Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 2 - Blue Mars

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will have to think harder than ever before what it means to be Martian.

Her listeners sat slumped in chairs, looking out the windows at the

terrain flowing by. They were tired, their eyes were scoured. Red-eyed

Reds. In the harsh dawn light everything looked new, the windswept land

outside bare except for a khaki scree of lichen and scrub. They had kicked

all Earthly power off Mars, it had been a long campaign, capped by a burst

of furious action following the great flood on Terra; and they were tired.

We came from Earth to Mars, and in that passage there was a certain

purification. Things were easier to see, there was a freedom of action that

we had not had before. A chance to express the best part of ourselves. So

we acted. We are making a better way to live.

This was' the myth, they had all grown up with it. Now as Ann told it to

them again, the young Martians stared through her. They had engineered

the revolution, they had fought all over Mars, and pushed the Terran police

into Burroughs; then they had drowned Burroughs, and chased the Tenons

up to Sheffield, on Pavonis Mons. They still had to force the enemy out of

Sheffield, up the space cable and back to Terra; there was work still to be

done. But in the successful evacuation of Burroughs they had won a great

victory, and some of the blank faces staring at Ann or out the window

seemed to want a break, a moment for triumph. They were all exhausted.

Hiroko will help us, a young man said, breaking the silence of the train's

levitation over the land.

Ann shook her head. Hiroko is a green, she said, the original green.

Hiroko invented the areophany, the young native countered. That's her

first concern: Mars. She will help us, I know. I met her. She told me.

Except she's dead, someone else said.

Another silence. The world flowed under them.

Finally a tall young woman stood up and walked down the aisle, and

gave Ann a hug. The spell was broken; words were abandoned; they got to

their feet and clustered in the open space at the front of the train, around

Ann, and hugged her, or shook her hand-or simply touched her, Ann

Clayborne, the one who had taught them to love Mars for itself, who had

led them in the struggle for its independence from Earth. And though her

At a certain moment before dawn the sky always glowed the same

bands of pink as in the beginning, pale and clear in the east, rich and starry

in the west. Ann watched for this moment as her companions drove them

west, toward a mass of black land rearing into the sky-the Tharsis Bulge,

punctuated by the broad cone of Pavonis Mons. As they rolled uphill from

Noctis Labyrinthus they rose above most of the new atmosphere; the air

pressure at the foot of Pavonis was only 180 millibars, and then as they

drove up the eastern flank of the great shield volcano it dropped under 100

millibars, and continued to fall. Slowly they ascended above all visible

foliage, crunching over dirty patches of wind-carved snow; then they

ascended above even the snow, until there was nothing but rock, and the

ceaseless thin cold winds of the jet stream. The bare land looked just as it

had in the prehuman years, as if they were driving back up into the past.

It wasn't so. But something fundamental in Ann Clay-borne warmed at

the sight of this ferric world, stone on rock in the perpetual wind, and as the

Red cars rolled up the mountain all their occupants grew as rapt as Ann,

the cabins falling silent as the sun cracked the distant horizon behind them.

Then the slope they ascended grew less steep, in a perfect sine curve,

until they were on the flat land of the round summit plateau. Here they saw

tent towns ringing the edge of the giant caldera, clustered in particular

around the foot of the space elevator, some thirty kilometers to the south of

them.

They stopped their cars. The silence in the cabins had shifted from

reverent to grim. Ann stood at one upper-cabin window, looking south

toward Sheffield, that child of the space elevator: built because of the

elevator, smashed flat when the elevator fell, built again with the elevator's

led them through the maze of warehouses and small tents surrounding the

intersection of the equatorial piste with the one circling the rim. As they

followed her she described for them the local situation. Most of Sheffield

and the rest of the Pavonis rim settlements were already in the hands of

the Martian revolutionaries. But the space elevator and the neighborhood

surrounding its base complex were not, and there lay the difficulty. The

revolutionary forces on Pavonis were mostly poorly equipped militias, and

they did not necessarily share the same agenda. That they had succeeded

as far as they had was due to many factors: surprise, the control of Martian

space, several strategic victories, the support of the great majority of the

Martian population, and the unwillingness of the United Nations Transitional

Authority to fire on civilians, even when they were making mass

demonstrations in the streets. As a result the UNTA security forces had

retreated from all over Mars to regroup in Sheffield, and now most of them

were in elevator cars, going up to Clarke, the ballast asteroid and space

station at the top of the elevator; the rest were jammed into the

neighborhood surrounding the elevator's massive base complex, called the

Socket. This district consisted of elevator support facilities, industrial

warehouses, and the hostels, dormitories, and restaurants needed to

house and feed the port's workforce. "Those are coming in useful now,"

Irishka said, "because even so they're squeezed in like trash in a

compactor, and if there hadn't been food and shelter they would probably

have tried a breakout. As it is, things are still tense, but at least they can

live."

It somewhat resembled the situation just resolved in Burroughs, Ann

thought. Which had turned out fine. It only took someone willing to act and

the thing would be done- UNTA evacuated to Earth, the cable brought

down, Mars's link to Earth truly broken. And any attempt to erect a new

cable could be balked sometime in the ten years of orbital construction that

it took to build one.

So Irishka led them through the jumble that was east Pavonis, and their

little caravan came to the rim of the caldera, where they parked their

rovers. To the south on the western edge of Sheffield they could just make

Now he answered the call and his face appeared on her wrist. He

looked quite like her, which she found disconcerting. He was absorbed, she

saw, concentrating on something other than her call.

"Any news?" she asked.

"No. We appear to be at something of an impasse. We're allowing all of

them caught outside free passage into the elevator district, so they've got

control of the train, station and the south rim airport, and the subway lines

from those to the Socket."

"Did the planes that evacuated them from Burroughs come here?"

"Yes. Apparently most of them are leaving for Earth. It's very crowded in

there."

"Are they going back to Earth, or into Mars orbit?"

"Back to Earth. I don't think they trust orbit anymore."

He smiled at that. He had done a lot in space, aiding Sax's efforts and

so on. Her son the spaceman, the Green. For many years they had

scarcely spoken to each other.

Ann said, "So what are you going to do now?"

"I don't know. I don't see that we can take the elevator, or the Socket

either. It just wouldn't work. Even if it did, they could always bring the

elevator down."

"So?"

"Well-" He looked suddenly concerned. "I don't think that would be a

good thing. Do you?"

"I think it should come down."

Now he looked annoyed. "Better stay out of the fall line then."

"I will."

"I don't want anyone bringing it down without a full discussion," he told

her sharply. "This is important. It should be a decision made by the whole

Martian community. I think we need the elevator, myself."

"Except we have no way to take possession of it."

"That remains to be seen. Meanwhile, it's not something for you to take

into your own hands. I heard what happened in Burroughs, but it's different

But king or not, there was a Red army now converging on Pavonis

Mons. They were the strongest military operation left on the planet, and

they intended to complete the work begun when Earth had been hit by its

great flood. They did not believe in consensus or compromise, and for

them, knocking down the cable was killing two birds with one stone: it

would destroy the last police stronghold, and it would also sever easy

contact between Earth and Mars, a primary Red goal. No, knocking down

the cable was the obvious thing to do.

But Peter did not seem to know this. Or perhaps he did not care. Ann

tried to tell him, but he just nodded, muttering "Yeah yeah, yeah yeah." So

arrogant, like all the greens, so blithe and stupid with all their prevaricating,

their dealing with Earth, as if you could ever get anything from such a

leviathan. No. It was going to take direct action, as in the drowning of

Burroughs, as in all the acts of sabotage that had set the stage for the

revolution. Without those the revolution wouldn't even have begun, or if it

had it would have been crushed immediately, as in 2061.

"Yeah yeah. We'd better call a meeting then," Peter said, looking as

annoyed at her as she felt at him.

"Yeah yeah," Ann said heavily. Meetings. But they had their uses;

people could assume they meant something, while the real work went on

elsewhere.

"I'll try to set one up," Peter said. She had gotten his attention at last,

she saw; but there was an unpleasant look on his face, as if he had been

threatened. "Before things get out of hand."

"Things are already out of hand," she told him, and cut the connection.

She checked the news on the various channels, Manga-lavid, the Reds'

private nets, the Terran summaries. Though Pavonis and the elevator were

now the focus of everyone on Mars, the physical convergence on the

volcano was only partial. It appeared to her that there were more Red

guerrilla units on Pavonis than the green units of Free Mars and their allies;

but it was hard to be sure. Kasei and the most radical wing of the Reds,

called the Kakaze ("fire wind"), had recently occupied the north rim of

The meeting went about as she expected. Nadia was at the center of

the discussion, and it was useless talking to Nadia now. Ann just sat on a

chair against the back wall, watching the rest of them circle the situation.

They did not want to say what Peter had already admitted to her in private:

there was no way to get UNTA off the space elevator.

Before they conceded that they were going to try to talk the problem out

of existence.

Late in the meeting, Sax Russell came over to sit by her side.

"A space elevator," he said. "It could be ... used."

Ann was not the least bit comfortable talking to Sax. She knew that he

had suffered brain damage at the hands of UNTA security, and had taken a

treatment that had changed his personality; but somehow this had not

helped at all. It only made things very strange, in that sometimes he

seemed to her to be the same old Sax, as familiar as a much-hated

brother; while at other times he did indeed seem like a completely different

person, inhabiting Sax's body. These two contrary impressions oscillated

rapidly, even sometimes coexisted; just before joining her, as he had talked

with Nadia and Art, he had looked like a stranger, a dapper old man with a

piercing glare, talking in Sax's voice and Sax's old style. Now as he sat

next to her, she could see that the changes to his face were utterly

superficial. But though he looked familiar the stranger was now inside him-

for here was a man who halted and jerked as he delved painfully after what

he was trying to say, and then as often as not came out with something

scarcely coherent.

"The elevator is a, a device. For ... raising up. A ... a tool."

"Not if we don't control it," Ann said to him carefully, as if instructing a

child.

"Control..." Sax said, thinking over the concept as if it were entirely new

to him. "Influence? If the elevator can be brought down by anyone who

really wants to, then ..." He trailed away, lost in his thoughts.

"Then what?" Ann prompted.

"Then it's controlled by all. Consensual existence. It's obvious?"

reason at all, and so Ann glared at her as she walked over to them and

said curtly, "We need the elevator. It's our conduit to Terra just as much as

it's their conduit to Mars."

"But we don't need a conduit to Terra," Ann said. "It's not a physical

relationship for us, don't you see? I'm not saying we don't need to have an

influence on Terra, I'm not an isolationist like Kasei or Coyote. I agree we

need to try to work on them. But it's not a physical thing, don't you see? It's

a matter of ideas, of talk, and perhaps a few emissaries. It's an information

exchange. At least it is when it's going right. It's when it gets into a physical

thing-a resource exchange, or mass emigration, or police control- that's

when the elevator becomes useful, even necessary. So if we took it down

we would be saying, we will deal with you on our terms, and not yours."

It was so obvious. But Nadia shook her head, at what Ann couldn't

imagine.

Sax cleared his throat, and in his old periodic-table style said, "If we can

bring it down, then in effect it is as if it already were down," blinking and

everything. Like a ghost suddenly there at her side, the voice of the

terraforming, the enemy she had lost to time and time again-Saxifrage

Russell his own self, same as ever. And all she could do was make the

same arguments she always had, the losing arguments, feeling the words'

inadequacy right in her mouth.

Still she tried. "People act on what's there, Sax. The meta-nat directors

and the UN and the governments will look up and see what's there, and act

accordingly. If the cable's gone they just don't have the resources or the

time to mess with us right now. If the cable's here, then they'll want us.

They'll think, well, we could do it. And there'll be people screaming to try."

"They can always come. The cable is only a fuel saver."

"A fuel saver which makes mass transfers possible."

But now Sax was distracted, and turning back into a stranger. No one

would pay attention to her for long enough. Nadia was going on about

control of orbit and safe-conduct passes and the like.

The strange Sax interrupted Nadia, having never heard her, and said,

"We've promised to ... help them out."

But not on Mars.

"You know," Sax said in a conversational tone, again very un-Sax-like

but in a different way, "it wasn't the Red militia that caused the Transitional

Authority to evacuate Burroughs and the rest of the planet. If guerrillas had

been the only factor then the Terrans would have gone after us, and they

might well have succeeded. But those mass demonstrations in the tents

made it clear that almost everyone on the planet was against them. That's

what governments fear the most; mass protests in the cities. Hundreds of

thousands of people going into the streets to reject the current system.

That's what Nirgal means when he says political power comes out of the

look in people's eye. And not out of the end of a gun."

"And so?" Ann said.

Sax gestured at the people in the warehouse. "They're all greens."

The others continued debating. Sax watched her like a bird.

Ann got up and walked out of the meeting, into the strangely unbusy

streets of east Pavonis. Here and there militia bands held posts on street

corners, keeping an eye to the south, toward Sheffield and the cable

terminal. Happy, hopeful, serious young natives. There on one corner a

group was in an animated discussion, and as Ann passed them a young

woman, her face utterly intent, flushed with passionate conviction, cried out

"You can't just do what you want!"

Ann walked on. As she walked she felt more and more uneasy, without

knowing why. This is how people change- in little quantum jumps when

struck by outer events-no intention, no plan. Someone says "the look in

people's eye," and the phrase is suddenly conjoined with an image: a face

glowing with passionate conviction, another phrase: you can't just do what

you want! And so it occurred to her (the look on that young woman's face!)

that it was not just the cable's fate they were deciding-not just "should the

cable come down," but "how do we decide things?" That was the critical

postrevolutionary question, perhaps more important than any single issue

being debated, even the fate of the cable. Up until now, most people in the

underground had operated by a working method which said if we don't

agree with you we will fight you. That attitude was what had gotten people

of Sheffield. People still went to work, ate in restaurants, talked on the

grass of the parks, gathered in the public spaces in this most crowded of

tent towns. The shops and restaurants were jammed. Most businesses in

Sheffield had belonged to the metanats, and now people read on their

screens long arguments over what to do-what the employees' new

relationship to their old owners should be- where they should buy their raw

materials, where they should sell-whose regulations they ought to obey,

whose taxes they ought to pay. All very confusing, as the screen debates

and the nightly news vids and the wrist nets indicated.

The plaza devoted to the food market, however, looked as it always

had. Most food was grown and distributed by co-ops; ag networks were in

place, the greenhouses on Pavonis were still producing, and so in the

market things ran as usual, goods paid for with UNTA dollars or with credit.

Except once or twice Ann saw sellers in their aprons shouting red-faced at

customers, who shouted right back, arguing over some point of government

policy. As Ann passed by one of these arguments, which were no different

than those going on among the leaders in east Pavonis, the disputants all

stopped and stared at her. She had been recognized. The vegetable seller

said loudly, "If you Reds would lay off they would just go away!"

"Ah come on," someone retorted. "It isn't her doing it."

So true, Ann thought as she walked on.

A crowd stood waiting for a tram to come. The transport systems were

still running, ready for autonomy. The tent itself was functioning, which was

not something to be taken for granted, though clearly most people did;Tjut

every tent's operators had their task obvious before them. They mined their

raw materials themselves, mostly out of the air; their solar collectors and

nuclear reactors were all the power they needed. So the tents were

physically fragile, but if left alone, they could very well become politically

autonomous; there was no reason for them to be owned, no justification for

it.

So the necessities were served. Daily life plodded on, barely perturbed

by revolution.

been a threat, every glance of resentment an attack; which eventually

would have forced the militias from the street corners into some safer

place. People's faces, staring in concert; this ran the world.

So Ann brooded over the next few days. And even more so after she

took a rim train in the direction opposite to Sheffield, counterclockwise to

the north arc of the rim. There Kasei and Dao and the Kakaze were

occupying apartments in the little tent at Lastflow. Apparently they had

forcibly evicted some noncombatant residents, who naturally had trained

down to Sheffield in fury, demanding to be reinstated in their homes, and

reporting to Peter and the rest of the green leaders that the Reds had set

up truck-drawn rocket launchers on the north rim, with the rockets aimed at

the elevator and Sheffield more generally.

So Ann walked out into Lastflow's little station in a bad mood, angry at

the Kakaze's arrogance, as stupid in its way as the greens'. They had done

well in the Burroughs campaign, seizing the dike very visibly to give

everyone a warning, then taking it on themselves to breach the dike after

all the other revolutionary factions had gathered on the heights to the

south, ready to rescue the city's civilian population while the metanat

security were forced to retreat. The Kakaze had seen what had been

needed and they had done it, without getting bogged down in debate.

Without their decisiveness everyone would still be gathered around

Burroughs, and the metanats no doubt organizing a Terran expeditionary

force to relieve it. It had been a perfectly delivered coup.

Now it seemed that success had gone to their head.

Lastflow had been named after the depression it occupied, a fan-shaped

lava flow extending more than a hundred kilometers down the northeast

flank of the mountain. It was the only blemish in what was otherwise a

flawlessly circular summit cone and caldera, and clearly it had come very

late in the volcano's history of eruptions. Standing down in the depression,

one's view of the rest of the summit was cut off-it was like being in a

shallow hanging valley, with little visible in any direction-until one walked

out to the drop-off at rim's edge, and saw the huge cylinder of the caldera

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willhavetothinkharderthaneverbeforewhatitmeanstobeMartian.Herlistenerssatslumpedinchairs,lookingoutthewindowsattheterrainflowingby.Theyweretired,theireyeswerescoured.Red-eyedReds.Intheharshdawnlighteverythinglookednew,thewindsweptlandoutsidebareexceptforakhakiscreeoflichenandscrub.TheyhadkickedallEa...

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Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 2 - Blue Mars

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