Martian Rainbow

by Robert L. Forward

  "Hi!" Red said loudly to attract his attention, and when he came to the counter she leaned forward to shake his hand firmly. "Red Storm," she said. "They say you can set up a bank account for me."

  "Mike," the bartender said. "You don't need a separate account here. All the bases on Mars are linked. You can use your account at your home base."

  "Don't have a home base," Red said. "Just dropped in from the belt to do some high-gravity prospecting. Will have to buy some supplies. Got a few bucks on Earth. What's the procedure to get them out here?"

  "Got an eye-card?" Mike asked.

  "Sure." She reached into her grimy, well-worn, pale green coveralls and pulled out a small wallet. Peering down into it, she pulled out a silver-colored card. As she looked up, she caught Mike's eyes roving over her face and hair. He had that intense, bemused look of a man that hadn't seen an unattached good-looking woman in a long while. Suddenly flustered, she blushed, then brushing ineffectually at her unruly mop and, unable to look him in the eyes, she pushed the card slowly across the bar. Mike looked down at it and his eyes popped to attention.

  "Wheeoo ..." he whistled softly. "I've heard about these before, but never saw one." He lifted the heavy, metal card and his eyes widened further. "Real platinum ..."

  He put the eye-card in the scanner and raised the wand. She obediently leaned forward and opened her right eye wide as he waved the infrared beam over the beautiful blue-green iris.

  "Well, the card says it's you, Octavia," Mike said, looking at the scanner display.

  "Red!" she snapped, suddenly glaring.

  Mike raised both hands in surrender. "Okay! Red it is," he said agreeably. He glanced again at the scanner. "The card number isn't on the wanted list, so you're good for a thousand instantly. Heck, the card by itself is worth a thousand. An account transfer will take about half an hour because of the time delay in the Earth comm link. How much do you want shifted?"

  "I'll probably have to lease a crawler and I'll want to top off my H-bar tanks before I leave, so make it a hundred million U.S. to start," she said thoughtfully. "What does that amount to here?"

  "A hundred million! That's a million spiders!" Mike spluttered.

  "Can't make money without spending money," Red said, unconcerned. "Is that what they call the local money here—spiders?"

  "Spider is the local slang here at Boring. The usual name for the Mars one-dollar coin is the viking, since it was a picture of the Viking lander on it. How much pocket cash do you want?"

  "I'll take a full thousand. Make most of it large bills."

  "Sorry." Mike opened his cash drawer with a key. "Bills wear out. Hope you've got big pockets." He took out five stacks of coins from the racks in the drawer and piled up the colorful graduated stacks one by one in front of her.

  "Nine blue polars for nine hundred dollars, nine green olys for ninety dollars, nine yellow vikings for nine dollars, nine orange potatoes for ninety cents, and ten reds for ten cents—one thousand Mars dollars even."

  "Pretty," Red said, picking up an oly and admiring the intricate bas-relief carving of the Mount Olympus volcano. She shoveled the money into a pocket and, clinking slightly, stood up.

  "I'm going to want a room tonight," she said. "The bunk on my ship isn't designed for high-gee sleep. Does this place have a hotel?"

  "The base director's office will assign a dorm room to you. Three stories straight up," Mike said, pointing. He leaned forward to put his elbows on the counter and raised his eyebrow at her. "But you don't have to bother with that. Why don't you just sleep at my place tonight?"

  "Look!" Red said, clouding up like a thunderstorm. She pointed a finger at him. "Let me get one thing clear at the start. I don't fool around, and I always pay my own way ... with cash!"

  Mike raised both his hands once again in surrender. "Sure, Red. I understand."

  Red turned and clanked her way over to the stairwell to the offices above.

  NIGHT CAME to Boreal Base, and when Red returned to the Bore Hole, there were already a few customers there, sipping Mike's homemade brew while waiting for the dinner serving at the lab cafeteria to start. One of them, too hungry to wait, was gnawing away at a plate of pickled minipig feet and hard-boiled bantam eggs he had selected from the little deli Mike ran at one end of the bar. Red now wore clean, well-worn coveralls, dark green this time. Her hair hung in a shoulder-length mop of limp, rusty ringlets—clean, but still damp from the welcome hot shower. She smiled and waved at Mike—their past little run-in forgotten—and clinked her way to the nearest table.

  "Hi!" she said, shoving out a hand. "Red Storm. Join you?"

  "Sure!" one of the men said, starting to get up.

  "Siddown," Red said, pushing on his shoulder and grabbing a chair. "Mike!" she called to the bartender. "A round of drinks here ... and see what the boys at the next table will have."

  More people came in, most of them men, and Red kept introducing herself and buying drinks until she finally cornered her target. Dinnertime came and the men at her table started to get up to leave.

  "Why don't you come to the cafeteria with us," one of them said. "Only costs visitors two spiders for a good meal. We're having catfish and fries tonight—better than Mike's pig feet."

  "I just may," Red said, putting a restraining hand on the man next to her. "But why don't you five go ahead? I want to talk to Viktor some more about the critter he found."

  Viktor, with three beers on an empty stomach and a pretty woman paying attention to him, was feeling on top of the world. As soon as the others had left, Red got serious.

  "I've made arrangements with the base director to lease a crawler with three techs to run it around the clock," Red said. "I've got a microwave sounder to scan under the ice for objects and a coring rig to get samples. I've got a fossil hunting license from the governor of Mars and an agreement with the director of the Sagan Institute that I can sell what I find to the highest bidder, once the scientists have had a chance to study it.

  "But I need someone that knows their way around the ice cap, someone who can tell me where the ancient ice beds have been uncovered, so I spend my time prospecting in the best places." She poked him in the chest with a finger. "Everyone tells me you're the expert. How about taking an unpaid vacation from the institute and working for me? Name your own fee."

  "I don't know," Viktor said, uncertain. "I'm still editing the last volume on the Lineup findings."

  "You can work on it in the crawler," Red suggested. "We'll be spending most of our time either traveling from one spot to another or doing slow search spirals. How about it?"

  "I guess that will work ..." Viktor replied, still uncertain.

  "How much do you want?"

  "I don't know ..."

  "Let's make it a thousand a day," Red said. "A sol," she corrected herself.

  "A thousand!" Viktor said in a whisper.

  Oops ... Red said to herself. Guessed a little too high. Well, if you want the top, pay the top.

  "Sure!" she said out loud. "A thousand Mars dollars per sol. Okay?" She held out her hand.

  "Okay!" Viktor grabbed the thin hand and shook it vigorously. He got up, wavering a little. "Shall we go eat now?" he asked, pointing the way to the cafeteria.

  "You'd better pack, instead," she replied. "The techs say if we leave this evening, we can get to the site of the finding at dawn tomorrow." She grabbed him by the arm and headed for the dormitory wing.

  "Lead me to your room, and I'll tell you about my plans while you pack. We'll have dinner on the crawler while the techs drive. I supplemented the usual crawler food selection with some items from the larder on my spaceship. We have five jars of sterlet caviar, six bottles of Stolichnaya Vodka, four tins of ..."

  THE LONG spring dragged on as Mars climbed slowly out of the Sun's gravitational well on its way to aphelion. It took a long time coming, but finally the twenty-seven weeks of spring were over and it was Independence Sol again. The governor of Mars and de facto Mayor of Olym
pia was leaning over Gus' desk, his badge of office, a violet thousand-Mars-dollar "globe" coin in a silver holder, dangling from around his neck on a rainbow-colored ribbon some woman had donated from her personal baggage allowance stores.

  Gus knew the picture on the rare coin well—a beautifully detailed bas-relief map of the northwest hemisphere of Mars—the north polar spiral pattern at the top, Olympus Mons lifting its peak above the west horizon, the three volcanoes of Tharsis Ridge prominent near it, and the Mariner Valley stretching across the lower middle from horizon to horizon. Gus had the only other thousand-Mars-dollar coin ever minted in his desk. He often took it out when he was thinking through some tough administrative problem and used it to go through the exercises designed to maintain the dexterity of the stubs on his left hand.

  "The guys have it all figured out, Gus," Chris said. "We'll bring the beam off Max MacFadden's materials diagnostics bench, send it out through the lab door, down the corridor to the southwest hub, up the light well, then along the ceiling of the ground floor corridor, through the window of the airlock into the commons, right into Seichi Kiyowara's lasermonium, and—bang! Multicolor laser fireworks for Independence Sol all over the inside of the Boston Commons dome!"

  "I don't know," Gus said, shaking his head and looking concerned. "That diagnostic laser is powerful enough to blast holes in rocks. I don't like the idea of having that powerful a beam bouncing all over the institute."

  "Come on, Gus. It'll be Independence Sol. Everybody will be on holisol anyway and we'll just lock off those corridors. Max has fixed his laser modulator so that the output beam has a large diameter that won't cause any damage and can be transmitted over those distances without loss. Seichi's tied in the laser frequency control on Max's bench to his jury-rigged harmonium-vibrator keyboard so he has control of the color and rep rate as well as the position on the dome."

  "It should be spectacular!" Gus agreed, leaning back. "Sure. You can use Max's laser for the fireworks show."

  "Great! Can I count on you for a speech sometime during the ceremonies?"

  "Isn't that your job?" Gus replied. "One of the reasons I didn't want to be considered for governor was that I wanted to spend less time attending meetings and giving speeches, and more time doing research." He waved at a screen full of messages awaiting his decision or reply. "Although, being institute director, it doesn't always turn out that way."

  Chris' face lost its boyish glee and turned pensive, almost sad. "I'd really like to have you give us a pep talk, Gus. It's our first Independence Sol and we're all a little concerned."

  "About what? Things are going fine here."

  "Funny things are happening on Earth," Chris said. "People here are wondering how that will affect our support from Earth in the future."

  "Oh," Gus groaned, forced to think about things that he tried not to think about. "My brother ..."

  WHEN THE first news stories about Alexander becoming the Infinite Lord of the Church of the Unifier had come in from Earth, the staff at the Sagan Institute had made jokes about it.

  "Where's your golden tunic, Gus?"

  But after Alexander had finished his world tour and the Church of the Unifier started to grow, Alexander's success scared people and the jokes stopped. It got really serious when Alexander announced his candidacy for president of the United States in the upcoming elections, with the widely popular Diane "Di" Perkins as his running mate. They had formed a new "Unification" party dedicated to unifying all the disparate parties, people, and cultures of the U.S. under Alexander's banner of the vertical infinity symbol.

  Alexander's speeches over Ron's captive television channels were sent to Mars on the laser comm link along with all the rest of the television channels. Fortunately, they seemed to have lost their ability to persuade by the time they got to Mars, and the Church of the Unifier made no converts there. Either it was the generally higher intelligence level of the average inhabitant of Mars, or more likely the harsh reality of a life of hard physical and intellectual activity on a hostile planet.

  The latest crew rotation ship from Earth, however, had brought a number of Unies—two scientists and five techs. It was weird to see them carrying out their normal duties—Gus had no complaints about their competence or work habits—while all the time, through nanodisks in their Caps of Contact, their left eyes were feeding their right brains a continuous replay of Alexander and his messages. Even more appalling was that lately, in any crowd scene shown on normal network television, more than a third of the people in the crowd were wearing the multicolored Caps of Contact. Even a significant number of those running for congressional seats in the upcoming elections wore their caps while on the stomp, trying to ride into office on Alexander's coattails.

  "I just had my third 'Dear John' case," Chris said. "Only this time it was a 'Dear Gladys'. Gladys Polatkin's husband has divorced her because she wouldn't come back and join the Church of the Unifier with him. Not only that, he sold their house, emptied their joint savings accounts, and gave it all to the Church."

  "She's a tech on the Sagan Institute staff," Gus said, bewildered. "Why didn't she come to me?"

  "Can't you guess?" Chris replied quietly.

  "She's probably furious with Alex," Gus admitted. "It must be all she can do to keep from throttling his carbon copy."

  Chris came forward once again to lean his tall, lanky frame on Gus' desk, his face still serious. "You're our hero, Gus. We need you. Come out on Independence Sol and let us hear the real you. Give us some hope. Give us some inspiration. Give us a future to look forward to."

  THE INDEPENDENCE Sol ceremonies and laserworks were over, and it was now just past midnight on Sunday of Week 50, the first week of summer. Seichi Kiyowara was still going strong on the lasermonium, but the music was now soft and dreamy, and the multicolored laser beams waltzed smoothly in spirals around the inside of the darkened dome of the Boston Commons. Gus and Tanya were sharing a large tarp with Chris and his mob of friends. Gus had his head in Tanya's lap, and she was running her fingers through his hair while he looked at the colorful display on the domed ceiling. Chris had taken off his governor's medallion and was sipping a glass of home-brew hop-less beer he had bought from an enterprising vendor who had convinced a few handfuls of northern Scotland barley to grow in a makeshift greenhouse.

  "That was just the right speech, Gus," Chris said. "It helped for you to remind people that the Earth had gone through periods of religious fanaticism before, and even if religious fanatics did take over some countries, like Iran in the 1980s, the checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution would keep any religious group from doing the same in the U.S."

  "Yeah, and remember: Mars is an independent territory and not part of the U.S.," Gus said. "I'd like to see the Russians come back here in force, and other nations, too, so we're less dependent on support from the U.S. Congress."

  "Well," Chris said, ostentatiously getting out his governor's medallion and slipping the rainbow-colored ribbon back over his neck, "as governor of the sovereign and independent Territory of Mars—I shall invite them."

  "Great idea!" Gus said, rolling his head out of Tanya's lap and resting on one elbow to look at him. "Since ninety-five percent of the Lab budget comes from the U.S., I've been hesitant to make any overtures to the Russians since the U.S. is technically still at war with them along the Baltic front because of their invasion of the Baltic republics after the Neocommunist takeover of Soviet Russia."

  "The Territory of Mars is not at war with Russia," Chris said. "They're more than welcome—just bring money."

  "And I can guarantee adequate funds to support your personal research if anyone is so politically stupid as to try to cut them off," Gus assured.

  "I'll do it day after tomorrow, on Monday," Chris said, looking at his watch. "Oops—past midnight. I'll do it tomorrow."

  "Past midnight? Time to reset." Gus lay on his side and fiddled with buttons on his wristwatch. "Damn!" he cursed, sitting up and taking off his watch
so that he could manipulate the buttons better. "Got it wrong. Now let's see, subtract forty minutes and add twenty-five seconds ..." He finally got the watch reset and put it back on his arm. "We've got to do something about this thirty-nine-minute, thirty-five-second set-back-every-night nonsense!" He turned to Chris. "Has anything come of your contest for a new clock system to subdivide the Martian sol?"

  "Got lots of suggestions. But nothing as clean as the calendar system we adapted from the Russians."

  "What were the best clock suggestions?" Gus asked.

  "The simplest one was to adjust our watches so that they run 2.7 percent slow. But that brought a storm of protest from the scientists. You would think the second was their god from the defense they put up. 'A second is a second is a second—throughout all space and time,' one said." Chris paused to grin and take a sip of beer. "I reminded him of the slowdown of time near black holes and he shut up. The trouble is, most modern watches are so accurate when made, they don't have a 2.7 percent adjustment in range. We would have to have a new chip designed, and if we are going to do that, we should consider other options that save the second for the scientists.

  "I also got one from somebody who must have labored for days over it. It has twenty-four Martian hours, called maurs, but the maurs have eighty-six Martian minutes, or marmins, and the marmins have forty-three seconds—with the Martian second exactly equal to the Earth second. This results in a clock sol of 88,752 seconds, twenty-three and a quarter seconds less than the physical sol of 88,775 and a quarter seconds. There doesn't seem to be any other combination of prime factors around 88,775 that does any better. Close, but not close enough, since it would add up to over four maurs over the Martian year.

  "The one that seems to be the best is a compromise between commerce and science, but it looks like it was designed by a congressional committee trying to meet a holiday recess deadline."

  "Most successful compromises do," Gus said, rolling back to put his head in Tanya's lap again. "Let's hear the gory details."