Authors: Kim Stanley Robinson
She moved on, did it again with another likely-sized pile. Thabo Moeti. It was better than checking teeth against dental records; but she wouldn’t have done that.
She was light-headed and numb when she came to a soot pile near the city offices, alone, its right hand splayed out so that she only had to check. She cleaned the tag and checked. Arkady Nikelyovich Bogdanov.
After Korolyov, they encountered no one. The radios and TVs went dead as satellites were shot out, the pistes were empty, and the Earth was on the other side of the sun. The landscape seemed as barren as before their arrival, except for the spreading patches of frost. They flew on as if they were the only people in the world, the sole survivors.
White noise buzzed in Nadia’s ear, something to do with the plane’s ventilators no doubt. She checked the ventilators, but they were okay. The others gave her chores to do, let her go on walks by herself before takeoff and after landing. They were stunned themselves by what they had found at Carr and Korolyov, and unable to bring much to the effort of cheering her up, which she found a relief. Ann and Simon were still worried about Peter. Yeli and Sax were worried about their food supplies, dropping all the time; the plane’s cabinets were nearly bare.
But Arkady was dead, and so none of that mattered. The revolt seemed to Nadia more a waste than ever, an unfocused spasm of rage, the ultimate cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. The whole world, wrecked! She told the others to send out a radio message on one of the general channels, announcing that Arkady was dead. Sasha agreed, and helped convince the others to do it. “It will help stop things more quickly,” Sasha said.
Sax shook his head. “Insurrections don’t have leaders,” he said. “Besides, no one is likely to hear it.”
But a couple of days later, it was clear some people had heard it. They received a microburst in response from Alex Zhalin. “Look, Sax, this isn’t the American Revolution, or the French or the Russian or the English. It’s all the revolutions at once, and everywhere! A whole world is in revolt, with a land area equal to Earth’s, and only a few thousand people are trying to stop it— and most of those are still in space, where they have a good view but are very vulnerable. So if they manage to subdue a force in Syrtis, there is another in the Hellespontus. Imagine space-based forces trying to stop a revolution in Cambodia, but also in Alaska, Japan, Spain, Madagascar. How do you do it? You can’t. I only wish that Arkady Nikelyovich had lived to see it, he would have—”
The microburst ended abruptly. Perhaps a bad sign, perhaps not. But even Alex hadn’t been able to keep a note of discouragement out of his voice, when he talked about Arkady. It was impossible; Arkady had been so much more than a political leader— everybody’s brother, a natural force, the voice of one’s conscience. One’s innate sense of what was fair and just. One’s best friend.
Nadia stumped through her grief, helping to navigate their flights by night, sleeping as much as she could through the days. She lost weight. Her hair turned pure white, all the remaining gray and black hairs coming out in her brush. She found it hard to speak. It felt like her throat and guts had petrified. She was a stone, it was impossible to weep. She went about her business instead. No one they met had any food to spare, and they were running out themselves. They set a strict rationing schedule, dividing meals in half.
And on the thirty-second day of their journey from Lasswitz, after a journey of some 10,000 kilometers, they came to Cairo, up on the southern rim of Noctis Labyrinthus, just to the south of the southernmost strand of the fallen cable.
Cairo was under the de facto control of UNOMA, in that no one in the city had ever claimed otherwise, and like all the rest of the big tent cities it lay helpless under the orbiting lasers of UNOMA police ships, which had burned into orbit sometime in the last month. Also most of the inhabitants of Cairo at the beginning of the war had been Arab and Swiss, and in Cairo, at least, people of both nationalities seemed only to be trying to stay out of harm’s way.
Now, however, the six travelers were not the only refugees arriving. A flood of them had just come down Tharsis from the devastation in Sheffield and the rest of Pavonis; others were driving up from Marineris, through the maze of Noctis. The city was at quadruple capacity, with crowds living and sleeping in the streets and parks, the physical plant strained to the breaking point, and food and gases running out.
The six travelers were told this by an airstrip worker who was still stubbornly doing her job, although none of the strip shuttles were running anymore. After guiding them into parking places among a great fleet of planes at one end of the strip, she told them to suit up and walk the kilometer to the city wall. It made Nadia unreasonably nervous to leave the two 16Ds behind and walk into a city; and she was not reassured once through the lock, when she saw that most people inside were wearing their walkers and carrying their helmets with them, ready for depressurization if it came.
They went to the city offices, and there found Frank and Maya, as well as Mary Dunkel and Spencer Jackson. They all greeted each other with relief, but there was no time for catching up on their various adventures. Frank was busy before a screen, talking to someone in orbit by the sound of it, and he shrugged off their hugs and kept talking, waving once later to acknowledge their appearance. Apparently he was hooked into a functioning communications system, or even more than one, because he stayed in front of the screen talking to one face or another for the next six hours straight, pausing only to sip water or make another call, not sparing another glance for his old compatriots. He seemed to be in a permanent fury, his jaw muscles bunching and unbunching rhythmically; other than that he was in his element, explaining and lecturing, wheedling and threatening, inquiring and then commenting impatiently on the answers he got. Wheeling and dealing in his old style, in other words, but with an angry, bitter, even frightened edge, as if he had walked off a cliff and was trying to argue his way back to ground.
When he finally clicked off, he leaned back in his seat and sighed histrionically, then rose stiffly from his seat and came over to greet them, putting a hand briefly on Nadia’s shoulder. Aside from that he was brusque with all of them, and completely uninterested in how they had managed to make it to Cairo. He only wanted to know whom they had met, and where, and how well these scattered parties were doing, and what they intended. Once or twice he went back to his screen and contacted these groups immediately upon being informed of their location, an ability that stunned the travelers, who had assumed that everyone was as cut off as they had been. “UNOMA links,” Frank explained, running a hand over his swarthy jaw. “They’re keeping some channels open for me.”
“Why?” Sax said.
“Because I’m trying to stop this. I’m trying for a cease-fire, then a general amnesty, then a reconstruction joined by all.”
“But under whose direction?”
“UNOMA’s, of course. And the national offices.”
“But UNOMA agrees only to the cease-fire?” Sax ventured. “While the rebels only agree to the general amnesty?”
Frank nodded curtly. “And neither like the reconstruction joined by all. But the current situation is so bad they may go for it. Four more aquifers have blown since the cable came down. They’re all equatorial, and some people are saying it’s cause and effect.”
Ann shook her head at this, and Frank looked pleased to see it. “They were broken open, I was pretty sure. They broke one at the mouth of Chasma Borealis, it’s pouring out onto the Borealis dunes.”
“The weight of the polar cap probably puts that one under a good bit of pressure,” Ann said.
“Do you know what happened to the Acheron group?” Sax asked Frank.
“No. They’ve disappeared. It might be like with Arkady, I’m afraid.” He glanced at Nadia, pursed his lips unhappily. “I should get back to work.”
“But what’s happening on Earth?” Ann demanded. “What does the U.N. have to say about all this?”
“
‘Mars is not a nation but a world resource,’
” Frank quoted heavily. “They’re saying that the tiny fraction of humanity that lives here can’t be allowed to control the resources, when the human material base as a whole is so deeply stressed.”
“That’s probably true,” Nadia heard herself say. Her voice was harsh, a croak. It felt like she hadn’t spoken in days.
Frank shrugged.
Sax said, “I suppose that’s why they’ve given the transnationals such a free hand. It seems to me there’s more of their security here than U.N. police.”
“That’s right,” Frank said. “It took the U.N. a while to agree to deploy their peacekeepers.”
“They don’t mind having the dirty work done by someone else.”
“Of course not.”
“And Earth itself?” Ann asked again.
Frank shrugged. “The Group of Seven seems to be getting things under control.” He shook his head. “It’s hard to say from here, it really is.”
He went to his screen to make more calls. The others went off to eat, to clean up, to sleep, to catch up on friends and acquaintances, on the rest of the first hundred, on what news there was from Earth. The flags of convenience had been destroyed by attacks from the have-nots in the south, but apparently the transnationals had fled to the Group of Seven, and had been taken in and defended by the seven’s giant militaries. The twelfth attempt at a cease-fire had held for several days now.
So they had a bit of time to try and recover. But when they went through the comm room, Frank would still be there, shifting ever more surely into a bitter black fury, snapping his way through what seemed an endless nightmare of screen diplomacy, talking on and on in an urgent, scornful, biting tone. He was past cajoling anyone into anything now, it was purely an exertion of will. Trying to move the world without a fulcrum, or with the weakest of fulcrums, his leverage consisting mainly of his old American connections and his current personal standing with a variety of insurrection leaders, both nearly severed by events and the TV blackouts. And both becoming less important daily on Mars itself, as UNOMA and the transnational forces took over town after town. It seemed to Nadia that Frank was now trying to muscle the process along by the sheer force of his anger at his lack of influence. She found she could not stand to be around him; things were bad enough without his black bile.
But with Sax’s help he got an independent signal to Earth, by contacting Vega and getting the technicians there to transmit messages back and forth. That meant a few hours between transmission and reception, but in a long couple of days after that, he got in five coded exchanges with Secretary of State Wu, and while waiting through the night for return messages, the people on Vega filled the gaps with tapes of Terran news programs that they had not seen. All these reports, when they referred to the Martian situation at all, portrayed the insurrection as a minor disruption caused by criminal elements, principally by escaped prisoners from Korolyov, who had gone on a rampage of senseless property damage, in the process killing great numbers of innocent civilians. Clips of the frozen naked guards outside Korolyov were featured prominently in these reports, as were satellite telephotos of the aquifer outbursts. The most skeptical programs mentioned that these and all other clips from Mars were provided by UNOMA, and some stations in China and the Netherlands even questioned the accuracy of the UNOMA accounts. But they provided no alternative explanation of events, and for the most part, the Terran media disseminated the transnationals’ version of things. When Nadia pointed this out, Frank snorted. “Of course,” he said contemptuously. “Terran news
is
transnational.” He turned off the sound.
Behind him Nadia and Yeli leaned forward instinctively on the bamboo couch, as if that might help them to hear the silent clip better. Their two weeks of being cut off from outside news had seemed like a year, and now they watched the screen helplessly, soaking in whatever information they could. Yeli even stood to turn the sound back up, but saw that Frank was asleep in his chair, his chin on his chest. When a message from the State Department came in Frank jerked awake, turned up the sound, stared at the tiny faces on the screen, snapped out a reply in a hoarse rasp. Then he closed his eyes and slept again.
At the end of the second night of the Vega link, he had gotten Secretary Wu to promise to press the U.N. in New York to restore communications, and halt all police action until the situation could be assessed. Wu was also going to try to get transnational forces ordered back to Earth, though that, Frank noted, would be impossible.
The sun had been up for a couple of hours when Frank sent a final acknowledgment to Vega, and shut down. Yeli was asleep on the floor. Nadia stood up stiffly and went for a walk around the park, taking advantage of the light to have a look around. She had to step over bodies sleeping in the grass, in groups of three or four spooned together for warmth. The Swiss had set up big kitchens, and rows of outhouses lining the city wall; it looked like a construction site, and suddenly she found tears running down her face. On she walked. It was nice to be able to walk around in the open light of day.