He came on a find of porphyry copper, unusually dense, and with high concentrations of silver in it as well. That would be welcome. Copper and silver were both only somewhat scarce metals on earth, but silver was used in massive quantities in a great number of industries, and they were running low on easy sources of it. And here was more of it, right on the surface, in good concentrations; not as much as in Silver Mountain on the Elysium massif, of course, but the Arabs would not care. Harvest it, and then they would get to move again.
He moved on himself. Days passed, the shadows wheeled. The wind went downslope, upslope, downslope, upslope. Clouds formed and storms broke, and sometimes the sky was spangled with icebows and sundogs and dust devils made of hail, sparkling like mica in the pink sunlight. Sometimes he would see one of the aerobraking continuous shuttles, like a blazing meteor running steadily across the sky. One clear morning he saw Elysium Montes, bulking over the horizon like a black Himalaya; the view was bending a thousand kilometers over the horizon, bent by an inversion layer in the atmosphere. He stopped turning on the lectern as he had the TV. Nothing but the world and him. Winds caught at the sand, and tossed clouds of it against the rover. Khala, the empty land.
But then dreams began to plague him, dreams that were memories, intense and full and accurate, as if he were reliving his past while he slept. One night he dreamed of the day he had found out for sure that he would lead the American half of the first Martian colony. He had driven from Washington out to the Shenandoah Valley, feeling very odd. He walked for a long time in the great Eastern hardwood forest. He came on the the limestone caves at Luray, now a tourist attraction, and on a whim he took the tour. Every stalagtite and stalagmite was lit by lurid colored lights. Some had had mallets attached to them, and an organist could play them like the plates of a glockenspiel; the well-tempered cavern! He had to walk out into the peripheral blackness and stuff his sleeve in his mouth so the other tourists wouldn’t hear him laugh.
Then he parked in a scenic overlook and walkd off into the forest, and sat down between the roots of a big tree. No one around, a warm fall night, the earth dark, and furry with trees. Cicadas cycling through their alien hum, crickets creaking their last mournful creaks, sensing the frost that would kill them. He felt so odd… could he really leave this world behind? Sitting there on the earth he had wished he could slide down a crack like a changeling and re-emerge something else, something better, something mighty, noble, long-lived-something like a tree. But nothing happened, of course; he lay on the ground, cut off from it already. A Martian already.
And he woke, and was disturbed all the rest of that day.
And then, even worse, he dreamed of John. He dreamed of the night he had sat in Washington and watched John on TV, stepping out onto Mars for the first time, closely followed by the other three. Frank left the official celebration at NASA and walked the streets, a hot D.C. night, summer of 2020. It had been part of his plan for John to make the first landing, he had given it to him as one sacrafices a queen in chess, because that first crew would be fried by the voyage’s radiation, and according to the regs grounded for good on their return. And then the field would be cleared for the next trip out, for the colonists who would stay for good. That was the real game; and that was the one Frank planned to lead.
Still, on that historic night he found himself in a foul mood. He went back to his apartment near Dupont Circle and then went out and lost his FBI tag and slipped into a dark bar and sat there watching the TV over the bartenders’ heads, drinking bourbon like his father, with martian light pouring out of the TV and reddening the whole dark room. And as he got drunk and listened to John’s inane talk his mood got worse and worse. It was hard to focus on his plan. He drank hard. The bar was noisy, the crowd inattentive; not that the landing hadn’t been noticed, but here it was just another entertainment, on a par with the Bullets game that one bartender kept cutting to. Then blip, back to the scene on Chryse Planitia. The man next to him swore at the switch. “Basketball’s gonna be a hell of a game on Mars,” Frank said in the Florida accent he had long ago eradicated.
“Have to move the hoop up, or they be breaking their heads.”
“Sure, but think of the jumps. Twenty foot dunks, easy.”
“Yeah even you white boys’ll jump high there, or so you say. But you better leave the basket alone, or you got the same trouble you got here.”
Frank laughed. But outside it was hot, a muggy DC summer night, and he walked home in a plummeting foul mood, blacker and blacker with every step; and coming upon one of Dupont’s beggars, he pulled out a ten-dollar bill and threw it at the man, and as the bum reached for it Frank shoved him away shouting “Fuck you! Get a job!” But then people came up out of the Metro and he hurried off, shocked and furious. Beggars slumped in the doorways. There were people on Mars and there were beggars in the streets of the nation’s capital, and all the lawyers walked by them every day, their freedom-and-justice talk no more than a cover for their greed. “We’re gonna do it different on Mars,” Frank said viciously, and all of a sudden he wanted to be there immediately, no careful years of waiting, of campaigning, “Get a fucking job!” he shouted at another homeless man. Then on to his apartment building, with its bored security team behind the foyer desk, people wasting their whole lives sitting there doing nothing. Upstairs his hands shook so hard that he couldn’t at first get his door open; and once inside he stood frozen, horrified at the sight of all the bland executive’s furniture, all of it a theater set, built to impress infrequent visitors, really just NASA and the FBI. None of it his. Nothing his. Nothing but a plan.
And then he woke up, alone, in a rover on the Great Escarpment.
Eventually he returned from this horrid expedition of dreams. Back in the caravan he found it hard to talk. He was invited to Zeyk’s for coffee, and he swallowed a tablet of an opiate complex to relax himself in the company of men. In Zeyk’s rover he sat in his spot, and waited for Zeyk to pass around little cups of clove-dosed coffee. Unsi Al-Khal sat on his left, speaking at length about the Islam vision of history, and how it had begun in the Jahili or pre-Islam period. Al-Khal had never been friendly, and when Frank tried to pass him the cup that came his way in a standard gesture of politeness, Al-Khal curtly insisted that the honor was Frank’s, that Al-Khal would not be prevailed upon to usurp it. Typical insult by over-politeness, the hierarchy again: one could not do favors for one higher in the system, favors only went downward. Alpha males, pecking orders; really they might as well have been back on the savannah (or in Washington), it was nothing more than primate dominance tactics again.
Frank ground his teeth, and when Al-Khal began pontificating again he said, “What about your women?”
They were taken aback, and Al-Khal shrugged. “In Islam men and women have different roles. Just as in the West. It is biological in origin.”
Frank shook his head and felt the sensuous buzz of the tabs, the black weight of the past. The pressure on a permanent aquifer of disgust at the bottom of his thinking increased, and something gave, and suddenly he didn’t care about anything and was sick of pretending he did. Sick of all pretense everywhere, the glutinous oil that allowed society to run on in its gnashing horrible way.
“Yes,” he said, “but it’s slavery, isn’t it?”