Red Mars (56 page)

Oh man once I saw him pull a glider out of a downdraft that would have killed anyone else, it was a shear-off and it would have ripped the glider apart if he’d tried to resist it, but he just went with it and the plane dropped like a Rickover a thousand meters in a second, three or four times terminal velocity, and then when it was about to go smash he just tweaked it to the side and up and pancaked it in about twenty meters. Came out with his nose and ears bleeding. He was the best pilot on Mars, he could fly like an angel. Hell the whole first hundred would’ve been dead if he hadn’t hand flown them into their orbital insertion, that’s what I heard.

There were people who hated him. And with good reason too. He stopped the mosque on Phobos from being built. And he could be cruel, I’ve never met a man more arrogant.

We were on Olympus Mons and the whole sky went black.

Well, back before the beginning, Paul Bunyan came to Mars, and he brought his blue ox Babe with him. He walked around looking for lumber and his every footprint cracked the lava and left a rift canyon. He was so tall that he could reach into the asteroid belt while he walked around, and he chewed those rocks like Bing cherries and spit the pits out and boom there would be another crater.

And then he ran into Big Man. It was the first time Paul had ever seen anyone bigger than himself, and believe me Big Man was bigger— the usual two magnitudes, and that ain’t just twice as big let me tell you. But Paul Bunyan didn’t care. When Big Man said Let’s see what you can do with that axe of yours Paul said Sure, and with one stroke he hit the planet so hard that all the cracks of Noctis appeared at once. But then Big Man scratched the same spot with his toothpick, and the entire Marineris system yawned open. Let’s try bare fists, Paul said, and he landed a right cross on the southern hemisphere and there was Argyre. But Big Man tapped a spot nearby with his pinky and there was Hellas. Try spitting, Big Man suggested, and Paul spat and Nirgal Vallis ran as long as the Mississippi. But Big Man spat and all the big outflow channels ran at once. Try shitting! Big Man said, and Paul squatted and pushed out Ceraunius Tholus— but Big Man threw back his butt and there was the Elysium massif right next to it, steaming hot. Do your worst, Big Man suggested. Take a shot at me. And so Paul Bunyan picked him up by the toe and swung his whole bulk around and slammed him into the North Pole so hard that that whole northern hemisphere is depressed to this day. But without even getting up Big Man grabbed Paul by the ankle, and caught up his blue ox Babe in that same fist, and swung them into the ground and slammed them right through the planet and almost out the other side. And that’s the Tharsis Bulge— Paul Bunyan, almost sticking out— Ascraeus his nose, Pavonis his cock, and Arsia his big toes. And Babe is off to one side, pushing up Olympus Mons. The blow killed Babe and Paul Bunyan both, and after that Paul had to admit that he was beat.

But his own bacteria ate him, naturally, and they crawled all around down on the bedrock and under the megaregolith, down there going everywhere, sucking up the mantle heat, and eating the sulfides, and melting down the permafrost. And everywhere they went down there, every one of those little bacteria said I am Paul Bunyan.

He showered and dressed, padded down to the dining hall. It was just after dawn. Sunlight flooded Isidis with horizontal beams of red-bronze light, and high in the eastern sky cirrus clouds looked like copper shavings.

Rashid Niazi, the Syrian representative to the conference, passed by and gave Chalmers a cool nod. Frank returned it and walked on. Because of Selim el-Hayil, the Ahad wing of the Moslem Brotherhood had gotten blamed for Boone’s assassination, and Chalmers had always been quick and public in defending them from all such accusations. Selim had been a lone assassin, he always asserted, a mad murder-suicide. This underlined the Ahads’ guilt while at the same time commanding their gratitude. Naturally Niazi, an Ahad leader, was a bit frustrated.

Maya came into the dining room and Frank greeted her cordially, automatically covering the discomfort he always felt in her presence.

“May I join you?” she said, watching him.

“Of course.”

Maya was perceptive, in her way; Frank concentrated on the moment. They chatted. The subject of the treaty began to come up, and so Frank said, “How I wish John were here now. We could use him.” And then: “I miss him.” This kind of thing would distract Maya instantly. She put her hand over his; Frank scarcely felt it. She was smiling, her arresting gaze full on him. Despite himself he had to look away.

The TV wall was showing the news package beamed up from Earth, and he tapped on the table console and turned up the sound. Earth was in bad shape. The video was of a massive protest march in Manhattan, the whole island packed with a crowd the protesters would call ten million and the police five hundred thousand. The helicopter images were quite arresting, but there were a lot of places these days that, although less visual, were much more dangerous. In the advanced nations people were marching because of draconian birth reduction acts, laws that made the Chinese look like anarchists, and the young had erupted in fury and dismay, feeling their lives pulled out of their hands by a great crowd of ancient unnatural undead, by history itself come alive. That was bad, sure. But in the developing countries they were rioting over “inadequate access” to the treatments themselves, and that was far worse. Governments were falling; people were dying by the thousands. Really these images of Manhattan were probably meant to reassure; everything’s still orderly! they said. People conducting themselves in a civil manner, even if it be civil disobedience. But Mexico City and São Paulo and New Delhi and Manila were in flames.

Maya looked at the screen and read aloud one of the Manhattan banners: send the old to mars.

“That’s the essence of a bill someone’s introduced in Congress. Reach a hundred and you’re off, to retirement orbitals, the moon, or here.”

“Especially here.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“I suppose that explains their stubbornness about emigration quotas.”

Frank nodded. “We’ll never get those. They’re under too much pressure down there, and we’re seen as one of the few escape valves. Did you see that program aired on Eurovid about all the open land on Mars?” Maya shook her head. “It was like a real estate ad. No. If the U.N. delegates gave us any say in emigration, they’d be crucified.”

“So what do we do?”

He shrugged. “Insist on the old treaty at every point. Act like every change is the end of the world.”

“So that’s why you were so crazy about the preface material.”

“Sure. That stuff may not be all that important, but we’re like the British at Waterloo. If we give at any point the whole line collapses.”

She laughed. She was pleased with him, she admired his strategy. And it was a good strategy, although it was not the one he was pursuing. For they were not like the British at Waterloo; they were if anything like the French, making a last-ditch assault which they had to win if they wanted to survive. And so he had been very busy giving in on many points in the treaty, hoping to thrust forward and hold on to what he really wanted in other areas. Which certainly included some remaining role for the American Martian Department, and its Secretary; after all, he needed a base from which to work.

So he shrugged, dismissing her pleasure. On the TV wall the crowds boiled up and down the great avenues. He clenched his teeth a few times. “We’d better get to it again.”

Upstairs the conferees were milling about in a sequence of long high rooms that were divided by tall partitions. Sunlight streamed into the big central room from the eastern meeting chambers, throwing a ruddy glare over the white pile carpet and the squarish teak chairs and the dark pink stone of the long tabletop. Knots of people were chatting casually against the walls. Maya went off to confer with Samantha and Spencer. The three of them were now the leaders of the MarsFirst coalition, and as such had been invited to the conference as nonvoting representatives of the Martian population: the people’s party, the tribunes, and the only ones there actually elected to their positions, although they were there only at Helmut’s sufferance. Helmut had been as inclusive as anyone could ask. He had allowed Ann to attend as a nonvoting member representing the Reds, even though they were part of the coalition; Sax was there observing for the terraforming team; and any number of mining and development executives were observing as well. There was a whole crowd of observers, in fact; but the voting members were the only ones to sit at the central table, where Helmut was now ringing a small bell. Fifty-three national representatives and eighteen U.N. officials took their seats, and another hundred continued to wander in the eastern rooms, watching the discussion through the open portals or on small TVs. Outside the windows, Burroughs crawled with figures and vehicles, moving around in the clear-walled mesas, and the tents on and between the mesas, and in the network of connecting clear walktubes that lay on the ground or arched through the air, and in the huge valley tent with its wide streetgrass boulevards and its canals. A little metropolis.

Helmut called the session to order. In the eastern rooms people clustered around the TVs. Frank glanced through a portal into the east room nearest him; there would be rooms like that all over Mars and Earth, thousands of them, with millions of observers. Two worlds watching.

The day’s topic, as it had been for the past two weeks, was emigration quotas. China and India had a joint proposal to make, which the head of the Indian office rose and read in his musical Bombay English. Stripped of camouflage it came down to a proportional system, of course. Chalmers shook his head. India and China between them had 40 percent of the world’s population, but they were only two votes of fifty-three at this conference, and their proposal would never pass. The Brit in the European delegation rose to point out this fact, not in so many words of course. Wrangling began. It would go on all morning. Mars was a real prize, and the rich and poor nations of Earth were struggling over it as they were over everything else. The rich had the money but the poor had the people, and the weapons were pretty evenly distributed, especially the new viral vectors that could kill everyone on a continent. Yes, the stakes were high, and the situation existed in the most fragile of balances, the poor surging up out of the south and pressing the northern barriers of law and money and pure military force. Gun barrels in their faces, in essence. But now there were so many faces, a human-wave attack might explode at any instant, it seemed, just from the expansive pressure of sheer numbers— attackers shoved over the barricades by the press of babies in the rear, raging for their chance at immortality.

At the midmorning break, with nothing more accomplished, Frank rose from his seat. He had heard little of the wrangle, but he had been thinking, and his lectern’s sketchpad was marked up with a rough schematic. Money, people, land, guns. Old equations, old trade-offs. But it wasn’t originality he was after; it was something that would work.

Nothing would happen at the long table itself, that was certain. Someone had to cut the knot. He got up and wandered over to the Indian and Chinese delegation, a group of about ten conferring in a camera-free side room. After the usual exchange of pleasantries he invited the two leaders, Hanavada and Sung, to take a walk on the observation bridge. After a glance at each other, and quick conversations in Mandarin and Hindi with their aides, they agreed.

So the three delegates walked out of the rooms and down the corridors to the bridge, a rigid walktube which began at the wall of their mesa and arched out over the valley and into the side of an even taller mesa to the south. The bridge’s height gave it an airy flying magnificence, and there were quite a few people walking its four kilometers, or just standing midway and taking in the view of Burroughs.

“Look,” Chalmers said to his two colleagues, “the expense of emigration is so great that you will never ease your population problems by moving them here. You know that. And you already have lots more reclaimable land in your own countries. So what you want from Mars isn’t land but resources, or money. Mars is leverage to get your share of resources back home. You’re lagging behind the North because of resources that were taken from you without payment during the colonial years, and you should have repayment for that now.”

“I am afraid that in a very real sense the colonial period never ended,” Hanavada said politely.

Chalmers nodded. “That’s what transnational capitalism means— we’re all colonies now. And there’s tremendous pressure on us here to alter the treaty so that most of the profits from local mining become the property of the transnationals. The developed nations are feeling that very strongly.”

“This we know,” Hanavada said, nodding.

“Okay. And now you’ve made the pitch for proportional emigration, which is just as logical as allotting profits proportional to investment. But neither of these proposals is in your best interest. The emigration would be a drop in the bucket to you, but the money wouldn’t. Meanwhile the developed nations have a new population problem, so a chance at a larger share of emigration would be welcome. And they can spare the money, which would mostly go to transnationals anyway and become free-floating capital, outside any national control. So why shouldn’t the developed nations give you more of it? It wouldn’t really be coming out of their pocket anyway.”

Sung nodded quickly, looking solemn. Perhaps they had foreseen this response, and had made their proposal to stimulate it, and were waiting for him to play his part. But that just made it easier. “Do you think your governments will agree to such a trade?” Sung asked.