Chalmers interviewed some the prisoners over their room videos, two or three at a time. “You see how easy it was to detain you,” he told them. “That’s the way it will be all over. The life support systems are so fragile that they’re impossible to defend. Even on Earth advanced military technology makes a police state much more possible to implement than ever before, but here it’s absurdly easy.”
“Well, you got us when it was easiest,” replied a man in his sixties. “Which was smart. Once we get free I’d like to see you catch us. At that point your life support system is as vulnerable to us as ours is to you, and yours is more visible.”
“You should know better than that! All life support here is hooked back ultimately to Earth. But they have a number of vast military powers at their disposal, and we don’t. You and all your friends are trying to live out a fantasy rebellion, some kind of sci-fi 1776, frontiersmen throwing off the yoke of tyranny, but it isn’t like that here! The analogies are all wrong, and deceptively wrong because they mask the reality, the true nature of our dependence and their might. They keep you from seeing that it’s a fantasy!”
“I’m sure there was many a good Tory neighbor arguing the same case in the colonies,” the man said with a grin. “Actually the analogy is in many ways a good one. We’re not just cogs in the machine here, we’re individual people, most of us ordinary, but there’s some real characters too, we’re going to see our Washingtons and Jeffersons and Paines, I guarantee you. Also the Andrew Jacksons and Forrest Mosebys, the brutal men who are good at getting what they want.”
“This is ridiculous!” Frank cried. “It’s a false analogy!”
“Well, it’s more metaphor than analogy anyway. There are differences, but we intend to respond to those creatively. We won’t be hefting muskets over rock walls to take potshots at you.”
“Hefting mining lasers over craters walls? You think that’s different?”
The man flicked at him, as if the camera in his room were a mosquito. “I suppose the real question is, will we have a Lincoln?”
“Lincoln is dead,” Frank snapped. “And historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can’t grasp the current situation.” He cut the connection.
Reason was useless. Also anger, also sarcasm, not to mention irony. He could only try to match them in fantasyland. So he stood up in meetings and did his very best, haranguing them about what Mars was, how it had come to be, what a fine future it could have as a collective society, specifically and organically Martian in its nature, “with the dross of all those Terran hatreds burnt away, all those dead habits that keep us from really living, from the creation that is the world’s only real beauty, damn it!”
Useless. He tried to arrange meetings with some of the disappeared, and once he talked with a group by phone, and asked them to pass the word along to Hiroko if possible, that he urgently needed to talk to her. But no one seemed to know where she was.
Then one day he got a message from her, in print faxed down from Phobos. He’d be better off talking to Arkady, it said. But Arkady had disappeared while down in Hellas, and was no longer taking calls. “It’s like playing fucking hide and seek,” Frank exclaimed bitterly to Maya one day. “Did you have that game in Russia? I remember playing with some older kids one time, it was around sunset and a storm over the water making it really dark, and there I was, wandering around empty streets knowing I’d never find any of them.”
“Forget the disappeared,” she advised. “Concentrate on who you can see. The disappeared will be monitoring you anyway. It doesn’t matter if you can’t see them or if they don’t reply.”
He shook his head.
Then there was a new wave of emigration. He shouted for Slusinski and ordered him to get an explanation from Washington.
“Apparently, sir, the elevator consortium has been bought in a hostile takeover by Subarashii, so its assets are in Trinidad Tobago and it is no longer interested in responding to American concerns about the matter. Infrastructure construction capability is now in line with a moderate emigration rate, they say.”
“Damn them!” Frank said. “They don’t know what they’re doing with this!”
He walked in a circle, grinding his teeth. The words spilled quietly out of him, in a monologue of their own making; “You see but you don’t understand. It’s like John used to say, there’s parts of Martian reality that don’t make it across the vacuum, not just the feel of the gravity, but the feel of getting up in a dorm and going down to the baths, and then across the alley to a dining hall. And so you’re getting it all wrong, you arrogant, ignorant, stupid sons of bitches… “
He and Maya took the train from Burroughs back up to Pavonis Mons. All during the trip he sat by the window and watched the red landscape rise and fall, contract in to the flatland five kilometers and then, as they rose, extend out to forty kilometers, or a hundred. Such a big bulge in the planet, Tharsis. Something inside, breaking out. As in the current situation. Yes, they were stuck on the side of the Tharsis bulge of Martian history, with the big volcanoes about to pop.
And then there one was, Pavonis Mons, an enormous dream mountain, as if the world were a print by Hokusai. Frank found it difficult to talk. He avoided looking at the TV at the front of the car; news flashed up and down the train almost instantly anyway, in snatches of overheard conversation or the looks on people’s faces. It was never necessary to watch the video to find out the really important news. The train ran through a forest of Acheron pines, tiny things with bark like black iron, and cylindrical bushes of needles; but the needles were all yellow and drooping. He had heard about this, there was some kind of problem with the soil, too much salt or too little nitrogen, they weren’t sure. Helmeted figures stood around one on a ladder, plucking specimens of the sick needles. “That’s me,” Frank said to Maya under his breath, as she was asleep. “Playing with needles when the roots are sick.”
In the Sheffield offices he started meeting with the new elevator administrators, at the same time beginning another round of simultaneous meetings with Washington. It turned out Phyllis was still in control of the elevator, having aided Subarishii in the hostile takeover.
Then they heard that Arkady was in Nicosia, just down the slope from Pavonis, and that he and his followers had declared Nicosia a free city like New Houston. Nicosia had become a big jump-off point for the disappeared; you could slip into Nicosia and never be heard of again, it had happened hundreds of times, so many that it was clear there was some system there, of contact and transmission, an underground railroad kind of thing that no undercover agent had yet been able to penetrate, or at least to return from. “Let’s go down there and talk to him,” Frank said to Maya when he heard. “I really want to confront him in person.”
“It won’t do any good,” Maya said darkly. But Nadia was supposed to be there as well, as so she came along.
All down the slope of Tharsis they rode in silence, watching the frosted rock fly by. At Nicosia the station opened for their train as if there was not even a question of refusing them. But Arkady and Nadia were not in the small crowd that greeted them; instead it was Alexander Zhalin, and Raul. Back at the city manager’s offices, they called up Arkady on a vidlink; judging by the sunlight behind him, he was already many kilometers to the east. And Nadia, they said, had never been in Nicosia at all.
Arkady looked the same as ever, expansive and relaxed. “This is madness,” Frank said to him, furious that he had not gotten him in person. “You can’t hope to succeed.”
“But we can,” Arkady said. “We do.” His luxuriant red-and-white beard was an obvious revolutionary badge, as if he were the young Fidel about to enter Havana. “Of course it would be easier with your help, Frank. Think about it!”