Moving Mars (31 page)

Good plan, I said.

Someone should stay with her. Allen has volunteered, but I thought to offer the chance to you.

I should leave Earth, I said without hesitation.

We have both had enough of Earth, Bithras said. Then, dropping his gaze, You think Im a fool.

My lips worked and my eyes filled with tears of anger and betrayal. Y-yes, I answered, looking away.

I am not the best Mars has to offer.

I hope to God not, I said.

I have given you opportunities, however, he said.

I refused to meet his eyes. Yes, I agreed.

But perhaps disgrace, as well. The Council will conduct hearings. You will be asked embarrassing questions.

That isnt what makes me so angry, I said.

Then what?

A man with your responsibilities, I said. You should have known. About your problems and the trouble they might cause.

What, and have myself therapied? He laughed bitterly. How Terrestrial! How fitting a Martian should suggest that to me.

It happens on Mars all the time, I said.

Not to a man of my heritage, he said. We are as we are born, and we play those cards, and none other.

Then well lose, I said.

Perhaps, he said. But honorably.

I said my farewells to Alice in the suite an hour before we left for the spaceport. For a time, Alice had withdrawn, refusing to answer our questions about her contamination. She would not even talk with the advocate chosen for our lawsuit, or his own thinker. But that changed, and she seemed to accept her new statusa beloved member of the family who could not be employed as she had once been.

I have been replaying parts of the sim you shared with Orianna, she told me as she tracked on her carriage into my room. My suitcase and slate lay on the field bed, squared with the corners. I am sometimes excessively neat. You kept all of it? I asked.

Yes. I have observed fragments of created personalities undergoing portions of the sim. It has been interesting.

Orianna thought you might find it useful, I said. But you should delete it before the Mind Design thinkers check you over.

I can delete nothing, I can only condense and store inactively.

Right. I forgot.

Suddenly, Alice laughed in a way I had not heard before. Yes. Like that. I can temporarily forget.

Im going to miss you, I said. The trip home will seem much longer without you.

You will have Bithras for company, and fellow passengers to meet.

I doubt that Bithras and I will talk much, I said, shaking my head.

Do not judge Bithras too harshly.

Hes done a lot of harm.

Is it not likely that the harm was prepared for him to do?

I couldnt take her meaning.

People and organizations on Earth behave in subtle ways.

You think Bithras was set up?

I believe Earth will not be happy until it has its way. We are obstacles.

I looked at her with fresh respect. Youre a little bitter yourself, arent you? I asked. And no longer very naive.

Call it that, yes. I look forward to joining with my original, Alice said. I think we may be able to console each other, and find humor in what humans do.

Alice displayed her image for the first time in weeks, and young, long-haired Alice Liddell smiled.

We returned to Mars. News of the suit on behalf of Alice followed us. It did indeed make a ripple overshadowing Bithrass indiscretions. The scandal caused GEWA considerable embarrassment and may have contributed to a general cooling of the nascent confrontation between Earth and Mars. The suit, however, was quickly swamped in drifts of prevarication and delay. By the time we arrived homethe only home I would ever haveten months later, there still had been no decision. Nothing had changed for the better. Nothing had changed at all.

Part Three

2178-2181, M.Y. 57-58

I would

Love you ten years before the Flood,

And you should, if you please, refuse

Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires, and more slow.

Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress

After a Martian year away from home, I returned to deep disappointment, the suspension of my apprenticeship, a furor at Majumdar, and Bithrass resignation. The Majumdar suit against Mind Design Incorporated did indeed turn into a scandal, but it wasnt enough to save my third uncle from disgrace. Mind Design passed blame to the Intra-Earth Computer Safety Bureau, which they said was responsible for injecting certain obscure safeguards into neural net designs. The suit dragged on for years and satisfied nobody, but it spurred fresh interest in Martian-grown thinkers.

Martian thinker designersthe best Mars had to offer at the timeclaimed they could deactivate the evolvons. Mars would be safe from Terrie eavesdropping. Alice was soon cleansed and redeemed, and that pleased me. The concern faded. It shouldnt have.

One benefit of the scandal was that we heard no more about Marss threat to Earths security. Indeed, a good many Terrie pressures on Mars subsided. But the scandal was not the sole reason. Earth for a time seemed content with a few stopgaps.

Cailetet broke from the Council and negotiated directly with Earth. We could draw our own conclusions. Stan, lawbonded and transferred to Janes BM, did not know what Cailetet had done, or what agreements had been reached and I would not ask Charles, who ostensibly still worked for Cailetet. My letter to him requesting information still embarrassed me.

Father told me that Triple dollars smelling of Earth were flooding steadily into Cailetet, but not to the Olympians. Funding for the requested QL thinkers had never gone through.

Cailetet continued to refuse Majumdar BMs offer to join the project. Cailetet revealed little, except to say that the Olympians had been working on improved communications; nothing terribly strategic. And they had failed, losing their funding.

My mother died in a pressure failure at Jiddah. Even now, writing that, I shrink; losing a parent is perhaps the most final declaration of lone responsibility. Losing my mother, however, was an uprooting, a tearing of all my connections.

My fathers grief, silent and private, consumed him like an inner flame. I could not have predicted this new man who inhabited my fathers body. I thought perhaps we would become closer, but that did not happen.

Visiting him was not easy. He saw my mother in me. My visits, those first few months, hurt too much for him to bear.

Like most Martians, he refused grief therapy and so did Stan and I. Our pain was tribute to the dead.

I had to make my own plans, find my own life, rebuild in the time left to my youth. I was thirteen Martian years old and could find only the most mundane employment at Majumdar, or work for my father at Ylla, which I did not want to do.

It was time to seek alliances elsewhere.

My vegetable love grew and blossomed in the Martian spring.

The best fossil finds on Mars had been discovered while I traveled to and from Earth. In the Lycus and Cyane Sulci, spread across a broad band north of the old shield volcano Olympus Mons, canyons twist and shove across a thousand kilometers like the imprint of a nest of huge and restless worms. The Mother Ecos once flourished here, surviving for tens of millions of years while the rest of Mars died.

One of the chief diggers was Kiqui Jordan-Erzul. He had an assistant named Ilya Rabinovitch.

I met Ilya at a BM Grange in Rubicon City, below Alba Patera. He had just finished excavating his twelfth mother cyst. I had heard of his work.

The Grange was uniquely Martian. Held at a different station in each district every quarter, Granges combined courting, dancing, lectures and presentations, and BM business in a holiday atmosphere. BMs could swap informal clues about Triple business, negotiate and strike deals without pressure, and prospect for new family members.

Ilya delivered a vivid report on his fossil finds at Cyane Sulci. Memories of my visit with Charles to the sites near TrHaut Mc drew me into conversation with Ilya after his talk.

He was smalla centimeter shorter than mebeautifully made, with dark and lively eyes and a quick refreshing smile. Physically, he reminded me of Sean Dickinson, but his personality could not have been more opposite. He loved dancing, and he loved talking publicly and privately about ancient Mars. During a lull between an exhausting series of Patera reels, he sat with me in a tea lounge under a projected night sky and described the Mother Ecos in loving detail, pouring intimate descriptions of the ancient landscape into my sympathetic ear, as if he had lived in those times.

To dig is to marry Mars, he said, expecting either a blank stare or a move to another part of the lounge. Instead, I asked him to tell me more.

After the dances, we spent a few hours walking alone around a well-head reservoir. With little warning other than a slow approach and a warning smile, he kissed me and told me he had an irrational attraction. I had heard similar lines before, but coming from Ilya, the technique seemed fresh.

Oh, I said, noncommittal, but smiling encouragement.

Ive known you for a long time, he said. Then he winced and glanced at me with his head turned half aside. Does that sound stupid?

Maybe we were Martians once, I suggested lightly. Ive always been intrigued by the beginning of a courtship, curiously detached and relaxed, wondering how far the mating dance could possibly go. I had given my signals; I was receptive, and the work was now up to him. Maybe we knew each other a billion years ago.

He laughed, drew back, and stretched, and we listened to the liquid tones of falling and circulating waters. Arbeiters ignored us, rolling along their ramps checking flow and purity. Ilya seemed as relaxed as I was, immensely self-assured without appearing arrogant.

You went to Earth a couple of years ago, didnt you?

Just over a year ago, I said.

Earth years, I meant.

He was involved with fossils; he used Earth years instead of Martian. I wryly considered that history might be repeating itself. Yes.

What was it like?

Intense, I said.

Id love to be involved in an Earth dig. Theyre still finding major fossils in China and Australia.

I dont think Ill go back for a while, I said.

You didnt enjoy yourself, did you?

Parts of it were lovely, I said.

Disappointed in love? he asked. I laughed. His smile thinned; like most men, he didnt enjoy being laughed at.

Im sorry, I said. Disappointed by politics.

His smile returned. Babe in the woods?

Embryo in the savage jungle, I said ruefully.

The next day, the third day of the Grange, we met again, gravitating with delicious half-conscious intent. He bought me lunch and we walked through glass tubes on the Up, looking across Rubicon Valley. He prodded gently, asking more questions.

For the first time, with a persistent ache that had me close to tearstears of old pain and relief at finally speakingI told someone in detail how I personally felt about Earth and what had happened there. I told about feeling betrayed and ignorant and powerless, about Earths overwhelming culture.

We finished our lunch and checked into a private space, nothing said, nothing suggested; Ilya led me. I talked some more, and then I leaned on him and he put an arm around my shoulders.

They treated you pretty shabbily, he said. You deserve better.

Of course, that was what I wanted to hear; but he meant it with utmost sincerity. And gauging what I was prepared for, and not prepared for, he did not press his suit too strongly.

I had rented guest lodgings at Rubicon City for the duration of the Grange. He suggested I stay afterward with his family, Erzul BM, at Olympus Station. I didnt have timeI had planned to leave early and get back to Jiddah to work on a Majumdar project report. But I promised wed get together soon.

I wasnt about to let this relationship lapse. My feelings toward Ilya began simply and directly. He was the sweetest, most intuitive, and most straightforward man I had ever met. I wanted to continue talking with him for hours, days, months, and much longer. Making love seemed a natural extension of talking things through; lying naked together, warmed by our exertion, limbs casually locked, giggling at jokes, aghast at the state of the BMs and the Council that bowed low before Earth

When I was with him, I felt an extraordinary peace and wholeness. Here was someone who could help me sort things out. Here was a partner.

Erzuls Olympus Station felt very different from Ylla, or any other station I had visited on Mars. Erzul BM had begun in 2130 as a joint venture between poor American Hispanic, Hispaniolan, and Asian families on Earth. Trying to finance passage to Mars, they had eventually drawn in Polynesians and Filipinos. When they arrived on Mars, they occupied a ready-built trench dome in the western shadow of the Olympus Rupes. Within five Martian years, they had established liaisons with seven other BMs, including the ethnic-Russian Rabinovitch. Erzul had quickly prospered.

A small, prosperous mining and soil engineering BM, respected and unaligned, Erzul had kept all of its contracts on Mars. Now, with ninety mining claims in four districts, they were still small, but efficient and well-regarded, known for their trustworthiness and friendly dealings.

When I arrived at Olympus Station, I checked in to a guest roomIlya gave me this much freedom, a way out if I didnt get along with his familyand toured the BM museum, a boring collection of old drilling and digging equipment enlivened by large murals of Polynesian and Hispaniolan myth. He left me before a portrait of Pele, Little Mother of Volcanoes, a passionate and bitchy-looking female of considerable beauty, and returned a few minutes later. A formidable woman accompanied him, taller than Ilya and twice as broad.

Casseia, Id like you to meet our syndic, Ti Sandra.

Ti Sandra looked me over with a little frown, lower lip poked out. An impressively large woman, two meters high and big-boned, with an enormous smile, deep-set warm eyes and a soft-spoken alto voice, Ti Sandra Erzul carried herself with stately bearing. Very dark, thick black hair in a halo around her head, a firmly friendly face with prominent and assertive features, she might have been a warrior queen in a fantasy sim But her easy manner, her girlish pride in bright clothes, dissipated whatever threat her physical presence might have implied. Are you a banker? she asked.