Obelisk Read online

And she let herself fall backwards, away from the ledge. The men pressed forward, following her descent through the glass. The gentle Martian gravity, which had permitted the building of the Obelisk, drew her down gently at first, then gradually faster. Her breathing, in Wei’s ears, was as if she stood next to him, staying calm even as she fell away, drifting down the face of the tower. He lost sight of her as she passed through the cloud, long before she reached the distant ground.

  ESCAPE FROM EDEN

  Yuri had to kick Lemmy awake. Lemmy stirred slowly, feeling around for his jumpsuit in the dark of the barrack.

  Yuri always thought it was amazing the kid slept at all, what with his scurvy, as the Martians called it, the stuffy head and the nausea and the disorientation, the result of a profound non-adaptation to the low gravity, and that was despite him having spent half his nineteen years up here. Whereas Yuri sometimes wondered if he’d slept properly at all since being thawed out, eighty years out of his time. He lay there in his narrow bunk every night, listening to the snoring of the men around him in the barrack, and the shuffling of the bed-hoppers, like it was some border-control prison back in Manchester. And behind all that there were the uncomfortable sounds of Mars itself, the unending wheeze of the dome’s pumps and fans, the popping of the dome shell as the temperature swung through its day and night extremes, and the occasional distant artillery-shell crump that might be a meteorite, or something worse. Sleep, for Yuri, was a luxury on Mars. But Lemmy slept like a baby.

  Anyhow, as soon as Lemmy woke up he remembered what they’d planned for today, and he grinned as he pulled on his bright green jumpsuit, his wheezy breath rattling.

  The two of them padded barefoot through the barrack. A few inmates were awake, Yuri could tell; eyes gleamed in the dark, predatory or fearful. But nobody bothered them. Yuri still had enough of his Earthborn strength to be able to swing a fist pretty effectively, and they mostly stayed away. Which was one reason why Lemmy, smart but small and sickly, hung around with him.

  Once out of the barrack they hurried through corridors, heading for the dome wall. All was quiet, save for a couple of squat maintenance robots working their dull way across the scuffed plastic floor. Partitions sliced up the dome’s inner space, and Yuri imagined sleepers racked up in their bunk beds behind those smooth walls. But over their heads the bland surface of the main dome stretched, shutting out the sky. They passed a row of VR booths, all occupied. Always somebody trying to escape from life on Mars, and prepared to spend their hard-earned scrip to do it, whatever the time of day or night.

  ‘Told you it would be quiet,’ Lemmy murmured. ‘Supposed to be a twenty-four-hour shift pattern here, WorkTherapy all day and all night. But the handover from late night to early morning is always a slack time.’

  ‘Good for us.’

  They reached the outer wall of the dome, a sheet of plastic reinforced by ribs of Martian steel, which sloped sharply down to meet the flooring in a tight seal. Lemmy led the way with a shambling run around the curve of the wall, which was plastered with UN posters in Spanish, English, French, Russian, even some in Chinese, exhorting you to eat, sleep, exercise, to obey the Peacekeepers and accept whatever verdict the Community Council handed down to you, and to throw yourself into your WorkTherapy. All the posters had been systematically marred by graffiti.

  ‘So where is this lock?’

  ‘Not far now. Keep your voice down.’ Lemmy looked up nervously at the black snubs of the Peacekeepers’ surveillance cameras, everywhere. Of course they would be seen, their identities revealed, every movement recorded; it was just a question of whether they could get to where they wanted to be before they were stopped.

  They came to a stretch of wall covered by a new poster, taller than Yuri was, plastered against the inward-sloping face. It showed an astronaut in a snazzy pressure suit with a helmet of pale UN blue, smiling out at you while pointing to a cluster of stars in the night sky: JOIN ME AT FAR CENTAURUS, said the slogan, in the blocky modern font Yuri had so much trouble reading. Somebody had scratched a UN-dollar sign into his forehead. Lemmy briskly ripped this off the wall, to reveal another poster reassuring you that gen-enged Martian wheat from the province of Cadiz was wholesome to eat despite the rumours, and under that …

  A hatchway. A metal door with rivets, rounded corners.

  ‘Told you.’ Lemmy punched a bypass code into a panel, then worked a heavy manual handle, a stiff bar that needed all his weight to turn. ‘Used when they first built this place, but now it doesn’t pass the safety-standard checks. But they never seal anything up. You never know.’

  The door hissed open, pulling inward. Yuri had been born on Earth in the year 2067, nearly a hundred years ago, and, dozing in a cryo tank, had missed mankind’s heroic expansion out into the solar system. But after a year in this place he understood a few details. Like this door, that it was designed to open inward so that the dome’s inner air pressure would keep the hatch closed rather than push it open.

  Beyond, the hatch fluorescents blinked reluctantly to life. The pair hurried down a short corridor towards another hatch. The air smelled musty.

  The second hatch was stiffer, but Lemmy got them through.

  Now they entered a small compartment, which had windows to the outside showing streaky Martian dawn light, and the domes and blocks of Eden, this UN township. Yuri went straight to the window and pressed his hands against it. He’d been taken through spacesuit and airlock drills for the sake of emergency training, but he’d never been outside. Mostly he never even got to look through a window.

  He stepped back and looked around. There was nothing in this chamber but four holes in the wall, each about as wide as his waist and sealed with some kind of plastic diaphragm, and shelves with a clutter of elderly gear: jars of skin cream, an empty water bottle, a heap of dirty clothing.

  ‘Is this an airlock? How do we get outside?’

  Lemmy grinned. ‘Shoes off.’ He kicked off his own soft-soled slippers. Then he got hold of a handrail over one of those holes in the wall, lifted himself up with a grunt, and slid his legs feet-first through the hole. The diaphragm, flaps of flexible plastic, swallowed his lower body. He looked back at Yuri. ‘Try it. One size fits all.’ And he raised his arms above his head, and slipped bodily through the hole and out of sight.

  Yuri had no choice but to trust him. He kicked away his own shoes, grabbed the bar, jumped up and swung. The plastic flaps slid around him easily, and he felt his legs being guided into tubes of fabric. With a faint misgiving he let go of the bar, wrapped his arms around his torso, and let himself fall through the hole – and found himself standing up, in some kind of pressure suit, outside, on the Martian surface. His head had ended up in a bubble visor. His legs had slid easily into the lower part of the suit, the leggings and boots, but his arms were still clasped around his chest. He heard the suit come alive now he was inside it, the high-pitched hum of fans, and the material squirmed around his legs and feet, evidently adjusting to fit.

  The helmet, and the whole back of the suit, was fixed to the wall behind him, as if glued. But he was outside. Through the visor he saw a panorama of dusty buildings and equipment.

  Beside him, Lemmy stood inside another suit, pinned at the back to the wall like his own. Lemmy was working his arms into dangling sleeves, and a neck light inside his helmet showed his face. ‘Told you.’ His voice came over a crackly radio link.

  Yuri found the arms of his own suit, and pushed his hands down the sleeves and into gloves. The suit chafed in places, and he could see the outer layer was grubby and worn.

  Lemmy sneezed spectacularly, spraying the inside of his dome helmet. ‘Shit. Dusty.’ A small white shape wriggled around inside the helmet, pink eyes peering out fearlessly.

  ‘So you brought Krafft along.’

  ‘What, you think I’d leave him in the barrack? Good boy, Krafft.’ The rat wriggled and disappeared.
r />   ‘What kind of suits are these, that you don’t put on inside a lock?’

  ‘Planetary protection gear. Designed to keep humans and their mucky bodies sealed off completely from Mars. And vice versa. From back in the day when they cared about such things.’

  ‘They don’t any more?’

  ‘Look, you just have to pull away from the wall. One, two, three—’ He braced, leaned, and Yuri saw his suit part from the wall, with a spray of ancient dust. Everything got dust-covered on Mars.

  Yuri knew nothing about the air of Mars, except there wasn’t much of it and he couldn’t breathe it, and he’d freeze to death even before he got a lungful. He didn’t let himself hesitate, didn’t stop to think what would happen if the decades-old suit failed on him. He just pulled himself forward, there was a smacking sound like somebody noisily kissing the back of their hand, and there he was, free of the wall, standing independently on Mars. He tried a step or two. He felt just as light as he did inside the dome, and the suit wasn’t much of an encumbrance; he could hear the whir of elderly exoskeletal artificial muscles helping him bend the joints.

  There was dust heaped everywhere, the relic of many storm seasons; this area was evidently unused. When he kicked, the dust fell like crimson snow, in the gathering red-brown light of a Martian dawn.

  Out!

  Lemmy coughed again; his breath was a wheezy rattle.

  Yuri said, ‘So which way’s the rover?’

  ‘This way. Come on. Let’s get to it before some Peacekeeper crawls out of bed and comes after us …’

  Yuri followed Lemmy away from the dome. Just to be out was a relief, to be able to walk more than fifty metres or so and not be stopped by a wall. But he longed to rip off this enclosing suit, he longed to run, off into the lapping desert.

  Eden was the UN’s largest outpost on Mars, and one of the oldest. You could see its history in the jumble of buildings around the dirt-track streets. The cylindrical bulks like Nissen huts were the remains of the first ships to land, tipped over and heaped with dirt and turned into shelters. Then had come domes like the one Yuri had been assigned to, built of panels prefabricated on Earth and shipped out here, and covered over with dirt as a shield from meteorites and solar radiation. Then there were a few buildings of blocks of red Martian sandstone – the newest structures, and made of local materials, but oddly they looked the oldest to Yuri’s Earthborn eye, like the archaeological remains that survived among the sprawl of the cities of his native North Britain. The whole place had the feel of a prison to Yuri, or a labour camp.

  And this was pretty much all the UN held on Mars these days. The scuttlebutt was that a colony like this would be dwarfed by the giant cities the Chinese were building on the rest of the planet, like their capital, Obelisk, in Terra Cimmeria.

  They came to a kind of parking lot where ground vehicles were gathered around big pressurised maintenance workshops. The vehicles ranged from little one-person dust buggies to huge drilling rigs with anchors to hold themselves down against the low gravity while they sought for water from deep aquifers. All these great engines were coated with the clinging dust of Mars, all reduced to the same washed-out reddish-brown, their paintwork obscured. The area was quiet, nobody around; Lemmy had been right about this window of small-hours stillness.

  ‘Here.’ Lemmy led him to a boxy vehicle with a big sealed compartment at the back, and a smaller two-seat cabin up front. With six big bubble wheels and a boat-like lower hull, the rover was dust-covered like the rest, but Yuri saw from scuffs and smears that a big heavy airlock door at the rear had been opened recently.

  ‘Just a rover, for getting workers from A to B. It ain’t pretty, but it is fast. And stupid enough to do what we tell it.’

  Lemmy walked up to a smaller lock that led into the driver’s cabin, punched a code and pushed open the lock door. Lemmy was good at this kind of stuff, knew his way around. Which was one reason why Yuri hung around with him – the other being, Yuri sometimes admitted to himself, a need to protect somebody even weaker than himself here on Mars. Like Lemmy with his rat Krafft, so it was with Yuri and Lemmy.

  The cabin was a two-seater, with two sets of controls, two wheels. A hatch at the back evidently led to the rear pressurised bay. Lemmy deferred to Yuri and let him take the left-hand seat. As the cabin pressurised they opened up their suits. Settling in the right seat, Lemmy punched a few panels and murmured a few commands, while his pet rat crawled around his neck and inside his jacket. ‘That’s it. Safety overrides off. Of course alarms will be ringing in the domes.’

  ‘So we’ll get our butts kicked.’ Yuri strapped himself in tightly with a wraparound belt. ‘But not yet. Let’s do this.’ He started punching buttons, and grabbed the joystick before him. Soon they were rolling away from the vehicle lot. Panels lit up with red flags, and a ponderous automated voice in what sounded to Yuri like a Bostonian accent instructed them to turn back, but Lemmy shut it all down.

  It was the first time Yuri had driven since his cryo-freezing, and the first time he’d driven any kind of vehicle on Mars. But he found the controls hadn’t changed much in a century, even on a different world; you just pointed and steered with the joystick and squirted the gas with your foot, even if the ‘gas’ here was methane manufactured out of Martian air and water. There was even some kind of manual override on the transmission if you needed it. Since his waking, he’d found twenty-second-century technology easy to work. User interfaces seemed to have settled down to common standards some time before he’d been frozen. Even the language had stabilised, more or less, if not the accents; there was a huge mass of recorded culture, all of which tended to keep languages static. Vehicles and vocabularies of the year 2166 were easy. It was the people he couldn’t figure out.

  Lemmy performed another miracle. He produced a plastic flask full of a clear liquid from inside his pressure suit. Yuri grabbed it, unscrewed the cap using his teeth, and swigged. He knew what it had to be: illicit vodka made by a group of Russians in their illegal still in Y Dome, from stolen gen-enged potatoes. ‘Suddenly the day got better yet.’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘So, this Chaos we’re heading for. Which way?’

  ‘North.’

  The sun was rising now, a small, pale, distorted disc whose light turned the sky a kind of diarrhoea-brown, washing out the last of the starlight. Yuri knew where he was on Mars, more or less, in an area called Atlantis in the southern hemisphere, so he took his alignment from the sun. They roared north, following a dusty trail, not much more than a braid of overlapping tyre tracks. He got up some speed, and a plume of dust rose up behind them, ancient Martian dust that, he was told, got endlessly sifted around this snow globe of a planet, never settling, never washing out, never consolidating. Lemmy whooped in exhilaration, though it quickly broke up into a cough.

  They soon left the colony behind. Now, under the dung-coloured sky, there was nothing but the trail, and the vehicle, and the two of them, and barely a sign that humans had ever come this way before. Directly ahead Yuri made out what looked like a range of low, eroded hills, looming on the close horizon. That was the Chaos, whatever it was, where they were going to have some fun.

  Lemmy pointed to a mound of stuff that they passed a little way off the track, a heap of boxes and canisters, some of them broken open already, and a fallen parachute draped over the dirt. All of it was stamped with UN roundels, evidently a supply drop gone wrong. Eden relied on supplies dropped from orbit, because the rest of Mars was owned by the Chinese. It was an operation like the Berlin airlift to keep them alive, somebody had once told Yuri, as if he would remember an event that had happened over a century before he was even born.

  They went over a pothole in the track, and the rover bounced on its fat tyres, lifting off the ground with an eerie low-gravity slowness. As they hit the dirt once more Yuri thought he heard a noise in the rear compartment, like a grunt. But tho
ugh he listened closely, he heard no more.

  After that Lemmy went quiet, and when Yuri looked over he saw he had fallen asleep. Even the rat was dozing on his shoulder. Lemmy was only nineteen, a year younger than Yuri biologically, but he looked older, sallow, the dirt accentuating the lines in his face, even when he slept.

  Well, his silence suited Yuri. He wanted nothing more in all this shrivelled-up cage of a world than to be left alone. And here in this hijacked rover, with his only companions sound asleep, Yuri was about as alone as he’d been since the medics had woken him up from his cryo tank. He grinned, and put his foot down harder.

  He came upon the Chaos before he knew it. Distances were evidently tricky to judge here, with the near horizon, the dry but dusty air.

  The Chaos was a bunch of irregular mounds sticking out of the ground, big slabs like some huge piece of Martian crust had been picked up and dropped and allowed to shatter. All of it was softened, eroded under the dusty yellow-brown sky, but he could see a few sharp edges and sheer cliffs.

  He drove into shadow, between two huge hill-sized slabs, like the paws of some tremendous animal. He found himself in a kind of valley, a gully. He could tell no water had ever run here, or not enough to carve this feature; it was just a break in the slabs.

  A screen on the dash pinged and lit up with some kind of map, along with more red warning lights. Lemmy, woken by the ping, tapped a pad until the flags went away. ‘Safety off. But you might want to slow down—’

  ‘Not just yet.’ Yuri put his foot down harder.

  They raced through a nest of mesas, buttes and hills, chopped through by valleys that looked as if they had been carved out by some huge laser beam. It was a hell of a country, like nothing he’d ever seen on Earth – not that landscapes had ever been his bag anyhow. It was kind of like a ride he’d once had on a high-speed two-man jetski through the concrete canyons of a drowned Canary Wharf, in Londres. He whooped, and ignored the pinging of the warning flags, and pushed the rover even harder, and the vehicle bounced on its tyres. Again he thought he heard some kind of grunt come from the rear cabin, but it must be a creaking of the hull.