The mob was spurred on by Mars itself. Mars found its voice, and screamed its own pain.
The first great quake rumbled south of Ascraeus. Three stations tumbled to ruin, and one split asunder as a crevice formed between Pavonis and Ascraeus. The crevice — in later years to be called the New Tharsis Rift — grew in four weeks from a few meters to over a thousand kilometers. The echoes of this new stretching of the crust rebounded. Mars rang like a struck gong.
Within Preamble, the areologists — led by a frantic and inspired Faoud Abdi — tried to track the course of the new Martian tectonic order without satellites, relying entirely upon reports sent across the ex net. But the ex net itself was fragmented as links were broken, repaired, and broken again. Our nano resources were stretched past their limits.
From Kaibab, volunteer crews flew shuttles along Marineris, charting the changes, taking on fuel and supplies at those intact stations willing to cooperate, and proceeding across the Tharsis Bulge. Elevation changes of a few dozen meters were common. In some places, changes of a hundred meters were noted.
The Tharsis Bulge, some predicted, would subside within a hundred years — old years.
Mars orbited the New Sun with a period of three hundred and two days.
On the opposite side of Mars, narrow, linear ridges appeared, thousands of kilometers long, aligned in great arcs like waves frozen in stone. More stations found their tunnels in jeopardy and had to be evacuated.
Wachsler’s contingency plans were enacted, but often too late. For this of course I was blamed. To have pushed Mars into such an extremity, without adequate planning, seemed a horrible blunder; the word “crime” was not too strong.
On my orders, the remaining Olympians disassembled the tweakers and carried them away from Kaibab to secure storage elsewhere. Some of the shipments were seized by factions who laid claim to them. No single faction, thankfully, could do anything with what they had. No one understood. The Olympians fell silent, even under threat.
Some were imprisoned.
I spent much of my time flying from station to station, touring quake sites and trying to provide solace, meeting with the new unsympathetic committees. Each and every Martian had become a refugee, even if they still had their lifelong familiar four walls around them.
And Martians were afraid. In station after station, they asked when we would go Home — to the Solar System — and when I told them, probably never, many wept in anger and despair.
Some supported me, but not many.
Mars, on its surface and below, suffered madness.
When water poured from the northern scarps of Olympus and flooded Cyane Sulci, damaging the labs where my husband had worked to make the mother cysts bloom, I flew in the last Presidential shuttle, on my last official tour of a disaster area. Dandy accompanied me, and Stephen Leander. We traveled first to UMS, spending the night and refueling there; then we proceeded to the sulci.
Something had come awake within the huge volcano, liberating a vast subarean mineral aquifer. The water boiled from the northern rapes, some of it coursing into the sulci, flooding the hundreds of kilometers in between to a depth of several meters. The water, meeting age-old flopsand and sizzle, liberated huge quantities of bound carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Lakes of fizzing mud bubbled, churned, and then froze. We flew across this dark, thickly clouded terrain, observing new islands in the new mud oceans.
Only the southern lowlands and valleys of the Cyane Sulci had been flooded, of course. But the lab had been positioned in one such valley, and the containment domes had been destroyed, leaving four mother cysts open to the new skies of Mars.
My husband’s colleagues met us. Dr. Schovinski, Ilya’s assistant, extended cordial greetings in the makeshift airlock.
“It is proverbial,” Schovinski said, leading Dandy and Leander and me to a small room where tea and a crude lunch was being served. “We lose most of our buildings and tunnels, nearly all of the domes, and yet… The experiment is a success. What you have done is controversial, dear Madam President, but from this scientist, all I can say is… thank you!”
We ate quickly and Schovinski showed us through a shored-up and still-damp tunnel to the lab where fossil mother cysts had once been prepared for experiments in the domes. The cyst cradles here were empty. “We’ve moved them all outside,” Schovinski explained. “If only Ilya could have seen this!”
We put on pressure suits and walked into the open. Beneath the brighter skies, filled with high, swirling clouds of ice crystals, the floods had pushed the containment domes into mounds of glittering scrap. The carefully prepared soil beds had been scoured, leaving deep ruts and gullies, and in these gullies, beneath a thin layer of ice rime that gathered every evening and dissipated by noon , thick brown shoots rose two and three meters, forming fan-shaped leaves at their tips.
Schovinski urged me into a gully about a meter deep. He took my gloved hand and slapped it against the trunk of a shoot; rising from congealed and vitrified slime. The slime poured from a cracked mother cyst six meters away.
“First come the aqueduct bridges,” Schowinski said. “Then, we assume, follow other forms. First the young ecos manages its water supply, then it tries to complete its blooming.”
From one advanced shoot, five meters tall and two meters thick at the base, four fan-shaped leaves had sprouted, spread wide now in the bright light of the New Sun. A translucent green globe as big as a watermelon hid in the shadow of the largest leaf.
Even before Schovinski told me, I knew what this was. In time, the fruit would grow huge, and serve as one of many reservoirs for the aqueducts. It seemed an eternity ago that Charles had guided me into one such buried and fossilized globe.
I resolved he would see this someday, when he was ready.
We spent several hours in the open, and even experienced a light flurry of snow. The brown shoots gave me a sharp, high joy, and I enthused over them like a little girl, trying to live this for Ilya as well as myself.
When we returned to the surviving tunnels, we heard from concerned lab assistants that half a dozen shuttles had arrived from Amazonis. Dandy’s intuition kicked in and he quickly hurried me toward our own shuttle, but too late; we were met by a solid wall of well-armed citizens.
Schovinski’s indignation meant nothing to the vigilantes. The time had come. They arrested me and charged me with half a dozen crimes, highest among them treason. Dandy and Leander were bound hand and foot like lambs before slaughter; the grim-faced mob, all men, subjected me to the lesser indignity of having my hands sticky-roped.
It had happened to me before.
So died the Federal Republic of Mars.
I have drawn the limits of my story and will stay with them. All that I have written deals with moving Mars, the whys and hows, and my role in this event. What comes after I would just as soon forget.
Writing in prison is much overrated.
I do not ask for forgiveness, or even for fair judgment. In a way, I have received my reward. I do beg however that Charles Franklin be treated gently, as well as all of the Olympians held under arrest.
Because of them, Mars still exists and would-be-governments can still struggle and argue and accuse.
When all the judgments are made and my punishment settled, I will think of these things: a trunk, a leaf, a green and glittering globe. Children will be born who remember nothing of the Old Sun. The new bright-flowered skies will be home for them — for you, whom I hope and pray will read this story. I see you playing in the shadow of the bridges of Old Mars, your skin revealed to the air, a hundred, a thousand years from now. For you there will be no time, no distance, no limits; nothing but what you will.