Blue Mars

‘The control rockets might be able to adjust to disruptions at the bottom,’ Kasei explained. ‘Hard to say what would happen, really. But a break just above the areosynchronous point would decrease damage to the equator, and keep New Clarke from flying off as fast as the first one did. We want to minimize the drama of this, you know, avoid any martyrs we can. Just demolition of a building, you know. Like a building past its usefulness.’

‘Yes,’ Ann said, relieved at this sign of good sense. But it was curious how hearing her idea expressed as someone else’s plan disturbed her. She located the main source of her concern: ‘What about the others – the Greens? What if they object?’

‘They won’t,’ Dao said.

‘They are!’ Ann said sharply.

Dao shook his head. ‘I’ve been talking to Jackie. It may be that some of the Greens are truly opposed to it, but her group is just saying that for public consumption, so that they look moderate to the Terrans, and can blame the dangerous stuff on radicals out of their control.’

‘On us,’ Ann said.

They both nodded. ‘Just like with Burroughs,’ Kasei said with a smile.

Ann considered it. No doubt it was true. ‘But some of them are genuinely opposed. I’ve been arguing with them about it, and it’s no publicity stunt.’

‘Uh huh,’ Kasei said slowly.

Both he and Dao watched her.

‘So you’ll do it anyway,’ she said at last.

They continued to watch her. She saw all of a sudden that they would no more do what she told them to do than would boys ordered about by a senile grandmother. They were humouring her. Figuring out how they could best put her to use.

‘We have to,’ Kasei said. ‘It’s in the best interest of Mars. Not just for Reds, but all of us. We need some distance between us and Terra, and the gravity well re-establishes that distance. Without it we’ll be sucked down into the maelstrom.’

It was Ann’s argument, it was just what she had been saying in the meetings in East Pavonis. ‘But what if they try to stop you?’

‘I don’t think they can,’ Kasei said.

‘But if they try?’

The two men glanced at each other. Dao shrugged.

So, Ann thought, watching them. They were willing to start a civil war.

People were still coming up the slopes of Pavonis to the summit, filling up Sheffield, East Pavonis, Lastflow and the other rim tents. Among them were Michel, Spencer, Vlad, Marina and Ursula; Mikhail and a whole brigade of Bogdanovists; Coyote, on his own; a group from Praxis; a large train of Swiss; rover caravans of Arabs, both Sufi and secular; natives from other towns and settlements on Mars. All coming up for the endgame. Everywhere else on Mars, the natives had consolidated their control; all the physical plants were being operated by local teams, in co-operation with Separation de L’Atmosphere. There were some small pockets of metanat resistance, of course, and there were some Kakaze out there systematically destroying terraforming projects; but Pavonis was clearly the crux of the remaining problem – either the endgame of the revolution or, as Ann was beginning to fear, the opening moves of a civil war. Or both. It would not be the first time.

So she went to the meetings, and slept poorly at night, waking from troubled sleep, or from naps in the transit between one meeting and the next. The meetings were beginning to blur: all contentious, all pointless. She was getting tired, and the broken sleep did not help. She was nearly one hundred and fifty years old, after all, and had not had a gerontological treatment in twenty-five years, and she felt weary all through, all the time. So she watched from a well of growing indifference as the others chewed over the situation. Earth was still in disarray; the great flood was indeed proving to be the ideal trigger mechanism for which General Sax had waited. Sax felt no remorse for taking advantage of Earth’s trouble, Ann could see; he never thought once about the many deaths the flood had caused down there. She could read his face thought by thought as he talked about it – what would be the point of remorse? The flood was an accident, a geological catastrophe like an ice age or a meteor impact. No one should waste time feeling remorse for it, not even if they were taking advantage of it for their own purposes. Best to take what good one possibly could from the chaos and disorder, and not worry. All this was right on Sax’s face as he discussed what they should do next vis a vis Earth. Send a delegation, he suggested. Diplomatic mission, personal appearance, something about throwing things together; incoherent on the surface, but she could read him like a brother, this old enemy! Well, Sax – the old Sax anyway – was nothing if not rational. Therefore easy to read. Easier than the young fanatics of the Kakaze, now that she thought of it.

And one could only meet him on his own ground, speak to him on his own terms. So she sat across from him in the meetings and tried to concentrate, even though her mind seemed to be hardening somehow, petrifying inside her head. Round and round the arguments went: what to do on Pavonis? Pavonis Mons, Peacock Mountain. Who would ascend the Peacock Throne? There were potential Shahs everywhere – Peter, Nirgal, Jackie, Zeyk, Kasei, Maya, Nadia, Mikhail, Ariadne, the invisible Hiroko …

Now someone was invoking the Dorsa Brevia conference as the framework for discussion they should use. All very well, but without Hiroko among them the moral centre was gone, the one person in all Martian history, apart from John Boone, to whom everyone would defer. But Hiroko and John were gone, along with Arkady, and Frank, who would have come in useful now, if he had been on her side, which he wouldn’t have been. All gone. And they were left with anarchy. Curious how at a crowded table those absent could be more visible than those present. Hiroko, for instance; people referred to her frequently; and no doubt she was somewhere in the outback, deserting them as usual in their hour of need. Pissing them out of the nest.

Curious too how the only child of their lost heroes, Kasei the son of John and Hiroko, should be the most radical leader there, a disquieting man even though he was on her side. There he sat, shaking his grey head at Art, a small smile twisting his mouth. He was nothing like either John or Hiroko – well, he had some of Hiroko’s arrogance, some of John’s simplicity. The worst of both. And yet he was a power, he did what he wanted, and a lot of people followed him. But he was not like his parents had been.

And Peter, sitting just two seats away from Kasei, was nothing like her or Simon. It was hard to see what blood relationships meant; nothing, obviously. Though it did twist her heart to hear Peter speak, as he argued with Kasei and opposed the Reds at every point, making a case for some kind of interplanetary collaborationism. And never in these sessions addressing her, or even looking at her. It was perhaps intended as some kind of courtesy – I will not argue with you in public. But it looked like a slight – I will not argue with you because you don’t matter.

He continued to argue for keeping the cable, and agreed with Art about the Dorsa Brevia document, naturally, given the Green majority that had existed then and persisted now. Using Dorsa Brevia as a guide would assure the cable’s survival. Meaning the continued presence of the United Nations Transitional Authority. And indeed some of them around Peter were talking about ‘semi-autonomy’ in relation to Terra, instead of independence, and Peter went along with that; it made her sick. And all without meeting her eye. It was Simonlike, somehow, a kind of silence. It made her angry.

‘We have no reason to talk about long-term plans until we have solved the cable problem,’ she said, interrupting him and earning a very black look indeed, as if she had broken an understanding; but there was no understanding, and why should they not argue, when they had no real relationship – nothing but biology …

Art claimed that the UN was now saying that it would be willing to agree to Martian semi-autonomy, as long as Mars remained in ‘close consultation’ with Earth, and an active aid in Earth’s crisis. Nadia said she was in communication with Derek Hastings, who was now up in New Clarke. Hastings had abandoned Burroughs without a bloody battle, it was true, and now she claimed he was willing to compromise. No doubt; his next retreat would not be so easy, nor would it take him to a very pleasant place, for despite all the emergency action, Earth was now a world of famine, plague, looting – breakdown of the social contract, which was so fragile after all. It could happen here too; she had to remember that fragility when she got angry enough, as now, to want to tell Kasei and Dao to abandon the discussions and fire away. If she did that it very likely would happen; a strange sensation of her own power came over her then, as she looked around the table at the anxious, angry, unhappy faces. She could tip the balance; she could knock this table right over.

Speakers were taking five-minute turns to make their case one way or the other. More were in favour of cutting the cable than Ann would have guessed, not just Reds, but representatives of cultures or movements that felt most threatened by the metanat order, or by mass emigration from Earth: Bedouins, the Polynesians, the Dorsa Brevia locals, some of the cannier natives. Still, they were in the minority. Not a tiny minority, but a minority. Isolationist versus interactive; yet another fracture to add to all the others rending the Martian independence movement.

Jackie Boone stood up and spoke for fifteen minutes in favour of keeping the cable, threatening anyone who wanted to bring it down with expulsion from Martian society. It was a disgusting performance, but popular, and afterward Peter stood and spoke in the same way, only slightly more subtly. It made Ann so angry that she stood up immediately after he had finished, to argue for bringing the cable down. This got her another poisonous look from Peter, but it scarcely registered – she talked in a white heat, forgetting all about the five-minute limit. No one tried to cut her off, and she went on and on, though she had no idea what she was going to say next, and no memory of what she had already said. Perhaps her subconscious had organized it all like a lawyer’s brief – hopefully so – on the other hand, a part of her thought as her mouth ran on, perhaps she was just saying the word Mars over and over again, or babbling, and the audience simply humouring her, or else miraculously comprehending her in a moment of glossolalic grace, invisible flames on their heads like caps of jewels – and indeed their hair looked to Ann like spun metal, the old men’s bald pates like chunks of jasper, inside which all languages dead and living were understood equally; and for a moment they appeared all caught up together with her, all inside an epiphany of Red Mars, free of Earth, living on the primal planet that had been and could be again.

She sat down. This time it was not Sax who rose to debate with her, as it had been so many times before. In fact he was cross-eyed with concentration, looking at her open-mouthed, in an amazement that she could not interpret. They stared at each other, the two of them, eyes locked; but what he was thinking she had no idea. She only knew she had caught his attention at last.

This time it was Nadia who rebutted her, Nadia her sister, arguing slowly and calmly for interaction with Earth, for intervention in the Terran situation. She spoke of the need to compromise, the need to engage, influence, transform. It was deeply contradictory, Ann thought; because they were weak, Nadia was saying, they could not afford to offend, and therefore they must change all Terran social reality.

‘But how!’ Ann cried. ‘When you have no fulcrum you can’t move a world! No fulcrum, no lever, no force—’

‘It isn’t just Earth,’ Nadia replied. ‘There are going to be other settlements in the solar system. Mercury, Luna, the big outer moons, the asteroids. We’ve got to be part of all that. As the original settlement, we’re the natural leader. An unbridged gravity well is just an obstruction to all that – a reduction in our ability to act, a reduction in our power.’

‘Getting in the way of progress,’ Ann said bitterly. ‘Think what Arkady would have said to that. No, look. We had a chance here to make something different. That was the whole point. We still have that chance. Everything that increases the space within which we can create a new society is a good thing. Everything that reduces our space is a bad thing. Think about it!’

Perhaps they did. But it made no difference. Any number of elements on Earth were sending up their arguments for the cable – arguments, threats, entreaties. They needed help down there. Any help. Art Randolph continued energetically lobbying for the cable on behalf of Praxis, which was looking to Ann as if it would become the next transitional authority, metanationalism in its latest manifestation or disguise.

But the natives were being won over by them slowly, intrigued by the possibility of ‘conquering Earth’, unaware of how impossible this was, incapable of imagining Earth’s vastness and immobility. One could tell them and tell them, but they would never be able to imagine it.

Finally it was time for an informal vote. It was representative voting, they had decided, one vote for each of the signatory groups to the Dorsa Brevia document, one vote also to all the interested parties that had arisen since then – new settlements in the outback, new political parties, associations, labs, companies, guerrilla bands, the several Red splinter groups. Before they started some generous naive soul even offered the First Hundred a vote, and everyone there laughed at the idea that the First Hundred might be able to vote the same way on anything. The generous soul, a young woman from Dorsa Brevia, then proposed that each of the First Hundred be given an individual vote, but this was turned down as endangering the tenuous grasp they had on representative governance. It would have made no difference anyway.

So they voted to allow the space elevator to remain standing, for the time being – and in the possession of UNTA, down to and including the Socket, without contestation. It was like King Canute deciding to declare the tide legal after all, but no one laughed except Ann. The other Reds were furious. Ownership of the Socket was still being actively contested, Dao objected loudly, the neighbourhood around it was vulnerable and could be taken, there was no reason to back off like this, they were only trying to sweep a problem under the rug because it was hard! But the majority were in agreement. The cable should remain.

* * *

Ann felt the old urge: escape. Tents and trains, people, the little Manhattan skyline of Sheffield against the south rim, the summit basalt all torn and flattened and paved over … There was a piste all the way around the rim, but the western side of the caldera was very nearly uninhabited. So Ann got in one of the smallest Red rovers, and drove around the rim counterclockwise, just inside the piste, until she came to a little meteorological station, where she parked the rover and went out through its lock, stiff in a walker that was much like the ones they had gone out in during the first years.

She was a kilometre or two away from the rim’s edge. She walked slowly east toward it, stumbling once or twice before she started to pay proper attention. The old lava on the flat expanse of the broad rim was smooth and dark in some places, rough and lighter in others. By the time she approached the edge she was in full areologist mode, doing a boulder ballet she could sustain all day, attuned to every knob and crack underfoot. And this was a good thing, because near the rim’s drop-off the land collapsed in a series of narrow curving ledges, the drops sometimes a step, sometimes taller than she was. And always the growing sense of empty air ahead, as the far side of the caldera and the rest of the great circle became visible. And then she was climbing down onto the last ledge, a bench only some five metres wide, with a curved back wall, shoulder-high: and below her dropped the great round chasm of Pavonis.

This caldera was one of the geological marvels of the solar system, a hole forty-five kilometres across and a full five kilometres deep, and almost perfectly regular in every way – circular, flat-floored, almost vertically walled – a perfect cylinder of space, cut into the volcano like a rock sampler’s coring. None of the other three big calderas even approached this simplicity of form; Ascraeus and Olympus were complicated palimpsests of overlapping rings, while the very broad, shallow caldera of Arsia was roughly circular, but shattered in every way. Pavonis alone was a regular cylinder: the Platonic ideal of a volcanic caldera.

Of course from this wonderful vantage point she now had, the horizontal stratification of the interior walls added a lot of irregular detail, rust and black and chocolate and umber bands indicating variations in the composition of the lava deposits; and some bands were harder than those above and below, so that there were many arcuate balconies lining the wall at different elevations – isolated curving benches, perched on the side of the immense rock throat, most never visited. And the floor so flat. The subsidence of the volcano’s magma chamber, located some one hundred and sixty kilometres below the mountain, had to have been unusually consistent; it had dropped in the same place every time. Ann wondered if it had been determined yet why that had been; if the magma chamber had been younger than the other big volcanoes, or smaller, or the lava more homogenous … Probably someone had investigated the phenomenon; no doubt she could look it up on the wrist. She tapped out the code for the Journal of Areological Studies, typed in Pavonis: ‘Evidence of Strombolian explosive activity found in west Tharsis clasts’. ‘Radial ridges in caldera and concentric graben outside the rim suggest late subsidence of the summit’. She had just crossed some of those graben. ‘Release of juvenile volatiles into atmosphere calculated by radiometric dating of Lastflow marks’.

She clicked off the wristpad. She no longer kept up with all the latest areology, she hadn’t for years. Even reading the abstracts would have taken far more time than she had. And of course a lot of areology had been badly compromised by the terraforming project. Scientists working for the metanats had concentrated on resource exploration and evaluation, and had found signs of ancient oceans, of the early warm wet atmosphere, possibly even of ancient life; on the other hand radical Red scientists had warned of increased seismic activity, rapid subsidence, mass wasting, and the disappearance of even a single surface sample left in its primal condition. Political stress had skewed nearly everything written about Mars in the past hundred years. The Journal was the only publication Ann knew of which tried to publish papers delimiting their inquiries very strictly to reporting areology in the pure sense, concentrating on what had happened in the five billion years of solitude; it was the only publication Ann still read, or at least glanced at, looking through the titles and some of the abstracts, and the editorial material at the front; once or twice she had even sent in a letter concerning some detail or other, which they had printed without fanfare. Published by the university in Sabishii, the Journal was peer-reviewed by like-minded areologists, and the articles were rigorous, well-researched and with no obvious political point to their conclusions; they were simply science. The journal’s editorials advocated what had to be called a Red position, but only in the most limited sense, in that they argued for the preservation of the primal landscape so that studies could be carried on without having to deal with gross contaminations. This had been Ann’s position from the very start, and it was still where she felt most comfortable; she had moved from that scientific position into political activism only because it had been forced on her by the situation. This was true for a lot of areologists now supporting the Reds. They were her natural peer group, really – the people she understood, and with whom she sympathized.

But they were few; she could almost name them individually. The regular contributors to the Journal more or less. As for the rest of the Reds, the Kakaze and the other radicals, what they advocated was a kind of metaphysical position, a cult – they were religious fanatics, the equivalent of Hiroko’s Greens, members of some kind of rock-worshipping sect. Ann had very little in common with them, when it came down to it; they formulated their Redness from a completely different worldview.

And given that there was that kind of fractionization among the Reds themselves, then what could one say about the Martian independence movement as a whole? Well. They were going to fall out. It was happening already.

Ann sat down carefully on the edge of the final bench. A good view. It appeared there was a station of some kind down there on the caldera floor, though from five thousand metres up, it was hard to be sure. Even the ruins of old Sheffield were scarcely visible – ah – there they were, on the floor under the new town, a tiny pile of rubble with some straight lines and plane surfaces in it. Faint vertical scorings on the wall above might have been caused by the fall of the city in ’61. It was hard to say.

The tented settlements still on the rim were like toy villages in paperweights. Sheffield with its skyline, the low warehouses across from her to the east, Lastflow, the various smaller tents all around the rim … many of them had merged, to become a kind of greater Sheffield, covering almost 180° of the rim, from Lastflow around to the southwest, where pistes followed the fallen cable down the long slope of west Tharsis to Amazonis Planitia. All the towns and stations would always be tented, because at twenty-seven kilometres high the air would always be a tenth as thick as it was at the datum – or sea level, one could now call it. Meaning the atmosphere up here was still only thirty or forty millibars thick.

Tent cities forever; but with the cable (she could not see it) spearing Sheffield, development would certainly continue, until they had built a tent city entirely ringing the caldera, looking down into it. No doubt they would then tent the caldera itself, and occupy the round floor – add about fifteen hundred square kilometres to the city, though it was a question who would want to live at the bottom of such a hole, like living at the bottom of a mohole, rock walls rising up around you as if you were in some circular roofless cathedral … perhaps it would appeal to some. The Bogdanovists had lived in moholes for years, after all. Grow forests, build climbers’ huts or rather millionaires’ penthouses on the arcuate balcony ledges, cut staircases into the sides of the rock, install glass elevators that took all day to go up or down … rooftops, terraces, skyscrapers reaching up toward the rim, heliports on their flat round roofs, pistes, flying freeways … oh yes, the whole summit of Pavonis Mons, caldera and all, could be covered by the great world city, which was always growing, growing like a fungus over every rock in the solar system. Billions of people, trillions of people, quadrillions of people, all as close to immortal as they could make themselves …

She shook her head, in a great confusion of spirits. The radicals in Lastflow were not her people, not really, but unless they succeeded, the summit of Pavonis and everywhere else on Mars would become part of the great world city. She tried to concentrate on the view, she tried to feel it, the awe of the symmetrical formation, the love of rock hard under her bottom. Her feet hung over the edge of the bench, she kicked her heels against basalt; she could throw a pebble and it would fall five thousand metres. But she couldn’t concentrate. She couldn’t feel it. Petrification. So numb, for so long … She sniffed, shook her head, pulled her feet in over the edge. Walked back up to her rover.