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“Good.”
Sax said, “John, you said there was more than one thing going on?”
John nodded. “It hasn’t just been sabotage, you see. Someone’s been trying to kill me.”
Sax blinked, and the rest of them looked shocked. “At first I thought it was the saboteurs,” John said, “trying to stop my investigation. It made sense, and the first incident really was an act of sabotage, so it was easy to get confused. But now I’m pretty sure that that time was a mistake. The saboteurs aren’t interested in killing me – they could have done it and they didn’t. One night a group of them stopped me, including your son Kasei, Hiroko, and the Coyote, who I take it is the same as the stowaway that you were hiding on the Ares—”
This caused an uproar; it looked like a fair number of them had had suspicions about this stowaway, and Maya was on her feet pointing a dramatic finger at Hiroko, crying out. John shouted them all down, forged on: “Their visit – their visit! – that was the best proof of my theory about the sabotages, because I managed to get a few skin cells off one of them, and I was able to get his DNA read and compared with some other samples found at some of the sabotage sites, and this person had been there. So those were the saboteurs, but they weren’t trying to kill me, obviously. But one night at Hellas Low Point I was knocked down, and my walker cut open.”
He nodded at his friends’ exclamations. “That was the first intentional attack on me, and it came pretty soon after I went up to Pavonis, and talked to Phyllis and a bunch of transnational types about internationalizing the elevator and so on.”
Arkady was laughing at him, but John ignored him and forged on. “After that, I was harassed several times by UNOMA investigators that Helmut allowed to come up, and he did that under pressure from those same transnationals. And in fact I found out that most of those investigators had worked for Armscor or Subarashii on Earth, rather than for the FBI like they told me. Those are the transnationals most involved with the elevator project and the mining on the Great Escarpment, and now they’ve got their own security people established everywhere, and this roving team of so-called investigators. And then, just before the big storm ended, some of those investigators tried to get me accused of that murder that happened at Underhill. Yes they did! It didn’t work, and I can’t absolutely prove it was them, but I saw two of them working on the set-up. And I think they killed that man, too, just to get me in trouble. To get me out of their way.”
“You should tell Helmut,” Nadia said. “If we present a united front and insist that these people be sent back to Earth, I don’t think he could deny us.”
“I don’t know how much real power Helmut has anymore,” John said. “But it would be worth a try. I want these people kicked off the planet. And those two in particular I’ve got recorded by the Senzeni Na security system, both going into the med clinic and messing with the cleaning robots before I did. So the circumstantial evidence against them is about as strong as it could be.”
The others didn’t know quite what to make of this, but it turned out that several of them had also been harassed by other UNOMA teams – Arkady, Alex, Spencer, Vlad and Ursula, even Sax – and they quickly agreed that an attempt to get the investigators deported was a good idea. “Those two in particular ought to be deported at best,” Maya said hotly.
Sax simply tapped at his wristpad, and called Helmut up on the phone right then and there: he laid the situation out to Helmut, and the angry group pitched in from time to time. “We’ll take this to the Terran press if you don’t act on it,” Vlad declared.
Helmut frowned, and after a pause he said, “I’ll look into it. Those agents that you complain about in particular will be rotated back home, for sure.”
“Check their DNA again before you let them go,” John said. “The murderer of that man in Underhill is among them, I’m sure of it.”
“We will check,” Helmut said heavily.
Sax cut the connection, and John looked around at his friends again. “Okay,” he said. “But it’ll take more than a call to Helmut to make all the changes we need. The time has come to act together again, across a whole range of issues, if we want the treaty to survive. That as a minimum, you know. A start on the rest of it. We need to form a coherent political unit no matter what kind of disagreements we might have.”
“It won’t matter what we do,” Sax said mildly, but he was jumped on immediately, in an incomprehensible babble of competing protests.
“It does matter!” John cried. “We’ve got as much chance as anyone does of directing what happens here.”
Sax shook his head, but the others were listening to John, and most seemed to agree with him: Arkady, Ann, Maya, Vlad, each from their different perspective… It could be done, John could see it in their faces. Only Hiroko he could not read; her face was a blank, closed in a way that brought back a sharp pang of recollection. She had always been that way to John, and suddenly it made him ache with frustration and remembered pain, and he got annoyed.
He stood, and waved a hand outward; it was nearing sunset, and the enormous curved plate of the planet was dappled with an infinite texture of shadows. “Hiroko, can I have a word with you in private? Just for a second. We can go down into the tent below here. I just have a couple questions, and then we can come right back up.”
The others stared at them curiously. Under that gaze Hiroko finally bowed, and walked ahead of John to the tube down to the next tent.
They stood at one tip of that tent’s crescent, under the gazes of their friends above, and the occasional observer below. The tent was mostly empty; people were respecting the first hundred’s privacy by leaving a gap.
“You have suggestions for how I can identify the saboteurs?” Hiroko said.
“You might start with the boy named Kasei,” John said. “The one that is a mix of you and me.”
She would not meet his eye.
John leaned toward her, getting angry. “I presume there’s kids from every man in the first hundred?”
Hiroko tilted her head at him, and shrugged very slightly. “We took from the samples everyone gave. The mothers are all the women in the group, the fathers all the men.”
“What gave you the right to do all these things without our permission?” John asked. “To make our children without asking us – to run away and hide in the first place – why? Why?”
Hiroko returned his gaze calmly. “We have a vision of what life on Mars can be. We could see it wasn’t going to go that way. We have been proved right by what has happened since. So we thought we would establish our own life—”
“But don’t you see how selfish that is? We all had a vision, we all wanted it to be different, and we’ve been working as hard as we can for it, and all that time you’ve been gone, off creating a little pocket world for your little group! I mean we could have used your help! I wanted to talk to you so often! Here we have a kid between us, a mix of you and me, and you haven’t talked to me in twenty years!”
“We didn’t mean to be selfish,” Hiroko said slowly. “We wanted to try it, to show by experiment how we can live here. Someone has to show what you mean when you talk about a different life, John Boone. Someone has to live the life.”
“But if you do it in secret then no one can see it!”
“We never planned to stay secret forever. The situation has gotten bad, and so we’ve stayed away. But here we are now, after all. And when we are needed, when we can help, we will appear again.”
“You’re needed every day!” John said flatly. “That’s how social life works. You’ve made a mistake, Hiroko. Because while you’ve been hiding, the chances for Mars remaining its own place have gone way down, and a lot of people have been working to speed that disappearance, including some of the first hundred. And what have you done to stop them?”
Hiroko said nothing. John went on: “I suppose you’ve been helping Sax a little in secret. I saw one of your notes to him. But that’s another thing I object to – helping out some of us and yet not others.”
“We all do that,” Hiroko said, but she looked uncomfortable.
“Have you had the gerontological treatments in your colony?”
“Yes.”
“And you got the process from Sax?”
“Yes.”
“Do these kids of yours know their parentage?”
“Yes.”
John shook his head, exasperated and more. “I just can’t believe you would do these things!”
“We do not ask for your belief.”
“Obviously not. But aren’t you the least bit concerned about stealing our genes and making kids by us without our knowledge or consent? About bringing them up without giving us any part in their upbringing, any part in their childhood?”
She shrugged. “You can have your own kids if you want. As for these, well. Were any of you interested in having children twenty years ago? No. The subject never came up.”
“We were too old!”
“We were not too old. We chose not to think of it. Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people. You did not want children, and so you did not know about late birth. But we did, and so we learned the techniques. And when you meet the results, I think you will see it was a good idea. I think you will thank us. What have you lost, after all? These children are ours. But they have a genetic link to you, and from now on they will exist for you, as an unexpected gift, say. As a quite extraordinary gift.” Her Mona Lisa smile appeared and disappeared.
The concept of the gift, again. John paused to think about it. “Well,” he finally said. “We’ll be talking about that for a long time, I suspect.”
Twilight had turned the atmosphere below them into a dark purple band, running like a velvet border around the black star-studded bowl which had appeared over their heads. In the tents below they were singing, led by the Sufis: “Harmakhis, Mangala, Nirgala, Aquakuh; Harmakhis, Mangala, Nirgala, Aquakuh,” and around again, time after time, adding grace notes that were other names for Mars, and encouraging the bands already there to add instrumental accompaniments of all kinds, until every tent was filled with this song, all of them singing together. The Sufis then began their whirling, and little knots of dancers swirled all through the crowds.
“Will you at least stay in contact with me now?” John said intently to Hiroko. “Will you give me that?”
“Yes.”
They returned to the upper tent and the group went down together into the general party and joined the celebration. John made his way slowly to the Sufis, and tried the spins he had learned from them on their mesa, and people cheered and caught him when he spun out of control into the spectators. After one fall he was helped to his feet by the thin-faced man with dreadlocks who had led the midnight visit to his rover. “Coyote!” John cried.
“It’s me,” the man said, and his voice caused a ripple of electricity down John’s spine. “But no reason for alarm.”
He offered John a flask; after a moment’s hesitation John took it and drank. Fortune favors the bold, he thought. Tequila, apparently. “You’re Coyote!” he shouted over the music of the magnesium drum band.
The man grinned widely and nodded once, took the flask back and drank.
“Is Kasei with you?”
“No. He doesn’t like this meteor.” And then with a friendly slap to the arm the man moved off into the swirling crowd. He looked over his shoulder and shouted, “Have fun!”
John watched him disappear among the faces in the crowd, feeling the tequila burn in his stomach. The Sufis, Hiroko, now Coyote; the gathering was blessed. He saw Maya and hurried over to her and threw an arm over her shoulder, and they walked through the tents and the connecting tunnels, and people toasted them as they passed. The semi-rigid tent floors were gently bouncing up and down.
The countdown reached two minutes, and many people ascended to the upper tents, and then pressed against the clear walls of the south-facing arcs. The ice asteroid would probably burn up in a single orbit, its injection trajectory was so steep; an object a quarter the size of Phobos burned to steam and then, as it got hotter, to oxygen and hydrogen molecules; and all in a matter of minutes. No one could be sure what it would look like.
So they stood there, some of them still singing the chords of the name round. And then a final countdown was picked up by more and more of them, until they were all into the last ten, shouting out the reversed sequence of numbers at the top of their lungs, in the astronaut’s primal scream. They roared out “zero!", and for three breathless heartbeats nothing happened; then a white ball trailing a blazing fan of white fire came shooting up over the southwestern horizon, as big as the comet in the Bayeux Tapestry, and brighter than all the moons and mirrors and stars combined. Burning ice, bleeding across the sky, white on black, hurtling fast and low, so low that it was not much higher than they were on Olympus, so low that they could see white chunks bursting back through the tail and falling away like giant sparks. Then about halfway across the sky it broke into fragments, and the whole collection of incandescent blazes tumbled east, scattering like buckshot. All the stars suddenly shuddered; it was the first sonic boom, striking the tents and shaking them. A second boom followed, and the phosphor chunks bounced wildly for a moment as they tumbled down the sky and disappeared over the southeast horizon. Their firebrake tails followed them into Mars, and disappeared, and it was suddenly dark again, the ordinary night sky standing overhead as if nothing had happened. Except the stars were twinkling.
After all that anticipation, the passage had taken no more than three or four minutes. The celebrants had mostly gone silent at the sight, but many had cried out involuntarily at the sight of the breakup, as during a fireworks show; and again at the impact of the two sonic booms. Now, in the old dark, the silence was complete, and people stood in their tracks. What could you do after something like that?
But there was Hiroko, making her way down through the tents to the one where John and Maya and Nadia and Arkady were standing together. As she walked she chanted, in a tone that was quiet but carried throughout each tent she crossed: “Al-Qahira, Ares, Aquakuh, Bahram. Harmakhis, Hrad, Huo Hsing, Kasei. Ma’adim, Maja, Mamers, Mangala. Mawrth, Nirgal, Shalbatanu, Simud, Tiu.” She walked through the crowd right to John, and facing him she plucked up his right hand and pulled it aloft, and suddenly shouted, “John Boone! John Boone!”
And then everyone was cheering and yelling “Boone! Boone! Boone! Boone!” and others were shouting “Mars! Mars! Mars!”
John’s face blazed like the meteor had, and he felt stunned, as if a piece of it had pinged him on the head. His old friends were laughing at him, and Arkady yelled “Speech!” in what he imagined was an American accent: “Speech! Speech! Speeeeeeeeeech!”
Others picked this up, and after a time the noise died down, and they watched him expectantly, laughter rippling through them at the sight of his slack-faced astonishment. Hiroko released his hand, and he raised the other one helplessly, holding both overhead with hands outstretched.
“What can I say, friends?” he cried. “This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for.”
But his blood ran high with adrenalin, with tequila and omegendorph and happiness, and without willing it the words spilled out of him as they so often had before. “Look,” he said, “here we are on Mars!” (Laughter) “That’s our gift and a great gift it is, the reason we have to keep giving all our lives to keep the cycle going, it’s like in eco-economics where what you take from the system has to be balanced by what you give in to it, balanced or exceeded to create that anti-entropic surge which characterizes all creative life and especially this step across to a new world, this place that is neither nature nor culture, transformation of a planet into a world and then a home. Now we all know that different people have different reasons for being here and just as important the people who sent us up had different reasons for sending us, and now we’re beginning to see the conflicts caused by those differences, there are storms brewing on the horizon, meteors of trouble flying in and some of them are going to strike dead on rather than skip overhead like that blaze of white ice just did!” (Cheers). “It may get ugly, at times it almost certainly will get ugly, so we have to remember that just as these meteor strikes enrich the atmosphere, thicken it and add the elixir oxygen to the poison soup outside these tents, the human conflicts coming down may do the same, melting the permafrost at our social base, melting all those frozen institutions away and leaving us with the necessity of creation, the imperative to invent a new social order that is purely Martian, as Martian as Hiroko Ai, our own Persephone now come back up out of the regolith to announce the start of this new spring!” (Cheers) “Now I know I used to say that we had to invent it all from scratch but in these last few years traveling around and meeting you all I’ve seen that I was wrong to say that, it’s not like we have nothing and are being forced to conjure forms godlike out of the vacuum – we have the genes you might say, the memes as Vlad says meaning our cultural genes, so that it’s in the nature of an act of genetic engineering what we do here, we have the DNA pieces of culture all made and broken and mixed by history, and we can choose and cut and clip together from what’s best in that gene pool, knit it all together the way the Swiss did their constitution, or the Sufis their worship, or the way the Acheron group made their latest fast lichen, a bit from here and there, whatever’s appropriate, keeping in mind the seven generation rule, thinking seven generations back and seven generations forward, and seven times seven if you ask me because now it’s our lives we’re talking about extending way off into the years, we don’t know how that will affect us yet, but it’s certainly true that altruism and self-interest have collapsed together more tightly than ever before. But also it’s still and always our children’s lives and our children’s children and on down forever that we have to think of, we must act in a way that gives them just as many chances as we have been given and hopefully more, channeling the sun’s energy in ever more ingenious ways to reverse the flow of entropy in this little pocket of the universal flow. And I know that’s an awfully general way of putting it when this treaty that orders our lives here is coming up for renewal so soon, but we have to keep that level in mind because what’s coming is not just a treaty but more a kind of constitutional congress, because we’re dealing with the genome of our social organization here – you can do this, you can’t do that, you have to do this, to eat or to give. And we’ve been living by a set of rules established for empty land, the Antarctic treaty so fragile and idealistic which has held that cold continent free of intrusion for so long, up until the last decade in fact when it’s been chipped away at, and that’s a sign of what’s beginning to happen here too. The encroachment on that set of rules has begun everywhere, like a parasite feeding on the edges of its host organism, because that’s what the replacement set of rules is: the old parasitic greed of the kings and their henchmen – this system we call the transnational world order is just feudalism all over again, a set of rules that is anti-ecologic – it does not give back but rather enriches a floating international elite while impoverishing everything else, and so of course the so-called rich elite are in actuality poor as well, disengaged from real human work and therefore from real human accomplishment, parasitical in the most precise sense, and yet powerful too as parasites that have taken control can be, sucking the gifts of human work away from their rightful recipients which are the seven generations, and feeding on them while increasing the repressive powers that keep them in place!” (Cheers)
“So it’s democracy versus capitalism at this point, friends, and we out on this frontier outpost of the human world are perhaps better positioned than anyone else to see this and to fight this global battle, there’s empty land here, there’s scarce and non-renewable resources here, and we’re going to get swept up into the fight and we cannot choose not to be part of it, we are one of the prizes and our fate will be decided by what happens throughout the human world. That being the case, we had better band together for the common good, for Mars and for us and for all the people on earth and for the seven generations, it’s going to be hard it’s going to take years, and the stronger we are the better our chances, which is why I’m so happy to see that burning meteor in the sky pumping the matrix of life into our world, and why I’m so happy to see you all here to celebrate it together, a representative congress of all that I love in this world, but look I think that steel drum band is ready to play, aren’t you?” (shouts of assent) “so why don’t you folks start and we’ll dance till dawn and tomorrow scatter on the winds and down the sides of this great mountain, to carry the gift everywhere.”
Mad cheers. The magnesium drum band picked them up into its staccato flurry of plinks and plonks, and the crowd heaved into motion again.
They partied all night long. John spent the time wandering from tent to tent, shaking hands and hugging people, “Thanks, thanks, thanks. I don’t know, I don’t remember what I said. But this is what I meant all along, this right here.” His old friends laughed at him. Sax, drinking coffee and looking supremely relaxed, said to him, “Syncretism is it? Very interesting, very well put”—with the tiniest of smiles. Maya kissed him, Vlad and Ursula and Nadia kissed him; Arkady lifted him up and with a great roar swirled him around in the air, giving him a hairy kiss on each cheek and shouting, “Hey, John, could you repeat that please?” hooting at the very thought. “You amaze me, John, you always amaze me!” And Hiroko with her private smile, with Michel and Iwao flanking her, grinning at him…
Michel said, “I think this is what Maslow meant by the term peak experience,” and Iwao groaned and elbowed him, while Hiroko reached out and touched John on the arm with her forefinger, as if to pass along a certain animating touch, a power, a gift.
They next day they sorted and bagged the party wreckage and took down the tents, leaving the flagstone terraces behind, like strands of cloisonné necklace draped down the side of the old black volcano. They said good-bye to the dirigible crews, and the dirigibles drifted down the slope like balloons slipped from a child’s fist; the sand-colored ones of the hidden colony got hard to see very quickly.
As he got in his rover with Maya John said good-byes, and as they drove around the rim of Olympus Mons they caravaned with rovers containing Arkady and Nadia, and Ann and Simon and their son Peter. In conversations that day John said, “We need to talk to Helmut, and get the UN to accept us as speakers at large for the local population. And we need to present the UN with a draft of the revised treaty. Around Ls ninety I’m scheduled to go to a dedication ceremony for a new tent city on east Tharsis. Helmut is supposed to be there, maybe we could meet then?”
Only a few of them could make it, but they were named delegates for the rest, and the plan was agreed on. After that they talked about what the contents of the draft treaty should be, calling around to all the caravans and the dirigibles. The next day they came to the ramp down the northern escarpment, and at its foot they took off each in every direction. “That was a good party!” John said over the radio to each in turn. “See you at the next one!”
The Sufis rolled by while they were stopped, and they waved from their windows came on the radio to say good-bye as well. John recognized the voice of the old woman who had tended him at the toilet after his dance in the storm; as he was waving at their caravan she said over the radio,
“Whether it be of this world or of that,
Your love will lead us yonder at the last.”
PART SIX Guns Under the Table (#ulink_b7ba29b9-2786-50dc-8f60-d516db7d5e0e)
The day John Boone was assassinated we were up on east Elysium and it was morning and this meteor shower came raining down on us, there must have been thirty streaks or so and they were all black, I don’t know what those meteorites were made of but they burned black instead of white. Like smoke from crashing planes except straight and fast as lightning. It was so strange to see that we all were amazed and we hadn’t even yet heard the news, but when we did we figured back, and it happened at exactly the same time.
We were down in Hellas Lakefront and the sky went dark and a sudden wind whipped over the lake and blew every walktube in that town away, and then we heard.
We were in Senzeni Na where he worked a lot, and it was night and lightning started hammering us, giant bolts of lightning shooting right down into the mohole – no one could believe it, and it was so loud you couldn’t hear. And there was a picture of him down in the workers’ quarters, up on the wall of one suite, and a lightning bolt hit the concourse window and everyone was blinded for a second, and when our sight returned the frame of that picture was busted and the glass cracked and it was smoking. And then we heard the news.
We were in Carr and we couldn’t believe it. All the first hundred there were crying, he must have been the only one in that whole gang that everyone liked, if most of them were killed a good half of the rest would be cheering. Arkady was out of his mind, he cried for hours and it was so scary because it was so unlike him, Nadia kept trying to comfort him and she was saying, It’s all right, it’s all right and Arkady kept saying It’s not all right, it’s not all right, and roaring and throwing things and then falling into Nadia’s arms again, even Nadia was freaked. And that was when he ran off to his room and came back with one of the ignition transmitter boxes, and when he explained what it was Nadia got really furious at all of us, she said Why would you ever do a thing like that? And Arkady was crying and yelling What do you mean why? Because of this, because of what just happened to John, they killed him, they killed him! Who knows which of us will be next! They’ll kill all of us if they can! And Nadia kept trying to give the transmitter back and he got so upset, he kept making her hold it saying Please Nadia please, just in case, just in case, please, until finally she had to keep it to get him to calm down. I never saw anything like it.
We were in Underhill and the power went off, and when it came back on every plant in the farm had frozen solid. The lights and heat came back on and the plants all began to wilt. We sat around all night telling stories about him. I remembered what it was like when he first touched down back in the twenties, a lot of us did. I was just a kid at the time but I remember everyone laughing at his first words, I thought it was funny myself but I remember being very surprised that all the adults were laughing too, everyone was so tickled, I think everyone fell in love with him at that moment, I mean how could you not like someone who was the first person on another planet walking out there and saying Well, here we are. It was impossible not to like him.
Oh I don’t know. I saw him punch a man once, it was on the Burroughs train and he was in our car obviously high, and there was this woman who had some kind of deformity, a big nose and no chin and when she went down to the toilets some guy said My Lord, that woman has really been beat hard with the ugly stick, and Boone bam! knocks him into the next seat and says, There is no such thing as an ugly woman.
That’s what he thought.
That is what he thought, why he slept with a different woman every night, and he didn’t care what they looked like. Or how old they were – he had to talk fast when they found him with that fifteen-year-old. I don’t suppose Toitovna ever heard of that one or it would have been his balls, and hundreds of women would have gone wanting. He used to like to do it in two-person gliders with the woman on top of him while he piloted.
Oh man once I saw him pull a glider out of a downdraft that would have killed anyone else – it was a shear-off and it would have ripped the glider apart if he’d tried to resist it, but he just went with it and the plane dropped like a Rickover a thousand meters in a second, three or four times terminal velocity, and then when it was about to go smash he just tweaked it to the side and up and pancaked it in about twenty meters. Came out with his nose and ears bleeding. He was the best pilot on Mars, he could fly like an angel. Hell the whole first hundred would’ve been dead if he hadn’t hand flown them into their orbital insertion, that’s what I heard.
There were people who hated him. And with good reason too. He stopped the mosque on Phobos from being built. And he could be cruel, I’ve never met a man more arrogant.
We were on Olympus Mons and the whole sky went black.
Well, back before the beginning, Paul Bunyan came to Mars, and he brought his blue ox Babe with him. He walked around looking for lumber and his every footprint cracked the lava and left a rift canyon. He was so tall that he could reach into the asteroid belt while he walked around, and he chewed those rocks like Bing cherries and spit the pits out and boom there would be another crater.
And then he ran into Big Man. It was the first time Paul had ever seen anyone bigger than himself, and believe me Big Man was bigger – the usual two magnitudes, and that ain’t just twice as big let me tell you. But Paul Bunyan didn’t care. When Big Man said let’s see what you can do with that axe of yours Paul said sure, and with one stroke he hit the planet so hard that all the cracks of Noctis appeared at once. But then Big Man scratched the same spot with his toothpick, and the entire Marineris system yawned open. Let’s try bare fists, Paul said, and he landed a right cross on the southern hemisphere and there was Argyre. But Big Man tapped a spot nearby with his pinky and there was Hellas. Try spitting, Big Man suggested, and Paul spat and Nirgal Vallis ran as long as the Mississippi. But Big Man spat and all the big outflow channels ran at once. Try shitting! Big Man said, and Paul squatted and pushed out Ceraunius Tholus – but Big Man threw back his butt and there was the Elysium massif right next to it, steaming hot. Do your worst, Big Man suggested. Take a shot at me. And so Paul Bunyan picked him up by the toe and swung his whole bulk around and slammed him into the North Pole so hard that that whole northern hemisphere is depressed to this day. But without even getting up Big Man grabbed Paul by the ankle, and caught up his blue ox Babe in that same fist, and swung them into the ground and slammed them right through the planet and almost out the other side. And that’s the Tharsis bulge – Paul Bunyan, almost sticking out – Ascraeus his nose, Pavonis his cock, and Arsia his big toes. And Babe is off to one side, pushing up Olympus Mons. The blow killed Babe and Paul Bunyan both, and after that Paul had to admit that he was beat.
But his own bacteria ate him, naturally, and they crawled all around down on the bedrock and under the megaregolith, down there going everywhere, sucking up the mantle heat, and eating the sulfides, and melting down the permafrost. And everywhere they went down there, every one of those little bacteria said I am Paul Bunyan.
It’s a matter of will, Frank Chalmers said to his face in the mirror. The phrase was the only residue of the dream he had been having when he awoke. He shaved with quick decisive strokes, feeling tense, crammed with energy ready to be unleashed, wanting to get to work. More residue: Whoever wants it the most wins!
He showered and dressed, padded down to the dining hall. It was just after dawn. Sunlight flooded Isidis with horizontal beams of red-bronze light, and high in the eastern sky cirrus clouds looked like copper shavings.
Rashid Niazi, the Syrian representative to the conference, passed by and gave Chalmers a cool nod. Frank returned it and walked on. Because of Selim el-Hayil, the Ahad wing of the Moslem Brotherhood had gotten blamed for Boone’s assassination, and Chalmers had always been quick and public in defending them from all such accusations. Selim had been a lone assassin, he always asserted, a mad murder-suicide. This underlined the Ahads’ guilt while at the same time commanding their gratitude. Naturally Niazi, an Ahad leader, was a bit frustrated.
Maya came into the dining room and Frank greeted her cordially, automatically covering the discomfort he always felt in her presence.
“May I join you?” she said, watching him.
“Of course.”
Maya was perceptive, in her way; Frank concentrated on the moment. They chatted. The subject of the treaty began to come up, and so Frank said, “How I wish John were here now. We could use him.” And then: “I miss him.” This kind of thing would distract Maya instantly. She put her hand over his; Frank scarcely felt it. She was smiling, her arresting gaze full on him. Despite himself he had to look away.
The TV wall was showing the news package beamed up from Earth, and he tapped on the table console and turned up the sound. Earth was in bad shape. The video was of a massive protest march in Manhattan, the whole island packed with a crowd the protesters would call ten million and the police five hundred thousand. The helicopter images were quite arresting, but there were a lot of places these days that, although less visual, were much more dangerous. In the advanced nations people were marching because of draconian birth reduction acts, laws that made the Chinese look like anarchists, and the young had erupted in fury and dismay, feeling their lives pulled out of their hands by a great crowd of ancient unnatural undead, by history itself come alive. That was bad, sure. But in the developing countries they were rioting over “inadequate access” to the treatments themselves, and that was far worse. Governments were falling; people were dying by the thousands. Really these images of Manhattan were probably meant to reassure; everything’s still orderly! they said. People conducting themselves in a civil manner, even if it be civil disobedience. But Mexico City and Sao Paulo and New Delhi and Manila were in flames.
