He wanted to talk to Arkady. A call determined that Arkady had finished the gerontological treatment in Acheron with Nadia, however, and had gone up to Phobos. John had still never visited the fast little moon. “Why don’t you come on up and see it?” Arkady said over the phone. “Better to talk in person, yes?”“Okay.”
He hadn’t been in space since the landing from the Ares twenty-three years before, and the familiar sensations of acceleration and weightlessness brought on an unexpected bout of nausea. He told Arkady about it as they docked with Phobos, and Arkady said, “It always used to happen to me, until I started drinking vodka right before takeoff.” He had a long physiological explanation for this, but the details began to pull John back over the edge and he cut him off. Arkady laughed; the gerontological treatment had given him its usual postoperative lift, and he had been a happy man to begin with; he looked like he wouldn’t be sick again for a thousand years.
Stickney turned out to be a bustling little town, the crater’s concrete dome lined with the latest heavy-duty radiation proofing, and the floor of the crater terraced in concentric rings down to a bottom plaza. The rings alternated between parks and two-storied buildings with gardens on their roofs. There were nets in the air for people who lost control of their leaps across the city, or took off by accident; escape velocity was only fifty kilometers per hour, so it was almost possible to run right off the moon. Just under the dome foundation John spotted a small version of the exterior circumnavigating train, running horizontally compared to the buildings of the town, and moving at a speed that returned its passengers to a sensation of Martian gravity. It stopped four times a day to take people on, but if John took refuge in it that would only delay his acclimatization, so he went to the guest room assigned to him, and miserably waited out the nausea. It seemed he was a planet dweller now, a Martian for good, so that leaving Mars was pain. Ridiculous but true.
The next day he felt better, and Arkady took him on a tour of Phobos. The interior was honeycombed with tunnels, galleries, drifts, and several enormous open chambers, many of them still being mined for water and fuel. Most of the interior tunnels inside the moon were smooth functional tubes, but the interior rooms and some of the big galleries had been built according to Arkady’s socio-architectural theories, and he showed John around some of these: circular hallways, mixed work-and-recreation areas, terracing, etched metallic walls, all features that had become standard during Mars’s crater-oriented phase of construction, but of which Arkady was still proud.
Three of the little surface craters on the side opposite to Stickney had been domed with glass and filled with villages which had a view of the planet rushing beneath them— views never available from Stickney, as Phobos’s long axis was permanently aligned toward Mars, with the big crater always pointed away. Arkady and John stood in Semenov, looking up through the dome at Mars, which filled half the sky and was shrouded by its dust clouds, all its features obscured. “The Great Storm,” Arkady said. “Sax must be going mad.”
“No,” John said. “A thing of the moment, he says. A glitch.”
Arkady hooted. Already the two of them had fallen back into their old easy camaraderie, the feeling that they were equals, brothers from way back. Arkady was the same as ever, laughing, joking, a great kidder, ideas and opinions flooding out of him, confident in a way that John enjoyed immensely, even now, when he was sure many of Arkady’s ideas were wrong, and even dangerous.
“Sax is probably right, in fact,” Arkady said. “If those aging treatments work, and we are living decades longer than previously, it will certainly cause a social revolution. Shortness of life was a primary force in the permanence of institutions, strange though it is to say it. But it is so much easier to hold onto whatever short-term survival scheme you have, rather than risking it all on a new plan that might not work— no matter how destructive your short-term plan might be for the following generations. Let them deal with it, you know. And really, to give them their due, by the time people learned the system they were old and dying, and for the next generation it was all there, massive and entrenched and having to be learned all over again. But look, if you learn it, and then stare at it for fifty more years, you will eventually be saying, Why not make this more rational? Why not make it closer to our heart’s desire? What’s stopping us?”
“Maybe that’s why things are getting so strange down there,” John said. “But somehow I don’t think these people are taking the long view.” He gave Arkady a quick account of the sabotage situation, and ended it by saying boldly: “Do you know who’s doing it, Arkady? Are you involved?”