The Complete Mars Trilogy. Kim Stanley Robinson
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that.”
“I figured not. But your people are doing it without your knowledge. Your children, in fact. Working with the Coyote.”
Her eyes narrowed, and she threw a quick glance down at the tents below.
When she looked at John again he went on. “You grew them, right? Fertilized a bunch of your eggs, and grew them in vitro?”
After a pause she nodded.
“Hiroko!” Ann said. “You don’t have any idea how well that ectogene process works!”
“We tested it,” Hiroko said. “The kids have turned out all right.”
Now the whole group was silent, and watching Hiroko and John. He said, “Maybe so, but some of them don’t share your ideas. They’re doing things on their own, like kids will. They have eyeteeth made of stone, isn’t that right?”
Hiroko wrinkled her nose. “They’re crowns. A composite rather than true stone. A silly fashion.”
“And a kind of badge. And there are people out on the surface who have picked it up, people in contact with your kids, helping them with the sabotages. I almost got killed by some of them in Senzeni Na. My guide there had a stone eyetooth, although it took me a long time to remember where it was I had seen it. I assume it was an accident that we were down there at the time the truck fell. I hadn’t given them any warning I was going to visit, so I assume the whole thing was planned before I got there, and they didn’t know to stop it. Okakura probably went down the hole thinking he was going to get squished like a bug for the cause.”
After another pause Hiroko said, “Are you sure?”
“I’m pretty sure. It was confusing for a long time, because it’s not just them – there’s more than one thing going on. But when I remembered where I had seen that first stone tooth I looked into it, and I found out that a whole shipment of dental equipment from Earth arrived empty, back in 2044. A whole freighter ripped off. It made me think I was onto something. And then, the sabotages kept happening in places and at times when no one who was in the net could possibly have done it. Like that time I visited Mary at the Margaritifer aquifer, and the well housing was blown up. It was clear it hadn’t been done by anyone stationed there, it just wasn’t possible. But that’s a really isolated station, and there was no one else anywhere nearby at the time. So it had to be someone outside the net. And so I thought of you.”
He shrugged apologetically. “When you check it out, you find that about half the sabotages simply couldn’t have been done by anyone in the net. And in the other half, someone with a stone tooth was usually spotted in the area. It’s becoming a pretty widespread fashion now, but still. I figured it was you, and I had my AI do an analysis which showed that about three-quarters of the cases have happened in the lower southern hemisphere, that or else inside a three thousand kilometer circle with the chaotic terrain at the east end of Marineris as its center point. That’s a circle that holds a lot of settlements, but even allowing for that it seemed to me the chaos was a logical place for the saboteurs to hide. And we’ve all figured for years that that was where you folks went when you left Underhill.”
Hiroko’s face revealed nothing. Finally she said, “I will look into this.”
“Good.”
Sax said, “John, you said there was more than one thing going on?”
John nodded. “It hasn’t just been sabotage, you see. Someone’s been trying to kill me.”
Sax blinked, and the rest of them looked shocked. “At first I thought it was the saboteurs,” John said, “trying to stop my investigation. It made sense, and the first incident really was an act of sabotage, so it was easy to get confused. But now I’m pretty sure that that time was a mistake. The saboteurs aren’t interested in killing me – they could have done it and they didn’t. One night a group of them stopped me, including your son Kasei, Hiroko, and the Coyote, who I take it is the same as the stowaway that you were hiding on the Ares—”
This caused an uproar; it looked like a fair number of them had had suspicions about this stowaway, and Maya was on her feet pointing a dramatic finger at Hiroko, crying out. John shouted them all down, forged on: “Their visit – their visit! – that was the best proof of my theory about the sabotages, because I managed to get a few skin cells off one of them, and I was able to get his DNA read and compared with some other samples found at some of the sabotage sites, and this person had been there. So those were the saboteurs, but they weren’t trying to kill me, obviously. But one night at Hellas Low Point I was knocked down, and my walker cut open.”
He nodded at his friends’ exclamations. “That was the first intentional attack on me, and it came pretty soon after I went up to Pavonis, and talked to Phyllis and a bunch of transnational types about internationalizing the elevator and so on.”
Arkady was laughing at him, but John ignored him and forged on. “After that, I was harassed several times by UNOMA investigators that Helmut allowed to come up, and he did that under pressure from those same transnationals. And in fact I found out that most of those investigators had worked for Armscor or Subarashii on Earth, rather than for the FBI like they told me. Those are the transnationals most involved with the elevator project and the mining on the Great Escarpment, and now they’ve got their own security people established everywhere, and this roving team of so-called investigators. And then, just before the big storm ended, some of those investigators tried to get me accused of that murder that happened at Underhill. Yes they did! It didn’t work, and I can’t absolutely prove it was them, but I saw two of them working on the set-up. And I think they killed that man, too, just to get me in trouble. To get me out of their way.”
“You should tell Helmut,” Nadia said. “If we present a united front and insist that these people be sent back to Earth, I don’t think he could deny us.”
“I don’t know how much real power Helmut has anymore,” John said. “But it would be worth a try. I want these people kicked off the planet. And those two in particular I’ve got recorded by the Senzeni Na security system, both going into the med clinic and messing with the cleaning robots before I did. So the circumstantial evidence against them is about as strong as it could be.”
The others didn’t know quite what to make of this, but it turned out that several of them had also been harassed by other UNOMA teams – Arkady, Alex, Spencer, Vlad and Ursula, even Sax – and they quickly agreed that an attempt to get the investigators deported was a good idea. “Those two in particular ought to be deported at best,” Maya said hotly.
Sax simply tapped at his wristpad, and called Helmut up on the phone right then and there: he laid the situation out to Helmut, and the angry group pitched in from time to time. “We’ll take this to the Terran press if you don’t act on it,” Vlad declared.
Helmut frowned, and after a pause he said, “I’ll look into it. Those agents that you complain about in particular will be rotated back home, for sure.”
“Check their DNA again before you let them go,” John said. “The murderer of that man in Underhill is among them, I’m sure of it.”
“We will check,” Helmut said heavily.
Sax cut the connection, and John looked around at his friends again. “Okay,” he said. “But it’ll take more than a call to Helmut to make all the changes we need. The time has come to act together again, across a whole range of issues, if we want the treaty to survive. That as a minimum, you know. A start on the rest of it. We need to form a coherent political unit no matter what kind of disagreements we might have.”
“It won’t matter what we do,” Sax said mildly, but he was jumped on immediately, in an incomprehensible babble of competing protests.
“It does matter!” John cried. “We’ve got as much chance as anyone does of directing what happens here.”
Sax shook his head, but the others were listening to John, and most seemed to agree with him: Arkady, Ann, Maya, Vlad, each from their