She tapped on her lectern, and typed out Chalmers.
It was an immense bibliography: articles, interviews, books, videos, a whole library of his communiques to Earth, another library of commentaries, diplomatic, historical, biographical, psychological, psychobiographical — histories, comedies, and tragedies, in every medium, including, apparently, an opera. Meaning some villainous coloratura was down there on Earth, singing her thoughts.
She clicked off the lectern, appalled. After a few minutes of deep breathing she clicked it back on, and called up the file. She couldn’t bear to look at any video or still images; she went for the shortest biographical articles in print, from popular magazines, and called one up at random and began to read.
* * *
He was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1976, and grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. His mother and father divorced when he was seven, and after that he lived mostly with his father, in apartments near Jacksonville Beach,, an area of cheap stucco beach property built in the 1940s, behind an aging boardwalk of shrimp shacks and hamburger joints. Sometimes he lived with an aunt and uncle near the downtown, which was dominated by big skyscrapers built by insurance companies. His mother moved to Iowa when he was eight. His father joined Alcoholics Anonymous three separate times. He was his high school’s class president, and the captain of its football team, on which he played center, and of its baseball team, on which he played catcher. He led a project to clear the choking hyacinths from the St. Johns River. “His entry in his senior yearbook is so long you just know something had to be wrong!” He was accepted by Harvard and given a scholarship, then after one year transferred to MIT, where he earned degrees in engineering and astronomy. For four years he lived alone, in a room above a garage in Cambridge, and very little information about him survived; few people seemed to have known him. “He went through Boston like a ghost.”
After college he took a National Service Corps job in Fort Wal-ton Beach, Florida, and here was where he burst onto the national scene. He ran one of the most successful civilian works programs associated with the NSC, building housing for Caribbean immigrants coming through Pensacola. Here thousands of people knew him, at least in his work life. “They all agree he was an inspirational leader, dedicated to the immigrants, working nonstop to help their integration into American society.” It was in these years that he married Priscilla Jones, the beautiful daughter of a prominent Pensacola family. People spoke of a political career. “He was on top of the world!” -
Then in 2004 the NSC was terminated, and in 2005 he joined the astronaut program in Huntsville, Alabama. His marriage broke up that same year. In 2007 he became an astronaut, and moved quickly into a “flying administration” post. One of his longest space flights was six weeks on the American space station, alone with fellow rising star John Boone. He became head of NASA in 2015, while Boone became captain of the space station. Chalmers and Boone together rode the “Mars Apollo” project through the American government, and after Boone made the first landing in 2020, they both joined the First Hundred, and went to Mars in 2027.
* * *
Maya stared at the clear black letters of the Roman alphabet. The pop articles with their one-liners and exclamation points had their suggestive moments, no doubt about it. A motherless boy with a father who drank; a hardworking idealistic youth, riding high and then losing a job and a marriage in the same year; that 2005 would be worth looking into in more detail. After that, he seemed pretty clearly in it for himself. That was what being an astronaut generally meant, in NASA or Glavkosmos; always trying to get more space time, doing administration to get the power to get out more often… By that time in his life, the brief descriptions chimed with the Frank she had known. No, it was the youth, the childhood; it was hard to see that, hard to imagine it as Frank.
She called up the index again, and ran down the list of biographical materials. There was an article called “Broken Promises: Frank Chalmers and the National Service Corps.” Maya tapped out the calling code for it and the text appeared. She scrolled down until she saw his name.
Like many people with basic structural problems in their lives, Chalmers coped in his Pensacola years by filling the days with ceaseless activity. If he had no time to rest, then he had no time to think. This had been a successful strategy for him all the way back to high school, when in addition to all his school activities, he had worked twenty hours a week in a literacy program. And in Boston his academic load made him what one classmate called an “invisible man.” We know less about this period of his life than any other. There are reports that he lived out of his car through his first Boston winter, using the bathrooms of a gym on campus. Only when he had secured the transfer to MIT do we have an address for him—
Maya hit fast forward, dick dick.
The Florida panhandle was one of the poorest areas of the nation at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with Caribbean immigration, the closure of the local military bases, and Hurricane Dale combining to cause great misery. “You felt like you were working in Africa,” one National Service Corps worker said. In his three years there we get our fullest view of Chalmers as a social creature, as he secured grants to expand a jobs program that made an immense impact on the entire coast, helping thousands who had moved into makeshift shelters after Dale. Training programs taught people to build their homes, meanwhile learning skills that could be put to use elsewhere. The programs were immensely popular among the recipients, but there was opposition to them from the local development industry. Chalmers was therefore controversial, and in the first years of the new century he appears often in the local media, enthusiastically defending the program and advocating it as part of a mass surge of grassroots social action. In a guest editorial for the Fort Walton Beach journal he wrote, “The obvious solution is to turn all our energies on the problem and work on it as a systemic thing. We need to build schools to teach our children to read, and send them off to become doctors to heal us, and lawyers to work the powers that be, so we get our fair share. We need to build our own homes and our own farms, and feed ourselves.”
The results in Pensacola and Fort Walton Beach got the local NSC larger grants from Washington, and matching grants from participating corporations. At the high point, in 2004, the Pensacola Coast NSC employed 20,000 people, and was one of the main factors responsible for what was called the “Gulf Renaissance.” Chalmers’s marriage to Priscilla Jones, daughter of one of the old money families from Panama City, seemed to symbolize this new synthesis of poverty and privilege in Florida, and the two were a prominent couple in the society of the Gulf Coast for about two years.
The election of 2004 ended this period. The abrupt cancellation of the NSC was one of the new administration’s first acts. Chalmers spent two months in Washington testifying before House and Senate subcommittees, trying to aid the passage of a bill reinstating the program. The bill passed, but the two Democratic Florida senators and the congressman from the Pensacola district did not support it, and Congress was unable to override the executive veto. The NSC “threatened market forces,” the new administration said, and so it came to an end. The indictment and conviction of 19 congressmen (including Pensacola’s representative) for lobbying irregularities originating in the building industry came eight years later, and by that time the NSC was a dead issue, its veterans scattered.
For Frank Chalmers it was a watershed. He retreated into a privacy from which in many respects he never emerged. The marriage did not survive the move to Huntsville, and Priscilla soon remarried a friend of the family she had known before Chalmers’s arrival in the area. In Washington, Chalmers led an austere life in which NASA appeared to be his exclusive interest; he was famous for his 18-hour days, and the enormous impact they had on NASA’s fortunes. These successes made Chalmers nationally famous, but no one at NASA or elsewhere in Washington claimed to know him well. The obsessive overscheduling served again as a mask, behind which the idealistic social worker of the Gulf Coast disapp
eared for good.
A disturbance at the front of the car caused Maya to look up. The Japanese were standing, pulling down luggage, and it was clear now that they were Burroughs natives; most of them were about two meters tall, gangly kids with toothy laughs and uniformly brilliant black hair. Gravity, diet, whatever it was, people born on Mars grew tall. This group of Japanese reminded Maya of the ectogenes in Zygote, those strange kids who had grown like weeds… Now scattered over the planet, that whole little world gone, like all the others before it.
Maya grimaced, and on an impulse fast-forwarded her lectern to the article’s illustrations. There she found a photo of Frank at age twenty-three, in the beginning of his work with the NSC: a dark-haired kid with a sharp confident srnile, looking at the world as if he were ready to tell it something it didn’t know. So young! So young and so knowing. At first glance Maya thought it was the innocence of youth to look so knowing, but in fact the face did not look innocent. His had not been an innocent childhood. But he was a fighter, and he had found his method, and was prevailing. A power that couldn’t be beaten, or so the smile seemed to say.
But kick the world, break your foot. As they said in Kamchatka.
The train slowed and glided to a smooth stop. They were in Fournier Station, where the Sabishii branch met the main Bur-roughs-to-Hellas piste.
The Burroughs Japanese filed out of the car, and Maya clicked off her lectern and followed. The station was only a small tent, south of Fournier Crater; its interior was simple, a T-shaped dome. Scores of people wandered the three levels of the interior, in groups or singly, most of them in plain work jumpers, but many in business suits or metanational uniforms, or in casual clothes, which these days consisted of loose pantaloons, blouses, and moccasins.
Maya found the sight of so many people a bit alarming, and she moved awkwardly past the kiosk lines and the crowded cafes fronting the pistes. No one met the eye of such a bald withered androgyne. Feeling the artificial breeze on her scalp, she took her place at the front of the line to get on the next train south, turning over in her mind the photo from the book. Had they ever really been that young?
At one o’clock the train floated in from the north. Security guards came out of a room by the cafes, and under their bored eye she put her wrist to a portable checker, and boarded. A new procedure, and simple; but as she found a seat her heart was racing. Clearly the Sabishiians, with the help of the Swiss, had beaten the Transitional Authority’s new security system. But still she had reason to be afraid — she was Maya Toitovna, one of the most famous women in history, one of the most wanted criminals on Mars, with the passengers in their seats looking up at her as she passed down the aisle, naked under a blue cotton jumper.
Naked but invisible, by reason of unsightliness. And the truth was that at least half the occupants of the car looked as old as her, Mars vets who looked seventy and could have been twice that, wrinkled, gray-haired, balding, irradiated and bespectacled, scattered among all the tall fresh young natives like autumn leaves among evergreens. And there among them, what looked like Spencer Jackson. As she flung her bag onto the overhead rack, she looked at the seat three ahead; the man’s bald pate told her little, but she was pretty sure it was him. Bad luck. On general principle the First Hundred (the First Thirty-nine) tried never to travel together. But there was always the chance that chance itself would screw them up.
She sat in the window seat, wondering what Spencer was doing. Last she had heard, he and Sax had formed a technological team in Vishniac mohole, doing weapons research that they weren’t telling anyone else about, or so Vlad had said. So he was part of Sax’s crazy outlaw ecotage team, at least to some extent. It didn’t seem like him, and she wondered if he had been the moderating influence one recently noticed in Sax’s activities. Was Hellas his destination, or was he returning to the southern sanctuaries? Well — she wouldn’t find out until Hellas at best, as the protocol was to ignore each other until they were in private.
So she ignored Spencer, if it was him, and she ignored the passengers still filing into the car. The seat next to her remained empty. Across from her were two fiftyish men in suits, emigrants by the look of them, apparently traveling with the two just like them who were seated in front of her. As the train pulled out of the station tent they discussed some game they had all played together: “He hit it a mile! He was lucky to ever find it again!” Golf, apparently. Americans, or something like. Metanational executives, off to oversee something in Hellas, they didn’t mention what. Maya took out her lectern and headphones and put the headphones on. She called up Noyy fravda and watched the tiny images from Moscow. It was hard to concentrate on the voices, and it made her drowsy. The train flew south. The reporter was deploring the growing conflict between Armscor and Subarashii over the terms of the Siberian development plan. This was a case of crocodile tears, as the Russian government had been hoping for years to play the two giants off against each other and create an auction situation for the Siberian oil fields, rather than be met by a united metanat front dictating all terms. It was surprising in fact that the two metanats had broken ranks like this. Maya did not expect that it would last; it was in the metanats’ interest to hold together, to make sure it was always a matter of parceling out the available resources and never fighting for them. If they squabbled, the fragile balance of power might collapse on them, a possibility of which they were surely aware. She put her head back drowsily and looked out the window at the passing land. Now they were gliding down into the lapygia Sink, and had a long view to the southwest. It looked like the Siberian taiga/tundra border, as depicted on the news program she had just been watching — a great frost-fractured jumble of a slope, all caked with snow and ice, the bare rock coated with lichen and amorphous mounds of olive and khaki mosses, the coral cacti and dwarf trees filling every low hollow. Pingoes dotting one flat low valley looked like a rash of acne, smeared with a dirty ointment. Maya dozed for a while.
The image of Frank at twenty-three jerked her awake. She thought drowsily about what she had read, trying to piece it together. The father; what had made him join Alcoholics Anonymous three times, and quit it twice (or three times)? It had a bad sound. And after that, as if in response to it, the kind of workaholic habits that were just like the Frank she had known, even if the work seemed un-Frankishly idealistic. Social justice was not something that the Frank she had known had believed in. He had been a political pessimist, engaged in a constant rearguard action to keep the worse from coming to the worst. A career of damage control — and, if some were to be believed, personal aggrandizement. No doubt true. Although Maya felt he had always craved power in order to effect more damage control. But no one could tease the strands of those two motives apart; they were tangled like the moss and the rock out there in the Sink. Power was a many-faceted thing.
If only Frank hadn’t killed John… She stared at the lectern, turned it on, tapped in John’s name. The bibliography was endless. She checked: 5,146 entries. And it was a selected list. Frank had had several hundred at most. She switched to index mode, and looked up “Death of.”
Scores of entries, hundreds! Cold and yet sweating, Maya ran swiftly down the list. The Bern connection, the Moslem Brotherhood, Marsfirst, UNOMA, Frank, her, Helmut Bronski, Sax, Sa-mantha; by title alone she could see that all theories of agency in his death would be advocated. Of course. Conspiracy theory was tremendously popular, always and forever. People wanted such catastrophes to mean something more than mere individual madness, and so the hunt was on.
Disgust at the crackpot inclusiveness of the list almost caused her to shut the file. But then again, perhaps she was just afraid? She opened one of the many biographies, and there on the screen was a photo of John. A ghost of her old pain passed through her, leaving a kind of bleached, emotionless desolation. She clicked to the final chapter.
The Nicosia riot was an early manifestation of the tensions informing Martian society which would later explode in 2061. There were already a gre
at number of Arab technicians living in minimal housing arrangements, in close proximity to ethnic groups with whom they had historical grievances, also to administration personnel whose better housing and travel and walker privileges were obvious. A volatile mix of several groups descended on Nicosia for its dedicatory celebration, and for several days the town was extremely crowded.
click click
The violence has never been satisfactorily explained. )ensen’s theory, that the intra-Arab conflict, stimulated by the Lebanese war of liberation from Syria, sparked the Nicosia riot, is insufficient-there were also documented attacks on the Swiss, as well as a high level of random violence, all impossible to explain in terms of the Arab conflict alone.
The official depositions of the people in Nicosia that night still leave the ignition of the conflict a mystery. A number of reports suggest the presence of an agent provocateur , never identified
click click
At midnight, when the timeslip began, Saxifrage Russell was at a cafe midtown, Samantha Hoyle was on a tour of the city wall, and Frank Chalmers and Maya Toitovna had met in the western park where the speeches had been given a few hours before. Fighting had already broken out in the medina. John Boone went down the central boulevard to investigate the disturbance, as did Sax Russell from another direction. At approximately ten minutes into the timeslip, Boone was set upon by a group of between three and six young men, sometimes identified as “Arab.” Boone was knocked down and whisked into the medina before any witnesses could react, and an impromptu search turned up no sign of him. It was not until 12:27 A.M. that he was located by a larger search party in the town’s farm, and taken from there to the nearest hospital, on Boulevard of the Cypresses. Russell, Chalmers, and Toitovna helped to carry him —
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