“I haven’t been able to talk to anyone associated with Red Oasis,” he told her in a voice low and resonant with age. “The support network may have disbanded.”
She sat down in the old, armless chair she kept by the door, and pulled off her boots. “Have the rights to Red Oasis gone on the market yet?”
“No.” Balancing with one hand against the door, he carefully stepped out of his clogs. “If they had, I would have bought them.”
“What about a private transfer?”
He offered a hand to help her up. “I’ve got people looking into it. We’ll find out soon.”
In stockinged feet, she padded across the hardwood floor and the handmade carpets of the living room, but at the door of the Mars room she hesitated, looking back at Nate. Homesteads were robotic vehicles, but they were designed with cabs that could be pressurized for human use, with a life-support system that could sustain two passengers for many days. “Is there any chance some of the colonists at Red Oasis are still alive?” Susannah asked.
Nate reached past her to open the door, a dark scowl on his worn face. “No detectable activity and radio silence for nine months? I don’t think so. There’s no one in that homestead, Susannah, and there’s no good reason for it to visit the obelisk, especially without any notice to us that it was coming. When my people find out who’s issuing the orders we’ll get it turned around, but in the meantime, do what you have to do to take care of our equipment.”
Nate had always taken an interest in the Martian Obelisk, but over the years, as so many of his other aspirations failed, the project had become more personal. He had begun to see it as his own monument and himself as an Ozymandias whose work was doomed to be forgotten, though it would not fall to the desert sands in this lifetime or any other.
“What can I do for you, Susannah?” he had asked, seventeen years ago.
A long-time admirer of her architectural work, he had come to her after the ruin of the Holliday Towers in Los Angeles—her signature project— two soaring glass spires, one eighty-four floors and the other 104, linked by graceful sky bridges. When the Hollywood Quake struck, the buildings had endured the shaking just as they’d been designed to do, keeping their residents safe, while much of the city around them crumbled. But massive fires followed the quake and the towers had not survived that.
“Tell me what you dream of, Susannah. What you would still be willing to work on.”
Nathaniel had been born into wealth, and through the first half of his life he’d grown the family fortune. Though he had never been among the wealthiest individuals of the world, he could still indulge extravagant fancies.
The request Susannah made of him had been, literally, outlandish.
“Buy me the rights to the Destiny Colony.”
“On Mars?” His tone suggested a suspicion that her request might be a joke.
“On Mars,” she assured him.
Destiny had been the last attempt at Mars colonization. The initial robotic mission had been launched and landed, but money ran out and colonists were never sent. The equipment sat on Mars, unused.
Susannah described her vision of the Martian Obelisk: a gleaming, glittering white spire, taking its color from the brilliant white of the fiber tiles she would use to construct it. It would rise from an empty swell of land, growing more slender as it reached into the sparse atmosphere, until it met an engineering limit prescribed by the strength of the fiber tiles, the gravity of the Red Planet, and by the fierce ghost-fingers of Mars’ storm winds. Calculations of the erosional force of the Martian wind led her to conclude that the obelisk would still be standing a hundred thousand years hence and likely far longer. It would outlast all buildings on Earth. It would outlast her bloodline, and all bloodlines. It would still be standing long after the last human had gone the way of the passenger pigeon, the right whale, the dire wolf. In time, the restless Earth would swallow up all evidence of human existence, but the Martian Obelisk would remain—a last monument marking the existence of humankind, excepting only a handful of tiny, robotic spacecraft faring, lost and unrecoverable, in the void between stars.
Nate had listened carefully to her explanation of the project, how it could be done, and the time that would be required. None of it fazed him and he’d agreed, without hesitation, to support her.
The rights to the colony’s equipment had been in the hands of a holding company that had acquired ownership in bankruptcy court. Nathaniel pointed out that no one was planning to go to Mars again, that no one any longer possessed the wealth or resources to try. Before long, he was able to purchase Destiny Colony for a tiny fraction of the original backers’ investment.
When Susannah received the command codes, Destiny’s homestead vehicle had not moved from the landing site, its payload had not been unpacked, and construction on its habitat had never begun. Her first directive to the AI in charge of the vehicle was to drive it three hundred kilometers to the site she’d chosen for the obelisk, at the high point of a rising swell of land.
Once there, she’d unloaded the fleet of robotic construction equipment: a mini-dozer, a mini-excavator, a six-limbed beetle cart to transport finished tiles, and a synth—short for synthetic human although the device was no such thing. It was just a stick figure with two legs, two arms, and hands capable of basic manipulation.
The equipment fleet also included a rolling factory that slowly but continuously produced a supply of fiber tiles, compiling them from raw soil and atmospheric elements. While the factory produced an initial supply of tiles, Susannah prepared the foundation of
