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

was captured again:

      “… this treaty isn’t going to make all that much difference anyway. The transnational that want to invest will find a way. They’ll make a new flag of convenience and it’ll look like a country staking its claim here, exactly according to the treaty’s quotas. But behind it will be transnational money. There’ll be all kinds of that stuff happening, Frank. You know how it is. Politics, right? Economics, right?”

      “Maybe,” Frank said harshly, upset. He walked away.

      Later he found himself in an upper valley district, still being built. The scaffolding was extreme, as Sax had said, especially for Martian g. Some of it looked like it would be hard to bring down. He turned and looked out over the valley. The city was nicely placed, that was indisputable. The two sides of the valley meant there was going to be a lot visible from any point. Everywhere in town would have a view.

      Suddenly his wristpad beeped, and he answered. It was Ann, staring up at him. “What do you want?” he snapped. “I suppose you think I sold you out too. Let in the hordes to overrun your playground.”

      She grimaced. “No. You did the best that could be done, given the situation. That’s what I wanted to say.” She clicked off and his pad went blank.

      “Great,” he said aloud. “I’ve got everyone on two worlds mad at me except Ann Clayborne.” He laughed bitterly, took off walking.

      Back down to the canal and the rows of Bareiss columns. Lot’s wives. There were knots of celebrants scattered over the canalside sward, and in the late afternoon light their shadows were long. The sight took on a somehow ominous cast, and Frank turned, uncertain where to go. He didn’t like the aftermath of things. Everything seemed finished, done, revealed as pointless. It was always this way.

      A group of Terrans were standing under one of the more magnificent new office blocks in the Niederdorf tent. There was Andy Jahns among them.

      If Ann was pleased, Andy would be furious. Frank walked up to him, wanting to witness that.

      Andy saw him, and his face went still for a moment. “Frank Chalmers,” he said. “What brings you down here?”

      His tone was amiable, but his eyes were unamused, even cold. Yes, he was angry. Frank, feeling better every second, said, “I’m just walking around, Andy, getting the blood flowing again. What about you?”

      After the briefest of hesitations Jahns said, “We’re looking at office space.”

      He watched as Frank digested the implications of the statement. His smile took on an edge, became a genuine smile. He went on: “These are friends of mine from Ethiopia, from Addis Ababa. We’re thinking of moving our home office there next year. And so— ” his smile broadened, no doubt in response to the look on Frank’s face, which Frank could feel hardening over the front of his skull— “we have a lot to discuss.”

      Al-Qahira is the name for Mars in Arabic and Malaysian and Indonesian. The latter two languages got it from the former; look at a globe and see how far the Arabs’ religion spread. The whole middle of the world, from West Africa to the West Pacific. And most of that in a single century. Yes, it was an empire in its time; and like all empires, after death it had a long half-life.

      The Arabs who live out of Arabia are called Mahjaris, and the Arabs who came to Mars, the Qahiran Mahjaris. When they arrived on Mars a good number of them began to wander Vastitas Borealis (“The Northern Badia”) and the Great Escarpment. These wanderers were mostly Bedouin Arabs, and they traveled in caravans, in a deliberate recreation of a life that had disappeared on Earth. People who had lived in cities all their lives went to Mars and moved around in rovers and tents. The excuses for their ceaseless travel included the hunt for metals, areology, and trade; but it seemed clear that the important thing was the travel, the life itself.

      Frank Chalmers joined old Zeyk Tuqan’s caravan a month after the treaty was signed, in the northern autumn of M-15 (July 2057). For a long time he wandered with this caravan over the broken slopes of the Great Escarpment. He worked on his Arabic, and helped with their mining, and took meteorological observations. The caravan was composed of actual Bedouins from Awlad ’Ali, the western coast of Egypt. They had lived north of the area that the Egyptian government had named the New Valley Project, after a search for oil discovered a water aquifer holding an amount equal to a thousand years of the Nile’s flow. Even before the discovery of the gerontological treatment, the Egyptian population problem had been severe; with 96 percent of the country desert, and 99 percent of the population in the Nile Valley, it was inevitable that the hordes relocated in the New Valley Project would overwhelm the Bedouins and their entirely distinct culture. The Bedouins wouldn’t even call themselves Egyptians, and despised the Nile Egyptians as spineless and immoral; but that did not keep the Egyptians from crowding north from the New Valley Project into Awlad ’Ali. Bedouins in the other Arab countries had taken the side of these overwhelmed outposts of their culture, and when the Arab commonwealth started a Mars program, and bought space on the continuous Earth-to-Mars shuttle fleet, they asked Egypt to give preference to their western Bedouins. The Egyptian government had been only too happy to oblige, and clear the region of its troublesome minority. So here they were, Bedouins on Mars, wandering the world-wrapping northern desert.

      The weather observations piqued Frank’s interest in climatology like none of the scientists’ talk ever had. The weather on the Escarpment was often violent, with katabatic winds rushing downslope and colliding with the Syrtis trade winds to create tall fast red tornadoes, or onslaughts of gritty hail. Currently the atmosphere was at around 130 millibars in the summer, in a mix about 80 percent carbon dioxide and 10 percent oxygen, the remainder mostly argon. It wasn’t clear yet whether they were going to be able to overwhelm the CO₂ with oxygen and the other gases, but Sax seemed satisfied with their progress so far. Certainly on a windy day on the escarpment it was clear that the air was thickening; it had some real heft to it, it threw heavy sand, and darkened the afternoons to the color of a scab. And in the hardest gales the gusts could knock you down quite easily. Frank timed one katabatic gust at six hundred kilometers an hour; luckily it was part of such a hard general blow that everyone was in the rovers when it happened.

      The caravan was a mobile mining operation. Metals and ore-bearing minerals were being discovered in all kinds of locations and concentrations on Mars, but one thing the Arab prospectors were discovering was that a lot of sulfides were very lightly scattered on the Great Escarpment and the flats immediately below it. Most of these deposits were in concentrations and total quantities that would not justify the use of conventional mining methods, and so the Arabs were engaged in pioneering new extraction and processing procedures; they had built an array of mobile equipment, altering construction vehicles and exploration rovers to suit their purpose. The resulting machines were big, segmented, and distinctly insectile, looking like things out of a truck mechanic’s nightmare. These creatures wandered the Great Escarpment in loose caravans, seeking the diffuse surface areas of stratiform copper deposits, preferably those with high amounts of tetrahedrite or chalcocite in them, so that they could recover silver as a byproduct of the copper. When they located one of these, they would stop for what they called the harvesting.

      While they did this, prospector rovers would range ahead along the Escarpment, on expeditions of a week or ten days, following the old flows and rifts. When Frank had arrived he had been welcomed by Zeyk, who told him to do whatever work he chose; so Frank commandeered one of the prospector rovers, and took it out on solo expeditions. He would spend a week out, puttering around on automatic search, reading the seismograph and the samplers and the weather instruments, doing an occasional boring, watching the skies.

      All over both worlds, Bedouin settlements looked drab from the outside; when they abandoned tents, their neighborhoods took on a windowless thick-walled look, as if perpetually hunched over to protect themselves from the desert heat. Only when you got inside their homes did one see what was protected, the courtyards, the gardens, the fountains, the birds, the staircases, the mirrors, the arabesques.

      The Great Escarpment was strange country, cut by north-south canyon systems, marred by old craters, overrun by lava flows,