Red Mars (37 page)

“But who’s to say that with that first step done, you won’t want more?”

“Maybe some will. But I for one will try to stop them. I will! I may not be on your side, but I see your point. And when you fly over the highlands like I did today, you can’t help but love it. People may try to change the planet, but all the while the planet will be changing them too. A sense of place, an aesthetics of landscape, all those things change with time. You know the people who first saw the Grand Canyon thought it was ugly as hell because it wasn’t like the Alps. It took them a long time to see its beauty.”

“They drowned most of it anyway,” Ann said blackly.

“Yeah yeah. But who knows what our kids will think is beautiful? It’s sure to be based on what they know, and this place will be the only place they know. So we terraform the planet; but the planet areoforms us.”

“Areoforming,” Ann said, and a rare little smile flashed over her face. Seeing it John felt his face flush; he hadn’t seen her smile like that in years, and he loved Ann, he loved to see her smile.

“I like that word,” she said now. She pointed a finger at him: “But I’ll hold you to it, John Boone! I’ll remember what you’ve said tonight!”

“Me too,” he said.

The rest of the evening was more relaxed. And the next day Simon saw him down to the airstrip, to the rover he was going to drive northward, and Simon, who usually would have seen him off with a smile and a handshake, at most a “nice to see you,” suddenly said to him, “I really appreciate what you said last night. I think it really cheered her up. Especially what you said about kids. She’s pregnant, you see.”

“What?” John shook his head. “She didn’t tell me. Are you the, the father?”

“Yeah.” Simon grinned.

“How old is she now, sixty?”

“Yeah. It’s stretching things a bit, so to speak, but it’s been done before. They took an egg frozen about fifteen years ago, fertilized it and planted it in her. We’ll see how it goes. They say Hiroko stays pregnant all the time these days, just keeps popping them like an incubator, same C section over and over.”

“They say a lot of things about Hiroko, but it’s all just stories.”

“Well, but we heard this from someone who supposedly knows.”

“The coyote?” John said sharply.

Simon raised his eyebrows. “I’m surprised she told you about him.”

John grunted, obscurely annoyed. No doubt his fame meant he missed out on a lot of gossip. “It’s good that she did. Well, anyway—” He extended his right hand and they shook, hooking their fingers in the stiff clasp that had developed in the old space days. “Congratulations. Take care of her.”

Simon shrugged. “You know Ann. She does what she wants.”

S
o Boone drove north from Argyre for three days, enjoying the countryside and the solitude, and spending a few hours each afternoon ransacking the planetary records to track people’s movement, looking for correlations with the sabotage incidents. Early on the fourth morning he reached the Marineris canyons, which were some 1,500 kilometers north of Argyre. He ran into a north-south transponder road, and followed it up a short rise to the southern rim of Melas Chasma, and got out of the rover to have a proper look.

He had never been to this part of the great canyon system; before the completion of the Marineris Transverse Highway it had been extremely hard to get to. It was dramatic, no doubt about it; the Melas cliff dropped a full 3,000 meters from rim to canyon floor, so that the rim had a kind of glider’s view north. The other wall of the canyon was just visible out there, its rim peeking over the horizon; and between the two cliffs lay the spacious expanse of Melas Chasma, the heart of the whole Marineris complex. He could just make out the gaps in distant cliffs that marked the entrances to other canyons: Ius Chasma to the west, Candor to the north, Coprates to the east.

John walked the broken rim for more than an hour, pulling his helmet’s binocular lenses down over his faceplate for long periods of time, taking in as much as he could of the greatest canyon on Mars, feeling the euphoria of red land. He threw rocks over the side and watched them disappear, he talked to himself and sang, he hopped on his toes in a clumsy dance. Then he got back in his rover, refreshed, and drove a short distance along the rim, to the start of the cliff road.

Here the Transverse Highway became a single concrete lane, and switchbacked down the spine of an enormous rock ramp that extended down from the south rim to the canyon floor. This odd feature, called the Geneva Spur, pointed north almost perpendicularly from the cliff, straight toward Candor Chasma; it was so perfectly placed for their purposes that with the road on it, it looked like a ramp that the road-builders had constructed.

It was a steep spur, however, and the road had been forced to switchback all the way down, to keep the grade within reason. It was all visible from above, a thousand switchbacks snaking down the spine, looking like yellow thread stitched down a bump in a stained orange carpet.

Boone drove down this marvel carefully, turning the rover’s steering wheel left then right then left then right, time after time until he actually had to stop to rest his arms, and give himself a chance to look back and up at the southern wall behind him; it was steep indeed, fluted by a fractal pattern of deeply eroded ravines. Then it was off again for another half hour’s drive, hairpins left and right, again and again, until finally the road extended straight down the top of the flattening spur, which eventually spread out and merged into the canyon floor. And down there was a little cluster of vehicles.

It turned out to be the Swiss team that had just finished building the road, and he ended up spending the night with them. They were a group of about eighty: mostly young, mostly married, speaking German and Italian and French and, for his benefit, English in several different accents. They had kids with them, and cats, and a portable greenhouse thick with herbs and garden vegetables. Soon they would be off like gypsies, in a caravan made up mostly of their earthmoving vehicles, traveling up to the west end of the canyon, to thread a road through Noctis Labyrinthus and onto the east flank of Tharsis. After that there would be other roads; perhaps one over the Tharsis Bulge between Arsia Mons and Pavonis Mons, perhaps one north to Echus Overlook. They weren’t sure yet, and Boone got the impression they didn’t really care; they planned to spend the rest of their lives traveling around building roads, so it didn’t much matter to them where they went next. Road gypsies forever.

They made sure all their kids shook John’s hand, and after dinner he gave a short talk, rambling in his usual way about their new life on Mars. “When I see you people out here it makes me really happy because it’s part of a new pattern to life, we’ve got the chance to create a new society out here, everything’s changing on the technical level and the social level might as well follow. I’m not exactly sure what the new society should be or should look like, that’s the hard part after all, but I know that it should be done, and I think you and all the other small groups out on the surface are figuring it out on an empirical basis. And seeing you helps me to think about it.” Which it did, though he was never much at doing it on his feet; so he just slithered along a bit more in his free associational way, plucking whatever stuck out of the bag of his thoughts. And their eyes shone in the lamplight as they listened to him.

Later he sat with a few of them in a circle around a single lit lamp, and they stayed up through the night talking. The young Swiss asked him questions about his first trip, and about the first years in Underhill, both of which obviously had mythic dimensions for them, and he told them the real story, sort of, and made them laugh a lot; and asked them questions about Switzerland, how it worked, what they thought of it, why they were here rather than there. A blond woman laughed when he asked that. “Do you know about the Böögen?” she said, and he shook his head. “He’s part of our Christmas. Sami Claus comes to all the houses one by one, you see, and he has an assistant, the Böögen, who wears a cloak and a hood and carries a big bag. Sami Claus asks the parents how the children have been that year, and the parents show him the ledger, the record you know. And if the children have been good, Sami Claus gives them presents. But if the parents say the children have been bad, the Böögen sweeps them up in his bag and carries them away, and they’re never seen again.”

“What!” John cried.

“That is what they tell you. That is Switzerland. And that is why I am here on Mars.”

“The Böögen carried you here?”

They laughed, the woman too. “Yes. I was always bad.” She grew more serious. “But we will have no Böögen here.”

They asked him what he thought of the debate between the reds and the greens, and he shrugged and summarized what he could of Ann and Sax’s positions.

“I don’t think they are either right,” one of them said. His name was Jürgen and he was one of their leaders, an engineer who seemed some kind of cross between a burgermeister and a gypsy king, dark-haired and sharp-faced and serious. “Both sides say they are in favor of nature, of course. One has to say this. The reds say that the Mars that is already here is nature. But it is not nature, because it is dead. It is only rock. The greens tell this, and say they will bring nature to Mars with their terraforming. But that is not nature either, that is only culture. A garden, you know. An artwork. So neither way gets nature. There isn’t such a thing as nature possible on Mars.”

“Interesting!” John said. “I’ll have to tell Ann that, and see what she says. But. . . .” He thought about it. “Then what do you call this? What do you call what you’re doing?”

Jürgen shrugged, grinned. “We don’t call it anything. It is just Mars.”

Perhaps that was being Swiss, John thought. He had been meeting them more and more in his travels, and they all seemed like that. Do things, and don’t worry too much about theory. Whatever seemed right.

Later still, after they had drunk another few bottles of wine, he asked them if they had ever heard of the coyote. They laughed and one said, “He’s the one who came here before you, right?” They laughed again at his expression. “A story only,” one explained. “Like the canals, or Big Man. Or Sami Claus.”

Driving north the next day across Melas Chasma, John wished (as he had before) that everyone on the planet was Swiss, or at least like the Swiss. Or more like the Swiss in certain ways, anyway. Their love of country seemed to be expressed by making a certain kind of life: rational, just, prosperous, scientific. They would work for that life anywhere, because to them it was the life that mattered, not a flag or a creed or a set of words, nor even that small rocky patch of land they owned on Earth. The Swiss road-building crew back there was Martian already, having brought the life and left the baggage behind.

He sighed, and ate lunch as his rover rolled past transponders north. It was not that simple, of course. The road-building crew were traveling Swiss, gypsies of a sort, the kind of Swiss who spent most of their life out of Switzerland. There were a lot of those, but they were selected out by that choice, they were different. The Swiss who stayed at home were pretty intense about Swissness; still armed to the teeth, still willing to be the bagman for whoever brought them cash; still not a member of the U.N. Although that fact, given the power UNOMA currently had over the local situation, made them even more interesting to John, as a model. That ability to be part of the world but to stand away from it at the same time; to use it, but hold it off; to be small but in control, to be armed to the teeth but never go to war; wasn’t that one way of defining what he wanted for Mars? It seemed to him there were some lessons there, for any hypothetical Martian state.

He spent a fair amount of his time alone thinking about that hypothetical state; it was a kind of obsession with him, and he found it very frustrating that he could not seem to come up with anything more than vague desires. And so now he thought hard about Switzerland and what it might tell him, he tried to be organized about it: “Pauline, please call up an encyclopedia article on the Swiss government.”

The rover passed transponder after transponder as he read the article that came up on the screen. He was disappointed to find that there was nothing obviously unique about the Swiss system of government. Executive authority was given to a council of seven, elected by the assembly. No charismatic president, which some part of Boone did not like very much. The assembly, aside from selecting the federal council, appeared to do little; it was caught between the power of the executive council and the power of the people, as exercised in direct initiatives and referendums, an idea they had gotten in the nineteenth century from California of all places. And then there was the federal system; the cantons in all their diversity were supposed to have a great deal of independence, which also weakened the assembly. But cantonal power had been eroding for generations, the federal government wresting away more and more. What did it add up to? “Pauline, please call up my constitution file.” He added a few notes to the file he had just recently begun:
Federal council, direct initiatives, weak assembly, local independence, particularly in cultural matters
. Something to think over, anyway. More data to add to the stew of his ideas. It helped somehow to write it down.

He drove on, remembering the road-builders’ calmness, their strange mixture of engineering and mysticism. The warmth of their welcome, which wasn’t something Boone took for granted; it didn’t always happen. In the Arab and Israeli settlements, for instance, he was received very stiffly, perhaps because he was seen as being antireligion, perhaps because Frank had been spreading tales against him. He had been amazed to discover an Arabic caravan whose members believed he had forbidden the building of a mosque on Phobos, and they had only stared at him when he denied even hearing about such a plan. He was pretty sure that was Frank’s doing, word got back to him through Janet and others that Frank was prone to undercutting him in that way. So yes, there were definitely groups that greeted him coolly: the Arabs, the Israelis, the nuclear reactor teams, some of the transnational executives . . . groups with their own intense and parochial programs, people who objected to his larger perspective. Unfortunately there were a lot of them.