Red Mars (49 page)

One of them whispered into his wristpad. In a suspiciously short time Sam Houston appeared down the hallway, and as he hurried up glowering John laughed. “What were you doing, hiding around the corner?”

Houston walked right up to him and stuck his face forward, and said in a low voice, “Look, Mr. Boone, we’re in the midst of a very important investigation here, and you are obstructing it. Despite what you seem to believe you are not above the law—”

Boone jerked forward so that Houston had to flinch to avoid their bumping noses. “You aren’t the law,” he said. He unfolded his arms and poked Houston in the chest, driving him back farther down the hall. Now Houston was losing his temper, and Boone laughed at him. “What are you going to do to me, officer? Arrest me? Threaten me? Give me something good to include in my next report on Eurovid? Would you like that? Would you like me to show the world how John Boone was harassed by some tin-god tin-badge functionary who came to Mars thinking he was a sheriff in the Wild West?” He remembered his opinion that anyone who spoke of themselves in the third person was a self-declared idiot, and laughed and said, “John Boone doesn’t like that kind of thing! No he doesn’t!”

The other two had taken the opportunity to slip out of his room, and were now watching closely. Houston’s face was the color of Ascraeus Mons, and his teeth were revealed. “No one’s above the law,” he grated. “There are criminal acts occurring here, very dangerous ones, and quite a few of them happen when you’re around.”

“Like breaking and entering.”

“If we determine that we need to check your quarters, or your records, to pursue our investigation, then we’re going to do that. We have that authority.”

“I say you don’t,” John said arrogantly, and snapped his fingers in the man’s face.

“We are going to search your rooms,” Houston said, articulating each word very carefully.

“Get away,” Boone said contemptuously, and jerked at the other two and waved them back. He laughed, lip curled with scorn: “That’s right, go! Get out of here, you incompetents— go back and read the regs on search and seizure!”

He went in his room and closed the door behind him.

He paused. It sounded like they were leaving, but either way he had to act like he didn’t care. He laughed, and went to the bathroom and took some more painkillers.

They hadn’t yet gotten to the closet, which was lucky; it would have been hard to explain the torn walker without telling the truth, and that would have been messy. Curious how tangled things got when you concealed the fact that someone had tried to kill you. That made him pause. The attempt had been pretty clumsy, after all. There must have been a hundred more effective ways to kill someone out in a walker on Mars. So if they were just trying to scare him, or were perhaps hoping that he
would
try to conceal the attack, so that they could find him lying, and then have something on him…

He shook his head, confused. Occam’s razor, Occam’s razor. The detective’s primary tool. If someone attacks you they mean you harm, that was the basic, the fundamental fact. It was important to find out who the attackers were. And so on. The painkillers were strong, and the omegendorph was wearing off. It was getting hard to think. It was going to be a problem disposing of the walker; the helmet in particular was a big bulky thing. But now he was into it, and there was no graceful way out. He laughed; he knew he would think of something eventually.

“Okay.”

He hadn’t been in space since the landing from the
Ares
twenty-three years before, and the familiar sensations of acceleration and weightlessness brought on an unexpected bout of nausea. He told Arkady about it as they docked with Phobos, and Arkady said, “It always used to happen to me, until I started drinking vodka right before takeoff.” He had a long physiological explanation for this, but the details began to pull John back over the edge and he cut him off. Arkady laughed; the gerontological treatment had given him its usual postoperative lift, and he had been a happy man to begin with; he looked like he wouldn’t be sick again for a thousand years.

Stickney turned out to be a bustling little town, the crater’s concrete dome lined with the latest heavy-duty radiation proofing, and the floor of the crater terraced in concentric rings down to a bottom plaza. The rings alternated between parks and two-storied buildings with gardens on their roofs. There were nets in the air for people who lost control of their leaps across the city, or took off by accident; escape velocity was only fifty kilometers per hour, so it was almost possible to run right off the moon. Just under the dome foundation John spotted a small version of the exterior circumnavigating train, running horizontally compared to the buildings of the town, and moving at a speed that returned its passengers to a sensation of Martian gravity. It stopped four times a day to take people on, but if John took refuge in it that would only delay his acclimatization, so he went to the guest room assigned to him, and miserably waited out the nausea. It seemed he was a planet dweller now, a Martian for good, so that leaving Mars was pain. Ridiculous but true.

The next day he felt better, and Arkady took him on a tour of Phobos. The interior was honeycombed with tunnels, galleries, drifts, and several enormous open chambers, many of them still being mined for water and fuel. Most of the interior tunnels inside the moon were smooth functional tubes, but the interior rooms and some of the big galleries had been built according to Arkady’s socio-architectural theories, and he showed John around some of these: circular hallways, mixed work-and-recreation areas, terracing, etched metallic walls, all features that had become standard during Mars’s crater-oriented phase of construction, but of which Arkady was still proud.

Three of the little surface craters on the side opposite to Stickney had been domed with glass and filled with villages which had a view of the planet rushing beneath them— views never available from Stickney, as Phobos’s long axis was permanently aligned toward Mars, with the big crater always pointed away. Arkady and John stood in Semenov, looking up through the dome at Mars, which filled half the sky and was shrouded by its dust clouds, all its features obscured. “The Great Storm,” Arkady said. “Sax must be going mad.”

“No,” John said. “A thing of the moment, he says. A glitch.”

Arkady hooted. Already the two of them had fallen back into their old easy camaraderie, the feeling that they were equals, brothers from way back. Arkady was the same as ever, laughing, joking, a great kidder, ideas and opinions flooding out of him, confident in a way that John enjoyed immensely, even now, when he was sure many of Arkady’s ideas were wrong, and even dangerous.

“Sax is probably right, in fact,” Arkady said. “If those aging treatments work, and we are living decades longer than previously, it will certainly cause a social revolution. Shortness of life was a primary force in the permanence of institutions, strange though it is to say it. But it is so much easier to hold onto whatever short-term survival scheme you have, rather than risking it all on a new plan that might not work— no matter how destructive your short-term plan might be for the following generations. Let them deal with it, you know. And really, to give them their due, by the time people learned the system they were old and dying, and for the next generation it was all there, massive and entrenched and having to be learned all over again. But look, if you learn it, and then stare at it for fifty more years, you will eventually be saying, Why not make this more rational? Why not make it closer to our heart’s desire? What’s stopping us?”

“Maybe that’s why things are getting so strange down there,” John said. “But somehow I don’t think these people are taking the long view.” He gave Arkady a quick account of the sabotage situation, and ended it by saying boldly: “Do you know who’s doing it, Arkady? Are you involved?”

“What, me? No, John, you know me better than that. These destructions are stupid. The work of reds, from the look of it, and I am no red. I don’t know exactly who is doing it. Probably Ann does, have you asked her?”

“She says she doesn’t know.”

Arkady cackled. “Still my same John Boone! I love it. Look here, my friend, I will tell you why these things are happening, and then you can work at it systematically, and perhaps see more. Ah, here’s the subway to Stickney— come on, I want to show you the infinity vault, it’s really a nice piece of work.” He led John to the little subway car, and they floated down a tunnel to near the center of Phobos, where the car stopped and they got out. They pushed across the narrow room, and pulled themselves down a hall; John noted that his body had adjusted to the weightlessness, that he could float and keep his trim again. Arkady led him into an expansive open gallery, which on first glance appeared to be too large to be contained inside of Phobos: floor, wall and ceiling were paneled in faceted mirrors, and each round slab of polished magnesium had been angled so that anyone in its microgravity space was reflected in thousands of infinite regresses.

They touched down on the floor and hooked their toes through rings, floating like sea-bottom plants in a shifting crowd of Arkadys and Johns. “You see, John, the economic basis of life on Mars is now changing,” Arkady said. “No, don’t you dare scoff! So far we have not been living in a money economy, that’s the way scientific stations are. It’s like winning a prize that frees you from the economic wheel. We won that prize, and so did a lot of others, and we’ve all been here for years now, living that way. But now more people are flooding onto Mars, thousands of them! And many of them plan to work here, make some money, and return to Earth. They work for the transnationals that have gotten UNOMA concessions. The letter of the Mars treaty is being kept because supposedly UNOMA is in charge of it all, but the spirit of the treaty is being broken left and right, by the U.N. itself.”

John was nodding. “Yes, I’ve seen that. Helmut told me about it right to my face.”

“Helmut is a snail. But listen, when the treaty renewal comes up, they will change the letter of the law to match the new spirit. Or even give themselves license to do more. It’s the discovery of strategic metals, and all the open space. These represent salvation to a lot of countries down there, and new territory for the transnationals.”

“And you think they’ll have enough support to change the treaty?”

Millions of Arkadys stared bug-eyed at millions of John. “Don’t be so naíve! Of course they have enough support! Look, the Mars treaty is based on the old Outer Space treaty. That was the first mistake, because the Outer Space treaty was in fact a very fragile arrangement, and so the Mars treaty is too. According to the treaty’s own provisions, countries can become voting members of the treaty council by establishing an interest here, which is why we’re seeing all the new national scientific stations, the Arab League, Nigeria, Indonesia, Azania, Brazil, India and China and all the rest. And quite a few of these new countries are becoming treaty members specifically with the intent to break the treaty at renewal time. They want to open up Mars to individual governments, outside U.N. control. And the transnationals are using flag-of-convenience countries like Singapore and the Seychelles and Moldavia to try to open Mars to private settlement, ruled by corporations.”

“The renewal is still a few years off,” John said.

A million Arkadys rolled their eyes. “It’s happening now. Not just in talk, but in what’s happening day-to-day down there. When we first arrived, and for twenty years after that, Mars was like Antarctica but even purer. We were outside the world, we didn’t even own things— some clothes, a lectern, and that was it! Now you know what I think, John. This arrangement resembles the prehistoric way to live, and it therefore feels right to us, because our brains recognize it from three millions of years practicing it. In essence our brains grew to their current configuration in response to the realities of that life. So as a result people grow
powerfully attached
to that kind of life, when they get the chance to live it. It allows you to concentrate your attention on the real work, which means everything that is done to stay alive, or make things, or satisfy one’s curiosity, or play. That is utopia, John, especially for primitives and scientists, which is to say everybody. So a scientific research station is actually a little model of prehistoric utopia, carved out of the transnational money economy by clever primates who want to live well.”

“You’d think everyone would join,” John said.

“Yes, and they might, but it isn’t being offered to them. And that means it wasn’t a true utopia. We clever primate scientists were willing to carve out islands for ourselves, rather than work to create such conditions for everyone. And so in reality, the islands are part of the transnational order. They are paid for, they are never truly free, there is never a case of truly pure research. Because the people who pay for the scientist islands will eventually want a return on their investment. And now we are entering that time. A return is being demanded for our island. We were not doing pure research, you see, but applied research. And with the discovery of strategic metals the application has become clear. And so it all comes back, and we have a return of ownership, and prices, and wages. The whole profit system. The little scientific station is being turned into a mine, with the usual mining attitude toward the land over the treasure. And the scientists are being asked, What you do, how much is it worth? They are being asked to do their work for pay, and the profit of their work is to be given over to the owners of the businesses they are suddenly working for.”

“I don’t work for anyone,” John said.

“Well, but you work on the terraforming project, and who pays for that?”