Red Mars

Before dinner that evening John stood in his bathroom, and without looking at himself in the mirror took out two tabs of omegendorph and swallowed them. He was sick of Phyllis. But the drug made him feel better. Phyllis was just another part of the game, after all; and when he sat down to dinner he was in an expansive mood. Okay, he thought, they have their gold mine of a beanstalk. But it wasn’t clear that they would be able to keep it to themselves— highly unlikely in fact. So that their fat-cat complacency was a bit silly, as well as grating, and he laughed in the middle of one of their enthusiastic exchanges and said, “Don’t you think it unlikely that an elevator like this will stay private property?”

“We don’t intend for it to be private property,” Phyllis said with her brilliant smile.

“But you expect to be paid for its construction. And then you expect concessions to be granted. You expect to make a profit from the venture, isn’t that what venture capitalism is all about?”

“Well, of course,” Phyllis said, looking offended that he had spoken of such things so explicitly. “Everyone on Mars will profit from it, that’s its nature.”

“And you’ll skim a percentage of every percentage.” Predators at the top of the chain. Or else parasites, up and down the length of it. . ”How rich did the builders of the Golden Gate Bridge get, do you think? Were there great transnational dynasties formed from the profits of the Golden Gate Bridge? No. It was a public project, wasn’t it. The builders were public employees, making a standard wage for their work. What do you want to bet that the Mars treaty doesn’t stipulate a similar arrangement for infrastructural construction here? I’m pretty sure it does.”

“But the treaty is up for revision in nine years,” Phyllis pointed out, her eyes glittering.

John laughed. “So it is! But you wouldn’t believe the support I see around this planet for a revised treaty that sets even tighter limits on Terran investment and profit. You just haven’t been paying attention. The thing you have to remember is that this is an economic system being built from scratch, on principles that make sense in scientific terms. There’s only a limited carrying capacity here, and to create a sustainable society we’ve got to pay attention to that. You can’t just lift raw materials from here to Earth— the colonial era is over, you have to remember that.” He laughed again at the glinty stares being leveled on him; it was like gun sights had been implanted in their corneas.

And it only occurred to him later, back in his room and remembering those looks, that it probably had not been a very good idea to stick their noses in the situation so hard. The Amex man had even lifted his wrist to his mouth to take down a note, in a gesture obviously meant to be seen: This John Boone was bad news! he had whispered, eyes on John all the while; he had wanted John to see him. Well, another suspect then. But it took John a while to get to sleep that night.

• • •

He left Pavonis the next day, and headed east down Tharsis, intending to drive a full 7,000 kilometers to Hellas, to visit Maya. The journey was made strangely solitary by the great storm. He glimpsed the southern highlands in murky snatches only, through billowing sheets of sand, with the ever-shifting whistle of the wind as accompaniment. Maya was pleased he was coming to visit; he had never been to Hellas before, and a lot of people there were looking forward to meeting him. They had discovered a sizable aquifer to the north of Low Point, so their plan was to pump water from that aquifer to the surface, and create a lake in the low point, a lake with a frozen surface which would be continuously subliming into the atmosphere, but which they would keep supplied from below. Sustained in that way it would both enrich the atmosphere, and serve as a reservoir and heat sink for cultivation, in a ring of domed farms built around the lake shore. Maya was very excited at the plans.

John’s long journey toward her passed in a mesmerized state, as he watched crater after crater loom out of the clouds of dust. One evening he stopped at a Chinese settlement where they knew hardly a word of English, and lived in boxes like the trailer park; he and the settlers had to make use of an AI translation program which kept them both laughing for most of the evening. Two days later, he stopped for a day at a huge Japanese air- mining facility in a high pass between craters. Here everyone spoke excellent English, but they were frustrated because the air miners had been brought to a standstill by the storm. The technicians smiled painfully, and escorted him through a nightmare complex of filtering systems that they had set up to try to keep the pumps working— and all for naught.

East three days from the Japanese, he ran across a Sufi caravanserai, located on top of a circular steep- walled mesa. This particular mesa had once been a crater floor, but it had been so hardened by impact metamorphosis that it had resisted the erosion that had cut away the surrounding soft land in the eons that followed, and now it stood above the plain like a thick round pedestal, its furrowed sides a kilometer high. John drove up a switchbacking ramp road to the caravanserai on top.

Up there he found that the mesa was situated in a permanent standing wave in the dust storm, so that there was more sunlight leaking through the dark clouds here than anywhere else he had been, even on the rim of Pavonis. Visibility was almost as truncated as everywhere else, but everything was more brightly colored, the dawns purple and chocolate, the days a vivid cloudy rush of umbers and yellow, orange and rust, pierced by the occasional bronzed sunbeam.“Talib?” John said. “Tariqat?”

It was a great spot, and the Sufis proved to be more hospitable than any of the Arab groups he had met so far. They had come up in one of the latest Arab groups, they told him, as a concession to religious factions in the Arab world back home; and as Sufis were numerous among Islamic scientists, there had been very few objections to sending them as a coherent group of their own. One of them, a small black man named Dhu el-Nun, said to him, “It’s wonderful in this time of the seventy thousand veils that you, the great talib, have followed his tariqat here to visit us.”

“A talib is a seeker. And the seeker’s tariqat is his path, his special path you know, on the road to reality.”

“I see!” John said, still surprised at the friendliness of their greeting.

Dhu led him from the garage to a low black building which stood in the center of a ring of rovers, looking dense with concentrated energy; a squat round thing like a model of the mesa itself, its windows rough clear crystals. Dhu identified the black rock of the building as stishovite, a high-density silicate created by the meteor’s impact, when pressures of over a million kilograms per square centimeter had momentarily existed. The windows were made of lechatelierite, a kind of compressed glass also created by the impact.

Inside the building, a party of about twenty people greeted him, both men and women alike. The women were bare-headed and behaved just like the men, which again surprised John, and alerted him to the fact that things among the Sufis were different than they were among Arabs generally. He sat down and drank coffee with them, and started asking questions again. They were Qadarite Sufis, they told him, pantheists influenced by early Greek philosophy and modern existentialism, trying by modern science and the ru’ yat al- qalb, the vision of the heart, to become one with that ultimate reality which was God. “There are four mystical journeys,” Dhu said to him. “The first begins with gnosis and ends with fana, or passing away from all phenomenal things. The second begins when fana is succeeded by baqa, or abiding. At this point you journey in the real, by the real, to the real, and you yourself are a reality, a haqq. And after that you move on to the center of the spirit universe, and become one with all others who have done likewise.”

“I guess I haven’t begun the first journey yet,” John said. “I don’t know anything.”

They were pleased by this response, he could see. You can start, they told him, and poured him more coffee. You can always start. They were so encouraging and friendly compared to any of the Arabs John had met before that he opened up to them, and told them about his trip to Pavonis, and the plans for the great elevator cable. “No fancy in the world is all untrue,” Dhu said. And when John mentioned his last meeting with Arabs, on Vastitas Borealis, and how Frank had been accompanying them, Dhu said cryptically, “It’s the love of right lures men to wrong.”

One of the women laughed and said, “Chalmers is your nafs.”

“What’s that?” John asked.

They were all laughing. Dhu, shaking his head, said “He is not your nafs. One’s nafs is one’s evil self, which some used to believe lived in one’s chest.”

“Like an organ or something?”

“Like an actual creature. Mohammed ibn ‘Ulyan for instance reported that something like a young fox leaped