Time to work fast, as the night was getting on, and this would have to be done very surreptitiously. In short, just the kind of job the Coyote liked. So, as sneaky as his namesake, he climbed Table Mountain and reached a boulder high on the east face of the mesa. He had to drill a ringbolt in place (he had prepared Ellis and Hunt ahead of time) but that was only a matter of laser work, all the while trying to muffle the noise. But a big city provides a high level of background noise at all hours, and it went well. He attached one end of the replacement banner to the ring and started back down the trail, trailing the banner’s Ariadne thread, gossamer on the gentle night air circulation. Down to Thoth Boulevard, across it like any night-shift worker (a big city provided plenty of other night wanderers, as well), hurrying discreetly so that the exposure of the thread to passersby would be minimal. Then up another steep forgotten trail on the prow of Branch Mesa, until he was at an altitude level with the ringbolt on Table Mountain, some 250 meters above street level.
He drilled in another bolt. The commotion on Ellis was dying down. When the bolt was in far enough he pulled the Ariadne thread across the gulf of air, through the bolt over a kilometer away. Despite its gossamer fineness he had to pull the last part through hard, hand over hand, until the thicker line, like fishing line from his childhood but very much stronger, was all the way across. He tied a knot around the bolt, grinning as he pulled hard on the final loop. Later that morning, if Hastings did indeed emerge from the train station with his group of functionaries, Coyote would be able to activate the drop of the banner with a wave of a laser penlight, and it would drop and the visitors would be greeted by a banner hanging over Thoth Boulevard. The two young women had composed the message on the banner lost to their treachery on Ellis Butte, but Coyote had made a different banner for a backup. The young women’s had read: “THE TRUE TRANSITION HAS NOT YET BEGUN,” a telling reference no doubt to the United Nations Transitional Authority, very clever; but Coyote had revised the message somewhat, and his banner would read: “UNTA WE ARE GOING TO KICK YOUR ASS OFF MARS.”
He laughed at the thought. It would be in the air less than ten minutes, he figured, but photos would be taken. Some would laugh, others scowl. Maya would be irritated with him, he knew. But it was a war of nerves at this point, and UNTA needed to know that the majority of the population was against them; this in Coyote’s opinion was extremely important. Also important to have the laughter on your side. He would argue strategy with her if he had to.
We’ll laugh them right off the planet, he said to her in his mind, angrily, and laughed at the thought. Dawn was lightening the sky to the east. Later that day he would have to get out of town. But first a good breakfast, maybe even a champagne breakfast, down by the canal before the train came in. It wasn’t every day you got to announce a revolution.
Chapter 9
Michel in Provence
Many years later Michel made it to Mars anyway.
There was a European Union base on the Argyre Planitia, at the foot of the Charitum Montes, and Michel flew up in one of the fast Lorenz rockets, so it only took six weeks to get there. Once there he settled in for a year and a half residency, the time it took for the planets to realign properly for an inexpensive return. And though the Charitum Range was striking, like the baked ridges of the Atlas Mountains or the ranges in the Mojave, and the light very good (compared with night in Antarctica), he was never once outside, not really. Always indoors, even when out in a rover, or in the modified space suits, which were almost like divers’ wetsuits, with helmets and backpacks, altogether very light in the magical gravity. Nevertheless, shut in. Contained; a sealed vessel. And Michel, like most of the others there, felt it more and more acutely as time passed. All the people at the eight scientific stations exhibited symptoms of claustrophobia, except a small minority who developed agoraphobia. Michel collected data on all of them, and recorded in particular some spectacular breakdowns and a few emergency medevacs. No—there was no doubt—he had been right. Mars was not habitable over the long haul. Terra-forming, while theoretically possible, was thousands of years off. In the meantime it was a rock in space, in effect a giant asteroid. Like all the rest of his team, Michel was overjoyed when it was time to return to the warm blue world and the open air.
But had he really been right? Was Mars really any different than McMurdo, or even Las Vegas, a city located in an unlivable desert? Might not a permanent Mars colony have given humanity a kind of purpose, a symbolic existence to guide it through the splendors and miseries of this dark century, this dangerous millennium? Here back on Earth miracles were being performed, the sciences changing everything on a daily basis, and particularly the medical sciences, where the antivirals and the anticancer treatments and the cell-rejuvenation treatments were all together adding up to some larger balking of death, mind-boggling in its implications. Decades were being tacked on to people’s lives, to Michel’s own life, which went far past the normal span, which went on and on, like many others. If they were lucky enough to have access to the care—if they could afford it, in other words—they would live for many extra decades. Decades! And given the vertiginous logarithmic expansions of scientific knowledge, perhaps that meant they would have the time to make decades into centuries. No one could say.
And yet at the same time no one knew what to do with the added years. An incomprehensible gift. It baffled one’s sense of meaning, for the rest of the world’s troubles did not go away. On the contrary, the immediate practical problems of the increased longevity were vicious—more people, more hunger, more jealousy, more war, more unnecessary premature death. The ingenuity of death seemed to be matching the life sciences stroke for stroke, as in some titanic hand-to-hand combat, so that it sometimes seemed to Michel, as he averted his eyes from the headlines, that they added years to their lives only to have more people to kill or render miserable. Famines were killing off millions in the “underdeveloped” world, while at the same time, on the same planet, near-immortals were sporting in their Xanadus.
Perhaps an international village on Mars could have made it clearer to all that they were a single culture on a single world. The sufferings of any individual Martian settler would have been inconsequential in comparison to the benefits of this great lesson. The project would have justified it. They would have been like cathedral builders, doing hard, life-eating, useless work, in order to make something beautiful that said, We are all one. And some of them certainly would have loved that work, and the life it brought, because of that very statement. That goal—the sheer act of sacrifice for others, of work for the good of later generations. So that people on Earth could look up at night and say, That too is what we are—not just the horrific headlines, but a living world in the sky. A project in history.
So Michel was uneasy when the red star shone in the sky, and his life in the decades after his return from Mars was troubled at best. He moved around Provence restlessly, and even around the rest of France and the Francophone world. Trying to catch hold somewhere, but always slipping off, and returning to Provence. That was home. But still he was not comfortable, there or anywhere.