Icehenge (10 page)

“They must not be too worried about you,” I said, “if they're still trying to save the buildings and facilities.”

“I know,” Andrew said, discouraged and bitter. “They think they can just kill us and walk back into their property.”

“And you've lost contact with a lot of rebel-held cities?”

“You bet.” He became grimly cheerful. “They've retaken most of the sectors, like I told you. They drop in on the air and water buildings and blast the people there—if there's still resistance in the city, they take away the air. A lot of buildings are self-contained, but that's just mopping up. These cities”—he grimaced—“they're too centralized. Some of the rebel cells have set up underground retreats in the chaos. We hope they made it out to them.”

“What about the general population?”

“Most of them fought for us. At first. That's why we did so well.”

“A lot of people must be dead.”

“Yes.”

Thousands of people dead. Killed. People who would have lived a thousand years. My father—jail may have protected him, but on the other hand, he may be dead. And my turn may be coming.

*   *   *

They asked me to make a small speech for the rebels in New Houston, which they would then transmit to the other rebel outposts. “When the revolt began,” Susan Jones told me, “the MSA members still here joined the fight, and they told everyone about the starship effort. It's been a big story, people are very interested and excited about it. To hear you announce that the starship has taken off would be good for morale.”

They're in bad shape, I thought to myself. But I got the dozen of us who had helped Davydov's people to sit with me at another meeting in the lounge of the command building. The same group, slightly larger and slightly more exhausted, was gathered there. A couple of video cameras were trained on us, and I was given a mike. I said,

“The Mars Starship Association was part of the revolution. They worked isolated from the main effort, and have existed for the last forty years.” I told them what I knew of the Association's history, aware as I spoke of the strangeness of the fact that it was
me
telling them this story. I described the starship and its capabilities, and events from the previous two months flashed in my mind, disturbing my concentration. “When I left Mars on
Rust Eagle
I didn't know there was an MSA. I didn't know there was an underground movement dedicated to the overthrow of the Committee. I did know that—I did know…”—suddenly it was hard to talk—“that I hated the Committee and its control over our lives. When I found out about the MSA, sort of by accident out there”—a sympathetic laugh—“I helped it. So did my friends sitting up here with me. Now that we're here, we want to help you, too. I'm glad—I'm glad that the Mars Development Committee wasn't here to greet us.” I paused to catch my breath properly. “I hope they never rule Mars again.”

And at that they stood up and cheered. Clapped and cheered. But I hadn't been finished! I had wanted to say, Listen, there is a starship leaving the solar system! I wanted to say that out of all our petty and stupid and destructive squabbles on this planet, a pure, feeble effort had struggled away—that the revolution had been responsible for it, partially, and that it was a historical event to stun the imagination.…

But I never got to say any of that. My friends from
Rust Eagle
crowded around me, familiar faces all, filled with affection, and my speech was over. We looked at each other with a new tenderness—now, and perhaps from now on, we were each other's only family. Noah's cousins, left behind.

*   *   *

Not much time left. The city has been broached by police troops, and we'll be evacuating soon.

I was up on the crater's rim with Andrew Jones when the missiles started falling on the spaceport to the north of the city crater. The explosions were bright enough to leave blue after-images in our eyes, and they lofted tall, lazy clouds of rusty dust above the larger chunks of spaceport.

Inside our daysuits the attack had been soundless, though I felt the thumps of the explosions even in Mars's thin air. “Our turn,” Andrew said without emotion. “We'd better get back inside.”

We went to the passage lock in the crater's dome, and hurried down the escalator on the rim wall. We were just outside the command building when the dome fell. I guess the police weren't worrying about property anymore; perhaps New Houston is the last rebel city left, and they are anxious to be done with us. We saw the starring appear around the perimeter, saw the huge sections of thin plasteel crack and tilt as they slowly dropped toward us. Then we were under the eaves of the building and in the protection of the door lock.

The plasteel rained down for over a minute. Police troops followed immediately, coming down on individual rocket backpacks. Figures in suits began pouring into our lock from indoors, not worrying about air loss. Andrew and I were handed two of the long-nosed light rifles, and we slung the straps over our shoulders and stepped out of the lock.

There were a lot of them falling, in pale red suits. But it was a vulnerable way to come down. Beams of light laced the dark pink sky, and the police troops shot back as they descended. But they had to control their rocket packs, and they were falling. Their aim was bad. We shot them out of the sky. I pushed the trigger button on my gun and watched the beam intersect with a human form that was falling and shooting in my direction. Suddenly he tilted over and his rockets powered him down into buildings a few blocks away. I sat down, feeling sick, cursing the Committee for attacking in such a stupid and wasteful manner, cursing and cursing. The common band roared with voices. A beam hissed near me and I scrambled for cover under a building's eave, thinking, not rain drops but death beams, these eaves are for … stupid stuff like that. I looked up again. If a beam hit the rocket packs for more than an instant they exploded. Little pops like obscene firecrackers burst everywhere above me. I cursed and sobbed, hit the wall of the building with my gun, pointed it at the sky and shot again.

Over on the other side of the city the defense wasn't doing well. Hundreds of police descended in the residential district across the crater from us. Then they stopped falling.

A voice on the radio said, “Enemy is trapped in the residential quarter, northwest. Return to headquarters or to outposts five, six, seven or nine.” This was the first sentence in half an hour I had understood. I found Andrew and followed him to the command building. It was just three hours after dawn, when we had ascended the crater wall.

In the command apartment everyone took off the head-pieces. Andrew looked fierce, desperate. Others were helping a man who was shaking uncontrollably.

After an hour to clear our senses and take accounts, there was a meeting in the central lounge. Susan Jones, still in her silver day-suit, sat down beside me. “We're going to evacuate the city.”

“And go where?” I asked dully.

“We have a contingency plan for this situation.”

“Good.”

Ethel and Sandra and Yuri joined us, and Susan raised her voice to include them.

“There was always the chance this would happen, of course. We had to risk it.” Her mouth pursed. “Anyway, we've got some retreats in the chaos to the north of here. Hidden colonies, underground or in caves. They're all small and well separated. Since we took over the cities we've been stocking them and supplying them with the equipment we'll need to make them self-contained systems.”

“They'll spot us from satellite photos,” I said.

She shook her head. “There's almost as much land surface on Mars as on Earth. And geographic features so impenetrable as to defy belief. I know, I've been up there. Even if they photograph it all, they'll never have the time or the people to examine all the photographs.”

“Computer scan—”

“Can only catch regular shapes. Ours are disguised and hidden. They'd have to check all the photos by eye, and even then they wouldn't see us. Mars is too big, and the retreats too well hidden. So. We have a refuge, and it's ready.

“The other choice,” she continued, looking at our faces, “is to fade away in the city, and pretend you were neutral and hiding the whole time. Could be tough. But we've programmed a lot of imaginary people into the city register, and you could become one of those.”

Then the meeting was called to order by a tall thin man, and Susan joined him. “The police are contained for now,” he said. “But our situation in New Houston is untenable, as you know. As soon as it's dark, we're going to disperse, and either evacuate or infiltrate the city. Field cars hidden in Spear Canyon will take off for the north. There we'll start the revolution over again.” The man looked tired, disappointed. “You all knew this was a possibility. That the best we would do this time would be to establish the hidden outposts. Well, that's how it has turned out. I'm afraid we're losing space control. And that we're one of the last cities left holding out.” He consulted with Susan. “Those of you who want to continue on in the city, we've got a list of apartments near here that still have air. And we've got the fake identities ready for your pictures and fingerprints and all.”

He whispered with the people around him some more. Ginger Sims joined us. Conversations began among the forty or fifty people in the room. “Okay. Get some rest before sunset. That's all for now.”

*   *   *

So there it is. Ethel and Yuri are in the next room, arguing about what to do. But I never even thought about it. I'm going into the chaos. In a curious way it is as though I had decided to go with the starship after all … enclosed in a little underground colony, where we will have to work hard to establish a life-support system, I have no doubt. And yet we are still on Mars, and still opposing the Committee. So I have what I want. I'm satisfied.

There is little time left. I am too nervous to rest, I have been writing for an hour or more. We will leave soon. All of my friends from
Rust Eagle
are coming along—Ethel and Yuri have just decided. I think of the starship, flying away from all this … of my father. My thoughts are dense and confused, it's hard to write one thing at a time.

The police will follow us into the chaotic terrain. The Committee will want to wipe out every vestige of resistance. But this desire is part of what insures that we will succeed. We didn't come to this red planet to repeat all the miserable mistakes of history, we didn't. Even if it looks like it so far. Martians want to be free; truly free.

I'm going to go in the car with Andrew, so he tells me. His sister and my companions will be along. That will be the most dangerous part, the escape tonight. It looks as though it will all happen as I dreamed it out there with the starship, in the asteroid belt—I will run over the surface of red Mars forever and ever, for the rest of my life. Except in the real world they'll be chasing me.

II

HJALMAR NEDERLAND

2547
A.D
.

“I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

Or heard or felt came not but from myself;

And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”

—
Wallace Stevens,
“Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”

 

 

Memory is the
weak link. This year I will be three hundred and ten years old, but most of my life is lost to me, buried in the years. I might as well be a creature of incarnations, moving from life to life, ignorant of my own past. Oh, I “know” that once I climbed Olympus Mons, that once I visited the Earth, and so on; I can check the record like anyone else; but to recall none of the detail, to
feel
nothing for this knowledge, is not to have done it.

It isn't as simple as that, I admit. Certain events, moments scattered here and there in my life, exist in my memory like artifacts in the layers of an excavation: fragments of meaning in the debris of time, left in a pattern of deposition that I fail to understand. On occasion I will stumble on one of these artifacts—a trolley bell in the street, and I see an Alexandrian's smile—a whiff of ammonia, and suddenly I am reacquainted with my first daughter's birth—but the process of deposition, the process of recovery, both are mysteries to me. And each little epiphany reminds me that there are things I have forgotten forever—things that might explain me to myself, which explanation I sorely need—and I clutch at the fragment knowing I might never stumble across it again.

So I have decided to collect these artifacts, with the idea that I had better try to understand them now, while they are still within my reach—working as the archaeologists of old did so often, against rising waters in haste, while the chance yet exists: hurrying to invent a new archaeology of the self.

*   *   *

What we feel most, we remember best.

*   *   *

The Tharsis Bulge—the bulge is five thousand kilometers across and seven kilometers high, and formed early in Mars's history. The stresses caused by this deformation in the crust were instrumental in the formation of the large volcanoes, the equatorial canyon system, and an extensive system of radial fractures.

We came on the site in a hundred field cars, a caravan that lofted a plume of umber dust over the rocky plain. The site looked like any other youngish crater: a low rampart we could drive right up, and then a flat-topped symmetrical rim-hill, surrounded by the hummocky slope of the ejecta shield. Few craters look impressive from the outside, and this was not one of the exceptions. But my pulse quickened at the sight of it. It had been a long time coming.

I put on a thermal suit, and ordered those of my students in the car to do the same, as I needed companions for a hike to the rim. Gritting my teeth I walked up to the car containing Satarwal and Petrini, and knocked on their door window. The door popped open with a hiss and there they were, faces poking out like Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee: the codirectors of my dig. Blandly I told them I was going up to the rim with a few students to have a look around.