Greg Bear: Moving Mars

“ Remind them !” many of us shouted. Some said, “ Kill them ,” and I said, “Tell them what we — ” But I was not given a chance to finish, my voice lost in the roar.

Sean laid out his plan. We listened avidly; he fed our anger and our indignation. I had never been so excited. We who had kept the freshness of youth, and would not stand for corruption, intended to storm UMS overland and assert our contractual rights. We were righteous, and our cause was just.

Sean ordered that we all be covered with skinseal, pumped from big plastic drums. We danced in the skinseal showers naked, laughing, pointing, shrieking at the sudden cold, embarrassed but greatly enjoying ourselves. We put our clothes back on over the flexible tight-fitting nanomer. Skinseal was designed for emergency pressure problems and not for comfort. Going to the bathroom became an elaborate ritual; in skinseal, a female took about four minutes to pee, a male two minutes, and shitting was particularly tricky.

We dusted our skinseal with red ochre to hide us should we decide to worm out during daylight. We all looked like cartoon devils.

By the end of the third day, we were tired and hungry and dirty and impatient. We huddled in the pressurized poly dome, ninety in a space meant for thirty, our rusty water tapped from an old well, having eaten little or no food, exercising to ward off the cold.

I brushed past a pale thoughtful fellow a few times on the way to the food line or the lav. Lean and hawk-nosed and dark-haired, with wide, puzzled eyes, a wry smile and a hesitant, nervously joking manner, he seemed less angry and less sure than the rest of us. Just looking at him irritated me. I stalked him, watching his mannerisms, tracking his growing list of inadequacies. I was not in the best temper and needed to vent a little frustration. I took it upon myself to educate him.

At first, if he noticed my attention at all, he seemed to try to avoid me, moving through little groups of people under the gloomy old poly, making small talk. Everybody was testy; his attempts at conversation fizzled. Finally he stood in line near an antique electric wall heater, waiting his turn to bask in the currents of warm dry air.

I stood behind him. He glanced at me, smiled politely, and hunkered down with his back against the wall. I sat beside him. He clamped his hands on his knees, set his lips primly, and avoided eye contact; obviously, he had had enough of trying to make conversation and failing.

“Having second thoughts?” I asked after a decent interval.

“What?” he asked, confused.

“You look sour. Is your heart in this?”

He flashed the same irritating smile and lifted his hands, placating. “I’m here,” he said.

“Then show a little enthusiasm, dammit.”

Some other students shook their heads and shuffled away, too tired to get involved in a private fracas. Diane joined us at the rear of the line.

“I don’t know your name,” he said.

“She’s Casseia Majumdar,” said Diane.

“Oh,” he said. I was angry that he recognized the name. Of all things, I didn’t want to be known for my currently useless family connections.

“Her third uncle founded Majumdar BM,” Diane continued. I shot her a look and she puckered her lips, eyes dancing. She was enjoying a little relief from the earnest preparations and boredom.

“You have to be with us in heart and mind,” I lectured him.

“Sorry. I’m just tired. My name is Charles Franklin.” He offered a hand.

I thought that was incredibly insensitive and gauche, considering the circumstance. We had made it to the heater, but I turned away as if I didn’t care and walked toward the stacks of masks and cyclers being tested by our student leader.

Neither a Statist nor a Goback, Sean Dickinson seemed to me the epitome of what our impromptu organization stood for. Son of a track engineer, Sean had earned his scholarship by sheer brainwork. In the UMS engineering department, he had moved up quickly, only to be diverted into attempts to organize trans-BM unions. That had earned him the displeasure of Connor and Dauble.

Sean worked with an expression of complete concentration, hair disheveled, spidery, strong fingers pulling at mask poly. His mouth twitched with each newfound leak. He hardly knew I existed. Had he known, he probably would have shunned me for my name. That didn’t stop me from being impressed.

Charles followed me and stood beside the growing pile of rejects. “Please don’t misunderstand,” he said. “I’m really behind all this.”

“Glad to hear it,” I said. I observed the preparations and shivered. Nobody likes the thought of vacuum rose. None of us had been trained in insurrection. We would be up against campus security, augmented by the governor’s own thugs and maybe some of our former classmates, and I had no idea how far they — or the situation — would go.

We watched news vids intently on our slates. Sean had posted on the ex nets that students had gone on strike to protest Connor’s illegal voiding. But he hadn’t told about our dramatic plans, for obvious reasons. The citizens of the Triple — the linked economies of Earth, Mars, and Moon — hadn’t turned toward us. Even the LitVids on Mars seemed uninterested.

“I thought I could help,” Charles said, pointing to the masks and drums. “I’ve done this before…”

“Gone Up?” I asked.

“My hobby is hunting fossils. I asked to be on the equipment committee, but they said they didn’t need me.”

“Hobby?” I asked.

“Fossils. Outside. During the summer, of course.”

Here was my chance to be helpful to Sean, and maybe apologize to Charles for showing my nerves. I squatted beside the pile and said, “Sean, Charles here says he’s worked outside.”

“Good,” Sean said. He tossed a ripped mask to Gretyl. I wondered innocently if she and Sean were lovers. Gretyl scowled at the mask — a safety-box surplus antique — and dropped it on the reject pile, which threatened to spill out around our feet.

“I can fix those,” Charles said. “There are tubes of quick poly in the safety boxes. It works.”

“I won’t send anybody outside in a ripped mask,” Sean said. “Excuse me, but I have to focus here.”

“Sorry,” Charles said. He shrugged at me.

“We may not have enough masks,” I said, looking at the diminishing stacks of good equipment.

Sean glared over his shoulder, pressed for time and very unhappy. “Your advice is not necessary,” Gretyl told me sharply.

“It’s nothing,” Charles said, tugging my arm. “Let them work.”

I shrugged his fingers loose and backed away, face flushed with embarrassment. Charles returned with me to the heater, but we had lost our places there.

The lights had been cut to half. The air became thicker and colder each day. I thought of my warren rooms at home, a thousand kilometers away, of how worried my folks might be, and of how they would take it if I died out in the thin air, or if some Statist thug pierced my young frame with a flechette… God, what a scandal that would make! It seemed almost worth it.

I fantasized Dauble and Connor dragged away under arrest , glorious and magnificent disgrace, perhaps worth my death… but probably not.

“I’m a physics major,” Charles said, joining me at the end of the line.

“Good for you,” I said.

“You’re in govmanagement?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“I’m here because my parents voted against the Statists. That’s all I can figure. They were in Klein BM. Klein’s holding out to the last, you know.”

I nodded without making eye contact, wanting him to go away.

“The Statists are suicidal,” Charles said mildly. “They’ll bring themselves down… even if we don’t accelerate the process.”