by Lewis Shiner
Reese said, “Go on.”
“Pulsystems is going to sponsor a Mars expedition. Chairman Morgan wants you to train the crew and direct the mission from Houston.”
Reese set the beer bottle on the table, pushed it away. “They’re all dead, you know.”
“Sorry?”
“The colonists. Nobody’s heard anything from them in over seven years.”
“He’s not expecting to find them alive. This is just the beginning. If this works out, there’ll be a space program again, with the companies sharing the expense and pooling the results. It could be a new age.”
“Who’s the crew supposed to be?”
“Me, for one. There’s a doctor, and three pilots.”
“So,” Reese said. “After all these years. You finally get your shot. How did you talk Morgan into it?”
“I work for him now. Foreign security.”
In other words, Reese thought, Morgan’s corporate mercenaries. In the last days of the government, the US Army had become a parody, two officers for every enlisted man, obsolete weapons, no morale or fighting experience. The corporations had hired the best strategists and munitions people for their own use, protecting overseas investments from terrorists and rebel governments.
“You were in North Africa, then,” Reese said.
Kane nodded.
Nobody in the States really understood what had happened there—at least no one outside the boards of directors of the companies involved. All anyone knew was that the Red Chinese had moved on the UN biotechnology lab in Luxor—Biotek Afrika—and the US government hadn’t been in any shape to stop them. Instead the multinational corporations and zaibatsus had sent their own troops, and when the shooting was over, the corporations were in control, all over the world.
“Tell him it’s no,” Reese said. His stomach was jumping, and his blood ran icy and thin. He forced himself to stand up, draining the rest of his beer for moral support. “I have to go along, or it’s no. Tell him that.”
“Reese.”
He turned back.
“I’ve seen the mission profile. This isn’t NASA. This is a stripped-down, high-risk, low-redundancy mission. Antique hardware, not even our own excursion module. Aerocapture. Do you think you could handle that?”
“Tell him,” Reese said, and walked out.
Outside the sun smoldered and flowers ran riot over the guest cabins. Reese had never seen so many flowers in his life; Mexico seemed a nation of flowers, obsessed with them, drunk on their color and perfume.
Not like Mars, he thought. On Mars, there were only edible flowers; no trees, no wood, no yards, no swimming pools.
He climbed two steps into his cabin, kicked off his damp bathing suit, and stood under the shower. When he finished, he put on real clothes for the first time in days, black cotton pants and a black pullover shirt. In the mirror he saw jowls and puffy, sunken eyes.
The kid is right, he told himself. You’d never make it.
He took out his I Ching and the envelope with his three coins. They were copper pennies from the year he graduated high school, dark brown and corroded now from the acids in his fingers. He tried to focus his thoughts, failed, threw the coins anyway.
He built hexagram 34, the Power of the Great. Not, as he’d hoped, something obvious and straightfoward, like Sheng, Pushing Upward. The oracle was enigmatic, as always. The judgment, minimal, was merely “Perseverance furthers.” The interpretation tantalized him with bits of relevance: “inner worth mounts with great force and comes to power…one may rely entirely on one’s own power and forget to ask what is right…greatness and justice must be indissolubly united.”
His change line in the third position gave him: “The inferior man works through power. The superior man does not act thus.”
Morgan, Reese thought. It’s trying to warn me about Morgan. And sure as hell, if he’s involved with this, he’s up to something. He put the book away, restless and uncomfortable, and stepped out into the blazing sunlight.
Without conscious thought, his feet took him down the Calle Cuaglia to Carlos Fuera and across the baranca. His diaphragm hurt and his eyes burned, the first physical pain he could remember in weeks. Like the pain, he thought, when the blood starts moving again in a leg that’s gone to sleep.
He crossed over to Avenida Morelos with its long, whitewashed, windowless walls and downhill to the Borda Gardens. Maximillian and Carlotta had used it for a summer retreat in the 1860s, but now it was just another elaborate ruin, a walled maze of garden paths, stagnant ponds, and crumbling outbuildings. For a while the government had charged admission, with a pretense of repairing it, but the charade was dropped when the socialistas took over. Now that PEMEX was the de facto ruler of the country, there was little interest in the past.
The gardens covered five or six city blocks, but only the immediate area near the entrance had been kept up. Towards the northwest the park disintegrated into dying trees and ruined fountains.
Another message, he thought, this one from my subconscious. A metaphor for Frontera, its gardens and fields and buildings all walled in by the dome. Like this now, gone, crumbling, ruined.
And yet, he thought. Perseverance furthers. “A movement in accord with heaven, producing great power.” He bent his legs into a lotus, straining the shortened muscles. In front of him was a crumbling adobe wall, beyond that the hills of the city, and beyond that the pine-covered mountains. In time his mind began to clear, and he sat for over an hour, feeling the sun move in the sky overhead.
From the gardens he took Lopez Rayon toward the zocalo, his sense of calm evaporating. He wanted to go back to the hotel and see if Kane had talked to Morgan. Instead he forced himself to keep walking, past the dilapidated theater and its endlessly recycled kung fu movies, past the steeply climbing streets and the tiled hotels.
Mirrored glasses winked at him from the shadows of El Portal, an open-fronted restaurant across from the Hotel del Parque. Kane sat calmly at a side table, watching, making no effort to attract Reese’s attention. A clever piece of tradecraft, Reese knew, designed to work on his nerves, impress him with Kane’s omniscience.
He sat down at Kane’s table without speaking. Together they watched a party of Japanese tourists posing for pictures on the steps of the hotel across the street. Without looking at him, Kane said, “I talked to my uncle. He says it’s your ass. You can kill yourself if you want to. Those were his words.”
Reese stood up.
“Reese.”
“Yeah?”
Kane took off his glasses, folded them carefully, and put them in his shirt pocket. His eyes were dark, emotionless. Reese wondered if he could trust someone with eyes as dark as that.
“When I was a kid,” Kane said, and then looked down at the street. “When I was a kid, it meant a lot to me that you did what you did. Showed me around. Talked to me. I used to think what it would have been like if you were my father.”
“I hardly remember any of that.”
“I suppose. But it doesn’t matter. The thing is, if you insist on this, it’s going to kill you. I don’t want to be responsible for that.”
Reese shook his head. “It’s not your responsibility. Okay? It’s something I want more than anything. More than anything. That means I take the risks I have to in order to get it.”
Kane put his glasses back on. “Okay,” he said.
Reese left him there. He was suddenly tired and took a taxi back to the hotel to pack. In the nearly empty room he found the scrap of paper with his hexagram and followed the change line: the old yang would move to a yin, becoming Kuei Mei, the Marrying Maiden. It was, in a vague sort of way, supposed to be his future. “Undertakings bring misfortune. Nothing that would further.” Too late now, he thought, dropping the book into his bag.
They caught an Estrella de Oro bus for the short ride to Mexico City; from there Kane had them booked on an evening flight to Houston.
Reese sat back in the plush red seat of the airliner
, relaxed, watching the lights moving below him. It was almost, he thought, like checking into a hospital. He was no longer making decisions, had been relieved of responsibility for his own existence for the first time in eight years. He’d heard of ex-convicts who’d deliberately put themselves back in jail, and for a second he understood the logic.
The flight came in to Houston Intercontinental a little after ten p.m. Kane had left his car in the parking lot, a large V-8 gasoline-powered sedan. To Reese it seemed almost as cumbersome as the aircraft they’d just left. He sank helplessly into the heavily cushioned seats and flinched as Kane power-locked the doors.
He hadn’t seen much of the city during his brief stint at Pulsystems, had not, in fact, spent any time there since his NASA days before his first Mars flight. The changes were sweeping and dramatic.
Kane drove them over a nearly deserted Gulf Freeway, avoiding gaping holes in the overpass and the worst of the broken chunks of pavement. Twice he swung off the freeway altogether and sped past collapsed interchanges. The barricades blocking the mounds of shattered concrete and twisted rebar were themselves falling apart, obviously temporary precautions that had become permanent.
“From the riots,” Kane said as Reese turned to stare out the rear window. “There’s probably a hundred people in each of those piles. Kids set off some bombs at rush hour. That was about the last rush hour Houston ever had.”
“You were here then?”
“Hospital,” Kane said. Reese raised an eyebrow but didn’t want to press him. “It was right after North Africa. I was laid up for a while.”
Reese’s memories superimposed themselves on the dark screen of the city: streetlights that burned all night long, the brilliant, tangled geometries of the Houston skyline at night, the hundreds of thousands of cars—now rusting and abandoned at the edges of the expressway.
Reese could see no details once they passed through the deserted downtown, only a few ragged pines and collapsing tilt-wall warehouses blurred by the speed of their relative motion. They passed South Houston and the old white-on-green signs for NASA shot by with increasing frequency. Finally, after nearly an hour in the car, they roared off at the NASA/Alvin exit and screamed left onto NASA Road 1. Kane’s driving had the intensity of a compulsion, but with the scarcity of cars on the road it seemed harmless, almost childish.
Clear Lake City had virtually dried up and blown away. Reese remembered the long lines of convenience stores and gas stations, burger joints and boutiques that had lined the highway. Hardly a pane of glass had survived.
Finally they swung left into the Johnson Space Center, past the paint-flecked Saturn V shell, then right past Visitor’s Parking and into the restricted lot behind Building 1, the Project Management Building. At nine stories it was the tallest in a matched set of concrete-and-smoked-glass boxes scattered over the 1600 acres of the complex.
“No security?” Reese asked.
“Surveillance,” Kane said. “They know we’re here.”
Kane released the locking mechanism and Reese got out of the car. A breeze from the lake, a few hundred yards to his right, touched his face and rustled the high grass all around them.
“The place has gone to hell,” Kane said. “But cut grass doesn’t launch a shuttle.” He brought Reese’s bag around from the trunk, and Reese took it absently. How long had it been? Nine years since he left Mars, and they didn’t even debrief him when he got back from that one. A year on Mars and almost another year getting there, so that made it eleven…
It had all happened so suddenly. He hadn’t had time to prepare himself, to anticipate these sudden attacks of memory. He wanted a bath and a drink and a chance to meditate.
Kane unlocked the door of the building and led the way to the elevators. At the top floor they got off, and Kane pointed to the end of the hall, “The last office on the left has been fixed up for you. There’s a shower in the bathroom next door, refrigerator and hot plate in the room.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. Somebody will call us in the morning for a briefing.”
Reese tried the door of the room, found it unlocked. The air inside was stifling. He flicked on a light and went straight to the window, letting in more thick, humid air. It wasn’t until he threw his suitcase on the bed that he noticed the man in the far corner of the room.
“Hello, Reese,” Morgan said. He slouched in an armchair, legs stretched out in front of him, and Reese saw with some relief that he wasn’t going to offer to shake hands. He looked just as Reese had remembered him, over six feet tall with the physique of a drugstore cowboy: broad shoulders, no hips, and a convex stomach with a belt cinched underneath. His dyed hair shone like black patent leather.
“So,” Reese said, “you’re the welcoming committee?”
“We need to talk.”
The furniture, Reese noted, was plain but comfortable. A double bed, chest of drawers, and a portable closet. He took a stack of shirts out of his suitcase. “Then let’s talk.”
“I want you to know I’m serious about this. We have all the hardware we need, and I’ve got a lot of the old Mission Control people back on board. We can pull this off.”
“Maybe you can. The question is why you want to bother. You don’t think they’re still alive up there, do you?”
Morgan stood up and walked over to the window, hands at his waist, theatrically straightening his back. After a long moment he said, “No. It wouldn’t be realistic to expect to find any survivors. But there are reasons enough to put a mission together without any of that. Hell, man, the climatology alone paid for that first Mars mission, paid for it when they broke that drought in the Midwest. Look at history, look what happened to the Chinese when they shut themselves off back in the fifteenth century. If a company the size of Pulsystems stops growing and stops taking chances, it dies in its tracks. Christ, Reese, I don’t have to tell you how important it is to have a space program.”
Reese finished unpacking and closed up the suitcase. “Only if you intend to keep it going,” he said. “And that’s a hell of an investment for one company to take on.”
“What if I told you,” Morgan said, “that I’m prepared to take that risk? Things have been stable for almost five years now. The corporations have divided up the world, and it’s back to business as usual. Somebody needs to make a gesture, to take the lead, to try something new. What if I told you that once things got rolling, other corporations will want in, that the momentum will take us…well, as far as we want to go.”
I’d say, Reese thought, that you were lying.
“There’s another reason,” Morgan said, sitting down in the armchair again, twisting sideways and throwing both legs over the arm. “The Russians seem to be over their hard times as well. It looks as though Aeroflot is going to be trying for Mars too.”
“Another space race? Come on, Morgan. Nationalism is finished. Aeroflot is just another zaibatsu; they’ve got branches all over the world, just like you do.”
“But they’re Russians, Reese. The people running that company all grew up under the Soviet, they all played war games in grade school where Americans were the bad guys. The first generation to grow up without nationalism is barely out of its diapers. Don’t forget that. Don’t underestimate the old factionalism. They beat us to Mars before, and I don’t plan to let it happen again.”
Reese stretched out on the bed. “Whatever you say.”
“You sound awfully skeptical, Reese. Especially for a man who insisted he get to go along. The same man who was so desperate for information that he went to work for me under a false name five years ago.”
Shit, Reese thought.
“I didn’t find out till you’d already disappeared again,” Morgan said. “But I must say, it hurt my feelings. I wish you’d just talked to me.”
“Look, Morgan. I don’t trust you. We’ve got what they call an adversary relationship. I’m going to be trying to get your people to Mars, and you’re going to be trying to
make money. Anything else you say is just a smokescreen, just so much bullshit. I don’t see any point in our trying to be friends, or your trying to sway me with a lot of outmoded politics and noble-sounding rationalizations.”
“If that’s the way you want it, Reese, that’s okay with me. I’ve always admired you, and I would like to have your respect. But I can’t force you to be my friend, and I’m not going to try.”
The hell of it is, Reese thought, he’s probably sincere. Whatever view he has of himself, whatever he sees when he looks in the mirror, is probably a lot like the way he sees me. As if we were brother pioneers.
“I’m a little tired,” Reese said, the closest he could come to an apology. “Let’s just put the personalities aside for now. What can you tell me about the crew? How long have I got?”
Morgan cleared his throat. “Kane didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“Um. There’s a bit of pressure, because of the Russians, you see. I’m afraid you’ve only got six weeks.”
“Six weeks?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“No way,” Reese said. “It’s impossible.”
Morgan leaned forward, his eyes glittering. “I don’t like that word, Reese. If we’re going to be working together, you’ll find it’s to your advantage not to tell me something’s impossible. Ever. Do you understand?”
Reese nodded, almost involuntarily. The force of the man’s will was frightening, almost psychotic. He thought of Kane’s driving, wondering if the entire family was unstable.
“Fine,” Morgan said, relaxing again. “NASA used to train mission specialists for the shuttle in five weeks. And my people are in top condition, all of them with pilot experience. Most of the lander training can be done with the on-board computers in simulator mode anyway, give them something to do on the trip out. Now if you’re worried about not getting yourself in shape in that amount of time, that’s no problem. You can pull out any time you want.”
