Molly herself was not immune to the feeling; as she looked around she felt crowded, constricted by the half-dozen people around her, just off the late shift at the Industrial Complex, or watching the sunrise from a bench along the wall of the dome, or still drunk from the night before and wandering aimlessly.Arctic syndrome, the psychologists called it: the sense of lost privacy that came from the knowledge that there was nowhere else to go, no chance to get away from the structures of the society, except in the confines of a rigid pressure suit.
Or, of course, in one of the isolation tanks.
They’d started building them two years after the break with Earth, heavy cellulose coffins made of processed leaves and stalks.The upper floor of the Center, with its Nautilus machines and ping pong tables and basketball hoops, had been walled off down the middle and. the tanks lined up and filled with ten-percent magnesium sulfide solution.
Molly had tried a few hours in the warm darkness, but she couldn’t deal with the disorientation afterward, the luminescent colors and undulating walls. She wanted a solid reality, unlike the others, like Curtis, who couldn’t get enough time in isolation, who claimed it purified and crystallized their thoughts.
As far as she could tell, it had only made Curtis stranger.
She stood up and shuffled toward the Center, ignoring the people she passed.The years had taught them a kind of Japanese politeness that retreated from physical existence, that tried not to intrude with meaningless conversation.
The concrete walls of the Center were a dirty reddish-gray, cast from Martian sand mixed with salty contaminants from the fields.A long time ago somebody had painted Tharsis Hilton across the front of the building. Molly went through the double doors just under the faded letters and pulled her mask down around her neck.
Astronomy was the first office on the left.The walls inside were covered with printouts, charts, and notes thumbtacked directly to the durofoam. Dirt and shreds of paper had been ground into the carpet beyond the saturation point.
Blok didn’t look up as she sat in the swivel chair next to his.“They came through the high gate about two minutes ago,” he said.“They’re headed right for us.”
His eyes were bloodshot over his heavy mustache and stubbled chin. Many of the Russians from Marsgrad had hair all the way down their backs, the men growing thick beards and the women experimenting with permanents and peroxide. But Blok had kept his hair short and his chin shaved, almost as if he expected the Party to check in with him any day.
Molly patched in a microphone, then hesitated. She had too many questions: what were they after, how had Morgan talked Reese into working for him, what condition were they in, how long were they planning to leach off the colony’s meager resources? Static popped on the line, making her jump. Say something, she thought.
She switched the mike on, gave them landing instructions, then pulled the plug.The rest could wait.
“Get sickbay mobilized, will you?” she asked Blok, rubbing her forehead, trying to plan the contingencies.“We’ll probably need some stretchers to bring them in, depending on how beat up they are.”
“This is the biggest thing that’s happened in eight or ten years,” Blok said, his hands stretched like talons.“Don’t you even care?”
“I care,” she said.“I care so much I hope they burn up on re-entry, even with Reese on board.We don’t need them, not any more. Haven’t you thought it through? They want something from us, and they’re coming here to get it.Whatever it is.” She was a poor liar, she knew, and she was afraid Blok would see through her, through to her knowledge of the machine in the cave, the thing the Earthmen wanted.“Can’t you see that? Do you think this is going to be some kind of high school reunion or something?”
“I just want things to be different,” Blok said.“I don’t even care how, anymore. I’m sick of that plastic sky overhead, of goat meat and goat milk and goat cheese, sick of wearing a mask every time I go out of my own house—”
“They’re not going to change any of that.What, do you think they’re going to take you back to Earth with them? Forget it.You know better than that. Earth’s gravity would kill you, cripple you at the very least.
You’ve been here too long.”
“You don’t have to remind me.”
“I’m sorry,” Molly said, and she was.“I know how you feel. It’s just... not the answer, that’s all. It’s going backward, looking for help from Earth.We have to find our own way, by ourselves.”
“Eight years ago, when I came in out of the desert, I might have believed that. I would have looked for a Martian flag to wave and I would have waved it. But I don’t believe it any more.”
How many others were like him, she wondered? Most of them seemed to feel the way she did: bitter, betrayed, abandoned. But was she just seeing what she wanted to see?
She stood up.“I have to go talk to the kids,” she said.
“The kids,” Blok said, nodding, knowing which kids she meant.And then, a little hesitantly, he added,“Good luck.”
She shrugged, taking extra care not to slam the door on her way out. Diplomacy was a survival trait here, and she refused to let him know how much his attitude hurt and angered her.As far as she knew he’d never had any children of his own; afraid, probably, they’d turn out like Molly’s daughter and so many of the others.
It was the risk you took when you got out from under the barriers of Earth’s atmosphere and left yourself open to the hard radiation of space: the cosmic primaries, the solar flare protons, the solar X-rays, doses of ten to thirty rads a year.The dome cut out the worst here on Mars, but during solar maximum or heavy flares they had nowhere to hide.
The adults paid for it with cancer and miscarriages, and the kids paid for it with birth defects and the rarest, strangest price of alclass="underline" genetic change.
Of the nearly fifty children born on Mars, the ones who made it all the way to term, most were perfectly normal. Of the fifteen or so who weren’t, the damage was usually insignificant or easily correctable—a vestigial sixth toe, cleft palate, malfunctioning kidney.
Usually.
What Blok would never understand was what it felt like to carry a child for nine months and feed her with your breasts and diaper her and love her and still not be able to look at her without a shadow of fear and sadness and even, on the worst days, just the slightest trace of hatred. It changed you. Even though you were one of the top fraction of a percentile that had been judged stable enough to be here in the first place, let alone one of the tough ones who had stayed behind when the failures shipped back to Earth.
And then sometimes it seemed like leaving had been the only sane decision, that the rest of them were all crazy, from the borderline paranoids like Curtis with his shaved head and power obsessions to the extreme psychotics who were sent out to work the fields with their pre-frontal lobes chemically numbed.
She stopped and put one hand on a crumbling wall of durofoam that had once twisted and curved in an ornate imitation of the onion domes of Moscow. These had been the last living modules to go up, back before the final ship to Earth and the casualties of the next two years, before Curtis put things back together.And after those years the survivors had lost their desire for durofoam crystals and Mayan pyramids and giant, abstract igloos.They’d pulled back to the center, to the comfortable cottages and geodesics that, whether they wanted to admit it or not, reminded them of Earth.
Somebody had thrown a rock through the onion dome, maybe one of the Russians, maybe one of the normal kids who roamed the fields in packs, chafing at the limits of their existence.The morning condensation that fell from the inside of the dome, the local equivalent of rain, had started to rot the foam and nobody had bothered to stop it.The decay had been gradual enough that she hadn’t really noticed it before, but she was still seeing things through the eyes of the Earthmen who would be coming in through the south locks.Through Reese’s eyes.