Green Mars m-2

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Again a disturbance in the car drew Maya out of the text. Her skin was clammy, and she was shivering slightly. Some memories never really went away, no matter how you suppressed them: despite herself Maya remembered perfectly the glass on the street, a figure on its back on the grass, the puzzled look on Frank’s face, the so different puzzlement on John’s.

  But those were officials, there at the front of the car, standing in the aisle and moving slowly down it. Checking IDs, travel documentation; and there were another two stationed at the back of the car.

  Maya tapped off her lectern. She watched the three policemen move down the car, feeling her pulse knocking hard through her body. This was new; she had never seen it before, and it seemed the others on board hadn’t either. The car was hushed; everyone watched. Anyone in the car could have had irregular ID, and that fact made for a kind of solidarity in their silence; all eyes focused on the police; no one looked around to see who might be blanching.

  The three policemen were oblivious to this observation, and almost seemed oblivious to the very people they interviewed. They joked among themselves as they discussed the restaurants of Odessa, and they moved from row to row rapidly, like conductors, gesturing for people to put their wrists up to the little reader, then cursorily checking the results, comparing for only a few seconds people’s faces to the photos called up by their IDs.

  They came to Spencer, and Maya’s heart rate picked up. Spencer (if it was Spencer) merely held up a steady hand to the reader, apparently looking straight at the seat back in front of him. Suddenly something about his hand was deeply familiar — there under the veins and the liver spots was Spencer Jackson, no doubt of it. She knew it by the bones. He was answering a question now, in a low voice. The policeman with the voice-and-eye reader held it to Spencer’s face briefly, and then they all waited. Finally they got a quick line on the reader, and moved on. Two away from Maya. Even the exuberant businessmen were subdued, eyeing each other with sardonic grimaces and raised eyebrows, as if it were ludicrous to have such measures imported into the cars themselves. No one liked this; it was a mistake to do it. Maya took heart from that, and looked out the window. They were ascending the southern side of the Sink, the train gliding up the gentle grade of the piste over low hills, each higher than the next, the train always moving at the same speed, as if moving by magic carpet, over the even-more-magic carpet of the millefleur landscape.

  They stood over her. The one closest wore a belt over his rust uniform jumper, with several instruments hanging from the belt, including a stun gun. “ID wrist please.” He wore an ID tag, with photo and dosimeter, and a label that said “United Nations Transitional Authority.” A thin-faced young emigrant of about twenty-five, though it was easier to guess that from the photo than the face itself, which looked tired. The man turned and said to the woman officer behind him, “I like the veal parmesan they do there.”

  The reader was warm on her wrist. The woman officer was observing her closely. Maya ignored the look and stared at her wrist, wishing she had a weapon. Then she was looking into the camera eye of the voice-and-eye reader. “What is your destination?” the young man asked.

  “Odessa.”

  A moment’s suspended silence.

  Then a high beep. “Enjoy your stay.” And they were off.

  Maya tried to regulate her breathing, to slow it down. The wrist readers took pulses, and if you were over 110 or so they notified the applicator; it was a basic lie detector in that sense. Apparently she had stayed under the line. But her voice, her retinas; those had never been changed. The Swiss passport identity must be powerful indeed, overriding the earlier IDs when they were consulted, at least in this security system. Had the Swiss done that, or the Sabishiians, or Coyote, or Sax, or some force she didn’t know? Had she actually been successfully identified and let go, to be tracked so that she would lead them to more of the fugitive Hundred? It seemed as likely as the idea of overmastering the big data banks — as likely or more.

  But for the moment, she was left alone. The police were gone.

  Maya’s finger knocked on the lectern, and without thinking about it she called back what she had been reading. Michel was right; she felt tough and hard, diving back into this stuff. Theories to explain the death of John Boone. John had been killed, and now she was being checked by police while traveling over Mars in an ordinary train. It was hard not to feel that there was some sort of cause and effect there, that if John had lived, it wouldn’t be this way.

  All the principal figures in Nicosia that night have been accused of being behind the assassination: Russell and Hoyle on the basis of sharp disagreements in Marsfirst policy; Toitovna on the basis of a lovers’ quarrel; and the various ethnic or national groups in town on the basis of political quarrels either real or imaginary. But certainly the most suspicion over the years has fallen on the figure of Frank Chalmers. Though he was observed to be with Toitovna at the time of the attack (which in some theories gets Toitovna called an accessory or coconspirator), his relationship with the Egyptians and Saudis in Nicosia that night, and his long-standing conflict with Boone, make it inevitable that he is often identified as the ultimate cause of Boone’s murder. Few if any deny that Selim el-Hayil was the leader of the three Arabs who eventually confessed before their suicide/ murders. But this only adds to suspicion of Chalmers, as he was a known acquaintance of el-Hayil’s. Samizdat and one-read documents are reputed to tell the story that “the stowaway” was in Nicosia, and spotted Chalmers and el-Hayil in conversation that night. As “the stowaway” is a myth mechanism by which people convey the anonymous perceptions of the common Martian, it is quite possible that such a tale expresses the observations of people who did not want to be identified as witnesses.

  May a clicked to the end.

  El-Hayil was in the late stages of a fatal paroxysm when he broke into the hotel occupied by the Egyptians and confessed to the murder of Boone, asserting that he had been the leader, but had been aided by Rashid Abou and Buland Besseisso of the Ahad wing of the Moslem Brotherhood. The bodies of Abou and Besseisso were found later that afternoon in a room in the medina, poisoned by coagulants that appeared to be self-administered or given to each other. The actual murderers of Boone were dead. Why they acted, and with whom they may have acted, will never be known. Not the first time such a situation has existed, and not the last; for we hide as much as we seek.

  Scrolling through footnotes, Maya was struck again by what a Topic this was, debated by historians and scholars and conspiracy nuts of every persuasion. With a shudder of revulsion she tapped the lectern off, and faced the double window and shut her eyes hard, trying to restore the Frank she had known, and the Boone. For years she had scarcely ever thought of John, the pain was so great; and in a different way she hadn’t wanted to think of Frank either. Now she wanted them back. The pain had become the ghost of pain, and she needed to have them back, for her own life’s sake. She needed to know.

  The “mythical” stowaway … She ground her teeth, feeling the weightless hallucinatory fear of that first sight of him, his brown face distorted and big-eyed through the glass … did he know anything? Had he really been in Nicosia? Desmond Hawkins, the stowaway, the Coyote — he was a strange man. Maya had her own particular relationship with him, but she doubted whether he would tell her much about that night.

  What is it? she had asked Frank when they heard the shouting.

  A hard shrug, a look away. Something done on the spur of the moment. Where had she heard that before? He had looked away as he said it, as if he could not bear her gaze. As if he had somehow said too much.

  The mountain ranges ringing the Hellas Basin were widest in the western crescent called the Hellespontus Montes, the range on Mars most reminiscent of Terran mountains. To the north, where the piste- from Sabishii and Burroughs crossed into the basin, the range was narrower and lower, not so much a matter of mountainous terrain as of an uneven drop to the basin floor, the land seemingly shoved to the n
orth in low concentric waves. The piste threaded its way down this hilly slope, and often it had to switchback down long ramps cut into the sides of the rock waves, each new one lower than the last. The train slowed greatly for the turns, and for many minutes at a time Maya could look out her window either straight at the bare basalt of the wave they were descending, or out over a big expanse of northwest Hellas, still three thousand meters below them: a wide flat plain, ochre and olive and khaki in the foreground, then, out on the horizon, a dirty jumble of white, winking like a broken mirror. That was the glacier over Low Point, st’U mostly frozen, but thawing more each year, with melt ponds on its surface, and deeper pods of water far below — pods which teemed with life, and occasionally broke onto the surface of the ice, or even the adjacent land — for this lobe of ice was growing fast. They were pumping water out of aquifers below the surrounding mountains onto the basin floor. The deep depression in the northwest part of the basin, where Low Point and the mohole had been, was the center of this new sea, which was over a thousand kilometers long, and at its widest, over Low Point, three hundred kilometers across. And situated in the lowest point on Mars. A situation rich with promise, as Maya had been maintaining from the very moment they had landed.

  The town Odessa had been established well up the north slope of the basin, at the — 1-kilometer elevation, where they planned to stabilize the final level of the sea. Thus it was a harbor town waiting for water, and with that in mind the southern edge of the town was a long boardwalk or corniche, a wide grassy esplanade that ran inside the tent, which was secured in the edge of a tall seawall that now stood above bare land. The view of the seawall as the train approached gave one the impression that it was a half-town, with a southern part that had split off and disappeared.

  Then the train was coasting into the town’s train station, and the view was cut off. The train stopped and Maya pulled down her bag and walked out, following Spencer. They did not look at each other, but once out of the station they went with a loose group of people to a tram stop, and got on the same little blue tram, which ran behind the corniche park bordering the seawall. Near the west end of town they both got off at the same stop.

  There, behind and above an open-air market shaded by plane trees, was a three-story apartment complex inside a walled courtyard, with young cypresses lining the side walls. Each floor of the building stepped back from the one below, so that there were balconies for the two higher levels, sporting potted trees and flower boxes hung on their railings. As she climbed the stairs up to the gate of the courtyard, Maya found the architecture of the building somewhat reminiscent of Nadia’s buried arcades; but up here in the late afternoon sun behind the market, its walls whitewashed and its shutters blue, it had the look of the Mediterranean or the Black Sea — not all that unlike some fashionable seaside apartment blocks in Terra’s Odessa. At the gate she turned to look back over the plane trees of the market; the sun was setting over the Helles-pontus Mountains to the west, and out on the distant ice, blinks of sunlight gleamed as yellow as butter.

  She followed Spencer through the garden and into the building, checked in with the concierge right after he did, got her key, and went to the apartment that had been assigned to her. The whole building belonged to Praxis, and some apartments functioned as safe houses, including hers, and no doubt Spencer’s. They got in the elevator together and went to the third floor, not speaking. Maya’s apartment was four doors down from Spencer’s. She went inside. Two spacious rooms, one with a kitchen nook; a bathroom, an empty balcony. The view from the kitchen window overlooked the balcony, and the distant ice.

  She put her bag on the bed and went back out, down to the market to buy dinner. She bought from vendors with carts and umbrellas, and sat on a bench placed on the grass bordering the corniche, eating souvlakia and drinking from a little bottle of ret-sina, watching the evening crowd make their leisurely promenade up and down the corniche. The closest edge of the ice sea looked to be about forty kilometers away, and now all but the easternmost part of the ice was in the shadow of the Hellespontus, a dusky blue shading in the east to alpenglow pink.

  Spencer sat down beside her on the bench. “Nice view,” he remarked.

  She nodded and continued eating. She offered him the bottle of retsina, and he said, “No thank you,” holding up a half-eaten tamale. She nodded and swallowed.

  “What are you working on?” she asked when she was done.

  “Parts for Sax. Bioceramics, among other things.”

  “For Biotique?”

  “For a sister company. She Makes Seashells.”

  “What?”

  “It’s the name of the company. Another Praxis division.”

  “Speaking of Praxis …” She glanced at him.

  “Yes. Sax wants these parts pretty bad.”

  “For weapons?”

  “Yes.”

  She shook her head. “Can you keep him on a leash for a while?”

  “I can try.”

  They watched the sunlight drain out of the sky, flowing westward like a liquid. Behind them lights flicked on in the trees over the market, and the air began to chill. Maya felt grateful that there was an old friend sitting beside her, in comfortable silence. Spencer’s behavior toward her made a telling contrast to Sax; in his friendliness was his apology for his recriminations in the car after Kasei Vallis, and his forgiveness for what she had done to Phyllis. She appreciated it. And in any case he was one of the primal family, and it was nice to have that during yet another move. A new start, a new city, a new life — how many was it now?

  “Did you know Frank very well?” she said.

  “Not really. Not like you and John knew him.”

  “Do you think … do you think he could have been involved in John’s murder?”

  Spencer continued to look out at the blue ice on the black horizon. Finally he took the retsina bottle from the bench beside her, drank. He looked at her. “Does it matter anymore?”

  She had spent many of the early years working in the Hellas Basin, convinced as she had been that its low elevation was going to make it an obvious site for settlement. Now the land just above the — 1-kilometer contour was being settled in places all around the basin, places she had been among the first to explore. She had her old notes on them in her AI, and now, as Ludmilla Novosibir-skaya, she got to put them to use.

  Her job was in the administration of the hydrological company that was flooding the basin. The team was part of a conglomerate of organizations developing the basin, among them the Black Sea Economic Group’s oil companies, the Russian company that had tried to resuscitate the Caspian and Aral seas, and her company, Deep Waters, which was Praxis-owned. Maya’s job involved coordinating the many hydrological operations in the region, so again she got to see the heart of the Hellas project, just as in the old days when she had been the driving force behind the entire thing. This was satisfying in various ways, some of them strange — for instance her town Low Point (a mistaken siting, she had to admit) was out there getting drowned deeper every day. That was fine: drown the past, drown the past, drown the past…

  So she had her work, and her apartment, which she filled with used furniture and hanging kitchen implements and potted plants. And Odessa proved to be a pleasant town. It was built principally of yellow stone and brown tile, and placed on a part of the slope of the basin rim that curved inward more than usual, so that every part of town looked down on the center of the dry waterfront, and every part had a great view over the basin to the south. The lower districts were devoted to shops and business and parks, the higher ones to residential neighborhoods and garden strips. The town lay just above 30° latitude in the south, and so she had gone from autumn to spring, with the big hot sun shining down the stepped streets of the upper town, and melting away the winter’s snow from the ice mass’s edge, and the peaks of the Hellespontus Mountains on their western horizon. A handsome little town.

  And about a month after her arrival, Michel came d
own from Sabishii, and took over the apartment right next door to hers. At her suggestion he installed a connecting door between their two living rooms, and after that they wandered between the two apartments as if in one, living their lives in a conjugal domesticity which Maya had never experienced before, a normality that she found very restful. She did not love Michel passionately, but he was a good friend, a good lover, and a good therapist, and having him around was like having an anchor inside her, keeping her from flying away into exhilarations of hydrology or revolutionary fervor, also from sinking too deep into terrible abysses of political despair or personal repugnance. Cycling up and down the sine wave of her moods was a helpless oscillation that she hated, and anything Michel did in the way of amplitude modulation she appreciated. They kept no mirrors in the apartments, which along with clomi-pramine helped to dampen the cycle. But the bottoms of pots, and the windows at night, gave her the bad news if she cared to have it. As often enough she did.

  With Spencer down the hall, the building had just the slightest feeling of Underhill to it, reinforced occasionally by visitors from out of town, using their apartment in its capacity as safe house. When others of the First Hundred came through, they would go out and walk the waterless waterfront, looking at the ice horizon and exchanging the news like old folks anywhere. Marsfirst, led by Kasei and Dao, was becoming more and more radical. Peter was working on the elevator, drawn like a moth back to its moon. Sax had stopped his mad ecotage .campaign for the time being, thank God, and was concentrating on his industrial effort in Vishniac mohole, building surface-to-space missiles and the like. Maya shook her head at this news. It was not military might that would do it for them; on that issue she sided with Nadia and Nirgal and Art. They would need something else, something she could not yet visualize. And this gap in her thinking was one of the things that would start her downward in the sine wave of her moods, one of the things that made her mad.