Desmond got them four shots of tequila and one nitrous inhaler. “Pretty soon we’ll have agave cactus growing on the surface, eh?”
“I think you could do it now.”
They sat at the end of one table, with their elbows bumping and Desmond talking into Sax’s ear as they drank. He had a whole wish list of things he wanted Sax to steal from Biotique. Seed stocks, spores, rhizomes, certain growth media, certain hard-to-synthesize chemicals. . . . “Hiroko says to tell you she really needs all of it, but especially the seeds.”
“Can’t she breed those herself? I don’t like taking things.”
“Life is a dangerous game,” Desmond said, toasting the thought with a big whiff of nitrous, followed by a shot of tequila. “Ahhhhhhhhh,” he said.
“It’s not the danger,” Sax said. “I just don’t like doing it. I work with those people.”
Desmond shrugged and did not answer. It occurred to Sax that these scruples might strike Desmond, who had spent most of the twenty-first century living by theft, as a bit overfine.
“You won’t be taking it from those people,” Desmond said at last. “You’ll be taking it from the transnat that owns Biotique.”
“But that’s a Swiss collective, and Praxis,” Sax said. “And Praxis doesn’t look so bad. It’s a very loose egalitarian system, it reminds me of Hiroko’s, actually.”
“Except that they’re part of a global system that has a fairly small oligarchy running the world. You have to remember the context.”
“Oh believe me, I do,” Sax, said, remembering his sleepless nights. “But you have to make distinctions as well.”
“Yes, yes. And one distinction is that Hiroko needs these materials and cannot make them, given the necessity to hide from the police hired by your wonderful transnational.”
Sax blinked disgruntiedly.
“Besides, theft of materials is one of the few resistance actions left to us these days. Hiroko has agreed with Maya that obvious sabotage is simply an announcement of the underground’s existence, and an invitation for reprisal and a shutdown of the demimonde. Better simply to disappear for a while, she says, and make them think that we never existed in any great numbers.”
“It’s a good idea,” Sax said. “But I’m surprised you’re doing what Hiroko says.”
“Very funny,” Desmond said with a grimace. “Anyway, I think it’s a good idea too.”
“You do?”
“No. But she talked me into it. It may be for the best. Anyway there’s still a lot of materials to be obtained.”
“Won’t theft itself tip off the police that we’re still out there?”
“No way. It’s so widespread that what we do can’t be noticed against the background levels. There’s a whole lot of inside jobs.”
“Like me.”
“Yes, but you’re not doing it for money, are you.”
“I still don’t like it.”
Desmond laughed, revealing his stone eyetooth, and the odd asymmetricality of his jaw and his whole lower face. “It’s hostage syndrome. You work with them and you get to know them, and have a sympathy for them. You have to remember what they’re doing here. Come on, finish that cactus and I’ll show you some things you haven’t seen, right here in Burroughs.”
There was a commotion, as an ice shot had hit the other bank and rolled up the grass and bowled over an old man. People were cheering and lifting the woman who had made the throw onto their shoulders, but the group with the old man was charging down to the nearest bridge. “This place is getting too noisy,” Desmond said. “Come on, drink that and let’s go.”
Sax knocked back the liquor while Desmond popped the last of the inhaler. Then they left quickly to avoid the developing brouhaha, walking up the canalside path. A half hour’s walk took them past the rows of Bareiss columns and up into Princess Park, where they turned right and walked up the steep wide grassy incline of Thoth Boulevard. Beyond Table Mountain they turned left down a narrower swath of streetgrass, and came to the westernmost part of the tent wall, extending in a big arc around Black Syrtis Mesa. “Look, they’re getting back to the old coffin quarters for workers again,” Desmond pointed out. “That’s Subarashii’s standard housing now, but see how these units are set into the mesa. Black Syrtis contained a plutonium processing plant in the early days of Burroughs, when it was well out of town. But now Subarashii has built workers’ quarters right next to it, and their jobs are to oversee the processing and the removal of the waste, north to Nili Fossae, where some integral fast reactors will use it. The cleanup operation used to be almost completely robotic, but the robots are hard to keep on-line. They’ve found it’s cheaper to use people for a lot of the jobs.”
“But the radiation.” Sax said., blinking
“Yes,” Desmond said with his savage grin. “They take on forty rem a year.”
“You’re kidding!”
“I am not kidding. They tell the workers this, and give them hardship pay, and after three years they get a bonus, which is the treatment.”
“Is it withheld from them otherwise?”
“It’s expensive, Sax. And there are waiting lists. This is a way to skip up the list, and cover the costs.”
“But forty rems! There’s no way to be sure the treatment will repair the damage that could do!”
“We know that,” Desmond said with a scowl. There was no need to refer to Simon. “But they don’t.”
“And Subarashii is doing this just to cut costs?”
“That’s important in such a large capital investment, Sax. All kinds of cost-cutting measures are showing up. The sewage systems in Black Syrtis are all the same system, for instance—the med clinic and the coffins and the plants in the mesa.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I am not kidding. My jokes are funnier than that.”
Sax waved him off.
“Look,” Desmond said, “there are no regulatory agencies anymore. No building codes or whatever. That is what the transnational success in sixty-one really means—they make their own rules now. And you know what their one rule is.”
“But this is simply stupid.”
“Well, you know, this particular division of Subarashii is run by Georgians, and they’re in the grip of a big Stalin revival there. It’s a patriotic gesture to run their country as stupidly as possible. That means business too. And of course the top managers of Subarashii are still Japanese, and they believe Japan became great by being tough. They say they won in sixty-one what they lost in World War Two. They’re the most brutal transnat up here, but all the rest are imitating them to compete successfully. Praxis is an anomaly in that sense, you must remember that.”
“So we reward them by stealing from them.”
“You’re the one who went to work for Biotique. Maybe you should change jobs.”
“No.”
“Do you think you can get these materials from one of Subarashii’s firms?”
“No.”
“But you could from Biotique.”
“Probably. Security is pretty tight.”
“But you could do it.”
“Probably.” Sax thought about it. “I want something in return.”
“Yes?”
“Will you fly me out to have a look at this soletta burn zone?”
“Certainly! I would like to see it again myself.”
So the next afternoon they left Burroughs and trained south up the Great Escarpment, getting off at Libya Station, some seventy kilometers from Burroughs. There they slipped into the basement and their closet door, down their tunnel and out into the rocky countryside. Down in a shallow graben they found one of Desmond’s cars, and when night came they drove east along the Escarpment to a small Red hideout in the rim of Du Martheray Crater, next to a stretch of flat bedrock the Reds used as an airstrip. Desmond did not identify Sax to their hosts. They were led into a little cliff side hangar, where they got into one of Spencer’s old stealth planes and taxied out to the bedrock, the
n took off in an ündulant acceleration down the runway. Once in the air they flew east slowly through the night.
They flew in silence for a while. Sax saw lights on the dark surface of the planet only three times: once a station in Escalante Crater, once the tiny moving line of lights of a round-the-world train, and the last an unidentified blink in the rough land behind the Great Escarpment. “Who do you think that is?” Sax asked.
“No idea.”
After a few minutes more Sax said, “I ran into Phyllis.”
“Really! Did she recognize you?”
“No.”
Desmond laughed. “That’s Phyllis for you.”
“A lot of old acquaintances haven’t recognized me.”
“Yeah, but Phyllis . . . Is she still president of the Transitional Authority?”
“No. She didn’t seem to think it was a powerful post, anyway.”
Desmond laughed again. “A silly woman. But she did get that group on Clarke back to civilization, I’ll give her that. I thought they were goners, myself.”
“Do you know much about that?”
“I talked with two of the people who were on it, yeah. One night in Burroughs at the Pingo Bar, in fact. You couldn’t get them to shut up about it.”
“Did anything happen near the end of their flight?”
“The end? Well, yeah—someone died. I guess some woman got a hand crushed when they were evacuating Clarke, and Phyllis was the closest thing they had to a doctor, so Phyllis took care of her through the whole trip, and thought she was going to make it, but I guess they ran out of something, the two telling me the story weren’t too clear on it, and she took a turn for the worse. Phyllis called a prayer meeting for her and prayed for her, but she died anyway, a couple of days before they came into the Terran system.”
“Ah,” Sax said. Then. “Phyllis doesn’t seem all that . . . religious anymore.”
Desmond snorted. “She was never religious, if you ask me. Hers was the religion of business. You visit real Christians like the folks down in Christianopolis, or Bingen, and you don’t find them talking profits at breakfast, and lording it over you with that horrible unctuous righteousness they have. Righteousness, good Lord—it is a most unpleasant quality in a person. You know it has to be a house built on sand, eh? But the demimonde Christians are not like that. They’re gnostics, Quakers, Baptists, Baha’i Rastafarians, whatever—the most agreeable people in the underground if you ask me, and I’ve traded with everybody. So helpful. And no airs about being best friends with Jesus. They’re tight with Hiroko, and the Sufis as well. Some kind of mystic networking going on down there.” He cackled. “But Phyllis, now, and all those business fundamentalists—using religion to cover extortion, I hate that. Actually I never heard Phyllis speak in a religious manner after we landed.”
“Did you have much opportunity to hear Phyllis speak after we landed?”
Another laugh. “More than you might think! I saw more than you did in those years, Mister Lab Man! I had my little hidey-holes everywhere.”
Sax made a skeptical noise, and Desmond shouted a laugh and slapped him on the shoulder. “Who else could tell you that you and Hiroko were an item in the Underhill years, eh?”
“Hmm.”
“Oh yes, I saw a lot. Of course you could make that particular observation about practically any man in Underhill and be right. That vixen was keeping us all as a harem.”
“Polyandry?”
“Two-timing, goddammit! Or twenty-timing.”
“Hmm.”
Desmond laughed at him.
Just after dawn they caught sight of a white column of smoke, obscuring the stars over a whole quadrant of the sky. For a while this dense cloud was the only anomaly they could see in the landscape. Then, as they flew on and the terminator of the planet rolled under them, a broad swath of bright ground appeared on the east-em horizon ahead—an orange strip, or trough, running roughly northeast to southwest across the land, obscured by smoke that poured out of one section of it. The trough under the smoke was white and turbulent, as if a small volcanic eruption were confined to that one spot. Above it stood a beam of light—a beam of illuminated smoke, rather, so tight and solid that it was like a physical pillar, extending straight up and becoming less distinct as the cloud smoke thinned, and disappearing where the smoke reached its maximum height of around ten thousand meters.
At first there was no sign of the origin of this beam in the sky—the aerial lens was some four hundred kilometers overhead, after all. Then Sax thought he saw something like the ghost of a cloud, soaring very far above. Maybe that was it, maybe it wasn’t. Desmond wasn’t sure.
At the foot of the pillar of light, however, there was no question of visibility—the pillar of light had a kind of biblical presence, and the melted rock under it was truly incandescent, a very brilliant white. That was what 5000°K looked like, exposed to the open air. “We have to be careful,” Desmond said. “We fly into that beam and it would be like a moth in a flame.”
“I’m sure the smoke is very turbulent as well.”
“Yes. I plan to stay windward of it.”
Down where the pillar of lit smoke met the orange channel, new smoke was spewing out in violent billows, weirdly lit from underneath. To the north of the white spot, where the rock had had a chance to cool, the melted channel reminded Sax of film of the eruptions of the Hawaiian volcanoes. Bright yellow-orange waves surged north in the channel of fluid rock, occasionally meeting resistances and splashing up onto the dark banks of the molten channel. The channel was about two kilometers wide, and ran over the horizon in both directions; they could see perhaps two hundred kilometers of it. South of the pillar of light, the channel bed was almost covered with cooling black rock, webbed by dark orange cracks. The straightness of the channel, and the pillar of fight itself, were the only obvious signs that it was not some kind of natural lava channel; but these signs were more than enough. Besides, there hadn’t been any volcanic activity on the surface of Mars for many thousands of years.
Desmond closed on the sight, then banked their plane sharply and headed north. “The beam from the aerial lens is moving south, so up the line we should be able to fly closer.”
For many kilometers the channel of melted rock ran northeast without changing. Then as they got farther away from the current burn zone, the orange of the lava darkened and began to cake over from the sides with a black surface, broken by more orange cracks. Beyond that the channel surface was black, as were the banks on each side of it; a straight swath of pure black, running over the rust-colored highlands of Hesperia.
Desmond banked and turned south again, and flew closer to the channel. He was a rough pilot, shoving the light plane around ruthlessly. When the orange cracks reappeared, a thermal updraft bucked the plane hard, and he slid to the west a little. The light of the molten rock itself illuminated the banks of the channel, which appeared to be smoking lines of hills, very black. “I thought they were supposed to be glass,” Sax said.
“Obsidian. Actually Tve seen some different colors. Swirls of various minerals in the glass.”
“How far does this burn extend?”
“They’re cutting from Cerberus to Hellas, running just west of Tyrrhena and Hadriaca volcanoes.” Sax whistled.
“They say it will be a canal between the Hellas Sea and the northern ocean.”
“Yes, yes. But they’re volatilizing carbonates much too fast.” “Thickens the atmosphere, right?”
“Yes, but with CO2! They’re wrecking the plan! We won’t be able to breathe the atmosphere for years! We’ll be stuck in the cities.”
“Maybe they think they’ll be able to scrub the CO2 out when things are warmed up.” Desmond glanced at him. “Have you seen enough?”
“More than enough.”
Desmond laughed his unsettling laugh, and banked the plane sharply. They began to chase the terminator to the west, flying low over the long shadows of the dawn terrain.
“Think
about it, Sax. For a while people are forced to stay in the cities, which is convenient if you want to keep control of things. You burn cuts with this flying magnifying glass, and fairly quickly you have your one-bar atmosphere, and your warm wet planet. Then you have some method for scrubbing the air of carbon dioxide—they must have something in mind, industrial or biological or both. Something they can sell, no doubt. And presto, you have another Earth, and very quickly. It might be expensive—”
“It’s definitely expensive! All these big projects must be setting the transnationals back by huge amounts, and they’re doing it even though we’re a good step on the way to two-seventy-three K. I don’t get it.”
“Maybe they feel two-seventy-three is too modest. An average of freezing is a bit chilly, after all. Kind of a Sax Russell vision of terraforming, you might call that. Practical, but. . .” He cackled. “Or maybe they’re feeling rushed. Earth is in a mess, Sax.”
“I know that,” Sax said sharply. “I’ve been studying it.”
“Good for you! No, really. So you know that the people who haven’t got the treatment are getting desperate—they’re getting older, and their chances of ever getting it seem to be getting worse. And the people who have gotten the treatment, especially the ones at the top, are looking around trying to figure out what to do. Sixty-one taught them what can happen if things get out of control. So they’re buying up countries like bad mangoes at the end of market day. But it doesn’t seem to be helping. And here right next door they see a fresh empty planet, not quite ready for occupation, but close. Full of potential. It could be a new world. Beyond the reach of the untreated billions.”
Sax thought it over. “A kind of bolt-hole, you mean. To escape to if there’s trouble.”
“Exactly. I think there are people in these transnationals who want Mars terraformed just as quickly as possible, by any means necessary.”