Obelisk

by Stephen Baxter

  He entered Wei’s office, carrying a heavy-looking satchel. He held the door open for Xue Ling as she departed, and he looked after her with an odd wistfulness. ‘Pretty girl, Mr Mayor.’

  Wei winced. After four years here Kendrick’s Standard Chinese was pretty good, but when he addressed Wei he always stuck to the English form of that inappropriate appellation. A subtle form of rebellion, Wei supposed. He wanted to deter any interest Kendrick might have in Xue Ling, before it even started. ‘She is sixteen years old. She is my daughter. My adopted daughter.’

  ‘Oh.’ Kendrick glanced around the uncluttered office, and settled on one of the two empty chairs facing Wei’s desk. ‘Your daughter? I didn’t know you had one, adopted or otherwise. She looks kind of sad, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

  Wei shrugged. ‘She is an orphan. She lost her family, in fact, during the flight of the Sunflower, the ship that—’

  ‘Your ship. I see. And now you’ve adopted her?’

  ‘It is a formality. She needs a legal guardian. Since being brought to Mars a decade ago she has failed to settle with foster or adoptive parents, though many attempts were made. She ended up in the Public School at Phlegra Montes.’

  Kendrick frowned. ‘I heard of that place. Where they send all the broken kids.’

  Wei winced again. But the man was substantially right. Childbirth and child-rearing were chancy processes on Mars. Because of the low gravity, the sleet of solar radiation, intermittent accidents like pressure losses or eco collapses, there were many stillbirths, many young born unhealthy one way or another, many accidents and injuries. Even a healthy child might not grow well, simply because of the pressure of confinement in the domes; there was something of a plague of mental disorder, or autism. Hence Phlegra Montes. But the school also served as a last-resort refuge for children like Ling who simply didn’t fit in. ‘In fact the UN and the Chinese run the school together. One of our few cooperative acts on Mars.’

  Kendrick nodded. ‘Admirable. And good for you for giving her a home now. I can see why you’d feel responsible.’

  You could say this for Kendrick, Wei thought. He was prepared to express things bluntly, things that others danced around. Perhaps this was a relic of Kendrick’s own past. He had after all pursued a successful career of his own before falling foul of Heroic-Generation legislation on Earth, and being banished to Mars; no doubt plain speaking had served him well.

  ‘We are here to discuss you, Mr Kendrick, not my daughter.’ He tapped his slate. ‘Once again I have to read reports about your indiscipline—’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it that,’ Kendrick said. ‘Call it inappropriately applied energy. Or the generation of inappropriate ideas, which the dead-heads you put me under can’t recognise as potentially valuable contributions.’

  Wei felt hugely weary, even as they began this exchange. Kendrick was learning the language, but consciously or otherwise he was not fitting into the local culture. A big noisy American here in a Chinese outpost, he was too vivid, too loud. ‘Once again, Mr Kendrick, I am using up time on your antics which—’

  ‘You volunteered for the job, Mr Mayor.’

  That term again. In fact, Wei had nothing like the autonomy of the ‘mayors’ of western cities to which Kendrick alluded. Wei was actually the chair of the colony’s council, with only local responsibilities; he reported up to a whole hierarchy of officials above him that extended across Mars and even back to New Beijing on Earth. Nevertheless, it was a burden of responsibility. And it was a role he had drifted into, almost naturally, given his experience and background, despite his own reluctance. Once again it was as if he was a captain, of this grounded colony-ship, sailing around Mars’s orbit. It was a burden he accepted as gladly as he could. Perhaps it was atonement.

  But if not for this role, he thought, he would not have to confront issues like the management of this man, Bill Kendrick.

  ‘You are not here for ideas,’ he said, exasperated. ‘Or for “energy”. You are to work on the new derrick.’ The latest plunge into the rocky ground of Mars, to bring up precious water from the deep-lying aquifers beneath.

  ‘Oh, I can do the roughneck stuff in my sleep.’

  ‘And what is it you do when awake, then?’

  Kendrick seemed to take that as a cue. ‘I make these.’ He opened his satchel and produced two rust-red squared-off blocks, each maybe thirty centimetres long, five to ten centimetres in cross-section. He set these on the desk, the blocks shedding a little dust.

  Wei picked one up; on Mars, like everything else, it was lighter than it looked. ‘What’s this? Cut stone?’

  ‘No. Bricks. I made bricks, out of Martian dust.’

  ‘Bricks?’

  He half-listened as Kendrick briskly ran through the steps in his brick-making process: taking fine Martian dust, wetting it, adding a little straw from the domed gardens or shreds of waste cloth, then baking it in a solar-reflector furnace he had improvised from scrap parts. ‘It’s a process that’s as old as civilisation.’

  Wei smiled. ‘Whose civilisation do you mean?’

  ‘So simple a child could run it.’

  ‘You say you need water—’

  ‘Which is precious here, I know that. I’m breaking my back drilling for my own supply to avoid draining the communal reserve. But most of what I use can be recovered from the steam that comes off during baking.’

  ‘Tell me why anybody would want to make bricks.’

  Kendrick leaned forward. ‘Because it’s a quick and dirty way for this township to expand. Think about it. Most of your people are still living crammed into these domes, and most of them are still shipped from Earth. Your plastics industry here is in its infancy, along with everything else. In fact, I’ve got plans for two kinds of structure you can build from Martian brick. The first is dwelling spaces.’

  Wei piled the two bricks one on top of the other. ‘How could I build a useful dwelling of brick? Our buildings have to be pressurised. A brick structure would be blown apart by the internal pressure; remember that Martian air is at only a fraction of Earth’s.’

  ‘That’s the whole damn point.’ Kendrick rummaged in his satchel again. He showed Wei hand-drawn plans of domes and vaults, half-buried in the Martian ground. ‘See? Pile it up with dirt, which you need for radiation shielding anyhow.’ Which was true. On Mars there was no ozone layer, and the sun’s ultraviolet reached all the way to the ground. ‘And the weight of the dirt will maintain the compression you need. This is only a short-term solution but it could be an effective one. There’s no shortage of dust on Mars, God knows; you could make as many bricks as you like, build as wide and deep as you can manage. It would give you room to grow your population fast, even before longer-term industries like plastics and steel kick in at production scales, and you can begin to achieve your strategic goals.’

  Wei held up his hand. ‘As always, you over-reach yourself, Mr Kendrick. Remember, you have no rank here, no formal role. You were sent here from the UN base at Eden because of the trouble you caused there; it is better that you are used as a labourer here at Fire City than to rot in some prison at Eden, breathing the expensive air—’

  ‘I always think big,’ Kendrick said, grinning unabashed. ‘What got me in trouble in the first place. Even if I did achieve great things when I had a chance.’

  ‘“Great things” which earned you banishment to Mars.’

  Wei was overfamiliar with Kendrick’s file. He was one of the youngest of a generation of entrepreneurs and engineers who had used the Jolts, a succession of climate-collapse shocks on Earth, as an opportunity; they had rushed through huge, usually flawed schemes to stabilise aspects of the climate, from sun-deflecting mirrors in space to gigantic carbon-sequestration plants in the deep oceans – schemes that, as had been revealed when the prosecutions started, had made their originators hugely wealthy, no matter how well they wor
ked, or not. Even now, Wei thought, Kendrick probably carried around much of that wealth embedded in the very fabric of his body, in genetic therapies, cybernetic implants.

  ‘Can you not see, Mr Kendrick, that if I allow you a role in influencing the “strategic goals” of this community, as you call them, suspicions will inevitably arise that you are simply reverting to type?’

  Kendrick shrugged. ‘I’m stuck on Mars, like you. I’m more interested in the common benefit than my own personal gain. Believe that or not, as you like. Sell this under your own authority if it makes you feel better.’ Then he shut up.

  In the lengthening silence Wei was aware of a seed of curiosity growing in his own mind, a seed planted by Kendrick. He suppressed a sigh. The man was a good salesman if nothing else. ‘Tell me, then. You have described living shelters. What is the second kind of structure that could be built with your bricks?’

  Kendrick glanced out of the window. ‘The monument.’

  ‘The cairn?’

  ‘Look at it. It’s kind of impressive, in its way. Everybody adds to it. I’ve seen the school kids climbing the ladders to add on another couple of rocks.’

  Wei shrugged. It had been one of his initiatives to build up the cairn of Cao Xi as a cheap way to unite the community, and to remember a great hero.

  ‘But how tall is it?’ Kendrick asked now. ‘A hundred metres? Listen – there were pyramids on Earth taller than that. And this is Mars, Mr Mayor. Low gravity, right? We ought to be able to build a pyramid three or four hundred metres tall, if we felt like it. Or …’ Another expertly timed pause.

  This must have been how the Heroic Generation made their plays, Wei thought. The sheer ambition of the visions, the scale – the chutzpah, to use one of Kendrick’s own words – it was all dazzling. ‘Or what?’

  ‘Or we use my bricks. There were cathedral spires on Earth over a hundred and fifty metres tall. Here on Mars—’

  ‘Spires?’

  ‘Just imagine it, Mr Mayor.’ Kendrick could clearly see he had hooked Wei’s interest. ‘If nothing else, you need something to keep me busy, and maybe a few other miscreants. You can’t send me back to Earth, can you?’

  Wei could not; that was no longer an option. A post-Jolt redistribution was shaping the home planet now; in China and around the rest of the world, whole populations were being displaced north and south from the desiccating mid-latitudes, and the central government had told the Martian colonists that they needed to find their own solutions to their problems. Yes, this would use up spare labour.

  And anyway, Wei had long had an instinct that the first humans living on Mars should be doing more than merely surviving.

  ‘A spire, you say?’

  Kendrick grinned, and produced a slate with more diagrams. ‘You’d start by digging foundations. Even on Mars a tree would need roots as deep as it is tall …’

  Kendrick’s rover was waiting for Wei outside the lock from the Summertime Vault. It was mid-morning and a break in the school timetable; at this time of day, as usual, most of the colony’s hundred children were running around the big public space that dominated the Vault, many of them low-gravity tall, oddly graceful. They were full of energy and life, and Wei, feeling old at fifty-two, regretted having to turn his back on them.

  But Kendrick was waiting for him, his oddly youthful face full of calculation, eager as ever to draw Wei into his latest schemes.

  To Wei’s surprise, he and Kendrick were alone in the rover when it pulled away from the lock. ‘I didn’t know you were permitted to pilot one of these.’

  Kendrick just grinned. ‘There’s a lot of stuff in this town that goes on under your personal radar, Mr Mayor. I’ve made a lot of friends here, a lot of contacts, and I call in favours every now and then.’

  Wei glanced back at the heavy brick shoulders of the Summertime Vault, under its mound of rock and dust. ‘You have accumulated these favours ever since we let you become so influential in the colony’s destiny.’

  ‘I’m doing no harm – you’ve got to admit that. Everybody benefits in the end. Xue Ling helped fix me up with this, actually.’

  ‘She isn’t your personal assistant. She merely volunteered to—’

  ‘I know, I know.’ Kendrick looked away hastily, as if seeking to close down the subject. ‘It’s the way the world works. Don’t sweat it.’

  Wei was sure Kendrick knew he disapproved of his relationship with Xue Ling, such as it was. The spurious glamour of the man seemed to draw in Xue Ling, as it drew in others. Wei didn’t believe that Kendrick intended to push this too far. Nor did he suspect that Kendrick would succeed if he tried; Xue Ling, twenty-two years old now, was engaged to be married to a decent Chinese boy, a student. But still, something about Kendrick’s interest in Xue Ling didn’t feel right, given the paternal instincts Wei hoped he had developed as the girl’s foster parent.

  Heading out of town, they drove past the new Cao Xi monument. The old heap of rubble had long been demolished to make way for Kendrick’s spire, a lofty cone nearly four hundred metres tall – almost three times the height of the tallest cathedral spires of medieval Europe, though constructed with much the same materials and techniques, of brick and mortar over a frame of tall Martian-grown oak trunks. The usual gaggle of protestors was gathered here, at the foot of the unfinished monument. Kendrick let the rover nose through their thin line, and Wei peered out, forcing an official smile for the benefit of any cameras present. Some were protesting because of the diversion of materials into what they called ‘Wei’s Folly’, and it did Wei no good to point out that the building of the spire had kick-started the development of whole industries in the colony. Others protested because of the spire’s echoes of the Christian west. And still others protested simply because they had liked the old cairn, the mound of stones they and their children had worked together to build up.

  Kendrick, typically, ignored the people and peered up at the spire: slim, tall, already a monument impossible on Earth, at least with such basic raw materials. ‘Magnificent, isn’t it?’

  ‘Magnificent for you,’ Wei murmured. ‘Is this how it was for the Heroic Generation? You build your monuments, overriding protests. You persuade the rest of us they are essential. And you grow fat on the profits, of one kind or another.’

  ‘Binglin, my friend—’

  ‘I am not your friend.’

  ‘Sorry. Look, maybe I push my luck at times. But the reason I get away with it is, you’re right, because you need what I do. Thanks to my brick-making you have the Vaults now, a huge expansion of space that would have been impossible without me. And that helps everybody, right? I’ve heard you talk of the Triangle. I read the news in the slates. I do pay attention, you know …’

  The Triangle was the latest economic theory, of how Earth, Mars and the asteroids could be linked in a mutually supportive, positive-feedback trade loop. The asteroids were a vital source of raw materials that could be mined cleanly to support a starving Earth. So Earth, or rather the Chinese Greater Economic Framework down on Earth, exported expertise and high-tech goods into space, and got asteroid resources back in return. Mars, with its rapidly expanding colonies, served as a source of labour and living space for the asteroid development agencies, and in return received the raw materials it needed, particularly the volatiles of which the planet was starved.

  But Mars’s local administrators, Wei among them, were concerned that Mars should not be a mere construction shack on the edge of the asteroid belt. So a deliberate effort was being made to turn Mars’s new communities, including Fire City, into hotbeds of communications, information technology, and top-class education. The dream was to start exporting high-quality software and other digital material both to the asteroids and to Earth – a dream that was already beginning to pay off.

  And Kendrick had been right. To achieve those strategic goals Mars needed room, human space, to grow its po
pulation. Kendrick had managed to spot a kind of gap in the resource development cycle, and to fill it with his brick constructions. But that didn’t make him necessary in any sense. Not as far as Wei was concerned.

  Soon the centre of Fire City was far behind, and they passed the last colony buildings, the big translucent domes that sheltered the artificial marshland that was the hub of the city’s recycling system. Then they drove through fields covered with clear plastic, where scientists were experimenting with gen-enged wheat and potatoes and rice, growing in Martian soil. Further out still the fields were open, and here banks of lichen stained the rocks, green and purple: the most advanced life forms on Mars, before humans arrived. Some of these lichen, which were some kind of relation to Earth life, were being gen-enged too, more experiments to find a way to farm Mars.

  Beyond the lichen beds, at last they were out in open, undeveloped country. Even so they were still well within the walls of Mendel crater. And as the humming rover bounced over the roughly made track, Wei began to make out a slim form, dead ahead. It was a kind of tower, skeletal, with a splayed base. He peered forward, squinting through the dusty air. ‘What is that?’

  Kendrick grinned. ‘What I brought you out here to see, Mr Mayor. You ever heard of the Eiffel Tower? In Paris, France. It was pulled down during a food riot in the 2060s, but—’

  ‘Stop the rover.’ As the vehicle rolled to a halt, Wei leaned forward, peering out of the blister window. Already they were so close that he had to tip back his head to see the peak. ‘What is its purpose?’

  Kendrick shrugged. ‘It’s a test. A demonstration, of what’s possible to build with steel on Mars. Just as the spire—’

  ‘Steel? Where did you get the steel from?’ But of course Wei knew that; the city’s new metallurgy plant, already up to industrially useful capacity, was pumping out iron and steel produced from hematite ore, the primary commercial source of iron on Earth, and an ore so ubiquitous on Mars it was what made the planet red. ‘You diverted the plant’s production for this?’