Red Mars (82 page)

S
now fell. Though it was early morning, it was dim. Wind whipped across the chaos, swirling the spindrift over the shattered land. Boulders as big as city blocks lay jumbled against each other, and the landscape was broken in a million little cliffs, holes, mesas, ridges, peaks— also many peculiar spikes and towers and balancing rocks, held in place by
kami
alone. All the steep or vertical stone in this chaotic terrain was still black, white flatter areas were now white with snow, so that the landscape was a densely variegated black and white, all swirling in and out of visibility as billows and veils of snow gusted by.

Then the snow stopped. The wind died. The black verticals and white horizontals gave the world a definition it didn’t usually have. In the overcast there were no shadows, and the landscape glowed as if light were pouring up through the snow onto the bottoms of the dusky low clouds. Everything was sharp-edged and distinct, as if captured in glass.

Over the horizon appeared moving figures. One by one they appeared, until there were seven of them, in a ragged line. They moved slowly, their shoulders slumped, their helmets bent forward. They moved as if they had no destination. The two in front looked up from time to time, but they never paused, or pointed the way.

The western clouds gleamed like mother-of-pearl, the only sign on that dull day that the sun was lowering. The figures walked up a long ridge that emerged from the blasted landscape. From the upper slopes of the ridge one could see a long way in every direction.

It took a long time for the figures to climb the ridge. Finally they approached a peak, a bouldery knob where the ridge began to descend again. At the summit of the knob was a curious thing: a big flat-bottomed boulder standing high in the air, balanced on six slender stone pillars.

The seven figures approached this megalith. They stopped and regarded it for a time, under the dark bruised clouds. Then they stepped between the pillars, and under the boulder. It stood well over them, a massive roof. The circular floor beneath it was flat, made of cut polished stone.

One of the figures walked to a far column, and touched it with a finger. The others looked out at the motionless snowy chaos. A trapdoor slid open in the floor. The figures went to it, and one by one stepped down into the ridge.

When they were gone the six slender columns began to sink into the floor, and the great dolmen that they held aloft descended on them, until the columns disappeared and the great rock rested on the ridge, returned to its ancient existence as an impressive peak boulder. Beyond the clouds the sun had set, and the light leaked out of the empty land.

It was Maya who kept them going, Maya who drove them into heading south. The refuge under the dolmen was just that, a sequence of small caves in the ridge, stocked with emergency rations and gas supplies, but otherwise empty. After a few days to rest and catch up on sleep and food, Maya began to complain. It was no way to live, she said, it was no more than a kind of death-in-life; where were all the others? Where was Hiroko? Michel and Kasei explained again that the hidden colony was in the south, that they had moved down there long ago. All right, Maya said, then we will go south too. There were other boulder cars in the refuge’s garage, they could caravan down by night, she said, and out of the canyons they would be safe. The refuge was no longer self-sustaining in any case, its supplies were large but limited, so they would have to go sooner or later. Best to go while the dust storm would still provide some cover for the trip. Best to go.

So she drove the tired little group to action. They loaded two cars, and took off again, south across the great rumpled plains of Margaritifer Sinus. Free from the restrictions of Marineris, they made hundreds of kilometers per night, and slept through the days, and in a nearly speechless journey of several days they passed between Argyre and Hellas, through the endless craterland of the southern highlands. It began to seem that they had never done anything but drive onward in their little cars, that the journey would last forever.

But then one night they drove onto the layered terrain of the polar region, and near dawn the horizon ahead gleamed, and then became a dim white bar, which thickened and thickened as they proceeded, until it was a white cliff standing before them. The southern polar cap, evidently. Michel and Kasei took over the two drivers’ seats, and conferred over the intercom in low voices. They drove on until they reached the white cliff, and they continued to drive straight at it, until they were on frozen crusted sand that was under the bulk of the ice. The cliff was an enormous overhang, like a wave stopped in the moment it was about to crash onto a beach. There was a tunnel cut into the ice at the bottom of the cliff, and a figure in a walker appeared and directed the two rovers into it.

The tunnel led them straight into the ice for what must have been a kilometer at least. The tunnel was wide enough for two or three rovers, and had a low ceiling. The ice around them was a pure white, dry ice only lightly streaked by stratification. They passed through two locks filling the tunnel, and in the third lock Michel and Kasei stopped the rovers, and opened their locks, and climbed down. Maya, Nadia, Sax, Simon and Ann followed them out of the cars. They passed through a lock door and walked down the tunnel in silence. Then the tunnel opened up and they all stopped, stilled by the sight that met them.

Overhead was an enormous dome of gleaming white ice. They stood under it as if under a giant overturned bowl. The dome was several kilometers in diameter, and at least a kilometer high, maybe more; it rose swiftly from the perimeters, and then bowled gently across the center. The light was diffuse but fairly strong, as if on a cloudy day, and it seemed to come from the white dome itself, which gleamed.

The ground under the dome was gently rolling reddish sand, grassy in the hollows, with frequent stands of tall bamboo and gnarled pine. There were some small hillocks to the right, and clustered in these hills was a little village, one- and two-story houses painted white and blue, interspersed with large trees which had bamboo rooms and staircases set in their thick branches.

Michel and Kasei were walking toward this village, and the woman who had guided their cars into the tunnel lock was running ahead, shouting “They’re here, they’re here!” Under the other side of the dome there was a lake of faintly steaming open water, its surface a white sheen lined by waves that broke on the near shore. On the far shore stood the blue bulk of a Rickover, its reflection a smear of blue across the white water. Gusts of cold damp wind nipped at their ears.

Michel came back and retrieved his old friends, who were standing like statues. “Come on, it’s cold out,” he said with a smile. “There’s a water-ice layer stuck to the dome, so we have to keep the air below freezing all the time.”

People were spilling out of the village, calling out. Down by the little lake a young man appeared sprinting toward them, gazelling over the dunes in great leaps. Even after all their years on Mars such a flying run still looked dreamlike to the first hundred, and it took a while before Simon clutched Ann by the arm and cried “That’s Peter! That’s Peter!”

“Peter,” she said.

And then they were in a crush of people, many of them young folk and children, strangers, but with familiar faces everywhere making their way to the fore, Hiroko and Iwao, Raul, Rya, Gene, Peter crashing in to hug Ann and Simon, and there were Vlad and Ursula and Marina and several others from the Acheron group, all clustered around them, reaching to touch them.

“What is this place?” Maya cried.

“This is home,” Hiroko said. “This is where we start again.”

My thanks to: Lou Aronica, Gregory Benford, Adam Bridge, Michael H. Carr, Robert Craddock, Bruce Faust, Bill Fisher, Hal Handley, Jennifer Hershey, Cecelia Holland, Fredric Jameson, Jane Johnson, Damon Knight, Steve McDow, Beth Meacham, Tom Meyer, Lisa Nowell, James Edward Oberg, Donna Shirley, Ralph Vicinanza, and John B. West.

A special thanks to Charles Sheffield.

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON is the author of the Nebula and Hugo Award-winning Mars trilogy—
Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars
as well as
The Years of Rice and Salt, The Martians, Antartica, The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, Pacific Edge, A Short, Sharp Shock,
and other novels. He lives in Davis, California.

“The novels and short stories of Kim Stanley Robinson constitute one of the most impressive bodies of work in modern science fiction . . . he virtually invented a new kind of science fiction in which characters as richly drawn as any in conventional fiction inhibit near future worlds evoked with as much versimilitude as the contemporary settings of any conventional novel.”

“Robinson provides enough ‘sense of wonder’ for any dozen SF novels, introduces and juggles a mammoth cast of characters and provides intrigue, mystery, murder and political maneuvering, as well as a nuts-and-bolts account of how human technology would tame a wild planet.”

“The best pure science fiction novel I have read in years, a book so full of credible human drama, technological savvy, breathtaking planetary scope, stunning historical sweep, and hard-nosed spiritual uplift that I regard it as the prologue of a brand-new Martian Chronicles.”

“If
Red Mars
were a movie, it would feature a cast of charismatic stars . . . big special effects and set-pieces, and a literate script full of intrigue, romance, and high adventure . . . Fortunately, it is a novel, and as fully-imagined a science fiction novel as any I can think of.”

“This epic tale of colonization, settlement, and revolution on Mars is a people story despite lots of technical detail: it is impossible to stop reading.”

“Splendid characters in a brilliantly realized and utterly convincing setting . . . For power, scope, depth, and detail, no other Martian epic comes close. . . . An intricate and fascinating mosaic of science and politics, love and betrayal, survival and discovery, murder and revolution.”

“Robinson’s prose is as good as usual, his scientific homework impeccable, and his handling of a large cast a model to many avowed saga mongers.”

“A lyrical, beautiful, accurate legend of the future by one of the best writers of our time.”

“
Red Mars
is a huge, engaging novel that provides a provocative and compelling vision of a very plausible scenario for Martian colonization. . . . A fascinating story of the early days of human existence on an alien world.”

“If you’re looking for a scientifically sophisticated story, deftly told with enormity and grace, here it is.”

“An expansive widescreen epic of the settlement of Mars, the kind of sweeping narrative that could be called ‘old fashioned’ save that few science-fiction writers, old or new, have ever done a job so well. Beautifully detailed and vividly realized, Robinson’s novel dramatizes the transformation of Mars. . . . Not only the best SF novel about Mars ever written, but one of the best novels of political science fiction yet published in English. Readers across a broad spectrum of literary tastes should enjoy it.”

“An enthralling work, as vast and colorful as its namesake subject . . .
Red Mars
is a ‘real’ science fiction novel that is beautifully written, and an epic in the classical sense— a narrative of heroic scope peopled with heroic characters. Robinson is a literary landscape artist, creating breath-taking vistas. . . .
Red Mars
is so full of fascinating and elegantly written speculation on the future . . . a wonderful book . . . Its last chapters fly past, until we reach those final stunning pages.”

“A splendid book. The scientific background and technological details are utterly convincing, the people come alive, and as the story comes to its catastrophic climax it gives a sense of time passing and history happening such as is rare in world literature.”

“Amazingly and refreshingly, here is a book about Mars that has no native Martians, green, bug-eyed or otherwise; no Schwarzenegger slashing at villains. . . . For sci-fi fans who crave hard science, Robinson has crammed all they could want into an adventure that opens in 2026.”

“This is a strongly realized work, transmuting today’s concerns for ecology and international cooperation into an exciting story. Mr. Robinson makes the future seem not only plausible, but already here, and his novel is a model of thoughtful extrapolation, admirably controlled plotting and good writing.”

“
Red Mars
will be the
Dispossessed
of the nineties; as with LeGuin’s novel, a host of new political thoughts will be awakened by it, to match the unforeseeable possibilities of the new century.
Red Mars
is one of those rare moments in which science fiction and the mainstream novel meet and coincide, without either one losing its gratifications: you can read it either way. It is Robinson’s most ambitious work by far, in which all his varied literary and descriptive gifts finally come together: collective delirium and personal lyric experience, the epic of sport and physical exertion, the language of exotic landscapes, farce, a vivid characterization of memorable individuals— all this now struck and illuminated by History as by a lightning bolt.”