Climbing Olympus. Kevin J. Anderson
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and I would like to speak with my counsel. If the Indian delegate has finished this line of questioning, may I request a short recess?”
In truth, she needed to go to the bathroom.
But while Rachel Dycek and her fellow team members went before the Geneva hearings day after day, delegates from the Sovereign Republics fought the real battle behind the closed doors of UNSA. They merely let Rachel give the world a show, like a dancing bear in a circus.
World interest in the Mars project had been flagging for years. The terraforming work had gone on longer than most people had been alive, and the average person could not comprehend the slow but steady progress of algae growth and increasing partial pressures of oxygen. The actual day when people could live on Mars was still dozens of years away. The world economy was suffering, and money spent on the project had become as easy a target as bloated defense spending had been in the late twentieth century. Stop the terraforming work, people said, and just imagine all the good things we could use those funds for!
But the unexpected appearance of Rachel Dycek’s adins had shocked the world and catapulted Mars into the headlines again. Thirty human test subjects had begun eking out a living on the surface of Mars, setting up terraforming industries, installing automatic factories that would have waited years for the next manned mission. They ingested the algae and lichens they found in the lowlands, they recovered water from underground ice. The adins transmitted progress reports that the whole world watched.
Because of Rachel’s adins, the Mars project again had a kind of immediacy, a newfound legitimacy that the other nations had not been able to achieve for it.
And so, in the end Rachel Dycek and her team were vindicated, granted a rather grudging apology. They were allowed to move onto the second phase, the dvas, with research conducted in the open this time, with less-coercive calls for volunteers, with proper controls and techniques exercised.
But a year later, before the first dvas were completed, Boris Petrovich Tiban’s rebellion of the adins on Mars had been a slap in the face, a demonstration of failure that set the newsnets hounding Rachel again. They accused her of insufficient psychological evaluations, poor choices from the camp volunteers. How could someone with a criminal record like Tiban’s—?
Six years after that, UNSA had sent her to the austere habitation modules on Mars, and representatives of her government made it clear that she should not refuse the offer. At Lowell Base she would take charge of the two hundred dvas already toiling on the planet’s surface, to keep an eye on them so that they did not revolt as the adins had done.
UNSA must have meant the assignment as a punishment, but Rachel thought of it as an escape, a way to come to another world she had helped shape. It was a place where she could be free from prying eyes, where she could emphasize her successes. She had spent the last ten years as commissioner of the base, performing to the best of her abilities.
But all the adins vanished years before she came to Mars. The dvas were no longer so important, especially after the disastrous avalanche in Noctis Labyrinthus had swallowed up their best and brightest. …
Rachel kept her eyes open, staring into the dimness of her cubicle in Lowell Base, looking at the curved walls of metal film. She felt confined, trapped, and unwilling to surrender. She closed her eyes, but there could be no hiding, not even the escape of sleep.
Jesús Keefer’s lander would arrive in the morning.
THE TITANIUM STAFF WAS sharp and strong. Unyielding and deadly—like Boris himself. The smooth metal was so cold it would have stripped the skin off a human hand, but the plastic adin skin kept him from feeling anything. Crouching, Boris ground its tip into the loose volcanic soil, as if stabbing Mars. He pried up a heavy rock and knocked it aside.
The powder of the fine rusty soil puffed like wind-scattered flour. The high-altitude breezes on the long, smooth slopes of Pavonis Mons picked up the red particles and whipped them around his feet. The storm season would soon be here.
Through with staring at the ground, Boris stood up, brushing off his ragged jumpsuit. “We must go,” he said to Nikolas.
Nikolas squatted near the rock. In his hand he held a scimitar that he had fashioned from a long strip of scrap metal taken from the original supply modules. He clanged its flat surface like a chime against the rough rock. Nikolas had honed and sharpened the edge repeatedly over the sixteen years of adin exile. For a moment it made Boris recall the anachronistic sickle and hammer of the old Soviet flag.
“Let us say goodbye to the women. Remember, we are doing this for Cora,” Boris said. “Stroganov is staying here in the caves. You and I will be the ones to strike.”
Nikolas nodded. “As it should be.”
Hooded eyebrows and the flattened noses and ears muted the expressions on scarred adin faces, but after so many years the adins had learned to read each other’s moods. When Nikolas grinned at Boris’s invitation, he looked cadaverous, like a laughing skull. In the low gravity he bounded past Stroganov’s frozen sculptures of Russian rebels to the mouth of the sheltering caverns. Boris followed him.
Inside the musty sheltered passages Nikolas lifted Nastasia from where she hunkered beside the volcanic steam vent. She dropped the wisps of wind-caught algae she had been boiling to remove the entrapped dust. “Let me kiss you, my passion!”
Nastasia shrieked in surprise, but then laughed as Nikolas wrapped his arms around her waist. “I shall return and make love to you all night long!” he said.
Boris turned his glance around in the dimness. Stroganov would be down by himself, deeper in the caves, exploring some of the labyrinthine lava tubes or polishing wall surfaces so that he could scratch his thoughts in stone. Stroganov was the only one who cared about making monuments and keeping a record of their toil. Boris intended to make his mark in a more immediate way.
Huddling away from the other adins, her only companions on an entire world, Cora Marisovna was by herself up at the caldera rim. Boris sighed and took long strides, squeezing his way through the winding upward passage until he saw Cora outside. He hesitated with a baffling rush of fear, just looking at her before she turned.
His woman, the adin he had claimed as his own. Boris had protected her during their first years on Mars; he had taken her away with him to a place where they could be comfortable and live out their remaining years as free people, not as serfs for the Earth governments. He did not know how to make her happy—and she did not know how to tell him, either.
Boris wanted to hold her tightly, crush her body against his, touching deadened skin to deadened skin. He needed to squeeze her so hard that it would hurt, inflicting his passion upon her in the only way their stolen nerves could feel. But the algae-tinted sky was like an open empty bowl above them, and the gentle winds around the caldera sighed with whispers of loneliness. He gathered his courage and shouted to her.
“Cora!” he called, trying to imagine the booming voice Pugachev might have used when rallying his rebels. “Wish me luck! Nikolas and I will take our revenge against the dvas for what has happened to you.”
But Cora shied away from him, as she had been doing for weeks. She mumbled to herself as she picked at the rocks strewn on the crumbly ground. “The dvas did nothing to me, Boris. Do not make another of your grand gestures in my name.”
He shrugged off her comment. Cora blamed him for her condition, but she refused to look at the entire picture. Everything on Mars was connected to everything else, and Boris Tiban and his surviving adins were at the bottom of the chain, as they always had been.
He tamped his staff down into the dirt impatiently. He breathed the air through his filtered nostrils, felt the bite of the cold on his sensitive inner mucous membranes. Cora was in one of those moods again, and Boris wondered how long it would last