Red Mars (72 page)

There was silence in the two planes as they stared down at this most un-Martian spectacle. Finally, after two mute circumnavigations of the steam column, they flew on westward over the shattered waste. “Sax must be
loving
this revolution,” Nadia said as she had before, breaking the silence. “Do you think he’s part of it?”

“I doubt it,” Ann said. “He probably wouldn’t risk his Terran investment. Nor an orderly progression to the project, or some kind of control. But I’m sure he’s evaluating it in terms of how it affects the terraforming. Not who’s dying, or what’s getting wrecked, or who’s taking over here. Just how it affects the project.”

“An interesting experiment,” Nadia said.

“But hard to model,” Ann said. They both had to laugh.

Speak of the devil— they landed west of the new sea (Lakefront was drowned), and spent the day resting, and the next night as they followed the piste northwest toward Marineris, they flew over a transponder that was blinking SOS in Morse code. They circled the transponder until dawn, and landed on the piste itself, just beyond a disabled rover. And next to it was Sax, in a walker, fiddling with the transponder to send his manual SOS.

Sax climbed into their plane and slowly took off his helmet, blinking and purse-mouthed, his usual bland self. Tired, but looking like the rat that ate the canary, as Ann said to Nadia later. He said little. He had been stuck on the piste in the rover for three days, unable to move; the piste was dead, and his rover had no emergency fuel. Lakefront had indeed drowned: “I was leaving for Cairo,” he said, “to meet with Frank and Maya, because they think it would help to have the whole first hundred together, to form some kind of authority to negotiate with the UNOMA police, and get them to stop.” He had taken off, and was in the Hellespontus foothills when the Low Point mohole’s thermal cloud had suddenly turned yellow, and plumed 20,000 meters into the sky. “It turned into a mushroom cloud like a nuclear explosion on Earth; but with a smaller cap,” he noted. “The temperature gradient isn’t so steep in our atmosphere.”

After that he had turned back, and gone to the edge of the basin to see some of the flooding. The water running down the basin from the north had been black but kept going white, icing over in big segments almost instantaneously, except around Lakefront, where it had bubbled “like water on the stove. Thermodynamics were pretty complex there for a while, but the water cooled the mohole pretty fast, and—”

“Shut up, Sax,” Ann said.

Sax lifted his eyebrows, and went to work improving the plane’s radio receiver.

They flew on, six of them now, Sasha and Yeli, Ann and Simon, Nadia and Sax: six of the first hundred, gathered together as if by magnetism. There was a lot to talk about that night, and they exchanged stories, information, rumors, speculations. But Sax could add little concrete to the overall picture. He had been cut off from the news just as they had been. Again Nadia shuddered as if at a lost sense, realizing that this was a problem that wasn’t going to go away.

The next morning at sunrise they landed at Bakhuysen’s airstrip, and were met by a dozen people carrying police stun guns. This little crowd kept their gun barrels down, but escorted the six with very little ceremony into the hangar inside the crater wall.

There were more people in the hangar, and the crowd grew all the time. Eventually there were about fifty of them, about thirty of them women. They were perfectly polite, and, when they discovered the travelers’ identities, even friendly. “We just have to make sure who we’re dealing with,” one of them said, a big woman with a strong Yorkshire accent.

“And who are you?” Nadia asked boldly.

“We’re from Korolyov Prime,” she said. “We escaped.”

They took the travelers into their dining hall, and treated them to a big breakfast. When they were all seated, people took up magnesium jugs and reached across the table to pour their neighbors’ apple juice, and their neighbors did likewise, until everyone was served. Then over pancakes the two groups exchanged stories. The Bakhuysen crowd had escaped from Korolyov Prime in the first day of the revolt, and had made their way this far south, with plans to go all the way down to the southern polar region. “That’s a big rebel location,” the Yorkshire woman (who it turned out was really Finnish) told them. “There are these stupendous bench terraces with overhangs, you see, so in effect they’re these long open-sided caves, a couple klicks long most of the time, and quite wide really. Perfect for staying out of satellite view but having a bit of air. A kind of a Cro-Magnon cliff-dweller life they’re setting up down there. Lovely, really.” Apparently these long caves had been famous in Korolyov, and a lot of the prisoners had agreed to rendezvous there if a breakout ever occurred.

“So are you with Arkady?” Nadia asked.

“Who?”

It turned out they were followers of the biologist Schnelling, who from the sound of it had been a kind of red mystic, held in Korolyov with them, where he had died a few years before. He had given wrist lectures that had been very popular on Tharsis, and after his incarceration many of the prisoners in Korolyov had become his students. Apparently he taught them a kind of Martian communalism based on principles of the local biochemistry. The group at Bakhuysen wasn’t very clear about it, but now they were out, and hoping to contact other rebel forces. They had succeeded in establishing contact with a stealthed satellite, programmed to operate in directed microbursts; they had also managed briefly to monitor a channel being used by security forces on Phobos. So they had a little news. Phobos, they said, was being used as a surveillance and attack station by transnational and UNOMA police forces, recently arrived on the latest continuous shuttle. These same forces had control of the elevator, of Pavonis Mons, and of most of the rest of Tharsis; the Olympus Mons observatory had rebelled, but been firestormed from orbit; and transnational security forces had occupied most of the great escarpment, effectively cutting the planet in two. And the war on Earth appeared to be continuing, although they had the impression it was hottest in Africa, Spain, and the U.S.-Mexican border.

They thought it was useless to try going to Pavonis; “They’ll either lock you up or kill you,” as Sonja put it. But when the six travelers decided to try anyway, they were given precise directions to a refuge a night’s flight to the west; it was the Southern Margaritifer weather station, the Bakhuysen people told them. Occupied by Bogdanovists.

Nadia’s heart leaped when she heard that word, she couldn’t help it. But Arkady had a lot of friends and followers, and none of them seemed to know where he was. Still, she found herself unable to sleep that day, her stomach again tied in a knot. That night at sunset she was happy to return to the planes and take off. The rebels in Bakhuysen sent them on their way so laden with hydrazine and gases and freeze-dried food that their planes had a hard time getting off the ground.

Their night flights had taken on a strangely ritual aspect, as if they were in the process of inventing a new and exhausting pilgrimage. The two planes were so light that they were buffeted hard by the prevailing western winds, sometimes bouncing wildly ten meters up or down, so that it was impossible to sleep for long even when one was not flying— a sudden drop or lift and one was awake again, in the dark little cabin, staring out the window at the black sky and stars above, or the starless black world below. They spoke hardly at all. The pilots hunched forward, expending their energy on keeping a visual fix on the other plane. The planes hummed along, winds keening over their long flexible wings. It was sixty degrees below zero outside, the air only 150 millibars and poisonous; and there was no shelter on the black planet below, for many kilometers in every direction. Nadia would pilot for a while, then move to the back, and twist and turn, and try to sleep. Often the click of a transponder over the radio, combined with the general aspect of their situation, would remind her of the time she and Arkady had ridden the storm in the
Arrowhead
. She would see him then, striding red-bearded and naked through the broken interior of the dirigible, tearing away paneling to throw overboard, laughing, fines floating in a nimbus around him. Then the 16D would jerk her awake, and she would twist with the discomfort of her fear. It would have helped to pilot again, but Yeli wanted to as much as she, at least for the first couple of hours of his watch. There was nothing for it but to help him watch for the other plane, always a kilometer to the right if all was well. They had occasional radio contact with the other plane, but microbursted the calls, and kept them to a minimum— hourly checks, or inquiries if one fell behind. In the dead of night it sometimes seemed this was all any of them had ever done, it was hard to recall what life had been like before the revolt. And what had it been, twenty-four days? Three weeks, though it felt like five years.

And then the sky would begin to bleed behind them, high cirrus clouds turning purple, rust, crimson, lavender, and then swiftly to metal shavings, in a rosy sky; and the incredible fountain of the sun would pour over some rocky rim or scarp, and they would search anxiously as they ghosted over the pocked and shadowed landscape, looking for some sign of an airstrip by the piste. After the eternal night it seemed impossible that they would have navigated successfully to anything at all, but there lay the gleaming piste below, which they could land on directly in an emergency. And the transponders being all individually identifiable, and pegged to the map, their navigation was always more sure than it seemed; so every dawn they would spot a strip down in the shadows ahead, a welcome blond pencil strip of perfect flatness. Down they would glide, thump against the ground, slow down, taxi to whatever facilities they could find, stop the engines, slump back in the seats. Feel the strange lack of vibration, the stillness of another day.

That morning they landed at the strip by the Margaritifer station, and were met at their planes by a dozen men and women who were extravagantly enthusiastic in their welcome, hugging and kissing the six travelers countless times, and laughing as they did so. The six clumped together, more alarmed by this than by the wary greeting of the day before. Their welcomers did not neglect to run laser readers over their wrists to identify them, which was reassuring; but when the AI confirmed that they were indeed receiving six of the first hundred, they burst into cheers, and carried on in the very highest of spirits. In fact when the six were led through a lock into a commons, several of their hosts went over immediately to some small tanks, and breathed in hits of what proved to be nitrous oxygen and a pandorphin aerosol, after which they laughed themselves silly.

One of them, a slender fresh-faced American, introduced himself. “I’m Steve, I trained with Arkady on Phobos in 12, and worked with him on Clarke. Most of us here worked with him on Clarke. We were in Schiaparelli when the revolution began.”

“Do you know where Arkady is?” Nadia asked.

“Last we heard he was in Carr, but now he’s out of the net, which is the way it should be.”

A tall skinny American shambled up to Nadia, and put his hand on her shoulder and said, “We’re not always like this!” and laughed.

“We’re not!” Steve agreed. “But it’s a holiday today! You haven’t heard?”

A giggling woman scraped her face off the table and cried, “Independence Day! Fourteen the Fourteenth!”

“Watch, watch this,” Steve said, and pointed at their TV.

An image of space flickered onto the screen, and suddenly the whole group was yelling and cheering. They had locked onto a coded channel from Clarke, Steve explained, and though they could not decode its messages, they had used it as a beacon to aim their station’s optical telescope. The image from the telescope had been transferred onto the commons TV, and there it was, the black sky and the stars blocked at the center by the shape they had all learned to recognize, the squared-off metallic asteroid with the cable extending out of it. “Now watch!” they yelled at the puzzled travelers. “Watch!”

They howled again, and some of them began a ragged countdown, starting at one hundred. Some of them were inhaling helium as well as nitrous oxide, and these stood below the big screen singing, “We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz! Because, because, because, because, because of the wonderful things he does! We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz! We’re. . . 
off
to see the
wizard!
…”

Nadia found herself shivering. The shouted countdown got louder and louder, reached a shrieked “
Zero
.”

A gap appeared between the asteroid and the cable. Clarke disappeared from the screen instantly. The cable, gossamer among the stars, dropped out of view almost as fast.

Wild cheers filled the room, for a moment at least. But it caught, as if on a hitch, as some of the celebrants were distracted by Ann leaping to her feet, both fists at her mouth.

“He’s sure to be down by now!” Simon cried to Ann over their din. “He’s sure to be down! It’s been weeks since he called!”

Slowly it got quiet. Nadia found herself at Ann’s side, across from Simon and Sasha. She didn’t know what to say. Ann was rigid, and her eyes bugged out horribly.

“How did you break the cable?” Sax asked.

“Well, the cable’s pretty much unbreakable,” Steve replied.

“You
broke
the
cable
?” Yeli exclaimed.

“Well, no, we separated the cable from Clarke, is what we did. But the effect is the same. That cable is on its way down.”

The group cheered again, somewhat more weakly. Steve explained to the travelers over the noise, “The cable itself was pretty much impervious, it’s graphite whisker with a diamond sponge-mesh gel double-helixed into it, and they’ve got smart pebble defense stations every hundred kilometers, and security on the cars that was intense. So Arkady suggested we work on Clarke itself. See, the cable goes right through the rock to the factories in the interior, and the actual end of it was physically as well as magnetically bonded to the rock of the asteroid. But we landed with a bunch of our robots in a shipment of stuff from orbit, and dug into the interior and placed thermal bombs outside the cable casing, and around the magnetic generator. Then today we set them all off at once, and the rock went liquid at the same time the magnets were interrupted, and you know Clarke is going like a bullet, so it slipped right off the cable end just like that! And we timed it so that it’s going directly away from the sun, and twenty-four degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic as well! So it’ll be damned hard to track it down. At least we hope so!”