Kim Robinson - Red Mars

So it was a great festival, and John was pleased, partying hard in every waking moment. He didn’t need any omegendorph or pandorph, and once when Marian and the Senzeni Na crowd hustled him in a corner and started passing tabs around, he could only laugh. “I don’t think so right now,” he said to the young hotheads, waving a hand weakly. “It’d be carrying a coals to Newcastle at this point, really it would.”

“Carrying coals to Newcastle?”

“He means it’d be like taking permafrost to Borealis.”

“Or pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere.”

“Bringing lava to Olympus.”

“Putting more salt in the goddamn soil.”

“Putting any more ferric oxide anywhere on the whole damn planet!”

“Exactly,” John said, laughing. “I’m already full red.”

“Not as red as these folks,” one of them said, pointing down to the west. A string of three sand-colored dirigibles floated up the slope of the volcano. They were small and antiquated, and did not answer radio inquiries. By the time they had scraped over Zp’s rim and anchored among the larger and more colorful dirigibles in the crater, everyone was waiting to hear from the observers at the lock who they might be. When their gondolas popped open, and twenty or so figures in walkers stepped out, a silence fell. “That’s Hiroko,” Nadia said suddenly over the common band. The first hundred made their way quickly to the upper tent, looking up at the walktube that ran over the rim. And then the new visitors were walking down the tube to the tent lock, and were through and inside, and yes, it was Hiroko— Hiroko, Michel, Evgenia, Iwao, Gene, Ellen, Rya, Raul, and a whole crowd of youngsters.

Shrieks and shouts pierced the air, people were embracing, a few crying, and there were a good number of angry accusations; John himself couldn’t help it when he got a chance to hug Hiroko, after all those hours in his rover worrying about things, wishing he could have talked to her; now he took her shoulders in his hands and almost shook her, ready for hot words to pour from his throat; but her grinning face was so much like his memory of her and yet not— her face thinner and more lined, not her and yet clearly her— that her face blurred and flowed in his vision, from what he expected to see to what he saw. He was confused enough by this hallucinatory smear (in his feelings too) that he only cried, “Oh, I’ve wanted to talk to you so!”

“And me to you,” she said, although it was hard to hear her in the din; Nadia was intervening between Maya and Michel, for Maya was shouting “Why didn’t you tell me?” again and again, before bursting into tears. John was distracted by this, and then he saw Arkady’s face over Hiroko’s shoulder, bunched in an expression that said, There’s going to be questions answered later , and he lost his train of thought. There were going to be some hard things said— but still, here they were! Here they were. Down in the tents the noise level had jumped twenty decibels. People were cheering their reunion.

Late in the afternoon John convened the first hundred, now numbering almost sixty. They gathered in the highest tent by themselves, and looked out over those below, and the land beyond.

It was all so much huger than Underhill and the tight rocky plain around it. Everything had changed, it seemed; the world and its civilization all grown vastly larger and more complicated. And yet there they stood nevertheless, all the oh-so-familiar faces changed, aged in all the ways human faces age: time texturing them with erosion as if they had lived for geological ages, giving them a knowing look, as if one could see the aquifers behind their eyes. They were in their seventies now, most of them. And the world was indeed larger— in many different ways: after all it was now quite possible that they were destined to watch each other age a lot more, if they were lucky. It was a strange sensation.

So they milled about, looking at the people in the tents below, and beyond them to the variegated orange carpet of the planet; and the conversations rushed this way and that in quick chaotic waves, creating interference patterns, so that sometimes they all went still at once and stood there together, stunned or bemused or grinning like dolphins. In the tents below, people occasionally looked up through the plastic arcs at them, curious to catch a glimpse of such a historic meeting.

Finally they sat in a scattering of chairs, passing around cheese and crackers and bottles of red wine. John leaned back in his chair and looked around. Arkady had one arm over Maya’s shoulders, the other over Nadia’s, and the three of them were laughing at something Maya had said. Sax was blinking his owlish pleasure, and Hiroko was beaming. John had never seen that look on her face in the early years. It was a shame to disturb such a mood, but there would never be a good time; and the mood would return. So in a quiet moment he said to Sax in clear loud tones, “I can tell you who’s behind the sabotages.”

Sax blinked. “You can?”

“Yes.” He looked Hiroko in the eye. “It’s your people, Hiroko.”

That sobered her, though she still smiled: but it was the contained, private smile of old. “No no,” she said mildly, and shook her head. “You know I wouldn’t do that.”

“I figured not. But your people are doing it without your knowledge. Your children, in fact. Working with the coyote.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she threw a quick glance down at the tents below.

When she looked at John again he went on. “You grew them, right? Fertilized a bunch of your eggs, and grew them in vitro?”

After a pause she nodded.

“Hiroko!” Ann said. “You don’t have any idea how well that ectogene process works!”

“We tested it,” Hiroko said. “The kids have turned out all right.”

Now the whole group was silent, and watching Hiroko and John. He said, “Maybe so, but some of them don’t share your ideas. They’re doing things on their own, like kids will. They have eyeteeth made of stone, isn’t that right?”

Hiroko wrinkled her nose. “They’re crowns. A composite rather than true stone. A silly fashion.”

“And a kind of badge. And there are people out on the surface who have picked it up, people in contact with your kids, helping them with the sabotages. I almost got killed by some of them in Senzeni Na. My guide there had a stone eyetooth, although it took me a long time to remember where it was I had seen it. I assume it was an accident that we were down there at the time the truck fell. I hadn’t given them any warning I was going to visit, so I assume the whole thing was planned before I got there, and they didn’t know to stop it. Okakura probably went down the hole thinking he was going to get squished like a bug for the cause.”

After another pause Hiroko said, “Are you sure?”

“I’m pretty sure. It was confusing for a long time, because it’s not just them— there’s more than one thing going on. But when I remembered where I had seen that first stone tooth I looked into it, and I found out that a whole shipment of dental equipment from Earth arrived empty, back in 2044. A whole freighter ripped off. It made me think I was onto something. And then, the sabotages kept happening in places and at times when no one who was in the net could possibly have done it. Like that time I visited Mary at the Margaritifer aquifer, and the well housing was blown up. It was clear it hadn’t been done by anyone stationed there, it just wasn’t possible. But that’s a really isolated station, and there was no one else anywhere nearby at the time. So it had to be someone outside the net. And so I thought of you.”

He shrugged apologetically. “When you check it out, you find that about half the sabotages simply couldn’t have been done by anyone in the net. And in the other half, someone with a stone tooth was usually spotted in the area. It’s becoming a pretty widespread fashion now, but still. I figured it was you, and I had my AI do an analysis which showed that about three-quarters of the cases have happened in the lower southern hemisphere, that or else inside a three-thousand-kilometer circle with the chaotic terrain at the east end of Marineris as its center point. That’s a circle that holds a lot of settlements, but even allowing for that it seemed to me the chaos was a logical place for the saboteurs to hide. And we’ve all figured for years that that was where you folks went when you left Underhill.”