Kim Robinson - Red Mars

‘Probably Terran,’ Vlad said. Probably Terran!”

“ Pro babry tewwan!” her little boy said, catching Ann’s intonation perfectly.

“Well, it probably is,” John said.

“But we’ll never know! They’ll end up debating it for centuries to come, there’ll be a journal devoted to that issue alone, but we’ll never really know .”

“If it’s too close to tell, it’s probably Terran,” John said, grinning at the boy. “Anything that evolved separately from Terran life would give itself away in an instant.”

“Probably,” Ann said. (“ Pro babry.”) “Except what if there’s a common source, the space-spores theory, for instance, or ejecta blasted from one planet to another with microorganisms buried in its rock?”

“That’s not too likely, is it?”

“We don’t know. We’ll never know, now.”

John had a hard time sharing her concern. “They might have come from the Viking landers for all we know,” he said. “There’s never been a very effective effort to sterilize our explorations here, that’s just the way it is. Meanwhile we’ve got more pressing problems.” Such as a global dust storm longer than the longest one ever recorded, or an influx of immigrants whose commitment to Mars was as minimal as their housing, or an upcoming treaty revision that no one could agree on, or a terraforming effort that a lot of people hated. Or a home planet going critical. Or an attempt (or two) to do one John Boone some harm.

“Yeah yeah,” Ann said. “I know. But all that’s politics, we’ll never get away from that. This was science, a question I wanted answered. And now I can’t. Nobody can.”

John shrugged. “We’ll never answer that one, Ann. No matter what. That was one of those questions that was fated always to remain unanswered. Didn’t you know that?”

“ Pro babwy Tewwan.”

A few days after that, a rocket landed on the little lake station spaceport pad, and a small group of Terrans emerged out of the dust, still bouncing around as they walked. Investigative agents, they said, here on UNOMA authority, to look into sabotage and related incidents. There were ten of them in all, eight clean-cut young men right out of the vids, and two attractive young women. Most had been assigned from the American FBI. Their leader, a tall brown-haired man named Sam Houston, requested an interview with Boone, and John agreed politely.

When they met after breakfast the next morning— six of the agents were there, including both women— he meekly answered every question without hesitation, though instinctively he told them only what he thought they knew already, plus a bit more to seem honest and helpful. They were polite and deferential, thorough in their questioning, extremely reticent if he asked them anything in return. They seemed unaware of much of the detail of the situation on Mars, and asked him about things that had happened in the first years at Underhill, or during the time of Hiroko’s disappearance. They obviously knew the events of that time, and the basic facts of the various relationships among the first hundred’s media stars; they asked him a lot of questions about Maya, Phyllis, Arkady, Nadia, the Acheron group, Sax. . all of whom were well-known to these young Terrans, permanent fixtures on their TV. But it seemed they knew little beyond what had been taped and sent back to Earth. John, his mind wandering, wondered if that would be true of all Terrans. After all what other sources of information did they have?

At the end of the interview, one of them named Chang asked him if there was anything else he wanted to say. John, who had omitted an account of his midnight visit from the coyote, among many other things, said, “I can’t think of anything!”

Chang nodded, and then Sam Houston said, “We’d appreciate it if you’d give us access to your AI on these matters.”

“I’m sorry,” John said, looking apologetic. “I don’t give access to my AI.”

“You have a destruct lock on it?” Houston said, looking surprised.

“No. I just don’t do it. Those are my private records.” John stared the man in the eye, watched him squirm under the gaze of his associates.

“We, um, we can get a warrant from UNOMA, if you like.”

“I doubt you can, actually. And even if you do I won’t let you in.”

John smiled at him, almost laughed. Another moment where being the First Man On Mars was useful. There was nothing they could do to him without causing far more trouble than it was worth. He stood up and surveyed the little gang with as much easy arrogance as he could muster, which was quite a lot. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.”

He left the room. “Pauline, click into the building comm center and copy anything you can that they send out.” He called Helmut, remembering that his own calls would be opened as well. He kept his questions brief, as if just checking credentials. Yes, a team had been sent out by UNOMA. They were part of a task force, assembled in the last six months to deal with problems.

Police on Mars, then, as well as a detective. Well, it was to be expected. But it was a nuisance nevertheless. He couldn’t do much with them hanging around watching him, suspicious because he hadn’t given them access to Pauline. And really there wasn’t that much to do in Hellas anyway. There had been no incidents of sabotage there, and it seemed unlikely that any would occur now. Maya was unsympathetic, she didn’t want to be bothered with his problems, she had enough problems of her own, with the technical aspects of the aquifer project. “You’re probably their chief suspect,” she said irritably. “These things keep happening to you, a truck in Thaumasia, a well at Bakhuysen, and now you won’t let them into your records. Why don’t you just do it?”

“Because I don’t like them,” John said, glaring at her. It was back to normal with Maya. Well, not really; they went through their routines in a kind of high spirits, as if playing a good role in the theater, knowing they had time for everything, knowing now what was real, what lay at the base of the relationship. So in that sense it was much better. On the surface, however, it was the same old melodrama. Maya refused to understand, and in the end John gave up. After that he spent a couple of days thinking it over. He went down to the station’s labs, and had the sample of skin taken from under his fingernails cultured, cloned, and read. No one with that genome was in the planetary records, so he sent the information to Acheron requesting an analysis and any information they could give. Ursula sent their results back coded, with a single word added at the end. Congratulations .

He read the message again, swore out loud. He went out for a walk, alternately laughing and swearing. “Damn you, Hiroko! Damn you to hell! Get out of your hole and help us! Ah, ha ha ha! You bitch! I’m sick of this Persephone shit!”

Even the walktubes were oppressive at that moment, and he went to the garage and suited up, and went out the lock for a walk outside, the first in many days. He was out at the end of the northern arm of the town, on a smooth desert floor. He wandered around, staying within the fluctuating column of dust-free air that every city created, thinking the situation over as he surveyed the city. Hellas was going to be much less impressive than Burroughs, or Acheron, or Echus, or even Senzeni Na; located at the low point of the basin, it had no heights to build on, no prospect. Although the whipping dust made it a poor time to judge that. The town had been built in a crescent which would eventually become the shoreline of the new lake. That might look nice when it happened— a waterfront— but meanwhile it was as featureless as Underhill, with all the latest in power plant and service apparatus, intake vents, cables, tunnels like giant sloughed snakeskins. . the old scientific station look, no aesthetics involved. Well, that was fine. They couldn’t put every town on a mountaintop.