MARS UNDERGROUND

by William K. Hartmann

  Sturgis, who had been happy, grew red. "Don't you feel like a parasite, Annie Pohaku? How do you live with yourself? You can be as cynical as you like, because you don't have to keep things working. We are the ones who have to keep things working, while you chip away.... Anyway, I assure you I have the authority. I can show you the papers."

  "Mr. Sturgis, I think your plan and your papers can go to hell."

  Sturgis turned even redder with anger. "What you people don't realize is that to have a democracy, the political system has to have a backbone. A lot of squeamish people like you don't want to look at the backbone. But let me tell you, all through history, it's people like us who preserve the system, keep things peaceful and happy, the way everyone wants. Sometimes we have to deal behind the scenes. Look at North's early career. A lot of people now call him a great president, but it was people like you tried to bring him down for his work behind the scenes. All through history people like us have had to be there, but we always have to work in the background because of people like you. We're the ones who deal with all the problems ordinary people don't want to talk about. We're the ones who weed out terrorists and despots so you don't have to think about them."

  "But we don't have terrorists."

  "Yeah? What about when they blew up LAX in '13? I call that terrorism."

  "But that was nearly twenty years ago. You don't hear about terrorism now."

  "You think the world changes so fast? The reason you've grown up with so few incidents is 'cause you've got us on the job. Cut us out of the picture and see what happens."

  "I guess we're really lucky to have you guys."

  "Sarcastic b ... No, I'm sorry." He paused to regain his composure. "Listen, did you ever hear of the Riphah conspiracy to blow the pressure seals all over Tycho?"

  "No."

  "Exactly. That's just the point. We got them just in the nick of time. And not with all the legal niceties that you guys are always crying about. So nobody ever heard about it. You included. All these scientists and academics at this base—they just go along with their happy little lives as if..."

  "I'm not a scientist. I'm..."

  "Listen, the last time we had a period of calm like this was under Eisenhower. You go back and look at it. The historians, all the intellectuals, said he was a lousy president because you had status quo. But that's the point. That's when we had real operators on the job, taking out terrorists before they could stir up trouble. Quietly, behind the scenes, you know, so that ordinary citizens could go on with their lives. You have to have people like us on the job, looking out for the interests of democracy so you people can enjoy it."

  "That's what you believe?"

  "That's not just what I believe, that's the way it is." A flicker of uncertainty passed across his face as if he were mystified by the difference, but it was not a mystery worth thinking about. "One thing I don't like about you and your friends, you think you are such philosophers."

  "Look, Sturgis," Annie exploded. "I grew up hearing schoolteachers and presidents tell me that Mars was an international human adventure for everybody's good, a role model for other international programs like the CO2 projects, et cetera et cetera. Maybe it was all bullshit, but that's what I learned in school. That's what my elected government told me."

  Sturgis had resumed grinning genially, as if secretly enjoying her discomfort. "Well, I don't have to defend..."

  "Listen to me! You pass yourself off as an official of some agency. You smile while you say you lied to us all, and we have to follow your secret rules. Well, most of us never agreed to your damn rules, you hear? Maybe that's why the system works as well as it does. If you guys didn't play straight with me, why do I have to accept your word when you announce rules to me? Oh, no. I've got a story to file."

  Sturgis became very calm. "I don't think you'll be doing that. All the terminals are secure. Have been for months. But in another few weeks ... Imagine what you'll have when we finally do lift the press restrictions. You'll be worth a million! The lone captive reporter, released from the heart of the story. The nets will love it."

  "Meanwhile, I suppose you'll lock me away."

  Sturgis smiled, as if to dazzle her with his white teeth. "No, no. I told you I'd take you all out to see the artifact. I won't renege on my promise. Maybe it will change your mind. Meanwhile ... Hey, let's not argue. I think when you see what we've found, the magnitude of what we're doing here, you'll come to agree with the extraordinary measures."

  Annie gritted her teeth. She had forced enough out of Sturgis; now she could calibrate him. He was typical of so many self-perceived important young officials in the government: a little boy playing with big guns for the first time. She had met a lot of them during her assignments, and the worst were always the ideological purists from either side. She decided not to provoke any more argument.

  The important thing now was to put the story together and get it out. She knew Sturgis and Elena and probably even Stafford—maybe even Carter himself?—would try to stop her, but by God, she wouldn't let them.

  "Anyway, look," Sturgis said, "I'm not trying to make things miserable for you. It's just a job. We've all got a job to do." He was affecting weary patience, as if being reasonable.

  Annie stared icily at Sturgis's empty desk. "Look, my people will be asking about what's going on. I don't know about Carter's people, but my people'll certainly start calling if I don't report in within a few days. What're you going to do about that?"

  "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. The fact is, Ms. Pohaku, according to our background checks, your people aren't calling in every few days. The word I get is that your boss sent you here to research a documentary—they don't expect anything on that for weeks. As for your stringer reports on Dr. Stafford, no one expects anything from you if there's nothing new to report. The suspense is over. As far as the outside world is concerned, Dr. Stafford is extinct and therefore you are, too."

  "They'll start checking up on me, sooner or later."

  "There are a dozen cover stories we can put out to get us through that period. I can tell them you're out in the field on the cap, and we can't patch through; I can tell them you're ill; or that we've got equipment malfunctions. I can send out all kinds of disinformation. That's what I do." He laughed. "It's just a different kind of disinformation than you guys put out."

  He studied her intently, as if analyzing the effect of his words. "Remember, no one will pay attention to how we managed this situation, once the discovery is announced. Any big scandals you try to start about government secrecy, they'll be lost in the shuffle once people realize we're talking alien artifacts."

  Annie had a feeling he was right. She said nothing.

  She walked to the window. The meeting was over. She stood at the window for a long time with Sturgis waiting for her. The sun was still at the same height. She felt that it should be rising, starting a new day. Or at least setting, ending something. But it seemed frozen in place, and, unbelievably, the scene outside seemed entirely normal. She had had this feeling once before, the morning she woke in Hilo and heard that the stock market had crashed in New York and Moscow, hours before. That morning, too, she had stepped to a window. She had felt surprise, to watch the rain falling gently on the huge leaves, dripping from the petals of the plumeria. The world economic order had gone into convulsion, yet the rain had fallen normally, and the distant green mountains had been swathed in low morning clouds, as if nothing had happened.

  Outside, on the Martian landing field, some men were using a forklift to move a huge crate. They were waving their arms at each other and laughing at some joke, as if it were just another day.

  When she returned to her room, neither the tape nor the hair that she had put on the door had been disturbed.

  BOOK 6

  The Ancient of Days

  Change [in human history] no longer means a new stage of coherent development, but a shift from one side to another ... as understood by designers dreaming up the fas
hion for the next season....

  —Milan Kundera, Immortality, 1990

  26

  2031, MARCH 5, THURSDAY

  At dawn, as the lights slowly came up in her room, Annie lay half-awake. Today they would see the ancient ... thing ... that had been found.

  Philippe's tree came into her mind, branching and branching. The future was like that. Branch points. She was an ant, climbing the tree. Each branch, once followed, led to a different future. Perhaps, even though each branch was unique, there was not really so much difference between them. Perhaps it did not matter which branch she chose at any fork. This direction might lead to one life; that other direction might lead to another. This direction led to one future of the world; that to another. But from a distance, all branches of the tree looked the same.

  She was determined to break this story wide open, which might be a climb up a branch leading to a different world. But she wondered about her own motivation. Why was she so anxious to violate what seemed to be a vast and tidy legal machinery? She had to be careful not merely to be paying back Sturgis for his arrogance. The story was more important than that. Was she defending a free press? Was she just after a career-making story? Was it a crusade for truth? There had been famous editors who had held back news for the good of the country; but those cases usually involved lives at risk, or unspoken agreements to suppress scurrilous personal stories that had no bearing on performance in office. Here, it seemed to be only knee-jerk secrecy; the desire for power to control events.

  And after all, it was only two weeks. Was it the duration of the charade, or the principle of the thing? She tried to ask herself: What if the ban had been for one day? Or two months? Was there a time limit when her answer would have been different?

  At some point you have to stop asking questions and go with instinct. Let the pieces fall where they may. Something new and cleaner would emerge from that.

  Later in the morning, the blue buses churned down a well-used road west of the Polar Station, spewing clouds of dust around them.

  The south polar country was unlike any Carter had ever seen on Mars.

  Instead of a blistered landscape of ancient craters and broken lava flows, laced with aborted river channels, it evoked old, odd familiarity of sedimentary hills. There were rounded slopes and steeper cliff sides scored with blocky red strata, which projected raggedly like rows of old, disintegrating bricks. Now the bus crawled along the foot of a terraced hillside that rose on their left like giant pieces of thinly layered cake. The top of the cake disappeared into a tenuous mist that hung above them, almost invisible against the pale sky. The aroma of dust seemed to hang in the air of the bus, as if it came in through the vents. That was impossible; but he couldn't get the sensation out of his head.

  Stafford sat close to Carter. "Those red cliffs always remind me of the red-rock country of the Southwest. I can imagine Navajo shepherds on the hill crests."

  Lena was standing at the front of the bus like a tour guide, hanging on with one hand and waving toward the hills with the other, and holding forth over an intercom. "...the strata. You've got a billion years of snows, seasonal dumping of dust grains at the poles, and orbital cycles thrown in to complicate things. And an occasional volcanic outburst adding a layer of ash. It's all there." She couldn't help adopting the role of teacher. "The whole history of the planet, including the most amazing part, as you'll soon see."

  The bus rolled on into thicker polar fog. Gloomy light filtered through the low clouds onto the frost deposits, turning Mars an uncharacteristic gray instead of red.

  Through the haze, they could see the fresh creamy white of the recent snow, draping down from the plateaulike surfaces atop the cliffs. On the lower sun-facing elevations along the road, it was already evaporating. Pockets of thicker white frost lurked in the shadows of the brown boulders that dotted the bases of the slopes.

  Lena lectured them on the passing landscape, as if understanding the geology would make them forgive the conspiracy. How many people has she brought here in the last ten weeks? Carter wondered. What had she wanted from them? He tried to shake the thought. Is she really just an ordinary person caught up in great machineries? Sure, she had pumped him for information. Wouldn't he have done the same? Wouldn't Annie have done the same? Hell, Annie had done the same. Were questions asked in bed automatically less honest than questions asked in the conference room?

  He leaned against the bus window, feeling strangely relaxed and sardonic. He thought of the missionaries and priests and now the agency operatives who had come to Mars. Must be nice to have a value system that lets you see things in black and white. But black and white, as humans had proved again and again, were the most dangerous colors in history.

  Ah, well, in this bus, for once, all he had to do was sit back, observe, judge perhaps, be ready in case one of those right moments came along.... He pictured himself as a lion in the veldt, half-relaxed, half-ready to spring...

  For now, he didn't have to judge Lena. He knew he was not attracted to her in any long-term way. He would return to Mars City and rarely see her again—perhaps at a meeting now and then. They would act friendly and professionally. With luck, his final report—if he had to write a report—would not have to say anything about her. Funny, Carter thought. This had started off to be his assignment, but it was splintering into a thousand shards. There was something in it for everyone but him. He was just along for the ride, now, literally. He would finish his report; a little fragment of the whole, it would be forgotten. In the hubbub, he would return to work.

  He turned to watch Annie. Annie would face a different problem with Lena. If Annie were to write the whole story, she would have to judge Lena. She would sit in judgment of them all. They would all become her characters, assembled from the parts she collected. It would be Annie who made all the moral judgments. He himself would record only facts and recommendations. Philippe might make sketches and paintings and sculptures; but no matter what "feeling" he put into them, they were morally neutral objects in the end. It was Annie who would be forced by her medium to make judgments.

  Did the judgments matter, in the long run? Professors would argue about the reports. Whichever way Annie wrote it, someone else would come along and write the opposite, just to make a buck. You had to live by your own judgments, not the ephemeral judgments of historians.

  The sheen of Annie's black hair caught reddish highlights from the landscape outside. He realized with a tinge of despair that he measured his time in intervals from the times he could be alone with her. Yet, at least, now he knew the framework of her life; that was better than operating under the false assumptions he had carried with him earlier.

  Suddenly they broke out of the fog, revealing the sunlit cliff in sharp and stark outline, as if to say there might be only one fixed reality, in spite of the historians and writers.

  "See that drill rig up there?" Lena was saying.

  They all peered to the left, where a tower rose atop one of the plateaus, silhouetted against a sky the color of a New Yorker's flesh in winter. The base of its legs was hidden in a faint ground mist hovering at the top of the cliff. The tower seemed to hang in the sky.

  "Keep it in mind. You'll be seeing more of them."

  Later, ten kilometers down the road, they dropped into a wide, shallow valley mouth, seemingly eroded through the polar hills by some defunct drainage. An array of drill towers stretched up the valley floor, spaced half a kilometer apart. They labored up the valley's ramplike far side onto a broad bajada apron skirting along the foot of the layered hills, and bounced onward. Every ten kilometers or so they passed another single tower, perched on a slope or a hill crest to their left. On one low hill, there was an array of drill rigs, arranged in a geometric grid.

  Coming into sight now was the mouth of another broad valley. The valley's far side was a steeply rising cliff, more imposing than any they had seen yet. The cliff's foggy summit was surmounted by yet more drill towers. Clustered around the base
of the cliff were vehicles, stacks of crates, and temporary inflatables with winking lights on their airlock doors. In the base of the cliff, shored up by Martian concrete, was the wide mouth of an enormous cemented tunnel, from which vehicles came and went like ants around their hole.

  Elena Trevina explained everything to them. Her crew had been drilling all over the cap, to get core samples that would let them map the strata sequence that recorded ancient climate variations. They were trying to deduce the unique Martian history of that rarest of solar system commodities, liquid water. The terraced cliffs that encircled the pole offered cross sections of strata that simplified the mapping of the older deposits, while the drills offered access to pristine buried deposits.

  The drill data, they hoped, would shed light on conditions during the long-lost Martian springtimes of three or four billion years ago, when— according to most researchers—polar ponds and seas sparkled in the once-thicker Martian air. Perhaps there would be answers as to why life had never gotten much of a tentacle-hold on Mars, had never gone much beyond the now-fossilized microbial forms scattered in buried rocks and sediments.

  The drills labored year round, but the favorite time for fieldwork was in the "warm" southern summer, when the sun wheeled all day above the horizon, eating away the snowy veneer of carbon dioxide frost and revealing the permanent, dirty-white layer of frozen water trapped underneath—the sun, like a bright vulture.

  Success of a poor sort had come in '25 when the drills hit a meter-thick stratum of grayish soil that had a higher-than-average content of organic materials, averaging just in the range of a few parts per billion—an extension of the layer Stafford had studied a decade before. Barely out of the noise. Hardly evidence of ancient, teeming life, but enough to make scientists twitch. Stafford had spent a year studying materials from the site. The layer was 3.2 billion years old. Since the microbes were rarer below that layer, and more abundant above, Stafford had concluded that the layer might mark the climax of the fluvial period, when life got its start, but after which life died out because of the declining conditions.