Blue Mars (58 page)

“It isn’t domination.”

“Of course not.” Zo kept a straight face. “But the big worlds, you
know—”

“Are big.” Jackie nodded. “But add all these little ones together,
and they’re big too.”

“Who’s going to add them?” Zo asked.

Jackie ignored the question. The answer was obvious anyway: Jackie
would. Jackie was locked into a long-term battle with various forces on Earth,
for what came down to the control of Mars; she was trying to keep them from
being inundated by the immense home world; and as human civilization continued
to spread throughout the solar system, Jackie considered the new little
settlements pawns in this great struggle. And indeed if there were enough of
them, they might make a difference.

“There’s not much reason to worry about Mercury,” Zo reassured
her. “It’s a dead end, a provincial little town, run by a cult. No one can
settle very many people there, no one. So even if we do manage to bring them on
board, they won’t matter much.”

Jackie’s face took on its world-weary look, as if Zo’s analysis of
the situation were the work of a child—as if there were hidden sources of
political power on Mercury, of all places. It was irritating, but Zo restrained
herself and did not show her irritation.

Antar came in, looking for them; he saw them and smiled, came over
and gave Jackie a quick kiss, Zo a longer one. He and Jackie conferred for a
while about something or other, in whispers, and then Jackie told him to leave.

There was a great deal of the will to power in Jackie, Zo saw once
again. Ordering Antar around gratuitously; it was a flaunting of power that one
saw in many nisei women, women who had grown up in patriarchies and therefore
reacted virulently against them. They did not fully understand that patriarchy
no longer mattered, and perhaps never had—that it had always been caught in the
Kegel grip of uterine law, which operated outside patriarchy with a biological
power that could not be controlled by any mere politics. The female hold on
male sexual pleasure, on life itself—these were realities for patriarchs as
much as anyone, despite all their repression, their fear of the female which
had been expressed in so many ways, purdah, clitoridec-tomy, foot binding and
so on—ugly stuff indeed, a desperate ruthless last-ditch defense, successful
for a time, certainly—but now blown away without a trace. Now the poor fellows
had to fend for themselves, and it was hard. Women like Jackie had them
whipped. And women like Jackie liked to whip them.

“I want you to go out to the Uranian system,” Jackie was saying.
“They’re just settling out there, and I want to get them early. You can pass
along a word to the Galileans as well, they’re getting out of line.”

“I should do a co-op stint,” Zo said, “or it will become too
obvious that it’s a front.”

After many years of running with a feral co-op based in Lunae, Zo
had joined one of the co-ops that functioned in part as a front for Free Mars,
allowing Zo and other operatives to do party work without it becoming obvious
that that was their principal activity. The co-op Zo had joined built and
installed crater screens, but she hadn’t worked for them in any real job for
over a year.

Jackie nodded. “Put in some time, then take another leave. In a
month or so.”

“Okay.”

Zo was interested in seeing the outer satellites, so it was easy
to agree. But Jackie only nodded, showing no sign of awareness that Zo might
not have agreed. Her mother was not a very imaginative person, when all was
said and done. No doubt Zo’s father was the source of that quality in Zo, ka
bless him. Zo did not want to know his identity, which at this point would only
have been an imposition on her freedom, but she felt a surge of gratitude to him
for his genes, her salvation from pure Jackieness.

Zo stood, too tired to take her mother any longer. “You look
tired, and I’m beat,” she said. She kissed Jackie on the cheek as she went off
to her room. “I love you. Maybe you should think about getting the treatment
again.”

Her co-op was based in Moreux Crater, in the Protonilus Mensae,
between Mangala and Bradbury Point. It was a big crater, puncturing the long
slope of the Great Escarpment as it fell down toward the Boone’s Neck
peninsula. The coop was always developing new varieties of molecular netting to
replace earlier nets, and the old tent fabrics; the mesh they had installed
over Moreux was the latest thing, the polyhydroxybutyrate plastic of its fibers
harvested from soybean plants, engineered to produce the PHB in the plants’
chlbroplasts. The mesh held in the equivalent of a daily inversion layer, which
made the air inside the crater about thirty percent thicker and considerably
warmer than the outside air. Nets like this one made it easier to get bi-omes
through the tough transition from tent to open air, and when permanently
installed, they created nice meso-climates at higher altitudes or latitudes.
Moreux extended up to forty-three degrees north, and winters outside the crater
were always going to be fairly severe. With the mesh in place they were able to
sustain a warm high-altitude forest, srjorting an exotic array of plants
engineered from the East African volcanoes, New Guinea, and the Himalayas. Down
on the crater floor in the summer the days were seriously hot, and the weird
blooming spiky trees as fragrant as perfume.

The crater’s inhabitants lived in spacious apartments dug into the
northern arc of the rim, in four set-back levels of balconies and broad window
walls, overlooking the green fronds of the Kilimanjaro slope forest underneath
them. The balconies baked in the sun in the winter, and rested under
vine-covered trellises in the summer, when daytime temperatures soared to 305
K, and people muttered about changing to a coarser mesh to allow more hot air
to escape, or even working up a system where they could simply roll off the
mesh during the summer.

Zo spent most of every day working on the outer apron or under it,
grinding out as much of a full work stint as she could before it came time to
leave for the outer satellites.

The work this time was interesting, involving long trips
underground in mining tunnels, following veins and layers in the crater’s old
splosh apron. The impact brecciation had created all kinds of useful metamorphic
rock, and greenhouse-gas minerals were a common secondary find throughout the
apron. The co-op was therefore working on new methods of mining, as well as
extracting some feedstocks for mesh looms, hoping to make marketable
improvements in mining methods that would leave the surface undisturbed while
the regolith under it was still being mined intensively. Most of the
underground work was of course robotic, but there were various human-optimum
tasks still, as there always would be in mining. Zo found it very satisfying to
spelunk in the dim submartian world, to spend all day in the bowels of the
planet between great plates of rock, in caves with their close rough black
walls gleaming with crystals, the powerful lights exploding off them; to check
samples, and explore newly cut galleries, in a forest of dull magnesium
uprights jammed into place by the robot excavators; to work like a troglodyte,
seeking rare treasure underground; and then to emerge from the elevator car,
blinking madly at the sudden sunlight of late afternoon, the air bronze or
salmon or amber as the sun blazed through the purpling sky like an old friend,
warming them as they trudged up the slope of the apron to the rim gate, where
the round forest of Moreux lay below them, a lost world, home to jaguars and
vultures. Once inside the mesh there was a cable car that dropped on looping
wires to the settlement, but Zo usually went instead to the gatehouse and got
her birdsuit out of its locker, and slipped into it and zipped up, and ran off
a flier’s platform and spread her wings, and flew in lazy spirals down to the
north rim town, to dinner on one of the dining terraces, watching parrots and
cockatiels and lorikeets dart about trying to scavenge a meal. For work it was
not bad. She slept well.

One day a group of atmospheric engineers came by to see how much
air was escaping through the Moreux mesh in the midday summer heat. There were
a lot of old ones in the group, people with the blasted eyes and diffuse manner
of the longtime field areologist. One of these issei was Sax Russell himself, a
small bald man with a crooked nose, and skin as wrinkled as that of the
tortoises clomping around the crater floor. Zo stared and stared at the old
man, one of the most famous people in Martian history; it was bizarre to have
such a figure out of the books saying hello to her, as if George Washington or
Archimedes might dodder by next, the dead hand of the past still there living
among them, perpetually dumbfounded by all the latest developments.

Russell certainly appeared dumbfounded; he looked thoroughly
stunned through the whole orientation meeting, and left the atmospheric
inquiries to his associates, and spent his time staring down at the forest
below the town. When someone at dinner introduced Zo to him, he blinked at her
with a tortoise’s dim cunning. “I taught your mother once.”

“Yes,” Zo said.

“Will you show me the crater floor?” he asked.

“I usually fly over it,” Zo said, surprised.

“I was hoping to walk,” he said, and looked at her, blinking.

The novelty value was so great that she agreed to join him.

They started out in the cool of the morning, following the shade
under the eastern rim. Balsa and saal trees intersected overhead, forming a
high canopy through which lemurs howled and leaped. The old man walked slowly
along, peering at the heedless creatures of the forest, and he spoke seldom,
mostly to ask if Zo knew the names of the various ferns and trees. All she
could identify for him were the birds. “The names of plants go in one ear and
out the other, I’m afraid,” she admitted cheerfully.

His forehead wrinkled at this.

“I think that helps me to see them better,” she added.

“Really.” He looked around again, as if trying it. “Does that mean
you don’t see the birds as well as the plants?”

“They’re different. They’re my brothers and sisters, they have to
have names. It’s part of them. But this stuff”—she gestured at the green fronds
around them, giant ferns under spiky flowering trees—”this stuff is nameless,
really. We make up names, but they don’t really have them.”

He thought about this.

“Where do you fly?” he said a kilometer down the overgrown trail.

“Everywhere.”

“Do you have favorite places?”

“I like Echus Overlook.”

“Good updrafts?”

“Very good. I was there until Jackie descended on me and put me to
work.”

“It’s not your work?”

“Oh yes, yes. But my co-op is good at flex time.”

“Ah. So you will stay here awhile?”

“Only until the Galilean shuttle leaves.”

“Then you will emigrate?”

“No no. A tour, for Jackie. Diplomatic mission.”

“Ah. Will you visit Uranus?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to see Miranda.”

“Me too. That’s one reason I’m going.”

“Ah.”

They crossed a shallow creek, stepping on exposed flat stones.
Birds called, insects whirred. Sunlight filled the entire crater bowl now, but
under the forest canopy it was still cool, the air shot with parallel columns
and wires of slanting yellow light. Russell crouched to stare into the creek
they had crossed.

“What was my mother like as a child?” Zo asked.

“Jackie?”

He thought about it. A long time passed. Just as Zo was concluding
with exasperation that he had forgotten the question, he said, “She was a fast
runner. She asked a lot of questions. Why why why. I liked that. She was the
oldest of that generation of ectogenes, I think. The leader anyway.”

“Was she in love with Nirgal?”

“I don’t know. Why, have you met Nirgal?”

“I think so, yes. With the ferals once. What about with Peter
Clayborne, was she in love with him?”

“In love? Later, maybe. When they were older. In Zygote, I don’t
know.”

“You aren’t much help.”

“No.”

“Forgotten it all?”

“Not all. But what I remember is—hard tc characterize. I remember
Jackie asking about John Boone one day, just in the way you’re asking about
her. More than once. She was pleased to be his granddaughter. Proud of him.”

“She still is. And I’m proud of her.”

“And—I remember her crying, once.”

“Why? And don’t say I don’t know!”

This balked him. Finally he looked up at her, with a smile almost
human. “She was sad.”

“Oh very good!”

“Because her mother had left. Esther?”

“That’s right.”

“Kasei and Esther broke up, and Esther left for—I don’t know. But
Kasei and Jackie stayed in Zygote. And one day she got to school early, on a
day I was teaching. She asked why a lot. And this time too, but about Kasei and
Esther. And then she cried.”

“What did you say to her?”