Red Mars ← We Can Solve This

perhaps it is not surprising that all the oldest names for Mars have a peculiar weight on the tongue—Nirgal, Mangala, Auqakuh, Harmakhis—they sound as if they were even older than the ancient languages we find them in, as if they were fossil words from the Ice Age or before. Yes,

The idea that they should stay on a fraternal basis was big at NASA: out of the 1,348 pages of the tome NASA had compiled called Human Relations in Transit to Mars, only a single page was devoted to the subject of sex; and that page advised against it.

Emergencies in space can be as obvious as an explosion or as intangible as an equation, but their obviousness has nothing to do with how dangerous they are.

Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.

Mutual professional respect, a great maker of friendships.

sump and pump, and an insulated transport line leading to a

Nadia had never seen it properly before, or never really felt it, she realized that now; she had been enjoying her life as if it were a Siberia made right, so that really she had been living in a huge analogy, understanding everything in terms of her past. But now she stood under a tall violet sky on the surface of a petrified black ocean, all new, all strange; it was absolutely impossible to compare it to anything she had seen before; and all of a sudden the past sheered away in her head

and the CO2. The actual slopes are never more than six degrees

“You damned liberals.” “I don’t know what that means.” “It means you’re too soft-hearted to ever actually do anything.”

“We became friends first,” Arkady said once, “that’s what makes this different, don’t you think?” He prodded her with a finger. “I love you.” It was as if he were testing the words with his tongue. It was clear to Nadia that he hadn’t said them often; it was clear they meant a lot to him, a kind of commitment. Ideas meant so much to him!

Nadia would watch from their bed feeling so serene and happy that she had to remind herself that the floating sensation was probably just Martian g. But it felt like joy.

“You really don’t know what beauty is, do you?” “I certainly do,” Nadia said mulishly. Arkady ignored her and said, “Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often,” he grinned and pushed at her belly, “expressed in curves.”

“You’re not a conventional man.” “No!” He hooted. “I never claimed to be! Except before certain selection committees of course. A conventional man! Ah, ha ha ha ha ha!—the conventional men get Maya. That is their reward.” And he laughed like a wild man.

“We’re in big trouble!” “Maybe,” he said. “Definitely! And it’s all your fault! Some of those fool biologists in the trailer park took your anarchist rant seriously!” “Well,” he said, “that at least is a point in their favor, the bastards.

who’s going to believe that?” “….Good point. Those bastards, they really got me with this one.” Clearly this was what bothered Arkady most. Not that they had contaminated Mars with alien biota, but that he had been kept out of a secret. Men were such egomaniacs when it came down to it.

He couldn’t seem to make up his mind whether he was pleased or angry, and Nadia finally believed that he was both at once. That was Arkady; he felt things freely and to the full, and wasn’t much worried about consistency.

cutting away at parts of the gondola frame she judged inessential, until the engineers in Friedrichshafen would have shuddered. But Germans always overengineered things, and no one on Earth could ever really believe in Martian g anyway.

it was dangerous to generalize. But Maya was a classic case. Moody, angry, flirtatious, brilliant, charming, manipulative, intense

People didn’t understand that true intimacy did not consist of sexual intercourse, which could be done with strangers and in a state of total alienation; intimacy consisted of talking for hours about what was most important in one’s life.

Michel tried to concentrate on what she was saying. It was difficult, because he knew full well that in a week everything would be different, all the dynamics in that little trio altered beyond recognition. So it was hard to care.

Michel asked the questions that a shrink program would have asked, Maya answered in the way a Maya program would have answered.

Michel hesitated before continuing, unsure how to say it. Subtlety was dangerous when you were both using a second language,

He went on reassuring her, telling her that she was powerful, that (using Frank’s terms) she was the alpha female of the troop. She disagreed and forced more praise from him until finally she was satiated,

carefully deployed colors, colors that he himself had chosen for the most part, utilizing the very latest in color-mood theory, a theory which he now understood to be based on certain root assumptions that did not in fact apply here. The colors were all wrong, or worse, irrelevant. Wallpaper in hell.

In fact physiological investigations had revealed that extroversion was linked with resting states of low cortical arousal, introversion with high cortical arousal; this had sounded backward to Michel at first, but then he remembered that the cortex inhibits the lower centers of the brain, so that low cortical arousal allows the more uninhibited behavior of the extrovert, while high cortical arousal is inhibitory and leads to introversion. This explained why drinking alcohol, a depressant which lowers cortical arousal, could lead to more excited and uninhibited behavior.

She had fallen in love with Mars for the same reason that Michel hated it: because it was dead. And Ann was in love with death.

sere and barren rockpile, no matter how large it got. From

He moved easily from table to table, asking questions as he went. This was what pleased people, what gave them the festival feeling that a meeting with John Boone should bring. John liked being able to do that, it was the part of his job that made celebrity tolerable; because when he asked questions, people leaped to answer like salmon in the stream. It was peculiar, really, as if people were seeking to right the imbalance they felt in the situation, in which they knew so much about him while he knew so little about them.

with the right encouragement, often a single carefully judged prompt, they would erupt with the most astonishing spills of personal information: witnessing, testifying, confessing.

He knew that many people thought of him as a figurehead only, a celebrity for consumption back on Earth, a dumb space jock who had gotten lucky once and was living off that for good. That didn’t bother John; there were always knee-high people hacking away, trying to get everyone down to their size. That was okay, especially since in his case they were wrong.

Power wasn’t a matter of job titles, after all. Power was a matter of vision, persuasiveness, freedom of movement, fame, influence.

Dropping like a rock, like that asteroid, John thought with a grin, and he pulled up for the landing with a dramatic last flourish, putting down with as much precision as he could muster, aware of his reputation as a hot flyer, which of course had to be reinforced at every opportunity. Part of the job…

John had brought along a half-liter bottle of Utopian cognac, and he broke it out after dinner to moans of approval. As the areologists sipped he cleaned the dishes (“I want to”)

The kitchen clean, John asked Ann to go out for a sunset walk. She hesitated, unwilling; but it was one of her rituals and everyone knew it, and with a quick grimace and a hard glance she agreed.

in her opinion the northern hemisphere was simply the biggest impact basin of all, the ultimate bang of the Noachian. A similar-sized strike had knocked the moon out of the Earth, probably around the same time.

And seeing you helps me to think about it.” Which it did, though he was never much at doing it on his feet; so he just slithered along a bit more in his free associational way, plucking whatever stuck out of the bag of his thoughts.

Perhaps that was being Swiss, John thought. He had been meeting them more and more in his travels, and they all seemed like that. Do things, and don’t worry too much about theory.

John wished (as he had before) that everyone on the planet was Swiss, or at least like the Swiss. Or more like the Swiss in certain ways, anyway. Their love of country seemed to be expressed by making a certain kind of life: rational, just, prosperous, scientific. They would work for that life anywhere, because to them it was the life that mattered, not a flag or a creed or a set of words, nor even that small rocky patch of land they owned on Earth. The Swiss road-building crew back there was Martian already, having brought the life and left the baggage behind.

their strange mixture of engineering and mysticism.

Juggling all these factors into any meaningful extrapolative program was more than anyone had yet accomplished to Sax’s satisfaction, so he had resorted to his usual solution; he was trying to do it himself.

“They add up to a terawatt a year.”

Sax shrugged. “Push an Amor asteroid into orbit, set up a robot factory, let it go to work. It’s not as expensive as you might think.” John rolled his eyes. “Sax, who’s paying for all this?” Sax tilted his head, blinked. “The sun.”

One look at his grimace and John could read it all, the whole complex of disgust and impatience and amusement. A part of John was pleased at this instant recognition; he knew his old friend better than he had ever known any of his family, so that the swarthy pale-eyed face glowering at him was like that of a brother, a twin that he couldn’t ever remember not knowing. On the other hand, he was annoyed with Frank for his condescension.

Lit up by Maya as usual, he had to admit it. She made him pay attention. Sex for her was not (as it tended to be for John) some kind of extension of sport; it was a grand passion to her, a transcendent state of being, and she was so tigerish when she got going that she always surprised him, woke him up, brought him up to her level, reminded him what sex could be.

He almost laughed, he almost said something to set her off, then thought better of it. Just knowing was enough, no need for another demonstration,

At some point in the long lazy session he found himself thinking I love you, wild Maya, I really do. It was a disconcerting thought, a dangerous thought. Not something he would risk saying. But it felt true.

always talking, talking in public speeches or private conversations, talking to strangers, old friends, new acquaintances, talking almost as fast as Frank did, and all in an attempt to inspire the people on the planet to figure out a way to forget history, to build a functioning society.

They’d have to institute some pretty intense population control, or else they’d go Malthusian really fast. We thought we’d better leave the decisions to the authorities down there.” “But word is sure to get out.” “Is that true? They might try to put a clamp on it. Maybe even a comprehensive clamp, I don’t know.” “Wow. But you folks…you just went ahead and did it?” “We did.” She shrugged.

when he returned he was strapped into what looked like a cross between a couch and an electric chair. That didn’t bother him; astronaut training had inured him to all devices.

It had been M-11 years since those first days in the trailer park, and in most of the years since, the two of them had been lovers, with a number of (blessed) interruptions and separations,

“haecceity,”

I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every moment. That’s why I want to know what is this? what is this? what is this? Now, remembering Sax’s odd word and his odd religion, John finally understood him; because he was feeling the thisness of the moment like a rock in his hand, and it felt as if his entire life had been lived only to get him to this moment.

beside him in the process of being reborn was the pink body of Maya Toitovna, Maya’s body which he knew better than his own.

She was, for better and worse, the person he was closest to, a beautiful pink animal and also an avatar for him, of sex, of life itself on this bare rocky world.

She kissed him and he found that despite the sauna’s heat it was going to be easy to shift the emphasis from agape to eros;

When you expect to live another two hundred years, you behave differently from when you expect to live only twenty.

he had to rely on Pauline not only for statistics but advice, which was worrying.

Marina’s lab was getting ahead of the game. But so was everyone else. This seemed to be a result of the treatment, it made sense on the face of it. Longer experiments. Longer (John groaned) investigations. Longer thoughts.

“That’s the only real measure of our contribution to the system,” Vlad would say. “If you burn our bodies in a microbomb calorimeter you’ll find we contain about six or seven kilocalories per gram of weight, and of course we take in a lot of calories to sustain that through our lives. Our output is harder to measure, because it’s not a matter of predators feeding on us, as in the classic efficiency equations—it’s more a matter of how many calories we create by our efforts, or send on to future generations, something like that. And most of that is very indirect, naturally, and it involves a lot of speculation and subjective judgment. If you don’t go ahead and assign values to a number of non-physical things, then electricians and plumbers and reactor builders and other infrastructural workers would always rate as the most productive members of society, while artists and the like would be seen as contributing nothing at all.”

“Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is—people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.”

“The basic equation is simple, efficiency merely equals the calories you put out, divided by the calories you take in, times one hundred to put it in the form of a percentage. In the classic sense of passing along calories to one’s predator, ten percent was average, and twenty percent doing really well. Most predators at the tops of food chains did more like five percent.” “This is why tigers have ranges of hundreds of square kilometers,” Vlad said. “Robber barons are not really very efficient.”

tigers don’t have predators not because they’re so tough, but because it’s not worth the effort,” John said. “Exactly!”

“we can say that their efficiency is very low, and that they predate on the system without having any predators, so that they are either the top of the chain or parasitical, depending on how you define it. Advertising, money brokering, some types of manipulation of the law, some politics….”

Would the energy cost of the transfer overwhelm the potential profit? “Of course,” they said, just like the men at Bradbury Point. “It will take the space elevator to make it worthwhile.” Their chief said, “With the space elevator we are in the Terran market. Without it we will never get off Mars.” “That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” John said. But they didn’t understand him, and when he tried to explain it they only went blank and nodded politely, anxious to avoid thinking about politics.

When John realized what was going on, he found he could bring up the topic of politics to get some time to himself;

He stood, reeling; all of a sudden he understood that one didn’t have to invent it all from scratch, that it was a matter of making something new by synthesis of all that was good in what came before.

Nadia smiled briefly. “I try to make Arkady think about things. That’s the best I can do.

“Muscle and brain have extended out through an armature of robotics that is so large and powerful that it’s difficult to conceptualize it. Maybe impossible. That’s probably part of your talent, and Sax’s too—to flex the muscles that no one else realizes we have yet.

Maybe that’s why things are getting so strange these days, everyone talking about ownership or sovereignty, fighting, making claims. People squabbling like those old gods on Olympus, because nowadays we’re just as powerful as they were.” “Or more,” Nadia said.

He stood up and surveyed the little gang with as much easy arrogance as he could muster, which was quite a lot.

Shortness of life was a primary force in the permanence of institutions, strange though it is to say it. But it is so much easier to hold onto whatever short-term survival scheme you have, rather than risking it all on a new plan that might not work—no matter how destructive your short-term plan might be for the following generations.

people grow powerfully attached to that kind of life, when they get the chance to live it. It allows you to concentrate your attention on the real work, which means everything that is done to stay alive, or make things, or satisfy one’s curiosity, or play. That is utopia, John, especially for primitives and scientists, which is to say everybody.

there they stood nevertheless, all the oh-so-familiar faces changed, aged in all the ways human faces age: time texturing them with erosion as if they had lived for geological ages, giving them a knowing look, as if one could see the aquifers behind their eyes.

We need to form a coherent political unit no matter what kind of disagreements we might have.” “It won’t matter what we do,” Sax said mildly, but he was jumped on immediately, in an incomprehensible babble of competing protests. “It does matter!” John cried. “We’ve got as much chance as anyone does of directing what happens here.”

We chose not to think of it. Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people.

“What can I say, friends?” he cried. “This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for.”

transformation of a planet into a world and then a home.

The video was of a massive protest march in Manhattan, the whole island packed with a crowd the protesters would call ten million and the police five hundred thousand.

The weakness of businessmen was their belief that money was the point of the game; they worked 14-hour days in order to earn enough of it to buy cars with leather interiors, they thought it was a sensible recreation to play around with it in casinos—idiots, in short.

That she would get what she wanted. For of course it was impossible that she was doing it all without cause. That was the nature of power; when you had it no one was ever again simply a friend, simply a lover. Inevitably they all wanted things you could give them—if nothing else, the prestige of friendship with the powerful.

they asked Egypt to give preference to their western Bedouins.

progress so far. Certainly on a windy day on the escarpment it was clear

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.

“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,

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.”

Arab nations had contributed money and people to the Mahjaris.

It was the same as in El Paso, different accents but the same complaints. His earlier visit gave him the ability to anticipate what they were going to say, to say it before they did. He watched grimly as their faces revealed how impressed they were by this ability. They were young.

Well, she always had been a little stupid.

It took a while to rachet them into agreement. Disarm, cooperate, organize, petition the American government for help, for justice. Put themselves in his hands, in effect.

He gave them advice in media relations and arbitration technique, he told them how to organize cells and committees, to elect leaders. They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always.

Maya had that certain look of admiration on her face, as if pacifying exploited laborers with lies and sophistry were the highest heroism.

She asked him to accompany her, and he was too exhausted to run a cost/benefit analysis of the act.

“It’s amazing how little you need to keep starving people strung along.”

They believe you because you don’t try to flatter them or soften the truth.” “That’s what works best,” he said, looking out the window at the tents running by. “Especially when you’re flattering them and lying to them.” “Oh Frank.” “It’s true. You’re good at it yourself.” This was an example of the trope under discussion, but Maya didn’t see it.

“No wonder Marxism is dead.” “Well, sir, actually a lot of people on Mars call themselves Marxists.” “Shit! They might as well call themselves Zoroastrians, or Jansenists, or Hegelians.” “Marxists are Hegelian, sir.” “Shut up,”

“You can’t influence him?” Maya said. “No.” Frank could see that this was hard for Maya to believe, and it almost made him laugh: not influence

“You can’t influence him?” Maya said. “No.” Frank could see that this was hard for Maya to believe, and it almost made him laugh: not influence a man, not manipulate him? What was Nadia’s problem?

“We should join whoever we can, and help fight!” Angela said. “I’m not fighting anyone,” Nadia said mulishly. “It’s stupid. I won’t do it. I’ll fix things where I can, but I won’t fight.”

The occupants were enthusiastic; they had not known about the contents of the airport warehouses. Nadia shook her head at this. “It’s in all the records,” she said to Yeli later, “they only had to ask. They just weren’t thinking. They were just watching the TV, watching and waiting.”

Basic construction was something that robots did, or so they seemed to think. It was hard to say how long they would have gone before they would have started in on the reconstruction themselves, but with Nadia there to point out what could be done, and drive them with a brief burst of withering scorn at their inactivity, they were soon under way.

She did not stop working for even a single waking second; she worked as she ate, she read reports and programs in the bathroom, and she never slept except when exhaustion knocked her out. While in this timeless state she told anyone and everyone she worked with what to do, without regard for their opinion or comfort; and in the face of her monomaniacal concentration, and the authority of her grasp of the situation, people obeyed her.

They lived in what Yeli called Waldo World, ordering robots about as if they were slavemasters or magicians, or gods; and the machines went to work, trying to reverse the film of time and make broken things fly back together.

Maya muttering viciously in Russian, crying—only Maya was tough enough to keep feeling in all of this

inchoate roar smashed at the air, and quivered their stomachs