Welcome Aboard Air Marineris

When the exhilaration wore off, I became even more intimidated by the scale of what they wanted me to do. Some of it was easily within my capabilities, but there were functions I would need to perform that I knew were well beyond me.

The rail project was fine. I had handled big jobs before and, even though this one was much bigger than any I had done, I could manage it. It was the factory jobs that scared me. We would need to get someone who knew machine tools and manufacturing, and I could think of no-one on Mars who could do that. We had most of the scientists and engineers we needed to explore and develop the planet. We didn’t have the tech managers we would need for the machine tool and the rolling and stamping plants.

We would need to hire talent like that, and the obvious place for that was where the factories mostly were. On Earth. But that would take time we did not have. We would have some lead time to develop the resources they would need – expanded supplies of metal and alloys that would feed into the manufacturing. That reminded me of another kind of plant that would be necessary. Not the pip squeak one-off miniatures we had for prototype fabrication, but something of industrial scale. We would need a sophisticated alloy mixing plant with a big electric furnace to create the alloys. That would require another specialty, but we might have that on Mars already. We had several metallurgical engineers, and maybe one of them could manage a foundry.

I thought that Bee could help with the manufacturing plants we would need to manage. He had lived on the Moon at Newton, and he did know, at least slightly, the people who run Moon Metals and Moon Tools. They must have either mastered or coped with the skills we needed, and they would certainly be farther ahead than we would be. They would even be keyed into the marketing we would need to do after the initial supplies had been delivered. Starward should be happy enough to recommend him, respectable as he suddenly was. They could easily get more talent from Earth when they had Rubin to attract them. It might work. He could do some recruiting while visiting his friends on the Moon. He would love that. Not many people come back from the dead.

All this speculation made me feel much more hopeful, and I was so excited that I had an urgent need to share all this with Ondine, so I called her.

“Love, it’s me. I’ve just seen Klara, and I’ve been given the biggest job you can imagine, I’ve….”

Ondine cut me off. She hadn’t really heard what I said.

“Mo, I can’t talk right away. Syd and I are just going to do that heart insertion that I told you about. The clone is ready for harvest right now, and our patient is in prime condition. There will never be a better time to do it, so we can’t delay. I’d love to talk with you about it, but it will need to wait ’til tonight. Bye, Cherie.” And she rung off.

Ondine was very well chosen for me, maybe a bit too well chosen. To be honest, we are both intense, hard driving fems who are just a little too focused on our own careers to be able to share. I well understood that, even though it chafed sometimes. Most of us know ourselves a little better as we mature, even though we may not want to accept the same in others, and I knew there were numerous times when I had shut Ondine out in the same way.

It was not because Dini loved me less. When she was caught up in the excitement of her work, other things, even people, faded a bit. It was because we were alike that I knew that. That it was the cost of loving someone like her. I would not have wanted her any different. There is always competition. Even between the generations. I had experienced it with my mother.

When I was bettering myself with an education in Lima, mother, even in fierce pride, had derided me as a ‘schoolgirl’, or a ‘college girl’, and I could feel the resentment in the names, though I knew she bragged to others about me. Parents can feel shamed by the abilities of their children, and of their success using those abilities. They shouldn’t, and most of them know that. Their children ride on their contributions, and most parents are proud of the help they were able to give. But they wouldn’t be human if they were not, just a bit, envious of the people a rung or two farther up the ladder than they were ever able to reach. So, even though Dini and I were talking past one another, there was communication in that.

And I did also have Bee, my brother. He always seemed to have time to listen, and he was always happy to be involved. He wasn’t the only person close to me anymore, but he seemed genuinely happy at my good fortune in becoming one of a couple. I thought it was because of his own family, and the richness that his loves had lent to his life. He wanted it for me.

I had become closer to Bee in working with him for the previous two Martian years. I had come to trust him, believing he always meant to do right by me. He indulged me as if I were his blood sister, grown up in the bosom of family with him. Many times, he was my only resort, as I had been his during the murder investigation that had rescued the colony from chaos and despair. Our shared love of classic books, videopac, and music, with their wealth of back stories, stood in for a family history. That was something we found in Dini, too, who, not unexpectedly for a hand-picked person, loved old time culture as well.

So, I called him, my main and only man. I needed to talk out plans for the project with someone who could listen and help. I foned and invited him to meet me at a table near the window wall. One at the opposite end of the great gallery from the kitchen area that held the autochefs. I got there early to order the coffee and Danishes, the kind his wife had made, the kind he liked. We were going to have a long session. Then I called the office and told Lou that Boris and I would be out for the afternoon. He would watch over it all. It was Chantelle's day off. None of our robot miners would complain that the boss was out.

It was a quiet period in the Commons, so we could easily get the table I wanted. It was in the last rank of tables before the lounges, and the closest table to the Rose, a popular place to meet. It was called that because it was next to a defaced column left marked as a memorial to the woman who was stabbed by our first murderer on Mars, painted over by her partner. It was a rose and a brier enwrapped about one another, painted on the black background of one of the blast marks made on that ugly day when many died at the Commons Massacre. For a while, people got flowers from up top and laid them there, but eventually that tapered off. Still, most people thought it needed to stay there. No one would paint it over, so it endured, reminding everyone that many sacrifices were made to keep us where we are.

The huge space loomed around us. The displayscreen, on the outer wall, looked like a window on the scene it pictured, even if it was a little inaccurate. Our cliff wasn’t originally as sharp-edged as it looked in the view. That was for Earth eyes. The authentic valley looked like a slab of fudge cracked in half and put on a hot plate to melt. So, the view was displaced up about fifty meters. We had used earth movers to move much of the slump at the base of the cliff, but it kept pelting down in little puffy slides that would remake the slump in a few millennia. You can’t stop nature; you can only delay it.

It was a clear winter day, and the sun was winter height in the sky, casting long shadows in the early afternoon. You could see far out into the valley, the opposite cliff only discernible because it closed off the dusty red sky at that distance. It was one of the most magnificent views I had ever seen. I had long come to feel comfortable with the great expanse I saw, notwithstanding my initial unease at the overwhelming vastness of it. Then, I saw it as threatening, this world over the cliff of that mountain where we had first landed. Of the sights you could see in the modern world, there was none better. I had come to appreciate its grandeur and disregard its danger.

The Earth is still closed off by its poisoned atmosphere, its inhabitants largely consigned to an underground life. Even though there were signs of clearing there, it will still be decades, perhaps centuries, before an unsuited person can venture outside. The Moon is another thing entirely. Even though Rubin was coming to fruition, it was not the Outside. You were still confined, even if it was in a much larger space. Here, there was a whole planet of incomparable magnificence, and you could see it almost as if it were before your eyes. I felt lucky to be there sharing it with people I loved.

My engineer’s eye picked out the high-tensile tiebacks stabilizing the wall of the Commons, supporting ornaments to those huge screens. They held back the gargantuan pressures of our atmosphere pushing the wall towards the wispy vacuum outside. They knitted a lacy network. The artistic complexity somehow made that huge edifice appear almost delicate and insubstantial. The displayscreens radiated artificial warmth from a sun bloated to be familiar to us. A sun depicted as able to toast us at Mars’ distance. We sat in those beneficent rays, enjoying the warmth, relaxing with the coffee and pastries, just enjoying one another’s company. There was a subtle answering smile on Bee’s lips mirroring the one on mine. A time to savor.

Finally, I had to start into it.

“Bee, they’re going to approve my estimates, and that means we have much more work ahead of us than we’ve ever had before. It isn’t just the building of a mining industry. That was a big job. This is the development of a planet. We are going to need an industrial infrastructure in order to make our stuff. I didn’t have time to think about it before. There is no other place we can get it. It’s almost everything we need, and when we are finished, we are going to have an industrial powerhouse that will be positioned to supply the whole system, both farther out, when we get there, and insystem.

“I’m a bit scared of it, to tell the truth. I’ve done a lot, but nothing like this. Yet I was bred for it.My ancestors did this kind of thing all over Peru.I am from them. I can do the same.Bee, it almost feels sacred what we are going to do, like we are building dozens of Temples.

He smirked. Nothing sacred for him. Just try to fly, he will cut you down. He’s always watching for overreach. My fault. A little rich.

“Well, Mo, that’s thrilling. You know how spiritual I am, don’t you? Even if it doesn’t move me in the same way, I will try to fake it. I will follow you anyplace no matter what. You know that.”

Sometimes you just need to ignore his words. He does get the point.

“I am going to need to ask a lot of you. I love you so much I’m going to send you away.Now, it’s very important that you have history on the Moon. I want you to contact your people and ask for help and support both as associates and customers. We’re going to need them as much as they need us. I am going to ask you to go back there to where they tried to kill you. To do part of your work. Are you ready for that?”

He brightened and leaned forward to me across the table.

“Sure. I’d love it! I’ll be able to see my family and friends. Gloria, and Fin, and my people on Earth. In real conversation, not texts. All the people who were mad at me are gone anyway, and I am sure you plan to give me some impressive document that will smooth my way. I’ll be their white-haired boy.”

I went on, my words tumbling forth. The coiled energy of my excitement pushed them.

“All we need is a few miracles. You need to recruit a couple of factory managers who are well set up there already and sell them a whole lot of products we can’t even make yet. There is no way we can build the road without a lot of help. I can’t run a factory at the same time as building the road, and neither can you. We will have all we can do to finish our primary task. We need experienced people, and the closest ones are on the Moon. I’m sure your silver tongue will convince them to give up their best people at Moon Tools and Moon Metals. We will need permission to poach them for our new factories here, but they will give it if you can convince the people to come. If we can’t get them there, we will need to go to Earth.But really, look at all of this. What ambitious manager wouldn’t want to be a part of it?”

I gestured at the valley outside with a grandiloquent sweep of my arm. Very theatrical. I hadn’t reached even near the bottom of my well of words yet.

“We need to mix alloy and process it to make our rails and pylons. We can’t order them from the Moon. We need half a million of them. Too expensive to ship that many even if they were available. Anyplace in space will need to build the capacity to do that. Why not us? Add the airships, too bulky for cargo, ditto for the polyconcrete we will need. A lot of it! And the specialized prospectors that can place the pylons in their form tubes. We will need to make everything here but the teeny gizmos that run them. They make them already there. We are going to need plenty of those as well.

“And that’s not all. We will have a lot of capacity after we make all that stuff. We will need to keep it coming to satisfy the money men. They are building new LEO settlements. They will need construction materials for that, and we can supply them, cheaper than anyone else. We are above the gravity well and we can ship them easily in space. Did I tell you we were building a skyhook as well?And maybe even a space elevator from Arsia. Here on Mars, it can be done with present tech. No super strong materials required.We could free up those poor rocket jockey wretches on Phobos. The longer-term plan is the asteroid belt and Titan for raw materials. Not enough ambition for you? Anybody with dreams will kill to be part of it. Who of us doesn’t have those dreams? Would anyone unmoor herself and voyage up to space into danger and uncertainty without it? I am just asking you to do the impossible. You are a sucker for this too. I know you.”

He couldn’t resist making fun of my unself-conscious zeal, just a little. Fair enough, I was always setting him back on his heels when he let his enthusiasm outrun his common sense.

“How could I refuse a sweet sister like you? When do I leave? Shouldn’t we talk about this just a little teeny bit more before you put me on the Rockship? Like maybe an introduction to the new Director there from Klara. I understand she’s a Nigerian like Zainab. And I could correspond a little with Gloria and Fin to get the lay of the land. You know I haven’t been there in four years and a lot has changed. They have a citizen council now, and more people. Rubin is nearing completion and they are preparing to move in there. They probably have asks for Rubin. Maybe it would be wise to offer help we can give while we are helping ourselves?

“They’re more likely to cooperate later if we can give them something now. Even though we are producing metals, we can buy something they have more of, like silicon products, and tools they are already making. We’re probably going to need to bulk up our satellite observation, especially over the valley. They make very good ones. It wouldn’t do us any harm to have up-to-date, detailed pictures of every meter we need to tread when we set up the road. That’s in addition to the flyeyes for closeup. Right now, maybe competition isn’t what they are looking for when there is so much to do. They haven’t been standing still for us. I have been corresponding with them a bit, and I know that much. Maybe listen for what other people need before offering them what we think they want?”

I responded:

“OK. You’re right. I am getting a bit punch drunk already. She did tell me to hold up a bit before I charged into it, but it’s hard. It’s so sweet. All those colleagues, mostly male, who thought that the end of the line was where I belonged. Imagine what they will think when they hear I’ve landed this. Sorry, Bee, but I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t relish it just a little more than is oh so correct. If you could know all the jobs I have lost because I’m ‘just a fem’. They said I couldn’t manage it out there with the big boys. You would understand how fulfilling it is to get this job. So, thanks, brother, for being an anchor for me. Annoying, but useful.”

He knew I was skittish about physical expressions of affection from him, but he couldn’t help himself. His wife, Esther, had converted him into more of a touchy person than his mother and father, both old school anti-touchetarians, had ever raised. He put his hand on my hand. I’ll tell you the truth that I wanted to move it, but I made the effort. I didn’t flinch. I knew it was important to him. I was still not good at spontaneous tenderness after all the desert years. I wanted to get better at it so that I would be able to express what I felt. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. The human connection was more than enough. It did feel good. We sat there again, relishing the feeling. Once again, silent.

Then I roused myself: ’“I’ve got to call to get Klara to do that intro for you. You need to get writing your friends in Newton and Einstein to prepare for your imminent journey to the Moon. A Rockship is due later this week. I want you on it. You will be on the Moon in two weeks. In the meantime, we need to meet further to establish a wish list for our facilities. I want to be able to nail down the estimates before you leave.

“There’s something else I want you to do before you leave, Bee. It’s the training for the constructors we are going to need to do all the work. So far, you and Lou are the only ones to have done this. Besides me, of course. I don’t want to wait till the staff come out here to ask you to train them. I want them ready to work when they step off the shuttle. You have the records from the constructors you used for the line we finished from the mine at Utopia. I want you to ship them down to a firm called CAE in Canada on Earth. They make the simulators for the Rockships. They have been doing that kind of work for a long time. I want them to configure the design of the constructor simulators on your experience base. It shouldn’t be a hard job for them. They should train groups of twenty-five operators at a time. We can ask Starward to recruit them. They are recruiting all the time. Fifty should do us to keep production up. I would like twenty-five operators in three months, working twenty-four seven. Don’t worry about the price. Let Starward’s purchasing department negotiate that. Those bloodsuckers will push them to the wall.”

“Ok, Mo, shouldn’t be too hard. I can ask Chantelle to help. She’s done a lot of our own procurement. She’s good at detail work, and it will take some time to get the specifications right and make sure CAE understands everything we want. By that time, I can be on my way.

“I’ve been thinking about my friends on the Moon. Nobody’s going to think I had any other motive than friendship to keep in touch. They have been telling me quite a bit about what’s happening there between the lines. Delegating me authority as a purchasing agent and a salesman is a natural. The personal touch is always better than remote texts. We can build on that. And, while I am there, I want to go to Newton, to see Zainab, Dr. Musa. Partly to see how she is, and partly to find out if we can help one another with the new manufacturing facilities we will have.

“Lastly, if there are any bites in LEO, I want to be able to go there with authority too. Maybe I can even get us some direct contacts on Earth at Starward and the UN. Can’t hurt. I know they are very interested in LEO right now. There is a big latent market on Earth. The closer you get to something, the more tantalizing it is. People on Earth are starting to see the possibilities for life on the surface now as a few places are starting to clear. It seems to be creating a bit of a sensation. There are a bunch of videopacs about resettling the surface, and it’s all over the nets. Of course, I’m not on Earth anymore, and I haven’t heard the campaign to get people into the LEO colonies, but I can easily imagine the line they would use. Taking our basic instincts into account, it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t be outrageously successful. And there is a lot of profit in it for Starward. People always mean money. Especially with the dedicated manufacturing that comes with it. And if we are there with products in space, how could we lose?

“I know it will be expensive for us to send me all over, and I could fail to sell, but the major cost will be the Mars trip, and it would be a start no matter how it turns out. Compared to that, the local trips are pennies. You tell me when we can meet Klara. It’s true that she’s a friend now, and I could call her up, but this is business, and it should go through you. I know you just called her. Tell her this just occurred to me. Let me take the blame. This won’t take long.”

I replied: “Maybe she can see me again for a few minutes.”

I made the call and Klara was still willing. We gathered again. Me, with Bee, and Klara still behind her desk. The collar of Klara’s white tunic was limp and a little gray, her scalp no longer looked freshly shaved, and there was no lemon scent. She had settled back into her work routine after I had left her, and it showed. Behind Klara’s desk, on the back wall, was an exquisite representation of a garden pond, I thought “Water Lilies” by Monet. It seemed strangely suited to this office on its far planet, evoking a world still closed to us all.It sought to represent nature realistically in a vast painting that showed you a patch of the artist’s world. I wondered whether that might have been there all along. On previous meetings, I remembered some sort of naturalistic backdrop, but I had never chanced to consider it before. Klara was not all pioneer, then. She reminisced about our home world.

It fit in my mind. It filled in another brick of her personality. Not a few times, Bee told me he had seen her looking in his direction with an unfocused look. The kind you get when the switch of reminiscence is tripped, and you imagine what might have been. Perhaps there had been a time for them, but it had passed. She had suddenly shut him out. It could have been his limitation, or hers. Those looks could have indicated regret. She had had to cope with expectations laid upon her and had made her choice.

Leaders, especially female ones, need to preserve all the authority they can muster. Despite all the good intentions, and all the reforms to unharness female potential, there was still a difference in the way women were seen. Social convention and the expectations they fostered had changed very slowly.

My experience showed she wasn’t wrong. She needed all she had. We all had a lot to do in the coming months, and Klara had to make all the foundation arrangements. She was beginning the preparations for the vast infrastructure projects that needed to be constructed on Mars long before the first shovel. That was in addition to the little matter of leading us all. She did not appear to be pleased that the unexpected trailing call from me had reclaimed her attention from all she needed to do, but she didn’t underline it.

The two of us sitting uncomfortably there, Bee and I, were certainly mismatched in our appearance. My copper skin tone contrasted with his of pale white. We hardly looked like the brother and sister we felt we were.As we sat in Klara’s side chairs, we exchanged reassuring sideways glances, the kind that emotional intimates cast at one another to reassure themselves. You could see that we were together, and Klara didn’t miss that. The last time we approached like that, we had formed ranks against her to continue that murder investigation. We had dogged her when we had arrested our killer, and she thought she needed to oppose us on further enforcement to save the colony. She had since become more friendly with both of us than was immediately comfortable to her then. I imagine she was hoping history was not going to repeat itself. She had too much to do. Neutral, she opened to us both cautiously: “You wanted to see me?”

It was not me, the leader, who spoke, but Bee. You know history has made me sensitive to that. Maybe a bit too much in new circumstances. That instantly irritated me. Perhaps, under pressure, he had reverted to being just another man in the long line with dominance issues. I stiffened momentarily. Bee had never been a problem before, though, and he seemed to understand our relative positions. I held my tongue and listened.

“Klara, Monica has given me my instructions. I am happy to follow them. But I have a different take on them that may encourage you to enlarge them. She didn’t put me up to it.I am going to be getting on the Rockship when it returns to the Moon later this week, and I wanted to get full authorization from you. You are sending me as a recruiting agent to snag talent for you on the Moon. I understand from Mo that you would also like me to explore the possibilities of selling some of our products, both present and projected, to the Moon and LEO. I am fully on side with that too.

“I suggest, though, that you let me do more. I may be way behind both of you in the planning of this enterprise, but I am ahead of you in one area. You selected me to go to the Moon because I have lived there, and I have contacts there. That is true, but I think that the knowledge of how they think there could stand to our advantage. The idea of involving them in our shared tasks is good, but I suggest we haven’t had the time to pursue the idea to its logical conclusion.

“You know I have kept up a little correspondence with several people on the Moon over the past four years. One, regular with Fin, the environmental engineer, and the other, sporadic, with my other friend Gloria. The bottom line is that people on the Moon are very excited about the opening of the new townsite of Rubin. Its lava tube is now enclosed. You have probably been following it. The completion of the Eye of the Moon has sealed the end of its cavern. They are now finishing the interior, and, although it is an awesome undertaking that will take years to complete, they are preparing to move people into the unfinished space soon.

“The anticipation there is almost beyond bearing. They will be the first people in almost a hundred years to have an authentic semblance of outdoor life. It will be more lifelike even than it is for the few thousand in the O’Neill cylinders. They plan on twenty thousand people there. Everybody wants to be a part of it. I did, before I left and got involved here. So, amid all of that, it’s going to be hard to get someone to abandon it. It’s been on the front burner for years, and I am going to be asking that the people I recruit abandon that. If you are going to get someone to switch from a big dream, you need to have a bigger one.

“All of us are really here because we had that dream. You two might be tough, professional fems, and you might have come here as a last resort to get a big job even though you were fems, but I don’t have that kind of confusing chaff in my mind. My motives are simple. I came to the Moon, and now here, because I have wanted to go to space all my life. From the dawn of my intellectual life in late childhood, I have been a fan of science fiction, of speculation about the future, and I wanted to be a part of it. I suspect you tough, dedicated fems have a strong dose of that same spice in your makeup. If you are honest with yourselves, you are here for that adventure too. I can tell you that is the way most of the people on the Moon see it. That’s why Rubin is so exciting to them.

“Not a lot of people know it yet, but we have a big dream here too. And if you let me paint it out in all its colors, it is magnitudes bigger than even Rubin is. And much more exciting. I may not have it right. From my worm’s eye view, we are going to develop an industrial infrastructure on this planet in order to build the biggest project ever. After that we will build another city like Lowell, and maybe a skyhook because we don’t have any local super mountains at the other end. Then we are going to Ceres, spin it up so we can live in it, and use that to mine the Asteroid Belt. Then we go to Titan, building a cylinder in orbit there to use it as a base to mine and get all the carbon we need to complete our resource base. To me, that sounds like quite a bit. Telling them that would convince any one of us are to sign on. The extra money and status we have to offer don’t hold a candle to that.

“And if we offer to work with the other settlements, that will encourage them to buy into it. Buy anything we can find from them that they are good at, if we can use it. We are going to be getting a lot of funding. It will do better if we can spread it around. They make very good remote sensors on the Moon at Moon Electronics. We are going to need stuff like that for our tramway. It’s high value low mass. We can ship it here cheaply, and we don’t need to invest in a factory for it. The same thing for Moon Tools for the small hand tools we will need in great quantity for the constructors, and for hand labor in the assembly facilities. There will be other examples. We will be processing lots of raw materials and metals. They may be high mass and relatively low value, but if it’s something they can use, it will be worth it. Perfect for bulk shipping in unpowered containers going insystem. They will be more likely to cooperate getting good returns. And the people we hire will feel less like traitors for leaving while so much is going on. Give me some authority to make these arrangements, and I think I will be able to do much better – for all of us. And I think that when they see the results, Starward will approve.”

Klara said: “You know, Boris, I like all of that. You’re right, I haven’t had any time to think of anything more than this huge job. I don’t think any of your speculation is contrary to Starward’s general plan, they just didn’t bother to announce more than one step ahead. Maybe they think it would intimidate people or maybe they just didn’t think we were smart enough to understand it. What you have stated, though, is what I think their long-term plan is. No harm in using it if you think it will do some good. I agree with you that it likely will. But as to the purchase of goods, while I agree with it, I don’t want you busting my budget. I am still responsible for making this all happen. You are not to make any arrangements without agreement from Mo and me. Understood?”

Then she redirected her attention to something on her desktop display. We had been dismissed enough times to know that her action indicated the end of the interview. He got up. He did not wait for me to follow him. He knew he was not a decision maker. There had been no reason for anxiety about his motives. He had tried to shield me from criticism for overreach. Since the idea was well received, I wasn’t all that sure I was entirely grateful for the exclusion. Still, Klara and I had things to discuss, and he was not needed for that.