Red Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson

He wants to be king!” Selim made a fist and struck his other hand. He was slimmer than the other Arabs, weak-chinned, his moustache covering a small mouth.

      “The treaty comes up for renewal soon,” Frank said. “And Boone’s coalition is bypassing me.” He ground his teeth. “I don’t know what their plans are, but I’m going to find out tonight. You can imagine what they’ll be, anyway. Western biases, certainly. He may withhold his approval of a new treaty unless it contains guarantees that all settlements will be made only by the original treaty signatories.” Selim shivered, and Frank pressed; “It’s what he wants, and it’s very possible he could get it, because his new coalition makes him more powerful than ever. It could mean an end to settlement by non-signatories. You’ll become guest scientists. Or get sent back.”

      In the window the reflection of Selim’s face appeared a kind of mask, signifying rage. “Battal, battal,” he was muttering. Very bad, very bad. His hands twisted as if out of his control, and he muttered about the Koran or Camus, Persepolis or the Peacock Throne, references scattered nervously among non-sequiturs. Babbling.

      “Talk means nothing,” Chalmers said harshly. “When it comes down to it, nothing matters but action.”

      That gave the young Arab pause. “I can’t be sure,” he said at last.

      Frank poked him in the arm, watched a shock run through the man. “It’s your people we’re talking about. It’s this planet we’re talking about.”

      Selim’s mouth disappeared under his moustache. After a time he said, “It’s true.”

      Frank said nothing. They looked in the window together, as if judging boots.

      Finally Frank raised a hand. “I’ll talk to Boone again,” he said quietly. “Tonight. He leaves tomorrow. I’ll try to talk to him, to reason with him. I doubt it will matter. It never has before. But I’ll try. Afterwards – we should meet.”

      “Yes.”

      “In the park, then, the southernmost path. Around eleven.”

      Selim nodded.

      Chalmers transfixed him with a stare. “Talk means nothing,” he said brusquely, and walked away.

      The next boulevard Chalmers came to was crowded with people clumped outside open-front bars, or kiosks selling couscous and bratwurst. Arab and Swiss. It seemed an odd combination, but they meshed well.

      Tonight some of the Swiss were distributing face masks from the door of an apartment. Apparently they were celebrating this stadtfest as a kind of Mardi Gras, Fassnacht as they called it, with masks and music and every manner of social inversion, just as it was back home on those wild February nights in Basel and Zurich and Luzern … On an impulse Frank joined the line. “Around every profound spirit a mask is always growing,” he said to two young women in front of him. They nodded politely and then resumed conversation in guttural Schwyzerdüütsch, a dialect never written down, a private code, incomprehensible even to Germans. It was another impenetrable culture, the Swiss, in some ways even more so than the Arabs. That was it, Frank thought; they worked well together because they were both so insular that they never made any real contact. He laughed out loud as he took a mask, a black face studded with red paste gems. He put it on.

      A line of masked celebrants snaked down the boulevard, drunk, loose, at the edge of control. At an intersection the boulevard opened up into a small plaza, where a fountain shot sun-colored water into the air. Around the fountain a steel drum band hammered out a calypso tune. People gathered around, dancing or hopping in time to the low bong of the bass drum. A hundred meters overhead a vent in the tent frame poured frigid air down onto the plaza, air so cold that little flakes of snow floated in it, glinting in the light like chips of mica. Then fireworks banged just under the tenting, and colored sparks fell down through the snowflakes.

      Sunset, more than any other time of day, made it clear that they stood on an alien planet; something in the slant and redness of the light was fundamentally wrong, upsetting expectations wired into the savannah brain over millions of years. This evening was providing a particularly garish and unsettling example of the phenomenon. Frank wandered in its light, making his way back to the city wall. The plain south of the city was littered with rocks, each one dogged by a long black shadow. Under the concrete arch of the city’s south gate he stopped. No one there. The gates were locked during festivals like these, to keep drunks from going out and getting hurt. But Frank had gotten the day’s emergency code out of the fire department AI that morning, and when he was sure no one was watching he tapped out the code and hurried into the lock. He put on a walker, boots, and helmet, and went through the middle and outer doors.

      Outside it was intensely cold as always, and the diamond pattern of the walker’s heating element burned through his clothes. He crunched over concrete and then duricrust. Loose sand flowed east, pushed by the wind.

      Grimly he looked around. Rocks everywhere. A planet sledgehammered billions of times. And meteors still falling. Someday one of the towns would take a hit. He turned and looked back. It looked like an aquarium glowing in the dusk. There would be no warning, but everything would suddenly fly apart, walls, vehicles, trees, bodies. The Aztecs had believed the world would end in one of four ways: earthquake, fire, flood, or jaguars falling from the sky. Here there would be no fire. Nor earthquake nor flood, now that he thought of it. Leaving only the jaguars.

      The twilight sky was a dark pink over Pavonis Mons. To the east stretched Nicosia’s farm, a long low greenhouse running downslope from the city. From this angle one could see that the farm was larger than the town proper, and jammed with green crops. Frank clumped to one of its outer locks, and entered.

      Inside the farm it was hot, a full 60° warmer than outside, and 15° warmer than in the city. He had to keep his helmet on, as the farm air was tailored to the plants, heavy on CO₂ and short on oxygen. He stopped at a work station and fingered through drawers of small tools and pesticide patches, gloves and bags. He selected three tiny patches and put them in a plastic bag, then slipped the bag gently into the walker’s pocket. The patches were clever pesticides, biosaboteurs designed to provide plants with systemic defenses; he had been reading about them, and knew of a combination that in animals would be deadly to the organism …

      He put a pair of shears in the walker’s other pocket. Narrow gravel paths led him up between long beds of barley and wheat, back toward the city proper. He went in the lock leading into town, unclipped his helmet, stripped off the walker and boots, transferred the contents of the walker pockets to his coat. Then he went back into the lower end of town.

      Here the Arabs had built a medina, insisting that such a neighborhood was crucial to a city’s health; the boulevards narrowed, and between them lay warrens of twisted alleyways taken from the maps of Tunis or Algiers, or generated randomly. Nowhere could you see from one boulevard to the next, and the sky overhead was visible only in plum strips, between buildings that leaned together.

      Most of the alleys were empty now, as the party was uptown. A pair of cats skulked between buildings, investigating their new home. Frank took the shears from his pocket and scratched into a few plastic windows, in Arabic lettering, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew. He walked on, whistling through his teeth. Corner cafes were little caves of light. Bottles clinked like prospectors’ hammers. An Arab sat on a squat black speaker, playing an electric guitar.

      He found the central boulevard, walked up it. Boys in the branches of the lindens and sycamores shouted songs to each other in Schwyzerdüütsch. One ditty was in English: “John Boone, Went to the moon, No fast cars, He went to Mars!” Small disorganized music bands barged through the thickening crowd. Some moustached men dressed as American cheerleaders flounced expertly through a complicated can-can routine. Kids banged little plastic drums. It was loud; the tenting absorbed sound, so there weren’t the echoes one heard under crater domes, but it was loud nevertheless.

      Up there, where the boulevard opened into the sycamore park – that was John himself, surrounded by a small crowd. He saw Chalmers approaching and waved, recognizing him despite the mask. That was how the first hundred knew each other—