MARS UNDERGROUND Read online

  MARS UNDERGROUND

  William K. Hartmann

  TOR®

  A Tom Doherty Associates Book New York

  Other Books by William K. Hartmann

  The American Desert

  Astronomy: The Cosmic Journey

  The Cosmic Voyage

  Desert Heart

  Moons and Planets

  With Ron Miller

  Cycles of Fire

  The Grand Tour

  History of Earth

  Out of the Cradle

  Coedited by William K. Hartmann

  In the Stream of the Stars

  Origin of the Moon

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  MARS UNDERGROUND Copyright © 1997 by William K. Hartmann All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper. Edited by James Frenkel A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

  Tor Books on the World Wide Web: http://www.tor.com Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  Design by Basha Durand Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hartmann, William K.

  Mars underground / William K. Hartmann. p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-86342-X I. Title.

  PS3558.A7143M3 1997

  813'.54—dc21 97-1398

  CIP

  First Edition: July 1997

  Printed in the United States of America 0987654321

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  The author wishes to thank the parties who granted permission to reprint material as follows: from Crossing the Gap ©1987 C. J. Koch, Chatto & Windus, London. Permission to quote granted by the author. from An Innocent Millionaire ©1985 Stephen Vizinczey, Atlantic Monthly Press. Permission to quote granted by the author. from Leap Year ©1989 Steve Erickson. Permission to quote granted by the author. from In Praise of Older Women ©1965 Stephen Vizinczey, University of Chicago Press. Permission to quote granted by the author. from Immortality ©1990 Milan Kundera, Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Permission to quote granted by author. quote reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster from The Immoralist by Andre Gide, translated from the French by Dorothy Bussy (London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1930). from The Mosquito Coast ©1981 Paul Theroux, reprinted with the permission of Aitken & Stone Ltd.

  Acknowledgments

  With thanks to diverse friends who were foolish enough to encourage me.

  ...a country and its landscapes perhaps don't fully exist until they've been written about—until poets and novelists create them.

  C. J. Koch, author of The Year of Living Dangerously, quoting poet Vivian Smith, from "Crossing the Gap," 1987

  Prediction is always difficult, especially of the future.

  Danish proverb cited by Niels Bohr, quoted by Walter Moore in Schrödinger: Life and Thought, 1989

  Mars in 2031

  Nothing that is can pause or stay;

  The moon will wax, the moon will wane,

  The mist and cloud will turn to rain,

  The rain to mist and cloud again,

  Tomorrow be today.

  —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Keramos, 1878

  Prologue

  HAWAII, 2032

  The plane banks over the blue sea and the white waves, and the deep green blanket that cloaks the mountainsides.

  She gets off the plane at Hilo's ancient airport, and the cool air smells of plants and humidity. Home at last.

  The other end of the universe from Mars.

  Upon her arrival back on Earth, during her fifteen minutes of fame, she had been called by Newsnet, "the woman who brought it all crashing down." The phrase had won her respect in Tokyo, in Moscow, and in certain hallways along the Potomac, but she knows that in the crucial hours on Mars, the actions that changed two worlds were not hers alone. Besides, respect in Earth's gray, frenzied capitals seemed no longer to matter. Here at home, amidst the perfumed greenery of the islands, people still acted as if the ancient ways of pleasure might, just possibly, be more important than the ways of power. The thought intensifies her questions about her own life.

  The greenness and wetness shield her from the urgent needs of men now far away, but still in her mind. Carter. Philippe. All of them on that Oz-like red world, following their brick roads that they were laying ahead of them, one brick at a time. And here, of course, Tomas is waiting for her.

  Later, she and Tomas make frantic love, Tomas betraying a hint of suspicion. But the love of Tomas is different from the love of Philippe which was different from the love of Carter. They are all different, men. Philippe had said she was sincere but not honest, and the nature of the distinction still goes around and around in her mind. Yet here, among the soft plants and the warm waters that fall from the sky like liquid caresses, she feels free.

  She settles in, visits her aunt in the hundred-year-old house under the banyan tree on the hills of Ka'u. She sits on the wooden veranda and looks across the land toward the sea. Do they still have verandas anywhere else in the United States? The mainland is a teeming mess, consumed by the drought, the debt, the lottery, this year's sports scandal, the crisis du jour, and everyone's doomed quest to be rich, famous, a player, the winner—or at least to acquire the facade of being something; here, she takes time to listen to insects pursuing their business. She walks on the black beach at Ninole cove and stares at the slimy creatures in the tide pools. They have climbed over wet rocks like these for eons beyond human memory, without caring whether other species conquered the land or went still further, beyond the sky.

  She is surprised that she feels no impatience in this quiet island life. She feels renewal, recreation. Wonders if some day she will go back. Back to what? She is not sure she knows how to answer that. What was it she had sought out there?

  Being on the island again makes her aware of cycles. Liquid water, for example: Earth's unique attraction. Mainlanders seem to believe that water flows in rivers because water's nature is to do so. But islanders see the whole truth before their eyes. Water babbles down from the mountains across the black lava rocks and dry grassy plains and into the sea; the only way it can get back to the mountains is for the ocean waters to be lifted through the air, to recondense, to fall on the broad summits, where it can begin the cycle again.

  She feels part of a vast cycle like that, a molecule of water at one stage of its history. On this island, she sees that even the land has cycles. Twenty new acres of lava have flowed out into the sea since she left; down the coast, an old black lava cliff, where she played as a child, has fallen back into the sea. And she has been to another planet and back.

  Still later, there is her tiny son and she is happy for a while, content that she has been, after all, true to herself.

  One day a piece of mail arrives from Mars. It's on actual paper, with handwriting, months old. So characteristic of what Carter would dream up. Was he afraid to contact her in real time?

  She sits on the veranda, and tries to think how to answer him. She gazes at the distant ocean far below, lost in haze on the humid horizon. Everything is beyond that horizon, and yet she is here and content. For now.

  That evening, she checks out "Mars" on the net. Newsnet explains that Mars is reaching the point in its own orbital cycle where it is close to Earth. It is shining in the darkening east as the twilight settles in, and she goes down the road to the ancient heiau above Ninole cove to watch it. She sits on one of the prehistoric rock walls as waves send white foam crashing over the rocks below. Salt spray accumulates on her skin.

  Mars' amber beacon is the brightest light
in the part of the sky above the sea. Strange. In ancient tales of quests, the hero travels to distant empires and then escapes home, leaving the distant land far behind forever. In her case, the distant land has followed her around the sun and watches her balefully from the sky across the sea. With a shock, she realizes she will never escape it. At the right season, it will always be within direct sight. Wars and carnage, craft and madness, lust and spite; Philippe taught her Tennyson's prescient poem about Mars and Earth. They remain there, living their lives in that point of peaceful light: friends, lovers, enemies.

  It is unbelievable to her: a glowing dot containing the whole world where she had lived, a world that already seems an amber dream. She . I ambers down to the tide pools in the rough lava at the edge of the sea, and looks for a reflection of Mars' red sparkle on the water. She would like to see the sea and sky, Mars and Earth, tied together by that reflection. Il would make some kind of link. But the planet does not glow quite brightly enough; it is too far away and the sea is too restless.

  BOOK 1

  Kilroy in Hellespontus

  ... each tale is but a fragment of a tale

  —the tale of mankind's history.

  —Stephen Vizinczey, An

  Innocent Millionaire, 1985

  1

  2031, FEBRUARY 42, SATURDAY

  Morning. So, was he really going to keep driving west, after all, into the unknown Martian desert? Stafford smiled to himself.

  Stafford's dune buggy churned across the ocher sands of Hellespontus. In the immense empty wasteland, the buggy looked like an insignificant blue insect crawling across a dusty parking lot. The dust kicked up by its big wheels spurted into the air and fell away slowly, sometimes twisted by uncertain gusts of wind. Along the horizon, the hazy sky was exactly the same color as Stafford's creased Anglo flesh. But high above, wasn't that a trace of blue he had been seeing in the last year or so?

  They were a long way from anything, Stafford and his dune buggy. Alone. Five thousand klicks from Mars City. Three-fifty from little Hellas Base, hotbed of desert dreams. There was no road. There had been no road for more than a day.

  Virgin territory, Stafford noted to himself. Well, it wasn't the first time. Old Man of the Desert, they called him. Not for nothing. He looked at the forbidding, unblemished vista. The smile was still on his lips.

  The blue buggy churned on toward ... something. Squinting, Stafford pushed his square, weathered face forward against the front window, feeling his thick white hair and even his white mustache bristle against the glass. It was as if he were trying to be out there, to be part of the landscape. The thing he was searching for would be up ahead, somewhere. He didn't know what it would turn out to be, but he knew it was there, and he had his suspicions.

  When he first started out from Hellas Base on Thursday, he surprised himself by spending as much time looking out the back window as the front, watching for possible pursuers. This unexpected reaction intrigued him. Paranoia? Guilt setting in? Still, he knew that people were interested in his actions. The young engineers and scientists gossiped about him. "So where's Old Man Stafford off to this time?" It was like the Old West: when a grizzled prospector set out purposefully into the hills, the rumor-mongers said he was after some secret treasure. Well, this time they were right. Doubly so. Soon they would learn how right they were.

  By virtue of nothing more than the clock's steadfast ticking, Stafford had become one of the seniors in a rusty world of young technicians.

  Martians, they were pleased to call themselves. Well, Stafford had the best claim to the title. Old Man Stafford, the desert rat, the codger, who spent his retirement searching for ... well ... things. "Wonderful things." As a boy, back in California, Stafford read about Howard Carter's words when the archaeologist first peered into King Tut's tomb. "What do you see?" his team asked him. "Wonderful things," he said. It applied to Mars, Stafford thought.

  He peered through the dust-streaked glass. Ahead, to the west, a backlit haze of dust reduced distant, eroded mesas to pale fantasy castles. They did not shimmer. The air was too thin and too cold. The castles stood, stolid and still, two-dimensional in the luminous haze. Far cry from the Berkeley cafes and the last redwood forests, old man. To a lot of the farmers, watching holeo images in their worn armchairs Earthside, Mars seemed only a landscape of desolation. Red rocks, black rocks, and dust. To Stafford, it was a new world full of Wonderful Things. Interesting oddities. Martian El Dorados. The things desert rats had sought for a thousand years.

  The spartan horizon ahead was a clean, pale line that no one had ever crossed.

  It's always folks from green and wet places like northern California who end up loving the desert, he mused. Lawrence out of Oxford. Van Dyke out of New Jersey or someplace.

  Well let them call him what they wanted. In his twenty-one years on Mars he had had his fill of the Engineering Corps, the Agriculture Experiment Stations, the Clarke Project, the hundred other progressive projects of the clean, keen greenhorns who kept pouring into Mars City, intent on bringing it above what they called "critical mass." Critical mass for survival—that's what they were talking about. The minimum population and supporting equipment to make a self-sustaining colony. Critical mass was a shiny, polished concept from the gray halls of the universities and space agencies on Earth, but it had its dark side—a side discussed only in hushed conversations among the planners who hung out during late hours in what passed for dim bars in Mars City: they would have to reach critical mass before they could survive a catastrophic shutdown of the supply lines from Earth—a shutdown that could happen any day because of an economic collapse Earthside, a spacecraft disaster at Crystal City or Phobos, or worse. Ordinary Martians laughed it off. But some of the planners thought it might happen. Look what had happened already in Kazakhstan and Lima.

  Stafford's opinion of Earth was that no disaster was too unlikely to contemplate, given the way things terrestrial were going. The farmers, as Martians called them, had a truly Ptolemaic lack of imagination: they still thought of Earth as the center of the solar system. Rich, ravaged, unheedful Earth.

  Stafford was all for Martian self-sufficiency—an exciting goal—but he grew more and more disillusioned with the way the greenhorns and uncivil engineers were bent on transforming the rusty old planet not into a new Mars, but into a streamlined suburb of Earth, full of transplanted farmers and mall people.

  The thing of it was, no one knew how many people and machines it would take to reach critical mass on Mars. Some experts said a population of three thousand, plus nuclear generators, soil processors. Others said five or ten thousand, plus redundant infrastructure; the whole urban mess. For every Ph.D., an equal and opposite Ph.D.

  Martians hoped the present population was enough. Three thousand people—putting Mars City somewhere in limbo between a research out-post and a functioning town. Six thousand Martians in all, if you counted Phobos, Hellas, and the Polar Station. Too many for Stafford. The old days of basic, mission-driven exploration had ended. Politics was starting to rear its ugly head. You found yourself doing something because someone said so, not because it had to be done.

  He glanced all around the horizon again. Nothing yet. He craned his neck to peer out the back window. Nothing behind either. The desert was empty. "Clean" was the word Lawrence had used in Arabia.

  Hours later, the blue beetle was still crawling along. In the north, the summer sun had crossed the meridian and was sinking toward the west. Afternoon. It ought to be hot. Of course, it wasn't. Stafford didn't let himself think about how cold the air was outside.

  He spotted something ahead projecting above the sand. It was dark-colored, not bright as he'd anticipated. He drove closer.

  It turned out to be only a curious rock formation, sticking up like an African anthill. It looked to be some odd-shaped boulder, exhumed by the winds, sculpted and undercut by the blowing sand. As he drove by, he foresaw that in another thousand years it would be gone.

  Once u
pon a time, his heart had beat fast every time he saw an odd exposure of old rock. They were windows into the past. When he first came to Mars, he had been seeking his own holy grail. He had wanted to be the one to confirm the widespread theory that life had evolved far beyond the measly microbes that had been reported—on again, off again—since the turn of the century. Given the clement conditions geologists had established for the earliest phase of Martian history, it should have been true. From the work of Krennikov and Boikova, it seemed a small step to conclude that once life got started, it had a thousand non-convergent paths to follow—different paths in each environment, on each clement planet. Long ago, during the mysteriously moist early millennia of the planet, when the air was thick and water ran on the surface, Martian RNA and DNA should have gone off in directions never seen on Earth. He, Stafford, would be the one to find the evidence.

  For years, Stafford and his cronies had hoped that they would find rich bioorganic pockets and advanced fossil forms, sealed deep in protected strata since the beginning of time, proof of their catechism, of carbon chemistry's quirky ability to adapt. They had wanted an icon, more than a rational test of a chemical theory, something they could hold in front of the cameras and proclaim, "See, it can happen anywhere in the universe. We're not alone. Copernicus and Darwin were right: we're not special."

  No luck.

  But he'd had his day. Dr. Alwyn Stafford—the father of a tantalizing but disappointing new consensus: ancient wet Mars had produced no more than a few stunted microbial forms, starting three, maybe three and a half billion years ago. The earliest examples seemed to be found in the ancient southern highlands. Eventually, with the atmosphere thinning, all lifeforms in the surface layers had died and were buried. On the third day they had not risen from the dead, and for the rest of Martian time the arid surface soils had been sterile, while the primordial atmosphere dissipated, albeit with spasms that had left now dry riverbeds. Some of the microbes apparently hung on in buried strata, but there was little evolution because they were in static, frozen environments. And across the entire planet, the surface soil was sterile, thanks to the planet's unkind lack of an ozone layer. Seasonal dust storms churned the soil every year and exposed dust grains to the sun's ultraviolet light, sterilizing and re-sterilizing them, breaking up any group of carbon atoms that might have an idea of getting together for a fling...