Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [138]
The miners had had a recent unusual visit, however; an Arab caravan had come by, traveling the edge of Vastitas Borealis. And, they said, the Arabs had claimed to have been visited by some of “the lost colonists,” as they called them.
“Interesting,” John said. It seemed unlikely to him that Hiroko or any of her crew would reveal themselves, but who could tell? He might as well go check it out; after all, there was only so much he could do at Bradbury Point. Very little detective work, he was noticing, could be accomplished before a crime occurred. So he spent a couple more days observing the mining, but that only reinforced his shock at the scale of the operation, at how much robotic earthmovers could tear away. “What are you going to do with all the metal?” he asked, after taking a look down into another great open pit mine, located twenty-five kilometers to the west of the habitat. “Getting it to Earth will cost more than it’s worth, won’t it?”
The chief of operations, a black-haired man with a hatchet face, grinned. “We’ll hold onto it until it’s worth more. Or until they build that space elevator.”
“You believe in that?”
“Oh yeah, the materials are there! Graphite whisker reinforced with diamond spirals, why you could almost build one on Earth with that. Here it would be easy.”
John shook his head. That afternoon they drove for an hour back to the habitat, past raw pits and slag heaps, toward the distant plume of the refineries on the other sides of the habitat mesa. He was used to seeing the land torn up for building purposes, but this . . . It was amazing what a few hundred people could do. Of course it was the same technology that was allowing Sax to build a vertical town the whole height of the Echus Overlook, the same technology that allowed all the new towns to be built so quickly; but still, wreaking such havoc just to strip away metals, destined for Earth’s insatiable demand. . . .
The next day he gave the operations chief a fiendishly tight security regimen, to be followed for two months. Then he drove out into the wind-eroded tracks of the Arab caravan, and followed them north and east.
4
It turned out that Frank Chalmers was traveling with this Arab caravan. But he had not seen or heard of any visitation by Hiroko’s people, and none of the Arabs would admit to being the one who had told the story at Bradbury Point. A false lead, then. Or else one that Frank was helping the Arabs to eliminate; and if so, how would John find that out? Though the Arabs had only recently arrived on Mars, they were already Frank’s allies, no doubt about it; he lived with them, he spoke their language, and now, naturally, he was the constant mediator between them and John. Not a chance of an independent investigation, except what Pauline could do in the records, which she could do as well away from the caravan as in it.
Nevertheless, John traveled with them for a while as they roamed the great dune sea, doing areology and a bit of prospecting. Frank was only there briefly himself, to talk to an Egyptian friend; he was too busy to stay anywhere for long. His job as U.S. Secretary made him as much of a globe-trotter as John, and they crossed paths pretty frequently. Frank had managed to keep his position as the American department head now through three administrations, even though it was a cabinet post— a remarkable feat, even without considering his distance from Washington. And so he was now overseeing the introduction of investment by the American-based transnationals, a responsibility that made him manic with overwork and puffed up with power, what John thought of as the business version of Sax, always moving, always gesturing with his hands as if conducting the music of his speech, which had shifted over the years to full-tilt Chamber of Commerce overdrive, “Got to