Red Mars

link to you, and from now on they will exist for you, as an unexpected gift, say. As a quite extraordinary gift.” Her Mona Lisa smile appeared and disappeared.

The concept of the gift, again. John paused to think about it. “Well,” he finally said. “We’ll be talking about that for a long time, I suspect.”

Twilight had turned the atmosphere below them into a dark purple band, running like a velvet border around the black star-studded bowl which had appeared over their heads. In the tents below they were singing, led by the Sufis: “Harmakhis, Mangala, Nirgal, Auqakuh; Harmakhis, Mangala, Nirgal, Auqakuh,” and around again, time after time, adding grace notes that were other names for Mars, and encouraging the bands already there to add instrumental accompaniments of all kinds, until every tent was filled with this song, all of them singing together. The Sufis then began their whirling, and little knots of dancers swirled all through the crowds.

“Will you at least stay in contact with me now?” John said intently to Hiroko. “Will you give me that?”

“Yes.”

• • •

They returned to the upper tent, and the group went down together into the general party, and joined the celebration. John made his way slowly to the Sufis, and tried the spins he had learned from them on their mesa, and people cheered and caught him when he spun out of control into the spectators. After one fall he was helped to his feet by the thin-faced man with dreadlocks who had led the midnight visit to his rover. “Coyote!” John cried.

“It’s me,” the man said, and his voice caused a ripple of electricity down John’s spine. “But no reason for alarm.”

He offered John a flask; after a moment’s hesitation John took it and drank. Fortune favors the bold, he thought. Tequila, apparently. “You’re Coyote!” he shouted over the music of the magnesium-drum band.

The man grinned widely and nodded once, took the flask back and drank.

“Is Kasei with you?”

“No. He doesn’t like this meteor.” And then with a friendly slap to the arm the man moved off into the swirling crowd. He looked over his shoulder and shouted, “Have fun!”

John watched him disappear among the faces in the crowd, feeling the tequila burn in his stomach. The Sufis, Hiroko, now Coyote: the gathering was blessed. He saw Maya and hurried over to her and threw an arm over her shoulder, and they walked through the tents and the connecting tunnels, and people toasted them as they passed. The semi-rigid tent floors were gently bouncing up and down.

The countdown reached two minutes, and many people ascended to the upper tents, and then pressed against the clear walls of the south-facing arcs. The ice asteroid would probably burn up in a single orbit, its injection trajectory was so steep; an object a quarter the size of Phobos burned to steam and then, as it got hotter, to oxygen and hydrogen molecules. And all in a matter of minutes. No one could be sure what it would look like.

So they stood there, some of them still singing the chords of the name round. A final countdown was picked up by more and more of them, until they were all into the last ten, shouting out the reversed sequence of numbers at the top of their lungs, in the astronaut’s primal scream. They roared out “zero!” and for three breathless heartbeats nothing happened; then a white ball trailing a blazing fan of white fire came shooting up over the southwestern horizon, as big as the comet in the Bayeux Tapestry, and brighter than all the moons and mirrors and stars combined, Burning ice, bleeding across the sky, white on black, hurtling fast and low, so low that it was not much higher than they were on Olympus, so low that they could see white chunks bursting back through the tail and falling away like giant sparks. Then about halfway across the sky it broke into fragments, and the whole collection of incandescent blazes tumbled east, scattering like buckshot. All the stars suddenly shuddered— it was the first sonic boom, striking the tents and shaking them. A second boom followed, and the phosphor chunks bounced wildly for a moment as they tumbled down the sky and disappeared over the southeast horizon. Their firedrake tails followed them into Mars, and disappeared, and it was suddenly dark again, the ordinary night sky standing overhead as if nothing had happened. Except the stars were twinkling.

• • •

After all that anticipation, the passage had taken no more than three or four minutes. The celebrants had mostly gone silent at the sight, but many had cried out involuntarily at the sight of the breakup, as during a fireworks show; and again at the impact of the two sonic booms. Now, in the old dark, the silence was complete, and people stood in their tracks. What could you do after something like that?

But there was Hiroko, making her way down through the tents to the one where John and Maya and Nadia and Arkady were standing together. As she walked she chanted, in a tone that was quiet but carried throughout each tent she crossed: “Al-Qahira, Ares, Auqakuh, Bahram. Harmakhis, Hrad, Huo Hsing, Kasei. Ma’adim, Maja, Mamers, Mangala. Mawrth, Nirgal, Shalbatanu, Simud and Tiu.” She walked through the crowd right to John, and facing him she plucked up his right hand and pulled it aloft, and suddenly shouted, “John Boone! John Boone!”

And then everyone was cheering and yelling “Boone! Boone! Boone! Boone!” and others were shouting “Mars! Mars! Mars!”

John’s face blazed like the meteor had, and he felt stunned, as if a piece of it had pinged him on the head. His old friends were laughing at him, and Arkady yelled “Speech!” in what he imagined was an American accent: “Speech! Speech! Speeeeeeeeeech!”

Others picked this up, and after a time the noise died down, and they watched him expectantly, laughter rippling through them at the sight of his slack-faced astonishment. Hiroko released his hand, and he raised the other one helplessly, holding both overhead with palms outstretched.

“What can I say, friends?” he cried. “This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for.”

But his blood ran high with adrenaline, with tequila and omegendorph and happiness, and without willing it the words spilled out of him as they so often had before. “Look,” he said, “here we are on Mars!” (Laughter.) “That’s our gift and a great gift it is, the reason we have to keep giving all our lives to keep the cycle going, it’s like in eco-economics where what you take from the system has to be balanced by what you give in to it, balanced or exceeded to create that anti-entropic surge which characterizes all creative life and especially this step across to a new world, this place that is neither nature nor culture, transformation of a planet into a world and then a home. Now we all know that different people have different reasons for being here and just as important the people who sent us up had different reasons for sending us, and now we’re beginning to see the conflicts caused by those differences, there are storms brewing on the horizon, meteors of trouble flying in and some of them are going to strike dead on rather than skip overhead like that blaze of white ice just did!” (Cheers.) “It may get ugly, at times it almost certainly will get ugly, so we have to remember that just as these meteor strikes enrich the atmosphere, thicken it and add the elixir oxygen to the poison soup outside these tents, the human conflicts coming down may do the same, melting the permafrost at our social base, melting all those frozen institutions away and leaving us with the necessity of creation, the imperative to invent a new social order that is purely Martian, as Martian as Hiroko Ai, our own Persephone now come back up out of the regolith to announce the start of this new spring!” (Cheers.) “Now I know I used to say that we had to invent it all from scratch but in these last few years traveling around and meeting you all I’ve seen that I was wrong to say that, it’s not like we have nothing and are being forced to conjure forms godlike out of the vacuum— we have the genes you might say, the memes as Vlad says meaning our cultural genes, so that it’s in the nature of an act of genetic engineering what we do here, we have the DNA pieces of culture all made and broken and mixed by history, and we can choose and cut and clip together from what’s best in that gene pool, knit it all together the way the Swiss did their constitution, or the Sufis their worship, or the way the Acheron group made their latest fast lichen, a bit from here and there, whatever’s appropriate, keeping in mind the seven generations rule, thinking seven generations back and seven generations forward, and seven times seven if you ask me because now it’s our lives we’re talking about extending way off into the years, we don’t know how that will affect us yet, but it’s certainly true that altruism and self- interest have collapsed together more tightly than ever before. But also it’s still and always our children’s lives and our children’s children and on down forever that we have to think of, we must act in a way that gives them just as many chances as we have been given and hopefully more, channeling the sun’s energy in ever more ingenious ways to reverse the flow of entropy in this little pocket of the universal flow. And I know that’s an awfully general way of putting it when this treaty that orders our lives here is coming up for renewal so soon, but we have to keep that level in mind because what’s coming is not just a treaty but more a kind of constitutional congress, because