Green Mars m-2

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Maya cursed the video and talked to Spencer about it. Spencer said, “Sax thinks if we’re going to pull this off we might need some weapons, if only in reserve. It seems sensible to me.”

  “What happened to the idea of a decapitation?”

  “Maybe he thinks he’s building the guillotine. Look, talk to Nirgal and Art about that. Or even Jackie.”

  “Right. Look, I want to talk to Sax. He’s got to talk to me sometime, goddammit. Get him to talk to me, will you?”

  Spencer agreed to try, and one morning he arranged a call over his private line to Sax. It was Art who answered the call, but he promised to try to get Sax to come to the line. “He’s busy these days, Maya. I like to see it. People are calling him General Sax.”

  “God forbid.”

  “Thai’s all right. They talk about General Nadia too, and General Maya.”

  “That’s not what they call me.” The Black Widow, more like, or the Bitch. The Killer. She knew.

  And Art’s squint told her she was right. “Well,” he said, “whatever. With Sax it’s kind of a joke. People talk about the revenge of the lab rats, that kind of thing.”

  “I don’t like it.” The idea of another revolution seemed to be gaining a life of its own now, a momentum independent of any real logic; it was just something they were doing, were always going to have done. Out of her control, and out of anyone else’s control. Even their collective efforts, scattered and hidden as they were, seemed not to be coordinated or conceived with any clear idea of what they were going to try to do, or why. It was just happening.

  She tried to express some of this to Art, and he nodded. “That’s history, I guess. It’s messy. You just have to ride the tiger and hold on. You’ve got a lot of different people in this movement, and they all have their own ideas. But look, I think we’re doing better than last time. I’m working on some initiatives back on Earth, negotiating with Switzerland and some people at the World Court and so on. And Praxis is keeping us really well informed about what’s going on among the metanationals on Earth, which means we won’t just get swept into something we don’t understand.”

  “True,” Maya admitted. The news and analysis packages sent up from Praxis were more thorough by far than any commercial news shows, and as the metanationals continued to drift into what was being called the metanatricide, they on Mars, in their sanctuaries and safe houses, were able to follow it blow by blow. Subar-ashii taking over Mitsubishi, and then its old foe Armscor, and then falling out with Amexx, which was working hard on breaking the United States out of the Group of Eleven; they saw it all from the inside. Nothing could have been less like the situation in the 2050s. And that was a comfort, if a very small one.

  And then there was Sax on the screen behind Art, and looking at her. He saw who it was, and said, “Maya!”

  She swallowed hard. Was she forgiven, then, for Phyllis? Did he understand why she had done it? His new face gave her no clues — it was as impassive as his old one had been, and harder to read because so unfamiliar still.

  She collected herself, asked him what his plans were.

  He said, “No plan. We’re still making preparations. We need to wait for a trigger. A trigger event. Very important. There are a couple of possibilities I’m keeping an eye against. But nothing yet.”

  “Fine,” she said. “But listen, Sax.” And then she told him everything she had been worrying about — the strength of the Transitional Authority troops, bolstered as they were by the big centrist metanats; the constant edging toward violence in the more radical wings of the underground; the feeling that they were falling into the same old pattern. And as she spoke he blinked in his old fashion, so that she knew it was really him listening under that new face — finally listening to her again, so that she went on longer than she had intended to, pouring out everything, her distrust of Jackie, her fear at being in Burroughs, everything. It was like talking to a confessor, or pleading — begging their pure rational scientist not to let things go crazy again. Not to go crazy again himself. She heard herself babbling, and realized how frightened she was.

  And he blinked in what seemed a kind of neuter, ratlike sympathy. But in the end he shrugged and said little. This was General Sax now, remote, taciturn, speaking to her from the strange world inside his new mind.

  “Give me twelve months,” he said to her. “I need twelve more months.”

  “Okay, Sax.” She felt reassured, somehow. “I’ll do my best.”

  “Thanks, Maya.”

  And he was gone. She sat there staring at the little AI screen, feeling drained, teary, relieved. Absolved, for the hour.

  So she returned to the work with a will, meeting groups almost every week, and making occasional off-the-net trips to Elysium and Tharsis, to talk to cells in the high cities. Coyote took charge of her travel, flying her across the planet in night voyages that reminded her of ‘61. Michel took charge of her security, protecting her with the help of a team of natives, including several of the Zygote ectogenes, who moved her from safe house to safe house in every city they visited. And she talked and talked and talked. It was not just a matter of getting them to wait, but also coordinating them, forcing them to agree they were on the same side. Sometimes it seemed that she was having an effect, she could see it on the faces of the people who came to listen. Other times her whole effort was devoted to applying the brakes (worn, burning) to radical elements. There were a lot of these now, and more every day: Ann and the Reds, Kasei’s Marsfirsters, the Bogdanovists under Mikhail, Jackie’s “Booneans,” the Arab radicals led by Antar, who was one of Jackie’s many boyfriends — Coyote, Dao, Rachel… It was like trying to stop an avalanche that she herself was caught up in, grasping at clumps even as she rolled down with them. In such a situation the disappearance of Hiroko began to loom as more and more of a disaster.

  The attacks of deja vu returned, stronger than ever. She had lived in Burroughs before, in a time like this — perhaps that was all it was. But the feeling was so disturbing when it struck, this profound unshakable conviction that everything had happened before in exactly this way, as ineluctably as if eternal recurrence were really true… So that she would wake up and go to the bathroom, and certainly all that had happened before in just that way, including all the stiffness and small aches and pains; and then she would walk out to meet with Nirgal and some of his friends, and recognize that it was a genuine attack and not just a coincidence. Everything had happened just like this before, it was all clockwork. Strokes of fate. Okay, she would think, ignore it. That’s reality, then. We are creatures of fate. At least you don’t know what will happen next.

  She talked endlessly with Nirgal, trying to understand him, and get him to understand her. She learned from him, she imitated him in meetings now — his bright friendly quiet confidence, which so obviously drew people to him. They both were famous, they both were talked about on the news, they both were on UNTA’s wanted list. They both had to stay off the streets now. So they had a bond, and she learned all she could from him, and she thought he learned from her as well. She-had an influence, anyway. It was a good relationship, her best link to the young. He made her happy. He gave her hope.

  But to have it all happen in the remorseless grip of an overmastering fate! The seen-again, the always-already: nothing but brain chemistry, Michel said. There was simply a neural delay or repetition, which was giving her the sensation that the present was a kind of past as well. As maybe it was. So she accepted his diagnosis, and took whatever drugs he prescribed, without complaint and without hope. Every morning and evening she opened the pocket in the container strip he prepared for her every week, and took whatever pills were in it, without asking questions. She did not lash out at him; she no longer felt the urge. Perhaps the night of the vigil in Odessa had cured her. Perhaps he had finally mixed the right cocktail of drugs. She hoped so. She went out with Nirgal to meetings, returned to the apartment under the dance studio, exhausted. And yet very often insomniac. Her health
got bad, she was sick often, digestive troubles, sciatica, chest pains… Ursula recommended another course of the gerontological treatment. Always helps, she said. And with the latest genomic mismatch scanning techniques, faster than ever. She would only have to take a week off, at most. But Maya didn’t feel like she had a week to take off. Later, she told Ursula. When this is all over.

  Some nights when she couldn’t sleep, she read about Frank. She had taken the photo from the Odessa apartment with her, and now it was stuck to the wall by her bed in the Hunt Mesa safe house. She still felt the pressure of that electrifying gaze, and so sometimes in the sleepless hours she read about him, and tried to learn more about his diplomatic efforts. She hoped to find things he had been good at to imitate, and also to identify what he had done that she thought had been wrong.

  One night in the apartment, after a tense visit to Sabishii and the community still hidden in its mound maze., she fell asleep over her lectern, which had been displaying a book about Frank. Then a dream about him woke her. Restlessly she went out to the living room of the apartment and got a drink of water, and went back and began to read the book again.

  This one focused on the years between the treaty conference of 2057 and the outbreak of the unrest in 2061. These were the years when Maya had been closest to him, but she remembered them poorly, as if by flashes of lightning — moments of electric intensity, separated by long stretches of pure darkness. And the account in this particular book sparked no feelings of recognition in her at all, despite that fact that she was mentioned fairly frequently in the text. A kind of historical jamais vu.

  Coyote was sleeping on the couch, and he groaned in some dream of his own, and woke and looked around to find the source of the light. He padded behind her on the way to the bathroom, looked over her shoulder. “Ah,” he said meaningfully. “They say a lot about him.” And he went down the hall.

  When he came back Maya said, “I suppose you know better.”

  “I know some things about Frank that they don’t, that’s for sure.”

  Maya stared at him. “Don’t tell me. You were in Nicosia too.” Then she remembered reading that, somewhere.

  “I was, now you mention it.”

  He sat down heavily on his couch, stared at the floor. “I saw Frank that night, throwing bricks through windows. He started that riot single-handed.”

  He looked up, met her stare. “He was speaking to Selim el-Hayil in the apex park, about a half hour before John was attacked. You figure it out for yourself.”

  Maya clenched her teeth and stared at the lectern, ignoring him.

  He stretched out on the couch and began to snore.

  It was old news, really. And as Zeyk had made clear, no one would ever untangle that knot, no matter what they had seen or thought they remembered seeing. No one could be sure of anything that far in the past, not even of their own memories, which shifted subtly at every rehearsal. The only memories one could trust were those unbidden eruptions from the depths, the memoires involun-taires, which were so vivid they had to be true — but often concerned unimportant events. No. Coyote’s was just one more unreliable account among all the rest.

  When the words of the text on the screen started registering again, she read on.

  Chalmers’s efforts to stop the outbreak of violence in 2061 were unsuccessful because in the end he was simply ignorant of the full extent of the problem. Like most of the rest of the First Hundred, he could never quite imagine the actual population of Mars in the 2050s, which was well over a million; and while he thought that the resistance was led and coordinated by Arkady Bogdanov, because he knew him, he was unaware of the influence of Oskar Schnelling in Korolyov, or of the widespread Red movements such as Free Elysium, or the unnamed disappeareds who left the established settlements by the hundreds. Through ignorance and a failure of the imagination, he addressed only a small fraction of the problem.

  Maya pulled back, stretched, looked over at Coyote. Was that really true? She tried to think back into those years, to remember. Frank had been aware, hadn’t he? “Playing with needles when the roots are sick.” Hadn’t Frank said that to her, sometime in that period?

  She couldn’t remember. Playing with needles when the roots are sick. The statement hung there, separated from anything else, from any context that could give it meaning. But she had the very strong impression that Frank had been aware that there was a huge unseen pool of resentment and resistance out there; no one had been more aware of it, in fact! How could this writer have missed that! For that matter how could any historian, sitting in a chair and sifting through the records, ever know what they had known, ever capture the way it had felt at the time, the fractured kaleidoscopic nature of the daily crisis? Each moment of the storm they had struggled…

  She tried to remember Frank’s face, and there came to her an image of him, hunched over miserably at a cafe table, a white coffee cup handle spinning under his feet; and she had broken the coffee cup; but why? She couldn’t remember. She clicked forward through the book on the screen, flying through months with every paragraph, the dry analysis utterly divorced from anything like what she could recall. Then a sentence caught her eye, and she read on as if a hand were at her throat, forcing her to:

  Ever after their first liaison in Antarctica, Toitovna had a hold over Chalmers that he never broke, no matter how much it damaged his own plans. Thus when he returned from Elysium in the final month before the Unrest broke out, Toitovna met him in Burroughs, and they stayed together for a week, during which it was clear to others they were fighting; Chalmers wanted to stay in Burroughs, where the conflict was at a crisis; Toitovna wanted him to return to Sheffield. One night he showed up in one of the cafes by the canal so angry and distraught that the waiters were afraid, and when Toitovna appeared, they expected him to explode. But he only sat there as she reminded him of every connection they had ever had, every debt owed, all their past together, such as it was; and finally he bowed to her wishes, and returned to Sheffield, where he was unable to control the growing violence in Elysium and Burroughs. And so the revolution came.

  Maya stared at the screen. It was wrong, wrong, wrong, all wrong — nothing like that had happened! A liaison in Antarctica? No, never!

  But she had once confronted him at some restaurant… no doubt it was possible they had been observed … so hard to say. But this book was stupid — stuffed with unwarranted speculation — not history at all. Or maybe all the histories would be like that, if one had really been there and so could judge them properly. All lies. She tried to call it back — she clenched her teeth, and stiffened, and her fingers curled as if she could dig out thoughts with them. But it was like clawing at rock. And now when she tried to remember that particular confrontation in a cafe, no visual image at all came into her mind; the phrases from the book overlaid them, She reminded him of every connection they had ever had no! Nol A figure hunched at a table, there it was, the image itself — and it finally looked up at her —

  But it was the youthful face from her kitchen wall in Odessa.

  She groaned; she began to cry; she chewed at her clenched fists and wept.

  “You okay?” Coyote said blearily from the couch.

  “No.”

  “Find something?”

  “No.”

  Frank was being erased by books. And by time. The years had passed, and for her, even for her, Frank Chalmers was becoming nothing but one tiny historical figure among many others, standing out there like a person seen through the wrong end of the telescope. A name in a book. Someone to read about, along with Bismarck, Talleyrand, Machiavelli. And her Frank … gone.

  She spent a few hours of most days going over the Praxis reports with Art, trying to find patterns and comprehend them. They were getting such great amounts of data through Praxis that they had the reverse of the problem they had had in the pre-’61 crisis — not too little information, but too much. Every day the screws tightened in a multitude of crises, and Maya often ended up
near despair. Several countries attending the UN, all of them Consolidated or Subarashii clients, requested that the World Court be abolished, as its functions were redundant. Most of the metanats immediately declared their support for this idea, and as the World Court had long ago begun as an agency of the UN, there were those who claimed the action would be legal and have some historical reason for being — but the first result was to disrupt some of the arbitrations in process, leading to fighting in Ukraine and Greece. “Who’s responsible?” Maya exclaimed to Art. “Is there anyone doing this stuff?”

  “Of course. Some metanats have presidents, and they all have executive boards, and they get together and talk things over, and decide what orders to give. It’s like Fort and the eighteen immortals in Praxis, although Praxis is more democratic than most. And then the metanat boards appoint the executive committee for the Transitional Authority, and the Authority makes some local decisions, and I could give you their names, but I don’t think they’re as powerful as the folks back home.”

  “Never mind.” Of course people were responsible. But no one was in control. It was the same on both sides, no doubt. Certainly it was true in the resistance. Sabotage, against the Vastitas ocean platforms particularly, was now pandemic, and she knew whose idea that was. She talked with Nadia about getting in touch with Ann, but Nadia just shook her head. “Not a chance. I haven’t been able to talk to Ann since Dorsa Brevia. She’s one of the most radical Reds there is.” “As always.”