Red Mars (47 page)

The ground stopped trembling. The black leviathan no longer moved. They approached it warily. A Brobdingnagian dump truck, on tracks. Built locally, by Utopia Planitia Machines; a robot built by robots, and big as an office block.

John stared up at it, feeling the sweat drip down his forehead. They were safe. His pulse slowed. “Monsters like this are all over the planet,” he said to Nadia wonderingly. “Cutting, scraping, digging, filling, building. Pretty soon some of them will attach themselves to one of those two-kilometer asteroids, and build a power plant that will use the asteroid itself as fuel to drive it into Martian orbit, at which point other machines will land on it, and begin to transform the rock into a cable about thirty-seven thousand kilometers long! The
size
of it, Nadia! The size!”

“It’s big all right.”

“It’s unimaginable, really. Something completely beyond human abilities as we were brought up to understand them. Teleoperation on a massive scale. A kind of spiritual waldo. Anything that can be imagined can be executed!” Slowly they walked around the giant black object before them: no more than a kind of dump truck, nothing compared to what the space elevator would be; and yet even this truck, he thought, was an amazing thing. “Muscle and brain have extended out through an armature of robotics that is so large and powerful that it’s difficult to conceptualize it. Maybe impossible. That’s probably part of your talent, and Sax’s too— to flex the muscles that no one else realizes we have yet. I mean holes drilled right through the lithosphere, the terminator lit with mirrored sunlight, all these cities filling mesas and stuck in the sides of cliffs— and now a cable strung out way past Phobos and Deimos, so long that it’s both in orbit and touching down at the same time! It’s impossible to imagine it!”

“Not impossible,” Nadia noted.

“No. And now of course we see the evidence of our power all around us, we almost get run down by it as it goes about its work! And seeing is believing. Even without an imagination you can see what kind of power we have. Maybe that’s why things are getting so strange these days, everyone talking about ownership or sovereignty, fighting, making claims. People squabbling like those old gods on Olympus, because nowadays we’re just as powerful as they were.”

“Or more,” Nadia said.

He drove on into the Hellespontus Montes, the curved mountain range surrounding Hellas Basin. Somehow, one night when he was sleeping, his rover got off the transponder road. He woke up, and in breaks in the dust saw that he was in a narrow valley, walled with small cliffs that were cut by the typical fluting of ravines. It seemed likely that by staying on the valley floor he would cross the road again, so he headed on cross-country. Then the valley floor was disrupted by shallow transverse grabens like empty canals, and Pauline kept having to stop and turn and try another branch in her route-finding algorithm, defeated by one gulch after another as they appeared out of the murk. When John got impatient and tried to take over, it only got worse. In the land of the blind, the autopilot is king.

But slowly he closed on the valley mouth, where the map showed the transponder road descending to a wider valley below. So that night he stopped, unworried, and sat in front of the TV and ate a meal. Mangalavid was showing the premiere performance of an aeolia built by a group in Noctis Labyrinthus. The aeolia turned out to be a small building, cut with apertures which whistled or hooted or squeaked, depending on the angle and strength of the wind hitting them. For the premiere the daily downslope wind in Noctis was augmented by some fierce katabatic gusts from the storm, and the music fluctuated like a composition, mournful, angry, dissonant or in sudden snatches harmonic: it seemed the work of a mind, an alien mind perhaps, but certainly something more than random chance. The almost aleatory aeolia, as a commentator said.

After that came news from Earth. The existence of the gerontological treatments had been leaked by an official in Geneva, and had flashed around the world in a day; now there was a violent debate going on in the General Assembly concerning the matter. Many delegates were demanding that the treatments be made a basic human right, guaranteed by the U.N. for all, with funding from the developed nations placed immediately in a pool to make sure that financing for the treatments would be equally available to all. Meanwhile other reports were coming in: some religious leaders were coming out against the treatments, including the Pope; there were widespread riots, and some damage at certain medical centers. Governments were in a turmoil. All the faces on the TV were tense or angry, demanding change; and all the inequality, hatred and misery that the faces revealed made John flinch, he couldn’t watch. He fell asleep, and then slept poorly.

He was dreaming of Frank when a sound woke him. A knock on his windshield. It was the middle of the night. Groggily he locked the lock; sitting up he wondered that he had such a reflex action in him. When had he learned that one? He rubbed his jaw, turned on the common band. “Hello? Anyone out there?”

“The Martians.”

It was a man’s voice. His English was accented, but John couldn’t identify how.

“We want to talk,” the voice said.

John stood and looked out the windshield. At night, in the storm, there was precious little to see. But he thought he could pick out shapes in the blackness, there below him.

“We just want to talk,” the voice said.

If they had wanted to kill him they could have blown open the rover while he slept. Besides, he still couldn’t quite believe that anyone wished him harm. There was no reason for it!

So he let them in.

There were five of them, all men. Their walkers were frayed, dirty, patched with material that had not been made for walkers. Their helmets were without identification, stripped of all paint. As they took off the helmets he saw that one of the men was Asian, and young; he looked about eighteen. The youth went forward and sat in the driver’s seat, leaned over the steering wheel to look closer at the instrument array. Another got off his helmet; a short brown-skinned man, with a thin face and long dreadlocks. He sat on the padded bench across from John’s bed, and waited for the other three men to get their helmets off too. When they did they crouched on their haunches, watching John attentively. He had never seen any of them before.

The thin-faced man said, “We want you to slow the rate of immigration.” He was the one who had spoken outside; now his accent sounded Caribbean. He spoke in a low voice, almost in a whisper, and John found it very difficult not to emulate him.

“Or stop it,” the young man in the driver’s seat said.

“Shut up, Kasei.” The thin-faced man never took his gaze from John’s face. “There are too many people coming up. You know that. They’re not Martian, and they don’t care what happens here. They’re going to overwhelm us, they’re going to overwhelm you. You know that. You’re trying to turn them into Martians, we know, but they’re coming in a lot faster than you can work. The only thing that will work is slowing down the influx.”

“Or stopping it.”

The man rolled his eyes, appealed with a grimace for John’s understanding. The youth was young, his look said.

“I don’t have any say—” John began, but the man cut him off:

“You can advocate it. You’re a power, and you’re on our side.”

“Are you from Hiroko?”

The youth snicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The thin-faced man said nothing. Four faces stared at John; the other looked resolutely out the window.

John said, “Have you been sabotaging the moholes?”

“We want you to stop the immigration.”

“I want you to stop the sabotage. It’s just bringing more people here. Police.”

The man eyed him. “What makes you think we can contact the saboteurs?”

“Find them. Break in on them at night.”

The man smiled. “Out of sight, out of mind.”

“Not necessarily.”

They had to be with Hiroko. Occam’s razor. There couldn’t be more than one hidden group. Or maybe there could. John felt light-headed, and wondered if they were doctoring the air. Releasing aerosol drugs. He definitely felt strange, it was all surreal, dreamy; the wind buffeted the rover, sent a sudden burst of aeolian music coursing by, a weird drawn-out hoot. His thoughts were slow and ponderous, and he felt the edge of a yawn. That’s it, he thought. I’m still trying to wake from a dream.

“Why do you hide?” he heard himself say.

“We’re building Mars. Just like you. We’re on your side.”

“You ought to help, then.” He tried to think. “What about the space elevator?”

“We don’t care about it.” The kid snicked. “That isn’t what matters. It’s people that matter.”

“The elevator will bring a lot more people.”

The man considered that. “Slow the immigration, and it can’t even be built.”

Another long silence, punctuated by the wind’s eerie commentary. Can’t even be built? Did they think people would build it? Or maybe they meant the money.

“I’ll look into it,” John said. The kid turned and stared at him, and John raised a hand to forestall him. “I’ll do what I can.” His hand stood before him, a huge pink thing. “That’s all I can say. If I promised results, it would be lying. I know what you mean. I’ll do what I can.” He thought about it more, with difficulty. “You ought to be out in the open, helping us. We need more help.”

“Each in his way,” the man said quietly. “We’ll be going now. We’ll keep track to see what you do.”

“Tell Hiroko I want to talk to her.”

The five men looked at him, the young one intense and angry.

The thin-faced man smiled briefly. “If I see her I will.”

One of the crouching men held out a diaphanous blue mass— an aerogel sponge, barely visible under the night-running lights. The hand holding it made a fist. Yes, a drug. He lunged out and caught the young one unawares, clawed the youth’s bare neck and then fell, paralyzed.

When he came to they were gone. He had a headache. He fell back onto the bed, into an uneasy sleep. The dream about Frank made an improbable return, and John told him about the visitation. “You’re a fool,” Frank said. “You don’t understand.”

When he woke again it was morning, swirling a dim burnt umber outside the windshield. The winds had appeared to be lessening in the last month, but it was hard to be sure. Shapes in the dust clouds appeared briefly and then fell back into chaos, in little sensory-deprivation hallucinations. It really was sensory deprivation, this storm, and getting very claustrophobic indeed. He ate some omeg, suited up and went outside and walked around, breathing talcum and bending over to follow the tracks of his visitors. They crossed bedrock and disappeared. A difficult rendezvous, he would have thought; a lost rover at night, how had they found it?

But if they had been tracking him . . .

Back inside he called up the satellites. Radar and IR got nothing but his rover. Even walkers would have shown on the IR, so presumably they had a refuge nearby. Easy to hide in mountains like these. He called up his Hiroko map and drew a rough circle around his location, bulging it north and south in the mountains. He had several circles on the Hiroko map by now, but none of them had been searched by ground crews with any thoroughness, and probably they never would be, as most of them were in chaotic terrain, ravaged land the size of Wyoming or Texas. “It’s a big world,” he muttered.

He wandered around the inside of the car, looking at the floor. Then he remembered the last thing he had done. He looked under his fingernails;a little skin matter was stuck there, yes. He got a sample dish from the little auto-clave, and carefully scraped what was there onto the dish. Genome identification was far beyond the rover’s capabilities, but any big lab ought to be able to identify the youth, if his genome was on record. If not, that too would be useful information. And maybe Ursula and Vlad could identify him by parentage.

He relocated the transponder trail that afternoon, and came down into Hellas Basin late the next day. He found Sax there, attending a conference on the new lake, although it appeared that it was turning into a conference on agriculture under artificial lighting. The next morning John took him out in the clear tunnels between buildings, and they walked in a shifting yellow murk, the sun a saffron glow in the clouds to the east. “I think I met the coyote,” John said.

“Did you! Did he tell you where Hiroko is?”

“No.”

Sax shrugged. It appeared he was distracted by a talk he had to give that evening. So John decided to wait, and that evening he attended the talk with the rest of the lake station occupants. Sax assured the crowd that atmospheric, surface, and permafrost microbacteria were growing at a rate that was a significant fraction of their theoretical maximums— about at 2 percent, to be precise— and that they were going to have to be considering the problems of outdoor cultivation within a few decades. Applause at this announcement was nonexistent, because everyone there was absorbed by horrible problems engendered by the Great Storm, which they seemed to think had begun as a result of a miscalculation of Sax’s. Surface insolation was still 25 percent normal, as one of them waspishly pointed out, and the storm was showing no signs of ending. Temperatures had dropped, and tempers were rising. All the new arrivals had never seen more than a few meters around them, and psychological problems ranging from ennui to catatonia were pandemic.

Sax dismissed all that with a mild shrug. “It’s the last global storm,” he said. “It will go down in history as some kind of heroic age. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

This was poorly received. Sax, however, did not notice.

A few days later, Ann and Simon drove into the settlement with their boy Peter, who was now three. He had been, so far as they could tell, the thirty-third child born on Mars; the colonies established after the first hundred had been fairly prolific. John played with the boy on the floor as he and Ann and Simon caught up on news, and exchanged some of the thousand and one tales of the Great Storm. It seemed to John that Ann ought to be enjoying the storm and the horrendous knock it had put on the terraforming process, like some kind of planetary allergic response, the temperatures plummeting below the baseline, the reckless experimenters struggling with their puny clogged machines. . . . But she was not amused. Irritated as usual, in fact. “A dowsing team drilled into a volcanic vent in Daedalia and came up with a sample containing unicellular microorganisms significantly different from the cyanobacteria you released in the north. And the vent was pretty nearly encased in bedrock, and very far from any biotic release sites. They sent samples of the stuff up to Acheron for analysis, and Vlad studied it and declared that it looked like a mutant strain of one of their releases, perhaps injected into the sample rock by contaminated drilling equipment.” Ann poked John in the chest: “