Kim Robinson - Red Mars

“But we can,” Arkady said. “We do.” His luxuriant red-and-white beard was an obvious revolutionary badge, as if he were the young Fidel about to enter Havana. “Of course it would be easier with your help, Frank. Think about it!”

Then before Frank could say more, someone off-screen got Arkady’s attention. A muttered conversation in Russian, and then Arkady faced him again. “Sorry, Frank,” he said. “I must attend to something. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

“Don’t you go!” Frank shouted, but the connection was gone. “God damn it!”

Nadia came on the line. She was in Burroughs, but had been linked into the exchange, such as it was. In contrast to Arkady she was taut, brusque, unhappy. “You can’t support what he’s doing!” Frank cried.

“No,” Nadia said grimly. “We aren’t talking. We still have this phone contact, which is how I knew where you were, but we don’t use it direct anymore. No point.”

“You can’t influence him?” Maya said.

“No.”

Frank could see that this was hard for Maya to believe, and it almost made him laugh: not influence a man, not manipulate him? What was Nadia’s problem?

That night they stayed at a dorm near the station. After supper Maya went back to the city manager’s office, to talk to Alexander and Dmitri and Elena. Frank wasn’t interested, it was a waste of time. Restlessly he walked the circumference of the old town, through alleys running against the tent wall, remembering that night so long ago. Only nine years, in fact, though it felt like a hundred. Nicosia looked little these days. The park at the western apex still had a good view of the whole, but a blackness filled things so that he could scarcely see.

In the sycamore grove, now mature, he passed a short man hurrying the other way. The man stopped and stared at Frank, who was under a street lamp. “Chalmers!” the man exclaimed.

Frank turned. The man had a thin face, long tangled dreadlocks, dark skin. No one he knew. But seeing him, he felt a chill. “Yes?” he snapped.

The man regarded him. He said, “You don’t know me, do you.”

“No I don’t. Who are you?”

The man’s grin was asymmetrical, as if his face had been cracked at the point of the jaw. Underneath the streetlight it looked warped, half-crazed.

“Who are you?” Frank said again.

The man raised a finger. “The last time we met, you were bringing down the town. Tonight it’s my turn. Ha!” He strode off laughing, each sharp “Ha!” higher than the last.

Back at the city manager’s, Maya clutched his arm. “I was worried, you shouldn’t be walking around alone in this town!”

“Shut up.” He went to a phone and called the physical plant. Everything was normal. He called the UNOMA police, and told them to mount an armed guard at the plant and the train station. He was still repeating the order to someone higher up the chain of command, and it seemed likely it would go all the way up to the new factor for final confirmation, when the screen went blank. There was a tremor underfoot, and every alarm bell in town went off at once. A concerted, adrenal brinnnnng!

Then there was a sharp jolt. The doors all hissed shut; the building was sealing, meaning pressures outside had made a rapid drop. He and Maya ran to the window and looked out. The tent over Nicosia was down, in some places stretched over the tallest rooftops like saran wrap, in others blowing away on the wind. People down on the street were pounding on doors, running, collapsing, huddled in on themselves like the bodies in Pompeii. Frank wheeled away, his teeth pounding with hot pain.

Apparently the building had sealed successfully. Below all the noise Frank could hear or feel the hum of a generator. The video screens were blank, which had the effect of making it hard to believe the view out the window. Maya’s face was pink, but her manner calm. “The tent is down!”

“I know.”

“But what happened?”

He didn’t reply.

She was working away at the video screens. “Have you tried the radio yet?”

“No.”

“Well?” she cried, exasperated by his silence. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“Revolution,” he said.

On the fourteenth day of the revolution Arkady Bogdanov dreamed he and his father sat on a wooden box, before a small fire at the edge of the clearing— a kind of campfire, except that the long low tin-roofed buildings of Ugoly were just a hundred meters behind their backs. They had their bare hands extended to the radiant heat, and his father was once again telling the story of his encounter with the snow leopard. It was windy and the flames gusted. Then a fire alarm rang out behind them.

It was Arkady’s alarm, set for four A.M. He got up and took a hot sponge bath. An image from the dream recurred to him. He had not slept much since the revolt’s beginning, just a few hours snatched here or there, and his alarm had awakened him from several deep-sleep dreams, the kind one normally did not remember. Almost all had been undistorted memories of his childhood, memories never once recalled before. It made him wonder just how much the memory held, and if its storage might not be immensely more powerful than its retrieval mechanism. Might one be able to remember every second of one’s life, but only in dreams that were always lost on waking? Might this be necessary, somehow? And if so, what would happen if people started living for two or three hundred years?

Janet Blyleven came by, looking worried. “They’ve blown up Nemesis. Roald has analyzed the video, and guesses they hit it with a bunch of hydrogen bombs.”

They went next door to Carr’s big city offices, where Arkady had spent most of the previous two weeks. Alex and Roald were inside watching the TV. Roald said, “Screen, replay tape one.”

An image flickered and held: black space, the thick net of stars, and midscreen a dark irregular asteroid, visible mostly as a patch of occluded stars. For a few moments the image held, and then a white light appeared on the side of the asteroid. The expansion and dispersal of the asteroid was immediate. “Fast work,” Arkady remarked.

“There’s another angle from a camera farther away.”

This clip showed the asteroid as oblong, and it was possible to make out the silver blisters of its mass driver. Then there was a white flash, and when the black sky returned the asteroid was gone; a shimmering of stars to the right of the screen indicated the passage of fragments, then they steadied and it was over. No fiery white cloud, no roar on the soundtrack; just a reporter’s tinny voice, chattering about the end of the Martian rioters’ doomsday threat, and the vindication of the concept of strategic defense. Although apparently the missiles had come from the Amex lunar base, launched by rail gun.

“I never did like the idea,” Arkady said. “It was mutual assured destruction all over again.”

Roald said, “But if there’s mutual assured destruction, and one side loses the capability. .

“We haven’t lost the capability here, though. And they value what’s here as much as we do. So now we’re back to the Swiss defense.” Destroy what they wanted and take to the hills, for resistance forever. It was more to his liking.

“It’s weaker,” Roald said bluntly. He had voted with the majority, in favor of sending Nemesis on its course toward the Earth.

Arkady nodded. It couldn’t be denied that one term had been erased from the equation. But it wasn’t clear if the balance of power had changed or not. Nemesis had not been his idea; Mikhail Yangel had proposed it, and the group in the asteroids had carried it out on their own. Now a lot of them were dead, killed by the big explosion or by smaller ones out in the belt, while Nemesis itself had created the impression that the rebels would countenance mass destruction on Earth. A bad idea, as Arkady had pointed out.