues. The waitress was a new face to them. It was wonderful how new women kept coming to Mars for adventure. She had long legs and a lingering smile. "Do you like her? I will give her to you," Philippe said after she departed.
"Stow it, Brach." Carter leaned back against the wall, studying the bluish glints off the ice in his glass.
Philippe Brach leaned back as well, hands behind his head, ruffling his sandy brown hair and giving more prominence to his large ears. His arms and legs seemed to have a life of their own, independent of his lanky body. In the shadowy light of their corner, the light from behind the fern he looked slightly sinister. Now he folded his hands in front of him in a prayerful attitude. "Well," he said at last, "it will not be so interesting if you spend the night staring around the room like a tourist. Are you going to tell Brother Philippe your problems?"
Carter sipped happily at his blue, and began to explain his theory of office life. He could never decide if the Martian blue tide felt warm or cool, but its calming waves washed over him like a tide.
"You should be glad you don't have to work in an office," he told Philippe.
"Oh, but I am."
"There's this infatuation with the latest tidbit of news or rumor. Drives me nuts. Whoever has the latest item is at the top of the pecking order. But these tidbits have a half-day half-life. By the next day, everything has become obsolete. Why don't people realize this? They always view the time they wasted on yesterday's rumors as keeping up-to-date. Then they start in again on today's 'news.' "
"There's another Eastern European writer who says that in every office there's someone who hasn't produced anything in years. But, he says, the funny thing is, that's the person who is always the most feverishly busy. The Compromise. Amusing book. You ought to read it sometime."
"Mmmm. It keeps getting worse, the office politics. Stafford says things are going to hell on Mars. Sometimes I think he's right."
"This does not sound like you. This attitude, it could be fatal to your job, you know? You have to play this game if you want to be an American big shot. You had better keep these ideas to yourself!"
Philippe was right about that.
"The trouble is," Philippe continued, "you cannot expect Mars City to keep growing as it has. Today, in your profession ... Well, the crises will multiply as the budget goes down. You could become like one little fish, who is trying to stop a tide from going out. Your problem is you are still enthusiastic about building Mars."
"You're not?"
"I am an observer. I watch tides come and go."
The waitress, legs and all, passed by. They watched her.
"Maybe I ought to order a red. Wake myself up," Philippe muttered. "We're the only ones who care about history, you know. Mars is mostly American, in spite of what they say. Today is the only day that counts. Everything is now. Now, now, now."
Outside
, it was February on Mars. More significantly, it was summer in the southern hemisphere, the season of dust storms, triggered by the summer "warming." "Warming" in quotes, since these were still temperatures that would make a polar bear stop wanting to go fishing. Still, the sun beat as hard as it could. Invisible parcels of air, perhaps stagnating over a dark basalt flow during a momentary lapse of wind, grew warmer than usual and ascended like a hot air balloon without a bag.
During this silent summer shuffling and reshuffling of air, during these invisible ascents and descents, the light dust of the Martian surface stirred uneasily. In the afternoons, if you could hover above the unexplored mesas and secret valleys of Hellespontus, you would see the first stirrings of the dust. A formless cloud here, a twisting, typhoonlike column there. The first spindly dust devils. Then bigger ones, rising like fat Minoan columns, gathering themselves up to their full height of a kilometer or more, and then wandering off on aimless journeys like beheaded giant warriors who staggered for hours before realizing that they had to die: mindless ghosts of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Martian monsters.
On the outskirts of Mars City, as Carter and Philippe argued like Buddhist monks about how to create good karma on Mars, dust clouds swirled also across the landing pad on the outskirts of the town. But these were not summer dust devils. They were clouds kicked up by the beetlelike buses that crawled around the Phobos shuttle that had just landed.
Soon, two buses lumbered from the landing pad toward the soil-banked mounds and gleaming towers of Hellas Base. Inside the second bus, IPN correspondent Annie Pohaku watched the twisted tufts of dust picked up by the wheels of the first. They looked like little question marks, floating in the air.
The woman who had piloted the ship down from Phobos was riding in the same bus. She sat a couple of seats forward of Annie, but turned as they rumbled along toward the city's main terminal airlock. She eyed Annie carefully and identified in her shining eyes an undisguised intensity, the signs of a relative newcomer. "And how do you find Mars?" she asked.
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