Kevin J. Anderson - Climbing Olympus

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Climbing Olympus

by Kevin J. Anderson

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Fictionwise

www.Fictionwise.com

Science Fiction

Locus Poll Award Nominee

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RACHEL DYCEK

Under a salmon sky, the rover vehicle crawled over the rise, looking

down into the cracked canyons of Mars. Without a pause, the rover descended a

tortuous path into the gorge, feeling its way with a thousand sea-urchin

footpads.

The site of the old disaster lay like a broken scab: fallen rock,

eroded fissures, and utter silence.

Alone in the vehicle, Commissioner Rachel Dycek held a cold breath as

she looked through the windowport at the debris crumbled at the bottom of the

toppled cliffside. The avalanche had been enormous, wiping out all thirty-one

of the _dva_ workers who had been tunneling into the canyon network of Noctis

Labyrinthus, the "Labyrinth of Night."

Around Rachel, the wreckage still appeared fresh and jagged. Even after

a full Earth year, the pain burned inside her. Another loss, the largest link

in a long chain of disappointments, against which she had kept her face of

stone. Russians were good at enduring, but inside she felt as fragile as

stained glass.

The weathered rock walls of Noctis Labyrinthus formed barriers of

reddish oxides, gray silicates, and black lava debris -- all sliced a

kilometer deep by ancient rivers. For millions of years, the entire planet had

barely changed. But now, after six decades of terraforming activities had

bombarded the planet with comets and seeded its atmosphere with innumerable

strains of algae and free-floating plankton, Mars looked raw. The terraforming

had awakened the planet like a slap in the face -- and occasionally Mars

lashed back, as it had with the avalanche.

The rover's engines hummed, and the telescoping sea-urchin feet

underneath made popcorn-popping sounds as the pressurized vehicle scrambled

effortlessly over the rough terrain. Letting the Artificial Intelligence

navigator pick its best path, Rachel brought the rover _Percival_ to a halt

next to a stack of granite boulders. Back at Lowell Base, operations manager

Bruce Vickery had reserved _Percival_ for later in the day to check his

remotely placed instruments, but Rachel had traveled only a hundred

kilometers. She had hours yet before she needed to worry about getting back.

Alone in this desolate spot, Rachel felt as if she were entering a

haunted house. She listened to the intense, peaceful emptiness. Then she began

working her way into the protective environment suit. The slick fabric was

cold. The chill never went away on Mars -- but it slithered up her legs,

hugged her waist and shoulders, and clung to the damp sweat of her hands as

she worked her fingers into the tough gloves. It took her fifteen minutes, but

Rachel was accustomed to suiting up by herself; she didn't like the

interference of too many hands.

Technically, she was not supposed to be out in the rover by herself,

but Rachel was still commissioner of Lowell Base -- for the moment, anyway --

and she could bend the rules. She had logged her intentions on the vehicle

assignment terminal as "historical research." Duration of outside activity:

half a sol (which was the correct term for a Martian day, though the fifty

human colonists at the base simply called them "days"). And she had set out

across the sprawling wilderness by herself, leaving Lowell Base behind.

Rachel sealed the suit and powered it up. A thin hiss echoed in her

ear, and the stale metallic smell of manufactured air spilled into her

nostrils. Pressurized, the suit puffed up, pushing the fabric of the suit away

from her skin and making her feel less confined. The oxygen regenerator on her

back burbled as its chemicals reacted to make air thick enough for her to

breathe.

Lowell Base environment suits were lighter, more streamlined than the

bulky monstrosities the original visitors to Mars had been forced to wear.

After many decades of terraforming, Mars was more hospitable to human life,

nearly as pleasant as the worst day she had lived through in Siberia.

Rachel clambered through _Percival_'s sphincter airlock and stepped out

onto the powdery red dirt of Mars. With a crackle like wadded tissue paper,

the cold wrapped around her body, and she turned up the suit's embedded

heaters so that she could stand tall.

On the eve of her forced return to Earth, Rachel Dycek felt a profound

sense of displacement. But she wanted to return to this place one last time,

to see her shattered expectations, to see the buried dreams of Dmitri

Pchanskii and his _dva_ group who had given up everything for Mars, even their

lives.

One Earth year ago today, a team of surgically augmented humans, the

_dvas_, had been mining the labyrinth, using explosives to uncover channels of

primordial ice. The blasting brought down a huge section of the canyon wall,

burying everything beyond hope of recovery....

Standing next to the rover, Rachel felt the weak but insistent wind

push against her suit. Rust powder gusted into the air in tiny whirlwinds. She

had been on Mars for a decade now, and she no longer felt light and springy on

her feet. The red canyons, the extinct volcanoes, the growing tendrils of

green in sheltered areas, no longer awed her. She had lost the energy for

enthusiasm.

Rachel picked her way into the rubble, half expecting to hear some

sound, some echo of the rocks crashing down into the gorge ... the screams of

dying _dvas_, pitched high in the thin air. All the tracks from the Lowell

Base rescue missions and search parties had long ago been wiped away by storms

and sifting microfine dust. Nothing left, just dreams.

In one wash of sloughing boulders that fell slowly in the low gravity,

but with just as much mass and just as much inertia, thirty-one of Rachel's

best _dvas_ were lost -- a sixth of their population. Rachel could not

understand why her augmented human beings had been fated to suffer such

disasters.

The _dvas_, an English bastardization of the Russian word for "two,"

were the second and most successful phase of humans surgically altered to live

in the rigorous Martian environment. Performed under the bright lights of

world scrutiny, the _dva_ surgery had been much more successful than the great

gamble of the _adin_, Rachel's secret initial phase.

The _dva_ volunteers had been willing individuals, rather than subjects

pulled from Siberian labor camps. The first three shipments of _dvas_ were

tough and dedicated workers, while the fourth group of fifty were true jewels,

members of the intelligentsia who had volunteered for the augmentation surgery

because they considered it their duty to the human race. A brilliant flash of

glory, now smothered forever.

Dr. Dmitri Pchanskii himself, a talented Belorussian obstetrician and

surgeon, had set an example as the leader of the fourth group of _dvas_.

Watching his outspoken commitment, other medical professionals and scientists

volunteered for the extreme surgery, with the justification that becoming a

_dva_ would be the best way to do research on an alien world. After the

surgeries, they could be part of the environment, studying Mars hands-on, the

same way field researchers studied Earth.

Firebrand legal representatives for the _dvas_ had even demanded of the

UN that their clients actually "own" the land they worked, not just receive

lifelong leases. A Volga German lawyer named Rotlein had played on public

sympathies -- everyone admired the _dva_ bravery, especially after learning of

the horrors that had befallen the _adin_ phase. Why not throw the _dvas_ a

bone? The _dvas_ would probably not live long in such a harsh environment

anyway....

For a time, the _dva_ project appeared to be a complete success. Over

the years, the _dvas_ had received enormous, robotically piloted shipments

containing the modules for Lowell Base and the four other human bases

scattered across the surface of Mars. Before the first unmodified humans

arrived to stay, the _dvas_ completed all the prep work, like servants sent

ahead to prepare the master's room. Three years after the last _dva_ landing,

Rachel and fifty others arrived at Lowell Base to prepare for the "Grand

Opening" of a terraformed Mars.

But, when a project was as large as an entire planet, the work never

ended. Pchanskii's team of _dvas_ had been searching for subterranean water in

Noctis Labyrinthus. But Pchanskii had been a surgeon on Earth, not a geologist

or a construction engineer. He had not understood what he was doing when he

blasted the fragile rocks.

When Lowell Base received no progress reports from them for several

days, and with a large seasonal dust storm approaching, Rachel had dispatched

a search team. She herself had rushed out on the rescue mission, as others

watched the green-and-pink skies thicken with approaching waves of dust.

Rachel had stared at the fallen rocks, the sheared-off cliffs, and the fine

dust that refused to settle, whipped back into the air by precursor gusts of

wind.

As much as a week could have gone by since the collapse; little wonder

they found no survivors, no sign at all.

With grim irony, Pchanskii's avalanche had exposed a rich vein of water

ice that looked like a steaming white gash on the rock. It created a thick,

temporary fog in the canyons as the ice sublimed in the thin air....

The weather satellites politely advised everyone to take shelter at the

base and ride out the storm. The rescue team, unable to recover _dva_ bodies

or precious equipment from under tons and tons of rock, was forced back to the

base. Later, after the abrasion from the month-long storm, there had been

little point in even looking.

Pchanskii's group had been swallowed up by the tumbling walls of rock,

but Rachel was left to face the avalanche of recriminations, and

"I-told-you-so's", and the sadly shaking heads. She had endured it, barely

flinching, with no more than a tic in the right eye and a grim twitch at the

corner of her wide mouth.

She could no longer deny that the entire _dva_ project, her brainchild,

was at an end, with only a few messy loose ends to tie up: 150 _dvas_ still

toiling on the surface of Mars, while spacesuited humans plowed ahead with

their own work. In a few more decades, neither surgical augmentations nor

environmental suits would be necessary to survive in the cold, brittle

atmosphere. The remaining _dvas_ were obsolete, the program a dead end, and

they would live out their lives on Mars with no hope of returning to Earth.

Now, Rachel's decade as commissioner seemed like such a grand folly.

She stared at the motionless rubble in the canyon and listened to the whispers

of wind and the burbling of her air-regeneration system.

In the first launch opportunity from Earth after the _dva_ disaster,

the UN Space Agency had dispatched a new commissioner along with a dozen more

mission members assigned to Lowell Base. Jesus Keefer, her replacement, would

arrive tomorrow. The Mars transfer vehicle was already in orbit. She craned

her neck, looked through her polarized faceplate up into the frigid sky that

sometimes showed a few bright stars even during daytime when the dust or the

algae clouds weren't too thick; but she saw no sign of the orbiter.

She stayed at Noctis Labyrinthus for a few useless and depressing

hours. Finally, leaving the wreckage behind with the wreckage of her _dvas'_

future, Rachel returned to the rover, brushing the clinging dust from her

thermal suit.

She should get back to the base and put her things in order.

--------

JESUS KEEFER

The Mars transport slid into high orbit as if with an exhausted sigh

after the long marathon across interplanetary space. Then, in a leisurely

manner over the next two days, the captain damped velocity to shrink and

circularize the orbit in preparation for deploying the lander to the surface

of Mars.

During the final weeks of the slow approach, Jesus Keefer ran thin

fingers through his neat, dark hair and watched the disk of the planet grow

larger. Though the ground-based sensors indicated phenomenal improvement in

the Martian environment, sixty years of aggressive terraforming had left

little to be seen from this high up. It seemed disappointing, as if belittling

the extensive efforts of mankind. But then, Mars was a big place.

Finally, Keefer distinguished a tinge of green through the on-board

telescopes, a smear of murkiness in one of the deep canyons, which he insisted

on showing to Tam Smith, the young agronomist, and Chetwynd, and Ogawa, and

Shen, and any of the other passengers bound for Lowell Base. Everyone quickly

learned to avoid him when his enthusiasm began to get out of control.

The terraforming process was working, by God, and it shored up his

faith in the slow, long-term project. He cracked his knuckles and grinned like

a kid in the small lounge. So much more exhilarating to see the awakening

planet with his own eyes, rather than just viewing status reports and

videobursts from the five UN bases on the surface.

Inside the cramped-but-tolerable craft that had been their home for

four months, Keefer felt the tug of shifting forces as another short engine

burn diverted the craft into parking orbit. Captain Rubens announced over the

intercom that orbital insertion was successful. The Mars-bound people in the

lounge cheered.

Though the view had changed little over the past few days, suddenly

everybody hurried to the lounge viewport. Ogawa and Shen, Chetwynd, and Tam

each took turns to gawk, silently jockeying to keep Commissioner Keefer last

in line, since he had already spent more than his share of time at the

observation scopes.

Keefer simply sat back in his webbed relaxation seat with an inward

smile, feeling at peace.

Mars. At last.

He had been only twenty-eight when he had begun working with the United

Nations Space Agency on the terraforming efforts. He had served with the

ground support staff on Earth, watching the first manned landing in many

years. The small multinational team of explorers had collected geological

samples, taken data on how much hydrated water in the rocks was boiling out

and how much permafrost was thawing and oozing into the soil to chart the

progress of the terraforming efforts, already several decades under way. The

mission specialists had endlessly imaged sun-exposed outcroppings and

sheltered crannies, cataloging which species of the robotically introduced

simple plants were gaining a foothold. The astronauts had returned to Earth to

a genuine ticker-tape parade, leaving Mars to continue its slow and inexorable

progress toward paradise.

Only four years after that, Dr. Rachel Dycek and her team from the

Sovereign Republics had thrown everything into confusion with the surprise

landing on Mars of the _adins_ -- monstrously altered human beings -- long

before any humans were expected to live on Mars....

Tam Smith moved away from the viewport and gestured for him to look,

her wispy blond hair crackling around her head with static electricity.

"You're not fooling anybody with that bored act, Keef," she said with a smile.

"Go ahead, take a look."

"Caught me," he answered and launched himself out of the web chair. At

the viewport he peered down through a wispy veil of thickening atmosphere, the

faint milkiness of high cirrus clouds smeared out near the poles. The

bloody-ochre surface carried a flush of olive color, the first heartbeats of

new life. He realized he was grinning with glassy-eyed delight, and his

enthusiasm was infectious. Ogawa and Shen were chuckling at him and whispering

to each other.

What other project could be so grand? Keefer asked himself. This

sculpting task could make men approach the level of gods. They were remaking

an entire world! This had been his dream since his adolescent years.

Rubbing his black-brown eyes in the lounge's dry recirculated air,

Keefer stretched out to touch the insulated wall of the ship. He pushed away

from the port, drifting toward the center of the room. Ogawa and Shen claimed

his space to ogle the planet once more.

History would eventually imbue the Mars project with the grandeur it

deserved, although the apathy shown by Earth's general population frustrated

Keefer. People had no patience for long-term projects. What was a hundred

years or so in the grand scheme of things? The universe itself would blink its

eyes in astonishment at how Sol's frozen fourth planet had suddenly exploded

into life.

Long before Keefer had even been born, governmental huckstering had

finally brought about a flags-and-footprint manned mission to Mars that

managed to accomplish real science as well as take care of the political

obligations for worldwide viewers, including the "For All Mankind" plaque.

But during the years of preparation and the actual landing, the world's

space agencies carefully avoided the question of what to do next. Was Mars

destined to be a dead end, a dusty trophy like the Moon? The red planet had

enormous resources, but the sheer distance and the travel times involved made

it unlikely that anything available there could make a difference to lives on

Earth.

Seeing that the governments did not have their hearts in exploiting

Mars, multinational corporations scrambled to put together their own resource

expeditions. Though Keefer had no love for the sheer-profit-motivated

industrial mindset, he did credit the multinationals with finally forcing the

UN Space Agency into action, to secure a beachhead on Mars before the

companies could. In a bold move UNSA absorbed and adopted the other fledgeling

programs, arm-wrestled all the competing work into a pool of combined

resources, and secured the backing of the major governments. Riding the wave

of support, UNSA struck out on a century-long program to make the fourth

planet more like Earth, to change its hostile environment so that people could

live there.

The terraforming process would be costly, but no more so than a handful

of short-term missions to Mars. Terraforming involved merely a lot of time, a

lot of tedious long-distance maneuvers, remote operations -- and thinking on

scales larger than anyone had ever tried before....

Keefer found a coffee tube in the wall locker, pulled the zip-tab that

made it heat itself, then sucked on the nozzle, careful not to burn the inside

of his mouth. He frowned at the taste -- he had accidentally removed a tube

with cream-and-sugar flavoring. "Want this?" he asked Tam, who took it from

him, brushing his dry fingertips with hers, but he was too preoccupied to

notice her flirtations this time. Keefer rummaged in the wall locker again

until he found a tube marked cream only, and sipped idly.

Back at the viewport, shoulder to shoulder with the other four, Keefer

saw how the orbit had carried them over Mars. Below stretched the gouge of

Valles Marineris, the "grand canyon" of Mars, miles deep in places and wider

than the entire United States. In the northern highlands, a giant whitewashed

crater marked Encke Basin, the scar left by one of the comets that had been

hurled into Mars as the first step in the terraforming process.

UNSA had undertaken a rendezvous mission to Encke as the comet whipped

close to Earth on its 3.3-year orbit, detonating precisely positioned nuclear

warheads that sent Encke straight to Mars, where it grazed the atmosphere,

aerobraking to slow its descent. Thus it burned up and dumped its contents

into Mars's atmosphere rather than ionizing all the gases into space. The

comet strike brought with it cubic miles of free water, as well as enough

energy of impact to warm the atmosphere. The shock wave and the heat imparted

by the collision released an additional four times Encke's water vapor from

the soil into the air.

The resulting Encke Sea had volatilized in only two years, but the

changes in the Martian atmosphere were permanent. The upset in the climate and

the brief greenhouse effect melted part of the ice caps, which increased the

atmospheric pressure further, which melted more....

The escalation had begun. Mars had been locked in an unsteady climatic

equilibrium, waiting for a shove from ambitious humanity.

A year later two transports released samples of airborne algae --

voracious for carbon dioxide -- into the Martian atmosphere. The algae

included a dozen different varieties genetically engineered to thrive on

Martian conditions. They soaked up the weak sunlight, gathered minerals from

the ever-present fine dust that whipped through the air, settled on exposed

surfaces, and released bound oxygen. All this laid the groundwork for a

terrestrial ecology. Two years later another cargo ship dumped more algae into

the air, new strains. Monitors showed measurable improvements in the air

concentrations.

That was the year Keefer had been born.

Six years after that, new algae and free-plankton strains were

deployed, tweaked to optimize their metabolism in the changing environmental

conditions, while the first species grew obsolete in an atmosphere becoming

too rich for them.

Nineteen years after the first cometary impact, a second iceball

crashed into Mars. The long-period comet Harlow-Burris, previously

undiscovered, roared down into the solar system in an orbit that would take it

astonishingly close to Mars on its trip through the ecliptic plane. A frantic

mission was set up to give Harlow-Burris a nudge and change its course just

enough to smack it into Mars, dumping more water, adding more heat, freeing

more of the locked moisture and oxygen buried beneath the sands and hydrated

within the rocks.

During Earth's worldwide recession, when Keefer himself began working

as a student in planetary geology, most of the cost-intensive terraforming

work ground to a halt, but the wheels of nature had already been set into

motion. Algae strains continued to swarm over the planet, making the Martian

atmosphere thicker in the lowlands, trapping more sunlight, reducing the rocks

and the oxide soil.

When humans again set foot on Mars after an eighteen-year hiatus in

manned missions, things had changed dramatically. Preparations for a permanent

UNSA base were made. Living modules were sent by slow cargo ships, for

automatic landing and robotic assembly. Supplies were delivered in cheap but

slow trajectories, preparing for the day when people could establish a

long-term presence.

As he continued his headlong drive for Mars Mars _Mars_, Keefer had

tried to engender in his twenty-year-old son Allan an appreciation for the

magnitude of the terraforming task. Keefer spent two months a year with Allan,

who feigned interest whenever he talked to his father; Keefer felt sorry for

Allan, because the boy had no burning goal. But Keefer vowed that when he

finally set foot on the surface of Mars, waving his gloved hand at the cameras

for newsnets back on Earth, Keefer would be waving at Allan and no one else.

The boy was entering college, where he would probably study space

science because Keefer had opened all the right doors for him, planned out his

courses, urged him to follow a good curriculum, pointed the way. Keefer had

worked hard to ensure that his son's future was established, since his own new

job as commissioner of Lowell Base would keep him away for years. Keefer

promised himself he would pay the price just to make sure Allan had a clear

trail of footsteps to follow....

Now, hand over hand, he pushed his way to the orbiter's bridge. Captain

Rubens sat back with all lights down except for the instrument panels,

enjoying the best view available on the craft. The cherub-faced captain bore a

wistful expression: he would not be going down to the surface with the rest of

them.

Rubens swiveled around. He wore a bulky green sweatsuit and thick socks

to insulate him from the ever-present chill on the spaceship. "Ah,

Commissioner! I was going to go get you. I've contacted Lowell Base because I

thought you might want to talk to Commissioner Dycek, but she's unavailable at

the moment. Think that means she's in the bathroom, or something?"

Keefer didn't know yet how he was going to deal with Dycek. He had

never met the woman, but her work had certainly raised enough eyebrows and

thrown a monkey wrench into UNSA's neatly planned terraforming schedule. Her

surprise project had placed augmented human beings on Mars years before any

other permanent presence. First the unruly _adins_, then the more cooperative

_dvas_ set up modular buildings and infrastructures that would have taken

ordinary humans many years to complete. But though the 150 or so surviving

_dvas_ still provided a good pool of laborers, their special skills were no

longer really needed, now that the five human bases had expanded their

complement of inhabitants.

He nodded to Rubens. "No matter. I'll have plenty of time to talk to

the commissioner once we get down. We've got a lot of transition details to

work out, but you'll be sitting on Phobos for two weeks refueling."

"Yeah. Get some rest. Lander's leaving early tomorrow morning."

As a special treat, Captain Rubens allowed his dozen passengers to

transmit brief messages back home. Keefer addressed his videoletter to Allan,

admonishing him to work hard in school, making chitchat about how much he was

looking forward to feeling real planetary gravity again, not just the

artificial tug from a spinning ship. He edited his message several times,

vaguely dissatisfied that he could think of nothing important to say that he

hadn't already said. As Terrence Chetwynd took his place at the communications

station, Keefer pulled himself back to the lounge compartment.

Looking out the porthole, he could see the dark terminator sweeping

around the planet, folding the long breach of Valles Marineris into darkness.

He recognized the giant swelling of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the

entire solar system, rising to the upper fringes of the atmosphere.

Keefer picked out three smaller volcanoes clustered at the equator:

Arsia Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Ascraeus Mons, each about seventeen kilometers

higher than the surrounding plains, thrust out in a great swelling called the

Tharsis Bulge. Lowell Base was centered between Pavonis Mons and the tangled

badlands of Noctis Labyrinthus. The other UNSA bases were located at the

eastern end of Valles Marineris, at the northern and southern poles, and in

the lower part of the Hellas basin

As the orbiter's local night approached, the twelve new arrivals went

to get some rest for the last night in their cramped ship quarters. Unable to

sleep, Keefer double-checked all the preparations himself, then stewed with

anxiety for another half a day. Tomorrow morning they would touch down on

Mars.

In his mind he pictured the Mars he had read about as a child, the

visions that had haunted his dreams after reading Ray Bradbury and Edgar Rice

Burroughs. A shiver of anticipation fluttered down his back. The UNSA

terraforming work was changing the real Mars into the Mars of fiction. And he

was a part of it.

--------

BORIS TIBAN

An inhuman hand added finishing touches to the human face.

The sculpted visage stood two meters high, with pointed nose, Cossack

beard, thick eyebrows, and a superior grin that scorned fear. Lighter rocks

set into molded sockets gave the eyes a blank stare, looking down the slopes

of Pavonis Mons. The black pupils would be painted on later.

The _adin_ Boris Tiban squatted on the rough volcanic ground, ignoring

discomfort as he watched his companion Stroganov work. The cold poked fingers

through small rips in his worn jumpsuit, but could not penetrate his

polymer-insulated skin.

His _adin_ eyes were set deeply under a continuous frilled hood to

shield them from the cold and the blowing dust. A transparent plastic membrane

covered the eyeballs to prevent them from freezing solid. An additional

membrane draped over the broad nostrils to help retain exhaled moisture. A set

of auxiliary lungs mounted beneath the shoulder blades and surrounded by

artificial diaphragm musculature made the _adins_ look like grotesque

hunchbacks. Their skin had a milky cast, nearly dead of feeling due to the

long-chain polymers grafted onto the hide, like an insulating suit.

The sculptor cupped a lump of hot mud in one tough palm as he took a

final glance at his creation. Touch-up dabs of mud on the towering bust froze

into cement within a few moments in the harshness of the Martian high

altitudes. Stroganov had to pry the ice-covered scraps from his numb fingers,

plopping them back into the steaming bucket at his side.

"Another one finished," Stroganov said, his voice reedy in the thin

air. "I apologize for the delay. You can call the others now, Boris. Not that

they haven't been watching from the caves...."

Behind Stroganov, like guardians around the volcanic caves where the

five surviving _adins_ lived, stood glowering busts of other Russian rebels --

Stepan Razin, Ivan Bolotnikov, Kondrati Bulavin, even Vladimir Ilitch Lenin

himself.

Grumbling, Boris had argued against that sculpture of Lenin, since the

man had fallen into disfavor with the backlash against communism and the

resurgence of nationalism. But Stroganov argued quietly and patiently -- in

his teacher's way that always drove Boris to frustration -- that Vladimir

Ilitch, too, was a rebel in his time, and that Lenin had also been exiled to

Siberia, though his sentence was vastly more pleasant than what the _adin_

volunteers had experienced in the labor camps.

In the gathering twilight Boris used his long titanium staff to haul

himself to his feet beside Stroganov's sculptures, digging its hard point into

the dirt and making a satisfying scar. Boris had torn the rod from UNSA's

transmitting dish ten years before, when he and the other _adins_ revolted

against Earth, took whatever equipment they could salvage, and hiked off to

higher elevations where they could live more comfortably and breathe the thin

air for which they had been created.

Even here on the highest slopes of the enormous volcano Pavonis Mons,

the air tasted thick and spoiled to Boris, a flavor of too much oxygen, ripe

with airborne algae, tainted with toxic pollutants from the _dva_ mining and

excavation settlements that sprang up like mushrooms in the lowlands. The air

grew worse each year. Boris wanted to mutter a curse and spit at the ground --

but he and all the _adins_ had learned never to waste valuable moisture in

pointless gestures or unheard words.

Brushing red dust from his arms, Boris turned toward the cave mouth to

call the others. The shadows of Stroganov's sculpted heads grew longer, like

the distorted silhouettes of history. Stroganov stood proudly beside his new

creation, anxious to tell another story.

Night fell rapidly on the Pavonis caldera. Stars blazed down, more

brilliant than the darkest Siberian night. Knowing where to look, Boris could

make out the two tiny moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos -- Greek for "fear" and

"dread." The moons were tiny rocks, fossilized potatoes in orbit. Phobos

scurried across the sky three times in a single sol, while Deimos hung in

nearly the same spot, day after day. Fear and Dread. Boris wondered how two

such small pebbles could inspire such terror.

Cora Marisovna, Boris's almond-eyed lover, crouched in the darkness of

the cave mouth, unwilling to come outside. Wiry and thin Nikolas, the youngest

of their group, came out, hovering beside Nastasia, the _adin_ woman he shared

with Stroganov. Since Stroganov had been busy with his new project lately,

Nikolas had taken extra turns with Nastasia, who never seemed to know where

she was anyway.

She came out beside Nikolas, gasping in amazement at the new sculpture,

and as she had done with each of the other faces before, she pointed a blunt

_adin_ finger. "I knew him! I remember him!" Nikolas gave her a condescending

smile. Boris kept his face expressionless.

There was no real love between Nastasia and Stroganov or Nikolas,

because the person who lived within the mind of Nastasia changed from hour to

hour. She was one of those who had suffered a defect in the _adin_

augmentations; oxygen had been cut off to parts of her brain during the first

few days, before she had somehow adapted and survived. All that remained of

her personality were scattered fragments of memories, things she had imagined

and things she had experienced, puzzle pieces that did not belong next to each

other, but were forced by clumsy hands into a crude interlocking.

Nikolas helped Nastasia squat down beside him on the rocky soil. "Who

is it this time, Boris?"

Boris shrugged. "Wait until Stroganov tells you. Somebody you've never

heard of, no doubt."

Nikolas nodded. Of all the _adins_, Nikolas looked up to Boris Tiban

the most, and Boris considered it his duty to adopt a protege. Back on Earth,

Nikolas had been in the Siberian prison camp for a stupid reason -- he had

stolen construction equipment for the black market, but got caught when he

tried to sell it back to its original owner. Boris had helped the young man

survive the rigors of the camp, when he would surely have died in the first

year otherwise.

"I give you another hero," Stroganov said proudly, "someone we must not

forget from our history." He stood beside the recently completed monument and

raised his hands. The new sculpture looked darker and sharper than the others,

unworn by abrasive dust. Next to the stylized human face, Stroganov's _adin_

modifications made him look even more of a monstrosity.

Stroganov bent forward, as if to make certain his audience remained

attentive. Nastasia could not focus her mind clearly enough, but she made a

great show of it. Nikolas raised his watery blue eyes, though, and Cora

Marisovna listened from the shadows.

"I give you Emelian Ivanovich Pugachev." Stroganov smiled.

_At last_, Boris thought, _someone we have heard of._

The Sovereign Republics had seen many changes of boundaries and

governments, but the people had a common history, common hostilities,

occasionally even common cultures. They were tied together by strands much too

strong to be severed by the winds of changing politics.

One of the strange consequences of the fall of the Soviet Union among

ethnic Russians was that they looked at their Russian imperial history as a

golden age, resurrecting tsarist heroes: Ivan the Terrible battling the

boyars, Peter the Great and his eccentricities, Alexander I and his wars

against Napoleon.

Boris Tiban was Azerbaijani, with a dash of Armenian and Georgian --

but in his foster homes he had been forced to attend Russified schools that

taught Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky. All schoolchildren had

heard of the great Pugachev Revolt.

Stroganov began to tell his story: "During the time of Tsarina

Catherine II, whom old historians used to call Catherine the Great, Emelian

Ivanovich united the Cossacks in a rebellion that stretched from the Urals to

the Pacific. Pugachev forged serfs and enslaved ethnic groups into such a

powerful army that the tsarina had to conclude an unsatisfactory peace with

the Turks so she could turn her military against him.

"Pugachev gathered fifteen thousand supporters, claiming to be the true

tsar whose death Catherine had falsely staged thirty years before. But when

Catherine sent her full army against him, even Emelian Ivanovich could not

survive. The tsarina's army captured him and brought him to Moscow in a cage.

Pugachev was beheaded and quartered, and during the following months, peasants

in the rebellious villages were hanged and tortured, their homes burned."

Stroganov sighed. "Pugachev was a brave man, but he struck at the wrong

time. I think he would have done well on Mars."

"Yes," Nastasia said, "I remember him! I do." Nikolas shushed her.

Boris nodded grimly. "A good choice, Stroganov. Pugachev was one of

Russia's greatest heroes."

Boris liked the great rebels. Even their missteps sent ripples through

the tsarist governments and the mindset of the Russian people. Boris's own

_adin_ rebellion on Mars had caused as great a stir -- for a time -- though

now it seemed Earth had forgotten all about his grand gesture.

Caught up in bickering and their own internal ethnic problems, the

Sovereign Republics had remained side players in the terraforming of Mars. But

all along they had had a surprise up their sleeves that would let them steal

the show from the UN Space Agency, and at a relatively low cost.

Thirty _adins_ were shipped to Mars in a cargo transport officially

described as "unmanned," filled only with supplies for the eventual human

colony. But when the ship landed and opened its doors to a worldwide audience,

the transmission showed a human being -- augmented, yes, but wearing no

environment suit -- setting foot on Mars. The _adins_ were the showpieces of

the Sovereign Republics, displaying an imagination, bravery, and efficiency

that no one else in the world expected of them. The uproar could be heard

practically across interplanetary space.

Cut off from their Earthly masters, the _adins_ had not meekly tamed a

world and bowed to every command transmitted to them, though a few of the

_adins_ behaved like cowering serfs instead of pioneers. Sixteen years ago

Boris Tiban had led his own bloody rebellion, like Pugachev. He had freed the

_adins_ to make their own lives on their own world. Now, though, only five of

them remained.

The Martian atmosphere grew thicker and warmer. Hundreds of the

second-phase _dvas_ swarmed over the surface, trained dogs of the UNSA

project. And now unmodified, unwanted normals had established a clumsy

foothold with their permanent bases.

The _adins_ were obsolete, no longer needed.

As night fell and the air grew even colder in the star-streaked

darkness, Boris squeezed his fist until the reddish rock crumbled into powder,

like freeze-dried blood. Taking one last look at the towering statues

Stroganov had constructed, he turned and walked without a word into the caves.

Cora backed out of his way. She did not say a word to him. He glared at

her, at how her body had betrayed both of them, and felt the long, dull rage

eating at his stomach. Without the furnace of anger he kept stoked within him,

Boris felt nothing at all.

_I am obsolete, but I am not a museum piece!_ he thought. Statues and

trophies gathered dust. But Boris Tiban could still act against his

oppressors.

--------

RACHEL DYCEK

By the time Rachel brought the long-distance rover back to Lowell Base,

meandering aimlessly across the Martian landscape as she gathered her

thoughts, the distant sun had already fallen behind the line of crags called

the Spine.

Operations manager Bruce Vickery was there to meet her at the parking

shelter, hands on stocky hips, suited up and ready to clamber into _Percival_

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======================ClimbingOlympusbyKevinJ.Anderson======================Copyright(c)1994byKevinJ.AndersonFictionwisewww.Fictionwise.comScienceFictionLocusPollAwardNominee---------------------------------NOTICE:Thisworkiscopyrighted.Itislicensedonlyforusebytheoriginalpurchaser.Duplicationordistri...

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