Kim Robinson - Red Mars

But sadly deceived. One morning he awoke from a dream of John. It was from their time together on the space station, when they had been young. Except in the dream they had been old, and John had not died and yet he had; he spoke as a ghost, aware that he had died and that Frank had killed him, yet aware also of everything that had happened since, and free of all anger or blame. It was just something that had happened, like the time John had gotten the first landing assignment, or had taken Maya away on the Ares . A lot of things had happened between them one way and another, but they were still friends, still brothers. They could talk, they understood each other. Feeling the horror of that Frank had groaned through the dream, and tried to fold in on himself, and awakened. It was hot, his skin was sweaty. Maya was sitting up, her hair wild, her breasts swinging loosely between her arms. “What’s wrong!” she was saying. “What’s wrong!”

“Nothing!” he cried, and got up and padded to the bathroom. But she came after him, put her hands on him. “Frank, what was it?”

“Nothing,” he shouted, involuntarily jerking out of her grip. “Can’t you leave me alone!”

“Of course,” she said, hurt. A flush of anger: “Of course I can.” And she walked out of the bathroom.

“Of course you can!” he shouted after her, suddenly furious at her stupidity, to be so ignorant of him, so vulnerable to him, when it was all an act anyway. “Now that you’ve got what you want from me!”

“What does that mean?” she said, reappearing instantly in the bathroom doorway, a sheet around her.

“You know what I mean,” he said bitterly. “You’ve got what you wanted from the treaty, haven’t you. And you never would have, without me.”

She stood there, hands on her hips, watching him. The sheet was loose around her hips and she looked like the French figure of Liberty, very beautiful and very dangerous, her mouth a tight line. She shook her head in disgust and walked away. “You don’t have the faintest idea, do you,” she said.

He followed her. “What do you mean?”

She threw the sheet away and stepped violently into her underwear, yanked it up over her bottom. As she dressed she hurled short sentences at him. “You don’t know anything about what other people think. You don’t even know what you think. What do you want out of the treaty? You, Frank Chalmers? You don’t know. It’s only what I want, what Sax wants, what Helmut wants. What any of them want. You yourself have no opinion. Whatever is easiest to manage. Whatever leaves you in control at the end.

“And as for feelings !” She was dressed, standing at the door. She stopped to glare at him, a look like a lightning strike. He had been standing there too stunned to move and so now he stood there naked before her, exposed to the full blast of her scorn. “You don’t have any feelings, do you. I’ve tried, believe me, but you just—” She shuddered, apparently unable to think of words vile enough to describe him. Hollow, he wanted to say. Empty. An act. And yet—

She walked out.

So when they signed the new treaty, Maya was not at his side; not even in Burroughs. Which was a relief in many ways, really. And yet he could not help but feel empty, and cold in the chest; and certainly the others of the first hundred (at least) knew something had happened between them (again), which was infuriating, or so he told himself.

They signed the thing in the same conference room in which they had hammered it out, with Helmut doing the honors with a big smile, and each delegate coming up in turn, in penguin suit or black evening gown, to say a few words for the cameras and then put their hand to “the document,” a gesture that only Frank seemed to see as bizarrely archaic, like scratching a petroglyph. Ridiculous. When it was his turn he went up and said something about striking a balance, which was exactly it— he had arranged the competing interests to strike together at angles that matched their momentum exactly, arranging a traffic accident so that all the vehicles would collide into a single solidified mass. The result was something not all that dissimilar to the precious version of the treaty, with both emigration and investment, the two main threats to the status quo (if there was such a thing on Mars) mostly blocked, and (this was the clever part) blocked by each other . It was a good piece of work, and he signed with a flourish, “For the United States of America,” he announced emphatically, glaring around the room intently. That would play well on vid.

So he strode through the subsequent parade with the cold satisfaction of work well done. The grass-floored tents and walktubes of the city were crowded with thousands of spectators, and the parade wound through them, wandering down the big canalside tent with diversions up into the mesas, coming back down and crossing every canal bridge to cheers, and proceeding up to Princess Park for a great street party. The weather people had set for cool and crisp, with brisk downslope winds. Kites dueled under the tent roofs like raptors, their colors bright against the dark pink afternoon sky.

Frank found the party in the park unsettling, there were too many people watching him, too many who wanted to approach him and talk. That was fame: you talked to groups. So he turned around and walked back up the canalside tent.

Two parallel rows of white pillars ran down the side of the canal; each pillar was a Bareiss column, semicircular at top and bottom but with the half-circles rotated 180 degrees to each other. This simple maneuver created pillars that looked completely different depending on where you were when you looked at them, and the two rows of these pillars had a strange tumbledown look, as if they were already ruins, although the smoothness and whiteness of their diamond-coated salt belied that. They stood off the grass as white as sugar cubes, and gleamed as if wet.

Frank walked between the rows, touching each pillar in turn. Above them on each side the valley slopes rose to the window-walled bluffs of mesas. Massed greenery shone behind these cliffs of untinted glass, so that it looked as if the city were rimmed by enormous terrariums. A really elegant ant farm. The part of the valley slope under tenting was dotted with trees and tile roofs, and cut by broad grassy boulevards. The uncovered part was still a red rocky plain. A great number of buildings were just being finished, or still under construction; there were cranes everywhere rearing up toward the tent roofs, a kind of odd colorful skeletal statuary. Also scores of scaffolded buildings, so that Helmut had said the tented hillsides reminded him of Switzerland, no surprise since most of the construction was being done by Swiss. “They scaffold a house to replace a window box.”

Sax Russell was standing at the foot of one of these scaffolded buildings, looking up at it critically. Frank turned and walked up a tube to him, said hello.

“There’s twice as much support as they need,” Sax said. “Maybe more.”

“The Swiss like that.”

Sax nodded. They stared at the building.

“Well?” Frank said. “What do you think?”

“The treaty? It will reduce support for terraforming,” Sax said. “People are more inclined to invest than to give.”

Frank scowled. “Not all investment is good for terraforming, Sax, you have to remember that. A lot of that money is spent on other things entirely.”

“But terraforming is a way to reduce overhead, you see. A certain percentage of the total investment will always be devoted to it. So I want the total as high as possible.”

“Real benefits can only be calculated using real costs,” Frank said. “All the real costs. Terran economics never bothered to do that, but you’re a scientist and you should. You have to judge the environmental damage from higher population and activity, as well as the benefits to terraforming that go along with it. Better to up the investment devoted to pure terraforming, rather than compromising and taking a percentage of a total that in some ways is working against you.”