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 benchpresser 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 co-ordinated 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 ampitheater, built from fixed salt blocks in classical Greek style. The semi-circle 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.
The classical Greeks had certainly gotten the size and proportions right for a single orator; he hardly had to raise his voice, and they all heard him. He told them some of the usual things, his standard address, all chopped and censored, as it was sadly tattered by current events. It didn’t sound very coherent, even to him. “Look,” he said, desperately revising as he spoke, ad libbing, searching through the faces in the crowd, “when we came up here we came to a different place, to a new world, and that necessarily makes us different beings than we were before. None of the old directives from Earth matter. Inevitably we will make a new Martian society, just in the nature of things. It comes out of the decisions we make together, by our collective action. And they are decisions that we’re making in our time, in these years, right now at this very instant. But if you dodge off into the outback and join one of the hidden colonies, you isolate yourself! You remain whatever you were when you came, never metamorphosing into a Martian human. And you also deprive the rest of us of your expertise and your input. I know this personally, believe me.” Pain lanced through him, he was astonished to feel it: “As you know, some of the first hundred were the first to disappear, presumably under the leadership of Hiroko Ai. I still don’t understand why they did it, I really don’t. But how we have missed her genius for systems design in the years since, I can hardly tell you! Why, I think you can accurately say that part of our problems now result from her absence these many years.” He shook his head, tried to gather his thoughts. “The first time I saw this canyon we’re in, I was with her. It was one of the first explorations to this area, and I had Hiroko Ai at my side, and we looked down into this canyon, its floor bare and flat, and she said to me, It’s like the floor of a room.” He stared at the audience, trying to remember Hiroko’s face. Yes… no. Strange how one remembered faces until you tried to look at them in your mind, when they turned away from you. “I’ve missed her. I come here, and it’s impossible to believe it’s the same place, and so… it’s hard to believe I ever really knew her.” He paused, tried to focus on their faces. “Do you understand?”
“No!” someone bellowed.
A flicker of his old anger boiled through his confusion. “I’m saying we have to make a new Mars here! I’m saying we’re completely new beings, God dammit, that nothing is the same here! Nothing is the same!”
He had to give up, go sit down. Other speakers took over, and their droning voices floated over him as he sat, stunned, looking out the open end of the ampitheater into a park of wide-set sycamore trees. Slender white buildings beyond, trees growing on their roofs and balconies. A green and white vision.
He couldn’t tell them. No one could tell them. Only time, and Mars itself. And in the meantime they would act in obvious contradiction to their own best interests. It happened all the time, but how could it, how? Why were people so stupid?
He left the ampitheater, stalked through the park and the town. “How can people act against their own obvious material interests?” he demanded of Slusinski over his wristpad. “It’s crazy! Marxists were materialists, how did they explain it?”
“Ideology, sir.”
“But if the material world and our method of manipulating it determine everything else, how can ideology happen? Where did they say it comes from?”