When we returned to the surviving tunnels, we heard from concerned lab assistants that half a dozen shuttles had arrived from Amazonis. Dandy’s intuition kicked in and he quickly hurried me toward our own shuttle, but too late; we were met by a solid wall of well-armed citizens.
Schovinski’s indignation meant nothing to the vigilantes. The time had come. They arrested me and charged me with half a dozen crimes, highest among them treason. Dandy and Leander were bound hand and foot like lambs before slaughter; the grim-faced mob, all men, subjected me to the lesser indignity of having my hands sticky-roped.
It had happened to me before.
So died the Federal Republic of Mars.
I have drawn the limits of my story and will stay with them. All that I have written deals with moving Mars, the whys and hows, and my role in this event. What comes after I would just as soon forget.
Writing in prison is much overrated.
I do not ask for forgiveness, or even for fair judgment. In a way, I have received my reward. I do beg however that Charles Franklin be treated gently, as well as all of the Olympians held under arrest.
Because of them, Mars still exists and would-be-governments can still struggle and argue and accuse.
When all the judgments are made and my punishment settled, I will think of these things: a trunk, a leaf, a green and glittering globe. Children will be born who remember nothing of the Old Sun. The new bright-flowered skies will be home for them — for you, whom I hope and pray will read this story. I see you playing in the shadow of the bridges of Old Mars, your skin revealed to the air, a hundred, a thousand years from now. For you there will be no time, no distance, no limits; nothing but what you will.
Do better than your elders. You will have to; the power is yours to command.
Afterview
It’s been my privilege to edit this new text edition of Casseia Majumdar’s memoir. Even today, Majumdar’s life and actions provoke controversy — witness the recent attempt by Old System Advocates to impose their own notes and comments on all versions of Moving Mars. That attempt was squelched — but it points to the simmering angers still felt by many Martians.
I met Casseia Majumdar once in her garden, twenty years ago — when she was fifty by the old way of measuring Martian years, and I was twelve by the new. My mother had just become President of Mars, under the New Republic Constitution, and she, my father, and I were making the pilgrimage across Cyane Sulci to Casseia’s home, as had become traditional in the past few administrations.
Casseia Majumdar was a straight, proud, stocky woman with wispy gray and black hair and deeply lined brown skin. Beneath her pressure suit, her arms seemed thin but strong, and her legs moved swiftly and with youthful confidence. She met us in a tractor that had once belonged to her husband. She smiled, shook our hands, and invited us into her house, perched on the edge of the Cyane Sulci Preserve, where we removed our suits and showered and became comfortable.
She introduced us to her longtime housemate, Charles Franklin. Franklin greeted us with a pleasant but separated expression. Tall, very thin, with white hair growing thickly above a face marked by peculiar lines, neither laughing nor sad, Franklin said little, walking around the house doing various small tasks that seemed to have no real purpose, but which amused him. He smiled to himself, sometimes laughed, and this bothered me. I didn’t connect this odd, shell-like person with the Charles Franklin who had figured so prominently in my history lessons. I asked my mother, “Is he all right?” My father nudged me in the ribs, bent down, and said, “That’s him. Now behave!”
I stared at the man with even more unease. He glanced at me, nodded as if we were in deep agreement, and sat beside Casseia Majumdar.
Mother, always straightforward, asked Majumdar how Franklin was faring lately.
“As well as ever,” she answered. “Don’t mind him,” she told me. “He’s having his own kind of fun, and sometimes he’s very lively. But he doesn‘t think the same way you and I do.”
She prepared dinner for us with Franklin ’s help. I remember she said to me, “Martian vegetables taste better prepared by human hands, I think you’ll agree.”
We sat at her table, made from a single dried bridge leaf, near a window that overlooked a broad russet-colored valley. We ate bridge fruit, the first time I had tasted such a delicacy, prohibitively expensive on the open market. Majumdar spoke to us enthusiastically about the mother cysts and how, in the last twenty years, they had finally shown us more of their varied offspring. Some of those offspring lumbered and grew in the gardens outside: rotifer-sheep, pipeworms, dustdogs.
Franklin listened to this conversation with a pleased expression, then added his own contribution. He pulled a drafting wand from a shirt pocket full of paper scraps and scribers and used it to sketch in the air, with thin orange lines, a number of mother ecos organisms, known only by their fossils: glider bees, sandpuffs, drift-tangles. Then, with equal enthusiasm, he sketched a series of involved squiggles that had no shape whatsoever.
“Sometimes I see what Charles is getting at,” Majumdar said, following the squiggles in the air with her finger. “These are tracks of genetic diversity, I think. Only the least demanding creatures are being produced by the mothers now. They seem to be holding their best offspring in reserve — in case Mars decides to go back to its old dead days. Very intriguing, Charles.”
Franklin smiled and replaced the wand in his pocket.
As we ate, my mother told Majumdar that the Council of Governors had approved the erection of a monument to her, the first President Ti Sandra Erzul, and the Olympians. There would be a group of bronze and steel statues and a plaque.
Casseia appeared sad, then irritated. “I don’t want recognition, ” she said. “They gave me the gardens. The gardens are enough. I don’t blame anybody now.”
“They took away your freedom for ten years,” Mother said. “We owe you so much more.”
‘“We took them away from all that they knew, and couldn’t even ask permission. I refused to let any votes be taken.”
“We have a different view of these things now,” my father said.
“I don’t need a statue,” Majumdar insisted. “I do wish you Presidents would stop coming here to apologize. You know what I’d really like? I’d enjoy taking your lovely daughter on a tour of the garden.”
“All of it?” Father asked. The preserve stretched across a million hectares of the Sulci, impossible terrain for a tractor.
“Just the part I watch over,” Casseia explained with a laugh.
And she gave me her own special tour, treating me like a granddaughter. There was such a gleam in her eyes when she stopped the tractor beneath an aqueduct bridge. We sealed our helmets and got out, looking up at the huge deep-red petals of the flowers, as wide as I was tall, clustered the length of a pier which stretched thirty meters into the blue-black sky. The great glassy liquid-filled vines stretched across the ridges and hummocks and deep valleys like cables on a bridge. A full-grown man could walk through these vines, if they were emptied of their slow sugary sap.