Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [141]
And when he agreed, on a whim, she grinned like a girl with a secret. “You won’t be sorry.” With a kiss she was off, driving south to Burroughs to catch the train west.
After that, there was less chance than ever of learning anything from the Arabs. He had offended Frank, and the Arabs closed ranks behind their friend, as was only right. Hidden colony? they said. What was that?
He sighed and gave up on it, and decided to leave. Stocking his rover the night before his departure (the Arabs were punctilious about filling his hold with supplies), he pondered what he had accomplished so far in his investigation of the sabotages. Sherlock Holmes was in no danger, that was sure. Worse than that, there was now a whole society on Mars that was basically impenetrable to him. Moslems, what were they exactly? He read Pauline that evening after he was done stocking, and then he rejoined his hosts and watched them as closely as he was able, asking questions all that night long. . . . He knew asking questions was the key to people’s souls, infinitely more useful than wit; but in this case it didn’t seem to make any difference. Coyote? Some kind of wild dog was it?
Baffled, he left the caravan the next morning and drove west, on the southern border of the dune sea. It would be a long journey to Acheron to join Maya, 5,000 kilometers of dune after dune; but he preferred driving to going down to Burroughs and taking the train. He needed time to think. And really it was a habit now, driving cross-country, or flying gliders— getting away, traveling slowly across the land. He had been on the road for years now, crisscrossing the northern hemisphere and making long excursions into the south, inspecting moholes or doing favors for Sax or Helmut or Frank, or looking into things for Arkady, or cutting ribbons at the opening of one thing or another— a town, a well, a weather station, a mine, a mohole— and always talking, talking in public speeches or private conversations, talking to strangers, old friends, new acquaintances, talking almost as fast as Frank did, and all in an attempt to inspire the people on the planet to figure out a way to forget history, to build a functioning society. To create a scientific system designed for Mars, designed to their specifications, fair and just and rational and all those good things. To point the way to a new Mars!
And yet after every year that passed it seemed less likely to happen the way he had envisioned it. A place like Bradbury Point showed how rapidly things were changing, and people like the Arabs confirmed the impression; events were out of his control, and more than that, out of anyone’s control. There was no plan. He rolled west on autopilot, up and down over dune after dune, not seeing a thing, sunk deep in an attempt to understand what exactly history was, and how it worked. And it seemed to him as he drove on day after day that history was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren’t looking— an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything. After all, he had been here from the very beginning! He had been the beginning, the first person to step on this world, and then he had returned against all the odds, and helped to build it from scratch! And yet now, despite all that, it was spinning away from him. Contemplating that fact made him tense with disbelief, and sometimes with a sudden furious frustration; to think that the whole thing was accelerating not only beyond his control, but even beyond his ability to comprehend— it wasn’t right, he had to fight it!
And yet how? Social planning of some sort . . . clearly they had to have it. This flailing about without a plan, in violation of even the flimsy plan people had made back at the beginning with the Mars treaty . . . well, societies without a plan, that was history so far; but history so far had been a nightmare, a huge compendium of examples to be avoided. No. They needed a plan. They had a chance at a new start