have been impossible for the Americans to learn a thing about them.
But that evening Frank went back over into the Amex tent by himself. The folks inside were from Florida, and their voices brought up memories in him like nets filled with coelacanths; Frank ignored all the little mental explosions, and asked question after question, concentrating on the black and Latino and redneck faces that answered him. He saw that this group was imitating an earlier form of community just like the Arabs did; this was a wildcat oil field crew, enduring harsh conditions and long hours for big paychecks, all saved for the return to civilization. It was worth it even if Mars sucked, which it did. “I mean even on the ice you can go outside, but here, fuck.”
They didn’t care who Frank was, and as he sat among them listening they told stories to each other that astonished him even though they were somehow deeply familiar. “There was twenty-two of us prospecting with this little mobile habitat with no rooms to it, and one night we got to partying and took all our clothes off, and all the women got in a circle on the floor with their heads in the middle, and the guys went in a circle around the outside, and there were twelve guys and ten gals so the two guys out kept the rotation going pretty fast, and we actually got all the way around the circle in the timeslip. We tried to all come at once at the end of the timeslip and it worked pretty good, once a few couples got going it was like a whirlpool and it sucked everyone down into it. Felt so good.”
And then, after the laughter and the shouts of disbelief: “We was killing and freezing these hogs in Acidalia, and those humane killers are like shooting a giant arrow into their heads so we figured why not kill and freeze them both at once and see what happens. So we got them all handicapped, and bet on which ones would get the furthest, and we open the outer lock door and those pigs all dash out outside and wham, they all keeled over inside of fifty yards of the door, except for one little gal that got almost two hundred yards, and froze standing upright. I won a thousand dollars on that hog.”
Frank grinned at their howls. He was back in America. He asked them what else they had done on Mars. Some had been building nuclear reactors up on top of Pavonis Mons, where the space elevator would touch down. Others had worked on the water pipe running up eastern Tharsis bulge from Noctis to Pavonis. The parent transnational for the elevator, Praxis, had a lot of interests at the bottom end, as they called it. “I worked on a Westinghouse on top of the Compton aquifer under Noctis, which is supposed to have as much water in it as the Mediterranean, and this reactor’s entire job was going to be to power a bunch of humidifiers. Fucking two hundred megawatts of humidifier, they’re the same as the humidifier I had in my bedroom when I was a kid, except they take fifty kilowatts apiece! Gigantic Rockwell monsters with single molecule vaporizers and jet turbine engines that shoot the mist out of thousand meter stacks. Fucking unbelievable. A million liters a day of H and O added to the air.”
Another of them had been building a new tent city in the Echus channel, below Overlook: “They’ve tapped an aquifer there and there’s fountains all over town, statues in the fountains, waterfalls, canals, ponds, swimming pools, you name it, it’s a little Venice up there. Great thermal retention too.”
The conversation removed itself to the gym, which was well-stocked with machines designed to enable their users to stay Earth-ready. “He’s buffed, look at that, must be short time.” Almost everyone kept to a rigorous workout schedule, three hours a day minimum. “If you give up you’re stuck here, right? And then what good is that savings account?”
“Eventually it’ll be legal tender,” another one of them said. “Where people go, the American dollar is sure to follow.”
“You got it backwards, assbite.”
“As we are the proof of.”
Frank said, “I thought the treaty blocked the use of Terran money here?”
“The treaty’s a fucking joke,” said one doing lat pulls.
“Dead as Bessy the Long Distance Hog.”
They stared at Frank, all of them in their twenties and thirties, a generation he had never talked to much; he didn’t know how they had grown up, what had shaped them, what they might believe. The oh-so-familiar accents and faces might be deceptive, in fact probably were. “You think so?” he asked.
Some of them seemed more aware than the rest that he might be connected to the treaty, along with all his other historical associations. But the man doing lat pulls was oblivious: “We’re here on a deal that the treaty says is illegal, man. And it’s happening all over. Brazil, Georgia, the Gulf States, all the countries that voted against the treaty are letting the transnats in. It’s a contest among the flags of convenience as to how convenient they can be! And UNOMA is flat on its back with its legs spread, saying, More, more. Folks are landing by the thousands and most are employed by transnats, they’ve got their government visas and five year contracts, including rehab time to get you Earth buffed, things like that.”
“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 oldtimers like you – A whole bunch of newtimers 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 inner 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
