Red Mars

  Those who were interested— about sixty people— clumped behind him to watch the screen. The rest relocated at the far end of the tank with the people worrying about motion sickness, a group that definitely didn’t want to know how much radiation they were taking. Just the thought was enough to send some of them into the heads.

  Then the full force of the flare struck. The exterior radiation count shifted to well above the solar wind’s usual level, and then soared in a sudden rush. An indrawn hiss came from several observers at once, and there were some shocked exclamations.

  “But look how much the shelter is stopping,” John said, checking the dosimeter pinned to his shirt. “I’m still at only point three rem!”

  That was several lifetimes of dentists’ X-rays, to be sure, but the radiation outside the storm shelter was already 70 rem, well on its way to a lethal dose, so they were getting off lightly. Still, the amount flying through the rest of the ship! Billions of particles were penetrating the ship and colliding with the atoms of water and metal they were huddled behind; hundreds of millions were flying between these atoms and then through the atoms of their bodies, touching nothing, as if they were no more than ghosts. Still, thousands were striking atoms of flesh and bone. Most of those collisions were harmless— but in all those thousands, there were in all probability one or two (or three?) in which a chromosome strand was taking a hit, and kinking in the wrong way: and there it was. Tumor initiation, begun with just that typo in the book of the self. And years later, unless the victim’s DNA luckily repaired itself, the tumor promotion that was a more or less unavoidable part of living would have its effect, and there would appear a bloom of Something Else inside: cancer. Leukemia, most likely; and, most likely, death.

  So it was hard not to regard the figures unhappily. 1.4658 rem, 1.7861, 1.9004. “Like an odometer,” Boone said calmly as he looked at his dosimeter. He was gripping a rail with both hands and pulling himself back and forth, as if doing isometric exercises. Frank saw it and said, “John, what the hell are you doing?”

  “Dodging,” John said. He smiled at Frank’s frown. “You know— moving target!”

  People laughed at him. With the extent of the danger precisely charted on screens and graphs, they were beginning to feel less helpless. This was illogical, but naming was the power that made every human a scientist of sorts. And these were scientists by profession, with many astronauts among them as well, trained to accept the possibility of such a storm. All those mental habits began channeling their thoughts, and the shock of the event receded a bit. They were coming to terms with it.

  Arkady went to a terminal and called up Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, picking it up in the third movement, when the village dance is disrupted by storm. He turned up the volume, and they floated together in the long half-cylinder, listening to the intensity of Beethoven’s fierce tempest, which suddenly seemed to enunciate perfectly the lashings of the silent wind pouring through them. It would sound just like that! Strings and woodwinds shrieking in wild gusts, out of control and yet beautifully melodic at the same time— a shiver ran down Maya’s spine. She had never listened to the old warhorse this closely before, and she looked with admiration (and a bit of fear) at Arkady, who was beaming ecstatically at the effects of his inspired disk jockeying, and dancing like some red knot of fluff in the wind. When the symphony’s storm peaked, it was difficult to believe that the radiation count wasn’t rising; and when the musical storm abated, it seemed like theirs should be over too. Thunder muttered, the last gusts whistled through. The French horn sang its serene all-clear.

  People began to talk about other things, discussing the various business of the day that had been so rudely interrupted, or taking the opportunity to talk about other things. After a half hour or more, one of those conversations got louder. Maya didn’t hear how it began, but suddenly Arkady said, very loudly and in English, “I don’t think we should pay any attention to plans made for us back on Earth!”

  Other conversations went silent, and people turned to look at him. He had popped up and was floating under the rotating roof of the chamber, where he could survey them all and speak like some mad flying spirit.

  “I think we should make new plans,” he said. “I think we should be making them now. Everything should be redesigned from the beginning, with our own thinking expressed. It should extend everywhere, even to the first shelters we build.”

  “Why bother?” Maya asked, annoyed at his grandstanding. “They’re good designs.” It really was irritating; Arkady often took center stage, and people always looked at her as if she were somehow responsible for him, as if it were her job to keep him from pestering them.

  “Buildings are the template of a society,” Arkady said.

  “They’re rooms,” Sax Russell pointed out.

  “But rooms imply the social organization inside them.” Arkady looked around, pulling people into the discussion with his gaze. “The arrangement of a building shows what the designer thinks should go on inside. We saw that at the beginning of the voyage, when Russians and Americans were segregated into Torus D and B. We were supposed to remain two entities, you see. It will be the same on Mars. Buildings express values, they have a sort of grammar, and rooms are the sentences. I don’t want people in Washington or Moscow saying how I should live my life, I’ve had enough of that.”

  “What don’t you like about the design of the first shelters?” John asked, looking interested.

  “They are rectangular,” Arkady said. This got a laugh, but he persevered: “Rectangular, the conventional shape! With work space separated from living quarters, as if work were not part of life. And the living quarters are taken up mostly by private rooms, with hierarchies expressed, in that leaders are assigned larger spaces.”

  “Isn’t that just to facilitate their work?” Sax said.

  “No. It isn’t really necessary. It’s a matter of prestige. A very conventional example of American business thinking, if I may say so.”

  There was a groan, and Phyllis said, “Do we have to get political, Arkady?”

  At the very mention of the word, the cloud of listeners ruptured. Mary Dunkel and a couple of others pushed out and headed for the other end of the room.

  “Everything is political,” Arkady said at their backs. “Nothing more so than this voyage of ours. We are beginning a new society, how could it help but be political?”

  “We’re a scientific station,” Sax said. “It doesn’t necessarily have much politics to it.”

  “It certainly didn’t last time I was there,” John said, looking thoughtfully at Arkady.

  “It did,” Arkady said, “but it was simpler. You were an all-American crew, there on a temporary mission, doing what your superiors told you to do. But now we are an international crew, establishing a permanent colony. It’s completely different.”

  Slowly people were drifting through the air toward the conversation, to hear better what was being said. Rya Jimenez said, “I’m not interested in politics,” and Mary Dunkel agreed from the other end of the room: “That’s one of the things I’m here to get away from!”

  Several Russians replied at once. “That itself is a political position!” and the like. Alex exclaimed, “You Americans would like to end politics and history, so you can stay in a world you dominate!”

  A couple of Americans tried to protest, but Alex overrode them. “It’s true! The whole world has changed in the last thirty years, every country looking at its function, making enormous changes to solve problems— all but the United States. You have become the most reactionary country in the world.”

  Sax said, “The countries that changed had to because they were rigid before, and almost broke. The United States already had flex in its system, and so it didn’t have to change as drastically. I say the American way is superior because it’s smoother. It’s better engineering.”

  This analogy gave Alex pause, and while he was thinking about it John Boone, who had been watching Arkady with
great interest, said, “Getting back to the shelters. How would you make them different?”

  Arkady said, “I’m not quite sure— we need to see the sites we build on, walk around in them, talk it over. It’s a process I advocate, you see. But in general I think work space and living space should be mixed as much as is practical. Our work will be more than making wages— it will be our art, our whole life. We will give it to each other, we will not buy it. Also there should be no signs of hierarchy. I don’t even believe in the leader system we have now.” He nodded politely at Maya. “We are all equally responsible now, and our buildings should show it. A circle is best— difficult in construction terms, but it makes sense for heat conservation. A geodesic dome would be a good compromise— easy to construct, and indicating our equality. As for the inside, perhaps mostly open. Everyone should have their room, sure, but these should be small. Set in the rim, perhaps, and facing larger communal spaces—” He picked up a mouse at one terminal, began to sketch on the screen. “There. This is architectural grammar that would say ‘All equal.’ Yes?”

  “There’s lots of prefab units already there,” John said. “I’m not sure they could be adapted.”

  “They could if we wanted to do it.”

  “But is it really necessary? I mean, it’s clear we’re already a team of equals.”

  “Is it clear?” Arkady said sharply, looking around. “If Frank and Maya tell us to do something, are we free to ignore them? If Houston or Baikonur tell us to do something, are we free to ignore them?”

  “I think so,” John replied mildly.

  This statement got him a sharp look from Frank. The conversation was breaking up into several arguments, as a lot of people had things to say, but Arkady cut through them all again:

  “We have been sent here by our governments, and all of our governments are flawed, most of them disastrously. It’s why history is such a bloody mess. Now we are on our own, and I for one have no intention of repeating all of Earth’s mistakes just because of conventional thinking. We are the first Martian colonists! We are scientists! It is our job to think things new, to make them new!”

  The arguments broke out again, louder than ever. Maya turned away and cursed Arkady under her breath, dismayed at how angry people were getting. She saw that John Boone was grinning. He pushed off the floor toward Arkady, came to a stop by piling into him, and then shook Arkady’s hand, which swung them both around in the air, in an awkward kind of dance. This gesture of support immediately set people to thinking again, Maya could see it on their surprised faces; along with John’s fame he had a reputation for being moderate and low-keyed, and if he approved of Arkady’s ideas, then it was a different matter.

  “Goddammit, Ark,” John said. “First those crazy problem runs, and now this— you’re a wild man, you really are! How in the hell did you get them to let you on board this ship, anyway?”

  Exactly my question, thought Maya.

  “I lied,” Arkady said.

  Everyone laughed. Even Frank, looking surprised. “But of course I lied!” Arkady shouted, a big upside-down grin splitting his red beard. “How else could I get here? I want to go to Mars to do what I want, and the selection committee wanted people to go and do what they were told. You know that!” He pointed down at them and shouted, “You all lied, you know you did!”

  Frank was laughing harder than ever. Sax wore his usual Buster Keaton, but he raised a finger and said, “The Revised Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory,” and a great jeer went up from them all. They had all been required to take this exam; it was the world’s most widely used psychological test, and well regarded by experts. Respondents agreed or disagreed to 556 statements, and a profile was formed from the replies; but the judgments concerning what the answers meant were based on the earlier responses of a sample group of 2,600 white, married, middle-class Minnesota farmers of the 1930s. Despite all subsequent revisions, the pervading bias created by the nature of that first test group was still deeply ingrained in the test— or at least some of them thought so. “Minnesota!” Arkady shouted, rolling his eyes. “Farmers! Farmers from Minnesota! I tell you this now, I lied in answer to every single question! I answered exactly opposite to what I really felt, and this is what allowed me to score as normal!”

  Wild cheers greeted this announcement. “Hell,” John said, “I’m from Minnesota and I had to lie.”

  More cheers. Frank, Maya noted, was crimson with hilarity, incapable of speech, hands clutching his stomach, nodding, giggling, helpless to stop himself. She had never seen him laugh like that.

  Sax said, “The test made you lie.”

  “What, not you?” Arkady demanded. “Didn’t you lie too?”

  “Well, no,” Sax said, blinking as if the concept had never occurred to him before. “I told the truth to every question.”

  They laughed harder than ever. Sax looked startled at their response, but that only made him look funnier.

  Someone shouted, “What do you say, Michel? How do you account for yourself?”

  Michel Duval spread his hands. “You may be underestimating the sophistication of the RMMPI. There are questions which test how honest you are being.”

  This statement brought down a rain of questions on his head, a methodological inquisition. What were his controls? How did the testers make their theories falsifiable? How did they repeat them? How did they eliminate alternative explanations of the data? How could they claim to be scientific in any sense of the word whatsoever? Clearly a lot of them considered psychology a pseudoscience, and many had considerable resentment for the hoops they had been forced to jump through to get aboard. The years of competition had taken their toll. And the discovery of this shared feeling sparked a score of voluble conversations. The tension raised by Arkady’s political talk disappeared.

  Perhaps, Maya thought, Arkady had defused the one with the other. If so it had been cleverly done, but Arkady was a clever man. She thought back. Actually it had been John Boone who had changed the subject. He had in effect flown to the ceiling and come to Arkady’s rescue, and Arkady had seized the chance. They were both clever men. And it seemed possible they were in some sort of collusion. Forming a kind of alternative leadership, perhaps, one American, one Russian. Something would have to be done about that.

  She said to Michel, “Do you think it’s a bad sign we all consider ourselves such liars?”

  Michel shrugged. “It’s been healthy to talk about it. Now we realize we’re more alike than we thought. No one has to feel they were unusually dishonest to get aboard.”

  “And you?” Arkady asked. “Did you present yourself as a most rational and balanced psychologist, hiding the strange mind we have come to know and love?”

  A small smile from Michel. “You’re the expert in strange minds, Arkady.”

  Then the few still watching the screens called out. The radiation count had started to fall. After a while it slipped back to just a little above normal.

  Someone returned the Pastoral to the moment of the horn call. The last movement of the symphony, “Glad and Grateful Feelings After the Storm,” poured from the speaker system, and as they left the shelter and fanned out through the ship like dandelion seeds on a breeze, the beautiful old folk melody was broadcast throughout the Ares, elaborating itself in all its Brucknerian richness. While it played, they found that the ship’s hardened systems had survived intact. The thicker walls of the farm and the forest biome had afforded the plants some protection, and although there would be some die-offs, the seed stocks were not harmed. The animals could not be eaten either, but presumably would give birth to a healthy next generation. The only casualties were some uncaptured songbirds from D’s dining hall; they found a scattering of them dead on the floor.

  As for the crew, the shelter’s protection had shielded them from all but about six rem. That was bad for a mere three hours, but it could have been worse. The exterior of the ship had taken over 140 rem, a lethal dose.

  • • ?
??

  Six months inside a hotel, with never a walk outside. Inside it was late summer, and the days were long. Green dominated the walls and ceilings, and people went barefoot. Quiet conversations were nearly inaudible in the hum of machinery, the whoosh of ventilators. The ship seemed empty somehow, whole sections of it abandoned as the crew settled down to wait. Small knots of people sat in the halls in toruses B and D, talking. Some stopped their conversations when Maya wandered by, which she naturally found disturbing. She was having trouble falling asleep, trouble waking up. Work made her restless; all the engineers were only waiting, after all, and the simulations had gotten nearly intolerable. She had trouble gauging the passage of time. She stumbled more than she used to. She had gone to see Vlad, and he had recommended overhydration, more running, more swimming.

  Hiroko told her to spend more time on the farm. She gave it a try, spending hours weeding, harvesting, trimming, fertilizing, watering, talking, sitting on a bench, looking at leaves. Spacing out. The farm rooms were max chambers, their barrel roofs lined with bright sunstrips. The multi-leveled floors were crowded with crops, many new since the storm. There was not enough space to feed the crew entirely on farm food, but Hiroko disliked that fact and struggled against it, converting storage rooms as they emptied out. Dwarf strains of wheat, rice, soy, and barley grew in stacked trays; above the trays were hanging rows of hydroponic vegetables, and enormous clear jars of green and yellow algae, used to help regulate the gas exchange.

  Some days Maya did nothing but watch the farm team work. Hiroko and her assistant Iwao were always tinkering at the endless project of maximizing the closure of their biological life-support system, and they had a crew of other regulars working on it: Raul, Rya, Gene, Evgenia, Andrea, Roger, Ellen, Bob, and Tasha. Success in the closure attempt was measured in K values, K representing closure itself. Thus for every substance they recycled,