Red Mars (5 page)

They floated weightlessly around the room. December 21st, 2026: they were moving faster than anyone in history. They were on their way. It was the beginning of a nine-month voyage— or of a voyage that would last the rest of their lives. They were on their own.

Those responsible for piloting the
Ares
pulled themselves to the control consoles and gave the orders to fire lateral control rockets. The
Ares
began to spin, stabilizing at four rpm. The colonists sank to the floors, and stood in a pseudogravity of .38 g, very close to what they would feel on Mars. Many man-years of tests had indicated that it would be a fairly healthy g to live in, and so much healthier than weightlessness that rotating the ship had been deemed worth the trouble. And, Maya thought, it felt great. There was enough pull to make balance relatively easy, but hardly any feeling of pressure, of drag. It was the perfect equivalent of their mood; they staggered down the halls to the big dining hall in Torus D, giddy and exhilarated, walking on air.

In Torus D’s dining hall they mingled in a kind of cocktail party, celebrating the departure. Maya wandered about, sipping freely from a mug of champagne, feeling slightly unreal and extremely happy, a mix that reminded her of her wedding reception many years before. Hopefully this marriage would go better than that one had, she thought, because this one was going to last forever. The hall was loud with talk. “It’s a symmetry not so much sociological as mathematic. A kind of aesthetic balance.” “We’re hoping to get it into the parts per billion range, but it’s not going to be easy.” Maya turned down an offered refill, feeling giddy enough. Besides, this was work. She was co-mayor of this village, so to speak, responsible for group dynamics, which were bound to get complex. Antarctic habits kicked in even at this moment of triumph, and she listened and watched like an anthropologist, or a spy.

“The shrinks have their reasons. We’ll end up fifty happy couples.”

“And they already know the match-ups.”

She watched them laugh. Smart, healthy, supremely well-educated— was this the rational society at last, the scientifically designed community that had been the dream of the Enlightenment? But there was Arkady, Nadia, Vlad, Ivana. She knew the Russian contingent too well to have many illusions on that score. They were just as likely to end up resembling an undergraduate dorm at a technical university, occupied by bizarre pranks and lurid affairs. Except they looked a bit old for that kind of thing; several men were balding, and many of both sexes showed touches of gray in their hair. It had been a long haul; their average age was forty-six, with extremes ranging from thirty-three (Hiroko Ai, the Japanese prodigy of biosphere design) to fifty-eight (Vlad Taneev, winner of a Nobel Prize in medicine).

Now, however, the flush of youth was on all their faces. Arkady Bogdanov was a portrait in red: hair, beard, skin. In all that red his eyes were a wild electric blue, bugging out happily as he exclaimed, “Free at last! Free at last! All our children are free at last!” The video cameras had been turned off, after Janet Blyleven had recorded a series of interviews for the TV stations back home; they were out of contact with Earth, in the dining hall anyway, and Arkady was singing, and the group around him toasted the song. Maya stopped to join this group. Free at last; it was hard to believe, they were actually on their way to Mars! Knots of people talking, many of them world class in their fields; Ivana had won part of a Nobel Prize in chemistry, Vlad was one of the most famous medical biologists in the world, Sax was in the pantheon of great contributors to subatomic theory, Hiroko was unmatched in enclosed biological life-support systems design, and so on all around; a brilliant crowd!

And Maya was one of their leaders. It was a bit daunting. Her engineering and cosmonautic skills were modest enough, it was her diplomatic ability that had gotten her aboard, presumably. Chosen to head the disparate, fractious Russian team, with the several commonwealth members— well, that was okay. It was interesting work, and she was used to it. And her skills might very well turn out to be the most important ones aboard. They had to get along, after all. And that was a matter of guile, and cunning, and will. Willing other people to do your bidding! She looked at the crowd of glowing faces, and laughed. All aboard were good at their work, but some were gifted far beyond that. She had to identify those people, to seek them out, to cultivate them. Her ability to function as leader depended on it, for in the end, she thought, they would surely become a kind of loose scientific meritocracy. And in such a society as that, the extraordinarily talented constituted the real powers. When push came to shove, they would be the colony’s true leaders— they, or those who influenced them.

She looked around and located her opposite number, Frank Chalmers. In Antarctica she had not gotten to know him very well. A tall, big, swarthy man. He was talkative enough, and incredibly energetic, but hard to read. She found him attractive. Did he see things as she did? She had never been able to tell. He was talking to a group across the length of the room, listening in that sharp inscrutable way of his, head tilted to the side, ready to pounce with a witty remark. She was going to have to find out more about him. More than that, she was going to have to get along with him.

She crossed the room, stopped by his side, stood so their upper arms just barely touched. Leaned her head in toward his. A brief gesture at their comrades: “This is going to be fun, don’t you think?”

Chalmers glanced at her. “If it goes well,” he said.

After the celebration and dinner, unable to sleep, Maya wandered through the
Ares
. All of them had spent time in space before, but never in anything like the
Ares
, which was enormous. There was a kind of penthouse at the front end of the ship, a single tank like a bowsprit, which rotated in the opposite direction the ship did, so that it held steady. Solar watch instruments, radio antennas, and all the other equipment that worked best without rotation were located in this tank, and at the very tip of it was a bulbous room of transparent plastic, a chamber quickly named the bubble dome, which provided the crew with a weightless, nonrotating view of the stars, and a partial view of the great ship behind it.

Maya floated near the window wall of this bubble dome, looking back at the ship curiously. It had been constructed using space-shuttle external-fuel tanks; around the turn of the century NASA and Glavkosmos had begun attaching small booster rockets to the tanks and pushing them all the way into orbit. Scores of tanks had been launched this way, then tugged to work sites and put to use— with them they had built two big space stations, an L5 station, a lunar orbit station, the first manned Mars vehicle, and scores of unmanned freighters sent to Mars. So by the time the two agencies agreed to build the
Ares
, the use of the tanks had become routinized, with standard coupling units, interiors, propulsion systems and so forth; and construction of the big ship had taken less than two years.

It looked like something made from a children’s toy set, in which cylinders were attached at their ends to create more complex shapes— in this case, eight hexagons of connected cylinders, which they called toruses, lined up and speared down the middle by a central hub shaft, made of a cluster of five lines of cylinders. The toruses were connected to the hub shaft by thin crawl spokes, and the resulting object looked somewhat like a piece of agricultural machinery, say the arm of a harvester combine, or a mobile sprinkler unit. Or like eight knobby doughnuts, Maya thought, toothpicked to a stick. Just the sort of thing a child would appreciate.

The eight toruses had been made from American tanks, and the five bundled lengths of the central shaft were Russian. Both kinds of tanks were about fifty meters long and ten meters in diameter. Maya floated aimlessly down the tanks of the hub shaft; it took her a long time, but she was in no hurry. She dropped down into Torus G. There were rooms of all shapes and sizes, right up to the largest, which occupied entire tanks. The floor in one of these she passed through was set just below the halfway mark, so its interior resembled a long Quonset hut. But the majority of the tanks had been divided up into smaller rooms. She had heard there were over five hundred of them in all, making for a total interior space roughly the equivalent of a large city hotel.

But would it be enough?

Perhaps it would. After the Antarctic, life on the
Ares
seemed an expansive, labyrinthine, airy experience. Around six every morning the darkness in the residential toruses would lighten slowly to a gray dawn, and around six-thirty a sudden brightening marked “sunrise.” Maya woke to it as she had all her life. After visiting the lavatory she would make her way to Torus D’s kitchen, heat a meal, and take it into the big dining hall. There she sat at a table flanked by potted lime trees. Hummingbirds, finches, tanagers, sparrows and lories pecked underfoot and darted overhead, dodging the creeping vines that hung from the hall’s long barrel ceiling, which was painted a gray-blue that reminded her of St. Petersburg’s winter sky. She would eat slowly, watch the birds, relax in her chair, listen to the talk around her. A leisurely breakfast! After a lifetime of grinding work it felt rather uncomfortable at first, even alarming, like a stolen luxury. As if it were Sunday morning every day, as Nadia said. But Maya’s Sunday mornings had never been particularly relaxed. In her childhood that had been the time for cleaning the one-room apartment she had shared with her mother. Her mother had been a doctor and like most women of her generation had had to work ferociously to get by, obtaining food, bringing up a child, keeping an apartment, running a career; it had been too much for one person, and she had joined the many women angrily demanding a better deal than they had gotten in the Soviet years, which had given them half the money jobs while leaving them all the work at home. No more waiting, no more mute endurance; they had to take advantage while the instability lasted. “Everything is on the table,” Maya’s mother would exclaim while cooking their meager dinners, “everything but food!”

And perhaps they had taken advantage. In the Soviet era women had learned to help each other, a nearly self-contained world had come into being, of mothers, sisters, daughters, babushkas, women friends, colleagues, even strangers. In the commonwealth this world had consolidated its gains and thrust even further into the power structure, into the tight male oligarchies of Russian government.

One of the fields most affected had been the space program. Maya’s mother, slightly involved in space medical research, always swore that cosmonautics would need an influx of women, if only to provide female data for the medical experimentation. “They can’t hold Valentina Tereshkova against us forever!” her mother would cry. And apparently she had been right, because after studying aeronautic engineering at Moscow University, Maya had been accepted in a program at Baikonur, and had done well, and had gotten an assignment on
Novy Mir
. While up there she had redesigned the interiors for improved ergonomic efficiency, and later spent a year in command of the station, during which a couple of emergency repairs had bolstered her reputation. Administrative assignments in Baikonur and Moscow had followed, and over time she had managed to penetrate Glavkosmos’s little politburo, playing the men against each other in the subtlest of ways, marrying one of them, divorcing him, rising afterward in Glavkosmos a free agent, becoming one of the utmost inner circle, the double triumvirate.

And so here she was, having a leisurely breakfast. “So civilized,” Nadia would scoff. She was Maya’s best friend on the
Ares
, a short woman round as a stone, with a square face framed by cropped salt-and-pepper hair. Plain as could be. Maya, who knew she was good-looking, and knew that this had helped her many times, loved Nadia’s plainness, which somehow underlined her competence. Nadia was an engineer and very practical, an expert in cold-climate construction. They had met in Baikonur twenty years before, and once lived together on
Novy Mir
for several months; over the years they had become like sisters, in that they were not much alike, and did not often get along, and yet were intimate.

Now Nadia looked around and said, “Putting the Russian and American living quarters in different toruses was a horrible idea. We work with them during the day, but we spend most of our time here with the same old faces. It only reinforces the other divisions between us.”

“Maybe we should offer to exchange half the rooms.”

Arkady, wolfing down coffee rolls, leaned over from the next table. “It’s not enough,” he said, as if he had been part of their conversation all along. His red beard, growing wilder every day, was dusted with crumbs. “We should declare every other Sunday to be moving day, and have everyone shift quarters on a random basis. People would get to know more of the others, and there would be fewer cliques. And the notion of ownership of the rooms would be reduced.”

“But I like owning a room,” Nadia said.

Arkady downed another roll, grinned at her as he chewed. It was a miracle he had passed the selection committee.

But Maya brought up the subject with the Americans, and though no one liked Arkady’s plan, a single exchange of half the apartments struck them as a good idea. After some consulting and discussion, the move was arranged. They did it on a Sunday morning, and after that, breakfast was a little more cosmopolitan. Mornings in the D dining hall now included Frank Chalmers and John Boone, and also Sax Russell, Mary Dunkel, Janet Blyleven, Rya Jimenez, Michel Duval, and Ursula Kohl.

John Boone turned out to be an early riser, getting to the dining hall even before Maya. “This room is so spacious and airy, it really has an outdoor feel to it,” he said from his table one dawn when Maya came in. “A lot better than B’s hall.”

“The trick is to remove all chrome and white plastic,” Maya replied. Her English was fairly good, and getting better fast. “And then paint the ceiling like real sky.”