Red Mars (24 page)

He climbed out of the lander’s hatch about twenty minutes later, and stood upright on the top step, looking around. He descended the staircase confidently, and once on the ground bounced experimentally on the tips of his toes, took a few steps, then spun around, arms wide. Nadia had a sudden sharp memory of how it had felt, that hollow sensation. Then he fell over. She hurried over to him, and he saw her and stood and made straight for her and tripped again across the rough Portland cement. She helped pull him back to his feet, and they met in a hug and staggered, him in a big pressurized suit, her in a walker. His hairy face looked shockingly real through their faceplates; the video had made her forget the third dimension and all the rest that made reality so vivid, so real. He banged his faceplate lightly against hers, grinning his wild grin. She could feel the stretch of a similar smile on her face.

He pointed at his wrist console and switched to their private band, 4224, and she did the same.

“Welcome to Mars.”

Alex and Janet and Roger had come down with Arkady, and when they were all out of the lander they climbed into the open carriage of one of the Model Ts, and Nadia drove them back to base, over the wide paved road at first, and then shortcutting through the Alchemists’ Quarter. She told them about each building they passed, aware that they already recognized them all. Suddenly she was nervous, remembering what it had looked like to her after the trip to the pole. They stopped at the garage lock and she led them inside. There it was another family reunion.

Later that day Nadia led Arkady around the square of vaulted chambers, through door after door, room after furnished room, all twenty-four of them, and then out into the atrium. The sky was a ruby color through the glass panels, and the magnesium struts gleamed like tarnished silver.

“Well?” Nadia said at last, unable to stop herself: “What do you think?”

Arkady laughed and gave her a hug. He was still in his spacesuit, his head looking small in the open neck hole; he felt padded and bulky, and she wanted him out of it.

“Well, some of it is good and some of it is bad. But why is it so ugly? Why is it so sad?”

Nadia shrugged, irritated. “We’ve been busy.”

“So were we on Phobos, but you should see it! We’ve walled all the galleries in panels of nickel striped with platinum, and scored the panel surfaces with iterated patterns that the robots run at night, Escher reproductions, mirrors offset for infinite regress, scenes from Earth, you should see it! You can put a candle in some of the chambers and it looks like the stars in the sky, or a room on fire. Every room is a work of art, wait till you see it!”

“I look forward to it.” Nadia shook her head, smiling at him.

That evening they had a big communal dinner in the four connected chambers that formed the largest room in the complex. They ate chicken and soyburgers and large salads, and everyone talked at once, so that it was reminiscent of the best months on the
Ares
, or even of Antarctica. Arkady stood to tell them about the work on Phobos. “I am glad to be in Underhill at last.” They were nearly done doming Stickney, he told them, and under it long galleries had been drilled into the fractured and brecciated rock, following ice veins right through the moon. “If it weren’t for the lack of gravity, it would be a great place,” Arkady concluded. “But that’s one we can’t solve. We spent most of our free time on Nadia’s gravity train, but it’s cramped, and meanwhile all the work is in Stickney or below it. So we spent too much time weightless or exercising, and even so we lost strength. Even Martian g makes me tired now, I’m dizzy right now.”

“You’re always dizzy!”

“So we must rotate crews there, or run it by robot. We are thinking of all coming down for good. We’ve done our part up there, a functioning space station is now available for those who follow. Now we want our reward down here!” He raised his glass.

Frank and Maya frowned. No one would want to go up to Phobos, and yet Houston and Baikonur wanted it manned at all times. Maya had that look on her face familiar from the
Ares
, the one that said it was all Arkady’s fault; when Arkady saw it he burst out laughing.

The next day Nadia and several others took him on a more detailed tour of Underhill and the surrounding facilities, and he spent the whole time nodding his head with that pop-eyed look of his that made you want to nod back while he said, “Yes, but, yes, but,” and went into one detailed critique after another, until even Nadia began to get annoyed with him. Although it was hard to deny that the Underhill area was battered, thrashed to the horizon in every direction, so that it seemed as if it continued outward over the whole planet.

“It’s easy to color bricks,” Arkady said. “Add manganese oxide from the magnesium smelting and you have pure white bricks. Add carbon left over from the Bosch process for black. You can get any shade of red you want by altering the amount of ferric oxides, including some really stunning scarlets. Sulphur for yellows. And there must be something for greens and blues, I don’t know what but Spencer might, maybe some polymer based on the sulphur, I don’t know. But a bright green would look marvelous in such a red place. It will have a blackish shade to it from the sky, but it will still be green and the eye is pulled to it.

“And then with these colored bricks, you build walls that are all mosaics. It’s beautiful to do it. Everyone can have their own wall or building, whatever they want. All the factories in the Alchemists’ Quarter look like outhouses or discarded sardine tins. Brick around them would help insulate them, so there is a good scientific reason for it, but truthfully it’s just as important that they look good, that it looks like home here. I’ve already lived too long in a country that thought only of utility. We must show that we value more than that here, yes?”

“No matter what we do to the buildings,” Maya pointed out sharply, “the ground around them will still be all ripped up.”

“But not necessarily! Look, when construction is over, it would be very possible to grade the ground right back to its original configuration, and then cast loose rock over the surface in a way that would imitate the aboriginal plain. Dust storms would deposit the required fines soon enough, and then if people walked on pathways, and vehicles ran on roads or tracks, soon it would have the look of the original ground, occupied here and there by colorful mosaic buildings, and glass domes stuffed with greenery, and yellow brick roads or whatnot. Of course we must do it! It is a matter of spirit! And that’s not to say it could have been done earlier, the infrastructure had to be installed, that’s always messy, but now we are ready for the art of architecture, the spirit of it.”

He waved his hands around, stopped suddenly, popped his eyes at the dubious expressions framed in the faceplates around him. “Well, it’s an idea, yes?”

Yes, Nadia thought, looking around with interest, trying to visualize it. Perhaps that kind of process would bring back her pleasure in the work? Perhaps it would look different to Ann then?

“More ideas from Arkady,” as Maya put it in the pool that night, looking sour. “Just what we need.”

“But they’re good ideas,” Nadia said. She got out, showered, put on a jumper.

Later that night she met Arkady again, and took him to see the northwest corner chamber of Underhill, which she had left bare-walled so she could show him the structural detail.

“It’s very elegant,” he said, rubbing a hand over the bricks. “Really, Nadia, all of Underhill is magnificent. I can see your hand everywhere on it.”

Pleased, she went to a screen and called up the plans she had been working on for a larger habitat. Three rows of vaulted chambers stacked underground, in one wall of a very deep trench; mirrors on the opposite wall of the trench, to direct sunlight down into the rooms. . . . Arkady nodded and grinned and pointed at the screen, asking questions and making suggestions: “An arcade between the rooms and the wall of the trench for open space. And each story laid back a bit from the one below it, so each has a balcony overlooking the arcade. . . .”

“Yes, that should be possible. . . .” And they tapped at the computer screen, altering the architectural sketch as they spoke.

Later they walked in the domed atrium. They stood under tall clusters of black bamboo leaves, the plants still in pots while the ground was prepared. It was quiet and dark.

“We could perhaps lower this area one story,” Arkady said softly. “Cut windows and doors into your vaults, and lighten them up.”

Nadia nodded. “We thought of that, and we’re going to do it, but it’s slow getting so much dirt out through locks.” She looked at him. “But what about us, Arkady? So far you’ve only talked about the infrastructure. I should have thought that beautifying buildings would be pretty low down on your list of things to do.”

Arkady grinned. “Well, maybe all the things higher on the list are already done.”

“What? Did I hear Arkady Nikelyovich say that?”

“Well, you know— I don’t complain just to complain, Ms. Nine Fingers. And the way things have been going down here, it’s very close to what I was calling for during the voyage out. Close enough that it would be stupid to complain.”

“I must admit you surprise me.”

“Do I? But think about how you all have been working together here, this last year.”

“Half a year.”

He laughed. “Half a year. And for all that time we have had no leaders, really. Those nightly meetings when everyone has their say, and the group decides what needs doing most; that’s how it should be. And no one is wasting time buying or selling, because there is no market. Everything here belongs to all equally. And yet none of us can exploit anything that we own, for there’s no one outside us to sell it to. It’s been a very communal society, a democratic group. All for one and one for all.”

Nadia sighed. “Things have changed, Arkady. It’s not like that anymore. And it’s changing more all the time. So it won’t last.”

“Why do you say that?” he cried. “It will last if we decide that it will.”

She glanced at him skeptically. “You know it isn’t so simple.”

“Well, no. Not simple. But within our power!”

“Maybe.” She sighed, thinking of Maya and Frank, of Phyllis and Sax and Ann. “There’s an awful lot of fighting going on.”

“That’s all right, as long as we agree on certain basic things.”

She shook her head, rubbed her scar with the fingers of her other hand. Her absent finger was itching, and suddenly she felt depressed. Overhead the long bamboo leaves were defined by occluded stars; they looked like sprays of a giant bacillus. They walked along the path between crop trays. Arkady picked up her maimed hand and peered at the scar, until it made her uncomfortable and she tried to pull it back. He drew it up, gave the newly exposed knuckle at the base of the ring finger a kiss. “You’ve got strong hands, Ms. Nine Fingers.”

“I did before this,” she said, making a fist and holding it up.

“Someday Vlad will grow you a new finger,” he said, and took the fist and opened it, then held the hand as they continued to walk. “This reminds me of the arboretum in Sebastopol,” he said.

“Mmm,” Nadia said, not really listening, intent on the warm heft of his hand in hers, in the tight intermingling of their fingers. He had strong hands too. She was fifty-one years old, a round little Russian woman with gray hair, a construction worker with a missing finger. So nice to feel the warmth of another body; it had been too long, and her hand soaked up the feeling like a sponge, until the poor thing tingled, full and warm. It must feel odd to him, she thought, then gave up on it. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said.

Having Arkady at Underhill made it like the hour before a thunderstorm. He made people think about what they were doing; habits that they had fallen into without thought came under scrutiny, and under this new pressure some became defensive, others aggressive. All the standing arguments got a bit more intense. Naturally this included the terraforming debate.

Now this debate was in no sense a single event but was rather an ongoing process, a topic that kept coming up, a matter of casual exchanges between individuals, out working, eating meals, falling asleep. Any number of things could bring it up: the sight of the white frost plume over Chernobyl; the arrival of a robot-driven rover, laden with water ice from the polar station; clouds in the dawn sky. Seeing these or many other phenomena someone would say, “That’ll add some BTUs to the system,” or “Isn’t that hexafluoroethane a good greenhouse gas,” and perhaps a discussion of the technical aspects of the problem would follow. Sometimes the subject would come back up in the evenings back in Underhill, leading from the technical to the philosophical, and sometimes this led to long and heated arguments.

The debate was not, of course, confined to Mars. Position papers were being churned out by policy centers in Houston, Baikonur, Moscow, Washington, and the U.N. Office for Martian Affairs in New York, as well as in government bureaus, newspaper editorial offices, corporate board rooms, university campuses, and bars and homes all over the world. In the arguments on Earth, many people began to use the colonists’ names as a kind of shorthand for the various positions, so that watching the Terran news the colonists themselves would see people saying that they backed the Clayborne position, or were in favor of the Russell program. This reminder of their enormous fame on Earth, their existence as characters in an ongoing TV drama, was always peculiar and unsettling; after the flurry of TV specials and interviews following touchdown, they had tended to forget the ongoing video transmissions, absorbed in the daily reality of their lives. But the video cameras were still shooting tape to send back home; and there were a lot of people on Earth who were fans of the show.

So nearly everyone had an opinion. Polls showed that most supported the Russell program, an informal name for Sax’s plans to terraform the planet by all means possible, as fast as they could. But the minority who backed Ann’s hands-off attitude tended to be more vehement in their belief, insisting that it had immediate applications to the Antarctic policy, and indeed to all Terran environmental policy. Meanwhile different poll questions made it clear that many people were fascinated by Hiroko and the farming project, while others called themselves Bogdanovists; Arkady had been sending back lots of video from Phobos, and Phobos was good video, a real spectacle of architecture and engineering. New Terran hotels and commercial complexes were already imitating some of its features, there was an architectural movement called Bogdanovism, as well as other movements interested in him that were more concentrated on social and economic reforms in the world order.