Red Mars(141)
Eventually he came to Senzeni Na. He was returning because Pauline had identified two workers there as absent without explanation from their jobs on the day the truck had fallen on him. The day after he arrived he interviewed them, but they proved to have plausible explanations for their absence from the net; they had been out climbing. But after he had apologized for taking their time, and started back to his room, three other mohole technicians introduced themselves as friends of Arkady’s. John greeted them enthusiastically, glad that something would come of the trip; and in the end a group of eight took him in a rover to a canyon paralleling the mohole’s canyon. They drove down through the obscuring dust to a habitat dug into an overhanging canyon wall; it was invisible to satellites, its heat was released from a number of dispersed small vents which from space would look like Sax’s old windmill heaters. “We figure that’s how Hiroko’s group has done it,” one of his guides told him. Her name was Marian, and she had a long beak of a nose and eyes that were set too close together, so that her gaze was very intent.
“Do you know where Hiroko is?” John asked.
“No, but we think they’re in the chaos.”
The universal response. He asked them about the cliff dwelling. It had been built, Marian told him, with equipment from Senzeni Na. It was currently uninhabited, but ready if needed.
“Needed for what?” John said as he walked around the little dark rooms of the place.
Marian stared at him. “For the revolution, of course.”
“The revolution!”
John had very little to say on the drive back. Marian and her companions sensed his shock, and it made them uneasy too. Perhaps they were concluding that Arkady had made a mistake in asking them to show John their habitat. “There are a lot of these being prepared,” Marian said defensively. Hiroko had given them the idea, and Arkady thought they might come in handy. She and her companions began ticking them off on their fingers: a whole stockpile of air- and ice-mining equipment, buried in a dry ice tunnel at one of the south polar cap processing stations; a wellhole tapping the big aquifer under Kasei Vallis; scattered greenhouse labs around Acheron, growing pharmacologically useful plants; a communications center in the basement of Nadia’s concourse at Underhill. “And that’s just what we know about. There are one-read samizdat appearing in the net that we had nothing to do with, and Arkady’s certain that there are other groups out there, doing the same thing we are. Because when push comes to shove, we’re all going to need places to hide and fight from.”
• • •
“Oh come on,” John said. “You all have to get it through your heads that this whole revolution scenario is nothing but a fantasia on the American Revolution, you know, the great frontier, the hardy pioneer colonists exploited by the imperial power, the revolt to go from colony to sovereign state— it’s all just a false analogy!”
“Why do you say that?” Marian demanded. “What’s different?”
“Well for one thing, we’re not living on land that can sustain us. And for another, we don’t have the means to revolt successfully!”
“I disagree with both those points. You should talk to Arkady more about that.”
“I’ll try. Anyway I think there’s a better way of doing it than all this sneaking around stealing equipment, something more direct. We simply tell UNOMA what the new Mars treaty is going to say.”
His companions shook their heads scornfully.
“We can talk all we want,” Marian said, “but that’s not going to change what they do.”
“Why not? Do you think they can just ignore the people who are living here? They may have continuous shuttles now, but we’re still eighty million kilometers away from them, and we’re here and they’re not. It may not be North America in the 1760s, but we do have some of the same advantages: we’re at a great distance, and we’re in possession. The important thing is not to fall into their way of thinking, into all the same old violent mistakes!”
And so he argued against revolution, nationalism, religion, economics— against every mode of Terran thought that he could think of, all mashed together in his usual style. “Revolution never even worked on Earth, not really. And here it’s all outmoded. We should be inventing a new program, just like Arkady says, including the ways to take control of our fate. With you all living a fantasy of the past you’re leading us right into the repression you’re complaining about! We need a new Martian way, a new Martian philosophy, economics, religion!”