Climbing Olympus

A year later two transports released samples of airborne algae—voracious for carbon dioxide—into the Martian atmosphere. The algae included a dozen different varieties genetically engineered to thrive on Martian conditions. They soaked up the weak sunlight, gathered minerals from the ever-present fine dust that whipped through the air, settled on exposed surfaces, and released bound oxygen. All this laid the groundwork for a terrestrial ecology. Two years later another cargo ship dumped more algae into the air, new strains. Monitors showed measurable improvements in the air concentrations.

That was the year Keefer had been born.

Six years after that, new algae and free-plankton strains were deployed, tweaked to optimize their metabolism in the changing environmental conditions, while the first species grew obsolete in an atmosphere becoming too rich for them.

Nineteen years after the first cometary impact, a second iceball crashed into Mars. The long-period comet Harlow-Burris, previously undiscovered, roared down into the solar system in an orbit that would take it astonishingly close to Mars on its trip through the ecliptic plane. A frantic mission was set up to give Harlow-Burris a nudge and change its course just enough to smack it into Mars, dumping more water, adding more heat, freeing more of the locked moisture and oxygen buried beneath the sands and hydrated within the rocks.

During Earth’s worldwide recession, when Keefer himself began working as a student in planetary geology, most of the cost-intensive terraforming work ground to a halt, but the wheels of nature had already been set into motion. Algae strains continued to swarm over the planet, making the Martian atmosphere thicker in the lowlands, trapping more sunlight, reducing the rocks and the oxide soil.

When humans again set foot on Mars after an eighteen-year hiatus in manned missions, things had changed dramatically. Preparations for a permanent UNSA base were made. Living modules were sent by slow cargo ships, for automatic landing and robotic assembly. Supplies were delivered in cheap but slow trajectories, preparing for the day when people could establish a long-term presence.

As he continued his headlong drive for Mars Mars Mars, Keefer had tried to engender in his twenty-year-old son Allan an appreciation for the magnitude of the terraforming task. Keefer spent two months a year with Allan, who feigned interest whenever he talked to his father; Keefer felt sorry for Allan, because the boy had no burning goal. But Keefer vowed that when he finally set foot on the surface of Mars, waving his gloved hand at the cameras for newsnets back on Earth, Keefer would be waving at Allan and no one else.

The boy was entering college, where he would probably study space science because Keefer had opened all the right doors for him, planned out his courses, urged him to follow a good curriculum, pointed the way. Keefer had worked hard to ensure that his son’s future was established, since his own new job as commissioner of Lowell Base would keep him away for years. Keefer promised himself he would pay the price just to make sure Allan had a clear trail of footsteps to follow. …

Now, hand over hand, he pushed his way to the orbiter’s bridge. Captain Rubens sat back with all lights down except for the instrument panels, enjoying the best view available on the craft. The cherub-faced captain bore a wistful expression: he would not be going down to the surface with the rest of them.

Rubens swiveled around. He wore a bulky green sweatsuit and thick socks to insulate him from the ever-present chill on the spaceship. “Ah, Commissioner! I was going to go get you. I’ve contacted Lowell Base because I thought you might want to talk to Dr. Dycek, but she’s unavailable at the moment. Think that means she’s in the bathroom, or something?”

Keefer didn’t know yet how he was going to deal with Dycek. He had never met the woman, but her work had certainly raised enough eyebrows and thrown a monkey wrench into UNSA’s neatly planned terraforming schedule. Her surprise project had placed augmented human beings on Mars years before any other permanent presence. First the unruly adins, then the more cooperative dvas set up modular buildings and infrastructures that would have taken ordinary humans many years to complete. But though the 150 or so surviving dvas still provided a good pool of laborers, their special skills were no longer really needed, now that the five human bases had expanded their complement of inhabitants.

He nodded to Rubens. “No matter. I’ll have plenty of time to talk to the commissioner once we get down. We’ve got a lot of transition details to work out, but you’ll be sitting on Phobos for two weeks refueling.”

“Yeah. Get some rest. Lander’s leaving early tomorrow morning.”

As a special treat, Captain Rubens allowed his dozen passengers to transmit brief messages back home. Keefer addressed a videoletter to Allan, admonishing him to work hard in school, making chitchat about how much he was looking forward to feeling real gravity again, not just the artificial tug from a spinning ship. He edited his message several times, vaguely dissatisfied that he could think of nothing important to say that he hadn’t already said. As Terrence Chetwynd took his place at the communications station, Keefer pulled himself back to the lounge compartment.

Looking out the porthole, he could see the dark terminator sweeping around the planet, folding the long breach of Vallis Marineris into darkness. He recognized the giant swelling of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the entire solar system, rising to the upper fringes of the atmosphere.

Keefer picked out three smaller volcanoes clustered at the equator: Arsia Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Ascraeus Mons, each about seventeen kilometers higher than the surrounding plains, thrust out in a great swelling called the Tharsis Bulge. Lowell Base was centered between Pavonis Mons and the tangled badlands of Noctis Labyrinthus. The other UNSA bases were located at the eastern end of Valles Marineris, at the northern and southern poles, and in the lower part of the Hellas basin.

As the orbiter’s local night approached, the twelve new arrivals went to get some rest for the last night in their cramped ship quarters. Unable to sleep, Keefer doublechecked all the preparations himself, then stewed with anxiety for another half a day. Tomorrow morning they would touch down on Mars.

In his mind he pictured the Mars he had read about as a child, the visions that had haunted his dreams after reading Ray Bradbury and Edgar Rice Burroughs. A shiver of anticipation fluttered down his back. The UNSA terraforming work was changing the real Mars into the Mars of fiction. And he was a part of it.

BORIS TIBAN

AN INHUMAN HAND ADDED finishing touches to the human face.

The sculpted visage stood two meters high, with pointed nose, Cossack beard, thick eyebrows, and a superior grin that scorned fear. Lighter rocks set into molded sockets gave the eyes a blank stare, looking down the slopes of Pavonis Mons. The black pupils would be painted on later.

The adin Boris Tiban squatted on the rough volcanic ground, ignoring discomfort as he watched his companion Stroganov work. The cold poked fingers through small rips in his worn jumpsuit, but could not penetrate his polymer-insulated skin.

His adin eyes were set deeply under a continuous frilled hood to shield them from the cold and the blowing dust. A transparent plastic membrane covered the eyeballs to prevent them from freezing solid. An additional membrane draped over the broad nostrils to help retain exhaled moisture. A set of auxiliary lungs mounted beneath the shoulder blades and surrounded by artificial diaphragm musculature made the adins look like grotesque hunchbacks. Their skin had a milky cast, nearly dead of feeling due to the long-chain polymers grafted onto the hide, like an insulating suit.

The sculptor cupped a lump of hot mud in one tough palm as he took a final glance at his creation. Touch-up dabs of mud on the towering bust froze into cement within a few moments in the harshness of the Martian high altitudes. Stroganov had to pry the ice-covered scraps from his numb fingers, plopping them back into the steaming bucket at his side.

“Another one finished,” Stroganov said, his voice reedy in the thin air. “I apologize for the delay. You can call the others now, Boris. Not that they haven’t been watching from the caves. …”

Behind Stroganov, like guardians around the volcanic caves where the five surviving adins lived, stood glowering busts of other Russian rebels—Stepan Razin, Ivan Bolotnikov, Kondrati Bulavin, even Vladimir Ilitch Lenin himself.

Grumbling, Boris had argued against that sculpture of Lenin, since the man had fallen into disfavor with the backlash against communism and the resurgence of nationalism. But Stroganov argued quietly and patiently—in his teacher’s way that always drove Boris to frustration—that Vladimir Ilitch, too, was a rebel in his time, and that Lenin had also been exiled to Siberia, though his sentence was vastly more pleasant than what the adin volunteers had experienced in the labor camps.

In the gathering twilight Boris used his titanium staff to haul himself to his feet beside Stroganov’s sculptures, digging its hard point into the dirt and making a satisfying scar. Boris had torn the rod from UNSA’s transmitting dish ten years before, when he and the other adins revolted against Earth, took whatever equipment they could salvage, and hiked to higher elevations where they could live comfortably and breathe the thin air for which they had been created.

Even here on the highest slopes of the enormous volcano Pavonis Mons, the air tasted thick and spoiled, a flavor of too much oxygen, ripe with airborne algae, tainted with toxic pollutants from dva mining and excavation settlements that sprang up like mushrooms in the lowlands. The air grew worse each year. Boris wanted to mutter a curse and spit—but he and all the adins had learned never to waste valuable moisture in pointless gestures or unheard words.

Brushing red dust from his arms, Boris turned toward the cave mouth to call the others. The shadows of Stroganov’s sculpted heads grew longer, like the distorted silhouettes of history. Stroganov stood proudly beside his new creation, anxious to tell another story.

Night fell rapidly on the Pavonis caldera. Stars blazed down, more brilliant than the darkest Siberian night. Knowing where to look, Boris could make out the two tiny moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos—Greek for “fear” and “dread.” The moons were tiny rocks, fossilized potatoes in orbit. Phobos scurried across the sky three times in a single sol, while Deimos hung in nearly the same spot, day after day. Fear and Dread. Boris wondered how two such small pebbles could inspire such terror.

Cora Marisovna, Boris’s almond-eyed lover, crouched in the darkness of the cave mouth, unwilling to come outside. Wiry and thin Nikolas, the youngest of their group, came out, hovering beside Nastasia, the adin woman he shared with Stroganov. Since Stroganov had been busy with his new project lately, Nikolas had taken extra turns with Nastasia, who never seemed to know where she was anyway.

She came out beside Nikolas, gasping in amazement at the new sculpture, and as she had done with each of the other faces before, pointed a blunt adin finger. “I knew him! I remember him!” Nikolas gave her a condescending smile. Boris kept his face expressionless.

There was no real love between Nastasia and Stroganov or Nikolas, because the person who lived within the mind of Nastasia changed from hour to hour. She was one of those who had suffered a defect in the adin augmentations; oxygen had been cut off to parts of her brain during the first few days, before she had somehow adapted and survived. All that remained of her personality were scattered fragments of memories, things she had imagined and things she had experienced, puzzle pieces that did not belong next to each other, but were forced by clumsy hands into a crude interlocking.

Nikolas helped Nastasia squat down beside him on the rocky soil. “Who is it this time, Boris?”

Boris shrugged. “Wait until Stroganov tells you. Somebody you’ve never heard of, no doubt.”

Nikolas nodded. Of all the adins, Nikolas looked up to Boris Tiban the most, and Boris considered it his duty to adopt a protégé. Back on Earth, Nikolas had been in the Siberian prison camp for a stupid reason—he had stolen construction equipment for the black market, but got caught when he tried to sell it back to its original owner. Boris had helped the young man survive the rigors of the camp, when he would surely have died in the first year otherwise.

“I give you another hero,” Stroganov said proudly, “someone we must not forget from our history.” He stood beside the recently completed monument and raised his hands. The new sculpture looked darker and sharper than the others, unworn by abrasive dust. Next to the stylized human face, Stroganov’s adin modifications made him look even more of a monstrosity.

Stroganov bent forward, as if to make certain his audience remained attentive. Nastasia could not focus her mind clearly enough, but she made a great show of it. Nikolas raised his watery blue eyes, though, and Cora Marisovna listened from the shadows.

“I give you Emelian Ivanovich Pugachev.” Stroganov smiled.

At last, Boris thought, someone we have heard of.

The Sovereign Republics had seen many changes of boundaries and governments, but the people had a common history, common hostilities, occasionally even common cultures. They were tied together by strands much too strong to be severed by the winds of changing politics.

One of the strange consequences of the fall of the Soviet Union among ethnic Russians was that they looked at their Russian imperial history as a golden age, resurrecting tsarist heroes: Ivan the Terrible battling the boyars, Peter the Great and his eccentricities, Alexander I and his wars against Napoleon.

Boris Tiban was Azerbaijani, with a dash of Armenian and Georgian—but in his foster homes he had been forced to attend Russified schools that taught Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky. All schoolchildren had heard of the great Pugachev Revolt.

Stroganov began to tell his story: “During the time of Tsarina Catherine II, whom old historians called Catherine the Great, Emelian Ivanovich united the Cossacks in a rebellion that stretched from the Urals to the Pacific. Pugachev forged serfs and enslaved ethnic groups into such a powerful army that the tsarina had to conclude an unsatisfactory peace with the Turks so she could turn her military against him.

“Pugachev gathered fifteen thousand supporters, claiming to be the true tsar whose death Catherine had falsely staged thirty years before. But when Catherine sent her full army against him, even Emelian Ivanovich could not survive. The tsarina’s army captured him and brought him to Moscow in a cage. Pugachev was beheaded and quartered, and during the following months, peasants in the rebellious villages were hanged and tortured, their homes burned.”

Stroganov sighed. “Pugachev was a brave man, but he struck at the wrong time. I think he would have done well on Mars.”

“Yes,” Nastasia said, “I remember him! I do.” Nikolas shushed her.

Boris nodded grimly. “A good choice, Stroganov. Pugachev was one of Russia’s greatest heroes.”

Boris liked the great rebels. Even their missteps sent ripples through the tsarist governments and the mindset of the Russian people. Boris’s own adin rebellion on Mars had caused as great a stir—for a time—though now it seemed Earth had forgotten all about his grand gesture.

Caught up in bickering and their own internal ethnic problems, the Sovereign Republics had remained side players in the terraforming of Mars. But all along they had had a surprise up their sleeves that would let them steal the show from the UN Space Agency, and at a relatively low cost.

Thirty adins were shipped to Mars in a cargo transport officially described as “unmanned,” filled only with supplies for the eventual human colony. But when the ship landed and opened its doors to a worldwide audience, the transmission showed a human being—augmented, yes, but wearing no environment suit—setting foot on Mars. The adins were the showpieces of the Sovereign Republics, displaying an imagination, bravery, and efficiency that no one else in the world expected of them. The uproar could be heard practically across interplanetary space.

Cut off from their Earthly masters, the adins had not meekly tamed a world and bowed to every command transmitted to them, though a few of the adins behaved like cowering serfs instead of pioneers. Sixteen years ago Boris Tiban had led his own bloody rebellion, like Pugachev. He had freed the adins to make their own lives on their own world. Now, though, only five of them remained.

The Martian atmosphere grew thicker and warmer. Hundreds of the second-phase dvas swarmed over the surface, trained dogs of the UNSA project. And now unmodified, unwanted normals had established a clumsy foothold with their permanent bases.

The adins were obsolete, no longer needed.

As night fell and the air grew even colder in the star-streaked darkness, Boris squeezed his fist until the reddish rock crumbled into powder, like freeze-dried blood. Taking one last look at the towering statues Stroganov had constructed, he turned and walked without a word into the caves.

Cora backed out of his way. She did not say a word to him. He glared at her, at how her body had betrayed both of them, and felt the long, dull rage eating at his stomach. Without the furnace of anger he kept stoked within him, Boris felt nothing at all.

I am obsolete, but I am not a museum piece! he thought. Statues and trophies gathered dust. But Boris Tiban could still act against his oppressors.

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