Red Mars(187)

“But they don’t know how the disappeared live!” Chalmers objected. “Or even if they survive at all!”

The woman shook her head. “Word gets around. People come back. There are one-play videos that show up occasionally.” The people around her nodded. “And we can see what’s coming up from Earth after us. Best to get into the country while the chance is still there.”

Frank shook his head, amazed. It was the same thing the bench presser in the mining camp had been saying, but coming from this calm middle-aged woman it was somehow more disturbing.

That night, unable to sleep, he put out a call for Arkady, and got him half an hour later. Arkady was on Olympus Mons of all places, up at the observatory. “What do you want?” Frank said. “What do you imagine will happen if everyone here slips away into the highlands?”

Arkady grinned. “Why then we will make a human life, Frank. We will work to support our needs, and do science, and perhaps terraform a bit more. We will sing and dance and walk around in the sun, and work like maniacs for food and curiosity.”

“It’s impossible,” Frank exclaimed. “We’re part of the world, we can’t escape it.”

“Can’t we? It’s only the blue evening star, the world you speak of. This red world is the only real one for us, now.”

Frank gave up, exasperated. He had never been able to talk to Arkady, never. With John it had been different; but then he and John had been friends.

He trained back to Elysium. The Elysium massif rose over the horizon like an enormous saddle dropped on the desert; the steep slopes of the two volcanoes were pinkish white now, deep in snows that had packed down to firn, and would become glaciers before too long. He had always thought of the Elysium cities as a counterweight to Tharsis— older, smaller, more manageable and sane. But now people there were disappearing by the hundreds; it was a jump-off point into the unknown nation, hidden out there in the cratered wilderness.

In Elysium they asked him to give a speech to a group of American newcomers, on the first evening of their orientation. A formal speech, but there was an informal gathering before, and Frank wandered around asking questions as usual. “Of course we’ll get out if we can,” one man said to him boldly.

Others chipped in immediately. “They told us not to come here if we wanted to get outdoors much. It’s not like that on Mars, they said.”

“Who do they think they’re fooling?”

“We can see the video you sent back as well as they can.”

“Hell, every other article you read is about the Mars underground, and how they’re communists or nudists or Rosicrucians—”

“Utopias or caravans or cave-dwelling primitives—”

“Amazons or lamas or cowboys—”

“What it is, is everyone’s projecting their fantasies out here because it’s so bad back there, do you understand?”

“Maybe there’s a single coordinated counterworld—”

“That’s another big fantasy, the totalizing fantasy—”

“The true masters of the planet, why not? Hidden away, maybe led by your friend Hiroko, maybe in contact with your friend Arkady, maybe not. Who knows? No one knows for sure, not on Earth they don’t.”

“It’s all stories. It’s the best story going right now, and millions of people on Earth are into it, they’re addicted to it. A lot of them want to come, but only a few of us get to. And a good percentage of those of us who got chosen went through the whole selection process lying through our teeth to get here.”

“Yes, yes,” Frank interjected gloomily. “We all did that.” It reminded him of Michel’s old joke; since they were all going to go crazy anyway . . .

“Well there you are! What did you expect?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head unhappily. “But it’s all fantasy, do you understand? The need to stay hidden would hamper any community in a crippling way. It’s all stories, when you get right down to it.”

“Then where are all the disappeared going?”

Frank shrugged uneasily, and they grinned.

An hour later he was still thinking about it. Everyone had moved out into an open-air amphitheater, built from fixed salt blocks in classical Greek style. The semicircle of rising white benches was filled with bodies topped by attentive faces, waiting for his speech, curious to see what one of the first hundred would say to them; he was a relic of the past, a character out of history, he had been on Mars ten years before some of the people in the audience were born, and his memories of Earth were of their grandparents’ time, on the other side of a vast and shadowy chasm of years.