Blue Mars

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Blue

----------Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson

PART
ONE

              
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---Peacock
Mountain

               
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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 passage 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 Tenons up to
Sheffield, on Pavonis Mons. They still had to force the enemy out of Sheffield,
up the space 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 clustered in the open space 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 massif, 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 mass 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 Clay-borne 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, clustered in particular
around the foot of the space elevator, some thirty kilometers to the south of
them.

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 space 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 passed 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 space 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 space,
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 mass 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 space station at the top of the elevator;
the rest were jammed into the neighborhood surrounding the elevator’s massive
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 impasse. We’re allowing
all of them caught outside free passage 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 orbit?”

“Back to Earth. I don’t think they trust orbit anymore.”

He smiled at that. He had done a lot in space, aiding Sax’s
efforts and so on. Her son the spaceman, 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 assume 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, Manga-lavid, 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 space 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 space 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.”

“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.”