Red Mars (50 page)

John tried out Sax’s answer: “The sun.”

Arkady hooted. “Wrong! It’s not just the sun and some robots, it’s human time, a lot of it. And those humans have to eat and so on. And so someone is providing for them, for us, because we have not bothered to set up a life where we provide for ourselves.”

John frowned. “Well, in the beginning we had to have the help. That was billions of dollars of equipment flown up here. Lots of work time, like you say.”

“Yes, it’s true. But once we arrived we could have focused all our efforts on making ourselves self-sufficient and independent, and then paid them back and been done with them. But we didn’t, and now the loan sharks are here. Look, back in the beginning, if someone were to ask us who made more money, you or me, it would have been impossible to say, right?”

“Right.”

“A meaningless question. But now you ask, and we have to confer. Do you consult for anybody?”

“Nobody.”

“Me neither. But Phyllis consults for Amex, and Subarashii, and Armscor. And Frank consults for Honey-well-Messerschmidt, and GE, and Boeing, and Subarashii. And so on. They are richer than us. And in this system, richer is more powerful.”

We’ll just see about that, John thought. But he didn’t want to make Arkady laugh again, so he didn’t say it.

“And it is happening
everywhere on Mars
,” Arkady said. Around them clouds of Arkadys waved their arms, looking like a Tibetan mandala of red-haired demons. “And naturally there are people who notice what’s going on. Or I tell them. And this is what you must understand, John— there are people who will fight to keep things the way they were. There are people who loved the feel of life as a scientist primitive, so much that they will refuse to give it up without a fight.”

“So the sabotages . . .”

“Yes! Perhaps some of them are done by these people. It is counterproductive, I think, but they don’t agree. Mostly the sabotage is done by people who want to keep Mars the way it was before we arrived. I am not one of those. But I am one of those who will fight to keep Mars from becoming a free zone for transnational mining. To keep us all from becoming happy slaves for some executive class, walled in its fortress mansion.” He faced John, and out of the corner of his eye John saw around them an infinity of confrontations. “Don’t you feel the same?”

“I do, actually.” He grinned. “I do! I think if we disagree, it’s mostly on the matter of methods.”

“What methods do you propose to use?”

“Well— basically, I want to get the treaty renewed as it stands, and then adhered to. If that happens then we’ll have what we want, or we’ll have the basis for getting to full independence, at least.”

“The treaty will not be renewed,” Arkady said flatly. “It will take something much more radical to stop these people, John. Direct action— yes, don’t you look so unbelieving! Seizure of some property, or of the communication system— the institution of our own set of laws, backed by everyone here, out in the streets— yes, John, yes! It will come to that, because there are guns under the table. Mass demonstration and insurrection are the only things that will beat them, history shows this.”

A million Arkadys clustered around John, looking graver than any Arkady he could ever remember seeing— so grave that the blossoming rows of John’s own face exhibited a regressive expression of slack-jawed concern. He pulled his mouth shut. “I’d like to try my way first,” he said.

Which made all the Arkadys laugh. John gave him a playful shove on the arm and Arkady went to the floor, then pushed off and tackled him. They wrestled while they could keep contact and then flew away to opposite sides of the chamber; in the mirrors, millions of them flew away into infinity.

After that they went back to the subway, and to dinner in Semenov. As they ate they looked up at the surface of Mars, swirled like a gas giant. Suddenly it looked to John like a great orange cell, or embryo, or egg. Chromosomes whipping about under a mottled orange shell. A new creature waiting to be born, genetically engineered for sure; and they were the engineers, still working on what kind of creature it would be. They were all trying to clip the genes they wanted (their own) onto plasmids and insert them into the planet’s DNA spirals, to get the expressions they wanted from the new chimerical beast. Yes. And John liked much of what Arkady wanted to put into it. But he had his own ideas as well. They would see who managed to create more of the genome in the end.

He glanced at Arkady, who was also looking up at the sky-filling planet, with the same grave expression that had been on his face in the hall of mirrors. It was a look that had been impressed on John very accurately and powerfully, he found, but in a weird multiple fly’s-vision format.

John descended back into the murk of the Great Storm, and down in the dim blustery sand-swept days he saw things he hadn’t seen before. That was the value of talking with Arkady. He paid attention to things in a new way; he traveled south from Burroughs, for instance, to Sabishii (“Lonely”) Mohole, and visited the Japanese who lived there. They were old-timers, the Japanese equivalent of the first hundred, on Mars only seven years after the first hundred had arrived; and unlike the first hundred they had become a very tight unit, and had “gone native” in a big way. Sabishii had remained small, even after the mohole was dug there. It was out in a region of rough boulders near Jarry-Desloges Crater, and as he drove down the last part of the transponder trail to the settlement, John caught brief glimpses of boulders carved into oversized faces or figures, or covered with elaborate pictographs, or hollowed out into little Shinto or Zen shrines. He stared in the dustclouds after these visions, but they were always gone like hallucinations, half-seen and then disappeared. As he passed into the tattered zone of clear air directly downwind from the mohole, he noticed that the Sabishiians were taking the rock hauled out of the great shaft to this area and arranging it into curving mounds— a pattern— from space it would look like, what, a dragon? And then he arrived at the garage and was greeted by a group of them, barefoot and long-haired, in frayed tan jumpers or sumo-wrestler jock straps: wizened old Japanese Martian sages, who talked about the
kami
centers in the region, and how their deepest sense of
on
had long ago shifted from the emperor to the planet. They showed him their labs, where they were working on areobotany and radiation-proofed clothing materials. They had also done extensive work on aquifer location, and climatology in the equatorial belt. Listening to them it seemed to John that they just had to be in touch with Hiroko, it didn’t make sense that they weren’t. But they shrugged when he asked about her. John went to work drawing them out, establishing the atmosphere of trust that he was so often able to generate in old-timers, the sense that they went back a long way together, into their own Noachian. A couple of days of asking questions, of learning the town, of showing that he was “a man who knew
giri
,” and slowly they began to open up, telling him in a quiet but blunt way that they did not like the sudden growth of Burroughs, nor the mohole next to them, nor the population increase in general, nor the new pressures put on them by the Japanese government, to survey the Great Escarpment and “find gold.” “We refuse,” said Nanao Nakayama, a wrinkled old man with scraggly white whiskers and turquoise earrings, and long white hair in a ponytail. “They cannot make us.”

“And if they try?” John asked.

“They will fail.” His easy assurance caught John’s attention; and John remembered the conversation with Arkady among the mirrors.

So some of the things he now saw were the result of paying attention in a new way, of asking new questions. But others were the result of Arkady sending word down through his network of friends and acquaintances, to identify themselves to John and show him around. Thus when John stopped in settlements on the way from Sabishii to Senzeni Na, he was often approached by small groups of two, or three, or five, who introduced themselves and said, Arkady thought you might be interested to see this. . . . And they would lead him to see an underground farm with an independent power plant, or a cache of tools and equipment, or a hidden garage full of rovers, or complete little mesa habitats, empty but ready for occupation. John would follow them bug-eyed and slack-jawed, asking questions and shaking his head in amazement. Yes, Arkady was showing him things; there was a whole movement down here, a little group in every town!

Eventually he came to Senzeni Na. He was returning because Pauline had identified two workers there as absent without explanation from their jobs on the day the truck had fallen on him. The day after he arrived he interviewed them, but they proved to have plausible explanations for their absence from the net; they had been out climbing. But after he had apologized for taking their time, and started back to his room, three other mohole technicians introduced themselves as friends of Arkady’s. John greeted them enthusiastically, glad that something would come of the trip; and in the end a group of eight took him in a rover to a canyon paralleling the mohole’s canyon. They drove down through the obscuring dust to a habitat dug into an overhanging canyon wall; it was invisible to satellites, its heat was released from a number of dispersed small vents which from space would look like Sax’s old windmill heaters. “We figure that’s how Hiroko’s group has done it,” one of his guides told him. Her name was Marian, and she had a long beak of a nose and eyes that were set too close together, so that her gaze was very intent.

“Do you know where Hiroko is?” John asked.

“No, but we think they’re in the chaos.”

The universal response. He asked them about the cliff dwelling. It had been built, Marian told him, with equipment from Senzeni Na. It was currently uninhabited, but ready if needed.

“Needed for
what?
” John said as he walked around the little dark rooms of the place.

Marian stared at him. “For the revolution, of course.”

“The revolution!”

John had very little to say on the drive back. Marian and her companions sensed his shock, and it made them uneasy too. Perhaps they were concluding that Arkady had made a mistake in asking them to show John their habitat. “There are a lot of these being prepared,” Marian said defensively. Hiroko had given them the idea, and Arkady thought they might come in handy. She and her companions began ticking them off on their fingers: a whole stockpile of air- and ice-mining equipment, buried in a dry ice tunnel at one of the south polar cap processing stations; a wellhole tapping the big aquifer under Kasei Vallis; scattered greenhouse labs around Acheron, growing pharmacologically useful plants; a communications center in the basement of Nadia’s concourse at Underhill. “And that’s just what we know about. There are one-read samizdat appearing in the net that we had nothing to do with, and Arkady’s certain that there are other groups out there, doing the same thing we are. Because when push comes to shove, we’re all going to need places to hide and fight from.”

“Oh come on,” John said. “You all have to get it through your heads that this whole revolution scenario is nothing but a fantasia on the American Revolution, you know, the great frontier, the hardy pioneer colonists exploited by the imperial power, the revolt to go from colony to sovereign state— it’s all just a false analogy!”

“Why do you say that?” Marian demanded. “What’s different?”

“Well for one thing, we’re not living on land that can sustain us. And for another, we don’t have the means to revolt successfully!”

“I disagree with both those points. You should talk to Arkady more about that.”

“I’ll try. Anyway I think there’s a better way of doing it than all this sneaking around stealing equipment, something more direct. We simply tell UNOMA what the new Mars treaty is going to say.”

His companions shook their heads scornfully.

“We can talk all we want,” Marian said, “but that’s not going to change what they do.”

“Why not? Do you think they can just ignore the people who are living here? They may have continuous shuttles now, but we’re still eighty million kilometers away from them, and we’re here and they’re not. It may not be North America in the 1760s, but we do have some of the same advantages: we’re at a great distance, and we’re in possession. The important thing is not to fall into their way of thinking, into all the same old violent mistakes!”

And so he argued against revolution, nationalism, religion, economics— against every mode of Terran thought that he could think of, all mashed together in his usual style. “Revolution never even worked on Earth, not really. And here it’s all outmoded. We should be inventing a new program, just like Arkady says,
including
the ways to take control of our fate. With you all living a fantasy of the past you’re leading us right into the repression you’re complaining about! We need a new Martian way, a new Martian philosophy, economics, religion!”

They asked him just what these new Martian modes of thought might be, and he raised his hands. “How can I say? When they’ve never existed it’s hard to talk about them, hard to imagine them, because we don’t have the images. That’s always the problem when you try to make something new, and believe me I know, because I’ve been trying. But I think I can tell you what it will feel like— it will feel like the first years here, when we were a group and we all worked together. When there was no purpose in life except to settle and discover this place, and we all decided together what we should do. That’s how it should
feel
.”

“But those days are gone,” Marian said, and the others nodded. “That’s just your own fantasy of the past. Nothing but words. It’s like you’re holding a philosophy class in a giant gold mine, with armies bearing down on both sides.”

“No no,” John said. “I’m talking about methods for resistance, methods appropriate to our real situation, and not some revolutionary fantasy out of the history books!”

And around they went, again and again, until they were back at Senzeni Na, and had retired to the workers’ rooms on the lowest residential floor. There they argued passionately, through the timeslip and long into the night, and as they argued a certain elation filled John, because he could see them beginning to think about it— it was clear that they were listening to him, and that what he said, and what he thought of them, mattered to them. This was the best return yet on the old First Man fishbowl; combined with Arkady’s stamp of approval, it gave him an influence over them that was palpable. He could shake their confidence, he could make them think, he could force them to reevaluate, he could change their minds!