Kim Robinson - Red Mars

Afterward on the train up to Sheffield Maya gabbled with nervous relief, face flushed, eyes brilliant, hand clutching his arm as she threw her head back abruptly and laughed. That nervous intelligence, that arresting physical presence. . He must have been exhausted himself, or more shaken than he had realized by the time in the tents, or maybe it was the encounter with Phyllis; because he felt himself warming to her, it was like stepping into a sauna after a freezing day outside, with that same sense of relief from vigilance, of penetrating ease. “I don’t know what I would have done without you,” she was saying rapidly, “really you are so good in those situations, so clear and firm and sharp. They believe you because you don’t try to flatter them or soften the truth.”

“That’s what works best,” he said, looking out the window at the tents running by. “Especially when you’re flattering them and lying to them.”

“Oh Frank.”

“It’s true. You’re good at it yourself.”

This was an example of the trope under discussion, but Maya didn’t see it. There was a name for that in rhetoric, but he couldn’t recall it. Metonymy? Synecdoche? But she only laughed and squeezed his shoulder, leaning against him. As if the fight in Burroughs had never happened, not to mention everything before that. And in Sheffield she ignored her stop, and got off the train with him at his stop, walking at his shoulder through the spaciousness of the rim station, and then to his rooms, where she stripped and showered and put on one of his jumpers, chattering all the while about the day and the situation at large, as if they did this all the time: went out to dinner, soup, trout, salad, a bottle of wine, every night sure! Leaning back in their chairs, drinking coffee and brandy. Politicians after a day of politics. The leaders.

She had finally wound down, and was poured into her chair, content just to watch him. And for a wonder it didn’t make him nervous, it was as if some force field protected him from all that. Perhaps the look in her eye. Sometimes it seemed you really could tell if someone liked you.

She spent the night. And after that she divided her time between her quarters at the MarsFirst office and his rooms, without ever discussing what she was doing, or what it meant. And when it was time for bed, she would take off her clothes and roll in next to him, and then onto him, warm and calm. The touch of a whole body, all at once.. . And if he ever started things, she was so quick to respond; he only had to touch her arm. Like stepping into a sauna. She was so easy these days, so calm. Like a different person, it was amazing. Not Maya at all; but there she was, whispering Frank, Frank.

But they never talked about any of that. It was always the situation, the day’s news, and in truth that gave them a lot to talk about. The unrest on Pavonis had gone into abeyance temporarily, but the troubles were planetwide, and getting worse: sabotages, strikes, riots, fights, skirmishes, murder. And the news from Earth had plummeted through even the blackest of gallows humor, into just plain awfulness. Mars was the picture of order in comparison, a little local eddy spun away from the vortex of a giant maelstrom, which looked to Frank like a death spiral for everything that fell into it. Little wars like matchheads were flaring everywhere. India and Pakistan had used nuclear weapons in Kashmir. Africa was dying, and the North bickered over who should help first.

One day they got word that the mohole town Hephaestus, west of Elysium, manned by Americans and Russians, had been entirely deserted. Radio contact had stopped, and when people went down from Elysium to look, they had found the town empty. All Elysium was in an uproar, and Frank and Maya decided to see if they could do something in person. They took the train down Tharsis together, back down into the thickening air and across the rocky plains now piebald with snowdrifts that never melted, with snow that was a dirty granular pink, conforming tightly to the north slope of every dune and rock, like colored shadows. And then onto the glistening crazed black plains of Isidis, where the permafrost melted on the warmest summer days, and then refroze in a bright black crackle. A tundra in the making, maybe even a marsh. Flying by the train windows were tufts of black grass, perhaps even arctic flowers. Or maybe it was just litter.

Burroughs was quiet and uneasy, the broad grassy boulevards empty, their green as shocking as a hallucination or an afterimage of looking into the sun. While waiting for the train to Elysium, Frank went to the station’s storage room and reclaimed the contents of his Burroughs room, which he had left behind. The attendant returned with a single large box, containing a bachelor’s kitchen equipment, a lamp, some jumpers, a lectern. He didn’t remember any of it. He put the lectern in his pocket and tossed the rest of it in a trash dumper. Wasted years— he couldn’t remember a day of them. The treaty negotiation was now revealed as pure theater, as if someone had kicked a stage strut and brought down the whole backdrop, revealing real history on the back steps, two men exchanging a handshake and a nod.

The Russian office in Burroughs wanted Maya to stay and deal with some business there, so Frank took a train on to Elysium by himself, and then joined a rover caravan out to Hephaestus. The people in his car were subdued by his presence, and irritably he ignored them and glanced through his old lectern. A standard selection for the most part, a great book series only slightly augmented by some political philosophy packages. A hundred thousand volumes; lecterns today beat that a hundredfold, although it was a pointless improvement, as there was no longer time to read even a single book. He had been fond of Nietzsche in those days, apparently. About half the marked passages were from him, and glancing through them Frank couldn’t see why, it was all windy drivel. And then he read one that made him shudder: “The individual is, in his future and his past, a piece of fate, one law more, one necessity more for everything that is and everything that will be. To say to him ‘change yourself’ means to demand that everything should change, even in the past. . ”

In Hephaestus a new mohole crew was settling in, old-timers for the most part, tech and engineering types, but much more sophisticated than the newcomers on Pavonis. Frank talked with quite a few of them, asking about those who had disappeared, and one morning at breakfast, next to a window that looked out on the mohole’s solid white thermal plume, an American woman who reminded him of Ursula said, “These people have seen the videos all their life, they’re students of Mars, they believe in it like a grail, and organize their lives around getting here. They work for years, and save, and then sell everything they have to get passage, because they have an idea of what it will be like. And then they get here and they’re incarcerated, or at best back in the old rut, in indoor jobs so it’s all just like it’s still on TV. And so they disappear. Because they’re looking for more of the kind of thing they came here for.”

“But they don’t know how the disappeared live!” Chalmers objected. “Or even if they survive at all!”

The woman shook her head. “Word gets around. People come back. There are one-play videos that show up occasionally.” The people around her nodded. “And we can see what’s coming up from Earth after us. Best to get into the country while the chance is still there.”

Frank shook his head, amazed. It was the same thing the bench presser in the mining camp had been saying, but coming from this calm middle-aged woman it was somehow more disturbing.

That night, unable to sleep, he put out a call for Arkady, and got him half an hour later. Arkady was on Olympus Mons of all places, up at the observatory. “What do you want ?” Frank said. “What do you imagine will happen if everyone here slips away into the highlands?”