“The physicist?”
Kane nodded.A physicist? It made as much sense as anything, he supposed.
“Sure. Everybody knows everybody around here.Why?”
Earlier he had thought through a number of excuses, but he didn’t know enough about Dian to lie convincingly. He ignored the question and asked,“Could I talk to her?”
Apparently she was not ready to abandon her ruthless politeness.“I don’t see why not. I can take you to her.”
That would have to do, Kane thought. He had no doubt that Hanai reported directly to Curtis, but even so he could learn where Dian lived, find out something about her, maybe set up a meeting for later on.“What about these?” Kane asked, pointing to his empty dishes.
“In the vats beside the sink,” Hanai said.
When he came back from the kitchen, Hanai was standing by another of the wall phones.“You’re in luck,” she said.“She’s usually working with Molly but this is her menials week and she’s farming up in the Bronx.”
“Sorry?”
“The northeast section. I’ll take you over there.”
At the outer door Hanai handed him an oxygen mask without explanation and he watched her to see what she did with the straps and valves.Then she opened the door and motioned him out.
He’d been nearly unconscious when they brought him from the ship to the infirmary, and now, stepping out under the dome for his first real look at the colony, Kane felt only dismay. He’d expected something that looked like the future, and what he saw reminded him of a shopping mall in decay: cramped, faded, lived-in.
“Is there someplace we can see out?” he asked Hanai.
“Over there.”
It was getting easier to move around. His ribs hurt, but the ache was constant, controllable.The only problem came if he moved his head too quickly, baffling his inner ear and making his stomach lurch with vertigo.
Hanai led him on a curving path around the central building, past two long structures near the edge of the dome.Through dull plastic windows, bowed outward slightly from positive pressure, he could see a small herd of goats, the females diapered to conserve their milk.The animals didn’t seem to mind the crowded conditions, bumping into each other, stumbling through the marble-sized pellets of their own dung.
“There it is,” Hanai said.
Kane caught up to her, stood beside her in an oversized window box built out between two of the bulkheads that supported the dome. Concrete benches had been set up along the sides, and the ground was planted in flowering cactus and yucca. Beyond the window, Kane could see huge chunks of ice, wrapped in green plastic and shaded by aluminum ramadas: the colony’s water supply.And beyond that lay the vast Zen rock garden of Mars.
The land was more subtly alien than the cold white dust of Deimos, warmer, more like the deserts of northern New Mexico or Arizona. But the sand was too red, the rocks too dark and porous, the horizon closer but without promise, a desolation that went on endlessly beyond the reach of his eyes.
For the first time he understood, not just intellectually, but viscerally, that this was all there was. No ancient races and lost civilizations, no canals, no hidden valleys with jungles and perpetual clouds. Just the dry, empty husk of a planet and the few fragile lives clustered under the dome.
A gust of wind wrinkled the nearest plastic sheet and Kane, warmed by second-hand sunlight in the still air of the dome, shivered.
“A little bleak for you?” Hanai asked.“There’s more interesting places. Like the Valles Marineris. But you wouldn’t want to live there.”
“No,” Kane said,“I guess you wouldn’t.”
He turned away and followed Hanai through the zigzagged paths between the fields.As they came up on a strip planted in beans, a dozen workers straightened up and stared at Kane, some with a distant, dreamy expression, others with obvious recognition.
They know who I am, Kane thought.
“Where’s Dian?” Hanai asked.
The woman who answered her was short and thick-waisted, with limp brown hair cut to her jawline.“She didn’t show this morning.” The woman never took her eyes off Kane, even when talking to Hanai.
“Goddammit,” Hanai said.“Why didn’t you report it?”
Slowly the woman turned to face Hanai.“Hey, bag it, will you? I don’t give a fuck why she ain’t here.You want to phone it in to Curtis, you can fucking phone it in.” She bent over and jerked a clump of grass from between the orderly rows.
The underbelly of Utopia, Kane thought. One or two of the others went back to work, but most of them stood and stared at Kane. Hanai blinked, twice, and said,“Okay, Kane, let’s go.” She broke into her smooth, gliding walk again, and this time Kane couldn’t keep up.
In less than a minute she gained a dozen yards on him and Kane stopped, the pain in his chest glowing brighter like a coal under the bellows.“Hey,” he shouted, the amplifier chip in his mask clipping the high end from his voice.“I thought you were supposed to be watching me.”
Hanai looked back and said,“If you can’t keep up, just wait there for me.”
“What’s the matter with you all of a sudden? A little backtalk from one of the peasants and you come flying off the handle.”
“Look, Kane, I’m not here to argue politics with you, okay? Just mind your own business and everything will go a lot better for you.”
“What’s politics got to do with anything?” Kane said.And then he answered himself.“Curtis.You think he did something to her.”
Hanai was already moving again, ignoring him. She ran up to the front steps of one of the maddeningly identical houses between the fields and pounded on the door.As Kane caught up with her he heard a low whistling noise, realized that it came from the edges of the door, which were bowing inward.
“Look out!” Kane shouted as Hanai reached for the handle of the door.“It’s going to—”
The door seemed to leap backward, jerking Hanai with it.Air rushed into the vacuum of the house with a roar that numbed Kane’s ears.The
mask was nearly pulled from his face, and he fell to his knees, hunching over to protect himself.
He knew then what they were going to find, but he wasn’t prepared for the sheer quantity of blood.
It had pooled around Dian’s head as she lay in bed, face down, dead in the act of trying to crawl toward the floor.The inrush of air had blown crusts and spatters of it onto the far wall in a complex pointillist pattern, and in it Kane could read the message that Curtis had left for him.
There were other ways that Curtis could have killed her. He could have poisoned her, could have stabbed her, clubbed her, dissected her with a laser. Instead he’d given her a uniquely Martian death, a death that showed Kane that even the air he breathed was under Curtis’s command.
“Okay,” Kane said out loud. He folded his hands into tight hammers, the first two knuckles standing out in high, calloused relief.
Hanai turned Dian onto her back, exposing runnels of dried blood that met at her lips and spread in a chocolate smear across one cheek. “What?” Hanai asked belligerently.“You say something?” Her eyes locked on Kane’s tightly clenched hands.
Kane straightened his fingers and brushed them against his thighs. “This was meant for me,” he said.
“Was it? Well I hope to hell you got the point, whatever it was. I hope it was worth it to you. Because it’s not worth it to me. I didn’t know her, not that well, but she was one of us and you’re not. It’s because of you she’s dead, you say.Well, that’s great.As far as I’m concerned that’s the same thing as if you killed her with your own hands.We don’t want you here, none of us do.We don’t need you, we don’t need anything you could possibly give us.All we want is for you to go away and stay the hell away.”
She was close to tears or violence, Kane saw, and she could go either way.This too was Curtis’s fault, like the tension between Hanai and the farmer.“It’s not up to me,” Kane said, aware of too many levels in what he was saying.