Moving Mars (60 page)

Were responsible.

Theyll put you in a pillory, Cassie. I wish I could share it with you. Stephen will, and the others. Im taking the easy way.

Charles, no.

Times up.

I did not even feel the potential, and that may have been why he spoke to mebecause that last, final twitch of the toe was the hardest, the worst.

The images projected into my eyes and into my head suddenly hurt abominably. None of it made any sense, all the messages and tags and labels scrambled, all the armillaries blown apart. I could not translate what I saw. The interpreter cut me offleaving me in neutral, toneless darkness, and Leander pushed the bands away from my head and the projectors from my eyes.

Charles jerked on his couch, grinning horribly with clenched teeth. I rose from my couch and went to his side. Confusion and shouting from the gallery and around the lab; for the moment, everyone seemed to have forgotten us.

Were there! Hergesheimer called out. My God, were actually there!

Only then did Charles relax. His head lolled, eyes shivering back and forth in their sockets. I cradled his head as Leander disconnected the optical leads. The medical arbeiters pushed forward then, through a sudden crowd, and took over, lifting Charles onto a stretcher.

I squatted on the floor beside his empty couch, dazed; we had done it. Charles had done it.

Hergesheimer walked before a vid image of the new system, pointing out stars as if this were his own triumph. Pictures of the new sun popped up around the lab.

Leander lifted me to my feet with strong hands and held me by the shoulders.

Are you all right? he asked.

I nodded. Charles?

I think he pushed it, Leander said. Well see

The first nine hours of the first day in the New System I slept in my quarters. I came awake when Hergesheimer, Leander, Abdi and Wachsler announced themselves at my door. Leander was solicitous.

Are you feeling stronger? he asked.

Well enough, I answered. I felt as if I could sleep another hundred years, but at least I was functional.

Wachslers engineers had erected a transparent dome on the surface and built a platform for us to walk on. I was pushed to the front of the first group of fifty, still expected to lead the way, and in crowded shifts we took an elevator to the central emergency exit, rose to the new airlock, and stepped out under a new sky.

Leander guided Charles in a wheelchair, attended by compact medical abeiters. I held Charless hand as we stood under the billowing, crystal-clear dome, but he responded only with a slight squeeze of my fingers.

The new sun seemed only slightly larger, though Mars in fact orbited eighty million kilometers closer. Twilight grew in the east. The suns disk slipped below the horizon, its bright, pearly, youthful corona flared and went away, and with nightfall came another glory.

Our eyes adjusted slowly. Minutes passed before we could see the depths of color, the promise of this new garden of suns. Flowers of nebula all around, rose and violet and deep lilac and faint wisps of spring green and daffodil yellow, and within them, the blurred faces of infant stars.

I kneeled beside Charless chair and took his hand again. He turned toward me, looked directly at me. Something lingered in his eyes, in his expression, to give me a little hope. I touched his face with my fingers and he flinched back, cheek muscles tightened. Then he relaxed.

Do you know whats happening, Charles? I asked him.

Settled down, he whispered, eyes straying again.

You brought us here, I said. For better or for worse, but it feels safe. That must be better.

Mm hmmm, he murmured.

Were looking at the New System. Its nighttime. We can see the stars, and theyre beautiful.

Good, he said.

Do you understand?

Yes, he said, nodding. Too much.

The quiet that followed our movestunned realization, adjustment, and recoveryapplied, it seemed, as much to Mars as the Martians.

No moons rose over Mars.

The threat of the locusts faded day by day as more machines wandered into our defenses and were shredded, or their energy and purpose died on the cold dry sands.

With Many Hills gone, and Ti Sandra and much of the legislature dead, there was no government, no Republic. Large stations naturally became the centers of Martian social and political life. Martians talked vaguely of returning to normal, but the instinctive pattern of society was the family, the station, the Binding Multiple; nothing else had yet had chance to take root.

At first, millions of Martians had difficulty even understanding what had happened to them. They could not conceive of a force so massive, a conspiracy so powerful, as to tear the planet away from the Old Sun. As the reality seeped inechoed across the ex net, reaffirmed by scientists and pundits trusted within the smaller communitiesshock replaced disbelief, and then indignation.

The evidence of Earths assaults on Mars seemed far away from everyday life. Destroyed stations had no voice, of course, and scarred territories, hundreds of millions of hectares of scorched sand, did not seem reason enough for so drastic a move.

Shock ruled. Families made alarmed and angry judgments, and those judgments were passed along the ex net. Committees formed to investigate, argued with each other, and eventually the committees became a kind of ad hoc judicial system, and that system made inquiries.

What at first was called the Escape began to be called the Retreat, then the Rout, and finally the Shame. We could have stayed, some said, and used our new power to fight Earth on its own terms. Surely a few billion Earth citizens would have been fair exchange for keeping Mars independent within the Solar System

Homesickness of the most extreme kind added to the miseries.

The Republic, despite the best efforts of the surviving government, was quickly being replaced by something worse than anarchypassionate mob rule, directed by untutored but skilled opportunists.

The mob was spurred on by Mars itself. Mars found its voice, and screamed its own pain.

The first great quake rumbled south of Ascraeus. Three stations tumbled to ruin, and one split asunder as a crevice formed between Pavonis and Ascraeus. The crevicein later years to be called the New Tharsis Riftgrew in four weeks from a few meters to over a thousand kilometers. The echoes of this new stretching of the crust rebounded. Mars rang like a struck gong.

Within Preamble, the areologistsled by a frantic and inspired Faoud Abditried to track the course of the new Martian tectonic order without satellites, relying entirely upon reports sent across the ex net. But the ex net itself was fragmented as links were broken, repaired, and broken again. Our nano resources were stretched past their limits.

From Kaibab, volunteer crews flew shuttles along Marineris, charting the changes, taking on fuel and supplies at those intact stations willing to cooperate, and proceeding across the Tharsis Bulge. Elevation changes of a few dozen meters were common. In some places, changes of a hundred meters were noted.

The Tharsis Bulge, some predicted, would subside within a hundred yearsold years.

Mars orbited the New Sun with a period of three hundred and two days.

On the opposite side of Mars, narrow, linear ridges appeared, thousands of kilometers long, aligned in great arcs like waves frozen in stone. More stations found their tunnels in jeopardy and had to be evacuated.

Wachslers contingency plans were enacted, but often too late. For this of course I was blamed. To have pushed Mars into such an extremity, without adequate planning, seemed a horrible blunder; the word crime was not too strong.

On my orders, the remaining Olympians disassembled the tweakers and carried them away from Kaibab to secure storage elsewhere. Some of the shipments were seized by factions who laid claim to them. No single faction, thankfully, could do anything with what they had. No one understood. The Olympians fell silent, even under threat.

Some were imprisoned.

I spent much of my time flying from station to station, touring quake sites and trying to provide solace, meeting with the new unsympathetic committees. Each and every Martian had become a refugee, even if they still had their lifelong familiar four walls around them.

And Martians were afraid. In station after station, they asked when we would go Hometo the Solar Systemand when I told them, probably never, many wept in anger and despair.

Some supported me, but not many.

Mars, on its surface and below, suffered madness.

When water poured from the northern scarps of Olympus and flooded Cyane Sulci, damaging the labs where my husband had worked to make the mother cysts bloom, I flew in the last Presidential shuttle, on my last official tour of a disaster area. Dandy accompanied me, and Stephen Leander. We traveled first to UMS, spending the night and refueling there; then we proceeded to the sulci.

Something had come awake within the huge volcano, liberating a vast subarean mineral aquifer. The water boiled from the northern rapes, some of it coursing into the sulci, flooding the hundreds of kilometers in between to a depth of several meters. The water, meeting age-old flopsand and sizzle, liberated huge quantities of bound carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Lakes of fizzing mud bubbled, churned, and then froze. We flew across this dark, thickly clouded terrain, observing new islands in the new mud oceans.

Only the southern lowlands and valleys of the Cyane Sulci had been flooded, of course. But the lab had been positioned in one such valley, and the containment domes had been destroyed, leaving four mother cysts open to the new skies of Mars.

My husbands colleagues met us. Dr. Schovinski, Ilyas assistant, extended cordial greetings in the makeshift airlock.

It is proverbial, Schovinski said, leading Dandy and Leander and me to a small room where tea and a crude lunch was being served. We lose most of our buildings and tunnels, nearly all of the domes, and yet The experiment is a success. What you have done is controversial, dear Madam President, but from this scientist, all I can say is thank you!

We ate quickly and Schovinski showed us through a shored-up and still-damp tunnel to the lab where fossil mother cysts had once been prepared for experiments in the domes. The cyst cradles here were empty. Weve moved them all outside, Schovinski explained. If only Ilya could have seen this!

We put on pressure suits and walked into the open. Beneath the brighter skies, filled with high, swirling clouds of ice crystals, the floods had pushed the containment domes into mounds of glittering scrap. The carefully prepared soil beds had been scoured, leaving deep ruts and gullies, and in these gullies, beneath a thin layer of ice rime that gathered every evening and dissipated by noon, thick brown shoots rose two and three meters, forming fan-shaped leaves at their tips.

Schovinski urged me into a gully about a meter deep. He took my gloved hand and slapped it against the trunk of a shoot; rising from congealed and vitrified slime. The slime poured from a cracked mother cyst six meters away.

First come the aqueduct bridges, Schowinski said. Then, we assume, follow other forms. First the young ecos manages its water supply, then it tries to complete its blooming.

From one advanced shoot, five meters tall and two meters thick at the base, four fan-shaped leaves had sprouted, spread wide now in the bright light of the New Sun. A translucent green globe as big as a watermelon hid in the shadow of the largest leaf.

Even before Schovinski told me, I knew what this was. In time, the fruit would grow huge, and serve as one of many reservoirs for the aqueducts. It seemed an eternity ago that Charles had guided me into one such buried and fossilized globe.

I resolved he would see this someday, when he was ready.

We spent several hours in the open, and even experienced a light flurry of snow. The brown shoots gave me a sharp, high joy, and I enthused over them like a little girl, trying to live this for Ilya as well as myself.

When we returned to the surviving tunnels, we heard from concerned lab assistants that half a dozen shuttles had arrived from Amazonis. Dandys intuition kicked in and he quickly hurried me toward our own shuttle, but too late; we were met by a solid wall of well-armed citizens.

Schovinskis indignation meant nothing to the vigilantes. The time had come. They arrested me and charged me with half a dozen crimes, highest among them treason. Dandy and Leander were bound hand and foot like lambs before slaughter; the grim-faced mob, all men, subjected me to the lesser indignity of having my hands sticky-roped.

It had happened to me before.

So died the Federal Republic of Mars.

I have drawn the limits of my story and will stay with them. All that I have written deals with moving Mars, the whys and hows, and my role in this event. What comes after I would just as soon forget.

Writing in prison is much overrated.

I do not ask for forgiveness, or even for fair judgment. In a way, I have received my reward. I do beg however that Charles Franklin be treated gently, as well as all of the Olympians held under arrest.

Because of them, Mars still exists and would-be-governments can still struggle and argue and accuse.

When all the judgments are made and my punishment settled, I will think of these things: a trunk, a leaf, a green and glittering globe. Children will be born who remember nothing of the Old Sun. The new bright-flowered skies will be home for themfor you, whom I hope and pray will read this story. I see you playing in the shadow of the bridges of Old Mars, your skin revealed to the air, a hundred, a thousand years from now. For you there will be no time, no distance, no limits; nothing but what you will.

Do better than your elders. You will have to; the power is yours to command.

Afterview

by Dane Johansen, Ph.D.

Its been my privilege to edit this new text edition of Casseia Majumdars memoir. Even today, Majumdars life and actions provoke controversywitness the recent attempt by Old System Advocates to impose their own notes and comments on all versions of Moving Mars. That attempt was squelchedbut it points to the simmering angers still felt by many Martians.