Mars Life (4 page)
TITHONIUM CHASMA: THE DIG
Carleton would not allow Doreen to handle the explosives. Not that they were actually dangerous, but he would not take any chances. She might be just what she says she is, he told himself, a nanotech engineer with nothing better to do while she’s here on Mars. But she
might
be another plant by those psalm-singing sonsofbitches, he fumed inwardly as he planted the strips of plastique in a careful pattern across the bottom of his excavation. Who knows? She might be one of those fanatics who’d be willing to blow herself up just to destroy me. Like the old suicide bombers back in the Middle East, years ago.
might
be another plant by those psalm-singing sonsofbitches, he fumed inwardly as he planted the strips of plastique in a careful pattern across the bottom of his excavation. Who knows? She might be one of those fanatics who’d be willing to blow herself up just to destroy me. Like the old suicide bombers back in the Middle East, years ago.
Still, he was glad of her company. He talked to her as he put down the strips of plastic explosive, absently chatting away as if they were strolling along a campus path back on Earth.
“Everything we know in biology supports Darwin’s concept of evolution through natural selection,” he was saying. “Hell, biologists have even watched populations of fishes splitting into separate species, in lakes in Africa.”
“But so many people are against Darwin,” Doreen said, more to keep him talking than out of conviction, he thought. She was sitting up on the lip of the pit, her nanosuited legs dangling into the excavation.
“Know-nothing fundamentalists,” he grumbled as he worked. It was impossible to bend far enough inside the hard-shell suit to lay down the doughy strips. Carleton had to get down on his knees. As he worked he crawled along the rough base of the pit like an oversized infant encased inside a robot.
“I think they see Darwin as a challenge to their beliefs,” Doreen said.
“I think they don’t think at all,” he groused. “They just follow orders from their know-nothing ministers.”
“Now be fair,” Doreen countered. “If Darwin’s right and we humans are just another kind of animal, it destroys their belief that we’re special, that we were created by God separate and apart from all the animals.”
“Yeah, and given dominion over the Earth so we can slaughter all the other animals and chop down all the trees and just generally screw up the environment.”
“It destroys their belief that God sent his only son to redeem our souls,” Doreen said firmly. “It hits them where it hurts the most.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “It’s not about religion. It’s about politics. It’s about power. Their leaders use religion to keep their followers in line. When you’re told you’re doing God’s work you’re willing to do just about anything they tell you to.”
“But they really believe their religion.”
“Of course they do. That’s what makes them so ruthless. They think they’re on God’s side.”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
He looked up at her, from his kneeling position. “Is that what you believe?”
“It’s what they believe, Professor.”
“And you? What about you?”
She hesitated a long moment before answering, “I’m not certain of what I believe. I know that I don’t have all the answers, that’s for sure.”
“But you’re a Christian.”
“A Quaker.”
Surprised, he blurted, “A Quaker?”
“Society of Friends,” Doreen said.
“I never met a Quaker before,” Carleton admitted.
“There aren’t that many of us. We’ve only got four regulars at Selene.”
A Quaker, Carleton mused silently. William Penn was a Quaker. Philadelphia was founded by the Quakers. The University of Pennsylvania, too, if I remember right. But the university isn’t run by Quakers anymore. Hasn’t been for a long time.
He felt the old anger simmering inside him again. Squatting on the floor of the excavation, he craned his neck to see Doreen up on the lip of the pit. A Quaker. Could a Quaker be a Mata Hari? he asked himself. Not very likely, he answered. Or are you just thinking with your testicles again?
Finally he finished laying out the explosive strips and planting the thumb-sized detonators in them. Carleton laboriously slipped the climbing rig’s harness over the shoulders of his hard suit, then pressed the button on it that activated the winch. Through the thin Martian air the winch’s motor sounded like the faint whine of a mosquito.
Once he reached the lip of the excavation Doreen came over to help him out of the harness. Then he took her gloved hand and led her fifty paces from the rim of the pit.
“You’re going to set it off?” she asked.
“Got to call control, back at the base,” he said, pecking at the suit radio’s keypad on his left wrist. “The geologists want to know when I blast, so they don’t get their seismometer records screwed up.”
She watched him as he called the base and told the excursion director he was ready to fire the explosives.
“Hold on while I check with the rock jocks,” the controller’s cheerful young voice came through his helmet earphones.
Doreen started to ask, “Do they ever stop you from—”
“Dr. Carleton? You’re cleared to detonate at 11:15 precisely. It’s now 11:06:33.”
“Eleven-oh-six-thirty-three,” Carleton repeated, his eyes on the digital clock set into the wrist pad. “Check. I’ll blow at 11:15, on the tick.”
The explosion, when it came, disappointed Doreen. It wasn’t a ground-shaking blast: just a little
whump
followed by a cloud of dust that slowly wafted away from the pit.
whump
followed by a cloud of dust that slowly wafted away from the pit.
She walked beside Carleton to the edge of the excavation. Its floor was covered now with broken, shattered bits of rock.
“Now we start the day’s real work,” he said to her.
* * * *
It took hours to spade up the rubble, pack it into containers, and hoist it up to the surface. Carleton was impressed with Doreen’s willingness to work. And the fact that she could move so much more easily in her nanosuit than he could in his unwieldy hard shell. The strangely small sun climbed higher in the saffron sky. Temperature’s getting up to twenty below, Carleton surmised as they hauled rock shards to the sifter.
He felt perspiration trickling along his ribs and saw Doreen absently try to wipe her brow, only to bump her gloved hand against the spongy bubble of her inflated helmet.
“You should’ve worn a head band,” he told her. “Keeps the sweat out of your eyes.”
Blinking hard, she said, “I didn’t think I’d be sweating when it’s so cold.”
“The suits keep your body heat in.”
“Now you tell me.”
The sifter rattled away. Carleton stopped it to study the contents of the tray beneath it, running his gloved fingers through the dust, finding nothing more than grains of rusty sand. Then he and Doreen poured still another load of shattered rock and started the machine rattling again. Even in the gentle gravity of Mars his arms were starting to ache.
“So much of science is manual labor,” he said as they strained to lift another carton of rubble onto the sifter’s grid. “Just plain donkey work. Hours of it. Years of it. All for the chance of making a discovery.”
“It’s a lot easier in the nanolab back at Selene,” Doreen said, puffing slightly from exertion. “Nanomachines are teensy little things.”
He laughed. “And the Moon’s gravity is even lighter than Mars’s.”
“We should be using nanomachines here,” she said.
“Here? For what?”
“They could build bigger domes for us, pull out atoms of iron and other metals from the ground and build really strong domes, big as you want.”
Carleton felt impressed. “You could do that?”
“Sure,” she replied, her voice eager. “Back at Selene they build spacecraft out of carbon soot. Nanomachines turn the carbon into pure diamond, stronger and lighter than steel.”
“So you think we could build a bigger, safer base with nanobugs.”
She nodded brightly inside her helmet. She’s really good-looking, he thought. Not much of a figure but her face is pretty, with those big soulful gray-green eyes. Carleton smoothed the rubble over the grid and reached for the switch that would start the sifter working again.
“That’s a funny-looking piece of rock,” Doreen said, pointing to one of the shards on the grid.
Carleton grunted and picked up the odd-shaped rock in his gloved hand. It rested in his palm easily. He held it for a moment, then turned it over and brought it up almost touching his visor so he could look at it more closely.
He goggled at it. He actually felt his eyes bugging out, felt the breath gush out of him.
“Dr. Carleton?” Doreen said. “Carter? Are you okay?”
It took several tries before he could say, “It’s a funny-looking piece of rock, all right. It’s a vertebra! I’ll eat camel dung if it’s not a goddamned mother-loving vertebra!”
ALBUQUERQUE: UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO
Let’s put this in perspective,” Jamie said to Dex and the Navaho president. “It doesn’t have to mean the end of everything.”
“The hell it doesn’t,” Dex muttered.
“Most of our funding comes from the Foundation,” said the Navaho president. “The government’s contribution is important, I know, but we get most of our money from private donors, don’t we?”
Dex answered, “Private contributions have been tailing off. It’s harder and harder to get major donations; the big money people have been backing away from us, and now, with the goddamned feds pulling out of the program, it’ll be tougher than ever to get them to come through.”
The president said, “I know we’re not supposed to make a profit out of Mars, but my Council people have been making noises.”
“Noises?” Jamie asked.
“You know, questions. They’re wondering why we can’t get something out of the program.”
Dex started to say, “You’re running the world’s biggest conservation effort, and—”
“The biggest in two worlds,” the president corrected, with a sly smile.
“Three,” Dex immediately countered. “Don’t leave out the Moon.”
Jamie listened to them arguing mildly back and forth, remembering how Dex had originally come to Mars on the Second Expedition, bubbling with plans to make a tourist center of the red planet. Ostensibly a geologist, C. Dexter Trumball had insisted that if private donors such as his father were expected to finance the exploration of Mars they had to be allowed to make a profit out of it. He had his father’s vision of using Mars to make money. But once he saw the ancient cliff dwellings, once he realized that this seemingly barren planet had sustained intelligent life, Dex defied his father and helped Jamie turn legal stewardship of Mars to the Navaho nation.
A friendship had grown between the two men, a friendship that held strong even after Dex returned to Earth to face his furious father.
It was a supreme irony, granting control of the red planet to the red-skinned Navaho, who regarded the guardianship of Mars as a sacred trust and would allow only scientific exploration. The news media trumpeted the story while financial backers such as Darryl C. Trumball howled about betrayal and turned to their lawyers. The International Astronautical Authority upheld the Navaho claim, and so did the World Court—as long as at least one member of the Navaho nation actually lived on Mars. International law prohibited any nation or corporate entity from claiming ownership of a planet or even a pebble-sized asteroid, but anyone could claim exclusive
use
of a body in space if they were actually working on that body.
use
of a body in space if they were actually working on that body.
So the Navaho nation controlled Mars as long as one Navaho lived and worked on the planet. The scheme had succeeded for nearly twenty years. Mars was being explored by international teams of scientists. Tourism was limited to virtual reality simulations, where paying customers could experience a visit to Mars without leaving their living rooms on Earth, without disturbing the frigid desert sands of the red planet.
With a conscious effort, Jamie returned his attention to the meeting and the problems of the day.
“The VR tours are bringing in a steady income,” the Navaho president was saying, “especially when we open up a new territory to walk through.”
“So what’s the problem?” Jamie asked.
“The Council’s hoping for more income,” she replied, her normally stolid face frowning slightly. “Maybe a bigger percentage of the gross.”
“Christ, you’re already getting everything above our operating costs,” Dex Trumball snapped.
“Your operating costs include a pretty fat fee,” said the president.
“My Foundation people can’t work for free!”
The president sighed. “It’s just like the casinos: you’re making more money out of the VR tours than we are.”
“But you’re not doing anything,” Dex insisted. “You don’t have any costs at all. It’s all pure profit for you.”
Jamie jumped in before the president could reply. “Dex, listen: no matter how much money the VR tours bring in, the Diné will always need more.”
“And my Foundation’s supposed to be an endless source of bucks?”
“We have a lot of legal fees coming up,” the president pointed out. “Washington is making claims on reservation land. Squatters are moving in on us.”
Dex’s youthful face broke into a wicked grin. “We could offer the refugees land on Mars. Like the old Homestead Act, let ‘em settle—”
“No!” Jamie shouted.
Laughing, Dex replied, “I was wondering how long it’d take you to yell.”
“You’re not serious,” the Navaho president said.
“Not really,” Dex admitted. Then his expression turned crafty. “Although I bet we could build big domes, pump air into them, bake the oxides out of the soil and start growing crops.”
Scowling, Jamie said, “Don’t even joke about that, Dex.”
But Dex went on, “With the new fusion torch ships the transportation costs wouldn’t be so bad, I bet.”
“Dex—“
“I know, it’s just crazy enough for some politicians in Washington to go for it. Send the refugees to Mars! A trillion-dollar boondoggle.”
“It’s not funny,” Jamie insisted.
“Yeah,” Dex admitted. “I guess not. Wouldn’t work anyway. Even with the fusion rockets it’s too damned expensive to ship millions of people off-planet.”
“So can we get a better break on the revenue income?” the president asked, returning to her point.
“I don’t see how,” Dex replied immediately. “Besides, we’ve got a bigger problem now.”
“Bigger?” asked Jamie.
“With Washington backing out of the program, the Foundation’s going to have to carry the funding load pretty much alone.”
“But there’s the Europeans, the Chinese—”
“And the Russians, I know. They’ll all back away, you wait and see. Besides, what they’re putting into the pot now isn’t enough to lake up the slack.”
“So it’s up to the Foundation,” Jamie said.
“Yeah, but the donations are getting harder to come by. The big money’s going into reconstruction, restoring the electric power grid, new housing for the refugees. Everybody and his brother has their hands out. It’s endless.”
“And Mars is a luxury,” the Navaho president murmured.
“Worse than that,” said Dex. “The religious nuts want to close us down. They don’t want us finding anything else about the Martians. They don’t even want to think that there was another intelligent race on Mars.”
“The New Morality?”
“And the Holy Disciples in Europe and all the rest of them. They don’t like us finding anything that conflicts with their twelfth-century view of the world. They want to forget about Mars. They want everybody else to forget about Mars, as well.”
Jamie sank back in his desk chair. “So they’re putting pressure on you.”
“Not just me. On our donors, our backers. Spend your money here on Earth, they say. Help your fellow human beings instead of poking around on Mars.”
“That’s a strong argument,” said the Navaho president.
Searching for a ray of hope, Jamie said, “But the universities want to continue the exploration.”
“The universities are under pressure, too,” said Dex, with a shake of his head. “And now that the White House has skunked us, it’s going to be tougher than ever to raise new funds.”
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