Red Mars (68 page)

“It won’t do any good,” Maya said darkly. But Nadia was supposed to be there as well, and so she came along.

All down the slope of Tharsis they rode in silence, watching the frosted rock fly by. At Nicosia the station opened for their train as if there was not even a question of refusing them. But Arkady and Nadia were not in the small crowd that greeted them; instead it was Alexander Zhalin. Back at the city manager’s offices, they called up Arkady on a vidlink; judging by the sunlight behind him, he was already many kilometers to the east. And Nadia, they said, had never been in Nicosia at all.

Arkady looked the same as ever, expansive and relaxed. “This is madness,” Frank said to him, furious that he had not gotten him in person. “You can’t hope to succeed.”

“But we can,” Arkady said. “We do.” His luxuriant red-and-white beard was an obvious revolutionary badge, as if he were the young Fidel about to enter Havana. “Of course it would be easier with your help, Frank. Think about it!”

Then before Frank could say more, someone off-screen got Arkady’s attention. A muttered conversation in Russian, and then Arkady faced him again. “Sorry, Frank,” he said. “I must attend to something. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

“Don’t you go!” Frank shouted, but the connection was gone. “God
damn
it!”

Nadia came on the line. She was in Burroughs, but had been linked into the exchange, such as it was. In contrast to Arkady she was taut, brusque, unhappy. “You can’t support what he’s doing!” Frank cried.

“No,” Nadia said grimly. “We aren’t talking. We still have this phone contact, which is how I knew where you were, but we don’t use it direct anymore. No point.”

“You can’t influence him?” Maya said.

“No.”

Frank could see that this was hard for Maya to believe, and it almost made him laugh: not influence a man, not manipulate him? What was Nadia’s problem?

That night they stayed at a dorm near the station. After supper Maya went back to the city manager’s office, to talk to Alexander and Dmitri and Elena. Frank wasn’t interested, it was a waste of time. Restlessly he walked the circumference of the old town, through alleys running against the tent wall, remembering that night so long ago. Only nine years, in fact, though it felt like a hundred. Nicosia looked little these days. The park at the western apex still had a good view of the whole, but a blackness filled things so that he could scarcely see.

In the sycamore grove, now mature, he passed a short man hurrying the other way. The man stopped and stared at Frank, who was under a street lamp. “Chalmers!” the man exclaimed.

Frank turned. The man had a thin face, long tangled dreadlocks, dark skin. No one he knew. But seeing him, he felt a chill. “Yes?” he snapped.

The man regarded him. He said, “You don’t know me, do you.”

“No I don’t. Who are you?”

The man’s grin was asymmetrical, as if his face had been cracked at the point of the jaw. Underneath the streetlight it looked warped, half-crazed.

“Who are you?” Frank said again.

The man raised a finger. “The last time we met, you were bringing down the town. Tonight it’s my turn. Ha!” He strode off laughing, each sharp “Ha!” higher than the last.

Back at the city manager’s, Maya clutched his arm. “I was worried, you shouldn’t be walking around alone in this town!”

“Shut up.” He went to a phone and called the physical plant. Everything was normal. He called the UNOMA police, and told them to mount an armed guard at the plant and the train station. He was still repeating the order to someone higher up the chain of command, and it seemed likely it would go all the way up to the new factor for final confirmation, when the screen went blank. There was a tremor underfoot, and every alarm bell in town went off at once. A concerted, adrenal
brinnnnng!

Then there was a sharp jolt. The doors all hissed shut; the building was sealing, meaning pressures outside had made a rapid drop. He and Maya ran to the window and looked out. The tent over Nicosia was down, in some places stretched over the tallest rooftops like saran wrap, in others blowing away on the wind. People down on the street were pounding on doors, running, collapsing, huddled in on themselves like the bodies in Pompeii. Frank wheeled away, his teeth pounding with hot pain.

Apparently the building had sealed successfully. Below all the noise Frank could hear or feel the hum of a generator. The video screens were blank, which had the effect of making it hard to believe the view out the window. Maya’s face was pink, but her manner calm. “The tent is down!”

“I know.”

“But what happened?”

He didn’t reply.

She was working away at the video screens. “Have you tried the radio yet?”

“No.”

“Well?” she cried, exasperated by his silence. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“Revolution,” he said.

It was Arkady’s alarm, set for four A.M. He got up and took a hot sponge bath. An image from the dream recurred to him. He had not slept much since the revolt’s beginning, just a few hours snatched here or there, and his alarm had awakened him from several deep-sleep dreams, the kind one normally did not remember. Almost all had been undistorted memories of his childhood, memories never once recalled before. It made him wonder just how much the memory held, and if its storage might not be immensely more powerful than its retrieval mechanism. Might one be able to remember every second of one’s life, but only in dreams that were always lost on waking? Might this be necessary, somehow? And if so, what would happen if people started living for two or three hundred years?

Janet Blyleven came by, looking worried. “They’ve blown up Nemesis. Roald has analyzed the video, and guesses they hit it with a bunch of hydrogen bombs.”

They went next door to Carr’s big city offices, where Arkady had spent most of the previous two weeks. Alex and Roald were inside watching the TV. Roald said, “Screen, replay tape one.”

An image flickered and held: black space, the thick net of stars, and midscreen a dark irregular asteroid, visible mostly as a patch of occluded stars. For a few moments the image held, and then a white light appeared on the side of the asteroid. The expansion and dispersal of the asteroid was immediate. “Fast work,” Arkady remarked.

“There’s another angle from a camera farther away.”

This clip showed the asteroid as oblong, and it was possible to make out the silver blisters of its mass driver. Then there was a white flash, and when the black sky returned the asteroid was gone; a shimmering of stars to the right of the screen indicated the passage of fragments, then they steadied and it was over. No fiery white cloud, no roar on the soundtrack; just a reporter’s tinny voice, chattering about the end of the Martian rioters’ doomsday threat, and the vindication of the concept of strategic defense. Although apparently the missiles had come from the Amex lunar base, launched by rail gun.

“I never did like the idea,” Arkady said. “It was mutual assured destruction all over again.”

Roald said, “But if there’s mutual assured destruction, and one side loses the capability . . .

“We haven’t lost the capability here, though. And they value what’s here as much as we do. So now we’re back to the Swiss defense.” Destroy what they wanted and take to the hills, for resistance forever. It was more to his liking.

“It’s weaker,” Roald said bluntly. He had voted with the majority, in favor of sending Nemesis on its course toward the Earth.

Arkady nodded. It couldn’t be denied that one term had been erased from the equation. But it wasn’t clear if the balance of power had changed or not. Nemesis had not been his idea; Mikhail Yangel had proposed it, and the group in the asteroids had carried it out on their own. Now a lot of them were dead, killed by the big explosion or by smaller ones out in the belt, while Nemesis itself had created the impression that the rebels would countenance mass destruction on Earth. A bad idea, as Arkady had pointed out.

But that was life in a revolution. No one was in control, no matter what people said. And for the most part it was better that way, especially here on Mars. Fighting had been severe in the first week, UNOMA and the transnationals had beefed up their security forces in the previous year. A lot of the big cities had been instantly seized by them, and it might have happened everywhere except that there turned out to be so many more rebel groups than they or anyone else had known about. Over sixty towns and stations had gotten on the net and declared independence, they had popped out of the labs and the hills and simply taken over. And now with Earth on the far side of the sun, and the nearest continuous shuttle destroyed, it was the security forces who were looking under siege, big cities or not.

A call came from the physical plant. They were having some trouble with the computers, and wanted Arkady to come have a look.

He left the city offices and walked across Menlo Park to the plant. It was just after sunrise, and most of Carr Crater was still in shadow. Only the west wall and the tall concrete buildings of the physical plant were in sunlight at this hour, their walls all yellow in the raw morning light, the pistes running up the crater wall like gold ribbons. In the shadowed streets the city was just waking. A lot of rebels had come in from other towns or the cratered highlands, and they slept on the park grass. People sat up, sleeping bags still draped over their legs, eyes puffy, hair wild. Night temperatures were being kept up, but it was still cool at dawn, and those out of their bags crouched around stoves, blowing into their hands and puttering with coffee pots and samovars, and checking to the west to see how close the line of sunlight had crept. When they saw Arkady they waved, and more than once he was stopped by people who wanted to get his opinion of the news, or give him advice. Arkady answered them all cheerfully. Again he felt that difference in the air, the sense that they were all in a new space together, everyone facing the same problems, everyone equal, everyone (seeing a heating coil glowing under a coffee pot) incandescent with the electricity of freedom.

He walked feeling lighter, chattering into his wristpad’s diary file as he went. “The park reminds me of what Orwell said about Barcelona in the hands of the anarchists— it is the euphoria of a new social contract, of a return to that child’s dream of fairness we all began with—”

His wristpad beeped and Phyllis’s face appeared on the tiny screen, which was annoying. “What do you want?” he asked.

“Nemesis is gone. We want you to surrender before any more damage is done. It’s simple now, Arkady. Surrender or die.”

He almost laughed. She was like the wicked witch in the Oz movie, appearing unexpectedly in his crystal ball.

“It’s no laughing matter!” she exclaimed. Suddenly he saw that she was scared.

“You know we had nothing to do with Nemesis,” he said. “It is irrelevant.”

“How can you be such a fool!” she cried.

“It is not foolishness. Listen, you tell your masters this— if they try to subdue the free cities here, we will destroy everything on Mars.” That was the Swiss defense.

“Do you think that matters?” She was white-lipped, her tiny image like a primitive fury mask.

“It matters. Look, Phyllis, I’m only the polar cap of this, there’s a massive underground lens that you can’t see. It’s really vast, and they’ve got the means to strike back at you if they want.”

She must have let her arm fall, because the image on his little screen swung wildly, then showed a floor. “You were always a fool,” her disembodied voice said. “Even back on the Ares.”

The connection went dead.

Arkady walked on, the city’s bustle no longer as exhilarating as it had been. If Phyllis were frightened . . .

At the physical plant they were busy running a malfunction search. A couple of hours before, oxygen levels in the city had begun to rise, and no warning lights had gone off. A tech had discovered it accidentally.

Half an hour’s work and they found it. A program had been substituted. They replaced it, but Tati Anokhin was not happy. “Look, that had to be sabotage, and there’s still more oxygen than even this accounts for. Look, it’s nearly forty percent out there right now.”

“No wonder everyone is in such a good mood this morning.”

“I’m not. Besides that mood thing is a myth.”

“Are you sure? Go through the programming again, and look at the encryption IDs, and see if there are any other substitutions hidden under this one.”

He headed back to the city offices. He was halfway there when there was a loud pop overhead. He looked up and saw a small hole in the dome. The air suddenly took on an iridescent shimmer, as if they were inside a great soap bubble. A bright flash and a loud boom knocked him to his feet. Struggling back up, he saw everything ignite simultaneously; people were burning like torches; and right before his eyes his arm caught fire.

Nadia Cherneshevsky discovered this while holed up in the city offices of Lasswitz, a tent town which had been punctured one night just after sunset. All the surviving occupants were now huddled in the city offices or the physical plant. For three days they had spent their time going out to try to repair the tent, and watching TV to try and figure out what was going on. But the Terran news packages were concerned with its own wars, which seemed to be coalescing into one. Only infrequently was there a brief report on the wrecked Martian towns. One said that many domed craters had been hit by missiles from over the horizon, usually in a sequence where oxygen or aerated fuels were introduced and then quickly followed by an ignitor that caused explosions of varying severity— from antipersonnel fires, to blasts that blew the domes off, to really big explosions that in effect re-excavated the crater. Antipersonnel oxygen fires appeared to be the most common; these left the infrastructure intact, for the most part.