Moving Mars Read online

  At first, if he noticed my attention at all, he seemed to try to avoid me, moving through little groups of people under the gloomy old poly, making small talk. Everybody was testy; his attempts at conversation fizzled. Finally he stood in line near an antique electric wall heater, waiting his turn to bask in the currents of warm dry air.

  I stood behind him. He glanced at me, smiled politely, and hunkered down with his back against the wall. I sat beside him. He clamped his hands on his knees, set his lips primly, and avoided eye contact; obviously, he had had enough of trying to make conversation and failing.

  "Having second thoughts?" I asked after a decent interval.

  "What?" he asked, confused.

  "You look sour. Is your heart in this?"

  He flashed the same irritating smile and lifted his hands, placating. "I'm here," he said.

  "Then show a little enthusiasm, dammit."

  Some other students shook their heads and shuffled away, too tired to get involved in a private fracas. Diane joined us at the rear of the line.

  "I don't know your name," he said.

  "She's Casseia Majumdar," said Diane.

  "Oh," he said. I was angry that he recognized the name. Of all things, I didn't want to be known for my currently useless family connections.

  "Her third uncle founded Majumdar BM," Diane continued. I shot her a look and she puckered her lips, eyes dancing. She was enjoying a little relief from the earnest preparations and boredom.

  "You have to be with us in heart and mind," I lectured him.

  "Sorry. I'm just tired. My name is Charles Franklin." He offered a hand.

  I thought that was incredibly insensitive and gauche, considering the circumstance. We had made it to the heater, but I turned away as if I didn't care and walked toward the stacks of masks and cyclers being tested by our student leader.

  Neither a Statist nor a Goback, Sean Dickinson seemed to me the epitome of what our impromptu organization stood for. Son of a track engineer, Sean had earned his scholarship by sheer brainwork. In the UMS engineering department, he had moved up quickly, only to be diverted into attempts to organize trans-BM unions. That had earned him the displeasure of Connor and Dauble.

  Sean worked with an expression of complete concentration, hair disheveled, spidery, strong fingers pulling at mask poly. His mouth twitched with each newfound leak. He hardly knew I existed. Had he known, he probably would have shunned me for my name. That didn't stop me from being impressed.

  Charles followed me and stood beside the growing pile of rejects. "Please don't misunderstand," he said. "I'm really behind all this."

  "Glad to hear it," I said. I observed the preparations and shivered. Nobody likes the thought of vacuum rose. None of us had been trained in insurrection. We would be up against campus security, augmented by the governor's own thugs and maybe some of our former classmates, and I had no idea how far they — or the situation — would go.

  We watched news vids intently on our slates, Sean had posted on the ex nets that students had gone on strike to protest Connor's illegal voiding. But he hadn't told about our dramatic plans, for obvious reasons. The citizens of the Triple — the linked economies of Earth, Mars, and Moon — hadn't turned toward us. Even the LitVids on Mars seemed uninterested.

  "I thought I could help," Charles said, pointing to the masks and drums. "I've done this before ..."

  "Gone Up?" I asked.

  "My hobby is hunting fossils. I asked to be on the equipment committee, but they said they didn't need me."

  "Hobby?" I asked.

  "Fossils. Outside. During the summer, of course."

  Here was my chance to be helpful to Sean, and maybe apologize to Charles for showing my nerves. I squatted beside the pile and said, "Sean, Charles here says he's worked outside."

  "Good," Sean said. He tossed a ripped mask to Gretyl. I wondered innocently if she and Sean were lovers. Gretyl scowled at the mask — a safety-box surplus antique — and dropped it on the reject pile, which threatened to spill out around our feet.

  "I can fix those," Charles said. "There are tubes of quick poly in the safety boxes. It works."

  "I won't send anybody outside in a ripped mask," Sean said. "Excuse me, but I have to focus here."

  "Sorry," Charles said. He shrugged at me.

  "We may not have enough masks," I said, looking at the diminishing stacks of good equipment.

  Sean glared over his shoulder, pressed for time and very unhappy. "Your advice is not necessary," Gretyl told me sharply.

  "It's nothing," Charles said, tugging my arm. "Let them work."

  I shrugged his fingers loose and backed away, face flushed with embarrassment. Charles returned with me to the heater, but we had lost our places there.

  The lights had been cut to half. The air became thicker and colder each day. I thought of my warren rooms at home, a thousand kilometers away, of how worried my folks might be, and of how they would take it if I died out in the thin air, or if some Statist thug pierced my young frame with a flechette . . . God, what a scandal that would make! It seemed almost worth it.

  I fantasized Dauble and Connor dragged away under arrest, glorious and magnificent disgrace, perhaps worth my death . . . but probably not.

  "I'm a physics major," Charles said, joining me at the end of the line.

  "Good for you," I said.

  "You're in govmanagement?"

  "That's why I'm here."

  "I'm here because my parents voted against the Statists. That's all I can figure. They were in Klein BM. Klein's holding out to the last, you know."

  I nodded without making eye contact, wanting him to go away.

  "The Statists are suicidal," Charles said mildly. "They'll bring themselves down . . . even if we don't accelerate the process."

  "We can't afford to wait," I said. The skinseal wouldn't last much longer. The nakedness and embarrassment had bonded us. We knew each other; we thought we had no secrets. But we itched and stank and our indignation might soon give way to general disgruntlement. I felt sure Sean and the other leaders were aware of this.

  "I was trying to get a scholarship for Earth study and a grant for thinker time," he said. "Now I'm off the list, I'm behind on my research — " He paused, eyes downcast, as if embarrassed at babbling. "You know," he said, "we've got to do something in the next twenty hours. The skinseal will rot."

  "Right." I looked at him more closely. He was not homely. His voice was mellow and pleasant, and what I had first judged as lack of enthusiasm now looked more like calm, which I was certainly not.

  Sean had finished weeding out the bad helmets. He stood and Gretyl called shrilly for our attention. "Listen," Sean said, shaking out his stiff arms and shoulders. "We've had a response from Connor's office. They refuse to meet with us, and they demand to know where we are. I think even Connor will figure out where we are in a few more days. So it's now or never. We have twenty-six good outfits and eight or ten problem pieces. I can salvage two from those. The rest are junk."

  "I could fix some of them if he'd let me," Charles said under his breath.

  "Gretyl and I will wear the problem pieces," Sean said. My heart pumped faster at his selfless courage. "But that means most of us will have to stay here. We'll draw sticks to see who crosses the plain."

  "What if they're armed?" asked a nervous young woman.

  Sean smiled. "Red rabbits down, cause up like a rocket," he said. That was clear enough. Martians shoot Martians, and glory to us all, the Statists would fall. He was right, of course. News would cross the Triple by day's end, probably even reach the planetoid communities.

  Sean sounded as if he thought martyrdom might be useful. I looked at the young faces around me, eight, nine, or ten — my age — almost nineteen Terrestrial years — and then at Sean's face, seemingly old and experienced at twelve. Quietly, as a group, we raised our hands with fingers spread wide — the old Lunar Independence Symbol for the free expression of human abilities and ideas, tolerance a
gainst oppression, handshake instead of fist.

  But as Sean brought his hand down, it closed reflexively into a fist. I realized then how earnest he was, and how serious this was, and what I was putting on the line.

  We drew fibers from a frayed length of old optic cord an hour after the mask count. Twenty-six had been cut long. I drew a long, as did Charles. Diane was very disappointed to get a short. We were issued masks and set our personal slates to encrypt signals tied to Sean's and Gretyl's code numbers.

  We had already gone over and over the plan. Twenty would cross the surface directly above the tunnels leading back to UMS. I was in this group.

  There were aboveground university structures about five kilometers from our trench domes. The remaining students — two teams of four each, Charles among them, under Sean's command — would fan out to key points and wait for a signal from Gretyl, the leader of our team of twenty, that we had made it to the administration chambers.

  If we met resistance and were not allowed to present demands to Connor personally, then Sean's teams would do their stuff. First, they would broadcast an illegal preemptive signal to the satcom at Marsynch, forcing on all bands the news that action in the name of contractual fulfillment was being taken by the voided students of UMS. Contractual fulfillment meant a lot even under the Statist experiment; it was the foundation of every family's existence, a sacred kind of thing. Where Sean had gotten the expertise and equipment to send a preemptive signal, he would not say; I found his deepening mystery even more attractive.

  Sean would personally take one team of four to the rail links at UMS junction. They would blow up a few custom-curved maglev rods; trains wouldn't be able to go to the UMS terminal until a repair car had manufactured new rods, which would take several hours. UMS would be isolated.

  Simultaneously, the second team of four — to which Charles was assigned — would break seals and pump oxidant sizzle — a corrosive flop-sand common in this region — into the university's net optic and satcom uplink facilities. That would break all the broad com between UMS and the rest of Mars. Private com would go through, but all broadband research and data links and library rentals would stop dead . . .

  UMS might lose three or four million Triple dollars before the links could be repaired.

  That of course would make them angry.

  We waited in two lines spiraling from the center of the main trench dome. At the outside of the spiral lines, Sean and Gretyl stood silent, jaws clenched. Some students shook their red-sealed hands to get ready for the cold. Skinseal wasn't made to keep you cozy. It only protected against hypothermia and frostbite.

  My own skinseal had come loose at the joints and sweat was pooling before being processed by the nanomer. I had to go to the bathroom, more out of nerves than necessity; my feet and legs had swollen, but only a little; I was not miserable but the petty discomforts distracted me from the focus I needed to keep from turning into a quivering heap.

  "Listen," Sean said loudly, standing on a box to peer over our heads. "None of us knew what we'd be getting into when we started all this. We don't know what's going to happen in the next few hours. But we all share a common goal — freedom to pursue our education without political interference — freedom to stand clear of the sins of our parents and grandparents. That's what Mars is all about — something new, a grand experiment. We'll be a part of that experiment now, or by God, we'll die trying."

  I swallowed hard and looked for Charles, but he was too far away. I wondered if he still had his calm smile.

  "May it not come to that," Gretyl said.

  "Amen," said someone behind me.

  Sean looked fully charged, face muscles sharply defined within a little oval of unsealed skin around his eyes, nose and mouth. "Let's go," he said.

  In groups of five, we removed our clothes, folding them neatly or just dropping them. The first to go entered the airlock, cycled through, and climbed the ladder. When my turn came, I crowded into the lock with four others, held my breath against the swirling red smear, and slipped on my mask and cycler. The old mask smelled doggy. Its edges adhered to the skinseal with the sound of a prim kiss. I heard the whine of pumps pulling back the air. The skinseal puffed as gas pressures equalized. Moving became more difficult.

  My companions in the lock began climbing. My turn came and I took hold of the ladder rungs and poked through the hatch, above the rust-and-ochre tumble and smear. With a kick, I cleared the lip, clambered out onto the rocky surface of the plain, and stood under the early morning sky. The sun topped a ridge of hills lying east, surrounded by a dull pink glow. I blinked at the glare.

  We'd have to hike over those hills to get to UMS. It had taken us half an hour simply to climb to the surface.

  We stood a few meters east of the trench dome, waiting for Gretyl to join us. In just minutes, smear clung to us all; we'd have to destat for half an hour when all this was over.

  Gretyl emerged from the hole. Her voice decoded in my right ear, slightly muffled. "Let's get together behind Sean's group," she said.

  We could breathe, we could talk to each other. All was working well so far.

  "We're off," Sean said, and his teams began to walk away from the trench. Some of them waved. I caught a glimpse of Charles from behind as his group marched in broken formation toward the hills, a little south of the track we would follow. I wondered why I was paying any attention to him at all. Skinseal hid little. He had a cute butt. Ever so slightly steatopygous.

  I bit my lip to bring my thoughts together. I'm a red rabbit, I told myself. I'm on the Up for the first time in two years, and there are no scout supervisors or trailmas-ters in charge, checking all our gear, making sure we get back to our mommies. Now focus, damn you!

  "Let's go," Gretyl said, and we began our trek.

  It was a typical Martian morning, springtime balmy at minus twenty Celsius. The wind had slowed to almost nothing. The air was clear for two hundred kilometers. Thousands of stars pricked through at zenith like tiny jewels. The horizon glimmered shell-pink.

  All my thoughts aligned. Something magical about the moment. I felt I possessed a completely realistic awareness of our situation . . . and of our chances of surviving.

  The surface of Mars was usually deadly cold. This close to the equator, however, the temps were relatively mild — seldom less than minus sixty. Normal storms could push winds up to four hundred kiphs, driving clouds of fine smear and flopsand high enough and wide enough to be seen from Earth. Rarely, a big surge of jetstream activity could send a high-pressure curl over several thousand kilometers, visible from orbit as a snaking dark line, and that could raise clouds that would quickly cover most of Mars. But the air on high Sinai Planum, at five millibars, was too thin to worry about most of the time. The usual winds were gentle puffs, barely felt.

  My booted feet pounded over the crusted sand and tumble. Martian soil gets a thin crust after a few months of lying undisturbed; the grains fall into a kind of mechanical cement that feels a lot like hoarfrost. I could dimly hear the others crunching, sound traveling through the negligible atmosphere making them seem dozens of meters away.

  "Let's not get too scattered," Gretyl said.

  I passed an old glacier-rounded boulder bigger than the main trench dome. Ancient ice floes had sculpted the crustal basalt into a rounded gnome with its arms splayed across the ground, flat head resting on its arms in sleep . . . pretended sleep.

  Somehow, red rabbits never became superstitious about the Up. It was too orange and red and brown, too obviously dead, to appeal to our morbid instincts.

  "If they're smart and somebody's anticipating us, there may be pickets out this far to keep track of the periphery of the university," Sean said over the radio.

  "Or if somebody's tattled," Gretyl added. I was starting to like Gretyl. Despite having an unpleasant voice and an unaltered, shrewlike face, Gretyl seemed to have a balanced perspective. I wondered why she had kept that face. Maybe it was a family face, something to b
e proud of where she came from, like English royalty's unaltered features, mandated by law. The long nose of King Henry of England.

  Damn.

  Focus gone.

  I decided it didn't matter. Maybe focusing on keeping a focus was a bad thing.

  The sun hung above the ridge now, torch-white with the merest pink tinge. Around it whirled the thinnest of opal hazes, high silicate and ice clouds laced against the brightening orange of day. The rock shadows started to fill in, making each step a little easier. Sometimes wind hollows hid behind boulders, waiting for unwary feet.

  Gretyl's group had spread out. I walked near the front, a few steps to her right.

  "Picket," said Garlin Smith on my right, raising his arm. He had been my classmate in mass psych, quiet and tall, what ignorant Earth folks thought a Martian should look like.

  We all followed Garlin's pointing finger to the east and saw a lone figure standing on a rise about two hundred meters away. It carried a rifle.

  "Armed," Gretyl said under her breath. "I don't believe it."

  The figure wore a full pressure suit — a professional job, the type worn by areologists, farm inspectors. Statist police. It reached up to tap its helmet. It hadn't seen us yet, apparently, but it was picking up the jumbled buzz of our coded signals.

  "Keep going," Gretyl said. "We haven't come this far to be scared off by a single picket."

  "If it is a picket," Sean commented, listening to our chat. "Don't assume anything."

  "It has to be a picket," Gretyl said.

  "All right," Sean said with measured restraint.

  The figure caught sight of us about four minutes after we first noticed it. We were separated by a hundred meters. It looked like a normal male physique from that distance.

  My breath quickened. I tried to slow it.