Green mars (59 page)

One night after a very sharp meeting with a group of young engineers and areologists, as she was telling Michel about it, she tapped away at her lectern, and found the photo of the young Frank in that article, and printed out a copy of it. The article had taken the photo out of a newspaper of the time, and it was black and white, and quite grainy. She taped the photo to the side of the cabinet over the kitchen sink, feeling odd and turbulent.

Michel looked up from his AI and peered at it, and nodded approvingly. “It’s amazing how much you can read from people’s faces.”

“Frank didn’t think so.”

“He was just afraid of the ability.”

“Hmm,” Maya said. She couldn’t remember. She recalled instead the looks on the faces of the people at that night’s meeting. It was true, they had revealed everything—they had been like masks expressing exactly the sentences their owners had spoken. The meta-nats are out of control. They’re screwing things up. They’re selfish, they only care about themselves. Metanationalism is a new kind of nationalism, but without any home feeling. It’s money patriotism, a kind of disease. People are suffering, not so much here, but on Earth. And if it doesn’t change it will happen here too. They will infect us.

All said with the look from the photo, that knowing confident righteous blaze. It could change to cynicism, no doubt about it; Frank was the proof of that. It was possible to break that fervor, or lose it, in cynicism which could be so contagious. They would have to act before that happened; not too soon, but not too late. Timing would be everything. But if they timed it right... .

One day at the office, news came in from the Hellespontus. They had discovered a new aquifer, very deep compared to the others, very far away from the basin, and very big. Diana speculated that earlier glacial ages had run west off the Hellespontus range, and come to rest out there, underground—some twelve million cubic meters, more than any other aquifer, raising the amount of located water from 80 percent to 120 percent of the amount needed to fill the basin to the—1-kilometer contour.

It was amazing news, and the whole headquarters group gathered in Maya’s office to discuss it and plot it onto the big maps, the areographers already charting pipeline routes over the mountains, and debating the relative merits of different kinds of pipeline. The Low Point sea, called “the pond” in the office, already supported a robust biotic community based on the Antarctic krill food chain, and there was a spreading melt zone at its bottom, heated by the mohole and the accumulating weight of the many tons of ice pressing down from above. Increased air pressure and ever-warming temperatures meant that there would be more and more surface melting as well; bergs would be slipping and crashing together and breaking up, exposing more surfaces, and warming things with friction and sunlight, until they reached a kind of pack ice, and then brash ice. At that point newly pumped-in water, properly aimed to reinforce the Coriolis forces, would start a counterclockwise current.

On and on they talked about it, getting further and further ahead of the game, until when they went out to celebrate with a big lunch, it was almost a shock to see the corniche standing over the rocky plain of the empty basin floor. But today they would not be deterred by the present. They all had a lot of vodka with lunch, so much so that they gave themselves the rest of the afternoon off.

And so when Maya went back to the apartment, she was in no shape to deal with the sight of Kasei, Jackie, Antar, Art, Dao, Rachel, Emily, Frantz, and several of their friends, all there in her living room. They were passing through on a trip to Sabishii, where they planned to meet with some Dorsa Brevia friends, and enter Burroughs and spend a few months working there. They were perfunctory in their congratulations on the discovery of the new aquifer, all but Art; they weren’t really interested. This and the sudden crowding of her apartment made Maya cross, and it did not help that she was still affected by the vodka, or that Jackie was so effervescent, with her hands all over both proud Antar (named after the unbeaten knight of the pre-Islamic epic, as he had once explained to her) and dour Dao—both of whom stretched under her touch without appearing to mind when she was on the other one, or playing with Frantz. Maya ignored it. Who knew what perversion the ectogenes were capable of, brought up like a litter of cats as they were. And now they were rovers, gypsies, radicals, revolutionaries, whatever—like Nirgal, except not, as he had a profession, and a plan, while this crowd—well, she forced herself to suspend judgment. But she had her doubts.

She talked to Kasei, who was usually much more serious than the younger ectogenes—a gray-haired mature man, who somewhat resembled John in feature but not in expression, his stone eyetooth exposed like a fang as he darkly eyed his daughter’s behavior. Unfortunately this time through he was full of plans for ridding the world of the Kasei Vallis security compound. Obviously he felt that the relocation of Korolyov to his namesake valley had been a kind of personal affront, and the damage done to the complex by their raid to rescue Sax had not been enough to assuage him—indeed, it seemed only to have given him a taste for more. A brooding man, Kasei, with a temper—perhaps that had come from John—though really he was not much like either John or Hiroko, which Maya found endearing. But his plan to destroy Kasei Vallis was a mistake. Apparently he and Coyote had worked up a decryption program that had broken all the lock codes for the Kasei Vallis compound, and now he planned to storm the sentries, shut the occupants of the city into rovers on a locked course for Sheffield, and then blow up all the structures in the valley.

It might work or it might not, but either way it was a declaration of war, a very serious break in the rough strategy that had held ever since Spencer had managed to stop Sax from knocking things out of the sky. The strategy consisted of simply disappearing from the face of Mars—no reprisals, no sabotage, nobody home in whatever sanctuaries they happened to stumble on. ... Even Ann seemed to be paying at least some attention to this plan. Maya reminded Kasei of this while praising his idea highly, and encouraging him to use it when the proper time came.

“But we won’t necessarily be able to break the codes then,” Kasei complained. “It’s a one-time opportunity. And it’s not as if they don’t know we’re out here, after what Sax and Peter did to the aerial lens, and Deimos. They probably think we’re even bigger than we are!”

“But they don’t know. And we want to keep that sense of mystery, that invisibility. Invisible is invincible, as Hiroko says. But remember how much they increased their security presence after Sax went on his rampage? And if they lose Kasei Vallis, they might bring up a huge replacement force. And that only makes it harder to take over in the end.”

Stubbornly Kasei shook his head. Jackie interrupted from across the room and said cheerily, “Don’t worry, Maya, we know what we’re doing.”

“Something you.can be proud of! The question is, do any of the rest of us? Or are you princess of Mars now?”

“Nadia is the princess of Mars,” Jackie said, and went to the kitchen nook. Maya scowled at her back, and noticed Art watching her curiously. He did not flinch when she stared at him, and she went to her room to change clothes. Michel was in there cleaning up, making room for people to sleep on the floor. It was going to be an irritating evening.

The next morning when she got up early to go to the bathroom, feeling hung over, Art was already up. Over the sleeping bodies on the floor he whispered, “Want to go out and get breakfast?”

Maya nodded. When she was dressed they walked down the stairs and out, through the park and along the corniche, which was . lurid in the horizontal beams of dawn sunlight. They stopped in a cafe that had just washed down its section of sidewalk. On the dawn-stained white wall of the building, a sentence had been painted with the help of a stencil, so that it was neat and small, and brilliantly red:

YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK

“My God,” Maya exclaimed.

“What?”

She pointed at the graffito.

“Oh, yeah,” Art said. “You see that painted all over Sheffield and Burroughs these days. Pithy, eh?”

“Ka wow.”

They sat in the chill air by a small round table, and ate pastries and drank Turkish coffee. The ice on the horizon blinked like diamonds, revealing some movement under the ice. “What a fantastic sight,” Art said.

Maya looked at the bulky Terran closely, pleased at his response. He was an optimist like Michel, but more canny about it, more natural; with Michel it was policy, with Art, temperament. She had always considered him to be a spy, from the first moment they had rescued him from his too-convenient breakdown out in their pathf a spy for William Fort, for Praxis, perhaps for the Transitional Authority, perhaps for others as well. But now he had been among them for so long—a close friend of Nirgal, of Jackie, of Nadia as well ... and they were in fact working with Praxis now, depending on it for supplies, and protection, and information about Earth. So she was no longer so sure—not only whether Art was a spy, but what, in this case, a spy was.

“You’ve got to stop them from making this assault on Kasei Vallis,” she said.

“I don’t think they’re waiting on my permission.”

“You know what I mean. You can talk them out of it.”

Art looked surprised. “If I could talk people out of things that well, we’d be free already.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Well,” Art said. “I suppose they’re afraid they won’t be able to break the code again. But Coyote seems pretty confident he has the protocol. And it was Sax helped him work it out.”

“Tell them that.”

“For what it’s worth. They listen to you more than me.”

“Right.”

“We could have a contest—who does Jackie listen to least?”

Maya laughed out loud. “Everyone would win.”

Art grinned. “You should slip your recommendations into Pauline. Get it to imitate Boone’s voice.”

Maya laughed again. “Good idea!”

They talked about the Hellas project, and she described the import of the new discovery west of Hellespontus. Art had been in contact with Fort, and he described the intricacies of the latest World Court decision, of which Maya had not heard. Praxis had brought a suit against Consolidated for arranging to tether their Terran space elevator in Colombia, which was so close to the site in Ecuador that Praxis had planned to use that both sites would be endangered. The court had decided in favor of Praxis, but had been ignored by Consolidated, who had gone ahead and built a base in their new clierit country, and were already prepared to maneuver their elevator cable down onto it. The other metanats were happy to see the World Court defied, and they were backing Consolidated in every way possible, which was creating trouble for Praxis.

Maya said, “But these metanationals are squabbling all the time, yes?”

 
“That’s right.”

“The thing to do would be to start a big fight between some of them.”

Art’s eyebrows shot up. “A dangerous plan!”

“For who?”

“For Earth.”

“I don’t give a damn about Earth,” Maya said, tasting the words on her tongue.

“Join the crowd,” Art said ruefully, and she laughed again.

Happily, Jackie’s troop
soon left for Sabishii. Maya decided to travel out to the site of the newly discovered aquifer. She took a train counterclockwise around the basin, over Niesten Glacier and south down the great western slope, past the hill town of Montepulciano to a tiny station called Yaonisplatz. From there she drove a little car along a road that followed a mountain valley through the violent ridges of the Hellespontus.

The road was no more than a rough cut in the regolith, secured by a fixative, marked by transponders, and obstructed in shadowed places by drifts of dirty hard summer snow. It ran through strange country. From space the Hellespontus had a certain visual and areomorphological coherence, as the ejecta had been thrown back from the basin in concentric rings. But on the surface these rough rings were almost impossible to make out, and what was left was random pilings of rock, stone dropped from the sky chaotically. And the fantastic pressures engendered by the impact had resulted in all manner of bizarre metamorphoses, the most common being giant shattercones, which were conical boulders fractured on every scale by the impact, so that some had faults you could drive into, while others were simply conical rocks on the ground, with microscopic flaws that covered every centimeter of their surfaces, like old china.

Maya drove through this fractured landscape feeling somewhat spooked by the frequent kami stones: shattercones that had landed on their points and stood balanced; others that had had the softer material underneath them eroded away, until they became immense dolmens; giant rows of fangs; tall capped lingam columns, such as the one known as Big Man’s Harden; crazily stacked strata piles, the most prominent of them called Dishes In the Sink; great walls of columnar basalt, patterned in hexagons; other walls as smooth and gleaming as immense chunks of jasper.

The outermost concentric ring of ejecta was the one that most resembled a conventional mountain range, appearing on this afternoon like something out of the Hindu Kush, bare and huge under galloping clouds. The road crossed this range by means of a high pass between two lumpy peaks. In the windy pass Maya stopped her car and looked back, and saw nothing but ragged mountains, a whole world of them—peaks and ridges all piebald with clouds’ shadows and snow, and here and there the occasional crater ring to give things a truly unearthly look.

Ahead the land dropped to the crater-pocked Noachis Planum, and down there was a camp of mining rovers, drawn up in a circle like a wagon train. Maya drove hard down the rough road to this camp, reaching it in the late afternoon. There she was welcomed by a small contingent of old Bedouin friends, plus Nadia, who was visiting to consult on the drilling rig for the newly discovered aquifer. They all were impressed with this one. “It extends past Proctor Crater, and probably out to Kaiser,” Nadia said. “And it looks like it goes way far south, so far it might be coextensive with the Australis Tholus aquifer. Did you ever establish a northern boundary for that one?”

“I think so,” Maya said, and started tapping at her wristpad to find out. They talked about water through an early dinner, only occasionally pausing to exchange other news. After dinner they sat in Zeyk and Nazik’s rover, and relaxed eating sherbet that Zeyk passed around, while staring into the coals of a little brazier fire on which Zeyk had earlier cooked shish kebab. The talk turned inevitably to the current situation, and Maya said again what she had said to Art—that they should foment trouble between the meta-nationals back on Earth, if they could.

“That means world war,” Nadia said sharply. “And if the pattern holds, it would be the worst one yet.” She shook her head. “There has to be a better way.”

“It will not take our meddling for it to start,” Zeyk said. “They’re on the spiral down into it now.”

“Do you think so?” Nadia said. “Well, if it happens ... then we’ll have our chance for a coup here, I guess.”

Zeyk shook his head. “This is their escape hatch. It will take a lot of coercion to make the powerful give up a place like this.”

“There are different kinds of coercion,” Nadia said. “On a planet where the surface is still deadly, we should be able to find some kinds that don’t involve shooting people. There should be a whole new technology for waging war. I’ve talked with Sax about this, and he agrees.”

Maya snorted, and Zeyk grinned. “His new ways resemble the old ones, as far as I can tell! Bringing down that aerial lens—we loved that! As for firing Deimos out of orbit, well. But I can see his point, to an extent. When the cruise missiles come out ...”

“We have to make sure it doesn’t come to that.” Nadia had the mulish expression she got when her ideas were set in concrete, and Maya regarded her with surprise. Nadia, revolutionary strategist— Maya wouldn’t have believed it possible. Well, she no doubt thought of it as protecting her construction projects. Or a construction project itself, in a different medium.

“You should come talk to the communes in Odessa,” Maya suggested to her. “They’re followers of Nirgal, basically.”

Nadia agreed, and leaned forward with a miniature poker to tap one of the coals back into the center of the brazier. They watched the fire burn; a rare sight on Mars, but Zeyk liked fires enough to take the trouble. Films of gray ash fluttered over the Martian orange of hot coals. Zeyk and Nazik talked in low voices, describing the Arab situation on the planet, which was complex as usual. The radicals among them were almost all out in caravans, prospecting for metals and water and areothermal sites, looking innocuous and never doing a thing to reveal that they were not part of the metanat order. But they were out there, waiting, ready to act.

Nadia got up to go to bed, and when she had gone, Maya said hesitantly, “Tell me about Chalmers.”

Zeyk stared at her, calm and impassive. “What do you want to know?”

“I want to know how he was involved with Boone’s murder.”

Zeyk squinted uncomfortably. “That was a very complicated night in Nicosia,” he complained. “The talk about it among Arabs is endless. It gets tiresome.”

“So what do they say?”

Zeyk glanced at Nazik, who said. “The problem is they all say different things. No one knows what really happened,”

“But you were there. You saw some of it. Tell me first what you saw.”

At this Zeyk eyed her closely, then nodded. “Very well.” He took a breath, composed himself. Solemnly, as if giving witness, he said, “We were gathered at the Hajr el-kra Meshab, after the speeches you gave. People were angry at Boone because of a rumor that he had stopped a plan to build a mosque on Phobos, and his speech hadn’t helped. We never liked that new Martian society he talked about. So we were there grumbling when Frank came by. I must say, it was an encouraging sight to see him at that moment. It seemed to us that he was the only one with a chance to counter Boone. So we looked to him, and he encouraged us to—he slighted Boone in subtle ways, made jokes that made us angrier at Boone while making Frank seem the only bastion against him. I was actually annoyed with Frank for stirring up the young ones even more. Selim el-Hayil and several of his friends from the Ahad wing were there, and they were in a state—not just at Boone, but also at the Fetah wing. You see the Ahad and Fetah were split over a variety of issues—pan-Arab versus nationalist, relations to West, attitude to the Sufis ... it was a fundamental division in that younger generation of the Brotherhood.”

“Sunni-Shiite?” Maya asked.

“No. More conservative and liberal, with the liberals thought to be secular, and the conservatives religious, either Sunni or Shiite. And el-Hayil was a leader of the conservative Ahad. And he had been in the caravan Frank had traveled with that year. They had talked often, and Frank had asked him a lot of questions, really bored into him, in that way he had, until he felt that he understood you, or understood your party.”

Maya nodded, recognizing the description.

“So Frank knew him, and that night el-Hayil almost spoke at one point, and decided not to when Frank gave him a look. I saw this. Then Frank left, and el-Hayil left almost immediately after.”

Zeyk paused to sip coffee and think it over.

“That was the last I saw of either of them for the next couple of hours. It began to get ugly well before Boone was killed. Someone was cutting slogans on the windows of the medina, and the Ahad thought it was the Fetah, and some Ahad attacked a group of Fetah. After that they were fighting throughout the city, and fighting some American construction crews as well. Something happened. There were other fights going on as well. It was as if everyone had suddenly gone crazy.”

Maya nodded. “I remember that much.”

“So, well, we heard that Boone had disappeared, and we were down at the Syrian Gate checking the lock codes to see if he had gone out that way, and we found someone had gone out and hadn’t come back in, so we were on our way out when we heard the news about him.’We couldn’t believe it. We went down to the medina and everyone was gathered there, and they all told us it was true. I got into the hospital after about a half hour of moving through the crowd. I saw him. You were there.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, you were, but Frank had already left. So I saw him, and went back out and told the others it was true. Even the Ahad were shocked, I am sure of that—Nasir, Ageyl, Abdullah. ...”

“Yes,” Nazik said.

“But el-Hayil and Rashid Abou, and Buland Besseisso, were not there with us. And we were back at the residence facing Hajr el-kra Meshab when there was a very hard knocking at the door, and when we opened it el-Hayil fell into the room. He was already very sick, sweating and trying to vomit, and his skin all flushed and blotchy. His throat had swollen and he could barely talk. We helped him into the bathroom and saw he was choking on vomit. We called Yussuf in, and were trying to get Selim out to the clinic in our caravan when he stopped us. They have killed me,’ he said. We asked him what he meant, and he said, ‘Chalmers.’ “

“He said that?” Maya demanded.

“I said, ‘Who did this?’ and he said, ‘Chalmers.’ “

As if from a great distance Maya heard Nazik say, “But there was more.”

Zeyk nodded. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ and he said, ‘Chalmers has killed me. Chalmers and Boone.’ He was choking it out word by word. He said, ‘We planned to kill Boone.’ Nazik and I groaned to hear this, and Selim seized me by the arm.” Zeyk reached out with both hands and clutched an invisible arm. “ He was going to kick us off Mars.’ He said this in such a way—I will never forget it. He truly believed it. That Boone was somehow going to kick us off Mars!” He shook his head, still incredulous.

 
“What happened then?”

“He—” Zeyk opened his hands. “He had a seizure. He held his throat first, then all his muscles—” He clenched his fists again. “He seized up and stopped breathing. We tried to get him breathing, but he never did. I didn’t know—tracheotomy? Artificial respiration? Antihistamines?” He shrugged. “He died in my arms.”

There was a long silence as Maya watched Zeyk remembering. It had been half a century since that night in Nicosia, and Zeyk had been old at the time.

“I’m surprised how well you remember,” she said. “My own memory, even of nights like that ...”

“I remember everything,” Zeyk said gloomily.

“He has the opposite problem to everyone else,” Nazik said, watching her husband. “He remembers too much. He does not sleep well.”

“Hmph.” Maya considered it. “What about the other two?”

Zeyk’s mouth pursed. “I can’t say for sure. Nazik and I spent the rest of that night dealing with Selim. There was an argument about what to do with his body. Whether to take it out to the caravan and then hide what had happened, or to get the authorities in immediately.”

Or to go to the authorities with a lone dead assassin, Maya thought, watching Zeyk’s guarded expression. Perhaps that had been argued as well. He was not telling the story in the same way. “I don’t know what really happened to them. I never found out. There were a lot of Ahad and Fetah in town that night, and Yussuf heard what Selim had said. So it could have been their enemies, their friends, themselves. They died later that night, in a room in the medina. Coagulants.”

Zeyk shrugged.

Another silence. Zeyk sighed, refilled his cup. Nazik and Maya refused.

“But you see,” Zeyk said, “that is just the start. That’s what we saw, what we could tell you for sure. After that, whew!” He made a face. “Arguments, speculation—conspiracy theories of all kind. The usual thing, right? No one is ever simply assassinated anymore. Ever since your Kennedys, it is always a matter of how many stories you can invent to explain the same body of facts. That is the great pleasure of conspiracy theory—not explanation, but narrative. It is like Scheherazade.”

“You don’t believe in any of them?” Maya asked, feeling suddenly hopeless.

“No. I have no reason to. The Ahad and Fetah were in conflict, I know that. Frank and Selim were connected somehow. How that affected Nicosia—whether it did—” He blew out a breath. “I don’t know, and I don’t see how one could know. The past... Allah forgive me, the past seems a sort of demon, here to torture my nights.”

“I’m sorry.” Maya stood. The brilliant little chamber suddenly seemed cramped and florid. Catching a glimpse of the evening stars in a window, she said, “I’m going to go for a walk.”