Kim Stanley Robinson - The Complete Mars Trilogy - Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars

It explained a lot. John smiled as he finished his report, and Sax cocked his head at him curiously. “Do you think this truck was meant to kill you?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do the people there seem?”

“Scared.”

“Think they’re in on it?”

John shrugged. “I doubt it. They’re probably just worried about what happens next.”

Sax flicked a hand out. “Sabotage like that won’t make the slightest dent in the project,” he said mildly.

“I know.”

“Who’s doing this, John?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could it be Ann, do you think? Has she become another prophet, like Hiroko or Arkady, with followers and a program and the like?”

“You have followers and a program too,” John reminded him.

“But I’m not telling my followers to wreck things and try to kill people.”

“Some people think you’re trying to wreck Mars. And people will certainly die as a result of terraforming, in accidents.”

“What are you saying?”

“Just reminding you. Trying to get you to see why someone might do this.”

“So you do think it’s Ann.”

“Or Arkady, or Hiroko, or someone we’ve never heard of in one of the new colonies. There are a lot of people here now. A lot of factions.”

“I know.” Sax walked over to a countertop, drained his battered old coffee mug. Finally he said, “I’d like you to try to find out who it is. Go where you need to go. Go talk to Ann. Reason with her.” There was a plaintive note in his voice: “I can’t even talk to her anymore.”

John stared at him, surprised at the display of emotion. Sax took this silence for reluctance, and went on: “I know it isn’t exactly your thing, but everyone will talk to you. You’re practically the only one left we can say that about. I know you’re doing the mohole work, but you can get your team to do your part of that, and keep visiting the moholes as part of this inquiry. There really isn’t anyone else who can do it. There’s no real police to turn to. Although if things keep happening, UNOMA will provide some.”

“Or the transnational.” Boone considered it. The sight of that truck, falling out of the sky … “All right. I’ll go talk to Ann, anyway. After that we should get together and talk about security for all the terraforming projects. If we can stop anything more from happening, that will keep UNOMA out.”

“Thanks, John.”

Boone wandered out onto his suite’s balcony. The concourse was filled with Hokkaido pines, the chilled air stiff with resin. Copper figures walked below, among the tree trunks. Boone considered the new situation. For ten years now he had worked for Russell on terraforming, managing the moholes and doing PR and the like, and he enjoyed the work; but he wasn’t on the cutting edge of any of the sciences involved, and so he was out of the decision-making loop. He knew that many people thought of him as a figurehead only, a celebrity for consumption back on Earth; a dumb space jock who had gotten lucky once, and was living off that for good. That didn’t bother John; there were always knee-high people hacking away, trying to get everyone down to their size. That was okay, especially since in his case they were wrong. His power was considerable, although perhaps only he could see the full extent of it, as it consisted of an endless succession of face-to-face meetings, of the influence he had over what people chose to do. Power wasn’t a matter of job titles, after all. Power was a matter of vision, persuasiveness, freedom of movement, fame, influence. The figurehead stands at the front, after all, pointing the way.

Still, despite all that, there was something to be said for this new task. He could feel that already. It would be problematic, difficult, perhaps risky … above all, challenging. A new challenge: he liked that. Going back into his suite, getting into bed (John Boone Slept Here!) it occurred to him that now he was going to be not only the first man on Mars, but the first detective. He grinned at the thought, and the last action of the omegendorph set his nerves aglow.

Ann Clayborne was doing a survey in the mountains surrounding the Argyre Basin, which meant he could check out a glider and fly from Senzeni Na to her. So early the next morning he took the elevator balloon up the mooring mast to the stationary dirigible floating over the town, exulting as he rose in the ever-expanding view of the big Thaumasia canyons. From the dirigible he lowered himself into the cockpit of one of the gliders hooked to its underside. After securing himself he unhooked, and the glider dropped like a stone until he ran it into the mohole thermal, which tossed it violently upward. He fought for control and banked the big gossamer craft into a steep rising gyre, whooping as he battled the intense buffeting; it was like riding a soap bubble over a bonfire!

At five thousand meters the plume cloud flattened and spread out to the east. John swooped out of his spiral and headed southeast, playing with the glider as he went to get a feel for it. He would have to ride the winds carefully to make it to Argyre.

He aimed into the sun’s smeary yellow blaze. Wind keened over the wings. The land below him was a dark rough orange, shading to a very light orange at the horizon. The southern highlands were wildly pocked in every direction, with the raw, primordial, lunar look that saturation cratering always had. John loved flying over it, and he piloted unconsciously, concentrating on the land below. It was precious to sit back and fly, feeling the wind as if under his elbows, watching the land and not thinking a thing. He was sixty-four years old in this year 2047 (or “m-year 10” as he usually thought of it), and he had been the most famous man alive for almost thirty of those years; and nowadays he was happiest when he was alone, and flying.

After an hour had passed, he started thinking about his new task. It was important not to get caught up in fantasies of magnifying glasses and cigar ash, or gumshoe with handgun; there was work he could do even as he flew. He called up Sax, and asked if he could connect his AI into the UNOMA emigration and planetary travel records, without alerting UNOMA to the connection. After some investigation Sax got back to him and said that he could manage that, and so John sent a sequence of questions through, and then continued to fly. An hour and many craters later, Pauline’s redlight blinked rapidly, indicating a downloading of raw data. John asked the AI to run the data through various analyses, and when she was done he studied the results on the screen. Patterns of movement; they were confusing, but he hoped that when matched with the sabotage incidents, something might turn up. Of course there were people moving around off the record, the hidden colony among them; and who knew what Hiroko and the others thought of the terraforming projects? Still, it was worth a look.

The Nereidium Montes popped over the horizon ahead. Mars had never had much tectonic movement, and so mountain ranges were rare; those that existed tended to be crater rims writ large, rings of ejecta thrown out by impacts so great that the debris fell in two or three concentric ranges, each many kilometers wide, and extremely rugged. Hellas and Argyre, being the biggest basins, therefore had the biggest ranges; and the only other major mountain range, the Phlegra Montes on the slope of Elysium, was probably the fragmentary remains of a basin impact later inundated by the Elysium volcanoes, or by an ancient Oceanus Borealis. Debate raged over that question, and Ann, John’s final authority in such matters, had never expressed an opinion on it.

The Nereidium Montes made up the northern rim around Argyre, but currently Ann and her team were investigating the southern rim, the Charitum Montes. Boone adjusted his course southward, and in the early afternoon he soared low over the broad flat plain of the Argyre Basin. After the wild cratering of the highlands, the basin floor seemed smooth indeed, a flat yellowish plain bounded by the big curve of rim ridges. From his vantage he could see about ninety degrees of the arc of the rim, enough to give him a sense of the size of the impact that had formed Argyre; it was an amazing sight. Flying over thousands of Martian craters had given Boone a sense of the sizes they came in, and Argyre was simply off the scale; a quite big crater named Galle was no more than a pockmark in Argyre’s rim! A whole world must have crashed in here! Or, at the very least, a damn big asteroid.