Climbing Olympus. Kevin J. Anderson
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bases had expanded their complement of inhabitants.
He nodded to Rubens. “No matter. I’ll have plenty of time to talk to the commissioner once we get down. We’ve got a lot of transition details to work out, but you’ll be sitting on Phobos for two weeks refueling.”
“Yeah. Get some rest. Lander’s leaving early tomorrow morning.”
As a special treat, Captain Rubens allowed his dozen passengers to transmit brief messages back home. Keefer addressed a videoletter to Allan, admonishing him to work hard in school, making chitchat about how much he was looking forward to feeling real gravity again, not just the artificial tug from a spinning ship. He edited his message several times, vaguely dissatisfied that he could think of nothing important to say that he hadn’t already said. As Terrence Chetwynd took his place at the communications station, Keefer pulled himself back to the lounge compartment.
Looking out the porthole, he could see the dark terminator sweeping around the planet, folding the long breach of Vallis Marineris into darkness. He recognized the giant swelling of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the entire solar system, rising to the upper fringes of the atmosphere.
Keefer picked out three smaller volcanoes clustered at the equator: Arsia Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Ascraeus Mons, each about seventeen kilometers higher than the surrounding plains, thrust out in a great swelling called the Tharsis Bulge. Lowell Base was centered between Pavonis Mons and the tangled badlands of Noctis Labyrinthus. The other UNSA bases were located at the eastern end of Valles Marineris, at the northern and southern poles, and in the lower part of the Hellas basin.
As the orbiter’s local night approached, the twelve new arrivals went to get some rest for the last night in their cramped ship quarters. Unable to sleep, Keefer doublechecked all the preparations himself, then stewed with anxiety for another half a day. Tomorrow morning they would touch down on Mars.
In his mind he pictured the Mars he had read about as a child, the visions that had haunted his dreams after reading Ray Bradbury and Edgar Rice Burroughs. A shiver of anticipation fluttered down his back. The UNSA terraforming work was changing the real Mars into the Mars of fiction. And he was a part of it.
AN INHUMAN HAND ADDED finishing touches to the human face.
The sculpted visage stood two meters high, with pointed nose, Cossack beard, thick eyebrows, and a superior grin that scorned fear. Lighter rocks set into molded sockets gave the eyes a blank stare, looking down the slopes of Pavonis Mons. The black pupils would be painted on later.
The adin Boris Tiban squatted on the rough volcanic ground, ignoring discomfort as he watched his companion Stroganov work. The cold poked fingers through small rips in his worn jumpsuit, but could not penetrate his polymer-insulated skin.
His adin eyes were set deeply under a continuous frilled hood to shield them from the cold and the blowing dust. A transparent plastic membrane covered the eyeballs to prevent them from freezing solid. An additional membrane draped over the broad nostrils to help retain exhaled moisture. A set of auxiliary lungs mounted beneath the shoulder blades and surrounded by artificial diaphragm musculature made the adins look like grotesque hunchbacks. Their skin had a milky cast, nearly dead of feeling due to the long-chain polymers grafted onto the hide, like an insulating suit.
The sculptor cupped a lump of hot mud in one tough palm as he took a final glance at his creation. Touch-up dabs of mud on the towering bust froze into cement within a few moments in the harshness of the Martian high altitudes. Stroganov had to pry the ice-covered scraps from his numb fingers, plopping them back into the steaming bucket at his side.
“Another one finished,” Stroganov said, his voice reedy in the thin air. “I apologize for the delay. You can call the others now, Boris. Not that they haven’t been watching from the caves. …”
Behind Stroganov, like guardians around the volcanic caves where the five surviving adins lived, stood glowering busts of other Russian rebels—Stepan Razin, Ivan Bolotnikov, Kondrati Bulavin, even Vladimir Ilitch Lenin himself.
Grumbling, Boris had argued against that sculpture of Lenin, since the man had fallen into disfavor with the backlash against communism and the resurgence of nationalism. But Stroganov argued quietly and patiently—in his teacher’s way that always drove Boris to frustration—that Vladimir Ilitch, too, was a rebel in his time, and that Lenin had also been exiled to Siberia, though his sentence was vastly more pleasant than what the adin volunteers had experienced in the labor camps.
In the gathering twilight Boris used his titanium staff to haul himself to his feet beside Stroganov’s sculptures, digging its hard point into the dirt and making a satisfying scar. Boris had torn the rod from UNSA’s transmitting dish ten years before, when he and the other adins revolted against Earth, took whatever equipment they could salvage, and hiked to higher elevations where they could live comfortably and breathe the thin air for which they had been created.
Even here on the highest slopes of the enormous volcano Pavonis Mons, the air tasted thick and spoiled, a flavor of too much oxygen, ripe with airborne algae, tainted with toxic pollutants from dva mining and excavation settlements that sprang up like mushrooms in the lowlands. The air grew worse each year. Boris wanted to mutter a curse and spit—but he and all the adins had learned never to waste valuable moisture in pointless gestures or unheard words.
Brushing red dust from his arms, Boris turned toward the cave mouth to call the others. The shadows of Stroganov’s sculpted heads grew longer, like the distorted silhouettes of history. Stroganov stood proudly beside his new creation, anxious to tell another story.
Night fell rapidly on the Pavonis caldera. Stars blazed down, more brilliant than the darkest Siberian night. Knowing where to look, Boris could make out the two tiny moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos—Greek for “fear” and “dread.” The moons were tiny rocks, fossilized potatoes in orbit. Phobos scurried across the sky three times in a single sol, while Deimos hung in nearly the same spot, day after day. Fear and Dread. Boris wondered how two such small pebbles could inspire such terror.
Cora Marisovna, Boris’s almond-eyed lover, crouched in the darkness of the cave mouth, unwilling to come outside. Wiry and thin Nikolas, the youngest of their group, came out, hovering beside Nastasia, the adin woman he shared with Stroganov. Since Stroganov had been busy with his new project lately, Nikolas had taken extra turns with Nastasia, who never seemed to know where she was anyway.
She came out beside Nikolas, gasping in amazement at the new sculpture, and as she had done with each of the other faces before, pointed a blunt adin finger. “I knew him! I remember him!” Nikolas gave her a condescending smile. Boris kept his face expressionless.
There was no real love between Nastasia and Stroganov or Nikolas, because the person who lived within the mind of Nastasia changed from hour to hour. She was one of those who had suffered a defect in the adin augmentations; oxygen had been cut off to parts of her brain during the first few days, before she had somehow adapted and survived. All that remained of her personality were scattered fragments of memories, things she had imagined and things she had experienced, puzzle pieces that did not belong next to each other, but were forced by clumsy hands into a crude interlocking.
Nikolas helped Nastasia squat down beside him on the rocky soil. “Who is it this time, Boris?”
Boris shrugged. “Wait until Stroganov tells you. Somebody you’ve never heard of, no doubt.”
Nikolas nodded. Of all the adins, Nikolas looked up to Boris Tiban the most, and Boris considered it his duty to adopt a protégé. Back on Earth, Nikolas had been in the Siberian prison camp for a stupid reason—he had stolen construction equipment for the black market, but got caught when he tried to sell it back to its original owner. Boris had helped the young man survive the rigors of the camp, when he would surely have died in the first year otherwise.
“I give you another hero,”