Red Mars Read online

  In Torus D’s dining hall they mingled in a kind of cocktail party, celebrating the departure. Maya wandered about, sipping freely from a mug of champagne, feeling slightly unreal and extremely happy, a mix that reminded her of her wedding reception many years before. Hopefully this marriage would go better than that one had, she thought, because this one was going to last forever. The hall was loud with talk. “It’s a symmetry not so much sociological as mathematic. A kind of aesthetic balance.” “We’re hoping to get it into the parts per billion range, but it’s not going to be easy.” Maya turned down an offered refill, feeling giddy enough. Besides, this was work. She was co-mayor of this village, so to speak, responsible for group dynamics, which were bound to get complex. Antarctic habits kicked in even at this moment of triumph, and she listened and watched like an anthropologist, or a spy.

  “The shrinks have their reasons. We’ll end up fifty happy couples.”

  “And they already know the match-ups.”

  She watched them laugh. Smart, healthy, supremely well-educated— was this the rational society at last, the scientifically designed community that had been the dream of the Enlightenment? But there was Arkady, Nadia, Vlad, Ivana. She knew the Russian contingent too well to have many illusions on that score. They were just as likely to end up resembling an undergraduate dorm at a technical university, occupied by bizarre pranks and lurid affairs. Except they looked a bit old for that kind of thing; several men were balding, and many of both sexes showed touches of gray in their hair. It had been a long haul; their average age was forty-six, with extremes ranging from thirty-three (Hiroko Ai, the Japanese prodigy of biosphere design) to fifty-eight (Vlad Taneev, winner of a Nobel Prize in medicine).

  Now, however, the flush of youth was on all their faces. Arkady Bogdanov was a portrait in red: hair, beard, skin. In all that red his eyes were a wild electric blue, bugging out happily as he exclaimed, “Free at last! Free at last! All our children are free at last!” The video cameras had been turned off, after Janet Blyleven had recorded a series of interviews for the TV stations back home; they were out of contact with Earth, in the dining hall anyway, and Arkady was singing, and the group around him toasted the song. Maya stopped to join this group. Free at last; it was hard to believe, they were actually on their way to Mars! Knots of people talking, many of them world class in their fields; Ivana had won part of a Nobel Prize in chemistry, Vlad was one of the most famous medical biologists in the world, Sax was in the pantheon of great contributors to subatomic theory, Hiroko was unmatched in enclosed biological life-support systems design, and so on all around; a brilliant crowd!

  And Maya was one of their leaders. It was a bit daunting. Her engineering and cosmonautic skills were modest enough, it was her diplomatic ability that had gotten her aboard, presumably. Chosen to head the disparate, fractious Russian team, with the several commonwealth members— well, that was okay. It was interesting work, and she was used to it. And her skills might very well turn out to be the most important ones aboard. They had to get along, after all. And that was a matter of guile, and cunning, and will. Willing other people to do your bidding! She looked at the crowd of glowing faces, and laughed. All aboard were good at their work, but some were gifted far beyond that. She had to identify those people, to seek them out, to cultivate them. Her ability to function as leader depended on it, for in the end, she thought, they would surely become a kind of loose scientific meritocracy. And in such a society as that, the extraordinarily talented constituted the real powers. When push came to shove, they would be the colony’s true leaders— they, or those who influenced them.

  She looked around and located her opposite number, Frank Chalmers. In Antarctica she had not gotten to know him very well. A tall, big, swarthy man. He was talkative enough, and incredibly energetic, but hard to read. She found him attractive. Did he see things as she did? She had never been able to tell. He was talking to a group across the length of the room, listening in that sharp inscrutable way of his, head tilted to the side, ready to pounce with a witty remark. She was going to have to find out more about him. More than that, she was going to have to get along with him.

  She crossed the room, stopped by his side, stood so their upper arms just barely touched. Leaned her head in toward his. A brief gesture at their comrades: “This is going to be fun, don’t you think?”

  Chalmers glanced at her. “If it goes well,” he said.

  • • •

  After the celebration and dinner, unable to sleep, Maya wandered through the Ares. All of them had spent time in space before, but never in anything like the Ares, which was enormous. There was a kind of penthouse at the front end of the ship, a single tank like a bowsprit, which rotated in the opposite direction the ship did, so that it held steady. Solar watch instruments, radio antennas, and all the other equipment that worked best without rotation were located in this tank, and at the very tip of it was a bulbous room of transparent plastic, a chamber quickly named the bubble dome, which provided the crew with a weightless, nonrotating view of the stars, and a partial view of the great ship behind it.

  Maya floated near the window wall of this bubble dome, looking back at the ship curiously. It had been constructed using space-shuttle external-fuel tanks; around the turn of the century NASA and Glavkosmos had begun attaching small booster rockets to the tanks and pushing them all the way into orbit. Scores of tanks had been launched this way, then tugged to work sites and put to use— with them they had built two big space stations, an L5 station, a lunar orbit station, the first manned Mars vehicle, and scores of unmanned freighters sent to Mars. So by the time the two agencies agreed to build the Ares, the use of the tanks had become routinized, with standard coupling units, interiors, propulsion systems and so forth; and construction of the big ship had taken less than two years.

  It looked like something made from a children’s toy set, in which cylinders were attached at their ends to create more complex shapes— in this case, eight hexagons of connected cylinders, which they called toruses, lined up and speared down the middle by a central hub shaft, made of a cluster of five lines of cylinders. The toruses were connected to the hub shaft by thin crawl spokes, and the resulting object looked somewhat like a piece of agricultural machinery, say the arm of a harvester combine, or a mobile sprinkler unit. Or like eight knobby doughnuts, Maya thought, toothpicked to a stick. Just the sort of thing a child would appreciate.

  The eight toruses had been made from American tanks, and the five bundled lengths of the central shaft were Russian. Both kinds of tanks were about fifty meters long and ten meters in diameter. Maya floated aimlessly down the tanks of the hub shaft; it took her a long time, but she was in no hurry. She dropped down into Torus G. There were rooms of all shapes and sizes, right up to the largest, which occupied entire tanks. The floor in one of these she passed through was set just below the halfway mark, so its interior resembled a long Quonset hut. But the majority of the tanks had been divided up into smaller rooms. She had heard there were over five hundred of them in all, making for a total interior space roughly the equivalent of a large city hotel.

  But would it be enough?

  • • •

  Perhaps it would. After the Antarctic, life on the Ares seemed an expansive, labyrinthine, airy experience. Around six every morning the darkness in the residential toruses would lighten slowly to a gray dawn, and around six-thirty a sudden brightening marked “sunrise.” Maya woke to it as she had all her life. After visiting the lavatory she would make her way to Torus D’s kitchen, heat a meal, and take it into the big dining hall. There she sat at a table flanked by potted lime trees. Hummingbirds, finches, tanagers, sparrows and lories pecked underfoot and darted overhead, dodging the creeping vines that hung from the hall’s long barrel ceiling, which was painted a gray-blue that reminded her of St. Petersburg’s winter sky. She would eat slowly, watch the birds, relax in her chair, listen to the talk around her. A leisurely breakfast! After a lifetime of grinding work
it felt rather uncomfortable at first, even alarming, like a stolen luxury. As if it were Sunday morning every day, as Nadia said. But Maya’s Sunday mornings had never been particularly relaxed. In her childhood that had been the time for cleaning the one-room apartment she had shared with her mother. Her mother had been a doctor and like most women of her generation had had to work ferociously to get by, obtaining food, bringing up a child, keeping an apartment, running a career; it had been too much for one person, and she had joined the many women angrily demanding a better deal than they had gotten in the Soviet years, which had given them half the money jobs while leaving them all the work at home. No more waiting, no more mute endurance; they had to take advantage while the instability lasted. “Everything is on the table,” Maya’s mother would exclaim while cooking their meager dinners, “everything but food!”

  And perhaps they had taken advantage. In the Soviet era women had learned to help each other, a nearly self-contained world had come into being, of mothers, sisters, daughters, babushkas, women friends, colleagues, even strangers. In the commonwealth this world had consolidated its gains and thrust even further into the power structure, into the tight male oligarchies of Russian government.

  One of the fields most affected had been the space program. Maya’s mother, slightly involved in space medical research, always swore that cosmonautics would need an influx of women, if only to provide female data for the medical experimentation. “They can’t hold Valentina Tereshkova against us forever!” her mother would cry. And apparently she had been right, because after studying aeronautic engineering at Moscow University, Maya had been accepted in a program at Baikonur, and had done well, and had gotten an assignment on Novy Mir. While up there she had redesigned the interiors for improved ergonomic efficiency, and later spent a year in command of the station, during which a couple of emergency repairs had bolstered her reputation. Administrative assignments in Baikonur and Moscow had followed, and over time she had managed to penetrate Glavkosmos’s little politburo, playing the men against each other in the subtlest of ways, marrying one of them, divorcing him, rising afterward in Glavkosmos a free agent, becoming one of the utmost inner circle, the double triumvirate.

  And so here she was, having a leisurely breakfast. “So civilized,” Nadia would scoff. She was Maya’s best friend on the Ares, a short woman round as a stone, with a square face framed by cropped salt-and-pepper hair. Plain as could be. Maya, who knew she was good-looking, and knew that this had helped her many times, loved Nadia’s plainness, which somehow underlined her competence. Nadia was an engineer and very practical, an expert in cold-climate construction. They had met in Baikonur twenty years before, and once lived together on Novy Mir for several months; over the years they had become like sisters, in that they were not much alike, and did not often get along, and yet were intimate.

  Now Nadia looked around and said, “Putting the Russian and American living quarters in different toruses was a horrible idea. We work with them during the day, but we spend most of our time here with the same old faces. It only reinforces the other divisions between us.”

  “Maybe we should offer to exchange half the rooms.”

  Arkady, wolfing down coffee rolls, leaned over from the next table. “It’s not enough,” he said, as if he had been part of their conversation all along. His red beard, growing wilder every day, was dusted with crumbs. “We should declare every other Sunday to be moving day, and have everyone shift quarters on a random basis. People would get to know more of the others, and there would be fewer cliques. And the notion of ownership of the rooms would be reduced.”

  “But I like owning a room,” Nadia said.

  Arkady downed another roll, grinned at her as he chewed. It was a miracle he had passed the selection committee.

  But Maya brought up the subject with the Americans, and though no one liked Arkady’s plan, a single exchange of half the apartments struck them as a good idea. After some consulting and discussion, the move was arranged. They did it on a Sunday morning, and after that, breakfast was a little more cosmopolitan. Mornings in the D dining hall now included Frank Chalmers and John Boone, and also Sax Russell, Mary Dunkel, Janet Blyleven, Rya Jimenez, Michel Duval, and Ursula Kohl.

  John Boone turned out to be an early riser, getting to the dining hall even before Maya. “This room is so spacious and airy, it really has an outdoor feel to it,” he said from his table one dawn when Maya came in. “A lot better than B’s hall.”

  “The trick is to remove all chrome and white plastic,” Maya replied. Her English was fairly good, and getting better fast. “And then paint the ceiling like real sky.”

  “Not just straight blue, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  He was, she thought, a typical American: simple, open, straightforward, relaxed. And yet this particular specimen was one of the most famous people in history. It was an unavoidable, heavy fact, but Boone seemed to slip out from under it, to leave it around his feet on the floor. Intent on the taste of a roll, or some news on the table screen, he never referred to his previous expedition, and if someone brought the subject up he spoke as if it were no different from any of the flights the rest of them had taken. But it wasn’t so, and only his ease made it seem that way: at the same table each morning, laughing at Nadia’s lame engineering jokes, making his portion of the talk. After a while it took an effort to see the aura around him.

  Frank Chalmers was more interesting. He always came in late, and sat by himself, paying attention only to his coffee and the table screen. After a couple of cups he would talk to people nearby, in ugly but functional Russian. Most of the breakfast conversations in D hall had now shifted to English, to accommodate the Americans. The linguistic situation was a set of nesting dolls: English held all hundred of them, inside that was Russian, and inside that the languages of the commonwealth, and then the internationals. Eight people aboard were idiolinguists, a sad kind of orphaning in Maya’s opinion, and it seemed to her they were more Earth-oriented than the rest, and in frequent communication with people back home. It was a little strange to have their psychiatrist in that category; though bilingual, he was very focused on France.

  Anyway English was the ship’s lingua franca, and at first Maya had thought that this gave the Americans an advantage. But then she noticed that when they spoke they were always on stage to everyone, while the rest of them had more private languages they could switch to if they wanted.

  Frank Chalmers was the exception to all that, however. He spoke five languages, more than anyone else aboard. And he did not fear to use his Russian, even though it was very bad; he just hacked out questions and then listened to the answers, with a really piercing intensity, and a quick startling laugh. He was an unusual American in many ways, Maya thought. At first he seemed to have all the characteristics, he was big, loud, maniacally energetic, confident, restless; talkative and friendly enough, after that first coffee. It took a while to notice how he turned the friendliness on and off, and to notice how little his talk revealed. Maya never learned a thing about his past, for instance, despite deliberate efforts to chat him up. It made her curious. He had black hair, a swarthy face, light hazel eyes— handsome in a tough-guy way— his smile brief, his laugh sharp, like Maya’s mother’s. His gaze too was sharp, especially when looking at Maya; a matter of evaluating the other leader, she assumed. He acted toward her as if they had an understanding built on long acquaintance, a presumption which made her uneasy given how little they had spoken together in Antarctica. She was used to thinking of women as her allies, and of men as attractive but dangerous problems. So a man who presumed to be her ally was only the more problematic. And dangerous. And . . . something else.

  She recalled only one moment when she had seen further into him than the skin, and that had been back in Antarctica. After the thermal engineer had cracked and been sent north, news of his replacement had come down, and when it was announced everyone was quite surprised and excited to hear that it was going
to be John Boone himself, even though he had certainly received more than the maximum radiation dosage on his previous expedition. While the evening room was still buzzing with the news Maya had seen Chalmers come in and be told of it, and he had jerked his head around to stare at his informant; and then for a fraction of a second she had seen a flash of fury, a flash so fast it was almost a subliminal event.

  But it had made her attentive to him. And certainly he and John Boone had an odd relationship. It was difficult for Chalmers, of course; he was the Americans’ official leader, and even had the title “Captain”— but Boone, with his blond good looks and the strange presence of his accomplishment, certainly had more natural authority— he seemed the real American leader, and Frank Chalmers something like an overactive executive officer, doing Boone’s unspoken bidding. That could not be comfortable.

  They were old friends, Maya had been told when she asked. But she saw few signs of it herself, even watching closely. They seldom talked to each other in public, and did not seem to visit in private. Thus when they were together she watched them more closely than ever, without ever consciously considering why— the natural logic of the situation just seemed to demand it. If they had been back at Glavkosmos, it would have made strategic sense to drive a wedge between them, but she didn’t think of it that way here. There was a lot that Maya didn’t think about consciously.

  She watched, though. And one morning Janet Blyleven wore her video glasses into D hall for breakfast. She was a principal reporter for American television, and often she wove her way through the ship wearing her vidglasses, looking around and talking the commentary, collecting stories and transmitting them back home where they would be, as Arkady put it, “predigested and vomited back into that baby bird consensus.”