Edge of Infinity (30 page)

But Mars’s local administrators, Wei among them, were concerned that Mars should not be a mere construction shack on the edge of the asteroid belt. So a deliberate effort was being made to turn Mars’s new communities, including Fire City, into hotbeds of communications, information technology, and top-class education. The dream was to start exporting high-quality software and other digital material both to the asteroids and to Earth – a dream that was already, after a half-decade of intensive development and salesmanship, beginning to pay off.

Kendrick was right. To achieve these goals, Mars needed room, human space, to grow its populations. Kendrick had managed to spot a kind of gap in the resource development cycle, and to fill it with his brick constructions. But that didn’t make him necessary, in any sense. Not as far as Wei was concerned.

Soon the centre of Fire City was far behind, and they passed the last colony buildings, the big translucent domes that sheltered the artificial marshland that was the hub of the city’s recycling system. Then they drove through fields covered with clear plastic, where scientists were experimenting with gen-enged wheat and potatoes and rice, growing in Martian soil. Further out still the fields were open, and here banks of lichen stained the rocks, green and purple: the most advanced life forms on Mars, before humans arrived. Some of these lichen, which were some kind of relation to Earth life, were being gen-enged too, more experiments to find a way to farm Mars.

Beyond the lichen beds, at last they were out in the open, in undeveloped country. Even so, they were still well within the walls of Mendel crater. And as the humming rover bounced over the roughly made track, Wei began to make out a slim form, dead ahead. It was a kind of tower, skeletal, with a splayed base. He peered forward, squinting through the dusty air. “What is
that
?”

Kendrick grinned. “What I brought you out here to see,
Mr Mayor
. You ever heard of the Eiffel Tower? In Paris, France. It was pulled down during a food riot in the 2060s, but –”

“Stop the rover.” As the vehicle rolled to a halt, Wei leaned forward, peering out of the blister window. Already they were so close that he had to tip back his head to see the peak. “What is its purpose?”

Kendrick shrugged. “It’s a test. A demonstration, of what’s possible to build with steel on Mars. Just as the spire –”

“Steel? Where did you get the steel from?...” But of course Wei knew that; the city’s new metallurgy plant, already up to industrially useful capacity, was pumping out iron and steel produced from hematite ore, the primary commercial source of iron on Earth, and an ore so ubiquitous on Mars it was what made the planet red. “You diverted the plant’s production for this?”

“Diverted – yeah, okay, that’s the right word. Look, this is just a trial run. The steelworkers were keen too, to learn welding techniques in the Martian air, and so on... When it’s proved its point, we will tear it down and put the materials to better use.”

“And that point is?”

“To see how high we can build, of course. We’re still far from the tower, you don’t get a sense of scale from here. Listen: that thing is almost eight hundred metres tall. Nearly three times the height of Eiffel, on Earth. That good old Martian gravity. This thing is already taller than any building on Earth until the late twentieth century. Think of that! Can you feel how it draws up the eye? That’s the magical thing about Martian architecture. It baffles the Earthbound instinct.”

“You erected this without my knowledge.”

“Well, people live in holes in the ground here. You could get away with building almost anything you like, out in that big open Mars desert.”

“You are showing this to me now. Why?”

“I told you, this is a trial run. Just like the spire.”

“For what?”

“The monument of Cao Xi, Mark III. You need to keep expanding,
Mr Mayor
. My brick has filled a gap, but in future, Martian steel, Martian glass, and Martian concrete are going to be the way to do it. But why keep burrowing into the ground? What way is that to bring up a new generation? Oh, I know we need to think about shielding, but...”

“What are you saying?”

“Tell me you can’t guess. Tell me you aren’t inspired. I know you by now, Wei Binglin.” Kendrick pointed to the brownish sky. “No more cairns or spires, no more non-functional monuments. I’m telling you we should build a place for people to live. I’m telling you that we should build, not down –
up
.”

T
HE CHAIRMAN OF
the review committee, appointed directly by New Beijing on far-off Earth, was called Chang Kuo, and as the meeting came to order for its second day he regarded Wei and Kendrick solemnly. This conference room was deep underground, buried in the floor of the Hellas basin, which was itself eight kilometres beneath the Mars datum. Wei reflected that it would have been impossible for this place, the Chinese administrative capital, buried at the deepest point on Mars, to have been further away in spirit from what he and Kendrick were trying to build at Fire City.

Yet the room was dominated by a hologram, sitting in the centre of this circular room, a real-time relayed image of the Obelisk, as people were calling it, an image itself as tall as a human being. The real thing was already more than a kilometre tall, a great rectangular arm of steel and glass reaching to the Martian sky. And the damage done by the meteorite strike was clearly visible, a neat circular puncture somewhere above the three-hundredth level: the disaster was the reason for this review.

The room shuddered, and Wei thought he heard a boom, deep and distant.

“
What the hell was that?
” Kendrick had lapsed into his native English. “Sorry, I meant –”

He looked alarmed, to Wei’s unkind satisfaction. “It was a nuclear weapon, detonated far beneath the fragmented floor of the Hellas crater. I would not have thought that a Heroic-Generation engineer like you would have been frightened by a mere firecracker.”

“Why are they setting off nukes?... Oh. The terraforming experiments.”

“You heard about that. Well, of course you would.”

“Xue Ling showed me some of the documentation. Don’t blame her. I pushed her to leak me the stuff. Blame her pregnancy; it’s making her easier to handle.” But his smile was secretive, reluctant.

Wei thought he understood. Xue Ling, now twenty-eight years old, married and with child, had been campaigning to be allowed to leave Fire City – to come here, in fact, to Hellas, where she felt she could carve out a more meaningful career in administration than was possible back home. Her husband too, now a senior terraforming engineer, was having to commute to Hellas and back. It made sense in every way to Wei to allow her to go.

Every way but one: Kendrick.

There were other communities who were after Kendrick now, other opportunities, clandestine or otherwise, he might be tempted to pursue. Probably part of his long-term game plan had always been to manoeuvre himself into a position where such opportunities would turn up. But it would be disastrous for Fire City if he were allowed to leave before the tower was finished – and disastrous, too, for Wei himself, of course, who had become so closely identified with the project, even in the eyes of these mandarins at Hellas. So Kendrick could not be allowed to leave. How, though, to keep him?

Xue Ling still seemed to be important to Kendrick, and therefore was a hold on him. Conversely she was a conduit of information to Wei, about his difficult, unpredictable, rogue of an ally. Regretfully, then, if Kendrick must be kept here,
Wei could not allow Xue Ling to leave
. He assured himself that greater concerns, the good of the community as a whole, were paramount over her wishes. Besides, he told himself, it was better for Xue Ling herself, whether she knew it or not, after the chaotic start to life she had endured, to stay close to what had become the nearest thing to home: close to her father, to himself...

The chairman, Chang Kuo, had spoken to him.

“I’m sorry, sir. Could you repeat that?”

“I said that this is the second day of our review of the project, of this Obelisk, as the popular media are calling it – or Wei’s Folly, as I believe your own people refer to it. We must come to a verdict soon as to whether to allow the project to continue.”

Wei said carefully, “Yesterday we reviewed the practical value of the tower. The living space it will afford. The stimulus it has given to local industries, to the development of skills and technologies specialised to Martian conditions. It is a great challenge, and as a people we are at our best when we rise to challenges.”

“Citizens have died. Its absurd vulnerability to meteorite strikes –”

Just as Mars’s thin air was no barrier to solar ultraviolet, so it did not screen the ground from medium-sized meteorite impacts, as Earth’s thick atmosphere shielded the mother lands.

Kendrick said confidently, “That is a problem that can be solved, with warning systems, orbital deflection, laser batteries –”

“Ha! A typical Heroic-Generation answer. All at great expense, no doubt. Already the Obelisk project is distorting the whole of the regional economy. There are those who say it is a mere grandiose folly.”

Kendrick stood up, eliciting gasps of shock at his ill manners. “Grandiose? Is that what you think this is, grandiose, a mere gesture? Mr Chairman, the point of the Cao Xi Tower is to give this current generation a dream of their own. To give them something more to do than fulfil the dreams of their parents...” He looked at Wei.

Wei knew how the argument should go now. They’d rehearsed it often enough. He even agreed with it, up to a point:
Everybody wants to be a pioneer. The first on Mars, like Cao Xi! Either that, or an inhabitant of the settled world of the future, living on a terraformed Mars, or at least under a dome big enough to cover Taiwan – big enough to allow children to grow without visible walls around them. Nobody wants to be in one of the middle generations, you see. Nobody wants to be a settler. It is this cadre’s tragedy to be that settler generation. But settlers need dreams too. We aren’t building this tower because it’s sensible. We do it precisely because it’s a grand gesture – even grandiose, yes. For children who can’t dream of journeying to Mars, for they were
born
on Mars, this is their goal, their monument. Their chance to leave a legacy for history...

He was silent. They all looked at him, even Kendrick, who had sat down beside him.

“Pan Gu,” he said at last.

“What was that, Wei Binglin?”

“I am Pan Gu. Or my colleague is. Pan Gu, who was born in the primordial egg, and grew for eighteen thousand years, and stood up...” He looked around at their blank faces. He wondered how many of them even knew what he was talking about; the culture of Chinese Mars was fast diverging from the old country. He felt old himself. He was only fifty-three. He had already spent a decade of his life working with this man, this monster, Kendrick, and still he was not done.

One of the mandarins spoke into the silence. “It was always a mistake to allow a pilot to assume a position of administrative power. The hero of the
Sunflower
! He was always liable to make some such gesture as this. Once a hero, always a hero – eh, Captain Wei?”

Chang Kuo nodded, stern. “You have certainly bound yourself up to this monument, Wei Binglin. This monument, or folly.”

“Of course he has,” said Kendrick dryly. “But he can’t stop. We can’t stop...”

Wei collected himself. “None of us can stop,” he said now, firmly. “The Obelisk is known across the planet, and at home, across the Framework – even in the UN-allied nations, thanks to satellites which image it from orbit.
We cannot stop
. The loss of face would be too great. That is the foundation of our argument for continuing, and it runs as deep and solid as the foundations we built for the tower itself. Now. Shall we discuss how best to proceed from here?” And he glared at them, one by one, as if daring them to contradict him.

T
HE WORD CAME
to the two of them as they were having another long, wrangling meeting in Wei’s office, in the old Summertime Vault.

The call came from her estranged husband, who was in Hellas, and who had in turn received a panicky call from a friend. She was heading for the top of the Obelisk. She had looked desperate as she left her apartment, on the prestigious fiftieth floor.

So they ran, the two of them, through the underground way to the base levels of the Obelisk, chambers carved into the tower’s massive foundations. Wei was in his late fifties now, Kendrick in his early sixties, and neither was as healthy as he once had been, Wei knew, he himself with an obscure cancer eating at his bones, and Kendrick limping along beside him, his oddly distorted face youthful yet slack, for his expensive implants were, after decades without replacement, beginning to fail.

At the Obelisk, Wei had a priority card that enabled him to gain access to one of the high status, fast-ascent external elevators. They were both breathless, and stayed silent as the elevator car climbed.

Soon they rose above ground level, and the car began to crawl its way up one glass-coated side of the building. They were afforded a tremendous view of the city, and of Mars, as they climbed. Yet it was the Obelisk itself that captured the attention, as ever. As he looked up through the elevator’s clear roof, Wei saw the glass face shining in the low, buttery morning sunlight of Mars, climbing on and on, a dead flat plane that narrowed to a fine line and seemed to pierce the sky itself. In a sense it did, for the Obelisk rose above the weather. The shell was complete now, a cage of Martian steel under tension, holding concrete piles in place, all of it glassed over. It was mostly pressurised, though the labour of fitting out its interior would likely go on for years yet. To the external walls were fixed a number of elevator channels, like the one they rode, and inside, a steep staircase wound up within the pressurised hull. That was the other way to ascend the building, to climb up, like ascending a mountain.