Red Mars (51 page)

And so in the murky purple Great Storm dawn they wandered down the halls to the kitchen and talked on, looking out the windows and bolting down coffee, glowing with a kind of inspiration, with the age-old excitement of honest debate. And when they finally quit to go catch a little sleep before the day got going, even Marian was clearly shaken, and all of them were deep in thought, half-convinced that John was right.

John walked back to his guest suite feeling tired but happy. Whether Arkady had intended to or not, he had made John one of the leaders of his movement. Perhaps he would come to regret it, but there was no going back now. And John was sure it was for the best. He could be a sort of bridge between this underground and the rest of the people on Mars— operating in both worlds, reconciling the two, forging them into a single force that would be more effective than either alone. A force with the mainstream’s resources and the underground’s enthusiasm, perhaps. Arkady considered that an impossible synthesis, but John had powers that Arkady didn’t. So that he could, well, not
usurp
Arkady’s leadership, but simply
change them all
.

The door to his room in the guest quarters was open. He rushed in, alarmed, and there in the room’s two chairs sat Sam Houston and Michael Chang. “So,” Houston said. “Where have you been?”

“Oh come on,” John said. His temper flared, his good mood burnt off in a flash. “Did I pick the wrong door by mistake?” He leaned back out to look. “No, I didn’t. These are my rooms.” He lifted his arms and clicked on his wristpad’s recorder. “What are you doing in here?”

“We want to know where you’ve been,” Houston said evenly. “We’ve got the authority to enter all the rooms here, and to get all our questions answered. So you might as well start.”

“Come on,” John scoffed. “Don’t you ever get tired of playing the bad cop? Don’t you guys ever trade off?”

“We just want answers to our questions,” Chang said gently.

“Oh please, mister good cop,” John said. “We all want answers to our questions, don’t we.”

Houston stood up— already he was on the edge of losing his temper, and John walked right over to him and stopped with their chests about ten centimeters apart. “Get out of my rooms,” he said. “Get out now, or I’ll throw you out, and then we’ll figure out who had the right to be in here.”

Houston merely stared at him, and without warning John shoved him hard in the chest. Houston ran into his chair and sat down involuntarily, bounced up going for John, but Chang jumped between them, saying, “Wait a second, Sam, wait a second,” while John shouted, “Get out of my rooms!” over and over at the top of his lungs, bumping against Chang’s back and glaring over his shoulder into Houston’s red face. John nearly burst into laughter at the sight; his high spirits had returned with the success of the shove, and he stalked to the door bellowing “Get out! Get out! Get out!” so that Houston would not see the grin on his face. Chang pulled his angry colleague out into the hall and John followed. The three of them stood there, Chang carefully placing himself between his partner and John. He was bigger than either of them, and now he faced John with a worried, irritated look.

“Now what did you want?” John said innocently.

“We want to know where you’ve been,” Chang said doggedly. “We have reason to suspect that your so-called investigation of the sabotage incidents has been a very convenient cover for you.”

“I suspect the same of you,” John said.

Chang ignored him. “Things keep happening right after your visits, you see—”

“They happen right
during
your visits.”

“— hoppers of dust were dropped in every mohole you visited during the Great Storm. Computer viruses attacked the software in Sax Russell’s office at Echus Overlook, right after your consultation with him in 2047. Biological viruses attacked the fast lichens at Acheron right after you left. And so on.”

John shrugged. “So? You’ve been here two months, and that’s the best you can do?”

“If we’re right, it’s good enough. Where were you last night?”

“Sorry,” John said. “I don’t answer questions from people who break into my rooms.”

“You have to,” Chang said. “It’s the law.”

“What law? What are you going to do to me?” He turned toward the open door of the room, and Chang moved to block him; he lost his temper again and jerked toward Chang, who flinched but remained in the doorway, immovable. John turned and walked away, back down to the commons.

He left Senzeni Na that afternoon in a rover, and took the transponder road north along the eastern flank of Tharsis. It was a good road and three days later he was 1,300 kilometers to the north, just northwest of Noctis Labyrinthus, and when he came to a big transponder intersection, with a new fuel station, he hung a right and took the road east to Underhill. Each day as the rover rolled along blindly through the dust, he worked with Pauline. “Pauline, would you please look up all planetary records for theft of dental equipment?” She was as slow as a human in processing an incongruous request, but eventually the data were there. Then he had her go over the movement records of every suspect he could think of. When he was sure where everyone had been, he gave Helmut Bronski a call to protest the actions of Houston and Chang. “They say they’re working with your authorization, Helmut, so I thought you should know what they’re doing.”

“They are trying their best,” Helmut said. “I wish you would stop harassing them and cooperate, John. It could be helpful. I know you have nothing to hide, so why not be more helpful?”

“Come on, Helmut, they don’t
ask for help
. It’s rank intimidation. Tell them to stop it.”

“They are only trying to do their job,” Helmut said blandly. “I have not heard of anything illegitimate.”

John broke the connection. Later on he called Frank, who was in Burroughs. “What’s with Helmut? Why is he turning the planet over to these policemen?”

“You idiot,” Frank said. He was typing madly at a computer screen as he talked, so that he seemed to be only barely conscious of what he was saying. “Aren’t you paying any attention at all to what’s going on here?”

“I thought I was,” John said.

“We’re knee deep in gasoline! And these goddamned aging treatments are the match. But you never understood why we were sent here in the first place, so why should you understand anything now?” He typed on, staring hard into his screen.

John studied the little image of Frank on his wrist. Finally he said, “Why were we sent here in the first place, Frank?”

“Because Russia and our United States of America were desperate, that’s why. Decrepit outmoded industrial dinosaurs, that’s what we were, about to get eaten up by Japan and Europe and all the little tigers popping up in Asia. And we had all this space experience going to waste, and a couple of huge and unnecessary aerospace industries, and so we pooled them and came here on the chance that we’d find something worthwhile, and it paid off! We struck gold, so to speak. Which is only more gasoline poured onto things, because gold rushes show who’s powerful and who’s not. And now even though we got a head start up here, there are a lot of new tigers down there who are better at things than we are, and they all want a piece of the action. There’s a lot of countries down there with no room and no resources, ten billion people standing in their own shit.”

“I thought you told me Earth would always be falling apart.”

“This isn’t falling apart. Think about it— if this damned treatment only goes to the rich, then the poor will revolt and it’ll all explode— but if the treatment goes to everyone, then populations will soar and it’ll all explode. Either way it’s gone! It’s going now! And naturally the transnats don’t like that, it’s horrible for business when the world blows up. So they’re scared, and they’re deciding to try to hold things together by main force. Helmut and those policemen are only the smallest tip of the iceberg— a lot of policymakers think a world police state for a few decades or so is our only chance of getting to some kind of population stabilization without a catastrophe. Control from above, the stupid bastards.”

Frank shook his head disgustedly, then leaned toward his screen and became absorbed in its contents.

John said, “Did you get the treatment, Frank?”

“Of course I did. Leave me alone, John, I’ve got work to do.”

The southern summer was warmer than the previous one that had been shrouded in the Great Storm, but still colder than any recorded. The storm was now almost two M-years long, over three Terran years, but Sax was philosophical about it. John called him at Echus Overlook, and when John mentioned the cold nights he was experiencing Sax only said, “We’ll very likely have low temperatures for the greater part of the terraforming period. But warmer per se isn’t what we’re trying for. Venus is warm. What we want is survivable. If we can breathe the air, I don’t care if it’s cold.”

Meanwhile it was cold, cold everywhere, the nights down to a hundred below every night, even on the equator. When John reached Underhill, a week after leaving Senzeni Na, he found there was a kind of pink ice covering the sidewalks; it was nearly invisible in the storm’s dim light, and walking around was a treacherous business. The people at Underhill spent most of their time indoors. John occupied a few weeks by helping the local bioengineering team field test a new fast snow algae. Underhill was crowded with strangers. Most of them were young Japanese or Europeans, who fortunately still used English to communicate with each other. John roomed in one of the old barrel vaults, near the northeast corner of the quadrant. The old quadrant was less popular than Nadia’s concourse, smaller and dimmer, and many of its vaults were now used for storage. It was strange to walk the square of hallways, remembering the pool, Maya’s room, the dining hall— now all dark, and stacked with boxes. Those years when the first hundred had been the only hundred. It was getting hard to remember what that had been like.

He kept track through Pauline of the movements of quite a few people, the UNOMA investigating force among them. It was a not-very-rigorous surveillance, as it was not always easy to track the investigators, especially Houston and Chang and their crew, whom he suspected were going off-net deliberately. Meanwhile the spaceports’ arrival records gave more evidence every month that Frank had been right about them being only the tip of the iceberg. A lot of people coming down at Burroughs in particular were working for UNOMA without job specifications, and then spreading out to the mines and moholes and other settlements, and going to work for the local security heads. And their Terran employment records were very interesting indeed.

Often at the end of a session with Pauline John would leave the quadrant, and go for a walk outside, feeling disturbed and thinking hard. There was a lot more visibility than there had been; things were clearing up a bit out on the surface, though the pink ice still made walking tricky. It seemed the Great Storm was lessening. Wind speeds on the surface were only two or three times the prestorm average of thirty kilometers per hour, and the dust in the air was sometimes little more than a kind of thick haze, turning the sunsets into blazing pastel swirls of pink, yellow, orange, red, and purple, with random streaks of green or turquoise appearing and disappearing, along with icebows, and sun-dogs, and occasional brilliant shafts of pure yellow light: nature at her most tasteless, transient and spectacular. And watching all that hazy color and movement John would be distracted from his thoughts, and climb the great white pyramid to have a look around, and then go back inside ready to start the fight again.

One evening after one of these sunset extravaganzas he climbed down the peak of the great pyramid, and walked slowly back toward Underhill— and then he spotted two figures climb out one of the garage side doors, and down a clear crawltube into a rover. There was something quick and furtive in their motion, and he stopped to look closer. They did not have their helmets on, and he recognized Houston and Chang by the backs of their heads and the size of their bodies. They moved with scurrying Terran inefficiency into the rover, and drove toward him. John polarized his faceplate and started walking again, head down, trying to look like someone coming in from work, veering to the side a bit to increase the distance between him and them. The rover plunged into a thick dust cloud and disappeared abruptly.

By the time he got to the lock doors he was deep in thought, and almost frightened. He stood motionlessly at the door, thinking it over, and when he moved it was not to the door, but to the intercom console in the wall next to the door. There were several different kinds of jacks under the speakers, and carefully he unplugged the stopper in one and cleared away the fines crusting the edge— these jacks were never used anymore— and plugged in his wristpad. He tapped in the code for Pauline, and waited for encryption and decryption to work through. “Yes, John?” said Pauline’s voice from his helmet intercom speaker.

“Turn on your camera please, Pauline, and pan my room.”

Pauline was sitting on the side table by his bed, plugged into the wall. Her camera was a little fiber thing, rarely used, and the image on his wristpad was small, and the room was dim with only a nightlight on; and his face-plate’s curve was yet another barrier, so that even with the wristpad right against it, he couldn’t quite make out the images— gray shapes, shifting. There was the bed, there was something on it, then the wall. “Back ten degrees,” John said, and squinted trying to comprehend the two-centimeter square image. His bed. There was a man lying on his bed. Wasn’t that what it was? The bottom of a shoe, torso, hair. It was hard to tell. It didn’t move. “Pauline, do you hear anything in the room?”

“The vents, the electricity.”

“Transmit to me what you’re picking up on your mike, at full volume.” He leaned his head to the left against his helmet, cramming his ear against the helmet speaker. A hiss, a whoosh, static. There was too much transmission error in a process like this, especially using these corroded old jacks. But certainly he heard no breathing. “Pauline, can you enter the Underhill monitoring system, and locate our vault’s door camera, and transmit its image to my wrist, please?”