Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 4 - The Martians

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THE MARTIANS

Kim Stanley Robinson was born in 1952. After spending some considerable time

travelling and working around the world, he has now settled in his beloved

California. His recent Mars series, (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) was the

product of a seventeen-year obsession with the planet. The series was lavishly

praised, won numerous awards and has been a long-running global bestseller.

By Kim Stanley Robinson

The Wild Shore

The Gold Coast

Pacific Edge

Escape from Kathmandu

Down and Out in the Year 2000

Icehenge

Red Mars

Green Mars

Blue Mars

The Martians

Antarctica

THE MARTIANS

Kim Stanley Robinson

HarperCollinsPublishers

_Voyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers,

77-8S Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

This edition published by Voyager 1999

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

First published in Great Britain

by Voyager 1999

'Exploring Fossil Canyon' appeared in Universe 12, 1982;

and 'Green Mars' was published in Asimov's SF Magazine, 1985.

The Author asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

ISBN 0-00-225932-X

Typeset in Stone Serif and Optima by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Polmont, Stirlingshire

Printed in Great Britain by

Caledonian International Book Manufacturing Ltd, Glasgow

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,

in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior

permission of the publishers.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,

by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or

otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent

in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it

is published and without a similar condition including this

condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

[INSERT MAIN MAP HERE]

[INSERT MARTIAN CALENDAR MAP HERE]

_ONE

MICHEL IN

ANTARCTICA

_ AT FIRST IT WAS fine. The people were nice. Wright Valley was awesome.

Each day Michel woke in his cubicle and looked out of his little window

(everyone had one) at the frozen surface of Lake Vanda, a flat oval of cracked

blue ice, flooding the bottom of the valley. The valley itself was brown and

big and deep, its great rock side-walls banded horizontally. Seeing it all he

felt a little thrill and the day began well.

There was always a lot to do. They had been dropped there in the largest

of the Antarctic dry valleys with a load of disassembled huts and, for

immediate occupancy, Scott tents. Their task through the perpetual day of the

Antarctic summer was to build their winter home, which on assembly had turned

out to be a fairly substantial and luxurious modular array of interconnected

red boxes. In many ways it seemed analogous to what the voyagers would be

doing when they arrived on Mars, and so of course to Michel it was all very

interesting.

There were one hundred and fifty-eight people there, and only a hundred

were going to be sent on the first trip out, to establish a permanent colony.

This was the plan as designed by the Americans and Russians, who had then

convened an international team to enact it. So this stay in Antarctica was a

kind of test, or winnowing. But it seemed to Michel that everyone there

assumed he or she would be among the chosen, so there was little of the

tension one saw in people doing job interviews. As they said, when it was

discussed at all - in other words when Michel asked about it - some candidates

were going to drop out, others would be invalided out, and others placed on

later trips to Mars, at worst. So there was no reason to worry. Most of the

people there were not worriers anyway - they were capable, brilliant, assured,

used to success. Michel worried about this.

They finished building their winter home by the autumn equinox, March 21st.

After that the alternation of day and night was dramatic, the brilliant

slanted light of the days ending with the sun sliding off to the north and

over the Olympus Range, the long twilights leading to a black starry darkness

that eventually would be complete, and last for months. At their latitude,

perpetual night would begin a little after mid-April.

The constellations as they revealed themselves were the stars of another

sky, foreign and strange to a northerner like Michel, reminding him that the

universe was a big place. Each day was shorter than the one before by a

palpable degree, and the sun burned lower through the sky, its beams pouring

down between the peaks of the Asgaard and Olympus Ranges like vibrant

stagelights. People got to know each other.

When they were first introduced, Maya had said 'So you are to evaluate

us!' with a look that seemed to suggest this could be a process that went both

ways. Michel had been impressed. Frank Chalmers, looking over her shoulder at

him, had seen this.

They were a mix of personality types, as one might. expect. But they all had

the basic social skilfulness that had allowed them to make it this far, so

that whether outgoing or withdrawn in their basic nature, they could still all

talk easily. They were interested in each other, naturally. Michel saw a lot

of relationships beginning to bloom around him. Romances too. Of course.

To Michel all the women in camp were beautiful. He fell a little in love

with a lot of them, as was his practice always. Men he loved as elder

brothers, women as goddesses he could never quite court (fortunately). Yes:

every woman was beautiful, and all men were heroes. Unless of course they

weren't. But most were; this was humanity's default state. So Michel felt, he

always had. It was an emotional setting that called out for psychoanalysis,

and in fact he had undergone analysis, without changing this feeling a bit

(fortunately). It was his take on people, as he had said to his therapists.

Naive, credulous, obtusely optimistic - and yet it made him a good clinical

psychiatrist. It was his gift.

Tatiana Durova, for instance, he thought as gorgeous as any movie star,

with also that intelligence and individuality that derived from life lived in

the real world of work and community. Michel loved Tatiana.

And he loved Hiroko Ai, a remote and charismatic human being, withdrawn

into her own affairs, but kind. He loved Ann Clayborne, a Martian already. He

loved Phyllis Boyle, sister to Machiavelli. He loved Ursula Kohl like the

sister he could always talk to. He loved Rya Jimenez for her black hair and

bright smile, he loved

_Marina Tokareva for her tough logic, he loved Sasha Yefremova for her irony.

But most of all he loved Maya Toitovna, who was as exotic to him as

Hiroko, but more extroverted. She was not as beautiful as Tatiana, but drew

the eye. The natural leader of the Russian contingent, and a bit forbidding -

dangerous somehow - watching everyone there in much the same way Michel was,

though he was pretty sure she was a tougher judge of people. Most of the

Russian men seemed to fear her, like mice under a hawk, or maybe it was that

they feared falling hopelessly in love with her. If Michel were going to Mars

(he was not) she was the one he would be most interested in.

Of course Michel, as one of the four psychologists there to help evaluate the

candidates, could not act on any of these affections. That did not bother him;

on the contrary he liked the constraint, which was the same he had with any of

his clients. It allowed him to indulge his thoughts without having to consider

acting on them. 'If you don't act on it, it wasn't a true feeling' - maybe the

old saying was right, but if you were forbidden to act for good reasons, then

your feelings might not be false after all. So he could be both true and safe.

Besides the saying was wrong, love for one's fellow humans could be a matter

of contemplation only. There was nothing wrong with it.

Maya was quite certain she was going to Mars. Michel therefore

represented no threat to her, and she treated him like a perfect equal.

Several others were like her in this respect - Vlad, Ursula, Arkady, Sax,

Spencer, a few others. But Maya took matters beyond that; she was intimate

from the very start. She would sit and talk to him about anything, including

the selection process itself. They spoke English when they talked, their

partial competence and strong accents making for a picturesque music.

'You must be using the objective criteria for selecting people, the

psychological profiles and the like.'

'Yes, of course. Tests of various kinds, as you know. Various indexes.'

'But your own personal judgments must count too, right?'

'Yes. Of course.'

'But it must be hard to separate out your personal feelings about people

from your professional judgments, yes?'

'I suppose so.'

'How do you do it?'

'Well ... I suppose you would say it is a habit of mind. I like people,

or whatever, for different reasons to the reasons that might make someone good

on a project like this.'

'For what reasons do you like people?'

'Well, I try not to be too analytical about that! You know - it's a

danger in my job, becoming too analytical. I try to let my own feelings alone,

as long as they aren't bothering me somehow.'

She nodded. 'Very sensible, I'm sure. I don't know if I could manage

that. I should try. It's all the same to me. That's not always good. Not

appropriate.' With a quick sidelong smile at him.

She would say anything to him. He thought about this, and decided that

it was a matter of their respective situations: since he was staying behind,

and she was going (she seemed so sure), it didn't much matter what she said to

him. It was as if he were dying to her, and she therefore giving herself to

him, openly, as a farewell gift.

But he wanted her to care about what she said to him.

On April 18th the sun went away. In the morning it sparked in the east,

shining directly up the valley for a minute or two, and then with a faint

green flash it slipped behind Mount Newell. After that the dark days had

midday twilights, shorter every day; then just night. Starry starry night. It

was beyond Martian, this constant darkness - living by starlight with the

aching cold outside, experiencing sensory deprivation in everything but one's

sense of cold. Michel, a Provencal, found that he hated both the cold and the

dark. So did many of the others. They had been living in an Antarctic summer,

thinking life was good and that Mars would not be such a challenge after all,

and then with winter they were suddenly getting a better idea of what Mars

would be like - not exactly, but in the sense of experiencing a massive array

of deprivations. It was sobering how hard it hit.

Of course some did better than others. Some seemed not even to notice.

The Russians had experienced cold and dark almost like this before. Tolerance

of confinement was also good among the senior

_scientists - Sax Russell, Vlad Taneev, Marina Tokareva, Ursula Kohl, Ann

Clayborne - these and other dedicated scientists seemed to have the capacity

to spend great amounts of their time reading, working at their computers, and

talking. Presumably lives spent largely in labs had prepared them.

They also understood that this was the life Mars was waiting to give

them. Something not that different from the lives they had always led. So that

the best analogy to Mars, perhaps, was not Antarctica, but any intense

scientific laboratory.

This led him to thoughts of the optimum life history when considering

inclusion in the group: middle-aged lab scientist, dedicated, accomplished;

childless; unmarried or divorced. Lots of applicants fitted the criteria. In

some ways you had to wonder. Though it wouldn't be fair; it was a life pattern

with its own integrity, its own rewards. Michel himself fitted the bill in

every respect.

Naturally he had to divide his attention equally among all of the

candidates, and he did. But one day he got to accompany Tatiana Durova alone,

on a hike up the South Fork of Wright Valley. They hiked to the left of the

flat-topped island ridge called the Dais that divided the valley lengthways,

and continued up the southern arm of Wright Valley to Don Juan Pond.

Don Juan Pond: what a name for this extraterrestrial desolation! The

pond was so salty that it would not freeze until the air chilled to -54 C;

then the ice coating the shallow saline pond, having been distilled by the

freezing, would be fresh-water ice, and so would not thaw again until the

temperature rose above zero, usually in the following summer when trapped

sunlight would greenhouse in the water under the ice, and melt it from below.

As Tatiana explained the process it hovered in Michel's mind as some kind of

analogy to their own situation, hanging right on the edge of his understanding

but never coming clear.

'Anyway,' she was saying, 'scientists can use the pond as a single-

setting minimum-temperature thermometer. Come here in the spring and you know

immediately if the previous winter has got below minus 54.'

As it had already, some cold night this autumn; a layer of white ice

sheeted the pond. Michel stood with Tatiana on the whitish,

humped, salt-crusted shore. Over the Dais the noon sky was blueblack. Around

them the steep valley walls fell to the floor of the canyon. Large dark

boulders stuck out of the pond's ice sheet.

Tatiana walked out onto the white surface, plunging through it with

every step, boots crackling, water splashing - liquid salt water, spilling

over the fresh ice, dissolving it and sending up a thin frost smoke. A vision:

the Lady of the Lake, become corporeal and thus too heavy to walk on water.

But the pond was only a few centimetres deep, it barely covered the tops

of her thick boots. Tatiana reached down and touched the tip of one gloved

finger into the water, pulled up her mask to taste the water with her

impossibly beautiful mouth - which puckered to a tight square. Then she threw

back her head and laughed. 'My God! Come taste, Michel, but just a touch, I

warn you. It's terrible!'

And so he clomped through the ice and over the wet sand floor of the

pond, stepping awkwardly, a bull in a china shop.

'It's fifty times saltier than the sea, taste it.'

Michel reached down, put his forefinger in the water; the cold was

intense, it was amazing that it was liquid still, so cold it was. He raised it

to his tongue, touched gingerly: cold fire. It burned like acid. 'My God!' he

exclaimed, spitting out involuntarily. 'Is it poison?' Some toxic alkali, or a

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摘要：

THEMARTIANSKimStanleyRobinsonwasbornin1952.Afterspendingsomeconsiderabletimetravellingandworkingaroundtheworld,hehasnowsettledinhisbelovedCalifornia.HisrecentMarsseries,(RedMars,GreenMars,BlueMars)wastheproductofaseventeen-yearobsessionwiththeplanet.Theserieswaslavishlypraised,wonnumerousawardsandha...

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Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 4 - The Martians

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