The Complete Mars Trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson

pure New York, Frank had always called him Jeeves, because he looked like the actor in the BBC series. “We’re like dwarves in a waldo,” Frank said to him angrily. “One of those really big waldo excavators. We’re inside it and supposed to be moving a mountain, and instead of using the waldo capabilities we’re leaning out of a window and digging with teaspoons. And complimenting each other on the way we’re taking advantage of the height.”

      “I see,” Jeeves said carefully.

      But there was nothing to be done about it. He was back in Burroughs, hurrying around, four meetings an hour, conferences that told him what he already knew, which was that UNOMA was now using the treaty for toilet paper. They were approving accounting systems which guaranteed that mining would never show any profits to distribute to the general assembly members, even after the elevator was working. They were handing out “necessary personnel” status to thousands of emigrants. They were ignoring the various local groups, ignoring MarsFirst. Most of this was done in the name of the elevator itself, which provided an endless string of excuses, thirty-five thousand kilometers of excuses, a hundred and twenty billion dollars of excuses. Which was not all that expensive, actually, compared to the military budgets of the past century – less than a year of the global military budget of those days, in fact, and most of the elevator funds had been needed in the first years of finding the asteroid and getting it into proper orbit, and setting up the cable factory. After that the factory ate the asteroid and spat out the cable, and that was that; they only had to wait for it to grow long enough, and nudge it down into position. A bargain, a real bargain!

      And also a great excuse for breaking the treaty whenever it seemed expedient. “God damn it,” Frank shouted at the end of a long day in the first week back. “Why has UNOMA caved like this?”

      Jeeves and the rest of his staff took this as a rhetorical question and offered no theories. He had definitely been away too long; they were afraid of him now. He had to answer the question himself: “It’s greed I guess, they’re all getting paid off in one cosmeticized way or another.”

      At dinner that night, in a little café, he ran into Janet Blyleven and Ursula Kohl and Vlad Taneev. As they ate they watched the news from Earth on a bar TV. Really it had gotten to be almost too much to watch. Canada and Norway were joining the plan to enforce population growth slowdown. No one would say population control, of course, it was a forbidden phrase in politics, but that’s what it was and it was turning into the tragedy of the commons all over again: if one country ignored the UN resolutions, then nearby countries were howling for fear of being overwhelmed – another monkey fear, but there it was. Meanwhile Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, Azania, the United States, Canada, and Switzerland had all proclaimed immigration illegal. While India was growing by eight percent a year. Famine would solve that, as it would in a lot of countries. The Four Horsemen were good at population control. Until then… the TV cut to an ad for a popular diet fat, which was indigestible and went right through the gut unchanged. “Eat all you want!”

      Janet clicked off the TV. “Let’s change the subject.”

      They sat around their table and stared at their plates. It turned out Vlad and Ursula had come from Acheron because there was an outbreak of resistant tuberculosis in Elysium. “The cordon sanitaire has fallen apart,” Ursula said. “Some of the emigrant viruses will surely mutate, or combine with one of our tailored systems.”

      Earth again. It was impossible to avoid it. “Things are falling apart down there!” Janet said.

      “It’s been coming for years,” Frank said harshly, his tongue loosened by the faces of his old friends. “Even before the treatment life expectancy in the rich countries was nearly double that in the poor. Think about that! But in the old days the poor were so poor they hardly knew what life expectancy was, the day itself was their whole concern. Now every corner shop has a TV and they can see what’s happening – that they’ve got AIDS while the rich have the treatment. It’s gone way beyond a difference in degree, I mean they die young and the rich live forever! So why should they hold back? They’ve got nothing to lose.”

      “And everything to gain,” Vlad said. “They could live like us.”

      They huddled over cups of coffee. The room was dim. The pine furniture had a dark patina; stains, nicks, fines rubbed in by hand… It could have been one of those nights in that distant time when they were the only ones in the world, a few of them up later than the rest, talking. Except Frank blinked and looked around, and saw in his friends’ faces the weariness, the white hair, the turtle faces of the old. Time had passed, they were scattered over the planet, running like he was, or hidden like Hiroko, or dead like John. John’s absence suddenly seemed huge and gaping, a crater on whose rim they huddled glumly, trying to warm their hands. Frank shuddered.

      Later Vlad and Ursula went to bed. Frank looked at Janet, feeling immobilized as he sometimes did at the end of a long day, incapable of ever moving again. “Where’s Maya these days?” he asked, to keep Janet from retiring too. She and Maya had been good friends in the Hellas years.

      “Oh, she’s here in Burroughs,” Janet said. “Didn’t you know?”

      “No.”

      “She’s got Samantha’s old rooms. She may be avoiding you.”

      “What?”

      “She’s pretty mad at you.”

      “Mad at me?”

      “Sure.” She regarded him across the dim, faintly humming room. “You must have known that.”

      While he was still considering how open to be with her, he said “No! Why should she be?”

      “Oh Frank,” she said. She leaned forward in her chair. “Quit acting like you’ve got a stick up your ass! We know you, we were there, we saw it all happen!” And as he was recoiling she leaned back, and said calmly, “You must know that Maya loves you. She always has.”

      “Me?” he said weakly. “It’s John she loved.”

      “Yeah, sure. But John was easy. He loved her back, and it was glamorous. It was too easy for Maya. She likes things hard. And that’s you.”

      He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

      Janet laughed at him. “I know I’m right, she’s told me as much! Ever since the treaty conference she’s been angry at you, and she always talks when she’s mad.”

      “But why is she angry?”

      “Because you rejected her! Rejected her, after pursuing her for years and years, and she got used to that, she loved it. It was romantic, the way you persisted. She took it for granted, sure, but she loved you for it. And she liked how powerful you were. And now John is dead, and she could finally say yes to you, and you sent her packing. She was furious! And she stays mad a long time.”

      “This…” Frank struggled to collect himself. “It just doesn’t match with my understanding of what’s happened.”

      Janet stood up to go, and as she walked by him she patted him on the head. “Maybe you ought to talk to Maya about it then.” She left.

      For a long time he sat there, feeling stunned, examining the shiny grain of his chair arm. It was hard to think. Eventually he stopped trying and went to bed.

      He slept poorly, and at the end of a long night he had another dream about John. They were in the long drafty upcurved chambers of the space station, spinning at Martian gravity, in their long stay of 2010, six weeks together up there, young and strong, John saying I feel like Superman, this gravity’s great, I feel like Superman! Running laps around the big ring of the station hallway. Everything’s going to change on Mars, Frank. Everything!

      No. Each step was like the last jump of a triple jump. Boing, boing, boing, boing.

      Yes! The whole question will be learning to run fast enough.

      A perfect interference pattern of cloud-dots lay pasted over the western coast of Madagascar. The sun bronzing the ocean below.