And so history is made, because facts are not things. But things make facts or break them, or so the archaeologist believes. For every great lie of history—if we assume they were all caught, which would be wrong—for the Tudor’s Richard III, for the first Soviet century, the Americans’ Truman, the South African war, the Mercury disaster—for each of these lies there had been a revision based on things.
And I swore there would be a revision here too. Satarwal’s sneer: “We can explain every thing you find.” And his Ministry of Truth stood massively behind him, confident because the real history never got written down. But archaeology is the art of reading what did not get written. And things don’t lie.
* * *
“The dome fell and suddenly the rim defense is useless,” I said to Hana and Bill and Heidi, one day as we stood in the ruins of the physical plant. “Thousands are dead and the rest are trapped in shelters, and police troops are falling out of the sky. So what do you do? Where do you go?”
“The physical plant here was their last hold-out, right?” said Bill. I regarded him with a skeptical eye; he was quick with the freewheeling theory, slow to back it. “Over the rim from here is what they called Spear Canyon—maybe they used it for cover, and tried to evacuate. Like that note we found seemed to indicate.”
“They’d be seen going over the rim,” I said. “We need something more likely than that.”
Bill shrugged, turned away. And the more I thought of it, the more sense it made. But I said, “Any better ideas?”
“They could have mingled with the civilians and disappeared,” Hana said. “When the police made their final assault they would find no one there.”
“In which case they would roust the civilians and jail all of them. Although that beats getting killed, I admit. The police reported finding thirty-eight people alive”—including me, I thought—“but they might have lied about that too.”
Heidi said, “Kalinin’s team found a burn zone just south of here that they think marks a rocket’s descent—police supply ship, they’re guessing. But maybe the rebels had a ship ready to take off if necessary. Maybe they blasted right out of here.”
“Awfully dangerous,” Hana said.
“They would be shot right down,” I said. “They wouldn’t do something that stupid.”
So they all stood around and looked cross, as if it were my fault they couldn’t think of anything sensible. Though that Spear Canyon was an idea. “No doubt they were captured, executed and shipped out of here,” I said.
* * *
Radial fracture—crustal stresses caused by the Tharsis bulge have resulted in an extensive system of fractures in the terrain around it.
The time came for my visit to the gerontologist, and I got the necessary releases from Satarwal and Burroughs, and took a car to the train depot at Coprates Overlook. I took the train into Alexandria, and went to the clinic early one morning.
It was an all-day exam. I spent the usual hour in Dr. Laird’s waiting room, looking at the same old photographs of the Jovian moons. When I walked into his examining room we greeted each other and he went to work in his businesslike way. He had me strip and put me before the gaze of his machines. I drank liquids and stood in front of a battery of mechanical eyes, then was injected and clamped to a slab to submit to more penetrations. Meanwhile pieces of me—blood, urine, feces, saliva, skin, muscle tissue, bone, etc.—were taken away for tests. Dr. Laird then thumped and prodded me with his fingers; primitive stuff, but he appeared to think it necessary. While the samples were being tested and the pictures developed, he pinched my skin in places and asked me questions.
“How’s the tendinitis in the knee?”
“Bad. I’ve felt it more than ever this year.”
“Hmm. Well, we could strip that tendon clean, you know. But I’m not sure you shouldn’t wait a few years.”
“I’ll wait.”
“How have your moods been?”
Naturally I refused to reply to such an impertinent question. But as he continued to prod and pinch, like a plant geneticist testing the roots and leaves of a new hybrid (will this little shrub live on Mars, Dr. Science?) I thought, why not. When they test the plant they need to know how the flower fares.
“My moods have been up and down.” What was the technical terminology for all this? “Out of my control. I’m depressed. I worry about losing it and falling into a funk. Sometimes I feel one coming so clearly … to counteract it I may work too hard, I don’t know. I’m frustrated—”
The nurse came in with the developed pictures, and interrupted my confession. Dr. Laird didn’t seem to mind. He took the pictures from her and pored over them. Still checking them he said slowly, “Your physiological signs don’t show any indication of reduced affectual function. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
It’s worse than reduction, I wanted to say. It’s absence. Total indifference. Thalamic shutdown, and so no new memories. Emotional death.
“Your heart is a little enlarged. How much time are you spending in a centrifuge?”
“None.”
“That’s not quite enough.” A disapproving look. “Humans weren’t made for this gravity, you know. We can do the whole program for your immune system and your cell division accuracy, and you can still ruin it with negligence. I notice also that your facial skin is severely chapped, and your bone calcium deficient,” and so on—going into his usual litany of my ills. It lasted about ten minutes. Then he began writing out prescriptions and giving me “the whole program” for curing these ills, talking as if to somebody else about a plant with problems, a Hokkaido pine with sick needles, broken bark, twisted limbs, stunted roots. He used up almost an entire prescription pad, and we spent half an hour going through the explanation of the drugs and the instructions for their use. Acetylcholine stimulants, new form of vasopressin-equivalent: these drugs were new to me, so perhaps he had been listening to my confession after all. Perhaps there were signs of a funk he hadn’t told me about. “And that tendinitis—I’m going to have you try this,” and he rattled off a new syllabic witches’ brew for me. “Remember—take care of yourself, and you’ve got an endlessly replicating system, there. Think about that. If you don’t take care, nothing else is going to matter.” A friendly shake of the hand. Good little shrub. “See you next year.”
I put my clothes on and walked into the waiting room. Mimas’s bull’s-eye crater stared at me from its poster like the Cyclops. I looked at the sheaf of prescriptions in my hand. Things as they are have been destroyed.…
I could not stand to be in fleshy hothouse Alexandria that night, and I walked to the station to take the very next train east, back to New Houston. In the station I stopped in the drug store and got my prescriptions filled.
Once we were taut bowstrings, vibrant on the bow of mortality—now the bow has been unstrung, and we lie limp, and the arrow
has clattered to the ground.
Graben
But then I left the station and went back into the city, to see Shrike. That night we had dinner in an Indian restaurant in the lower part of the city, where canals alternate with industrial plants and tenement dormitories, and the poor live everywhere, even under the bridges where the icy canals abrade their skin until the sores look like leprosy. Of course they could get a prescription for it, if they could afford it.
“It’s like Soviet history,” I said on one of the canal bridges.
Shrike stopped at the bridge’s peak. Above us between the shabby dormitories the sky was marbled like a jar of marmalade. “What is?”
“We are. Right after the 1917 revolution the Bolsheviks set up the government, and it ruled the country. Then Lenin built up the party until it was his tool. To get into the government you had to be in the party first, so the party lay on top of the government and was the real power system. Then when Stalin took over, he built the security network as his personal power base. It didn’t matter if you were in the party or not—it was the secret police had the power,
and Stalin controlled the police. So there was a three-tiered system. Khrushchev’s big reform was to dismantle the secret police, and return the power to the Communist party. So it was back to two tiers.”
“How are we like that?” Shrike said, peering closely at the tenements surrounding us, looking into an open window where a woman washed clothes.
“You can see it as well as I! The first power system on Mars was the individual rule of the corporations here. The Committee was convened first to be no more than an information pool for the corporations and the Soviets. But the Russians and Americans decided to use the Committee to get control of the planet away from the corporations.”
“That would be like Lenin’s use of the party?” Shrike said, his voice mocking me with faked interest.
“Right.”
“It’s not a very close analogy, is it.”
“Close enough. And the third step was when the Committee took over all planetary policy—took over the legislative, executive, and judicial powers. At that point Chairman Sarionovich—Kremlin-trained, remember—set up his own five-year plans, overstressing the Martian economy and of course the people, to prove to the two superpowers that we could make them money if he was given a free hand. And they gave him a free hand, and he increased the size and power of the police enormously to accomplish his goals. And so we got the Unrest.”
“And now?” Shrike asked, humoring me. “Are we like Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Kerens?”
“Brezhnev was nongovernment. Confusion and corruption, even when he was healthy. And Andropov and Chernenko were still in the push and pull with the Americans. I’d say you’re most like Kerens.”
Shrike contemplated me with a big O of mockery rounding his lips. “Why, Hjalmar! What a compliment! That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me in months, are you sure you spoke correctly?”
“Ach,” I said. “Quit being an ass and listen.”
“I know. I’m not taking your history lesson seriously. But to tell the truth I find the analogy stretched. Don’t you find historical analogies a bit … artificial? And you’re distracting me from my walk.”
“So you look around when you walk in this district! I should think you would turn away, to keep your conscience clean.”
“My righteous professor,” Shrike said with a wide grin. “My holy professor who shuns all the privileges of his class, and devotes every moment of his life to ending social injustice—”
“Shut up—”
“Who can’t imagine any other way of working for change than moaning and groaning from the top of his ivory tower, and digging about in the dirt.” By the width of his grin I saw I had angered him, and that surprised me.
“So I’ve hit a sore spot,” I said.
“No! You’ve hit unfairly, as usual. You bitch at me every time we meet, as if it’s impossible for me to be in pursuit of anything but personal power. And then you take advantage of my work every day of your life. So ungrateful.” He grinned again. “Perhaps I am tired of you, Hjalmar. Perhaps I am tired of working for your good and being nagged about it too. Perhaps you should not have bothered me this evening at all.”
But even in the dusk he could see the fear on my face, and after a moment’s scrutiny he laughed. “Come back to my place, Hjalmar, and teach me some more ancient history. And leave the righteousness in the canal. You’re doing no better than any of the rest of us.”
And later that night, in bed, I woke from a doze and said, “Can you get rid of Satarwal for me? He’s dangerous, I think.”
“How so?” He was half asleep.
“He hates me. It’s gone beyond obstructing my efforts, he wants to destroy them—he’ll do anything. He’s plotting with Petrini against me.”
“We’ll see. Maybe I’ve put him out there to keep you on your toes, eh, Hjalmar? To keep you sharp?” And he fell asleep.
* * *
Olympus Mons—the tallest volcano in the solar system; its peak is 27 kilometers above the datum, and its volume is one hundred times that of the largest terran volcano, Mauna Loa.
One day I ordered my team over the crater rim and into the rift once called Spear Canyon, to do a survey. Bill Strickland gave me an aggrieved look, as if because he had once mentioned the canyon I was obliged to acknowledge him every time the matter came up. Irritably I sent him packing, to complete the gathering of equipment; for this Hana gave me a piercing glare.
New Houston was set in a “splosh crater,” meaning the ejecta shield is made of lobes of what was fluidized material directly after the impact. The shield is thus an even surface, except for a narrow rift created by two lobes of fluid being split by some prominence that was later buried by the falling ballistic ejecta of the rim. This rift or canyon broadens to split the shield’s low outer rampart, so it opens up directly onto the surrounding plain. Altogether it seemed to me a promising avenue of escape for any party trying to slip away from the crater unobtrusively.
I led my team down the outside of the rim, switchbacking from ledge to ledge down the broken slope. The drop was about one in two, but the use of ledges as ramps made it an easy walk, down pitted rock sheets that lapped over each other like insulating tiles. Behind me the others remarked at the cold; it was a windy day, and most of them wore masks and goggles. But I enjoyed the chill of the harsh wind on me (Dr. Laird would be angry). The sky was the color of old paper; it made a fine dome to hike under.
We explored the length of the canyon, through the break in the rampart and onto the boulder-covered plain. In several places we found remnants of a road that had been cut into the south slope of the canyon. Landslides covered the majority of this road, but near the upper end of the canyon a good stretch of it was clear. The entire team stood on this trace and looked back up at the rim. “It must have switchbacked to the top,” Bill said.
“Or stopped in this little cirque,” I suggested, “where an escalator could take them up to the dome.”
“Possibly,” said Bill with a shrug.
“I wonder why they cut the road into the slope when the landslide danger was so great,” Hana said.
“Mass wasting is a hundred times faster now,” I said irritably. “They built for the erosion of their time.”
Bill and Xhosa took off down the course of the road with metal detectors and seismic probes, intent on mapping what they could. The others dug away at the edges of the slides, and searched the bottom of the canyon, where intermittent ice creeks alternated with slides that had filled the canyon and pushed up the other side. We would have stayed until dark, but the wind was rising. Plumes of sand spindrifted off the rim above us, turning the sun a dull copper and obscuring its troop of mirrors entirely. “We’d better get back,” I shouted. “We can continue when the weather improves.” For the weather satellite photos had shown a cyclonic system approaching.
So we hiked back over the rim, across the city and over the escalator to camp, swathed in masks and goggles for the final descent down a slope made invisible by the flow of wind-driven sand. The next day the storm broke in earnest, and we were trapped in camp for ten days while thick sandhail pummeled the tents and drifted against their windward sides. For my group it was a long wait, particularly since none of the old maps showed a road in Spear Canyon, implying that it had been built in the city’s last days. When the storm broke we were ordered by Satarwal to help dig the camp out of the mud, and that took three more days.
On the afternoon of the third day Hana and Xhosa and I went up to the crater rim to look at the dome foundation above Spear Canyon, and check for signs of an escalator. The foundation was battered in this area, and Hana was giving one of her munitions lectures when something caught my eye. I stared down Spear Canyon, which snaked away from its head about half a kilometer down from the rim. There in the clear post-storm light, had something blinked? Some light had winked at me. I moved my head about experimentally, and there it was again: blink. Reflected sunlight, as yellow as fire. On the south slope. “Have either of you got a pa
ir of binoculars?” I said, interrupting Hana.
“There’s one in my tool box,” Hana said. “What is it?”
“Something down there.” I took the binoculars from their case. “Do you see a mirror down there, reflecting light at us? Here, stand where I was standing. On the road, about halfway down what we can see.” I looked through the binoculars and focused them, fingers slipping in my haste.
“No light,” Xhosa said.
“No, but the sun’s moved, and it was small. Look there. There’s a new slide, just above the road.” Magnified twenty times, the slide was clearly a fresh one, dark brown and sharp-edged at the top and sides. “You should be able to see it even without the glasses, it’s dark—”
“About halfway down,” Hana said. “I think I see the slide, anyway.”
The newly exposed face had the shimmery holographic look of things seen through binoculars. Something floated through the superimposed rings of vision, and I veered back to it. Near the upcanyon edge of the slide something—a regular shape, rust-colored, just darker than the smectite clay … something smooth, rounded, with a shiny patch in it, like glass. I moved from side to side, and the patch flared gold.
“By God.” I cleared my throat. “I think it’s—a hut or something. Take a look.” I gave the glasses to Xhosa. Hana was shading her eyes, staring at it. “I definitely see the slide.”
“I see it,” Xhosa said. “Close to the upper end of the slide?”
“Yes.”