Obelisk

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Diverted – yeah, OK, that’s the right word. Look, this is just a trial run. The steelworkers were keen too, to learn welding techniques in the Martian air, and so on … When it’s proved its point we will tear this prototype down and put the materials to better use.’

  ‘And that point is?’

  ‘To see how high we can build, of course. We’re still far from the tower, you don’t get a sense of scale from here. Listen: that thing is almost eight hundred metres tall, twice the height of the Cao Xi monument. Nearly three times the height of Eiffel on Earth. That good old Martian gravity. This thing is already taller than any building on Earth before the late twentieth century. Think of that! Can you feel how it draws up the eye? That’s the magical thing about Martian architecture. It baffles the Earthbound instinct.’

  ‘You erected this without my knowledge.’

  ‘Well, people live in holes in the ground here. You can get away with building almost anything you like, out in the big open Mars desert.’

  ‘You are showing this to me now. Why?’

  ‘I told you, this is a trial run. Just like the spire.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘The monument of Cao Xi, Mark 3. You need to keep expanding, Mr Mayor. My brick has filled a gap, but in future Martian steel, Martian glass, and Martian concrete, are going to be the way to do it. But why keep burrowing into the ground? What way is that to bring up a new generation? Oh, I know we need to think about shielding, but …’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Tell me you can’t guess. Tell me you aren’t inspired. I know you by now, Wei Binglin.’ Kendrick pointed to the brownish sky. ‘No more cairns or spires, no more non-functional monuments. I’m telling you we should build a place for people to live. And I’m telling you that we should build, not down – but up.’

  The chairman of the review committee, appointed directly by New Beijing on far-off Earth, was called Chang Kuo, and as the meeting came to order for its second day he regarded Wei and Kendrick solemnly. This conference room was deep underground, under the floor of the Hellas basin, which was itself eight kilometres beneath the Mars datum. Wei reflected that it would have been impossible for this place, the Chinese administrative capital, buried at the deepest point on Mars, to have been further away in spirit from what he and Kendrick were trying to build at Fire City.

  Yet the room was dominated by a hologram, sitting in the centre of this circular room, a real-time relayed image of the Obelisk, as people were calling it, an image itself as tall as a human being. The real thing was already more than a kilometre tall, a great rectangular arm of steel and glass reaching to the Martian sky. And the damage done by the recent meteorite strike was clearly visible, a neat circular puncture somewhere above the three-hundredth level: the disaster that was the reason for this review.

  The room shuddered, and Wei thought he heard a boom, deep and distant.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ Kendrick had lapsed into his native English. He looked alarmed, to Wei’s unkind satisfaction.

  Wei said, ‘It was a nuclear weapon, detonated far beneath the fragmented floor of the Hellas crater. I would not have thought that a Heroic-Generation engineer like you would have been frightened by a mere firecracker.’

  ‘Why are they setting off nukes? Oh. The terraforming experiments.’

  ‘You heard about that. Well, of course you would.’

  ‘Xue Ling showed me some of the documentation. Don’t blame her. I pushed her to leak me the stuff. Blame her pregnancy; it’s making her easier to handle.’ But his smile was secretive, reluctant.

  Wei thought he understood. Xue Ling, now twenty-eight years old, married and with child, had been campaigning to be allowed to leave Fire City – to come here, in fact, to Hellas, where she felt she could carve out a more meaningful career in administration than was possible back home. Her husband too, now a senior terraforming engineer, was having to commute to Hellas and back. It made sense in every way for Wei to allow her to go.

  Every way but one: Kendrick.

  There were other Chinese-Martian communities who were after Kendrick now, other opportunities, clandestine or otherwise, he might be tempted to pursue. Wei knew that part of Kendrick’s long-term game plan had always been to make himself indispensable, to manoeuvre himself into a position where such opportunities would turn up. But it would be disastrous for Fire City if he were allowed to leave before the tower was finished – and disastrous too for Wei himself, of course, who had become so closely identified with the project, even in the eyes of these mandarins at Hellas. So Kendrick could not be allowed to leave. How, though, to keep him?

  Xue Ling still seemed to be important to Kendrick, and therefore, for Wei, she served as a hold on him. She was also a conduit of information to Wei, information about his difficult, unpredictable, rogue of an ally. Regretfully, if Kendrick must be kept, Wei could not allow Xue Ling to leave. She was simply too useful. He assured himself that greater concerns, the good of the community as a whole, were paramount over her wishes. Besides, he told himself, it was better for Xue Ling herself, whether she knew it or not, after the chaotic start to life she had endured, to stay close to what had become her nearest thing to home: close to her adoptive father, to himself …

  The chairman, Chang Kuo, had spoken to him.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. Could you repeat that?’

  ‘I said that this is the second day of our review of the project, of this “Obelisk” as the popular media are calling it. We must come to a verdict soon as to whether to allow the project to continue.’

  Wei focused, and said carefully, ‘Yesterday we reviewed the practical value of the tower. The living space it will afford. The stimulus it has given to local industries, to the development of skills and technologies specialised to Martian conditions. It is a great challenge, and as a people we are at our best when we rise to challenges.’

  ‘Citizens have died. Its absurd vulnerability to meteorite strikes …’

  Earth’s thick atmosphere shielded the mother world from a variety of hazards. But just as Mars’s thin air was no barrier to solar ultraviolet, so it did not screen the ground from medium-sized meteorite impacts.

  Kendrick said confidently, ‘That is a problem that can be solved, with warning systems, orbital deflection, laser batteries—’

  ‘Ha! A typical Heroic-Generation answer. All at great expense, no doubt. Already the Obelisk project is distorting the whole of the regional economy. There are those who say it is a mere grandiose gesture.’

  Kendrick stood up, eliciting gasps of shock at his ill manners. ‘Grandiose? Is that what you think this is? Grandiose? Mr Chairman, the point of the Cao Xi Tower is to give this current generation a dream of their own to achieve – something more than a promise of a distant future they will never see …’ He looked at Wei for support.

  Wei stayed silent. They all looked at him now, even Kendrick, who sat down beside him. Wei felt old himself. He was only fifty-eight. He had already spent a decade of his life working with this man, this monster, Kendrick, and still he was not done.

  One of the officials spoke into the silence. ‘It was always a mistake to allow a pilot to assume a position of administrative power. The hero of the Sunflower was always liable to make some such gesture as this. Once a hero, always a hero – eh, Captain Wei? Is that your account of yourself?’

  Chang Kuo nodded, stern. ‘You have certainly bound yourself up personally to this monument, Wei Binglin. This monument, or folly.’

  ‘Of course he has,’ said Kendrick dryly. ‘But he can’t stop. We can’t stop …’

  Wei collected himself. He had to speak.

  ‘None of us can stop,’ he said now, firmly. ‘The Obelisk is known across the planet, and at home, across the Framework – even in the UN-allied nations, thanks to satellites that image it from orbit. We cannot stop. The loss of face wo
uld be too great. That is the foundation of our argument for continuing, and it runs as deep and solid as the foundations we built for the tower itself.

  ‘Now, shall we discuss how best to proceed from here?’ And he glared at them, one by one, as if daring them to contradict him.

  The word came to the two of them as they were having another long, wrangling meeting in Wei’s office, in the old Summertime Vault.

  The call came from her estranged husband, who was in Hellas, and who had in turn received a panicky call from a friend. She was heading for the top of the Obelisk. She had looked desperate as she left her apartment, on the prestigious fiftieth floor.

  So they ran, the two of them, through the underground way to the base levels of the Obelisk, chambers carved into the tower’s massive foundations. Both were in their sixties, neither as healthy as they once had been, Wei knew – he himself with an obscure cancer eating at his bones, and Kendrick limping along beside him, his oddly distorted face youthful yet slack. His expensive implants were, after decades without replacement, beginning to fail.

  At the Obelisk, Wei had a priority card that enabled him to gain access to any of the fast-ascent external elevators. They were both breathless, and stayed silent as the elevator car climbed, smooth and effortless. Soon they rose above ground level, and the car began to make its way up one glass-coated side of the building. The car seemed to crawl, despite its speed, such was the scale of the building. A tremendous view of the city, and of Mars, opened up as they climbed.

  Yet it was the Obelisk itself that captured the attention, as ever.

  As he looked up through the elevator’s clear roof, Wei saw the building’s glass face shining in the low, buttery morning sunlight of Mars, climbing on and on, a dead flat plane that narrowed to a fine line and seemed to pierce the sky itself. And in a sense it did, for the Obelisk rose above the weather. The shell was complete now, a cage of Martian steel under tension, holding concrete piles in place, all of it glassed over. It was mostly pressurised, though the labour of fitting out its interior would likely go on for years yet. To the external walls were fixed a number of elevator channels, like the one they rode, and inside, a steep staircase wound up within the pressurised hull. That was the other way to ascend the building, to climb up, like ascending a mountain.

  The tower itself reached an astounding ten kilometres into the sky, three times as tall as any conceivable building of the same materials on Earth, and over five times as tall as any building ever actually constructed there. Wei had seen simulations of the sight of it from orbit – he himself had never left the planet since stepping off the shuttle from the Sunflower. From space it was an astonishing image, slim, perfect, rising out of the chaotic landscape to claw at the sky. Even on the ground, you could see it from hundreds of kilometres away, a needle rising up from beyond the horizon.

  Ten kilometres! Why, if you laid it flat out it would take a reasonably healthy man two hours to walk its length. And the walk up the stairs, if you took it, was itself fourteen kilometres long. Mars was a small world but built on a big scale, with tremendous craters and deep valleys; but only the great Tharsis volcanoes would have dwarfed the Obelisk. All of mankind seemed to agree it was a magnificent human achievement, especially to have been constructed so early in the era of the colonisation of Mars.

  And the Obelisk had transformed the community from which it had sprung. Just as Kendrick had predicted, as a result of the forced development that had been required for the building of the tower, Fire City had become a global centre of manufacturing industry, of the production of steel and glass, even Kendrick’s venerable bricks. There was even talk of moving the planet’s administrative capital here, from the gloomy dungeons of Hellas.

  Yet there was still controversy.

  ‘I received another petition,’ Wei said, breaking the silence as they rose.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the water you use up, making your concrete.’

  He shrugged. ‘We have plenty of water coming up from the aquifer wells now. Besides, what of it? If civilisation falls on Mars, let future generations mine the wreck of the Obelisk for the water locked up in its fabric. Think of it as a long-term strategic reserve.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I should not be astounded by you any more, but I am. To think on such timescales! But have we really made much difference, despite all your arrogant bluster? Out there. What do you see?’

  Kendrick turned to look out at the Martian landscape opening up beyond the confines of the city, the horizon steadily widening.

  Beyond the walls of Mendel, they could see more crater walls, on a tremendous scale but eroded, graven with gullies, and dry valleys snaking between them. This was Terra Cimmeria, a very ancient landscape. It dated from the earliest days of the formation of the solar system, when the young worlds were battered with a late bombardment of huge rock fragments, some of them immature planets themselves. That was a beating whose scars had been eroded away on Earth, but they had survived on the moon, and on Mars. And here the cratering process had competed with huge flooding episodes, as giant underground aquifers were broken open to release waters that washed away the new crater walls, and pooled on the still-red-hot floors of the impact basins.

  Terra Cimmeria, a museum of primordial violence, had itself endured for billions of years, a crazy geological scribble. And humanity had barely begun to touch this vast, primal disorder, Obelisk or no Obelisk. Yet there was beauty here. He spied one small crater where a dune field had gathered, Martian dust shaped by the thin winds, a fine sculpture, a variation of crescents. Maybe that was the proper role of humans here, he thought. Not to shape the world, but to pick out fragments of beauty amid the violence. Beauty like the spirit of Xue Ling, perhaps, who was fleeing from him into the sky.

  But Kendrick said nothing. A mere planet, it seemed, did not impress him, save as raw material.

  They climbed through a layer of cloud, of fine water-ice particles.

  Once they were above the cloud, the ugly ground was hidden, and it was as if the Obelisk itself floated in the sky.

  For the last few hundred floors, as the tower narrowed, they had to switch elevators to a central shaft. They hurried down a corridor inhabited only by patient robots, squat cylinders, which worked on an incomplete weld. There was no carpet here, and the walls were bare concrete panels; the very air was thin and cold. At the central elevator shaft they had to don pressure suits, provided in a store inside the car itself; pressurisation was not yet guaranteed at higher levels.

  They rose now in darkness, excluded from the world.

  Wei said carefully, ‘We have not even spoken of why we are here.’

  ‘Xue Ling, you mean. Neither of us is surprised to find ourselves in this position. Be honest about that, Wei Binglin. You know, I could never …’

  ‘What? Have her?’

  ‘Not that,’ Kendrick said angrily. ‘I knew I could never tell her how I felt. Mostly because I don’t understand it myself. Do I love her? I suspect I don’t know what love is.’ He laughed. ‘My parents didn’t provide me with that implant. But she was something so beautiful, in this ugly place. I would never have harmed her, you know. Even by loving her.’

  ‘I knew that.’

  Kendrick looked at him bleakly. ‘And yet you kept her close to me. That was to control me, was it?’

  Wei shrugged. ‘Once the Obelisk was begun, you could not be allowed to leave.’

  ‘How could I leave anyhow? I’m a criminal, remember. This is a chain gang for me.’

  ‘I’ve known you a long time, Bill Kendrick. If you had wished to leave you would have found a way.’

  ‘So you nailed me in place with her, did you? But at what cost, Wei? At what cost?’

  The elevator slid to a halt. The doors peeled back to reveal a glass wall, a viewing gallery a
s yet unfinished. They were near the very top of the tower now, Wei knew, nearly ten kilometres high, and the horizon of this small world was folded, a clear curve, with shells of atmosphere visible as if seen from space. A layer of cloud draped the lower storeys of the Obelisk, concealing the ground. To the east there was a brownish smudge: possibly a dust storm brewing.

  And there, on a ledge, outside the wall of glass, was Xue Ling. She was aware of their arrival, and she turned. Wei could easily make out her small, frightened face behind her pressure suit visor. She was still only thirty-three, Wei realised, only thirty-three.

  The two men ran to the wall, fumbling with gloved hands at the glass. Wei slapped an override unit on his chest to ensure they could all hear each other.

  ‘Now you come,’ Xue Ling said bitterly. ‘Now you see me, as if for the first time in my life.’

  Kendrick looked from left to right desperately. ‘How do we get through this wall?’

  ‘What was it you wanted? You, Bill Kendrick, creating a thing of stupendous ugliness to match the crimes you committed on Earth? You, Wei Binglin, building a tower to get back to the sky from which you fell? And what was I, a token in your relationship with each other? You call me your daughter. Would you have treated your blood daughter this way? You kept me here. Even when I lost my baby, even then, and my husband wanted to go back to Hellas, even then … You never saw me. You never heard me. You never listened to me.’

  Wei pressed his open palm to the glass. ‘Ling, please. Why are you doing this? Why now?’

  Kendrick touched his arm. ‘She asked again to leave, to go to Hellas.’

  ‘She asked you?’

  ‘She wanted me to persuade you this time. I said you would forbid it. It was one refusal too many, perhaps …’

  ‘Your fault, then.’

  Kendrick snorted. ‘Do you really believe that?’

  Ling cried, ‘You never saw me! See me now!’