Red Mars (62 page)

T
hey had arranged things so that if you spent half the year in Underhill you were assigned a permanent room of your own. Towns all over the planet were adopting similar systems, because people were moving around so much that no one felt at home anywhere, and this arrangement seemed to mitigate that. Certainly the first hundred, who were among the most mobile Martians of all, had started spending more time in Underhill than they had in the years before, and this was mostly a pleasure, to most of them. At any given time twenty or thirty would be around, and others came in and stayed for a while between jobs, and in the constant come and go they had a chance to carry on a more-or-less continuous conference on the state of things, with newcomers reporting what they had seen firsthand, and the rest arguing about what it meant.

Frank, however, did not spend the required twelve months a year in Underhill, and so he did not have a room there. He had moved the department’s head offices to Burroughs back in 2050, and before joining the Arabs in ‘57 the only room he had kept was there in the offices.

Now it was ‘59 and he was back, in a room one floor down from his old one. Dropping his bag on the floor and looking around at the room, he cursed aloud. To have to be in Burroughs in person— as if one’s physical presence made any difference these days! It was an absurd anachronism, but that’s the way people were. Another vestige of the savannah. They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.

Slusinski came in. Though his accent was pure New York, Frank had always called him Jeeves, because he looked like the actor in the BBC series. “We’re like dwarves in a waldo,” Frank said to him angrily. “One of those really big waldo excavators. We’re inside it and supposed to be moving a mountain, and instead of using the waldo capabilities we’re leaning out of a window and digging with teaspoons. And complimenting each other on the way we’re taking advantage of the height.”

“I see,” Jeeves said carefully.

But there was nothing to be done about it. He was back in Burroughs, hurrying around, four meetings an hour, conferences that told him what he already knew, which was that UNOMA was now using the treaty for toilet paper. They were approving accounting systems which guaranteed that mining would never show any profits to distribute to the General Assembly members, even after the elevator was working. They were handing out “necessary personnel” status to thousands of emigrants. They were ignoring the various local groups, ignoring MarsFirst. Most of this was done in the name of the elevator itself, which provided an endless string of excuses, 35,000 kilometers of excuses, 120 billion dollars of excuses. Which was not all that expensive, actually, compared to the military budgets of the past century. And most of the elevator funds had been needed in the first years of finding the asteroid and getting it into proper orbit, and setting up the cable factory. After that the factory ate the asteroid and spit out the cable, and that was that; they only had to wait for it to grow long enough, and nudge it down into position. A bargain, a real bargain!

And also a great excuse for breaking the treaty whenever it seemed expedient. “God damn it,” Frank shouted at the end of a long day in the first week back. “Why has UNOMA caved like this?”

Jeeves and the rest of his staff took this as a rhetorical question and offered no theories. He had definitely been away too long; they were afraid of him now. He had to answer the question himself: “It’s greed I guess, they’re all getting paid off in one cosmeticized way or another.”

At dinner that night, in a little café, he ran into Janet Blyleven and Ursula Kohl and Vlad Taneev. As they ate they watched the news from Earth on a bar TV. Really it had gotten to be almost too much to watch. Canada and Norway were joining the plan to enforce population-growth slowdown. No one would say population control, of course, it was a forbidden phrase in politics, but that’s what it was in fact, and it was turning into the tragedy of the commons all over again: if one country ignored the U.N. resolutions, then nearby countries were howling for fear of being overwhelmed. Another monkey fear, but there it was. Meanwhile Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, Azania, the United States, Canada, and Switzerland had all proclaimed immigration illegal, while India was growing by 8 percent a year. Famine would solve that, as it would in a lot of countries. The Four Horsemen were good at population control. Until then. . . The TV cut to an ad for a popular diet fat, which was indigestible and went right through the gut unchanged. “Eat all you want!”

Janet clicked off the TV. “Let’s change the subject.”

They sat around their table and stared at their plates. It turned out Vlad and Ursula had come from Acheron because there was an outbreak of resistant tuberculosis in Elysium. “The
cordon sanitaire
has fallen apart,” Ursula said. “Some of the emigrant viruses will surely mutate, or combine with one of our tailored systems.”

Earth again. It was impossible to avoid it. “Things are falling apart down there!” Janet said.

“It’s been coming for years,” Frank said harshly, his tongue loosened by the faces of his old friends. “Even before the treatment life expectancy in the rich countries was nearly double that in the poor. Think about that! But in the old days the poor were so poor they hardly knew what life expectancy was, the day itself was their whole concern. Now every corner shop has a TV and they can see what’s happening— that they’ve got AIDS while the rich have the treatment. It’s gone way beyond a difference in degree, I mean they die young and the rich live forever! So why should they hold back? They’ve got nothing to lose.”

“And everything to gain,” Vlad said. “They could live like us.”

They huddled over cups of coffee. The room was dim. The pine furniture had a dark patina; stains, nicks, fines rubbed in by hand.. . . It could have been one of those nights in that distant time when they were the only ones in the world, a few of them up later than the rest, talking. Except Frank blinked and looked around, and saw in his friends’ faces the weariness, the white hair, the turtle faces of the old. Time had passed, they were scattered over the planet, running like he was, or hidden like Hiroko, or dead like John. John’s absence suddenly seemed huge and gaping, a crater on whose rim they huddled glumly, trying to warm their hands. Frank shuddered.

Later Vlad and Ursula went to bed. Frank looked at Janet, feeling immobilized as he sometimes did at the end of a long day, incapable of ever moving again. “Where’s Maya these days?” he asked, to keep Janet from retiring too. She and Maya had been good friends in the Hellas years.

“Oh, she’s here in Burroughs,” Janet said. “Didn’t you know?”

“No.”

“She’s got Samantha’s old rooms. She may be avoiding you.”

“What?”

“She’s pretty mad at you.”

“Mad at me?”

“Sure.” She regarded him across the dim, faintly humming room. “You must have known that.”

While he was still considering how open to be with her, he said, “No! Why should she be?”

“Oh Frank,” she said. She leaned forward in her chair. “Quit acting like you’ve got a stick up your ass! We know you, we were there, we saw it all happen!” And as he was recoiling she leaned back, and said calmly, “You must know that Maya loves you. She always has.”

“Me?” he said weakly. “It’s John she loved.”

“Yeah, sure. But John was easy. He loved her back, and it was glamorous. It was too easy for Maya. She likes things hard. And that’s you.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Janet laughed at him. “I know I’m right, she’s told me as much! Ever since the treaty conference she’s been angry at you, and she always talks when she’s mad.”

“But why is she angry?”

“Because you rejected her! Rejected her, after pursuing her for years and years, and she got used to that, she loved it. It was romantic, the way you persisted. She took it for granted, sure, but she loved you for it. And she liked how powerful you were. And now John is dead, and she could finally say yes to you, and you sent her packing. She was furious! And she stays mad a long time.”

“This . . .” Frank struggled to collect himself. “It just doesn’t match with my understanding of what’s happened.”

Janet stood up to go, and as she walked by him she patted him on the head. “Maybe you ought to talk to Maya about it then.” She left.

For a long time he sat there, feeling stunned, examining the shiny grain of his chair arm. It was hard to think. Eventually he stopped trying and went to bed.

He slept poorly, and at the end of a long night he had another dream about John. They were in the long drafty upcurved chambers of the space station, spinning at Martian gravity, in their long stay of 2010, six weeks together up there, young and strong, John saying I feel like Superman, this gravity’s great, I feel like Superman! Running laps around the big ring of the station hallway. Everything’s going to change on Mars, Frank. Everything!

No. Each step was like the last jump of a triple jump. Boing, boing, boing, boing.

Yes! The whole question will be learning to run fast enough.

A perfect interference pattern of cloud-dots lay pasted over the western coast of Madagascar. The sun bronzing the ocean below.

Everything looks so fine from up here.

Get any closer and you begin to see too much, Frank murmured.

Or not enough.

It was cold, they argued over the temperature, John was from Minnesota and had slept as a boy with his window open. So Frank shivered, a down coverlet draped over his shoulders, his feet blocks of ice. They played chess and Frank won. John laughed. How stupid, he said.

What do you mean?

Games don’t mean anything.

Are you sure? Sometimes life seems like a kind of game to me.

John shook his head. In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing. You could put your bishop out there to mate the other guy’s king, and he could lean down and whisper in your bishop’s ear, and suddenly it’s playing for him, and moving like a rook. And you’re fucked.

Frank nodded. He had taught these things to John.

A confusion of meals, chess, talk, the view of the rolling Earth. It felt like the only life they had ever lived. The voices from Houston were like AIs, their concerns absurd. The planet itself was so beautiful, so intricately patterned by its land and its clouds.

I never want to go down. I mean this is almost better than Mars’ll be, don’t you think?

No.

Huddled, shivering, listening to John talk of boyhood. Girls, sports, dreams of space. Frank responded with tales of Washington, lessons from Machiavelli, until it occurred to him that John was formidable enough as it was. Friendship was just diplomacy by other means, after all. But later, after a vague blur. . . talking, halting, shivering, talking about his father, coming home drunk from the Jacksonville bars, Priscilla and her white-blond hair, her fashion-magazine face. How it meant nothing to him anymore, a marriage for the resumé, for looking normal to the shrinks without holding him down. And not his fault. Abandoned, after all. Betrayed.

That sounds bad. No wonder you think people are so fucked.

Frank waved at their big blue lamp. But they are. Waving by coincidence at the Horn of Africa. Think about what’s happened down there.

That’s history, Frank. We can do better than that.

Can we? Can we?

You just wait and see.

He woke up, his stomach knotted, his skin sweaty. He got up and took a shower— already he could remember no more than a single fragment of the dream: John, saying “Wait and see.” But his stomach was like wood.

After breakfast he clicked his fork on the table, thinking. All that day he spent distracted, wandering as if still in a dream, wondering from time to time how one told the difference. Wasn’t this life dreamlike in every significant respect? Everything overlit, bizarre, symbolic of something else?

That evening he went looking for Maya, feeling helpless, in the grip of a compulsion. The decision had been made the night before, when Janet said, “She loves you, you know.” And he turned a corner to the dining commons and there she was, her head thrown back in the middle of her pealing laugh, vividly Maya, her hair as white as it had once been black, her eyes fixed on her companion; a man, dark-haired, handsome, perhaps in his fifties, smiling at her. Maya put a hand to his upper arm, a characteristic gesture, one of her usual intimacies, it meant nothing and in fact indicated that he was not her lover but rather someone she was in the process of enchanting; they could have met just minutes before, although the look on his face indicated he knew her better than that.

She turned and saw Frank, blinked with surprise. She looked back at the man and continued to speak, in Russian, her hand still on his arm.

Frank hesitated and almost turned and left. Silently he cursed himself— was he no more than a schoolboy, then? He walked by them and said hello, did not hear if they replied. All through the dinner she stayed glued to the man’s side, not looking his way, not coming over. The man, pleasant-enough looking, was surprised at her attention, surprised but pleased. Clearly they would leave together, clearly they would spend the night together. That foreknowledge always made people pleasant. She would use people like that without a qualm, the bitch. Love.. . . The more he thought about it the angrier he got. She had never loved anyone but herself. And yet. . . that look on her face when she first saw him; for a split second hadn’t she been pleased, and then wanted him angry at her? And wasn’t that a sign of hurt feelings, of a desire to hurt back, meaning a certain (incredibly childish) desire
for
him?

Well, the hell with her. He went back to his room and packed his bag, and took the subway to the train station, and got on a night train west, up Tharsis to Pavonis Mons.

In a few months’ time, when the elevator was maneuvered into its remarkable orbit, Pavonis Mons was going to become the hub of Mars, superceding Burroughs as Burroughs had once superseded Underhill. And as the elevator’s touchdown was not far off, signs of the area’s coming predominance were already everywhere. Paralleling the train piste as it ascended the steep eastern slope of the volcano were two new roads and four thick pipelines, as well as an array of cables, a line of microwave towers, and a continuous litter of stations, loading tracks, warehouses, and dumps. And then, on the last and steepest upcurve of the volcano’s cone, there was a vast congregation of tents and industrial buildings, thicker and thicker until up on the broad rim they were everywhere, and between them immense fields of insolation-capture sheets, and receivers for the energy microwaved down from the orbiting solar panels. Each tent along the way was a little town, stuffed with little apartment blocks, and each apartment block was stuffed with people, their laundry hanging from every window. The tents nearest the piste had very few trees in them, and looked like commercial districts. Frank caught quick glimpses of food stands, video rentals, open-front gyms, clothing stores, laundromats. Litter piled in the streets.