The Martians by Kim Stanley Robinson
In any case: a perfect red plane in all directions, to the round horizon. Inside certain flat craters, you stand at the center and see a double horizon, in fact: the lower one five kilometers away, and perfectly straight; the higher one farther away, and usually less straight, even serrated. (This second horizon also considerably flattens the dome of the sky.)
But the completely flat areas are the purest view. Much of Vastitas Borealis is so flat that only millions of years of existence as the floor of an ocean can explain it. And parts of Argyre Planitia are equally flat. We cannot lose these places. In these regions one stands confronted by a radically simplified landscape. It is a surreal experience to look around oneself—surreal in the literal sense of the word, in that one seems to stand in a place “over-real,” or “more than real"—a higher state than reality; or reality revealed in its barest, most heraldic simplicity. The world says then, This is what the cosmos consists of; rock, sky, sun, life (that's you). What a massive aesthetic impact is conveyed by this so-simplified landscape! It forces you to pay attention to it; it is so remarkable you keep looking at it, you cannot do or think anything else—as if living in a perpetual total eclipse, or within any other physical miracle. Which of course is always the case. Remember.
Maya and Desmond
1. Finding Him
After she saw the strange face through the bottle in the farm of the Ares, Maya couldn't stop thinking of it. It frightened her, but she was no coward. And that had been a stranger, not one of the hundred. There on her ship.
And then she told John about it, and he believed her. He believed in her; and so she was going to have to track that stranger down.
She began by calling up the plans for the ship and studying them like she had never studied them before. It surprised her to find how many spaces it contained, how large their total volume. She had known the areas the way one knows a hotel or a ship or a plane, or one's hometown for that matter—as a set of her life-routes, wound through the whole in an internal mental map, which itself could be called up sharply visible in her mind's eye; but the rest was only vagueness, deduced, if she ever thought about it, from the parts she knew; but deduced wrongly, as she now found out.
Still, there was only so much livable space in the thing. The axis cylinders were not livable, by and large, and the eight toruses were, for the most part; but they were also very heavily traveled. Hiding would not be easy.
She had seen him in the farm. It seemed possible, even perhaps likely, that the man had allies in the farm crew, helping him to hide. A lone stowaway, unknown to anyone aboard, was difficult for her to believe in.
So she began in the farm.
Each torus was octagonal, made of eight American shuttle fuel canisters that had been boosted into orbit and coupled together. More bundled canisters formed the long axis that speared down the centers of the torus octagons, and the octagons were connected to the central axis by narrow spokelike passage tubes. The entire spacecraft spun on the long axis as it moved forward toward Mars, spinning at a speed that created a centrifugal force the equivalent of Martian gravity, at least for people walking on the floors set against the outside of the torus rings. The Coriolis force meant that if you walked against the rotation of the ship you felt you were leaning forward a little. The opposite effect, walking in the other direction, was somehow not so noticeable. You had to lean into reality to make progress.
The farm chamber filled torus F, the well-lit rows of vegetable and cereal lined out in a circular infinity. Above the ceilings and under the floors the supplies were kept. A lot of spaces to hide, in other words, when you got right down to searching for someone. Especially if you were trying to search in secret, which Maya most definitely was. She did it at night, after people were asleep. Here they were in space and yet people were still incredibly diurnal, regular as clockwork; indeed only clockwork kept them to it, but it was the clockwork of their own biology; and indicative of just how much of their animal natures they were carrying with them. But it gave Maya her opportunity.
She started in the chamber where she had seen the face, and made sure that no one ever saw her at work. So already she was a kind of ally of the man. She worked her way forward through the farm, row by row, storage compartment by storage compartment, tank by tank. No one there. She moved down the ship one torus to the storage tanks, and did the same. Days were passing, and Mars was the size of a coin ahead of them.
As her search progressed she realized how much all the chambers looked the same, no matter how they had been customized for use. They were living inside tanks of metal, and each tank resembled the others, much like the years of a life. Much like city life everywhere, she saw one day: room after room after room. Occasionally the great bubble chamber that was the sky. Human life, a matter of boxes. The escape from freedom.
She searched all the toruses and didn't find him. She searched the axis tanks and didn't find him.
He could have been in someone's room, many of which were locked, as in any hotel. He could be in a place she hadn't looked. He could be aware of her, and moving away from her as she searched.
She began again.
Time was running out. Mars was the size of an orange. A bruised and mottled orange. Soon they would arrive and go through aerobraking and orbit calming.
It was almost as if she were being watched. She had always felt observed somehow, as if she were living her life on an invisible stage, performing it for an invisible audience who followed her story with interest, and judged her. There had to be something that heard her endless train of thoughts, didn't there?
But this was more physical than that. She went through the crowded days prepping for arrival, slipping off to make love with John, fencing with Frank to avoid doing the same with him, and all the while feeling there was an eye on her, somewhere. She had learned that no matter where she was, she was in a tank filled with objects, and had trained herself to see the things filling the tank against the Platonic form of the tank itself, looking for discrepancies like false walls or floors, and finding some. Jumping around occasionally. But never catching that eye.
One night she came out of John's room and felt she was alone. Immediately she returned to the farm and went from its ceiling up to the axis tanks. Above the ceiling, under the low curve of the inner tank wall, was a storage chamber with a back wall that was too close to be the true end of the tank. She had seen that while eating breakfast one morning, without thinking about anything at all. Now she pulled away a stack of boxes set against this false wall, and saw the whole wall was a door, with a handle.
It was locked.
She leaned back, thought about it. She rapped lightly on the door, three times.
“Roko?” said a hoarse voice from within.
Maya said nothing. Her heart was beating hard and fast. The handle turned and she snatched it and yanked the door open, pulling out a thin brown arm. She let go of the door and grabbed the arm harder than the door; instantly she was yanked back into the tiny closet, and seized by hands with a talon grip.
“Stop it!” she cried, and as the man was trying to flee under her arm, she crashed down onto him, hitting boxes and insulation padding hard, but staying latched to a wrist. She sat on him with all her force, as if pinning an enraged child. “Stop it! I know you're here.”
He gave up trying to escape.
They both shifted to get more comfortable, and she lessened her grip on the man's arm, but still held on, not trusting him not to bolt. A small wiry black man, thin face bent or asymmetrical somehow, big brown eyes as frightened as a deer's. Thin wrist, but forearm muscles like rocks under the skin. He was quivering in her grip. Years later when she remembered their first meeting, what she remembered was his flesh trembling in her grip, trembling like a frightened fawn.
Fiercely she said, “What do you think I'm going to do? Do you think I'm going to tell everyone about you? Or send you home? Do you think I'm that kind of person?”
He shook his head, face aver
“No,” he said, in almost a whisper. “I know you're not. But I been so afraid.”
“Not necessary with me,” she said. Impulsively she reached out with her free hand and touched the side of his head. He shivered like a horse. Body like a bantamweight wrestler. An animal, moving involuntarily at the touch of another animal. Starved for touch, perhaps. She moved back away from him, let go of his arm, sat with her back leaning against the padding on the wall, watching him. An odd face somehow, narrow and triangular, with that asymmetry. Like pictures in magazines of Rastafarians from Jamaica. From below wafted the smell of the farm. He had no smell as far as she could tell, or else just more of the farm.
“So who's helping you?” she said. “Hiroko?”
His eyebrows shot up. After a moment's hesitation: “Yeah. Of course. Hiroko Ai, God damn her. My boss.”
“Your mistress.”
“My owner.”
“Your lover.”
Disconcerted, he looked down at his hands, bigger than his body seemed to need. “Me and half the farm team,” he said with a bitter little smile. “All of us wrapped around her little finger. And me living in a crawl space, for Christ's sake.”
“To get to Mars.”
“To get to Mars,” he repeated bitterly. “To be with her, you mean. Crazy man that I am, damn fool idiot crazy man.”
“Where are you from?”
“Tobago. Trinidad Tobago, do you know it?”
“Caribbean? I visited Barbados once.”
“Like that, yeah.”
“But now Mars.”
“Someday.”
“We're almost there,” she said. “I was afraid we would get there before I found you.”
“Hmph,” he said, looking up at her briefly, thinking this over. “Well. Now I not in such a hurry to get there.” He looked up again, with a shy smile.
She laughed.
She asked him more questions, and he replied, and asked more of his own. He was funny—like John in that—only sharper-edged than John. A bitterness there; and interesting, she suddenly realized, just as someone new, someone she didn't already know all too well. You got to watch out for Hiroko, he warned her at one point. “Hiroko, Phyllis, Arkady—they be trouble. Them and Frank, of course.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It's quite a crew you have,” he replied slyly, observing her.
“Yes.” She rolled her eyes; what could one say?
He grinned. “You won't tell them about me?”
“No.”
“Thanks.” Now it was him holding her by the wrist. “I'll help you, I swear. I'll be your friend.” Staring her right in the eye, for the first time.
“And I'll be yours,” she said, feeling touched, then suddenly happy. “I'll help you too.”
“We'll help each other. There'll be the hundred and all their jostle, and then you and me, helping each other.”
She nodded, liking the idea. “Friends.”
She freed her arm, and with a brief squeeze of his shoulder got up to leave. He still trembled slightly under her hand.
“Wait—what's your name?”
“Desmond.”
2. Helping Him
Thus in Underhill Maya always knew her stowaway Desmond was out there in the farm, getting by in circumstances almost as prisonlike as those he had suffered on the Ares. For days and months at a time she forgot this as she mangled her relationships with John and Frank, irritating Nadia and Michel, who were both nearly worthless to her, and irritating herself just as often or more—feeling incompetent and depressed, she didn't know why—having difficulty adjusting to life on Mars, no doubt. It was miserable in a lot of ways, to be cooped up in the trailers and then the quadrangle, with only each other. It wasn't that much different from the Ares, to tell the truth.
But every once in a while Maya would see a movement in the corner of her eye, and think of Desmond. His situation was worse than hers by far, and he never complained, did he? Not that she knew, anyway. She didn't want to bother him to find out. If he came to her, fine; if not, he would be observing from his hideaway, would see what he saw. He would know what kind of trouble she was facing, and if he cared to speak to her, he would come to her.
And he did. Every once in a while she would retire to her cubicle in the quadrangle of barrel vaults, or then to the larger one out in the arcade that Nadia built, and there would come that scritch-tap-scritch which was their private signal, somehow, and she would open the door and there he was, small and black and buzzing with energy and talk, always in an undertone. They would share their news. Out in the greenhouse it was getting strange, he said; Hiroko's polyandry was catching, and Elena and Rya were also enmeshed in multiple relationships, all of them becoming some kind of commune. Desmond obviously remained apart somehow, even though they were his only associates. He liked to come by and tell Maya all about them; and so when she saw them in the ordinary course of life, looking innocuous, it brought a smile to her face. It taught her that she was not the only one having trouble managing her affairs; that everyone was becoming strange. Everyone but Desmond and her, or so it felt as they sat there in her cubicle, on the floor, talking over every one of their colleagues as if numbering rosary beads. And each time as their talk wound down she would find some reason to reach out and touch him, hold his shoulder, and he would clasp her arm in his viselike grip, quivering with energy, as if his internal dynamo was spinning so fast he could barely hold himself together. And then he would be off. And the days after that would be easier. It was therapeutic, yes; it was what talks with Michel should have been but weren't, Michel being both too familiar and too strange. Lost in his own problems.
Or overwhelmed by everyone else's. One time, out walking with him to the salt pyramids they were constructing, he said something about the growing oddity of the farm team, and Maya pricked up her ears, thinking, If only you knew. But then he went on: “Frank is thinking they may have to be investigated by some kind of formal, I don't know, tribunal. Apparently material has gone missing, equipment, supplies, I don't know. They can't account for their hours properly to him, and people back in Houston are beginning to ask questions. Frank says some down there are even talking about sending up a ship to evacuate anyone who has been actively stealing things. I don't think that would do anyone any good, things are tenuous enough as it is. But Frank, well, you know Frank. He doesn't like it when there are things going on outside his control.”
“Tell me about it,” Maya muttered, pretending to worry only about Frank. And you could pretend anything with Michel, he was oblivious, more and more lost in his own world.
But afterward it was Desmond she worried about. The farm team she didn't care about at all, serve them right to be busted and sent home, Hiroko especially, but really all of them, they were so self-righteous and self-absorbed, a clique in a village too small to have cliques; but of course cliques only ever existed in contexts too small for them.
But if they did get rousted as they deserved, Desmond would be in trouble.
She did not know where he hid, or how to contact him. But from her conversations with Frank about Underhill affairs she judged that the problem of dealing with the farm team was going to develop slowly; so instead of searching for Desmond, as she had in the Ares, she merely walked around in the greenhouse late in the night, when she normally would not have, asking Iwao questions about things she would not usually show an interest in; and a few nights later she heard the scritch-tap-scritch at her door, and she rushed to let him in, realizing from his initial downcast glance that she was wearing only a shirt and underwear. But this had happened before; they were friends. She locked the door and sat down on the floor next to him, and told him what she had heard. “Are they really taking things?”
“Oh yeah, sure.”
“But why?”
“Well, to have things that are their own. To be able to go out and explore different parts of Mars, and have things
“Are they doing that?”
“Yeah. I've been out myself. You know, they say it's just a trip to Hebes Chasma, and then they get over the horizon and set off to the east, mostly. Into the chaos. It's beautiful, Maya, really beautiful. I mean maybe it's just because I been cooped up so long, but I love being out there, I love it. It's what I came for, here at last. In my life. I have a hard time convincing myself to come back.”
Maya looked at him closely, thinking it over. “Maybe that's what you all ought to do.”
“What?”
“Take off.”
“Where would I go?”
“Not just you—all of you. Hiroko's whole group. Take off and start your own colony. Go off where Frank and the rest of the police couldn't find you. Otherwise you may get busted and sent home.” She told him what she had heard from Michel.
“Hmm.”
“Could you do it, do you think? Hide them all, like you've hidden yourself?”
“Maybe. There's some cave systems in the chaoses east of here, you wouldn't believe what I've seen.” He thought it over. “We'd need all the basics. And we'd have to disguise our thermal signal. Send it down into the permafrost, melt our water for us. Yeah, I suppose it could be worked out. Hiroko has been thinking about it already.”
“You should tell her to hurry up then. Before she gets busted.”
“Okay, I will. Thanks, Maya.”
And the next time he dropped by in the middle of the night, it was to say good-bye. He hugged her and she held on to him, clutching. Then she pulled him onto her, and instantaneously, without any transition, they were getting their clothes off and making love. She rolled over onto him, shocked at how slight he was, and he flexed up to clasp her and they were off into that other world of sex, a wild pleasure. She did not have to play it safe with this man, who was the perfect outsider, an outlaw, her stowaway, and at this hard point in her life, one of her only real friends. Sex as an expression of friendship; it had happened to her before, a few times when she was young, but she had forgotten how much fun it could be, how friendly and pure, neither romantic nor anonymous.