Stavenger felt his brows hike up. The chairman’s got something up his sleeve, he realized. And he never mentioned it to me.
He caught the chairman’s eye. The man was grinning slyly at him. Stavenger gave him a nod, admitting he was surprised.
“Would you ask Ms. McManus to come in?” the chairman said into his cell phone.
All eyes turned to the door as Doreen McManus, pencil thin and big eyed, looking almost frightened, entered the meeting room. Stavenger searched his memory and recalled that she was a nanotechnician.
“Ms. McManus has a proposal for enlarging the base on Mars, using nanomachines,” the chairman said.
Tithonium Chasma: The Dig
Usually Zeke Larkin was the gentlest of souls, yet the normal expression on his sharp-featured face was somewhere between a glare and a scowl. People expected him to have a volcanic temper, and he did—but he had spent most of his adult life struggling to control it.
Still Zeke grumbled to himself as he worked at the excavation. He regretted volunteering for the dig. I’m a biologist, not a shit-shoveling day laborer, he told himself. I should be in my lab, studying the SLiMEs, not working out here like an extra in some “curse of the mummy” flick. Besides, we ought to be looking for the farming area instead of poking into these ruins. Seen one collapsed building, you’ve seen ’em all.
Larkin’s expertise was in the forms of bacteria that lived deep underground, where they literally ate the iron-rich rock and excreted methane. When similar organisms had first been discovered on Earth, thriving in temperatures and pressures that biologists had assumed were far too extreme for living cells to survive, existing even without the need for sunlight, some waggish biologist had dubbed them subsurface lithotropic microbial ecosystems: SLiMEs. Deep drills had pulled up similar SLiMEs from kilometers below the surface of Mars.
Larkin’s career goal was to study these colonies of underground bacteria, to determine how long they had been living deep below the surface of Mars, to study how they were different—and similar—to the SLiMEs of Earth.
He was a postdoctoral student from the University of Michigan, lean and wiry, with sapphire blue eyes that looked at the world warily, as if expecting trouble. He worked very hard at being friendly and sociable, especially with his fellow scientists. He had even developed a sense of humor that they variously described as wry, dry, or devilishly clever.
But on this sunny Martian afternoon he saw nothing humorous about being out at Carleton’s dig, slaving away like an ordinary laborer with the rest of the volunteers. Instead of a pick and shovel, though, these laborers used digging lasers to break up the rock-hard ground, and then tiny chisels and whisks to slowly, carefully, patiently uncover the remains of the long-buried village.
There’s nothing here, Larkin saw. Twenty meters behind him a pair of postdocs were delicately brushing eons of dust off the remains of a broken, uneven wall, a wavering line of blackened stone that once was the foundation of a building. A Martian home, Larkin mused. Or maybe a barn for their livestock. He grinned inside his nanosuit’s bubble helmet. Maybe it was a bar, a saloon like in those western vids about the wild frontier.
But where he was standing there was nothing. No crumbled foundations, no remnants of ancient walls. No ancient pollen or seeds, even. Just bare, empty ground right out to the thirty-meter-high side of the excavation pit. Larkin leaned on the long-handled broom he had been using, wondering why he should bother to continue. We’ve run the dig out to the edge of the old village and beyond. There’s nothing more here to uncover, and Carleton’s too damned stubborn to move off to the area where the farms probably were. Time for me to get back to my lab and leave this bullshit behind me.
He saw Carleton standing off at the other end of the excavation, more than a hundred meters away, out where the village’s neat gridwork of buildings gave way to a pair of meandering lanes. The anthropologist was unmistakable at any distance; he was the only person in the crew who still wore a hard suit. Larkin thought he looked like an alien robot who had enslaved all these nanosuited humans and forced them into stoop labor for him.
Well, this slave is revolting, Larkin told himself as he hefted the metal-whiskered broom and started off toward the ramp that led up to the edge of the pit. Then he chuckled as he remembered the old joke: Revolting? He’s disgusting!
I suppose I could use a shower, he thought.
“You there!” Carleton’s peremptory shout rang in Larkin’s earphone so piercingly it made him wince. “Where are you going?”
“There’s nothing more out here, Dr. Carleton. We’ve gone past the edge of the village.”
“Let me see.”
Annoyed, Larkin let the broom fall languidly to the ground and waited for Carleton, hands on his hips.
Once the anthropologist reached him, clunking through the rows of building foundations and the people hunching over them, Larkin pointed to the area where he’d been working.
“It’s empty,” he said. “We’ve gone beyond the limits of the village.”
“What about the farm that you’ve been nagging me about?” Carleton said. He clumped past the biologist and looked out over the empty area.
“It’s not here,” said Larkin. “More likely on the other side of the village, upriver.”
For several moments Carleton said nothing. Larkin couldn’t see his face behind the tinted visor of his helmet, but he imagined the anthropologist was trying to find some reason to make him stay and work for him.
At last Carleton said, “You should go over with Macintyre and the others, then. There’s more to uncover there.”
“I’m finished for the day,” Larkin said. “I need to get back to my own research.”
“You agreed to work here,” Carleton said.
“Not at the expense of my own research. I’ve got to get back to my lab.”
“It’s still a couple of hours before sundown. We’ve still got plenty of time to work.”
“I’ve got to get back to my lab,” Larkin repeated.
“There’s still work to do here.”
“Dr. Carleton, may I remind you, sir, that I am a volunteer. I don’t owe you fealty and you don’t have the power to command me.”
Even though the gold-tinted helmet visor remained blank, Larkin could feel Carleton’s fury radiating from it. “I have the power to write a negative evaluation for your dossier.”
Once that would have worried Larkin, but now he was too tired to care. He let his anger seep through. “Go ahead and write whatever you want. Who’s going to accept your word about anything?”
And he strode forcefully away from Carleton, toward the ramp that led up to the valley floor and the dome of the base, leaving the broom in the dust like the symbol of his independence.
“You can’t leave while there’s still work to be done!” Carleton shouted. “You can’t just go!”
“The hell I can’t,” Larkin answered, without even looking back over his shoulder.
“I’ll ruin you!” Carleton yelled.
“Go rape a student,” Larkin retorted, without missing a step.
Carleton watched him go, white-hot rage boiling inside him. He tried to kick the broom but in the hulking hard suit all he managed was to scuff the ground and puff up a pathetic little cloud of dust. Glaring furiously, he saw that the other men and women working on the site all had their backs to him, all were bent over their tasks, none of them wanted any part of this conflict. They heard us yelling at each other, Carleton realized, but nobody’s going to say a word about it. Not to me, at least. They’ll talk about it among themselves, though, he knew. There won’t be any other subject on their lips at dinner tonight.