LITMIR.BIZ

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Finally a tall young woman stood up and walked down the aisle, and gave Ann a hug. The spell was broken; words were abandoned; they got to their feet and clustered in the open space at the front of the train, around Ann, and hugged her, or shook her hand – or simply touched her, Ann Clayborne, the one who had taught them to love Mars for itself, who had led them in the struggle for its independence from Earth. And though her bloodshot eyes were still fixed, gazing through them at the rocky battered expanse of the Tyrrhena Massif, she was smiling. She hugged them back, she shook their hands, she reached up to touch their faces. It will be all right, she said. We will make Mars free. And they said yes, and congratulated each other. On to Sheffield, they said. Finish the job. Mars will show us how.

       Except she’s not dead, the young man objected. I saw her last month in Arcadia. She’ll show up again. She’ll show up somewhere.

      

      At a certain moment before dawn the sky always glowed the same bands of pink as in the beginning, pale and clear in the east, rich and starry in the west. Ann watched for this moment as her companions drove them west, toward a mass of black land rearing into the sky – the Tharsis bulge, punctuated by the broad cone of Pavonis Mons. As they rolled uphill from Noctis Labyrinthus they rose above most of the new atmosphere; the air pressure at the foot of Pavonis was only 180 millibars, and then as they drove up the eastern flank of the great shield volcano it dropped under 100 millibars, and continued to fall. Slowly they ascended above all visible foliage, crunching over dirty patches of wind-carved snow; then they ascended above even the snow, until there was nothing but rock, and the ceaseless thin cold winds of the Jetstream. The bare land looked just as it had in the prehuman years, as if they were driving back up into the past.

      It wasn’t so. But something fundamental in Ann Clayborne warmed at the sight of this ferric world, stone on rock in the perpetual wind, and as the Red cars rolled up the mountain all their occupants grew as rapt as Ann, the cabins falling silent as the sun cracked the distant horizon behind them.

      Then the slope they ascended grew less steep, in a perfect sine curve, until they were on the flat land of the round summit plateau. Here they saw tent towns ringing the edge of the giant caldera, clustered in particular around the foot of the space elevator, some thirty kilometres to the south of them.

      They stopped their cars. The silence in the cabins had shifted from reverent to grim. Ann stood at one upper cabin window, looking south toward Sheffield, that child of the space elevator: built because of the elevator, smashed flat when the elevator fell, built again with the elevator’s replacement. This was the city she had come to destroy, as thoroughly as Rome had Carthage; for she meant to bring down the replacement cable too, just as they had the first one in 2061. When they did that, much of Sheffield would again be flattened. What remained would be located uselessly on the peak of a high volcano, above most of the atmosphere; as time passed the surviving structures would be abandoned and dismantled for salvage, leaving only the tent foundations, and perhaps a weather station, and, eventually, the long sunny silence of a mountain summit. The salt was already in the ground.

      A cheerful Tharsis Red named Irishka joined them in a small rover, and led them through the maze of warehouses and small tents surrounding the intersection of the equatorial piste with the one circling the rim. As they followed her she described for them the local situation. Most of Sheffield and the rest of the Pavonis rim settlements were already in the hands of the Martian revolutionaries. But the space elevator and the neighbourhood surrounding its base complex were not, and there lay the difficulty. The revolutionary forces on Pavonis were mostly poorly equipped militias, and they did not necessarily share the same agenda. That they had succeeded as far as they had was due to many factors: surprise, the control of Martian space, several strategic victories, the support of the great majority of the Martian population, the unwillingness of the United Nations Transitional Authority to fire on civilians, even when they were making mass demonstrations in the streets. As a result the UNTA security forces had retreated from all over Mars to regroup in Sheffield, and now most of them were in elevator cars, going up to Clarke, the ballast asteroid and space station at the top of the elevator; the rest were jammed into the neighbourhood surrounding the elevator’s massive base complex, called the Socket. This district consisted of elevator support facilities, industrial warehouses, and the hostels, dormitories and restaurants needed to house and feed the port’s workforce. ‘Those are coming in useful now,’ Irishka said, ‘because even so they’re squeezed in like trash in a compactor, and if there hadn’t been food and shelter they would probably have tried a breakout. As it is things are still tense, but at least they can live.’

      It somewhat resembled the situation just resolved in Burroughs, Ann thought. Which had turned out fine. It only took someone willing to act and the thing would be done – UNTA evacuated to Earth, the cable brought down, Mars’s link to Earth truly broken.

      So Irishka led them through the jumble that was East Pavonis, and their little caravan came to the rim of the caldera, where they parked their rovers. To the south on the western edge of Sheffield they could just make out the elevator cable, a line that was barely visible, and then only for a few kilometres out of its twenty-four thousand. Nearly invisible, in fact, and yet its existence dominated every move they made, every discussion – every thought they had, almost, speared and strung out on that black thread connecting them to Earth.

      When they were settled in their camp Ann called her son Peter on the wrist. He was one of the leaders of the revolution on Tharsis, and had directed the campaign against UNTA that had left its forces contained in the Socket and its immediate neighbourhood. A qualified victory at best, but it made Peter one of the heroes of the previous month.

      Now he answered the call and his face appeared on her wrist. He looked quite like her, which she found disconcerting. He was absorbed, she saw, concentrating on something other than her call.

      ‘Any news?’ she asked.

      ‘No. We appear to be at something of an impasse. We’re allowing all of them caught outside free passage into the elevator district, so they’ve got control of the train station and the south rim airport, and the subway lines from those to the Socket.’

      ‘Did the planes that evacuated them from Burroughs come here?’

      ‘Yes. Apparently most of them are leaving for Earth. It’s very crowded in there.’

      ‘Are they going back to Earth, or into Mars orbit?’

      ‘Back to Earth. I don’t think they trust orbit any more.’

      He smiled at that. He had done a lot in space, aiding Sax’s efforts and so on. Her son the spaceman, the Green. For many years they had scarcely spoken to each other.

      Ann said, ‘So what are you going to do now?’

      ‘I don’t know. I don’t see that we can take the elevator, or the Socket either. It just wouldn’t work. Even if it did, they could always bring the elevator down.’

      ‘So?’

      ‘Well—’ He looked suddenly concerned. ‘I don’t think that would be a good thing. Do you?’

      ‘I think it should come down.’

      Now he looked annoyed. ‘Better stay out of the fall line then.’

      ‘I will.’

      ‘I don’t want anyone bringing it down without a full discussion,’ he told her sharply. ‘This is important. It should be a decision made by the whole Martian community. I think we need the elevator, myself.’

      ‘Except we have no way to take possession of it.’

      ‘That remains to be seen. Meanwhile, it’s not something for you to take into your own hands. I heard what happened in Burroughs, but it’s different here, you understand? We decide strategy together. It needs to be discussed.’

      ‘It’s a group that’s very good at that,’ Ann said bitterly. Everything was always thoroughly discussed and then always she lost. It was past time for that. Someone had to act. But again Peter looked as if he were

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