Blue Mars (4 page)

Perhaps they did. But it made no difference. Any number of
elements on Earth were sending up their arguments for the cable—arguments,
threats, entreaties. They needed help down there. Any help. Art Randolph continued
energetically lobbying for the cable on behalf of Praxis, which was looking to
Ann like it would become the next transitional authority, metanationalism in
its latest manifestation or disguise.

But the natives were being slowly won over by them, intrigued by
the possibility of “conquering Earth,” unaware of how impossible this was,
incapable of imagining Earth’s vastness and immobility. One could tell them and
tell them, but they would never be able to imagine it.

Finally it came time for an informal vote. It was representative
voting, they had decided, one vote for each of the signatory groups to the
Dorsa Brevia document, one vote also to all the interested parties that had
arisen since then— new settlements in the outback, new political parties,
associations, labs, companies, guerrilla bands, the several red splinter
groups. Before they started some generous naive soul even offered the First
Hundred a vote, and everyone there laughed at the idea that the First Hundred
might be able to vote the same way on anything. The generous soul, a young
woman from Dorsa Brevia, then proposed that each of the First Hundred be given
an individual vote, but this was turned down as endangering the tenuous grasp
they had on representative governance. It would have made no difference anyway.

So they voted to allow the space elevator to remain standing, for
the time being—and in the possession of UNTA, down to and including the Socket,
without contestation. It was like King Canute deciding to declare the tide
legal after all, but no one laughed except Ann. The other Reds were furious.
Ownership of the Socket was still being actively contested, Dao objected
loudly, the neighborhood around it was vulnerable and could be taken, there was
no reason to back off like this, they were only trying to sweep a problem under
the rug because it was hard! But the majority were in agreement. The cable
should remain.

Ann felt the old urge: escape. Tents and trains, people, the
little Manhattan skyline of Sheffield against the south rim, the summit basalt
all torn and flattened and paved over.... There was a piste all the way around
the rim, but the western side of the caldera was very nearly uninhabited. So
Ann got in one of the smallest Red rovers, and drove around the rim counterclockwise,
just inside the piste, until she came to a little meteorological station, where
she parked the rover and went out through its lock, moving stiffly in a walker
that was much like the ones they had gone out in during the first years.

She was a kilometer or two away from the rim’s edge. She walked
slowly east toward it, stumbling once or twice before she started to pay proper
attention. The old lava on the flat expanse of the broad rim was smooth and
dark in some places, rough and lighter in others. By the time she approached
the edge she was in full areologist mode, doing a boulder ballet she could
sustain all day, attuned to every knob and crack underfoot. And this was a good
thing, because near the rim’s drop-off the land collapsed in a series of narrow
curving ledges, the drops sometimes a step, sometimes taller than she was. And
always the growing sense of empty air ahead, as the far side of the caldera and
the rest of the great circle became visible. And then she was climbing down
onto the last ledge, a bench only some five meters wide, with a curved back
wall, shoulder-high: and below her dropped the great round chasm of Pavonis.

This caldera was one of the geological marvels of the solar
system, a hole forty-five kilometers across and a full five kilometers deep,
and almost perfectly regular in everyway— circular, flat-floored, almost
vertically walled—a perfect cylinder of space, cut into the volcano like a rock
sampler’s coring. None of the other three big calderas even approached this
simplicity of form; Ascraeus and Olympus were complicated palimpsests of
overlapping rings, while the very broad shallow caldera of Arsia was roughly
circular, but shattered in every way. Pavonis alone was a regular cylinder: the
Platonic ideal of a volcanic caldera.

Of course from this wonderful vantage point she now had, the
horizontal stratification of the interior walls added a lot of irregular
detail, rust and black and chocolate and umber bands indicating variations in
the composition of the lava deposits; and some bands were harder than those
above and below, so that there were many arcuate balconies lining the wall at
different elevations—isolated curving benches, perched on the side of the
immense rock throat, most never visited. And the floor so flat. The subsidence
of the volcano’s magma chamber, located some 160 kilometers below the mountain,
had to have been unusually consistent; it had dropped in the same place every
time. Ann wondered if it had been determined yet why that had been; if the
magma chamber had been younger than the other big volcanoes, or smaller, or the
lava more homogenous.... Probably someone had investigated the phenomenon; no
doubt she could look it up on the wrist. She tapped out the code for the
Journal of Analogical Studies, typed in Pavonis: “Evidence of Strombolian
Explosive Activity Found in West Tharsis Clasts.” “Radial Ridges in Caldera and
Concentric Graben Outside the Rim Suggest Late Subsidence of the Summit.” She
had just crossed some of those graben. “Release of Juvenile Volatiles into
Atmosphere Calculated by Radiometric Dating of Lastflow Mafics.”

She clicked off the wristpad. She no longer kept up with all the
latest areology, she hadn’t for years. Even reading the abstracts would have
taken far more time than she had. And of course a lot of areology had been
badly compromised by the terraforming project. Scientists working for the
metanats had concentrated on resource exploration and evaluation, and had found
signs of ancient oceans, of the early warm wet atmosphere, possibly even of
ancient life; on the other hand radical Red scientists had warned of increased
seismic activity, rapid subsidence, mass wasting, and the disappearance of even
a single surface sample left in its primal condition. Political stress had
skewed nearly everything written about Mars in the past hundred years. The
Journal was the only publication Ann knew of which tried to publish papers
delimiting their inquiries very strictly to reporting areology in the pure
sense, concentrating on what had happened in the five billion years of
solitude; it was the only publication Ann still read, or at least glanced at,
looking through the titles and some of the abstracts, and the editorial
material at the front; once or twice she had even sent in a letter concerning
some detail or other, which they had printed without fanfare. Published by the
university in Sabishii, the Journal was peer-reviewed by like-minded
areologists, and the articles were rigorous, well researched, and with no
obvious political point to their conclusions; they were simply science. The
Journal’s editorials advocated what had to be called a Red position, but only
in the most limited sense, in that they argued for the preservation of the
primal landscape so that studies could be carried on without having to deal
with gross contaminations. This had been Ann’s position from the very start,
and it was still where she felt most comfortable; she had moved from that
scientific position into political activism only because it had been forced on
her by the situation. This was true for a lot of areologists now supporting the
Reds. They were her natural peer group, really—the people she understood, and
with whom she sympathized.

But they were few; she could almost name them individually. The
regular contributors to the Journal, more or less. As for the rest of the Reds,
the Kakaze and the other radicals, what they advocated was a kind of
metaphysical position, a cult—they were religious fanatics, the equivalent of
Hi-roko’s greens, members of some kind of rock-worshiping sect. Ann had very
little in common with them, when it came down to it; they formulated their
redness from a completely different worldview.

And given that there was that kind of fractionization among the
Reds themselves, what then could one say about the Martian independence
movement as a whole? Well. They were going to fall out. It was happening
already.

Ann sat down carefully on the edge of the final bench. A good
view. It appeared there was a station of some kind down there on the caldera floor,
though from five thousand meters up, it was hard to be sure. Even the ruins of
old Sheffield were scarcely visible—ah—there they were, on the floor under the
new town, a tiny pile of rubble with some straight lines and plane surfaces in
it. Faint vertical scorings on the wall above might have been caused by fall of
the city in ‘61. It was hard to say.

The tented settlements still on the rim were like toy villages in
paperweights. Sheffield with its skyline, the low warehouses across from her to
the east, Lastflow, the various smaller tents all around the rim .. . many of
them had merged, to become a kind of greater Sheffield, covering almost 180
degrees of the rim, from Lastflow around to the southwest, where pistes
followed the fallen cable down the long slope of west Tharsis to Amazonis
Planitia. All the towns and stations would always be tented, because at
twenty-seven kilometers high the air would always be a tenth as thick as it was
at the datum—or sea level, one could now call it. Meaning the atmosphere up
here was still only thirty or forty millibars thick.

Tent cities forever; but with the cable (she could not see it)
spearing Sheffield, development would certainly continue, until they had built
a tent city entirely ringing the caldera, looking down into it. No doubt they
would then tent the caldera itself, and occupy the round floor—add about 1,500
square kilometers to the city, though it was a question who would want to live
at the bottom of such a hole, like living at the bottom of a mohole, rock walls
rising up around you as if you were in some circular roofless cathedral ...
perhaps it would appeal to some. The Bogda-novists had lived in moholes for
years, after all. Grow forests, build climber’s huts or rather millionaires’
penthouses on the arcuate balcony ledges, cut staircases into the sides of the
rock, install glass elevators that took all day to go up or down ... rooftops,
row houses, skyscrapers reaching up toward the rim, heliports on their flat
round roofs, pistes, flying freeways ... oh yes, the whole summit of Pa-vonis
Mons, caldera and all, could be covered by the great world city, which was
always growing, growing like a fungus over every rock in the solar system.
Billions of people, trillions of people, quadrillions of people, all as close
to immortal as they could make themselves....

She shook her head, in a great confusion of spirits. The radicals
in Lastflow were not her people, not really, but unless they succeeded, the
summit of Pavonis and everywhere else on Mars would become part of the great
world city. She tried to concentrate on the view, she tried to feel it, the awe
of the symmetrical formation, the love of rock hard under her bottom. Her feet
hung over the edge of the bench, she kicked her heels against basalt; she could
throw a pebble and it would fall five thousand meters. But she couldn’t
concentrate. She couldn’t feel it. Petrification. So numb, for so long. . ..
She sniffed, shook her head, pulled her feet in over the edge. Walked back up
to her rover.

She dreamed of the long run-out.
The landslide was rolling across the floor of Melas Chasma, about
to strike her. Everything visible with surreal clarity. Again she remembered
Simon, again she groaned and got off the little dike, going through the
motions, appeasing a dead man inside her, feeling awful. The ground was
vibrating—

She woke, by her own volition she thought—escaping, running
away—but there was a hand, pulling hard on her arm.

“Ann, Ann, Ann.”

It was Nadia. Another surprise. Ann struggled up, disoriented.
“Where are we?”

“Pavonis, Ann. The revolution. I came over and woke you because a
fight has broken out between Kasei’s Reds and the greens in Sheffield.”

The present rolled over her like the landslide in her dream. She
jerked out of Nadia’s grasp, groped for her shirt. “Wasn’t my rover locked?”

“I broke in.”

“Ah.” Ann stood up, still foggy, getting more annoyed the more she
understood the situation. “Now what happened?”

“They launched missiles at the cable.”

“They did!” Another jolt, further clearing away the fog. “And?”

“It didn’t work. The cable’s defense systems shot them down.
They’ve got a lot of hardware up there now, and they’re happy to be able to use
it at last. But now the Reds are moving into Sheffield from the west, firing
more rockets, and the UN forces on Clarke are bombing the first launch sites,
over on Ascraeus, and they’re threatening to bomb every armed force down here.
This is just what they wanted. And the Reds think it’s going to be like
Burroughs, obviously, they’re trying to force the action. So I came to you.
Look, Ann, I know we’ve been fighting a lot. I haven’t been very, you know,
patient, but look, this is just too much. Everything could fall apart at the
last minute—the UN could decide the situation here is anarchy, and come up from
Earth and try to take over again.”

“Where are they?” Ann croaked. She pulled on pants, went to the
bathroom. Nadia followed her right in. This too was a surprise; in Underbill it
might have been normal between them, but it had been a long long time since
Nadia had followed her into a bathroom talking obsessively while Ann washed her
face and sat down and peed. “They’re still based in Lastflow, but now they’ve
cut the rim piste and the one to Cairo, and they’re fighting in west Sheffield,
and around the Socket. Reds fighting greens.”

“Yes yes.”

“So will you talk to the Reds, will you stop them?”

A sudden fury swept through Ann. “You drove them to this,” she
shouted in Nadia’s face, causing Nadia to crash back into the door. Ann got up
and took a step toward Nadia and yanked her pants up, shouting still: “You and
your smug stupid terraforming, it’s all green green green green, with never a
hint of compromise! It’s just as much your fault as theirs, since they have no
hope!”

“Maybe so,” Nadia said mulishly. Clearly she didn’t care about
that, it was the past and didn’t matter; she waved it aside and would not be
swerved from her point: “But will you try?”

Ann stared at her stubborn old friend, at this moment almost
youthful with fear, utterly focused and alive.

“I’ll do what I can,” Ann said grimly. “But from what you say,
it’s already too late.”

*
     
*
       
*

It was indeed too late. The rover camp Ann had been staying in was
deserted, and when she got on the wrist and called around, she got no answers.
So she left Nadia and the rest of them stewing in the east Pavonis warehouse
complex, and drove her rover around to Lastflow, hoping to find some of the Red
leaders based there. But Lastflow had been abandoned by the Reds, and none of
the locals knew where they had gone. People were watching TVs in the stations
and cafe windows, but when Ann looked too she saw no news of the fighting, not
even on Mangalavid. A feeling of desperation began to seep into her grim mood;
she wanted to do something but did not know how. She tried her wrist-pad again,
and to her surprise Kasei answered on their private band. His face in the
little image looked shockingly like John Boone’s, so much so that in her
confusion Ann didn’t at first hear what he said. He looked so happy, it was John
to the life!

“. . . had to do it,” he was telling her. Ann wondered if she had
asked him about that. “If we don’t do something they’ll tear this world apart.
They’ll garden it right to the tops of the big four.”

This echoed Ann’s thoughts on the ledge enough to shock her again,
but she collected herself and said, “We’ve got to work within the framework of
the discussions, Kasei, or else we’ll start a civil war.”

“We’re a minority, Ann. The framework doesn’t care about
minorities.”

“I’m not so sure. That’s what we have to work on. And even if we
do decide on active resistance, it doesn’t have to be here and now. It doesn’t
have to be Martians killing Martians.”

“They’re not Martian.” There was a glint in his eye, his
expression was Hiroko-like in its distance from the ordinary world. In that
sense he was not like John at all. The worst of both parents; and so they had
another prophet, speaking a new language.

“Where are you now?”

“West Sheffield.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Take the Socket, and then bring down the cable. We’re the ones
with the weapons and the experience. I don’t think we’ll have much trouble.”

“You didn’t bring it down first try.”

“Too fancy. We’ll just chop it down this time.”

“I thought that wasn’t the way to do it.”

“It’ll work.”

“Kasei, I think we need to negotiate with the greens.”

He shook his head, impatient with her, disgusted that she had lost
her nerve when push came to shove. “After the cable is down we’ll negotiate.
Look Ann, I’ve gotta go. Stay out of the fall line.”

“Kasei!”

But he was gone. No one listened to her—not her enemies, not her
friends, not her family—though she would have to call Peter. She would have to
try Kasei again. She needed to be there in person, to get his attention as she
had Nadia’s—yes, it had come to that: to get their attention she had to shout
right in their faces.

The possibility of getting blocked around east Pavonis kept her
going west from Lastflow, circling counterclockwise as she had the day before,
to come on the Red force from its rear, no doubt the best approach anyway. It
was about a 150-kilometer drive from Lastflow to the western edge of Sheffield,
and as she sped around the summit, just outside the piste, she spent the time
trying to call the various forces on the mountain, with no success. Explosive
static marked the fight for Sheffield, and memories of ‘61 erupted with these
brutal bursts of white noise, frightening her; she drove the rover as fast as
it would go, keeping it on the piste’s narrow outside apron to make the ride
smoother and faster—a hundred kilometers per hour, then faster— racing, really,
to try to stave off the disaster of a civil war— there was a terrible dreamlike
quality to it. And especially in that it was too late, too late. In moments
like these she was always too late. In the sky over the caldera, starred clouds
appeared instantaneously—explosions, without a doubt missiles fired at the
cable and shot down in midflight, in white puffs like incompetent fireworks,
clustered over Sheffield and peaking in the region of the cable, but puffing
into existence all over the vast summit, then drifting off east on the.jet
stream. Some of those rockets were getting nailed a long way from their target.

Looking up at the battle overhead she almost drove into the first
tent of west Sheffield, which was already punctured. As the town had grown
westward new tents had attached to the previous ones like lobes of pillow lava;
now the construction moraines outside the latest tent were littered with bits
of framework, like shards of glass, and the tent fabric was missing in the
remaining soccer-ball shapes. Her rover bounced wildly over a mound of basalt
rubble; she braked, drove slowly up to the wall. The vehicle lock doors were
stuck shut. She put on her suit and helmet, ducked into the rover’s own lock,
left the car. Heart pounding hard, she walked up to the city wall and climbed
over it into Sheffield.

The streets were deserted. Glass and bricks and bamboo shards and
twisted magnesium beams lay scattered on the streetgrass. At this elevation,
tent failure caused flawed buildings to pop like balloons; windows gaped empty
and dark, and here and there complete rectangles of unbroken windows lay
scattered, like great clear shields. And there was a body, face frosted or
dusted. There would be a lot of dead, people weren’t used to thinking about
decompression anymore, it was an old settlers’ worry. But not today.

Ann kept walking east. “Look for Kasei or Dao or Marion or Peter,”
she said to her wrist again and again. But no one replied.

She followed a narrow street just inside the southern wall of the
tent. Harsh sunlight, sharp-edged black shadows. Some buildings had held, their
windows in place, their lights on inside. No one to be seen in them, of course.
Ahead the cable was just visible, a black vertical stroke rising into the sky
out of east Sheffield, like a geometric line become visible in their reality.

The Red emergency band was a signal transmitted in a rapidly
varying wavelength, synchronized for everyone who had the current encryption. This
system cut through some kinds of radio jamming very well; nevertheless Ann was
surprised when a crow voice cawed from her wrist, “Ann, it’s Dao. Up here.”

He was actually in sight, waving at her from a doorway into a
building’s little emergency lock. He and a group of some twenty people were
working with a trio of mobile rocket launchers out in the street. Ann ran over
to them, ducked into the doorway beside Dao. “This has to stop!” she cried.

Dao looked surprised. “We’ve almost got the Socket.”

“But what then?”

“Talk to Kasei about that. He’s up ahead, going for Arsia-view.”

One of their rockets whooshed away, its noise faint in the thin
air. Dao was back at it. Ann ran forward up the street, keeping as close as she
could to the buildings siding it. It was obviously dangerous, but at that
moment she didn’t care if she was killed or not, so she had no fear. Peter was
somewhere in Sheffield, in command of the green revolutionaries who had been
there from the beginning. These people had been efficient enough to keep the
UNTA security forces trapped on the cable and up on Clarke, so they were by no
means the hapless pacifistic young native street demonstrators that Kasei and
Dao seemed to have assumed they were. Her spiritual children, mounting an
attack on her only actual child, in complete confidence that they had her
blessing. As once they had. But now—

She struggled to keep running, her breath hard and ragged, the
sweat beginning to flood through all over her skin. She hurried to the south
tent wall, where she came on a little fleet of Red boulder cars, Turtle Rocks
from the Acheron car manufactory. But no one inside them answered her calls,
and when she looked closer she saw that their rock roofs were punctured by
holes at their fronts, where the windshields would have been, underneath the
rock overhang. Anyone inside them was dead. She ran on eastward, staying
against the tent wall, heedless of debris underfoot, feeling a rising panic.
She was aware that a single shot from anyone could kill her, but she had to
find Kasei. She tried again over the wrist.

While she was at it, a call came in to her. It was Sax.

“It isn’t logical to connect the fate of the elevator with
terraforming goals,” he was saying, as if he was speaking to more people than
just her. “The cable could be tethered to quite a cold planet.”

It was the usual Sax, the all-too-Sax: but then he must have
noticed she was on, because he stared owlishly into his wrist’s little camera
and said, “Listen Ann, we can take history by the arm and break it—make it.
Make it new.”

Her old Sax would never have said that. Nor chattered on at her,
clearly distraught, pleading, visibly nerve-racked; one of the most frightening
sights she had ever seen, actually: “They love you, Ann. It’s that that can
save us. Emotional histories are the true histories. Watersheds of desire and
devolution—devotion. You’re the—the personification of certain values—for the
natives. You can’t escape that. You have to act with that. I did it in Da
Vinci, and it proved—helpful. Now it’s your turn. You must. You must— Ann—just
this once you must join us all. Hang together or hang separately. Use your
iconic value.”

So strange to hear such stuff from Saxifrage Russell. But then he
shifted again, he seemed to pull himself together. “... logical procedure is to
establish some kind of equation for conflicting interests.” Just like his old
self.

Then there was a beep from her wrist and she cut Sax off, and
answered the incoming call. It was Peter, there on the Red coded frequency, a
black expression on his face that she had never seen before.