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

But that evening Frank went back over into the Amex tent by himself. The folks inside were from Florida, and their voices brought up memories in him like nets filled with coelacanths; Frank ignored all the little mental explosions, and asked question after question, concentrating on the black and Latino and redneck faces that answered him. He saw that this group was imitating an earlier form of community just like the Arabs did; this was a wildcat oil field crew, enduring harsh conditions and long hours for big paychecks, all saved for the return to civilization. It was worth it even if Mars sucked, which it did. “I mean even on the ice you can go outside, but here, fuck.”

They didn’t care who Frank was, and as he sat among them listening they told stories to each other that astonished him even though they were somehow deeply familiar. “There was twenty-two of us prospecting with this little mobile habitat with no rooms to it, and one night we got to partying and took all our clothes off, and all the women got in a circle on the floor with their heads in the middle, and the guys went in a circle around the outside, and there were twelve guys and ten gals so the two guys out kept the rotation going pretty fast, and we actually got all the way around the circle in the timeslip. We tried to all come at once at the end of the timeslip and it worked pretty good, once a few couples got going it was like a whirlpool and it sucked everyone down into it. Felt so good.”

And then, after the laughter and the shouts of disbelief: “We was killing and freezing these hogs in Acidalia, and those humane killers are like shooting a giant arrow into their heads so we figured why not kill and freeze them both at once and see what happens. So we got them all handicapped, and bet on which ones would get the furthest, and we open the outer lock door and those pigs all dash out outside and wham, they all keeled over inside of fifty yards of the door, except for one little gal that got almost two hundred yards, and froze standing upright. I won a thousand dollars on that hog.”

Frank grinned at their howls. He was back in America. He asked them what else they had done on Mars. Some had been building nuclear reactors up on top of Pavonis Mons, where the space elevator would touch down. Others had worked on the water pipe running up eastern Tharsis bulge from Noctis to Pavonis. The parent transnational for the elevator, Praxis, had a lot of interests at the bottom end, as they called it. “I worked on a Westinghouse on top of the Compton aquifer under Noctis, which is supposed to have as much water in it as the Mediterranean, and this reactor’s entire job was going to be to power a bunch of humidifiers. Fucking two hundred megawatts of humidifier, they’re the same as the humidifier I had in my bedroom when I was a kid, except they take fifty kilowatts apiece! Gigantic Rockwell monsters with single molecule vaporizers and jet turbine engines that shoot the mist out of thousand meter stacks. Fucking unbelievable. A million liters a day of H and O added to the air.”

Another of them had been building a new tent city in the Echus channel, below Overlook: “They’ve tapped an aquifer there and there’s fountains all over town, statues in the fountains, waterfalls, canals, ponds, swimming pools, you name it, it’s a little Venice up there. Great thermal retention too.”

The conversation removed itself to the gym, which was well-stocked with machines designed to enable their users to stay Earth-ready. “He’s buffed, look at that, must be short time.” Almost everyone kept to a rigorous workout schedule, three hours a day minimum. “If you give up you’re stuck here, right? And then what good is that savings account?”

“Eventually it’ll be legal tender,” another one of them said. “Where people go, the American dollar is sure to follow.”

“You got it backwards, assbite.”

“As we are the proof of.”

Frank said, “I thought the treaty blocked the use of Terran money here?”

“The treaty’s a fucking joke,” said one doing lat pulls.

“Dead as Bessy the Long Distance Hog.”

They stared at Frank, all of them in their twenties and thirties, a generation he had never talked to much; he didn’t know how they had grown up, what had shaped them, what they might believe. The oh-so-familiar accents and faces might be deceptive, in fact probably were. “You think so?” he asked.

Some of them seemed more aware than the rest that he might be connected to the treaty, along with all his other historical associations. But the man doing lat pulls was oblivious: “We’re here on a deal that the treaty says is illegal, man. And it’s happening all over. Brazil, Georgia, the Gulf States, all the countries that voted against the treaty are letting the transnats in. It’s a contest among the flags of convenience as to how convenient they can be! And UNOMA is flat on its back with its legs spread, saying, More, more. Folks are landing by the thousands and most are employed by transnats, they’ve got their government visas and five year contracts, including rehab time to get you Earth buffed, things like that.”

“By the thousands?” Frank said.

“Oh yeah! By the tens of thousands!”

He hadn’t looked at TV, he realized, for… For a long time.

A man doing military presses spoke between lifts of the whole stack of black weights. “It’s gonna blow pretty soon – A lot of people don’t like it – Not just oldtimers like you – A whole bunch of newtimers too – They’re disappearing in droves – Whole operations – whole towns sometimes – Came on a mine in Syrtis – completely empty – Everything useful gone – Completely stripped – Even stuff like inner lock doors – Oxygen tanks – Toilets – Stuff that’d take hours – to pull loose.”

“Why did they do that?”

“Going native!” a bench presser exclaimed. “Won over by your comrade Arkady Bogdanov!”

From flat on his back this man met Frank’s gaze; a tall, broad-shouldered black man with an aquiline nose. He said, “They get up here and the company tries to look good, gyms and good food and rec time and all, but what it comes down to is them telling you everything you can do and can’t do, it’s all scheduled, when you wake up, when you eat, when you shit, it’s like the Navy has taken over Club Med, you know? And then here comes your bro Arkady, saying to us, You’re Amurricans, boys, you got to be free, this Mars is the new frontier, and you should know some of us are treating it that way, we ain’t no robot software, we’re free men, making our own rules on our own world! And that’s it, man!” The room crackled with laughter, everyone had stopped to listen: “That does the trick! Folks get up here and they see they’re schedule software, they see they can’t keep Earth-buffed without they spend their whole time in here sucking the air hose, and even then I spect it’s impossible, they lied to us I’ll bet. So the pay means nothing, really, we’re all software and maybe stuck here for good. Slaves, man! Fucking slaves! And believe you me, that’s pissing a lot of folk off. They’re ready to strike back, I mean to tell you. And that’s the folks who are disappearing. Gonna be a whole lot of them before it’s all over.”

Frank stared down at the man. “Why haven’t you disappeared?”

The man laughed shortly and began pumping weights again.

“Security,” someone else called from the Nautilus machine.

Military Press disagreed. “Security’s lame – But you got to have – Somewhere to go. Soon as Arkady shows – Gone!”

“One time,” Bench Press said, “I saw a vid of him where he talked about how folk of color are better suited for Mars than white folk, how we do better with the UV.”

“Yeah! Yeah!” They were all laughing at that, both skeptical and amused at once.

“It’s bullshit, but what the hell,” Bench Press said. “Why not? Why not? Call it our world. Call it Nova Africa. Say no boss is gonna take it away from us this time.” He was laughing again, as if everything he had said was no more than a funny idea. Or else a hilarious truth, a truth so delicious that just saying it made you laugh out loud.

And so very late that night Frank went back to the Arab rovers, and he continued on with them, but it wasn’t the same. He had been yanked back into time, and now the long days in the prospector only made him itch. He watched TV; he made some calls. He had never resigned as Secretary; the office had been run in his absence by Assistant Secretary Slusinski, and he had done just enough by phone for them to cover for him, telling Washington that he was working, then that he was doing deep research, then that he was taking a working vacation, and that as one of the first hundred he needed to be out there wandering around. It wouldn’t have lasted much longer, but when Frank called Washington directly the President was pleased, and in Burroughs the exhausted-looking Slusinski looked happy indeed. In fact the whole Burroughs office sounded pleased that he planned to come back, which surprised Frank quite a bit. When he had left Burroughs, disgusted at the treaty and depressed about Maya, he had been, he thought, a bastard of a boss. But here they had covered for him for almost two years, and seemed happy to hear he was coming back. People were strange. The aura of the first hundred, no doubt. As if that mattered.

So Frank returned from his final prospecting trip and sat that evening in Zeyk’s rover, sipping his coffee, watching them talk, Zeyk and Al-Khan and Yussuf and the rest, and, wandering in and out of the room, Nazik and Aziza. People who had accepted him; people who in some sense understood him. By their code he had done the necessary things. He relaxed in the flow of Arabic, still and always awash with ambiguity: lily, river, forest, lark, jasmine, words that might refer to a waldo hand, a pipe, a kind of talus, robot parts; or perhaps just to lily, river, forest, lark, jasmine. A beautiful, beautiful language. The speech of the people who had taken him in, and let him rest. But he would have to leave.

They had arranged things so that if you spent half the year in Underhill you were assigned a permanent room of your own. Towns all over the planet were adopting similar systems, because people were moving around so much that no one felt at home anywhere, and this arrangement seemed to mitigate that. Certainly the first hundred, who were among the most mobile Martians of all, had started spending more time in Underhill than they had in the years before, and this was mostly a pleasure, to most of them. At any given time twenty or thirty would be around, and others came in and stayed for a while between jobs, and in the constant come and go they had a chance to carry on a more-or-less continuous conference on the state of things, with newcomers reporting what they had seen firsthand, and the rest arguing about what it meant.

Frank, however, did not spend the required twelve months a year in Underhill, and so he did not have a room there. He had moved the department’s head offices to Burroughs back in 2050, and before joining the Arabs in ’57 the only room he had kept was there in the offices.

Now it was ’59 and he was back, in a room one floor down from his old one. Dropping his bag on the floor and looking around at the room, he cursed aloud. To have to be in Burroughs in person – as if one’s physical presence made any difference these days! It was an absurd anachronism, but that’s the way people were. Another vestige of the savannah. They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.

Slusinski came in. Though his accent was pure New York, Frank had always called him Jeeves, because he looked like the actor in the BBC series. “We’re like dwarves in a waldo,” Frank said to him angrily. “One of those really big waldo excavators. We’re inside it and supposed to be moving a mountain, and instead of using the waldo capabilities we’re leaning out of a window and digging with teaspoons. And complimenting each other on the way we’re taking advantage of the height.”

“I see,” Jeeves said carefully.

But there was nothing to be done about it. He was back in Burroughs, hurrying around, four meetings an hour, conferences that told him what he already knew, which was that UNOMA was now using the treaty for toilet paper. They were approving accounting systems which guaranteed that mining would never show any profits to distribute to the general assembly members, even after the elevator was working. They were handing out “necessary personnel” status to thousands of emigrants. They were ignoring the various local groups, ignoring MarsFirst. Most of this was done in the name of the elevator itself, which provided an endless string of excuses, thirty-five thousand kilometers of excuses, a hundred and twenty billion dollars of excuses. Which was not all that expensive, actually, compared to the military budgets of the past century – less than a year of the global military budget of those days, in fact, and most of the elevator funds had been needed in the first years of finding the asteroid and getting it into proper orbit, and setting up the cable factory. After that the factory ate the asteroid and spat out the cable, and that was that; they only had to wait for it to grow long enough, and nudge it down into position. A bargain, a real bargain!

And also a great excuse for breaking the treaty whenever it seemed expedient. “God damn it,” Frank shouted at the end of a long day in the first week back. “Why has UNOMA caved like this?”

Jeeves and the rest of his staff took this as a rhetorical question and offered no theories. He had definitely been away too long; they were afraid of him now. He had to answer the question himself: “It’s greed I guess, they’re all getting paid off in one cosmeticized way or another.”

At dinner that night, in a little café, he ran into Janet Blyleven and Ursula Kohl and Vlad Taneev. As they ate they watched the news from Earth on a bar TV. Really it had gotten to be almost too much to watch. Canada and Norway were joining the plan to enforce population growth slowdown. No one would say population control, of course, it was a forbidden phrase in politics, but that’s what it was and it was turning into the tragedy of the commons all over again: if one country ignored the UN resolutions, then nearby countries were howling for fear of being overwhelmed – another monkey fear, but there it was. Meanwhile Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, Azania, the United States, Canada, and Switzerland had all proclaimed immigration illegal. While India was growing by eight percent a year. Famine would solve that, as it would in a lot of countries. The Four Horsemen were good at population control. Until then… the TV cut to an ad for a popular diet fat, which was indigestible and went right through the gut unchanged. “Eat all you want!”

Janet clicked off the TV. “Let’s change the subject.”

They sat around their table and stared at their plates. It turned out Vlad and Ursula had come from Acheron because there was an outbreak of resistant tuberculosis in Elysium. “The cordon sanitaire has fallen apart,” Ursula said. “Some of the emigrant viruses will surely mutate, or combine with one of our tailored systems.”

Earth again. It was impossible to avoid it. “Things are falling apart down there!” Janet said.

“It’s been coming for years,” Frank said harshly, his tongue loosened by the faces of his old friends. “Even before the treatment life expectancy in the rich countries was nearly double that in the poor. Think about that! But in the old days the poor were so poor they hardly knew what life expectancy was, the day itself was their whole concern. Now every corner shop has a TV and they can see what’s happening – that they’ve got AIDS while the rich have the treatment. It’s gone way beyond a difference in degree, I mean they die young and the rich live forever! So why should they hold back? They’ve got nothing to lose.”

“And everything to gain,” Vlad said. “They could live like us.”

They huddled over cups of coffee. The room was dim. The pine furniture had a dark patina; stains, nicks, fines rubbed in by hand… It could have been one of those nights in that distant time when they were the only ones in the world, a few of them up later than the rest, talking. Except Frank blinked and looked around, and saw in his friends’ faces the weariness, the white hair, the turtle faces of the old. Time had passed, they were scattered over the planet, running like he was, or hidden like Hiroko, or dead like John. John’s absence suddenly seemed huge and gaping, a crater on whose rim they huddled glumly, trying to warm their hands. Frank shuddered.

Later Vlad and Ursula went to bed. Frank looked at Janet, feeling immobilized as he sometimes did at the end of a long day, incapable of ever moving again. “Where’s Maya these days?” he asked, to keep Janet from retiring too. She and Maya had been good friends in the Hellas years.

“Oh, she’s here in Burroughs,” Janet said. “Didn’t you know?”

“No.”

“She’s got Samantha’s old rooms. She may be avoiding you.”

“What?”

“She’s pretty mad at you.”

“Mad at me?”

“Sure.” She regarded him across the dim, faintly humming room. “You must have known that.”

While he was still considering how open to be with her, he said “No! Why should she be?”

“Oh Frank,” she said. She leaned forward in her chair. “Quit acting like you’ve got a stick up your ass! We know you, we were there, we saw it all happen!” And as he was recoiling she leaned back, and said calmly, “You must know that Maya loves you. She always has.”

“Me?” he said weakly. “It’s John she loved.”

“Yeah, sure. But John was easy. He loved her back, and it was glamorous. It was too easy for Maya. She likes things hard. And that’s you.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Janet laughed at him. “I know I’m right, she’s told me as much! Ever since the treaty conference she’s been angry at you, and she always talks when she’s mad.”

“But why is she angry?”

“Because you rejected her! Rejected her, after pursuing her for years and years, and she got used to that, she loved it. It was romantic, the way you persisted. She took it for granted, sure, but she loved you for it. And she liked how powerful you were. And now John is dead, and she could finally say yes to you, and you sent her packing. She was furious! And she stays mad a long time.”

“This…” Frank struggled to collect himself. “It just doesn’t match with my understanding of what’s happened.”

Janet stood up to go, and as she walked by him she patted him on the head. “Maybe you ought to talk to Maya about it then.” She left.

For a long time he sat there, feeling stunned, examining the shiny grain of his chair arm. It was hard to think. Eventually he stopped trying and went to bed.

He slept poorly, and at the end of a long night he had another dream about John. They were in the long drafty upcurved chambers of the space station, spinning at Martian gravity, in their long stay of 2010, six weeks together up there, young and strong, John saying I feel like Superman, this gravity’s great, I feel like Superman! Running laps around the big ring of the station hallway. Everything’s going to change on Mars, Frank. Everything!

No. Each step was like the last jump of a triple jump. Boing, boing, boing, boing.

Yes! The whole question will be learning to run fast enough.

A perfect interference pattern of cloud-dots lay pasted over the western coast of Madagascar. The sun bronzing the ocean below.

Everything looks so fine from up here.

Get any closer and you begin to see too much, Frank murmured.

Or not enough.

It was cold, they argued over the temperature, John was from Minnesota and had slept as a boy with his window open. So Frank shivered, a down coverlet draped over his shoulders, his feet blocks of ice. They played chess and Frank won. John laughed. How stupid, he said.

What do you mean?

Games don’t mean anything.

Are you sure? Sometimes life seems like a kind of game to me.

John shook his head. In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing. You could put your bishop out there to mate the other guy’s king, and he could lean down and whisper in your bishop’s ear, and suddenly it’s playing for him, and moving like a rook. And you’re fucked.

Frank nodded. He had taught these things to John.

A confusion of meals, chess, talk, the view of the rolling Earth. It felt like the only life they had ever lived. The voices from Houston were like AIs, their concerns absurd. The planet itself was so beautiful, so intricately patterned by its land and its clouds.

I never want to go down. I mean this is almost better than Mars’ll be, don’t you think?

No.

Huddled, shivering, listening to John talk of boyhood. Girls, sports, dreams of space. Frank responded with tales of Washington, lessons from Machiavelli, until it occurred to him that John was formidable enough as it was. Friendship was just diplomacy by other means, after all. But later, after a vague blur… talking, halting, shivering, talking about his father, coming home drunk from the Jacksonville bars, Priscilla and her white blond hair, her fashion magazine face. How it meant nothing to him anymore, a marriage for the resume, for looking normal to the shrinks without holding him down. And not his fault. Abandoned, after all. Betrayed.

That sounds bad. No wonder you think people are so fucked.

Frank waved at their big blue lamp. But they are. Waving by coincidence at the Horn of Africa. Think about what’s happened down there.

That’s history, Frank. We can do better than that.

Can we? Can we?

You just wait and see.

He woke up, his stomach knotted, his skin sweaty. He got up and took a shower; already he could remember no more than a single fragment of the dream: John, saying “Wait and see.” But his stomach was like wood.

After breakfast he clicked his fork on the table, thinking. All that day he spent distracted, wandering as if still in a dream, wondering from time to time how one told the difference. Wasn’t this life dreamlike in every significant respect? Everything overlit, bizarre, symbolic of something else?

That evening he went looking for Maya, feeling helpless, in the grip of a compulsion. The decision had been made the night before, when Janet said “she loves you, you know.” And he turned a corner to the dining commons and there she was, her head thrown back in the middle of her pealing laugh, vividly Maya, her hair as white as it had once been black, her eyes fixed on her companion; a man, dark-haired, handsome, perhaps in his fifties, smiling at her. Maya put a hand to his upper arm, a characteristic gesture, one of her usual intimacies, it meant nothing and in fact indicated that he was not her lover but rather someone she was in the process of enchanting; they could have met just minutes before, although the look on his face indicated he knew her better than that.

She turned and saw Frank, blinked with surprise. She looked back at the man and continued to speak, in Russian, her hand still on his arm.

Frank hesitated and almost turned and left. Silently he cursed himself; was he no more than a schoolboy, then? He walked by them and said hello, did not hear if they replied. All through the dinner she stayed glued to the man’s side, not looking his way, not coming over. The man, pleasant-enough looking, was surprised at her attention, surprised but pleased. Clearly they would leave together, clearly they would spend the night together. That foreknowledge always made people pleasant. She would use people like that without a qualm, the bitch. Love… The more he thought about it the angrier he got. She had never loved anyone but herself. And yet… that look on her face when she first saw him; for a split second hadn’t she been pleased, and then wanted him angry at her? And wasn’t that a sign of hurt feelings, of a desire to hurt back, meaning a certain (incredibly childish) desire for him?

Well, the hell with her. He went back to his room and packed his bag, and took the subway to the train station, and got on a night train west, up Tharsis to Pavonis Mons.