Red Mars (67 page)

Maya met him at the Burroughs station, gave him a hug. He endured it stiffly, his bags hanging from his hand. Outside the tent low chocolate thunderheads billowed in a mauve sky. He couldn’t meet her eye. “You were wonderful,” she said. “Everyone is talking about it.”

“For an hour.” After which the emigrants would disappear as before. It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.

He hurried off to the mesa offices. Maya came along and chattered at him as he checked into one of the yellow-walled rooms on the fourth floor. Bamboo furniture, flowery sheets and couch cushions. Maya was full of plans, cheery, pleased with him. She was pleased with him! He crushed his teeth together until they hurt. Bruxism was giving him headaches and all kinds of facial pain, wearing through his crowns and the cartilage in his jaw joints.

Finally he stood and walked to the door. “I have to go for a walk,” he said. As he left he saw her face in his peripheral vision: hurt surprise. As usual.

He walked quickly down to the sward, and paced off the long row of Bareiss columns, their disarray like bowling pins caught flying. On the other side of the canal he sat at a round white table at the edge of a sidewalk café, and nursed a Greek coffee for an hour.

Suddenly Maya was standing before him.

“What do you mean by this?” she said. She gestured at the table, at his own annoyed scowl. “What is wrong now?”

He stared at his coffee cup, looked up at her, then back down at the cup. It was impossible. A sentence was pronouncing itself in his mind, each word equally weighted: I illed John.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “What do you mean?”

The corners of her mouth tightened, making her glare look contemptuous and her face old. Nearly eighty now. They were too old for this. After a long silence she sat down across from him.

“Look,” she said slowly. “I don’t care what happened in the past.” She stopped speaking, and he risked a glance at her; she was staring down, looking inward. “What happened in the
Ares
, I mean, or in Underhill. Or any of it.”

His heart beat inside him like a child trying to escape. His lungs were cold. She was still talking, but he hadn’t caught it. Did she know? Did she know what he had done in Nicosia? It was impossible, or she would not have been here (would she?); but she ought to have known.

“Do you understand?” she asked.

He hadn’t heard what she was referring to. He continued to stare at his coffee cup, and suddenly she slapped it away with the back of her hand. It clattered under a nearby table and broke. The white ceramic semicircle of the handle spun on the ground.

“I said
do you understand
?”

Paralyzed, he continued to stare at the empty tabletop. Overlapping rings of brown coffee stains. Maya leaned forward and put her face in her hands. She was hunched tight over her stomach, not breathing.

Finally she breathed, pulled her head up. “No,” she said, so quietly that at first he assumed she was addressing herself. “Don’t speak of it. You think I care, and so you do all this. As if I would care more about then than now.” She looked up at him and caught his gaze. “It was thirty years ago,” she said. “Over thirty-five since we met, and thirty since all that happened. I am not that Maya Katarina Toitovna. I don’t know her, I don’t know what she thought or felt, or why. That was a different world, another life. It doesn’t matter to me now. I have no feeling for it. Now I am here, and this is me.” She poked herself between the breasts with a thumb. “And look; I love you.”

She let the silence stretch, her last words drifting out like ripples on a pond. He couldn’t stop looking at her; then he pulled his gaze away, he glared up at the faint twilight stars overhead, let their position seep into his memory. When she said I love you, Orion stood tall in the southern sky. The metal chair under you was hard. Your feet were cold.

“I don’t want to think about anything but that,” she said.

She didn’t know; and he did. But everyone has to assume their past somehow. They were nearly eighty years old, and healthy. There were people who were now 110 years old, healthy, vigorous, strong. Who knew how long it would last? They were going to have a lot of past to assume. And as it went on, and those years of their youth receded into the distant past, all those searing passions that had cut so deep. . . could they really be only scars? Weren’t they crippling wounds, a thousand amputations?

But it wasn’t a physical thing. Amputations, castrations, hollowing out; they were all in the imagination. An imaginary relationship to a real situation. . . .

“The brain is a funny animal,” he muttered.

She cocked her head, looked curiously at him. Suddenly he was afraid; they
were
their pasts, they had to be or they were nothing at all, and whatever they felt or thought or said in the present was nothing more than an echo of the past; and so when they said what they said, how could they know what their deeper minds were really feeling, thinking, saying? They didn’t know, not really. Relationships were for that reason utterly mysterious, they took place between two subconscious minds, and whatever the surface trickle thought was going on could not be trusted to be right. Did that Maya down at the deepest level know or not know, remember or forget, swear vengeance or forgive? There was no way of telling, he could never be sure. It was impossible.

And yet there she was, sitting there miserably, looking as if he could shatter her like a coffee cup, shatter her with a single flick of his finger. If he didn’t at least pretend to believe her, what then? What then? How could he shatter her like that? She would hate him for it— for forcing her to remember the past, to care about it. And so. . . one had to go on, to act.

He lifted his hand, so frightened that the movement felt like teleoperation. He was a dwarf in a waldo, a waldo that was stiff, touchy, unfamiliar: lift, quick modulate! To the left, hold; return, hold; steady. Down gently. Gently gently onto the back of her hand. Clasp, very gently. Her hand was really very cold; and so was his.

She looked wanly at him.

“Let’s—” He had to clear his throat. “Let’s go back to our rooms.”

For weeks after that he remained physically clumsy, as if he had withdrawn into some other space, and had to operate his body from a distance. Teleoperation. It made him aware of how many muscles he had. Sometimes he knew them so well he could snake through the air, but most of the time he jerked across the landscape like Frankenstein’s monster.

Burroughs was flooded with bad news; life in the city seemed fairly normal, but the video screens piped in scenes of a world Frank could scarcely believe. Riots in Hellas; the domed crater New Houston declaring itself an independent republic; and that same week, Slusinski sent tape of an American orientation in which all five dorms had voted to leave for Hellas without the proper travel permits. Chalmers contacted the new UNOMA factor, and got a detachment of U.N. security police to go there; and ten men arrested 500, by the simple expedient of overriding the tent’s physical plant computer and ordering the helpless occupants to board a series of train cars before the tent’s air was released. They had then been trained off to Korolyov, which was now in effect a prison city. Its transformation into a prison had become general knowledge sometime recently, it was hard to recall exactly when, as it had an air of already-always about it, perhaps because the parts of a prison system had existed for several years, scattered planetwide.

Chalmers interviewed some of the prisoners over their room videos, two or three at a time. “You see how easy it was to detain you,” he told them. “That’s the way it will be all over. The life-support systems are so fragile that they’re impossible to defend. Even on Earth advanced military technology makes a police state much more possible to implement than ever before, but here it’s absurdly easy.”

“Well, you got us when it was easiest,” replied a man in his sixties. “Which was smart. Once we get free I’d like to see you catch us. At that point your life-support system is as vulnerable to us as ours is to you, and yours is more visible.”

“You should know better than that! All life support here is hooked back ultimately to Earth. But they have a number of vast military powers at their disposal, and we don’t. You and all your friends are trying to live out a fantasy rebellion, some kind of sci-fi 1776, frontiersmen throwing off the yoke of tyranny, but it isn’t like that here! The analogies are all wrong, and deceptively wrong because they mask the reality, the true nature of our dependence and their might. They keep you from seeing that it’s a fantasy!”

“I’m sure there was many a good Tory neighbor arguing the same case in the colonies,” the man said with a grin. “Actually the analogy is in many ways a good one. We’re not just cogs in the machine here, we’re individual people, most of us ordinary, but there’s some real characters too— we’re going to see our Washingtons and Jeffersons and Paines, I guarantee you. Also the Andrew Jacksons and Forrest Mosebys, the brutal men who are good at getting what they want.”

“This is ridiculous!” Frank cried. “It’s a false analogy!”

“Well, it’s more metaphor than analogy anyway. There are differences, but we intend to respond to those creatively. We won’t be hefting muskets over rock walls to take potshots at you.”

“Hefting mining lasers over crater walls? You think that’s different?”

The man flicked at him, as if the camera in his room were a mosquito. “I suppose the real question is, will we have a Lincoln?”

“Lincoln is dead,” Frank snapped. “And historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can’t grasp the current situation.” He cut the connection.

Reason was useless. Also anger, also sarcasm, not to mention irony. He could only try to match them in fantasyland. So he stood up in meetings and did his very best, haranguing them about what Mars was, how it had come to be, what a fine future it could have as a collective society, specifically and organically Martian in its nature, “with the dross of all those Terran hatreds burnt away, all those dead habits that keep us from really living, from the creation that is the world’s only real beauty, damn it!”

Useless. He tried to arrange meetings with some of the disappeared, and once he talked with a group by phone, and asked them to pass the word along to Hiroko if possible, that he urgently needed to talk to her. But no one seemed to know where she was.

Then one day he got a message from her, in print faxed down from Phobos. He’d be better off talking to Arkady, it said. But Arkady had disappeared while down in Hellas, and was no longer taking calls. “It’s like playing fucking hide-and-seek,” Frank exclaimed bitterly to Maya one day. “Did you have that game in Russia? I remember playing with some older kids one time, it was around sunset and a storm over the water making it really dark, and there I was, wandering around empty streets knowing I’d never find any of them.”

“Forget the disappeared,” she advised. “Concentrate on who you can see. The disappeared will be monitoring you anyway. It doesn’t matter if you can’t see them or if they don’t reply.”

He shook his head.

Then there was a new wave of emigration. He shouted for Slusinski and ordered him to get an explanation from Washington.

“Apparently, sir, the elevator consortium has been bought in a hostile takeover by Subarashii, so its assets are in Trinidad Tobago and it is no longer interested in responding to American concerns about the matter. Infrastructure construction capability is now in line with a moderate emigration rate, they say.”

“Damn them!” Frank said. “They don’t know what they’re doing with this!”

He walked in a circle, grinding his teeth. The words spilled quietly out of him, in a monologue of their own making. “You see but you don’t understand. It’s like John used to say, there’s parts of Martian reality that don’t make it across the vacuum, not just the feel of the gravity, but the feel of getting up in a dorm and going down to the baths, and then across the alley to a dining hall. And so you’re getting it all wrong, you arrogant, ignorant, stupid sons of bitches. . . .”

He and Maya took the train from Burroughs back up to Pavonis Mons. All during the trip he sat by the window and watched the red landscape rise and fall, contract in to the flatland five kilometers and then, as they rose, extend out to forty kilometers, or a hundred. Such a big bulge in the planet, Tharsis. Something inside, breaking out. As in the current situation. Yes, they were stuck on the side of the Tharsis Bulge of Martian history, with the big volcanoes about to pop.

And then there one was, Pavonis Mons, an enormous dream mountain, as if the world were a print by Hokusai. Frank found it difficult to talk. He avoided looking at the TV at the front of the car— news flashed up and down the train almost instantly anyway, in snatches of overheard conversation or the looks on people’s faces. It was never necessary to watch the video to find out the really important news. The train ran through a forest of Acheron pines, tiny things with bark like black iron and cylindrical bushes of needles, but the needles were all yellow and drooping. He had heard about this, there was some kind of problem with the soil, too much salt or too little nitrogen, they weren’t sure. Helmeted figures stood around one on a ladder, plucking specimens of the sick needles. “That’s me,” Frank said to Maya under his breath, as she was asleep. “Playing with needles when the roots are sick.”

In the Sheffield offices he started meeting with the new elevator administrators, at the same time beginning another round of simultaneous meetings with Washington. It turned out Phyllis was still in control of the elevator, having aided Subarashii in the hostile takeover.

Then they heard that Arkady was in Nicosia, just down the slope from Pavonis, and that he and his followers had declared Nicosia a free city like New Houston. Nicosia had become a big jump-off point for the disappeared. You could slip into Nicosia and never be heard of again, it had happened hundreds of times, so many that it was clear there was some system there, of contact and transmission, an underground railroad kind of thing that no undercover agent had yet been able to penetrate, or at least to return from. “Let’s go down there and talk to him,” Frank said to Maya when he heard. “I really want to confront him in person.”