Blue Mars Part 2

"I thought that wasn't the way to do it."

"It'll work."

"Kasei, I think we need to negotiate with the greens."

He shook his head, impatient with her, disgusted that she had lost her nerve when push came to shove. "After the cable is down we'll negotiate. Look Ann, I've gotta go. Stay out of the fall line."

"Kasei!"

But he was gone. No one listened to her- not her enemies, not her friends, not her family- though she would have to call Peter. She would have to try Kasei again. She needed to be there in person, to get his attention as she had Nadia's- yes, it had come to that: to get their attention she had to shout right in their faces.

The possibility of getting blocked around east Pavonis kept her going west from Lastflow, circling counterclockwise as she had the day before, to come on the Red force from its rear, no doubt the best approach anyway. It was about a 150-kilometer drive from Lastflow to the western edge of Sheffield, and as she sped around the summit, just outside the piste, she spent the time trying to call the various forces on the mountain, with no success. Explosive static marked the fight for Sheffield, and memories of '61 erupted with these brutal bursts of white noise, frightening her; she drove the rover as fast as it would go, keeping it on the piste's narrow outside ap.r.o.n to make the ride smoother and faster- a hundred kilometers per hour, then faster- racing, really, to try to stave off the disaster of a civil war- there was a terrible dreamlike quality to it. And especially in that it was too late, too late. In moments like these she was always too late. In the sky over the caldera, starred clouds appeared instantaneously- explosions, without a doubt missiles fired at the cable and shot down in midflight, in white puffs like incompetent fireworks, cl.u.s.tered over Sheffield and peaking in the region of the cable, but puffing into existence all over the vast summit, then drifting off east on the jet stream. Some of those rockets were getting nailed a long way from their target.

Looking up at the battle overhead she almost drove into the first tent of west Sheffield, which was already punctured. As the town had grown westward new tents had attached to the previous ones like lobes of pillow lava; now the construction moraines outside the latest tent were littered with bits of framework, like shards of gla.s.s, and the tent fabric was missing in the remaining soccer-ball shapes. Her rover bounced wildly over a mound of basalt rubble; she braked, drove slowly up to the wall. The vehicle lock doors were stuck shut. She put on her suit and helmet, ducked into the rover's own lock, left the car. Heart pounding hard, she walked up to the city wall and climbed over it into Sheffield.

The streets were deserted. Gla.s.s and bricks and bamboo shards and twisted magnesium beams lay scattered on the streetgra.s.s. At this elevation, tent failure caused flawed buildings to pop like balloons; windows gaped empty and dark, and here and there complete rectangles of unbroken windows lay scattered, like great clear shields. And there was a body, face frosted or dusted. There would be a lot of dead, people weren't used to thinking about decompression anymore, it was an old settlers' worry. But not today.

Ann kept walking east. "Look for Kasei or Dao or Marion or Peter," she said to her wrist again and again. But no one replied.

She followed a narrow street just inside the southern wall of the tent. Harsh sunlight, sharp-edged black shadows. Some buildings had held, their windows in place, their lights on inside. No one to be seen in them, of course. Ahead the cable was just visible, a black vertical stroke rising into the sky out of east Sheffield, like a geometric line become visible in their reality.

The Red emergency band was a signal transmitted in a rapidly varying wavelength, synchronized for everyone who had the current encryption. This system cut through some kinds of radio jamming very well; nevertheless Ann was surprised when a crow voice cawed from her wrist, "Ann, it's Dao. Up here."

He was actually in sight, waving at her from a doorway into a building's little emergency lock. He and a group of some twenty people were working with a trio of mobile rocket launchers out in the street. Ann ran over to them, ducked into the doorway beside Dao. "This has to stop!" she cried.

Dao looked surprised. "We've almost got the Socket."

"But what then?"

"Talk to Kasei about that. He's up ahead, going for Arsiaview."

One of their rockets whooshed away, its noise faint in the thin air. Dao was back at it. Ann ran forward up the street, keeping as close as she could to the buildings siding it. It was obviously dangerous, but at that moment she didn't care if she was killed or not, so she had no fear. Peter was somewhere in Sheffield, in command of the green revolutionaries who had been there from the beginning. These people had been efficient enough to keep the UNTA security forces trapped on the cable and up on Clarke, so they were by no means the hapless pacifistic young native street demonstrators that Kasei and Dao seemed to have a.s.sumed they were. Her spiritual children, mounting an attack on her only actual child, in complete confidence that they had her blessing. As once they had. But now- She struggled to keep running, her breath hard and ragged, the sweat beginning to flood through all over her skin. She hurried to the south tent wall, where she came on a little fleet of Red boulder cars, Turtle Rocks from the Acheron car manufactory. But no one inside them answered her calls, and when she looked closer she saw that their rock roofs were punctured by holes at their fronts, where the windshields would have been, underneath the rock overhang. Anyone inside them was dead. She ran on eastward, staying against the tent wall, heedless of debris underfoot, feeling a rising panic. She was aware that a single shot from anyone could kill her, but she had to find Kasei. She tried again over the wrist.

While she was at it, a call came in to her. It was Sax.

"It isn't logical to connect the fate of the elevator with terraforming goals," he was saying, as if he was speaking to more people than just her. "The cable could be tethered to quite a cold planet."

It was the usual Sax, the all-too-Sax: but then he must have noticed she was on, because he stared owlishly into his wrist's little camera and said, "Listen Ann, we can take history by the arm and break it-make it. Make it new."

Her old Sax would never have said that. Nor chattered on at her, clearly distraught, pleading, visibly nerve-racked; one of the most frightening sights she had ever seen, actually: "They love you, Ann. It's that that can save us. Emotional histories are the true histories. Watersheds of desire and devolution-devotion. You're the- the personification of certain values- for the natives. You can't escape that. You have to act with that. I did it in Da Vinci, and it proved- helpful. Now it's your turn. You must. You must- Ann- just this once you must join us all. Hang together or hang separately. Use your iconic value."

So strange to hear such stuff from Saxifrage Russell. But then he shifted again, he seemed to pull himself together. "...logical procedure is to establish some kind of equation for conflicting interests." Just like his old self.

Then there was a beep from her wrist and she cut Sax off, and answered the incoming call. It was Peter, there on the Red coded frequency, a black expression on his face that she had never seen before.

"Ann!" He stared intently at his own wristpad. "Listen, Mother- I want you to stop these people!"

"Don't you Mother me," she snapped. "I'm trying. Can you tell me where they are?"

"I sure as h.e.l.l can. They've just broken into the Arsiaview tent. Moving through- it looks like they're trying to come up on the Socket from the south." Grimly he took a message from someone off-camera. "Right." He looked back at her. "Ann, can I patch you into Hastings up on Clarke? If you tell him you're trying to stop the Red attack, then he may believe that it's only a few extremists, and stay out of it. He's going to do what he has to to keep the cable up, and I'm afraid he's about to kill us all."

"I'll talk to him."

And there he was, a face from the deep past, a time lost to Ann she would have said; and yet he was instantly familiar, a thin-faced man, harried, angry, on the edge of snapping. Could anyone have sustained such enormous pressures for the past hundred years? No. It was just that kind of time, come back again.

"I'm Ann Clayborne," she said, and as his face twisted even further, she added, "I want you to know that the fighting going on down here does not represent Red party policy."

Her stomach clamped as she said this, and she tasted chyme at the back of her throat. But she went on: "It's the work of a splinter group, called the Kakaze. They're the ones who broke the Burroughs dike. We're trying to shut them down, and expect to succeed by the end of the day."

It was the most awful string of lies she had ever said. She felt like Frank Chalmers had come down and taken over her mouth, she couldn't stand the sensation of such words on her tongue. She cut the connection before her face betrayed what falsehoods she was vomiting. Hastings disappeared without having said a word, and his face was replaced by Peter's, who did not know she was back on-line; she could hear him but his wristpad was facing a wall, "If they don't stop on their own we'll have to do it ourselves, or else UNTA will and it'll all go to h.e.l.l. Get everything ready for a counterattack, I'll give the word."

"Peter!" she said without thinking.

The picture on the little screen swung around, came onto his face.

"You deal with Hastings," she choked out, barely able to look at him, traitor that he was. "I'm going for Kasei."

Arsiaview was the southernmost tent, filled now with smoke, which snaked overhead in long amorphous lines that revealed the tent's ventilation patterns. Alarms were ringing everywhere, loud in the still-thick air, and shards of clear framework plastic were scattered on the green gra.s.s of the street. Ann stumbled past a body curled just like the figures modeled in ash in Pompeii. Arsiaview was narrow but long, and it was not obvious where she should go. The whoosh of rocket launchers led her eastward toward the Socket, the magnet of the madness- like a monopole, discharging Earth's insanity onto them.

There might be a plan revealed here; the cable's defenses seemed to be capable of handling the Reds' lightweight missiles, but if the attackers thoroughly destroyed Sheffield and the Socket, then there would be nothing for UNTA to come down to, and so it would not matter if the cable remained swinging overhead. It was a plan that mirrored the one used to deal with Burroughs.

But it was a bad plan. Burroughs was down in the lowlands, where there was an atmosphere, where people could live outside, at least for a while. Sheffield was high, and so they were back in the past, back in '61 when a broken tent meant the end for everyone in it exposed to the elements. At the same time most of Sheffield was underground, in many stacked floors against the wall of the caldera. Undoubtedly most of the population had retreated down there, and if the fighting tried to follow them it would be impossible, a nightmare. But up on the surface where fighting was possible, people were exposed to fire from the cable above. No, it wouldn't work. It wasn't even possible to see what was happening. There were more explosions near the Socket, static over the intercom, isolated words as the receiver caught bits of other coded frequencies cycling through: "- taken Arsiaview pkkkkkk pkkkkkk-" "We need the AI back but I'd say x-axis three two two, y-axis eightpkkkkk-"

Then another barrage of missiles must have been launched at the cable, for overhead Ann caught sight of an ascending line of brilliant explosions of light, no sound to them at all; but after that, big black fragments rained down on the tents around her, crashing through the invisible fabrics or smashing onto the invisible framework, then falling the last distance onto the buildings like the dropped ma.s.ses of wrecked vehicles, loud despite the thin air and the intervening tents, the ground vibrating and jerking under her feet. It went on for minutes, with the fragments falling farther outward all the time, and any second in all those minutes could have brought death down on her. She stood looking up at the dark sky, and waited it out.

Things stopped falling. She had been holding her breath, and she breathed. Peter had the Red code, and so she called his number and tapped in a patch attempt, heard only static. But as she was turning down the volume in her earphones, she caught some garbled half phrases- Peter, describing Red movements to green forces, or perhaps even to UNTA. Who could then fire rockets from the cable defense systems down onto them. Yes, that was Peter's voice, bits of it all cut with static. Calling the shots. Then it was only static.

At the base of the elevator brief flashes of explosive light transformed the lower part of the cable from black to silver, then back to black again. Every alarm inside Arsiaview began ringing or howling. All the smoke whipped away toward the east end of the tent. Ann got into a north-south alley and leaned back against the east wall of a building, flat against concrete. No windows on the alley. Booms, crashes, wind. Then the silence of near airlessness.

She got up and wandered through the tent. Where did one go when people were being killed? Find your friends if you can. If you can tell who they are.

She collected herself and continued looking for Kasei's group, going to where Dao had said they would be, and then trying to think where they would go next. Outside the city was a possibility; but having come inside they might try for the next tent to the east, try to take them one by one, decompress them, force everyone below and then move on. She stayed on the street paralleling the tent wall, jogging along as fast as she could. She was in good shape but this was ridiculous, she couldn't catch her breath, and she was soaking the inside of her suit with sweat. The street was deserted, eerily silent and still, so that it was hard to believe she was in the middle of a battle, and impossible to believe she would ever find the group for which she was looking.

But there they were. Up ahead, in the streets around one of the triangular parks- figures in helmets and suits, carrying automatic weapons and mobile missile launchers, firing at unseen opponents in a building fronted with chert. The red circles on their arms, Reds- A blinding flash and she was knocked down. Her ears roared. She was at the foot of a building, pressed against its polished stone side. Jaspilite: red jasper and iron oxide, in alternating bands. Pretty. Her back and bottom and shoulder hurt, and her elbow. But nothing was agonizing. She could move. She crawled around, looked back to the triangle park. Things were burning in the wind, the flames little oxygen-starved orange spurts, going out already. The figures there were cast about like broken dolls, limbs akimbo, in positions no bones could hold. She got up and ran to the nearest knot of them, drawn by a familiar gray-haired head that had come free of its helmet. That was Kasei, only son of John Boone and Hiroko Ai, one side of his jaw b.l.o.o.d.y, his eyes open and sightless. He had taken her too seriously. And his opponents not seriously enough. His pink stone eyetooth lay there exposed by his wound, and seeing it Ann choked and turned away. The waste. All three of them dead now.

She turned back and crouched, unclipped Kasei's wrist-pad. It was likely that he had a direct access band to the Kakaze, and when she was back in the shelter of an obsidian building marred by great white shatterstars, she tapped in the general call code, and said, "This is Ann Clayborne, calling all Reds. All Reds. Listen, this is Ann Clayborne. The attack on Sheffield has failed. Kasei is dead, along with a lot of others. More attacks here won't work. They'll cause the full UNTA security force to come back down onto the planet again." She wanted to say how stupid the plan had been in the first place, but she choked back the words. "Those of you who can, get off the mountain. Everyone in Sheffield, get back to the west and get out of the city, and off the mountain. This is Ann Clayborne."

Several acknowledgments came in, and she half listened to them as she walked west, back through Arsiaview toward her rover. She made no attempt to hide; if she was killed she was killed, but now she didn't believe it would happen; she walked under the wings of some dark covering angel, who kept her from death no matter what happened, forcing her to witness the deaths of all the people she knew and all the planet she loved. Her fate. Yes; there was Dao and his crew, all dead right where she had left them, lying in pools of their own blood. She must have just missed it.

And there, down a broad boulevard with a line of linden trees in its center, was another knot of bodies- not Reds- they wore green headbands, and one of them looked like Peter, it was his back- she walked over weak-kneed, under a compulsion, as in a nightmare, and stood over the body and finally circled it. But it was not Peter. Some tall young native with shoulders like Peter's, poor thing. A man who would have lived a thousand years.

She moved on carelessly. She came to her little rover without incident, got in and drove to the train terminal at the west end of Sheffield. There a piste ran down the south slope of Pavonis, into the saddle between Pavonis and Arsia. Seeing it she conceived a plan, very simple and basic, but workable because of that. She got on the Kakaze band and made her recommendations as though they were orders. Run away, disappear. Go down into South Saddle, then around Arsia on the western slope above the snowline, there to slip into the upper end of Aganippe Fossa, a long straight canyon that contained a hidden Red refuge, a cliff dwelling in the northern wall. There they could hide and hide and start another long underground campaign, against the new masters of the planet. UNOMA, UNTA, metanat, Dorsa Brevia- they were all green.

She tried calling Coyote, and was somewhat surprised when he answered. He was somewhere in Sheffield as well, she could tell; lucky to be alive no doubt, a bitter furious expression on his cracked face.

Ann told him her plan; he nodded.

"After a time they'll need to get farther away," he said.

Ann couldn't help it: "It was stupid to attack the cable!"

"I know," Coyote said wearily.

"Didn't you try to talk them out of it?"

"I did." His expression grew blacker. "Kasei's dead?"

"Yes."

Coyote's face twisted with grief. "Ah, G.o.d. Those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds."

Ann had nothing to say. She had not known Kasei well, or liked him much. Coyote on the other hand had known him from birth, back in Hiroko's hidden colony, and from boyhood had taken him along on his furtive expeditions all over Mars. Now tears coursed down the deep wrinkles on Coyote's cheeks, and Ann clenched her teeth.

"Can you get them down to Aganippe?" she asked. "I'll stay and deal with the people in east Pavonis."

Coyote nodded. "I'll get them down as fast as I can. Meet at west station."

"I'll tell them that."

"The greens will be mad at you."

"f.u.c.k the greens."

Some part of the Kakaze snuck into the west terminal of Sheffield, in the light of a smoky dull sunset: small groups wearing blackened dirty walkers, their faces white and frightened, angry, disoriented, in shock. Wasted. Eventually there were three or four hundred of them, sharing the day's bad news. When Coyote slipped in the back, Ann rose and spoke in a voice just loud enough to carry to all of them, aware as she never had been in her life of her position as the first Red; of what that meant, now. These people had taken her seriously and here they were, beaten and lucky to be alive, with dead friends everywhere in the town east of them.

"A direct a.s.sault was a bad idea," she said, unable to help herself. "It worked in Burroughs, but that was a different kind of situation. Here it failed. People who might have lived a thousand years are dead. The cable wasn't worth that. We're going to go into hiding and wait for our next chance, our next real chance."

There were hoa.r.s.e objections to this, angry shouts: "No! No! Never! Bring down the cable!"

Ann waited them out. Finally she raised a hand, and slowly they went silent again.

"It could backfire all too easily if we fight the greens now. It could give the metanats an excuse to come in again. That would be far worse than dealing with a native government. With Martians we can at least talk. The environmental part of the Dorsa Brevia agreement gives us some leverage. We'll just have to keep working as best we can. Start somewhere else. Do you understand?"

This morning they wouldn't have. Now they still didn't want to. She waited out the protesting voices, stared them down. The intense, cross-eyed glare of Ann Clayborne.... A lot of them had joined the fight because of her, back in the days when the enemy was the enemy, and the underground an actual working alliance, loose and fractured but with all its elements more or less on the same side....

They bowed their heads, reluctantly accepting that if Clayborne was against them, their moral leadership was gone. And without that- without Kasei, without Dao- with the bulk of the natives green, and firmly behind the leadership of Nirgal and Jackie, and Peter the traitor....

"Coyote will get you off Tharsis," Ann said, feeling sick. She left the room, walked through the terminal and out the lock, back into her rover. Kasei's wristpad lay on the car's dashboard, and she threw it across the compartment, sobbed. She sat in the driver's seat and composed herself, and then started the car and went looking for Nadia and Sax and all the rest.

Eventually she found herself back in east Pavonis, and there they were, all still in the warehouse complex; when she walked in the door they stared at her as if the attack on the cable had been her idea, as if she was personally responsible for everything bad that had happened, both on that day and throughout the revolution- just as they had stared at her after Burroughs, in fact. Peter was actually there, the traitor, and she veered away from him, and ignored the rest, or tried to, Irishka frightened, Jackie red-eyed and furious, her father killed this day after all, and though she was in Peter's camp and so partly responsible for the crushing response to the Red offensive, you could see with one look at her that someone would pay- but Ann ignored all that, and walked across the room to Sax- who was in his nook in the far corner of the big central room, sitting before a screen reading long columns of figures, muttering things to his AI. Ann waved a hand between his face and his screen and he looked up, startled.

Strangely, he was the only one of the whole crowd who did not appear to blame her. Indeed he regarded her with his head tilted to the side, with a birdlike curiosity that almost resembled sympathy.

"Bad news about Kasei," he said. "Kasei and all the rest. I'm glad that you and Desmond survived."

She ignored that, and told him in a rapid undertone where the Reds were going, and what she had told them to do. "I think I can keep them from trying any more direct attacks on the cable," she said. "And from most acts of violence, at least in the short term."

"Good," Sax said.

"But I want something for it," she said. "I want it and if I don't get it, I'll set them on you forever."

"The soletta?" Sax asked.

She stared at him. He must have listened to her more often than she had thought. "Yes."

His eyebrows came together as he thought it over. "It could cause a kind of ice age," he said.

"Good."

He stared at her as he thought about it. She could see him doing it, in quick flashes or bursts: ice age- thinner atmosphere- terraforming slowed- new ecosystems destroyed- perhaps compensate- greenhouse gases. And so on and so forth. It was almost funny how she could read this stranger's face, this hated brother looking for a way out. He would look and look, but heat was the main driver of terraforming, and with the huge orbiting array of mirrors in the soletta gone, they would be at least restricted to Mars's normal level of sunlight, thus slowed to a more "natural" pace. It was possible that the inherent stability of that approach even appealed to Sax's conservatism, such as it was.

"Okay," he said.

"You can speak for these people?" she said, waving disdainfully at the crowd behind them, as if all her oldest companions were not among them, as if they were UNTA technocrats or metanat functionaries....

"No," he said. "I only speak for me. But I can get rid of the soletta."

"You'd do it against their wishes?"

He frowned. "I think I can talk them into it. If not, I know I can talk the Da Vinci team into it. They like challenges."

"Okay."

It was the best she could get from him, after all. She straightened up, still nonplussed. She hadn't expected him to agree. And now that he had, she discovered that she was still angry, still sick at heart. This concession- now that she had it, it meant nothing. They would figure out other ways to heat things. Sax would make his argument using that point, no doubt. Give the soletta to Ann, he would say, as a way of buying off the Reds. Then forge on.

She walked out of the big room without a glance at the others. Out of the warehouses to her rover.

For a while she drove blindly, without any sense of where she was going. Just get away, just escape. Thus by accident she headed westward, and in short order she had to stop or run over the rim's edge.

Abruptly she braked the car.

In a daze she looked out the windshield. Bitter taste in her mouth, guts all knotted, every muscle tense and aching. The great encircling rim of the caldera was smoking at several points, chiefly from Sheffield and Lastflow, but also from a dozen other places as well. No sight of the cable over Sheffield- but it was still there, marked by a concentration of smoke around its base, lofting east on the thin hard wind. Another peak banner, blown on the endless jet stream. Time was a wind sweeping them away. The plumes of smoke marred the dark sky, obscuring some of the many stars that shone in the hour before sunset. It looked like the old volcano was waking again, rousing from its long dormancy and preparing to erupt. Through the thin smoke the sun was a dark red glowing ball, looking much like an early molten planet must have looked, its color staining the shreds of smoke maroon and rust and crimson. Red Mars.

But red Mars was gone, and gone for good. Soletta or not, ice age or not, the biosphere would grow and spread until it covered everything, with an ocean in the north, and lakes in the south, and streams, forests, prairies, cities and roads, oh she saw it all; white clouds raining mud on the ancient highlands while the uncaring ma.s.ses built their cities as fast as they could, the long run-out of civilization burying her world.

Part Two