скачать книгу бесплатно
Each vocal outburst he made untied a knot in his chest. He came to realize that no one was watching him, no one was listening. The tiny imaginary audience inside his head did not exist; no one watches our life movies. No friend or enemy would ever know what he did here, he could do whatever he liked and normalcy be damned. Apparently this was what he had been craving, what he had instinctively sought. He could go out and kick stones down the side of a karst for a whole afternoon; or cry; or write aphorisms in the sand; or scream abuse at the moons, careening across the southern sky. He could talk back to himself over meals, he could talk back to the TV, he could have conversations with his parents or his lost friends, with the President, or John, or Maya. He could dictate long rambling entries into his lectern: bits of a sociobiological history of the world, a journal, a philosophical treatise, a pornographic novel (he could masturbate), an analysis of the Arab culture and their history. He did all these things, and when he and his prospector rolled back to the caravans, he would feel better: emptier, calmer. More truly hollow. “Live,” as the Japanese said helpfully, “as if you were already dead.”
But the Japanese were aliens. And living with the Arabs sharpened his sense of how alien they were too. Oh, they were part of twenty-first century humanity, no doubt about it; they were sophisticated scientists and technicians, cocooned like everyone else in a protective shell of technology at every moment of their lives, and busy making and watching their own life movies. And yet they prayed three to six times a day, bowing toward Earth when it was the morning or evening star. And the reason their techno-caravans gave them such great and obvious pleasure was because the caravans were an outward manifestation of this bending of the modern world to their ancient goals. “Man’s work is to actualize God’s will in history,” Zeyk would say. “We can change the world in ways that help to actualize the divine pattern. It’s always been our way: Islam says the desert does not remain desert, the mountain does not remain mountain. The world must be transformed into a semblance of the divine pattern, and that is what constitutes history in Islam. Al-Qahira gives us the same challenge as the old world, except in a purer form.”
He would say these things to Frank as they sat around in his rover, in its tiny courtyard. These family rovers were transformed into private preserves, spaces that Frank was seldom invited into, and then only by Zeyk. Each time he visited he was surprised anew: the rover was nondescript from the exterior, big, with darkened windows, one of several parked in a bunch with walktubes between them. But then one ducked through a doorway and inside, and stepped into space filled with sunlight pouring down through skylights, illuminating couches and elaborate rugs, tiled floors, green-leafed plants, bowls of fruit, a window with the Martian view tinted and framed like a photo, low couches, silver coffee urns, computer consoles of inlaid teak and mahogany, running water in pools and fountains. A cool wet world, green and white, intimate and small. Looking around, Frank had the powerful sensation that rooms like this had existed for centuries, that the chamber would be instantly recognized for what it was by people living in the Empty Quarter in the tenth century, or across Asia in the twelfth.
Often Zeyk’s invitations would come in the afternoon, when a group of men would convene in his rover for coffee and talk. Frank would sit in his spot near Zeyk, and sip his muddy coffee and listen to the Arabic with all the attention he could muster. It was a beautiful language, musical and intensely metaphoric, so that all their modern technical terminology resonated with desert imagery because of the root meanings of all the new words, which like most of their abstract terms had concrete physical origins. Arabic, like Greek, had been a scientific language early on, and this showed in many unexpected cognates with English, and in the organic and compact nature of the vocabulary.
The conversations ran all over, but they were guided by Zeyk and the other elders, who were deferred to by the younger men in a way Frank found incredible. Many times the conversation became an overt lesson for Frank on Bedouin ways, which allowed him to nod and ask questions, and occasionally to offer comments or criticism. “When you have a strong conservative streak in your society,” Zeyk would say, “which detaches itself from the progressive streak, that’s when you get the worst kinds of civil wars. As in the conflict in Colombia that they called La Violencia, for instance. A civil war that became a complete breakdown of the state, a chaos that no one could understand, much less control.”
“Or like Beirut,” said Frank innocently.
“No, no.” Zeyk smiled. “Beirut was much more complex than that. It was not only civil war, but also had a number of exterior wars impinging on it. It was not a matter of social or religious conservatives detaching from the normal progress of culture, as in Colombia or the Spanish Civil War.”
“Spoken like a true progressive.”
“All Qahiran Mahjaris are progressive by definition, or we would not be here. But Islam has avoided civil war by remaining a whole: we have a coherent culture, so that the Arabs here are still devout. This is understood even by the most conservative elements back home. We will never have civil war, because we are united by our faith.”
Frank let his expression alone speak the fact of the Shiite heresy, among many other Islamic “civil wars”. Zeyk understood the expression, but ignored it and forged on: “We all move together through history, one loose caravan. You could say that we here on Al-Qahira are like one of our prospecting rovers. And you know what a pleasure it is to be in one of those.”
“So…” Frank thought hard about how to word his question; his inexperience with Arabic would only give him a certain amount of leeway before they got offended. “Is there really the idea of social progress in Islam?”
“Oh, certainly!” Several of them had replied in the affirmative, and were nodding still. Zeyk said, “Don’t you think so?”
“Well…” Frank let it pass. There still was not a single Arab democracy. It was a hierarchical culture with a premium put on honor and freedom; and for the many who were low down in the hierarchy, honor and freedom were only achievable by deference. Which reinforced the system and held it static. But what could he say?
“The destruction of Beirut was a disaster for progressive Arab culture,” another man said. “It was the city where intellectuals and artists and radicals went when they were attacked by their local governments. The national governments all hated the pan-Arab ideal, but the fact is we speak one language across these several countries, and language is a powerful unifier of culture. Along with Islam it makes us one, really, despite the political borders. Beirut was always the place to affirm that position, and when the Israelis destroyed it, that affirmation became more difficult. The destruction was calculated to splinter us, and it did. So here we begin the work again.”
And that was their social progress.
The stratiform copper deposit that they had been raking up ran dry and it was time for another ráhla, the movement of the hejra to the next site. They traveled for two days, and arrived at another stratiform deposit that Frank had found. Frank went out again on another prospecting trip.
For days he sat in the driver’s seat, feet on the dash, watching the land roll by. They were in a region of thulleya or little ribs, parallel ridges running downslope. He never turned on the TV anymore; there was a lot to think about. “The Arabs don’t believe in original sin,” he wrote in his lectern. “They believe that man is innocent, and death natural. That we do not need a saviour. There is no heaven or hell, but only reward and punishment, which take the form of this life itself and how it is lived. It is a humanist correction of Judaism and Christianity, in that sense. Although in another sense they have always refused to take responsibility for their destiny; it’s always Allah’s will. I don’t understand that contradiction. But now they are here. And the Mahjaris have always been an intimate part of Arab culture, often its leading edge; Arabic poetry was revived in the twentieth century by poets who actually lived in New York or Latin America. Perhaps it will be the same here. It is surprising to find how much their vision of history corresponds to what Boone believed; I don’t think either understood that at all. Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.”
He came on a find of porphyry copper, unusually dense, and with high concentrations of silver in it as well. That would be welcome. Copper and silver were both only somewhat scarce metals on earth, but silver was used in massive quantities in a great number of industries, and they were running low on easy sources of it. And here was more of it, right on the surface, in good concentrations; not as much as in Silver Mountain on the Elysium massif, of course, but the
Arabs would not care. Harvest it, and then they would get to move again.
He moved on himself. Days passed, the shadows wheeled. The wind went downslope, upslope, downslope, upslope. Clouds formed and storms broke, and sometimes the sky was spangled with icebows and sundogs and dust devils made of hail, sparkling like mica in the pink sunlight. Sometimes he would see one of the aerobraking continuous shuttles, like a blazing meteor running steadily across the sky. One clear morning he saw Elysium Montes bulking over the horizon like a black Himalaya: the view bent a thousand kilometers over the horizon by an inversion layer in the atmosphere. He stopped turning on the lectern as he had the TV. Nothing but the world and him. Winds caught at the sand, and tossed clouds of it against the rover. Khála, the empty land.
But then dreams began to plague him, dreams that were memories, intense and full and accurate, as if he were reliving his past while he slept. One night he dreamed of the day he had found out for sure that he would lead the American half of the first Martian colony. He had driven from Washington out to the Shenandoah Valley, feeling very odd. He walked for a long time in the great Eastern hardwood forest. He came on the limestone caves at Luray, now a tourist attraction, and on a whim he took the tour. Every stalactite and stalagmite was lit by lurid colored lights. Some had had mallets attached to them, and an organist could play them like the plates of a glockenspiel; the well-tempered cavern! He had to walk out into the peripheral blackness and stuff his sleeve in his mouth so the other tourists wouldn’t hear him laugh.
Then he parked in a scenic overlook and walked off into the forest, and sat down between the roots of a big tree. No one around, a warm fall night, the earth dark, and furry with trees. Cicadas cycling through their alien hum, crickets creaking their last mournful creaks, sensing the frost that would kill them. He felt so odd... could he really leave this world behind? Sitting there on the earth he had wished he could slide down a crack like a changeling and re-emerge something else, something better, something mighty, noble, long-lived – something like a tree. But nothing happened, of course; he lay on the ground, cut off from it already. A Martian already.
And he woke, and was disturbed all the rest of that day.
And then, even worse, he dreamed of John. He dreamed of the night he had sat in Washington and watched John on TV, stepping out onto Mars for the first time, closely followed by the other three. Frank left the official celebration at NASA and walked the streets, a hot DC night, summer of 2020. It had been part of his plan for John to make the first landing, he had given it to him as one sacrifices a queen in chess, because that first crew would be fried by the voyage’s radiation, and according to the regs grounded for good on their return. And then the field would be cleared for the next trip out, for the colonists who would stay for good. That was the real game; and that was the one Frank planned to lead.
Still, on that historic night he found himself in a foul mood. He went back to his apartment near Dupont Circle and then went out and lost his FBI tag and slipped into a dark bar and sat there watching the TV over the bartenders’ heads, drinking bourbon like his father, with Martian light pouring out of the TV and reddening the whole dark room. And as he got drunk and listened to John’s inane talk his mood got worse and worse. It was hard to focus on his plan. He drank hard. The bar was noisy, the crowd inattentive; not that the landing hadn’t been noticed, but here it was just another entertainment, on a par with the Bullets game that one bartender kept cutting to. Then blip, back to the scene on Chryse Planitia. The man next to him swore at the switch. “Basketball’s gonna be a hell of a game on Mars,” Frank said in the Florida accent he had long ago eradicated.
“Have to move the hoop up, or they be breaking their heads.”
“Sure, but think of the jumps. Twenty foot dunks, easy.”
“Yeah even you white boys’ll jump high there, or so you say. But you better leave the basket alone, or you got the same trouble you got here.”
Frank laughed. But outside it was hot, a muggy DC summer night, and he walked home in a plummeting foul mood, blacker and blacker with every step; and coming upon one of Dupont’s beggars, he pulled out a ten-dollar bill and threw it at the man, and as the bum reached for it Frank shoved him away shouting “Fuck you! Get a job!” But then people came up out of the Metro and he hurried off, shocked and furious. Beggars slumped in the doorways. There were people on Mars and there were beggars in the streets of the nation’s capital, and all the lawyers walked by them every day, their freedom-and-justice talk no more than a cover for their greed. “We’re gonna do it different on Mars,” Frank said viciously, and all of a sudden he wanted to be there immediately, no careful years of waiting, of campaigning— “Get a fucking job!” he shouted at another homeless man. Then on to his apartment building, with its bored security team behind the foyer desk, people wasting their whole lives sitting there doing nothing. Upstairs his hands shook so hard that he couldn’t at first get his door open; and once inside he stood frozen, horrified at the sight of all the bland executive’s furniture, all of it a theater set, built to impress infrequent visitors, really just NASA and the FBI. None of it his. Nothing his. Nothing but a plan.
And then he woke up, alone, in a rover on the Great Escarpment.
Eventually he returned from this horrid expedition of dreams. Back in the caravan he found it hard to talk. He was invited to Zeyk’s for coffee, and he swallowed a tablet of an opiate complex to relax himself in the company of men. In Zeyk’s rover he sat in his spot, and waited for Zeyk to pass around little cups of clove-dosed coffee. Unsi Al-Khal sat on his left, speaking at length about the Islam vision of history, and how it had begun in the Jahili or pre-Islam period. Al-Khal had never been friendly, and when Frank tried to pass him the cup that came his way in a standard gesture of politeness, Al-Khal curtly insisted that the honor was Frank’s, that Al-Khal would not be prevailed upon to usurp it. Typical insult by over-politeness, the hierarchy again: one could not do favors for one higher in the system, favors only went downward. Alpha males, pecking orders; really they might as well have been back on the savannah (or in Washington), it was nothing more than primate dominance tactics again.
Frank ground his teeth, and when Al-Khal began pontificating again he said, “What about your women?”
They were taken aback, and Al-Khal shrugged. “In Islam men and women have different roles. Just as in the West. It is biological in origin.”
Frank shook his head and felt the sensuous buzz of the tabs, the black weight of the past. The pressure on a permanent aquifer of disgust at the bottom of his thinking increased, and something gave, and suddenly he didn’t care about anything and was sick of pretending he did. Sick of all pretense everywhere, the glutinous oil that allowed society to run on in its gnashing horrible way.
“Yes,” he said, “but it’s slavery, isn’t it?”
The men around him stiffened, shocked by the word.
“Isn’t it?” he said, helplessly feeling the words bubble up out of his throat. “Your wives and daughters are powerless, and that is slavery. You may keep them well, and they may be slaves with peculiar and intimate powers over their masters, but the master-slave relationship twists everything to it. So that all these relations are twisted, pressured to the bursting point.”
Zeyk’s nose was wrinkled. “This is not the lived experience of it, I can assure you. You should listen to our poetry.”
“But would your women assure me?”
“Yes,” Zeyk said with perfect confidence.
“Maybe. But look, the most successful women among you are modest and deferent at all times, they are scrupulous in honoring the system. Those are the ones that aid their husbands and sons to rise in the system. So to succeed, they must work to enforce the same system that subjugates them. This is poisonous in its effects. And the cycle repeats itself, generation after generation. Supported by both masters and slaves.”
“The use of the word slaves,” Al-Khal said slowly, and paused, “is offensive, because it presumes judgement. Judgement of a culture you do not really know.”
“True. I only tell you what it looks like from the outside. This can only be of interest to a progressive Moslem. Is this the divine pattern you are struggling to actualize in history? The laws are there to read, and to watch in action, and to me it looks like a form of slavery. And, you know, we fought wars to end slavery. And we excluded South Africa from the community of nations for arranging its laws so that the blacks could never live as well as the whites. But you do this all the time. If any men in the world were treated like you treat your women, the UN would ostracize that nation. But because it is a matter of women, the men in power look away. They say it is a cultural matter, a religious matter, not to be interfered with. Or it is not called slavery because it is only an exaggeration of how women are treated elsewhere.”
“Or not even an exaggeration,” Zeyk suggested. “A variation.”
“No, it is an exaggeration. Western women choose much of what they do, they have their lives to live. Not so among you. But no human submits to being property, they hate it, and subvert it, and have what revenge they can against it.
That’s how humans are. And in this case it is your mother, your wife, your sisters, your daughters.”
Now the men were glaring at him, still more shocked than offended; but Frank stared at his coffee cup, and went on regardless. “You must free your women.”
“How do you suggest we do this?” Zeyk said, looking at him curiously.
“Change your laws! Educate them in the same schools in which you educate your sons. Make them the equal in rights to any Moslem of any kind anywhere. Remember, there is much in your laws that is not in the Koran, but was added in the time since Mohammed.”
“Added by holy men,” Al-Khal said angrily.
“Certainly. But we choose the ways we enforce our religious beliefs in the behavior of daily life. This is true of all cultures. And we can choose new ways. You must free your women.”
“I do not like to be given a sermon by anyone but a mullah,” Al-Khal said, mouth tight under his moustache. “Let those who are innocent of crime preach what is right.”
Zeyk smiled cheerily. “This is what Selim el-Hayil used to say,” he said.
And there was a deep, charged silence.
Frank blinked. Many of the men were smiling now, looking at Zeyk with appreciation. And it came to Frank in a flash that they all knew what had happened in Nicosia. Of course! Selim had died that night just hours after the assassination, poisoned by a strange combination of microbes; but they knew anyway.
And yet they had accepted him, taken him into their homes, into their private enclosures where they lived their private lives. They had tried to teach him what they believed.
“Perhaps we should make them as free as Russian women,” Zeyk said with a laugh, extricating Frank from the moment. “Crazed by overwork, don’t they say? Told they are equal, but actually not?”
Yussuf Hawi, a high-spirited young man, leered and cackled: “Bitches, I can tell you! But no more or less than any other woman! Isn’t it true that in the home the power always goes to the strong? In my rover I am the slave, I can tell you that. I kiss snake’s butt daily with my Aziza!”
The men roared with laughter at him. Zeyk took their cups, and poured another round of coffee. The men patched up the conversation as best they could; they covered for Frank’s gross assault, either because it was so far beyond the pale that it only indicated ignorance, or because they wanted to acknowledge and support Zeyk’s sponsorship of him. But only about half of them looked at Frank anymore.
He withdrew and listened again, profoundly angry at himself. It was a mistake to speak one’s mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. Best to strip all statements of real content, this was a basic law of diplomacy. Out on the Escarpment he had forgotten that.
Disturbed, he went out in a prospector again. The dreams became less frequent. When he came back in, he did not take any drugs. He sat silently in the coffee circles, or spoke about minerals and groundwater, or the comfort of the newly-modified prospecting rovers. The men regarded him cautiously, and only included him in the conversation again because of Zeyk’s friendliness, which never flagged – except for that one moment, when he had most effectively reminded Frank of one of the basic facts of the situation.
One night Zeyk invited him over for a dinner with Zeyk and his wife Nazik only. Nazik wore a long white dress cut in the traditional Bedouin style, with a blue waist band and bare-headed, her thick black hair drawn back into a flat comb and then left to fall down her back. Frank had read enough to know that this was all wrong; among the Bedouin of the Awlad ’Ali, women wore black dresses and red sashes, to indicate their impurity, sexuality, and moral inferiority; and they kept their heads covered, and used the veil in an elaborate hierarchical code of modesty. All in deference to male power; so that Nazik’s clothes would be deeply shocking to her mother and grandmothers, even if she was, as now, wearing them before an outsider who didn’t really matter. But if he knew enough to understand, then it was a sign.
And then at one point, when they were all laughing, Nazik rose at Zeyk’s request to get them dessert, and she said to Zeyk with a laugh, “Yes, master.”
Zeyk scowled and said, “Go, slave,” and took a swipe at her, and she snapped her teeth at him. They laughed at Frank’s fierce blush, and saw that he understood: they were mocking him, and also breaking the Bedouin taboo against showing marital affection of any kind, to anyone. Nazik came over and put her fingertip on his shoulder, which shocked him further. “We are only joking with you, you know,” she said. “We women heard about your declaration to the men, and we love you for it. You could have as many wives among us as an Ottoman sultan. Because there is some truth to what you said, too much.” She nodded seriously, and pointed a finger at Zeyk, who wiped the grin from his face and nodded as well. Nazik went on: “But so much depends on the people within the laws, don’t you find? The men in this caravan are good men, smart men. And the women are even smarter, and we have taken over entirely.” Zeyk’s eyebrows shot up, and Nazik laughed. “No, really, we have only taken our share. Seriously.”
“But where are you, then?” Frank said. “I mean where are the caravan’s women, during the day? What do you do?”
“We work,” Nazik said simply. “Take a look, you’ll see us.”
“Doing all the kinds of work?”
“Oh yes. Perhaps not where you can see us much. There are still some – habits, customs. We are reclusive, separate, we have our own world – it is perhaps not good. We Bedu tend to group together, men and women. We have our traditions, you see, and they endure. But there is much that is changing here, changing fast. So that this is the next stage of the Islamic way. We are…” She searched for the word. “Utopia,” Zeyk suggested. “The Moslem Utopia.” She waggled a hand doubtfully. “History,” she said. “The hadj to Utopia.”
Zeyk laughed with pleasure. “But the hadj is the destination,” he said. “That is what the mullahs always teach us. So we are already there, no?” And he and his wife smiled at each other, a private communication with a high density of information exchange, a smile which they shared, for a moment, with Frank. And their talk veered elsewhere.
In practical terms Al-Qahira was the pan-Arab dream come alive, as all the Arab nations had contributed money and people to the Mahjaris. The mix of Arab nationalities on Mars was complete, but in the individual caravans it separated out a bit. Still, they mixed; and whether they came from the oil-rich nations or the oil-poor ones didn’t seem to matter. Here among the foreigners they were all cousins. Syrians and Iraqis, Egyptians and Saudis, Gulf Staters and Palestinians, Libyans and Bedouins. All cousins here.
Frank began to feel better. He slept deeply again, refreshed by the timeslip in every day, a little slack in the circadian rhythm, the body’s own time off. Indeed all life in the caravan had an altered duration, as if the moment itself had dilated: he felt there was time to spare, that there was never a reason to hurry.
And the seasons rolled by. The sun set in almost the same spot every night, shifting ever so slowly; they lived entirely by the Martian calendar now, it was the only new year they noticed or celebrated: Ls=0, the start of northern spring in the year 16. Season after season, each six months long, and each passing in the absence of the old sharp sense of mortality: it was like living in the eternal now, in an endless round of works and days, in the continuous cycle of prayer to the oh-so-distant Mecca, in the ceaseless wandering over the land. In the always-cold. One morning they woke to find it had snowed in the night and the whole landscape was pure white. And mostly water ice. The whole caravan went crazy for the day, all of them, men and women, outside in walkers, giddy at the sight, kicking snow, making snowballs that did not cohere satisfactorily, trying to pile snowmen that likewise did not stick together. The snow was too cold.
Zeyk laughed hard at these efforts. “What an albedo,” he said. “It’s astonishing how much of what Sax does rebounds against him. Feedbacks naturally adjust toward homeostasis, don’t you think? I wonder if Sax shouldn’t have first made things so much colder that the whole atmosphere froze out onto the surface. How thick would it be, a centimeter? Then line up our harvesters pole to pole, and run them around the world like latitude lines, processing the carbon dioxide into good air and fertilizer. Ha, can’t you see it?”
Frank shook his head. “Sax probably considered it, and rejected it for some reason we don’t see.”
“No doubt.”
The snow sublimed away, the red land returned, they traveled on their way. Occasionally they passed nuclear reactors, standing like castles on the top of the Escarpment; not just Rickovers but giant Westinghouse breeders, with frost plumes like thunderheads. On Mangalavid they saw programs about a fusion prototype in Chasma Borealis.
Canyon after canyon. They knew the land in a way that even Ann didn’t; every part of Mars interested her equally, so she could not have this focused knowledge of a single region, this way they had of reading it like a story, following its leads through the red rock to a patch of blackish sulfides, or the delicate cinnabar of mercury deposits. They were not so much students of the land as lovers of it; they wanted something from it. Ann, on the other hand, asked for nothing but answers. There were so many different kinds of desire.
Days passed, and then more seasons. When they ran into other Arab caravans they celebrated long into the night, with music and dance, coffee and hookahs and talk, in meeting tents covering an octagon of parked rovers. Their music was never recorded, but played with great facility on flutes and electric guitars, and mostly sung, in quarter-tones and wails so strange to Frank’s ear that for a long time he couldn’t tell if the singers were accomplished or not. The meals lasted hours, and afterwards they talked till dawn, and made a point of going out to watch the furnace blast of sunrise.
When they met with other nationalities, however, they were naturally more reserved. Once they passed a new Amex mining station manned mostly by Americans, perched on one of the rare big veins of mafic rock rich in platinoids, in Tantalus Fossae near Alba Patera. The mine itself was down on the long flat floor of the narrow rift canyon, but it was mostly robotic, and the crew lived up in a plush tent, on the rim overlooking the rift. The Arabs circled next to this tent, made a brief guarded visit inside, and retreated into their insectile rovers for the night. It would have been impossible for the Americans to learn a thing about them.
But that evening Frank went back over into the Amex tent by himself. The folks inside were from Florida, and their voices brought up memories in him like nets filled with coelacanths; Frank ignored all the little mental explosions, and asked question after question, concentrating on the black and Latino and redneck faces that answered him. He saw that this group was imitating an earlier form of community just like the Arabs did; this was a wildcat oil field crew, enduring harsh conditions and long hours for big paychecks, all saved for the return to civilization. It was worth it even if Mars sucked, which it did. “I mean even on the ice you can go outside, but here, fuck.”
They didn’t care who Frank was, and as he sat among them listening they told stories to each other that astonished him even though they were somehow deeply familiar. “There was twenty-two of us prospecting with this little mobile habitat with no rooms to it, and one night we got to partying and took all our clothes off, and all the women got in a circle on the floor with their heads in the middle, and the guys went in a circle around the outside, and there were twelve guys and ten gals so the two guys out kept the rotation going pretty fast, and we actually got all the way around the circle in the timeslip. We tried to all come at once at the end of the timeslip and it worked pretty good, once a few couples got going it was like a whirlpool and it sucked everyone down into it. Felt so good.”
And then, after the laughter and the shouts of disbelief: “We was killing and freezing these hogs in Acidalia, and those humane killers are like shooting a giant arrow into their heads so we figured why not kill and freeze them both at once and see what happens. So we got them all handicapped, and bet on which ones would get the furthest, and we open the outer lock door and those pigs all dash out outside and wham, they all keeled over inside of fifty yards of the door, except for one little gal that got almost two hundred yards, and froze standing upright. I won a thousand dollars on that hog.”
Frank grinned at their howls. He was back in America. He asked them what else they had done on Mars. Some had been building nuclear reactors up on top of Pavonis Mons, where the space elevator would touch down. Others had worked on the water pipe running up eastern Tharsis bulge from Noctis to Pavonis. The parent transnational for the elevator, Praxis, had a lot of interests at the bottom end, as they called it. “I worked on a Westinghouse on top of the Compton aquifer under Noctis, which is supposed to have as much water in it as the Mediterranean, and this reactor’s entire job was going to be to power a bunch of humidifiers. Fucking two hundred megawatts of humidifier, they’re the same as the humidifier I had in my bedroom when I was a kid, except they take fifty kilowatts apiece! Gigantic Rockwell monsters with single molecule vaporizers and jet turbine engines that shoot the mist out of thousand meter stacks. Fucking unbelievable. A million liters a day of H and O added to the air.”
Another of them had been building a new tent city in the Echus channel, below Overlook: “They’ve tapped an aquifer there and there’s fountains all over town, statues in the fountains, waterfalls, canals, ponds, swimming pools, you name it, it’s a little Venice up there. Great thermal retention too.”
The conversation removed itself to the gym, which was well-stocked with machines designed to enable their users to stay Earth-ready. “He’s buffed, look at that, must be short time.” Almost everyone kept to a rigorous workout schedule, three hours a day minimum. “If you give up you’re stuck here, right? And then what good is that savings account?”
“Eventually it’ll be legal tender,” another one of them said. “Where people go, the American dollar is sure to follow.”
“You got it backwards, assbite.”
“As we are the proof of.”
Frank said, “I thought the treaty blocked the use of Terran money here?”
“The treaty’s a fucking joke,” said one doing lat pulls.
“Dead as Bessy the Long Distance Hog.”
They stared at Frank, all of them in their twenties and thirties, a generation he had never talked to much; he didn’t know how they had grown up, what had shaped them, what they might believe. The oh-so-familiar accents and faces might be deceptive, in fact probably were. “You think so?” he asked.
Some of them seemed more aware than the rest that he might be connected to the treaty, along with all his other historical associations. But the man doing lat pulls was oblivious: “We’re here on a deal that the treaty says is illegal, man. And it’s happening all over. Brazil, Georgia, the Gulf States, all the countries that voted against the treaty are letting the transnats in. It’s a contest among the flags of convenience as to how convenient they can be! And UNOMA is flat on its back with its legs spread, saying, More, more. Folks are landing by the thousands and most are employed by transnats, they’ve got their government visas and five year contracts, including rehab time to get you Earth buffed, things like that.”
“By the thousands?” Frank said.
“Oh yeah! By the tens of thousands!”
He hadn’t looked at TV, he realized, for… For a long time.
A man doing military presses spoke between lifts of the whole stack of black weights. “It’s gonna blow pretty soon – A lot of people don’t like it – Not just oldtimers like you – A whole bunch of newtimers too – They’re disappearing in droves – Whole operations – whole towns sometimes – Came on a mine in Syrtis – completely empty – Everything useful gone – Completely stripped – Even stuff like inner lock doors – Oxygen tanks – Toilets – Stuff that’d take hours – to pull loose.”
“Why did they do that?”
“Going native!” a bench presser exclaimed. “Won over by your comrade Arkady Bogdanov!”
From flat on his back this man met Frank’s gaze; a tall, broad-shouldered black man with an aquiline nose. He said, “They get up here and the company tries to look good, gyms and good food and rec time and all, but what it comes down to is them telling you everything you can do and can’t do, it’s all scheduled, when you wake up, when you eat, when you shit, it’s like the Navy has taken over Club Med, you know? And then here comes your bro Arkady, saying to us, You’re Amurricans, boys, you got to be free, this Mars is the new frontier, and you should know some of us are treating it that way, we ain’t no robot software, we’re free men, making our own rules on our own world! And that’s it, man!” The room crackled with laughter, everyone had stopped to listen: “That does the trick! Folks get up here and they see they’re schedule software, they see they can’t keep Earth-buffed without they spend their whole time in here sucking the air hose, and even then I spect it’s impossible, they lied to us I’ll bet. So the pay means nothing, really, we’re all software and maybe stuck here for good. Slaves, man! Fucking slaves! And believe you me, that’s pissing a lot of folk off. They’re ready to strike back, I mean to tell you. And that’s the folks who are disappearing. Gonna be a whole lot of them before it’s all over.”
