Mars Life (9 page)

The shuttlecraft accelerated at nearly a full g halfway to the Moon, then turned around and decelerated the rest of the way to the surface of the huge crater Alphonsus. The g force was enough to keep everyone’s stomach reasonably in place for the five-hour-long trip. They even had a meal in transit with no more difficulty than sipping the wine from covered containers. An animated video showed the passengers the details of the shuttlecraft’s trajectory and its highly efficient plasma propulsion system.

“It took the Apollo astronauts more than three days to make the trip from Earth to Moon,” explained the video’s voice track. “Today it takes only a few hours to travel the same distance.”

The thrust was enough to banish the woozy feeling of zero gee. Jamie felt almost normal by the time the shuttlecraft settled down on the dusty concrete landing pad at Armstrong Spaceport.

“Here on the Moon you are now in one-sixth of normal terrestrial gravity,” the safety video warned. “Please use extreme caution when walking or moving about. Weighted boots are available at the visitors’ center for a nominal rental fee.”

Neither Jamie nor Vijay bothered with the boots. They headed out of the shuttlecraft in the slow shuffling strides they both remembered from earlier visits to the Moon. Other passengers stumbled and staggered in the low gravity.

They rode the automated electric bus through the long tunnel that connected the spaceport to the city proper. It looked like an oversized golf cart, roofless, with ten rows of double seats. Jamie used his pocket phone to pull up a map of Selene and locate the hotel.

“This place has grown, even in the few years since I was here,” he said, showing Vijay the labyrinth of tunnels that made up the underground community.

“People come up here to retire,” she said. “The low gravity and all that.”

All that
meant escaping from Earth’s problems, Jamie knew: from the crime and poverty and the disastrous flooding and climate changes that racked the world.

“Pretty expensive retirement,” he muttered.

“The rich always run away,” Vijay said. “They use their money to insulate them from troubles.”

Is that what we’re doing? Jamie asked himself silently as the bus rolled smoothly, quietly through the shadowy tunnel. Running away to Mars? No, he immediately answered. We’re exploring a new world, we’re searching for new knowledge. Which is why the fundamentalists hate us.

“I don’t know if I could live in these tunnels,” Vijay said. “Not full time.”

“Aussies do,” Jamie said. “In Coober Pedy.”

“The opal mines,” she murmured. Then she added, “But they can go up on the surface any time they want.”

Jamie said, “There’s the Grand Plaza, under the dome. Plenty of trees and greenery up there. They even have a swimming pool.”

Nodding, Vijay murmured, “Still . . .”

By the time they reached their hotel room, guided by the electronic maps on the corridor walls, their two travel bags were already on the king-sized bed.

Jamie glanced at his wristwatch. “Hungry? It’s just about dinnertime.”

“Let’s unpack first,” she suggested.

It didn’t take long. Soon they were walking up the gently sloping ramp that led to the hotel’s restaurant. There were no stairs in Selene: too tricky for newcomers to the low lunar gravity.

“This is lovely,” Vijay said once they were seated at a small table. The restaurant was almost full, but the patrons’ conversations were quiet, muted. Soft music purred from the speakers set into the ceiling, something classical that sounded vaguely familiar to Jamie. Human waiters in dark jackets moved among the tables, together with flat-topped little robots that carried the food and drinks.

“Big day tomorrow.” Vijay smiled brightly, trying to make it sound cheerful.

“Right,” Jamie agreed. Inwardly he wondered what it was going to be like seeing Edith again.

Once they had ordered and the human waiter was walking away from their table, Jamie started to say, “Um, Vijay, you know that Edith and I. . .”

“I know,” she said, her dark eyes on him. “You told me years ago.”

“I haven’t seen her since then,” he muttered. “I wonder what she’s like now.”

“We’ll soon find out, won’t we, love?”

Like almost all of Selene, the home of Douglas Stavenger was in one of the underground corridors that made up most of the city. Up on the airless surface of the Moon, temperatures could swing from two hundred degrees above zero in sunlight to nearly two hundred below in shadow. Hard radiation from deep space bathed the barren lunar surface, and a constant infall of micrometeoroids peppered the ground, sandpapering the mountains over eons of time into tired, rounded humps.

Underground was safer, the deeper the better.

“I couldn’t live here,” Vijay said, frowning slightly as she and Jamie walked along the corridor, following the path mapped out on his pocket phone.

“You said that before,” Jamie reminded her.

“Yes, but now I’m certain of it.”

“You lived on Mars,” he said.

“But there we had a dome, we could move around, we could look outside. We could work outside—”

“In spacesuits. Or in an enclosed tractor.”

“But it wasn’t like this. . . . This is like being a mole or a wombat, living in tunnels.” She shuddered with distaste.

Eying a trio of coverall-clad people coming up the corridor toward them, Jamie half-whispered, “Better not let them know how much you don’t like it here.”

Vijay smiled at them as they approached. They noted Jamie’s western-cut shirt and jeans, the colorful scarf Vijay wore knotted at her throat over her poppy red blouse.

“Can we help you?” one of the men asked.

Jamie said, “I think we’re in the right corridor. Level four, corridor A?”

The man nodded, smiling. “Looking for Doug Stavenger’s place? It’s right down the corridor.” He pointed.

Jamie thanked them and they went their separate ways.

Vijay shook her head. “I don’t understand how they can live like this. It’s so completely . . . artificial.”

“Maybe we ought to ask Dex how he does it.”

“Dex lives in Boston.”

“He spends a lot of time in New York. That’s a completely artificial environment, too.”

“At least you can walk out in the open.”

“If you’re carrying a weapon,” Jamie countered.

At last they came to a plain door, no different from the others spaced along the corridor, except that it was marked STAVENGER.

“This is it,” Jamie said, taking in a breath. Edith’s in there, he thought. I wonder—

The door opened before he could find a buzzer to push. A solidly built young-looking man smiled at them. His face was handsome, his skin darker than Jamie’s, lighter than Vijay’s. Jamie realized that he was taller and wider of shoulder than himself, but his compact physique disguised his true size. He was wearing a soft velour pullover of deep blue and comfortable light gray slacks.

He smiled and put out his hand. “Welcome. I’m Douglas Stavenger.”

His grip was warm, strong without being overpowering.

“Jamie Waterman,” he introduced himself. “This is my wife, Vijay.”

“Come on in,” said Stavenger, with an ushering swoop of his arm.

They stepped into an unpretentious living room tastefully furnished with a pair of sofas facing each other, an oval metal coffee table between them. A pair of cushioned armchairs were placed on either end of the low table. The floor was carpeted, grass green. The pictures on the wall looked like actual paintings, not flat-screen images, mostly landscapes from Earth.

“Make yourselves comfortable,” Stavenger said, gesturing to the nearer sofa. “My wife will be—”

At that moment Edith entered from an open doorway on the far side of the living room. She seemed to light up the place, radiantly blond and smiling bright as a Dallas cheerleader, big wide eyes the color of Texas bluebonnets, wearing a short-skirted sleeveless frock of white patterned with golden yellow flowers.

Jamie felt suddenly tongue-tied.

“Hello, Jamie,” she said, striding straight to him.

“Edith,” he managed.

She bussed him on the cheek, then turned to Vijay. “You must be Varuna Jarita.”

“Vijay, please. It’s easier.”

“Vijay,” Edith acknowledged, taking both Vijay’s hands in her own. Dark and light, Jamie thought. They couldn’t look more different if they came from different worlds.

Then he realized, “My god, Edith, you haven’t changed a bit. You look as if you haven’t aged at all.”

Edith flicked a glance at her husband. “We’re aging, but a lot slower than most folks.”

“Nanomachines,” Vijay guessed.

“Yes.”

“You, too?” Jamie asked.

Edith smiled, almost demurely. “Me, too. Doug wants to keep me just as young as he is.”

“It’s a bit incredible, i’n’t it?” said Vijay.

“It certainly is.”

Stavenger gestured again to the twin sofas. “Sit. Relax. Would you like something to drink? Wine? Rocket juice?”

Jamie laughed. “No rocket juice, thanks. I’ve heard about that.”

“Some wine, then?” Edith suggested. “It’s new and kind of thin.”

“Our first vintage,” Stavenger explained.

Jamie and Vijay sat on one of the sofas, Edith on the facing one, while Stavenger ducked behind the counter that separated the living room from the kitchen.

“How do you like living here?” Vijay asked.

“It’s fine,” said Edith.

“Doesn’t it bother you to be underground all the time?”

“You didn’t grow up in west Texas, honey. This is a whole lot better, believe me. ‘Sides, we’ve got the Grand Plaza any time you want to see trees and some flowers.”

Jamie listened to them chatter and realized the two women were communicating on a level far beyond his male power of understanding. They’re sizing each other up, he thought; getting to know each other in some subliminal way.

Stavenger carried in a metal tray bearing a frosted bottle of wine and four stemmed glasses.

“We make these in our glass factory,” he said as he poured for them. “Bricks for construction, too.”

Jamie sipped at the wine. It was thin and slightly tart. They do a lot better in New Mexico, he said to himself.

“So,” Stavenger said, setting his glass down on the coffee table, “Edith tells me you need to talk to me.”

Jamie nodded. “We need your help.”

“ ‘We’ being the Mars program?”

“That’s right. You’ve heard about Washington zeroing Mars out of the federal budget.”

“That’s a blow, isn’t it?” Stavenger said softly.

“It’s not just Washington’s cutoff. It’s becoming increasingly hard to get private donors. Several of our biggest contributors have backed away from us.”

Vijay interjected, “They’re all under pressure to help alleviate the problems from the climate shift.”

“Those are serious problems,” Stavenger murmured.

“I know,” said Jamie. “But we mustn’t let them stop the exploration of Mars.”

“Why not?” Stavenger asked, with a smile.

“Why not?” Jamie snapped.

Raising his hands almost defensively, Stavenger said, “I’m playing devil’s advocate for the moment. Why shouldn’t the exploration of Mars be stopped? Aren’t the greenhouse disasters on Earth more important?”

Jamie glanced at Vijay, who nodded encouragement to him. If you want help from this man, he thought, you’ve got to be honest with him. You’ve got to bare your soul to him.

Taking a deep breath, Jamie began, “First, I don’t see it as an either-or situation. We can work on the greenhouse problems and explore Mars, too. They’re not mutually exclusive.”

“Everyone else seems to think they are,” said Stavenger.

Shaking his head, Jamie went on, “The greenhouse crisis is being used as an excuse to kill the Mars program.”

“Used as an excuse?” Edith asked, her blue eyes widening. “Who by?”

“The fundamentalists. The New Morality and their people in government. They don’t want us to learn more about the Martians. They want to bury everything we’ve discovered, forget about it forever. They’ve got control of the government, they’re scaring the big money into lining up with them. Everywhere I turn to, there’s this big invisible enemy all around me, stifling me, pushing me down. I feel like I’m drowning.”

Stavenger looked at his wife for a moment, then turned back to Jamie. “So you’re asking Selene to take up the funding burden for you?”

“I don’t think of it as a burden.”

“A poor choice of words. But you need financial help, don’t you?”

Jamie hesitated, then admitted, “Yes. It boils down to funding.”

“Always does,” Edith murmured.

Stavenger reached up and scratched at his dark brown hair. The gesture made him look suddenly boyish.

“Look,” he said. “Selene isn’t prosperous enough to spend billions on something that won’t bring us any return.”

“It won’t cost billions,” Jamie said.

“No?”

“Basically, what we need is help with transportation. I plan to ask the men and women on Mars to stretch out their stays an extra year, so we can cut our transportation costs just about in half.”

“Except for life-support supplies,” Vijay interjected.

Jamie suppressed an urge to scowl at her. “Supplies are a major part of it, yes.”

Stavenger asked, “How much of your life-support requirements do you generate from Mars itself?”

“We take oxygen and nitrogen from the atmosphere to make breathable air,” Jamie replied. “Water from the permafrost. We grow some of our own food hydroponically.”

Nodding, Stavenger said, “But you need protein, medical supplies, that sort of thing.”

Impressed with Stavenger’s understanding, Jamie said, “Right.”

“We’ve been there. We’ve worked damned hard to make Selene as self-sufficient as possible. We use aquaculture to raise protein: fish, shellfish, frogs.”

“Gives us a lot more protein for the energy inputs than a herd of cattle would,” Edith added.

“Or even rabbits and smaller land animals,” said Stavenger.

“You understand what we’re up against, then,” Jamie said.

“Yes,” Stavenger replied, “but the question that needs to be answered is still, what’s in it for Selene? We can’t afford to be philanthropic.”

“We’re talking about exploring a new world!” Jamie said, trying to keep his tone even, reasonable. “A world that once bore intelligent life.”

“I know that. But that exploration costs money. That’s why you’re here.”

“Yes,” Jamie admitted.

“I’m willing to do whatever I can to help you,” Stavenger said. “But I’ve got to bring something reasonable to our governing council.”

“Reasonable,” Jamie muttered darkly.

“If there was some hope of a payback, some kind of return on our investment—”

“Exploring Mars isn’t a profit-making operation,” Jamie snapped. “Science doesn’t give you a payback, not right away.”

“I know that, but still — “

“But still, you’re going to sit on your backside and let them close down the Mars program. The same people who tried to take over Moonbase, the same know-nothings and power brokers who’ve banned nanotechnology, who sat there for fucking
decades
and let this greenhouse disaster roll over them, you’re going to let them shut down the exploration of a new world without lifting a finger to help us!”

Jamie realized he was on his feet, standing in front of Stavenger, glowering down at him, while Vijay pulled at his sleeve.

I’ve got to apologize, Jamie told himself. I lost my temper. I shouldn’t antagonize this man. I shouldn’t be yelling at him.

But before Jamie could force a word past his lips, Stavenger smiled up at him.

“That’s what I needed to see,” Stavenger said, his voice mild, pleased. “I needed to see some passion. You’re entirely right: this isn’t a matter of profits and money. It’s part of the struggle between knowledge and ignorance, between those who want to push back the frontier and those who want to control people.”

Jamie stammered, “I didn’t mean to . . .”

Vijay tugged harder at his sleeve and Jamie sat down on the sofa beside her with a thump.

Edith was smiling too. “I told you it was in his blood,” she said to her husband.

“So I see,” Stavenger murmured. Looking across the low table at Jamie, he said, “The frontier is where new knowledge comes from, whether it’s the intellectual frontier of a laboratory or the physical frontier of an unexplored territory. Selene is a frontier nation.”

“So you’ll help us?” Jamie asked.

“Let’s see just how much I can coax out of the governing council.”

Jamie stared at him, openmouthed.

“Thank you,” Vijay said for him.

Stavenger’s smile thinned a little. “Just don’t expect a lot. Don’t hope for miracles.”