Kim Robinson - Red Mars

One morning they crossed the last broken hills of Cerberus, and floated out over the flat dusty plain of Amazonis Planitia. Arkady brought the dirigible down, to set a windmill in a pass between two final hillocks of old Cerberus. Something went wrong with the clasp on the winch hook, however, and it snapped open when the windmill was only halfway to the ground. The windmill thumped down flat on its base. From the ship it looked okay, but when Nadia suited up and descended in the sling to check it out, she found that the hot plate had cracked away from the base.

And there, behind the plate, was a mass of something. A dull green something with a touch of blue to it, dark inside the box. She reached in with a screwdriver and poked at it carefully. “Shit,” she said.

“What?” Arkady said above.

She ignored him and scraped some of the substance into a bag she used for screws and nuts.

She got into the sling. “Pull me back up,” she ordered.

“What’s wrong?” Arkady asked.

“Just get me up there.”

He closed the bomb bay doors after her, and met her as she was getting out of the sling. “What’s up?”

She took off her helmet. “You know what’s up, you bastard!” She took a swing at him and he leaped back, banging into a wall of windmills. “Ow!” he cried; a vane had caught him in the back. “Hey! What’s the problem! Nadia!”

She took the bag from her walker pocket and waved it before him. “This is the problem! How could you do it? How could you lie to me? You bastard, do you have any idea what kind of trouble this is going to get us in? They’ll come up here and send us all back to Earth!”

Round-eyed, Arkady rubbed his jaw. “I wouldn’t lie to you, Nadia,” he said earnestly. “I don’t lie to my friends. Let me see that.”

She stared at him and he stared back, his arm stretched out for the bag, the whites of his eyes visible all the way round the irises. He shrugged, and she frowned.

“You really don’t know?” she demanded.

“Know what ?” “What?”

She couldn’t believe he would fake ignorance; it just wasn’t his style. Which suddenly made things very strange. “At least some of our windmills are little algae farms.”

“The fucking windmills that we’ve been dropping everywhere,” she said. “They’re stuffed with Vlad’s new algae or lichen or whatever it is. Look.” She put the little bag on the tiny kitchen table, opened it, and used the screwdriver to spoon out a little bit of it. Little knobby chunks of bluish lichen. Like Martian life-forms out of an old pulp novel.

They stared at it.

“Well I’ll be damned,” Arkady said. He leaned over until his eyes were a centimeter from the stuff on the table.

“You swear you didn’t know?” Nadia demanded.

“I swear. I wouldn’t do that to you, Nadia. You know that.”

She heaved a big breath. “Well— our friends would do it to us, apparently.”

He straightened up and nodded. “That’s right.” He was distracted, thinking hard. He went to one of the windmill bases and hefted it away from the others. “Where was it?”

“Behind the heating pad.”

They went to work on it with Nadia’s tools, and got it open. Behind the plate was another colony of Underhill algae. Nadia poked around at the edges of the plate and discovered a pair of small hinges where the top of the plate met the inside of the container wall. “Look, it’s made to open.”

“But who opens it?” Arkady said.

“Radio?”

“Well I’ll be damned.” Arkady stood, walked up and down the narrow corridor. “I mean. .”

“How many dirigible trips have been made so far, ten? Twenty? And all of them dropping these things?”

Arkady started to laugh. He tilted his head back, and his huge crazed grin split his red beard in two, and he laughed until he held his sides. “Ah, ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

Nadia, who didn’t think it was funny at all, nevertheless felt her face grinning at the sight of him. “It’s not funny!” she protested. “We’re in big trouble!”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Definitely! And it’s all your fault! Some of those fool biologists in the trailer park took your anarchist rant seriously!”

“Well,” he said, “that at least is a point in their favor, the bastards. I mean—” he went back to the kitchen table to stare at the clump of blue stuff—”who exactly do you think we’re talking about, anyway? How many of our friends are in on this? And why in the world didn’t they tell me ?”

This really rankled, she could tell. In fact the more he thought about it, the less amused he was, because the algae meant there was a subculture in their group that was acting outside UNOMA supervision but had not let Arkady in on it , even though he had been the first and most vocal advocate of such subversion. What did that mean? Were there people who were on his side but didn’t trust him? Were there dissidents with a competing program?

They had no way of telling. Eventually they pulled anchor, and sailed on over Amazonis. They passed a medium-sized crater named Pettit, and Arkady remarked that it would make a good site for a windmill, but Nadia only snarled. They flew by, talking the situation over. Certainly several people in the bioengineering labs had to be in on it; probably most of them; maybe all. And then Sax, the designer of the windmills, certainly had to be a part of it. And Hiroko had been an advocate of the windmills, but they had neither been sure why— it was impossible to judge whether she would approve of something like this or not, as she was simply too close with her opinions. But it was possible.

As they talked it over, they took the broken windmill completely apart. The heating plate doubled as a gate for the compartment containing the algae; when the gate opened, the algae would be released into an area that would be a bit warmer because of the hot plate itself. Each windmill thus functioned as a micro-oasis, and if the algae managed to survive with its help, and then grow beyond the small area warmed by the hot plate, then good. If not it was not going to do very well on Mars anyway. The hot plate served to give it a good sendoff, nothing more. Or so its designers must have thought. “We’ve been made into Johnny Appleseed,” Arkady said.

“Johnny what?”

“American folktale.” He told her about it.

“Yeah, right. And now Paul Bunyan is going to come kick our ass.”

“Ha. Never. Big Man is much bigger than Paul Bunyan, believe me.”

“Big Man?”

“You know, all those names for landscape features. Big Man’s Footprints, Big Man’s Bathtub, Big Man’s Golf Course, whatever.”

“Ah yeah.”

“Anyway, I don’t see why we should get in trouble. We didn’t know anything about it.”

“Now who’s going to believe that?”

“. . Good point. Those bastards , they really got me with this one.”

Clearly this was what bothered Arkady most. Not that they had contaminated Mars with alien biota, but that he had been kept out of a secret. Men were such egomaniacs when it came down to it. And Arkady, he had his own group of friends, perhaps more than that: people who agreed with him, followers of a sort. The whole Phobos crew, a lot of the programmers in Underhill. And if some of his own people were keeping things from him, that was bad; but if another group had secret plans of its own, that was worse, apparently, because they were at least interference, and perhaps competition.

Or so he seemed to think. He wouldn’t say much of this explicitly, but it became obvious in his mutterings, and his sudden sharp curses, which were genuine even though they alternated with bursts of hilarity. He couldn’t seem to make up his mind whether he was pleased or angry, and Nadia finally believed that he was both at once. That was Arkady; he felt things freely and to the full, and wasn’t much worried about consistency. But she wasn’t too sure she liked his reasons this time, for either his anger or his amusement, and she told him so with considerable irritation.