Red Mars (54 page)

He shrugged apologetically. “When you check it out, you find that about half the sabotages simply couldn’t have been done by anyone in the net. And in the other half, someone with a stone tooth was usually spotted in the area. It’s becoming a pretty widespread fashion now, but still. I figured it was you, and I had my AI do an analysis which showed that about three-quarters of the cases have happened in the lower southern hemisphere, that or else inside a three-thousand-kilometer circle with the chaotic terrain at the east end of Marineris as its center point. That’s a circle that holds a lot of settlements, but even allowing for that it seemed to me the chaos was a logical place for the saboteurs to hide. And we’ve all figured for years that that was where you folks went when you left Underhill.”

Hiroko’s face revealed nothing. Finally she said, “I will look into this.”

“Good.”

Sax said, “John, you said there was more than one thing going on?”

John nodded. “It hasn’t just been sabotage, you see. Someone’s been trying to kill me.”

Sax blinked, and the rest of them looked shocked. “At first I thought it was the saboteurs,” John said, “trying to stop my investigation. It made sense, and the first incident really was an act of sabotage, so it was easy to get confused. But now I’m pretty sure that that time was a mistake. The saboteurs aren’t interested in killing me— they could have done it and they didn’t. One night a group of them stopped me, including your son Kasei, Hiroko, and the coyote, who I take it is the same as the stowaway that you were hiding on the
Ares
—”

This caused an uproar— apparently a fair number of them had had suspicions about this stowaway, and Maya rose to her feet and pointed a dramatic finger at Hiroko, crying out. John shouted them all down and forged on: “Their visit— their visit!— that was the best proof of my theory about the sabotages, because I managed to get a few skin cells off one of them, and I was able to get his DNA read and compared with some other samples found at some of the sabotage sites, and this person had been there. So those were the saboteurs, but they weren’t trying to kill me, obviously. But one night at Hellas Low Point I was knocked down, and my walker cut open.”

He nodded at his friends’ exclamations. “That was the first intentional attack on me, and it came pretty soon after I went up to Pavonis, and talked to Phyllis and a bunch of transnational types about internationalizing the elevator and so on.”

Arkady was laughing at him, but John ignored him and forged on. “After that, I was harassed several times by UNOMA investigators that Helmut allowed to come up, and he did that under pressure from those same transnationals. And in fact I found out that most of those investigators had worked for Armscor or Subarishii on Earth, rather than for the FBI like they told me. Those are the transnationals most involved with the elevator project and the mining on the Great Escarpment, and now they’ve got their own security people established everywhere, and this roving team of so-called investigators. And then, just before the big storm ended, some of those investigators tried to get me accused of that murder that happened at Underhill. Yes they did! It didn’t work, and I can’t absolutely prove it was them, but I saw two of them working on the set-up. And I think they killed that man, too, just to get me in trouble. To get me out of their way.”

“You should tell Helmut,” Nadia said. “If we present a united front and insist that these people be sent back to Earth, I don’t think he could deny us.”

“I don’t know how much real power Helmut has anymore,” John said. “But it would be worth a try. I want these people kicked off the planet. And those two in particular I’ve got recorded by the Senzeni Na security system, both going into the med clinic and messing with the cleaning robots before I did. So the circumstantial evidence against them is about as strong as it could be.”

The others didn’t know quite what to make of this, but it turned out that several of them had also been harassed by other UNOMA teams— Arkady, Alex, Spencer, Vlad and Ursula, even Sax— and they quickly agreed that an attempt to get the investigators deported was a good idea. “Those two in particular ought to be deported
at best
,” Maya said hotly.

Sax simply tapped at his wristpad, and called Helmut up on the phone right then and there. He laid the situation out to Helmut, and the angry group pitched in from time to time. “We’ll take this to the Terran press if you don’t act on it,” Vlad declared.

Helmut frowned, and after a pause he said, “I’ll look into it. Those agents that you complain about in particular will be rotated back home, for sure.”

“Check their DNA again before you let them go,” John said. “The murderer of that man in Underhill is among them, I’m sure of it.”

“We will check,” Helmut said heavily.

Sax cut the connection, and John looked around at his friends again. “Okay,” he said. “But it’ll take more than a call to Helmut to make all the changes we need. The time has come to act together again, across a whole range of issues, if we want the treaty to survive. That as a minimum, you know. A start on the rest of it. We need to form a coherent political unit no matter what kind of disagreements we might have.”

“It won’t matter what we do,” Sax said mildly, but he was jumped on immediately, in an incomprehensible babble of competing protests.

“It does matter!” John cried. “We’ve got as much chance as anyone does of directing what happens here.”

Sax shook his head, but the others were listening to John, and most seemed to agree with him: Arkady, Ann, Maya, Vlad, each from their different perspective. . . . It could be done, John could see it in their faces. Only Hiroko he could not read; her face was a blank, closed in a way that brought back a sharp pang of recollection. She had always been that way to John, and suddenly it made him ache with frustration and remembered pain, and he got annoyed.

He stood, and waved a hand outward. It was nearing sunset, and the enormous curved plate of the planet was dappled with an infinite texture of shadows. “Hiroko, can I have a word with you in private? Just for a second. We can go down into the tent below here. I just have a couple questions, and then we can come right back up.”

The others stared at them curiously. Under that gaze Hiroko finally bowed, and walked ahead of John to the tube down to the next tent.

They stood at one tip of that tent’s crescent, under the gazes of their friends above, and the occasional observer below. The tent was mostly empty; people were respecting the first hundred’s privacy by leaving a gap.

“You have suggestions for how I can identify the saboteurs?” Hiroko said.

“You might start with the boy named Kasei,” John said. “The one that is a mix of you and me.”

She would not meet his eye.

John leaned toward her, getting angry. “I presume there’s kids from every man in the first hundred?”

Hiroko tilted her head at him, and shrugged very slightly. “We took from the samples everyone gave. The mothers are all the women in the group, the fathers all the men.”

“What gave you the right to do all these things without our permission?” John asked. “To make our children without asking us— to run away and hide in the first place— why? Why?”

Hiroko returned his gaze calmly. “We have a vision of what life on Mars can be. We could see it wasn’t going to go that way. We have been proved right by what has happened since. So we thought we would establish our own life—”

“But don’t you see how
selfish
that is? We
all
had a vision, we
all
wanted it to be different, and we’ve been working as hard as we can for it, and all that time you’ve been
gone
, off creating a little pocket world for your little group! I mean we could have used your help! I wanted to talk to you so often! Here we have a kid between us, a mix of you and me, and you haven’t talked to me in twenty years!”

“We didn’t mean to be selfish,” Hiroko said slowly. “We wanted to try it, to show by experiment how we can live here. Someone has to show what you mean when you talk about a different life, John Boone. Someone has to live the life.”

“But if you do it in secret then no one can see it!”

“We never planned to stay secret forever. The situation has gotten bad, and so we’ve stayed away. But here we are now, after all. And when we are needed, when we can help, we will appear again.”

“You’re needed every day!” John said flatly. “That’s how social life works. You’ve made a mistake, Hiroko. Because while you’ve been hiding, the chances for Mars remaining its own place have gone way down, and a lot of people have been working to speed that disappearance, including some of the first hundred. And what have you done to stop them?”

Hiroko said nothing. John went on: “I suppose you’ve been helping Sax a little in secret. I saw one of your notes to him. But that’s another thing I object to— helping out some of us and yet not others.”

“We all do that,” Hiroko said, but she looked uncomfortable.

“Have you had the gerontological treatments in your colony?”

“Yes.”

“And you got the process from Sax?”

“Yes.”

“Do these kids of yours know their parentage?”

“Yes.”

John shook his head, exasperated and more. “I just can’t believe you would do these things!”

“We do not ask for your belief.”

“Obviously not. But aren’t you the least bit concerned about stealing our genes and making kids by us without our knowledge or consent? About bringing them up without giving us any part in their upbringing, any part in their childhood?”

She shrugged. “You can have your own kids if you want. As for these, well. Were any of you interested in having children twenty years ago? No. The subject never came up.”

“We were too old!”

“We were not too old. We chose not to think of it. Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people. You did not want children, and so you did not know about late birth. But we did, and so we learned the techniques. And when you meet the results, I think you will see it was a good idea. I think you will thank us. What have you lost, after all? These children are ours. But they have a genetic link to you, and from now on they will exist for you, as an unexpected gift, say. As a quite extraordinary gift.” Her Mona Lisa smile appeared and disappeared.

The concept of the gift, again. John paused to think about it. “Well,” he finally said. “We’ll be talking about that for a long time, I suspect.”

Twilight had turned the atmosphere below them into a dark purple band, running like a velvet border around the black star-studded bowl which had appeared over their heads. In the tents below they were singing, led by the Sufis: “Harmakhis, Mangala, Nirgal, Auqakuh; Harmakhis, Mangala, Nirgal, Auqakuh,” and around again, time after time, adding grace notes that were other names for Mars, and encouraging the bands already there to add instrumental accompaniments of all kinds, until every tent was filled with this song, all of them singing together. The Sufis then began their whirling, and little knots of dancers swirled all through the crowds.

“Will you at least stay in contact with me now?” John said intently to Hiroko. “Will you give me that?”

“Yes.”

They returned to the upper tent, and the group went down together into the general party, and joined the celebration. John made his way slowly to the Sufis, and tried the spins he had learned from them on their mesa, and people cheered and caught him when he spun out of control into the spectators. After one fall he was helped to his feet by the thin-faced man with dreadlocks who had led the midnight visit to his rover. “Coyote!” John cried.

“It’s me,” the man said, and his voice caused a ripple of electricity down John’s spine. “But no reason for alarm.”

He offered John a flask; after a moment’s hesitation John took it and drank. Fortune favors the bold, he thought. Tequila, apparently. “You’re Coyote!” he shouted over the music of the magnesium-drum band.

The man grinned widely and nodded once, took the flask back and drank.

“Is Kasei with you?”

“No. He doesn’t like this meteor.” And then with a friendly slap to the arm the man moved off into the swirling crowd. He looked over his shoulder and shouted, “Have fun!”

John watched him disappear among the faces in the crowd, feeling the tequila burn in his stomach. The Sufis, Hiroko, now Coyote: the gathering was blessed. He saw Maya and hurried over to her and threw an arm over her shoulder, and they walked through the tents and the connecting tunnels, and people toasted them as they passed. The semi-rigid tent floors were gently bouncing up and down.

The countdown reached two minutes, and many people ascended to the upper tents, and then pressed against the clear walls of the south-facing arcs. The ice asteroid would probably burn up in a single orbit, its injection trajectory was so steep; an object a quarter the size of Phobos burned to steam and then, as it got hotter, to oxygen and hydrogen molecules. And all in a matter of minutes. No one could be sure what it would look like.

So they stood there, some of them still singing the chords of the name round. A final countdown was picked up by more and more of them, until they were all into the last ten, shouting out the reversed sequence of numbers at the top of their lungs, in the astronaut’s primal scream. They roared out
“zero!”
and for three breathless heartbeats nothing happened; then a white ball trailing a blazing fan of white fire came shooting up over the southwestern horizon, as big as the comet in the Bayeux Tapestry, and brighter than all the moons and mirrors and stars combined, Burning ice, bleeding across the sky, white on black, hurtling fast and low, so low that it was not much higher than they were on Olympus, so low that they could see white chunks bursting back through the tail and falling away like giant sparks. Then about halfway across the sky it broke into fragments, and the whole collection of incandescent blazes tumbled east, scattering like buckshot. All the stars suddenly shuddered— it was the first sonic boom, striking the tents and shaking them. A second boom followed, and the phosphor chunks bounced wildly for a moment as they tumbled down the sky and disappeared over the southeast horizon. Their firedrake tails followed them into Mars, and disappeared, and it was suddenly dark again, the ordinary night sky standing overhead as if nothing had happened. Except the stars were twinkling.