Red Mars

“So they struck out for a clean start.”

“Yes.”

“The selfish gene theory. Intelligence only a tool to aid successful reproduction.”

“I suppose.”

“But this trip endangers successful reproduction,” Frank said. “It isn’t safe out here.”

“But it isn’t safe on Earth either. Waste, radiation, other people …”

Frank shook his head. “No. I don’t think the selfishness is in the genes. I think it’s somewhere else.” He reached out with a forefinger, and tapped her between the breasts – a solid tap on the sternum, causing him to drift back to the floor. Staring at her the whole while, he touched himself in the same place. “Good night, Maya.”

A week or two later Maya was in the farm harvesting cabbages, walking down an aisle between long stacked trays of them. She had the room to herself. The cabbages looked like rows of brains, pulsing with thought in the bright afternoon light.

Then she saw a movement and looked to the side. Across the room, through an algae bottle, she saw a face. The glass of the bottle warped it: a man’s face, brown-skinned. The man was looking to the side and didn’t see her. It appeared he was talking to someone she couldn’t see. He shifted, and the image of his face came clear, magnified in the middle of the bottle. She understood why she was watching so closely, why her stomach was clenched: she had never seen him before.

He turned and looked her way. Through two curves of glass their eyes met. He was a stranger, thin-faced and big-eyed.

He disappeared in a brown blur. For a second Maya hesitated, scared to pursue him; then she forced herself to run the length of the room and up the two bends of the joint, into the next cylinder. It was empty. She ran through three more cylinders before stopping. Then she stood there, looking at tomato vines, her breath rasping hard in her throat. She was sweating yet felt chilled. A stranger. It was impossible. But she had seen him! She concentrated on the memory, tried to see the face again. Perhaps it had been … but no. It had been none of the hundred, she knew that. Facial recognition was one of the mind’s strongest abilities: it was amazingly accurate. And he had run away at the sight of her.

A stowaway. But that too was impossible! Where would he hide, how would he live? What would he have done in the radiation storm?

Had she begun to hallucinate, then? Had it come to that?

She walked back to her room, sick to her stomach. The hallways of Torus D were somehow dark despite their bright illumination, and the back of her neck crawled. When the door appeared she dove into the refuge of her room. But her room was just a bed and a side table, a chair and a closet, some shelves of stuff. She sat there for an hour, then two. But there was nothing there for her to do, no answers, no distractions. No escape.

Maya found herself unable to mention her sighting to anyone, and in a way this was more frightening than the incident itself, as it emphasized to her its impossibility. People would think she had gone mad. What other conclusion was there? How would he eat, where would he hide? No. Too many people would have to know, it really wasn’t possible. But that face!

One night she saw it again in a dream, and woke up in a sweat. Hallucination was one of the symptoms of space breakdown, as she well knew. It happened fairly frequently during long stays in Earth orbit, a couple dozen incidences had been recorded. Usually people started by hearing voices in the ever-present background noise of ventilation and machinery, but a fairly common alternative was the sighting of a workmate who wasn’t there, or worse yet of a doppelgänger, as if empty space had begun to fill with mirrors. Shortage of sensory stimuli was believed to cause the phenomena, and the Ares, with its long voyage, and no Earth to look at, and a brilliant (and some might say driven) crew, had been judged a potential hazard. This was one of the main reasons the ship’s rooms had been given so much variety of color and texture, along with changing daily and seasonal weather. And still she had seen something that couldn’t be there.

And now when she walked through the ship, it seemed to her that the crew was breaking up into small and private groups, groups which rarely interacted. The farm team spent almost all its time in the farms, even eating meals there on the floors, and sleeping (together, rumor had it) among the rows of plants. The medical team had its own suite of rooms and offices and labs in Torus B and they spent their time in there, absorbed with experiments and observations and consultations with Earth. The flight team was preparing for MOI, running several simulations a day. And the rest were … scattered. Hard to find. As she walked around the toruses the rooms seemed emptier than ever before. The D dining hall was never full anymore. And then again in the separated clumps of diners that were there she noticed arguments broke out fairly frequently, and were hushed with peculiar speed. Private spats, but about what?

Maya herself said less at table, and listened more. You could tell a lot about a society by what topics of conversation came up. In this crowd, the talk was almost always science. Shop talk: biology, engineering, geology, medicine, whatever. You could chat forever about that stuff.

But when the number of people in a conversation fell below four, she noticed, the topics of conversation tended to change. Shop talk was augmented (or replaced entirely) by gossip; and the gossip was always about those two great forms of the social dynamic, sex and politics. Voices lowered, heads leaned in; and word got around. Rumors about sexual relations were becoming more common and more quiet, more caustic and more complex. In a few cases, as in the unfortunate triangle of Janet Blyleven, Mary Dunkel and Alex Zhalin, it went very public and became the talk of the ship; in others it stayed so hidden that the talk was in whispers, accompanied by pointed, inquisitive glances. Janet Blyleven would walk into the dining hall with Roger Calkins, and Frank would remark to John, in an undertone meant to reach Maya’s ears, “Janet thinks we’re a panmixia.” Maya would ignore him, as she always did when he spoke in that sneery tone of voice; but later she looked up the word in a sociobiology lexicon, and found that a panmixia was a group where every male mated with every female.

The next day she looked at Janet curiously; she had had no idea. Janet was friendly, she leaned in at you as you talked, and really paid attention. And she had a quick smile. But … well, the ship had been built to insure a lot of privacy. No doubt there was more happening than anyone could know.

And among these secret lives, might there not be another secret life, led in solitude, or in teamwork with some few among them, some small clique or cabal?

“Have you noticed anything funny lately?” she asked Nadia one day, at the end of their regular breakfast chat.

Nadia shrugged. “People are bored. It’s about time to get there, I think.”

Maybe that was all it was.

Nadia said, “Did you hear about Hiroko and Arkady?”

Rumors were constantly swirling about Hiroko. Maya found it distasteful, disturbing. That the lone Asian woman among them should be the focus of that kind of thing – dragon lady, mysterious orient… Underneath the scientific rational surfaces of their minds, there were so many deep and powerful superstitions. Anything might happen, anything was possible.

Like a face seen through a glass.

And so she listened with a tight feeling in her stomach as Sasha Yefremov leaned over from the next table and responded to Nadia’s question by wondering if Hiroko were developing a male harem. That was nonsense; although an alliance of some sort between Hiroko and Arkady had an unsettling sort of logic to Maya, she was not sure why. Arkady was very open in advocating independence from mission control, Hiroko never talked about it at all; but in her actions hadn’t she already led the whole farm team away, into a mental torus the others could never enter?

But then when Sasha claimed in a low voice that Hiroko had plans to fertilize several of her own ova with sperm from all the men on the Ares and store them cryonically for later growth on Mars, Maya could only sweep up her tray and head for the dishwashers, feeling something like vertigo. They were becoming strange.

The red crescent grew to the size of a quarter, and the feeling of tension grew as well, as if it were the hour before a thunderstorm, and the air charged with dust and creosote and static electricity. As if the god of war were really up there on that blood dot, waiting for them. The green wall panels inside the Ares were now flecked with yellow and brown, and the afternoon light was thick with sodium vapor’s pale bronze.

People spent hours in the bubble dome, watching what none among them but John had seen before. The exercise machines were in constant use, the simulations performed with renewed enthusiasm. Janet took a swing through the toruses, sending back video images of all the changes in their little world; then she threw her glasses on a table, and resigned her post as reporter. “Look, I’m tired of being an outsider,” she said. “Every time I walk into a room everyone shuts up, or starts preparing their official line. It’s like I was a spy for an enemy!”

“You were,” Arkady said, and gave her a big hug.

At first no one volunteered to take over her job. Houston sent messages of concern, then reprimands, then veiled threats. Now that they were about to reach Mars, the expedition was getting a lot more TV time, and the situation was about to “go nova,” as mission control put it. They reminded the colonists that this burst of publicity would eventually reap the space program all kinds of benefits; the colonists had to film and broadcast what they were doing, to stimulate public support for the later Mars missions on which they were going to depend. It was their duty to transmit their stories!

Frank got on the screen and suggested that mission control could concoct their video reports out of footage from robot cameras. Hastings, head of Mission Control in Houston, was visibly infuriated by this response. But as Arkady said, with a grin that extended the realm of the question to everything: “What can they do?”

Maya shook her head. They were sending a bad signal, she knew; and revealing what the video reports had so far hidden, that the group was splintering into rival cliques. Which indicated Maya’s own lack of control over the Russian half of the expedition. She was about to ask Nadia to take over the reporting job as a favor to her, when Phyllis and some of her friends in Torus B volunteered for the job. Maya, laughing at the expression on Arkady’s face, gave it to them. Arkady pretended not to care. Irritated, Maya said in Russian, “You know you’ve missed a chance! A chance to shape our reality, in effect!”

“Not our reality, Maya. Their reality. And I don’t care what they think.”

Maya and Frank began conferring about landfall assignments. To a certain extent these were predetermined by the crew members’ areas of expertise, but because of all the skill redundancies, there were still some choices to be made. And Arkady’s provocations had had this effect at least: Mission Control’s preflight plans were now generally regarded as provisional at best. In fact no one seemed all that inclined to acknowledge Maya’s or Frank’s authority either, which made things tense when it became known what they were working on.

Mission Control’s preflight plan called for the establishment of a base colony on the plains north of Ophir Chasma, the enormous northern arm of Valles Marineris. All the farm team was assigned to the base, and a majority of the engineers and medical people – altogether, around sixty of the hundred. The rest would be scattered on subsidiary missions, returning to the base camp from time to time. The largest subsidiary mission was to dock a part of the disassembled Ares on Phobos, and begin transforming that moon into a space station. Another smaller mission would leave the base camp and travel north to the polar cap, to build a mining system which would transport blocks of ice back to the base. A third mission was to make a series of geological surveys, traveling all over the planet; a glamor assignment for sure. All the smaller groups would become semi-autonomous for periods of up to a year, so selecting them was no trivial matter; they knew well, now, how long a year could be.

Arkady and a group of his friends – Alex, Roger, Samantha, Edvard, Janet, Tatiana, Elena – requested all the jobs on Phobos. When Phyllis and Mary heard about it, they came to Maya and Frank to protest. “They’re obviously trying to take over Phobos, and who knows what they’ll do with it?”

Maya nodded, and she could see Frank didn’t like it either. The problem was, no one else wanted to stay on Phobos; even Phyllis and Mary weren’t clamoring to replace Arkady’s crew, so it wasn’t clear how to oppose him.

Louder arguments broke out when Ann Clayborne passed around her crew list for the geological survey. A lot of people wanted to join that one, and several of those left off her list said they were going on surveys whether Ann wanted them or not.

Arguments became frequent, and vehement. Almost everyone aboard declared themselves for one mission or another, positioning themselves for the final decisions. Maya felt that she was losing all control of the Russian contingent; she was getting furious at Arkady. In a general meeting she suggested sarcastically that they let the computer make the assignments. The idea was rejected with no regard for her authority. She threw up her hands. “Then what do we do?”

No one knew.

She and Frank conferred in private. “Let’s try giving them the illusion of making the decision,” he said to her with a brief smile; she realized that he was not displeased to have seen her fail in the general meeting. Their encounter was coming back to haunt her, and she cursed herself for a fool. Little politburos were dangerous …

Frank polled everyone concerning their wishes, and then displayed the results on the bridge, listing everyone’s first, second and third choices. The geological surveys were popular, while staying on Phobos was not. Everyone already knew this, and the posted lists proved that there were fewer conflicts than it had seemed. “There are complaints about Arkady taking over Phobos,” Frank said at the next public meeting. “But no one but him and his friends want that job. Everyone else wants to get down to the surface.”

Arkady said, “In fact we should get hardship compensation.”

“It’s not like you to talk about compensation, Arkady,” Frank said smoothly.

Arkady grinned and sat back down.

Phyllis wasn’t amused. “Phobos will be a link between Earth and Mars, like the space stations in Earth orbit. You can’t get from one planet to the other without them, they’re what naval strategists call choke points.”

“I promise to keep my hands off your neck,” Arkady said to her.