Blue Mars Part 1

BLUE MARS.

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Part One

Peac.o.c.k Mountain

Mars is free now. We're on our own. No one tells us what to do.

Ann stood at the front of the train as she said this.

But it's so easy to backslide into old patterns of behavior. Break one hierarchy and another springs up to take its place. We will have to be on guard for that, because there will always be people trying to make another Earth. The areophany will have to be ceaseless, an eternal struggle. We will have to think harder than ever before what it means to be Martian.

Her listeners sat slumped in chairs, looking out the windows at the terrain flowing by. They were tired, their eyes were scoured. Red-eyed Reds. In the harsh dawn light everything looked new, the windswept land outside bare except for a khaki scree of lichen and scrub. They had kicked all Earthly power off Mars, it had been a long campaign, capped by a burst of furious action following the great flood on Terra; and they were tired.

We came from Earth to Mars, and in that pa.s.sage there was a certain purification. Things were easier to see, there was a freedom of action that we had not had before. A chance to express the best part of ourselves. So we acted. We are making a better way to live.

This was the myth, they had all grown up with it. Now as Ann told it to them again, the young Martians stared through her. They had engineered the revolution, they had fought all over Mars, and pushed the Terran police into Burroughs; then they had drowned Burroughs, and chased the Terrans up to Sheffield, on Pavonis Mons. They still had to force the enemy out of Sheffield, up the s.p.a.ce cable and back to Terra; there was work still to be done. But in the successful evacuation of Burroughs they had won a great victory, and some of the blank faces staring at Ann or out the window seemed to want a break, a moment for triumph. They were all exhausted.

Hiroko will help us, a young man said, breaking the silence of the train's levitation over the land.

Ann shook her head. Hiroko is a green, she said, the original green.

Hiroko invented the areophany, the young native countered. That's her first concern: Mars. She will help us, I know. I met her. She told me.

Except she's dead, someone else said.

Another silence. The world flowed under them.

Finally a tall young woman stood up and walked down the aisle, and gave Ann a hug. The spell was broken; words were abandoned; they got to their feet and cl.u.s.tered in the open s.p.a.ce at the front of the train, around Ann, and hugged her, or shook her hand- or simply touched her, Ann Clayborne, the one who had taught them to love Mars for itself, who had led them in the struggle for its independence from Earth. And though her bloodshot eyes were still fixed, gazing through them at the rocky battered expanse of the Tyrrhena ma.s.sif, she was smiling. She hugged them back, she shook their hands, she reached up to touch their faces. It will be all right, she said. We will make Mars free. And they said yes, and congratulated each other. On to Sheffield, they said. Finish the job. Mars will show us how.

Except she's not dead, the young man objected. I saw her last month in Arcadia. She'll show up again. She'll show up somewhere.

At a certain moment before dawn the sky always glowed the same bands of pink as in the beginning, pale and clear in the east, rich and starry in the west. Ann watched for this moment as her companions drove them west, toward a ma.s.s of black land rearing into the sky- the Tharsis Bulge, punctuated by the broad cone of Pavonis Mons. As they rolled uphill from Noctis Labyrinthus they rose above most of the new atmosphere; the air pressure at the foot of Pavonis was only 180 millibars, and then as they drove up the eastern flank of the great shield volcano it dropped under 100 millibars, and continued to fall. Slowly they ascended above all visible foliage, crunching over dirty patches of wind-carved snow; then they ascended above even the snow, until there was nothing but rock, and the ceaseless thin cold winds of the jet stream. The bare land looked just as it had in the prehuman years, as if they were driving back up into the past.

It wasn't so. But something fundamental in Ann Clayborne warmed at the sight of this ferric world, stone on rock in the perpetual wind, and as the Red cars rolled up the mountain all their occupants grew as rapt as Ann, the cabins falling silent as the sun cracked the distant horizon behind them.

Then the slope they ascended grew less steep, in a perfect sine curve, until they were on the flat land of the round summit plateau. Here they saw tent towns ringing the edge of the giant caldera, cl.u.s.tered in particular around the foot of the s.p.a.ce elevator, some thirty kilometers to the south of them.

PAVONIS MONS CALDERA.

They stopped their cars. The silence in the cabins had shifted from reverent to grim. Ann stood at one upper-cabin window, looking south toward Sheffield, that child of the s.p.a.ce elevator: built because of the elevator, smashed flat when the elevator fell, built again with the elevator's replacement. This was the city she had come to destroy, as thoroughly as Rome had Carthage; for she meant to bring down the replacement cable too, just as they had the first one in 2061. When they did that, much of Sheffield would again be flattened. What remained would be located uselessly on the peak of a high volcano, above most of the atmosphere; as time pa.s.sed the surviving structures would be abandoned and dismantled for salvage, leaving only the tent foundations, and perhaps a weather station, and, eventually, the long sunny silence of a mountain summit. The salt was already in the ground.

A cheerful Tharsis Red named Irishka joined them in a small rover, and led them through the maze of warehouses and small tents surrounding the intersection of the equatorial piste with the one circling the rim. As they followed her she described for them the local situation. Most of Sheffield and the rest of the Pavonis rim settlements were already in the hands of the Martian revolutionaries. But the s.p.a.ce elevator and the neighborhood surrounding its base complex were not, and there lay the difficulty. The revolutionary forces on Pavonis were mostly poorly equipped militias, and they did not necessarily share the same agenda. That they had succeeded as far as they had was due to many factors: surprise, the control of Martian s.p.a.ce, several strategic victories, the support of the great majority of the Martian population, and the unwillingness of the United Nations Transitional Authority to fire on civilians, even when they were making ma.s.s demonstrations in the streets. As a result the UNTA security forces had retreated from all over Mars to regroup in Sheffield, and now most of them were in elevator cars, going up to Clarke, the ballast asteroid and s.p.a.ce station at the top of the elevator; the rest were jammed into the neighborhood surrounding the elevator's ma.s.sive base complex, called the Socket. This district consisted of elevator support facilities, industrial warehouses, and the hostels, dormitories, and restaurants needed to house and feed the port's workforce. "Those are coming in useful now," Irishka said, "because even so they're squeezed in like trash in a compactor, and if there hadn't been food and shelter they would probably have tried a breakout. As it is, things are still tense, but at least they can live."

It somewhat resembled the situation just resolved in Burroughs, Ann thought. Which had turned out fine. It only took someone willing to act and the thing would be done- UNTA evacuated to Earth, the cable brought down, Mars's link to Earth truly broken. And any attempt to erect a new cable could be balked sometime in the ten years of orbital construction that it took to build one.

So Irishka led them through the jumble that was east Pavonis, and their little caravan came to the rim of the caldera, where they parked their rovers. To the south on the western edge of Sheffield they could just make out the elevator cable, a line that was barely visible, and then only for a few kilometers out of its 24,000. Nearly invisible, in fact, and yet its existence dominated every move they made, every discussion- every thought they had, almost, speared and strung out on that black thread connecting them to Earth.

When they were settled in their camp Ann called her son Peter on the wrist. He was one of the leaders of the revolution on Tharsis, and had directed the campaign against UNTA that had left its forces contained in the Socket and its immediate neighborhood. A qualified victory at best, but it made Peter one of the heroes of the previous month.

Now he answered the call and his face appeared on her wrist. He looked quite like her, which she found disconcerting. He was absorbed, she saw, concentrating on something other than her call.

"Any news?" she asked.

"No. We appear to be at something of an impa.s.se. We're allowing all of them caught outside free pa.s.sage into the elevator district, so they've got control of the train station and the south rim airport, and the subway lines from those to the Socket."

"Did the planes that evacuated them from Burroughs come here?"

"Yes. Apparently most of them are leaving for Earth. It's very crowded in there."

"Are they going back to Earth, or into Mars...o...b..t?"

"Back to Earth. I don't think they trust orbit anymore."

He smiled at that. He had done a lot in s.p.a.ce, aiding Sax's efforts and so on. Her son the s.p.a.ceman, the Green. For many years they had scarcely spoken to each other.

Ann said, "So what are you going to do now?"

"I don't know. I don't see that we can take the elevator, or the Socket either. It just wouldn't work. Even if it did, they could always bring the elevator down."

"So?"

"Well-" He looked suddenly concerned. "I don't think that would be a good thing. Do you?"

"I think it should come down."

Now he looked annoyed. "Better stay out of the fall line then."

"I will."

"I don't want anyone bringing it down without a full discussion," he told her sharply. "This is important. It should be a decision made by the whole Martian community. I think we need the elevator, myself."

"Except we have no way to take possession of it."

"That remains to be seen. Meanwhile, it's not something for you to take into your own hands. I heard what happened in Burroughs, but it's different here, you understand? We decide strategy together. It needs to be discussed."

"It's a group that's very good at that," Ann said bitterly. Everything was always thoroughly discussed and then always she lost. It was past time for that. Someone had to act. But again Peter looked as if he were being taken from his real work. He thought he would be making the decisions about the elevator, she could see that. Part of a more general feeling of ownership of the planet, no doubt, the birthright of the nisei, displacing the First Hundred and all the rest of the issei. If John had lived that would not have been easy, but the king was dead, long live the king- her son, king of the nisei, the first true Martians.

But king or not, there was a Red army now converging on Pavonis Mons. They were the strongest military operation left on the planet, and they intended to complete the work begun when Earth had been hit by its great flood. They did not believe in consensus or compromise, and for them, knocking down the cable was killing two birds with one stone: it would destroy the last police stronghold, and it would also sever easy contact between Earth and Mars, a primary Red goal. No, knocking down the cable was the obvious thing to do.

But Peter did not seem to know this. Or perhaps he did not care. Ann tried to tell him, but he just nodded, muttering "Yeah yeah, yeah yeah." So arrogant, like all the greens, so blithe and stupid with all their prevaricating, their dealing with Earth, as if you could ever get anything from such a leviathan. No. It was going to take direct action, as in the drowning of Burroughs, as in all the acts of sabotage that had set the stage for the revolution. Without those the revolution wouldn't even have begun, or if it had it would have been crushed immediately, as in 2061.

"Yeah yeah. We'd better call a meeting then," Peter said, looking as annoyed at her as she felt at him.

"Yeah yeah," Ann said heavily. Meetings. But they had their uses; people could a.s.sume they meant something, while the real work went on elsewhere.

"I'll try to set one up," Peter said. She had gotten his attention at last, she saw; but there was an unpleasant look on his face, as if he had been threatened. "Before things get out of hand."

"Things are already out of hand," she told him, and cut the connection.

She checked the news on the various channels, Mangalavid, the Reds' private nets, the Terran summaries. Though Pavonis and the elevator were now the focus of everyone on Mars, the physical convergence on the volcano was only partial. It appeared to her that there were more Red guerrilla units on Pavonis than the green units of Free Mars and their allies; but it was hard to be sure. Kasei and the most radical wing of the Reds, called the Kakaze ("fire wind"), had recently occupied the north rim of Pavonis, taking over the train station and tent at Lastflow. The Reds Ann had traveled with, most of them from the old Red mainstream, discussed moving around the rim and joining the Kakaze, but decided in the end to stay in east Pavonis. Ann observed this discussion silently but was glad at the result, as she wanted to keep her distance from Kasei and Dao and their crowd. She was pleased to stay in east Pavonis.

Many Free Mars troops were staying there as well, moving out of their cars into the abandoned warehouses. East Pavonis was becoming a major concentration of revolutionary groups of all kinds; and a couple days after her arrival, Ann went in and walked over compacted regolith to one of the biggest warehouses in the tent, to take part in a general strategy session.

The meeting went about as she expected. Nadia was at the center of the discussion, and it was useless talking to Nadia now. Ann just sat on a chair against the back wall, watching the rest of them circle the situation. They did not want to say what Peter had already admitted to her in private: there was no way to get UNTA off the s.p.a.ce elevator. Before they conceded that they were going to try to talk the problem out of existence.

Late in the meeting, Sax Russell came over to sit by her side.

"A s.p.a.ce elevator," he said. "It could be... used."

Ann was not the least bit comfortable talking to Sax. She knew that he had suffered brain damage at the hands of UNTA security, and had taken a treatment that had changed his personality; but somehow this had not helped at all. It only made things very strange, in that sometimes he seemed to her to be the same old Sax, as familiar as a much-hated brother; while at other times he did indeed seem like a completely different person, inhabiting Sax's body. These two contrary impressions oscillated rapidly, even sometimes coexisted; just before joining her, as he had talked with Nadia and Art, he had looked like a stranger, a dapper old man with a piercing glare, talking in Sax's voice and Sax's old style. Now as he sat next to her, she could see that the changes to his face were utterly superficial. But though he looked familiar the stranger was now inside him- for here was a man who halted and jerked as he delved painfully after what he was trying to say, and then as often as not came out with something scarcely coherent.

"The elevator is a, a device. For... raising up. A... a tool tool."

"Not if we don't control it," Ann said to him carefully, as if instructing a child.

"Control..." Sax said, thinking over the concept as if it were entirely new to him. "Influence? If the elevator can be brought down by anyone who really wants to, then..." He trailed away, lost in his thoughts.

"Then what?" Ann prompted.

"Then it's controlled by all. Consensual existence. It's obvious?"

It was as if he were translating from a foreign language. This was not Sax; Ann could only shake her head, and try gently to explain. The elevator was the conduit for the metanationals to reach Mars, she told him. It was in the possession of the metanats now, and the revolutionaries had no means to kick their police forces off of it. Clearly the thing to do in such a situation was to bring it down. Warn people, give them a schedule, and then do it. "Loss of life would be minimal, and what there was would be pretty much the fault of anyone so stupid as to stay on the cable, or the equator."

Unfortunately Nadia heard this from the middle of the room, and she shook her head so violently that her cropped gray locks flew out like a clown's ruff. She was still very angry with Ann over Burroughs, for no good reason at all, and so Ann glared at her as she walked over to them and said curtly, "We need the elevator. It's our conduit to Terra just as much as it's their conduit to Mars."

"But we don't need a conduit to Terra," Ann said. "It's not a physical relationship for us, don't you see? I'm not saying we don't need to have an influence on Terra, I'm not an isolationist like Kasei or Coyote. I agree we need to try to work on them. But it's not a physical physical thing, don't you see? It's a matter of ideas, of talk, and perhaps a few emissaries. It's an thing, don't you see? It's a matter of ideas, of talk, and perhaps a few emissaries. It's an information exchange information exchange. At least it is when it's going right. It's when it gets into a physical thing- a resource exchange, or ma.s.s emigration, or police control- that's when the elevator becomes useful, even necessary. So if we took it down we would be saying, we will deal with you on our our terms, and not yours." terms, and not yours."

It was so obvious. But Nadia shook her head, at what Ann couldn't imagine.

Sax cleared his throat, and in his old periodic-table style said, "If we can bring it down, then in effect it is as if it already were down," blinking and everything. Like a ghost suddenly there at her side, the voice of the terraforming, the enemy she had lost to time and time again- Saxifrage Russell his own self, same as ever. And all she could do was make the same arguments she always had, the losing arguments, feeling the words' inadequacy right in her mouth.

Still she tried. "People act on what's there, Sax. The metanat directors and the UN and the governments will look up and see what's there, and act accordingly. If the cable's gone they just don't have the resources or the time to mess with us right now. If the cable's here, then they'll want us. They'll think, well, we could do it. And there'll be people screaming to try."

"They can always come. The cable is only a fuel saver."

"A fuel saver which makes ma.s.s transfers possible."

But now Sax was distracted, and turning back into a stranger. No one would pay attention to her for long enough. Nadia was going on about control of orbit and safe-conduct pa.s.ses and the like.

The strange Sax interrupted Nadia, having never heard her, and said, "We've promised to... help them out."

"By sending them more metals?" Ann said. "Do they really need those?"

"We could... take people. It might help."

Ann shook her head. "We could never take enough."

He frowned. Nadia saw they weren't listening to her, returned to the table. Sax and Ann fell into silence.

Always they argued. Neither conceded anything, no compromises were made, nothing was ever accomplished. They argued using the same words to mean different things, and scarcely even spoke to one another. Once it had been different, very long ago, when they had argued in the same language, and understood each other. But that had been so long ago she couldn't even remember when exactly it was. In Antarctica? Somewhere. But not on Mars.

"You know," Sax said in a conversational tone, again very un-Sax-like but in a different way, "it wasn't the Red militia that caused the Transitional Authority to evacuate Burroughs and the rest of the planet. If guerrillas had been the only factor then the Terrans would have gone after us, and they might well have succeeded. But those ma.s.s demonstrations in the tents made it clear that almost everyone on the planet was against them. That's what governments fear the most; ma.s.s protests in the cities. Hundreds of thousands of people going into the streets to reject the current system. That's what Nirgal means when he says political power comes out of the look in people's eye. And not out of the end of a gun."

"And so?" Ann said.

Sax gestured at the people in the warehouse. "They're all greens."

The others continued debating. Sax watched her like a bird.

Ann got up and walked out of the meeting, into the strangely unbusy streets of east Pavonis. Here and there militia bands held posts on street corners, keeping an eye to the south, toward Sheffield and the cable terminal. Happy, hopeful, serious young natives. There on one corner a group was in an animated discussion, and as Ann pa.s.sed them a young woman, her face utterly intent, flushed with pa.s.sionate conviction, cried out "You can't just do what you want!"

Ann walked on. As she walked she felt more and more uneasy, without knowing why. This is how people change- in little quantum jumps when struck by outer events- no intention, no plan. Someone says "the look in people's eye," and the phrase is suddenly conjoined with an image: a face glowing with pa.s.sionate conviction, another phrase: you can't just do what you want! And so it occurred to her (the look on that young woman's face!) that it was not just the cable's fate they were deciding- not just "should the cable come down," but "how do we decide things?" That was the critical postrevolutionary question, perhaps more important than any single issue being debated, even the fate of the cable. Up until now, most people in the underground had operated by a working method which said if we don't agree with you we will fight you if we don't agree with you we will fight you. That att.i.tude was what had gotten people into the underground in the first place, Ann included. And once used to that method, it was hard to get away from it. After all, they had just proved that it worked. And so there was the inclination to continue to use it. She felt that herself.

But political power... say it did come out of the look in people's eye. You could fight forever, but if people weren't behind you....

Ann continued to think about that as she drove down into Sheffield, having decided to skip the farce of the afternoon strategy session in east Pavonis. She wanted to have a look at the seat of the action.

It was curious how little seemed to have changed in the day-to-day life of Sheffield. People still went to work, ate in restaurants, talked on the gra.s.s of the parks, gathered in the public s.p.a.ces in this most crowded of tent towns. The shops and restaurants were jammed. Most businesses in Sheffield had belonged to the metanats, and now people read on their screens long arguments over what to do- what the employees' new relationship to their old owners should be- where they should buy their raw materials, where they should sell- whose regulations they ought to obey, whose taxes they ought to pay. All very confusing, as the screen debates and the nightly news vids and the wrist nets indicated.

The plaza devoted to the food market, however, looked as it always had. Most food was grown and distributed by co-ops; ag networks were in place, the greenhouses on Pavonis were still producing, and so in the market things ran as usual, goods paid for with UNTA dollars or with credit. Except once or twice Ann saw sellers in their ap.r.o.ns shouting red-faced at customers, who shouted right back, arguing over some point of government policy. As Ann pa.s.sed by one of these arguments, which were no different than those going on among the leaders in east Pavonis, the disputants all stopped and stared at her. She had been recognized. The vegetable seller said loudly, "If you Reds would lay off they would just go away!"

"Ah come on," someone retorted. "It isn't her doing it."

So true, Ann thought as she walked on.

A crowd stood waiting for a tram to come. The transport systems were still running, ready for autonomy. The tent itself was functioning, which was not something to be taken for granted, though clearly most people did; but every tent's operators had their task obvious before them. They mined their raw materials themselves, mostly out of the air; their solar collectors and nuclear reactors were all the power they needed. So the tents were physically fragile, but if left alone, they could very well become politically autonomous; there was no reason for them to be owned, no justification for it.