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Frank stared down at the man. “Why haven’t you disappeared?”
The man laughed shortly and began pumping weights again.
“Security,” someone else called from the Nautilus machine.
Military Press disagreed. “Security’s lame – But you got to have – Somewhere to go. Soon as Arkady shows – Gone!”
“One time,” Bench Press said, “I saw a vid of him where he talked about how folk of color are better suited for Mars than white folk, how we do better with the UV.”
“Yeah! Yeah!” They were all laughing at that, both skeptical and amused at once.
“It’s bullshit, but what the hell,” Bench Press said. “Why not? Why not? Call it our world. Call it Nova Africa. Say no boss is gonna take it away from us this time.” He was laughing again, as if everything he had said was no more than a funny idea. Or else a hilarious truth, a truth so delicious that just saying it made you laugh out loud.
And so very late that night Frank went back to the Arab rovers, and he continued on with them, but it wasn’t the same. He had been yanked back into time, and now the long days in the prospector only made him itch. He watched TV; he made some calls. He had never resigned as Secretary; the office had been run in his absence by Assistant Secretary Slusinski, and he had done just enough by phone for them to cover for him, telling Washington that he was working, then that he was doing deep research, then that he was taking a working vacation, and that as one of the first hundred he needed to be out there wandering around. It wouldn’t have lasted much longer, but when Frank called Washington directly the President was pleased, and in Burroughs the exhausted-looking Slusinski looked happy indeed. In fact the whole Burroughs office sounded pleased that he planned to come back, which surprised Frank quite a bit. When he had left Burroughs, disgusted at the treaty and depressed about Maya, he had been, he thought, a bastard of a boss. But here they had covered for him for almost two years, and seemed happy to hear he was coming back. People were strange. The aura of the first hundred, no doubt. As if that mattered.
So Frank returned from his final prospecting trip and sat that evening in Zeyk’s rover, sipping his coffee, watching them talk, Zeyk and Al-Khan and Yussuf and the rest, and, wandering in and out of the room, Nazik and Aziza. People who had accepted him; people who in some sense understood him. By their code he had done the necessary things. He relaxed in the flow of Arabic, still and always awash with ambiguity: lily, river, forest, lark, jasmine, words that might refer to a waldo hand, a pipe, a kind of talus, robot parts; or perhaps just to lily, river, forest, lark, jasmine. A beautiful, beautiful language. The speech of the people who had taken him in, and let him rest. But he would have to leave.
They had arranged things so that if you spent half the year in Underhill you were assigned a permanent room of your own. Towns all over the planet were adopting similar systems, because people were moving around so much that no one felt at home anywhere, and this arrangement seemed to mitigate that. Certainly the first hundred, who were among the most mobile Martians of all, had started spending more time in Underhill than they had in the years before, and this was mostly a pleasure, to most of them. At any given time twenty or thirty would be around, and others came in and stayed for a while between jobs, and in the constant come and go they had a chance to carry on a more-or-less continuous conference on the state of things, with newcomers reporting what they had seen firsthand, and the rest arguing about what it meant.
Frank, however, did not spend the required twelve months a year in Underhill, and so he did not have a room there. He had moved the department’s head offices to Burroughs back in 2050, and before joining the Arabs in ’57 the only room he had kept was there in the offices.
Now it was ’59 and he was back, in a room one floor down from his old one. Dropping his bag on the floor and looking around at the room, he cursed aloud. To have to be in Burroughs in person – as if one’s physical presence made any difference these days! It was an absurd anachronism, but that’s the way people were. Another vestige of the savannah. They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.
Slusinski came in. Though his accent was pure New York, Frank had always called him Jeeves, because he looked like the actor in the BBC series. “We’re like dwarves in a waldo,” Frank said to him angrily. “One of those really big waldo excavators. We’re inside it and supposed to be moving a mountain, and instead of using the waldo capabilities we’re leaning out of a window and digging with teaspoons. And complimenting each other on the way we’re taking advantage of the height.”
“I see,” Jeeves said carefully.
But there was nothing to be done about it. He was back in Burroughs, hurrying around, four meetings an hour, conferences that told him what he already knew, which was that UNOMA was now using the treaty for toilet paper. They were approving accounting systems which guaranteed that mining would never show any profits to distribute to the general assembly members, even after the elevator was working. They were handing out “necessary personnel” status to thousands of emigrants. They were ignoring the various local groups, ignoring MarsFirst. Most of this was done in the name of the elevator itself, which provided an endless string of excuses, thirty-five thousand kilometers of excuses, a hundred and twenty billion dollars of excuses. Which was not all that expensive, actually, compared to the military budgets of the past century – less than a year of the global military budget of those days, in fact, and most of the elevator funds had been needed in the first years of finding the asteroid and getting it into proper orbit, and setting up the cable factory. After that the factory ate the asteroid and spat out the cable, and that was that; they only had to wait for it to grow long enough, and nudge it down into position. A bargain, a real bargain!
And also a great excuse for breaking the treaty whenever it seemed expedient. “God damn it,” Frank shouted at the end of a long day in the first week back. “Why has UNOMA caved like this?”
Jeeves and the rest of his staff took this as a rhetorical question and offered no theories. He had definitely been away too long; they were afraid of him now. He had to answer the question himself: “It’s greed I guess, they’re all getting paid off in one cosmeticized way or another.”
At dinner that night, in a little café, he ran into Janet Blyleven and Ursula Kohl and Vlad Taneev. As they ate they watched the news from Earth on a bar TV. Really it had gotten to be almost too much to watch. Canada and Norway were joining the plan to enforce population growth slowdown. No one would say population control, of course, it was a forbidden phrase in politics, but that’s what it was and it was turning into the tragedy of the commons all over again: if one country ignored the UN resolutions, then nearby countries were howling for fear of being overwhelmed – another monkey fear, but there it was. Meanwhile Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, Azania, the United States, Canada, and Switzerland had all proclaimed immigration illegal. While India was growing by eight percent a year. Famine would solve that, as it would in a lot of countries. The Four Horsemen were good at population control. Until then… the TV cut to an ad for a popular diet fat, which was indigestible and went right through the gut unchanged. “Eat all you want!”
Janet clicked off the TV. “Let’s change the subject.”
They sat around their table and stared at their plates. It turned out Vlad and Ursula had come from Acheron because there was an outbreak of resistant tuberculosis in Elysium. “The cordon sanitaire has fallen apart,” Ursula said. “Some of the emigrant viruses will surely mutate, or combine with one of our tailored systems.”
Earth again. It was impossible to avoid it. “Things are falling apart down there!” Janet said.
“It’s been coming for years,” Frank said harshly, his tongue loosened by the faces of his old friends. “Even before the treatment life expectancy in the rich countries was nearly double that in the poor. Think about that! But in the old days the poor were so poor they hardly knew what life expectancy was, the day itself was their whole concern. Now every corner shop has a TV and they can see what’s happening – that they’ve got AIDS while the rich have the treatment. It’s gone way beyond a difference in degree, I mean they die young and the rich live forever! So why should they hold back? They’ve got nothing to lose.”
“And everything to gain,” Vlad said. “They could live like us.”
They huddled over cups of coffee. The room was dim. The pine furniture had a dark patina; stains, nicks, fines rubbed in by hand… It could have been one of those nights in that distant time when they were the only ones in the world, a few of them up later than the rest, talking. Except Frank blinked and looked around, and saw in his friends’ faces the weariness, the white hair, the turtle faces of the old. Time had passed, they were scattered over the planet, running like he was, or hidden like Hiroko, or dead like John. John’s absence suddenly seemed huge and gaping, a crater on whose rim they huddled glumly, trying to warm their hands. Frank shuddered.
Later Vlad and Ursula went to bed. Frank looked at Janet, feeling immobilized as he sometimes did at the end of a long day, incapable of ever moving again. “Where’s Maya these days?” he asked, to keep Janet from retiring too. She and Maya had been good friends in the Hellas years.
“Oh, she’s here in Burroughs,” Janet said. “Didn’t you know?”
“No.”
“She’s got Samantha’s old rooms. She may be avoiding you.”
“What?”
“She’s pretty mad at you.”
“Mad at me?”
“Sure.” She regarded him across the dim, faintly humming room. “You must have known that.”
While he was still considering how open to be with her, he said “No! Why should she be?”
“Oh Frank,” she said. She leaned forward in her chair. “Quit acting like you’ve got a stick up your ass! We know you, we were there, we saw it all happen!” And as he was recoiling she leaned back, and said calmly, “You must know that Maya loves you. She always has.”
“Me?” he said weakly. “It’s John she loved.”
“Yeah, sure. But John was easy. He loved her back, and it was glamorous. It was too easy for Maya. She likes things hard. And that’s you.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
Janet laughed at him. “I know I’m right, she’s told me as much! Ever since the treaty conference she’s been angry at you, and she always talks when she’s mad.”
“But why is she angry?”
“Because you rejected her! Rejected her, after pursuing her for years and years, and she got used to that, she loved it. It was romantic, the way you persisted. She took it for granted, sure, but she loved you for it. And she liked how powerful you were. And now John is dead, and she could finally say yes to you, and you sent her packing. She was furious! And she stays mad a long time.”
“This…” Frank struggled to collect himself. “It just doesn’t match with my understanding of what’s happened.”
Janet stood up to go, and as she walked by him she patted him on the head. “Maybe you ought to talk to Maya about it then.” She left.
For a long time he sat there, feeling stunned, examining the shiny grain of his chair arm. It was hard to think. Eventually he stopped trying and went to bed.
He slept poorly, and at the end of a long night he had another dream about John. They were in the long drafty upcurved chambers of the space station, spinning at Martian gravity, in their long stay of 2010, six weeks together up there, young and strong, John saying I feel like Superman, this gravity’s great, I feel like Superman! Running laps around the big ring of the station hallway. Everything’s going to change on Mars, Frank. Everything!
No. Each step was like the last jump of a triple jump. Boing, boing, boing, boing.
Yes! The whole question will be learning to run fast enough.
A perfect interference pattern of cloud-dots lay pasted over the western coast of Madagascar. The sun bronzing the ocean below.
Everything looks so fine from up here.
Get any closer and you begin to see too much, Frank murmured.
Or not enough.
It was cold, they argued over the temperature, John was from Minnesota and had slept as a boy with his window open. So Frank shivered, a down coverlet draped over his shoulders, his feet blocks of ice. They played chess and Frank won. John laughed. How stupid, he said.
What do you mean?
Games don’t mean anything.
Are you sure? Sometimes life seems like a kind of game to me.
John shook his head. In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing. You could put your bishop out there to mate the other guy’s king, and he could lean down and whisper in your bishop’s ear, and suddenly it’s playing for him, and moving like a rook. And you’re fucked.
Frank nodded. He had taught these things to John.
A confusion of meals, chess, talk, the view of the rolling Earth. It felt like the only life they had ever lived. The voices from Houston were like AIs, their concerns absurd. The planet itself was so beautiful, so intricately patterned by its land and its clouds.
I never want to go down. I mean this is almost better than Mars’ll be, don’t you think?
No.
Huddled, shivering, listening to John talk of boyhood. Girls, sports, dreams of space. Frank responded with tales of Washington, lessons from Machiavelli, until it occurred to him that John was formidable enough as it was. Friendship was just diplomacy by other means, after all. But later, after a vague blur… talking, halting, shivering, talking about his father, coming home drunk from the Jacksonville bars, Priscilla and her white blond hair, her fashion magazine face. How it meant nothing to him anymore, a marriage for the resume, for looking normal to the shrinks without holding him down. And not his fault. Abandoned, after all. Betrayed.
That sounds bad. No wonder you think people are so fucked.
Frank waved at their big blue lamp. But they are. Waving by coincidence at the Horn of Africa. Think about what’s happened down there.
That’s history, Frank. We can do better than that.
Can we? Can we?
You just wait and see.
He woke up, his stomach knotted, his skin sweaty. He got up and took a shower; already he could remember no more than a single fragment of the dream: John, saying “Wait and see.” But his stomach was like wood.
After breakfast he clicked his fork on the table, thinking. All that day he spent distracted, wandering as if still in a dream, wondering from time to time how one told the difference. Wasn’t this life dreamlike in every significant respect? Everything overlit, bizarre, symbolic of something else?
That evening he went looking for Maya, feeling helpless, in the grip of a compulsion. The decision had been made the night before, when Janet said “she loves you, you know.” And he turned a corner to the dining commons and there she was, her head thrown back in the middle of her pealing laugh, vividly Maya, her hair as white as it had once been black, her eyes fixed on her companion; a man, dark-haired, handsome, perhaps in his fifties, smiling at her. Maya put a hand to his upper arm, a characteristic gesture, one of her usual intimacies, it meant nothing and in fact indicated that he was not her lover but rather someone she was in the process of enchanting; they could have met just minutes before, although the look on his face indicated he knew her better than that.
She turned and saw Frank, blinked with surprise. She looked back at the man and continued to speak, in Russian, her hand still on his arm.
Frank hesitated and almost turned and left. Silently he cursed himself; was he no more than a schoolboy, then? He walked by them and said hello, did not hear if they replied. All through the dinner she stayed glued to the man’s side, not looking his way, not coming over. The man, pleasant-enough looking, was surprised at her attention, surprised but pleased. Clearly they would leave together, clearly they would spend the night together. That foreknowledge always made people pleasant. She would use people like that without a qualm, the bitch. Love… The more he thought about it the angrier he got. She had never loved anyone but herself. And yet… that look on her face when she first saw him; for a split second hadn’t she been pleased, and then wanted him angry at her? And wasn’t that a sign of hurt feelings, of a desire to hurt back, meaning a certain (incredibly childish) desire for him?
Well, the hell with her. He went back to his room and packed his bag, and took the subway to the train station, and got on a night train west, up Tharsis to Pavonis Mons.
In a few months’ time, when the elevator was maneuvered into its remarkable orbit, Pavonis Mons was going to become the hub of Mars, superceding Burroughs as Burroughs had once superceded Underhill. And as the elevator’s touchdown was not far off, signs of the area’s coming predominance were already everywhere. Paralleling the train piste as it ascended the steep eastern slope of the volcano were two new roads and four thick pipelines, as well as an array of cables, a line of microwave towers, and a continuous litter of stations, loading tracks, warehouses, and dumps. And then, on the last and steepest upcurve of the volcano’s cone, there was a vast congregation of tents and industrial buildings, thicker and thicker until up on the broad rim they were everywhere, and between them immense fields of insolation capture sheets, and receivers for the energy microwaved down from the orbiting solar panels. Each tent along the way was a little town, stuffed with little apartment blocks; and each apartment block was stuffed with people, their laundry hanging from every window. The tents nearest the piste had very few trees in them, and looked like commercial districts; Frank caught quick glimpses of food stands, video rentals, open-front gyms, clothing stores, laundromats. Litter piled in the streets.
Then he was into the train station on the rim, and out of the train and into the spacious tent of the station. The south rim had a tremendous view over the great caldera, an immense, nearly circular hole, flawless except for a single giant scoop bursting out of the rim to the northeast. This scoop formed a great gap across the caldera from the station, the mark of a truly huge sideways explosion. But that was the only flaw in the design; otherwise the cliff was regular, and the floor of the caldera was almost perfectly round, almost perfectly flat. And sixty kilometers across and a full five thousand meters deep. Like the start of the mohole to end all moholes. The few signs of human presence on the caldera floor were on an ant’s scale, almost invisible from the rim.
The equator ran right across the southern rim, and that was where they were going to secure the lower end of the elevator. The attachment point was obvious: a massive tan and white concrete blockhouse, located a few kilometers west of the big tent town around the train station. Running west along the rim beyond the blockhouse was a line of factories and earthmovers and cones of feedstock materials, all gleaming with photographic clarity in the clear dustless thin high air, under a sky that was a kind of plum black. There were a number of stars near the zenith that were visible by day.
The day after his arrival, the staff of the local department office took him out to the elevator base; apparently technicians were going to capture the leader line from the cable that afternoon. This turned out to be unspectacular, but it was a peculiar sight nevertheless. The end of the leader line was marked by a small guidance rocket, and this rocket’s eastern-facing jets flared continuously, while the north and south jets added occasional spurts. The rocket thus descended slowly into the grasp of a gantry, looking like any other landing vehicle, except that there was a silver line extending up from it, a straight fine line that was only visible for a couple of thousand meters above the rocket. Looking at it Frank felt as if he were standing on a sea floor observing a fishing line dropped down among them from the plum sea surface – a fishing line tied to a bright colorful lure, in the process of snagging on a bottom wreck. His blood burned in his throat, and he had to look down and breathe deep. Very peculiar.
They toured the base complex. The gantry that had captured the leader line was located inside a big hole in the concrete block, a concrete crater with a thick ring of a rim. The walls of this concrete crater were studded by curved silver columns, which held magnetic coils that would fix the cable butt in a shock-cushioning collar. The cable would float well off the concrete floor of the chamber, suspended there by the pull of the outer half of the cable; an exquisitely balanced orbit, an object extending from a moonlet down into this room, thirty-seven thousand kilometers in all. And only ten meters across.
With the leader line secured, the cable itself could be guided down fairly easily; but not rapidly, as it had to drift down into its final orbit very gently indeed, in an asymptotic approach. “It’s going to be like Zeno’s paradox,” Slusinski said.
So it was many days after that visit when the butt of the cable finally appeared in the sky, and hung there. Over the next few weeks it descended ever more slowly, always there in their sky. A very odd sight indeed; it gave Frank a touch of vertigo, and every time he saw it the image of standing on an ocean floor returned to him. They were looking up at a fishing line, a black thread hanging down from the plum sea surface.
Frank spent this time setting up the head Department of Mars offices in the town, which one day was christened Sheffield. The Burroughs staff protested the move, but he ignored them. He spent his time meeting with American executives and project managers, all at work on various aspects of the elevator or Sheffield, or the outlying Pavonis towns. Americans represented only a fraction of the workforce on hand, but Chalmers was kept busy nevertheless, because the overall project was so huge. And Americans appeared to be dominating the superconducting, and the software involved with the actual elevator cars, a coup that was worth billions and which many people gave Frank credit for, though it was in fact his AI and Slusinski who were responsible, along with Phyllis.
Many of the Americans lived out in a tent town east of Sheffield called Texas, sharing the space with internationals who liked the idea of Texas, or had just ended up there randomly. Frank met with as many of them as he could, so that by the time the cable touched down they would be organized and working with a coherent policy – or under his thumb, as some of them put it. But happy to be there, as long as it gave them any clout. They knew they were less powerful than the East Asian commonwealth, which was building the elevator car shells, and less powerful than the EEC, which had constructed the cable itself. And less powerful than Praxis, and Amex, and Armscor, and Subarashii.
Eventually the day came when the cable was going to touch down. A giant crowd gathered in Sheffield to see it; the train station concourse was jammed to well over capacity, as it had a good view along the rim to the base complex, popularly referred to as the Socket.
As the hours passed, the end of the black column drifted downward, moving more and more slowly as it approached its target. There it hung, not that much bigger than the leader line guiding it down; smaller in fact than the business end of an Energia rocket. It stood up into the sky perfectly vertically, but it was so thin and the foreshortening was so severe that it looked not much longer than a tall skyscraper. A very skinny tall skyscraper, walking on air. A black tree trunk, taller than the sky. “We ought to be right under it, down on the floor of the socket,” one of his staff said. “There’d be headroom when it stops, right?”
“Magnetic field might scramble you a bit,” Slusinski replied, never taking his gaze from the sky.
As it got closer they saw that the cable was knobbed with various protrusions, and filigreed with silver lines. The gap under it got smaller. Then the end of it disappeared into the base complex, and the seashell roar of the crowd in the concourse grew louder. People watched the TVs closely; cameras inside the socket showed the cable come to a slow halt, still ten meters above the concrete floor. After that came the tweezerlike movement of gantries, and the clamping of a physical collar around the cable, a few meters up from its end. Everything happened in dreamlike slow motion, and when it was done it looked like the round socket room had suddenly gained an ill-fitting black roof.
Over the loudspeaker system a woman’s voice said, “The elevator is secured.” There was a brief cheer. People moved away from the TVs and looked out the tent walls again. Now the object looked much less strange than it had when hanging out of the sky; now it was nothing more than the reductio ad absurdum of Martian architecture, a very slender, very tall black spire. A beanstalk. Peculiar, but not so unsettling. The crowd burst into a thousand conversations, and scattered.
And not long after that, the elevators were working. During the years when the cable was extruding from Clarke, robots had been spidering along it, constructing the power lines, safety cables, generators, superconducting pistes, maintenance stations, defense stations, position adjustment rockets, fuel tanks, and emergency shelters that marked the cable every few kilometers. This work had proceeded at the same pace as the cable construction itself, so that soon after touchdown the cars were running up and down, up and down, four hundred of them going in each direction, like parasites on a strand of hair. And a few months after that, you could take an elevator into orbit. And you could take another elevator down out of orbit, to the surface.
And down they came, transported from Earth by the fleet of continuous shuttles, those big spaceships that boomed around the Earth-Venus-Mars system, using the three planets and Luna as gravity handles, fielding madly accelerating ferry packets from Earth and Mars. Each of the thirteen operating ships held a thousand people, and they were full every trip out. So there was a continuous stream of people docking on Clarke, descending in elevator cars, and debarking in the socket. And then pouring into Sheffield’s concourses, wild and unsteady and bug-eyed with gawking, as they were herded with some difficulty to the train station, and onto trains outbound. Most of these trains then emptied their loads into the Pavonis tent towns; robot crews were building the tents just fast enough to house the influx, and the completion of two new pipelines had secured the water supply on Pavonis, which was being pumped up from the Compton Aquifer beneath Noctis Labyrinthus. So the emigrants settled in.
And back in the socket, on the other side of the cable, upbound elevator cars were being loaded with refined metals, platinum, gold, uranium, silver; and then the cars swung in and locked onto the piste, and up they rose again, accelerating slowly to their full speed of three hundred kilometers an hour. Five days later they arrived at the top of the cable, and decelerated into locks inside the ballast asteroid Clarke, now a much-tunneled chunk of carbonaceous chondrite, so filigreed with exterior buildings and interior chambers that it seemed more a spaceship or a city than Mars’s third moon. It was a busy place: there was a continuous procession of incoming and outgoing ships, and crews perpetually in transit, as well as a large force of local traffic controllers, using some of the most powerful AIs in existence. Though most of the operations involving the cable were computer controlled and robotically accomplished, entire human professions were springing up to direct and oversee all these efforts.
And of course media coverage of all the new imagery was immediate and intense; and all in all, despite the decade of waiting, it seemed that on touchdown the elevator had sprung into being like Athena.
But there was trouble. Frank found that his staff was spending more and more time dealing with men and women from the tents, who had come in to Sheffield and right into their offices, new arrivals who were sometimes nervous, sometimes loud and angry, rattling on about crowded living conditions or insufficient police or bad food. One bulky red-faced man wearing a baseball cap shook a finger at them and said, “Private security companies come in from tents higher up and offer protection, but they’re just gangs, it’s just extortion! I can’t even give you my name or our security might find out I came here! I mean I believe in the black economy as much as the next guy, but this is crazy! This isn’t what we came here for.”
Frank paced his office, seething. These kinds of allegations were clearly true, but difficult to verify without a security team of one’s own, a big police force in fact. When the man left, he grilled his staff, but they could tell him nothing new, which made him even angrier. “You’re paid to find these things out for me, that’s your job! What are you doing sitting around in here all day watching Terran news!”
He cancelled a day’s appointments, thirty-seven meetings in all. “Lazy incompetent bastards,” he said loudly as he stalked out of the door. He went to the train station and caught a local downslope to have a look for himself.
The local train now stopped every kilometer of the descent, in small stainless steel locks that served as stations for the tent towns. He got out in one; signs in the lock identified it as El Paso. He walked through the open doors of the passage lock.
At least these tents had a view, there was no denying that. Down the great eastern slope of the volcano ran the train piste and the pipelines, and on either side of them tent after tent, like blisters. The clear fabric of the older ones upslope was already turning a bit purple. Ventilators hummed loudly from the physical plant next to the station, and from somewhere a hydrazine generator was adding its high hum. People were conversing in Spanish and English. Frank called his office and got them to ring the apartment of a man from El Paso who had dropped in to complain; the man answered, and Frank arranged to meet him at a cafe next to the station, then walked over and sat at an outer table. Men and women sat around tables eating and talking like anywhere else. Little electric cars hummed up and down the narrow streets, most piled high with boxes. The buildings near the station were three stories tall and appeared prefab, steel-reinforced concrete painted bright blue and white. There was a line of young trees in tubs running away from the station down the main thoroughfare. Small groups sat on the astroturf, or walked aimlessly from shop to shop, or hurried with shoulderbags and daypacks toward the station. All of them looked a bit disoriented or uncertain, as if they had no habits, or had not yet learned to walk properly.
The man showed up with a whole crowd of his neighbors, all in their twenties, too young to be on Mars or so it used to be said; perhaps the treatment could fix damage from radiation, allow them to reproduce accurately, who could say for sure till they tried? Laboratory animals, that’s what they were. What they had always been.
It was strange to stand among them like some ancient patriarch, treated with a mixture of awe and condescension, like a grandpa. Irritably he told them to take him on a walk and show him around. They guided him down narrow streets away from the station and the taller buildings, between long rows of what turned out to be AG huts, designed for temporary shelter in the outlands: research outposts, or water stations, or refugee huts. Now lined up by the score. The slope of the volcano had been hastily graded, and a lot of the huts were on a two or three degree slope, so that they had to be careful in the kitchens, they said, and make sure to align their beds properly.
Frank asked them what they did. Stevedores in Sheffield, most replied; offloading the elevator cars and getting the stuff on trains. Robots were supposed to do it, but it was surprising how much labor remained in the process for human muscle. Heavy equipment operations, robot programmers, machine repairmen, waldo dwarves, construction workers. Most of them had rarely gotten out onto the surface; some of them never had. They had done similar kinds of work back home, or had been unemployed. This was their chance. Most wanted to return to Earth someday, but the gyms were crowded and expensive and time-consuming, and they were all losing their tone. They had southern accents that Frank hadn’t heard since childhood; it was like hearing voices from a previous century, like listening to Elizabethans. Did people still talk that way? TV never revealed it. “Y’all been here so long you don’t mind being indoors, but I can’t stand it.” Ah caint stayun det.
Frank glared into a kitchen. “What do you eat?” he demanded.
Fish, vegetables, rice, tofu. It all came in bulk packages. They had no complaints: they thought it was good. Americans, the most degraded palates in history. Somebody gimme a cheeseburger! No, what they minded was the confinement, the lack of privacy, the teleoperation, the crowding together. And the resulting problems: “All my stuff got stole the day after I got here.” “Me too.” “Me too.” Theft, assault, extortion. The criminals all came from other tent towns, they said. Russians, they said. White folks with strange talk. Some black folks too, but not so many here as at home. A woman had been raped the previous week. “You’re kidding!” Frank said.
“What do you mean you’re kidding,” one woman said, disgusted at him.
