MARS UNDERGROUND

by William K. Hartmann

  Everything was normal in his office. People expressed sympathy about Stafford, and then screamed about the budget report from the financial office. The screens lit up as usual.

  Why did he feel people were watching him? Jeez, he was getting paranoid. If there was a conspiracy, were there people in Mars City who were part of it? Or was it limited to Braddock and the polar cabal?

  He felt like a general in a bunker, awaiting some climactic, distant battle. He could not avoid the feeling that fate had arranged some dread event for him, and was maintaining a facade. Over a solitary lunch, he struggled to concentrate on his reports. It was a pain to work on them in this mood, but he forced himself to finish, reasoning that he had to free his mind to deal with whatever fate might be preparing for him.

  The unveiling of Philippe's tree proceeded according to plan. Carter watched from the sidelines. A suited crowd gathered in the little garden-like alcove outside the main airlock. Helmets gleamed in the sun. As Philippe had said, the alcove looked like a Zen garden. Oddly suggestive boulders, artlessly dotted at random, stood on manicured cinders and gravels of reds and grays. In the center rose the shining metal tree with its crystal leaves refracting the sunlight's blues and golds and reds. Annie had set up three holeo recorders on tripods. There were a few speeches, and Annie clambered from one recorder to another, spending most of her time shooting from a perch atop the airlock doors. The crowd bustled impatiently. To Carter, they seemed unaccountably anxious to be out of their suits.

  The turrets and antennae of Mars City formed the backdrop to the garden and its new tree, with its shining leaves. To a thousand travelers of this future, this would be an introduction to the new culture that was growing on Mars, the twig, the new offshoot from Earth's ancient ways, budding now on a new world. Long-term Martians would come to treasure it: Philippe had placed it so that the tops of its sparkling branches were visible from the observation lounge on the upper level of the Nix Olympica Bar, across arching roof lines bristling with antennae, duct access ports, and domed skylight windows. It was a symbol of wistful tenderness in what many first-time visitors perceived as a sterile alien-industrial setting. Philippe had planned it that way. It said: This is our new home.

  After the ceremony, the small crowd dwindled quickly. Carter and Philippe, bulky in their suits, said nothing to each other. They stood, staring at the leaves, which flashed occasionally in the listless air. Annie dismantled her camera setups. "Tomorrow's the big day," she whispered.

  They followed her to the airlock and turned in their suits together.

  They hustled, putting their suits in their lockers. It seemed to Carter that they were uncomfortable to be together but more uncomfortable to be apart.

  Finally, Annie turned to them.

  "Look," she said, "could we all go somewhere? We need to talk."

  As Philippe was saying, "but we have a right to be angry," Annie finally lost her temper.

  "No! Damn it, I just don't accept that," she said. "I'm the one who's pissed. You guys don't own me, you know. Either one of you. Why do you have to act that way and spoil everything?" Tears were welling in her eyes. She tried to hold them back. Her eyes flashed. Then she slumped almost imperceptibly and stared at the floor.

  They had come to Carter's room, all three of them, out of desperation for a place to expose their feelings.

  Carter sat at the end of the bed, away from Annie. He felt his own anger welling up. It was he who had wanted her in the first place, he believed. Philippe never really wanted anybody. He just played; played at women, played at life. No, that was unfair. Well, the hell with it. The thoughts that crowded in on him seemed too self-serving. So he said nothing.

  Philippe stood leaning against the wall, almost laconically. His stance projected a detached air, but his thin face was grim. He sat down in the single chair, elbows on widespread knees, leaning toward her unflappably. He stared at her in silence, as if daring her to continue. Finally he said, "You are pissed?" "You are pissed?"

  "This is crazy," she muttered, almost to herself. "And it isn't fair." She was still looking at the floor.

  "What is it, that is not fair?" Philippe said.

  "I just wanted friends. I like you both, that's all. I just wanted to be free and to do my job and to have friends. And, yes, lovers, too. In fact, we all love each other if we could just open our eyes to it. That should be good, not bad. I didn't want you to be jealous. I didn't want to make a mess."

  Philippe: "But I have not acted jealous, or angry. I have just tried to do my work and to see you and..."

  Carter: "Come on, Philippe, you know we've all been tense."

  "Well, if you are feeling such love for me..." Philippe said sarcastically, "you might have come and talked to me about what you were doing next, where you were going. That you were going to Phobos to see him."

  Annie: "Bullshit! How many women have you had, Philippe? Did you tell them all about the next one? About the one you were seeing tomorrow?"

  "Sometimes..." With a Gallic gesture of exasperation, Philippe blew a burst of air from his pursed lips. It rustled his hair. "Well, it depends..."

  "You and your supercilious attitude. There was some real affection here. You could have let it go at that, but now all of a sudden you are acting possessive and wrecking everything. Both of you."

  Carter stirred. "You could have said something. You could have talked."

  "You and all your talk about a new planet. Both of you. And then you want some sort of twentieth-century behavior. This isn't high school anymore, you know. Nobody's talking about going steady here. I'll bet every goddamn man on Mars feels free to take a lover when he wants. So how do you get off bitching at me?"

  Carter: "Because you weren't open with us."

  Philippe: "You were sincere, you just weren't honest."

  Annie slammed her palm on the bed. "What the hell! It's only been a few days. A couple of sporadic, spontaneous incidents a few days apart! You act like I broke a contract. I hate to tell you, we didn't have a contract. Is that what you ask from your lovers, a contract? A daily log of comings and goings? Well, to hell with that!" Suddenly she shook her head at the floor and muttered again. "Crazy." Quietly, as if she were resigned. "Besides, don't I have any rights to form intimate bonds with friends? This isn't about starting families, you know. This is about having a full life...."

  Philippe: "A sailor in every port, in other words."

  Annie: "A sexual life, yes."

  There was an instant of silence, and Carter stood up, shoulders tense, legs like lead. "Sporadic incidents," he mimicked. It came out as a burst of icy sarcasm. Carter's voice didn't sound kind anymore, even to himself. "Anyway, you could have leveled with us."

  Annie: "You want my life, is that it? You want to know my life? Well, there's more to it. You want me to be so damn honest? Let me tell you. I'm not looking to live in a nice little house with a man and a nice little contract. I had that, a long time ago, in my life. It didn't work. After a while he hated me and I hated him. We split. I like men though. You guys both know that. I like relationships and I like sex. They aren't always the same, either. You want the truth? So the truth is, there is another guy back on Earth. Tomas. Tom. He's my number one. You get the idea? I eat vegetables and meat for nourishment and candy for pleasure, you know? You guys are the candy."

  She paused, only for a moment. "Wonderful candy. The best. The kind that adds something to your life, you know? At least that's what I thought. But don't give me that twentieth-century crap about how all my attention, all my sexual chemistry and admiration and friendship have to be focused on just one of you. 'Oh, there could only ever be one man for me.' Maybe you guys want to believe that stuff down inside, when it suits you, but you know it isn't true. I thought you were guys that understood something about that. You're both always going on about how this is a new world, a new society. New rules and new traditions. I can see that didn't mean anything!"

  There was silence in the little room, a
nd the air seemed thick, like syrup. Annie ran a finger along a rough brown stripe in the bedspread. Suddenly her voice grew quieter. "I happen to care for you guys. I like your freshness, both of you, and intelligence. You wouldn't believe most of the men I meet.... And I'm sexually attracted to you. You guys are real to me. I love you. We're doing something important together. I learn from you." She looked at Carter. "That's the way it should be with friends.

  "But if you want to know everything, Tomas is my real love. He's the one I go back to. He's who I connect with. It's like psyche to psyche and family to family. He's who I really make love with; who I'll have children with. The fact is, if you're so damn curious, we're married. And we have our own apartment and our own arrangement." She stopped and looked at the floor. "We have our own lives, and I travel all over. We're free, but he's always the one I come back to."

  She was still looking at the floor, as if her anger had taken something out of her.

  "Oh, that's great, Annie," Carter stammered. "That's great. Nice going."

  Philippe said, "And you'll do anything for a story, yes?" He turned and stormed out, slamming the door.

  "Carter?..." she started.

  "I can't deal with all this, Annie. On again, off again, off the record, on the record. What's your game, Annie? I've got enough to deal with at the south pole. I'm not sure I have time to deal with someone I can't...

  I thought there was something between us. I mean, something, you know, that could last. Trust at least." He stared at her finger still tracing lines on the bedspread, back and forth.

  "There is trust between us, Carter. Just be open to it."

  "I think you better just get out of here, okay?" Carter said. Just go. Go and stay away."

  Annie left. She closed the door quietly.

  Carter thought to himself: What is she talking about? But he could not grasp his own thoughts. Had something been wrong in those moments when time had crystallized between them? And if so, would he forever be the prisoner of those moments? Was it simply that he was in love with her? Is this, finally, what it meant, being in love? Was it as simple and as biological and as terrible as this?

  Carter needed to walk. He walked to his office. Evening was coming on. The hallways, usually bustling with people, were mostly quieting down. Tomorrow was his first trip to the pole, and suddenly he didn't care.

  He wondered if he were undergoing some sea change. A new phase. He had been happy on Mars. It was enough, the job and the life around him. He had never felt alone on Mars. Never felt... empty, the way he felt now. The very idea of sculpting Mars City out of steel, soil, and people—the very idea had kept him company. He had been happy to fall asleep thinking about energy consumption and temperature control and traffic flow; happy to wake in the morning and take command of his piece of the human mosaic, implement his decisions, and see the people in the office working with him and making little jokes. He knew he had never been as close to them as he was with Philippe, but he had always been happy just to try to keep the rest of the staff—his staff—challenged and excited. And when a project was done, there was a new world full of diversions: going with one woman or another to see the new holeos from Earth; a weekend in one of the so-called Mars Hotel love suites. Or more prosaically, a ride outside to help the geologists in field trips to the vast hazy rim of Valles Marineris or the lava caves of Tharsis. Drinking in the Nix Olympica Bar with the guys from Engineering, or Philippe. Conducting tours for any of the extraordinary visitors who passed through Mars City and wanted to know how it all worked. Once he had spent an evening in the Nix Olympica with Jacqueline Forrest. Her agent had called him up; she was researching a role for a new Nicole Wolff production set on Mars. She said that when they came back to start shooting, she would see him again. Thar had kept him going for six months, but like most movie projects, it had never materialized. But there was always something new, and someone new.

  Women. Mars City was swarming with them. Bright, aggressive, full of life, wanting to love, each in her own way. A hundred women; a hundred ways to love. And he had to pick Annie.

  As Philippe had once joked, life was full of surprises, even if they came a year apart....

  His life had seemed complete. Now he questioned if he had ever been in charge of anything. People coming into his life on strange terms of their own ... People staging disappearances... In charge? He laughed to himself bitterly. Whose pawn was he? In this skeptical mood, the specter returned of a connection between Annie's appearance and Stafford's disappearance. He tried to think of Annie as some kind of agent, sent to monitor his own progress with the investigation. Whose agent? What was behind Annie's smile? He recalled a line on one of his dad's old disks: Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't really out to get me.

  It was hard to focus on this line of thought. Annie had made him reassess everything. During the field trips, and more clearly when they had worked together during the weekend on Phobos, she had given a sense of complicity and partnership he hadn't experienced before. Annie had seemed a co-conspirator with him, not a conspirator with someone else. Conspirator. A good word for a lover.

  This was the picture of Annie that had grown in his mind. Reality continued to contradict it. She had been ... He toyed with a new ego-salvaging fantasy of Annie torn between her impulses. In this desperate picture, Annie remained noble. But another interpreter of the same facts would argue that Annie had turned up in Nix-O to get a story, insinuated herself into the middle of it (first-person journalism, she called it!), and seduced them both, all in order to stay (he smiled coldly to himself) abreast of developments. If there had been a surveillance camera overhead all the time, isn't that what it would have shown? How do you judge purity and sincerity from the bare camera-eye record of facts and actions?

  So, Carter thought, after all this, Lena was right. Annie had been using them. You never knew...

  Which reminded him. The pole. He reached for the phone. He requisitioned a shuttle for the morning. He had purposely waited to the last minute. Give those bastards at the pole, whoever they were, as little warning as possible.

  The call forced him to give up theorizing and face Annie's role. All right. Make it three passengers. If this was her game, make her play it.

  Was that a reason or another rationalization?

  He left the office, walking again just to walk. Into the metal heart of Mars City. As he cooled off, he began to imagine that two years in the future, it would be good to sit down with her and try to get at her thoughts on what had happened. Maybe they could have a friendly talk one day. He would no longer let her use him; but it might be interesting to listen to her try to justify herself. Maybe he could learn something for a change....

  He gravitated to the Nix Olympica. In the midst of the blue and the chrome, he found Philippe, huddled alone over a drink. He both did and didn't want to talk to Philippe. Through an effort of will he went over and sat down.

  Philippe was staring into his blue drink.

  Without looking up, Philippe said, "I don't know why the poem talks about Truth and Beauty. Beauty always comes before Truth. First Beauty. Then Truth."

  Carter sat down beside him.

  Seeing that Carter was making no response, Philippe rambled on. "I went walking. I walked around the construction area, where they're working on the new housing module. When you're inside you can hear all the vibration. All that drilling. I couldn't stand it. I went up to the observation deck. Nobody was there. I lay there on one of the couches and looked out through the dome. As it got dark, Phobos came up and sailed overhead. It was so quiet. Then it went away, and I thought: All this talking and building and organizing we do, it's just a wrinkle on time. Most of the universe's existence is just ... nonexistence, you know? All that space out there, where nothing is happening." Philippe was staring fixedly into his drink, like a man obsessed. "All that history on Earth when there were no animals and no people, for example. Just wind. Like Mars before we came. And before the big bang, all
that preexistence, or whatever it was ... That's the natural state of things. We're just anomalies. All this shouting and fretting and organizing we do, worrying about things, those are just momentary aberrations, little transitory organizations of atoms, like a cluster of leaves floating in a stream, coming together and making a pretty little pattern for a moment, and then breaking up and going back to a natural random distribution...."

  Philippe took a long drink and continued. "You know how life started?"

  Carter said, "No," expecting a joke.

  "There were all these molecules floating around, and some could form special links with others...."

  "I think we ought to talk about Annie...."

  "That's what I'm doing," Philippe snapped. "There were certain molecules that had the ability to pick up other atoms arranged along their length, so that when they broke in half, they had created copies of themselves. Pretty soon there were molecules so big that they had structures and could absorb whole pieces of other molecules.... And eventually they grew big enough where one could ingest another.... But to keep it all going for three billion years, they all still had to send out their half molecules to link up with other half molecules. If they didn't do that, the whole thing would stop in a single generation."

  "Annie."

  "I am talking about Annie, damn it. The only way you get good sex with a woman is to happen to be there when she wants it. All the rest is just ... posturing." Philippe was still staring at his drink, his second double blue.

  Carter wanted to say don't talk to me about sex, but at the same time did not want to say it. "Ah, drinking to forget?"

  "Just drinking, damn it. There's nothing to forget."

  "Nothing to forget!...?"

  "We've been asses, Carter, my friend. We've been—what is the expression?—had. We've been had."

  Carter ordered an expensive Martian beer. The people in the greenhouses were recently developing a pretty good home brew in limited supplies. Necessity, the mother of invention.