The Complete Mars Trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars

“Probabry tewwan!” her little boy said, catching Ann’s intonation perfectly.

“Well, it probably is,” John said.

“But we’ll never know! They’ll end up debating it for centuries to come, there’ll be a journal devoted to that issue alone, but we’ll never really know.”

“If it’s too close to tell, it’s probably Terran,” John said, grinning at the boy. “Anything that evolved separately from Terran life would give itself away in an instant.”

“Probably,” Ann said. (“Probabry.”) “Except what if there’s a common source, the space spores theory, for instance, or ejecta blasted from one planet to another with micro-organisms buried in its rock?”

“That’s not too likely, is it?”

“We don’t know. We’ll never know, now.”

John had a hard time sharing her concern. “They might have come from the Viking landers for all we know,” he said. “There’s never been a very effective effort to sterilize our explorations here, that’s just the way it is. Meanwhile we’ve got more pressing problems.” Such as a global dust storm longer than the longest one ever recorded, or an influx of immigrants whose commitment to Mars was as minimal as their housing, or an upcoming treaty revision that no one could agree on, or a terraforming effort that a lot of people hated. Or a home planet going critical. Or an attempt (or two) to do one John Boone some harm.

“Yeah yeah,” Ann said. “I know. But all that’s politics, we’ll never get away from that. This was science, a question I wanted answered. And now I can’t. Nobody can.”

John shrugged. “We’ll never answer that one, Ann. No matter what. That was one of those questions that was fated always to remain unanswered. Didn’t you know that?”

“Probabwy tewwan.”

A few days after that, a rocket landed on the little lake station spaceport pad, and a small group of Terrans emerged out of the dust, still bouncing around as they walked. Investigative agents, they said, here on UNOMA authority, to look into sabotage and related incidents. There were ten of them in all, eight clean-cut young men right out of the vids, and two attractive young women. Most had been assigned from the American FBI. Their leader, a tall brown-haired man named Sam Houston, requested an interview with Boone; John agreed politely.

When they met after breakfast the next morning – six of the agents there, including both women – he meekly answered every question without hesitation, though instinctively he told them only what he thought they knew already, plus a bit more to seem honest and helpful. They were polite and deferential; thorough in their questioning, extremely reticent if he asked them anything in return. They seemed unaware of much of the detail of the situation on Mars, and asked him about things that had happened in the first years at Underhill, or during the time of Hiroko’s disappearance. They obviously knew the events of that time, and the basic facts of the various relationships among the first hundred’s media stars; they asked him a lot of questions about Maya, Phyllis, Arkady, Nadia, the Acheron group, Sax … all of whom were well-known to these young Terrans, permanent fixtures on their TV. But it seemed they knew little beyond what had been taped and sent back to Earth. John, his mind wandering, wondered if that would be true of all Terrans. After all what other sources of information did they have?

At the end of the interview, one of them named Chang asked him if there was anything else he wanted to say. John, who had omitted an account of his midnight visit from the Coyote, among many other things, said, “I can’t think of anything!”

Chang nodded, and then Sam Houston said, “We’d appreciate it if you’d give us access to your AI on these matters,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” John said, looking apologetic. “I don’t give access to my AI.”

“You have a destruct lock on it?” Houston said, looking surprised.

“No. I just don’t do it. Those are my private records.”

John stared the man in the eye, watched him squirm under the gaze of his associates.

“We, um, we can get a warrant from UNOMA, if you like.”

“I doubt you can, actually. And even if you do I won’t let you in.”

John smiled at him, almost laughed. Another moment where being the First Man On Mars was useful. There was nothing they could do to him without causing far more trouble than it was worth. He stood up, surveyed the little gang with as much easy arrogance as he could muster, which was quite a lot. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.”

He left the room. “Pauline, click into the building comm center and copy anything you can that they send out.” He called Helmut, remembering that his own calls would be opened as well; he kept his questions brief, as if just checking credentials. Yes, a team had been sent out by UNOMA. They were part of a task force, assembled in the last six months to deal with problems.

Police on Mars, then, as well as a detective. Well, it was to be expected. But it was a nuisance nevertheless. He couldn’t do much with them hanging around watching him, suspicious because he hadn’t given them access to Pauline. And really there wasn’t that much to do in Hellas anyway. There had been no incidents of sabotage there, and it seemed unlikely that any would occur now. Maya was unsympathetic: she didn’t want to be bothered with his problems, she had enough problems of her own, with the technical aspects of the aquifer project. “You’re probably their chief suspect,” she said irritably. “These things keep happening to you, a truck in Thaumasia, a well at Bakhuysen, and now you won’t let them into your records. Why don’t you just do it?”

“Because I don’t like them,” John said, glaring at her. It was back to normal with Maya. Well, not really; they went through their routines in a kind of high spirits, as if playing a good role in the theater, knowing they had time for everything, knowing now what was real, what lay at the base of the relationship. So in that sense it was much better. On the surface, however, it was the same old melodrama. Maya refused to understand, and in the end John gave up. After that he spent a couple of days thinking it over. He went down to the station’s labs, and had the sample of skin taken from under his fingernails cultured, cloned, and read. No one with that genome was in the planetary records, so he sent the information to Acheron requesting an analysis and any information they could give. Ursula sent their results back coded, with a single word added at the end. Congratulations.

He read the message again, swore out loud. He went out for a walk, alternately laughing and swearing. “Damn you, Hiroko! Damn you to hell! Get out of your hole and help us! Ah, ha ha ha! You bitch! I’m sick of this Persephone shit!”

Even the walktubes were oppressive at that moment and he went to the garage, suited up and went out the lock for a walk outside, the first in many days. He was out at the end of the northern arm of the town on a smooth desert floor. He wandered around, staying within the fluctuating column of dust-free air that every city created, thinking the situation over as he surveyed the city. Hellas was going to be much less impressive than Burroughs, or Acheron, or Echus, or even Senzeni Na; located at the low point of the basin, it had no heights to build on, no prospect. Although the whipping dust made it a poor time to judge that. The town had been built in a crescent which would eventually become the shoreline of the new lake; that might look nice when it happened – a waterfront – but meanwhile it was as featureless as Underhill, with all the latest in power plant and service apparatus, intake vents, cables, tunnels like giant sloughed snakeskins … the old scientific station look, no aesthetics involved. Well, that was fine. They couldn’t put every town on a mountaintop.

Two people passed him, their faceplates polarized. Odd, he thought, it being so gloomy in the storm. Then they leaped on him, knocked him down. He shoved off the sand with a wild John Carter leap and threw his fists around him, but to his surprise they were running off into the clouds of dust whipping by. He staggered, stared after them. They disappeared behind the veils of dust. His blood jolted through him; then he felt his shoulders burn. He reached up and back; they had cut his walker open. He pressed his hand over the rip and began to run hard. He couldn’t feel his shoulders at all any more. It was awkward to run with his arm up and behind his neck. His air supply appeared to be all right – no – a tear in the tube, at the neck. He took his hand from his shoulder long enough to dial maximum flow on his wristpad. The cold flowed down his back like ghost ice water. A hundred below 0°C. He was holding his breath and could feel dust on his lips, caking his mouth. Impossible to tell how much CO2 was getting into his oxygen supply, but it didn’t take much to kill you.

The garage appeared out of the murk; he had run right to it, and was feeling mighty pleased with himself until he came to the lock door and pushed the open button and nothing happened. It was easy to lock a lock’s outer door, just leave the inner one open. His lungs burned, he needed a breath. He ran around the garage to the walktube that connected it to habitat proper, reached it, stared in through the layers of plastic. No one in sight. He took his hand away from the rip on his shoulder and as quickly as he could opened the box on his left forearm and took out the little drill, turned it on and plunged it into the plastic, which gave without breaking and gathered up around the spinning bit, until the drill almost broke his elbow; he poked wildly with it and finally got the plastic to tear, then ripped downward, widening the hole until he could dive through it helmet first. When he was inside to the waist he held still, using his body as a rough plug for the hole. He unclipped his helmet and ripped it off his head and gasped for breath as if coming up from a long dive, out in out in out in. Get that CO2 out of the blood. His shoulders and neck were numb. Down at the garage an alarm bell was ringing.

After a twenty second compressed burst of thought, he yanked his legs through the hole and ran down the quickly depressurizing tube toward the habitat, away from the garage. Happily the door there opened on command. Once inside he jumped in an elevator and dropped to the third floor below the ground, where he was staying in one of the guest suites. He let the elevator door open and looked out. No one in sight. He hustled down to his room. Inside he stripped off the walker and stashed it and the helmet in his closet. In the bathroom he winced at the sight of his whitened shoulders and upper back; a really horrible case of frostnip. He took some oral painkiller and a triple dose of omegendorph, put on a shirt with a collar, pants, shoes. He combed his hair, composed himself. The face in the mirror looked glassy-eyed and distracted, almost stunned; he threw his face through the most violent contortions, slapped it, resettled his expression, started breathing in a deep pattern. The drugs began to kick in, and his reflection looked a little better.

He went out into the hall and walked to the big trench wall concourse, which extended downward three more stories. He walked along the railing looking at the people below, feeling a curious mixture of elation and rage. Then Sam Houston and one of his women colleagues approached him.

“Excuse me, Mr Boone, but will you please come with us?”

“What’s up?” he said.

“There’s been another incident. Someone cut open one of the walkway tubes.”

“Cut open a walktube? You call that an incident? We have mirror satellites flying out of orbit, and trucks falling into moholes, and you’re calling a prank like that an incident?”

Houston glared at him, and Boone almost laughed at the man. “How do you think I can help?” he asked.

“We know you’ve been working on this for Dr Russell. We thought you might like to be informed.”

“Oh, I see. Well, let’s go have a look then.”

And then it was a matter of going through the paces, for nearly two hours, his shoulders burning like fire the whole time. Houston and Chang and the other investigators spoke to him as if in confidence, and anxious for his input; but their gazes were coolly evaluative. John returned them with a little smile.

“Why now, I wonder?” Houston said at one point.

“Maybe someone doesn’t like you being here,” John said.

Only when the whole charade was finished did he have time to think about why he wanted to keep them from finding out about the attack. No doubt it would have drawn more investigators up, and that was bad; and certainly it would have become the top news story all over Mars and Earth, tossing him back into maximum fishbowl. And he was sick of the fishbowl.

But there was something more than that that he couldn’t quite pin down. The subconscious detective. He snorted with disgust. To distract himself from the pain he stalked around from dining hall to dining hall, hoping to catch some expression of poorly-concealed surprise when he walked into each room. Back from the dead! Which one of you murdered me! And once or twice he saw someone flinch from his roving gaze. But the fact was, he thought dourly, many people flinched when he looked at them. As if avoiding the gaze of a freak, or a condemned man. He had never felt his fame in quite that way before, and it made him angry.

The painkillers were wearing off, and he returned early to his rooms. His door was open. When he rushed in he found two of the UNOMA investigators inside. “What are you doing!” he cried angrily.

“Just looking out for you,” one of them said smoothly. They glanced at each other. “Wouldn’t want someone to try something.”

“Like breaking and entering?” Boone said, leaning against the doorway.

“Part of the job, sir. Sorry we’ve upset you.” They shuffled nervously, trapped in his room.

“Just who gave you authorization for this?” Boone said, folding his arms over his chest.

“Well.” They looked at each other again. “Mr Houston is our superior officer—”

“Call him and get him here.”

One of them whispered into his wristpad. In a suspiciously short time Sam Houston appeared down the hallway, and as he hurried up glowering John laughed. “What were you doing, hiding around the corner?”

Houston walked right up to him, stuck his face forward and said in a low voice, “Look, Mr Boone, we’re in the midst of a very important investigation here, and you are obstructing it. Despite what you seem to believe you are not above the law—”

Boone jerked forward so that Houston had to flinch to avoid their bumping noses. “You aren’t the law,” he said. He unfolded his arms and poked Houston in the chest, driving him back further down the hall. Now Houston was losing his temper and Boone laughed at him. “What are you going to do to me, officer? Arrest me? Threaten me? Give me something good to include in my next report on Eurovid? Would you like that? Would you like me to show the world how John Boone was harassed by some tin-god tin-badge functionary, who came to Mars thinking he was a sheriff in the wild west?” He remembered his opinion that anyone who spoke of themselves in the third person was a self-declared idiot, and laughed and said, “John Boone doesn’t like that kind of thing! No he doesn’t!”

The other two had taken the opportunity to slip out of his room, and were now watching closely. Houston’s face was the color of Ascraeus Mons, and his teeth were revealed. “No one’s above the law,” he grated. “There are criminal acts occurring here, very dangerous ones, and quite a few of them happen when you’re around.”

“Like breaking and entering.”

“If we determine that we need to check your quarters, or your records, to pursue our investigation, then we’re going to do that. We have that authority.”

“I say you don’t,” John said arrogantly, and snapped his fingers in the man’s face.

“We are going to search your rooms,” Houston said, articulating each word very carefully.

“Get away,” Boone said, contemptuously jerking at the other two and waving them back. He laughed, lip curled with scorn: “That’s right, go! Get out of here, you incompetents – go back and read the regs on search and seizure!”

He went in his room and closed the door behind him.

He paused. It sounded like they were leaving, but either way he had to act like he didn’t care. He laughed, went to the bathroom and took some more painkillers.

They hadn’t yet gotten to the closet, which was lucky; it would have been hard to explain the torn walker without telling the truth, and that would have been messy. Curious how tangled things got when you concealed the fact that someone had tried to kill you. That made him pause. The attempt had been pretty clumsy, after all. There must have been a hundred more effective ways to kill someone out in a walker on Mars. So if they were just trying to scare him, or were perhaps hoping that he would try to conceal the attack, so that they could find him lying, and then have something on him …

He shook his head, confused. Occam’s razor, Occam’s razor. The detective’s primary tool. If someone attacks you they mean you harm, that was the basic, the fundamental fact. It was important to find out who the attackers were. And so on. The painkillers were strong, and the omegendorph was wearing off. It was getting hard to think. It was going to be a problem disposing of the walker; the helmet in particular was a big bulky thing. But now he was into it, and there was no graceful way out. He laughed; he knew he would think of something eventually.

He wanted to talk to Arkady. A call determined that Arkady had finished the gerontological treatment in Acheron with Nadia however, and had gone up to Phobos. John had still never visited the fast little moon. “Why don’t you come on up and see it?” Arkady said over the phone. “Better to talk in person, yes?”

“Okay.”

He hadn’t been in space since the landing from the Ares twenty-three years before and the familiar sensations of acceleration and weightlessness brought on an unexpected bout of nausea. He told Arkady about it as they docked with Phobos, and Arkady said, “It always used to happen to me, until I started drinking vodka right before takeoff.” He had a long physiological explanation for this, but the details began to pull John back over the edge and he cut him off. Arkady laughed; the gerontological treatment had given him its usual post-operative lift, and he had been a happy man to begin with: he didn’t look like he would be sick again for a thousand years.

Stickney turned out to be a bustling little town, the crater’s concrete dome lined with the latest heavy-duty radiation proofing, and the floor of the crater terraced in concentric rings down to a bottom plaza. The rings alternated between parks and two-storied buildings with gardens on their roofs. There were nets in the air for people who lost control of their leaps across the city, or took off by accident: escape velocity was only fifty kilometers per hour, so it was almost possible to run right off the moon. Just under the dome foundation John spotted a small version of the exterior circumnavigating train, running horizontally compared to the buildings of the town, and moving at a speed that returned its passengers to a sensation of Martian gravity. It stopped four times a day to take people on, but if John took refuge in it that would only delay his acclimatization, so he went to the guest room assigned to him, and miserably waited out the nausea. It seemed he was a planet dweller now, a Martian for good, so that leaving it was pain. Ridiculous but true.

The next day he felt better, and Arkady took him on a tour of Phobos. The interior was honeycombed with tunnels, galleries, drifts, and several enormous open chambers, many of them still being enlarged, mined for water and fuel. Most of the interior tunnels inside the moon were smooth functional tubes, but the interior rooms and some of the big galleries had been built according to Arkady’s socio-architectural theories, and he showed John around some of these: circular hallways, mixed work and recreation areas, terracing, etched metallic walls, all features that had become standard during Mars’s crater-oriented phase of construction, but of which Arkady was still proud.

Three of the little surface craters on the side opposite to Stickney had been domed with glass and filled with villages which had a view of the planet rushing beneath them – views never available from Stickney, as Phobos’s long axis was permanently aligned toward Mars, with the big crater always pointed away. Arkady and John stood in Semenov, looking up through the dome at Mars, which filled half the sky and was shrouded by its dust clouds, all its features obscured. “The Great Storm,” Arkady said. “Sax must be going mad.”

“No,” John said. “A thing of the moment, he says. A glitch.”

Arkady hooted. Already the two of them had fallen back into their old easy camaraderie, the feeling that they were equals, brothers from way back. Arkady was the same as ever, laughing, joking, a great kidder, ideas and opinions flooding out of him, confident in a way that John enjoyed immensely, even now, when he was sure many of Arkady’s ideas were wrong, and even dangerous.

“Sax is probably right, in fact,” Arkady said. “If those ageing treatments work, and we are living decades longer than previously, it will certainly cause a social revolution. Shortness of life was a primary force in the permanence of institutions, strange though it is to say it. But it is so much easier to hold onto whatever short-term survival scheme you have, rather than risking it all on a new plan that might not work – no matter how destructive your short-term plan might be for the following generations. Let them deal with it, you know. And really, to give them their due, by the time people learned the system they were old and dying, and for the next generation it was all there, massive and entrenched and having to be learned all over again. But look, if you learn it, and then stare at it for fifty more years, you will eventually be saying, Why not make this more rational? Why not make it closer to our heart’s desire? What’s stopping us?”

“Maybe that’s why things are getting so strange down there,” John said. “But somehow I don’t think these people are taking the long view.” He gave Arkady a quick account of the sabotage situation, and ending it by saying boldly: “Do you know who’s doing it, Arkady? Are you involved?”

“What, me? No, John, you know me better than that. These destructions are stupid. The work of reds, from the look of it, and I am no red. I don’t know exactly who is doing it. Probably Ann does, have you asked her?”

“She says she doesn’t know.”

Arkady cackled. “Still my same John Boone! I love it. Look here, my friend, I will tell you why these things are happening, and then you can work at it systematically, and perhaps see more. Ah, here’s the subway to Stickney – come on, I want to show you the infinity vault, it’s really a nice piece of work.” He led John to the little subway car, and they floated down a tunnel to near the center of Phobos, where the car stopped and they got out. They pushed across the narrow room, and pulled themselves down a hall; John noted that his body had adjusted to the weightlessness, that he could float and keep his trim again. Arkady led him into an expansive open gallery, which on first glance appeared to be too large to be contained inside of Phobos: floor, wall and ceiling were paneled in faceted mirrors, and each round slab of polished magnesium had been angled so that anyone in its microgravity space was reflected in thousands of infinite regresses.

They touched down on the floor and hooked their toes through rings, floating like sea bottom plants in a shifting crowd of Arkadys and Johns. “You see, John, the economic basis of life on Mars is now changing,” Arkady said. “No, don’t you dare scoff! So far we have not been living in a money economy, that’s the way scientific stations are. It’s like winning a prize that frees you from the economic wheel. We won that prize, and so did a lot of others, and we’ve all been here for years now, living that way. But now more people are flooding onto Mars, thousands of them! And many of them plan to work here, make some money, and return to Earth. They work for the transnationals that have gotten UNOMA concessions. The letter of the Mars treaty is being kept because supposedly UNOMA is in charge of it all, but the spirit of the treaty is being broken left and right, by the UN itself.”