The Martians

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  They came to the far shore of the lake. Michel looked back: Their complex sparkled like a bright winter constellation coming up over the horizon. Inside those boxes their companions were working, talking, cooking, reading, resting. Tensions in there were subtle but high.

  A door opened in the complex, a wedge of light was thrown onto rust-colored rock. It could have been Mars, sure; in a year or two it would be. Many of the current tensions would be resolved. But there would be no air. Outside they would go, yes, sometimes; but in space suits. Would that matter? The winter suit he was wearing at that moment was as much like a space suit as the designers could make it, and the frigid numbing down-valley breeze was like breathing purified oxygen just gasified from liquid stock, and insufficiently warmed. The sub-biological chill of Antarctica, of Mars; nothing much to choose between them. In that sense this year of training and testing had been a good idea. They were getting at least a taste of what it might be like.

  Ben stepped down onto the uneven lower ice of the lake's summertime moat, slipped and went down in a flash. He cried out and the others rushed to him, Michel first because he had seen it happen. Ben groaned and writhed, the others crouched around him—

  “Excuse me,” Maya said, and ducked between Michel and Arkady to kneel at Ben's side.

  “Is it your hip?”

  “Ah—yeah—”

  “Hold on. Hold steady.” Ben clutched at her arm and she held him on his other side. “Here, let's get your harness unclipped from the sled. Okay, slip the sled under him. Move him gently! Okay. Hold still there, we'll get you back to the station. Can you stay steady or should we strap you down. Okay, let's go. Help stabilize the sled. Someone radio the station and tell them to get ready for us.” She clipped her own harness onto the banana sled and started back across the lake, quickly but steadily, almost ice-skating on her boots, flashlight lit to show her the ice underfoot. The others followed beside Ben.

  Across the Ross Sea, McMurdo Station had an extra complement of winter staff precisely to help support them out at Vanda, and so the winter helicopter came yammering down in a huge noise only an hour or so after their return to the station. By that time Ben was furious at himself for falling, more angry than hurt, though they found out later that his hip had been fractured. “He went down in a flash,” Michel said to Maya afterward. “So fast he had no time to get a hand up. I'm not surprised it broke something."

  “Too bad,” Maya said.

  “You were good out there,” Michel said, surprising himself. “Very quick.”

  She blew this away with a sound and a wave of her hand. “How many times I've seen it. I spent my whole childhood on ice.”

  “Ah of course.” Expertise. A fund of experience was the basis of all natural decision making. This was true of Maya in many different realms, he felt. Ergonomics, her specialty, was a matter of people getting along well with things. She was going to Mars. He was not. He loved her. Well, but he loved many women. That was just the way it was. But with her . . .

  From Michel's personal notes, heavily encrypted:

  Janet Blyleven: beautiful. Speaks rapidly, confidently. Friendly. Looks healthy. Nice breasts. Doggy friendship is no friendship at all.

  Maya: very beautiful. A tiger slouches into the room, reeking of sex and murder. The alpha female before whom all submit. Quick in everything, including moods. I can talk to her. We have real conversations because she doesn't care what I'm here for. Can that be true?

  Spencer Jackson: a power. A secret soul. Depths beyond all calculation, even for him. The Vanda inside us. His the mind into which the whole community falls, transmuted to art. Can sketch any face in a dozen strokes, and there they are pebble all bare. But I don't think he's happy.

  Tatiana Durova: very beautiful. A goddess trapped in a motel. She's looking for a way out. She knows everyone thinks she is beautiful, and therefore trusts none of us. She needs to get back to Olympus, where her appearance would be taken for granted, and she able to get through to someone. To her peers. Perhaps she takes Mars to be Olympus.

  Arkady Bogdanov is a power. A very steady reliable fellow, earnest almost to the point of dullness. One sees everything he's thinking: He doesn't bother to conceal it. What I am is enough to get me to Mars, he says in his manner. Don't you agree? And I do. An engineer, quick and ingenious, not interested in larger issues.

  Marina Tokareva: a beauty. Very serious and intense, no small talk to her. One is forced to think about things. And she assumes you are as quick as she is. So it can be work to follow her. Narrow chiseled features, thick jet-black hair. Sometimes following her glances I think she is one of the homosexuals who must be among us; other times she seems fixated on Vlad Taneev, the oldest man here.

  George Berkovic and Edvard Perrin are paired in their regard for Phyllis Boyle. Yet it is not a competition but a partnership. They both think they like Phyllis, but really what they like is the way the other one mirrors their affection. Phyllis likes this too.

  Ivana is quite beautiful, despite a thin face and an overbite; a goofy smile lights up the face of the classic chemist nerd, and suddenly the goddess is revealed. Shared a Nobel Prize in chemistry, but one has to quash the thought that the smile is what won the prize. It makes one happy to see it. One would give her the Nobel Prize just to see that smile.

  Simon Frazier: a very quiet power. English; public-school education from age nine. He listens very closely, speaks well, but he says about one-tenth as much as everyone else, which naturally gains him the reputation of a complete mute. He plays with this image, quietly. I think he likes Ann, who is like him in some ways, though not so extreme; in other ways very unlike. Ann does not joke with her image among the others, she is completely unaware of it—American lack of self-consciousness, versus Simon's Brit irony.

  Ann is a real beauty, though austere. Tall, angular, bony, strong; both body and face. She draws the eye. She certainly does take Mars seriously. People see that in her and like her for it. Or not, as the case may be. Her shadow is very distinct.

  Alexander Zhalin is a power. He likes women with his eyes. Some of them know it, some don't. Mary Dunkel and Janet Blyleven are both with him a lot. He is an enthusiast. Whatever has taken his fancy becomes the horizon of all interest.

  Nadia Cherneshevsky: At first you think she is plain, then you see she is one of the most beautiful of all. It has to do with solidity—physical, intellectual, and moral. The rock everyone rests on. Her physical beauty is in her athleticism—short, round, tough, skillful, graceful, strong—and in her eyes, as her irises are particolored, a dense stippled carpet of color dots, bits of brown and green mostly, with some blue and yellow, all flecked together in concentric rings of pattern, shot by rays of a different pattern, merging in a casual glance to a color like hazel. You could dive into those eyes and never come out. And she looks back at you without fear.

  Frank Chalmers: a power. I think. It's hard not to see him as an adjunct to John Boone. The sidekick, or enabler. On his own out here, not so impressive. Diminished; less a historical character. He's elusive. Big, bulky, dark-complexioned. He keeps a low profile. He is quite friendly, but it doesn't seem to one that it is real friendliness. A political animal, like Phyllis; only they don't like each other. It's Maya he likes. And Maya makes sure he feels part of her world. But what he really wants is not clear. There's a person in there one does not know at all.

  More formally, he administered the Revised Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, giving the questionnaires in groups of ten. Hundreds of questions, calibrated to give statistically significant personality profiles. Only one of several different tests he was giving over the winter; testing was one of the main ways they passed the time.

  They were taking this test in the Bright Room, which was lit by scores of high-wattage bulbs, until everything in it seemed incandescent, especially people's faces. Looking at them as they worked, Michel suddenly felt how absurd it was to be schoolmaster to this brilliant crowd. And he saw very cle
arly in their glowing faces that they were not answering the questions to tell him what they were like, but rather to say what they thought they should in order to get to go to Mars. Of course reading the answers with that in mind would reveal almost as much as if they were being sincere. Still it was a shock to see it so clearly right there on their faces.

  He shouldn't have been surprised. Faces revealed mood and much else with extreme precision, in most people anyway. Perhaps all people; a poker face reveals someone who is feeling guarded. No, he thought while watching them, a whole language might be developed from this, if one paid proper attention. Blind people hear actors' voices as completely artificial and false, and in this world they were all blind to faces, but if they looked . . . it might yield a kind of phrenology of sight. He might become the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

  So he watched their faces, fascinated. The Bright Room was very bright indeed; time spent in such spaces had been shown to ward off the worst of seasonal affective disorder. In this luminous glare each translucent face seemed not just to be speaking to him, but also to be a complete rebus of that person's character: variously strong, intelligent, humorous, guarded, whatever, but in any case the entire personality, all right there on the surface. There was Ursula, faintly amused, thinking this was just one of the many silly things psychologists did; she as a medical person recognized that it was both ludicrous and necessary, she knew all the medical sciences were as much art as science. Sax, on the other hand, was taking it all very seriously, as he seemed to take everything: This was a scientific experiment to him, and he trusted that scientists in other disciplines were honestly dealing with the methodological difficulties of that discipline. All right there on his face.

  They were all experts. Michel had studied NDM, or Naturalistic Decision Making; he was an expert on the subject; and he knew that experts took the limited data available to them in any situation and compared it to their vast fund of experiences, then made quick decisions based on analogies to past experience. Thus now, in this situation, this group of experts were doing what they would do to win a grant, or to win over a committee judging a tenure-application package. Something like that. The fact that they had never faced a task quite like this one was problematic but not debilitating.

  Unless they considered the situation to be unstable beyond the point of prediction. Some situations were like that; even the best meteorologists could not predict hailstorms well, even the best battlefield commanders could not predict the course of surprise attacks. For that matter some recent studies had shown that it was much the same with psychologists when they attempted to predict people's future mental diagnoses from their scores on standard psychological tests. In each case there weren't enough data. And so Michel stared intently at their faces, pink or brown summaries of their personalities, trying to read the whole in the part.

  Except it was not really true. Faces could be deceptive, or uninformative; and personality theory was notoriously vexed by deep uncertainties of all kinds. The same events and environments produced radically different results in people, that was the plain fact. There were too many confounding factors to say much about any aspect of personality. All the models of personality itself—the many, many theories—came down to a matter of individual psychologists codifying their guesses. Perhaps all science had this aspect, but it was so obvious in personality theory, where new propositions were supported by reference to earlier theorists, who often supported their assertions by reference to even earlier theorists, in strings all the way back to Freud and Jung, if not Galen. The fascinating Psychoanalytic Roots of Patriarchy was a perfect example of this, as was Jones's classic The New Psychology of Dreaming. It was a standard technique: Citing a guess by a dead authority added weight to one's assertions. So that often the large statistical tests administered by contemporary psychologists were designed mostly to confirm or disconfirm preliminary intuitive stabs by near-Victorians like Freud, Jung, Adler, Sullivan, Fromm, Maslow, etc. You picked the earlier expert whose guesses seemed right to you, then tested these intuitions using current scientific techniques. If going back to the original either/or, Michel chose Jung over Freud; after that he was partial to the whole utopian self-definition crowd—Fromm, Erikson, Maslow—and the matching philosophers of freedom from the same era, people like Nietzsche and Sartre. And the latest in modern psychology, of course—tested, peer-reviewed, and published in the journals.

  But all his ideas were elaborations of an original set of feelings about people. A matter of hunches. On that basis he was supposed to evaluate who would or would not do well if removed to Mars. Predicting hailstorms and surprise attacks. Interpreting personality tests designed according to the paradigms of alchemists. Even asking people about their dreams, as if these were anything more than the detritus of the sleeping brain! Dream interpretation: Once Jung dreamed about killing a man named Siegfried, and he struggled mightily to figure out what the dream might have meant, never once wondering if it had anything to do with his immense anger at his old friend Freud. As Fromm noted later, “The slight change from Sigmund to Siegfried was enough to enable a man whose greatest skill was the interpretation of dreams, to hide the real meaning of this dream from himself.”

  It was a perfect image for the power of their methodology.

  Mary Dunkel sat beside him at lunch one day. Her leg pressed against his. This was not an accident. Michel was surprised; it was a tremendous risk on her part, after all. His leg responded with a matching pressure, before he had a chance to think things over. Mary was beautiful. He loved Mary for her dark hair and brown eyes and the turn of her hips as she went through doorways ahead of him, and now for her boldness. Elena he loved for the kindness in her beautiful pale eyes, and for her rangy shoulders, wide as any man's. Tatiana he loved for being so gorgeous and self-contained.

  But it was Mary pressed against him. What did she mean by it? Did she mean to influence his recommendation for or against her? But surely she would know such behavior might very possibly be counted against her. She had to know that. So knowing that and doing this anyway meant that she must be doing it for other reasons, more important to her than going to Mars. Meant it personally, in other words.

  How easy he was. A woman only had to look at him right and he was hers forever. She could knock him down with the brush of a fingertip.

  Now his body began to fall over yet again, reflexively, like the jerk of the lower leg when the knee is properly tapped. But part of his mind's slow train of thought, trailing behind reality by a matter of some minutes (sometimes it was hours, or days), began to worry. He could not be sure what she meant. She could be a woman willing to risk all on a single throw of the dice. Try sidling up to a man to get on his good side. It often worked like a charm.

  He realized that to have power over another's destiny was intolerable. It corrupted everything. He wanted to slip away to the nearest bed with Mary, hers or his, to fall onto it and make love. But making love could by definition only occur between two free human beings. And as he was warden, judge, and jury to this group . . .

  He moaned at the thought, a little “uhnn” in his throat as the problem struck him in the solar plexus and forced air upward through his vocal cords. Mary gave him a glance, smiled. Across the table Maya picked this up and looked at them. Maya had perhaps heard him groan. Maya saw everything; and if she saw him wanting silly reckless Mary, when really he wanted Maya with all his heart, then it would be a double disaster. Michel loved Maya for her hawklike vision, her fierce sharp intelligence, now watching him casually but completely.

  He got up and went to the counter for a piece of cheesecake, feeling his knees weakly buckling. He dared not look back at either of them.

  Though it was possible the leg contact and all their looks had been in his mind only.

  It was getting strange.

  Two Russians, Sergei and Natasha, had started a relationship soon after their arrival at Lake Vanda. They did not try to hide it, like some other coupl
es Michel knew about or suspected. If anything they were a bit too demonstrative, given the situation; it made some people uncomfortable how affectionate they were with each other. Ordinarily one could ignore strangers kissing in public, watch them or not as one chose. Here there were decisions to be made. Was it worse to be a voyeur or a prude? Did one apply to the program as an individual or as a part of a couple? Which gave one a better chance? What did Michel think?

  Then during the winter solstice party, June 21, after everyone had drunk a glass of champagne and was feeling good about getting past that ebb tide in the psychological year, Arkady called them out to see the aurora australis, a filmy electric dance of colored veils and draperies, soft greens and blues and a pale pink flowing across the grain of their reality, shimmering through the black plenum in quick sine waves. And suddenly, in the midst of this magic, shouting erupted from inside the compound—muffled shrieks, bellows. Michel looked around and all the hooded ski-masked figures were looking at him, as if he should have known this was coming and forestalled it somehow, as if it were his fault—and he ran inside and there were Sergei and Natasha, literally at each other's throats. He tried to detach them and got hit in the side of the face for his trouble.

  After that operatic debacle Sergei and Natasha were expelled to McMurdo—which itself took some doing, both getting the helicopter over during a week of stormy weather, and getting Sergei and Natasha to agree to leave. And after that people's trust in Michel was heavily damaged, if not shattered completely. Even the administrators of the program, back in the north, were faintly overinquisitive when they asked him about it. They noted that records showed he had had an interview with Natasha the day before the fight, and asked what they had talked about, and if he could please share his notes on the meeting, which he declined to do for reasons of professional confidentiality.