Authors: Stephen Baxter
‘Then you are free.’
‘Do I need to go and unpack?’
‘If you wish. Your bags are being transferred to your rooms, in the Cao Xi Obelisk itself, in fact. I can take you there if—’
‘Believe me, I’m fine. We flew out on a hulk ship like a fancy hotel. Not exactly what I’m used to. They even served coffee on the shuttle. I guess I’ve had enough
pampering for now.’
He nodded. ‘Then would you like the guided tour?’
She patted his arm. ‘If I can’t get rid of you, I may as well make use of you.’
He laughed, and she decided, tentatively, that she liked him.
Jiang led her down an escalator into an underground level. From here, more walkways and cargo ramps descended even deeper into the Martian ground.
This seemed to be basically an industrial area; through glass walls she saw gleaming manufactories where robots and white-suited humans worked side by side to assemble impressive-looking
machinery. People walked everywhere, bright, busy, or they rode smart-looking robot carts, and the halls were noisy with their chatter. There were few residences on this level, no dormitories or
schools or hospitals, though she did spot a few shops and restaurants, and noodle bars where workers lined up patiently. She saw no obvious signs of security.
Jiang Youwei discreetly observed her. ‘You walk easily, though you are new to Mars.’
‘You say you know about me.’
He smiled. ‘I know you are a seasoned interplanetary traveller. That much is public knowledge. You have visited the moon, Mercury, and now Mars. I myself was born and raised on Mars, here
in this city in fact, though my parents were originally from New Beijing. I have never left this planet.’
‘Well, you learn to adapt to the gravity, wherever you go. On the moon, you don’t so much run as bounce kangaroo style.’
‘Children discover these things for themselves, as I did. The human frame instinctively reaches for a minimal-energy solution to each mode of ambulation, though these solutions are quite
different on each world.’
‘ “Minimal energy”, huh. I guess you really are a physicist.’
They paused by a window where robots and humans laboured to assemble a gadget, a long, heavy tube plastered with warning labels, like a finless missile.
‘An aquifer bomb,’ Jiang said. ‘Or at least the delivery system. The fissile material will be loaded into it away from the public areas.’
‘I should hope so. Part of your terraforming programme, right? The extraction of water from the aquifers.’
‘Indeed. No detonations are scheduled for the period of your stay. And in any event, none are allowed close enough to cause any risk to the monument.’
She peered in through the glass. ‘Golly gosh. All this heavy stuff right in the shop window – and right where dignitaries like me are going to come rolling in off the bus to see it!
What a coincidence.’
He laughed. ‘One must put on a show. In fact the city’s primary product is more abstract.’
‘You mean the software and AI technology you export to Earth . . .’
They walked on.
‘You must understand this is a deliberate strategy. It was once a truism that interplanetary trade would forever be impractical because of the cost of transport. Not so. Our miners in the
asteroid belt are already selling raw materials to UN nations on Earth, as well as to your colonies on the moon, as you know. But here at Obelisk we have created a hub of excellence in software and
AI development. Of course, the transport costs to ship such products off-planet are minimal, merely a question of data transfer.
‘This was planned. Despite the priorities of survival, resilience and protection, from the beginning the city was built on a top-quality information technology infrastructure. Excellence
in the education of the young was a priority; we have a system of rewarding achievement which – well . . .’ He smiled modestly. ‘You might call it social engineering, although I
understand that term has negative connotations in the West. I can only say that it benefited me hugely, and this community, which has grown rich in intellectual capital.’
She spotted a crocodile of schoolchildren, evidently visiting the area, walking in pairs hand in hand, boys and girls in bright green uniforms: green, of course, for visibility on Mars, with its
palette of rusty red and brown. They stared openly at Penny – there were few Western faces to be seen here – and she took care to smile back.
She said, ‘I’d be interested in a discussion on the nature of freedom here before I leave.’
‘I would enjoy that.’
2193
B
eth, Freddie and some of the other youngsters loaded backpacks and set off west to attempt a circumnavigation of the lake.
The rest pitched camp in their practised fashion, laying down hearths, digging out storm shelters and latrine trenches, erecting their tepees and houses. The trucks, released from the
ColU’s direct control for these simple tasks, got to work ploughing up yet another stretch of Arduan ground, digging out fields extensive enough to raise a quick crop.
The ColU itself, meanwhile, rolled down to the lake, where there were wide stem beds, and communities of builders with their usual nurseries, middens, dams, weirs and traps. It was almost like
the builder projects around the
jilla
lake, Yuri thought. But there was no evidence that these builders were making any effort to manage this lake as a whole. The ColU watched the builders
patiently, inspecting their structures, even communicating with them with its manipulator-arm hand-puppet builder talk.
When Beth and the rest returned from the lake, Mardina gave them a camp night off to recover, feed, wash. Then she called a council of war.
The core group were Mardina, Yuri, Delga, Liu Tao, Mattock. They gathered around a hearth, unlit but with its base slabs of basaltic rocks still hot enough to warm a pan of nettle tea. Other
adults gathered close by to listen, a dozen or so, dozing, doing chores, with kids running around at their feet. The rest stayed away, working, napping in the heat. The ColU rolled up too, silent,
massive, its hull and manipulator arms grimy from the soil it had been working.
At last Beth and Freddie showed up, all but naked save for strips of stem-bark cloth at breasts and groin, and well-worn bark sandals on their feet.
Beth gracefully helped herself to a mug of tea. She was twenty years old now, and as she moved Yuri noticed how the men in the group reacted to her slim grace. Her tattoos showed up on her dark,
sweat-streaked skin: on her face was etched a mask something like Delga’s but less severe, more stylised, and there was a kind of sunburst design on her back, a Proxima-like star poised over
an upturned human face. She had had almighty battles with her mother about getting these done; Mardina the ex-astronaut associated tattoos with gangs and drugs and criminality. But most of the
kids, especially those from the mothers’ group who had started the fashion, wore tattoos of one kind or another. It was about the only kind of art they could practise, and for sure the only
kind they could carry as the group continued its endless migration. Yuri had stayed out of the argument. Delga, poster model of the tattooed crowd, had just laughed.
‘So,’ Yuri said, prompting Beth. ‘You’re back earlier than you thought.’
‘Yeah.’ Beth sat on her haunches, sipped her tea, and glanced around the group, confident in herself. ‘You know we hoped to go all the way round the lake. We started on the
north side, and went west and skirted that shore, and came to the southern shore. Then we came to a river we couldn’t cross, a heavy flow that comes down from the higher ground to the
south.’
Freddie said, ‘The river water pushes right out into the lake. You could see the mix of colours, the mud it raised.’
‘OK,’ Mardina said. ‘And can you get any further south?’
Beth said, ‘You could follow the river valley. But it looks like it gets pretty narrow, and there’s a steep climb.’ She grinned at Yuri. ‘Dad, there’s a waterfall!
You should see it. And beyond that the ground just rises up, and there’s a sort of forest. Not like the trees at home.’ By which she meant the place she had been born, near the stately
forests of the far north. ‘These are short, lots of branches, rattled around by the wind. It’s hot and steamy. I can’t imagine us ever clearing it, and living there. But . .
.’
‘Yes?’
She grinned. ‘We saw more tyre tracks. Heading off south into that jungle.’
Mardina murmured, ‘There has to be some kind of base in there. A technologically advanced base, sitting at this pivotal point on the planet, while the rest of us scrabble in the
dirt.’ She glanced at the cloud-covered sky. ‘ISF. Presumably resupplied from orbit. Maybe even relieved by the return of the
Ad Astra
, or some other ship. Christ. I was right
all along. They never did leave.’
Delga said, ‘Well, we’re going in to see. Right?’
The ColU said, ‘If I may speak, Lieutenant Jones—’
Mardina said, ‘When have I ever been able to stop you?’
‘There is another reason to go into the Hub.’
Yuri said, ‘ “The Hub”, ColU?’
‘Forgive me. That is the local builders’ term for the substellar point. Probably a term used across the planet, in fact. “Hub” being my translation of a term that also
refers to the cylindrical core of their stem bodies.’
Delga snorted. ‘You’ve been talking to those spindly little jokers again. What a waste of time.’
‘I cannot agree,’ said the ColU precisely. ‘I learn a great deal whenever I meet a new community. Their language is very ancient, quite static; their culture is locally
variable, but there are many universals. Such as the concept of the Hub. This is my interpretation of a complex idea . . . To the builders, the substellar point is the centre of the world, a
pivotal place. Yet it is a lost place. It is their Garden, Lieutenant Jones. That is where they lived before they Fell, they believe. It is the centre of their consciousness. Much of this is a very
old apprehension. Memories deep and old, like relics of animal ancestries. You humans have the trees, from which your ancestors once descended. The builders have the Hub.
‘Yet there is a newer layer of meaning. These local builders seem to speak of recent events. They
did
return to the Hub, I mean in living memory – why, I am not certain, but
surely to perform some task. That is what builders do. They worked here. But now they are excluded.’
‘By the ISF team in there,’ Mardina said grimly.
‘Presumably.’
Liu Tao said, ‘What concerns me is how we’re going to live here.’ Since leaving the confluence Liu had taken a young wife, a daughter of Dorothy Wynn, who had given him a
child, a daughter called Thursday October – named that way for her Earth-calendar birthday. Yuri had seen how Liu’s priorities had changed dramatically once the kid had arrived.
‘Whatever we do about the ISF and the Hub, let’s get it done, so we can get out of here.’
‘I would agree,’ the ColU said. ‘The star winter won’t last for ever. I have in fact been making this point for some time.’
‘We know you have,’ said Yuri.
‘When normal temperatures return, this region will become uninhabitable—’
‘We know
.’ Mardina looked at Yuri, Delga – even Mattock the former Peacekeeper, who was scowling furiously at the idea of some kind of well-equipped ISF base on this
planet, from which he was obviously excluded too. ‘We’ll go back north,’ Mardina said. ‘But not before we go and see what’s in this jungle. We’ve come this far.
Anybody object violently to that?’ There was no reply. Mardina stood up. ‘OK. We’ll take the trucks, or at least one of them. Beth, Freddie, you scouted it out. Work out a route,
a way in. Yuri, you can work with the ColU on how to manage the trucks. We’ll take our time. Get ready properly.
Then we go in
,’ she said evenly.
‘What about weapons?’ Liu asked. He looked around the group. ‘I’m just asking.’
Delga laughed.
Mardina asked, ‘Is there any of that tea left?’
T
he party to travel was pretty much self-selecting.
Mardina and Mattock, stranded astronaut and Peacekeeper respectively, had the strongest personal reasons for going to seek out whatever the ISF had left behind in the Hub. Mattock even put on
the remains of his Peacekeeper uniform, though he was going to be way too hot in it. Delga and Liu were going in as representatives of their factions. As a captured Chinese, Liu had even less
motive than the rest to go near any semblance of UN authority. But he had a group behind him too, roughly those who had once endured the rule of Gustave Klein, and they had to be represented.
Yuri had to go, because Mardina was going in with Beth, who had scouted out the route. Where his family went, he must go too.
And, incredibly, they took a bunch of builders. The ColU somehow talked them into it. If the authoritarian-type humans in the Hub, a builder name for a builder location, had thrown these natives
out, maybe it was right to take them back in.
The other kids watched the adults getting ready to go. They seemed bemused by the whole thing, uncaring; to them the ISF was a fantasy of their parents’, as unreal as the ghost of Dexter
Cole.
The party walked in a convoy, the ColU and one of the dumb trucks at the centre, the humans walking alongside. They all wore packs, with some food, water, weapons, though most
of their stuff was on the back of the truck. Beth went ahead, running with a natural fluidity despite the heat. Tom Mattock trailed behind. He looked ridiculous in his Peacekeeper uniform, he was
hampered by his limp, and he was soon overheating.
And a little party of builders, Yuri counted nine, all adults, came spinning and skimming behind.
They skirted the southern shore of the lake and made it to the estuary where Beth and Freddie had had to give up their attempted circumnavigation of the lake. The river they’d found flowed
out of a belt of forest, dense and green, and Yuri thought he could feel the humid heat radiating from the forest even from this distance, a few kilometres away.