Welcome Aboard Air Marineris

About two hours later, at the end of the afternoon, when we finished work, I asked Bee to eat dinner with me. Dini was still immersed in her heart surgery with Syd, and she was not available. She had her work. He probably assumed that I just wanted to talk more about the job in the brief time we had available.

I ordered Esther’s lentil soup to start, with fresh pita bread. The main course was fish, prepared with limes in the Peruvian manner, and peppered potatoes. He would remember the last time we had had that meal. It was in the middle of the spate of killings we had ended together.It was a substantial meal then, and it was that day, minus the sour note of the raw fear that had seasoned that previous meal. When it was stacked on the table with fizzy water and fresh cups of coffee, I started to explain the project that would be the making of Mars.

“Bee, we’ve accomplished a lot together. This new job is something else entirely. We will do something unprecedented in human history. Your lifeline has equipped you to play a vital part in all of this. I love you, brother. I want you to be here to do allthat with me. Yet, you know I am more than just a little afraid for you. You are going into some danger.”

“Don’t worry, Mo. We’ve talked about this already. Enough. It appears that’s what I do now. So strange that after a lifetime as a passive observer, I become a man of action. My Esther would hardly recognize me now. Taking risks I never would have taken then. And I’m happy to take them again to help the people I love.”

He talks that way. I felt my eyes soften. I went on.

“What we are going to do is creative and important. With an American, I can only compare it to a Mississippi River of Mars. Instead of water, we float our barges on air, just like we did for the mine. Our river will be no less a lifeline for us on Mars than the great rivers were on Earth. At the other end of the line will be Burroughs, but eventually we will have cities strung on that line like jewels on a necklace. Klara plans to make each one home to at least twenty thousand people. They will fill the sedimentary deposits at the base of the cliffs of the Valles Marineris. When that is done, we will thicken the air in the Valley so that eventually people will be able to go out and walk around with respirators only. The air will be so dense that it will protect us from most radiation the way the Earth’s atmosphere used to protect us when we lived on the surface. The Valles is big enough to be a world for us, Boris. That will take several hundred years to do, and it will take resources that we will need to stretch for, but it will come to pass. The people who come after us will do it, and we will make it possible with our work.

“I’ve been surveying parts of this world for the past four years, and I have been astounded by the resources it offers. Much more than they have on the Moon. It has concentration of minerals by geological action like on the Moon, and by hydrological action just like on Earth. The only thing that is yet missing is biological concentration by life forms. Maybe it has that too, but we haven’t found it yet. Despite that, it is rich beyond measure. And it is much easier and cheaper to extract minerals. We will be able to supply the whole system with manufactured products from here. So now we are making a start, and you will be taking the first step. I envy you your task, but I don’t have the time to go with you, brother. I do, however, need to tell you more about how we will do it so you can get a comprehensive understanding of our plans and get a sense of what we will need, now, and in the future.

“We are building this river to last. I am planning a line of four thousand kilometers with two tramways and two extra lines of pylons for a future passenger line. Each will require a tow rail from end to end. We have done all this already on a small scale. All we need to do is make it a whole lot bigger! The rail will be the I-beam form we have already used, and it will pull the trains with the same linear drive induction motors we have been using. The pylons will be set in the polyconcrete we have been using all along. We will need twenty cars at first, two eight-car trains with one extra reserve car per line and two free-flying rocket airships for emergencies. They will have extra powerful compressors to allow anemic rocket propulsion when needed. That’s the best we can do without dangerous explosive rockets. We will have sidings every five hundred kilometers and refuge shelters at the sidings if anything goes wrong. It shouldn’t. We have been running the airways at the mines for two years and we haven’t even had any alerts, never mind failures. Airships, especially pulled airships, are very stable. They can’t fall if the atmosphere doesn’t change its properties. That isn’t going to happen. There are periodic small changes in pressure, but nothing to worry about so far as lift is concerned. And the air is a little denser at the bottom of the valley, so we will get more lift than we would up top.

“When you go in system, I want you to order a bunch of stuff from the Moon. That will start things off nicely. As you suggested, it will prove to them that we really want to cooperate. We can build twenty airships in our workshop at the mine just as easy as we built eight. But I still want to use the avionics from Moon Electronics. I want to buy sensors from them and enough flyeyes to provide surveillance of the whole line. It will be in the hundreds of thousands. Not right away, of course. We will be working on this line for years.

We will also want prospector parts and tools for them. Moon Tools does them already, and we know their stuff. We need equipment for constructors to assemble the rails and place the pylons. And we will need another ring of cube sats to monitor from above. Moon Satellites does them very well. And they can loft them all to us cheaply by pod. We will build all the bulk stuff here, of course. We have the resources and transshipping. All that heavy stuff would be too expensive. The rails, the pylons and all that. We will need the factory manager for Mars Metals for our alloy operation. We also need the Manager of Moon Tools for our assembly factory. Fair trade, don’t you think?

“They can get personnel replacements from Earth easier than we can, and quicker. When you are doing all that, tell them that we are looking to partner with them on a continuous basis, that we want to form a relationship. Nothing further than commercial cooperation at this point though. Klara emphasizes that we don’t want to get Starward nervous. And you don’t want them to, either. You remember what their wrath feels like. We just want to be good, cooperative girls and boys at this stage, doing what they want us to do the best way we can. It will be a huge order and mean a lot to the Moon’s economy. It won’t even faze us because it’s Starward’s money, so easy to spend.

“Bee, in the future, when they get over their reflexive pique that we are ungrateful churls, they will realize this is all for the best, for all of us. That is often what happens when colonies separate. It happened with your country. With this Airway, Earth will have exhausted its expendable resources. We estimate they can’t give us much more. It’s up to us to produce the wealth to go further, and to help them by helping ourselves. It doesn’t take too much foresight to understand that the downpods that LEO sends back down to Earth with special drugs, foamed metals, and the like, are only the beginning.

“There is going to be a huge market on Earth when they recover, and we will want to be a part of it. We will need to find a way to sell to them, and to buy what they have to offer. We will need to build the skyhooks or whatever to enable that two-way trade. We all have folks on Earth. We don’t hate them. It’s better for them to have a strong partner rather than dependent colonies. It just doesn’t make sense for Earth to try to govern Mars, or any other colony, from millions of miles away. Better to make the break and reorganize.

“I am not trying to insult you when I say this. I know you, Bee. You like to talk and share. Especially to those dear to you. Don’t do it about this. You can’t help but cause a lot of trouble if you do. Now that we have something to keep secret, we need to remember that.”

“No need to remind me, Mo. I am doing it all the time. I sometimes tell myself that it’s because my tongue moves faster than my brain. But I know why. I was taught that way from an early age. Both my parents were unfiltered people and I have been trying to hold myself back in social confrontations all my adult life. I admit I will need to be careful with my family, but I will be afraid for them enough to make me shut up on dangerous subjects. I have done that before. I will do it again.”

I replied with a smile.

“Okay, mister secret agent, we are taking you at your word. It’s getting late. Get a good night’s sleep. Klara wants to see you first thing in the morning. I will be there too. We want to lay out the whole project for you. I will have numbers then. You will need complete information to negotiate intelligently, and you leave on Friday with the weekly ship. Fifty more coming in then. And more after them, regular as clockwork. Those fifteen hundred extra apartments we built will be filled up fast.

“And you will be referred to a lot in transmissions to the Directors of the Moon and Leo too. We want you to get the best head start we can give you. It will be a pip on your shoulder to be working for people as great as Klara and me. Get ready to be a great man in service to great fems.”

He smiled at that one. Bee was familiar with the struggles that prompted that. I thought I was entitled to it, but I was coming to think that maybe I mentioned it a bit too much. After all, Mars with its fem centred society, at seventy-one percent, was the most fem friendly society there ever was. All my previous life fighting for my place as a woman entitled me to remember it, but I had to keep it in proportion.

I might still have some problems with unreformed people from off planet, but I had never had an inkling of that on Mars. I think he was happy for me that I had attained what I wanted. He was losing his edge though, as he talked to me. He was getting tired even though it was only ten o’clock. He was four years older than when he came to Mars at seventy-three, and although good health allowed him to do what he needed to, it didn’t make him any less tired when he had done it. He obviously felt that way then. And he still had to climb the pegpost all the way up to the top floor where he lived alongside me. He was going to need my help to get home safely.

When we had reached his place, he moved one of his side chairs and sat in front of the window, contemplating the world he had come to love for almost an hour. He sat, waiting until his vision clouded and he became drowsy. I just sat with him waiting for him to flag, and when he was too tired to get up himself, but already half asleep, I pulled him up and guided him to his bed. When Dini was taken up with her busy life, and we ate together, I often took him home and put him to bed. I loved spending the quiet time with him, and he loved it too. I had never had such intimate leisure before. My mother never had time like that to spend with me, or even the desire to do so. There was no opportunity with Dini, nervous and always energized. With Bee, I spent a different kind of time than I had ever experienced. Life on Mars was, in many ways, a rebirth into a new, more tender life. I had never loved so many people. It was indeed a new world for me.

The next day was Bee’s last full day on Mars. He was to leave for the Moon on Friday.

Just before he closed his eyes, after I had moved him, he said “I don’t want to forget a single thing about you, and this place, and all its people.”

After I put him into bed, I stayed looking out his window alone for a few moments before I left to go to my own unit next door. Although at ten in the winter you could only see a dim red glow, I thought of the view we got out through our front windows as it showed the Valles from his heights. It was glorious beyond description. In the daytime, most days, you still couldn’t really see the other wall at all. The view faded so slowly through the fine dust in the thin air that it seemed to go on forever. At the edge of vision, it became a red tinged fog, obscuring the vista behind it.

Dini didn’t come home that night. The operation she was performing with Syd was much more complex than she had planned. They ran into problems and that took extra time, but the guy survived. She called me at three in the morning and told me so. We didn’t talk much about my project. She was pumped about saving her patient, and the development of a planet didn’t seem to have as much immediate significance. I just went back to sleep; She must have come in just before the morning, because I half woke to her snuggle. I love that now. I woke up earlier than her. I had to prepare for the last conference Bee would have with Klara and me.

The next morning, untrammeled by someone like Dini, Bee must have woken up earlier than me, because he was already gone when I knocked on his door. Before he had dozed off, I had arranged to meet him for breakfast. Dini was a lost cause since I didn’t even know when she had come in. So, I went down to meet him myself.

He was there already. He had delayed his day’s exercise in the gym to enjoy a leisurely breakfast before his conference with Klara and me. He apparently had expected that the meeting would be protracted, and that there would be a lot of facts and figures for him to absorb. He was sitting with his headsup studying I knew not what.

“I’ve got big plans for my final day. But first, we still have some things to cover. We’ve been through two instruction sessions on this. Truth to tell, I’m looking forward to hearing the rest from you two. You both know more than I do about the complications of this undertaking. I do have ideas of my own, but I don’t want them to conflict with your plans.

“Maybe you don’t know the emotional anguish of ordering people into battle. We are all fortunate that I’m one of the few people left who does. You were very clear about the dangers last night. There would be no need for Linh’s gadget if you didn’t see risks. I know well the queasy feeling you get when you realize that you could be sending someone to die. It’s a godlike feeling, and a god’s conscience can never be clear. You are trying to reassure yourself that if I am hurt or killed, it will not be because you did not take the utmost care. Forgive yourself, Mo. There’s only so much you can do. At some point you’ve got to let it happen. You can’t get used to it. I do find it comforting that you are taking as much care for me as you can. Maybe talking will help. But then, let it go. You’ve got too many other things to do, girl.”

He walked alongside me from the cafeteria to enter Klara’s office and to seat himself in front of a distracted Director. We had been seated there for many hours throughout our short life on Mars. Bee always seemed to choose the left chair unconsciously. The right chair was the pressure chair. Klara’s Monet was still displayed on the wall in its color saturated splendor.

We waited for her to raise her head. We had seated ourselves without a word. We weren’t sure she even knew we were there. After a short delay, Klara’s head rose to greet us. She surprised me. She began:

“Boris, I think Mo has given you a clear idea of what you need to do when you go insystem, but I think both she and I went a bit overboard on the danger thing. As I see it now, we aren’t doing anything at all that would rile Starward, if we don’t tell them about our long-term plans. And when we spend their money on the Moon, we are only taking it from one of their pockets to put into the other. They own it all anyway. We don’t dispute any of that. We are grateful for that. They own the companies that will supply us, the resources that will enable us, and they employ the people who will be working for us.

“They may think you are a little bit jumped up considering your lowly status, but what of it? Mo still insists on keeping Linh’s real time monitor on you. I agree with that, as a precaution, even though I don’t think we will need it. Nonetheless, be careful out there. And good luck. We will help you all we can. See you in a month. Remember you’ve got lots of work to do here when you get back. We need to build a planet.”

She just stood to shake Bee’s hand this time. No repetition of the kiss he got when he was saving lives. Still, nice. We were both used to Klara’s direct ways. He didn’t seem to mind. He got up to leave. Klara and I had a lot to talk about. He wasn’t needed for that.

As he turned to leave, I turned around in my chair to speak directly to him.

“Tomorrow’s your last day. Have breakfast with me. I’ll be at your door seven thirty.”

Klara looked up with raised eyebrows, obviously wondering about the meeting, but I turned and smiled apologetically at her, and she let it pass.

Bee left. Since the meeting hadn’t taken him very long, I expected that he would have the time to return to his office up top one last time. He would finish up anything he could do before his last day. Knowing him, I expected that he was finally starting to get excited about the epic trip he was about to make. Considering the cost of the journey, he knew it was one that few people were privileged to take. I knew he had been disappointed to miss that when he was shoved off the Moon, so, he was not about to miss Ruben this time. He probably didn’t think he would see it with his own eyes. To spend some time there was a pleasure he would prepare for. And I knew he would hasten to see Zainab for personal as well as professional reasons. Maybe I could help him get in to see her. It would be better to arrange a time with her auto assistant. I knew that much about her. She wasn’t a drop in person.