Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,224

he stood up in meetings and did his very best, haranguing them about what Mars was, how it had come to be, what a fine future it could have as a collective society, specifically and organically Martian in its nature, “with the dross of all those Terran hatreds burnt away, all those dead habits that keep us from really living, from the creation that is the world’s only real beauty, damn it!”

Useless. He tried to arrange meetings with some of the disappeared, and once he talked with a group by phone, and asked them to pass the word along to Hiroko if possible, that he urgently needed to talk to her. But no one seemed to know where she was.

Then one day he got a message from her, in print faxed down from Phobos. He’d be better off talking to Arkady, it said. But Arkady had disappeared while down in Hellas, and was no longer taking calls. “It’s like playing fucking hide-and-seek,” Frank exclaimed bitterly to Maya one day. “Did you have that game in Russia? I remember playing with some older kids one time, it was around sunset and a storm over the water making it really dark, and there I was, wandering around empty streets knowing I’d never find any of them.”

“Forget the disappeared,” she advised. “Concentrate on who you can see. The disappeared will be monitoring you anyway. It doesn’t matter if you can’t see them or if they don’t reply.”

He shook his head.

Then there was a new wave of emigration. He shouted for Slusinski and ordered him to get an explanation from Washington.

“Apparently, sir, the elevator consortium has been bought in a hostile takeover by Subarashii, so its assets are in Trinidad Tobago and it is no longer interested in responding to American concerns about the matter. Infrastructure construction capability is now in line with a moderate emigration rate, they say.”

“Damn them!” Frank said. “They don’t know what they’re doing with this!”

He walked in a circle, grinding his teeth. The words spilled quietly out of him, in a monologue of their own making. “You see but you don’t understand. It’s like John used to say, there’s parts of Martian reality that don’t make it across the vacuum, not just the feel of the gravity, but the feel of getting up in a dorm and going down to the baths, and then across the alley to a dining hall. And so you’re getting it all wrong, you arrogant, ignorant, stupid sons of bitches….”

He and Maya took the train from Burroughs back up to Pavonis Mons. All during the trip he sat by the window and watched the red landscape rise and fall, contract in to the flatland five kilometers and then, as they rose, extend out to forty kilometers, or a hundred. Such a big bulge in the planet, Tharsis. Something inside, breaking out. As in the current situation. Yes, they were stuck on the side of the Tharsis Bulge of Martian history, with the big volcanoes about to pop.

And then there one was, Pavonis Mons, an enormous dream mountain, as if the world were a print by Hokusai. Frank found it difficult to talk. He avoided looking at the TV at the front of the car—news flashed up and down the train almost instantly anyway, in snatches of overheard conversation or the looks on people’s faces. It was never necessary to watch the video to find out the really important news. The train ran through a forest of Acheron pines, tiny things with bark like black iron and cylindrical bushes of needles, but the needles were all yellow and drooping. He had heard about this, there was some kind of problem with the soil, too much salt or too little nitrogen, they weren’t sure. Helmeted figures stood around one on a ladder, plucking specimens of the sick needles. “That’s me,” Frank said to Maya under his breath, as she was asleep. “Playing with needles when the roots are sick.”

In the Sheffield offices he started meeting with the new elevator administrators, at the same time beginning another round of simultaneous meetings with Washington. It turned out Phyllis was still in control of the elevator, having aided Subarashii in the hostile takeover.

Then they heard that Arkady was in Nicosia, just down the slope from Pavonis, and that he and his followers had declared Nicosia a free city like New Houston. Nicosia had become a big jump-off point for the disappeared. You could slip into Nicosia and never be