The Martians

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Sure they will,” Mike said. “People will go there. Eventually. They'll settle, they'll terraform—just like you've been dreaming. It might take longer than you were thinking, but you were never going to be one of the ones going anyway, so what's the rush? It'll happen.”

  “I don't think so,” Bill said darkly.

  “Sure it will. Whichever way it happens it'll happen.”

  “Oh thank you! Thank you very much! Whichever way it happens it'll happen? That's so very helpful!”

  “Not your most testable hypothesis,” Nassim noted.

  Mike grinned. “You don't have to test it, it's that good.”

  Bill laughed harshly. “Too bad you didn't tell the reporter that! Whatever happens will happen! This discovery means whatever it means!” and then they were all cackling, “This discovery means that there's life on Mars!” “This discovery means whatever you want it to mean!” “That's how meaning always means!”

  Their mirth subsided. They were still stuck in stop-and-go traffic, in the rows of red blinks on the vast viaduct slashing through the city, under a sour-milk sky.

  “Well, shit,” Mike said, waving at the view. “We'll just have to terraform Earth instead.”

  Coyote Makes Trouble

  The city was beautiful at night. Tent invisible—it seemed they lived under the stars. And stars seemed to have fallen into the city as well, lining the sides of the nine mesas, so that walking the streets it appeared one sailed in a fleet of immense luxury liners, as during one well-remembered evening in his childhood, when suddenly four great white ships had appeared in Port of Spain's outer harbor, each an entire sparkling world. Like galaxies come down to anchor in their harbor.

  Down by the canal the sidewalk cafés were open late; and rare was the night when the stars in the canal were not set awash by the plunge of some drunken reveler, or victimized passerby. Coyote spent many of his evenings on the grass fronting the Greek restaurant, at the end of the double row of Bareiss columns. When people were not splashing in the canal Coyote flicked pebbles into it, to make the stars dance under his boots. People came down and sat on the grass near him; made their reports; discussed plans; went on their way. Things were getting tighter these days. It was no longer such a simple thing to run a spy ring in the capital of the United Nations Transitional Authority. But there were still thousands of construction workers, rudimentarily documented, who were excavating the nine mesas and turning them into gargantuan buildings. As long as you had a work identity for the checkpoints, no one was bothering you yet. So Coyote worked by day (some days; he was not reliable) and caroused by night, like thousands of others; and gathered information for the underground, from a loose group of old friends and a few new ones. The ring included Maya and Michel, who were holed up in an apartment above a dance studio, sharing information with Coyote and putting it to use, but staying out of sight and away from checkpoints, as they were on UNTA's growing wanted list. And after what had happened to Sax, and to Sabishii, it was clear that you didn't want to be found by them.

  The current situation both frightened Coyote and made him very angry. Hiroko and her crowd, disappeared—killed, in other words (though he was not sure yet); Sax brain-damaged; Maya and Michel gone to ground; UNTA security police everywhere you looked. And checkpoints. And even his ring of spies; it was hard to be sure none of them had turned. One young woman, for instance—a clerk in the UNTA Burroughs headquarters, a very attractive Dravidian. She sat down on the grass beside him, telling him that Hastings was going to arrive by train from Sheffield the day after tomorrow. Hastings, Coyote's nemesis. But was it true? He thought that the good-looking young woman was brittle in a way she hadn't been before, friendly but glittery-eyed. His electronics said she was not wired. But turned and telling tales, or setting him up; who knew?

  She was supposed to have been working on finding out what UNTA security had on the radical reds. Irritated, he asked her about it, but she nodded, and had a report there too. Apparently they knew quite a bit. He asked her question after question, getting more and more interested; she was telling him things about the reds he didn't know himself.

  Finally he sent her on her way with a cheerful smile. He was always the same with everybody, all the time, and very much doubted that she would have seen any of his suspicions. He knocked back his glass of metaxa, left it on the grass, wandered down the Street of the Cypresses to the little dance studio. People behind plate glass were pirouetting. He slipped upstairs and scratched-tapped his knock. Maya let him in.

  They discussed the latest news, went through their lists for each other. One of Maya's biggest current worries was that the radical reds would strike before the rest of the resistance was ready, and Coyote agreed it was a bad possibility, even though he liked the reds' attitude. But now he had news for her.

  “Apparently they think they can bring the terraforming down,” he told her. “Crash the system. UNTA has gotten a mole in somewhere, and this is what they're finding. There's a wing of the reds think they can do it biologically. Another faction wants to make something go wrong with the deep thermal bombs. Sabotage one of those nukes in such a way that the radiation reaches the surface, get the whole operation shut down.”

  Maya shook her head, disgusted. “Radiation on the surface. It's insane.”

  Coyote had to agree, though he liked their attitude anyhow. “I suppose we should hope that UNTA knocks out those groups before they act.”

  Maya grimaced. Misguided or not, the reds were their allies, UNTA their shared enemy. “No. We should warn them they are penetrated. Then get them to stop their crazies. Follow the general strategy.”

  “We might have to stop the crazies ourselves.”

  “No. I'll talk to Ann.”

  “Right.” This in Coyote's opinion was a waste of time for anyone. But Maya looked determined.

  Michel came in and they took a break for tea. Coyote sipped, shook his head. “Things are getting tight. We may be forced to make our move before we're ready.”

  “I want to wait for Sax,” Maya said, as always.

  When he was done with his tea Coyote got up to leave. “I want to do something in case Hastings comes here,” he said.

  Maya shook her head. It was no time to show their hand.

  But Maya's whole project these days was to keep them all out of sight until the right moment came. Since she was in hiding she wanted the whole movement hidden. She was vehement on this point, and usually got her way with most of the movement. There'll be a trigger event, she would insist. I'll know it when I see it.

  But Coyote, seeing her and Michel there in their little warren, was irritated. “Just a little sign,” he said. “Nothing serious.”

  “No,” she said.

  “We'll see,” he said.

  He left their hideout and went back to the canal side. He had a couple more drinks, mulling things over. Irritated at the sight of Maya in such confinement. Well, she was a dangerous revolutionary. Precautions were necessary. Still, the whole situation was getting dangerous, and worse than that, tiresome. Something needed to be done.

  Also he needed to know if that young woman had turned or not.

  The next night, after the restaurant row had almost emptied out, and the waiters were turning chairs onto tabletops and cursing each other in dull tired voices, Coyote wandered in by way of the Niederdorf, checking to make sure he was not followed. His contacts were waiting at the last Bareiss column. Separately they walked up to the shops at the intersection of Great Escarpment Boulevard and the Street of the Cypresses. There between two cypresses they met: Coyote and two young women in black, including the one from headquarters.

  “Such dryads in the night,” he said.

  The two women laughed nervously. “You have the banner?”

  They nodded nervously, and one showed him a package that just filled her hand.

  He led them through the night, uphill, until they looked down on the tips of the cypresses, swaying so slightly in the nig
ht air circulation. It was pleasantly cool at first, but began to seem warmer as they climbed.

  Ellis Butte was steep, but he had long ago memorized the footpath beaten up a ravine cleaving the northern wall of the mesa. Burroughs's nine mesas had become stupendous buildings and in people's minds they were nothing more than that, like a convocation of massive cathedrals, so that climbing them now was like climbing the side of a building, and seldom done anymore. But every one of the mesas still had old footpaths draping its sides, if you knew where to find them. And Coyote had his routes, on every side of all nine of them."Everyone freeze," said an amplified voice, and figures appeared behind them on the ledge. Coyote leaped up and grabbed the railing of the private terrace and did a John Carter up over the side. A mellow party barely registered his presence before he was through them and off into the picturesque Aegean alleys of the mesa top, very convenient for a man fleeing the cops. On the other side of the mesa there was a trail down that few knew about, and in the dark Coyote was able to get down it a good distance before the security people reached the railings overhead and shined lights down that side. He ducked and became a rock for the period of their search. When they moved on he continued his descent.

  The top of Ellis Butte was very expensive real estate, completely built over. But there was a ledge under the mesa proper, too narrow for anything but a trail, and he led the two young women along it, holding their hot hands in his. It seemed he could feel their heartbeats pulsing in their sweaty palms. Finally they came to an outcropping of the ancient basalt, ending the ledge and blocking their way. Leaning out they seemed to look directly down onto Great Escarpment Boulevard. The train station bulking against the tent wall was still lit, of course, but no night trains had arrived in the past hour, and all was quiet—so quiet they could hear voices above them, on some private terrace. Coyote gestured to his companions, and one of them got the package out of a pocket. The other touched a button on her wristpad.

  But at the bottom of the trail there were more security police. They were trying to cordon off the whole damned mesa. Coyote climbed back up to a bolt-hole that led him onto one of the mid-mesa internal floors. From there he took an elevator down to the subway system, and got on a subway and sat back unobtrusively catching his breath until they reached Hunt Mesa Station, where he got off.

  Up and back onto Great Escarpment Boulevard, across from the commotion surrounding Ellis. Free to go his way in the dark night city. But he was mad. He had made a couple extra packages when they manufactured the first one, so he went back to his coffin room in the workers' section of Black Syrtis Mesa, and got one of them. He walked back down Thoth Boulevard, thinking things over. He had planned to hang the first banner between Ellis and Hunt, so that when people left the train station they would see it overhanging Great Escarpment Boulevard, greeting them. That no longer seemed a practical place to do it. But as they came down Great Escarpment they would reach Canal Park and be facing the great concourse where Thoth Boulevard intersected the park. So he could try hanging it between Table Mountain and Branch Mesa, and delay releasing the banner until they were down where they would see it.

  Time to work fast, as the night was getting on, and this would have to be done very surreptitiously. In short, just the kind of job the Coyote liked. So, as sneaky as his namesake, he climbed Table Mountain and reached a boulder high on the east face of the mesa. He had to drill a ringbolt in place (he had prepared Ellis and Hunt ahead of time) but that was only a matter of laser work, all the while trying to muffle the noise. But a big city provides a high level of background noise at all hours, and it went well. He attached one end of the replacement banner to the ring and started back down the trail, trailing the banner's Ariadne thread, gossamer on the gentle night air circulation. Down to Thoth Boulevard, across it like any night-shift worker (a big city provided plenty of other night wanderers, as well), hurrying discreetly so that the exposure of the thread to passersby would be minimal. Then up another steep forgotten trail on the prow of Branch Mesa, until he was at an altitude level with the ringbolt on Table Mountain, some 250 meters above street level.

  He drilled in another bolt. The commotion on Ellis was dying down. When the bolt was in far enough he pulled the Ariadne thread across the gulf of air, through the bolt over a kilometer away. Despite its gossamer fineness he had to pull the last part through hard, hand over hand, until the thicker line, like fishing line from his childhood but very much stronger, was all the way across. He tied a knot around the bolt, grinning as he pulled hard on the final loop. Later that morning, if Hastings did indeed emerge from the train station with his group of functionaries, Coyote would be able to activate the drop of the banner with a wave of a laser penlight, and it would drop and the visitors would be greeted by a banner hanging over Thoth Boulevard. The two young women had composed the message on the banner lost to their treachery on Ellis Butte, but Coyote had made a different banner for a backup. The young women's had read: “THE TRUE TRANSITION HAS NOT YET BEGUN,” a telling reference no doubt to the United Nations Transitional Authority, very clever; but Coyote had revised the message somewhat, and his banner would read: “UNTA WE ARE GOING TO KICK YOUR ASS OFF MARS.”

  He laughed at the thought. It would be in the air less than ten minutes, he figured, but photos would be taken. Some would laugh, others scowl. Maya would be irritated with him, he knew. But it was a war of nerves at this point, and UNTA needed to know that the majority of the population was against them; this in Coyote's opinion was extremely important. Also important to have the laughter on your side. He would argue strategy with her if he had to.

  We'll laugh them right off the planet, he said to her in his mind, angrily, and laughed at the thought. Dawn was lightening the sky to the east. Later that day he would have to get out of town. But first a good breakfast, maybe even a champagne breakfast, down by the canal before the train came in. It wasn't every day you got to announce a revolution.

  Michel in Provence

  Many years later Michel made it to Mars anyway.

  There was a European Union base on the Argyre Planitia, at the foot of the Charitum Montes, and Michel flew up in one of the fast Lorenz rockets, so it only took six weeks to get there. Once there he settled in for a year and a half residency, the time it took for the planets to realign properly for an inexpensive return. And though the Charitum Range was striking, like the baked ridges of the Atlas Mountains or the ranges in the Mojave, and the light very good (compared with night in Antarctica), he was never once outside, not really. Always indoors, even when out in a rover, or in the modified space suits, which were almost like divers' wetsuits, with helmets and backpacks, altogether very light in the magical gravity. Nevertheless, shut in. Contained; a sealed vessel. And Michel, like most of the others there, felt it more and more acutely as time passed. All the people at the eight scientific stations exhibited symptoms of claustrophobia, except a small minority who developed agoraphobia. Michel collected data on all of them, and recorded in particular some spectacular breakdowns and a few emergency medevacs. No—there was no doubt—he had been right. Mars was not habitable over the long haul. Terra-forming, while theoretically possible, was thousands of years off. In the meantime it was a rock in space, in effect a giant asteroid. Like all the rest of his team, Michel was overjoyed when it was time to return to the warm blue world and the open air.

  But had he really been right? Was Mars really any different than McMurdo, or even Las Vegas, a city located in an unlivable desert? Might not a permanent Mars colony have given humanity a kind of purpose, a symbolic existence to guide it through the splendors and miseries of this dark century, this dangerous millennium? Here back on Earth miracles were being performed, the sciences changing everything on a daily basis, and particularly the medical sciences, where the antivirals and the anticancer treatments and the cell-rejuvenation treatments were all together adding up to some larger balking of death, mind-boggling in its implications. Decades were being tacked on to people's li
ves, to Michel's own life, which went far past the normal span, which went on and on, like many others. If they were lucky enough to have access to the care—if they could afford it, in other words—they would live for many extra decades. Decades! And given the vertiginous logarithmic expansions of scientific knowledge, perhaps that meant they would have the time to make decades into centuries. No one could say.

  And yet at the same time no one knew what to do with the added years. An incomprehensible gift. It baffled one's sense of meaning, for the rest of the world's troubles did not go away. On the contrary, the immediate practical problems of the increased longevity were vicious—more people, more hunger, more jealousy, more war, more unnecessary premature death. The ingenuity of death seemed to be matching the life sciences stroke for stroke, as in some titanic hand-to-hand combat, so that it sometimes seemed to Michel, as he averted his eyes from the headlines, that they added years to their lives only to have more people to kill or render miserable. Famines were killing off millions in the “underdeveloped” world, while at the same time, on the same planet, near-immortals were sporting in their Xanadus.

  Perhaps an international village on Mars could have made it clearer to all that they were a single culture on a single world. The sufferings of any individual Martian settler would have been inconsequential in comparison to the benefits of this great lesson. The project would have justified it. They would have been like cathedral builders, doing hard, life-eating, useless work, in order to make something beautiful that said, We are all one. And some of them certainly would have loved that work, and the life it brought, because of that very statement. That goal—the sheer act of sacrifice for others, of work for the good of later generations. So that people on Earth could look up at night and say, That too is what we are—not just the horrific headlines, but a living world in the sky. A project in history.