Kim Robinson - Red Mars

Zeyk laughed hard at these efforts. “What an albedo,” he said. “It’s astonishing how much of what Sax does rebounds against him. Feedbacks naturally adjust toward homeostasis, don’t you think? I wonder if Sax shouldn’t have first made things so much colder that the whole atmosphere froze out onto the surface. How thick would it be, a centimeter? Then line up our harvesters pole to pole, and run them around the world like latitude lines, processing the carbon dioxide into good air and fertilizer. Ha, can’t you see it?”

Frank shook his head. “Sax probably considered it, and rejected it for some reason we don’t see.”

“No doubt.”

The snow sublimed away, the red land returned, they traveled on their way. Occasionally they passed nuclear reactors, standing like castles on the top of the escarpment— not just Rickovers but giant Westinghouse breeders, with frost plumes like thunderheads. On Mangalavid they saw programs about a fusion prototype in Chasma Borealis.

Canyon after canyon. They knew the land in a way that even Ann didn’t; every part of Mars interested her equally, so she could not have this focused knowledge of a single region, this way they had of reading it like a story, following its leads through the red rock to a patch of blackish sulfides, or the delicate cinnabar of mercury deposits. They were not so much students of the land as lovers of it; they wanted something from it. Ann, on the other hand, asked for nothing but questions to be asked. There were so many different kinds of desire.

Days passed, and then more seasons. When they ran into other Arab caravans they celebrated long into the night, with music and dance, coffee and hookahs and talk, in meeting tents covering an octagon of parked rovers. Their music was never recorded, but played with great facility on flutes and electric guitars, and mostly sung, in quarter-tones and wails so strange to Frank’s ear that for a long time he couldn’t tell if the singers were accomplished or not. The meals lasted hours, and afterward they talked till dawn, and made a point of going out to watch the furnace blast of sunrise.

When they met with other nationalities, however, they were naturally more reserved. Once they passed a new Amex mining station manned mostly by Americans, perched on one of the rare big veins of mafic rock rich in platinoids, in Tantalus Fossae near Alba Patera. The mine itself was down on the long flat floor of the narrow rift canyon, but it was mostly robotic, and the crew lived up in a plush tent, on the rim overlooking the rift. The Arabs circled next to this tent, made a brief guarded visit inside, and retreated into their insectile rovers for the night. It would have been impossible for the Americans to learn a thing about them.

But that evening Frank went back over into the Amex tent by himself. The folks inside were from Florida, and their voices brought up memories in him like nets filled with coelacanths; Frank ignored all the little mental explosions, and asked question after question, concentrating on the black and Latino and redneck faces that answered him. He saw that this group was imitating an earlier form of community just like the Arabs did— this was a wildcat oil-field crew, enduring harsh conditions and long hours for big paychecks, all saved for the return to civilization. It was worth it even if Mars sucked, which it did. “I mean even on the Ice you can go outside, but here, fuck.”

They didn’t care who Frank was, and as he sat among them listening they told stories to each other that astonished him even though they were somehow deeply familiar. “There was twenty-two of us prospecting with this little mobile habitat with no rooms to it, and one night we got to partying and took all our clothes off, and all the women got in a circle on the floor with their heads in the middle, and the guys went in a circle around the outside, and there were twelve guys and ten gals so the two guys out kept the rotation going pretty fast, and we actually got all the way around the circle in the timeslip. We tried to all come at once at the end of the timeslip and it worked pretty good, once a few couples got going it was like a whirlpool and it sucked everyone down into it. Felt so good .”

And then, after the laughter and the shouts of disbelief: “We was killing and freezing these hogs in Acidalia, and those humane killers are like shooting a giant arrow into their heads so we figured why not kill and freeze them both at once and see what happens. So we got them all handicapped, and bet on which ones would get the furthest, and we open the outer lock door and those pigs all dash out outside and wham , they all keeled over inside of fifty yards of the door, except for one little gal that got almost two hundred yards , and froze standing upright . I win a thousand dollar on that hog.”

Frank grinned at their howls. He was back in America. He asked them what else they had done on Mars. Some had been building nuclear reactors up on top of Pavonis Mons, where the space elevator would touch down. Others had worked on the water pipe running up eastern Tharsis Bulge from Noctis to Pavonis. The parent transnational for the elevator, Praxis, had a lot of interests at the bottom end, as they called it. “I worked on a Westinghouse on top of the Compton aquifer under Noctis, which is supposed to have as much water in it as the Mediterranean, and this reactor’s entire job was going to be to power a bunch of humidifiers. Fucking two hundred megawatts of humidifier , they’re the same as the humidifier I had in my bedroom when I was a kid, except they take fifty kilowatts apiece! Gigantic Rockwell monsters with single-molecule vaporizers and jet turbine engines that shoot the mist out of thousand-meter stacks. Fucking unbelievable. A million liters a day of H and O added to the air.”

Another of them had been building a new tent city in the Echus channel, below Overlook: “They’ve apped an aquifer there and there’s fountains all over town, statues in the fountains, waterfalls, canals, ponds, swimming pools, you name it, it’s a little Venice up there. Great thermal retention too.”

The conversation removed itself to the gym, which was well-stocked with machines designed to enable their users to stay Earth-ready. “He’s buffed, look at that, must be short time.” Almost everyone kept to a rigorous workout schedule, three hours a day minimum. “If you give up you’re stuck here, right? And then what good is that savings account?”

“Eventually it’ll be legal tender,” another one of them said. “Where people go, the American dollar is sure to follow.”

“You got it backwards, assbite.”

“As we are the proof of.”

Frank said, “I thought the treaty blocked the use of Terran money here?”

“The treaty’s a fucking joke,” said one doing lat pulls.

“Dead as Bessy the Long Distance Hog.”

They stared at Frank, all of them in their twenties and thirties, a generation he had never talked to much; he didn’t know how they had grown up, what had shaped them, what they might believe. The oh-so-familiar accents and faces might be deceptive, in fact probably were. “You think so?” he asked.

Some of them seemed more aware than the rest that he might be connected to the treaty, along with all his other historical associations. But the man doing lat pulls was oblivious. “We’re here on a deal that the treaty says is illegal, man. And it’s happening all over. Brazil, Georgia, the Gulf States, all the countries that voted against the treaty are letting the transnats in. It’s a contest among the flags of convenience as to how convenient they can be! And UNOMA is flat on its back with its legs spread, saying More, more. Folks are landing by the thousands and most are employed by transnats, they’ve got their government visas and five-year contracts, including rehab time to get you Earth-buffed, things like that.”