Red Mars (40 page)

The discovery of the Bradbury Point complex had accelerated this hunt, as it was turning out to be as big as the largest Terran complexes, perhaps the equal of the Bushveldt Complex of Azania. So, a gold rush in Nilosyrtis. And Helmut Bronski had visited the scene.

Which turned out to be small and utilitarian, a mere beginning; a Rickover and some refineries, next to a mesa hollowed out and filled by a habitat. The mines were scattered in the lowlands between mesas. Boone drove up to the habitat, coupled to the garage, then ducked through the locks. Inside a welcoming committee greeted him, and took him up to a window-walled conference room to talk.

There were, they said, about 300 people in Bradbury, all employees of UNOMA, and trained by the transnational Shellalco. When they took John on a brief tour, he found they were a mix of ex-South Africans, Australians, and Americans, all happy to shake his hand; about three-quarters men, pale and clean, looking more like lab techs than the blackened trolls John envisioned when he heard the word
miner
. Most of them were working on two-year contracts, they told him, and keeping track of the time they had left, by the week or even by the day. They ran the mines mostly by teleoperation, and looked shocked when Boone asked to go down into a mine for a look around. “It’s just a hole,” one said. Boone stared at them innocently, and after another moment’s hesitation, they scrambled to gather an escort team to take him out.

It took them two hours to get into walkers and out a lock. They drove to the rim of a mine, and then down a ramp road into a terraced oval pit some two kilometers long. There they got out, and followed John as he walked around. Surrounded by big robotic dozers and dump trucks and earthmovers, his four escorts’ faceplates were all eyes— on the alert for a behemoth on the loose, John guessed. He stared at them, amazed at their timidity; it made him realize, all of a sudden, that Mars could be just another version of the hardship assignment, a hellish combination of Siberia, the interior of Saudi Arabia, the South Pole in winter, and
Novy Mir
.

Or else they just thought he was a dangerous man to be around. Which gave him a start. Everyone had no doubt heard of the falling dump truck; maybe it was just that. But could it be something more? Might these people be aware of something that he wasn’t? Reflecting on this for a while, John found his own eyes beginning to press glass. He had been thinking of the falling truck as an accident, or at least something that could only happen once. But his movements were easy to trace, everyone knew where he was. And every time you went outdoors you were only a walker away, as they said. And in a pit mine there were a lot of behemoths about. . . .

But they got back in without incident. And that night they had the usual dinner and party in his honor, a hard-drinking party, with a lot of omegendorph consumption and loud raucous talk: a bunch of young tough engineers, pleased to find that John Boone was actually a fun guy to party with. A fairly common reaction among newcomers, especially younger men. John chatted them up, and had a good time, and slipped his inquiries into the flow pretty unnoticeably, he thought. They had not heard of the coyote, which was interesting, as they did know about Big Man, and the hidden colony. Apparently the coyote was not in that category of tale; he was some kind of insider thing, known, so far as John could tell, only to some of the first hundred.

The miners had had a recent unusual visit, however; an Arab caravan had come by, traveling the edge of Vastitas Borealis. And, they said, the Arabs had claimed to have been visited by some of “the lost colonists,” as they called them.

“Interesting,” John said. It seemed unlikely to him that Hiroko or any of her crew would reveal themselves, but who could tell? He might as well go check it out; after all, there was only so much he could do at Bradbury Point. Very little detective work, he was noticing, could be accomplished before a crime occurred. So he spent a couple more days observing the mining, but that only reinforced his shock at the scale of the operation, at how much robotic earthmovers could tear away. “What are you going to do with all the metal?” he asked, after taking a look down into another great open pit mine, located twenty-five kilometers to the west of the habitat. “Getting it to Earth will cost more than it’s worth, won’t it?”

The chief of operations, a black-haired man with a hatchet face, grinned. “We’ll hold onto it until it’s worth more. Or until they build that space elevator.”

“You believe in that?”

“Oh yeah, the materials are there! Graphite whisker reinforced with diamond spirals, why you could almost build one on Earth with that. Here it would be easy.”

John shook his head. That afternoon they drove for an hour back to the habitat, past raw pits and slag heaps, toward the distant plume of the refineries on the other sides of the habitat mesa. He was used to seeing the land torn up for building purposes, but this . . . It was amazing what a few hundred people could do. Of course it was the same technology that was allowing Sax to build a vertical town the whole height of the Echus Overlook, the same technology that allowed all the new towns to be built so quickly; but still, wreaking such havoc just to strip away metals, destined for Earth’s insatiable demand. . . .

The next day he gave the operations chief a fiendishly tight security regimen, to be followed for two months. Then he drove out into the wind-eroded tracks of the Arab caravan, and followed them north and east.

I
t turned out that Frank Chalmers was traveling with this Arab caravan. But he had not seen or heard of any visitation by Hiroko’s people, and none of the Arabs would admit to being the one who had told the story at Bradbury Point. A false lead, then. Or else one that Frank was helping the Arabs to eliminate; and if so, how would John find that out? Though the Arabs had only recently arrived on Mars, they were already Frank’s allies, no doubt about it; he lived with them, he spoke their language, and now, naturally, he was the constant mediator between them and John. Not a chance of an independent investigation, except what Pauline could do in the records, which she could do as well away from the caravan as in it.

Nevertheless, John traveled with them for a while as they roamed the great dune sea, doing areology and a bit of prospecting. Frank was only there briefly himself, to talk to an Egyptian friend; he was too busy to stay anywhere for long. His job as U.S. Secretary made him as much of a globe-trotter as John, and they crossed paths pretty frequently. Frank had managed to keep his position as the American department head now through three administrations, even though it was a cabinet post— a remarkable feat, even without considering his distance from Washington. And so he was now overseeing the introduction of investment by the American-based transnationals, a responsibility that made him manic with overwork and puffed up with power, what John thought of as the business version of Sax, always moving, always gesturing with his hands as if conducting the music of his speech, which had shifted over the years to full-tilt Chamber of Commerce overdrive, “Got to stake a claim on the Escarpment before the transnats and the Germans snap everything up, lotta work to be done!” which was his constant refrain, often said while pointing for illustration at the little globe he carried with him in his lectern pocket. “Look at your moholes, I just entered them last week, one near the North Pole, three in the sixties north and south, four along the equator, four bracketing the South Pole, all of them nicely placed west of volcanic rises to catch their updrafts, it’s beautiful.” He spun the globe and the blue dots marking the moholes blurred for a moment into blue lines. “It’s good to see you finally doing something useful.”

“Finally.”

“Look, here’s the new habitat factory in Hellas. They’re manufacturing starter units at a rate that’ll enable them to handle some three thousand emigrants per ell ess ninety, and given the new fleet of round-trip shuttles, that’s just barely enough.” He saw John’s expression and said quickly, “All heat in the end, John, so it helps the terraforming with more than just money and labor, I mean think about it.”

“But do you ever wonder what’s going to come of it all?” John asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You know, this deluge of people and equipment, while things are falling apart on Earth.”

“Things are always going to be falling apart on Earth, you might as well get used to it.”

“Yeah, but who’s going to own what up here? Who’s going to call the shots?”

Frank just made a face at John’s naíveté, at the very nature of the question. One look at his grimace and John could read it all, the whole complex of disgust and impatience and amusement. A part of John was pleased at this instant recognition; he knew his old friend better than he had ever known any of his family, so that the swarthy pale-eyed face glowering at him was like that of a brother, a twin that he couldn’t ever remember not knowing. On the other hand, he was annoyed with Frank for his condescension. “People are wondering about it, Frank. It’s not just me, and it’s not just Arkady. You can’t just shrug it off and act like it’s a stupid question, like there’s nothing to be decided.”

“The U.N. decides,” Frank said brusquely. “There’s ten billion of them, and ten thousand of us. That’s a million to one. If you want to influence those kind of odds you ought to have become the UNOMA factor like I told you to when they set up the position. But you didn’t listen to me. You just shrugged it off. You could have really done something, but now what are you? Sax’s assistant in charge of publicity.”

“And development, and security, and Terran affairs, and the moholes.”

“Ostrich!” Frank pounced. “Head in a hole! Come on, let’s go eat.”

John agreed and they went off to a dinner in the Arabs’ biggest rover, a meal of basted lamb and dill-flavored yogurt, delicious and exotic. But John found himself still irritated at Frank’s scorn, which never let up. The old rivalry, sharp as ever; and no First Man routine would ever make a dent in Frank’s sneery arrogance.

Thus when Maya Toitovna showed up unexpectedly the next day, traveling west on her way to Acheron, John gave her a longer hug than he might have otherwise, and by the time that night’s dinner was over, he had made certain that she would spend the night in his rover— a matter of a particular attentiveness, a certain laugh, a certain look, the nearly accidental brushing of arms together as they stood trying sherbets, talking to the happy men of the caravan, who clearly found her fascinating. . . . All their old code of conciliation and seduction, established through the years. And Frank could only watch, deadpan, talking in Arabic to his Egyptian friends.

And that night, as John and Maya made love in John’s rover bed, John pulled up from her briefly and looked down at her white body, and thought, So much for political power Frank buddy! That deadpan look had told it all, the fierce desire for Maya still there, still burning. Frank, like most of the men in the caravanserai that night, would have loved to have been in John’s place at that moment; once or twice in the past he no doubt had been; but not when John was around. No, tonight Frank would be reminded what real power was made of.

Distracted by such nastiness, it took John a while to pay any real attention to Maya herself. It had been almost five years since he and she had slept together, and in the intervening time he had had several other partners, and knew she had lived for a time with an engineer in Hellas. It was strange to begin again, as they knew each other intimately and yet didn’t. Her turning face flickering under him in the dim light, sister then stranger, sister then stranger. . . . Something happened, then, something turned in him; all that exterior business fell away, all those games. Something in her face, in the way she was all there, the way she would give her whole self to him when they made love. He didn’t know anyone else who was quite like that.

And thus the old flame sparked again, uncertainly at first, as it had not been there at all in their first lovemaking. But then, after an hour’s quiet talk, they had started kissing and rolled together and suddenly it was ablaze and they were inside it. Lit up by Maya as usual, he had to admit it. She
made
him pay attention. Sex for her was not (as it tended to be for John) some kind of extension of sport; it was a grand passion to her, a transcendent state of being, and she was so tigerish when she got going that she always surprised him, woke him up, brought him up to her level, reminded him what sex could be. And it was wonderful to be reminded again, to learn that again— really wonderful. Omegendorph was nothing to it, how could he have forgotten, why did he keep wandering away from her as if she weren’t, somehow, irreplaceable? He crushed her with a hug and they twisted together, bit at each other, panted and moaned; came together as they had so often before, Maya pulling him over the edge with her. Their ritual.

And even afterward, just talking, he somehow felt very much more fond of her. He had started things just to irk Frank, it was true; he had been completely careless of her. But now, lying beside her, he could feel how much he had missed her presence in the previous five years, how bland life had seemed. How much he had missed her! New feelings— they always surprised him, he kept assuming he was too old for them, that he had more or less stopped changing. And then something would happen. And so often that something (thinking back over the years) was a meeting with Maya. . . .

She was still the same Maya Toitovna, however: mercurial, full of her own thoughts and plans, full of herself. She had no idea what John was doing out there on the dunes, and would never think to ask. And she would slash him to ribbons if he accidentally crossed her mood, he could tell that just in the sultry set of her shoulders, just in the way she padded off to the toilet. But he knew all that already, it was old news, something from the first years at Underhill, so long ago; and the sheer familiarity of it was pleasing— even her irritability was pleasing! Like Frank and his scorn. Well, he was getting old, and they were family. He almost laughed, he almost said something to set her off, then thought better of it. Just knowing was enough, no need for another demonstration, Lord! At that thought he did laugh, and she smiled to hear it, and came back to bed and shoved him in the chest. “Laughing at me again I see! Because of my fat bottom is it?”