Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  K = I - e/E

  where E was the rate of consumption in the system, e the rate of (incomplete) closure, and I a constant for which Hiroko, earlier in her career, had established a corrected value. The goal, K = I - 1, was unreachable, but asymptotically approaching it was the farm biologists’ favorite game, and more than that, critical to their eventual existence on Mars. So conversations about it could extend over days, spiraling off into complexities that no one really understood. In essence the farm team was already at their real work, which Maya envied. She was so sick of simulations!

  Hiroko was an enigma to Maya. Aloof and serious, she always seemed absorbed in her work, and her team tended always to be around her, as if she was the queen of a realm that had nothing to do with the rest of the ship. Maya didn’t like that, but there was nothing she could do about it. And something in Hiroko’s attitude made it not so threatening; it was just a fact, the farm was a separate place, its crew a separate society. And it was possible that Maya could use them to counterbalance the influence of Arkady and John, somehow; so she did not worry about their separate realm. In fact she joined them more than ever before. Sometimes she went with them up to the hub at the end of a work session, to play a game they had invented called tunneljump. There was a jump tube down the central shaft, where all the joints between cylinders had been expanded to the same width as the cylinders themselves, making a single smooth tube. There were rails to facilitate quick movement back and forth along this tube, but in their game, jumpers stood on the storm-shelter hatch, and tried to leap up the tube to the bubble-dome hatch, a full 500 meters away, without bumping into the walls or railings. Coriolis forces made this effectively impossible, and flying even halfway would usually win a game. But one day Hiroko came by on her way to check an experimental crop in the bubble dome, and after greeting them she crouched on the shelter hatch and jumped, and slowly floated the full length of the tunnel, rotating as she flew, and stopping herself at the bubble-dome hatch with a single outstretched hand.

  The players stared up the tunnel in stunned silence.

  “Hey!” Rya called to Hiroko. “How did you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  They explained the game to her. She smiled, and Maya was suddenly certain she had already known the rules. “So how did you do it?” Rya repeated.

  “You jump straight!” Hiroko explained, and disappeared into the bubble dome.

  That night at dinner the story got around. Frank said to Hiroko, “Maybe you just got lucky.”

  Hiroko smiled. “Maybe you and I should total twenty jumps and see who wins.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “What’ll we bet?”

  “Money, of course.”

  Hiroko shook her head. “Do you really think money matters anymore?”

  • • •

  A few days later Maya floated under the curve of the bubble dome with Frank and John, looking ahead at Mars, which was now a gibbous orb the size of a dime.

  “A lot of arguments these days,” John remarked casually. “I hear Alex and Mary got into an actual fight. Michel says it’s to be expected, but still . . .”

  “Maybe we brought too many leaders,” Maya said.

  “Maybe you should have been the only one,” Frank jibed.

  “Too many chiefs?” said John.

  Frank shook his head. “That’s not it.”

  “No? There are a lot of stars on board.”

  “The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.”

  “I leave the judgment to you, Captain.” John grinned at Frank’s scowl. He was, Maya thought, the only relaxed person left among them.

  “The shrinks saw the problem,” Frank went on, “it was obvious enough even for them. They used the Harvard solution.”

  “The Harvard solution,” John repeated, savoring the phrase.

  “Long ago Harvard’s administrators noticed that if they accepted only straight-A high school students, and then gave out the whole range of grades to freshmen, a distressing number of them were getting unhappy at their Ds and Fs and messing up the Yard by blowing their brains out on it.”

  “Couldn’t have that,” John said.

  Maya rolled her eyes. “You two must have gone to trade schools, eh?”

  “The trick to avoiding this unpleasantness, they found, was to accept a certain percentage of students who were used to getting mediocre grades, but had distinguished themselves in some other way—”

  “Like having the nerve to apply to Harvard with mediocre grades—”

  “— used to the bottom of the grade curve, and happy just to be at Harvard at all.”

  “How did you hear of this?” Maya asked.

  Frank smiled. “I was one of them.”

  “We don’t have any mediocrities on this ship,” John said.

  Frank looked dubious. “We do have a lot of smart scientists with no interest in running things. Many of them consider it boring. Administration, you know. They’re glad to hand it over to people like us.”

  “Beta males,” John said, mocking Frank and his interest in sociobiology. “Brilliant sheep.” The way they mocked each other . . .

  “You’re wrong,” Maya said to Frank.

  “Maybe so. Anyway, they’re the body politic. They have at least the power to follow.” He said this as if the idea depressed him.

  John, due for a shift on the bridge, said good-bye and left.

  Frank floated over to Maya’s side, and she shifted nervously. They had never discussed their brief affair, and it hadn’t come up, even indirectly, in quite a while. She had thought about what to say, if it ever did: she would say that she occasionally indulged herself with men she liked. That it had been something done on the spur of the moment.

  But he only pointed to the red dot in the sky. “I wonder why we’re going.”

  Maya shrugged. Probably he meant not we, but I. “Everyone has their reasons,” she said.

  He glanced at her. “That’s so true.”

  She ignored his tone of voice. “Maybe it’s our genes,” she said. “Maybe they felt things going wrong on Earth. Felt an increased speed of mutation, or something like that.”

  “So they struck out for a clean start.”

  “Yes.”

  “The selfish gene theory. Intelligence only a tool to aid successful reproduction.”

  “I suppose.”

  “But this trip endangers successful reproduction,” Frank said. “It isn’t safe out here.”

  “But it isn’t safe on Earth either. Waste, radiation, other people. . . .”

  Frank shook his head. “No. I don’t think the selfishness is in the genes. I think it’s somewhere else.” He reached out with a forefinger and tapped her between the breasts— a solid tap on the sternum, causing him to drift back to the floor. Staring at her the whole while, he touched himself in the same place. “Good night, Maya.”

  • • •

  A week or two later Maya was in the farm harvesting cabbages, walking down an aisle between long stacked trays of them. She had the room to herself. The cabbages looked like rows of brains, pulsing with thought in the bright afternoon light.

  Then she saw a movement and looked to the side. Across the room, through an algae bottle, she saw a face. The glass of the bottle warped it: a man’s face, brown-skinned. The man was looking to the side and didn’t see her. It appeared he was talking to someone she couldn’t see. He shifted, and the image of his face came clear, magnified in the middle of the bottle. She understood why she was watching so closely, why her stomach was clenched: she had never seen him before.

  He turned and looked her way. Through two curves of glass their eyes met. He was a stranger, thin-faced and big-eyed.

  He disappeared in a brown blur. For a second Maya hesitated, scared to pursue him; then she forced herself to run the length of the room and up the two bends of the joint, into the next cylinder. It was empty. She ran through three
more cylinders before stopping. Then she stood there looking at tomato vines, her breath rasping hard in her throat. She was sweating yet felt chilled. A stranger. It was impossible. But she had seen him! She concentrated on the memory, tried to see the face again. Perhaps it had been . . . but no. It had been none of the hundred, she knew that. Facial recognition was one of the mind’s strongest abilities, it was amazingly accurate. And he had run away at the sight of her.

  A stowaway. But that too was impossible! Where would he hide, how would he live? What would he have done in the radiation storm?

  Had she begun to hallucinate, then? Had it come to that?

  She walked back to her room, sick to her stomach. The hallways of Torus D were somehow dark despite their bright illumination, and the back of her neck crawled. When the door appeared she dove into the refuge of her room. But her room was just a bed and a side table, a chair and a closet, some shelves of stuff. She sat there for an hour, then two. But there was nothing there for her to do, no answers, no distractions. No escape.

  Maya found herself unable to mention her sighting to anyone, and in a way this was more frightening than the incident itself, as it emphasized to her its impossibility. People would think she had gone mad. What other conclusion was there? How would he eat, where would he hide? No. Too many people would have to know, it really wasn’t possible. But that face!

  One night she saw it again in a dream, and woke up in a sweat. Hallucination was one of the symptoms of space breakdown, as she well knew. It happened fairly frequently during long stays in Earth orbit, a couple dozen incidences had been recorded. Usually people started by hearing voices in the ever-present background noise of ventilation and machinery, but a fairly common alternative was the sighting of a workmate who wasn’t there, or worse yet of a doppelgänger, as if empty space had begun to fill with mirrors. Shortage of sensory stimuli was believed to cause the phenomena, and the situation on the Ares, with its long voyage, and no Earth to look at, and a brilliant (and some might say driven) crew, had been judged a potential hazard. This was one of the main reasons the ship’s rooms had been given so much variety of color and texture, along with changing daily and seasonal weather. And still she had seen something that couldn’t be there.

  And now when she walked through the ship, it seemed to her that the crew was breaking up into small and private groups, groups that rarely interacted. The farm team spent almost all its time in the farms, even eating meals there on the floors, and sleeping (together, rumor had it) among the rows of plants. The medical team had its own suite of rooms and offices and labs in Torus B, and they spent their time in there, absorbed with experiments and observations and consultations with Earth. The flight team was preparing for MOI, running several simulations a day. And the rest were . . . scattered. Hard to find. As she walked around the toruses the rooms seemed emptier than ever before. The D dining hall was never full anymore. And then again in the separated clumps of diners that were there, she noticed arguments broke out fairly frequently, and were hushed with peculiar speed. Private spats, but about what?

  Maya herself said less at table, and listened more. You could tell a lot about a society by what topics of conversation came up. In this crowd, the talk was almost always science. Shop talk: biology, engineering, geology, medicine, whatever. You could chat forever about that stuff.

  But when the number of people in a conversation fell below four, she noticed, the topics of conversation tended to change. Shop talk was augmented (or replaced entirely) by gossip; and the gossip was always about those two great forms of the social dynamic, sex and politics. Voices lowered, heads leaned in, and word got around. Rumors about sexual relations were becoming more common and more quiet, more caustic and more complex. In a few cases, as in the unfortunate triangle of Janet Blyleven, Mary Dunkel and Alex Zhalin, it went very public and became the talk of the ship; in others it stayed so hidden that the talk was in whispers, accompanied by pointed, inquisitive glances. Janet Blyleven would walk into the dining hall with Roger Calkins, and Frank would remark to John, in an undertone meant to reach Maya’s ears, “Janet thinks we’re a panmixia.” Maya would ignore him, as she always did when he spoke in that sneery tone of voice, but later she looked up the word in a sociobiology lexicon, and found that a panmixia was a group where every male mated with every female.

  The next day she looked at Janet curiously; she had had no idea. Janet was friendly, she leaned in at you as you talked, and really paid attention. And she had a quick smile. But . . . well, the ship had been built to insure a lot of privacy. No doubt there was more happening than anyone could know.

  And among these secret lives, might there not be another secret life, led in solitude, or in teamwork with some few among them, some small clique or cabal?

  “Have you noticed anything funny lately?” she asked Nadia one day at the end of their regular breakfast chat.

  Nadia shrugged. “People are bored. It’s about time to get there, I think.”

  Maybe that was all it was.

  Nadia said, “Did you hear about Hiroko and Arkady?”

  Rumors were constantly swirling about Hiroko. Maya found it distasteful, disturbing. That the lone Asian woman among them should be the focus of that kind of thing— dragon lady, mysterious Orient . . . Underneath the scientific rational surfaces of their minds, there were so many deep and powerful superstitions. Anything might happen, anything was possible.

  Like a face seen through a glass.

  And so she listened with a tight feeling in her stomach, as Sasha Yefremov leaned over from the next table and responded to Nadia’s question by wondering if Hiroko were developing a male harem. That was nonsense; although an alliance of some sort between Hiroko and Arkady had an unsettling sort of logic to Maya, she was not sure why. Arkady was very open in advocating independence from Mission Control, Hiroko never talked about it at all, but in her actions hadn’t she already led the whole farm team away, into a mental torus the others could never enter?

  But then when Sasha claimed in a low voice that Hiroko had plans to fertilize several of her own ova with sperm from all the men on the Ares, and store them cryonically for later growth on Mars, Maya could only sweep up her tray and head for the dishwashers, feeling something like vertigo. They were becoming strange.

  • • •

  The red crescent grew to the size of a quarter, and the feeling of tension grew as well, as if it were the hour before a thunderstorm, and the air charged with dust and creosote and static electricity. As if the god of war were really up there on that blood dot, waiting for them. The green wall panels inside the Ares were now flecked with yellow and brown, and the afternoon light was thick with sodium vapor’s pale bronze.

  People spent hours in the bubble dome, watching what none among them but John had seen before. The exercise machines were in constant use, the simulations performed with renewed enthusiasm. Janet took a swing through the toruses, sending back video images of all the changes in their little world. Then she threw her glasses on a table and resigned her post as reporter. “Look, I’m tired of being an outsider,” she said. “Every time I walk into a room everyone shuts up, or starts preparing their official line. It’s like I was a spy for an enemy!”

  “You were,” Arkady said, and gave her a big hug.

  At first no one volunteered to take over her job. Houston sent messages of concern, then reprimands, then veiled threats. Now that they were about to reach Mars, the expedition was getting a lot more TV time, and the situation was about to “go nova,” as Mission Control put it. They reminded the colonists that this burst of publicity would eventually reap the space program all kinds of benefits; the colonists had to film and broadcast what they were doing, to stimulate public support for the later Mars missions on which they were going to depend. It was their duty to transmit their stories!

  Frank got on the screen and suggested that Mission Control could concoct their video reports out of footage from robot cameras. Hastings, head of Missi
on Control in Houston, was visibly infuriated by this response. But as Arkady said, with a grin that extended the realm of the question to everything: “What can they do?”

  Maya shook her head. They were sending a bad signal, and revealing what the video reports had so far hidden, that the group was splintering into rival cliques. Which indicated Maya’s own lack of control over the Russian half of the expedition. She was about to ask Nadia to take over the reporting job as a favor to her when Phyllis and some of her friends in Torus B volunteered for the job. Maya, laughing at the expression on Arkady’s face, gave it to them. Arkady pretended not to care. Irritated, Maya said in Russian, “You know you’ve missed a chance! A chance to shape our reality, in effect!”

  “Not our reality, Maya. Their reality. And I don’t care what they think.”

  • • •

  Maya and Frank began conferring about landfall assignments. To a certain extent these were predetermined by the crew members’ areas of expertise, but because of all the skill redundancies, there were still some choices to be made. And Arkady’s provocations had had this effect at least: Mission Control’s preflight plans were now generally regarded as provisional at best. In fact no one seemed all that inclined to acknowledge Maya or Frank’s authority either, which made things tense when it became known what they were working on.

  Mission Control’s preflight plan called for the establishment of a base colony on the plains north of Ophir Chasma, the enormous northern arm of Valles Marineris. All the farm team was assigned to the base, and a majority of the engineers and medical people— altogether, around sixty of the hundred. The rest would be scattered on subsidiary missions, returning to the base camp from time to time. The largest subsidiary mission was to dock a part of the disassembled Ares on Phobos, and begin transforming that moon into a space station. Another smaller mission would leave the base camp and travel north to the polar cap, to build a mining system which would transport blocks of ice back to the base. A third mission was to make a series of geological surveys, traveling all over the planet— a glamour assignment for sure. All the smaller groups would become semi-autonomous for periods of up to a year, so selecting them was no trivial matter; they knew well, now, how long a year could be.