Mars Life (30 page)

“Do you think it would be possible,” Stavenger asked mildly, “to have newcomers go through a waiting period before they’re allowed to apply for citizenship?”

“They have to wait six months,” said the chairman. “That’s in our constitution.”

“Could we stretch it to a few years? Give them enough time to learn how our community works? Let them integrate themselves into our society?”

The debate growled on for another half hour, but much more politely. Stavenger watched and listened, content that he had sucked the venom out of the argument. In the end, the council voted to extend the waiting period for citizenship to five years. And then immediately voted to enlarge the city’s underground living area by twenty percent.

The chairman nodded happily, then said, “That leaves only one item on the agenda: Mars.”

Again they all turned to Stavenger.

Clasping his hands together on the table, Stavenger said, “The explorers on Mars need our help. Funding from national governments Earthside has been cut to zero, and private donations to the Mars Foundation are running dry.”

“What can we do about it? We can’t spend billions on Mars, for god’s sake.”

“It won’t take billions,” Stavenger said, with a soft smile. “Basically, they need help with two things: transportation and supplies.”

“How many people are we talking about?”

“At the moment there’s just over two hundred people, all at one base in the Grand Canyon.”

“We’re supposed to feed two hundred people?”

“On Mars?”

“They grow some of their own food,” Stavenger replied. “Two of our people are there right now, studying—”

“Who sent two people to Mars?”

“They volunteered. One’s an agro-engineer and the other a logistics specialist—”

“A glorified accountant,” somebody said in a stage whisper.

Stavenger waited for the snickering laughter to die out, then admitted, “He does have a CPA ticket, in addition to his engineering degrees.”

“And he went to Mars?” asked the chairman, trying to move the discussion forward.

“Yes. He and the agro man want to see how the Mars base might be made self-sufficient, food-wise.”

“And we paid for their transportation?”

“They went on a fusion torch ship that the Mars Foundation paid for.”

“Hitchhikers, huh?”

A few council members laughed again.

“You might say that,” Stavenger replied.

The chairman asked, “Just what does the Mars team need? And how much of it can we afford to give them?”

Stavenger hesitated a heartbeat. Then, “I don’t think of it as giving them anything. I think we’d be investing in the exploration of a new world.”

“Damned expensive investment.”

“With no return.”

“No return?” Stavenger snapped. “They’ve found the remains of intelligent life! They’re uncovering villages and finding a whole ecology of living organisms! Isn’t that return enough?”

“It doesn’t buy any bread.”

With a shake of his head, Stavenger replied, “It wasn’t that long ago that we were the ones who needed help. This community of ours began as a collection of aluminum cans scattered across Alphonsus’s floor. We needed help from Earth in those days. Now the people on Mars need help from us.”

“That’s all well and good,” said one of the older men, “but the question remains: what’s in it for us? We can’t afford to run a charity operation.”

“We’re already doing that with the damned refugees,” grumbled one of the other councilmen.

For several heartbeats Stavenger didn’t reply. He looked up at the acoustic tiles of the ceiling, then broke into a grin as a teenaged girl flew past the window on colorful plastic wings. How to answer them? he was asking himself. How to make them see?

“Look,” he said at last. “We’re in a battle against the armies of ignorance.”

The other council members stirred with curiosity. Even the chairman’s perpetual grin faded into a puzzled, almost worried expression.

“Back on Earth most people are governed by those who are using religion to suppress freedom. They’re the ones who ignored the warnings about the greenhouse, who denied that the Earth’s climate was changing. They’re the ones who allowed this catastrophe to overwhelm the Earth.”

“What’s that got to do with Mars?”

“Hear me out, please. Those people tried to rule us. They sent troops here to force us to bend to their authority. They killed our citizens. If and when they feel strong enough, they’ll try it again.”

“No!”

“I can’t believe that!”

“Believe it,” Stavenger said firmly. “All through history human civilization has been a struggle between individual liberty and the power of the state. Whenever a religious movement has gained the reins of governmental power, individual liberties are strangled. That’s what’s happening on Earth today. Now.”

Several council members glanced uneasily at one another, but no one contradicted him.

“Why do you think so many refugees want to live here?” Stavenger continued. “If they’re wealthy enough to come to Selene they’re wealthy enough to take their pick of safe residences on Earth. They’re coming here for freedom! Not because they want to live in cramped underground quarters. Not because they want to worry about water allocations and air pressure regulations. They want to be free: socially, intellectually, even religiously free.”

The chairman said slowly, “Doug, I still don’t understand what this has to do with Mars.”

“It’s part of the battle. Part of the long war for human freedom. Oppression thrives on ignorance. The explorers on Mars are finding new facts, new ideas, that challenge the ideas of the oppressors. That’s why the fundamentalists are working so hard to end the exploration of Mars. That’s why we’ve got to do everything we can to support that exploration.”

For long moments the conference room was so silent that Stavenger could hear the faint whisper of the air circulation fans buried behind the ceiling’s panels.

Then the youngest member of the council, a molecular biologist who had come to Selene University to study genetic engineering, asked, “How much can we do?”

“Not much,” the chairman answered immediately. “But if I sense the feeling around this table, we’ll do whatever we can. Right?”

One by one, the other council members nodded agreement.

“Very well, then,” said the chairman. “In that case, we should listen to a proposal from one of our citizens who’s just returned from Mars.”

Stavenger felt his brows hike up. The chairman’s got something up his sleeve, he realized. And he never mentioned it to me.

He caught the chairman’s eye. The man was grinning slyly at him. Stavenger gave him a nod, admitting he was surprised.

“Would you ask Ms. McManus to come in?” the chairman said into his cell phone.

All eyes turned to the door as Doreen McManus, pencil thin and big eyed, looking almost frightened, entered the meeting room. Stavenger searched his memory and recalled that she was a nanotechnician.

“Ms. McManus has a proposal for enlarging the base on Mars, using nanomachines,” the chairman said.

Usually Zeke Larkin was the gentlest of souls, yet the normal expression on his sharp-featured face was somewhere between a glare and a scowl. People expected him to have a volcanic temper, and he did—but he had spent most of his adult life struggling to control it.

Still Zeke grumbled to himself as he worked at the excavation. He regretted volunteering for the dig. I’m a biologist, not a shit-shoveling day laborer, he told himself. I should be in my lab, studying the SLiMEs, not working out here like an extra in some “curse of the mummy” flick. Besides, we ought to be looking for the farming area instead of poking into these ruins. Seen one collapsed building, you’ve seen ‘em all.

Larkin’s expertise was in the forms of bacteria that lived deep underground, where they literally ate the iron-rich rock and excreted methane. When similar organisms had first been discovered on Earth, thriving in temperatures and pressures that biologists had assumed were far too extreme for living cells to survive, existing even without the need for sunlight, some waggish biologist had dubbed them 
subsurface lithotropic microbial ecosystems: 
SLiMEs. Deep drills had pulled up similar SLiMEs from kilometers below the surface of Mars.

Larkin’s career goal was to study these colonies of underground bacteria, to determine how long they had been living deep below the surface of Mars, to study how they were different—and similar— to the SLiMEs of Earth.

He was a postdoctoral student from the University of Michigan, lean and wiry, with sapphire blue eyes that looked at the world warily, as if expecting trouble. He worked very hard at being friendly and sociable, especially with his fellow scientists. He had even developed a sense of humor that they variously described as wry, dry, or devilishly clever.

But on this sunny Martian afternoon he saw nothing humorous about being out at Carleton’s dig, slaving away like an ordinary laborer with the rest of the volunteers. Instead of a pick and shovel, though, these laborers used digging lasers to break up the rock-hard ground, and then tiny chisels and whisks to slowly, carefully, patiently uncover the remains of the long-buried village.

There’s nothing here, Larkin saw. Twenty meters behind him a pair of postdocs were delicately brushing eons of dust off the remains of a broken, uneven wall, a wavering line of blackened stone that once was the foundation of a building. A Martian home, Larkin mused. Or maybe a barn for their livestock. He grinned inside his nanosuit’s bubble helmet. Maybe it was a bar, a saloon like in those western vids about the wild frontier.

But where he was standing there was nothing. No crumbled foundations, no remnants of ancient walls. No ancient pollen or seeds, even. Just bare, empty ground right out to the thirty-meter-high side of the excavation pit. Larkin leaned on the long-handled broom he had been using, wondering why he should bother to continue. We’ve run the dig out to the edge of the old village and beyond. There’s nothing more here to uncover, and Carleton’s too damned stubborn to move off to the area where the farms probably were. Time for me to get back to my lab and leave this bullshit behind me.

He saw Carleton standing off at the other end of the excavation, more than a hundred meters away, out where the village’s neat gridwork of buildings gave way to a pair of meandering lanes. The anthropologist was unmistakable at any distance; he was the only person in the crew who still wore a hard suit. Larkin thought he looked like an alien robot who had enslaved all these nanosuited humans and forced them into stoop labor for him.

Well, this slave is revolting, Larkin told himself as he hefted the metal-whiskered broom and started off toward the ramp that led up to the edge of the pit. Then he chuckled as he remembered the old joke: Revolting? He’s disgusting!

I suppose I could use a shower, he thought.

“You there!” Carleton’s peremptory shout rang in Larkin’s earphone so piercingly it made him wince. “Where are you going?”

“There’s nothing more out here, Dr. Carleton. We’ve gone past the edge of the village.”

“Let me see.”

Annoyed, Larkin let the broom fall languidly to the ground and waited for Carleton, hands on his hips.

Once the anthropologist reached him, clunking through the rows of building foundations and the people hunching over them, Larkin pointed to the area where he’d been working.

“It’s empty,” he said. “We’ve gone beyond the limits of the village.”

“What about the farm that you’ve been nagging me about?” Carleton said. He clumped past the biologist and looked out over the empty area.

“It’s not here,” said Larkin. “More likely on the other side of the village, upriver.”

For several moments Carleton said nothing. Larkin couldn’t see his face behind the tinted visor of his helmet, but he imagined the anthropologist was trying to find some reason to make him stay and work for him.

At last Carleton said, “You should go over with Macintyre and the others, then. There’s more to uncover there.”

“I’m finished for the day,” Larkin said. “I need to get back to my own research.”

“You agreed to work here,” Carleton said.

“Not at the expense of my own research. I’ve got to get back to my lab.”

“It’s still a couple of hours before sundown. We’ve still got plenty of time to work.”

“I’ve got to get back to my lab,” Larkin repeated.

“There’s still work to do here.”

“Dr. Carleton, may I remind you, sir, that I am a volunteer. I don’t owe you fealty and you don’t have the power to command me.”

Even though the gold-tinted helmet visor remained blank, Larkin could 
feel 
Carleton’s fury radiating from it. “I have the power to write a negative evaluation for your dossier.”

Once that would have worried Larkin, but now he was too tired to care. He let his anger seep through. “Go ahead and write whatever you want. Who’s going to accept your word about anything?”

And he strode forcefully away from Carleton, toward the ramp that led up to the valley floor and the dome of the base, leaving the broom in the dust like the symbol of his independence.

“You can’t leave while there’s still work to be done!” Carleton shouted. “You can’t just go!”

“The hell I can’t,” Larkin answered, without even looking back over his shoulder.

“I’ll ruin you!” Carleton yelled.

“Go rape a student,” Larkin retorted, without missing a step.

Carleton watched him go, white-hot rage boiling inside him. He tried to kick the broom but in the hulking hard suit all he managed was to scuff the ground and puff up a pathetic little cloud of dust. Glaring furiously, he saw that the other men and women working on the site all had their backs to him, all were bent over their tasks, none of them wanted any part of this conflict. They heard us yelling at each other, Carleton realized, but nobody’s going to say a word about it. Not to me, at least. They’ll talk about it among themselves, though, he knew. There won’t be any other subject on their lips at dinner tonight.