Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [215]
“By the thousands?” Frank said.
“Oh yeah! By the tens of thousands!”
He hadn’t looked at TV, he realized, for. . . for a long time.
A man doing military presses spoke between lifts of the whole stack of black weights. “It’s gonna blow pretty soon— a lot of people don’t like it— not just old-timers like you— a whole bunch of new-timers, too— they’re disappearing in droves— whole operations— whole towns sometimes— came on a mine in Syrtis— completely empty— everything useful gone— completely stripped— even stuff like lock doors— oxygen tanks— toilets— stuff that’d take hours— to pull loose.”
“Why did they do that?”
“Going native!” a bench presser exclaimed. “Won over by your comrade Arkady Bogdanov!”
From flat on his back this man met Frank’s gaze; a tall, broad-shouldered black man with an aquiline nose. He said, “They get up here and the company tries to look good, gyms and good food and rec time and all, but what it comes down to is them telling you everything you can do and can’t do. It’s all scheduled, when you wake up, when you eat, when you shit, it’s like the Navy has taken over Club Med, you know? And then here comes your bro Arkady, saying to us, You’re Amurricans, boys, you got to be free, this Mars is the new frontier, and you should know some of us are treating it that way, we ain’t no robot software, we’re free men, making our own rules on our own world! And that’s it, man!” The room crackled with laughter, everyone had stopped to listen: “That does the trick! Folks get up here and they see they’re schedule software, they see they can’t keep Earth-buffed without they spend their whole time in here sucking the air hose, and even then I ‘spect it’s impossible, they lied to us I’ll bet. So the pay means nothing, really, we’re all software and maybe stuck here for good. Slaves, man! Fucking slaves! And believe you me, that’s pissing a lot of folk off. They’re ready to strike back, I mean to tell you. And that’s the folks who are disappearing. Gonna be a whole lot of them before it’s all over.”
Frank stared down at the man. “Why haven’t you disappeared?”
The man laughed shortly and began pumping weights again.
“Security,” someone else called from the Nautilus machine.
Military Press disagreed. “Security’s lame— but you got to have— somewhere to go. Soon as Arkady shows— gone!”
“One time,” Bench Press said, “I saw a vid of him where he talked about how folk of color are better suited for Mars than white folk, how we do better with the UV.”
“Yeah! Yeah!” They were all laughing at that, both skeptical and amused at once.
“It’s bullshit, but what the hell,” Bench Press said. “Why not? Why not? Call it our world. Call it Nova Africa. Say no boss is gonna take it away from us this time.” He was laughing again, as if everything he had said was no more than a funny idea. Or else a hilarious truth, a truth so delicious that just saying it made you laugh out loud.
• • •
And so very late that night Frank went back to the Arab rovers, and he continued on with them, but it wasn’t the same. He had been yanked back into time, and now the long days in the prospector only made him itch. He watched TV; he made some calls. He had never resigned as Secretary— the office had been run in his absence by Assistant Secretary Slusinski and the staff, and he had done just enough by phone for them to cover for him, telling Washington that he was working, then that he was doing deep research, then that he was taking a working vacation, and that as one of the first hundred he needed to be out there wandering around. It wouldn’t have lasted much longer, but when Frank called Washington directly the President was pleased, and in Burroughs