Red Mars (36 page)

But everyone in the trailer seemed to agree that they weren’t finding any evidence for glaciation, and they were all good areologists. There were high basins that resembled cirques, and high valleys with the classic U-shape of glacial valleys, and some dome-and-wall configurations that might have been the result of glacial plucking. All these features had been seen in satellite photos, along with one or two bright flashes that some people had thought might be reflections from glacial polish. But on the ground none of it was holding up. They had found no glacial polish, even in the most wind-protected sections of the U-shaped valleys; no moraines, lateral or butt; no signs of plucking, or of transition lines where nanatuks would have stuck out of even the highest levels of ancient ice. Nothing. It was another case of what they called sky areology, which had a history going back to the early satellite photos, and even to the telescopes. The canals had been sky areology, and many more bad hypotheses had been formulated in the same way, hypotheses that were only now being tested with the rigor of ground areology. Most collapsed under the weight of surface data, got tossed in the canal as they said.

The glacial theory, however, and the oceanic model of which it was part, had always been more persistent than most. First, because almost every model of the planet’s formation indicated that there should have been a lot of water outgassing, and it had to have gone somewhere. And second, John thought, because there were a lot of people who would be comforted if the oceanic model were true; they would feel less uneasy about the morality of terraforming. Opponents to terraforming, therefore . . . No, he was not surprised that Ann’s team was not finding anything. Feeling the cognac a bit, and irritated by her unfriendliness, he said from the kitchen, “But if there were glaciers the most recent would have been, what, a billion years ago? That much time would take care of any of the superficial signs, I should think, glacial polish or moraines or nanatuks. Leaving nothing but the gross landforms, which is what you have. Right?”

Ann had been silent, but now she said, “The landforms aren’t unique to glaciation. All of them are common in Martian ranges, because they were all formed by rock falling out of the sky. Every kind of formation you can think of is out here somewhere, bizarre shapes limited only by the angle of repose.” She had refused any cognac, which surprised John, and now she stared at the floor with a disgusted look.

“Not U-shaped valleys, surely,” John said.

“Yes, U-shaped valleys too.”

“The problem is that the oceanic model isn’t very falsifiable,” Simon said quietly. “You can keep failing to find good evidence for it, and we are, but that doesn’t disprove it.”

The kitchen clean, John asked Ann to go out for a sunset walk. She hesitated, unwilling; but it was one of her rituals and everyone knew it, and with a quick grimace and a hard glance she agreed.

Once outside he led her up to the same peak he had napped on. The sky was a plum-colored arch over the black serrated ridges surrounding them, and stars were popping into existence in a flood, hundreds per eyeblink. He stood by her side; she stared away from him. The ragged skyline might have been a scene from Earth. She was a bit taller than him, a gaunt, angular silhouette. John liked her, but whatever reciprocal liking she may have had for him— and they had had some good talks in years past— had dissipated when he chose to work with Sax. He could have done anything he liked, her hard looks said, and yet he had chosen terraforming.

Well, it was true. He put his hand before her, forefinger raised. She punched her wristpad and suddenly her breathing sighed in his ear. “What,” she said, without looking his way.

“It’s about the sabotage incidents,” he said.

“I thought so. I suppose Russell thinks I’m behind them.”

“It’s not so much that—”

“Does he think I’m stupid? Does he imagine I think a little bit of vandalism will stop you from your boys’ games?”

“Well, it’s more than little bits. There’ve been six major incidents now, and any of them could have killed people.”

“Knocking mirrors out of orbit can kill people?”

“If they’re doing maintenance on them.”

She hmphed. “What else has happened.”

“A truck was knocked off one of the mohole shaft roads yesterday, and almost landed on me.” He heard her breath catch. “That’s the third truck to go. And that mirror was knocked into a spin with a maintenance worker on it, and she had to do a free solo to a station. It took her more than an hour to get there, and she almost didn’t make it. And then an explosives dump went off by accident at the Elysian mohole, a minute after a whole crew left it. And all the lichen at Underhill were killed by a virus that shut down the whole lab.”

Ann shrugged. “What do you expect from GEMs? It could have been an accident, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.”

“It wasn’t an accident.”

“It all adds up to peanuts. Does Russell think I’m stupid?”

“You know he doesn’t. But it’s a matter of tipping the balance. A lot of Terran money is being invested in the project, but it wouldn’t take much bad publicity to get a lot of it to drop out.”

“Maybe so,” Ann said. “But you ought to listen to yourself when you say things like that. You and Arkady are the biggest advocates of some kind of new Martian society, you two plus Hiroko, maybe. But the way Russell and Frank and Phyllis are bringing up Terran capital, the whole thing’s going to be out of your hands. It’ll be business as usual, and all your ideas will disappear.”

“I tend to think we all want something similar here,” John said. “We want to do good work in a good place. We just emphasize different parts of the process of getting there, that’s all. If we only coordinated our efforts, and worked as a team—”

“We don’t want the same things!” Ann said. “You want to change Mars, and I don’t. It’s as simple as that.”

“Well . . .” John faltered before her bitterness. They were moving slowly around the hill, in a complicated dance that imitated the conversation, sometimes face to face, sometimes back to back; and always her voice was right in his ear, and his in hers. He liked that about walker conversations, and used it, that insidious voice in the ear which could be so persuasive, caressing, hypnotic. “It’s not that simple, even so. I mean, you ought to be helping those of us who are closest to your beliefs, and opposing those furthest away.”

“I do that.”

“Which is why I came to ask you what you know about these saboteurs. It makes sense, right?”

“I know nothing about them. I wish them luck.”

“In person?”

“What?”

“I’ve traced your movements in the last couple of years, and you’ve always been near every incident, within a month or so before it happened. You were in Senzeni Na a few weeks ago on your way here, right?”

He listened to her breathe. She was angry. “Using me as cover,” she muttered, and something more he didn’t catch.

“Who?”

She turned her back on him. “You should ask the coyote about this stuff, John.”

“The coyote?”

She laughed shortly. “Haven’t you heard of him? He wanders around on the surface without a walker, people say. Pops up here and there, sometimes on both sides of the world in a single night. Knew Big Man himself, back in the good old days. And a big friend of Hiroko’s. And a big enemy of terraforming.”

“Have you met him?”

She didn’t reply.

“Look,” he said after nearly a minute of their shared breathing, “people are going to get killed. Innocent bystanders.”

“Innocent bystanders are going to get killed when the permafrost melts and the ground collapses under our feet. I don’t have anything to do with that either. I just do my work. Trying to catalog what was here before we came.”

“Yes. But you’re the most famous red of all, Ann. These people must have contacted you because of that, and I wish you’d discourage them. It might save some lives.”

She turned to face him. Her helmet’s faceplate reflected the western skyline, purple above, black below, the border between the two colors jagged and raw. “If you left the planet alone, it would save lives. That’s what I want. I’d kill
you
if I thought it would help.”

After that there was little to say. On the way back down to the trailer, he tried another topic. “What do you think happened to Hiroko and the rest of them?”

“They disappeared.”

John rolled his eyes. “She didn’t talk to you about it?”

“No. Did she talk to you?”

“No. I don’t think she talked to anyone but her group. Do you know where they went?”

“No.”

“Do you have any idea why they left?”

“They probably wanted to get free of us. Make something new. What you and Arkady say you want, they really wanted.”

John shook his head. “If they do it, they’ll do it for twenty people. I mean to do it for everyone.”

“Maybe they’re more realistic than you.”

“Maybe. We’ll find out. There’s more than one way to do this, Ann. You have to learn that.”

She didn’t reply.

The others stared at them as they entered the trailer, and Ann, storming into the kitchen nook, was no help. John sat on the arm of the one couch and asked them more questions about their work, and about groundwater levels in Argyre and the southern hemisphere generally. The big basins were low in elevation, but had been dehydrated in the impacts that formed them, and in general it appeared that the planet’s water had mostly seeped north. Another part of the mystery: no one had ever explained why the northern and southern hemispheres were so different, it was
the
problem in areology, a solution to which might prove the key to explaining all the other enigmas of the Martian landscape, as tectonic plate theory had once explained so many different problems in geology. In fact some people wanted to use the tectonic explanation again, postulating that an old crust had slid over itself onto the southern half, leaving the north to form a new skin, then all of it freezing in position when planetary cooling stopped all tectonic movement. Ann thought that was ridiculous; in her opinion the northern hemisphere was simply the biggest impact basin of all, the ultimate bang of the Noachian. A similar-sized strike had knocked the moon out of the Earth, probably around the same time. The areologists discussed various aspects of the problem for a while, and John listened, asking an occasional neutral question.

They turned on the TV for news from Earth, and watched a short feature on the mining and oil drilling that was starting in Antarctica.

“That’s our doing you know,” Ann said from the kitchen. “They kept mining and oil out of Antarctica for almost a hundred years, ever since the IGY and the first treaty. But when terraforming began here it all collapsed. They’re running out of oil down there, and the Southern Club is poor, and there’s a whole continent of oil and gas and minerals right next to them, being treated like a national park by the rich northern countries. And then the south saw these same rich northern countries start to take Mars completely apart, and they said What the hell, you can tear a whole planet apart and we’re supposed to protect this iceberg we’ve got right next door with all these resources we desperately need? Forget it! So they broke the Antarctic Treaty, and there they are drilling and no one’s done a thing about it. And now the last clean place on Earth is gone too.”

She walked over and sat before the screen, stuck her face in a mug of steaming hot chocolate. “There’s more if you want,” she said to John rudely. Simon gave him a sympathetic glance, and the others stared round-eyed at the both of them, looking appalled to see a fight between two of the first hundred: what a joke that was! It almost made John laugh, and when he got up to pour a mug for himself, he leaned over impulsively and kissed Ann on the top of the head. She stiffened and he went on to the kitchen. “We all want different things from Mars,” he said, forgetting he had just said the opposite to Ann out on the hill. “But here we are, and there aren’t that many of us, and it’s our place. We make what we want of it, like Arkady says. Now you don’t like what Sax or Phyllis want, and they don’t like what you want, and Frank doesn’t like what anyone wants, and more people are coming every year supporting one position or another, even if they don’t know it. So it could get ugly. In fact it’s started to get ugly already, with these attacks on equipment. Can you imagine that happening at Underhill?”

“Hiroko’s group was ripping off Underhill the whole time they were there,” Ann said. “They had to’ve been, to take off like that.”

“Yeah, maybe. But they weren’t endangering people’s lives.” The image of the truck falling down the shaft came to him again, quick and vivid. He drank hot cocoa and scalded his mouth. “Damn! Anyway, whenever I get discouraged about all this I try to remember that it’s natural. It’s inevitable that people are going to fight, but now we’re fighting about Martian things. I mean people aren’t fighting over whether they’re American or Japanese or Russian or Arab, or some religion or race or sex or whatnot. They’re fighting because they want one Martian reality or other. That’s all that matters now. So we’re already halfway there.” He frowned at Ann, who stared at the floor. “Do you see what I mean?”

She glanced at him. “It’s the second half that matters.”

“All right, maybe so. You take too much for granted, but that’s the way people are. But you have to realize that you’re having your effect on us, Ann. You’ve changed the way everyone thinks about what we’re doing here. Hell, Sax and a lot of others used to talk about doing anything possible to terraform as quick as possible— driving a bunch of asteroids directly into the planet, using hydrogen bombs to try and start volcanoes— whatever it took! Now all those plans have been scrapped because of you and your supporters. The whole vision of how to terraform and how far to go with it has changed. And I think we can eventually reach a compromise value, where we get some protection from radiation, and a biosphere and maybe air we can breathe, or at least not die in immediately— and still leave it pretty much like it was before we came.” Ann rolled her eyes at this, but he forged on: “No one’s talking about pumping it up into a jungle planet you know, even if they could! It’ll always be cold, and the Tharsis Bulge will always stick right out into space, in effect, so there’ll be a huge part of the planet that’s never touched. And that’ll be partly because of you.”